MY FAVOURITE FILMS OF 2012

So here's my twenty favourite films of 2012 in descending order. Please note: I don't claim these as the best films of the year, just the ones I personally enjoyed the most. At the bottom of this post you'll also find my five least favourite films of 2012. Enjoy.



20. REC 3
The third in the Spanish horror franchise takes a stylistic left turn from found footage to ‘proper’ film and also becomes more of a black comedy ala Sam Raimi/Peter Jackson. And it works. Bloody, brutal, blackly funny and with the coolest bride since Uma went postal on Bill. Love it.

Trailer

19. HAYWIRE
Steven Soderbergh turns his hand to action movie making in this stylish and violent tale of espionage, double crosses and revenge. Mixed martial artist Gina Carano makes her film debut as the lead, playing a betrayed spy on the run to clear her name. So far so seen it all before. But Soderbergh brings his distinctive look to proceedings as well as a much welcomed pulled back camera and steady and restrained editing to the impressive chases and fights. Carano isn’t the greatest of actors but she certainly has screen presence and charisma. And she can kick ass with the best. She’s scary and sexy and can beat the biggest baddest guys to a pulp. A flop at the cinema this is still way better than the latest Bourne effort.

Carano vs. Fassbender

18. TED
Seth Macfarlane’s directorial debut is exactly the movie you’d expect and hope from the creator of Family Guy, namely lewd, crude, geeky, clever and gut achingly funny. The years best out and out comedy by a mile.

17. SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN
A stylish and exciting retelling of the classic fairytale with added grit, black magic and battles. It’s dark enough, violent enough and intriguing enough to grab your attention. But then add in a wondrously sexy/scary turn by Charlize Theron as the evil queen and this movie had me completely in its power. Kirsten Stewart is good too as Snow and Chris Hemsworth once more oozes gruff movie star charisma as the Huntsman. Not to everyone’s tastes maybe but as a fairytale geek I loved it. Plus much more entertaining than The Hobbit.

16. THE AWAKENING
An old school British horror, The Awakening is set in the early 1920’s in an allegedly haunted boarding school for boys. Handsomely made and wonderfully slow burn and mysterious, the film features a flawless central performance from Rebecca Hall as she tries to debunk the haunting in the school only to discover some disturbing truths about her own past. Dominic West and Imelda Stanton provide excellent support in this classy, atmospheric and highly watchable chiller.

Trailer

15. BRAVE
Pixar do it again with this gorgeous looking, funny and charming adventure about making one’s own fate and fighting for your place in life. Kelly Macdonald is splendid and positively crackles with energy and warmth as the voice of Merida, our young, feisty, flame haired heroine. The rest of the voice cast are great too including Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly and Robbie Coltrane. A lovely film, especially for mothers and daughters everywhere.

14. ARGO
Ben Affleck directs and stars in this true story about the rescue of American diplomats from 1979 revolutionary Iran. Affleck directs in a straightforward and non-showy way letting the story and the actors do all the hard work. It pays off. Argo is a tense thriller with a nice line in humour and Alan Arkin stealing the show and all the best lines as a cynical movie producer who helps with the rescue plan. Great stuff.

13. THE TALL MAN
A darkly disturbing and thought provoking film from Pascal Laugier, the director of the infamous Martyrs, that goes places you aren’t expecting it to go. The Tall Man sees small town doctor Jessica Beil investigating the legend of the Tall Man along with the disappearance of several children from what is a dirt-poor American mining community. Beil is excellent in what is a multi-faceted role and Laugier raises all sorts of troubling questions and moral quandaries around issues such as poverty, parenting and how best to improve the lives and futures of our children. Powerful, affecting and horrific in its own special way, The Tall Man is intelligent horror filmmaking.

Trailer

12. PARANORMAN
A beautifully made stop motion animation from the studio that gave us the sublime Coraline, Paranorman is an affectionate ode to horror movies and to the important role scary stories play in childhood. It’s good to be scared it tells us. However it is not good to let your fear get the better of you and to then hurt others because of it. The movie looks great and the voice talent does sterling work. There are even a couple of proper scares in there to make you jump. But the film finds its real power towards the end as the truth of things is revealed and its message of not letting fear lead to bad things hits home in a sad and genuinely affecting way.

