Arts

A Year Watching Pictures: The Best Films of 2012

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lincoln

The past year has been discussed as a marvelous year for cinema, one that showcased some of the finest work that’s been done since the banner year of…2007. That’s a five year gap between epic years of celluloid, with ’07 bringing forth such spectacles as No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Longest Movie Title in History, Ratatouille, Juno, Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Tim Burton’s Mind…okay, so the first two were fantastic, and there were a bunch of other great movies, and something about a guy who can only blink through the entire movie, but his blinks are in French! which makes it awesome. Oh, and that was also the year that gave us Academy Award nominee Norbit.

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Not Just Anybody: A Reflection on “Zero Dark Thirty”

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(This piece should only be read by people who have either a, seen the movie, or b, don’t particularly care. It will cover the plot from beginning to end, so be forewarned.)

 

“Do you think I’m just anybody, Ali? Do you?”  – T. E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), Lawrence of Arabia, 1962

 

“I’m the motherfucker who found this place.” – Maya (Jessica Chastain), Zero Dark Thirty, 2012

 

 

Zero Dark Thirty is a film at once thoroughly of its time and promising an enduring timelessness, the sort of picture which will be taught in colleges and universities for decades to come as a model to aspire to, but will also be enjoyed and remembered by those who see it. “Enjoy” may not be the right word, for the level of positive feeling in the film is minimal and even when it comes carries with it a sense of uncertainty over whether we the audience should be unequivocally happy by the events. Zero Dark Thirty is riveting…it holds attention from the very first sounds we hear and keeps one gripped until the concluding image, an almost terrifying calmness over two and a half hours of storm. [Read more…]

Alex and Andrew Talk Oscar Nominations: Part 1

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I am guessing that we will all be missing Emma Stone when he hosts solo.

Alex:

As I sit down to start our conversation about this year’s Oscar nominations nearly 48 hours have elapsed since Seth MacFarlane and Emma Stone announced them. This break between the announcement and our analysis wasn’t necessarily by design, I just got quite sleepy last night. But it has allowed the nominations to sink in a little more, which can only be a good thing, right?

Anyway, even with the break I don’t quite know where to start in our assessments. The biggest news from the nominations, and certainly the biggest shock, is what the Best Director category looks like. Best Director nominations are a necessity for any film to win Best Picture (only Driving Miss Daisy has won it all without a Directing nomination in the past 80 years or so), which means that yesterday morning saw a dramatic shake-up of the race. The Academy snubbed Kathryn Bigelow’s masterful work on Zero Dark Thirty and did the same to the extremely popular Ben Affleck for his direction of Argo. I don’t even know how to convey the seismic upheaval that those misses represent. Both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo were tipped by myself and most others as major dark horses. Either could have snuck past Lincoln and win Best Picture. Without Directing nominations though, both suddenly appear to be dead in the water. I’ve seen a lot of chatter in the wake of the snubs that suggests some other films are stronger than we suspected and could win (most prominently Silver Linings Playbook, which improbably became the first film in 31 years to get nominated in all seven major categories). I don’t really buy that line of thinking right now, though. Until the industry awards start getting really wild, I think that these nominating snubs have essentially cleared the path for Lincoln to win without much of a contest.
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A Pre-nomination 2013 Oscar Primer

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So shiny…

Oscar nominations come out on Thursday morning (7:30 CST for our loyal local readers), a couple weeks earlier than usual. Since I have spent way too much of my life reading, writing, and thinking about this annual race to milquetoast  immortality it seemed prudent for me to create a little pre-nomination primer. I’ll check back in after nominations are announced and again closer to the ceremony in February because I nerd over this like Travis nerds over baseball hall of fame ballots. I’ll go over Best Picture in detail and then just post my prediction for the other major categories (acting, directing, and writing).

The “Major Contenders” Group:

Lincoln

Zero Dark Thirty

Argo

Les Miserables (requisite UGH)
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Recorded Conversations: New Favorites from 2012

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders.

Question: To ring in the New Year on the Recorder, we look to our recent past and ask “What new thing (or things) that you discovered in 2012 has become one of your favorites?”

Wait, seriously? It’s 2013?

Well… crap. Last I recall, it was September, and suddenly I look and I’ve been on a hiatus nearly as long as Homestar Runner (.com). But I shall clear the cobwebs and my fuzzy memory of the past twelve months to talk about discoveries and my new favorite thing(s). Before we get to the Favorites, let’s look at those that came oh-so-close:

THE WARM-UP

Once upon a time, I kept up with the cutting edge of music. Oh, sure, I continue to discover more quirky Scandinavian groups each year (Of Monsters & Men this year, Katzenjammer this year or last) to add to my tally, and put them in heavy rotation in my playlists. And I haven’t been totally absent in discovering new bands. I’m enjoying the debut album of critical darlings alt-J, but nothing this year has dethroned TV On The Radio’s Nine Types of Light, the 2011 album that is still my favorite. (If you have a spare hour, check out the album’s music video anthology:)

Other realms of popular culture fared similarly. I was poised to count the Minnesota Wild and the NHL as rediscovered new favorites… until the lockout killed half the season. [Read more…]

Recorded Conversations: New Favorites from 2012

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders.

To ring in the New Year on the Recorder, we look to our recent past and ask “What new thing (or things) that you discovered in 2012 has become one of your favorites?”

