Reviews by JxSxPx

It has a tremendous amount of things in common with Dracula, it’s a canonized lion of a film despite not being much good and interminably boring, yet it’s blessed with a central performance that is probably the entire reason that the film continues to endure. I suppose the most accurate way to describe to would be: classic-by-default.

Gaston Leroux’s source material, on the surface level, should lend itself incredibly well to stage and screen, but there has yet to be a totally satisfying adaptation. Some lean too strongly in favor of musical numbers and lavish sets and costumes (the 1943 version and the thundering, inexplicably popular Andrew Lloyd Weber stage show) or too far into Gothic horrors and grotesque makeups (the 1989 version springs to mind). None of them have been able to marry the two diametric sides together and create a satisfying complete and whole film. The best of the various versions remains the silent one, which is ironic all things considered, yet this one still is far from perfect.

The main problem is how the plot lacks any distinct sense of construction or structure. The alleged romantic triangle at the center of the whole thing is anemic and undercooked. Never for a minute do we believe that Christine and Raoul are hot and bothered for each other under the collar. Erik’s deranged phantom is obviously consumed by his sexual obsessions and greedily lusts after the young Christine after training her and giving her the tools to succeed in the Paris Opera House. But there’s no reason given for his obsession with Christine, how did they meet? Why did he choose her? The Faustian bargain at the center is a wispy thing that barely holds the plot together.

For all of the money thrown into the production (the behind scenes story of bringing this film to theaters is often more fascinating than the film it birthed), the hack director manages to make the whole affair look pretty pedestrian. These are some lavish, opulent sets and costumes, true things of beauty, and Rupert Julian doesn’t do much to create a sustained atmosphere of gothic dread or horror. He points and shoots like a layman effectively making all of his production look matte and removed of any/all textures.

Phantom of the Opera remains a classic solely due to Lon Chaney’s masterful performance as the titular character, which ranks amongst Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein and Lugosi’s Dracula for sheer greatness. His Erik is a living skeletal fragment of a man, a twisted and broken thing which is consumed with rage and desire that will never be met. His unmasking sees him churn this rage from inward towards the outward world and the angelic figure that breaks his heart.

Chaney works doubly hard to create something in this vacuum, and he succeeds through sheer force of will, artistic magic and a makeup job that still provokes a reaction. He’s capable of creating a few moments of pure terror through his acting choices alone. None of them are more disturbing than when he calmly walks into the murky underground canals in search for the intruders to his lair. He becomes a man possessed of distilled revenge and defense. And when his hands reach out from the water to pull the intruders off their boat, everything has come together in synchronous harmony.

I know everyone will bring up the infamous chandelier scene, which plays out in every variation of this story. All I can say is that it doesn’t live up to the hype. It plays out in a disjointed, poorly edited manner. There is no tension built up since it takes so long for us to realize that Erik is indeed cutting it down, and it proceeds to cut back and forth without creating any kind of rhythm between the two shots. A more interesting scene isn’t one of horror but of great pathos in which Erik follows Raoul and Christine out of a ball and listens to them discuss their love for each other and running away. Erik’s wounded nature is given a full-bodied reaction in which he collapses as if stabbed by her very words and reaches out towards the sky at the laughing gods who give him no moment of peace.

How exactly Erik came to be both his disfigured image and living in a very ornate underground layer is never fully explored or even explained. He’s dubbed a practitioner of the black arts, which we’re never really shown nor is anything done with it, and an escaped sadistic criminal, which is evident by the very nature of the plot’s twists and turns. He is an opaque sketch, yet Chaney manages to color his personality and try to build up a more substantial image of him through his immense talents as both makeup artist and actor. The plot may not work in service of his fantastic creation, but Chaney makes Opera worth watching at least once.

This might be one of those films which you watch as a completist, and nothing more. The Golem has a fantastic makeup job and a few standout sequences, but everything in-between is just painfully dull.

Other than Paul Wegener’s performance as the titular character, The Golem is filled to the brim with bad acting, the kind that makes people wary of silent films. Lyda Salmonova in particular seems half asleep much of the time, which I guess was supposed to suggest her being drunk on lust and erotic awakenings, but she just looks like she swallowed a Tylenol PM and is about to crash.

The sets and cinematography are first rate, but they’re not in the service of a great or interesting story. The film has a great setup, but then it quickly veers into a love triangle and unintentionally hilarious sequences of the Golem going about the town and running errands. I thought this was a creature brought to life to help protect the Jews, and instead he’s awkwardly buying groceries in a scene that goes on for way too long. Wegener’s makeup and costuming sell the illusion that this is a creature made from clay and brought to life through the dark arts, but the creature, and the film, never make much use of this nightmarish aspect until far late in the film, and by that time it doesn’t matter.

