Okay, here we go.

We’re now officially more than halfway through Looking‘s first season, and we’ve finally gotten the series’ first pretty great episode.

Sure, Looking‘s detractors can still complain that nothing happens — in fact, even less happens on a plot level in “Looking For The Future” than does in previous episodes — but that’s by design. Looking cuts out all the side characters to focus exclusively on Patrick and his developing romance with Richie, finally giving us some insight into the show’s lead.

It’s no coincidence that “Looking For The Future” was written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who was one of the series’ most promising elements in its inception. Andrew Haigh also wrote and directed Weekend, one of the best “gay” movies in recent years, and also one of the best romances. Up until now, Looking displayed only a few of the qualities that made Weekend so great — whereas “Looking For The Future” seems like a specific and self-conscious attempt to replicate that movie’s charms precisely.

Original? Not really. But it works.

The episode finds Patrick and Richie in bed together, at some point after their chance meeting at Folsom. Patrick tries to shower without waking Richie, but instead finds himself serenaded from Richie’s bed with a bass. They chat and cuddle, Patrick says he really has to go to work (about five times), and leaves… then promptly returns to Richie’s apartment to play hooky. It’s Patrick Murray’s Day Off, everybody!

Patrick and Richie spend their day mostly wandering around, eating, and checking out the sky in an observatory, underneath the “stars.” Along the way, we learn that Richie’s last boyfriend was HIV positive, Patrick has “bottom shame,” Patrick is perhaps more cautious than the average gay, and that he also had a preteen crush on Sean Astin in Goonies. It’s typical early-date stuff, until Richie convinces Patrick to see a psychic who uses eggs to read the future. (They leave before the actual reading.) Looking has previously depicted dates going awkwardly awry, but it’s harder us a date that’s actually going really well, yet we can see on both Patrick and Richie how much fun they’re having. We, by extension, are also having fun, like we’re right along on that date with them.

As in Weekend, most of the pleasures of “Looking For The Future” stem from our witnessing two men genuinely falling for each other, which is still a pretty rare thing in film and television these days. In all the noise about coming out and hooking up and marriage equality, that initial connection between two gay men often gets lost in the ether, but that‘s what it’s all about.

And that, I daresay, is what Looking should be about — not bathhouses and public parks and antiquated sexual practices, not developing a crush on a hooker and deciding whether or not to be one yourself, and not about uncut penises. All that is fine, I guess, but what has always been missing from Looking is what we finally find in “Looking For The Future” — a specific sense of who these characters are, and some actual chemistry between them. We learn so much more about Patrick through Richie than we ever learned in his reasonably hollow interactions with Dom and Augustin (a friendship trio that still doesn’t really make sense to me). I’m not sure it’s quite enough to make Patrick a fully likable leading man yet, but I liked him just fine in this episode.

It’s the sort of information that we probably should have had in the pilot — I don’t know that something like “Looking For The Future” really could have worked as a pilot episode, but it has the warmth and ease and charm and specificity that has been missing so far for so many of us. Looking has largely been a disappointment because gay men wanted to see themselves represented on TV, and instead we got some strange bearded folk from the 80s that didn’t really represent us at all. Who are these people? we wondered. We kind of recognized them, but found only a fraction of ourselves in them. It was all so hesitant and tepid, especially for a show on HBO. And that’s not really the gay way of doing things.

“Looking For The Future” isn’t necessarily more titillating or splashier than preceding episodes; in fact, it’s far more intimate. But it’s bolder in the sense that it’s unlike any other episode of TV I can think of. The sex scenes aren’t attention-grabbing or “hot”; it’s an actual depiction of what’s going down between two guys who really like each other, which is a lot more daring than a three-way or a Grindr hookup or a bathhouse dalliance or whatever else Looking has been depicting this season. Queer As Folk already did that stuff, and it’s been done elsewhere too. Looking can get away with some of that sexy stuff, but ironically, it isn’t that that feels like a revelation. It’s the stuff two men talk about on their second or third date. It’s the moment they realize they’re both former fatties. It’s one man sharing his love for his favorite movie, and the other admitting he hasn’t seen it. Sounds like mundane stuff, but Andrew Haigh is typically very good at making the mundane feel insightful. This is what Looking‘s audience is likely to connect to.

