Think of Rome.

All sorts of images may flash into your mind. You might first think of religion, or perhaps of the Italian glamor captured by Fellini in the sixties. Maybe you think of the history, the architecture, the art.

Whatever it is, you’ll likely find it in La Grande Bellezza, the latest film from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino. The title translates to The Great Beauty, and it’s true — the film is utterly gorgeous and breathtaking to behold, in part because of the showy cinematography, and in part because Rome itself is so aesthetically beautiful.

But the title is perhaps an irony, because The Great Beauty isn’t about prettiness at all. There are many beautiful things in it, but it’s a film about ugliness and waste and excess, about too much of a good thing. The film is drenched in death — the glorious opening scene comes to a halt with the sudden demise of a random tourist, and several other characters will expire before it’s over. These deaths make little impact — life just goes on.

Yes, these deaths are accompanied by beautiful images and beautiful music. They look great, but it’s all surface. Life is beautiful, La Grande Bellezza proclaims, and death even moreso. Sorrentino depicts ugliness in a very beautiful way, but The Great Beauty constantly reminds us that what we’re seeing is superficial and hollow and ultimately unsatisfying. Life is a non-stop party for these fabulous beautiful people; it only ends when they die. That sounds great at first, but then it goes on… and on… and eventually the parties seem more like punishment. What good is cutting loose when there’s nothing to be cut loose from? When all of life is one big party, how do you take a break? You can live la dolce vita for as long as you like, The Great Beauty says, but there comes a point where it ceases to be so sweet. And by then, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.

The Great Beauty is not a film that is easily summed up. It’s not as elusive as many movies that favor style over substance, for it states its themes fairly openly in several bits of dialogue — but there are also many curiosities to be found within. The film takes on a dream-like effect, especially in the outrageous final third. In many ways, The Great Beauty is a love letter to Rome — “love” being a rather strong word for it, since our protagonist Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) has mixed feelings on the life he lives there.

Jep is a somewhat successful novelist, but he quit after his first book. He claims he was too busy partying to finish another, and that seems to be true — he’s up late every night, drinking and dancing and talking at length with a group of friends who are as superficially successful as he is. He goes to bed when the sun comes up, just when an average man would be waking up to go to work. He has no children, and we get the sense that he hasn’t had a serious relationship in the recent past. He lives the life of a young bachelor, even though he’s now getting to be an old man.

The film begins with a busload of Asian tourists taking in the glories of Rome; we, too, are tourists in Sorrentino’s magnificent vision of this ancient city. Then the tourist dies. Sorrentino jumps from there into a long party scene, featuring several delightful minutes of dancing, drinking, and debauchery. Later, there will be talk about how Rome is not what it used to be; it is, essentially, dying. Art is dying, religion is dying, these glamorous parties are dying. There is a lively band of socialites still living it up until the wee hours of morning, but they’re aging fast now. There will come a point when none of these people are left, and who will replace them? We don’t meet many characters of a younger generation, and when we do, they don’t wind up too well off, either. (Witness the strange and heartbreaking sequence of a young girl furiously painting on a huge canvas for an audience of rich observers.) Everything is dying.

Jep, like the film, is preoccupied with aging. He still lives like his younger self, but feels old while doing it. He begins an unlikely romance with a stripper past her prime named Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli), the daughter of an old friend he hasn’t seen in thirty years. She’s younger than Jep but too old to continue taking her clothes off for money, and she has a dark disposition that gradually reveals itself to us and explains, at least partially, why she’s stuck in a rut. There’s not much hope for Ramona, either, in this decaying Rome.

As in many European films, there is much intellectual discourse on the decline of society, particularly from Jep at these party scenes. The film is episodic, some episodes more surreal than others, though I suppose we are meant to take most of it at face value. We accompany Jep, now a journalist, on an interview with a pretentious young artist; we observe as he learns that his first love has recently passed away (another death!); we attend the funeral of another character with Jep and Ramona, which Jep is initially glib about until he breaks down in very real tears once actually confronted with the experience; we attend a dinner Jep hosts for a decrepit old holy woman who is revered by many — but not by Jep. Mostly, we party.

The film takes an odd turn when it focuses on religion in the third act, or at least on religious characters. Religion feels a little off-topic for these characters, since there’s very little talk of religion before this point. (Though there are a lot of nuns scurrying about throughout.) I’ll admit, The Great Beauty lost me for a little while — but it makes sense for an older man grappling with his mortality to flirt with religion near the end.

The Great Beauty is populated by unforgettable images and energetic editing; we encounter a drunk midget and a toothless nun along the way, for example. (Okay, actually, the nun does have one tooth left.) It’s a dazzling film, and also a rambling and rather pretentious one, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fun.

On the one hand, The Great Beauty evokes older Italian cinema — Fellini in particular — but rather than serve as a mere pastiche, it’s all about the death of what Rome used to be. Out with the old, and in with… well, The Great Beauty doesn’t seem to have anything new to replace them with.

Art, religion, tradition, and tourism will die — and the parties will, too. But they will be the last to go, raging on as the rest of the world decays around them.

*

Hollywood is obsessed with money, I say.

Duh, you think in response.

But hear me out.

In 2013, Hollywood was particularly obsessed with money. Not just with making money, but with telling stories about making — and losing — money. In my Top Ten list last year, I named Zero Dark Thirty my favorite film of the year; it’s a movie that serves as a symbol of America’s search for catharsis after 9/11.

And now, in 2013, we have Hollywood’s response to a very different national crisis — the recession from several years back that’s still taking its toll on our economy. It’s a subject that has woven its way into the fabric of many, many films this year — so many that explore what America stands for, strives to be, fails to be, and is.

Of course, lots of films from any era use money as a major motivator for its characters — particularly action and drama. Yet in examining my ten favorite films from the past year, as well as several others, I couldn’t help but notice a connective tissue. It’s like all the filmmakers in the world got together and decided to make on giant meta-movie that was all about the cracks and crevices marring our American dream.

Not all of them are good. Not even close. The past year gave us two very similar stories of our nation’s leaders in crisis — Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. Neither set the world on fire — just Washington, D.C., har har — but they’re emblematic of 2013′s cinematic mood. Escape From Tomorrow is a nightmare vision of the Happiest Place On Earth. Gangster Squad depicts the senseless violence, greed, and corruption of some of Los Angeles’ darkest days. Parkland is another take on the assassination of one of our most beloved presidents. Even Lone Survivor, a mostly rah-rah tale of American bravado, perhaps accidentally sheds light on questions about the wisdom of what we’ve been doing over in the Middle East.

Oz The Great And Powerful is the story of an American man who swindles the denizens of a fairyland and convinces them he’s a worthy leader. We’re The Millers is a comedy about a bunch of misfits mimicking a perfect American nuclear family. Identity Thief is a comedy about a very sad woman taking money that doesn’t belong to her in hopes of filling the void in her soul. The East is about an extremist group that takes revenge on American corporations guilty of actions that they’ll never be punished for in a court of law.

These are not the best movies of the year. Some of them are very bad, actually. They’re just a handful of titles that had such themes on their minds, though the better films I’ll discuss below are more provocative. Ask many film fans, and they’ll claim that 2013 was a very good year, cinematically; awards season is an embarrassment of riches, with the focus actually placed on very good, very deserving films for once.

So. Here are 2013′s best films, y’all.

(Click on the film title to read my original review.)

10. THE GREAT BEAUTY (LA GRANDE BELLEZZA)

While my list this year is largely America-centric, one foreign film I saw late in the game did manage to find its way into my year-end kudos, and that’s La Grande Bellezza, released as The Great Beauty here in the U.S.

Last year’s list had the brilliantly bizarre Holy Motors in the mix, and The Great Beauty is a worthy successor — though a slightly more cohesive one. Whereas Holy Motors was essentially a series of loosely connected vignettes, The Great Beauty does tell a singular story — though it, too, is vividly heightened with only a tenuous attempt at an anchoring plot.

Though The Great Beauty is specifically about life in Rome, it also bears many similarities to 2013′s crop of American movies. It’s about life as a non-stop party, even if several of these partygoers are starting to feel like they’re too old for this shit. There’s a scene in which our protagonist Jep encounters a less-privileged man, asking him what his plans for the night are. A little dinner and TV with his spouse, the man replies. Jep thinks that sounds nice — luxurious, even. But that’s not Jep’s life. Jep wouldn’t know an ordinary existence if it slapped him across the face.

Co-writer and director Paolo Sorrentino delivers the year’s most purely cinematic effort, with breathtaking images that are simultaneously dazzling and disorienting. It’s an overabundance of arresting scenes, so that days after seeing it, you might suddenly remember a mesmerizing moment you’d forgotten merely because there were already so many others caught in your brain. The Great Beauty is best viewed as a wild ride through Roman decline with a host of tantalizing surprises along the way. It took me some time to figure out just how to respond to The Great Beauty; now I’m certain that it’s one of the year’s most striking films, one I’m eager to revisit to take it all in again.

The Great Beauty isn’t an American movie, but like many domestic films this year, it taps into “rich people problems” — the boredom and blase attitude that can arise out of a too-easy life. Clocking in at well over two hours, the film is as much about excess as Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street, with similarly exhilarating sequences of raunchy behavior. (It’s not quite as sordid as what Jordan Belfort did, though — The Great Beauty actually makes a lot of this look fun.) We’re not the only ones dealing with a troubled economy, societal decline, and the questionable priorities of religious leaders — and we’re definitely not the only ones drinking and dancing the night away to forget it all.

9. FRANCES HA

The only way you’d catch Frances Halladay occupying Wall Street is if someone else convinced her to — probably her best friend Sophie. (“We’re the same person with different hair,” Frances says.) But Frances is very much a product of Right Now in America. She’s yet another broke twentysomething who expected things to fall much more easily into her lap, and now has no idea how to reconcile her broken dreams with her less-than-ideal reality.

Frances bounces around between a number of different apartments, paying less and less rent each time. She dreams of being a dancer, but everyone around Frances seems aware that she just isn’t cut out for that. (Frances, of course, is entirely unaware.) Frances thinks she’s poor, even though she is reminded at one point that she’s still a lot more privileged than an actual poor person; but that doesn’t matter much when you’re barely scraping by in New York City. At one point, she decides to blow her remaining cash on a spontaneous weekend getaway to Paris, just because — and then sleeps through half the trip. Frances watches as her best friend Sophie drifts away in favor of a better life with a stable job and a doting, well-to-do fiance; meanwhile, Frances is a twenty-seven-year-old still stuck in that awkward post-college lurch, living paycheck to paycheck when she can even get a paycheck, which isn’t always.

Nearly every scene has money on its mind, but Frances Ha doesn’t strive to be topical — it’s only about post-recession America if you choose to view it that way. The film is shot in black-and-white, and that, along with its ease and charm, evoke old school Woody Allen; it’s a delightful throwback while at the same time feeling very contemporary, which is an odd but enchanting mix. Inside Llewyn Davis and (to a lesser extent) Her also depict creative misfits struggling to find their place in a world that doesn’t seem to need them. Both are very good, but in the end, Frances Ha won me over because I found its down-on-her-luck outcast so very endearing — thanks in large part to co-writer Greta Gerwig’s alluring performance.

I’m not sure you’d really want to spend time in the company of grumpy, self-righteous Llewyn Davis (unless he agreed to sing for you), but how can you not want to hang out with Frances Halladay? Often praised for her warm and approachable indie naturalism, Gerwig makes Frances wholly relatable to millennials. By the end of her journey, I had the feeling that Frances and I were practically the same person — just with different hair.

8. THE BLING RING

The kids aren’t all right. That much is obvious in Sophia Coppola’s adaptation of a crazy-but-true tale of the Calabasas teenagers who easily robbed celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and Paris Hilton for months before being caught. And in case it isn’t immediately obvious: these kids weren’t exactly criminal masterminds.

This past year saw several different films about unlikely, unlucky lawbreakers, from the bodybuilders who kidnap one of their personal training clients for extortion in Pain And Gain to the foursome of bikini babe college girls who go on a crime spree in the surreal Spring Breakers. Sofia Coppola is a more capable director than either Michael Bay or Harmony Korine, however; those films dealt more explicitly with the American dream, the obsession with staying young and hot (and, hopefully, rich) forever. Coppola’s focus is on celebrity culture and social media; it may, in fact, have been too savvy in depicting how obsessed they are with gossip rags and Facebook selfies. Is it too soon for a send-up of such things? Some audiences were underwhelmed; these are likely the same people who tweeted about how they didn’t “get” The Bling Ring before clicking over to Perez Hilton.

What makes The Bling Ring so fascinating is how little separation there is between the stars and the kids who are obsessed with them. Lindsay Lohan got in trouble for drunk driving and stealing, just as these kids do; Audrina Partridge’s fame is a byproduct of her wealth and privilege, not something she earned with talent and hard work. It’s not like the Bling Ring targeted Meryl Streep and Al Pacino — they want after the flashy, accessible stars whose whereabouts could be traced on the internet, the celebrities who leave a wake of senseless buzz and chatter wherever they go. On the BluRay, there’s a special feature of Paris Hilton chiding these kids for their vanity and materialism as she takes us through a tour of her house, showing off her excessive goods. It’s hard to feel sorry for the “victims” of these crimes when they’ve barely earned this stuff themselves.

Anyone who claims to believe Spring Breakers is one of the year’s best films totally mystifies me — Korine’s film beats you over the head with repetitive scenes and voice-over dialogue, then James Franco arrives as a character based on a minor celebrity, imploring us to “look at his shit.” That’s fine, I guess, but I’d rather look at Paris Hilton’s shit than Riff Raff’s (though I do give the edge to Spring Breakers’ Britney Spears sing-alongs over The Bling Ring‘s M.I.A.). This is one of the best modern movies about celebrity, because the real stars are in the periphery. It’s actually about the people who obsess over stars, without whom there would be no stars at all.

Like several of my favorite films from 2013, this one is very much of this time. In its own way, The Bling Ring is every bit as astute as The Social Network in depicting how young people live now; it’s also a lot of fucking fun, as we are taken “shopping” in celebrity homes, with plenty of time spent ogling the merchandise. Coppola makes us complicit in these crimes — we get off on the vicarious thrill of ransacking celebrity cribs, wishing we were there ourselves. It’s like an extra-naughty reality show, and our schadenfreude toward a certain brand of celebrity allows us not to feel any guilt about it. We’re voyeurs, too — but in this day and age, it’s all but impossible not to be.

7. AMERICAN HUSTLE

This film is bullshit. Normally that’d be an insult, but bullshit is all American Hustle is trying to be. The original title of the script was American Bullshit, after all, and in this film, everybody’s a hustler. David O. Russell collects an all-star cast of the hottest actors working right now, most of whom have worked with him before. Between them, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence, and Bradley Cooper have been nominated for… well, more Oscars than I currently care to count. (Add Robert De Niro, who makes a cameo here to the mix, and it’s definitely too many to count.) And surely there will be a few more nods added to the list once this year’s nominations are announced.

In addition to movies about the financial portion of the American dream, 2013 has also been a big year for scorned wives. Two other movies that were in contention for my Top 10 were Blue Jasmine and Side Effects — movies that, on the surface, have little in common, but both Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara played wives of swindlers whose lives of luxury came to a crashing halt when their hubby got busted. And both of these women sought a particularly nasty form of revenge. Margot Robbie’s Naomi, the gorgeous Long Island housewife in The Wolf Of Wall Street, could be American Hustle‘s Rosalyn’s best friend. Jennifer Lawrence plays the kooky spouse of Bale’s Irving Rosenfeld, a seemingly dim-witted housewife who reveals more complicated layers late in the film. Love her or hate her, Lawrence is a total scene-stealer in this film with some of the film’s funniest lines, particularly a riff about a “science oven.” But every character is given a moment to shine — an absolute must in a film stuffed with this much red-hot talent.

American Hustle has met its share of critics, to which I say, To each their own. They complain that the film is overlong and more interested in splashy dialogue and showy costumes than an overarching plot, and I don’t necessarily disagree. American Hustle is like GoodFellas in drag, with Russell heating up Martin Scorsese’s leftovers in his science oven. It’s kind of funny coming in the same year that Scorsese himself released GoodFellas‘ younger, fatter, wealthier cousin. It’s like American Hustle and The Wolf Of Wall Street went shopping and discovered a really great thrift store together.

Both films have been dubbed as comedies, yet neither of them really is one; they’re both quite funny in parts, and both seemingly celebrate scandal and ultimately reward their characters’ bad behavior. But not really. They’re both satires of the American way, and while The Wolf Of Wall Street has taken the brunt of the flack, American Hustle presents even less of a downside to being a swindling douche bag. Irving Rosenfeld and Jordan Belfort both think their victims are stupid losers and “bad people” who deserve to be hustled away from their money; the lawbreakers and law-enforcers are presented as equally corrupt, so why take sides at all? Both films leave our final judgments of these characters up to us. If you think bad guys in America are always punished for lying, cheating, stealing, and so on, then I’m sorry, but you’ve been hustled.

In the end, American Hustle is less interested in storytelling than movie-making. It’s like a bunch of talented, attractive people got together just to play together — and when it’s this much fun to watch, I’m totally on board with that.

6. NEBRASKA

Pretty much everyone in America dreams of being a millionaire — that very dream is ingrained in our culture, even (or especially) in the most rundown town in Nebraska. And if you don’t even have to work to earn your massive fortune, all the better!

Movies like American Hustle, The Bling Ring, Pain And Gain, Spring Breakers, and so on depict people stealing to advance themselves to the good life. Nebraska‘s Woody Grant isn’t so unscrupulous, but when he gets a piece of mail informing him that he’s got a million dollars waiting for him in the Cornhusker State, he jumps at the opportunity to finally upgrade to the realization of the American dream.

Woody’s an old codger who’s probably spent more of his life drinking than working; he’s showing signs of dementia, though he’s not yet lost every one of his marbles. He’s got a squawking wife who’s probably right to constantly complain about him, and he definitely hasn’t been the ideal father to his two grown sons. Winning a million dollars is Woody’s last chance to prove himself to all the people who have long since stopped paying attention — he’s got a handful of years, at best, and he wants to go out on a high note. Woody really only needs a fraction of a million dollars to fulfill his modest dreams of owning a brand new truck, but of course, his journey to Nebraska is not really about that — something his son David knows, too. Woody and David are embroiled in a fight for Woody’s dignity, which isn’t easy when the old man is only half-there half the time.

Woody’s dreams are decidedly smaller than the lavish longings of the kids from The Bling Ring or Spring Breakers, but at the core is the same desire to “better than.” It’s just that the folks he’s trying to be better than aren’t that well-off to begin with. Nebraska is filmed in black-and-white to reflect the lack of variety and options where Woody hails from and where he is now — a shiny new truck is the only way to introduce a little pizzazz to his existence, and when news of Woody’s supposed good fortune spread, greed roils within many of Woody’s old friends and family members, proving that no American life is too squalid to resist the siren’s call of a dollar sign. (And who would have guessed that in the year 2013, two of my year-end picks would be in black-and-white?)

Like the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne has been accused of a condescending attitude toward his characters, and there are a few members of Woody’s family that come off as more cartoonish than complicated. (I wouldn’t argue that they’re unrealistic, though.) This could be a problem, except Payne and screenwriter Bob Nelson imbue Woody with such depth and humanity, never once allowing us to pity him even when everyone else is ridiculing him. This is thanks in large part to Bruce Dern’s career-capping performance, a truly remarkable achievement that easily could have been overplayed. Even if early scenes play Woody’s pain more for laughs than tears, ultimately it all leads to one of the most emotionally rich and satisfying payoffs of the year. It’s Payne’s best film in ages.

5. THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

Alongside Nebraska, here’s a story about fathers and sons that received far less attention this year. This one isn’t about one particular father or one particular son, though — there are several sets of fathers, biological and otherwise, focused upon in Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond The Pines, and the scope is even wider than that. You could say that this is a film about all fathers and all sons.

Though there are a few plum roles for women, including Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne as mothers in duress, The Place Beyond The Pines is clearly focused on multiple generations of males in a story that spans nearly two decades. In the opening, we meet a stunt motorcyclist aptly named Handsome Luke (played by handsome Ryan Gosling) who learns that a casual sex relationship has spawned a young son, who is now being provided for by the mother’s new beau; Luke himself doesn’t have the means to do so, but feels compelled to try anyway.

Unfortunately, in his eyes that means turning to a life of crime, a choice that has lengthy repercussions for multiple characters in this story — some of whom he hasn’t even met. There’s a police officer named Avery (played by Bradley Cooper) who happens to be the officer on duty when one of Luke’s bank robberies goes awry — what happens that day will change each man’s life in very drastic ways and continue to impact them and their families for years to come. The Place Beyond The Pines has a novelistic structure that may, upon first viewing, be jarring to some viewers, focusing on different characters at different times. But as both Avery and Luke’s sons approach adulthood late in the film, we see the cyclical nature of fatherhood and how one man’s actions can shape the destiny of his loved ones for years to come. A shot of Luke’s son at age 17 riding his bike is one of the most telling and poignant cinematic moments of the year, in my humble opinion.

