by Walter Chaw Searching for themes in 2013, you come upon the obvious ones first: the frustrations of the forty-five percenters; the growing income gap; and the death of the middle-class, encapsulated in brat-taculars like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers and prestige pics like Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, David O. Russell’s American Hustle, and, um, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. You see this preoccupation with the economy in Nebraska‘s quest for a million-dollar Clearinghouse payday, and in Frances Halladay’s desire for a place to sleep and a career that can subsidize it (see also: To the Wonder and Byzantium). It’s there in the identity theft of Identity Theft and the motivations of the prefab family from We’re the Millers, paid off with picket fences in an ending with echoes of My Blue Heaven and Goodfellas. Consider All is Lost, an allegory for pensioners who’ve lost everything to the wolves of Wall Street, adrift on a limitless span, taking on water but plucky, damnit. Too plucky, in the case of Redford’s Everyman hero–who, frankly, would’ve better served his allegory had he drowned with salvation in sight.
Alas, close only counts in horseshoes and Spielbergs. Fiscal, caste melodrama figures large in 12 Years a Slave, of course; in the positions of power occupied by the psychopaths of The Act of Killing; in the fruitless pursuit of reimbursement for a plane ticket in Berberian Sound Studio; in the crops that simply won’t return in The Fifth Season. It’s war between the haves and have-nots in The Lone Ranger, with a roomful of Rich Uncle Pennybagses Gatling’d to death for no reason but hell yeah. Should we mention Drug War? The privation of Beyond the Hills and Blue Caprice?
A note about 12 Years A Slave. I just want to go on record that this is slavery’s Schindler’s List, handsomely mounted while taking curious liberties with its source material that I had a hard time getting past. Riddle me this, all right? Say there was a text where a white guy dies of smallpox but in the film version, the white guy, after trying to save a white woman from being raped by an unspeakable caricature of an evil black guy in front of her child, is stabbed to death by the black guy. If that happened, wouldn’t someone say something about that? Honestly, the abomination of slavery doesn’t need dramatic embellishment. It is, in fact, diminished by it. All this to say that 12 Years a Slave is fine. And if Chiwetel Ejiofor wins the Oscar this year, it will be the third won by a black actor for playing a slave. I find that to be…the word isn’t “ironic.” What is it?
Or should we talk instead about the ascent of Scarlett Johansson, who, for all the meta-conversation surrounding what Miley Cyrus does or doesn’t know about her image and controlling her sexuality, expressed herself with courage and elegance in a trio of performances (Her, Don Jon, Under the Skin (2014)) that establish Johansson as, if not the best American actress, at least my hands-down favourite. Apropos, the second major theme of 2013: the gender divide–the “war on women,” played out in our entertainments like Her and Spring Breakers and even Computer Chess. Then there’s Kimberly Peirce’s exceptional adaptation of Carrie (told this time from poor Carrie’s point of view), Frances Ha again, and how about The Lords of Salem and the (maybe) literal deification of Sherri Moon Zombie? The unapologetically strong heroines of Byzantium and Stoker and Sightseers?
A note on The Wolf of Wall Street. At Telluride, there was wild rumour and excitement over a super-duper extra-special sneak screening scheduled for the last day of the festival (the day I was leaving, alas); the only clue to the title leaked was the letter “S.” Well, of course we thought the “S” stood for “Scorsese” and the sneak would be The Wolf of Wall Street. Instead, it stood for Salinger, which would land on worst-of-the-year lists if anyone actually saw it. The Wolf of Wall Street is not the worst film of the year, but it is sadly more proof that Scorsese is far from the vital, insistent voice he once was. Unfair to expect a 71-year-old legend to continue producing things like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets? I suppose. But in detailing the debauchery of stockbrokers flirting with the collapse of our financial system while folks like you and me lost our life’s savings, Marty presents a softcore vision of Caligula’s Rome. Even Bob Guccione knew better than to soft-core atrocity. What many awards-season audiences are calling “porn,” I’m calling nothing you can’t see in any three-hour chunk of prime-time television, and The Wolf of Wall Street did nothing to make me uncomfortable except to say it gave me that sick feeling once again that one of my favourite filmmakers should’ve retired maybe three movies ago.
Anyway: a strong year in film, one that rode the wave of the zeitgeist expertly, elegantly, and found me riding along with it. The best movie I saw this year won’t be released until April, 2014, Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece of disaffection and identity Under the Skin. Another unreleased festival discovery, Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, would challenge for top-five consideration in any year. I got ahead of the curve a little bit thanks to a restorative trip to the Telluride Film Festival, an illuminating visit to the Mile High Horror Film Festival, and a return to the Starz Denver Film Festival. This year I also got back into interviewing, sitting down with the likes of Glazer, Jim Mickle, Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, and Harry Dean Stanton–although there’s not much I can use of that particular interview. (I’ve been musing turning the whole experience into FFC’s first podcast.) And I discovered that there’s something to Oscar Wilde’s thoughts on “The Critic as Artist” after all. It’s a new day, and these were the films that memorialized it best.
