The Year in Movies: 2013

 2013

Number of Movies I've Seen: 66

Number of Movies from my original top 365:  ended in 2011

Oscar Winner:
12 Years a Slave -  A tearjerker about a man wrongfully enslaved who fights his way back to freedom with the help of Brad Pitt. This movie is solid and is carried by the heartbreaking performance of Lupita Nyong'o, but it reeks of white savior. This was still two years before #OscarSoWhite started trending, but this was a very safe way for the Academy to look diverse while giving the aforementioned Brad Pitt an Oscar for producing. 

Box Office Winner:
Iron Man 3 - Arguably the worst of the MCU on full display. How on Earth did it make so much money?

My Top Ten:
1. NEXT POST!

2. Fruitvale Station - The heartbreaking true story of the last day of Oscar Grant on the last day of 2008.  You know it's coming. You'll see it coming. It'll break your heart. The delicate direction and performances walk an incredibly difficult tightrope that never exploits, never patronizes, and always returns to the theme to love one another and treat every day like it's your last. Hard to believe we are still fighting this fight. Maybe if more people saw this instead of the two movies above, we'd be farther along in the fight.

3. her - Spike Jonze directs his masterpiece. Folks in 2050 are going to look back on this movie and talk about how far ahead of its time it was. The smarter computers get, the more we are going to fall in love with them.

4. Before Midnight  - Linklater puts the bow on his "Before Trilogy" and we get the most adult, scary, and argumentative version of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy talking. I could watch these movies forever.

5. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - Mockingjay was my favorite book, but because of the greed of splitting it into two movies, this is easily my favorite movie of the franchise. One of the best book to movie adaptations of the modern age.

6. Star Trek: Into Darkness - I need to rewatch this one, but I remember really loving it.

7.  August: Osage County - When I first reviewed this movie, I described it as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf but with an entire family. I'll stick by that. This is just a single, knockdown, dragout family fight put to screen. That might not sound very good to you, but I eat it up.

8. Frozen - The best movie in Disney's modern age. You can tell there were rewrites, but the storytellers were able to create some real magic in this one.

9. Kings of Summer - A beautifully odd story about three runaways who make a summer of their dreams in the woods a short walk from suburbia.  This movie is what happens when auteurs from my generation, raised on The Goonies, Stand By Me, and Explorers, begin to make art-house films.

10. Mud - I know this was on my 2012 list, but what can I say? It's release year is a bit questionable and you need to see this movie!