The Good Things to Come

I began this blog in January of 2013. It seems I chose a good year to start because it’s been a great year to write about movies. Though unevenly distributed –the good ones concentrate towards the end of the year—2013 was a great watch.  I can truthfully say that I can’t chose one movie as my favorite because there have been some really good films out there, but so very different and good in different ways, that it’s hard to choose the top one, so I’m going for the Top Ten, like most movie sites.

The caveat to my top ten is that despite living in a fairly large city in the south, with some film festivals, technology and tools like the Internet, Netflix, Hulu, and Red Box, I haven’t been able to see many non-English language films (“ foreign films” in the US), or documentaries,  so I guess I can’t completely recommend the best films of 2013. But this is why I’ve created the chart that follows this commentary. The chart holds my picks, but also the Top Ten of 2013 for my favorite movie critics. I don’t always agree with one or the other, but A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Peter Traverse of Rolling Stone magazine are usually my best guides; to a lesser degree Manola Darghis also of the New York Times. I’ve also included the French film magazine that was my guide in my more youthful days, Cahiers du Cinema, with which in more recent years I tend to agree with less, more on a feminist basis than anything (I dislike misogynistic films or films where actresses have been mistreated, which some critics overlook when analyzing films), but it will add the non-English films to the list.

Inside Llewyn Davis

As a “reality check” of the forces that drive film these days –i.e. the industry- I am also including a column of the Top Ten films that made most money at the box office in the United States. It will come as no surprise that there are very few films on the critics’ lists that are also top money makers, the exception that confirms the rule being Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (it’s Oscar chances rise by leaps and bounds).

12 Years a Slave

Box office information is not something to disdain in today’s world, since it is increasingly a predictor of trends. In North American ticket sales alone $10.9 billion dollars were made; that’s the yearly economy of many a country in the world. It’s also important in terms of trends and the future of film itself, especially now that there so many movie streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon,  and the gazillion other non-legal ones, as well as new Cable TV series and movies.  It is interesting to note, as the New York Times does, that “Combined, three presumed best picture contenders — “Nebraska,” “Her” and “Inside Llewyn Davis” — have been seen by roughly one-tenth of the more than 10 million viewers who tuned in to the last episode of “Breaking Bad.””. I loved the last episode of Breaking Bad, so this is a cautionary tale for movie producers, directors and critics. No serious documentary made a deep impression at the box office, so there is another.

American Hustle

For those of us who survive by film we’ll still end the year with a sigh of relief for we know that, whatever the medium chosen, there are young and middle aged film makers out there, along with actors, cinematographers, illustrators, screenwriters, and more, raising the bar and excelling. They are a promise of more good things to come and that makes for a Happy New Year to all!

TOP TEN 2013

Surviving by Film	Rolling Stone Peter Traverse	The New York Times A.    O. Scott	The New York Times Manola Darghis	Cahiers du Cinema
Nebraska (Alexander Payne)	12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	Inside Llewyn  Davis (Joen & Ethan Coen)	12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	Stranger by the Lake ( Alain Guiraudie)
12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	Gravity  (Alfonso Cuaron)	12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	American Hustle (David O. Russel)	Spring Breakers ( Harmony Korine)
Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler)	The Wolf of Wall Street  (Martin Scorcese)	Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche)	Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)	Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche)
Inside Llewyn  Davis  (Joen & Ethan Coen)	Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)	Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener)	Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh)	Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron)
American Hustle (David O. Russel)	Her (Spike Jonze)	A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang Ke)	Captain Philips (Paul Greengrass)	A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang Ke)
The Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée)	American Hustle (David O. Russel)	All is Lost (J.C. Chandor)	The Counselor  ( Ridley Scott)	Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)	Captain Philips (Paul Greengrass)	Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)	The Grandmaster (Wang Kar-wai)	Jealousy (Philippe Garrel)
Captain Philips (Paul Greengrass)	Nebraska (Alexander Payne)	Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta)	The Great Beauty	Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-soo)
Philomena (Stephen Frears)	Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)	Lee Daniels’ The Butler (Lee Daniels)	Her (Spike Jonze)	You and the Night (Yann Gonzalez)
Lee Daniels’ The Butler  (Lee Daniels)	Inside Llewyn Davis – Joen & Ethan Coen	Tie* (see below).	Inside Llewyn  Davis (Joen & Ethan Coen)	La Bataille de Solferino (Justine Triet)

*Tie for 10th: The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorcese), The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola), Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, American Hustle.

