2013: The Year in Superlatives

The Best of Everything Else in 2013

Each year there are so many great movie moments worth cherishing and recommending. This year got fairly ridiculous in how many media outlets had to make extensive lists for even the most minuscule things. I don’t have the time, patience or resources to write so many year-end lists, but it remains fun to make them. You can read my Best Movies of the Year list here; many included there can be found here.

Top 15 Scenes

  • Solomon Northup dangles from a noose struggling to keep his toes on the ground as other slaves go about their day in the background of an agonizingly long wide shot
  • Jesse and a half naked Celine argue in a Greek hotel room
  • Richie DiMasso and Edith Greensley dance in a club and agree in a bathroom stall to “No more fake shit” while a drunk Rosalyn predicts the exact moment when her husband Irving will say “We need to talk business”
  • The Weston family dinner table scene
  • The opening shot of “Gravity”
  • Captain Phillips can barely function as he’s just been rescued and Navy doctors tend to him
  • Theodore and his operating system Samantha have sex for the first time
  • Llewyn Davis auditions with a solo of “The Death of Queen Jane” before a producer coldly says to him “I don’t see any money here”
  • David and Ross Grant steal a compressor from a barn that turns out not to be their father’s
  • Detective Loki isn’t sure if he hears a faint whistle coming from somewhere
  • India and her uncle Charlie play a duet on piano complete with tension and forbidden sexual sensations
  • Audrina Patridge’s completely bright and see-through Hollywood home is robbed as seen from a single shot far off in the distance
  • Sutter has a fight with Aimee and kicks her out of his car
  • James Franco and Danny McBride argue about where they can and can’t masturbate
  • Kris is drugged and hypnotized by an unseen assailant with “a deformity in which his face is made by the same material as the sun” Continue reading “2013: The Year in Superlatives”

The Counselor

Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” is too strange to be sexy, alluring or memorable.

“The Counselor” spoils easily one of the most memorably bizarre scenes in a studio drama this year. In it, Cameron Diaz takes off her panties, clambers onto the hood of Javier Bardem’s Ferrari and proceeds to dry hump the windshield. Bardem refers to the distinct visual he receives from the front passenger seat as “like a catfish.”

Bardem calls it too odd to be sexy, and he’s right, but Director Ridley Scott plays it for laughs because he’s not sure what to do with writer Cormac McCarthy’s scene either.

This is McCarthy’s first original screenplay following multiple film adaptations of his novels including “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road.” He’s written a drug cartel drama in which women, morality, paradoxes and regret take a prominent role while a mysterious, never seen evil pulls the strings in the background.

Scott however shoots “The Counselor” like it’s “American Gangster.” It amounts to a clunky thriller reduced to tedious conversation pieces, a nonsensical plot and unclear motives or forces trying to create suspense. Continue reading “The Counselor”