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.

Girl on a Bicycle

A French Romantic Comedy! I had to work to convince The Boy and The Flower that French were actually famous for romcoms, not just angsty existential films chock full of ennui. Though not so much romcoms as sex farces, which are sort of like romcoms, except that everyone has sex with everyone else, but it never seems to matter in the end.

The Old Man used to say "sophisticated" was a word meaning "sexually deviant", which I always think about when I hear someone call the French sophisticated.

So, imagine my delight when A Girl on a Bicycle—while very French and containing a number of amusing sex scenes—turns out to be a sweet, funny, romantic film that I didn't regret taking The Flower to. (It's also mostly in English!)

Absolutely rife with European stereotypes. Heh.

Paolo, an Italian bus driver living in Paris, loves Greta, a German stewardess, and so proposes to marry her. (Paolo is an awesome tour bus driver: He describes Paris in terms of all of its monuments—which are all just pale imitations of the ones in Italy, natch.) He's as happy as a clam when she accepts—despite her stern and ordered nature, she seems to understand and appreciate his Italian-ness—until he's stopped at traffic light and the titular girl on a bicycle rolls up beside him.

And what a girl!

He becomes obsessed, especially when it happens again and again. His English friend Derek—constantly pissed off that despite years of studying French, no one in Paris will deign to talk to him, except in English—gives him a sensible plan: Meet the girl on the bicycle. That'll cure him, because no woman could possibly live up to this idealization he has of her.

Of course, things don't go as expected, and not just for the characters in the movie, but for me. I know how these French farces usually play out and, well, this didn't. So refreshing.

Instead we get a comedy where a sudden, unexpected humanity from the main character, puts him in an increasingly precarious position.

And it's funny!

Beautiful cast, though not anybody I knew (except Paddy Considine, who played the English bloke). I had a slight problem in that I didn't think the French girl was more beautiful than the German girl, especially, but that's not really the point.

The point, as Derek says, is: There's always gonna be a girl on a bicycle. How are you going to handle it?

This film has a whopping 8% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and 78% from viewers. Color me unsurprised.

Frozen

The Barb had a birthday and the pickings were slim at the bargain theater—Walking With Dinosaurs wasn't lighting her candles, and I sure wasn't gonna push it—so we went and paid full price for Frozen, Disney's latest animated musical fairy-tale extravaganza.

Had you told me that Disney would, in 2014, make a movie of all white people, that wasn't just a movie with songs but outright musical-with-a-vengeance, and that it would have not one but two princesses, I would have had a hard time believing it.

But for whatever reason (John Lasseter?), Disney seems to have decided they'd rather make a good, fun movie, damn political correctness, and thus Frozen, which is even inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen story (though apart from some names and the general premise of an ice-sorceress, one might be hard-pressed to detect the inspiration).

As a result, they do a damn good job.

It's got the Disney look (as it should) and it feels familiar but without feeling tired or reticent. It doesn't try to be hip, as it seemed like Tangled was trying to. The story is one of two sisters who are tight, with the younger one enamored of the older one's ice powers (and why wouldn't she be) until an accident nearly kills her.

The King and Queen decide the best approach is to make the little sister forget, and separate the two, and encourage the older sister to fight her powers.

Of course, as everyone but the King and Queen knows, fighting something is the absolute worst way to try to control it, and things go to Hell—the icy 9th circle, if you're into Dante, the 5th if you're into D&D—rather quickly (in movie time).

Well, look, they all live happily ever after. Can you imagine otherwise? The point isn't the destination, but the journey. And it's a good journey.

The music is unapologetic, as I said, if a little too modern for my taste. I can't remember any of it, except I guess the big ice number. Similarly with the dialog—it's a little too contemporary to my ear.

The characters are likable. The anthropomorphic/marketable cute animal is a charming moose. With two unmarried princesses, the movie has a chance to tease us with, well, more than one potential romantic outcome. The ending was refreshing.

The animation is wonderful, happily. The snow provides all sorts of interesting and vibrant scenery, and the attention to detail is there. There's one sequence of ice growing that looks fakey—but real ice can kinda look fakey, too, you know, when it's all perfect crystalline and light-reflection. (Hey, I'm an L.A. kid. I don't see much snow and ice.)

Elsa, the snow queen, has the sexiest sequence in a Disney movie (her "coming out" song) since Jasmine came on to Jaffar in Aladdin. Nothing lewd, just sort of a side-effect of not completely de-sexing her.

It's also interesting that the cast is not exactly jam-packed with A-List movie stars. Kristen Bell is Anna, the little sister. Alan Tudyk, doing a voice, is an officious duke, who fills in as the evil businessman (gotta have one). And Ciaran Hinds plays the leader of the trolls. But other than that, the names I recognized—Maurice LeMarche, Nick Jamison, Fred Tatasciore—are voice actors.

So, maybe there's a sea change going on. We can hope.

We all loved it. Great ending, as I mentioned. Pure Disney princess flick. Who'd've thunk?