REALLY WISHED I’D SEEN LAST YEAR: Tabu
HONORABLE MENTION: All Is Lost; The Wolverine; +1; This is Martin Bonner; Nebraska; Blue Caprice; Evil Dead; Before Midnight; The Broken Circle Breakdown; Grabbers; Escape from Tomorrow; Museum Hours
DISHONORABLE MENTION: The Wolf of Wall Street; American Hustle; Saving Mr. Banks; Lee Daniels’ The Butler; Dallas Buyers Club; The Counselor
NOTABLY MISSED: The Selfish Giant; August: Osage County; White Reindeer; Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?; Leviathan
25. Drug War (d. Johnnie To)
Johnnie To only makes the best, most economical crime movies in the world. The hotel scene is like something out of the Marx Bros., and that final shootout? With the handcuffs? Bliss.
24. Berberian Sound Studio (d. Peter Strickland)
Peter Strickland strands a woebegone Toby Jones in Italy–and a sound booth–as Jones’s ace foley artist and sound-mixer is spirited away to create the noise for a giallo about horses. (“She’s-a not riding a horse-a now!”) There, his reality blurs into his work, and what emerges is something that feels like a hallucination–the bad dreams that materialize when you can’t sleep.
23. Magic Magic (d. Sebastián Silva)
Juno Temple continues to earn her courage badge as an American in Chile who hasn’t slept in four days and begins to see through the world into the heart of all the dark workings there, just under the surface. A chthonic flick, then, but the tentacles and elder gods are the psychosexual disturbances of adolescence and Cab Calloway. With Magic Magic and This Is the End, Michael Cera successfully destroys his image as George Michael Bluth. Director Sebastián Silva has a real way with suspense, making a dive off a medium-sized rock into what’s possibly the scariest moment in film in 2013.
22. Pain & Gain (d. Michael Bay)
In which Michael Bay, maybe the worst human being on the planet making movies, stumbles across a story of bodybuilding fuckwits and empty-headed strippers in pursuit of material gain, and, accidentally or whatever, launches himself into the meta-sphere. Yes, Michael Bay has just made the best Carl Hiaasen adaptation there ever has been–and whether or not I believe he’s done it on purpose is beside the point. Mark Wahlberg is perfect, The Rock even perfect-er in a performance that, in a just universe, would be on the short-list for awards recognition. I know. I’ll show myself out.
21. Sightseers (d. Ben Wheatley)
A road movie about middle-aged schlubs/maybe-psychopaths set loose in the English countryside, celebrating finding each other against all odds. Between Down Terrace, Kill List, and the upcoming A Field in England, Ben Wheatley has already created a diverse and accomplished roster of brave, smart, provocative movies. And he keeps getting better.
20. Byzantium (d. Neil Jordan)
A road movie about an immortal MILF and her immortal daughter, burning corsets à la Thelma & Louise, albeit with slightly more bloodletting and beheadings. This is Neil Jordan at his Grimm best.
19. Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) (d. Cristian Mungiu)
The better version of Blue is the Warmest Color.
18. Only God Forgives (d. Nicolas Winding Refn)
Proving himself no one-trick pony, even as the bones of his auteurism come nearer to the skin, Nicolas Winding Refn’s follow-up to Drive marries that film’s deep Romanticism to Valhalla Rising‘s spiritual nihilism. It’s another mythopoeia, although this time the god is Asian and not one-eyed Odin; both are lost on Earth, immortals in the midst of impermanence. Unapologetically vile in its wallow in masculinity, it is, again, the corrective to the politesse of Scorsese’s late-career doddering.
17. At Berkeley (d. Frederick Wiseman)
Frederick Wiseman allows the camera to run and, in so doing, captures the rhythms–the very air–of life at a prestigious university. We’re allowed access to the teachers, to the students, to the atmosphere at Berkeley, and damned if I wasn’t transported in a visceral way back to the halls of privilege, suspended in time and tradition and the feeling of belonging to something larger. Sneakily, it’s a film about religion and faith, and how deeply belief systems shoot their roots into underdeveloped psyches young and old.
16. The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) (ds. Jessica Hope Woodworth, Peter Brosens)
Possibly the most beautiful film of the year, it’s also the logical inheritor of The Wicker Man‘s crown.
