Top 10 Films of 2017

Altogether, 2017 wasn’t a bad year for movies. Even if I had to travel to art houses to watch something worthwhile, there was never a shortage of interesting things to see. There were also a handful of mainstream movies such as Patty Jenkin's "Wonder Woman," Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” and  Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” that made an impression beyond their minimum financial requirements. My list contains many unabashed genre movies, including three monster movies, one superhero film, and two psychological horror films. In fact, only three of the films listed tell relatively common stories within a fairly naturalized version of the world we live in. Nevertheless, the list below represents last year’s films that stuck with me the most.

10 – Okja
South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s subversive allegory tells the story of a girl who fights the powers of the food industrial complex to keep her genetically modified super-pig from being killed. It’s heartwarming, weird, campy, smart, disturbing, and politically conscious without forgetting to keep you entertained.

09 – Call Me by Your Name
Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel of the same name explores first love and the complicated emotions associated with young hormones and queer awakening with the perfect proportions of guilt, lust, and righteous indignation. The performances by romantic leads Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer are honest and the movie’s total sensory immersion within this 1981, summer vista in Northern Italy only helps to drench this dream-like romance in youthful idealism.

08 – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
Every year has a great crime film, and this year’s entry by playwright/director Martin McDonagh, while not without a few tonal and narrative stumbles along the way, left a lasting impression.  McDonagh embraces the story’s pulpy post-Cohen trappings while finding surprising ways to empathize with every morally complicated character in his southern-gothic murder ballad.

 07 – Logan
 “Logan” went far and above anyone’s expectations, considering it was the third spinoff from 20th Century Fox’s wildly uneven X-Men franchise. This hard-R action thriller only concerned itself with its comic book origins when it needed to advance the thoughtful arc of its title character. This is the type of action fare that originally set the bar for fanboys, back when movies like “Robocop” and “Terminator 2” were the standards, instead of toothless, PG-13 cartoons, designed by committee.

06 – Colossal
Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis explore gendered power dynamics and alcoholism in Nacho Vigalondo’s unique comedic fantasy “Colossal.”  The relationship depicted here is mirrored by (and perhaps in control of) giant monster attacks in Seoul, South Korea. This is unquestionably one of the most creative and underappreciated films released in 2017.

05 – The Shape of Water 
After a decade of playing in his toy-box and exploring new technology with films such as “Hellboy: The Golden Army” and “Pacific Rim,” Guillermo del Toro was in desperate need to scale things back and explore emotional storytelling again, and that’s exactly what he did with his spectacular inter-species, cold-war romance, “The Shape of Water.” This takes familiar sci-fi/horror tropes and weaves them into a sophisticated love story about living in the margins of society.

04 – Get Out
Comedian Jordon Peele released his post-racial horror-comedy “Get Out” just as our country began to reexamine the old prejudices that we had been trying to ignore for decades. His film cleverly reinterprets the tradition of paranoid, socio-political supernatural thrillers such as “The Stepford Wives” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” but it’s also become a conversation piece around a time when Americans were forced to deal with the fact that polite racism is still racism.

03 – Raw
This Belgian horror film explores the sexual awakening of a college-aged vegetarian through the metaphor of cannibalism and manages to be vicious, disgusting, and painfully relatable at the same time. Scenes of grotesque mutilation and bloody meat-eating are fetishized through the laser-focused perspective of our confused protagonist. While being one of the gnarliest seat-squirmers released in recent memory, this also happens to contain one of the most honest portrayals of competitive sisterhood captured on film.

02 – The Florida Project
Sean Baker’s film about struggling families living week to week in cheap hotels outside Disneyworld was one of the more affecting movies I came across last year. This contains strong performances by children and non-actors and a subtle compassion that glows through the entire production. Baker presents these marginal lives with an insider’s objectivity that refuses to other them or turn into magically-wise gypsies.

01 – Lady Bird 
“Lady Bird” is my favorite film of the year for the sheer reason that it kept me in a good mood for at least forty-eight hours after I watched it. The level of specificity in its character dynamics and its 2002 Sacramento setting, alongside the underlying mother-daughter story and its themes about embracing your small-town roots, sets this film apart from the usual ‘quirky’ Sundance fodder. This is what great American filmmaking should look like.

Honorable Mentions: The Big Sick, Thor: Ragnarok, Downsizing, Happy Death Day, It, Blade Runner: 2049

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about our year-end lists.

