Best Films of 2013, Part One: Outlaws and Lost Souls

Look at me. Look at me. I’m the captain now.

Captain Phillips

The Best Films of 2013 - Introduction and Runners-Up

Picking the best movies of the year is always a difficult affair. Well, picking the best movie, singular, isn’t so bad, or even the best handful, but beyond that? Top ten lists can be kind of painful. Because, really, if you’ve seen enough films to care about listing the ten best, there are so many you’ll leave off. There’s also the weird sense of obligation to making a statement like this – you need to try to pick the right films, or at the very least avoid picking the wrong ones, or at least that’s the impression you could get. Unless you’ve managed to do a real bang-up job of isolating yourself from mass opinions, this is going to factor in somehow. Maybe you bumped off a stranger, more personal choice from your top ten to make room for some widely-admired, sophisticated bit of cinema that you could respect even if you didn’t really love it. And if you do that, the whole process becomes constrained and impersonal – it just becomes a list of ten “important” or “must-see” films of the year. That’s not what I’m trying to do here. I want to name the films that I thought the most of this year, somewhere between the films I thought were well-crafted and the ones that struck me personally. I can’t claim to be able to objectively rank films in order of artistic merit, but I can talk about this past year in cinema in terms of what seemed the most engaging, most interesting of the bunch. I will, however, need a few more slots than ten.

The 2014 Bergy Awards

What a wonderful year in the cinema we have had! It is so strange to think that it is already over. It seems as though it went so fast. It is so hard to nail down the deserving parties for a lot of these categories for many reasons, either a category that is beyond crowded (like Best Actor) or a film that could make the list but has not been widely available for general consumption (Short Term 12). These are not Oscar predictions for myself, but rather what I believe were the most worthy parties of the year, and I am giving out awards that I believe are deserved. I hope you enjoy my thoughts, and I encourage comments and thoughts. Regardless, all of these movies are worth seeing, and I hope you get a chance to explore the year in cinema! Go to a theatre! Get it on DVD or Blu-Ray! Just make sure you take advantage and support all the wonderful work being done in the cinema!

The Bergy Lifetime Achievement Award this year goes to Peter O'Toole. God rest his soul, and may "Lawrence" [one half of the blog's namesake] be forever remembered for his amazing contributions to cinema. "Lawrence" will always hold a very, very special place in my heart.

Best Picture

12 Years a Slave
Frances Ha
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Mud

The 2014 Gutty Awards

2013 has been exciting. I remarked last year that 2012 was one of the best years for film in a while, and it was, but 2013 was certainly more interesting. This has been a year of an abundance of artful black and white, a noteworthy amount of impressive visuals, more films than expected about the poisons of greed and extravagance, usually starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and at least two otherwise unrelated films being described by several different critics with the exact phrase "neon-soaked nightmare." This year I have nominated twenty-two different films in twelve categories (three more films than last year!), and even then, I had to make a few painful omissions (my apologies in advance to Jared Leto).

But anyway. Here are the nominations for the 2nd annual Gutty Awards:

Best Picture

12 Years a Slave
All Is Lost
Frances Ha
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis

The Essentials: Casablanca

Title: Casablanca
Run Time: 102 minutes
Release Date: November 26th 1942 (premiere), January 23rd 1943 (general release)
Director: Michael Curtiz
Writer(s): Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, and Casey Robinson (uncredited)
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, AND Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, AND Dooley Wilson as 'Sam'

"Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of Casablanca is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans."
~ Roger Ebert

Three Reviews - Side Effects, Spring Breakers, and The Place Beyond the Pines

Hey, it’s been a while.

Last time we checked in, the Oscars had just blown past us, and I figured after a couple of months I’d check in. Q1 is, as a rule, something of a dead zone for cinema, so I haven’t seen many movies, but I don’t feel worse off for it. In fact, as of mid-April I’ve only seen three in theaters. I have some opinions on them, naturally. Read on after the jump.

The Essentials: Lawrence of Arabia

Title: Lawrence of Arabia
Run Time: 216 minutes (228 director's cut)
Release Date: December 16th, 1962
Director: David Lean
Writer: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson
Stars: Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, AND Omar Sharif as 'Ali' AND introducing Peter O'Toole as 'LAWRENCE'

I would be remiss if I did not allow my first voyage into exploring essential film to be the film that is in the name of the blog, and there is a reason for that.

"There was no other director like David Lean. His ability draw you into the intimate portraits of his characters, of people like T. E. Lawrence, was remarkable. Lawrence of Arabia is the definitive epic, unrivaled in its capacity to combine pageantry and intimacy, and is the perfect example of the gift that only Lean had. He was able to awe you with spectacle and at the same time move you with the poignancy of a small, personal struggle. Still to this day, the film is one of the primary influences on both my career and my interpretation of the human condition. It inspires me just as much now as it did when I first saw it in 1962."
~ Steven Spielberg

"When I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time - 1962, Manhattan, the Criterion - I remember the lights going down, the opening 70mm shots from the point of view of a speeding motorcycle, and the powerful sensation that I was about to experience something completely new in cinema. David Lean and Robert Bolt took the epic form and gave it completely new life - in essence, this was the first interior epic, in which every monumentally scaled vision corresponded to the inner world of a hugely ambitious and complex man. You're looking at the landscape of the desert, as you've never seen it before, but you're also entering the landscape of a grand spirit, whose flaws were as vast as his accomplishments and his dreams"
~ Martin Scorsese