Because it’s never too late to waste time making lists, here are some of our writers’ favorites from 2012—and other things.
If you post your own top 10′s in the comments, we’ll be glad to form impulsive opinions and fight over them.
DOLAN COLESLAW:
Top 10 of 2012:
1. Amour (Michael Haneke)
2. Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)
3. Bullhead (Michael R. Roskam)
4. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)
5. The Master (PT Anderson)
6. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
7. The Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russel)
8. The Kid With A Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
9. Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik)
10. Bernie (Richard Linklater)
Top 10 Anticipated Films of 2013:
1. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
2. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
3. Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez)
4. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)
5. Nymphomaniac (Lars Von Trier)
6. You’re Next (Adam Wingard)
7. Resolution (Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead)
8. Twelve Years A Slave (Steve McQueen)
9. Oldboy (Spike Lee)
10. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)
Samantha Wilson:
Top 10 of 2012:
1. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)
2. Argo (Ben Affleck)
3. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
4. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)
5. The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard)
6. Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim)
7. Sleepwalk With Me (Mike Birbiglia)
8. The Master (PT Anderson)
9. The Five-Year Engagement (Nicholas Stoller)
10. Casa de Mi Padre (Matt Piedmont)
Worst 10 of 2012:
1. Prometheus (Ridley Scott)
2. The Man with the Iron Fists (RZA)
3. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov)
4. The Paperboy (Lee Daniels)
5. The Lucky One (Scott Hicks)
6. Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders)
7. The Possession (Ole Bornedal)
8. A Thousand Words (Brian Robbins)
9. American Reunion (Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg)
10. Rock of Ages (Adam Shankman) (actually the worst movie I have EVER seen)
Emily Parrish:
Top 10 Films Released In 2012 (That I Wanted To See But Didn’t):
1. Amour (Michael Haneke)
2. The Invisible War (Kirby Dick)
3. Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos)
4. The Artist is Present (Matthew Akers, Jeff Dupre)
5. The Cabin In The Woods (Drew Goddard)
6. This Is Not A Film (Jafar Panahi)
7. Looper (Rian Johnson)
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)
9. Side by Side (Christopher Kenneally)
10. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
Daniel Corona:
Top 10 Movies I Saw This In 2012 (Including One I Interacted With)
1. Horse Takes it to the Limit
http://youtu.be/LJSFlMCTXE8
No movie has brought me more joy this year
2. The Comedy
Not the best movie on this list but it resonated with me.
3. The Master
Massive
4. Holy Motors
Deserving of all its praise
5. Journey
I know it’s a videogame but videogames are still moving images and this one is beautiful
6. The Unknown Skater
http://vimeo.com/42130510
Stumbled across this randomly and was very pleased and surprised
7. Interview with a Cannibal
http://youtu.be/BosZxa1bYcE
A lonely late-night viewing, follow it up with a Suehiro Maruo book.
8. Chef and Dale
http://youtu.be/zAIqIk7sdnk
Andre Callot makes great work
9. 1002 Images of the moon
https://vimeo.com/34832411
A nice gesture
10. Indie Game: The Movie
Made me proud to be a game enthusiast, was even touching at times.
I have a friend with an obsession. It’s ok, we all have one or two. But my friend’s obsession is going to be examined here slightly because he called me just after I’d finally seen Zero Dark Thirty. He asked me how it was, but told me he wasn’t going to see it. He found the film’s existence offensive. He’d read a few reviews that confirmed his view and had put his foot down. And so after a brief skirmish, in what he imagined to be a complete change of subject, he started to tell me about his latest week’s worth of pouring over digital communications, piecing together criminal networks, and liaising with local law enforcement.
