ALT FEEDBACK

Because it’s never too late to waste time making lists, here are some of our writers’ favorites from 2012—and other things.

If you post your own top 10′s in the comments, we’ll be glad to form impulsive opinions and  fight over them. 

DOLAN COLESLAW:

Top 10 of 2012:

1. Amour (Michael Haneke) 2. Dark Horse (Todd Solondz) 3. Bullhead (Michael R. Roskam) 4. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow) 5. The Master (PT Anderson) 6. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev) 7. The Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russel) 8. The Kid With A Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) 9. Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik) 10. Bernie (Richard Linklater)

Top 10 Anticipated Films of 2013:

1. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine) 2. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) 3. Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez) 4. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola) 5. Nymphomaniac (Lars Von Trier) 6. You’re Next (Adam Wingard) 7. Resolution (Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead) 8. Twelve Years A Slave (Steve McQueen) 9. Oldboy (Spike Lee) 10. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)

I have a friend with an obsession. It’s ok, we all have one or two. But my friend’s obsession is going to be examined here slightly because he called me just after I’d finally seen Zero Dark Thirty. He asked me how it was, but told me he wasn’t going to see it. He found the film’s existence offensive. He’d read a few reviews that confirmed his view and had put his foot down. And so after a brief skirmish, in what he imagined to be a complete change of subject, he started to tell me about his latest week’s worth of pouring over digital communications, piecing together criminal networks, and liaising with local law enforcement.

My friend is an animal welfare activist. Protecting animals was a slowly discovered passion that is presently a minor obsession for him. Unlike Jessica Chastain’s composited CIA agent Maya, my friend’s obsession has nothing to do with his day job, but rather like hers it can occasionally, and strangely, fall into the category of “Who gives a fuck?”. Depending on where you’ve been in life or what pets you have at home his work risks seeming trivial at times, or at worst a distraction from larger issues. Why focus on animal abuse while millions of farm animals are being slaughtered? Why care about one life when many are at stake? There’s no overarchingly rational answer to questions like that. But of course people do care.

Zero Dark Thirty is first and foremost a detective story. But while it goes into suitably deep and murky detail about how Bin Laden was located it plays a deeper game by resting this accomplishment on the shoulders of a character about whom we learn next to nothing. Why does Maya ultimately give a fuck about Usama Bin Laden? Many of us can remember the time when the answer to this sort of question seemed obvious, but the movie’s decade long search takes us well beyond those early days. I suspect we’ve all thought back to our first reactions, to our fear and rage, and gained some perspective. But we don’t see Maya’s moment of reflection. We see the pressures and tragedies of the job reshape her desire to capture UBL into an obsession, but we aren’t shown what nurtured that desire originally or how she relates to it. This choice denies the audience an insight which many seem to crave from the movie. How does she sooth her visceral reactions to the torture she’s expected to facilitate? How does she justify it?

1. Get invited to a dinner party your friends are hosting. Text the hosts asking if they would like you to pick up a film at Le Video for later. When one of them texts back Samurai Cop understand that this is not a joke. You may think that it is, but it’s not. They want you to go into Le Video and ask the cashier for Samurai Cop. They want you to embark on an adventure.

2. When you enter Le Video check your text to make sure the film is actually called Samurai Cop and not Karate Cop for if you ask for Karate Cop, you will feel like a fool and walk out of the store filled with a shame that you will carry with you for many years to come.

3. When you do ask for Samurai Cop, the first cashier will pause to think if they have it, while the second one will quickly say in a whisper: “Upstairs. Action.” You know then that he has seen this movie more than once, and probably more than twice.

4. When you slip the DVD out from its hiding place, marvel at its cover. It’s a hand-drawn cop holding a bloody samurai sword in one hand, and an even bloodier head in the other. Think to yourself, “I think this is good. I think we’ve chosen right.” Then notice the wedding ring on his finger. Samurai Cop is taken. But that’s okay, he wasn’t your type anyway.

5. Pay for the movie. Don’t shop lift! Le Video needs your help. Get a little sad when you realize you have to renew your account and it costs an extra five dollars. Feel poor. Remember to go back to that one Indian place you saw that had a help wanted sign. Look up some other Indian dishes besides naan and tikka masala when you get home. You want to seem qualified.

“I have a $70,000 pair of Gucci crocodile boots.”

The only context you need: David Siegel created a timeshare empire (he sells the illusion of wealth, for a few days a year, to the middle classes.) Lauren Greenfield’s documentary finds him in the middle of completing the largest existent American home for his family. The film follows him and his wife, Jackie.

In one way, the primary subjects of The Queen of Versailles are martyrs, suffering at the lonely/dizzying heights of capitalism so that we can… suffer at the bottom? It’s a strange story, one that relies on the filth it photographs for slow-burn shock value. If you do not hate these people immediately, you will probably come to hate them.

Some have commented on the Siegel’s surprising “ordinariness,” which I find nowhere on display. They have been turned instead into human cyphers, symbols of a system that destroyed their humanity. When a pet lizard starves to death, Jackie Siegel enters into a bizarre pantomime of the appropriate parenting behaviors, unwilling to follow through with any of them. Watching this wife try and be a mother is like watching a groupie shred air guitar.

“He’s starving!” (the lizard.)

“That’s because you never take me to the pet store!”

“All right—I’m going to, go get a piece of turkey.”

