Capsule Reviews: The Deep Blue Sea, Cloud Atlas, Rust and Bone

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2012)

Lit in a stuffy haze by Florian Hoffmeister, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea continues the director’s penchant for visualizing the confining boundaries of conservative British upbringing. Ambiguities poke through, though, as they did for his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives. Here, the cukolding love triangle of Rachel Weisz, lover Tim Hiddleston and elder husband Simon Russell Beale certainly exhibit melodramatic flourishes—“To the Impressionists!” is a boisterously funny outburst begging to join the ranks of a cinephile’s referential quotes. Yet the material also resembles a British take on Anna Karenina, where the cheated husband responds not with blustering, annihilating anger but a measured, conflicted tone of hurt and resignation. Weisz and Hiddleston face the negative consequences of passion, but it is Beale who grounds the film and threatens to steal the film as the person truly suffering in all this. His flicker of a smile and the pant of excitement in his voice when he notes Weisz still wears her wedding ring is so delicate the film threatens to blow away with the extra breath in his exhale, and his subsequent offer to help her transition away from him in any way he can is more poignant and heartbreaking than the subsequent travails Weisz faces with her impetuous new beau. Grade: B+

Cloud Atlas (Larry Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, 2012)

The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer adapt David Mitchell’s novel by breaking up its Matryoshka doll structure into a cross-cut epic spanning time and space, yet the end result feels curiously unambitious. As with Mitchell’s book, each of the six stories is told in its own generic style, be it a corporate espionage thriller in the 1970s, a period melodrama of the early 20th century, a dystopic sci-fi social commentary in the not-too-distant future, and so on. But where Mitchell handles these transitions not simply with narrative adjustments but overhauls in prose, the direction across these separate stories is curiously homogenous despite some visibly different input between the chunk of segments primarily shot by the Wachowskis and those of Tkywer. Perhaps this was intended to keep the film stable, as it does not follow the novel’s structure but constantly leaps between each story. Nevertheless, this undermines each of the sub-films within the larger framework, for they lack direction unique to them, while the overarching themes of suffering and kindness echoed across each avatar lack the passion I expected. The remarked-upon race- and gender-bending of the cast members across the different stories brings to mind, of course, Lana Wachowski’s own violation of social binaries (a.k.a. that vile “natural order” bandied about by the villains who recur in different power positions throughout). Strange, then, and unfortunate, that the final film should feel so removed from its own earnest call for upending that system in favor of making a better, gentler world. The altered conclusion takes that quest literally, but that only makes the setting as removed as the tone, and indeed the hollow but sincere warmth the filmmakers find in the material can also feel like a capitulation to the order. Grade: D+

Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)

Two scenes in Rust and Bone bring Jacques Audiard’s direction in alignment with the complex, multitudinous emotions conjured by his actors. The first is Stéphanie’s (Marion Cotillard) return to water after an accident during her orca show at a sea park left her without legs. Cotillard’s face registers fear, nervousness, eagerness and, eventually, rhapsody as kickboxer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) carries her into the ocean and she finds herself “home” again even as she struggles to adjust. The second, when the pair have sex for the first time, brings those same emotions back as Audiard playfully moves with Stéphanie’s preparations, holding on the removal of stockings and darting to trace her quick concealment of her prosthetic legs. The rest, tragically, betrays the subtleties the leads bring to the movie, with intrusive close-ups and ill-advised fade-outs to the soundtrack force emotions where Cotillard and Schoenaerts so deftly left matters without easy conclusions and invited the audience to truly engage with their characters. Grade: C

Burlesque: Simple Past x Present Perfect

I love Cher and this movie. Tho movie has great dancing and musicals. It is worth seeing, for sure. The opening scene is wonderful to contrast the use of the simple past and present perfect tenses.




I. Watch the movie segment and decide if the activities refer to to her past - finished actions - (PA) or if they are still in progress in her present days unfinished actions - (PR).


















1. ( ) Practice on the bar stage

2. ( ) Pack her bags

3. ( ) walk away from her hometown

4. ( ) buy a one-way ticket to Los Angeles

5. ( ) travel by bus to LA

6. ( ) look for auditions in LA

7. ( ) stay in a small hotel room

8. ( ) have a hard time with the auditions

9. ( ) be happier in LA than in her hometown


II. Rewrite the sentences below in either the simple past or present perfect tenses. Mind whether the actions are finished or unfinished to justify your choices.


WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - BURLESQUE

Answer key: ITEMS 1 - 5 - PAST
                  ITEMS  6 - 9  - PRESENT


II.

When she lived in her hometown,


1. She practiced in a bar stage
2. She packed her bags
3. She walked away from her hometown
4. She bought a one-way ticket to LA
5. She traveled to LA by bus

 Now that she is in Los Angeles,


6. She has looked (has been looking) for auditions in LA
7. She has stayed in a small hotel in LA
8. She has had (has been having) a hard time with the auditions
9. She has been happier in LA than in her hometown

This Is 40 (Judd Apatow, 2012)

In Knocked Up, Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) played a side role to Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl’s unstably formed relationship. Mann played Heigl’s sister, and the rough patch of Pete and Debbie’s established bond ran parallel to the shaky formation of ties between the leads. Yet their arguments quickly crossed the line from the disruptions that test a relationship’s mettle to obvious, serious problems between two people clearly wrong for each other. Their eventual reconciliation is meant to show that Rogen and Heigl can and should make it too, but the desperate, artificial consolation left lingering fears of a futurish, even more nightmarish breakdown.

Enter This Is 40. Approaching their nearly simultaneous 40th birthdays, Pete and Debbie have regressed further in the last five years, their prickly resignation at spending the rest of their lives with each other now wholly removed of any evidence of true love save a few, futile lines of dialogue. In the Knocked Up DVD commentary, Apatow noted that Mann, his wife in real life, would never be able to stand Rudd’s lackadaisical, unserious approach to problems. This tension between the actual actors was visible in their supporting appearances in that film, and it seeps into every frame of this (over-)full-length examination of Pete and Debbie at a crossroads. The result is a terrifyingly toxic film in which the usual Apatow humor falls flat in the face of its nightmarish depiction of an entire family in freefall.

Amazingly, Pete and Debbie feel less developed now than they did as secondary characters, and what Apatow does establish of their relationship raises questions as to why they ever got together in the first place. This can be seen in minor incompatibilities—Pete’s rockist love of college rock classics is set against, in reductive and heteronormative Apatow fashion, Debbie’s “girly” enjoyment of dance music and Lady Gaga—and a larger, dysfunctional inability for the two to stand sharing the same space. Often, that is literally true: Pete hides out in the bathroom multiple times a day just to get away from his wife, playing iPad games in a clever recurring insight into his childishness.

This opens the door for cutting, probing black comedy in the mold of Elaine May (whom Apatow has routinely extolled up to and including featuring an interview with May and old partner Mike Nichols in his recent, guest-edited issue of Vanity Fair), but the director tackles the material with his usual style. The director’s over-reliance on contemporary pop culture has weighed down even his stronger features, but the recurring use of Lost as a plot device smacks of desperation and laziness and leaves the film instantly dated, as if the film were shot back in 2010 and only just now received distribution. But that is preferable to the sexist treatment of women, who speak only in screaming fits later explained by one of a choice of Women’s Troubles. (Well, that’s not true: Megan Fox, as Debbie’s possibly embezzling employee, is simply depicted as a whore.) There is even room for racism, such as when Pete and Debbie go to an “Eastern doctor” (Debbie’s words) and Pete mockingly imitates the man’s accent.

At all times, these two come off as if written by a 40-something who has forgotten his own age even as he blithely attempts to tackle issues nearer to it. When Debbie gets rid of the Wi-Fi in the house in some unexplained, asinine cleanse she forces onto the family, she and Pete encourage their kids (Apatow and Mann’s own daughters) to play with sticks and forts like they used to. This idiot was born in 1972; she was 10 when TRON came out, for God’s sake, and she acts like she grew up with the Joads. Apatow can barely process that oldness shifts with time, that the things that date a person culturally move with culture. It is also why this film, with the key role it gives the Lost finale, will date the movie horribly.

