From TOH
TOH! Top Tens of 2012
1. "Life of Pi"
Taiwan-born Ang Lee, more than any director working today, is a filmmaker for the world. His three great love stories -- martial arts romance "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," gay tragedy "Brokeback Mountain" and Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility"-- were accessible to multiple cultures. With "Life of Pi" Lee has fashioned, with screenwriter David Magee ("Finding Neverland") adapting Yann Martel's global bestseller, another love story that transcends borders. In this case, it's between a 17-year-old young man (non-pro Suraj Sharma) from India and a Bengal tiger. But it is also a stunning technological triumph, as the VFX required were impossible until now. Conceived four years ago before the arrival of the 3-D "Avatar," this movie is a live-action/animation hybrid, as major characters like the threatening tiger and sublime phosphorescent Pacific seascapes could only be created by artists in the digital realm.
2. "Beasts of the Southern Wild"
When he won the grand jury and cinematography prizes at Sundance, director Benh Zeitlin, who shot "Beasts" with his ragtag film collective on a constantly flooding delta island below the New Orleans levees with a cast of non-actors, said: "We had more freedom to make this film than any filmmakers in America ever." Zeitlin was able to control the chaos: the end result is a constantly surprising and deeply moving fantastical portrait of where we are, right now.
3. "Zero Dark Thirty"
Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's incredibly timely movie about the CIA's ten-year pursuit of Osama bin Laden is as relentless as its heroine (Jessica Chastain), laying out the hard facts and details without flinching from its purpose, which is to make real the daily headlines. Bigelow deploys 120 speaking parts from all over the world and three to four roving cameras to catch the unfolding action in wide-ranging locations from India, Egypt and Jordan to London and Washington, D.C. As Bigelow avoids Hollywood narrative conventions, she also gives us the toughest motherfuckin' woman lead since Ripley.
4. "Silver Linings Playbook"
This delicately edited family relationship comedy is both funny and moving. The film's two romantic leads, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, are two lost, emotionally damaged yet attractive people who draw comfort and kinship from each other. Writer-director David O. Russell has, dare I say it, Billy Wilder's tough unsentimental approach to romance. Even in this cynical age, we root for these two characters in pain to heal each other, make their families happy, win their dance contest and find true love.
5. "Lincoln"
The thing that hits you on first viewing "Lincoln" is how unconventional it is. It's organic, grown from the seeds in Doris Kearns Goodwin's 800-page Lincoln tome "Team of Rivals," nurtured over five years by playwright Tony Kushner, and shaped by Steven Spielberg and actor Daniel Day-Lewis into something we've never seen before. This alchemy of a torrent of words, well-researched history, and the powerful personality of the world's most popular American president has yielded a magical biopic that is the current front-runner in the Oscar race.
6. "End of Watch"
David Ayer celebrates the work ethic and bravery of two cops, partners on the beat in East Los Angeles, who face an unforgiving world with humor and verbal acuity. Shot on the run, the movie was choreographed with no room for waste or error: Ayer shot 135 hours of footage in 22 days. Jack Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena were primed and ready and give the best performances of their respective careers.
7. "Argo"
Ben Affleck directs this taut and commercial thriller, his third behind the camera, with screw-tightening efficiency that would make Michael Mann proud. Think "The Insider" on steroids. Affleck gives a solid, naturalistic performance as Tony Mendez, a smart and experienced CIA operative who specializes in pulling people out of tight situations. Affleck, like other actor-directors Clooney and Clint Eastwood, sees the value of staying hands-on with a modest budget. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Oscar-nominated for "Brokeback Mountain") does outstanding work on location in Turkey, Los Angeles and the Ontario airport, while composer Alexandre Desplat ("The King's Speech") could land a fifth Oscar nomination--unless he knocks himself out with "Zero Dark Thirty."
8. "The Sessions"
"The Sessions" starts with a script from Australian filmmaker Ben Lewin, who suffered polio as a youth and still limps with a cane. Helen Hunt and John Hawkes saw rich material in this story about the late great intellectual Mark O'Brien who wanted more from life than lying immobile in an iron lung. He found a sex surrogate to help him find love in his life. While the surrogate came to care deeply for O'Brien--within the confines of a professional relationship--she was able to teach him how to make another woman happy. Audiences are often uncomfortable with sex in cinema, and this movie embraces moments that are awkward and embarrassing, even humiliating. This intimate sexual souffle is so delicate and sensitive--both actors are literally naked-- that it could easily have gone flat. Instead it is uplifting.
