The New Year!

First, let's get this out of the way:

The 10 Best Movies I Saw In 2012

10. Dredd

Karl Urban's Chin for Best Supporting Actor

I will defend this movie until the end of time.  It was concise, exciting, well-edited, excellently visualized, very well acted, and some of the most fun I had at the movies all year.  It managed yet another post-apocalyptic wasteland story without being boring or tired, by staying focused on the minutia of the story...while ALSO not overburdening the viewer with unnecessary (to the story) details.  Plus, HELLA REWATCH VALUE.  See my full review here.

9. The Words

Bradley Cooper for Best Smarming Author

This movie is a lot of things I don't usually care for - generally unhappy, lacking a satisfying ending, and featuring some really unhappy, unlikable characters.  But I appreciate The Words for daring to be unsatisfying in a world that is too full of pandering, safe choices when it comes to film.  It's compelling and bold in its refusal to play to your expectations.  See my full review here.

8. ParaNorman

Laika Studios for Most Exciting Animation Studio

While I still think the ending could have been composed better, ParaNorman wins major points from me for daring to be different - especially when you stack it next to the stale, rehashed Frankenweenie (same genre, similar subjects, but Frankenweenie reeks of Tim Burton's overused storytelling).  ParaNorman works with a lot of the same material - the undead, an outcast main character, etc.) but does so in a way that feels fresh, vibrant, and, occasionally, legitimately scary.  If Laika Studios could keep making macabre children's stories, that would be fantastic.  See my full review here.

7. Skyfall

Best Use of Assassination Glass.  Also that giant lizard for Best Deus Ex Lizard, but I couldn't find a screencap of that.

Daniel Craig seems to be my Bond of choice - I was never invested in them until he donned the perfectly tailored suit and started kicking faces in.  Skyfall manages to feel like a classic Bond film while still retaining that signature Craig style that I've come to be so fond of, and is dotted with class-act performances by the indomitable Dame Judy Dench, the oily Javier Bardem, and the clever Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris.  It's also extremely beautiful to watch, and very well orchestrated.  See my full review here.

6. Looper

Joseph Gordon-Levitt for Best Healer of Paradoxes

I haven't done a full review of Looper, because I only watched it a couple weeks ago - but I'm including it here because it was a 2012 movie and because it was such a fabulous science fiction film that is ALSO a great example of how to do time travel effectively.  What lacked for me in the performances (Joseph Gordon-Levitt is intentionally detached, which works for the movie but made it hard for me to connect with him and, by extension, Bruce Willis as older-him, but Emily Blunt, and the kid who plays her son, were fantastic) was more than made up for in the vision, scope and cohesiveness of the film.  It is really easy for time travel movies to lose track of what they're doing, or to get lost in their own mechanics, but Looper maintains a consistent set of rules for time travel which, while they aren't my personal views on the subject, were internally consistent and ultimately easy to follow.  I'm hoping the positive reception that Looper had means we're going to get more original science fiction - if it's all as good as this, we'll be in excellent shape.

5. Wreck-It Ralph

Vanellope and Ralph for Cutest BFFs

For the first time I can remember, Disney and Pixar released movies in the same year...and Disney's was better.  Like, by a LOT.  Brave fell so flat for me, and Wreck-It Ralph was emotional, and engaging, and fun, and can I be Vanellope when I grow up?  (Or an Nintendo make Sugar Rush a real game for the Wii?  Because seriously.)  This was also so clearly a labor of love - the attention to the little details, like the way an eight-bit character moves compared to a character from a modern Halo clone, show the respect the filmmakers have for their source material.  The whole film honors the video game medium in a really touching way.  I had a serious case of warm fuzzies when the credits rolled.

Also, Wreck-It Ralph gets major points for making me feel like I knew where the ending was going, but then surprising me with a finale that was both foreshadowed but unexpected. 

4. Cabin in the Woods

Best Use of Zombie Redneck Torture Family

I thought I knew what was coming, and then I REALLY, REALLY DIDN'T.  By now, you know that Cabin in the Woods is not your typical horror movie - how could it be, when it's a Whedon project? - but if you haven't seen it, I'm betting you don't realize how THOROUGHLY not typical it really is.  While I don't make a habit out of watching horror film, I like reading horror lit and reading about horror film, so I'm pretty familiar with most of the common tropes and what's been done to death.  Cabin in the Woods looks those tropes in the eyes, laughs dismissively, and then frolics gaily all over them.  It doesn't just rip them to pieces, it revels in tearing them apart.  The ending is pretty whackjob nuts, but so is the rest of the film; right after viewing, I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but on contemplation I don't think it could have ended any other way and retained that sense of insanity.  Plus, there are so many little details and touches that make this a fun experience to watch, it invites rewatches just so you can see what you may have missed the first time around.