Justice League review

Well, whether we wanted it or not, Warner Bros have released the not-very-long-awaited “Justice League.” Of the film’s six central heroes (Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash) we’ve only been properly introduced to three of them.  This started with director and producer Zack Snyder’s 2011 “Man of Steel” and continued with last year’s misbegotten franchise booster-shot “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” which teased a Wonder Woman cameo, who, earlier this summer, starred in what has so-far been the DC cinematic universe’s only coherent origin story.  Somewhere in all of that, we were also treated to the stylistically confused, tangential distraction known as “Suicide Squad,” which added nothing to the world of pop-culture other than insufferable Joker/Harley Quinn true-love memes and bad tattoo ideas.

But this is it; this what is what all that other non-sense was leading up to. This was supposed to be Warner’s live-action “Super Friends” that would rival the blockbuster assembly-line that is Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. How well did it accomplish this goal, you might ask? Well, unlike the bulk of the DCU’s previous efforts—“Wonder Woman” notwithstanding—“Justice League” makes narrative sense, insomuch that is has a beginning, a middle and an end, and for 10-15 minute increments the unintentional camp that comes from Snyder’s inability to understand cinema beyond its ornamental surfaces overlaps with the most base pleasantries that come with superhero genre storytelling.

A race of interdimensional locust people is brought upon our world by a demi-god warrior known as Steppenwolf who wants to transform our planet into an apocalyptic kingdom. Superman (Henry Cavill) is still dead, so Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) travels the globe to recruit the world’s strongest remaining meta-humans. These super-powered beings include the naive and socially-awkward Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller), the brutish sea-merchant and low-key water-god Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the surprisingly still-relevant Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), and the barely-necessary Victor Stone/Cyborg (Ray Fisher). Together they must prevent Steppenwolf from weaponizing three magic cubes that generate enough raw energy to transform our planet.

“Justice League” isn’t totally unwatchable but within an era with endless, formulaic superhero flicks, it reeks of being too little, too early. The story is practically Mad-Libbed from stock comic-book movie tropes and since most of the previous entries in this franchise failed to give us compelling arcs for these characters—some of which we are only getting to know here—it becomes impossible to invest in the film’s message of togetherness. The screenplay is front-loaded with catch-ups and mini-origins, setting up each hero and giving them individual goals to accomplish by the film’s end. Because these characters are so loosely drawn and inconsequential to the plot, this ultimately feels like a waste of time and a slow lead up to the movie’s more pressing concerns with its villain and the possible resurrection of Superman—which, by the way, is not all that interesting either.

As far as action-spectacle goes, this is one of the sloppiest visual productions to have ever come from this director. I haven’t always responded positively to Snyder’s style of green-screen-driven art design, the slow-mo action sequences, or the artificial lighting schemes and color-correction that makes the bulk of his work look like high-budget Linkin Park videos, but even on that level, “Justice League” struggled to blend the actors into their CGI environments and hiding the unnatural physics behind the wire effects. Despite its bloated budget, this feels like discount Zack Snyder, and with a story as shallow and rehashed as this, the movie's effects deficit becomes all the more severe.

You may have heard that this film is better than expected (or even good) because it has a better sense of humor. Yes, unlike the dreadfully serious “Batman v Superman,” there’s Marvel-style jokes and quip-y dialogue (perhaps penned from quip-master himself, Joss Whedon, who stepped in to complete the last leg of the production) and occasionally Gal Gadot and Ezra Miller help to keep the group dynamics lively as they plod from one telegraphed set-piece to another, but as a piece of cinema there’s nothing here original or compelling enough to make up for the multi-car pileup that preceded and laid the foundation for its making.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Justice League."

Nocturnal Animals review

With his second feature “Nocturnal Animals, fashion designer Tom Ford tackles the very things that inspires great art and how the different people in our lives leave impressions that help form our creative responses. This is a lofty theme and with his adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan” Ford compares and contrasts two different genres and two different styles of visual filmmaking to comment on the formation the art and storytelling itself.

Amy Adams plays Susan Marrow, an icy and disconnected art curator who’s married to a traveling trophy husband named Hutton (Armie Hammer).  While Hutton is away on a clumsily obvious secret trip with his mistress, Susan receives a manuscript for a novel written by her ex-husband Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal). The book comes with a note about how the how the story was inspired by their turbulent history. The film then visualizes the contents of Tony’s book, in where Gyllenhaal also plays the main character of Tony’s Novel Edward Scheffeild. Edward is an easily frightened man who loses his wife and daughter to a gang of drunk rednecks after being forced off a West-Texas road after a car chase in the middle of the night. He seeks to punish these men with a rogue desert detective named Bobby Andels (Michael Shannon), a man of few words who no longer fears losing his job or his life to do the right thing.

