Since 2007, I've been doing my own best movies of the year list. It only consists of 3 categories; the "Akira Kurosawa/Sergio Leone Award for Cinematic Excellence (a fancy way of saying best film), a listing of the top 5 films of the year which is a new addition for 2012, and my own special award that I've named the "Finding Nemo Award for Cinematic Excrement." This award describes a movie that is generally beloved by critics and the populace at large but I just simply can't stand. Each year seems to produce one of these movies.
Before I reveal my picks for 2012, I'm going to list previous winners of the Kurosawa/Leone award and the winners of the Finding Nemo award for my own archival purposes.
2007:
Kurosawa/Leone: No Country For Old Men
Finding Nemo: Juno
2008:
Kurosawa/Leone: The Dark Knight
Finding Nemo: Slumdog Millionaire
2009:
Kurosawa/Leone: (tie) Avatar/Star Trek
Finding Nemo: District 9 *side note, this film is actually responsible for coining the term "cinematic excrement." Thank you to Aaron Goins for that.*
2010:
Kurosawa/Leone: Inception
Finding Nemo: The Social Network
2011:
Kurosawa/Leone: Moneyball
Finding Nemo: Hugo
Now, for 2012's awards. We'll start with the winners of the two main awards and then finish out with the top 5 list.
For our Kurosawa/Leone award, in 2012 this award goes to The Dark Knight Rises. This one was actually a little closer than I expected because of how unexpectedly wonderful Django Unchained was. However, the final chapter of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy eventually won out in the end and Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy joined my own upper echelon with Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy as the greatest film trilogies in history.
For our Finding Nemo award, 2012 features the first ever co-winners for this award. We have a tie between Pixar's film Brave and the Wachowski siblings' latest effort, Cloud Atlas. Quite honestly, part of the criteria for this award is that it needs to be loved by critics and while Cloud Atlas fits my description for this award more closely than Brave does, Brave was just so unimaginably awful and disappointing that it had to be at least a co-winner for this award. Cloud Atlas is basically a 3 hour congealed mess of a film. Way yonder too many stories trying to connect and other than the actors playing multiple roles across different timelines, there is no real explanation for how these timelines connect with each other. Someone very accurately described the movie as "a story that can't be understood because it doesn't want to be understood."
To finish out this post, here is the newest addition to my awards which is a simple top 5 listing of the best movies of the year in order. In essence, this is a listing of the movies that were in the running for the Kurosawa/Leone award. We know which one is number one, but the other 4 were all given high consideration for best film this year. So I close this blog with the top 5 films of 2012 in order:
1. The Dark Knight Rises
2. Django Unchained
3. Skyfall
4. Wreck-It Ralph
5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
