Growing pains – 2013 was a “Coming of Age” year at the movies

In theaters Friday: The Nut Job, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Ride Along
New on Blu-ray: The Spectacular Now, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Enough Said

I’ll admit it. I’m an absolute sucker for “coming of age” movies. Give me a young protagonist up against the world, or his parents, or a bully, or heartbreak or the alluring decadences of rock’n’roll, and I’m all in.

Stand By Me. Empire of the Sun. Dead Poet’s Society. Rushmore. Almost Famous. These are some of my favorite movies of all time. Each drives its hero to a point of enlightenment, past an essential signpost along the way to becoming. Because these stories are often told by their writers from very personal places, they make me want to live inside of them. And they are infinitely re-watchable.

Of course all good films take its lead characters, and by proxy, its disbelief-suspending audiences, on a journey—whether any literal distance is traversed or not. Look at the hottest movies this week: Spike Jonze’s uniquely fantastic Her is a downbeat travelogue through an isolated heart searching for connection, be it human or otherwise, and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a satirical nose-diving descent into excess and moral abandon.

Looking back on 2013, independent cinema may have had a less than stellar year overall, it did manage to produce a raft of “coming of age” movies worth noting. One of them, The Spectacular Now is released this week on Blu-ray. I haven’t seen that yet, but these three would make my list of the top 20 films of the year. Caution for sensitive types, plenty of warm fuzzies ahead.

This backwoods drama follows duo of hardscrabble youths—one suffering through his parent’s acrimonious split, the other basically an orphan—who venture to a river island and become the unlikely allies of a mysterious outlaw figure played by an alternately salty and lyrical Matthew McConaughey. Read my original review here.

By far the lightest, most humorous of these three picks—Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally make sure of that—Kings is the story of three young teens running away from home for the summer to build a house deep in the woods…so they can woo women. Why else?

Set largely at a beach house and dilapidated water park in the Northeast, everything about this dramedy from Allison Janie’s motor-mouthed riffing to Sam Rockwell’s bodacious schlub routing feels lifted wholesale from a John Hughes 1980s classic—never a bad aesthetic for a “coming of age” story. But it is young Liam James’ transformation from shy and wounded to self-sufficient and loveably bold that is the heart of the film.