Movies I Saw in 2012

This is my third Bergman film I've seen and I'm amazed by how different the three of them were. I've seen this story adapted a few times (most notably the Sondheim musical A Little Night Music) so it was nice to finally see the original. It doesn't connect with me on any sort of deep level, but I enjoyed my time watching it. There are some extremely funny moments (I laughed out loud when Henrik, in his moment of despair, accidentally brings his stepmother's bed through the wall). Overall, it's an extremely *pleasant* movie and I liked it, but that's as far as it goes for me.

Neil Simon and Woody Allen have similar dialogue patterns, similar humor, and similar themes. (I clearly love them both for the same thing.) This, more than almost any other Simon play, kept reminding of something Woody Allen would have directed. However, comparisons aside, I really enjoyed this film. I'd read the play before but watching it made all the difference - it seemed a much more unified story. Alan Alda is really great in the role of Jake. The dialogue is great - I laughed out loud quite a few times - and the overall story is a very touching one. When I read through all Neil Simon's plays, this one barely registered on my radar, but now I think I could call it one of my favorites of his.

This movie just wanders all over the place without really going anywhere. The humor jumps back and forth between absurd (slightly surreal) scenes, quirky characters, and droll comedy-of-manners scenarios, and combining them all somehow made them less funny. Just an *odd* movie that I couldn't get into on any level.

I watched the sequel to this movie, I know I have, but I can't actually remember anything about it, except being bored throughout it. I wasn't terribly bored during this one, although I wasn't impressed with it either. It's a nice plot - Bruce is easy to root for, and although there are a few too many villains, they all make sense as people who would be after him. However, the dialogue is cheesy, the comic book-like edits are not used effectively, and none of the characters are interesting except for Bruce himself. OK, but not good.

This movie is so much more effective than I thought it would be. I think this is due to two things that a lot of the "found footage" horror movies these days are missing: 1) the quality of the acting here is really good and completely believable, and 2) you see so little of what's going on. Instead of buckets of blood and spring-loaded cats, this movie does an amazing job of building up the tension and the desperation along with the characters. (As I think back on it, the build happens fairly slowly, but I felt like we were definitely moving toward something in each scene - it didn't feel slow.) In the final scene, almost NOTHING happens in comparison to other horror films, and yet it was one of the scariest things I've seen in a long time. Meep. By the way, watching it at 2:30 in the morning when you're the only person awake is awesome and terrifying.

This movie is completely silly and completely entertaining. It takes a lot of the alien movie cliches and turns them around, which means the movie's not only funny and entertaining, but actually an interesting story all on its own. Definitely enjoyed this one.

A fun take on the story of Macbeth with a lot of unexpected laughs in it. Maura Tierney in particular is good as the Lady Macbeth character, and Christopher Walken is extremely entertaining as Lieutenant McDuff. It's interesting to see the comedic angle on such a well-known play. The abrupt ending didn't quite work for me, but overall it was fun to watch.

So this is the third Bond movie I've seen, the third Bond actor I've seen, and the third I just haven't gotten into. (The other two are Goldfinger and Casino Royale, so I haven't just been watching all the mediocre ones.) But those were still above this one, which is mostly just lots of explosions and not any interesting spying moments. It's bland and forgettable. Fun story - it is SO bland and forgettable that when I took a break from watching it to hang out with someone, I couldn't remember what the name of it was. Clearly my brain decided it didn't need to retain that information, and it was pretty much right.

This movie has an entertaining premise, some funny dialogue, some good gags... you know what would make it genuinely funny? If Adam Sandler wasn't completely detestable. I told someone I hated Adam Sandler, but when I told them the movies of his I'd seen, they protested, "Oh, well, you haven't seen the GOOD ones, then." So I decided to give him one more shot. And, yeah, turns out I really do hate him and his characters. He's so difficult to root for. If ANYBODY else had played this role, I think I would have really enjoyed this, but as it is, I spent the whole time hoping the "bad guy" would win.

