Brian's Best and Worst of 2012

This is not an end-of-the-year list.  I forfeited that right when I didn't make this at the end of 2012.  I never get the chance to see all the biggest movies of the year in time for the end of the year anyway, so I am continuing my annual tradition of posting my own "best of" just before the Oscars.  That is not because the Oscars (don't call them Academy Awards this year!) are the end-all, be-all of movie awards.  They're just the biggest, and nothing good ever comes out in January or February, so it's okay to still focus on the previous year's releases.

I'm not a Top Ten sorta guy, though.  These are just my personal and highly subjective choices for the best and worst of the year.

What was considered for this list? Obviously, the movies of 2012 that I have already reviewed up to this point.  I do cram in a lot of movies right before the Oscars, too, and am suffering a backlog of recent reviews.  Here's what I watched before coming out with this list:

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  Alex Cross.  The Amazing Spider-Man.  Amour.  Argo.  ATM.  The Avengers.  Battleship.  Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  The Bourne Legacy.  Brave.  The Cabin in the Woods.  Coriolanus.  The Dark Knight Rises.  The Devil Inside.  Django Unchained.  Dredd.  Drew Peterson: Untouchable.  The Expendables 2.  FDR: American Badass.  Flight.  The FP.  Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.  Goon.  The Grey.  Haywire.  The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  The Hunger Games.  Iron Sky.  John Carter.  Lawless.  Les Miserables.  Life of Pi.  Lincoln.  Lockout.  Looper.  Moonrise Kingdom.  Nazis at the Center of the Earth.  Prometheus.  The Raven.  Red Tails.  Resident Evil: Retribution.  Seven Psychopaths.  Silent House.  Silver Linings Playbook.  Skyfall.  Total Recall (2012).  Underworld: Awakening.  V/H/S.  The Woman in Black.  Zero Dark Thirty.

Best Bit Character
While Michael Fassbender's charming/bad-ass turn in Haywire shouldn't be ignored --- he would make a good 007 if we were in the market for a new one --- nothing amused me as much as Jason Schwartzman in Moonrise Kingdom.  A lot of actors (okay, maybe not Bill Murray) merely play "dry" when working with Wes Anderson, but Schwartzman embraces the dry humor with just enough excitement to make him stand out, even in the most star-studded cast.

This needs to be a mass-produced Halloween costume

Worst Supporting Actress
There were some pretty good possibilities in this category in 2012.  Catherine Dent was noticeably bad in the noticeably bad Drew Peterson: Untouchable.  Perhaps one of the lovely ladies from Battleship?  No, I'm going to have to go with Bingbing Li in Resident Evil: Retribution.  She was so bad that all of her dialogue was redubbed.  In a Resident Evil movie, a franchise famous for not giving a crap about acting or coherence.  Ouch.

But hey, she can do...this.  That's something.

Best Supporting Actress
Look, I know that Anne Hathaway is going to win everything for Les Miserables.  And maybe she should; she was good in a I'm-singing-at-the-camera sort of way.  That's not my style, though.  That's why my favorite this year was Judi Dench in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  It's been a while since I've seen Dench play anything but a cold-hearted bureaucrat, and it was a pleasure to watch her in a warm, relatable role.  Definitely the best part of a quality ensemble cast.

Promo for M: Lost in Delhi

Worst Supporting Actor
This was a tough one.  I seriously hated a lot of supporting actors this year.  50% of the enormous cast from V/H/S were annoying douchebags.  The Ionut Grama was annoying in the truly awful The Devil Inside.  And how about Frank Grillo as the jackass who bitches about everything and fixes nothing in The Grey?  All are compelling choices, but I have to go with someone who has been irritating me for most of the year: Rafe Spall as the world's stupidest biologist in Prometheus.

You see a creepy alien and you smile and get close?  Death is too good for you, sir.

Best Supporting Actor
There were a lot of supporting actor roles that I loved from the past year: Javier Bardem in Skyfall, Sam Rockwell in Seven Psychopaths, Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises, Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln, CGI Hulk from The Avengers, Michael Fassbender in Prometheus, etc.  The runner-up is definitely Fran Kranz as the best stoner in movie history in Cabin in the Woods.  As good as all those guys were this year, I can't overlook just how much I enjoyed Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained.  Is the role similar to his character from Inglorious Basterds?  To an extent, although I would argue switching the good/bad dynamic makes it different enough.  I just can't get over Waltz speaking Tarantino's dialogue, though --- they're so damn good together!