The only images which linger in my head are the ones in which the film cuts loose and embraces the more occult and pagan elements of the story. The fire, smoke and floating demonic head used to bring to life the Golem are employed effectively and creepily. If more of the film had embraced this energy and spirit, I would have loved it. But The Golem uses these maze-like sets, expressionistic cinematography, and a monster to tell a story of domestic squabbles and a melodramatic love triangle. Once the monster is allowed to run amok and cause mass havoc, he’s taken down by a playful child removing his Star of David power source.

If it sounds anti-climatic, yes, it completely is. The fits and starts of the plot are maddening, but, of course, it couldn’t merge its disparate elements together for a coherent ending. True love has to win in the end, even if that was never the most interesting aspect of the story. Or even the driving force. If the film had gotten in deeper touch with the mysticism at the root of the story, or done more with the demonic force that animates the Golem, it could have been great. It’s a decent enough introduction to Germany’s wealth of silent horror films but it’s no match for the haunting poetry of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

For a good portion of its run United States of Tara found that happy medium between quirk-fest and serious exploration of one woman’s psychosis. The first season is highly addictive, but a little too front loaded on the quirky marginalizing of how debilitating, dangerous and series having multiple personalities can be. And the ending of the third season gets so dark that it practically feels like an altogether different show, but that glorious middle period is what made me love it.

The main players of the show are Tara, her alters and her family. The alters allow for Toni Collette to stretch her acting muscles and show just how good she really is. She never falters for a moment and throws herself into every crazy situation with commitment and panache. Seriously, any actress who will stand in a rain poncho growling and peeing over somebody is one who deserves some kind of recognition and respect.

Her alters are a mixed bag – mostly cardboard cutouts of archetypes that she uses to escape from reality. As the series progresses more alters present themselves, and they’re presented as more organic manifestations of the buried trauma at the center of her illness. The main three are the sexually promiscuous teenager T, the 1950s ice queen housewife Alice and redneck chauvinist Buck. We’re introduced to Chicken, the person that Tara was at five-years-old, Gimme, a feral creature of pure id, Shoshanna, a New York therapist who starts to treat Tara, and Bryan Craine, the most disturbed and disturbing alter of them all. Naturally, some of them are more interesting than others. I can live without Shoshanna, and that quirky storyline goes nowhere slowly before she finally agrees to seek real help, Gimme and Chicken.

And Tara’s family is equally a mixed lot of good and bad. Max, played by John Corbett who deserved an Emmy for one of the final episodes, is Tara’s husband, who is curious about the root of his wife’s illness, very loving and devoted to her and his kids. The series does call into question why he continues to support and stay with Tara, is she a project? Is it because his own mother has mental issues and his father abandoned them? The truth of his character lies somewhere in-between these opposing theories, and if they had given him a chance to really lead an episode outside of the second-to-last one, I think his character could have been really unique. Much of Max’s action involves damage control and cleaning up after the messes that Tara has made. Why he continually allows for her to be off medication and run around freely is anyone’s guess since she clearly needs serious, long-term help. Yet that question hanging over his character it what makes him so very interesting.

Her children start life as stereotypes before getting more individualized and interesting. Their relentless pursuit of an identity and freedom from the shadow of their mother’s illness feels real, even if it does dip too far into “zany” and “kooky” territory. Brie Larson and Keir Gilchrist also have a nice chemistry together, even if they don’t look like they could possibly be related in the slightest. They sell it by how alternately supportive, loving and antagonistic they are to each other. Larson is stuck with sub-plots that feel more tacked on to give her something to do on the show than organic extensions of the main action. It’s hard to believe that her spunky, kittenish, smart Kate would happily end-up with someone older with an ex-wife and a kid. Gilchrist fares better as his gay teenager approaches a more realistic and lived-in persona than, oh I don’t know, the happy-shiny kids on Glee who must always be perfect, camera-ready and pretty-cry on command. His Marshall likes boys, yes, but he also likes other things just as much, and his coming out and obvious queerness is presented as fact and not made a big deal of.

But no family member is more overwritten or more of a contrivance to the plot than Charmaine, Tara’s sister. Rosemarie DeWitt is a phenomenal actress and she tackles the narcissistic role with glee, but I think she deserved better. It’s not until season three that we see some semblance of humanity in her character. Granted, becoming a different-kind of crazy in response to their poor parenting and traumatic childhood makes logical sense, but Charmaine is a by-product from the a snark factory in which they produce nothing but distilled consumerism and middle-class values. Much of the drama for her character is this: when will she see that Neil, played by Patton Oswalt, is her soul-mate? That someone as attractive as DeWitt winds up with Oswalt is actually nice because we see their relationship develop and evolve over time, and they have a real understanding, support and sympathy with/for each other. Yet again, much of this doesn’t happen until season three, so for much of the time she’s a vain bitch.

