The Glass Case Top 10 Films Of 2012

10. Ruby Sparks - It took Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris a long time to direct another film after 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine.  They said that it took them a long time to find the right project, rather than any other reason, but in choosing Ruby Sparks (written by Zoe Kazan, who plays the titular character) they made an inspired choice, because Ruby Sparks is a wonderfully funny, clever and moving film.

In the film, Paul Dano plays a novelist, Calvin, who peaked with his debut, which was released when he was a teenager.  Struggling with writer’s block, he creates a character named Ruby Sparks, who somehow comes to life and appears in his kitchen, acting like his girlfriend.  He soon realises that he has actually created her himself, and control things she does, like making her speak French.

At first their relationship goes wonderfully, but Calvin’s behaviour starts to push her away, and he’s forced to try and write new ways for her to behave in order to stay with her.  One of my favourite scenes of the year is the moment when he explains to Ruby (and shows her) that he created it, with Kazan giving a brilliant performance as Calvin turns her into his own demented puppet, changing her behaviour from moment to moment.  It’s a film that ends really well and avoids being too twee or making Kazan’s character too much of a manic dream pixie girl, and I loved it.

9. Chronicle - Found footage films have existed since before The Blair Witch Project, but there have been so many since then that it’s become an incredibly tired genre, particularly when it comes to horror.  But although Chronicle is a found footage film, it isn’t just another horror film; instead it’s the tale of three teenagers who develop superpowers after an unexplained event, and how they learn to use those powers (to have a really good time, initially anyway), but also what having those powers does to them as people.

There are times during the film where it stretches the credibility of what it is actually possible to capture on a phone or handheld camera, but (in something of a rarity for found footage films) it is extremely well written (by Max Landis, son of John Landis) and well acted, with Dane DeHann (as the troubled Andrew) particularly good.  Chronicle is a film that manages to do something interesting and unique with both the found footage and superhero genre, and many of the people involved in making it are going to go on and have very interesting careers.

8. The Avengers –  This was the year when all the hard work really paid off for Marvel.  After two Iron Man films and one each for Captain America and Thor, Marvel assembled their super team (which also included The Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye) to take on Thor’s brother Loki, who had enlisted the help of an alien race to try and take over the world.

There was a lot of pressure on Marvel to deliver a quality movie so fraught with danger.  There were a large number of characters to write for properly; making finding enough room to give them all things to do extremely challenging, and then there was the challenge of finding the right tone and threat to justify bringing them all together.

So enter Joss Whedon, who came on board to write and direct and absolutely nailed it.  The Avengers is a brilliant blockbuster, with the right levels of humour, character development and threat from the bad guys to prove that Marvel had made the right decision in not only throwing all their eggs in one basket to make this movie, but by saying to Joss Whedon ‘do your thing’.  It was a spectacular success at the box office, and Whedon has signed up to write and direct the sequel.  That will be a whole new challenge, but The Avengers will always be one of 2012’s very best films.

7. Killing Them Softly –  The first collaboration between Andrew Dominik and Brad Pitt was the beautifully shot and epic The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.  It was over two and a half hours long, and a slow paced film with a lot of story to tell.  Their second collaboration couldn’t be more different; it’s a little over 90 minutes long and it’s a dark and dirty film, set in a grubby looking New Orleans and featuring some really loathsome men doing dirty work for dirty people.

Brad Pitt plays Jackie Cogan, a hitman brought into town by local gangsters to clean up a mess created by two men who held up a poker game run by the mafia.  Dominik assembles a great cast around Pitt, with Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta on top form (particularly Gandolfini) and the script is sharp and clever.  It’s set around the 2008 US elections, and although there’s a strong political theme throughout, I don’t feel like the film ever overdid it politically.

Killing Them Softly is set in what feels like a very real America.  Not the glamorous, shiny worlds that the rich and famous inhabit, but an ugly, dirty America that is the reality for most of the population.  I’d already been enjoying the film a lot before its final scene, a head-to-head between Jenkins and Pitt.  Without spoiling it, Pitt delivers a speech that really sums up the film and its stance, and it’s a powerful way to end another excellent film by Dominik.

6. Skyfall - After the massive disappointment that was Quantum of Solace, Daniel Craig found himself the subject of speculation as to whether or not he was actually a good James Bond.  His first effort, Casino Royale, had been a huge success as it rebooted and reinvigorated the franchise, but Quantum of Solace was a problematic film to make, cut short by a strike by writers, and as a result, filming had begun without a completed script.  So the pressure was on Craig (and everyone else) as they prepared for the release of Skyfall, Bond 23, which came 50 years after Bond’s first cinematic adventure, Dr. No.

