The Fog of War

Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he is speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people – unnecessarily. His own troops or other troops. Through mistakes, through errors of judgement. A hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand, maybe even a hundred thousand. But he hasn’t destroyed nations. And the conventional wisdom is: don’t make the same mistake twice. Learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. There’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.

Robert McNamara is quite a guy. Errol Morris uses an innovative “Interrotron” camera that basically lets McNamara look into the camera and see Morris’s face using tech similar to a teleprompter. It’s supposed to get a more immediate interview with the subject looking directly into the camera and even arguing with it. It works. McNamara’s clearly a smart guy and his ability to articulate what he went through in his time as Secretary of Defense and his life as a whole is pretty astounding. I have lived around 1/3 as much as McNamara had at this point and I certainly couldn’t talk about that time as well as he does here.

He says his earliest memory is of the end of The Great War. He was two at the time. 80 years later he can still remember seeing the people celebrate atop cars on the street and the sense of an end to all wars. It was the last big war we would ever fight. Of course, maybe he’s fabricating that memory, as 2 is a little young for a memory so vivid to stick, but maybe it’s just part of his being. He’s a man of war, fighting in WWII and acting as the Secretary of Defense for the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam war. He was also a professor at Harvard and the president of Ford Motor Co. for a few weeks. After resigning/getting fired from the Secretary of Defense job he became the president of the World Bank. The doc doesn’t touch on that last part very much, but that’s fine. Morris frames the doc as 11 lessons learned from McNamara’s life about how to fight wars and live effectively. They’re all good lessons, ranging from “Get the data” to “In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.” They’re all good lessons and McNamara expounds on them eloquently.

Morris intersperses archival footage between the interview footage, which works wonderfully. His hand is a little heavy, especially in the use of dominoes falling over a map and numbers taking the place of bombs dropping from the sky during a montage showing the calculations behind war. While these techniques are a little on the nose, I still appreciated them for their audacity. It’s not often a documentary allows for the director to stretch his artistic legs and it makes for a fun watch. That’s not to say this movie bends to Morris’s will. McNamara will often start a segment with a line like “Wait, we have to go back before we can get to that.” He’s always providing context. You can’t talk about Vietnam before you talk about the end of WWII because nuclear war is the (a?) reason why Vietnam was so messed up. He’s also not afraid to talk about what he got wrong. Early on he speaks to how knowing Khrushchev allowed the US to get out of the Cuban Missile Crisis without launching into full out war. At the end he explains that the US just couldn’t get into the minds of the Vietnamese. They didn’t understand why they were fighting or what they were fighting for. It’s maybe the biggest problem with that war and McNamara demonstrates exactly how and why they got into that situation.

The Fog of War is a fascinating document of a fascinating person. It doesn’t gloss over anything. I was afraid it would ignore the criticism he faced later in his 7 year tenure as Secretary of Defense but it gets ample time late in the film. McNamara talks about how all of this is hindsight, even those criticisms are in hindsight, so it’s hard to blame him for what happened. Also interesting is the different relationships he had with the two presidents he served, JFK and LBJ. His analysis of two pictures taken during a meeting of he and LBJ is pretty funny and telling. Each frustrated with the other not paying attention to him. Stubbornness is one of those human emotions that will always make war harder and longer than it needs to be. Just another lesson from the long, strange, complicated life of Robert McNamara.

Seven Days of Seeing: 5/12/13-5/18/13

I’ve gotten back into writing mini-reviews of every movie I watch thanks to Letterboxd. You can follow me there at this link. However, I’ll also be putting all of my mini-reviews here every Monday for the previous week, so you can just wait a bit and find out what I have to say. I’ll always arrange them in order of best to worst. Any questions? This week we have some musicals and a space action movie. Nothing incongruous there!

