Of course you do. You’ve been quoting it since 2004.

On Wednesdays, you say: “On Wednesdays we wear pink.” On October 3, you ask what day it is. If someone tries to make fetch happen, you snap: “Stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen.” You will never eat toaster strudel without thinking of its inventor.

In other words, you’re too gay to function.

Regina, Karen, Gretchen, and Cady — AKA “The Plastics” — have gone down in history as a certain generation’s gay female pop culture proxies. (Past recipients of this honor include Cher from Clueless, the cast of Sex & The City, The Wizard Of Oz’s Dorothy, Joan of Arc, and Mary Magdalene.) It’s unlikely that Tina Fey intentionally penned Mean Girls as the most homosexually-quotable film of this millennium, but that she did — and I bet she’s proud of herself. Mean Girls was adapted from the teen self-help book Queen Bees & Wannabes, of all things, so maybe it’s not surprising that a tome helping 15-year-old girls navigate their way through the perils of middle school became the go-to flick at any gay slumber party. (Not to be confused with an orgy.) Gay men love powerful women, even (or especially) when “powerful” can be more accurately described as “chillingly bitchy.” What is a singular word for a “mean girl,” after all? Yes, that’s right.

A bitch.

Superficial, catty women who love to flirt and party and buy expensive things tend to be good stand-ins for gay men’s base desires. I don’t want to make blanket statements and stereotype, because there’s more to (most) gay men than shopping and gossip and talking about boys. Lots of gay men prefer sports to shopping, political debates to trash talk… blah blah, whatever. Even they still like Mean Girls.

That’s because movies and TV are escapism, and such characters allow us to disappear into that fantasy for awhile. Maybe it stems from our insecure teen years — did you see the cute, ditzy popular girl with guys swarming around her, and wish you could have similar success? Maybe we’ve even unconsciously emulated her, because certain gay social circles follow the rules of Mean Girls’ “Girl World” to a T. The movie is, sadly but hilariously, quite relatable for most of us. The Plastics are who we all aspire to be, at least on an aesthetic level, while the film’s star Lindsay Lohan is the tragic, real-life cautionary tale of what will happen to us if we ever actually get there. (It’s not pretty.)  So thanks, Lilo, for the sacrifice — you’re proof positive that being “Plastic” only works out in the movies.

Why these girls? Why women, at all? Why don’t gay men aspire to be, I dunno, James Dean, or 80‘s Tom Cruise, or Chris Hemsworth? Pop culture is still having a “girl power” moment that began in the 90’s. Movie guys are getting ever more oafish — Seth Rogen is a funny guy, but do any of us aspire to be him? Doubtful. Straight guys may look at the couch-friendly stoner archetype and say, “Hey, cool, that guy plays video games all day like I do!” But women and gay men aspire to more; we’re still too unstable in a patriarchal, hetero-dominated society to rest on any such laurels. Our icons need to have it all — looks, social status, money, men. (Maybe smarts, too — but that’s negotiable.) It’s not so much a question of femininity as image and ambition. Why wouldn’t we prefer to be a Queen Bee than a McLovin’? Males just aren’t setting the bar very high at this moment in time, whereas Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada can dress in designer labels, boss her minions around, verbally cut a bitch at the drop of a hat, travel around in town cars sipping Starbucks, all while earning an Academy Award nomination for her troubles. It sure beats the hell out of dressing in drag and pretending to be your own fat sister, or whatever the fuck Adam Sandler is doing in any given year.

So will this quartet of high school girls (and their less popular classmates) ever fall out of fashion, as fictional creations sometimes do? It hasn’t happened yet! The funny thing about movie characters is that they stay the same age as we get older and wiser and (arguably) more mature, yet we don’t outgrow them the way we might move on from a real life friend who is still acting like a snotty cunt long after puberty can be claimed as the culprit. There was, in fact, a Mean Girls 2 that nobody watched and should never be mentioned again, but there likely will never be one that actually reunites Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, that tells us how Cady and the gang fared after graduation. (But wouldn’t a Mean Girls High School Reunion be incredibly awesome?) There is a movie, however, that gives us a glimpse at what a true Mean Girls sequel might be like, and that’s Bachelorette.

I feel the film needs no introduction, for already it’s one of the most buzzed-about and popular films to ever debut on demand. (It simultaneously hit theaters.) Given the girly title, female-dominated cast, and focus on nuptials, comparisons to Bridesmaids are inevitable, but Bachelorette is a totally different animal. A vicious animal that will maul you.

It’s about a quartet of friends from high school who reunite for a wedding. Sounds light and typical, right? Well, not when the one getting married is called “Pigface” by the other three. That trio is Regina George (Kirsten Dunst), Karen Smith (Isla Fisher), and Gretchen Weiners (Lizzy Caplan). Okay, those aren’t their actual names in this film — but we have the queen bee, the stupid slut, and the neurotic one, and their names are Regan, Katie, and Gena, respectively. Hmm… Regan, Katie, Gena… Regina, Karen, Gretchen… Regan, Katie, Gena… Regina, Karen, Gretchen… you see where I’m going with this?

I can neither confirm nor deny that writer/director Lesley Headland intentionally named her characters after their counterparts in Mean Girls, but let’s just say that Bachelorette serves as the unofficial sequel anyway. Bachelorette is just Mean Girls At The Altar, and a decade or so later, they’ve only gotten nastier. The three more conventionally attractive girls are shocked and appalled to discover that Becky (AKA “Pigface” AKA Rebel Wilson) is the first of their fab foursome to get engaged. They pretend to be happy for her, but behind her back (and occasionally to her face) they’re cruel as cruel can be. And since they’re all grown-ups now, the cruelty is more grounded and harder to take. It only makes these “mean girls” look more pathetic and juvenile, that they’ve only grown up now to be mean women.

As you might expect, these teen hyenas grow up to face their fair share of troubles. Katie’s bimbo act is growing stale after so many years of being used and discarded, while Gena is abusing alcohol to numb the emotional scars of her abortion of Clive (Adam Scott)’s baby. (And because “the world is an asshole” — as a sad-faced pancake explains.) Regan, meanwhile, is holding it together outwardly, but inside you can tell she’s a miserable Type A catastrophe. Some or all of these women have been bulimic. They have empty, unfulfilling sexual encounters. They’re selfish, coked up narcissists whose destructive actions constantly threaten to destroy what should be the happiest day of their faux-friend’s life, and they care only slightly.

In other words, please say hello to the gay world’s new female pop culture proxies, bitches!

Okay. So I’m (sort of) kidding. Yes, you can play “Which Bachelorette are you?” just as you can with the Plastics or the aging fashionistas of Sex & The City. But there’s a razor-sharp edge to Bachelorette that isn’t quite found in any of the above-mentioned properties, and much less of a silver lining. Bachelorette is technically a comedy, but the problems these ladies face are darker and more realistic than the usual fare. It’s bound to turn some off of Bachelorette, while at the same time inviting others to appreciate how willing the film is to let its female characters be so emotionally ugly. (Male characters get away with it constantly.) It won’t be so iconic as Mean Girls, but maybe you and your friends are just a few shades too dark to be Plastics. Maybe you have more in common with Bachelorette’s self-loathing, drug-abusing “B-Faces” instead. That’s okay — no one needs to know. Just secretly know that when you claim you’re “a Regina,” what you really mean is that you’re a Regan instead.

Bachelorette contains a few quotably bitchy lines (like Kirsten Dunst interrupting Rebel Wilson’s announcement of her engagement with: “Can I say something?”), a supporting cast featuring Andrew Rannells (so everywhere all of a sudden!) as a stripper cop and James Marsden as a slutty groomsman, plus copious indulgence in booze, cocaine, and meaningless sex. It’s a bitter pill, but a funny one, with strong performances by Dunst and Caplan especially. You won’t be disappointed — except in all the ways the film wants you to feel disappointed. And dejected. On down on the human race at large.

And, for those of us who glorify those high school mean girls, maybe it’s a necessary example of how we actually don’t want to be just like them when we grow up.

(And yet, deep down, maybe some of us still do.)

Either way, it’s grool.

As a child, I was an Oz fanatic. I’m not even talking about the MGM musical, though I liked that — for what it was. A great, iconic movie. But I was an even bigger fan of the books by L. Frank Baum, which continued the adventures of Dorothy and friends plus a slew of new characters. The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, on which the Wizard Of Oz most are familiar is based, is actually one of my least favorite Oz books. The mildly creepy 80′s movie Return To Oz is actually closer in spirit to Baum’s stories, what with the Deadly Desert and queens with interchangeable heads and all. I devoured them the way kids these days eat up Harry Potter.

Naturally, I was skeptical upon learning that Disney was rebooting Oz in the style of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, since that certainly wasn’t so wondrous. A prequel following the Wizard’s arrival in the Emerald City isn’t the worst idea, but tackling Oz is always tricky. The Oz everyone is familiar with is the MGM movie, but Disney doesn’t have the right to that, so they had to be crafty about not referencing anything that wasn’t also in the book. (That means no ruby slippers… in the book, they were silver.) But clearly, Disney is desperately hoping that no one notices this isn’t a direct prequel to The Wizard Of Oz. It doesn’t reimagine Oz at all… pretty much all the visuals are lifted from the MGM musical, starting with the black-and-white Kansas opening which goes full-color once the Wizard arrives in Oz.

Oz The Great And Powerful is a seriously strange movie. Two screenwriters are credited (including Rabbit Hole writer David Lindsay-Abaire… working in a very different genre), but it feels like it was written by about 26 of them. The tone keeps changing from goofy kiddie humor to earnest melodrama to genuinely witty banter to spectacle to some pretty dark and creepy stuff. Every twenty minutes or so, Oz changes into a completely different movie. Some of them work… some, not so much. It’s like Wicked meets Harry Potter meets Alice In Wonderland meets The Matrix meets Lord Of The Rings and so on.

Oddly enough, Oz The Great And Powerful jettisons almost everything from Baum’s books that wasn’t also in The Wizard Of Oz and makes up a new story. It’s probably a good thing, to avoid botching the books. There are two brands of flying monkeys now, one of them terrifying and evil and the other cute, cuddly, and voiced by Zach Braff. Finley, the monkey sidekick, actually works for the most part, as does a new character named China Girl — who is not from China, but made of china. (Why she doesn’t have an actual name, I’m not sure. How do they tell her apart from the other china girls?)

The script is a little lazy and inconsistent in this way. Like, how come the China Girl needs to be tucked in to go to sleep, but later has no trouble traipsing through the poppies that force everyone else to slumber? Yeah, it’s pointless to snuff out plot holes in a film like this, since there are plenty. In its most earnest moments — of which there are several — Oz The Great And Powerful is awfully sappy and pretty bad. Most of the attempts to steal from The Wizard Of Oz land with a thud, like the Wizard’s gift-presenting scene at the end, or how we meet all the characters in the opening in Kansas only to have them reprised in Oz, for some reason. (Does that mean this is a dream, too? So the Wizard hallucinates the same fairyland that Dorothy will hallucinate him into in another couple decades?) Also, I’m pretty sure the writers are trying to imply that the Wizard used to date Dorothy’s mom (a character played by Michelle Williams says she’s marrying a guy named John Gale… as in Dorothy Gale). That’s just confusing.

