RIP: The 5 Best Performances of 2012 Without the Slightest Bit of a Chance in Hell

It came with a great shock and awe when Nicole Kidman's trashy Southern belle performance in The Paperboy netted the Academy Award winner nominations from both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.  The road to the Oscar for the critically reviled Lee Daniels' gothic nor is tremulous at best, even for an actress with the refinement and temperament of someone like Kidman shepherding away.  While I, personally, couldn't really go on board with The Paperboy, I strongly admire the dedication and craft and deft hidden skill of Kidman's performance and greatly applaud the out-of-left-field choice, even if perhaps its a bit smeared by the fact the Hollywood Foreign Press likely nominated her more so that she would attend the fancy show versus the strength and magnitude of her performance.  Cynicism aside, it's great when choices like this are made by merit, instead of all-encompassing, often sadly confining choices typically made by what's been pre-selected as an "awards film."  Here are 5 other performances that shouldn't have been overlooked:

Emily Blunt in Looper
Blunt has had a pretty impressive 2012, with nicely modulated turns in The Five-Year Engagement, Your Sister's Sister, Looper and Salmon Fishing on the Yemen.  She received a random Golden Globe nomination for the latter, but it was her performance in Rian Johnson's dazzling science fiction feature that was the most fascinating.  At first nearly unrecognizable, exhibiting a raw toughness she has never really showcased before, she paints a vivid performance as young woman who would do anything to protect her child.  As introduced as a rifle-toting alpha, Blunt carefully and exquisitely unveils hidden vulnerabilities and maternal good-naturedness, while casually transgressing the archetypes of the noir vixen at the same time.  In a fairly weak Best Supporting Actress line-up, her's was one of the strongest, and is worthy of a nod alongside the locks of the category-- a French prostitute, bio-polar First Lady, and sex surrogate.

Michael Fassbender in Prometheus
Shamelessly snubbed last year for his incomparable work in the tough indie Shame, Fassbender went another direction in 2012 as the mysterious humanoid David in Ridley Scott's massively hyped and slightly underwhelming Alien origin story.  However, Fassbender, with his magnetic charisma and always intoxicating intensity bridged a few of the thematic boggles with an ingenuity and mystery and even an elegance.  We were never quite sure what was triggering David, aside from his obsession with Peter O'Toole and Lawrence of Arabia, but he bestowed such a credulous interest that he's work feels as deserving of trophies and plaudits just as much as those in the more "prestige" films.

Eva Green in Dark Shadows
Mere best in show honors seems like too small a praise for Green's remarkably agile performance in Tim Burton's massive dud- a retooling of the popular? soap opera.  I honestly believe that if the film, a shaky rehashing and dumping ground of past Burton forays, had been on line with the way that Green portrays the slinky, funny, dangerous, sexy villain Angelique, it would have been a ghoulishly fun ride.  As is, it's mostly a mess, but like Kidman in The Paperboy, Green's choices, line readings and allure cast a wider net than the sum of her films drifting parts.  Charismatic, fetching and adroitly playing to room, as her co-stars are slumping for pay day, Green was the best thing in a bad thing all year long.

Channing Tatum in 21 Jump Street
It was the year of Channing, like it or not, and even ones not quite wise to the charms that led 2012's sexiest man alive to churn out three films to grosses north of $100, one would be hard pressed to not be charmed, amused and elated by his masterfully on the nose supporting performance in 21 Jump Street.  Playing half of a team of cops sent back to high school, Tatum's sweet dim bulb showcases a versatility, grand sense of play, and a knack for comic timing, that counts as one of the biggest cinematic surprises of the year.  That he imbues an honest sensitivity to the broadly stretched raunchiness is a small miracle.

Charlize Theron in Snow White & the Huntsman
Unjustly ignored in 2011 for her bravura turn in the dark comedy Young Adult, Theron further found her grove in bitchiness as the Evil Queen in one of the thousand or so takes on Grimm classic this year.  Playing up the vanity and clearly having a ball, she merely saves Snow White & the Huntsman from the eternal doldrums of self-seriousness, but underlies her evilness with a grand connection with the scope, tremor and insecurity of her most powerful weapon-- her beauty.  Theron continued to be fairest of them all, but awards season probably won't pay much attention-- they usual prefer they're beautiful to de-glam for their art.

