Slowly Going Bald

For a year and a half now, I've been replaying a conversation I had with my friend's father at the friend's wedding. We (the wedding party) had been pressed into service to set up tables and chairs and place settings for the rehearsal dinner, and though I can speak for no one else, I did my level best to do as little as possible. Once we were done, though, the father chatted me up briefly about my career, knowing that I was a copy editor by day and a freelance film and TV critic on nights and weekends. He decided to ask me about the disparity between critical consensus and box-office tallies; basically, he wanted to know how I could presume to act as if I was in the know when I'd expressed displeasure for a movie that had grossed billions.

I can't reconstruct the dialogue with much accuracy, but I do remember being surprised at his casual glee in asserting that I probably wasn't tuned into the right frequency if something I trashed could make so much money. I didn't know what to say just then, and honestly wasn't in any position to begin to wrap my mind around an actual discussion of the issue; I still had a full weekend ahead of me. But I've been thinking it about it ever since, and I finally figured out what I should have said to him:

I know what I'm talking about.

Does that mean, though, that I know all I need to know, or will ever know, or want to know? No. I am constantly trying to learn more, read more, understand more, etc. Does it mean that I was born with the ability to understand art in a way he never could? Of course not. That'd be ludicrous to suggest and against the whole idea of being a critic, which is to get people interested in and excited about movies they might not know about or might have dismissed the first time around.

But I do know what I'm talking about, and it's falsely modest to pretend otherwise. If I'd had my wits about me then, I'd probably have talked to him about communities of informed judgment, the groups of educated doers in a given field that pass down knowledge and skill through generations. It's similar to an academic field, like mathematics: Every new student isn't reinventing formulas, but being ushered into the world of learning that's been there for thousands of years. Movies are the same way. You start out reaching for anything and everything, and you learn and read and study and analyze and eventually understand, and then that becomes the foundation for the next phase of your learning. The things I bring to the table now are things I wouldn't have known to do five years ago, and they'll seem childish in another five. You're constantly growing, but that doesn't make you ignorant.

I'd also have liked to point out that he's the same, and everyone is. He's a minister, and if I asked him for his opinion on a spiritual matter or scriptural passage, one for which he'd be able to bring his life and study to bear to help me — if I asked him that, and then ignored him because five friends with no training said the opposite, he'd likely be frustrated with the fact that I chose to let a crowd dissuade me from something counseled by a more learned individual. I'd be right to want to get multiple opinions, but misguided to count his as less than or equal to that of someone who lacked the depth of understanding really required by the situation.

That's one of the reasons why I trust some people's analysis of movies more than others. It has nothing to do with personal relationships and everything to do with the fact that they know more than most people (certainly more than me). Quality has nothing to do with reception. A good work of art is a good work of art, whether it's seen by millions of people or just a dozen. And because I trust people who have studied, who have clawed their way to a position of education and reason, and because I am on that path myself, I have to put more faith in their analyses than box-office returns. It's not because I discount the will of the people (at least, not wholly); it's because I know what I'm doing. I ask you to trust me, and see what you think.

Over at Pajiba, we continue our countdown of the best movies of the decade within certain genres; later this week, we'll unveil our overall top 10. This time, it's my turn, with The Ten Best Comedies of the Aughts.

Decent little melodrama.

Click here for the review.

I've been dealing lately with the larger issues that attend criticism, like why people see bad movies or why it's important to value honesty in stories. These posts are largely born of a desire to constantly wrestle with and come to an understanding of my relationship with quality in film, and what it means to wrestle with it, and what it means to want to wrestle with it, and so on. Basically, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I feel about how I feel. I do it because I respect the work, and the art.

Just as examining the motives behind intentionally seeing a bad movie led me to think about what's worth seeing in the first place, thinking about what makes a film worthwhile (e.g. emotional and narrative honesty) led me to realize what I've known for years: There is such a thing as an objective good in art and film. I wrote a paper about the subject for a philosophy course in college, and my convictions have only grown stronger with time. To pretend otherwise is a disservice to myself, and and all readers, and the film itself.

It's not at all wrong to respond to what moves you (keeping in mind, for now, that it's a good idea to think about what moves you and what you want to move you, etc.). A large part of art and film's appeal is the way it strikes an individual viewer. This is often tied to what's happening in the viewer's life at the time, whether it's an old man jarred to vivid recollection by a war film or a young woman moved to tears by a movie reflecting the inexpressible longing that comes with growing up. There is nothing at all wrong with these reactions, and everything right with them: Movies are weird because we view them in groups but react to them in our own ways, often reaching wildly different emotional outcomes than the people sitting next to us. And that's wonderful.

But if left unchecked, the relativistic thinking that welcomes different reactions to a film from different viewers can replace the notion that films can actually be rightly called good or bad, and that's a dark road to walk. If your favorite movie is Son-in-Law and mine is The Godfather: Part II, you can reasonably be said to have forfeited your claim on intellectual rigor at the expense of following the basest instincts of your gut, refusing to ask what you respond to and why, and devaluing art for the sake of cheap reflex. There are endless shades of nuance to be had in spirited film debate, but there are certain definable points past which a person can be said to be wrong or right. And it has to be this way.

Yes, a lot of movies are made to be disposable commercial products for their parent studios, but the artists involved are often doing their best to make a good work. And why? What does that even mean? Where does that effort come from, and more importantly, toward what is it striving? These men and women, these writers and directors and actors and everyone; they aren't just walking in front of a camera and reciting lines, or arbitrarily filming a scene and then stopping. They are working to create something honest and smart and emotive, something that strikes the heart in the best way. They are working to make art, and when they succeed, it's because they've created something identifiable as good, and not because the crowd dictates it but because the crowd recognizes in the art a reflection of the timeless aspects of goodness and quality that are in the best art. These creators labor to make something true, and when they do, it's something to see.

