Reaching the Trees: The Great Escape on a Great Expanse

I'd seen it dozens of times. But never like this.

Friday night, at the AFI Silver, just outside of Washington, DC, I saw The Great Escape as if for the first time — because for the first time I saw the 1963 classic stretched across a theater screen.

To say that viewing fulfilled a lifelong dream would be an exaggeration, but only by about 11 years. My uncle introduced me to The Great Escape in my preteen years on two grainy VHS tapes — and in so doing he connected me with a movie that instantly became one of my favorites and that fanned the flames of my growing passion for cinema.

The Great Escape wasn't the oldest movie I'd seen to that point or, at 172 minutes, even the longest. But it was certainly the oldest and longest movie I'd ever seen that captured my attention from the opening frames and never let go, filling me with as much excitement as the "faster-and-more-intense" Star Wars trilogy I'd been raised on, and anything else I'd seen.

Although I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at the time, The Great Escape was the movie that convinced me that the thrills of cinema could be timeless, and I so trusted its power that I frequently showed it to friends over the rest of my middle school, high school and even college years as a way to gain their faith in the potential of movies released prior to our generation — liberating them from the prison of artistic ageism.

It worked. And after seeing The Great Escape on Friday, I'm as confident as ever that it still works, even if the movie's signature stunt — the motorcycle jump pulled off without the assistance of CGI by Steve McQueen's buddy and stuntman Bud Ekins — is modest by modern standards.

Sitting in the middle of the back row of the main seating area at the AFI Silver, I was a few seats away from two people seeing The Great Escape for the first time: a boy of about 13 who munched on popcorn throughout, and a woman in her late 40s, there with her husband and her husband's friend.

My only apprehension about seeing the movie in a theater stemmed from the potential for the experience to be marred by those quick to demonstrate their fandom: moviegoers who would whistle to Elmer Bernstein's famous score in the opening credits and laugh just a hair before all the punchlines to make sure we knew this wasn't their first time.

Thankfully, everyone behaved. The audience was quiet, enraptured and always of-the-moment, and thus the two loudest emoters were those newbies sitting nearby.

For once, hearing those around me was delightful. The boy laughed with his whole body when Cavendish plummeted through three plank-deprived wooden bunks. The woman let out a whimper when Ives made his slow, suicidal trudge toward the wire after the discovery of "Tom." And both of them gasped — genuinely gasped — when MacDonald blew his French identity by responding in English to a German's "good luck."

It was comforting hearing a movie I love so much having such an effect on them.

It was just as comforting feeling the movie having such an effect on me.

The Great Escape is a heist movie in many respects, except this time it's about breaking out instead of breaking in. There are plans and schemes aplenty — three tunnels, lots of wood, even more dirt and 250 men in need of disguises and false documentation. There's ingenuity and good old-fashioned work ethic.

Process takes such precedence that, even in a movie just shy of three hours, there isn't much time for character development — and yet we glean who these men are by their roles in the grand operation. James Garner's Hendley is resourceful, charming and cocky — because that's what it takes to be the scrounger. Richard Attenborough's Bartlett is demanding, indomitable and a bit mad — because that's what it takes to be Big X. Donald Pleasence's Blythe is the epitome of tea-sipping calm — because who else would have the patience to be the forger? And so on.

John Sturges directed the film, based on a screenplay by James Clavell and W.R. Burnett, with astonishing efficiency. The first 23 minutes establish, through numerous absurd failed attempts, the difficulty of escape. The next hour is a long domino chain of obstacles crashing into one another: How to get out? Dig. How to dig? Through the foundation of the huts. How to blast through the concrete without arousing detection? Create diversions. How to shore up the tunnels? Wood. How to get the wood? Strip it from everyplace not in plain sight. Etcetera.

Only after the first tunnel is discovered by the German "ferrets" (need I say, "spoiler warning"?), and all of the prisoners' attention is put into the second tunnel ("Harry"), does the movie linger enough to allow us to appreciate the emotional toll of their labor, from Blythe's deteriorating eyesight to Danny's deteriorating sanity, so that we know how crucial it is that they succeed.

My favorite shots in the movie have always been any inside the tunnel, particularly those that capture its unforgettable combination of claustrophobic tightness and mouth-to-terminus expansiveness, which are especially apparent when the men ride rope-pulled dollies from station to station.

It's palpable, that tunnel. Damp and earthy. In each shot, you can feel all the effort and determination that went into carving it, one small shovel scoop at a time. The tunnel is the physical representation of the POWs' refusal to give up or give in. It's also their lifeline. All of the prisoners' hopes are invested in that tunnel, and so when they end up 20 feet short of the trees beyond the prison camp, it isn't just a logistical or strategic crisis. It's a dagger to the heart.

Twenty feet short.

In a way, that's how I watched The Great Escape for almost 10 years. And like the prisoners who built "Harry," I had no idea how much I was missing.

My well-worn VHS copy of The Great Escape was cropped in pan-and-scan, which was the format that aired on TV at the time. So it wasn't until The Great Escape got its DVD release, when I was in college, that I first saw it in widescreen. And on that first viewing — and even still — I was blown away by the significance of those little bits that had been trimmed from the periphery.

In the initial shots of the camp, for example, the widescreen canvas brought into view more men unloading from more trucks, a seemingly insignificant detail that somehow exponentially enhanced the vastness of the entire physical space. Much later on, the shots of Hilts riding his motorcycle toward the Alps brought forth a "new" (albeit original and intended) panoramic grandeur.

But of all the widescreen upgrades, the most significant was this: In the pan-and-scan version, we never once saw the entirety of Hilts' familiar cell in the cooler in a single shot. Indeed, in those famous moments when he throws his baseball against the wall, the ball would disappear off the right side of the screen — sometimes quickly captured with a cut, and other times merely bouncing around beyond the frame.

The effect of needing multiple shots to reveal each wall of Hilts' cell, combined with the loud echo of the baseball slamming against the concrete, created the sense of a room at least two times larger than it proves to be when the movie is seen in its original format. Only in widescreen could I fully appreciate the claustrophobia of Hilts' solitary confinement, not to mention the aesthetic beauty of the single-shot composition.

Watching The Great Escape on the big screen for the first time didn't redefine any shots in such a significant way, but it did feel like a new movie, despite all its wonderful familiarities.

Mostly, it was the little things — those details so easily lost in the background on even the widest of widescreen TVs that now felt like part of the foreground. The numbers on the huts. The expressions of the German "goons." The lettering painted on various trains and storefronts in the scenes outside the camp.

I can't say these "enhancements" changed the movie itself (certainly not like upgrading from pan-and-scan to widescreen), but they did change my experience.

Because make no mistake: size matters — at least if you know how to use it. And Sturges does.

Particularly striking on the big screen is the movie's strong use of depth in several shots, like the scene in which the Germans come into the hut where Danny is working on widening the mouth of "Harry," or the one much later in which Bartlett, having made a narrow escape, picks up a newspaper on a quiet street in an effort to blend in and catch his breath.

