Best of 2013: Screenplays

Best Original Screenplay

• Jean-Pol Fargeau & Claire Denis for Bastards, for slipping into so many cryptically rattled heads while concealing their sawtoothed secrets and motives, ingeniously operating within and testing the formal limits of noir/mystery storytelling mechanics.

• Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig for Frances Ha, for conceiving such a slinky and apropos refusal of a more rigid structure and a specific, tragically funny portrait of one of the most daunting protagonists to come from the often perfunctory American indie trend of late-20s ennui.

• Ethan Coen & Joel Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis, for layering in deliberate steps instead of simply piling on static, misanthropic oddities, supplying sad, ambiguous, tender-hearted, and tragicomic edges to a story haunted by unspoken grief.

• Abbas Kiarostami for Like Someone in Love, for imbuing his knack for mystery, intimacy and elliptical characterization into a delicate and concise polygon of the types of love (and their implications) that constantly shapeshift with the roles that the two protagonists play.

• Darci Piccoult for Mother of George, for adorning a semi-commonplace story with peculiar notes and risky insights into the culture and practices of the family at its core, withholding enough information to keep it from feeling too on the nose.

Honorable Mentions kick off with a trio of scripts that the Academy sprung for, but ultimately brought one too many reservations for me to embrace quite as fully as their cohorts, starting with Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke for Before Midnight (I know some, including the Academy, consider it adapted, but I think it belongs here), who craft some stellar sequences like the hotel argument or the Byzantine-era church conversation that come very close to matching the incisiveness of their predecessors while infusing the glowing personal attachment of the trilogy's protagonists and our own investment in their possibly crumbling relationship. But, especially with return visits, the film as a whole shows its stress marks from the weight of audience expectation, forcing awkward, desperate-to-please exposition and thematic foreshadowing in its first 30 minutes or so, which I think is most evident during the film's choppiest scene in which it actually literalizes these concerns as Jesse is having a very long conversation with his writer friend about the large expectations held in regards to his third novel. We then move to Eric Warren Singer & David O. Russell who present American Hustle as a vertiginous amalgam of Russell's typically bristly showcase of character/actor personalities and loopy, caper-soaked plot tropes that aligns so smoothly with the director's sensibilities that it's easy to dismiss how the script isn't entirely up to the tasks laid out by its modest ambitions, focusing a little too intensely on the con by the last act while letting the initially spiny entanglements of its characters fall slightly to the wayside. But some of the script's most bracing moments are a result of the way it's narrative is sculpted, so it's hard to complain too much. Meanwhile, the script that walked away with the whole thing, Spike Jonze's Her, spins a tale from the director's highest concept yet (give or take Being John Malkovich) and takes a distinct and achingly tender-hearted swerve into an emotionally honest adult parable. My only wish is that it would have taken a somewhat subtler approach to its themes to balance the softness of Jonze's tones, and that it could've been about 15 minutes shorter, but, like Hustle, there's just too much to savor here to fixate on the negatives. With my recent second screening of Hustle fresh in my mind, I still think that I'd be a Her voter, though I find a lot of merits in both. There were admirable aspects in the remaining Original Screenplay nominees (the vivid father-son bonds of Nebraska, the tight past and present weavings of Blue Jasmine, and the impassioned but ambiguous relationship between Ron's rancid politics in Dallas Buyers Club), but others that unfortunately rankle (like Nebraska's flat jokes and reliance on stereotypes, Blue Jasmine's generic and unconvincing conceptions, or Dallas Buyers Club's clunkier emotional devices). While I don't revile any of these scripts, it's still hard for me to accept that all three managed to sneak in over Inside Llewyn Davis (or any of my other favorites, for that matter, not that they actually had a chance).

