The Best & Worst Movies of 2012

Time once again for me to offer opinions that nobody cares about. In no particular order, here are the Best and Worst movies of last year.

THE BEST

The Avengers

It’s the best comic book movie ever made. ‘Nuff said.

The Central Park Five

Ken Burns’ documentary is one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen. And it made me damn mad, too. What the State of New York did to those five kids in 1989 is truly horrifying. And the fact that the detectives, reporters and attorneys who perpetrated the outrage continue to stick by their stories is despicable. Shame on them all.

Prometheus

Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel is exactly what good science fiction should be: thoughtful, slick, exciting and well-acted. Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace are fantastic (though Noomi always is: check out The Monitor if you haven’t already). Scott’s direction, as it was on his 1979 classic, is calm and avoids most genre clichés. Prometheus doesn’t have quite the claustrophobic menace as the original, but then it’s a movie with a different scope.

The Master

This is, hands down, the best movie I saw this year, and is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best work to date. As a meditation on male psychology, and the psychology of a cult and its followers, it resists easy categorization, which is probably why it received so little in the way of advertising, and underperformed at the box office. Philip Seymour Hoffman proves once again that he is one of our finest actors. And Mihai Malaimare’s cinematography is gorgeous.

Zero Dark Thirty

Osama bin-Laden was a very bad guy, but this is not, as some critics have labeled it, a rah-rah, kill-the-bad-guy movie. It’s about as far from that as you can get. Jessica Chastain gives her best performance so far as a CIA operative looking into the abyss. Kathryn Bigelow’s direction is tight. The moral ambiguity of the thing leaves your mind spinning, even as you want to take a long shower.

Margaret

On the surface, this is a movie about a lie, and a young woman’s attempt to atone for that lie. But it is also a thoughtful, smart examination of a young woman fending for herself in a world she isn’t experienced enough to grapple with. Kenneth Lonergan’s script is intelligent, emotionally complex, and genuine. I wasn’t sure Anna Paquin could pull off a high-school aged character, but she does it with honesty and élan. Mark Ruffalo shines in a small role, and Jeannie Berlin (daughter of Elaine May) is absolutely terrific.

Safety Not Guaranteed

A quirky hermit places an ad in the paper for someone to join him for a trip back in time. A journalistic intern is sent out to cover the story by posing as a candidate to join the expedition. Of course there is a love story involved, a very fun love story, that takes on true emotional resonance when it becomes clear why the man wishes to go back in time. Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza as the hermit and the intern are a joy to watch.

The Beasts of the Southern Wild

Some critics has called it a fantasy set in the real world, but I think it’s more a vision of the real world channeled through the mind of a child. There is something almost other-worldly about Quvenzhané Wallis’ performance as Hushpuppy. She was only five when the movie was filmed, so watching her isn’t like watching an actor, but something more present than that. She’s a thirty-pound force of nature and you can’t take your eyes off of her, or off this fine, fine movie.

Lincoln

This is easily Spielberg’s best work since Saving Private Ryan. His direction is so gentle and so confident. Daniel Day-Lewis gives his usual remarkable performance, but he is aided by marvelous work from Sally Field and James Spader (of all people), both of whom should get some Academy attention. The real star of the movie, though, is Tony Kushner’s screenplay. It’s a marvel of language.

The Cabin in the Woods

I have a weird love for horror movies that are laced with humor, as apparently does writer Joss Whedon, and his team of Sitterson and Hadley, as played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, bring out the demented laughs with gusto. Wonderful, twisted fun, that turns the slasher genre on its head, then makes it breakdance.

Honorable Mention

Moonrise Kingdom

You heard it here first. Wes Anderson managed to rid himself, for one movie at least, of his usual middle-class pretensions. A cute, clever little movie.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

A low-key love story where the kids actually feel like kids. Emma Watson knocks it out of the park.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

I love movies that aren’t afraid of big romantic gestures, and nobody does them better than Lasse Hallström.

AND THE WORST…

Dark Shadows

OK, Tim Burton is officially becoming an embarrassment. To himself and perhaps even to the entire history of film.

Rock of Ages

Is it possible to actually be oppressed by a movie, to be held down and incessantly beaten about the face and throat with awfulness? Yes. It is.

