With the Oscars a week away, I didn’t want to put off posting this any longer. This should be a fun list as this has been, in my opinion, the strongest year for new movies in about five years.
The order I come up with is fairly arbitrary. I keep a running list throughout the year and just plug in each new, worthy movie in where it feels like it fits compared to the others. I tend to do very little tweaking to a film’s initial placement.
First let me run through my honorable mentions, most of which would have easily made the top ten in previous years. All is Lost features Robert Redford with virtually no other actors and virtually no spoken dialogue the entire time as he fights to stay alive at sea while everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. It can be a bit tedious – we’re just watching Redford sailing and not talking, but it’s still pretty poignant. Also on the ocean is Captain Phillips. I’ll be curious to see how this is viewed once it can be seen without knowing how it’s going to end (as it’s based on a true story). As it is, while very well done, it’s largely forgettable outside of Tom Hanks’s final scene and Oscar nominated Barkhad Abdi as the leader of a band of Somali pirates. Enough Said is James Gandolfini’s final role and well worth the watch even if it’s a fairly standard romantic comedy/drama. Frances Ha is probably the most unique movie in my honorable mentions. It’s about a young woman trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to make a living in New York. It’s real and awkward and fun with plot as a distance second to just examining her character. Fruitvale Station is another story taken from the headlines and takes an interesting approach. It starts with the actual cell phone footage of a young man shot by police at an Oakland train station, then portrays his final day leading up to it. It does a great job of not turning him into either a hero or a villain, just a flawed, young man trying to make his way who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had Nebraska at number 11 and it probably should have made my top 10. It’s quirky and original and finds the humor in the mundane. But, the acting outside of the main characters just seemed like they hired locals instead of actors… and not in a good way. The Spectacular Now is probably similar to Enough Said in that it’s not particularly special or memorable weeks after watching it, but it’s a well-made high school drama/romance with interesting characters. Star Trek Into Darkness is the movie that kept me watching movies late into the award season. It was sitting at number 10 for the longest time for me and while I enjoyed it as a high-quality, very entertaining popcorn kinda movie, I realized months later I couldn’t really remember much about it. Finally, The Wolf of Wall Street is the current best picture nominee I most disagree with but still have to give it some respect. It was very entertaining and memorable, but its lack of a tight narrative (and three hour runtime) doesn’t work as well as it does in, say, Frances Ha.
Pretentious drumroll to the top ten…
10. The Way Way Back – A teenager is forced to spend the summer at his mom’s boyfriend’s beach house and no one seems to want him around. He finds escape (and, of course, himself) with a job at the nearby water park under the tutelage of a show-stealing Sam Rockwell. Delightfully awkward, funny, and real it’s one of those movies you could watch over and over or just have on in the background and find comfort in.
9. Short Term 12 – This movie flew way under the radar and is probably the most obscure film to ever appear on my end-of-year list. It’s set at a sort of halfway house for troubled kids awaiting foster homes with a staff of people in their early-20s who aren’t much older than the kids they’re responsible for. Great characters, great drama and deals very well with subject matter that could easily have turned into melodrama in a lesser movie. If you can find it, watch it!
8. Philomena – First, so you’ll know what I didn’t going in, the title is the name of the character played by Judy Dench. I’ve heard some grumbling that this is the movie least deserving of its best picture nomination, but I whole-heartedly disagree. It’s based on the true story of a reporter who helps a woman attempt to track down the son she was forced to give up for adoption 50 year earlier, whose existence she had kept a secret the entire time. Heart-wrenching and funny, the movie cuts back and forth between the quest with Philomena and the reporter and her time as a shamed teen mother working in an Irish convent with the nuns who basically sold her baby to an American couple.
