Top 12 of ’12 because 10 ain't enough

Cutting movies from my annual top 10 list was simply too difficult, so I did what any other list-compiling person would do in a similar situation — I expanded the list.

Here are my 12 favorite movies of the year. Happy New Year!

— Michael Clawson

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1. Silver Linings Playbook

No movie threw me through as many loops as Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell’s wacky descent — and then ascent — into mental illness. The jazzy overlapping dialogue is very sharp and reveals a clever comedy, but what sold me were brilliant performances by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, who play wounded old souls so delicate that you want to embrace them from your theater seat.

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2. Moonrise Kingdom

Of course the year’s best adventure movie is about a Boy Scout, a knot-tying, tent-pitching, trail-blazing, knife-sharpening little dweeb with a heart as big as his overstuffed backpack. Wes Anderson’s heartwarming romance about a scout (Jared Gilman) and his runaway girlfriend (Kara Hayward) is a touching portrait of being young and daring during an exploration of love.

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3. Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is about the creation of the Earth according to a 6-year-old girl who is wiser than most adults. Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father, Wink, live in a makeshift compound on an island in a bayou basin called the Bathtub. When the waters flood them out as Biblically as Noah, Hushpuppy begins an odyssey that is part myth, part fable and all poetry. Ben Zeitlin’s raw allegory is beautiful and enchanting.

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4. The Perks of Being a Wallflower

High school movies usually smack of bad writing and stereotypical teen portrayals, but not here with Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his own book. The first-time director gives his characters — played by Logan Lerman, Ezra Miller and Emma Watson — their own hopes, fears and dreams, and each one feels like an individual and not a name on a page. It’s a rare thing to see so much honesty in so many characters within one movie.

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5. Lincoln

More C-SPAN than Young Mr. Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s long-gestating Lincoln is a detailed and footnoted telling of how the 13th Amendment, the one outlawing slavery, was passed amid the final months of the Civil War. Holding up the whole film, large cast and all, is the remarkable Daniel Day-Lewis as President Abraham Lincoln. We only had photos of Lincoln before, but now we have a living breathing giant among men, as close to real footage of the famous president as you can get.

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6. Zero Dark Thirty

It begins with a black screen and the sounds of 9/11 and ends with Osama bin Laden in a bodybag, but the best parts of Zero Dark Thirty take place between the two, when a lone CIA agent had a hunch and acted on it to find the most wanted man in the world. Jessica Chastain stars in Kathryn Bigelow’s first film since The Hurt Locker. It’s like an episode of Law & Order with the biggest payoff in military history. It’s riveting.

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7. Argo

Here’s another CIA story, this time with Ben Affleck starring (and directing) in an espionage thriller about the rescue of American embassy workers from Iran. Analysts suggested we airmail them bikes so they could cycle out of hostile territory. Affleck’s character had a different idea: fly into Iran, pretend to make a big-budget sci-fi movie and then fly out with the hostages as they pretend to be members of a film crew. It was so crazy it worked.

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8. Looper

Ambitious science fiction lives! Rian Johnson directs a complicated little thriller about hired assassins who murder riff-raff dumped from 2074 into 2044, when no one will be looking for the corpses. Things get hairy when a killer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a morality crisis after his future self (Bruce Willis) turns up on the killing field. Held together with edgy-cool performances and post-modern tech predictions, Looper is a dazzling sci-fi film.

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9. The Hunter

A hunter is sent out in the wilderness to hunt the last fabled Tasmanian tiger, a species that went extinct in 1936. Alone in the wild with nothing but his thoughts and his decaying principles, the hunter (Willem Dafoe) is shaken to his core when he simultaneously finds the tiger and falls for a family living on the edge of the wilderness. The Hunter was not widely seen, or even shown, in the United States. Don’t let that shape your opinion of it — it’s a devastating film.

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10. ParaNorman

Stop-motion animation is now routinely more interesting than most other CGI animation films. Just look at ParaNorman, about a zombie-obsessed boy who unlocks a scary curse in his quaint little town. The animation is wonderful, the jokes are creepy-funny and the voice-acting is fantastic. I love how these stop-motion movies invent their worlds from the ground up: every doorknob, keyhole, car antenna, soda cup and tuft of hair is crafted by human hands. It’s amazing filmmaking. Also noteworthy: Pirates! Band of Misfits.

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11. Prometheus

Ridley Scott’s quasi-prequel to Alien disappointed many, and I must admit that the story could have used some tweaking. But even including those faults, Prometheus is still one of my favorite “big” movies of 2012. It expanded the Alien universe in a philosophical direction that I didn’t think was possible. And I just adore Noomi Rapace; I hope she has many more American films in the works. I can’t wait to see if Prometheus gets its own sequel (word on the street is that it will). 

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12. The Sound of Noise

This farce about musical terrorism was released in Sweden in 2010. It’s only just this year made it into American theaters, and I strongly urge you to find it if you can. It’s about a gang of musicians who invade and then terrorize public spaces using the city as a percussion instrument. Bulldozers roaring to life, coins flicked and spun, metal trays banged, high-tension wires plucked … these are the sounds of noise as the musicians hold an entire city hostage with music.

Unchained melody: Django’s song of the South is a cathartic explosion against slavery

The world is not ready for a movie like Django Unchained. I’m not entirely sure it will ever be ready. But here it is, in all its spur-jangling glory.

