Top 10 of 2012

As voted by yours truly, and as part of a time-honored tradition, I now present the list of the ten best films of the year of our Lord two-thousand twelve. As always, if you disagree with me you are wrong.

10. The Amazing Spider-Man
If you know the business behind why this movie was made, it means that like me you're probably a huge nerd and spend way too much time on the Internet. But it also means that we were sort of doomed to dislike this film.  However, because I'm also a die-hard fan of the character, I waited with bated breath to see how this movie turned out. Legal issues aside, and ignoring the money machine that demanded it, Spider-Man's return to the silver screen, while not glorious in every regard, turned out way better than I expected it to. Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy is a revelation, and the pieces are in place to turn this into an *ahem* amazing franchise.
Sorry about that.

9. Skyfall
In a year full of reboots and remakes and sequels (that's the nature of the beast, live with it), Skyfall actually manages to stand out and meets the standard set by Casino Royale so many years ago. Daniel Craig is perfect, the new additions to the story were well implemented, and the use of practical effects, amazing stunts, and engaging set-pieces make Skyfall a candidate for one of the best Bond films of all time. A perfect marriage of the old and the new, and one of the best experiences I had in the theater all year.

8. Killer Joe
William Friedkin seems to have this new thing about making movies based on plays about characters who are fucking insane. And that's exactly what makes Killer Joe so damn entertaining. Matthew McConaughey plays a deranged hitman hired by a family of trailer-park dwellers to off their mother and collect her life insurance policy. You can already guess that things go wrong. What follows is a treat to behold. Friedkin gets incredible performances from his actors every time, and the last fifteen minutes of this movie (much like Michael Shannon at the end of Bug) is one of the stand-out moments of the year for me. Unforgettable, shocking, crude, darkly hilarious. Seek it out.

7. Indie Game
This year's documentary slot goes to a film about three independent video game developers that allows us to learn about their lives, their craft, and the passion they have for what they do. Although some of them have differing philosophical ideas about what they do, they are all artists. They are all human beings. And the best documentaries should be about just that: humans and their nature. Even if you don't play video games, this movie is entertaining, emotional, and enlightening.

6. Moonrise Kingdom
Coming in to this film fresh and unclouded, I found it to be just as amazing as die-hard Wes Anderson fans did, and I don't even watch Wes Anderson movies. It's innocent without feeling kitschy. The power and immediacy of young love is captured perfectly, and it's combined with Anderson's visual flair, striking photography, and a roundtable of great performances from an ensemble cast. It's like a capsule of joy and good feelings waiting to be opened.

5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Not a whole lot to say about this one. If you don't like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you aren't going to like this either. If you do, then you've probably already seen it or are waiting to see it. It's not perfect (it's a little too long, little too much WETA magic, story kind of meanders and takes liberties with the source material) but it is a fun and joyous return to Middle-Earth, which is all I could ask for.

4. Looper
I knew I was going to love this movie going in, but I honestly did not expect it to end up as high on this list as it did. But it's a testament to just how great original ideas are, and how desperately we need more of them in Hollywood. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays an assassin who takes out criminals sent to him from the future, then the older version of him (played by Bruce Willis) shows up and everything gets topsy-turvy. Sound confused? Don't let it deter you. Very few films about time travel are this risky, and you could drive semi trucks through the plot holes, but that would destroy the purpose of the film. Rian Johnson doesn't want to bog you down in semantics and logic of time travel and its implications. What he does want to do is a little difficult to talk about. Good sci-fi is hard to come by, but we faithful know it when we see it, and Looper fits the bill.

3. Prometheus
Our other sci-fi candidate of the year, and it just barely edges past Looper on the count that it has slightly more to say and is made by a master of the craft, who after an extremely long wait has returned to the well to deliver a film that is big, bold, thought-provoking, thrilling, visually arresting without sacrificing believability, and includes enough fan service to satisfy us faithfuls (who are notoriously picky and difficult to please) but also remain welcoming to newcomers, reminding the new school (Chris Nolan comes to mind) to respect their elders. A mighty achievement indeed.

2. Django Unchained
Quentin Tarantino doesn't make bad movies. Django is no exception. While still ostensibly a tale of revenge, do not make the mistake of thinking Tarantino is relying on old tricks to make a paycheck. Django and his journey is the most well-developed thing Tarantino has crafted so far. Django Unchained is about a lot of nasty things, things Tarantino doesn't want you to ignore, but he also doesn't want to make a film that is preachy. And so this thematically rich, extremely well-written film gets wrapped up in a bloody, Spaghetti western-style/exploitation homage package that fires on every cylinder. It's impossible to deny. Don't write it off as just a splatterfest either. Perhaps the most incredible thing about Tarantino's latest movie is that he has learned to temper himself: when the film explodes in a parade of violence and gore, it's because the story calls for it, and you will want to leap out of your seat and roar in satisfaction.

