2012 Muriels: Other Stuff We Loved, Pt. 3 (Miscellany)

Best Screenplay: Joseph Kahn and Mark Palermo, Detention

"Detention's premise is as delightfully migraine-inducing as it is because writer/director Joseph Kahn and co-writer Mark Palermo want to wear you out. They want to make a post-post-modern horror-comedy. As the film's opening scene announces via its fourth-wall-busting narration, the intent is to smother you in the terrifying, tonally-schizophrenic present tense of genre filmmaking. While the most popular girl at Grizzly Lake tells us how not to be a social leper, she's brutally murdered by a someone dressed-up as Cinderhella, the titular killer in a popular series of films. Kahn wants to go beyond Scream, a film that half-heartedly made fun of how pointless slasher movie's paint-by-number formulas have become. But the formula used in Detention is a patchwork of various different genres -- everything from The Breakfast Club to Iron Man. Detention's shrill, self-promoting first victim insists that she's very self-aware, but has obviously confused being self-conscious with self-awareness. She knows "the rules," but she gets nailed anyway. Generic rules apply, but they're applied piecemeal as needed and at a breakneck pace.

Detention wants you to see formula storytelling as a freakish, constantly mutating thing. It's an essentially dystopian film because it's an more ironic-than-ironic comedy. In his world, everything is allowed now that '80s nostalgia is the same as '90s nostalgia is the same as '00s nostalgia. The high-low taste barrier is absolutely fucked, and the screenplay, which includes a time-traveling bear from the planet Starclaw and one kid transforming into a pubescent Brundlefly with a TV on his hand, revels in that chaos -- anything is probable. Hipster hero Clapton Davis's (Josh Hutcherson) quest to make the Cinderhella murders stop, thereby preventing any further disintegration of his world's sense of reality, is not modest. He's tasked with nothing short of restoring order to a world over-run by false permissiveness (blow jobs for school mascots!), and of blank pastiche run amok. It's the future! It's the end of the world! It's your sister, your daughter, and a dystopian utopia, too! Detention is clearly the product of some very artful crazy people." - Simon Abrams



Best Music: Jon Brion, Paranorman

"Jon Brion has been producing memorable scores for years, usually overlooked both in the public sphere and by his peers in the industry, despite their typically-welcoming gonzo aesthetic. With Paranorman¸ Brion once more succeeds in the usual fashion by smartly entwining his experimental stylings with the sensibilities of whichever film has his attention. As an animated film appealing largely to children, Paranorman must walk a fine line musically, and Brion appropriately balances the referential nods to his art’s history within the medium with a less academic approach to the material. He intersperses the whimsy of his now trademark piano tinklings with more serious-minded string arrangements throughout, never more noticeably brilliant than in the film’s final climactic showdown. The fact that Brion consistently manages to marry his left brain and right brain musical output, delivering equally dynamite work whether using a kid’s rainbow-colored xylophone or a full orchestra, is the reason that fans of film music never fail to appreciate the guy. Jon Brion may not be the guy you call when you’re looking for a composer to score Lincoln, but he is the guy you want when your film calls for a calculated playfulness alongside a genuine sense of mood and a savant-like understanding of music history and pop art." - Luke Gorham



Best Ensemble: Seven Psychopaths

"It’s perhaps a bit of a fine line, but there’s an important difference between a film simply having a good cast and a film that has an ensemble that really works. Just look at Woody Allen’s films -- even the most lackluster ones usually have terrific, star-studded casts (Celebrity, for instance), but it takes a great script, pitch-perfect casting and give-and-take chemistry among that ensemble to make the film as a whole really work (look at, say, Crimes and Misdemeanors).

I’ll admit that I approached Seven Psychopaths with a touch of trepidation. I liked but wasn’t head-over-heels in love with Martin McDonagh’s much beloved previous film In Bruges, and I was afraid that this looked too self-conscious and quirky. I even thought that the amazing cast would work against it, with all these cool actors cancelling each other out. I’m happy to say that I was wrong.

Not only does McDonagh clearly have great affection for every one of the actors in his film, but his ingeniously clever script gives each of their characters significant room to breathe and several memorable moments. These parts are challenging, too. Colin Farrell performs against type as a twitchy, pacifist, worrywart of a screenwriter. Christopher Walken is given the most interesting, complex role he’s had in years as a dog-kidnapper with a checkered past and a deep love for his wife (Linda Bright Clay) who is dying of cancer, and it seems to have invigorated him, because he’s also better than he’s been in ages. Sam Rockwell is more or less in his comfort zone as an eccentric blowhard who is constantly hogging the spotlight, but he still gives an enormously spirited and enjoyable performance.

