Here are my Top 10 movies of the year (meaning they opened in KC during 2013, even if they were considered for the 2011 Oscars). They are presented in no particular order. Alas, “Zero Dark Thirty” won’t open here until January. Otherwise it would definately be among the Top Ten.
PS Late addition: Holy crap, how could I forget about “SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN”? That ought to be in the Top Ten, too. I’m beginning to think this was a very good year at the movies.
Filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger…pondering a perplexing past
“THE FLAT” My rating: B (Opening Dec. 9 at the Tivoli)
97 minutes | No MPAA rating
A real-life detective story with far-reaching implications, “The Flat” is a worthy addition to the genre of Holocaust-related cinema.
But Arnon Goldfinger’s celebrated documentary – it’s been playing in theaters in Israel for more than a year — isn’t about cattle cars and gas chambers. It’s about human curiosity and human denial.
Five years ago filmmaker Goldfinger’s grandmother, Gerta Tuchler, died at age 98 in Tel Aviv. Born in Germany, Gerta left behind in her apartment more than 70 years’ worth of clothing (lots of creepy fox wraps and dozens of pairs of fancy ladies’ gloves) and evidence of her early life that her children and grandchildren knew nothing about.
The first clue was a yellowing Nazi newspaper, Der Angriff (The Attack), with an article about a trip to Palestine in the mid-1930s taken by Goldfinger’s grandparents, accompanied by Baron Leopold von Mildenstein, a German “journalist,” and Mildenstein’s wife.
The trip, as described by Mildenstein in the article, was to evaluate the suitability of Palestine as a destination for German Jews. The idea, at that time anyway, was that Jews could be shipped out of the Reich and relocated to another part of the world.
Diane (Juno Temple…last seen as the trailer court white trash Lolita in “Killer Joe”) is a British teen spending the summer with her aunt in NYC.
We first encounter Diane wandering around Greenwich Village, begging strangers to let her use their cell phones. With her unkempt blond mane she looks like the waif on a poster for the Broadway musical “Les Miserables.” When she’s under pressure (which is often) her nose bleeds. She has a tendency to pass out in odd places – like on the floor of a bathroom in a noisy disco.
When she runs into the boyish Jack (Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) it’s love at first sight. At least on Jack’s part (she has a mix tape she has long wanted to share with someone special). It takes Diane a bit longer to get on board (apparently she has had no prior sexual experience).
Bradley Rust Gray’s film follows the two young lovers as they come together, pull apart, party, and fight. There are confrontations with Diane’s disapproving aunt (Cara Seymour). On the rebound after a nasty spat, Jack has a fling with an older woman (Kylie Minogue).
And throughout Gray alternates the live action with disturbing stop-action animated sequences by the Brothers Quay. Here strands of hair, knots of viscera and rivulets of blood writhe sinuously and make squishy, slurping noises.
The girls watch an unsettling internet web site on which college girls are drugged and sexually abused.
At one point Diane transforms into a werewolf and eats Jack … but apparently that’s only a dream.
Never mind.
“Jack and Diane” (no relation to the John Mellencamp song with the same title) has a queasy Cronenberg-ish feel to it, with allegory, fantasy, eroticism, and adolescent angst colliding.
There’s a lot going on here and the acting is okay…but then why does it feel as banal as a teenage slumber party?
“ANNA KARENINA” My rating: B (Opens wide on Nov. 30 )
130 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Georgeous to gaze upon but muted dramatically, Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina” is an honorable adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s great Russian novel.
But then I don’t expect ever to see a movie that captures all the aspects of this monumental piece of literature, which contains within its pages not only a story of doomed love but a practically encyclopedic portrait of upper-class tsarist society.
In a way Wright (his resume includes “Pride and Prejudice,” “Hanna,” “Atonement” and “The Soloist”) has given us a Cliff’s Notes version of the book that touches on most of the main themes without developing them with anywhere near the detail provided by Tolstoy.