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – 1964

Dir. Jaques Demy – Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo

A simple love triangle blown up to melodramatic heights like no other when every word is sung. And there is little effort to make these words into real songs with rhymes and stuff. It’s weird at first but it grows on you until you can’t imagine it happening any other way. It’s French so you know there’s some true love to be had and you know there’s some heartbreak, too. What Demy does wonderfully is balance the two so it feels like a thing that might really happen, you know, if there wasn’t so much singing. The ever present score highlights each turn of the story. It feels very much of its time, which is great. Deneuve is, as always, gorgeous and easily charismatic. It’s also nice to see her not going crazy (Repulsion), but rather having a pretty ok time, all told. The end is a perfect distillation of everything that has come before. Every movie should end in snow. 9/10.

Star Trek Into Darkness – 2013

Dir. J.J. Abrams – Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto

Too much fun to care about the iffy script. The action is fun, the design is great, and the characters are still really great to hang out with for two hours. All the actors are doing good work, Chris Pine and BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH(!) in particular. Yeah, the story is kinda silly and the stakes all but disappear with one crucial mistake in the script but who cares? There will probably be a better summer movie this year and maybe one or two that might be more fun and they might even have better scripts. I’ll still enjoy going back to this on blu. 8/10.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch – 2001

Dir. John Cameron Mitchell – John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Aronov

This is maybe not my scene. I’m not huge into glam rock (though I can’t deny some greatness from the genre) and I can’t really claim any angst over my sexual identity. Still, this is a really great movie full of songs that work both within and outside the film. The Origin of Love sequence and song is a strong highlight. I love a good creation story. John Cameron Mitchell wrote all the talky bits from what I understand, and directs and acts in the lead role. He’s pretty awesome and I’d like to see more of this side of him in the future. The story is a little threadbare. That’s not to say uninteresting, of course. Thanks to the music I was never bored. However, this isn’t a film to watch for the compelling twists and turns. It’s a pretty standard showbiz story of wronged lovers and artistic problems. That’s fine, it’s still a supremely enjoyable film, one I’m glad I finally got around to watching. 8/10.

Cabaret – 1972

Dir. Bob Fosse – Liza Minnelli, Michael York

Liza Minnelli is a force of nature. Even in the opening number where she only appears halfway through and stays mostly in the background the camera catches her face and the celluloid lights on fire. The movie suffers anytime she isn’t onscreen. It can’t quite handle the long periods without the music stuff, either, because although the story is fine and a new-ish take on the old rise of the Nazis framed by a love triangle tale, it turns torporific five minutes after any given musical number. But boy howdy those musical numbers. They’re all good, some all-time great, and Fosse employs a wonderful technique of intercutting the stage stuff with the real-life stuff in such a clever way that I found myself wondering how such an inherently cinematic method would work in a stage play. Not that it really matters, but it’s great to see a director work not only great dancing and choreography but also camera placement and movement and editing into such a kinetic work. It’s too bad the non-music stuff doesn’t hold the same sense of movie-making wonder. 8/10

And that’s it! Do you like this new feature? Do you have anything to say about the movies I watched? Leave a note in the comments!

If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino

“You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others’ words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.”

I could start this blog post with a cleverly meta reference to Italo Calvino’s book If on a winter’s night a traveler. Firstly, it’d have to start in the second person because that’s how about half of the book is told. It’s kind of a marvel that such a strange storytelling device works outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books. There’s a reason why most books are written in the first and third person, and that reason is because it’s super tough to write in the second without sounding weird all the time. But Calvino manages it because he’s amazing. Moving swiftly on, I’d then have to start the review of the book but it wouldn’t be the review, it’d be a description of you reading the review, and your thoughts about the review as you read it. And then it’d end abruptly and we’d go back to the second person portion of the show for a while while we introduce another Blog Reader of the opposite sex to move the plot forward. I’d go back to the review part again but this time it would be a review for something else entirely, maybe the new Iron Man movie or whatever. And you’d get invested in that review, hanging on my every word, hoping to find out just what I thought of Tony Stark’s latest adventure. And then it’d stop and we’d have a new mystery on our hands. Why am I only writing the beginning of the reviews, and who is this other Reader?

