I started to write a disclaimer/ introduction to my 2013 Best Of…, but on looking at my annual round-up from last year, I realized that I was saying almost exactly the same thing I’d already said. So enough with the preliminaries: let’s get a-listin’. Rather than my traditional pile of undifferentiated titles arranged in alphabetical order, I’ve gone with a queerly arranged bracket system this year. Films that I have written about in one place or another are accompanied by appropriate links.
To get the ball rolling, may I introduce a string of I-don’t-know-how-many Movies That I Would Watch Again and Will Probably Think About in 2014:
Apres Mai a/k/a Something in the Air (Reviewed in The Village Voice)
At Berkeley
Berberian Sound Studio
The Bling Ring
Blue Jasmine (Reviewed in Sight & Sound)
Gravity (Discussed in Bombast #113)
The Great Gatsby (Reviewed in Sight & Sound)
I Used to Be Darker
It Felt Like Love
The Last Time I Saw Macao
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
Lee Daniels’ The Butler
Nebraska
Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear
Pain & Gain (Reviewed in Sight & Sound)
Parker (Reviewed in The Village Voice)
Passion (Reviewed in The Village Voice)
The Spectacular Now
Sun Don’t Shine
The Unspeakable Act
These Birds Walk
A Touch of Sin
Viola
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
The Wind Rises
The World’s End
Zero Charisma
Next up, what I’ll call the top-tier Top Ten, which is comprised of films that at this particular moment I feel somewhat more profoundly stirred by than those in the last batch:
Bastards (My interview with Claire Denis for Film Comment)
The Canyons (Reviewed at Reverse Shot)
The Grandmaster (Reviewed at Moving Image Source)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Reviewed in Bombast #119)
Leviathan (Reviewed in Sight & Sound)
Like Someone in Love
Museum Hours
Paradise: Love (Reviewed at Reverse Shot)
Prince Avalanche
The Wolf of Wall Street (Reviewed in Sight & Sound, discussed in Bombast #122)
And, finally, a drumroll followed by sad trombone for my unequivocal, unsurprising number one:
To the Wonder (Reviewed in Sight & Sound)
I’d be remiss not to add a few words about the short film, a form with its own noble history and freestanding aesthetic integrity that nevertheless seems consistently to get lost in the year-end shuffle. Contrary to popular opinion, the short film isn’t just a training ground on which to work your way towards eventually graduating to feature directing—in fact a few features which have landed on many Best Of… lists are short ideas stretched beyond their natural length, to the point of snapping. As Michael Koresky notes in Reverse Shot’s annual year-end “Two Cents” roundup, one such movie is Spike Jonze’s Her. I can think of no other filmmaker whose serious, ambitious work is as consistently less interesting than his trifles. The skate tapes, the music videos, the delightful short documentary Amarillo by Morning, and of course the Jackass collaborations, including this year’s Bad Grandpa, which was officially credited to Jeff Tremaine. As for another skaterat-turned-filmmaker, Harmony Korine, nothing he’s done since Kids has inspired me to believe that his ideas are worthy of their feature-length running times, and the sniggery Spring Breakers—another hypertrophied short—is no exception.
Spring Breakers aside, some of the most consistently exciting work that I saw this year was produced in the state of Florida. I’m talking about the output of Miami’s Borscht Mfg Corp., a loose collective of web culture savvy filmmakers who work principally but not exclusively in the short format. Captained by Lucas Levya and Jillian Mayer, Borscht Corp.’s noteworthy output this year included Levya and Mayer’s own #Postmodem, Bleeding Palm’s The Adventures of Chris Bosh in the Multiverse, Nick Corirossi’s Miami 1996, and Si nos dejan by Celia Rowlson-Hall, who I wrote about this year, and whose proposed silent feature MA recently achieved complete funding via Kickstarter.