Prometheus

With an unbridled ambition, amazingly sculpted production values, and a hype machine that is sort of unheard of, even in today's hyperbolic, every-week-releases-a-new-event-title world comes Ridley Scott's Prometheus.  Scott returning to the science fiction genre, one that he helped sculpt and mold for more forward thinking modern audiences, after a thirty absence would be enough a cause for celebration.  That Prometheus, despite it's non-committal marketing campaign, is essentially a de facto prequel to his 1979 horror masterwork Alien should give shivers to cinephiles everywhere.  While times may have changed, his latest is, but of course, offered in splendorific third dimension for the heightened demands of studio executives in love with head wear surcharges, there's still something striking about Scott's filmmaking.  The jolt, the bristles of tension, employed by an ingenious sound design and complementary score, coupled with a pristine and appropriately gray color scheme; his flair for pacing and dynamic for chills is still as sharp as ever.

It's just a bit of shame that his ambition got a little ahead of him this time out.  For as a chilly horror show, Prometheus hits the mark.  As a heavier, brainy piece of speculative science fiction, it's a bit messier.  Clearly Scott and team (the film was written by Jon Spaihts and Lost's Damon Lindelof) are aiming-- for the first half at least-- for the more minded scope of something like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the quest at hand is no less than the origins of humanity.  A mission, headed by true-believer archeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace- the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), and funded by an ominous third party corporation seemingly with motives of their own, the stage is set for flight aboard the space ship Prometheus.  With themes that spew heavier than the film can really handle, there's a two fold to Prometheus.  On one side there's a fun, futuristic caper with spellbinding effects, and on the other, a drabber, less fulfilling treatise on playing with fire, while trying to meet ones maker.  Thankfully, Scott relieves the high mindedness, for the most part, behind come the second half as we journey to that place where no one can hear you scream.

Shaw is an interesting character, and a wise one to detract with Sigourney Weaver's Ripley.  Both are smart, strong and vulnerable, but in altogether different ways.  Part of that lies in Rapace's performance, which is strong enough to eclipse the films murkier moments, and the earlier stages of the film, where the is-it\isn't-is a prequel to Alien are a bit more confounding.  Shaw is a woman of faith, of which is only really documented by the cross around her neck-- Hollywood in the year 2012, even in a film set in 2093, is still a bit sketchy on fully committing to any sort of religious affiliation-- who discovers primitive cave etchings that might point to the origins of man.  Along with her boyfriend, the more Darwinian-based Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green), and a motley-crew of geologists and character actors aboard the ship.  Idris Elba plays the no-nonsense captain of the ship, providing nicely balanced levity to the terror and Charlize Theron plays a corporate stooge, along for the ride, and essays for the second time this summer (third time in a year counting Young Adult) yet another icy woman contemptuous of all, and again nails it thoroughly with most entertaining results.

The most novel part of Prometheus is the introduction of the robot David (Michael Fassbender), a sort of HAL-clone who models himself after Peter O'Toole in Lawrence in Arabia in disposition and elocution.  The surprise is that the motivations about David are never really made clear, and that jolts the film in a nicely-modulated balance between falling for and detesting the man-made creature.  The glee comes fully in Fassbender's performance, and it's wry sense of humor, and slight danger.  Perhaps the only thing David really seeks is his own freedom.  The lead performances across the map are top-drawer, but the fun begins as the body count rises and the origins of Prometheus start to take it's place.  The gore is subtle by today's standards but a few sequences hold a candle to the jolting Jon Hurt through-the-stomach scene in the original Alien, especially an eerie performance of self administered surgery that should delight the horror devoted.  And that's where Scott's master class of pacing and control come firmly back in stride, as an anxious quiver of panic is unleashed in the second half, prompting that joyously queasy sensation of watching through a hands covered face.

