Reader question: What 2013 movies am I looking forward to?

Another reader question. Rob is pretty straightforward:

[A]ny 2013 movies you’re really looking forward to?

Indeed. My primary go-to guide is this io9 preview, which covers 77 sci-fi/fantasy flicks. Since that kind of stuff is definitely my bag, let me just run down a couple highlights, listed in chronological order.

_____

G.I. Joe: Retaliation – I dug the first one. What else can I say? Bring on the mountaineering ninja battles.

Upstream Color – Shane Carruth has finally made his second movie. Being as how Primer is one of the masterpieces of the 2000s, I couldn’t be more excited for this. I’m especially atwitter over the Kubrickean visual rhymes all over the most recent trailer. I’ll go ahead and say that I hope this will not only be one of the best (if not the best) films of the year, but of the decade.

Oblivion – Cool trailer. Joseph Kosinski did an awesome job with Tron: Legacy, and the biggest misstep with that film was casting Garret Hedlund in the lead role. With Tom Cruise as the headliner, I’m thinking this will rock.

This is the End aka The End of the World – For some reason, I’ve become a huge Seth Rogen fan in the last few years. I still despise Superbad, but I’ve liked most of his other stuff. As much as I bag on raunchy comedy, the redband trailer made me laugh.

The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, RIPD – July’s gonna be packed. The first two films already have cool trailers out, and with Gore Verbinski and Guillermo Del Toro directing them, I’m pretty confident I’ll have a good time. Not nearly as confident about RIPD, but when I saw him speak at a convention, James Hong said that he got strong vibes (Blade Runner strength) about its potential. Good enough for me.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters – I dug the first one. What else can I say? Bring on the Fillion.

Riddick – I’m a fan of the first two films. I fully expect much spacefaring badassery.

The Tomb – Arnie and Sly team up to break out of a high-tech prison. Fingers crossed that Dominic Purcell is their man on the outside!

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – I liked the comics. I liked Sin City. I even liked The Spirit. Odds of me liking this? Three to one in favor.

The World’s End – Pegg, Frost, and Wright re-team for genre shenanigans. What better reason for the world to end, if not to have them do a movie about it?

Ender’s Game – Let me clarify that I’m not looking forward to this per se. Gavin Hood is a hack, and my expectation is that he’ll screw this up. But it’s based on one of my very favorite books, so I’ll be seeing it no matter what. The line between fandom and masochism is oh so very thin.

Thor: The Dark World – The first one was surprisingly solid, and this one apparently has Thor versus the Ninth Doctor. Fantastic!

Saving Mr. Banks – A biopic about the making of one of my ten favorite films of all time? Yeah, pretty pumped.

Gravity – The director of Children of Men does hard sci-fi.

Snow Piercer – The director of The Host and Mother does a post-apocalyptic, socially-conscious… something. Really, I don’t know much about this one, other than the people involved make it a must see.

_____

That’s the easy part. Other films I’m hoping will come out in the theater near me this next year are as follows:

Chinese Zodiac – Jackie Chan’s last action picture. Absolutely required viewing.

The Grandmasters – Wong Kar-Wai does period kung-fu epic. Advance word is that it’s incredible.

Amour – This should be out pretty soon near me. To say I’m “excited” to see it wouldn’t be accurate. Let’s just say that I expect it to be an experience I will appreciate having had once I’ve had time to recover from it.

Bullet to the Head, The Last Stand – More Sly and Arnie. Because I’m one of those idiots who went to see Expendables 2 opening day.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters – Probably really bad. Then again, the trailers make it seem like it has some Hong Kong-esque energy to it.

Parker – Statham plays Richard Stark’s (aka Donald Westlake’s) most indelible creation. Pretty jazzed about this, especially as a potential franchise. Parker aged along with the books (more or less), so Statham could conceivably have a lifelong ride with this one.

A Good Day to Die Hard – Duh.

Stoker – An English-language vampire flick by the director of Oldboy. Not enough to get me salivating, but the trailer was pretty sexy.

Dead Man Down, Oz the Great and Powerful – I’ll probably be seeing one of these for my birthday. Not particularly looking forward to either, but you never know.

To the Wonder – Terrence Malick hasn’t made a great film since The Thin Red Line, but everything he does is still worth seeing.

Much Ado About Nothing – I’ve already blogged about this one. Very excited.

Oldboy – I expect the remake to be better than the original. You decide if I’m joking or not.

The Monuments Men – I’m a fan of Clooney as a filmmakers, and this sounds like a cool Oscar-season ensemble piece.