1. The Avengers
Call me biased, but The Avengers was always the obvious choice, if for no other reason than it is a goddamn miracle this film turned out this good. Joss Whedon flexes about as much muscle as a geek can and makes a movie that accomplishes several things at once:
A) being a gigantic, holy-shit popcorn movie that nerds wet themselves over,
B) making good on a promise made many years ago that some people (including me) have been waiting most of their adult lives to see,
C) representing the capstone to a franchise that began with Iron Man that is attempting (and royally succeeding at) something never tried before, bringing different fictional characters from the comic-book landscape together into one shared fictional universe of movies, just like the comic books themselves share one fictional universe,
D) being well-written enough to bring all those characters together at once, get at the heart of who they are, create believable conflicts between them, and make sure none of them feel flat or one-dimensional,
E) raising the bar for superhero films and summer action films all at once.
The Avengers, simply put, is a monument of this generation. No matter where the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes from here or how old I get, I will always remember the excitement, the anticipation, the apprehension of waiting for this film to happen, and the indescribable joy and ecstasy of finally seeing it on the big screen.

The Brazen and the Queer

David Foster Wallace, on many occasions, wrote about how irony had replaced sentimentality in our culture, and why this was an extremely dangerous trend for art. If you need that idea to be expanded on, then this little diatribe isn't for you.
There is no songwriter alive today who is more actively aware of this than Max Bemis, and his lyrics have reflected it since he was old enough to buy alcohol. Bemis ostensibly writes what we refer to as "emo" music, although that term is all too often used as pejorative and doesn't adequately reflect what the genre is trying to say and do (one needs look no further than the aptly titled "IN DEFENSE OF THE GENRE" available in a store near you). Bemis knows that our culture is on the brink of total annihilation if we don't get back in touch with a very deep and very real, one might say "human", part of ourselves.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that means [*cringe*] getting in touch with our feelings.
See, what separates us from the animal kingdom (apart from the literally hundreds of things that separate us from the animal kingdom) is our capacity for all sorts of different emotions that affect our behavior and decision making. We do not operate on instinct alone, much the way a dog or a cat inherently "loves" that which feeds it, but instead a part of our makeup that allows for a deeper connection with a shared psyche, and in turn use that to communicate in a language everyone can understand. I'm referring to the soul, and that language is art.
However, the postmodern attitude that has dominated since the late 80's/early 90's in American pop culture has all but destroyed the notion of the "emotional" (see: emo) and, with the help of mass media, replaced it with a hip, apathetic, ironic attitude that values individualism to the point of solipsism. While this may sound shallow and harmless on the surface, it is in fact a problem that permeates every aspect of our daily life, even if you don't realize it. But where it is most noticeable is in our art.
Let's all face it: the music on the radio is shit. It's been shit for a long time and we're actually starting to forget when it was ever good to begin with, but it's getting worse. We all hate it yet we keep buying it. On one hand, we cannot be blamed. After all,  it's far easier to listen to what's being effectively marketed to you (make no mistake: it's ALL marketing). Let's pull a page from Kid Rock's book. Love him or hate him, the man makes a good point:

If it looks good, you'll see it. If it sounds good, you'll hear it. If it's marketed right, you'll buy it. But if it's real... you'll feel it. 

And he's absolutely right. But we can seek out that which we feel; we can rebel. We can rage against the machine. That's where the "emo" comes in.
Emo is my favorite genre of music, and Max Bemis's band Say Anything's most recent album "Anarchy My Dear" is my favorite record of the year for this exact reason. No other genre of music today is more in touch with this profound philosophic idea than emo. When I was in high school, I listened to nothing but heavy metal because A) I was a rebellious teenager and B) it made me feel powerful. The lyrics and themes of metal revolve around that concept almost exclusively, which is all well and good, but even that primal force of feeling is dipped in the irony-sauce, and some of my favorite metal bands from my youth seem less majestic in retrospect when I realize how un-serious and superficial it all was.
But Say Anything isn't like that. It's genuine to the point of nauseating. It takes all the things you're too afraid to think and say for fear of being laughed at and ridiculed and expresses all of them in way that's impossible to deny. Max Bemis is the paragon of it. He isn't afraid to say what he feels, in fact, he needs to say what he feels. He knows that saying what he feels is not only important but necessary, and the fans respond to it in a way that's hard to put into words. There's a reason fans of SA are more devoted than any you'll find who are hooked up to the mainstream teat (one of them being that it is actually impossible to be a die-hard fan of a popular band, but that's beside the point). It's the same reason that once a year, Max Bemis personally writes songs for and delivers them to individual fans: because we have a soul, and so does he, and when you put a SA record in your CD player and hit play, those two ethereal balls of light glow fiercely with a vibrant kinetic energy that is immediately heartbreaking, satisfying, cathartic, orgasmic; despite the fact that you and him could not be physically further apart. And for those of you out there who have never felt it, I genuinely feel sorry for you.

So fuck you, emo is awesome.

