Pre-theatrical Video on Demand is emerging as a mainstream platform for movies. In 2012, I watched thirteen movies on Amazon VOD, YouTube and DirecTV BEFORE they appeared in theaters. These films includedTake This Waltz, the Sarah Polley film that made it to my Best Movies of 2012, as well as three other movies that I really liked, the affectionate documentary Paul Williams Still Alive, the rip-roaring satire King Kelly and the thriller Deadfall. Of course, I also saw a higher proportion of stinkers on VOD than in theaters. Anyway, I find that nowadays it’s well worth checking the pre-theatrical VOD offerings (which I do on IndieWire).
San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle recently wrote “Very few movies need to be longer than two hours. Directors should make movies, not take hostages.” He’s right.
Some filmmakers seem to have the mistaken view that length conveys importance. It does not. What makes good movies good – unpredictable plot, intriguing characters, evocative settings and singular visuals – can be accomplished in 90 minutes. A movie only needs to be longer if the sweep of the story requires it.
Sometimes it is necessary, but length itself never makes a movie better. It does make a poor movie more unbearable. The opening sentence of my comments on the ponderous The Dark Knight Rises was, “Well, there’s 2 hours and 44 minutes that I’ll never get back.” A much better franchise movie, Skyfall took two hours 23 minutes – but how much was really the action spectacle and Bond coolness that we were looking for? The Master was two hours 24 minutes long, but only the first 110 minutes was good; a potential masterpiece just fizzled out, trying to find an ending.
For some movies, being overlong is the fatal flaw. I wrote about A Royal Affair: “It’s a romance and tragedy of operatic depth, and, unfortunately, operatic length. It would make a gripping 90-minute film, but A Royal Affair slogs through 137 minutes. As a result the sharpness of the tragedy becomes dulled into mere grimness.”
Its 2 hours and 47 minutes duration was the only imperfection in In the Family. I wrote: “There’s probably a 130 minute indie hit somewhere inside In the Family.” If it lost half an hour, In the Family would have made my list of the year’s best movies.
Of course, an epic like Lawrence of Arabia needs to be long. That’s why this year’s Cloud Atlas needed over two hours to cover its six story threads across six centuries. With this year’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the leisurely pace and long length were key to its hypnotic appeal.
Seth Rogen and Michele Williams in TAKE THIS WALTZ
What are 2012’s most overlooked films? Take This Waltz, Elena and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia are on some Top Ten lists, including mine, but they still haven’t gotten the buzz that they deserve. These are three of the very best films of the year. I wish that more women, especially, would experience writer-director Sarah Polley’s work and Michele Williams’ performance in Take This Waltz. Anatolia is admittedly not for everyone, but I think that future film historians may rate it as a masterpiece.
The thriller Deadfall was solid, but got lost among the big Holiday movies. And the brilliantly original satire King Kelly, which I saw on VOD, wasn’t released in any theaters that I know of.
This year I wrote farewells to four of my movie favorites.
Most Baby Boomers first saw Ben Gazzara as the star of the 60s TV series Run for Your Life, and cinephiles point to his work in two groundbreaking John Cassavetes films, Husbands and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I immediately thought of the Coolest Movie Character Ever, John Russo in Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed.
Levon Helm‘s 17 acting credits include some very top shelf stuff. He was Loretta’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter. In The Right Stuff, he played Ridley, test pilot Chuck Yeager’s aircraft mechanic, the guy who loans him Beeman’s chewing gum before each life-risking test flight. He was also the narrator in The Right Stuff. I particularly loved one of his last roles, Old Man with Radio in Tommy Lee Jones’ overlooked 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
Susan Tyrrell was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a dead-on performance as a pathetic sad sack barfly in the under appreciated Fat City (1972).
For his very first feature film, Andy Griffith shed the likeability and decency that made him a TV megastar and became a searingly unforgettable villain. In the 1957 Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd, Griffith played Lonesome Rhodes, a failed country guitar picker who is hauled out of an Arkansas drunk tank by talent scout Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). It turns out that he has a folksy charm that is dynamite in the new medium of television. Presaging communication in the television age, A Face in the Crowd is one of our most important political movies.
(Note: I’m saving room for some films that I haven’t yet seen, especially Amour and Zero Dark Thirty, which I won’t get a chance to see until mid-January .)
You can watch the trailers and see my comments on all these films at Best Movies of 2012.
According to Metacritic, all of my picks (except Detachment) were highly rated by prominent critics. I did disdain some well-reviewed films, most notably The Master, which made lots of critics’ end-of-year lists.
(Further Note: A Separation won the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and Monsieur Lazhar was nominated, but neither were widely released in the US until 2012. Similarly, The Kid with a Bike was screened in October 2011 at the New York Film Festival, but was not theatrically released in the US release until March 2012. These films are on my 2012 list because, like most Americans, I couldn’t see them until 2012.)
Donna Reed in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE - the second best wife ever
Happy Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa The Love of My Life!
We howled in surprise together at the hilarious Norwegian curling comedy King Curling. And, in gown and tux, we sneaked out of a gala to catch a late night screening of The Ghastly Loves of Johnny X at Cinequest.
I cherished her company at Bernie, Moonrise Kingdom, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Ruby Sparks, Brave, Searching for Sugar Man, Argo, Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook. And, at home, I especially enjoyed sharing the 1979 BBC miniseries version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Although she’s always skeptical about French movie fare – especially on a Friday night – she was a good sport for some French films this year – and Israeli, Iranian and two Norwegian ones, too!
