One of my favorite writers/podcasters, Bill Simmons, states that “if we were to do the Oscars, we should do it 5 years after the movie comes out. That gives us sufficient time to evaluate if a movie is good or bad or not.” In general, as a reviewer, it’s good for me to see how accurate my reviews have held up since I watched the movies 5 years ago. Ok, 6 years ago for 2012.
2012 was the first year I really started watching most of the big films that came out, and reviewing them. Because of this, I was starting fresh, and trying to be hyper critical of everything I saw. 5 years later, it appears I was too harsh. Of the years I have been reviewing, 2012 has the highest number of films in my Top 100 of all time, and is up there with 1939, 1999 and 1994 as some of the best film years in movie history, as far as I’m concerned. The funny thing is, it’s not a top heavy year. At the time I had one perfect score (Looper), which I have rewatched and downgraded to a 4.5 out of 5. But there are 11 4.5 star ratings in 2012, by far the most of any year I’ve been reviewing.
Before I get to the Top 10, let’s get to my wildest misses. The biggest mistakes I made negatively were for comedies, pure action films and horror films. I was attempting to stick to a one size fits all rating system for movies back then which I’ve softened on, that pushed cultural impact much too highly, therefore relegating those three genres at a disadvantage. The Raid: Redemption goes up a whole star and a half from 2.5 to 4.0 stars; I’ve rewatched parts of this movie, and I was VERY unfair with that original score: it’s a tight and super entertaining action film. The Grey also has aged like a fine wine: it’s probably the best Liam Neeson action film, and its new 4 out of 5 star score reflects that. The biggest movers were The Cabin in the Woods, Pitch Perfect and 21 Jump Street. Cabin did as much as Scream with its meta commentary on horror filmmaking, and holds up really well on repeat viewings. 21 Jump Street modernizes the high school movie, creating new rules to follow while still being a really funny action comedy. And Pitch Perfect‘s cultural retention is as good as Mean Girls or Superbad, both in my opinion, snapshots of an era of young person that Pitch Perfect is now the standard bearer for, the highest praise any comedy can get. On the low end, there’s only one winner: The 3.5 star score I gave The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was on Andy Serkis and hope for the trilogy. However, the weaknesses in this movie became more glaring since they were amplified in later films, leaving a mediocre trilogy in its wake. I dropped its score to 2.5 stars, 1 star for one extra unnecessary hour of film needed.
You can find a copy of Revised Top 10 list for 2012 here. I won’t spoil the Top 10 in this post, but I will point out what isn’t on there because of how strong of a year it was: The Hunger Games. The Intouchables. The Grey. Argo. End of Watch. Wreck-It-Ralph. Skyfall. The Impossible. The Perks of Being A Wallflower. The Master. Goon. Chronicle. Lincoln. Silver Linings Playbook. Les Miserables. The Dark Knight Rises. Not only those, but the movies that fell out of the Top 10 are Cloud Atlas (score stayed the same, but other movies elevated above it) and Django Unchained (score dropped a little; hasn’t held up as well as I’d hoped). THINK ABOUT THAT!!! 2012 was so good, that 5 of the 9 Oscar Nominees, including the Best Picture Winner that year, a Spielberg Movie, 2 Jennifer Lawrence movies, the highest grossing French film of the year, Disney Animation’s revival film, one of the best Bond films, a Tarantino movie, a Tom Hanks movie, a Christopher Nolan movie, and a Paul Thomas Anderson Movie could not make my list of the 10 best movies of the year. Also amazing, is how varied the genres are for the Top 10: 2 documentaries, superhero, thriller, fantasy, horror/comedy, just comedy, and sci-fi are all represented.
Coming up next, is 2013, a year I’m pretty sure will be seen as a top heavy one. We’ll see….