The Last of the Unjust

I've lamented—frequently—on the trials and tribulations of being a frequent moviegoer at this time of the year. The Oscar contenders linger in the theaters like the smell of microwaved skunk, and the new crap being shoveled out is typically foreordained failure to meet even the meager demands of genre films.

I mention this as an explanation as to why, when a 3:40 minute documentary is the only thing at the local movie house you haven't seen, it actually doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

And, in fact, except for the very beginning of the film, the movie flies by.

The Last of the Unjust is Claude Lanzmann's follow-up to his nine hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and I would say, with all humility, that it's worthy of the 100% ratings (both critical and audience) on Rotten Tomatoes.

These are Lanzmann's interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the Last of the Elder Jews (a title apparently conferred by the Nazis), who was the last person to "run" the Threisenstadt ghetto at the end of The War.

Well, it's 210 minutes—what can I say? There's so much here. I had a little trouble following at first, because Lanzmann is an expert in the material, obviously, and at first he was throwing around a lot of detail about streets and railways and stuff like that.

But by the end, that stuff all comes back, over and over again, and becomes significant, so, yeah, even though it made me nervous at first—'cause nothing's worse than being five minutes into a 3-hour movie you know you're going to hate—the initial slowness sets everything up well.

The story? Gotta be one of the most challenging in human history.

Murmelstein was a "collaborator", a Jew who worked with the Nazis, in this case to make Threisenstadt useful for propaganda purposes. Dreadful! An abomination! He deserves to be hanged, according to one prominent Israeli historian (who had agitated for mercy for Eichmann).

And yet.

And yet.

Nothing about this is simple. Murmelstein had many chances to flee, yet took none. He ascribes this to a "thirst for adventure". When asked if he likes power, he retorts "Who doesn't?" When asked if he abused his power, he says, yes, but always in service of the people of the ghetto.

I said of Hannah Arendt that she her thesis that the Jews could've done more to fight the Nazis may be accurate, but it's also Grand Champion Hall of Fame Monday Morning Quarterbacking. (More on Arendt later.)

I felt that here.

Would it have been nobler for him to leave? It doesn't seem to be in dispute that he helped a lot of Jews escape. In fact, what's clear is that the reason he's vilified is that he lived and that's therefore suspicious, but it's just as clear that he lived primarily because the war ended before the Nazis could muster up the excuse to kill him. (While he was there for a couple of years, he was only in charge for a few months.)

And Murmelstein seems to have viewed his mission to say alive, and keep others alive as well, even if that didn't make him popular. At one point, the Nazis said, "Hey, get this typhus epidemic under control or..."

The "or" was always a given. The Jews knew the Nazis would kill them while pointedly (at least according to Murmelstein) not knowing about the camps. There was "out east", which was known to be worse, but not not known how much worse. Murmelstein relates two stories of trainloads coming in from other places where the passengers freaked out about the showers.

And yet, it's human nature to deny the awful, especially in the face of powerlessness. So when he says they didn't know, I believe that. When he says he played Scheherazade, spinning stories to keep the ghetto alive, I believe that, too.

And when he says he withheld food from people who refused to get typhus vaccines, that's not in doubt, and it's entirely inevitable that this would produce resentment in those who were there. And when he says he ended the freedom-for-favor style of management of the privileged Jews, who traded exit visas for service, sex, or whatever, well, then you can see why he'd really be hated.

It's not much discussed but the Jews did not behave admirably in the camps (and Threisenstadt was a camp, even if they called it a ghetto). This is expected: Treat people like animals and they'll become animals.

I'm just scratching the surface here, of course, but it's just an amazing thing, this record.

It was instructive to hear Murmelstein speak of Eichmann, whom he personally knew and personally witnessed during the Krystallnacht. He wasn't impressed with the tribunal that couldn't determine that Eichmann was there at all, given that there were hundreds of witnesses—and pictures!

He was also particularly disdainful of Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann with the phrase "the banality of evil". "He was a monster," says Murmselstein, and he's got the anecdotes to back it up.

It does support my observation of the Arendt movie when I said " it never seems to occur to Arendt that Eichmann is just lying." There's no doubt in Murmelstein—the hated collaborator—that Eichmann was no mere paper pusher.

Anyway, I could go on and on, and I'd understand being deterred by the length, but not only did I have no trouble sitting through it, The Boy found it riveting.

Now I'm looking to find the Shoah movie online—that one I'm going to watch over a period of a few days.

Gloria

Gloria is a movie about a woman living life out loud! Unapologetically! Like a Bossa Nova! Or so the critical reviews would have you believe.

I guess.

Also: Pointlessly, desultorily, and with no small amount of fear.

Also, senior-citizen genitalia got more screen time than I usually like in a film.

Look, the Tomatoes on this are 99% (!) for critics and 68% for audiences. And the audiences are skewed toward the sorts of people who would go see a plotless slice-of-life movie about a 50-something woman.

The story, such as it is, concerns Gloria (the lovely Paulina Garcia), who has a day job, and spends her nights dancing in a club, picking up guys who catch her eye. (Well, we only see one of these guys but the implication is that she's pretty comfortable doing this.) So, she lives like a 20-something, only she has two grown children and an ex-.