Taking a significant step away from the movies on Oscar's list we'll now turn our attention to scripts that were nowhere near their radar, like Kim Nguyen's familiarly textured but unexpectedly subversive script for his coming-of-age child-soldier drama, War Witch; Ulrich Seidl & Veronika Franz's best entry into the Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Love, which is relentlessly austere, yes, but is counterbalanced by a richly realized protagonist and surprising swerves into empathy; Jem Cohen's spatially complex and involving world-building of Museum Hours, which balances just the right amount of humor, intellectualism and specificity to keep it on its feet; Travis Matthews' revealing and concise, I Want Your Love, which steadily unfolds the relations and details of its tightly-knit queer community with warmth, laughs and introspection; Xavier Dolan's bravely messy debut script, I Killed My Mother, which somehow manages to be the young filmmaker's crowning achievement of jagged, multilateral perspectives on relationships, whether romantic or familial (haven't seen Tom at the Farm or Mommy as of yet, though, not that the opportunity to do so has arisen in the states); Brandon Cronenberg's (yes, that Cronenberg) vicious and tightly-wound body horror-as-satire, Antiviral, which grows wittier and tougher in its conceptions and plotting the further it goes; and Stacie Passon's modest but candidly detailed character study, Concussion, which can feel contrived and just a smidge judgmental but stokes real compassion and tough-edged convictions.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• John Ridley for 12 Years a Slave, for overriding some overly florid dialogue that, I imagine, feels more awkward actually spoken than it does on the page with powerful construction, historical insight, emotional investment, and subjective POV, treating the subject of slavery with unflinching honesty.

• Sofia Coppola for The Bling Ring, for acclimating her laconic and diaphanous gifts to an acerbic and unusually witty stranger-than-fiction satire, painting characters, loyalties, celebrities, commodities, and chains of events in a deliciously detached fashion.

• Sergei Loznitsa for In the Fog, for imposing a workable, patiently-structured narrative onto the bones of the livid, nonlinear dreamscape of his previous film, still probing his own concerns regarding Russian society and leading us to predatory places no one else would go.

• Pedro Peirano for No, for balancing the tricky trigonometry of political tensions in Pinochet-era Chile and of the allegiances held by its central characters, sliding nimbly between the beats of its Unbelievable True Story conceit without sacrificing context or spirit.

• Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant, for starting with Oscar Wilde's four-page, allegorical children's fairy tale and erupting into a bustling story of childhood, friendship and social realism, gracing its disparate narrative with thematic parallels that pay crushing emotional dividends.

Honorable Mentions do not include Captain Phillips, Short Term 12, The Wolf of Wall Street, or Phiilomena, all of which inspired their ardent devotees. I like Captain Phillips' script the most, which lends surprising complexity to the Somalians, but gets a hefty amount of assistance from Greengrass's direction and its actors. It was close, but not quite Honorable Mention-worthy. The next two on the other hand had some intriguing moments,  particularly those catered to their leads, but were ultimately too inconsistent to benefit from any of them. The Wolf of Wall Street's script especially feels undone by its director's commitment to ornate but colorless scenarios and by flabby improvisations that abstract any sense of the full-veined characters that many of its fans seemed to find it chock-full of. As previously mentioned, I never saw Philomena.

It wasn't exactly a banner year for this category, but there were a few scripts that I was sad to exclude from the shortlist, like Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck, Shane Morris & Dean Wellins' spiffy and progressive repackaging of Disney formula with Frozen's moving story and convincing characters, retaining the sweetness and beguiling innocence of its kid-friendly core; Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix's sprawling and multi-layered portrait of Blue is the Warmest Color's protagonist and the relationship explored between she and her beloved; Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber's funny, engaging and sympathetic teen dramedy, The Spectacular Now, which has more interesting things to say about blooming young love and misplaced affection than their (500) Days of Summer script; Richard LaGravenese's smartly proportioned breakdown of Behind the Candelabra's romance of convenience that turns into one of tetchy necessity, landing empathetic tenderness and playful flamboyance even through its appropriately bittersweet final images; and Hayao Miyazaki's unapologetically sentimental adaptation of his own comic, The Wind Rises, which coaxes his typical fondness for odd and lovely flights of visual fancy and fairy tale-ish conceits, but shows him chasing thornier ideas than he has in years.

