Tag: Upstream Color

The 3rd Annual Anti-Oscars

The movies and the performers that don’t stand a chance of getting nominated this year.

Each year there are movies and performers that don’t just fail to get nominated for the Academy Awards but aren’t even in the conversation. This is where the Anti-Oscars were born.

Blogs, critics and Oscar pundits spend a lot of time discussing what’s in and less discussing what’s out. So although I’ve taken the time to do actual Oscar predictions, hopefully this piece can shed some light on under the radar work while placing it in the context of this behemoth we call the Oscar race.

See last year’s Anti-Oscars

Best Picture

  • Prisoners
  • The Spectacular Now
  • Spring Breakers
  • The Place Beyond the Pines
  • Upstream Color
  • Frances Ha
  • This is the End
  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Some of this year’s actual Oscar nominees are as strong as they’ve ever been, and yet it still boggles the mind that the Academy considers there to be nine better movies than “Before Midnight”. That nominee, along with “Blue Jasmine,” “All is Lost” and “Fruitvale Station,” will likely miss the cut, but they were at least on someone’s radar.

Movies like “The Spectacular Now” and “Frances Ha” are those indie gems that never get noticed by the Academy, maybe an Original Screenplay nod if they’re lucky. They represent the modernity and the youth often missing in the Oscars. They’re actors’ films with minimal story but an exploration of a point in life, and they share the style that makes them distinctly cinema.

“Spring Breakers” and “Upstream Color” are on the other end of the spectrum, indies too weird and polarizing to even be considered by the old fashioned Academy, even if their membership is slanting younger. Both utilize excessive style and their directors’ daring vision to create jarring, innovative films, one about way too much and the other arguably about nothing at all. Both however are beguiling, hypnotic mysteries.

In the middle are “Prisoners” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” both midsize thrillers that were labeled as either too ridiculous or too portentous. They stretch storytelling boundaries with their ambitious screenplays, and they earn major thrills that even some of the likely Best Picture contenders can’t muster.

And last are the two studio movies, “This is the End” and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” one a bit more massive than the other. These movies are why most people go to the movies, and they’re the ones that almost never show up on Hollywood’s most important night. They combine massive movie star appeal with rambunctious and accessible storytelling. But most of all, they’re fun. If the Oscars can be  self-serious homework, these movies are a different sort of escapism. Continue reading “The 3rd Annual Anti-Oscars”

The Best Movies of 2013

Championing a year in cinema and the stories only it can tell

The major theme across the intros to most of this year’s Best Film lists has been that the movies matter. Critics have championed the movies that could only be movies, ones that feel cinematic not because they’re big but because they can be small, because they can avoid “complex narrative” as championed by TV and use imagery and style above all to convey a different sort of complexity.

Here’s Richard Brody on the cinematic squabble:

“The ever-increasing prominence of television is, in turn, sparking a renewed reflection on the part of filmmakers about what cinema is, and what it can be. The conflict between the dependent image and the essential image, between the transparent and the conspicuous, is real and serious…The best movies this year are films of combative cinema, audacious inventions in vision. The specificity and originality of their moment-to-moment creation of images offers new ways for viewers to confront the notion of what “narrative” might be.”

And A.O. Scott:

“It is easy to conclude that movies have surrendered that long-held vanguard position. The creative flowering of television has exposed the complacency and conservatism that rules big-money filmmaking at the studio level… But within this landscape of bloat and desolation, there is quite a lot worth caring about. More important, there are filmmakers determined to refine and reinvigorate the medium, to recapture its newness and uniqueness and to figure out, in a post-film, platform-agnostic, digital-everything era, what the art of cinema might be.”

They seem to say in blunter terms, “Yeah, TV’s good, but fuck that.”

This is cinema. You can hurl around “golden age of TV” all you want, but I can’t imagine any of these stories, some of them with minimal plot, some with no discernable plot at all, being transplanted to TV.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply moving works of art, experiences with beginnings, middles and ends that carry emotions, characters and visceral sensations through their durations.

These are the things you can’t find anywhere else. I don’t know if the movies are blooming or dying (the consensus seems to be both), but they continue to be groundbreaking and frankly amazing.

I’m aware there’s five seasons of “Breaking Bad” on Netflix, but these 25 movies, 15 ranked, eight unranked and two Honorable Mentions, are the stuff that will blow your mind if you gave it the time of day.

Click through to browse the gallery and read each blurb. Reviews to each film are linked in the caption of each photo. Continue reading “The Best Movies of 2013”

Upstream Color

“Upstream Color” is beguiling and impenetrable, but it is not without deep feeling. It’s a potential masterpiece.

 

Shane Carruth’s first film “Primer” was a maddeningly precise work of genius. Its lo-fi, home movie charm managed to amplify the science aspect of science fiction with a dense, procedural script. By its nature, it demanded to be scrutinized but resisted being solved, and “Primer” survives as not quite a cult mind-bender and not quite a critical darling.

Now nine years later, Carruth has grown up from a young man with studious fascination to a worn 30-something with little to his name. “Upstream Color” trades in the jargon for few words at all, and yet it is no less beguiling, impenetrable and a potential masterpiece.

But impenetrable does not mean without feeling. What can’t be unraveled about the plot or motivations in “Upstream Color” is amended by the pain and confusion that is inherent in these characters. On a rudimentary level, “Upstream Color’s” fantastical element involves a powerful form of hypnosis, a device used not as a suspense builder or parable, but one that makes us feel lost due to powers beyond our control. Continue reading “Upstream Color”