Around the time Mann was reduced to shrieking “Stop eating cupcakes!” at her physically fit husband, This Is 40 became truly intolerable. The moment should mark a warped kind of catharsis for Debbie, but there is no genuine pathos underneath her outburst, nor anywhere else in the film, for Apatow telegraphs his conservative need to uphold the family unit from the start. Because their eventual reconciliation is ordained, their caustic squabbles hold no weight, and the harsh, continuity-defying cuts between shots only compounds the feeling that the film is pointlessly bouncing around until it gets to its pre-accepted conclusion. To see the film that might have been, look no further than the performances given by Albert Brooks and John Lithgow as Pete’s and Debbie’s fathers, respectively. They manage to infuse their one-note roles with actual humanity, making even their thin sketches feel like people, a step up from the leads. Pete and Debbie struggle with issues outside Apatow’s demographic, but they are undone by having to still appeal to that younger group, leaving This Is 40 as stunted as its characters, unable to treat them lightly but equally incapable of handling their issues with any believable sincerity.

Capsule Reviews: The Day He Arrives, Bad 25, The Sessions

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives begins with a man walking down a street and taking a left. It ends with him returning to that street and going right. This mirroring movement captures the film, so reflective that even the lead actor’s name, Yoo Jun-sang, is spat back out as the character Yoo Seong-jun, an ex-filmmaker who returns to Seoul to catch up with friends, pitifully attempt to rekindle an old flame, and idly philosophize. Hong’s subtle but pristine compositions and varied repetitions tease out character beliefs, hypocrisies and longings as Seong-jun’s rants against the lies of fate that cinema propounds even as he chases a waitress solely for resembling his ex. The repetitions also cinematize the life he feels is so separate from the artifice of movies, the distorted sense of time starting over until Seong-jun “gets it right” recalling a more poetic Groundhog Day. But it’s that poetry that makes all the differences, making even Hong’s cheeky (sometimes outright funny) reflexive details so human that they work not only as critical observations but affecting conduits for the character’s own feelings. Grade: A

Bad 25 (Spike Lee, 2012)

Going into Bad 25, I had fears of the banal, uninsightful visual monographs VH1 used to do (still does?) for classic albums. Happily, Spike Lee is no slouch documentarian, and Bad 25 goes far beyond the usual fluff pieces in the detailed technical accounts for each song. But it is the other areas Lee must probe, the interviews with business managers and, especially, music video—excuse me, short film—directors that deepens the film. The doc is a map of a carefully orchestrated, cross-media campaign to take over the world using the 11 songs contained in the album’s grooves. Thriller, of course, was the more dynamite success, but it caught even MJ by surprise. With Bad, he, and the team of talented people he attracted to help him, were ready. The only objection: for a film that pointedly leaves out the tabloid traumas that would corrupt so much of Jackson’s legacy, Lee includes an unsettlingly exploitative montage of friends and collaborators tearfully remembering where they were when they heard the news back in 2009, a rapid tour through tears complete with zoom-ins to make sure the camera picks up the glistening drops sliding down cheeks. A host of interview subjects offer a wealth of personal anecdotes, technical information and retrospective appraisal, but sadly it is that montage that remains in the head as much as a desire to revisit Bad. Grade: B-

The Sessions (Ben Lewin, 2012)

There is such great potential in The Sessions, starting with its forthright admission that the disabled have sexual urges, too. Too often, disabled people get pitied into a kind of dehumanizing sanctity, one that especially weighs on Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) as a guilt-ridden Catholic. The film acknowledges the basic humanity of sex, and it even treats sex and nudity as mere facts of life. A shot resting casually on the exposed torsos of Mark and his sex surrogate, Cheryl (Helen Hunt), shows veins in the actress’ breasts that feels more beautiful and unvarnished than Hollywood’s coy, idealized treatment of nudity. Yet one can almost watch the film deflate in real time, its warm comedy tipping into trivialization as the frank treatment of its subject turns sheepish and deflecting. Hawkes does not get to grow and reflect with O’Brien, and his defensive humor never falters as Mark’s time with Cheryl introduces him to the realities, not the punishing self-perceptions, of his body. Numerous “Sundance” touches riddle this picture, from William H. Macy’s awkward Hip Priest to Levin’s banal direction being put toward a wan approximation of visual poetry, but nothing sums up how The Sessions squanders its assets like its approach to male nudity. Cheryl holds up a mirror to Mark’s naked body so he can finally see the real him, to see how normal he really is, but fear of the MPAA trumps honesty. Likewise, the denouement trades the somber, resigned reflection of the essay that inspired the movie for a treacly conclusion that rebuilds the pedestal that, ever so briefly, this film seemed primed to destroy. Grade: C-

Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)

Miguel Gomes’ cinephilic tendencies are embedded into the very title of Tabu, taken from F.W. Murnau’s final film and modeled after its bifurcated structure. Black-and-white photography, visibly shot on film instead of digital, only exacerbate the cinematic artifice. Yet the Portuguese director’s aims go well beyond referential touches, and the one on-screen character linked to filmmaking in any way is described in narration as finding movies trivial. Tabu dabbles in trivial matters of its own, but they are played against themselves as Gomes traces the ennui and isolation of the first half back to surprisingly poltiical roots in the second.

A hint lies in an enigmatic prologue that precedes the two stories. A melancholic colonialist stands about idly with sad eyes as African servants labor around him. A Murnau-esque smooth track over hilly terrain speaks to the man’s detached boredom as a narrator (Gomes himself) talks of a lost love that tugs at his heart. The segment ends with the colonialist transformed into an equally sad crocodile, a strange image that will return in the film’s second half.

First, though, Gomes moves to present-day Lisbon, where a Catholic social activist, Pilar (Teresa Madruga), attends to a dementia-stricken woman named Aurora (Laura Soveral). Soveral plays the old woman like a mad specter of old wealth, clad in oversized, designer sunglasses and an ostentatious fur coat. Underneath her amusing caricature, however, are darker impulses, including a gambling addiction that has left her penniless and the racism that manifests itself openly and, in a dream about “talking monkeys,” obliquely. Gomes hones in on Aurora’s rapport with her Cape-Verdean maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso, who quietly seethes with terrifying intensity), using the old lady’s frustrations at her daughter abandoning her and leaving a stranger in her stead to bring out her bigotry. In one moment, Gomes even makes ironic commentary on Aurora’s privileged racism, plunging Santa into shadow to make her even darker as Aurora flips out on her in a two-shot and makes open reference to her maid’s race. Then the director cuts to follow Aurora as she exasperatedly walks out of frame, trapping her in a white sunbeam that subverts the stereotypical moral split of black and white by illuminating what a disgusting person she is.

But she is not the only target of criticism communicated through Rui Poças’ immaculate cinematgoraphy. The first half floats in soft focus, an obvious signifier of the characters’ isolation but meaningful in how broadly the focal lengths are used. Gomes does not simply film Aurora in shallow focus but Pilar as well, cutting the well-meaning righteousness from under her protests and prayers. An early shot in what appears to be one of those restaurants that revolves around a skyline makes for a surreal swirl of blurred, shifting blotches behind the medium-close-up of Aurora as she describes the aforementioned monkey dream, but reverse shots of Pilar only mildly dampen the effect of the background, trapping her in the same headspace. Later, Gomes plays a mild joke on the convictions of Pilar’s activism, framing a close-up on her laptop as she closes out browser tabs before going to sleep. With every click, an article with a provocative political headline on poverty or war is replaced by another. The last tab, though, is a game of solitaire, a reminder that a liberal activist in the West still has comforts and distractions from the Fight.

Those who do not have that luxury can be seen after Aurora passes and an old lover, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), returns to relate the story of how he and the departed met. Ventura sits with Pilar and Santa in a restaurant decked out in jungle décor, and as he starts his story, the film suddenly jumps across time, space, and film stock to settle back in Africa in 16mm as the young Aurora (Ana Moreira) settles in with her husband (Ivo Muller), only for Ventura (Carloto Cotta) to appear and cause havoc.

The second half represents a slyly comic high in anti-colonial critique. Silent but for Santo’s narration and some diegetic noise (added in such a way as to seem non-diegetic), this portion of the film, titled “Paradise” to complement the first half’s “Paradise Lost,” traces the Western, modernist ennui of the first half to the imperial superiority and colonial wistfulness that informs it. Containing echoes of details scattered throughout the first half, this section is as much a stylized version of Aurora’s backstory as a straightforward piece of context. Gomes even shoots the young lovers’ interactions like a classical silent movie, with faces you can read at 100 paces (especially now that the focus depth increases), wild gestures and melodramatic action.