Battleship

This movie is so bad it actually caused the capillaries in my eyeballs to voluntarily burst in an effort to save themselves, and my brain, from seeing any more of it.

The Hunger Games

Go rent Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale instead. The books and the movie are rip-offs of that much better movie and the much better book by Koushun Takami.

Straw Dogs

Sam Peckinpah was one of our best directors, and this tepid, badly acted remake of his classic should’ve been put out of its misery before it ever hit the screen. You simply cannot replace Dustin Hoffman with James Marsden and think that anything good will come of it.

This Means War

I like Chris Pine. I really like Tom Hardy. And I really, really like Reese Witherspoon. But this movie really, really, really sucked. Not funny. Not exciting. Not sexy. Not much of anything, really. Really.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Bad acting, tedious direction, and an absurd plot. Kristen Stewart’s performance consists of a painful series of facial tics, intended, apparently, to convey emotion, but instead cause her to look like she has some kind of neurological malady.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2

Sweet shit. Are they done with this series yet? And if not, is there a vaccination available?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Tolkien’s book is shitty, and Peter Jackson somehow managed to make it shittier. The movie is a bloated CGI-fest, and commits the one unforgivable sin for an adventure movie: it’s boring.

Mansome

Morgan Spurlock’s documentaries have all been tiresome exercises in promoting Morgan Spurlock, but this awful thing about male grooming habits hits a new low. He provides no interesting information. He makes no discernible point.

And that’s all she wrote, folks.

Cheers.

Letting Go of Texas

So, I was traveling through Texas, doing my job, when, at about six in the evening I found myself loading up on coffee at a truck stop. This was about a week ago, in the scenic hamlet of Midlothian. I was splashing a little milk in my jitter juice when I saw this woman approaching the condiment counter. She was of average height, but probably weighed four bills. I mean, I’m no spindleshanks, but this lady…damn. She was huge. She was Trucker the Hutt. And she was carrying six little snack-sized bags of Cheetos. As I looked on, she systematically opened the bags and filled each about half-way with liquid nacho cheese from the machine. Then she rolled the tops shut and trundled over to the checkout line.

Standing in line behind her, I thought about several things, first among them being to wonder how she planned on eating her vile nosh. Or, more specifically, how she planned on eating her vile nosh while simultaneously piloting a tractor-trailer. And then I thought about how fast she might be going when all that cheese affixed itself around her heart like bath-tub grout and she went screaming across eight lanes of traffic.

In the end, I decided not to waste any more thought on the subject, and headed out to my car. Sometime between when I entered the truck stop and when I exited, the space next to mine had been filled with the obnoxious bulk of a shiny-black Hummer H3. I hadn’t seen one in a while. I mean, I’d been operating under the assumption that penis implants had largely done away with the need to purchase one, but there it was. As I backed out, I was able to get a look at its rear end, where a pair of bumper stickers offered the world the following information:

MY OTHER TWO CARS ARE ALSO GAS GUZZLERS

And:

SCREW TIBET!

FREE TEXAS!

SECEDE!

I’d been keeping up with my reading on the nascent secessionist movement in this country, but these two stickers really drove it home for me: the close to 900,000 Americans (some 115,000 from Texas alone) who have signed secessionist petitions are among the most ignorant—of history and economics, to name but two of the more vital departments of the project—people who have ever slouched about in the spotlight of the American stage. It might sound appealing to take your ball and go home, but the adult world is, oh, a tad more complicated than that.

I wanted to pull back in, wait for the Hummer Head to come out, and engage him in a little furious debate, but resisted the temptation. My only weapons would have been facts, and I suspected (without reason, I know) that presenting facts to someone who believed what this doofus apparently believed would be a little bit like presenting an iPad to an infant—the kid might look at it for a minute, especially if there’s something sparkly on the screen, but will inevitably go back to sucking its toes. So I drove away, but my brain continued to roil, sort of cataloging the array of potentialities the secessionists haven’t assimilated into their sulky political posturing.