'Moonrise Kingdom"
10. "Anna Karenina"
The decision not to shoot "Anna Karenina" on location in Russia liberated director Joe Wright. Without changing the Tom Stoppard adaptation of Tolstoy's classic, Wright used an old London theater as a way to completely free himself from the constrictions of period costume drama. "Anna Karenina" is a swirling, mad, exuberant, joyful, passionate celebration of the novel. Anna (Keira Knightley of Wright's "Atonement" and "Pride & Prejudice") is far from your ordinary romantic heroine. She's doomed to meet that train. But there's more to this story than adultery. Tolstoy's counterpart, Levin (Domhall Gleeson), balances out the drama. And Jude Law gives one of his best performances as Anna's cuckolded husband.
BEST FOREIGN FILM
"Barbara," Germany's Oscar entry, is Christian Petzold's fifth collaboration with actress Nina Hoss. She plays an intrepid East Berlin doctor in 1980 who has been sent to the boonies as punishment for wanting to leave the country. Like everyone around her, she lies to survive; she sneaks around in the night to meet her West German lover in the woods. But she's a great doctor who cares for her patients; that bonds her with her fellow doctor (up-and-comer Ronald Zehrfeld). Even though she's surrounded by fear and suspicion and paranoia, she comes to trust him.
BEST DOCUMENTARY
Eugene Jarecki's incisive and incendiary "The House I Live In," which won the U.S. documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and is shortlisted for next year's doc Oscar, will blow your mind. That's because it tackles a subject that you think you know a little about--America's war on drugs--and in excruciating detail shows you how the whole system is broken and dysfunctional.
BEST ANIMATED FILM
"Frankenweenie," Tim Burton filmed his most personal movie since "Edward Scissorhands" in black and white and stop motion. He returns to the Burbank suburbs he has loved to show us ever since the 1984 Disney short on which the movie is based. While the feature was not a box office success, it's an inspiring reminder of what an artist can do when he's not playing to the marketplace.
From NYTimes
25 Favorites From a Year When 10 Aren’t Enough
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: December 14, 2012
IF you spent a lot of time this year reading and writing about movies — as opposed to watching them, which is more fun — you might have detected recurrent notes of anxiety, trepidation, even dread. Television is better than movies; audience levels are in a state of permanent decline; the Hollywood studios have given up on grown-ups; and digital, a force so powerful that it is both adjective and noun, is destroying cinema as we know it. These are among the tenets of a pessimistic conventional wisdom.
They may well all be true, but the movies themselves answered this hand
wringing with a defiant “So what?” Over the past decade series
television has certainly (at last) begun to unlock its potential to
deliver complex, long-form narrative, but there are still feats of
scale, intimacy and visual ambition that cannot be doled out in episodic
small-screen doses.
And people still like to go to the movies! The big studios, after the
usual summer of superheroes and sequels, crowded the fourth quarter of
the year with solid stories about adult matters, some of which — “Argo,”
“Flight,” “Lincoln” — brought in pretty good box office. And some of
the best films of the year were actually, in the old-fashioned literal
sense, films, brought to us by the chemical transformation of strips of
stuff rather than the mathematical manipulation of strings of code.
Digital cinema is a mighty force, still emerging, and it continued to
extend its reach in 2012. Not only did computer-hatched effects help us
see superheroes, Hobbits and Pixar creatures; they also added the tiger
to “Life of Pi” and subtracted Marion Cotillard’s legs from “Rust and Bone.”
Digital, because it lowers costs and increases access to the tools of
filmmaking, is also partly responsible for the current boom in
documentaries, which were so various and powerful this year that they
demanded their own list.
