Best of 2012: My Favorite Reviews I Didn't Agree With

When did we stop engaging in good-hearted debate? Whatever happened to the lost art of agreeing to disagree? Personally, my favorite part of analyzing a movie is never writing the review. I enjoy the conversations that follow, the heated discussions and debates. I like trying to convince someone to give a movie they hated a second chance and I love when someone forces me to reconsider an opinion of my own.

So in the name of that lost art, here are my favorite professional reviews I read this year that made me reconsider and reevaluate a select few movies.

Though the movie didn’t do much for me, I understand why people enjoyed The Avengers. But I’ll always be amused at the outrage some people felt when they found out someone actually could have been unimpressed by the movie. I thought it was the same old product I'd seen a hundred times before (except this time a little bigger, a little louder and a lot longer) but Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe gave what I found to be the most persuasive argument for its existence. The movie, he writes, “is as close as a movie can come to the fantastical reality of a really good comic book.” And the fact that the movie offers no surprises isn't important. “I might not remember any of the sequences in The Avengers, but I’ll remember the rush. I don’t need anything else.” Fair enough.

And besides, how I felt about The Avengers is pretty much how a lot of other people felt about The Amazing Spider-Man, a movie I had a blast at. Its story, writes Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, is one “that many moviegoers older than 10 may think they’ve seen because they probably did when the first movie burned up the box office.” The filmmakers, she contends, “weren’t allowed to take true imaginative flight at a company that’s conspicuously banking on a resuscitated franchise to carry it through its next fiscal quarters.” Ouch. I suppose corporate products are as prone to subjective interpretation as art.

Speaking of art, I was one of many left in awe by Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, The Master. But I completely understood the reactions from friends and critics alike who were left cold by what they felt was a pretentious mess. Richard Corliss of Time magazine points out a number of issues that he feels holds the movie back from greatness. It “violates the cardinal rule of the father-son or master-servant plot: that the acolyte will somehow change his mentor” and once this becomes clear, “after about an hour, the story flatlines into repetition without development.” It’s a solid argument and one that I can't yet counter. But I suspect that this lack of change, while certainly counter to any intuitive sense of what drama should be, is part of the film's challenging message.

On the other end of the spectrum, I was thoroughly disappointed by Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. But I found New York Times critic A.O. Scott’s scholarly defense of the film enlightening. I felt Tarantino’s characters were flat and one-dimensional. Scott argues, however, that Tarantino “does not hesitate to train his revisionist energies on some deep and ancient national legends” and “exposes and defies an ancient taboo” – that a black man can be the agent of that classic literary motive: revenge. And the violence is not exploitative as much as it embodies Tarantino’s “moral disgust with slavery, instinctive sympathy for the underdog and an affirmation (in the relationship between Django and Schultz) of what used to be called brotherhood.” Scott views the movie from an interesting perspective, one I wouldn’t have thought to take. I’m still not sure the movie clicks for me but let’s just say I agree to disagree.

- Steve Avigliano, 2/23/13

All Things Super

Part 1: How The Avengers Took Over the World

When I was a kid, I had a Captain America action figure. I don’t remember ever reading a Captain America comic book but I liked that action figure so much, my next birthday party was Captain America themed. I liked him because… I liked him. That was all there was to it. I just knew he was awesome, maybe even instinctively. You didn’t have to sell Little Steve on the idea.

Leaving the theater after seeing Thor last summer, I felt as though I had been handed one of those cheap plastic toys you get in a Happy Meal with “Collect All Four” printed on the package. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the movie (and I’ll admit Marvel Studios is currently making some impressively flashy toys) but it left a bad taste in my mouth. The movie didn’t seem to care whether or not I enjoyed it, only that I had bought a ticket.

Well, not just one ticket. Six tickets (and counting!) if you’re keeping score. Each Marvel Avengers movie is entwined in a massive and knotty marketing campaign as staggering in relative size and ambition as the Large Hadron Collider. They have all been part of an ambitious setup building to The Avengers, which is really just a setup for The Avengers 2 anyways. And so we wait with bated breath for the next movie, which will then tell us what exciting movie is in store for us next. And so on.

Now, I’m being cynical and probably not giving these movies their full due. I’ve enjoyed most of them (Robert Downey Jr. has successfully carried two Iron Man movies, and Captain America had a giddy charm to it). Marvel’s mega-marketing scheme would hardly have paid off if the films weren’t entertaining. Still, there’s a nagging corporate agenda at work here that, at least for me, leaked into The Avengers and kept me from enjoying it. The movie never tried to win me over; I had already bought a ticket so why would it?

Part 2: Your Friendly Neighborhood Blockbuster

A number of people I have spoken to had similar feelings about The Amazing Spider-Man and several critics wrote perfectly reasonable reviews that mirror my own reaction to The Avengers. The latest Spidey adventure is a clear studio cash-grab; in order to keep the rights to the character, Sony had to make another movie. It is a faithful reworking of Sam Raimi’s 2002 film with just enough superficial differences to distinguish it from its predecessor – a new villain, a new cutie for Peter Parker to kiss – but it breaks no new ground.

What can I say? I fell for it anyways. Give me two likable romantic leads and throw them in a zippy energetic action movie and I’m happy.

But is this the best we can hope to get from superhero movies in 2012 and beyond? New versions of the same old and a fresh, young cast to replace the actors who have outgrown their roles? I don’t have the answer and as long as superhero movies are as fun as The Amazing Spider-Man, I’ll be too busy having a good time to even ask.

Part 3: The Dark Plight of the Superserious

There is, however, at least one filmmaker who believes superhero movies can give audiences more than disposable entertainment. Christopher Nolan has done an admirable job taking superheroes to a whole new level. In his hands, Batman, who had been languishing throughout the 90s in increasingly goofy (and decreasingly watchable) movies, gained some much-needed emotional heft and narrative sophistication.

