The Top 10 Movies of 2012

by Brett Parker

I love movies more than you can possibly imagine and I always vowed to stick up for the medium in all shapes or forms.  That’s why I’m usually weary of the more grumpier cinephiles who constantly grumble about the troubled state of movies.  Like the Kryptonian High Council with a very bad hangover, I’m sure most of you have heard their sing-along cynicism at some time over the past few years: “Hollywood keeps putting out mindless garbage, everything is pointless reboots or remakes, only superhero movies get greenlit these days, it’s all formulaic trash, TV smokes movies in content,” and so on.  I’ve never been down with such arguments because 1) dumb-minded romps have been present since the dawn of cinema, 2) most film snobs never realize that trash can unwittingly say more about how we live and how we think than most art house flicks, 3) every film era is filled with bitter killjoys who complain about the movies they’re getting until realizing years later that they actually had it pretty good at the time.

So I’m somewhat bewildered to admit that even a crusading optimist like myself has felt a bit of a mind-numbing strain with Hollywood products in recent years.  I’m trying to pinpoint the exact moment I felt something was amiss in my moviegoing pleasures.  Was it when the Footloose remake fumbled with it’s own musical identity?  Was it during Ryan Reynolds’ climactic surfer-dude monologue in The Green Lantern?  I’m actually pretty sure it was when I witnessed in horror as the Total Recall remake smugly neglected the original’s wit, creativity, and reason for existing.  Mind you, I’m one who doesn’t mind checking his brain at the front of a theater lobby, but recently I’ve been feeling so separated from my mind that I feared I was turning into a scarecrow.  It was during a recent viewing of Sylvester Stallone’s macho shoot-em-up Bullet to the Head, a candy-shop of old-school testosterone treats, where I wistfully realized that they don’t make trash like they used to.

That’s why I felt my frown turn upside down in 2012, a year in which primal generic pleasures reclaimed their intelligence and miraculously dazzled both the popcorn muncher and intellectual in all of us.  As we dabbed in the worlds of superhero flicks, historical love letters, crowd-pleasing dramedies, cutesy indie flicks, and sci-fi mind-benders,  the movies of 2012 gave us plenty to think about and stayed with us a lot longer than we initially suspected they would.  Mind you, I’m not saying that an artistic revolution kicked into high gear, but it seemed that a lot of flicks caught on to the Right Idea.  And in a town filled to the brim with Wrong Ideas, I’ll take multiple Right Ideas straight to the bank anytime.  So without further ado, I give you my Top 10 Movies of 2012:

1) Silver Linings Playbook

On paper, there’s a ton about Silver Linings Playbook that sounds cutesy and ridiculous, but the way director David O. Russell brings it all together makes the final product a cocktail of heart and hilarity that’s damn near impossible to resist.  Using a tenderly funny Bradley Cooper and sensationally smart Jennifer Lawrence as sympathetic guides through the world of mental illness, Russell finds lively juice in exploring his usual themes of wildly dysfunctional families and the ways human behavior can allow unhinged wackiness into the real world.  While the story appears to hold the usual trappings of a quirky dramedy, it’s old-school slapstick energy and surprising warmth towards the darker shades of life truly grabs you.  In a world where preposterousness has become the new normal and it seems like every person has something internal eating away at them, it’s Silver Linings Playbook’s acute understanding of this world, and the sensible optimism it offers up to deal with it, that helps it score a touchdown in our hearts.

2) The Master

With his usual ideas regarding hustlers and outsiders latching onto each other to find purpose in an unpredictable universe, Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a difficult dazzler that explores the ways in which man’s spiritual and animal sides try to uneasily co-exist with each other.  With Joaquin Phoenix giving the performance of the year (and the performance of a lifetime) alongside Phillip Seymour Hoffman displaying a scorching reptilian charm, Anderson teases the curious ways in which preachers and worshippers need each other to exist.  Using the origins of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology movements as a cryptic starting point, Anderson discovers the fascination in how religious institutions can bounce between sneaky hope and suspicious skepticism simultaneously.  This all makes The Master a spellbinding study of the cracks in created belief systems and the backhanded ways we can use them to deal with our lives.

