Poster for Alain Guiraudie's L'inconnu du lac, premiering at Cannes.

With the Cannes Film Festival just a week away, I thought it might be fitting to post this incredible poster for the film I'm probably most excited to see at the festival this year, Alain Guiraudie's L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake). The film screens as part of the Un Certain Regard section and will be released theatrically in France on 12 June by Les Films du Losange. In years past, I've collected as many posters for the films at the festival as possible, but since then, others–like Adrian Curry with his Movie Poster of the Week–have picked up my slack. Though I won't be doing a poster round-up, I will be posting about Cannes later this week. Until then!

"Comic Strip"

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)
2010, France
Joann Sfar

That Joann Sfar’s Serge Gainsbourg film was originally planned to star the famed musician’s own daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, as her father makes it difficult to imagine that, when Charlotte dropped out, anything or anyone that could have successfully taken her place. Sure, the casting of a woman in the role of an iconic, enigmatic singer/songwriter had been done (successfully) in Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan pic I’m Not There., with Cate Blanchett, but the possibility of seeing Charlotte Gainsbourg in drag as her late father, seducing and romancing an actor playing her mother, would have been as decidedly pervy and enticing as Charlotte’s own teenage duet with daddy, “Lemon Incest.” So it came as a bit of a surprise (to me, at least) that Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque), sans Charlotte, is actually quite good.

Certainly Eric Elmosnino’s channeling of Monsieur Gainsbourg, which won him the Best Actor prize at the Césars, is impressive, but a solid impersonation does not a good film make. Instead, it’s the bolder choices made by Sfar, best known as a comic artist, in his first foray as a filmmaker that elevate Vie héroïque, which he adapted from his own graphic novel, beyond your factory-line Hollywood biopic. Sfar too won the César for Best First Film. Throughout the film, Serge–whether played as an adult by Elmosnino or as the child Lucien Ginsburg by Kacey Mottet Klein (of Ursula Meier’s Home)–is accompanied by a nightmarish, computer-animated version of himself, which serves as a visually exciting and narratively clever device.

 

Sfar also excels at one of the film’s more difficult tasks: introducing the many famed women of Gainsbourg’s life. It’s unfortunate that the two women who get the most screen time, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, are the least convincing performances in the film, despite both Laetitia Casta and Lucy Gordon’s strong physical resemblances to their respective characters. However, each of the women represented in the film enter the film explosively, almost the way I would imagine would befit the introduction of a series of recognized villains in a well-known comic book or video game. Villains these women, of course, are not, but they each provide their own individual challenges to our hero.

 

The more inspired performances come from Yolande Moreau as Fréhel, Sara Forestier as France Gall, Mylène Jampanoï as Bambou, and especially Anna Mouglalis as Juliette Gréco. Greco’s entrance is the most astonishing: a single shot of the opening her eyes to the sound of a thunder clap, as if she were waking from a hundred-year slumber. There’s also a funny, cartoonish cameo from Claude Chabrol (in his final appearance on the silver screen) as the record producer to whom Gainsbourg brings his new version of “Je t’aime, moi non plus” with Birkin filling in on vocals for Bardot. Again, it’s all about the eyes. Vie héroïque is probably the best biopic of Serge Gainsbourg that could have been made without Charlotte, and for that, Sfar should be commended.

With: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Doug Jones, Kacey Mottet Klein, Razvan Vasilescu, Dinara Droukarova, Anna Mouglalis, Mylène Jampanoï, Sara Forestier, Yolande Moreau, Philippe Katerine, Deborah Grall, Ophélia Kolb, Claude Chabrol, François Morel, Joann Sfar

Wild Hearts

Laurence Anyways
2012, Canada/France
Xavier Dolan

Keep the Lights On
2012, USA
Ira Sachs

Laurence Anyways is Xavier Dolan's third and certainly most ambitious film to date, notably so in the fact that he took himself out of the equation this time. In stepping away from the autobiographical, he examines an adult relationship between Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and Fred (Suzanne Clément) and the ways in which Laurence's desire to live life as a woman affects it. As an actor himself, Dolan has a knack for eliciting great performances, especially from Clément, who won a best actress prize from the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes last year, and the always reliable Nathalie Baye as Laurence's mother. While Dolan's characters have matured and his scope has broadened, he still employs some of his iffy stylized characteristics that were more forgivable when he used them for angsty young love in Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats).

