2013: Best and Worst

Oscars are handed out and I realize I never did my Best/Worst of 2013. Oops. But who can blame me? I live in the sticks. If it’s “art house” good, I see it in March. Maybe. With my tardiness, I’m skipping a formal numbered Top 10, bottom 5. Brevity is key now.

The Best

No film floored me in 2013 quite like “12 Years a Slave,” a real American horror/history story. It is the truth to the lies of that other Oscar winner of American lies, “Gone with the Wind.” A must see.

Yet, I had no better time in a theater last year than “Gravity,” an amazing piece of film-making. And it has an equal companion, “All is Lost.” A woman adrift in space, a man lost at sea. Each facing hopelessness. These films are odd, perfect twins that hit me perfectly square in the chest and head, and why not as I turn 40. They are my No. 1 choices, tied.

Call “12 Years” a very close second. It certainly is the most vital film of 2013.

The rest from 4 down: Romantic drama “Her” -- again about a lonely man, notice a theme here? -- and family documentary “Stories We Tell.” Each told new stories with power. 

Trilogy closer “Before Midnight” seemed to spool out as a captured reality, while “American Hustle” and “Wolf of Wall Street” played two wild games of comedy from too-strange real events set in New York.

I also loved the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Issac Davis just another cool cat.

Closing out at No. 10, another tale at sea,“Captain Phillips,” with Tom Hanks, also staring down death while soaking wet, but desperate to be alone. 

Is this list complete? No. It will change many times. For now, it will do.

The Worst

No film pissed me off more in 2013 than “A Good Day to Die Hard,” an abomination on the 1988 classic action film. That film played for humanity among all the fireworks. “AGDTDH” is soul-dead garbage. 

Four more grating entries: “The Lone Ranger,” “The Host,” “Percy Jackson 2,” and “Fifth Estate.” 

Again, sure to change. But I doubt “AGDTDH” will be bottomed.

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

“A Good Day to Die Hard” is not a “Die Hard” movie. It’s an ugly, tired, dull action flick that regurgitates everything grand from the 1988 classic. It has no soul or point. It's an abomination. A cash grab by tired people who do not care anymore. Five minutes in I hated it. A tired Bruce Willis is “John McClane” -– quotes needed -– who bolts to Moscow to save his grown CIA agent son (Jai Courtney) stuck with a murder rap. The short of it: John and John go Roy Rogers on a pack of terrorists, one of whom eats carrots. Really. It all ends in Chernobyl in a swimming pool. Not joking. Actually, nothing here is funny. What’s worse: The Tea Party way director John Moore treats all foreigners as stupid trolls, or the way he turns McClane -– long ago scared, bleeding, but desperate to do right -– into some Stallone blockhead that the first film so beautifully refused? There is not even a delicious villain to root for. Twinkies were the food choice in 1988. This is a shit served cold. Yippee-ki-yay mother F.