I gave some thought to showing Tracy Letts some love in the Honorable Mentions, if only for August: Osage County's best moments, like Barbara taking control of the house during the raiding of Violet's drug supplies or the dinner and fish lunch scenes. But, as easy and justifiable as it is to blame John Wells and Weinstein interference (Jesus, that ending) on the overall film being underwhelming, I'm not so sure that Letts's script is doing the film that many favors either, despite a few compelling scenes. As much as Wells fails to deliver on Letts's acrid dramatic spark, the script itself never feels distinctively reformatted for its shift in medium while its best scenes alternate with stale, self-satisfied calculations about its characters, half of which only click as much as they do because of its MVP actors.

Best of 2013: Original Score

Best Original Score

• Hans Zimmer for 12 Years a Slave, because however much it lifts from his past work, Zimmer's music cues potently balance the heightened emotional directness of its subject with the sincere but open-ended approach to Solomon's catharsis.

• Daniel Hart for Ain't Them Bodies Saints, for taking the familiar narrative and emotional setup of its pastiche-laden script to unexpected places, indubitably calling up its influences, while offering jittery, alert and affecting edges of its own, however rough they can feel.

• Stuart A. Staples for Bastards, because even after 18 years of collaboration, Staples remains just as crucial to Denis's prepossessing formal intuition, setting tensile, serrate and eerily sensual tones to his director's slick and shadowy atmosphere.

• Cliff Martinez & Skrillex for Spring Breakers, for blending so seamlessly into its pop-fueled sound design, not necessarily in a way that induces a vexed superiority, but moreso in a way that evokes the specific and appropriately mystical ambience of the movie and its central characters/figures.

• Shane Carruth for Upstream Color, for already steering his own film to its inscrutable yet kind of transfixing plane of existence, but also utilizing his formidable and equally mesmeric musical stylings as a way of establishing the mood and setting that are key to its charms.

Honorable Mentions (Alphabetical Order): All is Lost, Antiviral, Berberian Sound Studio, Blue Caprice, Gravity, Her, Only God Forgives

Missed: Oblivion, Philomena (I know, I know. But I just can not work up the interest.)

Not Released in Time: Mekong Hotel, which would have easily made the top five had it been released in the U.S. (which it probably won't be).

Best of 2013: Visual Effects & Makeup

What do you know, twice in one day!

Best Visual Effects

• Timothy Webber, et. al. for Gravity, for its prodigious and utterly phenomenal force of power, staging every effects' painstaking detail across an array of new, authentic settings, while richly culminating the vastness of its protagonist's surroundings.

• Chris Godfrey, et. al. for The Great Gatsby, for better and worse, aiding Luhrmann's particular brand of glamour and extravagant artifice to bring Fitzgerald's world to life, using digital intervention to induce most of the fabulous locations, color schemes and party guests.

• Scott Farrar, Matt Johnson, et. al. for World War Z, for flavoring zombie warfare with bold and plausibly chaotic visual concepts (the zombies climbing the wall) and personality, keeping scenes like the airplane crash and the rooftop escape so in tune with its action rhythms.