Batman was always a childhood favorite of mine – Saturday mornings, I was reliably glued to the TV watching reruns of Batman: The Animated Series – and Christopher Nolan’s movies take the character every bit as seriously as I did when I was a kid. 2005’s Batman Begins and 2008’s The Dark Knight (still the high-water mark of the genre) are dark, brooding stories but they’re also great popcorn movies. Little Steve would have loved them.

With The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan has taken his series to its inevitable conclusion. Most everyone I know has been satisfied by its ending. It is a breathtaking movie and certainly one of the best-looking summer blockbusters in years. As Gotham City descends into anarchy in the dead of winter, its snow-covered streets are as gorgeous as they are ominous.

But Christopher Nolan gets so caught up in his bleak tragedy of a dying city that he neglects Batman. There is a half-baked love triangle and a full circle moment about falling to learn to get back up again, but these inclusions feel peripheral to the main story. The movie loads one grim development on top of another until it risks collapsing under its own weight. It may well be a satisfying finale to a gloomy series but somewhere in the middle of it, Little Steve walked off and started playing with a different toy.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/25/12

Summer Movie Survival Guide

The calendar on the wall says summer isn’t until June 20 but those who follow the Movie Calendar know summer starts this Friday with the release of The Avengers. From then until Labor Day, Hollywood will be in full-on blockbuster mode, for better or worse, and judging by the forecast, we’re in for a doozy.

Three movies in particular stand out to me. I hesitate to call them new lows because they very well may be good (and I genuinely hope they are), so let’s just call them firsts.

The aforementioned The Avengers is the first movie that audiences have already made a down payment on. If you’ve seen both Iron Man films, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger and stuck around for all the Samuel L. Jackson cameos, you’re practically contractually obligated to be excited for this movie. Marvel’s mega tie-in has proven to be a major success from a business perspective, a debatable success from a creative perspective and a little wearying from this audience member’s perspective. You’re not going to be able to escape this one so you might as well see it. At least that’s the way the geniuses at Marvel’s marketing department seem to be pitching it.

On May 18 we have Battleship, based on the classic game of naval strategy from Milton Bradley. (Go ahead and read that sentence again if you don’t believe it.) The film, which looks as though it will feature Liam Neeson fighting off a water-based Transformers invasion (not an inherently bad idea), will also be the film debut of Rihanna (far from an inherently good idea). Disappointingly, she did not contribute a theme song to the film. (Am I the only one who feels “Baby, sink my battleship” would have made for a classic Rihannian innuendo?) This is the first movie based on a plotless board game and will paradoxically be cashing in on your recognition of the brand name while also trying to convince you that adapting the game to the screen is not a very, very stupid idea.

Then there’s The Amazing Spider-Man on July 3, not really a first as much as it is a new record. Only five summers after the disappointing Spider-Man 3, we’re to be treated to a new take on the photographer-turned-arachnid’s origins. Unnecessary? Of course. Excessive? Only if you see it in 3D! But, boy, that Emma Stone sure is cute. Who wants to bet whether or not Sam Jackson will mind his own business during the end credits of this one?

That Hollywood can’t come up with any original ideas has long been taken to be self-evident but the 2012 summer release schedule really seems to be pushing it, don’t you think? And I haven’t even mentioned Tim Burton’s recycling of the old TV show Dark Shadows, or Men in Black III, or Disney’s big-budget action treatment of Snow White, or Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie, or the latest in the Madagascar, Ice Age and Bourne franchises. We even had a sort of preamble this year with the 3D re-release of the ultimate summer blockbuster, Titanic (still great, by the way). How long can this possibly go on for before things get better?

The answer is forever, the December apocalypse notwithstanding. We’re living in the Golden Age of Movie Marketing. Advertisement saturation can ensure that even the worst ideas will yield big profits and movies like Battleship seem to be cruelly testing the limits of marketing’s power this year.

But I’m not being fair to these movies. Summer blockbusters have always been about making money. I’d be kidding myself if I tried to act jaded and claim they’re not what they used to be. And yet, are they?

If all goes well, summer movies are a win-win for everyone. Audiences love watching movie stars share the screen with special effects. Studio executives and filmmakers love that we love said stars and effects, and will spend our money to see them. And movie theater owners are happy to know that paying the air conditioning bill is still worthwhile.

What happens though when one of those groups is no longer as satisfied as the rest? What happens when quality stops being relevant and the movies start to suck? Apparently we still see them. Studios know we want big, loud, dumb (BLD) summer movies and will see them every summer even when the choices are slim pickings.

Is there nothing we can do about this? Are we doomed to obediently buy a ticket to every movie that studios want us to? Must we sit through endless hours of mediocrity or worse until we can no longer distinguish the good from the merely loud? Can’t we still enjoy ourselves at the movies this summer without succumbing to the conglomerate will of the powers that be? Or must we become hardened cynics who grumble until the end of days through a mouthful of popcorn about the way the movies used to be? Isn’t there another way?

Rest easy. There is.

The current state of the summer blockbuster has driven me (and I imagine many others) to a breaking point. I love BLD summer movies but it’s hard not to become disenchanted in times like this. So here are the questions I will be asking in order to stay sane this summer even as the hammer of Thor attempts to bash us all into passive submission:

1) Does this film care if I like it, or is it just trying to nab my cash on a weekend between superhero movies?

2) It doesn’t matter if a movie didn’t need to happen. Good movies can arise from bad ideas. Stranger things have happened. Given the circumstances, did the filmmakers shoot a decent movie, or was the bottom line more important?

3) Was anyone not invited to be in The Expendables 2? (Nick Fury, if nothing else, is a more selective recruiter.)

