Films of 2012

[DonM435]

I saw Spider-Man the other day, and it wasn't amazing. A decent popcorn flick, but nothing original (surprise surprise).

Yeah, but a title like The Decent Spider-Man lacks something.

[parallaxicality]

And, I'm not sure I agree with the implication that singers should only sing about things they have personal experience with. I certainly don't think Foster the People should have to commit a school shooting before they can sing "Pumped Up Kicks"...

True, but given that the title is in the first person, and is attempting to sell a particular image of the singer to the population, it would help is she actually were writing from experience. Instead, she comes across like a little girl sitting in her bedroom thinking "What's the naughtiest thing I could sing about?! Oh! I know..."

And it wasn't a school shooting.

[HenrikOlsen]

United in Anger: A History of ACT UP : God people are stupid. It’s hard to imagine that we were once so scared of AIDS that we were willing to see those suffering marked and shipped off to camps. Funny thing is, research now shows all that hysteria had a negative effect; because the world didn’t end, people stopped believing in health warnings and so STD rates have skyrocketed in the next generation.

HIV/AIDS were THE STD of a generation, it was essentially the only warned about, it was THE reason for being careful. So now that it's no longer a death sentence all the other STD's are ignored and people stop being careful. It's not really surprising.

[Noclevername]

True, but given that the title is in the first person, and is attempting to sell a particular image of the singer to the population, it would help is she actually were writing from experience. Instead, she comes across like a little girl sitting in her bedroom thinking "What's the naughtiest thing I could sing about?! Oh! I know..."

And it wasn't a school shooting.

By her own admission, she's been desperate to be famous since she was a child.

[Jim]

I like Katy Perry. I like her music, I like her voice, I like her personality.

[R.A.F.]

I like Katy Perry. I like her music, I like her voice, I like her personality.

I've been a fan since "I kissed a girl"...she writes catchy tunes.

...and on a related note, Russell Brand has to be the stupidest person on the planet...

[Gillianren]

I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other. I just prefer Jill Sobule's "I Kissed a Girl."

[Doodler]

I've been a fan since "I kissed a girl"...she writes catchy tunes.

...and on a related note, Russell Brand has to be the stupidest person on the planet...

I've been pretty impressed with her depth. They've milked her current album of all the light catchy fluff. Now they're down to the more serious pieces like "Part of Me" and "Wide Awake", which in the usual course of a pop star, would be album filler, but in her case, they hold up just as well against the "marketable" material.

[parallaxicality]

The Dark Knight Rises: I decided to wait until I’d had time to digest this before giving my opinion, for two reasons: first, this film is about as light as a hippo sandwich. Second, while only 3 days old, it has already engendered controversy far beyond any that a film should endure, some of its own making, most not. Who knows what that kid was thinking before he took out those people at the premiere? Maybe he just wanted lots of targets. Or maybe, like many of my clueless generation, he took his disaffected revolutionary cues from blockbuster comic book movies, much as the Occupiers sported Guy Fawkes masks from V For Vendetta. As with Star Wars, this franchise’s fanbase has always been far out of proportion to its (admittedly superior) quality, and so I wasn’t all too shocked when that hapless critic found himself on a cellar-dweller’s death list. This is the internet; it is far easier to wish a collection of words dead than a human face. As to the film’s own politics, given that most people who have complained about them have promptly schtummed up to avoid spoilers, I’m not sure what their issue is. It seems to me that its only real political stance is against anarchy and in favour of civilisation, which would, to me to be fairly uncontroversial.

Anyhoo, aside from all this, what did I think of the film itself? Well, it fell victim to all the predilections I’ve come to dislike from Nolan, from his inability to tell a story simply when a more complicated option is available, to his overt fondness for the colour grey and the music of Hans Zimmer. That said, this film did not undermine its pedigree, though by trying to be both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, it fails to fully capture either the first’s mythic power or the second’s human drama. In fact, this movie almost feels like two separate films that were spliced together; there are so many plot points and character interactions crammed into a ~2.5hr running time that none ever have the chance to develop. This movie has not one, but two romantic subplots, and both feel like they emerged out of thin air. Given the sheer number of emotional scenes, I was surprised how little I was affected by them, and I think the issue is pacing. Nolan has never been particularly good with pacing, preferring to expertly condense massive, complex storylines into film-length narratives, leaving enough clues for his audiences to feel like geniuses for working them out. Here, his determination to end a story in the third segment means that event follows event follows event in a cascading barrage, so that we barely have time to see Michael Caine cry before Gary Oldman gets shot, Tom Hardy blows up a stadium or Anne Hathaway kisses Christian Bale. Speaking of which, the performances were all top notch, though Hathaway was never given enough time to fully luxuriate in her seductive vamp role, and Hardy, poor dear, had to speak all his lines through a distorting fog.

