The SpyGlasses Full: Official Winners (2013)

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Winners are below in bold.

Best Live-Action Film (Feature-Length)
12 Years a Slave
Blue Jasmine

Her
Oslo, 31. August

La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)

Best Director
Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine

Stephen Frears, Philomena
Paul Greengrass, Captain Phillips

Spike Jonze, Her

Abdellatif Kechiche, La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)

Best Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street

Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave

Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips

Anders Danielsen Lie, Oslo, 31. August

Joaquin Phoenix, Her

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine

Judi Dench, Philomena

Adèle Exarchopoulos, La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)

Meryl Streep, August: Osage County

Best Supporting Actor
Emory Cohen, The Place beyond the Pines

Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave

James Franco, Spring Breakers

Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street

Salim Kechiouche, La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)

Best Supporting Actress
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine

Scarlett Johansson; Don Jon, Her
Carey Mulligan, Inside Llewyn Davis

Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave

Octavia Spencer, Fruitvale Station


Best Art Direction
Hannah Beachler & Kris Boxell, Fruitvale Station
Judy Becker, Jesse Rosenthal, & Heather Loeffler; American Hustle

Andy Nicholson, Mark Scruton, & Rosie Goodwin; Gravity

Adam Stockhausen, David Stein, & Alice Baker; 12 Years a Slave

Justin Thompson & David Bleich, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

Best Cinematography

Luca Bigazzi, La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty)

Sofian El Fani, La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)

Jakob Ihre, Oslo, 31. August

Emmanuel Lubezki, Gravity

Hoyte van Hoytema, Her

Best Costuming

Catherine Martin, The Great Gatsby

Patricia Norris, 12 Years a Slave

Sandy Powell, The Wolf of Wall Street

Trish Summerville, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Michael Wilkinson, American Hustle

Best Make-Up
Mindy Hall, The Wolf of Wall Street

Peter King, Rick Findlater, & Tami Lane; The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Ve Neill & Linda D. Flowers, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Evelyne Noraz & Kathrine Gordon, American Hustle

Best Visual Effects

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Oz, the Great and Powerful


Best Original Score
Carter Burwell, The Fifth Estate

Arcade Fire & Owen Pallett, Her

Danny Elfman; Oz, the Great and Powerful & American Hustle

Henry Jackman, Captain Phillips

Best Original Song
"Moon Song" by Karen O. & Spike Jonze, Her

Best Sound Editing

Brent Burge & Chris Ward, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Lisle Engle, American Hustle

Glenn Freemantle, Gravity

Wylie Stateman, Lone Survivor

Oliver Tarney, Captain Phillips

Best Sound Mixing
Chris Burdon, Chris Munro, Mike Prestwood Smith, & Mark Taylor; Captain Phillips

Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead, Skip Lievsay, & Chris Munro; Gravity

Ren Klyce, David Parker, & Michael Semanick; Her

Andy Koyama, Beau Borders, & David Brownlow; Lone Survivor

Skip Lievsay, Greg Orloff, & Peter Kurland; Inside Llewyn Davis


Best Editing

Jeff Buchanan & Eric Zumbrunnen, Her

Claudia Castello & Michael P. Shawver, Fruitvale Station

Alfonso Cuarón & Mark Sanger, Gravity

La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)

Joe Walker, 12 Years a Slave

Best Screenplay (Original)
Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine (Honorable Mention)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Jon

Spike Jonze, Her (Winner)

Eric Singer & David O. Russell, American Hustle

Best Screenplay (Adapted)
Steve Coogan & Jeff Pope, Philomena

Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station

Mitchell Kapner & David Lindsay-Abaire, Oz, the Great and Powerful

Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia LaCroix, La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)
Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt, Oslo, 31. August

Best Animated Film (Feature-Length)
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

Best Animated Film (Short)
(Not Given This Year)

Best Documentary Film (Feature-Length or Short)(Not Given This Year)

Best Foreign-Language Film (Live Action or Animated, Feature-Length or Short)
La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty)

