Joe's 2013 Top 20, Bottom 10 and More
Overall, 2013 was a stout year for good movies. After a somewhat shaky summer season — "Pacific Rim" didn't tear up the box office but got lots of critical acclaim, and some of the year's biggest releases, including "Star Trek Into Darkness" and "Iron Man 3," left moviegoers, at best, divided — we got a really outstanding crop of "awards"-caliber films.
Several of my colleagues at The Film Yap, including Chris, Nick, and Sam, have offered their tops, bottoms and sideways(es) of the year, and here, at long last, are my picks for the worst, best, and more of 2013.
Don't Let Them Fool You; These Movies Didn't Suck:
5. The Lone Ranger: More than any, this film nudged the title of this section to "These Movies Didn't Suck" rather than "These Movies Are Good," because I can't call "The Lone Ranger" a good movie. By overly Deppifying and largely neutering the Lone Ranger, this should have been a complete disaster, but somehow, on the strength of a few really good action sequences and the wise casting of actors like Tom Wilkinson, "Ranger" was a little better than advertised.
4. The Purge: A sick, slick thrill ride of a morality tale set in a utopian American future where all crime is legal for one evening, leading to a night of death and destruction that makes its way out to the affluent suburbs. Yes, it relies too heavily on the off-screen savior and drops the morals in favor of bloody carnage, but as one of the more high-concept flicks of 2013, "The Purge" gives us dinner and dessert at the same time.
3. Riddick: I enjoyed "Pitch Black" back in the day, but found "The Chronicles of Riddick" to be a dull, overly complex slog. I was less than excited, then, to hear about Vin Diesel's third outing behind the goggles. What we actually got was a tense, exciting popcorn flick that delivers good action and a decent story that finally lives up to the hype the Riddick fanboys thought they've been getting all along but haven't.
2. Texas Chainsaw 3D: Talk about a movie with no right to be good. It's virtually impossible to even discern what they are rebooting (is it the original series or the remakes?) after four films, a remake and a prequel, each faithfully abiding to the Law of Diminishing Returns. This reboot, though, restored vitality to the series, making it less a standard slasher flick and more of a look at the family through a different set of eyes. By the time the flick's nifty twist came around, I was hooked, and not just because star Alexandra Daddario spent much of the movie in various states of near-undress.
1. Movie 43: Might it be embarrassing for Hugh Jackman to have a scrotum hanging from his chin, and to have said sack brushing awkwardly against Kate Winslet's face? Or Halle Berry to have clownishly collagened lips? Or for Naomi Watts to be (kinda) seducing her own son? Yeah, probably, but that doesn't make it any less funny. "Movie 43" is a collection of hit-and-miss skits starring some of Hollywood's biggest stars (seriously, it's like everyone in Hollywood got involved), but there are enough real laughs here to make this watchable. My personal favorite: Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville shaking down a leprechaun (Gerard Butler) for his pot of gold.
Most Disappointing
5. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues: Sure, it could have been worse, and the sequel to "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" has some solid laughs, but with no scenes even approaching the guffaw-producing levels of the Ron/Veronica newsroom fight, and a limp redux of the news anchor rumble, not to mention not a single line whose quotability rivals any of 15 or so from the first film makes "Anchorman 2" a distinct disappointment.
4. Man of Steel: Zack Snyder did some stuff right (the climactic fight is solid, problems aside; Henry Cavill is a good Superman and Michael Shannon was a formidable Zod), but there were a number of choices that range from puzzling to downright ludicrous; Krypton as Pandora, the fully interactive Jor-El, Pa Kent dying in a tornado ... for the dog, and not only Superman taking a life, but not saving others are among them. Oh, and that product placement. We might as well have seen Superman buying his costume at Sears, then celebrating by driving his Chevy to the IHOP and texting Lois on his ... you get the picture.
3. Elysium: Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" is one of the finest sci-fi films of the last decade, so maybe a letdown was inevitable. But this flick totally wastes Jodie Foster, is sometimes difficult to follow and has an overly easy hook; really, we can just rearrange all of society by inserting a command into a program? Blomkamp has some cool ideas in here, but they deserved a better movie around them.
2. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2: The first "Cloudy" was imaginative and witty, and had a snappy, scene-stealing performance from Mr. T as the short shorts-wearing cop who helps Flint Lockwood. The sequel replaces T with Terry Crews and replaces the wit and imagination with fart jokes.
