Some Came Running

The 25 best films of 2012: 5 through 1; honorable mentions; & sundry

John Carter

5) The Kid With a Bike, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, reviewed here.

4) Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson, reviewed here.

3) Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow, reviewed here. Some words on the controversy over its content here. 

2) The Turin Horse, Bela Tarr, discussed briefly here. Having seen it again, I am still under the spell of its dread and mordant laughter and, yes, at its self-awareness in terms of being at least in part a compendium of Eastern-European-art-cinema tropes. 

1) The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson, reviewed here; some brief further thoughts in MSN Movies' Best Of The Year gallery. 

Honorable mentions: with review links where applicable: The Avengers, Joss Whedon; Dark Horse, Todd Solondz; The Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen Larry Charles; Francine, Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky (full disclosure: co-director Cassidy was my wedding photographer; Shatzky helped); The Gray, Joe Carnahan; Jiro Dreams of Sushi, David Gelb; John Carter, Andrew Stanton; Kill List, Ben Wheatley; Killing Them Softly  Andrew Dominik.

We pause here for a caveat/objection, from an MSN Movies reader, sent to me via e-mail, with the heading "Never again will I trust your reviews": "How in the world could you give the movie, Killing Them Softly, 4 stars? You have people out here barely making a living, spending their hard earned money, using your reviews to help decide on movies. And you mislead us with a garbage review. I never went to a movie where people were walking out halfway through the movie. You should be ashamed of yourself for misleading us with whats obviously a paid review. No way you could have watched this movie and give it 4 stars without some type of payoff. I will never, I repeat never, go by your review of a movie again. I will also let MSN know how I feel about this situation."

Okay. Continuing. The Loneliest Planet, Julia Lotkev, discussed briefly here with the disclosure that the author of the source short story, Tom Bissell, is a close friend; The Perks of Being A Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky; The Secret World of Arietty, Hiromasa Yonebayashi; Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh; Ted, Seth MacFarlane (this picture gained in my estimation after My Lovely Wife had a raucous time with the Blu-ray); and To Rome With Love, Woody Allen. 

Best undistributed (as yet) movies: Post Tenebras Lux, Carlos Reygadas; Traveling Light, Gina Telaroli; The Unspeakable Act, Dan Sallitt. As mentioned in the posts about their films, Gina and Dan are friends.  

Regretably not seen at time of list compilation: Barbara, Christian Petzold; and pretty much every other documentary. And possibly many others.

I'm not allowed to discuss Haywire or Magic Mike but anyone who's acquainted with me socially understands that I love them very much. 

And now, as Fredonia goes to war, I'm gonna take a bath. 

UPDATE: To address the queries of commenters, God, I don't know why every time I make a list, Terence Davies' masterful The Deep Blue Sea always falls through the mental cracks, but it does and I'm sorry, it's great. As for Killer Joe, yes, that too is on my "to watch" pile even as we speak. 

The 25 best films of 2012: 15 through 11

ParaNorman

15: Amour, Michael Haneke.

After I saw this at the New York Film Festival I called my wife, from whom I have a not insubstantial age difference, and sincerly apologized to her for ruining her life. So, you know, another feel-good classic from Haneke. But seriously...yes, indeed, "but seriously," because there's a certain sense in which this movie does satisfy a conventional jones for "serious" film. I don't think such a thing is to be deplored, but it's also not really (as far as I know in my self-searching) a component in my commendation for the film. It is harrowing, it is tender, it is troubling, it is compelling, and Haneke is working with a technical mastery that comes within spitting distance of Bergman's, and those are the components in my commendation of the film. 

14: Hello, I Must Be Going, Todd Louiso, reviewed here.

13: ParaNorman, Chris Butler and Sam Fell, reviewed here.

12) Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

I've blown hot and cold on Ceylan's films for a long time. While the peanut-choking bit in Climates nearly made me a convert for life, the schematics of Three Monkeys (yep, THOSE KIND) turned me back around. With this commited, tense, claustrophobic near-epic, he nails both atmosphere and content in what seems an effortless exhalation. Nice. 

11) This Is Not A Film, Jafar Panahi.

I'm sorry that I didn't get to review this, and in a sense I'm not. It's a movie that's so perfectly self-contained that a description/exegesis would seem at least mildly insulting. It should be seen, is really all I've got to say about it. 