The real stars of Prometheus really are the aces behind the scenes.  The beautifully rendered and bountifully epic production design by Arthur Max and the immaculately lensed photography by Dariusz Wolski are bountiful, even in the earlier patches of Tree of Life-ponderousness is taking place.  Scott can always be expected to deliver on those fronts, with billowing, "Are you not entertained" pronouncements, but the spectacle of Prometheus is most certainly alive and exhilarating.  The chills and terror of mysterious creatures wrecking havoc are as well.  Too bad all the theology and philosophy gets in the way of a good time.  B

Snow White & the Huntsman

All the billboards and trailers for Snow White & the Huntsman proudly extol "from the producer of Alice in Wonderland," and that billion dollar earning film may be reason there's been so many reworkings of the classic Grimm fairy tales on display lately.  This is but the second Snow White take to enter cinemas this year, after Tarsem's comic retelling Mirror Mirror starring Julia Roberts crashed with a thud earlier this spring.  First-time feature director Rupert Sanders enters the mix with a darker, gothic telling of the Snow White tale that is visually plush, immaculately designed, but unfortunately resembles nothing close to a beating heart.  That's key, since the story is primed on such a vessel to keep evil at bay.  What's left to embrace is a go-for-broke visual design that takes the place of less sturdy structural storytelling.  Baroque, beautiful, even if often ill-fitting and unevenly patched together, there's an allure and grandeur (not to mention a cinematic softness) for sets seemingly built from the ground up.

The problem with Snow White & the Huntsman is two-fold.  First off, for a summer-time fantasy diversion, it takes itself far too seriously-- rigorously so in fact-- as if no one had any primary knowledge of fairy tale itself.  The second is a trickier one; one that it feels a victim of focus-group speak.  A weary blockbuster in waiting, yearning for a four-quadrant audience, that diminishes the appeal it might have been had it simply been its own thing-- a darker chapter in the Snow White canon.  The lengthy prologue tells us the earlier beginnings of Snow White, one who had "skin white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair black as night."  She's a beaut who lost her mother early and whose noble father was taken by a vain beauty, who in this version is named Ravenna (Charlize Theron.)  Theron is easily the best part of Snow White & the Huntsman; beautiful, yet vulnerable that her vanity might be stricken from her at any time.  She camps, and vamps, and makes full gestures that imply a greater deal of fun in store than the rest of the film can firmly deliver.

As Snow White grows up, locked inside her tower, she ages into Kristen Stewart, a shy, awkward waif.  Once she steals her freedom, Snow ends up in the Dark Woods, a chilly and illusive place where all the branches and nature springs to life as a coming of the most fearful of things-- the trees attack, the branches spawn into snakes-- it's a shatteringly evocative piece of art direction.  Queen Ravenna needs that bloody heart to keep her beauty thriving and she hires a huntsman (played by Thor's Chris Hemsworth) to hunt her down.  One of the niftier character decisions on the part of screenwriter Evan Dougherty (with an assist from John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini) was the reworking of Prince Charming into a drunken, Viking badass, a twist of sorts that brings out the best in Thor (I mean Hemsworth.)  The trouble is that while the story can never quite get a heads-up on the design.  The Dark Woods is a magnificently scary set piece, as is the movie's version of Eden, an idyllic Sanctuary where nature thrives, and sprightly faeries roam free.  Stewart herself acquits herself decently, even with an awkward British accent.

Snow White & the Huntsman devolves into a derivation of countless other films including The Lord of the Rings (the dwarfs strangely recall the behaviors of the hobbits, in body and spirit, while being digitally performed by actors by Ray Winstone and Ian McShane), Twlight (there's a-for-no-reason love triangle set up for Snow's affection), Gladiator and, of course Alice in Wonderland.  For some reason, the filmmakers felt the need to model Snow White in to some sort of Joan of Arc-type figure for the films climax; a strange and uneven attempt at putting a feminist spin on the fairy tale perhaps.  Another sequence, for some reason, I suppose, other than to show-off visual effects splendor seems to pay homage to last year's foreign art-house horror film TrollHunter.  That's the marketing angle of Snow White & the Huntsman that leaves the overly-long film a bit empty.

