2013 in Reviews: The Best

Yin and yang, peanut butter and jelly, rice and soy sauce, ham and cheese. All things require balance. (Also, I appear to have food on the brain. But let that go.) To balance my picks for 2013's worst movies, here's my list of some of the best.

A caveat: several of the year's most highly acclaimed films never came to theaters in my area, so I haven't seen Upstream Color, Before Midnight, or 12 Years a Slave yet -- I anticipate all of them would have made this list otherwise.

10) Warm Bodies. On the one hand, it's a fairly standard young adult romance: the isolated loner meets the sheltered sweetheart and they realize they have more in common than they first expected. On the other hand, it gives me a chance to use the phrase "zomromcom." Nicholas Hoult's tortured "R" has a funny, snappy inner monologue and John Malkovich gives a surprisingly restrained performance as Julie's father. It's not going to change the world, but it's a sweet little film that tries for more than it had to, and it's a refreshing change of pace from the insistent doom-and-gloom of most zombie flicks. *** out of ****

9) Much Ado About Nothing. I'm a big fan of Whedon's. This adaptation of Shakespeare's play is problematic in some respects, particularly its retention of the virginity plot, which just doesn't play well in 2013. Nevertheless, the film is slick and elegant and the two lead performances are quite engaging. It's also encouraging evidence that, in an era of megabudget blockbusters (one of which Whedon directed), the art of filmmaking on a small scale is still alive and thriving. *** out of ****

8) Stoker. Brutal, disturbing, and beautiful. Park Chan-wook, of Oldboy fame, delivers another stunningly sumptuous visual feast with his trademark attention to (literally) gory detail. The performances are top-notch. It's not for everyone (a scene with pruning shears was almost too much for me), but as a Gothic drama directed with precise, gorgeous vision, it's hella good. *** out of ****

7) The World's End. It's not as good as Shaun of the Dead, but it's got a lot of the same quirky charm that that film had. Like Shaun, it veers between the mundane and the bizarro, but Simon Pegg and his ensemble give funny, solid performances that keep the film grounded. *** out of ****

6) Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The second Hunger Games movie improves in a lot of ways on the first. No more shakicam! The first hour and a half is the most interesting part of the film for me in its satire of media consumption culture, while the games themselves feel a little rushed. The performances throughout are strong and the visuals -- especially in IMAX -- are stunning. ***1/2 of ****

5) Frozen. I was less immediately enamored with Frozen than I was with Brave (like Merida, I have crazy curly red hair), but both are significant in their challenges to the traditional Princess Romance plot. In Brave, Merida rejected a suitor altogether and the plot centered on her relationship with her mother instead. In Frozen, the two young women do end up with romances (spoilers, I guess?) but the progress towards the Happily Ever After ending is constantly checked and confronted in interesting ways. The animation is, as usual, sumptuously gorgeous. ***1/2 out of ****

4) Mud. After movies like Reign of Fire and Failure to Launch, my idea of Matthew McConaughey was as a good-looking man who had charisma but wasn't a terribly good actor. The past couple of years have changed my mind. His performance in Mud, like Killer Joe and Magic Mike, is gutsy, raw, and compelling. The film itself is by turns sweet and sad, much like coming-of-age itself. ***1/2 out of ****

3) Pacific Rim. It may have underperformed at the box office, but for all its flaws Pacific Rim does an amazing job at conveying the director's love of film, and inspiring that sense of joy in the audience. Visually beautiful with plenty of callbacks to the wacky creature features of yesteryear. It isn't very complex, character-wise, but this movie isn't about that: it's about watching giant robots beat the crap out of giant sea monsters. This is everything I want out of an action movie, with an extra helping of fun. ***1/2 out of ****

2) Gravity. It's a very simple, direct story: People get lost in space. People try to survive. See what happens. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave it a serious fact-checking, but Alfonso Cuarón's vision is a still a feast for the eyes. Hands-down THE best use of 3D I've ever encountered. I also appreciate the almost singular focus on a female character in a major action movie, unencumbered by being someone else's love-interest or sidekick -- it doesn't happen often. Gravity might play it simple on the story front, but as sheer filmic pleasure, it's hard to beat. **** out of ****

