• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
  • Review: “This Is 40”
  • Review: “Any Day Now”
  • Review: “Anna Karenina”
  • Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”
  • Review: “Hitchcock”
  • Review: “Lincoln”
  • Review: “Life of Pi”
  • Review: “Flight”
  • Review: “Skyfall”
  • Review: “Argo”
  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Monthly Archives: January 2013

Review: “Mama”

28 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

andres muschietti, frankenstein, freud, guillermo del toro, horror, jessica chastain, mama, nikolaj coster waldau, pans labyrinth

MAMA11

“Visitation Frights”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

THE FREUDIAN FREAKSHOW that is “Mama” features some genuine hair-raisers.  The movie’s monster is an undead mother who climbs the walls like a human tarantula and whose undulating hair is rivaled only by the ginger heroine in last year’s “Brave.” Linguistic analysts have shown that the syllabic repetition of “Ma-ma” originates in the infant’s primal pronunciations, in that original cry for food, warmth and only later on,936full-pan's-labyrinth-poster self-doubt and Hallmark cards. The film’s producer is Guillermo del Toro and you need only glance at the poster for his “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006) to grasp his adeptness at melding horror and vaginal symbols; he’s like the gothic Georgia O’Keefe.  In “Mama,” the film’s orphans – Victoria and little sister Lily – are haunted not just by the titular specter but by oozing crevices that ruin perfectly good wallpaper, out of which flutter moths and Mama herself, sometimes in the form of a vacuum-powered toupee.

“Mama” begins with that most psychoanalytical of scenarios: abandonment. The opening, which precedes a beguiling title sequence of creepy drawings in a child’s hand, is a rush: Victoria and Lily’s father has killed his coworkers, his estranged wife, and whisked away his daughters only to veer off a snowy highway into the valley below.  He comes upon a cabin in the woods where he attempts to kill his daughters in cold blood but, low and behold, the cabin is owned and operated by a more powerful and over-protective force: Mama Mia!  Fast film-review-mama-fca7bc20726c2efaforward to the aftermath of the girls’ disappearance and their worried uncle played by Nikolaj Coster Waldau of “Game of Thrones” and girlfriend Annabel (a rocker Jessica Chastain).  Everything about Chastain’s character is thin; she sports a Joan Jett haircut, plays bass in a band, and curses like a sailor because, well, she’s hardcore. Did I mention she’s a brunette here?  She’s also a rival to Big Mama who has managed to transplant herself to the girls’ closet thanks to a pseudo-scientific study of their rehabilitation. (Why, by the way, are there no spy-cams in this joint?)  Annabel must play mother to the girls inside a home that looks like the suburban one in “Home Alone” (1990) but, of course, this is a crowded house (with ghosts and things that go bump in the night). Annabel speaks to the film’s central contrivance when she herself asks the good doctor: “This is a joke, right?”  And a hokey one at that.  Like the Ramones T-shirt she dons to demark her air of twenties cool, her character is standard issue.

hqdefaultWhat is far from standard is the fact that we see more and more of the ghoulish Mama as her secret is found out.  She has her own tragic back-story and when the girls’ surrogate family returns to the very cliff where Mama took her life, we begin to sympathize with the film’s glass-eyed ghoul. (This was Mary Shelley’s conceit in her 1818 Frankenstein.: “I’m malicious because I’m miserable!”)  This is anything but standard in your conventional horror flick: the killer isn’t entirely unkind but kind of kin.  Here, in “Mama,” we get that old familiar feeling that the thing we all love and fear the most is, well, family.

2012 Best Actress: Will it be Watts?

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

action, alvarez belons, best actress, disaster films, ewan mcgregor, indian ocean, juan antonio bayona, naomi watts, the impossible, tom holland, tsunami 2004

the-impossible-movie-review

“Water Works”

Grade: B

TWO ASPECTS OF Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster film “The Impossible” will haunt you.  The first is the tsunami itself, which slammed into south-west Asia on the 26th of December, 2004, killing nearly a quarter-million people and leveling scores of luxury hotels.  “The Impossible” begins and ends with the Bennett family, Maria and husband Henry (Ewan McGregor), flying to and fro a high-end Thai resort where they open Christmas gifts and lounge poolside. The film’s first fifteen minutes are the lull before the storm and Bayona is even able to extract a frisson of terror out of something as quotidian as a red rubber ball that the Bennett boys – Lucas, Thomas, and Simon – bop around the pool area; they’ll soon find themselves floating out to sea like the ball itself.  Wilson!  A loose page is blown out of the book Maria is reading and gradually, the vacationers notice that something sinister is in the air.  One of the most terrifying images is of the palm trees just beyond the hotel walls being felled, one after another, as the Indian Ocean violently overruns the lazy sunbathers.  Bayona gives us numerous underwater shots in which we see a soup of twisted metal, palm trees, bodies, automobiles reduced to matchbox cars, even a drowned elephant.

