It would be an understatement to say that Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Departed) killed it in 2013. Before his Academy Award-nominating role as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio portrayed Jay Gatsby, one of the most legendary characters in literary history, most sincerely and intensely. It was a performance that F Scott Fitzgerald would be proud of and almost make him forget all of the other subpar attempts to recreate his work of fiction that nearly all of us have read in high school.
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Category Archives: Year of Release
Enough Said (2013)
It is unfortunate that director Nicole Holofcener (Friends With Money, Lovely and Amazing) Enough Said was the last film that James Gandolfini (television’s The Sopranos, The Last Castle) completed before his untimely death, but what a lasting impression he will leave with the mass public in the most real and honest movie of 2013. Gandolfini has frightened us on the big and small screens for the last 20 years. He has played some of the vilest characters and some of the meanest. Like me, you might go into this movie thinking Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a romantic dramedy. There’s A) No chance it will be good, and B) Even if the critics somehow give it a positive review, there is no way I will give it a chance because it will be so unbelievable. Just like with Gandolfini as some mobster, hard military man, or hitman, we think of Louis-Dreyfus as the queen of goofy television comedies like Seinfeld, Veep, and The New Adventures of Old Christine. There is no way this movie could ever work in the world, right? Well, I will say unequivocally that this assumption is wrong. This movie is not just good. It is great. The chemistry between Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus is not something that just gets by. It is something that works effortlessly.
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Captain Phillips (2013)
The movie of 2013 that I think I found to be most disappointing was Captain Phillips. This was by no means a bad movie, but I approached this movie with the belief that this was going to be THE movie of the year. It was anything but the movie of the year. It wasn’t even a top 10 movie of the year. After all, is said and done, it most likely won’t even be a top 20 movie of the year for me. I’m not entirely certain what the main reasons were that I didn’t like it. I will rattle off a couple during this review, but I think that, ultimately, it came down to not meeting my extraordinarily high initial expectations.
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Disconnect (2013)
Following the pattern of such successful smashes as Crash, Traffic, and Babel (all of which earned Best Picture nominations, with Crash winning the top prize), Henry Alex Rubin’s (Murderball) first non-documentary film, Disconnect is a movie that tells three distinct stories at the same time that have little connection with each other and only minor overlapping, but one in which many of its main actors are not on the screen at the same time. It’s a formula that, when done correctly, is magical but when done poorly, can be a disaster. Disconnect was done right. It is a daring movie and deals with not just one but three of the most prevalent technological safety issues of the day, which are cyberbullying, security fraud/identity theft, and the predatory practices of recruiting minors to become online porn performers. Each story could be its movie, but Disconnect does an awesome job of telling all three and showing the raw emotion associated with each. On top of that, the performances are top-notch. And while this movie came in at 68% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, it earned only $1.4 million at the box office. Both are much too low for a movie of this magnitude, officially classifying Disconnect as a hidden gem I think everyone should see. Continue reading Disconnect (2013) 2 Guns (2013)
2 Guns is not my type of movie because it isn’t sure what it wants to be. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it contains relationships between the characters that seem meaningful. At times, it’s a terrible drama. At times, it’s a comedy that isn’t funny. At times, it’s a lame attempt at a shoot ’em up in Quentin Tarantino style. Its lead actors are all over the place. In short, it’s a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s also a movie that wastes the talents of two great actors, Denzel Washington (Training Day, American Gangster) and Mark Wahlberg (Shooter, The Italian Job). It’s a little ironic because this was Washington’s first movie since his outstanding performance in Flight and the last movie Wahlberg shot before his outstanding performance in Lone Survivor. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a movie that either of these actors wishes they had not done, but it is a movie that I wish they hadn’t done.
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