(Also rich with detail on the big screen is the left-to-right pan when Bartlett enters the hut on the night of the escape, and walks by the other prisoners waiting in the queue.)

It would be going too far to suggest that modern filmmakers don't fill the frame with such detail. But so often these days the big screen is filled with CGI elements that, to my eye at least, still lack the tangibility of flesh-and-bone and brick-and-mortar. The compositions of The Great Escape, like many movies of its era, indeed feel "more real."

Having said that, I suppose it's time to mention that my first big-screen experience with The Great Escape was a high-definition digital projection — a format that many cinephiles regard with begrudging acceptance or outright derision. I'm not sure that a celluloid copy is still in rotation amongst revival houses (I know it's never come to the AFI Silver in my decade of living in the area), but if such a print exists I'd love to see it.

And yet for a movie like The Great Escape (or Lawrence of Arabia, which I've had the pleasure to see on the big screen in both 70mm and 4K digital formats), I'm of the opinion that there's greater upside in faithfulness to scale than in faithfulness to texture — and unless you only buy DVDs of movies that were digital in the first place, or unless you're equally happy to watch a movie on an iPad or a widescreen TV, you probably agree with me.

Whether Friday's viewing was my first or last big-screen experience with The Great Escape, the effect is sure to linger, and not in the ways I necessarily expected.

Yes, the motorcycle chase seems even bigger in a theater (it's especially thrilling to be able to recognize McQueen's face several frames earlier as he zooms in from the distance), but the same sequence on Blu-ray won't suddenly seem small. Indeed, none of the movie's adventure or suspense will be diminished in the slightest in my humble home theater.

Rather, from here on, all my viewings of The Great Escape will be emotionally enhanced — not by the romanticism of seeing an epic on the big screen but by the intimacy of it.

It was a given that the panoramas would be spectacular in a real theater, but I wasn't prepared for what it would mean to the film's emotional heft to be able read a character's expression in a long shot, or to have a medium shot play like an extreme close-up.

The agony of Charles Bronson's Danny, the playfulness of Garner's Hendley, the solitude of Pleasence's Blythe, the desperation of Attenborough's Bartlett, the moxie of McQueen's Hilts — it was always there.

But now, thanks to the big screen, it's even greater.

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In the Shadow of Giants: Elway to Marino

The 1983 NFL Draft produced more great quarterbacks than any other before or since. And that was just the first round. Six quarterbacks were taken in the first 27 picks that year, including two who would become among the top five (or so) ever to play the position, one who would play in four Super Bowls, two who would be fairly average and, not to be forgotten, a guy named Ken O'Brien who would flash enough brilliance to be named to two Pro Bowls but remain forever overshadowed by guys in his draft class named John Elway, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly. Elway to Marino, the latest entry in the ESPN Films "30 for 30" series, is fixated, no surprise, on the guys at the top. But in a documentary collection that has produced great films like June 17, 1994, The Two Escobars and Catching Hell, Elway to Marino is nothing more than a Ken O'Brien.

That's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's not much to cling to either. Director Ken Rodgers retells the events of the draft clearly and evocatively through talking-head interviews and archival footage, even going as far as to recreate the banquet room where then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced the picks under a gaudy chandelier. But drafts are only so interesting, particularly in retrospect — even drafts in which the consensus best talent available, Elway, used a potential Major League Baseball career as leverage to avoid signing with the Baltimore Colts, which had the top pick that year. And for all the ways Elway's draft experience was unusual, Marino's is actually typical. Sure, his eventual professional output suggests he should have been selected a lot sooner than 27th. But it wasn't all that long ago that NFL MVP quarterback Aaron Rodgers fell to the 25th pick in 2005, suffering all the while in the green room. And all-time legends Joe Montana and Tom Brady didn't get picked until the third and sixth rounds, respectively. So this stuff happens.

Ken Rodgers does his best to make the 1983 draft seem extraordinary, but it isn't really. That year, like any year, some guys were picked where they should have been, and other guys weren't. Some guys began productive NFL careers, and other guys got one step closer to unemployment. Some picks generated applause, and Jets picks inspired boos. So it was, and so it always will be. Which means that if you've seen any NFL draft, you'll feel like you've seen this one — and reliving Rozelle's introductions doesn't create quite the same nostalgic electricity as an actual classic game. Making matters worse, the "30 for 30" series has already produced a pair of films covering the same general time frame and even some of the same tangential stories, The Band That Wouldn't Die and Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?, which leaves the perfectly capable Elway to Marino unfairly covered in the stink of been there, done that.

Thus the pleasures of this documentary aren't provided by its narrative but by its trappings. The 1983 draft room, for example, is, in retrospect, awesomely modest. No players taking the stage to pose with the jersey of their new team — in fact not much of a stage to take; just a podium on a small, slightly elevated platform where Rozelle announced each pick. No glitzy ESPN production with Chris Berman's voice booming off the slick-back hairdo of Mel Kiper Jr.; just three guys sitting in typical banquet room chairs at a table with typical banquet room skirting looking like something out of a Ron Burgundy movie. No huge Radio City Music Hall crowd to react to each pick; just a hundred or so fans looking on from the balcony of the New York Sheraton ballroom.

One of those fans looks like a mini-Andy Reid, with a bright red mustache and ample chest hair protruding from the open neckline of his striped ketchup-and-mustard colored shirt, presumably from the Ronald McDonald Collection. The first time we glimpse this super-fan, he's standing with his buddies, dutifully scribbling notes like a Trekkie trying to transcribe William Shatner's keynote address at an annual Star Trek convention. It's an image that's simultaneously sweet and hilarious, and it's enough to make you reach for the pause button. Thankfully, Rodgers knows it. Because soon enough the super-fan is back, being interviewed on his own, looking appropriately puzzled by the Jets' selection of O'Brien from far off U.C. Davis, and getting no help from the interviewer who mistakenly refers to the new New York quarterback as "Ken Davis." That moment alone makes Elway to Marino worth watching.

Too much of the rest, like most NFL drafts, feels like much ado about nothing. Elway to Marino closes with the suggestion that the 1983 draft, which provided days of curiosity about how the Colts would handle Elway's preemptive holdout, sparked what is now an annual ritual of hype and excess. And that might be true, and certainly that would have been a more appropriate entryway to this story. But instead Elway to Marino, which is sorely lacking the directorial fascination of so many other entries in the "30 for 30" series, tries to position the events of April 26, 1983, as one of those "you never forget where you were when ..." sorts of historic moments, and, like so many draft picks, it fails to live up to those unfairly lofty expectations.

