Golden Muriel for Best Film of 2012

Holy Motors (Leos Carax) [322 points / 28 votes]

"Holy Motors, Leos Carax’s sprawling surrealist journey, is the type of film that you're likely to lament never being able to see again for the first time. It’s a movie about movies, attempting to reveal something about both the art of storytelling and the struggle between the old-school film aficionados and the digital age. It contains scenes of uproarious comedy and immense sadness, running the gamut of emotions during its two-hour run time. Most notable of all, it features the bravest leading male performance in years -- Denis Lavant plays eleven credited roles and is asked to portray acts of weirdness that would send most actors running for the hills, all while maintaining a sense of deeply affecting melancholy.

At film’s beginning, we see a man, played by Carax himself, wake from his sleep to the sounds of seagulls and a foghorn. He searches along his walls, then using a key that has suddenly manifested itself on his finger, he opens the walls to walk down a corridor leading him to the balcony of a movie house. Or is he still dreaming? Is the cinema his personal Maltese Falcon, the stuff that dreams are made of? We never come back to this room, cutting immediately to a wealthy man in Paris leaving home to go to work for the day. This is Monsieur Oscar, the root of Denis Lavant’s characters. He hops into a limousine and heads off to work, where his driver informs him he has nine appointments today.

Oscar wheels around a giant makeup mirror inside his limo, opens up large boxes of costumes, wigs, and prosthetics, and proceeds to transform himself into an old beggar woman. He stands in a crowded block in Paris, begging for money. “Nobody loves me, nowhere... but I’m alive anyway,” the old beggar woman mutters to herself. We watch as a lady passing by pauses, never looking at the old beggar woman -- she hesitates for a moment, as if to consider giving some money, before continuing forward. Carax's exploration of obsolescence touches a nerve: the disappearance of film in a digital age, the disappearance of an artist's work from memory, the disappearance of man over time from this earth. Our fears manifest themselves in this surrealistic universe in the strangest ways, yet they strike a perfect chord in each wildly different chapter.

Despite losing himself in each character and absorbing us into the world of each respective “appointment,” the tonal shifts are masterfully handled, as Lavant switches from deadpan comedy to heartbreak in the blink of an eye. In one memorable sequence, Oscar adorns a beard, long fingernails, and a white contact lens as Merde (translated to “Shit”), a vile flower-eating troll of chaos, who stumbles upon a supermodel’s photoshoot and proceeds to bite off a woman’s fingers, lick Eva Mendes’ armpit, and stand before her in a cave sporting a full erection (how many actors can you imagine with the bravery to fully commit to this kind of behavior?). But before running out into the world as Merde, he tucks a napkin in as a bib and eats noodles, managing to handle chopsticks flawlessly despite his long fingernails in an inspired bit of physical comedy. He asks his driver whether there will be any appointments in the forest this week, and when she says no, he looks out the window and mutters sadly, “Too bad. I miss forests.” This quasi-non-sequitur, further establishing Oscar as an old world man attempting to conform to a digital new age, is mysteriously affecting in the hands of Lavant.

In another sequence, Lavant plays a father of a young girl who went to her first party in Paris. He finds out that she was hiding in the bathroom the whole time, and he scolds her for not trying to mingle with the rest of the kids. She professes that the others don’t find her attractive; he believes she’s not easy-going enough, she’s not letting the others give her a chance. It’s about the war within one’s self as an artist and a human being: do I try to adjust to make myself more palatable to the tastes of the masses, or do I embrace who I am even if it means existing on the lonely fringe of society?

The heart-sinking melancholy of this scene is immediately followed by an Entr’acte, in which Lavant, stripped of all makeup, plays an accordion while walking around an empty building. Soon after, dozens more with instruments join him, walking about the premises, rocking out together. It’s pure celebration with a twinge of protest: the unconventional, the old-school, and the flat-out weird are resolutely here to stay. Thank God that they are. Denis Lavant, Leos Carax, and Holy Motors may never be able to mingle with the rest of the kids at the party (something as universal as the Academy Awards will likely never come knocking at their door), yet films of this demeanor will always refuse to simply disappear and be put out to pasture by their lack of mainstream audience. Even as the last scene sees some unexpected characters lamenting that they will likely be left behind for something sleeker, something newer, something more attractive, the idea rings clear: Holy Motors is such a sumptuous cinematic feast that, for this viewer at least, its pleasures will never be considered passé." - Russell Hainline

See the full results here.