The 25 best films of 2012: 25 through 21

Prometheus

I'm going to do my best of the year a little differently this year. This week, Monday through Friday, I'll be putting up five, and they're ranked by preference (I guess) and of course in reverse order so it's the SUSPENSE that gets you. 

25: Red Hook Summer, Spike Lee, reviewed here. 

24: Prometheus, Ridley Scott, reviewed here.

23: Goodbye, First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve, commendation and interview with the director here. 

22: Damsels In Distress, Whit Stillman, considered here. 

21: The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan, reviewed here.

The only Bond-movie-ranking article that matters

Whose do you think? And this time I'm not apologizing for the pain-in-the-ass gallery format, as it helps BUILD SUSPENSE. My Bond list, with two non-Eon titles, for MSN Movies. 

UPDATE: The indelible above image is from Live And Let Die. The Beretta/PPK switch gaffe is being fixed. 

My "Sight & Sound 50 Greatest Films Of All Time" Ballot

I was quite honored, this spring, to receive an invitation to participate in the British Film Institute/Sight & Sound "Greatest Films Of All Time" poll. Now that the results of that poll are being unveiled online, I figure it would not be improper for me to put up my own ballot, along with the note I attached to it. 

1) Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
2) Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
3) Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959)
4) Céline et Julie vent en bateau (Rivette, 1974)
5) Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
6) Belle de jour (Buñuel, 1967)
7) Boudu sauvé des eaux (Renoir, 1932)
8) Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Lang, 1922)
9) Singin' in the Rain (Donen & Kelly, 1952)
10)The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

Thanks so much for the invitation to participate in the poll. It's true; the task is not an easy one at all. I arrived at this particular list, one out of perhaps dozens of other entirely different ones, by splitting he difference between honoring convention and saying to hell with it. As it happens, the four films on the list which might conceivably be seen as "consensus" picks—Kane, Psycho, Singin' in the Rain, Searchers—are also ones close to "my heart" or at least the formation of my sensibility. The other six films came to me after a lot of debate with myself over whether I was being different for the sake of being different, or whether these were not in fact truly GREAT films that, when the time came for surveys along the lines of this one, did not get the proper recognition for being the imaginatively prodigious, paradigm-shifting, galvanic works that I believe they in fact are. OF COURSE I regret that my list cannot be longer, because surely Sansho Dayu, The General (not to mention Sherlock Jr.), The Last Temptation of Christ, and a lot more ought to have a place, and the more I think about the films and filmmakers I am leaving off (Yang! Naruse!...and, yep, Godard; what am I thinking?) the more I can twist a long knife inside both my guts and brain. And for all that this is a list that in its way satisfies me. If anybody asks me "What IS cinema," yeah, I can show them any one of these pictures and say "This is."

Board moves

The only-25-per-year limit of movies that can be added to the National Film Registry is an integral part of the excitement/frustration cinephiles feel on the unveiling of the list at the end of the year. The all-too-human compulsion to speculate on the motives and politics of the Registry's board was particularly strong in this observer as he looked over this year's selections. Forrest Gump, huh?  Well, score one for Dave Kehr, the board's representative for the National Society of Film Critics, both an outspoken Gump booster and general Zemeckis defender. On the other hand...here's Silence of the Lambs, the film that I believe ruined Demme for Kehr (the critic had once nursed hopes that the director could have become the American Renoir). I can just see the maneuvering going on around the table...well, no, actually I can't. But still. In any event, one of the more exciting pictures on the list is Otto Preminger's 1959 Porgy and Bess, a picture that's been almost impossible to see in any halfway decent presentation for pretty much...well, for pretty much the length of my own movie-going life, something a couple of hairs over four decades. (A couple years back I sprung for something along the lines of a bootleg German DVD of the film...I know, I'm completely anti-bootleg, but forgive me Lord, I was weak. In any event, it's completely worthless, unwatchable.) I'm not near my reference library at the moment, but from what I can recall the availability of the film for screening or video release has been pretty much sat upon, since not very long after the film's theatrical release, by the Gershwin estate. Now selection into the Registry means something more than just a sort of critical seal of approval from a government agency. No, it dictates that the film be "preserved as [a] cultural, artistic and historical [treasure] in the [...] Registry of The Library of Congress." In the case of a relatively recent and well-disseminated picture such as, say, Gump and/or Lambs, that's not such a huge deal to achieve. For something like Porgy and Bess—not to mention other obscure-to-the-general-public pictures such as A Cure For Pokeritis and The Cry of the Children, both made in 1912, George Kuchar's 1977 I, An Actress, and even Cassavetes' 1968 Faces—it's a different matter, and "preservation" might also entail restoration. Does this mean a rep-house revival of Porgy and Bess, complete with an eventual Blu-ray release? Not necessarily. But by naming the film to the Registry, its board is, in a sense, forcing the issue in a particular way. It will be interesting and hopefully gratifying to see what results from this gambit.  

