When I saw all the reviews for Bridesmaids calling it The 40 Year Old Virgin for ladies, I’d assumed that was just typical movie reviewer laziness, desperate to come up with a pithy one-liner. But sure enough, it is pretty much exactly what it says on the box: a Judd Apatow movie with all the genders reversed.

Which is weird, because Judd Apatow movies already struck me as kind of girly. Lots of guys chatting with their friends about their feelings before finding their soulmate and going on to a happy ending. And for all the raunchy reputation, they were predominately conservative: a story about the value of abstinence or maturing into a responsible father and husband (and avoiding abortion). They already seemed targeted at all of us guys who weren’t being properly serviced by all the Jason Statham and Vin Diesel movies. Basically: romantic comedies with all the genders reversed.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I liked 40 Year Old Virgin well enough and Knocked Up a lot. And Bridesmaids is pretty funny and enjoyable. And it’s enjoyable for exactly the same reasons: the marketing emphasizes the raunchiness, but there’s nothing remotely transgressive or subversive about any of these movies. Even with Melissa McCarthy shitting into a sink and Maya Rudolph taking a dump in the middle of the street and the other women vomiting on top of each other.

What is unusual about Bridesmaids and these other movies is that they have likable, semi-realistic characters stumbling through otherwise formulaic romantic comedies. Kristen Wiig gets plenty of opportunities to do almost all her schtick from Saturday Night Live, but there are just as many scenes where she’s having conversations that don’t sound written, with people she has a genuine chemistry with. Sure, I’ll pay to watch Wiig hang out with Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd from “The IT Crowd.” Those moments are the real appeal.

Well, those moments along with any scene with Melissa McCarthy, because she pretty much runs away with the whole movie. (I didn’t realize that her seatmate on the plane is played by her real life husband, which is kind of awesome).

You still end up with those semi-realistic moments pumping up a formulaic structure that’s threatening to collapse in on itself. I started to wonder whether they put so much emphasis on Kristen Wiig having written the script with a Groundlings colleague because if it were written by a man, it’d be laughably sexist. Granted, I’m one of the least qualified people on the planet to speak about “what women like,” but so much of the movie seems like videogame companies’ attempts to pander to female players by putting in more shopping and making everything pink. Bridesmaids has: a career woman with low self-esteem, having sex with Jon Hamm, planning her best friend’s wedding, jealous of a (ostensibly) younger and prettier woman who eventually gets her comeuppance, and finding a cute and funny cop she can fall in love with and also he has an accent.

(One of my favorite things about the movie is that they just cast the charming guy they liked and didn’t spend any more than a token attempt to explain how he could be Irish and a cop).

Of course, the romantic comedies for him show dudes getting stoned, playing videogames, spending all day at work, and going out to bars to try and get laid. So maybe at some point you’ve just got to relax and and stop getting so hung up about reinforcing stereotypes.

By the time they got to the extraordinarily conventional ending of Bridesmaids, I’d already gotten enough genuinely pleasant entertainment out of it to give the rest a pass. But after two hours (it’s really too long), plus an additional 15 minutes of trailers so clearly not directed at me that I’d considered slinking out into a cartoon or another screening of Thor, I started to wonder if I was witnessing the white dwarf-like implosion of an entire genre of movie.

All of the trailers (except for Super 8) were for interchangeable, near-indistinguishable chick movies, plus the inspiring story of a woman writer who overcomes a rich racist white woman, and a movie where womanizer Ryan Reynolds does a Freaky Friday with married man Justin Bateman after they both piss in a magic fountain. So: girly movies that are advertising themselves as being edgier than girly movies.

The worst offender was for a movie with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake as friends-with-benefits who — gasp! — might actually be falling in love. The characters deliberately set out to defy “Hollywood romantic comedy cliches,” and the trailer even has a scene with Kunis complaining about Katherine Heigl movies and screaming at a poster of The Ugly Truth. In a movie that has exactly the same premise as No Strings Attached, a near-identical romantic comedy that came out just this year.