I was pleasantly surprised by this flick. More mystery than horror, light on gore but heavy with atmosphere... this is much closer to the kind of scary movie I enjoy. Now, granted, it was also a ridiculous, contrived, gimmicky concept and I wasn't ever that *scared*, but I did find it fairly entertaining. Certainly better than I was anticipating.

I do enjoy sci-fi, but the world this movie created for me made very little sense. It had a few interesting sci-fi elements to it, and one or two interesting plot moments, but it was all intermingled with these bizarrely campy characters and silly dialogue. Maybe I was supposed to let go and let it just *be* campy, but I never really got to that point so I didn't really enjoy it much at any point.

War Horse is not a great movie. It has some nice moments, but overall it is very cheesy, the dialogue is silly, and it pulls every cheap emotional manipulation trick in the book. And... I'm extremely ashamed to admit it worked on me. Despite myself, I kept getting drawn into the emotion of the moment, even when it was surrounded by overdramatic music, cheesy dialogue, and rain during every single uber-emotional scene. EVERY SINGLE ONE. So. The more I think about this, I really shouldn't have enjoyed it at all. But somehow it worked, and I ended up having a pretty good time. So it ends up falling among my "extremely guilty pleasures" movies... the ones I enjoyed in spite of themselves.

There's nothing particularly *wrong* with Moneyball, but there's nothing that arresting about it either. It's a sports movie, with most of the usual sports movie stories. It does vary a little bit in being about the economics and the strategies behind *choosing* the teams, rather than focusing on the gameplay itself, so that has some interesting aspects to it. However, the overall atmosphere and story arc of the movie is very familiar. Fairly well done, but it's not going to stick in my mind. Whenever I try to name the Best Picture nominees this year, this is one of the ones I always, always forget.

Well, this is a difficult movie to rank. I *wanted* to love it, but it didn't captivate me the way I was hoping. There were a few absolutely breathtaking visual moments, but I didn't really connect to most of the themes. The switch back and forth between story and poetic visuals was a little jarring - I almost wish it had been all one or all the other. The Tree of Life is an incredibly ambitious film, and I admire it, but it misses the mark for me and never quite connects.

Last year's Best Picture nominees included The Kids Are All Right, a perfectly acceptable drama with good acting and good dialogue that I forgot within a week of leaving the theater. The Descendants fills that role this year. It's a solid little flick that never goes beyond that to be great. There's not much to be said about it - everything is pretty good, nothing is REALLY good.

Hugo impressed me more as a technical masterpiece than as an emotional piece of filmmaking. There are a few very nice moments, but overall I never really connected with the story or the characters. However, it LOOKS gorgeous, and I'm always a sucker for beautiful-looking movies. It's unlikely to stick in my memory for very long, but if I think about it, I definitely enjoyed it while I was watching it.

This is a fine little movie. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, although it's really hard to shake the feeling that I'm watching something on Lifetime. It certainly wasn't anything that blew me away, and I think all the concerns people have raised about the way it deals with racism are valid ones. I haven't been a victim of racism so I'm not really allowed to make the call on whether or not this movie is offensive, but I think it's probably good that people are discussing that. Writing this review a week after watching it, I remember it as being acceptably entertaining, but nothing that grabbed my attention and held it beyond the closing credits.

Walking into this movie, I did NOT expect to respond to it the way I did. I didn't know much about it, but the little I knew made it sound like something I wouldn't particularly like. What makes it something special is the main character, Oskar, one of the most sympathetic child characters I have ever seen on screen. His journey is interesting because *he* is interesting. I have always identified with characters struggling with their fears, especially social fears, so Oskar was incredibly relatable for me, and made the movie what it was.