15. The Lone Ranger (d. Gore Verbinski)
It gets better, and better, and better…
14. The Act of Killing (d. Joshua Oppenheimer)
I won’t add much to the ink spilled on this one but to say I genuinely wish I’d never seen it and, having seen it, I doubt I’ll ever watch movies the same way again. It doesn’t rank higher because I’m struggling with its occasional longueurs and deviations into non-metatextual self-indulgence. It also feels like a snuff flick… Yeah, I’m struggling. It would make a fascinating double-feature with Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.
13. The World’s End (d. Edgar Wright)
The conclusion to Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy, this one finds our boys trying to Thomas Wolfe their way home again in a twelve-pub crawl begun in high school and destined to finish in the early days of middle-age. At which point a genre movie erupts. Simon Pegg is unexpectedly poignant as an eternally-arrested adolescent looking for surcease to his sorrow in the unrecoverable past.
12. Stoker (d. Park Chan-wook)
Park Chan-wook’s American debut is elegant, sinister, beautifully framed, and meticulously plotted. An update and perversion of the already-perverse Shadow of a Doubt (my favourite Hitchcock), it honours the Master with its familial dynamics and rapturous camera movements. It has a brilliant, subversive shower sequence, as well as a smart nod to The Birds‘ phone booth. It’s among the best times I had at the movies in 2013.
11. The Wind Rises (d. Hayao Miyazaki)
Hayao Miyazaki’s self-declared swan song is a beautiful, dangerous, winsome, highly-fictionalized paean to the inventor of the Zero that works much like a biography of Albert Einstein should work. It deals with the passion of creation, and then with the unintended toll once that creation is loosed upon the world. As farewells from an artist go, it’s humble, apt, and devastating in its wisdom.
10. Carrie (d. Kimberly Peirce)
Detractors who say this is a shot-by-shot redux of the Brian DePalma adaptation aren’t paying attention. Detractors who say it’s not enough like the Brian DePalma soft-porn sleaze-athon–often the same ones saying it’s just like the Brian DePalma Carrie–also weren’t paying attention. Kimberly Peirce’s flick is the first telling of this story of a bullied girl exacting revenge at the prom–the prototypical romcom teensploitation conceit played for gore–by a woman, and it’s telling how significant a change that represents. It’s fantastic.
9. Frances Ha (d. Noah Baumbach)
Greta Gerwig is wonderful as a failed dancer looking for herself in Manhattan in another film that suggests Noah Baumbach is still in ascension as frequent collaborator Wes Anderson’s shtick is in decline. Deceptively light, it parses the signature scene from Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang in one of the most exhilarating sequences of the year, and demonstrates the too-rare example of how a compelling female character can drive a picture while herself remaining “un-dateable.” It’s all about a young woman struggling towards individualism. Intimate, human.
8. We Are What We Are (d. Jim Mickle)
A remake so superior to the original that they almost don’t belong in the same conversation, Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are deals with the abomination of nature and the religion that arises from it. It’s beautifully shot, tightly written, and performed with heat, and it resolves in the only way it could possibly resolve. In a year rich with strong female characters, it contains possibly the strongest trio of them all.
7. Computer Chess (d. Andrew Bujalski)
Sex and artificial intelligence at play in a hotel hosting a tech seminar assembled to test the idea that it’s possible to create a computer smart enough to beat a person at chess. Shot with vintage consumer-grade electronics and presenting more ideas per minute than films many magnitudes its budget and scope, it identifies, along with Her, a third possible throughline in 2013. Something about Ludditism, something about Frankenstein–but we’re not erecting SkyNet; we’re all Pygmalions creating Galateas to satisfy our desires.
6. To the Wonder (d. Terrence Malick)
Terrence Malick continues to marry the ebb and flow of the Natural with the pulse of human interaction. If it’s only a coda to The Tree of Life, it’s a transformative experience in and of itself.
5. Upstream Color (d. Shane Carruth)
No secret I hated Shane Carruth’s Primer for being too brittle, too mathematical, too much nothing masquerading as something in its cloud of words and theories. More a primer for how to try to get along with socially-adolescent engineers than the sci-fi masterpiece it touted itself to be, it’s the poster-child for Sundance success. So I approached Upstream Color, Carruth’s long-gestating follow-up, with reluctance, even hostility, only to discover that he made a film about Romanticism, regret, memory, love. It’s the second movie this year to take a cue from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman’s, not Siegel’s), one of many dealing with identity, with strong female characters, with science-fiction conceits, with doom. Upstream Color is what Primer was touted to be: obscure, but possessed of real meaning–instinctual, intellectual, complete.
