2013: It's a Wrap

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2013: The Year in Coin

TOP 10 GROSSING FILMS OF 2013

1. Iron Man 3- $409.0
2. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire- $393.4
3. Despicable Me 2- $367.8
4. Man of Steel- $291.0
5. Frozen- $271.8
6. Monsters University- $268.4
7. Gravity- $254.5
8. Fast & Furious 6- $238.6
9. Oz: The Great & Powerful- $234.9
10. Star Trek Into Darkness- $228.7

Superheroes, sequels, re-boots, Katniss and one true work of art consist of the top-ten moneymakers of the 2013.  Was it a good year?  Too soon to tell, but with the exception of Gravity, all that's old is new again on terms of the demigods of 2013's box office.  Marvel is king, again.  DC hopes to catch up, and animation (despite a depressing year) had three solid mega-bucks earning blockbusters.

TOP 10 OPENING AVERAGES

1. Frozen- $243,390 (1 theater)
2. American Hustle- $123,409 (6 theaters)
3. Blue Jasmine- $102,011 (6 theaters)
4. Inside Llewyn Davis- $101,353 (4 theaters)
5. Spring Breakers- $87,667 (3 theaters)
6. The Place Beyond the Pines- $69,864 (4 theaters)
7. Enough Said- $58,200 (4 theaters)
8. Fruitvale Station- $55,184 (7 theaters)
9. Before Midnight- $49,383 (5 theaters)
10. The Spectacular Now- $49,354 (4 theaters)

Okay, so the top two are essentially cheats-- big films with immediate wide releases just teased for a short limited run to garner a headline or two, but the rest is an eclectic mix of high-end art house films, auteur-driven works and one trashy freak show (guess which is which!)

Edgar Wright's Top Ten of 2013

I love it when filmmakers make a personal top ten list.  Here's Edgar Wright's auteur-heavy top picks for 2013.  Whilst his Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are dear to my heart (I haven't seen The World's End yet, I know!), it was his Scott Pilgrim vs. the World that stole it, a top ten personal favorite of mine from 2010.  He was even gracious enough to add a corresponding video.

1. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
2. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
3. Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
4. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
5. Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh)
6. Short Term 12 (Destin Cretton)
7. The Spectacular Now (James Pondstadt)
8. Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve)
9. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)
10. Rush (Ron Howard)

Film Comment's Best of 2013

1. Inside Llewyn Davis- Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
2. 12 Years a Slave- Steve McQueen
3. Before Midnight- Richard Linklater
4. The Act of Killing- Joshua Oppenheimer
5. A Touch of Sin- Jia Zhang-ke
6. Leviathan- Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel
7. Gravity- Alfonso Cuarón
8. Computer Chess- Andrew Bujalski
9. Frances Ha- Noah Buambach
10. Upstream Color- Shane Carruth
11. Museum Hours- Jem Cohen
12. Blue is the Warmest Color- Abdellatif Kechiche
13. Bastards- Claire Denis
14. Spring Breakers- Harmony Korine
15. Like Someone in Love- Abbas Kiarostami
16. Stories We Tell- Sarah Polley
17. Her- Spike Jonze
18. Nebraska- Alexander Payne
19. American Hustle- David O. Russell
20. The Grandmaster- Wong Kar Wai
21. At Berkeley- Frederick Wiseman
22. Beyond the Hills- Christian Mungiu
23. No- Pablo Larraín
24. The Great Beauty- Paolo Sorrentino
25. Blue Jasmine- Woody Allen
26. All is Lost- J.C. Chandor
27. Post Tenebras Lux- Carlos Reygadas
28. Something in the Air- Olivier Assayas
29. Viola- Matías Pineiro
30. Fruitvale Station- Ryan Coogler
31. To the Wonder- Terrence Malick
32. Night Across the Street- Raúl Ruiz
33. Room 237- Rodney Ascher
34. Faust- Aleksandr Sokurov
35. Let the Fire Burn- Jason Osder
36. Le Pont du Nord- Jacques Rivette
37. The Wolf of Wall Street- Martin Scorsese
38. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet- Alain Resnais
39. The Last Time I Saw Macao- Joao Pedro Rodriguez
40. The Past- Asghar Farhadi
41. The Square- Jehane Noujaim
42. The Wind Rises- Hayao Miyazaki
43. Drug War- Johnnie To
44. Cousin Jules- Dominique Benicheti
45. Much Ado About Nothing- Joss Whedon
46. Passion- Brian De Palma
47. Short Term 12- Destin Daniel Cretton
48. Dallas Buyers Club- Jean-Marc Vallee
49. Berberian Sound Studio- Peter Strickland
50. Captain Phillips- Paul Greengrass