It’s a kind of self-loathing that pervades these movies. Bridesmaids is also being packaged and sold as an antidote to the typical chick movie, even though the most appealing scenes, the only scenes that make it feel unique, are the ones that are the girliest: two women having a genuine conversation with each other.

Talking about this movie requires me to be a little crass, so be forewarned: Watching Sucker Punch is like getting an unwanted erection.

Every guy has had to deal with it: you’re walking along, perfectly content with your high-minded Dr. Jekyll life, and then you see or hear or taste something that makes Mr. Hyde assert himself, and you’re left with nothing but a disappointed, “Oh, man. Really?!” (And I know it happens to every guy or else there wouldn’t be Catholicism).

Sucker Punch isn’t a very clever or thought-provoking movie. I don’t even think it was all that original; I kept having the vague sense that all the imagery already exists somewhere in a pop art gallery or a sci-fi magazine. But despite that, you cannot deny that it has reasonably hot women fighting clockwork zombie Huns with railguns in alternate-history WWI trenches and a battle mech styled like a WWII bomber.

Against my better judgment, I’m hard-wired to like this.

Other things I’m hard-wired to like: “Army of Me” by Björk. Samurai. Giant samurai who shoot light out of the hole when you slice them up with a katana. German blimps over a ruined cathedral. Orcs, goblins, and dragons, and orcs getting cut up by helicopter blades. “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles. Space trains on the moon of a ringed planet. Studebakers. Jon Hamm.

Sucker Punch is only — self-consciously — a list of those things. It’s got a framing story that should be just an excuse to string all those things together. A young woman’s wrongly committed to a mental institution by her wicked stepfather, and she plans to escape an impending lobotomy by distracting her captors with passionate dance sequences that we never see, but which take her into a series of fantasy worlds. Also the institution’s a brothel, somehow, or maybe it’s not. And the whole thing is either a fairy tale story or a stage play.

That framing story is 90% of the problem: it’s a half-assed effort to make a adolescent male fantasy T&A movie that makes a commentary on T&A movies. I left the movie thinking that I just didn’t understand Zack Snyder at all. Which would be worse? If he genuinely thought he was making something significant, or if he knew exactly how insignificant the movie was, but added the framing story in an attempt to defend himself against making something so shallow?

This interview with Synder on Movieline sheds a little light on the creative process, and it’s pretty grim. It sounds like he was making a completely sincere, genuine attempt at the standard movie-audiences-as-voyeurs theme.

Except it’s all kind of clumsy and ham-fisted. Symbolism is fine; symbolism deliberately simplified for adolescents is pandering. The movie starts out with a curtain opening on a stage and a voiceover about stories and then segues into a dialogue-free backstory music video, all to make it clear that you’re watching a story. A short time later, a montage showing what’s going to happen to our heroine shifts into a rehearsal for a stage play. One of the characters angrily walks off stage, asking what kind of audience would want to see a beautiful woman be lobotomized. It doesn’t come across as cleverly self-referential so much as Synder covering his ass.

There’s no sense of discovery or interpretation. It’s not like art, but more like Cliff’s Notes of art. It smashes together all the elements that usually add depth to movies — self-reference, implicating the audience, using imagery and symbolism — but then leaves them lying there, inert. By the end, it’s all just muddled and meaningless, defying any attempt to make sense of it. There’s a lot of gross violence towards women towards the end of the movie; is it genuinely misogynistic, or is it just intended to be a contrast to the girls-kick-ass fantasy of the last hour and a half? I honestly couldn’t tell.

I hate the whole concept of the “you just have to turn your brain off” defense of bad movies. But I actually wish Sucker Punch had abandoned the pretense of commentary and just embraced its role as spectacle. This isn’t like Transformers or National Treasure; movies like those are doomed to failure, because they’re too literal. They insist on aping real movies, they don’t have enough imagination to turn into pure fantasy, so they fail as both story and spectacle. If Sucker Punch hadn’t tried to make a weak attempt at absolving itself of being T&A, it could’ve landed safely in the zone of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow-style spectacle.

