2012 IN CINEMA: HALFTIME

The year is half over, and earlier on Twitter a bunch of film critics and other assorted riffraff were posting their lists of the best of the year so far. I'm a good little lemming, so I'll join in the fun, even though for a variety of reasons this enterprise is more just for fun than any kind of lasting meaning. Then again, what the fuck do best-of-year lists mean even with a complete year? Eh? Riddle me that. Now that everyone's in a nice warm and fuzzy “morbidly questioning the purpose of existence” type mood, let's proceed:


Top 10 Movies I Haven't Seen Yet:

Money's been tight, and even if not for that, there are only so many hours in a day. Thus, without comment—

1—The Avengers (yep, still)
2—Moonrise Kingdom
3—Rowdy Rathore
4—Damsels In Distress
5—The Deep Blue Sea (the Terence Davies one, wiseasses, not the shark one)
6—Goon
7—Take This Waltz
8—From Rome With Love (I don't care if everyone says it's meh, Woody's Woody)
9—Kahaani
10—Bernie

Perils of being exclusively on the SF beat for Tor.com, and only being able to get into whatever else I can randomly hustle a screening for. Then again, less than a year ago I couldn't get into any screenings at all, so I should just shaddap.


The Shit List:

Though this has been a pretty good year for movies so far, there have been some real stinkeroodies here and there as well. Like the following (from godawful to disappointing in ascending order):

1—The Divide—Hateful, misanthropic, nihilistic garbage, and it lasted fucking eons.

2—Jesus Henry Christ—This pile of shit, I saw at Tribeca in '11, but as it (for some unfathomable reason) got theatrical release this year, and because I never talked about how terrible it was last year, here goes: this movie fucking sucks. It's a soulless, cynical attempt at twee quirk, that simply alienates through its rote horseshit attempts to be hip. Still, Michael Sheen's good in it, because Michael Sheen is always good, but that's literally the only thing in this movie that doesn't suck. The director openly admitting in the Q&A that he only made this picture (based on a short he'd already made and didn't really feel like revisiting) because his agent told him he could make money made the whole joyless experience make sense. Better luck next time, homes. Try doing what you feel instead of chasing a greenback dollar.

3—The Raven—Brainless horseshit. Would have made Poe turn over in his grave if he wasn't still too smacked out to move.

4—Gone—Amanda Seyfried's great, and the movie's not bad until the climax, at which point it abruptly ceases to make logical sense and faceplants, leading to a retroactive feeling of nothing in the whole movie having had any point.

5—Safe House—Denzel's Denzel, and it's not like this is any dumber than any ten other action pictures I'll happily rewatch, but holy balls is the editing bad.

6—John Carter—Conditional; I actually want to watch this one again, but the first time through was a little rough.

7—Prometheus—Partially brilliant, partially whatever the diametric opposite of brilliant is. Eminently frustrating as a result.

And, now, with no further ado, counting down from 10, my favorites (as opposed strictly to best) of 2012 so far. Due to where my head has been at and the way release calendars tend to go, the following overwhelmingly favors ownage pictures, but a) does that surprise you at all and b) whaddaya want from me, 2012's been a good year for ownage:

10—(tie) Men In Black 3/The Hunger Games—Both pictures had their problems (The Hunger Games' all that wobblydeewobblydee handheld camera, Men Black 3's cringe-inducing Chinese “jokes”) but overall two blockbusters that did their damn job.

8—Haywire—Gina Carano fucking owns.

7—Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal—Hasn't been released theatrically in the US yet, but when it does, look the fuck out. Canadian somnambucannibal horror comedy is going to be the new mumblecore, just you fucking watch.

6—Lockout—SPACE JAIL MOTHERFUCKERS SPACE JAIL SPACE JAIL SPACE JAIL!!!

5—The Raid: Redemption—Wall-to-wall fucking ownage, of highly inventive variety (weaponized refrigerators, fluorescent light bulbs to the jugular), but more than that, the single greatest action movie premise ever: “The bad guys are in a fucking building, and we need to go to that building and fucking kill every single one of them.” It's kinda like a bunch of dudes were sitting around Indonesia chewing qat and smoking angel dust while watching Die Hard and being like “Yeah, those guys're pussies.” This and Space Jail are the two movies on this list I'm most likely to buy on DVD and watch until they disintegrate.

4—The Grey—Less an ownage picture and more an existential meditation on the futility of testicles as survival tools, and less a big dumb thing about a bunch of dudes getting eaten by wolves than a really goddamn good movie. It's the best thing Joe Carnahan's ever done by quite a bit (Narc comes closest, but good as it was it was still nowhere near this), and neck-and-neck with Taken for “best late-period Liam Neeson ownage picture,” no mean feat these days now with Liam Neeson's ascension to godhood.

3—Magic Mike—On top of all the praise I rained on it like so many $1 bills, it's also a clear-eyed look at the precariousness of the American economy at present.

2—The Cabin In The Woods—So clever. So much fun.

1—Sleepless Night—And, my favorite of the year thus far. What, you thought I wasn't going to love a French gangster movie that inflects its essentially naturalistic presentation with surreal elements to create a dream-like effect and a sense of neither beginning nor ending but always existing? Child please.

So here we are at halftime. The second half of the year holds even more glories. Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Dark Knight Rises, Holy Motors, Ek Tha Tiger, Joker, Looper, Django Unchained, The Master, whatever the fuck Terry Malick's new picture is called, that David Russell picture that basically looks like I cast it while fapping, and a zillion other things I can't even think of at the moment. AND . . . Taken 2. As Robert Carradine said in Revenge of the Nerds, “It's gonna be a great year . . . HEHHHH HEHHH HEHHH!!!”

KEANU REEVES: MAN OF TAI CHI

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG Keanu is directing a movie called Man of Tai Chi fapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapfap *ascends bodily to Heaven*

LOVING THE ALIEN: WHEN A CLASSIC REALLY IS A CLASSIC

Ellen Ripley, Warrant Officer of the Nostromo, Admiral of the USS Ownage

Monday night, I was watching basketball—as I do—and one of the weirdest fucking things I've ever seen happened. Stephen A. Smith is an ESPN personality whose presentational style can best be described thusly: If you were jackhammering without earplugs at a My Bloody Valentine concert while fighter jets flew continuously overhead, you'd have to tell Stephen A. to shut the fuck up so you can concentrate. He doesn't do play-by-play, so when he was suddenly shouting at me during a commercial break I was like “GAAAHH” for a second and dropped my remote control. When my composure returned, I realized Stephen A. was talking about Prometheus. And that was a sign that Prometheus hype had gotten out of fucking control. As I'm a man of taste and discretion, I'd gotten my big preparatory geek-out ritual out of the way earlier that day, taking in Alien at Lincoln Center, as part of their pre-Prometheus whole-career Ridley Scott retrospective.

Whether or not Prometheus is any good is something I'll be finding out at some point within the week, but what is certain is that holy balls Alien rules all the ass there is. Its place in history is massive: one of the best science-fiction movies ever made and one of the best horror movies ever made, not to mention one of the best, if not the best, genre hybrids. It established Ridley Scott as a commercially viable feature director (his first feature, The Duellists, was gorgeous and awesome, though nowhere near the hit Alien was). And it gave us Sigourney Weaver (pictured above), and Ellen Ripley, without whom cinema would be lesser.

The thing about movies like that, though, is that every so often critics need to check in with them to make sure they're still all that. Someone I respect greatly recently revisited Bonnie & Clyde (a massively important movie, historically) for the first time in forever and it didn't go so well for him; I like the movie, but can see where parts of it could be jarring. No picture should be an unquestioned classic. Go into Citizen Kane questioning whether it's Citizen Kane. I mean, the answer is invariably yes, because it holds up under even the most powerful scrutiny, but still. It's Citizen Kane because it's motherfucking Citizen Kane, not because it's some special snowflake. Same with Alien. I didn't go in looking to find fault with it, obviously, but I went in ready to scrutinize it as a movie. And I did. And it still fucking ruled.

From a strictly experiential perspective, watching it on 35mm film as opposed to a cleaned-up digital version added to the grittiness of the movie and the rough-around-the-edges scruffballs that make up the crew of the Nostromo. The print was perfectly fine, and seemed like a well-maintained old one (I should be clear: I'm so warped by digital projection and DVDs my ability to accurately assess a print ain't what it once was). The apparent age and lived-in quality of the print only added to the experience.

As for the movie itself, I mean, what can you say. The production design is exquisite even at its most grotesque and decaying, equal parts standard 70s SF (the computer room brings to mind Nic Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth, the suspended animation couches Kubrick's 2001, which managed to be 70s SF in the 60s because Stanley Kubrick don't give a fuck what year it is motherfucker) and the groundbreaking, visually pessimistic futurism, all darkness and water dripping from the ceiling with big swinging chains and everything looking all fucked up like a bunch of roughneck sailors have had the run of the place, which is exactly the case.

The camerawork is a lot more flexible than a lot of later-period Ridley Scott, where the compositions are polished and relatively static, even if the colors and subjects within them are gorgeously lush. DP Derek Vanlint's camera actually moves quite a bit in Alien, all to excellent effect, either building tension to the point where you just want to fucking scream, or, toward the end, mirroring the agitation of the ever-dwindling crew.

What I noticed more than anything else this time through is the sound. Ho boy is sound used to great effect in Alien. The pitch of the blips and beeps from the computer and equipment is just so that each one of them is alarming. The score agitates, rather than soothes. The sounds of the ship and the odd non-diegetic cue give the Nostromo a heartbeat, which is sometimes a character's, but really the audience's: it's a nervous speed. Added with the other technical elements, we're already about to fucking lose our shit and we haven't even gotten up to the alien yet.

Before we do, it's important to note that when your premise, at its most basic, is “a bunch of people trapped in an enclosed space with a relentless, voracious alien,” if we don't give a shit about the people we ain't got a movie. The emotional core of Alien is its cast, which is absolutely spectacular. H.R. Giger's creature design is awesome and everything, and the technique is nonpareil, but the fact that this terrifying monster with acid for blood is fucking up people we care about is what elevates Alien from “merely” a technical masterpiece to “holy balls this is amazing” all-time classic status. Due to the logistics of its setting—a spaceship in the middle of space, that lands on an uninhabited planetoid and then takes off back into space—only seven human beings appear in the movie (not counting the Alien, who at the end was played by an actor in costume, and the cat, who was played by a cat, oh, yeah, and one humanoid, too), so there's no extras or anything, just principal cast.

