CF Films of 2012

Sorry for the delay but here’s my list… I wish I could say it’s because I’ve spent the last few weeks seeing all the important films I missed but there are still quite a few important ones I’ve yet to catch (The Master, Holy Motors, Moonrise Kingdom etc).

Thanks for the link to the release schedule Markie – it was a good memory aid.

Worst movie of the year
A Dangerous Method – not even Fassbender could redeem this. I couldn’t get past Keira Knightley’s ridiculous Russian accent. A particular lowlight was her “acting” hysterical by jutting out her (considerable) jaw to superhuman lengths – a cinema moment blessedly free from 3D treatment!

Best
Actor – George Clooney (The Decendants)
Actress – Charlize Theron (Young Adult)
Supporting actor -  Javier Bardem (Skyfall)
Supporting actress – Carey Mulligan (Shame)
(and worst) Prosthetic – Olivia Colman’s nose as Carol Thatcher (The Iron Lady)

Just outside the Top 10
Hunger games
Argo
Rust and Bone
The Imposter

Top 10

10 – Chronicle
Teens getting super powers is a familiar trope but I thought this was an innovative and fresh take on it. Much more interesting than the like of The Amazing Spiderman.

9 – Marvel Avengers Assemble
Continuing a theme - another super powered people film! Though this was a straight up romp. I enjoyed the scale of this film – bringing together an ensemble of characters (mostly) strong enough to head up their own franchises. An enjoyable romp but lacking depth to get higher up the list.

8 – Skyfall
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this. Great pace and excitement throughout. Really enjoyed Javier Bardem’s turn as the creepy antagonist.

7 – Silver Linings Playbook
Loved this indie comedy. Extremely compelling performances from the two leads (surprisingly good from Cooper). Thought the dialogue was excellent.

6 – Michael
This study of the daily life of a child abuser was both powerful and disturbing.

5 – Shame
I wasn’t bowled over by this initially as I know others were. However, certain moments in the film and the excellent performances stayed with me long after.

4 –Young Adult
Loved Theron as the self-obsessed writer returning to steal her high school boyfriend away. Impressed by the refusal to succumb to sentimentality.

3 – Dark Knight Rises
Brilliant and epic conclusion to the Nolan trilogy (and more superhero action on my list)! I liked the scale of this - especially the impression of a city being under siege in the final act.

2 – Amour
Beautiful and moving study of an elderly couple as one declines into extreme infirmity. I thought it captured  the sense of decline and the incremental strain on the couple extremely well.

1 – The Descendants
Loved this. Shows how film making can be great without being in your face. Clooney was great playing against type.

The Sessions - DM review

A potentially interesting topic that was uninterestingly portrayed...Helen Hunt does an amazing job of playing Helen Hunt (not Oscar worthy). I won't be making another appointment any time soon.

4/10 (at least it wasn't 3 hours of singing)

Les Miserables - DM review

I had heard that audiences were sobbing whilst watching this film. I found it overwrought and overlong and it only bored me to tears.
Now, I don't mind musicals and when it is done right it can be an emotionally moving artform (I'm thinking Cabaret, Dancer in the Dark) or just really good fun but this was dire.
I haven't seen the stage version (and definitely will not be now) and so cannot comment on the transfer to film. The sets and staging looked puny and I found the directing irritating...there are only so many close-ups of someone's face whilst singing I can see before I have enough (and I now know that is 10 minutes). And there is so much singing...song after song after song. I know this may be a silly criticism to throw at a musical but it just saturated me.
I felt like the emotional melodrama was being rammed down my throat and consequently I felt nothing...SPOILER ALERT...I even cheered when Gavroche (the irritating little urchin that had evidently wandered in from the "Oliver!" set) got shot.

OTT nonsense

2/10

MD- Django Unchained

Django Unchained marks a new threshold for Tarantino. While it delivers the expected sparkling and irreverent dialogue and stylized violent interludes there is solid and powerful storytelling resonate to its historical events. Where his version of WWII colorfully wrote large the black and white of Nazi vs. Ally, here there is more nuance. Django’s characters have motivations for their actions contextualized by their place in time; and aided by – in a movie first for Taratino – an outsider through whose eyes we can understand this world and see the repugnant absurdity of slavery.