4. The Lords of Salem (d. Rob Zombie)
Rob Zombie’s essential humanity has flavoured each of his genre exercises (arguably excepting House of 1000 Corpses, but I’d need to revisit it) to date. I began to look at him differently after The Devil’s Rejects, but wasn’t completely sold until Halloween II–which, let’s face it, is an incisive portrait of grief and the father-daughter relationship. Zombie’s films are about family, really, no less so The Lords of Salem, in which wife/muse Sherri Moon plays one-third of a trio of late-night radio wanks who receive a mysterious record and make the awful mistake of playing it. It’s a fever dream punctuated by moments of pathos as one of Moon’s lovesick co-workers (Jeff Daniel Phillips) calls her from an icy pier and a kind, crinkly-eyed teacher (Bruce Davison) has his worst suspicions confirmed by an affable coven of witches. A companion piece of sorts to Ti West’s The House of the Devil (with Greta Gerwig!), it’s all mood and dirges, infernal suggestions, and more strong female characters speaking all of mystery and things unknowable. At the late-night screening I attended after The Lords of Salem opened sans critic’s screening, it was me and a buddy and a trio of teenagers somewhere in the dark above us. When the film ended, a beat passed, and then a teenage girl’s voice piped out: “What? Fuck YOU Rob Zombie.” Proof of a certain kind of success, you’ll agree. I love this movie. It’s only grown in the distance I’ve had from it.
3. Inside Llewyn Davis (ds. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)
A completion of the Coens’ Odyssey, it’s heartbreaking in so many ways and a lovely complement to the hell-of-creation piece Barton Fink.
2. Spring Breakers (d. Harmony Korine)
Harmony Korine does his Terrence Malick film with this trance-like riff on what happens when four bubble-headed bimbos decide they want to go on spring break and so take up a life of crime first to pay for it, then again when reptilian burner Alien (James Franco, in the first performance I’ve liked from him in years) bails them out of lockup. Each frame a work of sleazy/sad art, each moment a devastating mirror held to our current state, it’s about the end point of our culture, the end-product of what we teach our young people to value and desire. Hopeless, deadening, and decidedly unsexy, whatever its unblinking hedonism (again, Marty, take note); never have acres of nubile flesh seemed less attractive. It would be the best film of any year that didn’t also feature…
1. Her (d. Spike Jonze)
Spike Jonze’s first film as both writer and director is existentially fraught, packed to the rafters with ideas and philosophies undreamt-of, and as with any best film of any year, a summary of 2013’s currents and themes. I could go on, but I already have.
10. The Grandmaster (d. Wong Kar-wai)
Harvey Scissorhands be damned, this pointillist look at two occasionally intersecting lives lived in service to martial arts and family honour feels like a watershed for the biopic, a stodgy genre normally defined by its clear timeline, historical signposting, and pre-packaged character beats. Here it’s the moments rather than the arc that register, thanks to Wong’s usual impressionistic mode of characterization and a wrenching supporting performance by Zhang Ziyi that somehow survives the American cut’s dumb, sweeping revisions with dignity intact.
9. The Act of Killing (d. Joshua Oppenheimer)
Like The Wolf of Wall Street but more consistently on-point, this is a gesture to the cinema as purgative agent, so faithful as a recorder of misdeeds that it can induce nausea in their perpetrators. More interesting, though, is Oppenheimer’s suggestion in the closing minutes that the purge might have failed–a canny acknowledgement that the danger of giving a mass murderer a starring role in your ironic morality play is that he might turn out to be an excellent actor, capable of vomiting on command and begging for his dignity like a more convincing HAL 9000.
8. Like Someone in Love (d. Abbas Kiarostami)
From the opening game of musical chairs to the abrupt finale, this is an immaculately structured game, an unofficial Lolita adaptation with a brilliant Tadashi Okuno as an especially doddering Humbert. While American Hustle yammered endlessly about playacting as a means of reinvention, Okuno and an equally game Rin Takanashi–as simultaneously a savvy sex worker, submissive fiancé, and doting granddaughter–embody that spirit of multiplicity in every scene without having to announce it.
7. Drug War (d. Johnnie To)
As compact a piece of storytelling as anything this year, all the more impressive given its seeming offhandedness. This is the fleet, punchy film about covert rats and triple-crosses Martin Scorsese tried to pull out of the wreckage of William Monaghan’s baggy screenplay for The Departed, capped with an ingeniously-rigged action set-piece.
6. Computer Chess (d. Andrew Bujalski)
A comedy of manners conceived and executed on a closed-circuit camera loop, you could see this as an affectionate variation on Leviathan‘s eerily autonomous ethnography. In this case, the system is a programming convention, the observer a higher intelligence attuned to the foibles of awkward men with floppy haircuts. Somehow, the result feels tender, as in one of the loveliest shots of the year: a glimpse of two shy twentysomethings wheeling an enormous computer down a hotel hall to do some late-night tinkering.