2012 Film of the Year Countdown: #2

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson) [295.5 points / 27 votes]

"As someone who has always had something of a love-hate relationship with the films of Wes Anderson -- always appreciating his style and thematic interests yet never quite connecting with them beyond, at best, detached admiration -- imagine my surprise when I came out of Moonrise Kingdom, his latest film, not only blown away but deeply moved in ways I’ve only been at isolated moments in previous Anderson works.

How to explain this? It’s not as if Anderson is doing anything appreciably different from what he normally does. With its bright storybook colors, toy-chest mise-en-scène and poised camera movements, the opening sequence of Moonrise Kingdom announces itself immediately as a vrai Anderson work, and not much in the rest of the film departs from that expected stylistic template. Maybe it’s the fact that his new film has two kids front and center. With the exception of perhaps Max Fisher in Rushmore back in 1998, Anderson has dealt with adults in a state of arrested development, and his visual style could be said to synch up with that mindset for better or worse. Moonrise Kingdom may be the first film since that previous one where Anderson’s fanciful style aligns perfectly not primarily with its adult characters but with its two lonely kid protagonists, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), both getting their first taste of adulthood in each other’s company.

That is not to say the film is all about the children, however. Adult disappointment hovers in the film’s margins, slyly suggesting what may lie ahead for these two young lovebirds in their later years. That Moonrise Kingdom ends on a note of hard-won affirmation hardly diminishes the melancholy at its heart. All of this has been in Anderson’s oeuvre before, but rarely in as focused, precise and affecting a manner as here. Either that, or I’m just now finally learning to stop worrying and love Wes Anderson after all." - Kenji Fujishima

2012 Film of the Year Countdown: #3

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson) [272 points / 26 votes]

"The opening quote of Tom Brokaw's oft-read "The Greatest Generation" is by FDR: "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny." The epochs of The Great Depression and WWII led to a deep anti-intellectual conformism, which only cracked during the horrendous foreign policy adventures in Indochina in the late 1960s. What was told, which most of us know to be false, is that the branding of stoic masculinity breeding, and hard work to achieve our own pocket-sized utopias was within arm's length; if we can destroy the Nazis and neuter the Soviets, anything is possible. And unfortunately, in popular culture, this was reinforced, with some exceptions (Ray's Bigger Than Life a clear standout).

The Master, then, feels like a lost narrative, but one of such familiarity that most who came of age even generations after the so-called "Greatest" will experience deja-vu. This post-WWII world is hyper-sexualized, moralistic but with arguments held together by scotch tape and intoxicated on cheap cult theories, politics and booze. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, in his best performance) slips through the cracks during the Eisenhower years: he can barely contain his nervous rage, constantly running from the jobs he's holding and eventually finding himself in the palm of a contrarian crackpot's hand, Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It is here that the film's greatest mystery lies: what does Quell find in Dodd, and vice versa, that binds them so tightly? Why is Quell at the mercy of a pseudo-science patriarch and Dodd with such an elusive, anti-authoritarian, feral creature? Wouldn't narrative traditions suggest that there ought to be some kind of compliment here?

Except that this is a film built on anti-compliments. How else to explain the unusual use of 70mm? The visual palate of the most generous and expansive of formats here is not of long panoramic vistas, but of medium shots and close ups, many times of faces, and often times using an extremely shallow depth of field, smudging foreground action into out of focus, shadowy blotches of color. Jonny Greenwood's score is also in this vein; its cues are, except in a few occasions, placed in transition scenes, unlike the operatic sonic blasts of his work in There Will Be Blood. But mostly, this is, like his masterpiece Punch-Drunk Love, director Paul Thomas Anderson taking an opportunity to complicate genres and filmmaking eras evoked by pitting anti-heroes (Adam Sandler in the Lewis/Tati tradition, Phoenix in the Phil Karlson/Nic Ray tradition) into an revisionist narrative.