The thing that's great about the cast is that they seem like grown-ass adults, primarily because they all are. Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton were already well into their 40s at least, John Hurt was just about to turn 40, and the younguns, Veronica Cartwright and Sigourney, were both around 30. They really make the characters seem like a bunch of people who've spent way too much time with just each other for company. They bitch about money, being under-appreciated, and the shitty food just like real workers. The two women, who statistically you'd think would be a natural pair of friends, especially around all these rough-and-tumble dudes, clearly loathe each other, but not in the contrived screenwriter-y kind of sexist way it's usually done, rather in a way that comes out of really good acting based in real human interaction. Especially with a genre piece that's as far out as Alien is in terms of real-life experience—a spaceship that, judging by what's said about distance traveled and time, must not be bound by Einsteinian relativity, not to mention the fact that they run into a fuckin alien with acid for blood—it's essential to ground things as much in reality as possible. That way, whether or not you're sitting there thinking “whoa, this is excellent, organic, naturalistic acting” (if you're a doofball egghead like me) or thinking at all, the emotional impact, the thing that transcends respect for a movie and becomes love, is achieved.

And yes, to paraphrase David Bowie, I love the Alien. It's the rare picture that is enriched by its scores of imitators; watching movies that tried to replicate Alien and then watching Alien again only serves as a reminder of “oh, yeah, this is how you do that well.” Getting back to the above discussion of historicity, Alien is Alien because it's Alien, not because people say it is. If that one sequence where we cut from the dummy severed head to [name of actor redacted] playing his final, harrowing scene talking in hushed awe about the structural perfection of the Alien, and then back to the dummy severed head is jarring because the dummy severed head isn't [redacted], you know what? Fuck it. Some of the effects look like they were made 30+ years ago because they were made 30+ years ago. This is the way of the world. The movie still fucking rules. It's still scary as hell. All other SF, horror, and SF/horror pictures must genuflect. Prometheus got one big spacesuit to fill.

A MOTHER'S DAY CHAT WITH MOM

Happy Mother's Day! This year, to commemorate the day, I decided I wanted to have a chat about movies with the person who took me to hundreds of them when I was a kid (and still occasionally to this day): my mom, Betsy Bowes.


me: Okay, so let's start: what was the movie that made you realize you loved movies?

Mom: The fist movie I ever saw, The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Farker who was already my favorite actor from Davy Crockett. It came out in 1956 when I was either 8 or 9.

me: Was there anything in particular about the movie or about Fess Parker that really spoke to you?

Mom: There was plenty of action and I was already interested in the Civil War. Fess was an engaging hero.

me: So you already knew Fess from Davy Crockett; was this the TV version? It wasn't the radio show, right?

Mom: It was the TV version, withe theme song you had a record of when you were a toddler. I had to watch it at my next-door neighbor's house because we didn't have a TV.

me: So, before you got a TV in the house, did you primarily see movies at the neighbors', or in theaters? What were your options as far as theaters at that time?

Mom: I had a friend whose mother took a few of us to the movies for her birthday party each year. The Pajama Game in 1957, a few Martin and Lewis comedies (I always liked Dean better than Jerry), and Ocean's Eleven in 1960. I LOVED Ocean's Eleven. I didn't start watching movies on TV until I was a teenager and was babysitting. The movie theaters we went to were the Embassy in Waltham, a movie palace from the 20's or 30's (the first suburban Boston theater to show talkies), the Community Playhouse in Wellesley, and the multiplex at Shoppers World in Framingham.

me: Whoa, there were already multiplexes in the early 60s? I thought those only came along later.

Mom: I think it was a very early one. I remember there being several different movies playing there.

me: The thing about Ocean's Eleven---the original---that really stood out to me was that they all looked like they were having so much fun, like that was the purpose of the whole thing; was it that way for you too? Also, Sammy was awesome in that, driving the garbage truck and so forth.

Mom: Absolutely, and Sammy was awesome with the garbage truck.

me: Didn't you meet him or get an autographed photo or something once?

Mom: Yes, when I was a freshman at NYU . A friend down the hall in my dorm had an uncle who was a VP at NBC. He got us into a dress rehearsal for the Sammy Davis Show. Sammy spoke to us and gave us unsigned photographs. He was friendly and gracious. Some of the guests on the shoe that week were Frank Sinatra Jr, Leslie Uggams, the Copacetics, and Milton Berle. One of us approached Milton Berle but he snubbed her. Sammy was married to Mai Britt at the time. She was in the audience and was very blond and pretty.

me: Milton Berle's all like "I have better things to do," what a tool.

Mom: (Like in his youth fucking Aimee Semple McPherson.) I was never a big fan of comedians who used drag as shtick. Of course Some Like It Hot was a different matter altogether. There was a reason for Jack and Tony to disguise themselves as women to hide from the mob. And in Bosom Buddies Tom [Hanks] and Peter [Scolari] need an affordable place to live.

me: And in Some Like It Hot, you've got Joe E. Brown not giving the slightest fuck that Jack Lemmon's really a guy, which I always loved. Trying to think of a better last scene that that's hard, no?

(Also, I love that you throw Bosom Buddies right in there with Some Like It Hot.)

So, let me ask this: at what point did you start getting European movies up there? Those were about the only foreign pictures you got back then, for the most part, right?

Mom: When I was a teenager the Exeter Theater in Boston was the place to see foreign films. The first movie I saw there was La Belle Americaine which was a series of vignettes featuring the same fabulous big American convertible. Also there was a student exchange program with my high school and a town in France, with an annual movie as a fundraiser. One year they showed Black Orpheus, which I loved. I saw 8 1/2 in Boston with some friends and a 7 year old sister one of them was babysitting.

me: And was this around the time you developed your thing for Alain Delon and Marcello?

Mom: How could a teenager resist them?

me: Any other favorite actors or movies from that period?

Mom: At a certain point my parents decided that if a movie was based on a book I had to read the book first. So in 1959 I read Ben Hur from cover to cover and was allowed to ride my bike to the Embassy in Waltham by myself to see it. I particularly like the naval battle and the chariot race. I read Tom Jones so I was allowed to go into Boston by myself to see the movie. One had to be at least sixteen to get in and I turned sixteen during its run. I fell in love with Albert Finney then and still love him today.

me: Well, he's Albert Finney. When was it you moved to New York, 1965?

Mom: Yes, in September, and started going to the movies as much as I could afford. There were so many great movies to see at so many movie theaters within easy walking distance. Most of them are long gone.

me: I was going to say, I imagine you started seeing more movies at that point. Were there any particular places you went to a lot? Any specific kinds of pictures you sought out more than others? Or just everything, as much as you could see?

Mom: Also, in 1965 the Protestant center began a film series, where I saw To Have and Have Not, Scorpio Rising, Triumph of the Will, Olympia (parts 1 and 2), I forget what else they showed. My dorm showed movies also, Shane, the Zombies of the Stratosphere serial, and other stuff. At theaters I saw La Dolce Vita (two showings back to back), Georgy Girl, The Graduate, La Chinoise, A Hard Days Night, and lots of other movies.

me: Nice.

Mom: One thing I forgot to mention earlier was how Hitchcock enabled me to pass a my high school chemistry mid-year exam. I was so stressed out and knew that more studying would be pointless, so the evening before the test I persuaded my parents to let me go see a double feature of Psycho and Vertigo to chill me out. It worked and I passed with a B-.

me: Awesome. Now, especially people my age and thereabouts who didn't actually get to experience it firsthand, kind of romanticize the period from about the late 60s through most of the 70s as being kind of a second Golden Age, or the Hollywood New Wave, or some such. I'm curious, since you were actually there and going to lots of movies, whether that was something people were conscious of at the time, or whether it was a perception that happened in retrospect, when people looked at the volume of awesome stuff that came out and went "whoa." Was that something people thought and talked about at the time?

Mom: I don't think we were conscious at that time that it was any second Golden Age or Hollywood New Wave. I think we just expected movies to be good, were discriminating in what we chose to watch, and were rarely disappointed. There were just a lot of movies worth seeing.

me: You mentioned Fess Parker, and The Great Locomotive Chase being your early favorite, owing to the action. Have you always been into action movies?

Mom: I went to the Rex Cinema (now Cobble Hill Cinema) to see Frank Sinatra in Dirty Dingus Magee. It was unmemorable, but the second movie of the double feature was a western I had not previously heard of, For a Few Dollars More. My love (and respect) for Clint Eastwood continues to this day.

I was introduced to Hong Kong action movies when we got our first VCR and you picked out movies at our local video rental outlet. Together we watched all of Bruce Lee's moves over and over, then Chuck Norris, Stephen Seagal, Bruce Li, Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold, Sly, Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, heroes all. And the great franchises: Terminator, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, on to Transporter, Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible, xXx, The Fast and the Furious.

An important aspect of the action hero/antihero was that though battered, bloody and often tortured, he managed to beat out Evil in the end by HIMSELF (or with, if he had one, his team).

me: I remember you telling me about seeing The Godfather in the Metropolitan in downtown Brooklyn, back when it was all one theater....

Mom: We went to see it with our upstairs neighbors. I absolutely loved it although I thought Diane Keaton was miscast. The Metropolitan was a great place to see movies. I saw Death Wish there. I was almost the only white person in the audience and everybody cheered when Charles Bronson killed another mugger.

me: Yeah, I kind of miss the Metropolitan too, even after it got all run down. I'll always remember seeing Double Impact there with you, with the guy behind us going "Look out! There goes Bolo!"

Mom: As it got all run down, audiences changed, but everybody always CAME TO SEE THE MOVIE, and were totally into it. There was never a security problem during daytime movies, no racial incidents going one way or the other. Couples often brought sleeping babies to action movies there to save on baby sitters, and there was no problem with babies crying. The Metropolitan is now a church, and I wonder if it is even half as much fun as it used to be.

me: Not even on its best day, I bet.

Mom: Today's movies with stadium seating and properly functioning air conditioning may be more comfortable, but I miss the funky old theaters without endless advertisements or too many trailers for shitty movies I don't want to see, but with audiences who really having fun at the movies.

me: Yeah, the ads and shit drive me nuts, with all the stupid trivia questions "This actress, whose name rhymes with Shmishirney Deaver, starred in Alien and Ghostbusters", and it's like, come on, man, can't we just watch a movie?

Mom: Yes those are totally stupid and they keep looping so you see the same ones repeating while you are WAITING FOR THE FUCKING MOVIE TO START FOR FUCK SAKE.

me: Absolutely. And if you cut things too tight in terms of showing up on time so you don't have to see that bullshit eight thousand times, you either don't get a seat or miss the start of the movie....

Mom: Sometimes makes it worth the wait for Netflix to have the movie so you don't have to deal with that shit. But there's nothing like watching the movie on a big screen in the dark.

me: Absolutely. Do you have much problem up on the Cape now with people screwing around on their cell phones for the whole movie? That's kind of an epidemic here in the city these days.

Mom: Not a problem on the Cape. In fact I have seen a number of movies here (especially the first showing of the day toward the end of a run) when I have been the only person in the theater. If almost feels like a Command Performance for me.

me: Heh, "Entertain me, mortals."

Mom: Entertain me, Celluloid Heroes!

me: Yes! Celluloid Heroes! Thank you so much for ensuring I never had a Kinks-deprived childhood.