When I saw this, it played right before Midnight in Paris, which was a wonderful double feature - both movies about preferring the past to the future. The Artist is not quite as charming as Midnight in Paris, but it does come pretty close. It tells a very dynamic story in a silent medium. It looks and sounds beautiful, bringing the idea of silent films into a new era. (I don't remember who, but I  heard someone muse that The Artist might regenerate the silent film in Hollywood, much the way Unforgiven did for westerns. We shall see. If they all are as well-done as this one, I'd be completely okay with that.)

This was one of the movies on my Blind Spot list for 2012 - a list of 12 movies I knew I needed to see but had never actually gotten around to it. I added this one to the list for a few reasons: 1) I wanted to have a few popular favorites on the list, not just super-artsy ones, 2) I love Tim Burton, and 3) my boyfriend is a huge fan of this movie and kept telling me I should see it. So now we're in mid-March and this is the first Blind Spot 2012 movie I've gotten around to actually watching.




He was right. I loved it.




I went into this movie knowing very little about its plot. I knew it had something to do with ghosts, but I had no idea that it was a reverse haunted house movie about a pair of ghosts trying to chase humans out of their house. The moment where Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis find out they're dead took me completely by surprise. I don't get surprised by movies all that often, so that was great fun.




As the story unfolded, I loved the mix of silly and dark humor throughout the whole movie. I was somewhat expecting that - Tim Burton's movies always have this offbeat, morbid sense of humor - but I had forgotten how much I love good dark humor. Sometimes, depending on the movie, it's something that takes me a little while to get into, but not here. I loved that tone throughout.




Sometimes you sit down to watch a movie and just end up thoroughly enjoying yourself the whole way through. It doesn't impact you emotionally or connect you with the characters, but it's just solidly good fun. That's what Beetlejuice was for me. I'm definitely glad I saw it, and I'm sure I'll enjoy watching it again someday.

A very well-done disease outbreak movie. These always work for me because I have a fairly healthy sense of paranoia already, so these play into that easily. This one has a pretty impressive celebrity cast, some of which are only on screen for a few minutes before their story is over. I liked the ensemble drama feel of this, however - I liked getting the sense of how all these different people in slightly different areas were affected by the outbreak. And it was certainly a tense movie, as well - right from the very beginning, where there are several shots of clearly sick people. Well done.

I wanted to love this movie, but in the end I only half-loved it. The opening sequence is fantastic, but the rest of the movie never quite matched up for me. As soon as the actual plot got going, I found myself losing interest, as much as I tried to stay focused. The visuals were not as interesting, the character not quite as intriguing to me... It regained a lot of it in the ending, but I just didn't get into the middle section, much as I tried.

I am all for making comedies about horrible things. As someone who deals with chronic pain, I'm a big fan of finding the humor in it whenever you can. Although my disease is not particularly life-threatening, I imagine I would ultimately feel the same way about something that was. When there's so much crap going on, you have to laugh because sometimes the alternative is completely losing it.




That's why I really loved 50/50. The characters were (overall) likable and entertaining, the situations were funny, and there were some extremely moving moments, especially toward the end, which balanced out the feel of the film nicely. It all feels like a very *human* movie... and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is clearly a very important movie, and a very well-made one, which makes it more difficult to admit I didn't like it. I never know what to do with these movies where there is nothing really wrong with them except for the fact that they never connected with me. I tend to be a very intuitive movie watcher - you can analyze whether or not a movie is technically good or not all you want, but for me it ultimately comes down to what I felt about it. Sometimes that analysis can help me connect, and other times it really can't. So this is one of those movies I admire but can't say I enjoy.

Not much of a story going on in this movie, but it's fascinating as a sort of time capsule with some of the greatest performers of the time. A lot of the jokes and references were, I'm sure, lost on me as a 21st century viewer, but it was great fun whenever there was a celebrity I recognized. The problem is the silly insistence on plot in between. It'd have been vastly more entertaining as an all-performance show.

I knew it was unlikely that I would fall head over heels in love with this movie, but I certainly didn't expect to be bored to death with it. I didn't connect with the main characters at any point, and so when they ran into the trouble they did, it was hard for me to care about it at all. Add to this the fact that I already have trouble paying attention during nature-heavy, dialogue-light movies, and I ended up with a movie that's considered a classic where I just don't get the appeal.

