Best of 2015

In 2015 I got a gig writing for THE paper of record in Sonoma valley and boy has that established for me that Hollywood is worse than I thought...and the requirement to watch the biggest releases each week impacted my ability to write on the WTT about other, better films (thankfully, the gig has not impacted my ability to make excuses about not writing). That said, read all my reviews! I'm working up a lather now and getting stronger even if the films aren't--bet on it.

In paging through WTT "Best of" posts from years past (in a desperate attempt to put off work on this new post), the films sort of reorder themselves around the ones I've had the biggest urge to watch since. For 2015 I tried to rank less on what I consider the best in this moment and more on which films will obsess me moving forward. 

Best Supporting Actor

I have more clarity on certain subcategories of this section--the best costumes for a supporting actor goes to Isaach de Bankole in The Last Witch Hunter, the best supporting voice acting is Sam Elliott in The Good Dinosaur, the best ensemble supporting acting is a fierce competition between Michael Sheen and Tom Sturridge in Far from the Madding Crowd and Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash and Adam Rodriguez in Magic Mike XXL. For some reason, Jeff Daniels' "Mark Watney is dead" line from The Martian still kills me, I don't know why. (I do know why. I wish Matt Damon were dead.) But the prize goes to Benicio del Toro, because his character in Sicario plays exquisitely off his Traffic statuette-winner and because he runs off and hides with the narrative in the last half hour of the film.

Best Supporting Actress

With apologies to Ilsa Faust in M:I5, Lea Seydoux wins for the best supporting actress name--Madeleine Swann--in Spectre. The most surprising supporting actress turn belongs to Monica Bellucci in The Wonders--one cannot imagine the American analog of her fabulous guest appearance in a film about rural Italian beekeepers. Praise be the ensemble of Turkish Coppola virgins in Mustang--Güneş Şensoy, Doğa Doğuşlu, İlayda Akdoğan, Tuğba Sunguroğlu and Elit İşcan--they are charm and wallop together. Lola Kirke is excellent smirks and turns of phrase against Greta Gerwig in Mistress America but really the only performance one sees is Kristen Stewart's in The Clouds of Sils Maria--her personal assistance to Juliette Binoche dominates the landscape and then recedes in the most affecting retreat of the year. 

Best Actor

2015 was a year of #hottiealerts. I must put order to my objectification, so, with apologies to Chris Hemsworth's faux Moby-Dick pecs In the Heart of the Sea and Jake Gylenhaal's phenomenal Southpaw abdominals, the best topless performances are by Michael B. Jordan in Creed (astonishing, truly astonishing that this film is left on the outside by the Academy) and Channing Tatum with so, so much Magic in his Mike. Shoutouts to the scruffier sex symbols Viggo Mortenson in Jauja and Vin Diesel in The Last Witch Hunter working their way handsomely through various portals. But in Far from the Madding Crowd Matthias Schoenaerts' Gabriel Oak is that most special heartthrob: women want him, blogging men want to be in (much smaller sizes of) his impeccable shepherd wear. To paraphrase J. Lo to Clooney in Out of Sight: "you really wear that scarf." I'm just thankful that now all theaters have those high-backed seats so I didn't snap my neck swooning when Gabriel sorted all those bloated sheep and got tarps over the haystacks in the rain.

Best Actress

Salute to Angelina Jolie for directing and starring in By the Sea--her excellent work was dismissed as vacuous and narcissistic with a viciousness that would never apply to male actors/directors--but I'll long remember her face in the film, a gorgeously-photographed mask of pain. Another hat tip to Kristen Stewart in American Ultra, as the straw that stirs Jesse Eisenberg's drink. One wonders how in the world Charlize Theron wasn't nominated for Mad Max: Fury Road and if one had any hopes to save #OscarsSoWhite, it would have been noms for the extraordinary cohorts in Tangerine, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor--they burn that motherfucker to the ground. I must credit longtime WTT-enemy David O. Russell for wising up and getting everything (Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, plot logistics) out of Jennifer Lawrence's way in Joy--her role shares the same electricity as that of the not-be-denied Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr. 

Best Pictures

20-11
Spectre, By the Sea, In Jackson Heights, Mistress America, The Wonders, Jauja, Joy, Mustang, Timbuktu, Mad Max: Fury Road.

10. Tangerine - The first minutes of the film have a fantastic effect. My mind was full of questions like what am I watching? why is it shot like this? who ARE these people? what is HAPPENING?? Sean Baker directs this picture so aggressively it's probably as close as we'll get to a Ryan Trecartin film at a cinema near us. The aforementioned excellence of Kitana Kiki Rodriguez is apparent in a flash--when her friend explains her boyfriend's been cheating on her she clarifies that she's "an upper hoe" and sets the narrative in motion. Rodriguez and her costar Mya Taylor drag the film by the hair through the streets of Los Angeles, which have never looked harsher or more beautiful than they do shot by iPhone, the day turning yellow and blue to orange and pink. Oh, and it's Christmas Eve in a city that's just "a beautifully wrapped lie." 

9. Far from the Madding Crowd - I covered the main points in my review but there are many additional things I love about this fast-paced and not-too-stately adaptation of Thomas Hardy. As previously discussed, this is an all-time great film for enthusiasts of scarves and cravats, the best I’ve ever seen in terms of neckwear style and variety (take a bow, costume designer Janet Patterson). In addition to the life-changing style of Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba is not slouch in a sterling blue milkmaid outfit, complete with kerchief, shot against a breathing couture cowhide. I also appreciate that Carey Mulligan sings a folk song that feels about an hour shorter than her “New York, New York” in Shame. As her Bathsheba explains of a most difficult year, “I seem to cry a great deal these days. I never used to cry at all.” Tell me about it lady. 

8. Macbeth - Here's another adaptation of concision--director Justin Kurzel took a lot out of the play but the snatches he left are indelible. "O full of scorpions is my mind!" he says and no contemporary actor has a more scorpion-dense head than Michael Fassbender. He is well on his way to developing the harshest crow's feet in cinema history and his Macbeth dispenses proper, proper violence. His handwash is blood, his war paint is ashes and his crown is tarnished gravestones. Marion Cotillard's Lady Macbeth matches his intensity, her face essentially a constant death frieze. The witches are hair-raising, the music chills. Kurzel took a green and grey Scottish expanse and turned it defiantly red and black. And as I turned another year older while writing this recap, I appreciated Macbeth's comforting speech about aging:

I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

7. The Assassin - The black and white opening movements of this film are so perfect I wished for time to stop; I wanted to ask the projectionist for the replay. I gasped and wrote furious notes to myself to look up the cinematographer: Ping Bin Lee (In the Mood for Love, of course). We're introduced to the Assassin in question as she deals death with remarkable naturalness, like a cloud passing across the sun, much more vivid for being so brief. Lee is the longtime lenser for Hou Hsiao-Hsien and, like their work together on The Flowers of Shanghai, this film uses the slightest of camera movements to ratchet the tension of palace intrigues. The set design is gauzy curtains and candlelight--seemingly peaceful, Lyndon-esque compositions interrupted by cuts like the flash of a knife. I often find myself back with the advice of the Assassin's mentor: "your mind is still hostage to human sentiment." 

(The 8 PM screening I attended is also my favorite theatre moment of the year. I was surprised at the relatively full house at the AMC Metreon but the turnout was all based on the title--throughout the two-hour run time, wuxia fanbois with strappy sneakers and ill-coiffed hair paraded out in huffy disgust. An auteur sneak attack!)

6. Carol - The biggest relief of the year. It was set up to be the one film to save all the shittiness that came before and so it did. Like all red-blooded Americans, I adore Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven and was impressed by how different Carol looks--it's less reminiscent of Douglas Sirk Technicolor than Robert Frank's black and white Americans. The acting is all so fine, with Cate Blanchett lionessing and Rooney Mara Audreying her tiny bangs and Coach Taylor behaving terribly because he had to be named Harge. The smeary interior of the Midwest is exactly the right amount of ugly, just as Highsmith would've wanted it, a slightly unfocused backdrop to the love story. And the formulation of the central relationship is ideal for me: a young artist is drawn resistlessly to an older lover whose art is her life itself. "Take me bed." My only problem with the film is that Carol is such an uninspired title. You know what's a great title? The Price of Salt.

