Die, die, die, 2012! Besides being a period of personal lows, it was a bad year at the movies for me. Not only did the quantity of the films I watched come down, but the enthusiasm with which I watched, read about and discussed films plummeted. That the amount of good films made this year pales in comparison to the last doesn’t help either. Not to mention the passing of Chris Marker. Unlike the years before, there are barely a handful of movies from 2012 that I’m really keen on seeing (most of them from Hollywood). The following list of favorite 2012 titles (world premiere only) was chalked with some struggle because I couldn’t name 10 films that I loved without reservations. Here’s to a better year ahead.
1. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, Canada)
Surely, it takes a bona fide auteur like David Cronenberg to locate his signature concerns in a text – such as Don Delillo’s – that deals with ideas hitherto unexplored by him and spin out the most exciting piece of cinema this year. Holed up in his stretch limo – an extension of his body, maneuvering through Manhattan inch by inch as though breathing – Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) comprehends the universe outside like cinema, through a series of moving images projected onto his car windows. Why not? This world, whose master he is, is experiencing the epistemological crisis of late capitalism: the increasing abstraction of tactile reality into digital commodities. Packer, like many Cronenberg characters, is more machine than man, attempts – against the suggestions of his asymmetrical prostate and of the protagonist of Cronenberg’s previous film – to construct a super-rational predictable model of world economy – a project whose failure prompts him to embark on an masochistic odyssey to reclaim the real, to experience physicality, to be vulnerable and to ultimately die. At the end of the film, one imagines Packer shouting: “Death to Cyber-capitalism! Long live the new flesh!”
2. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France)
Un chant d’amour for cinema, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is an ambitious speculation about the total transformation of life into cinema and cinema into life – the death of the actor, audience and the camera. The European cousin to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), Carax’s return-to-zero work draws inspiration from the process of film itself – death, resurrection and persistence of vision – and takes cinema to its nascence – fairground attractions, popular theatre and zoopraxography – while opening up to its future possibilities. Uncle Oscar (Denis Lavant, the raison d’etre of Holy Motors), like Cronenberg’s Packer, cruises the streets of Paris in his limo in search of purely physical experiences – a series of performance pieces carried out solely for “the beauty of the act” – only to find that the city is a gigantic simulacrum in which everyone is a performer and a spectator (and thus no one is) and where the distinction between the real and the fictional becomes immaterial. At the very least, Holy Motors is a reflection on the passing of “things”, of physicality, of the beauty of real gesture, of the grace of movement of men and machines.
3. differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey, France)
Nicolas Rey’s third feature, consisting of 9 short segments (reels, to be precise) projected in a random sequence, is a radical project that re-politicizes the cinematic image. Not only does the randomization of the order of projection of the reels circumvent the problem of the authoritarianism of a fixed narrative, it also exposes the seam between the semi-autonomous theses-like segments, thereby making the audience attentive to possible ideological aporias that are usually glossed over by the self-fashioned integrity of filmic texts. Furthermore, the existence of the film in the form separate reels is a breathing reminder of the material with which it was made: 16mm. The persistent dialectic between the visual – shots of highways, industries, farms and modernist suburban housing in the eponymous fictional city registering the sedate rhythm of everyday life – and the aural – snippets of conversations between two politicized industrial workers about the invisible tendons that enable a society to function smoothly – strongly drives home the chief, Althusserian concern of the film: the essential unity of the various, seemingly autonomous, strands of a state, contrary to claims of disjunction and autonomy.
4. Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
A film that is reminiscent of Weerasethakul’s many bipartite films, Miguel Gomes’ singular Tabu, too, works on a range of binaries – past/present, youth/old age, city/countryside, abundance/scarcity, modern/primitive, colonizer/colonized – and sets up a conversation between the carefree, profligate days of the empire full of love, laughter and danger and Eurocrisis-inflected, modern day Portugal marked by alienation and loneliness. The opening few minutes – a melancholy mini-mockumentary of sorts chronicling the adventures of a European explorer in Africa with a native entourage –announces that the film will be balancing distancing irony and classicist emotionality, donning an attitude that is in equal measure critical and sympathetic towards the past. In Gomes’ sensitive film, the heavy hand of the past weighs down on the present both on aesthetic (silent cinema stylistics, film stock, academy ratio, the excitement of classical genres) and thematic (collective colonial guilt, residual racism, punishment for forbidden love) levels and this inescapability of the past is also functions as (sometimes dangerous) nostalgia for the simplicity and innocence of a cinema lost and an entreaty for the necessity of exploring and preserving film history.
5. Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl, Austria)
What partially elevates the first film of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy from its rather undistinguished concerns about emotional alienation and old age loneliness is the nexus of intriguing cultural forces that it brings into the picture by having a relatively affluent, 50-year old Austrian single-mother (Margarete Tiesel, in a no-holds-barred performance) indulge in sex tourism in Kenya along with five other women friends. The result is a rich, provocative negotiation along class, gender, race and age divides that upsets conventional, convenient oppressor-oppressed relationships. In doing so, the film wrenches love from the realm of the universal and the ahistorical and demonstrates that between two people lies the entire universe. Seidl’s heightened, bright colour palette that provides a sharp chromatic contrast to the bodies of Kenyan natives and his confrontational, static, frontal compositions (Seidl’s nudes are antitheses to those of the Renaissance), which make indoor spaces appear like human aquariums, both invite the voyeuristic audience to take a peek into this world and place it on another axis of power – of the observer and the observed.
6. With You, Without You (Prasanna Vithanage, Sri Lanka)
Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage’s exquisite, exceptional adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Meek One (1876) aptly locates the Russian tale of matrimonial discord between a bourgeois pawnbroker and the gentle creature he weds within the ethno-political conflict between nationalist and rebel factions of the country. Unlike humanist war dramas that, often naively, stress the underlying oneness among individuals on either side, Vithanage’s intelligent film underscores how the political haunts the personal and how the tragic weight of history impacts the compatibility between individuals here and now, while deftly retaining Dostoyevsky’s central theme of ownership of one human by another. Though liberal in narration and moderate in style compared to Mani Kaul’s and Robert Bresson’s adaptations of the short story, Vithanage, too, employs an attentive ambient soundtrack that counts down to an impending doom and numerous shots of hands to emphasize the centrality of transaction in interpersonal relationships. The metaphysical chasm between the possessor and the possessed finds seamless articulation in concrete sociopolitical relations between Sinhalese and Tamils, between the army and refugees, between the poor and the wealthy and between man and woman.
7. Walker (Tsai Ming-liang, Hong Kong)
There has always been something intensely spiritual about Tsai’s films, even when they seem to wallow in post-apocalyptic cityscapes and defunct social constructions. In Tsai’s hands, it would seem, an empty subway corridor shot in cheap digital video becomes the holiest of spaces ever filmed. Walker, a high-def video short made as a part of the Beautiful 2012 project commissioned by Hong Kong International Film Festival, crystallizes this particular tendency in the director’s work and centers on a Buddhist monk played by Lee Kang-sheng (a muse like no other in 21st century cinema). As the monk walks the hyper-commercialized streets of Hong Kong at a phenomenally slow pace for two days and two nights, his red robe becomes a visual anchor in stark contrast to the greys of the urban jungle and the blacks of people’s winter clothing and his very being, his eternal presence, becomes a spiritual grounding point amidst the impersonal hustle-bustle of this super-capitalist Mecca. Part performance art with a gently cynical punch line, part an exploration of the limits of DV, Walker is a deeply soothing and often moving work from one of Asia’s finest.
8. Celluloid Man (Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, India)
Moving unsteadily with the help of a walking stick, the 79-year old founder of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), P. K. Nair, despite himself, becomes a metaphor for the state of film archiving in the country. It is of considerable irony that, in a nation that prides itself for its rich cultural heritage, film archiving is considered a useless exercise. During the three decades that Nair headed the NFAI, he was instrumental in discovering the silent works and early talkies of Bombay and south Indian cinema, including those of Dadasaheb Phalke, the “father of Indian cinema”. Celluloid Man, bookended by scenes from Citizen Kane (1941), draws inspiration from Welles’ film and sketches a fascinating if reverential portrait of Nair constructed from interviews with international filmmakers, scholars, historians and programmers and curiously hinged on the fact of Nair’s “Rosebud” – ticket stubs, promotional material and assorted film-related curios that the man collected during his childhood. Shivendra Singh’s film is a irresistible romp through early Indian cinema and an endlessly absorbing tribute to a man who is fittingly dubbed the “Henri Langlois of India”. To paraphrase one of the interviewees, Phalke gave Indian cinema a past, Nair gave it a history.
9. Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan, Canada)
Although it might appear that it is perhaps the hollowness of Xavier Dolan’s previous feature that makes his latest, 160-minute music video look like a cinematic coup, Laurence Anyways really does succeed in accomplishing more than most of contemporary “LGBT-themed independent cinema”. While the latter – including this year’s Cahiers darling – almost invariably consists of realist, solidarity pictures that use social marginalization as shorthand for seriousness, Dolan’s emotionally charged film takes the game one step further and probes the inseparability of body and character, the effect of the physical transformation of a person on all his relationships – a transformation that is mirrored in the flamboyant, shape-shifting texture of the film – without sensationalizing the transformation itself. Rife, perhaps too much so, with unconventional aesthetic flourishes and personal scrapbook-ish inserts, the film rekindles and enriches the youthful verve of the Nouvelle Vague – a move that should only be welcome by film culture. If not anything more, Laurence Anyways establishes that critics need to stop using its author’s age as a cudgel and look at his cinema du look as something more than a compendium of adolescent affectations.
10. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA)
Let me confess upfront that putting Wes Anderson’s (surprise!) whimsy, twee and self-conscious Moonrise Kingdom in my year-end list is less a full-hearted appreciation of the film than a confession that I find Anderson to be an important voice that I’m genuinely keen about, but can’t entirely celebrate. I don’t think I’ve seen any film that employs so many elements of industrial cinema yet feels meticulously artisanal, a film that, on the surface, seems to (literally) play to the gallery yet is so full of personality and one that is oddly familiar yet thoroughly refuses instant gratification. Moonrise Kingdom appears to have every ingredient of an obnoxious family comedy, but the unironic, straight-faced attitude and the single-minded conviction with which it moulds the material into an anti-realist examination of the anxieties of growing up, alone, is something not to be found either in cynical mainstream cinema or in the overwrought indie scene of America. Anderson’s neo-sincere film is, as it were, a classicist text couched within a postmodern shell, an emotional film without affect. Paper blossoms, but blossoms nonetheless.
January 1, 2013 at 5:36 pm
With Scorsese, steven soderbergh, Jim jarmusch, werner herzog, Richard linklater, Alexander payne and jean-freakin-Luc on the forefront, 2013 promises to be bright.
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January 1, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Oh yeah, it sure does! Happy new year,
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January 2, 2013 at 10:52 am
What a great list here JAFB, as always interesting to read and comment on.
“Cosmopolis” is a movie that I watched and inmediatly thought that it was ok, good, and then I forgot about it completely, I think the message or whatever it was trying to achieve didn’t stick with me, and hell, I’d love to see a good critique to any form of capitalism, but here I found none.
“Holy Motors” is, of course, one of the best films of the year, and you frame it spectacularly, kudos for that, I love the capsule!
I still haven’t seen “Tabu”, but I’m going to!
“Walker” is an interesting short, I even wrote a review for it at Wonders in the Dark, the whole contrast and colour and images that you frame so good in the capsule is just what I saw, but I wouldn’t put it in my list.
I think I understand what you say about Wes Anderson, but his direction has always bothered me, as well as the acting he seems to get out of his performers, but here he managed something else, and I think here we have to thank the script of “Moonrise Kingdom”, because Wes Anderson was made to make movies about kids or childish things, it suits his gallery and over.beautified style.
My own top 10 of 2012 (pure) as of now is like this:
1. Amour
2. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
3. The Dark Knight Rises
4. Indie Game: The Movie
5. Holy Motors
6. Cloud Atlas
7. Safety Not Guaranteed
8. Ace Attorney
9. Moonrise Kingdom
10. Where the Condors Fly
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January 2, 2013 at 6:24 pm
Thanks for the notes, Jaime.
A pretty eclectic list there, sure to raise more than a few eyebrows (esp. the Miike and The Hobbit). Have’t heart of INDIE GAME or CONDORS, but will check out what it is right away.
Of course, AMOUR and TDKR are the two films where I found much to like and much not to as well.
And wish you a happy new year.
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January 2, 2013 at 9:17 pm
Well, you know, I’m a sucker for Miike and Middle Earth, and videogames in general. I’d be interested if you ever see Condors, but it’s not available right now in any form.
Happy new year to you as well!
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January 2, 2013 at 12:09 pm
Happy new year, man!