There are fewer emotional obstacles in “Looking For The Future” than in Weekend, and the characters are still a little less developed, and also contrast less. Patrick likes Richie, and Richie likes Patrick, and there’s nothing exactly stopping them from being together. But sometimes it works like that. The pilot episode was titled “Looking For Now,” which I guess is what Patrick was doing then, stuck in the present and not open to changing up his options in hopes of finding something unexpected; now, in the aptly-titled “Looking for The Future,” this show is finally going somewhere.

(Sidenote: it was a good night of TV on HBO, with a rather stellar episode of Girls, too, that also ended up being pretty gay, with Andrew Rannells reprising his role as Elijah and bringing a cadre of gay boys — including Danny Strong — along to the Hamptons. There’s even a musical number!)

I find myself looking forward to the future of Looking moreso than I have in the past, and yet I also know that Augustin and Dom will be back next week, and so will the traditional format of the show. (Episodes of TV shows that focus exclusively on a few key characters and cut out the rest of the cast always feel special, and are usually very good.) I worry that “Looking For The Future” is just an anomaly, and next week we’ll go back to having no real grasp on who these people are. Do we need an all-Augustin episode, too, to see that there’s more to him than being a silly bitch? (If there even is…)

Regardless, “Looking For The Future” gives us some indication that Looking can actually be the show it should be. That it can form believable connections between people. That these characters actually have layers and more on their minds than meets the eye.

For once, the future of Looking is actually looking pretty bright.

*

Last week’s “Looking For The Future” was the first time in Looking‘s still-brief run that the show actually took a narrative and creative risk, allowing a single date between Patrick and Richie to sustain an entire episode. Some found it the epitome of the show’s nothingness, its willingness to let the mundane create drama.

Others, like myself, proclaimed that it was by far the best Looking yet, because it’s not that it matters so much what happens on a show, but how we feel about it. Looking‘s first four episodes similarly didn’t have a lot going on plot-wise, but they also kept the characters a bit of a mystery. Are we supposed to feel sorry for Augustin amidst all his self-entitled whining? Can I really sympathize with Dom’s moping about the Big 4-0 when he’s still gallivanting around like a fresh-sprung twink? (Answer: no, and not really.)

Now, with “Looking For The Future,” Looking has less to prove. We know it can be heartfelt and insightful, but will it be, ever again, from here on out? With “Looking In The Mirror,” we (kinda sorta) have an answer.

“Looking In The Mirror” opens up with Patrick and Richie, appropriately, since that’s where we left off. Patrick’s about to introduce Richie to his friends (already!), so Richie asks the questions we’ve wanted to know all along about how these guys know each other. (Still not sure these friendships makes sense, but oh well, I’m over it.) Patrick (accidentally) drops the B-word — “boyfriend” — which causes Richie to ask, “Who said I was your boyfriend?” (Ouch!)

Of course, Richie is only giving Patrick a hard time, because of course he wants to be Patrick’s boyfriend. All gay men can safely assume that the guy they’ve been on, like, three dates with is completely ready for a steady relationship! Right? It totally works that way.

Okay, so, no — I don’t believe that someone as self-conscious and relationship-averse as Patrick would so casually drop the B-word, even if the last date was a whole day long and took place partially in a planetarium. (Note to self: plan more dates in planetariums. Addendum to note to self: plan more dates.) And no, I’m not on board with it being quite so easy for Patrick and Richie to get this important talk out of the way so early in their courtship. In real life, it takes weeks and months of agonizing and hand-wringing and self-doubt before the B-word is broached, following many, many more dates (seldom in planetariums) and then an awkward phase where you realize all you do is eat Thai food and watch sitcoms with this person and you still don’t know if they’re sleeping with other people. (They are.)

Yes, okay, sometimes you find someone who’s super special and you just click and know that they’re as into you as you are into them, and then you barely even have to ask that question — because you’re soul mates! But that’s always shortly before said “soul mate” applies for a restraining order. (I mean, I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I’m pretty sure I’m right about this.)

