Rather than liveblog the Oscars and just make people click “refresh,” I’m doing it on the Twitter.

Feel sorta dirty.

BEST PICTURE: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, Precious, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, A Serious Man, Up, Up In The Air.

Well, first off the new game everybody has to play is “which five of these wouldn’t have gotten nominated if the Oscars hadn’t decided to super-size this category?” My guess is Up, District 9, An Education, The Blind Side and Inglorious Basterds. So that leaves Precious, The Hurt Locker, Up In The Air, A Serious Man and, yes, Avatar. Precious and A Serious Man have no chance. Up In The Air can play spoiler and potentially win, but I don’t think it quite has the support to do it. But really, this is about whether James Cameron making a zillion dollars impresses people more than the best war movie in years and a major artistic achievement.

BEST DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, James Cameron for Avatar, Lee Daniels for Precious, Jason Reitman for Up In The Air, Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds.

Basically I’m just gonna repeat my comments from Best Picture for this one: this is between Bigelow and Cameron. Bigelow has the DGA award, Cameron has the Golden Globe.

BEST ACTOR: Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, George Clooney for Up In The Air, Colin Firth for A Single Man, Morgan Freeman for Invictus, Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker.

Renner’s nomination is a pleasant surprise – he got a couple of SAG noms and a lot of critics’ awards, but no Golden Globe nomination at all. I think he has an outside shot at it as a dark horse. That having been said, the award this year is primarily a two-way fight between Jeff Bridges for never having won an Oscar and George Clooney for never having won an Oscar. Freeman has two Oscars and isn’t going to win one for Invictus, which was kinda boring. Firth isn’t going to win for A Single Man because he’s had better odds with other things.

BEST ACTRESS: Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, Helen Mirren for The Last Station, Carey Mulligan for An Education, Gabourey Sibibe for Precious, Carey Mulligan for An Education, Meryl Streep for Julie and Julia.

I’ve never even heard of The Last Station and Helen Mirren has an Oscar already so forget about that one. Carey Mulligan isn’t famous and beloved enough to win an Oscar in young-ingenue mode so she’s not gonna get it. Gabourey Sibibe has a shot, but I don’t think Oscar gives her a statue because A) her movie wasn’t that good and B) Oscar is still wary of the black people. So it comes down to whether Hollywood feels like giving Sandra Bullock an Oscar for making Hollywood so much money over the years, or whether they want to give Meryl Streep another award for being Meryl Streep, because Meryl Streep is probably about four or five Oscars short of her deserved total right now and everybody knows it. I’m pulling for Meryl Streep because she is fucking awesome.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Woody Harrelson for The Messenger, Matt Damon for Invictus, Christopher Plummer for The Last Station, Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones and Christoph Waltz for Inglorious Basterds.

Matt Damon was in a movie so dull that Hollywood actually didn’t give Clint Eastwood a directing nomination, so no. My high opinion of The Lovely Bones is an outlier and Tucci won’t win for it. (If he’d been nominated for Julie and Julia, he might actually have had a longshot chance.) Harrelson has made a lot of enemies in Hollywood and I don’t think even a truly great performance will get him the award. Christopher Plummer has a serious chance because he’s never won an Oscar and he’s quite old and everybody thinks he’s great, so he might get the proxy lifetime achievement award. But Christoph Waltz has to be considered the odds-on favourite.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Penelope Cruz for Nine, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick for Up In The Air, Maggie Gyllenhaal for Crazy Heart and Mo’Nique for Push.

Cruz is only here because she’s really popular with a lot of nominators; Nine was an overblown piece of crap and everybody knows it. The Up In The Air ladies will probably cancel each other out. Gyllenhaal has a good chance with her turn in Crazy Heart, but she’s young yet and will get more nominations in the future (or so goes the logic). Really, I would be shocked if Mo’Nique doesn’t win this.

BEST ANIMATED FILM: Coraline, Up, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells. There is some serious competition in this category this year so I’m mentioning it, although I think Up still squeaks out with the win.

Paul Giamatti voicing Asterix in the English-language version of Asterix and the Vikings.

Brad Garrett as Obelix works quite well, but every time I see Asterix open his mouth I now expect him to say “dubbayooENNNNNNNNbeesee!”

All right, I hope this is not an abuse of my posting priviledges here, but I thought there might be a chance that someone here could help me. There’s bit in the Tank Girl movie with Lori Petty where Malcolm McDowell says,

“Eight, eight, the burning eight. Between Sunday and Monday hangs a day so dark it will devastate.”

Okay, what the hell is that from? (Might also be “The burning hate”?) Surely that’s not original to the movie; there’s got to be a source, hasn’t there? But Google turns up nothing but quotes from Tank Girl itself. McDowell later quotes some variation on “Abandone all hope, ye who enter here” from Dante, but the “burning eight” bit does’t turn up in a cursory glance of the English translation of The Inferno I have.

If anybody out there could tell me the source, or if it really is an invention of the screenwriter, I would appreciate the hell out if it, because it’s been driving me crazy since Friday.