Instead, it gives up any notion of Sky Captain‘s self-aware fun, and tries to have Kill Bill‘s self-aware significance. But while the fantastic imagery of Sucker Punch works on a gut level — again, it’s a really pretty movie, even when it’s being ugly — it doesn’t feel as innovative or exhilarating as Kill Bill. Both take images they’ve seen elsewhere and throw them together onto the screen, but one feels as if it’s creating something more out of them, the other feels like it’s just regurgitating them. There’s not the same sense of inspiration.

It’s such a retread that I spent the whole movie being creeped out that they’d somehow CG-reanimated David Carradine, only to get to the credits and realize that the part of David Carradine was being played by Scott Glenn.

One other thing about inspiration: when I first saw the posters and trailer for Sucker Punch, I made up a version of the movie’s origins that has nothing to do with reality but is a lot funnier. I imagined that Zack Snyder had just made 300, an unabashed, balls-out fuck-yeah war movie for MEN. And he was stunned to release it and discover he’d just unintentionally made one of the gayest of gay movies ever. (Right down to the obligatory self-loathing bits).

So, undaunted, he tried to overcompensate by making a movie that was nothing but hot chicks in all kinds of skimpy outfits shooting guns at monsters and zombies. And he borrowed from all the least homo sources he could think of: Women in prison b-movies! War movies! Dragonslaying epics! 90s sci-fi action! (I’m assuming the only reason there’s not a drift-racing sequence in Sucker Punch is because of studio interference). It’d be a mash-up of his own visual style with Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction and The Lord of the Rings and Aliens, and all he needed was a distinctive style for the framing story of his totally not-gay adolescent male fantasy…

Moulin Rouge! Perfect! I’d known that I was just making shit up based on a poster, but my theory was totally blown out of the water when Sucker Punch started out just like a Baz Luhrmann movie. Which may be part of why I was predisposed to like it. In retrospect, it was wrong of me to make unfair assumptions, because for all its grossness, there’s really not that much to feel strongly about. If anything, it feels so slight partly because it’s so sheepish and ashamed to be objectifying women and showing so much gratuitous T&A&E (explosions). I hate to go out on a blurb-ready closing line, but: it’s got all the punch of the posters in a teenage boy’s bedroom.

This is in response to my friend Matt Dessem’s comments on another post, but it got too long for a comment box and stopped being about The Adjustment Bureau, so I’m starting a new one. Read the comments for context, along with the article that started the conversation: “The Day the Movies Died” by Mark Harris.

First off, I think the fact that The Rock is coming to the Criterion Collection is more evidence of the death of Hollywood than anything else. (I actually liked that movie, for what it was, which was Sean Connery chewing scenery and Nicholas Cage before he totally lost all his appeal. But it is most definitely the lowest of low art).

I’m not saying that I want the theater experience to go away completely, because even a mall multiplex gives a movie the feeling of an Event, even when there’s nobody else in the theater. But I do believe that a movie’s got to “earn” it. If it costs me $25 to see a movie in San Francisco (including parking and such), then I’m just not going unless it’s got lasers or Coen brothers. (Or both, which would be awesome).

You could make the case, as Mark Harris tries to, that that means I’ve given up on entertainment as Art. That I’m a man-child who’s abandoned any pretense of quality and am complicit in the death of movies. (Based on what I’ve been watching and reading lately, you could make a pretty convincing case). But I say that I’m just acknowledging that the media have changed in the past 30 years. It doesn’t make sense to cling to this outdated notion of a hierarchy of entertainment, with cinema resting comfortably at the top both in quality and in revenue.

Here are some of Matt’s comments, out of order:

And we agree that the most interesting work in drama is being done on television, and the audience is there in that format. I’m not going to get all weepy about the communal experience of going to a theater (I guess I will if pressed) but okay: drama’s still there, and TV has an unecessary stigma (although it’s not just self-important people in SoCal: remember that HBO’s slogan is still “It’s not TV. It’s HBO”). Of course, Mad Men, a pretty expensive TV show, has a budget of less than $5 million per hour; AMC couldn’t produce The Social Network if they wanted to. Not without a theatrical release, anyway.

Although it may sound like it, I don’t want to lose the communal experience of going to a theater, either. I just think that the idea of the cinema being the pinnacle of entertainment, with everything else being inferior, is an idea that needs to die.

