2013 Flicks

So it's now early December, and critics' lists are starting to come out. Problem is that many of the films that they are listing haven't yet reached Kitchener-Waterloo, or I missed them. So this is a handy list for me to keep track of what I've seen and what I need to catch up with.

Thus far, my favourite flicks of the year are Blue Jasmine, Mud and Wadjda; and if you consider Caesar Must Die a 2013 film, then that, too. You may notice that almost all of the films listed as seen have ratings of B- or more... how could that be? I think it's that I have a pretty good sense of what I will like, and avoid what I think I won't. When I had more money or when I worked at the theatre I would give less thought to what I would see -- hence why my flickchart does include some sparkling gems like Battle: Los Angeles. But it's also that I tend to gravitate towards films that are critically acclaimed. Blockbusters don't really appeal to me, especially the glut of superhero movies -- but that doesn't mean that I avoid them entirely. I enjoyed Pacific Rim, checked out Star Trek Into Darkness, and will see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire when the crowds die down a bit.


What I've Seen
12 Years a Slave (A)
All is Lost (A-)
American Hustle (A)
The Angels' Share (B+)
A Touch of Sin (A)
Blackbird (A)
Blue Jasmine (A+)
Blue is the Warmest Colour (B)
Caesar Must Die (A+)
Captain Phillips (B+)
The Conjuring (B+)
Dallas Buyers Club (A)
The East (C)
Enough Said (B+)
Elysium (B)
Frances Ha (B-)
Frozen (A-)
Fruitvale Station (B+)
Gravity (A)
The Great Gatsby (A-)
Her (A)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (B)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (B)
The Hunt (A)
Inside Llewyn Davis (A)
The Iceman (C)
Kon Tiki (C+)
Lee Daniels' The Butler (B)
The Manor (B-)
Much Ado About Nothing (B)

Mud (A+)
Nebraska (A)

Olympus Has Fallen (B-)

Only God Forgives (B)

Pacific Rim (B)

Philomena (A-)

Prisoners (B+)

Renoir (B+)
Room 237 (B)

Rush (A)

The Sapphires (A-)

The Spectacular Now (B)

Star Trek Into Darkness (B-)

This is the End (A-)

Trance (B)

Wadjda (A+)

The Way, Way Back (B-)
The Wolf of Wall Street (A-)

World War Z (B)

What I Need to See
20 Feet from Stardom^
The Act of Killing^
August: Osage County*
Before Midnight^
Behind the Candelabra
Blackfish^
The Bling Ring^
Evil Dead^
Gloria*
Labor Day*
Monster's University^
Out of the Furnace
The Past*
The Place Beyond the Pines^
Saving Mr. Banks*
Short Term 12
Side Effects^
Stories We Tell^
The Wind Rises*
The World's End^

*Hasn't come yet
^Had an opportunity to, but missed it


What I Have No Real Interest in Seeing
42 (Sports movies don't do much for me.)
Don Jon (Looks like an ego-stroking project.)
The Heat (No.)
Fast & Furious 6 (Do I have to?)
Iron Man 3 (Yawn.)
Man of Steel (Ew, Zack Snyder!)
Oblivion (Looks dull.)
Oz The Great and Powerful (Looks terrible!)
Stoker (I've heard it's boring.)
Thor: The Dark World (Didn't see the first one.)
Warm Bodies (I don't know about this one, and I can't place my finger on it.)
We're the Millers (Looks stupid.)
The Wolverine (Another superhero film??)

"Recommend me some movies!" #3: Terrific Trios

Trios of many different genres, styles, movements and themes. I've purposely tried to expand it a bit beyond what I think are the 'best' and more towards personal favourites. They are almost all well-known and should be easy to find. Asterisks will show films that may be more difficult to locate.


Three Great Québecois Films
C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2005) Recommended by me before, a queer coming of age film.
Maelström* (Denis Villeneuve, 2000) A dying fish narrates a strange, emotional tale.
The Decline of the American Empire (Denys Arcand, 1986) Intellectuals talk lots of sex.

