January. It's a Wrap

I always lose January in a rush of movie and work demands and previous year spillover. It's over already? Here were 10 highlights from the month that was:

Biggest Celebrity Crushes Of the Moment: Marius & Cosette Eddie & Amanda... weirdly Les Miz isn't really involved in this crushing.

Best of the Year Nathaniel's 22 Favorites of 2012
Jodie Foster is Single Thoughts on Jodie's brand of "coming out"
The Hours 10th Anniversary. Nick & Joe discuss the actressy film in depth
Blue Jasmine Tea Leaves Should we be excited for the new Woody Allen? 

César Nominations - Julien takes us through the French Oscars. This year half the big titles were also hits abroad: Rust & Bone, Amour and more.
100 Oldest Living Oscar Nominees - Emmanuelle Riva, Carol Channing, Doris Day and 97 more
Celebrity Globe Tweeting - from Cazwell through Zachary Levi to Adele
10 Big Surprises of Oscar Morning - from Silver Linings dominance to Affleck's Snub

Most Eyeballs: Eddie Redmayne Interview. The rising star talks skinny-dipping, name-calling, and live-singing. This was actually at the end of December but it kept on winning viewers, so I thought I'd include it.
Most Discussed: SAG Live-Blogging (in two parts)

COMING IN FEBRUARY
It's time to dive deep into the fire of the final awardage, both Nathaniel's own & Oscars (interviews and category spotlights coming). But because we're overly ambitious (even if we sometimes don't meet our ambitions) we'll try to throw in a few retro treats like...maybe...  Cabaret (1972), 8 ½ (1963) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) or Bringing Up Baby (1938) which all have anniversaries!

Stay tuned...

Best of the Year: Nathaniel's Top Ten

Previously: The Honorable Mentions

Often during the calendar-straddling list-making frenzy of "top ten season" a scene or a line of dialogue or even a whole film will refuse to dislodge itself from any internal conversation you may have with oneself about the year. That moment for me this year was Kylie Minogue's cameo late in Holy Motors when she arrives in a trenchcoat, like some lost Casablanca love, to sing:

Who were we. When we were. Who we were back then?

It'd be ineloquent bathos, too crudely and redundantly stated, if it weren't sung. But this heightened musical longing for a lost identity, lifts and soars with pathos instead. The year's best films kept reinforcing this most interior of questions as they wrestled with their past selves towards an uncertain future.

Nathaniel's Top Ten of 2012
From all movies screened that received US theatrical releases...

ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow)
Sony/Columbia. December 21st 

[SPOILERS FOLLOW] My favorite exchange in Mark Boal's dense script occurs between a government official and a CIA operative. "What the fuck does that mean?" "It's a tautology". I laughed at the wordplay in the film but wasn't expecting the widespread tautological eruptions that followed the film's premiere as everyone bent themselves into self-affirming pretzels to debate its portrayal of torture in the film's opening scenes as if there were only one way to look at the damn movie... as if torture were the only thing worth discussing about the film! To Zero Dark Thirty's credit, though I too was discomfited by its suggestion that torture yielded useful intel, there's nary a comfortable or pandering moment in the film. Like The Hurt Locker before it, ZDT attempts something like an apolitical stance though how successful that is (or ever can be) will be left to each viewer to decide. In my mind, Bigelow doesn't suggest that you're meant to enjoy torture or even embrace the mission's success, exactly...

more on Zero Dark and 9 more triumphs after the jump...

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Tues Top Ten: The Year in Dance Scenes

Michael C. here. Over at Serious Film I've been handing out awards for 2012, but when I tried to name the dance scene of the year I realized 2012 was too packed with great contenders to choose only a single champion. So here is a more comprehensive list of the best scenes where characters couldn't fight their dancing feet.

Honorable Mentions

I consider Holy Motor's accordion scene more parade than dance otherwise it would surely top this list. Likewise I don't know quite how to classify Philip Seymour Hoffman's disturbing performance during The Master's nude party fantasy although it certainly impossible to forget. As for Magic Mike all the movie's dance scenes blended together in my memory, so maybe some Ladies of Tampa can enlighten me in the comments as to which one was the standout. 

 Top 10 Dance Scenes of 2012 

10. Take This Waltz 
I wasn’t as in love with this infidelity drama as many were, but it had a handful of great scenes where I could see what everybody else was so excited about. The finest was a house party where the secret life of Michelle Williams’ character threatens to spill out into public view on the dance floor to the tune of Feist’s terrific cover of Leonard Cohen’s Closing Time. 

9. Silver Linings Playbook (and 8 more films after the jump)

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Best of 2012: Nathaniel's Honorable Mentions

We're reached the End of Watch. No, not the movie of that title though we'll soon get to it. But the invisible line I have to draw on my movie calendar between Now and Then. I've squeezed more screenings in this past month than I probably should have for a clear head but I must finally cut myself off. Now is the time to take stock and share favorites. The Film Bitch Awards have begun with my choices for Best Screenplays now posted. "But, wait, where's the top ten?" you ask. We're getting there. But first we start right here...

Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? (In No Particular Order)
No movie seemed more in my personal wheelhouse this year that Joe Wright's sumptuous ANNA KARENINA but in truth it divided me. lots more movie-lovin' after the jump...

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Favorite Trios! Three Days...

...until Oscar nominations arrive. So let's celebrate with our three favorite threesomes trios this year.

3. The Crown Princes in Brave 
I love Hamish, Hubert & Harris primarily because I share their weaknesses for pastries. If I had seen the pastry before them I would have been doomed to a life of furry hibernation. Cast a spell on a pastry and I will be magically defeated. Actually, even without a spell, a pastry will defeat me. Bonus points: we need more ginger characters in the movies. Apparently redheads are going to be gone in 60-75 years time, genetically speaking, so stock up on them now!

2. Royals + 1  in A Royal Affair
King (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), Queen (Alicia Vikander) and Their Personal Physician (Mads Mikkelsen)
Doctor Streunsee bills himself as the royal's personal physician but he's really more of a political adviser with a pinch of therapist / gynecologist when it comes to this royal marriage. This movie is good. See it.

1. "The B Faces" in Bachelorette Regan (Kirsten Dunst), Gena (Lizzy Caplan), and Katie (Isla Fisher) are
coke-snorting, bed-hopping, mean girls and though they're cruel to each other and especially to their fourth wheel Becky (Rebel Wilson), the one who is no longer a bachelorette, they're actually friends with shared messy history and statis problems. That's an uncomfortable sometime truth of long-term friendships that you don't often see dramatized in movies. Anyway, we can't get enough of them. Or at least we suspect we can't. Doesn't it seem like the type of movie we'll all know by heart in ten years time?