The New Classics: It's Such a Beautiful Day

by Michael Cusumano  

Scene: Immortality
Bill, the protagonist of Don Hertzfeldt’s animated masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), is the picture of ordinariness. With only his simple rectangle and line hat to distinguish him, he is every man.

The sweeping classical music on the soundtrack as we are plunged into Bill’s existence briefly tricks into thinking that Bill's life might be an extraordinary one. The film shares some selections with The Tree of Life, released the year before. But where Terrence Malick matched that music to images of equal grandeur, like the creation of the universe and butterflies landing on Jessica Chastain, Hertzfeldt goes in the opposite direction, using symphonies to elevate depictions of the most insignificant events conceivable. Bill’s life is as humdrum as his appearance...

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Michael's Best of 2012

Before Nathaniel's Top Ten drops over the next few days he has invited TFE correspondents to share their own best of 2012 lists. I confess up front that I have not yet managed to catch Tabu, Oslo August 31 or Middle of Nowhere, but then all lists are a work in progress, aren't they?

Honorable Mentions...
Richard Linklater's Bernie featured the enduringly weird paring of Shirley MacLaine and Jack Black in addition to a unceasingly funny peanuts gallery of small town Texans arguing that murder really isn't all that bad. Lauren Greenfield's Queen of Versailles is the perfect film for the moment with subjects that make the cast of Marie Antoinette seem admirably self-aware and thrifty. Walter Salles's On the Road is a bracing jolt of life that is being seriously undersold by critics. Looper does the sci-fi genre proud with its thoroughly imagined script that piles on the surprises well beyond the big hook. And finally, Amour should rightly be near the top of this list based strictly on filmmaking skill, but there was something about its unremmiting bleakness that felt incomplete to me. I can't help asking "Is that all there is?" even as the film itself calmly repeated that "Yes. It is." over and over. 

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ... after the jump

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