BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Melissa Leo for The Fighter is basically a lock for a nomination with her Golden Globe win. Amy Adams will get one for the same flick. Helena Bonham Carter will get the nod for The King’s Speech because it’s British and good and the Academy loves it when things are British and good (and is often willing to overlook “good”). Those three are certain; that leaves two slots, which will go to some combination of Mila Kunis and/or Barbara Hershey for Black Swan, Hailee Stanfield for True Grit, and Jacki Weaver for Animal Kingdom. I’m going to bet on Hershey and Weaver; I think Hollywood will decide that Kunis’ work, while good, wasn’t really magnificent, and that Stanfield is perfectly solid but not amazing enough to get the “kid gets the nom” momentum. If I’m wrong, I think Stanfield is the one I’m wrong about.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christian Bale’s Fighter performance basically has this award set aside for him already, so it’s really a matter of filling out the other four slots here. Geoffrey Rush gets one for The King’s Speech for the same reason Ethan Hawke got one for Training Day – the movie is basically a two-person movie when all is said and done, and he’s the other person. I think John Hawkes’ turn in Winter’s Bone gets one, simply because he’s an underdog in an underdog film and everybody keeps talking about how he’s an underdog in an underdog film, and frankly I think he deserves the award more than Bale does anyway (and given that I thought Bale’s performance was superb, that should say something). The rest of the pack is Mark Ruffalo for The Kids Are All Right, Jeremy Renner for The Town, Justin Timberlake for The Social Network and Matt Damon for True Grit. (I think the Michael Douglas cancer sympathy train that led to him getting a Golden Globe nomination for Wall Street 2 is finally over.) Out of that pack, I pick Ruffalo and Renner; if I’m wrong about anything, I think it’s Timberlake, who probably snags either Ruffalo’s or Hawkes’ spot.

BEST ACTRESS: Natalie Portman for Black Swan, duh. Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right, also duh. Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone, obviously. They are locks. Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole seems to be an increasing consensus, although I haven’t seen it and can’t comment as to whether she deserves it. I think Michelle Williams snags the last spot for Blue Valentine, but it might be too racy (gasp) for Academy voters because she blows Ryan Gosling in it so the cynical thing is to say that instead Julianne Moore for Kids or Lesley Manville for Another Year sneak in. (Either of those could also replace Kidman, but I don’t think they will.)

BEST ACTOR: Colin Firth for The King’s Speech is again obvious, as is James Franco for 127 Hours (and I think this is probably the only big nomination the movie gets). Jesse Eisenberg should score a nom for The Social Network. That leaves one slot and there’s a lot of good options: Jeff Bridges for True Grit, Mark Wahlberg for The Fighter, Robert Duvall for Get Low, Ryan Gosling for Blue Valentine, Paul Giamatti for Barney’s Version, maybe even DiCaprio for Inception (although it’s unlikely). My money is on Duvall and Gosling, but Bridges or Wahlberg could upset, because after all Ryan Gosling did play in a movie where he got a blowjob and apparently that’s a big deal now, to admit that people get blowjobs. (Why didn’t this hurt Julia Roberts for Pretty Woman back in the day?)

BEST DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan for Inception, Tom Hooper for King’s Speech, Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan, and David Fincher for The Social Network are all givens. That leaves one slot and it should go to Debra Granik for Winter’s Bone, but instead will go to either the Coens for True Grit or David O. Russell for The Fighter. Probably the Coens. The Oscars love them some Coens.

BEST PICTURE: Black Swan, The Social Network, The King’s Speech, Inception, True Grit, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right. Every one of them is certain. The remaining three will come from these five: 127 Hours, Winter’s Bone, Animal Kingdom, Toy Story 3 and The Town. My guess is that Toy Story 3, Winter’s Bone and 127 Hours are the nods here. Honestly, this category has gone from being the most fun to wager on to the least; the ten-picture rule kills the suspense because in any year there’s really only six or seven serious BP contenders.