Perhaps the biggest strikes against him are the misguided, clumsy bookends to the film. Someone should have advised him against every decision involved in the opening scene, a brooding montage set to Fever Ray's "If I Had a Heart." I'm not certain if fault should be given to Dolan for choosing a song any one of his fans would have already created so many associations with prior (note the spectacular, nightmarish music video by director Andreas Nilsson), but I am certain that the choice was wrong. It looks like a music video, creates a mood that the film never matches, and takes place in an fuzzy, uncertain time in Laurence and the film's timeline. This is a mistake that is repeated a few times during the film. The worst scene in Laurence Anyways could effectively be the best scene in a totally different movie, but as it stands, in this particular film, it feels wholly out-of-place. In what's possibly a fantasy sequence (possibly not), Fred puts on her sexiest gown and floats into a fancy ballroom, all cut to Visage's "Fade to Grey." These out-of-place music video montages don't advance the film in any way or tell the audience anything useful about the characters; instead, they're just mere reminders that Dolan has exceptionally good taste and unfortunate indications of the director's level of maturity as a filmmaker and his inability to self-edit. The film's final scene is a misfire as well, closing a long, vibrant journey on a humdrum note.

However, what Laurence Anyways does best is illustrating Laurence and Fred's explosive relationship. The film itself bares a number of similarities with another of 2012's notable queer films, Ira Sachs' Keep the Lights On (both won the top prize for queer cinema at the Berlinale (Teddy) and Cannes (Queer Palm)). Both films chronicle a turbulent relationship over the course of a decade in a fashion that feels almost fragmented and elliptical, though they're mostly told chronologically. Laurence Anyways effectively loses some of its power and intrigue when the narrative splits midway through the film. Keep the Lights On, on the other hand, restricts its perspective to one half of the couple, Erik (Thure Lindhardt), and we see the relationship between him and Paul (Zachary Booth) through Erik's eyes. The sort of dramatic strengths Dolan reaches in Laurence Anyways can best be chalked up to his decision to step away from autobiography, and on the flipside, clinging to autobiography is where Keep the Lights On seems to get lost. Basing the screenplay on his own long-term rocky relationship with a drug addict, Sachs fails to depict the sort of intensity and obsession that could possibly lead someone to carry on a relationship as destructive as Erik and Paul's. During a conversation Erik and Paul have near the end of the film, one of them smiles and says, "Well, we had some good times," to which a friend of mine leaned over to me during the screening and whispered, "Did we miss that part?"

Keep the Lights On has a few other problems, not least of which the flatness of the supporting characters played by Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, and Souleymane Sy Savane, but it does a commendable job creating and maintaining a mood and tone, beautifully lensed by Thimios Bakatakis (Dogtooth, Attenberg) and featuring just the right amount of Arthur Russell songs for the film's score. As I mentioned before, Laurence Anyways is all over the map visually and tonally, and its near-three-hour running time doesn't do Dolan any favors (though I'd never describe the film as boring). If only Laurence Anyways and Keep the Lights On could borrow each other's strengths and abandon their weaknesses, you'd have two spectacular films instead of two pretty messes.

Laurence Anyways
With: Melvil Poupaud, Suzanne Clément, Nathalie Baye, Monia Chokri, Yves Jacques, Catherine Bégin, Sophie Faucher, Guylaine Tremblay, Patricia Tulasne, Mario Geoffrey, Jacob Tierney, Susan Almgren, Magalie Lépine Blondeau, Emmanuel Schwartz, Jacques Lavallée, Perrette Souplex, David Savard, Monique Spaziani, Mylène Jampanoï, Gilles Renaud, Anne-Élisabeth Bossé, Anne Dorval, Pierre Chagnon, Éric Bruneau, Alexis Lefebvre, Denys Paris, Vincent Davy, Vincent Plouffe, Alexandre Goyette

Keep the Lights On
With: Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, Souleymane Sy Savane, Miguel del Toro, Justin Reinsilber, Sebastian La Cause, Maria Dizzia, Ed Vassallo, Chris Lenk

...Caligula Would Have Blushed

Caligula
Caligola
1979, Italy/USA
Tinto Brass, Bob Guccioni, Giancarlo Lui

Though I believe all perceived cinematic disasters should be revisited and reexamined through time, I regret the decision I made yesterday to give Caligula such treatment. Seeing it at an age when I actively sought out all things controversial and decadent, I possessed few feelings, one way or the other about the film, but following a strange impulse to give it another look, I'm surprised by my teenage ambivalence. Caligula is a trash heap of a movie, a singular achievement only in the fact that it managed to sour the combined efforts of so many talented individuals. Were those efforts collectively ruined by Penthouse founder Bob Guccione? Giving him any creative control or license was a mistake of course, but I'm pretty sure Caligula was beyond hope long before Guccione filmed those additional porn scenes.

