As always, thank you to everyone who participated. Here's the list of this year's voters:
Danny Baldwin
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Jim Emerson
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Sam Juliano
Adam Lemke
Michael Lieberman
Craig Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam Mac
Jeff McMahon
Matt Noller
Melissa Starker
Andreas Stoehr
Scott von Doviak
Bryan Whitefield
Patrick Williamson
Bryce Wilson
George Wu
And in case you were wondering, here's how the voting shook out:
9 votes
Sherlock, Jr. ('24 Keaton)
8 votes
The Lady Eve ('41 Sturges)
The Night of the Hunter ('55 Laughton)
The Seven Samurai ('54 Kurosawa)
Tokyo Story ('53 Ozu)
7 votes
The 400 Blows ('59 Truffaut)
Un Chien Andalou ('29 Bunuel)
Double Indemnity ('44 Wilder)
6 votes
Breathless ('60 Godard)
Bride of Frankenstein ('35 Whale)
Duck Amuck ('53 Jones)
Rio Bravo ('59 Hawks)
The Searchers ('56 Ford)
Singin' in the Rain ('52 Donen/Kelly)
5 votes
La Dolce Vita ('60 Fellini)
The Exterminating Angel ('62 Bunuel)
The General ('27 Keaton/Bruckman)
Hiroshima Mon Amour ('59 Resnais)
His Girl Friday ('40 Hawks)
Last Year at Marienbad ('62 Resnais)
Meshes of the Afternoon ('43 Deren/Hammid)
Touch of Evil ('58 Welles)
Trouble in Paradise ('32 Lubitsch)
4 votes
The Apartment ('60 Wilder)
City Lights ('31 Chaplin)
Duck Soup ('33 McCarey)
The Maltese Falcon ('41 Huston)
Metropolis ('27 Lang)
Nosferatu ('22 Murnau)
Only Angels Have Wings ('39 Hawks)
Rashomon ('50 Kurosawa)
The Red Shoes ('48 Powell/Pressburger)
Sunset Boulevard ('50 Wilder)
Window Water Baby Moving ('59 Brakhage)
3 votes
All About Eve ('50 Mankiewicz)
L'Atalante ('34 Vigo)
L'Avventura ('60 Antonioni)
Cleo from 5 to 7 ('62 Varda)
The Earrings of Madame De... ('53 Ophuls)
Freaks ('32 Browning)
Ikiru ('51 Kurosawa)
Imitation of Life ('59 Sirk)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers ('56 Siegel)
It's a Wonderful Life ('46 Capra)
Jules and Jim ('61 Truffaut)
The Magnificent Ambersons ('42 Welles)
Notorious ('46 Hitchcock)
Paths of Glory ('57 Kubrick)
A Star Is Born ('54 Cukor)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ('48 Huston)
Ugetsu ('53 Mizoguchi)
Unfaithfully Yours ('48 Sturges)
Wild Strawberries ('57 Bergman)
Zero for Conduct ('33 Vigo)
2 votes
The Crowd ('27 Vidor)
The Diary of a Country Priest ('50 Bresson)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ('53 Hawks)
In a Lonely Place ('50 N. Ray)
Late Spring ('49 Ozu)
M. Hulot's Holiday ('53 Tati)
Monsieur Verdoux ('47 Chaplin)
Orpheus ('49 Cocteau)
Out of the Past ('47 Tourneur)
Pather Panchali ('55 S. Ray)
Senso ('54 Visconti)
Stagecoach ('39 Ford)
The Steel Helmet ('51 Fuller)
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums ('39 Mizoguchi)
Umberto D. ('52 De Sica)
1 vote
Fantasia ('40 Various)
Make Way For Tomorrow ('37 McCarey)
Menilmontant ('26 Kirsanoff)
Peeping Tom ('60 Powell)
See you next year!
Friday, August 1, 2014
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: Sherlock, Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
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"As you watch Keaton fool around with the moving image, both behind and in front of the camera, you realize that Sherlock, Jr. is one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker going meta and fully recognizing the joyful, limitless transcendence that comes from watching movies." ~ Craig Lindsey
Click here for the full essay
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: Un Chien Andalou (1929, Luis Buñuel)
Click here for the full essay
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges)
Click here for the full essay
Monday, July 28, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
Click here for the full essay
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu)
Click here for the full essay
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: The Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)
Click here for the full essay
Friday, July 25, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
“It's difficult to think of another director who only directed one film having as much influence on cinema as Charles Laughton, but then again Laughton always was a singular figure. The Night of the Hunter, his one and only effort behind the camera, went on to inspire generations of filmmakers." ~ Danny Bowes
Click here for the full essay
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: The 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut)
Click here for the full essay
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2014: 8 1/2 (1963, Federico Fellini)
Click here for the full essay
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
The Muriels Hall of Fame returns!
In case you've been wondering what Muriel's been up to since this year's awards, the answer is... quite a bit! Once again, we're proud to present the Muriels Hall of Fame, wherein our voters take time out of their summer vacations to honor some of the greatest films in cinematic history. This year's class is made up of nine films, and I believe they are all worthy of being ranked alongside last year's inaugural honorees:
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
La Jetee
Lawrence of Arabia
M
The Man With the Movie Camera
North by Northwest
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Psycho
Rear Window
Rules of the Game
Sansho the Bailiff
The Seventh Seal
Sunrise
The Third Man
Vertigo
Yojimbo
So come back starting tomorrow evening to check out this year's inductees. Should be fun!
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
La Jetee
Lawrence of Arabia
M
The Man With the Movie Camera
North by Northwest
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Psycho
Rear Window
Rules of the Game
Sansho the Bailiff
The Seventh Seal
Sunrise
The Third Man
Vertigo
Yojimbo
So come back starting tomorrow evening to check out this year's inductees. Should be fun!
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Golden Muriel for Best Film of 2013
Before Midnight (Richard Linklater) [345.5 points /32 votes]
"Growing up and progressing through various relationships, romantic and otherwise, presents us with a lot of examples of human interaction to consider. When it comes to romance, I specifically have two such influences that forever wrestle inside me, Malick-style. One is the emotional wreck of the time in my life that my parents were together. (They are now divorced, for the betterment of them as well as my sister and me, but the time still registers as a failure, the bitter episodes of which continue to resonate). The other is my grandparents’ 60-some-odd years of marriage, a relationship that began when the army stationed my grandfather in England and he met a beautiful redhead of 16, with whom he fell in love and, after some months of foreign correspondence, married and raised four kids with.
My grandfather is an intellectual, the man in my life from whom I draw my love of most things cultural — film, of course, but also writing and language, the art of speaking and debating and weighing sides of an argument. All that is from him. My grandmother’s strength comes from emotional openness, compassion and empathy compensating for whatever academic shortcomings never finishing high school and choosing the path of a young mother may have created for her. I’ve witnessed the emotional fissures created by the dissonance of their personalities, but I’ve also witnessed how they’ve overcome them, and so it’s their example that I’ve tried to follow now that I myself have found love.
But it helps to have other models with their own nuances to draw from, and in the realm of the cinema, few modern examples offer a more rewarding glimpse of the changes and challenges of a relationship across the years than that chronicled in Richard Linklater’s Before... films.
In truth, I’ve always found the 1995 inaugural entry in this series to be, at least in the shadow of what was to come, slight. Before Sunrise found two young, beautiful souls — the American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and the French Céline (Julie Delpy) — in the throes of love during one rapturous evening in Vienna, starting with a chance encounter on a train and including a deluge of perhaps too-scripted conversational musings about love and culture and the things young, largely carefree people tend to talk about, albeit with a cleverly knowing dose of naiveté. At the end they part, with a genuine sense of melancholy hanging over the whole thing. Lovely, to be sure, but un-exceptional — at least in its scope.
Then, in 2004, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy created an addendum. Nine years later, Jesse and Céline’s paths cross again. Jesse’s published a novel about his one blissful eve with Céline (one aspect of this story I’ve honestly always found a little overly cute), and Paris, Céline’s home, is one stop on his book tour. Céline attends the signing and the two rekindle before spending another evening together, this time in more staid reminiscence. Before Sunset is when this series becomes vital - as a lens through which to both embrace and disillusion nostalgia, as a soulful and brilliantly wrought example of how the changes in two peoples’ lives affect their perceptions of each other in both the present and the past, and how they themselves can reflect upon that past with people who have no knowledge of their present. It’s one of the great American films of the last decade, but the follow up is even better.
Before Sunset signed off with one of modern cinema’s most indelible moments: Céline slinkily dances around her apartment to the strains of a live Nina Simone crooning “Just in Time”. Then, turning and intimating Nina’s pursed-lip sass, she warns her former and possibly present lover, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.” Until last year — though we could certainly hazard a guess — we were never completely certain if the allure of Nina and Céline in that cozy apartment was enough to keep Jesse planted on that couch. Now we are, and thanks to some expertly played exposition sprinkled throughout Before Midnight, we know a lot of other things about their life in the interim as well.