The Social Network. All the for-reals movie critics have already said how brilliant this is and they are basically completely right about everything. People complaining that the movie isn’t completely accurate – other than missing the point of movies generally – are mistaken because the accuracy here is about capturing the entire ethos of ruthless vision that led to the 2000s dotcom re-boom. Jesse Eisenberg gives what’s far and away the most brilliant performance of the year by any actor because he’s simultaneously so compelling and sympathetic while being so unlikeable and cold, and Aaron Sorkin’s script tones down his usual crutches to the point where it’s better than anything else he’s previously written.

Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game. Out of all the new boardgames I played in 2010, this was my favorite: a three-hour brainburner that genuinely captures the feel of playing a marathon game of Civ on your computer, except there’s no computer and you get the fun of playing against three other opponents face-to-face. Multiple victory conditions, variant civilization rules, tech advancement for strategic purpose – everything you would expect out of a game of Civ is here, and produced with screamingly awesome quality.

The first and third episodes of Sherlock. I can’t in good conscience give the whole series a total endorsement because the second episode, “The Blind Banker,” is just not in the league of the other two; cheap Orientalism plus a less-than-compelling mystery make for teevee that is only passably entertaining at most. But the first and third episodes are fantastic stuff – the best visual description of texting yet put to screen, genuinely inventive and fun mysteries, brilliant renditions of the Holmes thought process and of course Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman’s superb Holmes and Watson turn what could have been a goofy lark into some of the best long-form telly of the year.

ArchAndroid by Janelle Monae. Any year Janelle Monae drops a new album it will make this list.

Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson. As I get older, and to an extent more productive, the “I wish I had written that” feeling occurs less and less often – that sheer burst of envy you feel when somebody writes something that is so fucking good that is, in retrospect, such an obvious idea that it should have occurred to you years ago, but it didn’t. Beasts of Burden is the only comic all year that made me feel that way: gorgeous, intelligent, crucially not overwritten or overexplained (which would have just ruined it) and mostly just vital. A cat clawing a demon in the eyes felt more urgent than any superhero comic all year long, which says something about superhero comics.

Community. The second half of season one and the first half of season two combine for one of the most virtuosic meta-seasons of any show ever. Community is brilliant not because of the thematic parodies it does (in episodes like “Contemporary American Poultry,” “Epidemiology,” “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design,” and above all “Modern Warfare”), although those are brilliant. No, Community is brilliant because of its exacting attention to detail in crafting its stories: no show is as efficient at using every single inch of screen real estate and every second of running time to cram in as much story as possible. Think Abed’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it subplot in “The Psychology of Letting Go,” or the fact that the show actually gives away the ending of “Cooperative Calligraphy” in the first two minutes in a way that nobody watching will notice the first time through, or the numerous references to the fact that Jeff and Britta keep hooking up on the sly without ever actually bothering to address it in a main plotline (until they do, of course) – but then bear in mind that all of this detail and craft is simultaneously used to further develop and strengthen all of the show’s cast and drop as many gags as humanly possible.

Animal Kingdom. The best crime movie in years. Animal Kingdom features a teenaged protagonist actually acting like a real teenager (sullen and moody), some of the most vivid and genuinely evil characters to come along in a very long time (when one character matter-of-factly explains what is to be done about another – you’ll know it when you see it – it’s just a tour-de-force of the filmmakers daring you to believe that this isn’t happening when it is), and a plot that surprises out of old-school Hitchcockian tension rather than boring old shock value. Staggeringly good movie.

Matt Smith as the Doctor. Because he’s really, really good at it.

Excellent performances by all concerned almost make one forget the equally important fact that this is the first movie in a long time to treat Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne as the act of gross selfishness by a narcissistic asshole that it was, rather than some grand self-important gesture.

I’ve been reading some zombie novels lately; among others, I’ve read ‘Dead City’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘Day By Day Armageddon’…and I have to say, at the risk of offending authors who have some online presence (and plenty of online fans), most of them are really not that good. The current crop of zombie books tend to regurgitate Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, with a dash of “28 Days Later” for that bioweapon flavor and a generous helping of Mary-Sue-ism to boot. (One exception is David Wellington’s “Monster Island” and its sequels, which do some eye-poppingly clever things with the zombie apocalypse concept.)