American Film Institute Best of 2013

 MOVIES:

• 12 Years a Slave
• American Hustle
• Captain Phillips
• Fruitvale Station
• Gravity
• Her
• Inside Llewyn Davis
• Nebraska
• Saving Mr. Banks
• The Wolf of Wall Street

TELEVISON:

• The Americans
• Breaking Bad
• Game of Thrones
• The Good Wife
• House of Cards
• Mad Men
• Masters of Sex
• Orange is New Black
• Scandal
• Veep  

John Waters' Top Ten of 2013

I love it when filmmakers make ten best lists.  I wish more did the same, it's a small window into the mind of the artist and an expression of filmmaker as fan. A little while back Quentin Tarantino made his list of the best of the year and now comes John Waters'.

1. Spring Breakers- directed by Harmony Korine
2. Camille Claudel 1915- directed by Bruno Dumont
3. Abuse of Weakness- directed by Catherine Breillat
4. Hors Satan- directed by Bruno Dumont
5. After Tiller- directed by Martha Shane & Lana Wilson
6. Hannah Arendt- directed by Margarethe von Trotta
7. Beyond the Hills- directed by Christian Mungiu
8. Blue Jasmine- directed by Woody Allen
9. Blackfish- directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite
10. I'm So Excited- directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Sight & Sound Top Ten of 2013

1. The Act of Killing- directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
2. Gravity- directed by Alfonso Cuarón
3. Blue is the Warmest Color- directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
4. The Great Beauty- directed by Paolo Sorrentino
5. Frances Ha- directed by Noah Baumbach
6. A Touch of Sin- directed by Zhangke Jia
7. Upstream Color- directed by Shane Carruth
8. The Selfish Giant- directed by Clio Barnard
9. Norte, The End of History- directed by Lav Diaz
10. Stranger by the Lake- directed by Alain Guiraudie

Cahiers du Cinéma's Top 10 of 2013

Promising a riskier top ten list than anyone else, the Cahiers du Cinéma have announced their picks for the best of the year.  This might be the only group brave enough to put some of friskiest (and in the cases of #1 and #3 the gay sexiest) films of the year in their top three.

The controversial French gay cruising drama Stranger by the Lake

1. Stranger by the Lake- directed b Alain Guiraudie 
2. Spring Breakers- directed by Harmony Korine 
3. Blue is the Warmest Color- directed by Abdellatif Kechiche 
4. Gravity- directed by Alfonso Cuarón 
5. A Touch of Sin- directed by Zhangke Jia 
6. Lincoln- directed by Steven Spielberg 
7. La Jalousie- directed by Philippe Garrel 
8. Nobody's Daughter Haewon- directed by Sang-soo Hong 
9. You & the Night- directed by Yann Gonzalez 
10. Age of Panic- directed by Justine Triet

Quentin Tarantino's Top 10 of 2013

It's only October, but auteur/personality Quentin Tarantino has unveiled his top ten of the year, or at least so far.  It's a very Tarantino-like list, but there's something to said for filmmakers who dole out their personal favorites and an enduring fascination to that.  A fun experiment for all prolific filmmakers, me thinks.

In alphabetical order:

• Afternoon Delight (Jill Soloway)
• Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
• Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
• The Conjuring (James Wan)
• Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg)
• Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
• Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
• Kick Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow)
• The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)
• This Is the End (Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogan)

Halftime

The first half of the year usually is devoid of Oscar-y titles-- typically a dumping ground for product and the hopeful launch of things big and shiny-- but nonetheless we are well behind the first six months of 2013 and a short time ahead of the fall festival circuit when things start getting wonky.  Are there any takeaways thus far that may have any impact on the 2013 Oscar race?

It's true that Best Picture winners and nominees typically are introduced in the latter part of the calendar year-- since 2000 only three eventual Best Picture winners were released in the first half (The Hurt Locker, Crash, Gladiator) and only a handful of nominees (Up, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Midnight in Paris, Moulin Rouge!, Erin Brockovich) have managed that feat.  Still at this stage of the game when all is mere speculation and all in the movie awards land still feels pure and innocent, it's fun to ponder the playful possibilities.

The only Best Pictures winners since 2000 to be released before July.

BEST PICTURE

Last year, the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance was a plucky bit of poetry called Beasts of the Southern Wild which managed the nearly unbelievable task of netting four Oscar nominations including Picture and Director-- it became just the third Sundance to Oscar translation in history following Precious (2009) and Winter's Bone (2010.)  This year Sundance bestowed its top prize (as well as the Audience Award) to Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler's feature debut about the 2009 BART shooting of Oscar Grant.  The Weinstein Company hopes magic strikes again for the well-received film.  It opened last week in limited release to one of the biggest per-screen averages of the year (third to only Spring Breakers and A Place Beyond the Pines) and may very well enter the zeitgeist due to the sense of urgency bestowed due to the Zimmerman verdict (also last weekend.)  The key, of course, will be the position the great Harvey puts the film in towards the end of the year (remember, he's got a lot of awards potential set to come at the end of the year including August: Osage County, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Philamena and Grace of Monaco.)

