Salon.com > 2012 Mid-Year Musts

2012′s bests — so far!

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0000

It's July 4, and you know what that means -- it's only about five months before all the best-of-2012 lists start.

But if you're like us, the Netflix queue is already packed, and there's that looming fear the books teetering on the nightstand will crush us in our sleep. Now that it's summer, there's finally time to catch up -- if you play it smart. After all, the big fall novels and the new TV season will be on us before we know it.

So here's your 2012 cheat sheet -- everything you need to know about the best of culture, from the big things you're tired of hearing about (seriously, just go watch "Girls" already) to the deservedly buzzed about (stuff "Gone Girl" in your beach bag now, please). And at the end, some of our critical favorites for some extra cool points.

URGENT (Watch now or you won't know what people are talking about)

2012 mid-year musts: The essentials

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0000

ESSENTIAL (As good as your cool friends say)

LISTEN Alabama Shakes, "Boys & Girls." You know that band that all your friends told you that you had to hear, and then you heard them and you told all your friends they had to hear them, and then they got famous and you were a little pissed about it? Alabama Shakes is this year's version of that band. Their critically lauded debut album, "Boys & Girls," lived up to all the hype -- a soulful, bluesy jolt of passion and smolder. Just the thing for those sultry, much too short summer nights. -- Mary Elizabeth Williams

READ "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel. Hilary Mantel's follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, "Wolf Hall," is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. As with "Wolf Hall," the central character in "Bring Up the Bodies" is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England, typically depicted as a ruthless schemer. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry and resilience. Now he's got to get rid of Anne Boleyn, the wife Henry broke with the Vatican to wed. It's a dirty job, and Mantel carries the reader into some harrowing territory, forcing us to hang onto our sympathy for Cromwell by our fingernails. It's a tour de force. -- Laura Miller

2012 mid-year musts: Worth it

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:56:00 +0000

WORTH IT (Because you can't spend all your time playing Words With Friends)

WATCH "Take This Waltz." There are so many movies, big and small, competing for your attention this summer, and I'm worried that actress-turned-filmmaker Sarah Polley's brilliant second feature, starring the terrific Michelle Williams as a young Toronto married woman drawn into a fateful flirtation, will get filed under "indie chick flick" and ignored. Let it not be so, ladies and germs! "Take This Waltz" is a frank, sexy, funny, daring comedy with tragic undertones, that pushes the female-centric relationship movie into startling new territory and establishes Polley's budding-genius credentials. Her dialogue has terrific energy and insight, and her ear for pop music -- often the downfall of indie directors, with their reliance on emo whining -- is just as good. This might be Williams' best performance, and she's matched by Seth Rogen (underplaying nicely as her cookbook-author husband) and Luke Kirby, playing the rickshaw-pulling sexy Other Guy. "Take This Waltz" is absolutely not a girly-weepy movie; it's a highly ambitious thrill ride with a protagonist you can't trust to make the right decisions and who ends up, like all of us, trapped between the real and the possible, the what-is and the what-might-have-been. -- Andrew O'Hehir

2012 mid-year musts: Yes, really

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:55:00 +0000

YES, REALLY (Because culture should be fun, take these things seriously)

LISTEN Adam Lambert, "Trespassing." Adam Lambert is one of the few pop stars with the chops to craft cohesive albums, not just indelible singles. "Trespassing" is a sleek collection encompassing retro-minded funk, slinky disco, hi-NRG techno, robo-pop and soulful ballads. More impressive is Lambert’s versatility: He’s such a talented vocalist, he can handle sensitive tunes and dance-floor jams without missing a beat. On the kaleidoscopic synth-pop surge “Broken English,” he channels a young Simon LeBon; on “Shady,” he pants, vamps and seduces over an inimitable liquid groove from Nile Rodgers. And the album’s glammy title track, which sounds like “Another One Bites the Dust” at Studio 54, more than validates his side gig as Queen’s lead singer. -- Annie Zaleski

2012 mid-year musts: Extra credit

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:54:00 +0000

EXTRA CREDIT (You'll be the cool name-dropper if you can talk about these)

WATCH "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia." There's no point in trying to sell you Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's brooding, enigmatic 150-minute masterpiece as a gripping summer entertainment. Although it borrows its form from both the police procedural and the road movie, and its title from the 1960s epics of Sergio Leone, "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" is a completely different kind of film that demands a fully awake, attentive and patient audience. Somewhere in the rural Turkish heartland, an urbane doctor goes on an all-night journey with the local prosecutor, a group of cops and a hapless murder suspect, who has already confessed to killing somebody in a stupid dispute and burying him out on the steppes. If I said that this movie took the characters and mood of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the plot of an episode of "CSI" or "Law & Order" (in extreme slow motion), but that its real subject, under the surface, was the spiritual identity crisis of modern Turkey, that might get us somewhere. But to explain why I think this might be the one truly great film released so far in 2012, I'd have to refer to the wordless beauty of Gökhan Tiryaki's wide-screen cinematography, and to the impossibly fine line Ceylan walks between realism and mysticism. (Now available on DVD and Blu-ray.) -- Andrew O'Hehir