George Washington Bridge? Who does that?

Another year in the can, my 60th, more than half of them as a serious-in-need-of-intervention cinejunkie. At my age, I can be honest with you: this exercise is mainly just to remind me what I've liked this year. You're welcome to join me, but I'm not sure why you would.

January is, of course, traditionally a wasteland enlivened only by late arrivals of the year-end Oscar® fodder--but of course by my rules (year of my first screening is all that matters), those are eligible for lauding and listing. My first notable, in fact, was a 2010 release from Greece, the delightfully quirky Attenberg. Highlight of my first (of only 2) M4 was Barbara, love and betrayal in East Germany.

February began my devotion to Michael Apted's amazing "up" series: no reviews for the shorter 7 & 14 installments, but something (typically lots) to say about the features at ages 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and (new in 2013) 56. I called Amour "the best film of 2012 that I'm aware of." Soderbergh went out with a bang, not a whimper with the Hitchcockian Side Effects.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is probably not a great movie, but I have a real soft spot for the Herzog doc. And it was the best new thing I saw for most of March, until a trippy downtown double feature of Like Someone in Love and John Dies at the End. Highlight of the 2nd and last M4 was the sexual repression-via-exorcism Romanian film După dealuri (Beyond the hills).

April began with the discovery of Leo McCarey's 1937 Depression riff on King Lear, Make Way for Tomorrow. Habemus papam (We have a pope) was a gentle delight, like Bartleby the pope. Mud, late in the month, was, I guess, the first 2013 studio film of the year about which I got really excited--with another 19-century American hook, this to Huck Finn.

In May, Baz did Gatsby, and I was mostly wowed.

June brought the best is-it-a-documentary? of the year, Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell. Then the International Festival of Arts & Ideas brought Spike Lee and his moving-in-unexpected-ways 1997 doc about the Birmingham church bombings, 4 Little Girls. Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was gorgeous in black & white. Céline & Jesse came back again, wonderfully, painfully, and, of course, verbally, in Before Midnight.

Scarcely saw anything in July, but a colleague and I agree that Fruitvale Station and Michael B. Jordan's performance therein got robbed, award-nominations-wise.

Initial enthusiasm for Blue Jasmine seems to have dissipated; August is not the time for serious grown-up movies. It's a good time for smart teen movies, though, and The Spectacular Now is one of the best ever. In a World . . . made us want to see lots more of Lake Bell, and then that New York cover came out, and damned if we didn't!

Saw a bunch of stuff in September, but only Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said really made an impression. Damn, but we'll miss the big guy.

October: Captain Phillips: remarkable and unbearable.

November: 12 Years a Slave: remarkable and unbearable. All Is Lost: again; this one evokes another Am Lit classic, The Open Boat.

Reliable December goodies. In Nebraska, Alexander Payne goes to Oz. In American Hustle, David O. Russell goes to the '70s and Jennifer Lawrence takes a hilarious holiday from Panem. And in Inside Llewyn Davis, Ethan and Joel go to the Village in the '60s.

Shall I rate? I suppose it would go something like . . .

9. Mud
8. Beyond the Hills
7. Before Midnight
6. All Is Lost
5. Nebraska
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
3. Stories We Tell
2. 12 Years a Slave
1. American Hustle

Pretty conventional, huh? Best 2012 leftover: Amour. Best weird: John Dies at the End. Oh, and one more thing: the balcony is closed.

If, on the other hand, you don't like piña coladas . . .

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Crit

Despite a surprisingly positive review by A. O. Scott in the Times, I went into this with low expectations, and as is so often the case, I was thus . . . not much disappointed. The other day I commented that everyone in The Wolf of Wall Street seemed to be having fun, and it pained me not to be able to join in. Here, in contrast, no one seems to be having fun, except maybe Kristen Wiig when she gets to sing "Space Oddity."