Reading about the production nightmares of turning the roman emperor's debauched life into a motion picture, it's quite apparent that the various power struggles between screenwriter Gore Vidal, director Tinto Brass, art director Danilo Donati, producer Guccione, and star Malcolm McDowell were the source of the problem. And what's left is an unsurprisingly tasteless but surprisingly tiresome film that looks like a perverted child's version of Satyricon. I found myself cringing at every single aspect of Caligula, least of which its prurient affectations.

With: Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, Teresa Ann Savoy, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, Guido Mannari, Bruno Brive, Giancarlo Badessi, John Steiner, Donato Placido, Paolo Bonacelli, Leopoldo Trieste, Mirella D'Angelo, Anneka Di Lorenzo, Lori Wagner, Adriana Asti, Rick Parets

Best of 2012: Sophie Letourneur's Le marin masqué

 

Le marin masqué
2011, France
Sophie Letourneur

Similar to António da Silva's Julian, another of my favorite new films of 2012 follows the same set-up: someone returning home for a weekend visit with a friend in tow. In Le marin masqué, two young women, Laetitia and Sophie, take a road trip to Laetitia's home town of Quimper, in the northwest of France. The weekend consists of cute interactions with Laetitia's father, crêpe-hunting, and a night at the local disco where they run into one of Laetitia's girlhood crushes "le marin masqué" (or, the masked sailor, played by Johan Libéreau).

Made for around €150 and shot in black-and-white on HD video, Le marin masqué fills a similar cinematic void that Sofia Coppola did ten or so years ago, that void being films which combined youthful charm with intelligence and, most importantly, a feminine eye. Watching Laetitia and Sophie chat endlessly with one another, I was reminded of how few films exist that could be accurately referred to as "girly" without condescension. Le marin masqué premiered at the 2011 Locarno Film Festival, and Letourneur's festival-going experience became the inspiration for her latest feature Les coquillettes, about three young women cruising a film festival for available men, which subsequently made its world premiere at Locarno 2012.

With: Laetitia Goffi, Sophie Letourneur, Johan Libéreau, Thomas Salaun, Dominique Salaun, Emmanuelle Fitamant, Bertrand Boulogne

Best of 2012: António da Silva's Julian

 

Julian
2012, Portugal/UK
António da Silva

The best short I saw in 2012 was a ten-minute long, super 8 chronicle of a romantic fling/weekend-getaway to Portugal. The titular figure is a ginger-bearded, Swiss horticulturist/dreamboat who accompanies the filmmaker on a nature-seeking road trip around Portugal and Lisbon. Certainly aided by the super-8 film, the look of Julian conjures a particular nostalgia that's perfectly matched with the film's narration, which sounds like a recollection of an exquisite, faded memory. To me, Julian felt like "Heartbeats" by The Knife by way of Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, though it's much more approachable than either of those two. To see the film, you can make a donation via António da Silva's Tumblr. Short excerpt below.

 
JULIAN (film excerpt) from Antonio da Silva Films on Vimeo.

Best of 2012: 12 Singles

 

Though I like to consider myself an album kinda guy, I'm pretty sure the structure of the music industry as it is right now has seeped into the minds of musicians young and old, subconsciously nudging the faithful album creators into single territory (even if it's ever so slightly). I could be wrong, but I just wanted a valid excuse for why I'm not making a "best albums of 2012" list and why I've decided to dedicate a post to twelve songs from the past calendar year that left a significant mark on my life. I've already written about a song (Bat for Lashes' "Laura") and a music video (Grimes' "Oblivion"), and this will conclude the Best of 2012 music posts. Are these the twelve (er, fourteen) best songs of 2012? Probably not. They are, instead, an excellent sampler for the soundtrack of my past year... at least, in terms of new music. The tracks are not ordered, though if I had to pick the best of the lot (not counting "Laura"), I would probably opt for Light Asylum's "Shallow Tears." Off the Brooklyn-based duo of Shannon Funchess and Bruno Coviello's self-titled debut LP, "Shallow Tears" gives a new reference point to the moderately overused phrase, "hauntingly beautiful," with its hypnotic synth percussion and Funchess' exciting vocals, here sounding like a heavenly cross between Grace Jones, Q Lazzarus, and Alison Moyet of Yaz. On an even more exciting note, Funchess will be featured on my most hotly anticipated album of 2013, Shaking the Habitual from The Knife, due out in April.