Oz The Great And Powerful is a reasonably well-intentioned film, though, I think, which is why I don’t want to dwell too much on the obvious negatives and the 49% of it that doesn’t work. I just can’t be mean to Oz. It’s like going back in time to beat up my childhood self. Sam Raimi is obviously more comfortable with the more fantastic elements of the story than he is with the characters and drama… there are a few technically dazzling sequences, including the intense cyclone scene and a show-stopping good witch/bad witch smackdown. The entire third act is pretty good, except for that treacly ending. It’s important in a movie like this to stick the landing, and Raimi does it.

And while I normally hate 3D, I didn’t really have a choice at my screening. This is probably the best 3D experience I’ve had since Avatar (not that I’ve had many since). Oz The Great And Powerful is more like a Disney ride than a movie in a lot of ways, for better or worse, and the 3D enhances that.

So, yes, James Franco is probably miscast — he seems completely unaware that he’s in a period piece. The script does Mila Kunis’ character no favors, and I’m not sure why she was cast in the Margaret Hamilton role… you kind of need a Cate Blanchett type to carry that torch, no? (Both she and Franco seem curiously young for their roles.) It’s also a bit of a mystery why sisters Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz speak with different accents, but maybe there’s a perfectly logical Ozzy reason for this. Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams carry enough of the movie that it kind of works. It’s all hit or miss — Danny Elfman’s score is totally forgettable, but the CGI is pretty astounding on the whole. (Despite a lot of fakey-looking scenery.) Also: giant flowers is a Wonderland thing, not an Oz thing, you guys. And poison apples belong in Snow White, not Oz.

The new Oz will likely be a big hit, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t really fancy my Oz becoming just another stop in Disneyland (notice that Oz is a lot more multiracial than it was in 1939… it’s a small world, after all… was there a Nazi uprising at some point?). I imagine Glinda will now join the ranks of Disney princesses. And with Star Wars now being made by Disney too, pretty soon there won’t be any point to Disneyland, because literally every piece of entertainment ever will be there. It’ll just be Everythingland. But I digress.

I take comfort in the fact that Oz The Great And Powerful could’ve been a lot worse. Is that a ringing endorsement? Not exactly. The film is primarily geared toward kids, despite a few creepy or clever bits aimed higher. I’m not sure why Disney felt the need to make a film based on a series of 40 books and then ignore almost all the mythology in order to make up new stuff, but whatever leaves my childhood hopes and dreams unshattered. Disney will probably be back with a sequel to the prequel before too long, to wipe out what is left of my childhood. But for now… we’re good.

*

It used to be like Christmas, except it lasted even longer. From Thanksgiving or so all the way into late February, or even March, it was Oscar, Oscar, Oscar. Before there was internet, there were splashy articles in Entertainment Weekly. Interviews with the nominees, predictions of who would win… I was removed from it all. Just a spectator.

But every year I learn a little more about how it all really happens.

Last year was the height of my Oscar coverage — ironically, in one of the weakest races in recent memory. The Artist took Best Picture, but that’s because its competition was The Help, and War Horse, and Moneyball. Even just one year later, these sound like such weak movies in comparison with this year’s contenders — Lincoln. Zero Dark Thirty. Amour.

Oh, and Argo.

I’ve been burned by the Oscars before, and they were burning others like me since long before I was here. No matter the results, someone’s getting burned… it’s a popularity contest. By that measure, Argo is a fitting choice for Best Picture. It’s pretty inoffensive. I mean, it glorifies America and diminishes Canada, relies on twists that seem pulled from a Robert McKee Screenwriting 101 seminar for its invented third act, and arguably casts Iranians in an unfavorable light… but other than that, it goes down pretty smoothly.

Argo. Right up there with Titanic, and Schindler’s List, and The Godfather, and Lawrence Of Arabia. Does that feel right? Of course not, but you can say that about numerous other Best Picture winners. The Oscars are, after all, nothing but a time capsule, a window into what a certain select group of people’s tastes were, way back when. In the 70’s, they favored moody epics and socially relevant dramas, mostly. Now?

Well, it’s been a weak few years, with Best Picture winners The King’s Speech, The Artist, and now Argo. Last year I was more or less on board with The Artist’s win, but only because of a lack of competition. The Artist was well-made, and well-intentioned, and charming… though a bit of a trifle. I was much more irate about The King’s Speech triumphing over The Social Network, because it felt like a real fight — old school versus new school, then versus now. Of course, “then” ended up winning. After a few years of choosing challenging, dark, and/or divisive movies — No Country For Old Men, The Departed, The Hurt Locker — the Academy went back to rewarding “nice” movies.

I could tolerate that for a year or two, but no more.

Argo’s win signals the fact that it’s time for me to divorce myself a little from the Oscars. I’ll still watch them, and read about them, and write about them from time to time. Who knows what next year has in store for awards season? But these past few years, my relationship with Oscar has been an abusive one. I give, and give; I try to be heard; he doesn’t listen. And I just end up being disappointed.

And I’m not just talking about the winners themselves, but the whole show. Because Seth MacFarlane? What a disaster.

I don’t put the blame entirely on him. He was a bad choice for the show right from the beginning. Despite one huge cinematic success this year, Seth MacFarlane is a TV guy. That’s where his strengths are. Does Seth MacFarlane belong in a room with Meryl Streep, and Jack Nicholson, and Daniel Day-Lewis? Not really. Does Seth MacFarlane know much about movies? I doubt it. Seth MacFarlane might’ve been a decent Emmys or Golden Globes host, but this is the Oscars. They’re about movies… or, well, they’re supposed to be.

Instead, this Oscars was all about TV, music, and Broadway — two things that don’t really go together, mind you. Seth MacFarlane could clearly care less about the Broadway aspects, despite his song-and-dance routines. His lengthy opening sketch involved William Shatner (a TV actor); his most memorable joke was about Rihanna and Chris Brown; his closing number was with Kristin Chenoweth, a TV and stage personality. One of the night’s standout personalities was Adele — a musician, not an actress. There was a James Bond montage that felt more like an ode to the 007 marathons your dad watches on AMC than it did to the actual movies. Three stage-to-screen adaptations reprised some big numbers, including Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson, who rose to fame as a TV musician, won an Oscar primarily for her singing over her acting, and has barely been in a movie since. Was this the Tonys? The Emmys? The Grammys? It felt more like some mashup of those three than it felt like the Oscars.

Everyone’s always talking about how to fix the Academy Awards. It’ll probably never happen. There are too many different people’s interests at stake — ABC’s, the producers’, the Academy’s. They all want something different, which is how you end up with a show that celebrates both Bond and Broadway — appealing to “the guys” with a musical number by Shirley Bassey, apparently (how butch!), and to everyone else with a musical montage honoring three movies that have nothing to do with each other. It’s hosted by a man who was primarily meant to appeal to males and young people, the exact crowd that turns the TV off when Barbra Streisand comes out to sing some song they’ve never heard. What a mess. Is too much to exact for some consistency in this thing? Some kind of singular vision?

Just to prove that it isn’t impossible, I’ve decided to rewrite this year’s Oscar telecast. I mean, if I was starting from scratch, I would probably write Seth MacFarlane out of it entirely, and have it co-hosted by Al Pacino and Madonna. But let me try and work within the Academy’s parameters…

Seth’s opening monologue isn’t too terrible. There are mildly funny jabs at Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck’s Best Director snub, and Jennifer Lawrence. Keep it.

The problems begin when William Shatner arrives from the “future” with a headline that MacFarlane is “Worst Oscar host ever.” (How prescient.) He says it’s because Seth’s jokes are tasteless and everyone ends up hating him. “Tell me what it is that I do wrong!” Seth asks, which doesn’t make sense, because if he was about to sing it, he would’ve known the song already.

A better sketch would be if Shatner came back to warn him that he ruined the telecast by playing it too safe. That he didn’t tell any offensive jokes, and everyone was bored and disappointed. So then Seth launches into the “impromptu” “We Saw Your Boobs” song (which, admittedly, I did find mildly amusing). Shatner has to keep encouraging MacFarlane to be more offensive, which gives him a free pass to be himself and be as tasteless as he wants. He could sabotage Charlize Theron and Channing Tatum’s charming little ballroom dance by encouraging Channing to go all Magic Mike; something similar in that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Daniel Radcliffe soft-shoe.

The show goes on. Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy come out and do something that’s actually funny instead of bombing and starting the show off on a super awkward note. After the Jaws music abruptly plays off Life Of Pi’s VFX team, Seth makes an impromptu joke about how their mangled bodies just washed up on the beach.

Halle Berry comes out to introduce the 007 montage, which has no lame montage but goes right into Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger.” Midway through, Halle and Anne Hathaway and Michelle Pfeiffer and anyone else who has ever played Catwoman (and isn’t dead) comes out and does an ode to the Batman villainness, in costume, in a surprise tribute. Maybe they fight some guys in suits playing James Bond. It doesn’t matter that this makes no sense; no one would ever see it coming.

The next time the Jaws music strikes up, Steven Spielberg sneaks up to the stage with his hands together over his head, making a shark fin. Everyone laughs, and they stop playing the Jaws theme to let the Hollywood peons continue their speech.

When Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Garner are backstage just before presenting Best Foreign Language Film together, Jessica hisses, “Your hubby’s a hack, bitch,” and then steps on Jennifer’s dress as they walk out, causing her to stumble. “Oops!” Jessica says to the audience, helping Jennifer up, and everyone claps for her while Jennifer rushes off to tend to her bleeding nose.

The producers have decided Chicago and Dreamgirls aren’t really relevant this year, and decide to stick with the Les Miserables number. Just when the cast is getting to their big finish, there’s a reprise of the Oscar-winning “Blame Canada” from South Park, which is especially relevant because Argo totally fucked the Canadians over but they’re all too nice to say anything about it. Seth MacFarlane interrupts and says he’s sorry, but this isn’t the Tonys, and he’s required to show something that has to do with movies now.

Instead of a musical tribute, the show decides to honor comedies — particularly raunchy ones, like Bridesmaids and There’s Something About Mary, tracking the history of what was “risque” back in the early days of film and all the way up to movies like Ted. Because hey, that’s actually relevant for Seth MacFarlane!

Adele performs. Barbra doesn’t. When Norah Jones tries to take the stage, security stops her and says, “Excuse me, who are you?” She replies “Norah Jones,” and is promptly escorted off the premises. Instead of those three so-so montages from the Best Picture nominees, there’s just one big supercut featuring clips from every 2012 movie that the producers pulled off of YouTube. And it’s awesome. “The internet has a lot of funnier and more artfully cut videos than the stuff we have on our show!” one Oscar producer says to the other. “I have dishonored my family,” says the other, and pulls out a giant katana blade.

First Lady Michelle Obama makes a surprise appearance from the White House, surrounded by her mysterious white male minions. She makes a speech about how important the nominees are for The Children, not realizing that children should really not see movies like Amour or Django Unchained. She reads the Best Picture winner: “Argo.” Then says, “What? That’s bullshit. It was a competently made thriller, but that’s all!” Michelle uses her power as First Lady to demand a correction. “It should be Lincoln or Zero Dark Thirty, or else why did you even bother announcing this from the White House?” The president of the Academy tries to come out and reason with her, but to no avail. “Barack? You want to back me up here?” Barack Obama to appears that actually, Zero Dark Thirty was the best movie of the year. Chaos breaks out as Academy members fight about whether or not this is fair. Jessica Chastain spits on Jennifer Garner. “They hate me… they really hate me,” Ben Affleck says aloud, softly, to no one. The ominous strains of the Jaws theme strike up and just as it reaches a crescendo, Seth MacFarlane tells Kristin Chenoweth that nobody wanted to hear her sing, anyway, and cuts it all off with a, “Goodnight, everybody!”