Back to déjà-vu, though: The Master is something entirely singular in Anderson's body of work, closer to the revisionist historical cinema of Full Metal Jacket, Zodiac, Doomed Love and The House of Mirth. Which is to say: these histories are able to be experienced as a consciousness. With WWII, drifters are societal anomalies, bellwethers of a failure to suppress something else other than what was acceptable. There's a reason why these films stand out, which may say a lot about the times we live in and the years in which each of the films mentioned were made than the times depicted on screen. The Master, set during a period of "forward-thinking" capitalism, finds its elliptical narrative footing in the self-doubting head of a broken, rugged failure, whose primal, sexual impulses supersede any kind of professional or ideological adult conformism that our culture digests as pamphleteered self-fulfillment." - Michael Lieberman

2012 Film of the Year Countdown: #4

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow) [174.5 points / 17 votes]

"Kathryn Bigelow’s career just fascinates me. On her resume, she has an ultra-violent vampire Western (Near Dark), an action classic about bank robbing surfers (Point Break), a bizarre, apocalyptic science-fiction masterpiece (Strange Days), a suspenseful war film about an Army bomb squad (The Hurt Locker) and this year’s deeply engrossing procedural Zero Dark Thirty. Indeed, one of the very few similarities you can find with these five films is the amount of ass they collectively kick (a lot).

Compelling from first frame to last, the film recalls David Fincher’s masterful Zodiac in the way that it is essentially a film about the process of a manhunt. As such, part of the thing that makes it so gripping is its willingness to chronicle not just the successes of the hunt but also its dead ends and false starts. By trapping us in the circular ebb and flow of emotions that consume Maya (Jessica Chastain) in her obsessive quest, it makes it all the more satisfying when her dedication is rewarded. Because as we all know, unlike Zodiac, Zero Dark Thirty has a happy ending. Far from a jingoistic, “America, Fuck Yeah!” approach, however, this happy ending is complicated by Bigelow’s raw depiction of the violent climactic siege on bin Laden’s hiding-in-plain-sight compound, which is exhilarating, terrifying, and deeply unsettling all at once. It is easily once of the most brilliantly rendered sequences on movie screens this past year. When Maya, triumphant but also now adrift without the driving obsession she’s had for a decade, boards a plane destined for somewhere (could be anywhere), her uneasy, complicated, what-now? mix of relief and confusion mirrors our own as a country when the news struck. It feels good, like a victory, but what does it mean?" - Jason Alley

2012 Film of the Year Countdown: #5

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr) [163 points / 15 votes]

"And then the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia.

"Why didn't you go into town?" "The wind's blown it away."

It's a strange and dour apocalypse that we see in Béla Tarr's swan song The Turin Horse -- neither a bang nor a whimper, but a resigned heavy sigh, the sound of a man defeated and unable to do more than trudge towards oblivion. In a small hovel, an old man and his daughter eat potatoes while a gale-force wind wind howls mercilessly outside their window. Their already spartan existence seems threatened by their aged horse's sudden refusal to work; as the horse goes, soon goes the rest of the world. The stunning opening tracking shot, seemingly constructed entirely of damp, matted fur and the palpable weight of effort and set to a minimal funeral dirge for violin and organ, sets the tone as well as any shot could; this is a world where even the smallest actions, like eating a potato, come with fraught with pain and the deliberate ache of carrying on past the point of exhaustion. The expressive cinematography and slow pacing draw us deep into the film, like sinking into a swamp, one whose chill we can feel inside our bones and with strict, time-worn routines whose slow breakdowns send shockwaves through us far more potent than any explosion.

"Everything, everything is lost forever," goes the cry from a despairing neighbor... but then, is it? Despair truly feels like the watchword in The Turin Horse; as everything everywhere grinds to a halt, the everyday actions of the man and his daughter smack of a deluded attempt to maintain normalcy. But then, is that the point? If to hurt is to feel, and to feel is to exist, then is pain not an affirmation of existence? If this is Tarr's last film, his final statement, I can't think of a more powerfully bare piece with which to bow out -- its commitment to the winding-down of things certainly feels like someone's closing argument about humanity, anyway. This "ceremony of penitence," where resignation is the way out and frustrated flailing, whether against a stubborn horse or a malevolent band of water-stealing gypsies, has pessimism on its lips as manifest as the cracks in the rough-hewn wooden table in the center of the hovel. It's a bellow from the soul, a jagged sustained gut-cry that rings with the volume of the wind that constantly roars on the soundtrack, drowned out only by the droning score, and it certainly invites a nihilistic reading. Yet, the last few moments, in my mind, betray the smallest ember of hope -- if not hope for improvement, then hope at least for continuance in the face of the void. The wind will blow and thrash us about until everything falls away and we're reduced to rubble, but we'll still be here, in the dark, defiant against the unrepeatable. There will not be a second opportunity on earth. But regardless, we must carry on. Tomorrow, we'll try again." - Steve Carlson