The United States of Tara is problematic, but I did greatly enjoy it. I found much of the humor to be sarcastic and smart. The problem is, it takes a basic premise that has rich territory for a dramedy and stuffs it with as many extraneous side-stories as possible. The main narrative is Tara and the traumatic experience at the center of her illness. The outer layer or quirk and sheer irresponsibility on the part of Max and the family to allow for her to run around un-medicated and without professional help do hamper the overall feel of the show. But in moments when we slowly discover the roots of her problems and are given a distance from Tara, that is when we truly begin to understand her. It’s the most compelling and engaging thing about the show.

For all of its off-model animation, frequently overdone and unintentionally hilarious vocal work and occasionally bad characterization and writing, the X-Men animated series from the 90s remains the definitive televised incarnation of the beloved comic characters. Wolverine and the X-Men tries valiantly to recapture the magic of that series, and nearly succeeds. Its failures are fairly routine for any of the non-comic incarnations of these characters, but at least this thing has ambition and plays off some of the lingering mysteries at the core of the series.

What’s a major pity is that we’ll never be treated to a second season of this show, which had a tremendous amount of potential to expand and really go into darker and dramatically interesting places. And the whole thing starts off with a big bang. As Wolverine, who became the de facto X-related mascot after the animated series proved so popular and was cemented by the film’s insistence on centering on him, strolls through the mansion, a large explosion occurs taking out Jean Grey and Professor X. She appears to be dead for much of the time, and Xaiver is, somehow, in a coma, which he awakens from in an alternate dystopian future which owes a debt to the “Days of Future Past” storyline, amongst a few others.

Of course any movie or television series based upon so sprawling and labyrinthine a mythology as X-Men will need to condense, edit and re-contextualize the whole thing for the new medium and the story they want to focus on. Marvel demanded a product to align with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it’s astonishing that this didn’t turn out as clumsy or truly awful as the first season and a half of X-Men: Evolution.

Borrowing liberally from any/all eras, the show presents us with familiar character developments, back-stories and story lines that feel like Cliff’s Notes X-Men by this point: Cyclops/Wolverine rivalry and respect, Storm vs Shadow King, Magneto as misunderstood leader, Senator Kelly and his xenophobic political scheming, Emma Frost’s roguish ally, Jean Grey and the Phoenix – each of these stories come up at some point in time, and they’re well known and well-worn by any fan of the material.

So the show doesn’t break any new ground with these stories, and the Phoenix force stuff is heavily rushed at the end of the season, but at least it provides a chance to see newer characters and stories get a chance to shine. The Stepford Cuckoos, Dust, the “Age of Apocalypse,” amongst many other things too numerous to mention, get cameos, are hinted at for future exploration or get entire episodes dedicated to them. It’s a nice mix of the old and the new.

However, the series does continue the same problem of focusing too much on Wolverine, who works best as a supporting player, and giving short shift to other equally important and popular characters. Namely, Cyclops and Storm, who frequently appear in episodes, but don’t do much. They get one or two episodes to really standout, but are otherwise taken out of the action very quickly (which is out of character for both of them), or don’t appear for several episodes at a time. It’s disheartening to witness, but seeing Beast, Nightcrawler, Angel and Emma Frost being given a chance in the spotlight is quite lovely. Often they get stuck in smaller supporting roles despite being major players in the books.

But I suppose concessions must be made in any format that isn’t a comic. There simply isn’t enough room to include all of these characters in a satisfying way and develop them all. Someone’s favorite is going to get the shaft. (And much like the movies, it’s mine. Why is it so hard for people to get Storm right?)

Wolverine and the X-Men could have benefited from borrowing more liberally from the 90s cartoons it so clearly tries to imitate. X-Men and Batman: The Animated Series weren’t afraid to feature episodes that were quiet and hardly had any action in them, choosing instead to buildup characters and create more realistic drama. Wolverine should have done the same. We didn’t need an episode with Nick Fury, Wendigo and a prolonged battle between Wolverine and the Hulk. It doesn’t factor much into the season as a whole, feeling instead like a piece of filler to hit the 20+ episode marker it needed for a complete season order.

It’s always a fun time, but it could have saved some of the stories and characters for future seasons, choosing instead to buff up the development and play out a few stories in a more organic and satisfying way. Phoenix and “Age of Apocalypse” are great things to cover, but not in the final three episodes of your season. Granted, AoA was a teaser, and I would have loved to have seen that one play out. It’s clear that the creators have a deep love and respect for the material, but they didn’t need to stuff everything into one season. After all, all of this ambition, energy and fun could have lasted this show for years. It’s not their fault it was cancelled, blame the network brass and financing issues.

