School’s out, the sky is blue, and that summer sloth will be cured by just one thing—caffeine, and lots of it. Thus coffee shops are still the hangout du jour in the summertime, a place to chit-chat over chai or grab an ice-blended en route. But as the ceaseless summer populace buzzes in and out, people rarely notice a handful of solitary freaks in their midst: holed up in corners, avoiding eye contact, downing espresso by the gallon, these lone losers posses secret, special powers…

But their gift is also a curse, for it has made them outcasts.

These freaks are writers.

I’ve heard people say they despise writers in coffee shops because “they’re just trying to look cool,” but that’s an obvious fallacy. If I wanted to look cool, I could do better than stare into an iced Americano, noting that my reflections on the ice cubes all have the same “lost at sea” look on their ice-faces, a thousand little screenwriters adrift in a black abyss. There are few things less cool than staring at a blank white page on your laptop in public. In truth, writers work at coffee shops because they’d never leave the house otherwise, and because it is somewhat less likely that they will burst into tears, start screaming obscenities, or begin smearing their own feces on the wall in frustration if they’re in a public place. Cool? Hardly. “Writers” is on a short list of groups I’d rather not be associated with, a list that also includes Food Addicts Anonymous, My Super Sweet 16 fans, and Opus Dei.

But in the process of writing this very column at my neighborhood Starbucks, a man looked at me, grinned, and said, “Writer’s block!” on his way out the door. It wasn’t a question. Clearly he recognized my forlorn, vacuous stare into computer screen oblivion, the same way a birdwatcher would identify a familiar call echoing across the pond and proudly announce: “The common loon!”

He had me pegged. I smiled, thankful to have a kind stranger fleetingly acknowledge my eternal suffering. But as he walked on, I had to wonder… is it really that obvious?

Do I really look like a writer?

Ugh.

I’ve been called many things. Some ask if I’m an actor. Those craving a favor may ask if I’m a model. There was a period when every time I’d shop at Abercrombie & Fitch, customers would ask me to open fitting rooms for them. Last week a drunk guy who passed out in front of my garage swore he’d seen me on MTV. I’ve also been mistaken for a cocaine dealer, a prostitute, and someone trashy enough to buy chronic off a guy at a bus stop — all on the same street corner during my summer internship in fabulous Hollywood, California.

Yet none of these mistakes disturbed me quite so much as being called out as a writer.
I’ve always considered myself more of an “honorable mention” in the lineup of head cases and would-be carnies one typically associates with writing professionally — not a full-fledged member. I’m sure lots of flourishing writers come across as well-adjusted individuals by day, but the road to success is paved with Xanax, and without clocking at least a little field time in Crazytown, they’d pursue more sensible, reliable careers… such as barista. I admit to a certain degree of eccentricity, sure, but I also consider myself a fully functional member of society… not just an observer, a participant. So if I’m not even a prosperous writer at this tender young age, why carry the funny farm stigma now? I’ll have plenty of time to be freakish and socially awkward when I’m older.

I closed my laptop, left the coffee shop, and immediately set about making concerted efforts to differentiate myself from the writing community. This summer, I would boldly go where few writers had gone before. First stop? The beach!

A pallid, never-seen-the-light-of-day skin tone might earn a writer authenticity points, but it also puts him on automatic suicide watch, which isn’t very summery. A healthy, sun-kissed glow, however, seemed just the thing to help me blend in with those folks we writers call “normals,” and though I did succeed in bronzing away that “indoors” look, I did it at the expense of my poor, poor skin, which has mostly peeled away… for the Cause.

Next I decided to take up running — no longer would typing and frowning be the extent of my cardio. But this proved an even greater challenge than tanning, since it involved much less laying down. In the movies, an upbeat song would play and thirty seconds, six outfits, and as many close-ups of my “this is difficult” face later, I would reach my goal and high-five a grumpy yet paternal mentor. As it turns out, however, this only happens in the movies. Actual running involves your full body (no fitter-than-you stunt double), one sole outfit, and at least half an hour, and when you finish, you look all red and blotchy and no one cheers for you. My running remained montage-and-Miyagi-free, which needless to say was disappointing. Worst of all, I didn’t instantaneously feel like I was ready to take on any bullies or national championships or other third act obstacles, unless my big climactic moment involved tackling a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. (I earned it, okay?)

Finally, I decided social interaction was the key to ridding myself of writerly weirdness. A summer job seemed the perfect way to fraternize with new people — and pull in some extra cash to boot! Unfortunately, getting a mindless part-time gig was harder than expected. Employers somehow felt the need to ask why I wanted the job, as if I might be a secret millionaire whose inner satisfaction comes from spending summer afternoons helping bitchy tourists find pants that fit. I assumed “For the money, duh!” was a tacky response, so I went with the painful truth: “I’m a writer looking for a job that will leave me enough time to work on my scripts too…”

Well! I guess it’s too bad I didn’t get my BFA. in The Art of Retail, since nobody hired me. All that time perfecting my “I’m not overqualified for this job” face for naught.

After such rejection, I returned to my local Starucks for a venti self-pity party and considered giving up the quest to transcend my writer’s roots. I don’t tan, running is exhausting, and I had an easier time getting a job without a college degree. Perhaps my fate was already sealed. I pulled out my laptop and weighed my options, staring at that blank screen. It was then that an old man passed by and asked, “Why do you think so hard?”

I looked up and wondered if he’d been sent via divine intervention to convince me not to surrender. But then he went on: “She’s coming for you, and she’s going to give you BJ!” Then he hobbled away.

And while no such female appeared to do anything of that nature, something clicked. I looked around Starbucks at the batty old people, the twittering gossip queens, the ADD kids with their OCD parents and, yes, the writers, and I thought, “It’s not just us. Everybody in this place is crazy!”

Maybe it’s the heat plus caffeine, or maybe we’ve been mad all along, but suddenly those lone freaks holed up in the corners didn’t look so freakish; they looked one step ahead of me, as if they’d figured this out already. I decided not to give up on my summer plan, but rather to make it a three-pronged attack: Look good. Feel good. Write good.

Err… write well.

Then I promptly got to work, figuring: if we’re all crazy anyhow, there’s no shame in putting it to good use.

Though it may be time to find a new coffee shop.

*

(Throwback Thursday: This piece was first published in INsite Boston in 2006.)

There’s a thin line between genius and madness.

Or, if Frank is to be believed, no line at all.

Frank is the sort of movie that sneaks up on you all at once. If I had, for some reason, walked out of the theater five minutes before it ended, and then someone asked me what it was “about,” I wouldn’t have been able say very coherently. There is quite a lot of madness to be found in Frank, coming from a variety of different characters who all seem to be larger than life. You might be forgiven for thinking this is all just a bunch of heightened wackiness — like Wes Anderson goes to South By Southwest. (SXSW actually does make a prominent cameo in this movie.) But to write Frank off as a quirky comedy is a mistake.

The film’s final moments take a jarring dramatic detour, one that is not totally out of sync with what came before — after all, a major character dies midway through the film. But it does feel primed to leave us on a sour, sappy note, because so many indie dramedies do that when they don’t know how else to wrap things up. Too many movies force schmaltz upon us in order to end on a note of portent, as if to fool us that what we just saw had a lot more to say than it really did. For a moment, I thought Frank would, too.

Instead, it ends on just the right note, which is notable in a movie that’s all about some rather discordant music.

Frank begins with Jon (Domnhall Gleeson), trying helplessly to find musical inspiration in the everyday world. A woman in a red coat walks by, and he sings something like: “Hey woman in the red coat, what are you doing with that bag?” Even Jon knows this is not destined to be a hit. Despite his creative doubts, however, Jon still manages to tweet uplifting updates about his creative progress with a handful of familiar banal hashtags that we see displayed on screen — a clever conceit that could easily be annoying in a different sort of movie.

Then, one day, while about to eat a panini he has just tweeted about (#nomnomnom), a chance spectacle has him run across a band with an unpronounceable name that is in dire need of a keyboardist. It’s immediately clear that there are several odd things going on with this band, and it is telling that the craziest member of this group may not be the frontman, Frank, who wears a giant papier-mâché head at all times. (He may not even be the second craziest, in fact.) While Frank is the accepted leader of the group, the driving force behind it all, it seems the strings are really being pulled by the hostile chain-smoker Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who may or may not be romantically involved with Frank. Additional members of the band include Baraque and Nana (Francois Civil and Carla Azar), who remain in the background for much of the film, and the potentially unstable Don (Scoot McNairy), who has a thing for mannequins.Yes, this is a quirky bunch, and for a fairly long stretch of the film it seems we’ll just follow these kooks as they behave in increasingly absurd ways. (Which is not such a bad thing, since many moments in Frank are laugh-out-loud funny.) Clara has a lot of killer one-liners, mostly spewing hatred and threats of violence (not idle threats, as it turns out). The band’s recording sessions are one-of-a-kind and, to put it kindly, less than sonorous. Frank has one of the weirdest soundtracks a movie could ask for, including the delightful “Frank’s Most Likeable Song… Ever” and “I Love You All,” which becomes hauntingly lovely when paired with the themes of the film. (Be warned: I’m not sure any of this music works out of this context, however.)

Most movies follow a fairly predictable set of story beats. Like Frank’s music, Frank the movie follows an entirely different rhythm, so that you can never predict what will happen in any given scene or where the next one will take us. If most movies are Top 40 pop songs, then Frank is straight-up jazz.  It’s both refreshing and a little off-putting, but in the end, quite worth the spin. This is no standard behind-the-music movie; there’s no scene of musical inspiration where every member of the band starts jamming together in perfect harmony (except maybe in the very end, and it works). With the exception of “I Love You All,” Frank’s music isn’t very catchy. “Frank’s Most Likeable Song… Ever” isn’t that likeable at all, which ends up being a tragically funny parody of the kinds of songs people actually do like. (Kissing and dancing — that about covers it, right?)

Jon is our protagonist, and Frank uses up-to-date social media both to give us a 21st century spin on voiceover and to further the plot, as Frank and his crew are “discovered” and invited to perform at South By Southwest thanks to the YouTube page he has surreptitiously created to document the creation of Frank’s opus. In many movies, this would be the climactic, triumphant moment, but Frank is unlike just about every other movie out there, so don’t expect things to go too well. Jon is debatably talentless as a songwriter, and we keep expecting him to get better, perhaps with some inspiration from Frank, because that’s what normally happens in this kind of movie. I won’t spoil whether or not this happens, but the film does make some rather bold narrative choices; it takes a Great Gatsby-like approach to its protagonist, telling one man’s story half-heartedly so that it can display the much more fascinating story of another.

As Frank, Michael Fassbender gives a bizzarely captivating performance, given that he’s buried under plaster for nearly all of the movie. (Let’s also give credit to that impassive, Mona Lisa-like giant head, which manages to register shifts in emotion without moving a muscle.) Why cast a movie star in the role at all? we might wonder. Well, for the same reason we hire the beautiful Charlize Theron to play Aileen Wuornos in Monster, then make her sit in makeup for hours just to ugly her up enough so that she looks like an ordinary woman. Because it’s more fun that way. It’s practically a crime to cover up that handsome mug, which shows the daring of director Lenny Abrahamson. Sticking a papier-mâché noggin on the titular character feels like a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” gimmick, but it isn’t — that is all based on a true story, believe it or not. Many movies use mental illness as a source of easy comedy, and maybe Frank does too, but it does so without pandering. In fact, our ostensibly “sane” protagonist ends up faring the worst in our eyes by the end.

Jon’s interactions with the band play out as if Ed Sheeran had somehow found himself as a member of The Doors, and if you think that sounds like a good match, then you probably have no business seeing this movie. To be a truly gifted artist, perhaps one needs also to be truly batshit crazy, damaged beyond repair, tormented beyond belief. True genius comes at a high, unforgiving price, while the rest of us can only hope and hashtag, counting followers and subscribers in order to stall on creating. Music needs madness, and the mad need music. That’s the world according to Frank, a world best not intruded upon by the rest of us (except by watching this movie). It’s particularly poignant in the wake of the suicide of Robin Williams, another artist who has recently been described as brilliant despite — and possibly because of — his inner demons.

Frank is a boldly unusual film. On the surface, it treads where many quirky dramedies have gone before, but ultimately goes somewhere much deeper and darker at the core. The film’s final scene says everything — it’s one of the more beautiful endings I’ve seen lately. I’m eager to watch Frank again through the prism of what I now believe it is about. How true artistry may be at odds with popularity and social media; the thin line between a mentally ill person and a celebrity. It’s a film that makes fun of anyone who has ever worshipped a musician — which is to say, all of us. In the film, Frank is a genius until he takes his big head off, whereas Frank the movie is revealed to be genius at that very moment. When Frank finally reveals who he is under that large happy mask, the film also reveals what it’s truly about.

In both cases, what’s underneath is freakishly beautiful.   

*

It’s official. 2014 is the year of the doppelganger.

I said it before, and I’m saying it again. I may even say it again a time or two before the end of the year, if the trend continues. Two significant films this year dealt with misanthropic men encountering suaver, smoother versions of themselves in trippy, dreamlike realities. I’m speaking, of course, about Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, and The Double, featuring Jesse Eisenberg, both of which stand a good chance of making my Top Ten at the end of the year. There’s also the low-budget sci-fi treat Coherence, which takes that basic premise to another level with doubles, triples, quadruples, and multiple characters getting in on the doppelganger action.

And now there’s The One I Love, in which a married couple portrayed by Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss head out on a relationship-repairing weekend in a picturesque location in California and find that not only is the scenery idyllic, but so, all of a sudden, is their partner. This is because their spouse is not their spouse, exactly, but rather, some sort of robot or clone or entity from a parallel dimension posing as their spouse. (Maybe.)

What’s the deal, 2014? Why are we suddenly so preoccupied with doubles? There are so many of these movies with identical plots, it’s almost like they’re replicating themselves…

Like The Double, The One I Love mines humor from the unlikely situation it puts before us. A therapist (Ted Danson) sends Ethan and Sophie on a nice little retreat to a secluded home with a guest house, and soon Ethan and Sophie are smoking pot, having sex, and otherwise having a grand time with each other. But not together — since it turns out both Ethan and Sophie are having a different experience with their better halves — better halves who turn out to be even better versions of their better halves. A little investigation reveals that both Sophie and Ethan have a double living in the guest house, a doppelganger who appears only when they venture inside alone. Ethan’s instinct is to high-tail it the hell out of there, but Sophie is intrigued enough to want to go back, paving the way for plenty of conflict when Ethan begins suspecting that Sophie might prefer the sweeter, fitter, more genial version of her husband than the actual man she’s been married to all these years. (And we can see why she might.) Ethan, on the other hand, seems more put off by the Stepford-esque Sophie, whose primary virtue is that she allows and even encourages him to eat bacon. (Sophie is a vegetarian.)

There are many directions a story like this could go — one which includes over-explaining everything to a degree where it’s no longer fun anymore, and another which explains almost nothing and lets the metaphor stand for itself. (This latter approach is how 2014’s other doppelganger movies presented their stories.) The One I Love splits the difference, offering up about half of an explanation for what’s happening — one that really just raises more questions. While there’s something eerie and unnerving about the too-perfect Ethan and Sophie, the script by Justin Lader mostly plays the scenario for laughs without allowing things to get too serious until the final act. There’s a past infidelity still haunting Ethan and Sophie, which is part of the reason they’re in marriage counseling in the first place, and though some intriguing issues crop up early on, the film seems too distinctly made from a male point-of-view, spending a lot of time on Ethan’s paranoia that Sophie is “cheating” on him with Better Ethan. This, in a way, puts Ethan in the moral high ground rather than submerging both characters in some complex murk. The One I Love, directed by first-time filmmaker Charlie McDowell, doesn’t totally fulfill all the thematic promise of a killer premise, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable ride along the way.The One I Love is, of course, a bit of a punny title, given that there is not just one that either Sophie or Ethan might end up loving. Love Is Strange might have been an equally apt title, but that title has been snatched up by an indie dramedy in which love is actually much less strange in comparison. Co-written and directed by Ira Sachs, it concerns George and Ben (played by Alfred Molina and John Lithgow), a couple who has spent nearly forty years together but was only recently granted permission to tie the knot officially and legally. That they do, but news of their union causes the Catholic school where he works as a music teacher to unceremoniously oust him, which puts George and Ben in a precarious financial position.

Kind of. George and Ben live privileged lives in New York City, and even with the loss of George’s job, they’re not exactly penniless. They have to give up the cushy condo they currently reside in, which is unfortunate at their age, but they still have at least a tiny nest egg left over from the sale, and multiple friends and family members are willing to house them temporarily. Love Is Strange is Woody Allen-esque in a number of ways, not the least of which is its cluelessness about what actual financial hardship might be like. George and Ben are living in the most expensive city in America, after all, without considering much whether moving somewhere cheaper might be a good solution. I’m not sure I, or anybody else, would wish to watch a film in which this gay couple ends up on the streets, digging into dumpsters to procure their next meal. However, the script fails to make their situation truly dire, or anywhere close to dire. The stakes of this movie are never raised above mild inconvenience.Love Is Strange has Ben and George separated physically — Ben goes to stay with his nephew and his family, while George takes up residence on the couch in an apartment owned by two younger gay cop buddies (Manny Perez and Cheyenne Jackson) that we never get to know as well as we might like. What ensues are two mostly separate dramas, as Ben gets embroiled in the petty upper-middle-class problems facing his family members and George must contend with rambunctious Dungeons & Dragons games, Latin dance parties, and Game Of Thrones marathons — apparently, the sort of things youngish gay cops engage in every night of the week. It’s somewhat curious that George and Ben both choose to stay in Manhattan apart rather than go elsewhere together — Ben’s niece offers them shelter upstate. We’ve heard, many times, that New York city is a character in movies, but in this one, she’s the mistress.

Ben’s story seems to take up considerably more screen time, as his niece by marriage Kate (Marisa Tomei) grows increasingly frustrated by his benign imposition. Like a Woody Allen movie, this is the sort of story in which most major characters are artists. George is a music teacher, Kate is a novelist, her husband Elliot (Darren E. Burrows) seems to be a filmmaker, and Ben is a painter. (Whether or not he was ever gainfully employed is not explored.) Kate gets irritated that Ben talks too much when she’s trying to write her novel; a later family blow-out involves Kate’s son Joey (Charlie Tahan) and his buddy Vlad (Eric Tabach) possibly stealing library books. Yes, this is the sort of movie where the biggest argument revolves around a teenager’s illicit activities involving French literature.

Love Is Strange is a genial, likeable little film, and it seems unkind to poke at it too much for not providing much in the way of actual, tangible drama. Many subplots are introduced and mostly forgotten, including a number of supporting characters, and the resolution of Ben and George’s housing crisis is an absolutely maddening deus ex machina that will leave anyone who has ever lived in New York City tearing their hair out in exasperation. The epilogue is a curiously sad denoument that feels tacked on and focuses on one of the least interesting supporting characters in the film, and also steals some thunder away from the injustice that the movie started off (and should have been) about.

But Molina and Lithgow are wonderful apart and together, much better than most recent roles have allowed them to be. The film only truly comes alive when they’re together on screen, which unfortunately is a small percentage of this movie. Ira Sachs previously directed the gay romance Keep The Lights On, which similarly introduced a lot of subplots that never quite added up to a full movie. Unlike that film, however, this one concerns a relationship that actually does work, one that is easy to invest in. George and Ben pull us through even when this screenplays lets us down.

I liked Love Is Strange just fine, but left the theater with too many loose ends and magical solutions to complain about. Love isn’t particularly strange in Love Is Strange, but it’s fucking wacky in The One I Love, so you can probably guess which of these little love stories I ended up loving more.

*

Enemy is one of my favorite films of this year. But not everyone feels that way. The film’s surprising and confounding ending has left many scratching their heads, searching for meaning.

I know, because it has led them here.

Several inquiring minds have found their way to this blog through Google, usually through a search involving the phrase, “What the hell?”

“What the hell just happened in Enemy?”

“What the hell is Enemy about?”

And, a more specific search: “Enemy movie blueberries Jake.”

My initial review didn’t contain any answers, though, because I was reluctant to spoil the fun for those who still had yet to see the movie. If you haven’t seen it, the following probably won’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, and I would urge you to check out this trippy, fun mindfuck of a movie.

And if you have seen it, I think I’m ready to delve into some of the movie’s specifics and at least offer some theories about what it could be about.

First off, let me say that I don’t think there is any definitive explanation for Enemy. Which is not to say that the writers and director do not have one in their own minds, but I don’t think any amount of evidence can prove one theory and disprove others.

Enemy gives us many, many hints as to what is going on, many of which seem to contradict each other. None of the most blatantly obvious possibilities that come to mind quite work — twins separated at birth, clones, body snatchers from outer space. Perhaps there is a “logical” explanation that makes sense out there somewhere, but I don’t think you can view Enemy so literally. In my eyes, there is virtually no way to explain every element of this movie in a straightforward and rational way, no matter how fanciful that explanation may be. Instead, it requires the employ of dream logic. Metaphor. Allegory.