Outside of this clique, I was happy to be reminded of Sergio Oksman’s A Story for the Modlins, which made quite an impression on me when I saw it at the True/False Festival in Columbia, Missouri, and which was awarded Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Shot Filmmaking at this week’s Cinema Eye Honors. A work of speculative documentary, the film’s raw material is a collection of artifacts, the belongings of an expatriate American family, found discarded on a street corner in Madrid. The family’s patriarch, Elmer Modlin, was an unsuccessful actor whose claim to fame was a bit role in Rosemary’s Baby, and leaping off from this fact things only get curiouser and curiouser, as Oksman speculates on the closed-off, incestuous world which these artifacts offer glimpses of. Another “hybrid” work that left its mark was Mati Diop’s raggedly gorgeous Mille Soleils, rightly recognized in the quarterly journal La Furia Umana’s own Top Ten poll for the year. Mille Soleils follows one Magaye Niang around Dakar during the lead-up and aftermath to a screening of a film in which he’d starred forty years ago, Touki Bouki, made by Diop’s late uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty. (Were I to go about listing the year’s noteworthy home theater releases, the appearance of Touki Bouki as part of Criterion’s Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project would be a no-brainer.) I saw Mille Soleil in a program at the Museum of the Moving Image curated by FIDMarseilles festival director Jean-Pierre Rehm, a program that included Benjamin Tiven’s beguiling visit to a state film and television archive in Nairobi, A Third Version of the Imaginary. Tiven’s film also screened at this year’s Migrating Forms, which is always an invaluable showcase for short work, this year highlighted by Ed Atkins’ dolorous Even Pricks and Ian Cheng’s vexing, anxious animation bbrraattss.
An earlier iteration of Cheng’s short was as a music video for The Liars—which speaks to how narrow the gap is between short and music video, its even-less-esteemed cousin. Or should I say formerly less esteemed? For even that hegemony seems to be collapsing, and practically everyone last year could agree that the interactive video to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” was fascinating, if only as a sobering study in cultural/ historical contrast. In the main, however, my music video interests in 2013 gravitated towards the homemade/lo-fi/willfully-shabby: Taiyo Kimura’s video for Superchunk’s “Staying Home,” Dent de Cuir’s for Neosignal’s “Planet Online,” Hiro Murai’s for Earl Sweatshirt’s “Hive,” or Dean Blunt’s self-directed video for his “Felony/ Stalker” 7,” to give some examples. Perhaps it’s because I spent an unusual amount of time on the Internet last year, but music videos seemed more culturally central than in any time since the monocultural days of yore when we waited around our cave fires for the simulcast premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video. This is because the form lends itself to instant meme-ability: The artist sprinkles a breadcrumb trail of signifiers across the video, the exegesis of these provides the chattering classes fuel to stoke the content mills for a couple of days, and in turn the artist gets to be, if only temporarily, talk of the town. Last year we were socially mandated to manufacture opinions on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” Lily Allen’s “Hard Out There for a Bitch,” Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” and, most recently, Kanye West’s “Bound 2.” The latter inspired the identifiable low-point of the year in popular culture, Seth Rogen and James Franco’s shot-by-shot fauxmoerotic remake “Bound 3,” from The Guys Who Brought You celebrity as an inside joke that exists only to perpetuate itself i.e. their summertime offering This is the End. (Never one to resist a ducks-in-a-barrel either/or comparison, I’ll say that Edgar Wright, Nick Frost, and Simon Pegg’s The World’s End was a cool, human antidote to Rogen & Co.’s bro-solipsism.)
Talking of either/or: There’s no word of what the currently-embattled Armond White, an early advocate of the music video form, thought of either “Bound 2” or “3,” though we know by virtue of his annual “Better-Than” list that he preferred Kanye’s “New Slaves”—presumably the video which was projected onto the sides of hundreds of buildings worldwide, including the 5th Ave. Prada store—to its identified natural enemy, Inside Llewyn Davis. I finally caved in to Kanye in 2013, thanks in large part to a friend explaining that Yeezus was secretly a Chicago Industrial/Goth album in disguise. And while on the subject of music, should there be some very strange person out there who would like to know what new albums/songs I listened to and enjoyed last year, the list is as follows: A$AP Ferg Trap Lord, BLKHRTS Death, Romance, and the Color BLK, Dean Blunt The Redeemer, Broadcast Berbarian Sound Studio OST, Burial Rival Dealer EP, CFCF Outside, Eluvium Nightmare Ending, Eminem “Rap God,” Marnie Stern The Chronicles of Marnia, No Age An Object, Oozing Wound Retrash, Pet Shop Boys Electric, Pity Sex Feast of Love, Polvo Siberia, Power Trip Manifest Decimation, Pure X Crawling Up the Stairs, Rich Homie Quan “Type of Way,” Run the Jewels s/t, Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City, Yellow River Boys “Hot Piss.”