Well, at least this thing knows it’s faintly ridiculous at times, while at others it hints at a more adult, dark fantasy epic that’s bubbly under the surface. I think I would have preferred if the later had come rushing up, taking hold of the Bee Gees singing trolls and made them less kitsch. (Not a knock against the brothers Gibb, cause lord know I love them.) In fact, The 10th Kingdom would have been a lot better if it had just decided on which version it wanted to be and stuck with it.

Does anyone else vaguely remember the hyperbolic ads for this proclaiming it the television event of the millennium? Well, the introduction for the series nearly lives up to the hype. It sees a small fairy fly around Manhattan as the skyline slowly changes from concrete jungle to European mythological fantasia. The actual series never really lives up to this surrealistic promise, although it can come close on several occasions.

One of the main problems is the lead actress, Kimberly Williams. She lacks weight and seems uncomfortable in carrying an entire mini-series on her shoulders throughout. She’s perky and spunky, sure, but she doesn’t have the dramatic chops necessary to carry the whole enterprise. She’s practically swallowed up by John Larroquette as her father, Scott Cohen as a hybrid wolf-human and Dianne Wiest as the grand diva Evil Queen.

Cohen in particular overacts his part with a manic energy bordering on undiagnosed bipolar disorder and campy theatrics. His constant sniffing, panting, scratching and rubber faced mugging gets to be trying during several moments, yet he’s also infinitely watchable. In the way that only flagrant disregard for quality acting can be.

Look elsewhere for surprises in 10th Kingdom when it comes to good acting. Ann-Margaret as Cinderella and Camryn Manheim as Snow White do quite well, and are totally unique and original casting ideas and character revisions. Rutger Hauer is an imposing presence just by standing still, and he’s expertly cast as the huntsman. Wiest takes on the wicked step-mother/evil queen role like she born to wear the ornate costumes and jewelry. It’s like she took her theater diva from Bullets Over Broadway and merged her with a serpent, pretty terrific stuff.

But when 10th Kingdom is bad, it’s bad. And not in an ironic way, in a way that suggests the story is too bloated and could have used some pruning. The trolls could and should have been an interesting and dangerous assortment of characters. But they’re instead used as comedic fodder and quickly jettisoned from the storyline. This is a shame for many reasons, but amongst them is how marginalized Ed O’Neill becomes. The grotesque makeup and mannerisms that he adopts for his character are quite fun, and if given an opportunity to go darker and more dangerous with it he could have made a greater mark.

And then there’s the whole magical dog/prince body swap mess. Daniel LaPaine turns in a truly horrible performance as the prince with the mind of a dog. He plays for the balcony seats, always a bad idea on film, and does nothing but slobber, pant and whine. It’s a sight to see, but not in a good way. His voiceover for the dog is better since he seems more attuned to the pursed, tightly wound regal, and it gives him a chance to deliver witty asides that comment upon the story.

Yet when 10th Kingdom decides to do something clever, it really lasts in the imagination. The storyline concerning Bo Peep and her family’s dark secret is a laugh riot. Snow White mentioning that she’s more interested in acting as a corporeal fairy-godmother seems like a logical extension of her character, and is also pretty witty. The gossipy rummaging about Cinderella having a lot of “magic work” done over the years is a nice way to parody the concept that these heroines will remain youthful and beautiful for ever after.

The 10th Kingdom may be a little bloated, but it’s worth a cursory look for those of us interested in fairy tale adaptations. It may be uneven, and the first episode really drags and fails to ignite, but there’s a certain ragamuffin charm to the whole thing. It’s not a classic, or even all that great, but if the sight of three trolls proclaiming a boom box magical, or some mushrooms singing “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” or a sheep-herding remix of “We Will Rock You,” then this may just be the mini-series for you. Yet I maintain that the darker undertones and hinted at adult feints should have been brought more to the surface and played a larger role. Then this thing could have really been something. Plus, a good edit to trim down the story that meanders too much.

Seven women living in the ghetto and struggling to survive, that’s the basic thrust of this four-part mini-series. It details the tribulations thrust upon them by a patriarchal society – racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty and the wrongs done to them by various men, in simpler terms. Of course it comes courtesy of Oprah Winfrey and Harpo Studios seeing as how it testifies to the strength of the spirit to overcome, feminine identity and many of the other issues that she used her talk show to elevate to a national discussion.

Those are observations, not criticisms. While the show could have done more and gone further into presenting more favorable and sympathetic portrayals of black male characters, the female side of the equation are given a full range of personas to tackle. It’s a heavily flawed work, but for the way it highlights a group of working class black women, it has its merits.

Oprah Winfrey plays the main character, and I was reminded of how good of an actress she can be. She must age from teenager to old woman throughout the run of the show, and she does exceptionally well. She does look a little too old in the earliest scenes, but she plays the hurt and internal suffering in remarkably minimalist ways as her character ages. By the time her son has abandoned her, and she has become the matriarch of Brewster Place, her nurturing and caring nature becomes an obvious symbolic means of correcting perceived wrongs that she did with her son. Winfrey’s performance needed to anchor the film, and despite its faults, her leading turn is not one of them.