AT TRIBECA: SLEEPLESS NIGHT

The last couple/few years have seen an atypically high number of awesome thrillers coming out of France. Maybe it's just that I've seen all of them and it isn't actually all that atypical, but Tell No One was great, Point Blank was awesome (unpopular opinion alert: it was better than the John Boorman picture), and now there's Sleepless Night (original title: Nuit Blanche) which is both everything that you'd ever hope to want from a cop/gangster picture and yet one that almost seems like it was made by someone who'd never seen one before. In the best possible way.

Sleepless Night unfolds in a way that renders assumptions about what kind of picture it is and who its characters are absolutely worthless. Apparent stick-up artists turn out to be cops. Friends are covert enemies. Gangsters feel remorse about the dirt they do. People hide in plain sight. Brilliant plans go awry. Utterly fucking ridiculous extemporizing actually works. Pretty early on, you realize the only thing to do is just sit back and bask. Well, if the way you “sit back” is on the edge of your seat chewing your knuckle to keep from shattering glass with high-pitched “what the fuck . . .?”s. Because while it may not follow conventional diagrammatic thriller beats, this shit is fucking intense, dude.

For such a complex and nuanced movie, the basic premise is quite simple: Vincent (Tomer Sisley) and Manu (Laurent Stocker) pull a rip and run on a couple coke dealers, one of whom gets got, the other of whom gets away. Vincent catches one in the crossfire, but tis but a flesh wound and in any case they get the coke. It then transpires that Vincent and Lauren are cops, with an eye out for a mean-as-a-snake Internal Affairs bull (Julien Boisselier, at times bearing an eerie physical and vocal resemblance to Aiden Gillen). Vincent's son (Samy Seghir, who gives an excellent kid performance) busts his balls because all his police work has him a bit distant and mercurial. Vincent barely has time to reflect on how just the ball-busting is before the gangster whose coke he and Manu ripped kidnaps the kid and holds him in his massive demimonde multiplex (I mean, shit, there's a disco, a bar, a restaurant, a pool hall, and a whorehouse all in separate parts of the building under the same roof; if the place wasn't crawling with angry French people with guns I'd totally fucking hang out there). Vincent's task? Bring the coke, trade it for the kid. If you put twenty euros on “there's no way it's that simple” then you backed the winning horse.

Almost the entire movie takes place in that massive club, and after a while, Vincent gets a real feel for the place. In one of my favorite ongoing plotlines, he becomes kind of weirdly friendly with the kitchen workers, even though he never says much of anything to them that isn't yelling or cursing. But there's a bond that forms when you corner a man and demand in Franglais that he help you fill up a couple dozen plastic bags with flour to pass it off as temporarily missing cocaine. I like to think all the kitchen staff looked at Vincent as he had them do that and went, “Wow, that guy's fucking awesome.” And so when he stops back in they're almost like, “Hey, it's that awesome guy again.”

I wouldn't dream of revealing how all this shakes out. The hour-forty one spends with Sleepless Night is a mesmerizing, dream-like time. Director Frederic Jardin is the truth. The action is absolutely top echelon, with copious, brutal, relatively naturalistic ownage abound. The acting's great. The camerawork is killer. It's cut almost perfectly. Actually, there's only one thing wrong with the movie, and it's not anything cinematic. There's one scene where an ostensible good guy goes a little far in getting information out of a woman who's a lot smaller than him, and not one of the bad guys. Granted, the guy in question was under a bit of stress, and to the best of his knowledge the woman in question was working against him, but there was a moment there where it was a little uncomfortable. No “yeah, but” with that either, it's a definite debit.

That said, it's just about the movie's only one. Sleepless Night's highs rank with the best action cinema's seen. Almost the entire picture is a high. Oh man oh man this fucking movie is good. It's an absolute must-see for anyone who likes cop movies, gangster movies, action movies, and who likes it when all the above keep it fucking French. I know it's not just me, y'all.

REJOICE ALL, FOR THERE IS NEW STATHAM: SAFE

Statham can't even be on a movie poster without reminding you you're basically fucking dead.

Chris Sarandon: “You got some balls.”
Jason Statham: “I know,  it's amazing I can even walk.”

--the most self-aware line in Statham's entire oeuvre, in Safe

The advent of new Statham is always a good thing, and a sign that the universe is still capable, despite its massive fucking foibles, of good. Statham pictures are refreshingly devoid of subtext, and empirical in their simplicity of purpose: there are bad guys, those bad guys need to get owned, and Statham needs to frown a bit, growl, and maybe take his shirt off. Also, under normal circumstances, he gets laid. Safe, his latest, obviates any getting laid by having Russian gangsters kill his wife in his first scene, and giving him a 12-year-old female co-star. Fortunately, the most crucial elements of his skill set, the ones relating to the ability to deal violent and stylish death to many, many men, are left intact. Which is why Safe is fucking great.

Though, to be perfectly clear, as a movie qua movie, Safe is a gigantic pile of shit. The little girl's backstory is repetitive and takes forever, Statham's “character” is motivated by asequentual causality (Ed. Note: it's okay, you're not crazy, “asequential” isn't a real word, that's the point) and the twists, of which there are a couple medium-rare humdingers, don't have any resonance because they're not built on anything. It's really kind of bizarre that Boaz Yakin wrote this movie, because he started as a writer, and a pretty good (if nowhere near great) one once upon a time. Safe is not a well-written movie. The structure is like someone hacked Boaz Yakin's copy of Final Draft and reprogrammed it to be some kind of stochastic action movie plot point generator. All the stuff happens that's supposed to happen in a stupid action movie—and, at a certain point, the movie almost reluctantly embraces its own stupidity, which helps—but a lot of the stuff not directly concerned with Jason Statham murdering extras is stunningly bad.

One thing that carries Safe through a lot of those slow points is the cast. Safe is an object lesson in the perfect way to cast a stupid action movie:

—Obviously you need a star who brings the ownage (in this case, Statham, who meets this requirement with the ease of breathing).

—James Hong always helps, because James Hong is the fucking greatest.

—Then, although this might sound counter-intuitive, you want a non-Russian to play the Russian mobster. Sándor Técsy (who sadly died after the movie was completed), a Hungarian, meets this qualification; Russian heavies need fake Russian accents, and if there's one thing the entire world can agree on, it's that doing a fake Russian accent is massive fun. Look at John Malkovich in Rounders. Hell, look at the Russian dudes I used to lift weights with back in the day, they even liked doing fake Russian accents, and they were Russian.

—Another very important element is the random dude who used to be good on a TV show, which role is filled with élan by Prison Break alum Reggie Lee (for reference, see also Jon Hamm in like ninety supporting roles recently in things like The Town, Sucker Punch, and A-Team, where you're like “what the fuck is Jon Hamm doing here?” and he's always great, no matter how dumb the movie is) who takes the massive risk of attempting to bring nuance to his role as James Hong's man on the ground in New York, fulfilling the “ruthless fuckface” aspect of the role that should be all there is to it, except he throws the curveball of actually caring about the little girl in his evil motherfucker kind of way. Sure you have to grade him on a bit of a curve because the script is dumb and subtlety always seems more subtle when Jason Statham is running around emptying clips into people at point blank range, but still, Reggie Lee should be in more movies.

—Similar, but not quite the same, you need a “That Guy” who's good enough that you remember his name in the future. What's good, Robert John Burke?

—Very important, the kid has to not be annoying. Christina Chan pulls this off pretty well, although admittedly, the bar is low. Still, she's convincing as a smart kid, which, ya know, doesn't grow on trees.

—You need some random dude who when he shows up, you're like, “Whoa, wasn't this fuckin guy just in high school movies, like, last week?” This is known in certain circles as the Judd Nelson in New Jack City part. Anson Mount, as the Mayor's aide-de-camp, fits the bill with an entertainingly reptilian flair once he shows up two-thirds of the way through the picture (we could have used him earlier, for reasons that become clear towards climax time).

—And, essential to this entire enterprise (recall, if you will, the invaluable contribution of Powers Boothe to Rapid Fire) is the distinguished veteran of stage and screen who pretends like he's slumming it, whom all involved including the audience have to humor on this point, but who secretly knows he isn't really slumming it and so, in a manner of speaking, puts his hip into the performance. Chris Sarandon earns immediate induction into the Evil White Guy In A Suit Hall Of Fame here (he would have been a snap for The Princess Bride except for the technicality of him not actually wearing a suit in that due to it being fantasy), as DA MAYOR O' NOO YAWK FUCKIN CITY, complete with goatee, shameless 9/11 exploitation, and a complete absence of ethics or morals. He also does a perfect New York accent. Absolutely perfect. He makes the genius choice of not overdoing it, which is where everybody else on the planet who isn't from New York fucks up.

The story is about who gives a fuck, here's the hero, here's the kid, here are a whole lot of bad guys, and we're going to keep changing the rules every ten minutes until Statham just says fuck it and kills everyone. The whole point to a movie like this is that Statham kills everyone, and this is where Boaz Yakin, fight coordinator Chad Stahelski, and editor Frederic Thoraval (who cut Pierre Morel's classics District B13, Taken, and From Paris With Love) really shine. The action sequences are thumbs-up, a-ok, righty-o Sunny Jim. Statham kills a lot of people in this, very definitively (at one point, emptying the whole rest of his clip into a guy who was pretty much fucked anyway just because, at a certain point, you have to let motherfuckers know who's Statham and who's dead), and the filmmakers don't hang him out to dry in the slightest. The shittiness of the non-action parts are counterbalanced damn near perfectly by how dope the action parts all are. Let's, once more, have a round of applause for Chad Stahelski and Frederic Thoraval, as fight coordinators and editors don't get nearly enough love, and these two dudes are really fucking good at their jobs.

It's not a slight, even if it is a touch tautological, to say that Safe is for the kind of person who wants to see Safe. If you're already the kind of person who goes “fuck yeah, new Statham!” you'll be in good hands, especially with the picture's relative brevity; the running time's listed at 95 minutes but it isn't a second over 90. Non-initiates may find wading through the bullshit to get to the ownage a bit taxing, though Safe absolutely delivers once you get through the clunky expository parts. Statham is a singular entity. It's absolutely fucking hilarious to see him play a New York cop without making the slightest apparent effort to hide his English accent, but Statham don't change his accent for a motherfucker. He is to be beheld, not nitpicked.

AT TRIBECA: UNIT 7

Grupo Siete: Sí, somos badasses. 