Honorable Mentions are few and far between, since I missed a good handful of the films that usually make a play for this category (The Lone Ranger, Oblivion, Pacific Rim) and some of the ones that I did see (Elysium, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Thor: The Dark World) have some stimulating moments of CGI, but just as many bombastic or clunky ones. That being said, there was a lot to admire about the large-scale movements in Man of Steel and Iron Man 3, both of which strike me as minor entries into the Superhero genre (well, Man of Steel is a lot worse than Iron Man 3), but also happen to contain some of the genre's most sleekly executed, effects-driven passages in some time. I chose to revert back to the old rules of the Academy for this category, limiting myself to three nominees considering the scarcity of possibilities, but if the inconsistency bothers you that much, you can place those two in the last slots. Star Trek Into Darkness also has some galvanizing moments of visual extravagance, but to be honest, if I were asked I wouldn't be able to distinguish any of them from its predecessor. Meanwhile, Oz the Great and Powerful manages to avoid the garish pitfalls of its similarly conceived cinematic cousin, Alice in Wonderland, with some truly eye-catching visuals, but I thought a lot of the character designs fell flat. And on a much smaller scale, Post Tenebras Lux and John Dies at the End evoke two strong, thematically vital and singular visual ideas through CGI (the "Red Devil" and the soy sauce, respectively), and, saving Gravity, easily top any of the previously mentioned films in sheer technical ingenuity, for sure.

And those are literally all of the films that I seriously considered from what I've seen.

Best Makeup & Hairstyling

• Ma Kalaadevi Ananda, Adruitha Lee, et. al. for 12 Years a Slave, for acing subtle gradations of scarring and labor-induced grime, leaving room for its stony illustrations of devastating, granitic and paralyzing depictions of cruelty to count for a lot.

• Lori McCoy-Bell, Evelyne Noraz, et. al. for American Hustle, for so many variations on deliciously belabored character beats, deceitfully echoed through arduously composed, era-specific styles.

• Kate Biscoe, Marie Larkin, et. al. for Behind the Candelabra, for not only nailing the prosthetic achievements drawn from the plastic surgery story arch, but for lending them such unexpected poignancy as the characters age with them, and also for the convincing look of Liberace.

• Gretchen Davis, Yvette Rivas, et. al. for Blue Jasmine, for smartly painting the casually fabulous posturing of Jasmine in the flashbacks (also the crucial handsomeness of Baldwin's character) and allowing it to slowly build to that indelible park-bench meltdown, displaying her ruined dye-job.

• Nicki Ledermann, Cassandra Saulter, et. al. for Inside Llewyn Davis, for expressing lived-in character detail with Llewyn's raggedy, slightly graying hair and understated aging lines of his face, telling mournful prior chapters to Llewyn's life all on their own.

Yes, I technically dipped into the TV world with Behind the Candelabra, but I figured I'd let it slide, considering that this is the supposed swan song of a big-time celebrity director that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and had a theatrical release across the pond, so it's status as a "TV Movie" is arbitrary at best. Besides, not to spoil everything, but this is the only place it will be recognized.

Honorable Mentions to the makeup teams behind The Bling Ring's flashily groomed nuances; Antiviral's satirically brazen realizations of the latest lines in celebrity flues and cold sores; War Witch's haunting and mythic conjuring of maybe-hallucinated/maybe-real band of spirits; Dallas Buyer's Club's low-budget tackling of declining health (even if it could use a scene or two of visibly sick patients), Lovelace's bouncy, texturized locks and fun 70s styles in the American Hustle vein; The Broken Circle Breakdown's abstract yet character-illuminating tattoos; The Grandmaster's beautifying knack for period work, especially in regards to the always-gorgeous Tony Leung; Berberian Sound Studio's sumptuous gothic overtones; and A Hijacking's juxtaposition of weary, bureaucratic guises and increasingly decomposing maritime men.

Best of 2013: Film Editing & Sound

Three categories down, 14 more to go. This can't possibly end badly.

Best Film Editing

• Joe Walker for 12 Years a Slave, for sheer clarity of experience and emotion, the compact narrative beats and obscure passing of time heightening the urgency of Solomon's horrifying plight while allowing room for its sobering patches of hesitations and revolving evocation of a specific place in history.

• Annette Dutertre for Bastards, for weaving intricate strands of constricting narrative threads and elusive character motivations/perspectives, and for always finding new ways to keep Denis's typically elliptical style suggestive yet haunted by queasy premonitions and devastating reveals.

