A FEW WORDS ABOUT HARRY KNOWLES

The gentleman in question

(Like a lot of bloggers, unencumbered by the professional obligation to churn out immediate responses to the brutal mass murder in Colorado Friday midnight, I'm prefacing this post by saying this was supposed to go up Friday morning. When I woke up and turned on my computer, I saw, yeah, maybe this isn't the best time to rant about Harry Knowles. It was a time for contemplation for many, and for me a full day of sitting around stunned at what that malignant little fuck—I'm not giving him the satisfaction of saying his name; he has no name—did. Anyway, I don't really have anything to contribute to that discussion beyond the anger and sadness so many others share, intensified in this particular case because movie theaters are a place I've felt safe and free my whole life, especially in times when I felt in danger or trapped. I basically co-sign everything my good friend Filmi Girl says in the introduction to this post, so check that out, then come back, and watch the below video to transition back into our completely unrelated regularly scheduled programming.)



So, earlier this week, before anyone other than critics and a few lucky bloggers (and people like me who aren't quite as fancy as the former just yet but still a little fancier than the latter) had had a chance to see The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Knowles, founder of Ain't It Cool News, and for better or worse the ur-Internet movie blogger, spoiled the sweet living fuck out of it. While that's a little shitty, Mr. Knowles did admittedly preface everything with a spoiler alert, so it's not as bad as it could be. What is, and what makes this more notable than just internecine nerd grumping, is the way in which Knowles registers his “[p]rofound disappointment.” It's a stunningly lousy piece of criticism, fodder for everyone who would join Kevin Smith's recent crusade against not only critics themselves, but the entire form.

Whether or not Knowles' piece was meant as a “formal” review or not is a bit beside the point. Ain't It Cool is, by virtue of having been around the Internet practically since before civilians even knew what computers were, an institution. Its editorial perspective is right there on its sleeve, with its heart: ain't movies cool? I'm hardly in a position to disagree. In principle I'm right there with them. I love movies with a fierce intensity. Movies can be about anything and everything, so to love movies is to love life itself, at a certain point. On the other hand, loving cinema does not mean one loves all movies. Some are better than others.

I would submit that if the way in which your love of movies manifests itself is in the desire to write about them, you owe it to yourself and other movie lovers to at least try to get at what a movie is, rather than focusing on your own personal reaction to it to the exclusion of all other things. Criticism is not a simple matter of “I liked it” or “I didn't like it.” A big part of it is considering factors outside the self; while ultimately purely objective observation is always going to be impossible because the observer is part of the observation, it's incumbent on the observer to do the best s/he can. The best parts of oneself—knowledge, wisdom, and empathy—are the best tools of observation.

Where Knowles fucks up in that Dark Knight Rises piece, and the entire experience of watching the movie itself, from the sound of things, is in that inability to step even an inch outside himself and the Dark Knight Rises screenplay he'd already written in his head. (He's no stranger to reading the wrong script, if you'll recall his embarrassing adventures with that fake Prometheus script back in April.) Reading his reaction to the movie (since calling it a “review” is a bit much), everything that pissed him off relates to a choice Christopher (and brother Jonathan) Nolan made either in transposing characters from the comics into the very different realm of cinema, or in the effects of those characters' action in a world they, the Nolan brothers, not Harry Knowles, created.

Among those effects is something that relates to a larger discussion of fandom and sexism that's come to a bit of a boil this year. In the case of both this summer's previous mega-blockbuster superhero movies, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, women critics were subjected to shit like “Stick with rom-coms, bitch” for weighing in with anything other than adulation. In gaming there was the whole “getting the player to identify with Lara Croft by her getting almost-raped” crap and that woman's Kickstarter to fund a study of sexism in gaming that led to a deluge of threats of rape and a Flash game where the player could punch her in the face. Given this context, a discussion that has been unavoidable in fandom circles for months, it's a sign of great negligence that Knowles would register the following complaint (bolded emphasis mine, not his; shitty writing his, not mine):

“It is just at this stage that the film loses all sense of urgency. I mean, you have a city with a strange respirator men with an army of thugs and every hardened criminal in the city – and it doesn’t end up looking like Old Detroit from ROBOCOP? I mean – there’s 1000s armed bad guys and the city isn’t being raped and pillaged. Instead they set up courts to make people walk on ice?”

Yes, Harry, there are thousands of armed bad guys and the city isn't being raped and pillaged. Perhaps Christopher and Jonathan Nolan do not share your lazy conflation of rape and pillage with dramatic urgency. Perhaps they also share a frame of reference not entirely derived from other movies with no aesthetic, philosophical, or any other connection other than being movies. If anything, the absence of rape and pillage in this case could be interpreted as a) Bane not being an anarchist, because he's not an anarchist, and b) a sign to pay attention because (pardon the overly literal reading) something's happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Knowles?

I should clarify that accusing Harry Knowles of rape advocacy based on the above quote would be inaccurate. But it's indicative of a fundamental lack of taking a moment to think about other people and how they might think or feel, which is the same fundamental problem with his entire reaction. The near-mantra which the repetitions of “bullshit” become is derived almost entirely from the movie's interpretation of the comics being different from Knowles'. There is, I hate to break it to him, no one set-in-stone interpretation of the comics, which are, as a writer I rather like pointed out in The Atlantic recently, the product of many different authors and the different perspectives each brought to the material. Then, there are things such as Bane being “no longer South American,” which is an assumption based on the absence of it being spelled out, and not something there's any evidentiary basis to state as anything other than an assumption. And, even if he's not, not to be mean or anything, but who gives a fuck? If Knowles had liked the movie (on whatever squishy inarticulately-conveyed basis) he certainly wouldn't have.

While we're in an interrogative mood, another “who gives a fuck?” subject is Harry Knowles himself, as in “why should we give a fuck what he has to say?” His is not an a priori irrelevant voice. However irritating he's become both online and in Austin (and holy shit, if you want to hear invective, just wind Austin critic types up with a question about the guy and watch them go), and however many writers have come along who are better at doing what he does than he is (Ain't It Cool is home to some fine ones, as well as some not so fine), online movie and fandom discourse is what it is to a significant degree due to Harry Knowles' influence. And a lot of people still read Ain't It Cool. So when he hops on his computer the day before one of the biggest geek movies of the year and writes something this stupid, it's irritating.