The supporting cast is superb. Christoph Waltz's outsider is elegant, ruthless and brings the spark of genuine humanity; despite being a bounty hunter with scant regard for repentance. DiCaprio’s plantation owner Calvin Candie oozes menace not just to the newcomers and his slaves, but through complex and contradictory relationships with both his sister and the Uncle Tom figure of Stephen (an extraordinary Samuel L Jackson); and through his love of bare knuckle fighting. It’s a complex characterization hinting at personal fatalism and repressed homosexuality. It is he that ponders the question of why slaves don’t rise up and overpower their masters.

Somewhat unusually for recent Tarantino the women characters are muted and trophy-like, which becomes the movies biggest failing. A cameo by the original Django, Franco Nero, is fun and even when the director himself enormously and jarringly lumbers in with a strangulated Aussie accent the audible groan of the audience is soon rewarded with a wonderful payoff.

Jamie Foxx has to hold centre stage and does so admirably with a character that is essentially a foil. Whilst the shift from barely literate slave to an articulate facsimile of a slaver and the 'fastest gun in the South' stretches credibility it is nevertheless underpinned by his driving desire to avenge – not based on any altruistic strive for equality or freedom but simply for the love of his wife. He is a solid and simplistic focus for the events that revolve around him.

The exploration of the complex relationships within the strata of slaves on the “Candieland” ranch is laid out for us to draw our own conclusions. A ‘Stanford prison’ type assimilation, something more akin to a caste system or just the only mechanism for self-preservation? More widely this movie intrinsically ridicules an American past, contrasting European cultured egalitarian to the extraordinary crassness of the ‘wild wild west’; and in the cruelest of contemporary serendipity we see how that attitude prevails through the countless imbecilic gun owners still harking back to the period as being the touchstone of individualized freedom. Taratino doesn’t shy away from the ‘N’-word either. Where his liberal use in previously films often seems deliberately provocative, here he parks it in a true context and crafts the language and its use by all characters with meaning so it becomes a rhythmic counterpoint throughout the dialogue.

Django Unchained is Tarantino’s most accomplished movie. It has wonderful cinematography, the usual musical surprises and a rich stream of nuanced characters whose violent and contradictory actions sit within a complex moral framework. And it’s great fun.

9/10

MD - Les Miserables

The one thing cinema offers that stage-shows cannot is the ability to take the action into an expanded landscape. Here Les Mis misses. Outwith the first 15 minutes of Jean Valjean’s personal and physical journey, and for all of the talented vocalization on show (and Russell Crowe’s misjudged rock operatics), this epic tales seems small and localized. The barricades look like the front garden at a house clearance and the sweeping Parisian vistas go no further than a quick view of Notre Dame and  watching Russell spend more time precipitously wobbling along the edges of high walls than a depressed lemming.

Once Anne Hathaway goes so does most of our interest with Amanda Siegfried’s grown up Cossette being so pallid and dull you wonder what all the fuss is about. And, by sticking so closely to its core source, the coincidences become ridiculous. This is a big event movie that doesn’t rise above it’s confinements and is, consequently, extraordinarily long and emotionally distant.

4/10

MD - Gangster Squad

The cracking cast all did their job, Sean Penn hammed and mugged splendidly and the look and feel was authentic. But this just seemed so formulaic and has been done before and better…big boss, gang of mismatched characters subversively below the radar, innocent collateral damage...blah blah blah. It all got a bit tedious after a while.  

5/10

MD - Pitch Perfect

I haven’t laughed so consistently at a film that I was supposed to laugh at for ages. Subverting the regular college stereotypes without reverting to cruelty, and with a genuine pack of interesting characters, it hit the spot. The a cappella and wordplay were inventive and had some lovely geeky movie references which we would all no doubt appreciate. Acca-awkward.

8/10

MD - The Impossible

Laudable, visceral and with some cracking child acting I however struggled with this film. It’s has no pretentions of being an easy or enjoyable watch but having been in Cambodia at the time of the tsunami and back in Thailand soon afterwards I found it a difficult watch, with jolts of some of the residual suffering I saw returning to me for the first time in years. And yes its based on a true story and the facts are undeniable however the contrivances of the finale were a step too far and I didn’t understand the need to take such dramatic license.

6/10