Oh, and um … so that I’m actually providing some measure of content and not just a plea for assistance … Okay, I know that Tank Girl gets a bad rap, particularly among comics fans who see it as a travesty to the source material. And I guess it sort of is a travesty to the source material. But divorced from all that, it’s still a pretty iconoclastic movie. In the pantheon of Early To Mid Nineties Sci-Fi Dystopia Movies Made On A Modest Budget, it’s  a very fun and unusual experience (and I will watch Malcolm McDowell in pretty much anything, frankly). This is a movie in which Lori Petty gets a weird haircut and takes a bath in sand, Iggy Pop cameos as a pedophile, a bizarre animated interlude takes the place of a proper ending, two songs by Bjork are played, and Ice-T receives second billing as a mutated kangaroo-man designed by Stan Winston’s company. It’s a testament to that insanity of the Hewlett and Martin comics that a movie like this comes off a totally watered-down, cleaned-up Hollywood adaptation. It could have been a little better, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. At least it was directed by someone who wanted to get some of the visual feel and anarchic flavor of the comics, and who hard the absolute nerve to make a sci-fi movie with a female lead who wasn’t “conventionally” hot.

Weird thing, though, the box to the DVD has a banner across the top that says “AVANT-GARDE CINEMA,” and that’s probably stretching it. Avant-garde a clue, maybe. (Joke copyright 1968 George Harrison.)

8:05: Okay I’m a bit late but I am totally stoked to do this because liveblogging awards shows is the coolest. Okay, so your host is Andre Braugher. Starting off with a musical number by Fergie. I guess they couldn’t get all of the Black-Eyed Peas. That’s why this show isn’t the Oscars. Although they’re holding it on this real swank ship this year! Kurt Russell looks worried, which is weird because I don’t think he’s nominated for anything.

8:07: Kurt Russell’s daughter is way hot. I think she might have been in movies. Hey, this year it appears that the producers are going more “reality show” and they’ve got backstage cameras doing, like, vignette things and stuff. Okay. I can grok that.

8:15: Kevin Dillon and Josh Lucas are playing poker. Can you do that at an awards show? I mean I don’t think they have a license. Those Hollywood types, just breaking the law on camera. Next up they’ll be snorting blow right onscreen! Because they’re Hollywood types.

8:20: Hey, I know that guy! He’s been in movies! And he’s a waiter? He’s waiting tables? Man, Hollywood has it in for Hispanic actors, I tell you what. This guy was on Scrubs as whatsername’s brother and he’s so hard up for cash he’s serving George Clooney drinks. Okay, I haven’t seen Clooney yet but presumably he’s here somewhere.

8:23: Holy shit, since when is Richard Dreyfuss gay? I thought I would’ve heard about that on the news or something. When the kid from Who’s The Boss said he was gay, that made it into newspapers, and who cares about that guy? Richard Dreyfuss is a name. You’d think he’s on par with Ellen, at least.

8:24: Then again, I suppose nowadays “X is gay” isn’t really much of a headline. Besides, the last thing I saw Richard Dreyfuss in was that movie where he pretended to be a jungle savage that was kind of racist. That movie sucked. Jenna Elfman was in it. She sucks too. What’s that new show she’s in where she’s pregnant and everybody is terrible? She is like a magic beacon of bad.

8:28: Holy shit the guy whose name I don’t remember is using the Golden Globes to smuggle in illegal immigrants! Glenn Beck isn’t going to shut up about this I tell you what.

8:31: Apparently there’s this big tidal wave that’s gonna hit the boat. I don’t know why they aren’t warning the Hollywood people. I guess they don’t want to panic America.

8:33: WHOA

8:34: THE HOLLYWOOD BOAT IS UPSIDE DOWN

8:35: Holy shit I think that was Seth Green falling to his death right there

8:36: on second thought no way Seth Green got invited to the Golden Globes

8:38: Seth Green is safe because he is Hollywood’s official “we can laugh at ourselves” guy but they never invite him to parties.

8:40: Andre Braugher is saying they should all stay put and help the wounded. Why is this guy hosting the Golden Globes, anyway? I mean, he’s a great actor, but we all know that Golden Globe anything is really about making bank and sucking dick. Was this originally going to be hosted by one of the late night TV hosts, and then the Leno thingie happened and now they’re all taking sides? So Hollywood sat down and said “okay guys we need somebody neutral and inoffensive to host, let’s get Andre Braugher.”

8:42: Kurt Russell is saying “no we have to go,” and he says he knows about boats and stuff. Maybe he owns a boat? I could see Kurt Russell owning a boat. Although where is George Clooney in all of this? I mean, as Clooney goes, you got to know Matt Damon and Julia Roberts will follow his lead, and if you have those three you gotta figure there’s critical mass.

8:47: Kurt Russell, his daughter, Josh Lucas, Richard Dreyfuss and a couple other people are leaving. Andre Braugher seals up the awards ceremony behind them. I guess Clooney made it clear that he was staying. Don’t fuck with Clooney.

8:50: HOLY SHIT KEVIN DILLON IS DEAD

8:51: I wonder how they handle that on Entourage. Will Drama die off-screen and Vince has to deal with it, furthering the “Vince has to grow up” storyline, or will they just get a new actor to play Drama?