So initially, from this opening scene, I was already fired up about how the show had gone downhill again so fast. How dare Looking allow Patrick and Richie to be happy? I only watch shows where the main characters are significantly worse off than I am, which is why I watch Game Of Thrones and True Detective and American Horror Story instead of, like, Nashville. Only miserable people allowed on my TV screen, thank you! (This is also the reason most of my paired-off friends are dead to me.) Luckily for me, Patrick and Richie’s newfound boyfriendship takes a nosedive later in the episode. But we’ll get to that.

Meanwhile, Dom is spending more time with Lynn and his snooty, well-to-do friends, hoping said snoots will invest in his chicken shack or whatever (perhaps because one of them is black). Lynn ends up being a lot more impressed by Dom than his friends are; Dom dreads the stroke of midnight because it means he’s officially entering his fifth decade of life (and swiftly exiting his relevance as a sexual creature in the eyes of the young men he goes after). What Dom doesn’t realize is that he’s decrying his old age to a man who is roughly twenty years his senior, which results in a delightful verbal bitch-slap from Lynn, who says he spent his own 40th birthday doing mushrooms in a canoe. Dom is suitably put in his place. (Go Lynn!)Elsewhere in the city (Oakland, to be exact), Augustin is having a snit fit because the scantily-clad photos he took of a sexy hooker are somehow not “artistic” (who would have guessed?). Augustin defends CJ’s profession yet again as Frank displays a saintlike level of patience and understanding about his boyfriend spending all of his spare time with a narcissistic prostitute, sometimes in a state of undress. And this is before Augustin bags on Frank for being the black guy who wants to bring Cheetohs to the party, which is just rude. Moral of the story: Augustin is a whiny child, a terrible boyfriend, and an outright bitch. Are we seriously supposed to like this character? (More on that later.)

Doris and Dom talk about Lynn on the way to Dom’s birthday bash in the park. Doris is insightful enough to see that Dom’s feelings about Lynn run deeper than he’s letting on, which is confirmed later when a youngish Grindr guy goes untexted while Dom jaunts off to Lynn’s house unannounced.

But first: Richie is introduced as Patrick’s boyfriend, which has Augustin all miffed for some reason. Patrick does a prolonged and surprisingly offensive imitation of an effeminate gay man that really makes him seem like an asshole, just when some of us were kinda-sorta starting to like him. It’s odd that no one calls him out on this, given that nearly all gay characters on this show are reasonably masculine — are the writers unaware that gay viewers may see this as further evidence that Looking is, if not exactly homophobic, a little leery of coming off as too gay, just as many gay men are? (It goes hand-in-hand with the beards.) I’d wager that this moment didn’t play well with some of Looking‘s harsher critics, and seems like a fairly egregious misstep as written. (Looking could certainly shed some light on the masculine-versus-feminine debate, but this wasn’t the way to do it.)

Patrick’s uncomfortable sissy-boy imitation is interrupted by his boss Kevin, who has arrived with his studly Caucasian sports medicine-practicing partner Jon (Joseph Williamson), who is the counterpoint to scruffy Latino hairdresser Richie, who Patrick pointedly does not introduce as his boyfriend. (Danger, danger!) At this point, I was back on board with “Looking In The Mirror,” because if it isn’t going to explore the extreme awkwardness of the Boyfriend Conversation in a naturalistic fashion, at least it can explore the Boyfriend Omission in a realistic way. And aren’t there moments, early in a relationship, when you’re not sure how someone you know will react to your significant other, so you kind of don’t feel like getting into it? Patrick makes something up about Richie wanting to open his own salon (he doesn’t), which is ascribing his own upper-class ambitions onto a boyfriend who’s pretty happy to be who he is.

CJ shows up to the party (seriously, did Augustin have to pay for his attendance?) and is all over Augustin in front of Frank, who again doesn’t really mind because CJ is kinda all over him too. Lynn has flowers delivered to Dom. (Aww!) Then “Looking In The Mirror” cuts right into the meat of it when Augustin flatly accuses Patrick of slumming it in his relationship with Richie. Richie, unfortunately, overhears. Fortunately Richie has the cojones to stand up to Augustin, who backs down immediately, though Patrick doesn’t put up much of a fight. Richie’s just scoring all kinds of points lately, isn’t he?