My friend is an animal welfare activist. Protecting animals was a slowly discovered passion that is presently a minor obsession for him. Unlike Jessica Chastain’s composited CIA agent Maya, my friend’s obsession has nothing to do with his day job, but rather like hers it can occasionally, and strangely, fall into the category of “Who gives a fuck?”. Depending on where you’ve been in life or what pets you have at home his work risks seeming trivial at times, or at worst a distraction from larger issues. Why focus on animal abuse while millions of farm animals are being slaughtered? Why care about one life when many are at stake? There’s no overarchingly rational answer to questions like that. But of course people do care.
Zero Dark Thirty is first and foremost a detective story. But while it goes into suitably deep and murky detail about how Bin Laden was located it plays a deeper game by resting this accomplishment on the shoulders of a character about whom we learn next to nothing. Why does Maya ultimately give a fuck about Usama Bin Laden? Many of us can remember the time when the answer to this sort of question seemed obvious, but the movie’s decade long search takes us well beyond those early days. I suspect we’ve all thought back to our first reactions, to our fear and rage, and gained some perspective. But we don’t see Maya’s moment of reflection. We see the pressures and tragedies of the job reshape her desire to capture UBL into an obsession, but we aren’t shown what nurtured that desire originally or how she relates to it. This choice denies the audience an insight which many seem to crave from the movie. How does she sooth her visceral reactions to the torture she’s expected to facilitate? How does she justify it?
No character in Maya’s story gives a moral condemnation of torture. However the movie’s visual depiction of torture is a conscientious choice. It places the history we didn’t see (The CIA’s black site torture program) within the all too familiar visual context of the past decade’s history of war. We know the wars have not been fought perfectly. I doubt many would even argue they’ve been fought well. Showing the torture program as a collection of scrounged plastic pitchers and athletic mats, rented cargo ships, and cells cobbled from 2x4s and barbed wire, marks it as a product of the same hasty desperate stumblings that produced those wars. Whatever anyone in the movie might think of torture we see it strongly depicted as a flawed tool.
Once this visual context is established the movie quickly makes clear that not only is it uninterested in dwelling on morality or on Maya’s backstory, but it’s not interested in dwelling on anything except the process of gathering and synthesizing the information used to capture UBL. In the course of this it suggests the CIA might have been able to locate him years earlier, perhaps without torture, and it portrays Maya’s singular drive and confidence as crucial to discovering and destroying his final hiding place. It casts its questions in relief. Why was any of it done? Why give a fuck? The notion that the county and its bureaucracy might have moved on to some extent is presented clearly and unremarkably as Maya’s obstacle.
To quote Bruce Sterling: “We can program robots and digital devices to generate images and spew images at our eyeballs. We can’t legitimately ask them to tell us how to react to that”. Sterling was talking about computer derived aesthetics, but while watching Maya and her colleagues pour over petabytes of algorithmically gathered terrorist chatter, recordings of drone feeds and interrogations, and documents from around the globe, I couldn’t help but think it applied. In the midst of the deluge of information summoned up by the war on terror Maya finds it increasingly difficult to swim back to the source, and increasingly difficult to justify to why she needs to do so.
What keeps Maya on her trail is not justice for her country, or even vengeance for the voices heard in the opening’s black-screened audio-montage of first responders and victims (which, since Fahrenheit 9/11, seems to be emerging as the traditional device for representing the day). What ultimately motivates her is vengeance for the colleagues she lost during the search, and the certainty that her lead is the crucial piece to the mystery. But Maya can’t be seen as a superhuman protagonist whose certainty flows from total mastery of the case. It’s another younger agent who discovers the identity of the courier that leads to UBL. Maya’s is a less than rational certainty, intertwined with the obsession we watch developing but can’t ever fully see.
Zero Dark Thirty is part of a growing tradition of modern work using the investigation of murder to explore obsession (David Fincher’s Zodiac is a key example, as is Alan Moore’s graphic novel “From Hell”). That this theme has such resonance in our ever increasingly info-dense society isn’t surprising. Mysteries may seem more solvable now, but as they move into the past and leave behind exponentially larger wakes of information to be tracked and indexed and reviewed the risk for any obsession with a mystery to become dangerously all consuming increases. We can all relate now.
