Slowly Going Bald

Because we at Pajiba decided we didn't have quite enough to do, we've launched another series, this one aimed at examining what could best described as modern classics. The whole definition is pretty nebulous, but it's basically carte blanche to write about the high-profile, great movies of the past 15 years or so. The series began with American Psycho, and today I write about L.A. Confidential, which gets better every year.

Click here for the review.

me: at the end of Shawshank, the warden slams down the paper when he sees it's a story about his illegal deeds. but wouldn't the paper have had to contact him for a quote before running the story?
Sis: haha
yes and no
if they're wanting to break a story, they might just run it
me: true, but they can be reasonably assured it's an exclusive, given that they're probably the only ones who received a package containing the prison's ledger, not to mention this is way before online/instant news
it seems like it would only be responsible to contact the warden before going to press
maybe that would have changed everything
maybe the warden would've run off or plead out instead of killing himself
and now the paper's editor has the warden's death on his conscience
Sis: yeah, he might have been a flight risk
me: oh totally
bail would be super high at the arraignment
assuming they caught him

• Further thought: Andy created the fictional Randall Stevens as a way to launder the warden's money and act as a kind of nexus for all the illegal goings-on at Shawshank. Andy even says that if anyone wanted to trace the cash, it wouldn't lead to the warden, but to the nonexistent Stevens. But once Andy escapes, he temporarily assumes the Stevens identity to make a series of withdrawals at local banks before splitting for Mexico. Now that the local news and law enforcement officials are pursuing the missing Andy Dufresne and investigating the warden's life, isn't it reasonable to assume they're going to discover the Stevens alias and eventually track Andy to Mexico? I'm not saying this is a given; it just seems like Andy would want to stay on his toes.

This is our second Classics Week over at Pajiba, and I've got a piece about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which remains a pretty damn good movie.

Click here for the review.

And while you're at it, enjoy a classic scene:

Over at Pajiba, we posted our Second Annual (Sh)It List, wherein we take a moment to vent about cultural items or moments that drive us nuts. Some choice excerpts:

• There was no misogyny in Knocked Up or Superbad. Yet, in the Superbad comment section alone, "misogyny" or one of its derivations was used 26 times — for a movie about a couple of high school kids trying to get laid! … If I was guilty of misogyny every time I wanted to have sex at that age, I’d have been executed for war crimes by now. If you want to make the case that the female roles in movies of their ilk are underdeveloped or based on stereotypes, by all means, do so — I’d probably agree with you. For a readership that prides itself on its diction and grammar and understanding of sociological issues, many Pajiba readers fail to understand the significance of the term "misogyny," and it annoys the hell out of me. I don’t deny that misogyny exists in our world; in fact, I agree that it exists on a large scale. But we devalue the importance of the real issues when we misapply words like this. Is it too much to ask that we use words that suit the subject, instead of tossing out knee-jerk reactions? — TK

• (Motion capture) is also called Performance Capture. Or, to keep things brief, Puke. You may have seen it in The Polar Express and Beowulf. I didn’t. I ignored both those movies, so you may wonder why I feel qualified to write about this. It’s because the previews alone offered enough to know that this technology represents everything that’s wrong with movies, culture, nerds, and "progress." — John Williams

• Plus, I swear more in one paragraph than in anything else I've ever committed to the screen.

Go read it.

Our year-end roundtable concludes today at Pajiba.

Also: I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE.

Our first-ever year-end roundtable starts today at Pajiba. We only scratch the surface of what was a really good year for movies — there hasn't been one this packed since I was 17 — but it's still worth a read.

I don't often get excited about trailers, and I certainly don't greet them with the fervor I did when I was younger. But the latest trailer for The Dark Knight is just unrelentingly awesome. I saw I Am Legend (great premise, terrible third act) over the weekend, and I attended an Imax screening just so I could watch a terrific sequence involving the Joker's henchmen committing a bank robbery. Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins was one of the best superhero films ever made, and The Dark Knight looks to follow in its footsteps. It's not even opening until July 18 of next year, but what can I say: I'm already looking forward to it.

• So, at the end of Rent, Tom Collins shows back up with a wad of cash at Mark and Roger's apartment. Understandably curious, they ask him where he got the money. Tom replies that he rewired the ATM at the Food Emporium with what's apparently some kind of override code, so all you have to do is enter "A-N-G-E-L" as the password and out comes the money. But hold on, man: Are you seriously advocating that? What about the residents of Alphabet City who don't give a shit about your life, and whose money you seem to be okay with stealing; what about them? I mean, yeah, it sucks that Angel died on you like that, but still. If I were your neighbor, and I found out that you were ripping off my cash just because you think you're broke enough to deserve it, I would beat you down. And I know I'd win, too.

• Also, seriously, in what alternate world can Anthony Rapp pass as straight? At the beginning of the movie, he says he just broke up with Maureen, which made me pause and think, "That's odd. Maureen sounds like a woman's name." I mean, come on. It's Anthony Rapp. Good actor, good singer. Very gay. Am I the only one who felt the cognitive dissonance?

• Easily the most enjoyably random thing about Rent was the appearance of Aaron Lohr — of "Newsies" and "The Mighty Ducks" — as one of the AIDS support group members. When he stood up and started singing "Will I lose my dignity ..." I wondered if he would whip out a hockey stick and start checking the counselor.

Ryan: sarah and i saw The Kingdom last night at the $1 theater
me: poor blown-up kyle chandler
"i think we got most of it contained—" kaBLAM
second blast
Ryan: i guess he didn't get the newspaper early for that one

Sometimes I don't quite know what to say to people when they ask where I went to school. No one has ever really heard of Abilene, Texas, much less Abilene Christian University, and explaining the ideological background in which I was raised — as well as how that changed, and how I evolved to the point where I was really kind of frustrated and heartbroken at the way the school and its students sometimes handled themselves — always takes too much time. (I will never even attempt to explain Sing Song.) That's not to say I was ever particularly ashamed of my degree; I earned a B.S. in journalism from some respectable instructors, and my two years on the staff of the campus paper were solid ones, considering we only published twice weekly and came from a Division II school.

