MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: LINDSAY AND THE PORN STAR

The operating thesis of The Canyons is that movies are awful, the people who make them are awful, and the culture that permits their continued existence is awful. It is perhaps a keen example of form reflecting content, therefore, that The Canyons is itself pretty goddamn awful; and given who director Paul Schrader is, it's possible that this really is deliberate. It is even more possible, particularly given that legendary New York Times Magazine...

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RONIN, RONIN, RONIN ON THE RIVER

Since 47 Ronin opened, mystifyingly, on Christmas Day, it has earned for itself the right to be treated with the warmth and charity of the holiday season. Thus: this movie has, for serious, kind of amazing sound mixing. It is raging and violent during the battle scenes, it's hushed and soothing in the scenes of reflective solemnity, it creates at all times an immersive feeling that is more fluid and ethereal than naturalistic, and yet a kind of naturalism...

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COMPUTER DATING

There is much to love in Her, and there is a little bit to be hugely frustrated by, though on the whole the concept and world-building is beguiling enough that getting through the rough patches en route to the terrific stuff is no real chore. But there is a flaw so obvious and basic that I'm puzzled nobody seems to have brought it up yet, which is that the film ends three times. That is to say, three times the editing and the blocking are cue us...

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: THE MOTHERING INSTINCT

Bradford Young! Say it soft, and it's not really at all like praying, with those two shovey "D"s and all, but it's still an exquisite and important name to get to know. I feel as if Young has been my big discovery of the year, which is bad on me, since 2013 is not also the first year of prominent movies to be shot by him - going all the way back to 2011, he was the cinematographer on Pariah, a film that even had some pretty damn noteworthy cinematography....

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - IT'S BETTER DOWN WHERE IT'S WETTER

Here's a switch: Latitude Zero of 1969 was the first, and I believe only, Toho tokusatsu (effects-driven film) shot in English, for an English-speaking market, and only groomed for Japanese release afterward. So the "proper" version of the movie, and the longer cut (by 15 minutes), is the English language one. And it's that one that we'll primarily look at now, though in my zeal for completeness, did watch both cuts. The biggest difference between...

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AUGGGGHUST

Sometimes, one's biases are simply so great that it's impossible to do anything but acknowledge them and move on. Here, then, is mine: I saw Tracy Letts's Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County during its 2007 premiere run at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, playing in the space it was written for and starring actors that, in some cases, the parts had been written for, and it's simply the best live theatrical experience I've ever had. The best...

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HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF

The Wolf of Wall Street isn't done. That's the thing that has to be cleared out before we can do anything else at all with it. It might very well be a film that Martin Scorsese can live with for the rest of his life without ever considering for a minute that he and editor Thelma Schoonmaker need to revisit it for a home video re-edit somewhere down the road, and in that sense can be described as "finished"; but it's not done. There are several scenes,...

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: COMMEDIA DELL'MORTE

There's an insurmountable argument to be made that, most of a year later, there's no merit to kicking Movie 43 anymore. On the other hand, writing shell-shocked, visceral pans of fucking dreadful movies is fun, and it's Christmas Day. So here's my present to myself, and hopefully to you as well, my readers. God bless us, every one.Now, I have not seen every wide-release American film of 2013, but I do not need to in order to know with all my heart...

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

The Canadian indie horror film American Mary is good enough that I wish it were better. That's a weird way of phrasing what's meant to be a statement of praise; but American Mary is a weird movie. It's the second feature by filmmaking twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, following the 2009 Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which I have not seen, though I have a sneaking suspicion I can guess what it's about; their production company is named Twisted Twins, which sounds...

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DESPERATE TIMES

Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin is in some ways a harsh departure for the filmmaker, one of the reigning masters of Chinese cinema; the quiet gracefulness of his films best-known in the English-speaking world has been replaced by anger and violence, a lingering despair clinging to the movie like a bramble. But at the same time, it's business as usual for a director whose work has all explored the trauma of a swiftly-changing China caught in the gap...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - AND THEN DESTROY THEM!

The English title of Destroy All Monsters - not meaningfully similar to the Japanese title, which I've seen translated variously as Charge of the Monsters, March of the Monsters, or Attack of the Monsters - very nearly proved to be prophetic, for the 1968 film began its life as an intentional finale to the Godzilla series and to the whole matter of daikaiju eiga at Toho. It was, indeed, very nearly all monsters that would be involved; not just the...

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PERSONAL CANON: NOTHING MORE FOOLISH THAN A MAN CHASIN' HIS HAT

Miller's Crossing may or may not be the Coen brother's "best" movie. I think that argument exists to be made, but it's hard to get all the way through it with Barton Fink and Fargo over there in the corner, flexing their muscles. It is, though, almost certainly their most complicated and dense movie, both as a narrative and a character study - I have found it uniformly necessary to see Coen movies twice to fully suss out everything they have going...

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