Anyway, she picks up a guy who seems great or at least wealthy and accessible and they have a whirlwind romance complicated by the fact that he's a total wuss that is "separated" from his wife and fully-grown daughters, who nonetheless call him all the time.

It turns out about as well as you'd expect.

In the process, though, we get to meet Gloria's somewhat alienated children and her lugubrious ex-husband who laments his absence from the children's lives. We can infer from that that he initiated the split from Gloria, but it's never discussed at all. His kids, especially his daughter, are pissed at him, is all we know, really.

It kind of raises the question of what's going to happen with all the broken families and older parents acting like their kids, but only peripherally. Nothing here struggles to make any sort of statement at all. About anything.

We didn't dig it much. Not a lot of admirable character shown.

Sort of amusingly, the version of Gloria used in the movie was the Spanish love song lyrics, but the American version would probably fit better, if make an acerbic postscript.

I don't know. After this, we saw Last of the Unjust, the 3 hour, 40 minute talkumentary about Benjamin Murmelstein and we squirmed a lot less in our seats than we did during this.

The Broken Circle Breakdown

If Lone Survivor had me in tears from the get-go, The Broken Circle Breakdown wasn't far off, though for entirely different reasons. This is a remarkable—dare I say unique?—film just on the surface characteristics.

First of all, it's Flemish. So, it's Belgian, but not French Belgian. I've seen about two other Flemish movies in the past ten years, the one leaping to mind being the effective thriller Memory of a Killer. Flemish is a lot like English. Every now and again, the actors would speak whole sentences that were perfectly understandable English. (Kind of like Dutch, but more so, to my ear.)

Second of all, the Flems (heh) involved are bluegrass musicians. They do American bluegrass/folk/country with perfect Southern accents. I'm not talking Southern Belgium, either.

Seriously, how many Flemish bluegrass movies are there? Did that ever even occur to you? What's wrong with you? Have you no imagination?

Third, the music is really good. Besides sounding authentic, it's just really, really good. Standards, of course, but performed with complete sincerity and not inconsiderable skill. Like, the people involved really loved the music they were making. (Contrast with Inside Llewyn Davis' "I don't even like folk music."

Fourth, the music is absolutely central to the story. Both the individual songs and the fact that it's bluegrass is critical to both the details of the plot and the major themes.

Fifth, there is an amazing paean to America at one point, and later on an amazing anti-W rant. (More on this in a moment.)

The story, told in broken time (a la 500 Days of Summer) is that of a bluegrass singer/guitarist, Didier, who falls in love with a tattoo artist, Elise, and introduces her to the music. She becomes a singer in his band, and they have an amazing, passionate relationship which culminates in the birth of a child, Maybelle. The child gets sick—that's actually where the movie starts, in a hospital.

Obviously, the sick child is the pivotal plot point, but the movie isn't really about that, it's really about how the two handle crisis/tragedy. And, despite their love of bluegrass, they have none of the cultural roots nor even similarities with the culture that bluegrass comes from.

They have no community, to speak of. They have no family beyond the three of them. The band they play in seem like good guys and sort of like family, but that's about it. They have no religion. Didier is an earnest atheist. When Maybelle looks to him for comfort at various points, he can't give it to her.

Nor is he of any help to Elise in that regard. If Didier is an atheist, Elise is a pantheist. She wears a cross, but burns incense on a statue of Buddha. (And while Christianity and Buddhism are not incompatible, this doesn't seem to be a case of someone who's studied both carefully and reconciled them; she just believes in everything.)

As such, when they have fights over Maybelle, they have nowhere to turn, and end up blaming each other. Elise accuses Didier of never wanting Maybelle in the first place, and Didier points out Maybelle's smoking and drinking.

Never are we more superstitious than when we are powerless to help the ones we love.

Didier begins to drive Elise away with his militant atheism, which breaks through in a really ugly anti-George W. Bush rant, where he blames the President for holding back stem cell research.

Now, I saw this in North Hollywood, heart of the TV media district, and I could hear people vocally agreeing with this rant. But, you see, this isn't an American movie; it's a Belgian movie, so it didn't have to take a particular side.

If you're paying attention, though, it's hard to not come to the conclusion that this is just another exercise in superstition. (I think the Academy wasn't really paying close attention or it wouldn't have nominated this for an Oscar.)

In fact, even if you're not paying very close attention, it's hard to avoid the final scenes where the filmmakers seem to be overtly telling us that Didier is wrong. Not about the politics; I mean, who really cares about that? But about his materialism and by proxy his atheism.

He's so stubborn that he fails to recognize that Elise has embraced the American ideal he said he most admired: The ability to start fresh. He misses it very badly, perhaps to the very end.

It reminded me a little of Steve Coogan's character in Philomena. We know for a fact where the bulk of the filmmakers' sympathies lie in that story, and yet it's hard to not observe that she is the noblest of the characters, and Coogan among the despicable wretches.

