The International Online Film Critics’ Poll has announced the winners its 2013/14 survey. I was honored to have been asked to participate for the fourth edition of this poll (see previous surveys here). I was worried when I saw Scorsese’s messy, unchecked ego-trip of a movie, The Wolf of Wall Street among the nominees in one too many categories. Everyone knows my disdain for the film, which reeks of missteps in film-making from someone I consider a master movie maker, and my review of the film in 2013 still continues to attract like-minded film-goers who have made the comment section a sort of sanctuary for their equal disdain for the film (Film review: ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ is one nasty, vulgar film about nasty, vulgar people– for 3 hours!). It made the top 10, but nothing else. No, the big winner was not a huge surprise. Over a hundred on-line film critics from around the globe were polled, and they gave the major awards to Boyhood (Film review: ‘Boyhood’ is Linklater’s masterpiece on youth, existence and humanity), which should speak to its chances at the Oscars, as it rose above last year’s major Oscar winner, 12 Years a Slave.
Other big winners were Gravity (Film Review: ‘Gravity’ harnesses the power of uncut images to thrilling heights) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (Film Review: ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ may be cartoonish, but it’s also one of Wes Anderson’s most human films). As the headline for my Gravity review indicates, the film won the deserved prize for editing and other technical prizes: cinematography and special effects. When I got my ballot, I almost went down the row voting for The Grand Budapest Hotel, but at least it also won three prizes (ensemble cast, production design and score).
I’ll never protest Michael Keaton’s win for Birdman. He’s terrific in this intelligently subversive film (Film review: ‘Birdman’ lampoons Hollywood with humorous, hyper-real, hero-hating satire). But my fave will always be Ralph Fiennes for his work in Grand Budapest Hotel, even if I am biased for having had a chance to interview him for the film (Ralph Fiennes on Working With Wes Anderson: “A True Auteur in the Best Sense”). His thoughtful answers to my questions spoke to how deeply he connected to this character.
I have no real complaints about the results of the poll. All are deserving winners and include some favorites. I am particularly happy that many critics did not forget such great foreign language films as Ida (‘Ida’ comes to South Florida in 35mm; My review appears in ‘Reverse Shot’), The Great Beauty (Film Review: ‘The Great Beauty’ earns it’s title by looking beyond the superficial) and Blue is the Warmest Color (Film Review: ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ and the pain of loving). But too bad Something in the Air (Film Review: ‘Something in the Air’ presents vibrant picture of youth in tumult) and Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ presents complex, enthralling portrait of the jaded vampire) were both missing.
OK, enough links to our old reviews glowing with praise for most of these films. Below is the official press release. Winners are in bold and my picks have an asterisk next to them:
PRESS RELEASE – IOFCP WINNERS
The International Online Film Critics’ Poll is proud to announce its winners for the 4th biannual awards for excellence in film. Founded in 2007, the IOFCP is the only biannual poll of film critics from all around the world (over one hundred critics from USA, UK, Italy, Spain, Canada, France, Mexico, Australia, India, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, Serbia, Poland, Romania, Estonia, Pakistan, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden). The awards are biannual to allow the comparison of different film seasons.
The IOFCP voted the coming-of-age drama Boyhood as Best Film, according to the results of its biannual critics’ poll which was released on January 26. Director Richard Linklater was voted as Best Director and Patricia Arquette won Best Supporting Actress award.
Michael Keaton was voted Best Actor of the biennium for his performance in Birdman, and Cate Blanchett won Best Actress award for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel won Best Ensemble Cast, Best Production Design and Best Original Score. Another big winner was Gravity with three awards: Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Visual Effects.
For the screenplays, Spike Jonze’s romantic comedy-drama Her was chosen as Best Original Screenplay. Instead Best Adapted Screenplay went to Steve McQueen’s Academy Award winner 12 Years a Slave.
At last, for his performance in Whiplash, J.K. Simmons was awarded as Best Supporting Actor of the biennium.
Past IOFCP Awards winners include Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Inglourious Basterds and Slumdog Millionaire.
