Best of 2012: My Top 5 Movies of 2012

Here are my Top 5 Favorite Movies of 2012. (I’ve also included one Wildcard Pick and an Honorable Mention so I suppose altogether this is my Top 7.)

The Wildcard Pick: Savages (Original Review)

My wildcard pick this year is Oliver Stone’s addictive, blistering Savages about the weed business. Depending on how you look at this brash and reckless movie, you may deem it a frustrating failure or an exhilarating entertainment. Then again, why choose? Oliver Stone does the equivalent of bringing an Uzi to an archery range. He makes quite the mess of things but you can’t say he doesn’t hit his target. The movie is too long and the ending is a strange, ungainly disaster but I can’t say that any other movie this year shocked or thrilled me more. If you’re looking for the most bang for your buck, look no further.

Honorable Mention: Argo (Original Review)

A terrific audience-pleaser and perhaps the best thriller of the year, director Ben Affleck’s Argo is great, edge-of-your-seat entertainment. It tells the absurd, true story of a CIA mission that faked a movie production to retrieve a group of American citizens during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. The movie acknowledges the fraught international politics of the time but is first and foremost a daring rescue movie. This one is loads of fun and smart to boot.

5) The Master (Original Review)

At the end of The Master there are loose ends left untied and mysteries that go unexplained. Frustration with the film’s anticlimax and lack of a resolution is perfectly natural. But part of the fun of this movie – and this is assuming you share my idea of fun – is sifting through this strange and fascinating drama and guessing at what it could all possibly mean.

This is not to say the film is some sort of scholarly exercise; it’s much better than that. Watch the bizarre bond that forms between a mentally unstable WWII veteran named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, unhinged and with a wild look in his eye) and Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman, never better), the charismatic leader of a dubious New Age church. Their relationship twists and turns as the two men gain power and leverage over one another. The Master is a half-mad swirl of sexual impulses, pseudo-scientific babble and violent outbursts. I can’t say I understood it all but I was never bored.

4) Zero Dark Thirty

There are a number of thorny issues at play in Zero Dark Thirty – the use of torture on political detainees, the gender politics of women in government – but the heart of the film drives at a larger, more encompassing question: Is the ultimate objective of the War on Terror to protect the homeland from future attacks or to punish those responsible for 9/11? For Maya (an intensely focused Jessica Chastain), the distinction is irrelevant. Either way the goal is the same – take out Osama bin Laden.

The film is a historical approximation of the leads and events that resulted in bin Laden’s death on May 2, 2011, but what elevates it beyond the level of a made-for-TV movie is director Kathryn Bigelow’s remarkable craftsmanship and eye for poetic detail. The final assault on bin Laden’s compound – a flurry of night vision green and fiery explosions set against the darkness of night – is as tense as any action movie. When the dust clears, the human drama ends on a note of bittersweet uncertainty. Whether bin Laden was killed for the sake of homeland security or justice may not matter from a military perspective but emotionally how does one reconcile the two and move on?

3) Amour

Amour is a movie of few words so it seems wrong to use too many here to describe its greatness. This quiet, poignant love story follows an elderly couple as the husband grapples with the deteriorating health of his wife. Through the keen direction of Michael Haneke the film reveals intimate depths of its characters’ emotional lives often with little or no dialogue.

Amour is a devastating study of life and love in its final stages. It explores the difficulty of dying with dignity and of finally letting go when the time is right, but it is not all doom and gloom. Few movies are this honest and true. Every moment in it feels real and its message is ultimately life affirming.

2) Lincoln (Original Review)

There’s no sense in hiding it. Director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s Lincoln is a history lesson. But what this impressive, entertaining movie shows us is that the participants of history were real people with large personalities, not some culmination of dates and facts like our high school curriculum might have us believe. They were politicians who were as prone to grandstanding and as stubbornly biased as today’s elected officials are. Lincoln’s thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, was an ambitious piece of legislation and its passage required bravery and political cunning, but also bribery.

There is no mistaking that Lincoln is a Steven Spielberg prestige picture – it is beautifully shot and features a slew of exceptional performances that will no doubt make the Oscar voters swoon – but it is also vibrant and alive in a way few period pieces are. Abraham Lincoln and the congressmen of his time understood they were making history but for them it was a very real present where victory was far from certain. History lessons are rarely as fascinating and exciting as this one.

1) Moonrise Kingdom (Original Review)

Moonrise Kingdom has the warm feel of a half-forgotten childhood memory and director Wes Anderson brings it to life with the visual whimsy of a picture book. The movie breezes by, telling the story of Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, each pitch perfect), two lovesick kids who run away from home to be with one another. They are mature beyond their years and yet also heartbreakingly naïve, blissfully unaware of the crushing reality that awaits them outside the bubble of childhood.

This sad fact of life is not lost on the other inhabitants of the small New England island where the film takes place. The remaining cast of characters, a motley crew of melancholic grown-ups, drift in and out of the picture, desperate to find Sam and Suzy while also preoccupied with their own adult problems. Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola’s script finds bittersweet humor in their characters’ lives but never condescends to them. This blend of comedy and pathos is a delicate balancing act but Wes Anderson and his terrific cast – including Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Ed Norton and Bruce Willis – walk the tightrope wonderfully.

Much like the private cove its young heroes discover and seek refuge in (and also gives the film its name), Moonrise Kingdom is an inviting paradise. One visit is not enough.