Midnight begins as Jesse bids farewell to the son we knew he had with the wife he wasn’t happy with in Sunset. They’re at the airport after spending the summer together, and you can tell that the separation is hard for Jesse. Soon he arrives back at the car, where not only is Céline waiting, but also two tiny sleeping blondes in the backseat - children he’s had with Céline, as we learn. As is the hallmark of the series (at least since Sunset), a beautifully unforced dialogue unravels between the two on the drive back to their summer getaway in Greece. What’s already apparent is that, while the two have enjoyed some good times in their years together, the fairytale ending many imagined for them has not been effected. Their past includes a bitter divorce and ensuing custody battle, and the couple’s divergent roots in France and America have caused a constant and enduring strain on their relationship.
The new film also elects to sacrifice one of the principal tenets of the series by introducing the voices of other characters outside of the central couples’. Céline and Jesse are staying at the home of a renowned Greek author, who has invited the younger writer and his family to spend the summer with him and an assortment of friends and kin. These other personages all get their moment in which to offer up wisdom, humor, and biographical details during Before Midnight’s crowing set piece, a lengthy dinner table conversation that encompasses all the themes explored in the previous films, as well as a few new ones. Much of the conversation is given over to more cynical opinions on the war of the sexes, the needlessness of everlasting love in the modern age, and some grumpiness about technology. But tellingly, the final monologue is reserved for an elderly woman who’d otherwise been silent; it concerns a guilelessly romantic reminiscence about the woman’s late husband, and how much he meant to her. That it still finds room for some carefully unpretentious philosophy about how “we appear, and disappear... so important to some, but just passing through” is testament to the series’, and this installment in particular’s, underlying intelligence.
Another expansion made here allows for the setting of the film to become its own kind of character. While the Vienna of Sunrise and the twilight-hued Paris of Sunset had a presence in those films, Greece is an integral part of Midnight in ways both sardonic (there are several jokes made about the country and how its histories of tragedy render it a dubious vacation spot) and existential (this story had to be told away from both Jesse and Céline’s home, to better catalyze the moment when they each must decide where to return). Even more so than with the real-time gambit of Sunrise, this is a film that truly embraces European arthouse aesthetics, from the loving homage to Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray to the perhaps-coincidental similarity to recent years’ other European cross-cultural walk-and-talk essay on relationship dynamics. And with a sharp understanding of his film’s grammar, Linklater ensures that his landscape comments on his characters as much they do on the landscape.
So this becomes the second time Linklater’s saga has achieved its own unique vitality - unique because Midnight exists and probes at the anatomy of a relationship for a dissimilar purpose than Sunset did, at least to a point. It offers more of a range of perspectives on its thematic issues in a few impeccably chosen scenes; it represents the series’ high-watermark in terms of filmic accomplishment; and it refracts in its writing how compatible personalities in the short term can grow incompatible over the long haul, how extenuating circumstances can mount and diminish the exclusivity of even the happiest couple, and how geographical separation continues to loom over its central lovers. Most importantly — and daringly — it holds the couple themselves accountable for failure, as pettiness and an inability to see what good they have begins to put their relationship in critical jeopardy.
And as an example of love to be studied and learned from, the film offers an in-the-moment specificity that’s more valuable to me than any I could take from my own family’s history. I met the woman I’m now with while far away from home — both my born-and-raised home (Cape Cod) and the home of my adulthood happiness (New York) — on what was intended to be a year’s leave to China, teaching children English more or less to kill time until economic conditions in the States improved. Recently, my “you are gonna miss that plane” moment came and went: my contract to the school that employs me ended, and so much of me wanted to return to America, to my own friends and family. But the allure of love has kept me here, laying a plan for the future that presents all kinds of obstacles, many of which parallel those that have come to threaten the stability of Céline and Jesse’s union by the finale of Midnight — another tactful and emotional cliffhanger of indecision and possibility.
I offer very specific information of my own life only to enforce the broadness of these films’ applicable qualities to others. The details of Céline and Jesse’s relationship that have come to the fore over the course of three talky films can be related to in myriad ways, and they derive their strength from that elasticity. But it’s this film in particular, with its wealth of ideas about life and love and its privileged perspective on middle age, that represents a real culmination, whether it’s the last of the series or not.
- - -
At the Sundance Film Festival this year, Linklater had a new, well-received film called Boyhood, a project borne of an idea with an even greater scope than his Before’ films. Apparently it depicts the life of a boy from ages five to 18, and was filmed over 12 years, spanning its actor’s actual development into a man. It’s not a documentary - it’s a narrative film, scripted by Linklater, using his mainstay Hawke to play the boy’s father (which means he’s also aged that decade-plus during the filming). It strikes me that Linklater, too, has been going through a very extended period of growth as a director in the 23 years since his breakthrough stoner comedy Dazed and Confused. No one theme or motif has tied his work together in any meaningful way, from studio comedies like School of Rock to indie experiment Waking Life, from his animated sci-fi adaptation A Scanner Darkly to the misfire ensemble piece Fast Food Nation. (Well, no motif except for lots of talking.) I haven’t seen Boyhood yet, but the film’s reception to me suggests he may have found his masterstroke as a filmmaker: representing the vastness of life in a way that elides enough to be condensed into narrativized form, but not so much as to trivialize or sacrifice the greater gravity of his ambitions. Finding that balance is an extraordinary thing, and the Before series, Midnight in particular, bears the fruit of that alchemy." -- Sam C. Mac
See the full results.
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #2
The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese) [295.5 points / 29 votes]
"So much has been written online about The Wolf of Wall Street that trying to follow the talented likes of Richard Brody, Glenn Kenny, and Nick Pinkerton in 150 words feels akin to being the guy who has to give a speech after Jordan Belfort at Stratton Oakmont. Still, consider the plea of this penny stock of a blurb: this is Scorsese's greatest in nearly twenty-five years, from Leonardo DiCaprio's career-best work to the masterful way the pitch-black satire both entertains us and makes us hurt. Far too much has been made of alleged glorification of the leading character by refusing to show the victims. Seeing as how the victims weren't present in his life, I'm not sure why anyone would expect them to be present in his film. Besides, does anyone expect a simply-sold message from an artist the likes of Scorsese? From the FBI agent riding the subway to the provocative final shot, Scorsese has the balls to do what far too few cinematic storytellers would dare: tell the truth, simply, and let the audience see in it what they may. I saw hysteria. I saw depression. I saw people I know, including myself. I saw it, and continue to see it, as a landmark achievement in one of the greatest careers the art has ever known.
I felt compelled to reach out to a close friend who has worked on Wall Street for the better part of a decade. He, along with many of his stock trading associates, had seen the film on opening day, naturally. I asked him if it glorified Jordan Belfort, its penny stock trading protagonist who struck it rich thanks to a steady diet of deceit, disdain, and criminal behavior. He replied, with a casual quickness, "Of course." I tried to comprehend this particular read of the film, and during my stunned silence, my friend read my thoughts and added, "To people like me. You know... bad people. He's obviously a piece of shit." There's a terrific scene in the Stratton Oakmont offices in which we see his employees take up the guttural, chest-thumping anthem he inherited from his previous employer. You look across the eyes of these people, and you see no soul-- only a thirst for savagery, a regression to the most primal of human behavior. Take for yourself, kill the weak. My friend on Wall Street is fully aware that his behavior, like Jordan Belfort's, has no place in an ideal civilized society, yet civilization is merely the thinnest of veils that can scarcely mask the realities of our urges.
There's an old Chris Rock joke about the moral outrage of Republican politicians at the Monica Lewinsky affair: "No one's trying to blow you!" It's easy to imagine that we would not be Jordan Belfort, that we have the strength, the compassion, and the moral compass to avoid the temptations. We'd like to think that, if we were Icarus, we'd have flown close enough to the sun to get just enough of a good look, then returned to safety. History has shown us that isn't how human nature works. The Wolf of Wall Street is smart to avoid preaching. The majority of the audience members are the same ones looking to play the stock market, attending Belfort's seminars, and beating one's chest looking for the easiest route to success. Mmmm-hmmm-hmmm-hmmm." -- Russell Hainline
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #3
Her (Spike Jonze) [285.5 points / 25 votes]
(Original, longform version published here; excerpted, modified and published here with the consent of the author.)
"Her (2013) is the best movie of 2013. The joy it has provoked in the people who like it and the irksome hate that it manages to stir in those who don’t mark it as a film outside of indifference - this is meant to bring forth strong feelings either way. As the first movie written solely by Spike Jonze, it shows how his visual flair, familiar from his previous short films, music videos and feature-length films, also translates to the written word as a kind of delicate ambition, as in the delicacy of an object that appears plain but caries with it a beautiful and ineffable inner light. Though the film is named after the character voiced by Scarlett Johannson, an advanced OS that has been built around the twin concepts of companionship and human personality using an advanced algorithm (as announced in the futuristic programmed holographic announcements that Theodore, the protagonist, sees in the street), it is nevertheless truly about Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and his relationship with a being that really isn’t alive nor should have feelings. In other words, this is the future, but it's a future that isn't far removed from where we are today. Just how really close are we to a genuine artificial intelligence created to such detail and perfection that it seems indistinguishable from a human conciousness? If it tries to connect us in a meaningful way, what keeps it from being human? It’s scary to hear the advancements and projections in this movie, then reflect that experts in the matter have mentioned that we aren’t really that far off.
