TARR BÉLA'S DAMNED SPOT

It was with his 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth that Tarr Béla suddenly and without warning turned into Tarr Béla. No learning curve, no gradual shift - all at once, the social realism that had marked his early features simply wasn't there, replaced with "fuck you, that's why" approach to formalist storytelling that turns his film less into a version of William Shakespeare's tragedy than an exercise in how cinematic blocking dictates our response to narrative. I think that even one who has not seen a single Tarr film and merely knows of his reputation will understand how much more characteristic this film is of his later, more famous work if I share the simplest, most essential facts about it. The opening shot is about five and a half minutes long, on the NTSC DVD released by Facets; it contains the scene of Macbeth (Cserhalmi György) encountering the three witches (played by men; which men, I cannot say with certainty), hearing their prophecy, and having his lightbulb moment about what "king hereafter" might mean, exactly. The second and final shot is 57 minutes long and contains everything else.

It occurs to me, as I let that bit of trivia sink in, that Macbeth is, itself, the "gradual shift" from early Tarr to mature Tarr. There's a lot about that 57-minute single take into which the plot of Shakespeare's shortest (but not that short) tragedy has been compressed which feels tremendously different from the occasional stretched-out camerawork of The Outsider, the latter of which frequently involves documentarylike observation that Macbeth wholly lacks. But in certain key ways, Macbeth is just as clearly aligned with Tarr's realism trilogy, especially in its overwhelming reliance on close-ups. Faces dominate Tarr's Shakespeare film just as significantly as they dominate Family Nest, and as they certainly do not dominate The Turin Horse, to name one example. It is a story told almost exclusively through faces: the stone building playing the Scottish castle where all of the story takes place is devoid of all but the most plot-essential furnishings, meaning that the film consists of basically nothing for the great majority of its running time but yellow stone walls and human beings. The close-ups in the film belong to an entirely different order than the essentially neo-realist Family Nest (there's not a damn thing in Macbeth that can be meaningfully described as "realist"), but the emotional effect of them is more or less the same: we are confronted, with great immediacy, by persons in moments of intense, wrenching emotion, and forced to devote all our attention to how that emotion makes them feel.

This tendency reaches its clear peak during the scene where the witches return to present Macbeth with a vision of the future kings, staged so that Cserhalmi's face is bathed in candy apple red light, as he stares directly into the camera; the most aggressive moment in an aggressive film, and one that could take an essay in its own right to unpack, so I'll content myself with suggesting that by making the viewer co-exist with the horrifying vision Macbeth experiences, the film is making us active participants in his mental decline. Not necessarily in some schematic, gaze-theory manner where we're being condemned for wanting to watch him (though it's not not that. inherently), but that our act of watching him, and having his emotional state beamed directly to us through Cserhalmi's young-looking, open features, is what drives the film's meaning. That is, Macbeth - or anyway, this particular Macbeth, and plainly, Tarr isn't trying to make a definitive version - has meaning only because we're watching it decode that meaning.

For by all means, this is a film that must be decoded, not watched; stripped of everything conventionally entertaining about films set in palaces in the 11th Century where witches and murderers run rampant, the film openly presents itself as a intellectual exercise in considering Macbeth the play, rather than a spectating exercise in being moved by the story. In this incarnation, the story is virtually a shambles, as it must be: there's no conceivable way to fit the content even of Tarr's severely truncated version of events into just an hour, but there's that unavoidable single take insisting that every event we see happens with rampaging chronological and physical continuity. That being a clear impossibility, what we're left with is not the story of Macbeth, meaningfully told, but something like a walking tour of the emotional terrain of Macbeth conceived as a flow rather than a narrative (it is a most fluid movie: the camera practically floats through the castle, gliding back and forth along hallways with a fleetness that's most impressive for a dirt-cheap TV production made by a young director, while the scene transitions involve characters sidling in and out of frame so briskly that it takes a few tries before you notice that they're doing it). A distillation of Macbeth, if you will. One in which the titular anti-hero and his scheming wife (Kútvölgyi Erzsébet, absolutely wonderful in every imaginable regard that a non-speaker of Hungarian can judge) are not walked through scenes but hurtled through an inevitable chain of realisations and impressions in one blast of dramatic fatalism.

This is, all of it, terrifically compelling on an intellectual level and even on an emotional one, the latter effect relying heavily on Cserhalmi and Kútvölgyi's tremendous high-wire acting. I would be horrified to think of it being anybody's first contact with the play Macbeth, even setting aside the issue of it being translated to Hungarian (the Facets DVD uses direct lines from Shakespeare as the subtitles, which I somewhat wish it did not do). It's simply not a version of the story; not really a story at all, and not dramatically comprehensible, really. It uses the framework of Macbeth to explore how people feel, and how their feelings make them interact with their physical surroundings; the physical surroundings of the characters being, of course, particularly present in a film made this, the camera moving in and out of all the hallways and doors it can find. The nice way of putting it is that the film cuts to the immediate emotional truth of the play by using specifically cinematic techniques of staging and acting to dislocate those truths from the genre mechanics of the story; the mean way is that it relies on us already knowing what's going on and what to think as it indulges in snobby art film showmanship for its own sake. Clearly, I tend toward the former interpretation while allowing that the latter argument is easy to make; for all the film's audacity, Macbeth is the work of an ingenious mind more than a sophisticated one, perhaps. There's little in the film, individually, that Tarr himself didn't do better, earlier or later in his career. But he never did it all in one place like this, and that's the reason above everything else that Macbeth is such a stunner: it combines ideas about acting, character, and film creation in specific ways that are both surprising and intuitive, and it's pretty safe to say that there's never been anything else exactly like it.

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FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTERS FROM HELL

There's nothing quite as wholly wretched as a tremendously dumb movie that fails to be such a violation of basic filmmaking competence for its stupidity to blossom into something fun to mock. Thus: I, Frankenstein, a movie that exactly lives up to the pedigree "from the producers" - and co-scenarist Kevin Grevioux, a fact not mentioned in the ads - of Underworld. That is to say, we have here yet another modern urban adaptation of one of the classic horror monsters, drenched in sparkling black and tech-white production design and cinematography, anchored by actors who seem hellbent on having the least fun possible with inherently ludicrous concepts. And Bill Nighy lording over everything as a scenery-chomping bad guy that you'd be inclined to call "campy" if there was even a little bit of flavor to his performance.

The hook (the "plot", we might call it, but I think that's being awfully generous) is that the stitched-together undead monster (Aaron Eckhart) created in the 1790s by Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Aden Young) did not merely enjoy superhuman strength and stamina, but was immortal to boot. And thus it is that it still lives all this time later - the film uses "200 years" a lot, and I get the convention of using round figures, but that's not quite the phrasing you'd use if you were talking about the gap between 1795 and 2014, so I'm not really sure when "now" is - having spent most of that time in the wilderness hiding from the demons that want to study it to use Frankenstein's reanimation technique for their own ends. Opposing the hellspawn are the soldiers of the Order of the Gargoyle, an army of apparently low-tier angels that live inside the stone statues on cathedrals. The gargoyle queen, Leonore (Miranda Otto), was the first to recognise the monster's right to live, giving it the name Adam and treating it with something vaguely like kindness; but even she would rather use him as a pawn in her fight against the demon prince Naberius (Nighy) than really deal with the consequences of his potential humanity.

That, in practice: Aaron Eckhart, with scars on his face and chiseled abdomen that represents a grotesque inhuman abomination according to no standards ever held in any culture on Earth, attacks people with big metal sticks, they blow up in lousy CGI plumes of flame. Sometimes there are many of them all at once, and he kills them quickly, in combos. Sometimes there is a level boss, and it takes him longer, with more elaborate but not really any more interesting choreography. Sometimes he snarls at and/or protects the exorbitantly wan biologist - the world's greatest electro-chemist, or something like that - Terra (Yvonne Strahovski), who is incongruously chipper and quick to adapt after being plunged into a draggletail fantasy world by a glowering stranger who is, we are assured, meant to be gross and hideous and not at all smoldering and sexy. Not that any of the four adjectives I just used actually apply to Eckhart's hilarious gruff performance, though since it's really just a waiting game until the film tries to force a romantic attachment between the two, director Stuart Beattie certainly seems to be aiming more for "smoldering", regardless of where he ends up landing.

