The Best Albums of 2013

Late last January I started working a full time job. I drive a half hour to and back from work each day, I get home late, some nights I go out and others I stay in and try and do nothing at all.

That schedule often does not include watching a movie each night. Suffice it to say, keeping pace with my new and old movie watching was a struggle this year, be it staying up late nights or making the long hike downtown to see obscure art films. Being a cinephile can be hard.

Being a music buff however can be easy. Those drives and those slow moments at work amount to a lot of hours, and the ability to access just about any music has never been easier. I DID listen to music every day this year, and as a result the process of writing my year end Top 10 list was as intensive as I know my upcoming film list will be.

The additional beauty about music is that even in a bad year, there is SO MUCH of it to discover. Music doesn’t operate in the bullshit summer and winter release cycles that film does, so there is not only an album worth streaming each and every week but likely one of these same bands coming through town on a cheap, $20 ticket. Throw in a six buck beer and you have yourself an evening.

2013 was thankfully a great year for music. Those who avoided the controversy of Kanye and Miley and Daft Punk and Arcade Fire were still treated to a plethora of debuts, dream reunions and follow-ups that those in the film and TV industries would relish.

No one is writing think pieces declaring music in a golden age, but no one is declaring it dying either (except maybe David Byrne).

So while I’m still not a music writer, I’m no longer a film guy who dabbles in rock. Music is now my other “thing,” and despite how populist, rockist or in poor critical taste my list turns out, I look forward to doing this every year.

Click through to browse the gallery and read each blurb Continue reading “The Best Albums of 2013”

Computer Chess

“Computer Chess” is a fascinating docu-realistic experiment, but it gets trapped in a stalemate of ideas.

I can’t quite decide if “Computer Chess” is a brilliant bad movie or just a bad bad movie. It derives from the mumblecore movement of awkward dialogue, minimal story and consequence, ugly analog video cinematography and the “real kind” of naturalistic acting.

Some fascinating films have been made of these stripped parts, and Andrew Bujalski’s is one of them. “Computer Chess” is a movie that through diligent attention to detail immerses the viewer in another reality. It fools the viewer into believing this is a documentary and demonstrates remarkable craft in doing so. But whether or not this beguiling film is actually a reality worth delving into is another question altogether.

“Computer Chess” is the story of a group of programmers in the early 1980s who have gathered at a drab Midwest motel to test their chess software and see which is best. The winning team even gets the opportunity to play the master of ceremonies (film critic Gerald Peary) and see if for the first time a computer can best a human at a game of chess.

Bujalski transports us to a world complete with bulky computers the size of a wine fridge and haircuts from another time. He pulls back the camera and reveals a sea of pocket-protected shirts, thick rimmed glasses and ugly named tags. The black and white cinematography is not merely grainy and ugly; it’s downright amateurish as though the man hired to document this piddly occasion was learning for the first time. Continue reading “Computer Chess”

Inside Llewyn Davis

“Inside Llewyn Davis” is the Coen Brothers’ searingly intimate folk ballad.

Folk music is that most honest of all music genres. It’s often just a man, his words and his guitar, and through simple song structure and intimacy of the performance, it hits searing individual truths. And yet when folk music is done poorly, it can be the most hammy and phony of all, a parody of itself and hardly a solid piece of music.

The only American directors capable of handling that dichotomy are the Coen Brothers. The two are masters of characterization and tone, bordering on satire and sincerity with each of their characters. “Inside Llewyn Davis” is their folk ballad, and it’s a searing portrait of an unlikeable and sullen artist, one that feels warm and honest without ever trying to fake folksy charm.

“Inside Llewyn Davis” could not be possible without the lead performance of its title character by Oscar Isaac. In this film full of cartoonish supporting players coloring a strange, tough-to-crack world, Isaac plays Llewyn with every ounce of attitude and truth. Llewyn is completely unlikeable, stuck-up, lazy, pretentious, snarky and never cool, and Isaac turns him into a tragic figure befitting a travelling folk song. Continue reading “Inside Llewyn Davis”

The Wild Bunch: An unapologetically polarizing masterpiece

Sam Peckinpah’s pivotal and controversial late ’60s film helped define New Hollywood with gratuitous violence.

