My Movie Biography: Where It's At Now in 2012

(2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) Well, we're heading into the home stretch now. Tomorrow is the big day. Just to let you know, you will probably have trouble visiting the site for a while. Don't worry, (fingers crossed) everything goes fine and I'll be back up and running this time tomorrow. Hope to see you there!  Anyway, 2012 in my movie biography...

• By some small coincidence, all of the movies I got at one time from Fatso were by Roman Polanski. So I started off the year with Chinatown, Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. That was...fun.
• I saw The Muppets and The Adventures of Tintin on the same day. I felt so awkward being this 16 year old all alone in cinemas filled with children. Funnily enough, I preferred Tintin a lot more, but now The Muppets is pretty much my go-to movie when I want to feel better about life.
• I finally got out of NZ! My father and I went to Melbourne, Australia for a week and that was exciting. I was pretty excited for the plane trip, because Drive was playing on the plane and I hadn't seen it because it was an R18. I did really like it when I saw it, but I completely forgot about the fact that it was censored, so I was left wondering what was so R18 about it. Then I looked it up on the internet and apparently there were 70 swearwords in it, but I hadn't heard any of them. When I got the film on DVD, I finally embraced it and it became my second favourite movie of 2011. While I was in Melbourne I bought a crapload of movies because they had everything that I'd been looking for. And there's like, five JB Hi-Fi's in the city, so I was in heaven. Also heavenly was the Pancake Parlour, but that's another story. I also went to the cinemas a fair bit because I wanted to escape the heat. I only really wanted to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, because I thought it was going to be an R18 in NZ and it was only an MA15+ in Australia. I was so excited to be all rebellious. Then I got back to NZ and I found out that it was only an R16. Which was somewhat disappointing. I also saw The Descendants and Hugo just because I could. I really miss Melbourne. It was such a nice place. One day I hope to go back.
• While I wasn't as excited for the Oscars as much as I was last year (I blame the fact that I hadn't watched many of the movies), I still thought it was a good idea to wake up at 3am and watch the Oscar nominations for fun. It wasn't all that fun until I saw that Rooney Mara got nominated, in which case I let out this weird squeal that woke up everyone in the house. I stayed up until at least 4.30am ranting with people on Facebook about them. Which probably wasn't the best idea, because once the morning hit we were going to Palmerston North to watch War Horse. It didn't affect the experience. I still spent the entire film crying my eyes out. And when I say the "entire film", I mean the entire bloody thing. As soon as I saw that horse I was in tears.

The "I Love Ezra Miller" List.

Forgive me, I didn't know how I could title this post. Because I don't really have any particular reason to post this post, apart from the fact that I do indeed love Ezra Miller. Okay, so I'm doing this to 'celebrate' the long-awaited release of his debut film Afterschool, which first came out at Cannes in 2008, but has only just come out on DVD here four years later. Heck, I was in primary school when this movie originally came out. Which makes me feel kinda old. Oh well. The film itself didn't really warrant a full-length review from me, but it was worth a few words. So, I guess I can thinly veil what is basically an excuse to write about Ezra with promoting a little seen film. Along with a whole lot of his other little seen films that I think deserve a few words. What we have here is just a random list of all of the films I've seen him in - let's just say that it is a 'timeline' of his rising star status. Because I'm hoping that this guy becomes the next big thing.

Afterschool (2008) - Robert

Afterschool is a strange little film, heralding the feature debut of director Antonio Campos and of course Ezra Miller. Shot on a shoestring budget with a grainy camera, the film takes place in a boarding school, where Robert captures on camera the death of some twin sisters that go to his school. Throughout the film, we see the way everyone reacts to the deaths, before eventually finding out the truth to what really went on. This is a film which has a lot to say, mainly about children and their gadgets, but also the decisions that children make. However, while it has an interesting enough story, the movie wasn't very exciting. It was very much a 'beginners film': endlessly experimental but often losing focus. Which is kind of a shame, because I would have liked to see this film go much further than it did. Ezra's performance was brilliant, though, considering how young he was and how demanding the role was.

My 20 Favourite Movies of 2011.

Okay, here we are. 20 may seem like a big number, but it was the only way I could fit in everything that I wanted to fit in. So let's not spend any time waffling - it is time for me to close out 2011 once and for all...

Honourable mentions: Hesher, Moneyball, Like Crazy, The Ides of March, Incendies, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Captain America: The First Avenger, Sarah's Key, The Adventures of Tintin, Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Limitless, Thor, Young Adult, Hugo, Melancholia, Contagion, The Help, Crazy, Stupid, Love., Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Super 8, X-Men: First Class, Source Code, Jane Eyre, Rango, Another Earth, Perfect Sense.