But I’m struck, surveying my own favorites, by how many films relied on
old-fashioned methods and materials: the grainy 16-millimeter of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”;
the lustrous 65-millimeter of “The Master”; the burnished chiaroscuro
of “Lincoln”; the meticulous framing and cutting of “Amour.” Maybe this
is coincidence, or fuddy-duddyism on my part. Or maybe technological
means are, finally, less important than artistic ends.
The annual ritual of narrowing down hundreds of titles — and thousands
of hours of rapture and reverie — to just 10 is a cruel torment, but
also, perhaps, a necessary discipline. Although, as usual, I’ve found it
necessary to cheat a bit, and extend the 10 to 25. These lists are
never meant to be permanent historical judgments, graven in stone. They
are ephemeral and subjective, made up of hunches and desires, and they
record, in my case, the impressions that I could not shake and the
pictures I’m eager to see again, in some cases for the fourth or fifth
time.
Top 10 Films
1. AMOUR (Michael Haneke) With ruthless clarity, but also with tact and compassion, Mr. Haneke
invites us to look at the arrival of death at the end of a Parisian
couple’s long marriage, and shows, almost as if for the first time, how
the saddest and most intractable facts of life can be transformed into
art. Months after its debut at Cannes this film already feels permanent.
2. LINCOLN
(Steven Spielberg) A great, flawed movie about a great, flawed
president of a great, flawed nation. Argue about the flaws, but allow
yourself to be moved by the grand, noble sentiments that swirl through
Tony Kushner’s eloquent script and Daniel Day-Lewis’s sly performance.
3. BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
(Benh Zeitlin) A thousand years from now scientists will know that
there was a Hushpuppy, who lived in the Bathtub with her daddy.
4. FOOTNOTE (Joseph Cedar)
This Israeli film takes what might have been a trivial anecdote — a
committee accidentally awards a prize to the wrong scholar — and turns
it into a tragicomic opera with a great deal to say about Zionism,
academia, family life and the way language functions as a bridge between
the sacred and the profane.
5. THE MASTER (Paul
Thomas Anderson) Troubling and enigmatic, this movie — suggested by the
early career of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology — seems
designed to be misunderstood. It tells the story of a damaged soul
(Joaquin Phoenix) who seeks healing from a charismatic fraud and finds
what he is looking for.
6. ZERO DARK THIRTY
(Kathryn Bigelow) A milestone in post-Sept. 11 cinema, and an attempt
to grapple honestly with the moral complexities of the war on terror.
Jessica Chastain’s tough, quiet performance as a C.I.A. officer involved
in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden synthesizes much of the collective
emotion of the past decade — grief, fear, frustration and fatigue —
within a narrative that also works as a tense and brutal geopolitical
thriller.
7. DJANGO UNCHAINED (Quentin Tarantino) Mr. Tarantino follows “Inglourious Basterds,”
his action-cartoon about the Holocaust, with an even bolder
provocation: a blaxploitation spaghetti western about American slavery.
More than any other director he tests and extends the power of
pop-culture fantasy to engage the painful atrocities of history.
8. GOODBYE, FIRST LOVE
(Mia Hansen-Love) The tired phrase “coming-of-age story” hardly does
justice to this sensitive, observant chronicle of a young woman’s
discovery of passion, disappointment and her own resourcefulness as she
moves from adolescence into her early 20s. With her third feature Ms.
Hansen-Love confirms her status as one of the freshest, bravest voices
in French movies.
9. NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (Kleber Mendonça Filho) In his first feature Mr. Mendonça,
a former film critic, chronicles the daily rhythms of life in an
affluent apartment complex in the Brazilian coastal city of Recife. What
emerges is a subtle portrait of a society in the throes of rapid social
transformation, still haunted by the cruelties of its feudal past.
10. THE GREY
(Joe Carnahan) A pack of dudes. A pack of wolves. Liam Neeson leads the
fight for survival, and Mr. Carnahan conducts a clinic in muscular
action-movie technique that is also a somber, moving meditation on life,
death and the line between the human and the wild.
HONORABLE MENTION “Argo” (Ben Affleck); “Barbara”
(Christian Petzold); “Brave” (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman);
“Consuming Spirits” (Chris Sullivan); “The Deep Blue Sea” (Terence
Davies); “Moonrise Kingdom” (Wes Anderson); “Pitch Perfect” (Jason Moore); “Rust and Bone” (Jacques Audiard); “Take This Waltz” (Sarah Polley); “The Turin Horse” (Bela Tarr).