Why couldn’t AMC have made The Social Network? I haven’t seen it, but I’m pretty confident that it didn’t have a super expensive post-production, or any particularly exotic locations. I think that it’s all based on inflation — it’s expensive not because of anything inherent to the movie, but simply because it’s a movie.

So many people in Hollywood and observing Hollywood seem to take this as a given, but then go on to make arguments about quality as if it were somehow related. But a movie like Avatar would be expensive even if James Cameron weren’t attached. A movie like The Social Network is expensive only because David Fincher’s attached. (And, I’m guessing, Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake and even Aaron Sorkin now that he’s not slumming in television).

For that matter, Transformers was an inherently expensive movie. But the thing that all of us hate to acknowledge is that it made all its money back. (According to IMDB). I agree that Transformers — and I’m assuming the sequel, although I didn’t and will never see it because the first one was such an abomination — was a steaming pile of shit. (It’s a little surprising that Michael Bay and Shia LeBeouf both thought the sequel was crap and perversely charming that Bay sees it as a misstep in an otherwise artistically valid franchise). But I disagree about what it says about the movie industry:

You write that “a theatrical release, and the huge marketing budget that it requires, demands a certain level of spectacle.” I think you have it exactly backwards: a certain level of spectacle demands a huge marketing budget, especially when the film has nothing else to recommend it. It costs a tremendous amount of money to convince people, even for one weekend, that chicken shit is chicken salad, and that money crowds everything else out of the theaters, because every other movie has to open wide, and there’s no way to get the kind of press you need without spending a fortune, and an actor who’s just been paid $20 million to be in a film that they knew was shitty might take less to be in a great film… but not much less. It’s a positive feedback loop, and it’s not just crowding out dramas, it’s devouring its own tail.

I think you’re overestimating the box office draw of quality, and even overestimating how much power marketing has over audiences. Few things annoy me more than the “you just have to turn your brain off” defense of movies, but again, that’s talking about quality, which is near irrelevant to a discussion about the Bay-Bruckheimerization of Hollywood. People start off with a valid complaint about these movies as being assaults on the very notion of goodness, but then they invariably throw in money as if the two ideas were at all related. I think that a lot of the complaints about Bay being a shitty filmmaker are actually complaints that he’s such a good businessman.

I will definitely agree that Hollywood has become too obsessed with judging success/failure on the basis of first weekend box office, but I don’t agree that spectacle necessarily obviates quality and therefore demands a larger budget. Your Transformers 2 example proves that, in fact. The people who went to see Transformers 2 didn’t want a good movie; to hear some of them talk about it, they would’ve been distracted by a good movie. They wanted cars and hot chicks in cut-offs working on cars and robots fighting and helicopters and explosions. That stuff attracts audiences to theaters, but it’s expensive.

I don’t believe that the marketing money was designed to convince audiences that Transformers 2 was a good movie; I believe it was to tell audiences that Transformers 2 exists. To drown out the billions of other things fighting for their attention, to say “hey look lasers and robots are here.” If anything, it was for the studio’s benefit, not the audiences’. The studio spent millions on the lasers and robots, and they’re going to spend millions to make sure that nobody blames them for not marketing the movie sufficiently.

And I actually think it’s more condescending to say that Hollywood is tricking audiences into believing that “chicken shit is chicken salad,” than it is just to acknowledge that there’s an audience that just plain doesn’t care about the distinction. That doesn’t mean that that audience is stupid — many of them are, surely, but not $400,000,000 worth. But to claim that they’re being hoodwinked into watching cars turn into robots assumes that they are all stupid enough not to see through the marketing hype, even though everyone our age and younger has been trained since adolescence to pride ourselves on seeing through marketing hype. I think it’s a lot more reasonable to assume that you’re just underestimating the inherent draw of cars turning into robots.

For all I know, 90% of the audience left the spectacle they paid good money for, and went home to finish reading Infinite Jest. A novel I could probably have finished reading in the time I’ve spent complaining about how dumb it is for people to pay to see Transformers 2.