She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog, and I appreciate her and love her. Happy Anniversary, Honey!
1. I haven’t seen Undefeated, the Oscar winning documentary about an underdog high school football team, or the French political thriller The Minister (L’exercice de l’État ) because – as far as I know – they haven’t yet been released in the US. How can an Oscar winner not get a release? You can read descriptions and watch trailers of these films as Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
2. There was also no US release for the hilarious Norwegian curling comedy King Curling or the creepy Slovak voyeur thriller Visible World. I think that, given a chance, American audiences would have responded to both of them.
3. Sometimes my favorite filmmakers let me down. There wasn’t much to Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, which I had been eagerly awaiting for months.
Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona) hadn’t made a film for thirteen years and then came up with Damsels in Distress. With the tedious Greta Gerwig. Really, Whit?
Note: I don’t have a Worst Ten Movie list because, unlike professional critics, I don’t have to see every movie. I do see over 100 new movies each year, but I try REALLY, REALLY HARD to avoid the bad movies. So my worst movie going experience is always either 1) on an airline flight when I see a movie that I normally wouldn’t; 2) a hyped art film that disastrously falls on its face and/or really pisses me off (The White Ribbon); or 3) something I find on cable TV while channel surfing (Paul Blart: Mall Cop). But usually, the culprit finds its way aboard a long airline flight. Not this year.
4. That being said, the worst film that I saw was probably Dorfman, which would have derailed if it had started out on the rails.
In Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy Django Unchained, a bounty hunter(Christolph Waltz, the Jew-hunting Nazi colonel in Inglorious Basterds) and a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) hunt down slave holders and slave merchants and dispatch them in increasingly creative and cinematic fashion. The plot gives them each a credible motivation to do so, but this movie is really just a revenge fantasy aimed at American slavery.
Let’s not short the revenge film genre, which includes many top drawer movies – Winchester 73, The Searchers, Carrie, Gladiator, even The Virgin Spring and Zero Dark Thirty. (If it’s a really good revenge film, people tend not to identify it as a revenge film.) But Tarantino is never squeamish about the enjoyability of genre films, and Django Unchained is gloriously pedal-to-the-metal exploitation.
Waltz and Foxx are very good. The most fun performance is by Tarantino fave Samuel L. Jackson as the malevolent house slave who uses his wiles to advance the causes of his dim masters and of slavery.
Django Unchained – from its title on – is a love letter to the spaghetti Western genre. We have a title song that could have come from the Italian Ringo movies, lots of Ennio Morricone-like music and even the first movie Django himself (Franco Nero). The titles are blazing red, and some of the locations (as in the Italian movies shot in Spain) are hilariously inappropriate (California oak grasslands for Mississippi, some rocky California desert for East Texas and a random sequence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, apparently just because Tarantino wanted to show some bison). For spaghetti Western aficionados like myself, it’s a lot of fun.
There’s a lot of violence, including an especially gory final shootout that would have unsettled Sam Peckinpah. One thing for sure – it’s a lot of movie for your money.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a special film, and its star Quvenzhane Wallis carries the movie. Although this is her first film and she was only six years old during the filming, I would not be surprised if she is nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. That’s how stirring her performance is.
As I wrote in my comments on Beasts, writer-director Benh Zeitlin was specially audacious to bet his movie on the performance of a six year old. But we’ve seen some remarkable performance by child actors this year – and in many of my Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.
In my current pick for the top film of the year, the Dardennes brothers’ The Kid with the Bike , the story revolves around the 12-year old first time actor Thomas Doret. Doret pulls it off, delivering a performance of gripping intensity.
Although Mohammed Fellag is the lead in Monsieur Lazhar, there wouldn’t be a film without the performances by the kids, Sophie Nelisse and Emilien Neron.
Similarly, Wes Anderson’s delightful Moonrise Kingdomis carried by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayman. Moonrise Kingdom is their movie; even Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand and Bill Murray are just along for the ride.
And in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, the key point of view is that of the ever watchful teenage daughter. She desperately wants her parents back together, views everything through this prism and is powerless to make it happen. She is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter Sarina.
Pierce Gagnon plays one compellingly terrifying four-year-old in Looper.
Overall, it’s an uncommonly impressive year for child actors.
Let’s get this out of the way first – having neither seen nor desired to see the Broadway musical Les Miserables, I am not the target audience for this movie. I don’t care for melodramas – and Les Mis is two melodramas in one – the story of the saintly Jean Valjean being chased for decades by the monomaniacal Javert and a romance between two kids. So I was mostly bored. If, however, you love Les Mis, you’ll probably enjoy this long, long, lavish all-star effort from director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, The Damned United, John Adams).
The cast is mostly excellent. Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn), Amanda Seyfried, Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit are all excellent singers and give outstanding performances. Redmayne is exceptional. Sasha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are very funny in the comic roles (the highlight of the movie for lowbrow me). The other lead is Russell Crowe, who really can’t match the singing ability of the other actors, which is a distraction.
Hooper has made the costumes and make-up very realistic for the filthy and scabby period. This, for me, was jarring when juxtaposed against the artificiality of the characters breaking into song and some very cheesy CGI sets.
Now here’s one of my pet peeves – movies that should be over but linger like an unwanted guest. Here, both of the plot threads (the chase and the romance) are resolved, yet the movie goes on for three more songs, including a death scene and the stirring finale. Aaaack.