8:52: I bet the former. Nobody else can be Drama.

8:55: Man that upside-down ballroom looks rough. I don’t see Clooney anywhere. Maybe they have a special escape pod for the really important stars. If I were producing the Golden Globes on a ship, I’d have an escape pod ready.

8:57: Although in my case I wouldn’t use it to save George Clooney. It would be me and Kate Winslet.

8:58: Although Kate Winslet is married. Maybe I should rethink that plan. Assuming she survives.

8:59: Actually come to think I bet most of the celebrities have already gone into their escape pods and left behind wives and girlfriends and husbands and boyfriends they don’t like anymore. That’s why you don’t recognize anybody on the ballroom ceiling/floor except for Andre Braugher and Fergie.

9:00: Hollywood is probably sick of Fergie. I bet there’s a bunch of other “hey what happened to” people filling out the floor. Your Topher Graces, your Josh DuHamels, your extraneous Wayanses.

9:03: Richard Dreyfuss just kicked that guy who was on Scrubs in the face so that he could live! (Richard Dreyfuss, not the guy from Scrubs.) Man, it is so true what they say about Hollywood being uber-competitive.

9:06: And there goes the ballroom as it collapses under a tidal wave of water. Assuming that the Clooney-level stars have already exited via their escape pods as previously discussed, I guess that means there’s a whole new wave of jobs open up in Hollywood now. Probably every show on the CW has three or four empty roles they’ll need to fill. This could be a gold mine, folks! Especially if you’re young, white, and good-looking in a bland sort of way. Extra points if your name is “Logan.”

9:08: I wonder why Richard Dreyfuss doesn’t get an escape capsule. I mean, you got to know Jack Nicholson had an escape capsule.

9:12: Aw, the illegal immigrant that Richard Dreyfuss was dragging along with him drowned or something. Bet you that doesn’t stop people from complaining about immigration, though.

9:15: Hey, it just occurred to me that if the escape pod theory isn’t workable, that means that Kurt Russell is currently the most bankable box-office draw in the world. How weird is that? Sure, he’s done a lot of good movies, but… it’s still Kurt Russell, you know?

9:16: And where’s Goldie Hawn in all of this? Maybe she decided she wasn’t in the mood to do the Golden Globes this year and she was all “no, honey, you go ahead.” I bet she feels all ironic now! Or something.

9:22: MGK just told me that instead of the Golden Globes, I have actually been watching Poseidon, a movie that was made three years ago and which was on TV. Apparently Drew Barrymore won an award. I think what I was watching was more plausible.

1.) Up In The Air. Up until last week I thought my #2 had this in the bag, and then Jason Reitman had to come along and be brilliant and shit. Way to go, Jason Reitman, fucking up my list and making me have to juggle shit around! Anyway, George Clooney (who is undoubtedly the Actor of the Decade, incidentally – there just isn’t any goddamn competition for the title and you have to recognize that fact sooner rather than later) leads off a collection of nigh-perfect performances strung together by a narrative that shouldn’t work but in context seems not only believable but indeed natural. Illuminating and thought-provoking, and underrated by many critics simply because Reitman is comfortable with comedy and most critics have issues with that.

2.) (500) Days of Summer. I get that this is a polarizing picture and that there are people who absolutely hate this movie, or at the very least don’t understand what its proponents see in it. However, I am one of its proponents, so if you are one of those hating people, tough shit, this is my list. I adore how this movie plays with time in clever ways, how it builds a narrative out of barely connected moments by gradually building a web, how it’s not afraid to take a dumb risk now and again, how the performances are so damned strong. And it still has the best final line of a movie since The Apartment.

3.) The Hurt Locker. Winning a shitload of critical acclaim, because Serious Movie Critics, deep down, love to see shit blow up like everybody else, but this is finally the movie they’ve been waiting for all along: a movie that blows shit up but does so to assist the development of complex characters. A limited budget gave Kathryn Bigelow the perverse freedom to avoid name actors and instead hire Jeremy Renner, who delivers a blistering performance as the lead bomb tech/thrill junkie, but it didn’t stop her from blowing shit up real good. Making an Iraq war movie seems like an invitation to disaster with all the terrible ones that have come out in the last few years; this movie is proof that it’s not the setting that’s the flaw.

4.) Up. It’s Pixar. What the fuck did you expect? And it’s not just that it’s Pixar, but that Pixar have been on a real hot streak the last few years (ever since Ratatouille).

5.) Fantastic Mr. Fox. In a non-Pixar world, this would be the best animated film of the year without question: a Wes Anderson film, translated to all-ages stop-motion animation. The kids in the audience when I went loved it; so did their parents. It’s a fascinating fusion of Anderson’s style with Dahl’s source material, resulting in something that’s equal parts of both and incredibly entertaining; it’s almost weird to see Anderson go for running gags as he does in this movie with such gusto, but he pulls it off so well that you wish all his movies were stop-motion.

6.) The Cove. Quite simply, this doesn’t feel like a documentary; it feels like a thriller, a very nasty dark thriller with extremely bad guys, and you can be forgiven every once in a while for forgetting that this is really real – especially considering that Hayden Panettiere, of all people, shows up on the side of the good guys. (For which, I might add, she gets a lifetime pass from me, no matter how many shitty movies she makes.) Intense, gripping, and one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in years.

