Last year, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity blew us away. Not everyone loved the film, but most could agree that it was dazzling to behold on the big screen (especially in 3D) and one giant leap forward in cinema on a technical level. It was a thrill ride as much as a movie, anchored by one single magnetic performance by Sandra Bullock. Gravity went on to become one of two frontrunners for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, winning Best Director for Cuaron and conceding the top prize to 12 Years A Slave, quite rightly. Gravity was an experience, but 12 Years A Slave was a film.

At 91 minutes, Gravity was lean and mean, basically nonstop action from start to finish. Interstellar is not so concise. That should come as no surprise — Christopher Nolan has not made a film that clocks in at under two hours since 2002’s Insomnia. Most of his recent films have hovered around the two-and-a-half-hour mark, while The Dark Knight Rises was even longer. Interstellar is his longest yet, coming in at 169 minutes (nearly three hours). It doesn’t feel that long, though. Nolan’s films are propulsive, even if they wobble a little getting wherever they’re trying to go.

Paramount has done a good job of not spoiling Interstellar, to the extent that many people still don’t know what it’s about. It’s probably better that way, because it’s more fun to watch a movie unfold having no idea where it’s headed, except a reasonable assumption that at some point, it’s headed into space. To preserve that experience, I will be similarly vague in setting this up.The film stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts named Cooper (no first name that we know of) and Amelia Brand, respectively; it also stars Jessica Chastain, Wes Bentley, John Lithgow, and Michael Caine, as other humans. It takes place in the future, following a rough patch in our planet’s history. A number of people seem to have died of famine, but we don’t know how many. Technology has not advanced. Food is harder to come by. It’s hard to tell what the rest of the world is like, since we’re bound to what seems like a Kansas farmhouse in the 1990s. (I don’t know why it seems like the 90s. Maybe because it reminded me of Twister.) Only a few tech advancement seem even as advanced as 2014, let alone many years into the future. (It seems Apple did not survive the collapse.)

I’m all for the less-is-more explanation of what went wrong on the planet, except for a bit where Murphy Cooper’s teachers try to tell her that space exploration never happened. (Cute meta nod to Kubrick’s 2001, though.) It seems impossible that enough time has passed to allow that theory to be introduced into the public school system, especially if there are still living astronauts amongst the population. (Cooper himself is one, we are told.) In moments like this, we wish for either more or less world-building to explain the state of mind these people are in. (Also inexplicable: why NASA decided to relocate to an underground Kansas-like location.)

I’m also fairly certain that there is a character named Cooper Cooper in this film, but I can’t say how without spoiling a major plot point.Interstellar packs an emotional wallop and has a few killer concepts up its sleeve. As often happens with Nolan, his reach exceeds his grasp. As the filmmaker who is probably least likely to be told “no” in Hollywood at the moment, the screenplay (co-written with his brother Jonathan) could have used a little more scrutiny before production. There are a number of leaps in logic one must take in order to get on board with Interstellar. Some are easier to ride along with than others. Though the fate of all mankind depends on the success of the crew’s mission, Cooper and Brand seem to be winging it an awful lot of the time, making decisions on the fly that you’d think they would have discussed before shuttling off to Saturn. Many characters are scientists and engineers and the like, but actual scientists and engineers would probably go insane trying to make sense of this film. This might be why a lot of the science exposition seems to be mumbled or swiftly cut away from. Nolan definitely doesn’t care about the actual science; his approach to science exposition is basically: “Mumble mumble relativity… look over here! Pretty!”

Interstellar owes plenty to previous science fiction entries ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Signs, but it is closest in spirit to 1997’s Contact, which McConaughey also starred in. Like that Robert Zemeckis film, it explores the love between a father and a daughter stretching from infinity to beyond, while also giving us some time to ponder our small place in a vast universe. For all its wanderings in the cosmos, like Contact, Interstellar brings space exploration down to Earth. Space is a wondrous thing in all its majesty, but the human heart even moreso, as Nolan tells it. Parts of Interstellar play in the same mind-bending surreal realm as Nolan’s Inception, and you probably won’t want to think too hard about them. This is not a movie to think about, but to feel.That might comes as a surprise to some, since Nolan’s movies tend to be more cerebral than moving. (Or faux-cerebral, at least.) The performances are strong across the board, and why wouldn’t they be? Nolan has cast various Oscar winners and nominees, including many recognizable faces in relatively small roles, plus at least one surprise movie star. McConaughey could find himself with an Oscar nod if the competition isn’t too fierce. He’s wonderfully emotive, and he’s giving quite a lot of emoting to do. (Hathaway and Chastain are good, but their characters may be a tad too thin to warrant awards buzz.) The special effects are impressive because they don’t often look like special effects. The score by Hans Zimmer is exactly as bombastic as you’d expect it to be.

Like The Dark Knight Rises and Inception, Interstellar has more supporting characters than it knows what to do with, and we get little sense of who these people are or even what their function in this world is. Character remains one of his weaknesses. Interstellar feels like a lot of Nolan films do: like a really superb outline that somehow made it into production without ever being a screenplay. The broad beats are here, but the details aren’t, quite, and neither are the answers to my many questions. His stories defy the laws of logic the same way a wormhole defies time itself; instead of connecting Point A to Point B, he just bends the rules and smooshes them together. Nolan is essentially thrusting us all into a wormhole, saying: “It doesn’t matter how you get there, if you do indeed get there! Just go with it, okay?”

Okay, Christopher Nolan. Interstellar is an epic with big ideas and bigger emotions. It’s a thoroughly entertaining journey through space. Is it remotely coherent? Not really. I still admire Nolan for being one of few filmmakers who can transform an original idea into a blockbuster. We need more movies like Interstellar, and more movies like Interstellar need more input from someone who knows how to write a screenplay.

Gravity wasn’t a perfect film, either, but it was ambitious in all the right ways, while the actual story couldn’t have been simpler. It was, essentially, one character versus tremendous odds, and we followed her singularly from the beginning of her ordeal to the end. That’s all. Interstellar wants to do what Gravity did, and also so much more — it has similar action scenes and a few familiar emotional beats, but it also cuts between life on Earth and what’s happening in the far reaches of space, including a lot of manufactured silliness taking place on the Cooper family farm that could’ve been a lot shorter. Many of the events that unfold are episodic, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though it seems Nolan is delivering the action beats mainly because a budget of this magnitude requires him to.

For all its vastness, Gravity kept things simple — one woman’s life at stake. That was it, but it was enough. Interstellar is the anti-Gravity — bloated and sprawling, caring little about the physical experience of being adrift in space, more caught up in earthbound drama. Cuaron’s take ends up being more grounded — which is ironic, given that much less of Gravity takes place on Earth. (Though, to be fair, even Gravity couldn’t resist one rather silly dream sequence indulgence.)

Gravity is a more cohesive film, one of 2013’s best. Interstellar is impressive, but far from a masterpiece. Like the universe itself, it is a beautiful mess. There is life inside it. It may be Nolan’s most moving film yet. It is not his best, but it is more personal and more alive than most blockbusters. This one is worth getting sucked into.

*

“Well, I’m mad. And this is about to get messy.”

Hello, hello, hello!

Note to everyone: The Comeback came back.

In 2005, The Comeback was ahead of its time. So ahead of its time, in fact, that no one in the present watched it. It took me only a matter of months to discover Valerie Cherish, but by then the series had already been unjustly canceled following its debut and final season.

The Comeback is the smartest TV series ever made about the entertainment industry. It gets every detail just right, even though those details are comically exaggerated. Room And Bored isn’t that much more awful than a real sitcom, reality TV isn’t that much more shameless than it really was in that era, and we all know plenty of real-life celebs who are as starved for attention as Valerie Cherish. The cancellation was a lame move on HBO’s part, severely lacking foresight, because in the coming months and years, so many of us discovered and adored Valerie Cherish. (Let’s face it: the gays especially.) She paved the way for awkward, borderline abrasive sitcom heroines like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon and Parks And Recreation’s Leslie Knope. When sprinkled into the right conversation, her catchphrases are still funny.

That’s why Valerie Cherish is coming back to TV in 2014, nearly a decade after she was given the axe. HBO is correcting a nine-year-old mistake and we, the Cherished, can finally reunite with Red and the gang. This kind of thing was practically unheard of back in 2005, but now we live in a world that occasionally resurrects the long-dead corpses of our old favorites — Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, and now The Comeback. The risk, of course, is that some of the magic will be gone. The new material won’t hold up to the old stuff, and furthermore, we like that old stuff so much that it’s impossible for the new stuff to come close. Is that the case with The Comeback?

I think my feelings about the all-new second season of The Comeback are best expressed in the following GIF.

Yep, The Comeback has still got it. I’m not sure yet if The Comeback is just as good as it ever was, because I’ve found that Season One only got better on subsequent viewings, and I only had time to watch this episode twice. (Yep, twice. And it was better the second time around.) Valerie’s schtick becomes funnier the more you see her resort to the same desperate maneuvers over and over — repetition is how so many of her signature lines became modern comedy classics. (Saying “Jane! “Jane!” while making your hands into a “T” is never not funny.) Will Season Two’s “Valerie Makes A Pilot” be as amusing with repeat viewings? Who can be sure?

What I do know is that the season premiere satisfied me, a longtime fan, and I’m not an easy critic. Valerie has evolved (slightly), now taking the reigns and filming a reality show of her own. (Actually, it’s a pilot presentation.) In the lengthy opening scene, we get a glimpse at what Val has been up to in the decade since The Comeback debuted. (I’m referring here to the show-within-a-show Comeback, not the HBO series, but I suppose either works.) She guest starred on a medical procedural, got bloodied in a low-quality student film, endorsed her own line of redhead hair products (because “why should blondes and brunettes get all the attention?”), and tried to warn a Real Housewife about the booby-trapped world of reality TV. In the Season One finale, Val learned that being a reality star meant sacrificing her dignity and laughing at herself, and in the years since, plenty of stars, on Bravo and elsewhere, have laughed all the way to the bank on such a philosophy.

As usual, a scene that might seem like a throwaway pseudo-celebrity cameo (Lisa Vanderpump) is actually a sly meta commentary thanks to The Comeback‘s shrewd writing. Valerie Cherish was a (fake) version of a Real Housewife before the housewives were (slightly less fake) versions of themselves. (Valerie supposedly walks off the set of the first season of Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills, though I am now salivating over an alternate reality where she was one of those crazy Bravo bitches.) Yet they, like the rest of the world, must not have been watching, or else they just don’t care. That’s the reality Valerie Cherish faces in 2014: looking like a vain, pompous asshole on television isn’t embarrassing anymore. It’s expected. In fact, it’s totally en vogue.

In the new season of The Comeback, many of our favorites are back, with more on the horizon. Marky-Mark (Damian Young) is still ever-so-patiently putting up with his wife’s shenanigans, and Mickey is of course always by her side (or running after her, panting, comb and hairspray at the ready). Season One surprised us by making the hot blonde starlet Juna a sweet and genuine person, one of Val’s few true allies, and just when it seems that Juna has become too big a star to hobknob with Val anymore, the episode’s sweetest scene arrives when Juna has her driver stop and rushes out of the limo to give her old co-star a big hug. (Meta alert: Malin Akerman is now the star of her own failed one-season wonder,  Trophy Wife, which also deserved a kinder fate.) Yes, I did get a little emotional at this moment.

The 2005 Comeback was meta in that it starred an actress known for a wacky supporting turn on a network sitcom (Friends) as the washed-up star of a network sitcom (I’m It). Valerie Cherish was never a doppelganger of Lisa Kudrow, because everyone knows Kudrow is one of the sharpest comediennes in the business, probably the most respectable of the Friends sextet. (That’s debatable, but she’avoided the pitfalls most of her co-stars fell into, and is there anyone out there who doesn’t like her?) But the 2014 Comeback is even more meta, as the two Room And Bored stars who went on to be stars really did go on to be stars (Malin Akerman and Kellen Lutz), while Valerie Cherish finds herself desired by, of all the unlikely brands in the industry… HBO. Not bad, for an actress whose two claims to fame are a monkey shitting on her head and vomiting in a cupcake costume. “It’s a dramedy. That’s a comedy without the laughs,” is one of this episode’s pointed meta quotes. (The Comeback certainly has laughs, but it’s not an out-and-out comedy, and the humor proved to be too uncomfortable for many viewers back when it debuted.)

(Also: there’s nothing more meta than the comeback of a show called The Comeback, but if I think too hard about it, my brain may explode.)

As in the Season One finale, Val tries to take a stand for herself and ends up getting lured back into the limelight instead. She walks into HBO, all huffy because Paulie G (Lance Barber) has written an unflattering script called Seeing Red about their inharmonious time together. (Technically, it’s about another writer’s inharmonious time on a sitcom with “Mallory Church,” but even Valerie isn’t fooled.) Valerie has a bone to pick with HBO just like Lisa Kudrow does (they cancelled her show!), but all is forgiven in “Valerie Makes A Pilot” when Valerie reads for the part and knocks it out of the park (Just as I assume all is forgiven now that The Comeback is back.)

Smartly, Paulie G’s script doesn’t sound at all like anything we heard behind the scenes of Room And Bored, because his point of view wouldn’t be anything like what we saw on The Comeback. And Paulie G has turned a new leaf, no longer the pompous writer asshole he used to be, instead a more “enlightened” (and sober) individual who constantly sucks on an e-cigarette. It would be easy fan service to make Paulie G the same jerk-off he was in Season One, and allow us to love to hate him again. But The Comeback doesn’t do that. It’s smarter than that, and it’s moving forward.

The Comeback is still The Comeback, updated for 2014 by having Val take a DIY approach to her own image rather than waiting for a network to package her themselves. (One of her crew is a USC student majoring in… Urban Planning.) That’s what’s happening with celebrities nowadays — many of them take their brand into their own hands, for better or worse. Otherwise, we’ve got cameos from reality TV stars (RuPaul, Andy Cohen), physical comedy (Val getting punched in the stomach by Chateau Marmont staff), and moments that blend awkward humor with pathos (Valerie auditioning to play herself, Valerie desperately joining the paparazzi shouting at Juna). As before, the show’s best lines are often so off-the-cuff, it’ll take a few viewings to really pick up on all the comedy. (“That’s right. Privacy’s gone, yeah,” is one of my new faves.) Val has (unfortunately) lost her annoying ringtone but is otherwise the same as ever.

I expect The Comeback to reach even higher heights as this season unfolds. The devil is in the details, and the details are spot on. Valerie Cherish has both evolved and stayed exactly the same, and that is also true of The Comeback. It’s a spoof of life in Hollywood, of the scripted TV business and the unscripted TV business (which are two different beasts entirely). It holds a mirror up to itself first and foremost, and in so doing, holds a mirror up to the rest of us. Most of us will never audition to play ourselves in an HBO project, but now more than ever we can relate to a thirst for approval from the masses. For every moment that Valerie is rubbing elbows with RuPaul, there’s an equally relatable moment when she’s fighting with an unintelligible voice in a parking garage, having lost her validated ticket. I’m not sure how this plays outside of Los Angeles, but if you live here, it’s basically a documentary.

I’m 100% on board with the new Comeback. It’s already hilarious, heartbreaking, and quotable, everything we could ask for. I’ll be back with further thoughts next week. But for now, I’ll leave you with one of this episode’s most memorable lines:

“I’m not just a real person. I’m an actress!”

Welcome back, Val.

“Valerie Makes A Pilot” A-

*

Do you want to cry like a baby?

Then boy, have I got a pair of films for you.

Julianne Moore is one of the most reliable actresses in Hollywood. I daresay she’s never turned in a bad, or even close to bad, performance, even when she’s in films that are beneath her talents. There was a period when she fell into that Kevin Spacey-esque rut of choosing prestige projects that seem like awards contenders, but end up flopping both creatively and commercially — projects like The Shipping News and Blindness, largely forgotten — which came after her heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But she was always perfectly good in them.

Her big breakout as a capital-A Actress was Boogie Nights, which earned her the first of four Oscar nominations. Shortly after, she was a dramatic dynamo in Magnolia, a comedic force to be reckoned with in The Big Lebowski, the only woman who could fill Jodie Foster’s shoes and not be laughed out of Hollywood in Hannibal, and a cog in unusual artistic experiments like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake. Her most recent Oscar nominations were both in 2002, as Best Supporting Actress in The Hours (even though she had more screen time than Best Actress winner Nicole Kidman) and Best Actress in Far From Heaven, which should have been a win.

It has been over a decade since Julianne Moore was an Academy Award nominee, which seems crazy when you look at her body of work over those years. Children Of Men. A Single Man. The Kids Are All Right. She was terrific in all of them. The Golden Globes and Emmys awarded her for playing Sarah Palin in Game Change, but the Academy has drastically undervalued her over the past decade. Recently, she’s been in quirky, small-scale fare like Don Jon and The English Teacher, though she reliably pops up in standard studio fare, too, turning in solid performances in everything from The Lost World: Jurassic Park to Non-Stop to the Carrie remake to the upcoming Hunger Games: Mockingjay. She lends such films a touch of class that they wouldn’t get from most other actresses. And though she’s been in a number of films that didn’t hit the mark, Moore herself always nails it.

My point is simple: it’s criminal that this woman does not possess an Oscar.But there’s good news: thanks to Still Alice, this very well might be Julianne Moore’s year to step up to the podium.

Still Alice is, in a sense, Oscar bait — which is not a knock against it. It’s based on a book by Lisa Genova, who I’m sure did not write the novel with a mind to win Julianne Moore an Academy Award. It’s just the kind of story that makes so much sense to adapt into a movie, and if you’re going to adapt this story into a movie, you’re going to want to cast someone like Julianne Moore, and if you cast Julianne Moore in anything, she’s going to be fucking phenomenal. So there it is.

Moore plays Dr. Alice Howland, a brilliant linguist with an equally brilliant life. She lives in New York City. She is married to John, a fellow doctor who also works at Columbia. (Moore reunites with her 30 Rock paramour Alec Baldwin here, in a very different romance.) She has three extremely good-looking children — Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish), and Lydia (a very solid Kristen Stewart, finally shedding her Twilight pall and allowed to be a real actress again). Her two eldest are on the fast-track to success, while Lydia has moved to Los Angeles to be an actress, which Alice doesn’t so much approve of. Still, Alice’s problems are distinctly upper-middle-class problems, the kind you can disparagingly hashtag — until she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.It starts slowly. In the first scene, Alice is briefly confused at 50th birthday dinner, but it’s the sort of mistake anyone might make. Then she gets disoriented on a jog. Certain words slip her mind. Alice sees a neurologist who suspects that she could have Alzheimer’s before he says it aloud. Further tests confirm that. Worse news: Alice’s form of Alzheimer’s is hereditary, meaning there is a high likelihood that she will pass it on to her children.

Still Alice is a fairly by-the-numbers affair about a person struggling with an affliction. It touches on how Alice’s diagnosis affects her family, the highs and lows of her health, a sense of impending doom at the ultimate outcome. It could be a movie about cancer, AIDS, or any other illness, except in Alice’s case, this is a death of the mind rather than the body. That somehow makes Alice’s illness even more terrifying, and particularly ironic, because Alice is a brilliant women who has devoted her entire life to enriching her brain. And though we expect our bodies to betray us at a certain age, most of us hope that we will still be “ourselves” when we reach such a point. We can lose our bodies and still feel whole, but if we lose our minds, who are we?

The direction by Richard Glatzer and West Westmoreland finds a few competent ways to share the experience of gradually losing one’s faculties without doing anything particularly innovative or daring. Their script takes a pretty obvious course to the inevitable conclusion, but does so fairly elegantly. The story is heartbreaking and perfectly relatable, even if you’ve never known anyone with Alzheimer’s. Still Alice is a film about loss, the kinds of loss we will all face — the loss of a parent, and the loss of our own lives, and the loss of all the many things that have given our time on Earth meaning over the course of a handful of decades.

Yes, I spent a good portion of my time watching Still Alice choking on a sob, which is unusual given the number of pedestrian disease-du-jour films I’ve been subjected to over the years. This isn’t the sort of material that usually gets me, but this one did. Still Alice manages to find an angle that is just fresh enough, while still adhering to the usual tropes and tone we find in films about a person slowly dying. The bulk of the credit goes to Julianne Moore, who turns in another fearless, flawless performance as Alice. (Her triumphant moment, which involves a heartfelt speech made fairly late in her bran’s regression, makes remaining dry-eyed impossible.)

It’s hard to imagine who could beat out Moore for an Oscar this year, unless her curse continues: she’s always so reliably good that is hardly surprising to see her deliver an Academy Award-worthy turn, and awards often go to those who shock us with how good they can be. (Not always, of course, which is how Meryl Streep keeps getting nominated.) Her competition isn’t terribly formidable this year — most of the actresses up for this year’s race are either too new to pull off a win or already have one. Of course, it’s a bit early to the call race now, but if any of the four performance categories are to be called now, I’d say your safest bet was on Best Actress. (Moore might find herself again pulling double-nomination duty thanks to a supporting turn in David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars.)

Still Alice won’t be one of my very favorite films of this year, but I do want to see Julianne Moore get an Oscar. She’s earned it, dammit. Let’s give her an Oscar and then another Oscar, and ten more retroactive Oscars for all the years we missed.Unfortunately, I won’t be able to hold up Julianne Moore as my undisputed champion for favorite leading performance this year, because I also happened to catch Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, starring Anne Dorval as a mother who shares almost nothing in common with Dr. Alice Howland, except that they are both Going Through It. Unlike Julianne Moore, Anne Dorval is not an actress I am very familiar with, and not an actress who has narrowly missed several golden opportunities at the Oscars podium. She has, of course, never been nominated, and probably will remain unnominated this year, because Mommy is a Canadian film with dialogue in French that doesn’t feature any stars recognizable to U.S. audiences.

Its biggest star may be the man behind the camera, Xavier Dolan, an actor himself, though he does not appear in Mommy. He is a 25-year-old releasing his fifth feature; Mommy is likely his most mature and accomplished film to date, but they’ve all been well-received and buzzy on the indie/arthouse circuit. Mommy is Canada’s hopeful for a Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and it stands a good chance at a nomination. (It was a big hit at Cannes.) It’s somewhat rare to see a non-English-speaking performance nominated by the Academy, though not unprecedented — some, like Marion Cotillard and Roberto Benigni, have even won. Dorval probably doesn’t have the clout it’ll take to go toe-to-toe with this year’s more likely nominees, Julianne Moore, Reese Witherspoon, Felicity Jones, Amy Adams, and Rosamund Pike, but stranger things have happened. Let’s just make this clear: it certainly won’t be because Dorval’s work here isn’t worthy of a nomination.In Mommy, Dorval plays Die, a woman many might dismiss as “white trash” — she’s loud, brash, and swears like a sailor, most often dressed provocatively, the kind of woman who’s son you’d expect to be found in a juvenile detention center. And he is. Steve is a deceptively cherubic fifteen-year-old prone to explosive fits of anger that often escalate violently. Die and Steve can’t help but push each other’s buttons, even when they know that doing so can and will result in destruction of property, serious injury, and neighborly intervention, as one memorable encounter in this film does. They love each other, but neither has enough self-control to avoid hurting the other, which only ends up hurting themselves in the long run. Mommy is as much about a sado-masochistic relationship as it is about a maternal one. The film begins just as mother and son are reunited following his exile from a program that was meant to help him.

What is Mommy about? That’s a tricky question to answer, because it is partially about Die and Steve’s fraught dynamic, but a third character becomes significant, too — that’s Kyle (Suzanne Clement), a neighbor who has developed a difficulty speaking. (She is also a mommy.) We get the sense that Kyla’s time away from her teaching career has been pretty damn boring, which is why she’s attracted to the odd pairing across the street, even though they’re so self-destructive and prone to outrageous domestic disturbances. Kyla becomes a tutor to Steve and a pal and a confidante to Die, which might unfold fairly predictably in a story by a less ambitious filmmaker, but Dolan doles out several narrative surprises. Die and Steve can’t help but wear their hearts on their sleeves — everything they feel practically bursts out of them — but Kyla is a wild card, and we’re never entirely certain what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, or how her relationship with these two will develop.The base story of Mommy follows Die as she struggles with how to manage her own mess of a life with the considerable needs of her son, who seemingly can’t be left alone for very long without wreaking havoc. She hates the idea of institutionalizing him, but is there any other option? His rage will only intensify as he gets older; it’s practically a given that he’ll end up in prison at some point. There are moments in Mommy where Steve is terrifying, flying off the handle at the drop of a hat, uncontrollable and capable of almost anything. And yet there are also moments in which he is astoundingly sweet and couldn’t be more likable. Because of Steve, Die can neither work nor date, so we really do have to wonder if this mother would be better off without her offspring. There are moments when the two connect beautifully and seem like the only people in the world they could possibly belong with, and moments in which we’re hoping they break free from one another and end the cycle of misery they’re caught up in. These are real relationships. You take the good with the bad, and there’s no telling which side you’ll see at any given moment.