Here’s hoping summer 2012 is a good one for the movies. There are even alternative options to the above, including a handful of original concepts that seem promising. And if all else fails, you can always duck into an art house playing the new Wes Anderson movie. At least, that’s my Plan C.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/2/12

Revisiting Star Wars - Final Thoughts

There has always been a tug of war between George Lucas’s vision for the Star Wars movies and fans’ expectations for them. The first Star Wars (only dubbed Episode IV when re-released in 1981) is a lighthearted space opera and its sequel, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, breaks away from that a bit, offering something that transcends the inherent campiness of the first. Episode V is not content to simply give viewers dashing heroes and thrilling escapes (though it has its share of those too). It takes its characters and their fates too seriously for that and instead aims higher. The result is the best film of the series, one that invests audiences deeply in its story.

But maybe this more sophisticated approach was never George Lucas’s intention. What if Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, which trivializes its story with spear-throwing teddy bears – and sloppy filmmaking I might add – falls more in line with his vision for the series?

With Episode I: The Phantom Menace, George Lucas gets a fresh slate, an opportunity to reinvent what it meant for a film to be a Star Wars film. A handful of the series’ salient characters are introduced in it (Obi-Wan, Anakin, Palpatine) but for the most part, the story of Episode I is inessential to the overarching narrative. It’s a gee-whiz adventure that gives Mr. Lucas a chance to play freely in the universe he created.

Cue the outrage. Upon its release in 1999, fans bemoaned the childish approach of Episode I but, compared to Episode VI, I find it to be the more successful film. Episode VI does not fully work because it releases all the tension that was so carefully built up in Episode V. On the other hand, Episode I has no responsibility to uphold a previously established tone or style. As the first film in a trilogy, it can afford to be a little trivial.

George Lucas does deliver what fans want in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which comes closer than any other Star Wars movie to the approach of Episode V, telling the story of Anakin’s downfall with all the grandeur fans envisioned it would have. The prequel trilogy ends on an exciting and satisfying note, something Episode VI does not offer. Between Episode I and III is Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the low point of the series, but its failings are a result of issues with structure and exposition, not tone.

The other menace that has plagued the Star Wars films for years is George Lucas’s insistence on tinkering with them. The “Special Editions” of Episodes IV-VI, released in 1997, add a lot of new computer-animated effects among other cuts and reedits. While I’ll always believe that Han shot first, I have no major beef with the Special Editions. I watched the original theatrical versions when revisiting the films for these reviews but for all other intents and purposes I prefer the Special Editions. They’re flashier, crisper and nicely restored for a digital age. They may be unnecessary but these are George Lucas’s films and he may do with them what he wishes.

So where does the series go from here? According to his most recent statements, Mr. Lucas claims there will be no more Star Wars movies but he’s changed his mind before so it’s safe to say we may take his comments with a mountain of salt. My personal suspicion is that Mr. Lucas will use the profits from the 3D re-releases (which will continue annually until Episode VI is re-released in 2017) to finance another trilogy as he did with the Special Editions two years prior to the release of the first prequel. Only time will tell. Maybe there will be a reboot some day with a fresh crop of young actors in the vein of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek or maybe the world of Star Wars will only live on through novels and animated TV shows.

Watching the Star Wars movies again with an objective and critical eye has given me a new appreciation for them. As a second-generation fan, I hardly had any choice but to love them unconditionally. But sometimes you need to take a step back to remind yourself why you fell in love in the first place, flaws and all.

- Steve Avigliano, 4/9/12

Awards Season Blues

When did “awards season” become a phrase? It is certainly an accurate descriptor – the avalanche of end-of-the-year movie awards has become as interminable and seemingly unending as a Northeast winter (which has actually been rather mild this year in Jersey) – but has this time of year always been flooded with so much self-congratulatory nonsense? The Oscars have long been a staple of the industry’s love for itself but now we also have the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, the SAG Awards, etc., ad nauseam. The airwaves are positively saturated with three-plus hour broadcasts praising the Hollywood elite!

There is nothing wrong with recognizing the year’s best films and performances, and I understand these shows’ appeal. They are fun. Today’s media does not paint a flattering picture of celebrity and these red carpet spectacles offer a certain image of Hollywood glitz and glamour that has otherwise been long lost to paparazzi photos.

Maybe you enjoy seeing who Michelle Williams is wearing or watching Ryan Seacrest pretend to care about how honored Jonah Hill is to be there (Mr. Seacrest has made an art out of vapid celebrity chit-chat). I have no beef with any of that. What frustrates me is how repetitive the actual awards have become.

Each award show's nominees are culled from the same small batch of films and we hear their titles repeated again and again – The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo, The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo – until they are ingrained in our heads as the Chosen Films for this year. Rather than using the end of the year as an opportunity to praise different styles or recommend lesser seen films, December through February has become a time when a select few movies battle for entry into the contemporary cinematic canon whether they deserve it or not.

Awards season begins a little earlier than this though and many of the nominated films are released in the last quarter of the year. Beginning in the fall and chugging along into the early winter, a new batch of historical biopics and stuffy dramas reach theaters, each trying to generate some buzz. Studios do not want their Oscar prospects to be forgotten when the nominees are chosen so they release them as close to the telecast as possible.

This scheduling choice has a wearying effect on audiences. A handful of movies you have only just heard about are being praised as the must-sees of the season and even though the movies range in their subjects, there is a feeling of sameness to them. They all arrive with the label, “Oscar-worthy,” which can have a damaging effect on them. The Artist, The Descendants, and Hugo are all interesting films worth seeing but when these award shows lump them together and pit them against one another, they suddenly feel a lot less interesting. And it can be difficult to give each one a fair shake when their releases are piled on top of each other.

I argue that this idea of seasons is hurting movies on a whole. Is awards season really the only time when thoughtful, well-acted movies can be released? Can’t we see something besides action blockbusters and raunchy comedies in the summertime? The most common complaint I hear about movies today is that they’re all the same. There are no new ideas left, people say. Surely this can’t be true but evidence that suggests otherwise is hard to find.

The reason for this is that studios all have the same goals in mind. Superheroes and men trapped in their adolescence are popular. They’re safe bets. Studios can rest easy knowing they’ll turn a profit as long as the marketing is relentless. A similar business model applies to the “Oscar-worthy.” They are often made on lower budgets and appeal to smaller demographics but studios still want to make money off them. So they wait until awards season to release them and hope that critics and Academy voters will usher them through the various award shows leading up to Oscar night.