3. The Avengers

Best Smartasses

If The Dark Knight is the platonic ideal of a superhero movie, then The Avengers is the platonic ideal of a superhero ensemble movie (good luck, Justice League.  You're gonna need it).  I've watched this one several times since its release on DVD, and let me tell you, that final battle sequence never feels overly long or stale.  The Hulk beating the shit out of Loki never gets less funny, Mark Ruffalo always breaks my heart, and my need for a Black Widow/Hawkeye prequel grows ever stronger.  See my full review here.

2. Argo

Best Deployment of an Expletive: "Argo Fuck Yourself."

I had a rough time deciding which of these last two movies got to be number one on my list, and honestly, it changes depending on how I feel.  While they're both historicals and period pieces, Argo is tight, exciting, and provides a fascinating look into the machinations of an area of government that gets maligned quite a bit. It's a spy movie about real spies, and Affleck skillfully works tension into the story even though we all knew (sort of) how it ended.  

See my full review here.

1. Lincoln

Best Use of Daniel Day Lewis. Don't lie, you think so too.

Lincoln, on the other hand, is thoughtful, a story with no less importance but minus some of the urgency thanks to Daniel Day Lewis' performance.  Lewis is playing an old, worn down, brilliant man in his twilight days, and it's evident in every line on his face and every angle of his body.  His Lincoln is both a powerful, commanding leader and a compassionate storyteller, and Lewis mediates between them effortlessly.  The film is also refreshing in that it shows a pretty complete portrait of what was going on during Lincoln's attempts to bring the Civil War to a close.  There's a lot of political wheeling and dealing that isn't flattering to the President (or anyone), but it feels honest.

So what's coming up for the blog this year?  My New Year's Resolution for Boycott BluRay is to see at least  two movies a month in the theater, trying for more - I always reach the end of the year wishing I'd gotten to see more movies, so in 2013 I'm going to commit to doing just that.  I'm also resolving to post reviews within 48 hours of seeing a film, to keep things current (to me, anyway).

I'm going to feature more different kinds of articles as well, like more Trailer Talk (which is super fun to write) and more ruminations about things movie-related that are not necessarily about new releases.  So on the first day of the month, in addition to whatever reviews I've posted, I'll be writing to you about...well, something movie adjacent.  Stay tuned!

Movies Coming Out In 2013 That I'm Excited About

Gangster Squad

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

Warm Bodies

Now You See Me

Oblivion

Iron Man 3

The Great Gatsby

Star Trek Into Darkness

Man of Steel

Monsters University

Pacific Rim

The Wolverine

Elysium

Carrie

Ender's Game

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The Avengers

Let's chat.

There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong with The Avengers, truth be told.  It was helped immeasurably by some solid prequels, great actor choices, and a seemingly great writer/director, but still: I had my suspicions that it was simply going to be too BIG to handle.  Comic film franchises tend to suffer in their later films by the attempt to cram too much shit into one film: Spider-Man 3 was a clusterfuck of bad guys, X-Men 3 was a mess of poorly written plot and badly explained detail.  I was afraid that The Avengers was pulling too many elements together.

1. Joss Whedon dialed back his "Joss-ness."  Yes, I appreciate what Whedon does, and I love the dialogue he writes, but going at this big, hulking Hollywood behemoth with his style turned on 100% was never going to work.  I deeply appreciated that he was able to dial the irony back, and that Tony got the majority of his snark (which is where it should have gone) but that he also wrote the characters who needed to be earnest and transparent in that manner (Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner, mostly).  He found a good balance between his preferred aesthetic and the Hollywood comic machine, and it works.


2. The direction and cinematography were perfection.  Let's talk about Whedon a little more as a director, because this may be his biggest project yet in terms of Hollywood grandeur and dude seriously stepped up to the plate.  Shakey-cam was conspicuously absent - I could see and process everything that was going on, which is exactly what the singular power sets of our heroes demands.  (This is how you know that someone in the visuals department plays Marvel Ultimate Alliance; who else saw the Iron Man/Captain America fusion power?).  In the big fight scenes, the camera moves seamlessly from one hero to the next, so that you can see how, even while they're all fighting their own piece, it's all an interconnected sequence.  I called Whedon a virtuoso on Twitter, and I stand by that.

3. Not a minute was wasted.  Whedon was not playing around: he dropped you into the story, trusting that you'd done your homework and seen the lead-in films, and kicked the movie into overdrive in a matter of minutes.  This made his huge cast of characters easier to juggle, since none of them were burdened with obligatory background; the only characters who hadn't really gotten an origin story already, Black Widow and Hawkeye, delivered exactly as much detail as was necessary to understand their place in The Avengers narrative.  I would totally watch a prequel movie about the two of them being superspies, but for the purposes of this film we got what we needed and not a speck more.

