Results: The Jasper’s Take Awards 2012

The least coveted awards in the film business. The ones about which Matt Damon might have said “which ones?” The ones that even Kate Winslet is not interested in. They’re here. They’re now. The Jasper’s Take Awards 2012 (not Winslet and Damon, though that’d have been very cool). So, I hear you thinking, who are the ignorant winners?

The Michael Bay Award for loudest action film

In the absence of Michael Bay himself this year, and with the knowledge that I did not go and see the reportedly deafening Battleship, this award goes to – drum raffle and big bang – The Avengers. A film so loud that my review was literally unhearable in the mayhem…

The Adam Sandler Award for least funny comedy

Adam Sandler himself churned out two hugely unlikable ‘comedies’ this year (That’s My Boy and Jack & Jill), but to let him take part in this awards race would be unfair to the other contenders. So which movie was the least funny funny-film in 2012? Don’t laugh! It was The Watch. The only good thing about this film is that it reminded me of The IT-Crowd…

The Intelligent Design Award for worst case of history rewritten

There is actually some fun to be had with the idea of moon-nazis. And there is something charming about a British bloke making up an affair he had with Marilyn Monroe. Hugo sweetened the history of early cinema a bit too much, but had a good heart. But real toe-curling history-twitching this year concerned the painful subjects of slavery and racism. The award is shared between Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (this year’s worst film in general) and the painful The Help (aka White People Solve Racism).

The Iron Man 2 Award for least inspired sequel/prequel/spin-off

Next year this award can be properly awarded to Iron Man 3 of course, but for now we’ll have to make due. What was the least-inspired, most blindly-cash-grabbing sequel, threequel, spin-off, prequel or reboot of the year? Of course! It was the entirely unwanted The Amazing Spider-Man. A film that was only made so that Sony could keep the rights to the world’s most boring super hero.

The Martin McFly Award for best use of time travelling 

Quite some time-travelling going on this year. Or going to be in the history of thirty years from now. Looper had me wondering too often ‘what? And ‘how?’ Men in Black III was simply caught up in its own inconsistencies. Total Recall went back to the eighties and stole the set of Blade Runner, so that rules it out of competition. Which made me choose between Goldfinger‘s Aston Martin turning up in Skyfall and the eventual winner: The Muppets! Yes! Now that Einsteinian physics is re-established, surely the travel-by-map option constitutes bending the rules of light and time?

The Mind Heist Award for most enthusiasticating trailer

The most difficult choice. Argo‘s use of Dream On? The mysterious moodiness of Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da? Skyfall‘s breath-take-away-er? Fiveandahalf (!) minutes of Cloud Atlas? All worthy contenders, but the award for the best trailer goes to….

What kind of year has it been?

Well, any year in which The Campaign, The Help, The Watch and American Pie: Reunion don’t even make it on the ‘Flop 10′ list can’t have been a very good year, right? Or so you’d think…

2012 has been the year of the return of the hero. There was a new Spider-man (now toatz Amazing!) The dark knight rose, Bond was back and better than the last time around and the Hulk was not the lousiest Avenger on the assembly.

2012 was also the year of films about films and filmmaking. The Artist and Hugo scored big on Oscar night, while Argo – with its bonkers-but-real plot – is one of the favourites for the next big Academy ceremony. Meanwhile, Chronicle and The Cabin in the Woods were fresh efforts in the worn out genres of the superhero film and the slasher.

It was a mixed year for Charlize Theron. Young Adult – directed by Jason Reitman and penned by Diablo Cody – won over the critics, but not the audiences. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus must have earned its budget back, but was quite a disappointment – Despite the martketingf hype. Theron’s most succesful film was Snow White and the Huntsman, which she graced with a terrific menacing turn as the evil queen.

It was a year that proved that comedy is at its best when it is merciless. Despite the broad crudeness I laughed a lot during Ted, The Inbetweeners and A Few Best Men. More ‘family friendly’ comedy, like The Watch, was simply boring. And The Campaign was simply not pushing it far enough.

In the end, 2012 was the year of ‘finally…’ After all the troubles at MGM we finally had the new Bond, and finally the first part of The Hobbit. The Cabin in the Woods had been made years ago, but only saw its release this summer. And the Finnish makers of Iron Sky, finally, got the money together to finish their film.

