Best Pictures of 2013

It is time for the prestigious Ordpaxa Awards, those highly anticipated but too-cool-for-fanfare awards which come sandwiched between the Globes and the Oscars.  This year, there were but 2 films which qualified as nominees, but I've also included six honorable mentions to round out a Top Eight:

Honorable Mentions:

8.  Gravity
Overhyped and with some bad science (how were the debris particles going the opposite direction to all the other orbiting stations?), the special effects and acting were still pretty spectacular.  At the end of the day, the story was compelling, but will not be iconic.

7.  Mud
A low budget indie film with heart.  Manages to take the muddy rivers and strip malls of Arkansas and make them seem spellbinding with great filming and the frame of a coming of age story.  They overplayed their hand with an overdone ending, but McConoughy still gave some of the best acting of his career.

6.  Blue Jasmine
With a plot almost entirely ripped off from A Streetcar Named Desire, this film still manages to seem original with the stylings of Woody Allen and Best Actress caliber performance from Cate Blanchett.

5.  Saving Mr. Banks
The criminally under-recognized and under-nominated film from Disney chronicles the creating of the film Mary Poppins.  From this unlikely premise comes a great character-based script.

4.  12 Years a Slave
Solid.  Best performance from an actor this year.  Will almost certainly get the Best Picture Oscar. Intense, required viewing.

3.  American Hustle
David O. Russell strikes again with an incredibly creative well scripted film that is sexy, stylish and cool.  As with last year's Silver Linings Playbook, we get a mixture of drama and comedy, this time with a 70s vibe.

Runner Up:

2.  Before Midnight
Obviously the Ordpaxa best films skew towards movies with great scripts and great acting, and this would be exhibit A in that trend.  As the (probable) culmination to the 'Before' Series, this would have been the year they finally took home the (nonexistent) Ordpaxa statue for Best Film were it not for an 11th hour dark horse:

The Winner:

1.  Her
It's a movie about relationships.  It's a movie about the Singularity.  It's a movie that proves Scarlett Johanson would still be sexy even if she were a disembodied computer program. This movie is excellently paced, and has one of the most creative scripts I've come across in a long time.  It's quirky indie perfection with a scifi twist.




Full Disclosure Haven't Seen Yet:
- Nebraska
- Philomena
- August: Osage County
- Captain Phillips
- All is Lost
- Inside Llewyn Davis

Mitt

A documentary which shows that behind the platitudes and the persona, there's an actual person, and not an unlikable one at that.

One of the most interesting scenes of this latest Netflix Original depicts Tagg (or one of Romney's other whimsically named sons) being asked the question of whether it's all worth it.  He gives us two different answers, first the trained answer he would give to the media, and then the real one.  They don't quite contradict, but what's striking is that the second one is so much more appealing and earnest than the first.  The first achieves a consultant-enriched buzzword density, but the second elicits actual human feeling.

Does this mean politicians and their campaigns should speak from the heart, and be themselves?  Probably not.  Saying what a candidate actually thinks (or "going off message" as the pundits call it) leaves open the possibility of making an error which would then get played again and again and again through all the media channels.  Successful candidates must be disciplined.

That being said, this movie is not without its own biases.  It's clearly filmed and put together with a friendly eye--with the right editing and enough footage one could make Gandhi seem like a petty unlikeable hypocrite and Josef Stalin like an earnest compassionate saint.  But the family dynamic behind the scenes was touching, and wholesome enough to make It's a Wonderful Life look dysfunctional.

This fuzzy grandpa Romney is clearly only one side to the man though, and at one point we get a sense of the competent rational boardroom shark in the suit.  He's arguing with some debate organizers about the format, and the strategizing assertiveness comes out then.

And even while this documentary does give a sense that Mitt the man is less of a phony than Mitt the politician, the system as a whole is left looking phonier than ever for forcing a distinction between the two.

One More Thing by B. J. Novak

The debut book "One More Thing" by B. J. Novak, (who starred as Ryan in The Office, and wrote for the same show) came out earlier this month.  My anti-TV snobbery caused me to assume the book would be lame, so imagine my surprise.

I actually read the first story "The Rematch" 3 times the night I got a copy of this book.  It's a sequel to the fable of the tortoise and the hare.  When the humiliated and depressed hare tries to get a round 2, he's informed by the tortoise's spokesperson that "The tortoise is focused full-time on inspiring a new generation with the lessons of dedication and persistence through his popular speaking tours and his charitable work with the Slow and Steady Foundation."  And it only gets funnier from there.

Novak's really good at mimicking and distilling the most absurd elements of our modern culture.  Take for instance his story about the Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela.  It walks that blurry line between tasteless and satire of the tasteless.  You'll either be offended or you'll laugh.  A lot.  

Other great stories are "The Man Who Invented the Calendar" which first appeared in the New Yorker, "Sophia" which is like some kind of weird inversion of the new film "Her", and "Kellog's", all of which have a distinctly George Saunders feel to them.  

Not every story in the collection is as strong.  Some of the shorter ones are either a little too clever for me, or a little too random.  Others are super short and elicit a chuckle.  Take "The Literalist's Love Poem."  It goes:

                Roses are rose.

                Violets are violet.

                I love you.

And that's it.  This collection is super hip and super edgy.   Some will age better than others.

I will almost certainly read whatever he writes next, so at the end of the day it's a win for Novak.

Also, be sure to check out the trailer for the book, which he does with Office co-star and fellow writer Mindy Kaling:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FxhTn9cEhI