As good as Anne Dorval is, she’s boosted by two other stellar performances (who of course have even less of a shot at Oscar nominations). Antoine-Olivier Pilon is magnetic as Steve, running the gamut of human emotions. One moment he’s a wide-eyed innocent boy, the next he’s a moody, sexually frustrated teenager, the next he’s a man whose violent outrage could turn deadly. It’s reminiscent in many ways of Jack O’Connell’s rage-in-a-cage role in Starred Up, except that Pilon is given a little more range to play with, including a standout scene in which he, Kyla, and Die sing and dance along with “On Ne Change Pas” by Celine Dion. (More on that later.) Pilon’s range, as displayed here, is pretty incredible.And then there’s Suzanne Clement. In many moments, she’s barely able to get a single word out, but she’s so perfectly expressive that she doesn’t need to. So much goes unsaid by Kyla, yet by the end of this story we feel like we know everything about her. Yet Kyla shows a very different and totally unexpected side during one tutoring session, which is a showstopper as delivered by Clement.

But back to the music. Dolan’s music choices throughout are curious; I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing, and these songs have a different life in Canada than they’ve had in the states, or he’s deliberately chosen music from the late 90s and the early 2000s that feels played out. Most filmmakers consciously avoid songs that we associate with other movies (unless making a direct reference), or, worse, associate with a desire to gouge our eardrums out with a fork to avoid ever hearing again. But Eiffel 65′s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” is featured here, probably ironically, during an intense interaction between Kyla and Steve. That’s not too unusual, but other significant moments use Dido’s “White Flag” and Sarah Maclachlan’s “Building A Mystery” essentially as score. One beautiful sequence uses Counting Crows’ “Colorblind” (which will never not remind us of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe gettin’ busy in Cruel Intentions, and is therefore almost unusable in cinema forever after). Mommy‘s “calm before the storm” montage is set to, of all things, Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” You could hardly find a more cliche choice.

The Mommy soundtrack could easily double as an album called Songs I’m Sick Of And Hope Never To Hear Again, or perhaps Now That’s What I Call Music: French-Canadian Auteur Who Grew Up In The 90s Edition. But in context, it works somehow. You have to admire Dolan’s boldness in just going for it; how many other Canadians would so shamelessly include a lip sync Celine freakin’ Dion? Mommy contains three or four moments that are practically musical numbers, and they’re absolutely indelible. I would have been perfectly content watching two hours of Xavier Dolan directing music videos for his favorite songs from adolescence, but there’s a lot more to Mommy than just visual and aural panache.Mommy eventually gets around to a climactic moment, but it’s slow-building and takes a lot of detours getting there. Its pleasures are more about watching three people interacting. The film is shot almost entirely in a very rare 1:1 aspect ratio. (That’s a square, for those who failed geometry.) It’s distracting at first; at times I desperately wanted to the screen to open up and show me more, as it is so tightly focused on these people’s faces. But that’s the point. The constrained frame forces us to watch these performances and only these performances. There’s little chance we’ll be distracted by anything in the background. Movies weren’t always as wide as they are now, so Dolan’s choice feels as much like a throwback as it does a modern millennial choice. The shots of these characters have an intimate, selfie-like quality. It’s like Instagram: The Movie.

Dolan has said that the aspect ratio wasn’t an artistic choice, but one that felt appropriate given how character-focused this drama is. Yet there are two moments in which the screen opens up for us, and I couldn’t help but notice that they were the two key moments that depict these people as free, unburdened by the constraints society and economics place on them. Being initially frustrated by the 1:1 only makes the first time the frame widens out all the more glorious. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s set to that soaring, still-good Oasis song.) And the second one, Mommy‘s emotional climax, is just devastating. (I wouldn’t want to spoil it here, but you’ll see what I mean when you see the movie.)That sums up Mommy by the end of it. The actors are so good that our sympathy sneaks up on us. Die and Steve are not people we initially expect we’ll connect with, but then, much like Kyla, we do. Life is funny that way. The people we spend time with are not necessarily the people we think we’d spend time with, or the people we’d choose to. You don’t choose your mother, and you don’t choose your son, and you sort of choose your friends, but only sort of. Life throws people together at random times, in unforeseen ways, sometimes for a limited time only. Location, circumstance, and happenstance bring people into our lives that would otherwise never be there.

If Mommy were exclusively focused on Die and Steve, then a late segment of this film wouldn’t have made it to the final cut. The friendship between Die and Kyla, two very different mothers, is equally important, and explored in a way that we don’t often see in a movie. Not many films examine the course of a friendship from beginning to end without some kind of artifice, like sex or death or a love triangle, wedging its way in to force things to come to a boil and make the “plot” happen. Mommy has dramatic moments, but ultimately it’s just about two kinds of relationships — the kind that are bonded in blood, from which we can never escape (even if we take great pains trying to), and the kind that we form by choice — and dissolve by choice, too.

If there were justice in cinema, all three of this film’s outstanding trio would be lauded for these performances, and Xavier Dolan would be recognized outside of the Foreign Film race, too. But that’s not going to happen, so if Julianne Moore finally getting her Oscar is the consolation prize, I’ll be perfectly content living in that world, too.

  *

“Nice to meet you, Jane Benson, Jewish lesbian with an Oscar!”

If you want to quote The Comeback, you have an arsenal at your disposal. Chances are you’ll go with, “I don’t need to see that!”, or perhaps a simple “Hello, hello, hello!”

But nothing is more signature Valerie Cherish than crossing your hands into a “T” and protesting: “Jane! Jane!” (Best followed by a “We’re not going to be able to use that!”)

Episode Two of The Comeback‘s new season brings Laura Silverman’s Jane back into the fold in a big way, as someone at HBO suggests that she be asked to return to produce… whatever Val is filmng. (Val calls it “BTS for SR,” meaning behind-the-scenes for Seeing Red, though she was filming that even before she knew about Paulie G’s HBO series.) Jane isn’t interested, but that doesn’t stop Val from relentlessly pursuing her, because as Jane herself puts it: “You never give up.” (Val’s response: “You do.”)

But Valerie’s right. Jane has changed. When we met her, she was young and ambitious and determined to get the most demeaning footage of Val at any cost. She wasn’t a malicious person, but she knew that the success of her reality show rested on Val going down on the Room & Bored ship. (Of course, the fact that we knew so little about her reflected how often self-involved Valerie thought about Jane’s personal life — never.)

When we meet her in “Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back,” Jane is a wealthy but bitter lesbian who lives in isolation making goat butter, trying to finance issue-driven documentaries, finding little success or satisfaction despite the fact that she’s an Academy Award winner. She’s also, not so surprisingly, a big pothead. Season One’s Jane was always in the background, but she played a relatively small part in the action until the final episode when Val finally confronted her (dubbing her “spider-eyes” and showing up at Jane’s pad with the camera crew, trying to give her a taste of her own medicine). By the end of this episode, Jane is back behind the camera, mostly invisible but steering the ship when needed.HBO also gets a chance to poke itself in the ribs as Valerie visits the offices and declares that Sex & The City started it all… then declaring that The Sopranos also started it all… then looking at a poster for The Wire and declaring that she’s never heard of it. It’s a series of in-jokes about the network’s legacy (as chronicled by the book Difficult Men, which I just finished, which focuses extensively on The Sopranos and The Wire, only fleetingly mentions Sex & The City, and does not even mention The Comeback). Val also mistakes Mad Men for an HBO show, as many do; these are jokes that many people outside of the TV business might miss out on, but that’s how The Comeback has always worked. General audiences could miss about 50% of the humor; luckily, there’s such a high humor quota that they’ll still get plenty. Valerie’s so very excited to be a part of HBO’s prestige, and yet clearly is only glancingly familiar with their properties. (Anyone who thinks I’m It was a television classic is bound to have a lower threshold for quality.)

“Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back” also sees Val meeting with Brad Goreski, a fellow reality TV personality, to dress for the Golden Globes, which she intends to attend with her husband, her hairdresser, and her publicist. Instead, she and Mark end up with Jane and the camera in tow at a mere “HBO viewing party” (a room full of women who may or may not be Russian hookers), where they have an awkward run-in with Paulie G.

“Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back” is a bit scattered in its focus compared to other Comeback episodes. The HBO stuff is savvy and hilarious, and seeing Valerie share a doobie with Jane is sort of like Season One fan fiction come to life. (There’s got to be some Val/Jane slash fiction out there somewhere on the internet, right?) From there, though, Jane disappears behind the cameras again and the focus is on the Golden Globes visit, which is played a shade darker than The Comeback usually is, as Paulie G apologizes to Valerie while still clearly wanting to see as little of her as possible.

The episode’s funniest moments are the throwaway gags, like Val’s housekeeper realizing that Val is about to ditch Mickey and Billy to have her cameras with her at the Globes, or Val stating that she’s “hogging the Bogart” by taking too long with the joint at Jane’s place. I watched this episode several times, and it did indeed get funnier upon each viewing, as this show tends to do. The humor is so subtle at times that I don’t pick up on a joke until the third viewing.

While Season Two of The Comeback still mostly feels like Season One, there is one crucial difference thus far — Valerie is less desperate for her comeback. She still wants to be on top of the world, but she doesn’t really need this the same way she used to. The show-within-the-show Comeback earned her that validation. And now, with Val in charge of her own crew, she’s much less worried about the cameras picking up her most awkward and vulnerable moments. There’s less looking at the camera, wondering how all this will be perceived. There are no “Jane! Jane!” time-outs, because Valerie is (sort of) in control of her own destiny this time around.

It’s an interesting switch, but it does deflate the momentum a bit. Season One episodes tended to revolve around a clear goal for Val. This episode didn’t so much have that. Valerie tries on a somewhat outrageous dress, but she isn’t talked into actually wearing it to the Globes; she’s disappointed that she ends up at a viewing party, but she and Mark leave without much of a fuss. “Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back” sure has its highlights, but hopefully the second coming continues to move forward in addition to revisiting comedic high points from the first season. Is it too much to ask for a new character for Season Two as dynamic as Mickey, or Juna, or Gigi? What is Val really up against this season?

I’m satisfied enough for the time being, but I hope the next episode sees the resurgence of something we need even more than the return of Jane the Jewish lesbian. This time, it’s Val’s dire desperation that needs a comeback.

“Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back”: B for first viewing, B+ after

*

(Throwback Thursday: A glimpse back at my reasonably short-lived days as a production assistant, and what it taught me about making movies. First published in INsite Boston in April 2006.)

Astronauts and firemen, ballerinas and princesses. These are the professions we choose as kids to conclude that all-important statement, ”When I grow up I want to be…”

Granting power and prestige, filled with excitement and adventure — is it any wonder these lives appeal to five-year olds?

What could be better?

In reality, however, very few of us end up pursuing those careers we glamorized in our youths. Most end up setting our sights on more readily available occupations — doctor, lawyer, teacher, fry cook. These are practical jobs with everyday necessity. The naïve, egocentric fantasies of our formative years give way to more imminently pressing concerns — like fiscal responsibility, familial obligation, and man’s inherent urge to give something of himself back to humanity.

And then there are those of us who decide to make movies.Filmmakers are grownups who still want to make a living blasting off to the moon, delighting the masses in a frilly pink tutu. (But maybe without the intense training and sacrifice that comes with actually chasing down such coveted pursuits.) Early on we discover that the real world, with its 9-5/Monday-Friday/lather-rinse-repeat routine, is no place for us, so we pilfer a few extra years of make-believe and extend those juvenile daydreams to include special effects, bombastic soundtracks, and hootenannies with the stars. Pity the fool who trades fire engines for stock options; we’re the kids who never outgrew the desire to be princesses.

But there’s a rude awakening in store for dreamers awaiting a super-sized movie life. Sooner or later, every slumber must submit to a blaring alarm.

Though we like to pretend that it’s confidential, Hollywood wants the general public to be aware of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into its product, the behind-the-scenes drama that often trumps what we pay to see on screen. They know as well as we do: it’s all part of the show, the magic of movies. So recently, I went undercover to unveil what they don’t want us to see. Something that’s been kept off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush… until now.

My wakeup call sounded loud and clear on my first day as production assistant on an independent film:

Eyes open, sleepyhead, and leave those dreams behind.For the uninitiated, a PA is known throughout the industry as the lowliest position on a film crew, and possibly the planet. It’s a crash course in everything that sucks about moviemaking, an experience that will not only crush your dreams but also back up over them twice just to make sure they’re good and smooshy. The day rate seems sufficient until you realize that you’re logging 75 hours a week, so your paycheck breaks down to less than minimum wage hourly; the job itself embraces the least enviable aspects of careers such as mailman, secretary, chauffeur, housekeeper, and pizza delivery guy. (Please note that five-year olds seldom yearn to be any of these.) Which brings me back to that dirty, filthy, naughty little secret Hollywood truly doesn’t want you to know:

It’s boring.

Sure, only a child would imagine filmmaking to be as easy, breezy, beautiful as it looks on TV. I spent my whole life bracing for a bumpy ride. As a PA, I certainly didn’t expect red carpets rolled out for me, never indulged in fantasies of the director pulling me aside to say, “Hey, you seem pretty bright, why don’t you take a turn this time?” I went in expecting the worst, prepared to hate PAing spectacularly — with violins screeching violently, bolts of lightning reflected in my bloodshot eye. I ended up just hating it the normal way… sitting in traffic for six hours, in the rain, at rush hour, on my way to set, and on my way back, and then to set again because someone forgot to mention they needed those copies on buff-colored paper. (“What the hell is the color ‘buff’?” you’re asking. I asked, too — and no one had a satisfactory answer.) It turns out the entertainment industry is just the real world with a vengeance; I work longer hours for less pay than anyone I know with a “real” job, and have yet to behold the teensiest poof! of movie magic.

What a crock.

While the rest of the world looks to filmmakers for escapism, there’s no escape for us. As children, we watched our cinematic counterparts defy the daily grind through danger and mystery, and promised ourselves that we would, too. Unable to actually live inside a movie, we pursued the next best thing — a life on the cinematic sidelines. But there’s a price to pay for every fantasy we hold onto. Rent in the bubble I live in is not cheap, and with expenses like car insurance, clothing, and Special Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVDs released right after I bought the single-disc version, I can no longer afford it without seriously working. Like so many heroes and heroines before me, I wake to discover that my would-be adventures were only just a dream all along. And so begins my worst nightmare.

It’s strange and disappointing to be so close to everything I dreamed of, but nowhere near the reasons I pursued it. To struggle in vain as the Technicolor world I envisioned is sapped of sparkle, becoming a little more like drab Kansas every day. Perhaps most frustrating of all is that I know everyone faces this — the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the fry cooks. Probably even the astronauts and princesses. I went so far to evade the trappings of a normal life, and now my growing pains couldn’t be more universal.Still, sometimes I walk on set and realize that, although it’s nothing like what I imagined, I am exactly where I set out to be. I’ve adjusted to the grueling schedule, the thankless tasks. I’ve made friends with coworkers who are as tired and stressed out as I am. I’ve started to see moviemaking as a collaborative process, one that I’m a part of. Now and then something interesting happens, like the day they were short on high school kids and put me in two scenes as an extra. (After a couple hours of standing around, I discovered that that, too, is boring.) The rest of the time, I get through the day like I always have: daydreaming of a life less ordinary.

Roughly a year after graduating from cinema school, exactly a year after I began this column, I’m finally on the inside of this industry. And, if you look deep enough in the background, I’m also inside a movie.

It may not be a good movie. It may not be a successful movie. And my contribution to it is about as minimal as they come. But if I squint at my current life, I can kind of almost see it as something like what I always wanted.

*

“I got you, Gingersnaps.”

“Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” introduces us to “Mallory,” the not-so-thinly veiled character Valerie is playing “loosely” based on her time on Room & Bored. She’s got a stinky trailer Mickey can’t stop talking about and can’t remember the first AD’s name because there “no reference point.” She spars with the line producer over the $7,000 wig that looks identical to her actual hair and the fact that she needs an extra hair person (Marianina!) just to place it on her head properly. And her nephew Tyler is such a bad PA that he doesn’t even know what a PA is, and Jane refuses to acknowledge him as part of the crew.

And then Valerie meets Seth Rogen, her co-star, and sets to work trying to make him her new BFF.

As usual, Val has a bad habit of over-gifting. She not only buys flowers for Seth (“MacFarlane,” as she calls him, not long after spilling water all over him), but also gifts him with a ham based on an off-the-cuff joke he barely even remembers. And she gets an awkwardly sweet gift for Paulie G that causes one of the episode’s most uncomfortable moments. Lots of shows these days do awkward comedy, but it’s rarely as painful as this. Val has made a nice gesture, but probably the wrong gesture, and she discovers it at an opportune moment as Paulie G just stares at her in befuddled silence. Fortunately, Seth Rogen jumps in to make a joke of it and lighten the tension, but if ever we needed confirmation, here it is: Paulie G is still a jerk. Case in point: he has written a fantasy scene in which Valerie blows him, for no good reason except to literally bring the redhead comedienne to her knees. That’s the major focus of this episode (and the title’s inspiration), which takes the gag to an extreme by quite rightly pointing out how exploitative Hollywood is of women. In the truly unsettling fantasy sequence, Val has to stand still between two buck naked, fully-shaved porn stars who are moaning in orgasmic ecstasy, and just to add insult to injury, she’s back in Aunt Sassy’s running suit during the whole thing. The fact that Paulie G would even write such a thing tells us everything we need to know about how much he hasn’t evolved in his sobriety, yet there are plenty of writers just like Paulie G out there who would write the exact same thing.

It’s also another token of HBO’s willingness to take jabs at itself. We, like Jane, feel uncomfortable about how the women in this episode are treated, but it’s not a lot different from the double standard we see on so much of HBO’s programming, from The Sopranos to Game Of Thrones. Leave it to The Comeback, one of the network’s most frivolous and least lauded shows, to finally stick it to ‘em. That’s why I love The Comeback — because between the laughs, it aims for the bull’s eye with deadly precision. It’s merciless, biting the hand that feeds it with tongue-in-cheek. (30 Rock similarly lambasted NBC. May I suggest Season Three centers on Tina Fey creating a network sitcom for Valerie Cherish?) It’s somewhat predictable that Seth Rogen would be the one to suggest to Paulie G that Val discreetly duck out of the frame rather than exaggeratedly mime fellatio — Seth Rogen is playing himself, and Seth Rogen probably does not want to tarnish himself by looking like a jerk on The Comeback. But when he tosses it aside with an, “I got you, Gingersnaps,” it’s a genuinely touching moment that truly does endear us to him. Because any show can do awkward comedy, but not many pull off the rare triumphant moments when Valerie really does rise above the Hollywood muck she’s wading in. This is one of the most blatantly demeaning positions Val’s been in, and therefore, she’s earned the tiny vindication that comes at the end of the episode, even if it somewhat bucks The Comeback‘s tradition of not providing any easy outs or out-and-out happy endings.

“Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” is the new season’s strongest episode yet, because it is the first episode more concerned with moving the story forward rather than taking a nostalgic look back at Season One highlights. I like looking back, too, but I also want The Comeback to tackle new territories, and “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” does it. I can’t think of any TV show that has made a sharper or more direct critique of the way women are objectified in TV and film (especially on premium cable). There is a maybe-unnecessary (but totally in character) moment in which Jane tries to stop filming because she feels this wrong, but otherwise, no one needs to come out and say that Paulie G’s script is pretty fucked up. It’s obvious. This episode also features fewer callbacks to old jokes and instead brings us all new ones, which somehow made me feel like I was watching classic Season One Comeback than either of the previous episodes. It’s odd to see someone as famous as Seth Rogen on The Comeback playing himself. I’m not sure that Rogen’s Apatowian comedic universe quite aligns with the awkward orbit of Valerie Cherish, who exists on a planet of her own most of the time. Rogen has practically made a career out of playing himself at this point, often quite literally, and his presence naturally requires a certain pull of focus away from Valerie. (You don’t hire Seth Rogen to not do Seth Rogen.) But Rogen’s This Is The End self-referential comedic stylings aren’t of quite the same brand as Lisa Kudrow’s meta-comedy. Ultimately, it works, though I hope Rogen is used sparingly from here on out, merely because The Comeback is The Valerie Cherish Show, and having a good-natured movie star there to bail Red out of jams isn’t how this show operates.

I’d rather see more of Valerie’s interactions with the vapid bimbo who plays Juna (or April, based on Juna), who is exactly the sort of snob ingenue we thought Juna would be in the first season. More of Jane, now an Oscar winner who feels less of a need to hold her tongue and stay out of it. And more of Paulie G, who thinks he has written a soul-baring confessional that is probably just misogynist tripe like his sitcom. (We get some pretty awesome barely-bad dialogue from Seeing Red, like “Why don’t you put up a sign that says, ‘Watch out for falling lamps!'” His writing has evolved, but barely.)Valerie is still a pest in this episode, which is how we can’t totally fault Paulie G for mocking her when she insists on reminding everyone that she did not actually blow Paulie G. She tries her best to keep up with Seth Rogen’s “network jizz” improv. (Meanwhile, the script supervisor needs to make sure Val knows that she switched the interchangeable “keep out” and “stay out” in her own dialogue.) At one point, she reverts back to her sitcom roots by playing directly to the camera. Valerie has come a long way since the first season, yet that “long way” has brought her literally to her knees to perform oral sex on Seth Rogen. (Her previous attempts at stepping out of her comfort zone had her making out with Alan Thicke and playing a brunette with migraines.)

The episode is full of priceless moments, from Val doing her trademark schtick (“Hi, Simpsons? We want to shoot drugs in front of your characters!”) to Mickey defiantly telling the props guy that Val doesn’t need knee pads. Val’s straight-to-camera “Walk? It’s been a long day! Why don’t you just rape me?” is like her HBO version of a Room & Bored blow, and it fails spectacularly.

As much as I loved getting reacquainted with Jane, Mickey, Juna, and yes, even Paulie G in the first two episodes, this is the one that gives me full confidence in The Comeback‘s new season. I hope HBO has the good sense (and sense of humor) to keep it running longer than just this second season, but even if not, this episode alone has made its resurrection worth the effort. Valerie Cherish is back in full glory, everyone — which, in her case, is a lot more shameful and embarrassing than glorious.

“Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees”: A

*

“I don’t know what kind of candy you’re making, but I’m a coal miner!”

As comedies go, The Comeback rides a fine line between the light and the dark. The breezy tone suggests screwball comedy, yet the way it skewers every facet of Hollywood is so biting and dead-on that it really does, at times, feel like a docudrama. The way we squirm and cringe through each awkward day in the life of a C-list actress makes viewing as uncomfortable as it is hilarious. Yet even in its darkest moments, like Paulie G’s drug use or last week’s battle with misogyny, The Comeback has eschewed truly grim material.

Until Season Two’s fourth episode, “Valerie Saves The Show,” which tackles an entirely new subject for the series — death.

Things start off light enough. In “Valerie Saves The Show,” the cruelties of the television industry continue to plague Valerie Cherish, beginning with some fairly mundane ones — budgetary restrictions — which means her character Mallory (who she still constantly confuses with herself) will be drastically cut back and thus rendered less sympathetic to the audience. (Seeing Red contains some crucial drinking alone, crying in the tub, finding a stray cat scenes, apparently, which sounds exactly like the kind of hack work Paulie G would insert into this story.) Apparently, HBO didn’t feel the urge to bless Seeing Red with the same production value afforded to, say, Game Of Thrones.

Val’s creative solution: to allow the production to use her own home as Mallory’s, further blurring the line between fact and fiction.

This is, of course, a major imposition on Val’s loveball, Marky-Mark, who finds his home overrun by strangers, his precious espresso maker moved out of reach. “It’s not a crime scene!” Val explains of his reluctance to interfere, a prophetic foreshadowing of things to come later in the episode. But first? A trip to the the Groundlings, where Valerie can hone her improvisational skills (actually: show off how little she knows about improv).