Part of the problem is that most of us go to “Anna Karenina” expecting breathless, tragic romance. That was the main selling point of earlier movie versions with Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh.
Tolstoy had no intention of writing a romance. In depicting the affair of the married Anna (Wright protégé Keira Knightley) and the handsome but shallow officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his goal was not to bathe in swooning emotion but to dissect – some would say clinically and cruelly – the flaws in human character and in society at large that will lead to his heroine’s eventual downfall.
To the extent that Wright’s approach to the material is also clinical, he emulates Tolstoy. The problem, of course, is that we want, nay, demand to be emotional voyeurs, and this film’s dour take doesn’t give us the kick we’re expecting.
“Killing Them Softly” has the grimmest world view of any film since Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia.”
The difference is that despite destroying the Earth in the last scene, the pessimistic Von Trier found tremendous beauty on this spinning rock.
“Killing Them Softly,” on the other hand, is a jaundiced wallow in greed and corruption, a gritty and deliberately ugly tale of crime and consequences that evokes grim laughter but leaves behind the bitter taste of bile.
Based on a novel by prosecutor-turned-writer George V. Higgins (whose The Friends of Eddie Coyle became a brilliant crime film in 1973), this effort from Aussie auteur Andrew Dominik is so brutal as to be shocking even to jaded contemporary sensibilities. Yet you can’t call it exploitative or cheap.
Our hero (the word is used advisedly) is Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), a mob enforcer dispatched to post-Katrina New Orleans to clean up a mess.
Three oily (literally…they seem to sweat 10W-40) criminals (Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Vincent Curatola) have robbed an illegal poker game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). A few years earlier Markie arranged the robbery of his own game, a bit of outside-the-box thinking that earned begrudging admiration from his fellow lowlifes.
Of course, you can only pull off that sort of thing once, and that’s what the three mooks behind this new crime are counting on. In the wake of yet another robbery everyone will assume Markie is going for a perfecta. The presumption of guilt will fall on him, allowing a clean getaway for the true perps.
Except that the lethally laid-back Cogan isn’t falling for that. He knows that Markie is too smart to pull the same stunt again. Problem is, everybody else is thick as a brick. All the gamblers in town assumes Markie is the bad guy, and to keep peace in the valley Markie – even if he’s innocent – must be made an example. (more…)
“A ROYAL AFFAIR” My rating: C+(Now at the Tivoli and the Rio)
137 minutes | MPAA rating: R
It’s got no shortage of plush costumes and castles, not to mention an egalitarian sensibility that resonates with modern audiences.
But I found Nikolaj Arcel’s “A Royal Affair” (Denmark’s submission to this year’s Oscar competition for foreign language film) dry and morose and not much fun.
Historically, at least, it seems to be pretty accurate.
In the mid 1700s an English princess (Alicia Vikander) is wedded to Denmark’s King Christian VII. It is not a happy marriage for a variety of reasons.
For one thing, England seems positively liberal compared to repressive Denmark. Upon arriving in her new home, young Queen Caroline finds that much of her personal library has been seized for espousing the heretical ideas of the Enlightenment.
But that’s just a minor blip compared to the challenges posed by her husband. King Christian (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard) is flat out nuts. He drinks and whores to excess, is indifferent to his royal duties. The best education available has left him no better prepared to rule than a besotted frat boy at some Midwestern college.
If ever there was a novel that defied the journey to film, it is Yan Martel’s 2001 “Life of Pi.”
The narrative presents a daunting logistical nightmare for any filmmaker. Most of the story involves a shipwrecked teenager who spends months at sea sharing a lifeboat with a huge Bengal tiger. It’s the sort of setup that demands the utmost of film technology.
And, in the book’s final pages, Martel introduces the possibility that our young hero is an unreliable narrator, that he has invented this epic yarn to cover a much more tawdry, shameful and shocking reality.
How do you make that work on the screen? I thought it couldn’t be done.
I was wrong.
Ang Lee’s film version of “Life of Pi” is so good on so many levels that it’s unsettling.
