Taking On 2012: Top Films (Q2 Quarterly Review)

It's fairly easy to be critical of 2012 as a year in film thus far, I was earlier this year, mostly because many of the more exciting releases are so insanely back loaded that it seems like nothing has come out. And you know what? That's partially correct, but not entirely true. Sure in order to round out a complete list (mostly because so many foreign films I want to see haven't gotten releases in my neck of the woods yet) I needed to stretch some dates, but the end result I find to be fairly strong. Equally worthy of standing alongside the great year for songs and albums, at the very least.

Perhaps the most surprising development for 2012 in relation to the last few years is the presence of engaging comedies. There have been bad ones that were supposedly great while others that had every right to be terrible were surprisingly funny. It's been a long time since Superbad or Scott Pilgrim, and even if I've seen all the great comedy movies of the year (unlikely since Judd Apatow is holding off his latest for Christmas day) 2012 has been stronger than most years in recent memory. Yeah that's at the expense of drama, but the greats are yet to come.

So what did make the cut? Let us find out.

Every Superhero Need His Theme Music

Marvel's The Avengers (Whedon, 2012)

Only once have I attempted writing an extended fiction piece. It was a silly story that I hardly remember, but it was kind of playing on the idea of all the small events in a town that built toward some larger story in a Winesburg, Ohio kind of way. I kept losing track of the connections and eventually gave up, so when thinking about how Joss Whedon's Marvel's The Avengers attempts to fit together so many individual parts I can't help but be impressed by how much of it feels seamless. Sure there have been minor film crossovers, most notably Tony Stark showing up for a brief appearance in The Incredible Hulk or Nick Fury basically having his hands in every franchise film at some point. But often when all the pieces are assembled the result can easily feel inauthentic. For the most part Whedon's blockbuster gives all the heroes enough of a reason to join forces aside from the obvious "we would like to make money" mantra of Hollywood popcorn movies. All of the character groundwork has been, theoretically, set up, and Marvel's The Avengers is able to act like a grand sequel, but the thing about sequels is that many of them feel redundant, so how exactly does Whedon navigate this problem?

I Am Just Different

X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)

By and large, I think of the first X-Men film to be one of the paramount movies to usher in the recent comic book movie craze, and I have actually enjoyed all of the X-Men films I have seen up to this point. Sure I skipped out on what looked to be an abysmal spin off entry with the recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but with a cast that bolsters Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy, and Jennifer Lawrence, a script from Bryan Singer, and at least an experienced hand orchestrating everything in Matthew Vaughn I was excited to go back in time and really see the characters who set this universe in action. But, given my adverse reaction to Vaughn's previous film, Kick-Ass, I entered with tempered expectations, hoping for more, but expecting little outside of another run of the mill origin story.