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.

Side Effects

If true to word, than Side Effects may well be last feature film for the screen directed by Steven Soderbergh, and even more so, the immeasurably enjoyable film itself will likely fall to a mere footnote in his wealth of cinematic achievements.  The greatest asset of Soderbergh as a filmmaker, and one that's been amped in the past few years since those retirement rumors began, was always in that sense that he so easily could move on to something else and something quickly.  Trudging through a hot and cold career as one of American filmmaking top provocateurs by making a true blue Hollywood crowdpleaser (Erin Brockovich) just to follow it up mere months later with a bold, dense dissection of the drug war (Traffic), mixing big budget franchise for hire work (Ocean's Eleven) with experimental no-budget oddities (Bubble), traversing the less hallowed path of genuine journeyman.  And while some of his features left many a bit cold, perhaps made from the pure invention that someone could (Solaris, The Good German), but the saving grace was always that in a short time he would come out with something new, and something different, that while perhaps at times divisive still gave voice to a singular artist of the movie making language.  Whatever the case, the past two years of pre-retirement filmmaking may have to be considered one of the most rejuvenating periods in any filmmakers' period.  With Contagion, Haywire, Magic Mike and now, Side Effects, Soderbergh's has made a nervy and showy last call.  His latest may just be the best of the bunch-- a corker of thriller.

Stylish and immaculately staged-- lensed by Soderbergh himself, and as all of his films credited under the alias Peter Andrews-- Side Effects is a nervy, head-scratching reworking of the classic whodunnit with a gentle nod to cinema past, but not incidentally featuring a broader, more difficult to digest subject matter at its periphery.  Emily (Rooney Mara), a product, if any, of the Prozac Nation, is a angst-ridden Manhattan twenty-something.  She's battled depression before and things seem to taking a downward turn as her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum) is released from prison after a four year stint for insider trading.  One of the disarming and nearly comically asides of Side Effects comes directly from a culture that's all too aware and seemingly in the know of the ingredients for mind and soul improvement-- and the culture chic for antidepressants isn't exactly anything new, but it's still a bit strange that in the decades-plus, there really hasn't been a great movie to explore those effects candidly on screen before.  The fodder is endless-- from the countless television ads from the newest miracle aid to just idle conversation with friends and passersby-- the stigma is long gone and the pharmaceuticals are seemingly all the more richer because of it.

The simpler side of the story follows that as Emily's condition starts to worsen, she is prescribed a new wonder drug called Ablixa by her psychiatrist, Dr. Banks (Jude Law.)  At first all seems well, as the newly engaged Emily has more energy, a more vibrant sex drive but the drug has a nasty side effect in the form of sleepwalking.  One night, while doing so, Emily does something really awful; nasty tabloid-ready awful.  It's important, I feel, to stop there with plot elements, as the raw nervy pleasures of Side Effects are in the marvelous way in which it unravels, twists and turns and in the clever precision in which Soderbergh and scribe Scott Z. Burns (in his third outing with the filmmaker following The Informant and Contagion) begin Side Effects as a study of pharma morality and end it as a Body Heat-infused genre play sudser.  The delight comes in those turns, and the great pleasure of watching a master concoct a simple little ditty of suspense.  And even so in doing so, he asks his audience to swallow no small bit of absurdity-- most of which including Catherine Zeta-Jones' horny librarian take as a rival shrink-- yet the poker face of this not quite ripped from the headlines tale has that nearly alchemical way of tying it all together, dignity in tact.

It's a neat slight of hand that the film starts out as a deeper more unsettling morality play and settles as a fun house hall of mirrors.  For as Emily's crime-- again a really bad one-- becomes a played out plea for responsibility.  Is is Emily, the depressed young woman under the influence?  Or Dr. Banks, who like many in his field offer hope in a variety of pills forms?  Or the pharmaceutical industry who peddle brands into the mainstream?  Side Effects unnerves even more by introducing Dr. Banks as a professional with ties (and big time financial interests) with the drug peddlers, all of which becomes subverted as he becomes entangled in a classic case of Hitchcockian wrong man syndrome.  Law, for this effect, does a tremendous job in balancing out the moral judgements of his character by refusing judgements of his own.  There's a terrific scene midway through where Dr. Banks administers a truth serum to Emily that changes the veins of the film entirely, but that's held together-- almost a ludicrous degree-- by the fine caliber of the acting.

Of which Soderbergh has always been celebrated for getting layered and nuanced performances from the broadest range of actors-- be it porn stars, non-professionals, and true movie stars.  While else would actors forever clamor to be a part of his ensembles, no matter the part.  Side Effects is mostly a four character play, with Law and Mara at it's center, and both are unwaveringly good.  Mara, free of bombast and tattoos of The Girl of the Dragon Tattoo's trappings, displays that rare gift of fierce vulnerability, and proves even more so, the potential for auteurial muse-ship.  She makes grief and puzzlement palpable, both also seems to encapsulate an actor under wise tutelage, transcending mere hitting ones marks.  It's in her subtle hands that Side Effects keeps most of twists fresh and surprising as much as the cleverly deftness of the screenplay or the mastery of Soderbergh, whose crafted one of the least fussy and leanest Hollywood suspense thrillers since, well probably, Contagion.  

And so if this does end of being Soderbergh's grand finale from the silver screen, of course that would pretty much suck for less than gracious way of putting it, but that legacy that was cemented nearly twenty-five years ago when he helped pioneer the modern American independent film movement with sex, lies and videotape reared a career that maintained its edge, finesse and experimentalism.  Side Effects will never be remembered particularly as a great movie, but should have a lasting linger as being a part of the great Soderbergh canon of on-the-go cinema pleasures.  B+