And yet, the whole reason I picked them up is that I love zombie movies…and I gotta say, I love the cheesy ones just as much as the brilliant ones. “Nightmare City”, “Hell of the Living Dead”, “The Dead Next Door”, “Feeding the Masses” (which actually had a brilliant script, let down by sub-pornographic actors)…bad or good, I cheerfully watch them from beginning to end. Sometimes, the worse they are the better they are. “Diary of the Dead” is never going to match up to Romero’s earlier masterpieces, but I guarantee you, you will never find a movie with a more bad-ass Amish farmer or drama teacher.

So what’s the difference? Why do I love a bad zombie movie, but grow furious at the lack of ambition and drive behind the majority of most zombie novels? The answer, and I think a lot of readers will find it obvious, is the level of investment needed to finish a movie versus a book. A ninety minute movie lasts ninety minutes, and then it’s over. Whether that ninety minutes is filled with “Shaun of the Dead”, or “Shadow: Dead Riot”, they’re both done when the credits roll.

But a good 300-page book and a bad 300-page book…the former flies by almost on its own, as your mind pictures the story so vividly that you don’t even notice turning the pages. Whereas the latter crawls past at a snail’s pace, as your brain rebels at the thought of reading even one more sentence. You find yourself easily distracted, making excuses to put the book down…and yet, when you work up the nerve to get back to it, the book is right there waiting for you exactly where you left off. It’s like a movie that pauses itself whenever it thinks you’ve stopped paying attention.

And a horror movie can descend to the level of “so bad it’s good.” Inept comedy is merely excruciatingly dull, while inept horror can sometimes become brilliant comedy (which is why the movie “The Mad”, with Billy Zane, failed so badly. But I digress.) But the failings of prose are different than the failings of film, and what can inspire you to watch a bad movie again and again merely inspires you to throw a book at the wall so hard it makes a dent.

It’s a curious difference, the way that engaging with a work of bad art can produce such different effects in different media. The bad zombie movie only attains its true potential as entertainment when the audience engages with it, refusing to passively accept it and instead dealing with it on their own terms. But with bad zombie books, the more you engage with it, the worse it becomes. The only way to succeed is not to get involved at all. (Especially ‘City of the Dead’. Sorry, Brian Keene, but it was a mistake to try to get a sequel out of ‘The Rising’.)

Yes, of course I saw it again. I’ve been waiting for it since I was six.

1.) I think the “this movie has no plot” line a lot of people are using is unfair. It has a straightforward chase movie plot, for the most part: once Sam gets inside the Grid the entire movie is “survive until you get to X, then to Y, then to Z.” There’s nothing wrong with it, and the movie underlays the chase element with a nice dichotomy of Flynn’s relationships with his two “sons” (Sam and CLU). A more thorough explanation of Flynn’s within-the-Grid powers would have been nice so that the ending makes more sense, but other than that the plot is really very straightforward.

2.) A fairer complaint is that the information that drives the plot isn’t what people wanted. A common issue I’ve seen raised in many places is that there’s no mention of the internet or anything similar, no serious discussion of the revolutions in computing as it relates to the TRONverse, but instead some vague technobabble about the Isos. (Actually, the movie is correct in that abiogenetic digital life would in fact be a Big Deal, but it doesn’t really explain it properly.) This is reasonable and I can definitely sympathize with it. To which the only answer that can be made is: they didn’t want to make that movie. They wanted to make this one: a story about a long-divided father and son. The sealed system of the Grid as ruled by CLU simply doesn’t work with the internet, and if Flynn had been in digital form on the net he likely would have been able to talk to his son somehow.

3.) On a second viewing I really appreciate Jeff Bridges’ dual performance more. Shifting gears from maniacal, desperate-to-prove-himself CLU to Zen Kenobi Flynn couldn’t have been easy, but he really pulls off both roles; CLU’s cover of his own personal insecurity is particularly evident in Bridges’ body language, and the Flynn performance manages to be magnetic without sacrificing the essential techno-hippie nature of the character. He really manages the awkward bits of dealing with a grown son magnificently, too.

4.) Daft Punk’s score for the movie ranks in my top five artistic achievements in film for the year. It really is absolutely superb: it both matches itself to the story and stands up as a musical work in its own right to boot. They need to score more films.

