You can have your Top 10 lists stuffed with cold and corny prestige pics and all those “respectable” “films” headed for Oscar gold, but when I think back on 2012 I remember the movies that wrapped themselves around my heart and brain like a warm blanket made of light and sound and kick-ass jammin' electric guitars and made me feel excited to be alive, dammit!
(I can also pinpoint with a wistful pang the precise moment when Tyler Perry broke my heart. Still love you, TP.)
These are the films, big and small, ambitious and soulful, heart-rending and bone-crunching, about lovers, fighters, time-travelers, masters, closet-dwellers, hermaphrodite basketball players and friends (forever) that made my year at the movies. Join me in celebrating these magical movie moments and let's hope 2013 delivers even more awesomeness.
more »
2012 was a ho-hum year for "serious" cinema. As proof, the Oscar race has narrowed to films like the chipper Argo and dreary Zero Dark Thirty — a chase so routine that the alternative is a Steven Spielberg period piece as wholesome and agreeable as enriched bread. But it was also a banner year for the films that we'll still want to watch in 2022: Ambitious over-reachers (Cloud Atlas, The Master, Les Miserables), loony passion projects (Killer Joe, Magic Mike, The Paperboy), and perfect popcorn flicks (Step Up 4, The Expendables 2, Premium Rush).
That last category is frequently left off top ten lists, but it deserves our applause. When studios get tired of risking $250 million on a single blockbuster (and audiences get tired of paying $14 just to keep up with water cooler conversation), mid-priced modest hits like Looper will be our collective salvation — and help build the next generation of filmmakers and stars. The films that made my Top Ten did so because they were bold, memorable and flawless (or at least two of the three). But of course, if critics can judge art, we should take our own creative risks. And so I've written my remarks in haiku.
more »
I love horror films, but it's real life that gives me the heebie jeebies. And when I think about the cinematic moments that haunt my nightmares, they're rarely from scary movies. Sure, escapism is involved (and a bit of time travel) — just not the supernatural. With that in mind, here's a list of the top five movie scenes that make my skin crawl. I hope they inspire you to come up with more in the comments section. more »
Taken 2 exploded in its opening with $50 million and a spectacular per screen average of $13,657 in wide release. The film had one of the biggest October openings ever, showing momentum that should propel it in the coming weeks. Last weekend's box office topper, Hotel Transylvania, held strong in its second weekend, landing second in the box office ranking. Frankenweenie, meanwhile, failed to appeal to large numbers of theater-goers, only placing fifth on the box office chart in a wide open.
more »
After box office doldrums in late summer and the start of fall, Hollywood finally had a weekend it can celebrate. Hotel Transylvania and Looper debuted to great numbers, helping to end a five week slump. The top ten accounted for just over $104.4 million with the top two titles accounting for $64 million of that total. Another newcomer, Pitch Perfect also opened robustly, ranking sixth in the chart despite being in only 335 theaters. Won't Back Down, however, opened weak, providing a bit of a reality check.
more »
In the cinematic world of Rian Johnson, where friends are collaborators and cast and crew a part of a close-knit filmmaking "family," actor Noah Segan is a constant. But after appearing in Johnson's debut film Brick and his follow-up, The Brothers Bloom, Segan received what he calls a "gift" from Johnson — one of the smartest rising writer-directors of his generation — in the form of what's sure to be his breakout role: The finely-tuned, gun-obsessed futuristic cowboy Kid Blue in Looper, a "gat man" eagerly hunting down rival Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who's so fraught with seriocomic human frailty he only grows more sympathetic as he becomes increasingly unhinged.
more »
If time travel is ever to be invented, wouldn’t we already have had evidence of it? The question is enough to give grammarians seizures, let alone filmmakers. As Jeff Daniels’s world-weary time-traveling crime lord says in Rian Johnson's Looper, “this time travel shit fries your brain like an egg.” And the film, out this Friday, is far from the most brain-frying cinematic treatment of time travel. more »
Missing mothers, lost wives, abusive and indifferent father substitutes — Looper may be a movie powered by time travel, but its emotional fuel is abandonment. The new film from Brick director Rian Johnson is a clever, clever contraption about trading in your future to feed your present, and the lost boys and regretful men who willingly embrace such a bargain already believe they have nothing to live for or look forward to. Thirty years of kicking around with a lot of cash in your pocket looks like a pretty good bargain when you're gazing down at it from in front of all that time, but when those last few days are running out, you might not be so ready to go. more »
The filmmaker-critic relationship has always been complex — as demonstrated last weekend with hearty debate and even more heartfelt punches in the epic Joe Swanberg-Devin Faraci throwdown, henceforth known as the Mumble in the Jungle — but Sunday night, Looper director Rian Johnson and journalist Aaron Hillis united in sweet synergy to drop a rousing rendition of Weird Al's Kinks-meets-Star Wars classic "Yoda." I wish I had a futuristic time machine to take us all back to relive the moment with our younger selves, but this YouTube video capturing the entire number should suffice.