Last week, Val made a pretty killer direct-to-camera improv involving rape that was entirely inappropriate for the moment; this week, she tries to mine some humor out of cancer, and fails yet again. She also tries to mine some humor out of actual mining, as she stiffly plays a coal miner opposite a taffy-maker and then asks the instructor: “Now what?” Improv is all about teamwork, so it comes as no shocker that Valerie Cherish is lousy at it. She can’t lose herself in the moment or consider a scene partner her equal. She assumes the Groundlings will be intimidated by her because “I’m a professional” — but yeah, no, they are not.

Unfortunately, during the break, Val gets some disturbing news from her loyal sidekick. Mickey may have cancer. And while Val ordinarily tends to shrug off or completely ignore Mickey’s feelings, especially when they might drag down the mood of her reality show, this time she’s truly rattled by the thought of losing her faithful companion, which is how this line creeps into her improv: “Only two reasons to be out of work: bad economy or cancer. Do you have cancer?”

This brings us right to the heart of Valerie and Mickey’s curious friendship, which has always been one of the show’s strongest yet subtlest anchors. Mickey is more than just Val’s hairdresser — most of the time, he’s treated like a glorified assistant. (At times, not even so glorified.) His true role in her life, of course, is that he’s her biggest fan. Notice how he’s the only one laughing during her terrible improv? And yet it doesn’t seem like a courtesy laugh. He really does think she’s funny.

Mickey must love Valerie in order to put up with her for all these years, getting so little in return. He must believe in her talent. He seems totally content playing second-fiddle to her at every turn. What’s not so readily apparent is how Valerie feels about Mickey — we know she depends on him, but is this because she truly enjoys his company, or because he’s the only person in her life willing to put up with all her shit?

People get exasperated to varying degrees with Valerie Cherish. Not all of them call her out on it, but even those on Team Valerie defect every so often, as Mark does in this episode. (And not without reason.) Mickey is the only one who has never turned his back on Red, not even for an instant — though some telling looks to camera let us know he’s hip to Val’s least likable moments. Mickey is an essential part of Valerie’s life because he sees her the way she wants to be seen, allowing her to buy into all those delusions she carries around about her own importance. Without Mickey, Val wouldn’t have the validation she needs to invest as strongly as she does in her own brand. Mickey is constantly selling her on the story she wants to believe, the one she is trying (and failing) to tell via reality TV. Is this a true friendship, or just a narcissist’s gross misuse of a doting fan? I think the jury’s still out on that.

No matter the reason, Val is visibly shaken up by Mickey’s possible bout with cancer, which is how the Big C continually creeps up in her improv (and causes her to drop her fictional baby). Val is told by her instructor that cancer is not funny, and tellingly, “Valerie Saves The Show” takes on a heavier tone than usual once that topic is broached, even if the C-word is mostly absent from the rest of the episode. Val’s nephew Tyler is starting to “go Hollywood,” mouthing off to his boss and deciding he’d be just as good a star as Seth Rogen. (Probably false, buddy.) Val’s selfishness takes a holiday when she decides to use Tyler as Mickey’s gopher, a nice reversal of the way she usually has Mickey fetch for her. (In Valerie’s universe, there’s always someone who has nothing better to do than cater to her every whim — though she’s right that it’s in Tyler’s job description.)

Mark gets star-struck by Seth Rogen and makes a Valerie-like snafu in front of the wheelchair-bound line producer Ron. (Rogen is wisely underused in the episode, following a big role in last week’s episode.) TV production is depicted as the headache-inducing nightmare it usually is, rather than something that tends to bring Valerie joy. Even she is more pessimistic than usual. Valerie goes on a rant about Tyler’s self-congratulatory generation and explains how Ron got injured; paired with Mark’s foul attitude and Mickey’s medical diagnosis, this whole episode feels almost oppressive in its cynicism and gloominess, despite the levity offered by Val’s stabs at improv.

And that’s before someone commits suicide.

“Valerie Saves The Show” first introduces the very real possibility that Mickey could be facing death in the near future, then ends up somewhere darker as Val and Mark stop by their property to stay the night (because of Seeing Red‘s takeover of their own home). Jane is up to her old wily tricks, spying on Val after she’s asked them to turn the cameras off, and just when filming is about to wrap for the night, a gunshot startles the crew. A man has killed himself in the next apartment.

This isn’t a character we’ve met before, but it’s still the darkest moment of the series thus far, and it doesn’t seem accidental that it comes in an episode that already has us thinking about our beloved Mickey’s mortality. This gives Valerie a chance to call upon her vast CSI knowledge (she once had a guest spot) and to coin her new version of “Jane! Jane!” time-out hands: “N.G.,” which stands for “no good.”

Ironic: Val and Mark are refugees of a production about a drug addict, and go to stay in a place where a real drug addict has just offed himself. One of the cops who responds to the scene offers an unknowing warning to Val about drug users who turn their lives around — that tends to be when they snap, bringing the people around them down, too. Is this a harbinger of an even darker turn from Paulie G? Will his villainy resurface? I’d say that’s a safe bet.

We’re midway through The Comeback‘s (criminally short) Season Two now, and I’d also wager that this is likely the darkest the series will get. I don’t anticipate a wrenching chemo arc for Mickey or any more gunplay, though there’s still a feeling of dread created by what happens here. Nothing goes according to plan, everything falls apart, everyone is cranky (except, ironically, Mickey), and though Valerie tries to save the show, her fix is just a Band-Aid on a production with much larger problems.

To sum it up, basically everything that happens in “Valerie Saves The Show” is N.G., a somewhat sour half-hour with a few comedic high points. (Curiously, even the title is a mystery, since “Valerie Saves The Show” was also the title of a Season One episode. Is this an oversight, or an intentional callback?) Perhaps the death of a stranger is meant to put the stresses of production into perspective — though in this episode, for once, it’s Valerie who is concerned about real-world problems while everyone else is freaking out about more superficial concerns.

When revisited, this episode takes on a sweetness that offsets the bitter visit by the Grim Reaper. This is maybe the most we’ve ever seen Valerie care about anybody. For once, there’s nothing in it for her, unless you believe that she only cares about Mickey as her one-man fan club and not as a human being. Last week’s “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” was the high point of the season, the sharpest of the new episodes. This one is the most subtle and character-driven, from the genuinely empathetic look on Jane’s face when Mickey delivers troubling news to Val chewing out Tyler for not respectfully grabbing his elder a snack when he needs one.

The Comeback is all about Valerie Cherish, but in this episode, we are forced to take a moment to truly consider the little people. Valerie fails to disappear into character during her improv, but all around her, real feelings are felt, from Mark’s anger to Mickey’s optimistic joy and a solitary drug addict’s wish to die. Even Valerie connects with her humanity more than usual. Cancer may not be funny, but it can bring out an unexpected poignancy where you’d least expect, which is a curious but not entirely unwelcome turn for The Comeback.

“Valerie Saves The Show”: B+

*

In its most extreme realizations, the American dream means being the best. Foxcatcher is about three men who already are the best, and want to be better.

It is the based-on-a-true-story story of Mark and Dave Schultz, Olympic champions from the mid-80s, who are fixing to return to the ring in 1988, with a little help from the very wealthy John du Pont. John first lures Mark into his staid privileged world, promising glory and admiration (and a little cocaine), but it’s possible that he only does so to bait Mark’s brother. At some point, Mark and John’s curious relationship goes sour, and Mark feels betrayed by his actual brother as well as the father-like figure of John du Pont. (John seems to be playing friend, brother, father, and mentor roles simultaneously… and possibly another role as well? It’s hard to ignore the film’s total lack of sexuality.)

Dave and Mark are already Olympic gold medal winners. John du Pont is heir to one of the great “old money” fortunes in America. They’ve already achieved the dream other Americans long for. Still, they want more. Mark (Channing Tatum) claims he wants to be the best wrestler in the world — an itch which you’d think an Olympic gold medal might have scratched already — and John (Steve Carell) wants to soak up that glory through osmosis, by sponsoring Mark and his brother as wrestlers. Though both brothers are formidable, older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo) has accumulated the majority of the fame, at least in Mark’s eyes. So Mark wants to be even better. He wants more championship titles, more gold medals — just as the du Ponts want more pointless trophies to put in their pointless trophy room. In Bennett Miller’s America, too much is never enough.But what’s the point? Who really cares who funded a gold medalist? Does that fairy dust ever really rub off on the sponsor? And at a certain point, after you’ve already won a gold medal, isn’t enough enough? Mark wants to prove that he’s his own man, to crawl out from under his brother’s shadow — but the problem is that he’s trying to do it by wrestling, the very thing Dave is famous for. A smarter guy would have picked another sport, or another platform entirely. Mark’s wrestling skills will eventually fade, one way or another, and what then? You can’t move out of your brother’s shadow if you’re following his every motion.

As for John du Pont? We’re left to guess somewhat at the life he led before Mark Schultz met him, but it’s easy to see that John feels emasculated by his cold, controlling mother (Vanessa Redgrave). We can guess that he didn’t get a lot of opportunities to roughhouse with other boys as a youth, which might be why wrestling in particular appeals to him. The du Pont family has strength in their bank accounts, but John is a tiny, bird-like man (with a bird-like beak for a nose, and a probably-not-coincidental obsession with ornithology). He’s not a strong man in any sense of the word, which might be what attracts him toward a hulk of a man like Mark Schultz. He’s a leech.

Foxcatcher doesn’t give us much insight into any of these characters’ interior lives, but the easiest to understand, by far, is Dave. Dave is a simple family man and that’s what he cares about — wrestling is something he’s good at, something he can make money doing, but it’s all about his family. John has only his chilly mother, not far from death, and a mountain of money awaiting him. Mark has even less — no friends to speak of, no love interest, and no money until John enters the picture. These men chase after being the best because without such a pursuit, they are nothing at all. Foxcatcher unfolds in a sad, bleak little universe where getting better only means getting progressively worse.Wrestling and collecting weapons are John’s hobbies, his way of playing at being a tough guy, but it is an actual killing that ultimately undoes the bond between these three men. America loves violence. It was founded on it (as John reminds us, showing off his Revolutionary War-era home). Men like to watch other men wrestle each other. They like tanks and guns. They especially like tanks with guns attached to them. Foxcatcher may not connect all the dots on how America’s obsession with military and violent sports lines up with the murder that unfolds in this story, but it does give us the dots, and says: make of these what you will. It has an almost ambivalent attitude toward its thematic content, so you can easily leave the theater asking questions like, “Why?” and “So what?”

Miller quite obviously has the American dream on his mind, perhaps even more than the actual facts about these three real-life men. The real story is fascinating, but you’ll find only stray slivers of it here. What we do learn is that John is obsessed with military weapons, which he collects like the trophies his mother has devoted an entire room in the estate to. John has never fought in a war, but he’s content to acquire the accoutrement, the same way he’s content to collect wrestling medals he has only bankrolled, while other “real” men put the physical sweat into earning them. Merely owning symbols of powerful and masculininty makes John du Pont feel like a man.

For a while.

Until it doesn’t.

John du Pont is an overgrown boy, not a man, and when a spoiled child doesn’t get his way? Watch out.

Channing Tatum is solid as Mark, but Mark isn’t a terribly deep or interesting individual, and we have to wonder why this twentysomething is hanging out with a much older skeezy rich dude all the time. Sure, du Pont’s financial support is a factor, but we rarely see Mark socializing with anybody else, and never once does he display any interest in women or sex of any kind. And the dude looks like Channing Tatum. Yes, Channing Tatum with cauliflower ear, but still Channing Tatum. The homosexual undercurrent is never explicitly suggested by this film, but it’s impossible not to wonder about. (Discuss.) Mark Schultz’s book about these events probably gives us more insight into what’s going on here, but in terms of this film, it’s hard to say for sure.

Steve Carell is noticeably unshowy, despite that fake schnoz, underplaying his character to such a degree that the character is frequently lifeless and ultimately soulless. Mark Ruffalo rounds out the cast as Dave, exactly the sort of guy you’d expect to shrug off a gold medal. The kind of guy who has to write “Pick Up Kids” in black marker on his hands just to remember this daily errand. The kind of guy who doesn’t get that the Very Rich need to be treated like they’re Very Special. He’s the film’s simplest character, but Ruffalo plays him expertly, the only character here we really get to know.

This trio will undoubtedly all be a part of the awards conversation, though Carell has the best chance at a nomination (and even a win) — if audiences don’t find him too understated and removed to warm up to. (Then again, the Academy loves a big, fake nose — just ask Nicole Kidman.)

Bennett Miller’s original cut of the film was more than four hours long, which might have been brilliant or excruciating. At two hours and fifteen minutes, it feels too long. Foxcatcher begins slowly, in Miller’s well-composed but unhurried shots. It’s like a fly on the wall who has ceased buzzing. It feels like all the juiciest interactions have been cut out of the film, leaving competent but not utterly compelling scenes.

Foxcatcher is interesting almost in spite of itself. It may only be an interesting film because America is an interesting place. Bring your own magnifying glass to examine the subtext, because Bennett Miller doesn’t do it for us. Steve Carell’s John du Pont is a sad, worthless, empty black hole of a person, and Carell plays him that way. We want nothing to do with him. Then again, according to this film, neither did anyone else who got to know him. It’s hard to tell if we’re meant to think that extreme privilege made him this way, or if it’s just where this human cipher happened to land in the cosmic lottery — but either way, just looking at him is depressing.

Foxcatcher isn’t such a troubling movie because we’re invested in what happens in the characters, or because what happens is much darker than we’d see in any other movie, but because it’s so hopeless. There’s nothing we especially want for any of these characters, except maybe that they all go very far away from each other and never speak again.

*

Much has been made of the weak Best Actress race this year. The Best Actor field is filled to the brim with potential nominees, enough to fill ten slots with worthy performances from 2014.

The Best Actress race? Not so much.

The obvious frontrunner is Julianne Moore in Still Alice. Beyond that, there are not really any leading female performances that have set the screen on fire. (Some of my own favorites are lesser-known foreign actresses with virtually no shot at grabbing the Academy’s attention.) With four more slots to fill, obviously four more women will receive nominations, and these women — who very well might be Felicity Jones, Rosamund Pike, and Amy Adams — are certainly deserving of acclaim. Still, it’s a shame that there haven’t been enough dynamic female-driven roles to make this category feel like a real race.

At this point, Moore’s strongest competitor is likely Reese Witherspoon, a previous Best Actress winner (for Walk The Line) who sounds off a gamut of emotional frequencies in her latest cinematic endeavor — she sobs, she screams, she despairs, and she also perseveres in the face of hardships offered up by the Pacific Crest Trail, facing possible starvation and dehydration and other perils of nature as well as potential threats from her fellow man. It’s the kind of role that seems destined to capture the Academy’s attention, aided by the fact it’s based on a true story. (Oscar just loves that.) In short, the film lets Witherspoon go Wild… a journey that took her subject from California to Washington on foot, and may take the woman who plays her up to the podium to collect another Oscar.

Wild is based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, which I read recently in anticipation of the film. It is not one of those tales of a person up against the great odds of nature, as you might expect. Strayed faced some elemental obstacles, but nothing so extreme that it’s worth making a movie about. This isn’t Into The Wild or All Is Lost or 127 Hours. Cheryl Strayed may have walked 1,100 miles in too-small boots, but the journey Wild depicts is her inner journey. She does not get lost in the woods — she is lost when the story begins, and her trek across the west coast is to find herself. That may sound maudlin, and perhaps at times it borders on that, but it’s a true and inspiring story, at once very specific and universal.

Wild begins with Cheryl on the trail and then flashes back to reveal what drove her there, as does the book. The failure of her marriage, a flirtation with heroin, and primarily, her mother’s battle with cancer. As in the book, these flashbacks are often more vivid than what we learn of her time on the trail. Strayed is a woman hiking alone across almost the entire length of California and the entire length of Oregon. Not many women do this on their own. It makes sense that the movie version somewhat skimps on Strayed’s “alone time,” and instead looks to her interactions with fellow hikers and flashbacks to provide the most compelling narrative. Those looking for an adventure film may be disappointed, but having read the book, I knew what I was in for — a story about losing and then finding oneself.

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is a poignant read. Her prose is forthright and honest. She isn’t a terribly subtle writer, as she easily spells out her epiphanies and the themes she bumps up against, but the story is incredibly moving and, at times, invigorating. I’ll say the same for the movie, which was adapted by Nick Hornsby — who is primarily known as a novelist, and I must say, a surprising choice to adapt this story. There are moments in his script where the dialogue is too on-the-nose, where something left unsaid might have been better than what was on the page. Cheryl spends a lot of time muttering to herself, which isn’t always necessary. (Though I imagine she really did this to keep herself company.) The movie uses all kinds of tricks to get around the supposed lack of chatter we’d find in a one-woman story like Wild — quotes from famous authors, inner monologue voice-over, voices from the past in voice-over, Cheryl talking to herself, and a bit of narration from the book (though not as much as expected). Most of this works, though in a story about finding peace amidst the majesty of nature, there is an awful lot of talking.

Wild is quite faithful to the book, and thus to the actual events of Strayed’s hike. A few side characters are cut, and a few stops along the way go unmentioned, but the film manages to cram in more encounters than I thought it would. (I was initially dismayed that the Three Young Bucks had been excised, since they were some of Strayed’s most memorable companions, but luckily they appear at a later point in the story.) It is especially deft in the way it handles Strayed’s flashbacks, which never feel jammed in for the sake of exposition. The film doesn’t flinch at the less savory aspects of Cheryl’s life: the many anonymous sex partners she had while still married to her doting husband Paul, an abortion, heroin injections. (An upsetting sequence involving the execution of a horse is necessarily toned down for the screen.)

Witherspoon’s take on Strayed is a bit surlier than the prose of the book, but that mostly works, and perhaps makes it clearer that Cheryl needs this hike to get away from the waste of a woman she’s become. The real centerpiece of Wild (both the movie and book) is Strayed’s mother Bobbi, lovingly and strikingly captured by the book and wonderfully recreated in the film by Laura Dern. With only a handful of relatively short scenes, Laura Dern creates a whole character we feel like we know instantly, a figure so maternal, so flawed but so optimistic, that we can easily see how her absence might rip a hole in a person. At this point, Laura Dern is one of the most fabulous actresses around, and Bobbi’s smallish but significant role is fantastically written. Dern could elevate almost any material, and Bobbi the character alone elevates this story — the credit for which ultimately probably goes to Bobbi the woman, Strayed’s actual mother. But we can also credit Strayed and Hornsby as writers, and especially Laura Dern, for bringing her to life in the movie. Witherspoon gets the job done, but Dern should absolutely get an Oscar nomination for this.

The rest of Wild is a worthy venture, too. The film is surprisingly impressionistic, with striking editing that gives us glimpses of memories before we know what they mean exactly. (Unless we’ve read the book.) The subliminal cues create a sense of Strayed’s inner damage, the wounds she’s hiking to heal. Cheryl’s physical body takes on bruises and cuts as she makes her way northward, but inside she’s healing all the while.

The film is well-directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who made last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, the visual style of which transcended the limits of the screenplay, which is akin to what’s happening here. It’s impossible to know what I’d have thought of Wild had I not had such a deep connection to Strayed’s journey thanks to my enjoyment of the memoir. I knew already what every step of Cheryl’s journey had in store, and also what thematic significance each moment would have for her. The fun, for me, was in seeing how these elements were rearranged and executed in the film version.

Wild has moments of tremendous beauty and grace. Cheryl travels through extreme arid heat in the desert, through chilling snow, through sopping-wet rain, but the emotional terrain she covers is even more fraught with peril. The movie is more about this than it is about a woman alone against the elements. Its most memorable scenes are about the ways people interact, the little hurts and the little kindnesses that accumulate in our memories along the way.

It’s strange, the moments we remember most. Things that don’t seem important in the moment might be what lingers most heavily in our minds in years to come. Wild comes off like that — you’re more likely to recall the stray fragments of the film that stick with you than the story as a whole, the little moments Wild gets just right. There are enough of them that make it worth the journey.

*

“I don’t care if you’re available or unavailable. I don’t care if you just found out that you have have herpes or hepatitis C from one of those whores that you pay to come to your room on show nights. I’ve been in this business a lot longer than you have, and I will be in this business long after they take you out in a body bag, because you are gonna OD on some shit that you pump into your veins because you hate yourself. And guess what? I’m your way out. And you’re too fucking stupid to even know it.”

There’s a lot of danger in reviving a dormant TV series. These days, more than ever before, it is possible to resurrect a show that left us too soon, which is how we got movie version of series like Firefly and Veronica Mars and witnessed the return of Arrested Development and 24.

But the results are spotty. It’s all but unheard of for the revival to match the quality of the original in such cases, because if it was beloved enough to have fans clamoring for more, the reason is probably that it was really good. Reception of Arrested Development‘s fourth season on Netflix was mixed, but I don’t think anyone would claim that the latest season outdid the first two. It had been off the air for seven years, and in those years Arrested Development was hailed as one of the great TV comedies of all time. That’s a lot to live up to. A hit TV show arrives at a moment, and it is exceedingly difficult to recapture that moment two or seven or nine years later.

Exceedingly difficult, but not impossible.

As a major fan of Valerie Cherish, I was looking forward to — but in a way, almost dreading — the comeback of The Comeback. For years I proclaimed that it was the sharpest skewering of the entertainment industry I’d ever seen, that it was pretty much my favorite TV comedy — ever. (Alongside a series about the desperate and degrading shenanigans of another showbiz-mad redhead, I Love Lucy.) Following such hype, it seemed likely (and almost inevitable) that Season Two of The Comeback would fail to fly at such high heights, and might turn out to be merely adequate, good enough but not brilliant. I had faith in Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King and everyone else returning in front of and behind the cameras, but I am also a realist, and after talking up The Comeback for the past nine years, I didn’t want it to come back and be fine and make me look like a dumbass.

Season Two’s third episode, “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees,” justified the return of Valerie Cherish by matching the quality of Season One’s best episodes. It was fresh and smart and incisive and most of all, it was fucking funny. But what we really want when a show returns to our TV screens nine years after its cancellation is not just for it to be as funny as it was previously, but for it to evolve into something else — its own thing, a series that acknowledges the decade that has passed in the interim. While watching Season Two’s fifth episode, “Valerie Is Taken Seriously,” I suddenly had the feeling that I wasn’t watching my old favorite comedy from nine years ago, but another show entirely. A series that was made in 2014, not a series that was dressing up 2014 like 2005 and hoping no one noticed.

We still have a handful of episodes left before we can judge Season Two in it entirety, to really see how it measures up against the first season, but “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” might as well be titled “The Comeback Is Taken Seriously” because it is the first episode to make it explicitly clear that Season Two has an entirely separate agenda. All of the old stuff still applies; yes, Valerie Cherish is still an oblivious narcissist who can’t get out of her own way, but the relationships are different now, in a way I wasn’t expecting. Maybe things will take a turn, and the next three episodes will have Valerie again facing humiliation after humiliation and everyone else faring better… but I don’t think so. I think I’m onto what The Comeback is really doing in its second season, and I’m loving it. But more on that in a moment.

“Valerie Is Taken Seriously” first gives us some bickering between Valerie Cherish and Jane the producer (and Academy Award-winning Jewish lesbian). It’s reminiscent of several scenes from the first season (most memorably: “Well, I got it!!”), except the power dynamic in this relationship has shifted and Valerie is more argumentative than she ever would have been nine years ago. In the end, she does end up caving to Jane’s demand that Val arbitrarily make up which episode of Seeing Red she’s shooting, which seems like a mere comedic beat when it happens (but ends up being crucial later).

Next, Val heads to set, where she’s filming what she thinks will be a return to her Room And Bored roots. Instead, she’s working entirely without props or other actors to bounce off of, and the “studio audience” is about twenty hired actors who laugh when they’re told to, not when they actually think Valerie is funny. (That’s not all that different from a real studio audience, but Val isn’t happy.) HBO’s Rada and Connor return to explain as kindly as possible that Paulie G is falling behind on his writing duties and will be temporarily replaced by Andie, a female director who in so many ways is the anti-Paulie. For one, she doesn’t hate Valerie on sight, and she’s only mildly miffed when Val steps on her toes to tell her that the “studio audience” will be too jealous of her to chuckle appropriately. (Once they start laughing on command at everything Mallory says, Val’s tune changes.)