Like the Queen herself, the beauty of Snow White & Huntsman is sadly but skin deep.  C+

Young Adult

The drippy darkly tinted charm of Young Adult is tests its audience within the first few minutes.  Charlize Theron, playing a narcissistic, holier-than-thou vamp goes on a date with a faceless gentleman who drags on and on about humanitarian efforts in a third world country, when the comely beauty barks, "Why?"  The stinging burn, tossed-off with such a whatever-ness contempt explains the character, the films breathless, uneasy comedy from the start.  This isn't going to be a likeable portrait of a pretty young women brought to you by the award-winning crew of the mirth instilled Juno.  Yet it's the fact that director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody bring such an anti-Juno spin to their second collaboration seems to enhance and rejuvenate their spirits, their sense of play, and sense of character.  It marks a rejuvenation for Theron for herself, freed of the histrionics of having to gain weight and put on prosthetics to be taken seriously, for she is allowed to be very beautiful and entrancingly ugly at once, chewing on Cody's biting and hard to pin down dialogue with such aplomb that one must ask the question-- how has nobody ever correctly tapped into her hidden comedic talents before?  If Young Adult in the end proves nothing more than a standout vehicle for Theron's under-utilized talents, her spirit and joie de vivre in her harsh, yet deeply textured portrait of misanthropic Mavis Gary, is more than enough nourishment for comedy deprived movie-goers.

Mavis was that small town girl back in high school that everyone knew, and many probably loathed.  The prom queen, pretty-type who flaunted how much better she was.  She had the football heartthrob for her beau (played as milquetoast corn-fed grown-up by Patrick Wilson) and the drive and haughty grandeur of someone who would never come back to her hick small town roots-- her home is the quaint (and invented) town of Mercury, Minnesota.  Long ago traveled to the big city and seemingly a successful writer of young adult fiction, living her carefree existence in her very own condo, Mavis' disillusion of grandeur are apparent from the start-- she's but a ghost writer of a successful series of youth-driven books, who spends the bulk of her days finding quotes from CW-like television shows, and the bulk of her nights drinking up a storm.  With the realization that her book series work is nearly extinct, the true tailspin occurs when Mavis receives a mass e-mail blast from Buddy (Wilson) on the arrival of his newborn child.  Nearly hellbent, but utterly nonchalant, Mavis decides the only thing she can do is save her old flame from his humdrum domesticity.

Along the way, she meets a compatible drinking buddy, a former high school nobody with a tragic past (played by Patton Oswalt), the only one who instantly calls Mavis' bluff from the start, and raises lots of trouble.  However, it's the reckless abandon of Theron's performance that is utterly inspired, as well as the crisp notes that Reitman and Cody lay down from the start-- she is never let of the hook for a second, for it would be too easy for the film to be overtaken with last minutes odes of redemption.  Mavis is a strong, smart, manipulative, domineering, nearly detestable, absolutely enthralling characterization that it's shocking a major studio (in this case, Paramount) would agree to finance the film to begin with.  But it's the nimble and unmatched charm and stinging energy that Theron provides that gives Young Adult its bent and springy awkwardness-- one that's never quite laugh-out-loud funny, but impeccably timed and nearly courageous in it's go-for-broke splendor.

It's also a nice respite for Reitman, a filmmaker, perhaps slightly weighed down by the heavy lifting of his previous film-- the awards magnet Up in the Air, who has unabashedly returned with a nicely scathing humanistic portrait, one that one must concede could never have been made for the hope of gold statutes.  B+

Young Adult trailer

Whatever cool factor may have been lost on writer Diablo Cody since she won the Oscar for Juno, or followed-up that film with the silly horror\teen comedy Jennifer's Body, and whatever grace points director Jason Reitman may have lost since his Oscar also-ran Up in the Air, I'm fully on board with Young Adult.  The prime showcase appears to be a nicely nasty and committed comedic turn from Charlize Theron, an actress who, despite that Oscar for that lionized "performance of a lifetime" back in 2003, kind of vanished slightly.  I'm on board, totally, for what appears to a smokey, fun portrayal of a "high school prom queen bitch."  What appears less sturdy, at least on first appearances, is an Oscar campaign, of which I'm certain distributor Paramount Pictures is surely gunning for-- the trailer shows little dramatic pretense...of which makes me enjoy it all the more.  Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson and Juno's dad, J.K. Simmons co-star.