Spain's always been pretty hip. They were Islamic less than a century after the Prophet (before everyone else was into it, etc etc), you gotta love any country capable of winning the World Cup AND a gold medal in Olympic basketball—which could totally happen if Dwight Howard's back is actually injured; for bigs, Spain has the Gasol brothers and Serge Ibaka, the latter of whom represents a truly awesome blatant bit of underhandedness, as Mr. Ibaka is from the Congo, and the only reason he plays for Spain internationally is because fuck you, that's why—and there's Ibiza, Gaudi in Barcelona, Elena Anaya, Penelope Cruz. Basically what I'm saying is, Spain's really going out of its way to ingratiate itself to me. That opening shot in Sexy Beast with Ray Winstone just fucking basking is like the whole country is like “Hey, minus the accent, acting talent, and ability to not shit yourself when Ian McShane is pissed at you, THIS COULD BE YOU, BOWES!” The latest in Spain's outreach campaign is director Alberto Rodriguez's cop drama Unit 7 (original title: Grupo 7). They have Elena Anaya, basketball, and ownage? I may have to emigrate.

Unit 7 tells the story of a special police detail, assigned to eliminate (or eliminate the appearance of) the drug trade in Sevilla in preparation for the 1992 Expo. They've got four years. Over the course of those years, the unit's ruthless pursuit of its goal causes them to run afoul of Internal Affairs, the media, their significant others, and, of course, the dealers. It's a pretty standard cop movie scenario, because there are only so many cop movie scenarios to choose from, but like the best cop movies, it uses its policier aspects as a template, into which it fills in its real concerns. In this case, that's the observation that institutional power values appearances over reality, and that in the pursuit of those squeaky-clean appearances, the cops are even more in danger of losing their souls than their lives.

Inescapably, any urban cop story (especially one with parallels this direct) is going to be compared to The Wire, though Unit 7's cynicism about institutions bleeds down to color the foot soldiers as well. Grupo Siete don't blink at stealing heroin to suborn junkies into snitching, or beating the living fuck out of unarmed suspects to make a point, or straight going rogue and lighting recalcitrant dealers up like Nochevieja. On the other hand, though Grupo Siete pulls some pretty skeevy shit in the interests of eliminating Sevilla's drug problem, they're not bad guys; it's a little hard to root for them at times, but ultimately one gets the sense that their circumstances bear a lot of the responsibility for their bad deeds.

The two main cops in the unit, the young, ambitious Angel (Mario Casas) and the hardened, volatile veteran Rafael (Antonio de la Torre) end up gradually turning into one another: Angel starts out the naïve young kid with the pretty wife and kid and ends up becoming consumed by an ends-justify-the-means attitude toward his job and ambition. Rafael, on the other hand, is mean as a fuckin snake at the outset but finds some degree of serenity in an unconventional and unexpected relationship. Both actors are goddamn outstanding at conveying all this, and the story does a beautifully economical job of doling out exposition, doing a better job telling a story through what it omits than most movies do leaving everything in.

So the acting and narrative parts are all excellent, but ho boy the ownage sequences are fuckin outta sight. As ownage goes it's naturalistically derived, so you don't get the weaponized refrigerators of The Raid: Redemption, the sliding down the bannister with a toothpick in your mouth two-gun-shooting dozens of bad guys of Hard Boiled, or Albert Finney's fuckin Hanukah tommy gun in Miller's Crossing that kept continuously firing for eight days and nights. But those movies all exist, so you can watch them if you want to see that kind of thing. When people get owned in Unit 7, it's pretty much like someone getting owned in real life, except boosted by a factor of 1.2 or so because the sound design provides a subtle (and, frankly, necessary) heightening so that there's no mistake about the fact that whoever's getting owned is getting fucking owned, but it doesn't strain credibility.

When Unit 7 ends, it kind of feels like you just put down a James Ellroy novel. It's not exactly a happy feeling, but it's a feeling of having been in the presence of something really fucking well done. And, you know, the occasionally disturbing violence (there's one scene in particular just over halfway through about which dog lovers should be cautioned) and the overwhelming cynicism that comes invariably from spending too long pondering the realities of institutional law enforcement. Though, it should be said, a movie as well-done as Unit 7 carries with that slightly melancholy feeling an undercurrent of exhilaration, of having come through an adventure alive.

A well-done character study has its own reward, as is a well-done ownage picture, but both at the same time is occasion to take notice. Unit 7 is being distributed by Warner Bros, so keep an eye out either in the trades or my Twitter, whichever you prefer, cuz the second I hear about when the rest of y'all can check this out, I'm going to be urging anyone who likes cop movies and/or ownage to go see this joint. It's really fuckin good, people.

AT TRIBECA: EDDIE, THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL

Dylan Smith as the title character

Taste in comedy is one of the most subjective things there is, right up there with music and the way one takes one's eggs (Douglas Adams was right, everybody in the fucking universe takes their eggs differently, it's uncanny). Some people like goofy comedy, some like fart jokes, some repartee, some odd people even find bald men smashing watermelons with hammers funny. Me? I like all the aforementioned except the watermelon business, even though I'll concede it a point or two on pure strangeness. But one particular thing I love is really, really dark deadpan shit deriving from and intertwined with graphic violence. Another particular thing I love is lots and lots of levels and meta out the fuckin wazoo. A third, truly special thing I find hilarious, are titles that are both elaborately on-the-nose and insane. That last is a bit of a stretch intended as a segue into the glorious, sublime fact that there is a movie that exists in the world that people can go see called Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal.

The title was what initially intrigued me. Then I saw this enthusiastic recommendation. And I thought, hey, what the fuck. What's the worst that can happen? Even if it sucks it'll be over in an hour twenty. So I decided to give it a whirl. And oh boy oh boy lemme tell ya. This picture's fucking great. It's funny, it's dark, it's fucking fucked the fuck up (in the best sense of that exalted designation), and it's kind of a brutal “stop frontin, you know this is pretty much the way it is” critique of the “tortured artist” mythos that hits the center of the bulls-eye.

Our protagonist is a Danish painter named Lars Olafssen who, in the midst of a creative dry spell, takes a teaching gig way out in the middle of goddamn nowhere in rural Canada. On the way out there, he hits a deer with his car, a situation he deals with in a way that is . . . well . . . kind of strange. His fellow art school teachers welcome him with varying degrees of warmth, and almost immediately Lars is warned about a student named Eddie, a fairly innocuous looking dude (apart from being a mute) whom they let sit in provided he doesn't disturb anyone. Lars hits it off with Eddie, who comes to live with Lars in his house.

In fairly short order, Lars comes to discover that Eddie has a nocturnal routine you can probably guess from looking at the title of the movie: left unchecked, Eddie walks in his sleep and eats people. Lars is a little nonplussed (I mean, dude, somnambu-cannibalism is some ya-don't-see-that-every-day shit if ever there was such a thing) but he soon finds that Eddie's wanderings and snacking is inspiring him to paint for the first time in ten years. And because he wants to keep painting, Eddie has to keep eating people.

And yeah, all this insanity is really fuckin funny. Thure Lindhart is equally adept at playing Lars as endearingly alien, weirdly creepy, and someone who is his art, in a terrific lead performance. Dylan Smith has an even steeper difficulty curve as Eddie, not overdoing the simpleton aspect of his waking repose or the mania of his tormented, ravenous sleep, and making us care about Eddie even when he's gnawing on someone's neck before they're dead. Stephen McHattie shows up in a smallish role as the craven representation of art as commerce and, as the devil always does, has all the best lines. (Ed. Note: he doesn't play the literal devil, he's just a guy. Gotta clarify with a picture this strange.)

Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal works as a horror comedy even if it isn't exactly that thing, primarily because its setting, atmosphere and tone are so utterly fucking weird. The violence is kind of matter of fact, and only one person seems to really give a shit that Eddie's running around eating people. Everyone else is far more concerned with Lars and his art: no atrocity so great that it cannot be swept under the rug in the interests of A Great Man engaged in the process of making Great Art. The movie makes something of a point of never showing the audience any of Lars' paintings that everyone oohs and ahhs over, nor the sculpture his “love interest” shows him. The concern here is more with the artist and the way people enable artistic turpitude. The picture's conclusion ties that point up nicely, in both form and content; if it's a smidge too neat, that's a minor quibble.

The important point is, holy shit this movie's good. If you've been waiting for a movie about a Danish painter in rural Canada whose roommate eats people—and I know you have—you're going to want to check this one out, and keep an eye on writer-director Boris Rodriguez, because this cat knows how to make movies.

BOOK TO FILM: THE HUNGER GAMES

I finally saw The Hunger Games Tuesday afternoon. It's not perfect, but I'm certainly not going to begrudge it the holy-moley-great-balls-of-fire-fuckgantic box office gross it's racking up. For all we want to be cranky old people farting at the younger generation for being nekulturny nihilistic retards, sometimes the shit the kids are into is pretty good. Hell, Justin Bieber doesn't suck. Yeah, I said it. Sure, “If I was your boyfriend I'd never let you go/I can take you places you ain't never been before” ain't exactly William Butler Yeats, sure it's funny when Bieber uses the word “swag” (as in swag-ger, fellow olds), sure he looks like a lesbian. But “Oh yeah, I'll tell you something I think you'll understand/When you say that something, I wanna hold your hand” is stupid too, no one knew what the fuck “gear” meant even at the height of Beatlemania, and Paul McCartney looked even more like a lesbian than Bieber until he died in that car crash and his slightly butcher doppleganger took his place and grew a mustache. Sure, John Lennon could have melted Biebs with telekinesis, but the kid makes perfectly competent pop music. He's way the fuck better than the pop music teenagers listened to when I was a teenager—I don't care how female and how twelve years old you once were, the Backstreet Boys are war criminals—and moreover, you couldn't get kids to read books at gunpoint in the mid-90s. The Harry Potter books changed all that, proving that as long as you didn't try to get kids to read Paul Bowles, they would read. Publishing companies went “whoa, shit, let's try that again,” and while that meant we have to suffer the shame of being a species that created the Twilight series, it also meant a bunch of other YA properties are out there keeping books in kids' hands. One of which, and arguably the premier non-Potter out there, is The Hunger Games trilogy.

Thus far I've read the first book and a chunk of the second, and I gotta say, they don't fuck around. Suzanne Collins, with sparse, direct prose, renders a genuinely dark and scary far-future dystopia, where a totalitarian regime has divided North America into 12 (formerly 13) Districts, each devoted to producing a resource needed to keep the wildly luxurious Capitol in the lifestyle they require. In the other corner, weighing in at a lot less than she would if she had enough to eat, representing District 12 (the poorest District, whose raison d'etre is its coal mines) is Katniss Everdeen, 16 years of age. Katniss provides for her mother and younger sister by sneaking out into the woods and hunting, which while illegal is tacitly permitted by the local Peacekeepers (read: cops), since District 12 is widely considered too backward to be dangerous to anyone. All this changes forever, very early in the first book, when it comes time for the Hunger Games, held annually, which involve each District providing a boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to fight to the death on TV until one champion remains. The champion then returns to his or her District and lives in government-underwritten splendor for life. Katniss' younger sister is selected to compete, at which point Katniss volunteers to take her place. Katniss and her male counterpart, baker's son Peeta, are whisked away to the Capitol to get a crash course in media relations before being tossed into the arena for the Games.