Handsome Luke is another American in the movies this year trying to make a living he didn’t earn; his intentions are noble, but his methods are obviously flawed. Unlike many of this year’s cinematic swindlers, he and his loved ones are punished when he tries to take a shortcut to a financially secure happy ending. Luke himself never had a father; he strikes up a vaguely paternal relationship with an auto mechanic who first introduces him to the idea of robbing banks. He’s trying to provide for his infant son, not realizing that this very decision will lead his own son to grow up without him. And thus the cycle continues. Sometimes what we think is the answer to all our troubles is really just where the trouble begins…

4. BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Like Nebraska and The Place Beyond The Pines, the third entry in the most unlikely trilogy of all time also has a father-son conflict driving the movie, though it takes a while for that to surface in this one. Before Midnight opens with Jesse, now in his forties, dropping son Hank off at a Greek airport. It’s hard for Jesse to see Hank go, because while Jesse is living it up in France with his longtime partner Celine (they’re not married), his son has to return to his ex-wife in Chicago and grow up largely fatherless. You can have love or family, Before Midnight posits, but not both at once.

Before Sunrise was a romantic fantasy about strangers meeting cute in Vienna and developing red-hot passionate feelings for one another. Before Sunset was about their somewhat unlikely reunion almost a decade later, and how old flames can be rekindled quickly because, perhaps, they never really burn out in the first place. Before Midnight takes kismet out of the equation — there’s no chance meeting here. Jesse and Celine have been together for nine years now, raising adorable twin girls. They’re summering in Greece with their daughters, Jesse’s son, and friends representing several generations. But now summer is nearly over.

As the title suggests, Before Midnight grows darker than its predecessors. Jesse has realized his dream, falling in love with a European beauty and writing novels for a living. He may not live in America anymore, but it is a pretty perfect approximation of the American dream (minus the bitter ex-wife, of course). For Celine, though, life is not quite so dream-like — she loves her daughters and Jesse’s son, and she still loves Jesse, but she’s also nowhere near the place she thought she’d be, and Jesse’s domestic paradise means a sacrifice of her individuality and career aspirations, which Celine is slowly growing to resent. As in the prior two films, Jesse and Celine walk-and-talk about a wide variety of topics relating to gender politics, their feelings for one another, and life itself; but then they argue.

The film’s final act is a show-stopping fight scene that perfectly encapsulates a real lovers’ quarrel; they bicker and makeup and then bicker again. They say things they don’t mean, or maybe they really do mean them. They question whether or not their love is worth the struggle and sacrifice. In short, the honeymoon is over.

Before Midnight is the perfect movie for anyone who ever questioned two characters riding off into the sunset toward a supposed happily-ever-after — and asked, “Yeah, but then what?” Jesse and Celine were once perfect romantic foils for one another, but no two people can sustain such harmony and bliss forever. Richard Linklater, along with his co-writers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who put much of themselves into these scripts, explore and challenge the idea that two people would, could, and should spend their whole lives together. They have just about everything they could want, and yet it still isn’t quite enough. Still they yearn for more. When Jesse first hints that he’d be happier if Celine picked up her life and moved to America so they could be closer to Hank, she posits that this is the day that will break them apart, the beginning of the end for them.

Is it? Before Midnight may or may not be the final chapter for one of our favorite on-screen couples, and we watch in suspense to see whether or not these two will kiss and make up before midnight strikes and finds them starting a new day away from each other for the first time in nine years. Linklater forces us to confront a number of tough questions, starting with: If not even these two can make it work, how is there any hope for the rest of us?

3. GRAVITY

If movies had a common thread in 2013 besides money and the American dream, they were all about survival.

Yes, okay, lots of movies from lots of years also hit on this basic theme, but this year especially. From the biggest moneymaker of the year, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, to Best Actor hopefuls like Captain Phillips and All Is Lost and Dallas Buyers Club, there were so many films about people trying to get by on their own, facing obstacles large and small (mostly large, though). There’s even one called Lone Survivor.

Spoiler alert: Gravity could also have been called Lone Survivor, since Sandra Bullock’s only real co-star abandons her early in the movie. Gravity wasn’t the highest-grossing film of the year, or even in the Top 5, but it’s probably the movie 2013 will be remembered by. It’s the buzziest event movie since Avatar, with a similar emphasis on spectacle; the Best Picture race this year will echo 2009′s, when the 3D behemoth from outer space squared off against a lesser-seen but much more grounded story of earthly duress, The Hurt Locker. (In this case, Steve McQueen was never married to Alfonso Curaon, though.) Following that formula, 12 Years A Slave is a slightly more likely victor, but Gravity will likely hold up far better than Avatar did, because for all the razzle and dazzle, it’s a simple story about death and rebirth and survival. And, you know, trying not to float off into space.

Instead of another story about fathers and sons, Alfonso Cuaron delivers a story about mother and daughter, even though we never meet that daughter (she dies before the movie even begins). Perhaps his unconventional approach to filmmaking gave Cuaron the freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted with this story — how else to explain a big studio action film carried almost solely by one actress? (She is, at least, a very bankable actress.)

Cuaron has proven himself one of Hollywood’s most innovative visionaries, delivering that rare perfect blend of art and commerce. (Inception was the most recent.) Gravity is a one-of-a-kind immersive experience, a rare beacon of hope in a year that delivered dud after dud in the blockbuster department. Hollywood is certainly paying attention, though it remains to be seen whether or not it will learn any lessons. Unlike most of my other favorites from this year, Gravity is not really about money or the American dream, except on a meta level — it sure made a lot of money, so we can only hope that, like Ryan Stone, movies like this one will fight and beat the odds and survive the dark wasteland that normally sucks up well-intentioned gems like this. Because I’d rather float off and die in space myself than sit through most of the films that were released last summer. Studios should stop wasting money on the big, expensive junk no one wants and spend a little less on stories people actually want to tell, stories we want to be told.

But that’s not a free pass to go and make Gravity 2, you guys. Just… don’t go there.

2. 12 YEARS A SLAVE

Thanks in large part to Gravity, it’s been a decent year for women on the big screen — though the Best Actress race is still pretty lackluster compared to the boys’ club. It’s also been a very strong year for black filmmakers, with the release of buzzy dramas like Fruitvale Station (directed by Ryan Coogler) and Lee Daniels’ The Butler (directed by Lee Daniels, if you couldn’t tell).

The Butler is a massive hit, raking in over $167 million worldwide. Fruitvale Station is a more modest success (but a better film). The year’s ultimate triumph, however, could be likely Best Picture winner 12 Years A Slave, which has received about as unanimously positive critical response as you can get (there will always be a handful of naysayers). It hasn’t earned nearly as much as The Butler (around $50 million worldwide to date), but it’s already been heralded as the definitive movie on American slavery, Oscar or no. Already it has made its mark.

Here’s where it all began, more or less. We are a capitalist nation. The American dream has always piggybacked on someone else’s nightmares — in this case, Africans and their descendants who were shipped over to do the bidding of white men. More than 150 years ago, a real man named Solomon Northup was drugged and woke up to an unimaginably horrifying reality — he was now the property of a slave trader, and as their property, he could be beaten, tormented, and even killed without consequence. We all know all about slavery, and have since we were very young — but at a distance. 12 Years A Slave puts those injustices front and center, in our faces, and leaves them there for uncomfortably long moments. We are not allowed to look away, because director Steve McQueen knows: if we could, we would.

But 12 Years A Slave is no mere parlor trick. It’s not supposed to be punishment. And it certainly doesn’t provide any catharsis. It’s a potent reminder of where we came from. If The Place Beyond The Pines depicts how a father’s actions can have devastating effects on his son, then 12 Years A Slave is about how our founding fathers’ actions can carry over multiple centuries, creating problems we’re still dealing with as a nation. (The Butler and Fruitvale Station both address such problems in different eras.) America’s first black president is in office, something that would have been unthinkable in Solomon Northup’s time, and that’s progress. Maybe someday we’ll be free of the shackles of the past, but we’re not there yet. 12 Years A Slave is only partially about how far we’ve come; it’s also about how far we have yet to go.

I didn’t enjoy 12 Years A Slave because it was a didactic history lesson, though, or because it made me think about slavery in a new light. (It’s unlikely to make you think about slavery in a new way; the point is for audiences to think about it at all.)  I liked it because it was a good story — a great story, very well-told. Every aspect of the filmmaking is vital and beautiful, from the propulsive score by Hans Zimmer to the astounding cinematography by Sean Bobbitt and, of course, McQueen’s distinctive directorial flourishes, decried as too artsy by some. For me, they’re just artsy enough. 12 Years A Slave has some of the year’s boldest scenes, some of which can be hard to watch — an extended whipping scene, and Solomon hanging from a noose while daily life at the plantation goes on around him indifferently. But McQueen is no sadist. 12 Years A Slave does not take the Michael Haneke approach to “entertainment.” There are also many quietly beautiful moments; and though much of the discourse 12 Years A Slave inspires is made very obvious, there’s also a lot to think about that isn’t so blatant.

There is also no film this year with so many magnificent performances. Lupita Nyong’o is a revelation as the unforgettable Patsey, who almost threatens to steal the movie from Solomon. (Another suffering slave woman, played by Adepero Oduye, also makes quite an impact.) Michael Fassbender, Sarah Paulson, and Benedict Cumberbatch play slave owners with varying degrees of evil in their hearts; none of them are mere monsters, though Fassbender gets damn close. Of course, it’s Chiwetel Ejiofor who carries the movie with a largely understated performance; Solomon is an intelligent, thoughtful, and educated man who must hide both of these qualities in order to survive, but we can read his thought process on Ejiofor’s expressive face. When first realizing his terrifying reversal of fortune, we experience his personal horror vicariously as he thinks, I’m not supposed to be here. It’s only later that he thinks: But then again, nobody is. 

We, the audience, identify with Solomon the everyman, and thus undergo the same thought process. It’s not necessarily a pleasant journey, but it is a beautiful one. Should a movie about slavery be so pretty? I, for one, didn’t mind at all, because McQueen is so honest about the ugliness of it. There are moments in this film that already feel like a part of cinematic history. Solomon Northup probably never thought his story would resonate 160 years after it was first published, just as his enslavers likely never considered the impact their actions might have after a century or more. Slavery may be a thing of the past, but exploiting the weak so the wealthy can prosper? Yeah, about that…

1. THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

In a year during which so many movies were about America’s relationship to wealth and power, here is the movie that is most about that — if only because it is the longest.

Martin Scorsese is not fucking around with The Wolf Of Wall Street. The man is in his seventies, and he has chosen this movie to deliver some of the most explicit scenes of his career. Here we have a candlestick poking out of a major movie star’s anus; here we have that same major movie star blowing drugs into an attractive naked woman’s rectum. So, it’s settled then: this is in every way a movie about assholes. (You could also say it’s a movie about dicks, since there’s a prosthetic penis on display as well.) We also have quaaludes galore. Capitalism… it isn’t for pussies, that’s for sure.

America is still hurting from the recession, even though we’re pretending it’s fine. It’s not fine. Frances Halladay can’t pay her rent, strapping young lads have turned to robbing banks to provide for their families, elderly men are attempting to walk from Montana to Nebraska to claim a bogus prize — even Paris Hilton isn’t safe from criminals who want a taste of how the 1% lives. And then here’s this jerk Jordan Belfort, wrecking his yacht, his Lamborghini, and his helicopter. What a fucking asshole.

It’s a wonder, then, that as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Jordan Belfort still comes across as so winning. And even after all that, you almost, almost, almost want to hang out with him. (But you’d be sure and have a DD.) The self-proclaimed “Wolf Of Wall Street” lives up to his name, with modest beginnings in penny stocks that eventually have him making nearly a million dollars a week. (Fucker.)

Jordan has a hot wife — no, yeah, duh, but I mean, she’s like, extremely hot — and a ginormous house, and he has a horde of followers who would all fall on their swords for him. He bangs hot ladies all over town, drops thousands of dollars on every meal, and throws the wildest parties since Jay Gatsby. (Who, coincidentally, was also portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio this year.) So, do you want to help me strangle this motherfucker or what?

If you’re one of The Wolf Of Wall Street‘s many critics, the answer is probably yes. The film has proven surprisingly controversial, mostly thanks to people that seem to need a tidy moral literally spelled out for them at the end of the movie. (How about an end title card that reads: “The makers of this movie do not endorse drug use, prostitution, or screwing innocent people out of their hard-earned income, okay?”)

And that is, in large part, why The Wolf Of Wall Street is my favorite movie of 2013. I tend to root for the underdog, which often means taking a hard stance in favor of divisive films. (See also my previous #1s, which include Crash, United 93, and Zero Dark Thirty.) Last year, Zero Dark Thirty was trumped by Argo — fucking Argo, of all movies!! — mostly because of a stupid debate about whether or not the film endorsed torture. In truth, the film depicted torture, without anyone wagging their finger directly to camera and explaining, “This is bad!” Much in the same way, some people are all up in arms about how The Wolf Of Wall Street glorifies the illegal doings of stock brokers merely because the film itself doesn’t declare a judgment on them. The Wolf Of Wall Street endorses such behavior in the same way that Taxi Driver endorses assassinations, Cape Fear endorses biting people’s faces off during sex, and The Aviator endorses dating Katherine Hepburn. Which is to say: not at all.

Don’t like The Wolf Of Wall Street because it’s an overlong, excessive mess of a movie? Fine by me. It’s not for everyone. But to condemn the film because it doesn’t condemn its characters is just madness. The story may take place in the late eighties and nineties, but the film is very much about the here and now — the enormous greed of a small number of people that eventually proved toxic to every single American. How dare anyone expect Martin Scorsese to punish these people in his movie, when in real life, these people have not been punished? It would be dishonest — and though this movie is by and large about dishonesty, it is not dishonest.

The Wolf Of Wall Street is one big, crazy movie — the kind of movie many of us doubted Scorsese still had in him. It replaces his trademark violence with wild substance abuse and raunchy sex, but it’s the same ol’ Scorsese. God bless him. The movie is so much fun it’s almost too much fun, by design — certain scenes go on and on, but they’re magnetic. Leonardo DiCaprio gives the performance of his career (and let me remind you, it’s a hell of a career); he’s supported by solid work from Kyle Chandler, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, and plenty more, but it’s basically DiCaprio’s show, and he owns it.

This is the movie that put the theme of the year into focus for me — and once I saw it, it was impossible to unsee how many other films dealt with these ideas. And get this: the best movie of the year is also the perfect companion piece to the year’s best TV show Breaking Bad, which also bowed out in 2013. That’s a series about a man whose greed got the better of him, and cost so many people so much; both The Wolf Of Wall Street and Breaking Bad‘s best episode, “Ozymandias,” use the big bad dad grabbing his tiny tot and rushing off to the car while mom screams in agony as their climactic moment.

The Wolf Of Wall Street gives us barely a glimpse at anyone who isn’t living the high life. We don’t meet any of Jordan Belfort’s victims — but presumably, neither does he. And we don’t need to see any of that, because look around — we see it every day, everywhere we go. The American dream has gotten out of hand, and caused a lot of damage in its wake. That’s how we live in now, and it’s silly to expect that a movie will provide catharsis when the real world has not.

In its own way, The Wolf Of Wall Street is as much about the post-millennial strife we’ve faced as United 93 and Zero Dark Thirty; neither of those films sugar-coated the hard truth, and this doesn’t either. Good for you, Scorsese. Bad for us. It’s not a filmmaker’s job to punish Wall Street for its sins; it was ours. If we wanted it done, we should’ve done it ourselves. Some tried, but most of us did nothing.

So stop expecting a movie to do what you cannot. If you don’t like the world The Wolf Of Wall Street depicts, that’s too bad, because it’s the one you live in. This is America in 2013, exaggerated ever-so-slightly to fit the big screen. It is, unfortunately, not just a movie.

*

It’s the morning of the Oscar nominations, and I’m not upset.

This is weird. All the films I wanted to see nominated for Best Picture are. All the actors I hoped to see receive nominations for this year’s performances were. Compare and contrast to last year’s fatal omission of Kathryn Bigelow as Best Director, or 2011′s Oscar season, in which none of my ten favorite films were nominated for Best Picture — but Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was. This year, on the other hand, five of my own picks for Best Picture overlap with Academy’s. Three of my four favorite performances were recognized. All of the films from the Best Director nominees were in my Top 10.

What the fuck is going on here?

Yeah, it was a good year for movies, and thankfully, it’s a good year at the Oscars. It’s only natural that some of my favorite films aren’t represented as much as I may like, and you know what? I’m pretty okay with that.

Still, I think I can do the Academy a little better. So now it’s time for the really important awards — my picks for the films and performances that deserve more recognition than they got. Here are 2013′s Not-Oscars!

(As usual, I pick a winner and then list my four other “nominees” in descending order based on how much I liked them. Check out last year’s Not-Oscars here.)

BEST ACTRESS

Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Adele Exarchopoulos, Blue Is The Warmest Color
Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha

Honorable Mentions: Brie Larson, Short Term 12; Amy Adams, American Hustle

Cate Blanchett is the favorite to win and has been ever since the release of Blue Jasmine, and deservedly so — the role of a broken, vodka-guzzling socialite grieving for her dearly departed husband and dearly departed lifestyle (not necessarily in that order) is a perfect showcase for a performer, blending comedy and tragedy expertly, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job with the part. It’s one of the roles she’ll be remembered for.

Meanwhile, young Adele Exarchopoulos carries Blue Is The Warmest Color, as the film’s French title The Life Of Adele suggests. The movie is about every aspect of this young girl’s life, and she eats, showers, and has sex with equal gusto in an incredibly natural performance. She’s remarkably expressive for such a young actress, and if the rumors are to be believed, she put up with quite a lot of duress thanks to the film’s director, including some very long sex scenes.

If Blue Is The Warmest Color rests almost entirely on Exarchopoulos’ shoulders, Gravity rests even moreso on Sandra Bullock’s; the screenplay lets her down with a clunky bit of dialogue or two, but that doesn’t undermine Sandy’s remarkable feat as an action heroine who’s still as capable, with a mix of strength and vulnerability, as she was in Speed almost two decades ago. One of the year’s most beautiful scenes is her Ryan Stone howling along with a Chinese stranger via radio — and despite the massive amount of visual effects, Bullock had a lot of physical work to do to master this part.

And how about indie darling Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the perfect part for her winsome indie charms in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha? She may not exactly be the millennial female Woody Allen yet, but Lena Dunham better watch her back all the same.

My 2013 winner, though, is easy — Before Midnight‘s Julie Delpy, stepping into the role of Celine for the third (and final?) time. In the past two films, Celine was a smart, thoughtful, independent woman; she’s too fully realized to be written off as a mere manic pixie dream girl, but she was in many ways the perfect woman. It was to see why Ethan Hawke’s Jesse fell for her. Before Midnight presents a new challenge for the actress — Celine is less secure, revealing a fragility and bitterness that were only hinted at in earlier incarnations. Delpy deftly shifts from the “old” Celine we (and Jesse) know and love to reveal a darker shade to the character that is still so relatable. (And she performs a large part of the third act topless, so there’s that.)

BEST ACTOR

Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years A Slave
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

Honorable Mentions: Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station; Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips

It’s by far the best year for Best Actor in recent memory, with at least ten performances that deserve Academy recognition. The biggest performance of the year has to be Leonardo DiCaprio’s in The Wolf Of Wall Street — he’s brash and bold like we’ve never seen him before, and funnier, too. His quaalude overdose is a masterpiece of excruciating physical comedy, and he delivers some of the year’s best monologues to boot. After plenty of solid performances over the past couple decades, it’s maybe the performance that finally signals him as one of his generation’s best actors.

Then there’s Chiwetel Ejiofor, who guides us through the hell of a free man finding himself suddenly enslaved. In a big, brash drama, this is a surprisingly understated performance, since Solomon knows he can’t give away the fact that he’s smarter than his masters without suffering even worse consequences. This was the toughest category by far for me to pick a winner in, since Dern, DiCaprio, and Ejiofor were all about equal in my eyes.

Oscar Isaac has the advantage of singing beautiful folk music to win audiences over, and his voice is indeed lovely; his turn as the titular Llewyn Davis is prickly enough that we’re never allowed to feel sorry for the down-trodden musician — instead, we realize that his bad luck is a mixture of misfortune and bad behavior. Hopefully, enough people took notice of this largely unknown actor for us to see much more of him in the future.

And, of course, there’s Matthew McConaughey, in the midst of a massive career renaissance that no one saw coming, turning in unforgettable performances in a wide array of movies over the past two years. Dallas Buyers Club is the centerpiece, as he portrays a straight man afflicted with the last disease he’d ever admit to having. McConaughey lost a ton of weight in the role (and has been uncomfortably skinny-looking in a number of his other appearances over the past year), but he also resists the urge to sentimentalize Ron Woodruff as some actors may have; like Isaac, he doesn’t give a damn if he’s likable in the role or not.