The good news is that not only did Craig firmly place himself in the argument over who is the best ever Bond, but Skyfall also jumped right into the mix as the best Bond film ever.  Every piece of the puzzle required to make a good film is there, with the directing (by Sam Mendes) and the cinematography (by Roger Deakins) top notch, the acting superb, and a really good plot too.  Judi Dench is the Bond girl in this film, and she’s brilliant as M, but Javier Bardem steals the show as Raoul Silva, for me definitively the most charismatic and memorable Bond villain, who is the Ying to Bond’s Yang, the Joker to Bond’s Batman.  It’s only real flaw is a tedious theme song with awful lyrics.  50 years after Sean Connery first flirted with Moneypenny, Skyfall proved that there’s plenty of life left in James Bond.

5. The Cabin In The Woods - Ever since Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell ventured into the woods to make Evil Dead, remote log cabins have been the home of horror for many movies.  And so The Cabin In The Woods would initially appear to be treading on well-worn ground, as this looks like your average ‘Bunch of teenagers/twentysomethings have a weekend in a log cabin that goes horrifically wrong’ early on, but it soon becomes clear that all is not as it seems.

Because these teenagers are being watched, not by a traditional mad axeman or zombie or other kind of beastie, but by regular (sort of) working Joes.  The kids in the cabin are actually part of a game, where the workers bet on which terrifying enemy the kids are going to trigger, with various clues and stories available to them within the cabin.

Drew Goddard (writer of Cloverfield) is directing a Joss Whedon script in this film, and it’s a very funny, very clever deconstruction of a horror staple.  It’s wonderfully gory and its insanely, gleefully, violent final act is glorious carnage.  I loved it.

4. ParaNorman - It’s never really been the case that animated films were always aimed at children, but the rise of Pixar in recent years has shown that animated films can be taken as seriously as live action films, and ParaNorman was the best animated film of 2012.

The film is about a kid called Norman (Kody Smit-McPhee), who loves horror films (and makes his monster movies) and also sees dead people.  He’s a bit of an outsider at school, not really bullied a lot, just not very popular.  He also starts to have visions as the anniversary of his town’s last killing of a witch is coming up.

I was enjoying this film a lot as it is often very funny, and has a good story and voice acting, but what really made me love it is the final confrontation in the film between Norman and the ghost of the witch, which becomes one of the most beautiful and powerful scenes of any film this year.  I was absolutely staggered by it, as it reminded me of the visual power of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, musically too.  Its finale made it one of the films of the year for me, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

3. Cosmopolis - When I wrote my review of Cosmopolis, I wasn’t sure if I’d a) understood the film and b) even liked it.  I thought that it might be brilliant, but I just wasn’t sure.  But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it immediately made me want to read the novel (written by Don DeLillo), which I later did.  I discovered that the film was a very faithful adaptation, and not only did I really enjoy the book, I felt that it help me understand the film a lot more.

Which does sound like a description of a failed film; a film that couldn’t translate the words on the page of the book onto cinema screens, but it’s a film that I’ve continued to think about all year.  It may never be regarded as David Cronenberg’s finest work, but it certainly shows that there’s more to Robert Pattinson than playing what looks like a boring vampire, as he gives an outstanding performance in a very difficult role.  I have no doubts that this is a film that you’ll either love or hate (several people walked out during the screening I attended), but I can’t consider it anything other than brilliant.

2. Killer Joe - After years of tepid rom-coms, Matthew McConaughey has started to show people that he can actually act, and has taken on more challenging and interesting roles recently, even if he does still take his shirt off an awful lot.  2012 saw him take on what might be his darkest and nastiest role to date, as the titular character in William Friedkin’s Killer Joe.

Dark and nasty is a very accurate way of describing Killer Joe, a tale of redneck morons attempting to kill a family member to cash in on her life insurance, and hiring Killer Joe, a cop who (as you may have guessed) makes money on the side killing people.  Joe likes to be paid up front, but when they can’t afford to pay him, he takes Dottie, the teenage daughter in the family, as collateral.  That is as sinister and creepy as it sounds, and the rest of the film is like that too, as the family turn on each other and stab each other in the back.

If you’ve read anything about Killer Joe, you’ll have heard about the ‘chicken scene’, and the last 20 minutes or so of the film are ‘none more black’ as Joe seeks what he thinks is his, and discovers the truth about the family’s scheme.  Killer Joe is a film with some outstanding and brave performances (Gina Gershon and JunoTemple are brilliant), and it shows that even in his 70s, Friedkin is still capable of creating visceral films.

