Eyes Wide Open 2012

Eyes Wide Open 2012 The Year’s 25 Greatest Movies (and 5 Worst) by Chris Barsanti Copyright 2013 Chris Barsanti ISBN: 9781482366105 Cover design by Scott Russo Note: Versions of the following chapters were previously published in PopMatters: “Cloud Atlas,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Holy Motors,” “Take This Waltz,” “On the Road,” “17 Girls,” “The Invisible War,” “Wuthering Heights,” “In ‘Clue,’ Communism is Just a Red Herring,” “The Princess Has a Sword: ‘Snow White and the Huntsman,’” ‘Everybody Was Right About ‘Heaven’s Gate,’” “What ‘True Romance’ Did For Tony Scott and Hollywood,” “This Is All There Is?,” and “The Harsh World—Films Facing Reality in 2012.” Versions of the following chapters previously appeared in Film Journal International: “Detropia,” “The Master,” “Cosmopolis,” “Anna Karenina,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “West of Memphis,” and “Oslo, August, 31st.” for Marya Contents Introduction 1 The Top 25 Films of 2012 5 Honorable Mentions 84 The 5 Worst Films of 2012 90 Yet More Lists 108 DVD Reviews 111 Essays 125 Endnote 134 CHRIS BARSANTI INTRODUCTION Everybody Has an Audience FROM THE POINT-OF-VIEW SHOTS in End of Watch to the overt theatricality of Anna Karenina, 2012 was a year for self-conscious spectacle at the movies. In The Hunger Games, the life-and-death struggle of its teen protagonists is all for the benefit of home television audiences. In Leos Carax’s eye-popping Holy Motors, the whole point of life appears to be watching. Or acting. Or both. The irony here is that this was happening even as film as an art form slid even further off the cultural radar. What films did everybody want to see this year? Until the end-of-year award marathon, there was one: The Avengers. Whatever the film’s merits, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would spark long conversations. The only thing The Avengers inspired—outside of the circles of fanboys debating the merits of the Mark Ruffalo Hulk against earlier iterations—was talk about its Titanic-level box office (something north of a billion dollars, in case anybody’s paying attention). Sam Mendes’ Bond film Skyfall was a broad attention-getter, and while it definitely improved on the forgettable Pierce Brosnan entries and the nearly incomprehensible Quantum of Solace, it was still something of a disappointment. It is possible that Casino Royale just raised the bar too high. 1 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 Was anybody even paying attention to the movies outside of cinephile circles? This is hard to determine in the fractured media landscape. Good films came and went, but the buzz (if any) focused almost entirely on the opening weekend. There are many factors here, from our YouTube society’s ever-decreasing attention span to the ever-increasing range of visual entertainment available and the recent increase in quality TV shows. Yes, TV as a medium has come a long way from the days when Hill Street Blues was a pinnacle of dramatic smarts. But a good part of what makes modern longform television dramas so compelling is less their intelligence than the room they have to spin a tale. Stories are allowed to unfold in hour-long clips at a pace that would leave movie theater audiences heading for the door. Shows from Boardwalk Empire to The Walking Dead are merely bringing back the old art of the serial, where instead of resetting to zero at the end of each episode, they hook audiences in with a cliffhanger designed to keep them hungering for the next big reveal. Viewers can return each week for more of the same familiar characters and storylines but are not likely to want to sit in a theater for ten hours on end (Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings marathons aside). Movies are different: Excepting those sequels that pile up in the summer, each one is a risk, an all-new story. You plunk your money down and head into the theater not truly knowing what to expect. And unlike with TV, you are there for the duration. There is no turning the channel and, for most people at least, no 2 CHRIS BARSANTI leaving the room. It’s a gamble, and when you lose, it can be painful. Just ask most anybody who paid to see The Hobbit. But when you hit on a winner, the rewards can be transportive in a way that few TV shows can ever manage. Perhaps it’s the immersive aspect of it, the darkened chamber, the overwhelming screen and sound. Stumbling out of the theater after seeing a great film, one that left you so stunned you even sat through the credits, is an experience like little else. It’s a complete experience. 