That sense that no time was being wasted meant that, even at 2 and a half hours, The Avengers never drags or feels slow.  It's a briskly paced action film with rapid-fire dialogue that trusts its audience to keep up.

4. Mark Ruffalo is the best-written, and best-acted, Hulk we've ever seen.  I've been told the Edward Norton version of The Hulk gets better on re-watching, but I've never tried to sit through it again so I wouldn't know.  I can say, definitively, that Ruffalo does very different things with the character than Norton does and it works COMPLETELY.  This is not a Bruce Banner who's just been through the gamma ray accident - this is a Bruce Banner who is totally beaten down and defeated.  The way Ruffalo stands, the way he holds his hands, the way he talks to other people are all so indicative of a man who is completely resigned to his life being horrible and isolated.  But, and this is important, this is not a man who's lost control - rather, he is SO in control of every aspect, every emotion, every bodily movement that it's tragic.  Ruffalo gets my three favorite moments in the film, and I like them so much because they say so much about how Bruce lives with the Hulk, and how extraordinarily sad his life has been.  This is also the first time that I've ever been afraid of the Hulk and what he can do on a destructive level.

No, really.  He's freaking terrifying.

THIS PART IS KIND OF SPOILERY, FYI, SO YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YET.

I really loved the way that Ruffalo gives you the sense that, rather than the Hulk being the product of Bruce "getting angry," that he's ALWAYS angry; the Hulk is a product of him loosing the reigns on that anger.  So, you end up with two possible scenarios: Bruce loses control of the Hulk and that destructive energy, and lays waste indiscriminately to everything around him; OR, Bruce CHOOSES to let the Hulk loose, and can thus direct that energy to specific destruction.  Both go back to that idea that Bruce is a man tightly, tightly under his own thumb all the time, and it just makes him so endearing and empathetic as a character.

END SMALL SPOILER


5.  Everyone has a purpose.  This is not to be taken lightly.  You've got a team with three over-powered superhumans and one literal god, and then...two assassin-spies with a lot of gymnastics training and good eyesight.  And yet, I never felt like Hawkeye or Black Widow were shoe-horned in, or a waste of time.  They had clearly defined roles in the party and did some useful, kick-ass stuff.  I was also impressed with Scarlett Johanson's acting, which I haven't been in a really, really long time.  She gets some good scenes and some good lines, and actually delivers on them.

In summary: this movie does not disappoint.  I'm ready for the next round of Avengers, are you?

Summer Movie Season!

This Friday, The Avengers will finally open in U.S. theaters, officially marking the start of Summer Movie Season.  I tend to think of SMS as lasting from whatever Marvel blockbuster opens in May until early September, when it bleeds into the beginning of Oscar Bait Season.  With that timeframe in mind, allow me to share with you the top ten movies I'm excited about seeing this summer (that aren't The Avengers, since DUH).

These are in order of release date rather than order of excitement, since my excitement over movies is hard to quantify - it is roughly equivalent to length of time until the movie is released, multiplied by my familiarity with the property, triangulated with how awesome the trailer looked.  The point is, these are my must-sees this summer:

May 25: Men in Black III

I've been on the fence about this one for a long time - MIB2 was so bad, you guys.  SO BAD.  But I'm cautiously optimistic...and I have faith in the fact that Will Smith is only getting better with age, while retaining a bit of that smart-ass edge that MIB the original had so much of.  Also, Tommy Lee Jones should make more movies.

June 1: Snow White and the Hunstman

HELLO, ART DIRECTION.  But seriously, this movie looks super beautiful, and my love and respect for Charlize Theron more than makes up for how ambivalent or hostile I may feel about Kristen Stewart.  Plus I love the idea of a warrior-princess Snow White, and it is typically an easy sell to get me into a glossy, high profile fantasy film.  

This one also got a boost from how completely dreadful Mirror Mirror looked - if you can only see one Snow White retelling this year...

June 8: Prometheus

There is nothing about this that doesn't look awesome.  Space travel?  Science fiction horror?  Michael Fassbender playing a robot with ~feelings~?  Cinematography that looks like it took notes at David Fincher's film-making seminar, and staticky kind of scary music?  The return of Ridley Scott?  YES PLEASE.

June 22: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

The title of this movie sells itself, really.  Also I really liked the book, and while this looks like it's veered a bit more into whack-a-doo territory, I have faith in the power of axes that can explode trees.  And Rufus Sewell playing a vampire.

June 22: Brave

Are you excited about Pixar's first feature film starring a lady?  BECAUSE I AM. 