How could anyone ever hope to argue that there is no ultimate ideal of goodness? How could anyone ever hope to ignore the work and beauty and balance in a great work of art? There is composition and framing and color and writing and speech and tone and bodies and movement and music and presentation and on and on, these aspects that have histories and rules that are never better than in those works that unite them all and create something so much greater than the sum of their shaking parts. Twain was wrong when he said that learning to pilot a steamboat diminished his awe of the Mississippi; to know what it takes to write a story, evoke an emotion with color — these are things that highlight and enhance the experience, give it life and wing. To study the depths of the river and begin to grasp its might, and to then learn how to navigate it? That's what it is to know magic and work art, and immersing yourself in those things is the only way to begin to appreciate what's before you.

It's just movies, some people say. A lot of people say. And for those some, or lot, that's all they'll ever be. But these stories have creators, and the best of these stories reach for and realize moments of truth and power and quality, of overwhelming Goodness. To pretend they don't — or worse, to say it's all the same — is ignorance.

After a few months of strategically released clips that ran no more than seconds, the first full official trailer for New Moon, sequel to last year's Twilight, has been released. (I believe the full title for the film is actually The Twilight Saga: New Moon, a retroactive decision born of a desire to brand each chapter in the film series with the word "Twilight," itself a canny but vaguely soulless move I just don't want to get into here; suffice it to say that there's a reason franchises reuse phrases like "Pirates of the Caribbean" before their subtitle, and it's really all about eliciting a knee-jerk response from viewers. It's also stomach-churning, a little.)

Anyway: The new film arrives in theaters in November, and the trailer — viewable here for the morbidly curious or unbelieving — is notable because it's nothing at all like a normal trailer. At all. Most trailers, though they can vary when it comes to how much of the plot they give away or what kind of vibe they're going for or even how closely their atmosphere accurately reflects the film they're selling, follow a basic pattern: Scenes and dialogue from the film are edited to create a heightened, compressed experience. The movie itself is used as its own greatest selling point.

But the New Moon trailer, though it features footage from the film, largely relies on an interview with star Taylor Lautner in which he discusses the way the new film differs from its predecessor, with shots from the film sprinkled between interview chunks and Lautner's voice-over covering the whole thing. This is weird, and telling, and depressing for what it says about the movies, their target audience, and what each expects from the other.

Even eagerly awaited movies are trumpeted with trailers designed to ramp up excitement. Think of the first trailers for Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace or The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (the latter even had a teaser for the whole trilogy). Those were tentpole releases with huge audiences built right in — Star Wars is kind of one of those inescapable American pop cultural touchtones, and Tolkien fans are avid and many — but the trailers still did their best to hype those audiences up even further, as well as create engaging, fleeting looks at the upcoming films that were meant both to fan the flames of those already disposed to see the films and to win over anybody else.

But the New Moon trailer is just a sloppy collection of clips that don't even attempt to reconstruct the plot of the first film or the new one, instead relying on the puff quotes of a co-star to plug the new release as if this is a featurette on a DVD or a sneak peak on MTV instead of a brand new trailer for the second installment in a wildly successful book and film series. It's revealing that the trailer doesn't even try to pretend the movie is about anything other than its own existence, e.g., there's no reason to see the movie except to satisfy an artificially created desire. There's no effort to provide any kind of narrative hook. The movie just is. Period.

And that says a lot about the intended audience for the trailer, books, and movies, a group of consumers that's largely female and in their early teens. They don't seem to want anything more from the franchise than for it to continue to exist as a flimsily constructed soap opera; the fact that there's more faux-revealing sound bites from an actor than actual character dialogue in the trailer just underscores the fact that this audience, for this product, is as undiscerning as possible. They ask nothing more than for the shoddy books to be quickly make into cheap films, and it's no surprise that Summit Entertainment isn't interested in doing anything with the property except to cobble together a cheap 100-second preview built around one of the actors saying the movie is really good.

Typically, trailers are selling a story tied to an experience: They offer an exciting new world but package it like the very act of going to the theater will be life-changing. The New Moon clip is eye-opening because it's all about the experience. There's no semblance of story, no attempt to look like a legitimate film, and no effort to do anything but remind young girls to get ready to spend their parents' money again in November. Most trailers are just fragments of a larger story, but the one for New Moon manages to sum up the whole sorry, vapid, uncaring franchise. Seeing this is like seeing everything else, only mercifully shorter.

One of the easiest bombs to lob as a professional critic is to demean a film or TV series as "manipulative." This is also one of the most misleading and unthinking ways to attack a work of art. One of the goals of a good story is to evoke emotion, to stir up in the viewer feelings of joy or sorrow or empathy or any one of ten thousand; the fictional narrative is constructed specifically to manipulate you into that state. What we really mean when we call something manipulative is that it is falsely manipulative, i.e., the situations that unfolded to arrive at the given conflict or resolution felt forced, or cheap, or predictable, or dumb, or in any way unbelievable. Good storytelling makes the scripted feel surprising, and it makes the inevitable feel crafted by fate.

This came home as I rewatched the latter half of the second season of "The West Wing" recently. It's revealed in the first season that President Bartlet suffers from a relapsing-remitting course of multiple sclerosis, but the disease is kept secret from the staff and the world at large. The second season of the show becomes increasingly about Bartlet's decision to run for re-election, which would break a promise he made to his wife out of deference to his illness to limit himself to one term, but creator and writer Aaron Sorkin isn't about to make Bartlet's m.s. some clunky weight around the neck of a great story. In other words, though the disclosure of the disease to the public is unavoidable and destined to become an important part of the re-election arc and the rest of the series, Sorkin isn't going to employ some sitcom-level hijinks in which Bartlet's yakking about his m.s. treatments on the phone when some aide accidentally picks up the extension and hears all about it. To have the revelation come out that way would feel arbitrary and stupid and unoriginal, and it would feel that way because (a) it would be all those things, and worse, but also (b) that would rob the viewer of seeing a realistic, natural story play out among a stable of smart characters. No, Sorkin does the best and only available thing: He has someone figure out the secret.