UPDATE: The always gracious and informative Mr. Kehr clears up a bunch of things for us in the comments section, like so. 

Year's best

Back at Premiere, my bosses used to indulge me. In a LOT of ways, for sure, but one particularly crucial and welcome one was that they let me get away with doing non-weighted ten-best lists. Not only were they not weighted (sometimes I put 'em in alphabetical order, even), but they weren't always ten-best lists, either. 

Not that I'm complaining about participating in a weighted ten-best poll for MSN Movies. No, far from it. Just noting that DOING a weighted list concentrates the mind in a particular way—here, in two ways, since aside from the movie-assessment brain, the "what I want to end up on the final ten-best list" brain also has a say. As it so happens, the MSN system assigns x number of points to the number one film on a critic's list, something-less-than-x points to the number two film, and so on. I wish I could say that I'm so pure that boosting strategies NEVER entered my mind at any point, but that would be a lie. But I will report that not only did my sole (honest) boosting-strategy placement not bear the desired fruit, but that the number one film in the MSN Movies critics' poll is not represented either in my top ten or the further 17 films below that. Ten of the further 17, barring the Fincher, were submitted along with the top ten to Film Comment's annual poll. I thank Allison Benedikt for inviting me to participate in the Village Voice poll, but a) the Voice is dead to me since they fired Robert Christgau and b) I don't wanna be part of any club that would also have [at least three if not six names redacted] as a member. I don't know where the Fincher would be had I been able to see it in time to include it in either the MSN or the Film Comment poll, so there you have it. 

1) A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg) Reviewed here. Other musings here. Cronenberg interview here.

2) Hugo (Martin Scorsese) Reviewed here. Other musings here. 

3) The Descendants (Alexander Payne) Reviewed here. Payne interview here.                                        

4) Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) Reviewed here. 

5) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Written about here.

6) We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay) Reviewed here. 

7) Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan) Written about here. 

8) Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz) Written about here. 

9) The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar) Reviewed here. 

10) The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) Reviewed here.

11) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher) Come on, man. The link is in the post right below this one. Save me some goddamn keystrokes, okay?

12) Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami) Reviewed here. 

13) Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) The review that helped solidify Andy Rector's potentially homicidal hatred for me is here. The comments thread in which you can witness the homicidal hatred gelling is here. Fun times, those were. If I do end up murdered, I trust one of you out there will do the right thing for me and my widow.

14) Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) Reviewed here.

15) Winnie The Pooh (Stephen J. Anderson and Jon Hall) Reviewed here.

16) Shame (Steve McQueen) Reviewed here. 

17) A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) Review soon to come. 

18) Young Adult (Jason Reitman) Reviewed here.

19) Cold Weather (Aaron Katz) Reviewed here.

20) Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt) "Cultural vegetable," my ass. Reviewed here. 

21) Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt) Reviewed here. 

22) Win/Win (Tom McCarthy) Reviewed here.

23) J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood) Reviewed here.

24) Carnage (Roman Polanski) Reviewed here.

25) Burke and Hare (John Landis) Yes, really. Reviewed here.

26) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) I did not review this, but I did very much enjoy it. 

27) Rango (Gore Verbinski) Reviewed here. 

I also very much enjoyed Contagion, but the number and nature of disclosures I would have to make in order to be in the ethical clear to comment on it at any greater length are such that, well, I cannot. But seriously, check it out. And everything else here, if you haven't.

Okay, your ball.