I think this is why the film scores lower with critics than regular audiences. The critics who picked up on it I think decided to throw out the term "melodrama" to mean "I didn't like it but I don't know or don't want to explain why".

Anyway, great acting from the two principals, Johan Heldenbergh (who was one of the authors of the original play) and Veerle Baetens. Adapted from the play by the director Felix Van Groeningen.

The Boy liked it, but he found it music-heavy (he's not into music, somehow), and, as I pointed out, he hasn't been outside a hospital tearing his hair out because he's worried his kid is going to die. (Pointed cough.)

Fun aside: On the way out I was interviewed by a Flemish reporter who wanted to know what Americans thought about this film and why we went to see it. I opened with "Well, we've seen everything else..." but really Flemish Bluegrass. That's a hook right there.

This movie is up against La Grande Bellezza, The Missing Picture and The Hunt, which were all great, and Omar, which we haven't seen.

When she asked, I told her I thought the Italian picture would win, but they're all worthy.

The Past

I could make a comment on how, if you're Ashgar Farhadi, you gotta be feeling the heat after your last picture (A Separation) won the foreign language Oscar and you got a rare non-English nom for writing.

But if you're Ashgar Farhadi, you've made a half-dozen or more films, all pretty much hitting it out of the park.

And so we come to The Past, another Dickensian tale of people who are just a little bit crummy.

I can't actually remember now if A Separation was populated by crummy people. There were some, of course. I think I called them "flawed", which would be a good summation of the characters in The Past.

But on reflection, I'm thinking they're just a little bit crummy. For example, we have Berenice Bejo—looking fabulous, I should say—who has called in her husband from Iran so that they can get a divorce. They've been separated for years, but she wants to re-marry, and he opts to come in person to sign the papers in court.

He's been gone for a while, and she's been living with a new man and her son for a few months, since the man's wife "got sick". Meanwhile, her older child, a teenage daughter, is increasingly estranged from her and clearly missing the presence of the soon-to-be-ex, while hating the new boyfriend.

So, Bejo's character is pretty self-involved and not really getting why the teen is upset. The teen is upset and not telling anyone why. (In American movie, it'd be because the new boyfriend had made a pass at her; nothing so pedestrian here.) The two men are sullen, with the soon-to-be-ex having deserted the family years ago, and the new boyfriend with a wife still in the hospital.

Yeah, about the wife in the hospital: She's the MacGuffin, after a fact. Her story comes out—not in flashbacks, but in reminiscences by the other characters, that leave room for doubt as to what the whole truth is.

Everyone has sinned. Nobody seems to have sinned quite a badly as they think.

Ultimately, we're not really responsible for what others do, I guess, but it can sure feel that way.

Much like A Separation, this movie starts out slow, pedestrian even, and then involves you more and more in the details, defying you to come to conclusions about the characters. Judge not, lest ye be judged, it seems to say.

Well, I'm a regular Judgy McJudgerton and I say, they're all kind of crummy. Even the five-year-old.

Good movie, though. The Boy was, I think, less taken with it than I was, but liked it nonetheless.

Lone Survivor

It would be a fair assessment to say that my eyes began to tear up at the opening credits of Lone Survivor, and were seldom dry for the next two hours. I'm not unique; the Boy said as much on the way out, along with saying he'd love to see it again.

Yeah. It's that good. In our world it easily shot to the top of "best films of the 2013", though it may not be my top—it might be and it will certainly be top five.

I can't quite explain the emotionalism. It can't be that it's "based on a true story" because it is openly ficitonalized—and, in fact, the historical import of the film is nearly irrelevant. Unlike, say, Blackhawk Down, which fit into a larger picture of the military under Clinton and the role of the US in Africa, this movie could be about any four SEALs, sent into any village, and presented with a difficult situation.

Dramatically, that's a great thing. The real people, the inspirations, are shown in pictures at the end of the movie, which, dulce et decorum est.

So, what is it? It's partly The Charge of the Light Brigade effect: The opening montage of actual training shows what hardships special forces endure to become special forces. (And let us pause for a moment to marvel at the volunteer army.) And this brutal training—the sort of things the effete cluck at as "unnecessary"—is vitally necessary not just for physical endurance, training and toughening, but to build a brotherhood.

And so, in a way, the opening montage is justified by the next two hours. The hazing, of sorts, of new recruits, the eagerness of same recruits to actually go on a mission, and when things go sideways, the willingness to sacrifice for your brother, or to survive for him when it might be easier to just lay down and die.

And that, I think, is what it is, why this evokes such strong emotions. The note hit over-and-over again is that of male camaraderie, played unironically, straight and true, to the end.

We don't get a lot of that these days. Male relationships are usually between slackers. They're goofs. You kinda know they're not going to be there for each other, at least not until things get really bad.

What a concept to have a band of men who, however hard they rag on each other, know with as much certainty as anyone can know anything that they can depend on each other.

On top of that, it's a competent action film, helmed by personal favorite, Peter Berg. Not just competent, but the best in recent memory: The story doesn't adhere to action movie conventions, which means, for example, that when the heroes get shot, or—and this is unseen in modern action films—fall more than a few feet, it hurts.