Everything about I, Frankenstein is overdetermined and ridiculous in a manner that's more annoying than funny, beginning with its clumsy title (with the emphasis on glossy, sterile surfaces, I'd have preferred iFrankenstein), moving on to Eckhart's performance, and culminating in the overwhelmingly grim, grandly chintzy texture of both Ross Emery's drably shadowy cinematography and Michelle McGahey's production design, dominated as it is by the Order of the Gargoyle's command center, located in a stunningly massive Gothic cathedral that looks like Notre Dame de Paris went through a punk phase and came out with spikes jutting out of every possible surface. In these elements and others - the demons, looking awkwardly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer baddies, the villains' industrial-chic lair, the scar tissue that tends to augment Eckhart's abs rather than make him look like a perversion in God's eyes - the film indulges in a wide-ranging tackiness that actually makes it look cheaper than it is: from all the visual evidence, you'd guess it was one of those on-the-fly shot-in-Romania jobs, and not a largely Australia-based production. Certainly, nothing in the rinky-dink nondescript European settings nor the bargain-bin CGI implies any kind of level of care or investment in the production.

In comparison, the lousy screenplay is merely a distraction, not a significant flaw. Oh, there are plenty of problems that a first-year screenwriting student would be able to pick out - Leonore's wildly inconsistent motivation, the film's generally confused sense of how the gargoyles work in the first place, the blockheaded dialogue that involves Adam reciting essentially the same litany of thoughts in at least every other scene - but it's just bad. And bad horror/fantasy action films are easy to swallow, once you've seen enough of them. Beattie's screenplay, from Grevioux's comic book, is dysfunctional but only because it is lazy and hugely content to rework Underworld but with Frankenstein's monster this time. Underworld having been a bit of a slog to begin with, it's of course the case that I, Frankenstein ends up being a dull-minded, low-energy waste, but the screenplay still manages to be the best thing.

Between the design, the acting, and the pacing, the whole thing is a lugubrious bore, not daft enough to be fun, not wretched enough to be the kind of vigorously painful that bad movie masochists can still get a kick out of. It's ugly and miserable in the most generic way possible, amusing only in flashes, usually because of Eckhart's "kids roleplaying in the backyard" performance style. But mostly, it's just tedium, a routine January release without even enough creativity to be disgusting.

And in case you were wondering, the "Frankenstein must be destroyed" moment from the trailer? Re-edited dialogue, probably by a marketing consultant with a better sense of taste than the rest of the production combined. So there's not even dubious fan-service to make it worthwhile!

4/10

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JACK AND THE, SHADOW... RECRUITS?

Above all else, what Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit teaches us - if we really needed to be taught it, though we do not - is that Kenneth Branagh the director has an unstoppable infatuation with Kenneth Branagh the actor. Kevin Costner gets introduced coming up behind the camera and in profile. Keira Knightley just meanders into a shot. Chris Pine - the movie's star - is introduced in a wholly run-of-the-mill close-up. But Sir Kenneth Branagh is introduced in a splashy back-of-the-head shot where he punches and kicks a guy to death, flashes his Russian mafia tattoos at the camera, and only then does the film permit us a close-up of his face, framed dramatically and intensely, to make it clear that this man is someone we are very excited to stare at. Later on, he strides manfully out of a church, backlit and perfectly centered, in what is unmistakably the most dramatic image of the whole movie. Branagh on Branagh. Sounds like a sex act, because that's what it is.

It's not just the framing, either; the actors, in creating their characters, are helped not at all by their director in finding anything to make the patchwork script by Adam Cozad (author of the original script, Moscow) and David Koepp (brought on to Jack Ryan it up) feel like it involves credible human beings. The most ill-served is Knightley, who I genuinely believe, perhaps against the evidence, to be a worthwhile actress; she has to contend with both the achingly stock role of the nagging, worried girlfriend who doesn't realise that her lover is an action hero, played completely straight, and also with an American accent that completely destroys her. I did not know, till watching Knightley in Shadow Recruit, that there could be such a thing at somebody who has to strain so hard to put on an accent that you can literally see their jaw lock up and the tendons in their neck bulge out. In comparison, everybody looks good, though Pine has never been this hollow and asleep beneath his disposable good looks, and Branagh, blessed with an indulgent director, opens up with a cartoonivisk Rooshky accent that's hammy enough to bring its own toast, orange juice, and fried eggs along. If it wasn't for Costner's pleasantly gruff CIA handler being tart and folksy in a moderately appealing way, there'd be not a single thing standing between Shadow Recruit and total unwatchability.

I mean nothing. Not the action, which is inordinately relaxed and low impact (the first of two car chase scenes is one of the most laconic I have ever seen filmed, the latter shot mostly from inside vehicles and thus deprived of a chance to show off its choreography). Maybe the spy thrills, which rely for all of most of their effect on Patrick Doyle's decently bombarding score, though in the case of a computer hacking scene, that very nearly ends up being sufficient. Certainly not the story, which is a giddy, nonsensical pile of contrivances hoping the viewer will hear "economic warfare" and assume that the rest makes sense, even if the rest involves propping up that old chestnut, The Specter of Superpower Russia, and praying that we'll buy Russians as implacable villains more than two decades after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The film's main purpose, anyway, isn't to provide a credible geopolitical narrative, but a backstory for young Jack Ryan (Pine), an American economics student in London driven to join the Marines as a result of 9/11, wounded horribly in Afghanistan, and recruited by CIA agent Thomas Harper (Costner) as he recovers. The bright analyst of 1990's The Hunt for Red October and three subsequent films made over the next 12 years is to be found nowhere in the callow youth presented here, who has a certain instinct for ferreting out plots, but also has a pronounced tendency to get extremely lucky in plot-convenient moments, which probably has less to do with Pine's vacant performance and more to do with Shadow Recruit not taking its plot from any particular novel by process geek Tom Clancy (who died while the film was in post-production, and has had the film dedicated to his memory, which seems like a pretty mean thing to do to dead guy, if you ask me), and thus suffering from the lack of his attention to CIA mechanics.

The new movie has little to do with any kind of clever spying, and everything to do with the most generic sub-Bourne activity, only denuded of its most overtly action-oriented shading because Jack Ryan is the "thinking spy", or some such; it feels less like a Red October/Clear and Present Danger style renunciation of generic elements, and more like they just couldn't afford them. The whole thing is glossy and bland-looking, shot by Haris Zambarloukos in the same late-'90s computer-chic shiny greys that he and Branagh used on Sleuth, if you can bring yourself to remember that that existed. It traffics in spritely xenophobia and racism (as part of a franchise where Ryan's boss was a black guy four times out of four, the only non-white person this time around is killed horribly in his second scene), has nothing interesting to do with its sole prominent female besides have Knightley look pouty and happy in alternation - but then, it has nothing interesting to do with any of its characters. Only its over-the-top Russian bad guy, and even he is interesting only in the negative sense, in that he is broad, unbelievable, and hilariously campy in a film without a camp bone in its body. The film is insulting to the viewer hoping for a decent spy thriller, idiotically written, and worst of all, dull - I wouldn't have dreamed it would be possible for a Jack Ryan movie to end up worse than the leaden Ben Affleck vehicle The Sum of All Fears, but Shadow Recruit doesn't just fail to rise above that bar, it ecstatically dives under it like Esther Williams on a cocaine binge.

3/10

Reviews in this series
The Hunt for Red October (McTiernan, 1990)
Patriot Games (Noyce, 1992)
Clear and Present Danger (Noyce, 1994)
The Sum of All Fears (Robinson, 2002)
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Branagh, 2014)

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B-FEST 2014

And now I am recovered enough that I can share with you my tale of B-Fest 2014, the 32nd edition of Northwestern University student group A&O Productions' annual 24-hour celebration of bad (and sometimes, not-so-bad movies), and my own lucky number 13, as I started going as a sophomore at NU in 2002 and have never missed a year since.