Oslo, 31. August

La Vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)

Review: La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty)

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Genre: Drama (Meditative)

There is a great deal of what is true in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), Paolo Sorrentino's (palpably influenced) exploratory buffet of one man's particular experience in existential search of a singular gobbet of sustaining vision. Told in a retrospective soup — served calda — the film is impressive in its conjugation of so much of what one cannot underestimate as a panorama of instances, which not so carefully assembled would surely otherwise take the impression of a frivolous menagerie of curiosities sometimes provocative but mostly just lurid, even if manicured. What a viewer then should expect to receive from the film is not any truth himself or herself, but a strong sense of appreciation of something so well tuned and crafted that it bears vivid verisimilitude to an actual experience — not the experience, mind you — of trying. Is that experience what the film terms "The Great Beauty"? If so, then it is more lost than I am giving it credit for being; if not, then fiat ars.

Grade: A-

P. S. Woe to you, viewer who still "distinguish" 'high' from 'low.'

Review: Her

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That Joaquin Phoenix is striding in his prime is the least of the excellences that grace any audience savvy enough to visit Mr. Jonze's newest feature, Her, an elegant bastion of the verve behind the dynamic intersection among psychological science, computer science, and philosophy. Mr. Jonze views and portrays a future nuancedly real (and, purposely for counterbalance, quirky; see those tailored waistlines) for us spectators to warmly inhabit yet feel diaphanously separate from. The sun strokes and lens flares that festoon (previous SpyGlass Full winner's; see also here) Hoyte van Hoytema's imagery not simply paint pretty pictures but serve an adamantine purpose, making us spectators subconsciously aware of our own spectatorship, the fourth wall that divides us from the characters and preserves us — almost sterilely — from complete intoxication by the animus on the screen, a brooding counterpart to the manic pixie dream girl (see here) both borrowed from stock – true — but in the hands of Mr. Phoenix a relentlessly thorough and compassionately melancholy gentleman stumbling upon happiness in his small but vivid world. Misters Buchanan and Zumbrunnen's editing slices together the segments of his life with nanoscopic acuity, permitting an invasion of only reflections in any one otherwise linear scene; and the music, composed in parts by Arcade Fire, Karen O., and others, flavors special slices with a bitter sweetness or subtle ecstasy that captures what we know any idyllic dialogue between kindred consciousnesses is wont to be.

Were any voting awards-granting body bolder, notes for all named parties so far would be clear, as well as one for Ms. Johansson, whose voice over is simply perfect: Like light through a prism, she is radiant beyond what anyone I think could expect from an actress put to such a challenge as this always disembodied yet always present character. It is almost troubling how affecting she is, completely absent from screen.

Even what in other films would constitute a flaw, the predictable unidimensionality of the familiar "broken lovers" trope, here marks an asset, advancing the perhaps at one point insolvable tension of the plot to a natural conclusion; Theodore idly spars with his acerbic ex-wife as both evidence to growth and evidence of his growth's limitation: He is human; he must stumble on (taking solace in those familiar with — perhaps all too intimately — that terminal condition, a final thought that begs the perhaps trite but still interesting question, Who is she whom the title of the film names really anyway?, which I like the film leave open with intention here).

Grade: A, rhapsodic.

Review: The Wolf of Wall Street

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Genre: Comedy

Halfway through The Wolf of Wall Street you, like I or really any theatergoer, may find yourself wondering whether you may have accidentally intruded into another theater, screening Spring Breakers instead of this new collaboration of Mr. Scorcese with Mr. DiCaprio; debauchery, I'll concisely say here and then be done with it, abounds and, in its abundance — spanning the smorgasbord of sex, drugs, and emotional outbursts — at first grounds but later undermines the skill of this new film. A story of trust among the rowdy, the film aspires to be a bit like 'Julius Caesar [Shakespeare] meets Marie Antoinette [Coppola, 2006] featuring a male protagonist circa Wall Street [Stone, 1987] and beyond ' but fails to really sew together those far-flung patches of narrative filmmaking. Odds preponderate evens and, like Virginia Madsen's character in Sideways (Payne, 2006), I have to conclude, "Too much alcohol overwhelms the fruit."