I doubt Tina and Amy will host next year, since the Golden Globes will do everything they can to keep them. But how about Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph try and out-comedienne them? I could totally go for that. Can we make this happen?   

You, dear reader, have the honor of reading this in the future, after the Oscar nominations have been announced.

But I am writing from this from the near past, before we know which five contenders are fighting it out in each category.

Of course, some are shoo-ins; there are only a very small handful of slots that are anybody’s guess at this point, including one in Best Supporting Actress that could really go to anybody and a bit of confusion in Best Supporting Actor as well. Best Actor and Actress, meanwhile, are mainly both six-person races that must be whittled down. Who will be sacrificed ― Bradley Cooper, John Hawkes, or Joaquin Phoenix? Emmanuelle Riva, Quvenzhane Wallis, or Marion Cotillard?

(You future readers are probably laughing at me, because instead, it was an unexpected sweep by the casts of What To Expect When You’re Expecting, Battleship, and The Odd Life of Timothy Green in all major categories.)

Either way, the performers that actually are nominated doesn’t affect the ones I believe should be. There are many years that I vehemently disagree with the nominees and even the winners. Last year snubbed a couple of the best performances at nomination time, Michael Fassbender in Shame and Albert Finney in Drive, then gave another Oscar to (the admittedly fabulous) Meryl Streep for one of the most atrocious movies she’s ever been in. But I digress. This year has been much kinder, and there are very few potential nominees I don’t think should be in the running. In fact, in some of these races my own picks look a lot like the Academy’s, which makes me feel awfully pedestrian. Can it be that the Oscars actually get it right, once in a blue moon?

Well, it’s a little early to start that kind of talk. I’m still speaking from the past.

No matter what the Academy says today, here’s what I say. And what I say is better, because I’m not 3,000 old people. I’m just me.

Here are my Not-Oscars for the Best Performances of 2012! (The winner is at the top, then they’re in descending order of how much I like them.)

BEST ACTRESS

Naomi Watts, The Impossible
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Marion Cotillard, Rust And Bone
Emmanuelle Riva, Amour

Honorable Mentions: Zoe Kazan, Ruby Sparks; Rosemarie DeWitt, Your Sister’s Sister

Every year there’s one performance that grabs me like none of the rest, and this year it’s Naomi Watts. A large part of it is the movie itself, which does such wonders in making the audience feel every twist and turn of being swept up in a killer tsunami. There aren’t many actresses who’d be willing to go the extremes the role requires — it isn’t just CGI, she’s actually in a water tank holding on for dear life, screaming her lungs out. Yet Naomi often likes to put herself in miserable cinematic situations, for whatever reason, and still I am blown away by her commitment to this role. She really runs the gamut of emotions here.

Any other year, though, I might have picked Jessica Chastain. Divine Jessica Chastain, whose performance in Zero Dark Thirty at first seems kind of weak, until you realize that’s just the character she’s playing. Over the course of a decade, Maya goes from dedicated but naïve CIA operative to a force to be reckoned with, yet Chastain never goes broad or over the top in playing a girl who can not only hang with the boys, but outwork them. It’s that last scene, though, that cements this as one of the defining performances of the year. Since she’s still a relative newcomer, I can’t wait to see more Jessica Chastain in coming years.

Also, kudos to Katniss! Jennifer Lawrence nicely bridged the gap between teen worship and Academy cred this year, turning in solid work in The Hunger Games (take that, K-Stew) and then topping it in Silver Linings Playbook. Her Tiffany is a joy to watch, and somehow manages to steal scenes even when acting opposite a bunch of actors who all have their crazy dialed up to 10 (Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, and Chris Tucker). It’s also rare to find a screen female who can admit to extremely slutty acts on-screen and then defy being defined by that in the audience’s mind. In a way, it’s a more impressive feat of girl power than anything in The Hunger Games.

And I’m not even done with the female performances I’m truly wild about, because I also would love to see Marion Cotillard rewarded for her work as an amputee and so much more. Cotillard’s utterly convincing portrayal of a whale trainer who has lost her legs is matched by flawless CGI, reason enough to nominate her. But she’s also a full-blooded character who conveys vulnerability without ever having to speak it. It’s a must-see performance.

Last but not least, Emmanuelle Riva. Sometimes the stillest and quietest performances are the greatest of all, and she sells every single frame she’s in as Amour‘s dying wife. The old woman on her deathbed is a great cinematic cliché, yet Riva does things you’ve never seen with her performance.

This is the rare year when all five of my favorites could end up being the Academy nominees. I also have to give a little love to Honorable Mentions Rosemarie DeWitt, who lights up every film she’s in, and Zoe Kazan, who wrote herself a surprisingly good role in Ruby Sparks and then acted the hell out of it.

BEST ACTOR

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Matthis Schoenaerts, Rust And Bone
Tom Holland, The Impossible

Honorable Mentions: John Hawkes, The Sessions; Channing Tatum, Magic Mike

The year’s Best Actor race has had a predictable outcome ever since we got our first glimpse at Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln. And yes, he’s astounding. I’m probably unfairly suffering from some Meryl Streep-esque “But he’s always amazing!” fatigue by not choosing him for my top slot, but I just can’t. It’s too predictable. (As amazing as his disappearance into an American icon is.)

Anyway, Denis Lavant has an arguably trickier role in Holy Motors ― actually, several of them. He plays a number of wildly different characters, from a barbarian sewer-dweller who occasionally bites off people’s extremities to the presumed husband and father to a clan of chimpanzees. (Don’t ask.) In between, he strings it together with a believable (if fantastical) portrayal of a weary “actor” who’d love nothing more than to stop pretending to be other people. If the reward for the year’s Best Performance in a Movie was actually for Most Performances in a Movie, it would probably go to Lavant. (Even in the same year Cloud Atlas was released.)

I also have to give some love to Bradley Cooper, whose career-changing performance in Silver Linings Playbook was endearing in a way he hasn’t been since Alias. Just watch — he’ll get all sorts of other roles offered to him now, whether the Oscar noms favor him or not.

Matthias Schoenaerts, on the other hand, has scarcely been mentioned in any conversation about the Academy Awards, with all the love on Marion Cotillard with the more physically demanding role. Yet Schoenaerts complements her perfectly in a performance I found startlingly believable. His character, Alain, is basically a self-involved prick more often than not; obtuse, but without a mean bone in his body. It’s a rare sort of character to see on screen, but an easy one to find in real life. Schoenaerts exhibits real movie star charisma in the role — a Tom Hardy-like appeal. Here’s hoping we see more of him, whether in French cinema or a crossover role.

And The Impossible‘s Tom Holland, the true protagonist of that movie, wonderfully portrays a character who goes from selfish in his survival of a tsunami to rescuer of those in need. It’s not the sort of arc screenwriters usually give a child, but Holland pulls it off quite nicely.

Honorable Mention-wise, I have to mention John Hawkes, who does what he can to make The Sessions less treacly (quite a task), and Channing Tatum, who proved he can act this year not just in Magic Mike, but also a surprisingly funny turn in 21 Jump Street. Who knew?

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Sally Field, Lincoln
Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Emily Blunt, Looper

Honorable Mentions: Amy Adams, The Master; Jennifer Ehle, Zero Dark Thirty

I hate to side with the masses, but Anne Hathaway was pretty transcendent in the otherwise botched Les Mis, to the extent that the movie goes downhill once she dies — which is unfortunately less than an hour into it. She shows up most of her castmates, disappears for two hours, and then shows back up to right the ship and bring us home. She essentially saves the movie. If that isn’t a star turn I don’t know what it is.

Also, how much fun was Sally Field in Lincoln? She’s Hathaway’s only real competition in this category, and she injects some humor and surprise into Spielberg’s otherwise stately and staid presidential drama. Never underestimate the power of a hissy fit.

Jacki Weaver is the least buzzed-about of the major performers in Silver Linings Playbook, since she’s also the least crazy ― it’s bipolar vs. depressed vs. OCD vs. happiness. But since I love me some Jacki Weaver (from my favorite performance of 2010 in Animal Kingdom), I can’t not love her in it as she makes her “crabby-snakes and homemades” (whatever those are) and puts a happy face on her family’s constant manic turmoil. She’s the comparatively normal glue that holds all this crazy together.

And then there’s Helen Hunt’s T&A (and V, technically). You may never have asked to see this much Helen Hunt, but here it is. It’s a cliché to say that her emotional nakedness in the role matches her, you know, actually naked nakedness, but it’s true. She weaves a lot of complexity into a role that could’ve been brash and much simpler, to the extent that her “sessions” with John Hawkes are really the only thing that ground the movie.

And how about that Emily Blunt? Her Looper performance isn’t generating any awards season heat, but in a movie featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis trying to out-Bruce Willis each other, someone has to hold it together emotionally, and Emily does just that. She’s surprisingly convincing as a Kansas farm girl and goes above and beyond in conveying her devotion to her unusual son.

As for my Honorable Mentions — Amy Adams felt underused in The Master, but she held her own with the boys, and Jennifer Ehle made a reasonably small part in Zero Dark Thirty more memorable than it might have been, as the woman who didn’t find Osama, but was a casualty along the way.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Matthew McConaughey, Magic Mike
Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained
Eddie Redmayne, Les Miserables
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Ezra Miller, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

Honorable Mentions: Ewan McGregor, The Impossible; Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook

Alright, alright, alright! 2012 may be remembered as the year Matthew McConaughey stopped being a joke and started being a real actor. He turned in solid work in Bernie and Killer Joe, but he also brought a level of professionalism to the rowdy crew in Magic Mike, showing up lookers like Channing Tatum, Matthew Bomer, and Alex Pettyfer. It’s like he’s saying, “See, boys, this is how you do it for two decades and counting.” If taking your clothes off works for the girls, isn’t it about time it won the boys an Oscar nod, too?

Next to Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne was Les Miserables‘ other saving grace. The movie felt like amateur night at the Broadway movie-musical karaoke bar, but Redmayne was one of few who could sing and act simultaneously. If there were more justice in the world, he’d have an Oscar nod to match Hathaway’s.

A not-so-unheralded actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, towered in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a movie I expected to enjoy more than I did. But that’s because I couldn’t get into Joaquin Phoenix’s character, while Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd was just about everything you could want from a master. I mean, he screams “Pig fuck!” at a stranger, which for me, personally, is the most quotable line of the year.

And though he’s made a career out of parodying his former glory of late, Robert De Niro does good work in a comeback to actually acting as the OCD father who can only express himself through sports. There are a number of slyly funny moments, as when he shows his son his lucky handkerchief in such a manner that you know he’s trying to avoid the inevitable discussion about how a handkerchief could possibly help a football team win.

Ezra Miller, meanwhile, is the scene-stealer in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, which is one part ordinary high school movie, one part extraordinary high school movie. The best bits of it tend to feature Miller as the jolly outcast, the sort of gay character we need to see more of. (And less of the bitchy gay friend, please.) The movie would be almost nothing without him.