Andie is a dancer in addition to a director, so she occasionally busts a move on set, creating a goofy vibe that Valerie tries half-successfully to imitate. Valerie is a little awkward here, but so is Andie, and the two have a funny rapport together. (Are Andie’s dance moves any less embarrassing than Val’s Annie Hall? Not really.) We don’t often see Valerie interact with women who have power over her in the same way we’ve seen her constantly undermined by guys like Tom, Paulie G, and James Burrows in Season One. Val and Andie have a fun chemistry that’s unlike anything we’ve seen on the show before, and though there’s no reason to think that we’ll see Andie in the future (she’s only directing two Seeing Red episodes), she’s probably the best new character we’ve gotten this season. (Possible exception: Seth Rogen, who doesn’t count because he’s playing Seth Rogen.) We can probably bet that the blow job in “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” would’ve played out a lot differently had Andie been in charge; as in that episode, there’s some interesting stuff about women’s roles in Hollywood happening here. (More on that later, too.)

This is the densest of The Comeback‘s new episodes, which also has the production of Seeing Red overseen by The New York Times, which pisses off publicist Billy because his own stabs at interviews have been nixed for this “classy” exclusive. This causes temperamental Billy to have a total meltdown, going all Russell Crowe and throwing his phone at one of our little-seen cameramen, then firing himself as Val’s publicist. This is not long before Paulie G explodes when he learns Valerie has seen seen the dailies and she again tries to backseat direct by suggesting he light her scenes differently. At this, Paulie G’s biggest freakout yet, Valerie becomes so concerned with his well-being (and moreso, the well-being of her bid at being a serious actress on a serious premium cable network) that she hunts down a showrunner who hates her a little less. And this is where things get really interesting.

(For me, it was the turning point of this entire season.)

I’d been hoping Tom would return in Season Two. As far as I can remember, his character has gone unmentioned, which made some sense because Paulie G was a much more formidable villain, and his return to The Comeback was absolutely essential — more essential than any other character besides Valerie. (On a story level, at least — though I have a hard time imagining any of this working without Mickey constantly peering over Val’s shoulder, fussing with her hair at inopportune moments. As last week’s episode proved, Valerie can’t function without her best gay, and not just because he’s the only guy who can get her hair to look so very 80s.) It seemed plausible that if Robert Bagnell wasn’t readily available to reprise the Tom role, The Comeback would easily move forward without him — or even that they wouldn’t have reached out to him at all. These eight episodes are already stuffed with returning favorites like Jane and Juna, and a handful of new characters. Tom didn’t have to come back, but I was really hoping he would, because he was such an essential part of the first season. We see him squirming to keep it together every time Val makes an obnoxious request. Though he’s never outright unkind, it’s written all over his face in every moment of Season One what he thinks of her.

And poor, poor Tom — he is now on his fifth season executive producing a pretty wretched Nickelodeon show while his ex-partner is creating a series for HBO. Paulie G was a total dick back in the day, and he’s gotten only marginally better. He may be a halfway decent comedy writer (according to this show’s standards), but now that we know he was shooting heroin all through Room And Bored‘s production, we have even more reason to believe that it was Tom holding that show together all along, and how is he thanked for it? Fate is cruel, and nowhere is it crueler than in Los Angeles.

We learn more about Tom in this one scene than we learned about him all last season, and though he once played the peacekeeper, he’s now much too miserable to hold those emotions in when Val comes traipsing onto his candy-colored Nicky Nicky Nack Nack set. “You’re the monster!” Paulie G announces to Val earlier in the episode, pointedly and probably unfairly; he’s talking about Mallory becoming a CGI creature in a fucked up Seeing Red fantasy sequence, but he’s really talking about the way he’s brainwashed himself into seeing Valerie Cherish as the devil, to such an extent that he had to write a whole series about it. But when Valerie confronts Tom with her well-meaning request to bail Paulie G out of an impending relapse, Tom looks like he wants to dive under a table, like he really has seen a monster. At first, Paulie G telling Val that she’s a monster seems like just another way that he’s a pompous asshole, but Tom’s similar sentiment forces us to really consider: is she?

Season One of The Comeback was all about Valerie Cherish’s degradation. We caught little snippets of what was going on with everyone else, but ultimately, it was all about Valerie. She was the victim and her own worst enemy, and we mainly saw things from the point of view of how they affected Valerie. She was at the lowest point on the totem pole, so painfully unaware of how she was being perceived. Everyone else had this power over her: they knew she was making an ass of herself long before she did, and so, of course, did we.

Season Two still has plenty of that flavor, but it’s added a flip-side. Seeing Red is all about what Paulie G went through, a dark addiction that neither we nor Valerie were privy to. It’s somewhat comical that Paulie G thinks Valerie was such a thorn in his side, when we saw pretty clearly that he was a big fat jerk to her from the get-go. Of course a guy like that would paint the annoying but harmless actress as the bad guy. Of course he would write a self-aggrandizing series that degrades her again and again and colors himself the victim. But adding the more reliable Tom to the mix makes this all more complex.

A decade ago, Tom was a pretty level-headed and reasonable guy. Now he’s a live-wire who will push a man in a worm costume without much provocation. He’s kind of turned into a Paulie G (copping to his own issues with substance abuse). Both Tom and Paulie G are utterly traumatized by their time on Room And Bored, and while Tom paints Paulie G as the Big Bad in his version of the story, we are now forced to consider Valerie’s role in that sitcom in a whole new light. I don’t think it’s fair to say that she drove either Paulie G or Tom to madness — Paulie G would’ve been a heroin-shooting jackass regardless. But Valerie came out of that moment with a hit show (the reality show The Comeback, not Room And Bored) and has gone on to star opposite Seth Rogen on an HBO series.

When Season One ended, Val’s success seemed more like a compromise than a triumph, but in Tom and Paulie G’s eyes, she got the better deal and they got rehab and Nickelodeon. Juna became a movie star, Jane won an Oscar, and none of these people are as happy as they should be, but this isn’t just about Valerie Cherish looking foolish while everyone else winces anymore. In some ways, Valerie actually has the power here — the mere sight of her can make grown men regress into tantrum-throwing children. This season, there are many ways in which Valerie Cherish is really, truly winning, and that’s not something I expected from The Comeback. It’s a totally different M.O., and maybe it’ll change in the next episode. For now, Valerie Cherish is kinda fucking crushing it, and I’m very excited.

Thanks to a little visit from the Grim Reaper, last week’s “Valerie Saves The Show” was The Comeback‘s darkest episode yet, but “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” is also pretty menacing. Shayna the First AD wears a shirt that says “City of Angels,” and that’s no accident — this episode is all about how merciless Hollywood is. A once-promising comedy writer and Emmy winner is barely holding on as the producer of a kids’ show he can’t stand, and the cast of that series isn’t any happier, as evidenced by Gary the fury-filled worm. Tom hates his former partner, also an Emmy winner, who cleaned up his heroin habit and got a show on the most prestigious network around and is utterly joyless. A publicist flies into a rage at the drop of a hat, throwing a hissy fit and quitting his job because he’s been upstaged by the network publicist.

These are funny moments, but they’re sad, too — Billy cries! And while his rant is, on the one hand, rather infantile, it’s also heartfelt and raises a solid point. People like Billy and Tom and Paulie G made sacrifices that allowed Valerie to get where she is, and now it’s not just Red who has fallen prey to the monster that is Hollywood — they’re all in the same boat. In fact, her delusions of grandeur might be the very thing that is saving her from being as despondent as the rest of these people. (Remember: Jane is pretty down on herself, too.) Val’s still the same character, but Season Two has found a new spin on Valerie Cherish’s oblivious optimism. Rather than using it to make her the butt of every joke, this time she may be the luckiest out of any of these characters. (Seth Rogen seems pretty chipper, but again: that’s because he’s just Seth Rogen.)

Interestingly, “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” pretty squarely focuses the onus of its misery on the men. Paulie G, Tom, and Billy fly into major rages, while Mark (in his brief appearance) is also pretty cantankerous, and even Mickey seems a little pissier than usual. (Who would have guessed he’d have such beef with The New York Times crossword puzzle?) In contrast, Jane remains pretty level-headed when she and Val spar, and Andie either genuinely likes Valerie Cherish or at least does a better job of hiding her annoyance than Tom and Paulie G ever did. “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” had some pretty on-point criticism of how Hollywood’s boys’ club treats women, but in this episode, the ladies get the last laugh while the men are off sulking. It’s not coincidental that the critic character is also a woman — the sisters are all Team Valerie in this one, while none of the boys do her any favors. (Assuming we can safely count Mickey amongst the sisters.)

Also of note: here Valerie is obsessively worried about her appearance (even moreso than usual). She covers up that awful green body suit with a robe, she battles Paulie G over the unflattering dramatic lighting in Seeing Red, then refuses to let Jane shoot the behind-the-scenes footage with the docu-like lack of luminescence HBO prefers. (And this time, she puts her foot down.) When the New York Times critic refers to her portrayal of Mallory as “brave,” Valerie assumes it is a backhanded compliment that is somehow judging the way she looks. (Which, again, astutely highlights the double standard actresses face in this business. Men who look unattractive in movies are never called “brave.”) It turns out that this woman is giving her an actual compliment, something Valerie Cherish isn’t used to (and probably doesn’t often deserve). That’s why it takes her so long to catch on, worried about how she looks physically when she’s never come off looking better. Valerie is so used to spinning everything she hears into a compliment that she’s become totally deaf to genuine praise. After all her ego trips, what a twist for Valerie to be in denial of her talent, deflecting in the one moment she earns kudos.

Valerie watches the dailies with her “It wall” in the background, a reminder of all the fluffy vanilla material she’s known for. She thinks the scene is too dark, and no one — not even Mickey — agrees with her. Is this a meta-commentary, a way of staving off naysayers who might wish that The Comeback was more goofy fun, less biting and incisive? Maybe, maybe not, but it is telling of Valerie’s character that the first thing she sees when she watches her own tour-de-force performance is that the lighting isn’t flattering, and her I’m It fans don’t want to see her that way. This is the diametric opposite of almost every other episode of the series, where Valerie thinks she’s great and others have a different take on the matter. The script has been flipped, people.

The debate over the lighting is an on-the-nose but apt metaphor for what this episode is about: light-as-a-feather Valerie afraid of going “too dark,” of straying from her sitcom roots, when ironically, everyone else thinks she’s never been better. She’s actually good. (See above, re: Valerie Cherish crushing it.) The whole episode is full of contrasts between light and dark — like when a silly kiddie program takes on a very profane and adult tone, revealing the crushed dreams of its producer. “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” begins with Val bathed in the garish, cheesy reality lights she’s always reveled in; a multicamera sitcom, too, by necessity, has very bland and direct lighting. That’s the world Valerie knows, but she’s moving into darker, more serious territory. And so is The Comeback.

I’m not sure what lesson, if any, Val will take from all this, but it seems like another turning point for this series. If The New York Times genuinely thinks Valerie Cherish has given a raw, revealing performance, then there’s no reason to think the rest of the world won’t agree. We could see Valerie Cherish as a sought-after hot commodity in serious dramatic roles. We could see Valerie Cherish win an Emmy.

Would that ruin the delicious dynamic The Comeback has cooked up thus far, with Val dwindling down on the D list? I don’t think so. I see no reason the show couldn’t be just as funny if Valerie Cherish was working opposite Matthew McConaughey in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. I think that’s a natural evolution, a smart way for The Comeback to do more than just replay Valerie Cherish’s Greatest Hits from Season One. It would be a nice echo of the way Season One spent thirteen episodes preparing us for the humiliating debut of her reality series, only to surprise us at the very end and turn Valerie’s degradation into her salvation.

But I don’t think The Comeback has to go this route. Maybe Paulie G’s shortcomings are a sign that Seeing Red is going to flop. Valerie’s small victories in this episode could be a blip on the radar. I’m on board regardless. “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” truly surprised me, and though I’ve often said that The Comeback is the smartest and most (unfortunately) accurate dissection of Hollywood I’ve seen, this episode widened the scope in a way I’d never considered. True to its title, it made me take Valerie Cherish seriously. For all the comedy we get from Valerie’s miming of child-dismemberment in a hilariously hideous motion capture suit, this is a serious episode — even more serious than last week’s. There’s a lot of drama here.

My days of fearing that Season Two of The Comeback would be but a pale imitation of its glory days are long gone. The Comeback is doing what it has always done: taking risks and taking no prisoners, while still presenting a deceptively light tone overall. Here Valerie Cherish is asked to portray a monster that eats Paulie G’s inner child, but we all know that the monster is really the profession he’s chosen — the same monster that devoured Billy and Tom’s inner children, and who knows how many others? I feel bad for Tom and Billy and maybe even Paulie G, but it’s also nice to see Red on top of the world by episode’s end for a change. She gets a sweet gift from Seth Rogen and proclaims that it’s a good day, and for Valerie Cherish, it is. As dark as this episode goes at times, it also has one of the series’ sunniest endings.

We don’t yet know if Valerie Cherish’s portrayal of Mallory on Seeing Red is Emmy-worthy, but I can say with certainty that this episode of The Comeback is. It’s unlikely that the Hollywood monster really will take this little-watched but much-loved comedy seriously, but I do. This is one of The Comeback‘s very best episodes.

“Valerie Is Taken Seriously”: A

*

If you live in or around Hollywood, you’re likely to see open-top buses filled with tourists, taking a tour of your home like it’s Disneyland. I happen to live near a lot of the attractions on these tours — places that are pretty ordinary to me, but can still be sold as part of the Tinseltown mythos. The lookie-loos in these buses and vans want to see where the stars live — or, stranger still, used to live — because, as legend has it, such figures are larger than life, gods amongst men, living out their fabulous, unimaginable lives on a plane of existence we mere mortals can only dream of.

The truth is a far cry from that — and if you live here, you know it. But you’ll still see those buses full of people, their eyes glancing briefly at you, just in case you might be a celebrity, and then darting quickly away when they realize you’re just another person. Like animals in cages at a zoo, we don’t pay much mind to these tourists invading our natural habitat — which is not, in fact, our natural habitat, but an enclosure built up to vaguely resemble our former way of life. Our unnatural habitat. In Los Angeles, it’s a constant reminder that people are fascinated by our way of life here, even if that way of life loses its luster to those who actually live here. At some point, even glitz and glamor begin to look ordinary. I look at those tourists sometimes and try to remember what it’s like to be just thrilled by all this.

David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars is a lot like those “star tours,” except in addition to showing you gaudy homes, celeb hotspots, and a glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous, it will also show you incest, prescription drug abuse, the ghosts of multiple children, self-immolation, and at least one dead pet.

Welcome to Hollywood, folks!

Maps To The Stars begins, as most cliche Hollywood stories do, with a young woman stepping off a bus in Los Angeles. But if you think you’ve seen this one before, think again. Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) wears long black gloves to cover the burns on her arms. A less severe burn marks her face. Agatha requests a limo driven by Jerome (Robert Pattinson), who is — you guessed it! — an aspiring actor and screenwriter. Agatha, on the other hand, has not come to Los Angeles to make it as an actress. She’s come to make amends.

But first, she’s come to meet her Twitter buddy, Carrie Fisher (no, really, it’s Carrie Fisher), who helps her get a job as personal assistant (AKA “chore whore”) to an aging actress named Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). Havana is desperately, desperately, desperately attempting to procure a role in the remake of a film her mother, Hollywood legend Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), won a Golden Globe in. Clarice was later killed in a fire, which makes Havana’s meeting with burn victim Agatha feel predestined. And maybe it is! Around the time Agatha arrives in the City of Angels, Havana begins having visions of her dead mother — in the bath, in bed with her during a threesome — and let’s just say mommy isn’t playing nice. Havana is not the only celebrity who’s seeing things — child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) has visions of a recently deceased teen girl who was a major fan of his. (She’s not such a fan in the afterlife, though.)

Are these real ghosts? Or just figments of these warped celebrity imaginations? Maps To The Stars isn’t so interested in a plausible explanation, but seems to suggest that celebrity minds are already so fragile, and damaged, and used to lying to themselves, that adding visions of the dead on top of all tht is hardly a stretch. Its vision of Los Angeles is of a bizarre, interconnected world where there are many coincidences but no accidents. Benjie’s father Stafford (John Cusack) is a loopy self-help guru who treats Havana for the sexual abuse she (supposedly) suffered as a young child (in sessions that come off more like child rape fantasies than therapy). Benjie and Havana also have the same manager, Genie (Dawn Greenhalgh), though Benjie’s career is really run by his steely mother Christina (Olivia Williams).

Despite constantly sunny skies, there’s a foreboding sense of doom hanging over these characters’ heads from the very beginning, as if all of these people were poisoned by prosperity and fame long ago and are only now getting around to actually expiring from it. Benjie and Havana both grew up privileged, both began acting at a young age, and now are both insufferable narcissists. Benjie may still be a young teenager, but he’s also just 90 days out of rehab and is paranoid that his younger co-star (a mere moppet) is stealing scenes. Meanwhile, Havana pops just about every kind of pill there is and rejoices when a personal catastrophe strikes the younger actress who got the part she wanted. At her very lowest point, she lays bare her insecurity in a sickening seduction that has her asking Jerome if she has better skin than a burn victim. This is not the behavior of a happy person. Maps To The Stars is both a very funny satire of celebrity as well as a seriously fucked up tragedy. As in many of Cronenberg’s films, the real world feels “off” somehow — even for Los Angeles. It’s not quite as bizarre as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, though the two films not surprisingly have plenty in common. It’s also not technically set in a post-apocalyptic time like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, but it has a similar surreal quality that mixes nicely with the heightened reality of celebrity life. It is rather akin in tone to Cronenberg’s last film, Cosmopolis, which had Robert Pattinson riding around in the back of a limo instead of driving one. Cosmopolis, like Maps To The Stars, was about the gross and sometimes homicidal extremes that soulless rich people will sink to just to feel alive. (Sarah Gadon also returns from Cosmopolis, and after her recent appearance in Enemy, I’m starting to wonder if she has any interest in movies that take place in our actual reality.)

Maps To The Stars is the twisted nightmare version of sightseeing in Los Angeles, and like those star tours, it’s obsessed with the mythos of celebrity and ultimately quite critical of this city and this industry. David Cronenberg has been making movies for a long time, so it’s possible that he has an axe to grind with the kinds of people you find in this business, but it’s equally likely that he’s just having a laugh at our expense. Virtually every character in Maps To The Stars is ludicrously despicable, and that’s before some of them start killing people. We’re meant to laugh at the shallow words that come out of their mouths, we’re meant to pity them (but not sympathize).  None of these characters seems too closely based on a real person, but Benjie is the right age to display a foul Bieber-like ‘tude that instantly renders him a teenage monster — though we also sense that he’s had little choice in the matter, due to a disturbed childhood and some seriously freaky parents. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that Julianne Moore, in her Golden Globe nominated performance, was playing an overgrown Lindsay Lohan — maybe just because she looks so much like Lindsay Lohan — although by the end, even Lilo would look at her and say, “What a raging bitch!” It’s a credit to Moore that the character comes off as sympathetic as she does, before she takes a turn for the truly vile. (I would wager that that turn takes place in a brilliant gross-out sequence set in the bathroom.)

By the end, so many gruesome things happen to these people that Maps To The Stars becomes impossible to take too seriously as a tragedy. We feel a little sorry for them, but mostly these people have brought it on themselves. Nearly everyone in this story is a vulgar freak; the ones that aren’t might not be merely because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough. It’s hard to imagine that Cronenberg and screenwriter Bruce Wagner think they’re delivering an accurate representation of Los Angeles — it’s too extreme to take seriously — and yet it does play right into the stereotypical view of Hollywood so many people have. I’m a little uncomfortable with the way Maps To The Stars demonizes each and every corner of Los Angeles, without displaying a single corner worthy of redemption. I’m in on the joke, but will everybody else be? Or will this just serve as more fuel for the fire of L.A. haters? Personally, I happen to think Maps To The Stars is a satire of the way people think about Los Angeles than the city itself. There’s some truth in here, but it’s also a shallow, tourist’s point-of-view, one that scratches just barely below the surface and finds nothing but a void underneath. The movie’s title suggests a tour of Hollywood life, and the response is a movie that throws ugliness and depravity back in our faces.

You want to see celebrities? We’ll give you celebrities! Cronenberg seems to say. But then he won’t let us look away. We have to live in the grimy cannibalistic black hole these famous people do, and I’m not sure this is meant to reflect a real place so much as it is meant to mirror our fascination with gawking at the most shallow of celebrities. Stars would be nothing without their adoring fans, and that’s us. We’re their enablers. We’re the ones who allowed them to become such vicious monsters. Maps To The Stars just may be our punishment for that.

*

“That’s a cautionary tale, huh? That’s what happens, though, you know, when you make show business your whole life, right? You know? Next thing you know, you’re eating kale chips out of a shopping cart.”

The Comeback has had a rather dark streak the past few episodes, touching on misogyny, suicide, cancer, and explosive anger stemming from a deep well of unhappiness in several of these characters who’ve had their showbiz dreams dashed to pieces. “Valerie Cooks In The Desert” lightens up a smidge, although there’s a rather grim interlude in the middle (also involving shattered illusions).

The episode begins with Val glowing from her (first ever?) positive reviews — The New York Times has praised the performances in Seeing Red, though Paulie G’s writing gets disparaged. Marky Mark is less a fan of Valerie Cherish at the moment, since her re-shoots are getting in the way of their dinner at Nobu, not to mention tearing up the floors in their home. As foreshadowed in previous episodes, when Mark got so fed-up with Val’s production(s) that he defected to a rental home, there’s serious trouble in paradise between Mr. and Mrs. Cherish. (Valerie’s maid, Esperanza, on the other hand, is finally easing up in front of the cameras — or at least trying to, doing a stiff variation on the sassy housekeeper stereotype she thinks viewers will buy into. Let’s just say it needs work.)Mark and Val’s home being tarnished by production is an apt metaphor for the damage it’s done to their marriage. Valerie spends this whole episode trying to repair what’s broken, making a big gesture of cooking dinner for her man as an excuse for why she wants to wrap up her portion of production; unfortunately, no one else gets why this is such a big deal, because an average wife would be making meals for her mister on the regular. Paulie G has yet another freakout at Val when she suggests that the reviews for the Seeing Red premiere were mixed, which sends him into retreat mode as he tries to punch up the final episode, leading to further delays. Whereas Val once lived to be in front of the cameras, here she just wants it to be over.

Valerie is beckoned to the desert, where reshoots have her filming an insane kidnapping sequence in the trunk of a car, co-starring a bunch of snakes, with her mouth taped shut (a dream come true for Paulie G, surely). Meanwhile, Paulie G attempts to crank out pages, taking a break for a massage that Val bursts in on in an attempted drug bust, thanks to Tyler’s guess that he’s shooting up in there. (“You’re not a writer!” Val accuses of Tyler’s storytelling.) The heat is getting to everyone, which leads Valerie to display her diva actress side in an interaction with Ron and Shayla that ends with Val on the receiving end of “the middle finger” from the wheelchair-bound line producer. It’s never good to be flipped off by a guy in a wheelchair.Predictably, Valerie doesn’t make it out of the desert until well into the evening, stopping by Mark’s rental house to leave dinner at the door because he’ll be too mad to let her in. (Aww. You can tell Jane really feels for her in this one.) A well-intentioned “pebble” thrown at the bedroom window changes that when it smashes the glass and rouses Mark from bed. (“So cute!” Val says, moments before we hear glass breaking.) Mark lets Val in with her dinner (partially eaten by dogs Valerie mistakes for coyotes), but it’s clear that this relationship is in jeopardy, especially once we learn that Mark has “plans” with the woman he rented the house from. He’s enjoying his bachelor pad a bit too much, it seems, while his wife has forsaken him for the former heroin addict who was at one time her biggest nemesis.

“Valerie Cooks In The Desert” doesn’t introduce any new ideas. It pushes forward storylines that have been simmering for a while now. Mostly, the rockiness of Val and Mark’s marriage now that the cameras are back, but also Mickey’s illness and Paulie G’s continual spiral toward relapse. We already knew that Valerie was getting a good review from the Times. Val’s sparring with Ron and Shayla isn’t new, either — it’s just that here, it reaches a boiling point.

“Valerie Cooks In The Desert” has plenty of amusing throwaway comedy. Mickey has a gross-out moment when Rada stops by and he can’t make it all the way to the outside bathroom — apparently, his medication has led to some rather explosive moments on the toilet (and we have a remix of Season One’s similar gag, when it was Mark on the porcelain throne during one of Val’s confessionals). Valerie riffs on an old Wendy’s commercial, asking “Where’s the meat?” and announcing “Here’s the beef!” (Both wrong.) Mickey makes a rather lewd comment about how much fun one can have with beef (even I’m not sure what exactly he means). Valerie’s quip about the dragons on Game Of Thrones not being real as a live snake is locked in the trunk with her is also a winner, though Billy’s Orange Is The New Black reference goes over her head. (“Now you’re just saying colors!”) Val may be hip to HBO now, but she’s not caught up with Netflix.So it’s official — Valerie has gotten the acclaim she’s always wanted, but it hasn’t really gone to her head because she never noticed that she wasn’t acclaimed before. Sure, Valerie is more uppity here than usual, trying to use her good review to earn her a table at Nobu, but is that really because she’s gotten good notes from The New York Times? Or is it because the demands of the Seeing Red crew are pretty unreasonable? It’s hard to imagine Seth Rogen being asked to wait around in sweltering heat, locked in a trunk with a snake. Val has met success in the entertainment industry at last, but that’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.

