Delayed 2013 Movie Wrap Up

I've moved out of the big city, so it's no longer possible for me to post my year-end movie results on the 31st/ 1st of the year.  I've mulled over a new deadline for myself, and I'm going with one week after the Oscar nominations.  This was the deadline I used years ago, when I compiled a best-of list among my friends and needed to provide a deadline for the feet-draggers!  It seems like a good date to go with as I go forward with onelinereview, to still be timely, but allow me to see movies that are literally impossible to see in December living in a small town.

It was pretty tricky for me to see Blue is the Warmest Color, Nebraska, and even Oscar Best Picture front-runner 12 Years A Slave but I managed.  At this point there are a number of films that I most-certainly have to see before I can post my top ten, including: American Hustle, Dallas Buyers Club, Her; and, on DVD at this point: Fruitvale Station and Short Term 12.

I've seen 40+ films total and I will finalize my list when I've reached my usual 60 titles.

The Oscar nominations will be announced on January 16, 2014.  I'll post my Movie Wrap-Up on January 22nd and my Top Ten Movies and Noteworthy Achievements 2013 on January 23, 2014.

Happy New Year!

My Picks for the National Film Registry 2013

Happy Thanksgiving!

As is tradition, it's time for me to reveal my votes for this year's National Film Registry, due to be announced in about a month's time by the Library of Congress. We'll see how many of mine they pick! 

Last year's list spanned the years 1897-1999, and included: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1914), Sons of the Desert (1933), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), A League of Their Own (1992), and The Matrix (1999).   Also included were the usual selection of obscurer, but no-less-deserving picks such as the Technicolor industrial film The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair (1939).  A link to the Hollywood Reporter article from last year can be found here; I was mixed on the selections last year (although a few "biggies" undeniably got their due, like Breakfast at Tiffany's and Dirty Harry).

The National Film Registry started in 1989, and there are currently 600 films on the list.  Although there does seem to be less of a push for great films these days over those of "cultural" importance (Librarian of Congress James M. Billington was quoted last year to say: "These films are not selected as the best American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring importance to American culture"), there is still at least an unconscious push for inclusion of those considered works of art.  If the selections were based entirely on cultural "endurance" over that of a quality assessment, why would such narrative films that made the list last year as The Wishing Ring (1914), Born Yesterday (1950), and Anatomy of a Murder (1959) [films hardly part of the contemporary zeitgeist] make it in over such perennial shut-outs as The Seven Year Itch (1955), The Birds (1963), and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)?

Below are my picks for what should be on this year's list (I only do the narrative feature films: I'll let the Library of Congress decide on the obscure works).  To me, the film that most needs to be added above all (my choice now FOUR years running!) is Blue Velvet.  Last year just one of my picks made the list: A Christmas Story (1983). 

My choices for this go-round, by year:

1920s-30s (2 titles)

The Sheik (1921)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

1940s (5 titles)

The Little Foxes (1941)

Lifeboat (1944)

To Have and Have Not (1944)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

The Lady From Shanghai (1948)

1950s (10 titles)

Harvey (1950)

The Red Badge Of Courage (1951)

Strangers on a Train (1951)

Limelight (1952)

The Quiet Man (1952)

Stalag 17 (1953)

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

The Killing (1956)

The King and I (1956)

Auntie Mame (1958)

1960s (10 titles)

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

101 Dalmatians (1961)

Lolita (1962)

The Birds (1963)

The Great Escape (1963)

Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

The Naked Kiss (1964)

Seconds (1966)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

1970s (10 titles)

Love Story (1970)

Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (1974)

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

The Front (1976)

Grease (1978)

Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979)

1980s (10 titles)

Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)

Arthur (1981)

The World According to Garp (1982)

Terms of Endearment (1983)

Aliens (1986)

Blue Velvet (1986)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Raising Arizona (1987)

Wall Street (1987)

Die Hard (1988)

1990s (2 titles)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Titanic (1997)

2000s (1 title)

Bad Santa (2003)

EW Fall Movie Preview 2013

The EW Fall Movie Preview is out this week and my reaction is night-and-day compared with the summer movie issue-- there are TONS of movies coming out I can't wait to see.  Here's at least a few of them:

Parkland (9/30)

Gravity (10/4)

Captain Phillips (10/11)

Machete Kills (10/11)

Carrie (10/18)

Blue Is the Warmest Color (10/25)

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (10/25) [I confess!]

