Eyes Wide Open: 2013: The Year's 25 Greatest Movies (and 5 Worst)

By Chris Barsanti

Who has time to waste on a bad movie? In this quick and informative guide, critic Chris Barsanti ("Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to the Movies You Need to Know") runs down the 25 movies from 2013 you should seek out—and the 5 worst you should avoid at all costs. This guide to the year in movies also includes Best-Of lists, Honorable Mentions, and DVD reviews.

Inside you will find indelible dramas ("Gravity," "12 Years a Slave," "August: Osage County"), hilarious comedies ("Blue Jasmine," "Much Ado About Nothing," "This Is the End"), foreign films ("The Hunt," "War Witch"), idiosyncratic indies ("The Canyons," "Upstream Color"), and riveting documentaries ("Stories We Tell," "Let the Fire Burn"). "Eyes Wide Open: 2013" covers it all.

About the author:
Chris Barsanti is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, New York Film Critics Online, and the Online Film Critics Society. His opinions (negative, positive, indeterminate, indiscriminate, and frequently foolhardy) have been published in The Chicago Tribune, Playboy, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Film Racket , PopMatters, Film Journal International, Publishers Weekly, The Barnes & Noble Review, Kirkus Reviews, The Millions, The Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. He is the author of "Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to the Movies You Need to Know" (Adams Media) and the "Eyes Wide Open" film guide series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Barsanti
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310235085

Book preview

EYES WIDE OPEN: 2013

The Year’s 25 Greatest Movies

(and the 5 Worst)

by Chris Barsanti

Copyright 2014 Chris Barsanti

ISBN: 9781310235085

Smashwords Editions

Cover design by Scott Russo

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Note: Versions of many of the following reviews were previously published in Film Racket, Film Journal International, and PopMatters.

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For my parents

Many thanks to my readers and generous editors, including Kevin Lally, Cynthia Fuchs, Christopher Null, and Karen Zarker. Thanks also to Scott Russo for his incomparable design work. And thanks of course to Marya, without whose sharp eye this book would never have come together.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The Top 25 Films of 2013

Honorable Mentions

The 5 Worst Films of 2013

DVD Reviews

Yet More Lists

The Year’s Best Lines

About the Author

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INTRODUCTION

There is no easy uniting factor for the films of 2013, except perhaps one: it was a ridiculously fulfilling twelve months to be a moviegoer. That year-end critic’s chore, compiling a Best-Of list, often turns December into a brutal quest. You usually have to wade through a lot of muck to find those few diamonds. Like any other year, 2013 had its share of muck: disappointments and disasters from all over the spectrum. But it also had a sensationally surprising list of outstanding films that deserved a spot on anybody’s Best-Of list. It was such a good year, in fact, that some excellent films like Chan-wook Park’s whacked-out gothic Stoker—a fantastic viewing experience (if Hitchcock-ian creep and elegantly demented cinematography do it for you)—couldn’t even make the Honorable Mentions list that follows my Top 25.

Still, decisions must be made and lists winnowed. So in the pages that follow you will find my humbly submitted argument for the 25 greatest films that came to theaters in 2013. You will also find a shorter but in many ways easier to compile ranking of the year’s five worst films; they had plenty of company.

Besides the surplus of quality releases, 2013’s films had some other odd features. These ranged from the strange confluence of movies involving terrorists attacking the White House (Olympus Has Fallen, White House Down, G.I. Joe: Retaliation) to filmmakers wanting to put Saoirse Ronan in any movie about teenagers who’ve grown up too fast (The Host, How I Live Now, Violet and Daisy). A straight-up Disney musical based on a fairy tale (Frozen) conjured up more magic and awe than the year’s big Pixar film (Monsters University). Also, films about the apocalypse appear to have moved into their late, decadent phase, with comedies like This Is the End, It’s a Disaster, and The World’s End slinging satire at the people and things (yuppies, actors, generic pubs) that won’t be missed when everything falls apart. In the eager interest to cross-pollinate as many lucrative genres as possible, there was a teenage zombie romantic comedy of dubious achievement: Warm Bodies.