Two additional notes about the songs listed below. Firstly, the Animal Collective track "New Town Burnout," off their LP Centipede Hz, perfectly transitions into the next song, "Monkey Riches," on the album, so maybe you could consider listening to it as part of the full album or via this live YouTube video of them performing the two songs in Vancouver. And finally, be sure to check out the unofficial video below for Róisín Murphy's "Simulation," directed by fellow San Franciscan Aron Kantor and featuring one of our fair city's finest drag artists, Ambrosia Salad. The video uses a four-minute edit of the eleven-minute song, which was the best dance track of 2012 that I heard. Enjoy.

• Absolutely Free - "UFO"
• Animal Collective - "New Town Burnout"
• Antony and the Johnsons - "Cut the World"
• Cassie - "King of Hearts"
• Grizzly Bear - "Yet Again"
• iamamiwhoami - "idle talk"
• Light Asylum - "Shallow Tears"
• Liars - "No. 1 Against the Rush"
• Lower Dens - "Brains"
• Paradis - "Je m'ennuie"
• Róisín Murphy - "Simulation"
• Wild Nothing - "Shadow"

Simulation - Roisin Murphy - ft. Ambrosia Salad from Dirtyglitter on Vimeo.

Acting a Fool

The Fighter
2010, USA
David O. Russell

Biopics of athletes sit about as far down on my list of filmic interests as anything I can think of at the moment, so describing David O. Russell's The Fighter as "watchable" might sound like a recommendation coming from me. The film got quite a bit of attention a year or so ago for its performances, winning Academy Awards for Christian Bale and Melissa Leo in the supporting categories. The performances failed to impress me, however, and I think this is a large scaled reflection of the essential problem I have with the film as a whole. The Fighter is competent on nearly every level one could come up with to judge it. The cinematography is nice to look at. The screenplay is solid and mostly absent of sports-biopic clichés. The sound mix is professional. The direction is engaging. The pace is consistent. The actors all act their hearts out. Competent is great for award hand-outs and ideal for thoughtless viewings on HBO while you're nursing a cold. Unfortunately though, when competent is the only thing going for a film, it almost always cancels out interesting.

By noticing the individual competency levels of those dissected elements of this insipidly-titled film, I've already lost the illusion, which is absolutely essential to a sports biopic. The film crew creates the illusion of reality in order to convey morals, lessons, truths about life and the human existence. And yet the element for which The Fighter has received the most praise and accolades is the one that causes the most harm in abating the illusion. In the four central roles, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo all do what they're supposed to: inhabit their characters. All four have proven themselves respectable thespians throughout their careers, but the artifice of their performances was on constant display here. There's never a moment when it isn't blindingly clear that you're watching "acting." The gold statues now on Bale and Leo's mantles don't correctly lead to the conclusion that Bale and Leo were better than Wahlberg or Adams; in fact, they seem merely indicative of the "volume" at which these actors did their job, which also seemed to have been determined by the juiciness of their respective characters' sketches.

 

Wahlberg's acting was easily the quietest of the quartet; I mean, there's not a lot of meat to a character who's a "nice guy" who loves his brother, his mother, and his girlfriend and simply wants to do well in his chosen career. Wahlberg wasn't nominated for an Oscar (as an actor). Adams was, considering the fact that she had a few more bells and whistles at her disposal. She donned an accent, looked "unglamorous," and played a character with a few more than Wahlberg's. Adams' character is kind of a tomboy, dropped out of college in a town where the option of such a thing is close to unheard of, admits to having a slight drinking problem that may have been the reason she stopped her education, and becomes the target of severe verbal and physical animosity from Wahlberg's seven sisters. Effectively, she lost out to Leo, who is on the highest factory setting the entire film. Her character is an overbearing mother of nine, who chain smokes, has a tacky haircut and matching wardrobe, and suffers from a bad case of denial about many things in her life, not least of which being the fact that she may not love her younger son (Wahlberg) as much as she does his older brother (Bale). In a move that's become the actor's unofficial signature, Bale literally embodies his character, dramatically altering his physical appearance in the service of his craft. And he gets the juiciest of all the characters: the golden child of a small town whose glory is in rapid decline thanks to an addiction to crack, something which slides down to negatively affect his other roles as father to a toddler and trainer to his younger brother.