Part of me wants to say, in answer to the post’s title, “Then go ahead. What are you waiting for?” Bond is not exactly a continuity-heavy, mythology-dense series, whether you’re talking about the books or the movies. It was originally a series of cheap pulp paperbacks, the kind of thing you buy in airports, and it’s become a series of pacy action movies, the kind of thing you go to for fun. Neither one of those things lends itself to a series you have to work to get involved with.

But maybe you’re really just interested in dipping your toes into James Bond. After all, it’s still 22 movies and 35 or so books, not exactly the sort of thing you can just polish off in a weekend. (For the record, I find the books to be a bit of a curate’s egg. Without an actor playing the character, Bond tends to come off as remarkably unlikeable, which makes them difficult to get into. Feel free to try them if you want–they’re all short reads–but don’t be surprised if you come away disappointed. That said, the baccarat sequence in the novel of ‘Casino Royale’ is much better than the poker sequence in the 2006 film.) So what are some of the highlights, the quintessential Bond films if you will?

When it comes to Sean Connery, who is agreed by most to be the “definitive” Bond, two movies stand out above all the rest. ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’, between the two of them, pretty much define the “spy movie” genre, and most of the iconic moments of the Bond franchise come from one or the other of these two films. You’ve got the gold-painted girl, Oddjob throwing his hat, Bond strapped to the table with the moving laser, the villain petting the white cat, the hidden base inside the volcano, the bad guy dropping his henchmen into a piranha tank…pretty much the whole spy package. And you also get the unintentionally spectacularly racist sequence where Bond is made into an Asian through the cunning use of make-up.

Beyond that, there are two other good Connery Bonds (‘Dr. No’ and ‘From Russia With Love’), one mediocre one (‘Thunderball’) and one that feels like a canonical Bond parody (‘Diamonds Are Forever’, easily one of the lowlights of the series.) Oh, and George Lazenby tried his hand at Bond between ‘You Only Live Twice’ and ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, but despite being a decent actor, he wasn’t able to convince audiences that he was Bond.

The next Bond, Roger Moore, was a great light-comedy actor who unfortunately wound up doing an action hero part. This resulted in a number of “comedy” Bond moments, all of which fell pretty flat. Despite that, and despite some more spectacular unintentional racism (‘Live and Let Die’ is all about Sinister Black People, ‘The Man With the Golden Gun’ is all about Asians Who Know Kung Fu) he did have his moments. ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ has a great moment when Bond agrees to hear the villain’s demands, only to discover he really doesn’t have any–he just wants to blow up the world with stolen nukes. And despite its poor reputation, ‘Moonraker’ is full of classic Bond moments, from a stunning opening where Bond skydives without a parachute to a villain who delivers classic lines like, “Ah, Mister Bond. You have all the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.”

Then we have Timothy Dalton, an awesomely underrated Bond who was better than his scripts (but anyone who’s seen him in classics like ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘The Rocketeer’, and ‘Hot Fuzz’ knows how great Dalton is.) He only did two Bond movies, the very good ‘The Living Daylights’ and the somewhat less good ‘License To Kill’ (which is fun, but feels a bit too much like a “Miami Vice” episode to be a true Bond classic.)

And then, after a long pause, we got Pierce Brosnan, who had been touted as a potential Bond for about a decade by that point. He had one genuine bona fide classic, ‘Goldeneye’, which examined the relevance of Bond (and by extension, the spy drama) in a post-Cold War world, and then a slow decline through the entertaining ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ to the implausible ‘The World Is Not Enough’ to the ponderous and uninspired ‘Die Another Day’. That was about when they decided to reboot the franchise.

The reboot got a great Bond–Daniel Craig–but the movies to date haven’t lived up to their actor. (Although the 2006 ‘Casino Royale’ is certainly head and shoulders and chest and stomach and groin and thighs and knees and ankles and toes above the 1967 version.) And with MGM teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, we might not see another Bond movie until after Craig is too old to play the part. Still, it’s bound to go on in some form or another. James Bond isn’t just a franchise, it’s an institution.

Of course, these are just my picks for the quick and dirty version of the James Bond franchise. Everyone’s got their own opinions as to the best Bond movies to give you a condensed version of the franchise, and I hope to see them all in the comments!