But my favorite is Bruce Dern’s crazy old coot in Nebraska, because he is the movie. It’s a tribute to Dern as well as the screenplay that we can never tell just how “with it” Woody Grant is — he seems to simultaneously believe that he won his phony millions while somewhere, at the back of his mind, knowing it’s too good to be true. It’s a role that could have been cutesy or precious, but instead it’s just pitch-perfect all the way through, allowing us to laugh at, critique, and feel for Woody all at once. DiCaprio and Ejiofor hopefully still have many great performances in them, but this one feels like Dern’s crowning achievement after a long career.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years A Slave
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Joanna Scanlan, The Invisible Woman
June Squibb, Nebraska
Margot Robbie, The Wolf Of Wall Street

Honorable Mentions: Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine; Sarah Paulson, 12 Years A Slave

The Jennifer Lawrence backlash is beginning. She can ask her fellow Oscar-winner from last year, Anne Hathaway, how to deal with that. Some are calling her scene-stealing performance in American Hustle the best part of the movie; some think she was just plain awful. It’s pretty obvious which side of the fence I’m on — I found every moment Lawrence was on screen a delight. Yes, it’s the sort of big, brassy, ditsy performance that award-givers love to honor — see Oscar-winners like Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny or Mira Sorino in Mighty Aphrodite, both of which were controversial picks. But there are two scenes that show Lawrence is more than just a hairdo — when Rosalyn tears up and claims that change is hard for her while, under the surface, implying that her new beau should go rough up her old one — and ohhh, lordy, that bathroom scene.

Next there’s Joanna Scanlan, who beefs up an underserved part in The Invisible Woman with her expressive face. She’s the plump, put-upon wife of Charles Dickens, who gradually realizes her famous hubby is in love with a younger, prettier woman. We’re left to guess how she feels about it until the film’s best scene, when Mrs. Dickens confronts the young woman and presents her with a birthday gift. It’s the kind of supporting performance that makes you wish the movie was all about her.

And how about June Squibb, who played Jack Nicholson’s dumpy wife in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt a decade ago, and now shows up in a much livelier part in his Nebraska? While Will Forte plays the serious straight man and Bruce Dern touches our hearts with his senility, Squibb injects a welcome dose of energetic comedy to lighten the mood — she even flashes the grave of a deceased paramour at one point. Yeah, these may be cheap laughs in a way, but they’re still good ones.

Last in this lineup of scene-stealing wives is Margot Robbie of The Wolf Of Wall Street. Like Lawrence, she’s aided greatly by a fabulous wardrobe and a juicy script, and some may think she’s just a pretty face. But in a largely amoral film, she’s the closest thing to a sympathetic character we get, and over time we really do feel for her, particularly in her dramatic final confrontation with DiCaprio. Really, though, she’s here because she’s in what might be my favorite scene in a movie this year — yep, the “no panties” scene.

But none of these supporting actresses had quite the impact Lupita N’yongo did in 12 Years A Slave. Like them, she’s a scene-stealer, but she’s far from comic relief. Solomon Northup is such a dignified and reserved character, Steve McQueen’s film needs Patsey to be his counterpoint — and as much sympathy as we have for Solomon, it ends up being Patsey who we really feel for. We see Patsey suffer more than any other character, and Nyong’o sells every moment with fear, fury, despair, or whatever the scene calls for. It’s impossible to take your eyes off her for a moment, even when she’s being brutally whipped and you really want to look away. In a film populated by well-known actors like Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard, Michael Fassbender, Paul Giamatti, and Benedict Cumberbatch, the largely unknown Lupita Nyong’o gives the performance that’s burned in our brains.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
James Gandolfini, Enough Said
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years A Slave
Keith Stanfield, Short Term 12
Ryan Gosling, The Place Beyond The Pines

Honorable Mentions: Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips; Bradley Cooper, American Hustle

Best Supporting Actor is the weakest race this year, yet somehow the Oscars still overlooked the marvelous James Gandolfini, who passed away last year, leaving behind a legacy as Tony Soprano. Given the tough-guy roles he’s ordinarily known for, Gandolfini is an unlikely romantic comedy hero, but he sure as hell pulls it off in Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said, which finds the burly actor courting Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a comedy about taking a second stab at love in middle age. The Sopranos allowed Gandolfini to show off all kinds of gifts, though menace is certainly at the forefront of our minds. So his warmth and charm in this role is a nice way to cap off his career, though it’s a shame we won’t get to see more of him in movies like this.

Meanwhile, Michael Fassbender takes a page from Tony Soprano by playing the villain of 12 Years A Slave. He’s a drunk, he’s a rapist, and he’s a slave owner — so, yeah, not a very nice guy. Edwin Epps is outsmarted by Solomon Northup because Edwin can’t fathom that a slave could be smarter than him; together with his spiteful wife (played by an equally good Sarah Paulson), these two rain down an almost unbearable level of fear and torment on their human property. Yet what makes Fassbender’s performance so special is that there’s a hint of humanity buried underneath it, so we can’t merely write off Epps as a bad guy. He’s a coward and a bully and a brute, but he’s not uncomplicated. Through Fassbender, we understand how these people justified their atrocious actions, even if by modern standards they are nowhere near justifiable anymore.

A lesser-seen and lesser-known performance comes from Keith Stanfield, the young actor who plays Marcus in Short Term 12. It’s a film filled with terrific, understated performances, but Stanfield might have the trickiest role in Marcus, an angry young teenager with no place else to go. We can sense the rage within, as well as a deep well of sadness and betrayal, but Stanfield keeps us on edge wondering if — or when — Marcus will finally snap and do someone in this movie harm. One moment, we’re crying for him, the next we’re afraid he’s done something terrible. There are many poignant moments in Short Term 12, but the unlikely tearjerker is Marcus’ haircut scene.

And then there’s Ryan Gosling, who in 2013 starred in the overblown Gangster Squad and Nicholas Winding Refn’s surprisingly underwhelming Drive follow-up Only God Forgives. At least one of his roles lived up to its potential — the motorcycle-riding bank robber Handsome Luke in The Place Beyond The Pines. Like Margot Robbie, Gosling’s performance is helped by his character’s sense of style. His clothes are a moody hipster’s wet dream, and let’s face it — this is Ryan Gosling, bleached blonde and tatted up on a motorcycle. How could he not be cool? We’ve seen Gosling play the stoic type with rage and violence bubbling just under the surface in several previous roles, so his turn in The Place Beyond The Pines isn’t exactly a revelation. But in a lackluster year for supporting males, Handsome Luke is one of the characters who stayed with me.

This year, Best Supporting Actor the only one of these categories in which my pick will likely line up with the Academy’s. That will almost surely be Jared Leto, whose turn in Dallas Buyers Club is a total transformation within and without. To play the transgender Rayon, Leto doesn’t just put on a wig and some lipstick and call it a day, as many other actors might have. We believe that he believes he’s a woman, and Let fully commits to the femininity without ever winking at the audience. Rayon is a larger-than-life character both in the movie and outside of it, so yes, this is the kind of performance that the Academy likes to reward even when it isn’t done well. In this case, it is. Dallas Buyers Club is more notable for its two towering male performances than it is as a stand-alone movie; it’s a movie about the AIDS epidemic of the eighties that quite possibly under-represents the gay end of the equation, so that point of view is almost entirely up to Leto. Fortunately for us (and him), he nails it.

BEST DIRECTOR

Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
Steve McQueen, 12 Years A Slave
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Richard Linklater, Before Midnight
Derek Cianfrance, The Place Beyond The Pines

My five favorite directors line up exactly with my five favorite films — but not exactly in the same order. Alfonso Cuaron’s triumph with Gravity was innovative in so many ways — it was a pretty big risk that fortunately paid off. And Steve McQueen had quite a task ahead of him when he set out to make a slave epic that dealt so brutally with those horrors, which gives him the edge over an old pro like Martin Scorsese, whose bloated (but fabulous) The Wolf Of Wall Street cost a lot of money and looks like it. I have to give props to Richard Linklater, who films walk-and-talks so expertly, using incredibly long takes that must’ve been a major challenge. And Derek Cianfrance manages to lend an epic scope to The Place Beyond The Pines, a story that in other hands could feel much smaller.BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

12 Years A Slave — John Ridley
The Wolf Of Wall Street — Terrence Winter
Before Midnight — Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, & Julie Delpy
Short Term 12 — Destin Cretton
Blue Is The Warmest Color — Ghalia Lacroix and Abdellatif Kechiche

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Frances Ha — Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig
The Place Beyond The Pines — Derek Cianfrance & Ben Coccio and Darius Marder
American Hustle — David O. Russell and Eric Singer
Side Effects — Scott Z. Burns
Nebraska — Bob Nelson

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Great Beauty
12 Years A Slave
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Gravity
Her

BEST SCORE

All Is Lost — Alexander Ebert
The Place Beyond The Pines — Mike Patton
Only God Forgives — Cliff Martinez
Gravity — Steven Price
12 Years A Slave — Hans Zimmer

BEST DRIVING

Ryan Gosling, The Place Beyond The Pines

WORST DRIVING

Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street

BEST FIGHT (VERBAL)

Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight

BEST FIGHT (PHYSICAL)

Ryan Gosling & Vithaya Pansringarm, Only God Forgives

BEST TWIST

Side Effects

BEST MUSICAL NUMBER

I’m So Excited

WEIRDEST MUSICAL NUMBER

Spring Breakers

BEST KISS

Jennifer Lawrence & Amy Adams, American Hustle

BEST DRUNK

Bruce Dern, Nebraska & Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine

WORST DRUNK

Colin Ferrell, Saving Mr. Banks

BEST STRUGGLING ARTIST

Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Lea Seydoux, Blue Is The Warmest Color
Keith Stanfield, Short Term 12
Ernst Umhauer, In The House

BEST SCENE-STEALING WIFE

Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Margot Robbie, The Wolf Of Wall Street
June Squibb, Nebraska
Joanna Scanlan, The Invisible Woman
Oprah Winfrey, Lee Daniels’ The Butler

BEST HUSTLER

Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Christian Bale, American Hustle
Alec Baldwin, Blue Jasmine
Channing Tatum, Side Effects
Tom Hanks, Saving Mr. Banks

BEST LONER

Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Robert Redford, All Is Lost
Joaquin Phoenix, Her
Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis
Mark Wahlberg, Lone Survivor

BIGGEST BITCH

Kristin Scott Thomas, Only God Forgives
Sarah Paulson, 12 Years A Slave
Meryl Streep, August Osage County
Julia Roberts, August Osage County
Emma Thompson, Saving Mr. Banks

BEST DOUBLE FEATURE

Blue Jasmine & Side Effects
The Wolf Of Wall Street & The Great Beauty
Frances Ha & Inside Llewyn Davis
Captain Phillips & All Is Lost
Saving Mr. Banks & Escape From Tomorrow

*

2013 ROSTER

1. The Wolf Of Wall Street
2. 12 Years A Slave
3. Gravity
4. Before Midnight
5. The Place Beyond The Pines
6. Nebraska
7. American Hustle
8. The Bling Ring
Frances Ha
10.The Great Beauty
11.Side Effects
12.Short Term 12
13.Her
14.Blue Jasmine
15.Blue Is The Warmest Color
16.The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
17.Inside Llewyn Davis
18.Drinking Buddies
19.Captain Phillips
20.All Is Lost
21.Dallas Buyers Club
22.Enough Said
23.Mud
24.Stories We Tell
25.Fruitvale Station
26.The Past
27.The East
28.The Invisible Woman
29.The Spectacular Now
30.The World’s End
31.This Is The End
32.In The House
33.Much Ado About Nothing
34.Stoker
35.Prisoners
36.I’m So Excited
37.The English Teacher
38.Disconnect
39.August Osage County
40.Lone Survivor
41.Gimme The Loot
42.The Way Way Back
43.The Call
44.The Conjuring
45.Lovelace
46.Lee Daniels’ The Butler
47.Thor: The Dark World
48.Philomena
49.Saving Mr. Banks
50.Upstream Color
51.Only God Forgives
52.Pain and Gain
53.C.O.G.
54.Iron Man 3
55.Trance
56.We’re The Millers
57.Prince Avalanche
58.White House Down
59.Identity Thief
60.The Kings Of Summer
61.Oz The Great And Powerful
62.The Great Gatsby
63.Spring Breakers
64.Jobs
65.Computer Chess
66.Parkland
67.Post Tenebras Lux
68.The Canyons
69.Gangster Squad
70.Escape From Tomorrow

*

This blog has been so gay lately!

Allow me to interrupt my coverage of Looking for a review of my first 2014 film, which is coincidentally (or not coincidentally) also about men cruising for sex. Stranger By The Lake is a French production, by which I mean it is in French and takes place in France, and also that there are penises everywhere. I swear, no matter how attracted you are to the male anatomy, you will grow tired of penises by the end of this movie. The leads spend at least half of the movie fully naked, and the extras are pretty much all naked all the time. That’s because Stranger By The Lake takes place entirely at said lake, which is unofficially a nudist beach and cruising spot, with lots of dirty deeds going down in the nearby woods.

Including murder.

Which you’d think would be a total boner-killer in such a place. But as it turns out in Stranger By The Lake? Not so much.

Stranger By The Lake follows Franck, an attractive Frenchie who spends the entirety of his summers, it seems, trolling for anonymous sexual partners in this location. I recently criticized Looking for being a bit too stuck in the past when it comes to sex; it’s unclear exactly when Stranger By The Lake is meant to take place, since no one ever uses a cell phone (let alone Grindr), but it feels similarly antiquated. I have no doubt that such places still exist, and that men are still cruising in them like it’s 1983 all over again, but in Stranger By The Lake it seems this is the only place men can go for such kicks. Stranger still, it’s pretty much the same men, day after day, with little variation. Why is this so appealing to Franck, and his oft-nude cohorts? Don’t these people have anywhere else to be?

Though it’s not immediately obvious, Stranger By The Lake only makes sense as a critique of cruising culture. Fairly early in the film, Franck witnesses a murder in the lake, committed by the handsome mustached man he’s been unsuccessfully pursuing all summer. (Who actually looks a lot like Dom from Looking.) What’s Franck to do? A) Yell for him to stop? B) Rush home and call the police? C) Stay away from the lake for the rest of the summer? Or D) Return to the lake and immediately strike up a torrid affair with this known sociopath? If you answered D, then this just might be the erotic thriller for you.

In Stranger By The Lake, two men compete for Franck’s attention in very different ways. The first is Michel (Christophe Paou), who is perfectly dashing until Franck catches him pushing his lover’s head underwater. The other is Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), a mostly hetero logger and loner who comes to the beach to reminisce about his ex-girlfriend. (He admits to hooking up with guys in group settings before, though — because hey! It’s France!) There’s no sexual attraction between Franck and Henri, though the men are inexplicably drawn to each other in a way that transcends traditional male friendship. (Henri suggests that he and Franck try sleeping together in a non-sexual capacity.) While most of Franck’s encounters by the lake are fleeting and meaningless, his dynamic with Henri is an unusual but intriguing variation — Henri is so lonely that he comes to a spot where gay men cruise for sex merely because it’s the only place he knows where it’s socially acceptable to talk to strangers.

Less convincing is Franck’s quickly-evolving romance with Michel, who, again, has already demonstrated his homicidal tendencies (though Michele doesn’t know Franck saw him). Franck professes his love faster than Romeo and Juliet and the two become strangely inseparable by the lake, though Michel refuses to take the relationship outside of this hallowed territory. The murder, shot in an arresting long take from a far distance, representing Franck’s point of view, is a rather shocking interruption of the previously idyllic setting, and afterward the lake and the naked men surrounding it take on a more menacing role. Briefly. But then Franck decides to carry on with his intended summer lovin’ now that Michel’s other lover is out of the way, which involves plenty of skinny-dipping, unprotected sex, and leading inquiries about who was where the night of the drowning.

After the body is discovered (off-screen, unfortunately) washed up on the beach, it doesn’t take long for the police — namely, Inspecteur Damroder (Jérôme Chappatte)— to poke around, assuming for some reason that this is no accidental drowning. (They don’t have a whole lot of evidence saying otherwise, though.) Damroder questions the men frankly about their mating habits, forcing some to examine their behavior a little more closely. (Franck insists he’s not a “regular” at the lake, though he spends seemingly all day every day there.) Franck of course does not mention to the inspector that he witnessed his new boyfriend drowning a man, but Franck and Michel become the inspector’s primary targets anyway, while Henri goes a step further and tells Franck he should be afraid of his new paramour.

So what — is Franck an idiot? On the one hand, yes. He has exceedingly terrible taste in men. It seems unlikely that any rational human being would behave in this way, so we must find a different way to perceive this film. A scene late in the film finds the inspector questioning Franck about the callousness of their love-making — rarely exchanging names, feeling nothing for one another. How can one of their own die, and still these gay men feel nothing, but go back to business (fucking) as usual?

And that’s where Stranger By The Lake gets interesting, as an extended (if rather flawed) metaphor for casual sexual. Franck displays no remorse for the death of Michel’s former lover, and Michel is even more unfeeling. He dives into their affair head-first, proclaiming his love and practically begging Michel to let him sleep over. Is this love? How can it be? Franck knows Michel is a dangerous man, perhaps dangerous enough to kill him. Few men would engage in a tryst with a man they knew was a killer, but many men have engaged in trysts with men who could kill them in another way. Stranger By The Lake may not be a perfect allegory for the AIDS epidemic, but it’s no accident that Franck recklessly chooses unprotected sex with strangers on multiple occasions. A lot of gay men are hooking up with men who could kill them; sex with a stranger is always a risk, one way or another.

Given that reading, Stranger By The Lake is a credible critique of reckless promiscuity (even if the whole park cruising culture seems largely obsolete, at least in America). However, as a story on its own terms, Stranger By The Lake doesn’t exactly hold water. (Pun intended!) It’s too hard to buy Franck’s actions when he is otherwise a reasonable, rational character — does he have a death wish? Is he filled with self-loathing? We learn so little about his inner life that his external actions are inexplicable. Michel is a good-looking guy, but he’s not all that charming. In fact, he’s pretty creepy.

It should be obvious to Franck how his dalliance with Michel will end — and it’s very hard to feel sorry for him when it goes exactly that way. The motivations of the core trio fall apart uniformly by the end, though the final scenes are suspenseful in their own right. It’s too bad there wasn’t a little more character development in the interim; since both we and Franck know of Michel’s crime so early on, we spend a lot of time waiting for everyone else to catch up to what our protagonist already knows. We have a pretty good sense of where this is all headed.

Still, Stranger By The Lake at least takes risks and offers something besides the typical gay romance — and I’m not just talking about all the testicles. Seriously, this film may win some award for most cinematic nudity, which includes some very graphic sex scenes. (Most of it isn’t particularly arousing, however. You grow numb to it after a while.) Writer/director Alain Guiraudie has certainly crafted a very distinct gay film, if not an entirely cohesive one. All in all, you’ll likely walk away from it feeling pretty pleased with your own poor choices in the romance department, at least.

*

And so we’ve come to the end.

Of Season One, anyway.

And it’s time to think about what we’ve been Looking at all this while.

Looking began with a would-be hookup in broad daylight in a public park. It was a bit of a fake-out — a nod to the gay past — but still. It set a strange tone for the show, a series that wanted to be not about sex but still kinda sexy, about a group of gay men who are all over the place in terms of age, race, their sexuality, their facial hair, and where they are in life, but still somehow are meant to be friends. Supposedly they’re a tight unit, but we saw a lot more of them as individuals in their own lives than we saw of them together. And when they were together, they were mostly bitching at each other’s life choices (valid) or listening to the messy fallout of a vegan eating meat in the bathroom (totally not valid because no one does this).

We started off not really knowing who these guys were. Then, through a promising all-day date with Richie, we figured out a little more about Patrick; eventually we realized that Augustin is just a bratty jerk, and we don’t have to like him, and maybe that’s okay. The Season One finale “Looking Glass” borrows its title from Lewis Carroll, an homage to the topsy-turvy craziness of Wonderland. In a show as muted and low-key as Looking, I guess this is about as fucked up as it gets. Which is still not that fucked up, by HBO standards; I mean, last night’s Girls finale had Hannah in a blonde wig, donning a variety of accents, pretending to be a married woman cheating on her fictional husband with her actual boyfriend, with her tits out most of the time. That’s a level of fucked upedness that Looking has never broached (and likely will never broach). That’s fine. In comparison to the lackluster and eventless first few episodes, “Looking Glass” is positively wacky with conflict. Compared to most TV series, though? It’s still rather tame.

“Looking Glass” begins with Patrick stopping by Richie’s work, where he’s met with a cool “Can I help you?” Richie is still pissed that Patrick wouldn’t let him bring weed to his sister’s wedding, I guess. (I know, I know, it’s more than that, but that was the tipping point.) Richie asks for “space,” which is never a good sign, unless he means the kind of “space” that you find on a cute date at the planetarium, but we’ve been there and done that. And that’s not what Richie means at all.