It's also bad for criticism in general. I haven't had much to say about Kevin Smith's ridiculous and weird anti-critic tirades (in keeping with the “it's not always about me” theme here, Scott Weinberg basically nails the whole thing in this piece), but Smith and Harry Knowles are essentially on the same page on this subject. Their (apparent) weird mix of unquantifiable emotion, dogmatic certitude, and the utter refusal to address either is one of the most annoying things about movie geekery. Asking why something is “awesome” or “sucks,” or having to explain, does not in any way cheapen the experience of a movie, and in a lot of cases enriches it. Getting deeper on a movie you liked and discovering that, in fact, there are some things wrong with it doesn't mean the subjective, emotional experience of liking it is any less valid. All it means is that the movie in question did some things well and other things not so well. One can like a “bad” movie and not enjoy a “good” movie. No matter what the case, understanding is a net good.

Throwing stones at nerds, admittedly, will lead to a lot of shit getting broken in my glass house (which, because I'm a nerd, is a 1:1 scale replica of Dr. Manhattan's Martian palace in Watchmen). But, in terms of the discussion at hand, I find it particularly grating when unexamined feelings are presented as having any kind of relevance, and when the process of examination is dismissed as either boring or the occupation of sour-grapes killjoy assholes. I also think voices with large audiences of listeners should endeavor to say things of meaning and value.

Of, course, that might just be a by-product of my remembering that once upon a time, nerds were supposed to be smart.

CLEANING LEXICAL HOUSE: A FAREWELL TO "FANBOY"

On Saturday, Roger Ebert tweeted “Removing the word 'fanboy' from my vocabulary.” I know the feeling: last year I made this argument to retire the phrase 'chick flick' from the vernacular, and I've made a conscious effort to stop using words like “retard” and “fag” ironically, the former because if I can't find a better word than “retard” I'm, well, a retard (Ed. Note: this one's a work in progress, clearly), and the latter because even though I'd probably put out for Michael Fassbender or Hrithik Roshan, there's a difference between having a shortlist and being family. But this raises the question, with regards to the word “fanboy”: is it really on that same level? Actually, yes.

It's no n-word. That's still the big boy on the epithet block. The silver medalist is the c-word, which is only acceptable under extremely rare, extremely intimate conditions (or in the UK or Ireland). Then, to paraphrase Brad Pitt (speaking of the above-mentioned shortlist) in Moneyball, there's fifty layers of crap, and then there's the field, your retards and fags and, per the focus of this discussion, your fanboys. “Fanboy” is actually a matched pair with “hipster,” in that the hateful fuckface in question is always some other hateful fuckface, it's never you. But, where cracking on someone for being a hipster is essentially saying “That person is thin, dresses fashionably, lives on the first couple Brooklyn stops on the L train, and listens to music I very well may claim I always liked in five years,” because even though there's a lot to be annoyed by with that vague genus of urbanite, there is a sliver of class envy there. Sometimes.

The “fanboy,” though, everyone pictures roughly as being like this guy:



The Simpsons has been fucking with that guy—not specifically him; “that guy” in the cosmic sense—for decades. And it's not like “that guy” is always just benignly bitching about Bioware's avarice or confronting William Shatner about the fact that he was holding his phaser wrong on some episode or other of TOS. Sometimes shit gets ugly. The week or so leading up to the release of The Avengers when the reviews started coming out, there were a couple nasty incidents of guys telling female critics who committed the unpardonable sin of not fawning over the picture to “stick to rom-coms, bitch” and accusing them of having to check with their boyfriends because girls clearly know nothing about comics, don'tcha know.

Almost as bad was the return volley of sneering about “fanboys” after all that shit. Heaven forfuckingfend we get deep on the origins of this kind of stupid misogynistic bullshit. The problem was not “fanboys” taking comics too seriously, or even the way Samuel L. Jackson impulsively tossed a lit match onto the gassed-up mob mentality of Avengers movie fans (n.b., before anyone other than critics had actually seen it), siccing them on A.O. Scott for his lukewarm review in the New York Times. Fandom, much like the Chinaman (why not just get all the offensive nomenclature into this post, amirite) in The Big Lebowski, is not the issue here.

The problem with the condescension and hostility toward women critics is with a warped variety of hetero male privilege, and an inability to assume responsibility for personal inadequacies. It goes like this: sometime after the onset of puberty, boy meets girl, boy wants to make sex with girl, girl does not reciprocate but due to there being other things in the world besides coitus maintains polite interaction with boy, boy interprets girl's politeness as an indication that she wants to sex his penis, girl meets other boy to whom she actually is sexually attracted and becomes boyfriend-girlfriend with him, first boy interprets this as meaning that girl has been manipulating him and that second boy is ipso facto a douchebag for making sex to first boy's beloved, with said sexmaking being entirely assumed by first boy. The end result is an abiding belief that any time a girl does not make sex with one, the girl has “friend-zoned” one, and that all girls like douchebags, and that nice guys (because one always perceives oneself as being a nice guy) are prey for manipulative, scheming villainesses who will weaponize nice guys' niceness against them. One awesome side effect of this avalanche of paranoia is a bitterness toward women that makes it impossible for the guy in question to get laid. This feedback loop has other byproducts, such as regarding women as the enemy and ascribing all kinds of weird, occasionally baseless characteristics to them a la the commies in the Cold War. Meanwhile women—with their own massive array of shit to worry about—are sitting there going “what the fuck did I do?”

But, the next chapter in this story is not “Frustrated by sexlessness, boys turn to all-male fandoms and become that supervillain . . . THE FANBOY!” Fandom has nothing to do with gender or how often one gets laid, it has to do with consuming, uncritical enthusiasm. One will note, the term “fangirl” is usually self-applied, by girls who are fans of things, i.e. “I'm a huge Buffy fangirl,” and there isn't the pejorative, always-the-other-never-me taint of “fanboy.” That's because the shit that pisses people off about so-called “fanboys” has nothing to do with fandom, and everything to do with a lot of bullshit repressed dysfunction, and denial of privilege and agency. Fandom is fandom, though, and doesn't have to do with penises and vaginas (unless you're in a really fun fandom), it has to do with the heart. Y'know, in the gooshy sappy emotional sense.

Fandom and criticism exist on a polarity, since fandom is an a priori, uncritical state of being, and criticism is concerned with rationalism, observation, and leaving one's own tastes at the door. This is why people like Roger Ebert occasionally toss around the term “fanboy” derisively, because to a critic, someone who reacts as a fan actually is the other. Until now, though, as—while I obviously don't know what his actual motivation was for deciding to purge his vocabulary of the word “fanboy,” I'll take the risk of guessing—it would appear Ebert realized that “fanboy” is a reductive term at best and, to my eyes per the above, not even really a thing.