Quentino Tarantino, first a director of realistic crime dramas, has been making the rounds on all the other genres in recent years. He dabbled in kung-fu and martial arts movies with Kill Bill, sleazy exploitation films in Death Proof, and then World War II with Inglourious Basterds. Now here is Tarantino’s first western and, like his other jaunts through Hollywood’s varied genres, this one is a one-of-a-kind, see-it-to-believe-it kind of experience. I saw it, but I’m not entirely sure I believed it — I think my jaw hung open for most of it.

Just, just … wow! It really is a force that can’t be reckoned with. Scholars may analyze it, film professors may pick it apart, movie critics may diagnose it, but I really think it defies even the most basic scrutiny. It involves slavery, but it doesn’t make any grand statements about that scourge on American history, other than it is bad and woe unto the white man who keeps a black man in chains. Django is not an analogy, or metaphor, or a parable. It simply is. Take it at face value and just leave it alone.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a southern slave sometime around the Civil War. He’s propositioned by dentist and bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a wily German killer with a knack for long conversations that wind back around to startling conclusions. Schultz wants to purchase then hire Django to track down three killers, and in return Schultz will help Django — “The D is silent” — rescue his wife from vile slave owner  Calvin Candie, who lives on a plantation aptly named Candie Land. Milton Bradley is rolling (snake eyes) in his grave.

Like Kill Bill, much of the plot is a revenge fantasy set within an anachronism of hip-hop, ’70s-era exploitation cinema, Spaghetti Westerns and singer-songwriters. Django and Schultz are often seen riding through beautifully photographed plains and deserts while RZA, Ennio Morricone or Jim Croce are pumping from the speakers. Tarantino has no interest in playing fair with his history. Recall that in Iglourious Basterds he had two Americans fill Adolf Hitler with enough lead to contain a nuclear reactor in your kitchen with no radiation leakage, so yeah, there’s that. I imagine history books are more like coasters at the Tarantino casa. He does seem to take great interest in the look and feel of the Deep South, with period-appropriate costumes and interiors. There’s a funny bit with Schultz buying Django a suit, “any suit you want,” and he picks out an ensemble that Napoleon would call pajamas.

Foxx and Waltz are the right performers for these roles. Foxx is cold and calculated, downplaying his character’s brutality. And Waltz is electric as the moral and professional killer. He is given pages and pages of dialogue, all of it slithery and pliable, which gives Waltz plenty to work with to shape his devious dentist. By the time DiCaprio’s Candie makes an appearance I wasn’t sure if the script could hold him, but his dialogue rises to the occasion, giving Waltz material to weave around. I could listen to them talk circles around each other all day.

Django and Schultz wander through the Old West killing bounties until they finally find a way into Candie’s heart: they plan to pose as fight promoters of a specific kind of spectacle, black “Mandingo” fighters. This is a meta-reference to Richard Fleischer’s controversial 1975 Mandingo, and Tarantino drops the reference as if everyone has already seen it. Schultz and Django infiltrate Candie’s sprawling plantation, where they meet lots of champion fighters, Django’s whipped and broken wife (Kerry Washington), and Calvin Candie and his head servant/slave (Samuel L. Jackson), who might have forgotten what color his skin is in Candie’s intoxicating presence. They also meet the always-funny Walton Goggins, who can’t seem to wrap his brain around that D and J pairing: “I will you kill you Dee-Jango!”

The movie is full of slave imagery (including whippings and a dog mauling), brutal dialogue and roughly 100 or so utterances of the dreaded N word. It’s used by white and black characters, but the white characters use it in a snarly cadence that makes it sound much worse. In a historical context, the word was probably said a lot back then, but this is no Huck Finn and there is no deep lesson in its overuse. Tarantino uses it first to shock and then, after it’s been said a couple dozen times, to lull us into a numb daze. If saying the word takes its power away, then it is almost powerless by the end. Almost.

I’m trying to be sensitive in writing this review, though the film has no such worries: it is painfully blunt and so politically incorrect that it rates off the charts. Much of the humor is race-related juxtaposition: A black man on a horse!? A black man in a bar?! A black man in white peoples’ clothes?! Of course, no one says “black man,” though. As harsh as the dialogue is, Tarantino writes his black characters with warmth and affection. He’s also one of the few white people in American culture who can get away with this many N words (or even one), though I won’t entirely believe that until after the film’s been in general release for a couple of weeks. And though it can be lowbrow and cheap, Django Unchained also has a clever and slippery streak, like when Schultz wraps German folklore around Django’s wife and her experience as a slave in Mississippi. One image is especially poetic: a mist of blood spraying over the white cotton in a field. There is power, and poetry, in that visual.

Quentin Tarantino is fond to admit that he makes movies for himself — “Movies I would want to see,” he would say. Django Unchained might be Exhibit A in a case to prove that point. It’s filled with vile characters, horribly inappropriate dialogue and savage imagery, but it is pure Tarantino through and through. And though it may run a little long at nearly three hours, and Tarantino foolishly casts himself in a role, Django is an endlessly stylish adventure film that just so happens to take place at the same time as slavery.

And it just so happens to be totally ridiculous, in a good way. 

“Do you hear the people sing?”

Let me admit something right up top here: I have never seen Les Misérables before, in any format. I mention this first because it might frame your own opinion of my review; I won’t blame you.

Yes, it’s been around for awhile, but I have yet to partake in any of it. Not the 1862 French novel by Victor Hugo. Not any of the popular stage renderings, from Broadway all the way down to the community theater level. Not any of the numerous television and film adaptations. Not even the soundtrack, which I’m learning now is quite popular. For whatever reason, Les Misérables just never entered my life.

Now it has. And so Les Misérables gains another fan.