You're welcome.  Next round's on you.

Worst Actress
I'm going to go with the tough-as-nails Gina Coreno in Haywire for this one.  What makes her worse than any of the lead actresses wearing tight leather and shooting stuff this year?  Coreno had some amazing fight scenes in Haywire, but the movie didn't work because she gave an awful performance, even with the benefit of a good director.  If she was even halfway competent, she would have been on my shortlist for Best Actress.  THAT's how bad she is.

Example: I'm pretty sure this scene was supposed to be all dialogue

Best Actress
This one was easy.  Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games Silver Linings Playbook.  She carried that movie, and she wasn't even the main character.  She was funny, had levels and development, and showed some heart?  Come on!  What's not to love?  Besides, what are the other choices this year?  Jessica Chastain?  Ugh.  Pass.  This is the second time I've given this completely nonexistent and useless award to Lawrence, and it's getting to the point where I might actually watch movies because I have faith in the starring actress.  That's a big deal.

I like the scenes where Bradley Cooper is blurred best

Worst Actor
For as many bad movies as I watched this year, there were not many lead acting roles that I absolutely hated.  Sure, Rob Lowe was hilariously bad in his SNL-sketch-gone-horribly-wrong portrayal of a Chicagoan in Drew Peterson: Untouchable, but at least Lowe outperformed the material.  Taylor Kitsch --- who isn't really a bad actor --- played a role that emphasized all of his shortcomings in Battleship.  When your character is frequently described as being smart or talented, you should probably not come off as a complete moron, even when defeating board game-obsessed aliens.

That had better be your agent on the phone

Best Actor
This was a rough year for outstanding lead actor roles.  Of the nine Best Picture Oscar nods, only three of the films had Best Actor nominations!  I think 2012 was far stronger in the Supporting Actor category than the Lead Actor one.  Yes, Denzel Washington was terrific in Flight.  But the character and actor I would choose to watch or listen to again would be Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln.  I've always liked Lincoln as a historical figure, but Day-Lewis was perfectly cunning and warm; he commanded the screen with a soft voice, stooped posture, and anecdotes where other actors would have gone in a completely different direction.  Making America's (arguably) most legendary President into a human again was rather impressive.

The President apparently disagrees.  Or smells a fart.

Best Director
This is less about who was the best and more about what directors I liked that didn't have huge flaws in their finished products. I love Quentin Tarantino, but Django Unchained needed a damn editor. Cabin in the Woods was great, but Drew Goddard managed to make a great horror movie that was missing scares.  Competence narrows down the field considerably.  While Ben Affleck did a great job with the humor and pacing of Argo, I'm going to go with Sam Mendes and Skyfall.  He made a James Bond movie that was actually a legitimate film!  I don't like it because I'm comparing it to Bond movies --- I like it because it's awesome!  This is the first time anyone has tried to make a James Bond flick with character development, good cinematography and very good acting, and he was still able to film some great action sequences.  Mendes' work is sorely underrated on Skyfall.  Any decent director can make a prestige picture look good; making a series known for corny action and one-liners into an actually good movie in far more difficult.

Worst Director
There are movies that never had a chance of being good, and then there are the blockbusters that failed, in large part due to their direction.  Peter Berg took a stupid concept and did a terrible job with it, and Battleship was the nauseating result.  Timur Bekmambetov did a decent job with his cast, but pieced together a soulless abomination that sucked harder than any Twilight movie: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  The absolute worst direction this year, though, had to be Rob Cohen's work in Alex Cross.  He made a police procedural that was less competent than a third-rate CSI knockoff AND the acting wasn't great AND the editing was occasionally incoherent.  Stick to Vin Diesel movies, Mr. Cohen.

Biggest Disappointment
There were a lot of choices this year, primarily with sequels and reboots, but the one that stuck to me was Prometheus.  It's not bad, but it is intentionally obtuse and refuses to deliver on anything that its shared universe with the Aliens franchise has to offer.  Again, it isn't awful, but I was expecting a hell of a lot more.

These guys?  Seriously --- fuck these guys.

Biggest Surprise 
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the year was me not noticing Joseph Gordon-Levitt's makeup while I was watching Looper, but as far as feature films go, Dredd is the winner.  It should have been bad.  It's a remake of a crappy movie, and it has a lead actor who specializes in not emoting.  And yet, Dredd managed to get its core concept just right.  I was hoping for a movie so-good-it's-bad, but ended up genuinely enjoying it.