The last-named appears on Urinal St. Station, an entire album of songs on the subject of drinking piss, written and performed by Tim Heidecker of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! This concept–not to speak of going to the trouble to pull it off in convincing ’70s FM gold style–strikes me as hilarious, which should be some indicator as to where my sense of humor lies. (Indicates nearby festering gutter.) As for the previous year in low comedy, I had been more eager for Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, but it’s actually Movie 43 whose pungency no dry cleaner seems able to remove; given some generous trimming, it might’ve been a classic of the omnibus form. And though I’m susceptible to straight-no-chaser genre fare, aside from a few bright spots, the pickings were pretty slim among wide-release American movies. The Purge came packing as good an original premise as any seen in years, but was vitiated by replaying the same scene interminably: Character is cornered, on the verge of being exterminated… and at the very last minute the potential killer is dispatched by a deus ex machina rescuer. Of this year’s Ethan Hawke vehicles, though, I’ll confess that I slightly preferred The Purge to his third turn in a certain beloved Two for the Road duet, the trilogy-completing Before Midnight.
We change and movies change with us. I couldn’t abide Before Sunrise the first time I saw it, then subsequent viewings mellowed this into grudging recognition and deep affection. So perhaps I will yet someday heed the chimes of Midnight, though it would take nothing short of a massive blunt trauma to the skull resulting in the radical alteration of my entire personality to make me see the light on American Hustle, Computer Chess, Her, or Upstream Color, with its particularly galling attitude towards performers, exchanging Hitchcock’s apocryphal “actors are cattle” for “actors are swine.” The latter two seem to have achieved great emotional resonance with a number of my esteemed peers–as well as several whom I loathe–and this is something that I must respect even as I in no way understand it. For my money, the gutpunch of the year was delivered by David Gordon Green’s morosely funny, bitterly familiar Prince Avalanche, and its image of Paul Rudd performing a “Hi, honey, I’m home” pantomime inside the burned-out shell of a house is one that refuses to leave me.
Writing “I think” and “I feel” makes for unnecessary clutter, but the fact that I don’t prefix sentences thusly doesn’t mean that I suffer from the illusion that my opinions are universal truths handed down from on high. Even when lustily wielding my flaming sword of dismissive disdain, I’m always bedeviled by a niggling sense that it’s me who’s failed the movies, rather than the movies that have failed me. Certainly the circumstances of viewing can color one’s reception: Maybe I shouldn’t have watched Johnnie To’s Drug War sandwiched between re-viewings of King of New York and On Dangerous Ground, in whose company it looked decidedly like a bagatelle? Such are the perils of comparison—though certainly any one of the abovementioned non-starters might look like a masterpiece if viewed in close proximity to, say, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, which is an indefensible, racist pile of offal. (This is an actual universal truth.)
I am still sorting through the output of 2013, and will be doing so for weeks to come—this page will change accordingly as I catch up with any certifiable revelations. I have seen enough, though, to call this an unusually strong year for movies, strong enough at least to justify not pulling the plug on the long-rumored-terminal medium for another twelvemonth. On a personal note, I’ve never enjoyed working as a critic even marginally as much as I did over this last year, and this was in large part thanks to the kind acts and words that many people have graced me with, and the many good people I had the pleasure of meeting in 2013. This includes a number of people from outside of the film world who, upon learning what it is that I do, are usually, most unexpectedly, very excited. It’s a dirty little secret that the decline of film journalism, though widely attributed to popular indifference, is in large part the wishful thinking of studio scalawags and advertisers who should like nothing more than to be able to dump product onto the public without any uncooperative interference. I am sure that the blackguards will continue to do their best in 2014, and I will endeavor to do the same.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.