…by the time Bay is making Armageddon, the economics are such that you can’t make an R-rated spectacle film, not if you want to make your money back. Big spectacle movies are crowding out other big spectacle movies. You couldn’t make The Rock today, which is no great loss, But you also couldn’t make Alien, or Aliens, or The Terminator or any of the big scifi films of the 1980s (except for the ones with Jedis). You’d have to make them PG-13, and that’s new in the last fifteen years. You don’t get to make In the Mountains of Madness, the screenplay for which reads like an 80′s horror/sci-fi film. I’m not surprised, but I don’t like it.

But here’s the thing that so many of us forget, because the world in the 1980s is so alien to us now. I can still remember in around 1986 when I first went into a Blockbuster video — there was only one in the metro Atlanta area, and it was a good 20 miles from my house — and it absolutely blew my mind. They had hundreds of movies, and I could take any of them home to watch as much as I wanted for two whole nights!

Now, of course, I’ve got 10 movies I’ve ripped sitting on a hard drive waiting for me to watch them, plus a DVD from Netflix that I’ve had out for over a month, plus about 8 movies from HBO that I’ve got sitting on the DVR yet to be watched, plus all of Netflix’s Watch Instantly catalog, plus a few DVD’s that I’ve bought and are still in the shrink wrap, plus Amazon and iTunes and Xbox and Sony all trying to get me to download more. Not to mention the five channels of HBO that are showing full-length unedited feature films right now, while I choose to read and write plain text on a 15″ laptop monitor.

Also: the Video Toaster wouldn’t be released for another few years, and that would be the first exposure anybody in the consumer market had to “industry-quality” CGI. Now, people are throwing The Last Starfighter caliber effects into YouTube videos. Hell, I’ve got a still camera that shoots HD video. And people with talent can produce stuff to rival Hollywood of 5-10 years ago, at least, on a meager budget.

So the stuff that was inherently expensive about making Terminator or Alien (if not Aliens) is stupid cheap now. And there are dozens of channels to distribute it, not just a wide theatrical release. So is the problem really that you don’t get to make it, or is it that you don’t get 50 million dollars from a studio to make it?

That’s what I mean when I say that these are complaints about money disguised as complaints about quality. You can indeed make a good, intelligent R-rated sci-fi film these days, if you’re dedicated to what you’re making. And it’ll most likely barely recoup its cost. And you can blame that on its getting crowded out by higher-profile sci-fi movies, or poor marketing from the studio, or the fact that it was an R-rated movie, or that audiences were too stupid to appreciate it.

Or you can acknowledge that theater audiences weren’t in the mood for late-70s style psychological science fiction. But it would’ve been an amazing TV movie for the cost of what you quote as one episode of Mad Men. Or hell, Charlie Sheen’s salary alone for 5 episodes of Two and a Half Men. I think the audience is totally out there; it’s just not in the same place it was when Terminator got released. (Not to mention, of course that Terminator is a better film in a lot of ways, as well as being an easier sell. As lackluster as James Cameron’s post-Aliens movies have been, you have to admit the guy knows how to put a movie together).

Being risk averse isn’t new, the 70s were an anomaly, and in twenty years the only movies from 2010 anyone will know are the great ones. I do think it’s funny that you used Barton Fink to illustrate that it’s always been this way, because I don’t think that movie gets made today. The Coen Brothers directed 10 original features between 1984 and 2003. Since then, they’ve directed two more original features, but also two remakes and one adaptation of a novel. Their next film is a remake. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great remakes and adaptations, but still.

But still… what? While I disagree with the idea that wide-release film is the pinnacle of entertainment, I can at least see where the idea’s coming from. But the notion that adaptations, sequels, and remakes are somehow inferior to original stories is one I just don’t get at all, and it keeps getting trotted out as the downfall of the medium.

Just for the Coen Brothers: O Brother Where Art Thou was an adaptation of The Odyssey, and apparently Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski are loose pastiches of Raymond Chandler stories.

Almost all of Hitchcock’s best movies (except North by Northwest) were based on books or short stories. One of his best movies was a remake (of his own movie, sure, but it still counts).