After two brilliant years, it's not all that surprising that 2014 was a step down, though I'll say this for it: there was a nearly flawless mix of genres, eras, and styles. It's just that the audience wasn't as rowdy as it has been in years past; and as B-Fest is chiefly and above all about the enthusiasm of the audience, it hurts it quite a lot when the riffing isn't as boisterous. But it was a hell of a lot of fun nonetheless, and despite one curious scheduling gaff, which I'll talk about, it was a fluid, technically flawless 24 hours, a wonderful return to form after the Great Greenshift of 2013, when the projector lost a component cable.

In addition to the slightly calmed-down audience, I have my own super private reason for being a bit disinvested in this year's proceedings: there has never been such a small number of films I hadn't already seen. Out of 13 features - not including Plan 9 from Outer Space - the annual tradition that I've taken to skipping - four were brand new to me, and a fifth I'd only ever seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I don't officially count. I suppose this says more about me than the schedule, and so I will not hold it against the programmers.

Friday, 24 January, 6:00 PM
First up, and a pretty terrific opener, at that, was the 1989 Cold War future sport film Robot Jox, one of an unprecedented three films on the B-fest schedule to have previous received a full-length review here. Its last and only B-Fest appearance was in 2004, which puts in a strong bid for being the very best I've ever attended, and not least because this very movie was a part of it. '80s shlock that isn't too bad has proven one of the most reliable B-Fest openers in recent years, and the fact that there's a lot of legitimately cool B-movie antics (the robots, the simplistically Evil villain) to go along with the horrible nonsense (the spy thriller subplot, the ghastly acting of the female lead) makes it a perfect watch for the early, high-energy part of the day. Also, the many butts. Naked butts is always a crowd-pleaser at B-Fest

7:40 PM

The first appearance of a weird little tic that wouldn't sort itself out until most of the way through: the gap between films wasn't just long enough for a bathroom break, but a whole damn bubble bath. Frequently, 15 or even 20 minutes would click by between movies, and this paid off terribly at the end.

At this point, anyway, the schedule called for The Amazing Colossal Man, which would have been perfect in my opinion; it was swapped at the last minute with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which was... less perfect. In my opinion. The thing is, I've seen this one so many times, MST3K-ified and other, that I honestly wouldn't mind never seeing it again. But the crowd was pretty into it, with many of the night's best riffing coming at the expense of the sets and the horrible comic relief Martian. The biggest problem was that the sound started off much too low, meaning that the absolute best part of the movie - it's annoyingly chirpy theme song, "Hooray for Santy Claus" - was inaudible. And this maybe made me like it less than I would have.

All that being said, if you have not seen the film, and have the remotest affection for bad sci-fi, you should make it one of your highest priorities.

9:14 PM
The first of two shorts on 16mm, the only film projection of the fest (and, incidentally, the appearance of the DVD menus every time they started up a disc was one of the most charming parts of the fest): The Gipsy's Warning, a 1913 short - the first time a film of over 100 years of age has ever showed at B-Fest - directed by G. Méliès. That'd be Gaston Méliès, Georges's brother, but I didn't find out until two days later. This explains, at any rate, why it's such a sleepy melodrama (with, admittedly, some gorgeous location photograph). The audience clearly didn't give a shit, and I suspect that I was the only person in the auditorium actually trying to watch it.

9:27 PM
Returning from last year, the short one-reel version of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, made for home viewing. Last year I said "it's a pretty solid reduction of the original film, picking some of the best bits. Then it turns into a crazy, incoherent slurry of mobs with pitchforks. Stick with the massively flawed original", not a word of which has changed. And I rather hope it doesn't come back for the hat trick in 2015.

9:41 PM
So here's the tricky part of talking about this year's B-Fest: the absolute highlight was the same film as the absolute highlight of 2009, Megaforce. Which has, in the intervening five years, been released on DVD - a DVD that I bought the second I got home, incidentally - meaning we all got to see it with a wider frame and clearer picture, the better to appreciate Barry Bostwick's nightmarishly large schlong in nightmarishly tight pants. It was sponsored by long-time B-Fest stalwarts The Soylent Green Party, making their final appearance by that name; founding member Tre Chipman passed away in the last year, and the film, one of his favorites that his group had ever sponsored, was dedicated to his memory.

A great memorial it was, too: the film is an insanely good crowd-pleaser, it came at the perfect moment in the schedule, and anybody with a riffing bone in their body can make fun of it. Still, watching it now was functionally identical to watching it then, and while that was enough to make it the best part of the night, I hope that future programmers recognise the special circumstances of its appearance this year and let it stay hidden for a good long while now. Even though, as a college event (albeit one where a commanding majority of the attendees aren't college students), it's got a free pass to recycle every four years.

11:45 PM
An especially great historical moment: not only did I skip Plan 9 from Outer Space for the fourth time running, I skipped The Wizard of the Speed and Time, glorious short that it is, for the first time ever. I was in a BAD place, sleep-wise, and I needed to eke out every minute of napping I could, so I left the auditorium to snag a couch. As result, happily, I was bright and perky for-

Saturday, 25 January, 1:34 AM
Thomasine & Bushrod, a blaxploitation Western. But even more than that, a blaxploitation Bonnie & Clyde, which I will confess came as a disappointment. The tremendously brassy performance by Vonetta McGee as Thomasine carried it for a long while, but right around the point where the title duo commit to robbing banks instead of just wandering around the 1910s being enthusiastic anachronisms, some air goes out of the film, and it gets pretty laconic and aimless. 2:00 in the morning is a bad time for that to happen.

This was, by the way, the first film that I hadn't seen before; it was immediately followed by the second.

3:19 AM
And now, a film that would have benefited from more energy from a fuller house with a more awake crowd (though the 3:00-4:00 slot is usually even quieter than this), though the vast amount of nudity wouldn't have worked anyplace else. I refer to the space vampire epic Lifeforce, Tobe Hooper's first film after chaperoning Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist to completion. It is shockingly boring, for something with so many different tones throughout (haunted house in space riff, much like screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's earlier Alien; British vampire mystery; end-of-the-world military thriller), so much nudity, and a couple suprisingly great performances, especially Peter Firth's. In fact, it's probably because it was so free in switching from one mode to the next that it was tedious: no chance for it to build up any momentum. There's a lot of handsome production to it, but it is on the whole painfully mediocre, and a theoretically great choice for B-Fest; but again, almost impossible to schedule right, and that made watching it even less fun.

5:25 AM
Back to the films I'd already seen, with Antonio Margheriti's nuts space invaders picture War of the Planets. Which I just watched in, like, August, and I still needed sleep, so I slept. In my chair this time, which meant the sleeping wasn't quite as rich, but you get what you can at B-Fest

7:04 AM
Another film I saw not too long ago, if "about 15 months" is not to long ago; Kitten with a Whip, an overheated Juvenile Delinquency picture with Ann-Margret as the kitten. It struck me at the time as unbearably typical if slightly trashier than most examples of the form, so I slept right on through this one; that was apparently a dismal decision, as I am assured by one of my friends who attended with me. Apparently, the handful of people awake at the time where in choice riffing form, and the whole experience was a major peak. It was, in fact, his favorite movie of this year's B-Fest, and he's not a fan of JD movies or black and white B-pictures generally. So that's saying a hell of a lot.

8:32 AM
An historic moment: the first movie ever to be sponsored by your very own Antagony & Ecstasy! Super Mario Bros. was next, another film I've reviewed, and I will confess that it would feel weird to me, given those two facts, for me to say much about it. This much only: it landed perfectly well, no better than it had to; based on the crowd response, I'd say it was somewhere in the vast middle of this year's B-Fest, along with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Lifeforce, and a couple of the ones to come.

There followed a short breakfast break.