As “The Wild Bunch” opens, Pike Bishop and his gang ride past a group of children and look down from their horses with a scowl. The children are watching as a swarm of fire-red ants overwhelm two struggling scorpions. They giggle and laugh before piling brush on top and engulfing both ants and scorpions in flames.

It’s the wicked consuming the wicked as the next generation wipes the slate clean with an even more casual act of desensitized violence.

Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” is a Western with no redemption or morality. It ravishes the romantic vision of the Wild West and the sanitized Old Hollywood template through a gratuitously violent, emotionally drained portrait of real outlaws.

Peckinpah is going for something in which the uncomfortable act of violence in the West is not a cathartic, exciting spectator sport but a brutal look at where the world is moving. In the film’s infamous final showdown, Pike and company are the scorpions, the ants are the army of Mexican soldiers under a corrupt general, and those kids looking and laughing are the ones who have no trouble dealing Pike the killing blow.

“The Wild Bunch” was premiered to uproarious controversy and rapturous acclaim at Cannes in 1969. It was arguably the most violent film ever made and a definitive pillar in the New Hollywood movement slowly rising in Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino and Peckinpah himself.

If nothing else, “The Wild Bunch” is a polarizing masterpiece. Some will see it as an exercise in style over substance, trading in excessive bloodshed and elaborate set pieces rather than flesh out its characters, and others will find it slow and empty as a result of its existential execution. Its plot of old souls and wounded warriors just looking for a way out is forlorn, but not nostalgic and sentimental in the ambiguously elegant ways of something like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.” Continue reading “The Wild Bunch: An unapologetically polarizing masterpiece”

The Book Thief

“The Book Thief”, based on Markus Zusak’s novel, is both tragic and whimsical to a fault.

The Book Thief Movie

There’s no rule that Nazi Germany be depicted only as gray with splashes of red swastika flags, but to see it prettied up in snow white colors for much of Brian Percival’s “The Book Thief” makes the contrasting themes a bit off-putting.

Although it gets a pass on the light-hearted and nuanced performances of its lead actors, “The Book Thief” forms an unholy marriage between historical melodrama and a childlike fable. It feels overly precious, and it becomes both tragic and whimsical to a fault.

Percival’s film is based on Markus Zusak’s novel of the same name, and it follows a little girl named Liesel (Sophie Nelisse of “Monsieur Lazhar”) as she’s being dropped off with a new German family. Her mother is a Communist on the run and her younger brother has just passed away from illness, and now Liesel is alone with her new father and mother, Hans and Rosa (Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson).

Liesel cannot read and slowly begins to learn with her father, but when Hans takes in a sickly Jew on the run named Max (Ben Schnetzer), Liesel befriends him and helps nurse him back to health by reading him banned and stolen books. Continue reading “The Book Thief”

Stories We Tell

Sarah Polley’s touching and slightly experimental documentary about her family.

“Stories We Tell” is a groundbreaking documentary tackling the most familiar of subjects: your own family. It’s Director Sarah Polley’s (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) own account of her family’s life story along with the accounts from each of her family members, but she weaves a story that feels universal. What’s daring and so intellectual about it is hidden deep into the film after it has wrapped you in its warm family embrace.

“Who the fuck cares about our stupid family,” asks one of Polley’s sisters as she sits down in front of the camera. Polley tells the story, “the whole story, in your own words,” of her mother Diane from the perspective of everyone living who was directly involved in her life. And while we quickly get to know Diane as a charming, life-of-the-party type woman from the memories of her family and friends and from archive, home movie footage, Polley is smart to make us think about her sister’s question.

What the whole family realizes after some time however is that no one perspective is the “truth,” and when Polley picks and chooses the details that don’t conflict, the ones that tell a good story and show the Diane that she wants to remember, the narrative she edits together is less a reflection of any truth we’d like it to be.