...because this is totally sweet

Bottom 5 Movies
5. Iron Sky - How do you screw up a movie about Nazis living on the dark side of the Moon?  By assuming that the concept was funny enough to last for an entire movie.  This one had promise, but then dropped the ball when it tried to be clever, funny, or serious.  So, yeah, it sucks.

Above: my reaction

4. Battleship - I still have trouble understanding how this made it past the conceptual stage.  A board game about stealth transformed into an alien invasion action movie?  The guy who came up with that concept must have balls the size of Death Stars.  Battleship must have run an "obnoxious actors wanted" ad in Variety, too, because the supporting cast is about two peanuts shy of being 100% crap.

John Carter vs. Master Chief?

3. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - I like the source material and the director, and yet this turned out to be an unholy mess.  I am okay with the chocie to not play this concept for laughs.  I am not okay with it feeling like it was 2/3 exposition, 1/3 Abraham Lincoln running on top of a herd of stampeding animals.  Be funny or be darkly awesome.  Anything else is failure.

Get it?  The bad guy's using the horse as a pommel --- you know what?  Screw this movie.

2. The Devil Inside - Possession horror movies are oftentimes terrible.  With the advent of the found-footage horror sub-genre, possession movies have gotten a little worse.  The Devil Inside has a lame concept, irrational characters, and poor direction; none of those earmark it for being hate-worthy.  What separates it from the pack is its ending.  This is the worst film ending I have seen since the director's cut of The Butterfly Effect.  I only wish The Devil Inside strangled Ashton Kutcher, too.

This for ninety minutes would have made for a better film

1. ATM - This is the single dumbest concept for a film I have seen in a long time --- and I watched FDR: American Badass and Nazis From the Center of the Earth this year.  There are no redeeming qualities with this film, and then it gave me a nosebleed by inferring that the villain --- who had the most unbelievably idiotic victims I have ever seen on film --- was some sort of criminal mastermind.  Crap...I'm bleeding out my eyes now, just thinking about it.

They're looking at the world's largest bottle of scotch, AKA what you need to get through this movie

Top 10 Movies:
10. Lincoln - I absolutely love Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones in this film.  My biggest concern was how it would handle the whole "vampire hunter" angle, but I think Spielberg addressed the issue subtly.

9. Seven Psychopaths - Not a perfect movie by any means, but I adore the dialogue and I thought the supporting cast was stellar.  There are not many scripts that give Sam Rockwell license to be as crazy as he can be, but he was so odd that Christopher Walken looked...well, not normal, but sane by comparison.

8. Looper - I was concerned when this movie was being advertised.  Not only did it have a weird time travel concept at its core, but it contended that the Future Mob had sole control over time travel.  Add that to the incomprehensible choice to cover Joseph Gordon-Levitt's face in silly putty to look absolutely nothing like a young Bruce Willis, and this looked like a movie destined for the "mock" pile.  Looper surprised me, though.  It made some interesting and tough choices with its characters and delivered a movie intriguing enough for me to stop focusing on JGL's makeup.

Clever fan poster found on the Looper tumblr

7. Beasts of the Southern Wild - When you take semi-Artsy direction and some of the rawest acting talent around, you run a chance of creating something truly special.  This was easily the Academy Award-nominated film that I connected to best on an emotional level, and I am so disassociated with these characters that I cannot believe I live in the same country where it was shot.  And the editing and post-production work needed to make 6 year-old Quvenzhané Wallis this great was beyond impressive.

6. Argo - It is difficult to make a movie about a historical event suspenseful.  It's almost as hard to pace it well.  Ben Affleck managed to do both, and he still balanced it with humor.

This guy says he was in Argo.  I don't recall, but it's an awesome pic

5. The Dark Knight Rises - A fitting end to Christopher Nolan's trilogy, this was everything needed to thematically bring Batman's story to a close.  Bane was not quite as classic as Heath Ledger's Joker, but Tom Hardy was good enough to make me forget about the Joker while I was watching --- and that is damn impressive.  If this had more Batman and less Bruce Wayne, it might have been perfect.  It will tide me over until the next reboot (I'm calling 2017 right now).

4. The Cabin in the Woods - This was such a fantastic homage to the horror genre that I can overlook the fact that it is not scary in the least bit.  A smart script that goes in directions that you would not guess from the promos and a great script make this a personal favorite.