If Richie and Patrick are left up in the air at the beginning of this episode, Frank is very clear about the status of his relationship with Augustin: finite. Splitsville. Dunzo. And a good thing, too, since Augustin is truly in need of a comeuppance. Frank adds insult to injury by telling Augustin that he’s not a talented artist and never will be — a scorching burn that also holds a lot of truth, since we’ve seen what Augustin’s vision of “art” is. And that’s real life. A lot of people enter adulthood thinking they’re artists; many fewer end up making a living that way. Augustin is going to have to figure out something else to do with himself now that he’s got no man, no job, no artistic cred, and no place to live — it’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for him, until I remember what an obnoxious child he was in the last seven episodes. And then I just say, “Haha, you got told, Augustin.”

Does this mean no more Frank? I’m not that attached to Frank, though he’s clearly the better half of the Augustin+Frank=4ever equation. Patrick and Dom can’t exactly hang out with Frank now that their bud has dumped him, and the relationship seems over enough that there won’t be a “Will Frank take Augustin back?” arc in Season Two. (Or at least, not for a while.) Assuming this is it for O-T Fagbenle (what a name!) on Looking, let us say: so long Frank! We hardly knew ye.

(But we hardly know any of the characters, really.)

Meanwhile, Dom is still freaking about the Great Chicken Shack Experiment, or whatever they’re calling it. Lynn is MIA after Dom snapped at him (and made an unwise “daddy” comparison) in “Looking For A Plus One.” Yes, all three of our boys have been spurned after last week’s outbursts, with Dom’s being the least dramatic but perhaps also the most poignant. Again, I must point out that Looking‘s idea of high drama is having Lynn show up slightly late to Dom’s pop-up chicken restaurant; Macbeth this is not. There’s no yelling, no Lynn demanding his money back, no Lynn not showing up at all. Lynn does show up with a very San Francisco-looking (read: bearded) stud he claims is “just a friend,” but that can never be taken as gospel. After all, we met Lynn in a bathhouse.

Dom acts all jealous and Doris has a terrific scene where she practically begs Lynn to go easy on Dom’s heart, telling Lynn that he’s “worth it.” Then again, this episode also has a moment where Doris says she wants Lynn’s date to sit on her face, then corrects herself and claims she should be the one sitting on his face, but doesn’t sound too convinced; either way, I’m down to watch a Doris spin-off no matter who is seated upon whose visage. HBO’s Face-Sitting is bound to be more eventful than HBO’s Looking, especially if it stars Lauren Weedman, who I still say needs her own show (and, perhaps, her own country).

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like Lynn is taking Doris’ words to heart — I mean her words about Dom being worth it, since I don’t think he overheard that bit about his pal sitting on her face — until Dom desperately pulls him aside and apologizes like a grown-up, rather than the petulant teenager he was impersonating last week. Meanwhile, Lynn is really, really anxious not to keep his “friend” waiting, which is why I suspect he’s more than a friend, because real gay men don’t care if they keep their friends waiting. (Especially if it’s only for a few minutes.) Dom goes for the kiss, and this time, Lynn seems to like it — but we don’t know for sure because that’s the last we see of Dom and Lynn this season. I think we can feel reasonably confident that Scott Bakula will return to Looking next season… unless Face-Sitting somehow snaps him up instead. (Even better!)

Augustin decides to take (unspecified?) drugs, which actually make him a more tolerable character, as I suppose they do with a lot of people. He and Patrick stop by the One-Night-Only Chicken Shack Spectacular to show their support, where they discuss their respective breakups and Patrick cops to a surprising and somewhat alarming armpit fetish. (I thought Patrick was a little too vanilla for that?) Augustin must already have been aware of Patrick’s penchant for pit, because he doesn’t react at all; or maybe he’s just too fucked up on his drugs still. (He’s functionally eating chicken, so he can’t be that far gone.)

Then Patrick gets a call from Kevin demanding his presence at work. (Patrick is way more agreeable about working nights and weekends than just about anybody on the planet.) Augustin and Patrick leave the chicken shack with full glasses of wine abandoned on the table, which is another reminder that Looking is fiction, because real gay men do not leave full glasses of wine on a table. Ever. (Especially if they’ve just been called in to work.)

But just joking — Kevin didn’t call Patrick in to work, he called him in for a beer and another rapey kiss, because apparently last week’s “no” screamed “Yes!” when translated into British. Being called into work late at night and being forced to make out with one’s boss would be hell on Earth for 99% of Americans, but because he’s rather cute and from England, I guess Kevin gets away with it, because despite some feeble protests, it’s not long before you-know-what is happening…

And now it’s time to say our second good-bye this episode. Farewell, Patrick’s supposed bottom shame! We hardly knew ye, either!

Following that naughty office fuck (and, presumably, some armpit-licking), Kevin says he “doesn’t know” what this means for Patrick and Kevin in the future, which is probably code for “I’ll never text or call you again, I’ll avoid eye contact whenever I see you, and in six months or so I’ll find a lame excuse to lay you off when what I really want to do is forget all about this little episode. But thanks for bottoming!”

Patrick returns home to find Richie (of course!) waiting for him outside his apartment, which is something people on TV still do… because texting “hey can I come over?” and not getting an answer is too undramatic, even for Looking. (Have you noticed how people on TV are always dropping by unannounced? Seriously, no one in real life does this. TV characters are the only people who have six hours to spare to wait in front of someone’s apartment, just hoping they’ll find their way home eventually, without bothering to call or text.)

Patrick is understandably guilty about his naughty office fuck with his all-but-married boss, which is basically a porn-level escapade — and technically, he did kinda cheat on Richie. (It wasn’t exactly clear whether or not Richie’s “space” included a room to fuck one’s boss in.) Rather than confess, Patrick hears Richie out, and Richie says he’s “this close” to falling in love with Patrick (which is heartwarming) but he won’t, because he doesn’t think Patrick is ready (which is heartbreaking). Patrick’s unpreparedness for Richie’s jelly has just been confirmed on a sofa at Most Dangerous Games, so it’s time for Patrick to say his tearful good-bye to Richie and his armpits. (I, however, will bid neither Richie nor his armpits farewell, since this ends on an uncertain enough note that I’m sure Patrick and Richie’s saga is ongoing in Season Two.)

After that unhappy confrontation with Richie, Patrick returns home to find Augustin’s severed head impaled on a spike in his bedroom — ahh, sorry, I was just fantasizing about what might happen to Augustin if this were Game Of Thrones. On the less decapitation-happy Looking, Augustin is curled up asleep (in a drug-induced coma), snoozing to an episode of Golden Girls. Patrick picks up where Augustin left off, which is both a sweet moment and also a reminder that the tremulous gay bonds of friendship and occasional minor half-smiles engendered by Patrick, Augustin, and Dom of Looking are nothing compared to the pals, confidantes, and outright chuckles of Dorothy, Sophia, Rose, and Blanche. (But that’s a pretty high standard to live up to.)

The season finale of Looking essentially resets Season One back where it began. Patrick is single once more, Augustin is (probably) living with Patrick again, and Dom is (probably) still having age-related issues, except now he’s dealing with them by hooking up with a much older man instead of a much younger one. I imagine, with that Golden Girls theme music playing us out, that Looking is trying to be all about the friendship, and I still think that eight episodes in, these friendships seem totally arbitrary. We haven’t had any truly meaningful interactions between the three leads. Doris and Dom manage to have a poignant scene in nearly every episode; if the show were about their bond, I’d buy it.

But Patrick has not impacted a single one of Dom’s storylines. Nor has Augustin. Nor have Patrick or Dom had any significant hand in either preventing or provoking Augustin’s meltdown. Augustin had some effect on Patrick and Richie’s courtship, but it’s Patrick’s boss Kevin who ended up being the bigger threat (along with Patrick’s insecurities). These characters exist in this same universe, but only occasionally interact. Their friendship is not integral whatsoever to the show, and that should probably change if the show’s writers want to keep using Golden Girls as a reference. Would anyone have watched Golden Girls if all the old ladies were just off in their own corners, hanging out with other people every episode, barely seen together?

And that’s our show. Looking took a while to warm up to. I still wouldn’t call it appointment television. Girls was extremely sharp for the majority of this season, and True Detective was a much richer and more enticing HBO debut. I’d rate them higher than this one. But I will say that several Looking fellas (not necessarily the core cast members) made their way into my heart this season, and I do want to know what happens to them next. Will Lynn and Dom give it a go? How long will Richie’s armpits go unlicked? Whose face will Doris sit on? I guess you could say I’m Looking forward to the second season, more for the fringe benefits of the supporting characters than anything relating to Patrick or Augustin. But that’s still something.

So. I’ve seen him eight times now, and that’s a lot. After our first three or four outings, I was unimpressed, but I must have seen something to keep me coming back. Some… potential. And then there it was. On our fifth date, I witnessed something truly special. I felt something. Granted, it wasn’t something I’d never felt before — in fact, it reminded me very much of something I’d seen a couple years back — and it was better and fresher then. But still.

After that fifth date, I was willing to cut him some slack. He still frustrated me at times. I wanted him to go further; he was always holding back. It was like he was afraid to go too far, so he kept moving forward mere inches. And after so many weeks, I wanted more. I wanted to love him! Instead, I only liked him a little. But there were moments, little sparks, that made me believe he might be worth putting some more time into. And so I did.

Now he wants to take a break. I don’t know when I’ll see him again. Sometime next year, maybe? And who knows how he’ll change by then? Or how I will? I know there will be others to help me while away the hours in the meantime; soon, I’ll barely think of him. But when he returns, I’ll be glad to see him again, ready to pick back up where we left off. I wasn’t sure at first, but after these past eight weeks, I guess I’m ready to make a commitment.

Looking, I like you. I certainly don’t love you… yet. Maybe I never will. Maybe this is the peak of our… relationship? You are nice, and sometimes a little bit funny, and slightly sexy, though not nearly as promiscuous as I was expecting you to be. You are genuine, and at times endearingly awkward, and it takes time to get to know you. A lot of my friends didn’t like you when they first saw you, but I kept hoping for the best.

I didn’t get the best. I got you. And I suppose that will have to do.

*

Have you heard the Good News?

One of the most innovative filmmakers of this millennium has released an epic blockbuster that caters heavily to a Christian audience — and it’s actually pretty decent.

There was every reason to be skeptical about a major budget version of this tale. Actually, any major budget version of any tale. In case you haven’t noticed, movie studios are increasingly obsessed with telling (and retelling) recognizable stories in recent years — and there are few stories more widely recognized than the tale of Noah’s ark. We’ve all become reasonably cynical about Hollywood’s eagerness to turn anything you’ve ever heard of into a film — comic books, video games, board games, toys, people — regardless of story potential. There’s no actual correlation between brand name recognition and box office, since so many of these films have failed, but it keeps happening and almost always seems more like a cash grab than a movie.

Factor in the massive amounts of money that can be made when the right movie finds its built-in Christian audience, and Noah seems like a no-brainer — and by that, I mean both a really good way to make money, and also a potentially brainless movie. The wild card here is Mr. Darren Aronofsky, one of this generation’s most talented filmmakers, the man behind Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Requiem For A Dream.

Yes, that’s right — the same guy who brought us Ellen Burstyn hopped up on diet pills being attacked by a refrigerator and Jennifer Connolly going “ass to ass” for a heroin fix is now bringing us one of the most cherished biblical stories ever told. Who’d have guessed?Darren Aronofsky’s last film was the dark ballet drama Black Swan, which was nominated for Best Picture, won Natalie Portman an Oscar, and made a surprisingly massive killing at the box office. No one expected a psychological thriller about a demented lesbian ballerina who ends up stabbing herself in the belly on opening night to gross over $300 million worldwide… and nobody expected the man who made it to suddenly turn his eye toward the Bible with his newfound clout.

As it turns out, Noah is a passion project of Aronofky’s, and anyone who has seen the underrated, multi-century-spanning The Fountain can understand how Aronofsky’s sensibilities might line up with this kind of old-fashioned epic. But still! Even in comparison to other Bible stories, the tale of Noah’s ark is problematic. It doesn’t hold up to deep scrutiny. I mean, can we seriously believe that two of every species on Earth could fit on one boat? And have enough food to eat throughout those forty days of rainfall? And not kill each other? Where did all that water come from? And, forty days later, where does it all go? Does this mean that every single person on Earth is a descendant of Noah and his wife? What about black people? And Asian people? And Latin people? There weren’t two of any of them on the ark!No, this particular Bible story has never really seemed all that believable, and there’s only so much that the big screen Noah can do to combat that. Those who go into this movie questioning the veracity of this tale will not leave it utterly convinced that this is the way it happened, but that’s not necessarily a problem. Did we leave Lord Of The Rings thinking that Frodo really made that epic trek across Middle Earth? (Sorry, there is no Middle Earth.) Aronofsky adds further fantasy elements, such as angels-turned-rock-monsters, as if to highlight that the entire tale is utterly implausible. Turn your brains off, skeptics, and just enjoy the ride.

Noah stars Russell Crowe as the biblical hero, who is turned here into more of an antihero, determined to wipe mankind off the face of the Earth. ‘Cause, you know, God said so. This kind of defense didn’t work so well for the Son of Sam thousands of years later, which I count as progress, but back in the ol’ days I guess people just sort of accepted it. (Most people with this sort of agenda end up being the bad guy, thwarted by James Bond, which is what makes Noah rather nifty.) Noah is married to Naameh, played by Jennifer Connolly, who gets this film’s most powerhouse scene. (It’s too early to talk Oscars, but one can imagine a Supporting Actress nod in her future. Maybe.) You may remember that Connolly also played Crowe’s wife in A Beautiful Mind, so she’s had plenty of experience playing “supportive wife to potentially schizophrenic visionary played by Russell Crowe,” as she does here.Noah also has two studly sons, Shem (Douglas Booth) and Ham (Logan Lerman), plus Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll), a son too young to be deemed “studly,” and a surrogate daughter named Ila (Emma Watson). Since these are to be the only survivors of humanity, the fact that Ila is not really their sister is how Noah dances around the tricky issue of incest, although it is implied that there will be some funky pairings going on when Ham and Japheth eventually have to fuck their nieces in order to keep the population going. (Sequel!) The cast is rounded out by Noah’s loopy grandfather Methuselah, who is a little bit crazy, a little bit magical, and a lot obsessed with berries. He lives up on a mountain and apparently doesn’t get out much, since when Naameh finally visits him he’s apparently been cooling his heels, waiting for someone to bring him berries for the better part of a decade. (He is also apparently not invited to join his family on the ark? Harsh!)

Yes, there’s a lot of silliness in Noah, much of it thanks to the source material. But as blockbuster spectacle goes, it’s pretty killer. The CGI animals aren’t super convincing, but the imagery is dazzling nonetheless, and it’s nice to see what Darren Aronofsky can do with untold millions at his disposal. (Then again, the special effects in Black Swan and The Fountain were even more breathtaking, and done with a fraction of the budget.) There’s some Requiem For A Dream-like editing involving animated Bible sequences (swapping the forbidden apple for heroin, which is fitting), and another bombastic score by Clint Mansell. The epic battle scenes are… well, epic. And there’s a Tree Of Life-like montage of Earth’s creation which shrewdly avoids any evolution-related controversy by cutting away just before monkeys turn into people. (But we all know it happens… right?)What truly sets Noah apart from the average blockbuster — and the average movie that caters to a Christian audience — is its savvy attention to character. Each of the main players has a clear and compelling story, and though the Bible didn’t often give its female characters a lot of agency, the women in Noah are every bit as important as the men, even if everyone does ultimately defer to the titular prophet — even when he attempts to kill off members of his own family because he’s pretty sure that’s what God told him to do. (On this matter, it would have been helpful if God had been a little more specific.) There’s real angst to be found here, which is not so true of most films of this size and scope, and the Noah character goes surprisingly dark. He spends more time on the Ark threatening to kill his infant grandchildren than hanging out with giraffes — a bold move in a studio movie, which tend to demand that all heroes be “likable” (AKA boring). God tends to be a more benevolent figure in modern Christian lore, but Noah isn’t afraid to point out that back in the day, He could be kind of an asshole. (Don’t smite me. Just saying!)

The fact that Noah is Darren Aronofsky’s worst film yet is only a testament (ha!) to the fact that his other movies are so good. And in comparison to his pre-Black Swan oeuvre, Noah is poised to make boatloads (ha!) of cash, which means he may have even more artistic freedom from here on out. It’s far from a perfect movie — the teen romance dips into melodramatic Twilight territory once or twice, Anthony Hopkins starts off hammy and goes full-on goofy shortly after, and Ray Winstone’s broad villain should have been excised from the latter half of the movie to make room for the true “bad guy,” Noah himself — but it’s still all rather awesome, considering. After a string of flops, it’s nice to see Russell Crowe back in Gladiator mode, headlining the sort of movie he’s good at… even if he does sing again (triggering shudder-inducing Les Miserables flashbacks — but only briefly). It absolutely could be better, but it also could’ve been God-awful. (Ha!)

Faint praise? Maybe. But Aronofsky is one of few filmmakers I’m still willing to follow to the ends of the Earth. I only hope this budget hasn’t spoiled him, because I’d much rather see more pill-popping housewives, suicidal wrestlers, and demented ballerinas than Aronofsky’s take on the parting of the Red Sea.

Let’s save that one for Paul Thomas Anderson.

*

In cinema, there are twist endings… and then there are endings that are so twisted, so gnarled, so completely screwed up they leave you sitting in the theater with your mouth hanging open puzzling over what the hell just happened until the end credits are over.

Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy has such an ending.

But let’s start at the beginning. Enemy is the second English-language film from Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, though technically it was filmed before Prisoners, which also starred Jake Gyllenhaal (and an impressive cast of other high-caliber actors, including Hugh Jackman, Viola Davis, Paul Dano, Terrence Howard, Maria Bello, and Melissa Leo). Prisoners was an enjoyable but muddled and largely incoherent thriller with some unfortunate gaping plot holes that undermined its plausibility, and a lot of storylines and characters that went literally nowhere. (The real crime: Viola Davis was totally wasted.) The fault lied in the script rather than in Villeneuve’s taut direction; it was twisty and turny in the usual ways, with a few minor surprises along the way.

With that simple, ambiguous title, Enemy sure sounds like it could be the sequel to a film called Prisoners, but besides leading man Jake Gyllenhaal and Villeneuve, the two films couldn’t be more different. Enemy is by far the smaller of the two, in terms of look and scope, with only five or six characters of significance. It certainly feels like the kind of movie a director would make before prestigious, studio-friendly fare like Prisoners; it’s quirky, murky, and deliberately confounding. A lot of people would prefer the straightforward thrills of Prisoners, but I’m more transfixed by Enemy, a film I will need to see several more times before I feel like I have a solid grasp on what it’s actually trying to say. I knew the film had a surprising ending, and so I braced for it; yet I doubt there’s a single filmgoer in the entire world who could have predicted what happens in the last scene of this movie. It’s the ultimate cinematic “What the fuck?”, and it’s delightful.In Enemy, a milquetoast history professor named Adam finds himself experiencing a nasty case of Vertigo when he rents a DVD from the local video store (thanks to a colleague’s recommendation) and discovers an extra in the film who looks exactly like him. That man turns out to be the small-time, Toronto-based actor Daniel Saint Claire, whose real name is Anthony. Adam does some light stalking to find out where Anthony lives; he calls his doppelganger’s home and speaks to his wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon), who is severely confused by the man on the phone who sounds just like her husband but claims to be a stranger. Adam doesn’t tell his girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent) anything about this, and his mother (Isabella Rossellini) isn’t very helpful. Neither Anthony nor Adam reacts to these events the way you’d think a person would.

That’s because there’s clearly something larger going on here. Villeneuve strikes up an unsettling tone right from the very beginning, when we see one of the two Jakes enter a gentlemen’s club, of sorts, featuring sexy women and tarantulas. Automatically, we know we’re in for a pretty surreal ride.

It’s difficult to say much else about the story, since Enemy is a film that must be experienced to be believed, with Hitchcockian elements that have one foot firmly rooted in classic suspense, while others feel a bit more modern (Cronenberg and Lynch may come to mind). The film’s palette is a grimy yellow, which only unnerves us further. It’s not exactly a pretty movie, though it is a visually enticing one thanks to the clever camera work. The spooky score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Juriaans is top notch. And that ending!Okay, yes, back to that. Enemy‘s final scene has already been a subject of much lively debate amongst the few who have seen it. It’s rather unforgettable, simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying, and it’s bound to leave just about anyone with more than one feeling about the finish of this film. It’s more than an M. Night Shyamalan-style “gotcha!” — it’s as if The Sixth Sense ended with the reveal that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time, and then he turned into a watermelon.

As you might expect, Enemy leaves many questions unanswered. (Most of them, actually.) Are Anthony and Adam twins separated at birth? Clones? Two halves of the same man’s psyche? It’s hard not to notice that they’re both involved with beautiful, icy blondes. Adam’s mother seems to know more than she lets on, especially when she insists that he likes blueberries when we know it’s Anthony who likes blueberries. (Paired with Noah, this is the second movie in a row I saw in which berries played a significant role in the film.) Jake Gyllenhaal gives two compelling performances, establishing him further as leading man material as he matures as an actor, and Sarah Gadon is equally compelling as Helen, who finds herself drawn to her husband’s bashful double. (Melanie Laurent’s Mary doesn’t have enough screen time to make too much of an impact.)

