Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part 3

Blogger's Note:  Be sure to check out parts One and Two, if you missed  them.  You know you want to.

In our last installment we recapped Tree of Life, The Old Man and the Sea, Gone with the Wind, The Dust Bowl, and Red Tails.  What wonders will this edition bestow!

Midnight In Paris (2011 - Woody Allen) - Other than this one, I think I've only seen two other Woody Allen movies from start to finish, the mildly amusing Small Time Crooks, which I don't remember that much about except that I found it mildly amusing.  The other is Bananas, which I remember was actually pretty funny (that's about three steps ahead of mildly amusing).  I enjoyed Midnight in Paris.  Owen Wilson stars as a hacky screenwriter looking for inspiration to write a novel while in Paris with his neurotic fiance and her kooky rich parents.  On a late night walk he stumbles into an alternate universe where he is in 1920's Paris, rubbing elbows with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Salvador Dali, and a few other notable artists and authors of the era.  It's a lighthearted fantastic sort of movie, with good performances from Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and especially Michael Sheen as an uber-pretentious self-proclaimed expert on all things Paris.  The famous figures of the past are perfectly funny caricatures, particularly the manly man Ernest Hemmingway.  Dos Equis guy has nothing on him.  The dialog is clever and it probably helps that Woody is not actually saying the lines he's written.



Three Kings (1999 - David O. Russell) - A pretty underrated movie and one of Clooney's first meaty movie roles--ie not a cheesy action flick, rom-com, or franchise crushing comicbook movie.  Clooney plays an Army major during the closing days Desert Storm with doubts about the war.  He catches wind of a map a trio of non-coms find in an Iraqi soldier's hindparts that supposedly leads to a cache of Kuwaiti gold stolen by the Iraqis.  Seeking to get something out of his days in the desert, Clooney and his booty map (double-meaning!) finding cohorts, ably played by Mark Walberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze, take off to find the gold and end up in a series of sticky ceasefire situations involving the Iraqi Republican Guard, anti-Saddam partisans, and an exploding cow.  Among other things.  Director David O. Russell, who is getting love recently for his Oscar nominated Silver Linings Playbook, co-wrote the script which is both funny and thought provoking, which really all war movies should be.  Very solid flick.  I hadn't seen it for a long time and had forgotten how much I liked it.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010 - Dave Dubois and Chris Sanders) - I watched about half of Steven Spielberg's War Horse today, which is a similar type of story as How to Train Your Dragon, and I found the latter to be exceedingly more entertaining.  Granted they aren't exactly the same kind of movie, slapstick gags and one-liners may have been a little out of place in the WWI horse tale, but they're both "boy and his dog/horse/dragon" stories, where the lead character forms a bond with a creature and some sort of serration or crisis gets between them and the boy vows to never forget/desert the creature.  I won't be too hard on War Horse since I haven't seen it all the way through, but just as I wouldn't expect it to play for laughs, I would expecte it to go for the heart strings.  From what I've seen thus far Dragon tops Horse even in that respect, on top of being funny and exciting.  Rango was my favorite animated film I saw last year, but Dragon wasn't too far behind and had the added advantage of being something I could watch with my four year old daughter.

Rango (2011 - Gore Verbinski) - And speaking of the animated noir with a chamaleon in the lead role, here is my full-blow review of Rango from a few months back.  I really liked it.

From Here to Eternity (1953 - Fred Zinnermann) - Probably one of the most famous images from classic movies, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr sucking face on the beach as the tides washes over them, comes from this movie.  Starring Lancaster, Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Montgomery Clift, and Ernest Borgnine, the melodrama based on the racy novel of the same name, tracks the lives of the characters in and around an Army base at Pearl Harbor in the days before December 7th, 1941.  Honor, duty, infidelity, intimidation, love, scandal, friendship; it's all there.  Good performances all around, particularly Ernest Borgnine as scuzzy Sgt. Fatso Judson.  Legend has it Sinatra secured his role with a little help from his Mafia friends, providing the inspiration for the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather.  No word on how many horses lost their heads to make it happen.

Stay tuned for Part 4.

Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part Two

Blooger's Note:  Don't forget to check out Part One if you haven't already.

Last time we took at quick look at Lincoln, The Shootist, Army of Crime, Four Christmases, and The Ox-Bow Incident.  Let's dive into part two.  Once again, these are in no particular order.