 The film opens on an audience-testing slow-motion sequence where morbidly obese elderly women are shown dancing seductively to the movie’s melodramatic stringed score. This title sequence lingers on close-ups of sagging body parts before revealing these women are part of art exhibition curated by Adam’s dispossessed character. The mix between the grotesque the gorgeous permeates Ford’s every narrative and aesthetic choice here. The framing device about Susan rediscovering her young and complicated passion with the struggling writer of her post-college years is couched in the story to represent the ‘real-world.’ Yet the painfully stilted dialogue, the intentionally cold and bloodless performances within these scenes and the careful framing of Ford’s modern-art Los Angeles set-design presents a less relatable world than what is represented in the scenes depicting Tony’s pulpy and hyper-violent western/thriller manuscript.

With this strange juxtaposition, Ford tries to make the argument that success and wealth stifles creative expression by cutting the artists away from humanity, and in doing so, he proves his own point by constructing a film that is stifled by battling creative agendas. The two stories are supposed to be symbiotic and analogous but the movie lacks the necessary connective tissue to develop either story past their highly-stylized surfaces. Though pulpy and overly-treaded genre territory, the Coen Brothers-esq manuscript segments are far more engaging and impactful than the sterile soap-opera framing plot, which resembles the high-art sleaze of the 60s and 70s Italian filmmakers, as filtered through the steely cynicism of “Dead Ringers” era David Cronenberg. The two styles constantly trip over each other as the film cuts between them and their intended symbolic relationship reveals a disappointingly shallow connection.

“Nocturnal Animals” is filled with a lot of style and the structure of the story attacks character-motivations and themes in a challenging and indirect way. This is a laudable storytelling approach, but it fails to meet those challenges in a way that doesn’t seem overly self-conscious and ill-considered by the director. Gyllenhaal gives two great performances and Michael Shannon does what he’s made a career of doing and gives the best performance in a problematic movie.  Adams is almost denied an emotional reality so that she can act as a vessel by which the movie’s (unintentional?) misogyny is accounted for.  What makes the film all the more frustrating is that its ambitions are the cause of its own failure.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Nocturnal Animals."

The Purge: Anarchy review

               It’s difficult to enjoy a genre movie about government-sanctioned annual murder sprees when every three weeks or so our news is treated to another mass shooting or a real-life tragedy, but horror films and thrillers have occasionally been able to make poetic sense from of a senseless time.  In this regard, writer/director James DeMonaco’s  “The Purge: Anarchy”  at least tries to contextualize his brand of schlock alongside easy metaphors and well-worn, occupy-era allegory.

                While last summer’s surprise horror-hit “The Purge” only hinted at its dystopian sci-fi conceits, settling closer within the intimate, home-invader sub-genre, this sequel opens up DeMonaco’s futuristic setting. Rather than being locked into one location, we travel through the murderous streets, following a handful of frightened survivors as they look for temporary refuge from the bloody holiday. Pair number one consists of an inner-city mother and teenage daughter (Eva Sanchez and Zoe Soul) whose apartment door is kicked in by their sexually frustrated slumlord. After barely escaping his attack, they run into pair number two, a young disgruntled couple (Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez) whose car dies in the wrong side of town just before a city-wide alarm sets off the lawless free-for-all. The only thing keeping these four alive is a stoic police Sergeant (Frank Grillo) who’s on a path of vengeance, as he stalks the roads in his armored car.

                It’s clear that DeMonaco grew up on movies like John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” and Walter Hill’s “The Warriors” and tries to bring the same sense of unflinching bleakness alongside a broad satire of our current social landscape. But like other throwbacky horror directors such as Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, DeMonaco’s films live and die within the borders of their pastiche. As a fan, he can come up with an exploitation premise that sounds great as a one paragraph synopsis on the back of a DVD. As a director, he seems to struggle when it comes to telling an engaging story with characters you might care about.