This movie also finally gives stoners their own action hero

3. The Avengers - I'm a huge fan of the Marvel super hero movies, so the one where all the heroes team up and are directed by Joss Whedon, with a script he co-wrote?  Yeah, this was a no-brainer.  What makes it special, though, are the unexpectedly great moments, like when Hulk smashes Loki.  More of this, please.

Do you have this poster?  It was free w/purchase of the Blu-Ray.  FYI.

2. Skyfall - This is easily the best James Bond movie since Connery got bored with the role.  It has the best direction and cinematography of any Bond movie, and the best villain in decades.  This is the James Bond movie to show to people who (somehow) don't like James Bond.

Fan art poster taken from here

1. Django Unchained- Yes, it could have been better with thirty minutes less run-time, but Django scratched so many itches that this year's film crop failed to.  It was gory as hell, it had Tarantino's famously foul humor, and universally good acting.  There were a few movies about slavery in 2012, but this was the film that was fun to watch and I will come back to time and time again.  Bless your enormous chin (which houses your ego), Quentin Tarantino!

Sorry.  This was better than any Django posters I could find

Resident Evil: Retribution

After so many installments, it is getting harder and harder to overlook some basic problems with the Resident Evil franchise.  With the fifth (I know!) volume, Resident Evil: Retribution, I have to point out upfront what has ruined my suspension of disbelief: I have a hard time buying into an international evil organization, hell-bent on ruining the world that manages to keep finding glove-tight leather outfits for Milla Jovovich to kick ass in.  We're four movies into a global zombie apocalypse, and they still have someone working a bondage/tailoring shop?  Sure, it's obviously a solid investment when the zombie apocalypse comes a-knocking --- What would Milla wear, otherwise?  Capris? --- but you think somebody would at least brag about having the foresight for this eventuality.  If this was my movie, that would be the only thing discussed in the trailer.

***DISCLAIMER: The plot of Resident Evil: Retribution is pretty damn ridiculous, so forgive me if I simplify or gloss over some of the finer points in this plot summary***

When last we left Alice (Milla Jovovich), she was on an aircraft carrier, about to take on the forces of the evil Umbrella Corporation.

This picture perfectly encapsulates all Resident Evil plots

The next thing you know, Alice has woken up to an idyllic suburban life, where she has a husband and a child.  But then zombies happen.  Again.  The next thing you know (again), Alice wakes up in an unnecessarily bright and clean room, wearing only a small towel.  Why a towel?  Did she slip and hit her head coming out of the shower?  Are her hot pants at the cleaner?  Is this just a subtle clue that the zombie virus began with mildew accumulating in Milla's towel because she can't be bothered to hang it up like a grown damn woman, and I sure as shit don't need to keep picking up after her --- if she really respected me, she wouldn't be so thoughtless in the shared space of our bathroom, right?

Stained-glass floors.  Classy touch, evil corporation.

Actually, that stupid idea is only slightly less reasonable than the shoulder shrug reasoning of the actual script.  Although having the entire Resident Evil franchise be the concussed dream of Alice, after a bathroom-related head injury, would be pretty hilarious.  Anyway, the villain of the last four films, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), has taken the time to bleach his hair.  Almost as importantly, Wesker tells Alice that he is no longer part of the evil Umbrella Corporation.  Now he wants to help humanity, which makes as much sense as anything else in this series.  It seems that The Umbrella Corporation has been taken over by a virtual intelligence called the Red Queen.

Note: the worst CGI in this series is for a computer-generated character

Umbrella and the Queen have captured Alice and cloned the crap out of her and a lot of other people (many we have seen in previous Resident Evil movies), running simulation after simulation, and using Alice's unique physiology (I think) to perfect the zombie disease.  Wesker wants to help Alice escape the of-course-it's-underwater Umbrella station she is in, so he sends in some help, in the form of Ada Wong (Bingbing Li).  All the two of them have to do is fight their way across three city-sized zombie experiments and meet up with Wesker's extraction team. 

That sounds easy enough

There are a lot of returning characters to Resident Evil: Retribution, but the acting is at the level the series is known for (hint: the bar is not set high).  This is actually Milla Jovovich's best work in the series to date, as she not only kicks ass and looks sexy, but she also manages to deliver a few one-liners.  It's not impressive work by most standards, but for an actress as wooden as Jovovich, it is worth noting.  How about the rest of the cast?  Well, there are some newcomers.  Bingbing Li is pretty and wore some fantastically inappropriate clothes for fighting zombies, but it all of her dialogue was dubbed over in post-production.  And it looked like it, too.