The-Impossible-PosterBeyond such verisimilitude, which is agonizing indeed, there is also Naomi Watt’s performance as Maria, a doctor who has temporarily hung up her stethoscope to raise her three young sons while living abroad in Japan.  Bayona built the biggest water tank in Europe to simulate the disaster and, currently making the rounds on TV talk shows prior to Oscar night next month, Watts reports that she was strapped to a chair, submerged, and brought to the brink of drowning in order for the director to elicit true terror from her.  But Watts’s performance is a marvel not simply because of her lung-busting cries – she gave us plenty of those one decade ago in “The Ring” – but because of her relationship with Lucas (Tom Holland), the eldest of her sons. There’s that uncomfortable moment when Lucas is ashamed to see his mother’s mangled and exposed breast; there’s another when Maria insists on helping an abandoned boy whom she and Lucas hide in the treetops. Dehydrated, leg badly injured, Maria shares a soda can with the two boys and stares up at the younger one like he’s a cherub on high.  A good actor, like a good tennis partner, brings out the best in her scene-mate and Watts is able to elevate Holland so that he, too, becomes the emotional core of “The Impossible.”  You don’t doubt for a second that it’s her love for Lucas and the other family members that keep her fighting for her life.

The film’s title is trite, the family’s reunion never really in question, and Bayona (“The22003 Orphanage”) either forgot or simply didn’t feel the need to close the film with the official death toll or some kind of acknowledgment that most, if not all, the tsunami-victims weren’t as lucky as the upper-class Bennetts who had health insurance and private planes at their disposal.  It’s as if every other survivor is put there to either facilitate or frustrate the family’s predictable reunion. The Bennetts are actually an Anglicization of the real-life family that survived the disaster, the Alvarez Belóns of Spain, and it’s a shame that European actors were swapped out for blond-blue-eyed ones. Nevertheless, it’s Watts who powers “The Impossible.”  That’s her kilowatts.

Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

al qaeda, jason clarke, jeremy renner, jessica chastain, kathryn bigelow, mark boal, osama bin laden, reda kateb, september 11, the hurt locker, torture, zero dark thirty

zero-dark-thirty-wallpapers-e

“Your Detainee Will See You Now”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

NOW WHAT?  SUCH was the sentiment that snuck up and surprised any viewer of “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s last film on war and soldier psychology.  Recall Jeremy Renner, as the leader of a bomb disposal team in the Iraq war, returning home after his 265924-vlcsnap_176681last rotation. Oh how the mighty have fallen: he’s become a dad dispatched to get groceries.  We watch as a dazed Army Sergeant wanders a sterile-looking supermarket, looking out-of-place and bored by civilian life. The epigraph for that film came from Chris Hedges, a war correspondent at The New York Times: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”  Of course, “The Hurt Locker” ends with its hero back where he belongs, on the battlefield, but it’s hard to root for Army Sergeant William James when his resolution is likened to addiction.  Is this, then, a work of propaganda or pacifistic satire?

With “Zero Dark Thirty,” Bigelow’s first film since the Oscar-winning “Locker,” she stays in the (war) zone and expands her interest in America’s battles abroad and the addictive highs and lows they enable.  A similar air of futility hangs over the action of “ZDT.”  Here, we have a heroine, a CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain) who vows “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I’m gonna kill bin Laden.”  That revenge killing, which occupies 40 of the film’s 157 minutes, is certainly its climax, but the road to that now legendary raid on Bin Laden’s compound in the Pakastani city of Abbottabad, is where “ZDT” largely dwells. This is a film, controversially so, that gives us the interrogation rooms, torture chambers, and “black sites” that made the night of May 2nd, 2011 and the heroic efforts of SEAL Team 6, possible.  At the same time, “ZDT” asks whether all of those closed-door procedures were really worth it?  The film may end with a mission accomplished, but there is seemingly nothing but a string of defeats and detonations along the way.