TOP TEN BOX OFFICE: Iron Man, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Despicable Me 2, Man of Steel, Monsters University, Frozen, Gravity, Fast and Furious Six, Oz the Great and Powerful, Star Trek Into Darkness.

Despicable Him

I usually reserve my posts for movies I like, so I debated writing about The Wolf of Wall Street. The exception I make is for films directed by someone I admire and Martin Scorsese, who directs this film, is prominent among directors I like, so here goes.

The movie is based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, a corrupt stockbroker who overindulged in drugs, sex and stealing other people’s money. I wish I could say that the movie is loosely based on this white collar criminal, because seeing the debauchery, the cruelty and downright insanity of that lifestyle, it’s hard to believe such things occur, again, with other people’s money; hard-working, middle class people’s money, but the movie is based on the autobiography of the same name. In an interview, Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the Belfort criminal on screen, talked about: “This hedonistic lifestyle, this time period in Wall Street’s history where Jordan basically gave in to every carnal indulgence possible and was obsessed with greed and obsessed with himself essentially. He was so unflinching in his account of this time period and so honest and so unapologetic in this biography, I was compelled to play this character for a long period of time”.  And play him to the last detail is what he does, which kind of makes you wonder about this rich, model-dating, fast-living actor.

There are many disappointments here. First and foremost is the fact that Belfort, who only did 22 months prison for the theft (fraud) he committed, the truly despicable main character of this film, received a million dollars for the rights to make the film based on his autobiography and will receive royalties from the movie. I wish I hadn’t paid to see it! A warning would have been great as you entered this movie: “a portion of your ticket payment will be directed at keeping Belfort rich”. I don’t understand why seemingly progressive people, like Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, who supposedly made this film as a “reflection of everything that’s wrong in today’s society” wouldn’t see how contradictory –if not downright stupid- this ends up being.

Jordan Belfort is not only the man who scammed millions off working class people, but also a man who allowed his co-workers to throw short people at a bulls eye as sport, and spoke of them in the most demeaning and dehumanizing way; a man who humiliated a female co-worker shaving her head (for money); who brought sex-workers to his office, on planes, in his home on bacchanals that rivaled the romans at their worst; who in his drug-addled state risked the life of his child and many others who crossed his path, on land and sea. In an interview, DiCaprio talks about how Belfort has turned his life around. Hmm. He still owes millions of dollars to the working class people he ripped off with his penny-stock trading scam, something that was part of his agreement to get a reduced sentence; he has neglected his payments, despite the money he is making. And he still is making money by telling people how to get rich. So much for change.

Trying to forget that incongruous aspect of this film, which is really, really hard to do, and looking at it from the perspective of the directing, acting, screen writing and all, this film is still a disappointment. The movie is three hours long, cut down from four, but it could easily have been cut down to two for all it had to say; it draws out scenes incessantly and unnecessarily and ends up being incredibly repetitive. If the point was to make us sick of seeing such depravity, that might have worked if the movie wasn’t so Hollywood-Life-of-the-Rich-and-Famous in style; extreme debauchery and cruelty have been used as a way to cause rejection from the audience, such as with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s anti-fascist film Saló, from which you leave downright sick, but The Wolf of Wall Street is not, I believe, having that effect on the audience, in particular, not the modern, young, male audience. From comments overheard and the guffaws, it would seem that males, quite used to pornography these days, are seeing past the sex in the movie and probably focusing on how fast the guy made his money, how great his yacht with a helipad was, how cool Leo dressed and how funny and fun the frat games and partying at that office were.