So are the nine movies nominated for Best Picture truly representative of the best that 2011 had to offer? Of course not. The Academy has specific (and pretentious) tastes and this year’s nominees run the gamut of typical Oscar fare. You have your sentimental weepies (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help), some cinephile pandering (The Artist, Hugo), and the requisite period drama from Steven Spielberg (War Horse).

The remaining four (The Descendants, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life) are harder to label and, perhaps not coincidentally, are my favorites of the bunch. These are the films I predict will survive the season and maybe even get better with time. The other five, I’m not so convinced about (though I did like Hugo and War Horse). Years from now, which film had a strong showing during awards season will not matter. The Oscars’ history is full of misplaced praise and overlooked classics; they hardly have the final word.

Tomorrow and Friday, in preparation for and as an alternative to the Academy Awards, I’m going to discuss my favorite performances of the year and my personal Top 10 favorite movies of 2011. Will they stand the test of time? I think they will but, of course, who can say for sure? This is later than most critics release their picks for the year’s best but anytime is a good time to talk about great movies. Not just one season.

- Steve Avigliano, 2/22/12

Why They Suck: The Two Breeds of Bad Movies

By now most critics and organizations have published their picks for the best movies of the year. Typically, I wait until February to make my Top 10 list so that I have an opportunity to catch up on holiday releases and movies I missed in theaters. In the meantime though, I’d like to take a moment to discuss a few 2011 films on the opposite end of the qualitative spectrum – the bad ones.

Not all bad movies are made alike and for me the sea of duds divides into two categories: artistic failures and commercial failures. Since cinema is as much a business as it is an art form, all movies must straddle this line. A.O. Scott summarizes the point nicely. “No filmmaker sets out to make a bad movie,” he says, “and no producer or studio executive sets out to lose money.”

Of course, bad movies still get made. Loads of them. And I find that a clunker’s failings can usually be attributed to choices made on one side or the other of the aforementioned balancing act.

The first example in this case study is Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, a truly awful bomb from earlier this year that I chalk up as an artistic failure. True, this orgy of computer animation could not have happened without major studio backing, but it was also the first opportunity Mr. Snyder had to develop an original story rather than work from previous source material. After making a series of hits within the studio system (Dawn of the Dead, 300 and, to a lesser degree, Watchmen), he was given creative license to direct another, this time from the ground up.

The result is a bombastic blast of misogyny that pitifully vies for fanboy love by emulating every known geek-approved genre and blending them into a self-absorbed mess. It is Kill Bill with none of Quentin Tarantino’s levity or reverence for his female leads. Still, Sucker Punch is the kind of disaster that can only come from someone with a bold, if perhaps misguided, vision, and it is endlessly more watchable than the alternative.

Enter Exhibit #2: Green Lantern, a movie that, on first glance, appears to have all the necessary components of a successful superhero origin story. Beneath the surface, however, the film is empty and hollow; it has no heart, no humor. The same may be said of its star, Ryan Reynolds, whose good looks are a shell that hides an utter vacancy of charm. There is no drive, or purpose, or love of the character behind the production.

The movie is the result of a green-lighting frenzy that occurred in the years following Spider-Man’s $100M+ opening box office weekend nearly a decade ago. Every studio had to have a superhero franchise they could bank on for huge profit. Five or six, if possible. Green Lantern is a product designed to sell Burger King onion rings as much as tickets. I would happily rewatch Sucker Punch, the badness of which has a kind of operatic grandeur to it, than endure the stale lifelessness of Green Lantern again.

My point is, both films suck, but one had the potential to not, while the other was doomed to fail. You can feel Mr. Snyder’s enthusiasm brimming from every over-stylized, color-saturated shot of Sucker Punch. This is part of the reason why, when it stumbles, it doesn’t do so gracefully. It smacks hard, face-first on the pavement. But no one can accuse Mr. Snyder of not making bold choices, something the by-the-numbers Green Lantern lacks. His choices are, for the most part, bad choices but he took a chance, a tactic that can lead to great success in a way that playing it safe never can.

I’ll leave open the possibility that Zack Snyder may yet make a great film or, at least, a few very good ones. Even taking into account a hunk of junk like Sucker Punch, he is on the right track. On the other hand, the only good that can come of Green Lantern 2, should it ever get made, will be the return of avocado paste at Subway. (I’m a big guacamole fan.)

- Steve Avigliano, 1/13/12

Awards, Lists & Prestige: A Look at the Year-End Awards Craze and the Top 10 of 2010

Now mid-January, we find ourselves in the thick of movie awards season. The critics have published their Best of the Year lists, and just about every other weekend you can catch a glimpse of the Hollywood elite sipping on drinks and wearing their designers’ finest on any number of award broadcasts. But what are we supposed to take away from this frenzy? What does winning Best Picture mean? Or topping a Top 10 list? The cynic in me is tempted to dismiss it all. “There’s no way to determine an objective best film in a given year,” he says. And he’d be right to say so.

On the other hand, the realist in me (a close cousin to the cynic) understands that, for better or worse, the end of the year hubbub that builds up to the Academy Awards is an unavoidable part of the movie industry, so there’s no sense in bemoaning its existence. Despite what one might think seeing the annual onslaught of big-budget blockbuster hopefuls each summer, studios aren’t solely interested in box office receipts. Those glittering statuettes – whatever shape they may be – offer a chance to accumulate that other type of wealth (the non-monetary kind): prestige. The fight for prestige is not limited to studios either. Who wouldn’t want those three wondrous words (“Academy Award Winner”) attached to their name in trailers for the rest of their career?

The problem is that the winners are not always deserving of their new titles. Often, the Oscars generate a lot of (ultimately fleeting) enthusiasm around undeserving films and so the list of Best Picture winners becomes riddled with forgotten movies that, in their year, were deemed the best of the best. The Academy Awards are also painfully predictable. Nominations have yet to be announced, but I can already confidently say that The Social Network will win Best Picture.