When reading The Hunger Games, one (fairly dorky movie industry inside baseball) thought kept recurring: “How the fuck are they going to bring this in as a PG-13?” At one point in the Games, after a party I won't name does something that really pisses Katniss off, she shoots him in the throat, yanks the arrow out, and watches (reasonably dispassionately) as the guy chokes to death on his own blood. Now, I'm definitely on the “more the merrier” side of the ownage fence, but that's an R to me. So I knew that bit probably wasn't going to be in the movie (at least until Gareth Evans does the reboot with Iko Uwais in drag as Katniss) but at the same time, the thing Katniss is pissed off about is A Really Big Deal, narrative-wise, so if she just gives the dude a wedgie the significance of the moment is lost. There are a few other key moments where things get a bit bloody, too. It's not so much that I thought a movie version would be soft, it's that I was impressed with how dark the book gets. It “goes there.”

And, as much as ratings board issues and length restrictions made changes in the adaptation mandatory, the movie does too. Working from a script on which he collaborated with Collins herself and the very talented screenwriter Billy Ray, director Gary Ross made the cinematic equivalent of what The Hunger Games was as a book: an exciting, occasionally rough, but fiercely compelling SF action picture. Freed from the first-person narration in the book that limits the action strictly to what Katniss does, observes, and remembers, the movie is able to provide context to the world of the story, though this is a bit of a double-edged sword, as knowing more about what's going on kind of takes the edge off certain aspects of Katniss' path through the Games, and some of the more frightening surprises. Still, it's a damn solid movie.

Its one major debit as a movie is its overuse of handheld camera. Now, I'm not as militantly anti-shaky-cam as some, and it doesn't give me motion sickness or anything. But there's a time and a place. (Ed. Note: read that last sentence in your head as Paul Henreid. You're welcome.) I think the real problem is that Hollywood needs to either a) start cutting its cocaine with something a little more chemically equanimous, like, I don't know, Valium or something, or b) stop giving its camera operators quite so much of the shit, because man, the camera in The Hunger Games is jittery. Combined with the quick cutting, a lot of the movie is lost in a blur. Weirdly, the action sequences (some of which were directed by Steven Soderbergh, who's kind of the Energizer bunny of cinema; I pictured him coming up to Gary Ross being like, “Man, principal photography doesn't start for my other four movies for like three days, man, I need a fix, man, I need to shoot something, I don't give a fuck, man, I'll shoot second unit for you man, please, man, I'll suck your dick!”) are more visually clear than the bits where Jennifer Lawrence is just walking down a path in District 12 moodily contemplating her downtrodden existence. You get used to it (if you're able to) after a while, but the bit when they're arriving at the Capitol and seeing just how much more it is in ever sense than anything Katniss or Peeta have ever seen would have worked a lot better if the damn camera wasn't doing its coke-freak-out tarantella all over the fuckin place.

But anyway, enough of the problems. There's plenty that's awesome about The Hunger Games, and it all starts with the aforementioned Ms. Lawrence. Jennifer Lawrence is made out of movie star. She's gorgeous, she can act, she's got terrific physical presence. And there's this air of “wait . . . you're serious? You mean I get to make movies? That's ridiculous, and awesome, but I mean, come on. You're not seriously letting me be in movies, right?” about her that seems totally unaffected, and is endlessly endearing. She'll play along with the “joke” and keep being in movies until someone yells “psych!” at which point she'll shrug it off and go right on doing whatever. Except if she keeps being this awesome in everything she's in (Winter's Bone's still out there to watch, too) no one's yelling “psych” for a long, long time. Everyone's good in the movie, especially Lenny Kravitz, who's just terrific in the small but key role of Katniss' stylist Cinna, Woody Harrelson, quietly peaking as one of the best character actors alive as the drunken and haunted mentor and ex-Hunger Games champion Haymitch, and a young actor named Amandla Stenberg, as Rue, a District 11 competitor Katniss befriends over the course of the Games, who turns in a really affecting performance without the benefit of a ton of dialogue, but all Rue's subtext shines on the screen.

Most of the core story of The Hunger Games is right there on screen. A number of details of the story are presented with little or no explanation, which is fine as fan service, but might leave people who haven't read the book out in the cold. The only two worth mentioning (and it's something that could quite easily be addressed in the next movie) are, first, the pin Katniss acquires early in the movie, that she gives to her sister for luck, only to have returned when it turns out Katniss is going to be competing in the Hunger Games, and which is subsequently incorporated into one of her costumes by her stylist. It's identified as a “mockingjay,” though it's never explained what a mockingjay is. The book explains a mockingjay is a hybrid bird genetically engineered by the Capitol as a means of spying on the people, only it proves uncontrollable and slips the Capitol's grasp, living on as a signifier of the frailty of totalitarian rule. Also, Mockingjay is the title of the third and final book in the series, implying that it's pretty damn important. Still, with the first movie being entirely concerned with Katniss competing in the Hunger Games and finding that to be just the beginning, with the rebellion of the Districts (briefly addressed in the movie, in a scene not in the book that ends up being one of the movie's most powerful moments) coming mainly later on in the series, there is still time for the explanation of the significance of the mockingjay.

The second omission is a little more problematic. In the books, food is an enormously important thing. Katniss and nearly everyone else in District 12 is constantly on the brink of starvation, even though the ruling regime could feed everyone with little more difficulty than a snap of the fingers. It's a reminder of the power of the Capitol, and virtually every moment of Katniss' day at home is given over to acquiring and trading for food. The Hunger Games are so called because the winner never has to go hungry again, and as a reminder that their (optional) hunger is a symbol of the power the contestants' (and everyone else's) rulers have over them. The movie doesn't have as much time to address this as the book, with that exposition having to share room with all the other crap the movie has to pack into its first act, and while Jennifer Lawrence tells her mother “Don't let [my sister] starve!” that's about it. It wouldn't be that big a deal—any book loses pages on the way to the screen—except the movie's called, ya know, The Hunger Games.

That narrative shortcoming, and all that “holy shit give the fuckin camera operator some Thorazine” camerawork, are the only things really holding The Hunger Games back from being legitimately great as opposed to just really good. And, in a way, the jittery camerawork is the equivalent of Suzanne Collins' occasionally clunky prose, which cancels it out as a deal-breaker for the movie, which has the benefit of the book's dark, intense relentless narrative momentum. It's a damn easy movie to get caught up in. Damn, damn easy. And that's a blockbuster's job. I can nitpick the camerawork and the vagaries of book-to-film adaptation all the livelong day, but the most important thing about The Hunger Games is, it's the kind of movie whose strengths inspire a great big I-don't-give-a-fuck about its weaknesses. And, much like at the top where I compared Justin Bieber to Paul McCartney, allow me an additional sacrilege: The Hunger Games inspires a similar level of I'm-caught-up-in-it-so-fuck-the-parts-that-don't-work as Star Wars. By which I mean the real Star Wars, the one from the 70s.

Now, there's no way The Hunger Games can have the same cultural impact as Star Wars, which literally reinvented the movie industry almost singlehandedly. But if the kids who are the same age now as the kids were who made Star Wars into the institution is today grow up venerating The Hunger Games movie equivalently to Star Wars, it's not that they're assholes, or they don't get it (to reference an earlier movie featuring the actor who played Peeta, the kids are all right.) It's a legit comparison, speaking strictly as cinema.

All inflammatory nerd provocations aside though, here's to Jennifer Lawrence, movie star, who'll keep The Girl On Fire burning forevermore. May the rest of the movies in the series work as well as pop cinema as the first.

THE HUNGER RAID

Today's the big day! After months and months of hype . . . The Raid: Redemption finally opens today! FUCK YEAH! Here's my thing I wrote about it for Hudak the other day, and here's a link to the review by Lou Lumenick of the New York Post, which is pretty much exactly what I would have said in a proper review except without a star rating (though 3 out of 4 is pretty much spot-on) and way the fuck more cursing.

Oh yeah, and some independent movie with Jennifer Lawrence in it comes out today. Winter's Bone 2: Wintrier and Bonier, I think it's called. So, ya know, go support that. (On a serious note, dude, fucking The Hunger Games is projected to gross $160 million this weekend. That shit is insane. That's like fucking Ancient fucking Rome.)

AN SEAN GARDA: WHY BRENDAN GLEESON IS SO AWESOME IN THE GUARD (AND WHY I NEED TO LAY OFF THE BILINGUAL PUNS)

Brendan Gleeson in both The Guard and excellent company.

St. Patrick's Day is upon us once again. For deep contemplation of the holiday itself, I find once again unable to top my first St. Patrick's Day post, so read that if you like, but today we have very pressing business at hand. We gotta kick it for a minute about how good Brendan Gleeson is in The Guard.

He's kind of the final word in dopeness in that movie. From that opening scene with the drunk drugged-up douchebags driving, intercut with Brendan Gleeson being all reluctant to have to work and shit, to where he finds them after they crash and die (because of course they crash and die, THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DRINK AND DRIVE, SHITHEADS) and sees that bag of E pills, fucking takes one, then looks out at the horizon and goes “What a beautiful fookin' day . . .” Tone, set.

I didn't even know whether he was a good or bad guy at that point, but I knew it was going to be a hell of a ride. And it was, through the murder investigations, the revelation that there's an international drug ring in Galway, the arrival of a straight-laced FBI guy (Don Cheadle) tasked with dealing with said drug ring, and the fact that Brendan Gleeson is just slamming pints, playing video games, menaging a couple hookers in the trois on his “day off” (Brendan Gleeson takes leisure seriously), and generally just IRL trolling the living shit out of everyone who crosses his path.

The Guard is less a police procedural (it's barely even that) than it is a character study, but holy shit is it an interesting character study. Everyone in the movie is a slight variation on a standard cop movie archetype (the loose cannon cop, the straight arrow partner, the other straight arrow partner, the widow of the guy who gets killed, the bad guys—the friendly one, the scary quiet one, and the wisecracking psycho—the hooker(s) with a heart of gold. . .) but in every case that slight variation is in the direction of greater depth. There are no dull characters in the movie, but Brendan Gleeson is fascinating. He's way overqualified for the life of a small-town cop, but nonetheless content with it. The encroachment of the baddies with their drug business and the FBI's investigation thereof shakes him out of his stasis, and forces him to live up to his intelligence and talent level.

The fact that we never quite learn what makes Brendan Gleeson tick is kind of the point. He might have finished 4th in swimming at the Seoul Olympics, it might be bullshit. He might not give a fuck about anything, or he might just have no reason to. He might, as Don Cheadle puts it, be “really motherfuckin' dumb, or really motherfuckin' smart.” But the evidence points to the latter. While Brendan Gleeson's ultimate fate is left a bit ambiguous, the movie ends satisfyingly because whatever actually happens to him at the end, it happened on Brendan Gleeson's terms. Which is as it fucking should be.