And at last a list of movies to watch \m/
Got a hard disk which had all movies tagged with (very cute movie), (cute romantic comedy) etc., and for the lack of better things to watch – I did sit through a couple of those :p
Except for Moonrise Kingdom (which I have not watched), haven’t heard of the others at all :)
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January 2, 2013 at 6:25 pm
Happy new year to you too, buddy. Hope you find something less cute and more interesting among these!
Cheers!
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January 2, 2013 at 8:49 pm
Ah my friend, your compromised presence on the boards was sorely missed, but the reality of life takes precedent over blogging, which is really a luxury we can’t always enjoy. Still, I found 2012 a stronger year than 2011, and I dare say when you get around to everything you plan on seeing you will have a different appraisal. My own Number 1 choice THE TURIN HORSE, was your top film of last year, so right there we have a disparity of balance. Still we both agree that Tarr’s film is a staggering masterpiece. I am no fan of your Number 1 film this year (COSMOPOLIS) but I’ve stated my case on that, and I greatly respect your opinion. I do like HOLY MOTORS quite a bit, though it barely missed my list, and I do like MOONRISE KINGDOM. One of the most mystifying cinematic perceptions of this past year is how it is possible that a movie as torturous and pretentious as the Portugese TABU has won over so many critics. Some interesting ideas are wasted in a film poorly paced and simplistically visualized. No narrative cohesiveness, labored humor, no emotional connection. Also, I will say I agree with you on AMOUR, which I found brilliantly crafted and acted, but still an alienating film that practically implies it’s better to be dead than alive. I have it here on my “runners-up” list, but don’t think I’d watch it again.
As always your exceeding scholarship provides for wonderful and insightful reading! This is the first I have heard of DIFFERENTLY MOLUSSIA and WITH YOU, WITHOUT YOU. I’ll have to check out both!
My own completely list with the traditional tenth-place tie is as follows:
1. The Turin Horse
2. The Life of Pi
3. Oslo, August 31st
4. Les Miserables
5. War Witch
6. Zero Dark Thirty
7. Lincoln
8. Django Unchained
9. The Impossible
10. The Deep Blue Sea
and
The Perks of Being A Wallflower (tie)
Films that barely missed in no particular order:
Holy Motors
The Kid with a Bike
Amour
Monsieur Lazhar
Planet of Snail
A Royal Affair
Footnote
This is NOT a Film
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
Bernie
Argo
Frankenweenie
Moonrise Kingdom
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Happy New Year to you and yours my friend!
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January 3, 2013 at 2:25 pm
As usual, you’ seem to have had a terrific year, and your list is worthy of perpetual discussion.
Of course, we see eye to eye on Tarr’s film, And ZDT and DJANGO are two of the films I really want to see. As for LINCOLN, though I find it to be a skillfully done work (often with good taste and restraint), I have a problem with its history-as-a-closed-project approach, a la AMISTAD.
I remember thinking “Sam’s gonna love this” when I watched THE LIFE OF PI, and its inclusion here doesn’t surprise me (though DJANGO’s does!).
Re: TABU: I admit I’m very surprised by your vehement aversion to it, but I understand your reservations. Even I was a little taken aback initially with what seemed to be a calculated and cut-and-dried method, but it grew on me real quick.
Thanks for your elaborate comment and continuous support, Sam. Hope my presence in the ‘osphere is stronger this time around!
Happy new year to you and your family too!
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January 3, 2013 at 6:14 pm
And, Sam, gotta add, I’d take WAR WITCH over BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD too.
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January 3, 2013 at 12:16 am
Happy new year JAFB. Hope you get to see many more films this year. Although,your juicy & balanced list surely can be misleading about your year’s cinematic quantity. You managed to catch some of those must see films.
There could have been a possibility that your top 2 would have been flipped in my top 2. For a good portion of COSMOPOLIS, that seemed to be the case. But I can’t remember at what point my reaction turned. I plan to read the book before revisiting the film just to make sure my reaction is directed at the right source.
TABU is another revisit for me. I found one part more mesmerizing than the other. Or 2 out of 3 if I take the introduction to be separate.
And I have yet to see the Dolan. Missed it at our film festival & was certain it would open in cinemas. Instead, it went directly to online rental which I didn’t get around to see. But will seek it out soon.
Take care…
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January 3, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Thanks and a very happy new year to you too, Sachin.