So it's only out of deference to the teachers whose work helped me gain the skills to find a good job, and to some fading memory of the good time I had there, that I'm holding back from ripping the campus newspaper to rightful shreds. (I have a feeling I will not be able to do keep my word, though.) I'm trying to be understanding, I really am. I haven't even kept up with the campus paper since I was a recent graduate. But an editorial published in their increasingly shallow pages the other day has stirred up the feelings of bitter disappointment I felt by the time I'd reached the end of my days at ACU.

The editorial ran under the headline, "Golden Compass not so golden for Christians."

...I should probably take a moment to explain briefly the paper's mindset. It's a campus paper published at a private Christian university in Texas, which means most editorials (and a terrifying number of news stories) are going to necessarily seek out the God angle. The paper is even called The Optimist, and among the regular letters we received in my time were queries as to why we didn't publish more upbeat stories and "live up to our name." To be clear: We were often asked by unhinged alumni and current students to slant the news in a happy way. As the Arts Editor, I often received angry letters from alumni whenever I gave positive reviews to R-rated films. One such man, writing in the Lucado-esque doublespeak that passes for spiritual depth among some believers, told me that ACU had "broken covenant" with him by allowing me to write positive reviews of films that "do not measure up to Christian standards." Can you understand now, to some small degree, what that place is like? It's as if the institution and its alumni are practically daring you to drop your chosen major of journalism and pick something like youth and family ministry (which from a real-world marketplace standard has to be even more useless than a generic speech/communications degree). There are some genuine, earnest, progressive believers at the school, but they are always shouted down by the spiteful and controlling.

Anyway.

The editorial board at the Optimist, once a topic is decided upon, farms out the writing to one of the students on the board. This also often overlaps with the Opinion Writing class, whose members spend the semester under the firm guidance of a professor who takes particular delight in excising the passive voice from your columns until you go blind at all the red ink he's spilled on your page. (The final exam was just to write another column, but the professor would dock you a letter grade for each instance of passive voice. Yeah.) So it's not like I don't understand or remember what it was like to feel pressured and stressed and up against the wall to get a column out on deadline. But the editorial in question must've been written by a student so hard up for ideas and so clearly resigned to turning in a below-average piece that they felt there was naturally nothing else to do but write a lazy, inflammatory, and downright irresponsible column.

The editorial, which can be read in its pathetic entirety by clicking here, starts out with a slanted lede: "Controversy continues to swirl around the movie The Golden Compass, due in theaters Dec. 7." Wait a minute. You can't just throw that out there. Is the controversy because of the books' inherent religious stance, whatever that might be? It's foolish to think that (a) the reader knows all about these supposed controversies, or that (b) you don't have to back this up with evidence. Obviously, an editorial is going to take a side, but is it necessary to start out so declamatory? I really am curious.

The editorial states that the film's plot comes from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Actually, I'm wrong; it simply names the series without crediting the author. This isn't just shoddy reporting, but almost criminally stupid in an editorial that's apparently (given the headline) going to build some kind of case against the movie based on the books. Why is the author not mentioned? What did the author have to say about the film adaptation of his works, or the way controversy is apparently continuing to swirl? Does no one have a Lexis-Nexis account? Could no one be bothered to look this up? The film is also directed by Chris Weitz, but New Line removed him for a while and replaced him with Anand Tucker, only to eventually boot Tucker and bring Weitz back on board. Does this have anything to do with the delicate task of transferring the books' religious views (again, whatever those actually are) into a four-quadrant tentpole that's supposed to start a new film franchise?

Reading on, it's apparent that the author only has one source for the editorial: An article about the film published on MTV.com that revolves around the angry protests of Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, and his attacks on the movie. (Actually, the editorial spells it "Bill Donahue," but I'm going to assume they mean Donohue.) Donohue is the only source quoted in the editorial. Again, I know that editorials are meant to build an argument and take a stand, but wouldn't it make more sense to include both points of view before presenting the paper's opinion? Even if that opinion opposes Donohue, it still looks terribly weak to only have his words as a source.

Another major problem with the editorial is its insidious use of "many," "more," and "controversy" when talking about movies that apparently generated protests from Christians over their religious content. Take this sentence: "Christians worldwide continue to protest the release of the movie because of its atheistic views." Really? Christians worldwide? Where? Who? When? They surely weren't protesting at any movie theaters; the film bows Dec. 7, and this editorial ran on Nov. 7. Where are all these protesting Christians? Are they sending angry letters or emails? If so, are they organized or acting on their own? Are the protests physical? Have their protests been reported somewhere? If so, where, and what were the details of the protest? If not, why write the sentence? It's as if the author had no idea how hazardous and just plain stupid it is to invent facts. Later on, the author writes, "Many other movies, including The Da Vinci Code, have caused controversy in the Christian sphere and led Christian groups to boycott the movies." Again, you can't just say this stuff and refuse to back it up. The Da Vinci Code wasn't that long ago; who protested it, if any, and why? Where were the alleged protests? Did they accomplish anything?

The editorial then drops any pretense of effort or respectability and loses all energy, sputtering to a nonsensical ending by quoting John Milton in what's both a clear attempt to fulfill the number of sources required by the Opinion Writing professor and another sign of lazy research: The quote about truth and falsehood grappling in the marketplace of ideas from Milton's Areopagitica is emblazoned in the Comm Law syllabus and bandied about often in that class. The quote was staring the author in the face, and they used it, regardless of its inaccuracy. Read and weep:

The Optimist believes that while the concerns of the Christian groups have validity, trying to stop the movie's release cripples the marketplace of ideas.

John Milton wrote in Areopagitica that when truth and falsehood grapple, truth eventually wins.

If Christians believe in their religion and its truthfulness, they shouldn't feel threatened by ideas that counteract their beliefs.

Truth will win in the end, and by disproving differing opinions, that truth of Christianity remains stronger.

Even the Opinion Writing professor thinks that part of the column is weak. (I have no idea how he stetted the rest of the piece; he's clearly grown more forgiving since I took his course.) He wrote a letter to the editor of the school's paper stating that he found the author's invocation of the marketplace of ideas "illogical. The marketplace of ideas comes down on the side of releasing the movie and permits people to oppose the release of the movie. The ideas are grappling in the marketplace. No one is going to stop the film. And no one is going to stop people from trying to stop the film. That's the way the marketplace of ideas (works)." He even calls out the author by relaying the excuse they gave when they refused to do rewrites: "We've all looked over it and think it's okay. I don't have time to fix it because I have an obligation to the Reporter-News in 45 minutes." The author, apparently eager to take their poor work ethic and sloppy journalistic habits and infect an actual newspaper, didn't think it was worth it to take the time and fix just one of the many glaring errors in the editorial. I can't say that bodes well for my alma mater.