Why did I say scary? Simply, I don’t want anyone to live what Theodore went through. For the people who have seen the movie, I think that I’m clear enough when I say that the concept of the relationship that Theodore ends up with Samantha (the OS names herself that), is maybe one of the most heartbreaking things that you could possibly hear - the scale of the violation of trust, impossible when considering the limits of person-to-person interaction, is what makes it shattering. The way I see relationships, is that if there’s love involved, that love implies a secret; there are certain things that you know about each other that no other person should know, because two people know the same secret at the same time could constitute a weakening of trust and potential sliding into betrayal. No matter what, you have those secrets. You own that about each other. (Of course, there's the idea of exes, but it should and can feel unique in its own way.) Maybe the people who saw this movie and can’t find themselves involved with it don’t think that way - maybe they have different ideas about how love works, and the suggestion of ownership (usually implied negatively in a far more physical way than in what I speak of in the case of the movie) is what makes them reject it. Anything remotely or conceptually referencing the elements of "ownership," that you can claim to own anything about your significant other, is something that bothers them, and that makes them hate it. While I understand how someone like this could absolutely despise the attitude of Theodore towards the end, I found myself sympathetic.
I haven’t had the chance to speak a lot about the movie with people (those who I have just don’t have anything to say about it except that they love it), but I have noticed it connecting with people around me of my age - friends from school and university are all falling for it, while slightly older people are just downright furious with the concepts presented and younger people are less impressed (if they even have an interest in seeing a movie like this). I think I know the reason why this movie is connecting with me in a deeper way than any other movie has recently - I think this might be the perfect movie for my generation. Hell, I could say that this might be THE movie of my generation, at least in this decade. It expresses and manages to present certain elements that make it tie in closely to our perceptions of the modern world. I am 24 years old and my friends age range from 22 to 25, and I think they can all relate to a simple list of things: we are maybe the last generation that wasn’t given an iPhone when we’re just born, the majority of us didn’t have a computer in our house until we were teenagers, and the Internet was a scarce and expensive medium of communication. Hence, we are maybe the most heavy users of new technologies (under our own preconceptions and limitations - we know when something won’t work and when something will) because we can still be awed and struck with wonder by them." -- Jaime Grijalba
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #4
Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen) [259.5 points / 24 votes]
"If you ask me, I could write a book about Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis. I say that about each new Coen brothers movie (and, yes, I know Rodgers & Hart’s 1940 “I Can Write a Book” is not a folk song), but in this case I use the phrase to point out that it’s a movie that lends itself to considerable rumination and explication (and appreciation), which is probably easier to do at book-length than in just a few paragraphs. But here goes:
Inside Llewyn Davis is the only 2013 movie that I’ve watched more than twice. I think it’s been three or four times now. It’s certainly lovely to look at, while appropriately chilly with its moody blacks, blues, browns and greys (thanks, Bruno Delbonnel and Peter Doyle). The music (whether sung — always live — by the title character, Oscar Isaac, or Justin Timberlake or Carey Mulligan) is hauntingly gorgeous and sometimes so unspeakably haunting it raises goosebumps — which is often the case when the Coens work with frequent collaborators Carter Burwell and T Bone Burnett. And though I wouldn’t call it a flat-out comedy (like, say, The Big Lebowski or O Brother Where Art Thou?), it’s occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, especially when John Goodman or F. Murray Abraham are on the screen.
It’s all very loosely based on “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” the posthumously published 2005 memoir by Dave Van Ronk about his days and nights in the early-‘60s Greenwich Village folk revival scene. All of which is to say that Inside Llewyn Davis (title and album cover patterned after the 1962 Prestige LP, Inside Dave Van Ronk) is richly entertaining in multifarious ways.
It begins with a close-up of a microphone and a long close-up take of Llewyn singing an old folk song, “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” in a dark club known as the Gaslight Cafe. He’s told someone is waiting for him in the alley out back and a man in a black coat and wide-brimmed fedora punches him out. The movie then dissolves back in time to reveal (in its own good time) how Llewyn came to be punched. So, there’s that — a structural/narrative hook that teases us along through the story. We soon find that we can easily understand why somebody — anybody — would be likely to take a swing this guy. He’s a singer, but not exactly an entertainer — talented as hell, but he doesn’t exactly “connect” with people, from the stage or in his daily life.
There are so many ways to look at the movie. Watch how Llewyn uses his music as a tool: a weapon, a shield, a challenge, a payment, a bribe, a gift, a meal ticket, a proof of authenticity, an apology... You could see it as a kind of Raging Bull with an acoustic musician instead of a boxer, a man so steeped in pride and self-loathing that his life has become an effort to build a monument to his own iconoclasm and unlovability, cloaked in a form of non-careerist ideological purity.
And then there’s the cat, an orange tabby we (and Llewyn) belatedly find out is named Ulysses. He takes us on quite an odyssey, leading us back in time, through the Village streets and into the subway, and eventually all the way to Chicago. Who is this cat and what is he doing here? That’s a good excuse for another viewing..." -- Jim Emerson
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #5
12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)[200.5 points / 19 votes]
"I knew that 12 Years a Slave was the best movie I would see in 2013 almost immediately. And this is saying a lot, since 2013 was a very, VERY good year.
What is interesting to me is that it is such a powerful film, and so overwhelming, that only after this third viewing could I even begin to focus on small details and individual elements. The first two times I watched it, practically all I could feel when it was over was shell shock, both at the depth of the experience and my extreme admiration for everything about it.
Now that I can focus on details, I will. One must go first and foremost to the performances. Witness Chiwetel Ejiofor's trembling courage and roiling emotions churning beneath a stoic exterior; Michael Fassbender's disturbing, undeniable humanity in the role of an irredeemably evil man, the characterization of whom never boils over into caricature; Lupita Nyong'o's palpable pain and misery as the hauntingly tragic Patsey; Paul Giamatti's pragmatic soullessness. And is there anyone better at playing a slimy little shit than Paul Dano? There isn't a false note in the entire ensemble.
And of course there's more. Sean Bobbitt's weaving, floaty camerawork. Hans Zimmer's excellent score (I'm particularly fond of the ominous, percussion-heavy music during the boat sequence). John Ridley's pitch-perfect screenplay, blessedly free of showboating speeches. Joe Walker's editing, which makes 134 minutes fly by without ever feeling rushed. And it's clear from watching the making-of documentary included in the Blu-Ray that Steve McQueen did an amazing job directing and guiding a very big, very challenging film. It's also admirable how much warmth and emotion he worked into it, without ever making it the slightest bit sentimental or softpedaling the material.
And yet, even though I have seen the film enough times to focus on details, it is still best experienced as a whole and complete experience that hits with the force of a tidal wave. It's almost without question, in my mind, the best and most honest movie ever made about the inexplicable horrors of slavery, as well as about the heroism and courage found among its victims. And also without question the finest film achievement of 2013." -- Jason Alley
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #6
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer & Christine Cynn & Anonymous) [182 points / 17 votes]
"I don't think I've ever had a documentary as my favorite movie of the year. I'd rather say it was something with some fun in it (The Grandmaster, The Wolf of Wall Street, Her) than a movie documenting the perpetrators of mass killings. But I can't deny that when I was done with The Act of Killing I felt like it might've been one of the best movies I'd ever seen.
It's a story about a group of low level gangsters who were known for scalping movie tickets and, for a few years in the mid '60s, executing thousands of alleged communists in response to an attempted coup. Since the death squads grew into a paramilitary organization that is still powerful today those murderers have never been held accountable as war criminals, and in fact have been lauded as heroes. As one of these gangsters says, history is written by the victors. Since their society doesn't shame them for it they are willing to accept an offer from director Joshua Oppenheimer (and anonymous Indonesian co-director) to help them make a movie re-enacting one of their infamous massacres.
While they make their film they're also happy to reminisce and even joke on camera about the horrible things they did and how they did them. It's shocking to watch their casualness and somehow inspiring to notice the little cracks in the facade, the signs that deep down they know what they did was wrong, whether or not it was government sanctioned.
In a profound way this is a story about the power of movies. The allure of being in one causes these war criminals to open up about what they did, to call attention to it. The act of filming one forces them to face the horror of their actions, to admit the lies that they'd been telling all these years, to unmask themselves as savages in front of their own families (who they are clueless enough to have playing victims in many scenes). While their movie clumsily tries to glorify their activities (there's even a musical dream sequence where a victim pins a medal on his killer, Anwar Congo, as thanks for sending him to Heaven), Oppenheimer's documentary reveals these monsters as merely, pathetically, human.
To me, parts of The Act of Killing are grimly, uncomfortably funny, and I recently read a finger-shaking essay scolding those with the gall to find any laughter connected to such a tragic subject. This fails to acknowledge the basic human fact that some things are so sad, so awful that the best way to deal with them is with a bitter laugh. To an outsider some of this plays like blunt Paul Verhoeven satire. We see a propaganda talking point about the meaning of the word "gangster" spread from political speeches to television to daily life. In one scene Anwar appears on a daytime talk show to talk about filming the movie, and a smiley Indonesian Leeza Gibbons equivalent has no problem reading a cue card praising the "more efficient and humane" killing methods he developed (taking people out onto a roof and strangling them with wire).
A layer of reality is peeled back when we hear the crew members in the control room talking in disbelief about what Anwar is saying. It's a reminder that regular people don't agree with the killings, but also that they've been able to ignore them. That's what happens to nightmarish horror that happened to somebody else, or that was perpetrated by your side. For a long time it sickens you, eventually it's easier to become hardened to it, or to stop thinking about it.
