Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant film Inside Llewyn Davis is not, by definition, a musical. The characters do not break into spontaneous song to express their deepest emotions. There is no dancing. There is very little performance. No, Inside Llewyn Davis is something else entirely. It is a movie with real, honest music. A movie with real, honest people dealing with real, honest problems. Somewhere between film and real life, bridging the gap through song, it is a movie about love and loss and beauty, and it is absolutely one of the best films of 2013.
I’ll admit, as soon as I heard people claim that The Wolf of Wall Street was the next Goodfellas, my expectations went through the roof. In my mind, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas is a perfect movie that sits alongside Casablanca and The Godfather as a god in my movie pantheon. Because Martin Scorsese directed Wolf as well, I bought into the hype and walked into the theater thinking that my pantheon could soon be welcoming a new member.
David O. Russell is the director who keeps on doing. On the heels of the wildly successful Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Russell continues his filmmaking renaissance with the over-the-top comedy crime caper American Hustle. After finding moderate success early in his career with films like Flirting with Disaster (1996), Three Kings (1999), and I Heart Huckabees (2004), Russell went on a six-year filmmaking hiatus. But he’s come back stronger than ever—American Hustle is one of his best movies yet.
While you were studying hard this semester, I was keeping up with everyone’s favorite bipolar CIA operative. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything. Here’s my cheat sheet with the ten biggest things I “learned” from the third season of Homeland.
It seems that every year around Oscar season, the studios release a plethora of excellent films based on true stories, and soon after their release several of these films inevitably become embroiled in factual controversy. They take a lot of flak, gain a lot of free publicity, and then ironically go on to win an Oscar or two. Last year the highest profile cases were Argo (which won Best Picture) and Lincoln (which won Daniel Day-Lewis his third lead actor Oscar). This year, that Oscar-caliber, true-story film may be Paul Greengrass’ phenomenally thrilling Captain Phillips.
What’s it like to be a student filmmaker at Princeton? This year, five members of the Class of 2014 are making a film for their senior thesis: Nick Ellis (Religion), Jun Kuromiya (Philosophy), Dayna Li (Politics), Christina Maida (Anthropology), and Brady Valashinas (Anthropology).Each ispursuing the film track within the Visual Arts certificate and will submit their film as part of their independent work requirement.
I read Orson Scott Card’s science fiction masterpiece Ender’s Game for the first time when I was ten. When the main character Ender Wiggin was ten, he led the most successful army in the history of his “battle school” and then graduated early to become the commander of humanity’s forces in a war against an alien race. By the time Ender was twelve, he’d singlehandedly won the war and become a global icon considered the savior of the human race. As I write this, I’m twenty-two and I’ve never even had a paying job.
Anytime Woody Allen makes a movie, it’s inevitably going to be compared to Annie Hall. While Blue Jasmine doesn’t quite measure up, it does give Annie a run for her money. With its topical themes and experienced cast, Jasmine’s story is a solid addition to the 77-year-old filmmaker’s oeuvre.
As January rolls around, my favorite annual activity begins: reflecting on the best movies of the year. There is no better holiday party game. You learn which friends to keep because you respect their opinions and which friends to get rid of because you’re horrified by their taste in film (this year I unfortunately lost quite a few friends who enjoyed Pacific Rim). My list of 2013 favorites is packed with some goodies –The Spectacular Now, Dallas Buyers Club, Wolf of Wall Street – but my very favorite has to be one that far too many people missed: The Way, Way Back.
Discomfort at the movies is an odd feeling. It evokes a mixture of eye-averting, leg-shifting, and some casual looking around at the other moviegoers to make sure you’re not the only one feeling this way. There was a lot of discomfort involved in watching Blue is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche’s film that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this summer. The director shared the award with the two main actresses, Léa Seydoux, and Kechiche’s ingénue Adèle Exarchopoulos. Given the media hype around the explicit girl-on-girl sex in the film, in a few years we might remember it, unfortunately, simply as “that lesbian movie with the long (very long) sex scene.” But the discomfort I felt wasn’t at the sight of sex—after all, this is a European film—or with Kechiche’s objectifying male gaze which reduces cinematic sex to pornography. The realness of emotion that Kechiche captured and that the actresses beautifully portrayed is what had me squirming in my seat. Seydoux and Exarchopoulos were awarded for their acting, not their bodies.
“Life in space is impossible.” There is no gravity, no sound, no air pressure, and no oxygen. Director Alfonso Cuarón opens the film, Gravity, with these facts about space on a black backdrop, accompanied by unnerving silence. When astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s tweets dissected several inaccuracies in the film, many reviewers lashed back, arguing that the film is a science-fiction film and not a documentary: it makes no pretenses to scientific accuracy. But it does. I am neither an astrophysicist nor an astronaut—merely a chemistry major—but even I noticed a few key blunders in a film that painstakingly tries to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Little wonder science-minded viewers interpret every fact to be a taunt. Gravity throws down the gauntlet and dares us to find something wrong with it. Challenge accepted.
When I picture the 80s, I see scrunched-up leg warmers, primary-colored tights, high-cut leotards, and chunky off-the-shoulder sweaters Tae-Bo-bouncing in unison to “Eye of the Tiger” on a television of microwave thickness. I imagine the smell of aerosolized hairspray in the dressing rooms of Broadway’s Dreamgirls and the taste of glorified teenage angst served in The Breakfast Club. I hear the beats of Madonna’s “Material Girl” and feel the onslaught of the dancing plague made viral by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
But beneath the threat of environmentally unfriendly hair product dispensers and angry teenagers was a real danger, one so well known in present-day, first world, hygienic, retrovirus-aware America that we often forget how it horrified our country just thirty years ago. I’m not talking about dancing zombies. I’m talking about HIV.