The scene suggests that there’s a widening rift between these old college buddies, which makes sense because they don’t have much in common, and sometimes friendships go that way. Someone who used to be great can eventually become a sniveling little bitch like Augustin, who takes his own frustrations out on well-intentioned people like Richie to avoid looking in the mirror. (Ohhh, heyyy there, title of the episode!) Usually, said friend should be dropped immediately, but that’s unlikely given that Augustin is a series regular. Patrick calls Augustin out on his hooker bullshit, while Augustin at least does have a point about Patrick slumming it since Patrick couldn’t introduce Richie as his boyfriend to his boss. (Then again, that’s also because Patrick is attracted to Kevin, which doesn’t bode well.)

And suddenly it hit me — maybe we aren’t supposed to like Augustin? I mean, like, at all. That’s a strange choice for one of the three leads of a drama (at least one in which no one is a serial killer or meth dealer), but it’s much easier to accept Augustin’s whining and moaning and childish behavior if I don’t feel that the show’s writers are asking me to sympathize with him at the same time. Because I don’t. At all. Yes, he does remind me of guys I’ve met, just not guys I’ve liked, and in a way his arrested development is even more striking than Dom’s, and is perhaps an insightful look at 30-year-old men who still act like 15-year-old girls. (But at this point, only perhaps.) So there you have it: I am giving up on Augustin. I don’t like him. I won’t like him. And in that way, I may actually get some enjoyment out of hating his character.

But shouldn’t it be the other way around? Aren’t the supporting characters supposed to be the ones we love to hate? Aren’t we meant to side with our protagonists more often than not? That’s the super fucking strange thing about Looking — so far, the three leads’ love interests (Frank, Lynn, and Richie) are so much more likable than Augustin, Dom, and Patrick are. When was the last time a TV show did that? (If the answer is never, there’s probably a good reason.)

Now, for the first time, all of the Looking lads are finding themselves in or at least close to a significant partnership. Yes, Lynn rebuffs Dom’s rather desperate birthday lip-lock advance, as well he should — because Dom is not as ready as he thinks he is for a stable, mature guy like Lynn. (Though it was Lynn who said just a few episodes ago that he mourns “friendly” casual sex.) I highly doubt we’re seeing the end of Dom and Lynn’s flirtations, though. Lynn makes a proposition for a “pop up” of a different kind, offering to finance a one-night only chicken shack extravaganza, which we all kind of knew he’d end up paying for. I call bullshit on Lynn truly caring about this business partnership — does he really think Dom’s chicken restaurant is that solid an investment? No. He wants to be Dom-inated, he’s just being smart about not rushing into it.

At the same time, Augustin’s relationship is veering toward collapse as he invites CJ over for a (paid?) threeway, which they decide to film. This being 2014, naturally they film it on an iPhone — or perhaps a webcam, right? Oh, wait, no — I forgot that Looking takes place in a bizarro version of 1985, which is why Augustin films it on some sort of old-fashioned movie camera. (Is this “art,” too?) Augustin doesn’t look pleased that Frank and CJ are getting so intimate, which is a good reason not to bring a charismatic, chiseled hooker into your relationship. The episode ends with Patrick and Richie somewhat in a state of limbo after Richie legitimately wonders if Patrick can handle his rough-around-the-edginess. Patrick stands in front of a mirror naked (as you do), soul-searching while wearing only the necklace Richie gave him (that Augustin bitchily mocked).

Symbolically, I imagine the writers intended viewers to think, “Oh, look, Patrick has shed everything but this new identity as Richie’s boyfriend, and is ready to move into a new chapter in his life, away from his old pitfalls and values.” Most probably thought: “Hey, look! It’s Jonathan Groff’s ass!”