If this sounds like profound homework, it’s not. Polley devotes time to her father Michael to narrate a long autobiography of his life with Diane. Together with the family on camera, they talk of falling in love, sex, the highs and lows of home life, personal secrets and the dark, often sad state of their marriage. Diane died of cancer when Polley, the youngest of all the family’s siblings by over a decade, was just a child.

Over time however, Polley uncovered a strange story that for years was just a running joke in her family. Ever since Sarah was born, there were murmurs that Diane had an affair when she went off and acted in a play in Montreal. At times there was question of whether an abortion was in order, or if she might have another father due to her red hair, but as Diane got ill, any rumors were just water under the bridge. Continue reading “Stories We Tell”

Rapid Response: The Last of the Mohicans

“The Last of the Mohicans” is a rare action epic in this age of CGI mayhem.

Daniel Day-Lewis is not what you would call an action star, but he’s the kind of actor with a compassionate edge and a sense of intensity that makes him ideal for the role of Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans.”

“I ain’t your scout. And I ain’t in your damn militia,” Day-Lewis says with a glower, a fine example of how Mann gets him to wear this man-of-action face.

He truly helps make “The Last of the Mohicans” feel iconic, watching him sprint through a battlefield or leap through a darkened waterfall in slow motion, his hair flowing behind him.

It’s a treat, as this is a rare film today to have flesh and blood battles of this scale and scope. Mann relishes in the opportunity not just to blow stuff up but to watch how smoke billows through the frame from these unique cannon and mortar blasts. He puts hundreds in the spotlight at once, just marveling in wide vista shots and cutting swiftly from just about every angle. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Last of the Mohicans”

Rapid Response: Gigi

“Gigi” is a quaint and cutesy Old Hollywood musical that in 1958 won more Oscars than any film before it.

How grand it would be to live in Paris in the 1890s with no responsibilities, no job and to only be concerned with gossip, parties, “love making”, winning gems as party favors from royalty and wondering what to lavish piles of money on.

Such concerns define the society in “Gigi,” a stuffy, expensive-looking, pleasantly inconsequential Old Hollywood musical. The film is named for its spritely, bouncy and immature title girl Gigi (Leslie Caron), a name only correctly pronounced when done with an overstated French lisp (“Zhee-Zhee!”), but it’s actually the story of the stiff, stuck-up, rich grump Gaston (Louis Jourdan). Gaston is a playboy unimpressed with anything this life can offer, be it the garish parties and bourgeois lifestyle or the beauty to be found in nature.

“It’s a bore!” he asserts time and again in one of the film’s more grating songs. “The world is round, but everything in it is flat,” he says in an example of how the film dashes in intellectual prose amid the coquetry and scandalous whispering.

Continue reading “Rapid Response: Gigi”

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” finds new director Francis Lawrence raising the stakes on this already dark franchise.

“The Hunger Games” franchise has now done what it took the Harry Potter movies perhaps four or five films to get right. “Catching Fire” is a sequel that sees its stakes increase tenfold, its action becoming more crisp and polished, its themes growing deeper and its deep cast of talented individuals gelling completely.

It does beg the question, how does a story in which teenagers murder other teens for sport and sacrifice manage to get darker, more serious and more consequential? Gary Ross’s “Hunger Games” was a film about the internal struggle of an individual to find her strength and voice. It treated survival instincts like a virtue. Now in “Catching Fire,” that lone wolf mentality to just survive plays like another death sentence.

New director Francis Lawrence ties “Catching Fire’s” dystopian future concept and steamy love triangle to broader ideas about rebellion, fame, loyalty and psychology. Best of all, he’s packaged it in a slick, suspenseful package that hasn’t lost any of its twisted edge.

“Catching Fire” resumes shortly after Katniss and Peeta’s (Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson) victory from the previous games. Now President Snow (Donald Sutherland) is using their celebrity as a symbol of false hope as he tours them around each district of Panem. Snow threatens to kill Katniss and her family unless she tows the evil Capitol’s line and makes her act in front of the cameras genuine.