Thor: The Dark World (11/8)

The Wolf of Wall Street (11/15)

Her (11/20)

Nebraska (11/22)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (11/22)

American Hustle (12/13)

Saving Mr. Banks (12/13)

The Monuments Men (12/18)

Anchorman 2 (12/20)

The Invisible Woman (12/25) [maybe, we'll see]

Jack Ryan (12/25)

Best of the Year So Far: Mid-Year Top 5 2013

Time again for my top 5 of the year, and I've never had no "must sees" at this point.  Ugh! What a movie year this is turning out to be. Auteurs where are you? The eight contenders this year (all "recommended") are: 42, Before Midnight, Identity Thief, Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Oz The Great and Powerful, This Is the End, Warm Bodies.

It's not gonna be easy to cobble a decent list from them, but here it goes...

My top 5 2013 so far (listed alphabetically)
Before Midnight
42
Iron Man 3
Oz The Great and Powerful
This Is the End

EW Summer Movie Preview 2013

It's taken me quite a while to peruse my favorite EW issue of the year, and I was wondering why.  I discovered after I looked through it that I'm much less psyched than usual for this year's summer movie offerings.  As always, my top-to-see are May releases, but strangely the one I want to see most is not a blockbuster-- it's Before Midnight (very excited).

Man of Steel: what can I say? How can I get excited by a Superman movie?  Please stop (a.) with superhero movies and (b.) the same old, same old.  I feel the same way unfortunately about Wolverine. I like the X-Men, but there have been countless movies at this point.

Among the ones that I fear could be bad, but hope they are at least popcorn-fun: After Earth, The Lone Ranger, White House Down, and World War Z.

Curious about Only God Forgives due to Drive-director/actor reuniting.

Pacific Rim and Elysium are interesting to me in the same way: two directors who pulled off pretty cool past films on small budgets, now have a big budget to play with. Hopefully they don't screw it up.

Here are the top six films I'm most looking forward to seeing, in release order:

Iron Man 3 (5/3)

Star Trek: Into Darkness (5/17)

Before Midnight (5/24)

The Hangover: Part III (5/24)

Despicable Me 2 (7/26)

Elysium (8/9)

IMDb & Indiewire Top Films Mash-Up

MEETS

I was curious to see what would happen if I took the top films on the Indiewire poll of critics from 2012 and melded it with the (now "settled") top rated films from users on IMDb.  It was a pretty interesting list! (I looked at IMDb's 2011 list as well for foreign films that might have been released a year earlier in their country of origin. Didn't apply this year.) Here's the top ten (alphabetically listed):

TOP TEN 2012

Amour

Argo

Django Unchained

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Looper

Moonrise Kingdom

Silver Linings Playbook

Skyfall

Zero Dark Thirty

Putting the lists together eliminates both IMDb's top film (The Dark Knight Rises) and Indiewire's top film (Holy Motors).  It seems to "work" to eliminate the top "popular" acclaimed movie and the top "critically" acclaimed movie. Both of their #2s made the list: IMDb (Django Unchained), Indiewire (Zero Dark Thirty).

In the olden (pre-internet) days, The National Board of Review's top ten (plus foreign film list) was a pretty reliable list.  Melded with the New York Times top ten for any given year and compared against IMDb's users ratings, you get a similar more "accurate" list of the ten-best of any given year [again, shifting release dates as necessary].

Here's two years, to illustrate:

1937
Captains Courageous
The Good Earth
Grand Illusion
The Life of Emile Zola
Lost Horizon
Make Way for Tomorrow
Night Must Fall
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Stage Door
A Star Is Born

1973
Amarcord
American Graffiti
Day For Night
The Last Detail
The Long Goodbye
Mean Streets
O Lucky Man!
Paper Moon
Serpico
The Sting

It's not perfect since some movies were not acknowledged as great films in their day, most famously Touch of Evil and Vertigo in 1958, but in these cases it's pretty obvious when such films are missing, such as The Exorcist from 1973, above.  Does always seem to result in a pretty primo top ten, and a nice place to start for budding cinephiles.

None of this matters, but it's always fun to make a movie list!

Full Reviews on OneLineReview

From time to time, I write full movie reviews. Here's a list of all the movies for which I've written full reviews (a list I'll update with this annual March 1 blog entry from now on), in chronological order. It skips the capsule reviews I've sometimes written (I'll look to expand some of those and add them here). I'm doing it in paragraph, rather than list form, to conserve space.

A Bill of Divorcement (1932), It Happened One Night (1934), Top Hat (1935), Bringing Up Baby (1938).

Bambi (1942), Brief Encounter (1945), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Adam's Rib (1949), All the King's Men (1949).

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Quiet Man (1952), Marty (1955), Wild Strawberries (1957).

Psycho (1960), Dr. Strangelove... (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Gandhi (1982), Terms of Endearment (1983).

Casino Royale (2006), The Departed (2006), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Away From Her (2007), Juno (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007).