In case you didn't realize yet, 2013 is in the books. As I sit here and try to think about all that occurred in the last 12 months, all I can come up with is a simple, single thought: It was a long, strange year. I was best man at my best friends wedding, I had a few failed attempts at romance, I started writing and came up with some stuff I really like, and I made plans for my future. Outside of my personal life, there were the strange stories that consumed all of us for, you know, at least a couple days, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the Christopher Dorner saga right here in our backyard, as well as the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and the Edward Snowden story.* The Red Sox won the World Series again, giving Boston a team to rally behind after tragedy, the Heat won their second title in a row, giving Lakers fans even more fuel for their hate fire, and for some reason, the Ravens won the Super Bowl. It was a good year for TV, as noted in the previous post but now it's time to talk about what I really want to discuss, the year in film. In no particular order, these are more or less my favorite films of the year:
Mud
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Short Term 12
Out Of The Furnace
Upstream Color
American Hustle
The Way, Way Back
Frances Ha
Gravity
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Other favorites that are in the conversation include Stoker, Side Effects, Prince Avalanche, The Kings Of Summer, Pacific Rim, Inside Llewyn Davis, In A World..., Drinking Buddies and The Heat.
This list does not include one film that I have yet to see but which I will almost undoubtedly love, Spike Jonze's Her. I can't imagine I will see this film and dislike it, as it seems tailor-made for me. A man who is at odds with the world due to his inability to connect with those around him falls for the operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson, who more than anybody has a voice you could fall in love with, that helps him get through life in near-future LA. I've said that I may be drawn so much to this movie because I could conceivably be this character, as I have trouble fitting in and finding love in real life. I may watch and do away with real women altogether.
Another thing to note is that I didn't have an absolute favorite this year and, to be honest, I had a hard time coming up with 10 notable enough to be shortlisted as favorites. I didn't love a lot of the Oscar bait films and didn't even see some of the soon to be Academy Award winning films like 12 Years A Slave and Captain Phillips and wasn't swept away (pun intended) by films like All Is Lost and Dallas Buyers Club. I think this is the year with the highest number of films where when asked how they were, I said "Eh, it was pretty good." Most of the time, movies are just fine, not bad, not great, just...fine, a perfectly okay way to spend 2 hours. Very rarely do I see a film that blows me away or one that I absolutely loathe. I couldn't do a worst of list for the year because I didn't see ten films that I hated. If I don't think I'm going to like a film, I don't see it. I almost always know what I'm getting into beforehand.
In many ways, this was the year of McConaughey, popping up in The Wolf of Wall Street and the trailers for True Detective and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar which will arrive, as the trailer tells us, one year from now as well as his presumably Oscar winning performance in Dallas Buyers Club and the criminally underrated Mud, which, gun to my head, would maybe be my pick for my favorite film of the year. He plays a criminal hiding out on an island on the run from the law as well as backwoods gangsters who befriends a young boy in need of a real life hero and some adventure in his life. Jeff Nichols created something very extraordinary, a coming of age film inside of a small, tight, rural noir crime drama. Another great coming-of-age film that was part of a pair of great films this summer was The Way, Way Back, along with The Kings Of Summer. McConaughey also schools Leonardo DiCaprio and is responsible for turning him into the titular Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio goes all out in Wolf, doing some of the most vulgar and hilarious acting I've ever seen him do. It's a cautionary tale about the ability of Capitalism and greed to corrupt absolutely and it's also really fucking funny. Leonardo DiCaprio's chief rival for best actor of the generation Christian Bale had a great year, going gritty & dark in Out Of The Furnace and going fat & funny for American Hustle. Hustle is not as good as Silver Linings Playbook from last year but David O. Russell is at the top of his game and Scott Cooper cast Bale in his rust belt crime drama Out Of The Furnace to play a man out for revenge for the brother he tried to but ultimately couldn't protect. Bale shared the screen with the love of my life Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle, who had a bigger part this year reprising her star-making turn as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire. Catching Fire is the biggest surprise of the year for me. The book is the weakest of the trilogy but I was still excited to see the film and ready to pretend I didn't notice all of it's flaws. However, it ended up being legitimately great and a rarity, a young adult series and a second in a series, being made for adults and done very well. The other contenders, in my eyes, for best actress this year are Brie Larson, who was so great in Short Term 12 and Greta Gerwig who co-wrote and co-starred in Frances Ha. Both films tackle the problem that many twenty-somethings have and ask the question: What am I doing with my life and who should I surround myself with? Both films do it in different but equally real ways and are two of my favorites of the year. The technical achievement of the year is undoubtedly Gravity and looked stunningly beautiful on the big screen, one of the best movie-going experiences of the year. Upstream Color made me question the way I look at life, Shane Carruth made something disorienting and haunting and wrote, directed, starred in, edited, soundtracked and distributed the film himself. It's a meditation on loss of identity in the modern world and starred one of my new favorite actors, Amy Seimetz who also popped up in the shows The Killing and Family Tree. If you can get through it, it's worth checking out. The dude makes about 1 movie every 10 years (Primer - 2004) so you have time to catch up.
*I just finished reading through an oral history of 2013 that was heavy on tragedy.
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