I know some people were outraged when certain other awards passed over The Act of Killing in favor of more normal and upbeat documentaries. There were angry implications that such a choice was an insult to all the people who died in the events this movie is promoting awareness of. But I don't think that's why we voted for it, and I know it's not why you should see it. Documentary filmmaking is not just a contest to see who can find the most important issue to raise or the most gruesome crime to address.
I didn't vote for The Act of Killing to say that it's Important (although I believe it is). I voted for it to say that it's a great and powerful use of the medium. It takes us to places we've never been, shows us people we've never met, gets them to talk about things they've never talked about. It's nightmarish and thought provoking, surreal and visually stunning. You will be angered and you will laugh and you will feel bad for laughing and you'll be amazed at what can be accomplished with a lot of tenacity and guts and some cameras." -- Vern
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #7
Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron) [137.5 points / 16 votes]
"Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is the kind of movie that it would be easy to mistake for a mere “technological breakthrough,” like, say, Becky Sharp or The Jazz Singer (or Jurassic Park). (The Academy was probably grateful to have all those technical awards to shower upon it, though I wouldn’t be surprised if a few members didn’t feel sheepish about having already given Sandra Bullock her big award for The Blind Side.) It is a technological breakthrough, but the average viewer isn’t likely to sit through it consciously appreciating all the marvels unfolding in front of his eyes. This is both a $100 million experimental film and cinematic narrative boiled down to its essence, drawing the viewer into the skin of one person struggling to struggling just to stay alive. In lesser hands, dependence on so much technology, in an environment as fully, artificially constructed as this one, would mainly serve to get in between the director and the people he’s putting onscreen. Cuaron seems as totally in control and as intimately connected to his lead actress as Max Ophuls tracking Danielle Darrieux through a ballroom.
One way to appreciate how special a movie is might be to think about all the ways it could have gone wrong. I know that I am not the only Cuaron freak whose reaction to the trailer was, “Yeah, I’m glad he’s back, but I don’t know that I want to watch that for ninety minutes.” Yet I can’t remember the last time I’ve had my attention held that firmly for an hour and a half in a theater; Cuaron and Bullock and their other collaborators never let things go slack, never threaten to break the spell. There may not be a moment of transcendent relief in this year’s movies to match the sequence in which Bullock makes it inside the self-immolating ship and, before she’s forced to vacate it again, can strip off her space suit and just hold herself for a few minutes: Finally, to be able to scratch again! As series TV has seemed to gobble up the adult subject matter and serious narrative strategies and, increasingly, the serious talent, the people who finance big movies have become more and more dependent on technological gimmickry to offer an excuse for why anyone should ever visit a theater again. Gravity is a reminder that the best justification for technological gimmickry, and the best reason to visit a theater, are still the same: to make, and experience, great movies." -- Phil Dyess-Nugent
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #8
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami) [132 points / 12 votes]
(Originally published here; reprinted with permission of the author.)
"At the tippity top of 2013 film viewings so far. A rigorously contemplative character piece that exists in the spaces of loneliness and human connection. The film functions around what would normally be central events but not on them. It ponders what brings these people together, the lies they have told themselves and each other, and the untold history of the choices they’ve made. Abbas Kiarostami is a master filmmaker, using every single camera choice to maximum effect and dangling the possibilities of character perspective in front of us like catnip. I think of that first scene for example, and the way he quite simply has the audience from the word go, all because of where he places his camera and the way he uses sound. The return value on this film, just like Certified Copy, his first film made outside of Iran, is enormous. Leaves a lot to think about, particularly that slam-bang fade-in to the closing credits." -- Catherine Stebbins
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #9
Upstream Color (Shane Carruth) [127.5 points / 12 votes]
"In Upstream Color, Shane Carruth introduces the world to a new form of identity theft. It’s extraordinarily outlandish yet still deeply upsetting.
A young woman named Kris, played with wounded grace by Amy Seimetz, is out one night when she’s suddenly, randomly assaulted. Physically subdued by her unnamed attacker, she’s then force-fed a drug-infused worm that puts her in a hypnotic trance.
Kris wakes up in her car at some later point, and soon discovers that her life is a shambles. Her fulfilling job is gone because she can’t explain her absence to her employer. She has no memory of the random tasks she was asked to perform, the multiple trips she made to banks and ATMs, or the surgery she underwent to remove the mind-controlling parasite and transfer it to the body of a pig. Along with her entire net worth, the attacker has stolen her time and her sense of self-trust, leaving nothing but a near-crippling sense of violation.
What’s the source of the plant from which the drug is derived? Why are worms required as a delivery device and pigs used as a follow-up host? What does the pigs’ caretaker, a nearly wordless character named The Sampler, have to do with the mind control and money scam? How do electronic music and Thoreau’s Walden figure into all this? Damned if I can say for sure. But the discreet charms of Carruth’s mind-boggling second feature have nothing to do with total clarity and everything to do with total trust – between two lost characters, and between artist and audience.
He gives us two relatable emotions to cling to as we make our way through the oblique narrative: the greed of the theft and the love that resurrects Kris and the man she meets on a train, Carruth’s Jeff, who puts up a better front but is just as damaged. Beyond that, we’re left to make our own connections, grasp our individual meanings, and bask through multiple viewings in its enduring mysteries.
I’m not much of a subscriber to the term “auteur,” but Carruth earns it as writer-producer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer-star. He reveals images that can be coldly clinical or a sun-dappled gold, put together in cleanly severed, occasionally overlapping bits to an insidiously affecting soundtrack.
An existential puzzle that’s genuinely romantic and get-under-your-skin horrific, the film touches on the fragility of memory and identity, the perils of the material world and the unspoken traumas that connect us. The rhythms and organic chemistry that develop between Carruth and Seimetz give this mindfuck a warm human heart. Rare and remarkable is the movie that not only makes you scratch your head, but also shed a tear." -- Melissa Starker
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #10
The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino) [124 points / 12 votes]
"We all remember the last scene from La Dolce Vita, right?
That haunting, mostly wordless coda had Marcello Mastroianni’s party-boy journalist exchanging words with a young girl he previously met, across a noisy beach. As much as he tries to engage in a faraway conversation with the girl, he eventually gives up and moves back to his party, as the girl – his last, fleeting reminder of innocence – smiles and waves goodbye.
It’s not that surprising that The Great Beauty, Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s most Fellini-esque film yet, ends almost the same way, with a playboy writer and a nubile sweetie on a beach, trying to find the right things to say as crashing waves kill the silence. But instead of Sorrentino’s writer (wonderfully played by Toni Servillo) saying bye-bye to innocence, he closes his eyes and wonders what it would be like to experience it again before he leaves this damn place.
Beauty pulls off the amazing hat trick of being the most lively, vivacious, downright fun movie about the inevitability of death ever made. It begins with a Japanese tourist croaking during a snapshot-taking spree. But before you get doused with the morbidity of it all, the movie then cuts to an insane rooftop birthday party – the writer’s birthday party, by the way – that could wake the dead.
But even Servillo’s Jep Gambardella knows this is all smoke and mirrors. Now in his sixties, this dapper gadfly is in a lonely, cynical haze. He roams the streets late at night, like a protagonist in a Steely Dan song. (I’m shocked no one calls him Deacon Blues during this whole movie.) As much as his Rome home is a town full of eccentric, contradictory, breathtaking wonder, filled with fascinating people and characters I would love to see in movies of their own, he is always reminded how fleeting all of this is. Friends, young and old, start passing away at a feverish pace. He finds an ally in a mysterious, fortysomething stripper (Sabrina Ferilli, gorgeous and devastating), who also unfortunately disappears from Gambardella’s life just as quickly as she entered it. It isn’t long before he starts consulting with some people of the cloth about what the hell this all means.
But as much as Beauty is about death, it’s also about life and getting as much out of it as you can, whether you’re an aging bachelor living the glamorous life or some schmo spending a quiet evening at home with your girl. Much like the idols he listed off during his acceptance speech for his much-deserved Best Foreign Film Oscar win (Fellini! Scorsese! Talking Freakin’ Heads!), Sorrentino went about making a wildly eclectic, unpredictable work about how wildly eclectic and unpredictable life is. Also, just like his heroes have done, Sorrentino’s film embraces high and low culture, the pretentious and the profane. In Sorrentino’s worldview, there’s beauty in the bullshit, and vice versa. Great living – and great art – usually requires both." -- Craig Lindsey
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #12
Drug War (Johnnie To) [114 points / 13 votes]
"If you have any doubts when I say that China and Hong Kong have a hammer-lock on the cops-&-criminals genre, then you simply need to spend an evening with the latest masterpiece from Johnnie To. Don't be surprised to find the razor-sharp genre filmmaking on display to be only the tip of the iceberg, as Drug War is a first-rate example of what is may well be some of the finest cinema being produced anywhere in the world today. Consider for a moment that the last time the USA put this level of craftsmanship and care into such a genre picture was in 2006 with Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning The Departed, which happened to be a remake of a far superior Hong Kong film, Andy Lau's Infernal Affairs (2002). These are hard-edged, gritty, politically charged, and very bloody dramas that seek not just to sell some popcorn and fill a few seats, but are serious-minded (albeit damn entertaining) films that believe that these stories are important and they have something relevant to say about the state of the world. Drug War seems "bigger" than most To films in that the film breaks free of the typical confined metropolis and sets its story on mainland China. In this respect, it may be his biggest picture to date.
