We are spoiled. Anyone who thinks it’s pointless to go to the movies anymore simply isn’t paying attention (or at least reminds me of Louis CK’s impression of useless twenty year olds complaining about technology that’s been made for them, without having done any work themselves: “Yeah it’s good, but it’s not that good…”). If you went to a movie theatre in the past twelve months, you could have caught a film by any one of the following American directors: Spielberg, Malick, PT Anderson, the Coens, Baumbach, Linklater, David O. Russell, Scorsese, Spike Jonze, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Alexander Payne, and Tarantino (Soderberg and Fincher were doing work for HBO and Netflix, respectively, but the point stands that pretty much all of our great living directors have been putting stuff out lately). While I agree with Manuel that there have been a lot of incredibly good films this year while not necessarily a wealth of great ones, I will say that this was the first year in a while when I felt bad for having to kick stuff off the list, because there wasn’t enough room (sorry, Nebraska—I really did like you!).
For anyone who actually reads these (I do them every year), here’s the top five, plus three extra comments, for anyone who needs recommendations or wants to argue. If you haven’t seen them, though, beware of spoilers, as usual.
Overrated film of the Year: Spring Breakers
Wolf of Wall Street jr., in which Harmony Korine plays a practical joke on the world. He peoples the thing with scantily-clad former Disney stars to lure in the frat boys and sorority girls, only to deliver them a film that they won’t think is anything other than “weird” and “creepy.” But more significantly, he makes the whole thing so over-the-top that he lures in the academics and makes them sit around discussing what an ingenious, rebellious statement he’s making, when in reality the whole thing is shockingly hollow. For what does it really have to say? College kids like excess; they are desensitized to drugs, sex, and violence; the very idols they worship as kids, and whom their parents endorse (like eg Disney princesses) are actually sexuality-in-disguise, just like taking a week off to de-stress from the work of college is actually a cover up for a vacation so hedonistic that it basically just ends up looking like Borsch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Are you compelled yet? No? Maybe that’s because of how obvious the whole thing is—and it’s relevant to note that Korine, despite having begun his career in 1995, only just turned 41, and still sounds like an inchoate adolescent in interviews. Franco’s Alien is an interesting creation, but surely only interesting as pure camp (it’s on par with Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest), which isn’t as fun when it’s trying so hard (Britney Spears, anyone?).
Underrated film of the year: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Really hope this is a case of wrong time, wrong place(s), as far as how quickly this little gem was swept under the rug. Not that it’s Oscar bait, per se, but certainly the quality (if that still counts to the Academy) alone should have granted it at least a little bit of notice. David Lowery’s pared-down, simple, straightly told tale of a jailed father trying to reach his wife and daughter in Texas (“this happened in Texas” states the opening title) is so solid exactly because it’s so small. It doesn’t waste its time, not with the long tracking shots of empty land so typical of Ford-style Westerns, and not even with exposition. The story begins, the story continues, and the story ends, with zero lag time and at least three set pieces (the strangers strolling into Keith Carradine’s store, Carradine and Affleck’s confrontation, and Foster’s almost-catching Affleck in the house) that distinguish Lowery as a star. Plus, I mean Rooney Mara’s in it, so. You can’t really go too wrong with that.
Top Five films of the Year:
5. Her
All the reviews keep comparing it to different Charlie Kaufman films, but I think that subtracts significantly from Jonze’s accomplishment here. The Kaufman version would have been less straightforward narratively, more psychoanalytic, and maybe a little less understated. Phoenix’s muted performance allows Johansson’s equally talky one to fill the screen and our minds, and it’s sort of astonishing when you realize that, of the two hour run time, probably about an hour and a half of that is little more than Phoenix in a room, talking to himself. But Spike Jonze makes it all interesting, the visuals of the future both promising (it’s a lot cleaner, and there are fewer people, and the technology is well advanced) and Logan’s Run-scary (everything’s made of steel and glass, there’s too much space between everyone both literally and figuratively, and the technology is well advanced). Jonze’s usual gift with actors there, though it would be hard to fuck that up with this lineup: Phoenix and Johansson, but also Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt. Beautiful, haunting, a frighteningly realistic vision of the future. What’s with those pants, though?
4. Blue is the Warmest Color
In a year when so many stellar American films came out, who would’ve thought that a three-hour long French film would have made it on here? But I have to say it got its hooks into me from minute one and didn’t let go, even when I (occasionally) wanted it to. You could look at it as little more than a teenage romance (as some have) or as voyeuristic (as even more have), but both of those criticisms reduce the film in a way that it doesn’t deserve. It’s not about love, anyway, not even about the couple. It’s about one young girl’s awakening to everything it means to be an adult, to find and secure your place in the world, with all the inherent compromises and refusals to compromise that that entails. Adele is growing, physically—she can’t stop eating—mentally—she can’t stop reading—emotionally—she can’t turn down the advances of a boy she doesn’t even like very much—and sexually—she can’t help but kiss that girl in the schoolyard. She’s all hormones and emotion, and the most interesting turn in the film comes when we fast forward into adulthood, and see that her ramshackle way of living had nothing to do with the capricious impetuousness of youth, but that she is simply like this at her core, making poor choices on impulse on the off chance they’ll make her feel better (but they’re her choices, which is at least something). Both girls are surrounded by the color blue in nearly every frame (except for a stretch toward the end, when the life has been drained from Adele), and that’s a nice touch, though the actresses themselves—and the story—radiate so much light and heat that I don’t even think it was necessary.