2012 Film of the Year Countdown: #6

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) [156 points / 16 votes]

"The Deep Blue Sea begins with Hester, a tragically beautiful Rachel Weisz, lying before the hissing gas of an unlit furnace. For some, this opening signals a type of melodrama as dated as the mid-century era the film is set -- a Sirkian age to be eulogized with meta-distanciation, as in Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, but not approached with the earnest solemnity Terence Davies brings to his lush adaptation. What those who dismiss the film as a stiff is the still-subversive notion that accepting what is safe destroys what is passionate.

Hester’s father, a vicar, and husband, a judge old enough to be her father, have provided her a precious life filled with every sensible thing she could ever long for except, perhaps, a child. When her husband, William, asks if having a child would have made a difference, Hester replies “For whom?” A child may not have made her any more content with a dull life, but one may have altered her choice of a respite from it. In a post-war, pre-feminist age, children could become excuses for escaping the type of boxed-in existence exemplified in the film by Hester’s mother-in-law.

The early scenes of Hester and her lover, Tom Hiddleston’s handsome Freddie, focus on their lustful romanticism; however, the majority of the flashbacks concentrate more on the playful, unpredictable, and at times cruel and immature essence Freddie brings to Hester’s life. In one of the early flashbacks, Freddie and his friend are playfully performing a war routine. Hester looks on confused, then enraptured. She is unfamiliar with this type of camaraderie or social enjoyment. This community, more than any other aspect of Freddie, is what draws her to him. It is why, as she tells William, he is to her, “the whole of life.” This, she may believe in the moment, but the film undercuts by showing a sequence straight out of Hanke’s Amour. The landlady is taking care of her invalid husband, and has overheard much of Hester’s drama. “You know what real love is?” she pointedly asks. “It’s wiping someone’s ass.”

Love and its various incarnations are deeply explored throughout The Deep Blue Sea -- Hester’s obsessive, monomaniacal love for Freddie; William’s unconditional, paternal love for Hester; the landlady’s eternal, asswiping love for her husband. But love doesn’t save Hester. Eschewing a heteronormative conclusion, Hester chooses to live on her own. She makes this choice not after Freddie leaves, though she desperately wants him to stay, but shortly before the final confrontation between her detached lover and her devoted husband. After pleading with Freddie to come talk to her one last time, she runs down to a subway station, to throw herself on the tracks. But before the train comes, the rumble brings a memory of life before Freddie. A bombing rattles the underground, dust falls onto the tracks. The camera pans to reveal the bunker this station became during the war. A man begins singing "Molly Malone," and Davies slowly moves the camera in a beautiful dolly shot through the station. The camera stops once it reaches Hester, who is singing along. She is with her husband, but he isn’t integral to the moment.

Though chronologically the first, this is actually the third of three communal sing-a-longs. The first occurs in the film’s present, as Hester runs into a pub after Freddie has found out about her suicide attempt and left her. The voices drown out the dialog, and Hestor is completely divorced from the community. The second song is, I find, the only true moment of happiness between Hestor and Freddie. The two have just made up from an argument, and the entire pub is singing “You Belong to Me;” however, the overly cultured Hestor doesn't know the words. Instead she anticipates the lyrics by gazing at Freddie's lips. Lost in them, the other voices in the bar fade away, leaving only Hestor and Freddy in a slow-dancing embrace. This is the love she is willing to die for, the one that connected her to life. But the memory of embracing life before Freddie and just before the train comes is what she is willing to live for." - Kevin Cecil

2012 Film of the Year Countdown: #7

Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) [151 points / 16 votes]

(Originally posted in a longer form here; reposted and modified with the author's consent.)

