The Year in Review: The Tramp's Top Ten Films of 2012

As the year that saw the Avengers finally Assemble, the Dark Knight Rise, the Sky Fall and Joseph Gordon-Levitt Loop comes to a close, it's time to look back at the best of this year's cinematic offerings. It may surprise you that, try as I might I didn't see every single film this year. I missed out on treats like Rust and Bone and The Raid, and have not yet gotten to see the Oscar-tipped Silver Linings Playbook. Similarly,  I've not seen Tarantino's latest, Django Unchained, which isn't due for release in the UK until next month. Accordingly, this will be a very subjective list of my personal favourite experiences at the cinema this year. Initially, I'd wanted to do a top five, but given that this year has furnished us with some of the most interesting and diverse offerings for some time, I'm going to present a special top ten of the year, which is in chronological, as opposed to preferential, order. Enjoy!

Michael Hazanavicius' tribute to silent cinema was released in most countries late last year, but it took me until January this year to see it, so I'm sticking it in this list. The Artist was simply one of the loveliest films I saw this year, with a fantastic conceit, lovingly executed with extraordinary craftsmanship. A tribute to the joy of film itself, The Artist was a wonderful way to start the year and offered one of the best cinema experiences I've ever had.

One of two releases by director David Cronenberg this year, Cosmopolis beats A Dangerous Method to the top ten as an often obtuse, inaccessible and frustrating work that is equally fascinating, dark and nihilistic. Robert Pattinson, best known for the risible Twilight Saga films, gives an enigmatic and engaging performance here, announcing himself, somewhat unexpectedly, as a serious and talented actor. The trailer proclaims Cosmopolis as the first film about the new millennium; I'm not sure about that, but it certainly gave me an experience like no other in 2012.

Speaking of unique experiences, Ron Fricke's dialogue-free, staggeringly beautiful documentary presented us with something that literally no other film came close to this year. Made over the course of five years, Samsara has some of the best cinematography I've ever seen in a film, let alone this year. If any film justifies the purchase of an HD television and Blu-ray player, it's this, but to fully appreciate it, it's essential to see it in a cinema.

William Friedkin, director of classics such as The Exorcist and The French Connection gave us one of this year's darkest and most twisted films in the shape of pitch-black comedy Killer Joe. The film told the story of a father and son (played by Thomas Haden Church and Emile Hirsch respectively) who hire a hitman, played by a top-form Matthew McConaughey, to kill Hirsch's estranged mother and collect on a life insurance policy. Killer Joe plays with the tropes of film noir and exhibits some of the most disturbing and nauseatingly comical scenes of violence this side of Blue Velvet, giving us one of the most absurd, unsettling and memorable climaxes of the year.

While we're on the subject of endings, Christopher Nolan's magnificent, bombastic and audacious trilogy capper marvellously concluded his seven-year long Batman saga. While lacking the narrative clarity of its predecessor, and proving more divisive amongst critics that both The Dark Knight and Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises was a fantastic third chapter and great movie in its own right, and finally broke the curse of the Terrible Superhero Threequel. For me, it was one of the most enjoyable, thrilling and satisfying movie events of the year.

Andrew Dominik's follow up to The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a sprawling epic, was a much smaller affair, in both historic and geographic scope. Garnering mixed reviews, for me Killing Them Softly proved to be one of the most interesting and ambitious crime films of the year, reminding me of the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, and of the early work of Martin Scorsese. Tying the events of the film to the 2008 Obama / McCain US presidential election didn't work for some, but by the film's final, brutal last line, it damn sure worked for me.

With Looper, Rian Jonson gave us one of the best and most original science fiction outings for years, standing alongside Moon, District 9 and Inception as part of the recent resurgence of intelligent, popular sci fi for grown ups. Despite distracting prosthetics, Jospeph Gordon-Levitt gave a reliably nuanced and engaging performance of Joe, a hitman tasked with killing his future self. He and Bruce Willis, who played Gordon-Levitt's future counterpart, had great chemistry together, and in drawing on films such as Twelve Monkeys, The Terminator and Blade Runner, Johnson crafted a fully realised futurescape for his noir-inflected time travel story.   

Ah, Skyfall, let me count the ways. It's difficult to think of a Bond film that adheres to the formulas and cliches of the 007 franchise while somehow elevating them into a meditation on the series at fifty years old. A meditation with explosions, car chases, and a man in an electronically-sealed glass cage, of course. Skyfall, in the more-than-capable hands of Sam Mendes, was this year's best blockbuster, the best Craig iteration of Bond to date, and dare I say it, the best Bond film ever made (though my personal favourite remains On Her Majesty's Secret Service, your Goldfingers and You Only Live Twices be damned). After the disappointing Quantum of Solace, everything in Skyfall came together effortlessly. Welcome back to work, 007, we missed you.

In 2008, Paul Thomas Anderson gave us There Will Be Blood, a huge, menacing portrait of greed, obsession, and ambition. This year, he gave us The Master, which while lacking the scope of his last, was at least equally as menacing, and twice as unsettling. Jonny Greenwood returns too, providing one of the best scores of the year, perfectly complementing the tension between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, who, by the way, as a pair give not simply the best performances I saw this year, but amongst the best performances I've ever seen. While the film, with its lack of an eventful story, was not to everyone's tastes, its difficult to imagine a more finely crafted and expertly executed character study than The Master.

