The 10 best major motion pictures of 2012

1) "Skyfall" - Sam Mendes, Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem et al create a Bond film for the ages. One that looks itself squarely in the mirror and sees the crow's feet yet still finds plenty to smile about. Skyfall [Blu-ray]

2) "The Avengers" - Uber nerd Joss Whedon generates significant movement in the cargo pants of fanboys the world over with his deft handling of the superhero teamup of the century. Marvel's The Avengers (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo in Blu-ray Packaging)

3) "The Grey" - Liam Neeson's most heartfelt performance in years. Maybe ever. The Grey (Two-Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD)

4) "Lincoln" - Hard for me to pick a movie that has "Important" stamped on it before anyone's even seen it but Spielberg's late career embrace and exploration of history hits what may be it's highpoint with this reverential but riveting film. Lincoln [Blu-ray]

5) "Zero Dark Thirty" - Absolutely no disrepect intented to anyone who had a hand in airing out bin-whats-his-name but I suspect that Kathryn Bigelow could make a gripping movie about taking out the trash. Never has the world of policy wonks and intelligence analysts seemed so damned sexy.

6) "The Woman in Black" - Daniel Radcliffe lands squarely on his post-Potter feet with this, the best horror film of the year. Literally spine-tingling. The Woman in Black (+ UltraViolet Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]

7) "Total Recall" - Simultaneously one of the best sci-fi and best action films of the year. The rare badly needed and successful remake. Total Recall (Two Discs: Blu-ray + UltraViolet Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]

8) "Get the Gringo" - Mel Gibson rises from Hollywood purgatory to deliver the snazziest action/comedy in years. "But wait!" you say "How can it be a major motion picture if it went straight to VOD?" Answer: see the part about Mel rising out of purgatory. Get the Gringo [Blu-ray]

9) "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" - Peter Jackson returns to middle earth and, in spite of a few minor missteps, manages to pull a Rhosgobel rabbit out of his hat. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

10) "Prometheus" - It wouldn't have taken much to make this the movie of the year. But it's shortcomings were significant enough that it only gets the last rung on the ladder here. Hopefully Ridley and Co won't be deaf to the criticism and will iron out the wrinkles in the sequel. Prometheus (Blu-ray/ DVD + Digital Copy)

That's it! Farewell 2012, we hardly knew ye.

2012 - The year in review - A good year at the box office

Perhaps it's a good omen for the future, perhaps it's just a one off but 2012 has officially become the most lucrative year in the history of the domestic box office.

For the first time since 2009 gross receipts actually increased this year to $10.8 billion. That's up $600 million over last year (though the total number of admissions is still down from 2002's all time high).

With nothing like "The Avengers" or "The Dark Knight Rises" on the slate for 2013 it may be asking a lot to hope that next year will see a continuation of the upward trend but we'll keep our fingers crossed.

2012 - The year in review - The 5 worst major motion pictures of 2012

It was the best of times and - for the purposes of this list - it was the worst of times. That pretty much explains 2012 in movies. For every "Skyfall" there was a "Hunger Games", for every "Avengers" there was an "Iron Sky" to leave you muttering at the screen. The following is my personal list of the 5 worst films 2012 numbered 1-5 but in no actual order. I could easily fill out a worst 25 list but who wants to spend that much time recalling a bunch of cinematic duck farts? So 5 it is and here they are. 


1) John Carter: Misguided adaptation of the year easily becomes one of the worst major motion pictures of the year.

2) Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance: What do you say about a movie that makes the original "Ghost Rider" seem like "Lawrence of Arabia"? Not much.

3) The Hunger Games: If there was a more completely worthless media darling of a movie this year I'm not aware of it. The Disney post-apocalypse meets "Saw". Somewhere Donald Sutherland is quietly kicking himself for stooping this low.

4) Men in Black III - The first real indication that Will Smith is officially 'waning'. The film's shameless profiteering was almost as shameless as...

5) The Expendables II - Dear Diary: Today was a typical day on the Expendables II set. First the guys talked about lifting weights for 30 minutes. Then they reported to the set. After lots of manly Hollywood-style horsing around the camera guy said the camera would start rolling and the guys were told to act like they were killing bad guys and stuff. There were real Hollywood lights and cables and stuff. It was manrific! Then we had lunch. Then Chuck Norris stopped by so we got him a gun and and he moved it back and forth for a few minutes. He had to leave to get back to the bingo tournament but he's so great. You could feel you were in the presence of a real icon and stuff. After Chuck left, Ahnuld took a break to bang the cleaning lady and Sly ran out to get some more HGH. He didn't get back until it was dark so we turned on the camera and shot some footage of things blowing up at night. Awe-man-some! Sly's pretty confident he'll be able to exhume John Wayne for #3!

2012 - The year in review - The top 10 worldwide box office hits of 2012

While the final numbers aren't in yet this has been a real roller coaster of a year at the box office with everything from the runaway success of "The Avengers" to the Wachowski's DOA "Cloud Atlas". Appalling events like the Colorado theater shooting sent domestic box office results reeling for a couple of weeks while the number of movie goers in places like totalitarian China continues to grow by the day. While overall numbers will likely show a modest increase this year over last the fact is that the number of movies being produced by studios continues to dwindle as the focus on humungous, tent-pole productions continues to grow.

So without further ado here are the 10 biggest global box office successes of 2012.