_____

That’s pretty much it for the ones I know I’m hyped about. There are a few big other big ones I know that I’ll see just because, and a few about which I’m on the fence. The biggest maybe-maybe-not film at the moment is probably Iron Man 3. I’m not a particular fan of the first two, though I liked the second one better than the first. I’m also a bit leery of films trying to tap into The Dark Knight in order to grant themselves some legitimacy, and it feels like Iron Man 3 might be going for that vibe. At the same time, it looks visually impressive, it’s gone Shane Black directing, and if there’s one thing the Marvel films have done pretty well, it’s build up the need for heroism, even if the heroes are flawed and human. One of the things I think the trailer did particularly well was have that chest cell behind the logo wink out, then wink back on again. A small gesture, but well-delivered. I know I’ll probably see it within a week or two of its opening; I just hope it tops the disappointing first two films.

All of that said, though, one of the things I most look forward to in any given year is the number of films that I hadn’t previously anticipated, but which completely take me by surprise in the most pleasant way. The above list is by no means exhaustive. I can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store for me that I haven’t anticipated.

So, dear readers: what are you planning to see in 2013? ☕

Open for debate: the future of literary posterity

I’ve probably already touched on posterity in several of my posts on lists and listmaking, but — wouldn’t you know it? — another list has popped up. Via Alan Jacobs, Paleofuture has a post discussing an instance of a literary magazine in the 1930s asking its readers to predict which contemporary authors would be canonical by Y2K. These things fascinate me. At what point does a prediction become an act shaping the future? Does the wishful thinking of listmakers actually make those lists into reality? As both Jacobs and Matt Novak note, most of the writers in the magazine’s top ten are still widely read amongst the literary.

I don’t blog about contemporary literature much because, frankly, I’m frightfully out of touch with what’s hip and rad these days. (I can’t wait to read the new Dresden book; that’s all I know!) Both Jacobs and Novak had some great comments on their posts, so I thought I’d open this up for discussion, and hopefully we can get a good comment thread going. Of the English-language authors still living (or having died within, say, the last five years), who do you think will still be read in the year 2100? What considerations make those authors stand out? One of my bigger questions is how important is it for authors or works to be institutionalized (taught in high schools, universities, etc.) in order for them to survive? What kinds of stories survive best in popular culture, outside academia? Are we suffering a relative paucity of talent in our current crop of literary artists, or will future generations look back on this era as an embarrassment of underappreciated riches?

I look forward to your comments. Please have at it.☕

What about Ender Wiggin? Not epic enough?

The Doctor tops io9′s list of 8 Epic Heroes Who Committed Mass Murder. Just so. The case for (against?) him:

For a character who frequently makes moralistic pronouncements and shows plenty of righteous indignation towards other people’s actions, he is probably responsible for more deaths than any action hero or horror icon of the 1980′s. [...] In his 1103 years, the Doctor has racked up a body count that could be conservatively tallied in the trillions. It’s gotten so bad, for a while he was able to defuse any potential conflict by doing nothing more than introduce himself.

And now that he’s gone off grid with the whole faked-death thing, not even his reputation can hold him accountable to what he chooses to do. Prepare yourself, universe, for the Doctor unbound.☕

Just for reference…

This is how iSideWith.com describes my political bias. Overall, not too surprising. The graphic doesn’t show it, but I side with Virgil Goode (Constitution Party) 59% of the time, and with Jill Stein (Green Party) and Rocky Anderson (Justice Party) 39% of the time.  What I find heartening is that I apparently have at least some overlap with virtually everyone across the American political spectrum. Election years tend to frustrate me, because they leave me feeling that I have no “home,” so to speak, with any of the major political groups. Getting results like this don’t alleviate the stress of my mixed feelings toward the Big Two, but it’s nice to know that I’m not completely adrift.

Despite being so simpatico with Johnson, I still prefer to think of myself as conservative, rather than libertarian. The feature I really loved in this poll is the option to choose a slightly more nuanced option besides “yes” or “no;” the ability to rank each issue’s importance to me was also pretty nifty. It wasn’t perfect, but it’s probably the best survey of this sort that I’ve taken. When taking the poll, I didn’t rank the issues in their importance to me as stringently as I probably should have, but this is likely a fairly accurate reflection of my political sympathies at the present time. As always, they are open to persuasion.☕

The Sight & Sound 2012 poll: My hypothetical ballot(s)

Yesterday, the BFI made available an interactive list of every film tallied in its most recent poll of critics of the greatest films ever made. One of the most common complaints about this list (and every other like it) is the stuff that gets left off. When you’re looking at a list built from consensus, it’s not so much that stuff has been completely ignored so much as that the final result cannot possibly reflect the diversity of the selections — which is why I always look forward to the individual ballots so much. They probably more accurately reflect the diversity of taste and aesthetic priorities of those polled than the official top ten. Yet even creating an individual ballot is a challenge in itself. How does one decide on the best ten films one’s ever seen, let alone the best ten films ever made?