It’s a pity that so many of the other characters don’t get the same fully-realized treatment that she does. Phyllis Yvonne Stickney and Robin Givens are eternally regulated to the supporting faction despite having characters and stories that are meatier than some of the leads. Givens in particular is given a strong scene with Cicely Tyson as her mother in which Tyson lays bare the verbal and emotional hurts her daughter has given her by rejecting her Christian name and slumming. When Tyson details the origins of her name, her daughter’s accusations of perceived “blackness” and authenticity, it’s a standout, monumental moment. We never see or hear from Tyson again in the series, even though she gets second billing.

And Stickney’s young mother of seven may look like a gross stereotype on the surface, and perhaps that argument holds some valid criticism, but she’s allowed to briefly dig deeper in a few scenes where she discloses that she has so many children because she thinks of them as eternally loving and caring playthings, interactive dolls that she can dress up and take care of. Once they reach a certain age, she doesn’t stop loving them, but she can’t connect with them anymore. It is fertile ground for a dramatist to take on, but the series doesn’t do enough with it.

The same thing could be said of the lesbian couple that appears late in the film and don’t get much screen presence until the final episode. A nosy, rude neighbor that squawks about their lesbianism is a crude caricature and their main entrance into the story. The insistence on focusing on the gossipy neighbor’s gut-level disturbance to the happy couple is a solipsistic way to handle homophobia. But this being 1989, any depiction of reactionary emotions to homosexuality was progress, I guess. And, at least, the gorgon-lady is called out for mistaking herself and her own beliefs for everyone else.

These problems can probably be translated back to the source novel, which I haven’t read. As a series about a group of women overcoming personal obstacles and (re)learning to survive, it is quite satisfying. Yet it never reaches the level of greatness that it could. Too many characters fade into the background or are side-lined for much of the action before 11th hour prominence. And there’s not one redeemable or sympathetic male character in the whole thing. Yet as a showcase for an ensemble of talented, underutilized black actresses it’s a minor miracle.

Truth be told, Netflix was made for binge watching a mini-series like Lonesome Dove, which I might have abandoned watching on TV in 1989 had I not been two-years-old at the time. It’s not that Lonesome Dove is bad, far from it actually, but it just takes quite some time to get going, and the first episode is filled with most of the problematic writing that keeps it from being perfect.

Having said all of that, it remains a flawed but indelible classic. It’s a towering achievement as far as television mini-series’ go, and rivals many western films in sheer scope, unique characterizations and artistic merit.

I know that I am treading on sacred and beloved ground when I bring things in Lonesome Dove that aren’t perfect, but don’t try and scalp me just yet. The main problem with the whole series is that it gets too literal and obvious. For example, a character’s death practically comes complete with a clock running down the time until they exit the story as soon as they mention something that they greatly desire even at their own peril or that they’re afraid of. One character says that he fears water, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s a scene in which he must cross a large body of water. And, naturally, he doesn’t make it out alive. This kind of sign-posting doesn’t make for good, engaging or interesting drama.

Another major problem is that character’s consistently turn up in the story despite it straining logic and our suspension of disbelief to a very precarious limit. These characters constantly appear, disappear and reappear right where our main group is, or has just been or is about to go. It’s satisfying to keep up with these characters on an emotional level because they’re very dynamic and interesting, but I found it near impossible to believe that Chris Cooper’s character would constantly reappear as often as the story progressed. There’s a lot of land and undiscovered territories around this time, especially when you factor in that the main thrust of the story is a cattle drive, and it just seems faintly ridiculous that they keep hitting the same towns practically in tandem.

Yet what Lonesome Dove does so wonderfully is cultivate rich and complicated characters. Most welcome and delightful of all are the female characters who manage to escape the Madonna-Whore complex that normally befalls the distaff side of western characters. Diane Lane’s character may begin life as a prostitute, but she’s full of fire and determination to get out of the life and become something more. Her character has a nice strong arc from girlish hooker to fiery, strong independent woman. And Anjelica Huston, always a welcome sight for me and a good part of the reason that I watched this in the first place, plays a woman who runs her own farm, is capable, tough and in-charge of her life and destiny. She doesn’t need a man, but her long and complicated love affair with Robert Duvall’s character is a joy to watch since they seem to be having fun playing characters who understand each other deeply, yet still fight and bicker with fire and brimstone despite it all.

Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones seem to have been born into these parts which they tackle with such grace and ease. Of course, aging them is far easier than the rest of the cast members. Even in their first few films they looked old and middle aged. Duvall in particular is clearly having fun playing a rascal of a character, he manages to continually showcase his caring, heroism and sense of justice, but along the way he’s quick to dish out sarcastic jabs and enjoy as many drinks and women as he can before he dies. Jones is stuck with the crustier, crankier part, which comes as no surprise, but he does manage to give this character a deeply wounded soul. He is a man of limited emotional intelligence and few words, but he demonstrates his deep caring in many small ways that are very subtle to the others around him but feel like momentous achievements.

It’s this peek into their lives, over a period of a few years, which makes Lonesome Dove linger in the imagination. They are quintessentially American creations, given vivid life in a sparse, violent story. While it may have its faults, Lonesome Dove does deserve to be remembered so fondly, for it created some of the richest characters in the Western tradition.

Here it is my favorite movie of 2012. Kathryn Bigelow, the thinking-moviegoers action director, continues to make smart, thorny, complicated dramatic action films about the politics of gender, race and violence. Zero Dark Thirty continues that tradition, and is a nice spiritual cousin to her other film about the current wars in the Middle East, The Hurt Locker, which was my favorite film of 2009.

Silence all of the clatter that surrounds the film, most of it is zealously picking at whims and fancies that aren’t there from people who made this claims before the film had been screened, and be prepared to meet it on its own terms. This is not the propaganda agitprop that it was made out to be, it has far more in common with reportage and an ink-blot. This is a fictionalized, heavily-distilled and simplified account of something that took a decade to play out.

That the film so coldly depicts torture may be part of the extreme reaction to it. While a piece like Argo, which isn’t completely unrelated to this material, blunts the edges and presents something easily commoditized, Zero Dark Thirty remains prickly and opaque. People wishing to see explicit evidence that torture played a key role in the events can do so only if they chose to ignore numerous revelations which come later on in the narrative. And if they ignore the fact that the characters themselves are conflicted over these courses of action, or that, for several uncomfortable moments, our sympathies lie with the prisoner of war, and not with the CIA agents enacting the horrific brutality upon him.

Bigelow and Boal have gone on the record to state that depiction is not endorsement, and I agree with them. Like it or not, prisoners of war were subjugated to torture, and removing it from the narrative would have been a joke. There’s a difference between simplifying vexingly complex jargon-heavy passages of time, and outright removing historical fact. To put it another way, removing torture from the narrative would be like remaking Bonnie and Clyde and removing their bullet-riddle death, or not depicting them killing people. The film opens with this bang, but this isn’t torture porn. The Passion of the Christ was far more overdone and titillated by the viscera on display than this film; this film presents these acts as simply being what they are and were.

Now back to my point about people finding the torture scenes to be a depiction of it leading to the killing of Bin Laden. Later in the film, which sees Maya (Jessica Chastain) stuck in an office trying vainly to find leads on the courier who slipped through her fingers is presented with an folder with information on this man. The folder was created nearly ten years ago, when the detainee we see tortured at the beginning spilled the exact same information after being subjected to nicer, quieter conversational means of extracting information. They information they needed was there all along. The torture was unnecessary to obtaining that information.

This brings us back to Maya, who is an extraordinary character, not just to anchor this film, but in general. She has much in common with Jeremy Renner’s bomb specialist in The Hurt Locker. Both are creatures of startling, almost jarring stubbornness and commit themselves to lives which dangerous and fairly empty of normalized society. Maya was brought into the program straight out of high school and has done nothing but throw herself into the manhunt for Bin Laden, even when the main priorities had been shifted away from the leader and into taking out his drones. She is filling the emptiness with her work, and stands in symbolically for our foreign policy over terrorism in the Middle East, for good and bad. Her character is admirably tough, smart and head-strong, yet her at-all-costs resolve and unresolved guilt reach their climax in the final scene of the film, which should be considered up there with Queen Christina or The Passion of Joan of Arc in great female close-ups that anchor a film.

Now that Bin Laden is dead, and the exhaustive manhunt is over, she sits alone in a giant helicarrier and is asked “Where do you want to go?” It’s an open-ended question with no response from her. But Bigelow keeps the camera on her face as Chastain begins to break down and cry. It’s a powerful closing image that haunts long after the film is over. Maya’s mission has been completed, but what in her life has she got to show for it? The question isn’t just posed to her, but to us an audience. You’ve seen and experienced where we’ve been, but was it worth it? It’s an anticlimax for an action film; much like the night raid’s killing of Bin Laden.

Bigelow has always exceled at creating tense and smart action sequences, and the midnight raid is no different. How true is it to real life? Probably not very true, but it’s better for national security if the exact methods aren’t disclosed about these types of situations. As an imagined version of it, it’s thrilling stuff.