Luckily for you and me, I’m not doing that. Just that paragraph up there was hard enough to write, and I’m sure somebody else has already taken that tack when it comes to talking about this astounding novel. Instead, I’m just going to tell you why the book is amazing. And to go in a completely opposite direction I’m going to do it in a bulleted list format.

• As mentioned above, about half the book is written in the second person. It’s a way to make “you” a character in the story, which is really cool. It’s also a way to make you connect with the ideas Calvino presents throughout about what literature means to us, the readers. Who has the final say on what a book means. Is the author at all important? Would a computer generated novel that exactly mimics an author be an atrocity to art? Do references and stolen scenes detract or add to our appreciation of a work? How do we form our likes and our dislikes, and how do we pick which book to read next when there are innumerable options? All these questions and more are brought up throughout the novel and Calvino wisely answers few of them, preferring instead to let us come to our own conclusions. If every you’ve been captivated by a novel, this is one that you must read because it makes you question yourself and discovery why reading means so much to you.
• The other half of the book is ten opening chapters of ten wildly different fictional books. This was the perfect thing for me to read at the perfect time. I hadn’t read anything truly spectacular for a long time, at least the beginning of the year, and I had picked up the troubling habit of starting and stopping several books at a time. Nothing was grabbing my interest. Here comes Italo Calvino (an author I already knew I liked thanks to the Top-50-worthy Cosmicomics) with a book seemingly tailor made for my predicament. I couldn’t read past those tantalizing opening pages by design. And what opening pages they were! Almost every one was interesting in one way or another. The first, a spy caper gone provincial (?) was fascinating in Calvino’s ability to evoke a mood and sense of place. Other highlights include the paranoid musings of a professor who thinks any phone ringing is for him (he might be right) and a sad man who might be taking part in a jailbreak plot or might just be recording scientific observations. Each section has its own style and voice and genre, an idea which delighted me in Cloud Atlas (a book for which this is a clear predecessor and influence) and continued to do so here. It was the remedy for what ailed me and I loved it.
• The love story between the Reader and the Other Reader is a really nice throughline for a sometimes confusing plot. Always there’s “you” and her and “your” desire for her drives everything “you” do in the book. Even when things get crazy it’s always clear why this is happening. There’s a mystery (why can you only read the openings of books and why are the titles and covers all screwy?) which is fun but even that is a part of the love story because it’s what brings the two characters together.
• Italo Calvino is a hilarious guy. There are quite a few laugh-out-loud moments and the ever increasing strangeness of the plot is funny in its own way. But more than just being funny for funny’s sake, the humor is used to undercut some of the self-serious ideas Calvino ponders/causes us to ponder. The best example of this comes during the main plot portion of the book which, at this point, takes the form of a diary by a popular mystery writer. He has dreams of being literary and invents a literary writer who has dreams of being popular. He wonders what would happen if he wrote a literary book while the other writer wrote a populist book. Would people be able to tell the difference? Would the wrong person get credit for the wrong book? Would they end up writing the same book, word for word? Would it even matter? It’s a delightfully existentialist musing portion of the book which is unlike any other part of the book. But really, no part of the book is like any other part. That’s the genius.

Alright, four’s enough. In case you haven’t guessed it, I really love this book. It vaulted instantly into my top 5 of all time. I must read others by Calvino. He’s everything I want in a writer. Also, how is there not a movie version of this yet. And I’m not talking a straight adaptation with books taking the focus. It’s pretty easy to imagine a movie about movies like this is a book about books. Movie genres are easy to differentiate, maybe even more so than books. You probably couldn’t fit all ten openings into one movie but you could do 6 or so with the rest being the story of an avid movie watcher. Get on that, Hollywood.