In the Honorable Mention category, let’s have a shout-out for Ewan McGregor, who has less screen time than Naomi in The Impossible but acts the shit out of one scene, and yes, the lovable grump Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, the kind of role that would have won basically anyone who played him an Oscar. Better thank your agent, TLJ.

BEST DIRECTOR

Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
Juan Antonio Bayona, The Impossible
Rian Johnson, Looper
Leos Carax, Holy Motors
Tom Tykwer, Andy & Lana Wachowski, Cloud Atlas

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard, The Cabin In The Woods
Rian Johnson, Looper
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
Sergio G. Sánchez, The Impossible

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Tony Kushner, Lincoln
Kay Cannon, Pitch Perfect
Eskil Vogt & Joachim Trier, Oslo, August 31st
Jacques Audiard & Thomas Bidegain, Rust And Bone

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil, Cloud Atlas
Alexandre Desplat, Zero Dark Thirty
Nathan Johnson, Looper

ALL 2012 RANKINGS

1. Zero Dark Thirty
2. The Impossible
3. Silver Linings Playbook
4. Rust And Bone
5. Magic Mike
6. Looper
7. Holy Motors
8. The Cabin In The Woods
9. Amour
10.Girl Walk // All Day
11.Pitch Perfect
12.Lincoln
13.Oslo, August 31st
14.Django Unchained
15.Cloud Atlas
16.Ruby Sparks
17.Arbitrage
18.Skyfall
19.Bernie
20.The Master
21.The Imposter
22.Your Sister’s Sister
23.The Avengers
24.Flight
25.Chronicle
26.The Grey
27.The Dark Knight Rises
28.The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
29.21 Jump Street
30.Savages
31.Compliance
32.Beasts of the Southern Wild
33.The Hunger Games
34.The Sound of My Voice
35.Klown
36.The Queen Of Versailles
37.Argo
38.Haywire
39.Les Miserables
40.The Sessions
41.Friends With Kids
42.Bachelorette
43.Safety Not Guaranteed
44.Take This Waltz
45.Sleepless Night
46.Moonrise Kingdom
47.Prometheus
48.Killer Joe
49.Life Of Pi
50.Headhunters
51.The Deep Blue Sea
52.Ted
53.American Reunion
54.The Snowtown Murders
55.Promised Land
56.Lola Versus
57.The Raid: Redemption
58.Jeff Who Lives At Home
59.The Paperboy
60.Cosmopolis
61.The Bourne Legacy
62.Mirror Mirror
63.The Loneliest Planet
64.The Amazing Spider-Man
65.Snow White And The Huntsman

As usual, the Academy Awards are poised to make some very wrong decisions this year. So as usual, I am prematurely correcting them by releasing my Top Ten of the year.

That year is 2012, of course — real film critics release such lists at the end of December or beginning of January, but since I have numerous other obligations, you get it in late February, once I’ve had a chance to catch up with nearly all eligible films.

It was, overall, a good year for cinema — not the best in recent memory, but better than the past couple of years, on the whole. Women facing great obstacles factored largely into my faves this year, and a surprising three of my picks are in French. (But no other languages — sorry, rest of the world.)

You can find my full-length review by clicking on the title of the movie. Bon appetit!

HardintheCity’s Top 10 Films of 2012:

10. GIRL WALK // ALL DAY

My #10 slot tends to be my “I recommend this, but…” spot, and this year I’m cheating even more than usual. Girl Walk // All Day is not actually a 2012 film, nor was it given a proper theatrical release. In fact, the entire thing can (and should) be watched online. (Legally!) You have no excuse not to watch it immediately.

Jacob Krupnick’s film is essentially a lengthy music video set to Girl Talk’s album All Day, which itself “borrows” music from huge artists like Rihanna and U2 and Lady Gaga. Rights? Who needs right to anything in the age of the internet? Well, nobody, as long as you’re not making any money. Anne Marsen, Dai Omiya, and John Doyle carry the movie on the spirit of their moves alone — not so much technically polished as compulsively watchable — and you never know just what’s going to happen next. I just couldn’t turn it off.

So what makes this different than any YouTube video of a flash mob? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. I can only go with my gut, in that it feels like a film rather than some silly clip that’s been put up online. It’s full-length, for one thing, and for another there’s a lot more thought put into the craft and the execution than most things you’ll find on the internet. And yet it has the same fun “let’s put it on a show!” / do-it-yourself / handmade quality as the best of what the internet has to offer. In the future, I reckon, more films will be like this, so I may as well start putting them on my Top 10 now.

And yet, if anyone still has a problem with this pick, then I will happily substitute my #11 film of the year, Pitch Perfect, a surprisingly sharp and hilarious film that also uses mash up culture to great effect. So there.

9. AMOUR

Fun! Laughter! Dancing! Joy! Those are things you will never find in a Michael Haneke movie. (Even when it’s called Funny Games.) Amour is no exception. It is, however, a departure from his more confrontational body of work that preceded this slow and steady meditation on growing old and dying. Did I mention it’s not a comedy?

Plenty of films are about love, but few tackle this end of it. Decades after riding off into the sunset together, or however it is they met, any couple that grows old together will face some version of this story. Neither Georges nor Anne is as quick or spry as they used to be; they’ve stopped looking forward, and are looking back. Then one of them suffers a stroke and becomes greatly disabled, both mentally and physically — but not completely, because that’d be too easy. Emmanuelle Riva’s astonishing performance makes us guess how much of Anne is present in every scene, and how much of her mind has wandered far, far away. For a character who can hardly move, her performance is quite physical — even when it’s just her face doing the heavy lifting.

In Amour, Haneke gets the chance to be something he almost never is — subtle — and is a better filmmaker for it. That isn’t to say he completely loses his relish for punishing the audience, but here it feels earned, because Amour is no crueler than life is. Unlike its title, Amour is merciless and not easy to cozy up to, but its power lingers long after it’s over. Like being haunted by a loved one.

8. THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

At last! 2012 was the year Joss Whedon finally emerged as a filmmaking force to be reckoned with, and yes, The Avengers was quite good — especially compared to your average superhero movie (if still not quite on par with the very best, like The Dark Knight). It had a few Whedon signature touches of banter and humor, and yet, for a full dose of what fans love about the geek auteur, there’s an even better bet — The Cabin In The Woods, which he co-wrote with former Buffy The Vampire Slayer scribe Drew Goddard. It is, of course, no straight-up slice-and-dice affair, as anyone unfamiliar with Whedon’s genre send-ups would expect from the generic title. Instead, it’s the cleverest and most meta horror movie since Kevin Williamson’s Scream. What Scream did for slasher flicks, The Cabin In The Woods does for the rest of the horror genre.

The Cabin In The Woods doesn’t work quite as well within its genre as Scream does, at functioning both as a truly scary horror piece while also making sly commentary on over-familiar tropes. The genre conventions of The Cabin In The Woods are, well, generic, but thankfully there’s a lot more going on than just that. The third act in particular is to die for, but what cuts even deeper is what the film has to say about human nature — why do we watch horror movies? What does that say about us? Why do we want to see the same types of people die, over and over and over?

This the ultimate valentine to the horror genre, which is why many critics and horror fans fell for it, but it’s to Whedon’s credit that the film doesn’t settle for just a couple of winks and nudges, but also goes for the jugular thematically. The most callous scene has a major character about to meet a gruesome end, unnoticed, as a party rages around the image on a TV monitor — a sly response to the way we, too, often feel nothing when stereotypical horror heroines meet their maker. The last scene is a winking “fuck you” to the audience, but not a mean-spirited one; to reference a very different auteur whose work is also present in this list, The Cabin In The Woods basically makes the same point Michael Haneke has made numerous times, but actually has a little fun doing so. And so do we. Is that so wrong? Well, if so, we’re likely to be punished for it…

7. HOLY MOTORS

A fitting segue from The Cabin In The Woods, Holy Motors is as much a commentary on cinema as Whedon and Goddard’s horror film — it’s just a little less blatant about what it’s trying to say. I was tempted to include the ambitious and occasionally haunting Cloud Atlas in my list, even though the film had its share of awkward misfire moments — particularly with some distracting casting choices which have actors like Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Jim Sturgess playing characters of various races, genders, and ethnicities that they really have no business embodying. A much more successful endeavor on this front is Holy Motors, featuring Denis Levant inhabiting the skin of an assortment of quirky creations — a creepy and vaguely monstrous sewer-dweller, a scuzzy assassin, a harried father, and the actor who is assigned to play all these roles in various locations throughout Paris. Essentially, it’s a series of short films tied together by a loose narrative; then again, not really.

There’s no real way to take Holy Motors at face value — trying to figure out the “plot” is a worthless endeavor, like applying real-world rules to a David Lynch movie. Holy Motors follows a dream-like logic where there are sometimes life-and-death consequences to actions, sometimes not; no two segments are alike, either in tone or in how we perceive the world that’s been created for us. It’s all artificial, and Holy Motors is pretty direct about that — but every movie is artificial, after all. Holy Motors is a bizarre meditation on the way cinema has the power to move us, manipulate us, and make us marvel even if we don’t have the faintest idea what the hell is happening. Its protagonist, a kind of actor who seems to drag the emotional weight of every role he’s ever played around with him, might be an allegory for performers, or perhaps for storytellers — Holy Motors is broad enough that you can read almost anything into it.

The film is too bizarre (and French) for many mainstream filmgoers, but for serious cineastes, it’s a treat. Leos Carax has packed it with references that almost no one seems to get, and that’s fine. The nuttier the better, in this case. The final few minutes of Holy Motors go so absurdly off the rails that it’s almost like Carax just didn’t know how to top all the craziness that came before; in the future, I’ll probably watch it like I’d watch Paris Je T’aime, returning to my favorite bits more often than the film as a whole. This little wonder contains several of the most mesmerizing and memorable moments I saw all year — an ill-fated duet with Kylie Minogue, a fashion shoot that takes an oddball turn, an abrupt musical intermission, and especially a haunting “sex” scene involving motion capture suits. They’re more satisfying individually than the film is as a whole, and I can’t wait to rewatch them.

6. LOOPER

Science fiction tends to imagine brave new worlds that say something about the here and now — at least, they should. But most of Hollywood’s recent sci-fi offerings give us predictable story beats and zero food for thought. Looper is different — not because its premise is so much more original than, say, the hokey Justin Timberlake vehicle In Time, but because it was clearly made without any adherence to formula or genre conventions. Here is the rare movie that doesn’t feel like it’s on autopilot; rather, it unfolds in ways that are truly surprising and feel wholly organic to these characters and this world.

For a futuristic story, Looper spends an awful lot of time on a rustic Kansas farm. And for all its big ideas, what it really boils down to is surprisingly intimate and small-scale — a mother’s love. A lot of care was taken to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis, which I’m not sure was necessary — Gordon-Levitt’s performance alone sells it. Looper has several visual moments that catch the audience off guard, but it’s more notable for the emotional undercurrent that gives it a real pulse. It’s like a Sundance movie dressed up in Hollywood clothes; that low-budget indie that just so happens to take place in a dystopian future — more specifically, a dystopian future that doesn’t feel so far removed from our not-so-utopian present.

Time travel doesn’t often make sense in movies, and if you think about it too hard, perhaps Looper doesn’t either. But what it does have is a sense of originality and innovation absent in the works of all other filmmakers — hints of Kubrick and Tarantino, amongst others. If we could time-travel to the future, I bet we’d see that writer/director Rian Johnson is a filmmaking force to be reckoned with.