The Navy SEALs brought in are a likeable specialist group who are great at their job, as opposed to the macho/bro stereotypes which infest most other films. The night-vision helps with verisimilitude, and the cold aesthetic choice to film it in a calm way adds tremendously to its effectiveness. Room by room, story by story, they search the house, and when the kill finally happens, it’s not the slow-motion thunderous shootout one would expect from a different kind of action or military film. His death occurs practically off-screen.

Yet the film belongs to Maya, and her tireless struggle to capture Bin Laden. And there’s more than hint of an unspoken glass ceiling going on with her dealings with superiors. If there is any group that emerges looking like total shits it’s the DC politicos who are responsible for commanding and demanding our more questionable actions in the whole endeavor. Numerous scenes show Maya struggling with the Boys Club, but the film, and the character, never makes a big deal about her femininity. She maybe willowy to look at, but she’s a remote, raging warrior on the inside as she constantly questions and actions Cold War-era thinking and planning, or bringing up how actions and behaviors can change in a post-9/11 world.

I think this is the film that post-9/11 America deserves. It stares back at us coldly and coolly, asking of us to only look at the entrapment we’ve gotten ourselves in to. This is a shadowy cross-examination, an example of a writer and director playing devil’s advocate and asking us to look at the moral, political and social compromises, xenophobia and fear-mongering that has been wholly consumed for the past decade. This is film as psychological inkblot test. What I saw was the best film of 2012.

There’s a phenomenon that seem to happen every year around summer time – amidst all the strum und drag of the cacophonous summer movie season, a tiny indie film gets released that captures the hearts of critics, audiences and awards season. It started off with Little Miss Sunshine, and it continues with the exquisite miniature portraiture of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Typically the sleeper indie hit of the summer is a comedy, but Beasts of the Southern Wild is more of a southern magical realist drama concerning one little girl’s relationship with her father, her community and the vivid imaginative landscape she creates when things become too much. The plot, a bare thing around which is draped some of the finest cinematic garnishing, ebbs and flows and less in common with narrative momentum and everything to do with moving poetry.

This little girl, dubbed Hushpuppy, experiences an elemental, practically cosmic, connection with all things in the Bathtub, the nickname of the small fishing-ghetto the residents live in. The film begins with her listening to the heartbeats of the various animals scattered around her farm, at six she is already searching for how things are interconnected. Her presence is that of someone both ageless and older than her years, a spectral encounter with a world far removed from ours, yet familiar in details.

This interior life, which frequently takes fanciful flights as she imagines aurochs coming to devour her whole, what they could metaphorically represent could be any number of things and the film gives us enough details to make cases for any of them, is beautifully constructed by Quvenzhané Wallis. Her scowl is born from hardships in the film, and she manages to project a toughness and strength beyond the capacity for a normal grade-schooler. Her smile is charismatic and beaming, but it’s the scream she unleashes that proves most endearing. A high-pitched warrior call, like a mini-Valkyrie roaring into battle, which she wields to reassert her dominance or to make her fears subside. Wallis, a first-time actress, is a marvelous find, and will hopefully have a long and full career ahead of her.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a touching and tough little gem hidden away between the latest comic book adaptations and soulless Michael Bay exercises in vulgarity. The grit and grace are authentically rendered and felt, and it’s shocking to think that this comes from a first-time filmmaker. There’s much talent, heart, imagination and artistry on display in this film, and I am grateful for it being pointed out to me as something worth watching.

A cursory surface glance on any particular subject is usually not a bright idea. And with Lincoln, it’s downright idiotic to do so. When you think of the subject matter and the director, what immediately pops into your head is a plausible film in which sentimentality overrides all else and there’s an overly mannered and thunderous performance, more to do with imagined iconography than what real research about his character would turn up, from a leading man who is notoriously choosy in his roles.

But Lincoln is none of these things. Instead, it is a film about politics in action, about public and private faces and how they can intersect or clash, and it is glorious done from top to bottom. Steven Spielberg hasn’t made a film this good since AI: Artificial Intelligence. War Horse had its moments, but was too sentimental and obviously grabbing for awards. Lincoln goes about trying to bring to authentic, fully realized life to a man who has become a canonized holy icon in many ways, and it’s in this daring to ground the former president as an actual human being and explore the dirty politics at work both in his home and in Washington at large that makes the film so evocative and effective.

The film probes deeply into both the political life of the 1860s and the personal life of our 16th president. No cast member better highlights and encompasses this duality, and how more often than not how behavior in the social sphere and home life can dovetail and create conflict, than Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Field takes Mary Todd away from the shrieking hysteric woman she’s often thought of and instead invests in her an aura of sadness, volatile anger and social cunning. There are, predictably, moments when Mary Todd acts out in a way that can only be described as manic depression, but Field is a smart enough actress to know that underneath the hysteria was a tremendous amount of grief over a dead son, isolation from a husband who is being called away to fix various problems in the nation when he can’t fix problems within the home, yet she still mystifyingly finds a way to keep her thoughts and ideas whispered into her husband’s ear. This Mary Todd may or may not be suffering from mental illness, I walked away thinking that she was a highly emotional woman who had suffered a tremendous loss and was feeling alone in a crowded space and righteously angry against a patriarchy that treated her as a mad woman keeping the president from achieving true demagogic status, but she’s no shrinking violet.

