A Look Back at Films of 2012
This seems to have been a reasonably good year for films. Lincoln blew me away! I saw it at a Writers Guild screening with writer Tony Kushner in attendance doing a Q & A after. I generally avoid seeing movies at the Guild because I don’t like the audiences. Half the group loves the movie because they know the guy; half hates it for the same reason. The third half (writers are so schizophrenic that they have more than two halves) are thinking ‘How could they make shit like this when I have stuff every bit as bad as this?’ When I see a movie in a theater I prefer to watch it at a multiplex in Glendale with a real, breathing, and especially paying audience.
In this season the studios send Guild members (I belong to WGA and SAG-AFTRA) DVD screeners of pictures in contention for awards, and I see most of my films on the flat screen in my home screening room. Life of Pi is remarkable and more, indeed, astounding. Argo kept my attention the whole way, which is really saying something, as in most movies I’m likely to catch a little (or a lot of) shut-eye. I’m going to run some of Cloud Atlas even though I hate it already, just to see how disconnected and disjointed (and those are just the disses) it is.
The best movie this year? Bernie. Jack Black: amazing. It’s like no movie I’ve ever seen. It integrates dramatized reality and integrates it with documentary in a way that has never been done before.