5. Leviathan (ds. Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)
Some respond to this as an illumination of a complex, churning system through its constituent parts. Yet any narrative or sociological justifications are surely secondary to the visceral experience of seeing this thing–and surely it’s more thing than movie–in a theatre, where its perspective shots of fish being dive-bombed by seagulls make for some of the most disorienting images of the year.
4. Spring Breakers (d. Harmony Korine)
The clear frontrunner in this year’s crop of Great Gatsby adaptations and Terrence Malick imitators, not for lack of pretenders. For all of James Franco’s alternating sincere and hollow bluster as Alien, the most indelible image may be of a tearful Selena Gomez resting her face on the bus window for the long ride back from her trip to the sublime, like a kid who’s just run out of coins at the arcade.
3. Bastards (Les salauds) (d. Claire Denis)
Not since Trouble Every Day–not surprisingly, another genre film–has Denis worked with such gut-punching material. The watchword is, as always, elliptical, but Bastards isn’t playing around: its structure is determined from the first beat, and the rest is a metronome-steady loop back to the source of our initial confusion. Although sin-eater hero Vincent Lindon’s doomed march to the finish bored me on first viewing, the fatalism of his trajectory has haunted me since, not the least thanks to Tindersticks‘ pulsing score, more an act of radiation poisoning than a soundtrack.
2. Museum Hours (d. Jem Cohen)
A subversive cultural-vegetables movie for people who hate vegetables and view culture a bit warily, as something you might catch if you don’t wash your hands. The closing credits thank Peter Berger and Patti Smith alike, and why not? It’s a film about seeing shot through with a punk sensibility, as charitable towards detritus (and digital photography) as it to Bruegel.
1. Inside Llewyn Davis (ds. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)
Playful, empathetic, and achingly sad, this ought to give the lie to those who continue to insist upon the Coen brothers’ apparently unchecked misanthropy towards their leads. Those who look on the suffering of Llewyn–animated by the wonderful Oscar Isaac, playing the Coens’ most full-blooded, exhausted wanderer yet–as nothing but farce can have their flat movie, while the rest of us can bask in the brothers’ richest and most evocative film.
10. Side Effects (d. Steven Soderbergh)
A use, finally, for the antiseptic glaze/gaze of Soderbergh’s digital period: Big Pharma. A film in which the (sort of) good guy wins (more or less), but it doesn’t feel right, because he’s mostly avenging his emasculation. Everyone here is “sick” in some way, and while Soderbergh observes them all like the ant farmer he is, Thomas Newman’s gloomstruck waltz of a score allows an affecting melancholy to seep into the sterile images.
9. The Lone Ranger (d. Gore Verbinski)
Caravaggio goes western. I love looking at this movie, a Leone pastiche with the best action set-pieces of the year (maybe since the heyday of Spielberg and Indiana Jones) and just the right amount of pathos, courtesy a Tonto in tragicomic facepaint.
8. Beyond the Hills (Dupa dealuri) (d. Cristian Mungiu)
Sometimes, it does not get better.
7. Her (d. Spike Jonze)
Truth be told, I’ll read a glowing review of Her and agree with it, then I’ll read objections to the film–that the future it depicts is too white, that its deus ex machina‘s a little cheap–and agree with those as well. Her‘s presence on this list is to honour how much I’ve enjoyed grappling with it, even if I can’t commit to embracing it unreservedly.
6. The Wind Rises (d. Hayao Miyazaki)
Miyazaki doesn’t seem to interpret the life story of Mitsubishi engineer Jiro Horikoshi so much as remember it. This is not to dispute that the film’s Jiro is highly fictionalized, but rather to say that he exists in a fully-realized universe rife with details nostalgic in their specificity. Although animated (breathtakingly, at that), The Wind Rises almost feels like one of Terence Davies’s wartime reveries.
5. Room 237 (d. Rodney Ascher)
More “holy shit!” moments per minute than any of the year’s blockbusters, regardless of whether they stand up to scrutiny or reason. A monument less to Stanley Kubrick or The Shining, ultimately, than to the mental shrines we erect to our favourite media.
4. The Act of Killing (d. Joshua Oppenheimer)
In many ways the sitcom from Hell, The Act of Killing is, for all the Martian behaviour on display, a vital bit of anthropology.
3. The Lords of Salem (d. Rob Zombie)
A triumph of production design, performance, and mood, The Lords of Salem plays like a mashup of Dario Argento’s oneiric “Three Mothers” trilogy–and, true to form, one would be hard-pressed to articulate exactly what happens in it. But the feelings it generates are unmistakably cathartic.
2. Spring Breakers (d. Harmony Korine)
So stupid, so beautiful.
