Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

One of the boldest moments in Zero Dark Thirty comes before the audience even sees the first shot, and it has the potential to completely wreck the movie for a large portion of the audience. For what seems like 20 minutes (it’s probably more like one) we are shown nothing but a black screen, and—for a brief second—a subtitle reading “September 11, 2001.” There is no footage; just the sounds of horrific real-life recordings that are meant to take the audience right back to that day without actually showing them what happened. The final clip is a 911 call from a woman trapped in one of the towers of the World Trade Center, and it is truly sickening to listen to. For some it will seem exploitative, and it probably is, but within moments of the film actually starting it becomes very clear why director Kathryn Bigelow decided to start the movie off in such a dark place. It has no intention of getting any lighter.

Post-Holiday Review Roundup

Hello, everyone! Remember me? I hope you had a terrific December. I know I’ve said this a billion times in the last couple months, but this time I mean it: I’m about to resume a more frequent blogging schedule. Turns out the holidays were a far busier time than I thought they were going to be. But fear not, I have watched a handful of movies in this time and now I’m going to share with you my thoughts on all of them. Beginning this week, I will officially start writing all of my “2012 in film” posts, and then we can move on to 2013. Read on for my opinions of Jack Reacher, Les Misérables, The Loneliest Planet and This is 40. Thanks for still reading, and I assure you things are going to be back to normal real soon.

Review Roundup: Holy Motors, Life of Pi, The Sessions

In a Review Roundup, I give brief thoughts on movies I am just now catching up with or those that never quite got a full review. I may be doing a handful of these as the year comes to an end. Today, looks at three films that are sure to be discussed a lot on year-end lists and awards shows: Holy Motors, Life of Pi, and The Sessions.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

Peter Jackson is a talented filmmaker. We all know this, and anyone who attempts to deny it is just plain talking stupid. His Lord of the Rings trilogy is epic blockbuster filmmaking at its best. It was great material handled by a man who clearly cared about making it work, and despite the length of each installment the viewer felt as if they had been rewarded for their patience. Only Return of the King walked right up to the edge of overstaying its welcome, but it doesn’t come close to undoing all the greatness that came before. About a decade later, Jackson has decided to return to Middle Earth with an adaptation of The Hobbit. Devoid of context, this is a welcome development. Unfortunately he and the studio decided to split the story into two, and then three films. The Lord of the Rings was intended to be a trilogy, and as such each installment was satisfying on its own while also serving the larger story. They worked on both the micro and macro levels.

Django Unchained (2012)

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more playful director than Quentin Tarantino. As he grew up and watched movie after movie after movie, he absorbed everything he saw like a cinematic sponge. Once his career as a writer and director got started, this was his opportunity to wring all these influences out onto paper and call it a screenplay. The result has been one of the most audacious careers in filmmaking history, and somehow his formula has not grown old with the public. If anything, he’s as popular now as he’s ever been. His last film Inglourious Basterds was also his most successful, despite the fact it was 153 minutes long, brutally violent, most of the dialogue isn't spoken in English, and Brad Pitt really isn’t in it all that much. Everything about it screams box office bomb, yet the public seemed to buy in to what Tarantino was selling.

Killing Them Softly (2012)

If you’re a good filmmaker, in all likelihood you want your art to be about much more than what’s on the screen. You want your movie to actually mean something. The question then becomes: how obvious should these deeper messages be? You could always go the route of The Master, which was so startlingly opaque that some people left the theater scratching their heads. Watching that movie, the audience has to do all the work. Andrew Dominik’s new crime drama Killing Them Softly goes in the exact opposite direction and chooses to run away from subtlety at every opportunity. This is the kind of film that plays Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” on the soundtrack when Brad Pitt’s cold-blooded assassin character first enters the picture at the end of act one, and that winds up being one of Dominik’s more low-key choices. There’s some very skilled filmmaking to be seen here, but it’s all nullified by Dominik’s insistence on shouting his message at you every five seconds. These characters aren’t real people. They’re the filmmaker's puppets.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

One of the most surprising miracles of the past couple years has been the resurrection of filmmaker David O. Russell, who in the wake of 2004’s I Heart Huckabees seemed as if he jumped off the face of the Earth. He developed quite the bad reputation in the industry, and when most people hear his name they immediately associate him with the leaked video in which he spends a considerable amount of time screaming obscenities at Lily Tomlin. He also could never bring himself to commit to a project, and in general he seems like a man whose mind is bouncing all over the room rather than just focusing on a single thing. He finally made something of a comeback with 2010’s excellent The Fighter, but with his new film Silver Linings Playbook he’s back to making movies that are 100 percent his own, even if he seems more willing to play by the rules.