5. MAGIC MIKE

Take away the stripping — I know, no one wants that, but just go with it for a sec — and Magic Mike is a sobering look at the youth of America, the ones that don’t follow the straight-and-narrow path of a higher education followed by 9-to-5 mediocrity. You don’t need to take your clothes off for a living to relate to that.

Now put the stripping back in, and you have a rollicking good time that is also smarter than any film based on Channing Tatum’s life should be. Steven Soderbergh doesn’t shy away from the sex appeal that drove women and gays in droves to see Magic Mike opening weekend; the stripping sequences are great fun to watch, thanks in large part to the surprising skill and charisma of Channing Tatum. I’ll admit, I wrote him off long ago, but in 2012 he proved himself a talented performer, so I’m delighted to be wrong. He is, in fact, actually quite good here as the stripper with a heart of gold — a role that, with weaker writing and acting, could have been truly wince-worthy. (The whole ensemble is pretty solid, especially a standout Matthew McConaughey, who neatly parodies his real-life status as Hollywood’s resident ladykiller.)

To the surprise of many, Magic Mike is a bit of a tragedy — about creative people who are victims of an economic downturn, and about what happens to people who pay the bills with their body. It doesn’t dig as deep as Black Swan or The Wrestler on that subject, and for some, perhaps, the more dramatic elements of the story felt a bit inert. They came for a rain of men, not a storm of drama. But, fittingly for a movie about stripping, Magic Mike is all about money — the side jobs these guys perform to stay afloat, the price of living it up in your twenties. “I’m not my lifestyle!” Mike says in self-defense to his love interest, but of course, we all are — and all the sexy boys of Magic Mike become victims of their lifestyle one way or another, whether it’s drugs or debt or plain ol’ narcissism. Mike’s just the only who’s starting to realize it.

Magic Mike takes place in Tampa — what better place to explore the underbelly of the American dream? Isn’t that dream as much of a striptease as a lap dance from a guy in a G-string? Stripping might be harmless, but it’s a gateway drug to browner pastures, and respectable people don’t look on it kindly. Dallas, Mike, and the rest are ultimately disposable — one-night-only fantasies for women at bachelorette party or on their birthdays. They’re dressed up as firemen, cowboys, police… all those generic fantasies. Sex is a powerful and lucrative commodity — the good girl played by Cody Horn is both tempted and repelled by Mike, speaking to the conflicting sexual interests within us. For the audience, a night with Magic Mike is just a horny splurge, and indulgence, but for them, it’s life. Magic Mike gets us hot and bothered and all worked up, then pulls back the curtain and shows us what happens when these fantasy figures go home after a hard night’s work, or age a decade or two. What happens when the singles stop coming?

4. RUST AND BONE

Attraction doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes you fall for a movie the same way you fall for a person — you just happen to find each other in the right time and place, and something unplanned happens. That’s what happened to me with Rust And Bone, a film I wasn’t expecting much of and saw primarily because Marion Cotillard was getting solid awards season buzz for her performance. I knew very little about what I was getting into, and that ended up being a good thing.

Rust And Bone is by far the sexiest movie about a woman whose legs get eaten off by an orca. The special effect of excising Cotillard’s lower limbs are shockingly convincing, as is her performance — it’s a shame the Oscars couldn’t make room for her, though it was a particularly strong year for Best Actress candidates. Matthis Schoenaerts is equally strong as the film’s protagonist, a rather obtuse security guard and underground fighter who never seems to foresee the consequences of his actions. If Rust And Bone is a romance at all — I wouldn’t call it one, exactly — then it’s a very adult one, with two characters who behave like flesh-and-blood 21st century people rather than cliches operating according to a script. The film has no singular plot, but meanders pleasantly as we get to know these two characters without a clear sense of where they’re going. The film’s climax was a true surprise, but then, the whole movie was.

There’s not one thing I can easily point to that’s brilliant in Rust And Bone; you either fall for it or you don’t, and I doubt any further analysis would change anyone’s mind about it. It’s about chemistry. On paper, the synopsis sounds pretty maudlin. But Jacques Audiard makes it all so plausible and lived-in that I found myself totally falling for it, which happens sometimes. Attraction doesn’t always make sense.

3. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

Speaking of movies that don’t work so well on paper… Silver Linings Playbook constantly flirts with being ordinary, and yet somehow narrowly misses it at every turn. It’s the first film to receive acting nominations in all four categories in ages, and they’re all deserved — the marvelous Jacki Weaver may be slightly underused, but even the minor characters have their own lives happening in the margins. They don’t feel merely functional.

That’s particularly true of the standout leads, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Cooper unleashes a leading man charm he must’ve been saving for the right movie, while Lawrence is a live wire who feels like she could wander into any movie and be the best thing in it. They’re both compulsively watchable, and when they come together it’s like two trains constantly threatening to wreck, consistently missing each other by inches.

Silver Linings Playbook has a wonderful energy. It’s always marching forward, never stopping on one detail long enough for us to catch up and get bored waiting for the next beat. David O. Russell’s script is sharp and nimble, his direction maybe even a little moreso, but it’s the chemistry of the ensemble that feels just right. (The original plan was to make it with Vince Vaughn and Zooey Deschanel in the lead roles — I shudder to think.) I wouldn’t call Silver Linings Playbook a monumental film or even a must-see; it’s probably a bit too slight to take Best Picture, even with all of Harvey Weinstein’s might on its side. Yet it’s also nice to see a lighter movie made as well as all those heavy ones; if only all comedies had this much skill behind and in front of the camera.

2. THE IMPOSSIBLE

The Impossible is not a film for the cynical. It wears its heart on its sleeve, and in a Spielbergian way, cares more about hope than it does about darkness and depravity. Yet, also like Spielberg, director Juan Antonio Bayona isn’t afraid to immerse us in chaos and confusion when need be, and it’s a visual spectacle on par with some of Spielberg’s most breathless sequences, like War Of The Worlds’ initial alien attack or the Omaha Beach opening of Saving Private Ryan.

Naomi Watts cements her status as one of Hollywood’s most fearless actresses as she is twisted and turned and slammed by a giant tsunami, an electrifying sequence that outdoes pretty much any disaster movie sequence that came before it (rivaled only by Titanic, perhaps). The fact that was done practically on a budget of $45 million or so is mind-blowing. That’s not Naomi against a green screen, and you can tell.

After a hard-hitting opening, the film follows two surviving members of the happy family literally ripped apart — we don’t know whether or not the rest have survived until much later — and it isn’t afraid to get sentimental. Nor is it afraid to get reasonably dark, as when an adolescent boy advises his mother that they leave behind a crying child because he might slow them down. It faces the stark realities of an unimaginably catastrophic situation, with excellent performances all around (Naomi, Tom Holland, and Ewan McGregor). What’s truly remarkable, though, is the way Bayona stages that fucking tsunami — definitely the most breathless sequence I’ve experienced in a movie in years. It’s a shame this film didn’t quite break out the way it should have — with a stronger marketing push, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it win Best Picture. Perhaps my #2 slot is a fitting consolation prize?

1. ZERO DARK THIRTY

In my original review, I predicted Zero Dark Thirty for Best Picture and Kathryn Bigelow making history as the only woman to ever win Best Director twice.

Oops. Back then, I didn’t anticipate the weird backlash the film received regarding its depiction of torture, and it has taken me a long time to come to terms with why the film hasn’t been embraced as it probably should be; especially in a year that features a film so similar in many (superficial) ways as a Best Picture front-runner. Homeland, after all, has been handed just about every conceivable television award this past year, and yet it depicts far more torture than Zero Dark Thirty even hints at. (Rumor has it both edgy female protagonists are based on the same real-life CIA agent.) Why is Zero Dark Thirty held up to such a hypocritical, impossible standard of veracity, when Argo literally invents its entire third act? (Oh, don’t answer that, I already know why.)

Apparently, the film about the manhunt for Osama bin Laden is a controversial one. Who knew? Perhaps I (and Sony) should have anticipated more unease from the general public. Great and important films aren’t always recognized right away, after all, and the topics explored by Zero Dark Thirty are still fresh. (Meanwhile, everyone’s had time to get over a hostage situation from the 70′s.) Maybe I was more prepared to confront them. For me, Zero Dark Thirty is one of the few definitive films of this century so far, in large part because it deals with the most defining event of it.

Jessica Chastain’s Maya is a fascinating portrait of obsession. She’s a perfectionist. The fact that she’s a woman makes this a little more interesting, but ultimately doesn’t matter. Some have said they didn’t understand Maya’s motivation enough, but that’s ludicrous. Her motivation is 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our history — and a very recent one. We didn’t need to lose someone personally in New York that day to feel the effects, despair and fear and an overwhelming vulnerability. Neither did Maya. She would have already been working for the CIA at that point (we’re told she was recruited out of high school), so it is literally her job to answer the questions all of America is asking. Why wouldn’t she do her job to the best of her ability? What could possibly be a stronger motivation than the deaths of thousands of innocent people?

Some may have wanted Osama bin Laden dead out of vengeance; others might just feel safer knowing he’s not in the world. Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty script is smart enough to to not tell us what exactly Maya wants. By keeping her backstory almost nonexistent, she becomes a stand-in for all of us, seeking answers or retribution or catharsis and some kind of closure. And does she get them? Well… did we?

Clearly I was wrong about Kathryn Bigelow’s lock on Best Director — that snub is just a shame. This is clearly her best work. It’s a near-flawless film on every level. I was also almost certainly wrong about Zero Dark Thirty winning Best Picture, but perhaps it’s just too important a film to take home such a populist prize. The fact that it’s stirred so much debate is only a testament to its quality, but controversy doesn’t win awards. At least, not Oscars.

Argo is bullshit. It’s fine if you like bullshit, just know that that’s what it is. It’s a slick thriller that, I guess, is “prestigious” enough for the Academy because it takes place in Iran? It’s really just Speed in a turban. Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, is actually about something — some of the most significant events of the past dozen years. It portrays these things not only tensely and entertainingly, but honestly and accurately. But to borrow a phrase from another movie: “You can’t handle the truth!” A lot of people can’t, apparently.

But I can.

*

I figured I’d be writing something about the Oscars today, as I normally would do a few days before the big show, but since I have been covering them since the nominees were announced anyway — and particularly heavily this week — I have almost nothing left to say. (Plus, I’m still in denial about a few of the big winners.)

So let’s talk about TV. TV? Well, it’s sort of TV. Now movies are being released on VOD, meaning you watch them on television. And Netflix released House Of Cards Season One in its entirety all at once, like a movie. So what’s the difference between movies and TV anymore? Is there one? Or is House Of Cards just one long-ass movie?

Either way, Netflix’s sizable investment in this original program has clearly paid off, at least buzz-wise. House Of Cards is the first high-profile show to dump an entire season on us all at once, and also to bypass what we currently think of as “TV” completely. It’s a big deal… and yet, not, because anybody who is remotely forward-thinking has already realized that our current mode of television consumption is going the way of the dinosaur. (Extinct… and then resurrected eons later on a remote island somewhere near Costa Rica.) I say good riddance to TV in its current incarnation — 95% of these channels are clogged with reality junk I’d never dream of watching, like Real Housewives Who Hate The Color Of Their Toilet and Amish People Doing Handstands In Berlin. And yet, I’m paying for practically all of these channels, because I want to watch… let’s see, about three shows… on two channels. Someday, we should be able to just pay for the channels we want, as I do for HBO, which gives me Girls, Game Of Thrones, Veep, The Newsroom, and Enlightened, plus an occasional movie. Very bang-for-buck-worthy. The rest of cable gives me Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and… wait, why do I pay for cable? Note to self: look into that.