11 of my 25 most favorite movies are either remakes, sequels, or adaptations (or some combination thereof). (I’m counting Airplane! and Young Frankenstein because they’re both parodies of other movies). And 9 of the 16 runners-up are, too. Take a look at the IMDB Top 250 and as far as I counted, it’s got a pretty similar ratio. Most of the other “best movies” lists I’ve been able to find on the internet (apart from Roger Ebert’s, which only has 2001: A Space Odyssey) are the same.

There’s nothing new about remakes or adaptations, or even having a rash of them in the same year. Granted, the current trend is to have a glut of them, most of them unnecessary, but Hollywood does trends. We all know that. The tornado fad was short-lived, the Western fad lasted forever, luckily we all survived the first fad of disaster movies and later the subsequent remakes. In Barton Fink it was boxing pictures, if I remember correctly.

And it’s no secret that I think the Coen Brothers are the greatest living filmmakers, but they’re also my go-to example of why we should be optimistic whenever anybody talks about the death of cinema. Because they prove not only that talent makes all the difference, but also that having enough talent and business sense can prevail in a business that doesn’t particularly care about quality.

I’m assuming that making a successful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel is what allowed them to make their Existentialist Midwestern Jewish Dread movie. But True Grit doesn’t feel like they sacrificed anything at all. It’s not just that it’s a better movie than the last adaptation of the novel; it’s that it’s so good, it makes the last movie seem laughably unnecessary and even makes the book it’s based on feel like a novelization. Seriously: it is such a Coen Brothers movie that I still have a hard time believing the book was written in 1968. (And based on the very little I’ve read about Portis’s other books, I feel as if I’ve stumbled onto a treasure trove of unfilmed Coen Brothers movies).

And if you were to tell me that Raising Arizona was based on a book or was a remake of some obscure European comedy, it wouldn’t do anything to make it less of a brilliant movie. So great filmmakers can make great films out of just about anything, even comic books.

So maybe the argument is that in today’s Hollywood, studios are only willing to invest in the known selling power of remakes and adaptations, and even proven geniuses like the Coens aren’t immune to the system. But: we’ve all heard of the John Wayne True Grit, but is there some big-market draw to Gambit that I’m just not aware of? Or for that matter, The Ladykillers? After The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Hudsucker Proxy, I’m more inclined to believe they’re methodically working their way through all of the film genres that they love, and whether or not there’s actual source material is kind of an afterthought.

I can believe that Barton Fink could get made today. A Serious Man — another weird, R-rated, high-concept, hard-sell movie — got made two years ago. For that matter, Black Swan got made last year (although, granted, the promise of Natalie Portman making out with Mila Kunis probably helped with the marketing). The only part that worries me is that the Coens already, back in 1991, ruthlessly mocked the idea of the tortured cineaste fighting valiantly for Art against an industry that only cares about money (and they were making fun of themselves!), but we still react as if it’s a tragedy when people try to sell a product that no one wants to buy.

Every few years I read an article about the imminent death of the movie industry because of insert current trend here. And every year there are unique movies that somehow get made, but they’re either not mentioned, or they’re treated as a fluke. A fluke that repeats every year. I’m no Hollywood insider, but the only trend that I see as permanent is that wide-release theatrical movies are getting more and more expensive to make. (Big surprise there). But it’s not a crisis, because wide-release theatrical movies don’t have the monopoly on entertainment — filmmakers have the option to fight the system or work within the system to champion an idea they believe in strongly enough, or to get over their egos and release it on a channel with less resistance.

The Adjustment Bureau is the best movie I’ve seen based on a Philip K. Dick story. Yeah, I went there.

I haven’t read the story it was based on, but the synopsis provided by Wikipedia suggests that there’s little in common with the movie apart from the most basic premise. And it’s not particularly surprising that Dick in 1954 wrote a story of existential dread, while Hollywood in 2011 made a love story with undertones of a mediation on free will. It may be an example of a new genre: the romantic thriller.