Obviously, Enemy is not for everyone… and certainly not for the deeply arachnophobic. Many will find it impenetrable. Some may find it just too preposterous. And it’s totally fair to think that the ending is just a big “fuck you!” to the audience. But I happen to enjoy this sort of puzzle-box movie, a film that may not ever be completely solvable.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a very delicious-looking housefly I intend to have for lunch.

*

The people of Scotland need a refresher on “stranger danger,” at least according to the events depicted in Under The Skin. The lesson: even if someone looks as comely as Scarlett Johansson, that does not mean it is safe to get in a creepy van with her, return to her rural dungeon-like homestead “about a half an hour away,” and skinny dip in her icky black pool.

Just say no and walk away.

In Under The Skin, Johansson plays a nameless extraterrestrial temptress who arrives on Earth with zero empathy for human beings, and just as much clothing. After taking care of the latter issue, she spends all of her time lurking around in a conspicuous white van, on the prowl for menfolk. She has a specific type — youngish loners without families, even better if they work from home. You know, the kind of guys who won’t be missed if they suddenly vanish? Despite her brief time on this planet, this foreign being has a better understanding of thick Scottish accents than I do, because about half of the dialogue in this film was indecipherable to me. (Johansson herself dons a posh English accent that is perfectly understandable.) Several of the interactions we see were unscripted, using non-actors who apparently never saw one of the biggest movies of all time (The Avengers) and didn’t recognize Scar-Jo in acid-washed jeans, a fur coat, and an edgy black hipster haircut. (However, I assume that the men Scarlett hypnotically seduces in her alien lair were, indeed, aware that this is a movie.)

The film opens with a disorienting sci-fi moment — the temptress, in voice over, masters the English language as we see her obscurely being “formed.” It’s the first of many striking visuals, most taking place in Scarlett’s lair, a surreal space of immense proportions and very few colors. (Either white or black, mainly.) This is in stark contrast to the predominantly drab scenery of Scotland, though we do briefly jaunt to more arresting locales such as a noisy nightclub, a castle’s ruins, and a blustery beach where something incredibly tragic happens. It is in this scene, relatively early in the film, that Under The Skin first grabbed me emotionally; unfortunately, those grabs were few and far between.In theory, Under The Skin is a fascinating study of humanity and gender roles, and I can think back on it with some added context and recall several moments that are thought-provoking, maybe even profound. The experience of watching it was very different, however. Director Jonathan Glazer (who brought us such diverse titles as Sexy Beast and Birth) uses incredibly long takes with obvious intent, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that nearly every shot was held about twice as long as it really needed to be, which made me constantly restless between the more alluring and cinematic scenes. There’s precious little dialogue in the film, which works fine when what’s on screen is captivating to look at, but there’s a lot here that isn’t. Every scene serves a purpose, I’m sure, but what we’re seeing is given so little context that it’s hard to connect the dots until well after you’ve seen the film (and listened to a podcast or two to clear things up, as I did).

Now that I know what the fuck Under The Skin is about — or at least have grasped a few basic ideas — I find it a lot more intriguing than I did while I was watching it. There is at least one motorcycle-riding character whose function in the story completely eluded me; the film takes a jarring and abrupt turn halfway through that left me totally lost about any and all character motivation in a movie that is already very light on such things. Johansson’s alien character begins the movie outwardly confident, fitting in with humanity reasonably well; she is able to seduce several men easily and make the sort of small talk that results in a quick jaunt to someone’s place for some baby-making, and while this is at least partially a commentary on how easily a good-looking woman can get an average-looking man to go home with her, no matter how strange she is or how murder-ready her house looks, she’s also not so bizarre that it’s a total tip-off to her real agenda. Then, in a key scene, she picks up a hooded stranger who reveals himself to be disfigured; she runs through her whole seductress routine, but feels more sympathy for this kind and lonely man than she has for any of her prior victims. What happens next is pretty confusing, sending this exotic creature out into the world sans white van, sans black murder pool, on her own. All of her previous knowledge about how to approximate being human seems to have vanished, and it’s not clear why. This is the moment that the alien herself truly attempts to be human — trying a piece of cake, taking a stab at romance — because she apparently has now felt a human emotion — sympathy for mankind. Yet it all feels like a separate movie, because her sudden confusion and disorientation don’t seem to line up with her previous confidence and ease of assimilation into the human world. It’s a big leap to make all at once, and the perplexing aspects of the story in that moment add to the overall confounding quality. Scarlett literally walks into the fog as that transition happens; figuratively, so do we.

There are essentially no details provided about where this alien is from or why she’s here. I certainly wouldn’t want a lot of exposition to spell it all out — I’m fine with a reasonable level of ambiguity. But in Under The Skin, I was just lost, and it would have been a very different (and much better) viewing experience if I’d had just a slightly clearer understanding of what was going on. The key is the alien’s relationship to a man who appeared to me to be a human minion under her thrall; in this case, she is the sole extraterrestrial on Earth, and she’s in charge. Subsequent research has given me the idea that perhaps this man, and others, are also from a planet beyond, and she works either for or with them; this adds more subtext, but with so few clues from the screenplay, I never got such an inkling while actually viewing the movie, hence confusion. The alien’s story is much more tragic if she is essentially a prostitute from outer space, designed to seduce human males for the gain of her species; but I thought she was here alone, eating them for herself.Is that my bad? I think not really. Jonathan Glazer gives us less than the minimum to comprehend this story, which is based on a book that has little in common with the film but probably makes things much clearer. I’m frustrated, to be honest, because I wanted to like this movie, and I think I would have, if Glazer had budged just an inch or two on being so enigmatic. Am I asking for this movie to be dumbed down? I suppose I am, and I feel bad about that. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that Glazer withholds such details mainly for his own satisfaction, rather than with his audience in mind. Why deny us compelling dialogue, a comprehensible story? I’m only asking for a little more context to make all the murky metaphor palatable. Instead, it’s like he wanted 95% of his audience to find this movie… well, alienating.

Despite my frustrations with its director, Under The Skin contains several cinematic moments I won’t soon forget — ones that I wish were attached to a more consistently riveting movie that I could watch over and over again. (I’m not sure I could soon sit through this one again without fast-forwarding.) The end is hauntingly beautiful, disturbing, and unlike anything you’ve seen before, as are the unnerving seduction sequences, featuring horny naked men meeting a bitter end at the hands of a black widow from space. These scenes have all the right elements to be horror classics, as arresting and unsettling as moments from The Shining or 2001: A Space Odyssey (and, in the case of the latter, just as perplexing). It plays like a rape-revenge movie in reverse, with the female first exacting her ruthless predatory methods on unsuspecting males, then becoming vulnerable and meek in the third act as she squares off against one very creepy dude in the woods. (Again, I’m mystified as to where all her powers of seduction and thrall went in the latter half of the movie, and why she was so very helpless.)I know Under The Skin has a lot to say about “What It Feels Like For A Girl” (Glazer totally missed the boat on having that Madonna song in his movie). A lot of it has come into focus a day after I saw the movie (thanks, in large part, to extra-textual sources). I would even call the film “powerful,” if you can figure out what the hell is going on.

But that’s a big if. The hypocritical ways our world treats female sexuality would indeed seem bizarre to an outsider, probably even frightening. Men prey on females all the time, and rarely would they suspect that she is doing the same back to them (tenfold!). All intriguing ideas… which I had between seat-shifting and a couple yawns as I watched Scarlett Johansson drive around in her van for what seemed like hours, occasionally picking up a friendly bloke whose Scottish brogue I couldn’t decipher to save my life.

Under The Skin is a curiosity, featuring a pretty major movie star in a weird, revealing role; I’m sure a number of people will see it primarily because they’ve heard she gets naked in it, which is a strange exploitation of an actress considering the film’s message about the function of female sexuality in a male-dominated world. Just like her alien character, Scarlett Johansson can be seen as a piece of appealing flesh meant to lure men to the cinema; men wrote and directed this movie, but it’s this woman who gets asses in seats. Her body, her sexuality is used for commercial purposes… but does that mean she’s in charge?

It’s ironic (and probably not totally accidental) that Under The Skin is being released at the same time as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which Johansson plays Natasha Romanoff, AKA the Black Widow — named after the infamous arachnid who eats her male suitors after mating with them. Natasha Romanoff does no such thing (to the best of my knowledge), but the unnamed space-hussy in Under The Skin does something like that. (There’s some kind of black widow-themed meta-triple-feature to be found in The Winter Soldier, Under The Skin, and Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, but I don’t know what it means.) Johansson is unmistakably the eye candy (for hetero males) in the otherwise sausage fest-y Avengers lineup; she wears a tight black catsuit most of the time, and though she’s brainy enough to exist in a franchise sometimes helmed by Joss Whedon, let’s face it — she’s basically there to give eleven-year-old boys their first boner.

Under The Skin is a direct critique of exactly that type of casting, and of course you can nitpick all sorts of minor points in Marvel movies. But I had a pretty great time with Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and understood everything!), which bears little resemblance to the first Captain America movie except for the reprisal of certain characters. Gone are that movie’s period charms; instead, it’s a slick comic book movie that dips one toe into the pool of conspiracy thrillers. (But All The President’s Men it ain’t, despite the appearance of Robert Redford.) It’s in the upper echelon of Marvel movies, perhaps the most consistently good since Iron Man. (The Avengers hit higher highs, but took its sweet time getting there.) I suppose there are people in this world who will enjoy both The Winter Soldier and Under The Skin, but they’re basically as opposite as two movies could be, except for the black widow-ishness of Scarlett Johansson.

For my money, I wish Under The Skin had had a pinch more of Captain America‘s clarity of plot and witty banter (Johansson and Chris Evans spar nicely). And if Captain America had more naked men being flayed, I’d be fine with that too. Perhaps I’ll revisit Glazer’s murky sci-fi drama someday; if nothing else, I will forever be grateful to it for giving us this.

*

Summer movie season is officially underway, everybody, and you know what that means: I’ll be writing weekly reviews of each and every blockbuster that Hollywood throws our way.

Just kidding! What am I, made of money? I sure don’t have the funds to shell out sixteen bucks for all of the mindless crap the studios hope teenage boys and Chinese people will like enough to put them in the black for the year.

Nor do I have the time. Last summer, I saw one lone “summer movie” in theaters, which does not mean I didn’t see any movies during the summer. I just preferred to spend my summer hours on the likes of Blue Jasmine, The Spectacular Now, The Bling Ring, Much Ado About Nothing, I’m So Excited, and Before Midnight, all of which appealed to me more than Man Of Steel or Star Trek Into Darkness or The Lone Ranger.

This summer is a little better. The season kicked off early in April with the better-than-expected Captain America sequel The Winter Soldier. Next week sees the release of a promising X-Men movie, Days Of Future Past, with the return of Bryan Singer. And while there are a handful of obvious thuds on the horizon, like Blended and Transformers 4 and Let’s Be Cops, we can be cautiously optimistic about a number of titles including Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, 22 Jump Street, and Guardians Of The Galaxy. Cinematically speaking, I’m looking forward to this summer.This past weekend brought us the behemoth reboot of Godzilla, last spotted wreaking Independence Day-style havoc on New York City in Roland Emmerich’s largely reviled 1998 version, which had the bad luck to be released after Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Unleashing a Tyrannosaurus Rex on the mainland was a no-brainer for the blockbuster dino franchise, but the T-Rex’s rampage through San Diego was not a part of Michael Crichton’s book, and admittedly the sequence was randomly tacked on at the end of the movie as a bonus fourth act. I didn’t mind. It was basically Spielberg’s way of giving Emmerich’s Godzilla the finger (if T-Rexes had a middle finger…), beating the Americanized Asian monster to the punch by having him stomp through hordes of innocent civilians.

And why not? Emmerich’s Godzilla definitely stole a page or two from Spielberg, with a more T-Rexiified lizard than the traditional Japanese fatty and lil’ ‘zillas that were, no doubt about it, velociraptor rip-offs. Emmerich’s movie even had us feeling sorry for the big mama bitch, the same way we developed some feels for the mama-and-papa T-Rex duo in the Jurassic Park sequel. To be fair, Spielberg probably owes some kudos to the Japanese Godzilla movies, so this whole cycle is basically one giant lizard eating its own tail. In the years since, we’ve had Cloverfield, which was a rip-off of Godzilla‘s rip-off of Jurassic Park (and we all know JJ Abrams loves ripping off Spielberg!). And now we’re back with both a new Godzilla and next year’s highly anticipated Jurassic World. (Is anyone else starting to feel old, witnessing multiple reboots of the same franchise within their lifetime?)

It’s no surprise, then, that the latest Godzilla owes as much to Spielberg as it does to the Japanese B-movies of yore. The hero’s name is Ford Brody, for crying out loud! (That’s Ford as in Harrison Ford, AKA Indiana Jones, and Brody as in Martin Brody, the hero of Jaws. Because, I guess, “E.T. Goldblum” was just a bit too obvious.) Ford’s wife’s name is Elle Brody, not so far from Ellen Brody (also of Jaws), and for that matter, not so far from Ellie Sattler of Jurassic Park, either. The film opens with a picaresque helicopter sequence that we can only wish had a lush John Williams score to go along with it, and at one point, a soldier is pointing his flashlight beam dangerously close to a monster’s eye, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to jump up and scream, “Turn the light off! Turn the light off!”Moreso than these aesthetic similarities, however, what Godzilla really borrows from Spielberg is its pacing. It’s a good long while into the movie before we set eyes on the title titan, and before we do we see his “fins” poking out of the water (hello, Jaws) and his big ol’ legs (hello, T-Rex). Godzilla spends its first hour primarily on scientific-speak, which is not nearly as riveting as Jurassic Park‘s rather nerdy and utterly convincing discussion of just how dinosaurs were brought back to life, but posits what is probably the most plausible explanation for how Godzilla and perhaps a few other behemoth beasties have been hiding out unnoticed on Earth for the past however many years.

This pseudo-science buildup all might be a bit more riveting if it hadn’t been done (rather badly) back in the 90s, except with Vicky Lewis and Matthew Broderick instead of the award-winning likes of Juliette Binoche, Bryan Cranston, David Straitharn, and Sally Hawkins. Like Jurassic Park, Godzilla casts a caliber of actors we don’t normally see in a major summer blockbuster like this one, though none of them are really able to transcend their one-dimensional characterizations. Bryan Cranston has the most to do, emotionally, though he’s unfortunately not playing a meth kingpin (that we know of). Indie darling Elizabeth Olsen plays a W.I.J. (Wife In Jeopardy) and as such gets to do movie-wifely things like frown at the news, leave frantic voicemails, and then wait in some kind of crater for the army to rescue her. Protagonist Ford Brody is played by the newly buff Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who seems to have traded in his acting chops for biceps. I’m not sure the buff body really suits him; wasn’t he better off when he was quirky and scrawny? Wasn’t that kind of his niche? Does the world need another Taylor Kitsch? I dunno, these days Aaron Taylor-Johnson looks like he’s perpetually posing for a selfie.What director Gareth Edwards gets right in the latest Godzilla is that Spielbergian sense of awe and spectacle. Does anything match the Spielberg face goodness of Jurassic Park? Of course not, and no movie probably ever will, because back in 1993, seeing a CGI dinosaur roaming the Earth was about as novel as seeing a real one. Nowadays, we’ve seen too many monsters causing havoc on the big screen, and there’s not too much in the 2014 Godzilla that we didn’t see in Jurassic Park or Pacific Rim or some other Godzilla movie, which is the problem with these frequent reboots (it’s even more “been there, done that” in The Amazing Spider-Man). But these creatures are genuinely ginormous, way bigger than a T-Rex, and Gareth Edward’s Godzilla could probably step on Roland Emmerich’s. (He’s more or less gone back to the original Japanese design, big fat cankles and all. You’d think that would be cheesy, but it actually works.)

There are some genuinely awesome moments in the new Godzilla, the kinds of moments we can’t take for granted in a blockbuster these days. Several feature Spielbergian flourishes, like when a monster stomps idly under a bridge as Brody and a fellow soldier lie very, very still — because it can’t see you if you don’t move! There are also several children in jeopardy — at one point, a whole school bus full of ‘em. Edwards does not forget to ground all this mutant mayhem in the real world, in the context of what people’s reaction to this next-level chaos would be. (Not that we couldn’t have used a little more, especially from Elle Brody.) The scale is massive, proposing apocalyptic WTF reactions from the little people being stomped on like so many ants, and that’s at times genuinely unsettling. (Which is appropriate for a franchise that started off as an allegory for nuclear threat.)What doesn’t work so well is the large amount of screen time given to the military, almost always the most useless subplot in a city-in-peril blockbuster. (Spielberg knows this, but Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay, and countless others seem to think we want numerous cutaways to what some admiral or general thinks we should do about all this.) Making Ford Brody an expert at dismantling nuclear weapons is a tedious and ultimately pointless choice — the whole point of these movies is to spend time with the clueless, hapless, scared-shitless civilians, because that’s us. Martin Brody and Alan Grant may have some know-how, but when it comes right down to it, they’re just regular dudes who make Spielberg Face just like the rest of us would if presented with the gaping maw of a great white shark or a T-Rex. They’re relatable, you see. And Aaron Taylor-Johnson seems incapable of making Spielberg Face. (Either that, or he’s making it all the time. I can’t tell which.)

A few of the action set pieces are disappointingly brief, including a Hawaiian tsunami and especially an attack on Las Vegas, which could have been a whole ten minutes longer (because how much fun is it to see a monster take down that tacky city?). Edwards seems a little hesitant to dwell on mass destruction until the end, which basically obliterates San Francisco. The multi-monster battle at the end is suitably epic. The overall filmmaking is rather impressive, with a style and mood that isn’t matched by many movies of this ilk. There’s a parachute sequence that is hauntingly beautiful, and the images of burned and destroyed cities evoke the devastating blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that kicked this whole franchise off in the first place; it’s rare to see these disaster movies evoke such gravitas, and it’s much-needed. Godzilla has already been deemed worthy of a sequel, something its 1998 predecessor never was granted. With a hefty slate of blockbusters on the horizon and rather tepid word-of-mouth, though, it may not end up being quite the smash Warner Bros. is hoping for. Why aren’t people more favorable to Godzilla? It could be the weak characters, or the lack of humor, or the Godzilla-free first half of the movie — which may prompt some audience members to channel their inner Ian Malcolm and inquire, “You are planning to have Godzilla in this Godzilla movie?” — or maybe we’ve been so bombarded by Transformers-style mish-mash in the years since Jurassic Park that we’ve forgotten how to have patience with smart, slow-building spectacle.

It isn’t quite Spielberg, thanks largely to a rather dull cast of characters and an unfortunate lack of humor or levity to even out of the gloom and doom. (Not a single line approaches “Hold onto your butts”-level memorability.) But it’s also not Roland Emmerich.

In other words? We might wish life had found a way for the studio to spare no expense on a more clever girl to write the screenplay… but at least it’s not one big pile of shit.    *

Antz and A Bug’s Life. Deep Impact and Armageddon. Infamous and Capote. Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down.

It happens all the time — movies with eerily similar subject matter doubling up in the same year. As if there’s just something in the air causing different filmmakers to suddenly think alike, releasing movies that might as well be carbon copies of each other. (Though one is usually the clear superior — Dante’s Peak, take a bow; Volcano, you’re drunk, go home.)

Of course, there’s a special irony to it when the movies are about doppelgangers. Earlier this year, Jake Gyllenhaal played both a nebbishy professor and the cucumber-cool actor he discovers wearing his face in Enemy, and now Jesse Eisenberg is working double-time in Richard Ayoade’s The Double. Both movies feature the central actor as both an impotent, meek version of himself as well as a suaver, more confident twin; in both, an enigmatic blonde features prominently; in both, the doubles decide to switch places, with disastrous results; both are pretty open to interpretation as to what the hell is going on.

So which film is superior? Well, for once, these doppelgangers are equally good.

Despite surface similarities, Enemy and The Double are very different movies. Enemy takes itself very seriously, with the atmosphere of a Hitchcockian thriller. It ends not so much with a twist, but a full-on lambada. (I pretty much loved it; you can read my review here.)

The Double, on the other hand, has a surprising sense of humor. It’s very much a satire of bureaucracy, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, with the same manic zing to its performances. But it’s also a film about perception, one in which only the protagonist finds the fact that he’s been cloned overnight off-putting. Enemy is psychological and dream-like, while The Double is heightened and surreal. Enemy requires a bit more thought to put the pieces together, and I’m not sure there’s any way to arrive at a totally definitive answer to its eight-legged puzzle; The Double doesn’t require a whole lot of mental work, because it doesn’t present its premise as a mystery. You could, perhaps, explain away The Double with “He was really dead the whole time!” or “It was all a dream!”, but that’s less interesting than accepting this madcap world at face value and going along for the ride.

