Top 10 Movies of 2012

10. Pitch Perfect



Movies get bonus points for coming out of nowhere and surprising me, which is exactly what Pitch Perfect did. I like Anna Kendrick and a capella singing just fine, but neither would typically be enough to get me to the theater by themselves. What I do love are movies about contests that We've Just Gotta Win and this one is hilarious (especially - but not only - thanks to Rebel Wilson).

9. The Dark Knight Rises



Not as great as The Dark Knight, but it's a good finale to Christopher Nolan's trilogy. It proved once and for all that Nolan's Batman is not the comic-book Batman, but I'm okay with that. I not only like the way Nolan finishes the series, I wish the comics would wrap up the same way.

The thing I was most excited about for this film though was seeing Catwoman and it didn't disappoint me on that level. Anne Hathaway narrowly edges out Julie Newmar as my favorite Catwoman (only because Newmar's version had a touch of crazy that I don't think the character needs).

8. The Cabin in the Woods



Embraces most of what I love about horror movies while making fun of everything I hate. The ending isn't perfect, but the rest of it sure is.

7. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel



I'm a sucker for elderly British people and stories about second chances. This was right in my wheelhouse on so many levels.

6. Skyfall



I haven't actually talked to anyone who's called Skyfall the best Bond movie ever, but I've heard that such people exist. If I were to meet someone with that point of view, my response would be, "Really?" Because I don't think they're thinking that through very well.

Skyfall is a lot of fun, it's gorgeous, and it works both as the 50th anniversary of the Bond series and as the finale of the trilogy started in Casino Royale. I especially love it from that last perspective. Say what you want about Quantum of Solace's dumb story and boring villain, but one thing that film did right was continue the story of Bond's relationship with his country as personified by M. Skyfall pays that story off in a beautiful way while also reintroducing elements from the pre-Casino Royale films that I didn't realize how much I'd missed. It's also got a great villain and covers its themes in interesting ways. It's a great Bond film.

But the best ever? No way. It owes too much to the early Connery films to seriously consider letting it surpass them. I'm not even sure I like it as much as The Living Daylights or Casino Royale.

5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey



My including The Hobbit this high on the list is all the evidence anyone needs to verify that this Top 10 is my personal one and not an attempt at the 10 Objectively Greatest Movies of the year. If I were being objective about it, I'd agree with the critics who point out that Peter Jackson is indulging his every whim at the expense of telling a tight story. There's a reason that he released a Theatrical Cut of the Lord of the Rings films and then an Extended Edition for DVD. A lot of people simply don't have the patience to sit through scenes that legitimately could have been deleted to improve the pacing.

That said, I'm solidly in the camp of people who will only ever watch the Extended Editions of Lord of the Rings. I love all that extra stuff. I love seeing Middle Earth that fleshed out. I absolutely don't mind seeing Jackson do the same thing with The Hobbit. But I also can't be too harsh on those who do mind it. Jackson risked alienating those folks when he chose not to release a shorter, theatrical version, so it's fair for them to say it didn't work for them.

Even for me, it's not perfect. With Lord of the Rings, I love pretty much every change Jackson made to Tolkien's novels, but I miss the Bilbo that was blustered out his front door and into adventure by Gandalf in the book. Jackson's Bilbo begins his journey too eagerly for my taste. He's too heroic too early. It felt right as I watching it, so maybe I'll re-evaluate after I've seen all three films, but it feels like Jackson needed to speed up Bilbo's character development in order to make him more likable in this installment of the trilogy.

That - and the fact that it is the first installment in a trilogy instead of a complete story - keeps The Hobbit from being higher on my list.

4. Mirror Mirror



I've already written about Mirror Mirror a couple of times, so I'll spare us all another review. I really, really love this movie though.

3. Les Misérables



I knew I was going to have problems with this movie from the first time I saw the trailer and teared up listening to "I Dreamed a Dream." And I was right. Through the whole film, if I wasn't crying over the human misery, I was crying from the joy of hearing those songs again.

I've seen Les Misérables on stage a few times. It's my favorite musical and the reason I think Phantom of the Opera is over-rated. So I'm very familiar with the songs, but I don't own a cast recording and can't listen to them any time I want. I've never cared about hearing the songs outside of the context of the story as presented by actors.

But because I love those songs - and the story - so much, I've longed for a version with actors that I could own and watch whenever I want. In other words, I've been wanting this movie for about twenty years. And it was everything I hoped it would be. (Even Russell Crowe, who isn't an especially strong Javert, but has a perfectly lovely singing voice outside of that.)

The only reason Les Misérables isn't higher on my list is because I can't separate it from my feelings about the stage production. I don't know how I would've felt about it if I wasn't already in love with it from the moment it was announced.

2. The Avengers



Oh, wait... I mean the other Avengers movie about a red-headed spy in a black catsuit.



I seriously reconfigured my Top 3 movies I don't know how many times right up to the point of writing this post. There was a long time this year that I couldn't imagine any movie bumping The Avengers from first place.

A lot of my love for the movie is because it never should have worked. If I've learned anything from a lifetime of movie watching, it's that movies are never as awesome as we hope they'll be. From the moment Samuel L. Jackson appeared at the end of Iron Man, we were all thrilled by the notion of an integrated universe of Marvel superhero films all leading to an all-star Avengers movie. But admit it, you didn't think it would deliver, did you? I certainly didn't. It couldn't possibly live up to the awesomeness of its premise.