The film is being marketed as a sci-fi action film, but it’s not really an action film. Which is not to say there aren’t actiony bits, because of course there are, but this is far more an adventure film than it is an action film. Still exciting, but the excitement is drawn as much from discovery as it is from conflict. There are of course a couple of bits where things lag more than they should, some of the plot handwaving is a bit handwavey, and at least one moderately important character decision doesn’t make much sense in retrospect, but on the whole this is a very entertaining example of How Popcorn Movies Should Be, and visually impressive on par with Avatar (and with 3D surpassing it; I felt Avatar’s 3D was just distracting, but TRON‘s is immersive).

Anyway, other things of note: I was very glad to see that this was edited by an adult rather than a hyperactive six-year-old. Jeff Bridges playing the elder Flynn as a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Dude was awesome. And the Daft Punk soundtrack is as awesome as you think it is.

So the buzz around the internets is that Gore Verbinski will be remaking The Lone Ranger, with Johnny Depp playing Tonto. Let us leave aside the fact that despite Depp being generally pretty cool he is still bleach for the purposes of whitewashing a character, because every other site talking about this seems to have forgotten that Johnny Depp, despite some purported Cherokee ancestry, is still basically a white guy.

No, let us instead discuss the merits of a Lone Ranger remake, which has not received entirely kind press from the movie blogging community, mostly because the Lone Ranger seems sort of corny. Which is ridiculous, of course, because the guy has the finale of the William Tell Overture – one of the most exciting bits of classical music ever – as his theme, and no trailer with a lot of explosions and horse ridin’ and shootin’ set to the William Tell Overture is going to be boring.

If they asked me to write it, I’d go to the Mask of Zorro well and make it generational. Have the original Lone Ranger emerge out of the Bleeding Kansas period – Texas Rangers were known to occasionally cross into Kansas, and the possibility that a group of Texas Rangers could have been involved in something horrific involving escaped slaves – or at least allowed it to happen – and disillusion the Lone Ranger so much so that he would abandon his unit and become, well, the Lone Ranger? That seems entirely reasonable.

Now, if the Lone Ranger gets his start in northern Texas and Kansas, that means he’s not very far off from the historic stomping grounds of several of the Apache tribes. So let’s say Tonto is an Apache. The Apache were, frankly, some of the baddest asses of the southwest native tribes of the time – a lot of other tribes thought, not unfairly, that they were kind of crazy. And they didn’t like anybody.

So why the Lone Ranger/Tonto partnership? Well, in Apache legend, there’s a pair of heroes/demigods/myths (their exact status is unclear) named Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies. These two always work as a pair. Were the Lone Ranger – not yet the Lone Ranger yet, not really – to stumble into an Apache camp, half-dead from exhaustion and thirst, in such a way as to resemble many of the legends surrounding the beginning/birth/genesis of Child-Born-of-Water, perhaps the medicine men of the camp would suggest that he not be killed off in the usual way but watched closely, to make sure this was indeed a child of Usen. Sticking Tonto – antisocial even among his own, but with the Power that very few Apache have, to leave no tracks and know men’s thoughts – with him to make sure he didn’t die of eating the wrong snake. Eventually sending the two of them off together to defeat the enemies of mankind, as the legends demand that Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies do. And thus begins a partnership that lasts twenty years.

Twenty years later, with the Ranger and Tonto in their late forties, it’s a new era: the peak of the Wild West, and not coincidentally the sunset of the Apache nations. Mangas Coloradas was killed in 1863. Cochise is jailed in 1872, dies in 1874. His son Taza dies in 1876. Geronimo lasts until 1886, but by the 1870s he’s reduced to small-scale guerilla raids and escaping from the whites on a regular basis.

This is when the Lone Ranger dies, in the course of protecting innocents (as you might expect). Tonto tries to go home, but by this point there’s not really any home left for him to which he might return. And one of those people is a young man whose family was murdered by a rail baron relentlessly expanding west, who only wants revenge – but, as Tonto sees, for a second time a white man satisfies the legends of Child-Born-of-Water’s birth…

See? You’d go see that.

John Leavitt asked me in email

who do you see playing Dr. Strange in 2014?