I haven't ever seen any of Michael Moore's films, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. In the end, I thought it was an interesting film with a lot of interesting things to say, but several moments where I felt like it just kind of meandered around. I thought all the things he was pointing out about the fear-ridden culture of America is exactly correct, and that was a fascinating point... but then there were so many moments where I was clear on neither his point nor even what facts he wanted to bring to light. I appreciate the questions he was asking and I think he found some good possible answers, but the film kind of jumps from theory to story to illustration of a previous theory to personal anecdote to clips of the other side acting crazy, without as much tying them together as I would have liked. It was a clash of tones - jumping from topic to topic made it *seem* like an exploratory documentary, but then the message he was trying to send came through so clearly that all the jumping around and asking, "What about this? What about this?" kind of just felt like quasi-ADD interjections. Interesting, but I have a feeling his other films won't sit with me much better.

I've never seen anything by Lars von Trier before, but this one makes me want to go out and hunt down all his others. Emily Watson is incredible in this beautiful but tragic tale of someone willing to go to any lengths for love. That sounds like an IMDb summary for a terrible chick flick tearjerker, but this is a much more complex, difficult movie than that plot synopsis seems to indicate. It's one of those movies that I have trouble articulating my feelings about. This movie is heartbreaking and beautiful and awful and definitely deserves the high rating it's getting, even if I can't exactly tell you why.

I don't like crime movies, as a rule, but I'm always surprised to find I rather like Scorsese's. He's just a good director who knows how to tell a good story, and he focuses on the characters and their dilemmas and morality rather than just showing us a grim series of plot events. The characters are certainly what drew me into this movie, and although I wasn't nearly as blown away by it as a lot of other people were (it's currently rated #22 on Flickchart's global rankings) I did enjoy it a lot more than I did. Solid.

There are a few shining moments in this movie, but overall it suffers from all the typical symptoms of the "quirky indie movie." The characters are all a little too cute, the dialogue a little too snappy, the situations a little too eccentric. Setting the movie in the mental illness ward of a hospital just means it feels a little uncomfortable to see these tropes applied to people who aren't just "quirky," they have genuine issues that they need medical help to get through. However, there are a few *really* nice moments that redeem the movie and let me know that it could have been great.

This movie started out so well - so fascinating. However, by the end it had become a sentimental relational drama instead of the intriguing psychological drama it was at first. I'm not saying it should have been cold or distant or not discussed the characters' emotions - but I was interested in the scientific advances they were trying to make, not just the question "Will they or won't they have sex?" Disappointing.

I read the original play and liked it, but I felt that it was one of those that had to be *seen*. And I was right. This is a superb cast bringing to light all the viciousness and the hostilities of the characters. It's brutal and fascinating and illuminating. Roman Polanski and the original playwright, Yasmina Reza, worked together on the screenplay, and it is wonderful. Great adaptation.

I hate when my dislike or apathy toward a genre keeps me from enjoying a perfectly acceptable movie. And here it has happened. I didn't *hate* this movie, but... it's a spy movie. Which means that as clever or interesting or well-acted as it may be, it's never going to capture my attention the way it should. I struggled to pay attention all the way through, even with my beloved Benedict Cumberbatch's fairly prominent role. I'm always a little disappointed to run into these genre biases, but there's not much I can do about them. Maybe if I watch enough movies, some of these genres will click into place. In the meantime, this gets a middle-of-the-road rating from me.

Office Space is currently #59 on Flickchart's global ranking (and the #13 comedy). It's gained a huge cult following but I had never seen it before.

I feel about it the way I feel about most movies that have the "cult" sort of label attached to them: 1) I don't think it's nearly as interesting or funny as I think I should think, but 2) I have a feeling that if I watched it several more times it would grow on me. There's nothing wrong with the movie, but nothing really stood out to me as something I loved.