That's all I got, really. The Guard is great and Brendan Gleeson fucking owns. And as much as his character in The Guard likes a pint, he's enough of an instinctive contrarian to avoid going full retard on St. Patrick's Day, which makes him, more than any other character in contemporary cinema, truly a man after my own heart. (And if Fat Guy Nation ever needs a Taoiseach, Brendan Gleeson is fucking it.)

GAME CHANGE OF THRONES

So I watched Game Change and it was okay, except it was kind of like watching cable news while having drinks with Steve Schmidt and having him be all like “Yeah, y'know, the real story behind such and such is blah blah blah” and you're like “Dude, I kind of inferred that on my own” and he's like “Yeah, well, what do you expect from a veteran political operative, candor?” and you're like, “Yeah, good point.”

Woody Harrelson's great as Schmidt, and Julianne Moore does a rockin' Sarah Palin, but the woman who almost became vice president (Ed. Note: 2008 was both a year and the author's diastolic blood pressure that whole fucking campaign) remains elusive; the writers and filmmakers are clearly both fascinated and a bit horrified by her, but they're just as curious for genuine insight as the audience remains after the movie's over. It's nicely crafted and engrossing and there are some nicely observed moments, but really, this shit just happened and there's nothing really new. I'd been planning to write about it, but . . . well . . . I ain't got shit to say. As the poet Rasheed Wallace said on two separate occasions about something other than presidential politics, “It is what it is,” and “Both teams played hard.”

But ohhhhhhhh shit. Playing a couple HBO channels over from Game Change was the Game of Thrones season 1 episode “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things,” also known as the episode when, for me, Game of Thrones became Game of Owns, must-see TV. And it was like I was shlepping to Damascus and the skies opened up: Game Change of Thrones. (Warning: Game of Owns spoilers after this awesome photograph.)

Well, this is kind of a spoiler, too....

We open with Sarah, up in the north, by The Wall, illegally hunting direwolves. Word comes from King's Landing that the King needs a new Hand after Sean Bean gets got. Someone has the derptastic idea to appoint Sarah, who naturally goes “Ohh, you betcha!” and gets on her horse. Cut to a scene where Tyrion “Peter Dinklage” Lannister is getting blown while drinking a whole flagon of mead and going “Well that's a brilliant idea if ever I've heard one. Grip the shaft a bit there, love.” Cersei immediately hatches five horrendously devious assassination plots, not against Sarah, but just because. The gay Baratheon kid (Renly? Not having read the books it's a little difficult to remember all the names sometimes) goes “Goddammit, not only is my storyline underwritten, now I got this Jesus freak to deal with.” Jon Snow broods. Littlefinger and the eunuch welcome Sarah with open arms and big smiles and Sarah's like “Ooh, that bald fella there, he seems kinda funny” and dislikes Littlefinger because Aiden Gillen played Carcetti, a Democrat, on The Wire.

I mean, she'd be written out of the show after one or two episodes for being a dipshit and she'd end up being the Nikki and Paulo of Game of Thrones, but there'd be a fuck of a lot more ownage than there was in Game Change. Also, having his head cut off by Sarah Palin is almost ignominious enough an end for Joffrey Baratheon.

ON GENDER SEMIOTICS, GENRE GENTRIFICATION, AND RAW, UNCUT OWNAGE: HAYWIRE

Spoiler alert: when she catches the guy, she fucks his ass up.

Oh, Haywire. Where do we begin? With Gina Carano, the newest inductee into the Hall of Ownage? With Steven Soderbergh ticking off another genre conquered? With the utterly bizarre fact that Bill Paxton might give the best performance (and it's not that everybody else sucks, either, terrifyingly)? So much to discuss in a finite universe. The short version is it fucking rocks and you all should see it because it wasn't shot on film or digital video, it was filmed on pure fucking win.

Soderbergh reunited with the writer of The Limey (and opponent in one of the greatest “angry guy vs. passive aggressive wiseass” fights of all time on the DVD commentary track of same), Lem Dobbs, for Haywire, and the result is exactly the kind of cool, flashback-y, intelligent exercise in pure style that, in one's wildest dreams, one hopes for with a new episode of the Lem & Steve show. This one stars retired MMA fighter Gina Carano, whom we learn is an ex-Marine now kicking ass in the private sector, but before anyone even says a word, it's clear that she can (and will) fuck you up.

In a bizarre way, Haywire is of a piece with Soderbergh's Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience, discounting the obvious differences that it has twenty-five times the budget and features wall-to-wall ownage. All three are looks at different variations of being a woman who'd be doing fine if all the fuckin men would stop acting the fool for five seconds, with a protagonist who is not (yet) a professional actor (Sasha Grey got paid to be in movies, but . . . well, let's just say they were in a different genre). However, Gina Carano has a lot more support around her than Debbie Doebereiner (who didn't need any) and Sasha Grey (who could have used a bit more, though she was still better than most critics gave her credit for), as nearly the entire speaking cast are famous dudes, all of whom are terrific: Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, all guys we're used to being awesome . . . but then the oddity tier with French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz (who also acts occasionally), Bill Paxton (?), and Channing Tatum (???) . . . all of whom are also really good. Mathieu Kassovitz, that makes sense, he's French, that's how they do, but Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum putting in good performances—as Gina Carano's dad and maybe-in-a-parallel-universe-boyfriend type, respectively—that's just silly. And yet, it's true.

The story starts in media res, opening with Gina Carano, established as awesome in one camera move—say, why doesn't that Peter Andrews fellow work more?—tentatively heading into a diner in upstate New York for a cup of tea. Channing Tatum shows up and she's like “shit” (at this point, not knowing what her backstory was, I entertained the possibility she might be a film critic) and Channing Tatum Channing Tatums his way into the diner and a bit of cool oblique spy movie dialogue ensues until it becomes necessary for Gina Carano to unleash holy hell and beat the living shit out of him. He gets in some good shots before she puts him on his ass, at which point she shanghais civilian Michael Angarano, borrows his car, gets him to field dress her arm, and, for reasons that become clear later, tells him her story to date.

It's a humdinger, full of double-crosses, handsome men, copious ownage, and sweet David Holmes music. The kind of picture it is, we should probably leave the plot alone right here, because there are a few good surprises and things that you see coming a mile away where you're like “is this really this obvious or is there another level” and discovering whether they are or not is fun.

Also, as well-constructed as the plot is—and for a boilerplate “one-[wo]man ownage machine fends for [her]self against evil white guys in suits and attempts to restore [her] good name” plot it is well-constructed—the main attraction in Haywire is the execution, and the casual, almost offhand brilliance of the way it deals with gender. Soderbergh understands the genre on a fundamental level. He knows that if you throw in a bunch of windy, didactic dialogue and try to make your statements about gender and genre that way the audience for ownage pictures—not always the most progressive, sadly—is going to start fidgeting and grumbling what the fuck is this bullshit. No, Soderbergh knows the way. Ownage upfront. Gender commentary in the details through the deft use of signifiers.

This is not to say that Haywire isn't entirely about gender. It is. Gina Carano is the only woman in the picture, and being a Soderbergh joint, on a certain level the picture is about Gina Carano as a martial artist playing the lead in an action movie where she's the only woman who owns the bejesus out of all the men, and what that implies for cinema and gender. (Ed. Note: this is why Steven Soderbergh is the fucking best) When Ewan McGregor asks Gina Carano to pretend to be Michael Fassbender's wife for a job, her indignance on being the “eye candy” almost knocks Ewan McGregor through a wall, and she concludes by cracking “Maybe [Michael Fassbender] can wear the dress.”

Gina Carano is absolutely in charge. Channing Tatum? “Sure, I'll hit that.” Michael Fassbender? “Woooooooowwwwwwww, yeah, he's hot.” But always in a very in-control “sure he's hot but if he pulls anything I'll smash his face off something sharp and break every bone in his body and then if I think he's worth wasting a bullet on I'll light him the fuck up” kind of way. But still, as awesome and fully-versed in the fine arts of ownage as she is, the movie does acknowledge the issues inherent to kicking a larger opponent's ass. Some action pictures have 100 lb women punching pro football players in the face and crushing their skulls, which is cool and everything but nonetheless bullshit because physics. Gina Carano looking like a legit athlete (because she is) and being a women's middleweight—which is the same as a dudes' welterweight—eases the suspension of disbelief of something like Salt, with flyweight Angelina Jolie crushing skulls with her fists, slightly. But still, she has to compensate with technique, and this is where being a real martial artist comes in handy. Her moves employ leverage, getting the angle just right, and precision, and then using muscles. At one point, she out-Onatopps Famke Janssen in Goldeneye, asphyxiating [name of actor redacted] between her thighs, which is legendary for the several obvious reasons (ownage/hawwwwwt/Bond reference), but also because the continuity of the run in her tights that results from fighting with the guy is perfect.

And it's little details like that, and the awesome father-daughter relationship between her and Bill Paxton (who's like, “I love my little girl, but she could kung fu me in half without blinking . . . so proud! *wipes away tear*”) that lets Haywire have its cake and eat it too by simultaneously being exactly like the kind of picture Sly Stallone could have made in about 1986 (or Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1992) and yet something more. Cuz, I mean, sure, it's a gentrified Golan-Globus/Cannon Films picture . . . but fuckin a, man, it's a gentrified Golan-Globus/Cannon Films picture! This is why it's okay that Gina Carano's line readings are a bit monotone and her facial expression doesn't change that much. Dude, Sly Stallone went years at a time without changing his facial expression. Jean-Claude Van Damme his whole fucking career, practically. Action stars don't have to be “good” actors. They have to own.

And this is why Gina Carano is inducted into the Hall of Ownage, on the basis of one lead role only. Even if she does other pictures that suck, she'll always have this. Soderbergh and Dobbs set things up so she doesn't have to do any more acting than she has to, and what little she does have to works within the context of the movie. It also helps that she's got such a great supporting cast, in the truest sense of the term: good actors giving her just the right energy to work with, which is why the idea of a star vehicle starring the least famous person in the movie (another irony Soderbergh no doubt loves) works. It's all set up to make Gina Carano look good, and she does not squander it at all.

(Minor aside here: Michael Douglas is fucking rad as hell in this in the Evil White Guy In A Suit role, that with typical Soderbergh-ian subversiveness may or not be actually evil, but is totally an Evil White Guy In A Suit because Michael Douglas is awesome. In fact, he's playing the James Rebhorn role in this! Rebhorn taught him well. Give me a second to bask in the beauty of the interconnectedness of all things, then let's continue)

I mean, goddamn, Haywire's just about perfect. It's a marvelously tight ownage picture, with a rare compositional clarity and precision of structure that comes from having a really good director in charge. The fact that a director of Steven Soderbergh's stature and talents decided to make an ownage picture is just beautiful, and the fact that he pulled it off so perfectly is no mean feat. May this launch Gina Carano's movie career, and in a different direction than Out of Sight launched Jennifer Lopez, speaking of Steven Soderbergh. But none of that matters. What does is, Haywire is fucking great. Go see it, if you have any interest in things that own.

GUNS GUNS GUNS!