Optimism in the Face of Movie Culture

There’s a certain feeling that has come to pervade the movie-going culture, especially those that care about movies to a larger-than-normal degree. It’s a constant, oppressive pessimism. Every year we are treated to a cycle of horribleness, first the dumping grounds of the winter months where movies that a too crappy to live go to make the most money possible because somebody has to win the weekend. Then there’s the beginning of the summer movie season where all the big money blockbusters start appearing, but not really the good stuff yet because the studios are afraid they might find themselves accidentally releasing the film in those dumping grounds. Yet they continue to push the envelope, with Jack the Giant Slayer coming on the first day of March this year. After those early blockbusters we kick into the full summer swing, a pool now filled with unnecessary sequels to dumb comedies and the third, fourth, fifth entry into a superhero series. Or, even worse, a reboot of a superhero series that only ended 6 years ago. Around August time we slip into a mini slump where all the movies that were made for June and July but turned out too crappy get thrown to the wolves. In September we might see a studio trying to play the Oscar game a little earlier than everybody else, and it’ll probably be a really popular movie because the public is starved for any semblance of intelligence after a season of explosions and spandex. And then October is filled with remakes and sequels of horror films from the eighties or Asia. It’s the month of jump scares, which is all Hollywood remembers how to do in the world of horror. After that we’ve entered Oscarama, the time of year when BIG IMPORTANT FILMS are released and usually have something to do with somebody being oppressed and fighting back or taking it in a dignified manner. This can include racism or the Holocaust or natural disasters. There’s also the counterprogramming of a super violent film for all the teenaged boys to see while the rest of their family goes to some PG13 schmaltz-fest. And let’s not forget the final big-budget action film of the year, which has pretensions of Oscar hopes but will tell everybody that it just wants to entertain. These will make the most money of the year because everybody will just want to escape their families for 3 or so hours (these movies are always 3 hours long). So that’s, the movie release schedule for a year, after which we start at the beginning again but everything’s just a little worse than it was last year. Everybody knows that this was the worst year for film in the last 5 or so, if not more. Just look at all the crap that was released on a consistent basis. Was there even one movie that would stand up to something like The Godfather or Jaws?

Of course, not everybody will say all of these things. Most harbor only one or two of these thoughts in their movie-addled mind. Yeah, we have too many superhero movies and there hasn’t been a good horror movie since The Sixth Sense. Or look at all those Oscar-bait movies that exist solely to garner awards from an out of touch Academy and, hey, the only thing worse than Oscar season is post-Oscar season. It begins to feel like movie buffs aren’t really fans of movies anymore. They’ve reached a point where everything is predictable, from the release schedule to the movies themselves. Trailers show everything, there’s no point in even seeing the film anymore. Everything Hollywood does is just for the money, and most independent movies are just jumbles of quirks tossed into a juicer and puréed for easy consumption. Where are all the original stories? Everything is just a copy of something else. Creativity has gone down the drain and there’s no saving it.

Well, I’m calling bull. I’m tired of pessimism and cynicism in my favorite hobby. Since when does everything have to be amazing for us as a people to say it’s not horrible? Is anything I wrote in the first paragraph entirely wrong? No, of course not. There are movies that fit into each and every one of those molds every year and that will never change. But if I’m going to devote much of my free time to movies (and I will, because they have the capacity to be awesome) I’m just going to ignore those by-the-numbers films. Last year we saw such crap as Battleship and Silent Hill 2 and God Bless America. I watched all of those films and spent a bit of time complaining about how terrible they are, but will they be thing films that last, the one’s that stand out in our memory of 2012? Or, to put it another way, will anybody really remember Mama from this year. I saw it in theaters and I’ve already forgotten it. What has stuck with me is the Evil Dead remake. It proves at least two of the generalizations wrong by being a movie released in that period between the winter doldrums and summer blockbuster and a remake/sequel/reboot of a beloved horror franchise from the eighties. And it doesn’t rely on jump scares. What it does rely on is an interesting parallel between body horror and drug addiction/withdrawal which leads to a literal rebirth in a torrent of blood. It’s nuts, all out gore and grime and I loved it. So yeah, Hollywood can make good movies, even movies that fit into those categories that generally produce crappy films will sometimes score a nice little floater in the lane, if not a monstrous slam dunk. Things don’t have to be amazing to be not-horrible, they just have to not be horrible. That’s a pretty low bar to reach, and as a fan of movies I’ll always hope for a film to clear it rather than bonk its head. The movie buff culture has become a den of inequity where it’s cool to point out why a movie might be bad. I’d rather point out why a movie might be great. The worst that could happen is I’m wrong and Man of Steel doesn’t lift itself above a hit-or-miss director’s other works. I know it’ll look cool and have Michael Shannon yelling things. That’s enough to get me in the door. Optimism isn’t cool, but it should be. It’s more fun. Less angry. In the eternal words of Ricky Rubio:

Best Movies of 2012: Part 3

Sorry I’ve taken so long here. Hectic week and I’ve seen two more movies from the year so this installment is going to start at 21 instead of 20 where I left off. Silly, I know, but I’ll go back and fix everything so it looks less dumb. Anyways, time to start with the really good stuff. Remember, asteriskes

21. Django Unchained. A-. *

Our mutual friend has a flair for the dramatic.

Django really only suffers in comparison to the masterpiece that is Inglourious Basterds. Where that movie had a lot of things going on underneath the surface this one feels more like a straight up slavery western, as straight up as those can be. There are some amazing scenes and performances (DiCaprio in particular) and Tarantino does his thing. I only hope that he continues to try to say things rather than make less interesting stuff.

20. Anna Karenina. A-. *

I am not ashamed of who I am or what I’ve done. Are you ashamed for me?

Joe Wright is maybe the best stylist director we have working today. His movies always look and feel amazing, and this is no different with certain key scenes taking place on a stage with the participants sometimes acting as the audience and the backstage stuff indicating the lower class areas of the story. It’s a fascinating device that highlights the performative nature of the ruling class in a society that has a rough relationship with the rich. Keira Knightley and Jude Law are fantastic, it’s just too bad the third part of the love triangle at the core of the film, Aaron Taylor-Johnson doesn’t do anything with the role. It makes it hard to believe Anna’s choices. I wish she stayed with Jude Law.

19. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. A-.

I know who you are, Sam. I know I’m quiet… and, and I should speak more. But if you knew the things that were in my head most of the time, you’d know what I really meant. How, how much we’re alike and, and how we’ve been through things… and you’re not small. You’re beautiful.

Adapted for the screen by the writer of the popular book, I was really surprised at how much I liked this. It’s a highschool movie which could spell disaster yet through a great script and wonderful acting from the three main kids the movie turns into something grand. It totally weirded me out, actually. Made me feel all these weird feelings about my time in high school (which was neither as good nor as bad as the events depicted here) and my current friend relationships. It’s all so effectively emotional and even artistically inspiring. Don’t look past this one.

18. Les Misérables. A-. *

I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I’m living!

I guess there’s a reason why this story has been adapted and remade over and over again since 1862. It’s so damn emotional and it’s hard to not get caught up in the swell of things. Led by a strong Hugh Jackman turn and an amazing supporting performance by Anne Hathaway, the movie only hurts in a bad way when Russell Crowe is asked to sing. At all other times it hurts so good. I even liked all those horrible close ups.

17. Life of Pi. A-. *

I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.

I’m a fan of the first 90% of the book on which this film is based and luckily Ang Lee improves that percentage to about 95%. I still really hate the ideas the film has about God and “reality”. I can get past all of that for the majority of the film, though, because it’s so well made. I got to see it in 3D and it was truly a wonder to behold. I love the magical realism and Irrfan Khan saves a lot of what could be horrible voice over stuff. He even made me tear up during a speech at the end that I fundamentally disagreed with. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

16. The Master. A-. *

Man is not an animal. We are not a part of the animal kingdom. We sit far above that crown, perched as spirits, not beasts. I have unlocked and discovered a secret to living in these bodies that we hold.