If every draft disappointment has a retroactive tell, a detail that in hindsight makes one wonder how the erring team didn't see it coming, Elway to Marino's tell is its fascination with the journals of Marvin Demoff, the agent of both titular quarterbacks. "Demoff had a plan, and he would record each step of it in a diary that until now has never been made public," narrates Tom Selleck early in the film, sounding more like John Facenda than any Magnum P.I. watcher could have imagined in 1983. Yes, Demoff's detailed notes provide a specific timeline that lends the documentary an air of authenticity. But on closer inspection, the diary doesn't do anything more than corroborate what Rodgers uncovers in archival footage and interviews. It's a reminder that if the worst phrase in nonfiction reporting is "We don't want to speculate, but ..." the second worst might be anything along the lines of "never before seen." Tantalizing as those words sound, more often than not they indicate someone is trying to convince us that what doesn't seem interesting actually is, purely by virtue of its uncovering. What's uncovered in Elway to Marino produces a solid, professional achievement worthy of pride. Of course, you might use the same words to describe the less than unforgettable career of Ken Davis. I mean, O'Brien.

Elway to Marino premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler hopes to review each new film in the "30 for 30" series upon its release. See the Volume 1 and Volume 2 archive.

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Penrose Stairs: To the Wonder

Exteriors at magic hour. Interiors before the movers come. Curtains blowing in the wind, often with someone hiding on the other side. Trees. Sky. Churning, trickling and spraying waters. Hands caressing wheat and tall grasses. Women scampering away from the camera with sprightly verve. Lost, anguished men scanning the horizon for answers. Swings. Empty chairs. Livestock. Birds. Necks and necking. Classical music. Elliptical voiceover narration. Constant searching. These are the fundamental, incontrovertible elements of Terrence Malick's cinema — those things that both his most ardent fans and his befuddled detractors agree make a Malick film distinct.

Thus, any debate about Malick's cinema typically comes down to whether those elements combine to exude the two qualities Malick most consistently explores: grace and awe. Malick's latest film, To the Wonder, might have more of those basic signature elements than any of its predecessors, despite being Malick's shortest film in more than three decades, but it's almost entirely lacking in grace and awe. It's all fundamentals with almost no feeling — save for emptiness. The gestures are familiar, but this time there's no soul behind them. The auteur's trademark flourishes feel less designed for this film than leftover from previous ones. To the Wonder is Terrence Malick via Overstock.com.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Six features into Malick's 40-year career, maybe this is where the shine rubs off and what once felt so exotic starts to look overused. It's not that Malick's five previous features were wholly original; indeed, one of the most beautiful things about Malick's oeuvre is its visual and thematic consistency. But Malick's first five films were infused with a sense of exploration, discovery and birth. (Heck, his two most recent pictures chronicle the creation of Jamestown and the entire universe.) And that's sorely lacking here. To the Wonder isn't filled with characters looking for inspiration so much as actors desperately in search of their motivation. Malick might be emotionally connected to this material, but like Javier Bardem's lonely priest all I could see were stained-glass windows; I didn't see The Light.

Almost everything here comes off like a pose. Ben Affleck's performance as Neil is notable not for its scarcity of on-screen dialogue (hardly unusual in Malickland) but for the overwhelming effort he seems to put forth not-talking. (His character doesn't come off as terse or inward, despite attempts to describe him that way; more like a guy with fragile vocal cords whose doctor has ordered him to keep quiet.) Meanwhile, Olga Kurylenko, as Neil's love interest, is less a woman than a house cat, rubbing up against whatever man or structure happens to be nearby. Bardem's priest, as mentioned, indeed looks lost, but it's the kind of lost that suggests a drunk who can't remember where he parked his car the night before, or even if he has a car in the first place, no matter how often his inner monologues suggest otherwise. And then there's Rachel McAdams, as Neil's quasi-mistress, who appears so disoriented that at one point she turns toward the camera with an expression that seems to say: "Wait, you're rolling?"

It's tempting to attribute the film's lack of emotional heft to the slightness of the plot, as if To the Wonder is Malick at his most narratively ambiguous. But any sense that To the Wonder is "about" less than its predecessors is evidence of its blandness as a final product, not an architectural deviation from the norm. Malick's movies have always been more concerned with connecting us on an emotional level than with connecting plot points — that's what allows Malick to "find" his films in the editing room, excising footage that was once thought essential. Alas, here the characters are vapid and unknowable — as empty as the rooms they so frequently occupy, as thin as shadows of Malick's previous films that blanket this picture in scene after scene.

For someone new to Malick, To the Wonder might be an effective gateway: if you've never seen Malick, you've never seen anything quite like this. But I suspect that many of us who have Malick's movies printed on our heart will find it difficult to watch Kurylenko's Marina raising her hands to salute a storm without thinking about Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas doing the same in The New World, just like it's almost impossible to watch Affleck's Neil playing by lamplight without remembering Brad Pitt's character doing the same in The Tree of Life. What once felt specific, organic and true now feels random and offhand, which threatens to retroactively suffocate the charms of To the Wonder's predecessors. (All these years I thought I was connecting with Kilcher's Pocahontas in that beautiful follow-shot at the end of The New World; but then I saw Kurylenko's Marina mimic the same routine at least twice in this movie and realized I was merely connecting with Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's choreography.) It's like having your heart race when the pretty girl in school calls you "sweetie," only to later learn she calls everyone "sweetie."

Those still fully enthralled by Malick's magic spells — and I say that with envy, not condescension — will see no fault in any of this, I'm sure. For them, pointing out the sameness of Malick's images is like pointing out the sameness of Woody Allen's dialogue, and noting that these characters seem to have nothing to say to one another is like noting the way characters in musicals only express themselves in song. This is what Malick cinema is, they might rightly insist, as if nothing has changed. But it has changed. Malick's previous films remarkably yet routinely achieve transcendence, in parts and in sum. To the Wonder struggles to even achieve presence.

All that said, the timing of To the Wonder's release makes it something of an interesting case study: In recent years an increasing number of critics (including me) have attempted to get beyond hype, celebrity, legend and cinematic stereotypes by dismantling movies like mechanics — sometimes going so far as to assign specific (as if inflexible) values or definitions to various compositions, cuts, color palettes, camera movements, etc. According to that analytical approach, To the Wonder is the equal of Malick's previous pictures because it's built from the same auteuristic materials. And yet while To the Wonder is released into an evolving critical universe that sometimes seems uncomfortable with feeling first and deconstructing later, it's also released in the aftermath of the death of Roger Ebert, who never appeared to let the "math" of a movie talk him into a reaction he didn't first feel in his heart. None of this is to imply that those who adore To the Wonder do so insincerely, or that this movie is impossible to love on a gut level (Ebert, in one of his final reviews, was enchanted by it). But for me To the Wonder is another welcome reminder that the greatness of art is often intangible. In simplest terms, we feel it or we don't.

With a few fleeting exceptions, To the Wonder left me untouched. No movie in Malick's filmography better expresses the isolation of the individual (even when we are with someone, we are trapped inside ourselves). But at the same time, no other Malick movie treats its human characters like their bovine counterparts. Here, there is no depth of mind: women crawl on the ground in passion, crawl on the ground in apology and crawl on the ground in rage (who knew crawling was so versatile?), and at one point Kurylenko's character actually licks a tree. The latter might be a sign that eventually one of Malick's characters will literally fuck nature, as if living down to the wisecracks of his naysayers. But I fear it might be proof that at this point Malick isn't straining to realize a vision so much as getting lost in the image itself.