3) Looper
While most time travel stories get caught up in their own metaphysical logistics, Looper is a refreshingly imaginative sci-fi tale that uses time travel as a backdrop to evoke bigger ideas about the troubling habitual mindsets that wreak havoc upon mankind and how we could even hope to repair such negativity.  As an assassin who kills human targets sent from the future, a smoldering and intense Joeseph Gordon-Levitt faces off with an implosive and conflicted Bruce Willis playing an older version of the young assassin as he dives into the past to repair a disastrous future.  Writer/director Rian Johnson’s script is a model of intricate and contemplative sci-fi writing that leads to a shattering climax in which hope and gloom are reconciled in brilliant form.  Looper is a welcome reminder that big ideas can always trump big special effects when given the most attention.

4) Argo
Riffing on the spellbinding true story of how Hollywood created a fake movie to rescue American hostages during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, Argo became one of the most unlikeliest and generous crowd-pleasers of the year.  Relying on his growing knack for vivid surroundings and rich character details, actor/director Ben Affleck showed off a relaxed straight-forwardness in molding a tale of nail-biting danger and Hollywood insider humor that proved to be surprisingly fluid.  With all of its expert storytelling and great evocation of its time period, what makes Argo ultimately engaging is the adventurous kick it gets in showing both the U.S. government and Hollywood proving to be heroic in a time of great crisis.

5) Lincoln
What was initially assumed to be a lumbering and sentimental portrayal of one of our country’s most beloved presidents turned out to be one of the most illuminating and absorbing movies about the political process ever made.  By focusing primarily on Abraham Lincoln’s quest to abolish slavery at the end of the Civil War, the film highlights  great fascination in the shrewd dealings and grand emotions behind the difficult business of passing an amendment.  Helping matters is the work of top-of-their-form experts who spare this tale from being a lumbering history lesson: Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerizing at evoking Lincoln’s homegrown warmth and intelligence, the model screenplay by Tony Kushner finds surprising poetry and suspense amidst a political ordeal, and Steven Spielberg uses his lyrical gifts to find peculiar beauty in our nation’s past.  It’s rare to find a film so honest about our nation’s inner-workings that lifts our spirits about the institution at the same time.

6) Celeste and Jesse Forever
Female-driven films can feel like a rare entity at times, especially ones that don’t peddle cliches and stereotypes.  That’s why Celeste and Jesse Forever is such a gem, for it offers a rare glimpse of a woman dealing with a divorce, and the various emotional bases that includes, in a way we barely see handled well at the movies.  Armed with a script she co-wrote with Will McCormack, Rashida Jones turns in my favorite female performance of the year as an emotionally-imploding woman who proves to be hilarious, contemplative, challenging, tender, and heart-wrenching all at the same time.  It’s rare to find a movie about a modern woman packed with killer-funny laughs and deep, eye-opening insights into the female psyche.  

7) Moonrise Kingdom
While most filmmakers offer us unique visions of the world we live in, Wes Anderson offers us a portal to a whole new universe, one in which retro styles, candy-coated locations, peculiar pop, and internalized yearning emotions collide within a delightfully whimsical canvas.  Moonrise Kingdom is yet another worthwhile trip inside Anderson’s head, this time exploring the innocence of young love and the deep ways 1960s America rationalized its choices.  Fusing subtle touches of a hippie rebellion story and an age-old tale of adolescent romance across opposing summer camps, Anderson hints at how institutions of sanitized structures are no match for appetites of the heart and exuberance within the human spirit.  Filled with his trademark deadpan humor, european flavorings, and childlike vision of the world, Anderson offers one of his most heart-poking and bright-eyed landscapes yet.

8) Django Unchained
If Inglorious Basterds re-wrote the book on what historical war movies are good for, then his latest opus, Django Unchained, re-imagines the birth of blacksploitation to fit a time when black culture probably needed it the most.  Playing around once again with his favorite cinematic delights, Tarantino creates an epic fusion between the Western and blacksploitation, although the film is more an incarnation of the latter than most people realize.  Through the super-cool cowboy that is Jamie Foxx as the title character, Tarantino offers us troubling glimpses of the atrocities white people have committed against the black race during slavery and hints at the smarts and bad-ass resourcefulness blacks can possess to stick it right back to The Man.  While some people have trouble dealing with the fact that  a white filmmaker has used the horrors of slavery to get his moviegoing jollies off, it’s important to remember that Tarantino isn’t trying to solve the problems of racism.  He’s merely demonstrating how B-Movie formulas can be used evocatively to suggest the darker aspects of humanity and offer up release anxiety fantasies to deal with them in our heads.  It’s an important cinematic reminder and one that I’m thankful shows up in an exciting Tarantino package.  