Three Great Blaxploitation Films
Bone* (Larry Cohen) Also known as Beverly Hills Nightmare or Housewife, it's deliriously subversive fun.
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (Charles Bail, 1975) Campy, ass-kicking Cleo in Macau and Hong Kong.
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin van Peebles, 1971) Revolutionary, landmark blaxploitation.

Three Great Heist Films
The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) This Best Picture winner is frothy and fun.
Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2001) Gritty British thriller with dynamite performance from Ben Kingsley, who is terrifying as the psychotic Don Logan.
Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001) Miles ahead of the original, Soderbergh's film is a stylish delight.

Three Great Cary Grant Screwballs
Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944) Cary Grant plays the lone sane member of a hilariously murderous family.
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) One of the great scripts of Classic Hollywood, it's the sharpest screwball around.
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) Grant shines with Katharine Hepburn, who is delightfully ditzy.

Three Great Anthology Films
Paris, Je T'aime (2006) 20 short films that range from droll character studies to vampire mysteries and beautiful love stories.
Germany in Autumn* (1978) Biting examination of post-War West Germany, featuring shorts from Fassbinder, Kluge and Schlöndorff.
Sin City (Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, 2005) One of the best neo-Noirs.

Three Great Americana Films
The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) Stoic view of a small Western town as it transitions to a new era, featuring career-best performances.
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincent Minnelli, 1944) One of the best American musicals, it's dripping with patriotism and sentimentality... but a closer look reveals much more.
Melvin and Howard* (Jonathan Demme, 1980) An unassuming man's life is changed when he is mysteriously named in the will of none other than Howard Hughes.

Three Great Biopics
Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005) The best biopic ever made, it's subtle, moving and an intense examination into the working process of one of the most controversial and game-changing novels written.
Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008) Sean Penn walks away with his second Oscar, and Van Sant re-energizes a tired genre with some cinematic flair.
Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Most contemporary audiences know James Cagney for his gangster films -- but he was also a top song and dance man. Here he plays George M. Cohan, "The Man Who Owns Broadway".

Three Great New Hollywood Films Based on a True Story
All the Presidents Men (Alan Pakula, 1976) The breaking of and investigation behind the Watergate Scandal.
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) A bank robbery goes wrong, and The People eat it up.
Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973) A young couple is on the run and madly in love in this tribute to Americana.

Three Great Shakespeare Films
Titus (Julie Taymor, 1999) Shakespeare's infamous Titus Andronicus goes postmodern.
Macbeth* (Orson Welles, 1948) Welles described his project as "a perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and Bride of Frankenstein", and it's an apt suggestion.
Romeo + Juliet (Baz Lurhmann, 1996) Whirling, kaleidoscopic and pure pop, it's a brave blend that somehow works, and works gloriously.

Three Great Mindbenders
The Trial* (Orson Welles, 1962) Another gem from Orson Welles, featuring spectacular set design.
Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) It's hilarious, bizarre and gruesome, and totally worth watching.
Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991) I still don't know quite what I watched here, but it was sure exhilarating.

Three Great Marriages Falling Apart
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924) This silent epic was shorn by the studio, but in its remains it's still a crowning achievement.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966) Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are at each other's throats with wickedly witty vitriol.
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) Why would your wife suddenly despise everything about you, with only a flimsy excuse? Godard and Bridgette Bardot are a match made in cinematic heaven.

Three Great Documentaries
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father* (Kurt Kuenne, 2008) Guaranteed to get you sobbing, this is perhaps one of the most emotionally powerful films I've come across.
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) The life and death of bear fanatic Timothy Treadwell.
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) One of the first documentaries about the Holocaust, and still among the most poignant and devastating.