5. Magic Mike XXL - Some of my feelings are noted here but it's nice to revisit the film because the Magic Mike franchise is my favorite argument. How do we live in a culture that insists on taking Avengers films seriously but dismisses Magic Mike as too shallow for serious discussion? People who deny themselves the pleasures of XXL are like this gas station cashier holding off on smiling as long as she can. In part two of what I hope is an endless saga, there are some excellent laugh lines, my favorite being Ken's on the the departed Dallas: "Don't say his name, don't give him that power." As a road picture, a lot of pleasure comes from the casual conversations the guys have, on their plans as they grow up. When not stripping, they work low-level jobs, from running a fro-yo truck to moving furniture--they are American dreamers. The pleasure-center release of the dancing benefits the recipients (who, in XXL, have a beautiful variety of body shapes and colors) as well as the entertainers. I’d say it’s still their day.

4. Blackhat - I love Michael Mann left to his own devices. As I touched on in my In the Heart of the Sea review, Chris Hemsworth (like Colin Farrell in Miami Vice) is better as an exterior, a vacancy. Blackhat is a film about visions rather than words--characters speak in thick accents and shorthand with the meanings often glitched out. From Los Angeles to Hong Kong, they move through spaces that are like the inside of computers, prisoners tethered to technology, neon chips falling over their faces--even the gold chains on necks come to look like strings of data. Despite the abstraction of much of the film, Mann remains the best composer of gunfights ever, this time surpassing himself with a crosscut sequence where the bad guys retreat down a circular ramp as the good guys make right angle turns in a warren of apartment buildings. Mann features faces and locations no one else could find and set pieces no one else would conceive. I hope his next film bombs too so he can stay small, dirty, digital, violent--he's at his greatest at the edge of coherence.    

3. Sicario - While not a particular Denis Villeneuve fan before this film, I was thrilled with the look of the picture. There's a downright Mannian border crossing sequence and later a deep push into the realm of night goggles and body heat maps. Most of my praise is contained in the review I wrote at the time so I'll re-emphasize my appreciation for the good films and books that lend a better better understand the ongoing Ciudad Juarez apocalypse. Recently I've read Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World, the first chapter of The Story of Vincente and listened to Charles Bowden, all to say I'm more convinced than ever by the pitch blackness into which Villeneuve drops viewers. Critics of his film had similar difficulties with No Country for Old Men, in which many were put off by the surprise death of (the wonderfully resurrected in Sicario) Josh Brolin. But that's cartels, killing the protagonist of any counternarrative with their unslakable thirst for death.

2. World of Tomorrow - Across the 16 minutes of Don Hertzfeldt's short but capacious animated masterpiece, every frame is screenshot-worthy and every line is quotable. Emily Clone, speaking from the future to her much younger grandmother, Emily Prime, gave me both the hardest laugh ("I drew a snakeboy") and shared the darkest thoughts of 2016 ("I do not have the mental or emotional capacity to deal with his loss but sometimes, I sit in a chair, late at night, and quietly feel very bad"). As we watch World of Tomorrow, much like Emily Prime, we are enjoying ourselves and don't quite sense how serious it is all getting. As carefree 4-year old playing a carefree 4-year-old, the filmmaker's niece Winona Mae gives the best vocal performance...ever? Probably ever. The film is full of ideas, second to second, visual and intellectual and emotional ideas and I want all of it, I want to be it--learn it, love it, stream it, buy it. "I am very proud of my sadness because it means I am more alive." "Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle."

(A quick hat tip to David Ehrlich for alerting me that I needed to see this. And, while we're here, his yearly Best of videos are one of the greatest gifts to cineastes--the 2015 version builds to a climax worthy of any film.)

1. Clouds of Sils Maria - What I've come to understand is that the films I love best are the ones I must keep watching to try to understand--this is why Our Beloved Month of August and Certified Copy were perhaps underrated in previous years' lists. I saw Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria three times in theatres and there's still something just out of reach. 

The first act is an introduction to actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) who consider whether Maria should take the role of aging Helena in a restaging of the play Maloja Snake--Maria made her name 20 years earlier playing Helena's young foil Sigrid. Of course she must say yes. The second act--an endlessly beguiling affair that takes place in the cabin where Maloja Snake was written--has Maria and Valentine running lines as Helena and Sigrid with no real clarity on where the play ends and their personal conflicts intervene, whether the tensions between them are written. The third act is back in tumult of life with the new Sigrid, Lohanesque paparazzi-magnet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz), meeting and tormenting Maria/Helena with what is presumably excellent method acting.

All of this plays off of Moretz and Binoche and Stewart's real life notoriety. They ask themselves why an actress like Maria Enders (like Juliette Binoche!) would take a role in an X-Men film and their conversations about Hollywood compromises are not trivial--it feels like they are addressing the heart of my work, reckoning with the commercial pictures of 2015. More than any action film, these meta games had me on the edge of my seat with excitement. Stewart is so tremendous in this film (and in 2015 as a whole) that I want to watch the Twilight films. I cannot put that in starker terms. Binoche (revelatory as she shifts from slumping in a train car to glamming up for fashion photos) is the best selector of roles and directors alive. Moretz holds her own and even takes the lead in the best image from Cannes. 

Which role is Binoche? Sigrid or Helena? Helena and Sigrid? Can the present overwrite the past? Assayas makes the Maloja Snake eats its own tail. I will keep watching until I can tell you everything about the play within the play and movie within the movie and the actors within the actors--The Clouds of Sils Maria is my best obsession of the year. 

*

Remember: "Now is the envy of all of the dead." 2016 is going to be great--so cheer the fuck up.

Worse Than I Thought

As #WTTnation already knows, I have been writing less here not merely because of laziness and ennui but because of my exciting role as a film reviewer for the Sonoma Index-Tribune. Or, as I like to call it, THE paper of record for Sonoma county.

There is much to love about Sonoma, which possesses those beautiful, mustard-colored hills and an editor who is willing to publish my writing. But only two or three movies open there every week, which has resulted in a cinema-going transition from seeing mostly films that appear at Landmark Theatres to almost exclusively films that appear at AMC Theatres. This has been harder than I thought it would be.

While I'm quite pleased by how often I've been able to write about men not wearing their shirts, the treatment of women in most of these films is troubling. Had I not been to see them, I would have thought that these blockbusters were entertainments I might have enjoyed in the right mood. But to actually sit through these grating, two-hour-plus moneymakers is to see how repellant gender roles are across Hollywood.

While Mad Max: Fury Road and Spy are duly credited for Charlize Theron and Melissa McCarthy's badassery, the rest of the summer is a string of gendered insults, from the breasts-first roles for Alexandra Daddario and Sofia Vergara in San Andreas and Hot Pursuit to the grim celebration of co-dependent relationships in Insurgent to the head-smacking backstory of Black Widow's sterilization in Avengers: Age of Ultron....And, at the very bottom, beyond repellant and to the point of doing actual harm to viewers, is Jurassic World, which ought to be boycotted by sentient beings for the disgusting, demeaning, entirely unacceptable depiction of the Bryce Dallas Howard character (and her high heels). And I didn't even see Entourage. 

At any rate, here are all the reviews I've written since early March. After you've read them (they're so short—each one is just like reading 15 tweets in a row!), check out my ranking of the the first 21 reviewed films from best to worst (or, perhaps, least to most alarming portrayals of women). The titles are listed with the corresponding zinger I had the hardest cutting because of word limit restrictions for the column.