3. 12 Years a Slave
Armond White was kicked out of the New York Film Critics Circle this year for heckling Steve McQueen when he won their award for best director. White had criticized 12 Years as torture porn, and a feelbad movie for white people to use to feel good about their guilt. I took longer than usual to get around to seeing the film, and from a secondhand account, that complaint is understandable. Describing not only the film itself but why it’s so brutal, so unforgettable, why it leaves its mark so deep, doesn’t do the experience justice. Because 12 Years a Slave is nothing if not an experience. McQueen takes the single-minded ruthlessness with which he dealt with the subjects of hunger and shame in…well, Hunger and Shame, and applies it to a subject seldom dealt with and all-too-often explained away. You cannot escape the realities of slavery during the film; you can’t close your eyes to them, or justify them, or distance yourself from them. You can only live with them—and not just during but long after the film is over. Before either of us had seen the film, Ben had remarked to me that he heard 12 Years sounded like what everyone wanted Django Unchained to be last year, and while that’s certainly correct in a way, I think (and surely Ben would agree) the film is such a singular experience that it’s beyond comparison—certainly beyond comparison to any other Hollywood slave narrative. Brutal, unrelenting, and, contrary to Armond White’s opinion, ultimately not a case of moralizing, which is the most impressive thing about it.
2. Before Midnight
The best birthday present I ever got. Four days before I turned thirty, thinking very hard about the process of getting older, I took a bus to the movie theatre and watched the third installment of the love story of our generation. Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy all do their part to balance the project here—Delpy certainly gets the meatiest stuff to do, and sinks her teeth right in—but, just as was the case in Sunset, Midnight isn’t “really” about their relationship anyway. The whole series, honestly, is just about the same thing Linklater’s films are always about: the space between people, the process of life—rather than the subject or object—as we do our best to live it. Live it how? Live it honestly, live it happily, live it ethically and romantically and most important, not wastefully. That’s the heartbreaking thing about the film’s ass-kicking second half (and what makes the middle section at the dinner poignant rather than grating, Manuel: they’re spending even more time bullshitting and wasting all these moments, these sunrises and sunsets, listening to the sound of their own voices, and that doesn’t change whether you’re the young couple or the older one or, indeed, the middle aged Jesse and Celine): not that they might have fallen out of love, but that they might have wasted huge portions of their lives on the wrong person. Jesse’s got more at stake, since he’s the one who blew up his entire marriage (and left his kid) to pursue the young love embodied by Celine. But the film doesn’t allow the decks to be stacked too heavily, because Celine gave up her entire youth—Jesse was already settling into middle age at 32 (“I feel like I’m running a small nursery with someone I used to date,” recall him saying in Sunset) whereas Celine was a passionate environmentalist, dating a war photographer, with plenty of adventures ahead. Jesse’s attempts to win her back seem foolish at first (“I love the way you sing,” he says, “I destroyed my entire fucking life because of the way you sing,” and he means it, but a good line isn’t going to save a marriage), but ultimately it’s exactly his games that are the only thing to win her over, since he knows it’s their youth she wants back: “We think we change,” she tells him early on, sadly, “we think we change and grow through the years, but in the end we end up being the same people.” It takes the patience of Linklater for us to slowly discover that maybe that’s not sad at all
1. Inside Llewyn Davis
Fuck the Academy. Seriously. To go back to the original point in this entire note, the Coens have spoiled us. They are so solidly, consistently genius that our expectations get heightened, and so when they make merely the best film of the year, rather than one of the best films of all time, we just overlook it. Or the Academy does, anyway. It has the savage, emotional honesty of Before Midnight. It looks as beautiful and lush as Gravity. It’s as tight a script as Ain’t Them Body Saints, and as tightly directed, too. The performances are on par with all the best of the year; Oscar Isaac is officially a star, turning in a pained, anxious, yet somehow not insufferable performance as Llewyn, a difficult man while not being an entirely impossible one. Nick commented to me that he’s “kind of a dick—but only kind of one”, which is dead-on. Llewyn is ornery but he has every right to be, a dedicated artist living in a world where quality is arbitrary. Novelty songs become hits, cheesy four-part harmony is swooned over, his own best efforts are dismissed as unprofitable. Best of all is that the Coens don’t choose to make Llewyn particularly great at what he does—only good enough to know the difference between good and great, a curse from God (not unlike Salieri, and the Coens give us a knowing wink by throwing F. Murray Abraham in there to turn Llewyn down with that cold-but-honest “I don’t see a lot of money here”). Carrie Mulligan displays her trademark generosity and a newfound acidic tongue as Llewyn’s long-suffering (sometimes) fuck buddy, a complicated character who all at once likes Llewyn, knows she can’t count on him, hates him for that, but also knows deep down that what she’s doing (cheating on her boyfriend) isn’t all that much better than anything Llewyn does. The difference is just that Llewyn’s too pissy to hide who he is on the inside, and explodes without meaning to over practically nothing. My only real regret is that the film came out after October; I can’t wait to walk around on Halloween next year with a guitar strapped to my back and an orange cat in my arms. The Coens surely identify with Llewyn at least a little, being true artists themselves, but are also smart enough to get someone to punch him in the face, lest we think they’re wagging their fingers at us for not appreciating them. Cold? Certainly not. It’s simply clear-eyed about its protagonist’s full Self, and if that Self’s failings are a little too real, well…maybe we need more films like that.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.