LITTLE ROCK — I’ve seen everything, man.
That’s not quite true; there are some movies I didn’t get to see before sitting down to write my assessment of the best films of 2012. The DVD screener of Les Miserables that Universal sent wouldn’t play, the Weinstein Company didn’t make Django Unchained available, I didn’t see the German drama Barbara or the Canadian documentary Pink Ribbons Inc. (which comes highly recommended by a colleague).
Somehow I was the only one in my critics’ group who didn’t see Holy Motors.
Some of the films have had a theatrical run in Arkansas, a couple will open next year. I saw a couple at last year’s Little Rock Film Festival. I don’t imagine that any of these are so obscure that a dedicated seeker won’t be able to find them in digital form a few months hence.
I’m not sure its terribly profitable to try to make sense of a year’s worth of movies.
People went to see a lot of “true stories” this year, such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Ben Affleck’s Argo and Katherine Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (which opens in Arkansas on Jan. 11). They are doing extremely well in the year end critics’ polls and all three will probably garner Best Picture and Best Director Academy Award nominations.
But it would be something of an overstatement to say that the public has developed an appetite for fact-based dramas. The box office will be ruled by comic book heroes, the supernatural and yet another bloody elf movie.
And that’s nothing to be bothered about. The movies are changing - as are the screens we watch them on.
THE TOP 10
1.) Zero Dark Thirty. This thriller, about the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, represents a huge step forward for director Bigelow, whose last film - The Hurt Locker - wasn’t too bad. It opens in Arkansas Jan. 11.
2.) Beasts of the Southern Wild. I am aware of the criticisms some have made of this movie and I too doubt it is as much fun to live poor and off-the-grid as the entrophy-loving denizens of The Bathtub make it seem.
And we don’t get the fish-gut rot flavor that would certainly accompany the glittering dark visuals of the place if it existed in the real world.
But Beasts of the Southern Wild is, more than anything else, a visual tone poem. To try to impose any orthodox sensibility, much less political correctness, on the film is close to blasphemy. Benh Zeitlin and company have realized something more than the ordinary miracle that is your average well-realized movie.
They’ve made poetry.
3.) The Master. I don’t really get the backlash against P.T. Anderson’s skillfully imagined and beautifully photographed bromance between a broken sailor (an unnervingly good Joaquin Phoenix) and a sleek cult-building charlatan (Philip Seymour Hoffman). I’d watch it again just to see Amy Adams cut her eyes.
4.) Amour. Michael Haneke’s portrait of loving couple Georges and Anne (giants of French cinema Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, respectively) in their last days is devastating and ultimately humane. To quote Anne: “Mal ... mal” (It hurts, it hurts).
5.) Moonrise Kingdom. Wes Anderson - who was born in 1969 - builds his films with sticky, well-chewed wads of memory and balls of string, the back-of-the-closet detritus of childhood, recovered collections of 45s and fan magazines, the skewed perspectives of the alert and solitary child who perceives the world through books and glassine envelopes of colored stamps that arrive in the mail. This particular movie is presented in Instagram earth tones, warm golds and browns, the colors of boxed away Kodachromes.
It may not be exactly the childhood we experienced. It may be more along the lines of the childhood we wished for, although Anderson’s children are never thoroughly happy. But it reminds us of the way we (mis)apprehended the world when we were children, the way we strained to hear the adults in conference, the way we looked for clues in their manner and fastened our attention on what, from an adult perspective, might seem random or inconsequential details.
Anderson’s prime subject, in all of his films, is irrational yet unequivocal love. Which just might be the only subject worthy of adult attention.
Or at least all you need.
6.) Bernie. It might be fair to say that Richard Linklater’s Bernie is a bit like America’s Most Wanted, only with a high-priced cast taking over for the no-names who usually play the perps and victims. And that’s part of its charm. Linklater, an uncommonly inventive director who - when he’s good - is among our best, acknowledges the circumscribed circumstances of the small town without semaphoring any condescension at all.
And Jack Black makes the title character feel like a real person with a complicated history and the capacity for great kindness and murder. He’s a sweet man with a hungry hole inside him.
7.) Argo. Ben Affleck’s latest is the best kind of Hollywood movie, a gripping, suspenseful story leavened with dry, grim humor and resolved in well-earned uplift. That anyone could make such an entertaining movie about the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis might surprise those who lived through the time; that the erstwhile star of Gigli and Pearl Harbor has done it says much about the redemptive possibilities of art.