The movie is significantly more grounded, a little less imaginative, and a lot less European than Wings of Desire, but I thought there were a lot of similarities. Angels working behind the scenes — I’m a total sucker for a setup like this, especially when there’s a glaze of old-fashioned sentimentality over the whole thing.

And the romance actually works. The angels in fedoras [note: they're not overly explicitly called angels in the film] are a neat enough visual, but the movie really depends on the chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. It really works, and it feels genuine. Even Soderberghian.

Something I’d never quite realized about romantic comedies or dramas in the past: in almost all of them, you’re rooting for the relationship because you like the characters. (Or they’re bland enough that you can project whatever personality you like onto them). But while I wasn’t particularly charmed by either of the main characters in The Adjustment Bureau, I was charmed by their banter with each other. So it’s the kind of couple that you really want to see get together, and then go away and never hang out with you.

Also of note: the movie couldn’t quite decide whether to use John Slattery or Terrence Stamp, so it cast them both. Weird.

Last week my friend Matt Dessem linked to an article by Mark Harris in GQ titled “The Day the Movies Died”, which complains how animation and movies based on comic books are both catering to and perpetuating a market of young males in a constant state of arrested development. As a result, Hollywood has killed the adult drama and, by extension, the entire film industry.

I’ve got more problems with that article than I have time to cover now. All I’ll say is that a movie like this is a perfect example of how the article misses the point. Harris sees a rigidly divided hierarchy of media, in which the highest tier of cinema is being overrun with infantilizing man-child fantasies, driving intelligent films to the wastelands of premium or even basic cable. I see a billion different media channels fighting for my attention, each capable of its own highs and lows. It’s a pretty significant investment to make the trip to a theater except for the spectacle that only a huge screen and overpriced concessions can provide. I’m not paying ten bucks plus parking to see The Kids Are All Right if I can get the whole explosion-free experience on my TV screen.

The Adjustment Bureau isn’t cinéma vérité, but it’s a novel idea that doesn’t patronize the audience, and it’s not overloaded with effects. In terms of fantastic visuals, it’s about on par with an AT&T commercial. But it is the type of story that’s improved by seeing it in a theater. Show me more of that, and I’ll keep making the trip, even without 3D or IMAX.

[REC] came out in 2007 in Spain, and it was popular enough to get a sequel and also an American remake called Quarantine. And I say good for them, because it’s a clever idea well executed. You can tell the filmmakers are fans of horror making a horror movie for other fans.

It’s relatively low budget and was done in the first-person-movie style, but unlike Cloverfield (which came out a few months later), instead of watching annoying 20-something New Yorkers get eaten by a giant monster, you’re watching annoying Barcelonians locked in an apartment building and attacked by zombies. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, they used a steadier camera (it’s a professional TV crew in the fiction), and you don’t have to wait until the end of the movie for something interesting to happen. Unlike Paranormal Activity, something actually happens in the movie, and it doesn’t make you angry and sad about the gullibility of the American public that a movie so stupid and pointless could become so inexplicably popular.

Quarantine is the reason the movie’s easy to find in the US, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to see it instead of the original. I’m not saying it to be one of those people on the internet talking about horror movies — the fact that I’m just now writing about a 4-year-old movie should be evidence enough of that, plus I think The Ring is ten times better than the original — but because just looking at stills from the remake annoys me. It looks like every cliche come to life about Hollywood taking a pretty novel, original idea and ruining it.

And by that I mean that [REC] just works, even when it shouldn’t. It starts out as a scrappy indie film that tests the limits of the “found footage” gimmick, works up to a couple of pretty good scenes and then one fantastic moment. (If you’ve seen the movie: it’s the fall).

It starts to drift away from the gimmick a bit — sound effects, especially guns, that aren’t right; and a rewind/fast-forward bit that’s a little jarring — and it turns into a tight-but-predictable zombie movie. The tension ramps up, then it takes a brief side-trip into “Blue’s Clues” or “Dora the Explorer,” as the two ostensibly smartest characters keep asking each other for a bit of information that one of the other characters mentioned earlier, but they can’t remember. As they’re standing in front of the guy who’s been recording everything that happened that evening, and already re-wound the video once.