• Sarah Flack for The Bling Ring, for sustaining wizardly control over Coppola's dizzying rhythms, patterns, and individual panics, characteristics and connections of her privileged, seemingly consequence-free group of adolescent thieves.

• Roderick Jaynes for Inside Llewyn Davis, for deploying its deceptive, ingeniously conceived two-ply structure with the doleful, dark-circled finesse of a richly textured folk song, the chilly longueurs and daily circumstances of Llewyn's life enriching one another so gracefully.

• Roger Barton & Matt Cheese for World War Z, for making those elaborate action setpieces brutal and expansive in scope, pardoning the cobbled-together structure with palpable tension, restless pacing, and surprising stakes.

Honorable Mentions begin with Pete Beaudreau for All is Lost and Gordon Grinberg & Alexandre Moors for Blue Caprice who are all so crucial to nurturing their films' most compelling moods and moments, steeping them in physical and psychological immersion, respectively; Adam Nielsen for A Hijacking and
Christopher Rouse for Captain Phillips, both of whom tackle thematically opposite Somali pirate films, but skillfully juggle airtight precision and emotional and political implications; Douglas Crise for Spring Breakers' most potent and hypnotic sequences, deep-sea-diving into the strange but specific world that Debie creates in his images; AJ Edwards, Keith Fraase, Shane Hazen, Christopher Roldan & Mark Yoshikawa for To the Wonder, accumulating Malick's more "minor" ideas/concepts and dilating them into a singular, restless, geographically expansive and deeply personal tale of decaying relationships, despite the occasional ineloquent passage; and Jennifer Lame for injecting Frances Ha with clever, thoughtfully assembled comedic beats and uncontainable bouts of energy that help to layer a frustrating but lovable protagonist. 

I also admired various aspects of Antiviral, Gravity, Museum Hours, The Selfish Giant, and Upstream Color's cutting, but I have to start drawing the line somewhere. Great year for this category. (I don't know who I'd choose if I included winners on these lists, honestly. All so good!)

Best Sound (Mixing & Editing)

• Steve Boedecker, Richard Hymns, et. al. for All is Lost, for keeping the film captivating and aurally trenchant as it summons everything from the tranquil but increasingly hazardous lapping water to the mundane sounds of clanking metal and flapping sails to intensify life-or-death situations.

• Joakim Sunstrom, et. al. for Berberian Sound Studio, for deliciously playing its concept to the rafters and delivering on the ambiguous taste-testing of gruesome and euphonious sounds of gushing, stabbing, screaming and gouging, alike.

• Skip Lievsay, et. al. for Inside Llewyn Davis, for allowing the soundtrack to evoke the Coens' specific vision of 1960s Greenwich Village, while also exhibiting the directing duo's flair for artful proficiency and memorable sonic motifs, and for Isaac's beginning/ending ballads.

• Benjamin Burger, Erik Branting, et. al. for Mother of George, for capturing the aural sensibilities of the local rhythms, textures and traditions of the central couple's community with tact and piquant cultural estrangement.

• Aaron Glasscock, et. al. for Spring Breakers, for transcending the film beyond its surface-level squalor and delivering a mystical synthesis of pop, electronica and internal monologues that take a life of their own.

I understand and find value in the reasons that AMPAS separates the two categories (Editing being the creation of aural elements and Mixing being the finished soundscape (i.e. music and dialogue mixed together), but I like to recognize all aspects of the sound as used in the final film with my awards.