Did Like

1. Far from the Madding Crowd
Matthias Schoenaerts is the finest shepherd in cinema history—he can mend my fence or cover my haystacks any day ifyouknowwhatImean. And his neckwear, my god in heaven!

1a. Magic Mike XXL
Though Jada Pinkett Smith’s MC is no McConaughey replacement, she does get the line, “We’re gonna see if there’s still some magic in that Mike.” And C-Tates responds as would any great, with a lil headstand bump and grind. 

3. Mad Max: Fury Road  
In case you’ve wondered what Rose Huntington-Whiteley has been doing since starring in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the answer is nothing. 

4. Inside Out 
Riley: Broccoli on pizza is delicious—what is WRONG with you?

5. Spy
Director of Photography Robert Yeoman is alternating between lensing Paul Feig and Wes Anderson pictures, how rad is that job?

Didn't Make Me Want to Die

6. Wild Tales
Pedro Almodóvar produced this but it's more schematic and neatly ironic than he would allow in his best films…despite the manic presence of the Argentine Bradley Cooper channeling bad weddings past. 

7. Furious 7
In their series of standoffs, Statham and Diesel develop a very Hamilton-Burr relationship, if the two Alexanders had the good sense to always keep each other alive for potential sequels.

Did Make Me Want to Die a Little

8. Cinderella
Fair criticism is leveled at Cinderella for accepting her fate as an altruistic servant but that role does include an expansive attic space—its monthly rent in the Bay Area would be incalculable, regardless of whether or not you’re locked into it. 

9. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Richard Gere is so wooden should have played a memoirist writing about his past adventures as a totem pole. [Fuck, how could I not have included that one? #regrets]

10. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation 
The only truly inspired moment in the film is casting Tom Hollander (the boob politico from the fantastic In the Loop) as the prime minister of England, though I give the filmmakers no credit for this coincidence. 

11. Monkey Kingdom 
Ah, what might have been if we were allowed to see the macaque polyamory or learn more about their rampant herpes infestations.  

12. Southpaw 
Despite the screeching melodrama, there are funny moments. A fellow ward of the state looks at the broken man and asks Billy's daughter, “Is that your dad?” and she replies, “I don’t know anymore.” LOLZ!

Oh God Why
 
13. Minions 
[No extra zinger here, all the words I had about this incoherence went into the review...and there eight films below Minions on this list!]

14. San Andreas
Director Brad Peyton (who cut his teeth in the disaster genre with Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore) chooses all cheesy vertical shots of toppling buildings and heaving chests. 

15. Ted 2
The level of discourse for this film is “Eff Scott Fitzgerald” jokes though, as with his Oscar hosting fiasco, MacFarlane would probably defend himself by saying, “This is all I ever do, it’s not my fault if people think it’s funny.”

16. Hot Pursuit
It’s the kind of film that makes one reflect, in amazement, “maybe Identity Thief wasn’t THAT bad.”

17. Insurgent
Director Robert Schwentke, who most recently helmed R.I.P.D., has thrown down a gauntlet of worst two consecutive films (well, there is screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who has chased Winter’s Tale with this dreck).

18. Avengers: Age of Ultron 
It’s the latest from schlock auteur Joss Whedon, who alternates Marvel films with Shakespeare adaptations shot in his backyard like a rich, Middle Aged sinner buying indulgences from the church.  

19. Ant-Man
The only remotely entertaining part of the film is Michael Peña’s monologues in which his voice inhabits other characters. The one of four screenwriters who came up with that idea gets to feel the least embarrassed about appearing in the credits. 

20. Jurassic World
Five screenwriters labored over the script, apparently being paid per insertion of the word “asset” as it relates to dinosaurs or human beings. “Asset out of containment!” shouted ad infinitum. 

21. The Longest Ride
Black Mountain College is shown as a place for rich people to look at artists like animals in cages and perhaps buy an abstraction by one of the elephants. As Nicholas Sparks, the Thomas Kinkade of screenwriters, has our plucky protagonist explain, “I love art, the culture it brings...”

 

So, I'm looking forward to the fall season I guess?

Stupid Fucking Dead Man [White Elephant Blogathon]

[This year the WTT is participating in the White Elephant blogathon, coordinated by Philip Tatler of the Diary of a Country Pickpocket blog, wherein film writers exchange cult movies at random and write about whichever film they receive. Check out links to all the 2015 White Elephant pieces here.]

Dead Man was simply a bad draw. I have—let me scan that filmography again—never liked a Jim Jarmusch picture. Many people say that this is his finest film and I might share that opinion…but from me that’s not the same thing as praise. I tried to trade Dead Man to a white elephant friend of mine for Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven but he wouldn’t let me. Perhaps I ought to have tried harder to acquire something easily mockable across a thousand or so words.

My disaffection for Jarmusch bewilders. I like films that are black and white by choice. I like taking apart genre constructions. I like to laugh (but, perhaps crucially, I don’t embrace deadpan humor). I would go so far as to say I love much slow cinema of recent vintage—Our Beloved Month of August, Silent Light, Norte, the End of History are among my favorite films of the past decade. I’ve done Satantango and Shoah across multiple sittings. I wish Assayas’ Carlos were longer! 

But I also wish I’d been assigned Colin Farrell’s Dead Man Down or Sean Penn’s Dead Man Walking or 50 Cent’s Dead Man Running or Tom Everett Scott’s Dead Man on Campus. But plain old Dead Man has always been waiting for me, fated, at the end of the line for this stupid fucking white (elephant) man.

By not liking Dead Man, I find myself in all sorts of awful positions, like agreeing with Roger Ebert’s dismissal instead of throwing roses at its feet like many critics I respect. I'm heating my takes like an Amazon Movie Reviewer instead of a serious cineaste. I cannot find a friend who dislikes it and I've grown to believe that the movie is like a Magic Eye autostereogram that remains stubbornly 2-D for me alone. 

J. Hoberman wrote, “This is the Western Andrei Tarkovsky always wanted to make,” more praise that chilled me to the core. Jarmusch himself is quoted as “not liking” Westerns. You don’t say! The director might as well superimpose his arched white eyebrows onto every frame of the film. I read a couple compare and contrast pieces tying Dead Man to The Wild Bunch, which made me all the bitterer that my fellow white elephanter did not write down that other off-the-top-of-my-head-cult-Western that treats gun violence in an opposite (that is to say, entertaining) manner.  

To watch Dead Man I sat as straight as I could in a kitchen chair—the futon was too risky, no matter how assiduously I'd caffeinated. Perhaps I ought to have burned cigarettes between my fingers all evening like a long haul truck driver... 

At any rate, this film, Dead Man, which mocks attempts at introduction. Ohioan Bill Blake (Johnny Depp, who was doing that placid/reactive shtick long before Pirates) is heading West in an awful suit and no great hurry. He is or is not an unwitting reincarnation of William Blake, the poet and painter and Romantic and alleged early adopter of the free love moment and writer of that one poem you might have read about “The Tyger.” 

The arch opening sequence has Blake falling in and out of sleep on the train from the Erie to a town with the not-at-all-on-the-nose name of Machine. Jarmusch gives a full fadeout each time Depp nods off in his seat, as if the camera is closing its eyes too. And, every time he wakes up, there is an establishing cut to the gears of the train that, in a television serial, might increase excitement but here only roused my first tetchiness with the director’s methods.

Blake is on the rails for many days or, if you go by the growth of his beard, no time at all. Because this is a scare quotes Western and because it is aggressively slow-paced, Jarmusch helpfully punctuates most sequences with gunshots to help keep you awake. I tripped over them like the multiple snooze buttons on my alarm clock. The first fusillade is from men massacring buffaloes out the window of the train and these offhand gunshots go on throughout the film, every ten minutes or so.

