Cinema Shame- 2012 Edition

As I start to get myself together-- with the full realization that we are already mid-way through the first half of January 2013-- that annual twitchy anxiety yet again rears its ugly head as I formulate the last year of the filmmaking.  The truncated awards season is not helping much, typically there's another week or two to go before Oscar nominations.  Blerg.  I start my annual kvetching, first with something I sure about-- what didn't work.  I'll put aside easy targets that yielded uncomfortable viewing for me this past year-- the like of Wrath of the Titans, Dark Shadows, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, What to Expect When You're Expecting, as well, they all sucked, and further more why venture into half witted commentary on subject not nearly at worthy of it, or of items no one their right minds remember much of anyway.

CLOUD ATLAS (The Waschowskis, Tom Tykwer)- The OMG of worst of filmmaking in 2012 comes from three filmmakers, each of whom perhaps past their prime or novelty, a world class ensemble of movie stars and journeymen, and spans thousands of years in telling six disparate, but interconnected tales of, well something I'm sure.  There's a wealth of ambition, pyrotechnics, prosthetics, and pseudo gravitas, but the film a convoluted, pretentious mind fuck is also cold and insufferable, uneven to to point to be grandly ridiculous and long enough to arouse enough shuffling in ones seat to the point of dehydration and, I'm sure, a litmus of health of risks.  Perhaps that's being mean, but Cloud Atlas, with all its metaphysical daydreaming, is a film that yearns and believes its about everything, and in truth, it's about nothing at all except the brief novelty of a catching a game and rotating chess game of actors dive further into a needless rabbit hole that's head scratching and alternately alienating, confusing, and a bit racist.  Further more, the six strands of inter-connected gobbledygook are less bewitching separately making a product that cannot stand on the sum of it's parts because there's sparsely little their to begin with. 

COSMOPOLIS (David Croenberg)- Imagine spending two hours with the most deathly boring, abhorrent slice of humanity in the back of a limousine in an endless and fatiguing quest to, get this- get a haircut.  That specimen belongs to Robert Pattinson, in an effort for the Teen Beat incarnate of modern vampire romanticism to grow, or perhaps atone, as an actor.  Croenberg's films are always superbly crafted, and while Cosmopolis is certainly ambitious in it's thematic melding of the end of the world foreshadowing with Occupy-like hysteria, the material is so drab, stagey, and moribund that it becomes a draining couple of hours spent in the company of pseudo-intellectual types spewing needless nonsense in the man of art.  Pattinson, it appears, has further atoning to do-- getting a prostate exam in an art film does not equate a great artist.

"THE GRETA GERWIG DOUBLE FEATURE FROM HELL"- Greta Gerwig, the mumblecore romantic heroine, discovered after an appropriately praised performance in the misbegotten Noah Boambach dramedy Greenberg came off age in two headlining 2012 indie comedies, and both were nearly unwatchable.  The first was Whit Stillman's alien and oddly scoped anti-feminist curveball Damsels in Distress, and the second, the stifled and second rate Woody Allen carnival of neurosis in Lola Versus.  Coincidentally, Gerwig was also featured in To Rome With Love-- read below.  I still find myself interested in this unlikely movie star, whose slanted off-kilter line readings and cadences are certainly different and hopefully a right fit for some filmmaker, but this was not the coming out party for her this year.

HITCHCOCK (Sasha Gervasi)- The gloves deserve to come off so to speak in this ungracious, ever looking for a tone film that teases with early-Hollywood allure with insight into the making of Psycho and the genius behind it.  Something for the movie geeks to pine at, and at first, I was willing to take the bait, until I realized what a silly, barely together slight of hand truly on hand from director Sasha Gervasi, and nagging, winking portrait by Anthony Hopkins.  Replacing the fun, gentile ride with behind the scenes dirt on the making of one of the most savory pieces of filmmaking of time, with a dull scenes from a marriage burst the cinematic bubble, and dared to turn a subject so fascinating and gleefully alive into something so downtrodden and slow.  Hitchcock at once makes a fool of its subjects and moreso of it's actors-- especially Helen Mirren, the sprightliest of Dames reduced to second hand material and a particularly dull backstory, likely juiced just to woo her in the first place.  What's left is not fun, more so, it's quite deadly.