Hold on a moment, though. The cynic in me is taking control again. Sure, the Academy Awards are a fallible cultural game that cannot accurately predict which films will be remembered 10, 20, or 50 years later, but they’re hardly worthless. They help to highlight movies that the general public might not have paid attention to otherwise.

A few weeks back, for example, I saw The King’s Speech at my local theater. The movie had been getting a lot of critical attention and the Oscar prognosticators had begun to beat their drums, so I was excited to see it. I wasn’t the only one either. The movie played to a sold-out theater and ended up being a crowd-pleaser. Exiting the theater around me as the credits rolled were excited moviegoers chatting about their favorite parts. Oscar buzz led us into the theater, but the film’s humor and heart sent us home, wanting to recommend it to a friend. The film overcame the daunting expectations that are placed on an Award Winning Film and was able to sway the many subjective opinions in its audience.

Which leads me to critics’ lists. Like the Academy Awards, they do not offer a definitive statement of the year’s best films, but instead provide insight into a critic’s personal tastes. Seeing which critics chose which films as their favorites says something that the blinding glitz and glamour of the red carpet cannot. Of course, a critic’s list can be just as susceptible to end-of-the-year hype as an awards show. In my own experience, I often look back at my choices for the year’s best and scratch my head. In 2007, I wrote that Juno was the year’s best, with No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood and Zodiac all taking a backseat to that cutesy-quirky romantic comedy. Three years later, Juno is still a funny movie, but each of those other films has appreciated better, rewarding multiple viewings in a way that Juno’s one-liners cannot.

Predicting which films will be remembered years from now can be a tricky thing. So with that limitation in mind, I craft my Top 10 of 2010 list. There were no movies this year that I found truly great in the four-star sense of the word (last year I saw at least four: The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man and Up in the Air), but there were still some very fine movies that may yet become great in time.

The numbered order is subjective almost to the point of arbitrariness, but when organizing the list, I kept in mind the following: To what degree was the film a wholly satisfying experience? How have these films appreciated in the short time since I left the theater (or ejected the DVD as the case may be)? Organizing the list in this way led to some surprising results for me, but I think the list is an honest one. What follows are the ten films that most affected me in their various ways.

10) True Grit

Of course a Coen Bros. western would be heavier on talking than shooting. The prolific writer/directors seem to be able to take their style in just about any direction they please, and their adaptation of the novel that also inspired the 1969 classic is a witty and often violent trip out West. Add a grumbling, drunken Jeff Bridges in the John Wayne role and the promising young talent of Hailee Steinfeld and you have a very entertaining film.

9) The King’s Speech

Sometimes the best historical dramas are the ones with the narrowest focus. The King’s Speech centers on King George VI’s stammer in the burgeoning years of the Radio Age. This may not sound like much of a subject for a drama, but the story is a surprisingly touching and inspirational one. Colin Firth as the titular King and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist are thrill to watch play off each other too.

8) The Kids Are All Right

No other movie I saw this year has as keen an understanding of how people interact as The Kids Are All Right. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore star as lesbian mothers who struggle with their children’s desire to connect with their sperm donor father (Mark Ruffalo). This is wonderful comedy that occasionally flirts with melodrama but even then remains an honest a depiction of family dynamics. That the family is an unconventional one dampens none of its universality.

7) A Prophet

This fascinating French film follows a young man’s years in prison as he navigates the multicultural politics of organized crime on the inside. Though only a handful of scenes take place outside the prison walls, the film is as expansive and grand as a crime epic. Absorbing from beginning to end.

6) The Ghost Writer

A political thriller about a biographer (Ewan McGregor) who agrees to write the memoirs of former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after Lang’s former ghost writer mysteriously committed suicide. Director Roman Polanski hasn’t lost any of his knack for crafting great thrillers, and this one is one of the most rich and involving mysteries in recent years. It has a phenomenal ending too.

5) The Social Network

How much is fact and how much was made up? Does it matter? Director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin take the story of Facebook’s creation and turn it into the stuff of Greek drama. Jesse Eisenberg is wonderful as the borderline misanthropic Mark Zuckerberg and is surrounded by a strong supporting cast. Often dark, sometimes funny, and always engrossing.

4) Inception

Christopher Nolan is a marvelous craftsman and he outdoes himself here. He builds, then solves his own puzzle, playing by the rules he invents for himself. The result is one of the most dazzling and inventive action movies since The Matrix. Like that earlier film, Inception toys with metaphysical ideas just long enough to hold you over until the action scenes, all of which are exceptional.

3) 127 Hours

Only Danny Boyle could take the true story of Aron Ralston, who was trapped in a rock crevice for over five days, and turn it into one of the most entertaining movies of the year. Despite the seeming physical limitations of Ralston’s story, Boyle’s film is a kinetic and exhilarating ride. 127 Hours has all the tension of an action movie and its protagonist doesn’t even move for most of the film. Credit must also be given to James Franco for carrying the film in a career-best performance.

2) Black Swan

The best horror movie in years. Darren Aronofsky’s tour de force about a ballerina losing her mind is an eerie, paranoid thriller with top-shelf performances from Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey and Vincent Cassel. There are a number of twists and turns along the way, but the movie wisely does not trap itself into any one version of reality. The movie exists within Nina’s mind, so the question of what is or isn’t real is irrelevant. To her, everything is real, and I’m only all too happy to get caught up in her surreal nightmare.

1) Toy Story 3

Each of the previous Toy Story movies followed a basic formula: The toys leave the house, have an adventure, and eventually find their way home. In between, we’re treated to some exceptionally clever gags and top-notch animation. The third film delivers all of this plus a pitch-perfect, heart-breaking coda. Rarely does a sequel work as hard as Toy Story 3 to thematically unite its predecessors, but Pixar rises to the occasion and ends a wonderful series in a wholly satisfying way. Not even the unnecessary 3D could bring this movie down.