And it doesn't just hurt in a Wile E. Coyote sense, where one scene has them taking damage, and then they're fine in the next. When one of these guys takes a hit, they feel it, you feel it, and you feel the scar, the torn cartilage, the blow to the head that says you'll never be quite right again.

It also doesn't have a glib "10 Little Indians" approach where the characters are picked off one-by-one. Even though the title, and opening scene, tell you all you need to know about who's going to survive, the protagonists hang on for dear life, and you are rooting for the story to come out differently than you know it must.

Mark Wahlberg is good as Marcus Luttrell, the eponymous lone survivor who went on to write the book. Taylor Kitsch (John Carter) and Emile Hirsch (Killer Joe) are also good as Michael Murphy and Danny Deitz respectively. (Michael Murphy was the subject of a 2013 documentary which unfortunately got no theater play in our neighborhood.)

Ben Foster...well...he just becomes Matt "Axe" Axelson. It's uncanny, from the pictures shown. I saw his mother talking about the performance after the fact, and she said it was like having him back for a moment. (And if that doesn't rip your heart out, we can't be friends.)

The supporting players are also—well, the best way to describe it is "genuine". The whole thing feels very genuine.

Although I've always suspected Berg was not entirely at home with modern Hollywood's leftist values, I can't really back that up. I've heard that he was concerned about The Kingdom being too jingoistic, for example.

This movie (much like The Kingdom) is about as apolitical as it can be, given the circumstances. I have, of course, heard some really dumb movie critic observations. One person, who I can only assume didn't stay to the end, said the movie's message was "brown people bad". (And Afghan village is critical to Luttrell's survival, and they protect him at grave personal risk.)

It's only pro-America in the sense that, yes, we have a military, and it's staffed with good people who make great personal sacrifices for the rest of us, and we're not always worthy of that.

Well, if you can't muster at least that much pro-American sentiment, you're basically indifferent to America's survival at all (at best).

The closest it gets to a political point is that the key plot point, that starts the terrible events in action, is whether or not the SEALs should kill three villagers who have stumbled over them. One is clearly Taliban, and the other two can be expected to inform out of sheer survival necessity.

In a brief argument, they debate whether they should kill them, whether they can kill them (legally), the repercussions of either way—they basically know they're dead if they let them go. The fact that the Press will attack them comes up. The Rules of Engagement are discussed.

It's a great scene. Again, very Charge of the Light Brigade.

It's already been snubbed, getting just a couple of sound Oscar noms. War films can't get awards unless they're anti-war. (And this isn't pro-war, for crying out loud. It just posits that the character of the soldiers is actually a bit nobler and higher-minded than Hollywood is comfortable with.) Being an exemplary action film doesn't get you anything come award time either.

But to those who say "Well, it's not a great movie. It just gets its gravitas from the real story, and from the action," I say "OK, let's see a dozen more like that from the past 40 years."

And it's a shame, because the War on Terror has produced more than its share of gripping stories that Hollywood eschewed for making anti-war, anti-America propaganda.

If The Arts owe our soldiers anything, it's to tell their stories. I'm glad this one got told. It's in the top 30 for the 2013's releases, but that may not be enough to encourage similar films, since it probably won't do big business overseas.

But if it were up to me, I'd be turning out pictures like this 3-4 times a year. You'd never run out of stories.

Divorce Corp.

Holy crap. No, let me amend that: HOLY FREAKIN' CRAP! I knew Family Court was screwed up, but I had no idea the extent of the horrors.

Fortunately, there's this documentary, Divorce Corp, narrated by Dr. Drew Pinsky and featuring victims (and culprits) of the system.

Watch, and be horrified. By virtue of wanting a divorce, the government reaches into people's lives (and bank accounts) to extract the most money possible. If they don't set out to destroy people's lives—i.e., if that's a side-effect and not the intended purpose—they certainly show no remorse.

The fascinating thing is how the Family Court evolved: It's essentially extra-legal. There are no Constitutional protections. No trial by jury. No freedom of speech. No ethics. Going into one of these courts, you no longer have any right to your property, nor to your future earnings, nor even to your children.

Upon entering Family Court, the judge can force you to pay large amounts of money to an unqualified friend of the judge to determine whether or not you're a fit parent. And what they say goes.

It's a horror.

This is why I tend to recoil around social conservatives—not people who live socially conservative lives, but people who think the government should be involved in promoting social conservatism.

It's not that it's that the country doesn't have a decided interest in socially conservative values: the family unit, monogamy, even heterosexuality and birth control all have significant impact on society, and, well, you can count the number of successful societies that have been sustained on modern permissive values on the fingers of no hands.

And yet, the one thing you can count on is this: If the government has power, it will abuse it, it will pervert it, it will try to extend it. Family Court is a perfect example of this: Established to enforce traditional views of marriage—that a husband must support his wife and children even if he splits from them—it now is a complete and utter perversion, motivated to destroy families and even encourage divorce.

