If there’s one thing you can never find around New Year, it’s a film list. With that in mind, I’m going to go completely out on a limb here...
FIRST THING'S FIRST: IN THE INTEREST OF FULL DISCLOSURE
It never fails to surprise me - looking back over the release schedule at the end of the year, seeing just how many films I missed. So before you think “Hey, what about…” consult this list of things I could possibly have seen in the last year, but for whatever reason didn’t.
These are the films that received notably high praise or deep scorn across the year that I can’t yet fairly comment on - I’ve chopped out what I regard to be the middle ground – the stuff that didn’t seem to bother people one way or the other:
A HIJACKING
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
THE ACT OF KILLING
STORIES WE TELL
UPSTREAM COLOUR
FRANCES HA
THE CONJURING
LOVELACE
THE SELFISH GIANT
SHORT TERM 12
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR
NEBRASKA
ALL IS LOST
DOM HEMINGWAY
THE GRANDMASTER (Weinstein cut)
TOM AT THE FARM
I’M SO EXCITED
RIDDICK
MOVIE 43
GODDESS
I GIVE IT A YEAR
A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD
HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS
JACK THE GIANT SLAYER
G.I. JOE: RETALIATION
THE HOST
SCARY MOVIE 5
THE BIG WEDDING
AFTER EARTH
THE INTERNSHIP
THE FIFTH ESTATE
MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES
METALLICA: THROUGH THE NEVER
THE CALL
DIANA
R.I.P.D.
RUNNER RUNNER
ENDER’S GAME
ONE CHANCE
BATTLE OF THE YEAR
THE BUTLER
SAVING MR. BANKS
OLDBOY never did get a theatrical release in Australia. I also managed to be overseas for the entire theatrical run of what many are calling the best ‘Australian’ film of the year, THE ROCKET, while the following will hopefully all screen in my part of the world sometime in 2014:
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET
HER
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
BIG BAD WOLVES
A FIELD IN ENGLAND
WALKING WITH DINOSAURS: THE MOVIE
BLACKFISH
AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS
SUNSHINE ON LEITH
WE STEAL SECRETS
BLANCANIEVES
WADJDA
Right, let’s get a bit of grumbling over and done with:
FIVE DISAPPOINTING MOVIE EXPERIENCES OF 2013
PACIFIC RIM
I love Guillermo del Toro and wish he was a part of my direct family, but after a trailer campaign so exciting it made me physically giddy, seeing the final film was as crushing as being sat on by a Kaiju. The visual effects team can be singled out for praise, and Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi escape largely unscathed, but that’s about it. I left the theatre actually shocked by the lack of any depth or wit amid PACIFIC RIM’s procession of clichés. And who cast a Yank and a Brit as the Australian father/son team? I wouldn’t have minded, but for each attempting an accent as eardrum-puncturingly lousy as the other. Was Alan Dale (a Kiwi, but that would still work) unavailable?
THIS IS 40
These days I go into Judd Apatow’s movies pretty much expecting them to be overlong, but THIS IS 40’s problems started way before the cutting room. Everyone involved is so nice, so how did they manage to create such horrible characters? Mean, moaning, vindictive, and in a time when people in America are living in tent cities, they’re worried about having to downsize from their mansion of a house with two luxury cars. You know: arseholes. It wasn’t all bad, but I’d gone in hoping for so much more.
TO THE WONDER
I’m very pro-Malick, so watching TO THE WONDER failing to do for ‘love’ what TREE OF LIFE had done so successfully for, well, ‘life’, was painful. Given Malick’s elliptical approach, it’s difficult to see where the problems begin, but I’d start with poor Olga Kurylenko being unable to find a way to express happiness beyond whirling like a dervish every two minutes. On the other hand, I imagine this movie to be an honest and accurate representation of what happens when you spend longer than a five-minute montage with Manic Pixie Girl.
SPRING BREAKERS
I admit I’m no fan of Harmony Korine, but I honestly went in to this with an open mind. I wanted this to be the one that would turn it around. Not the case. I could literally cut SPRING BREAKERS’ running time in half and not lose a single second of plot or subtext. That’s how bloated and repetitive (literally repetitive: lines of dialogue are actually frequently re-spoken for no good reason) this tedious cinematic wank is. There’s only one reason to watch: James Franco’s scuzzy, low-rent gangsta Alien. The rest is waffle being woefully misjudged as satire by a perennially overrated hipster who genuinely seems to believe what his characters are doing is ‘cool’.
OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN
I’ll keep this as brief as I can, but I've got a lot to rant about OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN. I said at the top that I don’t like to think of movies in terms of best or worst, but every now and then a film comes along that’s so mean, so vile, so grubby...
RED DAWN (1984); INVASION USA; RAMBO II & III – I love
‘em all, but a lot has changed since their day. It’s not so much that OLYMPUS
HAS FALLEN didn’t notice as, like the drunk obnoxious dickhead who gets his ass
kicked the night before and learned nothing from the experience, this film
willfully fantasises of what it will do differently next time. And it seems
adamant in wanting there to be a next time.
Sure, Antoine Fuqua’s film is lousy on every technical level. Got your script
checklist handy? Good:. Crowbarred insertion of backstory? Check. Clunky exposition?
Uh huh. Relentless doling out of every genre cliché? Yup. Shot of the American
flag falling from the White House, at the mid-point? Boo ya. Sledgehammer-subtle
dialogue? You betcha. Even the wannabe DIE HARD one-liners suck: “Let’s play a
game of ‘fuck off’ – you go first.” My pleasure.
OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is stupid enough, but not self aware enough, to be parody. It’s the sort of thing you expect to see moments of as ‘the movie within a movie’, where the studio executives are tearing their hair out because they think they’ve got an irredeemable stinker on their hands and nobody knows what to do about it, ala THE PLAYER. But no, this is all too real, and it’s not joking.
The CG effects (and there are a lot of them) fare no better, and uniformly look like they’ve been done in-house at the SyFy channel. The score sounds like it’s been assembled from an archive of generic, royalty-free tracks filed under “A Bit Like Hans Zimmer”. This is not what people should be seeing - or hearing, for that matter - when they hand over $17.50 for what they expect will be a blockbuster popcorn movie.
These are, however, merely the disappointments, which is no crime. But OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN plummets further, and was the one film of 2013 that I found actually offensive. It’s so culturally insensitive – not just to Asians (any Asian character who isn’t an EVIL terrorist is dead by the beginning of the second act), but to a good many Americans. It’s a sad, pathetic, racist chunk of non-ironic escapism engineered to appeal to that ultra-macho corner of America’s ego that’s never quite been able to properly deal with loss and grief, and I pity the cynical minds that engineered and executed it
The fact that this cinematic turd out-grossed the utterly superior WHITE HOUSE DOWN (same movie with less racism but more irony, humour and effects budget) actually saddens me, and no-one involved with OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN should be proud of that fact. Shame on you all – especially those who didn’t really need the money.
And now that’s out of my system.
Coming soon: altogether happier thoughts...