I’m probably going to be tried for treason or something for putting this movie so low on my list. Well, hopefully the people with that kind of authority just stop reading this list now before they see what I put above it, then I’ll really get excommunicated. The unfortunate part is that I really really like this movie. It’s probably the best crafted movie on this list, everything is impeccable and works perfectly towards the goal of the film. It’s just that I didn’t have as much invested in this movie as I did with some of the others on this list and certainly with PTA’s previous films. It feels the most distant to me. I can’t really explain it, which, I guess, is apropos considering the film at hand.

15. Seven Psychopaths. A-. *

You didn’t think I was what? Serious? You think I’m not serious just because I carry a rabbit?

For the first twenty minutes or so of this movie had me worried. What happened to all of the wonderful character stuff and clever dialogue from In Bruges, Martin McDonagh‘s previous film? It all disappeared for some mildly interesting things about writing a script. Have no fear, though, all of that stuff returns soon and the movie never stops getting better. It’s a rare happening, an increasingly good movie. Bolstered by standout work from Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken, the movie’s meta-ness threatens to get out of control but always stays on that brink without going over. It’s a movie about movies about stories and I kind of love that stuff.

14. Prometheus. A-. **

A king has his reign, and then he dies. It’s inevitable. That is natural order of things.

I probably have this higher than most other people. That’s fine. Everybody else just can’t handle the greatness. Does it have script problems? Certainly. Do they detract from the quality of the film? A little, that’s why this has a minus next to that A. Do I care? No. It’s such an interesting movie to me, filled with little idea pods and hints of larger things that all those issues fall to the wayside. A well acted, intense, sci-fi movie with greater things on it’s mind is something to be praised, not torn to shreds by plot-hole-spotters.

13. Holy Motors. A-.

I am so old I’m afraid I’ll never die.

This is by far the strangest movie on this list. It’s almost a sister movie to Cosmopolis, only good. Leos Carax drops us into this weird world where a man has a job which entails going to 11 different locations and acting out a scene or two from wildly different genres of film/life. It’s totally nuts. There’s a motion capture sex scene and an odd (to put it mildly) leprechaun-y troll character and a family drama and a bank robbery gone wrong, to name a few of the crazy things on display here. Denis Lavant is the actor and his physicality changes so much with each character he transforms into it seems like they are being played by different people. It’s a breathtaking achievement that isn’t scared to do whatever the hell it wants at any given moment.

12. Coriolanus. A-.

He that will give good words to thee will flatter beneath abhorring. What would you have, you curs that like nor peace nor war? The one affrights you, the other makes you proud. He that trusts to you where he should find you lions, finds you hares; where foxes, geese. Who deserves greatness, deserves your hate.

Shakespeare adaptations are always tricky and this lesser known play is harder still, with a bunch of politics of a country that doesn’t actually exist mucking up the process. Luckily, first time director Ralph Fiennes does a great job of focusing us on the relationship between the two men at the heart of this conflict and the people around them trying to turn them towards their own goals. It’s a classic story, really, and the cast pulls off the tough Shakespearean dialogue with aplomb.

11. Looper. A. *

Then I saw it, I saw a mom who would die for her son, a man who would kill for his wife, a boy, angry & alone, laid out in front of him the bad path. I saw it & the path was a circle, round & round. So I changed it.

Looper is the third film by writer/director Rian Johnson and continues his streak of amazing films. I’ve loved all of them, even though this is the least of the three. It’s a time travel movie that has very little time travel, and an action movie which slows to a crawl in its second half to develop characters. Weird, right? Well, it’s those elements along with Johnson’s fine eye that make it such a great film. Everything about this movie works.

10. Girl Walk//All Day. A.

If there’s a movie you haven’t heard of on this list it’s probably this one. That’s because it’s actually a 75-ish minute full-album video featuring the entirety of mashup whiz Girl Talk’s All Day record. And there’s no talking, only dancing. There is a modicum of a story, yet another love triangle between The Girl, The Gentleman, and The Creep, but all of that takes second billing to the wonderfully joyous dancing and fluid camerawork on display. It’s just too damn fun not to be in the top ten for the year. And the best part is you can watch the entire thing for free here. Please do.