Moonrise-Kingdom-007

I’ll be honest right off the bat: 2012 sucked. Well, sucked might be too strong of a word, but it was less than I would have hoped for.

With that being said, I did get to experience a great many new things, and enjoyed most (if not all) of them. One thing I’ve noticed while reading Alex’s and Andrew’s responses is that while we’ve all experienced a great deal of the new over the last year, a great deal of it is centered in our love of all-things nostalgia. And there is nothing wrong with this; there is so much amazing output of artists in any given year, it is utterly impossible to take it all in, let alone the works that were put out in years prior. One of our missions here at the Addison Recorder is to highlight works that we feel might not get their proper praise, while illuminating more popular works in a way that they might not have been properly exposed in modern media culture.

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Recorded Conversations: New Favorites from 2012

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To ring in the New Year on the Recorder, we look to our recent past and ask “What new thing (or things) that you discovered in 2012 has become one of your favorites?”

 

Like Alex, it is nigh but impossible to limit myself to just one thing. But it becomes even trickier in my case because I’ve already written at length on the Recorder about many of the greatest experiences I had this year, including developing my obsession with the Grateful Dead (and by the way, the concerts in the Spring 1990 box, all of which are available online for free, contain some of the most inspired, heartfelt, and really damn fun rock/country/blues/folk music you will ever hear, much the same way Alex feels about bluegrass), and the 31st/5th season of Doctor Who (although this too may be surpassed by the current 33rd/7th season and the pairing of Matt Smith with Jenna-Louise Coleman, if “The Snowmen” is any indication). But besides having to use so many parentheses, who wants to hear my repeat myself, especially when I do so a lot in real life?

 

But in looking back, I found that the sheer limit of time and space kept me from celebrating everything which made 2012 such a delightful cultural year, more so than 2011 even, and I found three things in particular.

 

No jokes about the name, please.

Even more nineteenth-century novels

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Recorded Conversations: New Favorites from 2012

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders.

Question: To ring in the New Year on the Recorder, we look to our recent past and ask “What new thing (or things) that you discovered in 2012 has become one of your favorites?”

I need to limit myself on this one. When this idea first trickled across my brain it was as an idea for a full-blown article, not a shorter Conversation piece, so my apologies if I try to cram too much in. I have three distinct answers, and I have no idea which would win out above the others, so…I’ll tackle all three!

1. Bluegrass (and bluegrass-inspired) music

She’s from Southern California, but damn if she doesn’t sing like she’s from a coal town in Appalachia.

I’m starting off with this because I don’t think I have ever written about music on the Recorder before. Honestly, it’s just not a medium that gets a lot of deep thought out of me. If I like the music, then grand. If not, well, why annoy myself by listening? I don’t really get far beyond that because my interests are much more tied to narrative and visual forms of expression. Music is a bit too esoteric and pattern-based for my math-hating brain to really embrace as anything but a mood-setter.

However, I spend all day at work in front of a computer, which means I have lots of time to listen to music while my brain is occupied with other things. With the aid of Pandora and Spotify this has meant that I have been noodling around with the musical genres and forms that I like, finding new artists and other albums to fill in my day. Last year, urged on by my pre-existing love for Gillian Welch and the TV show Justified (which is back TONIGHT; gadzooks, I may need to write about that), I delved deeper into the sounds of bluegrass and its associated styles.
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I Dreamed a Dream…Kind Of: Two More Responses to “Les Miserables”

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(Note: The following reactions are recorded here because somehow myself, Andrew, and Alex all went and saw this movie on the same date. Needless to say, we all had differing reactions and viewpoints. Andrew’s response can be found here. I have since taken the liberties of providing Alex’s response, for reasons that should be immediately understandable. You’re welcome, Earth.)

TRAVIS’ REACTION

1) I came into Les Mis a complete virgin to the musical. I was aware of the plot, and had seen the 1997 movie with Liam Neeson, Geoffery Rush, and Uma Thurman, or as it’s collectively known amongst theatre people, the one based on the book that otherwise has nothing to do with the stage show. (Work that out in your heads as you will.)

Consequently, I approached this with a fresh eye and a mostly fresh ear. I must admit, I’ve heard “I Dreamed a Dream” before several times, but I knew that it dealt with how sucky it gets to be Fantine during that first third of the movie. In addition, I’d had the epic trailer shoved down my throat several times as I took in several movies this year. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having Anne Hathaway shoved down your throat, but there’s only so much of a starving waifling that I can take before it starts to get mildly irritating. Because of this, I feel like I came into the movie with a mindset prejudiced against any possibility the film had of succeeding.

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“Jesus, it’s amazing how it grows!” The Addison Recorder’s Adventures with “Les Miserables,” Part I

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In his remarkably informative and entertaining book Pictures at a Revolution, the story of the 1967 Oscar nominees for Best Picture, Mark Harris devotes several pages to one of the most disastrous gambles Hollywood ever made. After watching West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and the bonanza-grossing The Sound of Music take home the most coveted of Academy Awards, executives at every major studio decided that the public wanted giant, extravagant musicals, films which ran for three hours or so and filled up the Cinemascope screen. The final years of the sixties were littered with big-budget song-and-dance marvels which lost millions upon millions: Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Hello, Dolly!, Paint Your Wagon, Camelot, stretching into the supreme debacle of Lost Horizon.

Would you rather watch these guys in a musical…

Or Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch?

Since then, Hollywood and Broadway, which once went hand in hand, have been very wary of each other.

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