I’ll have to admit, though, that I struggled with this film. It was the singing dialogue. Not the songs; I liked those. Just the random bits of singing meant to be heard as a conversation. I know that’s a style musical fans enjoy, but it’s odd. Just speak already! Plain spoken English would make pieces of dialogue like “You’re under arrest,” so much easier to convey without sounding melodramatic and bizarre. If you recall, this was my big argument about The Phantom of the Opera from a couple years back, when Gerard Butler would get all sing-songy about metal Tupperware: Look at my cup / I have a cup / How did this cup get here in my hand?

In any case, speech-song stuff aside, Les Misérables is a gorgeous and cinematic movie. This isn’t Chicago, with minimal sets designed to look like a Broadway stage. No, this is a full-blown epic, with lots of location footage atop snow-dusted peaks, in vaulted European chapels and in fully realized outdoor sets with giant concrete elephants and armies and rebellions. It’s all so staggeringly large and eye-popping that it’s a wonder the actors can keep up with the set designers, but they do. The first scene really sets the stage: hundreds of prisoners pull a wounded warship into a dry dock. And down in the crowd is Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) heaving a rope and singing away like true jailbird.

Valjean, I’m told is one of the great stage characters, because he’s so conflicted and three-dimensional. Jackman plays him like it might be his last role, with every ounce of energy and with complete and utter confidence. Jackman excels at almost everything he touches, but he really outdoes himself here. Valjean is released from prison in 19th-Century France, and he immediately skips probation. On his trail is Un Chien le Bounty Hunter … I mean, Javert (Russell Crowe), a misguidedly noble officer for the government. These two play cat and mouse for the whole movie, including in a pivotal break in action during a revolution, when Valjean saves his life, thereby ruffling the frilly shirts in Javert’s military footlocker. Kindness, it seems, has eternally stumped him.

Valjean’s adopted daughter, Cosette (Amanda Seyfried), also figures in here, as does her tortured mother, Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who turned to a very dark place to make sure Cosette had the opportunities she deserved. Hathaway, weeping and broken, sings the famous “I Dreamed a Dream.” It’s a heartbreaking scene, and one of the film’s finest moments.

Almost all of the songs are wonderfully staged and sung. Hathaway is brilliant and hard to top, but the rest of the cast gets mighty close on “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and in an ambitious cross-cutting editing exercise in “One More Day,” as the cast ponders their placement in the story as an intermission approaches. Jackman’s singing performances are especially striking. He grows confused, sad, angry, frustrated, triumphant … seemingly the whole gamut of emotions during his internal argument with himself in “Who Am I?” (Pssst, you’re Jean Valjean.) And because the musical themes carry over through various parts of the film, it all blends together quite nicely, even when Crowe, the weakest singer in the cast, sing-talks his lines.

Another noteworthy performance is by Sacha Baron Cohen as a pimp, pickpocket and hustler in the fantastic “Master of the House,” in which he describes how to plunder his guests' wallets: Charge’em for the lice / extra for the mice / two percent for looking in the mirror twice. In the scene he holds up a menu for his brothel — “Look, touch, do.” — that might be simplicity at its least elegant. We laugh at Borat and Brüno, but Cohen is really quite talented at many other things.

I thoroughly enjoyed Les Misérables, much more than I ever thought possible. And here it is days after seeing the movie, and I’m still humming those damn songs. It must’ve worked.

This is a family affair in Knocked Up sequel

The Apatow Family reunion must be a riot. A laugh riot, not like a hockey riot or a Bieber-at-the-mall riot. Director Judd Apatow holds court at the grill, spitting jokes over the hot dogs. His wife, and lovely actress, Leslie Mann, sits in the shade telling all the other wives what Channing Tatum smells like. The kids, Maude and Iris Apatow, ignore their cousins as they tweet with Zooey Deschanel and that One Direction kid, the one who doesn’t own a comb.

The point is here that this is one famous and likeable family, which is why it’s perplexing that a film starring three quarters of them and written, directed and produced by the remaining quarter falls so short on so many levels. It’s a shame because I like these characters. I just didn’t really like anyone else.

This is a sorta-sequel to Knocked Up, in which a loser and a floozy find themselves parents-to-be after a one night stand. The stars of that film bounced parenting advice off their married friends, Pete and Debbie, who make it look easy but hide their fracturing patience for each other amid their hectic daily routines. At one point in that movie Pete says, “Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn’t last 22 minutes … it lasts forever.”

Now here are Pete and Debbie with their own movie in This is 40, a tangential offshoot within the Knocked Up universe. Like the first movie, Pete and Debbie are played by Paul Rudd and Mann, and their snarky affection is endearing and lovable, like when he farts in bed and blames it on the mattress springs as she fans a pillow in his direction. Or when she has to diagnose strange blemishes on his behind with one of those magnifying makeup mirrors.

The film is a random mish-mash of events and drama, though it starts out as just a sad portrait of the decaying spark that is their marriage. He obsesses over his musical superiority — “It’s a seminal Pixies track!” — while she rolls her eyes, and she harps on him for sneaking forbidden cupcakes from his various hiding spots. The film cycles through the various family routines — workout sessions, playdates, dinners, vacations, and household discussions — all leading up to their shared birthday party, though Debbie can’t bare reading 40 on a cake so she buys the 38 candle … again.

Some of this is charming and cute. It helps that Maude and Iris, playing two precocious tweens, are vital electrons spinning around this nuclear family. The film doesn’t neglect them, which is a commendable development when other movies give the kids so little dialogue. Maude is going through an obsession with TV’s Lost that can only be described as rigorous — “My relationship with Lost is not your business; It’s extremely personal” — and Iris, introverted and quiet, just craves attention from her big sister. They felt like real sisters because they are, and I’m enjoying watching them grow up in each new movie.