Co-writer/director Richard Ayoade’s first film was the quirky Submarine, which I didn’t love; you can sense some of Submarine‘s Wes Andersonian flourishes in The Double, but they’re put to much better use. As with Wes Anderson’s movies, The Double asks you to accept a world that does not exactly look like our own, where people do not behave quite as real people do. It’s all very stylized — instead of depicting the real world, it’s a facsimile that represents certain aspects we might recognize. (The sets and technology seems to plus us somewhere between the 1940s and the 1980s, but it’s definitely not a “period piece.”) That’s quite appropriate in a movie that is very much about copies, and how much our individuality and originality mean to us. It’s a movie about being different, and a movie about being the same.

Ironically, The Double turns out to be quite unique, though Anderson and Gilliam’s influences can certainly be felt. The world of The Double is not our real world, but a copy that turns out to be sharper than the original, just as the copy of its hero manages to upstage him in just about every way imaginable.

Doppelganger movies almost always present their protagonist and antagonist as dual sides of the same person, and that’s certainly the case here. Simon James is a corporate lackey at a company that does… something. There is much discussion of reports and productivity, but they don’t service any real purpose — nobody actually does anything that produces a tangible result. (Isn’t that basically how it is in the corporate world?) Their business is just a lot of busyness — paperwork, protocol, and prattle that yield nothing whatsoever, so far as we can tell. The company’s figurehead is the elusive Colonel, who is worshipped like a deity as so many CEOs and founders are, even when we know next to nothing about them. The company advertises that it’s all about “people,” but features them all speaking in unison — that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Then, one day, a worker named James Simon shows up. He looks exactly like Simon James, but no one seems to find that disturbing except for Simon himself. James is a jerk, a womanizer, a bully, and a buffoon who doesn’t even know what they do at this company, but everyone loves him immediately. That includes Simon’s boss, Mr. Papadopoulos (played by Wallace Shawn), and the love interest Simon is too shy to speak to, a winsome copy girl named Hannah (played by Mia Wasikowska). The fact that Hannah makes copies for a living, and her name is a palindrome, fit right in with the heightened reality The Double establishes in its early scenes. It’s all very surreal.An easy reading of The Double might lead you to believe that James Simon is merely Simon James’ id — he’s the bolder, brasher version of Simon himself, and therefore he’s more successful in every way. But this Tyler Durden approach has been done before, and The Double knows it. Really, The Double is making a sly point about the perils of perception — how some people, no matter what they do, can’t help but be perceived in a certain negative light, while others skate by with little to no effort and come out smelling like roses. Having both types portrayed by the same actor only highlights how arbitrary these factors of failure and success are — kindness, intelligence, thoughtfulness, and hard work often go unappreciated while someone louder, crueler, and far less careful reaps all the rewards. The Double picks away at this cosmic injustice until Simon essentially has a psychotic break — he’s not crazy, but everyone perceives him as crazy, so he might as well be. Knowing you’re right doesn’t much matter in this world if no one else knows it.

The Double gets at this existential dilemma, along with several others. It’s not subtle, but it is graceful. We all feel like beautiful, unique snowflakes in a world that treats us like cattle. We all want to be celebrated for our individuality, while the people we want to celebrate us look right through us.

Or — maybe not all of us. There are many Simon Jameses in this world, but also a handful of James Simons. Like, you know, the Kardashians. The Double digs into that nagging feeling that we deserve adoration and success more than they do. We’re better, dammit! And if you take appearance out of the equation — since Simon and James look exactly identical — it’s hard to see why the good ones flail when the bad ones thrive, except that human nature is just sick that way. It’s enough to drive a person crazy.For all its philosophical intrigue, however, The Double is also probably the funniest film I’ve seen yet this year, with a welcome streak of absurdity. Jesse Eisenberg is the perfect man to deliver the script’s rapid-fire deadpan — which should come as no surprise after his Oscar-nominated delivery of Aaron Sorkin’s drily funny dialogue in The Social Network — and there are amusing cameos from the likes of Chris O’Dowd and Sally Hawkins, as well as a surprising appearance by the recently elusive Cathy Moriarity as a bitchy waitress. (A large majority of the cast has worked with Ayoade previously.)

Its earnest moments are surprisingly touching, including a bit of dialogue in which Simon compares himself to the wooden Pinocchio that pays off beautifully later. The Double is amusing, touching, haunting, thought-provoking, original, and surprising — a combination that’s tricky to pull off, and something I certainly didn’t expect from Richard Ayoade. So far it’s one of my favorite films of 2014, competing only with — you guessed it — its evil twin, Enemy.

Time will tell which one I rank higher. For now, all I know is they’ll make a hell of a double feature.*

Here’s the sad fact: the more $200 million blockbusters make their money back, the less we see studios willing to spend $20 million, or $10 million, or even a lousy $1 million on a smarter movie that’s aimed at a smaller audience.

Thus, the independent’s revenge. If smaller, smarter movies want to be made, they essentially have to make themselves, without an assist from the billion-dollar conglomerates that will greenlight Transformers and Avengers movies until giant robots from space really do come down and annihilate the human race. It’s summer now, which means Godzilla and Ninja Turtles and X-Men; but it also means indies that tempt the more selective of us with shrewd counter-programming, pulling those Sundance darlings out of the freezer to cool us off in these creatively dry summer months.

My revenge? To see most of these smaller movies, and not many of the big ones. It’s not much, but it’s all I can do.

One of these early summer releases is Blue Ruin, which made something of a splash at Sundance this year. It’s about revenge — a subject studio films have explored often — but instead of following the crafty, implausible hijinks of a martial arts superstar or a gun aficionado, Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin centers on a homeless man named Dwight (Macon Blair) who has never committed an act of violence in his life. (Until he does.)

Blue Ruin is essentially the tale of what would have happened to Bruce Wayne if he hadn’t inherited millions from his deceased parents after their murder. If there was no kindly old butler named Alfred to watch after him. Instead, he’s got only his estranged sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves), spending his days digging food out of trash cans and sneaking into empty homes to take showers, living out of a very beat up car. Dwight is no Batman. But when he learns the man who went jail for killing his parents has been released years later, it’s enough to spark him to hunt the guy down, following him into a bar as he celebrates his release, all in the name of justice.

But in Blue Ruin, revenge isn’t easy, and it doesn’t come without consequence. Many revenge movies would save this first kill for the climax, but vengeance is only the first of many violent problems Dwight will contend with as he opens up Pandora’s very bloody box. Because when one criminal falls, you can bet there are plenty more where he came from. Blue Ruin takes us through the motions — how would a homeless man obtain a murder weapon in the first place? Where would he hide after? What if he got injured in the process? It all feels a lot more real-world than your average man-on-a-mission thriller.

Blue Ruin doesn’t say anything terribly novel about revenge, except that it’s harder than it looks in the movies. Dwight isn’t a total idiot, but he makes a number of crucial mistakes throughout the course of this story, and we often cringe at things he does that only make his situation worse. Like it or not, it’s probably closer to the way we’d behave in the same situation than anything in Payback, The Brave One, or Kill Bill. We’ve seen plenty of stories that intend to tell us that vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but that message tends to get muddled when there’s a bad ass action hero at the center. In Blue Ruin, revenge is a dish best served not at all, because it’s going to dish itself right back with some powerful indigestion.

The film is often tense and occasionally gruesome, but also takes time out for more off-the-beaten-path moments, like Dwight’s emotive confession to Sam, or his reunion with the high school buddy (Devin Ratray) who ends up helping him out quite necessarily. The final act is quietly suspenseful in a rather masterful way, with an empty house that couldn’t be more foreboding. As Dwight contends with the family of the man who torn his own family apart — including Jan Brady herself, Eve Plumb (!) — well, let’s just say it doesn’t end with hugs and a learned lesson.If Blue Ruin takes great pains to make a revenge story plausible, then another smallish thriller from 2014, Grand Piano, does the very opposite, reveling in absurdity. Grand Piano is like Die Hard in a concert hall, Speed goes to the symphony. And if that sounds like a ridiculous idea for a movie, well… it is. Truly.

Elijah Wood plays Tom Selznick, a piano wunderkind who flamed out five years ago during a concert when he flubbed the near-impossible “La Cinquette,” composed by his recently deceased mentor. Tonight he’s making his grand return to the grand piano, playing on the very instrument once owned by his millionaire maestro.

After a slow-building first act which sees Tom grow increasingly uneasy about his upcoming performance, Tom sits down to play… and discovers an ominous note written in his sheet music: “Play one wrong note and you die!” Tom soon discovers that a mysterious figure in the balcony seats has a gun trained on him and his famous actress wife (Kerry Bishe), which means he has no choice but to play “La Cinquette” flawlessly — or die trying.Obviously, this is a ludicrous premise for a movie. And even if you buy it, the script adds a number of loopy twists that might have had us tearing our hair out — if we hadn’t already checked our heads at the door. (Anything involving the killer’s “assistant,” or Tom’s hapless drunk friends in the audience, is particularly looney.) These phony developments could bring down a thriller that took itself more seriously, but Grand Piano is so baldly silly that it’s hard not to just sit back and enjoy it, the way you might take in a good classical concert. This is the kind of movie where a man sends a text message under his sheet music while performing for an audience of hundreds; where a major fight breaks out in the rafters just above the audience during an emotive performance, and no one hears it. Whatever! When the criminal mastermind’s reason for forcing Tom to perform a note-perfect concert comes into focus, it’s equally senseless — surely there was an easier way to accomplish this! (Or, you know… just smash the piano.) It’s practically a straight-faced spoof of single-location thrillers.

Does Tom prove himself to the snarky detractors who mock him mercilessly for choking? Does he execute “La Cinquetta” without getting himself shot to death? (Do you really have to ask?) Unlike Tom, the screenplay hits a lot of false notes, but it’s hard to stay mad about it. What does work is the cinematography, which is surprisingly expensive-looking for such a contained movie. The camera zooms and swoops along with the classical music, and despite the insane plot twists, the score gives the film a touch of class. (More thrillers these days should be given an entirely classical soundtrack.) Goofily written by Damien Chazelle and elegantly directed by Eugenio Mira, it’s the kind of movie Hitchcock might have made, if maybe a touch more ridiculous.And while we’re on the subject of revenge, let’s put in a few good words for the wide-release comedy Neighbors, which surprised me by receiving good enough word-of-mouth and reviews for me to actually bother seeing it. And you know what? I’m glad I did. Neighbors pits new parents Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne against a cadre of party-hearty frat boys played by Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Zac Efron. The conflict is this: the frat boys want to be loud, and the neighbors want them to be quiet. Enough to hang a summer comedy on? Sure! (We’ve seen movies hung on much less.)

Yes, the only stakes of this comedy are literally whether a baby sleeps or wakes up. That’s what Hollywood movies have come to! And I know this is a big deal to parents of tiny infants, but it’s not likely to leave the rest of us on the edge of our seats for two hours. I guess we should be grateful that it’s not a suspense thriller about whether the baby’s diaper is full or empty?

Anyway, Neighbors manages to get a number of laughs in despite a tepid premise, and the cast fully commits to the silliness. Seth Rogen adds his usual amount of heart to a movie that would mostly be a waste without it, while Zac Efron is (surprisingly?) convincing as a meathead aplha bro. (I’m not a fan of Zac Efron, but he disappears into a somewhat thankless role without doing what many young actors would do, which is wink at the audience to let us know he’s not really a dumb jock douche bag.) The supporting cast is fine, but the movie’s secret weapon is Rose Byrne, who shows off killer comedic timing that proves her hilarious supporting turn in Bridesmaids was no fluke. (It’s about time for Rose Byrne to carry her own comedy, isn’t it?)

Neighbors takes a few weak stabs at, like, having us sympathize with Efron’s Peter Pan complex, which comes as too little, too late in this movie. The frat end of the battle is undercooked, since everyone will root for the sweet, struggling young parents and their uber-cute moppet anyway. The script is a little slapdash, the pacing a little lazy, but nearly all of the jokes work, so whatever, bro. It’s an $18 million movie that unseated The Amazing Spider-Man 2 from the box office throne in the superhero’s second weekend, which feels like sweet revenge for anyone who’s growing tired of mindless summer actioners dominating the battlefield.

*

They say there are no small parts, only small actors. So I guess it’s also true that there are no small movies, only small budgets.

Coherence is a movie that plays with some very big ideas — so big that you may not even notice that it was shot on a micro-budget. Most of the film takes place inside the same house (well, kind of). The cast is an ensemble of eight actors playing eight characters (again, kind of). It all centers on a dinner party featuring four couples with a few complicated relationships between them, some of which are known, some of which will be revealed. The dialogue is mostly improvised; the actors did not know what the film was about when they signed on. And though it starts off like a mumblecore-style talky relationship drama, the fact that a comet is passing by overhead eventually casts a dark pall over the wine-drinking and gabbing.

Emily Foxler plays Em (appropriately), a dancer whose pride recently cost her a starring role in the production that might have made her career. Emily and her boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling) show up to dine with five friends, which does not include Lauren, the outsider of the group who used to date Kevin but is now on the arm of Amir (Alex Manugian). The friends assemble at the home of Lee (Lorene Scafaria) and Mike (Nicholas Brendon of Buffy fame) who reveals to Laurie that he was on a popular TV series. No, not Buffy — it’s a show called Roswell, which may or may not be some kind of WB in-joke about the sci-fi high school series of the same name that aired during the Buffy era but did not feature Nicholas Brendon. (It actually starred Jason Behr, who played Ford on an episode of Buffy.) Also in attendance are Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), who brings along some ketamine just in case anyone needs some loosening up, and Hugh (Hugo Armstrong), whose brother warned him that something strange might happen tonight as a result of that comet.

Hugh’s brother was right.

It’s probably best not to know much more about what goes down in Coherence, but suffice to say it’s one of several movies this year in which doppelgangers play a major part. Alongside The Double and Enemy, Coherence is a bit of a mindfuck and also one of the most entertaining films of the year. Co-writer/director James Ward Byrkit knows how to make the most of his premise, unleashing a mind-bending thriller that manages to be surprisingly funny, and though nearly all of the action takes place in the same room (kind of), the story is never obviously making concessions for its budget.

It’s a little bit Twilight Zone, a pinch of Donnie Darko, the kind of storyline that would easily be at home in an episode Buffy (speaking of). It’s a lot of fun. And it deserves a wider audience than it will probably find when it opens this weekend. (There’s hope for a healthy life on VOD and streaming, one would imagine.) It offers the kind of no-pressure fun that a $200 million blockbuster just can’t.

Sometimes less is more. Sometimes smaller is better. And some movies don’t require a pre-screening dose of ketamine to fuck you up a little bit.*

I’m not sure what the hell is going on, but in 2014, the summer blockbusters are actually good.

All of them?

No. Let me start over.

Most of the summer blockbusters this year have been pretty good, which is still fairly remarkable. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (a summer blockbuster with “winter” in the title that came out in spring) and Godzilla impressed me, and while I haven’t caught X-Men: Days Of Future Past yet, the word on the street is that it’s also pretty satisfying. After last summer’s dearth of large-scale entertainment that actually entertained, how sweet it is to see that Hollywood has learned that strong storytelling and a coherent vision actually matter even in a superhero sequel!

Except in the rare exception like The Amazing Spider-Man 2. And, no doubt, the upcoming Transformers: The Age Of Exinction — since when was the last time the fourth installment in a franchise rose in quality above the not-so-good first three?

And… okay, wait. Let me start over.

Summer blockbusters have a nasty habit of being repetitive. The same tropes, the same story beats, the same bland heroes, over and over. We’re able to predict how these movies will play out before we’ve walked into them. So imagine my surprise when a movie that’s all about repetition — featuring Tom Cruise going all Groundhog Day, living the same day again and again — turns out to be on of the freshest summer blockbusters we’ve seen in ages.

Tom Cruise plays Cage, a military spokesperson who’s never seen much action. To teach him a lesson about preaching what he hasn’t practiced, a hardass general (played by Brendan Gleeson) sends Cage to the front lines against an army of tentacled space beasties — a Normandy-on-acid battle he doesn’t have a chance in hell of surviving.

And he doesn’t.

He dies.

Tom Cruise dies, everybody!(Of course, he comes back to life immediately after.)

Edge Of Tomorrow has Cage living the same sequence of hours over and over, dying sooner or later every time. Gradually, he gets better and better at eluding the sinister E.T.s who have unleashed hell on Earth, living just a little longer every time. (Mostly.) Edge Of Tomorrow replicates the video game experience, as Cage is given infinite lives that allow him to get further and further in his “level” as his skills accumulate. Death isn’t death at all, merely an inconvenience that sets us back at the beginning again. Eventually, Cage realizes that the “Angel of Verdun,” AKA Rita Vrataski, AKA the “Full Metal Bitch,” also acquired this strange power at one point, and the two team up to, you know — save the world.

Yes, Edge Of Tomorrow is, in many ways, familiar territory for summer blockbusters, and certainly familiar territory for Tom Cruise. But director Doug Liman and writers Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth find ways to keep things fresh and surprising, especially in the film’s manic first half, injecting a surprising dose of humor (stemming mostly from seeing Cage and his buddies meet their maker in darkly comedic fashion — the more it happens, the funnier it gets). Unlike most of his “serious action hero” roles, Cruise is allowed to be inept for a large portion of this movie, endearing us to him and allowing him to charm in a way that he hasn’t since Tropic Thunder, maybe.Cruise and Blunt have terrific chemistry, boosted by the fact that Rita is allowed to be a bona fide action heroine, not just a love interest sidekick who gets to snarl a time or two. She’s way more badass than Cage ever gets to be (even though, yes, it is Cruise who’s ultimately tasked with saving all mankind… again). It’s one of the best female roles in a major studio blockbuster lately — possibly ever — and by the end of it, we sort of want to see a Full Metal Bitch spin-off that sees her kicking ass and taking names Cruise-free.

Which is not to say that Tom Cruise doesn’t carry this movie. Though the man has taken his fair share of knocks from the press (many of them deserved), he’s also still the most charismatic action hero around, and it’s fun to see him practically spoofing himself (and dying repeatedly in the process). It’s a shame that Edge Of Tomorrow has been such a disappointment at the box office. (With a production budget of $178 million, it feels unnecessarily expensive. There’s no reason it needed to cost that much, is there?)

It’s also unfortunate that, for all its ingenuity, we can still smell a whiff of studio interference. The film’s original title All You Need Is Kill is ten times better than the soap opera-esque Edge Of Tomorrow, and might have signaled to audiences that this is not your run-of-the-mill Tom Cruise sci-fi flick. (By which I mean, this is not the same movie as Oblivion.) And though it’s not a travesty, Edge Of Tomorrow‘s ending is totally edgeless, unlike the film preceding it. The film’s overblown third act fails to live up to the originality of the first two, and those final few scenes are — without giving too much away — an uplifting letdown.

Still, this film deserves better than it’s gotten. In a just world, it would this summer’s biggest hit, spawning sequels (Edge Of Two Days From Now) and prequels (Perimeter Of Yesterday). So catch it while you still can, before it leaves theaters — because in the unforgiving summer movie season, there are no do-overs. *

The story of Roger Ebert is a curious one. The man didn’t set out to be a film critic, but he ended up being the film critic. He’s still best known as the owner of one of two fateful thumbs from his days on TV, and if you know him only as the crotchety critic who so often sparred with Siskel, you don’t really know him at all.

On TV, it was always obvious that Ebert was a smart guy, and obviously passionate about movies, but what never came through there was his soul. Roger Ebert was an extremely gifted writer and an incredibly observant man; he had as much to say about life itself as he did about movies, and that’s perhaps why the fact that he titled his memoir Life Itself didn’t feel even slightly pretentious coming from a man who spent most of his working years debating the merits of Anaconda and Cop And A Half.

His film reviews were unique. Sometimes funny, especially when they were feisty; sometimes more enlightening about human behavior than the art of cinema; sometimes personal in a way that few critics ever open up. Critics tend to distance themselves from what they’re reviewing — to place themselves either above or below the work, looking up at a great film in wonder or looking down at a bad film with a sneer. Ebert himself did that sometimes — how else to explain books like Your Movie Sucks? — but more often, he was right alongside a film, looking at it. He grew more reflective in his later life, and so did his reviews. It’s hard to imagine the Ebert of his twilight years ever wanting to assign a reductive “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system to the movies. He wouldn’t even rank his film in order in year-end Top 10 lists. The man is a bit of a paradox. He became the face of film criticism, one of two film critics that most of the American public would know by name (the other, of course, being Gene Siskel). He was also scorned by many film critics for being too populist. For a time, he made criticism commercial in a way it hadn’t been before — and hasn’t been since. And yet he didn’t play favorites. He didn’t love just arthouse movies, or just blockbusters. He wasn’t snooty in his opinions. He loved a good story well-told and didn’t care at all whether his review would please the masses. That’s why they so often did. He watched and reviewed movies for himself. It just so happens that in doing so, he exposed many people to films they never would have seen without his thumb tilting upward.

He’s not around now to endorse (or demolish) Life Itself, the new Steve James documentary that happens to be all about him — so unfortunately you’re stuck with my review, which is bound to be less eloquent. But I’m reasonably sure he’d be a big fan of this film, and hey — so am I!

