2013: First Quarter

Time flies quickly.  We're already a quarter into 2013 and it feels like it just begun.  While the first couple of months of the cinematic year are clearly focused by the craziness and nonsense of the awards mania, movies did in fact come out.  While typically a dumping ground for inferior product and whatsits, I thought I'd pontificate.

Here's the "best" of the new year in terms of popularity, which means dollars and cents:

1. Oz: The Great & Powerful- $200.2
2. Identity Thief- $130.0
3. The Croods- $93.8
4. Mama- $71.5
5. Safe Heaven- $69.8
6. A Good Day to Die Hard- $66.5
7. Warm Bodies- $65.2
8. Jack the Giant Slayer- $61.5
9. Olympus Has Fallen- $56.5
10. G.I. Joe: Retaliation- $55.5

How about that?  The narrative this year so far has been focused on the downward stats on attendance and dollars earned.  A nod I have a particular distaste for as money should have nothing to do with the overall conversation of cinema.  That being said, 2013 thus far has been a waiting game for all.  Waiting, not just for a film to spark and engulf us into the joys of filmmaking, but also for the next big thing-- Oz: The So-So and Kinda Sexist changed the latter, to the mercy of executives and shareholders around the world...God bless!  Just to purge, the international box office paints a different picture; here's the top ten worldwide moneymakers of the 2013 so far:

1. Oz: The Great & Powerful- $414.2
2. A Good Day to Die Hard- $295.6
3. The Croods- $242.7
4. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters- $216.4
5. Jack the Giant Slayer- $158.0
6. Identity Thief- $146.7
7. G.I. Joe: Retaliation- $135.9
8. Mama- $127.0
9. Warm Bodies- $104.5
10. Gangster Squad- $99.2

Eight out of ten films overlap, but perceives failures Jack the Giant Slayer, Gangster Squad and A Good Day to Die Hard don't quite seem quite that overall.  Meanwhile, the Hansel & Gretel sequel is a real thing now, so thank you international audiences for that.

The top ten per-screen averages of 2013:

1. Spring Breakers- $87,667
2. The Place Beyond the Pines- $69,864
3. Somebody Up There Likes Me- $34,362
4. From Up on Poppy Hill- $28,793
5. Quartet- $23,561
6. Stoker- $22,935
7. 56 Up- %22,088
8. Gimme the Loot- $21,065
9. The Gatekeepers- $20,517
10. Oz: The Great & Powerful- $20,223

Moral of the story is that 2013 has been James Franco's world; the rest of us are just living in it.

Enough with the numbers game!  It's about the quality dammit. And while 2013 has been so far, as previously mentioned, a few months of the waiting game, there have been a few things to pay attention too.  Here's my take:

Honorable mentions:  Stoker and The Place Beyond the Pines aren't quite films that work for me as a whole, but they are worthy auteural installments of the collections of their filmmakers,  Chan-wook Park and Derek Cianfrance.  Both have lovely visual touches and are worthy argumentative pieces of film.  Also of note are two films that had blink and you miss them 2012 Oscar qualifying releases that were shafted aside into early spring 2013 by tentative indie studios clearly mismanaging their properties-- On the Road and Ginger & Rosa.  Again neither film is perfect, but both have indelible performances worthy of discussion and foaming at the mouth.  On the Road features a hopefully star-making turn by Garrett Hedlund and Ginger & Rosa has a worthy one for Elle Fanning.  Both of them deserve better-- casting directors take notice.  Warm Bodies, a surprise box office hit was a quiet charmer as well, even though it clearly follows the strident Twilight mold.

The real deals:

4) Beautiful Creatures- Speaking of a film that follows the strident Twilight formula, Beautiful Creatures reversed roles of teenage witch and mortal falling in love in a fried green tomato backdrop.  It shouldn't have worked and well, audiences didn't go for it, which in a way may be an outside complement for a film that's smarter, funnier and fresher than it really has any right to be.  Director Richard LaGravenese brought a literary sense to this tweener, but also had a top drawer cast in Alice Englart (also a find in Ginger & Rosa) and Alden Ehrenreich (both refreshing newcomers), and able support in Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum, Eileen Atkins, Margo Martindale, and most wondrous of all, Emma Thompson.  The mix of tones and acting styles, a gentle mix of earnest and camp made this a delightful surprise.  Terribly marketed by an unsure Warner Bros. seemingly desperate to brand this as something it wasn't quite, it's worthy of a look and a cult when it comes out on Blue-Ray.  Review here.

3) Side Effects- Steven Soderbergh's alleged swan song from the cinema was a lean, nervy potboiler.  Perhaps a film that could have been done in his sleep, it matters not.  Review here.

2) No- The most artful film thus far of 2013 was actually a Foreign Language Oscar nominee this year, and dare I say it (shameful I'm aware), I feel it might actually be better the winner.  Review here.

1) Room 237- The most refreshing and entertaining celebration of film geekery, perhaps of all time.  The Shining was one messed up movie.  Review here.

OSCAR-Y?