- Steve Avigliano, 1/17/11

Kick-Ass and the Future of Superhero Movies

Superhero movies have been so popular in the last decade it’s almost difficult to imagine what our summer blockbusters were about before they seemingly all became about caped crusaders. There were, of course, hits made from superheroes before 2000 – Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) and Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) were both huge – but it was Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) along with Sam Raimi’s Spiderman (2002) that confirmed what had already been proven by those earlier films. Superheroes are ingrained deep enough into our pop culture consciousness that even the so-so ones have a decent shot at scoring a profit in their big screen adventures.
 

In 2010, superhero films are still going strong, but for how much longer? When will a lot become too many? Are superheroes headed for overexposure? Next summer, there will be three big ones. Thor comes out in May, followed closely by Captain America: The First Avenger in July, and sandwiched in between them will be Green Lantern in June. Thor and Captain America will both set up characters for the super-sized Marvel crossover, The Avengers, to be released the following summer. All of the aforementioned films will be released in 3D, which means studios anticipate audience members spending up to $45 on superheroes at the cinema next summer, not counting repeat viewings.
 

And those are just the summer offerings. There will be The Green Hornet in January and an X-Men prequel titled, X-Men: First Class to be released sometime in 2011. In the following year, there will be Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman movie, as well as a Spiderman reboot from Mark Webb, the director of (500) Days of Summer.

With all these movies still before us and many more behind us, it’s no wonder there have been some less conventional takes on the superhero genre. I’m tempted to label them “post-superhero” movies if it weren’t for the fact that they don’t offer much that’s truly contrary to the more traditional superhero tales.

The long-awaited adaptation of Alan Moore’s cult classic Watchmen (2009) had potential to give us something new, but under 300 helmer Zach Snyder’s direction, the film was underwhelming and confirmed many fans’ suspicions that the book was unfilmable.

The ads for Hancock (2008), an original story, suggested that Will Smith’s title character would be a change-of-pace from the typical, morally upstanding heroes. A film portraying a superhero as a drunk suffering from a poor public image was intriguing, but a sloppy script gave the film a muddled tone. As it turned out, even this supposedly tongue-in-cheek superhero movie succumbed to having a big-budget action finale.

Then there’s Kick-Ass, which I missed when it came out earlier this year but recently had the opportunity to watch on DVD. Kick-Ass is directed by Matthew Vaughn (who also directed the excellent pre-Bond Daniel Craig vehicle, Layer Cake) and based on a graphic novel that creator Mark Millar always intended to become a movie.

Kick-Ass begins as a satirical take on the genre, introducing Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) as a high-school nobody obsessed with comic books. He wonders why anybody hasn’t tried to be a real-life superhero yet and wants to be the first. He dismisses the way comics always give Joe Shmoe superpowers as a result of some freak accident, or how Bruce Wayne is able to afford all that cool equipment that doesn’t exist in reality. So he takes a DIY attitude to crime fighting, buys a wet suit and some nunchucks online and practices badass one-liners in the mirror. Like a true teenager, he calls himself Kick-Ass.

These scenes are wonderful as are the high school scenes, which take more than a few cues from Superbad (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a.k.a. McLovin, is even here as the son of a wealthy mobster). There’s some funny stuff about how Dave unwittingly becomes the pseudo-gay friend of the girl he has a crush on, and some smart jokes about what a society populated with superheroes would really be like in the age of camera phones and online social networking. When Dave’s first successful scuffle with a couple of street thugs becomes a YouTube sensation, he wastes no time in creating a MySpace page for his alter ego and revels in the glory of the friend requests that come pouring in.

But Kick-Ass quickly breaks its own rules. After getting struck by a car, most of Dave’s bones are replaced with metal, and a lack of nerve endings allows him to get punched without feeling a thing. Maybe this twist is part of the film’s self-awareness and there’s a bit of irony in the fact that this miracle occurs after an embarrassing first attempt at heroism, but mostly it just takes the wind out of a clever premise. Then there is Damon Macready (Nicholas Cage) who goes by the alias Big Daddy and his daughter Mindy a.k.a. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz). Much like Bruce Wayne, whom the film pokes fun at earlier, Macready sinks countless dollars into buying heavy artillery and trains his daughter in martial arts. Early in the film, there’s a joke that mocks the way superheroes are always given cheesy motives of vengeance, but Kick-Ass doesn’t hesitate to turn around a few scenes later and give Macready just that. He seeks to avenge the death of his wife, for which he blames the mobster, Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong).

Hit Girl is another source of problems for the film. I realize, yes, that the character is supposed to be provocative and controversial, but she’s all shock. Her father has trained her to be the perfect killer, which explains the violence, but why all the vulgarity? Macready notably avoids such language in her presence, giving her cutesy pet names even while he trains her to take bullets as she wears a Kevlar vest. That scene gets some laughs because of the disparity between Macready’s words and actions. Wouldn’t Hit Girl have been funnier if amidst all the carnage she paused every once in while and acted like the little girl she is? Then there might have been a dash of irony added to a character whose actions are just gratuitous. We watch as Hit Girl pumps lead into bad guy’s heads and slashes them up with knives bigger than she is, and the film expects us to laugh simply because it’s a little girl doing all this.

The performances are mostly good. Aaron Johnson brings the right mix of everyman qualities and teen perviness to the role, Nicholas Cage strikes a balance between understatement as the father and pure camp when he dons his mask, and Chloë Grace Moretz, for what it’s worth, has a lot of onscreen charisma.

Still, once we reach the blood-splattered finale, the movie is no different than the superhero films it parodies in the earlier scenes. Everyday characters achieve great physical feats in the name of awesome fight choreography and a complex plot is resolved with simple action. The movie wants to have its cake and blow it up too.