It's impossible to understate just how vital this is to the integrity of the series, the characters, and the viewing experience. Sorkin's political drama moved fast and quick, running on adrenaline and wit and pure unfiltered hope. (For more of my gushing over the show's second season, click here.) It was a smart show about smart people, and to have such a major plot development left to less graceful devices would've been out of place. What's more, these characters had spent two seasons proving their worth, devotion, and intellect, and there could be no better way to honor that than to have one of them — communications director Toby Ziegler — discover the president's secret by just sitting in his office and thinking about the various clues (the president's reluctance to discuss re-election, the vice president's posturing) scattered around him. Toby blasts the president for his behavior, but coming as it does on the heels of his discovery, it doesn't play out so much like self-righteous thundering as it does legitimate anger. The show is honest to its emotions, and that's what makes it such worthwhile viewing. Any series can be a soap, but it takes real skill to make something this intelligent and nimble and captivating. And smart.

The death of John Hughes at age 59 is a sad passing, an occasion to once again show some love and respect for a writer-director whose core group of films in the 1980s became enduring classics of youth. But the most notable thing about Hughes' departure is that people aren't expressing their love of his work as if they've rediscovered it after a long haitus; no, they — we, I — have loved these movies all along. Hughes' death is not a chance to look at old films but to look at the films that are still with us. That's an important distinction, and one that could only happen now.

Two separate appreciations of Hughes' work published in the wake of his death have been written from the point of view of an author who lived through the Hughesian era the first time around; in other words, of someone who was actually a teenager when Hughes was defining teen culture on screen. What's more, both pieces use a similar construction to pin down what they feel to be Hughes' target demographic. From A.O. Scott's wonderful write-up in The New York Times:

Especially for those of us born between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Bicentennial, the phrase “a John Hughes movie” will instantly conjure a range of images and associations ...

And from Dana Stevens' piece at Slate:

John Hughes movies — the good ones, those five or six gems he wrote and directed in the mid-to-late '80s, before he stopped directing altogether and became a producer and writer of hack comedies — persist in the collective memory of a certain demographic (say, anyone born between the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate hearings) as foundational texts of adolescence.

Scott and Stevens make their case for Hughes' impact based on arbitrary but not necessarily nonsensical birthdate bookends: Scott's runs from August 1964 to July 1976, while Stevens' covers November 1963 to May 1973. They're shooting for people who would have been 20 years old or younger when Sixteen Candles was released in May 1984, a group of people whose teen years mostly coincided with Hughes' phenomenal mid-decade cluster of films: The Breakfast Club and Weird Science in 1985, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Pretty in Pink in 1986. (He directed all but the latter.) And there's no doubt that it would have been a wonderful experience to see those films released while you were struggling through the very same hellish stretch of high school that plagued Hughes' best-remembered heroes and heroines.

But the point is that that's not necessary. At all. We as a viewing public had the good fortune to get these films as home video was permeating the market, not to mention the eventual airings on movie channels and network television, followed by (often multiple) DVD releases. Thanks to the modern era Hughes chronicled, we don't have to look back wistfully and say that only teens of the 1980s enjoyed or learned from or loved those movies, or saw in them the same beauties as the first people to buy a ticket the year Reagan was re-elected.

Look: I was 11 years old when Jurassic Park came out in the summer of 1993, and there's practically no better age to be for that movie, especially if you're a geeky, hyper-literate boy with a fondness for dinosaurs who had already grown up with E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Sometimes the tumblers just line up, and a movie opens when your growing mind is ready for it. But there's no reason a child today, 16 years later, can't have the same basic experience. Absent going to the actual theater, an 11-year-old boy of similar disposition can see that film and feel excitement, terror, and amazement similar to what moved me at that age. The availability and distribution of home entertainment guarantee this.

That's why the pieces about Hughes are right about his impact on a generation but wrong in acting as if he only affected that specific generation. Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a huge part of my youth, just as it has been for a lot of people in the past two decades. I identified with the stratified angst of the Breakfast Clubbers as surely as my predecessors had when I was just a baby, regardless of how dated some of the slang had become. (Though to be honest, I doubt that "neo maxi zoom dweebie" was ever a remotely trenchant insult to throw at someone, even in Chicago's North Shore.) These movies were cultural touchstones for my peers and I as surely as they were for people now in their 30s or 40s. Hughes made comedies with heart designed to last for generations, and they have. And because of the gorgeous ease with which these films can be passed down, I know that teens twenty years from now will feel the same way.

I've been rewatching "The Wire" over the past month or so, reflecting on the work as a whole even more than I did my first time through, and I've come to realize that one of the show's many strengths is the way it creates nuanced characters without forfeiting its moral compass. This sounds easy, but it's incredibly hard to do, and pulling it off requires work.

One of the easiest and most popular ways to describe really well-made movies and TV series is also one of the most misleading. Faced with an army of finely drawn characters, especially on a long-form drama like "The Wire" that plays out over several years, it can be tempting to make a claim along the lines of, "There are no good guys or bad guys." It's not that this statement is evil; it's just that it fundamentally ignores the larger complications of great storytelling and places dangerous limits on the art in question.

That's because in a great story, there are still good and bad people, but these people occasionally do things at odds with their basic moral make-up. Omar is a bad, vicious man, a killer and thief not often given to remorse, but he feels genuine love in a relationship. Lester Freamon is a good, decent police, but he's not above burning a political figure for the hell of it. Herc is a brutish and dim officer, but when internal affairs comes calling, he takes the heat for his department and spares two other officers any punishment. Etc., etc., etc.

That's the glory of nuance, and what turns a good story into a great one. Good and bad aren't eliminated, but co-exist within a character. Saying that no one in the story is good or evil is wrong-headed, and it's unfair to just how complicated the fictional world actually is.