Comedy mogul Judd Apatow might be their father, but I doubt he lets them watch this movie any time soon: the opening little number involves a shower and some Viagra. The blue pills take Pete from “analog to digital” and the scene ends with an unrepeatable line that any 40-year-old woman has said, or thought, but one that only Leslie Mann can deliver with so much frustrated conviction. It’s the film’s best scene and most honest piece of dialogue.

By about the middle, though, This is 40 loses focus. Mostly it just introduces too many characters, migrating all the stars to the back of the crowd. First there’s Pete’s father (Albert Brooks), a lazy freeloader who feeds off his son’s miniscule profits from a going-bust record company. Debbie’s father (John Lithgow) is a distant man who’s asking for the check before the appetizers have arrived. Then there are numerous friends, coworkers, workout buddies, relatives, hockey players and burnouts, including British rock star Graham Parker playing himself as a British burnout rock star — he is a good sport about it. He’s more overused than even Sam Jones, aka Flash Gordon, was in the much funnier Ted from earlier this year.

Some of these little detours are funny — including Chris O’Dowd and Girls’ Lena Dunham as long-suffering music producers — though they often wear out their welcome. One thread involving a bully at Maude’s school turns into an ad-libbing free-for-all in a principal’s office. The scene is overbaked and smoldering, yet there it is again in the credit outtakes just in case you wanted to hear Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids) tell a character she was going to kick them with her “footbone” a couple more times.

This is 40 struggles to find its thematic core, but it occasionally finds a close orbit. In one unremarkable (albeit candid) scene, Pete disappears to the bathroom, where he sits and plays iPad games. Debbie gets wise to his scheme and confronts him. “I don’t smell poop,” she tells him standing at the door. “Because I flush as I go,” he says. It’s funny, and gross, but there are elements of honesty and truth to that joke. He retreats there to escape to a private time he’s not allowed in any other room in the house. She resents that time he takes because she assumes he doesn’t want to be with her. He, meanwhile, just wants to play Scrabble uninterrupted. The scene is a terrific analogy for marriage and its occasional claustrophobia, but the rest of the movie never hits, or even aims, that high again.

And how could it in such a crowded room?

Hope and courage in scary tsunami drama

American newspapers could not run the most grisly images from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. They were simply too shocking. I eventually saw a series of shots in a French photo magazine, and the scenes were of unimaginable horror. One was especially haunting, even to this day: a vast plain of compressed debris, made of splintered wood and torn metal, and in almost every patch, extending upward from the rubble, were dead hands and feet.

The earthquake-triggered tsunamis did not just wipe out beach communities and small towns, but whole islands and the populations that lived on them — more than 230,000 people. Whispers of this kind of destruction hit Japan last year, but what happened in 2004 in places like Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand was an ear-crushing yell.

It’s within this devastating disaster that The Impossible takes place. We meet a family on vacation: husband and wife Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) and their three young boys. They’re in Thailand, at a beautiful beach resort with sandy beaches and fields of palm trees. Director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) does not torture us by delaying the inevitable tsunami; it hits fairly quickly once the family lands on the island.

Once the tsunami hits, it’s ferocious, swallowing everything in its path and sucking people down into a blender of wood and metal and death. Remarkably, Maria and her oldest son, Lucas (Tom Holland), survive and are swept inland with the crush of CGI-animated waves. Maria is frequently dragged down into the muck, where her body is raked against steel fencing, splintered telephone poles, exposed tree roots and chunks of cars with victims still strapped inside. They eventually cling to a tree and wait for the waters to recede so they can search for Henry and the two other boys.

As wonderful as Watts is, it is child-actor Holland who really shines here as the receding waters reveal a post-apocalyptic nightmare. His Lucas is strong and resolute, and he bears a tremendous weight on his young shoulders as he helps his wounded mother limp out of this chaos. They eventually get to a crowded hospital, where a language barrier and the sheer scale of the disaster complicate their rescue. A beautiful scene involves Lucas as he races around the hospital to help a man locate his son. As he calls out the boy’s name, arms reach out to him from gurneys and injured survivors ask him to add new names to his list. Within a couple of minutes, he’s reading whole rosters of names out, desperately trying to reunite at least a single family, even while his own is fractured and lost.

The movie is based on a real family that experienced a miraculous — and, yes, impossible — resolution to one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded. I’m a little troubled that the film makes no effort to show the struggles of the locals. In fact it seems to even go out of its way to only feature white families from Spain, France and Germany. The Thai people are almost an afterthought, and occasionally they’re villains as they mess up doctor’s orders and separate Lucas from his mother in a cruel way that seemed to be added to the plot only for dramatic effect. Certainly people from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia lost more, and their stories deserved more recognition.

That withstanding, The Impossible is an incredible story of courage and survival, and it will warm your soul as you witness young children grapple with adult issues amid a disaster so large and fierce. The acting is impressive, even from the youngsters, as are the special effects, which convey the magnitude of the tsunami without sacrificing the film’s rather narrow viewpoint on one family.

Other than a brief segment in Clint Eastwood’s 2010 drama Hereafter, the Indian Ocean tsunami has not made its way into many films. I’m glad this movie exists, if only to show people how horrible the tsunami was and how resilient the human spirit is. 