HOLY MOTORS and COSMOPOLIS are pretty much interchangeable for me too, and the former would have topped, another day, another time.
Was planning to tell you last week: a lovely list at your place too, So many titles unheard of, the Canadian titles especially.
Cheers!
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January 3, 2013 at 1:25 am
Greetings,
Nice to know I wasn’t alone in thinking what passed us by was a bad year for good cinema. (I was beginning to wonder if something happened to my taste in movies.) However, in a year that saw Holy Motors – a (new) cinema that (partly) laments old cinema, it all seems coincidentally apt.
My own Top Ten list would go something like this:
1. Holy Motors
2.
3.
4.
5. Cosmopolis
6. Samsara
7.
8.
9.
9-1/2. Gangs of Wasseypur 1
10.
With Honorable Mentions:
1. Kadhalil Sodhapuvadu Yeppadi
2.
3. Raid: Redemption
4.
5. Moonrise Kingdom
(That was some tough work.)
I look forward to viewing Tabu and others from your list, especially With You, Without You and differently, Molussia.
For a critic who articulates so well, and whose insights are well-informed, I wish you write more. I hope you will.
A good year to you.
Regards
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January 3, 2013 at 2:32 pm
Thanks, Ahimaaz. HOLY MOTORS is most definitely the film event of the year (despite the 48fps film). And gotta watch Fricke’s film some day. BARAKA is a quasi-favorite and that’s good enough to catch up with the new one.
A happy new year to you too!
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January 27, 2013 at 6:00 pm
The 48 FPS, from what I understand, makes a movie lifelike – wonder why mainstream movies would employ it, I mean, if suspension of disbelief is what they’re aiming at. Would it turn out to be as “good” a gimmick as 3D or as bad as motion capture?
Samsara, as a companion piece to Baraka, isn’t as riveting as the latter but still mostly fascinating.
I saw Tabu and liked it very much – one of those movies makes you want to watch it again.
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February 3, 2013 at 7:57 pm
Haven’t seen THE HOBBIT, but have a feeling it might turn out to appear like a TV show. No plans of watching it in the near future whatsoever though!
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January 3, 2013 at 6:13 am
“In Tsai’s hands, it would seem, an empty subway corridor shot in cheap digital video becomes the holiest of spaces ever filmed.”
Heavens yes. Said more succinctly than I could manage (a piece I wrote on A CONVERSATION WITH GOD went on Notebook yesterday).
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January 3, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Hi Srikanth,
Another beautiful list :) was hoping to see Post Tenebras Lux & Beasts of southern wild on ur list :( but i can’t agree more on holy motors, paradise love and laurence anyways:) where did u watch Tabu ?
and check ur fb inbox !!
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January 3, 2013 at 2:42 pm
Thanks Arun,
Haven’t seen a single Reygadas film yet. And I am in two minds about the very polarizing BEASTS.
I’ll drop you a message today. Happy new year to you!
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January 3, 2013 at 2:39 pm
Alex, your comment here is sorta surreal, because I’d just finished reading your excellent write-up on FISH, UNDERGROUND just as you made the comment. (My favorite part: “It’s in the shots of “nothing” where Tsai finds something lurking, a presence that not seen but felt”).
For the benefit of other readers: http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/there-is-only-this
Thanks and a very happy new year to you!
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January 4, 2013 at 7:53 am
Well if that isn’t an odd bit of synchronistic happenstance. :) Gotta love the internet sometimes.
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January 3, 2013 at 5:47 pm
Am yet to catch up with most of the films you mention here (my city’s annual film festival is still a week away )
What did you think of Gangs Of Wasseypur, Shanghai, Paan Singh Tomar? Would love to hear your critique on these films. (capsules, maybe?) We aren’t anywhere close to making great films yet, but I really like where Hindi cinema’s going, especially with the indie gems released under the Directors’ Rare initiative (My personal favorites, Kshay and Supermen Of Malegaon are available on YouTube legally)
Oh and great list as always; and Happy New Year!
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January 3, 2013 at 6:12 pm
Hi MP,
I missed PAAN SINGH TOMAR, unfortunately. SHANGHAI is perhaps my favorite Hindi film of the year (Banerjee’s Eisensteinian dynamics is perhaps the most striking aspect in Indian cinema last year). As for WASSEYPUR, I was thrilled and put off in equal measures (unbridled, anti-Renaissance narrative undermined by self-styled epic creating tendencies). As for the “indies”, I wasn’t really impressed by most of the films I managed to catch up at the festival, though films like BA PASS will garner its hosannas from film buffs.