Life Itself will enlighten anyone who is not intimately familiar with Ebert’s life and works. It touches on his early days as editor of his college paper, his battle with alcoholism, and his brief stint as a Hollywood screenwriter (with plenty of enticing footage of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, which looks like a must-watch for any fan of the “so-bad-it’s-good” subgenre). A few famous faces appear to wax poetic, including Ebert’s buddy Martin Scorsese. Of course, the doc also spends a great deal of time on Ebert’s final years in and out of the hospital as he battled cancer and an even more epic battle in his life — the constant bickering that went on behind the scenes with rival critic Gene Siskel. The back-and-forth banter between the two was not just for show — they were both bitter rivals and passionate compatriots, with a relationship more akin to squabbling siblings than lifelong friends. And yet it’s obvious that the two men had a profound impact on each other.

Life Itself takes its name from Ebert’s own autobiography, and Steve James wisely sticks to that book’s broad scope rather than narrowing its focus down to its subject’s work (though we get the sense that there’s enough juicy backstage drama from At The Movies alone to fuel a whole documentary). It is partially the story of a great man, but even moreso, just the story of a man. For all his trailblazing, there are ways in which Ebert’s story couldn’t be more basic — an ambitious man spends his life making a name for himself, only to find, in the end, that the true reward is the love and family he found late in life that he never expected to have. Leave it to Ebert to live such a grand life and end up with something that still adheres to Hollywood formula.

Even someone without much stake in film criticism should find something here to savor. As most narrative biopics would, the film essentially begins with Roger’s birth and ends with his death and legacy. It is the story of a complete life, ups and downs and all. The film was made in collaboration with Ebert during what ended up being the last year or so of his life, so there’s a lot of footage of Ebert in the hospital after losing his lower jaw in surgery to battle his recurring cancers. He speaks via computer and gives a frequent “thumbs up.” He’s fascinating to look at, as the loss of his jaw makes his face comes across as somehow even more purely expressive.

Throughout most of what we see, Ebert is in shockingly high spirits despite this adversity, though we do also get a glimpse into his darker moods, which betray a more complex portrait. For all its exploration of the man himself, I’m not sure Life itself ever “solves” Ebert. His conflicted feelings about Gene Siskel, and about his mortality, still leave us pondering the figure at the center of it all. Which is, I imagine, exactly what Ebert would want us to take away from such a picture.

If it isn’t already obvious, I have a lot of respect and admiration for Roger Ebert. He was a figure I thought I knew vaguely from TV, but in the last decade or so of his life, he came into his own in a new way, thanks largely to the ways that the internet and social media allowed him to connect to his fans like never before, just when he needed to most. I saw Life Itself at a screening attended by Chaz Ebert, Roger’s widow, and a dynamic presence all her own. It takes a great woman to inspire a great man, and it became immediately obvious how Chaz Ebert had captivated a man who had previously been a bachelor for so many of his years on Earth.

Roger Ebert’s life is the sort of thing many of us can aspire to, even if we take a very different career trajectory. Though he was always intelligent and ambitious, he ended his life with more dignity than he started it and passed along the wisdom he accumulated along the way. His life was dominated by a love-hate partnership that made him famous, until he found the love of his life to share his final two decades with. He made an impact. Now the man who spent his life talking about, writing about, and fighting about movies is finally starring in one, and it’s beautiful. No one — not even Roger Ebert — could have written this story any better.

*

Movies entertain in different ways. Many are meant as mere diversions; some aim to bemuse, fewer aim to bewitch. One typically considers independent films less ambitious than their studio-made counterparts, at least on a technical level. But that’s not always the case.

Take Boyhood for example — it’s the latest film from Richard Linklater, director of the Before Sunrise series, though its inception actually pre-dates the latest two films in that series. While there are no obvious CGI effects, expensive sets, or massive scenes with thousands of extras in Boyhood, one can hardly imagine a more ambitious cinematic undertaking than this. It’s hard to imagine a blockbuster director like the ADD-addled Michael Bay being up to the challenge. But Linklater, perhaps moreso than any other working filmmaker, has displayed a cinematic virtue so many of his peers are sorely lacking: patience.

Boyhood is the story of a boy named Mason Jr., starting at the age of five and following him into young adulthood, as he grapples with the usual trappings of growing up — fighting with his sister, adjusting to the new men in his mother’s life, experimenting with alcohol and drugs, a budding attraction to the opposite sex. Sounds pretty simple, right?

What makes it epic is the fact that we watch the actor age along with the character. Boyhood was filmed over the course of twelve years, with a handful of actors recurring in most or all of these segments — including Patricia Arquette as his mother Olivia, Ethan Hawke as his father Mason, and Lorelai Linklater (the filmmaker’s own daughter) as his sister Samantha. In lesser hands, this might be a mere gimmick; in Linklater’s hands, it’s basically a counterpoint to his triptych romance of Jesse and Celine, which has checked in with the paramours every nine years since 1995, most recently in last year’s stellar Before Midnight. In those movies, centered on characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, we’re startled by the ways that Jesse and Celine have changed in the near-decade that passes between films. Once so idealistic, we see that the trappings of the real world have worn them down, hardened them, perhaps even turned them against each other. In Boyhood, the gaps are much smaller. The story is continuous. And the effect is awesome.Many movies try and fake the passage of time with wardrobe and makeup, subbing in younger actors for older characters. Usually, scenes taking place years or even decades apart might be filmed within days of each other. Some films do a better job at hiding it than others, but we can always tell on some level that the transition is artificial. Here, it isn’t. These characters’ appearances shift slightly from year to year the way real people’s do — their weight fluctuates slightly, hair goes from long to short to long again, an errant mustache appears. Mason Jr. goes through a physically awkward prepubescent phase before the loss of his baby fat, and also an artsy emo phase, and he looks pretty scruffy for a year or two. We feel the passage of time more acutely here than in any other movie I can think of.

There are close-ups on cell phones, video games, and other pieces of technology that are outdated just a few years later. Pop culture references are authentic, rather than just what we remember. When Samantha sings Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did It Again” in an early scene, we laugh because we know the song was more current when the scene was filmed in the early 2000s. Audiences will benefit from knowing how Boyhood was shot over the course of twelve years, because somehow, it becomes funny the same way digging through a time capsule can be. What people wore, listened to, watched, played, and cared about a decade ago becomes quaint and funny years later.

Boyhood may share one of the stars of the Before Sunrise series and similarly chronicle the way that people and relationships change (and don’t change) over the course of many years, but it’s an entirely different animal than Linklater’s previous films — or any other movie, for that matter. It’s hard to even categorize Boyhood as a movie, because it was made so differently — in pieces. It’s like other filmmakers have been making pictures with the same set of crayons all these years, and here Richard Linklater comes along and invents a whole new color.Of course, we’ve watched child actors grow up on screen before. It happens frequently on TV, and throughout the Harry Potter series. Francois Truffaut followed the same young actor for many years, and the 7 Up documentary series has checked in with the same set of subjects for a remarkably long time. But it’s an entirely different experience when it’s all in the space of one movie, and when that movie places its focus on the process of growing up itself. There’s no sitcom laugh track or school of wizards to distract us here — this movie is about a boy’s life, and only that. Mason is not an extraordinary child; nothing that happens to him isn’t something thousands or millions of other youths have experienced. But because of the unique way in which it was shot, Boyhood hits a level of profound naturalism that is essentially unrivaled by any other movie.

The film’s star, Ellar Coltrane, is exceptional as Mason Jr. — which is a lucky break considering that he was cast at the age of seven. Linklater always intended to adjust the story to fit the young man that Coltrane would turn out to be. (Thankfully, that ends up being a thoughtful, sensitive emo type and not some dumbass bully.) He’s incredibly believable as an average adolescent — because, hey, he is one! — whether he’s taking a verbal lashing from a teacher at school, sharing the kind of stoner thinking that young men often think is more profound and original than it really is, or trying to navigate being “just friends” with the girl he thought was “the one.” He shows a penchant for photography; works as a busboy, eating leftover shrimp off customers’ plates; and eventually goes off to college in the film’s denouement. It may not sound like revelatory cinema, but it is.

As is bound to happen in a film of this nature, some segments are more captivating than others. When Mason is a young boy, he’s so passive that his older sister Samantha tends to dominate scenes as the more significant character. Ethan Hawke as Mason Sr. may feel overly familiar to those who know him as Jesse in the Before series; here, as there, he is a father who semi-reluctantly abandoned his children and pops in and out of their lives now with a new wife. Boyhood also includes multiple drunken assholes brought into Mason’s life by his mother, who has much worse taste in men than we might expect of a smart and sensible woman like Olivia.

None of this rings false, but the moments in which Mason contends with these stepfathers are the film’s most plotty, movie-ish moments, and they almost threaten to take the story and run away with it, so it’s a good thing Boyhood doesn’t derail in order to explore them further. Ethan Hawke serves his purpose with adequate “cool dad” charisma, but Patricia Arquette is particularly good as the mother whose struggles and emotions are always in the background of Mason’s story — until she finally vents her frustrations in her final scene. As much as the film is centered on Mason, it’s equally fascinating to watch an actress like Arquette make subtle shifts over the course of a dozen years.

As in the Before Sunrise series, these actors had a hand in writing the screenplay, which is at least partially the reason why they all inhabit their roles with such ease. There are no cuts to black or title cards between segments to indicate the passage of time, but we always notice when the shift occurs, because each segment concludes as neatly as a short film would, at just the right moment.

As does the film itself. Given that the film ends with Mason at age eighteen, it’s no spoiler to say that the final scene depicts his first day in college — the natural point to end a tale called Boyhood. So many dramas have ended with a young protagonist stepping into university life for the first time, many of them emotionally arresting — but none have quite the punch of Boyhood, because we really have just watched this boy grow up before our very eyes. We have, in a way, witnessed his whole life. And so we share in Olivia’s pride, confusion, and grief at watching him abandon the family nest and head into whatever awaits him in the real world. (If anyone out there needs to replicate the experience of sending a kid off to college, here’s the film to do it.)

It isn’t every year that I walk out of a theater and realize immediately, That was a great movie. But with Boyhood, it was just obvious. It doesn’t entertain us in the expected ways, but it reflects life back at us in such an honest way that it feels like it’s a part of us. Even with a running time that clocks in at nearly three hours, and despite the film’s relative lack of conventional narrative momentum, it is riveting all the way through and you’re likely to feel sad when it’s over. It’s thought-provoking and quietly heartbreaking, but the audience I saw it with was laughing all the way through — not because there are a lot of uproarious comedic moments, but, I believe, because we all recognized ourselves in Boyhood. Something about the way this boy lived through the past twelve years reminds us of the way we lived through them, too. We were laughing at life itself.I can’t say for sure just yet that Boyhood will be my favorite movie of 2014, but if it isn’t, I’m sure as hell looking forward to the film that will be. As of now, it’s hard to imagine a greater cinematic achievement coming out this year. Linklater has made a lot of good movies over the past few decades, but now he’s put himself in another category altogether. He’s made a truly great movie, one that I think will stand the test of time and be remembered as something special. It may be too intimate and subtle to make a major impact at the box office or the Oscars, but you never know. It’s more accessible than The Tree Of Life, the Terrence Malick film that snuck into contention in 2011 despite a lengthy sequence depicting the inception of the entire universe, a puzzling and pretentious conclusion, and a brief cameo by dinosaurs. That was a beautiful movie, but this is a better one.

The experience of watching Boyhood is like flipping through a random family’s photo album. Some experiences we recognize from our own lives, while others we can at least relate to. Birthdays, family dinners, trips to visit the grandparents, graduation. The details may very, but the overall experience is universal. Boyhood is as bittersweet as life is; people enter and exit from our lives, sometimes making them better and sometimes making them worse. A child’s star rises while a parent’s is falling. A man who starts off seeming like an aimless loser can end up having it all, while the woman who appears to have it together might end up alone, wondering where she went wrong. And the end of childhood can feel like the beginning of an amazing adventure into adulthood.

I’m not sure if Richard Linklater and Ellard Coltrane are up to spending the next twelve years documenting Mason’s Manhood. (Working title.) If not, I’m already sorry to say goodbye to this character and not witness where life takes him next. Then again, Linklater has proven willing to resurrect memorable characters from the place where most (good) filmmakers let them rest. Unlike his counterparts with much bigger budgets to play with, Linklater is actually really good at sequels. Keep your endless, mindless Transformers sequels and however many times Jason, Freddy, and Michael have come back from the dead. I’ll let Mason join Jesse and Celine amongst the characters I’m hoping to see strike back.

*

You know what I hate about myself?

I know what people taste like.

I know that babies taste best.

That’s not a confession. It’s one of the most memorable lines in Bong Joon-Ho’s new film Snowpiercer — or any movie this year, for that matter — and it’s pretty indicative of the grim worldview on display in this and other 2014 films. Science fiction has been big this year, but big on a very small scale. Sure, there are the senseless cyborgs of Transformers: Age Of Extinction and time travel antics in X-Men: Days Of Future Past; the mutant lizard Godzilla and Tom Cruise’s never-dying soldier in Edge Of Tomorrow; because we expect sci-fi to drive a good number of our summer blockbusters.

But much of this year’s arthouse fare has also taken a page from the comic books. Scarlett Johansson’s extraterrestrial femme fatale was the subject of the slow-moving and ponderous Under The Skin, while Coherence took a look at the mind-bending shenanigans that happen as a comet passes overhead. And while neither The Double nor Enemy is exactly science fiction, they do center on the kind of events you could find on The Twilight Zone.

This summer has also seen the release of a couple dystopian titles from international filmmakers — Snowpiercer and The Rover. The former is set in a frozen-over Earth after a global cooling experiment gone awry; the latter uses the dry flatness of Australia to double for a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Despite these aesthetic differences, however, they tell similarly bleak tales about the base violence that kicks in whenever mankind is threatened with extinction.Snowpiercier is the flashier and starrier of the two. Directed by the man behind the silly-fun monster movie The Host and the excellent, heartbreaking Mother (one of my top films of 2010), it’s a Korean-American co-production based on a French graphic novel, and you can feel that it’s a multi-national hybrid of bloated American blockbusting and moody, menacing South Korean quirk. (Plus a bit of French whimsy and ass-kicking.) Set seventeen years after an attempt to curb global warming backfired and rendered all of Earth an inhabitable icy tundra, it begins in the caboose of the massive bullet train named Snowpiercer, which encircles the globe exactly once every year. The back of the train is populated by society’s lowest class, a group of grimy individuals — many missing limbs — including Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, and Chris Evans as our hero, Curtis, who plays his role as what would happen if Captain America was reduced to infant-chomping in order to survive.

Evans delivers one fantastic and frightening monologue about the baby-eating that includes what is probably my favorite line of dialogue from 2014 thus far. It’s a powerful, ponderous moment, the sort of material Evans will never get to deliver in the all-American Marvel movies, and it’s the reason that Snowpiercer feels so fresh and so fun. We’re not used to seeing a movie of this grandiose scope and budget ($40 million) that dares to delve into such dank, desperate places. Curtis leads a ragtag group of warriors to attack their guards, then helps the group push forward. As they move frontward, the cars get more uxurious (and, it must be said, slightly less plausible), ranging from a greenhouse to a sushi restaurant to a spa to a nightclub. The group suffers heavy fatalities along the way, prompting us to wonder if this little mission to take control of the train’s engine is even worth it now that Snowpiercer’s poor have tradied up from eating babies to eating a mushy black protein substance made of bugs. That question only looms larger as the survivors dwindle and get closer to the front of the train.

No, Snowpiercer is not totally easy to get on board with, logistically. A number of questions and concerns hover in our minds and are never fully satisfied. Besides Octavia Spencer’s plucky Tanya, there seems to be a curious lack of women in the back half of the train, and we have to wonder what it is these people actually do with their time that makes their existence on the train so vital. And as our ragtag heroes push forward through so many visually arresting train cars, it only raises questions about all the many, many cars we must not be seeing. Where is the car with the cows that the steak comes from? Where do all the wealthy people go when they’re not clubbing or getting their hair done? Is there really such a lack of security that allows these guys to move forward? (On the other hand, the international, multi-ethnic cast actually makes sense in this kind of story, unlike the new Transformers, which wedges in Chinese stars and subplots to ensure a massive showing overseas.)

Snowpiercer is better as a rich-versus-poor allegory than it is as a plausible piece of sci-fi — light on the science, heavy on the fiction. What it does have is one of Tilda Swinton’s kookier performances (and that’s saying something!) as a heartless lackey of the train’s mysterious, Oz-like creator, Wilford, and an attention-grabbing turn from Alison Pill as a perky but ruthless schoolteacher. (Meanwhile, a badass mute named Grey, played by Luke Paqualino, seems to have more potential than he’s allowed to utilize here.) It’s a lively and game cast of characters who engage in a number of memorable action sequences, from a grim axe battle to a suspenseful spa showdown — the second act is superb. Unfortunately, the third act moves into a talky, James Bondian villain-explains-it-all mode that raises more questions than it answers, and the final moments of Snowpiercer are narratively bold but not fully satisfying. (Again, prompting us to think that perhaps this whole rebellion was just a really bad idea from the start.) Still, it’s a welcome alternative to the more mindless fare often offered by studios — I’d rather watch an action movie that contains a lot of fairly silly ideas than no ideas at all.And that brings us to The Rover, the latest film from David Michod, who last brought us the stellar Animal Kingdom (another one of my favorites from 2010 — #2, to be exact). This dystopic world has far from frozen over. The post-apocalyptic details are less clear — all we know is that it’s been a decade since something called “the collapse” seems to have significantly thinned the population and turned everyone into a bunch of, well, low-life criminal Australians. And instead of revolving around the quest to take control of a massive train, here the entire story is driven by our antihero’s mission to reclaim his stolen automobile.

Eric (Guy Pearce) is drinking alone in a bar, as I suppose one would likely do in this unhappy world. When a trio of criminals absconds with his vehicle, Eric steals their vehicle in a memorably tense car chase, promising that he won’t stop pursuing them until he gets his wheels back. Along the way, he meets up with the brother of one of the thieves, Rey, played by Robert Pattinson. Rey is what we might politely call “a little slow,” and Pattinson turns in a pretty impressive performance (especially for those most familiar with his Twilight brooding). The Rover allows a partnership to form between these men, but certainly not a friendship. As suspenseful and moody as Animal Kingdom was, The Rover outdoes it tenfold, making this a much bleaker movie. It’s well-made, well-acted, well-shot, and contains the most hilariously atonal use of a Keri Hilson song you’re ever likely to see, but for whatever reason, it’s not a lot of fun to watch. Eric isn’t an easy care to like, so we’re rather uninvested in whether or not he gets his car back. This world is such a downer that there’s not much we can hope for at all.

Michod is still a very skilled filmmaker, and I look forward to his next piece of work. But The Rover is a step down from Animal Kingdom, and I’m not likely to watch it again. Still, I’m a fan of the meaner, darker dystopias we’ve seen this summer, and glad that Transformers: Age Of Extinction isn’t the only transportation-oriented science fiction available to us.

*

A few years back, Joss Whedon surprised us by releasing a superhero movie that satisfied all the mega-blockbuster mega-requirements and still found room for a little of the Buffy creator’s trademark meta-wit.

Since then, Marvel movies have all included a Whedon-esque gem or two. They certainly don’t take themselves as seriously as Christopher Nolan’s broodier comic book films — nor should they. But they haven’t exactly been laugh riots, either. Even when the stories would seem to make plenty of room for hilarious hijinks — like when brawny god Thor has to contend with 21st century mankind on Earth, or Captain America must adjust to having slept through the past few dozen decades — the Marvel movies never manage to elicit more than a chuckle or two at their heroes’ expense. Maybe the men who direct them are not well-suited for comedy, or maybe Marvel executives have been too leery to get too funny, lest their superheroes lose some of their machismo appeal. Even The Avengers opened with a bloated and largely humorless opening act that felt like it was written and directed by someone who was not Joss Whedon.

You can imagine versions of Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America that are outright comedies. All superhero stories are, at their essence, ridiculous, and I’d argue that almost every Marvel movie up until this point should have been funnier. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark is maybe the only Marvel character thus far to live up to his comedic potential, which is ironic because on paper, his situation is the least funny. All Marvel movies have at least one really good joke — I’m thinking of Steve Roger’s early days as a WWII PR machine in the first Captain America, or Thor hanging his epic hammer on a coat rack — but seldom more than two or three.

Marvel’s latest superhero feature, however, probably has more good jokes than all the other Marvel movies combined. Is this an aberration, or the dawn of a new era for the already well-worn Marvel formula? If Guardians Of The Galaxy‘s stronger-than-expected box office showing is any indication, this may just be the harbinger of a brave new hilarious world forming in the Marvel universe.Remember when I said that all superhero stories are inherently ridiculous? Well, some are more ridiculous than others, and this one is near the top of the heap. I was not familiar with the Guardians Of The Galaxy property prior to this film, but I have a hard time believing that any comic book featuring a talking tree named Groot and a wisecracking raccoon bounty hunter is asking to be taken very seriously. A Guardians Of The Galaxy movie was always primed to be a comedy, of course. Unlike most of the Avengers cast of heroes, Guardians Of The Galaxy was a property that almost no one cared about, which is probably why Marvel was willing to deviate from formula a little and poke fun at the usual straightforward seriousness of their franchises.