1. The Dark Knight Rises

When it comes to making films based on comic book characters, it’s very easy to get them badly wrong (I’m looking at you Daredevil).  So ever since Christopher Nolan took the helm fora reboot of Batman in 2003, he’s been under pressure to deliver the goods after the franchise had gone horribly wrong (I’m looking at you Joel Schumacher).  Batman Begins was a brilliant reinvention of Batman, while The Dark Knight upped the game even more, with Heath Ledger’s iconic portrayal of the Joker pushing the film into instant classic territory.

After The Dark Knight took over $1billion at the box office, the pressure on Nolan’s shoulders was even greater, as he attempted to not only better that film, but find a way of ending his take on the Bruce Wayne story before moving on to new projects.

Batman diehards had been initially outraged by the casting of Ledger as the Joker, and there were similar outcries when it was announced that Tom Hardy would be playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.  Anne Hathaway was cast as Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman) while Joseph Gordon-Levitt signed on as a Gotham city police officer, a character that hadn’t appeared in any comic series.

The film is set several years after The Dark Knight, with a broken down and reclusive Bruce Wayne no longer the Batman, hiding himself away from a Gotham city that lives in relative peace since the events of The Dark Knight.  But that peace is about to be shattered by the arrival of Bane, who wants to destroy the city and everything it stands for.

But despite all that pressure, Nolan delivered a truly spectacular finale to his Dark Knight saga, with everyone involved bringing their A game to make the best film of the year.  The Dark Knight Rises has everything a great superhero movie needs; action, fearsome villains, huge set pieces and great characters.  It even manages to pull off not having any Batman at all for large chunks of it, but the story is so good that you’re never left wishing there was more.  Sure you can pick holes in several elements of it if you really want to, but that it to go looking for flaws for the sake of it.

Christopher Nolan has created what will surely always be regarded as the definitive version of The Dark Knight on camera, and The Dark Knight Rises is the film of the year.

The Bourne Legacy Fails To Add Anything To A Brilliant Franchise

Even before the release of The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon seemed to feel that the Bourne franchise had gone as far as it could.  By 2010, it seemed that a fourth Bourne movie was definitely off the table, as Paul Greengrass, who had directed Ultimatum and Supremacy, said he was unlikely to return to the franchise, and Damon said he wouldn’t do another film without him.

But Hollywood always finds a way to make money, and in the summer of 2010 Universal announced that Tony Gilroy (who was involved in the writing of all three Bourne films) was writing a script for a fourth Bourne movie, which would be called The Bourne Legacy.  But what was the film going to be?  Matt Damon had previously suggested the next Bourne movie could be a prequel, but were Universal going to reboot Jason Bourne so soon after bringing him to the big screen?  It would turn out that neither of these things were true, but that The Bourne Legacy would actually be a film set in the same world as the events of the first three Bourne movies, but not actually about Jason Bourne.

Enter Jeremy Renner.

After a brilliant performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Renner earned himself an Oscar nomination and became Hollywood’s newest ‘next big thing’.  He followed The Hurt Locker with another Oscar nominated performance in The Town, got himself a recurring role as Hawkeye in Marvel’s comicbook adaptations (appearing in Thor and The Avengers) and a key role in Mission: Impossible 4.  He signed on for The Bourne Legacy last year, and it was announced that he would play a character called Aaron Cross.

Cross exists in a program similar to the one that created Jason Bourne, but the key difference when we meet him is that he knows who he is and why he does what he does, and appears to be totally fine about it too.  What he doesn’t realise is that Bourne is back on the grid, and the events that happened in The Bourne Ultimatum will force shady government officials (led by Edward Norton’s Eric Byer) to burn the program Cross is in to the ground (i.e. kill all the ‘assets’).  While Cross tries to avoid being made dead and stuff, he ends up on the run with sexy scientist Dr. Martha Shearing (Rachel Weisz, who could also be known as Basil Exposition, given the amount of plot she has to explain).

That’s about enough plot you need to know, it’s all in the trailer, so to reveal more would be too much.  That said, there’s really not much more plot to go around.  After the enormous success (critically and commercially) of the Bourne trilogy, The Bourne Legacy feels utterly redundant and entirely lacking in all the things that made those three movies great, and not just because Matt Damon isn’t in it.  The tagline for the film is ‘There was never just one’, and that is a good concept to use as a continuation of the Bourne franchise, but Legacy definitely feels like the ginger stepchild of the franchise.