While I personally disagree with the editorial — I think any Christian who gets really upset at The Golden Compass should probably spend more time worrying about widows and orphans and clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, and less time panicking about the non-apocalypse — my main beefs here are with the awful structure and embarrassing lack of insight. The piece pays lip service to a kind of calm strength Christians should take in their faith while also loudly doing everything it can to reinforce a cultural divide between the conservative Christians and the big spooky evil that is Hollywood. The entire editorial is lazy and uncaring, and that makes it dangerous.

This is why it takes so long to tell people where I went to school. When I do, they'll assume that I'm a Christian and that I'm proud of where I came from. They're only half right.

• Into the Wild is a good film, and a moving one, but in some pretty head-scratching ways.

• I guess it's appropriate that I find myself not quite willing to go along with the emotional premise of an Emile Hirsch movie; my issues with The Girl Next Door have already been documented. Specifically, Into the Wild is a moving film in that it hits the right notes and I allowed myself to be moved a certain degree. But I couldn't commit completely.

• Sean Penn is unquestionably a good director, and he's made a good film, despite weighing it down with awful narration. But by the end of the film, he's shifted from making a film about a boy striking out to find his own way in life to making a tone poem about what it would be like to make a film about that boy. In short, he shifts from storytelling to thinking about storytelling, and as a result, Into the Wild begins as a story about Christopher McCandless (Hirsch) and ends as a movie about Penn's struggle to tell a story about McCandless.

• But my bigger problem has to do with Penn's willingness to celebrate McCandless as some kind of visionary and almost deify a kid who ran off and died for no reason. I was sad but understanding when McCandless' parents turned out to be your typical suburban WASPy assholes. Sure, yes, burn that bridge, walk away. But McCandless clearly loved his sister, and she loved him, and Penn never even took a stab at figuring out why McCandless was moved to sever one of the few ties that could have held him to society. I don't even remember Penn even getting close to implying that no conclusion could be drawn in that area; it just kinda dropped.

• Likewise, I was sad that what in the film was McCandless' soul-altering epiphany — that happiness is only meaningful when it's shared — was something he didn't figure out until he was dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness. I probably knew that idea to be true in essence in high school, and in college I lived through a few things (like everyone does in college) that made me powerfully aware of just how true that idea is. But I didn't have to kill myself in Alaska to realize that, well, friends make life meaningful. This is something most people — popular, lonely, whatever — figure out on their own at some point, and I don't consider McCandless some kind of deified free spirit simply because he got really fit and lived off venison and cried when he realized how much he'd missed out on life. I hurt for him, yes. I wish he'd never come to that end. But I ultimately can't celebrate a film that seems to worship a boy for making such a cataclysmic mistake, the kind that cost him his life, especially when his existential breakthrough is something everyone else accepts much earlier, and easier. McCandless was a lost boy, but in none of the ways Penn showed.

I wrote a blurb for the Willamette Week, available by clicking here, about the recently released Blade Runner: The Final Cut. On the off chance that the link bugs out on you after the screening listings are no longer timely, I've reproduced the whole thing below.

One quick funny story, though: Sitting behind me at the theater were a man and his son, who couldn't have been older than 9 or 10. This immediately struck me as shoddy parenting, since Blade Runner features the kind of (literally) skull-crushing violence you shouldn't let a kid see, and even if he looked away, there's not a chance in hell he'd be willing/able to keep up with the plot. The kid actually made it through almost the entire movie, too. But in the final sequence, when Batty and Deckard face off in the abandoned apartment complex, Batty drives a nail through his own palm to keep himself alive and invigorated, at which point the kid just totally lost it, bursting forth in choking sobs at the nightmarish vision before him. His dad calmed him down with a soothing, "It's okay, we'll go, we'll go," at which point they stood and exited as discreetly as is possible in a packed theater on the Westside. Poor kid. Hope he sleeps well.

My brief review, below the line:

• I hope to start at least a few good conversations with this Guide, despite the fact that these features more and more seem to be drawing crazy people like flies. Big, crazy flies. But as my sister said, "I like this Guide idea. It's very Pajiba-esque. Forget this Comment Diversion crap. Let's talk about movies." Word.

• My sister also said, regarding Sandra Bullock's hug-out-the-racism character in Crash, who falls down a flight of stairs and learns to love: "I'm glad her character took the STEPS toward not being racist." When The Sis is on, she's on.

• This is maybe the greatest thing I have ever seen on YouTube:

The co-writers of 3:10 to Yuma were pretty great to oblige me with an e-mail interview. For those who haven't seen the movie yet, it's a solid, enjoyable Western.

Click here for the interview.

The upcoming comedy Good Luck Chuck is about Chuck (Dane Cook), a guy who's seemingly cursed in relationships because every time he sleeps with a woman, she winds up leaving him for the man she's meant to marry. That's how he got his nickname: Good Luck Chuck. The title is not a statement or wish of well-being — that would be Good Luck, Chuck. But there's no comma, because the title isn't a phrase, it's the character's handle. It's important to lay all that up front because (a) I am indisputably right about this and (b) Lionsgate is apparently abandoning the film's premise for the latest round of TV trailers, despite already having aired and screened teasers that more accurately reflect the film's story.

Here's the original trailer:

Cook appears to be playing a slightly toned-down version of the hyperkinetic stage persona he's crafted over the years, which is a welcome change. But he's playing a pretty sleazy-looking womanizer, working his stubble and oddly spiked hair to his advantage while bedding a succession of women who simply want to screw him so they can move on and find their true loves. That's the basis of the conflict: Chuck meets Cam (Jessica Alba), but is afraid that when he sleeps with her, she'll leave him. Chuck's willpower being about as low as you'd expect from a lanky white man who's been propositioned by Jessica Alba, Chuck sets out to "test" the curse, leading to what will inevitably be an embarrassing scene for the woman who was cast to play the fat obstacle Chuck must literally hurdle. The film looks to be a dull, predictable sex comedy.