I want to praise Crispin Glover, the soot-faced train fireman who accosts Blake with the one quote I take from the film: “Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”

The rest of the supporting cast in the film is mostly familiar faces with longer hair than usual: Billy Bob Thornton’s like barn hay, John Hurt’s appropriately lank, Gabriel Byrne’s in dignified waves, Iggy Pop’s hanging under a bonnet, etc. But none of these cameos satisfy as much as Bill Murray riffing with GZA and RZA in Coffee and Cigarettes. I mean, I also really enjoy Michael Madsen’s performance in the “Black Widow” video but I don’t require an entire film of such ham sandwiches.

Allow me to get even fussier: I hate Robert Mitchum’s presence in Dead Man. He plays the Machine factory magnate who tells Blake that he won’t be getting the position in the accounting department he’d been promised. His chewy scene with Depp is the ultimate degradation of beef-it’s-what’s-for-dinner era Mitchum, who looks much the worse for wear (as they say, your jowls never stop growing as you age). He spouts sub-Louis L’Amour clunkers like “The only job you’re goin’ to get is pushing up daisies from a pine box,” and parodies the indelible glower of his youth.  

  

Mitchum is one of the best and most important actors in film history. It is simply unacceptable to depict him before an ironic oil portrait of himself with a cigar and a shotgun to bring him down to size. If an artistically irrelevant figure like, say, Johnny Depp wants to appear in a film standing next to an ironic oil portrait of himself, he can do so. But I repeat: Robert Mitchum should not be brought down to size by Jarmusch or anyone else. 

And there are so many more slow minutes after the Mitchum sequence left me so embittered! Mostly it’s Depp getting shot in the chest (very gently) and meeting his traveling companion for the duration of the film: a man called Exaybachay/“He Who Talks Loud But Says Nothing”/Nobody (Gary Farmer). Nobody is full of droll lines like, “stupid fucking white man,” which are accurate if not terribly creative (Blake is out there in the forest spooning fawns, after all). Watching their sequences is like watching all the interminable two-characters-walking-together-through-the-woods scenes from a whole season of Game of Thrones at once, without the benefit of interruption by roaring dragons or upmarket whores.

They are playing a long game of who said it: William Blake or a Native American sage? It’s sort of fun but not the same thing as good writing. “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow,” could be Blake or a Blackfoot or could be an aimless non sequitur.

Another sonic irritant is the jagged soundtrack provided by Neil Young, his electric guitar and his electric guitar’s reverb. His riffs are incomplete thoughts, random ten-second bursts I Chinged into two hours of film (when put all together, the theme is rather good). 

 

In defense of Jarmusch, I think the main problem with the dialogue could be William Blake, dead poet. My second punishment, after the film, was reading this guy afterward.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.

Digital commons provide thousands of lines of Blake that oscillate between nursery rhyme claptrap and fortune cookie hoo-ha. I read from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and got as far as I could before I was too discouraged to continue. “The crow wish’d everything was black, the owl that everything was white. / Exuberance is Beauty. / If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.” Right then. If “Auguries of Innocence” is any indication, Blake might be a most excellent writer AND illustrator of Hallmark bereavement cards. “Joy and woe are woven fine, / A clothing for the soul divine. / Under every grief and pine / Runs a joy with silken twine.”

But back to the film (I must constantly guard against calling it Deadpan). More horseback riding, more crispy Robby Müller cinematography, more tedium—there is no threat that Blake will be caught by the bounty hunters sent after him. He cannot die until he reaches the sea. At some point he gets face paint and a way cooler coat...passes some totem poles...I swear I was awake the whole time...

When they arrive at last at the inky, Styxian body of water, Nobody says, “I prepared your canoe with cedar boughs” and, after that one nice shot of his arm dripping blood into the water, Blake floats off into eternity under one more staccato burst of gunfire and jangling guitar. I think I’m supposed to feel whoa that’s deep man but instead I want to have Jarmusch to tell me something I don’t already know.

I’m a dead man. That’s why I spend as much time as I can on writing, because my end is as certain as William Blake’s—the bullet is in my chest already. I just want to die having read better poetry and seen better films than this one. I only wish is that, after the film ended and I finally slept, I had kept better track of my dream world, its mood and pictures, taking note of whether the landscape moved while I laid still.

Best of 2014

Allow the WTT to quote the WTT this time last year:

I am comforted by patterns. 2013 confirmed that in even-numbered years the Giants win the World Series and in odd-numbered years all the best films come out. 

All I'm saying is don't doubt science or my rectitude. Madison Bumgarner gave one of only two onscreen performances I couldn't live without in 2014. (Spoiler alert: If I had not spent a stray Sunday afternoon watching a four-hour Filipino film I might not have even had the will to generate my traditional "Best of" post.)

In 2014, my rapidly eroding patience with our cinema found words in T.I.'s summer jam "No Mediocre."

As is often the case with rappers, you have to see past the T&A, the veneer of misogyny and get to their artistic concerns. T.I. is tired of mediocre shit being praised for greatness and I'm right there with him. As he scans the Billboard Top 40, I scroll down the vista of movie listings, unmoved by the indistinguishable B-average prestige pictures that Rotten Tomatoes encourages one to see (which one is The Imitation Game and which one is The Theory of Everything again?). If what's left for me to love is American Sniper, Boyhood, Interstellar, Gone Girl, et al, I'm at sea, I'm Robert Redford last year--all is lost.

Best Supporting Actresses

The finest seven minutes of actressing in a supporting role were lip-synched by Emma Stone on Jimmy Fallon but I suppose I ought to confine myself to film performances. In Listen Up Philip, Elisabeth Moss's humorous cat ventriloquy is as necessary as oxygen between Jason Schwartzman's wannabe Philip Roth and Jonathan Pryce's Philip Roth. Minnie Driver does some excellent scene-chewing in Beyond the Lights, possibly because her jawline is so pronounced it appears she has mandibles on her like a stag beetle. I'll take a stab at rating the female performances in Inherent Vice which, as far as I can tell, exists only to provide zany supporting roles: 1. Joanna Newsom's voice, 2. Jena Malone's teeth, 3. Katherine Waterston's nipples, 4. Maya Rudolph's wig, 5. Hong Chau's eyeliner (though, in the end, Jeremy Renner wore it better in The Immigrant). But the finest performance is in Ida--Agata Kulesza gives us a character of sublime brilliance and self-hatred, an ideal foil for the young nun at the center of the story. Kulesza makes us feel the utter necessity of pushing the self-destruct button.

Best Supporting Actors

(Best supporting actor is a tough race but worst supporting actor is easy: Christian Slater in Nymphomaniac. Good god, that tree metaphor...)

I admire The Lego Movie because, in a film that is otherwise full of absurd cartoon characters, Will Ferrell gives a stunning bit of vérité as President Business, who would stroll to election in 2016 if only he were a real person. Because I like the occasional nod to actual Oscar candidates, I support J.K. Simmons in Whiplash--I found real menace there, remembering my own arrhythmic terror, not knowing whether I'm rushing or dragging. "Not quite my tempo, no worries." Credit has to be given to Neil Patrick Harris in Gone Girl--you really appreciate his throat being slit (though perhaps that was more about my giddy realization that the film was almost over). To return to the sketch comedy drive-bys of Inherent Vice, props to Josh Brolin, who brought actual heft to the film--I guess I'm voting for his haircut and pancake ordering style. The ultimate kudos go to the genuine chills provided by Stranger by the Lake sex panther Christophe Paou and his fine, fine mustache.

Best Actresses

As with Suzanne Clément in Laurence Anyways last year, Angeli Bayani's performance in Norte, the End of History is so immense I can't even deal. Bayani hit that Falconetti level and may now ascend directly to heaven. Prepare yourself by rewatching The Passion of Joan of Arc, then stream Norte, and then give yourself a couple weeks to recover. Elsewhere, Marion Cotillard's life is somehow even more fucked up in Two Days, One Night than it was in Rust and Bone, even though she didn't have her legs bitten off by an orca. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and her subtly-metaphored theme song "Blackbird," impressed in Beyond the Lights (even if the film is somewhat undone by the fact that her exploitative, faux-Top-40 single "Masterpiece" is a much better song). Charlotte Gainsbourg dragged the second half of Nymphomaniac to some semblance of competence. Congratulations as well to the three young Swedes (Mira Barkhammer, Mira Grosin and Liv LeMoyne) who star in We Are the Best! and elevate what would be a by-the-numbers indie with their closeup camaraderie and hair-based bonding.