The answers we find for ourselves about Maya’s motivations probably won’t be of much use in any political sparing matches, but anything that gives us insight into how we approach our own obsessions is worth caring about.
1. Get invited to a dinner party your friends are hosting. Text the hosts asking if they would like you to pick up a film at Le Video for later. When one of them texts back Samurai Cop understand that this is not a joke. You may think that it is, but it’s not. They want you to go into Le Video and ask the cashier for Samurai Cop. They want you to embark on an adventure.
2. When you enter Le Video check your text to make sure the film is actually called Samurai Cop and not Karate Cop for if you ask for Karate Cop, you will feel like a fool and walk out of the store filled with a shame that you will carry with you for many years to come.
3. When you do ask for Samurai Cop, the first cashier will pause to think if they have it, while the second one will quickly say in a whisper: “Upstairs. Action.” You know then that he has seen this movie more than once, and probably more than twice.
4. When you slip the DVD out from its hiding place, marvel at its cover. It’s a hand-drawn cop holding a bloody samurai sword in one hand, and an even bloodier head in the other. Think to yourself, “I think this is good. I think we’ve chosen right.” Then notice the wedding ring on his finger. Samurai Cop is taken. But that’s okay, he wasn’t your type anyway.
5. Pay for the movie. Don’t shop lift! Le Video needs your help. Get a little sad when you realize you have to renew your account and it costs an extra five dollars. Feel poor. Remember to go back to that one Indian place you saw that had a help wanted sign. Look up some other Indian dishes besides naan and tikka masala when you get home. You want to seem qualified.
6. Decide you will make garlic bread for the dinner because people like garlic bread and garlic bread is easy. Get all the ingredients. Bread. Garlic. Butter. Parmesan. Parsley? No, that’s too much. You’re poor, remember? Realize you’ve never made garlic bread before and you and your boyfriend are already roasting the garlic wrong. Decide it doesn’t matter. It will probably be better this way. High-five and feel confident.
7. Show up to your friends house with brownish chunky garlic bread and at least two bottles of wine. Don’t worry, there will be at least one more bottle there.
8. Have a delicious meal with friends and talk expectations. What is a samurai cop? A cop who fights with a sword. Is he Japanese? No. Can he speak Japanese? It says he does on the back of the case. Decide that you should all just wait to watch it. Start talking about how to fry tofu. Apologize to the one guy you didn’t realize was vegan because all you brought was delicious buttery garlic bread. That’s okay. More for you.
9. Drink more. Watch one of your friends play Hotline Miami. Putter in the kitchen. Repeat.
10. Fill your glass. Insert disk. You are now ready to begin.
11. Try to watch the intro with Joe Bob Briggs. Laugh at the beginning because it’s so strange. Then realize it’s too strange and that Joe Bob is actually pretty boring. Skip to the actual film.
12. Realize very quickly that this movie may be one of the worst films you will ever see. Be grateful you just drank a lot of wine.
13. Watch the samurai cop preform only bad karate. Feel better about almost calling the film Karate Cop earlier at Le Video.
14. Realize that Samurai Cop has a black sidekick that the DVD case calls “puckish.” Laugh at this on an off throughout the film.
15. Feel slightly shocked at how sexual the movie is, then grow weary. It is more than once that a dopey-eyed girl will ask Samurai Cop, awkwardly biting her lip, “Would you like to fuck me?” Roll your eyes. Make a joke. If no one laughs make it again: they may not have heard. If after a second time no one laughs just know that it wasn’t funny. Spend the next couple scenes in shame.
16. Laugh at how ridiculous Samurai Cop looks. Extremely tan. Long hair. Small head. Thick neck. Kind of a neanderthal Tarzan. Wonder why he can’t pronounce anything in Japanese and why women are attracted to him. Shrug. Sometimes there are no answers.
17. Keep making jokes until people do laugh. Feel good. You’re so funny! You and your friends are now a regular comedy team. Zings comin’ left and right. Reward yourself with more garlic bread.