Kick-Ass was relatively cheap to make and did well enough at the box office to spawn a forthcoming sequel in graphic novel and movie form, but are movies like this the future of superheroes? I’m still waiting for someone to make a true anti-superhero movie, one that really skewers the conventions of the genre and commits to its satire.

In the mean time, there is a host of traditional superheroes lining up to receive our money in the form of ticket sales. My prediction though? After The Avengers and the third Batman movie come out in 2012, the Golden Age of superhero movies will end. They’ll still exist for sure, but will no longer be dependable megahits for studios. That day will be a bittersweet one. Fresh, new stories will hopefully find their way to multiplexes, and our favorite costumed heroes and heroines will return to the pages from whence they came. Before that happens, movies like Kick-Ass will no doubt try to change the direction of the tide, but will effectively only push us further into a superhero overload.

- Steve Avigliano, 8/19/10

The Hype Monster vs. The Great and Powerful Backlash

Hype is tough to avoid. The dutiful moviegoer and friend that I am, I like to recommend a good movie when I see it. Plus, if a good film does well at the box office, there may be more of its kind down the road and less garbage wasting screens at my local theater. There’s a difference though between a recommendation and hype. A recommendation says, “See this, I liked it and you will too.” Hype builds the anticipation to levels a film could never possibly satisfy. As a result, people who didn’t see the movie the opening weekend and aren’t riding the hype train feel underwhelmed when they finally do get to the movies. Thus, backlash ensues.

This happens with movies of all kinds from summer blockbusters to the Oscar-nominated. It happened with Avatar last year, The Dark Knight two years ago and it’s starting again with Inception right now. All of the above are critically acclaimed and the first two have become megahits with the latter likely to follow suit. I enjoyed all of them too, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Critics and moviegoers alike were hailing Avatar as a game-changer. Movies would never be the same, they said. Six months later, Avatar hasn’t had nearly the cultural impact of Star Wars, which the film was repeatedly compared to, or even Cameron’s own Terminator films. For better or worse Avatar has popularized 3D and proved it to be a profitable investment for studios. Yet I’m at a loss to quote a single good line from the movie and I can only think of one memorable scene off the top of my head. (I rather like the scene when he first gets into the avatar and feels the dirt under his feet.) For me, Avatar remains in my mind what it was when I first saw it theaters: A visually stunning and creative but poorly written sci-fi action movie.

When The Dark Knight came out two years ago, there didn’t seem to be any other movie out that summer and were people so wrong to treat it as such? The Dark Knight is the best superhero movie yet (though Spiderman 2 is a close second for me) and I admire the way director Christopher Nolan gave his film the tone, structure and grandeur of a crime epic. Is it a great film though, in the Citizen Kane, Godfather or Fargo sense of the word? Probably not. That didn’t stop me from championing it as such at the time, of course, but I have to be honest and look at the film in perspective. Heath Ledger deserved every bit of hype he got, but Christian Bale’s grunt can be a bit much and I wish the movie didn’t end with such an obvious sequel set-up. (That last shot of Batman on his motorcycle was cool at the time, but it’s more frustrating than anything else now.) Still, I look forward to one day showing Nolan’s Batman movies to my kids the way my father showed me Richard Donner’s Superman movies. As a piece of pop culture, The Dark Knight is a classic. But remember, that’s pop as in popcorn.

Now Nolan is at it again with Inception, a movie that everyone and their grandma have been calling a “mindfuck.” I’m still not sure what that means and how the word qualifies as a recommendation but I think I understand the intentions. Personally, I prefer the way a Charlie Kaufman movie makes sweet love to my mind and doesn’t just leave the next morning but to each their own, I suppose.

Since Inception’s release, some critics have laid out reasonable critiques of the film, mostly arguing that the movie’s action sequences and set pieces lack the mystical and amorphous qualities of real dreaming. This is true. I admire all of the above-linked reviews, particularly the A.O. Scott one, but I think some of these critics are missing the point. Christopher Nolan set out to make an action movie sprinkled with thoughtful ideas, not the other way around. If he did, he would’ve made it more Waking Life than The Matrix. Those are two more movies I like, but for very different reasons.

Movies operate on a sliding scale of ambition and Nolan has succeeded wonderfully in making a brilliant action movie. That little trick about how ten seconds in one dream equates to twenty minutes in another and an hour in a third is ingenious and I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s an inventive little cheat to give our heroes more time and who cares if it doesn’t hold up to anything resembling logic in the real world?

Those proudly waving the flag of backlash are shouting that the movie is not a visionary masterpiece. Who said it was? Certainly not Nolan. Ah yes, that snow-balling monster of hype did, giving a perfectly entertaining action blockbuster labels it never wanted.

When I searched for a synonym for "hype" in my computer’s thesaurus, I got "ballyhoo" as an option. I like that word more because I think it captures the ridiculousness of people's tendency to overrate. See Inception and see it again but please, let’s try and keep the ballyhoo in check.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/19/10

Do We Need 3D?

I don’t fully understand the technical reasons why watching a movie in 3D is worse than a normal viewing, but I do know these things: 1) The picture is dimmer in a 3D movie. 2) The 3D effect is distracting. 3) It adds a surcharge to an already expensive ticket.

There are technical reasons why 3D gives us a dimmer picture, but you don’t need to be an expert on film projection to notice the difference. Should you see Toy Story 3 in 3D, consider for a moment past Pixar movies. The studio’s films have always been vibrant and colorful and yet here (and when Up came out in 3D last year), everything is a shade too dim, as though the entire film were taking place at dusk. Why is this? Something about the 3D process makes the image dimmer, but those glasses don’t make it any better. Granted, they’re a marked improvement from those red/blue glasses that used to be the standard, but they’re still a discomfort. And if you already wear glasses, they’re even worse, having to awkwardly place them over your prescription lenses.