11. LOOPER
Rian Johnson’s time travel thriller is a riveting tale of nature vs. nurture and of changing ones fate. Bruce Willis comes back in time, avoids being murdered by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as his younger self, before setting out to change his fate and the future in a radical way. Small scale but with big ideas Looper is a quality thriller that plays with genre in a similar way in which Johnson’s film Brick did. Willis and Levitt are great, as is the lovely Emily Blunt. But it is young Pierce Gagnon as Blunt’s son Cid who proves quite astonishing in what is a challenging and significant role. Quality scifi.

10. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO
David Fincher’s English language version of Stieg Larsson’s darkly disturbing crime novel is a better film than the Swedish original, being far more cinematic and losing the TV movie feel. Daniel Craig is very good as investigative journalist Blomkvist who’s trying to uncover the mystery of the long vanished niece of Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger. But it is Rooney Mara as damaged-but-genius hacker Lisbeth Salander who makes the biggest impact. Noomi Rapace was fabulous in the Swedish film and is still the definitive Lisbeth, but Mara comes a very close second. Intense stuff.

9. THE RAID
Welsh director Gareth Evans’ Indonesian action flick is a stupidly violent, stupidly inventive movie that puts almost all Hollywood actioners of recent years to shame. A bunch of special forces cops enter a building owned by a crime boss who locks the building down and offers his tenants big rewards if they kill off all the cops. What follows is an uber-violent bloody battle as our main cop hero Rama must fight his way to the big boss before then escaping the building in one piece. It’s as simply plotted as that, but is pure bone breaking, bullet ridden genius in its execution. A sequel is on its way. Yay!

Claycat’s version of The Raid (awesome!)

8. CHRONICLE
Josh Trank’s found footage superhero drama is a genius little film that delves in to a troubled teenaged psyche before eventually unleashing the fury of a super villain on to the world in a gritty and ‘realistic’ way. A group of teenage friends develop telekinetic powers after encountering an apparent glowing meteorite in the woods. It’s all fun and pranks at first but things soon get dark and deadly as one of the group of teenagers growing fury at the world finally pushes him over the edge. Cue a big final superhero smackdown filmed in a handheld digicam documentary style but with the huge scope of the end battle of Superman 2. Brilliant stuff!

7. THE HUNGER GAMES
Gary Ross’s film of Suzanne Collins young adult best seller is thankfully far and away from being just another sappy Twilight tweenfest. Academy Award nominee Jennifer Lawrence is fabulous as Katniss, our young and resourceful heroine who, to save her younger sister, agrees to take her place in the barbaric future sport of the title – an annual fight to the death against lots of other children in a huge forested arena. Themes of fear and control and societal repression abound in what is a brutal (though thankfully not gratuitous) and intensely compelling story of inner strength and outer resistance. At last, an intelligent and daring movie franchise aimed at tweens with a strong, selfless and likeable female main character who we can all admire.

6. SKYFALL
Bond is back in Sam Mendes’ stylish, exciting and thematically rich deconstruction and reconstruction of the 007 mythos. Daniel Craig is an intense, emotional and deeply scarred but also humorous Bond, Javier Bardem is the best Bond villain in years, and Judi Dench proves to be perhaps the best Bond girl ever. The stunning Istanbul chase at the start is the action highlight but the drama and the characters hum with power all the way through to the deeply personal ending of what is a Bond film quite unlike all other Bond films. After the rubbish Quantum of Solace we can breathe a collective sigh of relief and say that Bond is most definitely back!

5. JOHN CARTER
Andrew Stanton’s mega-budgeted adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic pulp scifi novel A Princess of Mars may have been a box office flop but I for one bloody loved it. A long time fan of Burroughs’ Barsoom tales I thought Stanton captured the epic romantic sweep of the books extremely well. And boy, did it look good, especially the gorgeous Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, who made the role her own in a performance of great sensitivity and steely strength. What a woman! As Carter, Taylor Kitch was fine while great support came from Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, Dominic West and a stupidly charismatic James Purefoy. Michael Giachino’s score soared and the FX were mostly stunning. A damn shame then that we won’t get a sequel. Get your ass to Mars!

John Carter has a big fight

4. DREDD
Oh thank God, they got it right. That was my first thought after watching Pete Travis’ Dredd. Forget Sly Stallone’s rubbish Judge Dredd movie, this is the real deal. Karl Urban goes all Eastwood in his spot on performance as the UK’s favourite fascistic future lawman. The plot is essentially the same as The Raid but the execution is gratuitous art house with some stunningly beautiful imagery of utterly horrific things. A violent, no nonsense future thriller, Dredd kicks unholy ass. Urban rules as Dredd but kudos too to the splendid Olivia Thrilby as rookie Judge Anderson and to the always great Lena Headey as vile villain Ma-Ma. Sadly Dredd made no money at the box office so there will be no sequels. Boo!