All in all, Lynn is fantastic, Frank is a saint, Richie is pretty awesome, and… the show isn’t really about them, is it? Is it time for a spin-off already? “Looking In The Mirror” had legitimate conflict, pushed the dynamic between two lead characters, and (I think) advanced the overall story, in an episode that’s all about how none of our three lead characters deserve the men who are into them. That’s enough to rank it as probably the second-best Looking episode, which means in the latter half of its inaugural season, things are Looking up…

*

There’s only one episode left in Looking‘s first season, and unless they really fuck it up (which is entirely possible), it will go down as a lop-sided debut, with the first four episodes getting off to a wobbly and largely disappointing start, while the final four gave us something that was much more promising.

“Looking For A Plus One” continues last week’s trend of our three leads behaving like jerks to love interests who deserve better, but the stakes are even greater this time around. More “happens” in “Looking For A Plus One” than all of the other episodes combined, really, in terms of conflict between characters.

Yeah — conflict! Who knew Looking had such a thing in store?

The show opens with another scene of the core trio drinking beer and smoking bud in hoodies, firmly reminding us that this is San Francisco (though it could also be Portland or Seattle). Things are less harmonious this time, as Augustin bitches about his latest “art” project while Patrick takes the opportunity to gently suggest that taking sex pictures of your boyfriend being effed by a near-stranger is not inherently artistic. “How dare you, sir!” Augustin says (but not in those words), miffed at being called out in such fashion (the truth). Dom goes to get another beer, and so does most of the audience, because it seems like we’re in for plenty more of Augustin’s self-righteous whining.

The next day is a big one — Richie is to meet Patrick’s family at a grand Murray wedding. The early scenes expertly capture the high drama of getting ready for a major life event, during which you will inevitably spill a dark liquid all over yourself (Richie) and/or get a parking ticket (Patrick) for such a minor infraction as not turning your wheels. (There are two other moments in this episode during which Patrick is also in danger of getting a parking ticket, another reminder that the show is set in San Francisco. Ironically, I have never identified with Patrick more or had deeper sympathy for him than when he despaired at that ticket.)

Patrick is a little manic in anticipation of the wedding, which is perfectly understandable. Richie tries to fix his bow tie while they’re driving over the Golden Gate Bridge (reminder: this is San Francisco!), and Patrick freaks out, and Richie makes him pull over on the bridge, and Patrick does pull over, but not on the bridge, and Richie tells him to smoke some weed, and Patrick yells at him for bringing marijuana to his sister’s wedding, and Richie storms off all handsome and smooth-faced — because homeboy shaved for the big event! (And Looking becomes about 25% less hairy! At this rate, they’ll all be fully body-waxed and hairless by the series finale. Hooray!)

And, okay, I have to say I’m on Team Patrick on this one (for, like, the first time ever). First of all, it is annoying when people distract you while driving, as Hannah and her cousin discovered in Sunday night’s Girls, and if someone is asking you to stop tying their bow tie while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, well, you should stop it! Second of all, it is completely fair to ask your boyfriend to not be high as a kite while meeting your entire family at what seems like a reasonably conservative wedding, or really, any occasion. Patrick might have handled this better, but it’s a big day for him! This is one moment when Richie could have been the bigger man, sucked it up, not smoked it up, and just gotten back in the car to meet the Murrays. Patrick was legitimately a jerk last week when not introducing Richie as his boyfriend, and is kind of legitimately a jerk to Richie behind his back later in this episode, but it’s not totally one-sided. C’mon, Richie! Did you shave off all your good boyfriend potential along with that scruff?

Before we get back to Patrick being a jerk, though, we need to check in on Augustin being a jerk and Dom being a jerk. In this episode’s slightest subplot, Dom is stressed out about his big chicken shack debut, which is happening in a rundown Indian-Chinese fusion restaurant in about 28 hours. Dom snaps at Lynn (and everyone) because his entire future depends on this chicken being fucking delicious, which causes Lynn to abandon ship when Dom doesn’t care about his flowers. (Dear Dom: never dismiss Lynn’s flowers again.) Dom and Lynn’s interactions have always been one of Looking‘s strongest suits — until this week, because I still think it’s way too easy for Dom to suddenly start his own chicken business, even if it’s a one-night-only chicken extravaganza rather than a full-fledged restaurant.