                Neither Purge is particular memorable or entertaining, given their anarchic concepts, and unlike the Carpenter film’s they endlessly reference, their dower tone makes it uncomfortable to revel in the mindless popcorn violence. Likewise, the ripped-from-the-headlines soapboxing about class wars and wealth disparity lacks the depth or insight for the film to really work as a think-piece. Instead, we are treated to a competent TV-level cast wandering around an aimless plot as they jump from one scenario to another—some of which are mildly rousing, most of which are poorly staged and severely devoid of the necessary filmic discipline to garner adequate thrills.

                At best, “The Purge:  Anarchy” is a fanboy wish fulfillment that will make you nostalgic for Regan-era paranoia, at worst, it’s a philosophically muddy piece of trash-cinema that juxtaposes awkwardly and flippantly against the kinds of real-world terror and random acts of violence reported nightly on CNN. Perhaps only time and distance can illuminate the appropriate perspective to really understand what these movies are trying to say and what they might be doing effectively. Regardless, in a contextual vacuum, they tease more than they satisfy.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2014

Captain America: The Winter Soldier review

                  Captain America is a tricky Marvel character to sell to global movie market, despite his recognizable brand and the backing of a powerhouse film production conglomerate. These days people are a little jaded when it comes to national pride and a character that fights for truth, justice and the American way is an increasingly harder pill to swallow, especially when party divisions have dramatically split the country on the specific interpretation of what the “American Way” is even supposed to be. Even when conflict is injected into the character to please those on the homeland, the blatantly patriotic imagery of Cap-Am risks appearing like propaganda to those abroad.

                Though Disney/Marvel Studio’s first attempt to introduce this character in 2011 wasn’t an altogether failure, it really only managed to work as a placeholder for the anticipated Avengers movie being hyped at time.  Now, with the overwhelming success of “The Avengers” in 2012, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is afforded the benefit of doubt by those who may have been skeptical before. Surprisingly, in changing time-period, style, tone and directors, this movie cleverly takes advantage of its second chance and manages to exceed expectations by simultaneously defying and celebrating its genre-conventions.

                Having grown up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, only to be preserved in ice and unfrozen to become a superhero soldier, fighting alongside sci-fi anomalies like Bruce Banner’s Hulk and Tony Stark’s Iron-Man, Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans) is now suffering from state of mild temporal dysphoria, with only his work as a SHIELD super-spy to keep him focused and grounded. However, when his boss and mentor, SHIELD’s leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is targeted and hunted by his colleagues, Captain America is then forced to go rogue and figure out how high the governmental corruption infiltrates. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and military veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) help Rodgers with his impossible mission, while keeping guard from a mysteriously lethal mercenary known as the Winter Soldier.

                It’s actually difficult to be prepared for just how exceptional this pop-corn thriller is. Not since Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” has a sequel so magnificently improved upon its predecessor in a way that actually fixes some of the problems of the previous film. Rather than the cartoony, gee-golly pulp aesthetic of Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger”, Joe and Anthony Russo’s steely, post-Bourn, politically-minded sequel resembles the kind of cool immediacy of Michael Mann’s “Heat”, as well as ‘70s paranoid dramas like “The French Connection" and "All the President's Men."  The tensely-blocked, handheld bursts of action-violence is impactful, the performances are confident--particularly Evans who'd previously appeared a little stiff within the do-gooder limitations of his characters--and unlike even the best films from Marvel’s amoeba-vers, this world feels lived-in and dangerous with a semi-realistic sense of scale and threat. 

                With that said, this is still a comic-book action movie aimed at a young teenage audience, and we're reminded of that whenever the plot makes an illogical leap or when there's an occasional tonal hiccup. This includes some high-concept sci-fi tech that feels out of place compared to the movie's more sober interpretation of the Marvel world, as well as, a sporadic line of Saturday-morning dialogue.  In the third act, as is the demand for any film that costs more than 100 million dollars, the movie eventually devolves into an extended effect-driven sequence, slowly drifting the whole thing away from the refreshing tactility and level-headed sophistication it had built up to that point.

                Flaws and nitpicks aside—though not excused—“Captain America-The Winter Soldier” is still an exciting and daring move forward for the superhero genre, and it at least hints towards a maturity that Marvel Studios hasn’t been as interested in exploring since the Iraq war metaphors of the first “Iron Man."  Here, themes of political unrest and social distrust regarding NSA monitoring and military drone technologies make this sequel not only satisfying as a genre picture, but timely and relevant as well.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014

The Grand Budapest Hotel review

             Over the sweep of his career, filmmaker Wes Anderson has situated himself as the master of the minutia. When it comes to every aspect of his films, including costuming, performances, set-decoration, and camera placement, his movies have always exuded a sense of meticulous design and consideration. However, though generally well-reviewed and culturally appreciated, the thematic or emotional sincerity of his films have often been overlooked or underplayed by those in conversation with his work. And to be fair, even Anderson himself has occasionally put his storytelling on the back-burners to thoroughly explore the visual compositions of his worlds, sometimes resulting in frustratingly banal indulgences of control.