Juddment Day: Apatow returns to Knocked Up

Judd Apatow is tugging on a long-sleeved plaid shirt, pulling at his buzzing phone and reaching out for a handshake all at the same time. This is how I meet him — endlessly multitasking.

I tell him he’s the George Lucas of comedy. “Is that a good thing?” he says. Sure, because your films take place within the same universe and often star the same characters, and you also write, produce and direct way more than people realize, from your own movies (40-Year-Old Virgin) to web shorts (Funny or Die clips) to TV shows (Freaks and Geeks, and this year’s endlessly debated HBO series Girls).  Isn’t it exhausting?

“Not yet,” he says.

Apatow was in Phoenix touring with This is 40, his quasi-sequel to Knocked Up. The 2007 movie starred a doughy man-child who suddenly finds himself with a pregnant one-night stand. This is 40 follows the parents-to-be’s best friends, an older couple with two children, one of whom does the unthinkable: “I Googled murder.” The parents are played by Paul Rudd and Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann. Their children are their real children: Maude, 14, and Iris, 12. Needless to say, the film is kinda personal for the 45-year-old comedy mogul.

Here is our chat:

Volume: Your phone isn’t far from your reach. Is that a Twitter addiction? You seem to have embraced it (@JuddApatow) more and more over the last several months.

Judd Apatow: I like it. In a weird way it has the immediacy of stand-up comedy. Twitter is hard to resist for someone who likes to get reactions out of people. So in the middle of the night, if I think of something provocative or funny I can tweet it and watch as a hundred or so people respond — you can start fighting or laughing with them. I find that to be an irresistible idea. My wife doesn’t like it because it’s a whole new distraction.

Volume: It’s interesting as a viewer to watch your children grow up from movie to movie.

JA: I hoped people would like that aspect. I got such a positive feedback from Knocked Up and Funny People about them. I mean, there was that scene in Knocked up where Maude explains how babies are made. [Actual quote from the movie: “Well I think the stork, he, um, he drops it down, and then a hole goes in your body and there’s blood everywhere, coming out of your head, and then you push your bellybutton, and then your butt falls off, and then you hold your butt, and you have to dig, and you find the little baby.”] She came up with that herself. And then she sings “Memory” from Cats in Funny People. And then Iris is very funny as well. It seemed like a very honest thing to do, to show them at every stage, especially when you consider that Maude didn’t understand how babies were made several years ago and now she’s struggling with young adult problems in this film. It felt like it would be a powerful experience for people, and funny too.

Volume: Will she star in her own movie eventually? Maybe This is 16?

JA: She can do whatever she wants to do. She has a lot of interests, and also a lot of homework right now, so it is a balance of her pursuing things like acting and her writing, blogging and tweeting [@MaudeApatow] and not failing biology.

Volume: Could this be a trilogy?

JA: It could be seven films. I like the idea of revisiting people in stages. There’s no part of me that wouldn’t make This is 50, This is 60 or beyond. It’s a fascinating opportunity. When I listen to music, I’m always moved by people who share their lives within their songs, people like Loudon Wainwright.

Volume: Paul Rudd has always been great, but he was always misunderstood before your collaborations together.

JA: Paul is a brilliant actor. I just recently saw him on stage in New York and he’s terrific. He has a really strong chemistry with Leslie, and he can convey these deep issues that Leslie and I deal with within our relationship in a way that’s funny. His character is a Frankenstein monster made of his worst traits and my worst traits.

Volume: Was there ever any push to have the original Knocked Up characters, Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, appear?

No, because I felt that Seth and Katherine were so charismatic and funny that if they walked through the movie you would just want to follow them. You couldn’t have them in one scene because you would get frustrated that they weren’t on screen more.

Volume: My wife and I have been married just over a year, so I’m excited to see it with her to get her take on it. The jokes were very honest.

JA: It’s all very relatable material. And what’s so weird about that is the more specific I got the more universal it became. Things that I thought I only did — like taking the iPad to the bathroom for some peace and quiet — are actually quite common, so that’s been exciting because I never thought that people would see that and see their own habits.

Volume: Did you ever worry you were making the film too personal?

JA: Not really. It’s about a third from our life, a third observed from friends’ lives and third made up to make the movie interesting. It is like a soup of ideas. If you came to our house you wouldn’t think you were living the movie right now. It does represent our emotional issues and things we’re concerned about, including aging and communication problems.

Volume: The men in this movie are crazy, whereas the women appear to ground them. Was that a conscious decision to show that?

JA: I didn’t necessarily want to show how irresponsible men were, just how they kind of always had their own agenda, like in Knocked Up when Paul’s character sneaks out for fantasy baseball or here in This is 40 where he sneaks into the bathroom to play iPad games, or sneaks cupcakes even though he’s gaining weight. I wanted to show how men drive women crazy and how that disconnects the relationship. A lot of my relationship with Leslie is me learning lessons that I wouldn’t have learned if she wasn’t around. Without her I would just be eating McDonalds for every meal and sleeping on my couch 16 hours a day. 

Lower your Hobbit expectations just a bit

Few movies are as cherished by a generation — other than the first Star Wars trilogy, perhaps — than Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. And now that entire generation has to prepare itself for a little disappointment. Not a lot. But enough to produce a noticeable rattle against their plastic swords and staffs as they exit the theater.

Jackson, after a long trudge through development hell, returns to Middle Earth with J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy epic, The Hobbit, which takes place 60 years or so before Frodo’s adventure to destroy the One Ring. The book was originally supposed to be one movie, but then it was split into two. Later it was cut up again to make three movies, because if you have a machine that prints money why would you turn it off? Each is around three hours long. With nine hours of film to play with — first with An Unexpected Journey, next year’s The Desolation of Smaug, and 2014’s There and Back Again — Jackson threw every comma, semi-colon and period from Tolkien’s book into the movie. More on that later.