Skyfall (2012)

When the James Bond series was ingeniously rebooted in 2006 with Casino Royale, it was the result of producers (and series “showrunners,” if you will) Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli looking around the pop culture landscape and recognizing that their franchise—inherited from Albert R. Broccoli after his death—was losing relevance very quickly. Die Another Day was an obvious stab at making Bond as “modern” as possible, but that was rightly rejected by just about everyone. All around them they could see franchises with flawed protagonists that were just as interesting as the stories they were in, and meanwhile their main character was CGI surfing and taking fencing lessons with Madonna. The old Bond formula didn’t work any more, and when they brought Daniel Craig on board they decided to completely overhaul the series and the character. The basics of the original Bond were still there, but for the first time in decades the franchise was taking its protagonist seriously as a complicated and seriously messed up human being.

Flight (2012)

The first act of Robert Zemeckis’ addiction drama Flight is so good that it ultimately winds up making the rest of the movie look worse by comparison. Anyone familiar with the film’s marketing campaign will know where the early scenes are ultimately going to take us, but the construction and direction of these sequences—as Zemeckis takes us from the ground, to the air, then back to the ground again—is superb. Flight may be Zemeckis’ first live-action film since 2000’s Cast Away, but his work is so assured here that it feels like he never left. The final two thirds are more standard dramatic fare, and the final few minutes is something of a miscalculation, but this film always has one thing going for it: an extraordinary Denzel Washington performance. There’s plenty to like here across the board, but Flight works best as a reminder of how great an actor Washington is.

Lincoln (2012)

The prospect of Daniel Day-Lewis portraying Abraham Lincoln in a film directed by Steven Spielberg is one of those movie ideas that seems too obvious; not unlike when Morgan Freeman was Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood's Invictus. It’s almost strange that it hasn’t already been done. When one hears the words “Spielberg’s Lincoln,” they immediately feel as if they’ve already seen the movie. Surely there will be grand Day-Lewis monologues accompanied by a very loud and weepy John Williams score, and surely there will be scenes of Civil War brutality that provide a backdrop to Lincoln’s troubled, tragic and triumphant presidency. You probably feel like you already know the structure of the whole thing in your head, and it’s just a matter of how well they're able to pull it off.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

Ever since it was announced that Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer were going to attempt to adapt David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas into a feature film, people dismissed the project as a fool’s errand. Now that the movie has been shot, edited and released to the general public, it still doesn’t seem like the smartest idea, but sometimes to make a really unique film you need to be kind of stupid. This is a movie absolutely everyone who cares about movies needs to see, and I do not say this because I love it. It swings and misses far too often, and whenever it tries to deliver an emotional wallop it only succeeds a small percentage of the time. Everyone needs to see Cloud Atlas because we need to encourage more wildly ambitious projects like Cloud Atlas. That the Wachowskis and Tykwer were able to scoop up $100 million and make this cluttered behemoth is a darned miracle. I’d like to see stuff like this happen more often, even if the final product doesn’t quite work.

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Were it released in a previous decade, Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths could have been a revelation. It’s weird to think that the self-referential writer’s block comedy/drama has become a genre unto itself, but here we are, and as a result Seven Psychopaths doesn’t seem nearly as brilliant as it might have 15 years ago. It’s still wickedly entertaining, mostly because McDonagh has a unique ear for profane dialogue that few other writers can match. It’s a fun, violent and intermittently clever yarn, but it’s a little disappointing that the pieces don’t cohere as well as they could have.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

The Paranormal Activity franchise began with a simple and ingenious premise, as Oren Peli decided to shoot an ultra-cheap found footage horror film about all the things that may nor may not happen in our homes while we sleep. It played on a universal fear, and it was a terrifying little movie that was able to burrow its way into the minds of audiences everywhere and leave a deep impact. Then somewhere along the way these movies stopped being about the inherent scariness of 3:00 a.m. and started focusing on a fear far less universal: an evil demon lady wreaking havoc all over suburban California. The fourth and latest installment to come out of the Paranormal Activity processing plant is still fundamentally scary at points, but most of the “gotcha” moments are too predictable and it continues the series’ ill-advised journey into the Katie Featherston mythology. That has never been and will never be interesting.