TO ROME WITH LOVE (Woody Allen)- The reasons for returning to the yearly ritual of a Woody Allen film are partly because the romanticism of his necessary work (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah & Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo) is enough to take part-- Allen's very best will eternally play in a wonderful loop in head.  Also, even in the recent hit and miss, keep going run of his modern work, there's a surprise to behold every so often in the sea of Curse of the Jade Scorpion missteps.  Last years Midnight in Paris holds that to be true, as does the small pleasures of trifles like Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Match Point.  To Rome With Love is an epic blunder, however, a half-assed Euro bit of cheese, with neither any filling nor topping.  The boring and trite unconnected stories that make up Allen's Italian vacation harvest neither wit nor pleasure, but instead bore with barely cobbled together ruminations of celebrity, romance, sex and opera singing in the shower?- whatever-ness.  Any of which are things Allen has done better thousands of times, and without any bombast, nor an exceeding running time-- okay, it's barely a two hour film, but it felt like ten dull hours in half-wit Allen mode.  The briefest respite comes from Judy Davis, whose heavenly line readings offer the solace in one of Allen's worst.

And a special award to:

LEE DANIELS, writer and director of THE PAPERBOY
Cast aside after it's embarrassing showing at this years Cannes Film Festival, and cemented as the novelty freak show where Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron, The Paperboy-- despite some top talent involved including Matthew McConaughey (a blip on his unmatched year), John Cusack, Macy Gray and Nicole Kidman, to one who almost manages to get ahead of this stinking trainwreck-- this thundering piece of cinematic shame begs the question on which may be the worst follow-up in history to an Oscar-winning success story.  Daniels rightfully earned praise for Precious, but The Paperboy, with it's rote and pretentious style, flow and dirty energy may prove a top contender for that prize.  Ugly, unsubtle, and only wannabe-gritty, The Paperboy was handily the trashiest piece of filmmaking of 2012, but decorated in the veneer of laudable art project.  Daniels wastes the abundant talents of his cast and crew, and the time of the poor suckers spent in the auditorium of this filth.

Online Film Critics Society

Best Film Editing for the nearly three hour Cloud Atlas?

PICTURE: Argo
DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
ACTRESS: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Moonrise Kingdom- Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Argo- Chris Terrio
ANIMATED FEATURE: ParaNorman
DOCUMENTARY: This Is Not a Film
FOREIGN FILM: Holy Motors
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Skyfall- Roger Deakins
FILM EDITING: Cloud Atlas- Alexander Berner

Best Visual Effects

The semi-finalists for the Best Visual Effects Academy Award have been announced.  Five of these ten titles will be nominated when the announcements are made January 10th.

• The Amazing Spider-Man
• Cloud Atlas
• The Dark Knight Rises
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
• John Carter
• Life of Pi
• Marvel's The Avengers
• Prometheus
• Skyfall
• Snow White & the Huntsman

The lists of titles snubbed include: The Hunger Games, The Impossible, Total Recall, Looper.

Interesting to note that The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall would be somewhat anomalous in that both use more practical visual effects (stunts and mis en scene tricks) than CGI, prominent in the remaining films, which might make both films vulnerable in the end.  Life of Pi looks like the only one of the ten with a Best Picture chance, which might bode well not just for a nomination, but the eventual win-- the past three years the Visual Effects winner was a Best Picture nominee (Hugo, Inception and Avatar.)

Cloud Atlas, the box office dud from the Wachowski Bros. and Tom Twyker may still be an Oscar nominee.

Only four these films were not presented in 3-D (Cloud Atlas, The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall and Snow White and the Huntsman.)

Two of these films, Cloud Atlas and John Carter were two of the costliest bombs of the 2012, so it will be interesting to see if either can gain any traction in the one category that typically favors blockbusters.

Each film will present a clip reel and panel for members of the Visual Effects branch of Academy shortly before the nominations are announced.