Three Great Queer Films
Poison* (Todd Haynes, 1991) Certainly not for all tastes, but those willing to go along with its genre games and whacked-out narratives will have a blast.
The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) Lee went queer long before Brokeback Mountain with this touching and funny adventure of a Taiwanese man pretending to get straight married to hide his gay relationship.
My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) A young Daniel Day Lewis owns the screen.

Three Great French New Wave Films
The Butcher* (Claude Chabrol, 1970) The nouvelle vague goes horror with this chilling character study.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1963) And here, it goes American film musical with a jazz operetta that's sure to get you both dancing and crying.
Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) Perhaps Godard's most accessible film, it has all of his experimental and political flourishes but with plenty of laughs, colour and playfulness.

Three Great Gangster Films
White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) James Cagney is electric as a mama's boy turned psychopath.
The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) A jewellery caper goes wrong in this classic noir.
Shanghai Triad* (Zhang Yimou, 1995) A provincial boy meets the criminal underworld of 1930s Shanghai in Yimou's Chinese neo-noir.

"Recommend me some movies!" #2: A little bit arty

You've seen a lot of the Hollywood stuff, and you want to go a little deeper down the cinema rabbit hole... but not too much. This set of films tries to avoid the "that's a bit too weird" and the "I didn't get that at all" potentialities (well, mostly), but wants you to expand your repertoire beyond contemporary and recent mainstream cinema. Many of these films would fit well into an Introduction to Film Studies course, and I've even taken inspiration from courses I've taken or even helped teach. What would you recommend?

European Art Cinema
Post-WWII, often attempting a more radical approach to narrative, featuring the use of psychology and intense characterizations over plot. The question is not "What's going to happen next?", but instead "Why is this happening?". Various "new wave" movements sprung up during the 1960s, lead by young filmmakers who reacted against what Cahiers du cinéma called "daddy's cinema".

8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963, Italy)
One of the towering achievements of cinematic history, Fellini's elliptical, wandering, ambitious and surreal film is an art house epic. Hugely influential, this film is among the most difficult on this list for some audiences, while others will eat this epic up.

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957, Sweden)
A good introduction to the stoic cinema of Sweden's premier auteur, Ingmar Bergman. A medieval knight goes on his business while being stalked by Death himself as they play a game of chess.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainier Werner Fassbinder, 1974, West Germany)
Fassbinder was one of the most prolific directors out there, but this surely ranks as his most heart-wrenching yet accessible of his work. Excellent performances dominate.

Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960, France)
Truffaut's thriller-comedy-tragedy of a second feature film is far more playful than his seminal debut The 400 Blows (1959), but still features many of the same qualities that made the French New Wave so integral to film history.

Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964, France)
Like Shoot the Piano Player, this is Godard at his most playful and loose. Anna Karina, Godard's future wife, is simply delightful in every film she appears in, but rarely moreso than here. Look for an impromptu dance sequence that surely ranks as one of the most marvellous sequences in cinema.


American New Wave/The New Hollywood
Young filmmakers react to Classical Hollywood and the collapse of the Production Code that forbade many 'controversial' topics and their depiction.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Robert DeNiro's iconic performance as Travis Bickle is only one part of Scorsese's haunting masterpiece. It's dark, gritty, melancholic and profoundly disturbing -- and yet somehow supremely entertaining.

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
Although too late to be considered a true member of the New Hollywood, Blue Velvet remains one of the most integral of American films. Similar to Taxi Driver in that it's the disturbing portrait of the evil that lurks under the veneer of the American Dream, Lynch's masterpiece is a surreal mystery film with some of the greatest performances out there. Dennis Hopper truly disturbs as the unknown-gas-sniffing, sexual deviant and psychotic Frank Booth: one of cinema's greatest villains.

M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)
A little bit different than the spin-off television series, Altman's film is more biting, satirical and even a little bit bawdy -- but always worth a good belly laugh.