But the latest round of teasers jettison this story — which, I should probably reiterate, is the film's actual story — in favor of a new plot in which Chuck falls in love with Cam but is put through his paces when she turns out to be a bit of a klutz, whose pratfalls and accidents usually wind up hurting Chuck as much as herself. Observe the recut teaser:

It's not that the new trailer is meant to alter or redirect the film's sexuality: Although the original version deals more plainly with Chuck's quest to get laid and the eventual snag he hits when he discovers he actually has a heart, both teasers are unabashed fans of Jessica Alba's body. But the second teaser softens Chuck up significantly, turning him from a scheming (if ultimately harmless) lothario into a hapless victim of his girlfriend's pratfalls and mishaps. The new version is meant to sell the film as a more palatable, mainstream romantic comedy, something Ben Stiller would make, and move away from the more crass story presented in the original trailer. Chuck is no longer daring himself to sleep with a morbidly obese woman, who's stuffing her face with food the way absolutely no one does, or obsessing over the girl he wants to screw but can't. Now he's just some goofball who has to survive his girlfriend's klutziness.

But, as I said above, that's not the movie. People will see this new teaser and buy into the concept it's selling, only instead of the braindead comedy they expected, they'll receive a crueler movie that has used fellatio and handjob-referencing images to make itself known. And the problem, obviously, isn't that the movie contains sex, or even used sex to sell itself (however disgustingly); it's that Lionsgate is now pretending that a newer, kinder trailer can somehow give them a completely new movie. But maybe I'm overthinking this whole thing. As Alba's character says in the original trailer, "People will believe whatever they want to believe." Maybe the trailers aren't selling two conflicting movies, just different versions of the same idea of a movie, in this case, an R-rated sex comedy starring a dopey comedian and a blandly attractive model. If the target audience doesn't care what kind of movie they're getting, why should they care if the whole thing's a lie?

Over at Pajiba, I've got a brief summer wrap-up.

Did I include every film that was released? I did not.
Was that intentional? Yes, it was.

It's just a brief summer recap, people. I talked about a few of the good movies, tried to touch on some of their similar themes, and included a few boxoffice numbers. That's really all I set out to do, and I'm fine with the way it turned out.

[Wherein I recount, for no reason other than sheer boredom and public self-flagellation, the women who provided me with the first clues to the terrible burden of malehood that would one day come to run my life.]

As a boy, I found myself under the sway of subtle hints and longings that were vague harbingers of the terrible change to come. But while I started to really lose my head to hormones around age 11-12, I realize that as a boy I was still somehow fascinated with women, even though I had absolutely no idea what to do with them or why I cared so much. With that confusion in mind, this ongoing list will look at the images that stirred in my youthful chest the rumblings of a manhood that was still a long ways off (and should be here any minute, I assume).

The cover of Career Opportunities
I remember seeing this box on video store shelves and feeling a kind of sweet apoplexy at the sight of Jennifer Connelly. The film came out in 1991, the same year The Rocketeer was released. (1991 was a pretty big year for Jennifer Connelly invading my brain.) I didn't even know that the guy on the Career Opportunities was Frank Whaley, just that I wanted to be Frank Whaley. Boyhood is a weird and confusing time, mainly because everyone keeps telling you that you have it easy, when really your head is full of gauze and you're wary of just what exactly a woman is or what she can do to you. I loved it the way boys love anything, which is to say I was enamored of its curves and awed by its power. Jennifer Connelly would go on to more scandalous roles as her career developed, almost as if some terrible cosmic force was making sure the relative depravity of her roles increased as I aged, so that I went from thinking she was pretty and alluring when I was 9 to seeing things like Mulholland Falls and Requiem for a Dream in high school and wondering what the hell had happened to the babe in the white dress who was saved by the guy in the jetpack. But Career Opportunities will always be how I remember Jennifer Connelly. This video box cover was the perfect image for a 9-year-old boy: Vaguely sexual, but ultimately clean and harmless.

• So, at the end of You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks seems to have a pretty good time engineering his eventual coming together with Meg Ryan, since he knows she's the one he's been emailing and IMing all this time. She, however, doesn't know he's the one she's been communicating with, making the whole thing a little weird and one-sided. In the final scene, she's supposed to meet her online mystery man, only here comes Hanks, and birds are singing, and roses are blooming, and blah blah blah. She gets a little misty and says, "I wanted it to be you." This presents a few problems: (1) She's apparently OK with moving on from the online guy, who she still thinks is someone else, which makes me feel sorry for him, even though he's Hanks, and Hanks just cuckolded a digital version of himself. (2) Hanks will eventually have to come clean about his manipulation, right? Like, 15 minutes later, once the credits have already rolled, they'll probably be tired of sharing an awkward closed-mouth kiss in the middle of the park and decide to talk, and she'll say how glad she is to be in love with him but how bad she feels about screwing over the online guy, at which point Hanks will pretty much have to admit that he's known for a while now that they were communicating online, after which she'll feel violated and weirded out, and a little put off that this amazing man wasn't above rigging the game a little (which is a smart move, but risky, since it would eventually lead to the park bench DTR). I'm just saying, it's a sweet movie, and the end isn't half bad, but there's a fight just around the corner.

• Returning briefly to Back to the Future: Part III, why the hell are Marty and the Doc so scared when they find Doc's tombstone in 1955? He was already an older man when he was transported back to 1885; did they really expect him to never die? He'd be almost 150 years old by 1955. Come on, guys. That's stupid.

Over at Pajiba we're having ourselves a Classic Week, and today I'm taking a look at Sunset Blvd., a member of the small fraternity of good films whose titles derive from L.A. streets. (Everybody knows about Mulholland Dr.; I think someone should really make Van Nuys Blvd.: Less Exciting Than You'd Expect, and What's With All the Porn?.)

So, enjoy.

One of the things I discussed briefly in my original review of Stardust was the way that Yvaine (Claire Danes), a fallen star in the form of a woman, would begin to glow with an inner starlight whenever she experienced genuine happiness or peace. I find myself turning back to this image even now, hours after leaving the theater, because I'm convinced it's one of the film's greatest triumphs and also because I think it speaks to the benefits of telling what's typically referred to as a "genre" story, meaning anything that departs from the more accepted world of dramas, thrillers, and procedurals in favor of stories whose murky edges butt against the realm of magic or science fiction or something similar.