The movie starts with an odd thing. It says "50% of all marriages end in divorce. This is why." First of all, the 50% number isn't true. Second of all, as awful as family court is, I don't think it can be blamed for divorce. If anything, the awfulness of it should act as a deterrent—though perhaps only after the first divorce.

The Boy and I were amazed. We were also sort of annoyed by the constant references to Scandinavia's superior system but give the Scandis their due: You sign some papers, and you're done. Very few cases are litigated, because there's no incentive.

The first must-see documentary of the year.

The Invisible Woman

As it turns out, Charles Dickens was just another middle-aged celebrity cliché who jumped a 17-year-old at the first opportunity and whose amazing story can now finally be told! Or so is framed this Ralph Fiennes directed/starring vehicle The Invisible Woman.

Meh.

I suppose it's a fitting punishment, to have penned some of the great works of the English Language, only to be reduced to a late-life dalliance some 150 years later. I guess after nearly 70s years of Hollywood (and Borehamwood) of squeezing your literary output for material—and you have to go back to 1946 to find a year that didn't feature a video version of some Dickens story—it was only inevitable that they would start squeezing your personal life as well.

Or perhaps I'm being too cynical.

Probably. Actors and showbiz types being fascinated by actors and showbiz types from the 19th century is only natural.

Thing is? It's not fascinating. It's utterly banal. Where Fiennes debut picture, Coriolanus, was a brave and challenging take on a lesser known Shakespeare play, this is, well, sort of Lifetime movie material. Well, Lifetime plus amazing actors (but more on that in a bit).

In a nutshell: 40-something Dickens (Fiennes) catches the eye of adoring teen fan Nelly (Felicity Jones, Like Crazy). It seems like she's quite smitten, but of course, he's married, ancient and she's a virginal Victorian lass, despite being an actress.

Dickens is then seen oh-so-casually arranging his schedule to run into her, say, by walking to London from his house in the country. Everyone is pretty much aware of the situation, even before Dickens and Nelly are, including Mrs. Dickens (Joanna Scanlon, The Girl with the Pearl Earring) and Nelly's mom (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Nelly's mother demurs at first, fearing for her daughter's reputation but, in perhaps the only really interesting twist in the movie—that you should probably stop reading about if you don't want to be spoiled, even though it's only a 20 second bit in a two-hour movie—in this only really novel angle, her mother begins to encourage the possible affair on the basis of Nelly being a really, truly horrible actress with no real prospects in show business, apart from what Dickens might be able to help her with.

Heh.

As for the rest of it, the part that isn't "older dude hooks up with then falls in love with much younger woman", deals with the stigma of being a mistress in the 19th century, and the dialogue might just as well have come out of the 1960s, or the 1930s or the 1880s or any of the other time periods when non-traditional relationships struggled against the tyranny of monogamy.

It's woefully pedestrian.

Still, great things come from trite stories. Shakespeare did wonders with the trite. Valdemort could be considered trite and Fiennes did wonders with the dark wizard.

This, though? Nuffin'. There's an implication that Nelly was Dickens muse for works like Great Expectations from this period, but the movie doesn't really sell it. It's all sort of "No, I shouldn't. No. No. No. Well, okay. Crud. I really shouldn't have."

It just teases a bunch of stuff without ever coming into focus. Nelly should be the centerpiece of the film and—I mean, if you want a good drama—she should be completely infusing his work and his thoughts. And, in fairness, Dickens' actions here fit the bill, but we never actually see much actual passion.

Which brings up another point: As you might expect from a film directed by an actor there are long moments where nothing happens but acting. Thing is, though, these are usually middle-shots with the actors in shadow. We're left to glean how they must feel from their posture.

Not that it's hard to figure out, but if you're going to rest the camera so the actors can act for everyone, a Shatnerian approach beats a Fincherian one.

It's all so low-key. Long, mysterious walks on the beach with gazing off into the distance.

It's well made, of course. Competent, even proficient, in most regards. But some of the artistic choices make it difficult to recommend. The Boy was similarly unimpressed. We didn't hate it; we didn't even dislike it. It just didn't take off.

Saving Mr. Banks

I was reluctant to see this film, Saving Mr. Banks, about Disney's process of courting P.L. Travers through the process of turning her Mary Poppins books into the classic movie musical it became, because, quite frankly, Walt Disney isn't someone that modern Hollywood can even come close to comprehending.

An all-American fierce capitalist and vehement anti-communist, modern Hollywood was eager to suck up the slander in Hollywood's Dark Prince which had it that Disney was an anti-semite (because lord knows the Sherman brother who walked with a limp because he'd paratrooped into Germany and helped liberate Dachau would've totally been cool with that) and also that he had his head frozen cryogenically.

So, here's a guy who's not only an artistic genius, a promoter of technology and arts, and a great businessman to boot, he's also pro-America and probably never did anything in his life which could be classified as snark. And snark is where Hollywood lives, currently.