Of course, the most obvious metaphorical interpretation is that Anthony and Adam are two sides of the same coin, two halves of the same person co-existing somehow in the physical world. Anthony could be a figment of Adam’s imagination, or vice versa — except that they each have their own lives and interact with other people. This kind of story has been told many times, and frankly, I don’t think Enemy would be so fascinating if this were all that was behind it.

There are a number of other theories floating around out there. Adam and Anthony are psychological doppelgangers representing two halves of the same psyche; all of Toronto has fallen under a totalitarian regime. These certainly have merit, but neither is fully satisfying to me. Neither, in particular, explains the use of spiders throughout the film.

So what is going? I’ll offer up some observations I made during my three viewings of the film, and why they might be significant, and then present my own interpretation, based entirely on my own reading of the film.

1) After one of many shots of the Toronto skyline, Enemy begins with Adam (or Anthony) in a car and a shot of Helen pregnant. Over this is a voicemail from Adam’s (or Anthony’s) mother, expressing concern over his new apartment. “How can you live like that?” she asks. When we see a naked Helen, it doesn’t look like she’s in the gorgeous bedroom of the apartment she shares with Anthony, but rather in Adam’s dingier, yellower-looking digs. Then we get a quote: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” We can assume, then, that the events of the movie are chaotic because there is some truth that must be deciphered, and it is quite likely the movie will end when that truth is grasped.

2) Spider #1. The first we see of spiders in Enemy, one is served up on a golden platter in an underground club. There’s something dangerous and sexy and dream-like about this place. It seems to be Anthony, rather than Adam, who is visiting; there’s obvious a very hush-hush, “members only” vibe to this place. Maybe we are meant to take this literally; it’s possible that these rich-looking men have a fetish for sexy women stepping on bugs. More likely, though, this is all highly metaphorical. We learn that chaos needs to be deciphered, then cut to Anthony unlocking a door in a mysterious hallway. So it seems that whatever is in this room — in this case, spiders — is the key to “unlocking” the mystery of the movie. Got that? Spiders are the key.

3) The Doorman. Later in the movie, Anthony’s doorman begs Adam (whom he believes to be Anthony) to take him back to the spider club because he can’t stop thinking about it. Does it make any literal sense that Anthony would bring his doorman along to a weird sexy spider-stepping secret society? Not really. So why the doorman? Let’s think about metaphor some more. This is literally the man who holds the keys to Anthony’s apartment; he is instrumental in allowing Adam into Anthony’s world, and thus in letting Adam become Anthony at the end of the film. It is interesting that the doorman is asking to be let again into Anthony’s secret world at the same moment that he is unknowingly letting Adam into Anthony’s. While the doorman is eager to go back, Adam himself is rather cautious and reluctant to step too far into Anthony’s world; Anthony seems to be delaying an inevitable confrontation with some truth, inching toward it rather than fully pursuing it.

4) Adam’s history lesson. A much more obvious script would have Adam teaching his class about duality, since of course many, many great works of literature have dealt with that. (Jekyll And Hyde, perhaps?) Instead, Adam talks about dictators asserting their control over the populace. If you view the film in an alien-spiders-taking-over-Toronto light, then this is all pretty expository. But what else might it mean? Adam talks of “bread and circuses” — entertainment — being used to divert people’s attention. Later, Adam — who claims he doesn’t like movies — will become distracted by one piece of entertainment in particular, one in which he discovers his own doppelganger. Adam mentions another strategy dictators use: limiting education and information. We’ve already established that there is some information we’re not yet privy to, because it has yet to be deciphered (by Adam). Adam talks about history repeating itself, and patterns — perhaps, then, the events of this movie are a reflection of something that already happened? Adam’s lesson also mentions that artistic self-expression is forbidden; later, his mother will tell him that he needs to give up his dream of being a third-rate actor. We watch as Adam’s life repeats itself. This Adam seems to be “controlled” by some higher power. Overall, Adam’s lessons seems to suggest that a lot of what we’re seeing is a rote cycle, a distraction from some greater truth.

5) The night that Adam watches the movie breaks the pattern. Adam’s life seems to consist of the same day over and over — until he rents the movie. After watching it, he tries to engage Mary in sex while she’s sleeping, which causes her to get angry and leave. Prior to this, we also see and hear her leave several times. Is this because, later in the movie, Mary makes a more significant exit after a different sort of violation by Anthony? Mary’s exit seems to a major part of the “pattern” Adam is experiencing, and it isn’t until he watches the movie that things change ever-so-slightly and she leaves in anger. This seems to be inching closer toward a realization that involves her leaving in anger. Adam watching that movie is a turning point in more ways than one.

6) Adam doesn’t notice himself in the movie right away. Instead, the fact that he’s an extra in Where There’s A Will There’s A Way comes to him in a dream, which makes the discovery that much more surreal. This sets up a pattern of revelations coming to Adam via his subconscious. (And we already know patterns are important!) Also, what’s with that movie title? It seems unlikely that a cheeky-looking comedy would have such an earnest title; maybe we can assume that the title is a pun, and the “will” of the title has something to do with the estate of a deceased person? If so, that’s a nod toward death being a major factor in what brings Adam and Anthony together. Adam tells the man who recommended the movie that he could use something cheerful — he wants entertainment to be a pleasant distraction, just as dictators do — but it doesn’t exactly pan out that way, because the movie is the first step on the road toward Adam’s very dark revelation at the end of the movie.

7) Adam is constantly sneaking into places Anthony has access to. I’m not sure this really helps solve the mystery, but we first see Anthony easily gain access to the spider-smooshing club. Adam, on the other hand, has to sneak into Anthony’s talent agency, has to use the doorman to get up to Anthony’s apartment, and has to wait until he finds the second key to visit the spider-smoosh club. Adam and Anthony meet in a motel room, which is also a place that can only be accessed with a key. Also worth noting: Anthony rides a motorcycle and a sports car, getting him to and from places quickly, while Adam tends to walk and use public transportation. In these and other ways, Anthony has the idealized life — and the one time he uses public transportation is when he is stalking Mary and plotting to become Adam for a night.

8) Anthony and Adam decide to meet in a hotel an hour outside the city, and neither of them comments on how strange this is. Any logical person would say, “Hey, why not a cafe around the corner instead?” No one wants to meet a mysterious stranger in a dimly lit hotel room, for obvious reasons. There is no reason for the meeting to take place here, unless it’s symbolic. Something important obviously happened in this motel room, which is made even more clear when Anthony takes Mary to this same hotel later in the movie. And when Anthony and Adam meet, Anthony asks Adam, “Show me your hands,” to which Adam reacts defensively. Why? Perhaps because those hands played a major part in something else that happens in this hotel room… later, when Mary notices Anthony’s wedding ring.

9) The Hotel/Motel motif. Is it a coincidence that the movie Anthony is an extra in takes place at a hotel, and features him as a bellhop, and then their first encounter is at a motel? Doubt it! Also of note: when arriving at the motel, Adam takes a long look at a woman who appears to have blonde hair hidden under a black bob wig. Flashback? Is this Mary? I’m hesitant to read much into it, except that blonde women seem to have a lot of pull here (whereas the only dark-haired woman of note is Adam’s mother). That woman is seen holding a motel key card, and we’ve already established that keys play a pretty significant role in this story. Hmm.

10) We see things more from Helen’s point of view than Anthony’s. This is a curious choice. If the film were concerned with Adam and Anthony sharing equal confusion about why they look so much alike, we’d likely follow Anthony more. Instead, there are several scenes in which it’s Helen’s confusion that we identify with. We get only a few glimpses at Anthony’s thought process, so neither we nor Helen nor Adam can completely trust him. It doesn’t seem like he’s “in on it,” exactly, but it does often seem like he knows more than he’s letting on. (Helen even says as much.) So what’s the significance of Adam and Helen? Midway through the film, Adam and Helen have a strange encounter on his campus — she knows who he is, but he doesn’t know her. The film ends with them reunited. Clearly, this coupling is significant somehow — moreso than Anthony and Helen’s relationship is. Adam and Helen seem to have a purer, sweeter love, while Anthony and Mary’s brief fling is sinister, manipulative, and ends in death.

11) Helen is clued in to most of what is going on early on, but Mary never has any idea. Adam never mentions to Mary that anything strange is going on. In fact, once Anthony enters Adam’s life, we barely see them together at all, and Adam doesn’t put up any sort of a fight when Anthony suggests that he take Mary out to the motel. Instead, he is drawn toward Helen. This suggests that Mary isn’t remotely important to Adam, but Helen is. Why? My guess is that a lot of what we’re seeing involving Mary is some kind of memory or flashback. Anthony stalks her, first on his motorcycle, then on a bus, following her to work. Mary doesn’t see him, but if a man who looked exactly like her boyfriend was in her vicinity all that time, it seems like she’d probably notice if we were meant to view these scenes at face value. Instead, we’re probably seeing some sort of flashback of Adam/Anthony’s first time seeing Mary, becoming captivated by her, and wanting to begin an affair with her. But Mary isn’t ultimately important to Adam/Anthony. Helen is.

12) When Adam calls Anthony, Helen is suspicious, as if she believes Anthony is talking to another woman. This also indicates that Anthony has previously had an affair, possibly with Mary. If Helen suspected Anthony of cheating, and this is all a dream-like retelling of prior events, it makes sense that here, Helen would also be a suspicious person who is clued in to the strange events, and even goes on to investigate Adam herself. I believe that Enemy is a mixture of a dream state and a mixture of past events playing themselves out again, history repeating itself as it does in Adam’s lecture. It’s a fantasy story, a piece of entertainment distracting Adam from a painful realization.

13) People often cast blame outside themselves, rather than looking within. This explains why Adam and Anthony might be a fractured fantasy of the same person, which is pretty common in doppelganger movies and heavily implied here. Adam is boring and inoffensive — he doesn’t seem like a whole person, which means he might literally be Anthony distilled down to all of his “good” qualities, while Anthony is more like the id version. That way, Adam can blame Anthony for what went wrong rather than having to accept his own flaws and point the blame inward.

14) Movies represent reality. It’s no accident that Adam first encounters Anthony in a movie. We see “ourselves” in movies all the time; that’s the point of them. We’re meant to identify with fictional characters as a means of discovering things about ourselves.

15) Anthony is already a double of himself. Adam discovers the name of the actor who so eerily resembles him: Daniel Saint Claire. But that is not his actual name — it’s a stage name, a pseudonym. This already gives us a sense that he is not a real person. Adding to that is the scene where we see him “practicing” his dialogue to Adam in front of a mirror. Actors are constantly taking on new names and personalities, and Anthony seems to be more of a character than a full-fledged person. He is already all too used to seeing different versions of himself that all look like him because of his profession.

16) Adam tells Anthony he’s “great” in his movies. Would anyone really tell an extra he was “great”? Adam is saying this because he wants Anthony’s life. It’s like Adam telling himself he could be great if he was an actor. Adam is desperate to meet Anthony because he wants to “meet” that side of himself; Anthony is reluctant because that side of his psyche doesn’t want to “meet” and accept the pathetic, true version of himself.

17) Helen is pregnant with Anthony’s child. When it comes to actually doubling ourselves, we do so via procreation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Anthony has a child on the way; replication is already on this man’s mind even before the trippiness begins.

18) Adam’s name is Adam. The first man, according to the Bible. Is this to imply that he is the “original”? Just an observation.

19) Mom tells it like it is. Adam’s mother contradicts herself when she tells Adam he lives in a nice apartment — in the beginning of the film, we heard her saying exactly the opposite. (Mom has flipped!) She also has two other significant snafus here, telling Adam he likes blueberries and suggesting he give up acting. Both of these are Anthony qualities, not Adam qualities. We could assume that it’s Anthony in this scene, not Adam, but that doesn’t track because Gyllenhall is giving a very Adam performance here. It seems the lines between these two are beginning to blur. In my opinion, this scene’s mother is all wrong — if we can believe that the message at the beginning about the shabby apartment is true, then her saying his apartment is nice is false, and so is everything else she says here. It makes sense, if this is a fantasy, that this mother figure would be the one to start poking holes in the little fiction Adam’s psyche has created for him, because that’s what mothers do. They tell it like it is.

20) Lucid Dreams. Not surprisingly, the actors and filmmakers play cagey in the film’s rather unsatisfying Blu Ray extras, without providing a definitive answer for what the movie’s about. In fact, the clearest consensus seems to concern a man’s duality regarding whether or not he wants to remain faithful to his wife. This is certainly a major aspect of the story, though it still doesn’t explain those spiders. Curiously enough, it’s the title of the DVD extra, “Lucid Dreams,” that may provide the biggest clue. A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows he is dreaming. Now, I know that a film’s writer and director aren’t often involved in creation of DVD extras, but that’s a curious title choice for a movie that’s not about a character who is dreaming or fantasizing what’s going on. So let’s assume he is!

SO WHAT THE HELL?

Okay, now that I’ve presented some evidence, it’s time to explain what I think is going on here. My best guess is that Adam/Anthony’s psyche has fractured into two personalities, but neither of them is the “real” version. More likely, the truth exists between them. Adam/Anthony is dead or dying, and his subconscious is struggling to accept that, fraught with guilt over how he died and anxious about the future going on without him.

It’s something like this: Adam is a history professor living in a shabby apartment… with his pregnant wife. He always wanted to be an actor. He wishes he were a guy like Anthony. But because he has done something he’s feeling guilty about, he projects those things onto the “other” version of himself. Adam may be having doubts about fatherhood. He cheated on his wife with Mary at that motel an hour from home. Mary then freaked out when she noticed the shadow of the ring on his finger. Adam and Mary fought in the car on the way back and Adam got into an accident in which he killed or nearly killed himself. Now he is struggling to make sense of what happened. In his guilt, Adam wishes he could be back with his wife without the “bad” version — the cheating version — being there. In his fantasy, Anthony and the mistress die in an accident and Helen is left with the “good” Adam, a happy ending of sorts.

At least, until… a giant fucking spider replaces her. We’ll get to that in a moment. Here are a few additional matters to consider.

21) Tarantulas. A few facts about tarantulas seem relevant to Enemy‘s plot (though reading too heavily into it might be didactic). Females have much longer lifespans than males. Females often show aggression after mating. Tarantulas shed an exoskeleton. Take that for what you will.

22) Spiders are scary. “Why spiders?” is a common question related to Enemy. And indeed, the spiders feel random. They could just as easily be anything else. But if I had to guess, I’d say that Villeneuve is using the spiders as a visual representation of death. Why spiders? Because they’re scary! At least, according to a large percentage of the population. There’s no physical being or object more feared than spiders, and it wouldn’t exactly work for Helen to turn into “heights” or “public speaking” (or any of the other phobias people have) at the end of the movie. So: spiders. When Anthony and Mary are (presumably) killed in the car crash, the windshield looks like a spiderweb. If this is the last thing Adam/Anthony saw before slipping into this lucid dream, or death, or whatever, it explains why spiders would be on his mind as his subconscious fights to grapple with what is happening.

23) Back to Spider #1. The spider-smoosh club doesn’t feel like a real place, does it? Taken as metaphor, the film begins with sexy women serving up death on a platter, and teasingly raising a high heel over it, as if to squash death. Do we see the heel come down? No. Because death can’t be squelched. This is the smallest spider in the film because it’s at the point where death is least present in Anthony’s mind.

24) Spider #2. The shot of a woman with a spider’s head walking on the ceiling more literally conflates women and death. Specifically, sexy naked blonde women. Why? If Anthony/Adam is dead or dying, he knows that his extramarital transgression with a certain blonde caused it, so it makes sense that he would now see a hybrid of the two. The scene comes directly after Helen has confronted Anthony about “the man” (Adam): she asks what’s happening, then says, “I think you know.” In the back of his mind, Adam/Anthony does know, and this more human version of a spider is the realization of his death creeping up on him again.

25) Spider #3. Now we see a ginormous spider hovering over Toronto! We’re probably not meant to take this literally. I take this spider as a further metaphor for death — looming over everything, but ignored. Notice how there aren’t military aircraft shooting at this titanic arachnid — it has gone unseen even though it’s pretty fuckin’ present. Just like death itself.

26) “I want you to stay.” Adam finds the key he gave to Anthony, the one that leads to the spider-smoosh club. He’s getting ready to go, and Helen says she wants him to stay. Does this mean she prefers Adam to Anthony? Kind of, but the line seems to have a greater meaning, too — Helen, or this version of Helen existing in Adam’s subconscious, wants Adam not to realize that he has died and continue to live in this fiction. But that doesn’t seem to be a possibility.

27) Helen’s last line in the film is “I forgot to tell you that your mother called.” What did the movie begin with? Oh, yes. A call from Adam’s mother. This is the last thing we hear from Helen, just as the movie has come full circle. In fact, Adam then asks Helen a question and gets no response, prompting him to go into the room and see what the matter is. Of course, the matter is that she is a giant fucking spider, but why now? Is this just a coincidence? No. Adam asks if she has plans for the night, telling her that he has to go out. He means to the spider-smoosh club. If spiders represent death, then his “going out” is rather permanent. He’s got the key now, thus he’s ready to face his death. Helen tellingly never answers Adam’s question because Adam is dead and he will never know what his wife’s plans for the future are. Instead, he faces death — in the form of a giant spider.

28) The final shot is not a spider. Ask anyone what the last shot of this movie is, and most of them would probably tell you it’s the shot of that big-ass tarantula. It’s not. It’s a shot of Adam reacting to it. Does he scream? Does he jump back in fear? That is certainly what any normal person would do if actually confronted with a colossal arachnid. Instead, Adam’s reaction is rather understated. It seems like he’s having a realization — and not a major revelation, but an awareness of something he’s been putting together all along. This confrontation seems inevitable, rather than a sudden surprise, which makes sense given that he’s been gathering clues all this while. The look on his face is one of acceptance, possibly even relief, in that all the chaos he’s been faced with finally makes sense. It has finally been deciphered.

29) The song that plays during the closing credits is “After The Lights Go Out,” by The Walker Brothers. Assuming that this is a carefully selected piece of music thematically relevant to the movie, the title of this song supports the idea that Anthony/Adam is dead/dying and having some sort of disturbing “life flashing before his eyes” experience, likely after the car wreck we see late in the movie. The song opens with, “As the sun goes down / My silent little room is growing dim / And the man next door / Is saying what a lousy day it’s been,” which reminds us a lot of Adam in the film’s opening. Even more relevant are these lyrics later in the song: “Someone called for you / But I hung up the phone / What could I say?”, which remind us of Adam’s calls to Helen and Anthony. (Find full lyrics here.) If Adam is the speaker of the song, he seems to be mourning the fact that death is separating him from Helen.

30) The movie itself is a doppelganger. Enemy is based on The Double by Jose Saramago. (The original Portuguese title is The Duplicated Man.) Another doppelganger movie this year, The Double, was based on a novella of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The former novel presents the bare bones of the story we see in Enemy, but the movie takes it in another direction entirely, including the addition of the spiders. So don’t go looking for answers there.

Ultimately, the movie is open-ended enough to support any number of interpretations. The one I’ve presented here is the one that, I think, best explains away most of what we see in the movie, in comparison to other explanations I’ve read. But who knows? I’d be curious to read any supplements or critiques of my theory in the comments.

*

Back in the pre-podcast era (circa 2000 or so), I used to claim that I hated talk radio. “I don’t like people yammering on in my ear!” I claimed.

As it turns out, though, I do like people yammering in my year — as long as they’re yammering about something I yammer on about myself. Sports talk, uninformed chatter and canned interviews with celebrities, bitchy advice from bitchy shrinks — none of this ever struck my fancy. But the wonderful world of podcasts struck my fancy in all the right places, and just kept on striking it. Podcasts are specific enough that anyone can find a subject they don’t mind a stranger babbling on and on about, and they’re fine company for when you’re doing laundry, at the gym, on the subway, or stuck in traffic.

Now I subscribe to so many podcasts, it’s stressful just keeping up with them, but there’s something oddly comforting about that recurring blather. It’s hard to get lonely when familiar voices are always at your fingertips. When the house is too quiet, or I realize that the most significant human interaction of my day was telling my barista that I don’t need my receipt, I fire up Downcast and fill my ears with the scintillating conversations of people who are technically strangers, but I have come to know quite well.

Naturally, the ideal podcast for me tends to be film-related. It took me a while to stumble upon my favorites, so here I will share a few faves that listeners with a casual interest in cinema may enjoy also. I usually find that if I listen to two or three, I’m hooked. They’re like crack, I’m telling you!

1. How Did This Get Made?

“Let’s wallow in the mediocrity of subpar art.” So says the theme song to this podcast, hosted by comedians Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, and June Diane Raphael, along with a special guest on most occasions. My friends and I have been watching bad movies and ripping them apart for ages, but on the occasions when I want to make that experience portable, I have How Did This Get Made?, which eviscerates the most horrendous movies of all time, from The Room to Batman & Robin to Birdemic to Speed 2: Cruise Control and everything in between. These comedians aren’t exactly cinephiles; they’re just people who like the schadenfreude of mocking some of the most ill-advised cinema of all time. And who doesn’t?