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
This Best Picture winner is sometimes maligned by fanboys as the film that beat Star Wars for the Oscar, but it's difficult to argue after having seen it. Hilarious from start to finish, with some miraculous filmmaking skill and wonderful non-sequiters. Diane Keaton justly won the Academy Award for her iconic performance as the titular Annie Hall.

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
This stark coming-of-age tale was one of the major breakthroughs of the New Hollywood. A melancholic and moving view of a small mid-west town, with strong performances and homages to Classical Hollywood cinema.

Silent Cinema
While there are many places to begin with an incredible wealth of material, it seems that many audiences either don't know where to begin or are hesitant to start, afraid that they will be bored.

Nosferatu (FW Murnau, 1922, Germany)
This unauthorized version of Dracula was almost completely destroyed by Bram Stoker's widow. Thankfully, she didn't succeed, and we now have the ability to see one of the most entertaining and effective of all silent films. Max Schreck's remarkable performance as the vampire has become the stuff of legend, with fanciful suggestions that he was indeed a vampire himself (the basis of the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire): how else can you explain those hypnotic, unearthly movements, and that incredible stare and makeup?

Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927, Germany)
More hypnotic movements in this German Expressionist masterpiece and one of the most influential science fiction pieces. The narrative is near-mythic in its battle of good and evil, but it's the massive visuals and the towering art direction that make this a must-see for anyone who considers themselves a lover of cinema.

The Red Spectre (Sigundo de Chomón and Ferdinand Zecca, 1907, Spain)
This is one of my professor Tobias and mine favourite films, and a perfect example of what Tom Gunning calls the Cinema of Attraction. A devil-like figure performs tricks and magic.

Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì, 1929, France/Spain)
No art house list would be complete without Un Chien Andalou. Just watch it, and don't read anything about it before you do. You'll, uh, thank me.


Three East Asian Films

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949, Japan)
Ozu's meditative style is often called the 'most Japanese' of his peers, with a purposeful but slow pace and muted yet strong emotions. Late Spring may be considered by many as lesser than his masterpiece Tokyo Story, but I find the film to be one of the emotionally powerful films ever made. A widowed father watches as his only daughter goes through the milestone of marriage.

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000, Hong Kong)
Contemporary Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai made quite a splash with this film just over a decade ago. It's oozing with passion from every shot, and the romance is humid yet never quite consummated. A beautiful film.

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
One of my personal favourites, Rashomon is Kurosawa at his most focused and inventive. Multiple people have witnessed a murder, but each have different stories to tell of exactly what happened. Who is telling the truth? Is there any way that we can determine this?

Favourite Films of 2012 (So Far)

1. Holy Motors (Léos Carax)

The most exhilarating time I've had at the cinema in years. Absolutely bonkers, yet at times strangely moving. Denis Levant gives the performance of a lifetime.

2. Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)

Funny, touching, romantic, real.

3. Amour (Michael Haneke)

Beautiful and harrowing.

4. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

The best shot film of the year, with a beguiling elliptical script and a game cast.

5. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

Intelligent and thrilling, Boal and Bigelow up their ante, surpassing The Hurt Locker in cinematic and political spectacle.

6. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)

A surprisingly witty script raises this historical biopic above what could have been a "rah-rah-American" patriotism-fest. Daniel-Day Lewis deserves the Oscar he'll most likely win.

7. Anna Karenina (Joe Wright)

Dazzling, lush and sweepingly romantic. Wright's modernist games and Stoppard's twisting script remain true to the core of Tolstoy's novel, while rushing it forwards to the 21st century.

8. Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi)

My 'guilty pleasure' of the year. Mirren and Hopkins are a delight to watch, and while not all of the film's gambles work, who cares when you're having this much fun?

9. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)

Unabashedly highbrow, Cronenberg's film has many detractors --most of my theatre walked out-- but if you're up for an intensely cerebral time at the cinema, you may find yourself well rewarded. An incredible supporting cast, with Pattinson showing his chops.

10. Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard)

Simultaneously chilly and romantic, with powerful performances.