As Mickey grows less and less able to keep up with Red’s heavy production schedule, and Mark is less and less willing to let showbiz become the mistress in their marriage, it seems we soon may see Valerie Cherish faced with a choice: her personal life, or her dreams of fame and adulation? This becomes clearest in the episode’s centerpiece scene, when Valerie runs into good ol’ Gigi at the supermarket.

Gigi was one of many highlights in Season One — the lone female writer Valerie took under her wing (for mostly selfish reasons). Gigi had a bad habit of eating her feelings and frequently burst into tears when things didn’t go her way (which was always). In many moments, she was even more pathetic than Valerie. And not much has changed. Gigi has gained a significant amount of weight (even Mickey makes a catty comment about it!). When we re-meet her, she’s munching on a bag of kale chips. She also looks like she’s aged about thirty years.Valerie observes with embarrassed pity as Gigi claims to be living it up as a writer on Pretty Little Liars and expectant (adoptive) mother… before collapsing into sobs as she explains that she owns four empty homes, doesn’t get along with her co-workers, can’t get enough time off work for a root canal, and even hates her bitch of a dog-walker. She, too, had a dream of having a show on HBO, except unlike Val and Paulie G, she never made it. (They picked up Girls instead — ironically, also about a less-than-svelte lady who is fond of snacking.) Gigi’s in the same camp we learned Tom was in last week — technically successful, but hating every minute of it. Once again, Valerie Cherish is one of the unlikely lucky ones to come out of the Room And Bored debacle.

Valerie doesn’t offer to heal Gigi’s wounds this time around — how could she? Gigi’s personal damages may be beyond repair at this point, and Valerie is only one woman. She doesn’t have a lot of pull at HBO. But she does see a lesson about the dark side of success — and the dangers of being a single woman who only has “the business” to keep her warm at night, for Hollywood is a fickle lover. Valerie may be having fifteen more minutes of fame at the moment, but how long will that last? Is it worth sacrificing her marriage for? Aside from sharing some laughs with director Andie (who returns, with more bonkers dance references) and Seth Rogen (absent in this episode), Valerie hasn’t made any new friends despite her newfound success — and as of this episode, she’s clearly made a few enemies.

Valerie now has more or less what she always wanted — but how bad does she really want it? Bad enough to sabotage her own marriage, bad enough to leave Mickey behind in the dust? Stay tuned — there’s just two episodes left of The Comeback‘s second season! (And that just might be all we get, thanks to poor ratings. Television is a cruel mistress, indeed.)

“Valerie Cooks In The Desert”: B+

*

We are officially wrapping up the fall TV season now, as most shows have begun or are about to take a hiatus for the holidays, and others are taking a hiatus for… ever. Farewell, A To Z! Good riddance, Selfie! Manhattan Love Story, we hardly knew ye!

I’m not too broken up about any of this, since the final half of 2014 didn’t give us a whole lot to get excited about, televisually speaking, whereas 2015 brings the winter return of a few things I’m quite looking forward to, such as Girls, True Detective, and Looking on HBO, and AMC’s Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, which I’m cautiously optimistic about.

It should surprise no one that the comeback of The Comeback was the real bright spot in my fall TV schedule. In the last few weeks, the show h

as proven itself to be freakin’ brilliant all over again, and it remains the ultimate skewering of the television industry. (But you can read more about that here.)

This TV seasons earns a special shout-out for ABC, which far and away had the strongest new schedule. I’ll discuss one of its success stories at length below, but let’s not forget Cristela and Blackish, which earn points both for diversity and practically single-handedly saving the family sitcom from extinction, seeing as its competition is pretty dismal. (Exception: the charming The Goldbergs, also on ABC.)

Now, let’s take a moment to see what else survived on my DVR over these few cruel months… and which shows fell off the radar.

GOTHAM

Since Gotham has been reasonably well-reviewed, I decided to give it another chance after dismissing the laughable, weak pilot.

I got about ten minutes in, then turned it off.

Nope! Still terrible.

Wake me up when they’re in high school.

STATE OF AFFAIRS

When you watch a show with a title as generic as State Of Affairs, you know what you’re getting yourself into. I have to admit the concept of the show sounded mildly appealing, with a CIA officer who was involved with the president’s deceased son doing a bunch of other CIA stuff on a weekly basis. Okay, maybe I just wanted to see a TV world in which Alfre Woodard was the president. Unfortunately, that is the same world where Katherine Heigl is part of the CIA, which is a little bit like when Denise Richards was cast a nuclear physicist in a James Bond movie or Tara Reid was cast as anything in any movie. It’s just not believable! On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to Heigl and all actors who get typecast as one thing, and then can’t break out of that mold. On the other hand, 27 Dresses, The Ugly Truth, One For The Money, Life As We Know It, Killers, The Big Wedding, New Year’s Eve. Katherine, you did this to yourself.

In State Of Affairs, Heigl’s character’s name is Charleston Tucker, which I think should mean she has to do the Charleston every time she enters a new location, because that’s what I think of whenever her name is mentioned. Charleston reacts to severe national crises like her sorority pledge drive isn’t going very well, or maybe it just seems that way because the pilot dresses her up like a hipster librarian. (I feel like a real CIA agent would be shot on sight for an outfit like that, but what do I know?) State Of Affairs is a lot like Madam Secretary, especially since it requires the lead actress to do a lot of staring at screens with a furrowed brow — and Tea Leoni pulls that off better than Katherine Heigl ever will. Charleston mostly just looks like like she’s watching her own sex tape go viral. State Of Affairs doesn’t really utilize any of Heigl’s assets, instead trying to make an actress who doesn’t do dour and serious very well do nothing but dour and serious, but without the surrounding skill and gravitas of a show like Homeland. It’s basically Zero Light Thirty, so it’s harmless enough, but if it doesn’t make it past its first season America may be a better place for it.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW

Oh, Ryan Murphy. I wish I could quit you.

Popular was fun. For a brief, shining moment, Nip/Tuck was brilliant. I was never a fan of Glee, but now I’m basically watching it anyway, thanks to American Horror Story. Last fall’s Coven derailed mid-season, but remained watchable until the real death knell: when Stevie fucking Nicks dropped by for a series of musical numbers. This was only one in a vast number of problems with the season, which kept killing and resurrecting people until these beloved characters’ deaths felt about as momentous as a trip to the grocery store.

Now in its fourth season, Murphy’s FX anthology is now American Horror Story: Glee, and yes, that is the true extent of the horror. There’s a homicidal clown and his dandy protegee, there are assorted two-headed people and Kathy Bates in her most masculine role to date (and that’s saying something), but what there really is is a lot of singing. Imagine I walked into a network and pitched a story set in 1950s Florida where characters sometimes dropped everything to sing tunes by Lana Del Rey and Fiona Apple. I would be escorted off the studio lot immediately.

But I’m not Ryan Murphy.The anachronistic song choices might work if used sparingly, if they were more than a jukebox gimmick utilized because Ryan Murphy just can’t not have people burst into song. (How much do you want to bet that his American Crime Story, centered on O.J. Simpson, has Nicole Brown Simpson and Kato Kaelin dueting to Rihanna and Eminem’s “Love The Way You Lie,” or something?) Again, Murphy returns to the well of “just joking!” character deaths (this time, in extended lame fantasy sequences rather than lame resurrections) that just make us throw up our hands in frustration. The season began by ripping off Zodiac and Halloween, which was moderately promising, until Murphy decided to kill off the season’s most iconic and creepiest character, Twisty the killer clown played by John Carroll Lynch, in the Halloween two-parter (the best of Freak Show this season).

This season hasn’t recovered from the loss of Twisty. It’s now a black comedy about a bratty serial killer (Finn Wittrock) with dull detours (like a whole bunch of business involving tattoo-faced Grace Gummer) and little continuity from episode to episode. (Not as bad as last season, but that’s a low bar.) Coven had a bevy of bitchy witches that kept things fun even when the plot faltered. This season, Jessica Lange’s legless fame whore Elsa is a repetitive bore; Emma Roberts’ slightly snarky sham fortune teller is no match for last season’s vicious vixen Madison Montgomery; Evan Peters is a suitable enough “hero” as Jimmy the lobster claw man, but maybe they shouldn’t have kicked off the season with him murdering someone if they wanted us to truly root for him.

There’s no real momentum. Dandy has been a wacko since Day One, so we’re basically just cooling our heels until his storyline intersects with Elsa’s freak show in a meaningful way, and there is hardly anyone we even care about surviving there anyway, especially after the demise of Ma Petite (R.I.P.). At this point, the scariest thing about this show is the masochism of continuing to watch it.

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER

The gayest show on television is not on HBO or Logo. It’s on ABC prime time Thursdays, the network’s hottest night. So I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that How To Get Away With Murder is also one of the campiest, most over-the-top shows on TV. It’s the kind of show where people use the term “slut shaming” in court, where murder convictions are overturned a matter of days after the crime was committed. Or whatever. I can’t really follow How To Get Away With Murder‘s legal maneuvers, and I’ll bet the show’s writers are hoping you can’t, either, because they don’t make a lick of sense. I know that’s true of every legal procedural, from The Practice to Law & Order, but How To Get Away With Murder seems to take a special pleasure in ridiculous courtroom proceedings that make any given episode of Ally McBeal look like an actual courtroom transcript.

If you can set aside the ludicrous misuse of the law — and I’d forgive you if you can’t, because it’s not easy — then what you’ll get is a super-sudsy soap opera unfolding in two time periods: first, on the night of a crime that all of Annalise Keating’s star students are implicated in, and second, some weeks prior, as they are gearing up on the defense of a connected murder. The show’s weekly cases are throwaway at best, so lame that I almost stopped watching, and I wouldn’t be sorry if How To Get Away With Murder jettisoned the procedural element completely.

ABC’s try-hard marketing seems to be paying off in getting plot beats and dialogue snippets (like “Why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone?”) to become semi-water cooler moments, and it could grow stale any minute — especially now that the series has caught up to itself and revealed that Annalise is somehow in on the cover-up involving her husband’s accidental murder. (If you want to get away with murder, it helps to have an infallible attorney who happens to be married to the victim on your side.) The cast is appealing, Viola Davis grounds it in whatever reality she can muster, and the attempts at racial and sexual diversity build up enough goodwill to make this stand out from other completely absurd attempts at representing the legal profession that are not so consistently progressive. If nothing else, How To Get Away With Murder is a good example of what people want to see on TV nowadays, and that’s not always easy to find on network television.

OLIVE KITTERIDGE

One of fall 2014’s most appealing offerings wasn’t exactly a series at all. Or, it was — but it was only four episodes. That’s HBO’s Olive Kitteridge, the adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s collection of short stories, spanning many decades and starring Frances McDormand as the titular character, a woman who is hard to warm up to in the world of this story but easy to love as a viewer because she’s so feisty.

The series begins when Olive’s husband Henry (Richard Jenkins) takes on a new employee at his pharmacy in small-town Maine. She’s Denise (Zoe Kazan), young, cute, dorky, and married — but not for long, as tragedy soon strikes her handsome husband, also named Henry (Brady Corbet). The still-living Henry, obviously smitten with her from the beginning, now feels the urge to care for her even as Denise gradually moves into a romance with a younger and more eligible coworker (Jesse Plemons).

Olive Kitteridge eventually follows Henry and Olive from middle age to old age, as their son grows from a teenager into a man, gets married and then divorced and married again. Side characters come in and out of their lives, including a severely depressed woman (Rosemarie DeWitt) and, later, her equally depressed son (Cory Michael Smith), as well as a cranky widower with conservative views (Bill Murray). What connects these segments, occurring over so many years, is death — deaths that occur, or almost occur. Some are accidents, some are suicides, some are crimes, and some are just nature. A full life is filled with death, and Olive Kitteridge experiences more than her share of it, but marches forth anyway. Olive Kitteridge is a bittersweet experience with sharp characters and many moments of beauty amidst the tragedy, and it’s probably the best thing I saw on TV in fall 2104 (besides The Comeback).

*

(Throwback Thursday: My final column for INsite Boston, originally published in April 2007. I still feel that I wrote this shortly after Hollywood reached a turning point; when the advent of the internet paved the way for celebrity worship to give way to schadenfreude. Sensing that, I realized I had said all that there was to be said about the era’s most ridiculed stars… at least until I spent several years writing celebrity news — and continuously making fun of them.)

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”

“It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

When it comes to great exit lines, Hollywood is king. In real life, talk tends to be a lot more awkward. We stammer, we interrupt, we’re unable to fill uncomfortable silences. We say things — really stupid things — that no mentally capable human being should ever utter. It’s the stuff screenwriters skimp on to get the meat of the matter, hence why characters in movies are always much more succinct than anyone you’ll meet on the street. I suppose we actual humans rattle off one gem every ten thousand phrases or so, but for the most part we’re conversational klutzes, chit-chatting our way through life with all the finesse of Laurel and Hardy.

Take, for example, the process we undergo just to get off the phone. The countless minutes we waste muttering “So, um… yeah… uh… okay, then… I should go… what? no, you didn’t tell me…” before coming to a polite agreement on the issue of not wanting to speak to each other anymore. In movies, they don’t even have to say “good-bye” — it’s just the facts, ma’am, then click. Dial tone. But the big screen has always had a way of making things look easier than they really are.

I once worried that my shortcomings in the realm of communication would hinder my professional pursuits. How could I convey my ideas to the world if I can’t even communicate one-on-one without a conversational foul? It’s not just that I’m tongue-tied. When put on the spot, I go all deer-meets-headlights, and by the time I’ve thought up a decipherable response, someone’s off to fetch the smelling salts. Early on in life, I embraced the written word as my preferred platform, and for good reason. Writing allows me to ponder and plan out exactly what I’m going to say. Even if it takes hours, days, weeks, years… eventually I find the right words.

But aloud? Not so much. Lucky for me, the current trend in Hollywood is toward ineloquence and incomprehensibility. The stars are no longer distant and luminous. They are more like rapidly descending balls of gas. Gone are the days of well-turned phrases and witty asides. Now we usher in the era of the sound bite, the YouTube clip, the snarky T-shirt catchphrase brought to you at a half-literate starlet’s expense. The rapid, vast sprawl of information on the internet has created a demand for 24/7, up-to-the-minute surveillance of Hollyworld’s best and brightest, which means we’re capturing every single one of their blunders, and broadcasting them the world over. As a result, we now see that the stars truly are just like us. Retarded.

It’s hard to be too embarrassed by our own verbal snafus when, every day, famous people are saying much dumber things than we are in much more public venues. At first it was amusing, as those we worshipped suddenly revealed themselves as mere mortals, as flawed as we are… but more comically so. We were rapt as Tom Cruise, the world’s biggest action star, transformed before our very eyes into the world’s biggest dork — jumping on furniture, gobbling placentas, the whole crazy shebang. We jeered as Paris Hilton, the rich bitch heiress, got her tabloid comeuppance again and again, yet still never managed to open both eyes all the way. And when even Mel Gibson revealed himself as the misogynistic, anti-Semitic, alcoholic egomaniac we always feared had directed that Jesus snuff film, it was still pretty entertaining. Suddenly celebrities were making mistakes that… well, maybe we wouldn’t make, but our more embarrassing friends might, and we could relate. It was almost endearing.

But it didn’t end there.

There comes a point when bigoted, boozy rants become old hat. Only so many foreign moppets salvaged by Hollywood’s most beautiful people can warm our hearts before we start rolling our eyes. After being dragged through media hell, Britney Spears, our slowly-decaying pop princess, looks less like Madonna, more like Max Headroom, and we’ve seen such a Hefnerian sum of VIP nether-parts we could start a “who’s who” guessing game of celebrity vaginas.

But it wasn’t until the sudden death of Anna Nicole Smith that we really saw where celebrity was headed. Could a nation mourn someone they’ve only ever laughed at? Would she receive her only shred of public sympathy postmortem? No famous last words for Anna — tabloids bypassed grief and went straight for sensation. (Was it an overdose? Obviously. What will happen to her body? Morbid much? Who cares?)

Why? Because sensation is all she ever was to us. For Smith, a prime exemplar of the talent-light, controversy-heavy quasi-stars for whom headlines are the same as punchlines, it may have been a fitting denouement… but it also sounded a wakeup call.

Now we see: when the stars fall so far they end up six feet under, it isn’t quite so funny.We all live in the same swiftly interconnecting world. Nothing that happens to one of us is that far from happening to us all. Celebrity mediocrity isn’t just a result of seeing stars at their most ordinary, but also of our own rising stardom. Anyone with a social networking profile online knows what it’s like to expose our lives to innumerable strangers. Intimate details of our friendships and relationships are made public for all the world to see. These days, stars are just people whose sex tapes have more views than ours, whose party pictures are posted in People magazine instead of on Facebook, who have a couple million more anonymous “friends” than we do. Maybe we’re all doomed to become personas instead of people. As communication opens up the normal and the notorious alike to public scrutiny, someday the truly privileged will be those precious few who aren’t on global display.

So on that note, I bid the world of celebrity gossip a bittersweet adieu. Our envy of the stars has finally brought them down to our level, but only a real sadist would keep on kicking ‘em down. Who stands on the sidelines of a train crash to make sarcastic quips about the victims as they flail in the bloody wreckage? Not me, anymore.

I’d love to leave you with a clever line to remember me by — some famous last words — but I’m afraid it’s no longer in fashion.

So, um… yeah… okay, then… uh…

Bye!*

Paul Thomas Anderson is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. By some, one of the greatest filmmakers of any time. Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood are held up, almost unanimously, as some of the finest films of the last quarter-century; some would add Magnolia and The Master to that list. (A few might even include Hard Eight and Punch-Drunk Love.)

Love him or hate him, Paul Thomas Anderson never wastes our time. He won’t toss one off for the mere sake of making something or collecting a paycheck. Every single moment in every single one of his movies is fully thought-through and executed exactly the way he intended it. Personally, I’m still not on board with the last few scenes of The Master, but I don’t doubt that Anderson presented them that way for a reason.

For what reason? I’ve no clue.

And I have no clue why he made many of the decisions he made in Inherent Vice, having seen it only once. (Most of Anderson’s oeuvre only gets better with subsequent viewings.) I read Thomas Pynchon’s novel, and I still don’t know exactly what I’m meant to take away from much of Inherent Vice. I can’t be certain that every character in the movie is meant to be a real person, or that every character who starts off as a real person is still real at the end of the movie, or if some might be figments of its protagonist’s imagination. I might have been frustrated had Inherent Vice come from a filmmaker I’m less familiar with. But in this case, I’m pretty sure my confusion is intended.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a private detective. This is a curious profession for a man who is so perpetually stoned, he tends to forget how he arrived at any given location, or who he came with. When an informant gives him a key clue about a Spanish phrase that might solve the mystery, he writes down in his notepad: “Something Spanish.” Oh well, it’s the 70s. The major joke of Inherent Vice, both book and movie, is that it follows a stoner’s logic. Plot elements are impossibly connected through a series of absurd and unlikely coincidences. There is a seemingly endless parade of characters, yet all are somehow involved in the same labyrinthine mystery, which feels like the kind of conspiracy a stoner would dream up, rather than a plausible string of crimes. Doc doesn’t really understand what’s going on, but he manages to connect some of the dots anyway, and even through that marijuana fog he understands what’s happening better than we do. (Or thinks he does, anyway.)

Trying to follow the plot of Inherent Vice is like trying to follow a conversation with the most strung-out individual you’ll ever meet: impossible. It makes no sense. Inherent Vice forces us to wonder if we, somehow, got high upon entering the theater. The script is way heavy on exposition; nearly every scene includes a detailed explanation of something we don’t fully understand. Certain characters seem to come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly, and many who enter this movie for a brief moment never return. We might wonder for a moment: “Hey, where’d what’s-her-name go?” But then we’re distracted by something else… then something else… and hey, there’s that one thing again… but wait, what?

What were we so worried about a few minutes ago? What’s the point of all this, again?Inherent Vice begins as Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterson) reenters his life after a long absence. She’s cleaned up — no longer a hippie, she claims to now be the arm candy of real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). That’s the jumping off point, but before it’s over Inherent Vice will introduce us to Nazis, lecherous dentists, naughty masseuses, corrupt cops, contract killers, pot-smoking maritime lawyers, assorted junkies, and a cult or two — and that’s just for starters. Inherent Vice is basically a grand tour through all of 1970, or at least all of 1970 in Southern California. Nixon is president, the establishment is paranoid about drugged-out hippies, and the drugged-out hippies are paranoid about the establishment. It’s far out, man.

The plot may be incomprehensible, and Doc is so drugged out most of the time that we’re never entirely sure he isn’t hallucinating some or maybe all of this. The film is narrated by Sortilege (Joanna Newsom), who reads some of Pynchon’s prose and occasionally interacts with Doc (but no one else). She moves in and out of the story fluidly, mostly likely a figment of Doc’s imagination. The rest of the story, mostly, I take at face value, even if a handful of moments have the queasy unease of a bad trip. Characters hang around Doc and occasionally help with no motivation, but that feels about right for a bunch of hippies in 1970 who are most likely all stoned beyond belief. An ill-advised road trip that is interrupted by the cops is particularly loopy and manic, and also reminiscent of the fast friendships that are formed when people are totally fucked up.On a macro level, Inherent Vice is about the clash of the straight world with the counter-culture. When we meet Shasta, she has attempted to trade up her lot in life, shedding her beachside waif look for a more sophisticated ensemble, shedding her dopey detective ex for a fat cat tycoon. But it doesn’t stick. Doc is currently dating Penny (Reese Witherspoon), a high-and-mighty deputy district attorney who only lets her hair down in the privacy of Doc’s home. There’s a major rift between the uptight straights and the dippy hippies, made most explicit in Doc’s interactions with his nemesis Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), who seems like a straight-laced lawman but drinks heavily, harbors a failed ambition of Hollywood stardom, and calls Doc up for frequent chats, seemingly out of boredom.

There is much to unpack in Inherent Vice — much more than can be done after a single viewing (even if you’ve read the book). Certain characters stick out — like the dope fiend dentist Dr. Blatnoyd, played by Martin Short, and Jade the helpful masseuse (Hong Chau), who kindly offers up the “pussy eater’s special” when she first meets Doc and then keeps pop upping conveniently any time he needs some info. Other characters fade from memory and seem less essential, but all represent a wacky piece of 1970 Americana. By this point, the children of the revolution were starting to lose their way, growing less sure of themselves and the groovy ideals they preached; the 1969 murders by Charles Manson’s followers had revealed the dark side of mind expansion, free love, and all that jazz. There was a time when many “square” Americans worried that the counter-culture was becoming the culture; Inherent Vice displays a weird push-pull between these factions, viewed on the periphery through the droopy eyes of Doc Sportello.Doc doesn’t realize it, but 1970 may have seemed like an apocalyptic time when viewed from a certain angle. For all we knew, the establishment might have been eradicated, replaced by an overabundance or drugs and sex and the collapse of life as we knew it. The threat of anarchy hangs over an otherwise sun-drenched Los Angeles in this movie, which is surreal either because it’s surreal or just because it’s 1970. Doc gets involved in a twisted plot involving Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a saxophonist, recovering junkie, and possible government operative who supposedly overdosed and died; he has left behind a young daughter and his wife Hope (Jena Malone), who has kicked her heroin habit and now sports some noticeably fake chompers. These two, I think, stand in for all of hippiedom, as (almost) everyone realized the visions of peace, love, and perpetual acid tripping that emerged in the latter 1960s were not a sturdy foundation to build a revolution on. The hippie life is only possible if the straight world is there to clean up the messes; by 1970, many of these crazy kids, like Hope and Coy, were heading back toward the family values and simple materialism that have kept America ticking all these years.