Complete list of winners (and nominations)
TOP TEN FILMS (alphabetical list)
12 Years a Slave
Blue is the Warmest Colour
Birdman
Boyhood
Her
Ida
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Great Beauty
The Imitation Game
The Wolf of Wall Street
BEST PICTURE
12 Years a Slave
Birdman
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel*
The Wolf of Wall Street
BEST DIRECTOR
Alejandro González Iñárritu – Birdman
Richard Linklater – Boyhood
Wes Anderson – The Grand Budapest Hotel*
Paolo Sorrentino – The Great Beauty
Roman Polanski – Venus in Fur
BEST ACTOR
Michael Keaton – Birdman
Ralph Fiennes – The Grand Budapest Hotel*
Mads Mikkelsen – The Hunt
Benedict Cumberbatch – The Imitation Game
Leonardo DiCaprio – The Wolf of Wall Street
BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett – Blue Jasmine
Adele Exarchopoulos – Blue is the Warmest Colour*
Rosamund Pike – Gone Girl
Julianne Moore – Still Alice
Marion Cotillard – The Immigrant
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Edward Norton – Birdman*
Ethan Hawke – Boyhood
Jared Leto – Dallas Buyers Club
Mark Ruffalo – Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons – Whiplash
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Lupita Nyong’o – 12 Years a Slave*
Emma Stone – Birdman
Sally Hawkins – Blue Jasmine
Patricia Arquette – Boyhood
June Squibb – Nebraska
BEST ENSEMBLE CAST
12 Years a Slave
Birdman
Boyhood*
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
BEST ORIGINAL SCEENPLAY
Birdman
Boyhood
Calvary
Her
The Grand Budapest Hotel*
BEST ADAPTED SCEENPLAY
12 Years a Slave*
Gone Girl
Snowpiercer
The Imitation Game
The Wolf of Wall Street
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Birdman
Gravity
Ida*
Nebraska
The Great Beauty
BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Gravity
Her
Mr. Turner
The Grand Budapest Hotel*
The Imitation Game
BEST EDITING
Birdman
Boyhood
Gravity*
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Wolf of Wall Street
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Gravity
Her
Interstellar
The Grand Budapest Hotel*
The Imitation Game
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Interstellar
Gravity*
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
* * *
Some of the greatest films encountered in 2013
December 30, 2013
This year proved quite fruitful for worthwhile cinema experiences for this writer. So much so, I want to vary up my year-end list. There were so many amazing documentaries, I have decided to rank those separately because, quite honestly, some of those could dethrone several of my top feature films (stay tuned for a top 20 in February). I have also decided to rank separately some of the great sentimental films that pulled me by the heartstrings despite their contrivances.
All lists below are ranked from descending to ascending order. There are links to reviews or interviews, if applicable. All the large, bold, italicized titles under the posters link to the home video releases on Amazon. If you follow that link and purchase them, a percentage of the sale goes back to support this blog.
First, some might call the following guilty pleasures. I call them sentimental favorites, where I swooned along with everyone else who wanted to escape for just a pleasant night at the movies, be they action-adventure or idealized depictions of true stories:
5. Saving Mr. Banks
There’s something a bit surreal and somewhat incestuous about Disney dramatizing the true story behind bringing Mary Poppins to the big screen. Though much of the hype surrounding the film came from a not-always-flattering portrait of Mr. Disney (big deal, you get to see him sneak a cigarette), the real skeletons depicted come from the traumatic childhood of the book’s author. The film spends a great amount of time flashing back to the past of author P. L. Travers who proved stubbornly uncooperative in the adaptation of her novel on the Disney studios lot. There’s much talk of Emma Thompson in the role of the author and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. However, Colin Farrell offers the film’s most tangibly tragic performance as the father who cannot seem to rise to task during the author’s childhood. He’s the heartbreaking glue that explains all the trauma, escapism and defensiveness of Travers.
4. The Book Thief
More childhood trauma in real-life. This time, it’s a little girl growing up in Nazi Germany. Director Brian Percival, he of the stirring Downton Abbey series, brings his romantic eye to a place not often treated with romance. However, this is a child’s coming of age, so a hint of rose-colored lenses may be forgiven. Also, personal bias, my father survived living through Nazi Germany after he was drafted to fight for Hitler at the ripe age of 16. To add some more bias, I had a chance to speak to Percival, the film’s star (Sophie Nélisse) and the original book’s author, Markus Zusak, a conversation that began with sharing my dad’s journals during the war … which are still looking for a serious translator (read my interviews).
3. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
While the first Hobbit film felt like an overdose of effects and Rube Goldberg-like action sequences, things finally came together with the second part of this trilogy. There was time to get more intimate with the characters, as the film slowed down for some substantial moments between them. It also had a brisk pace and sense of adventure that harkened back to the great epic action films director Peter Jackson so much loves, like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
2. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
I had no idea I would like this film as much as I did. I think its message that celebrates experiencing life without the escapism, ironically enough, touched me. It’s funny how a film so anti-escapism can also feel escapist. It started with obvious, overly stylized, stagey fantasies by the title character and ended with him out-growing them. (Read my link to my review here).
1. Star Trek: Into Darkness
This movie was just the greatest thrill that had it all. The sentimentality on screen overwhelmed as stakes ran high, including a bromantic exchange of affection in the face of death between Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto). Even the evil Khan (a scene-stealing Benedict Cumberbatch) shed a tear for his cause, though it meant the extermination of humanity. It gives you high hopes for what director J.J. Abrams has planned for his series of Star Wars films under the ownership of Disney (Read my review).
* * *
Some of the most extraordinary documentaries I saw included these, again in bottom to top order. I reviewed all of these, so I shall spare additional commentary; click on the link below the poster art to read my reviews and the titles to purchase from Amazon and support the Independent Ethos:
5. Beware of Mr. Baker
(read my review)
4. Leviathan
(read my review)
3. The Act of Killing
(read my interview)
2. Stories We Tell
(read my review)
1. Cutie and the Boxer
(read my review)
* * *
Finally, the 10 best feature films I saw in 2013. I was surprised by my own ranking. Though consistency of tone, acting, cinematography, pacing and complexity of story all play a factor, I determined the ranking by considering how strongly the films drew me in and then delivered their message and punch line. As usual, ambitious foreigners often win this list, but there was also a strong showing by a pair of American indie directors and one pair of directors who are given free-reign in the Hollywood machine. Again, click on the link below the poster art to read my reviews; the titles all link to product listings on Amazon, which supports the Independent Ethos:
10. The Great Beauty
(Read my review)
9. Laurence Anyways
(Read my review)
8. Museum Hours
(Read my review)
7. Computer Chess
(Read my review)
6. Inside Llewyn Davis
(Read my review)
5. Frances Ha
(Read my review)
4. Blue is the Warmest Color
(Read my review)
3. Something in the Air (Après mai)
(Read my review)
2. Night Across the Street
(Read my review)
1. Beyond the Hills
(Read my review)
I think the Wolf of Wall Street, probably the biggest disappointment of the year for this writer, had some influence in my number one choice. Beyond the Hills indeed looked at some despicable people, but threw the lambs among them for a sense of dynamism that was missing from Wolf. It also had a similar ending that gave a shocking twist in perspective regarding the power of a leader who has led many astray that was well-earned over an extravagant run-time of two-and-a-half-hours. Because of that, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu proves himself a stronger director than Martin Scorsese is now.
Of course all these films, from sentimental faves, documentaries and features could be mixed for a top 10, or as in many previous years, a top 20, which I plan to prepare in February, when more late-coming foreign titles will see release (Miami has yet to see Mexico’s entry to the Oscars, the harrowing Heli arrive in theaters, and only now the multi-award-winning Wadjda is seeing release in indie art houses).
Sometimes the use of a song makes a movie or provides the perfect capper that resonates throughout the work. For Something In the Air it’s the aptly titled slow burn by Kevin Ayers: “Decadence” (Listen to it here). In fact, the entire soundtrack for this film is sheer brilliance, culled together by the director himself, Olivier Assayas. This was his soundtrack; it’s the alternative rock of his generation coming of age in a tumultuous France, and it goes deep beyond the usual culprits you would expect on a soundtrack for a film set in the early 1970s. OK, there’s Syd Barrett and Nick Drake, but for each of those selections there’s Dr. Strangely Strange and Soft Machine, Ayers’ band with Robert Wyatt. It’s not just about suiting the era so that the majority can relate. It’s about intimacy. Most of all, and especially in the case of “Decadence,” it’s about echoing the tragic themes of idealistic dreams turned hollow in the face of decadence.
With Something in the Air, Assayas has pulled together a film that floats on an indulgent air of nostalgia but also has the hindsight of decades worth of growth. As he has matured as a more subtle filmmaker, he has also matured as a man. He tackles a mighty subject that exists beyond the idealistic youth of his former self presented as Gilles 
(a brooding Clément Métayer). The film’s French title Après mai (changed to Something in the Air for English-language consumption) means “After May.” It’s a pity to lose the original title in translation, as it alludes to the May 1968 Marxist-inspired riots in Paris that nearly dismantled the economy and government. Set up with the title card “1971, not far from Paris,” the film shimmers with a relevance to the universal age between high school and adulthood while offering an impactful testament to a generation searching for purpose.