At its core, “ZDT” traces the metamorphosis of a friendless, work-obsessed Maya.  At the start, she’s only an ambivalent participant in the waterboarding of a suspect, Ammar (Reda Kateb), an Arab man with known ties to al-Qaeda bank accounts.  Up until the final scene, she’s as cold as ice.1134604 - Zero Dark Thirty  Bigelow’s writing partner, Mark Boal, is again on hand to pepper the script with intel of a different kind: “Everybody breaks – it’s biology,” says CIA field agent Dan (Jason Clarke) as he systematically destroys the mind and body of his detainee.  Much of “ZDT” is hard to watch – beyond the torture, there’s the suspenseful scene in which a Jordanian with information regarding bin Laden’s whereabouts slowly penetrates the bunkers of an American base – and when it’s all over, the viewer is again faced with the uncertainties that define a potentially un-winnable war against terrorism.  All that we know for certain is what Maya believes must be the case: an electronically cut-off bin Laden must be communicating with a courier named Abu Ahmed.  Catch the courier and catch the killer of 3,000 plus Americans.

If not for the ambiguous final shot of “Zero Dark Thirty,” it would be far easier to allege that Bigelow’s latest is on par with John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” (1968), a pep rally for the Vietnam War.  I, for one, am deeply discomforted by the idea that real-life works of American militarism can be turned immediately into a mainstream movie; this only zero-dark-Thirty-30-entertainment-news-Jessica-Chastain-719462581further blurs the line between war and entertainment in an era of “Call of Duty” and “Six Days in Fallujah.” As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote after World War 2, “real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.”  But Bigelow spares us hawkish politics for something more sly, more cynical. The only time we even hear President Obama speaking is when he’s giving an interview to “60 Minutes” and denouncing torture in a film that unflinchingly puts America’s torture of Muslim prisoners on display.  In the foreground are Maya and her fellow operatives, barely listening to their boss on the boob-tube; the suggestion is that they operate outside the law.  That exposes the official, albeit hypocritical, stance of the White House, and by extension, the nation at large, for what it really is: just noise.

Potentially, the real torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” lies not in those excruciatingly cruel interrogation scenes but in Chastain’s final expression.  What is Maya thinking exactly?  Is it relief or remorse?  With the hunt over, tears fall and if our heroine isn’t thinking “Now what?”, she may have something even more radical, even more un-American, on her mind, which is: What for?

Review: “Gangster Squad”

12 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

action, anthony mackie, crime, emma stone, gangster squad, giovanni ribisi, josh brolin, los angeles, michael pena, mickey cohen, nick notle, rubert fleischer, ryan gosling, sean penn

GANGSTER SQUAD

“Hey Mickey”
Grade: B- (RENT IT)

BY THE TIME the members of the Gangster Squad toast to their crime-fighting conquests in postwar Los Angeles, mobster Mickey Cohen is already red-in-the-face and shouting that they’ll never take him down.  Cohen, the legendary gangster who went west from his native Chicago to scope out Bugsy Siegel, is played by a pruned Sean Penn.  This is a performer who normally avoids uni-dimensional characters, but here, as a straight-up evil thug, he is crime incarnate.  “Gangster Squad” is indebted to Penn and his cast-mates, but it’s derivative in every way of a whole squad of other – make that, better – genre greats like “LA Confidential” and “Chinatown.”

Nevertheless, writer Will Beall, in an adaptation of “Gangster Squad: Cover Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles” by reporter Paul Lieberman, arms Penn’s Cohen with tommy-guns and zippy one-liners like “That’s wasn’t murder; it was progress” and gangster-squad-movie-image-emma-stone-ryan-gosling“L.A. belongs to Mickey Cohen.”  Not if Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) can help it.  Despite his pregnant wife’s protestations, he forms a group that  Cohen derisively nicknamed the “Stupidity Squad.”  Here, it’s comprised of Harris (Anthony Mackie), gun-slinger Kennard (Robert Patrick), Ramirez (Michael Peña), and techie Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi).  Ribisi is usually the chameleon who brings unique voices to supporting roles, as he did in last year’s “Contraband,” but in “Gangster Squad,” Ryan Gosling (as Sgt. Jerry Wooters) regresses to the pitch of his pubescence for some odd reason.  As Cohen’s girlfriend, Grace (Emma Stone) is less concerned with Wooters’ voice than she is with his looks. Gosling and Stone only recently romped in “Crazy Stupid Love,” but the results were neither lovely nor crazy (for the latter, see “Blue Valentine”).  These are two actors too keenly aware of their own allure to mix and melt in the way real chemistry on screen requires, so it’s a mystery why they’re reunited (and so soon).