1) The Wolf of Wall Street.  A lot of people seem to think Scorsese's latest film glamorizes Wall Street greed. I don't see it that way. Sure, there is plenty of excess on the screen, but it's played as hollow and sordid, the empty enjoyments of shallow people without souls. Over the course of the film's three hours viewers come to understand that Jordan Belfort is a desperate, disgusting man who doesn't care who he hurts in his pursuit of wealth, not an aspirational idol. The dialogue, written by Sopranos alum Terence Winter, crackles and even though the film is long, it never drags -- a major directorial feat. DiCaprio as usual gives an amazing performance. **** out of ****

2013 in Reviews: The Worst

It's that time of year again, folks, the time when we look back on the year and ask ourselves, "Why were there so many shitty movies this year? And why did I see so many of them?"  In keeping with the spirit of the season, I present my list of the ten worst films of 2013.

10) Star Trek: Into Darkness. I really enjoyed J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot in 2009. It had a fast-paced, fast-talking energy that I appreciated, and (lens flares aside) presented some of the best visuals of that year. Unfortunately, Into Darkness suffers from the law of diminishing returns. I liked it well enough while I was watching it, but the more I thought about it, the less it made any sense. Here is a movie that opens with Kirk explicitly and cavalierly violating the Prime Directive for no discernible reason, followed only minutes later by a scene that's supposed to be intensely emotional because of Kirk's responsibility not to -- you guessed it -- violate the Prime Directive. The movie only really works because of the strength of the performances: Simon Pegg is delightful as Mr. Scott, and Benedict Cumberbatch's Khan is a menacing blend of intelligence, calm, and brutality. Unfortunately, the story is lackluster and full of plot holes as big as the Enterprise herself. **1/2 out of ****

9) Iron Man 3. A close runner-up in the "plot holes the size of Manhattan" category, Iron Man 3 disappointed me on a variety of levels. I actually wasn't upset about the film's tinkering with the Mandarin backstory; Ben Kingsley's half-menacing, half-drunken idiot performance was the highlight of the movie for me. But I was unable to suspend disbelief about the film's central big-bad premise, and this sense of absurdity only escalated as the film went on. The film was very flashy, but ultimately as empty as Tony Stark's one million Iron Man suits. *1/2 out of ****

8) Oblivion. The title says it all: only a few months after I saw this movie and I remembered so little about it that I had to refer to imdb to jog my memory. Alien invasions, Tom Cruise, clones...yawn. The film has some beautiful visuals, but the story is a ludicrous mishmash of elements and never has much of an impact. * out of ****

7) Elysium. I love Matt Damon, but I hated basically everything about this movie. The plot simply doesn't make sense, the characters are thinly sketched and act with no discernibly human motivation, and what is meant to be a huge emotional payoff at the end comes across as a hollow triumph. I enjoyed director Neill Blomkamp's District 9, but this failed to live up to that movie's promise. * out of ****

6) Olympus Has Fallen. This is one of two DC-takeover films this year, and although this one boasts the better pedigree, with director Antoine Fuqua (of Training Day) behind the wheel, it just wasn't much fun. I don't hold disaster movies to the same standard as I expect from Quality Entertainment, but it's unforgivable for a disaster flick to be dull. The action clips along, but the plot is ludicrous and the performances surprisingly dour. The movie simmers with anger and a surprising amount of violence, but it fails to deliver any real thrills. * out of ****

5) Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. I have a very high tolerance for the filmic absurd. I unironically enjoyed Shark Night and will watch Prince of Persia whenever it's on TNT. Nevertheless, despite its promise of goofy fantasy schlock, Hansel and Gretel felt overlong at 88 minutes. There are a few laughs -- Hansel is diabetic thanks to his childhood candy ordeal -- but the story in general takes itself too seriously, and the gory violence feels over the top. * out of ****

4) The Host. I watched this on a transatlantic flight, and even as a captive audience I had a hard time finishing the film. The story is paper-thin, the acting melodramatic and often unintentionally hilarious. Given that Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame is the genius behind this mess, it shouldn't surprise that it's a bloated, ponderous "love story," hyperactively handwringing over The Big Questions in Life while failing to deliver any emotional validity or genuine feeling. * out of ****