more »
Hitman Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is confronted with his future self — in the form of a time-traveling Bruce Willis — in Rian Johnson's Looper, the writer-director's third feature and one of the freshest original science fiction tales in years. Before debuting the September 28 release at Fantastic Fest over the weekend, Johnson spoke with Movieline about the pre-Brick short script that gestated into Looper, the film's dark streak and the 1970 soul ballad that serves as "the heart of the movie."
more »
The genre/action/foreign film spectacular that is Fantastic Fest is my favorite festival of the year, and not just because you might catch a Hobbit-on-Hobbit boxing match or impromptu celebrity karaoke or see the lady next to you faint from shock inside the theater in the span of a few glorious days at the annual Austin, TX event. Take a look at the latest wave of programming for next month's Fantastic Fest (September 20-27), including screenings of Rian Johnson's Looper, the horror omnibus The ABCs of Death, Jean-Claude Van Damme (in 3-D!) in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, and more gloriously insane-sounding films from around the globe. Tree boobs, anyone?
more »
One of North America's biggest annual film events released details of its lineup Tuesday morning including 17 Galas and 45 "Special Presentations" that will screen in the 37th Toronto International Film Festival in September. Festival CEO and Director Piers Handling as well as TIFF Artistic Director Cameron Bailey announced the lineup this morning in Toronto at a live event about this year's festival, which includes 38 world premieres. As revealed earlier, Looper with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis will open the festival.
Debuts from directors worldwide including Andrew Adamson, Ben Affleck, David Ayer, Maiken Baird, Noah Baumbach, J.A. Bayona, Stuart Blumberg, Josh Boone, Laurent Cantet, Sergio Castellitto, Stephen Chbosky, Lu Chuan, Derek Cianfrance, Costa-Gavras, Liz Garbus, Dustin Hoffman, Rian Johnson, Neil Jordan, Baltasar Kormákur, Shola Lynch, Deepa Mehta, Roger Michell, Ruba Nadda, Mike Newell, François Ozon, Sally Potter, Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman, Eran Riklis, David O. Russell, Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski & Lana Wachowski, Margarethe von Trotta, Joss Whedon and Yaron Zilberman are in the lineup.
TIFF takes place September 6 - 16. Today's lineup follows. More details from the festival will be announced the coming weeks...
more »
TIFF heads Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling gave details on galas and other festival highlights taking place in Toronto this September, including its opening film. In other news from Tuesday's round-up of briefs, Jeremy Renner and Bill Condon eye a WikiLeaks pic and Steven Spielberg set to honor Stanley Kubrick at an L.A. museum.
more »
The existential crisis inherent to writer-director Rian Johnson's (Brick, Brothers Bloom) upcoming sci-fi time travel flick Looper is, itself, quite a pickle: Mob hitman Joseph Gordon-Levitt finds his latest target, sent back in time from the future for execution, is... himself. (Well, in older, balder Bruce Willis form.) But how much more than that do you want to know about Looper? If Johnson himself is advocating going in fresh, should we even watch these trailers?
more »
I’m a sucker for a good time-travel story. I’m also a sucker for a mediocre time-travel story with a stylish veneer or a sense of humor, so I found myself surprisingly captivated by the latest, belated Men in Black sequel. It doesn’t really work, but it does make for a more interesting story than the tedious Exploits with Alien Goo that I remember from the first two Men in Black films. Fortunately, it looks like there might be even better time-travel movies on the horizon. I have high hopes for Looper, which looks somewhat Twelve Monkeys in its mood and time-travel philosophy, and Sundance favorite Safety Not Guaranteed appears to be taking the indie, Dana Scully approach to the conceit. For these and other future efforts, I’m offering four ingredients for a successful time-travel story.
more »