The film opens, like Lord of the Rings, with myths and whispers. A dragon named Smaug has sniffed out a cancerous greed within a society of dwarves, who have hallowed out a mountain to store their precious metals. Smaug lays waste to the surrounding valley and claims the peak, the Lonely Mountain, as his own, sending the dwarves scampering into the wilderness. A generation later, Thorin Oakenshield — named after his ad-libbed defense with an oak branch — has decided to mount a raid on Smaug to reclaim the dwarves’ homeland.

The meeting to plan the attack is held at the underground home of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), a curious hobbit who had no clue that Tuesday was Plan-a-Suicidal-Attack-Against-a-Giant-Dragon Night in his living room. Bilbo is neck deep in some ale and a seedcake when wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Thorin (Richard Armitage) and a caravan of other dwarves descend on his little hobbit hole. Gandalf, it seems, wants to recruit Bilbo as the fellowship’s resident burglar, a role that Bilbo first refuses and then accepts with hesitation.

Besides the wizard, the hobbit and leader Thorin, there are a dozen other dwarves in the group: Balin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dwalin, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Fili and Kili. It’s a tongue-tying list of fantasy names, but fear not because you’re not expected to remember them, although I frequently recognized Bombur, whose round body has the physics of an overfilled water balloon.

Jackson and his writing team — including Rings veterans Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, and original director Guillermo del Toro — include everything they can from Tolkien’s source material, including a 10-minute dish-washing segment and several songs ripped right from the book’s pages. They even include material that isn’t even in The Hobbit, but from appendices within other Tolkien books. It’s a comprehensive effort, and an accurate one, but it dilutes the potential of The Hobbit. To paraphrase The Lord of the Rings, it “feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” I find it odd that The Hobbit, smaller than any single book in the Rings trilogy, gets three three-hour movies. If we were to apply the same math to Rings, that trilogy should have been 45 hours or more. The upside to this is that fans of the book will get a generous serving, with lots of meat to chew on.

The Hobbit, just as visually rich as Jackson’s other visits to Middle Earth — with all of New Zealand’s beauty, real and CGI, on display — is slow going for the first half as Bilbo and his troupe of dwarves trek through mossy forests, across rock-strewn plains and up treacherous mountains that come to life during thunderstorms. There is constant danger, first from a trio of hungry mountain trolls and then from a roaming pack of goblins, but the plot seems to meander along as Bilbo questions who he should follow: the easily disgruntled Thorin or wise Gandalf, who got him into the mess to begin with. The movie marched forward, though I was never sure where it was marching: A secret door into the Lonely Mountain? A battle with Smaug? The formation of an army? The mission’s goal was muddled and confusing, even after a visit to Elrond (Hugo Weaving) and Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), who caution Gandalf concerning the long-dead Sauron and a mysterious Necromancer, material for one of the next Hobbits.

The second half of the movie, though, is a treat as the company is trapped in a goblin mountain, with a bloated tumor-pocked goblin king. Tolkien’s world — and by extension, Peter Jackson’s world — is a remarkable place, and it is richly detailed and realized. This goblin kingdom is proof to that, with caverns of matchstick-like huts teetering on jagged cliffs, and inhabited by foul, contorted goblins. It’s in this setting that The Hobbit finds its greatest scene, one featuring the triumphant return of Andy Serkis as Gollum, who, by this point in Tolkien’s tales, has found the One Ring and become crazy from its power. Gollum’s scenes are small, but they are powerful in the way that they validate the adventures in The Hobbit. Gollum, more so than even Bilbo, is the link to Rings, and here he performs with bravado as he twitches and babbles about his “precious” during a game of riddles. I found myself missing Gollum as soon as he was absent from the screen.

The Hobbit is a marvelous feat of filmmaking, but I only wish that its story were more accessible. Frodo’s journey enveloped us right from the beginning, but Bilbo’s struggles to hook us right away. Compared to Rings, The Hobbit is just not as focused, which is understandable since it has more layers and many more references (footnotes included) to the source text. Rings fans will adore it, but I also think they’ll either crave more or, like me, a little less.

A final note: if you have the chance to see the film in 48fps — or 48 frames per second — then skip it. The technology is impressively sharp, but it gives the film an unnatural look compared to the usual 24fps, like it was shot on the set of a soap opera. It also makes movement look slightly sped up, which makes action look more realistic, but the effect can play tricks on your eyes to the point of distracting you away from Jackson’s film. Overall, it just doesn’t look cinematic.

“Mustard or ketchup, your highness?”

In June of 1939, as Hitler was gearing up to invade Poland and start World War II, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth traveled to New York to eat hot dogs on a picnic with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his various mistresses.

The fact that everything in the above sentence is entirely true does wonders for the film that features it all, Roger Michell’s subtle and silly Hyde Park on Hudson. At first glance, the movie might seem to denigrate the great FDR, with his drinking and mistresses and all his personality quirks, but Michell’s splendid little period piece does quite the opposite — it looks on FDR with great admiration and respect.

Roosevelt is played here by the American treasure Bill Murray, though the movie is not told from his perspective. It is viewed through the eyes of Roosevelt’s distant cousin, Daisy (Laura Linney), who was having an affair with the president whenever he visited Hyde Park, New York, his hometown on the Hudson River. Roosevelt would visit a grand estate owned by his mother, a controlling little woman portrayed here the way Norman Bates might portray his mother. “Mother doesn’t like me drinking,” the president will say after sipping from a flask and hiding it in his desk, like a child with a forbidden piece of candy.