I'll take it a step farther and say that fans and critics could do well to consider the other, or at least not dismiss the other out of hand. There's something to be said both for an emotional, visceral, experiential approach to the arts, and for understanding what in the given work of art creates that reaction. And, at the very least, we all need to remember that the world is not an extension of the self. So fare thee well, fanboy. And for fuck's sake get laid.

A NOBLE (BUT INCOMPLETE) ATTEMPT TO WATCH GREEN LANTERN

I was home not being a drunk shithead last night, which meant that at about 12:30 I was looking at the channel guide on TV; I was nearing the end of Dazed and Confused, a really fantastic movie that I should someday give a proper rewatch without commercial breaks and censored fucks, and looking for something else. Lo and behold, I found something. And before it even started, I regretted it:

Already feeling like the decision to watch GREEN LANTERN on HBO at 1:25 is a mistake and it hasn't even started yet.

I don't know whether it was morbid curiosity, self-flagellation because all anti-St. Pat's rhetoric aside I could have kind of used a drink, or what, but the die was cast. Despite being determined to go through with my plan, I knew it was probably a bad idea. My friend Jon Hoche, an actor, playwright, and a nerd of far purer heart than I, saw my tweet about watching Green Lantern and immediately started warning me against it; this, for those of you without the privilege of knowing Mr. Hoche, is a really bad sign with any comic book/geek property. But what is St. Patrick's Day if not a day to make bad decisions, and verily to do things that may induce vomiting? This, then, is the record of that horrendously ill-advised decision:

The opening of GREEN LANTERN is reminding me of what the opening of HEAVY METAL would be without a sense of ironic perspective.

Speaking of HEAVY METAL, I just had the horrifying realization that there are no gratuitous nude scenes in this movie.

(This led to me briefly brainstorming, with Isaac Butler, a live-action version of Richard Corben's Den starring Ryan Reynolds. Genius never sleeps, people.)

So all of a sudden Blake Lively is playing Goose in a heterosexual variation on TOP GUN. #GreenLantern

Holy shit, the Loch Nar is looking for Ryan Reynolds! (Ed. Note: the Loch Nar was the little green spherical thing that appeared in various iterations in the Heavy Metal movie that caused a variety of sin and perfidy; the weirdly dark tone of Green Lantern had me thinking the Lanterns were actually the bad guys.)

The military-industrial complex is kinda toothless here. Real evil white guys in suits would STILL be tasering Ryan Reynolds in the nuts. "Oh, you crashed our billion-dollar plane for no reason! Okay, we're not even going to yell at you, we'll let Blake Lively do it." Sure.

I don't wanna say these cats are wasting money, but if you gave me $200 mil and a camera Cecil B. Demille would rise from the fucking dead. (Ed. Note: I want to reinforce this point; the CGI was almost as bad as it was in the Telugu fantasy picture Once Upon A Warrior, which cost like 8% of what Green Lantern did and had cooler swordfighting and a better girl character than Blake Lively. If you gave me $200 mil, you would see that $200 mil on the screen. For better or worse.)

Peter Sarsgaard and Angela Bassett just had a ferocious bad hairstyling duel.

Ryan Reynolds just straight up murked three proles with his fancy Loch Nar ring. Maybe this IS a remake. Maybe Blake Lively WILL get naked! (Ed. Note: this is an important point, that Cracked also made: Ryan Reynolds gets his ass kicked by these three dudes who lost their jobs because he pulled his I-play-by-my-own-rules fucking bullshit and crashing that massively expensive plane, completely unnecessarily. This would be a fine moment for Ryan Reynolds to take a beating as character-building. But no. He whips out his Green Lantern ring . . . and fucking kills the three guys. They're fucking dead, they're not just knocked out. I mean, what the sociopathically self-absorbed fuck. And the movie doesn't dwell on this at all. It's just like, hey, if you fuck with Ryan Reynolds, you get got. Yeah, cool story, bro.)

British aliens were better when they were dudes in metal suits, man, fuck your computers. (Ed. Note: this is when the aliens whisk Ryan Reynolds off to their planet to tell him he's one of them now.)

Though I will say, having the infodump in a British accent was a very smart move. It adds "class."

"What is THAT?" "It's a computer-generated effect, Mr. Reynolds. Now allow me to recite a few non sequiturs in my melodious British accent."

Why's Mark Strong dressed like a hemorrhoid & talking about nuking THE PARALLAX VIEW? What did Warren Beatty ever do to you, motherfucker?

Peter Sarsgaard has a fivehead and is possessed by Something Alien. Gotta say if somebody's gotta do it, might as well be him.

GREEN LANTERN is an evocative movie. It evokes the desire for sleep. I'm out at the hour-ten mark; no idea what's going on & don't care.

One last parting thought: it is truly remarkable how awful everyone's hair looked in that movie.

And that's it. I couldn't make it past the big scene when Tim Robbins (as the Evil White Guy In A Suit, except with the murky moral tone I couldn't tell whether him being evil had anything to do with anything or whether it was just because they noticed how awesome an EWGIS Tim Robbins is now that his hair's gone gray) is getting some thing at a banquet and Blake Lively is made up to look like Jennifer Lopez's younger sister for some reason and some shit or other starts happening. I just had to say fuck it and pull the plug.

All this being said, it's probably an outstanding picture to smoke weed to, so if you're so inclined, knock yourself out. As for me, whose days of blazing are mostly a thing of the past, I couldn't hang. I did try, though.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON WHY EVERYONE NEEDS TO CHILL OUT ABOUT JOHN CARTER

(photo by StampyTurtle on Flickr)

So, John Carter is in theaters now, and there's an odd dynamic developing. This isn't the first time this has happened, but it's the first time I've been caught in the crossfire, so I'm noticing it more, to wit: the kind of things people who liked the movie are saying about people who didn't. For weeks now there have been stories all up and down entertainment media about the fact that John Carter cost $250 million, and was not only expected to suck but to lose more money than any movie in the history of the business. I weighed in on this narrative earlier this week, maintaining optimism both for its commercial and artistic prospects, partly because I knew I was going to have to review it for Next Projection. When I did, I discovered that there was a reason the narrative about it being shockingly expensive and not very good had developed. It was because, to my eyes, it was shockingly expensive and not very good.