An evening dress is a solid choice for outrunning zombies, right?

Aryana Engineer was adequate as the completely useless little girl that Alice took with her, but she was less of a character and more of a plot device.  Johann Urb played Leon Kennedy, the main character from the fifth RE video game, and he has a little less characterization than your average video game character; in case his haircut bothers you, that was also inspired by the game.  Kevin Durand also plays a character from the games.  While his role in the movie seemed somewhat minor, I thought Durand did a solid job as an unnecessarily macho character.  The returning cast sees Sienna Guillory, Shawn Roberts, and Boris Kodjoe survive the last film, with Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, and Colin Salmon having their now-dead characters cloned, with Fehr and Rodriguez doing double duty as both "good" and "bad" clones. On the whole, there is less "acting" in this movie than there is "shouting until something explodes," but that is to be expected.  Nobody (except for Li) was embarrassingly bad, but this is a movie about a supermodel who fights zombies in a leather bodysuit --- good acting was never in the cards.

Thankfully, "posing with weapons" was

Luckily, writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson was well aware of that fact, and made a movie that played to both the franchise's and his own strengths: CGI action sequences.  If you're looking for ninety minutes of mindless action sequences, Resident Evil: Retribution may be the film for you.  Anderson has a knack for making Jovovich look like a formidable action hero, and his production of action scenes is some of the smoothest in the business right now.  That doesn't make up for his shortcomings as a screenwriter, but at least he's not spending a lot of time trying and failing to have these characters force emotions or a lot of hammy jokes.  

Although a "women driving" line would have been good here

After watching this film with Danny O'D, we both reached the same conclusion with regards to Paul W.S. Anderson's talents: it's not that he's a good director or anything, but it is nice that he keeps making action movies for Milla Jovovich to be a sex object in.  She's not exactly old here, but how many other 37-year old actresses have this kind of opportunity to kill fake things and be ogled by audiences in genuinely profitable films?  The answer, obviously, is "not enough."  Hollywood has failed to generate a new generation of dumb action heroes as Stallone and Schwarzenegger have aged into irrelevance, so why not make some scripts for aging (by Hollywood standards) beauties that may or may not have acting talent?  Just retool an old Chuck Norris movie for someone like Jennifer Love-Hewitt or Jenny McCarthy and have them fight Communist zombie ninjas.  How hard is that?  It's obviously working for Kate Beckinsale.

Note: I would also watch Michelle Rodriguez fighting Nazi alien terrorists

Okay, so Resident Evil: Retribution isn't a legitimately good movie.  How is it in terms of action movies, or at least the other Resident Evil movies?  The action certainly looks good in Retribution, and there is an awful lot of it.  But there is also a lot of stupid plotting, despite the fact that this movie feels like an hour and a half of mindless action.  Did this story need to keep tabs on Leon Kennedy and the other gun-toting "characters" that were meeting up with Alice?  Absolutely not.  Did we need Alice to care for a child?  Lord, no.  How about changing the villain in the series out of absolutely nowhere?  That was only slightly less stupid than filling the cast with recognizable actors who were "only" clones, and therefore perfectly expendable.
  Look, the less attention you pay to this horrible excuse for a story (example: whatever happened to Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller after the last movie, anyway?), the better off you are.

More of this, less of deaf children

However, even glossing over the plot doesn't make this film a must-see.  The best action movies have cool heroes doing cool things that kill bad guys.  The action scenes in Retribution are very smooth and generally look pretty good and lots of bad guys die, but these scenes don't always make a lot of sense.  That wouldn't be a huge knock on the movie, but Alice is a dull heroine.  When you add zero charisma to nonsensical action and a terrible plot, you get a sub-par movie.  Still, this is a movie about a zombie-killing woman in a vacuum-sealed catsuit; it may not be great, but it at least plays up what it does well. 

Within the Resident Evil series, I would say that Retribution is slightly worse than Resurrection, but still a little better than Apocalypse.  Given the $220 million Resident Evil: Retribution has made, it looks like we'll be seeing a sixth Milla RE movie soon.  With any luck, it will be a little less idiotic and a little more sensational.  And then, most likely, we'll see a reboot two years later.