Early scenes in the film show Daisy and FDR riding through the picturesque countryside, tailed by a sheriff’s deputy for protection, as the two begin to explore their emotions for each other. How strange it must have been when Roosevelt held Daisy’s hand. Stranger still when Daisy leaned into his advances. Up until that point they had only been distant relatives. “What about Eleanor?” Daisy would ask. “Oh, she’s into she-men furniture builders,” the president would say referring to his wife’s rumored bisexuality.

As the inevitable war in Europe grinded closer, British royals had come to New York to feel out the president and his willingness to help fight the Nazis. King George VI, the same stuttering and stammering monarch from The King’s Speech, and his wife descended onto Hyde Park a little confused about their visit and why it was being held outside of Washington, D.C. A hilarious sequence takes place in the New York countryside, where the king decides he wants to greet some commoners, though no one seems to recognize him or care. One farmer barely musters a glance at the king while he plows his field — “He’s busy,” the king says with a huff after his waves go unanswered.

Murray is wonderful as the paralyzed president, but its Roosevelt’s interactions with the royals — played here by Samuel West and Olivia Colman — that make Hyde Park on Hudson so charming. Roosevelt treated them as his equals, not the nobility that they were, and it frazzled them to such a degree that they were dumbfounded. When it came time for the picnic, King George is utterly baffled at the notion of hot dogs. He even says “hot dogs” with this sour expression on his face, as if it were watery gruel from a Russian gulag. The president promises the king that the hot dogs have no hidden meaning, but ask yourself what the American people would have thought had the king refused the most American of foods.

The parts that interested me least were all the relationship drama between FDR, a manipulative and cruel Eleanor, and Daisy and the other women. It does sporadically work when Roosevelt enlists Daisy to spy on the royals — “All quiet on the upstairs front,” she tells him — or when Daisy must attend the hot dog picnic in the film’s closing scenes.

The best scenes, though, are when FDR is sticking it to the king, who is grown very accustomed to having his royal behind kissed.

Race and rape collide in New York City

We put a great deal of faith in men and women who don a police badge and set out upon the streets looking for criminals. Police officers are largely a noble and honest bunch, but the bad ones infect the whole system and they rot it from the inside out.

In New York City, five teens were arrested for a violent rape they never participated in. The police had no reason to suspect them except that they were up to no good, or "wilding," in Central Park the same night. With no evidence against the young men, police detectives laid into them during 30-hour interrogations, eventually getting them to admit that they were at the rape, but didn't join in. The boys were told if they admitted to witnessing the crime they could go home.

So, without food, sleep or attorneys, the teens each filmed confessions admitting to things they didn't do. Nevermind that the police had coached their answers, altered timelines, given them bogus information based on bad hunches, and then ignored how none of the confessions made much sense when added together. The police had decided one cold fact: these young men were guilty, and to prove it they would have to reverse engineer their crime.

All of this is rolled out in a devastating documentary, The Central Park Five, about the young men, now all in their late 30s. The film does a deliberate and thorough job to place the film firmly in 1989, when the rape occurred. Crime had not yet begun to drop in New York City. Shootings, stabbings and sexual assaults were common. Alleys were dark and dangerous. Muggings were so frequent many New Yorkers stopped reporting them. White stock traders and executives boarded graffiti-covered subways. Black teens played basketball in the street.

The city was thrown into a firestorm the night the Central Park Jogger was violently beaten and raped near a crossbridge in the northern half of the park. Several sources within the film suggest that the crime was a "perfect storm" of buzzwords: White woman. Rape. Central Park. Black suspects. One official said that if the rape had taken place in any other park — just not the famous Central Park — we wouldn't know the story today. Another points to a black rape victim from the previous month, a story that no one cared about because it didn't have enough buzzwords.

The movie hits the racial angle of the case hard, even bringing up the 1955 case of Emmett Till, the black youth who playfully whistled at a white woman and then was killed for it. Had these teens been white and on the side of the park that doesn't edge close to Harlem, then it's likely they would have never been questioned. Five rightfully implicates the police and the public for its unjustified bloodlust for the teens, but also the media, who sensationalized the story without asking the bigger questions. Then there's Donald Trump, a blowhard even back then, who took out a full-page ad calling for the return of the death penalty just for this case.

The movie is mostly told by the Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise — as they narrate that chapter of their life. They were found guilty in a 1990 trial and spent 12 years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated them. Prison seems to have hardened them, though they seem wiser and also contemplative and sad. They felt that their city had betrayed them, which is a correct assumption. It struck me that they never appeared angry. Just calm and quiet.

The film neglects one of the central figures: the jogger, later identified as Trisha Meili. She survived the attack, though her recovery was agonizingly slow. It's understandable that she not want to participate in the movie featuring the men she associated with her attack (she has no memory of the rape itself), but the film should have placed more emphasis on her story, especially since she's made it more public with her book I Am the Central Park Jogger.

The film is made by documentarian Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and David McMahon. It's less static and rigid than many of Burns' other documentaries (Baseball and The Civil War), and its use of footage is exact and well-researched. I liked some of the little details, like how Raymond Santana says his arrest and conviction made front-page headlines, but his exoneration barely made the paper.