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Remembering Roger Ebert

"Funny, thoughtful, opinionated, brilliant. An inspiration to anyone who ever wanted to write from a certain point of view." - Joe Posnanski

"To be able to have done exactly what he wanted to do for a living until the very end is an inspiration to anyone." - Jake Cole

"To be a good critic, you have to know your art-form. To be a great one, you have to love it." - Peter Sagal

"When I was a kid, no person turned me on to more movies and filmmakers than Roger Ebert. He changed my life." - Michael Bonfiglio

"Roger Ebert. Everything else you say is superfluous." - Ray Ratto


Up the stairs, past the scattered toys and piles of cardboard boxes that lined the walls of my grandparents' mostly unfinished attic, was the childhood bedroom of my mother's brothers. They'd been out of the house for more than 10 years. Their double beds were still there, neatly made as if waiting for them to return from school, but now this mostly forgotten space in the rafters belonged to my grandfather, who'd lined one wall with more fishing rods than anyone who went fishing only a few times a year could possibly hope to use in a lifetime and whose hoard of fishing magazines, lures and spools of line covered almost every available surface space except for the two square feet or so of table on which sat a small black-and-white television.

It was on that television, on an otherwise unmemorable day during a summer I can't quite pinpoint, that I distinctly remember watching Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert debating on the show that made thumbs famous. Or, more to the point, I remember trying to watch them. The TV in the attic provided me a bit of privacy and a respite from my grandfather's steady diet of local news, but it also gave me rabbit-ear antennae to adjust and a serrated tuning knob to manipulate ever so slightly in the hopes of generating a clear picture. Of course, no matter how much time you spent getting the image to come into focus, as soon as you stepped away from the TV whatever progress you'd made was sure to come undone.

Whether that was the first time I saw Siskel and Ebert on TV, I don't recall. It's possible. But what I've never forgotten is the amount of effort I put forth to watch them that day. They were almost certainly talking about movies I hadn't seen — in fact most of the time they probably discussed movies I was too young to see. But that didn't matter, because I loved movies and it was obvious that these guys did, too.

Siskel and Ebert were never appointment television for me. I couldn't remember what day their show aired, or at what time, or on which channel. But I managed to watch them a lot anyway over the years, through middle school, high school and into college, until Siskel's death in 1999.

I would have loved movies without them, but I loved movies a lot more because of them. They had passionate opinions, which inspired me to generate my own, and they were willing to fight for those opinions, which made me and my movie-loving friends want to do the same.

Most of the years I watched them, the introduction to their show emphatically underlined that these famous TV personalities were in fact print guys first: Siskel grinned as he tapped away at his computer keyboard, Ebert smiled as he hammered away at his typewriter, and then both men clutched their freshly printed columns as they argued on their way into the theater. Yet even though I went to college to major in journalism, and even though my father was a career newspaperman, and even though the idea of being a full-time critic appealed to me (at the time), I never thought of either of them as a writer until I was about 20.

That was the year I bought my mom the 1997 edition of Roger Ebert's Video Companion — a gift that was the result of her desire to have something to help her pick out movies to rent, now that her son was no longer around to provide in-house counsel. It was a sincere gift, truly meant for her, but the next time I was home from school I was the one who kept pulling the book off the shelf and losing myself in the reviews. (Years later, it now sits on my shelf.)

Unlike Ebert's subsequent Movie Yearbooks, the films chronicled in that almost 1,000-page volume spanned decades. I started by reading about the movies I'd seen, but it wasn't long before I was reading about the many more I hadn't. It was a hard book to put down. Some of the movies sounded dreadful, but the reviews were consistently compelling: the writing was accessible but also astute, and the length, whatever it was, always seemed just right.

Of course, you knew that already.

It's daunting to write about Roger Ebert in the aftermath of his death. There are so many reasons not to try: I'm ill-equipped to summarize his profound influence on criticism and cinema (although, to be clear, he was a profound influence on each of those individually, not just collectively). I'm not an expert on his body of work (I don't even have a favorite review). I never met the man (my only direct interaction with him was his brief e-mailed response to a question I submitted to his Movie Answer Man column many years ago). And the web is full of better writers who are so equipped, who have that expertise and who spent time with him — writers whose memories of Ebert's influence on them are sure sound a lot like mine.

But I'm writing about him anyway, because to avoid doing so would be to avoid this truth: as "sad" and "tragic" as I have found other "celebrity" deaths, only two have made me struggle to breathe: Jim Henson in 1990, and now Roger Ebert.

I feel a tinge of guilt about that, I have to admit. Who am I to be so heartbroken? I didn't even know the man.

But that's the thing: I did. I did know him. I knew him well enough to know that he considered himself a recovering alcoholic, that he didn't believe in God and that he died believing that there would be no sequel after the lights went out. I've got family I don't know that well.

I know those things because Ebert wrote about them explicitly at one time or another. But even without that I would have felt like I knew him, simply because that's the way that Ebert wrote, even when that wasn't what he was writing about.

His criticism is full of sincerity and heart. He could be narrow-minded. He could be stubborn. He could be unrelenting. But reading Ebert I never got the sense — not once — that he was posturing. For all the critics who write with an attitude that suggests that they don't give a damn what anyone else thinks about them, Ebert might be the only one whose criticism truly suggests he never gave a second thought as to how he would be perceived as a result of what he wrote.

You could call Ebert brave for a lot of reasons, like for the way he faced death, the loss of his (physical) voice and his collapsing jaw, or for the way he boldly invited young (and sometimes unproven) writers to contribute to the website that bears his name. But the bravery I'll always cherish most was his willingness to honestly articulate what he saw and felt when watching a movie. Much like "just being yourself," it can be harder than it sounds.

Harder, even, than saying goodbye.

It was only two days ago that Ebert said he was taking a "leave of presence" and scaling down his writing to focus on his health. No one could have been surprised by that: Ebert had already knocked on death's door several times, only to turn back and stay with us a little longer. Nevertheless, despite all those previous scares, despite his slowly deteriorating health, despite that hint that his life was becoming a struggle, the end proved as overwhelming as if it had come out of the blue. Like the ending of a heartbreaking movie you've seen a dozen times before, knowing it's coming doesn't eliminate the power of the response.

Admittedly, I haven't read as many of Ebert's reviews in recent years as I once did. But it wasn't all that long ago — less than eight years or so — that several days a week I'd spend my lunch hour reading new or classic Ebert essays along with the latest from a new blog that had come along, The House Next Door, which at the time was frequented by young writers who had grown up on Ebert and seemed to want to emulate his sincerity (several of whom, fittingly, went on to become contributors for Ebert's site). I've never loved an era of film criticism more.

Since then I've started this blog, contributed to The House Next Door (among other sites) and even had a link to one of my pieces listed on the homepage of Ebert's site (via a post featured by Jim Emerson at Scanners). It's been a thrill.