7.) Adventureland. Jesse Eisenberg seems prepared to star exclusively in movies that end in “-land,” but so far they’ve all been good; Zombieland was highly entertaining for what it was, and Adventureland just about perfect for what it attempted to be: a nostalgic reflection on growing up in the mid-80s that also serves as a classic examination of young-man-at-crossroads syndrome. Gets everything just about exactly right, and serves as confirmation that, Twilight aside, Kristen Stewart can actually act really well.

8.) The Lovely Bones. This currently has a low rating on Rottentomatoes, and the gripe from the critics disliking it is almost uniformly the same: they hate that Jackson shifts gears in mood and tone from horror to fantasy to drama to light family quickly. These are the exact same complaints that were made about The Frighteners; they were wrong then and they are wrong now. The Lovely Bones works precisely because it never stops being a horror film, in a way; even the family-friendliest of scenes are overlaid with the murder that exists at the heart of the film, which is the entire point. When I read the book, I thought it was unfilmable; I should have remembered that Jackson can make a movie out of anything.

9.) District 9. Questionable racial politics aside, this is a brilliant sci-actioner, with real and genuine emotion pushing it to its climax – the transformation of Sharlto Copley’s hapless government servant, both emotional and physical, never stops being immersive and powerful. Also, it has big alien gun that go ZWAAAAAM. It’s the perfect mix of the deep well of drama combined with high-quality FX pyrotechnics.

10.) Anvil! The Story of Anvil. The second-best documentary of the year is about some washed-up rockers who never stopped believing in rock, and who as a result of this movie suddenly found they had a career again. Personally, the music is not the best I’ve heard, but you can’t help but get dragged along with these lovable loser/freaks who keep pushing for their dreams even if they might not make it. Documentary as inspirational tract.

11.) Inglourious Basterds. I wanted to dismiss Basterds, but I just can’t – there’s too much art here to dismiss it. There’s not enough to put it into a top ten when the questions of substance (the lack of action, for one thing) are so numerous, but nobody has better style than Tarantino – absolutely nobody – and nobody makes his films as distinctively his own without sticking to a formula. The only movie in the top twenty I am still not sure if I actually liked on its own merit, but… it lingers, in the right ways, and that’s always a sign of greatness.

12.) Drag Me To Hell. Sam Raimi returns to his horror roots and it is fucking great. That is all.

13.) Summer Hours. Devastatingly honest family drama which asks penetrating questions about the nature of family and home, and permanescence of same. I know “it makes you think” is a horrible cliche, but this one really does make you think – it’s not a comfortable film to watch but it certainly qualifies as an important one.

14.) Mystery Team. Virtually ignored in theaters, which is a shame because Derrick Comedy’s first big-screen foray is goddamned hilarious – easily the best gutbuster of the year for me in a year where there were quite a few quality comedies. I nearly choked at many points during the flick, and just as importantly it’s not simply a stalking horse for a bunch of funny quips but instead a story (with a surprising amount of dramatic heft to it).

15.) Moon. Extremely smart sci-fi movie of the sort that makes you wonder how it even got made. Almost entirely a one-man show, and Sam Rockwell finally puts up the bravura performance we’ve always known he could manage but never really brought to the fore. Also, Kevin Spacey is a surprisingly convincing beneficient robot overseer, and I say that with all due respect.

16.) Coraline. Henry Selick is the fucking shit, yo.

17.) The Brothers Bloom. Maybe the idea of a movie about cons being in many ways a con itself isn’t new, but the execution here is refreshing and the lack of determinate resolution for much of the picture even moreso. Special recognition is due to Rinko Kikuchi for making Bang Bang a completely engaging and original character without saying a single word, which in a movie about lying is especially merited.

18.) Away We Go. Many people complained about the “smug hipster” vibe of this movie, because, I dunno, David Eggers wrote it and John Krasinski had a beard or something like that. But it’s not about smug hipsters; it’s about being terrified in the face of the awesome responsibility of parenthood, and coming to terms with that fear. The entire movie is a collection of pre-parental fears (partner abandonment, child death, becoming one of those horrible couples you always justifiably hated) and coming to terms with it; it’s travelogue as therapy.

19.) The Invention of Lying. Incredibly underrated movie – it’s frequently extremely clever and goes places one wouldn’t expect it to go. (Hint: religious satire of the most vicious variety imaginable, which likely has something to do with its abject box-office failure.) It’s very, very funny, and has a lot of good performances in it, and deserves to be slotted up with Ricky Gervais’ other accomplishments; it stands alongside them very well.

20.) Star Trek. All of the other films on this list merely had to be – nobody had any expectations for them beyond the hopes of a good time out at the theatre. Star Trek came with a horde of baggage: it had to satisfy fanboys and newbies, classic Trekkers and new-skool Trekkers, people wanting a good entertaining adventure flick and people wanting a good blow-up-shit-with-space-lasers movie (these are not necessarily the same thing). JJ Abrams managed to satisfy pretty much everybody beyond a few nitpickers and complainers, and delivered one of the most thoroughly fun blockbusters to come along in a good long while. And sometimes that’s all you need.