From the brilliantly cross-cut opening, Drug War hits the ground running: The film opens with a series of suspicious faces on a busy expressway. We know right away that some of these are cops, and some of these are criminals. Figuring out who is who is just part of the game, and the next 3 to 4 days of mayhem that unfolds details an obsessed detective and his attempts to coerce a captured drug lord into assisting with an ever-expanding sting operation. The amount of flip-flopping and psychological power plays that ensue are enough to make even the most attentive viewer crave a second screening. As shared earlier, it is worth noting that To is not just out creating tension for tension's sake but is playing to a very real social anxiety in Chinese culture regarding corruption and ulterior motives in positions of power.
When it comes to end of the year recaps of cinema, we tend to focus on a few key sequences or scenes that tend to define the films that we loved. Drug War features no less than 3 of these sequences, foremost a deliriously paced drug meeting that has the same scene repeated twice with the phenomenal actor Sun Honglei posing as a villain on each side of the table - first as buyer, then as seller. It's a veritable masterclass of acting and something that we should expect to see homaged in a Tarantino film within 10 years time. Add to this, then, both a monumentally choreographed bit where the police, posing as local crime bosses, must demonstrate their control of a shipyard and its fleet of vessels and also a blood-soaked gunfight finale that strikes a match to any sympathies you may have developed within the cast and rubs our face in the Chinese-imposed regulations that mandate the bad guys get their comeuppance. Each of these scenes in their own right are enough to make a good film great. The casual manner with which the great Johnnie To incorporates them with such ease and consistency only underscores the mastery at play here. You can bet that somewhere Robert Aldrich and Don Siegel are chomping cigars and high-fiving over this one." -- Adam Lemke
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #13
To the Wonder (Terrence Malick) [102 points / 12 votes]
"The title of Terrence Malick’s stunning To the Wonder acts as both metaphor and call to action. It reveals what the film is about, what Malick wants to do, and what Malick wants his audience to do. In this last respect, the title differs from that of his last film, The Tree of Life. Where that title is self-contained and iconic, To the Wonder is aspirational; it describes a journey and a goal. This difference helps to explain why To the Wonder, while of a piece with The Tree of Life, is more than just the earlier film’s leftovers. It’s less cosmic, more earthbound.
Unlike The Tree of Life, “the Wonder” is not just a spiritual concept. It’s also a real-world place: Normandy's Mont Saint-Michel, which lovers Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and Neil (Ben Affleck) visit in the film's early Europe-set sequence. During their visit, Marina and Neil walk on the wet low-tide ground surrounding the monastery, and Malick shoots the sequence so that they appear at points to actually be walking on water. This shot is similar to one in The Tree of Life - the one where Jessica Chastain seems to be walking on water - but it’s different in an important way. The shot in Tree of Life is mysterious and inexplicable, literally miraculous. In To the Wonder, the mystery is short-lived. Though Malick emphasizes the beauty of Mont Saint-Michel and its surroundings, he is careful to show that the apparent miracle has wholly ordinary roots. Marina and Neil aren’t walking on water at all. They’re walking in mud.
This approach continues throughout the film. A few moments later, there is a tracking shot of leaves fluttering in the air, which at first seems of a piece with the ruffling trees, flowing wheat fields, and other pastoral images so associated with Malick that his name has become an adjective. But here the shot continues, revealing that the leaves are blown not by nature’s wind but by a mechanical leaf-blower. Later still, a particularly Malickian montage of flowing water is followed by a shot of the water's source, a dirty concrete drainage pipe. In those shots and others, Malick reveals the mundane in the ineffable. Elsewhere in the film, he does the reverse. After Neil and Marina fall in love in France, Marina takes her daughter and follows Neil back to Oklahoma, and the way Malick shoots the everyday locales of middle America — the laundromats and Sonic drivethrus — recasts them as every bit as marvelous as Mont Saint-Michel. At one point, the family walks through a bright-white supermarket. Marina's daughter exclaims, "Everything's so clean—it's beautiful!" Thing is, she’s right.
What Malick presents is a choice, in vision and in life. What little narrative To the Wonder has focuses on Marina and Neil’s tumultuous relationship as it breaks apart and rebuilds. The problem is Neil, who, in his relationship with Marina and his later fling with Jane (Rachel McAdams), seems incapable of emotional commitment. His sin is indecision; he is, as Javier Bardem’s priest puts it, “the man who hesitates, who does nothing, who buries his talent in the earth.” He resigns himself to the earth — to the leaf-blower and drainage pipe and mud — and seeks nothing more. Marina, though, never stops seeking. Her unhappiness resembles that of the priest, who struggles to see God in the world's suffering. I think the key word for Malick here is "struggle": the fight to find the sublime within the fallen, to notice the grace of blowing leaves or how the shimmer of mud can, from the right angle, invoke the miracle of water-walking. Near what seems to be the end of his marriage, Neil turns to the priest for advice. The priest’s response — "You have to struggle with yourself. You have to struggle with your own strength." — appears to trigger some sort of change in Neil, though what exactly that change comes to is left ambiguous.
To the Wonder's conclusion is enigmatic but overwhelmingly hopeful. We hear the priest in voiceover: "Christ, be with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me. Christ in me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left. Christ in the heart. Thirsting. We thirst. ... Shine through us. Show us how to seek you." Malick is a religious filmmaker, but one can be a nonbeliever like me and still understand what "Christ" means here. We can call it something else — like, oh, say, "the Wonder." The beauty that Malick captures in this film shows that it's there if you look hard enough. Because maybe "the Wonder" is all the way on the other side of the world, in a monastery on a remote French island. But maybe, just maybe, it’s right here, right where you are, right now." -- Matt Noller
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #15
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) [101 points / 12 votes]
"I've been trying to figure out why Frances Ha gets to me so deeply, and I've begun to suspect that it's because of the film's rhythms — because of the pacing within each scene, between scenes, and across the whole of this very episodic movie. The editing and plotting have a beat to them that feels natural, maybe even circadian, and which draws me in instantly. I can't stop watching when one sequence ends, because I want to be reminded how poor Frances either rebounds or sinks even lower in the next. Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have collaborated here on a movie that ebbs and flows, with its hardships (and there are many, albeit mostly quite small) stitched tightly to its triumphs.
Everything is finite in Frances Ha, whether it's a montage-length Christmas back home or an especially low period Frances spends in a dorm at her alma mater. Everything contributes to her gradual maturation, which builds over the film's concise 86 minutes, yet never results in any sudden realizations, because this isn't that kind of movie. Instead of being vocalized, Frances' many regrets and rare moments of grace register on Gerwig's body: in her creased brow, strained laugh, and set of gawky mannerisms. The movie can stand to be cut so economically because its star's body language is so dense with subtext. The dialogue, meanwhile, tends to be reserved for these coiling fragments of conversation which sometimes erupt with blurted faux pas. They're funny, occasionally epigrammatic, but always rendered plausible and slightly clumsy by delivery.
The jokes here are subdued, but they can sting even minutes later, and that's because this is a small movie that expands. As every line swells in retrospect, so does every shot framing Gerwig somewhere lonely and asymmetrical. So, mercifully, does every burst of friendship or dance, until no motion seems more free than her skipping down crowded streets to "Modern Love," until no ending seems more desired than the simple phrase "She's my best friend." Frances Ha grows despite its modesty because it's utterly resistant to cliché. All this is familiar, yet here it's told anew with unexpected verve and a musical quality to its pacing. It's an array of formal pleasures all coupled with awkward pains." -- Andreas Stoehr
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #19
Mud (Jeff Nichols) [73.5 points / 7 votes]
"Matthew McConaughey’s Mud may be the title character of Jeff Nichols’ wonderful Southern drama, but the movie isn’t really about him. It’s a coming-of-age story about 14-year-old Ellis (Tye Sheridan), whose relationship with Mud is just one of the ways he learns about the harsh realities of adult responsibility. Even when the camera moves away from Ellis’ direct experience, Nichols filters the movie through his perspective, as Ellis holds onto his romantic notions of love even while betrayal and violence blossom around him. Discovering the mysterious Mud alone on an island is at first a great adventure for Ellis and deadpan best buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), and even when the two boys get themselves more deeply involved in Mud’s very serious troubles, Ellis keeps his wide-eyed appreciation of the situation.
Sheridan and Lofland anchor the movie in a believable friendship of two teenage boys, balanced between the kind of good-natured putdowns that can mask insecurity about masculinity (the first exchange between the two: “What the shit?” “Suck it.”) and a genuine, heartfelt love. They’re right at the age when the bond between male friends starts to become less important than potential bonds with members of the opposite sex, and while Neckbone has a coldly pragmatic view of that prospect, speaking matter-of-factly about his uncle’s “doin’ it music” and inquiring about the quality of the breasts on Ellis’ object of affection, Ellis is an unabashed romantic. He views the doomed love story between the volatile Mud and his equally unstable girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) as a grand romance to be emulated and encouraged, no matter what the consequences.