                From film to film, Anderson has oscillated between visual metaphor as a way of emotional storytelling and arch-comedy as a way of exploring character-dilemma.With his most recent film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” he seems to be working somewhere in the middle, accessing a darker sense of authenticity just beneath the whimsical world-building and the flip nature of his ironic wit.

                Ralf Fiennes stars as M. Gustave, the concierge of a famed European hotel on the eve of a barely discussed fascist takeover.  After the death of one of his wealthiest clients (Tilda Swinton), with whom he was having a long hidden affair, her sons (Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe) become disgruntled when it is revealed that she their mother has left the hotel manager with a priceless painting that had previously belonged in the family. When Gustave is then framed for her murder and put into jail, he must trust his right-hand lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) to help him escape, prove his innocents and survive the gruesome manhunt set into motion by the embittered siblings. 

                Taking place inside three separate framing devices, within three different generations, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” unfolds as a kind of multi-layered big-fish narrative. Full of interesting contradictions and historical allusions, it disguising itself as an adventurous comedy of errors, and if one wishes to view the film as just being that, it is both satisfying as a dark comedy and rousing action film, displaying some of Anderson’s most ambitious technical set-pieces yet. These low-tech but highly-choreographed scenes include a complex prison escape sequence and a shoot-out turn chase-scene that’s both evenly paced and exciting to view in it's masterful execution.  Likewise, his brand of dry, matter-of-fact dialogue is still very much present and the detailed designs of his visual spaces are pushed even farther outside of the realm naturalism. But below all of this playfulness there also exists layer of contextual melancholy that’s hidden just underneath the folktale we're being shown instead.

                Many scenes seem to purposely skim over the historical significance that exists in the background of the plot. Our two main villains are seen working with the fascist armies, gun in hand, as they ransack the hotel or when they stop trains to scan passenger’s personal documents. As Dafoe’s wolf-man like character searches for our hero, he leaves a trail of gruesome murders behind him. But even as we draw the obvious parallels to the Nazi occupation of Europe during WW2--or in this case, an Andersonian, fanciful, It's-A-Small-World maquette version of 1930's Europe--the film keeps averting our attention to the surfaces of its ‘film-ness’ in a way that seems to be saying something about the nature of memory, history, and the erosion and transformation of historical accuracy in the pursuit storytelling.

                One could choose to be frustrated by Anderson’s aloof treatment of the characters when it comes to the darker contrasts of this film, or, one can do as I have done and choose to assume that this director is making a point about the refusal to confront the ugliness of our past by way of idealized myth-making. As with all of Wes' work, if you are willing to accept the general eccentricities within “The Grand Budapest Hotel” then you will no doubt laugh at the movie’s quick humor and appreciate the craft behind its infrastructure.  However, upon reflection, you may be surprised by the movie's weighty suggestions that in your mind.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014

The Best Movies You Didn't Watch This Year

                Being a writer for a southeast Idaho publication, I have tried to review and discuss films that are going to play to the southeast Idaho audience.  But, being a movie fan, I have also been watching plenty of other movies that I didn’t get a chance to weigh in on. With the year coming to a close, I would feel remiss if I were to deny Journal readers my recommendations for the amazing output in this year’s limited releases. Though many of the films in this article may have not played first-run in our region, the year’s most interesting, groundbreaking and entertaining films, released in independent, foreign, and/or boutique markets, are now or will soon become perfectly available through rental or streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.

