Mr. Halfyard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love 2013

Kurt Halfyard, Contributing Writer; Toronto, Canada (@triflic)

January 4 2014, 9:00 AM

The theme of the year (if it can ever be boiled down to just one thing) is that "GREED is no longer GOOD, it is complicated." Perhaps this is just fall out from filmmaking projects that likely were conceived at about the low-point of the world economic meltdown of 2008-2009. Nevertheless, the nefarious means of acquiring wealth and fame in pursuit of becoming the 1% was featured in nearly a dozen films where those willing to go through hell to 'get theirs' was examined in various modes: The Counselor, American Hustle, The Bling Ring, The Wolf of Wall St., Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, and to a lesser extent, The Great Gatsby, Elysium and The Brass Teapot.

As per usual, most of the good movies were hiding in the margins, ignored by the multiplex crowd that keep gorging on franchise extruded superhero noise, kid-oriented CGI animation, and yet another 3 hour tour of Middle Earth. If 90% of everything is crap, then it is up to us to look a little closer to find the good stuff.

The disappointment of several glossy science fiction films movies including Oblivion, Elysium, Pacific Rim and Ender's Game (the less said about the embarrassment that was Star Trek: Into Darkness, the better) was more than offset by the technical bravura of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity which was a marvel on the big screen, something as significant as Jurassic Park (which itself got a tepid 3D re-release) was a decade ago in terms of how Hollywood can indeed provide great entertainment while pushing technology without sacrificing good storytelling. The more intimate science fiction like Her, Upstream Color, Under The Skin and if you want to stretch into documentary territory, Jodorowsky's Dune, offered satisfaction that there is always fresh soil to till.

It was a horrendous year for American animated movies (oh, how I pine for another year like 2009) that have fallen into a predictable and lame sequel/prequel pattern that has gobbled up all the big studio money for the past half-dozen years. Disney raked in the profits but undoubtedly has consumed Pixar's soul for prequelizing Monster's Inc. and even considering (let alone actually making and wide releasing) Planes. The exception was Miyazaki Hayao's retirement self-eulogy film on life, war and creative endeavours, The Wind Rises, which was indeed fantastic. I regret missing Ari Folman's The Congress on the festival circuit.

And our old friend Harvey is up to his old tricks again, thus I missed out on both Snowpiercer and The Grandmasters, hopefully someone on this side of the pond will get English subtitled prints of the Asian cuts of the films by two of cinema's great popular stylists.

Below are my 13 favourites of the past, quite robust year of 2013, viewed at festivals or in my hometown of Toronto, listed in no particular order

UNDER THE SKIN

Capital “C” cinema, Jonathan Glazer takes a page out of the Stanley Kubrick playbook, and offers a look at the human condition with a detached godlike eye. A buxom Venus fly-trap (Scarlett Johansson who had the year of her career in 2013) entraps men for nefarious other-worldly purposes before possibly finding some sort of moral anchor within herself.

Often obtuse, dabbling in the formal and the deeply intimate, and shot like a motherfucker, Under The Skin is challenging and immersive, visceral and intellectual, playful and vicious. I came out of the screening of this film more elated than any other film this year, knowing I had just seen something that finds new cinematic frontiers whilst standing on the shoulders of giants.

MAGIC MAGIC

Easily the best horror movie of 2013, the tragedy is that it went straight to DVD in Canada and the US. Juno Temple plays a young American girl visiting her friend (Emily Browning) in Chile who gets stuck the worst hosts ever (Catalina Sandino Moreno and Agustín Silva) at their island cottage. The additional houseguest Michael Cera at his creepiest fail to take heed to fragile mental state which deteriorates into a female hysteria that would make Roman Polanski quiver a little.

Magic Magic is an empathy endurance test and a richly directed, beautifully observed film. Perhaps the most underrated gem of 2013.

MANAKAMANA

This years most affecting documentary is little more than fly-on-the-wall observation of 11 cable-car rides by various souls coming to (or going from) Nepal’s high altitude Manakamana Temple. An exercise in people watching par excellence, it allowed for fairly introspective thought on my own choices for what I make of a life. I love it when the movies allow for this kind of reverie.

Note that this was another feature to come out of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, much like my favourite documentary of last year, Leviathan

(While on the subject of docs, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Norwegian exploration documentary, Encounters and the End Of The World, and the exquisitely excruciating Errol Morris interview of Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known and the surprisingly enchanting Baltimore street bike gang doc, 12 O'Clock Boys.)

THE LONE RANGER

Yea, that Johnny-Depp-With-A-Crow-On-His-Head Disney movie that tanked at the box office is actually a joyously silly ode to classic westerns and silent cinema, and it is very, very good. Gore Verbinski continues to demonstrate that he is the one of a rare breed experimentalists in Hollywood that is allowed to put a monster-sized budget to idiosyncratic and loving use.

That both critics and audiences choose to punish him for this with this particular project, which is as good as anything he has done to date, is beyond me.