It’s not hard to see why Ellis and, to a lesser degree, Neckbone, would be drawn in by the devious Mud, thanks to McConaughey’s mesmerizing performance. The actor’s charm is the character’s charm, and McConaughey channels all the shirtless rogues he played in forgettable romantic comedies in his portrayal of the ultimate shirtless romantic rogue. While those past rom-com characters might have been ultimately harmless, Mud is genuinely menacing, and it’s McConaughey’s ability to combine likability with danger that makes the character so compelling.
With an ace supporting cast that includes Sarah Paulson, Ray McKinnon, Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon and Joe Don Baker, Nichols creates a multilayered portrait of a specific Southern locale, from the ramshackle houseboats on the river to the nondescript strip malls and apartment buildings in town to the lush (and sometimes dangerous) wilderness that surrounds all of it. Nichols gives every character, even the most minor, an internal life and an emotional honesty, so that even when bad men put Ellis and Neckbone in danger, we can understand the pain that drives them to do so.
More than its belated thriller elements, Mud is about the way that men relate to women, and the way that those relationships can cause as much collateral damage as any gun battle. Although some have viewed the movie’s point of view as misogynistic, Nichols isn’t blaming or condemning women for the tragedies that unfold in his story. The fault lies with men who, like Ellis, are unable to see women as anything more than objects to be obtained or protected, who put women on unrealistic pedestals and then get angry when they dare to act like real, flawed human beings. Mud is full of real, flawed human beings, and Ellis might just be the most flawed of them all." -- Josh Bell
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #24
Nebraska (Alexander Payne) [48 points / 5 votes]
"The characters in Alexander Payne’s films have lived. No other working filmmaker populates his films with so many individuals that give the impression of depth, the look of one who really is the sum of all of their experiences, for better or worse. And few characters in any movie seem to have lived as much as Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), a senile old man convinced by a piece of junk mail that he has won $1 million. This isn’t because he has had a spectacular life; quite the opposite, though through even an apparently unremarkable existence one can sense the depth of a lifetime of experiences, the reservoir of memories and hopes and disappointments that total one’s time on earth. Payne and screenwriter Bob Nelson understand and depict the way that mortality has a way of making everything, from success to relationships, a race against the clock that most won’t win.
The film is both hilarious and melancholy, with its plain, vast Nebraska landscape rendered beautiful by Phedon Papamichael’s gorgeous, stirring black-and-white cinematography. The cast is impeccable: Forte as Woody’s son, fantastic as a kind everyman with more nerve than his lowly station would suggest; June Squibb as the family’s fiery, foulmouthed matriarch; Bob Odenkirk as Forte’s brother, pragmatic but supportive; Stacey Keach as Dern’s old business partner, a rotten fellow who gets what’s coming to him; and Dern, giving the year’s best performance as a man broken by years of alcoholism, disappointment, and mediocrity. Nebraska draws out these people like few works do, actually exploring the implications of legacy, identity, and the ghosts of the past. If great movies are ultimately about people, this is one of the best." -- James Frazier
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #28 (tie)
Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen) [43 points / 5 votes]
"It's impossible to write about Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine without referring to A Streetcar Named Desire. Both works are about fragile, refined women who find themselves displaced and dependent upon the kindness of strangers following scandal and subsequent nervous breakdowns. When we see Jasmine, a recently dethroned Park Avenue socialite, sizing up her sister, Ginger's modest San Francisco apartment (and her own temporary living situation) in Blue Jasmine's opening scenes, we can practically hear Vivien Leigh's line, 'Can this be her home??' from the 1951 film adaptation of the Tennessee Williams classic play.
What distinguishes Blue Jasmine as an original work, however, is Allen's skillful blending of flashbacks into the main narrative, providing contrasts between Jasmine's charmed former life and the harsh reality of her present life in which she's forced to re-invent herself. The aforementioned scene of Jasmine's barely-contained dread upon arrival to Ginger's apartment in San Francisco, for instance, cuts sharply to a scene of her, years earlier, being shown a spacious Manhattan penthouse by her husband, Hal. A later scene, where Jasmine coaches herself to take deep breaths following a stressful day at the dentist's office where she has taken a job as a receptionist, transitions to yet another flashback scene, opening with the line, "If you take a deep breath, you can smell the honeysuckle'", where we see Jasmine at her country house, looking very regal in a riding outfit as she discusses her stepson's success as a Harvard student. Flashback scenes such as these serve to highlight the seductiveness and allure of Jasmine's former life, while shedding light on the particulars that have led to her fall from grace, from her willed ignorance of Hal's financial chicanery and marital infidelities to her strained relationship with Ginger, whom she looks down on. They also provide a context to Jasmine's frequent nostalgic states of reverie in which she talks to herself.
This seamless storytelling structure, complemented by a rueful jazz soundtrack and engaging dialogue, sets the stage for a collision course among characters representing two vastly different social strata. Allen's choices in actors for these parts are as creative as they are spot-on, from casting controversial comedian Andrew "Dice" Clay as Augie, Ginger's blue-collar ex-husband, to Alec Baldwin as the charismatic swindler Hal, who steals Augie and Ginger's lottery winnings after promising to make them rich. Bobby Cannavale is also well-cast as Ginger's present-day boyfriend, Chili, who, in one hilarious scene tries to set Jasmine up with his friend Eddie, who couldn't be less her type; also strong is Peter Sarsgaard in the role of Dwight, a well-connected diplomat whose appearance in the second half of the film as Jasmine's love interest offers her possible salvation. Then, there is Sally Hawkins, who subtly underscores Ginger's optimism and looseness with hints of low self-esteem and dissatisfaction with her lot in life (the scene where she chides Augie for telling tasteless Polish jokes at Jasmine's fashionable birthday soiree is one of a few examples).
Finally, Blue Jasmine would be unimaginable without Cate Blanchett (my choice for Best Lead Performance - Female in a very competitive year), who anchors the film with her captivating and exquisite performance as Jasmine. Having seen Blanchett's performance as Blanche 4 years ago in the Sydney Theatre Company's production of A Streetcar Named Desire during its run at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, I could be biased, but it seems that it is in her DNA to play such a part. It would be so easy to dismiss Jasmine as a contemptible character who deserves her fate, but Blanchett plays her in such a humanizing way that the viewer is persuaded to see past her haughtiness and remain hopeful for her even in her worst moments of humiliation and self-delusion. Jasmine may be snobby and pretentious, but it is her valiant effort to maintain her dignity and fragile hold on reality that ultimately win our empathy. In the scene in the dentist office, for instance, when Dr. Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg) preys on Jasmine's vulnerability and forces himself on her, we recoil and feel protective of her. We also can't help but feel triumphant for her when she later meets Dwight, even while he seems to be more enchanted with what she represents, with her Chanel belt, Hermes bag, and Vivier shoes, than with who she really is. It is the dramatization of this kind of self-deception and false identity that makes Blue Jasmine to be a poignant cautionary tale that places it next to other standout Allen films from the last 25 years, such as Match Point, Husbands and Wives and Crimes and Misdemeanors." -- Kevin Dufresne
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #28 (tie)
The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki) [43 points / 5 votes]
"The modern is constantly bumping up against the traditional in The Wind Rises, like the wasen fishing boats sharing the water with warships. This kind of juxtaposition is unavoidable in Japan. It's a byproduct of a country with an ancient culture that has been forced to physically rebuild itself after multiple calamities, both natural and man-made. But it's all the more notable given that Miyazaki literally inserts every element of every shot by hand, in its proper place.
I mention this because a lot has been made of Miyazaki's apparent ambivalence toward the actions of his main character, Jiro Horikoshi, the chief engineer of the "Zero" bomber (so named for the last digit of the imperial year -- 2600 -- in which it was first deployed, another discrete link between the new and the very old). Miyazaki neither explicitly condemns nor glorifies this man's work despite the many thousands of lives it would eventually cost. In fact, the World War that is encroaching throughout the narrative is only depicted in one or two very late shots, and Horikoshi's only real acknowledgement is in voiceover, when he notes that none of his beautiful planes ever returned home. And while he pursued his dream of the perfect machine, his beautiful wife (a fictional element here) to whom he was devoted and who fully understood his obsession slipped away from him. It may not seem like much, but it's not like he gets off clean.
Miyazaki has been accused of whitewashing Japan's aggression, when nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, he sees a country increasingly prone to that exact behavior, to ignoring its own history in favor of a more reactionary traditionalism. As Horikoshi single-mindedly realizes his wish, either deliberately blind to or innocently ignorant of its consequences, Miyazaki draws a parallel with what he sees as his country's increasingly selective recontextualization of its history to serve an uncertain future. The Wind Rises isn't an ode to a perfect dream or a lionization of its dreamer, it's a gentle warning from a man who knows what it's like to give up his dreams to the world." -- Matt Lynch
(Mr. Lynch also wrote a similarly-striking appreciation of this film for Seattle's The Stranger, which you can read here. And you should. Go on, we'll wait.)