Top Five Documentaries
1. THE GATEKEEPERS
(Dror Moreh) The post-1967 history of Israel, public and secret, as
told by six former leaders of Shin Bet, the country’s clandestine
security service. Essential, eye-opening viewing if you think you
understand the Middle East.
2. THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES (Lauren Greenfield) How the other 1 percent lives: just like the rest of us, but with a lot more money.
3. HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (David France) A remarkable story of loss, love and activism during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.
4. THIS IS NOT A FILM
(Jafar Panahi) Mr. Panahi, forbidden by the Iranian authorities from
practicing as a filmmaker, responded with this brave and witty video
diary, an essay on the struggle between political tyranny and the
creative imagination.
5. THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE
(Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon) A notorious crime — the rape
of a jogger in Central Park in 1989 — is revisited in this painful,
angry, scrupulously reported story of race, injustice and media frenzy.
Against the Odds, Smart Films Thrive at the Box Office
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 14, 2012
SEEN any good movies lately? How could you not? This has been a bumper
year for movies big and small, imported and domestic, some made for
hundreds of millions of dollars and others made for about the price of a
grande soy latte. As has been the case in recent years, the top box
office movies in America were mostly formulaic corporate entertainments,
including the superhero comic-book fantasies like “Marvel’s The Avengers”
that make some critics despair. Even amid the usual selection of
big-screen cartoons and testosterone, though, it was nice to see
female-driven stories like “The Hunger Games” — and all the female
viewers its box office represents — muscling into the mix.
Look past the Top 20 on boxofficemojo.com,
and things become more interesting. The 21st domestic top grosser of
the year was the little male stripper movie that could and did, all
while flashing its viewers: “Magic Mike,”
directed by that cinematic chameleon Steven Soderbergh, was one of the
unexpectedly enjoyable movies of the year and one of the most
surprisingly profitable. Made on the cheap, the independently bankrolled
production was bought by Warner Brothers for about $7 million and
scooped up $113 million in the United States. It’s a shining,
sweat-kissed example of how the studios could diversify their offerings
and maybe their audiences by doing more than remaking the same movies
over again, as Sony Pictures did with the perfectly adequate if
misleadingly titled “Amazing Spider-Man.”
The next 20 box office domestic grossers included solid thinking-adult entertainments like “Argo,”
“Flight” and “Lincoln,” each of which has raked in more than two of the
most heavily promoted corporate-cinema bombs of the year, “Battleship”
and “John Carter.”
Does this mean that there is a sea change, and that the studios will
start filling their slates with outrageous international exploits,
constitutional fights and gravely flawed, complex protagonists? Your
guess is as good as mine, because, really, every year the studios
release good, bad, indifferent work, the best of which invariably end up
on my Top 10. Last year Mr. Soderbergh made one of those, “Contagion.”
He better not retire, as he has threatened to do, or I will be short one
studio-ready director whom I can generally count on.
There are other dependable American directors, filmmakers who are as
good as any working anywhere today — and as good and sometimes better as
many who worked in the old studio system. Two that come to mind are Paul Thomas Anderson (“The Master”) and Wes Anderson (“Moonrise Kingdom”).
“Moonrise Kingdom” has earned $46 million, more than movies as
different as “The Three Stooges” and “Resident Evil: Retribution,” both
of which played on more than twice as many screens. “The Master” has
brought in far less money ($15 million), but it’s pretty thrilling that
this brilliant, uncompromising film was the 109th most popular at the
box office, ahead of cynical dreck like “Dredd,” a reboot that flooded
theaters and came with built-in brand recognition.
Talking about money may seem polluting, and I loathe the Monday box
office reports, which, like the endless awards season, dominate so much
of entertainment media chatter. But just like the larger shifts that
certain Oscar wins underscore, the box office numbers are reassuring
proof that the state of our movie culture is not as dire as some insist.