Assayas’ talent for amping up the scenes of conflict in his masterful miniseries Carlos is on full-display during an early demonstration where protestors show up in helmets and armed with bats. They hardly state a single phrase when police rush them, firing tear gas canisters and swinging batons from the backs of motorcycles. After the violent dispersal of the protest, the first resonantly powerful moment key to appreciating Something in the Air arrives during a reading of Gregory Corso’s “I am 25.” Below the incandescent leaves of trees on a brilliant afternoon in a forest, the protagonist’s fair-weather girlfriend Laure (an ethereal Carole Combes, making her feature debut) gives Gilles a copy of Gasoline. Gilles reads from one of several pages she has bookmarked for him (I remove the author’s original emphasis on the first line here, as he does not read it as it’s written):
“I hate old poetmen.
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:—I did those then
but that was then
that was then—”
This may well be foreshadowing of by the director, looking back at the vessel of his youth gone by: Gilles, who is about to live these tumultuous events as both frustrated cog in an unstable France but also a young man seeking his path. At first, his drive seems to fall in line with the progressive, if privileged, youth embracing Marxism to fight for workers’ rights and denounce capitalism. He passes the slow minutes in a high school class carving the anarchist A into his desk while the professor pontificates on Pascal. After dismissal he runs outside the school’s front gate to sell subversive newspapers to classmates. Occasionally, the film offers passing, wry moments that reveal angry disagreements between Maoists and Trotskyites.
Lest you think this is some stale nostalgia piece stuck in the past, the film does offer a resonance beyond time. This about a universal state of growing up that could apply to anyone entering adulthood with a conscience. A meeting of these young revolutionaries recalls fissures between the young idealists who recently fronted the anti-Capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. With nary a manifesto, the movement soon imploded on itself, as business for stock brokers, big banks and corporations ultimately and mockingly boomed during the so-called recovery of the Great Recession of 2008. Unemployment still remains high and workers’ rights continue to be whittled away.
By the time this film picks up, the May 1968 riots are three years in the past. When do idealist good intentions turn to flagrant, empty violence? Something In the Air soon makes it clear, as a tense scene of mob vandalism at the school ends up having very real consequences for Gilles and his accomplices, and they find themselves on the run. 
If the troubling times and their relevance have not begun to echo with irrelevance, enter the ladies in Gilles’ life and his indulgence in painting. His real struggles lie with two desirable women, Laure and the earthy, doe-eyed Christine (Lola Créton), and his aspirations of making it as an artist. Conflicting with his activism, his personal bourgeois troubles soon start to overshadow any political consciousness.
The film is suffused with vibrant scenes steeped in both melancholy and urgency. It doesn’t waste a minute of runtime, as it not only considers Gilles, but the fates of those he loves. There’s a disconnection with his father that feels bitter-sweet. When Laure makes her dramatic exit from the movie it echoes with an unresolved air of life pitching forward, as the weight of the world waits for its inevitable turn to mash us all to dust. Nothing is easily tied up in life, and Something In the Air makes no pretense to try to do so. 
It’s a beautiful patchwork of cinema, from lighting to costumes to music and set pieces that are far from aimless, as its thesis of life struggling to define itself resonates during each scene and the connections between them.
Assayas offers this film not only as a chronicle of his memories growing up in a key era but as a cautionary tale that transcends any specific generation. Though Gilles ultimately comes to terms with his art in a brilliant closing scene that ends with the swelling synth and the calmly plucked electric guitar draped in decadent reverb by Ayers, we all know how our hero turned out. Ayers sings it best as a wall of dreamy guitars swell and shimmer alongside his morose baritone: “To live I have to die.”
Something in the Air is in French with English subtitles, runs 122 minutes and is unrated. It opens this Friday, May 31, at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, where I was invited to a preview screening for the purpose of this review. The film also opens in South Florida at the Cosford Cinema, in the University of Miami Coral Gables campus, and in Fort Lauderdale at the Cinema Paradiso. The film is also playing nationwide and on demand.
Independent Ethos 