Is Guardians Of The Galaxy a full-on comedy? I don’t know. I don’t think so — the actual plot itself isn’t remotely funny, and it still hinges on an epic battle with the fate of an entire planet at stake, as so many of these movies do. An even bolder Guardians Of The Galaxy might have done away with such shenanigans entirely and concerned some smaller, lower-stakes MacGuffin. Or the whole thing could have been a prison break movie. Whatever. Guardians Of The Galaxy was co-written and directed by James Gunn, perhaps the most Joss Whedon-y filmmaker you could find who is not actually Joss Whedon — a guy who knows how to mix genuine genre with elements that are also spoofing that genre (a la Whedon).

It’s the first time a Marvel movie has been as funny as it should be since The Avengers, and probably the best Marvel movie since then. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being at least slightly amused by the antics on screen here, and as an avid champion of underdogs everywhere, I’m pleased that it’s comic book characters no one had even heard of until this movie came about that have surprised and delighted this summer’s moviegoing audiences. Not the interminable Transformers, not the ill-conceived sequel to the iller-conceived reboot of Spider-Man, not the giant lizard or talking apes or time-traveling mutants we’ve seen on the big screen so many times before. After last summer’s dreary offerings, it’s great that we’re closing out the 2014 season on a sky-high note. 

Also, can we take a minute to realize that, once Guardians Of The Galaxy has finished its box office tally, Chris Pratt will be not only in, but the star of, two of the three biggest movies of the summer?Pratt plays Peter Quill, AKA Star Lord, who we’re introduced to as a child as he sits at his ailing mother’s bedside in an opening that should definitely be cheesy, but is actually somehow fraught with emotion despite the fact that we’ve seen so many similar dying mom scenes. (Very few end with the grieving child being abducted by aliens, however.) We are then re-introduced to Quill as he dances on an alien planet to a cassette tape dubbed “Awesome Mix Volume One,” and yes, it is awesome. Imagine if Star Wars had abandoned John Williams’ score and instead just strung together a bunch of hits from the 70s from “Hooked On A Feeling” to the Jackson 5, and that’s about what you get here. (Okay, now stop being sad about a world without John Williams’ Star Wars score — it was only a hypothetical.)

Pratt’s signature comedic sensibilities find a perfect home here, and he’s a large part of why this works. Unlike a lot of action hero types, he’s not a stud trying to be funny. He’s a comedian trying to be a stud, which works out way better for us all. Dave Bautista is surprisingly good as Drax, some sort of space badass who helps Quinn break out of prison; Bradley Cooper is a verbal scene stealer as Rocket the raccoon; Vin Diesel literally has one line (repeatedly) as the charming tree Groot, yet manages to be one of the film’s funniest characters. Zoe Saldana, on the other hand, has less to do as the traitorous (in a good way) Gamora — she’s the straight man who just so happens to be a green-skinned woman. (Sidebar: has Zoe Saldana told her agent that she is only accepting roles in which she plays some other-colored version of herself? Has this girl got some kind of CG-infused Michael Jackson complex or what?)

Guardians Of The Galaxy manages to pull off a feat that even The Avengers could not, which is to introduce us to a group of characters who feel like they were destined to adventure together. Who are better off together than apart. I’m not hating on The Avengers, but those guys hail from wildly different mythologies that obviously weren’t created with a singular story in mind — I mean, do you really need The Hulk and Thor? Isn’t that kind of redundant? In a lot of ways, Guardians Of The Galaxy feels more like a TV pilot than a movie. (The TV pilot that Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. should have been, perhaps?) And it means that the inevitable Guardians Of The Galaxy sequel is not only desirable, but necessary. We actually want to see what these guys get into next.I don’t want to oversell Guardians Of The Galaxy, because at its core, it’s as cookie-cutter as every Marvel movie, with basically the same plot as all the rest. I wish we cared more about what actually happens in the movie — considering that an entire planet might be obliterated in the film’s climax. It’s called Xandar, it’s led or protected or something by Glenn Close’s Nova Prime, and… well, that’s all we know, other than that it’s clean and white and looks like a futuristic Canada. None of the main characters have any personal attachment to Xandar, and nor do we (unless you’re a huge Damages fan). So why bother putting an entire planet in jeopardy at all? As fresh and surprising as Guardians Of The Galaxy is in many ways, I wish it wasn’t paired with the most overused and predictable available story. Here’s the synopsis: “[Powerful object you're unfamiliar with] must be obtained by [Marvel hero(es)] before [generic villain] gets his hands on it, or [Earth, or other civilization] will be decimated.” That may work for an Avengers-scale production, but when the goal is quirk and comedy, must we really return to that well again?

I can’t help but wish the movie had been even less Marvel-ous. Surely we could’ve had more fun with Benicio Del Toro’s Collector character, who barely makes an impression here. There’s a cool blue villainness named Nebula who also gets the short shrift, and the generic main villain Ronan (Lee Pace), who looks awesome but does nothing, is as forgettable as… some other generic villain I forgot. If the movie doesn’t take its threats seriously, how are we supposed to?

What’s novel here is how little the story actually matters. We have fun with the Guardians, no matter what they’re up to. It could have been just as entertaining and fraught with peril if these guys had been shopping on a particularly busy day at IKEA. Chemistry is important in any ensemble, of course, but that’s particularly hard to pull off when four out of five cast members have some heavy visual effects work going on, and two out of five are completely computer animated. Guardians Of The Galaxy blends its cast of characters pretty seamlessly.

This movie is about as subversive as Marvel is bound to get these days, which is not that subversive at all, but still more subversive than you’d expect. (One raunchy joke involving a blacklight will easily fly over childrens’ heads, but I appreciated it.) I still prefer to have more emotional investment in a superhero story than I had here, because a stray shot of one pink-skinned child is not enough to put me on the edge of my seat about whether or not her civilization is doomed. In that respect, I still give the edge to Iron Man and The Avengers in terms of Marvel movies that delivered the whole package.

I admit, however, that Guardians one-upped The Avengers on the laugh quotient — which means the ball is in Joss Whedon’s court. Avengers: Age Of Ultron is up next.*

(A version of the following first appeared in INsite Boston in 2005. Please forgive the dated references. The overall content is still relevant!)

There’s a golden rule in courtship that says, “Never talk business on a first date” — ditto politics and religion — likely because, for most people, that’s a fast pass to Snoresville. But what if your business is entertainment?

Someone recently had the bright idea to take me DVD shopping as a “get to know you” exercise on a first date — what better way to get familiar with a film major than to see what movies he likes? I knew I was doomed when my date held up a copy of a certain Nicole Kidman film in which she may or may not have been a robot and said, “Wasn’t this great?”

I blinked. My instinct is to always tell the truth: “While I enjoyed a few performances and a few stray lines of dialogue, the film favored cheap jokes over consistent characterization and failed to follow even its own incredible logic, resulting in one of the most atrociously misguided third acts I’ve ever been privy to. Even director Frank Oz claimed it was his biggest regret as a filmmaker at a Q&A I attended!”

Had it been a close friend, I would have sounded off exactly like that. (And they’d have agreed, because all my close friends are film snobs, too.) However, I know from experience that people are defensive about their film faves the way first-time mothers are protective of newborns, and you just don’t tell Mom her infant looks like the wrong end of a crack baby.

“Yeah,” I said.  “It was fun.”See, as an alum of one of the top-rated film schools in the world, people are often interested in my opinion on movies. But not my real opinion. The last thing anyone wants is some big screen know-it-all tearing apart their favorite flick, which in their mind is a cherished masterpiece that just missed awards season. If you cite “choppy editing” or “bad sound design” as a reason for disliking a movie in mixed company, you might as well say, “My trip to Mars was sensational!” for the all the blank stares you’ll get. What people want is my cinema-schooled stamp of approval, affirming that their love of all things Michal Bay is not totally unfounded.

I just don’t have the heart to shoot ‘em down.

Yes, I know it’s “just entertainment,” and as a fair-minded liberal I technically support a Filmgoer’s Right To Choose. But the mainstream abortion of good taste in movie-watching is an assault on everything I hold dear, and sometimes I can’t help but wonder: “Doesn’t anyone take entertainment seriously anymore?”

Take game shows, for example: those freaky-genius contestants can tell you the name of Mozart’s ninth cat but, when posed with the question, “Catherine Zeta-Jones is: A) an actress; B) a law firm; C) a fatal strain of malaria,” they have to phone a friend. How can such seemingly accomplished people be so blind when it comes to popular culture? Sure, maybe geniuses don’t see Academy Award-winning movies or flip through OK! at the supermarket… but I find it hard to believe that none of them use T Mobile. Their Catherine Zeta-Ignorance is evidence of the mainstream’s foolish belief that entertainment exists merely for their amusement.Maybe it isn’t their fault they haven’t been properly educated — but I worked hard and shelled out a pretty penny to be this film-savvy. How dare the Average Joe think his measly two cents rival the tens of thousands of dollars that went toward my film degree? I forgo Pulitzer Prize-winning novels to keep up with Entertainment Weekly; I need room in my head to memorize box office grosses, so I say goodbye to those trivial facts about Andrew Jackson I learned in high school. Does nobody appreciate my sacrifice? Do they not see how this qualifies my opinion as The Right One? When they say a movie’s good and I say, “Well, actually…” don’t they realize the debate should be over?

What I do for a living is what other people do for fun, but nothing I can say will convince anyone who think otherwise that Revenge of the Sith was a terrible movie on every imaginable level. (Even though I’m right.) Marine biologists don’t often run into contrarians arguing, “Actually, I don’t think dolphins use echolocation at all!”, but in my field, everybody thinks they get to weigh in, whether they’ve got a degree or not.

So to get along with the masses, I must swallow my pride (plus four years’ tuition), put on a game face, and lie my way through first dates with the cinematically challenged. I’ve learned to suppress my inner Criterion collector in favor of his socially acceptable cousin, who thinks all your favorite movies are “fun!” He’s not the guy who condemned your devotion to the Vin Diesel oeuvre, nor the guy who made you sit through a black and white movie with subtitles on your first date. He’s the guy who totally encouraged your purchase of that little gem, The Stepford Wives. His reward? A second date.

Sure, there’s a naggy voice in the back of my mind that likes to ask, “Whatever happened to character arcs?”, but it shuts up when I feed it popcorn. After all, who am I to judge?  Though I’d never admit it on a first date, I own Big Momma’s House on DVD.

‘Cause hey.  It was fun.

*

(Flashback Friday: This month marks the eight-year anniversary of this slithery thriller. So here’s a look back at a curious moment in film history; an examination of movies of the “so bad it’s good” variety, and one of the few that was actually aiming for that mantle. While certainly not notable for its innovative content — or anemic box office performance — this movie proved an interesting lesson to Hollywood nonetheless. First published in INsite Boston in August 2006.)

When first I heard that Samuel L. Jackson had signed on for a movie called Snakes On A Plane, I marveled at the title’s cornball reductionism, puzzling over whether it was “so dumb it’s clever” or so dumb it’s insulting. Studio execs seldom err on the side of daring, however; I knew they’d soon trade in for a title that didn’t mock itself, and I was right. The film was rechristened Pacific Air Flight 121, and had it stayed that way, would’ve been lost forever amongst this summer’s leggier blockbusters, soon to crappify a bargain bin near you.

Instead, fans of the schlocky title balked, and so did Jackson. They wanted their snakes on a plane called Snakes On A Plane, dammit! And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Flash forward a few months and Snakes On A Plane has inspired T-shirts, websites, bumper stickers, fan art, original music, and more, thanks to fans who latched onto the campy premise early and generated an unexpected, unprecedented level of buzz online — well before the studio had released even a poster or teaser trailer. Only recently has New Line caught up with its legion of avid ophiophiliacs, shooting additional scenes to include more violence and profanity (per fan request) and sponsoring a contest with the winner’s music featured on the soundtrack. To quote the best original SOAP song: Snakes On A Plane is a major issue.

Just how did this B-movie get bumped up to first class? Clearly fans who worship a campy thriller they haven’t seen don’t expect an instant classic. This isn’t Snakes On The River Kwai or Snakes On Golden Pond. These fans want cheesy special effects, Jackson’s de rigueur badass ‘tude, and the unequivocal thrill of reptiles attacking hysterical passengers amidst turbulence. In short, they want Snakes On A Plane to be bad. Really bad. And they don’t want to be disappointed.

Who could blame them?While the mainstream often settles for movies that are merely awful, cult enthusiasts seek something far more precious. When a movie is godawful — when script and direction and acting come together to make one splendidly horrendous whole — the result is more pleasurable than most competently made films.

Compare: Steve Carrell uses “Kelly Clarkson!” as a swear word in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and it’s funny. But when Showgirls’ Elizabeth Berkeley tries her damnedest to be taken seriously while convulsing Exorcist-style all over Kyle MacLachlan in a meant-to-be-steamy sex scene, it’s fucking priceless. Showgirls, Catwoman, and Glitter rank amongst the great comedies of all time without even trying. It’s not the movies we laugh at, but the people inept enough to have made them. (If you think cult film fans sound less like film geeks and more like heartless egomaniacs unfit for public interaction, well, that’s why they gather in cults.) It’s entertainment at the expense of the entertainers.

But in an age when our biggest stars tend to be the ones we ridicule most, the line between cult and mainstream is starting to blur. With its no-brainer title, Snakes On A Plane wants to be in the cult, too, marking a symbiotic dumb-down between movies and their audience. The filmmakers want us to know they know we’re all smarter than their dumb movie, and it’s those hard-to-please film snobs who are taking the bait. Is Hollywood finally in on the joke instead of just the punchline? Or are filmmakers simply getting too lazy to entertain us the legitimate way? If they make bad movies intentionally, and we fall for it willingly, are we any smarter than the dumb movies we’re mocking?

And if film fanatics do the music and marketing (and demand reshoots), leaving the filmmakers to make fun of their own movie, have we crashed through the barrier between audience and entertainer? If so, who’s taking who for a ride now?

Only a film with the lowest of ambitions could raise such intriguing questions. As we await SOAP’s August takeoff, New Line faces a unique marketing challenge — appeal to the mainstream but quell the overexposure to fans Snakes has already charmed, lest Hollywood’s serpentine darling face a venomous backlash from the very faction that put it on the radar.

Cults, after all, tend to be small, selective groups, which is how they get away with dressing in shrouds and Nikes to commit Kool-Aid suicide. If Snakes gets too popular before it opens, it loses cult credibility, and there’s no guarantee the rest of America will eat up this cold-blooded camp so readily. Big buzz doesn’t always equal big bucks.

More likely, however, Snakes On A Plane will attract audiences both smart and stupid, cult and mainstream, to emerge as one of summer’s great successes. The SOAP phenomenon will make way for a slew of copycats aimed at the lowest common denominator, as well as more tell-it-like-it-is titles like Misunderstood Teens In Suburbs, Unlikely Nanny Has A Change Of Heart, and You’re Probably Better Off Watching TV At Home For Free Than Paying To See This New Matthew McConaughey Movie. Subtlety and tact, beware, beware… bad movie marketing has changed forever.

Not that it bothers me. A friend once got me the “VIP edition” of Showgirls (complete with shot glass and pasties) as a birthday gift; I returned the favor this year with a “Snakes + Plane” T-shirt. Like every other card-carrying cultist seeking the next ticket to godawful heaven, I plan to see Snakes On A Plane, and I plan to consume several adult beverages before I do.

That ought to dumb me down just enough.

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This week, I had a chance to check out Los Angeles Plays Itself, a docu-essay by Thom Andersen that chronicles how L.A. is represented in the movies — not only the ones that take place there, but also those that were shot here hoping to pass as somewhere else.

As you might imagine, that encompasses a lot of fucking movies.

It only figures that a documentary on Los Angeles’ representation in film would be as sprawling as the city itself. Andersen makes many astute points in L.A.P.I. (an acronym I’m sure he’d despise), including one about how L.A. must have an inferiority complex if it allows itself to be referred to by acronym. As someone who has always been conflicted about saying I’m from “L.A.” — and also writing it, as there is no consistency as to whether or not people put the periods in, but if you don’t, then you’re likely to confuse it with Louisiana — I appreciated this commentary on our dubious, fake-sounding name, as if we Angelenos and the rest of the world are just too lazy to bother saying all four syllables.

Other subjects tackled include architecture, the increasingly bizarre representation of the LAPD, geographical gaffes, and the cinematically-tracked disappearance of the old Bunker Hill, all served up with equal doses of insight and entertainment. One of the most amusing aspects of this documentary is taking a gander at dated, mostly forgotten films with goofy titles and/or content, including 1933’s What! No Beer? and 1988’s L.A. Crackdown II.

Yes, Los Angeles has played a starring role in many, many B movies over the years.Particularly fun for me was a segment on Los Angeles destroying itself, as Hollywood has always taken an especially great pleasure in its own destruction — most notably (to me) in 1997’s magma-happy misfire Volcano, which was cleverly marketed (“The Coast Is Toast!”) but not so astutely written or directed. The City of Angels does sometimes seem to hate itself, or is at least willing to take a number of jabs in stride, as seen in industry-skewering films like The Player and L.A. Story. Few other locations are so mercilessly mocked as we are — but as this documentary points out, there’s a lot more to Los Angeles than what you see in the movies.

Overall, Los Angeles Plays Itself‘s focus on the entertainment industry is smallish, considering. Andersen is more interested in architecture and geography and social problems. This is more history lesson than cinematic celebration, and as such, it occasionally strays too far from its ostensible subject and, in a moment or two, becomes slightly pedantic bordering on cranky. The documentary is nearly three hours long, and would likely need to be at least three hours longer to totally encompass all that is L.A. and the movies. Perhaps it isn’t possible.

There are lengthy segments on several of cinema’s well-known SoCal staples, like Kiss Me Deadly, Chinatown, Blade Runner, and L.A. Confidential, as well there should be. (Other, less venerated movies pop up more often than it seems they should — The Replacement Killers, The Thirteenth Floor, Why Do Fools Fall In Love.) And there’s a nice nod to filmmakers who either disdained or ignored Los Angeles, like Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock.

Even so, there are some startling and glaring omissions. Andersen gives us a long bit on the failed L.A. trolley system (brought to the big screen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), but how can a movie that touches on the city’s transportation issues contain not a single frame of Jan De Bont’s 1995 action masterpiece Speed? Not only is the city front-and-center throughout the movie, but the passengers on the bus also represent a wide cross-section of Angelenos, with lots of L.A.-specific jokes.

Paul Thomas Anderson is also nowhere to be found, despite the fact that both Boogie Nights and Magnolia contain a multitude of scenes that would feel right at home in this essay. The film gives us a lot of James Dean, but no Marilyn Monroe, which seems unusual given that our city’s tourism is now practically built around her likeness. Movies as diverse as Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, and Clueless get cameos, but feel like they should be bumped up to co-starring roles. There’s no Swingers, no Ed Wood, but there is a curious examination of the long-forgotten dud Hanging Up. Of course, with a subject like this, you could spend all day thinking up relevant movies that are underrepresented here. (There’s a pretty good L.A. montage in the opening of The Brady Bunch Movie, but I didn’t expect to find that here.)

Los Angeles Plays Itself was completed in 2003, which explains the omission of some later movies that would almost certainly appear here otherwise, including Crash, Drive, and Collateral.

Ultimately, Los Angeles Plays Itself is a fascinating, if at times slightly unfocused, exploration of an immense subject. It is only in the film’s final 20 minutes or so that it starts to miss the mark, with a curiously long look at black neo-realism in films like Killer Of Sheep and Bush Mama. Race is such a colossal aspect of Los Angeles culture that it doesn’t feel right to shove it all the way to the end — it could, of course, easily be the subject of its own doc — and it would’ve been more jarring for Andersen to omit the subject entirely. But for a film that jumps so easily and gleefully through disparate decades and genres, it doesn’t make sense to finish focusing almost exclusively on a specific niche from the late 70s and early 80s. After two-plus hours of frolicking through time and space, Andersen plunks us down for a big ol’ spoonful of medicine, and it doesn’t go down so smoothly. This would have been the perfect place to compare and contrast depictions of different ethnicities in Los Angeles from various decades and points of view — a little more Boyz In The Hood, perhaps? Instead, it seemed Andersen reached such an insurmountable subject that he threw up his hands and decided to just roll credits. It’s a frustrating end to an otherwise fine film.

Due to rights issues, Los Angeles Plays Itself has been difficult to see for much of the decade since it was made, and only now is it about to be released officially on home video. But a film like this is best seen on the big screen, a must-see for residents of Los Angeles — and anyone who has ever seen a movie. I’m grateful for this thoughtful, informative, and insightful look at the city I live in, the City of Angels — one that is often dismissed or overlooked when it comes to serious cultural conversation. It’s hardly a fawning or self-congratulatory look at the movies — that would be more like Los Angeles Plays With Itself. Instead, Andersen does a rare thing and takes L.A. seriously, giving it both a critical eye and a forgiving look.

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