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Now, my dismay is not to say that all aspects of the film are lacking; surely, high-flying features like Sandy Powell's costuming, Jonah Hill's supporting performance, and Mindy Hall's make-up and hairstyling redeemed what otherwise may appear indifferent from a more mature and certainly more highly financed version of Project X (Nourizadeh, 2012). The verisimilitude that Ms. Powell and Ms. Hall imbue into the characters on screen takes after not only their eras and stations but also their emotional appeals in both comedic and dramatic fashions; a lavender crushed-velveteen belt on an infuriated cursing power broker cleverly snickers at the pretension of the fight that he foments, while a pristinely white polo underscores the protagonist's bid at being an upstanding, fiercely moral man. And Mr. Hill simply lives the part that he plays, with pugnacious honesty; like some of the best performances I've seen this year, his turn as the compatriotic bon homme and fuel tank to many a fire cultivates even at the wrists a thorough understanding of what in far less adroit hands could have been a meagerly sinister or even fecklessly foppish sidekick. However, these pieces alone truly shone here.

Regarding Mr. DiCaprio, whose own performance I've yet to mention here despite its being the centerpiece of this voracious enterprise, I must demur; pronouncements of excellence — though perhaps predictively accurate of his to-be-determined end-of-awards'-season accolades — feel overly generous to me. True, he does stretch his muscles over quite the range of emotional plot points and, true, he does offer some wonderful episodes in this film; yet, true also, to shout and cavort recklessly through scene after scene doesn't really press a thespian for his talents and, true also, to ride a rollercoaster doesn't make one a master engineer. Perhaps the fault, dear Leo, is not in the star but in the screenplay; perhaps the rather lumpy writing of non-film-veteran Terrence Winters ceases to allow any actor beyond adequacy in completing the realization of this quasi-real man. Even still, to lay in these shortcomings is to inhabit them and to inhabit them, to own them; falling into the potholes on the road lain before one is shoddy driving. Flirting with innocence at the film's beginning, Mr. DiCaprio doesn't really convince of what his lines suggest is his character's otherwise impeccably shiny youth and related exuberance, even though he does hammer down the awkward sheepishness of a minor public spectacle on one's first day. Stumbling through benders in the film's middle, Mr. DiCaprio doesn't really delve into the longer-term motivations of his character, even though from an script reader's perspective the character has no longer-term vision than that of the next few hours. Finally, mellowing in abnegation at the film's end, Mr. DiCaprio doesn't really exude contempt for his character's lawful remission, contempt that even a cursory script reader knows must be there. Mr. DiCaprio is here but a prince, not yet a king.

The only remaining comment that I can and will make at this time is that, to close the film with a somewhat oblique panegyric hearkening back to the earliest scenes but bestowing the spectatorship not on the audience again but rather on some extras against the audience anew is threatening storytelling at best, Mr. Scorcese. Don't misunderstand, reader; I am all for passive complicity with less than ideal characters. However, here to transform a specimen that you've until this close handled with mystified gloves into an icon of demonstrated admiration is to (attempt to) wrest opinion from the minds of your viewers and inject into its place preformulated and campaigning artifacts. Yes, we include the people whom the real-world counterpart of this fictionalized protagonist lured and deluded and, yes, we all — not simply those deludables — should be drawn to acknowledge that fact; but, no, under no circumstances is our acknowledgement to be a broad indictment of our our predictable gapishness and mawkery (both sic on purpose). The lingering question that you effectually propose is a finger in the eye of the viewer, Mr. Scorcese; I'd urge you to have reconsidered that finale. (Otherwise, your work was fine in every respect.)

Grade: B-.