Honorable Mentions are led by the equally essential sonic textures showcased in Gravity and World War Z, both of which feel insane to leave out of the top 5 considering how the contributions of the sound teams are partially imperative in making these films the spectacles that they are. A few rungs down on the list of expected Best Sound nominees include the constantly shapeshifting work in the fishing industry documentary, Leviathan, which is arguably more interesting than the previous honorable mentions from an aural standpoint, but, regardless, is still a wonder of odd and rigorous sensory immersion; Upstream Color which employs the same level of Carruthian mystery/profundity/indiscernibility in its aural concepts as it does in its visual concepts, enabling the film's uniquely warped consistency; and, weirdly enough, The Conjuring, along with other films of its generic ilk, are regularly excluded from recognition in this category, despite managing a number of relentless, head-swerving techniques of suggesting tension and terror. I did enjoy the "louder" aural elements of other big movies outside of Gravity and World War Z, such as Captain Phillips, Iron Man Three, Man of Steel, and Star Trek Into Darkness, but none of those quite reached the heights of the other Honorable Mentions for me. 

Best of 2013: Supporting Actor

Best Supporting Actor

• Barkhad Abdi for Captain Phillips, for lending invaluable, self-effacing resonance to a film that can feel overconcerned with depicting its harrowing factual details, outfitting this stock villain role with reckless desperation, sympathetic idealism, and unpredictability.

• James Franco for Spring Breakers, for finally utilizing his stuntiness and showboating to create an indelible act of star transformation, keeping Alien electric and essential even when the film is basically handed to him, and for the pistol fellatio.

• James Gandolfini for Enough Said, for his many subtle and selfless variations on bearish modesty, moving so gracefully with the generic beats and tart-ish rhythms of the script, equal amounts of bashfulness and charm, sweetness and resentment, and romantic bliss and heartbreak.

• Peter Kazungu for Paradise: Love, for gently suggesting a limit to Munga's preservation of Teresa's ideal perception of how he should love her, while managing to retain the ambiguity of whether or not he's acting entirely out of self-interest.

• Ben Mendelsohn for The Place Beyond the Pines, for keeping Robin's fluctuation between compassion and selfishness interesting where it could just as easily tip into contrivance, the sensitivity he shows around Jason, and the intelligence and experience he exudes in planning his heists.

Honorable Mentions: F. Murray Abraham, who's haunting, wise, and intuitive in Inside Llewyn Davis, earning every second of this one-scene wonder kind of role that is usually hand-delivered to other, more overembellishing Coen collaborators; Keith Stanfield for being one of two performers to successfully navigate the dubious patchwork of Short Term 12 to an emotionally honest and carefully proportioned characterization; Alec Baldwin for lending Blue Jasmine its simplest and most plausible side character, tacitly suggesting his appeal to and frustration with the titular protagonist, their relationship emerging as the film's most thoughtfully realized; Ben Foster for bordering the line between Patrick's genuine kindness and his stalker-like creepiness in Ain't Them Bodies Saints while generously keeping the central dramatic tensions at a keenly steady simmer. Outside of the states offered three more exceptional first-time performances from amateur actors that never quite top Abdi's or Kazungu's but are still honorable mention-worthy, ranging from the lived-in, slightly self-deprecating corporate fatigue of real-life pirate negotiator Gary Skjoldmose Porter in A Hijacking, the unsettling pathos provided by War Witch's antagonist-turned-ally-turned-beloved nailed with aplomb by Serge Kanyinda, and the graciously understated naturalism of Elyes Aguis in Asghar Farhadi's otherwise overstated The Past, landing, arguably, the film's most complex and frustrating character. 

I didn't forget Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club, Michael Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave or Jonah Hill in The Wolf of Wall Steet, all of whom obviously attracted a large, passionate fanbase. I just couldn't get as excited about the first two when there are far more interesting aspects to their respective films, while I thought Hill gave a frankly lazy performance, riffing on and calling attention to every odious characteristic of his character, avoiding every opportunity to make them interesting or in any way of a challenge for the actor to pull off. I'd take him in 21 Jump Street everyday over either of his nominated works (though, I am a fan of his performance in Moneyball).  They'll have to settle for their Oscar wins/nominations, I suppose. Bradley Cooper I also left off intentionally, but for different reasons than the other three. Just wait around for my Lead Actor preferences!