Also Enjoyed: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino), Life of Pi (Ang Lee), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson), Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson), Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh)

"Recommend me some movies!" #1: The Average Audience

This is something that I know my fellow film studies students, researchers and faculty get a lot from people they run into. "Oh! You do film studies? What are your favourite movies? What should I watch?"

This is an incredibly difficult task. You may not realize it, but it is.

"Oh, boy. What do I recommend them? Do I go for the Film Studies 101 canon? Do I name my personal favourites? Heck, what are my personal favourites? How many should I list? Will recommending a French film make me sound pretentious? Will a Japanese film make me sound like some fanboy? I should probably say something they've at least heard of... but then again, there are some pretty famous movies out there that I know some people haven't heard of. Remember that time I tried to rent Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? from the Blockbuster, and I got a blank stare in return from the counter guy? Or The Apartment? That's a bloody Oscar winner and he hadn't even heard of it. But this person here asking me this question... what do I say? I can't choose too many things that they've already seen. Or are they asking me this question just to gauge their taste in film? Do they want to hear movies they've already seen? Oh god oh god oh god."

Granted, I'm a anxiety-prone person, but it's nonetheless a loaded query. And so, in preparation for the next time someone asks me, I'm making a few different lists of recommendations. These lists are by no means thorough, but I think by making multiple lists people can decide which ones are targeted at them. And first up, I present...

Recommendations from a Film Snob for the Average Audience
Primarily English-language, mainstream, mostly contemporary, well-known but under-seen.

If I Voted in Sight & Sound

Ah, film nerds and listing: like peas and carrots, peanut butter and jelly, Thelma and Louise.

We're obsessed with them. The IMDb Top 250, the annual slew of critic lists, national film institutions, Flickchart, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? -- and the grand sultan of them all, the film magazine Sight & Sound's list. Coming out every ten years, this has historically been the most prestigious ranking of cinema, and is one of the primary reasons why many call Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made. This year's 2012 selection represents a watershed of sorts, as the number of voters has increased drastically with the magazine making a conscious effort to extend the critical voice beyond the bread-and-butter (look! another duality!) realm of Hollywood and European critics.

And when it dropped a number of months ago, there were perhaps two big stories that emerged. The one that dominated headlines --the unseating of Citizen Kane by Hitchcock's Vertigo as the new victor-- hinted at perhaps the more interesting story of the Top Ten's rather unsurprising picks. With the new plethora of international voices, some suspected that a wildly new top echelon would emerge. Instead, 'the classics' showed their continuing forté: the aforementioned Citizen Kane and Vertigo, Ozu's Tokyo Story, Renoir's La Règle du jeu, Fellini's 8 1/2. Furthermore, four of the critics' top 11 were from the silent era: Sunrise, Man With a Movie Camera, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and perennial favourite Battleship Potemkin.

Moving further down the list into the rest of the top 50, we find some very strong showings for Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky, with Breathless (#13), Mirror (#19), Contempt (#23), Andrei Rublev (#27), Stalker (#29), Pierrot le fou (#43) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (#48) making appearances. Other widely-cited filmmakers in the upper regions of the list include, unsurprisingly, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Ingmar Bergman and Martin Scorsese. The most recent films, as have been widely noted, are Wong Kar-Wai's 2000 romance In the Mood for Love at #24 and David Lynch's 2003 surrealist-noir Mulholland Dr. coming in at #28.

As any good film nerd that has a particular obsession with these lists, I have been working on my own for quite a long time. Rather than simply arranging films in a sort of Flickchart-style order based on an ever-changing "Which one is better?" process, my Top Ten is a curated list: I have taken the effort to select films that I feel cover a large range of cinema, can be seen to have impacted filmmaking in a significant way, are of excellent technical quality, and most importantly, represents my own particular taste. The films that appear speak very closely to me, and are fundamental to my understanding of cinema.

And so, without further ado, the list I would have submitted to Sight & Sound in 2012.