Take, for example, the billions of Federal dollars they get fed every year—after Louisiana, Texas gets the second-highest pile of government cheese in the country. All that dough would vanish instantaneously. Or how about the immediate closure of all military bases in the state? There are 15 major bases in Texas, and all those troops (along with their money-spending families) would be reassigned to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico to guard against any funny business from the Lone Star Nation. And where would they find trading partners? The EU? They have troubles of their own. China? Right. How about Cuba? Texas would be screwed from the get-go and would be left to watch with slack-jawed impotence as their economy collapsed like flour down a chute.

But then… But then, yes, something occurred to me which might make it possible for the citizens of the new nation to keep their heads above the ever-deepening lake of shit they created through their own machinations.

See, while lots of Texans claim a belief in the Christian god, the true religion of the place is football.

Secession would be fucking perfect for football people, and their favorite saint, Jerry Jones. Jerry could own the whole TFL. He could name every team after himself. You’d have the Dallas Jerries, the Houston Jerries, the San Antonio Jerries, and right on down the line. Jerry would also be the general manager and starting quarterback for every team. And he would get quite a workout every February when he played for both teams in the Jerry Bowl.

I know, I know. Pretty Stupid.

And so is the idea of seceding from the Union.

The two people I encountered that night in Midlothian, if you wadded them up together, would coagulate into the perfect secessionist brain: an unhealthy mass of air-inflated, deep-fried, lard blisters swimming in an inorganic orange slurry, and powered by an admixture of delirious paranoia and self-satisfied stupidity.

But if the Texans really want to go, I say this. Let ‘em.

Then in a few years, just for a goof, we can invade and steal their oil.

Cheers.

An Absolutist Position

Earlier this week, while researching material for a post on secularism in America, and in need of a good quote from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I found myself trolling through several reviews of her book Infidel (2007), and was astonished to find that numerous reviewers, while standing on their “liberal” credentials (not to mention their individual, finely-honed, pseudo-liberal outrage), took umbrage with Ms. Ali’s views on how women are treated under Islam. One critic, Lorraine Ali (no relation, thankfully; who reviewed Infidel for Newsweek) claimed that Ms. Ali has an “absolutist” opinion of Islam, and thus that opinion is to be discounted.

This got me thinking, and I spent the next couple of days re-reading Infidel to see if I had somehow missed something the first time around.

As it turns out, I hadn’t missed a thing. Ms. Ali does, in fact, have an absolutist position on how Islam treats women.

A seven-year-old girl should absolutely never be held down on the floor by four adults and told that her pain is the will of Allah as a man cuts away her outer labia and clitoris with a pair of scissors.

That same seven-year-old girl should absolutely never be forced to endure further agony as the man, working without anesthetic, sews the remains of her bleeding womanhood shut with button thread, leaving open only a tiny aperture through which her urine trickles like drips from a leaky faucet.

That same seven-year-old girl should absolutely never have to spend two weeks healing—on her back with her legs tied together, so that her movements will not inhibit the formation of scar tissue.

Years later, that same girl, now a young woman on her wedding night, should absolutely never be forced to suffer the pain and humiliation of having her husband rip open that scar with his penis, or if his penis isn’t up (bwah-hahahaha…) to the task, rendering his bride mountable by opening the scar with a kitchen knife.

A woman should absolutely never be required to cover herself in bulky, stifling fabric to mask any hint of her femininity, lest she inflame the passions of a bunch of sexually repressed cretins and thereby run the risk of being stoned or beaten.

A woman should absolutely never be forced to marry someone chosen for her by her male relatives, and should absolutely never fear being killed to avenge the “honor” of those same relatives if she refuses the arrangement.

A woman should absolutely never have to endure death threats and the necessity for body guards simply for telling the truth about a religion that is even more cruel and backward than most.

In short, a woman should absolutely never live in constant fear—of beatings, of torture, of death—because the central tenets of the religion that governs her life grant her the same societal status as a goat.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s critics were absolutely delusional when they reviewed her memoir in such a simple-minded way and, if they have not changed their minds, remain absolutely delusional. Religious correctness will get us nowhere. Unexamined tolerance is nothing more than fence-sitting masquerading as analysis. And in the case of Islam’s treatment of women, such misguided lenience borders on malice.