                 Early in the year we were treated with a smattering of interesting crime movies that not only broke the traditions of their genre but also broke the predictability of the typical three-act movie structure. Director Danny Boyle reteamed with his old “Trainspotting” screenwriter John Hodge and released the tenchnodelic brain caper “Trance” and reminded people that complicated plots and disappearing MacGuffins are not nearly as precious if you have three capable leads like James McCavoy, Rosario Dawson, and Vincent Cassel to carry you through. You’re never sure if what you are watching is actually happening or what character’s perspective you’re viewing the events through, but Boyle’s energy never lets up and the movie never gets boring. Similarly, Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers”—perhaps the most controversial and divisive film of the year—transforms a simple good-girls-gone-bad heist thriller into a fragmented, neon nightmare parable. James Franco makes a peculiar but refreshing turn as a white-trash, rapping Big Bad Wolf and Disney tween actors (Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, respectively) stand in as a satirical representation of the hopelessly duped and shallow Gen-Y marketing demographic.  In a more sober representation of American hopelessness, Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” tells an intricate collection of stories about families, fathers, murder, and secrets, highlighting an ambitious screenplay that manages to fit all the drama and operatic tension of the Godfather trilogy in just one feature.  

                This has also been a terrific year for movies about women.  Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha”, a modern black and white indie about a young New Yorker (Greta Gerwig) who can barely make ends meet or even hold on to a stable living situation in her post-academic life, perfectly captures the plight of the overqualified, jobless 20-somethings of our era. “Enough Said”, with Seinfeld’s Julie Lewise Dreyfus and James Gandolfin in his last role, is a warm and clever rom-com throwback about middle-aged second chances. In Woody Allen’s latest, “Blue Jasmine”, he wisely gives Cate Blanchett a meaty enough character and a light enough screenplay to let her take hold and command the screen for its entire ninety-eight minutes. Blanchett plays the complicated Jasmine with heartbreaking sympathy and sociopathic wit in such a way that the movie, refreshingly, never condemns the character or begs the audience for her redemption.

                If you’re like me than you probably can’t resist a good coming of age movie.  “Mud”, by Jeff Nichols, frames a criminal-on-the-lam plot with a teenage story about first loves and broken homes. Matthew McConaughey continues his impressive winning streak and Nichols’ southern world-building feels fully realized and lived in, creating something like a cross between “Huckleberry Finn” and “E.T”.  “The Spectacular Now” is a confident coming of age film about a young alcoholic (Miles Teller) who, in trying to mend a freshly broken heart, finds companionship in a geeky loner girl (Shalene Woodly) from his high school. In giving her the confidence she needs to make things happen in her life, he also exposes her to his most destructive tendencies. It’s a real film about real teenagers and it doesn’t promote or judge the character’s choices. Of course, when it comes to this category, one can’t not bring up the lyrical beauty of the French, Palme D’Or winner “Blue is the Warmest Color”, a young love story that isn’t afraid to take its characters or its actors anywhere.  Unlike many American coming-out dramas, this doesn’t end after our heroine figures out her sexual orientation gets the girl. Instead, the movie continues to follow both the pragmatic Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her artsy, bohemian lover Emma (Léa Seydoux) as they learn about who they are and what they need out of a long term commitment. Both leads give fearless performances and by the movie’s end you will feel like you have gone through the couple's most intimate highs and lows.

                Lastly, this year has also treated us too some wonderful oddball, genre-bending films such as the horror-comedy “John Dies at the End”, a film that crosses the slacker, pizza-breath vibe of “Wayne’s World” and “Idle Hands” with the shadowy and nonsensical terror of films such as “Donny Darko” and “Lost Highway”. And then, in what is probably still my favorite motion picture of 2013, one should not miss seeing the tragic sci-fi romance “Upstream Color”, about a young couple who find each other after unwillingly undergoing a psychic treatment that involves pigs, worms, orchids and the writings of Henry David Theroux.  It’s a puzzle box narrative without an instruction booklet, but it’s hard work pays off in an intensely interior and emotionally engaging way.  Self financed and self distributed, “Primer” director, Shane Caruth, not only makes one of the most impressive sophomore efforts by an indie filmmaker but he practically creates a whole new cinematic language in which to tell his story.  It’s on Netflix. And you’re welcome.

                 So, even though I have spent a lot of time ragging on the Hollywood blockbusters and the star vehicles from this year, 2013, film for film, has proven to be one of the most engaging years in movies. I also want to remind readers that I chose not to spotlight the obvious awards-season indies such as “Inside Llewyn Davis”, “Dallas Buyers Club”, or “Nebraska” because, while all of those films are fantastic and deserve your attention, they certainly don’t need my help. Also also, I want to remind those who may think my tastes lean so far left that I can’t enjoy a popcorn movie anymore, that Alfonso Cauron’s “Gravity” deserves just as much praise for its expressive storytelling as it does its special effects and sometimes it feels like I might be the only person left who will admit to unabashedly loving “Star Trek into Darkness”. So there.

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2013