Ever since I started to try and form coherent thoughts on why people see bad movies, I've found myself examining a tangential problem: namely, that a lot of people don't know what they want from filmed entertainment in any medium, or even why they particularly respond to certain TV series or movies. There's nothing inherently wrong or evil about this; it's just the way most everyone operates, trusting a vague combination of gut instinct and unexamined reaction to tell them they like or dislike a given story. But I think it's important to think about what you respond to, and what you want to respond to, and what you see others respond to, and how all of those and more can change and affect each other.

I've always been drawn to story and character, falling in love with the movies or series that create the most convincingly drawn universes or arcs or populations. But I've realized those related but disparate areas can be traced back/up to a broader concern for honesty above all else. I love all sorts of movies and shows, but they all either reflect an honest view of the world as it can be understood by those living in it or else construct different versions of that existence that still function under relatable and realistic character motivations as well as respect an internal consistency, refusing to violate their own rules.

Just coming to that conclusion, and learning from it, and knowing how to express it, and what it means to say it, where to look for its evidences, took years of watching and writing and thinking. It just did. The simple and ugly and cruel-sounding truth is that some people think about these things, and some don't. As an example, though Roger Ebert isn't quite what he used to be, he can still hit something out of the park when he tries because he has spent decades thinking about what he loves and why he loves it.

But it's also important to realize that loving honesty, as broad as that sounds (and, well, is), doesn't mean limiting myself to mumblecore or documentaries. It means respecting all brands of storytelling that respect their characters and viewers, and that make an attempt to be honest in their machinations. All fictional stories are plotted, but the good ones make the planned feel natural. For instance, Die Hard operates pretty clearly in the realm of the fantastic, but its enduring appeal comes from the way it creates a likable hero who exists in a heightened world but behaves with a recognizable rationality: He sweats, bleeds, plans, regrets his sins, hopes for a better life, tries to do right. It's my favorite action movie for its style, pacing, story, and originality, but also because of the way John McClane just makes sense on an emotional level. Hold it up against a Michael Bay movie and you can see that not all movies, even actioners, are cut from the same cloth. All explosions are not created equal.

From the other end of the spectrum, too, are the stories whose honesty takes such strong root in the real world that their stylization or lack thereof only enhances that relatability. There's no mistaking the heightened, precisely designed Rushmore for the real world, but it remains one of my favorite films (if not the favorite) for its absolutely honest portrayal of youth, confusion, heartbreak, and the sweet damnation at the core of the human condition that says not only do we suffer, but that we can survive more than we knew. It is true to its characters and their motivations, offering a specifically fictional version of honest and true feelings and events.

That commitment to honesty can have added impact when it informs all aspects of the film or series. One of the (many, many) reasons that "The Wire" is the best television show ever created is the way in which it just shatters the standard for verisimilitude in filmed entertainment. Every moment serves the greater story, every character is sharply drawn and beautifully nuanced, and every fragment of dialogue feels plucked from the mouths of the men and women who lived the lives that inspired the stories on the screen. It is honest to a fault, honest to its heart, and honest above all things. It is recognizable as a perfect story not because it defines quality but because it adheres to the definition passed down through all art, to hew as closely as possible to the beats and rhythms in the heart and soul of every viewer, and to make a made-up world feel like it's right outside the window. I look for honesty because that's what's worth seeking.

My run through the films of 1999 arrives at Fight Club, which I tried to do justice to with my review. I hope I did. It's still a great film.

Click here for the review.

My Pajiba retrospective series on the films of 1999 continues with Arlington Road, which has only gotten more awesome since you last saw it. Trust me.

Click here for the review.

As a budding film critic, I talk with people about movies. A lot. Being a critic can be a bit like living in Los Angeles: If you're not careful, you can lose perspective and think that all you know equates with all that needs to be known. So I talk to people about movies, what the like, what they've seen, what they want to see. And without fail, and concerning a wide variety of films, they say this to me on a regular basis:

"It doesn't look that good, but I'll probably see it."

This is the most bizarre thing you could possibly say to someone who cares about movies. I used to brush it off, but the statement's mix of dismissiveness and passivity — an acceptance of inferior quality as well as some assumed duty to see the movie anyway — has been haunting me for years. It's wholly different from hoping a film will be good but finding it isn't. That cycle of anticipation and disappointment is common among moviegoers. But saying a film looks bad but then admitting that you'll see it anyway is an acknowledgment of an awareness of a film's likely poor quality, followed by a resignation that patronage is still somehow required. At first I thought the idea didn't make sense at all. Then I remembered that this is America.

Decrypting the statement hinges upon two things: (1) Mass media serves as a common emotional background for Americans, uniting us in a nostalgia we all share without having to meet one another. And (2) most people set the bar so low for entertainment that they expect to be let down, and have come to view this not merely as a likely outcome of taking a risk on (even pop) art but consider it — the disappointment — one of the primary functions of movies or TV.

The first point is way easier to understand because it's something we actively talk about. The members of every generation are now united as much by what they see as by how they were affected by major sociopolitical events: Yes, the citizens of Generation Y can remember where they were on 9/11, but it's also not uncommon for them to insert (for instance) quotes from Anchorman into conversation. Film is something everyone can see and use to relate to others, and that ability to bond via pop culture references has made movies into something people often feel they need to see not to experience art but to keep up with the jokes of the day. It's a vital way to stay current.

But the second part — the concept that viewers expect movies to be bad just because they feel they're supposed to be that way — is infinitely more treacherous, confusing, and revealing. By feeling chained to the series of blockbusters, comedies, and action movies headed their way, viewers have come to value immediacy over artistic fulfillment, which is unfortunate because a staggering amount of mainstream films, the ones that offer themselves up as cultural touchstones, are bad. And these movies are bad for the same reason people see them: They exist simply to be known, and not to entertain or uplift or terrify or thrill. They want nothing more than to be the latest thing to be seen, and viewers know that, and they buy tickets regardless.