Benedict Cumberbatch, most recently in Sherlock. He’s got the acting skill to play someone who is (or at least starts out as) a total cock but still make him sympathetic. He’s definitely got the look for the part: add a moustache or goatee and he’s Stephen Strange, just so. He’ll likely be in Marvel’s price range (“kind of recognizable, has talent, but we can get him cheap”). And he’ll be exactly the right age, which defines as “five or six years younger than the character so you can get multiple sequels out of him before it starts looking silly and you need a reboot.”

The only question is if Cumberbatch can do a good American accent, but he’s got time to work on it, doesn’t he?

…because if you are a nerd then this is the movie you should be anticipating. Directed by Duncan Jones, whose first film was Moon, one of last year’s best movies, and who finally answered the longstanding question of “what if Groundhog Day was a thriller instead of a comedy?”:

FLAPJACKS: The trailer for the Green Lantern movie is online.
ME: Oh good.
FLAPJACKS: That sounded sarcastic. I don’t get why you’re being sarcastic. This is a comic book movie directed by Martin Campbell starring Ryan Reynolds and Peter Sarsgaard. There is nothing in that sentence you don’t like.
ME: Probably because the word “Green Lantern” was not in that sentence. I am not particularly a fan of Green Lantern, or of things both greenish and lanterny at once. The concept has never appealed to me the way it does to some. I am fine with this. And I especially particularly do not like Hal Jordan, who is the character I hate second-most in comics.
FLAPJACKS: The first being…
ME: Beast Boy.
FLAPJACKS: Why do you hate Beast Boy?
ME: Because fuck him, that’s why.

ME: Oh, god, we’re starting out with Hal Jordan as super-stud.
FLAPJACKS: You don’t complain when Iron Man bags chicks.
ME: That’s because it doesn’t seem like desperate trying when Iron Man sleeps around. But years of DC telling us over and over again that Hal Jordan is hot shit and he totally has threeways with DC superhero ladies like all the time have poisoned the well. That they’re having him played by Ryan Reynolds just underscores the point.
FLAPJACKS: But you like Ryan Reynolds.
ME: Because he’s good at playing “douchebag bro,” whether straight or for ironic purpose. Like, consider Tony Stark again. When Tony Stark wants to bail on a woman he just nailed, he just goes downstairs and tinkers with cars while Pepper Potts and his AI butler shove the girl out the door. It’s a dick move, pure and simple, which makes him sort of admirable in a way because he doesn’t pretend it’s anything but a dick move. Hal Jordan, on the other hand, is passive aggressive. “Hey I’m totally a decent guy, One Night Stand lady, I just have to go fly a plane so I’m gonna pretend I’m not an asshole for ten seconds okay bye.”
FLAPJACKS: You think about this too much.
ME: And now comes poetry about how awesome it is to fly a plane. Nobody in the whole world likes this. Nobody wants to hear about your hobby or your job completing you and putting you at inner peace.
FLAPJACKS: Abin Sur looks kind of awesome.
ME: The spaceship isn’t bad either.
FLAPJACKS: Man they are showing a lot of Abin Sur’s spaceship. That makes me worry. When the awesomest thing they’re showing is the spaceship that blows up in the first twenty minutes it kind of makes you wonder about, you know, the rest of the movie.
ME: The wormhole looks decent.
FLAPJACKS: Oa looks decent.
ME: Sinestro looks… like a horrible CGI experiment gone wrong.
FLAPJACKS: Oh my god he looks like an extra from Delgo.
ME: And the thing is that we know that’s actually Mark Strong. What is up with that? Is this like Avatar where they motion-traced people and then did it all with computers, or is the makeup job just that bad?
FLAPJACKS: I’m not sure. I hope it’s the latter. The former sounds like a horrible idea if you don’t have James Cameron and lots of millions of dollars handy.
ME: Pieface!
FLAPJACKS: I don’t think you’re allowed to call him that anymore.
ME: I bet it’s, like, his college bro nickname. “Pieface! PieFAAAAAACE! I can call you that because of all the pussy you ate.”
FLAPJACKS: Hal seems to have self-doubt.
ME: Presumably somebody realized at some point that Hal’s standard “overconfident asshole” schtick wasn’t a great selling point as a character and decided to go a different route, which is “pretend Hal is actually Kyle Rayner so people may end up liking him.”
FLAPJACKS: You really hate this character, don’t you?
ME: Oh my yes.
FLAPJACKS: That green fist was sweet.
ME: It was.
FLAPJACKS: Oh wait never mind the self-doubt is just to pick up chicks.
ME: That’s our Hal!
FLAPJACKS: Kilowog looks cool.
ME: I wonder if he will say “poozers.”
FLAPJACKS: He had better say “poozers.” If he doesn’t say poozers thousands of angry nerds will storm Hollywood asking for a refund.
ME: Hector Hammond looks decent as well.
FLAPJACKS: You know, for a movie about Green Lantern I was kind of hoping the trailer would show me a few more Green Lantern tricks.
ME: Well, they had to show you that first thirty seconds of Hal flying planes or you wouldn’t know how awesome he totally is.
FLAPJACKS: And the pre-title flash is the “hey ladies look how ripped Ryan Reynolds is” shot.
ME: Cross-marketing!
FLAPJACKS: Oh wait they said part of the oath! Everything is all right now.
ME: Shut up.
FLAPJACKS: But we’re going to go see this, right?
ME: Probably. I think we’ve established our standards are low.