The Sight & Sound 2012 critics poll: disappointment and hope

Plenty of analysis has already been done on the top 50 films from Sight & Sound’s 2012 critics poll. Indiewire has a whole series running on the poll, including a lament about the lack of female representation. As I mentioned in the comments in my previous post, I had three big disappointments in this year’s list, which was compiled from the top ten lists of 846 professionals.

 

Newbies but goodies

The most recent film in the top ten is from 1968, indicating that virtually no consensus has had time to emerge in the last 40-odd years about what constitutes great contemporary cinema. It’s also disappointing that the most recent film from the top 50 is Mulholland Dr. (not a favorite, though at least it wasn’t Inland Empire), and that it came in at 28 (with 40 votes). By contrast, many analysts have already noted that the silent era is well-represented, with three of the top ten films being silent films made between 1927 and 1929, though only five of the top 50 (if I understand the list correctly), are silent, and they are, ironically, clumped up into the top twelve slots, with Battleship Potemkin missing the tenth slot by one vote, and L’Atalante close behind.

I’m very glad that the silent era is well-represented, and I don’t know that newer films are more or less deserving of the distinction of being in the top ten (or 50), but it does seem to be such a shame that four decades of wonderful cinema are barely represented, once all the votes have been tallied. Here’s the tally of films in the top 50 from each post-60s decade:

Sight & Sound’s 2012 Greatest Films of All Time

From BBC News.

Critics’ Top Ten:

1. Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
2. Citizen Kane | Orson Welles, 1941
3. Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Ozu Yasujiro, 1953
4. La Regle de jeu (The Rules of the Game) | Jean Renoir, 1939
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans | F. W. Murnau, 1927
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick, 1968
7. The Searchers | John Ford, 1956
8. Chelovek s kino-apparotom (Man with a Movie Camera) | Dziga Vertov, 1929
9. La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) | C. T. Dreyer, 1927
10. 8 1/2 | Federico Fellini, 1963

Directors’ Top Ten:

1. Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Ozu Yasujiro, 1953
2. (tie) 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick, 1968
3. (tie) Citizen Kane | Orson Welles, 1941
4. 8 1/2 | Federico Fellini, 1963
5. Taxi Driver | Martin Scorsese, 1976
6. Apocalypse Now | Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
7. (tie) The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola, 1972
8. (tie) Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
9. Zerkalo (The Mirror) | Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975
10. Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) | Vittorio de Sica, 1948

The BFI’s intro to the updated list on the S&S site. The dates I’m most looking forward to are the 15th and 22nd, at which times S&S will reveal the ballots of all the critics and directors, respectively. Stay tuned.☕

Appreciating 80s cinema

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Adam Kuntavanish posts and solicits (respectively) top ten lists on various cinematic topics over at Next Projection. For this week’s topic — the best male performances of the 80s — I finally took the time to assemble a list. His introductory remarks struck a chord with me, though, on a broader note:

Koyaanisqatsi ☕ d. Godfrey Reggio, 1982

There’s no proselytizing to be found in Koyaanisqatsi; what I half-expected going in was an eco-nut jeremiad about the evils of industrialized civilization.  What I experienced was something much more akin to Shklovsky’s defamiliarization effect: a sustained, artistic effort to re-align my perception of modern life, if only momentarily, in order to induce me to reflect critically on my place in it. In order to portray a “life out of balance,” filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and his collaborators needed to find a style that would shock the audience without losing it, and the result is a very tight montage of nature in continuity from what some might call “pristine” wilderness to the garbage-strewn streets of the urban metropolis.  What the film evoked for me was a sense of someone who wanted to show me something very important, something beautiful, something terrifying, but this person found he could not stand far enough back to take it all in.  Even with its flaws, the impact was sublime.

A few remarks on Ebert’s top ten films of all time

Most of us nerds make lists; few of our lists will actually have some measurable form of cultural impact.  Roger Ebert has submitted his list for the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll.  As most of you probably know, this poll is conducted every ten years.  Prestigious filmmakers and critics around the world each submit their top ten films of all time; the results are tallied, and the results are published in as close to a “definitive” generational top ten as you’re likely to get.  His blog post, in which he ruminates on listmaking and his decision process is therefore of some interest to those of us who a.) like making lists and b.) are interested in the thought processes of people who make lists that matter.