That I've posted infrequently here of late has to do with my own sort of leave of presence as I try to figure out how to fit my movie criticism into growing demands in other areas of my life. I didn't need a sign of how much movie criticism means to me, but Ebert's death provided one just the same.

Roger Ebert wasn't the guy who made me love movies. He wasn't even the guy who inspired me to write about movies. But he was one of the guys on the black-and-white TV screen that day, all those summers ago, who confirmed to me that movies were as exciting as I'd thought. And he was the writer who first made me appreciate the power of the internet, when suddenly in the late '90s I could read this Chicago-based critic as if he were my own. And he was the critic whose work I studied when I was trying to figure out how to write criticism myself.

Movies aren't my life, but for virtually all of my life movies have been a huge part of me.

Roger Ebert shaped my love of movies, and deepened it.

He shaped me, too.

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This Time With Meaning: Survive and Advance

Dereck Whittenburg receives the awkward one-handed fling from Thurl Bailey less like the targeted shooter in the closing seconds of a national championship basketball game than like a defensive back intercepting a wayward pass before it sails into the bleachers. From nearer to half court than the 3-point arc, Whittenburg gathers the ball, turns, takes a deep knee bend and fires. It's a moon shot, and at the very moment it becomes obvious that the ball won't reach the rim Lorenzo Charles leaps into the frame, collects the ball near the iron and drops it into the hoop as time expires, giving North Carolina State a 54-52 upset victory over the University of Houston and sending the Wolfpack's flamboyant head coach Jim Valvano running around on the court looking for someone to hug.

It's one of the most famous sequences in college basketball history — memorable because NC State wasn't supposed to have a chance against Houston in that 1983 NCAA championship, memorable because Valvano's reaction reveals both his shock and his spirit, memorable because the game-winning bucket and Valvano's reaction are so charmingly inelegant and, last but not least, memorable because CBS and ESPN play the hell out of that highlight clip each March. If you're even a little bit of a college basketball fan, you've seen that play at least a dozen times. It's the quintessential March Madness moment and it's something of an eternal flame for Valvano, the beloved coach, broadcaster and motivational speaker. That said, the ubiquity of the NC State upset highlight is the very thing that made me skeptical about Survive and Advance, the latest edition of ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, which seeks to climax with a sports moment that is as worn from overuse as a child's favorite toy. In the original "30 for 30" volume, director Jonathan Hock did a marvelous job reviving the forgotten legend of Marcus Dupree, but I wondered if he could be as successful crafting drama and insight from a story that is already so familiar.

Turns out, he was ready.

Indeed, Survive and Advance gives due analysis to that game-winning play (all it's missing is Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison saying "back and to the left"), but what it does more impressively is to provide the play with emotional meaning through context — which is to say that Hock's film makes that highlight matter again. It's one thing to watch that clip and remember that NC State was an underdog even before it met up with the "Phi Slamma Jamma" Houston team starring Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, but it's another thing to really see it and feel it. Hock's documentary backs up to show us the improbable path that brought the Wolfpack to that one shining moment — a route that included numerous come-from-behind victories that would seem unbelievable even today that were even more miraculous in the pre-shot-clock era when teams could sit on even a mere 2-point lead for, well, as long as they wanted. NC State didn't just win these do-or-die games in the NCAA Tournament but, before that, in the ACC Tournament, which the Wolfpack had to win to gain entry into the big dance. In the nine-game run that closed out their season, NC State survived not one but two matchups with 7-foot-4 center Ralph Sampson, got through Michael Jordan's North Carolina Tar Heels and defeated Olajuwon on a night he scored 20, pulled down 18 boards and blocked 7 shots. And they did it all with a roster of players you wouldn't remember today if they hadn't done the unforgettable.

At 100 minutes, Survive and Advance is one of the longer documentaries in a "30 for 30" series that tends to do better at half that length. But after a slow start, Hock's doc repeatedly earns its running time. It's packed with interviews and roundtable reminiscences from the surviving members of that team, and it gets in its fair share of Valvano highlights from archival press conferences and speeches. But the film's strength is its game footage, which captures college basketball at a time when it was simultaneously more developed, less advanced and more joyously idiosyncratic than it is today (you gotta love some of these players' form on free throws!) and it blessedly lives up to and even surpasses the Cardiac Pack's rosy legend. Don't get me wrong: the Wolfpack's title run isn't pretty. NC State repeatedly earns victories by virtue of their opposition choking at the free throw line. It might not sound like gripping sports drama, but it becomes just that by virtue of the frequency with which the Wolfpack survives sure defeat.

Equally important, the rare chemistry that NC State players had with their charismatic coach is supported by the archival footage, too: Again, it's one thing for grown men to speak eloquently of Valvano's influence on them 20 years removed from his tragic death, but it's another thing to see Bailey, as a quiet collegian, say in a routine interview that he and his teammates "really believe in Coach V," or to see Whittenburg picking up his coach after numerous wins and kissing him on the cheek in the post-championship press conference. With a light touch, Hock repeatedly demonstrates that the 1983 NC State team was special long before they were champions, and that they deeply loved Valvano long before he became a figure of national admiration and sympathy through his battle with cancer.

There's still an air of hagiography to any depiction of Valvano, despite Hock's attempts to highlight the coach's faults without getting too far off topic, but, man, it's hard to feel as if Valvano doesn't earn it. Sure, you can see why he'd have rubbed some people the wrong way; even if you thought he was saintly you could find the volume of his saintliness overwhelming. But there's a sincerity to his spirit that makes you want to forgive his obvious need for attention. In his famous ESPY's acceptance speech, which Hock chronicles, Valvano urged everyone to strive to laugh, think and be moved to tears every day. Hock directs Survive and Advance as if he's trying to help us meet our daily quota. Hock's picture reminds us of what we love about sports and cinema.


Survive and Advance premieres tonight on ESPN at 9 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler hopes to review each new film in the "30 for 30" series upon its release.
See the Volume 1 and Volume 2 archive.

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The Eyes of March (2013)

It's been awhile.

Last month I let my five-year blogging anniversary pass by without notice, or without a single blog post.

But nothing brings back a blogger like tradition — and it doesn't hurt when said tradition requires very little writing.

And thus continues my annual tribute to eye shots (see also: 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012).

This year, including the header image (which you can consider number "0"), there are 13 eye shots. As usual, some of them are easily recognizable. Others not so much.

Although this is a tribute to eye shots more than anything, it tends to be a fun guessing game each year, too. So leave your guesses in the comments below.