Except it did. It totally did.

And, in the process, it gave us the Hulk movie we'd all been waiting for.

1. Looper



Outside of its being really stinking good, the reason Looper is number one on my list is because it's not based on something I already loved. I had to give it bonus points for being a completely original story about characters I'd never heard of before. And what a story.

I dig a good, tightly plotted time-travel story as much as the next person, but what I really love are stories that make me think and re-evaluate my opinions about people. I can't talk about how Looper does that without going into spoilers, but it's so much more than just a fun, scifi movie and deserves to be Number One.

5 things I learned from a second look at Mirror Mirror

In honor of Mirror Mirror's DVD release today (I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it), here are five observations I made after re-watching it.


SPOILERS FOR MIRROR MIRROR BELOW

1. The movie gently subverts fairy tales through the prince. He begins the movie with sort of classic, fairy tale motivations and attitudes: he travels for no other reason than seeking adventure and he's very traditional in his attitude about the dwarves and women. It takes him longer than the other characters to let go of those ideas, but by the end he's fully comfortable with Snow White's being active in her own story. 
2. Though Julia Roberts does a lot of hamming in this movie, she's obviously having a great time doing it and it's hard to dislike her for that.
3. Someone needs to make an action movie starring Martin Klebba. Seriously. Please. And for God's sake don't make the title a pun about his size.
4. Sean Bean is wonderfully humble and awestruck as the king. Most actors would have played him as fully confident and comfortable in retaking his throne at the end of the movie, but not Bean. He's awed by his daughter and her companions and subtly, but visibly embarrassed by his involuntary role in Snow's troubles.
5. I could watch Lily Collins and the cast dance Bollywood style to "I Believe" all day long.

You should look into Mirror Mirror

I wouldn’t blame you if you thought someone paid me off to write a positive review of Mirror Mirror. I get it. I wouldn't trust me either. In fact, I only even went to it as lesser-among-evils choice.

My brother-in-law and I are fortunate (or smart) enough to have married two, extremely cool women and so we have a standing Guys’ Night Out every week where we go to the movies. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. This week: I was this close to calling it off. I actually recommended at one point that we go back and watch a movie at my brother-in-law’s place because there was absolutely nothing in the theaters that didn’t make me want to stab my own eyes out rather than think about seeing it. (I probably could have sat through The Hunger Games again, but it may say something about that movie that I really didn’t want to, as much as I enjoyed it the first two times.)

My problem with Mirror Mirror had to do with two things. First: the marketing is all very focused on Julia Roberts. I don’t have a problem with Julia Roberts in principle, but I do have a problem with her and Nathan Lane hamming up one of my favorite fairy tales for two hours. The trailers had Nathan Lane acting very Nathan Laney while Julia Roberts cracked bad jokes and whined a lot. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, does have a problem with Julia Roberts, so he was even more reluctant than I was.

My second problem with Mirror Mirror was that it was directed by Tarsem Singh (Immortals), a guy who’s shown a few times that he’s much more interested in presenting beautiful images on screen than with telling a story that makes any sense. Fortunately, he had a smart, funny script this time, written by Melisa Wallack (Meet Bill) and Jason Keller (Machine Gun Preacher).

We have another buddy who sometimes joins us for the movie, so when my brother-in-law called him to tell him what we’re seeing, the message he left was that we were going to see the Snow White film. “Not the good one that’s coming out later. The crappy one with Julia Roberts.” We came out of the theater shocked that we’d enjoyed ourselves so much.

I’m not going to lie. Julia Roberts does whine and tell bad jokes in this movie. Nathan Lane does Nathan Lane his way through it. And they are in it quite a bit, but they are not the focus of the film. This is a Snow White movie and it stays a Snow White movie; a funny, gorgeous one that tells the story from a modern, feminist perspective. Not stridently feminist, but humorously. Like when Snow White locks up the Prince and tells him that she’s going to go fight the monster to protect him because letting him do it is out of date. He protests that the traditional way of letting the Prince go save the day is a great idea. “It’s been focus-grouped and it works!” That could be a bad joke if Armie Hammer didn’t deliver it as well as he does and if he and Lily Collins didn’t convince you that this wasn’t actually about feminism, but that each actually cared about and wanted to protect the other. The feminism is incidental and kind of taken for granted. I loved that.

The rest of the film is like that too. The seven dwarfs are awesome, having more in common with Time Bandits than Disney (though you will see winks toward Grumpy and Dopey in a couple of characters). These guys all have great comic timing and when they’re interacting with Snow White, which is quite a lot, it’s a wonderful film. So wonderful that I quite willingly forgave it for Nathan Lane. Julia Roberts – it turned out – didn’t need much forgiveness for. She’s playing exactly the role she needed to play: a vain, selfish ruler who doesn’t get pleasure from harming others because she doesn’t consider other people worth thinking about in the first place.

So we came out of the theater saying, “Wow! I really liked that!” So much so that it actually makes me less excited to see Snow White and the Huntsman, a movie that looks really great in so many ways, but will suffer for not starring Lily Collins and these particular dwarfs.