18. Get to the part with actual sword fighting. ‘FINALLY’ someone will say. Chuckle. Realize the two men fighting have probably never held a sword. Laugh. They look like children. Then feel a little sad. They look like children. Be glad when they quickly ditch the swords. It was a little too painful to watch.
19. Watch the credits role knowing that a lot wasn’t really resolved. And wait! Samurai Cop isn’t married! And he never cut off a head! Grumble about the deceitful cover.
20. Go to special features. Look at stills. Snicker. Tire. Go to commentary with Robert Z’Dar. See that he’s extremely overweight and sad. Get depressed QUICKLY. Realize you’re about to graduate.Think of the future. See yourself in a button up t-shirt with skulls and flames on it and balding head and small pony-tail. Get depressed. Look around at friends. See them happy and talking. Realize that you all are different from Robert Z’Dar and Samurai Cop. Feel hope. Know that you have a future. Feel relief and also joy for being in a room with such wonderful people. Celebrate with some garlic bread.
21. Return the DVD to Le Video the day that it’s due. Not because you wanted to watch it again, but because you like to live on the edge. Slip it silently into the DVD slot. Wonder where it’s off to next. Wonder where all the people who worked on it are today. Promise yourself you will write something better. Promise yourself you will finish that draft. Promise yourself you will get a job and start saving for your own feature.
22. Enter the store and rent something else. Feel happy that for some reason you’ve never been able to enter a video store without renting something. Embark on another adventure.
The only context you need: David Siegel created a timeshare empire (he sells the illusion of wealth, for a few days a year, to the middle classes.) Lauren Greenfield’s documentary finds him in the middle of completing the largest existent American home for his family. The film follows him and his wife, Jackie.
In one way, the primary subjects of The Queen of Versailles are martyrs, suffering at the lonely/dizzying heights of capitalism so that we can… suffer at the bottom? It’s a strange story, one that relies on the filth it photographs for slow-burn shock value. If you do not hate these people immediately, you will probably come to hate them.
Some have commented on the Siegel’s surprising “ordinariness,” which I find nowhere on display. They have been turned instead into human cyphers, symbols of a system that destroyed their humanity. When a pet lizard starves to death, Jackie Siegel enters into a bizarre pantomime of the appropriate parenting behaviors, unwilling to follow through with any of them. Watching this wife try and be a mother is like watching a groupie shred air guitar.
“He’s starving!” (the lizard.)
“That’s because you never take me to the pet store!”
“All right—I’m going to, go get a piece of turkey.”
And later, to another child:
“David, look: he’s dead!”
“I didn’t even know we had a lizard.”
Of course you can hardly blame the children (the Siegel’s have eight) for killing the hundredth pet their mother purchased. The home doubles as a bestiary for peacocks, dogs, fish, two kinds of snakes, and apparently lizards. There are two dead dogs lying around (one stuffed) one turned into… a piano decoration? But these pets are not companions or living creatures. In the Siegel’s world they are “pretty things” that, at one point, for one reason or another, were desirable to purchase.
The film also doubles as an occupy anthem, a reassurance that the winners of the American dream are more petty, soulless, and ultimately sad than we could have expected from the bottom. At one point, once their financial (timeshare) empire seems on the verge of, if not collapse, major downsizing, Jackie makes a telling confession: her children might have to pursue higher education. You’ll have to see the movie (and you ought to) to fully grasp the tone, but the implication is that this is the only reason any of her babies should ever have to be exposed to a university.
For then they would never know the splendor of uninterrupted money-worship, or of a life behind safely locked and gilded doors.
Did I mention Lauren Greenfield has unignorable talent? The movie is good.
We’re in mysterious terrain. The paradox that is Tarantino’s career most closely resembles the “so-bad-it’s-good” paradox—but that’s not it.