Less stylized are the shots of the Africans around the white colonials, tending fields or even sharing the frame with the whites and contrasting their stoic, impassive faces with the flourishes of the love triangle. A revolt simmers among them for most of the film, fed by outrage at the ridiculous and destructive solipsism of the romantic drama around them and the climactic act of the triangle acts as the final straw for those who cannot bear to let themselves be ruled by such people any longer as Aurora retreats back to Portugal to eventually pour all of her racial obliviousness out onto one poor woman. Tabu ends in the past, but it offers a radical recontextualization of the present, one that provides understanding for its addled petit-bourgeois elder and complicated new levels of withering criticism of her, and the mood of nationalist regret expressed through her.

There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

[The following is my belated October entry for Blind Spots. I hope to catch up on last months and watch my final pick for the year on time.]

Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray) has made a life of modest prosperity for himself. He has built a reasonably sized toy manufacturer from the ground up, offering him enough affluence to afford a nice house and a servant to help around it. Unlike Douglas Sirk’s “women’s pictures,” There’s Always Tomorrow remains with Cliff, who, in darkly amusing irony, is everything the husbands in those other melodramas is not. A decent, hard worker and a loving family man, Cliff is not the tyrant of his household but the ideal vision of the postwar American man. And yet, he exists in a prison as much the housewives who dot typical domestic dramas from the period, caged not by abuse but neglect, objectified not as a provider of care but of material sustenance.

Sirk inverts the usual dynamics of melodrama to tell Cliff’s story. The director wanted to shoot the movie in color but could not secure the money to do so. Nevertheless, Russell Metty’s black-and-white cinematography visualizes the different social pressures and archetypes at work on men. The emotive, visceral use of color is thus swapped for a kind of remove, denying Cliff an aesthetic outlet for his feelings to ensure he does not have any unmanly outbursts. Deep focus shots capture the vastness of the home’s interiors, and the cold space they create emphasizes how stark and dead the middle-class comfort around the man has become.

Most would say that the impetus for Cliff’s sudden reflection and dissatisfaction with his life comes when an old coworker, Norma (Barbara Stanwyck), knocks on his door one night. But the seeds of Cliff’s awakening are planted just before, by some show tickets he traverses through rain to acquire for his wife, Marion (Joan Bennett). Pleased with himself, Cliff returns home only for Marion to say she has to attend a recital and cannot back out of the engagement. Mildly dejected, Cliff tries to get one of the kids to come along, but everyone turns him down. Even the damn maid cannot go, and soon Cliff is left alone to fix his dinner and answer that fateful knock.

Yet the tickets remain meaningful even after Norma shows up, for they foretell the outcome of this brief injection of life into Cliff’s routine. The toymaker is thrilled to see his colleague, more still when he can finally use those tickets. Almost as soon as Cliff merrily settles into his seat, happy the tickets will not go to waste, Norma confesses she already saw the show back home in New York and would rather see his factory to see what he has been up to. The moment crystallizes Norma’s hidden feelings for Cliff, a desire to truly spend time with him and perhaps rekindle feelings. (No, kindle, for he never felt that way about her.) Yet her casual dismissal of Cliff’s desire to attend the show and use the tickets he had to go all over town to get points to even Norma selfishly using Cliff to her own ends. Cliff’s shifted, mundane priorities, evidenced by his simple desire to go to the theatre, hint at the fundamental futility of the fanciful thoughts of running away with Norma that gradually enter his head as she offers an alternative to such deflated goals.

The film further communicates the certainty of this flame’s futility through its very casting. In their fourth and final pairing, MacMurray and Stanwyck show a bit of their age. Neither was ever glamorous, but here even their twists on their Every(wo)man appearances — MacMurray’s penchant for being led astray from his father-figure wholesomeness, Stanwyck as the ultimate temptress — have been muted by age. Now, Norma is only tempting in her presence, not the sort of predatory conquest Stanwyck visited upon her hapless targets (including MacMurray himself in Double Indemnity), and the extent of temptation that Cliff feels is merely for an escape from his routine.

