Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding Refn (2013)

Only God Forgives is a beautiful, beautiful, empty shell. I don’t mind when aesthetics are chosen over narrative (cf. my love for Malick and Marker). But I never can really accept when they’re chosen over emotions. There was so much potential in the story we’re given, but it’s ruined by the fact that everything in the film is thought of in terms of style rather than substance. 

Mud, Jeff Nichols (2012)

Mud was amazing, probably my favorite release of the year. There is this raw and twisted beauty coupled with a talent for storytelling. Which is especially impressive since our protagonist is a young boy. The story has one foot in myth and the other in reality and it weaves both worlds together seamlessly. The more I think about the more I love it, I’m still not over the tension and the emotion that I found here.

Stoker, Chan-wook Park (2013)

The film is beautiful, the story is boring. Had there not been good performances, directing and photography I’d have already forgotten about Stoker. The most powerful scenes were those that had the least to do with the plot and there were a few of those. I feel like this film was ridden with visual metaphors, most of which I probably missed but I felt that they were there and sometimes that’s enough.

Le Passé, Asghar Farhadi (2013)

Foreign directors often come to Paris for its “history”, I say they come for the French penchent for drama and twisted stories. It’s difficult to find that drama and not create something totally morbid and unwatchable. Le Passé succeeds. It is intense, not so much in the drama (though wow there is a lot of that), but in the emotions. Every characters’ moments lead up to one exact point and the tension is just brilliant up to that moment. I’m not a big Bérénice Béjo fan but I absolutely love Tahar Rahim so they balance each other out. Also never forget that I saw Tahar Rahim while he was filming this. 

Pineapple Express, David Gordon Green (2008)

James Franco is hilarious. That is basically what I’m taking out of this viewing. Also I like how it embraced the absurdness and didn’t really even try to be believable. It makes the film funnier.

Elephant, Alan Clarke (1989)

If you like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant you owe it to yourself and both directors to watch the film that gave it its name (stream it on youtube). Clarke’s film is a brutal and uncompromising vision of violence in the UK. The viewer is given nothing to latch on to (no dialogue, no music, no plot) yet he is fully implicated in his voyeuristic role. Elephant is as compelling as it is repulsive. I will definitely be watching more of Clarke.

 Celeste and Jesse Forever, Lee Toland Krieger (2012)

I love Rashida Jones, I really like Andy Samberg. There was even some bonus Elijah Wood. And yet still, Celeste and Jesse Forever, wasn’t that good. There were some really cute moments, and some really funny ones as well, I can’t deny that. But there was no progress in the plot. We were given an interesting premise and then it just felt like they didn’t really know where to go from there. Like most “indie” rom-coms Celeste and Jesse tries a bit to hard to avoid all the clichés and that is where it fails.

Pitch Perfect, Jason Moore (2012)

This was entertaining, and funny. Not as funny as I expected it to be though (it also had a couple of questionable 1st grade level jokes), but that wasn’t really a problem because I didn’t have very high expectations. The musical bits were actually pretty great, especially the face off. Although I have to say, no that everyone references the Breakfast Club/John Hughes in every teen/college comedy, you have to do more than simply reference it to make it worth while. We get it, The Breakfast Club is amazing, everyone loves it. The reference was so awkwardly done here it was kind of annoying.

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Stephan Elliott (1994)

I have wanted to watch this film since a friend described it to me at a party in high school. It was the best movie synopsis I had ever heard (once I realized that no he wasn’t talking about porn he’d stumbled upon). Years later, I finally watched the film and I wish I had actually seen the film he was describing. I believe that a camp can be great, but it’s not an excuse for having such flat characters. None of them were that compelling. Guy Pearce’s over-the-topness stopped being funny after 20 minutes. It ended up being a pretty fun film and kind of emotional. But it had the means to do much better, in at least one if not both those aspects.

Family Life, Ken Loach (1971)

I won’t ever stress enough the incredible empathy that Ken Loach has for his main characters. He doesn’t romanticize their reality in any way but he creates a film in which even if people in the fiction treat them as less, the viewer can’t possibly do the same. Yet, he never lets us forget that this fiction is also our reality. Loach’s films are my favorite pieces of social cinema. This was the first time I saw him deal with a female protagonist and an this type of issue (mental health), I wasn’t disappointed. Family Life is an uncomfortable film to watch but it is both interesting and alarming.