10:36 AM
I'm still not sure what my favorite film of the year was, if I can't count Megaforce (and I don't think I should), but here's my easy pick for least favorite: the 1939 programmer Code of the Secret Service, starring Ronald Reagan as heroic T-man "Brass" Bancroft". It was Reagan's least-favorite film of his career (though, ironically, the one that inspired Agent Jerry Parr, who saved the president's life in 1981 during John Hinckley's assassination attempt, to join the Secret Service), and for the many things I have disagreed with that man about, we see eye-to-eye here: it's illogical, rather pointless, and far too confusing for something too short and generic to survive.

11:47 AM
Attempting follow last year's hugely successful, though not, as I recall, hugely crowd-pleasing Beach Blanket Bingo, another AIP pop-art film from the mid-'60s, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Which I have reviewed, and found not all that terrific - certainly not as energetic and fun and strange as Beach Blanket Bingo, and one of my two friends agreed with me. The other thought it was the highlight of the fest, so it just goes to show that we all have different needs and opinions.

My opinion, though, is that Vincent Price and the first 25 minutes are much too good on a legitimate level to count this as a "bad" movie, and the final chase sequence, which I'm sure isn't as long as it feels, because it feels goddamn endless, is much too bad to count as anything else. It's just not that much fun, to me, too campy to really mock, and too peppy to find boring. It fits all the requirements of B-Fest, I suppose, but I'd have much rather they scrounged up another Beach Party movie, honestly.

There followed a lightening-fast lunch break, preceding the raffle. I do not know why the raffle was so late; if the gaps had been sucked out of the pre-midnight schedule, there'd have been time to do it at its usual spot before The Wizard of Speed and Time.

1:57 PM
The final stretch began with The Deadly Mantis, which I have only seen on MST3K. But the experience is about the same. Formally speaking, the year's only giant monster movie should have come at the end, and the film immediately following would maybe have been a better return to speed after the raffle, but that's just my two cents. This is, at any rate, a thoroughly wonderful '50s monster picture, with outrageously stupid dialogue, a crazy opening that goes on and on about radar shields and is plainly just padding, and some hilarious giant mantis effects. Indeed, till Dario Argento came to play with Dracula 3D, I'd call it the best bad mantis in cinema history. If I'm counting Megaforce, I might just barely give it my edge for my favorite film of the festival, largely because it is so perfect a black and white piece of high-spirited garbage; but the crowd took to it well enough, as well.

3:26 PM
My other pick for best would have to be Yor, the Hunter from the Future, the second Antonio Margheriti film of the fest, swapped near the end with the actual final film to permit a small dedication from sponsor Noah Antwiler, aka The Spoony One, who learned late that a friend of his passed away the day prior.

It is a most wonderfully absurd film, combining a terrible barbarian film with a terrible science-fiction film, with Reb Brown giving a spectacular, charisma-free performance as Yor, and the mood in the audience was light as could be under the circumstances; honesty compels me to admit that I dozed for a long chunk of the middle. I've seen this one a couple of times, anyway, so not a huge loss.

4:55 PM
Note the start time of Drunken Tai Chi. Not an accident, nor an error; in fact, they managed to get it in early, compared to what was on the schedule. But, thing is, B-Fest is meant to end at 6:00, and I'd somewhat built plans around that, as had (kind of) my seatmates, so we made the painful decision to ditch about 40 minutes in.

Those 40 minutes were enough to show me a comic martial arts film that seemed to have exactly one idea, one mode, and unlikeable leads punching angry fat women. Good stuff for B-Fest, and potentially great it if it had come in earlier (this would be a good #3 or #4 on the schedule), but I was tired, and both of my friends were restless, and there's only so much that wacky slapstick can do when you're ready to check out. And we did, though I at least did so with some regret.

Notwithstanding all that, a tremendously fun night, and most of the schedule was tight as a drum. Not a single film that didn't deserve to be here on some level, though I missed having one truly, soul-scrapingly bad film. Hopefully in 2015!

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ON SOUTHWEST: THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR THAT YOU HAVEN'T HEARD OF

All my thanks to reader StephenM, who scrounged up a link to watch Southwest on Vimeo. In addition to recently anointing it the best feature and best-shot film of 2013, I've been crazy for it ever since the 2011 Chicago International Film Festival, and when I get around to a Best of the 2010s list, I'd be shocked if it's not high in the ranking.

It is artsy as all fuck, and totally wonderful. A computer isn't the best way to watch it, probably; but then, the only other time I've ever seen it was on a screener DVD, so it's not like I know what the hell I'm talking about.

Once again, the link: http://vimeo.com/51020067

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - ROBOT MONSTER

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, from 1974, was among the first Godzilla pictures I ever saw, so I was never till now in a position to appreciate what a massive shift in the series it represented. In particular, what a jaw-dropping change it meant for director Fukuda Jun, whose four preceding Godzilla projects had all been largely frothy, juvenile affairs with far too much emphasis on James Bond-style thriller mechanics. The optimist in my likes to suppose that the kid-friendly tack of the Godzilla films was starting to lose favor at Toho, with the immediate prior film, Godzilla vs. Megalon, selling fewer tickets than any other entry in the franchise's history, and the '70s Godzilla flicks having in general significantly underperformed. And by all means, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla sent the franchise at least temporarily in the right direction financially, out-performing every film in the series since Destroy All Monsters.

But it is not, I must confess, entirely because the film is meaningfully more "serious" than anything else in the franchise. Indeed, it is downright goofy in many ways; the difference is that Fukuda isn't treating the goofiness as trivial, but framing it for the first time with some kind of integrity and care. And thus it is that even as we have yet another damn movie about Godzilla fighting off an alien invasion and gadgets and mysterious figures in sunglasses, all of them matinee tosh at is most clichéd, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla still feels rather more legitimate than something like the giddy, idiotic, pointless Godzilla vs. Gigan. If not for the abysmally carnivalesque score by Sato Masaru, it wouldn't be at all hard to mistake this for a lower-tier effort by Hondo Ishirō.

The film's plot is a bit ditzy all around, but it gets to the good stuff quickly. Strange things are afoot in Okinawa - the first Godzilla film to take place in that region - with Princess Nami (Lin Beru-Bera) of the Azumi people having a vision of great destruction at the hands of a monster, just around the time that archaeologist Shimizu Keisuke (Daimon Masaaki) uncovers a subterranean chamber full of artificacts and murals referring to an ancient prophecy, also of great destruction at the hands of a monster. And also at the same time, Keisuke's brother Masahiko (Aoyama Kazuya) finds a shard of inexplicable metal that cannot be identified by his go-to expert, Professor Miyajima (Hirata Akihiko). And just when the number of subplots and characters starts to get complicated - I have mentioned neither Azumi priest Kunito Tengan (Imafuku Masao) nor prophecy-expert grad student Kanagusuku Saeko (Tajima Reiko), both of whom play significant roles - the prophecy bears fruit, when Mount Fuji erupts back on Honshu, and most of our principals are onhand to witness Godzilla coming forth to be wicked and evil for the first time in quite a while.

And not just Godzilla - Anguirus pops up too, and seems just as perplexed by the giant lizard's newfound villainy, for the two former allies set to battling. Anguirus gets much the worst of the fight - Godzilla rips his jaw open, in a truly discomfiting display of blood for a '70s Godzilla picture - and manages to lay in just enough blows to reveal something metallic beneath Godzilla's skin. That's all we need to go on who've read the film's title, but it will be a while yet before this wicked Godzilla with the wrong-colored flame breath and the tinny roar comes into contact with the real Godzilla, who pummels it hard enough that its controllers punch a button that causes its synthetic flesh to melt away, revealing a Godzilla-shaped machine, the one and only Mechagodzilla.