The biggest problem for the film is that it never feels like Cross is really in danger.  Jason Bourne didn’t know who he was and why he was part of a program he now loathed, but he was forced to use the skills he was taught to survive because he was a problem.  Cross knows who he is and why he is being targeted, so he’s always ready for what’s coming at him.  He may still be looking for answers, but the questions he is asking are not as interesting as Bourne’s.  And the advantage Cross has is that because he knows that people are after him, he knows how to get away from them.  This removes tension from the film because he’s always able to plan ahead, rather than reacting to a new danger suddenly appearing.

But Jeremy Renner is not a problem in this movie.  He gives a decent enough performance in a poorly written role, something which is true for the rest of the cast too.  As I said earlier, Rachel Weisz’s main function in the film is to tell the audience exactly what’s happening, while also being this film’s Franka Potente.  Edward Norton is sort of the bad guy, because he’s the man telling the man to pull the trigger, but he doesn’t seem to have the importance of any of the men Jason Bourne faced up to.

Tony Gilroy writes and directs the film, having been involved in the writing of the first three films, but his script and directing are not up to scratch.  He can’t create the same kind of atmosphere as Paul Greengrass did for Supremacy and Ultimatum, and the nods to the previous films he’s included in Legacy are unnecessary.  Of course the whole plot of the film is triggered by Ultimatum’s plot, but there’s too much in this film that has been seen before, and the fighting and action scenes also lack the visceral quality of the previous films.

The producers of the film have already talked about Legacy being a chance to open up the franchise to more stories, with the possibility of Bourne himself returning at some point in the future.  But The Bourne Legacy is simply not a good enough film to merit further entries.  Without giving away the end, the film does end with a new version of Moby’s ‘Extreme Ways’ the signature track of the franchise, but it really doesn’t feel like Legacy has earned the right to use that track.

The film tarnishes the ‘legacy’ of the Bourne franchise, and is a deeply flawed attempt to take it somewhere it doesn’t need to go.  Tony Gilroy may have been an important part of the first three films, but he’s failed to continue the story with any quality.

@TheGlassCase

Blockbusters Don’t Get Much Bigger (Or Better) Than This – Avengers Assemble Review

Okay, first things first.  Avengers Assemble sets a VERY high bench mark for 2012 blockbusters.  The likes of Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spiderman have enough hype surrounding them as it is, but Joss Whedon’s Marvel extravaganza gives the producers of those movies a lot to think about.

Whedon has already produced one of the movies of the year with The Cabin In The Woods, but the sheer size of Avengers Assemble is a daunting task to take on, but Whedon has absolutely nailed it.  This movie instantly catapults itself into the reckoning amongst the greatest superhero movies ever made, no mean feat when you consider the size of the movie, and that’s in terms of budget, ambition and cast.  Because this is a movie with a very strong (and very big) cast, all of whom need to have substantial amounts of screen time, without slowing the pace of the movie and sucking the excitement out of it.

This is something that Whedon has handled extremely well.  The movie begins with Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) bitter and angry brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) stealing an energy source known as ‘the tesseract’ (although it could just as easily be called the Macguffin), as well as Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Dr. Erik Selveg (Stellan Skarsgård reprising his role in Thor) from Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and S.H.I.E.L.D.  He has plans to conquer and rule Earth, and as the title of the movie suggests, Fury is forced to reactivate the ‘Avengers initiative’ and sends Agent Coulston (Clark Gregg) and the Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) to bring Captain America (a freshly thawed Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Bruce Banner aka The Incredible Hulk (not Eric Bana, not Edward Norton, but Mark Ruffalo) and Thor together to save humanity.

That leads to an awful lot of ego all in the one place, and it’s no surprise when the newly formed team doesn’t gel immediately.  Thor in particular is less than happy, and wants Loki to return to Asgard rather than be killed or held on Earth.

And that’s about as much of the plot as I care to reveal.  I could probably get away with saying more without straying into dangerous spoiler territory, but while Avengers Assemble is a great movie, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where the plot goes.  So without saying more about the plot, I’ll concentrate on the writing.

With so many characters so heavily involved in the film, it would be easy for Whedon to sideline a few of them, and give all the action and dialogue and hero shots over to one or two.  But this is not the case in Avengers Assemble, and everyone gets plenty to do.  The film has all the action and drama you’d expect from a superhero movie, but is also consistently hilarious, with lots of memorable lines and moments for almost every character.  As we know from his own movies, Tony Stark is the most sarcastic superhero of all time, but he’s not the only one with sharp wit and comic timing.  Whedon’s script is smart, funny and most importantly, never boring.  The film may be almost two and a half hours long, but it never drags and while there’s many dialogue-heavy scenes, they never last too long before something BIG and EXCITING happens.