Enjoy! (Numbers correspond to the image below them)


(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12)

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Everybody Breaks, Bro: Zero Dark Thirty

Let's start with torture, in part because Zero Dark Thirty's depiction of torture inspired controversy even before the movie was released, but mostly because that's where Zero Dark Thirty begins, and in a way it's where it ends, too. After a brief sequence in which the horrors of 9/11 are conjured through overlapping audio clips from that tragic and chaotic day, the movie opens at a secret military base at which an al-Qaeda terrorist is being "harshly interrogated." First we see the detainee waterboarded, and later he's stripped naked, dog-collared and stuffed inside a wooden box just big enough for him to fold into — all in an effort to get him to talk. None of this is brief. Director Kathryn Bigelow doesn't exactly ogle the brutality, but she doesn't shy away from it either. The first 30 minutes of the movie, scripted by Mark Boal and inspired by insider accounts, are dominated by the physical and psychological punishment of this beaten terrorist at the hands of the CIA. That Zero Dark Thirty spends so much time here confirms that Bigelow and Boal believe these interrogations to be historically significant, one way or another. And that torture is demonstrated to be a dehumanizing experience for both sides confirms that that Bigelow gets it right.

Did controversial interrogation techniques like waterboarding lead to intelligence that led to the discovery of Osama bin Laden? It seems silly to argue otherwise. The link might not have been direct, but the nasty reality is that these techniques were used and intelligence was gathered, and it seems reasonable to assume that some prisoners cooperated purely to avoid torture in the first place, which isn't possible if the potential for torture isn't on the table. Whether torture, as an actual technique or merely as a looming threat, is effective enough to justify its use is a different matter, and not one that Zero Dark Thirty cares to examine. So what does the film "say" about torture? Mostly that we did it, for better or worse. It's part of the history of that larger event. World War II had the beaches of Normandy and Higgins boats. The "war on terror" had undisclosed locations and pitchers of water. That's the way it was.

To ask the film to take sides on the torture debate, and even more to insist that it does, is to try to fit torture into a box and demand that it cooperate. It isn't that simple, and thankfully Zero Dark Thirty doesn't pretend otherwise. The film depicts, through the scene mentioned above, that some detainees can suffer all kinds of abuse and never crack, and that if they do talk it might be nothing more than a basic animal instinct to survive — saying whatever it takes to stop the abuse. It also makes it clear, in a later scene with the same prisoner, that torture can be effective as the "bad cop" alternative to a more friendly and productive "good cop" approach to intelligence mining. And, even later, in a scene in which a different detainee says he's willing to cooperate rather than be tortured, it demonstrates that the looming potential for torture can be an effective motivational tool. So, yeah, Zero Dark Thirty shows that torture "works." But it also leaves room to speculate that part of the reason it took so long to locate bin Laden is because the CIA and military couldn't come up with a more effective approach for hunting him down.

In some films, this kind of ambiguity would smack of gutlessness or faux complexity, but not here. No, here, Bigelow and Boal bravely refuse to oversimplify the unavoidably complicated — at least when it comes to torture. Other parts of the film feel a little too neat, particularly the way Boal funnels all of the momentum, tenacity and canniness of the hunt for bin Laden into a single character, Jessica Chastain's Maya, who comes off like a less reckless but equally omnipresent version of Homeland's Carrie Mathison. But such narrative efficiencies are mostly unavoidable, and because Zero Dark Thirty isn't about profiling "The Woman Who Brought Down Osama bin Laden" they're inconsequential, too. The film's approach is to recount the milestone moments in a manhunt that took years and was notable for being of great interest (bin Laden was America's most-wanted terrorist) and yet little urgency (bin Laden seemed so removed from the day-to-day operations of al-Qaeda that some wondered if he was anything more than a symbolic target). And it does exactly that, with Bigelow and Boal going so far as to separate each milestone into its own distinct chapter and only getting personal in order to reveal some of the swirling emotions motivating the CIA's actions, be they noble, ugly, foolish or something else.

All of this makes Zero Dark Thirty a departure from Bigelow and Boal's previous collaboration, The Hurt Locker, highlighted by an awesome performance from Jeremy Renner, which is designed to take us into a soldier's experience. With a few notable exceptions, this is a remarkably unemotional film, and sometimes it struggles when it strays from that reserve. (For example: Maya is almost exaggeratedly repulsed by her first exposure to torture, only to suddenly turn the corner and embrace physical punishment a few scenes later, an evolution that isn't exactly "developed.") That emotional distance serves the film's air of journalistic authenticity, making its Hollywood flourishes more obvious while appreciating the discovery and execution of bin Laden as evidence of American might rather than evidence of American character, which is a welcome break from the jingoistic norm.

Once the debates over Zero Dark Thirty's depictions of torture die down, what we'll remember about the movie is its depiction of the attack on bin Laden's compound, which is void of macho swagger (if that's the least embellished portion of the movie, it wouldn't surprise me). To the credit of an elucidating 60 Minutes interview with one of the members of SEAL Team 6, I had a good idea of how everything would unfold, but that credit rolls the other way, too. Bigelow presents the action from the soldiers' collective perspective — if they don't know if someone is lurking around the other side of a corner, we don't know either — which is a fitting way to portray an operation in which so much was known but so many blind spots remained, right up until the end. Speaking of which: When bin Laden is shot, there's nothing cinematic about it — he's a flash of movement in a doorway, and then he's gone. Many filmmakers would have been tempted to approach the scene closer to the way Tarantino shot the projection room shootout in Inglourious Basterds: with dramatic music and slow motion. But bin Laden's death was everything that 9/11 wasn't. It was brief, unremarkable and in front of a limited audience. Credit to Bigelow for staying true to that.

Despite knowing the Xs and Os ahead of time, what I couldn't appreciate until seeing it here was the patience of the strike on bin Laden's compound — assuming the film is even close to accurate. So many war movies portray military bravery through daring dashes across open spaces under enemy fire, but this one makes it clear that it took balls just being there, which helps explain why the strike wasn't authorized until everyone was convinced (within reason) that they'd find what they were looking for. Zero Dark Thirty ends with a shot that recalls The Graduate, of all things, with Maya on a plane back to the United States having found exactly what she was looking for but apparently without a clue what to do next. It's a shot that, like the torture scenes at the start of the film, implies the great lengths that someone like Maya would resort to in order to achieve success — making the hunt for bin Laden the sole focus of her life. And at the same time the shot also comments on the country's obsession with bin Laden. In the end, we got our man, and what we were left with was ourselves, and a lingering awareness of all we gave up in order to win.


Additional Thoughts ... Full of Spoilers:

* Although the raid on bin Laden's compound is easy to follow, while still giving a sense of the unavoidable "fog of war," Bigelow drops the ball a bit in the retreat. Unless I missed something, Bigelow shows two helicopters arriving and one of them crashing; then it shows one helicopter evacuating with men still on the ground; then it shows two helicopters landing safely back at the base.

* "I'm the motherfucker who found this place." That line, by Maya, is supposed to be Zero Dark Thirty's equivalent of "I'll be back." It's a good line. But it was better before Mark Duplass' character underlined it by repeating it with raised eyebrows. Great movie lines are allowed to own the moment.

* "We're all smart, Jeremy." That line, by James Galdolfini's nameless CIA director (read: Leon Panetta) in response to praise for Maya's smarts, has me puzzled. Is it meant to suggest defensiveness, as if Maya found bin Laden by being lucky, not by being gifted? Is it meant to skewer sexism, as if Maya's intelligence would be taken as a given if she were a male agent? Is it meant to remind the audience that the CIA is full of smart, hard-working people, and so finding bin Laden took a long time simply because the task was hard? Something else?