9. The Deep Blue Sea. A.

Lust isn’t the whole of life, but Freddie is, you see, for me. The whole of life. And death. So, put a label on that, if you can.

I watched my first and second Terence Davies movies this year, the other being The Long Day Closes, which ended up really high on my top 100 list. This one won’t make that list but it is good enough to place in the top ten for the year. It is, shockingly, another love triangle and where Girl Walk plays with the trope a little bit, this film embraces all of the dramatic potential of that situation. Thanks to astounding acting by Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, and Simon Russell Beale, every emotion is amped up to 11 while Davies masterfully orchestrates the drama with his soft focus and long takes. Scenes of note include a long tracking shot in a flashback to Weisz and Beale hiding in an Underground station during WWII and the first encounter between Weisz and Hiddleston which emphasizes the physical nature of their transgression. It’s fantastic stuff.

8. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. A. **

Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? That’s because I am afraid and it gives me courage.

Nobody in their right mind thought that stretching The Hobbit out to 3 movies was a good idea, and it still isn’t. This feels too long and bloated with things that don’t matter (Rivendell could have lasted 2 minutes, not 15) and yet I still loved it. It’s always nice to get back to Middle Earth on screen and Jackson still has a great eye for the more fantastical elements of the world. And there are more of those here than in the entirety of the Lord of the Rings films, from the rabbit sled to the fighting mountains and the goblins that live inside them. It’s a way more fun movie than any of the previous three, though not as well made as any of them. I’m super excited for the (even sillier titled) Desolation of Smaug later this year. BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH!

7. Cloud Atlas. A. *

Fear, belief, love. Phenomena that determined the course of our lives. These forces begin long before we are born and continue after we perish.

Cloud Atlas is one of those books that people call unfilmable thanks to the weird structure and confusing timelines and potential psychobabble. Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski co-direct and somehow manage to pull all of this into some kind of cohesive whole. While some hated the idea of having all the actors play different characters in different timelines, I welcomed the bold choice and I think it payed off spectacularly, especially with Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant in the evil roles. It’s also quite a marvel mechanically as it moves from timeline to timeline across decades and centuries. The pace of the movie is fast and loose, which keeps every ball in the air and never lets us catch our breath. And it looks gorgeous.

6. The Avengers. A. **

I won’t touch Barton. Not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he’ll wake just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I’ll split his skull! This is MY bargain, you mewling quim!

It took four years and five movies to set up the events of this film in the Marvel film universe and with Joss Whedon‘s second directorial effort it all payed off. He took the broken characters that make up this superhero team and bounced them off each other in his typical quick and witty way. Bringing back nearly everybody left alive at the end of all of those individual films and throwing us the man who was always meant to play Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) was a risky choice that payed off big time. Whedon also shows off his visual skills with some wonderful shots of action and dialogue, including the giant tracking shot at the center of the battle for New York City. I’ve seen it three times already and will be happy to see it again and again and again.

5. Lincoln. A. *

I am the president of the United States of America, clothed in immense power! You will procure me those votes!

I was one of those guys that liked War Horse so I think I was a little more excited for Lincoln than those that were burnt out on Spielberg schmaltz. Thankfully, Lincoln is probably one of the ‘berg’s top 5 movies, due in large part to the supreme performance by Daniel Day Lewis and the script by Tony Kushner which gave DDL lots of room to play. This is the most surprisingly funny movie of the year and both of those guys deserve the credit for making Lincoln into a real person and not a mythological figure. It’s a movie marred only by it’s opening and closing scenes and a pretty bad turn by Sally Field who didn’t figure out how to play a crazy person very well.

4. The Cabin in the Woods. A. *

Yes, you had “Zombies.” But this is “Zombie Redneck Torture Family.” Entirely separate thing. It’s like the difference between an elephant and an elephant seal.