3) Safe Haven. This was another captive-audience choice, as it was the only movie played (TWICE) on a recent flight from London. I have never enjoyed Nicholas Sparks' brand of sentimental schmaltz, and this film delivers as expected. Whether it's the overwrought, melodramatic story full of incomprehensible and laughable moments (there's a dead-wife ghost!) or the banal, saccharine performances, watching this film felt like drowning in cheap "maple" syrup: too sweet, too thick, and taking way too long. * out of ****

2) After Earth. The third Big Space Adventure of 2013 also failed to deliver. I shouldn't be surprised at this, of course; I haven't enjoyed an M. Night Shyamalan movie since 2004's The Village (and even that, I hated the ending of). After Earth, for all the trailer's promises of action-packed chases and space explosions, is that worst of combinations: preachy and boring. It insists on the message of its tagline: "Danger is real. Fear is a choice." (Biological autonomic responses be damned!) I wish boredom had been a choice. 1/2 out of ****

1) Now You See Me. I didn't have a lot of hope for this when I saw the trailer, but I enjoy watching Woody Harrelson, so I gave this a shot. This is probably the film that I felt most insulted my intelligence this year. Supposedly a movie about a group of magicians performing the ultimate con, the story is full of more holes than a lace hanky. This movie's logic asks you to accept that a group of people attending a magic show would suddenly find surprise sums of money in their bank accounts, stolen from someone present at the show, and that they would all a) accept that this had actually happened and wasn't a prank, and b) be able to keep the money. Worse still, it reveals a surprise "twist" at the end that was never hinted at at all and doesn't actually work in the logic of the story. It's the kind of tacked-on twist that makes M. Night Shyamalan's movies look subtle. When we finished this movie, my husband and I looked at each other and said we wished we had those two hours of our lives back. ZERO out of ****

And there you have it! What movies were your least favorites of 2013?

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

I am probably not the most objective judge of the Hobbit movies. I grew up on Tolkien's books, and I am not ashamed of admitting that I saw The Fellowship of the Ring in cinemas 9 times. Simply to see Middle Earth onscreen will always be a pleasure for me.

Much of that pleasure is present in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (H2 for short), the second installation in the Hobbit trilogy. I can't help but think that if the Lord of the Rings trilogy hadn't come first that these films would be being hailed as the standard-setters in fantasy filmmaking, because there really is nothing else like them, even now, more than a decade after The Fellowship of the Ring hit theatres.

The thing that Peter Jackson is arguably best at is a sense of scale. Middle Earth is huge, and Jackson's swooping camera movements and wide pan shots emphasize how small individuals are in this massive world of Tolkien's imagination. I saw this film twice, once in 35mm and once in HFR 3D, and while I'm usually a skeptic of 3D films, I have to admit the effect actually made a real contribution to the movie's impact. I know that plenty of people have complained about the HFR, and it does take some adjusting; actions move smoothly, details are crisp. Once my eyes became accustomed to it, however, I appreciated the lack of blur in the fast-paced, ever-moving sweeping shots that Jackson is so fond of. When I saw H2 in 35mm, many of the action shots seemed to pass in a blur. In HFR, every hair on the spiders and every scale on Smaug was crisp and clear, making these monsters even more terrifying. The 3D also contributed; Jackson's camera motions are notorious for their drunken, helter-skelter sweeping through the scene, and in 3D I felt even more like I was flying through Dol Guldur or swooping down a tunnel with Smaug.

The action has been considerably ramped up, both in quantity and scale, from the first film. While I actually really loved the opening of Unexpected Journey and its focus on Hobbiton and Bilbo's dismay at meeting all these unruly Dwarves, many other people hated what they perceived as slow pacing. That isn't really a problem here, although those who haven't read the books may think the Beorn excursion dead weight that doesn't contribute to the forward motion of the story. (They would be wrong, of course.) The action setpieces are here in full force, and several of them are quite inventive, such as the barrel escape from Mirkwood. Bilbo's confrontation with the Mirkwood spiders made me squirm in my seat, and I may or may not have squealed once. (I did. I totally did.)