Perfect For: Anyone who’s ever watched a godawful movie and asked, “How did this get made?”

Recommended Episode: Any will do, but you can’t go wrong with The Room.

 
2. Filmspotting: SVU

Filmspotting proper is also a podcast I digest regularly. In fact, it was one of my first. But this newer spinoff deals specifically with streaming films (“SVU” = “Streaming Video Unit” = get it?), so if you’ve ever spent an hour idly browsing what’s on Netflix, hosts Matt Singer and Alison Willmore can fill you in on what’s worth watching. They cover all kinds of platforms, VOD and rentals, Amazon and Hulu and Vudu and so on, but the show is quite Netflix-centric since that’s the language just about any streamer speaks. (And they also cover web TV like Orange Is The New Black too.)

Perfect For: Anyone who’s big on Netflix Watch Instantly, or who misses Alison and Matt’s glory days together on the defunct IFC podcast.

Recommended Episode: #6, “Unsexy Movies About Sex.” Because this is pretty much my favorite genre.

 
3. Slate Culture Gabfest

This isn’t specifically a film-related podcast, but they discuss a recently released movie more often than not, it seems, and one of the resident hosts is a film critic. Hosts Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, and Dana Stevens discuss whatever smart New Yorkers are talking about in any given week, which might be a Slate article, a book, a TV show, a meme, or really, anything that pops up on the culture radar. Julia and Dana are a delight, while Stephen is like the grating, opinionated, totally pretentious uncle you love to hate (or hate to love). Plus you can play a drinking game along with this podcast — take one shot when anyone says the word “delightful,” two shots when Stephen says he’s going discuss something “really quickly,” and chug when Stephen finds a bizarrely obnoxious way to say either of his co-hosts names (which he invariably does at least once per episode). While their discussions of the latest blockbusters can range from joyful to slightly perfunctory (in weeks that it seems no film need be discussed at all), these critics are some of the smartest around and always bring a fresh and insightful perspective to current events, whether it be Boyhood or The Lego Movie.

Perfect For: Anyone aspiring to be a little smarter than they are, without the time or initiative to actually seek out the best pop culture events themselves.

Recommended Episode: Whichever is most recent is probably best, and Slate has plenty of other worthy podcasts as well, including the XX and Political Gabfests. Trust me, your topicality will grow twofold.
 

4. Fighting In The War Room (formerly Operation Kino)

As the name might suggest, the opinions fly fast and furiously on this one, and few of the hosts hold anything back from the impassioned discussions. (“Tell us how you really feel” will never been employed in earnest here.) As with any banter involving people with firm opinions, you are bound to be challenged and annoyed by some of the opinions expressed here, by certain hosts more often than others. (I won’t name names, but one of them can be a little pedantic.) My tastes frequently fail to align with this foursome’s, just as their tastes usually fail to align with each other’s, and this is definitely the most “inside baseball” of the podcasts I listen to (meaning: not for anyone who isn’t pretty serious about current film releases of all shapes and sizes). I’ve even had moments of frustration which caused me to question my commitment to this podcast, and yet it is almost always one of the very first I listen to when it pops up in my feed and I find that it keeps me very well-informed about smaller releases on the horizon. (Also, several of these guys picked Shame as 2011’s best movie, just like I did, so there are moments in which we’re totally simpatico.) It is everything you should expect from a podcast named after a Stanley Kubrick movie.

Perfect For: People who want to recreate the film school experience of discussing, debating, delighting in, and decrying movies new and old with their peers.

Recommended Episode: I enjoyed their discussion of Magic Mike, but as with most podcasts, the more recent the episode, the more relevant it’ll be.

5.  Nerdist Writer’s Panel

I’m not sure how interesting screenwriting is to anyone but screenwriters, but Nerdist collects panels of writers from all kinds of entertainment (TV mostly, but also lots of comic books), from Buffy to Breaking Bad to Friends to Game Of Thrones and so on. They all chit-chat about how they got started in the business, how the writers’ rooms of various shows operate, and what went on behind the scenes of shows they’ve worked on that have since been canceled. TV writers tend to be funny people, so there’s plenty of comedy, plus it’s a sharp look at how the industry really works. (Spoiler alert: it’s brutal.)

Perfect For: Nerds, duh. Screenwriters, in particular. Or anyone who wants the juicy insider gossip on their favorite shows.

Recommended Episode: Any of the ones with the Buffy writers. (Not that I’m biased.)

*

So give these a listen and report back on what you think! I’m also curious to know which ones everyone else out there listens to (if any), so feel free to comment with recommendations.

The strong, silent type is a character that goes all the way back to the beginning of cinema… but that’s mostly because those movies were silent.

Still, stoic males have been front and center in countless dramas, especially those geared toward men. The grittier the movie, the quieter the antihero at the center of it all. Ryan Gosling probably spoke less in Drive and Only God Forgives combined than any character does in a single scene in a Woody Allen movie.

Tom Hardy is not unfamiliar with such roles — in Warrior and Lawless, for example — where his brawn outmatches his verbal skills. And, arguably, his evil beefcake character in The Dark Knight Rises should have done a lot less talking, since we could hardly tell what he was saying through that mask anyway.

Earlier this year, Hardy starred in Locke, in which he did nothing but talk — well, talk and drive — given that he was the only character who appeared on screen. Most movies named after their protagonists feel titularly uninspired, but in this one, Locke is pretty much all we get, so the title’s fitting. Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a Welshman overseeing a major construction project that he has just abandoned in order to make his way to the hospital where a one-night stand is giving birth to his child. The problem is that Locke is otherwise involved with a wife and children who are waiting for him to come home and watch football, and he still loves them very much. In fact, he only slept with this mysterious “other woman” once — he felt sorry for her because she was so lonely. (While this sounds like a brilliant new entry in the cheating husband handbook, Hardy actually sells that this reasoning is valid.)

Locke drives. And drives and drives and drives. And talks on the phone the whole way there. We’ve seen a number of thrillers that take place in a single location — from Lifeboat to Buried — but Locke is not a thriller. There is some suspense as to whether or not his wife will abandon him when she learns the truth, whether or not Locke will be fired for choosing a near-stranger’s baby over his own work responsibilities, but that’s just drama. Usually, movies like this throw in everything but the kitchen sink as an obstacle to constantly up the ante and distract us from the fact that we’re not seeing a lot of change otherwise, but Locke doesn’t get a flat tire or run out of gas. Nothing like that. That’s probably a good thing, but it does risk leaving us rather underwhelmed at the end of it all, despite Hardy’s fully committed and engaging performance. (Imagine this movie with an unskilled actor at the center, and it would be excruciating.) Locke is competently executed but not exactly tantalizingly conceived, and works mainly as another showcase for Tom Hardy.

The same could be said of The Drop, a more conventional drama based on a short story by Dennis Lehane, whose work has inspired more notable film adaptations like Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island. The Drop has a workmanlike approach to its writing and direction that seem almost destined to be forgettable in the grand scheme of things — no single scene etches itself in our memory, and though there is some suspense as to what will happen (and to whom), it ultimately follows a pretty tried-and-true formula. It’s the sort of movie that seems destined to play on cable during the daytime, and I don’t even mean that as a bad thing. The one (accidentally) notable thing about it is that it features the final performance of James Gandolfini, which is, perhaps, reason enough to see it.In The Drop, Hardy stars as the Brooklyn-raised bartender Bob Saginowski, who is tangentially involved in shady criminal dealings but not really interested in such things, as he reminds us, “I just tend the bar.” Bob is not a particularly smart man, and yet he may be the wisest person in this movie since he’s the only one who wants nothing to do with double-crosses and robberies that will, inevitably, get most of those involved killed before the credits roll. He’s the typical stoic antihero, capable of swift violence but not necessarily prone to it, and he especially has a heart of gold underneath it all. (He’s also religious, and in real life the sort of guy who would almost surely be a lot uglier than Tom Hardy, but that’s movies.)

Early in the film, Bob encounters a bloodied dog in a trash can and rescues it from an unknown fate, an act which unwittingly inserts him into a love triangle with a man who may or may not be tied to his past. The owner of the trash can is Nadia, played by Noomi Rapace, who displays a soft spot for a broken puppy (and, let’s be honest, a soft spot for a broken guy who looks like Tom Hardy) and agrees to help Bob look after the little pit bull. Unfortunately, the dog was left for her intentionally by an ex-con named Eric Deeds, played by Matthis Schoenarts of Rust And Bone (looking far less comely here, leaving hunk duties to Hardy in order to play the weasel of the piece). Deeds is Nadia’s ex-boyfriend, an unpredictable sociopath who begins stalking Bob in a number of nervy, unsettling encounters. Nadia is scarred, both literally and figuratively, but her druggie past with Eric, and he’s not about to let her move on to the next tough guy with a puppy.Meanwhile, Bob is also being watched by police detective Torres (Jon Ortiz), who is sniffing around an old murder case that involves Cousin Marv’s bar and, coincidentally, Eric Deeds. In the film’s opening moments, we learn that Cousin Marv’s is one of several drop locations for cash procured by the local Chechen (not Chechnian!) mafia. Things go south when Marv and Bob are robbed by a couple of young punks (one played by Animal Kingdom’s James Frecheville) who quickly find themselves in over their heads. It all builds to a pretty cool conclusion set on Super Bowl Sunday, and while the final twists aren’t exactly blindsiding, they’re probably not trying to be. Hardy is solid in the lead role, and Gandolfini goes out on a high note playing a much smaller-time criminal than Tony Soprano (it’s almost jarring to see him cowed by other bad guys in a way that Tony never would have stood for).

I can’t help but feel this film is missing a truly shocking act of violence or two to help push it over the edge into something like greatness. The Deeds character doesn’t quite pay off as he should; he’s this film’s wild card, and the character who feels the freshest, and if his character’s impulsive violent tendencies had been pushed a bit further, it could have elevated The Drop above its fairly elemental level. As is, The Drop is just a drop in the ocean of crime dramas, but certainly not a bad one on any level. (As a bonus, there are plenty of scenes of Tom Hardy playing with a cute puppy, which is bound to be your cup of tea if you are a gay man or a straight woman.)

Tom Hardy is a star who still hasn’t quite been given a role in a major movie that quite deserves him. His Bane paled in comparison to Heath Ledger’s Joker (a flaw in the writing, not Hardy’s acting) and his other post-Bronson leading roles, while smartly chosen, have all had the Drop-esque feeling that they should have been a drop better. (Again, nothing to do with the quality of his performances, which have all displayed Hardy’s A game.) If Hardy were a decade younger, he almost surely would have been called upon to play the lead in David Mackenzie’s Starred Up, a prison drama about a boy who contains all the unpredictable fury of a caged animal. The role actually went to Jack O’Connell of the UK teen soap Skins, whose performance I will describe as fearless even though that’s become a cliche. O’Connell plays Eric Love, a young inmate who gets “starred up” (AKA transferred into the adult prison system early).

As portrayed here, the British prison system has a few notable differences from the American one. Starred Up makes Orange Is The New Black look like Downton Abbey — we begin with Eric’s arrival at HM Wandsworth, and no other film I can think of captures the experience of being incarcerated so well. Eric says very little to begin with, but immediately upon his arrival he is already shrewdly making and hiding weapons in his claustrophobic cell. We may initially worry about this young man’s safety amongst larger, more dangerous-looking criminal types, but that goes out the window early on when we realize that Eric is his own worst enemy and much more likely to be the instigator of any violence on the horizon. He’s a feral animal, kicking and screaming and biting (or almost biting, in one of the film’s most memorable moments). What could turn a young man into such an animal? Well, Starred Up answers that question with the fact that Eric’s father Neville Love is incarcerated in the exact same prison.

Neville, played by Ben Mendelsohn, who I have never seen not breaking the law in a movie, is less the typical machismo prisoner and more of a wounded puppy who has now turned dangerous when provoked. (The way Mendelsohn plays him, Neville seems just a notch or two above mentally handicapped.) We don’t get many specifics on why either Eric or Neville is in prison, but it was clearly in the cards for both of them almost from the get-go, and though Neville seems to have earned a certain degree of respect in this institution, it’s actually his son who has the ferocity and nerve that will either make him the top dog around these parts or get him killed for trying. Eric gets involved in an anger management program run by Oliver (Rupert Friend) that allows for some of the film’s most dynamic scenes of prison life, as hot-headed men spar over next to nothing to the point where they might kill each other, and it’s immediately obvious how all of these guys ended up behind bars. Starred Up is a movie about rage in a cage; when you put a bunch of angry men in a box together and shake them up, the result is bound to be explosive, and Eric Love has never known anything better. O’Connell’s performance is electric and quite probably star-making, while Mackenzie’s direction is expert and John Asser’s script is spare on eloquent dialogue but remarkably true-to-life (or so I imagine).

I’m not sure Starred Up quite packed the punch I was hoping for dramatically, but it’s admirably lean, and Eric’s interactions with his fellow anger managers and his final confrontation with his father both satisfy dramatically (in a way that left me wanting even more satisfaction). The film has a dark streak of humor that adds just the right note of levity, and I have a feeling that seeing this one again will be more rewarding. Either way, watch out Tom Hardy — Jack O’Connell is coming for you, and he means business.

*

“Dad’s dead.”

These are the first words of the book This Is Where I Leave You, spoken by Wendy Foxman. How does she say it? “Offhandedly, like it’s happened before, like it happens every day. It can be grating, this act of hers, to be utterly unfazed at all times, even in the face of tragedy.”

These are not the first words of This Is Where I Leave You the movie, which begins instead with a shot of our protagonist strolling merrily through the streets of New York with some coffee in hand. (Real original, right?) It isn’t until several scenes later that Judd gets a phone call from Wendy (portrayed by Tina Fey in the movie), who says: “Dad’s dead.” How does she say it? Not offhandedly. Not like it’s happened before. She’s crying.

From there, we cut to a funeral for the aforementioned dead dad. It’s a beautiful fall day, and everyone is in proper mourning attire, and there’s some overwrought music from the score announcing this as a Sad Moment. It made me incredibly depressed, but not because I was feeling the loss of the family patriarch.

Because at that moment I realized that someone had seriously fucked up the movie adaptation of a pretty wonderful novel.

This Is Where I Leave You is the inevitable movie version of the well-received 2009 novel by Jonathan Tropper. I just read the book this week, so I was extra-attuned to which elements of the story were kept the same, and which were altered for the big screen. I recognized pretty much every line of dialogue that was taken directly from the book, cocking my brow at those that were added or exchanged, carefully keeping a tally of which changes were for good and which were for evil.

And I know: novels and films are different mediums. They need to be treated as such. A good book adaptation is not necessarily a faithful book adaptation — it’s all about capturing the spirit of the original text, which can mean axing full story threads or killing off supporting characters before we ever meet them on screen. It’s for the greater good. Oftentimes, movie adaptations suffer from trying to be too faithful to the book, cramming in way too much material instead of being true to the theme of the story. It’s a common mistake.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel flummoxed by some of the changes made here. The Foxman clan’s last name switch now makes them the Altman clan, a rather boring choice, and Judd’s cheating wife Jen is now, inexplicably, Quinn. I winced every single time someone mentioned the name “Quinn.” I winced every time we cut to a shot of Judd’s iPhone announcing that Quinn was calling. (It happens a lot.) And every time there was a scene with Quinn Altman, I had the urge to shake her and ask, “Who are you, bitch? And what have you done with Jen Foxman?”The world will never know how I would have reacted to Quinn Altman if I had not read the book, if I had never known Jen Foxman. I know this alteration doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s the kind of thing that makes me want to show up at director Shawn Levy’s house with my copy of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You and throw it at him, shouting, “Did you even read this thing?” (I would not do the same to the screenwriter, because the screenwriter is Jonathan Tropper.) You know how Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs cuts off pieces of womens’ skin and wears them? This Is Where I Leave You is kind of like that. All the same characters are here, and most of the things that happen are very similar to what occurs in the book, but it’s like a movie wearing the skin of the novel. All the pieces are right, yet what’s underneath is all wrong. The soul is missing.

This Is Where I Leave You is the story of the Foxman — sorry, Altman — family, led by matriarch Hilary (Jane Fonda), a famous (and newly buxom) child psychiatrist who based all of her parenting advice on her experiences with her own children. These children are now, uniformly, a mess: Wendy is a harried mom who married a certifiable asshole after a teen romance went askew; Paul (Corey Stoll) lives in his father’s shadow trying to hold the family business together but can’t start a family of his own because he’s sterile; Phillip (Adam Driver) is the bratty baby of the clan, always getting to trouble; and Judd has discovered his wife Jen — sorry, Quinn — sleeping with his asshole boss Wade (Dax Shepard).

Oh, and as for their father? Dad’s dead.Apparently, dad’s dying wish was for all of his children to sit shiva, even though he was an atheist, which means this group of sparring siblings will need to spend a whole week under the same roof. That leads to a lot of drama, as well as a few old romances rekindled. Paul’s wife Annie (Katherine Hahn) is actually Judd’s ex, and she’s pretty okay with having a baby by any of the Altman brothers; Wendy was once involved with the Altmans’ next door neighbor Horry (Timothy Olyphant), who’s still around; and Judd just might hit it off with Penny Moore (Rose Byrne), who always had a thing for him. Because when Rose Byrne is single and has her eye on you, are you seriously thinking of going back to a cheating whore named Quinn? (By the way, if you think the above description of the story sounds complicated, I have only covered about half of it.)

This Is Where I Leave You is a plethora of plots in search of a unifying theme. The book was told from a male’s point-of-view; it mostly shoved Wendy and Hilary to the sidelines and focused on the relationships between the three brothers, Judd’s feelings about his father’s death, as well as Judd’s marital woes, rivalry with his jerky boss, and lust for just about every other woman he encounters whom he is not related by blood to. (The “by blood” is an important distinction, because he actually does sleep with someone he is related to by marriage in the book.) Most of these aspects are still in the movie, but the movie also throws a bunch of other stuff at us; when not told through Judd’s first person narration, everything is given equal weight, and in a movie as stuffed as this one, that ends up being virtually no weight at all.

The main trouble is that Judd, played by Jason Bateman, is a bit of a nothing as a lead character. He’s a lot like every other character Bateman has ever played, especially Michael Bluth in Arrested Development — the calm eye at the center of a storm of a family. While that once worked really well, I’ve grown tired of seeing Bateman in this role; I’m not sure whose fault it is, exactly, that the Judd character has been so watered down, but this movie is sorely missing his perspective on what’s happening. Judd in the book was horny and bruised, torn between his feelings for two women, indifferent about becoming a father and uncertain in his grief over his own father’s demise. That irony is lost in the film, particularly because Judd’s scenes with Jen — sorry, Quinn — are by far the film’s weakest link. They’re poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly directed, and no offense to Abigail Spencer, but she seems awfully miscast in the role.

I grew frustrated with Judd in Tropper’s novel because Jen was, in my opinion, a heinous bitch, and did not warrant Judd’s deliberation about whether or not he should return to her when Penny was so much better. At the same time, Judd’s mourning of his marriage felt totally palpable, even in the way that it eclipsed his mourning of his father. The way he was haunted by his hatred for his adulterous wife also felt real. In a sense, the movie handles this better by not allowing Judd to waffle between his feelings for Quinn and Penny, skipping right to the conclusion that he and the unfaithful ex will raise their child as a divorced couple. But then why have so much Quinn in the movie? Dax Shepard is also miscast as Wade, which means pretty much everything involving Judd’s marital strife comes off pretty poorly. Wade is supposed to be an ultra-macho blowhard in his forties — Dax Shepard makes Wade too much an echo of Phillip, and not a serious threat whatsoever.The script reeks of studio notes demanding that Judd be “likeable,” which means not pining for his cheating wife, not lusting after every woman he lays his eyes on, not “accidentally” sleeping with his sister-in-law, not physically assaulting Wade on multiple occasions, not being such a jerk to Penny, and not being responsible for his brother’s attack by pit bull during their adolescence. Some of these are good and necessary omissions, but guess what? This Is Where I Leave You is about how guys are jerks; about how an emotionally distant father can create emotionally screwed up sons; about this chaotic family in which everyone is a little fucked up. Except now Judd is not fucked up. He’s an Everyman. A perfectly likeable guy.