July 3: The Amazing Spider-Man

Spider-Man 2 was awesome.  The third one, much less so.  Which is why I'm glad Sony is going back to basics with this reboot, scrapping even the visual tone of their first trilogy.  Andrew Garfield has enough dorkiness about him to make a convincing Peter Parker, so it just remains to be seen if he can pull his action weight.  Emma Stone is guaranteed to be charming, and I'm really, really hoping the villain delivers - The Lizard could be either really cool, or...really, really bad.  Fingers crossed for the former.

July 20: The Dark Knight Rises

BATMAN.  Although INFINITE SADNESS that Nolan and Bale aren't making any more of these.  I hope directors of Batman films in the future will take a page from Nolan's notebook; especially his fearlessness to explore the darker corners of this franchise.  Can I get a Long Halloween movie, now?  Please?

August 3: The Bourne Legacy

Jeremy Renner was pretty much born to play an action hero, and these movies have been SO fun.  While I found the original trilogy to be complete on its own, I feel as though there are still plenty of ~government secrets~ to plum, and you know what?  I trust Jeremy Renner to do that, and to kick a lot of people in the face in the meantime.

August 3: Total Recall

I didn't know I needed this movie in my life until I saw the trailer.  I love how they've spiffied up the super campy visuals from the original, and while it's kind of a bummer this one doesn't go to Mars (or so I've heard) I look forward to the CGI mutant yelling at Colin Farrell's eyebrows.  This is a remake that needed to happen, no matter how good you think the first one is - memory and brain stuff is a common science fiction story trope, but hard to do right.  I'm hoping this one does the job.

August 17: ParaNorman

I'm a sucker for good animation, and this one just looks charming (I'm more excited about Frankenweenie, but that one's not a summer release).  It also reminds me of Monster House, which I LOVED and felt was tremendously under-appreciated.  

The Avengers

I wanted to write about my reaction to The Avengers trailer about a week ago, but I had trouble because there aren't all that many interesting ways for me to say I AM EXCITE, MAY SHOULD GET HERE FASTER.  So, there you go: it's a fabulous trailer, and I have high expectations for the films.

I think it's both interesting and worth mentioning that Marvel has basically taken a backwards approach to The Avengers franchise; usually, you get the ensemble film and THEN the spin-offs.  Do to necessity, perhaps, Marvel gave us the spin-offs first, and now has the herculean task of bringing together half a dozen disparate, egotistical, arrogant and powerful characters.  Some things we should note that Marvel did particularly well in preparing for this task, which are also all reasons why The Avengers has more potential to be wonderful than to fall on its face:

- Giving the characters worth caring about their own films.  Let's be honest: Black Widow, Hawkeye, Agent Coulson and Nick Fury are pretty awesome characters, but none of them are strong enough to carry their own films.  And Marvel wisely didn't try; instead, they built them up through other, more interesting movies.  The Thor movie is sort of the exception, and I think it suffered because Thor himself isn't a very interesting character, but the argument can be made that that film was more about Loki than Thor anyway. 

- Hiring fabulous writers that (most importantly) have experience with ensemble casts.  Joss Whedon writes really good dialogue, and he has shown in multiple venues that he writes distinctive voices for multiple characters really well.  Zak Penn, the other credited script writer, worked on one of the best comic book movies of the last ten years (X2), and fabricated two sequels that, compared to their originals, were veritable works of genius (Norton's Hulk and Elektra, the latter of which I will defend until I die because I actually thought it was fun).  He also wrote X-Men: The Last Stand, and regardless of what you thought of that particular film (I liked it), the dialogue was as solid as its predecessors.  These guys know what they're doing.

- The casting is perfection.  I've already written about how impressed I am with Chris Evans' Captain America (read my review here), and at this point it pretty much goes without saying that Robert Downey Jr. = Tony Stark (similarly to how Patrick Stewart = Professor X).  Chris Hemsworth as Thor was one of the only interesting things about that movie, and Mark Ruffalo certainly can't do worse at being Bruce Banner than anyone already has.  And if I need to mention Sam Jackson's Nick Fury here, you really haven't been paying attention.

- Not introducing a new villain.  I've just convinced myself that the purpose of Thor was actually to introduce Loki, rather than Thor himself, and all of his daddy issues, which means that The Avengers won't have to dedicate valuable time to introducing a brand new villain.  What I hope this means is that we'll get to spend more time seeing how all these egos learn to play nice together, which is honestly more interesting to me than villain backstory.  Which leads me to my last point:

- We're essentially done with backstory.  All of the establishing is done.  We know everything about these people that we need to, so we can get right into the meat of the story.  It really, really bugs me when filmmakers waste time, or spin out a movie longer than it should be; hopefully, with The Avengers we'll get no wasted space.