Didn’t they just have this idea last week? Don’t they need more time to market it, and find people to actually cook this fabulous chicken? And if Dom doesn’t make the chicken himself, what exactly is he doing? So far, Dom has done nothing to convince me that he can or should open his own chicken place. Once again, the show is redeemed only with Doris speaking the truth in one succinct line of dialogue or sometimes even just a look. I propose a spin-off called Doris in which Lauren Weedman wanders onto the set of other TV shows and tells the characters all the bad things the audience is thinking about them. In summary: Doris continues to be awesome.

Meanwhile, Augustin is being the biggest jerk of all when he decides to bail on his art show because Patrick was right about how taking sex pics of your boyfriend getting it on with a prostitute isn’t really the kind of “work” that needs a home at a gallery, and is probably better suited for something like Snapchat. (Though I’m sure plenty of websites would display it happily.) Augustin confesses to Frank that he bailed on the gig — and that he paid CJ $220 an hour to seduce and destroy his boyfriend, which has Frank justifiably pissed that his man paid a hooker to have sex with him and neglected to mention it. Especially considering that said man isn’t even paying rent in their sweet Oakland pad! (Blowing all your money on secret hooker threesomes? Not the greatest plan, Augustin.)

Frank and Augustin have a reckoning during which Frank decides Augustin needs to move out, as well he should. Augustin has displayed a grand total of zero redeeming qualities as a boyfriend (and a human being, for that matter). But let’s not leave Frank totally blameless here — he knew that CJ was a hooker, he just didn’t know CJ was a hooker currently being paid for his services — and really, isn’t any situation that brings a hooker into your relationship pretty volatile and fraught with complication? Isn’t that basically always a harbinger of doom? Neither Augustin nor Frank should be surprised at this outcome, and neither should we. At this point, I’m all for storylines about Augustin’s suffering, especially since Dom and Patrick have it pretty easy these days. Moral of the story: don’t pay a whore to have sex with your boyfriend — or, if you do, tell him about it.

Now, back to the wedding. We meet Patrick’s mother Dana (Julia Duffy), who we’ve heard plenty about, and a twist of fate has Kevin and John, of all people, attending the ceremony! (Patrick and Kevin sure do randomly run into each other a lot, don’t they?) Kevin gets drunk and tries to kiss Patrick in the bathroom (naughty Kevin!), which Patrick ends maybe a little sooner than we’d expect him to (good Patrick!). The kiss is all kinds of complicated, because we don’t know precisely what flashes through Patrick’s mind at that moment. That he shouldn’t kiss Kevin because of John? That he shouldn’t kiss Kevin because of Richie? That he shouldn’t kiss Kevin because he’s his boss? Probably all of these — but in which order? It seems Richie’s absence has Patrick longing for him enough that a cheap affair with his boss is not so appealing, which we know because Patrick uses the word “totally” in his apologetic voicemail to Richie, which is what he does when he’s nervous.

The episode ends with Patrick having two distinct interactions with his parents. First up: that awful moment when “Love Shack” comes on and you don’t have a boyfriend to dance with you, so you end up chatting with your mom. Patrick tells Dana that she wouldn’t like Richie because he’s an unambitious Mexican hairdresser, and with an introduction like that, how could she? Patrick has failed to list any of Richie’s good qualities — he’s leading with the negative, turning his mother against Richie before she has a chance to do it herself. Dana isn’t having it — she tells Patrick that Richie’s absence at the wedding is not her fault. And she’s right. It’s time for Patrick to stop blaming mom for his relationship failings and take some ownership of his own choices. But also: Dana is munching a pot-infused Rice Krispie treat, which means she and Richie might get along just fine after all.

The episode ends on a different note, as Patrick has a brief conversation with his father, who bemoans the $40,000 dropped on this joyous occasion and asks Patrick, “You’re not going to want one of these, are ya?” It’s not the question Patrick wants to hear after his first major fight with his brand-new boyfriend, and it’s especially ironic coming at the end of an episode in which three gay partnerships of varying types are jeopardized. Patrick and Richie, Dom and Lynn, and Augustin and Frank are all at a crossroads that could very well lead the better halves out of our trio’s lives for good, because gay relationships often do come with added complications that heterosexual ones don’t. (Even Kevin and John could face a rocky future if John ever finds out about that kiss.) “Looking For A Plus One” has Patrick, Augustin, and Dom all “minus one” instead.