2012 didn’t offer too many complete experiences, particularly when compared to 2011. There were no epics for the ages along the lines of The Tree of Life, little in the way of cool-wired gonzo freakouts like Take Shelter, and few impossibly infuriating yet grand and unforgettable messes like Margaret. One positive development was the lack of a film from Lars von Trier. And Tom Cruise proved in Rock of Ages that, if nothing else, he would be awesome to do karaoke with. But there were at least a few arguable masterpieces, not to mention a clutch of vital music documentaries, and even a couple knockout adaptations of classic novels (Kerouac, Bronte) which didn’t fake relevance by using modernized settings or attitudes. There was also welcome evidence of a growing class of female directors (Kathryn Bigelow, Sarah Polley, Amy Berg, et al) with distinctive voices and new stories to tell—or old stories to tell in fresh ways. As usual, Hollywood managed to pull a few rabbits out of its hat at the end of the year. On the Road and Zero 3 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 Dark Thirty were both stunners in completely different ways. Silver Linings Playbook showed that it’s still possible to create a halfway decent audience-pleasing romantic comedy (no matter that it was curiously marketed as some kind of edgy indie). Les Miserables did its level best to keep the film musical alive, despite all of Russell Crowe’s worst efforts. The mostly stultifying Lincoln was nearly saved by an awe-inspiring performance from Daniel Day-Lewis—so impressive, in fact, that audiences and critics almost didn’t remark on it; the obviousness of his mastery was so complete, there was almost nothing left to say. If there is a narrative to the films of 2012, it might be something like this: We are tired, frantic, frightened, under close watch, and running out of options (see my concluding essay “The Harsh World” for more on that last, very cheery topic). The future was a critical factor in films from Cosmopolis to Cloud Atlas and Looper, and it was never something to look forward to. The churning froth of disruptive violence that eddied through films from The Dark Knight Rises to End of Watch created a razor’s edge of jangling tension that is never completely resolved. The recurrent motifs of surveillance and artifice in this year’s films raised questions about who’s watching who, who knows they’re being watched, and are they playing a role? Fortunately, there were still enough of us out there in the dark enjoying watching everybody up on the screen, and still more than enough reasons to keep doing it. 4 CHRIS BARSANTI THE TOP 25 FILMS OF 2012 1 — Detropia Directors: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s lavishly photographed, impassioned elegy for the decaying American city uses Detroit as its case study for the nation’s post-industrial, permanent recession future. “WE ARE HERE AT A CRITICAL TIME!” shouts a tent-revival preacher somewhere in the gloom of a rapidly downsizing Detroit. His is one of the many frightened, brave, saddened, still-fighting voices that Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady include as a chorus of the forgotten in their tragedy-tinted but clear-eyed look at what happens when a city’s reason for being up and leaves. The filmmakers capture a city going in reverse. In 1930, Detroit was the fastest-growing city in the world, and it’s shrunk by over 25 percent in the last decade alone. Unable to provide services to its many nearly empty blocks (arson and decay having laid waste to many weed-pricked neighborhoods), the city is demolishing some 10,000 homes. The mayor, trying to convince residents to relocate to denser areas, says with exasperation, “The city is broke. I don’t know how many 5 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 times I have to say it.” Bus service is being slashed and streetlights turned off. There is talk of the city “going back to the prairie.” Sprawling manufacturing complexes the size of small towns lie quiet, the jobs long gone to Mexico or China. Meanwhile, as residents agonize about their lives dwindling away, performance artists creep into downtown to take advantage of cheap rents, and tourists clamber into the train station’s cavernous ruin to luxuriate in the photogenic decay. As in 2010’s amazing 12th and Delaware, Ewing and Grady hang back and let their subjects open up. A video blogger and coffee-shop worker agitates about closing schools, which she calls “shutting down futures.” The head of a union fights to keep things together as management demands impossible wage cuts; the crushed looks on his workers’ faces say everything about the devaluing of labor in the modern world. Most poignantly, the owner of a bar who once served auto workers wonders aloud what has come of it all, and whether there is any future but revolution.

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