But this gets more into my second problem with 3D – that it’s a distraction. When Avatar came out, the buzzword everybody used was “immersive.” James Cameron’s innovations in 3D technology were supposed to pull the viewer in and make them a part of the experience. For many, the effect worked. For me, it was frequently distracting. Yes, those sweeping shots of oceans and flying mountains looked pretty spectacular in 3D (though I suspect they’d have been just as memorable without it), but what about the dramatic scenes in between the sweeping effects shots and action sequences? Did you notice the way the image blurs a little when two people are just sitting and talking to each other, or walking? Some call the effect “ghosting” and it was all over the place when I saw Avatar. The 3D blends nicely in action scenes, but for those quieter moments, it became very noticeable that I was watching a 3D movie, pulling me out of the experience rather than into it.

3D is being touted as the next great innovation in movies, as if 2D movies are suddenly inferior and outdated. Even using the term 2D is a misnomer. Were you ever unsatisfied with how “flat” movies used to be? No, of course not. That’s because since birth, our eyes and brain have worked together to interpret pictures and film as representations of depth and movement. Adding the artificial third dimension only calls attention to the fact that we’re watching a movie.

And then there’s the price. We’re paying extra money for an inferior product. I’m dazzled enough by Pixar’s animation, or the latest CG effects, why do we need 3D? The simple answer is that we don’t. Studios like it because they can make money off it, and they are. Avatar is the highest-grossing movie of all-time, largely thanks to the 3D surcharges. Then there’s the IMAX surcharge that, in an AMC theater, charges you for putting a faux-IMAX screen in front of the regular screen.

These scams will exist as long as people are paying for them. Christopher Nolan spoke out recently against 3D in response to questions about how the third Batman will be filmed. He explains that the choice is not up to him. Audience members speak through ticket sales and studios listen by looking at box office receipts.

So ask yourself: Do you need to see Toy Story 3 in 3D? Or Harry Potter? Or (God help us) the new Jackass movie? You can voice your opinion one way or the other with a ticket purchase.

Further reading: Roger Ebert’s “Why I Hate 3D (And You Should Too)”

- Steve Avigliano, 7/01/10

Seeing Stars: Why Critics Rate the Way They Do

All critics find their own way to rate a work. Ratings (be they numerical or otherwise) are a convenient and accessible way to get one’s opinions out there, and give some sense of objectivity to an otherwise entirely subjective form of writing. It’s easy to scan a newspaper (I’m sorry, I meant scroll a webpage) and get a quick idea of how good a movie is. Some critics might argue that a rating system lends itself to readers skipping the review and looking only at the stars (admittedly, I’m guilty of this crime), but for those truly interested, a rating can only say so much and instead functions as an “Inquire Within” sign.

Roger Ebert, on numerous occasions has expressed disdain for ratings, despite using a four-star system himself (in addition to creating the most basic of all movie criteria: the Thumbs Up). Ebert argues that, to the reader, equivalent ratings suggest equivalent quality in a film when in fact not all four-star movies are made alike. If, for example, the most recent Francis Ford Coppola film was a disappointment and received 2 stars and the latest Adam Sandler comedy was surprisingly decent (receiving 3 stars), is that suggesting that the latter is of higher merit than the former? Perhaps, but I’m a firm believer in taking each movie for what it is, not holding it to lofty standards.

That being said, I’d like to take a look at the many types of rating systems out there for both film and music (another area of criticism I have some interest in) before settling on my own standards I’ll be using for this blog.

Stars are classic. They’re what I’ve grown accustomed to in both reading and writing film criticism. Since as long as I can recall I’ve always made a quick note in my mind of how many stars a film gets after watching it. It’s a fun way to review things, and there’s just something nice about seeing four stars (or five if that’s your thing) next to the title of a movie I truly admire.

Often this can become problematic however, as it assumes all stars weigh the same. Clearly, the four stars for Casablanca aren’t the same as the four stars for The Dark Knight, right? In reviewing music, this problem arises often. David Bowie, for example released a number of full-score albums in his prime, but he’s still releasing solid music now, so should I compare the new to the old? As obvious as it might seem to do so, I’d avoid the comparison, otherwise no one would listen to his new stuff because it would be viewed as inferior to the old. The music website Pitchfork seems to have a reliable 10-point system that avoids this exact situation. This larger scale offers a wider range to be more specific in one’s quality assessment. Marching to a different tune entirely, I know a guy who runs a rather good music review site by timing the amount of good minutes an album has to create an overall percentage of how much of a record is worth listening to. This is pretty ambitious, and maybe a little crazy, but hey, it works and nobody else is doing it.

There are also the letter grades, as Entertainment Weekly uses for all media reviews, which take genre expectations into account. I know, for example what I’m going to get from a B- comedy or an A horror film.

One of my personal favorite critics, A.O. Scott for The New York Times, uses no rating at all, yet his essays are among the most concise and insightful I’ve ever read. All critics for the Times along with other publications do this as well, and I respect the practice.

The best of all however are the aggregate sites (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic). By compiling the average of many different rating systems from professional and significant online reviewers, these sites’ percentages are very insightful and I rarely disagree. It’s been a while since I’ve gone to see a movie I know will be rotten.

For my purposes here, however, I’m going to remain a classicist and use a four-star scale. Below are rough definitions of what these ratings mean but, in the end, it’s the words on the page that truly matter.

4 stars: A perfect, or near-perfect, film that elicits some additional mental or emotional response that pushes it into a category that, in film, is best described as “great.”

3 ½ stars: A perfectly, or near-perfectly, executed film where all aspects (direction, writing, acting, cinematography, etc.) exemplify the highest quality.

3 stars: A good to very good film worth a recommendation, containing some weakness or limitation that goes beyond nitpicking individual scenes.

2 ½ stars: A film that, despite its (possibly many) problems, I feel some level of admiration for. Worth a rental recommendation.

2 stars: A film with as many problems as strengths, with the bad unfortunately outweighing the good.

1 ½ stars: A bad film.

1 star: A bad film that I feel some level of hatred for.

½ star: A bad film that borders on offensive in its lack of respect for its audience.

0 stars: Manos: The Hands of Fate.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/27/09