2013 Year In Review

So, the Oscars again, and I care less than ever. I think, in part, it's because it's all so rigged. I mean, probably not the winners, but there are never any surprises. There's no room in the nominations for an unexpected outsider; they know which films are going to be nominated—the ones that get released in November and December.

So, The Boy and I saw nearly 160 films last year. Counting a couple of double-screenings, that's 160 trips to the cinema, close to every other day!

12 Years A Slave	Erased	Much Ado About Nothing	The Book Thief
20 Feet From Stardom	Evil Dead	Mud	The Conjuring
56 Up	Faust	Muscle Shoals	The Croods
A Good Day To Die Hard	Fill The Void	Nebraska	The Gatekeepers
A Hijacking	Frances Ha	No	The Grandmaster
A Single Shot	From Up On Poppy Hill	No Place On Earth	The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)
A Touch Of Sin	Gangster Squad (In Color!)	Now You See Me	The Heat
Aftermath (Poklosie)	Genius On Hold	Only God Forgives	The Hunt (Jagten)
Aftershock	Gravity	Our Children	The Iceman
Ain't Them Bodies Saints	Great Expectations (2013, London West End)	Our Nixon	The Impossible
All Is Lost	Great Expectations (Newell, 2013)	Oz: The Great And Powerful	The Internship
American Hustle	Hannah Arendt	Pacific Rim	The Missing Picture
An Unfinished Song	Hava Nagila (The Movie)	Paris-Manhattan	The Patience Stone
Anna Karenina	Hawking	Philomena	The Pin
Arena of the Street Fighter	Hitler's Children	Pitch Perfect	The Place Beyond The Pines
Barbara	Hotel Transylvania	Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself	The Purge
Bastards	How I Live Now	Populaire	The Rabbi's Cat
Becoming Traviata	Hunger Games: Catching Fire	Prisoners	The Sapphires
Big Ass Spider	Hush! Girls Don't Scream	Pulp Fiction	The Spectacular Now
Blancanieves	In A World...	Quartet	The Untouchables (1987)
Bless Me Ultima	In The House	Red 2	The Way, Way Back
Bullet To The Head	Informant	Red Dawn	The World's End
By Summer's End	Inside Llewyn Davis	Renoir	This Is The End
Cannon Fodder	Insidious 2	Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde	Thor: The Dark World
Carrie	Israel Film Festival: God's Neighbors	Rust and Bone	Thérèse
Casting By	Jack Reacher	Shadow Dancer	Turbo
Chasing Mavericks	Jack The Giant Slayer	Sharqiya	Wadjda
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2	Jewtopia	Short Term 12	Warm Bodies
Come Out And Play	Jurassic Park	Side Effects	What Maisie Knew
Dallas Buyers Club	Koch	Silent Hill: Revelation	When Comedy Went To School
Dark Skies	Kon-Tiki	Sinister	Wolf Children
Demon's Rook	Leonie	Stand Up Guys	Wolverine
Despicable Me 2		Star Trek Into Darkness	World War Z
Detention of the Dead	Life of Pi	Starbuck	Wreck-It Ralph
Dorfman in Love	Like Father, Like Son	Still Mine	You Will Be My Son
Drinking Buddies	Like Someone In Love	Stories We Tell	Zaytoun
Elysium	Lore	Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D	Zero Dark Thirty
Emperor	Love Is All You Need	The Act of Killing	Captain Phillips
Ender's Game	Mama	The Angel's Share
Enough Said	Man Of Steel	The Attack

If I seem uncertain, it's because this list is based on blog posts, and I know I didn't manage to post a review of all the movies we saw. For example, I just realized I had forgotten Captain Phillips. (Not that it's going to win in any awards at Casa 'strom.)

Which, among these were the best? Note that I'm not including Broken Circle Breakdown, and several other Oscar nominees, since they didn't meet the qualifications for the Casa 'strom awards (i.e., I had to see it in 2013).

Well, let's start by eliminating the worst...

Carrie	Cannon Fodder	Thérèse	The Place Beyond The Pines
Bastards	A Touch Of Sin	Ain't Them Bodies Saints	The Attack
The Pin	Our Children	Elysium	Man Of Steel
Muscle Shoals	The Internship	Our Nixon	Oz: The Great And Powerful
Demon's Rook	When Comedy Went To School	Only God Forgives	Sharqiya

Note that these were "bad" for a variety of reasons, and I hate to put some (like Demon's Rook) in this category because I wanted so much more for them. By far, the number one disease afflicting these films was self-indulgence (A Touch of Sin), manifested in over-long-ness (The Place Beyond The Pines), overbaked-special-effects (Man of Steel), self-importance (Elysium), or just adding nothing to the world (Our Nixon).

A few (like Oz or The Pin) were just misfires. The Attack has a special place on the list exclusively for being politically execrable. (Next year, Omar will occupy that spot.)