Movies like “Dredd” can be dispiriting, but only if you base your
arguments on the worst the movies have to offer. Today’s corporate
cinema is reflective of its moment, but so are movies like “The Master,”
which speaks to a fundamental human yearning for meaning in a story
that is specifically American. I love old Hollywood, but Louis B. Mayer
would never have made “The Master,” and neither would any other studio
boss of his era.
The sheer existence of “The Master” is reflective of the
aesthetic expansiveness of American movies, which contain multitudes —
along with, you know, garbage. Independents like Mr. Anderson usually
have to scrounge for money, true, but it is the price they pay for
making the films they want, the way that they want. That seems unfair,
but playing with large sums of other people’s money usually comes with
strings attached. It’s worth remembering that, just as it’s worth
remembering all the Hollywood hires who were forced to champ at the bit
once upon a studio time. In 1935 the great screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote a
hilarious, wildly filthy poem mocking the demands of his Hollywood
masters: “My heroine must be so nice,” he wrote, in one smut-free bit,
“This Venus of cliché and slop/Must nary imbecile affront.”
Heroines and heroes still must be nice. (Get ready for complaints that
Jessica Chastain’s character in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty”
isn’t nice or “relatable”; to the movie’s credit, she isn’t.) But there
is also more variety on screen than ever before, both in work from
across the globe and even from within America. (Is it necessary to point
out that this diversity means that our cinematic choices are no longer
almost entirely the creative domain of white men?) This increasing
diversity defines contemporary movie culture as much as corporate cinema
does. And while old Hollywood movies helped teach us how to be, and
dream as, Americans, movies today can impart other truths, including how
to listen to other voices and to dream with other cultures that aren’t
back-lot simulacrums.
There is, in other words, much to appreciate about contemporary movies
this year. In 1960 the great poet, essayist, critic and filmmaker Jonas
Mekas wrote: “Films will soon be made as easily as written poems, and
almost as cheaply. They will be made everywhere and by everybody. The
empires of professionalism and big budgets are crumbling.” More than a
half-century later Mr. Mekas’s Utopian vision appears to have come true
in some respects, as do-it-themselves filmmakers from North Hollywood
and digital cinema masters from Turkey prove. I have reservations about
all the images that are here in theaters today and streaming on iTunes
tomorrow. But Mr. Mekas, who turns 90 Dec. 24, and his stubborn faith in
art and artists are a restorative tonic. Here’s to him!
Top 10, alphabetical order: “Amour” (Michael Haneke); “The Deep Blue Sea” (Terence Davies); “The Gatekeepers” (Dror Moreh); “Holy Motors” (Leos Carax); “The Master” (Paul Thomas Anderson); “Moonrise Kingdom” (Wes Anderson); “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” (Nuri Bilge Ceylan); “Searching for Sugar Man” (Malik Bendjelloul); “Silver Linings Playbook” (David O. Russell); “Zero Dark Thirty” (Kathryn Bigelow).
The rest of the best, alphabetically: “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” (Alison
Klayman); “Argo” (Ben Affleck); “August and After” (Nathaniel Dorsky); “Auto-Collider XV”
(Ernie Gehr); “Barbara” (Christian Petzold); “Beasts of the Southern
Wild” (Benh Zeitlin); “Bernie” (Richard Linklater); “Brooklyn Castle”
(Katie Dellamaggiore); “The Dark Knight Rises” (Christopher Nolan);
“Departure” (Mr. Gehr); “Footnote” (Joseph Cedar); “The House I Live In”
(Eugene Jarecki); “The Kid With a Bike” (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne);
“Life of Pi” — only at sea (Ang Lee); “Magic Mike” (Steven Soderbergh);
“A Man Vanishes” (Shohei Imamura); “Middle of Nowhere” (Ava DuVernay);
“Miss Bala” (Gerardo Naranjo); “Napoleon” (Abel Gance, restored
by Kevin Brownlow); “Oslo, August 31st” (Joachim Trier); “The Pirates!
Band of Misfits” (Peter Lord); “Rust and Bone” (Jacques Audiard);
“Skyfall” (Sam Mendes); “Starlet” (Sean Baker); “This Is Not a Film”
(Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb); “The Turin Horse” (Bela Tarr);
“View From the Acropolis” (Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan).