Mechagodzilla wins pretty handily, leaving Godzilla to nurse his wounds and the humans to wonder what the hell is happening. Which is, for the record, that Mechagodzilla is an alien weapon created by the inhabitants of the third planet of the black hole (the precise meaning of that phrase is left as an exercise for the viewer, hopefully one with an exceptional illiteracy concerning astrophysics), currently hoping to take over the world, as alien races do. This threat is too much for the King of the Monsters to take on alone, but luckily, the Azumi prophecy has an answer: the humans just have to raise the guardian spirit King Shisa (not King Caesar, a common romanisation based in straight-up cultural ignorance at the time of the film's debut), and he and Godzilla will combine their forces to stop the invasion. Unfortunately, raising King Shisa is no cakewalk itself, especially with an alien agent (Kusano Daigo) trying to steal the statue that's key to unlocking the god.

There's a lot of plot involved, and most of it is unabashedly stupid, but does it ever move! I suppose that in theory, one could become bored with Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, for it is a bit flight and aimless, but the sheer variety of events and tones throughout the film would make that rather difficult. The biggest problem with it is that the early promise of lots of monster action - the Anguiras-Mechagodzilla fight happens surprisingly fast, and the Godzilla-Mechagodzilla fight not very long at after that - there's a long void during which we have only the human plot to carry us forward; and this is of course rarely a good thing in a daikaiju eiga. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla has the decency to be strange and kinetic in a straight-faced way that makes its loopiest developments - such as the reveal that the aliens are space gorillas with the ability to change themselves to look like humans - treated with a kind of horror-tinged sincerity that sets the film a solid step away from the cinematic junk food that the series had become.

What primarily sets the film apart, though, is the monster action, which is better here than it had been since Tsuburaya Eiji had stepped down. Effects director Nakano Teruyoshi isn't entirely able to disguise the small size of his budget - the wires used whenever one monster throws another through the air are embarrassingly visible - but the creativity of the fighting itself is high enough to compensate for the sometimes patchy work, and the rough-looking Godzilla that has been redressed but only marginally improved from the horrible-looking suit introduced in Godzilla vs. Megalon. King Shisa is a well-realised version of what he is, though I'll confess that what he is looks a bit too carpet-ey for my tastes.

There's a lot to love, though: the dramatic scene of Godzilla absorbing lightning; the shameless kitschiness of the scene where he subsequently turns himself into an electromagnet; the sheer brutality of the film, which feels like it might be the most violent Godzilla film to this point though I honestly don't know how one would go about quantifying that kind of thing. There's a lot of blood, and for all that it's a bit gaudy and over-the-top - the gushing arterial spray from Godzilla's neck in one scene is comically Grand Guignol - it's nevertheless startling to see it in what had been so comfortably childish and simple to this point.

And I have, naturally, put off the very best part of of all: Mechagodzilla. This is, simply put, one of the finest kaiju of all time, easily the best invented by Toho since the introduction of King Ghidorah, and the last wholly new creation that I truly adore out of all the films and decades to follow. It's sleek and pulpy in the very best tradition of pop sci-fi adventure, a bright silver beast that looks, honestly, nothing like a machine that anyone would build, but as the illustration for a comic book cover? Ideal. The details and tiny dashes of color are enough to make it terrifically appealling, and its arsenal is the very best sort of matinee fantasy nonsense. I could watch Mechagodzilla for hours and hours, shreiking and spitting lasers and firing its finger-missiles; repetition is bad and all, but the fact that it returned for a second go-round just a year later seems to me like the very best decision Toho could have made. This is the kind of playful, glossy, sharp design that gives pulp genre fiction a good name.

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TARR BÉLA GOES OFF MODEL

With 1982's The Prefab People, the third film in what we might profitably think of as Tarr Béla's "Social Realism Trilogy", we finally reach the defining point where social realism seems to have begun loosing its appeal for the young director, who began with this film to explore the styles and very characteristic rhythms that would define his later aesthetic. It is the first Tarr feature where a modern-day viewer, aware of Damnation and Sátántangó, might be able to say, "I can tell that Tarr made that". (Or perhaps not. Also in 1982, Tarr directed a television adaptation of Macbeth, which would make a strong claim on that development, but I have been unable to determine with absolute certainty which one was released first - IMDb suggests Macbeth, but I am suspicious. At any rate, The Prefab People appears to have been shot earlier). This despite it lacking one of the definitive traits of Tarr's later work, an expansive running time; clocking in around 80 minutes, give or take - the Facets DVD that I watched takes - it's a bare wisp of a thing that, from the outside, you'd never suppose would be able to reach any kind of emotional heights in such a compact frame.

But emotional heights are reached nonetheless, resulting in the best of Tarr's early realist films, and not by a little margin: it is, at any rate, the only one of the three that lacks any clear and obvious flaws, while also feeling much deeper and richer and rawer in its depiction of marital dischord. Eschewing the melodrama of Family Nest and the uncertain pacing of The Outsider, The Prefab People settles in on an unnammed married couple (Koltai Róbert & Pogány Judit), on the day that the husband finally decides he's had it, and he's walking out. This is presented gruffly and bluntly, with Koltai snapping about emotionlessly, and we're as thrown by it as his wife is, with her pathetic confusion informing our own. But this not a story about a cruel man abandoning a woman. For once we see the end point of this relationship, we are then allowed to see all the rest, as the bulk of the rest of the movie depicts in no immediately obvious order the couple's life together, allowing us the opportunity to watch all of the happy and unhappy moments of their marriage as something like pieces in a puzzle: since we know that this will end badly, we're encouraged to look for the cracks long before either of the characters have understood them to be so.

The results are wonderfully even-handed and objective and analytical, notwithstanding the opening scene that makes us so clearly identify with the wife. Once again, Tarr's thesis is that life in Hungary under communism is soul-crushing, and that the suffocating world outside the family unit negatively impacts the family to effectively communicate and co-exist. Only in the case of The Prefab People, it doesn't take the same pummeling with political content to make that point. The one explicitly political scene in the whole film finds the husband attempting to explain to his son the difference between capitalism and communism, and why it's preferable to live under the latter, and it quickly becomes clear to him and to us, and probably to the son, that he has absolutely no clue about communism or capitalism or anything like that; he just knows that everything kinds of sucks the way it is for him, and trying to sell a happy version of it confounds him.

As presented, this is the Tarr version of a funny scene, and it is certainly the lightest moment in The Prefab People, on top of being the most political. The film as a whole is far more invested in exploring the ramifications of dehumanised life in Hungary than in explaining it, like he sort of did in The Outsider and explicitly did in Family Nest. It does this with brutal directness in depicting the husband and wife consistently failing to make connections of any sort with one another, with Koltai and Pogány giving two immaculate performances, begging for neither sympathy nor understanding from the audience, but just existing in the most natural way they can. They were the first professional actors Tarr had worked with, and the shift is tremendous, all apologies to the non-professionals in the world. There's so much more nuance and elegant simplicity, and most of the film's best moments rely extensively on that.

It is, for example, the reason the director could get away with a handful of shots that do absolutely nothing but park and stare at the characters, probably the biggest single jump this film makes towards being more like later Tarr. There's a scene at a dance hall that is very nearly the perfect mixture of neo-realism and the proescenium-like tableaux of later Tarr; the emotional content is very character and psychology-driven in the fashion of his more conventional films, but the way we viewing the film access those emotions is not nearly so simple, relying as it does on comparing and contrasting different moments within the same frame, and understanding the physical relationship between the people based on the way they are presented in the flat panel of the image. The final shot (my favorite part of the film) does much the same thing.

As far as prefiguring future development, there's one lengthy, spurious moment of men riding on office chairs that feels particularly close to the director's later work, in terms of its absolute focus on the image and the moment rather than plot or "meaning", but in the main, it's not fair to The Prefab People to demand too much that it functions as a "transitional" film. For the most part, it's clearly not that - it is a simple, straightforward realist tale of two people in a bad situation that let it get worse through their somewhat self-destructive choices. The flashback structure muddies that a little, but mostly, this film is a very good example of something that was certainly not new by 1982; it finds Tarr attempting to do new things to make more interesting realist stories, not to abandon realism altogether. Taken for what it is, though, and it's hard for me to imagine it being any better. Naturalistic dramas about failing marriages are easy to find, but this is unquestionably one of the most sociologically intelligent and psychologically acute that I've ever seen.