1) The Avengers - $1.5 billion

2) The Dark Knight Rises - $1.08 billion

3) Skyfall* - $952 million

4) Ice Age: Continental Drift* - $875 million

5) Twilight Breaking Dawn 2* - $778 million

6) The Amazing Spider-Man - $752 million

7) Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted - $742 million

8) The Hunger Games - $686 million

9) Men in Black 3 - $624 million

10) Brave - $535 million

* Still in theaters as of this writing.

2012 - The year in review 1 - Prometheus

This piece contains plot spoilers. You have been warned.

Of all the disappointing movies in 2012 none were more so for me than Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" which arrived brimming with promise and stumbled across the finish line leaving me feeling like I'd just had a great dinner and then got food poisoning from the desert. Back in May I saw it several times in the theater and was of a mind that it was a very good movie that could have been a great one.

With the end of the year (and the world?) staring us in the face now seemed like a good time to begin my year end reviews by revisiting the one movie I had truly high hopes for. I'm going to expand on some of the things I mentioned in my initial review and try and touch on other things I either didn't have space to discuss originally or which only became apparent to me on repeat viewings. To aid me in my quest I watched the DVD a couple of times this past week. 

Let's start at the beginning shall we? It's 2089 right? Are you telling me they don't have some sort of communication device Shaw can use to notify Holloway that she found something in the cave? Here we are 77 years behind them and I think most grammar school kids today would know to simply send him an SMS. Not these future folks though. They stand on the mountainside and scream.

Moving on we come to the matter of one Fifield. The most poorly conceived, poorly written character in major motion pictures this year. All those responsible for this character seeing the light of the big screen should get a special Oscar for "WTF of the year". Every second this nasty clown is on the screen the film is substantially diminished. Fifield is the kind of character that might work for a week or two on "Survivor" or "Lost" but has absolutely no place in a serious sci-fi motion picture. You can get away with things on TV you simply cannot get away with in the theater. If "Lost: featuring Fifield" comes on the tube a viewer can just turn the station and watch a Simpsons rerun. In the theater though that same viewer has only 2 choices: either put up with it or leave, and no one wants to walk out of a movie after just plopping down hard earned cash for their seat.

Next we come to Vickers. Right up front I should say I like Charlize Theron. She's a damn fine actor. Here however she's wasted; told to stand in the shadows and sneer or stand in the foreground and sneer. Her character has not a single redeeming quality. Even the revelation that she's Weyland's long ignored daughter (a fact which is apparently at the heart of her loathsomeness) lands flat because it comes out at the same time she's making a public pitch for the old man to die so that she can get her hands on his money. The scene made modest allusion to the confrontation in Scott's "Gladiator" where Commodus vents at his Emperor father for his years of neglect yet it carries none of that scene's power. Imagine if Commodus had said his famous "I'd slaughter the world, if you would just love me!" and then let slip "Oh, and will you hurry up and die so I can have your sandals?"

There are myriad other problems with the film and they almost all come down to writing. More specifically characterization(s). Among these problems are: trained scientists who repeatedly do the most bone-headed things imaginable. Crew members who decide on the spot to sacrifice their lives with little more than a light-hearted chuckle. Janek and Vickers who go from adversaries to lovers to adversaries without even a "how could you?" There's the engineers who, for absolutely no apparent reason are filled with naught but seething hostility for their progeny. Charlie Holloway who goes from excited kid to depressed boozer in a matter of minutes without even a quick shot of him frowning in between. And Janek, who spontaneously changes from disinterested skipper of the Minnow to an analyst for Jane's Defense Weekly.

Here's a few other things that don't add up for me:
Exactly how did the homocidal engineer know that Shaw had left his ship and gone to the lifeboat?
How is it that the xenomorph at the very end is born full-size?
How did the union of Shaw and Holloway produce a land-based carnivorous octopus? The goo by itself is not life but a kind of steroid. Holloway ingested the goo which should have changed him into something more aggressive, (like it did with the worms) then when he mated with Shaw they should have produced some kind of mean-spirited hyper offspring. But a room-sized, Octobaby-facesucker? Where did the DNA for that come from?
Let's not even talk about Shaw's winning the Olympic decathlon minutes after having her mid-section sliced open and stapled back together.

I honestly cannot think of another film where the disconnect between the pictures and the words are so pronounced. Prometheus is both a stunning visual achievement and a narrative mess. The picture people knew how to utilize every square inch of the movie screen to breathtaking advantage. The sound people (writers and composer Marc Streitenfeld) thought they were writing for TV where mistakes can be glossed over or buried in an avalanche of episodes and insipid scores are de rigueur. The score, in fact, is so cheesy, small and inappropriate that, even if the writers hadn't suffered from their extended brain cramps, Prometheus might have failed to get off the launch pad because of it.

Prometheus had no business being as confusing and inexplicable as it was but it was a modest financial success and plans for a sequel are well under way. As such it is my most heartfelt wish that Ridley Scott purge his sequel crew of anyone that had anything to do with the script for this film - as well as the composer - and start fresh. Restraining orders should be taken out on Damon Lindelof and Marc Streitenfeld ordering them to have no contact of any kind with anyone involved in the production of the sequel and all the reality show castoffs who died in Prometheus must stay dead. The last thing a sequel needs is a Vickers clone.

There were enough things afoot at the end of Prometheus to provide for a rich and satisfying sequel that could make us forget about film 1's shortcomings. For that to happen though Ridley Scott will have to leave many of his crew from Prometheus on LV-223 as he follows Shaw and David into the unknown and focus on storytelling - not just ass-kicking visuals - next time around.