Best Actors

I'll just get it on the record here: I think Miles Teller is going to be a great one and Whiplash will be one of his early landmark roles. Macon Blair looks alarming as a bearded and blood-soaked hobo and somehow even more frightening as a pudgy and clean-shaven junior insurance salesman on the lam in Blue Ruin. Still, Blair is handsomer than Timothy Spall, who made a grabby, smudgy, don't-give-a-fuck-y Mr. Turner. In Cannibal, Antonio de la Torre is an exquisite table manners and savage display of appetite type of a guy. He makes me want to be a better man or at least wear better suits (overall he seems like a chill dude and I wouldn't fear him eating me at all). But I'll give the prize in this tepid year to Ralph Fiennes, who at least takes on a big role like a dang ole movie star in The Grand Budapest Hotel.  

Best Pictures 

(But first, a confession of blind spots (I mean, blind spots to films that might have made this list, not blind spots like Into the Woods): Actress, Goodbye to Language, Horse Money, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Winter Sleep.)

12. Two Days, One Night - The Dardennes have done it--they've made another film that's exactly as good as all of their other movies. This is praise that is also a criticism. Though perhaps if the directors had selected for Cotillard a white tank top rather than a salmon one this would be a couple of spots higher on the list. I still hold out hope that their next Cannes darling will feature hot Franco-Belgians fucking without consequence and eating decadent snacks.

11. Lucy - ScarJo's Lucy is a piece of meat, a human being based on a lecture by Morgan Freeman, conflated via intercuts with an antelope, spattered with blood on her cheetah-patterned coat, intergalactic fireworks before her eyes, following Romy Schneider into L'Enfer or Gaspar Noe Into the Void, restructured genomes like the finest graffiti, her limbs disintegrating into frosted doughnut sprinkles, strings of Matrix code tethering us to our cell phones, the cosmos of Luc Besson, the skin tag spots across Freeman's face. I got my eleven dollar's worth just for Lucy's excellent, direct summation of her motivation: "Someone put a bag of drugs inside me and I need you to get it out."

10. Citizenfour - On 26 December, 2014, I was politically radicalized because of this film. I'm done voting for presidents from the major political parties in the United States. Conscious Americans are all on a path like Edward Snowden's, where the day comes and we have to tell our loved ones, "I can't really speak out loud here." The documentary is depressing on two levels: we are fine with living in a surveillance state and we can't even be bothered to watch this crucial documentary about living in our surveillance state. As always, holler at your boy if you've got a lead on Norwegian citizenship. 

(This feels a little too serious for the WTT so I'll add this: the way Snowden's hair stuck up in the back drove me nuts. I know director Laura Poitras felt the same way because she included a scene of Snowden fussing with his 'do before going on the lam, perhaps for the rest of his days.)

9. Whiplash - Much as this list gives me a chance to allow only one Hollywood film in the top dozen, Whiplash afforded learned critics the ability to reveal themselves as jazz as well as film snobs (talking about you, Richard Brody, hilariously eager to expound upon all the things he's heard and you never will). For those of us who don't know any better, the film delivers pithy artist-at-work kicks and a climax as audacious as the last 15 minutes of The Red Shoes.

8. The Naked Room - This is a documentary film of relentless closeups, shots you'd expect to see in hostage videos, circumstances not unrelated to the children brought before the camera in this anonymous hospital in Mexico. Near the end of the film, one severely depressed teen, Hayde, is asked to promise that she will not hurt herself when she leaves the office but cannot state the affirmative. When she breaks down, she raises her arm to brush the tears from her cheeks and we see for the first time her left wrist wrapped in heavy gauze. It is a heartbreaking moment of grace. She wept, I wept.

7. Mr. Turner - There have been many great metaphors for what Timothy Spall looks and sounds like in his title role. I'm going to go with a lowland tapir in rutting season at the Brookfield Zoo (indelible childhood memory). A big thank you to Mike Leigh who, across decades of good work, continues to remind the viewing public that people over 40 still have sexual intercourse. The brilliance of this film, as with Topsy-Turvy, is not just in the climax (though shouting "The Sun Is God!" on your deathbed is a solid way to go out) but in the diminuendo that sketches the aftereffects of Turner's death, the shittiness for all of us lesser lights when the master's show is over.

6. Rich Hill - Tracy Droz Tragos' documentary is full of Malick, great following shots of cartwheeling kids and nighttime photography of fireworks hanging in the air above Rich Hill, MO. And much of the dialogue is as pungent as Kit's Badlands line, "I'll give you a dollar if you eat this collie." The three boys at the center of the story have surprising areas of knowledge. Harley explains that "you can get mango on food stamps." Appachey (that astonishingly American name!) expresses a stunning career plan: "I was thinking of moving to China...and becoming an art teacher." And Andrew says, wiser about his life in deep poverty, "I have no say in what happens; they're the parents, I'm just a kid." After watching this documentary you'll want to keep up with these boys as much as I do.

5. Ida - Pawel Pawlikowski made the most composed film of the year--without upsetting Wes Anderson I would buy a book of postcards of the shots from this movie first, from the mist on the rural fields to the grill work on dingy hotel windows (note the name of the cinematographer Lukasz Zal). The performances are also excellent: the aforementioned Agata Kulesza's Wanda as the long lost aunt to Anna/Ida, dark of eye, dimpled of chin, the Jewish nun, and the jazz musician (Dawid Ogrodnik) who charms them both, sort of a Polish Pattinson playing "Naima" by John Coltrane. It's the music you'll hear for the rest of your life, saving souls in a nunnery or drinking yourself to death in a Lodz apartment. 

4. Stranger by the Lake - Apparently the only sexy movies this decade are from France, far away from the Hollywood's flaccid, anti-dream factory. The death spiral attraction between Christophe Paou and Pierre Deladonchamps emphasizes the lengths to which I need to step up my mustache AND chest hair game. The film revels in the claustrophobia of only ever being at the lake and never indoors. The delirium of lust and cum in the afternoon is slowly replaced by fear in an endless dusk, enough to make the rabbit wish to be caught. Strangers builds to a climax that made my hair stand on end. A voice calls out, "I won't hurt you."

(Gillian Flynn and David Fincher are assuredly already plotting a ruinous Hollywood remake.) 

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel - The seventh best Wes Anderson film is still the third best film of 2014--it was that kind of year. Bu that doesn't mean Grand Budapest isn't excellent. As Ralph Fiennes' M. Gustave knows, the rudeness of Wes Anderson haters is merely an expression of their fear. I can only offer a rueful smile at someone who would take something as sumptuous, as beautiful, as well-crafted as a cake from Mendl's and say, "I don't like it, it's too sweet." 

2. Under the Skin - Scarlett's Johansson's Renaissance year allowed me to revisit a WTT post from 2008 (before the tabloids had even settled on ScarJo as a nickname!). It's a time capsule of my early approach: more pictures, more discussion of boobs. What's happened since? A tragic amount of films with colons in their titles. Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the impending drivel called, and I don't exaggerate: Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. This lucrative dross is interspersed with failed comedy vehicles He's Just Not That Into You, We Bought a Zoo, Chef and Hitchcock (that was supposed to be funny, right?). She's had, for ten years, a distinct inability to pick auteurs (Jon Favreau does not qualify). 

In popular conception, actors read scripts (or actors' assistants read scripts) to select their next films but what I'll always wonder is why they don't just choose by director. Juliette Binoche works globally, with the finest directors, and has had the best career of anyone in the past 25 years. How difficult is it? When Johansson finally arrived at Besson and then Jonathan Glazer this year there was a respite from the suck.