While these three unlikely compatriots are the core of the film, Woody Harrelson nearly steals the entire thing as the central villain, a dog-loving gangster named Charlie. Harrelson finds the perfect balance between being colorful and funny and being imposing and genuinely scary. He may be a ridiculous human being, but he’s still someone you don’t want to make angry.

Even if these four characters were all the movie had, it would be a terrific ensemble. But noooo, McDonagh has to stuff in Kevin Corrigan, Zeljko Ivanek, Harry Dean Stanton, Michael Pitt, Michael Stuhlbarg, Gabourey Sidibe, and Tom Waits (!!), all of whom are given their own distinctive moments in the sun, and none of which distract from the central storyline. I am particularly fond of Waits; always a welcome, if rare, presence in films, and his character here is full of surprises.

There are many reasons why Seven Psychopaths was one of the best films of 2012, but this cast, how well they work together, how engaged they are in the material, and how good they are both individually and as a team, is one of the biggest." - Jason Alley



Best Cinematography: Claudio Miranda, Life of Pi

"The Oscar nomination for best cinematography for Life of Pi may baffle more people that the film proper did. I mean, wasn’t it all filmed on a soundstage in Taiwan with lots of CGI enhancement? And indeed it was, but that doesn’t stop Life of Pi from being the best eye candy any of the nominees have on display -- a movie that utilizes some of the most incredible 3D imagery since Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.

Cinematographer Claudio Miranda has done amazing visual work before (witness The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Tron: Legacy), but Life of Pi contains a much more pleasing palette of imagery. The wide scope of the shining sea that engulfs Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) with a Bengal tiger, who happens to be named Richard Parker, also engulfs the viewer in this weird scenario -- we feel just as trapped as the two unlikely shipmates are on that lifeboat.

I feel biased because I read the book, but what Ang Lee concocts from the eye of Miranda takes what was considered un-filmable and makes it come alive in a way that feels organic even if we know how manipulative it is aesthetically. It doesn’t matter that it’s a soundstage -- the sparkling sea still surrounds the movie-goer. The effect is like that of Stanley Donan’s ‘70s children’s movie The Little Prince, based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little novella, but with a much bigger scope. In other words, it’s like The Little Prince on acid. Life of Pi is nominated for a slew of Oscars but Best Cinematography is the one it most deserves. Its visuals immerse the moviegoer in meaning -- they're inseparable from the film's impact." - Daniel Cook Johnson



Best Breakthrough: Panos Cosmatos (writer/director, Beyond the Black Rainbow)

"Panos Cosmatos explained in his director’s statement that much of the inspiration for Beyond the Black Rainbow, his first feature, stemmed from time spent as a child wandering the aisles of his local mom-and-pop video store. Staring at the VHS boxes for genre and cult movies, he says, “I was mesmerized by the lurid box covers and the vivid descriptions on the back. So I’d imagine, in great detail, my own versions of these movies without ever having seen them.” I’m sure many children of the eighties had the same experience (when I finally saw Pete Walker’s Schizo, it couldn’t possibly live up to the movie I carried in my head from its ominous box art), and Beyond the Black Rainbow definitely feels like a half-remembered late-night cable viewing of semi-obscure movies – perhaps back-to-back viewings of an early Cronenberg movie and Paperhouse – when I was a six-year-old insomniac. Like Ti West’s The House of the Devil, Cosmatos recreates the aesthetic of a very specific moment in cinema history that will only mean anything to a small fraction of the audience; for those of us, Cosmatos’ film carries a Proustian impact.

The story of a young woman with extrasensory powers who is held captive in a strange research laboratory by a cruel, strangely prissy doctor, Beyond the Black Rainbow’s 1983 setting has a purpose beyond homage – the film’s villains are aging boomers whose interest in psychedelics and other experiments in mind expansion have turned to something darker. It’s a movie about the corrupted ideals of an older generation and a younger generation trapped in a world they never made. Cosmatos tells this story through geometric compositions, bold use of color and light, and deliberately mannered staging of his performers, demonstrating an impressive ability to sustain a very specific mood and tone of the course of a feature film. Not every moment works – the scenes between the doctor and his wife are pretty brutal – but at its best, Beyond the Black Rainbow recalls the work of Jodorowsky in its ability to follow through with its own hallucinatory logic. Like an acid trip, it’s filled with moments of clarity and insight that are extremely difficult to verbalize to others without sounding ridiculous; it’s kind of something you have to experience for yourself." - Andrew Bemis