- Steven Avigliano, 2/24/13

REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom (2012): Dir. Wes Anderson. Written by: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. Starring: Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and Bob Balaban. Rated PG-13 (Nothing you didn't know about when you were a kid). Running time: 94 minutes.

4 stars (out of four)

Wes Anderson seems to have learned a few things from his previous movie, the stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr. Fox. In the past, some of his films have run dangerously close to being too Wes Anderson – too quirky-cute, too self-consciously hip – and when that happens, his characters feel less like people than they do the tongue-in-cheek creations of a clever filmmaker. The solution to that problem was not, as it turns out, reeling it in or toning down his style, but going all the way with it. Animation offered him a newfound freedom that allowed him to be unapologetically Wes Anderson and the result was one of his best movies.

Moonrise Kingdom, his seventh feature overall, is not animated but it feels like it is. The camera pans from side to side as though Mr. Anderson were shooting on a two-dimensional backdrop. His shots are filled with embellishing details and visual gags, and his characters – a colorful and endearing group of caricatures – bound about these finely detailed sets with a ceaseless energy not often found in live-action people.

The story concerns two children who, on the cusp of adolescence and feeling the potent sting of young love, decide to run off together one summer in 1965. They live on a sparsely populated island in New England where the residents receive their mail by plane and rely on a ferry that runs twice daily for transportation to the mainland.

Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) is plagued with a restless angst she will probably grow out of one day but for the time being her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and her three younger brothers must deal with. She has been labeled “emotionally disturbed” by some out-of-touch physician, a diagnosis that is supposed to help her family cope with her issues and properly treat them, but only compounds her isolation and loneliness.

So she reaches out to Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a fellow outsider, and the two form an intimate friendship. Sam, an orphan who has been passed around foster families his whole life, is a Khaki Scout at Camp Ivanhoe, a summer camp for boys on the island run by Scout Master Randy Ward (a hilarious Edward Norton). Scout Master Ward is a boy at heart with a deeply held devotion to the Khaki Scout program. When his campers ask what his real job is, he replies that he is a math teacher. No, wait. He changes his answer. His real job is being Scout Master. He’s a math teacher on the side.

We learn through flashbacks how Suzy and Sam met the previous summer and spent the proceeding year as pen pals, keeping one another company through letters and confiding in each other the difficult emotions they can only just barely express in words. They agree they are the only ones who truly understand each other and must run away together.

Naturally, this causes some distress for the adults. Not just Suzy’s parents and the Scout Master but also Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), the lone police officer on the island. He sets out to find the kids with the help of Scout Master Ward’s Khaki Scouts, a motley crew who don’t see the point in bringing Sam back anyway because they hated his guts and are all the happier with him gone.

Moonrise Kingdom is a sweet and very funny movie. Wes Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola write some of their best one-liners and they revel in the idiosyncrasies of their characters. Mr. Anderson has assembled a sprightly cast that is light on their feet and they slip easily into their roles. They help to take what are essentially cartoon characters and give them depth. We get a few brief glimpses into the troubled marriage between Mr. Bishop, a wonderful new variant on Bill Murray’s sad sack persona, and Mrs. Bishop, a chipper but lonely woman who finds companionship in the dopey Captain Sharp.

Bob Balaban has an almost ethereal presence in the film as the island’s resident meteorologist, drifting in and out to narrate portions of the story. Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and Harvey Keitel also appear in some fine bit parts, getting a chance for some comedic riffing alongside the main cast.

This story does not however belong to the adults, though their myriad issues and quirks could provide Mr. Anderson with material for a dozen more films. Moonrise Kingdom is about the kids and its young stars are wonderful. Suzy and Sam are confronting miniature-sized versions of the problems their grown-up counterparts face and Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman convey this with a subtlety that suggests much life experience.

I hesitate to call the film great and suspect it could fade away with time. It is a breezy film and I can’t quite say how much of it will leave an impression on repeat viewings. Still, the first time around, Moonrise Kingdom wraps you up its dizzy charm and smoothes over its own imperfections. The more time that passes after watching it, the more I think of reasons why this might not be one of Wes Anderson’s best. But his movies have always been more about feeling than thinking and the tone of Moonrise Kingdom is pitch perfect.

The movie is so heartbreakingly small it feels as though you could put it in your pocket. The tone is light and would have you believe that all of this is trivial. But it’s not. At least it’s not to these characters. And that’s something Mr. Anderson misses in some of his films. Occasionally he gets so caught up in the rhythms of his dialogue and the beats of his scenes that he neglects to give his characters real heart. Moonrise Kingdom somehow avoids this. There are moments here of startling honesty that resonate deeply, all the more so because they come by surprise in the midst of this airy comedy.

The soundtrack has its share of typical Wes Anderson tunes – dusty pop songs that capture emotions in flux – but the film’s real treasure is Alexandre Desplat’s score. Mr. Desplat keeps things pitched at “delicate whimsy” for most of the film but he also has a way of making grand the quiet emotions of children.

From our comfortable adult vantage points, we can see these kids’ adventure is minor, even inconsequential. From inside the bubble of childhood (and segregated geographically on their little island), however, it is as huge as life. They are running away from home, eloping in the name of true love and leaving behind their childhoods, ready (they believe) to take on whatever the future holds. The film never condescends to its characters or reveals their naiveté. That much, Wes Anderson assumes we in the audience will supply. Moonrise Kingdom is instead a movie you can escape into; watching it, you can perhaps even recapture a glimpse of what it felt like to run barefoot through the dirt, convinced the world is as big as you are.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/28/12