And later, to another child:

“David, look: he’s dead!”

“I didn’t even know we had a lizard.”

Of course you can hardly blame the children (the Siegel’s have eight) for killing the hundredth pet their mother purchased. The home doubles as a bestiary for peacocks, dogs, fish, two kinds of snakes, and apparently lizards. There are two dead dogs lying around (one stuffed) one turned into… a piano decoration? But these pets are not companions or living creatures. In the Siegel’s world they are “pretty things” that, at one point, for one reason or another, were desirable to purchase.

The film also doubles as an occupy anthem, a reassurance that the winners of the American dream are more petty, soulless, and ultimately sad than we could have expected from the bottom. At one point, once their financial (timeshare) empire seems on the verge of, if not collapse, major downsizing, Jackie makes a telling confession: her children might have to pursue higher education. You’ll have to see the movie (and you ought to) to fully grasp the tone, but the implication is that this is the only reason any of her babies should ever have to be exposed to a university.

For then they would never know the splendor of uninterrupted money-worship, or of a life behind safely locked and gilded doors.

Did I mention Lauren Greenfield has unignorable talent? The movie is good.

I could go on and on.

We’re in mysterious terrain. The paradox that is Tarantino’s career most closely resembles the “so-bad-it’s-good” paradox—but that’s not it.

If it’s working, Django is an examination of history from fantasy. If it’s not, it’s fantasy-pleasure scraped out of historical pain. The latter is amoral at best, immoral at worst. The former is highly moral. Both are self-aware.

And in that department: I don’t know what it is.

Structurally it’s a mess. An odyssey full of bits and segments and detours where the scramble for pleasurable-payoff is often so transparent, so easy, that it’s hard to just let yourself enjoy. The ride keeps stopping. That’s what makes it minor Tarantino.

And then there’s Candy Land. Once Tarantino finds his screenplay firmly rooted to Candy Land, everything gets much, much better. He seems to work best given restraints (unsurprising) and the natural physical crucible provided by the plantation space do his story a lot of favors. Suddenly we know where we are. We know the characters, the rules (sort of) and the stakes. For the sake of spoilers (Tarantino’s work is holy) I’ll only say here that the game does sort of collapse at the end. Perhaps the heroes aren’t smart enough, or good enough at doing their jobs?

Rather than mire in the details, I’ll say the movie works as: a vital injection of style into a commercial wasteland. It’s fun, brutal, and intriguingly historical (really.)

Watching American history get reprocessed as pop continues to be funny and eerie at the same time. How many times did you think about Abraham Lincoln between elementary school and when Spielberg’s “epic” came out?

I’m not accusing you, Dear Reader, just saying that this is where the dreams, the history, the ancestry, is getting stashed: Hollywood.

In a particularly bad Terry Gross interview, Terry asks if it was awkward shooting black people pretending to be slaves. Tarantino mentions, with admirable restraint, that they’re all breaking for Powerbars in between cotton pickin’ sessions and that “everyone knows what time it is.” I love the question, because it points to the fact that we still believe movies are real, even when we know they’re not.

Surprise has been registered (and more frequently, can be inferred) from some corners that a white man is making a film about a black slave killing white Americans. But it’s not surprising. Django is kind of sweet in that way. A lot more innocent when you realize it’s an awkward, fumbling scream from the white-guilt-ridden subconscious of one American, who only knows how to rip apart history and morals from a genre-film perspective. And in the end, that’s what makes the Tarantino “style over substance” debate so absurd. It’s like the complaint that Hemingway’s sentences aren’t long enough, or his words big enough, to tell the important stories.

-Max Berwald

Nearly everything that follows is a spoiler. 

Les Miserables was nearly three hours long, and there is no way I can fully review everything that happened. Instead, I will recap it via song.

PROLOGUE/A WORK

Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) stole some bread and has been imprisoned in post-revolution France, answering the age old question: what would you do if your son’s at home, cryin’ all alone on the bedroom floor, cause he’s hungry? You steal a loaf of bread and have to answer to Russell Crowe/Javert for the rest of your life. In this song, we establish that Hugh Jackman has the voice of a Broadway angel and that Russell Crowe must have fantastic blackmail material on Tom Hooper because a solid “nope” on his singing voice.

(It’s not that bad, it’s just…this is THE musical. You would expect one of the most recognized roles in the world to be filled by someone who has a fantastic voice. Lest we already forget the Gerard Butler/Phantom of the Opera casting fiasco already.)

VALJEAN ARRESTED/VALJEAN FORGIVEN

After they all stop singing, Valjean is released on parole and travels the French countryside looking for work. Ain’t nobody going to hire a convict though, so he seeks refuge in a church. Since he’s the world’s worst criminal (honestly, who gets sent to the French version of that-prison-that-Bane-came-from for stealingbread?), he tries to steal silver from the kind bishop and gets caught. The bishop takes pity, and lets him have the silver so he can get back on his feet.

Fun Fact! The man who plays the bishop is the original Broadway Jean Valjean. We have come full circle.

WHAT HAVE I DONE

Valjean confesses his sins via song and decides that he should both be a better man, and also a totally different dude. He rips up his parole papers and starts life anew under a different name. I see why he thinks this is a good idea. He’s got hella silver money and the likelihood that someone is going to devote their entire life to tracking down a fugitive bread thief is low. If only he knew