But opinions are, as the poet said, like assholes, in the sense that everybody's got one and they're frequently full of shit. I try my best to be enlightened and not let anger fuck me up—though it frequently does—so I'll lay my cards on the table about my own perspective:

1—I went in, as I always do, wanting it to be good.
2—It was a little clunky.
3—Its clunkiness was exacerbated by being projected in an unwatchable format.
4—I can't say this enough, 3D is bad enough but 3D IMAX is a hate crime against cinema.
5—In spite of the unspeakably awful presentation, I tried my best to be fair about the movie.

But in spite of being the most serious intellectual in three counties, possessed of immaculately refined tastes, and fucking awesome, occasionally, people disagree with me. Which is fine. Without different perspectives, there'd be no discourse, and were there no discourse, we might as well feed ourselves to the fuckin wolves. And so it is that a number of people, a lot of whom I respect greatly, liked John Carter, and found it to be the thing I thought it missed the mark in trying to be: a rousing SF fantasy popcorn epic. You say it owns, I say it makes Dune look like it was directed by Robert Bresson. It has ever been thus.

But the pro- and anti- camps have been talking a bit of shit, and it's getting a little out of hand. I'm going to be paraphrasing a bit here and there, and withholding names because I don't have anything personal against any of the parties involved (so if you see yourself quoted or paraphrased, don't be mad, please.) But here's the basic gist of a few strands of the conversation:


“Any critics who thought this was confusing need to go back to critic school.”

One very crucial hair needs to be split here: when a critic describes something as confusing (as I did John Carter, if not in so many words) that critic is not necessarily admitting to have been personally confused. I personally knew what was supposed to be happening in John Carter, but the way in which things unfolded was a bit fucky. This is what I, and most critics worth half a shit, mean when we say something is confusing.


“It's boring that everyone's piling on and trashing John Carter.”

This carries with it the implication that liking something that everyone dislikes is more interesting. This one's kind of sticky, because it's true that each should make up his/her own mind, and not reflexively go with the all out of comfort and solidarity. Especially in communities that can be as insular as the film blogosphere, there's a lot of apparent sameness. It's not just in criticism, either. When I was in college, I used to go to a lot of dance concerts, because physically fit girls in leotards = win. They were a lot of fun, and not just because of the leotards, but one thing that I noticed was an awful lot of virtually identical choreography. It wasn't because the girls were lousy choreographers; some were better than others, as it is in all walks of life. It was because they were always doing guest spots in each other's pieces and sitting in on each other's rehearsals, and as happens in any endeavor, sometimes they found themselves with like an hour to finish their 'ography and had to throw in some tried-and-true maneuver just to finish the damn thing. And the tried and true, by nature, has been tried and proven to succeed, so rather than do some lunatic shit that might not work, better to play it conservative. It won't wow anyone, but it also won't have them being like, “Wow, you suck.” Of all the examples of proximity breeding sameness, the college dance concerts always sticks out because it was physically demonstrable. Criticism is a different beast only in that ideas don't have tits that look really good in leotards. Or something like that.

Now, a dancer can potentially sprain an ankle or blow out a knee doing some crazy difficult shit no one's ever tried before. Movie critics aren't at that kind of risk, but back in the day Paul Schrader did get fired for panning Easy Rider, and I've been accused of having no soul for not loving the Star Wars movies, and for not having a sense of humor for hating Waiting For Guffman. Now, Schrader went on to write Taxi Driver and fuck Nastassja Kinski and I have a middle finger each for the Star Wars and Guffman people, so this isn't the apocalypse or anything, but unpopular opinions lead to fights and sometimes there's better shit to do.

On the other hand, not all sameness is created equal. Sometimes, what appears to be a bunch of sheep baaing and dickteasing Welsh people have among their number a wolf or two in drag. Which, in this case, means people like me who didn't like John Carter because we didn't like John Carter, independent of anyone else's opinion. It may be black and rectangular like a monolith, and it may make everyone go apeshit and start braining each other with leopard bones like a monolith, but it ain't necessarily a monolith.


“Yay! I'm glad you like John Carter too! [unlike these other sticks in the mud].”

Hey, being able to share how much you dig something with someone else is awesome. And, no shit, I'm glad someone liked John Carter. I wanted to, and might have if it hadn't been for that bullshit IMAX fuckshit. The movie was basically sitting in my lap, shouting at me, and prying at my ocular nerve with a crowbar for two-plus hours, which is exhausting at best. If it was up to me, I'd be right there with y'all fapping to happy memories of Lynn Collins and being all into it when the Thark or the Tharks or whatever the plural is crashland the hovercraft into the thing at the end and help Tim Riggins kick ass. I mean, shit, I'm right on board with both and I didn't even like the picture. But I'll make this deal: I'll assume you all like the picture in the same good faith in which I didn't.


“John Carter was fucking retarded. Anyone who likes this movie is also.”

Fuck you. Stop conflating your own dipshit opinion with empirical fact. A lot of people who are a lot fucking smarter than you liked this movie.


Anyone who's deriving pleasure from the picture flopping and the potential damage to Andrew Stanton's career

You all can blow those huge white furry ape things Tim Riggins owns in the gladiator scene. There's an ugly tendency in modern culture to hate all success with the same fury as undeserved success, and that shit needs to stop. Even though I find Pixar's memetic omnipotence a little disturbing, Andrew Stanton sufficiently made his bones with that company with Finding Nemo and WALL-E that it's only right that parent company Disney tell him, “Hey there! We like money and you made us lots of it, so now we're going to let you do whatever you want.” It reflects well on them that they let him do that, too. So Andrew Stanton wanted to make a $175 million movie version of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. So it ended up costing between $250 and $300 mil instead. Big fuckin whoop, Disney's got money. And yeah, a guy who spent his whole career with complete control over every element of his films shot in live action with people and weather and a crew he had to keep fed and coffeed and days when everybody's just not feeling it ended up with something that's a little less perfect than his earlier pictures. Again. So fucking what. He made the Mouse a shitload of money. They can write this one off.


The only point to all of this is, there aren't sides. We're all people who like movies. Judging someone on the basis of their liking or not liking one isolated thing is dumb, whether it's to align yourself with them or against them. And letting yourself get worked up about someone liking or disliking something you like or dislike is also dumb. Let's all just breathe in, breathe out, and move on.

PLOT DEVICE

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Just watch it. This thing is awesome.

3D: THREAT OR MENACE?