A practical guide to the critical application of group-unthink

Via More Than 95 Theses, we have yet another example of group-unthink at the expense of all those poor sods from the past who had the temerity to express opinions that went against the consensus formed by the tide of history.  In The Atlantic, Jason Bailey shines a spotlight on “12 Great Movies the Critics Got Dead Wrong.”  The pretext for this fluff/hit piece is Roger Ebert’s one-star pan of The Raid, which has generally gotten very positive notices.  Bailey writes:

“Then again, as much as we love Mr. Ebert, this isn’t the first time he got a great movie dead wrong. His one-star pan of Blue Velvet is still a head-scratcher; ditto the single star he awarded Wet Hot American Summer.”

Indeed.  Because think of the generations of future cinephiles who will be shaking their heads over the boobs who didn’t crown Wet Hot American Summer an an insta-classic back in 2001.

The Halloween roundup

Image’s Arts & Faith community released a top 25 list for horror movies just in time for Halloween. As seems to be the case with virtually every solid list made by anyone, there are a few films I haven’t seen. For the Arts & Faith list, my sins of omission include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, I Walked with a Zombie, and Curse of the Demon. Overall, there aren’t any real surprises or obscurities on the list; I’m a bit disappointed in the high ranking of Let the Right One In and its American counterpart, if only because I’m tired of the fanboy slobbering. Thankfully, Jeffrey Overstreet’s synopsis for the two films is devoid of fanboy slobbering. His apologia for the list is especially worth reading; it’s probably the best, most concise explanation I’ve yet read for the importance of horror cinema to the Christian viewer. His brief discussion of Ridley Scott’s seminal Alien cuts right to the heart of the film’s continuing power:

No Nanook, know nuthin’?

Not enough Flaherty. I'm not too proud to special plead.

Just another quickie post. Victor Morton finally updated Right Wing Film Geek this week after a long dry spell, and I wanted to draw attention to his post on “born yesterday-ism,” the phenomenon of propagating ultra-recent artifacts of pop culture as landmark achievements.  He was prompted in particular by Current TV’s list of “50 Documentaries to See Before You Die.”  All of them, by the way, have been released in the past 25 years. Morton makes many insightful observations about this phenomenon, and I don’t gainsay any of them.  The one that I want to add is simply blunt, and I can’t justify it with reasoned argument. Basically, if someone makes a list of films exclusively from the last 25 and gives it a title implying that it’s the be-all-end-all, my conclusion is that this person doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

NPR’s expert listeners tell you what the best Sci-fi/Fantasy books are. Mm-hm.

One of the big problems with crowdsourcing a “best of” consensus list is the fact that you never know if the people voting actually know anything about what they’re voting for.  This is true of pretty much every voting process, of course, and while I don’t want to be all down on democracy, it nettles me when I see things like NPR’s new Top 100 SF/Fantasy list.  NPR has, with the help of readers/listeners and an “expert panel,” selected 100 titles from which every voter will pick 10, culminating in the Ultimate Top Ten, I guess.  There’s nothing wrong with listmaking.  It’s just that I wonder if everyone voting has actually read every book on the list of 100 titles.  I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only read 23 (more like 30, if you count the series and books of which I’ve only read a part, but not the whole thing).  That’s a very small number.  It’s pathetic.  So I’m not going to vote.  But I’m guessing that of all the people that will vote in this poll, less than half will have read most of the titles.  (By “most,” I mean something like 85 or more.)  Most people will probably have read far less.  They have a right to vote, but that doesn’t mean their votes are informed or meaningful, which means that the eventual top 10 will be neither informed nor meaningful.

Annotations to the Obligatory Top 100

More for posterity’s sake than anything, I thought it worthwhile to include a link to the list of my one hundred favorite films, which is available on MUBI as as list entitled, ironically enough, “The Obligatory Top 100.” As I noted there, my criteria were incredibly broad. So broad, in fact, so as to be arguably little else than the fact that these films bring me a great deal of joy.  I imposed some arbitrary other criteria on my winnowing process, mostly because without arbitrary restrictions, I would never be equal to the task of narrowing my favorites down to a mere one hundred.  As I explained to a friend the other day, there are probably at least four hundred films that could just as easily hold a place on my list, but since 100 is the conventional number for such a thing, it is the number by which I abide (with much grumbling, groaning, and other pouty noises).