Trailer

3. THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
2012 is the year the rest of the world discovered what I already knew – Joss Whedon IS God! The Cabin in the Woods, written by Whedon and Buffy/Angel alumni Drew Goddard, and directed by Goddard, is a gloriously clever, funny, wicked homage/undercutting of the entire horror movie genre. See this and you’ll never look at a horror film in quite the same way again. The cast has fun playing twists on intentional archetypes, while the script is so damn sharp you could slice ham on it. Okay, so it isn’t actually that scary, but the fun to be had here is huge. And if you get it, then you REALLY get it. This year’s film with the biggest potential for DVD freeze framing, The Cabin in the Woods is an endlessly inventive blast.

Truth or dare

2. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
Christopher Nolan only went and bloody did it. The study of a man broken down by a lie and a perceived loss of purpose, TDKR may not quite reach the same dizzy heights as Batman Begins and The Dark Knight but it is still a deeply intelligent, thunderingly intense thriller. Bale is fab yet again, this time joined by Tom Hardy on splendidly odd and imposing form as Bane. However it is the beautiful and monstrously talented Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle who steals the movie with such slinky purr-fection. Yes, a few plot points don’t make much sense and the story relies on a few too many coincidences and contrivances to make it perfect, but its grandly thematic, operatic sweep overcomes such trifling quibbles. In the end The Dark Knight Rises ends up as 99% the triumph we’d all hoped it would be. And that’s good enough for me.

Trailer…in Lego

1. MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS
Oh Joss, you wonderful man you. Who else on this puny little planet could have been the ringmaster for such a huge and potentially messy and convoluted circus? Thank God then that Marvel had the brains and the balls to hire him for the gig. Of course, to us, his fans, it made perfect sense from the start. The man does motley outsiders who come together to form their own functional family unit in his sleep. It’s his bread and butter (see Buffy, Angel, Firefly). He is also a life long comics nerd who has actually written for Marvel and also runs his own comics line for Dark Horse. So a no brainer then. Except that his only prior movie making credit was the utterly brilliant but box office flop of Serenity. Anyway, he got the gig. And The Avengers came out…. And made a Billion-and-a-half dollars world wide while getting almost unanimous critical acclaim. So what if it ain’t so deep and clever? What The Avengers is, is big, brassy, funny, balls to the wall FUN! Don’t underestimate how hard it would be to make a movie like this work. So many big characters to balance, so many stories to serve, actors to give their appropriate screen time to, big action and drama beats to cover. But Joss does it all with so much apparent ease. You watch it and think, of course, that’s how you make a movie like this. Okay, so he isn’t the most cinematic of directors but he more than compensates where his talents really lie - in character and in making you care about the people. That is at least partly why The Avengers works so damn well. Plus it is very, very funny. Oh, and it also has the “And Hulk… Smash!” moment, my single favourite moment of any film this year. A moment that never fails to make me lose my shit. In the end, what The Avengers is, is the purest form of escapist fun to be had at the cinema this year. In many ways The Dark Knight Rises may be the better film, but for pure putting a huge silly grin on my face movie going, Cap, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Widow and Nick Fury just can’t be beat. Make mine Marvel and bring on Phase 2. Oh yeah, and Joss IS Boss!

Live to Rise (Soundgarden music video)


Almost made its: The Woman in Black, Detention, The Hobbit, Prometheus, Kill List, 21 Jump Street, Young Adult


MY FIVE LEAST FAVOURITE FILMS OF 2012

5. WRATH OF THE TITANS
Not so much a Greek tragedy, more a Greek travesty. If you thought the first one was pants then I dare you to watch this dim-witted toss of a sequel.

4. THE DEVIL INSIDE
The kind of horror film that give horror films a bad name being stupid, dull and deeply unscary. Do yourself a favour and do not try to ‘possess’ this silly little devil. If you want a low budget mockumentary film about demonic possession then go get the excellent The Last Exorcism instead.

3. THE DARKEST HOUR
Never has an alien invasion been so bloody dull and uneventful. The cgi energy beam aliens were shit but I was still rooting for them to hurry up and kill the annoying American teens arsing about in Moscow doing bugger all for 90mins. If they turned a corner they might have run in to the equally annoying American teens getting ready to go visit Chernobyl. Sigh.