I once described myself as an “Artists and Models junkie,” which is not a description you hear very much outside France. We all can name movies that somehow manage to bring together a lot of the things we like, and this 1955 film by Frank Tashlin, which I watched again recently, has always been the movie that sums up a lot of things I like about the movies. And one of the things that perversely makes it more interesting to me is that it’s a confused movie: though it’s a satire of comic books and the influence of comic books on children, writer-director Tashlin doesn’t seem completely clear about what his attitude is to the things he’s satirizing. So it’s not only a funny movie, it’s like an exhibit for how a movie can get away from its creators and wind up saying things they didn’t quite intend. In this case, it’s a time capsule for confused, ambiguous attitudes toward comic books at the height of the ’50s anti-comics craze.

First, some background: Artists and Models was Tashlin’s first film with the superstar comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. (He made one more film with the team, Hollywood or Bust, and then made six more films with Lewis starring and producing.) Martin and Lewis play roommates, one a suave stud, the other a childlike idiot; I’ll let you guess who plays which character. Lewis is obsessed with violent comic books, particularly a book called “The Bat Lady,” which he reads to find out “if the Bat Lady’s gonna blow one of the Rat Man’s heads off.” Lewis also talks in his sleep about the adventures of an entirely original superhero, “Vincent the Vulture.”

Later in the film, Martin is invited to pitch ideas to gore-crazed comics publisher Eddie Mayehoff — whose comics empire is actually controlled by his ex-wife, and who falls out with the Bat Lady artist (Dorothy Malone) for submitting a comic with “no blood, not one itsy-bitsy nosebleed… no stranglings, no decapitations.” In desperation to come up with something suitably gory, he starts pitching the story Lewis told in his sleep, and it’s accepted. He can’t tell Lewis, though (how he manages to publish a comic under his own name without his roommate finding out is something the movie doesn’t care about, and neither should we), because Lewis has been turned against violent comics and is teaming up with Malone to create a more suitable kids’ entertainment, “The Adventures of Freddie Fieldmouse.” In a parody of the Senate hearings on comic books, Lewis goes on a panel show (hosted by a real TV host of the era, Art Baker), to explain that comics ruined his life by making him “a little retarded.”

Malone’s roommate is the young Shirley MacLaine, who also acts as Malone’s live-action reference for drawing the Bat Lady character. MacLaine is obsessed with horoscopes and numerology (I mean her character is, in this case), decides that she’s destined to love Lewis. So Shirley tries to get him to stop obsessing over comic-book women and get interested in dating an actual woman.

And as if all this wasn’t enough plot, Lewis’s dreams turn out to contain a formula similar to a secret U.S. rocket fuel formula, and when the comic book comes out, Russian spies — along with sexy Hungarian commie agent Eva Gabor — descend on Martin and Lewis to try and get access to his dreams. Some fans of the film thinks it goes off the rails once the spy plot is introduced; I think it works, because it marks the point where the movie literally becomes what it originally seemed to be satirizing: these people’s lives are indistinguishable from the insane comic books that corrupted Lewis’s mind. Also it’s inherently funny to see serious-looking U.S. authority figures reading “Vincent the Vulture.”

But if the movie seems to come down on the side of wild comic-book reality, that definitely wasn’t Tashlin’s intention going into the project. Tashlin had done newspaper comics, he’d directed Looney Tunes cartoons, and he had written some excellent children’s books. All of these professions were held in more esteem, at the time, than comic books, and Tashlin really did seem to see Artists and Models as his chance to slam the shoddy, cheap comics that had made a mockery of cartooning. He even said so while the movie was in production, telling a newspaper that the movie would express his feelings about comic books, that the only good comic books on the market were “the historical classics” (which at the time meant adaptation of classic books in comics form), and that he didn’t see why kids wanted to read comics when “Treasure Island is so much better.” He said that as a cartoonist he had done some hack work to make money, but that things had gotten worse in the comic book era.

That anti-comics attitude is all over the movie, of course, since the main comic book reader is Jerry Lewis. Any movie that implies that reading comics will turn you into Jerry Lewis is making a very strong case against reading such things. In case that wasn’t bad enough, the other comic book reader in the movie is Richard (George Winslow) a kid who has been turned into a homicidal maniac by reading comic books (and who also calls Shirley MacLaine “mop-head,” which is as accurate a description of her haircut as any).

But several things happened to make the movie’s attitude much more ambiguous than Tashlin’s own. First, a lot of the anti-comics plot points didn’t make it into the movie, and the ones that did were more anti-corporate than anti-comics. Martin was originally supposed to quit comics after he sees kids imitating the violent actions of his comic book superhero. But in the finished film, he quits after seeing the way his publisher is merchandising the character:

Like most good satirists, Tashlin couldn’t ignore the absurdity in any argument, even the arguments he supported. So the anti-comics crusaders, like Richard’s mother, are portrayed as prissy fools, and Malone, the comic book artist who doesn’t want to draw superhero comics any more, is portrayed as a humorless prig who needs to lighten up. (But, like all the women in the movie who aren’t Kathleen Freeman, absurdly hot nonetheless.)