Movies unite people. Viewers want to be united, no matter the cost. Filmmakers know this. Viewers know that filmmakers know this. Repeat.

It can't be a surprise, then, that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen earned a little more than $60 million just in its first day, setting a record for the highest-grossing Wednesday and likely on its way to much, much more. Michael Bay's sequel to the 2007 film, both based on a line of Hasbro toys from 20 years ago, has a 21% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes and is at 36 out of a possible 100 at Metacritic. Are the critics wrong to find fault with the film? No. Should they be concerned at such an ideological divide between their camp and the general moviegoing masses, if there is one? No. Should they — we — be worried? Yes. Because people aren't seeing this movie to enjoy it, or like it, but out of a sick and misguided feeling that they should unless they want to run the risk of being left behind. We have to change that.

And now, on a related note, @kiala reviews the new Transformers:

Over at Pajiba, I continue my look at the films of 1999 with Office Space.

Click here for the review.

Over at Pajiba, we've got a wonderful list of great movie quotes. These are the lines you say all the time, the ones you find yourself dropping in conversation without even thinking about it. Plus, we even got plugged on the home page of IMDb. For a small operation, it feels pretty nice.

I'm starting a new, limited series over at Pajiba to look back at some of the films of 1999. That was a great year for mainstream U.S. movies, and it was also a really good year to be 17 and starting to fall in love with the possibilities of the medium. I'm starting out with The Matrix, because why not, but I've got at least a dozen more titles in the hopper.

Click here for the review.

• This is the best Star Trek film to date. Hands down. The various series and movies were too susceptible to getting caught up in hard science, but really, no one cares that you can defeat the evil space cloud by blasting it with a tachyon pulse. The best stories are the ones about characters, and that's what this movie had. Kirk and Spock were simply but effectively drawn, on opposite sides of the fence when it came to following procedure but united in their desire to get revenge against the man who killed their parents. For the first time since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the film was actually about someone.

• The screenplay's alternate timeline device was ingenious. The film takes place before the original series and films, but it opens with the enemy ship traveling back in time and changing the past, killing Kirk's father before he could get to know him. The idea was efficiently introduced on the bridge of the Enterprise years later, and driven home by the elderly Spock's confusion that Kirk was the ship's first officer, not captain. It was a perfect way to admit that the characters originated in a separate series of stories but are now free to create new ones without ruining what some consider an unimpeachable canon. J.J. Abrams' film exists in a new universe, one with unwritten stories.

• The humor was perfectly done, a mix of one-liners and slapstick that was still always rooted firmly in character. One of the many things that made the scene where Bones kept injecting Kirk with various ailments so funny was that it wouldn't have played the same with any other characters. It had to be these two guys, and that's what made it click.

• The effects were dazzling and slick, and the production design was gorgeously crowded. The bridge of "The Next Generation" looked like a Chevy Suburban, but the glistening, white deck of Abrams' redesigned ship was a way of literally starting over with a blank slate as well as honoring the overall aesthetic of retro-futurism. A lot of the film is meant to look like what people in the 1960s thought the future might look like, and it's fantastically executed.

As part of our ongoing Pajiba Blockbusters series, I once again take a look at a modern classic. This time around, it's Coming to America.

Click here for the review.

As part of our ongoing Pajiba Blockbusters series, today I take a look at The Empire Strikes Back, which is one of my all-time favorite films. I've loved it since childhood, but didn't start to genuinely appreciate it until I was older.

Click here for the review.

UPDATE: Against my better judgment and usual practices, there's a comment I can't help but point out. One reader named "Macafee" asked why, since "this is the internet," I didn't use video clips. I actually used three clips in the piece, linking them to key sentences. That's why the text was blue, guy. This is the internet.

I've known about Seth Rogen ever since I watched "Freaks and Geeks" back in high school, but it wasn't until fall 2006 that I realized I was kind of weirdly similar to him, or at least the onscreen personas he's created. As Rogen's popularity has grown, I've increasingly been accused of looking like him, mostly from drunks on the Westside, but it's just because I'm tall, overweight, and sport curly hair and a beard. I probably can't stress enough that this is something people (again, mostly when drunk) do all on their own. They look at me and make the leap. There's a slightly dickheaded writer at The Hollywood Reporter who half-jokingly said I was the one going around telling people, including celebrities, that I looked like Rogen, but I'm not. That's what makes part of the recent South by Southwest so weird.

Covering film premieres for work let me do some red-carpet interviews, and while talking to Paul Rudd ahead of I Love You, Man, he joked, "When Jason (Segel) and I pulled up, I said, 'Oh, Seth's here.'" I laughed but mainly thought it was kind of surreal that someone who knew Rogen was parroting what I usually get from inebriated locals at the Scarlet Lady. Later that week, on the press line for Observe and Report, Michael Pena said, apropos of nothing, "You look like Seth, dude." A few minutes later, as Rogen walked up to do his 60 seconds of chatting for my paper, he stuck out his hand and said, "Hello, me." First words out of the guy's mouth. It was bizarre, but not unpleasant.

Anyway, after being told many times I resemble the actor, he confirmed it himself. I don't know what that means, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean much of anything. I sat down for a few minutes the next day for interviews with him, Pena, Jody Hill, and Anna Faris, and I was also more comfortable interviewing Rogen than the rest just because I knew I wouldn't have to go very far to guess at what makes a 27-year-old sarcastic guy tick. We talked about movies and comic books, and I had a good time. He's a nice and completely normal guy.

My intro paragraph for the interview was given tonal direction by the editor and then chopped up anyway, so here's what it originally was:

"It makes sense that Seth Rogen is becoming a household name: He's almost earnestly normal, the kind of funny, smart, literate guy who's as down-to-earth as you'd expect from the man who came to fame playing stoner sidekicks. But he's also in the process of transforming that image, with roles like the unhinged security guard in Observe and Report and a bona fide superhero in Michel Gondry's forthcoming The Green Hornet. His days as the lovable schlub might be numbered after all."