And can I just say one thing about the ridiculous and undisciplined plot? No one with the experience working with film that Mitty (Ben Stiller, who also directed, if that's what you call it) and his assistant have could possible have failed to notice that a roll of film came into the lab in more than one piece. There's nothing wrong with an implausible plot in a fantasy story, but it needs not to rest upon an implausibility in the reality-grounded portion. Moreover, this is an unnecessary implausibility: either have them notice the gap immediately (that they fail to at first is not important to the plot) or have the roll end with frame 24, with the critical frame 25 having been cut from the end, leaving an apparently intact roll. Misplaying stuff like this is sloppy and stupid and insulting to the people who paid to get in.

Fortunately, I do not demand greatness, or even solid mediocrity, from my final film in a calendar year.

Clenched fist

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Crit

By-the-numbers biopic enlivened--to the extent is has any life at all--by strong performances by Idris Elba in the title role an Naomie Harris as a fireball Winnie. The best thing that come of the film is if it helps both become bigger stars.

American hustle

The Wolf of Wall Street

Crit

Darn it, everyone seems to have had such fun making this, especially Jonah Hill, and most of my fellow audience members seemed to be having great fun watching it, and it's a fun soundtrack, and doggone it, did I mention how much fun everyone else seemed to be having? I alas, had only intermittent fun. I admired the filmmaking, but it's hardly a surprise that Marty knows how to make a movie. I'll bet he had fun, too.

Trailers

• Bad Words--Jason Bateman (who also directed) as a grade school dropout who enters and thrives in the spelling bee on that technicality. We saw the red band trailer, and I'll be interested to see the censored version. The film will probably be awful, but it's got a chance.

Tales of brave Ulysses

Inside Llewyn Davis

Crit

Well, I'd buy his album--in fact, I might just.

The perfect Christmas Day movie--good music, smiles, exasperation with the protagonist, all in service of a shaggy cat story. Would have been a perfect Jewish Christmas Day had there not been a wait of more than an hour for carryout at Royal Palace. But hah! I'll show them! I'll just have some leftover Christmas Eve wild mushroom-and-four cheese lasagna! So there.

Oh, one cavil about a movie that seems a good bet to make my top ten for the year: wasn't there somebody in the production who knows that geographical numbering of U.S. highways was the opposite of the Interstate system, such that U.S. 90 would not have been anywhere near northern Illinois? In fact, according to Wikipedia, it went/goes from Van Horn, Texas, to Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Hey, maybe the Coens need a script supervisor!

Trailers

• Winter's Tale--Looks like sentiment soup.

The ice fishing story

American Hustle

Crit

Lots I didn't expect to be saying about this, but number 1 is that Katniss Everdeen gives one of the best comic performances--maybe THE best--in a film this year. It's a role that tiptoes dangerously close to dumb and dangerously close to cliché, but Lawrence infuses it with sympathy and street smarts and life and fall-down hilarity. One of the year's great performances, which I guarantee the Academy will ignore. Another thing I didn't expect to be saying is that this is one of my favorite--almost certainly one of my top 10--films of the year.

You may recall (but probably not) that I did not hop on the Silver Linings Playbook bandwagon, so while I've loved some of David O. Russell's work, I went into this one skeptical. No need. A good love story, a great con story, and--oh, here's another thing I didn't expect to be saying--a fantastic soundtrack not simply dependent on the mostly mediocre music of the real-life story's era (starts on my father's 59th birthday, 4/28/78) but also exploiting some wonderful jazz. Oh, and also--this is certainly the unlikeliest thing I'd be saying--a perfectly Grace Slick-sounding Arabic version of "White Rabbit."

Trailers

• RoboCop--I didn't know about this. Did you know about this?
• The Monuments Men--If I hadn't already been hot for this, the new trailer would have made me hot for it. But come on: how can you not be hot for this?

Orc, barrel, project

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Crit

Well, that was a lot more fun than part I of the cycle, An Unexpected Journey. It would even have been an appropriate entertainment for Christmas Day, but I've pretty much decided to give that slot to the Coens.