Kurt Russell is one of those actors who will probably never win an Academy Award, not even one of those special “Lifetime Achievement” awards they hand out when the Academy suddenly looks up and realizes, “Oh, shit! So-and-so has never won an Oscar?” He doesn’t take the right parts to be an Oscar-winning actor. While other actors are playing tortured poets or tortured soldiers or tortured gunslingers, Kurt Russell is always refreshingly angst-free. He’s the kind of guy who is always having fun, whether playing a super-hero or a fugitive or a trucker caught up in a struggle between ancient Chinese sorcerers, and he’s not afraid to let everyone know it.

And that’s what makes him an Unsung Hero. The sense of fun that Kurt Russell brings to every role he plays is infectious. While he’s on screen, you frequently find yourself smiling almost before you realize it; it’s something about his delivery, perhaps, the way that he drawls out each line with just enough of an accent to make you wonder whether he’s parodying John Wayne or whether he really talks like that. Or maybe it’s his body language, the way he seems to have just enough self-knowledge to play the Stallone-esque tough guy while letting the audience know he thinks it’s pretty silly, too. Or maybe it’s just the eyes. Watch Kurt Russell’s eyes when he’s on screen, and you’ll see it. He knows that this is a hell of a fun way to make a living.

Whatever it is, Kurt Russell makes movies fun. There has never been a movie so bad that it hasn’t perked up while Russell is on screen (“3000 Miles to Graceland” comes to mind)…and there have been a lot of cult classics that he’s made even better. “Escape From New York”, “The Thing”, “Big Trouble In Little China”, “Overboard”, “Tombstone”, “Stargate”, “Executive Decision”, “Sky High”, “Death Proof”…none of them art films, all of them what would probably be sniffed at by critics as ‘crowd-pleasers’, but all of them quite successful at pleasing crowds. Why? Because Kurt Russell’s in them. And he’s just damn fun to watch.

So let’s join together as geeks and give a big round of applause for Kurt Russell, an actor who knows that movies should be fun to watch.

A while back, Pajiba ran an article suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, Americans preferred to see relatively good movies rather than mindlessly spending their money on total crap.

I thought the idea of the analysis was interesting but the execution flawed; after all, Box Office Mojo’s “critical grades” bias themselves heavily towards the Bs by the system with which they weight user grades, so that The Departed, Wall-E and Slumdog Millionaire are all B+ movies and therefore only very slightly critically better than The Transformers, Fast and Furious and National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

So instead, I spent a few weeks when I had time collating the same sort of data, weighing movies’ box-office performance against their Rotten Tomatoes rating, on the basis that RT ratings would be more critically accurate than BOM ratings. And… well, see below.

(I really hope this doesn’t crash the server too badly.)

Space Cowboys minus the outer space plus a whole lot of guns (including the extra half hour the movie really doesn’t need).

So in lieu of actual original content, here is Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ waltz from Swing Time, one of the finest dances on film ever:

I have always held that this is an excellent test to see if a person has a soul or not. If you do not like this, strongly consider the possibility that you are an emotionless android, secretly tasked to destroy all humans.