Click here for the interview.

I'm going to be out of pocket for a few days as I'll be attending South by Southwest. It's my first time at the festival, and I'll be blogging about it here and also over here. So check it out.

UPDATE: Actually, please don't read the blog posts at The Hollywood Reporter. They were taken from me and largely rewritten without my consent, eliminating voice and style. I'm embarrassed by them, and consider them unusable.

The Pajiba Blockbusters series lets us look back at modern classics. (I've done retrospective reviews for L.A. Confidential, Seven, Swingers, and The Tao of Steve.)

Today, I review Moulin Rouge!, whose "Elephant Love Medley" has been playing on and off in my head since I was 19.

Click here for the review.

Over at Pajiba, we're taking a look at movies for the dumped. You know you want to check it out.

I mean, I get it. We all do. We understand the audience you're trying to capture. But man, you could at least try to be more cunning about it.

The Muppet Christmas Carol is one of those films whose repeated childhood viewings left it burned into my cerebral cortex, buried as deep as instinct but still never far from the surface. Released in theaters when I was 10 years old, it's a decent family musical and entertaining retelling of the Dickens story with Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge and the standard Muppet gang filling out the supporting roles, though new puppets were created to play the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future. It's a family mainstay and holiday staple: My parents and sister each own the film and soundtrack. My sister gathers us around to watch it annually. My father cries at least three times during the film.

Anyway: Repeated home video viewings as a child cemented the film and its songs in my brain, but it turns out that one song originally cut from the theatrical release — "When Love Is Gone" — was put back for VHS and TV. I saw the film so many times on tape that that's what feels to me to be the "official" version, even though the anniversary DVD again deletes the song. (Weirdly, only the widescreen version skips the tune. The full-frame version, though clearly aesthetically not what was shot or planned, keeps the song.) I didn't even know any of this until watching the DVD recently and wondering where the hell the missing song had gone. It's not just that cutting the number makes the film a little too short: It wrecks the pacing, screws with the finale, and completely undermines the protagonist's emotional journey.

The song comes at the end of Scrooge's visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past, a doll-like figure that's taken him back in time to relive the psychic trauma of his childhood failures as a means of breaking him down to the point where he can begin to rebuild himself into a more giving and less generally douchey old man. The elder Scrooge has already had to watch his boyhood self suffer winter after winter with no friends and extra homework, then had to stand there as the twentysomething Scrooge meets what will apparently be the only love of his life, Belle (Meredith Braun). Scrooge knows where all this is heading, and he begs the spirit not to show him his final Christmas with Belle, the one where everything ended. But he has no choice in the matter: Soon enough he's standing in the snow, watching his young self walk away from a chance at happiness.

In the edited version of the film, that's all the happens: Scrooge watches a pretty brief breakup and is transported back to his home, where he's soon visited by the next ghost, etc., etc. But without Belle's song — which eventually turns into a duet with the elder Scrooge — the scene lacks the emotional power that would be needed to adequately move Scrooge from a place of sorrow to the kind of genuine regret that inspires change. The key to the film, and to Scrooge's willingness to reconsider his life, is the sadness he begins to feel when forced to physically relive the worst day of his younger life, expressed in song. The young Scrooge doesn't respond to the song, and even walks away halfway through, leaving just Belle and the older man. Her song to him is a bittersweet one about what it means to be completely in love and know you have to walk away from it; she laments repeatedly that "the love is gone," and says, "Yes, some dreams come true ... and now the time has come for us to say goodbye." And she walks away. The scene is thoroughly moving, and exactly what needs to happen. There's no way to get to the root of what began to plague Scrooge, and the resurrected pain that might possibly force him to become better, without including that song in the film. It's absence moves the plot too quickly along. What's more, cutting it gets rid of most of the emotional risk for Scrooge, without which it's harder for him to legitimately come to care about others.

Additionally, the finale reprises the song as "When Love Is Found," during which Scrooge and everyone just hug and sing and have a pretty happy little Christmas morning, but that juxtaposition makes no sense at all if the earlier song is killed, not to mention that the sudden melodic shift into the reprise doesn't register unless someone has seen the earlier song. Killing the breakup song throws the rest of the film off kilter. Basically, we need to see this guy get dumped. Without that, it just doesn't work.

"Star Trek" and its multiple television and filmic entities have always been completely lame. It's amazing that a fictional universe with so many supposedly warring civilizations hasn't been able to drum up a single interesting conflict aside from the one Nicholas Meyer drummed up for The Wrath of Khan. There are no good villains or epic battles; it's just a lot of people driving around and classifying new planets and avoiding rock monsters. There's not much interpersonal conflict, the action is boring, problems are easily solved, and the only costs ever paid in service to exploration come from nameless red-shirted ensigns.

The series and its inhabitants are interminably dull, and it looks like J.J. Abrams is out to change that. The film aims to be a reboot of the story, a kind of new Genesis that runs parallel to the other works, which is something not usually attempted outside of comic book adaptations. Granted, this is still just a trailer, but it makes me use a word I've never before applied to the franchise: exciting.

Here it is:

I've got an entry in the ongoing series of Pajiba's Underappreciated Gems, I take a look at The Tao of Steve, a great little romantic comedy that I've liked for years. Plus it introduced me to Eytan Mirsky. I could probably use a lot of movies from my late high school/early college years for Gems, now that I think about it.

Anyway: Click here for the review.

As part of the ongoing Pajiba Blockbusters series, I take a look at Swingers. It's impossible to convey in the review or here just how much the movie became a part of my life when I saw it at 14, and how it grew with me through 18, 21, 26. It still works. It still stings. It still soothes.

Anyway: Click here for the review.

My Netflix queue has close to 200 titles just sitting in it, but most of them are your basic fillers, those films that look mildly or even more than a little interesting but that only make it to the queue because otherwise you'd forget about them completely. I've got some stuff on there that I'm excited about, yes, but most of it's not that thrilling.

