Best of 2012 So Far

The Woman In Black

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The year started with anticipation of the promising Woman In Black starring Daniel Radcliffe in his first post-Harry Potter effort as a widowed real estate lawyer who has to settle the estate of the family of a tormented and vengeful spirit who is terrorizing the local people of a village on the bleak and foreboding Moorland countryside.

This was the first really exceptional film of 2012, a Gothic horror film in the truest sense of the word, with creaking staircases, unexplained noises, frightful apparitions, and a pervasive feeling of dread throughout. There is one sequence about halfway through the film in which Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe)is trapped inside the family mansion overnight as the house literally comes to horrific life, apparitions abound, and the vengeful woman keeps appearing and reappearing.

Writing, direction, and production design are top knotch here as is Radcliffe,who skillfully manages to shed his Harry Potter persona and create a character that is maddeningly persistent and deeply sympathetic. The Woman In Black may prove to avoid the relalative anonymity that many films of this genre slip into over the long term. It's horror imagery is so memorable, indelible, even inventive that it may enjoy a coveted spot on many a DVD collector's shelf.

Boy

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆


From the writer-director of Eagle vs Shark, Taika Waititi, comes Boy a New Zealand film that took a long and circuitous route to US release beginning it's rounds in 2010 at Sundance. Set in 1984, 11 year old Boy played by an excellent James Rolleston, gets the chance to meet his father again for the first time when he comes home to retrieve money he buried on the family property after a years long absence. Boy did not really remember him and in the intervening years lived under the watchful eye of his paternal grandmother.

Boy's father turns out to be an irresponsible romantic whose quick flirtation with playing daddy and role model is eventually supplanted by the behavior of an opportunist who solicits his mother for financial help and puts the boy and his younger brother to work helping him dig for money he buried in some lost part of the sprawling family property. It's one of those coming of age stories in which one learns that people that are romanticized and put on a pedestal are often not in the end what you thought they were. It is about a son, who through painful experience, comes to accept the limitations of his father and comes out psychologically and emotionally intact. Matured by the experience, he is not a boy anymore but a young adult, even a better hewn individual.

Waititi's directorial and storytelling style is playful and the aboriginal setting is both beautiful and edifying. This is a gorgeous film to look at and every detail in the production design is absorbing. In an age where international films tend to vascillate between the overly cerebral or ridiculously trite, this movie is a real treat.

Las Acacias

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Rubén, a lonely truck driver, has been trucking wood for years on the motorway from Asunción to Buenos Aires. One morning, Jacinta shows up with her infant son Anahi to travel with him to the big city. It is not the best beginning, but as the kilometres go by,the relationship between Rubén and Jacinta grows.



What is truly remarkable about this film is how well Pablo Giorgelli constructs a story of great emotional depth with little dialogue or character exposition. The main characters are like "two ships passing in the night" who slowly and believably become connected to one another. This mimimalist approach to filmmaking is rare even among independent features, making this Cannes 2011 award winner a must see.

The Kid With A Bike

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, this modern day fairytale has the simplest of plots. Cyril (Thomas Doret),abandoned by his father and living in a boys home, runs away to search for him. He literally collides with Samantha(Cecile de France),a hairdresser, as he is pursued by officials who are trying to return him to care. She agrees to foster him on the weekends, no easy task given Cyril's complex emotional and hyperactive constitution. With her help he finds his father who has fallen on financial hard times and wants nothing to do with him. Now Cyril must grow to accept his father's limitations and accept the love that Samantha has for him.

Kubrick Season

Kicking Ass And Not Taking Names

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆The Raid:Redemption, which had its North American premiere at New Directors/New Films on March 22, one day before hitting theaters,is an action film that doesn't waste time getting started. In a brief prelude, the main character Rama (Iko Uwais) is revealed to be family man who loves his wife who is expecting their first child. Promising to return, he leaves to go to work. Within minutes he is dispatched to an Indonesian S.W.A.T. team to wrest control of an urban residential building from the crime lord that is holed up there running a drug operation.