Office Space actually reminded me a lot (in an odd way) of one of my very favorite cult movies - Napoleon Dynamite. They both have very low-key humor, a fairly loose plot, distinct and quirky characters, and infinitely quotable lines. They're both structured more as a series of entertaining scenes than a straight beginning-to-end story. The first time I watched Napoleon Dynamite I thought it was mildly funny but nothing special, but as friends kept making me watch it over and over again, little lines or moments started jumping out at me as hilarious. I feel like the same is true of Office Space. There were so many little things that, although they were new to me, jumped out as potentially hilarious, even though they just made me smile pleasantly at the time rather than actually laugh.

(It's also occurred to me that, although it's a bit flashier, I made the same journey with This Is Spinal Tap, which is now my #7 of all-time on Flickchart.)

It's weird to judge a movie based so much on how you think you might like it in the future, but I really feel this is a movie I shouldn't give up on. In a year or two, I'd like to rewatch it. I'd love to watch it with someone who really enjoys it. It's got a bizarre charm to it that I feel I am just on the verge of, and it could someday become one of my very favorites. Or I could watch it 3 more times and still not get it. I will have to keep everyone updated on the "liking Office Space"-o-meter.

I am so conflicted about this movie. I was LOVING it up until the very end. Then it took two turns that were very dark, even for me. The problem was this movie, while clearly very satirical, kept two of the main characters significantly more realistic in their reactions and responses. This meant they became real people in my mind, and then the ending happened, and I felt... devastated. I don't know what I expected to happen. I know it couldn't really have ended any other way. And I'm sure that was a very deliberate choice - that the ending was *supposed* to jar me in a way the dark tone of the rest of the movie hadn't. I just don't know if I can be OK with it.

I'm giving it a high rating for now because I did really enjoy and admire most of the movie. I am hoping that after a few months, my thoughts on this will settle some and I will be able to decide a little more clearly how I felt about this movie as a whole.

This movie has a great, imaginative opening, and then... maybe one more imaginative song after that. It never quite reaches its potential, becoming a fairly incoherent mess that takes itself far too seriously for a musical with such awkwardly-written lyrics. Disappointing, because I wanted to so badly to love this, and from the first 10 minutes I thought I was going to.

I DON'T GET IT. This is just one of those movies where I don't get the appeal at all. Maximus is an incredibly dull character who is portrayed as oh so noble but we don't see why and we certainly don't see him actually BEING noble. We get no real sense of his character, even though in 2 1/2 hours they had PLENTY of time to show it. Because of that, I couldn't care less about his dilemma or his situation. It's a violent action flick trying to be a bigger, more important story, but doesn't ever really *humanize* its protagonist.

This is easily one of the best horror movies I've ever seen. It's funny, it's scary, it's captivating, and even when you kind of think you know what's going on, the ending takes you completely by surprise. It is very aware of horror movie stereotypes and uses them creatively. The characters are easy to root for. If all horror movies were this well done and this creative, I'd like the genre so much better.

Immediately after watching this one, I went ahead and watched the original, which I own but hadn't seen in several years. Even without the immediate comparison, though, it was clear which one was the winner. This version is pleasant, but its dance scenes are not as infectious, its soundtrack is dull, its character development is nonexistent, its plot doesn't really seem to form a coherent whole, its protagonist is not as charming, and its antagonist is not as threatening. In many ways it's a carbon copy of the original, but the few things it does change, it changes for the worse. It's a truly unnecessary remake, and almost all the good bits are the bits that it stole from the first movie.

I already don't have a high tolerance for sports films, but I was even less impressed with this one than usual. It takes about three different cliched formulas, smushes them together into one movie, and then waters it down until it's completely uninteresting. Even now as I think back on it, I have to work really hard to remember the plot details. Sports movies have to be *really* good to overcome the genre handicap for me, and this one didn't even come close.