STOKER

Cinema for cinema’s sake, complete command of the craft of filmmaking, that piano duet (and a different kind of finger-solo) remind us that we do so enjoy a bit of lurid voyeurism at the movies. Beautiful, showered in symbols and immaculately designed. Korean master Park Chan-Wook’s English language debut colours in Hitchcock's underrated Shadow of a Doubt and manages to come at you like a lovechild between Wes Anderson and David Lynch. Evocations aside, Stoker is original in its own right.

MUD

A coming of age tale of about the confusion of a boy (Tye Sheridan who also was fantastic in David Gordon Green's Joe on the cusp of manhood, and the man (Matthew McConaughey who continues to astound) who has never really left his boyhood behind.

Michael Shannon reminds us here in the briefest of cameos, both what the movie is trying to say about life - all sorts of things float on down the river, and boys will be boys in playing fetch - while underscoring just how wasted he was in the Zach Snyder Man of Steel fiasco.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

Aging vampire hipsters hanging out in a dilapidated Detroit and making beautiful music together. A movie that only Jim Jarmusch could have made, and a welcome return to any semblance of maturity to a genre that the Young Adult Fiction, frankly, has been diluting the bloody hell out of for almost a decade. That the director loves Tilda Swinton is clear, in that he lovingly indulges in watching her pack her bags, take planes, taxis or simply walk the streets all the while making her logistical travel niceties look crazy-sexy-cool.

(Minor mention goes to Byzantium that was released commercially this year and saw Neil Jordan almost getting there with Saorise Ronan, Gemma Arterton and Caleb Landry Jones)

MUSEUM HOURS

A rich, pleasantly didactic, visualization of how art and the perception of art evolves right alongside society, and a richly compelling image is never that far away.

I feel closer to Pieter Bruegel the Elder than I ever thought I would from the varied musings on his pairings in the Vienna gallery that serves as the central location in this film. The human relationship at the core is also pleasingly adult and warm.

THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN

This film raked up emotions that spanned the gamut of sadness to joy. Earthy bluegrass numbers, uninhibited sex, child-killing cancer and embracing everything that life has to offer. It seems the ideal American experience resides in the Netherlands these days. After this and the 2009s The Misfortunates, I will unquestioningly flock to anything directed by Felix Van Groeningen.

THE COUNSELOR

I saw this film theatrically more times than any other film in 2013 and I simply cannot get enough of Ridley Scott’s cynical adult noir. Nor do I ever get tired of Cormac MacCarthy’s peculiar world-view which offers pleasingly loaded dialogue for the stellar cast to chew (and chew and chew) on. The themes and the overall presentation of the counselor's downward spiral by way of botched middle-management are simultaneously subtle and blunt. In storytelling or filmmaking, this is a feat unto itself, and as good a benchmark as any for labelling it 'good art.' Also, car-sex.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

A movie I probably couldn't watch with my wife, as we have verbal spats (just not as elegant as shown here) and this might kick another off, Richard Linklater updates the 30 year on/off relationship that started with Before Sunrise where a young American guy and a Parisian gal meeting on a train and stopping off for a night of conversation in Venice and then re-acquainted with them in Before Sunset. Now they are married with children and more complex and less romantic problems. This series of films gets richer and more complex with each entry to the point that it retroactively improves the earlier entries.

HER

Spike Jonze has a gift for rigorously constructing his cinema as a complex but intuitive mix of special effects filmmaking and structure, all the while making the whole concoction feel intimate and spontaneous, like the romantic couple at the films centre, a charmingly against type Joaquin Phoenix as the lonely man in a shell of immersive technology, and Samantha the sentient OS (voiced by a completely winning Scarlett Johansson), Jonze is talking directly to you while in reality he is talking to hundreds of collaborators simultaneously. Her is one of the great films of 2013, a bellwether to our own evolving near-future, the clean lines and messiness apiece, designed with a necessary pragmatic optimism. I have a little more faith in the world.

UPSTREAM COLOR

Polymath filmmaker Shane Carruth creates a disturbing, significative bit of speculative fiction that puts a lot of trust and a lot of faith its audience to assemble the story and the themes. The largest of which is through the lens of Thoreau's Walden, and how the total connection of man to nature is unfathomably huge, but still very intimate. The storytelling in the film is with pictures more than words and there are some mighty pretty pictures.

Also worth some love, so I will mention honourably:

The Wind Rises, Gravity, Sweetwater, The Last Stand, Nebraska, Night Moves, The Dirties, The Unknown Known, Encounters At The End of The World, 12 Years A Slave, The F Word, Big Bad Wolves, Spring Breakers and 12 O'Clock Boys.

and

Notably missed: Snowpiercer, At Berkely, Frances Ha, Inside Llewyn Davis, White Reindeer, Fruitvale Station, Short Term 12, A Touch of Sin, Bastards, Computer Chess, River, The Grandmaster, Enemy and Stories We Tell.

Lastly, the most baffling movie I saw this year was Danish biopic Spies & Glistrup (aka Sex, Drugs, And Taxation) which, among other things, packed more disturbing and gonzo goings on than The Wolf Of Wall Street, including actor Pilou Asbaek flashing his genitalia to a rather large gorilla in order to establish male dominance.