Anyway, this one is much better paced than the first and harks effectively back (though chronologically forward, of course) to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, particularly in its effective intercutting of the different geographies and their concomitant narratives. There are also set pieces carried over: Galdalf on a collapsing bridge, a beautiful elf woman's forbidden love (and folk medicine practice), dwarf-tossing. Well, no, that's not accurate: no dwarves are tossed in this film, but given what humiliations and hardships they are put through, I expect they'd welcome a simple heave.

One trivial callback, too: the first face we see is the director's, in what appears to be a precise reshoot of his cameo in Fellowship as a drunkard in Bree. The only thing not new and kind of annoying is the titular dragon's movie-villain-cliché-#1 performance: way too much talk, way too tardy dispatch of his antagonists. But then, I guess if he just ate them all without boasting what he's done and what he's going to do, we'd never get to part III.

Trailers

• Gojira--Just kidding: they're calling it Godzilla. Inexplicably, the trailer was in 2D.
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2--Fx look great; who knows otherwise.
• 300: Rise of an Empire--Fx look great on this sequel, too: almost as great as the dialogue sounds dreadful. Gotta admit, though: I'd follow Eva Green into battle.
• Maleficent--You gotta think there have been days when the two dozen adopted kids were squalling and puking that Angie really felt this way, don't you? This has possibilities; from Disney.

The saint, the flamingos, and the disappearing giraffe

La grande bellezza (The great beauty)

Crit

A heaping helping of Fellini and a soupçon of Last Year at Marienbad in this sort of episodic film that's sort of about a 65-year-old author of a single novelette, based on the great lost love of his youth, who has never written anything else because he has been too busy living in a Felliniesque Roma, which is both the real central character of the film and the best of many excellent candidates for title character. Not much happens, and everything happens, and beauty is.

Practically perfect in no way whatsoever

Saving Mr. Banks

Crit

Got just 2 things to say about this: (1) it was great to see Elizabeth McGovern and Rachel Griffiths on the screen again, though the end credits revealed that that wasn't Elizabeth McGovern at all, but rather Ruth Wilson; and (2) I'm glad I didn't save this to be my Christmas Day movie.

Trailers

• Non-Stop--We already knew career intervention was long overdue for Liam Neeson, but must we do the same for My Future Wife Julianne Moore?

Riotous

The Punk Singer

Crit

No, I knew nothing about Kathleen Hanna, nothing about her first band, Bikini Kill, very little about the riot grrrl movement to which she helped give birth. More's the pity, but I see some upcoming additions to the iPod.

For those of you who were similarly ignorant, well, see the damn film, but I'll tell you this much: Hanna overcame the kiss of death that polemics usually plants on pop, doing straight-up unapologetic feminism in a context of straight-up rocking rock. She was SuperGrrrl, unstoppable except by a kryptonite deer tick, and then only for a while. She's now back with a band named for her solo album Julie Ruin, with a The tossed in for good measure.

Le maillot jaundiced

The Armstrong Lie

Crit

Reminds me of Mary McCarthy's famous remark about Lillian Hellman that "everything she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Documentarian Alex Gibney started making a film about the 2009 comeback by the titular seven-time Tour de France apparent winner (all his victories have been vacated) who became perhaps even better known as a cancer survivor and anticancer crusader. When the PEDs and blood-doping hit the fan, Gibney suspended filming, only to come back to interview Armstrong after he admitted his sins to America's mother confessor, Oprah. But even when telling many unattractive truths, Armstrong seems unable to let go of some of the lies.

I never cared much, but I resent his betrayal on behalf of my older but more naïve brother--a cancer survivor himself--who kept faith with Armstrong as long as it was humanly possible. My takeaway from this is that in an enterprise where everyone cheats, the question is who cheats best. "Everybody" seems at worst a slight exaggeration for the years when Armstrong was collecting yellow jerseys, and while there will never be any way to know for certain, it seems a good bet that if all those races had been absolutely clean across the field, Armstrong still would have won, though it would have taken him a lot longer to do it.

It also occurred to me that the "who cheats best" principle applies to another fiercely contested athletic competition: American politics.