But what I’ll remember most, is that any year in which Ted, Jagten, Skyfall, Chronicle and The Cabin in the Woods do not make it on the ‘Top 10′ list can’t have been a bad year…

Rest of the year agenda + nominations Jasper’s Take Awards 2012

Having survived Roland Emmerich’s 2012, it is now time to do some introspection. So the rest of this week of the year will be devoted to looking back on the ‘year of film’ that 2012 was. What have we got in store for you the next few days? Well, first of all – today – I will present the nominees for the Jasper’s Take Awards 2012. As introduced last year, the  Jasper’s Take Awards celebrate all those qualities films can possess that are generally overlooked by the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press Agency and the British Academy. The winners of the 2012 awards will be announced one week from now, on Sunday December 30th. Of course you are more than welcome to try and influence the outcome, by posting good arguments in favor or for candidates on this website, on twitter or on facebook.

Another yearly feature in the last week of the year are my Top 10 and Flop 10 of the year: lists of the ten best and worst films we’ve been presented in the last twelve months. Please do not that these lists only contain those films that I saw in the cinema and reviewed on this website in 2012. Michael Haneke’s Amour, for instance, wont be on any list, because I have not been in the mood for any Haneke film this month. The Flop 10 will be posted online on December 29th, and the Top 10 – appropriately, on the 29th.

A new last-week-of-the-year feature will be the little essay titled ‘What kind of year has it been?’ In this little post, which will be posted on December 27th, I will look back on the year, discern some trends and surprising developments, and also discuss those films which just did not make it into either the Flop or the Top 10. Inbetween all this looking back and introspecting I will try and deliver some reviews of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina.

But now: The nominations for the  Jasper’s Take Awards of 2012:

The Michael Bay Award for loudest action film: The Avengers, Dredd 3D, Wrath of the Titans, Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man

The Adam Sandler Award for least funny comedy: The Campaign, American Pie: Reunion, Dark Shadows, The Watch, The Inbetweeners

The Intelligent Design Award for worst case of history rewritten: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Iron Sky, The Help, Hugo, My Week With Marilyn

The Iron Man 2 Award for least inspired sequel/prequel/spin-off: Wrath of the Titans, American Pie: Reunion, Prometheus, Men in Black III, The Amazing Spider-Man

Finally then, a positive award:

The Martin McFly Award for best use of time travelling: Looper, Total Recall, Men in Black III, The Muppets (travel by map scene), Skyfall (look, it’s the car from Goldfinger! How did that get here?)

And last year’s favourite gets to make a comeback:

The Mind Heist Award for most enthusiasticating trailer: Skyfall, Cloud Atlas, Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da, Moonrise Kingdom, Argo

For inspiration, look up last year’s winners!

Review: The Bourne Legacy (dir. Tony Gilroy)

Story: Jeremy Renner is Alex Cross, another agent in the secret Treadstone project of the CIA. His superiors want him dead to cover up the project after Jason Bourne exposed it. Together with a doctor (Rachel Weisz) who is also on the kill list, Cross escapes and sets out to reclaim his life.

I have never been a big fan of the Bourne movies. I liked Robert Ludlum’s novels well enough, but I though that The Bourne Identity was a poor adaptation. The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, directed by the much lauded Paul Greengrass, took their titles from the novels, but nothing else. Supremacy and Ultimatum are widely considered to have changed the face of action films. But I never much cared for that new face. The shaky camera style that makes it impossible to keep up with what is happening in an action scene is in my opinion but a trick to conceal that the filmmaker does not know how to properly shoot an action scene.

(Proper action scenes, I think, are hardly shot anymore, now that this trick has become widespread. Even the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace was hampered by it. I much prefer old-fashioned action set pieces like those directed by Michael Mann or Philip Noyce)

Where I find Greengrass’ contribution to the Bourne series to be overrated, I must admit that I was a big fan of Matt Damon as Bourne. Over the years, I’ve grown into the idea of Damon as a bona fide character actor, rather than as a Hollywood pretty boy. But for the fourth film in the Bourne series, The Bourne Legacy, both Damon and Greengrass have not returned. Tony Gilroy is now in the director’s chair. He was one of the writers of the previous films and he directed the exciting thriller Micheal Clayton. And the leading man is now Jeremy Renner, the rising star of The Hurt Locker, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and The Avengers.

In The Bourne Legacy, Renner does a decent job with admittedly poor material. This film is shockingly underthought and underwritten. Entire plot strands and developments make no sense at all (including a lengthy opening scene in Alaska). Characters are introduced and dropped at a whim, or not used at all (why Joan Allen’s Pam Landy had to reappear is a mystery to me). Curiously, the action scenes were better than they ever were in the previous films. Especially the Manila motorbike chase is a spectacle the likes of which we have not seen since The Matrix Reloaded.

