2012 in review

21,000! I got 21,000 views in my first year, and I didn’t even start until May! Thanks to everyone who’s clicked and read! There’s a lot more to come in 2013! – Logan

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 21,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Django Unchained

It takes two (extra hours) to Django

Dear Hollywood, when we said ‘overstuffed’, we were talking about our stomachs during holiday feasts, not movies.

Yes, your bottoms will be sore after you traverse the long and winding road alongside freed slave Django in Quentin Tarantino’s latest macabre smorgasbord, Django Unchained. Movies verging on three hours in length are the trend of the 2012 holiday season, it would seem. But when the film is as delightfully unhinged and as resiliently bizarre as Django is, shouldn’t the few pounds of extra fat be as welcome as they were Christmas evening?

Audiences could argue the film succumbs to its own insanity somewhere within its final twenty minutes, as the track the script seems to be taking swerves along an unpredictably divergent path. Yet at the same time you can practically hear Tarantino jumping up and down with excitement when the film proverbially sheds its shackles and jumps from ‘contained quirkiness’ to ‘chaotic mumbo jumbo.’ When Tarantino finally unchains himself in both the screenwriter’s desk and the director’s chair, the results are eccentric and unordinary, but that’s the movie’s entire point.

Pitch Perfect (DVD Release)

Unsung heroes

It’s scary how fast movies are released on DVD now. Pitch Perfect was released to nationwide theaters less than three months ago, and it’s already out on DVD and Blu-ray, just in time to be stuffed into stockings. (Do DVDs qualify as stocking stuffers? Awkward shape. Like an anaconda swallowed a book.) Anyway this post introduces my DVD reviews, which will probably help me be lazy and save money. I’ll write these about movies I kind of wanted to see, but was unwilling to pay the full theater price for.

First up is the musical teen comedy. Pitch Perfect is a sassy little thing. It’s Bring It On and Mean Girls with a few musical interludes thrown in, or what would have happened if Disney’s High School Musical script had gotten stolen by Seth McFarlane. Or to put it in television terms, it’s, uh, Glee. With a slightly more mature TV parental guidance rating.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

An un-expectations reaching journey

Pack your bags boys, we’re going on an adventure! No, really, pack your bags. You’ll be in the theater for a while.

One does not simply walk into a Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings film adaption and without expecting a vigorous reorganization of J R R Tolkien’s original tale. And when the news broke a few months ago that The Hobbit, a standalone novel approximately one fifth the length of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, was being split into the same number of films its mother series received, it was a no brainer that much reorganization would be required.