* As much as it was nice to see Maya portrayed as a strong, tough, determined woman — and without removing her femininity — I was a little disappointed by the number of scenes in which the men around Maya regard her like some PMSing bitch whose intensity is regarded as melodrama.

* I'm torn in regard to the device in which Maya notes the days of inaction on the office window with a red marker. It's a little corny, which is an out-of-place mood in this picture. And yet it conveys that period of inactivity between "discovering" bin Laden and taking action much better than if Bigelow had simply flashed some dates on the screen.

* I'm no fan of torture, but whenever someone suggests that torture is purely ineffective I think of that poor guy's head in a vise in Casino. Just watching that scene makes me want to start talking. What do you want to know?

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Skateboarding Cinema to the Future: QUIK

When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. Well, specifically, I wanted to make Return of the Jedi. Not instead of George Lucas. Immediately after him.

In first, second and third grade, I was mesmerized by the Star Wars trilogy not just as escapist adventure but also as an act of creation. As often as I watched the movies themselves, I watched my TV-recorded VHS copy of the 1983 documentary about their development. (I had a book, too.)

The Star Wars trilogy was full of moviemaking "stuff" that went beyond the usual. Instead of just actors, costumes and sets, there were models, robots and puppets — and things like Jabba the Hutt that seemed to be a combination of all three — not to mention an abundance of rubber and fur that appealed to the Muppet fan in me.

In my not-entirely-thought-through efforts to someday make a Star Wars movie of my own, I focused my initial energy on those smaller creations — even going so far as to beg my mom to buy me some furry fabric so that I could take a shot at making my own Ewok suit — in part because I was fascinated by that stuff, and in part because I knew I couldn't shoot an Ewok scene without an Ewok costume, but mostly because, at the time, owning my own movie camera seemed only slightly more realistic than owning my own Millennium Falcon.

Times have changed.

Now digital moviemaking cameras, and editing programs and equipment, are ubiquitous and attainable. Becoming the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg may not be easy. But making a movie and sharing it with the world? Barring significant income challenges, anyone can do it.

And they are.

All of which is the long way around to saying that cinema isn't just on the big screen or the TV anymore. It's also on the Web, where sites like YouTube and Vimeo allow a shut-in with an iPhone and a cat to share screening space with professional moviemakers using state-of-the-art equipment.

None of this is news to you. Yet even the most open-minded of cinephiles wouldn't be likely to include a 5-minute timelapse video in the same conversation as the movies of, say, David Fincher. And maybe it's time we should. (Kevin B. Lee nudged us in that direction with a list of five "essential online videos" from 2012.)

More and more, when I need a little dose of cinematic inspiration, one of the places I look is the Staff Picks section at Vimeo. Typically, I scan for travelogue-type movies shot by true amateurs, because in recent years I've made similar movies myself, chronicling weekend getaways to this place or that. But in general if I'm drawn to a movie's thumbnail image I'll do the video equivalent of flipping through its pages.

In the past year I've enjoyed a frenetic road-trip movie composed of 5,000 stills, a touching portrait of a fishing father by his son, a silly spectacle celebrating the numerous ways to open a beer bottle, and so many others. But I'm not sure any direct-to-Web video thrilled me quite like QUIK.



If you haven't watched QUIK, stop here, spend fewer than 6 minutes and watch the movie. No, wait, let me amend that: even if you have watched QUIK, stop now and watch it — and not embedded here. Do it right: click here to see it bigger and, this is crucial, turn up the music! Enable its cinematic soul.

Done? OK.

In a series of tweets and in my Bests of 2012 post, I recognized QUIK as the piece of cinema that we'd all be going apeshit about if it appeared within a feature film by a big-name director. I stand by that.

Then again, part of QUIK's charm is that, unlike the Star Wars trilogy, we can sense the modesty of its creation. It's a single-camera production, shot out of the back of a truck, that follows a skateboarder, Austyn Gillette, as he rides through fairly unspectacular parts of Los Angeles and performs fairly unspectacular stunts.

From afar, QUIK might appear to be just another skateboarding video set to music — a dime a dozen on the Internet. But it isn't, and the modesty of the production and the stunts is a big reason why. Directed by Colin Kennedy with cinematography by Marc Ritzema, QUIK isn't about showing off. It isn't about awesomeness. It's about fluidity.

The first 50 seconds establish the environment (concrete jungle Los Angles) and the approach (a moving camera, rolling by, capturing people at work and at play). Then, tilting down from a shot of blue sky and palm trees, we get our first glimpse of Gillette, who skates toward the camera as if catching up and then skates right on by.

The rest of the movie observes Gillette skating through the established environment, jumping off curbs and over obstacles (OK, sometimes fairly spectacularly) and weaving past people who seem as indifferent to him as he is to them.

It is, above all else, an exhibition of unceasing motion. QUIK isn't shot in one take and, given that Gillette wears at least three different outfits, there's no attempt to con the viewer into thinking that this is a single journey. But neither the skateboarder nor the camera ever stops — in fact, as often as not, Gillette is captured swinging his leg to propel himself forward to whatever lies ahead as the camera keeps pace.

That, if you will, is the "stunt."

The nonchalance of QUIK is felt right down to its sound design, which allows us to hear the sounds of the neighborhood and Gillette's skateboard rolling over the concrete. Thus, QUIK's boldest stroke might be its musical accompaniment, We Barbarians' "Chambray," which has a kind of U2 basement tapes sound to it and fairly ambiguous lyrics that set a mood without dictating narrative.

"Will I go back?" the song asks. "God, I hope not," it immediately answers. It's the perfect exchange for a movie that seems to be about moving to or away from something, about exploration and escape, about living in the moment and chasing the next one.

It isn't difficult to imagine the entirety of QUIK as the climax to a larger story of a young man struggling to find his place in the world (The Kid With a Skateboard, so to speak). In that context, no doubt this sequence would have stood out as some of the best cinema of the year, and movie fans would have fogged windows talking about it.

But make no mistake: QUIK has narrative, poetry and power on its own. It's a glimpse into the life of a man going away, away, away, or forward, forward, forward, until the daylight runs out. It's a portrait of a life in motion.

Cinema doesn't get much better than that. Shot by anyone. Playing anywhere.

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Bests of 2012

Happy New Year!

There are still a few items on my 2012-viewing short list that I expect to see in the next week or two, most notably Zero Dark Thirty, Rust and Bone and Amour.

In addition, at some point I need to track down several films that never seemed to come my way, like This Is Not a Film, The Turin Horse and The Color Wheel.

And then there are movies that I let slip by but still hope to catch up with, like The Imposter, End of Watch and The Loneliest Planet.

All of that said, here's my look back at the year in film, which included viewings of about 60 new releases, most of which are included below, in some fashion or another.