The "volume" of Bale's performance – loudest of the four – unintentionally silences whatever emotional truths the film tries to reveal... what those might have been, I haven't a guess since I was too distracted by craft and didn't especially care much in the first place. The illusion vanishes, and what's left is a person pretending to have a conversation with another person using sentences that were written by yet another person, who was giving words and thoughts to a pretend version of an actual person who lived. If The Fighter had emotional truths or life lessons to be discerned from its narrative, they were spoken to these deaf ears and shown to these eyes that couldn't stop looking at the man behind the curtain... doing his job.

With: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Jack McGee, Frank Renzulli, Mickey O'Keefe, Erica McDermott, Sugar Ray Leonard, Caitlin Dwyer, Alison Folland, José Antonio Rivera, Anthony Molinari

Best of 2012: Leos Carax's Holy Motors

Holy Motors
2012, France/Germany
Leos Carax

A lot of people have a lot of things to say about Leos Carax's Holy Motors, his first feature film in thirteen years following Pola X. I strangely do not. It was my most anticipated film of 2012, and it probably couldn't have ever lived up to my impossible expectations of it... but it's still quite good and certainly one of the notable films of 2012. It also continues the dynamic partnership between Carax and his cinematic proxy, Denis Lavant, which was rekindled in the short Carax made for the omnibus film Tôkyô! They were also both seen onscreen in Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely.

 

As always, Lavant is mesmerizing through each episode and character, and he's given fine support by Édith Scob as his chauffeuse (the Eyes Without a Face nod was appreciated), Kylie Minogue as his sullen ex-flame (light years -- pun not intended -- past her ill-fated cinematic endeavors of the 1990s), Eva Mendes as a supermodel held captive by M. Merde, the troll-ish figure from Tôkyô!, Elisa Lhomeau as one of Lavant's scene partners, and Jeanne Disson (from Tomboy) as his angsty teenage daughter.

With: Denis Lavant, Édith Scob, Kylie Minogue, Eva Mendes, Elise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson, Michel Piccoli, Leos Carax

Best of 2012: Nadav Lapid's Policeman

 

Policeman
2011, Israel
Nadav Lapid

In just his second feature, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid displays a bold confidence, narratively and stylistically, that's hard to fully grasp in a single sitting. When you look at the completed careers of some of the cinematic greats, few have found their footing or their voice by their second film, but with the way films are made these days, young filmmakers are expected to have mastered these things by, at least, their third film if they want to stay in the consciousness of both their audience and the film industry. So when a filmmaker shows such an ease with their visions at an early stage, we begin to fear that they've already peaked, or that they're a one- (or two-) trick pony... even though we've already decided that they should have found their cinematic voice by that point. Making a big splash early isn't easy.

  

In a sense, Policeman is actually Lapid's first feature; his previous film, Emile's Girlfriend (which features the same leading man Yiftach Klein as Policeman), only clocks in at forty-eight minutes, technically three minutes in the green according to the French definition of a "feature film." In Policeman, Klein plays Yaron, the central figure of the first of the film's dueling narratives. Yaron is a young, handsome policeman working with a group of other men as part of an anti-terrorist unit. In his personal life, he and his wife are anxiously awaiting their first child to be born; professionally, he and his fellow officers are coming off  an assignment where it seems things didn't go as they should have. The most fascinating elements of Policeman can be found in its small details and the whispers of strange, complicated side stories that are (purposefully) kept along the peripheral.

The second narrative concerns Shira (Yaara Pelzig), a fair-skinned, blonde, waifish revolutionary who is plotting, along with a handful of other young Jewish leftists, a large-scaled attack around the wedding of the daughter of one of Israel's wealthiest capitalists. Propelled by Pelzig's icy performance, Shira becomes an endlessly transfixing and perplexing figure, a commanding presence who is deeply conflicted with everything except, possibly, her mission. Naturally, the storylines collide in the final third of the film, leaving a rather surprising, or at least unexpected, aftertaste. After taking home a number of prizes at the Jerusalem, Locarno, BAFICI, Philadelphia, and San Francisco Film Festivals, Lapid certainly has a lot of promise to live up to when his next film begins its festival rounds; and hopefully that won't take too long to happen.