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THE 6th ANNUAL ANTAGONIST AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILMMAKING

The 6th Antagonists, that is, but only the fifth by that name. At some point, I shall have to at least come up with a crappy MS Paint graphic of what an Antagonist actually looks like.

Apologies for the lateness of this post this year! Sometimes life is not very busy, and sometimes it is, and I've been in the latter of those two states for all of the young 2014. But at least I'm getting it taken care of before the new year has produced any films at all likely to make an impact on next January's incarnation of this list.

Update: "The Academy can have their dumb rules, but you needn't follow", grouses a friend; and he's quite right. I've updated two of the categories below - Adapted Screenplay and Hair & Makeup - with a movie that certainly deserves more attention than a lot of 2013 releases, if only it hadn't premiered in the United States on television. But the Cannes International Film Festival ought to count for something.


BEST FEATURE
Southwest
We all have ideals for what we want cinema to be, and this was maybe the closest I've come to finding it in my years as a reviewer: a movie that seems to come from out of nowhere to invent a completely new visual and narrative sensibility. It's the kind of work that challenges one's sense of the possibilities of the medium, and even if it's cryptic and obscurantist to the point of inscrutability, the emotional logic of this gorgeous fairy tale in celebration of life, youth, aging, and remembering cuts through with potency and clarity.

Thanks to Nick Davis for mentioning to me that the film was released in the United States this year, and was thus eligible.

1st Runner-Up: Gravity
Pure cinema at its experiential: feel feelings, see sights, hear sounds, in the most convincing and involving way. It uses the bleeding edge of technology to link our sensations to that of its protagonist in thrilling, immediate ways, and then plunges her and us into a vigorous fable of rebirth that, however corny, is emphatic and rich.

Also Cited:
12 Years a Slave
-For presenting a very specific human story with depth and moral passion, exploring history in a robust, alive way
Before Midnight
-For revisiting old friends in a new context that manages to be as true and irritating and messy as life itself
The Lords of Salem
-For demolishing the distinction between high and low art, creating a pictorial masterpiece out of horror and blood


BEST DIRECTOR
Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing
Glorious simplicity: allow people who have committed grievous moral crimes to tell their own stories, and indict them through their own candor. The truly genius documentary director knows that he must permit his subjects a safe space and freedom, and this Oppenheimer does brilliantly, making the year's most ethical film without ever imposing ethics from on high. And being so intimate with his players, he manages to sketch a remarkably comprehensive portrait of a series of events largely unknown outside of their native country.

1st Runner-Up: Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
The film's achievements are impossible to separate from the director. For in a great respect, this film is its direction, with every gesture of the florid moving camera, every slow-down to visit with the characters in close-up, the precise position of every beat working in perfect concert to create the film's potent reality.

Also Cited:
J.C. Chandor, All Is Lost
-For taking a nearly empty location and hardly any words, and crafting a thrilling and moving psychological fable
Edward Nunes, Southwest
-For crafting and maintaining a delicate tone of magical fabulism, permitting the creation of potent, direct emotion
Rob Zombie, The Lords of Salem
-For brilliant stolen imagery, better original imagery, and the most uncanny realism of any modern horror film


BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Sometimes, the only reason not to be boring is to prove how much more sophisticated you are than everybody who believes the simple truth. And the simple truth is that Blanchett's performance is one of the best that Woody Allen has ever directed, not for want of competition, with a frigid theatricality and brittleness to the character's self-definition that is an exact fit for all of the actress's strengths. It's magnetic and captivating, and if saying so means I'm being as unimaginative as possible, well, at least I know I'm right.

1st Runner-Up: Margarete Tiesel, Paradise: Love
Everything about the film would tend to make Teresa inhuman: whether as a victimiser of other characters, or a victim of an angry camera content to physically humiliate her. Tiesel permits neither reading while including both in her characterisation, creating a cunning, broken portrait of willful self-delusion and sexual panic.

Also Cited:
Amy Adams, American Hustle
-For adding just the right bittersweet romantic truth to a frothy comedy, while perfecting that comedy on top of it
Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
-For finding new things in a well-worn part, and permitting herself to edge up to unlikability in search of honesty
Danai Gurira, Mother of George
-For expressing complex, conflicting impulses in a true and lived-in manner, turning a concept into a woman


BEST ACTOR
Oscar Isaacs, Inside Llewyn Davis
The best collaborators with the Coen brothers find ways to make the filmmakers' idiosyncratic, arch dialogue sing like poetry; the very best manage to do that while finding facets of the character that aren't even alluded to in the script. Isaac justifies that very, giving the best performance in a Coen film since Fargo. Llewyn Davis is a cruel bastard; he is a wounded romantic; he is a depressed pragmatist. And the character is so much more, a vivid portrait of insulated, untouchable humanity at its most self-aware and trapped.

1st Runner-Up: Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Maybe the year's hardest role. Ejiofor has to not merely play a anthropomorphic symbol of The Misery of Slavery as a flesh-and-blood human, he also has to portray a man whose survival instinct is to demolish his personality, without playing a blank. That he does all of these is the chief key to the film's artistic triumph.

Also Cited:
Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips
-For those glorious final ten minutes, and the two hours of careful building that made those minutes land so hard
Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight
-For creating such a complicated mix of warmth and negativity that for the first time, he upstages Julie Delpy
Gael García Bernal, No
-For exploring the point where cynicism, outrage, and optimism coalesce, and being funny as hell in doing it


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Léa Seydoux, Blue Is the Warmest Color
A day-dream who turns into a complicated, difficult lover, Seydoux smashes through the script's apparent limitation that she is only viewed through girlfriend Adèle's perspective, existing in such a particular and complete way that by the time the protagonist discovers that there's a lot of complicated humanity to other humans, we've been ahead of her for a couple of hours already. It's easy to see why anyone would fall in love with her, a key to making the entire film work: she is a smoldering and fascinating prickly personality.

1st Runner-Up: Emma Watson, The Bling Ring
There is no sure-fire way to impress me quicker than to do a tremendously great job of being a lousy actress, and Watson, exploding Hermione Granger in a cleansing nuclear holocaust, finds the perfect mixture of shallowness and intelligence in playing a woman whose surface fakeness is tactically precise.

Also Cited:
Elizabeth Debicki, The Great Gatsby
-For investing into a film that's deliberately all about theater and surfaces a spike of vibrancy, wit, and vivacity
Scarlett Johansson, Don Jon
-For using her voice and body language to create a caricature and cartoon who is also a perfectly lived-in human
Sarah Paulson, 12 Years a Slave
-For playing Pure Evil as a human quality, not as melodrama, and being all the more unsettling for being wholly real


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
More Pure Evil, and where Sarah Paulson's character feels, overall, like hateful human being, Fassbender's slave owner is different from that. More than any movie villain, he reminds me of the Judge from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a force of demonic evil embodied in human form; the actor's gift is in portraying that kind of mythic wickedness in a way that doesn't detract from the physical, historical realism of the movie around him. He is terrifying, but he is also flesh, and that makes all the more dangerous.

1st Runner-Up: Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
He's aided considerably by a script eager to make everything grey and transform his kidnapping pirate into a normal, small person driven by the desperation and need that every person is driven by; but for Abdi to convincingly play that in a non-schematic, disarmingly casual way speaks to an intuition bordering on genius.

Also Cited:
Dane DeHaan, The Place Beyond the Pines
-For anchoring a flighty third act in a clean, human-sized way that proves him our reigning Young Actor To Watch
Ben Foster, Ain't Them Bodies Saints
-For playing a romantic stalker with quiet, mumbling dignity, and imparting rich emotion to gorgeous absraction
Matthew McConaughey, Mud
-For the best and most complicated role in a great year, wheedling and friendly in just the right proportions


BEST CAST
Inside Llewyn Davis
The trick with any Coen film is finding people who can say the words naturally. The trick with this particular Coen film is that title character is so central to our perception, and such a tremendously meanspirited prick, that the ensemble has to simultaneously play the one-note version of themselves that he understands them to be, while also letting the audience understand that there's a complete human being behind that impression. This is done, making a movie both hilarious and psychologically complicated more of both those things.