Horror movies are great. I love them, even the crappy ones. I get the feeling that the duo behind this film (Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon) share that sentiment with me. The movie pokes fun at all the silly tropes that horror films use in a playful way. It’s not mocking horror movies, it’s embracing them, eating them up, and spitting them back out with a heaping dose of meta-fiction thrown on top. It escalates wonderfully as well, going from what you expect to what you’ve always wanted to happen in a movie like this. The last 30 minutes are spectacular. DING!

3. We Need to Talk About Kevin. A. *

It’s like this: you wake and watch TV, get in your car and listen to the radio you go to your little jobs or little school, but you don’t hear about that on the 6 o’clock news, why? ‘Cause nothing is really happening, and you go home and watch some more TV and maybe it’s a fun night and you go out and watch a movie. I mean it’s got so bad that half the people on TV, inside the TV, they’re watching TV. What are these people watching, people like me?

This is technically a 2011 movie but I didn’t see it until February of last year, and that was in a theater so I’m putting it on this list. Deal with it. It’s a truly amazing film, full of artistry and intense emotional struggles as a mother (Tilda Swinton) tries to love her son but just can’t. Well, that’s half of the movie. The other half still follows her as she tries to deal with the consequences of an act that becomes clear as the movie goes on. I won’t go into too much detail here to save the experience for any of you that haven’t watched it yet. Let’s just say that this movie is even more relevant now than it was when it came out. Director Lynne Ramsay totally immerses us in this horrible situation with her use of color and sound. It’s a singular movie experience.

2. Skyfall. A. **

It always makes me feel a bit melancholy. Grand old war ship. being ignominiously haunted away to scrap… The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?

I liked this movie so much I saw it twice in a 24 hour period. James Bond has always been hit or miss. It’s part of the charm of the series, you never know what you’re going to get from film to film. This time we got the best movie yet. Daniel Craig’s Bond is older and rustier than ever. He faces a world where his necessity is in question. Do we even need a Bond anymore? By the end of the movie the answer is a resounding yes, especially if they all look and feel like this. Outstanding work from Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ben Whishaw, Sam Mendes, and Roger Deakins meld into something wonderful. And it even has thematic depth!

1. Moonrise Kingdom. A+. *

There’s a cold water crabber moored off Broken Rock. The skipper owes me an IOU. We’ll see if he can take you on as a claw cracker. It won’t be an easy life, but it’s better than shock therapy.

There was a time when I didn’t like Wes Anderson. Fantastic Mr. Fox changed that and now I look forward to every new movie he makes. This was the first I got to see on the big screen and his meticulousness in framing and the art direction really pops when everything is larger than life. Featuring one of the few times when I’ve liked Ed Norton in a movie and a bunch of really solid supporting roles, the real stars are the two newcomers that play the kids at the center of the story (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward). It is, like most Wes Anderson films, full of melancholy and nostalgia and the driest wit and now that I have figured him out I really love it.

 

That’s the list. I hope you got something out of it. There is, of course, another, hidden list that is peeking out around the edges here. The list of movies I just didn’t get to. There are a ton of these and most of them not interesting. Here are the interesting ones:

This is Not a Film, Damsels in Distress, The Five-Year Engagement, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Headhunters, Rust and Bone, Men in Black 3, Oslo August 31^st, Your Sister’s Sister, Magic Mike, Ted, Take This Waltz, The Imposter, Shut Up and Play the Hits, Ruby Sparks, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Searching for Sugar Man, Hope Springs, The Bourne Legacy, Compliance, Lawless, Arbitrage, End of Watch, The Sessions, Flight, Chasing Ice, Rise of the Guardians, Hitchcock, The Guilt Trip, Jack Reacher, This Is 40, Not Fade Away, Tabu.

So if you can make a case for any of those please do in the comments below. Also let me know if you agree or disagree with any of my list items. Or even give your top 10 or whatever!