If it’s working, Django is an examination of history from fantasy. If it’s not, it’s fantasy-pleasure scraped out of historical pain. The latter is amoral at best, immoral at worst. The former is highly moral. Both are self-aware.
And in that department: I don’t know what it is.
Structurally it’s a mess. An odyssey full of bits and segments and detours where the scramble for pleasurable-payoff is often so transparent, so easy, that it’s hard to just let yourself enjoy. The ride keeps stopping. That’s what makes it minor Tarantino.
And then there’s Candy Land. Once Tarantino finds his screenplay firmly rooted to Candy Land, everything gets much, much better. He seems to work best given restraints (unsurprising) and the natural physical crucible provided by the plantation space do his story a lot of favors. Suddenly we know where we are. We know the characters, the rules (sort of) and the stakes. For the sake of spoilers (Tarantino’s work is holy) I’ll only say here that the game does sort of collapse at the end. Perhaps the heroes aren’t smart enough, or good enough at doing their jobs?
Rather than mire in the details, I’ll say the movie works as: a vital injection of style into a commercial wasteland. It’s fun, brutal, and intriguingly historical (really.)
Watching American history get reprocessed as pop continues to be funny and eerie at the same time. How many times did you think about Abraham Lincoln between elementary school and when Spielberg’s “epic” came out?
I’m not accusing you, Dear Reader, just saying that this is where the dreams, the history, the ancestry, is getting stashed: Hollywood.
In a particularly bad Terry Gross interview, Terry asks if it was awkward shooting black people pretending to be slaves. Tarantino mentions, with admirable restraint, that they’re all breaking for Powerbars in between cotton pickin’ sessions and that “everyone knows what time it is.” I love the question, because it points to the fact that we still believe movies are real, even when we know they’re not.
Surprise has been registered (and more frequently, can be inferred) from some corners that a white man is making a film about a black slave killing white Americans. But it’s not surprising. Django is kind of sweet in that way. A lot more innocent when you realize it’s an awkward, fumbling scream from the white-guilt-ridden subconscious of one American, who only knows how to rip apart history and morals from a genre-film perspective. And in the end, that’s what makes the Tarantino “style over substance” debate so absurd. It’s like the complaint that Hemingway’s sentences aren’t long enough, or his words big enough, to tell the important stories.
Les Miserables was nearly three hours long, and there is no way I can fully review everything that happened. Instead, I will recap it via song.
PROLOGUE/A WORK
Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) stole some bread and has been imprisoned in post-revolution France, answering the age old question: what would you do if your son’s at home, cryin’ all alone on the bedroom floor, cause he’s hungry? You steal a loaf of bread and have to answer to Russell Crowe/Javert for the rest of your life. In this song, we establish that Hugh Jackman has the voice of a Broadway angel and that Russell Crowe must have fantastic blackmail material on Tom Hooper because a solid “nope” on his singing voice.
(It’s not that bad, it’s just…this is THE musical. You would expect one of the most recognized roles in the world to be filled by someone who has a fantastic voice. Lest we already forget the Gerard Butler/Phantom of the Opera casting fiasco already.)
VALJEAN ARRESTED/VALJEAN FORGIVEN
After they all stop singing, Valjean is released on parole and travels the French countryside looking for work. Ain’t nobody going to hire a convict though, so he seeks refuge in a church. Since he’s the world’s worst criminal (honestly, who gets sent to the French version of that-prison-that-Bane-came-from for stealingbread?), he tries to steal silver from the kind bishop and gets caught. The bishop takes pity, and lets him have the silver so he can get back on his feet.
Fun Fact! The man who plays the bishop is the original Broadway Jean Valjean. We have come full circle.
WHAT HAVE I DONE
Valjean confesses his sins via song and decides that he should both be a better man, and also a totally different dude. He rips up his parole papers and starts life anew under a different name. I see why he thinks this is a good idea. He’s got hella silver money and the likelihood that someone is going to devote their entire life to tracking down a fugitive bread thief is low. If only he knew
Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story on which the movie is based (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
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