9) The Dark Knight Rises
With this final installment in Christopher Nolan’s take on the Batman legend, the filmmaker pushes the series’ comic book themes to their absolute breaking point and the result is compelling entertainment on a grand scale.  The success of The Dark Knight allowed Nolan to pull out all the stops this time, and one can’t help but marvel at the epic scale in which this comic book tale is carried out.  Adding electric interest is the wonderful perceptions of Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway, who take popular villains Bane and Catwoman, respectively, and dazzle us endlessly with their theatricality.  Yet it’s Christian Bale’s weary and tortured take on the legendary caped crusader that holds us the entire way through this troubling world.  Throughout the trilogy, he’s been alert to every complicated nuance the hero demanded, and he brings it all home here with piercing resonance.  In the end, we realize that The Dark Knight Rises isn’t just unlike any superhero film we’ve seen before, it’s unlike any film we’ve ever seen before period.

10) Chronicle
While hand-held “found footage” and superhero flicks feel like they been overdone to death in Hollywood, Chronicle meets both genres halfway and the result creates one of the most intimate and involving takes on each medium I can remember.  As three teenagers (the wonderful Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, and Alex Russell) obtain superpowers from a mysterious glowing substance, the film offers a unique bridge between a superhero origin story and a teen angst tale along with the scary, dangerous ways those two ideals can threaten each other.  The hand-held footage gimmick is actually used provocatively to bring a real sense of emotional discovery to scenes of superpower awakenings and a white-knuckled impending doom when those powers begin to fuel troubling juvenile emotions.  Everything comes to a head in a heart-stopping climax which is like a clash between the endings of Superman II and Rebel Without A Cause.  Your head reels from the fact that the film is overstuffed with exuberance, terror, and excitement until you catch on that being a teenager also bounces feverishly between those very same feelings.  

HONORABLE MENTIONS

-Amour

-The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

-Seven Psychopaths

-Zero Dark Thirty

A 'Warm' View of Zombies

by Brett Parker

In an age where it feels like every possible angle on zombies has been done to death (no pun intended), along comes Warm Bodies, which offers up the wildly incongruent perspective of the zombie as anguished romantic hero.  Seeing as how zombies are inherently rotting human carcasses who can’t exist without devouring living human flesh like a fat kid at a pie eating contest, having them fall helplessly in love with their food John Hughes-style sounds too ridiculously implausible to work.  But in an age where nonsense like Twilight has proven to be a smash, anything is possible, right?  So it’s bewildering as much as it is refreshing that Warm Bodies actually works as a film miles more than you’d expect.  No one ever really suspected that a shotgun marriage between George A. Romero and Cameron Crowe could gel, but maybe it’s just what this genre’s doctor ordered.

The film opens in what appears to be the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in America.  We meet R (Nicholas Hoult) a teenage zombie who can’t remember what his first name was when he was human, but he thinks it began with an “R.”  We see R as he conducts his daily routine of scrummaging through the North American wasteland with other decaying zombies looking for live humans to feast on.  He considers M (Rob Corddry) his best friend, but they’re too dehumanized to muster up a coherent conversation.  R has made an abandoned airplane his home, which is filled with relics of former civilization that include a record player and a vinyl collection.  Listening to what music used to be (which includes Bruce Springsteen amongst R’s records) causes R to pine for human feelings that he used to feel.  R spends his days wondering whether or not he could ever overcome his undead condition to act like a normal, full-blooded person ever again.

Things change dramatically for R when he goes out one day to hunt for flesh with his fellow zombies.  He meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), a pretty blonde fighter for a band of uninfected humans trying to survive in their post-apocalyptic world.  As the other zombies feast on Julie’s friends, R is hit with feelings of romanticism instead of feelings of hunger for her.  R tries his very best to convey a sense of human decency through his rotting exterior and he’s miraculously able to convince Julie that there’s remnants of a spirit inside of him.  Pretty soon, a peculiar courtship develops where R tries to convey his surprising romantic feelings towards Julie while she hopes to find a way to bring whatever heart and soul remains in him to the forefront.  Julie’s Dad, Grigio (John Malkovich), is the leader of the human resistance against zombies and R has the blonde warrior hoping to convince her father that zombies aren’t hopeless demons that have to be exterminated but could probably become human again with traditional feelings of love.  