That’s the work of Rubert (“Zombieland”) Fleischer whose “Gangster Squad” opens with a grizzly gangland murder that will make Gangster-Squadyou avert your eyes.  (Think of being snapped in half like a human biscotti as two cars pull you apart – oh, and there are coyotes around to eat your innards.)  Then, in keeping with the conventionality of “Gangster Squad,” Fleischer’s film ends with a hero hugging his wife and infant son on a beach in Southern California.  Order, family, justice have been restored: The End.  It’s this turn from the lurid to the lovely that makes “Gangster Squad” lopsided.  In short, it needs target practice.

Review: “Les Misérables”

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

amanda seyfried, anne hathaway, cameron mackintosh, eddie redmayne, hugh jackman, jean valjean, les miserables, musical, russell crowe, samantha barks, the king's speech, tom hooper, victor hugo

les mis main

“Did You Hear the People Sing?”
Grade: C (SKIP IT)

DIRECTOR TOM HOOPER has said he wanted to take a risk after winning an Oscar in 2010 for “The King’s Speech.” The result, an adaptation of the musical “Les Misérables,” was a nice try but it hits all the wrong notes. Here Hooper has on his hands another historical drama, an abridgement of Victor Hugo’s sweeping, five-volume novel from 1862, and one seemingly perfect for a Christmas day release, rife as it is with Christian themes: mercy, redemption, bread.  At one point, we’re told that “to love another person is to see the face of God” and the camera, in the final parishanne-hathaway-les-miserables-dreamed-a-dream__121124050625 scene, lingers on an ornate golden crucifix perhaps two seconds too long.  This comes as a relief since Hooper’s camera otherwise clings to the actors’ faces like a mud-mask and since most, if not all, of the principal players here can’t really sing, it makes their facial over-compensation that much more pained and pronounced.  You half wonder whether Hugh Jackson is standing on hot coals during his numbers.  Worse, there’s a tone-deaf Russell Crowe (as Javert) and Anne Hathaway, as the maligned Fantine, twisting her face so intensely that you fear for her tear ducts. On stage, “I Dreamed A Dream” is delivered with chest-beating intensity by a woman who has forsaken her dream but not her dignity. Hathaway’s version is more mousy than mighty and it drags the whole movie down to the level of melodrama.

By now, more than 60 million theatre-goers around the globe have seen CameronLes-Miserables-Still-les-miserables-2012-movie-32902319-1280-853 Mackintosh’s stage musical and know that “Les Misérables” doesn’t just entertain; it overpowers the audience with an immense cast of flag-waving characters, a barricade made of household furniture, a musical score both hushed (“Bring Him Home”) and hummable (“On My Own”).  Five years before it opened in London, to mixed reviews, the musical had a brief trial-run in Paris and at that time, the plot of Hugo’s novel was really only familiar to the French. That was no longer the case by 1985 when “Les Misérables,” powered by Claude-Michel Schönberg’s score and lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, opened at the Barbican Center and from there, took the world by storm.  “Les Miz,” as it’s now known, was also big biz: international tours and multiple recordings have made it one of the most successful stage musicals of all time.

les-miserables-trailer-ukIn case you’ve only recently reentered the earth’s atmosphere, “Les Misérables” is about a thief unjustly punished and pursued all his life by an obsessive police inspector. It’s 1815 and jailbird Jean Valjean (Jackman) is being paroled after a nineteen-year sentence for stealing a loaf of bread.  He escapes, reforms himself, and reappears as a factory owner and mayor of Montreuil where Crowe’s Javert remains hot on his trail.  Around the men swirl the love story of Cosette, the thief’s adopted daughter, and Marius, a political revolutionary swept up in the June Rebellion of 1832. As Cosette, Amanda Seyfried is a surprisingly strong songbird, as is Eddie Redmayne, who lobbied Hooper hard for the part, as Marius. His jaw trembles when he sings and he cries his way, profusely so, through the closing dirge “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.”  Still, they’re actors, not singers, and it’s puzzling why Hooper failed to cast a stronger vocalist than Samantha Barks as Éponine.  Each one of her costars is a one-dimensional vocalist at best and that’s a serious problem in a sung-through musical more than two and half hours long. Consider this costumed karaoke.