So I'm asking the literally sevens of people who read this blog to give me any and all ideas for movies or TV shows I should see. A handy list of almost every movie I've ever seen can be found here.

Okay. Let me hear it.

UPDATE: These suggestions are all great, and also helpful reminders of things I've actually left of the master list. (Like Punch-Drunk Love, which I actually own, and Real Genius, which is classic for so many reasons, from the boy who looks like Sarah Jessica Parker to the ending strains of Tears for Fears.) My Netflix queue is about to swell to epic proportions, but it's gonna be worth it.

As part of the ongoing Pajiba Blockbusters series, which examines modern classics, I've got a write-up of Seven, which remains a fantastic thriller and one of those movies guaranteed to suck me in for at least half an hour if I come across it on TV.

Click here for the review.

It's time once again for Classics Week over at Pajiba. This time we're going through the 1970s, a great decade that made it tough to choose just one film to praise. In the end, I went with Three Days of the Condor, a good movie that tends to get overlooked. I remember renting it in high school, so watching it again was weirdly nostalgic.

Click here for the review.

• Seriously, a horde of helpful monkeys swinging with Shia LaBeouf through the jungle? The fact that Shia LaBeouf swung from vine to fine in the first place?

• Indy survived a nuclear blast by hiding inside a fridge, and was completely fine after that? And why was there a jokey reaction shot to a prairie dog?

• Marion Ravenwood comes back and gets zero time to be a character? I don't know what's worse, squandering Karen Allen or ruining the memory of the relationship Marion built with Indy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They had so much time in that movie to spend together on screen, building chemistry, but in the new film she just shows up and they trade some really awful zingers that don't at all sound like them, and then they're back in love.

• I get that Indy doesn't like snakes, but he's not terrified of them. At the beginning of Raiders, when his pilot buddy flies him out of danger, he only freaks out for a minute at the snake coiled at his feet before his terror just turns to anger at having the snake there in the first place. Even in the chamber holding the Ark, he puts up with the snakes well enough to set them on fire and rescue Marion. All that to say: Having him act like a baby and refuse to grab hold of a snake that he can use to get out of a sandpit seemed weak, and having him insist that Marion and Mutt refer to the snake as a rope was just lamentable.

• Way too much dependence on CGI. Special effects are tools to tell a story; form cannot drive function. The whole film felt rubbery and unmoving and cold because of the huge emphasis on greater and greater scenes of CGI effects. (And let's not forget the prairie dogs and monkeys.)

• Aliens? Really? When Irina tells Indy that the skull was not made by human hands, he responds with a skeptical, "Come on." That's exactly how I felt. Indiana Jones has always existed in a heightened, pulpy universe as a hero questing after man-made objects imbued with supernatural gifts. (The reason Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade felt so much better than Temple of Doom is because the story returned to the format of Indy fighting the Nazis for control of a Christian historical artifact.) But these religious objects, whether the Ark of the Covenant or the ugly stones from that Indian village, were always tangible, believable things. Having the crystal skulls belong to aliens does away with all that, and what's worse, it turns the film from an adventure into a (really) bad sci-fi rip-off. The plot was just flat-out ludicrous.

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.)

Superman Returns could be the most confounding epic I've ever seen. It's a good film, but a disappointing one, a point I feel I hammered home pretty well in my review. I caught most of A&E's documentary about the history and evolution of the Man of Steel, and while the special confirmed for me that Superman really is just the dorkiest superhero out there, it also presented interviews with Bryan Singer and the cast of Superman Returns, as well as clips, production sketches, etc. The presentation of the film's footage was indeed captivating, but I quickly excised the seed of doubt by remembering that I'd been blown away and truly entertained by the wonderful trailers for X-Men: The Last Stand, which turned out to be a giant steaming pile of awful. The trailers presented an idea, but the film was the execution, and I remain sadly in the camp that the film, though occasionally stunning, was a let-down.

I say "sadly" because I wanted to love the film. Kurt Busiek made a good point when he talked about why he doesn't want to tell deconstructionist superhero stories. He (rightly) cites the graphic novels Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, both from 1986, as pioneering the modern trend in dark, introspective, psychologically complex heroes, but he also expresses a desire to put the superhero back together now to see what it can do. Batman Begins was a direct result of that trend toward darker tales, and it was one of the best superhero films ever made. But the thing about Superman is his inherent light from within, existing in a world of sun and glass and flags waving in the breeze. Superman Returns, though it manages to catch part of that spirit, is ultimately bogged down by its length, story, and curious treatment of the mythology.

[Spoilers follow. You've been warned.]

• I guess one of my biggest regrets is that Superman didn't actually fight Lex Luthor. Superman flew around the world answering the prayers of millions (and believe, I'll get to that in a minute), but Brandon Routh and Kevin Spacey shared the screen for just a few minutes. Superman landed on the giant kryptonite island, at which point Luthor and his henchmen whaled all crap out of the Man of Steel before dumping him off a cliff. By the time Superman was rescued by Lois and Superlovechild, Luthor and Kitty Kowalski had escaped in a helicopter. And that's that. This is the inherent problem with such a godlike hero. Batman and Spider-Man can have reasonably matched battles with various nemeses because of the limit on their powers, especially Batman, who has no supernatural abilities other than that he's really, really pissed off about being an orphan. Even the X-Men can be fought and defeated (though why Magneto never just nuts up and snaps Wolverine like a twig is beyond me). Some of the greatest moments in superhero movies are when the hero keeps fighting a losing battle: Batman's run-ins with the Joker or Scarecrow that at first yield nothing but failures; Spider-Man's refusal to back down from the Green Goblin or Doc Ock, even as both battles take him to the edge of death. But Superman's almost deified nature make it tough to find him a suitable villain to fight. As a result, the screenplay takes the safe route by giving us an essentially villain-free superhero movie, at least in the sense that the hero and the villain never directly fight. Hell, Superman doesn't even fight a giant robot or something that Luthor built, though that would have been entertaining.

