2013: A Year at the Movies

Anyone who knows me knows that when it comes to movies, I would much rather watch everything from the comfort of my own bed. However, looking back on this year made me realize that I actually saw quite a few movies on the big screen this year, probably more than in any year in the recent past. And I guess having a friend who is studying to be a screenwriter certainly doesn't hurt. Nonetheless, here are the films that I saw this year in chronological order:

1) Iron Man 3
 I actually went into Boston on Derby Day to see this one but that is an entirely separate story. IM3 isn't really the type of film that I would choose to go see on my own but with the abundance of Marvel revivals in the last decade or so it's not surprising that I would eventually end up seeing one in the theaters. I hadn't seen the other films in the trilogy before but that didn't make too much of a difference-they explained everything anyways. It's definitely helpful if you've seen the Avenger's movie as they make a couple references but again, hardly necessary for enjoying the film as a whole. I think one thing that has always been really refreshing about Tony Stark is that his superpower is essentially his brain. Yes, he can fly and shoot things from his awesome suit but he made that suit and lots of other prototypes through his sheer ingenuity. And as the Tumblr-famous quote goes "Take that [suit] off and what are you [left with]?" Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. He isn't really the distant hero that we have come to expect. He's sassy and brash and hot headed. And it is endlessly entertaining.


2) The Spectacular Now

I saw this movie at the end of the summer a couple days after it was released. The Spectacular Now was billed as an Indie film that showcased an authentic teenage experience, written by the writers of '500 Days of Summer'. It was advertised as a love story of sorts but frankly I find that kind of problematic. I think it would have been more accurate to bill it as a coming of age story. What it's really about is this one guy, Sutter Keely, a boy with a very bad case of Peter Pan syndrome. And he happens to meet this girl. But the story isn't really about her. And while I quite like Shailene Woodley as Aimee Finnicky, I can't help but feel like her character verges a bit on Manic-Pixie territory and this film barely passes the Bechdel test. Yes, she has her own journey of breaking free from her own demons but her plot definitely feels subordinate to Sutter's. The film deals cursorily with some things that people deal with in high school like drinking and sex but the argument that Sutter is a guy that lives for the now isn't one that's particularly compelling for me personally. I didn't find his character to be all that sympathetic, in fact he seemed a little too slick and very much satisfied with mediocrity. Which I guess being comfortable with what he has was kind of the point of the film but there were a lot of times during the film that I just cringed because his character is exactly the kind of guy that I would walk away from in a heartbeat. The Spectacular Now was an interesting movie that could hold my attention while I was in the theatre but it's certainly not one that I crave to see again and again.

3) Don Jon['s Addiction]
Don Jon was a movie that I had been waiting to see ever since it was released at the Cannes Film Festival. It is Joseph Gordon Levitt's debut as a director and he also stars as Jon, a bartender from Jersey. Jon meets a couple of girls who change his perspective on the world dramatically. While the media has endlessly ragged on rom-coms and fairytales for giving women unrealistic expectations of relationships, this movie argues that pornography does  exactly the same thing for guys. While women are waiting for their Prince Charming, men are waiting for that "dime" who will do exactly what they want. But even when he finds the most beautiful and willing women, Jon is still searching for that je ne sais quois.  There is something profoundly disappointing to him about real social interactions with women. Without giving too much away, JGL also doesn't really let his female characters down easy either and makes it pretty obvious that they also have an agenda. But more than that, they are real people. They have emotions and desires and are more than just his objects of fantasy (though there is gratuitous use of showing women as the object of fantasy). While the film barely passes the Bechdel test, I like the way that JGL portrays his female characters as decidedly different. Jon's sister doesn't say much but when she does have her line, it's absolutely a game changer. Barbara, played by Scarlett Johansson, is revealed to not be the complete dime that Jon initially saw her as nor is Julianne Moore's character of Esther. I like that the characters have a lot more depth than when they are introduced to us as kind of campy stereotypes. My only request of this film is that I wish it were longer.

4) Hunger Games: Catching Fire
After I crammed reading the entire trilogy on the Wednesday before the first film was released, I couldn't possibly go without seeing the second film and it did not disappoint. We meet Peeta and Katniss again after their win of the 74th Hunger Games only to be thrown back into the arena again for the Quarter Quell-special versions of the Hunger Games that occur every 25 years. I think this book gets a fair amount of slack for being the fluffy middle installment of the trilogy but frankly, I liked the fact that there was more character development than we saw in the previous film. I think the directors did a good job of showing that Katniss did what she did because she wanted to make it out of the arena alive and that it wasn't even her intention to start a revolution. It wasn't her intention to see people hurt. All she wants is to live with her family in peace but that can't ever happen. I think that showing her vulnerabilities helps to make her a more relatable character and it becomes very obvious that she is a very young person who has been given a task much larger than herself. And per usual, I always feel like the cast of the Hunger Games brings their characters alive in a way that I couldn't necessarily see in the book. Peeta has more grit to him and I absolutely adore Effie and Johanna. I'll admit that Finnick is a little derpy, considering I thought that the books portrayed him as really suave but it wasn't so bad that I couldn't enjoy the book. And as usual, I am not overly fond of Gale. But, there is still much more to the story and I want to see how it plays out on the big screen.

5) Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug
I saw this film with a group of friends as a celebration of sorts for making it through my exams. The Hobbit was another film series that I just wasn't into enough to keep track of the films. I had read the book a long time ago but I don't think I even finished it. Nonetheless, I'm a fan of Martin Freeman in Sherlock so there wasn't much arm twisting involved to make me go see the movie. As seems to be the trend with Tolkien's work, the characters are on an epic journey. In this case, the Dwarves are on a quest north to reclaim Erebor, their ancestral seat of power in the Lonely Mountain. They were driven out years ago by a dragon Smaug, who appears to have just been napping on their mountains of gold in the interceding years. There were a lot of different skirmishes throughout the film and it culminated with a pretty epic battle with the dragon. There was even a romantic triangle subplot, though I have been informed that that wasn't actually present in the books though I enjoyed it nonetheless. The locations were beautiful, though I am sure that about 90% aren't real (such is life). Another fairly entertaining movie, I just wish I had seen the first movie or read the book again before going to see it.

6) Frozen
I remember seeing the trailer for this film and immediately dismissing it because it was basically just a 3 minute clip of a snowman and reindeer having it out with eachother on a frozen lake and I thought it was going to be really lame. However, this film is actually a retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale of the Snow Queen, which I read a loooong time ago. In the weeks leading up to the premier however, some of my friends from Wellesley were disgusted that it wasn't as strongly female movie because many of the supporting characters are male....to which I say that is bull. This movie is ultimately about the power of sisterly love rather than romantic love and it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. Anna is the younger of the two princesses and while her character is pretty charming I think I must be getting desensitized to the "adorkable" females because she is sweet but nothing really out of the ordinary. Elsa, her older sister, is the second Disney female to become queen on screen after Kida in Atlantis. Moreover, I think that the portrayal of Elsa makes her one of the most compelling "princesses" to date. Elsa holds the great power of being able to form snow and ice but has been told from a very young age that it's a dangerous power. She has constantly been afraid to be herself because she fears how people will react to her and more importantly, she fears that she has the potential to hurt the people she loves. She has closed herself off emotionally and physically to avoid this but eventually opens up in the end. There are some really stereotypical plot lines for the Disney movie, like the fact that it is a story about rich, beautiful princesses who live in a beautiful castle(the beautiful elite), the fact that their parents die, there's a huge party, a charming prince-all of the things you would expect from a Disney movie. But there's also a lot more that we can appreciate from the adult standpoint even though this is a children's movie. Frankly, I loved it.

7) Saving Mr. Banks
This is the type of film that is right up my alley! Saving Mr. Banks is the behind-the-scenes story of adapting P. L. Travers stories about Mary Poppins into the movie musical we all know and love. However, the road to creating art (as with most things) was not a smooth one. This movie juxtaposes scenes from Travers' childhood in Australia with creative meetings with the great artistic minds of Walt Disney and the Sherman Brothers in 1960s Los Angeles. The cinematography is absolutely exquisite and the score, brought to you by Thomas Newman (the musician behind the scores of Finding Nemo, Skyfall and WALL-E) made the film feel very much like a fairytale. And naturally, I'm always drawn to the clothes of the 1960s because they always seem very sleek, stylish and streamlined. Everyone looks modern but feminine at the same time and it has the same kind of quality that I like a lot about Mad Men-showing characters looking of the time but not necessarily dated. It makes you feel like you could have been there, without the fuzziness of film that we usually see the decade through. Because this film was produced by Disney Studios, I have to wonder a little bit about whether or not it was an accurate portrayal of how things went down. Cursory research has lead me to believe that P. L. Travers never really liked the film adaptation of her book and was very upset with the studio until her death not to mention I can't imagine Disney studios showing Walt Disney as anything other than a well loved creative genius. Nonetheless, I really loved the film and the story.

While seeing a lot of these films wasn't necessarily pre-meditated on my part, I generally liked all of the storylines for each of the films. Can't wait to see what's on the queue for next year.