I present all in search of a time-killer with the Internet Movie Firearms Database. Because Robocop is one of the greatest things to ever exist, start with it. You're welcome.

LET'S GIVE OUT SOME AWARDS! THE "BEST" OF 2011

The more generic the better, that's our motto.

This year, inspired by the glut of awards-season stuff I've been reading for weeks on Twitter, I decided to give out my own awards. Mine are free of the capricious political bullshit (to say nothing of the sentimentality) that infects the Oscars. No, mine are more likely to result in my accidentally awarding Best Supporting Actor to Rajon Rondo because I'm getting distracted by the Celtics-Heat game on the TV as I type this. Which would be a neat little surrealist statement about how stupid movie awards are, but I'm going to stay on topic. EVEN IF IT KILLS ME.

As you'll notice, there are categories here that you won't find on the Oscars. These awards, not having been voted on by any kind of electoral body or bunch of critics or even my mom or her cat—and lemme tell ya, the cat was pissed at the over-representation of dogs this year, damn—just me and my lil ol' foul-mouthed lonesome. So these are all my usual blend of hyper-erudite genius, axe-grinding, and wildly overblown advocacy. And, of course, lots and lots of fucking cursing. Which is why the only possible nickname for the first annual Movies By Bowes ™ Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Scientology Awards is . . . The Fuckos. Let us now begin. Some spoilers, unavoidably, so be forewarned.


ACTING:

Best Performance By An Actor, male: George Clooney, The Descendants. It's an amazingly good performance, with so much done in the eyes. It helps that the movie's fucking great too, but a huge part of it being great is Clooney. This was a great year for lead performances by men; there are at least seven that I wouldn't mind seeing win the Oscar. For the Oscar, because it'd be awesome, I'm advocating Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor, but this here's “best” and that means Clooney this year. Though seriously, Brad Pitt in Tree of Life or Moneyball, Clooney, Gary Oldman, the dude from The Artist, Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes . . . loaded fuckin' year.

Best Performance By An Actor, female: Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method. When I first saw this, I couldn't quite figure out what it was about her performance that struck me as off. I thought it might have had something to do with Keira Knightley not having the formal training that Fassbender, Viggo, and everyone else had. But something I couldn't quite describe was telling me “Resist the knee-jerk reaction that she sucked. She didn't. Figure out why she didn't.” And the conclusion I came to was that her character (and characterization) was a challenge to the way men traditionally view women. She's very sexual but not in a way that's geared toward pleasing men. She's way the hell smart. And by the end of the picture, when she's figured out how to make her way in the world, she doesn't really need Fassbender (the POV character for dudes in the audience) anymore. So that's the character. As for the performance, Keira Knightley keeps throwing in these little darts to keep everyone off balance, so that no one, in the movie or out, quite knows what to make of her. She pulls all the focus to her, which sometimes works to the detriment of the movie at large but since A Dangerous Method is, more or less, all about her—she's the engine that drives the whole thing, including the Fassbender/Viggo Jung/Freud relationship—she did the job. And that's why Keira Knightley's performance in that picture deserves a little more love than she's been getting this award season. (6/1/12 EDIT: The preceding paragraph was written before I saw Young Adult. Charlize Theron was better. Sorry, Keira; I still stand by the above assessment of your performance, you have to share the trophy though.)

Best Performance By A Movie Star, male: I know, I know: “What the fuck, George Clooney's not a movie star?” Yeah, he totally is, he just happened to also out-act all the AC-TORRRRRs this year. This here's about swagger, ownage, and charisma, the un-subtle arts. And this category was looooooooooaded this year. From Vincenzo Gasolina (not to mention the Rock, nor Paul Walker) in Fast Five, to Baby Goose in Drive, to Salman Khan in Bodyguard, to Shahrukh Khan's both-barrels bid to reassert his status as king in Ra.One and Don 2 (hey, what can I say, they grow good movie stars in India, about which more later in the acting categories), it's Shahrukh's American analogue who takes this one: Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Dude hung off the hundred and what the fuck floor of the fuckin Burj Khalifa (roughly “REALLY FUCKING TALL BUILDING” in Arabic) by himself and did all that wacky rappelling shit and propped himself up on the fucking building by basically telling the building “Building? I'm a fuckin movie star. I can just chill here, right?” and the building went, “Sure. You are Tom Cruise, after all.” It was real nice to see Tom Cruise be the Tom Cruise that made him Tom Cruise again. That movie was fucking dope. Good to have ya back, Tom.

Best Performance By A Movie Star, female: Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I still think the book is horseshit and that Lisbeth Salander is a creepy jerk-off fantasy. But holy God Rooney Mara swaggered in that. The script material undercut her but she was just like “Fuck this shit, I didn't get all these piercings for real and start smoking for real and get in shape for all those nude scenes I didn't really need to do but did anyway because I ain't no punk . . . I didn't do all this fuckin shit to let a fuckin script undercut me. Prepare to be owned.” Et voila.

Best Performance By A Dog: Another weirdly loaded category this year. I was about an inch and a half from giving this to that wonderfully taciturn long-faced dog in Hugo, especially because Marty being a wise-ass with the 3D really let us into that dog's trip, but I have to be a conventional asshole and give this one to Uggie in The Artist. It is “best” performance by a dog, after all.

Best Performance By A Cat: The Cat, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Before Stieg Shithead Larsson (spoiler alert) iced the cat in a sensationalist hysterical bid to get the audience to really hate the bad guy, there was enough business with the cat that Daniel Craig got to chill with him a bit and let David “Honey Badger” Fincher make the dumb joke “huh huh Blomkvist is a pussy, get it? Hahahahaha” because why not. I liked that cat. I didn't like him getting iced. (End spoiler)

Best Performance by a Dude Playing A Chimp: This whole category is just cuz of Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar is truth. Caesar is revolution. Caesar Occupies your entire shit. Yeah a huge part of that was the VFX, but they just rendered what Serkis gave 'em. Don't forget this movie, and don't sleep on it. This was good stuff.

Raddest Old Guy: Amitabh Bachchan, Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap. He is the Big B. All hail. There were other cool things about this movie, like Sonu Sood and the adorable Charmy (oh, Charmy . . .) but it would have just been another “meh, whatever” picture without Amitabh holding it the fuck down in the lead. He's pushing 70 but still owned the living crap out of every bad guy in the whole picture without even smudging any of those crazy white suits of his.

Best Nudity: This is a total protest category about how all the goddamn time in movies filmmakers feel like they have to justify nudity or de-eroticize it and it all has to be for some kind of “purpose.” Fuck that shit. So, while 2011 featured a lot of very attractive actresses appearing full-frontally nude, the context was frequently such that the audience was being scolded not to find it hot. Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty, lit and made up luminously, is being pawed by skeevy old dudes, who are saddened by the experience (also that movie is inert, miserable crap). Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, we already covered that. So I guess by default it's Carey Mulligan in Shame because at least, brother-sister weirdness aside when Fassbender finds her in the shower, she's just kinda kickin' it, and she does look good, and the purpose of the scene isn't to leer over her or make her into some bullshit fantasy character. Actually, my rationalization just convinced me to strike the “default” part of that. Carey Mulligan, Shame.

Best Dudity: Michael Fassbender, Shame. Of course it was him. It had to be him. Michael Fassbender has a very good chance of being the first actor in the history of the Oscars whose penis gets a nomination while he splits the vote between his performances in this, Jane Eyre, A Dangerous Method, and X-Men. Cue months of tabloid stories about the split in the partnership between Michael Fassbender's Penis and Michael Fassbender; Fassbender's penis will go off to LA and make big gaudy movies and wear gold chains and hang out with fast women and start doing coke, while Fassbender spends most of his time bereft, on airplanes, heading to do another play or art movie, missing his old friend, before a tearful reunion in the third act preceding a renewed and glorious collaboration as the music and credits swell. A final kiss will only be possible if Fassbender does some serious yoga in preparation.


DIRECTING:

Steven Spielberg, energized by War Horse and Tintin, plans to direct this many movies in 2012

Best Directing, Big Budget: Martin Scorsese, Hugo. I had problems with this picture but exactly none of them had anything to do with what Marty S. brought to the table. Marty had a big fuckin' vision, he got someone to give him $150 million and some 3D cameras and he went and got a DP and a design team that'll make ya change gods. Marty got performances out of the kids, he kept Sacha Baron Cohen from flipping out and taking over the movie, and he got Ben Kingsley and said, “Be Ben Kingsley.” And Ben Kingsley said, “Fuck that, I'm gonna be George Méliès.” And Marty said, “Works for me. See you on set.” This picture drove me bonkers while I was watching it because I wanted to go find the writers and kick them in the balls for not being able to keep up with Marty's brain, but the more I think about it, the more I'm like, goddamn, that Marty S. sure knows what the hell he's doing with this filmmaking racket. If he keeps it up he might make something of himself.

Best Directing, Small Budget: Joe Cornish, Attack The Block. Yeah, $13 million's a lot of money in regular people terms, but it's a fuck of a lot less than 150, and Attack The Block's a better movie than Hugo is, so the math is pretty much done. In ten years, people are going to be like, “Yeah, I saw Attack The Block in theaters” and people are going to be like “Whooooooa . . . cool!” Because in ten years Attack The Block is going to be a cult classic of near-Lebowski (chill the fuck out, I said “near”) proportions. This is absolute. Quote this back to me in ten years and I'll say, “Don't ever argue with the big dog, the big dog's always right.”

Best Directing of Actors: Alexander Payne, The Descendants. This would have been close if Woody hadn't fucked up Rachel McAdams' character in Midnight In Paris, but he did, so it's not. Payne got performances out of George Clooney, multiple different kids (the youngest we can credit to Payne and maybe even Nick Krause as Sid channeling a hetero Keanu, but to be fair, when Shailene Woodley decides it's time to move on from that life of the American teenager show or whatever it is, she's going to be just fine with or without Alexander Payne), Beau Bridges, and the less scary killer from Scream, who's now all growns up and stuff. They all feel like real people who are of that place; whether or not they actually resemble native Hawaiians is up to Hawaiians to say, but there's a great connection between the actors and the place, and it's a movie to a very large degree about place. And that's that.

Best Directing of Ownage Sequences: Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive. Could just as easily have been Justin Lin for Fast Five, Brad Bird in Mission Impossible: Motherfuckers I Shot Tom Cruise Hanging Off The Top Of The Fucking Burj Khalia: A Brad Bird Film Directed By Brad Bird's Testicles (the only reason he doesn't win this is because Tom Cruise owning Michael Nyqvist at the end wasn't as impressive as it might have been because, come on, Michael Nyqvist? Still a pretty cool sequence with all the moving parts, but definitely loses points because by that point Tom Cruise has demonstrated sufficient awesomeness that getting his ass kicked by the guy from the shitty Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed implausible.) No, The Long And Winding Refn takes this one because hammers, straight razors, and Clippers games. And for involving Albert Brooks in an enterprise where he owns someone somehow other than verbally (and then doing it again) and having the audience be like, “Daaaaaaaamn, Albert Brooks a bad motherfucker!” rather than “Really? Albert Brooks? Please.” That right there wins this category, no question.