In fact, for me there is almost too much action. The reason I love Jackson's original Lord of the Rings trilogy isn't its action scenes -- although the battle of Helm's Deep will remain one of the greatest battle scenes ever committed to film -- but its heart. He was comfortable taking a break from the epic to focus on moments of intimate emotion, such as Boromir's death scene in Fellowship or Sam's heartbreaking inspirational speech in The Two Towers. When Jackson is content to linger on his actors' performances in these new films, there are some real moments of beauty. Ian McKellen's Gandalf can't help but dominate the screen when he's present -- he could be reading the menu at Pizza Hut and make it sound apocalyptic. Martin Freeman remains my favorite actor in this trilogy, although he is sorely underused; for a movie about THE Hobbit he isn't onscreen as much as you'd expect. When he is, though, his performance continues to be pitch-perfect. Freeman brings exactly the right blend of pluckiness and timidity that I would hope for from Bilbo Baggins. His interactions with Smaug, voiced by his Sherlock costar Benedict Cumberbatch, are incontestably the best scenes in the film.

The trouble is that there aren't enough of these personal moments, and characters tend to get lost in the onslaught of action. Even excellent confrontations, like the scenes near the end when Smaug and the dwarves face off, are drawn out too long. This movie would be better about 20-30 minutes shorter. And there are no emotional gut-punches like there are in the original trilogy. Jackson tries, with his addition of Tauriel and her (completely unnecessary) love triangle or his expansion of Bard the bargeman's backstory as an unwilling political dissident. These character touches are nice, but they don't carry the weight of the stories in Lord of the Rings. 

Perhaps that is somewhat inevitable: although the events in The Hobbit would eventually be ret-conned into The Lord of the Rings, the scale of the events is smaller. We're not looking at the extinction of Middle Earth here; we're talking about a very small band of people trying to reclaim their homeland. While that shouldn't be dismissed as a story not worth telling, it can be more difficult to feel like the weight of the world relies on this group's success. Jackson begins to suggest in H2 the larger importance of getting Smaug out of the Lonely Mountain with scenes involving Gandalf investigating the potential rise of Sauron, but for people unfamiliar with the source material, it might not be very clear yet. And Thorin Oakenshield is -- as he was in the book -- an unrelenting douchebag. The Hobbit films seem to want him to be another Aragorn, a king in search of his kingdom, but while I like Richard Armitage, he isn't Viggo Mortensen, and Thorin has few of Aragorn's redeeming characteristics.

Nevertheless, while the characterization leaves a lot to be desired, technically, the film is beautiful. There are scenes here that made my jaw drop; the aforementioned spiders, the first time Bilbo enters Smaug's hoard room, and a gorgeous moment when Smaug, covered in gold, pirouettes through the night sky scattering drops of light around him. Enjoyed simply as a feast for the eyes, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug delivers. As an adaptation of Tolkien's short novel, it has some great moments, but it's too long in general and too focused on action scenes in particular.

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE

There is a scene near the end of Catching Fire that encapsulates, for me, why the Hunger Games movies have been successful so far: a close-up of Jennifer Lawrence's face as emotions flash across it, conveyed by a crinkle of a frown, a twist of the lip, a widening of the eye. Serious emotional complexity presents itself to us in a matter of seconds. Jennifer Lawrence has a powerful screen presence, all the more remarkable given that she's only 23.

It's been interesting to watch these first two films, because they've been the first really successful action movies I can think of in quite a while to focus so centrally on a female protagonist. The other franchise that springs to mind is Alien and Sigourney Weaver's ass-kicking Ripley. That also was a sci-fi/fantasy story, and I wonder if one reason that stories like Alien and The Hunger Games are more palatable to society at large is precisely because they take place in an alternate reality. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to have an intelligent, resourceful, emotionally complex female character onscreen with bigger problems than finding/keeping a boyfriend. (You're damn right that was a dig at Twilight.)

The romance angle was the weakest part of the first film, and it's similarly underdeveloped here. Liam Hemsworth's Gale is a very pretty man, but that's about the only trait he appears to have, and why Katniss should be so attached to him remains a mystery to me. Her relationship with Peeta is more complicated. The first hour of the film is the best part, as Katniss and Peeta realize that although they may have left the arena behind, they haven't escaped it: they are part of a media machine that will keep going, as Haymitch sadly tells them, until they die. This revelation helps to explain Haymitch's angry alcoholism: in addition to having to watch District 12's tributes die every year, he's paraded around with the other "victors" in an unending pageant commemorating something despicable, and he can't refuse to be. No wonder he likes his whiskey.