Infidel is one of the most important and profoundly moving books of this young century. As the late, great Christopher Hitchens said:

“The three most beautiful words in the emerging language of secular resistance to tyranny are Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”

Cheers.

It Happened In Texas

I spent the last 11 days working in Texas. It’s a really special place. Everybody is so jolly and normal. And they don’t hardly ever do stupid shit. And they hardly never act like fuckwit rednecks. Shit, it’s a little slice of fuckin’ paradise down there. With a side of handguns.

When In Doubt, Run Away

My mouth gets me in the soup from time to time, but it’s been a while since it got me so deep in the stuff that I wondered if my next few meals were going to arrive via a feeding tube, in between hits off the morphine drip.

I rolled into a gas station about 10:30 one evening, on the outskirts of a distinguished little burg called, I believe, Gravelly Cloaca (actually, it was in Rhome, TX) and climbed out to see to my car’s sustenance. The place was more crowded than you’d imagine at that time on a week-night. Many of the pumps were occupied.

Directly ahead of me was a crappy-looking species of Mazda, under the supervision of two soldiers, both in full digital cammo, with one pumping gas and the other getting after the windows with a squeegee. Both front doors of the Mazda were wide open, and the soldiers’ programming choice was blaring out for the edification of everyone gassing up at that moment. They were listening to some talk-radio dipshit, though whether he was a local dipshit or a national, Clear Channel-type, dipshit I couldn’t tell you. But I can give you a rough approximation of his dipshit theme.

He was after the Blacks. At first I wasn’t sure what they had done to work him into such a lather, but he quickly provided the necessary lowdown. The Blacks, it seems, need to be educated about politics in America. They, and especially their leaders, are so fundamentally racist that they will vote for Barack Hussein Obama (he stressed the President’s middle name, I guess to make sure we got it, got it and pondered the ramifications) no matter what, because he has black skin, and that’s it. They know nothing about Obama’s policies, or about how those policies are keeping them down. No, all they understand is that Obama is black, and that’s good enough for them. They have a herd mentality, you see. Al Sharpton points, and off they go, like so many dark lemmings. The host then added a few well-reasoned words about Sharpton, specifically about how none of the people who will soon be voting according to his vile catechisms would “even allow Sharpton in their houses. They wouldn’t let Sharpton near their daughters.” Like Barack Hussein Obama, the Reverend Sharpton profits from the good ol’ melatonin pass. “When I talk about these things,” the host said, “it makes people uncomfortable. You know why? The truth always makes people uncomfortable.”

During the host’s seemingly endless stream of blather, about the point I began trying to mentally speed the flow of fuel into my tank, I glanced over to the opposite side of the pump I was using. There, filling her tank, was a young black woman. Our eyes met. She rolled hers, which ignited every damn-she’s-cute circuit in my head, and brought a grin to my lips.

As the radio dipshit was justifying his bigotry with the claim that “the truth always makes people uncomfortable,” my brain discharged the appropriate amount of stimulus to the appropriate synapses, creating a cascade of behaviors on my part.

I glanced again at the fetching young lady. I collated a series of words into a tidy little sentence. I opened my mouth. And I gave the sentence its freedom, at volume, and in the voice of an FM-radio DJ.

“Tonight on Radio KKK,” I burbled. “How to get blood stains out of your hood. Coming up after this!”

Then a few things happened pretty much simultaneously. That’s how I remember it, anyway.

The black lady burst out laughing, actually clapping both hands over her mouth, her eyes wide and sparkling. The soldiers, both of ‘em, whipped around on me like affronted gunslingers. And I cringed inwardly, my thoughts running something like oh, shit… I looked at the soldiers, noting the unpleasant facts that they were less than half my age and in better physical condition than I had ever been, and wondered how many punches I might be able to work into the coming dance before they reduced me to a runny pile of component parts. And when they didn’t immediately attack, I climbed behind the wheel of my car and drove the fuck away. For the next half-hour, I kept one eye on the rear-view mirror, preparing myself for the glare of oncoming headlights. Headlights that, lucky me, never materialized.

Thinking it over, I decided that it was military protocol which had kept the soldiers from beating me to death. They had obviously realized that pummeling me meant the risk of getting sideways with their superiors. I slowly relaxed.