And finally, as I said, the movie starts like a semi-normal light comedy and gets more and more wild and absurd until it becomes totally insane. This is partly because Tashlin never filmed some script pages that would have tied up the loose ends of the plot. But it’s also because when you watch the movie from beginning to end, it’s like the whole story is taking Lewis’s side, turning the world into a riot of action, splashy color, sexy spies and world-domination plots, just like a comic book. Intentionally or not, final effect is to make us feel like comics, the shame of the ’50s, aren’t really so different from movies, the ultimate middlebrow family entertainment. The ’60s and ’70s directors who loved this movie (like Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, whose movie Celine and Julie Go Boating was sort of an homage to Artists and Models) certainly thought so.

So it’s a movie that has a lot to say about why there was so much worry and panic about comic books in 1955; it’s also a movie that, almost unwittingly, tells us why movies and comic books have now became interchangeable.

Also, it’s got a scene where a chiropractor and/or massage therapist twists Jerry Lewis’s body into a human pretzel. Which satisfies both our need for cartoon slapstick and our need to see Jerry Lewis suffer great pain.

Really clever way to work around Heath Ledger’s death and amazing visuals don’t stop you from noticing that the plot goes all over the place and the movie tends to feel longer than it should; also, Mini-Me gets all the good lines.

I’ve seen this sentiment before, mostly recently expressed here:

Now, yes, it’s James Cameron. You’re not there for stellar dialogue, intricate storytelling, or nuance. And you’re not going to get it.

But this is exactly why Avatar disappoints so on this score: because James Cameron movies traditionally have all of those things. I mean, The Abyss is one of the most ambitious and intelligent science fiction/action movies ever, the Terminator films started a franchise precisely because they were intelligently realized works in addition to being exciting, and Aliens is the best hybrid sci-fi/war/action movie thingy that it could possibly be. Even a lighter work like True Lies is still a pretty clever and smart movie despite having a truly ludicrous premise. All of these films are well-written and, for action movies, willing to be at least somewhat contemplative when it doesn’t harm the pace of the film.

When did this “James Cameron makes dumb films” meme start? Was it Titanic? Because Titanic and Avatar are not endemic of his work: they’re outliers.

Fairly irritating editing from director who has done demonstrably better work in this area overcome by excellent performances and dialogue from principal cast; also, Kurrgan!

Christmas movies mostly suck. Miracle on 34th Street gives me hives. It’s A Wonderful Life is a depressing story told the wrong way. About half of the Christmas Carol adaptations completely miss the point (the exceptions: Muppet, Disney, Sim and the recent Zemeckis). Even a A Christmas Story gets more treacly and unbearable every year. (I will admit to a fondness for Love Actually, but what makes the film bearable are the bitter moments where things don’t work out. Plus Rowan Atkinson’s cameos.)

This is because Christmas is equal parts joyful and depressing. The good Christmas movies understand this, which is why most of the good Christmas movies are dark: black comedies about the human spirit’s capability for love even under the most degraded of circumstances, like Bad Santa, or hyperactive Dickens-on-crack stories like Scrooged, and Gremlins, which isn’t really a Christmas movie per se but come on, it’s Gremlins.

“I had this dream -”
“Do we have to do dreams?”
“I’m in this restaurant, and the waiter brings me my entree. It was a salad. It was Lloyd’s head on a plate of spinach with his penis sticking out of his ear. And I said, ‘I didn’t order this.’ And the waiter said, ‘Oh you must try it, it’s a delicacy. But don’t eat the penis, it’s just garnish.'”
“Lloyd, what do you think about the dream?”
“I think she should stop telling it at dinner parties to all our friends.”

But my favorite Christmas movie is far and away The Ref, because The Ref manages to be a very funny Christmas comedy without needing a super-ridiculous dose of silliness or lunacy beyond the everyday mundane madness of human life.

The plot is simple: Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey are married, and they hate each other. But they don’t just hate each other. That would be simplistic. They each hate what they’ve become – a suburbanite couple stuck in Fuckall, Smugachusetts, essentially living off his mother’s largesse – and they’re both depressed as all hell. And there’s nobody else to blame it on except themselves and each other, so naturally, as many couples do in these situations, they’ve opted for both. They’re miserable and planning a divorce.

This is when Denis Leary shows up. At this point in his career, Leary was already starting to transition away from his well-known “asshole” standup persona, most likely because it obviously bored the shit out of him. He goes on a couple of Learyesque rants through the picture because it’s expected, but he’s not playing Denis Leary – he’s inhabiting his character, a tired aging burglar who hates his life nearly as much as Spacey and Davis hate theirs.

“From now on, the only person who gets to yell is me. Why? Because I have a gun. People with guns get to do whatever they want. Married people without guns – for instance, you – do not get to yell. Why? NO GUNS! No guns, no yelling. See? Simple little equation.”