He is forgiven.
8.) Looper. Rian Johnson’s remarkably straightforward and admirably unperplexing time travel noir opens in a gritty urban Kansas city (I like to think of it as Lawrence, although we don’t really know) then shifts it to a lonely farmhouse for the film’s second act. One of the most enjoyable things about this world is the way Johnson cants it just a few degrees into the future - cell phones have gotten even thinner, you get your kicks from eye drops, but the weaponry and the gangster lingo is retro - you carry either a blunderbuss or a ‘‘gat’’. At one point Jeff Daniels (as a mobster from the future) remarks on the sullen persistence of the necktie as a touchstone of men’s fashion. Most of the vehicles seem to be refurbished and adapted models from our time, although motorcycles can fly.
There is a richness to this world that recalls Johnson’s auspicious debut, 2005’s Brick, a noir which also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and which transposed the hard boiled dialogue of Dashiell Hammett’s crime novels from the 1930s to modern Southern California. (In the process it confused thousands - check the comments at the film’s Internet Movie Database site.)
But if Brick was too clever for some, Johnson seems to have applied that lesson to Looper. While it’s a smart and sharply realized vision of a not-too-distant, not-too-dystopian future, it doesn’t get too fussy with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. It’s one time travel movie that won’t make your head hurt.
9.) Tchoupitoulas. One of my favorites at this year’s Little Rock Film Festival, this is a fever dream of a documentary that follows three boys as they navigate a New Orleans night. A wonderful companion piece to Beasts of the Southern Wild that will soon be out on DVD.
10.) Skyfall. Expertly shot by the unlikely genius Roger Deakins - who does spectacular work in the film’s Shanghai chapter - Skyfall is one of those movies that manages to impress you with its heft. Like a well-made pistol, it’s a lot heavier than it looks.
It “might” be the best Bond ever. I’m leaning more and more that way. Daniel Craig is the best actor to play the James Bond character, and the latest installment is pleasantly metafictional (reveling in an impossible past) and resoundingly visceral.
ANOTHER EIGHT (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)
Usually I present an alternative Top 10, but not this year. Most of these eight movies have some pretty serious flaws, but they also have substantial virtues.
Promised Land for it’s lush and humming cinematography. Unbeknownst to director Gus Van Sant, cinematographer Linus Sandgren and costume designer Juliet Polcsa used a color palette informed by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth - lots of greens, brown and yellows, mostly subdued but with an occasional vivid flare.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower for its delicate and real-feeling portrayal of high school experience.
Killer Joe for its great ensemble cast, including Thomas Haden Church and Juno Temple in key supporting roles.
The Central Park Five for the way the documentarians (Ken Burns, his daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon) wove the words of the unjustly imprisoned into a cogent and powerful indictment of American judicial indifference.
Anna Karenina for Tom Stoppard’s script, which captured Tolstoy’s spirit remarkably well, and Joe Wright’s clever direction.
Queen of Versailles for its remarkable compassion toward thoroughly unsympathetic subjects.
The Deep Blue Sea for Rachel Weisz’s doomed constancy and its critique of romantic irrationality.
Monsieur Lazhar for its gentle depiction of the possibilities (and the limitations) of the teacher-pupil relationship. While it’s probably too low-key for mainstream multiplex tastes, Monsieur Lazhar is a temperate, generous and deeply affecting experience.
Honorable mention, feature films: Arbitrage, The Avengers, The Cabin in the Woods, Bullhead, Compliance, The Dark Knight Rises, Frankenweenie, Lincoln, The Intouchables, Life of Pi, Not Fade Away, The Other Son, The Raid: Redemption, This Is 40, Toys in the Attic.
Honorable mention, documentaries: Ann Richards’ Texas, Bully, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, The Flat, How to Survive a Plague, The Imposter, The Invisible War, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, The Other Dream Team, Searching for Sugar Man, Shut Up and Play the Hits, Under African Skies.
Worst film I saw: Last Ounce of Courage.
Inexplicably overrated: Silver Linings Playbook.
Biggest disappointment: Take This Waltz.
One the critics got wrong: Bachelorette.
One I probably got wrong: Sleepwalk With Me.
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Style, Pages 43 on 12/30/2012