For me, Christmas is a great time to ask for all of the movies that you might not always buy yourself, and if it wasn’t for you getting them as a present, then you might not see them at all. This last Christmas, I made it a point to squander other peoples’ best of the year lists to see what I might have missed out on, and the result was that I found a couple of gems that might have been overlooked by the general public. I’ve already watched most of them, so I thought I’d throw a little bit of knowledge your way. They are:
Beasts of the Southern Wild
This is probably the most well known of the bunch as it’s had a lot of Oscar talk surrounding it, and rightfully so. For a first time feature director, Benh Zeitlin did an incredible job of bringing “The Bathtub”, most likely an allegory for a pre-and-post Katrina New Orleans, to life through language, culture and production design. My roommate Isaac described the film as a “docu-fantasy” almost in the same vein as District 9 in that it attacks real social, political and environmental issues through the use of dramatic fantasy narrative.
However, the acting is what has been mentioned the most this Oscar season with both Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and Wink (Dwight Henry) giving incredibly powerful performances, especially considering neither of them had acted before. Wink’s desperate portrayal of a controlling father trying to teach his daughter the ways of life before he passes gave a fresh look to the archetype, rather than letting it slip into the often used “strong but silent” father figure or the “crazy drunk” dad like a lot of movies portray. Even though Wink is intensely violent at parts and still a drunk, the audience feels sympathy for his cause because he always plays it off with a deep hidden love for his daughter, even when the world starts driving him mad.
What you might have missed: Ray Tintori was the second unit/special FX director. Who is Ray Tintori, you ask?
Overall Score: 16/17 (And would have easily made my top ten list of 2012 if I had seen it at that time)
The Raid: Redemption
The Raid was fairly well known as it made its way through the festival circuit, but it never got the full acclaim that it deserved due to the fact that it was a foreign film, made in the Philippines. If you haven’t seen it, what are you missing? Lots and lots of action. The film centers around a team of elite SWAT-type agents who are raiding (so it’s not just a clever name!) a 30-story apartment complex which is run by one of the most dangerous men in the city. Of course it’s not just him, however! He’s also been housing some of the worst criminals there so that he can call upon them when he needs them. Well, a police force raiding his complex would be a pretty good time!
Fortunately, The Raid makes up for a fairly uninspired plot (almost like Die Hard but with swarms of bad guys on every floor) with some dazzlingly inspired action. While most action movies feature only guns or swords or hand-to-hand combat, The Raid is able to combine all of these, and more. Although the movie sometimes slows down at points for extremely intense personal battles, its best when the action set pieces actually become part of the story line, with characters moving through walls and floors based off of where they need to get to accomplish their mission. And yes, walls, doors, floors. Everything is destructive and they’ll use anything in their fight to stay alive.
What you might have missed: The Raid was shot on Panasonic AF100s, possibly my least favorite camera ever.
Overall Score: 12/17
Overall Action Movie Score: 17/17
Safety Not Guaranteed
I don’t think we’ve talked about this on the blog yet, so I thought I would mention it. I did actually watch it before I did my best of 2012 list, and while I really enjoyed it, there was a lot of stuff that bothered me about it.
The premise behind Safety Not Guaranteed is pretty great, and the fact that it’s also based off of a real newspaper ad makes it even quirkier. The Premise: a man puts an ad in the newspaper saying that he’s looking for someone to travel back in time with him. This ad is picked up by a newspaper team who goes to investigate and see if the guy is just crazy or super freaking crazy, and, of course, they comes to see the humanity in someone who is, well, a little bit of both.
What the movie did well was in the script. It’s a great concept with some interesting characters, but some of the characters also fell a little flat by not really behaving believably and creating unneeded obstacles for their own team members. Also, it didn’t help that the direction and the acting sometimes fell flat and wasn’t able to bring enough variety to all of the characters. Fine, to name names: Aubrey Plaza. This was supposed to be her breakout role, and while she was sometimes able to emote, I can think of about 4 dozen actresses off the top of my head that could have pulled off her character more effectively. I didn’t hate her, it just wasn’t her role, and she didn’t own it as much as I wanted her to.
Overall, it was a good concept that could have been great if it had a different group of people behind it.
What you might have missed: Aubrey Plaza smiling
Overall score: 10/17
Sound Of My Voice
This is probably the least well known of the group since I’m not even sure if it came to theaters here, but I’m sure it made the festival circuit.
The film centers around a filmmaking couple who goes to investigate a cult whose beautiful leader claims she is from the future. The way it plays out is slow and cathartic and fairly plain, but it tries to let the characters carry the story, always leaving a sense of a) tension of the filmmakers being found out and b) wonder as to whether or not the cult leader is who she says she is. While these two things are consistent and do a good job at parts to entirely carry the scene, there wasn’t always enough variety between scenes and the stakes weren’t always raised high enough to merit an entire scene devoted to a single cause.