As Yvaine grows more in love with Tristan (Charlie Cox), she begins to glow more frequently whenever she's with him or looking at him, and the scene in which they finally confess their love builds on the preceding hour-plus of drama and rides on composer Ilan Eshkeri's orchestral power chords to create an emotionally resonant moment, the kind storytellers all shoot for, the kind that hits you sweetly in the gut. And it's when they kiss that her light burns a little brighter than it has before, in a beautiful mirror of the moment's emotional connection that's only possible within the confines of the genre in general and this story in particular. It's not that Yvaine's luminescence doesn't fit the mood, because it does, and more perfectly than anything else could. It's that such a blend of effects and fantasy is only possible in a story like this one, when the dynamics of the fictional universe dictate that Yvaine can and should light up like a pinball table whenever she gets happy. Using the effect in any other story would be considered a surreal and (to many) an off-putting touch, even though the image would likely still fit the emotion. This is the real reason why no one liked Moulin Rouge¹: They could tolerate the fact that Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman burst into song, and even the fact that those songs were well-known pop hits, but they just couldn't stomach Baz Luhrmann's willingness to coat everything in the kind of candy-colored lights and erratic use of special effects that would most accurately reflect what the characters were feeling at a particular moment. Christian can sing all the Elton John he wants to his one true love, but people weren't buying the fact that they would occasionally glow and waltz out onto the clouds.

Which is understandable, but also another reason that genre movies and TV shows, despite what might be a fairly limiting label, can get away with more than do standard dramas. What looks bizarre and off-putting in a mainstream story can really be amazing when it's put in a context that not only allows for something different to happen, but demands it.

^{1. But also one of the reasons I really liked it.}

Those of you with Facebook accounts can see more photos here.

In short: It was a huge, crazy event, and the crowds were often terrifying. And I want to go again next year.

UPDATE: There's a geek fight going on in the comment thread over at Pajiba. If this thing keeps escalating someone's gonna throw their TI-82, and then the gloves will be off.

• So, Big is the weirdest comedy about child kidnapping I've ever seen. Josh's dad is almost completely absent, despite having what appears to be a healthy marriage, mainly because the presence of another parent would complicate things and introduce all kinds of questions like: Why haven't the parents called in the police or the feds? The movie is presented from the kid's view, which makes it lighthearted, but Josh's mom must've been eaten alive nightly by the terror of what must be happening to her boy, who's been missing for months. And then at one point Josh writes a letter to his mom set to a montage of baseball and video games, as if the film wants to mock her for worrying so. Sure, granted, Josh's actions aren't completely incomprehensible. He moves into a loft, buys a soda machine, and sleeps with Elizabeth Perkins; all pretty plausible fantasties for a kid in 1988. But there's a dark side to the story that's shoved to the corner, and it always feels weird to watch the adult Josh play with toys and order pizza when his mom is at home crying her eyes out.

• Back to the Future: Part III ends with an admittedly cheesy send-off from Doc Brown that the future isn't written yet, and you can make it whatever you want, so "make it a good one." And that's all fine, I guess. But if the future isn't set, then traveling from the established present into, say, 2015 wouldn't be traveling into the actual future, merely one of the possible futures available from your particular present. So while Marty went forward in time in the second movie to save his kid's reputation, it's not merely feasible, but highly likely that something else happened in the intervening 30 years to re-ruin the life of Marty Jr. Not to mention the headaches caused by going into the past to change the present, which would theoretically give Marty two entirely different and warring sets of childhood memories, one in which he's a poor loser and the other in which his family is well-off and seems to employ Biff as a house servant/man-slave. These two completely independent lives would likely split Marty's brain apart, but instead he just hops into a pretty weak-looking truck and drives around with Jennifer instead of succumbing to the eventual psychosis brought on by one consciousness attempting to contain two separate but equally true histories. What gives?

• Judd Apatow is quickly becoming the master of making raunchy comedies that actually enforce personal responsibility and eschew the typical frat mentality that idolizes sloth in favor of a straight-laced, mature, and even moralistic lifestyle. The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a fantastic comedy because it mixed gross-out gags — e.g., Andy's peeing on himself while struggling with morning wood — with an equally blunt look at the emotional side of the story. That film was, after all, a story about a guy who waits until he's married to have sex, despite having at least two women offer themselves to him and even, one supposes, having the opportunity to sleep with Trish after revealing his sexual immaturity but before actually walking down the aisle on the side of that giant hill. And Trish's glancing shout to her daughter that "We are going back to church!" when the young girl expresses an interest in obtaining birth control can't just be an accident, can it? Not that Apatow means to shoehorn organized religion into his stories. But the invoking of a higher moral authority is at least a sign that Apatow recognizes the existence and necessity of living a life that includes accountability, and personal responsibility. That's already the second time I've used the phrase "personal responsibility," and it's likely to come up again, because Apatow's latest film, Knocked Up, is an epic paean to the upsides of taking stock of your life and deciding to, well, grow up a little. It's still a comedy, though, and every bit as graphic and hilarious and weirdly wonderful and geek-infested as The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But by shifting the subject matter from personal sexual liberation to pregnancy and child care, Apatow charts the next logical course in what could wind up being a series of films about postmodern losers and the sad and terrible and occasionally beautiful lives they find themselves living.

• Ben (Seth Rogen) is a more gregarious version of Virgin's Andy, but even more immature. He lives in a dirty house with a posse of roommates like he's still in college, and he wastes his days getting high and trying weakly to get his celebrity nudity site online. He's a slob, but he's also not without a relatively sensitive side: He's clearly flummoxed by women, as witnessed when he has an awkward meet-cute with Alison (Katherine Heigl), who walks away after he buys her a drink. He says he'll see her later, but he admits to himself he won't, then finds his buddies and says he just wants to get drunk. Andy was childlike in his innocence, a hermetically sealed and naive spirit who just may have been happy staying home and playing with his action figures. Ben, on the other hand, is aware of his loneliness, or at least his singleness, and that makes for a much darker and more realistic premise. Knocked Up is full of moments and themes like that one, where the characters butt up against an uncomfortable reality that can't be easily laughed off.