So tell me where you’ve heard this one before. With an outrageous mother, an absentee dad, a sister in an unhappy marriage, two nutty brothers (one of whom is sleeping with a woman who reminds us of his mother), a host of kooky friends and acquaintances, Judd Altman literally becomes Michael Bluth and This Is Where I Leave You is basically just a big screen version of Arrested Development, except not nearly as skillfully written or directed. It’s all been done before, and much better. Tropper’s book never once reminded me of Arrested Development, because it had its own point-of-view. It was about something. This Is Where I Leave You is mostly just about a bunch of crazies sitting shiva.A lot of this is thanks to Tina Fey’s beefed up role as Wendy, and on the one hand, I get it — you have Tina Fey in your movie, so why not use her? But Wendy played a pretty small part in the book. She was, arguably, the seventh most important character, here beefed up to second billing. Most of her scenes are pretty good; I’m glad she had something to do here. But too many of them feel shoehorned in from another movie. If this adaptation had to sacrifice a storyline or two in order to be leaner and more focused, I wish it had dropped the Horry character. This movie doesn’t have room for a brain damaged neighbor, though Timothy Olyphant does what he can with a handful of scenes. We can sense that there could have something good there, but this film doesn’t have time to develop it.

Alternatively, Horry might’ve fit in just fine if the film had sacrificed Connie Britton’s Tracy — Adam Driver’s Phillip is enough of a wild card that he doesn’t necessarily need his own love interest. The film would’ve worked just fine with him as the cad he is, minus his former shrink and future wife. I liked these characters in the book, and I like the actors in the movie, but something’s gotta give in a movie with this many disparate stories. As is, the second half of the film feels like ending after ending after ending, with so many scenes of resolution that leave us to wonder, “Okay, fine, but where were all the scenes of conflict leading up to this tender resolution?” Yes, what I am essentially saying here is that I’d like to go back in time to rewrite and direct this movie.

Jonathan Tropper’s script might even be fine; I suspect that Shawn Levy’s direction is mostly to blame for what has been lost in the translation from page to screen. My reasons for suspecting this are as follows: The Internship. Real Steel. The Pink Panther. Cheaper By The Dozen. Date Night. All of the Night At The Museum movies. I have seen only one of these, Date Night, which hooked me with Tina Fey and Steve Carell before I knew any better. (Beware, beware the movie Tina Fey stars in but did not write.) The reason I have not seen the rest of these is quite simply because almost nobody thinks they were any good. And not a single one of these titles suggests that Levy is capable of handling the emotional complexity of This Is Where I Leave You.

This Is Where I Leave You begins badly. Judd walks in on his wife fucking his boss, and in his hands is her birthday cake. So what does he do? Smash the birthday cake over the fucking couple, right? Because: physical comedy? No — that’s what Judd does in the book, but since that is, I guess, not likeable, Judd doesn’t do anything. The first ten minutes of this film are pretty lame, though fortunately it picks up after the funeral. The cast is talented, so seeing them play off each other works more often than it doesn’t. Adam Driver has surprisingly good chemistry with Fey and Bateman; Rose Byrne makes the most out of not that much, which is what she does so well; a busty Fonda delivers her handful of one-liners with appropriate aplomb; there are several genuinely good scenes here, but they’re smashed together artlessly without any sense of how they hang together.

I know I’m coming off pretty negatively about This Is Where I Leave You, even if I ultimately enjoyed watching it. It’s certainly not an abomination, although a handful of scenes are outright bad. Everyone around Judd is more worthy of their own movie, so why follow him? I’m not sure it’s fair to blame Levy for the casting and for Michael Giacchino’s obnoxious, intrusive score, but I’m going to, anyway. Even the house the Altmans live in feels too chic and upper-middle-class for this story. Maybe that’s just how I pictured it, and maybe that’s my own fault, but you’ll have to take my word for it: the movie in my head is better.The movie in my head is actually a lot like The Skeleton Twins, which is also about screwed up siblings coping with an uptight mother and a deceased father, though the similaritiesend there. A few years back, a movie about twins played by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader would sound like a slapstick comedy that might best be avoided, but that was before this particular wave of Saturday Night Live alums began to show off their dramatic chops. In The Skeleton Twins, we get the best of both worlds — the movie is, at times, hilarious, but it’s also wrenching and real and a bit of a downer. Wiig and Hader aren’t jut actors playing at being funny; they actually are funny, and that makes a big difference here. Other actors might’ve been able to fake some of this, but we get a sense that this movie’s strongest only work because they’re performed by Wiig and Hader. The two have a sibling-like rapport that fills in all the gaps that would’ve been left gaping by a pair of actors who weren’t so familiar with each other. These two have some major chemistry going on.

Fortunately, the script is up to the task of bringing these fine comedians together. Hader is Milo, who decides to slit his wrists in a bathtub on the same day that his twin sister Maggie contemplates swallowing a handful of pills to end her life. Milo’s depression seems justified: he’s still hankering for the closeted English teacher who broke his heart in high school, he’s failing as an actor in Los Angeles, and he hasn’t spoken to his twin sister in a decade. Maggie’s unhappiness is initially harder to fathom — she’s married to Lance (Luke Wilson), the sweetest guy imaginable; she holds down a decent job, lives in a nice house, and is quite likely on her way to motherhood.Gradually, we learn a lot more about both Milo and Maggie and their very flawed parents, as well as the rift that caused them to go radio silent for so long. The information is doled out perfectly and organically, rather than in awkward expositionial chunks like a certain other movie about emotionally damaged siblings that I may or may not have just reviewed above this one. Milo and Maggie’s dad committed suicide many years ago, which is at least part of the reason they’re both fucked up, but certainly not the extent of it. The rest of it is best left discovered as the movie unfolds, but let’s just say this movie isn’t afraid to test the likeability of its protagonists, unlike a certain other movie about emotionally damaged siblings I may or may not have just reviewed above this one.

It’s hard not to view The Skeleton Twins as a study in how This Is How I Leave You should have been made. It is tight and focused, whereas This Is How I Leave You is sprawling and messy; there are only six consequential characters, and many appear in only a small handful of scenes (or even just one). It deals with death in a very real, somber way, and it is not afraid to show its characters with all warts displayed. And yet it also manages to be much funnier than This Is How I Leave You — it’s the rare movie that is dark as hell but with terrific moments of levity, thanks to Hader and Wiig. It’s not often that a movie so drenched in suicide can be so funny, and yet the strength of the comedy does not in any way cheapen or undermine the more dramatic moments. In fact, Milo and Maggie are probably the most well-rounded and realistic characters I’ve seen in a movie this year.It shouldn’t surprise anyone by now that these and other SNL alums can do such heavy lifting. Both stars sell the dramatic moments as easily as the comedic ones. It’s easy to imagine many actors being as good in the sadder scenes, but impossible to imagine anyone else nailing the comedic timing with such precision. Milo is the sort of moody gay you’ve probably met at least once. He’s sarcastic, he’s morose, but he’s also totally ridiculous, always finding a silly silver lining even in the bleakest of moments. And Maggie? She has it all on paper, but there’s a self-destructive streak running through her, as she has too successfully fled from the past without properly dealing with. And, well, who can really blame her for being attracted to Billy (Boyd Holbrook), her Australian scuba diving instructor?

The Skeleton Twins is expertly written by Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman, skillfully directed by Johnson. It is the perfect matching of light and dark. It features several actors who come across better here than they usually do, including Luke Wilson and Ty Burrell; Joanna Gleason gets one killer scene as the twins’ icy, New Age-y mother Judy. But it’s really Hader and Wiig’s show, and they constantly steal scenes from one another. The scene in which they get high on nitrous oxide is the comedic high point of 2014 — at least until the scene in which they sing along to Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” which should go down as one of the great musical moments in cinema history.

The Skeleton Twins is the funniest movie I’ve seen in 2014, and it’s not even really a comedy. This Is Where I Leave You has a very talented cast, including the usually unbeatable Tina Fey, but when it comes to comedy, I guess two Saturday Night Live grads is better than one.

*

Hey everyone!

It’s that special time of year!

The new TV shows have premiered!

Yeah, okay — that used to be a big deal, back when network TV was a thing. Now? Shows debut pretty much year-round, and most of the best stuff is on cable. True Detective? January. Fargo? April. The Leftovers? June.

Is there a reason to get excited about fall TV anymore? Is there even a reason to tune in? Based on this season’s offerings, my answer is a tepid “yes.” Slowly but surely, the networks are learning valuable lessons from their younger, cooler little brothers and sisters. ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder has some fairly raunchy gay sex in the pilot, something only Shonda Rhimes could get away with on network TV at this point. And I’m not sure what the plan is for Manhattan Love Story — certainly ABC would love a multi-season comedy hit in the vein of How I Met Your Mother — but it has the look and feel of a movie and could easily satisfy as a limited series.

Networks are desperate to reclaim the water-cooler vibe that’s been hijacked by the likes of HBO and Netflix, and they’re not there yet. I do, however, find most of fall 2014’s offerings to be at least a little bit promising, and not quite as dunderheaded as a lot of past efforts.

Below are my thoughts on the new shows (that I bothered to watch), ranked from least favorite to most favorite.

7. GOTHAM

It’s The Dark Knight meets Muppet Babies. If that concept sounds appealing to you, you might like Gotham, Fox’s Batman-free version of the Batman story that begins with the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents and then concerns the police exploits of pre-Commissioner Jim Gordon, played by The OC‘s Ben McKenzie, as he takes on organized (and disorganized) crime in Gotham City. So who is this show for? Not fans of police procedurals, because the stories here are way too broad and cartoonish to contain any shred of reality. Not fans of Batman, because, hello! No Batman. The show attempts to strike some balance between the campy 60s Adam West Batman and the moody Christopher Nolan universe, achieving neither. It’s too cheesy and stupid for adults and too broody and violent for kids, so something went seriously wrong in the execution here. We all know Bruce Wayne started fighting crime because the police were too ineffective and corrupt, so the central premise of the show is basically asking us to watch the police fail at their jobs and wait for a decade until the cool stuff can happen. It’s DC Comics’ Waiting For Godot, everybody!

There may have been a way to pull that off effectively, but this isn’t it. The pilot blows its load introducing something like six villains (it’s hard to tell for sure), most of whom can’t be all that villainous any time soon, because then we would need Batman. And it does so in the most thuddingly obvious ways — the pubescent will-be Poison Ivy is watering plants 24/7, Catwoman steals a stranger’s milk, and everyone makes sure to clearly enunciate Oswald Cobblepot’s nickname “Penguin” even before he should have that nickname. (It kind of makes you wish the show had resurrected those cheesy title cards from the 60s series, so that every time a new villain comes on screen, a big flashy DURRR! could appear.) Gotham is about as subtle as The Riddler punching you in the face.

It would have been a lot more interesting to introduce characters and then surprise us when they turned into major foes. If these bad guys can hang around for ten years without killing everyone, then what do we need the Dark Knight for, anyhow? I’m not sure why everyone had to be so young — wouldn’t a teen billionaire Bruce Wayne be way more fun? Wouldn’t it be kind of cool if these villains were all high school aged and hooking up and stabbing each other in the back? (Figuratively, I should clarify.) How interesting can these young’uns be?

What kind of storylines are we in for? Poison Ivy gets her period? The Joker calls Two Face a “doody head”? Mr. Freeze experiences his first wet dream? I’m not sure it’s ever a good idea to take a popular and reasonably dark adult franchise and go back to when the characters were tweens, but at this rate I’d rather watch Silence Of The Lambs Preschool than another episode of Gotham. (Sole highlight: Jada Pinkett Smith knows what she’s doing as the campy villainess Fish.)6. SELFIE

Ignore the cutesy, soon-to-be-dated title for a moment, and the whole notion that this is somehow sprung from My Fair Lady (yes, really). The premise isn’t horrible: a self-obsessed social media whore teams up with a co-worker who endeavors to teach her how to actually interact with human beings. There are some decently funny gags centered on that — the jokes fly fast and furious. Unfortunately, the pilot reeks of too much meddling, so that nothing really connects. Karen Gillan’s Eliza Dooley has no real motivation to want to be a better person, and John Cho’s Henry has no motivation to want to help her. Nothing in this pilot feels remotely like the real world, and the somewhat appealing leads can’t save it. It’s destined to run out of steam (and social media tropes to make fun of) in about five episodes — if it lasts that long in the harsh, axe-happy world of network TV. It’s perfectly plausible that this could eventually right its course, but for now Selfie has about as much depth and nuance as… well, a selfie. You’re better off watching your Facebook news feed.5. MADAM SECRETARY

Tea Leoni is the Secretary of State! And that’s a big deal, I guess? She’s not the first female to hold the position, and even if she was, that would be trumped by Commander-In-Chief, in which Geena Davis had an even more powerful position (and was swiftly canceled), and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep. Madam Secretary is not a particularly good title for a series, either — the gender awareness of it is one step above calling it Lady Boss. Tea Leoni seems to have found a role that really suits her, as she has not really had great luck despite a reliable pluck she brings to every character she plays. At this point, she deserves a hit, and this might be it — Leoni’s Elizabeth McCord is a sorta tough, ex-CIA operative, but I can’t shake the feeling that her past with a shady intelligence agency probably would make for a more gripping series. The show has introduced a subplot about someone killing off the former Secretary of State (and also bumping off those who are catching onto the plot), but I’m not sure that’s quite juicy enough yet. For now, it seems like an alternate title for the show might be Things That Aren’t Important Enough For The President To Deal With, and in a post-West Wing world, how appealing can a glimpse into the Secretary of State’s life really be?

4. BLACKISH

Being black is hilarious! That’s the basic premise of Blackish, ABC’s new comedy about an African-America family just hanging out and being African-American. It’s unfortunate that the state of diversity on television these days necessitates that a show about a black family has to be titled after and hang every punchline on the characters’ race, and I wonder if this will pave the way for even more blatant stabs at diversity on television, like Kinda Asian or Pseudo-Native American or Half-Puerto Rican, Half-Perisan-esque. Yes, I may be giving Blackish a harder time than it deserves, because it is exploring some fresh and topical ideas — it’s just doing so in a canned, sitcom-ish way. Anthony Anderson’s mugging grows swiftly tiresome in the pilot — all the supporting characters outshine him — and it doesn’t help that his voiceover points out plenty of ironies we could very well observe for ourselves. I don’t mean to suggest that Blackish‘s humor should be color blind, but I’m also not convinced that a typical family sitcom needs to trot out this many gags about being black if it’s going to play them so safe and down the middle. (But what else would you expect from a network sitcom?) Tracee Ellis Ross is the show’s best asset as “the wife” — hopefully she’s given a bit more to do in future episodes. I’ll give Blackish another shot or two, but for now, it’s only funnyish.3. RED BAND SOCIETY

An evil cheerleader gets sick and finds herself in a hospital ward populated by live-in teens who are all suffering from one disease or another. Some have cancer, one girl has an eating disorder, and the whole series is narrated by a kid in a coma (a cloying touch I could have lived without). It could all be pretty maudlin, but mostly it isn’t, thanks to an appealing young cast and solid writing that doesn’t shy away from the gravity of the situation (much). Dave Annable and Octavia Spencer are the main adult figures around the hospital as a doctor and a nurse, respectively, while Charlie Rowe and Nolan Sotillo are the standout teens. It’s sometimes heartwarming, occasionally a little mushy, and might best be described as Glee With Cancer, but that’s what you get from a show about teens set in a hospital. It’s easy to see how this could go south without special care and attention, but I’m with it for the time being.2. HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER

Or “How. To Get Away. With Muuuuurdeeeeerrrrr.” You kinda have to say it the way Viola Davis does, all menacing and drawn-out and kinda sexy like that. Since unjustly losing the Oscar to Meryl Streep in 2012, Davis has mostly been cooling her heels, doing far less than she is capable of in movies like Beautiful Creatures, Ender’s Game, and Prisoners, so I guess it’s no surprise that she decided to headline a television series that she seems at least a notch too good for. (Though winning the Oscar may not have helped, since her Help co-star Octavia Spencer, who did win for her role, also ended up on TV this year.) The show is about law students helping their professor win cases, or some such ridiculousness; it also flashes forward to show these students burying a body and, presumably, getting away with muuuuurdeeeeerrrrr. Paired with Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, How To Get Away With Muuuuurdeeeeerrrrr buys into Shonda Rhimes’ brand of soapy self-seriousness, making for a reasonably fun twist on the standard TV lawyer formula. The cast is diverse and appealing, the morals are kinda wonky, and Viola Davis (predictably) nails it as Annalise Keating (AKA The Next Olivia Pope), so I’ll be back for more, assuming that “more” remains up to the snuff of the pilot.1. MANHATTAN LOVE STORY

So which pilot did I enjoy the most thus far in fall 2014? Probably this little gem, which I expected nothing from. Manhattan Love Story does nothing that has not been done before, as we have all seen plenty of love stories set in Manhattan. (That’s roughly all of them.) Analeigh Tipton is Dana, who arrives in New York City all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as winsome newcomers tend to do. She gets set up on a date with Peter (Jake McDorman) that goes badly, and with some nudging, he tries to make it up to her. That’s about all that happens, but Manhattan Love Story is well-written, well-acted, and well-directed (though yet another new comedy that is over-reliant on voiceover). I know from experience that days in New York City get a lot worse than the supposedly terrible day Dana deals with in the pilot, and I’ve definitely had worse dates. But what makes it work is that the leads feel, more or less, like believable people, so the comedy is grounded rather than just insane rapid-fire patter (I’m looking at you, Selfie).

The supporting characters are rather broad, as is typical in romantic comedies, and Jake McDorman doesn’t really get a chance to break out of the stereotypical male role of wisecracking boob-oggler. But Analeigh Tipton proves herself worthy of anchoring the show, and I have faith that the characters will get stronger in future episodes. Manhattan Love Story is not quite at the level of Manhattan’s very best love stories, but that’s a tall order. It feels more like a movie than a sitcom and contains enough of the charm and energy of something like Annie Hall to keep me watching.

*

(Throwback Thursday: Today we’re flashing back to October 2006. It’s hard to imagine that news about social media was once a novel and somewhat shocking thing. This piece reflects the moment that social networking stopped being just a college thing and started making national headlines; a time when “web series” wasn’t really a thing. It seemed ridiculous at the time. This piece was first published in INsite Boston.)

Close your eyes. Imagine a bizarre futuristic world in which words like “yahoo” and “google” dominate the global lexicon. Where “podcasting” and “blogging” are daily occurrences. Where “Add me!” has replaced “Call me!”

Now open your eyes. That future is here.

MySpace, YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook. A decade ago, editors would’ve been axed for running such nonsense compound words in their headlines. (What does our generation have against the space bar, anyway?) But last month, after Facebook went all Rear Window with its latest features, trusted periodicals like Time and The Washington Post treated the ensuing backlash as breaking news, as if all 750,000 student protestors had amassed outside Facebook HQ brandishing flaming torches. In reality, the “protests” required little more than a couple mouse clicks and an irate instant message.

For those, like me, who were actually in college for its auspicious debut, seeing “The Facebook” taken so seriously is ridiculous. Since when does our waste of time show up in our parents’ daily news digest? Yet CNN, Business Week, MSNBC, and other reputable sources have taken a peculiar interest in the inchoate phenoms.

Are they really newsworthy? Or is this just the media equivalent of that time Dad bought a Black Eyed Peas CD to prove he’s still “with it”? If you ask me, the whole charade smacks of desperation. Crusty old Washington Post is not only looking at hip young Facebook to find out where the party’s at, but asking, “Hey, can I come with you?”

Granted, teenagers have always set the standard for what’s hot, if only by default — who else has the time and energy to devote to such causes? But not since the cultural upheaval of the 60s have they wielded so much power. Conglomerates pay site creators millions to access the most voracious (and volatile) demographic. Amateur auteurs like David Lehre, director of MySpace: The Movie, have uploaded their way into development deals; actress Jessica Rose wound up on The Tonight Show when “lonelygirl15” fans discovered she wasn’t just another guileless teen knockout with a webcam. (Apparently, some people still fall for that.) And when it comes to viral video sites like the pirate-friendly YouTube, networks are now drawing contracts rather than slapping lawsuits.

But this frenzy is merely a knee-jerk reaction based on numbers Hollywood gets (millions) and a unit it doesn’t (“hits”). Sky-high expectations for Snakes On A Plane came crashing back down to Earth when internet hype failed to translate fiscally, an omen that the net is nothing if not unpredictable. But the big boys would rather bet billions on an unproven medium than risk being out of the loop, even if it means lowering the bar ‘til it’s just a shiny speck in Hell. Once the purveyor of pop culture cool, Hollywood is now tripping over itself to keep up with the zeitgeist.

Yeah… good luck with that.

Today’s youth grew up watching reality shows starring Average Joes. It was only a matter of time before they asked, “What do those bitches from Laguna Beach have that I don’t?” (Well, plenty — but certainly not star quality.) Now, thanks to the wonders of technology, anyone can make a movie, and in the vastness of cyberspace, someone is bound to watch. From there, the web serves as its own marketing machine. Never in the history of cinema has it been easier to make or distribute content — but at what cost to quality?