What’s so enduring about the zombie genre is how shrewdly oozing corpses have consistently served as the perfect metaphors for the trials and tribulations of American society.  Since Romero’s pioneering heyday, zombies have kindly offered us reflective commentaries on post-war trauma, consumerism, nuclear anxieties, social unrest, government corruption, mob mentality, and even crackpot Americana resourcefulness when depicted as comedy.  Perhaps Warm Bodies never feels as fully preposterous as it should because the repressed zombies on display perfectly depict present-day American people: numbed-out slugs trudging through a compromised existence yearning unconsciously for an emotional connection and nourishment of the heart.  The story gets its juice from the realization that if you were to ask a random zombie “what’s on your mind?,” then you’d probably get the same cryptic answers as any disillusioned American of today asked the same question.  To say that all a zombie needs is a lot of tender, love, and care to cure his problems may seem like a hell of a theoretical stretch, but the fact that most of the audience watching the film could use the same kind of medicine these days gives Warm Bodies an emotional connection that spares it from being completely vapid.

Warm Bodies is perhaps as surprisingly engaging as it is because director Jonathan Levine sees this tale as just another one of his trademark riffs on young men trying to find solid emotional ground in an increasingly confusing world.  Like a teenager trying to deal with youthful angst (The Wackness) or a young man battling cancer (50/50), Levine depicts R’s view of his own zombie condition as an inconvenient affliction that can perhaps be overcome with the right emotional mindset.  If Levine’s heroes are males trying to retain a strong sense of self as they fight for normalcy amongst bewildering circumstances, then his themes are put to the ultimate test here since zombieitis could be considered the ultimate threat to those very ideals.  Of course, reducing the entire zombie experience down to a young man’s coming-of-age quest to find emotional fulfillment sidesteps a ton of hellish circumstances naturally inherent in the basic concept of a zombie tale, but it sure does bring a lot of empathetic juice to a lunatic cinematic concept.  Plus it offers moments of cockeyed beauty rarely felt in this genre, as when R is drawn to the positive vibes he feels when he plays his vinyl records or when R’s newfound romance inspires the other zombies around him to feel all tingly at the sight of a poster depicting a romantic couple on a beach.  

To whatever extent this crackpot tale actually works, most credit can be given to Nicholas Hoult and the tricky sympathy he blasts through the guise of being a rotting corpse.  The trouble with a zombie being a romantic hero is the inherent lack of romanticism in their appearance, for ultra-pale skin, decaying flesh, and demonic eyes are hardly considered dreamboat traits.  Yet Hoult is able to make all of those things feel like it’s part of a disheveled, lonely teenager package and is able to generate a Quasimodo-style sincerity with it all.  His voice-over narration has a charmingly down-to-earth quirkiness about his ordeal, kind of like a post-apocalyptic Lloyd Dobler.  A scene in which Julie and a friend give him a shower and cover him with make-up offers up a rare moment in the zombie genre: one of heart-warming uplift.  As the lady love R pines for, Teresa Palmer proves here as she did in Take Me Home Tonight that she is a suitable throwback to that ancient Hollywood tradition of having a pretty blonde with inklings of spunk as the ultimate romantic holy grail.  If Julie is lacking in the personality department, then that makes sense seeing as how R would have a hard time dealing with a real ball of feministic fire.  Katherine Hepburn, for example, would make him give up and just start eating her out of inadequacy.  Julie feels like the perfect starter girlfriend until more of his lost humanity kicks in.  If their tender courtship scenes seems like pretty basic stuff, then they feel all the more impressive once you grasp the unlikely bizarreness they grew out of.

It’s not hard to suspect that a work like Warm Bodies was most likely concocted as a result of the Twilight series wild success, but I couldn’t help but notice that this zombie tale smokes the vampire one on its own ideological grounds.  My biggest qualm with Twilight is its heavy reliance on numbskull logistics and overdone romantic pulp to distract from the hard answers to the premise’s central question: why would a monster fall in love with his own food?  From where I sit, Warm Bodies answers such a preposterous question with a lot more tenderness, humor, and level-headedness.  Twilight makes the mistake of taking its ridiculous world so dreadfully seriously while the joy of Warm Bodies is its comic curiosity and gaga hopefulness about whether or not a zombie could actually fall in love.  That you can kind of halfway believe they could is the film’s ultimate success.