• Alison, on the other hand, is an aspiring TV producer, which is a nicely average ambition for an attractive blonde in Los Angeles. If the jobs of Apatow's men reflect their generic stations in life — tech-savvy but still somewhat aimless — then the jobs of his female characters are either plot devices or irrelevant. In Virgin, Trish worked at an eBay resale store solely for the purpose of eventually clearing out Andy's old toy collection and collecting a six-figure windfall. But Alison's job is completely beside the point, and doesn't serve to do anything except let Ryan Seacrest swear on-camera. It's a shame that Apatow didn't invest the same care in Alison's career that he did in other aspects of the script, or at least give it a purpose (I kept hoping the B-roll of Seacrest's rant would come back later, but it didn't, which was a wasted callback opportunity).

• In fact, the best female character in the film was Alison's sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann), the somewhat frigidly beautiful wife of goofy generic music exec Pete (Paul Rudd). There are several reasons for this, not least of which is that her supporting character status means Apatow doesn't have to try and saddle her with a job that has some kind of external significance. And it's only partly because Mann is Apatow's wife, and he clearly knows how to write for her in ways that emphasize her gifts of timing and delivery. It's that she's 35, and while Apatow has no problem tapping into the male mindset of any age group, he's more sure-footed when dealing with women his own age. The secondary plot that follows Pete and Debbie's rocky relationship, and charts the tangential relationships between Debbie and Alison and between Pete and Ben, was often meatier than the pregnancy story simply because it had the benefit of (probably) more accurately reflecting things Apatow knows more about. Apatow turns 40 this year, by no means an old man, but the fog of being 26 has surely faded as he's come to grips with what it means to be a father. What makes Pete and Debbie's relationship so interesting to watch is that they clearly love their kids, and have no plans to get divorced, but are also completely confused as to how they got so lost. They still love each other, but have forgotten how to like each other, and it's a welcome change to see an onscreen couple actually working through things instead of just divorcing and moving on. Pete is dumbfounded at how his problems aren't really problems at all, not on a big scale: His main complaint is that Debbie loves him so much that she wants him around all the time, and he doesn't know how to deal with that.

• It's still a hilarious movie, full of sick humor and geek love. The degree of Apatow's nerdiness becomes apparent when an editor working with Alison sees her vomit and compares it to "Jabba the Hutt dying," then does the little back-and-forth tongue thing Jabba did when Leia strangled him on the barge. It's such a fantastically specific reference it would almost be easy to overlook it, and it's a wonderful signifier that Apatow has been and will continue to be a friend to freaks and geeks. And the moral undertones don't diminish the blue humor quotient one bit; if anything, things here are even more sexually blunt than they were in Virgin. But again, the graphic sexuality usually works to embroider the characters, as in the scene when Ben and Alison try to figure out a workable position where Ben won't feel like he's crushing the baby. (On a personal note, I completely understand his fear. I mean, there's a person in there. It's like I'm invading his/her space in the worst way.)

• Still, Knocked Up flirts with the kinds of darkness that The 40-Year-Old Virgin never had to touch, which makes it a much tougher comedy at times. "I'm the guy girls f*ck over," Ben confesses to Alison at one point, and it's easy to see he isn't lying. Debbie looks at him and says to Alison, "He's overweight; where does that end?" Ben's attitude coasts past self-deprecating and stops short of a kind of self-loathing, which is infinitely sadder than Andy's wide-eyed way of just quietly going through life. And then, good grief, the film breezed through the abortion sequence with a disturbing lack of depth. There was never any doubt that Alison would keep the kid, since a movie about a one-night stand and her subsequent abortion would be much shorter and damn depressing. But the film hit a rocky patch when Apatow had to come up with a way to have Alison consider abortion as an option — she is, after all, an ostensibly secular and career-oriented woman working in the industry — but then to reject it and decide to raise the child. On the whole, the film is a little overlong, but it's hard to see just what Apatow could have done, considering he had to cram in 9 months of relationship issues and tough decisions into 2 hours. But the confrontation of abortion almost pushed the film into a paradox — mention it and it becomes a drama; avoid it and it loses its resonance — which is probably why Apatow's characters only referred to the problem as getting the pregnancy "taken care of," in the parlance of Alison's randomly cold mother (Joanna Kerns, seemingly taking a break from Lifetime movies), or a "shmashmortion," in the joking terminology of Ben's friend Jonah (Jonah Hill). Knocked Up isn't quite as tightly paced as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which was itself somewhat loose, but it takes advantage of its occasional languor to play with some heavy content. And if Apatow's willing to take the risks to explore modern life through comedy, I can forgive him a few length issues.

• Ultimately, Knocked Up is a raunchy, crass, funny, uproarious, sweet, and heartfelt look at what happens when people are forced to come to grips with the two-pronged hell that is young adult life: namely, the necessity of accepting personal responsibility for your actions, and the inability to prepare for the challenges and surprises life has in store. The major problems in the film all deal with these in some way and allow the characters to work through them: Alison's OB/GYN is out of town when she goes into labor (challenge) so she has to reconcile with the doctor she previously abandoned (acceptance); Ben's online startup fails (challenge) so he winds up getting a cubicle job (acceptance); etc. One of the film's many honest exchanges is between Ben and his dad (Harold Ramis), who looks with bemusement the pickle Ben's in while Ben pleads for help and guidance. "Just tell me what to do," Ben says; and who hasn't felt that? Who hasn't wished for someone to turn to who had the answers? But Apatow makes his point clear: Life isn't that easy. There is no set path, and certainly no guarantee of happiness, but we do it because it's what there is to do, and because buried in all the crap are occasional moments of genuine joy. Sitting in the park watching Pete's kids, Ben asks him, "Am I gonna be okay?" Pete just shrugs and says, "I don't know, man. Is anybody okay?" But later, as Ben and Alison are driving their daughter home from the hospital and the strains of Loudon Wainwright bounce with the sun off the Pacific, Apatow almost offers an answer.

If I had a penny for everything I liked about Waitress, I would have many pennies.