For every genuinely amusing enterprise — like those re-cut trailers for the “feel-good” Must Love Jaws and Biblical “teen comedy” 10 Things I Hate About Commandments — there are thousands of mind-numbingly stupid clips that show ordinary people behaving in ways the world wasn’t meant to witness. These movies have no Academy Awards, no opening weekend tally, no thumb of Roeper to judge whether or not they’re worth watching. They have only the fast-and-furiously-clicking teens racking up hits… and a rapt industry of grown-ups desperate to get in on the inaction.And so the baton is passed to a generation of humdrum exhibitionists and fickle voyeurs, overrun with show-offs and narcissists. Hollywood, that pesky barrier between artist and audience, has been circumnavigated. As an aspiring filmmaker, I should be grateful for the opportunity to reach viewers across the globe, if only I were willing to showcase my work alongside home videos of cats using the toilet. Instead, I brace for the webcam remake of Lawrence Of Arabia and re-coined catchphrases like “Frankly, my dear, you’re not in my Top 8 anymore.” What else to expect, now that the future of filmmaking lies in the hands of indiscriminate teenagers and the pedophiles who pretend to be them?

Then again, the more studios pander to web-savvy teens, the more kids will see that MySpace is now everybody’s space and Big Brother digs YouTube. I mean, even my mom has a Facebook now, and it’s awkward — but you can’t very well reject a friend request from someone who birthed you from her womb. The media would be wise to let sleeping dogs blog, for every kid knows what happens when old people catch on to what’s in: it’s out. By the time Hollywood gets a firm grasp on the brave new world wide web, youngsters might very well have declared the computer obsolete, donned monocles, and dusted off grandpa’s Proust collection.

Until that day comes, however, I have a few words of wisdom for the kids in today’s America:

Stay in school. Don’t do drugs. And please take your screenplay through at least a couple of drafts before you film anything.

*

Marriage is a contract. We select one person we love and trust, and pledge to continue loving and trusting them until our dying breath. We give them equal stake in all our assets. We promise to be with them and them only. We will eat, sleep, and travel with this person. Their friends become our friends. Our friends become their friends. Their interests become our interests, and vice versa. Words like “we” and “us” replace “I” and “me.” They will have more influence over us than any other person we have ever known — our parents, our best friends, our siblings — even if we have known this person for only a couple of years. We refer to that person as a “partner.”

And, when you think about it… isn’t that a pretty fucking insane agreement to enter into?

(I’ll attempt not to spoil specific plot points, but if you really want to go into this movie cold, you may want to discontinue reading.)

Gone Girl is the latest thriller from David Fincher, who is treading in similar waters to his Se7en, Zodiac, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in some ways. And in other ways? Not at all. (Though there actually is a rather crucial similarity between the central mysteries in Gone Girl and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, when you think about it.) When all is said and done, Gone Girl might have more in common with Fincher’s Fight Club in some rather crucial, twisty ways, and also in tone. Gone Girl is, in the end, a critique of our modern way of life, and of marriage in particular. Just as Fight Club had some intriguing and ultimately satirical ideas about masculinity, Gone Girl has plenty to say about the ways men and women relate to each other, in particular once they become lawfully wedded (for better or worse, ’til death do ‘em part).

Yes, it is nearly impossible to have a meaningful discussion of Gone Girl‘s themes without massively spoiling the big twist from Gillian Flynn’s uber-popular page-turner. Suffice to say, for the moment, that Gone Girl stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a husband whose wife has up and vanished, an event that quickly begins to uncover just how toxic that marriage was. Nick turns to his supportive twin sister Margo (played by The Leftovers‘ fantastic Carrie Coon) as the world begins to turn on him, as the world tends to do when a dashing husband seems too cavalier in the wake of a tragedy involving his pretty wife. That wife is Amy, portrayed by Rosamund Pike in, I would argue, her first role that demands the world take notice of her. As in the novel, we alternate between seeing how Nick copes with cops and the mystery surrounding his wife’s disappearance, and flashbacks from Amy’s diary chronicling their early romance.

Gone Girl features a number of compelling performances, from Kim Dickens as the competent but confounded Detective Boney, the lead investigator in Amy’s disappearance (and Patrick Fugit as her more cynical right-hand man), to Lola Kirke and Boyd Holbrook as a couple of trashy rednecks whose connection to the plot I shall keep secret, to Emily Ratajkowksi as one of Nick’s sexy students. The media itself is another character in the story, from the sharky celebrity defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) to the Nancy Grace-esque Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle) to the ruthless Sharon Scheiber (Sela Ward). There’s also Casey Wilson as Noelle Hawthorne, a woman who claims to be Amy’s best friend, and Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collings, a preppy rich guy from Amy’s past who just might be her soul mate.Amy is a star long before her disappearance makes her the topic du jour on the nightly news; her parents pilfered her childhood in the children’s book series Amazing Amy, which saw Amy constantly one-upped by an illustrated version of herself. As she tells it, Amy and Nick meet cute at a party with banter so rapid-fire the lines seem to crash into each other, enhanced by a disorienting (but very intentional) approach to the editing that comes off like Aaron Sorkin on speed. (Yes, even more speed than Sorkin is usually on.) It’s one of many masterful filmmaking touches in Gone Girl meant to throw everything off-kilter, because unlike most such scenes, we’re not supposed to fall in love with Nick or Amy in this moment. We’re supposed to feel… unsettled. Because there’s something off in this relationship… isn’t there? Is one of these people not who they claim to be? Are they both hiding something? Reasons to distrust Nick pile up as the investigation ensues, and though he claims to be cooperating with the police, he certainly isn’t divulging everything. If Nick and Amy both seem too clever for their own good when first they meet, that’s not an accident.

(And this is the part where I delve into slightly more spoilery material, though I’ll still be somewhat vague about it.)

If you were determined to, I suppose you could make an argument that Gone Girl is misogynistic. Never mind that both the book and screenplay were written by the same woman, and the movie features a number of women in significant roles — there are more influential females in this movie than in any other comparable thriller I can think of. The lead investigator is a woman, and you could argue that the film is from her point-of-view, at least in the first half — she’s the one investigating Nick’s involvement in Amy’s disappearance and also reading Amy’s diary. Additionally, Margo is one of the film’s most likable characters, and one of the more likable screen characters in general recently. (I wouldn’t mind a Nick-and-Margo spinoff a la The Skeleton Twins.) Sure, a lot of the women in this movie come off as bitches — especially those associated with the media — but the men don’t come out looking so great either. There’s one man who is particularly creepy in the way he wants to own and dominate his woman — things don’t turn out too well for him, and it’s hard to feel that bad about it. Gone Girl isn’t any more misogynistic than The Silence Of The Lambs is anti-male. It’s a cool and complicated feminist twist on the kind of story we’ve seen a thousand times, and a lot of it is actually intended to be darkly funny.The book Gone Girl has the advantage of taking us into Nick and Amy’s heads, which the movie can only do in a more limited fashion. That’s how the novel’s Amy wins us over — at least partially — with a rant about “cool girls” that is so dead on, it feels like it should have been made in something less pulpy and beach read-y. Fincher’s version tries to replicate this “cool girl” moment, but does so at a moment that contains such a multitude of new information that I’m afraid Amy’s astute observations about gender roles get lost amidst the plot twists. A lot of Nick’s inner maleness is also lost in translation from book to screen. (The book’s Nick is sort of a douche, while the movie’s Nick is more of a Ben Affleck, which may or may not also be synonymous with “douche” to you.) The gender politics are still present in the film adaptation, however muted, as the film ultimately becomes about the contract of marriage, and how we have somehow decided as a society to put on a game face outwardly and let the disappointments and deceit eat away at us privately, behind closed (and sometimes locked) doors.

I could delve deeper into Gone Girl, because there’s a lot going on here, and I don’t just mean the twists and turns at the most basic plot level. The film starts as a mystery, takes a turn into feminist-tinged character study, plunges into some psychological horror, and the final act is a black comedy. There’s at least one very bloody moment that’s seriously fucked up, and seriously memorable, pushing the envelope in a way that is just barely palatable for the mainstream, as Fincher tends to do. It’s reminiscent of the rape scene in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — a scene invented by Steig Larsson, not the filmmaker, as this one was invented by Gillian Flynn — but Fincher doesn’t flinch. He portrays such disturbing moments as graphically as he should, without watering them down as many other mainstream filmmakers would. (The word “cunt” is also applied more liberally than you’d usually see in a studio movie. It’s kind of like they’re itching for a fight with the feminists.)Gone Girl is an incredibly faithful adaptation of the novel, though it suffers a bit from skimping on the characters’ inner monologues. Ben Affleck is fine in it, though I think another actor might have brought more to the role, so that in the climactic showdown, the involved parties felt more evenly matched (as they are in the book). Nick Dunne needs to be a charming everyman in one sense, but there should also be something potentially dangerous about him, and that’s a quality Affleck lacks. Rosamund Pike, on the other hand, is pretty delicious as Amy, and will likely find her profile boosted a thousandfold from this. Fincher is an ideal auteur for this material, enhancing certain sequences of the book that never quite jumped off the page, such as all that business at the lake house. The second half of this movie is probably superior to the second half of the book, except I wish we’d gotten more from Nick and Affleck.

Gone Girl isn’t exactly a satire, but it does mock the American media and the institution of marriage. It flips the sensational stories about missing and murdered wives on their heads, taking that to the most outer edge of extreme “what if…?” scenarios. Those who are usually victims are, instead, villains, and the usual suspect is instead a victim but not so innocent after all. The media swings back and forth like a pendulum; it can be manipulated like a puppet (Punch and Judy, perhaps), just as any person can if they don’t watch out. And you have to love the idea that women, who are nearly always victims in these sorts of stories (fictional and not), are calling the shots here. Media tales of marriages gone murderous are aimed, mostly, at those very same suburban wives, watching at home while the kids are at school. Who better to exploit the media than one of those very same wives? We’re supposed to feel sorry for Amy Dunne, and everyone knows it, because these stories are meant to be predictable. It’s always the husband, right? Husband = killer. Wife = victim. That story has been playing out over and over again on the news for such a long time.

Going to the movies is a contract. We sit in the dark and tell Mr. Fincher, or whoever, that he can play with us for a couple of hours. We challenge him to make us laugh, cry, gasp, sweat, and think — some combination of those things — and he attempts to deliver. Surprise is a tall order at the multiplex these days, but Gone Girl should astonish anyone who hasn’t read the book (and those of us that have will delight in the way it pulls the rug out from under the people around us).

In a way, Gone Girl seems like Fincher’s answer to a body of work that has otherwise been pretty masculine (with a few exceptions). The blonde doesn’t end up with her head in a box at the end of this movie. (And yet her head is very important.) It’s like Vertigo with even more vertigo. This is a film about, of all things, a woman’s mind, and isn’t that pretty novel? Amy is a powerful character, one with the strength to manipulate an entire genre, and she’s able to do it because we don’t expect much from her. We’ve been trained not to. There are many people who underestimate the titular, supposedly absent female in Gone Girl, and most of them will end up regretting it.

It’s dangerous and potentially deadly to get bored in a marriage — to give in to mediocrity. To settle. There’s a character in Gone Girl who won’t tolerate such a thing; who is determined as hell to wake us all up out of our American stupor. Anyone who walks into Gone Girl expecting familiar story beats is in for quite a surprise, because this is not a movie that will lie down so easily. It has the feisty spirit of the character who turns out to be the killer, and a similar desire to fuck with us. Why? Because it can. Because it’s easy. Because it’s smarter than we are. It knows what we’re expecting — it saw it on the news, as we have. It will toy with us and get away with it, because we won’t see it coming, because we haven’t seen it done that way before, and therefore the possibility never entered our minds. We’re not prepared for a story like this.

*

Annabelle. Gone Girl. Ouija.

It’s no accident that such films are released in October. That’s when audiences are most in the mood to be thrilled and chilled, perhaps even killed, at the movies.

Most Octobers come and go without adding a truly classic villain to the repertoire — a Jason, a Ghost Face, a Freddy Kreuger. Yet this October, there is a new big screen baddie coming to a theater near you. A twisted psychopath who preys on guileless teenagers, who strikes fear into the hearts of all who invoke his name. You see him coming, you run the other way; but usually, by the time he’s set his sights on you, it’s already too late. He’s a monster.

Michael Myers and Leatherface, meet your new contemporary: Terence Fletcher.

I may be exaggerating a little, but then again, so is Whiplash. Terence Fletcher bursts into rooms with the same fury Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone might have in the eighties. It’s a wonder the doors don’t fly off the hinges. He wears an iconic porkpie hat that might as well be a hockey mask, dresses in all black almost always. He leaves his students bleeding on multiple occasions. He is not to be fucked with. Whiplash is an entry in the popular “inspirational teacher” subgenre, but only in the loosest sense. It’s like if Robin Williams’ John Keating had showed up to that first class in Dead Poets Society with an Uzi.Make no mistake: Terence Fletcher is a villain. Maybe not a murderous one (though he may be tacitly involved in one former student’s death, as we come to find out). He’s like the male version of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada — but instead of clicks of the tongue and withering looks, Fletcher really is a physically terrifying individual who is capable of doling out bodily harm, and he’s awfully fond of the word “faggot” (and so many other choice insults). In this case, the ingenue is not Anne Hathaway but rather Miles Teller, who also comes to develop a complicated love-hate (or respect-hate, at least) relationship with his tormentor-turned-mentor. The Devil Wears Porkpie, maybe? Fletcher may come at his students with the best of intentions, but his methods are highly suspect and possibly dangerous. I don’t know that I’d call him a bad guy, but he’s not a guy I’d want to cross paths with — especially not in a dark alley.

Whiplash is an invigorating new film about jazz music, a novelty in and of itself, and one of the most buzzed-about projects to come out of this year’s Sundance. It won both the jury and audience awards, and it’s easy to see why. Damien Chazelle’s direction has as much energy as the jazz. At times, it feels like an action movie. And in the music scenes — particularly the invigorating grand finale, set (but not filmed) at Carnegie Hall — he’s basically creating the world’s first jazz porn (that I’m aware of). There are lingering, fetishistic shots of golden sweat dripping off of cymbals, and off of Miles Teller. This is not a film that asks us to sit back and take in the music, but actively makes the audience a part of it, with cuts that feel as percussive and hard to pin down as jazz itself. The film’s title comes from a piece that proves central to the film’s story, but it also describes the feeling you may have watching it. (Cue whip-cracking sound.) Chicago is off somewhere sulking in a corner feeling sorry for itself after seeing Whiplash. It’s all that jazz, and all that other jazz, too. It is all of the jazz everywhere, so fuck you.Teller plays Andrew Neiman, bringing his usual earnest cockiness to a role that turns out to be a lot more physically intense than you’d expect in a movie about a jazz drummer. He likes to see classic movies with his father (Paul Reiser), he has a crush on the cute girl who sells him popcorn and Swedish fish at the theater (Melissa Benoist), but mostly, all he cares about is jazz. He can identify classic pieces played in obscure pizzerias and spends his free time listening to Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich instead of Foster the People or Mumford and Sons. He wants to be the best, and he’s willing to go through a lot of hell to get there, which includes bloodying his hands for his art. (He’s as much a perfectionist as Natalie Portman’s Nina in Black Swan, but thankfully a little more mentally balanced.)

Alongside him to crack the whip is Fletcher, the fearsome instructor at Schaffer, a Juilliard-esque music school in New York City. Fletcher, too, wants nothing but the best, and he is willing to terrorize and dismiss any student who doesn’t give it to him. His methods include throwing things, slapping students, and a hell of a lot of cursing, mocking, and screaming, the kind we usually hear from drill sergeants and football coaches. (In fact, there’s a scene that directly contrasts Andrew’s achievements with his cousin Travis, who is not as good a football player as Andrew is a drummer.) He reminds me a lot of my 7th grade P.E. teacher, who might very well be in jail right now. I used to have nightmares about him.Are Fletcher’s frightening teaching methods truly believable in the real world? No, not really. They’re exaggerated to an intentionally comic extreme, and J.K. Simmons chews into the role like he’s the next Avengers villain. (In truth, he’s actually much more menacing than anyone we’ve seen out of the Marvel universe lately.) I don’t buy for a second that Fletcher could have been teaching this long without some kind of intervention by either the faculty or the police, but the character and movie built around him are so intense and seductive it hardly matters. What does matter is that we understand how sheepish these students must feel in front of Fletcher, the complicated way he keeps them in a vice grip. Teacher-student relationships like this are a real thing, even if the physical violence isn’t.

Simmons is likely well on his way to an Oscar nod for his troubles, and perhaps even a win, though there’s some debate over whether he’s a Lead Actor or Supporting. (I say Supporting, but just barely.) It’s anything but a subtle role, and there’s an almost-unnecessary scene late in the game that attempts to humanize him, but it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Fletcher and Andrew both want complete and utter perfection. They’re willing to go to extremes to get it. And no one else in the movie really gets that.Is perfection worth it? That’s one question that floats by as Andrew breaks up with Nicole in anticipation of her holding him back when she feels herself competing with his commitment to jazz, and inevitably losing. Most prodigies aren’t so prescient, and I admired the way Chazelle didn’t waste our time with unnecessary hemming and hawing over a love story that doesn’t much matter. (There’s also a refreshing lack of cliched father-son drama of the sort we often find in these movies.) Whiplash shows us what Andrew could have if he were an ordinary student rather than a musical prodigy, then takes it back because being the best at something means sacrificing everything but that passion. Fletcher is probably a lonely man, and there are a lot of indicators that Andrew will be, too. But so was Charlie Parker. Is being the best worth being alone and miserable? For a small segment of the population, the answer to that question is: hell yes. And if that isn’t your answer, get the fuck out of Fletcher’s classroom.

In case I haven’t already made it clear, Whiplash is a highly entertaining movie, one with just enough downer gravity at the core to give us something to chew on once it’s over. The Fletcher character, as written and as portrayed by J.K. Simmons, is so over-the-top it’s borderline campy, which might not have worked in a movie that didn’t feel so coolly and confidently assembled. In Whiplash, all the elements come together with just the right skill, at just the right tempo, like a perfectly trained band. This year’s Frank might be a more moving account of a tortured genius, but Whiplash is more rousing and kinetic. I listened carefully, and couldn’t identify a single false note.

I don’t know if that’s perfection, but it’s a hell of a lot more than a good job.

*

 (Flashback Friday: The danger in writing about something “cutting edge” is that you will soon sound ridiculous. So I’ve learned upon reexamining my old columns, such as this one about the dawning of DVR and how it changed our television viewing processes forever. Of course, this was well before streaming changed the game even further; at this point, it was still rather mesmerizing just to choose when you watched any given program. This piece was first published in INsite Boston in March 2007.)

Architects and screenwriters know equally well: structure is important. Without it, stories come crumbling down.

The same is true in life. Without a schedule, we’re bound to idle away hours chatting online, playing Guitar Hero, contributing nothing to the world at large. To remedy this, many have looked to work or school to dictate how they spend their time.

Me? I looked to television.

See, when you’re a writer, Tuesday might as well be Saturday. Days of the week aren’t that differentiated. But when you’re also a TV viewer, you can recognize Tuesday as the time of week that saucy Olivia Benson solves yet another delectably perplexing sex crime. No matter how I spent the carefree days of my youth, I always knew that on certain choice evenings, I had to be on the couch at a certain time, tuned in to a certain channel.

Alas… that was before I became a grownup.

Then, a couple months ago, I finally caved and took a full-time job in the film industry. (Though at 60 hours a week, I’d say it’s full and a half.) Suddenly confronted with a real world schedule, I could no longer stick to my trusty routine of yesteryear, jumping onto the couch at 8 and sticking around until 11. Sometimes I’m working until 8, and sometimes I need to get to bed before 11. So I decided it was high time to join the so-called “TiVolution,” a switch that would forever cease my mad dashes home at the cusp of primetime, frantically fighting traffic so as not to miss a single frame of televised goodness. Now, I’m no couch potato, but I do have a select few favorites, and therefore am lucky to live in an era when even the busiest bee need not miss his broadcast honey. Viva la TiVolution!

I recall my first run-in with DVR a couple years ago, back when mentioning “TiVo” got you a furrowed brow and head tilt rather than a nod of satisfied recognition. I found it bizarrely humorous that one of the menu options was “Don’t do anything,” as if pushing that button could suck you  into some black hole of nonexistence. Even stranger was the ubercute mascot — which resembles a retarded beetle — and the insanely cheerful chirping that, with every push of a button, makes it sound as if you personally brought joy to a baby chickadee, merely by watching television. I held off on TiVo for so long because I don’t trust the adorable; I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and discover that our seemingly innocuous TiVos have taken over the world while they were supposed to be recording late-night reruns of Mary Tyler Moore. Don’t do anything, my ass. Don’t do anything except kill us in our sleep!!

I suppose they make the TiVo so endearing so you don’t take an axe to it during the unexpectedly grueling set-up process. As the third hour commenced, I cursed my decision to get in league with that chirpy black devil and bemoaned my maturation, all the complications and unnecessary strife that simply don’t exist in our formative years. Adult life is comprised of wires that are supposed to connect but don’t connect, the DVR to the TV and the TV to the cable and the cable to the hip bone and the backbone to the DVR. It’s such a process. However, when the TeVil finally appeared on my screen and started dancing his congratulatory jig, so did I. A new era had dawned. Viva!