Consider this: there have been a total of three movies that have even justified the existence of 3D. They are Avatar (which, a couple nice visuals aside, sucked elongated hippie Smurf dick), Tron: Legacy (which was barely more than something to smoke a joint to), and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (which I covered in all its shamefully entertaining glory over at Tor). None of these, if suddenly removed in one of those Stalin-era proto-PhotoShop “nah, fuck that guy, he never existed, who are you talking about?” maneuvers, would be missed in the slightest. And yet, 3D persists.

Yesterday I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. I did this because I wanted to see the movie, as one usually does when going to see a movie. Note the repetition of the word “see.” So I'd heard that David Yates had shot this one in 3D because . . . well, I never found that part out. It was being shown in 3D but also 2D, so I was hoping the Pavilion, my local neighborhood movie theater, was offering the choice. But they weren't, so the ticket lady handed me my 3D glasses and I sighed and said, “well, let's hope for the best.” (It should be noted that they didn't charge me a marked-up price, they charged the plain old bargain matinee rate, so I won't be ranting about the expense. This time.)

You know how back in the day, when they'd project a movie onto a screen, they'd use . . . what was that shit called . . . oh, right, “light”? None of that faggotry for our friends the 3D Borg, they use some sort of ooze distilled from the blackened, avaricious hearts of executives. The result is, there is no fucking light in the fucking movie theater at all. So when I walked into the theater in which Harry was playing, I had no idea where to sit, because they'd started the coming attractions ten minutes early and so the dim projection was giving off no light at all. The result was, I almost sat on some poor woman before hastily repairing to the row behind her. So I missed the Dark Knight Rises trailer, if they even showed it (whatever, it's not like Chris Nolan would reveal anything from one of his pictures, he doesn't even give out a plot synopsis until the fucking thing comes out on DVD, practically). And then I spent the next couple hours holding the stupid glasses on my face, dropping them once, missing the occasional scene because THERE WAS NO FUCKING LIGHT, and failing to be moved by a single one of the 3D effects in the movie. (The movie itself was fucking awesome, let's be clear, I just wish I could have watched it in 2D with actual light).

What's the 3D experience? It's like when you were in college and the good drug dealers were all at Burning Man or a Phish concert or something and you had to cop a couple tabs from that one skeevy little child molester looking townie motherfucker and you took them and realized “shit, either this isn't acid or it's fucking weak as fuck” and then you decided for reasons of sheer perversity to watch a bad movie underwater with your sunglasses on, just as a fuck you to the universe for giving you this shitty acid that had all the skin griminess and none of the “holy shit the color red is my friend” fun stuff.

If the previous paragraph is something you can't really relate to and you think it's kind of dumb and pointless and not all that funny, then congratu-fuckin-lations my perceptive friend, you've found the hidden meaning: 3D is something no one can relate to because of the biological process by which the eye sees things and passes them along to the brain, it's extremely dumb and fucking pointless, and it's no fun. If we were on a spaceship and you gave me the choice to airlock James Cameron, Rupert Murdoch, or The Alien, I'd have a long moment of deep moral dilemma before using Murdoch as bait to lure The Alien over to the airlock door, because fuck man, Jim Cameron really fucked us up with this 3D thing this time around. It sure would be nice if it just fucking went away.

But no plague just goes away without doing something proactive. I propose that we think of 3D as a physical villain, or at least the diabolical plot of a villain. And you know what happens when you got a villain running around. You need a hero to show up and dispense ownage. So here's a list of possible ways I'd like to violently murder the very notion of 3D, and the avatars (BOOM! Take it and like it, Cameron!) of said ownage:

John Matrix, Commando

Method: Explosions, machine guns, impalement, wit.

Why this among all the plethora of classic Arnold performances? Because you don't want to waste one of Arnold's better movies on something as retarded as vanquishing 3D, and because frankly, in his entire filmography, Commando is the one picture that exists entirely to have Arnold strut around owning bad guys. There's no other purpose to that movie whatsoever. And it is a fucking classic. John Matrix would kill 3D dead and then Austrianly say something demeaning and the universe would right itself once more.

James Bond, Any Bond Movie That Actually Exists

Method: English/Scottishness, sex, everything in Arnold's arsenal.

James Bond's bread and butter is going after villains with dumb, diabolical ideas for world domination, which certainly describes 3D. James Bond could go in wearing a tux, order a really cool cocktail, beat 3D at cards, fuck 3D's wife, garrot 3D's henchmen with the wife's underwear, have a showdown with 3D on top of the Golden Gate bridge or Seattle space needle, and then sail off into the sunset with 3D's widow, her sister, Moneypenny, and Helen Mirren.

The Doctor, Doctor Who

Method: English/Scottishness, pure positivity.

3D is, let's face it, the kind of thing only a Dalek could think was a good idea: “YOU HUMANS HAVE BEEN ENJOYING MOVIES FOR TOO LONG! WE MUST EXTEEERMINAAAAAAAATE!”Also, the Doctor is so cool playing him turned David Tennant into a sex symbol (though if anyone who knows more about being attracted to dudes wants to argue that this is a chicken-and-egg thing I'd probably have to concede, but much like Doctor Who there's a lot I don't know about that).

Andy Garcia, The Untouchables

Method: “I got him.”

Cuz Andy Garcia's got this motherfucker. Believe.

Harry Potter, Harry Potter

Method: magic, lots of redheads and nerds on his side.

Bringing things full circle, Harry beat Voldemort (SPOILER ALERT!) and 3D is some shit Voldemort would come up with after establishing his National Socialist Wizard's Party and having Dumbledore whacked and so forth. “We will force the Mudbloods to watch movies in a pointless, stupid, often expensive format; soon their will to live will escape them, much like a Dementor's Kiss only even more cruel.” Voldemort's not the type to punctuate that with a villainous laugh, but maybe he'd arbitrarily kill one of his subordinates just because he could (that was one of my favorite moments in Deathly Hallows 2; after Harry destroyed one of the last Horcruxes—the repositories in which Voldemort keeps parts of his soul in order to ensure immortality—Voldemort turned to the first flunky he saw and just straight dropped his ass with a Killing Curse . . . now that's a fucking villain, by Christ).


I know there isn't anything we can do about it. 3D is here until it stops making money. My position is basically, until we have direct-to-brain, all-senses virtual reality, we do not need bullshit half-measures that serve only to pull moviegoers out of the experience. Granted, once direct-to-brain VR is introduced, that's a whole new can of worms, but we'll cross that bridge in about 25 years. Until then, if Roger Ebert is the Don Corleone of this shit, I'll be Luca Brasi: let's make 3D an offer they can't refuse. In the back of the fucking head.