7. Gravity – How the #%$& did they film this movie?! In an age where we’re beginning to accept that virtually anything you can imagine can be rendered into a live action movie, Gravity still manages to baffle me. I seriously cannot understand how amazing this movie looks and Alfonso Cuaron is probably a week away from earning a best director Oscar for it. If you are unaware, the whole movie is basically Sandra Bullock floating adrift in space. The entire thing is tense and mesmerizing. I can’t stand 3D movies and, as such, I saw this in 2D, but I really thought about going back a second time and still regret that I didn’t. The only reason this isn’t higher on my list is that, for all it’s visual wonder, I rate story higher. Don’t get me wrong, the story is solid and Sandra Bullock deserves her nomination for bringing it to life and anchoring us to this spectacle. It’s just… a really strong year. Even as I’m writing this, I’m wondering if I should move Gravity up a couple spots, but I’ll stick with my initial impulse.
6. Saving Mr. Banks – This movie benefits greatly from the fact that I knew nothing going in and had very modest expectations. That said, it wowed me and is very well done. I hesitate to go into to much detail so if you are equally unaware, you can go in as blind as I was. How ’bout this – Tom Hanks is Walt Disney, Emma Thompson is P.L. Travers, the woman who wrote Mary Poppins and was very reluctant to allow Disney to turn it into a movie. Fun, interesting, and emotional.
5. American Hustle – This is another one I’m excited to watch again as I felt like they marketed it as an Oscar-caliber Ocean’s Eleven-type movie, and, while it has its light moments, it has a much more serious core. Director David O. Russell is on an unprecedented streak of getting eleven acting nominations out of his last three movies. The story is good, but watching the performances is even better. Oh, and Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence in the same movie? Sold!
4. Her – Amazing commentary on our technological culture and our relationship with our gadgets. In the not-to-distant future, Joaquin Phoenix develops a romantic relationship with his artificially intelligent operating system. The premise sounds funny, and it is, but they deal with it in a way that seems completely realistic. Director/writer Spike Jonze will likely walk away with a little statue next Sunday for his script.
3. Mud – If you haven’t already heard of it, let me introduce you to the term McConaissance. In a remarkably short amount of time, Matthew McConaughey has transformed himself from a dime-a-dozen shirtless romantic comedy star to one of the most respected actors working today. He has a good shot at winning an Oscar for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club, but the movie I preferred from him this year was Mud. Two boys are excited to find a boat that flooding on the Mississippi River has left up in a tree on an island. They soon discover that living on that island, and in that boat, is a fugitive named Mud. The boys develop a friendship with the man and try to help him and that’s about all I should say.
2. Before Midnight – One of the best trilogies ever is one that still far too few people have heard of – Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight staring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They are conversation driven romantic dramas following the relationship between Hawke and Delpy from when they first meet on a train in Europe. The movies are set and filmed nine years apart and we see a glimpse of their lives, with each film covering less than a day and comprised primarily of long conversations between the two. I was recently discussing this movie and I threw out the idea that this is probably the weakest of the three because it depends so much on having seen the previous two, but then I immediately made the counter argument. If this movie existed by itself, with no prequels, it would likely stand as the strongest of the three because you couldn’t bring with you what you thought you previously knew about the characters. Watch these movies! – and cross your fingers that we get a fourth in nine years.
1. 12 Years a Slave – I said it right after I watched it and I stand by it – this is the best movie I’ve seen in at least five years. The best picture race is the tightest in years, considered to be a runoff between this, Gravity, and American Hustle, but in my opinion it isn’t even close. The intensity and despair grabs you by the throat and won’t let go. Based on the memoir of a man who was born free in the North and then kidnapped and sold into slavery. I could spend another thousand words highlighting the turmoil of an intelligent musician forced to hide his true self for fear it will get him killed, but there’s no need. The brutality of slavery has been portrayed before, though perhaps never as raw as it is here. In my opinion it should win every one of the nine Oscars it’s up for. At the Golden Globes, however, it came away with only one, though it was the one that counted – Best Picture of the Year. It could do the same next Sunday.