Trailers

• The Invisible Woman--Ralph Fiennes as Dickens (who is perhaps the leading contender for my Mitchell exemption in 2014), Felicity Jones  as the love of his life, not to be confused with his wife.
• Le passé (The past)--Directed by Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), stars Bérénice Bejo (The Artist).

Tin man

Nebraska

Crit

I have often alluded to but never, it seems, comprehensively articulated my philosophy that the only useful cinematic classification system divides all films into two categories:

1. Wizard of Oz films
2. not-Wizard of Oz films

Tonight, when I articulated my philosophy to my companions after this film, some (well, all) of them challenged me to explain why Alexander Payne's new film is self-evidently an Oz movie while About Schmidt and Sideways are not. Which, of course, made me think a lot more about the sine qua nons of the subsubsubsubgenre. A Wizard of Oz film must present us with

1. a naïve protagonist
2. on a quest that
3. remains the central focus of the film, who
4. encounters much that is strange and frightening, and some that is strange and appealing, in his or her travels,
5. is stymied in the precise focus of the quest, but
6. eventually finds something else, something unsought, often something better, including
7. some sort of enlightenment, one result of which is
8. revision of the quest to simply a return home.

I'd also suggest a sliding scale of Oz-ness for certain elements: the more hapless the quest the Ozzier it is, (high points here, low points in both Schmidt [to prevent a bad marriage] and Sideways [to have a male-bonding wine weekend], but, to be fair, also low points in one of the best and Ozziest Oz movies ever, After Hours [getting laid]); the stranger the encounters, the Ozzier (After Hours makes up a lot of lost ground there, and this, with the bizarre family elements, gets more points than the other two Payne candidates).

Bruce Dern brings a defiant dignity to a character whose mental fog could easily have made him jokey, a bunch of nonprofessional actors play the precise midwesterners I grew up with, and Phedon Papamichael's black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.

Another human interest story

Philomena

Crit

If we were making a top ten list of the Roman Catholic Church's suckiest places and times, most of us would rank Spain of the late 14th and 15th centuries number 1, the U.S. in the late 20th century might be midtable somewhere, but surely there would be a place near the bottom for Ireland in the mid-1900s. Expanding on a secular tradition dating to the early 19th century, several Irish convents, under cover of Christian ministry, took in so-called Magdalenes--young women and girls whose commission of carnal sins had become manifest--and exploited the circumstances by engineering lucrative adoptions by wealthy Americans, and by binding the fallen women to years of indentured servitude.

This is not the first cinematic treatment of the scandal--The Magdalene Sisters (2002) was an angrymaking contemporary account--but it's the first that I'm aware of that looks back from the recent past, through the barely fictionalized perspective of a woman (happened to read this while waiting for the film to start) encountering after-the-fact stonewalling eerily similar to another on the top ten list imagined above. And it's certainly the only one directed by Stephen Frears with Judi Dench as the questing mother and Steve Coogan as the cynical journalist who allies himself with her. Subtle? Not particularly. Manipulative? Well, yeah. Did I mind? Not a bit of it.

Trailers

• One Chance--Heartwarming true story of a fat opera lover who scores on a talent show.
• Heaven Is for Real--Heartwarming true story of an adorable little boy who makes an eschatological round trip.
• Labor Day--Heartwarming Joyce Maynard story about a romance between an escaped con (Josh Brolin) and a single mother (Kate Winslet).

Bird's the word

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Crit

"That didn't suck" is how I began my review of The Hunger Games, almost 20 months ago. Reviews had been weak, and I had really enjoyed the book, and my expectations were low. This time reviews have been enthusiastic, but I thought the middle book of the trilogy was a decline from the first in just about every way, so I didn't know what to expect.

Well, not only does this one not suck, it's pretty terrific, an improvement on the book in pacing and in achieving (for me, anyway) the emotional response necessary to make us want these people not only to live but to carry us forth into the final third (books) or half (film, since as seems de rigueur nowadays for adaptations of trilogies--coincidentally, on that 4/1/12 when I saw The Hunger Games, I also had my first look at the trailer for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2--the third book will be split into two movies).