For starters, the film is the first romantic comedy I've seen in a long, long, long time that didn't feel as if it inhabited that godawful stereotype known as "romantic comedy." You know the ones I'm talking about: Reese/J.-Lo/somebody falls for Matthew/Josh/Matthew again in a sappy, phony, abrasively manipulative piece of tripe that's a trial to watch. These films are ostensibly aimed at women, but that's like saying The Transporter 2 is aimed at men, when really it's aimed at the lowest common denominator who have decided that the cars-go-boom id that often fuels us as a gender is something they'd like to live by every day. Hell, I like a well-done action movie as much as the next guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think that that's all there is. Same thing with typical romantic comedies: They're not actually good, but most women don't even bother defending them as good. They just watch them. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. Waitress is wonderful for many reasons, but the one that encompasses them all is its stubborn refusal to be a complacent, shallow, emotionally artificial movie. It's resonant, honest, open, and downright warm and fuzzy, and screw anyone who wants to bust my balls for saying that. Where most movies are syrupy and off-putting, Waitress is genuinely sweet and engaging.

Writer-director Adrienne Shelly imbues her heroine, Jenna (Keri Russell), with the kind of deep-rooted sadness the genre usually avoids like the plague. She's living in a small Southern town, where she works as a waitress and lives with her dull, abusive clod of a husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto), and isn't happy in the least when she turns up pregnant. Jenna isn't worried to tears over how she'll work the baby into her life with Earl; she isn't frightened of what Earl will do to her or the child; and she certainly isn't grinning blissfully at the thought of decorating a nursery in her tiny house. She's worn down by life, and it's tragic. But that's not to say the film is overly dark. Shelly balances the mood with a mild, light humor, often driven by Jenna's fellow waitresses, Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (Shelly). Shelly delights in crafting quirky dialogue that sounds almost vaguely formal, as if the characters are inhabiting quaint stereotypes of Southern people who have never actually existed. (Off the top of my head, there's the moment when diner owner Cal [Lew Temple] explains his theory of life and happiness to a distraught Jenna, ending with something like, "That's my truth, summed up for your feminine judgment." It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's still fresher than you'd expect.)

The same goes for the relationship Jenna initiates with her doctor, Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion). Rather than (a) rule out an affair from the get-go or (b) have Jenna and the good doctor wait it out until Earl is deus ex machinaed right out of the picture, Shelly has Jenna and Pomatter begin a sexual affair after a few meetings. It's heartbreaking to hear Jenna's narration, spelled out in caustic letters to the unborn baby she's already resenting, in which she relates how she gets "addicted" to actually mattering to someone, to having her words and feelings fall on the ears of a man who isn't dumb and cold. But Shelly's film is ultimately a comedy, so she only flirts with the legitimate complications that would bog down a drama: Earl has a few moments of tenderness for Jenna, which doesn't redeem him but does at least portray him as a feeling mammal. And Pomatter is married to a beautiful, wonderful, supporting woman, which is why she's on screen for a total of maybe 30 seconds; any longer and Shelly would risk having the audience oversympathize with Pomatter's wife and start to hate this handsome guy who's apparently willing to take it wherever he can get it. That's the tricky part about making a comedy where all these annoying feelings are involved, but Shelly pulls it off by keeping things somewhat light.

Look, this obviously isn't a full-on review, just a few brief thoughts about a movie I saw on my own time, for my own pleasure. But the film is so relentlessly sweet, and so damn honest about it, that I found myself more moved than I had been for a long time in the presense of a romantic comedy. Not that I was moved to extreme emotions: The humor here are solid, but not uproarious; the sadness here is deep, but not unbearable. Rather, Waitress is so honest about what it wants to do, so willing to wear its heart on its sleeve and quietly lay out a simple, kind, and emotionally true story that the effect is captivating.

As reported by pretty much everyone on the interwebs, as well as the good folks at PosterWire (who I assume will look kindly on my borrowing their images for educational purposes and duly crediting them), Emma Watson has been given a digital breast job in the Imax ads for this summer's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Take a look:

There are other minor differences between the images, including the way Watson's hair is blowing in the creepy wind, but the focus has understandably been on the fact that the art has slightly inflated her breasts. This is genuinely disturbing, and not merely because Watson is only 17. It's happened several times before.

A few brief notes about the latest Guide at Pajiba, this one a salute to action flicks:

1. Like all collaborative lists, this one ain't perfect. Sure, there are some good action films on the list, but I'd gladly trade Mr. & Mrs. Smith for Mission: Impossible. But I think I was the only one who didn't have Mr. & Mrs. Smith on his/her ballot, so it made the cut. Democracy in action, folks: First that f**ktard Bush, and now this. Ah well. Anyway, we only had room for 15 movies, so my advice to you if any of your favorites is to mention it in the comment thread.

2. I know it's kinda tautological, but an action movie is an action movie, OK? Close your eyes and think of action movies. That thing that came immediately to mind, with the explosions and the guns and bad guys getting blowed up — that's mostly what we were going for. Sure, we broadened it a little, because at Pajiba we're all about screwing with the rules, which is why we included Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is more of a classic adventure pic despite having some of the all-time great action sequences. But there aren't any Westerns on there because, well, it's a list of action movies, not Westerns. Get it? Same goes with gangster flicks, or vampire flicks. I look forward to reading the comments we get (well, not all of them, since some of you scare the tar out of me), but seriously, take a moment to think if the movie you're talking about is actually an action movie or if you just feel like bitching.

Thanks for your time.

And now: Pajiba's Guide to the Best Action Films of All Time.

First of all, Seth Rogen and Ed Helms were there, as was Jonah Hill. And I'm pretty sure I got a laugh out of Seth Rogen.

I'd seen ads for The Room around town: a billboard on Highland a while ago, and always the posters outside the Laemmle on Sunset (my default and favorite art-house theater in town). I even, I swear, saw a brief commercial for it one night on TV, but I really knew nothing about it. The friends I accompanied to the movie said that's the best way to approach the film: knowing as little as possible. And they were right.

The Room, briefly, is a film so genuinely awful that it's hilarious, and the unintentional humor is blown out exponentially when watching it in a theater full of people who've seen it before and are all shouting at the screen. The plot concerns a love triangle of sorts, and the whole thing (or most of it) unfolds in a tiny apartment dressed for Glamour Shots or straight-up porn. In fact, the first 15 minutes feel distinctly like a skin flick: The first few lines of dialogue between the male and female lead are along the lines of hi, how was your day, we need some alone time, etc., then the action fades to the bedroom. The sex scenes are laughably bizarre, with lots of long-stemmed red roses and strenous pelvic thrusting between the lead, writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau as Johnny, and Johnny's fiancee Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who was surely cast out of her willingness to do topless scenes. The sex is horribly blocked: Johnny appears to alternately be humping the mattress, Lisa's hip, and her upper chest. And this happens several times.