• Lois knows a lot about Superman, and her "I Spent the Night With Superman" article from the 1978 film is referenced. So would it have been so hard for her to tell the hospital staff that, instead of mounting a fairly dramatic sequence in which needles couldn't penetrate Superman's skin (duh, you idiots) and giving him a bed and some peace and quiet, maybe the doctors should have just taken Superman outside, since it's our solar system's yellow sun that gives him his powers in the first place? And if you're going to go that far, why did Superman even fall back to Earth in a near-death state after successfully launching the kryptonite island into space? Free from our atmosphere, Superman should have been able to absorb unfiltered sunlight, or at least fly closer to the Sun to grab a recharge. This cherry-picked approach to the character's film history hurt the plot.

• Another trouble spot: The fact that Superman can apparently spread his bright green Kryptonian man-juice at will without harming Earth women, and actually breed with humans to create human/alien hybrids. And aside from the fact that Kal-El would tear through Lois Lane like a freight train, there's a weird emotional subtext that also challenges the films' continuity. Superman and Lois actually got their swerve on in Superman II, though in order to do so, Superman gave up his powers, implying that his radiation-enhanced lovemaking abilities would render her comatose or something. I'm assuming they used protection, too, since they went to all the trouble of having Superman give up his abilities so he wouldn't kill Lois, and that means that they were probably thinking ahead. Of course, by the end of the film, Superman has regained his powers and erased Lois' memory, returning everything to normal.

So: Is little Jason in Superman Returns the illicit offspring of Superman and Lois' arctic love romp? He can't be, since Superman had given up his powers then to sleep with Lois (and really, giving up the ability to FLY AND SEE THROUGH WALLS just to tap Margot Kidder is maybe the dumbest idea in cinema). Superbastard must then be the result of an affair between Superman and Lois. And I think Lois slept with Superman, not Clark, if you follow me, since she was clearly frightened of the effect that Kryptonite would have on the kid once Luthor pulled out a chunk of the mineral and started waving it around. This doesn't gell with the originals at all, and while I respect the screenwriters' stated intent to take a more James Bond approach to the film, making it merely another entry in a series with a recurring hero instead of a specific chapter in that hero's tale, that tack doesn't really work with fantasy-themed films. Superman isn't some random figure completing pointless missions and bedding willing vixens while driving an Aston Martin; his world is an infinitely more complex one, and it demands some kind of respect for consistency and continuity. It's not required that the films match the myriad of comic book titles that have been running for almost 70 years, which would be impossible. But it would be nice if the film either (a) managed to meld with the originals, even just the first two, since Superman III & IV were unholy abominations, or (b) went its own way with the story, a la Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. Singer's decision to stick with the continuity of the originals was a fair choice, but he didn't follow through.

• I lost count of the number of awkward pseudo-religious images, many of which were just gratuitous. His origin story draws partly on the tale of Moses, shipped up-river to avoid certain doom. But a lot of commentators are sketching paralles between Superman and Jesus Christ, a link that's partly accurate but that misses some bigger points. First, comparing any modern male superhero to Christ is child's play, and requires little or no real intellect or insight: "Wow, Spider-Man just saved all those people … just like Jesus saved everyone!" Singer played up that old-time religion in a big way for Superman Returns, placing a noticeable emphasis on Superman's inherent alien nature; that he's in the world (for our protection), but not of it (he is, after all, from another planet). Superman's Smallville pop, Jonathan Kent, is barely mentioned, as is his Kryptonian mother; for Singer, it's all about the supernatural, heavenly father siring a child with an earthly woman. (In another bizarre kind of Hollywood karma, Superman's mother is played by Eva Marie Saint, who co-starred with Brando in On the Waterfront. Creepy.) Then there's Superman's trips into low Earth orbit to receive our prayers and swoop down to answer them. And don't forget the film's most needless bit of melodrama: Superman in a hospital bed/tomb as his mother and friends weep for him, before the bedsheet/stone is rolled away and he returns. The film is stuffed to the gills with religious imagery, and it winds up nearly choking to death on it. Personally, I'm more of the school of thought that forcefully combining art and religion, instead of letting the art flow from the religion, can wind up damaging both. And what was Singer trying to prove? Was all the trite symbolism just a cheap attempt to cater to religious fanatics? Or does he really believe that Superman is like Jesus? The first is offensive, the second misguided. It's a mystery.

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THR ran a story the other day about the disappointing first-weekend box office reults for Slither, which happens to be a pretty enjoyable horror-comedy. Sadly, Cinematical soon linked to the story like it was the gospel, going so far as to call the article "rather excellent," which is a cataclysmically retarded way to look at it. The article was far from excellent, and actually played right into the stupid numbers game the studios run, focusing on cash over content.

For starters, the THR piece proclaimed the death of Slither after the film had been in theaters for five days. Five. It took less than a week to be pronounced a failure. In this era of publicity onslaughts leading up to an opening weekend, followed by deafening silence shortly thereafter (does anybody remember V for Vendetta?), Universal couldn't even muster up a convincing ad campaign for the film (not the first time they failed at marketing, either). Not to mention that Slither opened against Ice Age: The Inevitable Sequel, which made an unholy $68 million its opening weekend. Nothing else performed well that frame, so to write off Slither as a failure just because a bunch of stupid families took their braindead kids to see a crappy cartoon is missing the big picture: Namely, box office often has little correlation with film quality.

It just sucks when yet another reporter writes the money story the studios want, instead of actually putting their mind into the story and looking for the big picture.

"Orlando Rojas."

"I don't know who that is."

"Orlando Rojas, the pitcher."

"Oh, Orlando Rojas, the pitcher!"

"Yes."

"I don't know who that is."

"He's pitching this afternoon."

"Orlando Rojas?"

"Yes."

"I don't know who that is."

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