Best Animation: Frankenweenie

Best Animated Movie: Brave

Best Classic Cinema Allusion: The chanting Oreo ("Orrr-EEEE-oh") guards in Wreck-It Ralph

Best Impression of a Classic Cinema Character: Michael Fassebender as David as Lawrence of Arabia's title character in Prometheus

Best Impression of Walter Matthau Doing an Impression of Sean Connery While Stuck Inside an Air Duct: Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises

Best Actor: Channing Tatum (21 Jump Street and Magic Mike)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Joaquin Phoenix in The Master

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role: James Gandolfini in Killing Them Softly

Best All-Too-Easily-Overlooked Performance: Simon Russell Beale as heartbroken husband Sir William Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea

Best Use of Sound: Ray Liotta's Markie takes a vicious beating in Killing Them Softly

Best Original Score: The Grey by Marc Streitenfeld

Best Musical Performance: The accordion and percussion jam of "Let My Baby Ride" in Holy Motors

Best Song, Individual: Anne Hathaway's one-shot "I Dreamed a Dream" as Fantine in Les Miserables

Best Song, Ensemble: London's various economic classes sing "Molly Malone" to wait out an air raid in The Deep Blue Sea

Best Use of a Pop Song: The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" in Take This Waltz

Best Soundtrack as Apparently Recommended by iTunes Genius: The painfully on-the-nose selections of Flight

Best Actress: Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises and Les Miserables)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises

Best Costume and Makeup: Suzy as a raven in Moonrise Kingdom

Best Facial Hair, Individual: Wes Bentley's Seneca Crane in The Hunger Games

Best Facial Hair, Ensemble: Lincoln

Best Commentary on Cinema: 21 Jump Street

Best Commentary on Criticism: Room 237

Best Journalism: The Invisible War

Best Journalist: Astute and articulate New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer in The Central Park Five

Best Reason to Leave the Theater Early: Compliance

Best Indication the 1% Can't Relate to the 99%: This Is 40

Best Film With the Magic of M. Night Shyamalan (But Not Really): Safety Not Guaranteed

Best Evidence M. Night Shyamalan Can Succeed Making M. Night Shyamalan Movies Provided They Aren't Utter Crap: Looper

Best Totally Ludicrous Movie That Kind of Works Anyway: Your Sister's Sister

Best Throwback: Argo

Best Time Capsule: Searching for Sugar Man

Best Documentary: Samsara

Best Musical: Les Miserables (only musical of the year?)

Best Musical Staging: Anna Karenina

Best Cameo: Martin Sheen in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Best Verification That Eva Green Is Terrific in Anything: Dark Shadows

Best Confirmation That Women Are Unequal to Men in Hollywood: The frequent and mostly unnecessary nudity of Helen Hunt versus the absent and yet comparatively essential nudity of John Hawkes in The Sessions

Best Nudity: The contrasted bodies in the shower in Take This Waltz

Best Black Comedy: Killer Joe

Best Surgical Procedure: Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw performs an abortion in Prometheus

Best Comedic Action Outburst in an Otherwise Unfunny, Unexciting Action Comedy: The Hulk swings Loki like a ragdoll in The Avengers

Best CGI Animal: Richard Parker the Bengal tiger in Life of Pi

Best Use of Practical/Analog Effects: Hogs as Maurice Sendak's wild things as aurochs in Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Plane Crash: The Grey

Best Disaster: The tsunami in The Impossible

Best Reminder That Tom Hooper's Cinematography Could Be Worse: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Extended Take: Lancaster Dodd "processes" Freddie Quell in The Master

Best Hyperedited Sequence: Sam and Suzy exchange letters in Moonrise Kingdom

Best Wide Shot: The president shuffles out of the telegraph room in Lincoln

Best Sequence We'd Be Going Apeshit About If It Appeared in a Feature Film by a Name Director: All 5:40 of Quik by Colin Kennedy with Austyn Gillette

Best Casting: Richard Gere as the smooth yet desperate, likeable yet detestable, caring yet aloof, cunning yet in-over-his-head Robert Miller in Arbitrage

Best Miscasting: Hugh Grant as a face-paint-wearing cannibal in Cloud Atlas

Best Marriage of Myth and Man: Daniel Day-Lewis' Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln

Best Humanization of a President: Bill Murray's Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson

Best Biopic: Bernie

Best Performance by a Graduate of the 'Kevin Costner School of Accents': Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant in Lincoln

Best Primal Scream: Batman, at the end of himself, fighting Bane in The Dark Knight Rises

Best Line, Deadpan: "You absolutely reek of sexual discharge." — Sarah Gadon's Elise to her husband in Cosmopolis

Best Line, Triumphant: "Fuck you, science!" — Channing Tatum's Jenko completes a scientific equation of his own invention while tripping on HFS in 21 Jump Street

Best Line Delivery: Asked by his science geek friend, who is an unwitting accomplice to an undercover investigation, if there's any urgency to testing the illegal wiretap they set up together, Channing Tatum's thick-headed Jenko tilts his head in search of an answer and responds with a hint of "been here before" frustration, "Not that I can think of that would make sense," in 21 Jump Street

Best Threat: "I'm going to start beating the shit out of you in the next five seconds, and you're going to swallow a lot of blood for a fucking billfold." — Liam Neeson's Ottway to Frank Grillo's Diaz in The Grey

Best Come-on: "No, I said: What kind of a bird are you." — Jared Gilman's Sam to Kara Hayward's Suzy in Moonrise Kingdom

Best Heart: Steve Carell's Dodge in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Best Fragility: Bradley Cooper's Pat and Jennifer Lawrence's Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook

Best Sensuality: Naomie Harris' Eve gives Daniel Craig's Bond a shave in Skyfall

Best Sorrow: Liam Neeson in The Grey

Best Self-consciousness: Logan Lerman's Charlie in Perks of Being a Wallflower

Best Narrator: Bob Balaban in Moonrise Kingdom

Best Storyteller: Christoph Waltz's Dr. King Schultz in Django Unchained

Best Villain: Charlize Theron's Ravenna in Snow White and the Hunstmen

Best Antivillain: Matthew McConaughey's Killer Joe Cooper in Killer Joe

Best Shootout: The mostly imagined bloodbath when Bruce Willis' Joe goes looking for Jeff Daniels' Abe in Looper

Best Execution: Gina Carano's Mallory uses her legs to squeeze Michael Fassbinder's Paul into an unconscious state before finishing him off with a gunshot through a pillow in Haywire

Best Absurd Image in an Absurd Movie: The little train that can in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Best Use of Color: Skyfall

Best Landscapes: The Hunter

Best Images, Documented: Samsara

Best Images, Dramatized: Skyfall

Best Sequence: A snooping suspicious husband is spied via a makeup mirror; a nervous lover's pounding heart is suggested by the rapid flutter of her fan; horses thunder across a stage; a racer and his horse tumble to the ground; and with a cheating wife's scream there are no secrets anymore, in Anna Karenina

Best Final Shot: Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet is renamed in Moonrise Kingdom

Best Picture: Moonrise Kingdom


OK, your turn. What are some of the bests of 2012?

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