In December, every writer is legally required to rank the
top 10 of each art form, so that’s what I’m just going to have to do this
month. I’ll start with movies. The brevity of this list is due to the fact that
we rarely see current movies in the theater or on Netflix. We usually just get
to them whenever. I’m sure the major Oscar movies being released this month are
lovely; we’ll see them sometime before 2016. Here is my ranking of movies of
2013. Not the best movies from 2013 —
all the 2013 movies I saw.
5. Escape From Tomorrow. This was an
hour and a half of my life I’ll never get back. It was a black-and-white
independent horror movie shot at Walt Disney World. The cast shot it with
iPhones surreptitiously at Disney because obviously no company would never give
anyone permission to shoot such a thing that might cast its park in a bad
light. I was hoping Escape From Tomorrow
might be a subversive look at Disney — especially given the irresistible cover
image of a clawed, bleeding Mickey Mouse hand — but none of the movie made a
bit of sense. Some dad had a weird obsession with teenage girls at the park and
ended up dying of cat flu in his hotel room. It was just awful. Do not see
this.
4. Iron Man 3. No. As a comic fan, I
have a weird relationship with the movies. Some, like The Avengers, are entertaining enough and close enough to the
spirit of the source that I can overlook the continuity errors. Iron Man 3 just irritated me by making
the Mandarin, a promising villain, into a joke; a goofy character as a front for
some less interesting unpowered terrorist. Yeah, deconstructing superheroes was
novel 25 or 30 years ago but I’m sick unto death of it. Can’t we have more
comic movies that actually celebrate the medium’s giddy heights? Can’t you stop
your eye from winking ironically for two hours? Plus, I am completely sick of
Robert Downey Jr. in this part (which, by the way, is way more obnoxious than how Tony Stark has been portrayed in the
comics since 1962). What I would give for a scene in Avengers 2 where one of his teammates says, “Christ, will you shut
up for one second?!”
3. Lovelace. This was OK. It’s a direct
to Netflix biography of Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat. This was kind of avant garde and had a nice look to
it. Chloe Sevigny was fine as Lovelace. Not much else to say about it.
2. Olympus Has Fallen. I am a sucker
for this type of “destroy the White House” movie. It’s not because I want to overthrow
the government or anything but I have a weakness for disaster movies and my
imagination runs wild to speculate what happened with the disaster outside the
scope of the movie. I thought this was just fun and entertaining and I got a
little riled up when the terrorists started destroying the White House and
killing people. I wanted to scream, “This is America and this doesn’t happen
here! Kick these bastards out of our house!”
1. The Conjuring. This movie didn’t
really scare me (at least beyond some jump scares) but it was a good, solid
horror movie. I felt like the movie was checking off boxes and doing sort of a
greatest hits version of horror movie tropes (demonic possession, the creepy
doll, the dog that won’t go in the house because he knows it’s haunted), which
could be a strength or a weakness. The cast was pretty good and the writing was
fine.
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