Now my favorite shows are right where I want them when I want them, like cheap floozies. It gives me a sense of godlike power having it all at my fingertips — yet it’s made watching TV a little too easy. I rather liked having a set date and time to sit down with my favorite shows; it was nice having a schedule. Now, as with so many things in the grown up world, I’m left to wonder… is that all there is?

I spend my days in an office, dealing with incessantly ringing phones and mischievous copy machines. It’s time-consuming, even annoying, but not difficult. I clock in, my personality clocks out; the days go by quickly and there are a tolerable number of headaches. I can’t complain, really, because being overworked and underpaid is a hallmark of your twenties. My problems are the same as everyone else’s… but my real problem is that I never expected them to be.

In college I was surrounded by uniquely gifted people and wondered, if so many young people have such a surplus of potential, how do most adults come out so ordinary? Now I know. We, the children of the TiVolution, are savvier and more capable than any generation before us, but the world is still operating on the ol’ standby schedule, complete with glass ceiling. Competent, creative individuals are presented with a rather slim menu of options, most of which consist of biding time until we’re allowed to realize our potential. It’s frustrating when we know we’re capable of so much more.

So leave it to TiVo to sum it up in three simple words. Whereas previous technological advancements provided such euphemistic options as “Back to Menu,” “Cancel,” or “Home,” TiVo was innovative enough to tell it like it is: when everything’s downloadable, digital, and portable, our greatest challenge is the lack thereof. When I get home after another mundane, mindless day at work, I have just enough time for one selection from my “Now Playing” list. When it’s over, TiVo tweedles and asks me what I’d like to do with the program next. Typically, I select “Don’t do anything.”

It’s starting to feel like I never will.

*

What has Michael Keaton been up to lately?

I don’t know the answer to that. I know he’s appeared in a handful of movies I haven’t seen (and have no desire to see) such as RoboCop and Need For Speed. He voiced the hilarious Ken doll in Toy Story 3, a fairly recent blockbuster. I still think he’s the big screen’s Batman, in the big screen’s best Batman movies.

But on the whole, it doesn’t seem like Keaton’s been on the Hollywood radar since the late 90s. Thus Birdman feels like something of a comeback, even though I acknowledge that Michael Keaton never exactly went anywhere. (He always knew where he was, even if the rest of us didn’t.) At least Keaton’s still getting paid, which makes him better off than Riggan Thompson, the character he plays in Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance). Thompson and Keaton are both famous for playing superheroes named after flying animals, so it’s hard not to feel like this is a little autobiographical. But the superhero connection is hopefully all these two have in common… because Riggan Thompson is nuts.

Birdman is mostly a love letter to actors — both in its storyline and also in the sense that it gives so many actors juicy, quirky scenes to play with. Keaton is not playing himself, but in a way, he is playing all actors, everywhere, reduced to their basic form: an ego. A bundle of neuroses. A child in an adult’s body, desperate to be loved. An in this case, a man who has allowed inhabiting other people to take him over, so that now these other characters are free to come and go through his mind as they please.Riggan hears the voice of Birdman frequently throughout the film — it’s his own voice, but angrier and raspier and, it must be said, more like Christian Bale’s Batman voice than Keaton’s own. It makes sense that such a ridiculous-sounding character would be the one to manifest itself in an actor’s psyche. Birdman is a brash and invincible movie hero, the counterpoint to the fragile man Riggan Thompson has become. Birdman is beloved, and Riggan Thompson is, too, but only because the general public can’t tell the two apart. Riggan is approached by several fans in the film, and none of them have any regard for who he is as a person or what he might be going through at any given moment. To them, he’s still a costumed character, even when he’s dressed like any other person. He’s a photo op, an autograph, and — once he gets locked out of the theater in his tightie-whities — a meme. No wonder Riggan is losing his grip on who he is. Most of the people in the world are confusing him with Birdman, too.

But a real man can’t be a superhero. Perhaps being a stage actor is the closest a human being can get — dashing into the fray so many nights a week, wearing masks, hiding one’s true persona to please the masses. Actors hide underneath other personas, and Riggan is starting to lose his mind, but the people around him don’t know it, because they’re so used to actors; crazy behavior. Temper tantrums, delusions of grandeur, outrageous demands — what’s the difference between a star and a schizophrenic, anyway?In Birdman, Riggan Thompson is a 90s action star who has fallen off of Hollywood’s radar since turning down the fourth installment in the franchise. In an effort to be taken seriously as an artist (for a change), he writes, directs, and stars in a play based on Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” His co-stars are Lesley (Naomi Watts), an actress for whom this appearance on Broadway is the culmination of a lifelong dream to “make it in the theater,” Laura (Andrea Riseborough), his pregnant girlfriend with bisexual tendencies, and Mike (Edward Norton), a hotshot Thespian-with-a-capital-T whose ego practically shoots through the roof.

Birdman does not take place in real time but does, supposedly, play out in one continuous shot — there are no visible cuts, though it is obvious when an hour or a day has passed. That gimmick lends everything a distinctly surreal vibe, enhanced by Riggan’s imagined telekinesis and the voice of Birdman that occasionally intrudes into his reality. Riggan is obviously an unbalanced dude when we meet him, and as the pressures surrounding his theater debut mount, that only gets worse. He gets into an All About Eve-style competition with Mike, who brings his own brand of crazy to the production, as Riggan’s assistant/daughter Sam (Emma Stone), lawyer Jake (Zach Galifianakis), and ex-wife (Amy Ryan) grow increasingly worried about his erratic behavior. (But never as concerned as they should be.)Birdman is an impressive piece of filmmaking, particularly on a technical level. It wouldn’t have been possible to make it this way a decade  ago — at least, not nearly so fluidly. It’s darkly comedic and, at times, straight-up dark, and gives its actors plenty of vibrant opportunities to poke fun at their profession. (There are also some sly digs at real-life celebrities like Robert Downey, Jr., Jeremy Renner, and Justin Bieber too.) In one pretty incredible scene, Riggan faces off against a bitchy theater critic (Lindsay Duncan) who is determined to sink his passion project no matter how good or bad it is merely because she doesn’t like it when Hollywood stars try and take over the Great White Way. It’s a wonder real-world critics have flipped over Birdman, given Riggan’s acidic takedown of professional criticism.

Yes, Birdman is one of this fall’s most lauded releases, and could very well earn nominations for several of its stars — most likely, Edward Norton and Michael Keaton. (Edward Norton is fresher, funnier, and more exciting here than he has been elsewhere in years.) It also has a lively percussive score by Antonio Sanchez. The story itself is not as novel as the filmmaking, however. It has the same “oh, fuck it” spirit as something like I Heart Huckabee’s, the madcap, half-grounded-in-reality satirical edge of Adaptation. We’ve seen criticism of critics in movies like Ratatouille, and the unhinged star at its center has quite a lot in common with Black Swan’s Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) — especially since both hallucinate giant bird-people at some point in the course of their stories.

But it’s a little easier to feel sympathy for the oppressed ballerina than it is for the brash, outrageous Riggan Thompson, whose trajectory is pretty obvious from the get-go. That doesn’t lessen the pleasure of watching his interactions with the other characters, all played by terrific actors at the top of their game. But I was in awe of the movie more than I was emotionally invested in it. I can’t think of a single scene I didn’t take some pleasure in, but only a handful resonated on a higher level. My favorite? An exchange between Lesley and Laura, as the two attempt to validate each other as both women and actresses, because the self-obsessed men in their lives can’t be bothered to take notice. Birdman has five pretty fantastic parts for women, and these characters come off a lot better than the men — all jerks — do. It made me wish for a story that followed them instead of the wild and crazy actor whose story I felt I’d seen before.

Birdman is quite different than any of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s previous efforts, which include prestige pics like 21 Grams and Babel. I welcome the grim weirdness from him and wouldn’t mind seeing more of it. Birdman is less of a Hollywood satire than you might expect from the premise, and much more about The Theater. Thus it is a movie that is probably most appreciated by actors and other theater-folk, who are both tenderly embraced and thoroughly mocked by this movie. Films about tortured talent are big this year — Whiplash being the more slick and entertaining release currently in the theaters, and Frank being slightly more grounded in reality. Individual moments crackle with wit and originality — I wish the overall thrust of the story had the same originality.

Instead, it’s a masterfully silly, self-indulgent movie best enjoyed by the very people who made it. That’s not really a bad thing, but Black Swan ended on a surprising note of excellence, with a bloody Nina awash in lights and applause and one sublime line of dialogue: “I was perfect.” Birdman seems poised to end on a similar beat, and then goes on. Like Riggan, Birdman doesn’t quite know what its limits are and over-reaches trying to make a grandiose artistic point that it already made several times over. Less is not more here.

I don’t suppose Riggan would take too kindly to my criticism, however, so let’s wrap this up before I overstay my welcome. Riggan Thompson had no chance in hell of earning an Oscar nomination for playing Birdman, but the same can’t be said for Michael Keaton. He’s a very good Birdman, but still a better Batman. I’m glad he’s back in a starring role, still getting nuts after all these years.

*

The secret is out.

If you don’t know the main twist in Gone Girl by now, then I feel sorry for you, because you will undoubtedly be spoiled any minute now, given the level of buzz the film has received. (And definitely by me, if you keep reading.)

David Fincher’s fantastic thriller has spawned countless articles claiming it is everything from another regressive and misogynistic entry in the psycho-bitch subgenre (joining the ranks of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct) to the most feminist film in years. It has prompted debates about women who cry rape, the roles of husbands and wives in a marriage, victims as portrayed by the media.

The debate has also launched discussions about how Fincher treats women in his films. His oeuvre is best remembered by titles like Fight Club, Zodiac, and Se7en, which feature smart, sophisticated roles for males and not a whole lot of women.

But what tends to be left out of the conversation are all the strong female characters that have appeared in Fincher movies. Not every one of his films is a feminist showcase, but on the whole he’s treated women a lot better than a lot of current filmmakers, especially those making the kinds of suspense thrillers Fincher is typically drawn to.

Sp here is my definitive ranking of Fincher’s films, from least to most feminist.

10. ZODIAC

Fincher’s best movie is pretty inarguably also his least feminist. The Zodiac killer murders people pretty indiscriminately, with male and female victims alike. A few of the female victims (or near victims) have satisfyingly tense scenes — in fact, they’re some of the most terrifying kill scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. That includes Darlene Ferrin, shot by the Zodiac at a lovers’ lane, who seems to think she knows the killer but dies before confirming that; it also includes Cecelia, whose lakeside picnic is thoroughly ruined by the infamous killer. In both cases, the men survive but the women are killed. Of course, that’s not Fincher’s doing — that’s just what happened.

None of these victims emerges as a major character, for obvious reasons. The only female character truly present here is Melanie (Chloe Sevigny), cartoonist-turned-Zodiac-hunter Robert Graysmith’s wife, but she has only a handful of scenes and basically becomes the naggy shrew wife archetype (though she’s being perfectly rational when she asks her husband to stop provoking a dangerous and unpredictable serial killer). Given that this movie is based on true events and takes place mostly in the 1970s, it makes sense that the film’s central trio would be entirely male (as played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr.). I don’t fault Zodiac for being a very masculine film, but it doesn’t help Fincher’s case when it comes to the debate over the female roles in his films, either. Next!9. THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Another (somewhat) true story in which males take up virtually all the major roles, The Social Network does have at least one memorable female who banters Sorkin-style with Mark Zuckerberg in the film’s indelible opening scene. That’s Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), in her breakout performance as the girl who inspired Facebook to happen. That’s arguably a powerful, world-changing role for a female, except Erica Albright is fictional, a device entirely invented by Aaron Sorkin to suggest Zuckerberg’s narcissistic loneliness. (Facebook is created after a rather misogynistic site that ranks the looks of female Harvard students gets shut down.) The Social Network has been accused of making up all but the broadest beats of its story, but the Erica Albright character nicely highlights how being just a few clicks away from the majority of the population doesn’t necessarily mean we feel any more connected to each other, especially in the fantastic final moments when Zuckerberg just keeps refreshing his Facebook page, hoping Erica will add him as a friend.

Beyond Erica, we also briefly meet Eduardo Saverin’s girlfriend Christy (Brenda Song), who goes into psycho-bitch mode when she feels marginalized, and the cute college girl that clues Sean Parker into Facebook. But the female roles are largely relegated to various hookups or love interests despite Sorkin’s usual knack for writing smart women. The exception is Marilyn Delpy (Rashida Jones), a lawyer on Zuckerberg’s team who attempts to get through to him about being more likable and fails pretty miserably. Still, all these women are essentially window dressing in a male-driven ensemble about the age of the internet and the advent of social media. Then again, it’s still a very male-driven field in real life as well, for which Fincher can’t be faulted. At least we get the sense that Erica Albright exits the movie because Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t deserve her — she is solidly in charge of that decision, and declining his friendship early on is probably the wisest thing she could do, given how he ends up treating his other buddies.

8. SE7EN

Se7en is another movie with a virtually all-male cast, centering on the detective duo played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman who eventually square off against a male killer played by Kevin Spacey. The film’s treatment of women — and all people, really — is dark, as the female victims are a prostitute who is raped to death by a killer sex toy and a model who chooses to commit suicide rather than live her life as a disfigured woman. Of course, all of the killer’s victims are meant to seem morally depraved in some way, representing lowlifes who abuse one or more of the seven deadly sins.

The lightest and most likable character in the movie is Detective Mills’ wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who strikes up a secret friendship with Detective Somerset after moving with her husband to a big city where she doesn’t know anyone. In most such thrillers, “the wife” is a barely-there presence who tends to nah her husband about working too much and not spending time with the family. Here, however, Tracy is a fully fleshed-out character who confides in Somserset that she’s pregnant and unsure about whether or not she should keep the child.

This might seem like a curious detour for a grim procedural like Se7en, but as it turns out, being sympathetic to Tracy is key for the film’s shocking denouement, when the killer has a delivery man drop off a special “package” containing Tracy’s pretty head. (The reason Se7en ranks as a favorite amongst Gwyneth-haters.) Because we got to know Tracy so well, the moment feels like a true tragedy, and we’re right there with Mills as his grief at the loss of his wife and unborn child causes him to kill the unnamed murderer. It’s gloomy stuff, but certainly not the last time Fincher dares to go where other filmmakers are less likely to. Unfortunately, the fact that the only female character in the film ends up decapitated doesn’t really give Fincher much credit as a feminist filmmaker, so, moving on…7. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Fincher’s most widely derided movie is also the one that is his least Fincher-esque. At first glance, it seems too heartwarming and benign to come from the man who made Fight Club and Se7en, but it has its share of grim moments and is all about death. Though Brad Pitt is the star, in a lot of ways the movie belongs to Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who ends up taking care of the reverse-aging Benjamin as he becomes an infant (in much the same way a woman might need to take care of an aging man as he grows senile). She’s the one reading Benjamin’s diary from her own deathbed in the film’s book-ending device (which happens as Hurricane Katrina rages).

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button also has strong female roles for Tilda Swinton and Taraji P. Henson (who was Oscar-nominated for her work), but none of them escape the overall storybook quality of this movie, which is more about sweeping themes than characters who break any sort of mold. The female characters are all pretty typical, functioning more as foils for the male protagonist than they do as women with their own agendas and inner lives. Still, as usual, Fincher tends to work with actresses who can elevate the material, and Cate Blanchett is more than capable of that. The decades-spanning story allows us to see her whole life unfold — a life that largely revolves around Benjamin. 6. THE GAME

The only major female role in 1997’s The Game is Christine, played by Deborah Kara Unger (a role that was originally intended for future Fincher collaborator Jodie Foster). At first, Christine seems like a hapless victim of “the game” unleashed upon the wealthy Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas) by the shady and elusive CSR as part of a bizarre gift from his brother Conrad (Sean Penn). However, Nicholas soon comes to suspect that Christine is in on it — and she is. Christine and Nicholas briefly join forces as she explains that CSR has relieved him of his finances, but then he realizes she’s drugged him and he’s back to suspecting her of foul play. In the climax, Nicholas holds Christine at gunpoint as she tearfully pleads with him to realize that this is all an elaborate put on — which is also a put-on, because Nicholas arriving with a gun was also a part of the ruse.

Christine ends up being our main source of information (and misinformation) about the culprit behind Nicholas’ wacky birthday present, and we suspect her of being both a victim and a villain multiple times before the final truth is revealed. It’s a fun twist on the typical sidekick girl/love interest we often see in such films, but she’s not exactly the femme fatale either. She’s just a woman doing her job, and doing it pretty damn well, and Deborah Kara Unger and Fincher keep us guessing about her allegiances all the way through. It’s a more complicated female role than anything Fincher offered any woman up until his recent book adaptations.5. FIGHT CLUB

Of all Fincher’s movies, Fight Club has to be the most masculine, because it’s all about men beating each other up to prove to themselves that they’re men. Our narrator, played by Edward Norton, feels emasculated by too much luxury and a cushy office job. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) enters his life to shake him out of his stupor, inspiring him to cause crimes and start an underground fight club where men ranging from pretty boy Angel (Jared Leto) to big-titted Bob (Meat Loaf) can duke it out ’til they’re left bruised and bleeding on the floor.

But the reason Fight Club ranks so highly amongst Fincher’s feminist films is because it has one truly awesome female character — the chain-smoking Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who seems perpetually on the verge of killing herself. We meet Marla at a support group for survivors of testicular cancer, and the lady does have balls — she’s fond of quotable gems like, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” It appears for a while that Marla has ditched our hero to fuck around with Tyler Durden instead, but when Tyler ends up being our narrator’s alter ego instead of a flesh-and-blood character, we realize it’s his erratic behavior that’s been hurting Marla, not the other way around. The finale of the movie, featuring Marla and the narrator holding hands and watching a city crumble to pieces around them, is one of the weirdest and most memorable romantic climaxes ever put to film.

4. GONE GIRL

Is Amy Dunne a regressive character? Or have we finally just progressed enough to let women be devious psychopaths, too? Gone Girl plays on gender stereotypes by posing a whodunit that automatically revolves around male suspects, because that’s how we’ve come to expect these things to play out. Men are the killers and women are their victims. Amy knows that, too, which is how she’s able to be so successful at playing the police and the media, allowing them to come to the conclusion that it must have been Nick Dunne who did away with his wife.

Of course, it’s Amy who has done away with herself, but when Nick starts playing along with her games, Amy changes her tune and decides to pin the blame on another former lover instead — Neil Patrick Harris’ Desi, who is graphically killed during an intense sex scene that leaves her covered in his blood. That Amy would go to such extremes — having sex with Desi just so she can claim he raped her — raises a lot of questions about how we deal with rape accusations in real life. It’s true that Amy Dunne is a horrible person, who expends most of her energy getting revenge against men she perceives to have wronged her (though those wrongs aren’t always so severe). But Nick ends up returning to her, not because he’s trapped (as some seem to believe), but because their partnership in deceit begins to make a weird kind of sense to him.

Amy is far from the first female psycho-killer to grace the big screen, but the fact that she gets away with it is much more novel. The killer in such films is no longer the lusty single woman who threatens the male protagonist’s family — she is the family herself. The reason Gone Girl gets away with making Amy such a total psycho is that writer Gillian Flynn grounds with film with an array of other colorful female characters, some wicked, some virtuous. (The film’s de facto hero Detective Boney is a woman.) Fincher has fun playing with stereotypes here, marrying the icy Hitchcock blonde and the knife-wielding psycho in a movie that makes the villain and the victim the same person. There’s no question that Amy is driving this story — she’s a woman you don’t want to fuck with, in any sense of that word. At its most basic level, Gone Girl can be read as an exploitation of men’s fears of rape accusations and controlling wives, but there’s much more to it than that.

3. ALIEN3

Alien3 is the weakest of the Alien series, and one of Fincher’s least-liked movies, largely because it feels like a betrayal of James Cameron’s spectacular Aliens to kill off little Newt off-screen. Due to the mother-daughter bond between Ripley and Newt — and the fact that the big bad villain, the Alien Queen, is also a female — Aliens definitely scores as the more feminist film in the series. (As does Alien Resurrection, which added Winona Ryder to the mix.) Alien3 sports the most masculine Ripley, head shaved and a sour attitude, the sole female amidst a ship of prisoners who face off against the aliens. Ripley eventually sacrifices herself because she’s carrying an alien inside her, another dour and disappointing plot beat after Ripley has come so far in the series.