Turbo probably shouldn't be on there. It wasn't much worse than The Croods, and that's up for an Oscar. Actually, I've taken that out and put on Our Children which was truly awful on many levels.

Still 20 really horrible experiences out of 155-160 isn't bad.

I'd rule out the others bit-by-bit, but I don't really have a good way to keep track of all these things. So I'm gonna skip right to my top 25. 

The Act of Killing

Aftermath (Poklosie)

Dallas Buyers Club

Faust

Fill The Void

From Up On Poppy Hill

The Hunt (Jagten)

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)

Inside Llewyn Davis

Like Father, Like Son

The Missing Picture

Monsters University

Much Ado About Nothing

Mud

Nebraska

Prisoners

Pulp Fiction

The Rabbi's Cat

Short Term 12

A Single Shot

12 Years A Slave

The Untouchables (1987)

Wadjda

Wolf Children

Some of these are hangovers from the previous year: Zero Dark Thirty; one of the kids' top 5, Wolf Children; my favorite for the first part of the year, Fill The Void; Faust, and The Rabbi's Cat. The Untouchables and Pulp Fiction, are of course from long ago.

The Act of Killing

Aftermath (Poklosie)

Dallas Buyers Club

From Up On Poppy Hill

The Hunt (Jagten)

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)

Inside Llewyn Davis

Like Father, Like Son

The Missing Picture

Monsters University

Much Ado About Nothing

Mud

Nebraska

Prisoners

Short Term 12

A Single Shot

12 Years A Slave

Wadjda

Paring down from this last 18 is challenging. I'd drop out some as falling just short of masterpieces: Dallas Buyers Club, Poppy Hill, The Missing Picture (as The Boy says, not great cinema, just a great story), and with even greater reluctance Much Ado About Nothing (even though I love it for many of the same reasons that critics trashed it), A Single Shot (Sam Rockwell should have two Oscars by now), and Nebraska. If throw in 12 Years A Slave for having no character arc (which I concede is true without admitting that it's necessary for a great story), I've still got eleven left. Gun to my head, I'd drop Short Term 12, over some slight roughness in the story editing.

The Act of Killing

Aftermath (Poklosie)

The Hunt (Jagten)

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)

Inside Llewyn Davis

Like Father, Like Son

Monsters University

Mud

Prisoners

Wadjda

At this point, I cry no más! I can reduce no further. I notice there's a commonality between these films: They're all kind of difficult. Even Monsters U deals with hard truths. Mud is a fun one, but also a sober look at friendship and love. I mean, for a coming of age movie, it's pretty heavy, man.

So, there's the official Bitmaelstrom top 10 for 2013!

Tim's Vermeer

Despite Jillette's bombastic voice, and their occasionally strident atheism, it's hard for me not to like Penn & Teller. I think they are basically good classical liberals with a live-and-let-live philosophy, who are genuinely concerned about the truth.

I mention this because, if you have any kind of P&T baggage, you shouldn't let it deter you from seeing their new movie, Tim's Vermeer (directed by Teller and narrated by Penn).

This is a joyous celebration of life, art, and genius. It's inspirational, compelling, and, at 80 minutes long, manages to avoid PDS (padded documentary syndrome).

It's a simple story: Fabulously wealthy Tim Jenison has spent his life inventing wild and wacky things, when he's not inventing industry-defining A/V software that makes him fabulously wealthy.

Well, Tim's got it in his had that the Dutch master Vermeer was a technologist, too. And, in fact, that he used a special gizmo to get the shadings of light he got in his paintings—shadings which no other painter of the day achieved.

Having established his premise and devised a hypothetical tool, Tim (who has never painted in his life) uses it as a proof-of-concept, painting a simple image of a vase. He shows his tool to other artists like Martin Mull (!) and David Hockney, and all agree that he's on to something.

So Tim (not a painter, remember) gets the idea to paint Vermeer's The Music Room to really demonstrate the worthiness of his idea.

The catch is, he wants to (has to, you could argue) do the whole thing using only the technology available to Vermeer, and recreate all the elements of the music room to boot.

This takes years.

Then, when he's done that, he's actually got to do the painting.

I have a bias here, of course: Obsession is favorite topic of mine. (I like being obsessed, too.) I sent my mom to see it (she tackles all kinds of projects) and she also found it inspirational.

It's just so much fun.

Also, while I generally don't pine for wealth, I do occasionally become aware of a story that makes me think, "Yeah, that's a good amount of money to have." This is one of those stories, since Tim and Penn and Co. all jet off to England and Holland, or wherever they need to whenever. Tim buys all kinds of hardware and generally doesn't let anything (least of all money) get in his way.

(By the way, my favorite "good amount of money" story is George Harrison listening to Erik Idle talk about the uncompleted Life of Brian, and Harrison funding it because it sounded like a good movie and he wanted to see it. Harrison of course went on to fund Handmade Films, which was credited with revitalizing British cinema.)

One of the best documentaries in years.