The next morning, I called my brother. He’s been in the service for almost 25 years—Rwanda, Bosnia, and two tours of Iraq. I told him the story and asked if my guesswork had been correct, that only the silent intervention of military regulations had stopped the soldiers from stomping the life out of an elderly civilian.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Unless the local police and the MPs both got involved. There’s no base near where you were, so they were probably reservists. Probably depends on how bad they beat you.”

Talking with my brother is usually more fun than that.  

Still, I considered myself fortunate. More importantly, I’d gotten a laugh out of a pretty girl. And it’s things like getting laughs out of pretty girls that smooth your passage over life’s little speed bumps.

That and Maker’s Mark.

Recombinant Bumper Cars

When you drive for a living, thoughts of accidents hover in the background of your thinking, like gnats at a family picnic.

All of the guys at my company who do what I do have had accidents of one kind or another. One fellow hit a deer. Three days later, in a rental car, he hit another one. The dude who runs the East Coast witnessed a collision between two vehicles, then drove through the debris field bifurcating his front bumper and grill-work on a random sheet of break-dancing wreckage.

Last week, I was burning miles toward my last stop, after which I would head home and sleep in my own bed for the first time in nine days. I had the Ramones on, singing and head-banging to End of the Century and Rocket to Russia (two of the best rock records ever recorded, by the by). My feet were jigging, my voice was screaming, my fingers were air-guitaring on the steering wheel, my head was bouncing.

Then the scene through the windshield changed. Changed in a nanobeat. One instant there was a dark, two-lane highway; yellow line; tree silhouettes left and right; a couple of red dots—tail lights up ahead. And the next instant my entire field of vision was a plume of orange sparks and flying white rectangles. Big flying white rectangles. Fast flying white rectangles. White rectangles coming at me like panicked refugees from Flatland.

I swerved to the left—into the oncoming lane, where there was a car oncoming like a motherfucker. More orange sparks, and something large and white flew by the passenger windows. A horn honked. I swerved back into my lane. One of the white rectangles jogged crazily away from me, the dark and my speed causing it to morph in and out of Euclidean harmony. And then the second white rectangle arrived. I hit it dead on and it sort of folded itself in half on my front bumper, jettisoning scraps of fabric and hunks of broken wood. It snapped upright again, then was pulled under my car. I bounced over the thing—whomp-whomp—and stared wide-eyed through a windshield now, thankfully, free of aeronautical geometry.

Hitting my flashers and my brakes, I aimed the car at the shoulder and rocked to a halt. As I climbed from the car, another vehicle skidded to a stop behind mine, throwing up a cloud of dust. Its front end appeared to have been reassembled from an Erector Set by an unhinged toddler. The driver, a guy about my age, got out looking shaky and pissed-off. We each asked after the others well-being, and surveyed the debris in the highway. Turned out that the flying white things were a wrought-iron headboard, a double mattress and a double box spring. The bouncing headboard had created the sparks. We teamed up and dragged the larger pieces out of the road.

Yes, some douchebag hadn’t tied his load down properly, and a sampling of his belongings had gone on a little wind-borne excursion.

When the box springs had folded over my hood the impact had dented it, and running them over had torn off my rear bumper and right rear quarter panel. The car was drivable, though, which is more than could be said about the other guy’s. He called AAA, then we stood around in the flashing hazards, thinking up inventive ways to do away with the dude who’d caused all this, and musing about how convenient it was that we were in the middle of nowhere and disposing of his carcass would be just that easy.

Annoyingly, the douchebag never returned to the scene of his douchebaggery. He either saw his load fly free and thought Oh, shit, now I’m in trouble, and hit the accelerator, or he got to wherever he was going and thought Where’s m’damn bed? Stupid fucker.

And then it occurred to me. Denial of responsibility, or complete ignorance of having any responsibility, kind of sums up Texas. They proudly drive gas-guzzlers, blindly get behind any war that comes their way, talk blithely of seceding from the United States, embrace their bigoted history, and wear cowboy stuff when the closest most of them have ever been to a cow is an Outback.

Texas: We Didn’t Do It!

Cheers.