All the additions to the cast, especially Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer as Beetee and Wiress and Jena Malone as Johanna (yes, the flash-in-the-elevator scene is included, yes, it's very funny, and--spoiler alert--no, we don't get Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch's pov), own their roles, and while I could complain that Paula Malcomson gets less screen time than Ma Everdeen's role in the book promised, that's certainly one reason why the pacing was an improvement over the first film's as well as over the source.

One fine popcorn muncher, that.

Trailers

• Divergent--Pretty sure this isn't a silent film, but the trailer was until the very last instant, when the projection room finally fixed the glitch. Targeted to the audience interested in stories about touch young chicks (Shailene Woodley here) in dystopia.
• I, Frankenstein--Not to be confused with the 2015 treatment of Mary Shelley's story promised on IMDb, this one seems to plop the monster down in the Underworld franchise, or something like it.
• Vampire Academy--A Harry Potter/Clueless mash-up, could be a hoot, or merely hootable.

Effrayante normale

La Vie d'Adèle (Blue is the warmest color)

Crit

It's reasonably safe to assume that I'm the only person to see this film through the eyes of participation in filming one particular lesbian coming-of-age story that's not in French or 3 hours long. (Have I mentioned, by the way, that the DVD release [lots of fun extras!] is imminent and you can already get the fantastic soundtrack?) So even though there's no comparison, it's up to me to compare them:

• number of leading ladies whom the camera loves: a tie, 2-2. Though I have to admit that if we had this to do over I'd have lobbied hard for blue hair on Danielle.
• awkward dinner with the ostensibly straight girl's house: I give us an edge on this, if only because the spaghetti Bolognese that Adèle's father proudly serves features pasta that clearly has been overcooked and doused in way too much sauce. As nasty as that food got as the takes piled up, I'll take good old American murdered cow and fries.
• dancing: more in La Vie, but that's partly a function of its almost double running length
• classroom scenes: ditto and ditto
• naked portraiture: we show more of the process, they show more of the product--and, it being France (specifically Lille, which is an interesting switch from the usual suspect), nobody gets in trouble
• hot lesbian sex scenes: OK, they kick our chastely draped ass here, and yes, it's a fair question whether the raison d'être of these scenes is more the male gaze than the narrative imperative. Google the title and "controversy" for more than you can possibly want to read about this.
• breakup scene: both are extremely painful to watch, theirs is more cruel and brutal
• reconciliation scene: can't compare them, but the coffee shop meeting in La Vie is very similar to and completely different from the L.A. health food restaurant meeting in Annie Hall.

So, but, wait: did I like the film? Yes, but. I liked that it's very much about sex but also about how life makes it impossible for sex to be enough. I empathized with both characters, though more with Adèle contrite for fucking up than with Emma unforgiving for a relatively small and understandable and in retrospect complementary lapse. But 3 hours? I can give no satisfactory answer to the "why" that must follow from that question.

Nouvelle drague

I Am Divine

Crit

Aware of the calendar all day, I was actually walking to the movie theater wondering how the historic date might fit with a documentary about a great big female impersonator notorious for eating dog doo on screen. Not that far a reach, as it turned out: a clip from an early John Waters film shows a very young Divine in an iconic pink pillbox hat (it's a b/w film, but we know what color it is), portraying a wife in the process of becoming a widow, scrambling out of an open limo and onto the trunk. Golly.

Waters tells us that Divine transgressed against the already transgressive drag culture. Well, yeah, but I guess I was looking to learn a little more. It's a perfectly OK film, worth seeing, but smaller than life, which is precisely what its subject was not.

Hard-hearted woman

Great Expectations

Crit

To those who know of my academic background as well as my cinematic obsession (and you wouldn't be here if you didn't know about the latter), it will seem as strange to you as the realization did to me that not only have I not read the novel, I had never before seen any adaptation of the story save this excellent episode of South Park, which is surprisingly true to the story (though--spoiler alert!--it turns out that the Dickens version includes no robotic flying monkeys).