Cable providers are still, for the time being, hell-bent on screwing us into paying for masses of content we don’t want or need; meanwhile, we the consumers anxiously await their demise. Enter Netflix. Netflix has made a few missteps in the past, like when they tried to separate their streaming and DVD service into different companies and then said, “Just kidding!” when everyone predictably hated that idea. (I also find their website rather dysfunctional… but that’s another topic.) I’m willing to forgive these transgressions in light of Netflix’s current forward-thinking tactics, which bypass a lot of unnecessary pains we normally have to deal with (cable subscription, repetitive advertisements, pop-ups) on conventional television and give us just what we want: everything, right now, easily.

Netflix could have raised their overall subscription rates. ($7.99 isn’t too shabby.) They could have asked subscribers to pay an extra premium for original content. Or forced some kind of advertising. It’s possible they will in the future, but for now, House Of Cards comes just as conveniently as any other show streaming on Netflix, and TV junkies are binging on it. A number of people have already finished the show, which debuted February 1, with all 13 “chapters” available simultaneously. It would’ve been a smarter business model to roll them out more gradually, I think, maybe 2-3 per week, to allow people to hunger for it and necessitate a longer subscription to complete the series. But whatever.

House Of Cards is the rare show that is more notable for how its being distributed than it is for the actual content. It has the buzz and prestige of an HBO or AMC series, but in quality and execution feels more like it belongs on FX. Which is fine. House Of Cards is glossy, soapy, compelling, and, ultimately, rather empty… from what I gather based on the first three episodes, at least. (I’m less a binge-watcher than many of my peers… out of time constraints, if nothing else.) It’s a political show on the one hand, since it takes place in Washington D.C. and concerns a congressman who gets screwed out of his rightful position as secretary of state by the president elect. But it also could care less about politics. The setting is merely a juicy hook, one that hasn’t been overdone on TV the way hospitals and law firms have. It’s supposed to feel a little transgressive, that a “respectable” congressman might secretly be fucking with everybody. Rather than display his outrage, our protagonist does the more politically savvy thing and plays nice, while secretly undermining the new president and his allies and pulling strings to make sure Washington plays by his rules, whether they know it or not. It’s sort of an exaggeration of the way the political world actually works; I doubt many politicians take such devilish delight in pulling strings, or do it so knowingly, yet I imagine the results are the same.

It’s a fun premise, because bad (or at least, somewhat naughty) characters tend to be more satisfying than goody-goodies — and, after all, House Of Cards is modeling itself after Breaking Bad, Mad Men, going all the way back to the grandaddy of premium cable antiheroes, Tony Soprano. Kevin Spacey seems to be having some degree of fun playing Francis Underwood… at times, a little too much fun, perhaps, since his Southern accent wavers between “nonexistent” and “high school production of a Tennessee Williams play.” Not helping: his character’s penchant for breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to camera, which lends it a jokey theatrical quality I’m not sure is in the show’s best interest. (This gimmick almost never works on TV… which is why Sex & The City wisely jettisoned it in Season Two, and became an infinitely better program for it.) The dialogue, too, feels well-suited for a play, though that works for the aesthetic House Of Cards aims for — decadent, conspiratorial, and larger-than-life. The performance simultaneously reminiscent of Spacey’s roles in The Usual Suspects (the wheeler-dealer), American Beauty (upper-crust husband who could stand to be in better shape), and Margin Call (maybe only because he suffocates an invisible dog in the series’ very first scene… never mind about that).

Robin Wright plays his Lady Macbeth of a wife, a compelling and unusual character who always seems to be up to something, even if we have no proof that this is the case. She sure can be ruthless when the situation calls for it, and yet it’s never clear just what agenda she’s pushing. (That’s not a bad thing, but an intriguing one.) If I had to give one performer in House Of Cards a gold star and a cookie, it’d be Robin Wright.

One interesting sidenote here, though — though she is fiercely loyal, their relationship is apparently sexless, and Underwood displays no real attraction to women at all. Is this foreshadowing? Merely an oversight by the writers? Or somehow a result of Spacey’s homosexuality? I’m sure one way or another this is resolved in future Season One episodes, since traditional TV logic would suggest more flirtation between Underwood and the cute young reporter he befriends, but so far he shows a curious lack of temptation. Given how unsubtle most of the rest of House Of Cards is, I have a hard time believing I’m being teased and assume it’s just a weird omission.

I’m also a fan of Kate Mara — I have been for awhile, long before her sister Rooney popped up on the radar. (This pilot is directed by David Fincher, the man who essentially put Rooney on the map, which I doubt is a coincidence.) She is given the relatively thankless role of Zoe Barnes, the eager-beaver reporter who wants to start a politico gossip blog (oy!), which starts her character as a pesky cliche. (Trying to include blog culture in TV and movies seldom works, and will immediately date it.) Luckily, the series has a few more interesting ideas in mind for her. She forms an (unlikely) alliance with Underwood and soon becomes the hot-shot she’s always wanted to be, earning both admiration and scorn from her superiors and rendering her pretty cocky. Like most characters, it’s still pretty unclear where exactly her morals lie, but the newspaper scenes are fun even if we’ve seen such scenes dozens of times before. Both politics and journalism play out in the most “TV” way possible in House Of Cards, but I doubt it ever yearned for documentary realism.

House Of Cards is like The West Wing‘s sourpuss cousin, cynical where Aaron Sorkin was idealistic and patriotic. It may even be a smidge more realistic; it’s absolutely more formulaic. It feels borne out of a pitch meeting rather than the mind of any individual. The characters, thus far, are wholly one dimensional, and though they sometimes behave badly, it’s a pretty “safe” kind of bad; it’s basic cable mischief rather than HBO-level depravity. Netflix clearly doesn’t want to alienate viewers who might find more controversial hijinks off-putting. House Of Cards always feels like it’s playing it safe, checking all the right boxes — and it doesn’t take any risks. Its very inception feels almost… well, political.

Perhaps the most crucial mistake — for me, anyway — is that although Underwood gets slighted at the beginning of the series, we the audience never particularly feel it. We don’t particularly care whether he’s secretary of state or not, so his quest for revenge feels hollow. We get precious little sense of who he was before House Of Cards‘ opening — was he a good guy? A bad guy? Has he always had it in for his fellow politicians, or was this the moment that changed? Three episodes in and I’m not that invested in what happens to him, or to anyone. House Of Cards is much ado about nothing — we see a lot of work done on an education bill, on Mrs. Underwood’s clean water charity, on the ousting of one secretary of state and the nomination of another. But to what end? The audience isn’t given enough information or emotional involvement to form an opinion on any of these things. They just happen, and we’re neutral all the while.

Of course, House Of Cards was designed that way — to go down as easily as possible, to turn off the least amount of viewers. To be binge-watched. Mission accomplished. I suspect that the fact that it could be consumed all at once has led some to overpraise it; what’s better than one great episode of television? How about thirteen pretty good ones? I quite enjoyed the pilot (even if Fincher’s direction was surprisingly just serviceable), was marginally less keen on the following episode, and dug the third. I could easily watch more, and probably will. But if this aired week to week on FX, would people go so crazy for it? So far, House Of Cards is nowhere near the caliber of the very best cable offerings — which, granted, is a very high bar. All its boldness is in the way it’s been packaged, rather than in the show itself.

Any criticism I have of House Of Cards might go out the window depending on where the show is going, though, which is exactly what makes Netflix’s release strategy frustrating for anyone trying to review it. You wouldn’t turn off a movie a quarter of the way through and sit down to write a full response; TV, as we know it, is meant to be digested in segments and discussed on the same timeline as everyone else who’s watching. This distribution model makes it hard to talk about House Of Cards until you’ve seen the whole damn thing, and if you wait too long to do so no one will care anymore. So get it while it’s hot!

See, now here I am again talking about the way we’re watching House Of Cards rather than the content. In that respect, I can’t help but feel that Netflix’s Machiavellian machinations are even trickier than anything we’ve seen from Francis Underwood, trying to beat TV at its own game by changing all the rules. For good? For evil? Or just for fun? As with Underwood, it’s probably that last one.

But fun it is. I’ll give House Of Cards that. It’s the best TV show that’s never been on TV.

On the one hand, the man has achieved his share of success. He won an Oscar for Traffic, he helmed the commercially successful Ocean’s Eleven trilogy, and several of his earlier works are adored by critics — Out Of Sight perhaps most of all. The man consistently puts out solid product, with only a couple of titles that have been adject artistic failures. (Ocean’s Twelve was particularly dismal.) Yet it seems we take him for granted. Maybe that’s because his movies tend to be more like genre exercises than passion projects; he executes them so expertly, and yet we rarely (if ever) feel his beating heart behind the story and characters. He always seems a tad removed from the films he’s made, whether or not that is actually the case.

Despite the wide variation of his work, from kinky little experiments like The Girlfriend Experience to crowd-pleasers like Erin Brockovich, he is perhaps Hollywood’s most consistent filmmaker, even though he never stays in the same genre for long. He’s threatened to retire from the industry, something it seems only a filmmaker like Soderbergh could do, because he comes across as colder than most directors. He doesn’t have the same whims or flights of fancy that make other filmmakers’ works both more flawed and easier to engage with; in a sense, he hardly seems human.

That’s a pretty harsh criticism, I know, and so let me clarify that I’m in no way speaking about Soderbergh the person — merely what comes across through his films. If every auteur’s body of work is, in some ways, a glimpse into his soul, then Soderbergh’s remains a bit of a mystery. He’s an experimenter, a chameleon… but who is he, really?

Side Effects won’t answer that question. It’s a slick genre exercise in the same way that Haywire and Contagion were, but it’s probably more successful than either of those in satisfying the genre’s requirements. Soderbergh isn’t as playful here as he has been in the past, though that isn’t to say that he’s phoning it in. Most directors seem to lose themselves when saddled with a genre project, but Soderbergh only uses every genre to do what he always does, and do it well. Rather than be weakened by tropes, Soderbergh seems to love working within new limits; he uses them to go exploring.

The less said about the plot, the better. Side Effects reunites Soderbergh with several actors he’s worked with before (including Magic Mike himself, Channing Tatum), and one new one — Rooney Mara, a pretty major star for a woman who’s had only one starring role in a notable movie. That movie was, of course, her Oscar-nominated turn in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, in which she so disappeared into the role of Lisbeth Salander that Side Effects serves as a nice introduction to what she’s like when she’s playing a normal person. (Maybe.)

The film begins with Emily visiting her husband Martin in prison. He’s served four years for insider trading, and now he’s about to come home. Naturally, Emily’s feeling a little anxious about the transition; she decides to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). He consults a former shrink of hers, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, with some questions.