Katniss however has become a reluctant symbol of a slowly growing rebel uprising. The film has done a wonderful job playing up the franchise’s iconography, with early shots framing Katniss as a figure of solemn power or people raising three fingers in defiance to the Capitol and making it feel significant. When they do celebrate her legend, people are beaten and killed by the Capitol’s “peacemakers,” faceless stormtroopers modeled off another similar franchise, “Star Wars.”

Because she’s creating problems, the new Master of the Games, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), arranges a special event for the 75th Annual Hunger Games in which past survivors of the games are forced to compete again. Given how few there are still living, Katniss and Peeta are on the chopping block yet again. Continue reading “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”

Oscar Predictions 2014 – Round 2

2014 Oscar Predictions near the end of the year and just before critics groups weigh in.

A month after my first batch of Oscar predictions, my sentiments about this season are summed up in this paragraph from just one of Mark Harris’s brilliant Oscar posts on Grantland:

In September, I got some ribbing from colleagues for saying it was too early to make predictions. I hope I don’t cause any of them to have an aneurysm by ever so gently saying it again two months later. At the very least, can we stipulate that Variety‘s pronouncement that 2013 offers “more terrific awards possibilities than ever” feels slightly out of sync with the fare at your local multiplex, which is playing Free Birds, Last Vegas, Ender’s Game, and Bad Grandpa?

 Right now I can go out and recommend a half dozen great movies that are playing in places outside New York and L.A.. But the disconnect between “Oscar talk and real-world moviegoers,” as Harris also mentions, is built not just on hyperbole. As Oscar world has hit its lull between the time when “American Hustle” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” come out, pundits have grown tired discussing “12 Years a Slave,” “Gravity” and “Captain Phillips” right as these movies need it most.

Movies like “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Nebraska” and “All is Lost” are encountering the same problem because everyone who matters saw these movies MONTHS ago at Cannes. I mean honestly, who hasn’t seen “Inside Llewyn Davis” yet? Oh, everyone.

My latest set of predictions doesn’t have much in ways of changes, and that’s more of the reason why it’s easy to become bored of all this. But I was able to see a few more films like “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Blue is the Warmest Color” and “All is Lost” to confirm what the pundits already knew or suspected.

Now in just a few days, the critics will weigh in and nominations from the Indie Spirits and Golden Globes will begin rolling in and dictating the shape of the season all over again. Until then, here’s going with the flow:

* Designates a movie I’ve seen

Bulleted entries are Dark Horse candidates ranked in likelihood of getting in

Best Picture

Inside Llewyn Davis
Inside Llewyn Davis – CBS Films
  1. Gravity*
  2. 12 Years a Slave*
  3. Captain Phillips*
  4. Saving Mr. Banks
  5. Inside Llewyn Davis*
  6. Nebraska*
  7. August: Osage County*
  8. Lee Daniels’ The Butler*
  9. The Wolf of Wall Street
  10. American Hustle
  • Dallas Buyers Club*
  • The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
  • Philomena*
  • All is Lost*
  • Blue Jasmine*
  • Before Midnight*
  • Her
  • Rush*
  • Fruitvale Station*

A month ago I worried that “Inside Llewyn Davis” might be ignored by the Academy, a slight Coen entry that would be overlooked by big Oscar bait like “12 Years,” “Saving Mr. Banks,” “The Butler” and “August: Osage County.” Now before the critics have even had their say, “Inside Llewyn Davis” is riding a small wave of anticipation as “August” and “The Butler” buckle under the weight of their casts and their reviews. It seems like a lock compared to the question marks that are “American Hustle” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

The other strong entry of course is “Nebraska,” which I feared would have the same fate. That film however, also a Cannes entry, has now reminded everyone that it is a genuine crowd pleaser that will scratch just the right itch in this Academy demographic.

Unfortunately for “All is Lost,” “Blue Jasmine,” “Before Midnight” or “Her,” those two movies in my mind take up the “indie” spots that the Academy now reserves. And if any were to bump out “The Butler” or “August” it would be “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Philomena” or a real Academy shocker in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” movies that are more Oscar friendly and could use the help.

Continue reading “Oscar Predictions 2014 – Round 2”