20. The Skin I Live In - Dir. Pedro Almodovar

A little strange? Definitely. The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodovar's latest film, explores themes of loneliness, sexual identity, death, and possibly the most unique tale of revenge that I've ever seen. In other hands, this would have been the stuff that fits right into The Human Centipede's generation of horror. Almodóvar creates his macabre, ominous tale with elegance, kitsch and malevolence. The Skin I Live In is almost in a breed of it's own, playing out as a horror that dares you to get under your skin and make you question your own identity. Which is somewhat funny to see these days when horrors are all about scaring you with more blood and guts than are probably possible to be inside one person.

Enough to Warn Me Off Becoming a Parent.

Film: We Need to Talk About Kevin
Year: 2011
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Written by: Lynne Ramsay and Rory Kinnear, based on the novel 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' by Lionel Shriver
Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, Rock Duer, Ashley Gerasimovich, Alex Manette, Kenneth Franklin.
Running time: 107 min. 

As a teenager, I'll be the first to admit that we are scary little creatures. I mean, really scary. Okay, so I'm not a parent, but it must be so disappointing when you spend all of that time being excited over having a tiny bundle of innocent youth...that turns into a huge bundle of angst. Yeah, that's probably an underestimation of teens (because I don't like being underestimated).

Or maybe I'm taking that idea straight from We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Eva (Tilda Swinton) and Franklin (John C. Reilly) fall in love. At that point, Eva is a successful travel writer who has been places, and wishes to keep going places. However, she and Franklin get married, and have a son called Kevin, which puts her plans on an indefinite hold. While Franklin instantly warms to his son, Eva feels doesn't feel any connection to him, partly because of the fact that she'd much rather be pursuing other interests. She can't control his constant crying - even standing by a jackhammer and revelling in the relief that that annoying sound makes, or control her son, as a matter of fact. And this is only when he's young.

Stevee's Best and Worst Posters of 2011...

Well, it's December (how, I do not know), so it's the time of the year when everyone rolls out their 'best of' lists for the year. While I might make a top ten films list (though it would be better if I did one at the end of next year), I'm going to look at all of the promotional stuff that I can see with the click of the fingers. Now, I'm quite the expert on movie posters, so I'll take a look at the five worst and ten best posters of 2011 films.

Here are the top five worst posters from 2011:

5. Main St - I already talked enough about this poster in this post. I still haven't seen this movie (I kinda plan to, just to see what went wrong), but here's some wishful thinking: it might be better than whoever photoshopped this hideous Coronation Street-esque poster.

4. The Darkest Hour - Sure, this isn't a horribly bad poster compared to some other ones. When it was one of the featured trailers on my IMDB app, the poster was so bad that I stopped using the app for a while until they changed it. Working at a DVD store, I see a whole lot of Z-grade straight-to-DVD disaster films, and this one - which is actually going to cinemas - looks exactly like one of those. I mean, just look at the lame lightning ripping through the city. And the awful colouring of the tagline. And that tagline being bigger than the title. It just makes it look really awful.

3. X-Men: First Class - The large majority of the X-Men: First Class posters were the victims of someone who got a bit too excited about photoshop. This one, showing all of the characters from the movie (and there are quite a few, hence the troubling one-dimensionality of some of them), is quite the eyesore. It all starts with the blueness, and then you wonder why half of these people are walking and the other half are just standing there looking menacing. James McAvoy probably came out worse off...I mean, look at how disproportionate his body is. Michael Fassbender looks like he is in pants that are miles too big to him and his turtleneck has made his neck disappear. And if you look really hard, you can see Lucas Till in the distance, all faded away. It's just such a silly poster.

2. I Don't Know How She Does It - Apart from having one of the most annoying titles of the year, this movie has an annoying poster to match. First of all, there is the colour. It makes me think of puke. Then there is Sarah Jessica Parker, who looks slightly uncomfortable and has a bizarre looking smile on her face. She's holding a teddy with her bag, just to show that no-one knows how she does it. On the right side of her she is a whole lot of things that she needs to do. I'm so glad that she has to make cookies. I don't know how she does that.

1. New Year's Eve - I don't know where to begin with this poster. It is just bloody awful. Just the way everyone looks. Some people look like they've been cut out of a tabloid magazine (ahem, Ashton Kutcher), some have been cut directly out of the official film stills, others just look purely idiotic. I'm talking about you,
Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges. I'm sorry, but you look like you're a prisoner applying to be Santa Claus, your smile is that un-genuine. There's just way too much gold. We get it, New Year's Eve is gold, but that doesn't mean it's the annual lottery holiday.

Best posters after the jump...