However, it can’t be denied that Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is absolutely the most badass action movie heroine of all time, and she still manages to kick plenty of ass in the third installment, even if we end up liking her a lot better in the first two movies. Fincher can’t take too much credit for Ripley here, but he benefits from jumping into an awesome feminist franchise for his directorial debut (!). Alien3 might score a tad higher if it didn’t undo a lot of the feminism of Cameron’s Aliens in the process.   2. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

At first, Fincher’s decision to cast the girl who played Erica Albright as the autistic punk Lisbeth Salander in his adaptation of Steig Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed like madness. But as usual in Fincher’s films, the casting ended up being perfect. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth is tough, resourceful, and has no patience for politeness due to a rough upbringing that left her well-being in the hands of some shady government officials. In a controversial moment, Lisbeth’s guardian ties her down and forces anal sex on her, and Fincher lingers in the moment longer than other filmmakers might in order to depict the extent of her suffering. But Lisbeth is no mere victim. She exacts her revenge in a scene that is equally graphic as the rapist becomes the victim. A lot of filmmakers wouldn’t have handled this material with the right touch, but the way that Fincher depicts it, it feels icky in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones.

Any faults with the sexual politics in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo stem largely from the source material. Fincher’s adaptation actually tamps down some of the problematic elements in the novel, such as the way that just about every female in the book throws herself at the male protagonist. (He’s played by James Bond, AKA Daniel Craig, but here he’s supposed to be a down-on-his-luck middle-aged journalist, so it’s not quite so sexy.) Did this story really need Lisbeth to throw herself at Blomkvist and, in the end, grow jealous when seeing him return to his editor and lover (played by Robin Wright)? Not really, but it’s in the book, and it’s kind of cool that Lisbeth takes charge and dispenses with any foreplay or niceties when she decides she that wants him.

As portrayed by Rooney Mara, Lisbeth Salander is pretty badass; despite her Oscar nomination, the film wasn’t exactly a runaway hit, which means we probably won’t see Fincher and Mara reteam for the book’s two sequels. (This one clearly ends on a note that assumes the story continues.) Larsson’s follow-up books are even more problematic than this one, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed that this could be the bittersweet end of the girl with the dragon tattoo.1. PANIC ROOM

Didn’t Kristen Stewart learn anything from Jodie Foster? Before playing Bella in the regressive and problematic Twilight series, Stewart played Foster’s daughter in Fincher’s Panic Room, a female-driven suspense thriller. Jodie Foster has been defying gender stereotypes since childhood, so it’s sort of fun to see her as the mother of a tomboyish daughter here. Foster is Meg Altman, who sure isn’t hurting financially after a divorce that left her with enough bank to purchase an enormous four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Seriously?)

As luck would have it, Meg and Sarah end up being robbed on the very night they move in by a trio of guys looking for a payday located somewhere in the house. Fortunately, the house comes complete with a panic room, where Meg and Sarah lock themselves in as the robbers attempt to flush them out and break in. Complicating matters are Sarah’s diabetes and the fact that the money the bad guys want is in the panic room.

As usual, Jodie Foster plays a competent, compelling character. She’s also a relatable mother who is fucking terrified by the fact that there are dangerous men in her house, and she’s cool under pressure but just barely. Foster eventually manages to kick some ass, but this never falls outside the realm of believability, and when she calls her ex-husband for help, he shows up and becomes just another victim that Meg has to rescue. (A lot of movies would have had the male swoop in to save the day.) It is a change of heart from one of the robbers (Forest Whitaker) that ultimately saves Meg from the more murderous of the trio (Dwight Yoakam). Still, Foster’s tough fragility totally owns this film, and anyone who says Fincher isn’t a feminist would have a hard time explaining this one into such an argument.

*

Birdman is one the year’s most critically beloved films. It features brilliant performances, breathtaking filmmaking, an off-the-beaten-path score, and unfolds in one long unbroken take (but not really).

And how about the story? Well, on a narrative level, it’s pretty much the same movie as Black Swan, which is why I admire the film but can’t get fully on board the Birdman train as so many critics have.

Don’t believe me? Below are 10 irrefutable reasons why Black Swan and Birdman are practically the same movie.

(Massive spoilers for both films ahead.)

10. New York City

Both films notably take place in New York City, the cultural capital of America. Black Swan is located on the Upper West Side and Lincoln Center, as is fitting for a ballet story, while Birdman is appropriately rooted around Broadway in the midtown theater district.

9. Adaptation

Birdman and Black Swan both center on stage adaptations of a previous work. In Black Swan, it’s a new interpretation of the classic ballet Swan Lake, and in Birdman, it’s Riggan’s adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

8. What is real?

Both films play with our perception of reality by depicting certain events as “real” that are later revealed to take place only in our protagonist’s minds. In both films, many scenes feel slightly surreal and “off,” tipping us off to their mental instability early on. Basically, we’re getting a taste of the crazy that’s running through Nina and Riggan’s minds.7. The Rivalry

Nina and Riggan both come up against a rival who threatens their star status. For Nina, it’s the ingenue Lily (Mila Kunis), who eventually worms her way into the role of Nina’s understudy and is praised by director Thomas Leroy as the perfect embodiment of the Black Swan. For Riggan, it is his outrageously vain co-star Mike (Edward Norton), who starts out by making suggested cuts to Riggan’s dialogue in the play and then engages in increasingly erratic antics, like breaking character to complain that his stage booze isn’t real booze and trying to have actual sex with his co-star during e performance (resulting in a very visible erection, much to the delight of the audience).

6. Duality

Duality is a major factor in Black Swan, as Nina perfectly embodies the White Swan but has a hard time channeling her inner Black Swan. (Probably because her inner Black Swan is a looney murderess.) She often sees alarming, evilly smirking reflections that suggest a darker side to herself. Riggan, too, is tormented by his on-screen alter ego Birdman, which a raspy inner voice constantly compels him to embrace. Like Nina, Riggan does eventually give in to his alter ego, further loosening his grasp on reality.

5. Opening Night

The narratives both Black Swan and Birdman build toward the opening night of their respective performances for their climaxes. 4. Lesbians!

In Black Swan and Birdman, two performers rather spontaneously engage in some steamy girl-on-girl hanky-panky — because dancers/actresses are just kind of like that, aren’t they? They’re not real out-and-proud lesbians, they just dabble in lesbianism. (Though in Black Swan’s case, the sapphic action turns out to be yet another hallucination.)

3. The Critic

The true antagonist in both films — besides the protagonists’ dark alter egos — is a bitchy female of a certain age who lives to criticize them. For Nina, it’s her mother Erica (Barbara Heshey), a former ballerina herself. For Riggan, it’s the cruel theater critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan). Nina and Riggan both explode in a fever-pitched rage at these women just before going completely bonkers, but that woman still ends up in the audience at their debut (and final) performance.2. Hallucinated bird-people.

What is it about crazy people and avians? Both Nina and Riggan’s main hallucination involves a human-bird hybrid. For Riggan, it’s himself as the costumed superhero he made famous in the 90s, and in later scenes, Riggan embraces Birdman and goes soaring before our eyes. For Nina, it’s the Black Swan. At one point, she sees (or thinks she sees) a menacing bird-man having sex with Lily (and then herself) backstage; she also sprouts feathers and literally becomes the Black Swan in her final performance. Embracing their inner birdness is an essential step on both Nina and Riggan’s pathway to crazytown.

1. Suicide on stage.

The inevitable conclusion in any story about a protagonist who is going irrevocably nuts is suicide. Both Nina and Riggan end up there, deciding to do the dirty deed on stage as the grand finale of their opening night performance. Riggan does so by replacing his prop gun with a real one, and Nina does so more accidentally, having stabbed herself in the belly with a shard of mirror while she thought she was attacking Lily. Nina’s suicide is apparently successful; Riggan succeeds in blowing his own nose off and winds up in the hospital, where he arguably makes a more successful attempt by jumping out the window. The ending of both films (Birdman in particular) is left somewhat open to interpretation as to what happens next, but the safest argument is probably that both Nina and Riggan are dead at the end of their respective films.

*

“Renee Zellweger looks like she just got back from a long trip to a Cold Mountain.”

I thought that comment was mildly amusing, so I tweeted and put it on Facebook.

Less than a minute later, I deleted both.

I started thinking of the wave of negativity Renee Zellweger is experiencing right now. Not because she gave a bad performance in a movie, or said something in an interview she’d later regret. Simply because she walked out of the house and attended an event — ironically, Elle‘s Women In Hollywood, a night that is meant to empower females.

Yes, when you walk out onto a red carpet, and you’re a woman, you know you’re subjecting yourself to all kinds of scrutiny. For actresses in Hollywood, it is a (probably unfortunate) part of their job. It takes a lot of tenacity and a fair amount of confidence to even do such a thing. But we don’t think about that when we see the pictures. We just judge.

I’m not here to judge anyone who made a snarky comment about Renee Zellweger. I did it, too. Whoever first wrote a Renee Zellweger-specific post about the event obviously knew that people would freak out at the sight of her — because it’s been so long since we’ve seen her, and because she looks so different than when we last saw her. And there the bandwagon was formed. It is human nature to jump on.

When we tweet, Facebook, or otherwise post about a celebrity on the internet, we don’t think that celebrity will actually see it, and most of the time, we’re right. Celebrities have so many comments flying at them from all directions, it would be impossible to view them all. Our one little joke will be seen by, at best, however many of our couple hundred followers on Twitter happen to be reading tweets right now, or however many friends actually see what we post on Facebook. And that’s that. Done.

But the thing about the internet is you never know for sure who will see it. It is, in fact, possible that Renee Zellweger could stumble upon what I tweeted about her, and if she did, she’d no doubt feel really bad about it, the same way I’d feel awful if she tweeted the same thing about how I looked last night. And in the more likely event that she does not see it, I’m still contributing to the huge storm of bad press she’s getting right now just for having her picture taken.

Did Renee Zellweger get plastic surgery? Probably. And I imagine it must feel pretty lousy to go through all that trouble, then step out in public and still have people saying mean things about how you look. Paradoxically, people who change the way they look tend to receive more flack their appearance rather than less. If Renee Zellweger had not had plastic surgery, and aged naturally, many people would have made snarky comments about that, too. Why did Renee Zellweger get plastic surgery in the first place? Probably because, even at the height of her success, people made fun of the way she looked — the squinty eyes, the chipmunk cheeks. Basically, there’s not much Renee Zellweger could have done that would have avoided bad press at this point.

But Renee is far from the only celebrity to ever prompt the “did she or didn’t she?” discussion. Whether she did or didn’t is irrelevant, unless she also had surgery to make her immune to mean jokes. Most of us are not talking about Renee Zellweger because she looks different than she used to, or because she looks bad, or because she looks old, or anything like that at all. We’re talking about her because other people are talking about her. We saw someone else post about it, so we posted about it, too. We want to partake in the hot topic, gather around the virtual watercooler. We want to be like the cool kids. And today, the cool kids are making fun of Renee Zellweger.

Twitter and Facebook comprise different wings of a worldwide high school. We’re all attending Social Media High, and like most actual high school students, we can’t be so easily divided into camps like “nerds” and “bullies.” Because the nerds have snarky things to say about the jocks sometimes, too.

At Social Media High, negativity is rewarded. You can turn in all your assignments on time, have perfect attendance, and say a thousand nice things to the other kids in your class on a daily basis. But that one moment when the popular girl trips and falls on her face, and you make just the right joke with just the right timing, and everybody laughs? That’s when you’ll be rewarded.

Why did I post a moderately amusing but not terribly funny Renee Zellweger zinger? Simple. I wanted to be rewteeted. I wanted “likes” and comments that would validate how funny I was. Not because my comment was all that hilarious, but it was the first decent joke I came up with, hastily written and thoughtlessly posted. I could have come up with a dozen more.

We get a high off of positive reinforcement, but that’s hard to come by. More often, we’re told we’re too late, not quite there, not enough. We aren’t often rewarded for the good things we do, except internally. Break no laws, and nothing happens; break a law and go to jail. Retweets and “likes” of a disparaging remark are a fleeting, virtual version of positive reinforcement that might briefly feel like the real thing. But the high we get off that is nothing compared to the low feeling the person it’s about will experience when they read it.

I’d rather be retweeted for something positive, but that doesn’t happen as often. I’ve written several movie reviews and articles over the past week, and more often than not, they’re ignored. Like everyone else, I crave good feedback on what I do, especially when I put a lot of effort forth. But I don’t always get it. And it leaves this empty void in me that wants to be filled.

Then Renee Zellweger shows up to the Women in Hollywood gala, and it’s all over my Facebook. She’s trending. It’s a hashtag. I know, as we all know, that taking a quick swipe at a celebrity who has the bad luck to be the day’s top story is the fastest way to gain notoriety in social media — some favorites and likes, a few retweets, perhaps a new follower.

Or, more likely, that tweet still goes ignored, as most tweets do when you’re not a social media “presence.” Like a snide comment mumbled under your breath when everyone around you is pointing and laughing at someone else, it just vanishes into the ether, unheard. But the promise that someone might hear it, and love it, and repeat to everyone how hilarious you are, is reason enough to mutter it at all.

We don’t think celebrities will hear us way down here amongst the masses. And if they do, we don’t believe they’ll care. But it can’t ever feel good to read something mean that people are saying about you, and when you put that comment in public, there is a chance they will. And so, when we post a negative comment about somebody famous, we should always think about that moment. Image them stumbling upon it and guess at what their reaction would be. Can they take it? Is it worth it? If so, click “Post.”

Renee Zellweger showed up to school wearing something different today. And because she’s been out of town for a while, she made an easy target. I briefly joined everyone else in roasting her, but then I stopped to think about it. My deleted tweet will hardly be the last jab I take at a celebrity, and I think that’s okay, because there’s a time and a place to make fun of people. You have to put it in context.

But I decided that making fun of the way Renee Zellweger looked on that red carpet last night was neither the time nor place to be cruel to her. She’s far from one of Hollywood’s top starlets these days, and she was at an event celebrating women that ended up doing just the opposite for her. Renee Zellweger probably missed thousands or millions of horrible individual comments made about her, but I’ll sure as hell bet she got the gist. Thanks to us all, Renee Zellweger is probably having a pretty bad day today.

So, in the unlikely event that she does stumble upon my not-so-popular Twitter, or Facebook, or blog, I offer up an apology. Renee Zellweger, I’m sorry.

*

Marriage is hard work. Ben Affleck said it, rather awkwardly, in his Oscars acceptance speech for Argo, allowing us to wonder what hells he and Jennifer Garner had been through that caused him to profess such a sentiment in front of millions of viewers. And this year, Affleck stars in Gone Girl, a movie that has prompted a lot of discussion about men, women, and the holy matrimony between the two.

Marriage has been the topic of many movies this year, from one of the first films centered on a same-sex married couple (Love Is Strange) and the unconventional twist in marriage counseling found in The One I Love. Of course, marriage is such a broad topic that I’m sure every year has numerous movies exploring the subject, yet with Gone Girl bringing the topic directly to the center of the cultural conversation at the moment, it’s hard not to think of other new releases in similar terms.

With a title like The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, you’d be forgiven for confusing Ned Benson’s new two-hander with a thriller about a missing wife, something akin to Gone Girl. The films have some surface similarities — both tell stories very distinctly from both spouses’ perspectives, with subtle (or not-so-subtle) shifts in how similar events are remembered from both sides. And both feature married people taking drastic actions to get out of their relationships.

But Eleanor Rigby’s disappearance is more metaphorical than Amy Dunne’s. In the opening scenes of her segment in the two-part movie, Eleanor takes a flying leap off a bridge, hoping to end her life. It doesn’t work — or else her chapter of this story would be a really short movie — but it does signal a sort of rebirth, as she is given the chance to discover who she is outside of her marriage, something she hasn’t considered in a while.The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby is two movies — one from Eleanor’s perspective, the other following her husband Conor. (There’s also a studio-mandated spliced-together version that is to be avoided.) The word on the street is that Her is the more successful half of the film, and because I love Jessica Chastain so dearly, that is the segment I saw and the one I am reviewing. The segment follows Eleanor Rigby (named after the Beatles tune) as she reconnects with her parents (Isabelle Hupert and William Hurt) and little sister Katy (Jess Weixler), starts up some college classes, and tries to avoid her ex-husband and any mention of the recent tragedy in their past. There are a few flashbacks to happier times with Conor, including a perfectly lovely sequence in which the two dance by car headlights to OMD’s “So In Love.”

The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Her is a character piece with no plot to speak of. The film takes its time before cluing us in on what precisely happened to dampen Eleanor’s spirits so thoroughly. Is this just a rough patch in the marriage she’s overreacting to, or is her grief valid? Without a compelling and watchable actress like Chastain at the center, the film would probably be unbearable. Instead, it’s a pleasure just to watch Eleanor interact with the people around her, including Professor Friedman (Viola Davis), who plays an entirely different kind of professor on ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder. Here, she’s a lot more grounded, and a lot less hammy, and she reminds us why she’s a two-time Oscar nominee, even if her part here isn’t flashy enough to warrant such acclaim.

A less conventional look at a strained marriage comes in the Swedish film Force Majeur, which follows a happy family’s ski vacation as it goes from idyllic to fraught with tension and several moments of peril, turning potentially deadly several times. If that makes this sound like a thriller, it isn’t. At all. It’s a comedy. And yet, there are moments of genuine dread, as we can’t entirely rule out the death of some or all of these characters. It also features some absolutely gorgeous mountain cinematography, and the rare pleasure of seeing skiing depicted in a film. (This must’ve been a bitch to shoot.)

In Force Majeur, Tomas and Ebba seem to have an ideal marriage, and their kids Vera and Harry are cute as can be (though occasionally quite bratty). Then, during lunch one day, it suddenly appears that the entire family is about to be swallowed by an avalanche. Tomas and Ebba have extreme opposite reactions, and afterward, can’t agree on what really happened. Initially, it seems the couple can brush off the incident as a briefly terrifying situation that they can now look back on with humor, but that avalanche ends up lingering in both of their minds and causing major repercussions in their relationship.

I’m being rather vague because Force Majeur is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. The film is completely unpredictable, taking us in several unforeseen directions, some of which pan out better than others. A newer couple, Mats and Fanni, end up getting dragged into the drama and finding their own bond tested by what happened to their friends. It’s a funny detour that gets dragged out a bit too long, as many scenes in Force Majeur do — much of the film unfolds in unbroken takes with dialogue that feels improvisational, and while that gives many scenes a fresh and funny energy, it also sometimes drags and makes the film feel overlong.

Tomas and Ebba’s initial disagreement over the incident takes place in front of a different couple (it’s a surprise to see Brady Corbet pop up in a Swedish film), in a terrifically awkward encounter. But Ebba’s later conversation with that woman about her open marriage feels somewhat off-topic, the necessity of its inclusion here questionable when there’s so much more to delve into. There’s no one scene in particular that shouldn’t be here, but some trimming might have helped the pacing to match the offbeat energy of much of the humor. The film is basically a weird black comedy, but it’s paced like a contemplative drama, which doesn’t always work in its favor.

Force Majeur ends on a curious note — I’m not sure what to make of it, or of the climactic-seeming scene that comes before it involving a possible ski injury and the family’s separation in blinding whiteness. The movie that gives us a lot to think about, along with the most epically awkward scene of crying I’ve probably ever seen. It’s not often that you see a movie that is this funny, and still makes you wonder if the entire cast is going to be killed in a horrible bus accident at the end.

I may not have loved every second of Force Majeur, thanks mostly to the languid pacing, but I did love the offbeat tone of the movie, and I have nothing but praise for the way it bucks tradition and presents us with a totally unpredictable and surprising narrative. The cast is uniformly spectacular, from the pathetically emasculated Johannes Kuhnke as Tomas and especially Lisa Loven Kongsli as the strong-willed, woefully betrayed Ebba. As several characters in Force Majeur state, you never know how you’ll react in a crisis until you’re right in the thick of it, and a good many of us might be disappointed to discover our own lack of bravado when the moment comes.

Not everyone can be a hero, and in both The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby and Force Majeur, it is the female half of the central married couple that must bear the brunt of the brooding and figure out how to soldier on without the support of her man. Structure aside, Eleanor Rigby is a very conventional indie drama, while Force Majeur is a strange and original dark comedy. Both are anchored by terrific female performances and, like Gone Girl, deal with wives let down by their husband’s inferiority, with plenty to say about the realities of marriage once the honeymoon is over.

*

Comedy is hard. I know that to be true. It’s hard to make, and in the case of network sitcoms, it can also be extremely hard to sit through. There are few things more awkward than watching someone try to be funny and fail miserably at it, especially when a canned laugh track subs in for any actual human amusement.

I don’t generally expect a whole lot out of network comedies these days. Last season brought us The Goldbergs, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the unjustly canceled Trophy Wife, all of which did the trick for me.

What has this fall added to the mix? This season, I’m basically adding shows to my DVR all willy-nilly and dropping them when I get bored. Occasionally, I give up after one episode, and sometimes it’s hard to even get that far. My second Fall TV Roulette is focusing on the comedies — or at least, the shows that are trying to be funny. (Actual comedy not guaranteed.)

