This week has been one of much deliberation as I’ve made a new New Year’s Resolution and I pray that I have the spirit to keep to it. With the TUMP Top Ten of 2012 podcast and my written list finally published I can finally put a lid on 2012 and go back to enjoying watching films from all different times of history as opposed to feeling the pressure to fit in one more film to see if it’ll break into the list.
Anyways, here’s what I’ve been watching this week:
ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)
This is the film from last year that has even the news discussing it with people all reacting to its content and what it is believed to saying about the nation of The USA. While some may claim it’s position on many subjects I feel what makes this movie uniquely well developed is how it fails to (or more importantly ignores) bring an emotion or agenda to the topic on hand. While I’m sure filmmaker Katheryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal completed intense research to depict as honest as possible a recreation of events surrounding the hunt for Osama Bin Laden I refuse to pretend that what’s presented is complete fact and therefore take this entirely to be just their own dramatization and nothing more. It doesn’t pro or con anything and properly depicts a search that derailed a nation only to have them wondering why they decided to be derailed in the first place.
CHLOE (2010)
A mediocre film for mediocre stories so that a bunch of actors could have something to do in the summer. When you believe you husband is cheating on you and you go and hire a prostitute to go and try and bang him to prove it to yourself please don’t be surprised to discover said prostitute is crazy. It’s not hard to see where the twists and turns come in this one and that’s about as much as can be said for this movie.
FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT REVISITED (2011)
A short film wherein Danny McBride, Elijah Wood and Seth Rogen play the Beastie Boys in a 30 minute long music video of them just being assholes (ala the Beastie Boys). Has a few laughs and a lot of ‘spot that comic’ moments, but more importantly it reminds me that I love the Beastie Boys music. Some of it at least.
SLEEPLESS NIGHT (2012)
A great tight French action thriller all concluded within the span of one day with this police officer who must go and get his son after a drug dealer kidnaps him because the officer stole his drugs that very morning. It’s without a doubt a lot of fun and very engaging to watch from start to finish.
REWATCHED
With 2012 over I decided to take a look back at the film that was my #1 of the year at the half way point, Take This Waltz, and while I still enjoy the movie as much as I did the first time around I’m glad to see that by the end of the year I had a flurry of films to choose from that I could call its superior.
Also I decided to take another look at Rian Johnson’s Looper which I fail to see any diminishing returns on viewing #3. Which inspired me to revisit Terminator 2: Judgement Day, a film I’d be happy to call Looper’s long lost Uncle (or some other relative of sorts). Both use science-fiction as a means of making an action film happen so seamlessly. Looper does a lot more thematically than Judgement Day, but we can’t all have Arnold Schwarzenegger in our movies can we?
My count for the year of 2013 is updated to 9 First time watches (0 from 2013); 5 Rewatches; 14 Total Films