2013: Halfway Report

The first half of 2013 is completed.  What has it brought upon the cinematic landscape?  Here's the unscientific Musings and Stuff compendium on what the first half of the year has brought.  I've viewed 39 films thus far and here's my take.

BURN THE NEGATIVES / TRASH COMPACT THE DCPS
Here's the trashiest of the trashy of the first half of the years cinematic offerings. 

To the Wonder

21 and Over (review)
Gangster Squad (review)
A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (review)
A Good Day to Die Hard (review)
Identity Thief (review)
Iron Man 3 (review)
Movie 43 (review)
Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor (review)
To the Wonder (review) or "To the Pretentious Pits of Cinematic Hell"
Trance (review)
Upside Down- a forgettable and nearly pointless romantic science fiction art film featuring wan, bored performances by Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturges as star crossed lovers in an upstairs/downstairs parallel universe of the haves and have-nots.  As a tagline it might appear to be CW version of this summers upcoming Elysium.

10 Best Performances of 2013 (So Far)

We have arrived at the halfway point of 2013.  What has the cinema offered us so far?  In the first part of a multi-part retrospective, here are my favorite performances of the year so far.

Runners-up:  Benedict Cumberbatch, Star Trek Into Darkness; Henry Cavill, Man of Steel; James Franco, Spring Breakers; Mia Wasikowski, Stoker; Michael Cera, This Is the End

10) Ryan Gosling, The Place Beyond the Pines
Gosling and filmmaker Derek Cianfrance cobbled together some kind of alchemy in Blue Valentine in 2010 (with a little bit of help from Michelle Williams, in an Oscar-nominated performance.)  The sharpest instinct Cianfrance exhibited with his grander, messier follow-up work was reuniting with the resourceful Gosling.  In a film that ultimately bites off more than it's able to chew, the ingenious performer proves to be the best part of this ambitious triptych melodrama about fathers and sons and the overbearing consequences of ones past and upbringing.  Gosling's Luke is a rebel outcast in the mold of an old school antihero-- James Dean or Marlon Brando might have played this part had Place been made in the 1950s-- and yet despite the endless look of cool and mystique so fetishistically photographed by Cianfrance, Gosling shades his Robin Hood-like character with a brimming and soulful yearning.  Luke is the first part of The Place Beyond the Pines, and without spoiling anything, once he disappears, the film starts to crumble.

9) Mickey Sumner, Frances Ha
The ugly sting of nepotism rings a dampening effect to a budding young performer, a nearly contemptuous sneer at times.  However, sometimes a performance and film is so radiant and so effortlessly lived-in that in the private sanctuary of a movie palace, you can forget the entire world outside.  It needn't be necessary to know that Sumner is the offspring of Sting and Trudie Styler, and the film that surrounds her richly comic and well observed supporting turn, Frances Ha, is strong enough to make you forget nearly anything that ales.  As Sophie, Frances' BFF through the scary jungle of contemporary New York ennui, Sumner is sarcastic and ironic, sardonic, but also a lovesick dreamer.  To play such contradictory notes without ever falling into caricature is a testament to a hopefully inspired new artist; to turn them is something that's nearly moving is something even more special.

8) Jude Law, Side Effects
If Steven Soderbergh's retirement from the movies is in fact deemed true, at the very least, one can say, he went out with a hell of a year.  Surely, it will be HBO's Behind the Candelabra that will be the one to net the most trophies and esteemed hosannas, but his year began with the tight and delightfully warped little noir called Side Effects that just as effectively imbued all the skills that have complemented Soderbergh's career.  The first and most glaring compliment must be his work his actors, and in that regard, Jude Law's lithe and menacingly playful performance as slippery doctor who may or may not be being duped is worthy in it of itself of more acclaim than it will likely ever receive.  Law, it appears, may be on the upswing with surprisingly fruitful performances in not just Side Effects, but also last fall's anemic Anna Karenina, and his performance here is easily his most awake, alert and sharply keyed in than the actor has been since his career peak period that ascended in The Talented Mr. Ripley and swayed as Gigolo Joe in A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