MULANEY

Well, this was just painful. Mulaney is clearly modeled after Seinfeld — a comedian whose show is his last name, who does bits of standup to begin the episode, and who can’t really act whatsoever. And that may have worked out okay for Jerry, but I think things will be different this time.

Since I’m sure this is being covered elsewhere, I’m not going to be the one to claim that the show is passively homophobic and actively misogynistic (as is the standup work of many male comedians). I can’t imagine many women will find this show funny, unless they hate themselves and/or each other. Some men may find it amusing in a brash, fratty sort of way, but anyone with a taste for humor more sophisticated than can be found in an average episode of Family Guy will be sorely disappointed.

What sort of hilarity ensues in the pilot? Well, none, but here are the attempts: a prostrate exam! A crazy ex-girlfriend insisting that she is not crazy! A black man named Motif who refers to women as “bitches”! Martin Short as a delusional, washed up TV star! Whereas most shows seem to bend over backwards to feel fresh, it’s kind of like this show was conceived specifically to play with the most cliche stereotypes available. None of this would be so bad if the show were actually funny, but… no.A TO Z

A To Z is a lot like Manhattan Love Story, but not as charming. I have nothing against the leads, except that Christina Milioti is exactly like Jennifer Love Hewitt in every way, and that’s rarely a good thing (unless you’re watching I Know What You Did Last Summer or Heartbreakers). The high concept of the show is maybe a little too high concept, as we are explicitly informed exactly how long these two will be together (in true rip-off-of-500-Days-Of-Summer fashion), and presumably will follow them through 26 episodes until they get to their breakup at Z. (Every episode is titled after a letter, which makes me wonder what “Z” word goes along with breakups.) However, I also doubt the show will leave us on such a sour note, so they’ll probably get back together in episode AA, or whatever. (Maybe in an episode titled “AA Is For Alcoholics Anonymous” after both have turned to drinking to cope with their grief? I’m overthinking it and I should be paid for this.)

Too much in A To Z is just too hard to buy. The leads have middling chemistry, the supporting cast is cartoonish, and it’s trying too hard to incorporate online dating and social media. A few moments amused me mildly, but I’m not at all invested in this couple, nor do they have any real obstacles in their way when it comes to getting together, which makes me think this show will have trouble even getting from A To D and holding our interest. Literally, the show could end after they kiss in the first episode. (I guess a show called From A To A isn’t quite as marketable.)

A To Z is not an aggressively bad show, and not one I wish to meet a swift cancellation, because it’s not as misbegottenly grating as Selfie or Mulaney. However, I am skeptical that A To Z will ever actually make it to Z, which seems a looong time from now for a show with so little going on. It’s more like from A To Zzzzzz... (I can’t be the first to make that joke… can I?) There’s some chatter on the internet that A To Z trumps Manhattan Love Story, but take it from me — that is blatantly wrong.

MARRY ME

Casey Wilson is funny. Ken Marino is funny. David Caspe, who created Happy Endings and then Marry Me, is funny. And Marry Me is sort of funny. The pilot follows Annie and Jake, a couple that experience a series of mishaps while attempting to get engaged — his proposal results in Annie accidentally insulting their friends and loved ones to their faces, her proposal results in Jake getting fired, and so on. In addition to the winning leads, there are some talented supporting players including John Gemberling and Sarah Wright doing riffs on the standard his-and-hers BFF, plus Tim Meadows and Dan Bucatinsky as Annie’s gay dads (diversity!).

None of that can save this show from a stereotype so well-worn it’s all but completely eroded. How many shrill, desperate-to-marry romcom heroines must we suffer through? Isn’t it time to put this archetype to bed for a little while? Weddings are a very tired romantic comedy cliche, so it’s rather difficult to imagine what ABC was thinking when they greenlit a whole show leading up to the big event. I doubt there’s much comedy to be mined from such staples as cake-tasting and flower-choosing anymore, and it’s a little sad to watch Marino and Wilson pan for gold in this way. Marry Me isn’t a bad show, but the subject matter feels beneath the smart writing and talented performers.

JANE THE VIRGIN

Jane The Virgin has an original and rather wacky premise, thanks in large part because it’s based on a telenovela. It’s not technically a sitcom, given that it’s an hour long rather than a swift half-hour, but it definitely plays up the comedy and tamps down the drama of Jane’s precarious predicament, which is that she is accidentally inseminated by a gynecologist when getting a pap smear. As you may have guessed from the title, Jane is a virgin, so this is particularly problematic for her — as well as her boyfriend and her religious grandmother, who sees this as a second coming of the immaculate conception.

Jane The Virgin has a lot going for it. As crazy as the central premise is, as it unfolds here, it’s actually fairly believable, and the characters similarly react in relatable ways. It’s particularly interesting to see how Jane’s boyfriend Michael reacts to this unconventional news. Gina Rodriguez is completely charming in the lead role, and there’s a lot going on with the supporting players (in true soap opera fashion) that suggests fun to come. I’m not sure Jane The Virgin has me hooked yet, but it’s nice to see the CW getting in on 2014’s diversity action, and yet in this show, the mostly Latino cast feels incidental rather than crucial to the premise.

MANHATTAN LOVE STORY

I praised this one in my first Fall TV Roulette. In fact, I called it my favorite new show of the bunch. I still like it, but I have to say that the premise is stretching itself a little thin. Analeigh Tipton and Jake McDorman are still talented leads with solid chemistry, but what’s with all the romantic comedy shows this season that have just waiting for the inevitable conclusion? Marry Me strings us along to prepare for nuptials, A To Z shows us every step on the road from meet-cute to breakup, and Manhattan Love Story pretty much guarantees that its leads will get together, and they already are sort of together, but they can’t be too together or there wouldn’t be a show, would there?

Episode 3 had Dana unwittingly bringing a gay man as her date to a dinner party, while Episode 4 saw bad oysters ruining a night of potential sexytime. Neither of these storylines felt particularly novel, and I’m not sure the series has quite figured out how to integrate its supporting actors, either. (In particular, the talented Chloe Wepper as Peter’s sister feels particularly underused.) I’m sticking with Manhattan Love Story, for now, but I do hope that the writing freshens up a bit.  CRISTELA

And the winner for “Most Improved” in the field of Diversity is… ABC! The network that brought us thae likable African-American family in Blackish has a different sitcom aiming, this time, for the Latino audience, and the formula is pretty similar. A crusty grandparent who constantly tries to get the younger generation to remember their roots heads up a colorful multigenerational household, with a spicy comedian mugging at the center. In this case, the mugging comes from the affable Cristela Alonzo, a welcome comedic presence on the fall lineup. Alonzo brings an energy and enthusiasm to the sitcom format that you’ll rarely see from more seasoned comedians — she looks really happy to be here.

Cristela features its star as a sassy law student crashing with her sister’s family while she slaves away at a no-pay internship, a strong and believable concept that makes a rare move: a realistic economic situation on a sitcom. The working-class angle of Cristela reminds me most of Roseanne, which is never a bad thing. There are many well-worn sitcom staples invoked here — the annoying neighbor with a crush on the lead, the disapproving mother, the jerky boss. Most of these are handled with just the right dose of ingenuity so that they don’t feel too stale. Cristela’s possible romance, possible just-friendship with co-intern Josh (Andrew Leeds) is, surprisingly, one of the strong suits thanks to their chemistry, and Cristela doesn’t overplay the comparisons between its star and the over-privileged white boss’ daughter (Justine Lupe).

Cristela is perhaps a touch too sitcommy for some, and it does take a bit of patience to suffer through the laugh track, but I have to say the appealing cast and overall goodwill of seeing something like this on network primetime makes it a hopeful in my book. I’m giving it a few more episodes.BLACKISH

And speaking of Blackish. The winner for “Most Improved Show After One Week” is… this one.

Do the writers of Blackish read my blog? No. But it kind of seems like they did, since the second episode was so much better than the first. In my initial review, I asked for more from Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross) and less from Anthony Anderson’s Andre, and in the series’ second installment, Rainbow gets a big, hilarious subplot in which she is so caught up in her own head about being the perfect mom, she completely tunes out what her kids are saying. The episode’s A story is about Andre walking in on his young son masturbating and the uncomfortable father-son bond that ensues, a storyline not predicated on the family’s race. The third episode struck a cleaner balance between the two, with just enough race-related humor and just enough that wasn’t.

Blackish is going strong, though Laurence Fishburne has yet to do much (maybe he’s just collecting an easy paycheck and prefers to sit in the background reading the newspaper). Tracee Ellis Ross is still the series’ MVP, and fortunately has been allowed to get as wild and wacky as Anthony Anderson, rather than relegated to the usual naggy sitcom wife role. The show’s race-specific humor now feels sprinkled in when appropriate rather than forced down our throats, as it was in the pilot. Blackish is a good reason to give a show at least one post-pilot viewing, just to be sure. As of now, it’s my favorite new sitcom of the fall (sorry, Manhattan Love Story, but you’re lagging).

*

The media is sleazy. We all know this. Films like Network and To Die For have highlighted the unscrupulous methodology of the news media in a way that, if you didn’t look carefully enough, might even feel like celebration. We hate the media, but we love to hate it. The talking heads, the sensational headlines, false urgency and faux concern. The movies that bring us behind the scenes of this industry tend to be splashy, morally bankrupt, and dripping with satire.

And now, here is their 21st century cousin, Nightcrawler, to do it all over again.

In 2014, it’s almost refreshing to see a movie about journalism that doesn’t also try to include the rapidly-changing world of social media and internet news. Nightcrawler is almost old-fashioned in that way. It is explicitly about the news we watch on our TV screens, when we wake up in the morning and before we go to sleep at night. For decades now, that’s been the primary delivery method of our daily digest of current events. These days, people are more likely to fire up a search engine than turn on their TV when a major story breaks, but Nightcrawler is not about momentous events. It’s about the daily news, the evening news, the nightly news — segments that need to be filled with content whether anything happened or not. It’s no different than any other programming. The advertisers have paid for their spots, the anchors are ready and waiting, you’re on in 3, 2…

Something has to fill those gaps. Does it have to be true? Not necessarily, as long as it can be sold as true. And if it’s on the news, people tend to believe just about anything.In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom doesn’t start out wanting to be a part of the news media. All he wants is a job — any job — and, like many Americans, he’s having a hard time getting one. Lou, however, is willing to sink to much lower depths than many of his unemployed brethren; his try-hard affect and vacant stare suggest either autism or sociopathy, perhaps both. Lou repeats motivational go-getter sound bites he’s probably picked up from self-help gurus and TED talks. When he happens upon a horrific accident and witnesses Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) running onto the scene with a camera to capture the carnage, he suddenly gets the bright idea to give Loder some competition. Lou feels nothing for the victim of this car accident, nor any of the other hurt or dead people he’ll come across in this line of work. He feels nothing for his co-workers, either. He feels nothing. Lou seems to realize that in today’s economy, sensitivity will get you nowhere. In fact, it’s liable to hold you back. All that matters is success.

Lou buys a police scanner and hand-me-down camcorder. It’s far from state of the art, but content trumps quality in broadcast news. Within a few hours of deciding on his new line of work, Lou is already hiring a gopher lackey, Rick (Riz Ahmed), who will work for next to nothing, and he’s talking up his company like he’s owned it for years. (“Fake it until you make it” is clearly one of Lou’s many mantras.)

Lou also strikes up a compelling work relationship with Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a former on-air talent who is now calling shots behind the cameras at KTLA, which we’re told has the lowest-rated news in Los Angeles. That means Nina is hungry for hits, and her new protegee is more than willing to bend the rules, ignore basic ethics, and even commit major crimes in order to get the top story. Nina matter-of-factly lays out what kind of news her viewers will tune in for — primarily, stories about well-to-do white people being affected by urban crime. The bloodier than better.The ruthlessness of the people who run the news media is hardly a novel concept. The fresh angle here is how Nightcrawler marries it with Lou, the entrepreneurial sociopath, an empty shell of a man spitting pearls of wisdom about the American dream. Nina is a direct descendent of the power-drunk Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) in Network, the carnivorous Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) in To Die For. In a word, she’s a bitch, but not necessarily because she was born that way. We sense that a lack of options shaped the woman we see today.

Lou Bloom’s cinematic cousins are less obvious and more numerous. You could go back to Taxi Driver for a story about a Caucasian misanthrope with no real place in American society until he endeavors to carve out a dangerous place for himself. There are more aesthetic echoes of the more recent Drive. (And all three films have something else in common: a lot of driving.)

Nightcrawler also has a lot in common with The Wolf Of Wall Street, my favorite film of last year, which some condemned for celebrating rather than condemning the hedonistic lifestyle of the men (and some women) who laughed all the way to the bank while fucking a good many Americans over. The same people may make similarly stupid claims about this movie, which isn’t interested in meting out a punishment that real life itself wouldn’t deliver. Like Jordan Belfort, Lou Bloom is a self-made man, but he is only allowed to succeed because he lives in a world that values money and image and grabby headlines, and looks the other way at greed and injustice. In both Nightcrawler and The Wolf Of Wall Street, there are law enforcing characters who represent a more idealistic school of thought. (In Scorsese’s film, it’s Kyle Chandler’s FBI agent, and here it’s Michael Hyatt’s Detective Fronteiri.) But there’s not a lot of time for justice when the clock is ticking and you’re on in 5.

Neither Lou nor Nina has any sympathy for the victims at the center of the crimes they’re exploiting, but they’re also struggling against a system that will chew them up and spit them out if they fail at their jobs. If they don’t do the dirty deeds, someone else will beat them to the story. In this movie, American capitalism is, perhaps, an even more vicious beast than the American media; they’re two mutant titans battling it out, and human beings are just little specks on the ground, running and screaming, trying to stay out of the way of the debris. No one in Nightcrawler is all-powerful, and no one does evil for evil’s sake. It’s all to get ahead, stay afloat, move forward. At one point, Lou stumbles upon a fresh crime scene that appears to be an innocent white family gunned down by Latino monsters. Eventually, we learn that this, too, was just a bit of bad business.

Nightcrawler was written and directed by Dan Gilroy, brother of Tony Gilroy, who brought us Michael Clayton. Like that movie, Nightcrawler has the bones of the standard studio thriller, but its flesh is something else entirely. These films elevate the standard genre material and dare to dig a little deeper into their characters, and into our souls. This is a movie that is saying something, not so much with words as with actions. Jake Gyllenhaal lost a significant amount of weight to portray the slimy-looking Lou Bloom, and he’s completely convincing and, in several moments, utterly creepy. We’re never quite sure what Lou is capable of, and we don’t put it past him to snap at any moment. (He could, maybe, be American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman’s less refined kid brother.) It’s one of Gyllenhaal’s best performances to date, and only one of several stellar showings from him recently. Enemy and Prisoners had extraordinarily impressive turns, but this one is Oscar-worthy. (Whether or not it actually nabs any attention from the Academy, we’ll see.)

It’s also a delight to see Rene Russo given plenty to do as the hard-edged but more vulnerable Nina, especially in one killer scene between these partners in crime set in a Mexican restaurant. Movies these days need more Rene Russo, especially if she’s feisty. For a film that seems to say so much about the American economy today, it’s surprising to note that Nightcrawler has only four characters of much significance, and focuses primarily on just two (though Rick becomes important in the film’s final act). Though it may not measure up entirely to the recent masterpieces of some of today’s finest auteurs, Nightcrawler has as much to say about Our Times as The Wolf Of Wall Street and The Social Network, as well a more recent David Fincher film: Gone Girl, which also hatefully and deliciously lambasted the American news media.

Nightcrawler will leave you disturbed about the news you watch and the country you live in, a place where a man like Lou Bloom can thrive at the expense of anyone who stands in his way. But that is the country we live in, a place where Jordan Belfort and Patrick Bateman and Mark Zuckerburg and Lou Bloom are calling the shots. Nightcrawler may be a work of fiction, but it rings truer than much of the “news” we’re fed. Because the news is brought to us by people, and all people have an agenda. Usually, that agenda is making money; other times, it’s just telling us the juiciest possible story.

*

(Throwback Thursday: A version of the following first appeared in INsite Boston in 2006. Forgive the dated references — including the very notion of sweeps overall, which is all but dead thanks to year-round programming and the diminishing importance of live ratings. The overall content here is still relevant! In fact, it’s interesting that many of the new shows I discussed became TV behemoths that are still discussed to this day. This is sort of a fun look back at a moment in time that may or may not have been a milestone.)

Life for a person with high-quality tastes can be hard. Because high quality isn’t always available! With the silver screen tarnished by an abnormally high suck factor this year, I recently found myself in need of an alternative to the late-summer doldrums of September and the horror schlock of October. I turned to television — that handy box that plays my DVDs for me, and is rumored to show live programming.

It had been a good long while since I caught up with TV. Perhaps the biggest losers and extreme makeovers of reality television scared me off… but never mind. All it took was one primetime gander and I was back like the skinny black pant — though in my absence, things have changed. Whereas TV was once a simple, even mindless medium, the stakes have been raised thanks to TiVo, iTunes, the rise of original cable programming, and possibly the lunar cycle. How else to explain the state of chaos on the tube these days?

Take a tally of the madness this season alone:

ABC scheduled The Nine at 10. NBC shows Friday Night Lights on Tuesday. CBS placed The Amazing Race, Cold Case, and Without A Trace on the same night and begat Must Rhyme TV. The WB and UPN birthed their lovechild The CW, which resuscitated 7th Heaven in spite of last May’s series finale. (I guess Somebody up there likes it!) And hark! What’s that sound o’er yonder? Why, it’s the good people at Fox drumming their fingers on their desks, killing time until the next American Idol. (Some things haven’t changed.) Now the networks gear up for November sweeps — luring viewers with stunts, guest stars, long-awaited couplings, and perhaps the demise of a beloved supporting player or two — all to woo advertisers, as if there were any shortage of commercials as is. (Is anyone else about to throttle poor, exploited Audrey Hepburn?) Yet I have to wonder how networks plan to top themselves in a season that has already held so many pleasant surprises.

The season’s champ in Best New Content Overall comes as a partial revelation — NBC has been in desperate need of buzz that rivals ABC’s (which itself was flailing just a few seasons back). The overbearing, pretentious promotion of Heroes would almost surely herald a belly-flop — so self-gratifying, you’d think the network had assembled an actual clan of superhumans — but the enthralling, exhilarating Heroes actually lives up to the hype. Kudos! Everybody’s watching your show! Now please shut up about it.

Perhaps to counterbalance the pomposity of Heroes, the Peacock mocked itself outright by gobbling up not one, but two heaping helpings of humble pie. I once thought The West Wing was so frenzied ‘cause it took place at the White House. Now, I’m pretty sure Aaron Sorkin would make shoe shopping look as stressful as imminent nuclear attack. For comedians, the folks at Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip are curiously gallant and tightly wound, marching in and out of scenes. Never before has “the huff” been such a popular mode of transportation. Even the skits center around controversies in politics and religion! As good as he is with drama, poor Sorkin is incapable of dumbing himself down enough to write what passes for sketch comedy these days.Happily, Tina Fey isn’t. Thus, 30 Rock feels more at peace with its SNL-inspired roots. The show is wildly uneven but certainly funny, making 30 Rock a perfect network-skewering supplement to Studio 60. And lest you forget which is the sitcom and which is the drama, remember each show contains its running time in the title. (Like I said — madness!)

On the off chance I find myself at a water cooler, I deemed it best to check out the ABC shows everyone’s nattering on about. Desperate Housewives remains an amusing trifle, but I found mega-hit Grey’s Anatomy overwrought and uninspired. At this point, I think shows are set in hospitals just to save on the wardrobe budget. I must also confess that, despite my best efforts, I don’t get Lost, which ironically puts me on an island with about thirteen other people in the world in terms of my pop culture relevance. The unlikely breakout hit Ugly Betty, on the other hand, managed to charm me even though it is often as awkward and mismatched as the Latina fea herself.

But nothing could have prepared me for the jolt I got upon viewing CBS’ Monday night sitcoms. I found them disturbingly watchable… funny, even. How I Met Your Mother pairs witty one-liners with quasi-believable characters worth investing in — no small feat in the same genre that produces Two And A Half Men (a CBS comedy I don’t recommend). The same can’t be said for The Class, which is as staged as they come. Maybe the producers are trapped in a hatch somewhere, forced to push the laugh track button every ten seconds whether the gags are funny or not. That said, approximately one in three jokes amuses, resulting in a respectable two chuckles per minute, or roughly 44 titters per half-hour episode.

Of course, TV’s biggest bombshells are too outrageous to find anywhere but cable. After an over-the-top third season, Nip/Tuck has undergone a much-needed facelift, retaining its trademark shock value while ensuring that this year, everyone who should have genitals does have genitals. (Presumably.) And if that doesn’t quite blow you away, would you believe a show called Battlestar Galactica on the Sci Fi network is brilliantly written, superbly acted, and one of TV’s finest?

You may not. But in this day and age, when even the exhumed corpse of Audrey Hepburn can be called upon to siren the return of 50s fashion… isn’t anything possible?

*