Best Understated Yet Vividly Clear Political Statement: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation. This movie was so goddamn good you forget it's a foreign movie—shit, I forgot I was reading subtitles—because the people are so recognizably and universally people. Then you're like, why's she so dead set on amscraying the country with the daughter (who's amazing in this, by the way), and why are these random schlubs in shitty offices wielding omnipotent power over these people's . . . ohhhh, right. It's a totalitarian regime where religion and the state control everything. That didn't even hit me until the final scene, at which point it just popped up in high definition like, “oh yeah, none of this shit needed to happen.” (Ed. Note: the reason Rise of the Planet of the Apes didn't take this is, if you'll recall, the political message wasn't subtle. It was “FUCK THE STATE, WE DROP EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS OFF OF BRIDGES IN FLAMING HELICOPTERS UP IN THIS. WHAT.”)

Most Unexpected Homage: Woody's fucking Inception trip in the Belle Époque sequence in Midnight In Paris. Okay, okay, I know it wasn't a straight-up homage to Inception. It just needs mentioning how great Midnight In Paris was a few dozen more times. And because the idea of Woody Allen directing Inception is really funny.


VISUALS & EDITING:

Raoul Coutard

Achievement in Camera Mastery: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree Of Life. Know why all the voice-overs in that were spoken in stunned fragmented whispers? They were watching the dailies while trying to talk. Those images were powerful, dude.

Most Immersive Production Design: The team that brought you Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I said in my Tor.com review, it felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s. And, well, yeah. It felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s.

Best Use of Visuals As an Expository Tool: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. They packed hundreds of pages of Stieg Larsson's bullshit into brisk, completely coherent minutes. That picture may have been two and a half hours but it was a fast two and a half, for sure.

Best Shot: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Gary Oldman + David Dencik + airplane slowly taxiing up behind them. Mmm mmm mmm that's some good stuff. Though, call me crazy, that one continuous shot in Hanna when Eric Bana walks through the airport, gets each baddie hiding behind each pillar to start following him, then lures them down into that underground walkway and owns all of them, concluding with throwing a knife through a dude's face (done without cutting away!) is a close second, and even better than Joe Wright's massive Dunkirk shot in Atonement, which was cool but it was also the only good thing about that movie. But there's something to be said for understated subtlety, which is why the Tinker Tailor airplane shot takes this one.

Uncanny Valley Memorial Achievement in VFX Verisimilitude: Rise. Dude Caesar was fucking real. (Resisted the urge to give this to the kid in Hugo, because otherworldly though he and those anime blue eyes were, he actually was a real person, I'm told.)

Best Editing, Action Movie: Drive. Cheating slightly because it's not an action movie, per se (as that batshit insane lawsuit plaintiff realized, much to her dismay) but the action sequences in this are put together fucking amaaaaaazingly. Patience goes well with action. Who knew?

Best Editing, Non-Action Movie: A Separation. Trust, that editing is crazy good. That movie isn't much more than people talking for an hour forty but damn is it ever intense. That's part writing and part performances, but the medium is montage. (Not in the Team America sense, wiseass, we talkin bout Eisenstein.)

Best Editing, “Damn, that picture didn't feel near that long” category: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Two and a half hours, and it barely felt half that. Runner-up, Fast Five, which—bizarrely—was two hours and twenty minutes long. It felt like the hour forty-five it should have been in any rational universe, which leads me to believe that Justin Lin might know the Jedi mind trick.


MUSIC:

Best Original Score: Attack The Block. Nothing else other than Hanna even need think about asking to be part of this category; while the Chemical Brothers did an excellent job with that, that movie wasn't propelled by the score to the same extent Attack The Block was. Attack The Block owns all. Not only does it work perfectly in the movie, it's the best goddamn writing music ever recorded.

Best Original Song: “Life's A Happy Song,” The Muppets. Though I'll hear arguments for several other songs from that movie. And the title song from Bodyguard, with the whistle-whistle, flex-flex, guitar-guitar hook. But “Life's A Happy Song” for the win.

Best Basically Original Song: “A Real Hero,” Drive. Everyone whined about it being in their heads for weeks/months afterward but you know why? Because it's a good song, that's why.

Best Use of a Previously Existing Song: the Soviet national anthem, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. That scene at the Circus' Christmas party before any of the bad shit happens, and they're all a little lit and start singing along . . . that's just awesome. It's a nerd joke, it's them kind of making a dark joke about the enemy, but also, all political implications aside, that's a really good fucking song; The Hunt For Red October would have won this category with the same song in 1990.

Best Song Cast As Pearls Before Swine In A Shitty Movie: “Shelter,” The xx, I Am Number Four. Terrible movie, and the song was used really badly, just because the xx were trendy when they were shooting the movie. But, even though no one cares about the xx anymore (nor do they care about I Am Number Four, thankfully), this song is still great and their album has a bunch of other good stuff on it.

Best Soundtrack: Midnight In Paris. Seriously. This might have been Woody's best soundtrack ever. “But what about the soundtrack to Drive?” What about the soundtrack to Drive? Woody's got Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker and Jacques fucking Offenbach on this fuckin thing. The soundtrack to The Descendants with all the Hawaiian stuff is right up there, but when Woody's awake and paying attention to detail, really good things happen.


SILLINESS:

All due respect to Melissa McCarthy, this was the year's breakout comedienne.

Best Joke: When Kumar goes to cop some weed off Patton Oswalt's mall Santa in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and he's going through all the Christmas-themed kinds of weed and a couple Hanukah ones, Kumar mentions something being as good as the “Diwali Dank” Patton Oswalt had had in October. That was a damn good joke.

Funniest Movie: The Trip. Going by US release date, it totally counts. GENTLEMEN TO BED.

Achievement in Unintentional Comedy: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. Everything about this is funny, from the fact that they made a movie out of the most boring part of Atlas Shrugged, to the fact that the adaptation goes out of its way to make the material seem as dumb as possible. Not enough was made out of the fact that the director voted for Barack in '08; this movie seems like an out-and-out trollpiece, presenting Atlas Shrugged just straight enough that all the Randian dummies will get boners about there being an Atlas Shrugged movie, but engaging in a whole bunch of subtle acts of sabotage (and some not subtle ones, like directing the male and female lead, the latter of whom can be seen in the above photo, to act like robot tards) so that the end result just flat-out fucking sucks. I cannot wait for parts two and three. Can. Not. Wait. The only way to improve on the first one is by hiring Tommy Wiseau.

Best Deadpan: Corey Stoll as Hemingway in Midnight In Paris. That speech he gives Owen Wilson capped with “Think about it” was gold.


OWNAGE:

The concept, reified.

Best Car Chase: Oddly enough, I think I gotta go with Priyanka chasing Shahrukh in Don 2. All charges of n00b infatuation with Bollywood can be referred to my dick. The car chases in Fast Five, the seeming clear favorite, were great and everything, but they were just like the car chases in the other four movies. And Drive was Drive, but that was more “good filmmaking” than “dope car chases,” which aren't mutually exclusive or anything, but when I think car chases I think of the director turning to some Australian 2nd unit director with an incomplete complement of eyes and limbs and going “it's all yours,” to which the Australian replies “Lit's git ta fuckin wehhk, mate!” and next thing you know stunt drivers are nearly getting blown up driving Dodge Chargers through oil tankers and shit. (Ed. Note: Australians own.) Now, the car chase in Don 2 wasn't, on the surface, all that flashy. It was just a basic meat-and-potatoes car chase, but with an ineffable batshit insanity that made it fucking rad. Also, Shahrukh fucking destroys his car, and as we all learned from The Blues Brothers (in which is the greatest car chase of all time) at the end of the car chase the car has to just be like fuck it. I'll debate this one, but only to a certain point.

Best Fight: Vincenzo vs. The Rock in Fast Five. Just don't even step to this one. I don't care that Justin Lin gets trendy with the shaky cam. I don't care that it was relatively short. It's Vincenzo Gasolina fighting against The Fucking Rock.

Best violent death: In a year with many contenders, among them several grisly ownings in the bullshit historical epic Ironclad, the gorilla grabbing his nuts and going “sure, I can take on a helicopter with machine gun turrets with nothing but my bare hands” (not only did he win, the evil white guy in a suit—who was played by a black actor, proving that Evil White Guy In A Suit is an attainable state of mind that crosses racial barriers, just as Cate Blanchett proved in Hanna that it transcends gender barriers too—eats it in the ensuing crash) in Rise, and The Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, the prize has to go to Albert Brooks owning Bryan Cranston with that straight razor in Drive. He slices his wrists open lengthwise, and then while Cranston bleeds out he's like reassuring him that the worst part is over and he'll be dead soon. I mean holy fucking shit. Albert Brooks. Good God.

Best shirt removal: This is only a category so I can say what's up to Salman Khan in Bodyguard. The way the water hose filled his shirt up with water til it exploded, revealing Salman's muscles really needs to be seen to be believed. It manages to simultaneously be hilarious, ridiculous, awesome, and frankly kind of inspiring. And each quality depends on the simultaneity with the other three. There really is only one Salman Khan.

Greatest “Go fuck yourself” moment: The above-mentioned bit with the Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, in Fast Five. I mean, come on. It's a shame JDA couldn't have still been alive for a second to be like, “Wow, yeah, okay, I understand the magnitude to which I just got owned.”

Best explosion: Gotta be when John Boyega, as Moses, detonates his apartment to kill all of “dem tings” at the end of Attack The Block. Not only was it a cool explosion, it was also Moses. Moses saved the fucking planet. Trust.

Best revolution: Caesar. Rise.

Awesomest hero: Moses. Attack The Block. Which, by the way, for anyone wondering how the Badass World Cup turned out, an update: there was a huge scandal surrounding North American Group Stage, when due to the fact that none of the participants would concede, America ended up pulling some 1980 Moscow Olympics shit and decided to withdraw from the competition entirely. The rest of the world kind of shrugged and went, “Well, with Makmende, Mad Max, the guy from The Secret In Their Eyes, Moses, and Tequila and Tony, America wouldn't even be a top seed, and fuck you guys for not letting Canada and Mexico play.” The only thing is, with America out of the Cup, American media stopped treating the Cup as if it existed (same as it ever was) and the wildly entertaining knockout stages, resulting in Moses' eventual victory, were lost to posterity. (Ed. Note: rumors that the real explanation is that Movies By Bowes ™ simply got bored with the conceit and had to write about other shit to pay the bills are scurrilous fucking Communism.) The point is, Moses is a hero. He saved the planet from dem tings. You do not attack the block and not get owned.


And those, dear readers, are the first annual Fucko Awards! Tune in in a couple days for the Top 11 movies of 2011!