7) Alden Ehrenreich, Beautiful Creatures
It was supposed to a silly little movie made in an attempt to cash in on the young adult star-crossed lovers/occult phase-- in short it was merely supposed to be a rip off of Twilight, and yet it somehow became 2013's most inexplicably ignored film critically and commercially.  Richard LaGravenese's Beautiful Creatures somehow, under some set of only-in-the-movies sort of magic is a gleefully underrated and joyous oddball of a movie about the teenage romance between a mortal boy and a witch.  Sounds pretty dull, but the writing, playful visuals and the potent performances that are sharp as a tick, but forever realizing what indeed this material really is make it one of the more pleasant surprises of the year.  Leading actor Alden Ehrenreich is perhaps the biggest surprise of all as the lovelorn Ethan Wade, a melding together of jock and nerd boy next door, he proves a charming leading man with a hopefully fruitful career ahead of him.  His performance here would blow Robert Pattinson and all the other mimics well away. 

6) Elle Fanning, Ginger & Rosa 
Elle Fanning, younger sister of Dakota, has for years been somewhat trapped in the doomed muse-like role for her leading men.  Sure, in films like Super 8 and Somewhere, Fanning had a captivating hold over the audience, but the characters themselves were used as little more than to serve her male co-stars.  Ginger & Rosa, a blink-and-you've-missed-it independent drama released this past spring gave Fanning the sharpest character she's yet to play, and the performer took to it with the natural precision of a gifted surgeon, even acquiring a believable British accent to boot.  As the rebellious young girl raised by a prim and conservative mother in the 1960s, Fanning shows incomparable diction and poise. 

5) Matthew McConaughey, Mud
Whatever happened in the last two years or so in the life of Matthew McConaughey, it was apparently and abundantly worth it.  For this sudden and startling period of productively in the career of the one-time nude-banjo-player is as surprising as any third act twist.  Mud, Jeff Nichols' follow-up to Take Shelter, made its inauspicious premiere at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and left the stew for nearly a year before making its way to American movie houses.  The surprise (or perhaps not after the year the performer has having) was McConaughey's richly nuanced and beatifically observed performances as the titular Mud, a fugitive forever dreaming for a better life with the troubled girl whom he loves.  Nichols' film takes a few missteps along the way, and concludes as an utterly contrived yarn, but McConaughey's steely gaze and reserve is unsettling, sympathetic and in sharp command.

4) Gael Garcia Bernal, No
The invaluable Bernal has made a wondrous journeyman career for himself working alongside filmmakers as varied and vibrant as Michel Gondry, Pedro Almodovar, Alfonso Cuaron, Walter Salles and Alejandro González Inárritu and yet imbuing a rich, quiet humanity carried over every genre and tone.  With Pablo Larraín's bold and enriching No, Bernal has clearly and authoritatively honed in on his gift for the title of leading man with the most humility and compassion for his projects and characters.  There's never a false note in the complex and beautifully engrossing performance, nor a stance for side-swipping showboating-- every tic, manner and line reading in the service of this most superior film and while his most compelling humanistic approach to his characters may never give this exceptional performer the awards or plaudits he richly deserves, it's a novel and engrossing detail that has made Bernal one of the finest actors of his generation.

3) Nicole Kidman, Stoker
Chan-wook Park's English-language debut was a mixed bag of a film, but the biggest and most reassuring highlight was the beaut and hoot and a half of the performance that Kidman delivered.  She spends the majority of the film sidelined in her own little chamber piece of play-- a sort of lost Tennessee Williams heroine, but in the final moments unleashes a giddy showcase of maternal hell that frankly the subdued hothouse of a chiller needed a bit more of.  Kidman's ravenous contempt and rage all quivers to the seems in a chilling last-minute monologue that gives the chameleon actress finally something to chew on, and settles the film with a tasty bit of naughtiness.

2) Elizabeth Debicki, The Great Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann's lurid and colorful retelling of The Great Gatsby was supposed to the ultimate cinematic staging for the doomed star-crossed lovers Jay and Daisy, played here by Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.  However it was newcomer Debicki as the supporting player Jordan Baker who ran away with the best in show honors, not because Luhrmann showcased or particularly upped the impact of the role, but because Debicki brought a stylized charm and grace to the one-note acting proceedings, adding notes and abundant flair to her side-lined character.

1) Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha
My favorite film so far in 2013 also featured my favorite performance from the year so far, a caveat I'm fairly certain isn't going to change much come six months from now.  The two are most certainly connected as Gerwig is Frances and Frances is Gerwig, a wonderful melding of actor and character and character and film.  With this, it brings a bit of sadness that Gerwig is likely unlikely not going to a favorite for a leading actress Oscar nomination come winter, and may even be but a longshot for the Indie Spirits, but in my book her joyous, witty and beguilingly profound creation is worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize for its brute honesty and natural joie de vivre.

What are your favorite performances from the first six months of 2013?