Review: Philomena

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Genre: Drama

Director Stephen Frears seems to hit well when featuring the grand dames in his films. Three films are certainly only scant evidence of a pattern, but the salience of his The Queen (2007) and Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) when it be allowed to be coupled with the quality of their younger American siblings Dangerous Liaïsons (1988; featuring Glenn Close) and The Grifters (1990; featuring Anjelica Huston) admits a winking trend toward artfulness within this particular dramatic plane. Better than their past collaboration, (I'll call it) Mr. Frears and Dame Dench's Philomena is a wonderfully coaxed description of a classic dialogue: that between commanded virtue and cured ethicality.

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To say that the pairing here breaks new ground would, not surprisingly, be an overstatement; the film walks no lines that have not seen considered — carefully even — elsewhere (see this year's Hannah Arendt for example). However, the film does shine in the same way as, though not to the same extent, as, say, The Tree of Life (2011) did; it hums a new vibrancy into the old bones that it resurrects (in good condition) and invests passion, fortitude, and accessibility where there may not have been before in describing its exchange. That the unfolding of the narrative envelopes not merely history personal and social, emotions on screen and behind it, and contentions political and theological but moreover comedy honest and quotidian, taxes interpersonal and individual, and a thorough thread of intertemporal disconnection speaks to its intelligence. The film thus understands that the dialogue in instances lives and may be investigated, changed, and resolved within actual people and their interactions (or lacks thereof). We see, for example, the simplicity of its eponymous character's ways, heaping in one scene croutons from a salad bar upon her plate for her delight, counterpoised by her wiles, frankly and coolly acknowledging bi-curiosity or clitoral stimulation in another scene. Such an artful counterposition is revealing; the character upends expectations yet breaks no lines, at once encompasses social change and (at least at one time and in one place) highly contended moral issues and submits under minimal delectations and elementary cues. She is Shakespearean in this way — the play is; it makes no pardons for its academic aspirations (though it may smart them on the side of their conscientious head at times) but also connives to jibe with the common crowd — explicitly sometimes. The film therefore succeeds most excellently where it began: in its screenplay itself. Writers Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope — and not surprisingly actress Judi Dench — are to be most congratulated for expressing most clearly a complex conceit. 

Ultimately, while we as the audience know that this conceit can never achieve a resounding or clear resolution — an issue that the screenplay in passing itself points out to comic effect — we nevertheless arrive farther along than where we began, armed with more intellectual substance for our own positions than we'd possessed at our independent starts. Learning then is the stuff of film-making here.

Grade: A-/B+, well done.

Review: Blue Jasmine

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Genre: Drama

Mr. Allen breaks new ground with this dense dense screenplay, following a character almost impossibly rich and perfectly played by Ms. Blanchett. Both appear to be at the heights of their crafts, he wielder of dialogue and interactions so complexly woven and steeped in the traditions of great intimate writing (e.g., Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, 1974; his own Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986) that to misplace any piece would be to fumble a glass chalice and she a paragon of control and expressiveness, furnishing even the smallest clip or aside with just buckets of depth and feeling. They are a wonder together and form what may be the tightest pairing of character with actor that I've seen in years.

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Ms. Hawkins also provides an excellent foil to her character's sister (Ms. Blanchett's role); her quirk and winsomeness are a sincere match to Jasmine's pressure and poise. Mr. Canavale does his role due justice, though falls well short of spectacle, as similarly do Mr. Baldwin, Mr. Stuhlbarg, and Mr. Sarsgaard — all fine in their own respects but rough and unfinished in comparison with the women.

Beyond the actors and the writer/director, the film was dressed beautifully and so communicated that strong sense of place (that a film with this storyline needs) through variations of noise over signal — noise in terms of size, shape, and population of each space. Never did sparsity vs. affective clutter play so well alongside characters in strife.

I'll conclude this brief and glowing review with two final thoughts: (1) The film, while excellent, seemed a tad unsure of its ending, as I had thought that Midnight in Paris (Allen, 2011) had also; and (2) one can't see this clip and not see parallels.

Grade: A

Trailer: Her

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Trailer: The Counselor

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Trailer: Don Jon

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Trailer: Something in the Air

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