And so, a hostage situation – starting with the married couple, and extending to their son, home from military academy for the holidays – gradually becomes both an extended drier-than-brut-champagne farce as Leary pretends to be a couples counsellor at Davis and Spacey’s family Christmas celebration, and the trigger event for a series of long-overdue bouts of honesty. Ted Demme (who never made another movie as good as this one, although Beautiful Girls came close) builds up tension slowly until Davis and Spacey finally just blow both their stacks and explode at one another in a way you know they never have, and the genius of their respective performances is that you really get that these are two people who really love one another despite everything, and who’ve completely lost how to tell the other that.

But just summing it up like that makes the movie sound boring. And it’s not boring. It’s fucking hilarious. There is an evil dog and a drunk Santa and a useless sidekick and inept small-town deputies. There are more killer performances in this movie than many movies have cast members – not just Davis and Spacey and Leary (every one excellent), but also one of the great Glynis Johns’ last (and most memorable) roles, plus ever-reliables like Christine Baranski and J.K. Simmons. And, as a special bonus, you get to see a great pair of underappreciated character actors – Robert Ridgely, the king of smarm, and Raymond Barry, normally stuck in “military advisor” gigs – use their chops in what’s arguably the best scene of the entire movie.

“That’s not the spirit of Christmas. The spirit of Christmas is either you’re good, or you’re punished and you burn in hell.”

Someone, I forget who, once said that family are the only people who can tear you down and build you up at the same time. This movie’s all about that. Which is why it’s a classic.

FLAPJACKS: I hate these 3D glasses.
ME: Why?
FLAPJACKS: They make me look like Elvis Costello.
ME: I think that is actually what you wish happened when you had them on.
FLAPJACKS: I totally would if I had the hair and was also much cooler. Besides, you hate them too.
ME: Yeah, but I hate them because the 3D always sucks unless it’s a Pixar movie. The mix of in-focus and still-in-focus-but-not-in-focus is so distracting. In real life, there aren’t fancy staggered levels of sharpness that you see. In real life, things you’re not focusing on are slightly blurry. The movies had already managed to achieve that with regular old cameras. Why do we need to make everything look like a giant Viewmaster reel?
FLAPJACKS: Because it is new and special and therefore better than old and regular!
ME: Sadly accurate. I mean – whoa.
FLAPJACKS: Whoa.
ME: Whoa.
FLAPJACKS. Whoa.
ME: Whoa.
FLAPJACKS: WHOA!
ME: Holy fuck WHOA!
FLAPJACKS: Okay all of that was pretty awesome with the chasing and the flying and the monsters and such.
ME: It almost made me forget that one of the characters actually said “we’re not in Kansas any more.”
FLAPJACKS: Wait, somebody actually said that in this movie?
ME: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: I guess I was too busy being pleased to see that Vasquez actually survived the end of Aliens somehow.
ME: That’s not Vasquez. That’s Michelle Rodriguez being… somebody. I think her character might have a name.
FLAPJACKS: Whatever. She’s Vasquez.
ME: Why do so many of the Nav’i speak fluent English? I mean, did Sigourney Weaver teach everybody English?
FLAPJACKS: Only the important ones. And they taught her Nav’i. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if they totally lied about the meaning of a word to her? And the humans who spoke Nav’i would say things like “honored chief, we have come to bring you tidings of great penis.”
ME: I think that movie would have to star Rob Schneider. James Cameron does not roll like that.
FLAPJACKS: This is true.
ME: Also, it is totally disturbing how all life on this planet basically communicates by rubbing tentacle-genitals against one another.
FLAPJACKS: No, see, the entire planet evolved as a system of something or another. It’s a systemic system of systems. It’s like how we have eyes and dogs have eyes and cats have eyes. All of these things have eyes. And also tentacle-genitals.
ME: Yes, but – whoa.
FLAPJACKS: Whoa.
ME: Whoa!
FLAPJACKS: WHOA!
ME: You know, I have to admit – the Nav’i look totally natural.
FLAPJACKS: There is no uncanny valley.
ME: You only know that concept because of that one episode of 30 Rock.
FLAPJACKS: So?
ME: I’m just sick of critics who learned a new phrase thanks to Tina Fey and want to show off.
FLAPJACKS: Speaking of that episode of 30 Rock, I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to see the blue aliens doing it.
ME: Oh, quit whining. You barely saw anything.
FLAPJACKS: But now it’s in my head.
ME: Okay, the scientists are totally going about this the wrong way with Giovanni Ribisi, Businessman. They should have been all “this entire planet is a gigantic biological computer more advanced than anything we’ve ever imagined. Think about how much that would be worth.”
FLAPJACKS: Wouldn’t work. Giovanni Ribisi, Businessman, is all about the quarterly profit report. I know this because he said “it’s all about the quarterly profit report” at the start of the movie. He is an Exxon-type guy and you are presenting a Google-type business plan. Ne’er shall the two meet, because despite what people might say about Google, Google is never going to hire mercenaries to kill aliens.
ME: They might hire mercenaries to spy on aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Well, that’s Google for you.
ME: The evil mercenary guy just sucks. “Wow, that’s an amazing giant tree. Time to blow it up, I guess.” How am I supposed to hate somebody this lame?
FLAPJACKS: Well, he did kill Sigourney Weaver.
ME: Until this movie came out, I thought Sigourney Weaver was dead. And then it turned out that it was just her career that was dead. If James Cameron can bring her back from Hollywood death, she will be back again in Avatar 2: Avatarz In The Hood.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, but whoa!
ME: WHOA!
FLAPJACKS: WHOA!
ME: What the shit whoa!
FLAPJACKS: MOTHERFUCKING WHOA!
ME: Aw, Michelle Rodriguez died.
FLAPJACKS: Vasquez isn’t dead until I see a body.
ME: See, I’m of two minds about this turn of events. On the one hand, the idea of Nature Itself rising up to fight the evil mercenaries and their warbots is incredibly dorky. But on the other hand, it looks completely fucking awesome.
FLAPJACKS: So why didn’t you like Transformers 2?
ME: Because despite the vast amount of money they spent to make that movie, Michael Bay is completely incapable of shooting a decent single shot, let alone a scene, or editing together a scene that looks coherent, or anything at all really. Even Michael Bay’s explosions are crappy, and given that all he really has a rep for is explosions, that’s just sad.
FLAPJACKS: That’s not true. He also has a reputation for bizarre editing decisions!
ME: This movie, on the other hand, is made by James Cameron, and even if the story frequently gets formulaic, illogical, or just plain stupid, it will look goddamned shitballs amazing, because James Cameron knows how to direct an action sequence like nobody’s business. Nobody else in Hollywood period can direct a scene with six billion things fighting six billion other things in it without it looking busy and incoherent and essentially impossible to watch: they’re directing the scene for DVD playback so nerds can jerk off to the one Jedi in the bottom of frame four million and twenty-three. James Cameron, on the other hand, says “twelve billion guys having a giant war? Hmmm.” And then he thinks about it for five years and then figures out how to make it look completely awesome and entirely involving all at once.
FLAPJACKS: All that thinking about making it look awesome probably came at the expense of making the story be, like, good.
ME: Yeah, but who cares when it looks this great? Because – oh come on, why does the giant robot have a knife? What the fuck, James Cameron? The giant robot should not have its own machete in a pop-out scabbard!
FLAPJACKS: Maybe the war robot was designed by Boy Scouts. Or the Swiss. Or Swiss Boy Scouts.
ME: And the movie ends with Sam Worthington failing to disguise his Aussie accent yet again as he turns into a Nav’i all permanent-like. I smell sequel.
FLAPJACKS: Hopefully written by Not James Cameron. Also, not by Michael Bay. We can’t set our standards too low here.
ME: Good thinking, but if you’re not more careful with your qualifications it’ll end up getting written by Paul Haggis. “Nav’i and humans are both racist!”
FLAPJACKS: Or it’ll get written by Akiva Goldsman and it’ll end with a tattoo on some extraneous character’s back being a sign from God – sorry, the planet – that dying to make a point is what has to happen here, or something like that.
ME: Or it’ll get written by Joss Whedon and there will be a secret order of female Nav’i who hunt vampires.
FLAPJACKS: I would probably go see that one.