And Tommy Lee Jones’ Thaddeus Stevens is another character/metaphoric image for this duality of the public and private sector. In public he is one of the loudest and most radical of supporters for the removal of slavery and making all races equal in the Constitution. He never gives a reason for this in any of the Congressional meetings, but we discover that this passionate belief system is in part because of the romantic relationship he carries on with his house maid (S. Epatha Merkerson, in one of many glorious subtle and well-acted cameo roles). His character’s journey is from radical integrationist to publicly swallowing his convictions, diluting them down to just the abolishment of slavery, so that one small victory may occur. The scene where he goes home and shows his lover the Constitutional Amendment which bans her from ever becoming “property” again is quietly moving. Jones, who excels at playing cantankerous and sarcastic individuals, is a riot. He delivers a typically strong, cranky and acerbic “Tommy Lee Jones” performance in large part, but he also delves into softer, calmer moments with a restraint that is very lovely to see.

And Daniel Day-Lewis for his part manages to once more perform his acting alchemy to transform into another being. His Lincoln is a man made up of dichotomies and home-spun quirks. His penchant for humorous and rambling stories which underscore a point, very subtly, drive home that this is a self-taught man from a quaint, humble background. The stories also slowly make his cabinet members think he’s lost the plot. These moments ground not just the film, but the character of Lincoln far away from the mythic, Christ-like Emancipator and into a more centered and real personage. That he stops frequently to talk with the common people underscores that this is a presidential figure who wanted to do what was right because it felt natural for him, and not because it would buy him up more votes. A scene featuring him talking with a former slave-turned-dress maker (Gloria Reuben) is a thoughtful examination of race relations, where Lincoln tells her that he doesn’t truly know any black people, and in time he will try to, but that they deserve at least a chance at the same opportunities he and his children have had. It’s a small scene, but it sticks with you. Along with Joaquin Phoenix and John Hawkes, this was one of the great male performances of 2012, and has been richly rewarded with nominations and awards.

But the whole cast, filled with numerous bit players since Lincoln, Stevens and Mary Todd are the primary players in this microcosmic look at events, is stellar from top to bottom. Character actors and up-and-comers like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hal Holbrook, Lee Pace, David Strathairn, John Hawkes, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, Joseph Cross, Jackie Earle Haley, Lukas Haas, Dane DeHaan, David Oyelowo and Jared Harris are all of the supporting figures that I recognized. There are only three notable female roles in the film, and I’ve mentioned them all. They may not get as much to do as the Boys Club of the political arena, but they are each given, at least, one standout scene that lingers long in the memory after the film has ended. Each of these actors brings something unique and well-rounded to the entire film, and there’s not one false or tinny performance in the lot. This is arguably the greatest ensemble of the whole year.

And Tony Kushner has given them brilliant words to work with. Like many of the greatest films, Lincoln is drunk on words and flowing with dialog. The glimpse into the political game is both humorous and trenchant, showing, if nothing else, that we haven’t changed at all in how we run our democracy in the century-plus since. That he managed to make a film about politics so interesting, engaging and alive with real humans interacting and trying to accomplish something is nothing short of a miracle. With any luck, the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay is his to lose.

Like any Spielberg film, the cinematography, costume and production design is top-shelf. The gowns, wigs and interiors feel period authentic to the point where one can practically smell the musk in the air and feel the dirt on the streets. The cinematography, by frequent collaborator Janusz Kamiński, is a beautiful display of light catching the dust in the air and drained of colors to deliriously gorgeous effect. The film looks frequently smoky, and there’s a nice bit of contrasts between the tortured, dark expanses of the White House and the gray, muddled Congress. The scene where Stevens shows his maid/common-law wife the 13th Amendment is lit in warm, earthy tones, I believe this goes a long way in making the moment stick out in my mind.

Clearly, I was enamored with Lincoln from start to finish. I suppose I can see how some people found this movie to be boring – politics in action, the differences and clashes in the public/private sector, and endless streams of words aren’t to everyone’s liking, and the film is more protracted and carefully measured than pure hagiography or liberal masturbatory-fest about the one Republican we all like. Lincoln instead prefers to take Big Ideas and examine them in microcosm. It emerges as a conflicted portrait of a man, who will eventually, through historical revisionism and symbolic handling, become an Icon, who always was and always will be fully formed and stoic. And to think, for the longest time my primary image of Lincoln was the animatronic from the Hall of Presidents at DisneyLand.