With: Yiftach Klein, Yaara Pelzig, Michael Aloni, Menashe Noy, Michael Moshonov, Gal Hoyberger, Meital Barda, Shaul Mizrahi, Rona-Lee Shim'on, Ben Adam

Best of 2012: Bat for Lashes - Laura

I haven't loved any of Bat for Lashes' three albums from start to finish, but with each of them, I've found myself hopelessly devoted to at least one track, so much so that I've put the rest of the album on hold to give said track the repeated listens it so deserves. On her latest LP The Haunted Man, that song is "Laura." A friend of mine suggested that all of her best songs were named after people; I had to disagree as I'd never heard of a person named "Trophy." "Laura" is fabulously decadent melodrama, a requiem perhaps for the woman who once captivated men by the droves at a cabaret that only existed for her. "You're the train that crashed my heart," Natasha Khan exclaims before reassuring, "Oh, Laura, you're more than a superstar." I think of the song as less of a requiem than a glittery reminder to the Laura of the song of what she possessed and, in present tense, still does -- the razzle-dazzle, je ne sais quoi that eternal stars/performers have within. It's not something that wears off, Kahn reminds her (and us) "when you're smile is so wide and your heels are so high." Video below.

Best of 2012: William Friedkin's Killer Joe

Killer Joe
2011, USA
William Friedkin

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be writing about a number of my favorite things of 2012, as opposed to doing my usual Top 10 list. This will cover films, albums, songs, music videos, performances, or whatever else that pops into my head

Though we'll always run into annual technicalities of whether a film belongs in X or Y year as a result of final quarter festival screenings, the fact that William Friedkin's adaptation of Tracy Letts' play Killer Joe didn't play anywhere outside of a few festival screenings in the fall of 2011 (Venice in competition and Toronto) makes it acceptable for me to proclaim it the best film of 2012. Killer Joe is feverish and shocking in ways you don't see often in cinema (these days? ever? I'm not sure). Friedkin and Letts had previously collaborated (brilliantly) on Bug in 2006, a film which finds a magnificent Ashley Judd being sucked into a claustrophobic, paranoid world by stranger Michael Shannon. Killer Joe has more room to breathe than Bug had, but it shares Bug's dangerous stroll down the line that separates wild, unsettling frenzy and overcooked rotten "camp." Just as Judd and Shannon nailed their parts in Bug, Matthew McConaughey (who has sculpted his body into a rather frightening, hairless mannequin), Juno Temple, and (especially) Gina Gershon do the same here; and as Harry Connick Jr. hit sour notes in Bug, Emile Hirsch rings a bit false, or perhaps a tad bland, in Killer Joe. With the air Friedkin gives the film to breathe, Killer Joe feels less like a film adaptation of a play than it does a perverse, dark-as-night fable children are told in a nightmarish, Night of the Hunter-esque version of the American south. The film's climax is truly a wonder to behold, and though I'm always a little biased when it comes to the admiration of Gina Gershon, her name should be added to the (long) list of "cryin'-shame" absences if it doesn't come up the morning the Academy Award nominations are revealed.

With: Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Gina Gershon, Thomas Haden Church, Marc Macaulay, Danny Epper

Best of 2012: Grimes - Oblivion

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be writing about a number of my favorite things of 2012, as opposed to doing my usual Top 10 list. This will cover films, albums, songs, music videos, performances, or whatever else that pops into my head.

Though I'm never current when it comes to music videos, I can say without any hesitation that the best video of 2012 is Grimes' "Oblivion." The first single off her widely lauded LP Visions, "Oblivion" finds the artist in several different sporting locales: a monster truck rally, the stands of an arena during a football game, two different locker rooms (one with toweled men lifting weights, the other with shirtless men moshing), the concession stand, and some bro-ed out tailgate party. If the video were trying to be ironic, it wouldn't have worked, but there's a certain charming authenticity to Grimes' music, her persona, and especially this video. She feels a bit more genuine than the oddball girl in your middle-school class, who was likely just trying to be "weird." The video, directed by Emily Kai Bock, really begins to stand apart (and above) most of the videos I've seen this year when a girl runs up behind her, pulling her hood up. It certainly feels like a spontaneous moment, and once you see Grimes usher a fan to run across the screen as he politely waits offscreen for them to stop filming. The video is dynamic, surprising, bizarre (without looking like its trying to be), cute, sexy, homoerotic, and endearing. It's a shame then that the best track on Visions, "Genesis," would have such a mess of a video to go along with it. Video below.