Like Stranger by the Lake, Under the Skin will discourage you from spending time on rocky beaches.
The best parts of the film are documentary, with non-actors being talked into a van by a very attractive someone they don't know is Scarlett Johansson. The ridiculous, porn setup dialogue shows us the bottom line--a Celtic fan will get into a car with ScarJo for any reason. The sexy voice, the trashy clothes and dull men willing to go to their death after that ass. A gorgeous sadism pervades the piece, as if Frederick Seidel decided to direct a picture. When her 20-film deal with Marvel expires, I hope ScarJo will take a ride with more auteurs.

1. Norte, the End of History - For director Lav Diaz, a four hour film is shortform. But this is slow cinema so good that I didn't need to check my cell phone, I didn't need to urinate. Norte is not just the longest film on the list but the most profound and, moment to moment, the most beautiful. Diaz begins with an adaptation of Crime and Punishment but far exceeds Doestoevsky in artistry. 

To quote Fabian (Sid Lucero), the film's protagonist, whose murder of a moneylender is the least of his problems, "How can I be at peace with the world's shallowness?" Joaquin (Archie Alemania) goes to jail for Fabian's crime and leaves his wife (the Falconetti-channeling Angeli Bayani) to survive without him.

To select a single sequence to set the mood: a long shot of a window propped open pre-dawn, insects whispering, a cock crowing, the putter of a motorbike that stops and allows a woman out, bags of vegetables piling on a cart, a dog observing, a younger sister appearing, a cooperative effort. A cut: the sky is lighter, bluer but it's still early, we look over the river as the women arrange the vegetables on the cart, trying to work the kinks out of their sore shoulders, a goat wanders by, a young daughter appears to help, they discuss the dawn of another day, their endless work.

As I wrote in my notebook many times, wow, wow, WOW. The digital camera is so crisp and bold you can't believe there aren't special effects involved. But it's just the blockbuster of Diaz's imagination. In the last hour you might ask yourself, as Ian Darke has deep into World Cup stoppage time, "how much more of this can their possibly be?" but the payoffs keep coming. This gorgeous suffering, this epic accomplishment.

Lav Diaz: no mediocre.

Proust Film Questionnaire

 
I have wanted for a long while to fill out the FAQ section of the WTT and it occurred to me that the Proust Questionnaire might help me on my way (I ought to have learned by now that the answer is always in Proust). How else will a new visitor understand the vicious biases I nurture against certain filmmakers and the directors and actors I consider above reproach?

Imagine in each question below the invisible phrase "as it applies to cinema," as these answers differ in places from the "as it applies to your whole life" answers.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Spending an afternoon with Renoir, Ophüls, Powell & Pressburger, Wes Anderson--delights in color, movement and sound. Those filmmakers who don't just make great films, but provide great joy.

What is your greatest fear?

As a tot I worried I'd one day run out of good films, but that has passed. Now my fear is everyone else's: early death.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

How often I must remind myself that sitting around and writing about film will make me happier than sitting around and not writing.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

It's one thing to pay your money and enrich the purveyors of Hollywood blockbuster nonsense (I've seen all three Transformers in theatres)--it's another to furiously insist that Nolan's Batman films or Favreau's Iron Man films are artistically worthwhile, on par with directors aiming to provoke thought, not mere wonder.

Which living person do you most admire?

For directors, it might be Steven Soderbergh--an explorer of genres, budgets, styles and mediums who defended movie storytelling as best he could before now trying his hand at television. For actors, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert--relentless workers and international stars who've collaborated with almost every major living director (and several dead ones).

What is your greatest extravagance?

Purchasing too many Criterion Collection DVDs...not to mention film books I don't have time to read.

What is your current state of mind?

Happy that there is room for people like Shane Carruth to make films and get them distributed, and curious about whether longform television is really "catching" film behind directors like Assayas, Fukunaga and Soderbergh.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Capital "A" acting of the kind most often rewarded with Oscars. Films are made by directors and non-actors are often as great as any star. Start with Hossain Sabzian in Close-Up and move on to hundreds of other examples.

On what occasion do you lie?

When people ask me if I know the films of the Japanese masters--Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa. And when people ask, "won't you come see the new J.J. Abrams picture?" Oh no, busy that day, and the next...

Which living person do you most despise?

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. They gave us the blockbuster and its even more odious cousin, the two hour and fifteen minute, Academy-bait drama. Look at the utter shit to win Best Picture in just the last ten years. 

What is the quality you most like in a man?

Laconism. As purveyed by noir philosophers like Bogart or Mitchum (or Belmondo in Breathless). Jeff Bailey: "You can never help anything, can you? You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another."

What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Maneating. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Lars von Trier's Medea, Emmanuelle Devos in Kings & Queen, the grand dame of them all, Martine Carol in Lola Montès. 

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Hard to pick from all my tic-y parentheticals...maybe "longtime WTT fave"?

When and where were you happiest?

Walking out of the film survey class I took at community college while a senior in high school, having just seen Breathless for the first time--the score pounding in my ears, almost dancing my way back to the car, knowing film would be a larger influence on my life than I had previously imagined.

What is the greatest love of your life?

I find the greatest romances are Chow-san's in 2046 and In the Mood for Love. Tony Leung has a great unrequited love with Maggie Cheung, denies himself a real relationship with Ziyi Zhang because of it, and pours all that thwarted passion into writing and tree-whispering. 

Which talent would you most like to have?

To only need four hours of sleep a night, so I could always watch a film before bed. 

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Obviously I ought to have been born independently wealthy. 

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Apparently I once made 50 posts on this blog in a year, which now seems impossible. 

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

Casa Malaparte, Capri, Italy. 

Where would you most like to live?

I need all the great movie houses and programmers in Manhattan to move to San Francisco. Then San Francisco is my answer. 

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

The January-February filmgoing period, when the releases aren't worthwhile and most of the new trailers are for summer blockbuster season, which now arrives in early May.

What is your favorite occupation?

Well, writing. Also my least favorite/most frightening. 

What is your most marked characteristic?

Snark! 

What do you most value in your friends?

The willingness to trust me again after I take them to terrible films (happened most recently with the disgraceful Liv & Ingmar). 

Who are your favorite writers?

Ben Hecht, Robert Evans, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Cormac McCarthy, Arnaud Desplechin. 

Who is your hero of fiction?

Sam the Lion. 

What are your favorite names? 

Santino Corleone, "Trashcan" Jack Vincennes, Deckard, John Grady Cole / Madeleine Elster, Camille Javal, Lola Montès, Pinky Rose. 

What is your greatest regret?

Having had a day job for all these years, when otherwise I might have spent weekday afternoons in near-empty theatres.

How would you like to die?

Just in time to be woken back up, as in Ordet or Silent Light.

What is your motto?

To pick one from all the Boris Lermontov lines: "Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on." 

Best of 2013

I am comforted by patterns. 2013 confirmed that in even-numbered years the Giants win the World Series and in odd-numbered years all the best films come out.

Perhaps as importantly, last year also brought to my attention an anthem for our time:

The year in film was so good there is a countdown before the countdown. 

Four close-outs that don't make my best baker's dozen: Her>Inside Llewyn Davis>The Wolf of Wall Street>American Hustle (that's the ranking but it's a tight three-and-a-half-stars-y bunch).

Three fascinating misses: Only God Forgives and The Grandmaster (American Cut) and The Counselor.

Two excellent films from 2012 that I only saw in 2013: In Another Country and Tabu--Hong Sang-Soo and Miguel Gomes tell stories on film the way I'd like them to be told.

One legend who has lost me: Terrence Malick--after To the Wonder my anticipation for his releases moves from fevered to slightly piqued.

