Worst movies I saw this year:

5) Brave
4) Amazing Spider-Man
3) Prometheus
2) Chernobyl Diaries
1) Battleship

Best of the year: Skyfall, Pitch Perfect, Life of Pi, Django, Argo, and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II. If Dorkman can list Dredd I can list Twilight.

Worst: The Chernobyl Diaries and The Raven.

Most disappointing: Snow White and the Huntsman and Perks of Being a Wallflower

Well, you can list Twilight if it was one of your favourite films of the year. Just like Mike can list Dredd in his, the two aren't really comparable. 

I haven't seen Twilight so I won't comment on it but Dredd is awesome.

Last edited by Jimmy B (2013-01-17 19:47:24)

Nah, that one scene was totally worth it.

I didn't pay for my ticket (thanks, college) but MAN that one scene is worth the money.

That was the ONLY reason I wanted to go.  The crowd was mostly subdued, and I was getting a bit disappointed, then that scene came on and MAN was that worth the price of the ticket.

She is going to FREAK OUT. Please have some tea or warm towels ready. And maybe a camcorder.

BEST

Honorable Mentions: Looper, The Grey, Boardwalk Empire S3E12: "Margate Sands"

10. Haywire
9. Ted
8. Cabin In The Woods
7. The Avengers
6. Cloud Atlas
5. Django Unchained
4. Dredd
3. The Dark Knight Rises
2. The Raid: Redemption
1. Skyfall

WORST

3. The Dictator
2. The Divide
1. Smiley

I still need to see Argo, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, Flight, Seven Psychopaths and Wreck-It Ralph.

I strongly disagree with you guys about the opening of Zero Dark Thirty, for a couple reasons.

First, this is a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. You have to open with the reason why we're hunting this guy, right? You could argue that everyone knows going in, but let's look at it from a movie perspective for a second. 9/11 is basically the inciting incident. I think that the opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty was the most tasteful way possible to acknowledge the events of 9/11 without veering too far into deliberate emotional manipulation.

I get that you guys feel uncomfortable with using footage of real tragedies to tell a fictional story, as you've expressed in the past, but this is different. Would you rather they show news footage of planes crashing into towers? Of course not, and I agree. That would have come across as a very obvious attempt to rile up the audience and get them to hate bin Laden, which is unnecessary anyway. So video footage is out. Should the 911 calls have been faked? Recorded by actors? To me, that seems entirely inappropriate and disrespectful to the people who actually died on 9/11. Yes, this entire movie is actors re-creating events from recent history, but to fake the voices of innocent people who died in a national tragedy? That's crossing a line.

So where do we end up? Mixing together a collage of 911 calls from inside the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. You have to acknowledge it in some way, and this was pretty clearly the least they could do.

I also didn't like Trey's comparison of this film to a 3rd grade class telling the story of the Pilgrims. Really? That's the attitude they should have taken? They should have come to work every day and thought, "Well, we're just a bunch of assholes who don't really matter telling a story that we're not worthy of telling." Why shouldn't they take themselves seriously? I feel like Trey really undersold the journalistic work involved in telling this story, as well as the professionalism of everyone involved, and that's not fair. Zero Dark Thirty is a very mature, straight-faced telling of history, and I admire it for that.

And I believe that using the voices of innocent people is crossing the line.   

"Re-creating" and "faking" are the same thing, why is re-creating that one particular thing unacceptable? Jessica Chastain didn't find bin Laden, so is it an insult that she pretended she did?   The actors portraying torture victims weren't actually tortured,  should real footage of waterboarding have been inserted to prove how serious this movie intends to be? 

I have no problem with a movie dramatizing a serious event, but using actual audio of the final moments of real humans suffering - when everything else in the movie is artificial - to me, that's inappropriate.

And unnecessary.   How many people would have known whether those were real voices in the opening scene?  ( I didn't - I just asked the question and Teague knew the answer.)   Would there have been a mass walkout in theaters if the audio wasn't the real thing?  "Hey, those aren't real people dying!  This movie is being disrespectful!"   I doubt it.   

That's not what I said.  What I said was that no matter how seriously they approached the material - and I'm sure they were totally serious about it - in the end they were merely crafting a dramatic interpretation of a real event.   9/11 and the hunt for bin Laden were profoundly important events that changed the course of world history, affected countless lives, and involved the deaths of thousands of people.   Zero Dark Thirty... is a movie.   As a great man once said: that ain't the same league.  It's not even the same fuckin' sport.

As you pointed out,  I've said this about other movies as well.  I don't like the slaughter of a buffalo on-camera in Apocalypse Now, I don't like the footage of a man being shot dead in the opening of The Road Warrior.  I am bothered by the inclusion of concentration camp footage in the special edition of The Abyss.   I'm even bothered that they stepped on live cockroaches in Starship Troopers.   I have no love for cockroaches, but killing one just for a damn movie is wrong to me.   So it shouldn't be surprising that I don't condone using the last terrifying moments of a real person's life as a dash of extra-dramatic spice in a movie, either.

Maybe it's because I'm in the business myself and have no illusions about what we do, but I am bothered whenever my colleagues blur the line between putting on a play - which, whatever the subject matter, is all we're ever doing - and real suffering.

So I like Zero Dark Thirty for what it is: a dramatic approximation of real events. Retelling a serious true story is fine, being serious about telling it is important, and Zero Dark Thirty succeeds at both.   But in the end it's just a movie, and thus no more "real" than Starship Troopers.   And unfortunately it chose to be a genuine snuff film in that opening scene.   I won't give any movie a free pass on that, no matter how serious the topic is.

And for the record: If I am ever murdered and any of you want to make a movie about how my murderer was brought to justice, you have my permission.   However, if you would like to use the actual recording of my murder in your movie... um...  that's a big no.   Kthx.

Perhaps the better way to open the film would be to dramatize the first responders. Forget the 911 calls and overused crash footage. Focus on the people who first responded to the events, then bookend that with Seal Team 6 as the "final responders" if you will.

Maybe somebody on Seal Team 6 even had a firefighter uncle in New York that day. If you're going to make shit up, that would be a better thing to make up than the fantasy that torture produced actionable intelligence.