That’s about all I’ve giving you, because in a neat change of pace, few of Side Effects‘ surprises are given away in the trailer. Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns pulls a nifty trick in shifting our focus from one protagonist to another, which we hardly notice as its happening. Side Effects avoids going down a few well-worn paths, raising questions about pharmaceuticals without feeling the need to completely demonize those who make them. It’s a refreshingly intimate study of a handful of characters, rather than vague, heartless corporate-types who are so popular as villains these days. There’s something nice and Hitchcockian about the relatively small cast of characters Side Effects focuses on, and its modest ambitions. It isn’t trying to do be much more than an intelligent and enthralling thriller, and that it is.

Why Side Effects feel like such a rare thing, then? How can we be so certain that this script would have been botched in the hands of most other working directors? Soderbergh is one few filmmakers capable of delivering a solid genre movie who still cares to. He seems right in his element, even though he’s never made a movie like this. It feels as if the man rarely gets his due. Soderbergh is admired, to be sure, but might be a more valuable filmmaker than we’ve given him credit for lately. With Contagion, Haywire, Magic Mike, and now Side Effects, it feels like he’s moved into a new phase of his career, delivering movies that adhere to certain genre conventions and buck others — mostly, by being better than we’ve come to expect from such films.

Side Effects isn’t a game-changing movie by any means. It doesn’t do anything groundbreaking, except maybe not suck. But is there anyone else in Hollywood delivering this kind of entertainment this consistently? Is anyone better at assembling a truly A-grade cast? After quite a few years on the sidelines, this film reestablishes Jude Law as a charismatic leading man and proves Mara’s Oscar nod was no fluke. If only there was a pill we could give Soderbergh to convince him that this shouldn’t be his final theatrical release.

*

For most, it’s probably nowhere near the top of the list. Intelligence, looks, hygiene, values, spirituality… there are a whole lot of other compatibilities that take priority.

But not for me! I have a cinematic agenda. I don’t often watch a movie just to, you know, unwind. A lot of people put in a DVD to stop thinking, but that’s when I start. I can’t help it. I was a film major, and that means movies on dates is serious business. It’s like taking a lawyer to court on a first date and asking them to not have an opinion. Or inviting someone who went to med school to an open-heart surgery. Think that will be relaxing?

It takes a little more than the average film to entertain me. There are so many good films out there that I hate to waste time watching the mediocre ones. And inevitably, that’s what I end up having to watch on a date more often than not. I can fully understand why someone wouldn’t want to be emotionally devastated by a film like Melancholia or Amour after a first date… believe me, I am well aware that Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke are NOT your first date friends. (On a second date? Maybe.) The thing is, I find a well-made but downbeat independent film a lot less depressing than some phony cash grab with a script that seems to have been rescued from a burning building, and they decided to just guess what might have been on those charred pages. December is the worst, because I’m far too busy seeing every possible Oscar hopeful to even consider seeing a movie that won’t be nominated. I go into a frenzy. If you aren’t seeing Lincoln or Django Unchained or The Impossible or The Sessions with me, you aren’t seeing me at all.

I mean, I get it. Relationships are give and take, and I can’t always be in charge. (Except, you know… in certain places.) I’ve certainly sacrificed my cinematic preferences on numerous occasions, like the time I saw Prometheus for the second time because my date wouldn’t go to Ruby Sparks. Or that time I agreed to watch 27 Dresses on the guarantee: “I promise, it’s really cute!” (Promise broken.) Or that shameful moment when I actually saw the fourth Fast & Furious movie in theaters, surrounded by people who were actually enjoying themselves. There are a few me-approved titles that tend to work for both me and the general public, but you can only watch The Devil Wears Prada or Bridesmaids on so many dates before it’s time to put in Zodiac. (It is admittedly problematic that all my faves tend to be an hour-plus longer than all yours.)

It always helps when people let me decide what we’ll see. I am, after all, a professional. (Sort of.) I try and work within people’s tastes, and I know a lot of people who trust my judgment and know that I’ll never take them to anything too challenging. This is smart. Because if I was dating a food critic, I’d probably let them choose the restaurant every time. I wouldn’t refuse to eat unless we went to McDonald’s every time, because of course, McDonald’s is more “fun.” My last ex dutifully watched the Korean thriller Mother, eventual Oscar-winner The King’s Speech, and the depressorama Blue Valentine with me. (A lot of people enjoy being attached during the winter for warmth. Luckily, this coincides with awards season.) And I did end up watching Ruby Sparks on a date when it hit DVD after all, and he liked it. So take that, person who wouldn’t go with me! (Granted, after that I made this person watch The Loneliest Planet, an interminable film that even I could barely sit through. He fell asleep twenty minutes in, and we agreed to end things amicably.)

I don’t know about anyone else, but I look back on relationships largely by what forms of entertainment we consumed together. There was that relationship that involved a lot of driving to Pasadena to catch the few Oscar-nominated films I missed, and the one where all we did was watch my newly-purchased complete set of Sex & The City DVDs. (It ended when we ran out of good episodes.) In my experience, relationships are primarily about eating and sex and watching movies, and so cinematic compatibility is a hugely important factor. I don’t think this is as much a problem for most, whose tastes run more general and mainstream. But I need a man who will, on occasion, at my request, watch a movie that is independent, or foreign, or black-and-white. Sometimes, all three. A lot of these movies are probably downers, but at least they prompt a lively debate. To date me, you must be willing to be occasionally emotionally obliterated… and well, frankly, that’s going to happen regardless of whether or not we’re watching a movie.

I recently went on a date with someone who said he preferred Argo to Zero Dark Thirty, and I wanted to walk out right there. I had to fight it, because for me, bad taste in film is the ultimate dealbreaker. Well, it’s right up there with halitosis and snoring. I asked, “Why?” and he laid out some halfway-legitimate reasons why he preferred Argo, and it turned out that we just had very opposite points of view on the film. He found the artificial third act of Argo really suspenseful, but was less than riveted by the real-life manhunt for Osama at the end of 0D30. And I realized that just because he experienced the movies differently than I did doesn’t mean he’s wrong about them. It’s just that I’m a little more right. And knowing that, I was able to put aside my very strong feelings about this issue and continue the date. (It helped that I was drinking.)

Worse, though, is another recent one, where Zero Dark Thirty was the culprit yet again. “I don’t want to see that,” he grumbled. “I don’t want to have to think.”

We watched Heartbreakers. My heart, however, had already broken a little.

That’s what sucks about entertainment being your business. You can’t turn it off. I’m going to notice bad writing regardless of whether I’m reviewing a movie or simply trying to get laid. And there’s nothing less sexy than forced dialogue or predictable story beats. In school, I was trained to notice these things, to find ways around them in my own writing… but never trained on how not to. So while most people won’t necessarily notice how lame their favorite movies are, I do. And that’s roughly 90 minutes where I have to wrestle with keeping my mouth shut. There’s nothing more terrifying than entering someone’s room for the first time and seeing a DVD shelf lined with nothing but Bride Wars, The Ugly Truth, and The Back-Up Plan, and then being told I get to “pick.” It’s a reverse Sophie’s Choice, like I’m choosing between chlamydia or gonorrhea.

On a first date, I’m usually willing to concede. Yeah, I’ll watch Georgia Rule… and I have, multiple times. Oh, the things I’ve done for love. But eventually, you’ll have to make sacrifices just as I have, because for better or worse, film is a huge part of my life and I’ll want to share it with you. You might learn something, you might feel something, or you might be bored to tears. It’s a gamble! But I guess that’s true on any date.

And, when you want to take me to a bad romantic comedy or another Fast & Furious, you are paying. Not just for the movie, but also, let’s say, $20 an hour. Because sitting through that is work.

Given the above, you should not be surprised to learn on this Valentine’s Day that I am still single. Now, and almost always. And while there are a variety of factors that have led to this, it’s quite possible that the greatest is cinematic compatibility. Tonight I may reengage with my Valentine’s tradition of drinking a bottle of champagne (Veuve!) and watching Casablanca by myself, possibly accompanied by some Red Velvet ice cream and a heart-shaped pastry of some kind. I don’t mind. I rather enjoy the life of a bachelor, cinematically, because I get to spend it with the one thing I desire above all else: a man with excellent taste in movies.

And I will. At least until I figure out that all the way up to the fifth date or so, we should probably just stick to dinner.

*

Django Unchained is no different. In fact, it’s hardly a departure for Tarantino, but rather nestled right at home between the nods toward blaxploitation of early works like Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, the genre mish-mash of the Kill Bill movies, and the revisionist history of Ingloruious Basterds. It’s maybe the most Tarantino movie of them all.

In many ways, Django Unchained is brilliant. Tarantino’s use of anachronistic music feels more pointed; there’s a thesis here. I never really bought into Inglorious Basterds as a revenge fantasy, but rather as a gimmick; after all, what connection does Tarantino really have to Jewish culture? But now he’s taken on something that, I feel, is closer to his heart, for African-American characters have been prominent in nearly all of his movies. Unlike Basterds (which, I’ll admit, I need to watch again, having only seen it once), Django Unchained makes a clear, concise statement. (Which is not to say that the movie itself is so concise.)

Jamie Foxx stars as Django, who plays second fiddle to Christoph Waltz’s bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz for the majority of the movie. Django is a slave who gets his freedom, but not really. Tarantino isn’t interested in exploring slaves as they actually were, but rather slaves as archetypes (that’s where Samuel L. Jackson comes in as the Uncle Tom-like Stephen). So Django never behaves like a freed slave really would, but rather, as a pissed-off modern man sent back in time to exact his revenge. And that’s fine. At no point in this or any other Tarantino movie do we ever feel absorbed enough in this world to forget that we’re watching a Tarantino movie.

There is something quite pleasurable about seeing him dressed up atop a horse while hip hop plays on the soundtrack, though; it’s a striking reminder of where American hip hip originated, as if history has just collapsed in on itself like an accordion, excising 150 years in the process. It took a long time to get us here, but in this moment, Tarantino shows us exactly where today’s black culture came from. There’s not much difference between Django, with his flashy clothes, his pride, and his fancy ride (a horse) and, say, Kanye West. That’s a bold statement, maybe as bold a statement as Tarantino has ever made.

Like most Tarantino films, Django Unchained is comprised of pleasurable detour scenes, each with their own ebb and flow. A showdown with a sheriff outside an Old West Bar; a gathering of a comedic Ku Klux Klan, debating over the eye-holes in their hoods; the unusual notion of a German-speaking slave named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, playing Django’s honey). In its more charming moments, Django Unchained is truly sublime, thanks mostly to Waltz and a perfectly delightful Leonardo DiCaprio as plantation owner Calvin Candie. (He’s basically taking on the Waltz Basterds role as a villain who is both despicable and genial.) To balance it out, there are a few moments of striking brutality to remind us that this is, in fact, the pre-Civil War American South, and slavery is a heinous business. That means a bloody mandingo fight and another scene in which a slave is ripped apart by dogs. These aren’t moments of “fun” Tarantino violence; it’s real violence.

But here’s where I think Tarantino slips when it comes to making a true masterpiece — he does go for over-the-top Tarantino violence in a couple of climactic sequences, and the tone just doesn’t quite mesh right with what’s come before. Sure, you go into a Tarantino film expecting a certain amount of excess; woe is anyone who wants to take him too seriously. But is it wrong to wish that, this time, he’d shown the smallest modicum of restraint? Django Unchained‘s more cartoonishly violent scenes leave something to be desired — they’re not particularly well-staged, nor are they very suspenseful — and, oddly, both take place in the same location (a rather unimaginative choice). I’m sure Tarantino has his movie geek reasons for why these scenes “need” to be as ultraviolent as they were, but there are many ways in which Django Unchained hints that he might have matured as a filmmaker… until Django’s crazy, bloody showdown with a lot of nameless, faceless white dudes we know nothing about, except that they’re the “bad guys.” It’s fairly juvenile.