The buzz was strong, though, and we'd seen everything else. And it's actually a very, very good movie. No, Tom Hanks doesn't really come across like Disney. He comes across like Tom Hanks in a Disney 'stache. And at the climax of the movie, he makes a speech to P.L. Travers that did not ring true. (Not the facts of the speech, but the idea that he would actually make that kind of speech, and say those things.)

And—and this sort of annoyed me—the premise of the movie is that Disney needs Travers to sign a release to make a movie, and she's very uptight and insists on being called "Mrs. Travers" so what does Disney do? Call her "Pam" the whole movie.

Really? Antagonize the woman you're going to need to sign this paper to make this venture work? And obliviously, too. Like he's not aware of it. It also seems wildly improbable that Disney would've missed the point of the Poppins story, i.e., that it is Mr. Banks that she's there to save.

I didn't like that he actually said "Mr. Disney was my dad." Even if he actually said it. Which brings up the main point:

It doesn't really matter. This is a solid movie about a writer coming to grips with her past and reality, and Emma Thompson kicks all kinds of ass in it. Disney isn't the main character—he's not much of a character at all, really, and more a deus ex machina who comes and goes as is needed to forward the plot.

Ostensibly, he's the one with the problem (getting Travers to sign), but he has no character arc, and he's not really going to suffer regardless of how things turn out. No, this is all about the fictitious Travers' journey.

As historical fiction, it's nonsense, pretty obviously. Travers and Disney had completely different ideas about how Mary Poppins should go down, and Travers hated the animation Disney used, and Disney made one of the great movies, one of the great musicals, and is probably largely responsible for Travers' books being read today.

And, I think, if they were alive today, Disney would love the film and Travers would hate it.

Nonsense aside, Thompson carries the film. It's about her, and in the first few seconds, with a close-up she gives a master class in acting. And it never lets up. She's incredibly difficult, especially to those around her, but to the audience she is warm. A great deal of the movie is done in flashbacks where young Travers grows up in increasingly hard times as her alcoholic father (whom she idolizes) drinks himself to death.

You know: Family film.

Nah, it's done well enough, with Colin Farrell being sufficiently charming and convincingly drunk to make us see how she might idolize him.

And this brings up the movie's other strengths: Besides Emma Thompson, there's Farrell, Ruth Wilson (the saucy Princess Besty from Anna Karenina and The Lone Ranger, but who saw that?) as Travers' mother, Paul Giamatti as the affable chauffeur who befriends Travers in L.A., Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak as the Sherman brothers, Rachel Griffiths, Bradley Whitford and on and on.

So, good acting. The exchanges between Giamatti and Thompson are especially nice. Hanks got the Disney mannerisms down; he didn't phone it in. (At no time was I in danger of thinking he was playing a real person, but that's not really his fault.)

Top notch score from 'strom favorite Thomas Newman, who did such classics as Finding Nemo and The Green Mile. (I told the kids almost immediately: "That's Thomas Newman!" They have no idea what I'm talking about or why I care.)

It moves along pretty well for a two-hour flick. The heart-wrenching flashbacks are actually more interesting than the contemporary timeline, I think in part because the contemporary timeline required a dramatic arc of characters who didn't actually have them.

John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Alamo) directs.

The Boy and The Flower liked it more than I did. I also liked it but there are a number of *s, †s and ‡s in my mind about it.

American Hustle

This was the last film we saw in the theater, early New Year's Eve of 2013, ending an amazing year of filmgoing. All told we saw over 150 films in the theater, which got a little pricey after our favorite theater closed and the new one doesn't ever comp us.

But The Boy is eighteen now, and he's already beginning to scope out the trouble juggling the many factors that come with adult life. I like to think he'll remember this year; I know I will.

And it's only fitting, I suppose that we should see David O. Russell's American Hustle as the last film of the year, since when our favorite theater closed we saw Silver Linings Playbook a second time (a couple days after seeing this, which they did as a kind of farewell).

American Hustle features, again, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence but the stars are Christian Bale (and his comb-over, which deserves a best supporting actor Oscar) and Amy Adams (and her cleavage, which deserves better than the Golden Globes pun that is all I can think of) as a couple of hustlers who get in too deep when a zealous FBI agent (Cooper) decides to use them for Abscam.

Abscam! Remember Abscam? It was...a thing...in the late '70s and early '80s. It was too hard to solve actual crime so the FBI got into the business of making crime and filming it so, you know, slam dunk at trial.

Impeccable acting from the top four (except for Amy Adams' dodgy accent which, while it was meant to be fake, was perhaps not meant to be quite so intermittent) and great support from Jeremy Renner (as Camden mayor "Carmine Polito"), Elizabeth Rohm (whom I did not recognize from "Law & Order") as his wife, and Louis CK as an uptight FBI agent trying to corral Cooper.

Over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours, the movie moves from vignette-to-vignette in a way that makes structural and dramatic sense, but lacks the urgency, focus and character arc of SLP. As a result, it's a fun time but not particularly moving. (Even though SLP was a fantasy in terms of how it depicted the sorts of problems its characters had, it was dramatically tight.)

The Boy and I liked it. I tried to talk The Flower into coming with us but she demurred.