The last time I saw Mads Mikkelsen was in Casino Royale, weeping blood as he crossed wits and playing cards with Daniel Craig. Here, under the fine direction of Thomas Vinterberg, he finds himself in no more enviable circumstances, as Lucas, a nursery teacher wrongly accused of child molestation. Rather than the central premise being the question of whether or not he did it, Vinterberg makes it explicit that the warm, kind Lucas is most definitely innocent, and allows the story to play out as a sickening, unravelling nightmare as Lucas' friends and colleagues succumb to suspicion, hysteria, and ultimately violence. Very much a modern-day parallel to Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, The Hunt was one of the most intense cinematic experiences I've ever had, and one which I surely shared with the rest of the audience: throughout the film exhalations of discomfort were audible, stoked by the unbearable tension of the film. As an examination of hysteria, paranoia and people's capacity to reason themselves into madness, The Hunt is unparalleled.

So there we have it, my top ten films of the year. As I said, this was a personal list and I make no claims to this being a definitive 'Best of 2012' list. There were many other films I would have liked to have included, and so honourable mentions go to the cleverclogs Cabin in the Woods, the underrated Brave, the strange Beasts of the Southern Wild, the exhilarating Avengers Assemble, and the tender Untouchable. Happy New Year, and I'll see you all on the 1st January for a special Tramp Announcement!

The Friday Tramp Review: Looper

Looper, directed by Rian Johnson, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Jeff Daniels, Emily Blunt.

Rian Johnson’s third feature, following his wonderful debut Brick, and 2008’s disappointing con-man fairytale The Brothers Bloom, is his largest, most ambitious to date, featuring a captivating central performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Looper follows Joe, a hitman in 2044 whose job it is to assassinate undesirables sent back from thirty years in the future. He is the eponymous looper, enjoying handsome rewards and a lavish lifestyle with one catch: eventually he will meet, and be compelled to kill, his future self, played with an appropriate impatience by Bruce Willis. The reward is an early retirement, a big cash settlement and thirty years to contemplate the inevitable. The reason that the future gangsters don’t just send the ex-loopers back to someone else to kill them is never addressed, nor are the various plot holes that present themselves, but it matters little that the film doesn’t concern itself too closely with the minutiae of time travel movie paradoxes. Rather, Looper is at heart a character piece, with both JGL and Willis doing a fine job of bringing pathos and believability to a character who is often so morally reprehensible he makes Rick Deckard look like a boy scout. Granted, it’s a character piece with hoverbikes, retro-futuristic weaponry and one of the best-realised and believable futurescapes this side of Blade Runner, with shanty towns lining the streets as Joe and his pals pass by in their solar-powered sports cars, seemingly indifferent to the extreme poverty surrounding them.

The future looks none too bright for Joe

Indeed, Looper’s most effective scene is the tense discussion between young Joe and his future self in a 1950s-styled diner. When young Joe, effectively standing in for the audience, asks old Joe how the time loop works the older man just tells him he doesn’t want to waste time having to draw diagrams with straws. It’s not why they’re meeting, and it’s not why we as an audience are watching, either. Johnson seems acutely aware that films like Looper, with complex premises and plots, are often susceptible to those enemies of narrative economy: needless exposition and unnecessary voiceovers. The director plays with both these clichés, first by beginning Looper with a voiceover from JGL, only to drop it before bringing it back at the end; referring both to the conventions of film noir, and to the rightly-maligned voiceover narration that was hastily put together for Blade Runner’s original theatrical release. Second, the frequent expository discussions between characters are often interrupted mid-explanation, leaving us with just enough information to get through without ruining the film’s singular sense of momentum.

It’s that sense of momentum, built up in the first two acts, that keeps things compelling in the final third, where the action slows in favour of developing the relationship between young Joe and Sarah (spot the reference), played by the ever-reliable Emily Blunt. Another bugbear of big action cinema, the shoe-horned love interest, Sarah and Joe’s reluctant friendship gives us just enough decent characterisation and well-placed plot developments to maintain emotional interest, even if we all know where it’s going. Moreover, it’s in this section that old Joe goes into full Terminator-mode, going after a hit-list of children (yes, children), knowing that one of them will grow into the man who will murder his future wife. It’s one of Looper’s greatest strengths that it borrows so heavily from the sci-fi canon without ever feeling derivative. The casting of Willis is an obvious homage to Twelve Monkeys, and the final act plays almost identically to the early scenes in James Cameron’s seminal time-travel yarn. Just as he did with detective movie Brick, Johnson blends a mixture of the familiar to make something that feels new and refreshing, though it’s fair to say that despite its emotional depth, Looper lacks the intellectual complexity of many of the works to which it pays tribute. In addition, and without spoiling anything, the ending feels just a little too neat and tidy, and while there’s little point in picking apart plot holes in this sort of film, there do seem to be one or two that could have been tightened at the scripting stage.

What with Neill Blomkamp's District 9, Duncan Jones’ excellent Moon and Source Code, Chris Nolan’s Inception and now Johnson’s Looper, it seems that intelligent, single concept science fiction has surely returned to mainstream cinema. Where, for example, Jones’ recent triumphs felt like callbacks to the meditative sci-fi of the 1960s and 70s,  Johnson’s entry in the genre is in many ways a tribute to the science fiction of the 1980s; movies that blended big ideas with bigger action. Though undoubtedly a smart film, Looper doesn’t match up to Cameron or Ridley Scott’s best work, and at no point is it at as groundbreaking as either The Terminator or Blade Runner. Nor is it as audacious as Paul Verhoeven’s extravaganza of violence, Total Recall. But consider this year’s remake of that film, widely considered a bland, flat and pointless retread of Verhoeven's original. Then consider Johnson’s film. Flawed, yes, but full of personality and ambition, not to mention giving us another great turn from JGL, finally in a leading role after playing second fiddle to the DiCaprios and Bales of Blockbusterville. While lacking the intellectual heft of the films to which it aspires, Looper is still challenging, engaging, and one of the most satisfying sci-fi movies you’re likely to see this year.