So I was much more involved in the story itself than all you Dickens buffs, and the best thing I can say about the film--and this is a very good thing indeed--is that I've been contemplating devoting a year to reading a ton of Dickens, and this encourages me further in that ambition. Maybe not 2014--I'm rather leaning toward David Foster Wallace for that calendar year--but sometime in the teens.

One note about the acting: as Miss Havisham, Helena Bonham Carter is every bit as creepy as in any role she's ever performed for her spousal equivalent.

Higher calling

Muscle Shoals

Crit

A story about music and abandonment and love and obsession and divorce. And did I mention music?

Ever wonder why Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones and Percy Sledge and Paul Simon and Dylan and Leon Russell and Etta James and on and on and on and on came to a little shitburg on the Tennessee River in Alabama to make music with a bunch of nerdy white session players? Well, it's complicated, except that it's quite simple: the Swampers had the funk.

But I don't care about their paying props to the Swampers in their sweet-homey big hit, or about what swell boys they were and are, I'm still not down with any band that performs in front of a huge Confederate flag.

Dallas Buyers Club

Crit

Matthew McConaughey's new thing, I think we now know, is updates of Huck Finn. This time he plays the Huck character himself, growing enough to love one member of a despised group without ever coming to see that despising the group itself is inconsistent with his love. But as with Huck, it's a start. Jared Leto is, yes, of course, positively amazing as the transvestite who takes her name from a synthetic fiber.

This is, in the end, I think, a movie about the fact that every damn one of us is living with a terminal disease, and every damn one of is going to go sooner or later, but there's nothing wrong with fighting it all the way.

Out of all the boats in all the oceans in all the world,she rams into me

All Is Lost

Crit

One of the many differences between me and Our Man, the only thing we are given to call the semi-ancient mariner played by Robert Redford (which is particularly poignant given that we know the name of his yacht, the Virginia Jean), is that I'd have been a lot more talkative, starting when container/disaster strikes by quoting Hugh Grant's opening line in Four Weddings and a Funeral. In fact, I'd probably have that line pretty much on a loop--except that another key difference is that I probably would have lasted only long enough to blurt it once.

Our Man finally says that word, but only once, a yawp to the universe that has done exactly that to him. Mostly he's stoic, though. I couldn't help compare him to the men in Stephen Crane's great novella The Open Boat. "If I am going to be drowned--" each wonders,

if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?

Our Man wastes little time contemplating the unfairness of it all; he's too busy trying to overcome it, small detail by small detail. One way to make a one-character, one-location (albeit an infinitely big location) film fascinating to keep the audience wondering, "What is he doing now, and why is he doing it?" The answer always comes in a few moments, but the wondering and the puzzling keep the film from ever becoming static, and also serve to tell us as much about Our Man  as a constant voice-over might. It's an action film wherein the action is mostly in one man's mind and hands.

Trailers

• Nebraska--Alexander Payne; 'nuff said.

All is lost

12 Years a Slave

Crit

Man, I can't wait for Steve McQueen's romantic comedy, Oh, wait: unless that was Shame. That film made me feel icky, Hunger made me feel hungry, and I left this one feeling as if I'd been kicked in the stomach, kicked really hard. It seems absurd to anoint someone after 3 features as one of the great directors of our time, but dammit, bring out the oil. Oh, and by the way: this is the one all the releases for the rest of the year will have to beat for Best Picture next February.

Trailers

• Black Nativity--Musical based on a work by Langston Hughes, who I'm guessing wouldn't recognize this.
• The Grand Budapest Hotel--Latest from Wes Anderson looks as if it might be all outtakes from Moonrise Kingdom, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
• Gloria--If this were a Hollywood pic rather than a Chilean one, I suspect I'd be a lot more dismissive of it; something about not understanding what people are saying makes them sound lots smarter.