A new episode on Christmas Day? Well, why not? You know, it always bugged me that everything was always a rerun on holidays anyway. Plus, since it's now only six more days until 2013, this is the perfect opportunity for a "Best Movies of 2012" episode! So, let's get to it starting at number 10!
10. Casa De Mi Padre
Yeah, that's right. This is one of the funniest and most original comedies I saw all year. Will Ferrell performing an entire role in phonetic Spanish in a note-perfect parody of vintage Mexican telenovelas? Just the premise is funny enough, but that the actual movie had a lot of biting, clever, fall-down funny gags beyond the genre spoof was a really pleasant surprise.
9. Ted
I like Family Guy, for the most part, and I think Seth McFarlane is a really talented guy. But if you told me last year that the funniest mainstream comedy of 2012 was going to be his debut feature about a foul-mouthed teddy bear, I would have called you nuts. And I'd have been wrong. Ted is hilarious, deftly skewering the immature gen-x male comedy genre by carrying the premise to the logical extreme, but also by being a great example of one as well. The extended house party sequence is an instant comedy cla**ic, Ted himself is one of the breakout characters of the year, and I was especially impressed that they were able to make a movie about male friendship where Mila Kunis still gets to play a character instead of a plot device as the girlfriend.
8. Lincoln
Instead of turning into the soft-focussed biopic people were expecting, Steven Spielberg's big period presidential showpiece is a lively, edgy and even funny movie about political dirty dealing...that comes down on the dirty dealer's side. In an election year that was positively awash in media sanctimony about how noble and honorable politics used to be, Lincoln boldly posits that one of our greatest presidents WAS great precisely because he was willing to play dirty, stretch the truth, bend the rules, twist some arms, and run the long con in service of his own high-minded ideals, resulting in a film that plays the pa**age of the 13th Amendment, one of the most important moments in American history, as a kind of Ocean's Eleven-style caper movie with the end of slavery as the prize.
7. The Cabin In The Woods
If you still haven't seen this, I'm still not going to spoil it for you. This was the big one, the first real game-changer for horror movies since...I can't even remember when. Even if you do figure out where this twisted, secret-laden bloodbath is going, you'll still never believe just how far.
6. Wreck-It Ralph
Wreck-It Ralph could have been another pand to the marketing power of Generation-X and gaming nostalgia, but instead, Disney delivered a funny, exciting and even poignant adventure story about the power of self-acceptance. While the advertising leaned heavily on video game cameos, the film's real strength came from terrific original characters like John C. Reilley as the big, savage lug of a lead, Sarah Silverman's spot-on parody of a 90s-style cute kid character, and Jane Lynch's Calhoun, a send-up of strong female game h**nes who's actually a lot better than most of the real ones.
5. Paranorman
This was a great movie because it had the guts to go small, intimate and genuinely spooky. Too many movies aimed at kids are in too much of a hurry to get to the wacky rollercoaster stuff, but Paranorman goes for a slow, character-focussed build-up, and a third act that's both genuinely frightening and genuinely moving, with a shockingly dark reveal and a script that has a lot more thoughtful things to say about bullying, self-esteem and other issues than most grown-up movies do.
4. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Peter Jackson's Middle Earth prequel had a rocky start, a couple of them, actually, and could've gone either way. But it turns out the return to The Shire is well worth waiting for. By design, it can't quite match Lord Of The Rings' potent depths or epic scope, but it's a cracking good adventure movie in its own right with more than enough canonical embelishment to make the expansion to trilogy length feel more or less justified so far. Is it extraneous to turn minor, throwaway references from the book into the basis for gigantic action setpieces? Well, probably. But if they're this much fun, why would I complain?
3. Django Unchained
You'll get a full review of this one from me at our regularly-scheduled time and place. Until then, just three simple words for now. GO...SEE...DJANGO.
2. Cloud Atlas
Even if it hadn't been a success, I'd still be tempted to put Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski's sprawling time-and-body-jumping epic on here just for having the guts to try. A film set in six time periods with multiple actors with multiple roles with no regard for conventional rules of race, gender or age, in the service of a single story - that took brains, heart and guts, and this movie has all of those and then some.
1. The Avengers
And really, what else would it have been? Genre fans have been waiting for the day when shared-universe continuity would follow comic book superheroes from the page to the screen, and now that seal has been forever broken by Joss Whedon's genre-redefining action epic that finally put to bed the short-sighted myth that you can't do these things faithfully and do them well. A clever script, the great characters, the amazing visuals, hands-down the best live-action superhero battle ever put to screen, took The Avengers from being an impossible dream to being the new gold standard for this entire genre. I waited three decades for someone to finally pull this off, and man, am I still amazed that they actually did it.
Well, alright! That was fun! In fact, I feel like having some more fun! Next week, the worst of 2012.
I'm Bob, and that's the Big Picture.