Verdicht: This film will entertain as long as you do not overthink it. Renner and Weisz are always a pleasure. There is some realy good action. But I can’t escape the thought that this was an idea for just another action movie first, and that the Bourne label got stuck onto it later, for marketing purposes only. And exactly that change has made this film such a mess.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Story: Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) lives in recluse. Mentally and physically broken by his years as Batman he sees Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) clean up the streets of Gotham. However, the arrivals of the gymnastic burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and of the cruel mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy) force Batman out of retirement. The question is if he is able to rise up again and confront his present foes as well as the demons of his past.

If The Dark Knight Rises is quite a disappointment, then it is so because of the enormous expectations of fans, and the high bar set by its predecessors, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). In fact, to call ‘TDKR’ a bad film is unjustified. It is a good summer blockbuster; by far the best of this summer. It grabs such fodder as The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-man in their necks and scoulingly sends them back to kindergarten. And yet it disappoints.

The biggest let down for me was that director Christopher Nolan does not chart new territories and themes in TDKR. Rather, he returns to the issues already covered in quite some extent in Batman Begins. And although Bruce Wayne / Batman does grow as a character, I miss the expansion to Batman’s universe and psychology that made The Dark Knight so very special. From a storytelling point of view it makes sense to make the circle complete, and Nolan does not hesitate to emphasize this, using quite a big number of flashbacks to Batman Begins. But I think he is mistaken to pressume that his audience is not already overly familiar with the previous films.

Valuable time is lost with these flashbacks, and although I do not think that The Dark Knight Rises is too long, I do think it could have spent some of its running time (a whopping 164 minutes) in a more effective manner. On many an occasion, especially in the climactic final hour, Nolan falls back on cheap short-cuts in his staging of the battle over Gotham’s fate. On first viewing these moments may be mistaken for plot holes, but on second viewing they appear to be the result of cramped storytelling and shoddy editing. Unnecessary mistakes that could easily have been solved had Nolan allowed himself more time to stage these scenes properly and less time reinvoking worn down, and this trilogy unworthy, generic stereotypes.

Nolan likes to work with the same people over and over again: Story writer David Goyer, producer Emma Thomas, writer Jonathan Nolan (yes, the brother), composer Hans Zimmer, editor Lee smith and cinematographer Wally Pfister. If I would recommend Nolan to look for another editor if he continues in action films, I must also praise Wally Pfister. Pfister was nominated for an Oscar for The Dark Knight, and he won one for Inception, and in The Dark Knight Rises he delivers again. The vistas of a Gotham under siege are stunning. In cooperation with the special effects team Pfister does something extraordinary: the stunts and effects that in other films seem weightless and immaterial digital constructions have heft and weight and, consequently, realism in TDKR.

Nolan also prefers to work with actors he already knows. Of course he brings back Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred Pennyworth), but he also calls in the services of his Inception veterans Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard (as business woman and love interest Miranda Tate) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Gotham city cop John Blake). And there are surprising cameos by some old characters as well. The only major new face is Anne Hathaway. And it must be said that, in such an enormous ensemble, it is Hathaway who stands out, next to Bale and Gorden-Levitt. The other actors suffer from the fact that their roles are perhaps slightly too marginal and underwritten. Tom Hardy is imposing, threatening and scary as Bane, but he can not rival Heath Ledger’s Joker. He should not want to either, and we should not expect it from him.

As an action spectacle, this film is stunning. Big set-pieces involve a chase scene with multiple motorcycles, a street battle between cops and thugs and, perhaps most memorable, a mid-air abduction in the opening sequence. We should not underestimate the contribution of composer Hans Zimmer to these scenes. The master of the genre almost overplays his hand with a thunderous score that drowns out bits of the dialogue, but the crucial word in this sentence is ‘almost’. Empire compared Zimmer’s soundtrack with an earthquake, and that is an appropriate metaphor. The music defies further description.

By not offering us something fundamentally new, apart from some interesting characters, Nolan deprives his film from the depth and the political commentary that The Dark Knight had. Complaints that TDKR is politically reactionary or conservative miss the point that there is actually a shocking lack of politics in this film. If there is any, it only serves as a masquerade of or a detraction from the actual plot, which then is too light to justify the epic ambitions of the film.

But Nolan does deliver emotionally. The fans who have made his films the huge successes that they are have invested in this world and in these characters. And although this individual film may not be able to match the quality of its predecessors, it does succeed in satisfyingly finishing this particular story of Bruce Wayne. Actually, it might be its strongest point (and this is the only small spoiler! I put into this review) that it finishes the story of Bruce Wayne, but not necessarily that of Batman. A relief for the studio and for the fans.

Final verdict: The Dark Knight Rises is a fitting and satisfying conclusion to what we can now call the best superheroe franchise to date. However, it is also demonstrably the weakest link in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and so it is with appropriate heartache that fans have to say goodbye to their holiday fling of three summers.