Enjoy your film fest (PIFF, I suppose?). Thanks and a happy new year to you too!
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January 3, 2013 at 9:03 pm
As of Wasseypur, I completely hear you. Even I was pretty disappointed with its tendency to reduce everything to a flat gag robbing the film of any possible dramatic impact and the stretching-to-the-point-of-breaking of the occasional brilliant idea (sample this: I really like that Sardar was more of an indulgent buffoon than a towering don, but that “andhere me operation kar” bit, really? Ditto for the Sultan killing in part 2)
That said, it grew on me like crazy on subsequent viewings.
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January 4, 2013 at 10:18 pm
Hi Srikanth
At least we can share Tabu!. The distribution of Asian films is getting worse in the UK, so I wasn’t even aware of some of your picks. I quite enjoyed Xavier Dolan’s earlier ‘I Killed My Mother’ which seemed strongly Nouvelle Vague-obsessed. Not sure about the 160 mins of Laurence Anyways though.
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January 5, 2013 at 9:10 am
Hi Roy,
I caught up with the Asian films at the local film fest and I’m not sure if these films have been picked up for distribution in the first place.
A happy new year to you!
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January 7, 2013 at 12:41 am
Cosmopolis as the top pick for the decade is a great choice. It was a film that left me in admiration of it’s style but cold in it’s substance when I first watched the film in theaters during the summer. However since, I’ve reevaluated and come to the opinion that it is one of the ten best films of the year because the film was able to accomplish something few films did for me this year: It made me think about it after I saw it. I’m currently catching up on 2012 film I missed so I can make my top ten for my blog, but of what I’ve seen, I argue fully with you about how disappointing this past year has been. A decent amount od interesting films here and there, but very few films I can call great. However there are still a few films to catch up on, and after seeing Walker and Paradise: Love make your list, they’ve just made it to the top of my list of must sees before my official top ten is posted.
My top ten (so far):
1. Dream and Silence/Sueño y silencio – dir. Jaime Rosales (Spain/France)
2. On Dealt Row – dir. Werner Herzog (US)
3. Amour – dir. Michael Haneke (France/Austria/Germany)
4. Paul Clipson’s work: Landscap Dissolves; Another Void; Abseigend (US)
5. Cosmopolis – dir. David Cronenberg (Canada/France/Portugal/Italy)
6. The Master – dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (US)
7. differently, Molussia/autrement, la Molussie – dir. Nicolas Rey (France)
8. Thursday til Sunday/De jueves a domingo – dir. Dominga Sotomayor Castillo (Chile/Netherlands)
9. Holy Motors – dir. Leos Carax (France/Germany)
10. ParaNorman – dir. Chris Butler/Sam Fell (US)
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January 7, 2013 at 2:50 am
I just read my comment and realized i made some terrible errors. Rather than “decade” i should have typed “year”, rather than “argue” I should have said “agree” and “od” to “of.” Ugh thats embarrassing.
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January 7, 2013 at 3:35 pm
Thanks for the comments and the list, Anubhav. I’d missed out on Rosales’ film last year even though I had the chance. I’ll take note. I’m also interested in PAUL CLIPSON… which I haven’t heard of now. And a surprising entry with PARANORMAN there.
Thanks again and a very happy new year to you!
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January 29, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Srikanth, Came back to your blog as I was dusting up my delicious bookmarks. Great work, please keep it going. I am a self made movie buff, I have noone among my friends with common tastes. I scour the net/imdb and other sites and pick a director and watch all of his/her movies. Right now I am on to Michael Haneke.
I have a question for you which may help other movie buffs like me( esp from India). Among the deluge of movies released every year how do you pick movie to watch? Meaning how did you hear about movies like Holy Motors, differently molussia, tabu etc.
And similarly, how do you choose to ignore certain movies?
Thanks,
Vinay.
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February 3, 2013 at 8:00 pm
Vinay,
Following festival coverage (Mubi, Fandor, NYT, In Contention) and critics on Twitter is pretty much what I do to know what’s significant right now. The rest is experience and intuition!
Hope that helps!
Cheers!
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February 11, 2013 at 3:27 pm
Wow! Those are 4 awesome resources you mentioned there, thanks a ton!
Vinay.
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