AN ACADEMIC INQUIRY INTO THE HOPELESS STUPIDITY OF ALIENS

We're in the middle of some kind of alien movie renaissance. Fuck knows why, it might be because District 9 was a hit and everyone wanted to go run out and knock it off, it could be that 90s retro is kicking in and everyone wants to pay homage to Independence Day, it could just be that time.

Aliens, in principle, are fucking awesome. They're from other planets, they don't share humanity's laziness; what, we got as far as the moon and then said fuck it? LET'S FUCKING GO TO SPACE, GODDAMMIT. Earth sucks. It's the New Jersey of the universe.

And yet, all these aliens want to come here and take our natural resources. I mean, I'd understand it if they were after our women. Katrina Kaif is worth crossing the universe for—



—or Monica Bellucci—



—or Jennifer Lawrence—



—or Janelle Monae—



—and it'd make sense if they came for Janelle, to repatriate her back to her own planet. But no, they're always after our less attractive natural resources. Which, when you think about it, is kind of stupid. There have to be thousands of other planets that have stuff worth taking that aren't defended by heavily-armed territorial fucknut Earthlings. So, why Earth? My theory: aliens are fucking dipshits.

Think about it. How many movies or TV shows can you think of with smart aliens? Michael Rennie in The Day The Earth Stood Still (the real one, not the Keanu one)? After that, who the hell's next? Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation? And even he mainly used his intelligence to troll Picard rather than do anything useful. Just about every other alien ever portrayed is a fucktard of cosmic proportions (hey, hey! Don't forget to tip your space waitress!)

H.G. Wells, fittingly, introduced the world to retarded aliens in The War of the Worlds. His point, whether or not it was a veiled cautionary tale to the British empire about being mindful of the universality of vulnerability even in the apparently invincible, was that even aliens badass enough to lay waste to London can be brought down not by brute force, but by chance. They catch cold (which they'd long since eliminated on Mars), and that's them laid the fuck out. But look at it from another perspective: they come all the way from Mars, millions of miles through space, and it never occurs to them to bring a motherfucking space suit so they don't breath shitty Earth air? Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiipshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

This is the original sin of every single alien who ever hopped in his spaceship and said “Herp derp, let's go to Earth.” None of them think ahead, and end up making stunningly fuckheaded mistakes, six of which are outlined in this Cracked article. It's truly amazing that aliens would have the resources to cross the entire universe, often going faster than the speed of light to do so (without, nota bene, getting any speeding tickets from the alien traffic cops, like ever), and never having it occur to them to so much as buy a Lonely Planet: Earth guide. “Caution: the natives often look at you funny if you walk around with your tentacles out. Dreadlocks are, contrary to what Will Smith seems to think, not the same thing. Also, there's fucking ricockulous amounts of water there, so bundle up tight if moisture makes you melt.” But no, they just show up, no subtlety at all, and start killing everyone until they either get a cold or start going “shit, how come my skin is burning? Oh fuck, right, the water. SMH. FML.”

And, as per point 4 in the Cracked piece . . . why in the sweet name of fuck do they always attack America? Not only do we have a startling plurality of heavily-armed racists, we flip our shit at the slightest provocation. If you're going to land somewhere and lay waste to the indigenous population, why not Sweden? If Lisbeth Salander is off having lesbian s&m sex and her typical twenty other phantasmagorical male fantasy activities while not smiling, they won't even have anyone who can hack into the aliens' computers. France would be a mistake: they have nuclear weapons and if the aliens lay one tentacle on Paris they'd get one right in the ass. Don't believe that whole “the French surrender at the first sign of trouble” meme, those motherfuckers are crazy. Fuck only knows what terrifying response would be unleashed if the aliens ever fucked with China. You know, come to think of it, there really aren't many soft targets on Earth.

The fine tradition of the retarded alien reached its apex in Battle: Los Angeles. Seriously. They can fucking beam right into our atmosphere . . . and they don't know how to melt ice? Are you fucking shitting me? The fucking no-spacesuit-wearing-ass aliens in Signs think that's retarded. The dreadlock tentacle shitheads who hired Steve Jobs to do their IT before trying to conquer Earth in Independence Day call them a couple cans short of a six-pack. Hell, the Martians in Total Recall who built that thing that was so awesome it terraformed the goddamn planet in five minutes and then never fucking turned it on are like, “Damn, those Battle: Los Angeles motherfuckers are stupid. Even we can melt ice. Shit, bitch, we can melt imaginary ice, who the fuck ever heard of a planetary core made of ice?”

Now, I understand the logic behind the aliens needing to have a flaw. The people need to win in the end, otherwise there's no story. The problem is the flaw the aliens have is nearly always something hideously stupid. Tim Burton handled this quite well in Mars Attacks! by having the flaw be that Slim Whitman records make the Martians' heads explode. That's stupid, but in a batshit crazy and very funny way, and stupid/batshit crazy/funny is actually quite a nice cocktail when you get the measurements right.

The problem is, when you take the inherent ridiculousness out of the equation, when you're telling a story about aliens that isn't funny, you're left with a difficult proposition. Any realistic conception of alien life has to take into account the infinitessimal probability of that alien life bearing any resemblance to people. Evolution is the result of billions of years of adaptive reactions against the environment. In a different environment with different variables, you're going to have different results. Shit, on Earth things could have turned out differently if this or that random-ass thing never happened. If that comet never goes boo ya 65 million years ago, dinosaurs stay in charge. Maybe if you spot them 65 million extra years the dinosaurs evolve and achieve sapience. But an advanced dinosaur civilization isn't going to have a fucking thing to do with people. If we were around we couldn't talk to them (not just because they'd be eating us). How the fuck, I ask, are we going to be able to communicate with some dudes from another planet? The reality of first contact is a lot closer to what Terry Bisson hypothesized in his novella “The Shadow Knows,” where we find this thing, we don't even know what the fuck it is, and then suddenly humanity collectively and simultaneously experiences “The Brush,” which no one can verbalize, because our minds by virtue of the way they're built can't wrap themselves around what the experience was. Aliens are different. That's what “alien” means. This is what's called “the anthropomorphic problem,” the inability of any creature to truly know anything other than itself and its own kind.

