The Top 20 Films of 2012 – Part 2

This week I’m happy to share my Top 10 films of 2012. You can see numbers 20-11 here, and a ranked list of all the films I saw this year here, but I’m excited about the range and quality of these picks. Since last year, I’ve made my list a top 20 in order to spotlight some picks that might be a bit more eccentric or overlooked, but each year a crop of films emerge that are too good to ignore. 2012 was no exception, reinvigorating both challenging North American filmmaking as well as the international festival favorites.

Regrets: Photographic Memory
Honorable Mentions: Lincoln, The Hole, The Gatekeepers, Chico & Rita, The Kid with a Bike

The Master

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2010s, Feature

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January 9, 2013

6 Comments

The Top 20 Films of 2012 – Part 1

An eclectic mix of animation, festival favorites and grimy genre films makes up numbers 20-11 of my top films of the year. Stay tuned for the Top 10 later, but in the meantime you can pad out your Netflix queue with some of these 2012 gems.

This Is Not A Film

20) 21 Jump Street / Phil Lord & Chris Miller

21 Jump Street is the funniest film of the year and a good example of how to smartly make dumb comedies. The film largely succeeds on the likeability of its pair of in-over-their-heads undercover cops—Jonah Hill, and especially Channing Tatum, who had a breakout year—but the film shows a bit more wit and intelligence than we’ve come to expect from this brand of comedy (see: The Campaign). Take, for example, the breezy establishment of the pair’s unlikely friendship and the social changes they experience living through high school a second time. Read more…

2010s, Feature

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January 4, 2013

2 Comments

My Review of “Cosmopolis” in the New Issue of Cineaste

If you find yourself around a bookstore or newsstand for some last minute holiday shopping, or holiday returns, look for the new issue of Cineaste Magazine. The Winter 2012 issue has some great features and articles, including my review of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis starring Robert Pattinson.

It’s one of my favorite films of the year, and I argue that it already deserves reconsideration after being coolly received by audiences and critics. While it may seem a departure from Cronenberg’s body horror classics of the 80s, Cosmopolis too transposes the fears and fascinations of contemporary society into monstrous amalgamations of man and machinery. In today’s world of global economic meltdowns and polarized class rhetoric, however, humans no longer meld with televisions or the DNA of flies, but rather with streams of information—vast, unknowable, and meaningless.

Article

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December 24, 2012

4 Comments

My Film “New Jersey Transit” to Screen at The New School

New Jersey Transit

If you’re in New York City this weekend, please come out to see my film New Jersey Transit. It’s playing as part of the The New School’s FINE CUTS screening series featuring student video work. The event will be Friday, December 14th at 7pm in the Tishman Auditorium, located at 66 W. 12th Street between 5th and 6th ave.

There are 10 other great student films screening, and the event will feature a Q&A with all the filmmakers, a public reception, plus an audience vote for favorite film. FINE CUTS is free and no tickets or reservations are required.

New Jersey Transit is a 6-minute short “city symphony” film shot in Hoboken, originally posted here.

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December 12, 2012

2 Comments

Frances Ha (2013)

Frances Ha / Noah Baumbach / 2013 / fourstar

Active Ingredients: Greta Gerwig; Affably casual and emotionally honest
Side Effects: Occasionally over-scripted; Tone of digital B&W images

Greta Gerwig

[Frances Ha plays at the New York Film Festival on September 30th, October 4th and October 10th.]

There’s often a whiff of “1st world problems” in the subgenre of the urban quarter-life crisis dramedy that can be a bit hard to shake. In Frances Ha, a young woman struggles with her relationships with men and her best girlfriends, while also halfheartedly searching for the drive to take the next step into maturity. We know Frances will turn out OK—she’s too smart and plucky not to—but her’s are still relateable and recognizable real-world problems, and I think Frances Ha has the sincerity and conviction to speak to a lot of people. Read more…

2010s, 3 Stars, Festival

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September 27, 2012

2 Comments

Final Cut – Ladies and Gentlemen (2012)

Final Cut – Ladies and Gentlemen / György Pálfi / 2012 /

Active Ingredients: Maintaining a story through recycled film clips
Side Effects: Misuse of form; Distracting music; Reductive gender roles

[Final Cut – Ladies and Gentlemen plays as part of the New York Film Festival’s “Cinema Reflected” sidebar on Monday, October 1st.]