On the one hand, Django Unchained is brilliant, making a searing statement about racial politics in America. It rubs our faces in some of our ugliest history, daring us to flinch. It imagines a revenge scenario most moviegoers are probably too suppressed to even know they wanted, until Tarantino delivered on a cinematic silver platter. And we have to ask questions about whether or not we like this, and why or why not.

And on the other hand, it’s just another Tarantino movie, not all that different from the ones before. It’s a curious blend of spaghetti Western and fairy tale, where the “white knight” is actually a black slave come to rescue his “princess.” In the end, that’s effective, but I can’t help but feel like Tarantino didn’t trust his fans enough to truly surprise us, to deliver more (or perhaps less, in this case) than we knew we’d be getting. Must every film Tarantino makes be a “Tarantino Movie”? Will he ever not give in to his basest desires? Here, the story works so well on its own — the characters, the tension, the comedy, the story — that it almost feels like Tarantino’s a (ahem) slave to expectations. Here, when it comes to the most sensational over-the-top bloody bits, it feels like he’s phoning it in. For my money, Django Unchained would have been a better movie at half the body count.

I’m not displeased to see it as a Best Picture contender, though — it’s not far from my own personal Top 10 of the year. It is, of course, nowhere near a front-runner to win — there are at least five other movies with much better chances at the big prize. The other nominee I’m rather belated in discussing is Ang Lee’s Life Of Pi, which I saw nearly two months ago but didn’t feel any urgency to speak on. At that time, I didn’t think it’d have much awards steam, but the movie has been pretty stalwart; Ang Lee even took one of the five coveted Best Director slots that excluded Ben Affleck, Tom Hooper, and Kathryn Bigelow from that race despite the fact that their films (at one point, at least) had better shots at Best Picture.

I still have almost nothing to say about Life Of Pi. It’s pretty, I guess — if you don’t mind everything being really fake-looking. I can see how some might be enchanted by the visuals; I, however, was not.

I also did not enjoy the framing device, with an adult Pi telling a novelist about his adventures of survival aboard a lifeboat, with only a hungry tiger named Richard Parker as company. The tiger is impressively animated, but I never grew to care for him as a character as Pi eventually does (and the audience is meant to); the film straddles a strange line between reality and fantasy, which had me neither believing in it at face value nor transported to another world. It’s never clear how seriously we’re supposed to take this. Nor did I go along with the “twist” (taken from the novel), a variation on “It was all a dream!” It stems from an interesting idea, but amidst all this CGI imagery with the emotional weight of a watercolor, it just seemed like the wrong place for such a heavy-handed message. Especially the tactless way it’s delivered. Give me the facts or give me the fiction, but don’t change your mind at the last minute and exchange one for the other.

It is pretty, though.

There’s an important distinction between this film and one or two others with better chances in the big race. I don’t want to pick on Life Of Pi, a well-crafted and well-intentioned film; I don’t begrudge it its Oscar nomination or massive box office success. (I feel similarly about Beasts Of The Southern Wild this year… I can see what some admire even if I didn’t exactly swoon for it myself.) Suraj Sharma’s performance as Pi is terrific; he expertly carries the movie, and I hope to see more of him soon. But this one missed the mark for me, though it seemed to fully enchant many critics. I even took the trouble of seeing it in 3D, which likely further removed me from an investment in the story; I can’t help but see a 3D movie as more of a theme park experience than an emotional one. Sorry, future. But that’s just me.

It’s just not the kind of year where a slighter, fluffier movie is going to win. (Slumdog Millionaire is likely this one’s closest Oscar-winning cousin.) Like Django Unchained, Life Of Pi is an also-ran in the Best Picture category. It’s well-liked enough that Ang Lee has at least a fighting chance at Best Director for his technical mastery; he’s respected in the industry, and even though he won Best Director for Brokeback Mountain, the movie’s Best Picture loss to Crash may carry over a few sympathy votes anyhow. Likely, though, Life Of Pi‘s rewards will come in the technical categories, where it may very well sweep. It’s maybe a shame to weigh this largely computer-generated creation against, say, the cinematography of Skyfall, but that’s the nature of the Oscars beast.And then there’s Flight, Robert Zemeckis’ “return” to live action. I avoided it in theaters based on mixed word-of-mouth and reviews. My expectations were sufficiently lowered so that I quite enjoyed it when I caught it on DVD. The movie’s advertisements downplayed the extent to which it is about addiction, playing up the courtroom drama of it all and making Whip Whitaker seem like a much more heroic figure than he comes off in the movie. The actual character is a broken man, in denial about his alcohol abuse, running on auto-pilot (excuse the metaphor). It’s terrifying to think that people we trust — like pilots, and police, and doctors and nurses — can be so dependent on substances, and just functional enough that it goes by undetected. But that’s the world we live in. It can be anyone. Whip is barely hanging on, and yet there’s no one to stop him. No one to say no. The people in his life quietly allow him to abuse and carry on, because how can they stop him? How do you stop a grown man from doing what he wants to do… even if you suspect that someone, or in this case many people, could get hurt?

Flight is a solid movie, if not a great one. It’s nice to see Zemeckis tackle such adult material — full frontal nudity! cocaine! heroin! — and that sequence leading up to the plane crash is pretty spectacular. In a year of very strong male performances, Denzel Washington’s is a little too big and broad for me to include him as one of my Top 5 (or 7, or even 10, possibly), but he is good. And it’s nice to see a relatively big movie that doesn’t shy away from a difficult lead character or somewhat touchy subject matter. Flight could have been an independent movie if not for the big-budget plane crash sequence, and that’s not something you can say about many studio movies these days.

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Girl Walk // All Day is one of my favorite films I’ve seen lately, except that I’m not sure it’s a film at all. It used to be that movies came in pretty much one format — you went to the theater and watched them all in one go. If it was a super long movie, maybe you’d get an intermission, but that was it.

But times have changed, my friends, and so has cinema. What separates the stuff we watch on YouTube from the stuff we’d watch in a theater? Quality and budget, mostly — but not necessarily. Girl Walk // All Day is feature-length with pretty good production value; it takes place all over New York City and is quite competently shot and edited, which is more than you can say about the majority of stuff currently floating around the internet. And yet, content-wise, it has more in common with the flash mob videos your mom still posts on your Facebook wall than it does with Zero Dark Thirty.

Girl Walk // All Day is essentially a 71-minute music video set to Girl Talk’s album All Day. There’s a loose story about three strangers who are inexplicably possessed by the spirit of Girl Talk’s music, presumably, and wander New York City dancing all the while, occasionally joined by passersby and sometimes crossing paths with one another. The most memorable of these is The Girl, performed by Anne Marsen, who clearly has some talent but is far from a technically perfect dancer; her go-for-broke moves are relatable, and what make her so compelling to watch.

There’s also a guy dubbed The Creep (John Doyle), so named because he exhibits some minor stalker tendencies and is dressed like a skeleton. He’s another compulsively watchable dancer, and again, not too polished. The least interesting figure is The Gentleman, who is probably the most technically proficient dancer but also the least interesting of the three. That’s because the other two, in some ways, come across as if they’ve never danced before — or at least, never like this. There’s a spontaneity to their movements (even if there must have been a fair amount of rehearsal to get this film right), a sense that this is one crazy day in their lives. But in the case of The Gentleman, it feels like he’s been doing this his whole life.   It hardly takes away from the fun of watching any of them perform, though. Girl Walk // All Day is a true New York City movie because most of the passersby by stride right past the dancers without so much as a glance of acknowledgement. That’s Manhattan, a place where you often will see people vigorously dancing on their own, perhaps for profit, perhaps as a result of insanity. (There’s even a delightful accidental cameo by New York legend Bill Cunningham, snapping photos as ever.)

The film moves through enough different locations and scenarios to keep things interesting; briefly, there’s a hint of romance, but that storyline never bogs down the rest. There’s also some Occupy Wall Street political commentary, as well as a couple moments when The Girl tries to get real people to dance with her, with mixed results. The film is divided into twelve segments, all of which are distinct. There’s a real progression here, if it isn’t in the service of a conventional narrative.

It’s all set to Girl Talk’s album, a radio-friendly collection of pop and hip hop hits that should be at least 90% familiar to most casual listeners of music. It’s where artists like Ke$ha and Waka Flocka Flame meet U2 and John Lennon, which is exactly why All Day is the perfect album for a film like this, and why New York is the perfect location. From the interior of an Apple store to the Apollo in Harlem (my old stomping grounds), somehow Girl Walk // All Day manages to capture the New York experience in total better than any other film in my mind. As The Girl and her pals dance through the city, we brush up against all the same people you do every day in Manhattan, which is why New Yorkers, I think, can find a special affinity for this film.

After all, if ever there was a city built for mash-up culture, it’s New York — a place where people from all walks of life are smooshed together, everybody bringing a little something different to the table. And somehow, all those disparate noises become homogenous, even harmonious.

Like Girl Talk’s album, Girl Walk // All Day is available online in its entirety (because obviously the music rights would cost millions of dollars). In some ways, the do-it-yourself, sell-it-for-free approach feels rather revolutionary, like we’re catching a glimpse at the future of filmmaking. And since I watched chapter after chapter like a junkie in desperate need of his next fix, I’d be just fine with that.

Which brings me to another surprisingly good movie I caught up with recently — Pitch Perfect. The summer release was unfortunately marketed as some sort of unholy cash cow lovechild of Glee and Bridesmaids, which doesn’t nearly do it justice. (That’s the reason I avoided in theaters… if only I’d known.) Mercifully, this movie has much more in common with the latter than the former (namely, Rebel Wilson and one major gross-out centerpiece), and even goes so far as to slyly poke a little fun at the Fox debacle it will inevitably be compared to. Pitch Perfect is smarter, though, primarily because characters only burst into song when performing (and with more inspired music choices, generally).

Anna Kendrick stars as Beca, a moody mash-up artist who’d rather skip college to move to L.A. and be a music producer. (It plays less awful than it sounds.) Thanks to a fairly contrived situation with her father, Beca gets roped into singing along with one of four campus a cappella groups, headed by Anna Camp and Brittany Snow. There’s also a geeky love interest played by Skylar Astin, who sings on a rival team… and, okay, now that I’m describing it, it sure doesn’t sound like a good movie. But I promise: the writing is sharper than usual, the supporting characters more winning than your average college comedy, and the script has a self-aware quality that avoids taking any of this very seriously. It’s one of the most quotable joke-a-minute comedies since Mean Girls, even if a few conventional trappings (mostly with the romantic subplot) stop it from truly transcending every cliche of the standard teen comedy.

Pitch Perfect manages to make almost much use out of mash-ups as Girl Walk // All Day. The song selections don’t feel like such shameless “you’re going to go to iTunes and download this now, right?” commercialism behind them, a la Glee. (Plus, Beca’s “Cups” is just awesome.) Both films use other people’s music to great effect and have the same endlessly rewatchable quality of musical/comedy greats.

I know I’ll be watching them both again, as soon as possible. Maybe even right now.

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