There’s no more hetero institution than a big ol’ wedding, after all, and “Looking For A Plus One” subtly explores how awkward that can be for men and women who only recently obtained the right to have a wedding themselves (in some places), in a world that isn’t quite used to them having that right yet. The inner workings of gay relationships are still a mystery to many straight people, while straight relationships are the norm, the institution, the standard to live up to (or fail trying) — we all know how that story is supposed to go.

Patrick’s father isn’t being mean-spirited in suggesting that Patrick might spare him several grand by neglecting to follow his sister’s matrimonial footsteps, but in the end, it seems the question only causes Patrick to realize: Yes, I do want this. Which might mean wanting Richie. However, the question might as well have been posed to the gay faction of Looking‘s audience: do we want this? A true partnership? Love and commitment and stability? Tuxedos and cake and “Love Shack”? (Well, of course we want “Love Shack.”) Or do we want to be the sole proprietors of our own enterprises, perpetual bachelors pursuing, um, chicken? Do we want to pepper our monogamy with the occasional hooker, risking all we’ve built together in the process?

Are Patrick and Richie done? Not likely, but it’s the third twosome that ends on an iffy note this week. One hetero union comes together while multiple gay ones fall apart. Gays haven’t had hundreds of years to get used to such partnerships and establish their own marital traditions, so perhaps Patrick and Dom and even Augustin can be forgiven for this week’s sins. Or perhaps not. But Looking is finally generating some suspense, at least, its plot actually moving forward — since Augustin and Frank actually do seem done.

Can we keep Frank instead of Augustin? I doubt it. But we’ll see what happens in Looking‘s Season One finale next week.

*

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.

*

* based on absolutely no criteria whatsoever

It’s almost summer again (here in Los Angeles, anyway — the rest of you may have another month or two before it’s good and sunny out). And that means it’s time to listen to some good fucking songs. Because the best fucking songs sound the very best when it’s nice out, and you’re laying by the pool or at the beach or driving around in a convertible.

It’s been quite a while since I compiled a list of The Best Fucking Songs, which is (like all music lists) totally subjective and impossible to definitively quantify. Everyone has a different taste in music, and it’s a bit harder to say whether a song is good, bad, or the best compared to a movie or a TV show. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it is.

Disclaimer: I have not heard all of the new music in the world, or even that much new music lately, yet I’m fairly confident in my selection of these songs as at least amongst the best.

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1. “Triggerfinger” // Donkeyboy feat. Kiesza

Sorry, everybody else. My very new favorite musical discovery all-around is Donkeyboy. I’m not sure where I was when they emerged onto whatever scene they emerged onto, but clearly I wasn’t there, and I’m a little mad at everyone in the world for not alerting me to their presence sooner. If you know anything about my musical tastes, which are rather clearly laid out in posts like “The Best Fucking Songs Right Now,” you will know that this music is essentially tailor-made for me.

Donkeyboy is reminiscent of previous Best Fucking Songs selection Sound Of Arrows, except a bit more upbeat and dancier. They hail from Norway — because almost zero of my Best Fucking Songs artists ever hail from the good ol’ USA, which gives us artists like Miley Cyrus and Jason Derulo instead — and have that artful Euro-pop appeal that seems almost impossible to emulate stateside, given that no one does it. (Of course, the rest of the world is fonder of artful Euro-pop than we are, for whatever reason.)

I stumbled upon Donkeyboy with the single “Triggerfinger.” While watching the female vocalist in the video, I thought, “Hey! She looks familiar!” A quick search confirmed that she was Kiesza, another previous recipient of my Best Fucking Song honors (and whom I hung out with a bit on my last night as a New York City resident). I was very pleased to see two talents come together like this, and “Triggerfinger” is a beautiful and hypnotic song.