Never has “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” which arrives toward the story’s conclusion, been more welcomed and more apropos since Tom Hooper’s “Les Misérables” knows how to clear a room.

The Best and Worst Films of 2012

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

argo, battleship, beasts of the southern wild, bernie, chernobyl diaries, cosmopolis, gay movies 2012, life of pi, lincoln, moonrise kingdom, movies 2012, prometheus, red tails, richard patinson, searching for sugar man, the master, the walking dead, this means war, total recall, tuskegee

THE BEST FILMS OF 2012

image

1. “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”  “Once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.”  It’s hard to believe that the speaker of those words, little Quvenzhané Wallis, was just six years old when director Benh Zeitlin created this little masterpiece on freedom, family and the future of climate change.  As a motherless child named Hushpuppy, Wallis inhabits a grungy trailer neighboring her father’s; the place is overrun by weeds, pigs, and roosters.  Despite the odds, Hushpuppy is so defiantly free that she won’t even put her clothes on.  Like the sparklers she wields, Wallis is a firework in a film that blends magic realism and the realities we all know too well: a dad’s tough love, diaspora, poverty, climate change.  Even the doctors in white lab coats who look like they’re there to help Hushpuppy’s dear ol’ dad (Dwight Henry) are another form of social control, but the exuberance of “Beasts” is that its wild child can’t – make that won’t – be contained.  Even the mythic aurochs – figments of Hushpuppy’s imagination or the four horsemen of Revelation? – bow down before her.

Next year’s “Noah,” another flood-on-film, starring Russell Crowe and directed by Darren (“Black Swan”) Aronofsky is currently in production, but it’s not too late to call the whole thing off.  Zeitlin’s more modest “Beasts” already beat “Noah” to the punch with its postdiluvian picture of water, water, everywhere.  That includes the tears to which I’m consistently brought by this inspiring fable.  In the words of Hushpuppy, “They think we’re gonna drown down here. But we ain’t going nowhere.”  This is how film is supposed to make you feel.

2. “Argo.”  While “Beasts” has the best ending to any film in 2012, “Argo” has thejohn-goodman-argo best beginning:  Iranian protesters, outraged with the US for sheltering a Shah, storm the gates of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Inside, staffers are shredding top secret documents and nervously planning their escape.  When only six escape, CIA operative Tony Mendez cooks up a crazy idea: force the diplomats to impersonate a film crew to get them home safely.  Enter funnymen John Goodman and Alan Arkin, the latter of whom exclaims “If I’m doing a fake movie, it’s going to be a fake hit!”  A lesser-known history lesson on the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and the political usefulness of America’s greatest export (the movies), “Argo” is tightly wound and terrific.

3. “Life of Pi.”  Is there anything Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) can’t do?  2005 was the pitiful year that the Oscar for Best Directing went to Lee but not to that sweetest taboo, “Brokeback Mountain,” a film that wentlifeofpi where most mainstream filmmakers fear to tread.    Weird and wondrous, “Life of Pi” is versatile enough that adults will appreciate it as a spiritual allegory while kids while stand in awe of its visual artistry.  And here’s another layer: “Life of Pi” ends up, on a meta-filmic note, being about the process of interpretation: were the animals actually Pi’s family members?  Is Pi the storyteller even a reliable one?  A film for the whole family, “Life of Pi” is gorgeous to look at and to meditate on the morning after.

4. “Searching for Sugar Man.”  Where in the world is Rodriguez?  From documentarian Malik Bendjelloul, “Searching” is the only musical detective story in recent history.  The artist known mononymously as Rodriguez never achieved major Sugar-Man-posteracclaim in America in the 1970s though he was an undeniable sensation in South Africa where his folky tunes became anthems against apartheid.  The film centers around two fans from Cape Town and their wish to unravel the mystery of Rodriguez’s disappearance.  Did he take his life or, everyman-style, skip out on fame to raise his daughters in Detroit and work construction?  Bendjelloul’s film should put an end once and for all to websites like “The Great Rodriguez Hunt.”  When they finally catch up with him all these years later, Rodriguez appears like a street-level sage saying cryptic things like “Nothing beats reality, so I went back to work.”  Come again?  This guy makes Bob Dylan look like an open book.