[Gillianren]

However much you may dislike Hans Zimmer, it has got to be better than what James Horner did to The Meh Spider-Man.

[Van Rijn]

Who knows what that kid was thinking before he took out those people at the premiere? Maybe he just wanted lots of targets. Or maybe, like many of my clueless generation, he took his disaffected revolutionary cues from blockbuster comic book movies, much as the Occupiers sported Guy Fawkes masks from V For Vendetta.

I don't believe people do horrible things just because they see something in a movie, but I did find the "I'm Joker" line a bit disturbing. The situation seems to fit the nastier Joker portrayals a bit.

Nolan has never been particularly good with pacing, preferring to expertly condense massive, complex storylines into film-length narratives, leaving enough clues for his audiences to feel like geniuses for working them out.

I haven't liked the Nolan Batman movies, and found the last one to be very boring. To be fair, the 1989 Batman is the only live-action Batman movie I've really liked. While that one was dark, it had its lighter moments. It had an insane Joker, but a Joker that was a real clown. The last Batman movie was just unrelentingly dark, slowly plodding along with the story. So there never was any chance I'd go see this movie in the theater. I don't know if I'll bother to put it in my Netflix queue. From what I've read, I expect I would like it even less than the last one.

[parallaxicality]

This is for you, Jim. Sheesh, the things I do for people. :-)

For the week of Friday, 2 November:

Wreck-It-Ralph: In this day and age, when video games come with universes nearly as big as the real one, packed with hundreds of characters and backstories large enough to collapse Wikipedia, it's hard to remember the time when their universe consisted of a single screen; its inhabitants subjected to an endless purgatory of repeating the same actions again and again (behaviour now relegated to online shooters). Even as a kid, I wondered what kind of life those people must have had, and now Disney (doubtless under the watchful eye of Pixar) has decided to show me. Presumably set in the last video game arcade in existence, its view of the cyber world is somewhat limited, consisting of a trip to a Halo-clone FPS and a kart racer based on Candyland. Surely there could be more variety on display? What would the hoodies from Journey have made of Ralph's predicament? Also, have the icons of the video game age, the Bowsers, the Zangiefs and the Dr Eggmen, really been mythologised enough to function outside their medium? Time will tell.

This Must Be The Place: Well one can't fault this for unoriginality. Sean Penn plays a mildly gender-bending ex-rock star who goes in search of the Nazi war criminal who tormented his late, estranged father. Perhaps the most laid-back depiction of familial vengeance I've ever witnessed, this trailer perfectly showcases Penn's mindbending versatility. And Harry Dean Stanton is in it, which automatically makes it cool.

The Man With the Iron Fists: Produced by Quentin Tarantino, written by Eli Roth and directed by the guy who ran the Wu-Tang Clan, this feels like a compilation of all the bits from Kill Bill that Quentin decided were too over the top even for him. Supposedly set in 19th century China, which would explain the black guy and the white dude, right? Still, Lucy Liu looks awesome.

Six Degrees of Hell: Apparently, there are only six degrees of separation... from Hell! So Sartre was right. Corey Feldman's in this, apparently. Didn't recognise him. Just watched him kill Jason Vorhees last night. Super weird.

Jack and Diane: Somehow I doubt John Cougar Mellencamp was thinking about borderline psychotic lesbians when he wrote that song, but hey who knows?

The Details: Tobey Maguire enacts what appears to be a kind of visual metaphor of his career post-Spiderman. Kinda hard to watch, but interesting nonetheless.

The Bay: Barry Levinson has not had the most consistent career, so it's either heartening or depressing to see him latch onto the found footage bandwagon. Premise initially looked cool, but then revealed itself to essentially be Slither played straight.

Flight: Pretty low on the list for such a major release; still I think I can see why- Denzel is always a draw, but air crash investigations, even if they save lives, don't necessarily make for riveting drama. Robert Zemekis is a fantastic director when faced with the right material, but I'm not sure if this covers it.

A Late Quartet: This actually seems good; a great cast, (Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, all for once acting against type) and a seeming genuine interest in classical music.

A Liar's Autobiography: I don't know who came up with the idea of making a 3D animated biography of Graham Chapman, but whoever you are, hats off to you.