However, the acting was solid and the end helped pay off a lot of the questions that we were left with throughout… come to think of it, this is almost the same movie as Safety Not Guaranteed! Hm… Maybe we should just switch up the actors and try them both over again. Aubrey Plaza would make a great pseudo-alien from the future.
Overall, Sound Of My Voice told a simple story effectively and never tried to overstep its bounds as an independent film.
What you definitely didn’t miss: Nicole Vicius has the most oddly shaped nose ever
Overall Score: 12/17
If you’ve seen any of these, feel free to chime in on the conversation.
Death to the Tinman was great! Thanks for sharing that. I can tell the filmmakers are all fans of Wes Anderson, for sure, as most of us here at Cinematic Attic. I laughed out loud at a couple parts and Sam was wondering what I was watching.
I have not seen any of these mentioned movies yet as it is terribly difficult to get out of the house and watch movies in one sitting these days for us. If I had to pick a movie to see from your list it would be The Raid. I’ve been wanting to see it for quite a while now, actually.
Death to the Tinman is one of my favorite shorts and we finds ourselves referencing it more often than should happen for a short film. You might also be interested to realize that he also went on to direct most of MGMT’s music videos, so he might be a good name to keep an eye on in the next few years.
I’d definitely say that you should watch The Raid when you get a chance, but uh… put the kids to bed, as they say. But really. I’m definitely looking forward to the next movie in the group when that comes out.
I love MGMTs videos. They’re great! I especially love the “Kids” video, it’s so crazy and awesome. Plus that kid looked genuinely scared the whole time. I enjoyed that Death to the Tinman short too. Dusty was right, it’s very Wes Anderson like.
Great 4-Film Review, Paul! I like the setup you used. I might use it because I watch so many movies but never have time to write a review for all of them.
I wasn’t a fan of Beasts of the Southern Wild. The story was intriguing at first, but got tiresome. I also want impressed with the shaky-cam technique it used. It bothers me when it’s a completely static shot that should be easy to hold still (even being handheld) but it looks like the cameraman suffers from extreme Parkinson’s disease.
I loved The Raid though! It was a fantastic action movie, even though the story was pretty generic. Did you see Dredd? It’s strange because it has almost the exact same “cops stuck in a high rise” storyline.
I enjoyed Safety Not Guaranteed quite a bit too. Some of it seemed too indie and Sundance-y but I liked that it stuck with the time travel story instead of going the usual indie direction. I agree with what you said about Aubrey Plaza too. Her acting didn’t seem believable.
Hey everyone!
I actually watched Safety Not Guaranteed with Paul and the fam, but I think I may have enjoyed it more. It actually even got pretty high on my own 2012 list (although that was when I’d only seen like 7 movies from 2012). I thought Aubrey Plaza was pretty good, take for example the first time she talks with the guy, and they’re in the supermarket.
Also, I just watched Sound of My Voice last night and was very pleasantly surprised. Paul, I think you recommended it the same night as we were watching Safety, but now I have no idea why exactly you did. But I’m glad for the rec. I thought the acting was indeed great, as you said, and the story was compelling throughout. I also went into it expecting horror (for some reason… maybe because one version of the cover looks sorta Ring-esque), but it wasn’t scary at all. And it’s left me thinking for the last 24 hours or so, so I can’t complain about that.
I’m gonna check out Raid and get back to you. In any case, great reviews!
So I watched The Raid. I liked it, at least as an action movie. It was pretty action-y, and crazier than almost any action I’ve seen. It’s like if Jackie Chan or Jet Li allowed themselves to go nuts, plus blood and killing people. I just read your review now and I think the comparison to Die Hard is very apt. In fact, I even thought during one scene, “This guy’s like the John McLane of Indonesia” (I think it was Indonesia, by the way, not The Philippines).
For me the biggest drawback was the bad video and subtitling, but I guess that comes with videos on can procure in Costa Rica. Seriously, though, I think the guy who did the subtitles might not have really spoken English OR Indonesian. My favorite was “What was it the fuck?” for what I presume was supposed to be “What the fuck was that?” I’ll upload it to our Facebook page. There were lots of other gems and gibberish, although due to the nature of the movie, I still understood about 70% of what they were supposed to be saying (I think… and it’s not like Shakespeare or anything anyhow).
Thanks for the recommendation!
Ry
Oh yeah. Indonesia. Good call. I’ll have to start fact checking myself.
But glad you liked it even if your subtitles were messed up. Mine were fine, but yeah, you’re right. It’s not exactly Shakespeare. I liked that it knew exactly what it wanted to be and did it really well.