Inherent Vice is a vast spectrum of all the many ways these two societies intersect (or fail to). Some characters, like Penny and Doc’s lawyer buddy Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), manage to live a straight life while occasionally dipping their toe into some pot-fueled fun; others, like Dr. Blatnoyd and his teen lover Japonica (Sasha Pieterse), maintain a (thin) facade of respectability when they’re really dope-fiend hedonists at heart. Some, like Mickey Wolfmann, long to be hippies but can never be because of the trappings of their success. Some manage to shed their vices and get back on the path toward the American dream, while others are lost forever to institutes and cults. Doc, Shasta, and Doc’s stoner buddy Denis (Jordan Christian Hearn) may be hippies for life, but by 1970, they’re an endangered species.There may not ultimately be that big a different between the straights and the rebels. Those with money and power are just as screwed up, equal slaves to temptation — or perhaps worse. At the center of the story, Doc is a simple-minded innocent who wants for nothing except a good buzz. He works mainly for free, driven only by a vague quest to do the right thing for people who seem to be worth it, even if he’s too high most of the time to realize that that is his motivation. He’s a good guy, but also a rare and dying breed in a culture that, in 1970, already seems to be on its way out, just a few short years after its inception. Inherent Vice maybe has a nostalgia for what could have been… what should have been?… for a time when a lot of people had the right ideas but a flawed execution of their convictions. Youth tried to bump up against the establishment, but ultimately they were too stoned and inexperienced to fight back properly, just as Doc is too out of his mind to do more than stumble through this mystery.

Doc’s way of life was, for America, a failed experiment, but for Doc personally, it seems to be working. That’s because Doc has no illusions of the American dream, no thirst for wealth or power or acclaim. He likes beer, he likes sex, he really likes marijuana, and he enjoys the company of just about anyone who will ride along and partake with him. Like many stoners, Inherent Vice has a lot on its mind — big ideas it can only begin to grasp at before they dissipate in the air like smoke from a bong.

(I still have only mentioned maybe half the characters in this movie, which also contains miniscule showings by the likes of Maya Rudolph, Timothy Simons, Jeannie Berlin, Martin Donovan, Jillian Bell, Serena Scott Thomas, and porn star Belladonna. Special shout out to director of photography Robert Elswit and composer Jonny Greenwood, doing typically stellar work in collaboration with Anderson. This looks and feels like it came directly from 1970.)Inherent Vice is tonally most consistent with Anderson’s oddball comedy Punch-Drunk Love, but set in the world of Boogie Nights. He can’t help but add a rather bonkers finale involving Brolin’s Detective Bigfoot, one that feels of a piece with the equally nutty climaxes of The Master and There Will Be Blood. As with both of these other films, there is a central conflict between two very different types of men. Doc, like Daniel Plainview and Freddie Quell, represent chaos and a bucking of the system, while Bigfoot, like Paul Sunday and Lancaster Dodd, represent order (and hypocrisy). Can these two very different types of men coexist, live and let live? Anderson sometimes ends such tales with a brutal murder by bowling pin, sometimes with a rendition of “Slow Boat To China,” and here falls somewhere in between. (I wager that the “Slow Boat To China” ending would make a lot more sense here than in The Master.)

As with most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of Inherent Vice at this point, and only time can tell how I’ll ultimately feel. One thing is obvious: the master is at work. Inherent Vice is willfully incoherent and has almost nothing in common with your average movie mystery. You will grow more confused, not less, as it unravels, and that is as it is intended to be. You may not enjoy Inherent Vice if you are looking for either a thriller or a comedy, or a story to follow, or characters to invest in. Inherent Vice isn’t that kind of movie. It isn’t any kind of movie, except a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

It’s about the American dream, about a very specific moment in time that says so much about everything that’s come after, about the highs and lows of habitual drug use… the old guard versus the new guard and the new guard becoming the old guard again… and also about a wacky detective who’s looking into a mysterious drug syndicate called the Golden Fang… and… a missing woman who’s not really missing, and a missing man who is easily found… and a murder, no, wait, not a murder… but there’s a different murder… but that’s not really relevant… and… wait, what was I talking about again?*

“No one? Really? Not ‘no one,’ Mark, because I believed in me. I’m not no one. That’s not nice. Maybe you don’t think I’m someone, but I have a birth certificate that says I am. Maybe you should talk to the Television Academy, ’cause they think I’m someone. Okay? They think I’m someone!”

Oh dear.

The Comeback was first canceled back in 2005, presumably because many viewers didn’t know what to make of it. Most people I know who watch the show love it, but I have heard some who say they find the perpetual awkwardness off-putting. The Comeback makes them laugh, but it also made them genuinely uncomfortable, and they don’t necessarily enjoy that.

I’m a masochist, so I do.

However, the penultimate episode of Season Two, “Valerie Faces The Critics,” did provoke the most visceral reaction the show has gotten out of me yet. Most shows might “learn their lesson” from Season One’s cancellation and aim for a lighter second season; instead, The Comeback doubled down on darkness. This was most apparent in the season’s fourth episode, “Valerie Saves The Show,” which seemed somewhat uncharacteristically dark until subsequent episodes neglected to lighten up much. Season Two has continued straying down that path, as Mickey’s health deteriorates along with Mark and Valerie’s marriage, and we peer into the many lives that have been soured or altogether ruined by “the business” — Billy’s, Tom’s, Gigi’s, and of course Paulie G’s.After viewing Episode 5 of this season, “Valerie Is Taken Seriously,” I predicted that The Comeback was spinning in a new and entirely different direction than Season One  — instead of making Val the butt of all jokes, a “lonely loser of an actress” (as Julie Chen puts it here), she would instead find some measure of success and deal with the fallout. “Valerie Faces The Critics” confirms that, but pushes it into more complex emotional territory than I anticipated. This season of The Comeback is not afraid to go for the jugular, nor to push Valerie Cherish into a very dicey position in terms of likeability. There’s plenty of comedy in this episode, but there’s also an overwhelmingly gloomy cloud of tragedy that will test even The Comeback‘s most loyal devotees.

I’ve grown so used to Valerie Cherish that I tend to revel in her ineptitude, but in this episode I was truly uncomfortable, to the extent that I almost felt bad. It’s the closest I’ve come to understanding why some people might not want to watch this show, which doesn’t at all mean that I didn’t want to watch it. The Comeback is typically a brilliant comedy, and frequently provides some insightful drama. But for fans of Valerie Cherish — and I think we can all agree that I’m one of the biggest — “Valerie Faces The Critics” is a horror movie.Ironically, the season’s most morally murky episode begins with Valerie Cherish’s greatest triumph to date — an honest-to-God Emmy nomination, something no one saw in her future (except Valerie herself). We find out about it via Val’s appearance on The Talk, and while this is huge for our heroine, we don’t see her discover the news but rather catch up with her in the midst of a flurry of high-profile press appearances. While The Comeback is often anal about showing us each and every excruciating step of the creative process, here we gloss over what may be Valerie Cherish’s biggest turning point this season. It’s not an oversight — we’re meant to be jarred by the “new” Valerie Cherish, which puts us in the position of those who are reacting to her — in this episode, mostly Mark and Mickey.

It’s also not an accident that Val begins this episode by explicitly stating to the ladies of The Talk that Seeing Red is a dark comedy. She may as well be talking about The Comeback: “This is, you know, edgy.” The Talk also brings up the topic of Val’s marriage, breaking out Valerie and Mark’s ski slope wedding photos — which becomes extra poignant upon a second viewing, once we know where this episode is taking us.

Val, Esperanza, and Mickey watch The Talk appearance, and Mickey’s obviously seen better days. (He falls asleep on the sofa, and for a brief terrifying moment I thought he might be dead — and that’s not the only time that happened in this episode.) Jane and Val have an amusing exchange equating Jane’s vegetarianism with her disdain for other forms of meat that might enter her body, then Billy drops by with some good news about a cushy Entertainment Tonight stint that forces Jane to pull her HBO documentarian trump card and rain all over the parade. Often, Jane’s instincts for incisive storytelling are spot on, even if they are at odds with Val’s dignity, but this time she might be pulling rank just because she can. Is there really any harm in letting Entertainment Tonight follow Val around for one lousy day? It’s not the last time this episode made me wonder if deep down, Jane Benson the Jewish Academy Award-winning lesbian might not be just a heartless bitch.Later, a phone call confirms just how bad Val’s marriage is at the moment — Valerie and Mark are officially separated and seeing a marriage counselor. We hear only Valerie’s end of this conversation, as she sits alone on the former marriage bed — where we saw many of Mark and Valerie’s most memorable interactions throughout the series — and she does indeed look like a “lonely loser of an actress.” She manages to convince Mark to meet her for a therapist-forbidden “sneak date,” which provides this episode’s riveting, haunting centerpiece.

As Valerie is about to walk in to dinner, she finds her cameras awaiting her (and other cameras awaiting Ryan Seacrest at SoulCycle). Valerie’s saner instincts kick in as she wisely nixes the idea of surreptitiously filming the reconciliation (with one of her trademark “absolutely not”s). Jane, however, assertively states that she needs this scene, knowing Valerie will cave because it makes good TV. It’s absolutely soul-crushing to watch Valerie give in to Jane’s demands here, because while Jane says the audience will want to know how Mark and Valerie mended their marriage, she knows full well that Mark would never tolerate a candid camera in this vulnerable and private moment — and she also knows Valerie isn’t stealthy enough to pull it off without Mark noticing. Jane throws Valerie’s marriage under the bus for her own selfish pursuit of a juicy documentary (which this is sure shaping up to be).

Jane has always been a morally questionable character on The Comeback, obviously complicit in the humiliation Valerie faced on the show-within-the-show Comeback back in Season One. However, we could also often see that Jane was conflicted about what she was doing, and her claims that editing was out of her hands rang at least half-true. But now Jane is not slave to a network. HBO probably doesn’t much care about this documentary, if they even remember it exists in the first place. Jane is a free agent, working solo, going rogue, and this time, her decision to document Valerie’s downfall is all her own. Worse, she’s willing to manipulate Valerie to make it happen, showing no sign of remorse. Valerie is ultimately to blame for allowing it to happen, but she did arrive at this dinner with the best of intentions. She’s just weak. Jane pushed all the right buttons, including a big red one that caused Valerie to self-destruct. If we thought “spider-eyes” Jane was marginally the bad guy in Season One, then Season Two’s Jane is a supervillain. She may think she’s making a feminist documentary about Valerie Cherish being abused and “assassinated” by Hollywood, but guess what, Jane? You’re the assassin now.The dinner does not go well. We know it’ll blow up in her face the moment Valerie agrees to wear a mic — or “a wire,” as Mark more astutely puts it. The blowout that ensues is predictable, at first, because we know Mark will be pissed. Reconciliation is not in the cards tonight. But the way this fight explodes and cuts straight to the heart of this marriage, touching on so many flaws and insecurities in both of these characters — well, it’s a breathtaking scene with some of the best work these actors have ever done on the series (or ever), and while it is very specific to these characters it is also universally about the ways any marriage might crumble.

Valerie and Mark both lay bare their feelings and unsparingly accuse each other of all sorts of love crimes, and as in most actual arguments, they’re both right. Both speak truth, both have demons, and neither one is the bad guy in this scenario. Yes, Valerie’s comeback has probably dealt this marriage its biggest blow, but Valerie’s not wrong when she says that she deserves to enjoy her success just as much as Mark has enjoyed his. Mark admits he isn’t as supportive of a successful Valerie as he thought he’d be. He’d rather have his desperate nobody back.

“Is there any part of you that is real anymore?” Mark asks at the beginning of the row, and at the end: “Are you even in there anymore?” In his eyes, at least, Valerie is now the shell of herself — a famous shell who cares more about her life looking great than actually being great. (She doesn’t know how to explain Mark’s absence at the Emmy’s, which may or may not be why she so desperately wants him to attend.) Mark might be on point with many of his criticisms, but Valerie has also worked extremely hard to get where she is now. She’s waited her whole life for this, and on some level, it’s a little cruel of Mark to want to take that from her just so he can have their simple life back. He feels threatened by the attention his wife is now receiving, threatened by the fact that he is no longer the sole person who loves Valerie Cherish (aside from Mickey). She can now get that love from other sources, and he can’t handle it.

Of course, the “love” one gets from the masses only goes so far and is in no way a suitable replacement for the love of a true partner, and if Valerie doesn’t realize that yet, she will shortly. In her heartbreaking rant, Valerie tells Mark that the Television Academy thinks she’s somebody — and while that is, on the one hand, totally depressing, it also explains why she seeks that approval so cravenly. If Mark doesn’t love who Valerie is right now, perhaps he never really loved her at all. It’s no wonder Valerie seeks adulation from another source, one that has, apparently, noticed and appreciated her hard work. Mark has never understood (or cared to understand) Val’s line of work, but she’s poured everything into it and now, at last, she’s recognized for it. That may not excuse all of Valerie’s questionable behavior in this episode, but it’s a place to start, and Mark can’t see past his annoyance at the constant surveillance long enough to comprehend why Valerie craves this.

Valerie Cherish gets an Emmy nomination for an HBO dark comedy in “Valerie Faces The Critics.” Lisa Kudrow should get one, too — she’s stellar throughout the series, obut her “I’m not nobody!” speech alone should seal the deal. (It likely won’t, though, given the show’s tiny viewership.) Arguably, this scene tells us more about Valerie Cherish than we’ve ever learned before (I was reminded of last season’s episode that gave us a brief, painful glimpse into her past as a high school outcast with scoliosis). The Comeback has never been afraid to get its hands dirty, but with the double-whammy reveals of Mark’s infidelity and Valerie’s abortion? Well, shit just got realer.

And that’s not even the end of the episode.

As edgy as The Comeback gets at times, I was fairly certain it would not go so dark to have Valerie walk in and discover Mickey’s naked dead body, so I wasn’t too surprised when she happily announced that he was breathing. (Funny moment, though.) I was more surprised by the gentleman, several decades Mickey’s junior, unapologetically popping out of the bathroom in his birthday suit. As bad as Val’s fight with Mark was, her invasion of Mickey’s privacy here feels in some ways like an even greater betrayal, as her cameras again capture a moment that would best be left undocumented. Valerie meant well when she stopped to check on Mickey, and again it is Jane who ensures that the cameras are in place before the action happens. (You could make the argument that Valerie just wants her hair done right, but I think it’s obvious that she’s more concerned about Mickey’s well-being than her curls.)For the time being, Mickey isn’t too upset about Val barging in on him (because he’s still drunk, maybe), or even the possibility that his large pasty backside will end up in an HBO documentary alongside his paramour’s dick. It’s shocking enough that he made the rare choice to put himself before Valerie, prioritizing some inebriated hanky-panky over his beloved Red — probably because he senses he doesn’t have a lot more opportunities to cut loose on the horizon. (He has no problem getting it up, though.) Whether or not Mickey succumbs to illness (which might be a shade too dark for this series), Valerie may be losing her biggest fan, and we certainly can’t blame Mickey for realizing he has better ways to spend his old age than constantly fluffing Red’s ‘do.

It has been clear for a few episodes that Val’s two greatest champions, Mark and Mickey, may not be around that much longer, and “Valerie Faces The Critics” brings those losses to a boiling point. As with most Comeback titles, “Valerie Faces The Critics” is both quite literal (as Val does press for Seeing Red) but has a broader meaning. Valerie’s two greatest supporters become her harshest critics. Mickey used to practically live for doing Val’s hair, and now he’s totally forgotten about her, blowing her off for a steamy hookup with a stranger. And of course Mark had some extremely harsh criticism in the earlier confrontation, most of which was accurate. Just as the rest of the world is finally beginning to cherish Valerie, those who really love her are pulling away. It’s sad stuff.

By the time Valerie actually faces “the critics” (mostly some freaky bloggers, ahem), there isn’t much criticism she hasn’t already heard, and she deflects it well. Bob (of the Paulie G-maligned BobTV.com) insinuates that laugh tracks are fake, which Valerie doesn’t take kindly to, while a nerdy blogger named Daphne reveals a rather embarrassing curiosity about fellating Seth Rogen — and questions the role of women on Seeing Red. After brushing off a lipstick-wearing male who deserves to be brushed off, Valerie gets her most insightful comment from a blogger who reads (too?) deeply into meanings of metaphors on a seemingly facile show. (Okay, I’ll say it: this character reminded me of me.) What this blogger doesn’t know is that Valerie herself needs to stop playing a version of herself if she wants to save her friendships and marriage.

“Valerie Faces The Critics” ends in an elevator, as Paulie G asks Valerie if he can tag along with her to Juna’s party. (Yay: more Juna!) She declines, maybe because she legitimately can’t get him in or maybe because she just doesn’t want to. The tables have turned — in terms of the elevator metaphor, Valerie is going up and Paulie G is going down, but there’s something sad and empty about this little victory over her nemesis. Back in Season One, we would have relished a chance to see Valerie rub her stardom in Paulie G’s face, but The Comeback isn’t interested in such easy wins.

And speaking of roles for women, here’s another non-accident: this episode features Valerie and Jane at their least likeable, boldly going where few other series do — difficult men are all over TV, but hard-to-like females are much rarer. Here we learn that the “working title” of Jane’s HBO documentary is The Assassination Of Valerie Cherish, which is also a fitting title for this episode.

This is Valerie Cherish at her least likeable — and, not coincidentally, her most successful. If many viewers found Val narcissistic and hard to warm up to before, they’ll be truly put off by her here. I am one of Valerie Cherish’s biggest fans, and even I was uneasy with what transpired in this episode. Valerie should know better than to wear a mic to dinner with her husband when their marriage is on the rocks; she should know better than to let Jane provoke her into dramatic confrontations all over again. At heart, I don’t believe Valerie Cherish is a bad person — she’s certainly self-involved, but I don’t think she’s truly selfish.

In this episode, she is, though. Up until this point, I would have said Valerie was a better person than in the first season, but “Valerie Faces The Critics” challenges that, essentially “assassinating” what we love about Valerie and turning her into a deceitful, shallow stereotype. TV shows tend to maintain a status quo — especially comedies — but this episode threatens much of what we hold dear. Mark and Valerie might very well be done, Mickey’s health and behavior are changing their relationship, and Valerie herself becomes the very sort of person who tormented her all these years. Just another famous bitch.

This episode proves that Jane doesn’t care about Valerie’s well-being, and we can probably guess that Billy is a fair-weather friend. It’s disheartening to see Valerie surrounded mostly by people who just want to leech off her success, as the people who are truly there for her are… well, not there, anymore. It’s actually quite painful to sit through this episode, because if you love the show as I do, you are deeply invested in these relationships that are imploding right before our eyes, and all because Valerie is making all the wrong choices. Valerie and Mark? Boom. Valerie and Mickey? Boom. Valerie and Jane? Boom.

With the way “Valerie Faces The Critics” tests us, perhaps we are the titular critics, challenged with the question of whether or not we still love Valerie Cherish after all this. Next week is the season finale, and quite possibly the series finale if HBO doesn’t bring Val back for a round three. (It’s hard to imagine what direction this show would head in a third season, having seemingly exhausted Valerie’s arc from nobody to somebody as well as all the meta fun of Seeing Red.) It wouldn’t be uncharacteristic of The Comeback to end cynically, with Valerie losing Mark and Mickey and becoming a “lonely loser of an actress” like Mallory Church.

But I don’t think this show is truly going to “assassinate” Valerie like that. Its creators, like its audience, love Valerie too much to leave her in such a lurch and let her become the monster that Paulie G thought she was. The Comeback may be dark, but it’s never truly bleak. If I had to guess, I’d wager that this is just a low point before Valerie wises up (to an extent). I don’t know that she can save her marriage, but I do believe that she will save her soul from the muck its currently caught in.

Mark and Mickey are all but done fighting for her, and the rest of Team Val only has their own selfish pursuits in mind. At this point, only Valerie Cherish can prevent her own assassination by Hollywood. I expect she will, but The Comeback being The Comeback, anything could happen. I anticipate a bittersweet ending, but which parts will be bitter and which will be sweet? We know how Seeing Red was received, but what about Jane’s documentary? Valerie may be somebody now, but is it enough to ensure that she’ll never be a nobody again? If Valerie Cherish can win a fictional Emmy, why can’t The Comeback win a real one?

“Valerie Faces The Critics”: A     

*

Into the woods

To sell a film

They don’t care how

The time is now.

Fairy tales are a universal language. Specific characters, like Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, appear in various versions of their tales in many languages, and even if they haven’t made it to every culture across the world, the tropes tend to be the same.

Little girls, watch out for big bad wolves. Wolves, watch out for big bad men. Damsels are distressed, princes are charming, and if a girl isn’t royalty when a story begins, she almost certainly will be by the ending. Women with power are old and ugly, and therefore must meet a gruesome demise. A few acts of bravado are all it takes for a suitor to win the heart of any young maiden, provided he is handsome enough.

These are the same tropes Stephen Sondheim played with in Into The Woods, his beloved musical, the very same tropes now explored in the movie adaptation by Disney. It’s a curious marriage. No company has as much stake in perpetuating these make-believe myths as Walt Disney, which has built an entire empire around weaning new generations on the same ol’ stories. One might argue that more recent efforts, like Frozen and Malificent, have taken a greater effort to add a postmodern feminist slant, but at the end of the day, they’re still about princesses. This is not a company that’s going to skewer fairy tales too vehemently any time soon.And that’s what we get in Disney’s Into The Woods, which may surprise moviegoers with adulterous heroes and vague implications of child molestation. I was glancingly familiar with Sondheim’s musical before seeing the film, which means I knew the broad beats of the story and some of the music, but had never seen or heard the show in full. I don’t know what specifically has been adapted or excised from the stage version, but my understanding is that this version is quite faithful (thanks largely to involvement by Sondheim and James Lapine). Nothing is egregiously missing from the original — no major character, essential musical number, or risqué bit of business that Disney deemed too naughty.

Nothing, except the maker’s intent.

Into The Woods gets off to a fabulous start, briskly introducing us to well-cast, familiar storybook-types like Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), and Meryl Streep as Helena Bonham Carter as the Witch. As tends to happen in magical kingdoms like this, an old crone sends a Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Emily Blunt) on a clear mission with specific (but illogical) rules: bring her the cape, the shoe, the cow, and the hair, and Mr. and Mrs. Baker will be with child. (If you’re questioning why these specific items are needed, what they have to do with the witch’s ultimate goal, or who mandated this spell in the first place, you’re watching the wrong movie.)Basically, a lot of fairy tale archetypes head “into the woods” on varying tasks, which is very much like a classic tale. They eventually become confused about what they want and why they want it, which is very unlike these classic tales. The “woods” are a symbol for the moral muck of adulthood. Gradually, storybook-simple characters grow a shade more complex, a shade more like you and me, people who sometimes debate whether or not that person who seems to love us really does, and really deserves to, or whether making a small (but morally questionable) sacrifice for the greater good is really the right thing to do. Many moral dilemmas are raised in Into The Woods, and the takeaway is this: being a grown-up is not as easy as being a kid. Fairy tales that make sense us to us when we’re little are actually quite problematic when seen from a modern-day adult point of view.

Think about it: Cinderella is a sweet rags-to-riches romance until you realize that the prince has “fallen in love” with his intended bride without even learning her name. What has captivated him so? Her crackerjack intelligence, her acerbic wit…? Or maybe just her sparkling eyes? Well, no, because he can’t even recognize her without first making sure that stupid shoe fits. What kind of a love story is this? A tale as old as time that reinforces the idea that the only way to catch a man is to gussy up, tell a pack of lies, play hard to get, and act the princess, and if you’re lucky you become so generic that he can’t even tell you apart from your ugly, big-footed stepsisters. This is the moral universe we want to raise little girls in?Sondheim has a sense of humor about such things, of course, allowing these characters to poke fun at their own antiquated values. That’s the whole point. In Into The Woods, Disney adopts that sense of humor as its own, yet we sense studio’s reluctance to lay the criticism on too thick, lest parents rethink how wise it is to show tots the animated Cinderella next time it’s broken out of the hallowed “vault.” (Or, worse yet, failing to show up for the upcoming live-action remake starring Cate Blanchett.) Sondheim’s musical has a light touch — it’s dark, but not too dark, and ends on a cheerful enough note. In so many ways, it’s tailor-made for Disney… and a little bit not. Sondheim didn’t have billions of dollars riding on the fairy tale business, which makes Disney somewhat suspect as the studio deigning to deliver us this particular melodic tale. What if, instead of HBO, the GOP had bankrolled Game Change? What if The Interview had been executive produced by Kim Jong Un?

