Tis the season for egg nog, friends, good conversations, video games, and top ten lists. So we put all of it into one post. Ghosts of SWJ past and future get together in this first episode of season two to give us their top tens from 2012. But first a few friends drop by for a drink and to talk about creativity in today’s climate.

Check out Bryan’s sites:
Bryanbruner.com
Loveandrobots.tumblr.com

Eric’s Film:
American Bomber Movie

Happy Holidays!
John

Top 10 of 2012:

Frank Mosley

1. The Comedy
2. Compliance
3. The Master
4. Killing Them Softly
5. Bad Fever (does this count for 2012? It counted for THE NEW YORKER’s list, so there.)
5. Two Gates of Sleep
6. Margaret (again, does this count for 2012?)
7. Looper
8. Magic Mike
9. Once Upon A Time in Anatolia
10. Silver Linings Playbook
And The Turin Horse is still lodged into my brain so much that i thought it HAD come out in 2012.  I was half-tempted to put it on the list anyway.
Still want to see Life of Pi, Hitchcock, and Haneke’s Amour.
Honorable mentions go to Skyfall and the glorious re-release of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.

Adam Schartoff

1. How to Survive a Plague
2. Detropia
3. Only The Young
4. The Comedy
5. The Waiting Room
6. Searching for Sugar Man
7. First Cousin Once Removed
8. Compliance
9. Francine
10. Richard’s Wedding

Donal Foreman

1. Tell Me Lies (A Film About London) (Peter Brook, 1968 – restored and re-released as part of MOMA’s To Save and Project festival)
2. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)
3. The Comedy  (Rick Alverson, 2012)
4. The online critical journal La Furia Umana (www.lafuriaumana.it)
5. Open Five 2 (Kentucker Audley, 2012) – available to view here.
6. No Budge Films (www.nobudgefilms.com)
7. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
8. The  Youtube accounts of bidsprinkhaanII, whateverhte, Rick Petaccio and KurtWalkur, among others
9. “Anatomy and Destiny: Sex in the Future / Sex in the Past”, a media-performance talk by Tom McCormack at Spectacle Theatre
10. Serge Daney: Itinéraire d’un “Ciné-fils” (Pierre-André Boutang & Dominique Rabourdin, 1992) – available to view here.

Marty Lang

Okay, my top 10 of 2012 (in no particular order)

Argo – Hit every emotional button. Strong, fearless filmmaking. And Bryan Cranston was wonderful.
Looper – Brick was no fluke. JGL and Rian Johnson do it again, with a sterling script and great makeup work.
Lincoln – Daniel Day-Lewis does it again. And James Spader was amazing. Stole every scene he was in.
Silver Linings Playbook – Bradley Cooper reaches another level, and De Niro should prep for a Supporting Actor Oscar nod.
Beasts of the Southern Wild – A low-budget epic, huge in scope and emotion. Welcome Quvenzhané Wallis to the big time.
The Sessions – John Hawkes is amazing in this most unlikely of sexual tales.
The Grey – Joe Carnahan should never do A-Team films again. This shows his immense talent. And Liam Neeson doesn’t hurt.
The Cabin in the Woods – The best horror deconstruction I’ve seen in a long time. And Sigourney Weaver was in it.
The Master – Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are the best one-two punch this year.
Life of Pi – Ang Lee puts forth a visual feast. The best looking movie of the year.

Rodrigo Lopresti

1. Rust and Bone
2. The Master
3. White Elephant
4. Amour
5. Sound of my Voice
6. The Sessions
7. Killing Them Softly
8. A Late Quartet
9. The Kid With a Bike
10. Dark Horse

Jarred Alterman

I’m not sure how you will post this, but its important this statement sits above my list:

Top Ten is bullshit in the arts. I gave up playing little league baseball for a VHS camera many moons ago. This list is also in no particular order. These films just connected with me in 2012 (who knows if I’ll even like them in 2013) Some are re-issues, thought to be lost forever, but resurfaced on the festival circuit.

1. Holy Motors
2. The Belovs
3. The Connection
4. Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry
5. Marina Abramovi: The Artist is Present
6. Tchoupitoulas
7. The Master
8. Family Nightmare
9. Gerhard Richter Painting
10. Detropia

Lauren Wolkstein

So instead of talking about the new films that I saw this year, I wanted to discuss the new and old discoveries I revisited this year from my favorite Polish filmmakers. My top ten of the year were Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique, Blue, White, and Red, every single Zulawski film and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End. You could say that I spent this year getting closer to my Polish roots in cinema.

Does this count?

“Shooting with John”, now in it’s second season, is a column and web-series by the folks who brought you “The Microbudget Conversation.” Please feel free to contact us with ideas, suggestions, and possible guests:
john@fifthcolumnfeatures.com