5. “The Master.” Certainly the strangest story on screen from 2012.  Anderson’s choice of 70-millimeter (twice the width of ordinary 35-millimiter film and customarily used for wide-screen films) was an interesting choice as “The Master” is an epic of internal proportions.  Its only landscapes are of the mental variety. Many claim the film is more a master-class for actors (Hoffman, Phoenix, Adams) than a story on par with Anderson’s earlier character studies (“There Will Be Blood,” “Magnolia”), but “The Master” requires multiple reviewing to discern its turbulent subtext.  When Hoffman, as cult-leader Lancaster Dodd, serenades his friend Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) by singing “Slow Boat to China,” the complexities of the men’s relationship finally sail to the surface.  Are they doctor-patient, priest-parishioner, frenemies or lovers?  Loosely based on Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard, Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) is a charlatan who preys on his disciples’ weaknesses, which makes Quell his lab rat, the slave to his “master.”  But is the relationship that definable?  “What does the ending of ‘The Master’ mean?” became a repeated web-search in 2012 and that question is bound to remain unanswered, even unanswerable, for some time.  The ending is like something out of Eliot.  Such a maligned mermaid that, I fear, won’t sing to me.

6. “Cosmopolis.”  In a fragment of Walter Benjamin’s from 1921, entitled “Capitalism as Religion,” the German philosopher asserts that capitalism is not only without precedent but that it offers its cult-like worshipers not redemption but total destruction.  Capitalism is “the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious cosmopolisexamstate of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation.  God’s transcendence is at an end.”  Make that the dead-end of “Cosmopolis” (based on a Don DeLillo novel now a decade-old), in which we follow a twentysomething billionaire named Eric Packer down his path of self-destruction. “Cosmopolis” is a neo-Marxist musing from the dark god of cinema David Cronenberg.  The first shot of Robert Patinson, just as bloodless as he is in the “Twilight” saga, sets the mood: Packer’s sunglasses are like the impenetrable windows of a limo and that limo, in which the bulk of the film takes place, is really a casket with vinyl interior. Everyone along the way is exploited in their own special way but that’s the lesson of this rare work of Wall St. noir: a free market enterprise enslaves both the boss and his workers. Patinson is proctological as Packer.

7. “Lincoln.”  A film so understated you’d almost dispute the fact it’s from uber-director Steven Spielberg.  That’s attributable solely to the acting and the erudition of screenwriter Tony Kushner who immerses himself in the sound of the Civil War just as D-Day, in the title role, loses himself in Lincoln.  The film, which smartly focuses on just a chapter in Lincoln’s political (and family) life, is another deposit in what Spielberg has been assembling for some time now, that is, a storehouse of American history lessons, from slavery (“Amistad”) through the twentieth century’s world wars (“War Horse,” “Saving Private Ryan”) to the techno-horrors of the past/present (“Jurassic Park”) and the future (“Minority Report”).  Oscar’s eyes will be on D-Day, Sally Field (as the First Lady), but the cast is full of other gems like James Spader, Julie White and the busiest actor of 2012: Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

8. “Bernie.” With the exception of “Moonrise Kingdom,” no comedies from 2012 found themselves on the critics’ Top 10 lists.  That’s because Wes Anderson’s valentine to young love (see Number 10 below) is artsy and highly stylized whereas “Bernie” is big bernie10and brash and how could it not be?  It stars Jack Black as a Texan funeral director Bernhardt “Bernie” Tiede who will either kill you with kindness or, if you’re his millionaire girlfriend Marjorie Nugent, a BB gun.  Richard Linklater (“Before Sunrise,” “School of Rock”) directs in the mode of a Christopher Guest mockumentary: we’re given the gossipy real-life locals of Carthage, Texas and Matthew McConaughey as the Inspector Javier to Bernie’s Jean Valjean.  McConaughey excelled in supporting roles this year (i.e. “Magic Mike”) and he’s large and in charge in “Bernie.”  Add in Shirley MacLaine as Bernie’s sugar-mama Marjorie and you have a comedy blacker than black.