1st Runner-Up: The World's End
A story about stale friendships needs two things to be absolutely perfect if it's going to do anything else right: we have to believe that these people know each other's most intimate truths, and we have to believe that this now makes them awkward and uncomfortable around each other. Mission very thoroughly accomplished.

Also Cited:
American Hustle
-For making stock characters relatable and fun, and finding chemistry in interesting, unexpected directions
Saving Mr. Banks
-For Emma, who I couldn't fit, and the pitch-perfect ensemble of studio functionaries sweating to deal with her
The Wolf of Wall Street
-For portraying hideous behavior in manner entirely true to the characters, alive and pungent and kinetic


BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Inside Llewyn Davis, by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
It is not the funniest, the most thematically probing, or densest of the Coens' scripts. It is, however, as unusual as anything they've ever done, in the way it presents character almost sideways, identifying its title character in a certain way and then testing that definition at every step and complicating it. It also boasts a stunning structure that looks completely shapeless until at the very end it gives you the key to understanding its shape and how the form of the thing is one more element of character exploration, and the richest.

1st Runner-Up: Before Midnight, by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke
At this point, all they have to do is not screw up, and they didn't do it. Just the lunch table scene - a collection of thoughtful monologues about sex - and the hotel room scene - a horrifyingly accurate two-hander about domestic arguments - would make this the best-observed piece of writing of 2013.

Also Cited:
American Hustle, David O. Russell and Eric Singer
-For being the year's best collection of dialogue, and having one of its most effectively disordered character studies
A Hijacking, by Tobias Lindholm
-For treating sensational content with cool detachment and exploring bureaucracies of all sorts with great insight
The World's End, by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright
-For burying clear-headed, uncomfortable observations about aging just underneath a loopy, funny genre riff


BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
12 Years a Slave, by John Ridley
Reducing the twelve years of the title to a swift flow of historical miseries, the script has a cunning way of making all of its apparent missteps (a needless flashforward opening, episode scenes) into strengths by folding them into the perception of its protagonist. And everything that's not an apparent misstep is historical storytelling of the highest order, using the briefest amount of time necessary to contextualise moments and sweep us into its world, while sketching characters quickly but vividly in just a few lines.

1st Runner-Up: No, by Pedro Peirano
Political process stories are very difficult to make remotely interesting, which is why the ones that do it well are as valuable as gold. And No doesn't do it very well - it does it damn near perfectly, laying out a dense historical scenario in comprehensible pieces and making its backstage story hilarious and fleet-footed, too.

Also Cited:
The Bling Ring, by Sofia Coppola
-For mercilessly autopsying celebrity culture with laugh-out-loud wit and fearless irony
Captain Phillips, by Billy Ray
-For investigating a sociologically complex situation without dumbing it down or making it antiseptically intellectual
Ernest & Célestine, by Daniel Pennac
-For telling a simple fable with a level of decency and affection that's anything but simplistic

Honorable Mention
Behind the Candelabra, by Richard LaGravenese
-For cutting to the heart of a celebrity drama to find the sensible human center of it, depicting a rancorous domestic drama with insight, wit, and a brilliant control of time


BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FEATURE not cited under Best Feature
No
Talky political situations spiked with pawky humor and relentlessly likable characters. A story of media representations filmed in an in-your-face style that's itself an example of media representations. And a presumably Inspiration Tale of Good Triumphing so full of pleasant-natured cynicism that it never for a second feels like a heartwarming story about heroes, but a tale in which the bastards we like beat the bastards we didn't. Energetic and smart and cinematic, it's the best combination of art and entertainment.

1st Runner-Up: Ernest & Célestine
A distinctly Gallic sensibility to the surface-level misanthropy and antisocial tendencies of its two titular characters doesn't keep it from being any less universal of a kid's bedtime story. There's a gentleness and generosity to it that transcends language, resting in its friendly characters and likably silly plot.

Also Cited:
Blancanieves
-For reworking an intensely familiar story into something fresh and even dangerous, with visual flair and elegance
A Hijacking
-For taking a hugely uncommercial tack to telling its thriller story as a character drama and intellectual procedural
A Touch of Sin
-For depicting a variety of desperate humans with sensitivity and a tricky lack of precision that adds to its empathy


BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Ernest & Célestine
The only animation of the year that genuinely felt like something new and unique and personal; and in a happy accident, it's accompanying the animated film with the most playful story and richest sense of character. A lush children's story to be certain, but soft and warm enough to captivate anybody.

Also Cited:
Frozen
-For complicating the Disney formula without trashing it, and for the glistening dance of light on snow
The Wind Rises
-For simply and beautifully playing tribute to imagination, without denying its damaging real-world ramifications


BEST DOCUMENTARY
The Act of Killing
I feel like I have written about this film so many times in so many contexts, and have barely scratched it. And now this is probably it, for a while. What is there to say at last, about the most mind-expanding film I saw in 2013, one who whose cutting but subdued moral code and outlandish collection of once-in-a-lifetime visuals combined to make a most exquisite, complicated study of intensely warped humans? Only that I am profoundly grateful that the film exists, as I am profoundly troubled by the fact that it has to.

1st Runner-Up: At Berkeley
The documentary as pure act of observation, though Frederick Wiseman's personality is unmistakable in the way images are combined and considered. It is a grand snapshot of life in America in an era of economic discomfort, and a definitive statement of 21st Century academe as a working, living, breathing entity.

Also Cited:
Leviathan
-For creating beautiful abstraction out of a rugged, wild form of economic life, and for its complex visions
Stories We Tell
-For the bravery and candor of using a deeply personal story as a window into how people construct history
These Birds Walk
-For getting down and dirty with a slice of life completely ignored by virtually every other part of humanity


BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Southwest (Mauro Pinheiro, Jr.)
Two words: aspect ratio. Namely, 3.66:1, an aspect ratio so comically wide that I don't think it even counts; it is an illusion and a dream, as surely as the impressionistic dreamlike events it depicts. But it's not just because of the laser-focused exactitude with which Pinheiro wields this ridiculous frame, but the gorgeous, cryptic images created in creamy black-and-white, that make it such a triumph of the cinematographer's art. It is a film largely told through images, and they are gloriously up to the task.

1st Runner-Up: Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
I'll admit to discomfort over the CGI thing, but there is a precise neatness to every shot and every light that sets this a million miles over something like Avatar: it is rigorously controlled, and married to the live-action flawless, and the way that the camera tells the story and defines the characters is visual art at its purest.

Also Cited:
The Bling Ring (Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt)
-For the sun-blanched California, and that awe-inspiring slow zoom of the house's exterior as it's being robbed
Inside Llewyn Davis (Bruno Delbonnel)
-For a mordant collection of muted winter tones that inject a layer of forgiving nostalgia into a brittle scenario
Mother of George (Bradford Young)
-For dumbfounding use of color, and for brilliantly lighting dark skin better than any of a thousand bigger films


BEST EDITING
All Is Lost (Peter Beaudreau)
One man, one boat (and one raft), one big ocean. It takes a masterpiece of cutting to make that kinetic, and Beaudreau's work is at least that. The simplest gestures are intensified thanks to some very pointed cuts, implying huge swaths of activity in the space of a single ellipsis, and the momentum of the film owes a great deal to what is covered extensively versus what is glossed over, and exactly what beats take us out of the tiny scope of the film for our rare glimpses of something wider. Great survival thrillers are made of this.

1st Runner-Up: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón & Mark Sanger)
The collision of insanely long takes with punchy dialogue scenes might seem random or simply convenient, but the ebb and flow of the pacing in the film produced by its very specific ordering of long and short shots is every bit as critical as the choreography of the camera movement. It is specific and masterfully pacey.