1. World War Z: Perhaps with the much-publicized production problems, we should be happy with the quality of the film we got to begin with. But with the source material being a great zombie novel and the great talent, we got a middling-at-best thriller that more or less involved zombies.
Worst 10 Films of 2013
10. The Great Gatsby: A giltzy, yet still somehow dull adaptation of a glitzy yet dull novel, "Gatsby" gets style points for production design, but Baz Luhrmann isn't able to make that material translate any better to the big screen than anyone else. Hey, it looks good anyway.
9. Oz the Great and Powerful: A boring, pompous prequel to "The Wizard of Oz" that turns the charlatan Oz into an antihero caught in a witchy web of intrigue. The only problem is it feels manufactured, with its wannabe-twisty take on the witches and their relationship. James Franco is miscast as the Wizard, and the whole film feels forced and fake. Oh, and it's pretty boring too. So there.
8. Free Birds: A Thanksgiving movie that would have us root for American settlers to starve to death rather than eat time-traveling turkeys. That's right: Time-traveling turkeys who set out to make ... something else the featured dish at Thanksgiving. It's pretty much as ridiculous as it sounds.
7. Planes: An animated movie based in the world of "Cars" that couldn't keep the attention of my kids, which is saying a lot. They got little more than halfway through this would-be DTV turd and gave up, and haven't even bothered to try it out again. And why should they when 2013 also produced "Frozen"? Also, lead role played by Dane Cook. 'Nuff said.
6. Bad Grandpa: Is this a spinoff "Jackass"-style prank movie or a narrative feature? It tries to be both, and the result is a red-hot mess. Johnny Knoxville and the boys essentially are making a movie where no one outside of a select few are aware a movie is actually being made. Knoxville plays a recently-widowed octogenarian who doesn't want his third-wheel grandson stifling his game with the ladies, which is a decent enough setup for a skit. But after the skit is done, the movie continues (at one point Knoxville's grandpa sits in a car alone and cries, acting as the character rather than as Knoxville as the character). The result is somewhat confusing. Yeah, I laughed a little, but not enough.
5. The Family: This could have been a good drama about a mob family on the lam, and it could have been a good comedy about a mob family on the lam. It's like director Luc Besson changed his mind on which he wanted on alternating days of filming. So we get scenes like the gruesome mob murder of women and children followed by small-town hijinks involving Michelle Pfeiffer blowing up a grocery store.
4. Escape Plan: So we've waited decades for Stallone and Schwarzenegger together on the big screen (and no, those lame "Expendables" movies don't count; we need more than five minutes of time together), and this is what we get? There are a few fun ideas in here, but few of them go anywhere. And while Jim Caviezel plays a good villain, he's hardly man enough to take on both of these heavyweights. Plus, we get lamer one-liners than usual, geriatric action scenes and some pretty massive leaps in logic.
3. A Good Day to Die Hard: Bruce, retire John McClane. Please. He's tired. He wants to rest.
1a/1b. The Canyons / After Earth: Two movies that couldn't be more different but share a passion for sucking so much that I couldn't decide which was worse.
"The Canyons" is a miserable film. Characters in this film are insufferable people who hate themselves so much they can't do anything but drink and screw, and can't even be bothered to do either in a way that we as viewers find remotely interesting. Imagine "The Room" without any self-awareness or sense of humor about itself. Porn actor James Deen is DOA, and Lindsay Lohan slobbers out her lines through a haze of booze and debauchery while offering us some of the least erotic nudity this side of "Schindler's List." Director Paul Schrader's on-set troubles with Lohan are well-known, and it shows on this film, where the characters meander around doing nothing in particular while Schrader struggles to inject subtext by splaying (admittedly) well-shot images of decrepit movie theaters. To be honest, I don't remember the plot of the film, or even if it has a plot.
"After Earth" is the latest abomination M. Night Shyamalan has foisted upon us, where he takes perhaps the most charismatic movie star in the world (Will Smith) and gives him a character totally bereft of emotion, asks him to stare off into space and speak without using contractions, and creates a world with no internal consistency (see my thoughts more in-depth in my original review). A science-less science-fiction thriller obviously designed to make Jaden Smith a star, all "After Earth" does is confirm Shyamalan's current status as laughingstock of Hollywood.