1. Inside Llewyn Davis (ds. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)
Like most Coen Brothers movies, but in a way unique to their most recent work, this portrait of an artist whose talent has taken him as far as it can without the intervention of luck (or with the intervention of bad luck) got under my skin and stayed there. It’d be a more indulgent pick–for a lot of critics, this one included, it’s a veritable Rorschach blot–if it weren’t so damn good.
1. Inside Llewyn Davis
2. Spring Breakers
3. The Lords of Salem
4. Her
5. The Act of Killing|Computer Chess
Nice to see Lords of Salem getting some love on these lists. I hate to be that guy, but I’m pretty sure Chiwetel Ejiofor is British, not African American. Looking forward to seeing the films on these lists that I haven’t seen yet!
it’s certainly bay’s most interesting, tightly-crafted and self-aware film, but i found PAIN & GAIN disturbing in a bad way. i’ve no doubt at this point that he’s acutely aware of his own (repulsive) legacy, but this is hardly his UNFORGIVEN, its gestures toward self-criticism are half-hearted if not insulting given how often he continues to wallow in the muck without complication or shame. the guy loves himself too much to ever really punish us for enjoying his films, and only dwayne johnson’s performance refuses to be swallowed up by that ego (which is some achievement considering it’s effectively the ego of an entire nation). otherwise it’s like watching the building of a concentration camp while hitler offers some winking satirical commentary over the top.
STOKER is kind of wonderful though, i’m so glad not everyone has forgotten or dismissed it. ditto for WE ARE WHAT WE ARE. these are the kinds of films the so-called vulgar auteurists ought to be preserving.
Excellent lists, all. Curious if anyone knows where Alex fell on Spring Breakers?
he loved it — ranked it in his top 50 of all time on criticker.
Delighted to see myself still talked about from time to time in these parts. Yes, loved SPRING BREAKERS saw it twice in the theaters, got the Blu-Ray, was tempted at one point to record an audio commentary but was too lazy to figure out how to actually do such a thing much less how to publish it. It’s absolutely sublime stuff, personally one of the high points of my life is seeing that in a mall theater– that bittersweet ending of spring break finally coming to close and Ellie Goulding’s “Lights” appearing on the soundtrack. Wonderful. Proud of the critical community also for not dismissing it. Audiences didn’t get it, but critics actually did their job and saw that there was something there. There’s something to that idea of mixing-and-matching “hot teenage girls” with “ghetto black gangsters”; how both groups actively embrace their dehumanization as transcendence. I don’t think that it’s simple provocation, I think that it makes liberals uncomfortable in a fruitful way. Or there may be some more profound commentary to be made about how our identity and sense of spirituality is formed through a corrupt consumerist culture.
Loved these lists by the way. Not only is SPRING BREAKERS in everyone’s top four, but stuff like CARRIE, LORDS OF SALEM, THE LONE RANGER, PAIN AND GAIN, and COMPUTER CHESS are part of the conversation. I didn’t love-love all those movies (would still put them behind things like BLING RING and GRAVITY), but I do like them quite a bit, I admire them, and thirty years from now they are likely to be the movies that film buffs are still watching and remembering. What a great place, Film Freak Central!
“possessed of real meaning–instinctual, intellectual, complete.”
Goddamnit Walter Chaw, you get to the root of a film’s success or failure with such incisive and unerring regularity I feel quite inadequate. I love that. Thank you.
no disrespect intended toward the more recent additions to the team (i particularly enjoy angelo’s stuff), but come back alex 🙁 also ian pugh!
i share the love for SPRING BREAKERS (http://themissingslate.com/2013/11/21/private-theatre-harmony-korines-spring-breakers/), the best of the many american dream dissections this year. i’m interested in how the FFC folks felt about THE CANYONS though?
i’m also digging any and every year-end list that excludes crap like PINES, MUD, FRUITVALE STATION, PRISONERS, PACIFIC RIM, as well as the likes of GRAVITY, BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, THE PAST and THE SPECTACULAR NOW, all servicable films which failed imo to justify the hype. kudos folks.
maybe the biggest surprise is that there’s no place for the denis film on walter’s list. does BASTARDS count as 2014, or did you not see it, or did you actually… *gulp* not like it? i also wish MUSEUM HOURS and THIS IS MARTIN BONNER made the top 25 (the former is probably my favourite of the year), but at the same time i’m glad you even mentioned them at all. have any of you folks seen THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT?
can’t wait for the 2014 list already. UNDER THE SKIN, A FIELD IN ENGLAND (amazing), BLIND DETECTIVE (amazing), STRANGER BY THE LAKE (amazing), BLUE RUIN, ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE and so many other intriguing titles, and that’s just the ones which already premiered o.o
There’s no real point in arguing with a best of list (which is itself the point, and also the fun of it), but it was somewhere around the fifth random swipe at Scorsese that you guys started to get just a tiny bit monotonous. I’ve come to tune this out from Walter, who only seems capable of viewing directors in some OCD binary of either GOOD or BAD (re: the frantic taxonomy of his Prometheus review), but seriously, where is this coming from?