Sirk employs some of his trademark visual tics throughout: tilted angles mingle with the slanted walls of the toy factory to hint at a stylized trap, while the aforementioned home interiors use the extra space to create a contradictory sense of imprisonment. Yet the film lacks much of the visual passion and erotic charge of his color melodramas; even the “romance” is hardly so, and it certainly stops well before the affair Cliff’s children come to suspect their father of having. Their sneaky whispering proves just how dehumanized Cliff is: no one bothers to ask him who this woman is on their way to spreading rumors among themselves. The film does not play on the idea that the patriarchy no longer holds power, merely that it has dessicated those whom it benefits, making the king of the house as unapproachable and abstract as any other monarch. The world is not aligned against Cliff the way it might have been for his wife in another movie, but even the patriarchy has been subjugated under the American Dream, and its attainment is laid bare as a hollow accomplishment that dehumanizes instead of bringing happiness.

Viewing Log: November 2012

Theatrical/Screener Viewings

Anna Karenina: Joe Wright finally over-directed his way into my heart.
Bad 25: Solid doc on the album and cross-format world takeover planned with it.
Beasts of the Southern Wild: Vomit.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: As dreary as its title.
The Comedy: One of the year's best. Irony as a life vest that has taken on too much water.
Generation P: Satiric reach exceeds grasp.
Holy Motors: A work of cynicism so filled with life that the cynicism crumbles.
Life Without Principle: Beats to hell and back all American financial collapse drama-thrillers.
Lincoln: Hampered by Spielberg's worst impulses but also powered by new levels of maturity.
On the Road: Man, and you thought the book was self-absorbed and unbearable!
Romancing in Thin Air: This Is Not a Film finally got topped for my year-end list.
Skyfall: Might have been a bit harsh on this but even my initial thoughts were mostly positive.

First Time Viewings

49th Parallel: No one made humanist propaganda like Powell/Pressburger.
The Bridges of Madison County: An Eastwood high point. Never once ironically distances himself from the melodrama.
The Day He Arrives: Hilarious, beautiful, and perfectly directed.
Detention: The best parts of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales mashed together without all the crap.
Election: No democracy among gangsters. To is, of course, a master.
Fixed Bayonets!: Fuller's second Korean War film of 1951, and somehow the superior of the masterful Steel Helmet.
Hatari!: Both Hawks' most laid-back and one of his most foreboding. Here, even the safe microcosm can fight back.
The House of Steinbrenner: Too slavishly loyal for my tastes. Slaps more clay on the feet of Steinbrenner's statue.
I Know Where I'm Going!: Even light romance is pure poetry in the Archers' hands.
Ishtar: The weakest of the three Elaine May films I've seen, and still incredible.
The Ladykillers (1955): Perfectly directed and extremely funny.
The Last Wave: Effectively makes concrete and workmanlike the abstractions of Roeg.
Lockout: New rainy-day film alert.
Perfect Blue: Finally watched a Kon movie. More than lived up to expectations.
Streets of Fire: It's like everything I want in a film, including big dumb Jim Steinman sing-alongs.
There's Always Tomorrow: A women's picture for men. Appropriately hollowed out as a result.
Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie: Insane enough to work.
The Turin Horse: Tarr goes out and takes the world with him.
White Hunter, Black Heart: One of Eastwood's best, and maybe his purest self-deconstruction.
Woman is the Future of Man: I really need to explore Hong's work after the end-of-year rush dies down.

Repeat Viewings

The French Connection: About as visceral as cop thrillers come. An entire way of filmmaking came out of this, and almost nothing can match it.
The Game: Oh to be a filmmaker so good that this would be considered a "minor" work.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011): The feeling that this is a summary work of Fincher persists, but the notion that this may be a masterpiece of new digital cinema is a fresh one.
Johnny Guitar: What can I even say? A masterpiece.
Little Shop of Horrors: First time with the newly restored director's cut. A big improvement over an already watchable film.
Moonrise Kingdom: I think Darjeeling Limited has officially been replaced as my favorite Wes.
The Rescuers: Not as good as I remember from my childhood.
The Rescuers Down Under: Even less good.
Week End: This year is all about either apocalypse movies or Death of Cinema movies. Jean-Luc beat allll y'all to the punch.

Total Films Seen in 2012: 390
Total New to Me Films: 274

Top Five First Time Films Viewed in November (excluding new releases)

1. There's Always Tomorrow
2. White Hunter, Black Heart
3. Hatari!
4. Fixed Bayonets!
5. Streets of Fire