One thing I've noticed about Russell's films of late is a near philanthropic feel: He seems content to draw drama not from good-vs-evil so much as many well-intentioned people who conflict in how they reach their desired goals.

Considering that our four heroes are scam artists (Bale and Adams), power drunk cops (Cooper and his pals), corrupt politicians (Renner and Rohm) and just plain dangerously nuts (Lawrence), that's kind of a feat.

Just like SLP's sort of breezy treatment of serious mental problems, this sort of looks a serious political and law-enforcement issues with a sort of shrug-and-smile, as if to say "People. What're you gonna do?"

Some folks aren't going to care for that sort of thing, but I think I prefer it to the far more common misanthropic cynicism, where everyone can be trusted to act in the worst possible way.

Winner of three Golden Globes.

Not a bad end to not a bad year.

Ender's Game

We saw over 150 movies this year (2013), so many that I'm sure I missed reviewing quite a few, like Ender's Game. We saw it second run and The Boy liked it. I also liked it, just not very much.

There was a dumb controversy surrounding it because sci-fi icon Orson Scott Card apparently said something (about gay marriage?) that was not approved of by the bien pensants, who apparently lack the sort of nuance that all those who disagree with them must embrace if they wish to partake in the modern culture at all.

To wit: You suck, but that's a pretty good song/movie/book.

The movie is essentially a standard young-adult space opera, as Heinlein might've written in the '50s, about an Earth that has barely survived an attack by evil ant-aliens (or was it bees?) and has rebounded by embracing a militaristic society where children are trained from a very young age to defend against an expected future assault.

It isn't well explained, but basically only the young have the adaptability to defeat the Alien Menace. (This gives it both that young-adult feel I was mentioning and an unfortunate Harry Potter vibe.)

Our movie shows Ender's progress in and out of the academy (which is highly manipulative), in boot camp, and in training for the anticipated future battle, and is fairly unobjectionable in its particulars.

I would single out Harrison Ford as being particularly miscast as a long-time military dude, but then I began to realize that I didn't think the possibly flawless Viola Davis was very good either. I've forgotten the kid (Asa Butterfield, Boy In the Striped Pajamas). His older brother seemed awkward and even Abigail Breslin as his older sister didn't feel quite right.

Nothing seems to fit here. There are all these little vignettes: Zero-G combat training (which never comes up outside of training), Ender's conflicts with his peers, his emergence as a sort-of leader, a mythical and possibly dead hero but something's up with the whole story, the sexual tension he has with a girl (Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit), and on and on.

Nothing seems to gel.

The movie's both too long and too short, if that makes sense: It's too long to be a fun, fluffy popcorn flick, and too short to develop all the critical mass it needs to carry its desired dramatic weight. This probably comes from not wanting to cut key elements of the 384-page book down even more than necessary but being stuck with having two hours to cram the whole thing in.

I mean, if you're Peter Jackson, you make it into a twelve-hour movie and add a sub-plot about ants in love. But if you're Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) you probably don't have that luxury. Might be worth viewing an extended/director's cut.

The Boy, as I said, liked it more than I did. And even though I've been critical, I wouldn't say it was bad. It just didn't work very well somehow, at least not for me.

Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConaughey is Losing Weight! Actually, it's not that funny, since he's having a hard time putting it back on, I've heard, and he is seriously skinny as Ron Woodruff, HIV sufferer, drug-user, and homosexual-bashing-occasional-maybe-bisexual-or-at-least-into-some-manly-looking-chicks.

Dallas Buyers Club is an essentially American story. Woodruff gets HIV and, in what should be his final days, gets a hold of experimental drugs that arrest his condition. And when I say "gets a hold", I mean "illegally procures". This leads to further procurement of other unapproved drugs, time south of the border in Mexican clinics, and ultimately smuggling—and kind of smuggling-in-plain-sight—these drugs across the border for fun and profit.

Where the hell does the U.S. Government get off saying what drugs anyone can use for any reason? is, of course, my question. Must be in one of them "penumbras and emanations" the Supreme Court likes to go on about.

Anyway.

Outstanding performances from McConaughey and Jared Leto as the gay man who provides Woodruff with his entreé to his client base. Both won Golden Globes for their performances last Sunday.

Woodruff, while doubtless lightened up by the charming and abdominally-excellent McConnaughey, is commendably incorrect politically, racist, sexist, antagonistic to homosexuals, antagonistic to most everyone outside of his parochial world, and yet still admirable for his boldness, his refusal to lay down and die, his refusal to accept a dubious authority telling him it must necessarily be this way.

He gets over the gay-bashing thing, more or less. He manages to woo Jennifer Garner, a doctor, which would strike me as more than implausible, if it weren't McConaughey. The movie doesn't make too much of his heroism, nor too much of the bizarre and corrupt drug trial system, nor even too much of the villainous FDA.

The director, Jean-Marc Valleé, is a French-Canadian. I think that's significant. Ultimately, this is a movie about a bunch of banal, desultory yet overpowering forces against a single, reckless man.

I do hope it makes people ask why, though.