Dystopia multiplied on screens like a zombie horde, from the totalitarian regime in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire to the undead apocalypse of World War Z and possibly the first dystopic action film ever in which the drama hinges on access to healthcare (Elysium). There was some commentary embedded in these films, but the devastation of the world is played more for escapism; though at least The Hunger Games made a decent stab at linking the dictatorship’s Roman circus-like entertainments to today’s ubiquitous deadening and distracting reality-TV trash. Of course, that didn’t stop the studio from releasing a special line of CoverGirl tie-in cosmetics for those women who want to look just like the film’s Capitol dwellers who cheer enthusiastically as Hunger Games contestants are sent to their deaths.

Consumerism played a big role as well, for better and for worse. The Jazz Age excesses of Baz Luhrmann’s alternately infuriating and snooze-inducing The Great Gatsby adaptation were lavishly lingered over by a film that couldn’t be bothered to offer up a critique. Michael Bay’s vaguely truth-inspired Pain & Gain briefly pretended to be scandalized by the violent extremes its moron protagonists went to in order to achieve the American Dream (get rich as quick and easy as possible) but it couldn’t stop itself from reveling in the same sort of status-worship. On the other side of things, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring made a dreamy comedy out of tabloid-dazed California teens robbing celebrity houses to snatch all the brand-name trophies they were besotted with. (Though even here, Coppola’s critical eye is often more focused on the kids’ Juicy Couture tackiness; her films tend to prefer characters so comfortably wealthy they don’t need to strive for it, as in Lost in Translation or Somewhere).

Summer had the expected lineup of sequels, reboots, an Adam Sandler comedy, and more films about catastrophe and destruction. Hollywood seemed to be chasing its own tail in a frenzy of self-mimicry that was bound to result in catastrophe. Once you’ve broken most MPAA taboos and destroyed the world five ways to Sunday, what’s left to do? Damon Lindelof, who was involved in two of the summer’s emptier science-fiction epics (Star Trek Into Darkness and World War Z), admitted as much to New York magazine¹ in August when he said: Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie … I have to construct a MacGuffin based on if they shut off this, or they close this portal, or they deactivate this bomb, or they come up with this cure, it will save the world—you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. Indeed.

In what was essentially his farewell to cinema, Steve Soderbergh alluded to this kind of creative exhaustion in his widely-commented-on state of cinema talk² at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Soderbergh noted the disturbing and long-gestating problem of studio heads and producers caring even less about movies as an art form: You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make. Soderbergh described his panicked reaction to sitting next to a man on a plane who had loaded several action movies onto his iPad and flipped past all the narrative to create five and a half hours of just mayhem porn. It’s hard to find a better analogy for what can pass as summertime blockbusters these days. Soderbergh no longer plans to make movies for theatrical release.

It’s an understandable reaction since one of the year’s best films was his Behind the Candelabra, the comically bleak epic of excess about Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his younger partner Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), which couldn’t get a theatrical release and had to premiere on HBO. Soderbergh’s now concentrating on television, which seems more open to his kind of popular but nuanced artistry. In a University of Southern California panel discussion, blockbuster innovators Steven Spielberg and George Lucas³ (both smarting from how hard it was to get films like Lincoln and Red Tails made even with their names attached) warned that Hollywood was overdosing on quarter-billion-dollar destruct-a-thons that could eventually implode the entire system. Spielberg noted that You're at the point right now where a studio would rather invest $250 million in one film for a real shot at the brass ring than make a whole bunch of really interesting, deeply personal—and even maybe historical—projects that may get lost in the shuffle. Lucas opined that better filmmakers would simply migrate to television, as Soderbergh did.

Yet despite all the mayhem porn and the studios’ bottom-line-obsessed perpetuators of the same-old same-old, the summer ended up being very far a complete write-off. The Wolverine and Iron Man 3 were perfectly enjoyable comic-book adventures. They focused more on characters and clever writing than on the big splashy effects needed to ensure they could open on thousands of screens simultaneously and command marketing budgets that could feed a small Third World nation for a month. The high-concept raunch comedy continued, for better (The Heat, at least the scenes where the genius Melissa McCarthy was let loose to improvise) and worse (We’re the Millers, far too impressed with its facility for swearing).

Thought-provoking narrative films and dramatic documentaries just kept coming. Week after week they scuttled around the big releases like those scrappy mammals that