My Dearest Apollo

Wake up. What am I doing today? I don't remember.
Take your medicine. Brush your teeth. No, take your medicine first. You'll forget.
But what if my medicine is actually making it worse. Maybe I shouldn't take it today.
There's no way to know for sure. Better to be safe than sorry.
Maybe I really am addicted after all?
Not possible. That's the crazy talk.
But I'm talking to you too. And you say a lot of things. How does that work?
Hush.
Okay. Now what?
You need to work.
I can't.
You can, you choose not to.
That's even more frightening than not being able to. I would rather know that I am physically incapable of doing something rather than constantly choosing not to do anything.
You're really more afraid of yourself than you are of me?
Shitless.
Well I guess that makes sense. After all, it wasn't me that went out on that bender. It wasn't me that put that mark there. You know, the one everyone keeps asking about. At family gatherings. At friend's houses. In living rooms. In bars.
I don't remember who that is.
Yes you do. It's the real you. You think this is real? This is made up. You manufactured this. I'm here to make you confront your deepest fears.
But I can't face it. I won't. It's all made up anyway. That's all in my head. That's the alternate reality, convincing me of lies. And that's all you are: a liar.
You say this now, yet you allow the lies to become your reality. You know that the more we sit here and talk, the more you're going to realize that you're one-hundred percent completely fucked. And you should give up while you're still ahead.
Enough!
You're not even ahead as it is. You're so far behind it's stupid. You aren't in last: the race already ended and you're still crawling towards the finish line. No one's in the stands. No one's watching. They went home. So you can quit now. They don't care.
Well...
Exactly. Look at this: they all tell you it's okay, you're okay, everything's okay. How can it be okay? You've seen enough movies, read enough books to know exactly how these stories go. There's no possible way this is okay. Are you forgetting the part where
Stop!
Or the part with the crying and screaming. And all the things you shouldn't have said out loud.
That was you!
No, it was you.
No, it was you. It was always you. It was you to begin with. It was always okay, and it still is. The only reason I made things less okay is because you made me think it wasn't okay, so I said fuck it, let's make it as not-okay as it can get. But I didn't have to do that. I could have stopped it...
Right.
Wait...
Yes. Your fault.
No, that's not what I meant. It's yours. I didn't mean to.
You just said you did. You intentionally made it worse. You knew exactly what you were doing.
But that's because I thought I knew exactly what was wrong.
Which is everything.
Which is nothing!
Look: where are your friends now? They're afraid of you. They know what you're capable of now.
I'm capable of good.
But you only do bad.
No, you only do bad. You only cause me harm. Why can't I just get rid of you! Why do you fucking do this to me every day of my life!
Well, look at who's all upset now. And you've only been awake for an hour. Guess what.
Now what?
It'll be this way tomorrow too. And the day after. And the week after that. And next month. And the following year.
Oh Jesus...
So end it now! I mean, look at this mess!
There is no mess. There is no mess. There is no mess. Everything's fine. I swear to God everything's fine. I swear to
Oh dear Lord, this is hilarious! Look at you! You might as well be clutching your knees and rocking back and forth. You are a pathetic cliche.
Please don't let me cry, please don't let them see me cry, this is going to pass this is going to pass this is
This is your reality. Open your eyes. Everything you see right now: it's all real. You can see everyone's thoughts. You're a smart guy, put it together. They all know you're pathetic, because they see what I see right now: a baby! A whimpering child! And it disgusts them. They pity you.
I'm fine I'm okay I'm just fine everything's fine
So here's the deal. You're smart. Oh no, I'll give you that. Otherwise I probably couldn't have sprung up in the first place. So you know a thing or two. They're on to you, but you can still trick them. Trick them one final time. Smile, say hello, give hugs. Make promises. Sound cheerful. Make a joke, laugh along. Let them think I'm not here, and then when they turn their back, let it out. Let every black part out, bleed it out on the floor, let everyone see it, and show them what they were missing all along. And you can die laughing.
What will that accomplish?
Well, it'll silence me once and for all. That's what you want, isn't it? Plus it will prove them wrong. They all underestimate you. They don't take you seriously. They've never felt like you, they've never bled like you, you've known this all along. You were special. You were exceptional. You were genius! So show them. Make them all know. It's only fair, after all this torture. They can never give you what you need. They're only hurting you, while you hurt yourself, and hurt them, and hurt me as I hurt you as the whole big cycle of hurt perpetuates itself and never stops and you can't stop it because you don't even know where it begins or ends.
No. That's not what I want.
Okay, so then don't let them see it. Spare them the final act. They deserve that, anyway. I won't even deny that. I mean, you don't want your grand finale to leave them as fucked up as you, do you?
This isn't me! You are not me! I am me!
Or...could it be that the evil twin is the original to begin with? That I am in fact superior in every way? You know, that whole ego/superego thing. You studied philosophy. You know how this works.
No, you're made up.
Hmm?
It's all in my head. It's all in my head.
Keep telling yourself that.
I can just stop thinking about this right now and go back to...
Back to...?
What? Nothing.
What is it you were doing?
I guess I forgot...
You're getting nothing done today, are you?

"Hey man, what's wrong?"
"Huh? Sorry. What?"
"Look, you can't hide it. Something's upsetting you. Just tell me what's wrong."
"...I don't know man."