Bones Brigade: An Autobiography: Stacey Peralta has a proven track record with sports docs, having made the highly regarded "Dogtown and Z-Boys" and "Riding Giants", and here he documents a strange phase in the history of skateboarding, the time I assume all sports go through when they cease to be a hobby and become a profession. It is a kind of wonder that we choose to idolise some forms of physical activity and not others, and this is yet more proof that our proclivities are essentially random.

[Gillianren]

Wreck-It-Ralph: In this day and age, when video games come with universes nearly as big as the real one, packed with hundreds of characters and backstories large enough to collapse Wikipedia, it's hard to remember the time when their universe consisted of a single screen; its inhabitants subjected to an endless purgatory of repeating the same actions again and again (behaviour now relegated to online shooters). Even as a kid, I wondered what kind of life those people must have had, and now Disney (presumably under the watchful eye of Pixar) has decided to show me. Presumably set in the last video game arcade in existence, its view of the cyber world is somewhat limited, consisting of a trip to a Halo-clone FPS and a kart racer based on Candyland. Surely there could be more variety on display? What would the hoodies from Journey have made of Ralph's predicament? Also, have the icons of the video game age, the Bowsers, the Zangiefs and the Dr Eggmen, really been mythologised enough to function outside their medium? Time will tell.

At any rate, that's what they're showing us. I actually went to an arcade a couple of weeks ago; they also have laser tag, which my friends played. (I, who am not terribly good at video games or inclined toward laser tag, played pinball.) Heck, in July, I discovered a coin-operated machine museum on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. There are arcades, but mostly for novelty. Still, this looks like a fun movie, and I'm glad to have the chance to see John C. Reilly in something without Will Ferrell.

This Must Be The Place: Well one can't fault this for unoriginality. Sean Penn plays a mildly gender-bending ex-rock star who goes in search of the Nazi war criminal who tormented his late, estranged father. Perhaps the most laid-back depiction of familial vengeance I've ever witnessed, this trailer perfectly showcases Penn's mindbending versatility. And Harry Dean Stanton is in it, which automatically makes it cool.

I've been resisting the trailer for some time now. Sean Penn is talented, but he's also right--I don't like him.

The Man With the Iron Fists: Produced by Quentin Tarantino, written by Eli Roth and directed by the guy who ran the Wu-Tang Clan, this feels like a compilation of all the bits from Kill Bill that Quentin decided were too over the top even for him. Supposedly set in 19th century China, which would explain the black guy and the white dude, right? Still, Lucy Liu looks awesome.

You know, Quentin Tarantino is one of the people I was thinking of when I was saying there were worse people than Spike Lee to direct an Oldboy remake.

Flight: Pretty low on the list for such a major release; still I think I can see why- Denzel is always a draw, but air crash investigations, even if they save lives, don't necessarily make for riviting drama. Robert Zemekis is a fantastic director when faced with the right material, but I'm not sure if this covers it.

I think Denzel Washington's star has been slipping in recent years, but that could be me.

A Late Quartet: This actually seems good; a great cast, (Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, all for once acting against type) and a seeming genuine interest in classical music.

Hmmm. I will have to add that to my list.

A Liar's Autobiography: I don't know who came up with the idea of making a 3D animated biography of Graham Chapman, but whoever you are, hats off to you.

I have a copy of the book around here somewhere, and I really ought to get around to reading it.

Bones Brigade: An Autobiography: Stacey Peralta has a proven track record with sports docs, having made the highly regarded "Dogtown and Z-Boys" and "Riding Giants", and here he documents a strange phase in the history of skateboarding, the time I assume all sports go through when they cease to be a hobby and become a profession. It is a kind of wonder that we choose to idolise some forms of physical activity and not others, and this is yet more proof that our proclivities are essentially random.

Anyone who isn't a fan of sports in general can tell you that. Curling amuses me, but it is literally the only sport I will sit and watch on my own. The obsession some people have with games just gets to me after a while.

[Solfe]

I watched Monsters, Inc. in 3d... with the kids. Excellent film in 2d, it is better in 3d. I think it was the best 3d movie I have ever watched. The detail was incredible and as an added bonus, some scenes seemed to have been reworked to take advantage of the new level of detail.

Additionally, "For the Birds" was presented in 3d before the film. It was almost overwhelming in detail. All those feathers!

One interesting thing about this theater was the smallish screen. I was left with the impression that the 3d elements were disappearing into the crowd. That was very cool and not a distraction at all.

The trailers were in 3d too. Epic looks pretty good, but Despicable Me 2 looked just so-so. The Minions are always fun, but maybe they don't require 3d to be funny.