After that, it’s about 15-20 minutes of full-on Halloween haunted house. Right down to the climax, which sounds like something a teenager, or the designer of a Japanese survival horror game, would come up with. I’ve got to give them credit: they kept to the main storytelling gimmick and still managed to give the ending some exposition.

But at the end, you won’t miss the clever indie zombie movie you may have been hoping to see, because the cheap-scares haunted house is so well done. Pacing is excellent throughout, and the make up and sound effects are well done. Plus there’s just something inherently scary about first-person shots, and they take advantage of every variation, right down to the Silence of the Lambs night vision.

So ultimately, it’s not some obscure burst of creativity like The Devil’s Backbone, or a plucky low-budget upstart like The Blair Witch Project. It does, however, feel like an old-fashioned, fun B-movie, and it’s worth reading some subtitles to avoid seeing a slick Hollywood production drain all the life out of it.

Edit: When I say that looking at the stills of the remake annoys me, this shot is exactly what I mean. What TV video camera has depth of field like that? Or lighting like any of those shots? That’s not being picky, either, it’s just completely missing the central gimmick of the movie. Like explaining where The Birds came from.

When In Bruges came out in 2008, I was looking forward to seeing it because Bruges is one of the few cities in Europe I’ve been to. I must’ve been around 11 or 12 years old, and I’ve remembered it ever since as being fantastic, right from a fairytale, the perfect setting for a movie. I didn’t make a big effort to see it at the time because I’d assumed it was just another British gangster movie like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch.

I think I was right on both counts, to some degree. In the special features, writer and director Martin McDonagh says that the impetus of the story was his own vacation to the city. He says that part of him was enchanted by the city and enjoyed sightseeing, but eventually he grew to hate it and just wanted to get back to a real city. The two sides of his character are represented by the two main characters. They also, conveniently, represent my own opinion of the movie: part of me was very pleasantly surprised and impressed by the movie’s depth and soul. The rest of me won’t shut up with my various criticisms and irritating nitpicks.

All of the performances were good, especially Colin Farrell, who was excellent. Except for all the whispering in heavy Irish accents, which made subtitles necessary. And more significantly, it didn’t take long to realize that Farrell’s charisma and looks are the only things that make his character tolerable. Since the entire movie hinges on having sympathy for his character, everything falls apart once you spend any time thinking about his character as if he were an actual person.

It’s a story with a very unconventional premise and structure, and you’re intrigued from the opening narration. But then, once you get past the twist at the halfway point, the rest of the premise plays out pretty much exactly as you’d expect it to.

One of the movie’s strongest aspects is the way it humanizes its characters, turning a gangster story into a character study about honor and a meditation on morality, childhood, and lost innocence. But again, once you think about it for a few seconds, it evaporates. It tries to have it both ways with the whole schtick of being offensive on the surface but with a heart of gold on the inside; the movie tries to play the message of we’re-all-in-this-together but ultimately just says it’s okay to make fun of gays and overweight people. And the all-encompassing problem: it’s based on this idea of a warrior code of honor among gangsters, which isn’t just hopelessly over-used at this point; it’s a concept that’s total horseshit.

There’s a wisely deleted scene on the DVD with the current Dr. Who playing Ralph Fiennes’s character in a flashback. It’s interesting because it shows just how close the movie was to being just another millennial gangster movie: it’s inept and affected, as if it were aping Quentin Tarantino without his flair for visuals, or Guy Ritchie without whatever it is that made Guy Ritchie famous. Any aspirations to depth simply disappear; what seemed like a genuine, heartfelt, humanizing message suddenly feels like empty hipster artifice.

Despite my complaints; I did enjoy the movie and I’d still recommend it. I just would encourage everyone in the audience to watch it to its conclusion and refrain from thinking about it at all the moment it ends.

Incidentally, I didn’t link to the Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB page for the movie like I usually do, because each has a minor spoiler right on the front. One of the most clever aspects of the screenplay was how it gradually set up the mystery of why the characters are in Bruges in the first place, then doled out relevant bits of the back-story at exactly the right times. It’s best if you know nothing about the movie other than that it’s about hitmen and a city in Belgium.