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #33
Bastards (Claire Denis) [35 points / 4 votes]
"That Claire Denis had made a film noir came as little surprise. Denis is a classic auteur in the sense that, throughout her 25-year career, her visual style and thematic preoccupations have remained remarkably consistent, regardless of subject or genre. She’s made family dramas, music and dance documentaries, a coming-of-age story, a horror tale, and a variety of films that defy simple classification. Adding a noir to that list made sense. However, the pitch darkness of Bastards, its near-total nihilism and its treatment of sexual violence, caught many critics and viewers off guard. Reviews were mixed coming out of Cannes, where it premiered in Un Certain Regard, and even Denis’s strongest advocates (I’d include myself among them) have been slower than usual to fully embrace it. Bastards is indeed a hard film to love. It’s wicked, painful, and soul-sick. It’s also the best new release I saw in 2013.
Bastards opens with a suicide and with a dreamlike image of a young woman walking naked through a vacant Paris street. In her typically elliptical fashion, Denis spends the next 90 minutes piecing together the two events. If there is a single defining characteristic of Denis’s cinema, it’s her subjective camera, and here she adopts the perspective of the suicide’s brother-in-law, Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon), a sea captain who abandons his ship to return home and care for his sister and niece. We in the audience know only what Marco knows — that the family’s manufacturing business is in ruins, that his brother-in-law was deeply indebted to local tycoon Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), and that his niece Justine (Lola Créton) has been hospitalized. The rest is a puzzle to be solved in classic noir style, complete with fistfights, fast cars, and a seductive femme fatale (Raphaëlle Laporte, played by Chiara Mastroianni). Marco is Denis’s rendition of the kind of character Toshiro Mifune played in Akira Kurosawa’s films: battle-tested and honor-bound but still open and exposed. The film is so emotionally brutal because we discover each new horror alongside Marco, as if we’re supporting a grieving friend at the graveside.
I saw Bastards two nights in a row at the Toronto International Film Festival. After the first screening, I was shocked by the bitterness and despair; after the second, I was overwhelmed by the sorrow. It’s an essential distinction, I think. Bastards is Denis’s most Lynchian film: the story echoes Twin Peaks, certain scenes and characters recall Lost Highway, and the style of the film reminds me at times of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. (Bastards is Denis’s first narrative feature shot on digital, as Inland Empire was for Lynch.) But more than anything else it’s that moral distinction between despair and sorrow that makes this a Lynchian film. Darkness, nihilism, anxiety — these are relatively easy conditions to reproduce on screen. Lynch has an innate and uncanny talent for expressing the transcendent loss that inevitably accompanies violence and human tragedy. That is what Denis taps into here.
Bastards ends with an ugly image of an ugly act, a father molesting his child. What makes it doubly horrific is that we’ve already seen this image many times before in the film. It’s become familiar, a gestural echo. Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard are among contemporary cinema’s great portrait artists. They shoot in intimate close-ups that make the actors’ bodies present and familiar. The final image, although desaturated and pixilated, is no exception. At the moment of violence, the father and child embrace and the film cuts to black, which summons retroactively every other embrace in the film: Marco holding Justine in the hospital and his own daughter in his apartment or Laporte taking his young son’s hand as they ride in a limo. Most devastating of all is a moment between Marco and Raphaëlle — he walks through a door, she grabs his jacket by the lapels and pulls it down off of his shoulders, they embrace — that Denis restages at the climax of the film, this time between Raphaëlle and her son. “The first taboo is incest,” Denis told Nick Pinkerton. “It’s the origin of the law.” The sorrow in Bastards is primal, eternal. It’s the poisoning of affection, the blaspheming of love." -- Darren Hughes
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #40
The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie) [30 points / 3 votes]
"Here’s a film that proves that all recovery movies aren't necessarily the same. It’s entirely possible to accept Robert Zombie’s masterpiece at its ghoulish face value as the inevitable fulfillment of a curse sworn hundreds of years before, satanic panic come home to roost in the very crotch of American Puritanism, but there’s just as much evidence that the demonic forces involved are an incarnation of the relentless tenacity of addiction (see also Jason Banker's haunting and bleak Toad Road).
The monkey on the back of Sheri Moon Zombie’s Heidi LaRoc (a/k/a Adelheid Elizabeth Hawthorne, rejector of patrician custom and mores), driving her headlong into the abyss, is either an ancient plan of infernal vengeance set forth by a cult slaughtered by an overzealous witchfinder, or a recursive inability to get out from under a crack habit; either way, you lose. It’s as schematic as the cruelest of Haneke/Von Trier scenarios, but there’s so much more here - a leap beyond the sleazy rednecks, roadhouses splattered red, and grungy shocks that lurked around every corner in Zombie’s previous works. It has the sensibility of a Hammer classic but with the sense of geographic terror that Kubrick excelled at and the Russellian freakout as well. But the voice at the center is distinctively Zombie's - and it aches.
Zombie’s vision of Salem is something unusual. Restrained. Quiet. And suffused with a grandeur and power that, while occasionally surfacing in House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, and both Halloween films, never quite sustained feature length. The Salem witch trials are, by this point, an example of how history takes something unspeakable and metabolizes it into something kitsch, a flippant dismissal. 2012’s ParaNorman did a great job of stripping away the camp and novelties and forcing the viewer to confront some of our national legacy of guilt on the subject. But here, a different tack is chosen, and that film’s national indictment becomes something much more personal.
The literal aspects of the Hawthorne curse just get muddled about (laid out more clearly but less effectively in Zombie’s novel, written with S.K. Epperson, which has a completely different ending and a much more expansive portrait of the workings of the curse), but that's okay - dream logic can be its own justification. The mark of a truly great horror film is if you would be willing to spend time within it, knowing full well its particular horrors. The Lords of Salem is a lush blanket, so comfortable and inviting you never notice its slow, inexorable tightening into a noose.
For much of the year, it was battling with Stories We Tell for the film that I couldn’t escape from. Then, after seeing Her, there was another contender for defining the zenith of cinema circa 2013. But Theodore and Samantha’s relationship, while hitting incredibly close to home, doesn’t quite have the devastating crunch of what could have been but was never meant to be with Heidi and Whitey (Jeffrey Daniel Phillips). You hurt for Heidi, and you hurt for Whitey because of how much he loves her. It's not a geek crush or an establishing love to chart Whitey's path into adult relationships or Heidi's path out of addiction. These are adults who've seen how life is and the shit that it so often brings.
Whitey loves Heidi with the strength of someone who's seen how bad it can get and still wants to take that chance. And what Heidi feels for Whitey is complex; there are no manic pixie dreams to be found here, just a concern, devotion, and sense of fun that feels real - the realest concept in the film’s exquisite blend of horrors. Someone you make waffles for and listen to music with in the middle of the night... well, that’s someone very dear to you. Multiple viewings untie some knots, while binding other strands together; it’s a flawed gem that nonetheless demands to be held dearly. I will oblige.
Also, between this, Short Term 12, and A Madea Christmas, 2013 really was the year of the genuinely caring beardy dude. Here, here..." -- Jason Shawhan
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #45
Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh) [26 points / 2 votes]
"Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh’s homage to the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock — billed as the auteur’s final theatrical film — is a good, old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment with thoughtful undercurrents. In fact, even labeling this an homage seems like a slight, as it’s truly an original and wholly new product. Soderbergh marries Hitchcockian techniques with the hyper-digital aesthetic of his late period to craft a film that’s about elemental fears in modern society. Killer birds and shower-stabbings scared us yesterday, so Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns must invoke a phobia more specific to contemporary Americans: the potentially dangerous consequences of an over-medicated populace.
Tackling such a hot-button issue through the unpretentious lens of a thriller allows Soderbergh to communicate thoughts on the zeitgeist just as effectively as a capital I-Important drama would, without any of the preaching. Side Effects isn’t anti-psychopharmacology, but it sees a need to confront the pervasive fear Americans still have about this type of drug, even though 1 in 10 of us takes them daily. Soderbergh realizes that the ideal way to do so is to fully engage the fear, to take it to its logical extreme in the form of a thriller. Yes, Side Effects goes off the rails for the sake of entertainment in its final third, but Soderbergh so masters both the social commentary and the B-thriller mechanics that he succeeds in having his cake and eating it too. This is the kind of smart, middle-budget movie for adults that the big studios should be making a lot more of." -- Danny Baldwin
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #46
Night Across the Street (Raul Ruiz) [23 points / 2 votes]
"It feels wrong to think of Night Across the Street, Chilean director Raoul Ruiz's final film, as a mature work by a master filmmaker. Based loosely on Hernan del Solar's novel, Night Across the Street is a typical Ruiz film in that it's a magically realistic reverie about the fluidity of time and memory. In Night Across the Street, memories, like people, are marbles. They're designed to collide into each other, though Ruiz is still not sure who is the active player in this metaphor: the author, his characters, his friends and family, or whoever/whatever God is (perhaps a"phantom puppeteer?").
That image is one of many that Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez) toys with before he retires from his menial job as a clerk. At the end of his life, he rejects the notion death ends everything. Even inanimate objects, like alarm clocks and guns, have memories that are jogged by arbitrary triggers, like the word "Rhododendron" that excites Don Celso so much.
Celso's memories aren't miniature ships to be kept separate in bottles. They're more like the movies of his youth, shadows that come to life and change every time he watches them. When he rewatches these films, Celso doesn't remember how they'll end, but simply takes pleasure in seeing them come to life again. He similarly has conversations with Long John Silver and Beethoven and puzzles over the meaning of mistranslated poetry. And he flirts with death, wondering, or perhaps demanding, that some mysterious assailant suddenly appear and take his life.