Argo (2012)

Like so many films based on allegedly true stories, how much you enjoy Ben Affleck’s Argo will be directly proportional to your ability to ignore the truth. In fact, it’s probably best you know absolutely nothing about its real-life inspiration going in. Unfortunately this will not be the case for most people, and this film’s tendency to overdramatize history may rub skeptics the wrong way. That’s a shame, because then they’d be missing one of the most compulsively watchable and entertaining Hollywood movies to come out this year. It isn’t the most challenging film, and there aren’t too many surprises, but it’s the kind of grown-up thriller that should be in theaters far more often than not. Argo is the work of a director that has immense faith in himself and the audience, and it provides further proof that Affleck is no fluke. In fact, he could potentially be one of the most naturally gifted filmmakers working today.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

When it comes to high school-centric entertainments, the ones that most appeal to me are those that avoid overly romanticizing the teen years. Perhaps this is because I have a hard time identifying with such sentiments, but mostly I become far more invested when a film or television series admits that high school is kind of a horrible place. Take, for instance, my love of the television series Freaks and Geeks, which is almost exclusively about a select few groups of kids who are just biding their time until they can get out of high school and actually be comfortable in their own skin. The new comedy/drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower is another such entertainment; its high school is a land completely controlled by what is cool or acceptable, even among the outcasts. All is not a lost cause, of course—otherwise it would just become too depressing—but Wallflower’s most powerful and uplifting moments work because of how unflinching it is in between.

Taken 2 (2012)

The biggest reason that Liam Neeson has evolved into everyone’s favorite aging action hero is because he takes everything so deathly seriously. There is no winking at the camera or even all that much comic relief; the audience genuinely believes that he’s doing what he needs to do to save his family. If that involves beating the crap out of a hundred or so foreigners, so be it. However, it’s still imperative that he winds up in a film that makes at least some sense, and Taken 2—the latest installment in the “Liam Neeson vs. Evil Europeans” genre—makes about as little sense as any mainstream action film in recent memory. The writing is both clunky and uncreative, and the direction is equally dire. The first Taken at least had a sense of newness to it. The sequel just throws the same thing back at you (only worse) and expects you to like it.

Looper (2012)

There’s no denying that Rian Johnson is a clever filmmaker. The question is just how clever you can be before it becomes too much. Thus far, he has mostly stayed on the right side of that line. His first film Brick was an ingenious combination of hard-nosed noir and high school movie, while The Brothers Bloom was an examination of storytelling that was awfully amusing but never quite found a way to take the next step. It’s an example of Johnson perhaps being a little too cute for his own good, and ultimately he wrote himself into a corner. The Brothers Bloom was a film destined for greatness that ultimately tripped on its own intricately tied shoelaces.

The new science fiction yarn Looper is Johnson’s latest crack at flexing his creative muscles, and this is easily his most assured film to date. It is no less clever or ambitious than Brick or Bloom—if anything it has loftier, almost Philip K. Dick-ian goals—but somehow he is able to pack it all in to a single, absurdly entertaining action movie package. It’s also a meticulous film, with a universe that seems thoroughly thought-out and a story in which every last action has a consequence. Looper is not just Johnson’s first science fiction lark. It’s a thrilling, violent, and strangely moving story about much more than time travel.

The Master (2012)

Something is broken in Freddie Quell’s mind. We can feel it from the first moment we see him. He seems unable to focus on any one thing, and he has an overall aggressive demeanor that seems as if it will bubble over at any second. Occasionally it does. This is not wholly new territory for filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who has spent his last few films (Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood) exploring characters with—to put it mildly—brains that don’t function quite like they should. Not everything is in its right place, and that is certainly true of Freddie; the central character in Anderson’s new film The Master. This is a man metaphorically, and sometimes literally, lost at sea.

Trouble With the Curve (2012)

If there ever was a movie that felt like it was written during an all-day Full House marathon, it is Robert Lorenz’s Trouble With the Curve; a confused, messy and laughably cheesy drama that never seems to be about anything besides getting to the next moment of unearned sentiment. At least it’s a well-performed fiasco, with Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake all doing their best to make the proceedings as charming as possible. They almost succeed, and for the first two and a half acts Trouble With the Curve isn’t great or terrible as much as it’s just middling. Then the ending comes along, and there’s no preparing for one of the cheesiest, lamest resolutions you will ever see. It tries so hard to be a crowd-pleaser that it winds up being a crowd-annoyer.

Side by Side (2012)

With any major cinematic transition, there are going to be people who drag their feet before being forcibly pulled into the new era. For proof, look no further than movies like Singin’ in the Rain and The Artist, in which silent film stars laugh off the possibility that movies would ever have sound. The same thing probably happened when color was introduced, and filmmakers likely complained that film would lose much of its beauty if you started throwing all these bright colors up there. Now in the 21st century, filmmaking is in the middle of another such transition, and the new documentary Side by Side is there to capture this very specific and contentious moment in time.