A little more digging led me to Donkeyboy’s 2011 release Silver Moon, which is home to several more great songs, as well as their latest, “Crazy Something Normal,” which is a slight departure from the Silver Moon sound, but not radically. It’s a track that reminds me of “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John, and hopefully will be a similar breakout hit here. Needless to say, I’m much looking forward to Donkeyboy’s forthcoming album which contains “Crazy Something Normal” and presumably “Triggerfinger.” Until then, let me highly recommend those tracks as well as “Get Up,” “Out Of Control,” and “Pull Of The Eye.” Seriously, more Americans need to jump on this bandwagon with me. There’s room.

*

2. “24 Hours” // Sky Ferreira

And now, the rare appearance by an American on my Best Fucking Songs list — the Los Angeles native Sky Ferreira. She’s been on my music radar for a few years now, since she was breaking out back when I was writing for Idolator. Then I started writing less about pop music and she fell off my radar. So recently, I was surprised to hear her new album recommend by sources who might not have enjoyed her poppier tunes from a few years back.

Sky’s Night Time, My Time is a very listenable record that I suppose you would still classify as pop — especially a couple of the catchier tracks like “You’re Not The One” and “Love In Stereo.” But it’s also a touch darker and more melancholy than you might expect from a talent who also moonlights as a model/actress, and whose first EP was titled As If.

All of Night Time, My Time is pretty solid, but the track I find myself listening to most is “24 Hours,” in which Sky sings about how she’s got exactly one day left with her love. (It’s unclear where he’s heading in 24 hours… prison, maybe?) It’s upbeat and catchy, but at the core, mournful — as a lot of the best pop songs are. And if you like “24 Hours,” there’s a good chance you’ll like the rest of Night Time, My Time too. Most highly recommended: “I Blame Myself,” “You’re Not The One,” and “Love In Stereo.”

*

3. “Volcanoes” // Andreas Moe

In addition to Kiesza, who snuck in thanks to her Donkeyboy collaboration, we have another returning champion on this Best Fucking Songs list. That’s Andreas Moe, from Sweden, also known as pretty much the best place to find music I will like.

Andreas Moe first came to my attention with his badass “Long Time” remix video (a collaboration with John De Sohn. I then discovered that “Long Time” was actually a beautiful acoustic song when stripped of its techno beat (and the bloody children from the music video). It appeared on his Collecting Sunlight EP, which was similarly soft and melodic, with light electronic influences.

The This Year EP continues in a similar fashion. It’s a year old, but I only just found it, and Moe’s forthcoming Ep isn’t due until June. This is the kind of music I often find too earnest or schmaltzy from other artists, and isn’t exactly my speed, but for some reason, the way Andreas Moe does it just works for me. Get it!

*

4. “Somebody Loves You” // Betty Who

Australia’s Betty Who just released her Slow Dancing EP last week, and I can highly recommend it. That’s how I came across Betty Who in the first place. However, I can’t honestly call any of the Slow Dancing tracks the best fucking song when it’s her previous EP that yielded the one I’ve been listening to non-stop, “Somebody Loves You.” (But they are Very Fucking Good Songs, I promise.)

This is sort of upbeat pop song that tries its damnedest to put you in a good mood, and if you are immune to its charms, you are probably also immune to kittens, rainbows, sunshine, and all other things that are said to bring a smile to a human face. (For the record, I’m not so strongly endorsing the micro-budgeted 80s-tinged music video, which is only so-so.)

I really feel like I should be promoting Betty Who’s latest music, which is very good, so check out tracks like “Alone Again” and “Heartbreak Dream.” But since I’d never heard “Somebody Loves You,” I have to imagine that there are many others out there who haven’t either, and may benefit from the sunshine-kitten-rainbow-like effect of it. I’m basically like a doctor here, prescribing you dancey-happiness in sonic form, so you’re welcome.

*

5. “Mega Tubes” // Moon Hooch feat. Alena Spanger

I heard about Moon Hooch secondhand from their recent SXSW show. They are American, they play what they call “cave music,” and they are two saxophones and a drum kit. And that’s pretty cool. If you’re looking for something offbeat and different, that’s basically Moon Hooch.

*

For more of the best fucking songs…

The Five Best Fucking Songs Right Now* (Volume 3)

The Five Best Fucking Songs Right Now* (Volume 2)

The Five Best Fucking Songs Right Now* (Volume 1)

*

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.

*

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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