Marty had a two-picture slump with the empty, Shamalyan-style Shutter Island and with Hugo, which was little more than an overly expensive gift to his granddaughter. Does that eradicate The Aviator, The Departed, his Boardwalk Empire pilot, and now The Wolf of Wall Street?
For that matter, were Island and Hugo any worse than New York New York, Cape Feare, Kundun, or The Color of Money? Is it unreasonable to suggest that from day one, the guy has always had his share of artistic failures, none of which register in light of his successes? Honestly, Scorsese may be the only director wherein I don’t even like half of his films and would still consider him a candidate for Best Ever status.
The Wolf of Wall Street is his best film in a decade, but still obviously inferior to The Lone Ranger and Pain & Gain. Or is it possible that those films made the list purely out of contrarian preening? If Pain & Gain is Michael Bay’s best movie, it’s still markedly less enjoyable than a spinal tap.
Doubly frustrating since these lists also champion some of my underdog favorites like Stoker, Byzantium, and especially Only God Forgives. But a little perspective might not hurt. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Martin Scorsese is actually a BETTER director than Michael Bay. Or Rob Zombie. Or Gore Verbinski or, for that matter, Spike Jonze.
Wolf of Wall Street isn’t Goodfellas. Sorry. There’s quite a few others films that aren’t either.
in fairness i’m not sure it’s “contrarian preening” so much as an extension of what walter has always said about dishonourable mentions — there’s no point naming the stuff everybody already knows is shit. the same goes in the opposite direction, he’s more inclined to defend the the films that need defending rather than make the same list as all the other like-minded critics on the internet. i’m not saying he consciously does this (maybe he does, idk), i’m saying most of us sub-consciously do this.
of course, it’s also possible that he just thinks those films are better. you’re being kind of presumptuous. one thing i tend to enjoy about walter’s criticism is he judges every film on its own merits rather than being blinded by legacy or reputation; if even his most favourite filmmakers (let’s say tarantino) put out a stinker i do believe he’d call it out, and he’s just proven he’ll do the opposite (i can’t think of any filmmaker he’s slated more than bay). maybe his comment about scorsese needing to retire is a bit harsh, but there’s an argument that he hasn’t been a particularly vital voice since the ’90s, and in a sense the comment is a compliment to his legacy (as in, the reason his new stuff disappoints so much is he was once so great).
besides, ‘the lone ranger’ has actually been promoted by a bunch of good critics, especially for its keaton-esque set pieces and whatnot. ‘pain and gain’ is getting a shitload of good reviews (far too many in my opinion but that’s by the by). if anything, the likes of CARRIE and WE ARE WHAT WE ARE would seem like more contrarian picks, except that he’s argued well for their inclusion here and elsewhere.
Tom – I think we’re on the same page in a lot of ways. It seems that once or twice a year, Walter will cathect some completely ludicrous choice (like Carrie, or the Fright Night remake), and this is actually one of the more charming aspects of the sight. I’d also agree that Walter is more than willing to put down movies from his darlings; off the top of my head, Christopher Nolan, Hayao Miyazaki, Guillermo del Toro and David Fincher are all professed favorites which have had at least one or two pans (usually with justification).
My only real point of contention is that there’s a difference between a lack of bias – which seems to be what we’re discussing and which would be admirable – and a lack of context, which just seems blinkered. To use both of my previous examples: Pain & Gain is basically indefensible, and the best Walter can offer about it is that it reflects the zeitgeist. Great. For better or worse, the Transformers films were HUGELY reflective of the zeitgeist. Would that elevate them as well?
Re: The Lone Ranger, I don’t think it falls under the aegis of championing some obscure film (a la Stoker or OGF, as stated below). 250 million dollar Disney flicks don’t get to play the underdog. Walter sighs over the racial politics in 12 Years a Slave, but Tonto is… what exactly? All in good fun? Forgivable pulp? Really, Lone Ranger is nothing if not the outgrowth of the enormous, Rube Goldberg leviathan of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies… which Walter basically hated. I should mention in passing I liked both Pirates AND the Ranger. But I like them as stylish and satisfying garbage, not as some unappreciated gem(s).