This approach to the question—being all, like, smart about it and shit—is no fun. Let's get back on topic. Fuck aliens. YEAH! Take that, motherfuckers. Go pick your nose with your tentacles and catch a fucking cold. Here on Earth? We got balls. Your fancy spaceships can't fuck with that. Joo fock with Earth, mang, joo focking with the best. Really, though? If they're not crippled by narrative expedience, the aliens are Sosa's hit squad. Earth is Tony Montana, heavily armed, coked out of his huevos, babbling horseshit. But we all remember how that shit ended. So let's ease up, in case They're Watching.

NOT ONE, BUT THREE, 2010 TOP TENS!

I considered not even doing a Top 10 this year, or doing something weird under the pretense that I was somehow above whoring for traffic. Please. I will wear heels with goldfish in them for more traffic. So, a Top 10 list it is. No such petty considerations as “not having seen everything” or “methadone-shaky critical credibility” are gonna stop this guy.

You know what? Fuck it, I'm going to do more than one Top 10 list. Let's start with . . .


Top 10 Pictures I Haven't Seen

True Grit
Fair Game
Biutiful
The King's Speech
Four Lions
Animal Kingdom
The Killer Inside Me
Blue Valentine
A Solitary Man

All of which I'm looking forward to for a variety of reasons. True Grit needs no introduction: I love the Coens, I love Jeff Bridges when he's got a good script and a real director, and I didn't like the original all that much (Duke was awesome, movie was half-assed), making it a prime candidate for a remake. Fair Game seems like a prime candidate for one of my periodic world-affairs nerd-outs, and a fine opportunity to smile at Naomi Watts for a couple hours; also, I like Doug Liman when he has an actual script.

Biutiful looks like it's going to be two-plus hours of misery wank, but Alejandro González Iñárritu makes me really want to sit through two-plus hours of misery wank. I watched Babel when I was coming down from a migraine and thought it was the tits (and no, not just because of Rinko Kikuchi's), so I'll give Biutiful a shot, aunque Guillermo Arriaga no escribió esta película. Nadie es perfecto.

The King's Speech is one of my soft spot pictures. I have this fatal weakness for diagrammatic feel-good English pictures about people overcoming adversity. It helps that most of them, take Billy Elliott for one shining awesome fucking example, are pretty good. And I like that this one's got a twist: the guy who needs to overcome adversity . . . is the king! Jolly good, cheerio, pip pip old chap. Of course, it's Colin Firth, and I'd watch Colin Firth read the letters to the editor from the Sunday Times. Anyway, all's I'm saying is, if you want me to defend my love of formulaic British feel good movies, all you're getting in response is a “fuck you” and maybe a “stop bothering me” if I'm feeling loquacious.

All I heard about Four Lions is that it's got serious balls and the director's crazy. That always gets my antennae perky. Animal Kingdom's Australian, say no more. The Killer Inside Me is Jim Thompson, Michael Winterbottom, and C-Fleck, which intrigues me, as all three of those motherfuckers were/are nuts. Blue Valentine made the four people who've seen it walk around stunned with smoke coming out their ears, which always intrigues me. And my mom told me to see A Solitary Man, and I'm a good son. (EDIT 1/1/11: Mom: "You made a mistake. It was Animal Kingdom I told you was good. I have Solitary Man on my queue, I haven't seen it yet." Whoops. Still want to see A Solitary Man, though.)


Top 10 Movies That Weren't Good Per Se (Or Even Actually Movies) But That I Still Liked

From Paris With Love
The Warrior's Way
Red
The Town
Heavy Rain
Lost
The Runaways
The A-Team
Tron: Legacy
Human Target

Again, not every movie on this list is good, and only seven of them are movies (and you can make a decent argument that some of the movies aren't even movies). But show me someone who only likes things that are good, and I'll show you a morally consistent tight-ass who has a lot less fun than I do.

From Paris With Love I've already yakked at length about both here and at Premiere, but the bottom line is that movie is fun. It takes time-dishonored action movie clichés and puts slight, subtle, intelligently conceived variations on them, kind of like the way a skilled guitar player can make an ordinary chord progression sound like something exciting and special. Which leads to another way to describe From Paris With Love. It's rock 'n' roll. And I like rock 'n' roll.

I covered both The Warrior's Way and Red for Tor.com; you can revisit those reviews if you like, or if not I'll say both were stylishly executed diversions, if lacking that feverish “let's do another line!” intensity of From Paris With Love. Jang Dong-Gun handles a sword almost as well as Helen Mirren does a machine gun, and if you know me you know movies with cool swordfights and Dame Helen Mirren firing machine guns get much love from yours truly.

The Town (aka The Fackin Tann) is a new entry in the pahk the cah at Hahvid Yahd subgenre of pictures where actors go up to Boston, get unflattering haircuts, and develop accents of the highest cartoonishness. B-Fleck did a fine job directing this picture, and the cast is awesome (Jon Hamm kicks mucho ass as the one guy in the movie without a Bahhhhhhhhstin accent; despite this, it's great fun to bellow “DAWN FACKIN DRAYPA!” whenever he does anything cool, which is frequently) but the script is dumb, and the whole thing with B-Fleck falling in love with Rebecca Hall teeters on the brink of full retard; wondering whether it'll tip or not is more suspenseful than whether B-Fleck and Jeremy Fackin Renner ah gonna fackin get away with the final fackin heist. Still, flaws aside, B-Fleck's here to stay as a director; I just hope he gets more/better help with the script next time.

And now, Heavy Rain, which isn't a movie, per se. But it kind of is. I don't have anything new to add to this, except regret that that La Marseillaise joke didn't work better.

Lost, too, not a movie, but that didn't stop me from yammering like a coked-up parrot about it back in May. Those couple months I spent with Lost were great fun, and concentrating the geek-out in a small period of time probably helped me enjoy it more than the people who suffered through the weeks between episodes only to find out “FUCK it's a fucking Kate episode.” I would be like “Ah, a Kate episode. Oh well.” I think its rewatchability was killed by the way in which it resolved, but that doesn't diminish the first time through one bit. It also makes it a good choice for a localized thing about “best of” a given year, as it was a much-enjoyed one-shot.