On the whole, Into The Woods is fantastically entertaining. The opening “Prologue” is so fleet and entertaining that I wondered if I had underestimated one of the best movies of the year. A lot of credit is due to Sondheim’s zippy, playful lyrics and the clever story. The cast is almost uniformly great — Streep has plenty of fun as the witch, Blunt makes for a relatable heroine, lesser-known actors hold their own against high-wattage stars, and though it’s easy to imagine someone doing more with the Wolf role, limply crooned by Johnny Depp, his mediocre singing is nowhere near as damaging to this movie as Russell Crowe’s was to Les Miserables.

As told by Sondheim (as riffs on much older tales), the Rapunzel story becomes one about overprotective parents feeling reluctant about their children growing up (and losing their virginity); the adventures of Red Riding Hood have seriously creepy sexual predator vibes; Jack (of giant-killing/beanstalk-climbing fame) is ambivalent about growing up (which might have been more resonant if the part were cast with a slightly older boy). These things  come across without being so adult that the youngsters in the audience will be traumatized and shirk away from such tales. Sondheim certainly didn’t invent these metaphors, and Into The Woods is hardly the only riff on such themes. Disney’s version deserves credit for going as far as it does, but may still leave the adults in the audience hungry for the full-on  fang-baring that might have been.

The structure of the show doesn’t lend itself well to a film adaptation — you can’t really resolve every conflict in a movie in the middle and then expect the audience not to get restless once they realize this is nowhere near the end. (Stage performances are built around intermissions for a reason.) Rob Marshall’s direction is solid, but given that this is a fairy tale world, there is room to make it all a bit more stylized and abstract; the visuals don’t do much to represent the emotions its characters are singing about. (It almost made me long for a Tim Burton version, though not for the inevitable replacement of Helena Bonham Carter as the wicked stepmother or the witch.)

Curiously for a movie with this budget, with a fair amount of CGI artistry, Into The Woods feels quite stagey — which is, in a  sense charming and evocative of the original musical, and in another sense not nearly taking full advantage of the cinematic form. Much of the action takes place off-screen, which is a necessity on stage — but here, it just feels like we’re missing a lot of key stuff. It’s hard to understand why we don’t ever see, say, the giants in the sky during “Giants In The Sky,” or why we almost never see Cinderella and her Prince interact until their final moment together. These scenes would be superfluous or impossible in a musical, but feel absolutely essential in a movie. (The Rapunzel storyline is the biggest clunker, because the Rapunzel character is so thin and inconsequential.)

Disney’s Into The Woods quite nearly executes itself flawlessly, yet ultimately misses the mark by not aiming anywhere at all. It’s been marketed as a family-friendly holiday flick, and sure, there’s stuff kids might like, but the whole point of it will tower over their heads like a beanstalk. It’s hard to imagine that there will be a Baker’s Wife action figurine in Disneyland gift shops — but also a little hard to imagine that there won’t, given their reputation. Will “Hello, Little Girl” be added to a Disneyland parade? If this material isn’t really meant for families, then why pretend that it is? Why dress the wolf up in grandma’s clothing? Why not just let Into The Woods be a wolf, and allow us adults to enjoy it for what it is? Because of money, obviously.

The fine people at Disney did their calculations and realized that pulling in the tykes, the Disneyphiles, and the diehard Broadway fans was their best bet at a boffo profit, and they’re probably right. Into The Woods is good enough to snag some Oscar nominations, to not piss off parents who thought this was another tame princess tale, to amuse fans of the show and delight those who had never heard of the thing before it became a Johnny Depp movie. I can’t really begrudge them for it. Into The Woods is all about adult themes paying a visit to a children’s storybook world, but the film looks completely and totally like a kids’ movie. Had Disney not been so concerned with squeezing Sondheim’s vision in line with their global brand, it might have looked and felt a lot more daring. Instead, I saw a trailer for the bland-looking live action Cinderella just before Into The Woods, and they looked like the same movie. Sondheim’s lyrics contain a heaping helping of sly wit, but there’s no wit in these visuals. (Though the musical numbers are well staged in spite of this.)

There are fleeting moments in Into The Woods where what might have been and what is sync in perfect harmony, like the cheeky handsome princes’ duet “Agony” and almost any scene that prominently features Meryl Streep — plus a number of nods to modern common sense that pop into these characters’ heads and disappear just as quickly. (The tone is handled well.) Unlike less successful recent musical adaptation like Les Miserables, Rent, or Phantom Of The Opera, Into The Woods was made by a man who knows how to direct a movie musical, though the panache of Chicago is sorely lacking. (Thankfully, so is whatever made Nine such a dud.) It is one of the more successful stage-to-screen adaptations in recent years, with talented performers and skilled writing and an overall competence behind the camera. I can imagine a more potent Into The Woods with this cast brought to us by, say, Alfonso Cuaron, but there’s no way Disney would allow him to make that movie with their precious castle logo at stake. The version we get instead is a perfectly “nice” version.

But nice is different than good.

A toothier tale about the loss of childhood innocence is The Babadook, an Australian horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent. Amelia (Essie Davis) a harried widow is terrorized first by her unmanageable six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who is so troubled and full of wild energy that he gets kicked out of school, then terrorized by something else entirely.

Like the assorted giants and wolves in Into The Woods, the Boogeyman is a familiar figure from childhood with a clear moral purpose — to scare the shit out of little children, with an intended end goal of good behavior. In this tale, the Boogeyman is the Babadook, a character in a sinister-looking pop-up book that appears mysteriously on a child’s bookshelf. (“Babadook” is an anagram for “a bad book.”)

As in most good horror movies, the big idea here is a representation of something else, though this one is a bit more obvious about it. The Babadook represents both Amelia’s haunted past and her ambivalence toward motherhood; Amelia is underslept and at the end of her rope, like many single mothers, so when she is terrorized by a murderous boogeyman, defeating the forces of evil becomes just one more annoying, fruitless task on her “to do” list.

The Babadook is a lot of fun. The illustrations in the storybook are truly frightening and implant visuals of a menacing, malevolent, and truly nightmare-worthy figure (that we see less of than I anticipated). The film contains a few fresh twists but ultimately explores some fairly well-trodden ground in the horror genre, which is a bit of a letdown after such a chillingly effective setup. (The last few minutes are rather deliciously original, though.)

The Babadook is a perfectly satisfying entry in the genre, though not one that transcends it in my eyes. Both Wiseman and Davis are wholly believable in these roles, going a long way to sell this material, and Kent’s direction is top notch. (The editing is also nifty, moving things along at an almost alarming pace.) I’d be happy to see a sequel to The Babadook, perhaps with a little more Babadook in it, or at least to check out Jennifer Kent’s next project.

Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind seeing Jennifer Kent’s take on Into The Woods…

*

“It’s HBO. Not that many people are gonna see it.”

But what does Valerie Cherish really want?

The Comeback‘s Season Two finale answers that question once and for all. “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” is all about the price of fame, and whether or not Valerie is willing to pay that price when fame is available to her. It begins with Valerie showing up to a hot Hollywood party thrown by Juna Millken, her former co-star who is now a mega-star but still retains the same sweetness — so unlikely in a beautiful blonde starlet. Her sincerity is proven as Juna displays great concern both for poor ailing Mickey as well as Valerie’s troubled marriage, warning Valerie that she isn’t seeing clearly at this moment in time. It’s the first of many mirrors held up to Season One, when it was Valerie mentoring Juna on how to cope with fame (even though Juna was already more famous than Valerie). Juna seems to have maintained a level head despite her stardom — thanks to Val’s counsel, perhaps? Now, it’s Valerie who needs a few lessons from the people who knew her way back when, starting with Juna Millken.

Valerie Cherish is having a moment: nominated for an Emmy, acclaimed for her work on Seeing Red, and actually recognized by people (some, not all). Here, Val must confront her apparent new catchphrase, “old woman’s pussy,” which she clearly isn’t as keen on as “I don’t need to see that!” Now when she walks into a hot Hollywood party, everyone claps for her. But she also has to deal with the price of all that success, which includes apologizing for Juna’s hurt feelings over how she was portrayed in Seeing Red. Of course Valerie didn’t write the thing, but now that she’s reaping the benefits of the show being a hit, it looks like an endorsement of Paulie G’s version of how things went down. After years of talking up her forgotten role on I’m It, Valerie Cherish really is it. Who’d have guessed?Juna’s party also reunites Val with Chris MacNess, who like Juna has become a major movie star since slumming it on Room And Bored. Chris is a lot more excited to see Val than we might think a hunky action hero type would be, and Jane is equally excited (because it’s a great get for her documentary, though Chris’ masculine charms are clearly wasted on her). Chris pulls Val into the bathroom for some privacy (plus cameras) and then puts the moves on her in a major way at Val’s doorstep. It’s the kind of shenanigans Aunt Sassy would never have dreamed of.

It seems Chris has harbored a crush on Valerie since Room And Bored, which is surprising but not totally unlikely, and the harder he tries to get into Valerie’s bedroom in this episode, the more we buy that he really wants it. It could be because he’s a movie star, and he’s not used to women saying no, and maybe he’s bored with the picture-taking bimbo types who normally throw themselves at him. Maybe Val’s maternal behavior on Room And Bored really did get him going all along. Regardless, a night of passion with Valerie Cherish would almost certainly be just another notch in the MacNess bedpost, and would certainly do nothing to salvage Val’s marriage. This is probably the most surprising development to emerge from the Season One revivals, and I have to say, it’s kind of awesome. Sure, it plays a little bit more like fantasy wish fulfillment than the hard-edged reality we usually get from The Comeback, but also: lots of movie stars are fucked up. It makes a weird kind of sense that a guy like Chris MacNess might find himself at the top of the world and suddenly start jerking off to Aunt Sassy’s track suit. Stranger kinks have happened. And while a part of me really did want to see what would happen if Chris went in, a larger part of me was squirming, hoping this wasn’t some weird Carrie moment where the hot guy hits on the nerdy girl only to humiliate her in the end, and also realizing that Valerie sexing it up with Chris MacNess would basically have been the final nail in the coffin for Valerie’s character assassination. Instead, Valerie is flattered and somewhat tempted, but also dismisses the handsome, horny heartthrob without much deliberation: “Movie star with a mommy complex. Next!”

Next, The Comeback makes a callback to the pilot episode as Valerie practices her Emmy speech while snacking in the kitchen, reminiscent of the obsessive practice of her signature “I don’t need to see that!” line. As in that episode, Valerie also ignores some water-related warnings from Esperanza that then have greater repercussions — in this case, an explosion of sewage from her garage. It’s all a result of Valerie’s decision to let HBO shoot part of Seeing Red in her own house, which was also the major factor in Mark’s departure. Now Valerie’s success has literally created a shitstorm in her domestic situation.Everything is going wrong on what might be the biggest night of Val’s life. Mickey has a cancer-related nosebleed and is unable to attend, Brad Goreski face-plants in feces in front of Entertainment Tonight, Val is dateless because Mark still won’t answer her calls, and it looks like rain. Valerie meets Sean Hayes, who will present the Best Supporting Actress category, and then James Burrows gives her some tough love just as he always did back on Room And Bored, explaining that her marriage is more important than a trophy. That may sound obvious, but it’s news to Valerie Cherish.

Then, at last, Valerie is all set to enjoy her big night, when a text message from Mark changes everything: Mickey is in the hospital.

Billy and Jane are both adamant that Valerie set the bad news aside and enjoy the moment, but it doesn’t take Val long to decide what she needs to do.

She leaves her cameras behind.Then The Comeback breaks with the format it has utilized since day one, in the pilot way back in 2005 — we’ve always seen the raw footage that will later be manipulated by Jane, “the network,” HBO, or whoever else gets their hands on it. The Comeback suddenly becomes very cinematic as Valerie dashes to the hospital in the rain (thanks to Uber!), ruining her Emmy dress on the way. (I couldn’t help but be reminded of both Carrie Bradshaw and Buffy Summers, who also wore fancy dresses in dire moments during season finales of their respective shows.)

Fortunately, Mickey is fine, and better yet: his tumor is shrinking. Mark arrives and sees that Valerie has chosen her personal life over her fleeting stardom, allowing him to sweep any former grievances under the rug and return to her. The trio watches the Emmys in Mickey’s hospital room, celebrating Val’s win. Valerie has what she’s always wanted — the highest accolades a TV actress can get. But more importantly, she has what she really needs — her best friend and her husband.

And that’s the end.The Comeback‘s final episode of Season Two is bittersweet, because it is quite likely the final episode ever. It gives Valerie Cherish a happy ending that will be hard to come back from (though Michael Patrick King did it with relative success when he revived Sex And The City for the big screen), and now the series has broken form in a way that feels permanent. Valerie walked away from her cameras, and it would be off-putting to go right back to that raw footage format after the way this episode ends.

“Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” takes its time, letting scenes play out longer than they really need to. It dabbles in nostalgia for many of our favorite characters and recreates beloved moments from Season One. In other words, it feels as much like a series finale as it possibly could, wrapping up most (but not all) loose ends and providing an honest-to-god happy ending, something I didn’t necessarily expect from a show as biting as this one. This season of The Comeback got quite dark at times, dragging Valerie Cherish (and its audience) through the sludge, but ultimately chose not to leave us there. Whereas the Season One finale was both cheery and cynical, there’s no such blend here. “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” is a logical end for the televised journey of Valerie Cherish, which makes me suspect that it will remain as such. It’s not impossible to bring The Comeback back for a Season Three, but it’s not a natural fit, either. This story is essentially over.So, as a series finale, “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” held a few surprises for me. First and foremost, Paulie G’s near-absence from this episode — he almost accepts Valerie’s Emmy for her, which is a brilliant slice of comedy that says so much about Seeing Red. Because of course Paulie G thinks he should take credit for Valerie’s Emmy, just like he thinks she was the villain behind the scenes of Room And Bored. Seeing Paulie G so easily dismissed and discarded is a great “fuck you” to his character, but certainly not what I anticipated given previous epic showdowns between these two. This season seemed to be building toward some sort of relapse or meltdown as Paulie’s shortcomings as a writer and director clashed with Valerie’s newfound success as an actress.

It is perhaps one of this episode’s savviest commentaries on the industry — as much as Paulie G has been a monster to Valerie, no one else knows who he is. Even with Seth Rogen playing a thinly-veiled version of him, it is always ultimately the actors who get the brunt of the stardom from a hit series. Paulie G is just a blip on the radar in the minds of most television viewers, while pictures of Valerie Cherish will be in magazines. Can we assume that Paulie G will spend the rest of his days toiling in relative obscurity? Sure. (Somewhat less surprising: Paulie G’s Seeing Red doppelganger, Seth Rogen, is also a no-show here.)Another loose thread is Jane’s documentary on Valerie, which was meant to culminate at the Emmys. Sure, maybe the whole point is that Val doesn’t care about that anymore, but it seemed like Jane was cooking up something pretty potent with The Assassination Of Valerie Cherish, and I still want to know what it is. Was Jane going to bat for Val, trying to depict her in a favorable light after throwing her to the wolves a decade ago? Was it meant to be Jane’s redemption? Was Jane’s feminist statement about the way women are treated in TV going to meet the same acclaim as her documentary? Or were Jane’s manipulative ways rearing their ugly little heads again, and would The Assassination Of Valerie Cherish again misconstrue the truth about a struggling TV actress who just wants everybody to like her? Jane was, at best, Val’s frenemy, constantly pushing her to make career-beneficial but self-destructive decisions. It feels appropriate that Val would leave Jane behind, but what’s next?

As a fan of Valerie Cherish, I can’t be too upset at seeing her triumph in this finale. After all she’s been through, she’s earned it. Last week’s “Valerie Faces The Critics” brought the character to her lowest point, sabotaging her marriage and invading Mickey’s privacy to get better footage for her documentary. Valerie was really just the puppet, with Jane’s hand up her ass telling Val what to do and not taking no for an answer. In contrast, this episode is determined to make Valerie as likable as possible. It’s the Redemption of Valerie Cherish, everybody! The cost of stardom ends up being too high for Valerie Cherish this time around, and she ultimately decides not to pay. I didn’t want to see Val heartbroken and alone, coming back from Mickey’s funeral to an empty house and crying onto her Emmy. But up to this point, The Comeback has been so merciless about the cruelties of the television industry, and I’m not sure that this happy-go-lucky finale doesn’t undo some of that acerbic commentary by suggesting it’s so easy to just walk away.

Valerie Cherish has grown as a character — learned her lesson, done the right thing, and all that jazz. Valerie got what she really wants. Good for her. But what about us? “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” is, technically, a happy ending, though so many characters who didn’t fare so well are left in the lurch. (Poor Tom! Poor Gigi!) Do we want Valerie Cherish to grow up, or did we want her to remain a fame-hungry, oblivious narcissist? We clamored for The Comeback to come back once, because we sensed that Valerie had more degradation and embarrassment ahead of her. She’d learned a lesson, but not that much. She was still Valerie Cherish. Now, she’s an Emmy winner who walked away from a career high to cheer up her best friend and save her marriage. That’s a nice ending, but it doesn’t hit the same ironic note that Season One’s finale did. Maybe it’s good that The Comeback didn’t go back to that well again… or maybe it’s a cop-out.

When Breaking Bad ended last year, it gave us a trio of final episodes that satisfied its fans in different ways. Those who wanted a tidy, reasonably upbeat ending got one in “Felina,” and those who wanted Walter to suffer in lonely, miserable isolation for his sins saw that in “Granite State.” Those of us who wanted a lot of fucked up shit to go down preferred the jaw-dropping chaos in “Ozymandias,” as I did. “Valerie Faces The Critics” was the “Ozymandias” of The Comeback, “assassinating” Valerie’s character as both Mickey and Mark seemed poised to exit her life for good. It was about as dark and upsetting as a TV comedy like this could be and still bounce back from the next week, and bounce back it did.

“Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” is the “Felina.” It is a satisfying finale, but only because I was already satisfied before it came along. Everything else was just the cherry on top of that cake. Both seasons of The Comeback made for spectacular television — Season One winning as a vicious comedy, and Season Two satisfying on a deeper, more dramatic and thoughtful level. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a single show where two consecutive seasons felt so different from each other, but still felt like pieces of a whole. (Though the nine-year gap probably has a lot to do with that.)“Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” is a fantastic episode of television and a worthy series finale, and while I might have preferred a little more of that jagged edge The Comeback does so well, I also loved every minute of the softer, cuddly version of The Comeback, which literally ends with smiles and holding hands. Only a show that had cut so deep could get away with this kind of sappy ending and not come off feeling trite. With everything Valerie Cherish was put through to get to this point, she fucking earned it. I may admire her choices in this episode — I’m glad she saved her marriage, I’m glad she stuck by Mickey’s side in what might have been the end — I also really wanted to see her step onto that stage and hold up that gold trophy and yell, “Suck it, Paulie G!” Or whatever version of that would have happened. I think we all did.

And that’s the point. Valerie Cherish wanted that moment more than anything, until she realized that moment would be just a moment, and she had the whole rest of her life to live. We care so deeply about Valerie at this point that we are equally invested in seeing her win, though “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” surprises us by letting her win by not winning — or at least, not being there to celebrate her big win. She’s not even sad about it. Valerie’s not such a vain actress after all.

Perhaps the real irony in the otherwise saccharine-sweet “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” is a meta-irony. Valerie is now an Emmy winner for a not-terribly-great HBO series, while Lisa Kudrow is Emmy-free as far as The Comeback goes. Season Two of the The Comeback is one of the best seasons of a TV comedy I’ve ever seen, yet it will almost certainly go unrecognized because so few have been watching. (This episode gets in a nice dig about that.) It is probably the reason Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow decided to wrap things up so neatly, in a way that feels like a complete ending even if we never see Valerie, Mickey, Mark, Jane, Paulie, Juna, Chris, or even Esperanza again. I am not certain that the show won’t be back for a third season, but I wouldn’t bet on it. (In another nine years? Perhaps.)

Like most aging comediennes, Valerie Cherish was lucky enough to get one comeback, let alone two. And so were we. In the likely event that this is really, truly the end of the road for Cherish and company, I will say my fond farewells now — and thanks for the hilarious, heartbreaking, awkward-as-hell, button-pushing, spot-on memories.

Goodbye, Valerie.

“Valerie Gets What She Really Wants”: A (Find reviews and recaps for the rest of the season here.) 

*

Art is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A picture is worth a thousand words. And everybody — I mean everybody — is a critic.

We critique based on the artist. A Picasso will be held up and judged against other Picassos, while a Tim Burton film will be scrutinized first and foremost as a Tim Burton film. “It’s better than Alice In Wonderland, but it’s no Ed Wood!” In recent films such as Ratatouille and Birdman, the figure of the critic is demonized, because these films were made by people who know what it feels like to have a good-hearted effort torn apart.

Bad criticism can hurt, but no criticism hurts even more, because then no one is paying attention. Being critiqued is an artist’s highest privilege, a sign that one’s endeavors matter enough to instill an opinion in those who glance upon it. Creative types may complain about the critics, just as the critics complain about artists, but what is art without opinion? If a work of art does not beg for analysis, then it is not worth being viewed at all.

Margaret Keane is an artist who was robbed of the opportunity to have her work criticized. Technically, it was criticized — heavily, mercilessly, savagely — but that had nothing to do with her, for Keane’s artistry was attributed to a man who stole credit for her paintings: her husband. The truth came out in 1970, but it didn’t really come out until 2014, when Tim Burton made a movie about it starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. Because millions of people who never knew or had forgotten Margaret Keane will now remember her name, and her work.Big Eyes follows Keane’s story, and it’s a very nice movie to look at — nicer, even, than Keane’s best-selling artwork, which was dubbed obvious and sentimental by critics who favored more subtle or obfuscated works. The film takes its name from the gigantic peepers found in Keane’s subjects — lost-looking waifs with moist eyeballs that look like they’ll burst into tears at any moment, and some that already have. Margaret believes that eyes are windows to the soul, so she makes them very big windows. As this story grows sadder, Margaret’s connection to these pouty moppets grows more and more apparent. Art is personal, and Margaret’s gentle nature is very much on display for all the world to see — if only they knew it was hers.

It is the late 1950s, and Margaret leaves one lousy husband for another. At first, Walter Keane is utterly charming — he’s an artist himself, as well as an excellent salesman. Or at least, he seems to be. He’s not so good at selling his own artwork, some rather simplistic renditions of Paris streets, but he does interest the public in Margaret’s big-eyed tykes. The catch? He takes credit for the paintings, blaming a man’s world for the fact that womens’ art isn’t taken seriously. And he’s probably right — we get the sense that mild-mannered Maragret would never have gotten around to selling herself. In Walter’s hands, and under Walter’s name, her pictures sell like hotcakes and spawn endless cheap reproductions, posters and postcards with her paintings shrunk down to an easily-consumable form and size, perfect for taking home and pinning to the fridge with a magnet. Art critics scoff at both this and the art itself, but who cares about the critics when you’re making tons of money?That very question, in fact, may be what drew Tim Burton to this material. Burton has been knocking himself off for years — most of his recent films feel like pale imitations of old faves like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, but minus some of the magic that made them so delightful in the first place. Apart from a few stylistic flourishes, Big Eyes doesn’t feel like a Tim Burton remix — the colors pop, there are no pale freaks to be found, and Johnny Depp is entirely absent. (He must have been busy being all Tim Burton-y in Into The Woods.) This is a more grounded story in the vein of Ed Wood, but with the tone and look of Big Fish. It’s the sort of movie Burton needed to make if he wants to be taken seriously as an artist anymore, not just a Walter Keane-like salesman who is content making cheap imitations of his old hits. Burton can’t rightly be dubbed a fraud, but many have wondered if the onetime visionary still has a creative bone left in his body after debacles like Alice In Wonderland and Planet Of The Apes. His work of late has consisted of noble near-misses and a few utter misfires, but it’s been a long while since he had a real critical and commercial smash hit.

Alas, Big Eyes is not poised to be that movie. The film got a trio of Golden Globe nominations, for the two lead performances as well as Lana Del Rey’s theme song. But the Oscar race may be too tight this year to squeeze either Amy Adams or Christoph Waltz in, especially considering that both have been better elsewhere. Adams is good, but her character is a bit of a doormat, going along with Walter’s scheme without much reason to. She’s nearly as complicit in the deceit as he is, and for what? A little bit of money? In order for Big Eyes to work as it should, the romance between Margaret and Walter would need to be palpable. We’d need to believe that she really loved him, and that he was worth loving. (Spoiler alert: he is not.)