Anything coming out so far have any awards potential?

Well, Oz: The So-So & Kinda Sexist will have an outside shot at effects awards, but the nature of the blockbuster contingent can be hard to predict as we're not quite sure what the rest of the year will hold.  Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton's ugly revisionist tale did well with the Academy and Oz was clearly made in the same mold, so Production Design seems a near given, but who really knows.  Stoker and The Place Beyond the Pines will have its critical champions and are worthy perhaps of some plaudits, but since neither will likely be audience favorites nor money makers, the Oscars aren't probable.  Aside from that James Franco has an bonafide Indie Spirit nod in the making for Spring Breakers.  That's all folks.

Room 237

Obsessing about movies is healthy.  I hope so at the very least.  But then there are some who take this natural and quite healthy obsession into uncharted territories.  Room 237, a playfully insane rumination of the hidden codes and agendas of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, goes well and above the realm of uncharted obsessiveness.  It's easy to get hooked, especially coupled with the sparsest of backstory of the famed auteur and his storied reputation.  Kubrick was a stylist, innovator and a meticulous showman whose exacting visual prowess pervades all of his work-- there could never for once be something in his films that was a mistake, right?  And on the surface of things, The Shining was his most linear work-- an adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller starring Jack Nicholson-- made and financed with the pretense of mainstream accessibility a few years after Kubrick threw everything to the wall for the ambitious, if lowly attended, period drama Barry Lyndon.  One piece of commentary that Room 237 articulates with clarity and verve is a sense that perhaps Kubrick was drained, or furthermore, even bored with filmmaking as he approached The Shining, and he just wanted to make the whole thing more interesting for himself.  And theories abound as to how we are supposed to read the whole damn thing.

It's interesting to note that The Shining, now regarded as a modern horror classic, received very mixed. if not down right, bad notes upon its release-- it even received two Razzie Nominations in their inaugural year including one for, shutter to think, Worst Director.  The puzzle and mystery of The Shining, an obsessive-worthy film if ever there was one, is that on most respects, the film isn't exactly scary, but an endlessly fascinating and utterly loopy labyrinth of a picture that twists itself in so many directions that had it not been so endlessly fascinating, likely would have completely fallen astray.  Stephen King was famously not pleased with the adaptation, which fair to say shares only the barest backbone of the novel.  Room 237 as a documentary is intended mostly as a lark, I assume.  Director Rodney Ascher assembles a rotation of talking heads who decipher and read the hidden clues and meanings of the film, but those heads are never seen.  It's all voice-over as segments of The Shining are played (usually ultra-slow, frame by frame); it plays like a warped and thoroughly entertaining, conspiracy theory-laden special episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  It doesn't much matter that the commentators themselves feel mostly anonymous, the film powerfully plays to a cinema-obsessed cult of geeks and weirdos whose impression is left as nerds freeze framing their well worn VCR cassettes in their parents basements.

What's fascinating is what they come up with.  Kubrick, allegedly, took a great interest in the visual cues of suggestion that were commonly used by advertisers in the late seventies and early eighties, which may have signaled playful gags and setups of subliminal messaging.  Something like this certainly feels valid when you consider the mastery filmmaker at work, often for years at a time.  Every motif, hung piece of art work, color scheme, character movement must have been exactly choreographed.  Right on...I'm on board that Stuart Ullman walks in front of his desk to greet Jack Torrance and an exactly positioned paper weight on his desk gives the impression that he has a hard-on.  Well played.  The trick and thrill and allure of Room 237 is the way it sucks you in on the onset, just as the madness ups the ante.

Perhaps The Shining really was a grand metaphor for the genocide of the Native Americans, or a pointed commentary of the Holocaust (a subject that Kubrick apparently wanted to tackle as a subject for a film dead-on, but never did.)  Or best of all, and this where the full-tilt warped mechanics of Room 237 go all in, is the theory that The Shining was Kubrick's apologia for staging the moon landing.  It's the sort of conspiracy theorist gone batshit, aha moment that makes for grand entertainment.  The trick and further allure of Room 237 is that the arguments are compelling and crazy enough that you turn your head and buy into it, just for the quick quivering moment you might start to think...could this all really be true?

Of course, rational sense comes back shortly thereafter, but that's it's trick, it's odd Kubrickian Da Vinci Code power-- an idea transfixing and out-of-this-world enough that it can tease your senses into accepting it as reality.  Some of the commentators in Room 237 may well be certifiable, but that it's so easy to accept their seductive theories makes a case in the hopeful evolved status of film geekdom.  For one thing that is an absolute certain after an experience like Room 237-- The Shining is a nutty movie...it makes no sense and it is almost a necessity to bring whatever you would like to the table as there isn't quite a wrong answer.  And while many of its peculiarities may well be simple continuity errors, or such mundane things like that, what would be the fun in that.  Room 237 is a nuthouse, funhouse celebration of cinema, and obsessive-worthy in its own right.  A

Room 237 is currently playing in New York and will expand throughout the coming weeks.  It is also available on VOD and iTunes.