Too many of these stories are happening: police are so sure of a suspect that they overlook evidence to support their false hopes. I saw it in all three Paradise Lost movies, about the West Memphis Three and their eventual exoneration, and also with Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line, in which Randall Adams is wrongly convicted because he just seemed guilty. Police have a responsibility to get these facts right, but in all three cases, police answered one bad hunch with a worse one. And when they were called on it they doubled down on wrong assumptions, false hope and tampered confessions.

Police need to be held to a high standard, not just for the Trisha Meilis of the world, but also the Antron McCrays. The Kevin Richardsons. The Raymond Santanas. The Yusef Salaams. And the Korey Wises.

Brewer "slugs/punches/taps" reporter (UPDATED)

Small break from movies for just a second, but fear not, reviews of Django Unchained, The Hobbit, Zero Dark Thirty and This is 40 are all in the works.

Last week I was out at Hickman’s Family Farms in the far west Valley for a PR event of sorts. While there — in a scentless demilitarized zone somehow untouched by that acidy all-engulfing chicken-poo scent that hovers over chicken farms — I witnessed a little impromptu press conference with Gov. Jan Brewer. She was asked about global warming (she sounded skeptical that it exists) and then she reacted flippantly to the reporter who asked about it by tapping him on the arm with the back of her hand. You can read most of my version of the story here, on Jim Romenesko’s site.

I submitted the story to Jim because he’s a collector of behind-the-scenes stories about reporters and their news-gathering efforts. I greatly respect his work. I figured he’d appreciate the way KTVK’s Dennis Welch handled the question, and then his response to the governor’s response. Jim expressed some interest in the story, and he suggested he might run with it. I figured he’d use my email as background, and then build from it using other sources. Instead, he quoted nearly my entire email and then gave Welch a single quote at the end: “I’d say this is a fair an[d] accurate account.”

So that’s exciting. But now, as the story spreads across the news sites — including The Atlantic, one of my favorite sites — I have some observations on my viral little email.

First, memories can be deceiving. After Brewer touched the reporter, my mind seemed to file a version of the event that was slightly different than the real version. I can see it still in my head: Brewer raises her left hand and reaches out to Welch, touching his right arm. Videos of the event, which weren’t available when I typed my email, show what looks like Brewer reaching out with her right hand. Yet the video seems to conflict with my memory … even as I watch it. It’s a very strange phenomenon, and I can understand why witness testimony can be so misleading in criminal investigations. In any case, I hope readers forgive me: I said Brewer used her left hand when she most likely used her right.

Second, the physical act of touching another person. I called it a “slug,” and others have called it a “tap” or “punch.” All of these words are unfortunate choices for what happened. Clearly, Brewer did not pull her fist back and cold-cock a reporter in the jaw. I used the word “slug” because it seemed appropriate. A slug is what you give your kid brother when he’s being a pest, or friend who cracks a joke in your direction. It’s playful, but also serious. It says, “Hey, don’t test me.” You feel a slug, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s just a reminder that personal space can be playfully violated, and will if the need arrive. In my opinion Jan Brewer slugged a reporter. But when headline writers put it in a headline, it reads differently and sounds malicious. A slug to one person is a punch to another. So what did Brewer actually do? “Tap” does not do the altercation justice; what she did was a slight escalation. So whatever is between “tap” and “slug.” Perhaps “swat.” No matter the case, though, she was upset at the reporter and she put her hand on him, and that’s a risky business to be playing in when you’re such a high-profile politician.

Finally, Gov. Brewer, I could tell a story about her every week. She’s just so … odd. The wandering silences, the broken sentences, the dodging she does with members of the press. I was once at a press conference for Luke Air Force Base, but no one wanted to ask Luke questions. Instead the media was hounding Brewer about SB 1070, which was either on the table or had already been signed (I forget). Her handler promised the media that if we asked Luke questions, Brewer would take immigration questions later. Once the press conference ended, Brewer bolted down a long corridor, her security officers in tow, until she hopped in a waiting car and sped away. I left the event and stopped for a drink at a convenience store down the street. Guess who’s inside getting a Big Gulp and some snacks? Gov. Jan Brewer. No time for reporters, but time for a soda. The clerk was astonished: “The governor was just here,” he told me. Yeah, I know, but don’t ask her to stick around.

UPDATE: Here are links to all the sites that are picking up this ridiculous story. It's remarkable that a little inside-journalism story could be so widely read, but then again it does involve "punching." Links: Jim Romenesko, Gawker, Talking Points Memo, Phoenix New Times, Think Progress, Joe Sharkey, The Christian Post, The Blaze, The Daily Mail, Dennis Welch's station KTVK-3TV, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, another Phoenix New Times ... more to come (possibly).

By the way, several groups of comments have called me out for not getting the exchange on camera. Trust me, I'm bummed I didn't document it more. I had photographed Brewer for more than an hour at that point, and I didn't realize what I was seeing until it was too late. Also, after Brewer started walking away from the cluster of reporters, I, like Welch, began messing around with my equipment and I didn't take another shot because it all happened so quickly. I did get a shot of Brewer staring at Welch for those awkward 5 seconds or so. That photo is up top.

Lastly, I never thought Brewer tapping a reporter was all the newsworthy. That part is being sensationalized. The part that was more interesting was that she thought global warming was not caused by man, and that she objected to being asked about it. She's the governor of a state, one that has slowly begun to embrace alternative energies including solar, so I find it troubling that she didn't have an answer to the question already. And then to get upset that it was asked ... silliness. I'm going to end with this last photo, taken in October 2010 as Brewer ceremoniously turned on the machinery at Suntech, a solar facility in Goodyear. Did she not form an opinion about global warming then, when solar executives were talking about clean energy?