Best Supporting Actresses

If you've read the preceding reviews for The Counselor and Only God Forgives you know it's quite a battle between Cameron Diaz and Kristin Scott Thomas over the Most Scenery Chewing Award. Gun to my head I lean towards Diaz because of eye makeup. Zhang Ziyi is an excellent coiled weapon in The Grandmaster, poised to fight and full of swallowed pain. The best part of American Hustle is Jennifer "I put out the fire" Lawrence. I remember sitting down for Winter's Bone, hearing her say, "bred and buttered," and going full Dick Vitale: "She's a star baby! S-T-A-R, STAR!!" Scarlett Johansson has hopefully learned something from being sexier as a voice in Her than on screen in Don Jon. I thought the idea of nominating someone who never appears in the flesh was just the thing to make Academy voters feel clever (and think of the short term savings in their phone sex charges). But she'll have to settle for the WTT nod.

Best Supporting Actors

If Scarlett is recognized for her voice in Her then Rob Lowe should get it for his face in Behind the Candelabra ("Will I be able to close my eyes?" "Not entirely.") I begrudge Franco everything but have to give it up for Spring Breaker's Alien (Gucci Mane's method acting as Archie deserves further kudos). I enjoyed any number of tiny roles, including Giovanni Arcuri's Caesar in Caesar Must Die, Michael Shannon's stern and hilarious avuncular turn in Mud, and Clark Gregg, Nathan Fillion and Fran Kranz's uproarious collective in Much Ado About Nothing: There's a nice cumulative effect from Bad Coach Taylor as the repetitious alcoholic in The Spectacular Now and Good Coach Taylor shit talking DiCaprio on the yacht in The Wolf of Wall Street. But perhaps the most memorable supporting acting is Jonah Hill affecting a waspy rasp and hashing out those cousin-humping Punnett squares in Wolf. 

Best Actresses

There are only two types of people: those who know that Suzanne Clément is the best actress of the year and those who have not seen Laurence Anyways. Her window-rattling explosion at a grande dame dinette waitress is hair-raising: "Serve coffee, bring food, take money and shut the fuck up." She steals the film, and with ease, from WTT fave Melvil Poupoud. Her win comes with apologies to Rooney Mara styling, Greta Gerwig running, Amy Seimetz suffering and Adele Excharpolous and Lea Seydoux being great with each other. (And I'm still awaiting the final tallies on the competition between Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now and Brie Larson in Short Term 12 for Miss Indie Teen 2013.)

Best Actors

First, I give the annual award for Most Acting to Bradley Cooper in American Hustle--he is in illustrious company. Watching Her, it was fun to spot Joaquin Phoenix's scar under that sad sack mustache. Oscar Isaac certainly made it look cold Inside Llewyn Davis. Toni Servillo stands at the end of culture in The Great Beauty, looking at the great ugliness of Rome, his own unhandsome face so desirable against the distended bodies flexing unsexily around him. Shane Carruth gives a starmaking turn in Upstream Color, though I hope he doesn't go on to act in anything he hasn't also written and directed. I've reserved my highest praise for Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave--he pulls off a most dangerous thing for an actor, using his eyes to speak the most important lines.

Best Pictures

(I've done one of my better jobs of seeing all potential placeholders--the only caveat is there's a 95% Claire Denis' Bastards would have made this list because she makes my world go 'round.)

The "I Wanna Rob" Section

13. Spring Breakers - This film tastes like Sour Patch Kids. Harmony Korine's casting choices are fascinating--the aforementioned Franco and Gucci Mane, Jeff Jarrett as an evangelical preacher, wifey Rachel Korine as the most libidinous reveler and Selena Gomez, with her open revulsion to appearing in the film. St. Pete's beach is the most spiritual place of all, full of lizard brain GIFing, days coated in sweat and malt liquor, nights the color of Virgin America cabins with Gatsby lighting provided by an Outback Steakhouse at the end of a pier. And Britney, good Christ, the Britney.

12. Bling Ring - The protagonists of this film might be even dimmer or, anyway, less cunning than their counterparts to the southeast. The blankness of the text: "Let's go to Paris," and the Eiffel Tower key ring they find under Ms. Hilton's mat. For those teenage nitwits, being there is like rolling around in the treasures of the grail. It's a full immersion in reality culture, the way Emma Watson asks, "what did Lindsay say?" in her terrifying accent. Cinematography is not reduced all the way down to GIFs but, for Sofia Coppola, this is more intercut and less studied--intentionally disposable. 

The Soderbergh Section

11. Side Effects - The characters are lit in a haze, or the poisonous fog that blurs everything around the depressive Rooney Mara. She gives Channing Tatum the Janet Leigh MacGuffin treatment and participates in what, back in February, seemed a likely candidate for the juiciest lesbian hookup of the year (was Catherine Zeta-Jones channeling Laura Prepon in Orange Is the New Black or the other way around?). Soderbergh's willingness to push beyond the limits of a serious drama about our prescription-drug-addicted country into a nasty little potboiler is commendable.

10. Behind the Candelabra - Here the scene is lit like, well, a candelabra the size of my apartment, picking out the individual spots of glitter in Liberace's hair. Michael Douglas was smart to take a break from his cancer-inducing tonguework to do Lee--he has so many wonderful lines, about Sonja Henie's thighs and looking like his father in drag. It's such a fabulous moment when he realizes he can adopt someone he's fucking. His sequin-tastic ensembles are spot on (I say this a visitor to the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas to see the originals) and the ensemble cast is perfect, down to the rheumy, shitting lapdogs. 

Steven Soderbergh has retired from film directing at his pithiest, his most playful, when the maximum amount of people will beg to have him back. As he finishes work on the miniseries The Knick, I wonder if, 20 years down the line, we'll find this a key moment where longform television passed film.

The Top 9
9. Something in the Air - Continuing from Summer Hours and Carlos, Olivier Assayas moves his camera through large groups and houses like a better version of Robert Altman. Clement Metayer's Gilles deals with the typical (French) teenage concerns: making love (to Carole Combes' Laure, a real firestarter) and art. But then there's also revolution, in fits in starts "After May," to which his friends say he must be totally committed. As one explains, "Art is solitude." That tension informs the rest of the film, one that further stokes my rage at not growing up in French schools, where communist manifestos are handed out before class and most 17-year-olds are familiar with John Ashbery and Gregory Corso. The floppy-haired cast blows across Europe like it's the only thing in the world. And it is.

8. Mud - Seems rather a forgotten film this awards season--Jeff Nichols' work might always be too subtle. The young stars never make it past a narrow, riverine range. Ellis and Neckbone's small boat pokes through some lovely landscapes but they are shot unpretentiously, like the jungles in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. The story is more or less two kids tracing the arc of two fairly stupid adults in a death spiral together. But if the dumb grownups are Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey, I'd want to keep watching too. Plus Matt says fun things like, "it's tough to make a meal out of pumpkin pie filling" while his skin is a Pantone match to pumpkin pie filling. For bonus points, Nichols takes on the challenge of an extended snake metaphor, running it from live cottonmouths and water moccasins to McConaughey's tats to the Bible.

7. Museum Hours - I spend a fair amount of time wishing for more W.G. Sebald in my life and this is a film for that. Between Johann and Anne there is something fresher than a love story: a film about walking around in the cold and occasionally coming inside to gaze at masterworks. As a security guard, Johann's job is watching--but even when he is not at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum he is out with a birdwatching group or playing online poker. Anne is good match, in that she also has a funny voice and enjoys inexpensive hobbies. I wish I had time for repeated visits to the same masterpieces, to allow for things I've never done, like finding all the easter eggs in a Breughel painting. With such exquisite moments--like Johann describing Rembrandt portraits to help a woman in a coma, or a young museum guard's theory that Dutch and Flemish still lives were depictions of burghers' bling, the equivalent of piling diamonds and flat screens on a canvas now--I wish it had gone on longer, or will pick up in another volume soon.