2. THIS MEANS WAR
Laugh? No. No I really didn’t. At all. Here, McG wastes lots of Fox’s money on a big budget and deeply stupid, deeply tiresome and woefully unfunny romantic action comedy that somehow manages to take the genuinely likeable and talented Tom Hardy, Chris Pine and Reece Witherspoon and make you hate them with a passion. Hmm, quite the achievement really when you think about it. Way to go, McG.

1. STRIPPERS VS. WEREWOLVES
Oh sweet baby Jesus, make Billy Murray (dad of yummy Jamie) and his friends stop making these ultra cheap, ultra terrible British ‘horror’ movies. I managed only half of this one as it was so unbearably terrible on every conceivable level. Just avoid, okay? Your life is way too short for this sort of punishment.

Proof of terribleness

John Carter (Or How I Got My Ass to Mars and Didn't Want to Come Back!)

Dejah Thoris - my favourite Martian.

I bloody loved Disney’s John Carter.

See, I was already a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original Barsoom books, starting with the classic A Princess of Mars on which Disney’s movie is based, albeit also drawing heavily from various other story elements from later in the series. So I've been excited for this movie for a while now. But also pretty wary too. I mean, the casting didn't click for me. The decision to be more 'realistic' in look and feel didn't either. And the trailers when they appeared weren't exactly great. In fact, the whole marketing effort by Disney has been atrocious. And that's being kind. But I was still excited, but also worried.

A bit of my history with JC.

I'm a late comer to the whole Barsoom series as I first picked up these books just a few years ago after reading an article about how Harry Knowles of Ain’t it Cool fame was involved in trying to get a JC movie made. At that point I was only vaguely aware of the character and his story, being far more familiar with Burroughs’ much more famous creation Tarzan. But finding out that John Carter and his adventures formed the inspiration and basis for much of the pulp sci fi/fantasy adventure I love (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Star Wars, modern superhero stories amongst many others) I felt compelled to get the books and to give them a go.

And I was immediately hooked.

I mean, what red blooded ‘young’ man wouldn’t want to go to Barsoom and befriend the awesome Tars Tarkas and fight hordes of white apes and evil doers while also rescuing, romancing and then marrying the most beautiful woman in the universe?

Wow! Count me in.

For those who don’t know, the basic story of John Carter over the course of his book series goes something like this:

It’s the late 1880’s and Captain John Carter is an ex-confederate civil war hero who’s busy prospecting for gold, just wanting to be left alone to get rich or die trying. However events lead him to an isolated cave where somehow he gets transported to Mars (or Barsoom as the natives call it) from Earth (Jarsoom to the Martians) where he finds he now has super strength due to changes in gravity etc. and soon gets himself reluctantly involved with Martian tribal wars while also meeting, saving and falling in love with the most beautiful princess in the universe,. Eventually, through the course of his adventures and many battles, Carter works his way up the Martian hierarchy to become a great planetary leader.

The books are quick and exciting reads. They are swiftly paced swashbuckling romantic pulp sci-fi fantasies filled with epic fights, daring do, hissable villains and nasty monsters. The conceit of the stories is that they were actually written by Edgar Rice Burroughs after he listened to the wild tales told to him as a lad by his beloved uncle Jack – the heroic John Carter himself. So the tales are told as if being true with Burroughs having created his own personal mythology in to which he inserted himself. One can imagine ERB telling his little children and grandchildren spellbinding bedtime stories about his amazing Uncle Jack and his epic adventures on Barsoom, swearing to the goggle eyed kiddies that it was all absolutely true.

Now, a century after Burroughs first gave the world his epic tales of Barsoom comes Disney’s mega budget adaptation of the first novel A Princess of Mars, titled simply (and awfully) John Carter.

Disney’s John Carter, under the assured, stylish, wonderfully old fashioned direction of Andrew (Wall-e) Stanton, does an almost perfect job of adapting the source material while also changing it enough to make it work on screen. Stanton has also wisely toned down/removed certain elements that either wouldn’t have worked on film or would come across as anachronistic hangovers from a different time, likely making modern audiences a tad uncomfortable (there is a certain degree of old fashioned attitudes towards race and behaviour in the books. It isn’t especially bad or unpleasant, just kind of odd, though perfectly acceptable for its time period.) But for all the changes made, the core of the novel’s story, of the characters, of the feel for gloriously old fashioned epic widescreen daring do and swashbuckling romantic adventure remains intact. This movie feels like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood crossed with the look and grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia played out on a beautifully designed and realised alien world.