So Night Across the Street is necessarily the work of an older artist. Compare it with an earlier Ruiz film, like City of Pirates, and you'll see that memories, myths, and real people are no longer competing with each other for validity. There's no struggle here, just an impassioned sigh about how necessarily confusing and exciting the passage of time can be at the end of life. Don Celso accepts his own powerlessness and confusion, and is consequently overwhelmed by beauty." -- Simon Abrams
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #51
Faust (Alexander Sokurov) [20 points / 2 votes]
"Somewhere between a Rabelaisian paean to Earthly pleasures and a serious inquiry into the folly of man’s desire for knowledge, Alexander Sokurov’s Faust is quite unlike any other cinematic event I encountered in 2013. The film, which adapts Goethe’s masterwork, sees no difference between its high aspirations and its low humor - an opening CGI shot sets up an epic mythology, only to end with a blurry shot of a cadaver's flaccid penis. The film waltzes through a maze of life’s lowly pleasures (a bath of virgins, a drunken pub, mockery at a funeral), all in the hopes of finding what will cause man to betray his intellect. It’s easy to dismiss Sokurov’s portrayal of this “important” myth as the sign of a filmmaker who can’t tell good from bad, but even his obsession with scatological humor is sublimated into the great philosophical search. While certainly owing a debt to Tarkovsky, Sokurov’s most apparent references come from outside of cinema from the world of painting: Rembrandt in the lighting, Brueghel in his parade through the village, a Botticelli in the Venus-like portraiture of Margarete, and an ending out of Friedrich's "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog." These images are both repulsive and rapturous, implemented through the garish colors of Bruno Donbonnel's boldly inventive visual palette. The film's billing as the final part in the director’s "Men of Power" tetralogy frames it not only an explanation of Sokurov’s interest in the root of fascism in the 20th century but perhaps also a sly nod toward philistinism. Ultimately, Faust uses its wide range of comedy, passion, and tragedy to give the sense of the failures of all men, not just great ones." -- Peter Labuza
2013 Film of the Year Countdown: #58
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger) [14 points / 1 vote]
Such was my delight in Blancanieves that I saw it in the theater twice in the span of four days. I don't remember the last time I did that. This is a film that ran a needle-fine wire into the pleasure center of my brain. It's a film that plays like a lost Tod Browning film, rediscovered and restored by Pedro Almodovar. I hardly know how to convey how much I loved it.
Blancanieves is a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In this film's ideation of the fairy tale, Snow White's father, Antonio Villalta, is a renowned matador. He is possessed of a beautiful wife, Carmen, who is about to give birth to their first child. She's in the stands as he swaggers to the center of the bullring and takes on bull after bull. Clearly, he is a master, but even a master can't predict everything and when a photographer startles a bull while Villalta's attention is elsewhere, it gores him. While he is in the hospital, Carmen goes into labor. The child is born, but the mother does not survive the experience. Meanwhile, Villalta catches the eye of one of his nurses, Encarna, who gazes upon him with wicked and covetous eyes. The child is sent to live with her grandmother, while Villalta remarries. Carmencita wants to be a flamenco dancer, like her mother, but her dreams are cut short when her grandmother dies and she’s sent to live with her father and stepmother. Carmen is warned to stay off the second floor of the house. Carmen breaks the rules when she follows her pet rooster into the forbidden part of the house where she discovers that her father is a prisoner in his own body. Carmencita continues to visit her father in secret and her father teaches her to be a matador. Carmencita grows up. When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, she asks to drive out into the woods to gather flowers for his funeral. Encarna orders her chauffeur to kill her on the errand, and he makes a game attempt. He leaves her for dead. She’s rescued by a traveling band of dwarfs, who perform as matadors and rodeo clowns. Carmencita cannot remember her name or her old life, so the dwarfs name her Blancanieves — Snow White — and take her in. When one of their shows goes awry, Blancanieves jumps into the ring and demonstrates formidable skill as a matador. Soon, she’s headlining the act. She’s invited to perform in the big ring in Seville, where she once again comes to the attention of Encarna. Encarna has a gift for her.
Blancanieves is a contemporary silent film. The touchstones for this film are Browning, as I’ve said, but also Gance and the Soviets (who inspire the film's rapid-fire editing of flashback images, sometimes distilled down to one or two frames per cut), Murnau, Paul Leni, and even Rudolph Valentino, whose performance in Blood and Sand is all over the bullfighting scenes in this film. Blancanieves doesn't use these points of reference as in-jokes, though. Rather, it uses them as grammar. The whole field of silent techniques are open to it, and it embraces them.
This is a film that is more reliant on visual symbols than on text, of course, and it deploys them with malice and purpose: The apple with the skull glowing within it, Carmencita’s communion dress dyed black, the black mantilla that Encarna appropriates from Carmen at the end of the film, the demonic bull (appropriately named Satan), the great Gothic mansion, Carmencita’s mannishly short hair. This is a film that understands how to communicate without words. The performances, too, draw on the silents. This is a film where a hundred years of film acting is thrown over and emotions that might be internalized with, say, the method, are externalized so an audience can read them. Maribel Verdu is particularly good at this, but she gets to play the villain and has license to chew the scenery. She has a good face for a silent villainess: vulpine, predatory. Macarena Garcia and Sofia Oria have the role of Blancanieves as an adult and child respectively. The film doesn’t use her beauty as a plot point, but Garcia would certainly take the prize as fairest of them all had the films gone there. Her eyes are huge and filled with cinematic light. The androgyny of her character combined with the way her eyes are often lit suggest Falconetti’s performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Sofia Oria, by contrast, has a broader range to play. She goes from happy childhood to Dickensian misery and has to show it. Her horror at what Encarna does to Pepe is entirely convincing. It doesn’t hurt that she’s another in a long line of Spanish child actors placed into similar narratives, a lineage tracing back through Ivana Baquero (who also co-starred with Maribel Verdu) to Ana Torrent. I don’t think either of the performances as Carmencita/Blancanieves would fly in a sound film, but for a silent film, they’re perfect.
This is a film that’s in love with textures, both literally and figuratively. The first images it puts on the screen are the brocade and embroidered details of a matador’s uniform. The act of dressing the matador at the outset of the film is positively erotic. That it’s dressing Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and not a female character is the first hint that this is not exactly a heteronormative film but is rather one that sometimes subverts the male gaze. The film goes on to challenge gender roles when Carmencita grows up to encompass both of her parents’ occupations: flamenco dancer and matador. When she’s dressed as a matador, she cuts a striking genderqueer figure on the sand of the bullring. In this context, a crossdressing dwarf hardly seems out of place, so the movie gives us one. Aberrant sexuality informs the depiction of Encarna, too. This film makes explicit what has only been hinted at in most of the other depictions of wicked stepmothers: Encarna is a natural dominatrix, and her hatred for Carmencita is less about beauty (there is no concern about who is the fairest of them all) so much as it’s about control and power. Encarna’s lust for control and power is bottomless. Carmencita represents a challenge to her hegemony. She expresses this sexually, taking it out on her chauffeur who she makes into her dog (literally at one point). With Villalta himself she hardly has to bother, given that the bull has left him a quadriplegic. There’s a strong undercurrent of castration anxiety in this film between Villalta and the chauffeur, who are both unmanned by Encarna.
This is a fairly sophisticated revision of Los Hermanos Grimm. The familiarity of the Snow White story to film audiences weaned on Disney’s version works to the filmmakers’ advantage, because they change things in very surprising ways. The huntsman, for instance, goes through with the murder of Snow White (or thinks he does). There is no magic mirror. The evil queen isn’t the only villain of the piece (see also the sinister bullfight promoter, whose contract with Blancanieves has a whiff of brimstone about it). One of the dwarfs, jealous of Blancanieves, betrays her. Prince Charming has been conflated with one of the dwarfs. This last might be the film’s most subversive conceit…well, that and the way the film ends. In all, this is a film that’s both familiar and exotic. It hits expected story beats in unexpected ways. The end is devastating. The final image pushes this film out of the realm of the Grimms and into the realm of Goya by way of Tod Browning’s grotesque, in which the world is a carnival, viewed through a glass, darkly. There is no “love’s first kiss” in this movie. Snow White finds her way into a glass coffin, sure, but she’s there for good, to be exploited, just as she was exploited in life. Oh, Prince Charming eventually gives her a kiss, but that kiss elicits no life from her, only one solitary tear. The last image of this film is a gut punch, because suddenly we’re not in a fairy tale at all. Rather, we are in a horror movie. This sequence is foreshadowed in the scenes after Villalta has died, when Encarna props him up in full matador drag and invites people to take pictures with his corpse. After all the gawkers have left, a disconsolate Carmen takes her own picture with her father. There's a commentary on fame in this sequence, and on the ghastly, carrion nature of the industries that feed it. There's also something haunting about the way Carmen tries to drape her father's arm over her shoulders. This is replayed at the end, when its her in her glass coffin and when it's Rafita, who originally found her in the stream, who clings to her lifeless body. It's a haunting image. It’s a dark and bittersweet aftertaste that lingers long after the credits roll." -- Christianne Benedict
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