Cloud Atlas

A maddeningly ponderous and laborious feat is Cloud Atlas, a relentless endurance test even for the most patient and open minded of filmgoer.  Ambitious enough that the film tells six disparate stories, set from 1850 to post-apocalyptic Apocalypto territory, and requiring three filmmakers-- half the project was helmed by Tom Tykwer, the man behind the 1999 German art house sensation Run Lola Run, and the other half by the Wachowski siblings Andy and Lana, famous for The Matrix trilogy, and...um...Speed Racer-- there's nothing about Cloud Atlas that comes across as easy, discernible or accessible.  And at a nearly three hour running length, there's a spark of creative sparks flying all over the place in a project so manically hard to pin to down, but none seem to strike as expected, leaving a pained tremor of wasted energy (and perhaps a pained posterior) for any adventurous cinephile ready for the trek.  What's missing beyond the grand visuals, the epic settings and perfectly game master cast, all of whom take on multiple roles in many cases crossing genders and ethnicity, is much of a point.  For a film that purports to be about it all, and bounds to connect the disjointed stories into a cohesive whole about life, love, death, reincarnation, and anything else pretentiously convoluted the press packages may be making up, there's such a corny, unnecessary arbitrary-ness to the event.  What may have been perceived and concocted with the intention of being the grandest cinematic mindfuck moviegoing experience is mostly just random vignettes of beautifully photographed serving moreso for cinematic masturbation for whomever will soak it in.

Adapted from David Mitchell's best-selling 2004 novel and indulgently put together, and put up with a $100 million-plus budget (one such, that this may be of the first films where an audience may sympathize with the suckered studio executives and investors bamboozled), the film begins with what feels like a teaser trailer.  A prologue to the stories about to unfold, but as we get deeper into this auteurial madness of a film, there's an oddly and sadly homogenized reality that those teasers just beget more teasers, with wisps of a metaphysical passage here and there.  As Cloud Atlas reaches its half way point, there's no sense catharsis is near, and wears down anybody who may have been clinging to risible sparks of promise.  Even as the chapters themselves start to slowly, very slowly, make their initial gravitation toward a conclusion, there's the nagging but persistent notion that not one of those meticulously choreographed stories-- all of which are acted the hell out of-- would be able to stand on their own.  The exercise shows it's strain and the gimmicks becomes way too apparent, like a big-budged version of The Five Obstructions without the fun.  The barrier in consistency may be partially explained due to the fact that Twyker and the Wachowski's were working with two different sets of crews in their tales, the cast being the only thing that remained constant.  However, the range in style and tone is so radically berserk that any five minute period of Cloud Atlas is nearly batted to a thud because the inter-connectedness that feeds the entire film is never fully processed, and the stories range from the mighty to the indifferent within a whim.

The best, or most cinematically complete story revolves around a gay outcast (Ben Whishaw) living in 1930s era Cambridge who becomes an amanuensis to a weathered, but once mighty composer (Jim Broadbent.)  Told mostly through letters that the student shares with his secret lover (James D'Arcy), there's a danger and searing connection to his plight.  A ripe, if overly played out, essay of a young, penniless artist trying to mark his future and be freed from his oppressive society, there's certainly an emotional connection-- much of which comes for Whishaw's sensitive portrayal, but this also the one segment free from insipid mugging or dragged out histrionics.  The filmmakers-- Tykwer directed this chapter-- restrain this tale, play it straight and allow the complications to form organically.

The other tales, which range from 1850s shipwrecked victim (Jim Sturges), being poisoned by a guileless doctor (Tom Hanks), while making friends with captured slaves, a 70s detective story about a journalist (Halle Berry) uncovering something big about big oil, a current day tale of literary twit (Jim Broadbent) trying to break free from a nursery home, a futuristic tale of Blade Runner-esqe robot (Bae Doona) stages a revolution, and a post-apocalyptic journey lead by goat-herder (Tom Hanks), who speaks like Jar Jar Binks, all run the gambit from novelty to heavy handed, each concluding with overly simplistic ideas than which it began.  Each segment makes a statement, more or less, of a hero who is victimized and their rise above.  The gimmick the filmmakers use, of which the actors are clearly agog with, is that each actor plays several roles, many times altering gender and ethnicity.  For instance, Sturges, an afflicted notary in 1850 comes home to his sweetheart, played in white face by Korean actress Doona, and Sturges played Doona's savior in future.  The many instances imply a great device for the filmmakers in trying to make their themes palpable, but the gimmick never passes.  While there's certainly great sight gags, especially when Hanks dons a deplorably caddish accent to play a nefarious novelist in Broadbent's signature segment; other worldy thespians like Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant and Hugo Weaving journey along the centuries with the filmmakers.

The never seemingly connect, but befuddle, provide momentary giggles, as one patiently looks at their watch.  D