Nothing remarkable about the acting either.  Leo DiCaprio doesn't have the range to embody a complex character. He comes off much like a modern day Jay Gatsby, which he also played this year, but with no love for anyone but himself. Jonah Hill is still pretty much the Jonah Hill of Superbad, 21 Jump Street and the like, but raunchier. And one can’t help but think about the graphic sex scenes (the infamous candle scene) that these actors did not use body doubles for and wonder about how that differentiates them from the man who did them first time around and wrote about them, who is supposedly being criticized in the film (or is he?).

 If the point was to raise awareness about what happens on Wall Street, the swindling and the excess of Wall Street at the expense of millions of Americans, in the most realistic way possible, I have two words for the people who made the film: Inside Job. That movie has been made and won multiple awards.

Some say this is part of a trilogy of Martin’s, one that includes Good Fellows and Casino, both about the mob. It does share with those films the greed, the depravity, the criminality of an underworld that we wish did not exist, but does; it exposes it. However, the criminals in those movies were either killed or locked up for good. The most despicable one in this film is receiving royalties from the movie. What does that say about the film and our times?

Small Town Folk like All of Us

People tend to forget that more than half the population of the United States live in small towns. A good portion of the other half, the one that lives in cities larger than 25,000 people, probably came from a small town. So, few will not recognize the folks and places that form the beautiful quilt of characters that is Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. This is a small-town film, but it is also somewhat of a road movie, something that Payne has already filmed before in Sideways and About Schmidt. In both cases, it is a poignant film very much worth seeing.

Before I dive into all the things I loved about this movie, I have to express my delight in the director, Alexander Payne himself, and the quasi documentary style he has developed in movies like Nebraska, Sideways and The Descendants; I call it so because he presents situations that ordinary, non-famous people like most of us live, without judgment and without pushing feelings or circumstances. The movies feel authentic and it is the situations we recognize in our families, our friends or acquaintances, which allow us to bring emotions to what he presents. It is noteworthy, in speaking of this documentary style, that Payne frequently uses non-actors to play minor characters in his movies; actual policemen, restaurant servers, teachers, etc. Payne also injects his films with a dry, many times dark and cynical humor, but a great sense of humor none the less. There are, after all, many things funny in even the most difficult situations.  This humor is forefront in his earlier movies, like Election (probably the best acting Reese Witherspoon has ever accomplished) or Citizen Ruth (with Laura Dern, Bruce Dern's daughter), but it also very present even in the more dramatic films like Nebraska, Sideways or The Descendants.

Bruce Dern and Will Forte in Nebraska

Nebraska is visually beautiful. It was a brilliant choice of the director to film the movie in black- and-white; mostly striking shades of gray, to tell the truth. The choice of black-and-white adds so much to the movie! The landscape, dry and barren; the small towns made more abandoned by the lack of color; the older generation, with their already white hair, and the close ups that without color add so much depth to their expressions. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who worked with Payne in Sideways and The Descendants, but who has also shown his skill in movies like 3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line and The Pursuit of Happyness, does wonders with his black-and-white compositions in this film.

But it is the acting that makes this film a prize winner. Bruce Dern, who plays the grouchy, confused, old melancholic alcoholic who is Woody Grant, has already won the Best Actor prize at Cannes and is pretty much on all the best actor lists for other prizes this year. In the movie he is married to June Squib, his acid-tongued wife Kate, who not only complements his acting, but dominates a good portion of the film with her great acting as well. Will Forte plays one of their two sons, the one that decides to accompany his father on a road trip to appease Woody, who has fallen for a junk mail announcement of a million dollar sweepstake. This is probably the most questionable casting of the film since Forte is known more for his parts as a comedian and in the movie he has to play probably the most serious part of the film, the son who has lived all his life with this remote and cold man as a father, whom he has loved in this one-sided relationship. He pulls it off.

In end, Will Forte’s character reminded me of another son in another great film about parent – child relationships: Daniel Bruhl’s character, Alexander Kerner, in the great German film Good-bye Lenin; both sons are desperate to please their parents and create a closeness that never was, guided by the hope that it is never too late for it to be.