6. Like Someone in Love - A possible formulation:

Sebald : walking :: Kiarostami : shots in cars

This film is the observation a young call girl, Akiko, being shepherded from one glass enclosure to another over the course of 16 or so hours. It begins with a tense negotiation between Akiko and her pimp in a glassy, Murakami-short-story jazz bar. From there she's shuttled via cab to Professor Watanabe's apartment and its large bay window. Finally, in the professor's car, she is forced to meet with her unhinged boyfriend, Noriaki, who knows her as a student without evening employment. Akiko never laughs but does sort of smile, speaking like a ventriloquist's dummy even when shouting. She's shocked by the sound of her own voice, the dexterity with which she can sharpen and soften her eyes.

There is a definitive Abbas Kiarostami situation in the car where Watanabe--moving seamlessly from role of john to grandfather--tells young Noriaki all he needs to know about being married: "If you know she's going to lie, best to not ask." When Akiko joins them, Watanabe shifts again, to a kind of couples counselor--it's all for naught, but the effort is lovely. The first night in his apartment, Akiko talks charmingly to Professor Watanabe about how she resembles the young woman in his print of Chiyoji Yazaki's painting Training a Parrot--but she is always treated like the bird.

5. 12 Years a Slave - Wesley Morris wrote the only column you need on the film--it makes clear that every movie featuring slavery before this one was insufficient. I would make an additional compliment to Steve McQueen: I greatly admire the tension he creates by holding an establishing shot for an extra beat before the characters go in motion, making a beautiful tableau that shatters at the next threat. The shot that kills me occurs late in the film, when Chiwetel Ejiofor's eyes pass through stages of terror and sorrow and unwanted hope against the ever-humming lushness of the bayou. This is where my tears started rolling in earnest--at the potency of his performance and the power of wordless cinema. I will have an active interest in a potential Oscar winner for the first time since No Country for Old Men.

4. Leviathan - I always complain about the boring presentation of documentaries, the way they are graded on a curve, without proper criticism of their flat visuals. Leviathan does that have that problem. Cameras make seamless moves into the underwater litter of fish guts or closeups on the Peckinpah red of gasping gills. The wings of the gulls seem to beat nighttime stars into existence. Obviously, I spent much of my time making metaphors of the action on screen. There are men working of course, and the deep fatigue in the captain's eyes as he tries to stay awake while watching shark week on TV is a wonderful contrast to the inhuman speed of the guy who sorts the clam shells on deck. I have never been more shocked at the quick passage of 90 minutes--I was locked in to my notetaking and I thought the film was perhaps halfway over when the credits rolled. Director Lucien Castaing-Taylor has attained "must-see" status.

3. Blue Is the Warmest Color - I swear to you--with full awareness of the checkered, horndog archives of this website--that this film does not rank so high because of its explicitness, its NC-17 titillation. It's not even erotic at the highest level, nothing like Bibi Andersson's description of sex on the beach in Persona or Michelle Jenneke's pre-hurdles warmup routine. Plus, the hardest thing for me to admit is loving a film that Steven Spielberg also loved.

And Blue requires so much defending. As a straight white male, of course I find critiques about "the male gaze" annoying (though The Male Gaze would be a pretty good title for a book about the history of cinema). If you can read just one takedown, check out Eileen Myles' bile spewing in the Twitter rant of the year. She says it's a hate crime, that they don't even fuck. I think the former assertion is laughable and the second is more a condemnation of a porn film than a film film (see also: real lesbians reacting to the sex scenes). Then there's the backlash to Abdellatif Kechiche's hard-driving direction of stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux...all I can say is you have no right to complain about mistreatment unless Lars von Trier won't unlock the giant wheel chained to your neck.

Blue fetishizes, endlessly, a young girl's hair and lips--you have to get over that, the same way you get over the fact that the most influential love story in the Western canon is about two 14-year-olds fucking. Adèle (Exarchopoulos) lusts after Emma (Seydoux) and that lust is returned. There are 30 minutes of sex in a three hour movie, and they're not the best parts. You can read glib comments like, "OMG, even when they go to the museum they just look statues' butts!" But then they look at a work by Jean-Léon Gérôme, who does blue better, and perhaps warmer, than anyone else (not to mention Emma's surprising defense of Klimt over Schiele).

I agree with Myles that the sexiest thing about Adèle is her appetite at the table--her family's spaghetti is my favorite food I've never tasted. The strongest sequence in the film might be when Adèle cooks dinner for a party of Emma's artist friends, is a wonderful hostess, does all the dishes and, upon arriving in bed, receives instructions from her beloved on how she should also write, and be an artist herself. Kechiche captures the devastating reproach in the kind suggestion, the heartrending moments in life when you need your partner to say she loves you, she loves you just as you are and the words don't come.

Adèle and Emma break up and it's terrible. The film's rawness is not the sex, it's the ground giving way underneath Adèle's feet when Emma ends it and the horrendous bar scene where she tries to get her back. "I can pay in flesh and blood...I want you. All the time. And no one else." To have earned that. I saw Blue twice in theatres and would go again tomorrow. In France, this film is called La vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 et 2--I want to put the rent money into a Kickstarter for chapters 3 and 4 (after taking care of Zach Braff, obviously).

2. Post Tenebras Lux - Carlos Reygadas is switching places with Terrence Malick in my constellation of directors. In this film, all the scenes might not be in chronological order, but they work (and I say that as someone who generally doesn't like glowing red demons carrying toolboxes or Neil Young). If we are to take this as a self-portrait of Reygadas, it is self-lacerating. The protagonist's villa is isolated in violent countryside, filled with oddly-named and dangerous addicts. Juan himself engages in the unacceptable treatment of pets, explaining, "I always hurt the ones I love the most." His children, Rut and Eleazar, are charming, especially in the scene where the young man greets his parents by lobbing a used diaper at them like a hand grenade. 

Lux is less explicitly religious than Silent Light but still fills me with awe. There's the opening, where Rut toddles through the magic hour, speaking animals into existence, and the sweaty sauna Pieta, where Juan's wife is comforted under the ample bosom of a fellow sex tourist. The grandest scene of the year is an audacious pivot of memory at the beach--Rut and Eleazar stare out to rosy-fingered sea as teenagers and, by the time the camera pans back around to them, they have become children again.

1. Upstream Color - I saw this film under an auspicious star. I have a tradition of taking a redeye to NYC and powering through the first day, capping it with a film in the evening with my best friends in the world (among other notables, this series has included my first viewing of Silent Light). This April, Scott and I selected Upstream Color and it happened that we saw Kenneth Lonergan walking his dog on the way to the theatre in which Shane Carruth would be speaking after the screening. My sleeplessness, the La-Z-Boy reclinability of my seat and incredible film on screen gave me a rare sense of physical immersion in the picture. Was I watching sci-fi or horror or noir or romance or what?

I was first impressed with the complexity of the editing and sound design, the sharp starring role by the director and his willingness to respect a viewer's intelligence. Carruth acquitted himself well in responding to asinine audience questions and moved even further into my good graces by announcing that he picked Walden as a touchstone because he thought the book was dumb.

The gift and the curse of Carruth's films is not knowing exactly what you've just seen (Primer-watching supergeniuses excepted). But on the second and third and fourth viewings, Upstream Color moves higher and higher in my estimation. I'm still not certain of its genre but the film is like a thousand-year-old basket, handmade and still watertight. For now, the sequence that sticks with me starts with Carruth and costar Amy Seimetz, who are recovering from the same mysterious hypnotic violation, wondering whether the birds in the tree are grackles or starlings. Every time, the next two minutes make my scalp tingle. They chatter in circles, the idea of a shared past leading to confusion over whose childhood it is they're remembering. Just as I'm about to come unglued, a whistle blows and they stop talking. I pant together with them for a minute.

It's important to note that the best special effects of 2013 are mealworms and blue food coloring and the budget for this masterpiece was $100k. Allow me to make an overstatement for which I might very well be mocked--Shane Carruth can be our Orson Welles: inventive, fearless, iconoclastic. And Carruth was born at a better time--writing, directing and distributing the films himself. Long may he live on the outside.