The social satire isn't exactly subtle here, but then again, most satire isn't. The skewering of society's strange desire to feast on the details of strangers' personal lives and to watch them live out their lives onscreen is more aggressive than in the first film. So is its critique of our tendency to use entertainment to escape unpleasantness in our real lives.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's Plutarch Heavensbee, the new Games master, embodies this criticism. His Heavensbee is enigmatic: at one moment advising President Snow to increase the horrific violence towards the districts with a soft-spoken delight, and the next having what seems to be a heartfelt, sympathetic conversation with Katniss. Smug, quietly intense, wearing a perpetual look of amusement, Heavensbee comes across as having has his own secrets (which, of course, he has). He voices the film's most literal criticism of our media obsessions: what better way to sow fear and resentment, he asks Snow, than nonstop coverage of violence interlaced with relentless attention to the frivolous details of a celebrity wedding?
Everyone is wound tighter in this film as fissures in the media machine begin to appear. Elizabeth Banks's Effie Trinket has an increasingly difficult time keeping her cheery facade uncracked as she watches the children she's come to have a real affection for be summoned to the slaughter again. Effie's manic cheerfulness is edgier here, the product of a woman who has been confronted with the real ugliness of the world that she is a part of and is trying to cope with that cognitive dissonance, and Banks's portrayal makes Effie much more sympathetic than I expected her to be. Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman is equally manic: his grin is wider this time around, his laugh louder, his gestures broader, but beneath the purple eyebrows there is panic in his eyes as he realizes his world of flashy TV interviews is undergoing a paradigm shift.

The irony of all this, of course, is that we are watching a critique of people who delight in watching a pageant of people they don't know kill and be killed...while we do precisely the same thing. It's difficult to say whether the film is aware of the contradiction; there certainly isn't the level of meta-commentary as there was, for example, in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

Despite its many strengths, Catching Fire has some significant weaknesses. Perhaps most disturbingly to me, the film is very, very white. It has characters of color, but they're desperately undercharacterized. In fairness, most of the characters other than the main protagonists are also sketched quite faintly, and this is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in the games structure of the story: how do you adequately characterize and humanize 24 people at once? And given that most of them are destined to be quick cannon fodder, would you even want to?

Regardless of the story's inherent character limitations, I have to believe racial diversity could be better implemented than it is. Although Lenny Kravitz's Cinna looks at Katniss with sympathetic eyes (lined in effortlessly cool gold liner), there's not much more to him than that onscreen. Jeffrey Wright's Beetee fares even worse, which is double shame because Wright is a fine actor and manages a great deal with what little he's given. There is also a black female tribute who makes a brief appearance -- Enobarbia? -- but her characterization doesn't extend beyond her filed teeth, which she flashes at Katniss during training.

This trend continues the disturbing absence of racial diversity in big-screen action movies. I'm particularly confused by the lack of representation here given the first film's choice to make Rue a black character. Compared to most of the games cohort, Rue had a significant amount of screentime, and she was a sympathetic and more fully drawn character. Why was it so hard to give the characters of color some detail the second time around?

There's significantly less person-to-person violence shown onscreen in Catching Fire than there was in the first film, and part of me feels like it's a cop-out. The first film's use of violence struck me as disturbing in a thought-provoking way; watching children murder each other provokes intense dissonance. Children aren't supposed to do this. Children aren't supposed to like doing this. Granted, "children killing each other is bad" isn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Deep Thought any time soon, but I felt that there was more to the violence than that. Those children who took delight in the killing were bullies; their viciousness had simply been allowed a greater outlet than is usually accepted in society. Raised from birth to be tributes, the "careers" have been immersed in a culture that privileges their brutality, tells them they are superior to everyone else, encourages self-centeredness at others' expense as the ultimate virtue...uncomfortably familiar things from our own culture. When all the violence occurs offscreen, it's too easy to distance the protagonists from it, rather than seeing them as complicit in it, however unintentionally.

Overall, the games feel rushed. I would have liked to have seen more of the arena, and in particular its peculiar psychological effects on the tributes. After the slower, more exploratory pace of the first part, the games seem hurried, and characters who have the potential to be very interesting don't get the screentime they need or deserve.