"Don’t you all have those tingling sensations when you watch certain films? Like when you are sitting in your chair, eating your supper, and suddenly the door knocks and someone else opens it, and you know that it’s the mailman with just the thing that you ordered or wanted to receive? Don’t you all have that sensation? That you know that the thing that is coming is just right for you? Well, that’s how I felt when I knew that there was going to be a new Quentin Tarantino film, a western that revolves around the issue of slavery in the Deep South of the United States.

The thing is that, looking back on the masterpiece that was Inglourious Basterds, there is one scene that stands out among the others. I’m not talking about the "best" scene, but the one that is the "most different" of them all. While the 2009 film was a pastiche of many genres and references, either literary, filmic or musical, it was still pretty much grounded in the war genre as well as exploitation cinema. Nevertheless, there is the scene at the bar in the basement when some of the Basterds are meeting up with Bridget von Hammersmarck in which the whole tone of the film shifts a bit. When seen in comparison to Django Unchained, this scene turns out to be a rehearsal for the themes and the genre that he would exploit here: the gunfighting that ensues, the card games, the conversation, the angles... everything is lifted up from western movies, and the principal theme in that scene was that of identity. Every element in that particular moment of Basterds was related towards who we are, what we are and where are we from. You just have to watch the scene a couple of times to really take into account how much of it is about identity: the card game where everyone is taking another "personality" and has to guess who they are by asking the others (what a fun game as well, to play in summer evenings), the whole of the accent endeavor where a German can know where you are from just by listening to the way you talk, the pitfalls of hiding your own identity by speaking German yet still getting cultural signals mixed up.

So in this script and film (something that he was prompted to do after not being able to finish a critical essay on Italian spaghetti Westerns), he expands these ideas about the Western genre and shifting identities for two and a half hours for us to wonder and enjoy. It’s just wonderful the depth that he goes into when he cuts and films every scene. Let’s just take one of the most already-"famous" ones, the one where the proto-KKK has a discussion on the bags on their heads. The fact of that scene, that which connects it to the rest of the film, is its theme about how they are trying to hide their identities. There’s also a meta-joke thrown in about how a famous actor (Jonah Hill, who really surprises here in his tidbit role) is thrown on in a role for a masked KKK member... again playing with ideas of identity and anonymity. So identity is a large part of it, and much of that is due to the fact that it’s a Western, and Westerns have always toyed with names (The Man with No Name comes to mind, as does Nobody changing his name into Trinity or the other way around), reputations (even a recent film like Rango is telling of how that element is important to the genre), or how the past can change someone’s fate and how they are always carrying their past with them (literalized as the coffin being carrying in the original Django). So here, Tarantino mixes up a significant trope of the spaghetti Western with a particular element of it that he explored before in the previously mentioned scene from his last film -- the issue of representation, of performing or acting a role as a way of affirming, hiding or otherwise muddling one’s identity.

The whole film is rife with references to the act of performance, both literally (Dr. King Schultz asks Django to perform the role of his servant when they are looking for the Brittle brothers, and later he is asked to play the role of a black slaver, during which he specially emphasizes that he needs to play the part with the furious anger that he feels towards those kind of people) and in a more metaphorical sense. In that latter sense, we have Calvin Candie "playing" a franco-phile without any actual knowledge of the French culture nor idiom, as well as "playing" as a man smarter than he is, hiding his ignorance under a suggestion of brilliance and acute ear for business, though he truly comes into himself only when he watches the mandingo fights. So, is Tarantino finally trying to tell us something with all these references to the covering of one’s identity through performance? Well... while the act of performance helps for a while, it is not something that always works, and it’s not something that will pull you out of the water when you’re drowning; in fact, it will finally bring you down low, as every character who’s hidden their identity, either through a role they are playing or with a mask or hood, are uncovered and end up dead or otherwise dealt with. Even our protagonist has to pay the price for playing a role, and even if he ends up succeeding, he still has a lot of suffering to go through to pay for his sin of trying to negate who he really is. It is when he is finally liberated of the schemes towards performance is that he can finally, truly succeed in his quest. With the final shot he assures his position towards the issue of his own race and self." - Jaime Grijalba