Tree of Life (2011 - Terrence Malick) - About a month ago I wrote up a full blown review of Tree of Life on my phone, only to have it inexplicably erased for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me.  I have no idea what life lessons Malick was trying to convey in Tree of Life, but he is indirectly responsible for teaching me one valuable lesson:  don't compose posts on your phone unless you are prepared to save every two minutes.  As the movie actually goes, if you've seen a Terrence Malick movie before you know what you're going to get, more or less.  If you haven't here's what you're going to get:  a non-linear, amorphous "plot", lots of shots of the sun and leaves and hands running through tall grass, and possibly dinosaurs.  The movie is "about" the life and times of a 1950's family in Waco, Texas.  Growing up and domineering fathers (Brad Pitt), and childhood and loss and Sean Penn wandering around looking like he's got IBS and...dinosaurs.  It's not for everybody, but it's worth seeing if for nothing else then its incredible visual beauty.  Just don't expect to have any idea of what's going on for at least the first hour.  Then the dinosaurs show up.

The Old Man and the Sea (1958 - John Sturges) - A straight forward visual retelling of Ernest Hemmingway's famous novella.  Spencer Tracy stars as the Old Man.  Not really much else to say about it.  Considering the vast majority of the movie is the Old Man sitting alone in a boat thinking to himself, Tracy does a good enough job of keeping you interested, but the movie doesn't really add anything to the story and the book is, of course, much better.

Gone with the Wind (1939 - Victor Fleming) - I had never seen Gone with the Wind before, but as an amateur film buff had always wanted to.  However, it's quite a commitment at 238 minutes.  I could watch a few other movies I'd also like to see in that same time frame.  But, when you're laid up on the couch with the flu you've got nothing but time on your hands.  Such was the case this past Thanksgiving weekend.  Like a lot of classic movies, it's one I'm glad I saw and can certainly appreciate it's achievements, but it's not a movie I see myself watching again for a very long time.  It's romantic celebration of the Old South seems juuuuust a touch out of step with today's sensibilities.  Slavery is actually mentioned very little, which might seem odd for a movie set in and around the Civil War.  And though it isn't really meant to be about slavery, it is about the antebellum South and to sort of whitewash the peculiar institution almost completely out of the picture, some may find of-putting.  I didn't, only because it should be viewed as a product of it's time (which is not the same as saying the attitudes of that time are ok just because they were the attitudes of that time, if that makes any sense at all).  I imagine a sort of parallel study of slavery as seen through the history of film making with Gone with the Wind and modern films such as, oh I don't know,say, Django Unchained, would be pretty interesting.  Again, worth seeing for it's place in movie history, and because it is a good movie, but also because you'll recognize a lot of well known lines that have been repeated, copied, and spoofed that you never knew originated from the mouths of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

The Dust Bowl (2012 - Ken Burns) - As a history buff, I'm a huge Ken Burns fan.  His latest offering chronicles the experiences of those who lived in a few small towns in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, right in the heart of the dust bowl during the Depression.  If you're unfamiliar with what the dust bowl was, see this movie.  But in a nutshell, for a good part of the 1930's the Great Plains were struck by an ecological catastrophe, caused both by man and by nature.  The combination of drought and over exuberant plowing, left the land barren and windswept.  Giant dust storms became the norm, blowing mountainous clouds of dirt into the air and causing "black blizzards."  You know in dry, dusty areas when you get those nasty black boogers in your nose?  Imagine having that experience for half a decade or so.  In typical Ken Burns style, The Dust Bowl comes to life through photographs, interviews with the regular folks who survived it, and letters and correspondence from those who have since passed away.  Another edutaining look at American history from Mr. Burns.  This Mr. Burns, not this one.

Red Tails (2012 - Anthony Hemmingway) - I gave this plane wreck a full scale review several months ago.  It still makes me angry that the Tuskegee Airmen might not ever get the film treatment their story deserves thanks to this debacle.  Sigh.

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Stay tuned for Part Three.

Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Editon - Part One

Well apparently my 12 Days of Criticismas was a touch ambitious.  Thanks to a pretty bad stretch of The Plague running through my household this month, coupled with a couple of my guest writers not being able to squeeze a post into their own busy schedules, our 12 days ended up being A Week's Worth of Criticismas.  Oh well, even Santa drops the ball every once in a while.  I mean, you have seen the holiday classic Santa Claus:  The Movie haven't you?  Dudley Moore was never better.  We'll give it another shot next year.  I would like to thank Rhett Paro, Josh Carrillo and Peter Brown for their efforts and hopefully they'll be back reviewing bad TV specials, food, and weather phenomena again soon.

Critical Errors isn't the sort of review blog where you're going to get run-downs on all the latest offerings in movies, music, TV, food, products, what have you.  Anyone who's surfed through this humble corner of the Internet at all would know that.  How many reviews of the Ox-Bow Incident written post-1943 do you think are floating around the Interwebs?  My guess is not many, and yet you'll find one on Critical Errors, proudly.  However, I don't spend all my time only watching western morality plays from the war years.  So, I figured I'd do a look back at--nearly--everything I watched in 2012 and would give either a brief two-cents take or a just a link to the review I already wrote for it just in case you had the mis(?)fortune of missing it the first time around.  These are movies I either watched for the first time ever, or first time in a long time, presented in no particular order whatsoever.

Lincoln (2012 - Steven Spielberg) - As popular and successful as he has been for nearly 40 years, Spielberg gets flack from a lot of artsy cinefile types for being too populist and often pulling his punches in service of the happy, or at least happiest possible, ending.  Among other things, these folks will concede his talents as a filmmaker capable of entertaining with the best, but lacking the bravery of a true artist.  Now, my formal film education may only consist of a single community college course, but to those accusations I say, haters gonna hate.  They don't come much braver than Lincoln.  To make a movie about the passing of a piece of legislation, even concerning perhaps the most important piece of legislation in our nations history, in this case the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and with as compelling a historical figure as there may be, in this case Abraham Lincoln, and have not one minute of its 150 minute running time feel like history class, is a herculean task only a handful of directors could have pulled off.  Lincoln is a masterpiece and Daniel Day-Lewis channels Honest Abe himself.  Even though I have obviously never seen Lincoln walk or move or heard his voice, somehow DDL manages to perfectly capture what I always imagined he would move and sound like, based on whatever still images I have seen over the years.  It's a virtuoso performance to add to DDL's ever growing list of virtuoso performances.  The movie is chock full of other recognizable faces, like David Straighairn, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon-Levit and pretty much every character actor ever.  Lincoln is a great movie, and to the haters that would say otherwise I have a message for you:  shut up.

The Shootist (1976 - Don Siegal) - Great character piece starring John Wayne as a dying gunslinger.  Read my full review here.

Army of Crime (L'armee du Crime - 2009 - Robert Guedeguian) - A French movie about the French resistance in Paris during WWII.  Based on actual events, while a goodly portion of the French people and French police collaborated with the Nazi's, in many cases without much convincing needed, many of the French resistance groups were actually made up of immigrants; in this case foreign Jews, Spainards, Italians, and Armenians.  The army of crime is a rag tag group of resistance fighters with little to no training, harassing and killing Nazi's in the streets of Paris, some questioning the morality of what they're doing, some enjoying it a little too much.  A pretty interesting, and at times upsetting and at times uplifting, look at an often overlooked portion of history.

Four Christmases (2008 - Seth Gordon) - Don't think this one will be making the yearly Christmas movie rotation.  Simple premise:  couple Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon attempt to spend Christmas day with all four of their divorced parents.  Hijinx ensue.  A scenario that should be ripe for comedy gold.  The best this one achieves is bronze...plated.  There's a few decent slapstick moments, especially with the pair visiting Vaughn's blue collar dad Robert Duvall and his idiot brothers, redneck Tim McGraw (irony!) and ultimate fighter wannabe Jon Favreau.  There's also a pretty amusingly awkward sequence when they visit Vince's mom, Sissy Spacek, who happens to be dating Vince's ex-best friend.  Pretty gross, but also kinda funny.  The biggest problem is Vince Vaughn though.  He just won't shut up!  I guess that's what he does, but it gets seriously annoying.  A far cry from his days scoping out the babies in LA diners.

And speaking of The Ox-Bow Incident (1943 - William Wellman) - here's my 102 word review of the western morality play starring Henry Fonda.

Stay tuned for Part Two of the Year in Reviews 2012:  Movie Edition.