Prometheus-Movie-Spoilers9. “Prometheus.”  “I beheld the wretch, the miserable monster whom I had created!”  That’s not Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” but Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the 1818 novel that pretty much invented science-fiction as we know it and bore the subtitle: “The Modern Prometheus.” Don’t worry: you needn’t have a degree in Greek mythology to get at the film’s interest in biogenesis.  A prequel to Scott’s “Alien” of 1979, “Prometheus” sustains the series’ interest in the alien versus the human, the other versus, well, us.  (Wasn’t it Zizek who argued that the alien itself is beyond representation and therefore menaces the human and his fantasies of coherence?) Yes, there’s a reptilian man-eater on the loose aboard a spaceship but there are also corporate drones working for Weyland Corporation, an outfit so exploitative it makes the mining colony of “Avatar” look like the Walt Disney Company. Here there’s a self-administered C-section as horrifying as the gut-busting moment in that earlier classic. Michael Fassbender is only halfway human as the android David; he is just as true to Ian Parker as Ash in the original as heroine Noomi Rapace is to the queen of sci-fi feminism: Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley.  Those are some mighty big moon-boots to fill.

10. “Moonrise Kingdom.”  The other great film by a guy with the last name Andersonmoonrise-kingdom-whysoblu.com-3 in 2012.  If 2004’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and 2007’s “The Darjeeling Unlimited” are marked by a kind of comic chilliness, “Moonrise Kingdom” turns to puppy-love to warm up matters.  We’ll always have summer camp. Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward have just the air of chic geek to set Anderson’s wheels spinnin’.  It’s so funny you forgot to laugh.

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS OF 2012

Battleship-Movie-Image

1.  “Battleship.” “It’s the North Koreans, I’m telling you!” screams some soldier as robotic squid rise from the Pacific Ocean.  No, it’s this noisy shipwreck of a summer dud, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Pop-star Rihanna plays against type by wearing pants.  Here she’s a weapon specialist. The traditional features of narrative, such as characterization and actual human dialogue between mortals, take a backseat to a never-ending sequence of aerial shots and fiery explosions.  All inspired by the classic board game; I would have much preferred a round of Russian roulette.

2.  “Chernobyl Diaries.” Did somebody say Russia? What’s next? A movie based on the recent Japanese nuclear meltdown known as the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster of 2011, Godzilla and all?  Even worse that being exploitative of an actual tragedy, namely the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, responsible for an unknown number of deaths, deformities, and cancers, “Chernobyl Diaries” isn’t the least bit scary.  The shaky hand-held camera bequeathed to horror-film-goers post-“Blair Witch Project” produces more vertigo than uneasiness and the flesh-eating mutants that haunt the abandoned power plant look like overstock from “The Walking Dead.”  Spielberg consistently turns historical tragedy into art; these guys turn tragedy into cash.  Scratch that: they turned a disaster into a disaster.

this-means-war-port3. “This Means War.” This  means refund. Reese Witherspoon exhausts the cute factor in this romantic comedy/spy film in which Tom Hardy and Chris Pine pine after Witherspoon’s character Lauren, a product testing executive with zero taste.  Directed by McG, “This Means War” really means two men triangulating their desire for each other through a woman, which is what the late theorist Eve Sedgwick identified as the dark-side of male homosocial bonds.  Women, it seems, are only there to get in the way of what can’t be openly expressed. Get a room, guys!

4. “Total Recall.”  We hardly expect an actress such as Kate Beckinsale, best known as an icy werewolf slayer in the Underworld series, to bring pathos to a reboot of the Phillip K. Dick classic, “Total Recall.”  (She brought that, however, to “Contraband” by playing the victim for once.)  Colin Farrell is going through the motions here as he jumps realities and time-frames; if it’s time traveling you’re after, a far better film this year was the edgier, and more original, “Looper.”  Directed by Mr. Beckinsale (aka Len Wiseman), “Total Recall” is supposedly about remembering but all you’ll want to do is forget.

5. “Red Tails.” How did the true story of the African American Air Force service517MK7QHhiL._SL500_SS500_ members known as the Tuskegee airmen of WWII become a tepid video game from the 1980s?  Oh, that’s because “Red Tails” has been kicking around Hollywood since the ’80s, when producer George Lucas first took interest in the project.  All that prep-time and it never leaves the runway and that’s because special effects trump life-like characters.  Lucas didn’t help matters when he openly discussed the difficulty in making such a film, which was followed by a broader discussion about the (mis)representation of black Americans on film.  “Flight” is a far better film from 2012 of a commanding African American pilot in mid-air.   “Red Tails,” meanwhile, is a total nosedive.

TWO MORE dishonorable mentions:  “American Reunion” and “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer“

What am I forgetting?  Praise AND Punch the films of 2012 below…

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