And what a world it is.

Barsoom aka Mars looks incredible! The city of Helium is lavish and exotic; the Tharks' city is rough and rugged just as I imagined it. The air ships are elegantly beautiful. The costumes (though in the books most people are naked save for light armour and decoration) detailed and highly designed. Indeed, like the best sci-fi or fantasy, the filmmakers had to build everything for the film hence the huge budget. Everything from tables, chairs, cutlery to costumes, armour, weapons, vehicles had to be designed and built from scratch. That’s your $250m budget right there; that and all the gorgeous FX. It's all up on the screen.

But what about the characters and the actors playing them?

Taylor Kitsch plays John Carter. I’d only ever seen Kitsch before in the woeful X-Men: Origins: Wolverine as Gambit. And he was pretty poor. His casting as JC I just didn’t get. Likewise I’d only seen Lynn Collins in the very same terrible film. She was ok. Pretty, yes, but just ok. Again, when she was cast as Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, the most beautiful, desirable woman in creation, I didn’t get it.

But having now seen them both in action, together, I get it.

Kitsch is very good. He’s still not out and out great in the classic Harrison Ford sense (few are), but he cuts an impressive dash as Carter, balancing the heaviness on the characters soul and his reluctance to involve himself in others affairs with his ingrained heroic nobility. You can see the battle going on inside of him. Of course, in the end you know that John will do the right thing. He’ll be the hero. But it is fun watching him fight the inevitable.

And what of Collins?

Flat out awesome is what!

With her long raven black hair, skin made a copper shade and her piercing blue eyes, big screen Dejah Thoris is drop dead stunning to look at. But Collins is also a damn fine actress who brings tough intense intelligence and nobility as well as a fearful fragility to Dejah. She’s smart beyond words. She can kick ass with the best of them. She can make you fall in love with a wounded look. Perfect.

And the supporting cast are pretty much all round great too.

Willem Dafoe is Tars Tarkas, the heroic tough-but-fair Thark leader who befriends Carter early on, seeing in him potential to be a great force upon Barsoom. Tars is a nine foot tall four armed green dude with tusks created via motion capture. Dafoe and all the mocap actors were actually on set, on stilts, giving the performance using tiny cameras on their faces ala Avatar. And it shows. The performances come through the pixels. And the pixels look realistic too, not the cartoony look given to so many cgi creations nowadays (ILM I’m looking at you). Other great actors in the movie are Samantha Morton as Tars’ daughter Sola, Dominic West, Thomas Hayden Church, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong and the always fun James Purefoy. And a special mention goes to the animators who created Woolla, Carter’s super fast, super loyal Martian ‘dog’. It’s a character that shouldn’t work being far too silly, far too cute. But work it does. Woolla is fab. He steals almost every scene he’s in.

The film is a testament to the skill of its director and the care taken in crafting the fun and intricately plotted script. There is always something important going on be it plot machinations or epic battles or internal/external character work. And most of it is told visually. No walking/talking down endless corridors or sat around tables discussing things here (take note George Lucas.) No sir. Stanton makes his live action directing debut with John Carter after making Wall-E and Finding Nemo for Pixar. Coming from Pixar he knows that story, character and tone are king. You need to make the story interesting, compelling. You need to make rounded characters with arcs that people can invest in and care about. You need to strike an appropriate tone for your tale. Here he manages all three with almost complete success. Most successfully I’d say is the striking of tone. John Carter has its dark edges - especially John dealing with the death of his wife and child and his initial apathy in helping others. But the dark edges never eclipse the overriding sense of fun and high adventure that carries the movie to its thrilling and emotionally satisfying climax. By the time the film’s full title comes on screen at the end to Michael Giacchino’s soaring score (wonderfully ‘John Carter of Mars’ and not just ‘John Carter’) if you have the tiniest escapist/romantic /adventure loving bone in your body, then, like Arnie, you’re gonna want to get your ass back to Mars double quick.

So as a fan count me happy.

John Carter is a wonderful piece of escapist adventure and probably the best film adaptation of the source material I could have hoped for. It is also the first movie in a long while that I can’t wait to go back to the cinema and see again sharpish.

Yes, I liked it that much. I was swept away.

Plus, y’know, Dejah Thoris! Mmmmm.....



Reported faithfully by the Stoopid Monkey of Jarsoom