Payne is from Omaha Nebraska. He knows these small towns and their people well. Woody and his son drive from Billings Montana to a small town in Nebraska (really Plainview, but given another name in the movie), where he is reunited with his family, friends and his past. The characters unfold in the most subtle of ways, as do their life stories.  We slowly become aware of how this couple and their sons have become the distant, bitter, sharp-tongued people they are and we witness how they can still, in some strange way, be redeemed. The background of the small town, almost a ghost town, enhances these every day relationships that are, after all, what life and this movie is all about. 

All the Lonely People

The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children;
those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Hubert H. Humphrey

There are certain very good films that one is hesitant to recommend because of how difficult they are to watch. They are films about every day, ordinary people who live and suffer in what Humphrey in the cited quote calls “the shadows of life”; their plight is not unusual and their numbers are larger than we’d care to admit. These are the movies about the darker sides of our society that haunt us because we know they exist, yet wish we could forget that they do. We can’t; not without dehumanizing ourselves.

Such a movie is The Dallas Buyers Club, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, with the awe inspiring acting by Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey. In brief, the movie is about a bigot; a rather lonely, very dissolute, trailer-living electrician who is diagnosed with AIDS and, since it takes place in 1985, is pretty much “sentenced to die” in a month’s time. His diagnosis ends up being a turning point in many ways and he begins to work around the medical and pharmaceutical establishment to buy himself time and a life. He does this with the unlikely partnership of a transvestite, played with remarkable realism by Mr. Leto.

 

Jared Leto in The Dallas Buyers Club

Jared Leto is an actor that lives his role with such passion, with such adherence to the part he is playing, that it sometimes feel as if we are watching a documentary. He already astounded us in another film of this type, Darren Aronofsky’s very dark Requiem for a Dream. In that movie he played a drug addict as well, the son of a working class family which is slowly falling into a social abyss. Ellen Burstyn played his mother in Requiem and despite how well Jared Leto acts in that movie, it is totally dispassionate to state that she outshines him completely. Ms. Burstyn shows us what acting is about in Requiem for a Dream. 

Ellen Burstyn and Jared Leto in Requiem for a Dream

The movie also served to confirm that the Hollywood establishment is one that would like to pretend that the people living in the shadows of life do not exist. Requiem did not receive any major nominations except for Ms. Burstyn’s acting. Jared Leto and Aronofsky were not nominated at all, and, in one of its most shameful and unfair decisions ever, the Academy chose to give Julia Roberts the Best Actress award instead of awarding Ms. Burstyn’s awe inspiring acting; it’s hard to think of someone less deserving to have beaten Ellen Burstyn in that category! That year, the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, nominated for Before Night Falls, another movie about those marginal, albeit in Cuban society, also did not win the Best Acting award.

 

Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream

Many of the kind of movies we are talking about, those that take us to the shadows, those that denounce the abandonment our society is capable of, are now made by independent film makers. With the industry side of film making becoming more and more dominant over the artistic side, it is harder to find directors employed by the larger studio systems that are willing to make them. Hollywood used to be more willing to take the monetary risk to make these films that denounce and educate. In the late sixties, famous movie directors like Sidney Pollack and John Schleisinger made movies like They Shoot Horses Don’t They, or Midnight Cowboy (respectively), with actors like Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman bringing the lonely people to the forefront. Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is probably one of the last of these so very hard to watch movies that took the major awards, winning 5 Oscars in 1976. That year, Sidney Lumet was nominated as Best Director for another Best Film contender, Dog Day Afternoon, a strong social commentary about other people left behind by our society.

 

John Cazale and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon

The directing in The Dallas Buyers Club is strong as well, although the acting is certainly what stands out. Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has already received many accolades for his earlier films, like C.R.A.Z.Y. a family drama about a young gay man and his relationship to his siblings and father, The Young Victoria, which received 3 Academy Award nominations in 2009, and Café de Flore, in 2011, which also received much praise and many awards.


It is our hope that this year films like The Dallas Buyers Club and Fruitvale Station, which are smaller budget films, but ones that give voice to the silent, forgotten and lonely people of our world, will join 12 Years a Slave and Captain Phillips on the Academy Awards’ ballot. Well made movies about life, every part of it, no matter how hard to watch, should receive the light they deserve.