Just as DJs can repurpose music to create something qualitatively new, just as artists can assemble found material into a collage, so too can a filmmaker create a brand new film without shooting any new material. Montage films have existed for some time, but with digital technology and over 100 years of recorded images to remix, artists are now more equipped than ever to experiment with the unlimited new effects that can be created using found footage. Montage films are a perfectly valid art form, and they can be masterful in their own way without owing anything to the fragments that comprise them. Like all art, however, the form must be used for a purpose to succeed, and, if nothing else, Final Cut – Ladies and Gentlemen demonstrates the wrong way to make a montage film. Read more…

1 Star, 2010s, Festival

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September 26, 2012

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Passion (2013)

Passion / Brian De Palma / 2013 / fourstar

Active Ingredients: Evolving cinematography; Sleazy fun; Thriller setpieces
Side Effects: Rachel McAdams; Dips into camp; Script

[Passion will play at the New York Film Festival on September 29th, October 6th and October 11th.]

Passion has been billed as a return to form for director Brian De Palma. After the dark neo-noir of The Black Dahlia, and Redacted, an Iraq war film using a variety of video formats, Passion is psycho-sexual thriller akin to the 1970s films that made his name as a Hitchcockian craftsman. The film does seem to fit the bill of a genre comeback for De Palma, complete with lusty psychological gamesmanship, a twisting narrative and self aware formalism, but while De Palma devotees may delight in stylistic references to the director’s classic thrillers, it seems to me that the irony—bordering on comedy and camp—of more recent films like Snake Eyes and Femme Fatale is key to understanding this slick, wacky offering. Read more…

2010s, 4 Stars, Festival

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September 19, 2012

1 Comment

Berberian Sound Studio (2013)

Berberian Sound Studio / Peter Strickland / 2013 /

Active Ingredients: Soundscapes; Sincere interest in B genres; Tobey Jones
Side Effects: Lack of direction; Unfinished feeling; Slow pace

[Berberian Sound Studio will play as part of the New York Film Festival’s “Midnight Movies” sidebar. It screens Friday, October 5th and Tuesday, October 9th.]

Sound is a powerful tool in modern filmmaking. Sound can fool us into perceiving something that’s not there, just as it can make us ignore something that’s actually present. The magic trick is so effective that we never realize the noises don’t match the images we see. But we believe them anyway. Perhaps the illusion is too alluring to let our doubt to shatter. In the slick, but ultimately unsatisfying genre exercise Berberian Sound Studio, director Peter Strickland explores just how strong the force of sound is in film, asking what would happen if sound and image slipped further and further out of synch, both in cinema and in reality. Read more…

2 Stars, 2010s, Festival

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September 17, 2012

1 Comment

Short Film: “New Jersey Transit”

This is a short montage film I made of sounds and images from Hoboken, New Jersey. I filmed different fragments of objects—wires, water, buildings, etc.—and tried to edit a montage emphasizing the shapes, lines and colors of the images rather than the subjects themselves. Shots are placed together with the logic of graphic design rather than narrative, but I think a certain pace of a lazy afternoon in Hoboken emerges.

This project was inspired by Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice, as well as other “city symphony” films, and also by Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage as a form of graphical conflict.

Please let me know what you think in a comment!

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August 29, 2012

2 Comments

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

Beasts of the Southern Wild / Benh Zeitlin / 2012 / twostar

Active Ingredients: Originality and vibrancy; Sense of location; Dwight Henry
Side Effects: Manipulation; Music; Distracting camerawork

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a unique film, a rare creative gesture that both invents its own universe and emerges from the energy of a specific corner of our own. Independently produced by a small crew collaborating with local (largely non-professional) talent, and with personality to burn, the film is messy, but its shagginess constitutes its appeal. Audiences looking for new tones, new pulses in a film don’t need all the corners neatly smoothed away. Indeed, even the film’s technical flaws separate it from other movies you’re likely to see in theaters or at award shows. It’s not Beasts’ budgetary or technical limitations that dilute its power as a unique vision, then, but rather its emotional calculations and the tried and true filmic devices it uses to turn a warts-and-all slice of magical realism into the most unlikely of crowd-pleasers. Read more…

2 Stars, 2010s

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August 28, 2012

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