Tight and efficient camera work on high definition video, taut and well rehearsed direction, and creative production design that stretches a modest budget to its limits, The Raid:Redemption is a remarkable achievement. The first half of the narrative is a series of explosive machine gun exchanges between the dedicated police team and the merciless thugs who protect a monstrous criminal; the second half, after both sides exhaust their ammunition, features some beautifully filmed mixed martial arts fights that rival those in the classics of this genre. The tension increases as the police team learns that they were led into an ambush by a corrupt and ambitious commander, Rama learns that his brother is one of the evil henchman, and the ultimate enemy, Mad Dog, a brute that seems impervious to injury,is unleashed.

In the end, the film succeeds in what it set out to do, provide the pure and simple, an action film that mixes conventional shoot em up verve with mixed martial arts entertainment. What is particularly impressive is the finely polished result, given that the film is an independent feature with a modest budget.

Silent House

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ After her father is knocked unconscious by a malevolent and mysterious intruder, a young woman discovers she is locked in her family's summer home and must escape from what proves to be a terrifying ordeal in the new film Silent House. What progresses as a seemingly conventional horror house story where the evil that besets Sarah may prove to be either psychopathological or demonic, surprisingly transforms in the final act into an art house psychological thriller with a twist ending that may disappoint, even anger, some. Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, the husband-wife team who brought us 2003's Open Water based their story on the Urugayan film The Silent House which was shown at Director's Fortnight in Cannes 2009. One of the film's selling points is that it appears to the naked eye to be one continuous unbroken 88 minute shot. This is of course not true, the filmakers have admitted as much, and a trained cinephile's eye can detect the seams at different points in the film. What is, however, truly remarkable about this effort is Elizabeth Olsen's Sarah. As we join her in her ordeal in seemingly real time, we truly appreciate the wide-eyed fear and raw terror conveyed by her extraordinarily visceral performance.

Poltergeist (1982)

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ When I saw Silent House yesterday, I thought of this 1982 classic. In fact, whenever I see a horror movie, I think of it. Not because haunted house films today are strikingly similar to Poltergeist but because they are not. This fact will eventually weigh heavily on some production company and a reboot is inevitable.

I think it was David Ansen in Newsweek who called Poltergeist "a roller coaster ride of spills and chills" and,unlike any haunted house story before or since,this is true. But it is not the only thing that makes it unique. Unlike films of its genre, Poltergeist was not scary in the Gothic sense, and I am always amazed when people declare it was so scary, or it was the scariest movie they ever saw.

What made Poltergeist scary in a different way was how much you cared about the Freeling family in peril and how desperately you wanted to see them survive the demons that plagued them. This of course is Spielberg's creative stamp on a film he wrote, produced (and perhaps de-facto directed). Sorry Tobe Hooper, but it looks and feels like Spielberg.

Darth Vader

Are We Done With Star Wars Yet?

A few weeks ago I struggled with the question of whether I should shell out 14 dollars for a ticket to The Phantom Menace. After all, it was 13 years since I saw it on the big screen, I don’t belong to any rabid anti-Jar Jar societies, and it might look really cool, even in post-converted digital 3D.

This begs the question, however, is all of this just too much, a never ending vicious cycle? Even though Lucas announced his retirement upon the release of the less than impressive Red Tails in January, one wonders what his definition of retirement is. After making Star Wars in 1977 (and yes I’m calling it Star Wars) and reportedly suffering from exhaustion and declaring he would never direct again, he opted to turn over the helm to two British directors to complete the original trilogy. We were nevertheless excited, albeit ultimately underwhelmed, when 16 years later he returned to direct the prequels. It was after that that it became increasingly clear that he was not going to go away. We had already gone to see the original films with digital changes, now there was the pressure to see the films on DVD (seems so quaint now), then it was hi-definition Blu-Ray, and now the digital 3D format. If anyone had suggested to me at 11 years of age when I saw the Imperial Star Destroyer fill the screen at the beginning of the film that eventually I would tire of revisiting these films over and over again during the course of my lifetime, I would have declared them insane. Now I’m not so sure. And worse than that, maybe the saga always belonged where it started. Back in the day.