Thursday Movie News Flash Update Blog-message

Things that we’ve learned this week:

 

Yes We Cannes Again

Iron Man 3 gets crowded: Chastain out, Hall and Dale in

The Avengers has earned just enough to spawn a sequel

Channing Tatum in mix up between Die Hard 5 and Air Force 2

and

Prometheus will be tough

Boom! Aargh! Pow! – the The Avengers review

Boom! Aargh! Pow! Good Joke! Green Monster! Flying Aircraft Carrier! Eye-Scorchingly Bad 3D! Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth &  Chris Evans! Scarlett Johansson, Hot! Gwyneth Paltrow, Not Enough Of! Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders in Too Small Roles! Boom! Aargh! Pow! Directed by Joss Whedon! He of Buffy! And Cabin in the Woods! Chonk Boom Aargh Pow! Tom Hiddlestone Dressed Up As A Golden Reindeer! Chunk! Crunch!

Trailer:

Judgment: Entertaining, funny, too long, bad 3D, some good acting, annoying kids in the auditorium (it’s a 12 certification stupid parents!), bad beginning, better ending. Bring on Iron Man 3.

Horror For People Who Do Like Horror – the The Cabin in the Woods review

First of all, it is really hard to review this film without giving away spoilers, but I will try to do so anyway.

I must admit that I have a love-hate relationship with the horror genre. I have serious difficulty stomaching chainsaws, blunt axes, fountains of blood and people screaming in terrible agony. I cannot really look at that, let alone listen to it. Which is why I watch most of my horror films at home, on a small, contained screen and with the volume adjusting remote control close by. Why then watch horror films at all, if you dislike them so much, you might ask me. Well, I must also admit that more than any other genre the horror genre has been a genre in which young, intelligent directors have experimented on low budgets with the form that film can take. The genre has been a hotbed for experiments with visual and sound effects, and with narrative twists and turns. Furthermore many good horror films have subtexts grounded in mythology, mysticism and psychology that are really interesting. “What does it mean to be human?” is a question that can not be more urgent than when your girlfriend has turned into a zombie and all you have to defend yourself is a roaring chainsaw.

The Cabin in the Woods is one of those interesting, experimental horror film, although hardly low-budget. Its twists and turns were rumored to be so inventive and surprising that I decided to go and see it in the cinema, even though I knew I would turn my eyes away at the initial moments of bloodshed. The film is made by people who have narrative experimentation running through their veins. Director Drew Goddard is one of JJ Abrams protégées, a former writer and producer on Cloverfield, Lost and Alias. Writer Joss Whedon, whose The Avengers opens today, created iconic television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly and was one of the writers on Toy Story.

Goddard and Whedon have not hold back. It is more than understandable that studio MGM, which has suffered big financial problems the last years, left this film on the shelf for about three years after it was finished. Big studios don’t like taking risks as much as their creative employees do. The Cabin in the Woods is a genre-bending and expectations-shredding horror film. The natural successor to Scream, if you will, but Scream delighted in following the clichés of the genre despite the characters’ knowledge of the ‘rules of the game’. In The Cabin of the Woods, the rules are enforced from the outside, and the characters actively resist them.

I won’t tell you more about the plot than this. Five teenagers / early twenty-somethings (amongst whom a pre-Thor fame Chris Hemsworth) take a holiday in a cabin in the woods. The cabin is an almost exact copy of that in The Evil Dead or Cabin Fever. There is a redneck gas station attendant who should be warning enough. There is sex, and booze, and strange artifacts, and somewhere else Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) are making a bet.  Be aware, in my opinion the trailer here already gives away too much.

There will be blood. And there will be screams, but there will be much, much more than that. The Cabin in the Woods is perhaps not as smart as it thinks it is, but it is still pretty smart. And when it stops being smart, all hell breaks loose (literally) and it becomes outrageously funny. An absolute must see if you can stomach it.

Friday Movie News Flash Update Blog-message

I am one day late, but that doesn’t keep me from posting what we’ve learned this week, like:

 

Javier Bardem is blond (in Bond)!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sin City 2 will be filmed this summer!

Wes Anderson’s new film Moonrise Kingdom will open Cannes 2012!

A first image of Jack Sparrow and Armie Hammer in The Lone Ranger!

And for the Marvel geeks:

Krees and Skrulls are not in Loki’s Army!

 

Thursday Movie News Flash Update Blog-message

Things we have learned this week:

3D is silver, Silence is gold

Public support from Billy Crystal for allegedly racist Dutch folklore tradition?

Sam Worthington vehicle inspires illegal money showering in Rotterdam

The Expendables 2 has a vilain and, no, that is not a spelling mistake

The Avengers has a new title (in the UK at least)

and

Russell Crowe is expecting rain