Do I Want To Watch This?

Awards season is quickly approaching, and my 2012 "to watch" list is growing by the day as the potential contenders have started making cranking up their campaigns. Documentaries, for instance, rarely get much buzz until this time of year, and now I'm looking forward to tracking down titles like "The House I Live In" and "Searching for Sugar Man." However, every year there are at least a dozen films that are clearly jockeying to be contenders, but it's hard to tell if they're actually worth my time. These are the movies that I wouldn't be watching if they weren't in the awards conversation, and that tend to require a little more effort to find because they aren't high profile enough to pop up on an in-flight channel in three or four months. Last year, for instance, I was mildly curious about Angelina Jolie's "In the Land of Blood and Honey," which got decent reviews. However, I just wasn't all that interested in watching a melodramatic romance set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war, and there was no one raving about it or much discussion at all, really, so I skipped the film entirely. If time and resources weren't an issue I'd watch everything, but they always are.

So what's at the far end of the queue this year?

The Paperboy - Lee Daniels won raves for "Precious," and now he's followed it up with a Southern fried detective story, starring Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, and Nicole Kidman. You may know it as the film with the notorious urination scene I have not sought out the details of. What's interesting about this one is how divisive it has been among the major critics. Ordinarily that would be a huge plus, but "sleazy" and "trashy" keep coming up as descriptors in the negative reviews, which suggests that Daniels may have gone a little too far. Maybe I'll skip this for now and circle back after seeing how Daniels handles his upcoming prestige piece, "The Butler" next year.

Bully - Despite all the controversy and uproar over the film when it was released last spring, nobody has been talking much about "Bully" since. I've slowly been getting less enamored with the subgenre of very issue-centric, hand-wringing documentaries over the years, especially after the spate of films we had illustrating the ills of the American education system, so I'm not particularly keen on sitting through a documentary focused on this subject matter. I also have no reason to believe "Bully" is a very good film in the first place, since the reviews have been very mixed, and there's been a lot of criticism of the approach that the filmmakers took with their young subjects.

Compliance - Based on actual events, "Compliance" dramatizes an incident where a young woman was detained and sexually abused by her superiors at a fast food restaurant on the orders of a prank caller posing as a policeman. I'm familiar with the story, having seen the various news reports and read the articles detailing what happened. So now do I want to watch an indie thriller based on this? The film has been very well received, and I can certainly believe that a good film could be made about the disturbing events, but I don't know if I'm comfortable seeing those events up close. I put those feelings aside for Michael Haneke and Gasper Noe, but should I for this one?

The Impossible - There's been some criticism of the new Juan Antonio Bayona film already for focusing on a Caucasian family's experience during the South Asian 2004 tsunami disaster. In fact, the cast list reveals a disturbing lack of Asian actors overall. That does raise my hackles a bit, but really, I have doubts about the film because the trailers make it look so trite and cliché. Separated family members struggling to reunite in against enormous odds? This is a live action Don Bluth film. Still, it does star Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, who I am generally willing to watch in anything. I think I'll stay on the fence about this one for a while longer.

Antiviral - And finally, something that isn't even remotely an awards contender. Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg, has directed his first film. It's about a subculture where fans willing to pay to be infected with illnesses harvested from their favorite stars. It's a horror film, specifically a body horror film, where alteration to the state of the human body is the source of the horror. It's a genre I don't usually enjoy outside of the work of, well, David Cronenberg. I've been reading the "Antiviral" festival reviews for months, but I can't tell what the gore to-psychological-horror ratio is, and if braving the cringe-inducing subject matter is going to leave me properly horrified or just grossed out.
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