Not only does Lee capture the vast arc of this unconventional survival tale, but he renders it in the best 3-D I’ve ever witnessed (the only thing that comes close is “Avatar”). Moreover, the entire film is a visual tour de force, a panorama of such hallucinogenic beauty that words cannot do it justice.
For mind-blowing visuals it is rivaled only by the acid-trippy “star gate” sequence at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This film has that sort of impact. (more…)
“CHINESE TAKE-AWAY” My rating: B(Opens Nov. 2 at the Glenwood Arts)
93 minutes | No MPAA rating
“Chinese Take-Away” opens with one of the weirdest images you’ll see in movies this year.
On an idyllic lake in China two young lovers sit in a boat. The boy has a couple of wedding rings…he’s preparing to propose. And then a cow falls from the sky, shattering the boat and, in the process, the kid’s life.
Next thing you know we’re in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the tiny hardware store operated by Roberto (Ricardo Darin). He’s a middle-aged grump, sour and solitary, obsessed with making sure that when his suppliers sell him a box of 500 screws that there are actually 500 screws in the box. He spends a lot of time counting screws…that and collecting tiny blown glass animals for a shrine to his late mother, who died giving birth to him..
Sebastian Borensztein’s comedy with a heart throws together the truculent Roberto with a visitor, Jun (Ignacio Huang), that same young man from the comic/tragic prologue. Jun has traveled to Argentina to live with an uncle who immigrated there years before. But the uncle has moved out of the city to parts unknown and the childlike Jun, who speaks not a word of Spanish, must throw himself upon the comfort of strangers — or at least on the comfort of the strange Roberto.
That you can see where “Chinese Take-Away” is going doesn’t really diminish its pleasures. Roberto tries repeatedly to ditch his unwelcome guest, but his conscience always gets the best of him. For his part, Jun does what he can to be useful to his benefactor. And his presence does have one upside…it shows Roberto’s off-and-on girl (Muriel Santa Ana) that he’s not such a curmudgeon after all.
The joy in all this is the balancing of Roberto’s surly pessimism against Jun’s sad innocence. Together they make a pretty complete human being.
“SOMEWHERE BETWEEN” My rating: C+ (Opening Nov. 2 at the Tivoli)
88 minutes | No MPAA rating
The adolescent girls who are the focus of the documentary “Somewhere Between” often refer to themselves as Oreos: White on the inside, yellow (or Chinese) on the outside.
Linda Goldstein Knowlton’s documentary concentrates on four girls born in China, abandoned by their parents (China’s one-child-per-family policy has pushed thousands of couples to give up their female offspring until a more-prized boy comes along) and adopted by Americans.
In most respects these girls (they’re not young women yet, though a couple exhibit a maturity far beyond their years) are thoroughly Americanized. They tend to be high achievers. One is a fervent Christian. Another is determined to be the first Chinese-American to perform on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry.
But they’re still children, emotionally vulnerable and, despite their happy circumstances, torn by the fact that they weren’t wanted by their birth parents.
The film runs on two parallel tracks. There’s the story of their lives in the U.S.: birthday parties, church services, sports, academics, boyfriends.
And then there are the efforts (often hopeless, but sometimes remarkably successful) of these girls to discover their birth parents back in China. In at least one case this results in a girl discovering her father, two older sisters and a little brother.
We meet an adoptive mother who has launched a charity to send relief aid to abandoned children in China and spend time on a European tour sponsored by a worldwide support organization for adopted Chinese girls.
My main problem with “Somewhere Between” is not with the information it imparts, but in the relative dryness of the delivery. Knowlton exhibits competance but not much real inspiration.
Still, for families that have adopted Chinese girls or are thinking of doing so, the film is required viewing.
“The Sessions”
“Life of Pi”
“Argo” 
“ANNA KARENINA” My rating: B (Opens wide on Nov. 30 )
“KILLING THEM SOFTLY” My rating: B
Butler's Cinema Scene 