The Runaways was a weird movie. Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart were both really good in it, though their performances were a lot more committed to depth and totality than writer/director Floria Sigismondi's script and direction, both of which were concerned almost completely with surface. The Runaways were a singularity in pop music history, an all-girl rock band that charted at a time when that simply did not happen. The Runaways is one of many “rise to fame/crash and burn” music biopics, which is kind of sad, because it could have been more. Still, it's a watchable movie, and should get a lot of credit for avoiding major ickiness in re: 15-year-old Dakota Fanning doing coke and making out with chicks. Anyone looking to perv on that stuff will be disappointed, which is a credit to Sigismondi.

I won't defend The A-Team, partly because I don't remember anything about it except Sharlto Copley being awesome and Jon Hamm (again) showing up at the end as the villain for the sequel if there's going to be one. I really should watch Mad Men at some point, that guy rules.

Again, no defending Tron: Legacy. It was energetic. And Olivia Wilde, though painfully underused, sure is pretty. Empty-headed fun is a proud tradition in cinema. But, you know, not on a Ten Best list.

The not-so-good/not-a-movie list concludes with Fox TV series Human Target, which is pretty good, but not a movie. The story of enigmatic ex-assassin turned protector of the innocent Christopher Chance (Mark Valley), Human Target is well done on a modest scale, with pretty good action and an engaging supporting cast headed by Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley. It's an old-school TV show with a decent sense of the modern age, inasmuch as an old-school TV show needs to have such a thing. And, like most of the things on this list, it's something I enjoy very much but can't/won't defend.


And now, with no further ado . . . the TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2010 (that I've seen), in ascending order from 10 to 1:

Endhiran

Singing, dancing, SF, Indian Voltron Cobra, and Aishwarya Rai. This one's good for anyone with the capacity for joy in their lives. More here and here. This picture got me very excited about getting more into Indian movies, and while I'm still at the very early stages, I'm going to keep on it.


Runaway

Oh, Kanye. Kanye, Kanye, Kanye. The second I heard he directed a 35 minute video for his 9 minute single, I immediately said, “I need to see this.” And OH holy shit. He apparently worked closely with noted hip-hop video director Hype Williams on this, but really Runaway is like Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch showed up at Yeezy's place and said “What's good, baby, you want to split a five-strip between the three of us?” and gave Ye three tabs and a camera and watched as he staggered giggling out into the woods. The scene where Kanye gets pissed at the fancy dinner party because the snooty fucks are snickering about his half-phoenix/half-Victoria's Secret model girlfriend and Kanye stomps over to the piano and starts playing “Runaway” as all the ballerinas come in . . . well it's just as great as the description makes it sound. The movie was a great and thoroughly apt preview for Kanye's album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, as it's just as beautifully crafted and duckfucking insane as the record.


Kick-Ass/Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Although these two pictures are quite different, I mention them together because of the comic book connection, and because both frequently made me go, “Wow, is this really happening . . .?” One main difference is that the titular protagonist of Kick-Ass assumes the mantle of comic book hero as a conscious choice, while Scott Pilgrim has it thrust upon him. Both are tales of dorks who achieve great things and end up with stunningly beautiful geek-friendly girlfriends. Despite that similarity, though, these two pictures are vastly different, similar only in their being fantastically entertaining in their own ways.

One thing I do have to say though, as awesome and capable of taking care of herself as Hit-Girl was (Chloe Moretz is ridiculously good in the role), when Mark Strong punches her in the face during the climactic boss fight, it bothered me. Sure she'd killed all his dudes. But she's a fuckin 10 year old girl, man.

(One final note, speaking of Mark Strong: seeing all those English guys, like Dexter Fletcher and Jason Flemyng, playing NYC Italian mobsters was a lot of fun).


The Kids Are All Right

I'm a very big Lisa Cholodenko fan, and have been for years, and was thrilled when she finally put a new picture out (she's been directing TV for forever). I love the way she deals with sexuality, leaving politics out of the question and focusing on the way things actually are. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore's marriage is one of the best, richest, and most honest portrayals of a romantic relationship I've ever seen, and bonus points to Lisa C. for not turning Julianne Moore into a villain for banging Mark Ruffalo out of validation, instead treating her like a real person who made a mistake. Also, leaving it relatively ambiguous though guardedly optimistic about the future of the marriage at the end of the picture is a nice touch, and one of my favorite things about Lisa Cholodenko as a director: she leaves all the cheap melodramatic Hollywood shit at the door and says “All right, people, let's make an actual fucking movie.” God, I love her.


The American

Hey there, Anton Corbijn. Thanks very much for this picture. George Clooney as an aging, shadowy, tight-lipped guy who makes custom-built weapons for assassins and works for a Dutch guy who won a bet with Lance Henriksen to see who could be more of a leathery badass? Sure, I'm all in. Oh, and thanks as well for Irina Bjorklund, Thekla Reuten, and Violante Placido (che bellezza immortale e celestiale . . .)

Every single shot in this movie is so beautiful you feel it. The execution is beautiful, elegant, precise. Oh, and anyone who claims this picture is boring either needs a fucking brain transplant or got given a bootleg copy of The Limits of Control (which was similar in premise and did suck) by mistake.


Inception

I still stand by all this, with the addendum that it gets even better with repeated viewings. And watching it with headphones on is an exquisite experience if you're into sound. It's also a lot less confusing each revisit; if you pay attention, it's all laid right out for you right there. Bravo, Chris Nolan.

By the way, I know box office grosses don't necessarily mean anything, but it rules that this picture of all pictures has made $800+ million.


Black Swan

Again, I pretty much said all I needed to with this post. Jesus Christ, Natalie Portman was good in this. And remember, nearly everything from the first act break on is a metaphor.


The Social Network

No more need be said than this: a movie that not four months ago I thought of on a level with Ridley Scott's rumored adaptation of Monopoly, I know think is the best studio picture since . . . fuck, I don't know. Best in years. For a movie that's so heavily fictionalized, it has an amazing sense of this time and place, the modern age. More here.


And, finally, the #1 . . . drum roll . . .


Winter's Bone

Give Debra Granik what she needs. And get the fuck out of her way. She's one of the best directors in the world right now. And let's see what we can do about making sure Jennifer Lawrence doesn't have to do fucking comic book movies, shall we? I know Matthew “Kick-Ass” Vaughn is directing that X-Men thing she's in next, and he's awesome, but I don't want any fucking around with an actor this good. Jennifer Lawrence HAS IT. Give her roles where she can act. I know this is asking a lot (Gender equity? Crazy talk), but let's give it a try.


Well, that's it. Angry comments about shit I “forgot” are always welcome. Happy New Year, everyone!

EVERY CREATION MYTH NEEDS A DEVIL

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