But the joy of seeing The Room in a theater full of fans is getting caught up in the constant yelling at the screen. The audience chatter is ceaseless and falls into one of two categories: traditional jokes they people yell at certain scenes in every viewing, and the kind of spontaneous free-form riffing that's born on the spot. (It's like watching Rocky Horror, if Rocky Horror weren't like 19 hours long and kinda boring and worshipped by some fairly unstable people.) One of the traditional jokes involves shouting "Because you're a woman!" at the screen when Lisa's mom tells Lisa that she's incapable of supporting herself; another involves throwing spoons at the screen whenever a framed picture of a spoon appears on the table near the couch. Observe both:

Here's another clip featuring Wiseau. You may think the audio is out of sync because it's a YouTube clip, but you'd be mistaken. The ADR really is that bad on almost all of Wiseau's dialogue, which just makes is indeterminately European accent that much more entertaining:

The film's dramatic thrust, such as it is, comes from the triangle formed between Johnny, Lisa, and the bearded man in the previous clip. But that probably makes it sound like the film has an actual cohesive narrative flow, which is definitely not the case. For instance:

• Characters appear out of nowhere, never to be named, only to disappear later;

• The basic rules of lighting, camera work, focus, etc., are willfully ignored;

• Cutaway footage of the city at night is interspersed with a party scene, unintentionally conveying the passage of time and making the party appear to take place over something like six nights;

• Again, much humping of chests and hips.

And through it all, the constant yelling and laughing, even though the theater I saw it in was, sadly, only about three-fourths full. There was some brief speculation among people near me as to whether the experience would be different because Rogen and Helms were in the audience, since what would have just been a collection of bored semi-hipsters was now like some weird performance in front of some legitimately funny writer-performers, the men whose lines we quote. (Lord, beer me strength, indeed.) But they were quiet the whole time, content to laugh along with the crowd, which of course meant you were always aware when Rogen was laughing, because it sounds just like it does in the movies. I was happy to mostly ride along on the crowd jokes and screw around with my friends, though I did say some things that went over fairly well, my nerves aside (I explained away a character's apparent suicide by saying, "It's okay, he just has breast cancer," which believe it or not was a pretty contextually appropriate callback). But like I said, the fun of the thing is being there to hear the dozens and dozens of jokes that are passed down from screening to screening, and to hear people stand up and unleash something less well-known or even new (I have no idea if it was new or not, but a guy in front of me howled at the screen during a coffeeshop scene, "You turn around, extra, you f**king day player!" Brilliant.).

The movie was terrible, just absolutely abysmal, but I've spent all day wanting to see it again. It still plays the last Saturday of the month at midnight, though the crowds are thinning and Wiseau hasn't shown up for a pre-show Q&A in a few months. But the film's site is still up and running, so feel free to explore it. The film is too bizarre, too terrible, to be a hoax; if it were fake, it would be so genius as to make Andy Kaufman look like Carlos Mencia. No, the great thing about The Room is that it's real. And, oddly enough, the unsourced review blurbs pasted on some of the ads are truer than I ever would have believed: I've entered The Room, and my life is forever changed. Hi, doggy:

I can't help but feel I should bring up a few points about spoofs and satires in the wake of the release of Hot Fuzz and the renewed interest in its predecessor, Shaun of the Dead. It wasn't until I read an interview with Simon Pegg in which he said that "the word spoof must never be applicable to what we do" that it even occurred to me that some people might consider the films to be spoofs. I need to actually repeat that, emphatically: That some people might classify these films as spoofs never occurred to me at all. Not once.

Why? Because a spoof is an extended joke, and often a weak one, at the expense of the original film or genre that came before it. Films like Airplane, Hot Shots, and the execrable Scary Movie series exemplify the form in that they are nothing more than 90-minute riffs on the respective films/scenes that inspired them, and often do nothing more than re-create specific moments from the earlier movies to get a laugh instead of actually creating a new joke. But Shaun/Fuzz are different precisely because while certain — in fact, many — moments are inspired by earlier films, the scenes also stand on their own in the new film. For instance, toward the end of Hot Fuzz, when Danny (Nick Frost) refuses to shoot a criminal he loves and instead fires his gun into the air while yelling, the setup is a direct nod to the sweaty Keanu-Swayze relationship in Point Break. Except the scene isn't completely a nod to the earlier film. Danny and Nick (Pegg) had already bonded while watching Point Break, so Danny's firing into the air wasn't a spoof of Point Break; it was a callback to the fact that Danny and Nick had watched the movie, and Danny had expressed his desire to actually live that scene. When Danny acts it out, it's a completely organic moment in the film.

That's the other way Edgar Wright's films aren't spoofs: They have plots. No one watching Airplane thinks the plane is actually going to crash, or that anyone will actually "die" within the film's constructed universe. That's part of what makes Scary Movie so pointless, in addition to its stupefying masturbatory humor. It's ostensibly a film about a killer, but no one viewing the film is ever in danger of believing that the characters are actually progressing through a connected series of events; it's just 90 minutes of bad puns and clunky restagings of real films. Nobody labeled Scream as a spoof, because it was a legitimate thriller that happily played with the genre conventions that had made its existence possible. Similarly, Shaun of the Dead is a top-notch zombie movie because it never for a moment pretends that the zombies aren't real; despite the loving humor injected throughout, the plot takes itself seriously. The characters' lives are threatened by their circumstances, and several good guys get hurt along the way. That sense of legitimacy, of reality, is what makes the film so entertaining: There's a chance that Shaun and Liz might not actually wind up together, which makes us care about them the way we could never care about one of the gruff caricatures in some low-level spoof. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz wouldn't exist without their forebears, but they also don't need them to survive. They're great films in their own right, and that's something a spoof can never be.

Which is the better film:

Die Hard 2 or Die Hard With a Vengeance?

I say it's Vengeance, though a couple coworkers disagree and side with Die Hard 2. (The first film is, unimpeachably, the best.)