Also Cited:
The Bling Ring (Sarah Flack)
-For its detached, analytical way of separating and combining its dehumanised subjects with scientific curiosity
Her (Jeff Buchanan and Eric Zumbrunnen)
-For doing more than anything else to convince that a disembodied voice has a real presence in the mise en scène
The Lords of Salem (Glenn Garland)
-For ruthlessly dictating how and when we should react to events, playing us like a spooky fiddle


BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Her (K.K. Barrett)
A vision of the future that does something so simple, I can't stand that it isn't done more often: it looks at what we do right this minute, and asssumes we'll keep doing exactly the same. And so we end at a world mostly like our own, but with just a little more space to emphasise the direction we're headed with all our doodads and gewgaws, creating something that looks less like high-tech futurism and more like the setting for an Apple-themed MMORPG. Sleek, a little bland, a little soulless, and completely lived-in.

1st Runner-Up: The Lords of Salem (Jennifer Spence)
A film that runs the gamut from the psychotic Italianate indulgences of the final nightmare-concert-fantasy, to the scraped-up realism of the low-rent apartments crammed with personalising bric-a-brac. It's not just rare for horror to create such a thorough world for its protagonist to live in; it's rare for any movie to do it.

Also Cited:
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
-For creating a fantasy version of The Twenties that is lush enough to embrace and gaudy enough to condemn
Inside Llewyn Davis (Jess Gonchor)
-For a Greenwich Village based in iconography over reality, bent just enough to suit the film's mordant comedy
Pacific Rim (Andrew Neskoromny and Carol Spier)
-For comic book fantasies of the first order made physical tangible and plausible and vibrant with color


BEST COSTUMING
The Bling Ring (Stacey Battat)
In a film where character, theme, and even narrative are all ultimately functions of the desire to procure overpriced, sub-attractive clothing precisely because it isn't desirable for any real reason other than as a signifier of class, influence, and power, the clothes had better be goddamned perfect. Low and behold, they are: even the costumes that are only ever seen adorning hangers so vividly evoke the characters and their world that it's literally impossible to imagine what the movie might be without them.

1st Runner-Up: Mother of George (Mobolaji Dawodu)
Color and texture as psychological marker, as emotional cue, and as signifier of one's fidelity to traditional old-fashioned lifestyle; in a beautiful film that uses imagery for just about every important narrative purpose, the bright, showy costumes are a key insight into who these people are and how they function.

Also Cited:
Blancanieves (Paco Delgado)
-For contributing to the sense that this is a real-world fairytale by rendering haute couture as Expressionism
Her (Casey Storm)
-For being just abnormal enough from us that you can't help but notice, and reflect on how it affects the wearer
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
-For understanding exactly why Gatsby's shirts matter, and building an entire world of clothing on that principle


BEST HAIR & MAKEUP
12 Years a Slave
The literally blistering reality of slavery is not merely made to be real in a documentary sense, but in a vivid, empathetic sense where the viewer is directly confronted with each wound and drained, sweaty expression. The whipping scene alone would earn this slot; it is fragile flesh made real in the most nauseating way.

Also Cited:
American Hustle
-For evoking a fantasy of The '70s and defining and shaping character, rather than embalming them in style
Prisoners
-For evoking a specific kind of lifestyle; and for confrontationally exploring the effects of violence

Honorable Mention
Behind the Candelabra
-Make-up as character, as comedy - the work down on Rob Lowe is one of the most amazing things I saw all year - and and the stuff of a low-key body horror exercise. The film relied to a great extent on the perfection of its latex effects, and they certainly delivered, rendering an eerie Michael Douglas and a distorted Matt Damon in exactly the way the film required.


BEST SCORE
Ain't Them Bodies Saints (Daniel Hart)
There is something a little cloying, perhaps, about the way that folk orchestrations are used in this winsome slice of Americana. But that's not really the same as saying that it doesn't work, because by golly, it surely does that: creating a weary, evocative wall of musical sounds rather than actual pieces of music, that simultaneously express the characters' feelings while also placing them at a level of abstraction. I wouldn't want to go jogging to it, but as an audible depiction of yearning, lost love, and uncertain hope, it's flawless.

1st Runner-Up: Maniac (Rob)
Electronic cues as distorted and out-of-place as the titular psychopath, the score suggests what would happen if the 1980s hadn't stopped but gotten stuck on repeating loop that grew ever more corrupted and mutated and nightmarish as it went along. Its jagged edges make it a virtually perfect horror soundtrack.

Also Cited:
Her (Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett)
-For delicate romanticism in an idiom as subtly futurist as the rest of the world building, and more touching
The Lords of Salem (John 5 and Griffin Boice)
-For atonal rumbles that drive the mood, and screaming cacophonous "rock" that drives the plot
Man of Steel (Hans Zimmer)
-For being everything you could ever want a mainstream popcorn movie to sound like: grandiose and grave


BEST SOUND MIXING
Gravity
This was sewn up less than 120 seconds into my first viewing of the film, when the sounds of being stuck instead a space-suit helmet begin to wrap themselves around you from behind, almost as though you're leaning back into the film's world. It's my single-favorite moment of sound of the year, and the whole film doesn't really drop down from that level; in a film where CGI and 3-D spent all of their time creating a fully three-dimensional space, the audio does a fantastic job of convincing us that we're within that space.

1st Runner-Up: Inside Llewyn Davis
Music = sound mixing; that's lazy, academy voter thinking. Except that in a film where musical performance is so much a part of character psychology, floating the songs atop and into the visuals is absolutely essential to making the thing feel unified, and this has some of the best marriage of song and dialogue I've ever heard.

Also Cited:
All Is Lost
-For so perfectly depicting Our Man's relative awareness of his situation through solely audible means
Frozen
-For lots of reasons, but "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" would probably be enough all by itself
The Lords of Salem
-For building up the bangs and shocks of horror into something far more intense than the genre usually dreams of


BEST SOUND EDITING
The Lords of Salem
Horror relies on good sound; that was old news generations ago. Still, few horror films exploit that truth to any kind of success. It is not the least, and may indeed be the best, of the reasons that The Lords of Salem is such a singular genre experience, that it includes such perfect expressions of all the usual horror audio tropes - flat interior echoes, shrieking door creaks, bowel-rattling hums in the bass - while also introducing an entire population of sounds that could only happen in a movie about evil coming in the form of music.

1st Runner-Up: All Is Lost
The moment that it occurs to you that they didn't actually have Robert Redford on a boat in the ocean, in queasy-making calms or nightmarish storms, is the moment you start to wonder why it's so easy to believe that he was. The easiest answer: the excellent cacophony of waves, echoes, and rumbles of a living ocean.

Also Cited:
Berberian Sound Studio
-For being the backbone of a story explicitly about sound editing, and helping to create a state of pure paranoia
The Conjuring
-For making a house sound like the most suffocating, unearthly place to be, even before the ghostly clapping
Frozen
-For evoking a snowscape with all the noises of winter turned up just enough to give everything a dose of magic


BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Gravity
How could it not be? There are so many individual elements that would make the argument that it's the year's best on their own: the photorealistic everything, the perfect execution of Emmanuel Lubezki's complex lighting scheme, the sheer variety and scope of moving pieces, the best post-production 3-D in history. That all of these things exist in one package is all the argument needed to anoint a new champion of the digital toybox school of effects, hugely realistic and entirely spectacular, hand-in-hand.

1st Runner-Up: Man of Steel
The morality of a "superhero" being complicit in so many deaths is one thing; the unbelievably convincing depiction of the cities crumbling and tornadoes devastating Kansas, however, is quite another thing. This world is never less than convincing, and its panorama of sci-fi marvels never less than enthralling.

Also Cited:
Ender's Game
-For sprawling space vistas and battles that do not call attention to themselves, but simply exude authenticity
Pacific Rim
-For the successful marriage of realistic textures and physics with the broadest designs from a boys' daydreams
Star Trek Into Darkness
-For improving on an already-great original, creating a bright and bold but wholly plausible idea of the future

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