Someone oughta edit a Youtube where Sandra Bullock, the abusive boss in The Proposal, falls in love with Sandra Bullock, the unappreciated assistant in Two Weeks’ Notice.

If you do this you owe me a million dollars.

Exhibit A: the poster for Pirate Radio.

First, consider the original poster for The Boat That Rocked, when it was released in Britain with its original (superior) title.

This is a pretty clever poster. Obviously, it’s a reference to the cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, but smartly combined with the walking-off-a-plank motif which both suggests the pirate nature of the radio station as well as a hint to how things are going to end (it is not a spoiler to say that, yes, eventually the British government did manage to get the pirate stations shut down). It’s simple. It doesn’t try to do too much, and as a result it’s still a bit enigmatic without being obscure.

But apparently that wasn’t enough!

Now, this isn’t, one supposes, a bad poster. Certainly there are worse. But come on: this is lame. You completely lose the Abbey Road reference by shuffling around the order of the four principal actors and then adding the young but mostly unimportant male viewpoint character and the female character who is in the movie for maybe seven minutes tops (because young audiences don’t care about boring old Bill Nighy and Philip Seymour Hoffman!). Hoffman and Rhys Ifans have their heads cocked towards the camera acknowledging the viewer for absolutely no reason. And just in case you didn’t see the trailer and in case the young pretty fellow and the pair of tits did not convince you that these are actually for reals cool people, I guess we’d better add a boat full of screaming fans! That way you, as the viewer, know that Philip Seymour Hoffman is playing somebody cool for once, rather than boring old Lester Bangs who listens to records at three in the morning, or a possibly-gay priest who feuds with Meryl Streep.

AND IT’S THE SIXTIES Y’ALL SO LET’S MENTION THE SOUNDTRACK!

Honestly. Sometimes I am amazed that Hollywood actually ever manages to make a great poster anymore.

EDIT TO ADD: I think what really turns me off about the second poster is its rank desperation. ‘Look at me,” it says, “I got pretty young people, just like you like! They’re even English! I tried to get Robert Pattinson, I know how you like Robert Pattinson, but he wasn’t available. And don’t you like this boat? Full of screaming teenagers! You like that, right? Whyyyyyy don’t you liiiiiiike meeee?“