What rankles about Scorsese, from the offing, is simply the tone. That he USED TO be good doesn’t ring as quite the compliment you seem to suggest, and that the FFC criticisms largely amount to an unappealing sense of “Get off the stage, old man” is mighty unfortunate. Walter may be willing to view news films context-free, but he has a bad habit of dismissing directors (careers, really) like some French monarch. And once they’re gone, they stay gone. So Scorsese is too old to ever direct another good film. How long before (like Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, and Stephen Spielberg before) FFC starts picking over the old bones and deciding he was never that great to start with?
fair enough. a couple points:
i’m not sure PAIN & GAIN is indefensible. i mean, it’s pretty savvy about the psychoses underlying the appeal of shit like TRANSFORMERS. my issue is that the film’s thesis basically boils down to “i know my films are the epitome of all that’s wrong with america, but dayAMN they’re hella fun,” which is actually worse and more insulting than just being mindlessly awful. at best his attitude is one of gentle mockery, usually undercut by examples of exactly the shit he was mocking. for that film to genuinely be good it needed to be far more uncomfortable (OBSERVE & REPORT comes to mind), but ultimately it has far more sympathy for its characters than disdain, and any feelings to the contrary are provoked by the actors more often than the director. which is a roundabout way of saying that bay remains indefensible, but maybe a case can be made for the film in spite of him.
i can’t comment on THE LONE RANGER, haven’t seen it, but a lot of the praise seems to be for how it integrates some brains and detail and spatial awareness into a blockbuster that might’ve made more money without it. i dunno if you’ve read walter’s review. it doesn’t exactly read like a review for the 15th best movie of the year, but maybe it grew in the rearview?: http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2013/07/the-lone-ranger-2013.html
i think FFC’s relationship with scorsese has always been a little weird. i recall a bunch of the writers and commenters agreeing that RAGING BULL is a lesser film than BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, for example. again i can’t comment as i haven’t seen the latter. *shrug* for the record i think walter really liked TIDELAND which is pretty recent gilliam. think he was pretty big on AMERICAN GANGSTER and BLACK HAWK DOWN too? and he’s always been pretty clear about what he wants from spielberg and how that differs from what he gets – think he still adores near everything up to RAIDERS. anyway, all that aside, i get why you feel his scorsese comments were premature and unnecessarily dismissive.
PAIN&GAIN was enjoyable at times, but man, be careful when Michael Bay wants to be funny. Be very careful. Just think of the Dwarf tossing thing, or the EddyMurphy-esque look on Doorbal’s face when – SPOILER – they get their death sentence at the end. Bay is really just a mean frat. It’s a shame that Dwayne Johnson does probably the performance of his life in this movie.
On THE LONE RANGER, Tonto is an embodiment of the stunted/crippled identity of the American Indian. The character is played by the white Johnny Depp who gives a very attention-seeking self-indulgent Johnny Depp performance, but I think that the film is designed to roll with this and we are supposed to acknowledge it. The idea is that the identity of the “American Indian” has been completely destroyed and can then only be resurrected as an artificial construct. Supporting this is the fact that the character is introduced in a Natural History exhibit, that this framing device (and old man make-up) calls back to Arthur Penn’s 1970 LITTLE BIG MAN which also depicts the genocide of the American Indian semi-satirically through the eyes of a white identifying as Indian, and that Tonto is explicitly described as “crazy” within the film. This aspect of the film, that Tonto is neither the colored sidekick and comic relief for the white hero nor is he a superhero himself, is possibly one of the things that alienated the mass audience but makes the film interesting for many of the rest of us.
The biggest dud on Walter’s list, by the way (and so far as I have seen), is actually FRANCES HA. Surprised not to see more of a backlash against it; the writing (dialogue, characterization, and plot) reminded me of GILMORE GIRLS (a highly pejorative comparison, if it needs to be said). Compare and contrast with INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, in what it says about the “starving artist”, and get back to me.
Alex – I hadn’t even considered the Little Big Man echos. They don’t suddenly reveal new depths in TLR or anything, but I appreciate the connection. I suppose the biggest divergence is that Little Big Man, like Butch Cassidy or Judge Roy Bean, arrived at a time when the Western was ready to be eulogized (and approached with considerable ironic distance, which all three films adopt). Lone Ranger, much like Verbinski’s Pirates trilogy, is drawing upon a genre which has basically been MIA for decades. Whereas people were game for Pirates, Lone Ranger (whatever its inherent appeal) is out in the wilderness, and likely to remain there for a good long while.
I actually liked Francis Ha. It’s extremely slight, but the whole movie basically rests on how far Greta Gerwig’s charm can take you. Mileage may vary, but in my case, it was very far indeed (or at least 85 minutes). I’m not sure I’d put it on my Top Ten. Then again, my Top Ten includes The Counselor, so feel free to pelt me with stones.
Oh, and all is basically forgiven on account of Walter including The World’s End, which is not only Simon Pegg’s best performance by miles, but the smartest and saddest of the Cornetto Trilogy. Also a nice palliative to the state of arrested development which consumes 90% of all comedy and action films these days.