Summer has long since past, but that doesn't mean there haven't been some notewothy cinema releases. September and October have typically been as dismal as January and February in terms of notable releases. It's that unfortunate period between summer blockbusters and the holiday ones. 2012 has been full of pleasant surprises though, and the past two months each held some nice morsels among the trash.
As always, I present mini-reviews of the films I've seen in order that I saw them, not in the order they were released.
Premium Rush
The second of three Joseph Gordon-Levitt films I've seen this year sees him playing a bike messenger being pursued by unknown evil entities because of a mysterious package he has been asked to deliver. It is a premise that looked intriguing from what the trailer offered, but that's the problem with trailers: They don't povide the details.
JGL delivers a fine, but ultimately flat performance in an ultimately flat movie. The action is pretty standard, the villain is idiotic, and a promising climax amounts to nothing.
The biggest problem with this movie is that the stakes never seem high enough to warrant the actions the characters are taking. This isn't a movie about saving the world or anything so outlandish, but in a movie focused on bike messengers and twisted cops, maybe it should be.
(Not to mention that when I left the theater, I had this terrible feeling of just having spent 90 minutes watching people bike around Manhattan.)
Impressed or Unimpressed: Unimpressed
Looper
The third of JGL's 2012 films was also his most successful. While JGL knocked it out of the park in The Dark Knight Rises, Looper put the focus solely on him (and Bruce Willis playing future him).
Reuniting him with the director that put him on the map with Brick, Rian Johnson, JGL delivers in a thoughtful and mesmerizing sci-fi masterpiece. Good sci-fi, and more directly good time traveling stories, are very hard to come by. There are always going to be holes to poke in time travel plots, but what separates good films from bad is whether or not the story can carry it over those hiccups. In that aspect, Looper suceeds. It's an amazing piece of storyteller combined with solid special effects.
Time travel is always a hard concept for audiences to wrap their head around, but Looper lays the rules out pretty early to help the audience get up to speed with the world they are about to encounter. Johnson takes some gutsy moves in the storytelling, interrupting the movie just as it starts to get interesting to go back and get Willis's perspective, but the pacing and suspense keep the story interesting without bogging it down.
The movie keeps the audience guessing from start to finish, with an ending that may seem simple, but ultimately illustrates the development of the character during the journey, which is all any film can hope for.
Impressed or Unimpressed: Impressed
Taken 2
I think the numbers Taken 2 has pulled in at the box office clearly demonstrate the passion and excitement people have for this film franchise. Taken was a surprise hit, one that neither asked for nor demanded a sequel. But audiences repsonded to Liam Neeson kicking ass around eastern Europe, so most people were up to see what would happen if he was allowed to go Round 2.
However, Taken 2 is only 2/3 of a good movie. The movie starts out by hitting many of the same beats of the first, and that's what works. People want to see Liam Neeson taking out baddies. They want to see someone get kidnapped. But the difference between this film is and the first one is that the first movie was a mystery. The audience never knew where his daughter was, who had taken her, or for what purpose. The fun of the movie was following Neeson along as he unraveled the mystery.
This time, the opening scene reveals everything. It kills most of the tension that the film can never build back up. But even that misstep isn't the most egregious falt of the film. Without giving anything away there is a very distinct point where the film goes from being exciting, to preposterous, to simply boring. A movie like this should never be boring. It doesn't have to be good, but it at least needs to prevent me from falling to sleep.
Impressed or Unimpressed: Unimpressed
Argo
Here's a weird thing about Argo. Argo is a great movie. It's a fascinating story that Ben Affleck executes brilliantly. The but: There isn't anything remotely memorable about this film. The acting is good, but no one stands out. It's well written, but I can't recall any particularly good lines.
In many ways this movie reminds of Jarhead starring Jake Gyllenhaal. That movie focused on snipers during the Gulf War, but the notable thing about the movie is how they never fire a shot in battle.
Argo is not a guns-blazing action film, it's a slow-burning thriller. It's amazing to see behind the scenes of how this operation was put together and the lengths that the CIA went through to make the production of this film seemed legitimate. In a world before the internet, it might be easy to think creating a movie that would never be produced would be easy to fake, but this movie shows how hard it was. They had a harder time putting on an elaborate ruse in the U.S. than they had fooling people in Iran.
I would encourage everyone to go see Argo, but I doubt anyone will be rushing to see again.
Impressed or Unimpressed: Impressed, even though it was a little impression-less
Cloud Atlas
This might not make the most sense, but The Avengers and Cloud Atlas may be the two most ambitious movies of 2012. With The Avengers, Marvel built perhaps the first cohesive cinematic universe through five films that amounted to a successful team-up super-film. No easy task, and one that paid off.
Cloud Atlas, on the other hand, was telling a story across five time lines with a core cast that was playing different characters in each time line, sometimes changing gender and race to do so. Cloud Atlas is based on a book of the same name, and if someone went into this movie cold (meaning having not seen a trailer or read anything about it) I would guess they would hate it.
That being said, Cloud Atlas is not the best movie I've seen this year, but it is arguably the coolest. The movie spans time and genres beautifully. It is amazing to have the movie flow so well, never feel too long (despite a running time close to three hours) and never get too bleak (as films of this nature are wont to do). The one reason I say this is not the best movie I've seen this year is that the message it leaves the audience with is not exactly revelatory.
Anyone looking for a mind blowing experience though cannot go wrong with Cloud Atlas.
Impressed or Unimpressed: Impressed
Seven Psychopaths
There have been very few good comedies in 2012, but Seven Psychopaths bucks the trend by being batshit insane in the best way possible. Seven Psychopaths picks up on the laugh-out-loud dark humor of director Martin McDonagh and Colin Farell's first collaboration, In Bruge, while still managing to go in a completely different direction.
The movie has a lot of pleasant surprises. Today, it is rare for a trailer not to give away most of a movie's plot, but there were quite a few things about Seven Psychopaths I wasn't expecting, all of them wonderful. I'm a sucker for anything about writer's, so having Colin Farrell's character work as a screenwriter was an added bonus for me.
The real delight of this film is how electric the actors are together. Chirstopher Walken is an absolute standout giving one of his best performances in years. The chemistry between him, Sam Rockwell and Colin Ferrell is the best trio since the first Hangover movie. The one oddity is Woody Harrelson, who for some reason just doesn't fit into this movie as well as he should.
That being said it's good fun with outstanding dialogue and just the right amount of action.
Impressed or Unimpressed: Impressed
Agree? Disagree? Hit the comments and let me know
On deck as we head towards the end of the year: Skyfall, Flight, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Red Dawn, Django Unchained, The Hobbit, Hyde Park on the Hudson, This is 40, and Les Miserables.
Wow, that's a lot. We'll see what actually happens.