The acting is great across the board too.  Mark Ruffalo is the only newcomer to the Marvel universe, replacing Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, but gives a quietly assured (except when he’s massive and green, obviously) performance as the highly intelligent physicist.  You know what you’re getting with the rest of the cast, having seen their characters in their own movies already, and all of them play it straight, avoiding the hammy histrionics that could easily come while playing superheroes, gods or giant green angry monsters.  There are no complaints on the CGI front either, with everything looking spectacular and the set pieces are huge and hugely impressive.

So all this makes Avengers Assemble the first must-see movie of the year.  It will make huge amounts of money worldwide, and with every character capable of carrying a movie on their own, you can expect to see a lot more of the Avengers, alone or together in the next five years.  Blockbusters don’t get much bigger (or better) than this.

@TheGlassCase

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol Review

Tom Cruise is a man that divides opinion.  People seem to love him or hate him as an actor, and his personal life tends to generate as many headlines as his movies.  Whatever your opinion of him, it’s hard to deny that he is a proper Hollywood star.  2011 is his 30^th year of making movies, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is his 33^rd movie.

The fourth movie in the franchise, Ghost Protocol is directed by Brad Bird, who helms a live-action movie for the first time, after directing Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille.  The action takes place in Hungary, Russia, Dubai and Mumbai, with Cruise returning as Ethan Hunt, leading a disavowed IMF team attempting to stop a Swedish born Russian terrorist from acquiring and launching nuclear weapons.  Simon Pegg also returns as Benji Dunn, having first appeared in Mission: Impossible III.  The other members of the team are Jane Carter (Paula Patton, Precious) and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker).

The movie begins with Benji and Carter breaking Ethan out from a Russian prison.  After the breakout, Hunt and the team attempt to break into the Kremlin, in order to identify a terrorist known as Cobalt.  But Cobalt is a step ahead of the team, and triggers a bomb that destroys part of the Kremlin, framing the IMF team in the process.  Hunt meets with the IMF secretary (Tom Wilkinson), who explains that Hunt’s team has been disavowed, after the president initiates Ghost Protocol.  The secretary has resigned, but gives Hunt one last mission, find Cobalt and prevent him from starting a nuclear war.  The car Hunt and the secretary are travelling in is ambushed and the secretary is killed, leaving Hunt and analyst Brandt trying to escape after the car crashes into a river and Russian security forces fire shots into the water.  Following their escape, Hunt and Brandt join Benji and Carter, as they plan the next move.

Their mission will take them to Dubai and Mumbai, where most of the action takes place.  As you’ll know from the trailer, the Dubai part of the movie takes place inside (and outside) the Burj Khalifa, the tallest structure in the world.  In order to hack into the building’s security servers, Ethan has to scale the outside of the building and break in to the server room.  In Mission: Impossible II, Cruise climbed a mountain in Utah without safety harnesses, but in Ghost Protocol he climbs the outside of the Burj Khalifa, taking the kind of risks that give Hollywood producers nightmares.  It’s a tense scene in the movie, so one can only imagine how fast hearts were beating when the scene was actually being filmed.

The movie offers up the standard fare for modern action thrillers.  There are car chases and explosions, fist and gun fights, and spectacular settings being destroyed in various ways.  But there’s something missing from the movie.  The plot is fairly bog standard, we’ve all seen a ‘shady Russian has a nuclear device’ plot-line in any number of movies in the past.  The script also suffers.  Pegg essentially becomes sidekick Simon, his character for the most part doing nothing other than fiddle with electronic devices and make quips while the rest of the team get on with the action. It becomes grating after a while, and dilutes the dramatic elements of the movie.  The bad guys are under-written, and we learn little about their motivation for wanting to spark nuclear war.  Brad Bird’s direction is fine, with some spectacular shots, and he handles action fairly well.

Pegg aside, Cruise does exactly what you expect, leading the film with ease, with Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton also joining him in doing the physical stuff.  Michael Nyqvist has little to do as Cobalt, other than a fight scene with Cruise late in the film.  Overall, the film never quite lives up to expectations.  It feels rather tame and predictable in the post-Bourne world, with not much new or original to separate it from the pack.  It’s not a bad movie, but you’ll be left wanting more.