Red-blooded romance has never been Burton’s bag, especially when it’s not of the goopy, fairy-tale-esque Edward Scissorhands variety. And I would wager that Waltz is miscast, playing Walter as a manic huckster schmuck from the get-go, the kind of man we want Margaret to turn and run away from at first sight. Maybe we’ve seen Waltz play naughty in too many Tarantino movies in order to buy him as a romantic lead just yet, or maybe Burton never wanted to go that route in the first place. Regardless, there just isn’t much at stake in this movie — Margaret can get up and walk away at any time, and for a long while, she just doesn’t. She loses her only friend (Krysten Ritter), she loses her art, and she loses her self-respect. And what does she gain in the process? She trades her “big eyes” for a big house and a big jerk.

Big Eyes finishes strong, thanks to a cleverly comedic courtroom climax written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also penned Ed Wood. It zips along easily enough, but never anchors us in the fear or uncertainty that Margaret claims she feels. There’s only one scene, late in the game, when Walter is truly frightening, allowing Waltz to unlock some of the sadistic magic he brought to Hans Landa and King Schultz, his two Oscar-winning roles from Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Perhaps Waltz would feel more at home in one of Burton’s zanier films. (And, gasp, would Johnny Depp have been better in this one?) Big Eyes‘ obvious feminist message gets drowned somewhat when our heroine is so incapable of defending herself. We’re never allowed to be invested in their romance, or in Margaret as a character, since it’s impossible to be on board with her choices. The story doesn’t offer her enough incentive to make them.Adams is a great actress, but it’s hard to imagine that the Academy will want to recognize her for a role that is so much weaker than her dynamo turns in movies like The Master and American Hustle. (Though they do have a history of selecting an actor’s weaker roles for accolades. See recently: Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.) Instead, Big Eyes seems to fall into place as one of the also-rans in an enormously crowded holiday season (it might have fared better in the spring). With a more nuanced actor playing Walter, it might have worked, but with every revelation that Margaret has about Walter’s dishonesty, we say, “Duh.” His Keane is so obviously full of shit that it’s hard to believe anyone would buy what he’s selling. Because we don’t.

On a more positive, the art direction is breathtaking — nearly every shot would be worthy of framing and hanging on the wall. Big Eyes is one of the prettiest pictures of 2014, and the direction shows promising restraint from Burton. There’s at least a touch of real artistry at work behind the scenes here, enough to generate a feeling of goodwill toward Burton that I’ve been lacking lately. Burton certainly knows how to make a gorgeous movie, and that goes a long way in a film about art.

Even more visually impressive — not to mention visually daring — is Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, a likely nominee for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards this year. (It also nabbed a Golden Globe nod, and I’d bet that it’s poised to win both prizes.) Ida follows a young nun named Anna who learns of an aunt who gave her up to the convent as an orphan. Anna is all set to take her vows and devote herself entirely to God, but first there’s a trip to meet Wanda, who is in most way’s Anna’s opposite. Anna is demure and virginal, while Wanda enjoys booze and sex. But Wanda is no mere floozy — she has a horrific past we learn about gradually, a tragedy that also enlightens Anna on how and why she was orphaned.

The cinematography in Ida is mesmerizing, shot in black-and-white and a 1.375:1 aspect ratio that looks more like an Instagram than a movie. (It’s shot much better than most selfies, though.) Movies became widescreen in the first place as a response to the squareness of television sets, and now that TVs are getting all cinematic on us, movies like Ida and Mommy are heading back to the classical era with their framing. It might seem like a frustrating gimmick if Ida weren’t so meticulously composed, leaving lots of head room above its characters so we don’t forget that Anna is always thinking of God. If I could open an art gallery filled with nothing but still frames of Ida, I would. (Maybe I’ll just settle for a new Instagram account with the same agenda.)

Ida is more than just a visual masterpiece — the dialogue is spare and the story is simple, but it says so much. Anna and Wanda take a road trip that gradually reveals how Anna’s parents died in the Holocaust, and the “how” isn’t exactly what you’re expecting. But Ida is just as much a tale of the bond between an aunt and an orphan who never knew each other, as well as a tale of a sheltered, sober young woman exploring the big, bad world for the first time. The brief third act is almost its own mini-movie, exploring how Anna’s views on her life’s devotion change once she knows of her past. But it wouldn’t be nearly so poignant without the setup that precedes it.

Most movies would make grand sweeping gestures out of such grand themes, but Ida skips nimbly through all three plot threads, covering ground that many filmmakers might take three hours to explore in a mere 87 minutes. Pawel Pawlikowski doesn’t waste a single millisecond of our time, managing to be meditative at a breakneck pace. A story about a young nun and her chain-smoking aunt dealing with the fallout of the Holocaust in 1960s Poland — in black-and-white, no less — sounds more like a chore than a pleasure, but Ida is a pure delight to behold, with performances and visuals working in perfect harmony. It’s the best-looking film I saw this year. (But nice try, Big Eyes!)*

Happy New Year!

This little blog of mine has existed for a little over three years now, and you know what? The more I blog, the more I realize what ignorant freaks the human race can be, thanks to the magic of Google.

Google has helped a handful of people find my blog for perfectly relevant reason — they come seeking Looking or Comeback recaps, comparisons of Black Swan to Birdman, or an explanation of what the hell Enemy is about. Just as often, however, it brings assorted masturbators and perverts to my photo gallery, seeking all sorts of unsavory things. (Some of which they may find on HardintheCity, some of which they may not.)

A lot of Google searches are your basic filth, while plenty are completely nonsensical and defy logic. I’m growing more and more certain that extraterrestrials are studying us through Google, but have not quite managed to get a grip on English syntax yet.

Here are my favorite Google searches from the past year — some hilarious, some creepy, and some that are completely baffling.

“lady from breaking bad”

There are several to choose from. Skyler? Marie? Lydia? Andrea? Gretchen? Maybe even little Holly…? You probably mean Skyler. Anna Gunn has an Emmy, so learn her fucking name.

“bug and salud skylars boobs”

Skyler’s boobs in “Bug” and “Salud”? Awesome. Please don’t bother me with Skyler’s boobs from any other episodes of Breaking Bad in which Skyler’s boobs were inferior.

“did holly get killed to’hajiilee”

No! Breaking Bad‘s precious baby Holly is alive and well. Breaking Bad may have been bleak at times, but it wasn’t that bleak. What show were you watching?

“breaking bad jesse died”

No. He didn’t.

“breaking bad that scene walter say: im not in danger i am the danger”

Eh, close enough.

“breaking bad why was skyler heavier”

Well… she wasn’t! That’s just the warped standards of beauty Hollywood imposes on actresses making anyone who is actually human being-sized look like a rhino in comparison. I’m glad you asked! Aren’t you?

“christina hendricks hefty”

Rude.

“christina hendricks groped”

Who did she grope? Oh, wait, you probably meant Christina Hendricks being groped, didn’t you?

“christina hendricks gagged”

Boy, Google really has it out for Christina Hendricks.

“madmen season 2 when joan sits on bed and takes bra strap off”

I do have a picture of this very moment, which occurred in Season 2, Episode 8, “A Night To Remember,” my third favorite Mad Men moment of all time.

“what happens to chauncey in mad men”

Good question. We will probably never know. Poor Chauncey.

“hbo looking scene”

Any scene from Looking? Any scene at all?

“patrick patrick (jonathan groff)”

Typing it twice won’t help with your vague search.

“looking in the mirror, grindr guy”

Pretty much every guy on Grindr is looking in the mirror. Oh, but I think this was referring to the TV show Looking.

“comeback lisa kudrow love paulie g”

I’m pretty sure this is not the case. In fact, the only person who would think that is Paulie G…

“is the comeback renewed”

I hope so!

“buffy et le scooby gang”

Do they not translate “Scooby gang” when it’s aired abroad? It sounds so much sexier in French!

“what does the black principal on buffy do wrong”

He Googles senseless questions about defunct TV shows that are vaguely racist. No, wait… that was you.

“orange is the new black prison guard matthew mccoughnehay”

Matthew McConaughey is a little too busy winning Oscars to play a bit part in a Netflix show. And none of the prison guards look anything like Matthew McConaughey. So… what?

“albert brooks naked”

Because who doesn’t sit around and idly think about Albert Brooks in the buff?

“adam arkin naked”

The only person I can seriously believe Googled this was Adam Arkin.

“rhea perlman nude”

Seriously? Danny DeVito, is that you?

“viola davis naked nude”

No results yet, but at this rate it’s bound to happen on How To Get Away With Murder before long.

“robert de niro nude”

Too bad Google wasn’t around back in De Niro’s heyday, he wasn’t a bad-looking fellow back then. Are you looking for vintage-era De Niro nudes, or current ones? It makes a big difference.

“free naked pictures of stacy keach.”

Naturally, yes, they would be free. I can’t imagine anyone going into business trying to make money off of Stacy Keach nudes. Then again, someone out there is obviously into it…

“lena dunham fucking”

Watch an episode of Girls. Any episode of Girls! You’ll get what you came for.

“anna kendrick naked and having sex”

Do not bother me with pictures of Anna Kendrick naked and merely going about her day-to-day business, nor any pictures of Anna Kendrick having sex fully clothed. She must be naked and having sex. Mmkay?

“james franco giving blow job”

The man does a lot of things, but that’s one thing he probably doesn’t do. (Probably.)

“michael fassbender gay orgy”

Dream on.

“how many movies has channing tatum nude in”

Never enough!

“naked channing tatum,alex pettyfer and steven soderbergh”

Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer? Yep, they were pretty naked in Magic Mike. But was Steven Soderbergh naked while directing it? I don’t think so!

“james deen dick”

It’s probably harder to find pictures of James Deen without his penis visible.

“ix brad pitt still a sex symbol”

Well, it’s not like an official title that they revoke at a certain age. That’s just up to interpretation!

“was heather orourke blood sacrificed”

I don’t think so… um, why do you ask?

“all photos of uma thurman”

That’s a lot of photos.

“every jurassic park pictures”

Enjoy your extensive Google search for every single image of one of the most popular movies of all time!

“the craziest pictures”

Of…?

“train leaving a station 1895″

You must be looking for the 1895 short Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat, one of the first films ever shown in theaters, which caused its audience to run and flee because they thought the train was real. Train Leaving A Station was the higher-budgeted sequel, which flopped hard in 1903 despite bigger stars and state-of-the-art special effects.

“a kiki is a party”

Well, it was… back in 2012…

“words liberice would say”

The man seemed fairly eloquent, so I imagine there are a lot of words Liberace might say. Care to narrow it down a little?

“the talking in the beginning of lady gagas marry the night”

Also known as “dialogue.”

“what did girl say to the aurochs?”

I don’t know, what did the girl say to the aurochs? Wait, was that not the beginning of a joke?

“britney spears fucked by man”

Which type of man were you hoping for? A Justin Timberlake type, or more of a Kevin Federline?

“britini sphere fucking hard”

Not even close.

“brity spaers fucking pic.com”

Nope!

“britni spars hard fucking”

Still no.

“hard fucking image of britny spears”

One thing I have learned through Google searches of my site? People are really not into soft, gentle fucking images of Britney Spears. Hard only!

“zero dark thirty naked”

You know, that scene where, after killing Osama bin Laden, Jessica Chastain strips naked and takes a nice, long, hot shower? Hmm? Right, no, that didn’t happen.

“argo nude”

What is it about hot-button, Oscar-nominated thrillers set in the Middle East that has everyone so worked up? Are you looking for naked shots of Ben Affleck? Try Gone Girl. If you are looking for naked shots of the Iranian hostages, I cannot help you.

“matt bomer and his naked”

…Emotions? You were attempting to Google “matt bomer and his naked emotions,” am I right?

“anglee fuck photo”

I assume you do not mean Ang Lee, director of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Life Of Pi.

“hot boobs touching scenes of kristen wiig from bridesmaid”

Are there hot boobs-touching scenes in Bridesmaids? Are they in the deleted scenes? I’ll need to get back to you on this, because I don’t recall.

“different movies of lovers having sex”

Those same old movies of lovers having sex are starting to get old. Let’s have some different ones for a change!

“new best fucking movie”

That best fucking movie from five minutes ago? So over it! So ready for a new best fucking movie, please!

“naked porn sex naked or porn or sex”

Not picky. That’s good.

“any fucking movie for hard”

Any fucking movie. Any fucking movie at all!

“what is best fucking film in 2013″

You are a year late, but here is my best of 2013. Surely that’s what you’re looking for.

“good songs for hard fucking”

If the music is so essential, you are doing it wrong.

“busty blond teacher took off her”

Took off her what? Favorite jacket? The suspense is killing Google!

“girls gooone wildp”

The number of one-handed typers who find my site is simply astonishing.

“white girl afro porn -black”

You seem confused about what you really want.

“white girl juicy come out”

It’s best not to think about any of the things this might mean.

“elisabeth naked”

Which Elisabeth do you mean? No matter how naked she may be, this Elisabeth has a last name and she’d probably prefer that you use it!

“porn stars frontal nudity”

A good way to filter out all those shy, demure porn stars who just won’t do full frontal.

“bare butt whore”

Whores who are shy about their asses being uncovered are the woooorst!

“bare ass boogie”

Is this a new “Macarena”-style dance number I should be on board with? I’m hoping not.

“uncut latin cocks”

This is what happens when you recap a show that has episode titles like “Looking For Uncut.” You find out that a lot of people on Google are also looking for uncut.

“grizzly beer”

Try again.

“sheronstonehard”

I’ve heard of death rattles… was this a death Google?

“learn to off bra panty”

Are you trying to Google how to remove a bra and panties? If you have to Google this, I’m pretty sure you will never have any use for these skills. Sorry!

“what is nude sex”

Thank you for providing your answer in the form of a question, but this is not Jeopardy. How old are you? Go ask your parents.

“dermot mulroney is smoking”

Oooh, I’m gonna tell!

“stranger by the lake cum”

Yes, actually, this movie does have some of that.

“is quentin tarantino a good fuck?”

Probably! Report back with your findings.

“does netflix have lovelace”

You know what might be a better site to search for this? Netflix!

“is lovelace on netflix”

See above.

“lovelace is it on netflx”

Really?

“katniss and finnick having sex”

I’m right there with you, but there are no pictures because it didn’t happen. Team Finnick all the way!

“jennifer lawrence hot in a silver lining playbook”

Make sure to specify that it’s just one singular silver lining playbook. We don’t have time to sift through all those playbooks, people.

“jennifer lawrence wolf of wall street”

You’re either thinking of American Hustle or Margot Robbie. Given the similarities between these characters, I will let this one slide.

“the wolf of wall street sick of waring panties”

A three-hour movie about the financial collapse of America, and this is your takeaway.

“margot robbie no panties”

They didn’t show it in the movie, so what makes you think Googling it will magically come up with some full-frontal Robbie?

“margot robbie legs open”

There we go. You’re welcome.

“wolf of wallstreet: wife with no panties”

The inevitable sequel.

“no country for the old man”

Is that supposed to be the No Country For Old Men prequel?

“raped hard”

For those moments when those a soft and gentle rape just will not do.

“sarah michelle gellar nip”

Regular Buffy perv.

“sarah michelle gellar leather”

Bondage Buffy perv.

“sarah michelle gellar barefoot”

Foot fetish Buffy perv.

“sarah michelle gellar face”

Face perv? Googling “sarah michelle gellar” is going to bring up pictures of her face even without that specification. What did you think, it would just come up with a bunch of images of her elbow?

“sarah michelle gellar oops”

Hmm. Not sure.

“kesha mouth”

Yeah, I’d wager that most pictures of Ke$ha probably include her mouth.

“sela ward hard”

When you find a picture of Sela Ward with a boner, you let me know.

“the avengers not a great plan”

A team of heroes with the most extraordinary powers on Earth? Seems like a decent plan to me!

“what pants did scarlett johansson wear in winter soldier”

I’m pretty sure they just spray-painted her legs black.

“enemy what the fuck”

My thoughts exactly.

“what the hell is enemy about”

See above.

“blueberries meaning enemy”

So it wasn’t just me who picked up on some significance with the blueberries, then?

“enemy movie mother blueberries”

Yeah, maybe the mother has something to do with that, too.

“that movie called enemy with jake in it i didn’t get the ending”

After seeing the way you use Google, it’s obvious that you aren’t the brightest crayon in the box. I’m surprised you can even type. Cool that you and “Jake” are on a first-name basis, though!

“the one i love ending fake sophie bacon”

Ahh, some more food-related confusion about the end of a 2014 doppelganger movie.

“victims in horror movies who didn’t deserve to die”

Here you go!

“blonde girls that survive horror movies”

Has this ever happened?

“horror movies with blonde teens in highschool”

Yeah, you know… that horror movie! Like… with that blonde girl? I think maybe she’s in high school…? Come on, you know the one!

“is the ending of like crazy sad or happy?”

Because there are only two kinds of endings, right? 1) Sad. 2) Happy. There are no gray areas in cinema.

“conflict in before sunset between jesse and celine”

The whole movie is a conflict between Jesse and Celine. That is literally the only thing in the entire movie.

“thesis statement for django unchined”

Why, hello, there, film student who waited until the last possible moment to write his paper!

“main comedy elements of silver lining playbook”

Film student who waited until the last possible moment to write his paper, is that you again?

“zac efron plot twist”

Uh, which Zac Efron movie has a plot twist? 17 Again? High School Musical? Hairspray? Neighbors?

“edward norton’s erection”

How explicit!

“birdman 2014 erection”

Oh, right, Edward Norton’s erection in Birdman.

“birdman is riggan dead at the end”

That is open to interpretation.

“in birdman does riggan lose his nose”

That is not open to interpretation. They very clearly state what happens. He shoots off his nose.

“who can explain the ending of the michael keaton ‘bird man’ movie?”

Nobody! Please stop asking!

“titanic movie scenes”

You know what part of Titanic I really liked? The scenes!

“titanic 1997 ending”

It sinks.

“titanic movie heroine nude sketch hd”

She has a name. It’s Rose, dumbass.

“titanic jack & rose in car”

Subtle. But you really wanted to Google “Jack and Rose fucking,” didn’t you?

“titanic jack and rose not together”

Seventeen years later, still not over it.

“titanic fail”

Yes, sure, you could categorize that whole “hitting an iceberg” thing as a “fail.” An “epic fail,” even.

“dicaprio gives one of the boldest performances in his movie career”

Does he? In what? I’m seriously curious, because you could make an argument for “boldest performance” in just about any one of his movies!

“philip seymour hoffman as j. edgar hoover”

Wrong.

“gone girl mocks media”

Yes! It does! Very astute.

“gone girl don’t fuck with women”

That’s a pretty good way to sum up the theme of the film.

“nicole kidman fucking in dog town”

It’s Dogville, actually — there are only about a dozen people, it’s hardly a whole town. And for the record, she was being subjected to rape, not “fucking.”

“kate winslet c grade rape”

Do rapes get graded now? Who grades them, and what are the criteria? I would think the person being raped would pretty much give out nothing but “F”s, on principle. And why does Kate Winslet get a totally average rape? I feel like a Kate Winslet rape would get either an “A” or an “F,” nothing in between.

“is thomas horn gay”

Kinda seems that way, may be too early to tell.

“is the boy from movie extremely loud and incredibly close okay in real life”

I was wondering this myself, and I seriously doubt it.

“bruce wayne story”

It’s called Batman. 

“in spider man what is the green lizards name”

You gotta love Googlers who phrase things like they’re having an actual conversation. “Pray tell, where might I find the name of that charming lizard chap from the Spider-Man pictures?”

“storm coming up batman”

I guess this is reasonably close to “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne.” This is like a really bad translated version that gives away that he’s Batman.

“women of flash gordon naked porn”

Is this a thing? If this is a thing, I don’t want to know about it.

“redhead teen stepchild porn”

I’m not sure “redheaded stepchild” is meant to be a sexy term. Usually it’s pejorative.

“raped with sex machines”

Weird.

“nude sexual enjoyment”

Not to be confused with clothed sexual enjoyment, or various forms of nude enjoyment that are decidedly not sexual, or nude sexual misery.

“men grabbing each others crotch”

So you’re looking for PG-rated porn, then? Ohhhkay…

“verry hard & best fuck”

When non-English-speaking people try to Google in English.

“the most fuking movi film”

There are lots of very fucking movie-films, but which is the most fucking movie-film of them all?

“sex in motion”

Not a necrophiliac. That’s good!

“cleavage body swap”

Uh-oh, sounds like they’re running out of body swap ideas in Hollywood. Is this like Freaky Friday, except instead of a full body switch, Lindsay Lohan has Jamie Lee Curtis’ breasts and Jamie Lee Curtis has Lindsay Lohan’s breasts?

“oops i did it again schoolgirl”

Wrong Britney video, asshole.

“britney spears oops not again dance”

If you are gay, why don’t you know that Britney Spears did not record a song called “Oops, Not Again!” The proper title is “Oops I Did It Again.” And if you are not gay, why are you Googling Britney Spears dances?

“witch scratching”

What’s this?

“teen screams its to hard”

Hmm. Nope. Not going to go there.

“naughty america hot”

Does the Statue of Liberty have nudes?

“the best of oriental volume 2 fucking”

Good thing they added the “fucking,” because I was thinking we meant Oriental rugs. It’s also probably time to change this series to “best of Asian volume 2 fucking,” right? I mean, it’s 2015.

“fucking moviefullynaked”

I seriously don’t understand all the searches for “fully naked.” Is it really that hard to find fucking movies with nudity? How often have you seen a sex scene and thought, “Man, this would be really hot, if only she wasn’t wearing that fedora…”

“tree of life movie”

Good thing you specified Tree Of Life the movie. Otherwise your search might’ve taken you to Tree Of Life: The Ride.

“movies on netflix with male frontal”

Perhaps that $7.99 per month would best be spent on some other website subscription…

“hot blonde girls that play in movies”

There may be one or two of these in Hollywood.

“naked naked sex”

When naked sex just won’t do. This sex needs to be naked naked.

“les miserables sex”

You know what porn needs more of? Women selling their teeth and hair before they do it! I mean, if you are jacking off to Les Miserables, then I don’t know what to tell you.

“twister film sex”

Now you’re trying to masturbate to Twister? Is it Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, or the flying cow that got you going? There is nothing even close to sex in Twister. Nothing!

“the awkward pictures of beyonce”

She will cut you.

“movie about people with doubles when comet passes”

It’s called Coherence. You’re welcome!

“love.crack.smoking”

So do many of the people who find my website. Is that why you put periods in between words in Google?

“sexy fuck me dude”

Don’t just fuck me, dude. Sexy fuck me.

“find magic mike”

This is actually a good idea for a sexier version of “Where’s Waldo?”

“margaret thatcher deficiencies”

You mean the woman, or the biopic The Iron Lady? Either way, yes, tons of deficiencies.

“hitler studio”

It’s time to rename that studio.

“ryan phillippe scream”

Ryan Philippe was I Know What You Did Last Summer, not Scream.

“hate ny want to move to california”

We’ve all been there, everybody’s doing it!

“bad ass christmas song”

Here you go.

“i am bad here”

I’d rather you be bad wherever you are then bad here.

“daddy knocked me out to fuck me hard sex films”

Ah, my favorite shelf at any video store! A truly underrated genre.

“horny and lust for real true sibling”

Turn on your privacy settings.

“hot naked harmless rape”

Much like “fun, consequence-free manslaughter” or “frivolous, mutually beneficial burglary,” this is not really a thing.

“i hate jake gyllenhaal”

I’m sorry you feel that way.

“george c scott was difficult”

Still holding that grudge, eh?

“pl travers was a bitch”

Agreed. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one with that takeaway from Saving Mr. Banks.

“was p.l. travers a bitch?”

Yes.

“was p l travers really a bitch”

Yes!

“why was p l travers such a bitch”

There is literally an entire movie devoted to this question, and yet it seems this person Googled this after watching it rather than before.

“pl travers was acted like a bitch”

Yeah, we covered this, except with better English.

“i dont like rihanna becuase she like hitler”

Because she’s like Hitler? Or because she likes Hitler? Either way, this is news to me, and it’s not good.

“rihanna fucked hard and crying seriously”

No crocodile tears during sex, RiRi. We want real tears.

“sister is horny on christmas day to fuck brother and dad on film”

Ho, ho, ho! Nothing says “happy holidays” like a whole lotta incest!

“fucking birthday cakes”

A strange fetish I don’t care to learn more about.

“fuck cake”

I wouldn’t eat that if I were you.

“toaster strudel boy looks like kerstin dundts”

You couldn’t have spelled Kirsten Dunst’s name any more phonetically. Anyway, I had no idea who this was, but when I Googled this myself, I discovered that it’s actually true:

‘Til next time, Google.

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