I had a very important discussion last night with both my wife and my good friend Richard. I’ve had a lot swirling around my head the past few weeks, mostly centered around the treatment of LGBT people in America and – by extension – the United Methodist Church, the church I call home. These thoughts kicked off with the UMC’s General Conference, which decides policy for the international church, being unable to agree that they disagree on how LGBT people should be received in the church – a turn of Onion-caliber satire that would be hilarious if it were not harming and disenfranchising actual human beings.

The UMC took steps back. North Carolina took us back even further, by pulling the ultimate Dick Move and “affirming” that the sacred, traditional definition of marriage – now a hoary 45 years old – remains sacrosanct, even though it’s already illegal for anyone else to get married in the eyes of the state. Like I say, Dick Move.

Finally there was Obama’s evolution, or whatever you want to call it, where he made the significant gesture of being the first sitting president to support marriage rights for all. Lots of discussion about whether this gesture was token, calculated, a ploy, or something he was forced into – but honestly, who the fuck cares? Politicians don’t act until they’re backed into a corner, that’s what happened here, and no one is more aware of that than LGBT people. This one was a win. This is not another leg of the horse race to them. This is their lives being discussed here.

So I’m proud of the president, and even more so of Joe Biden. I’m sorely disappointed by North Carolina, but what they did was a meaningless gesture and hey, won’t it be great explaining to our grandkids why we were all such complete idiots? Voting to take away rights (or to just reaffirm that those rights can never exist) has never, ever worked in this country; has never withstood the test of time; has never been anything but the craven, cowardly lashing out of lizard-brain savagery. It’s a barbaric piece of work and a staggering display of the evil men can do. But it won’t last.

No, I’m more disappointed by the UMC, even though my home church – Northaven UMC – is a reconciling congregation that openly embraces its LGBT congregation. That reconciling stance is a big reason I joined in the first place. As I told pastor Eric Folkerth before I officially joined, “I’m shopping around, but I’m really only looking in one store.”

Nonetheless, the broader UMC’s steps backward pissed me off. There’s a very real resentment toward the UMC right now, and it’s well grounded, and it goes something like this: we pay our apportionments, we put in the volunteer hours, we follow the Greatest Commandment, we often go above and beyond our neighboring churches because that’s what we’re called to do. We fund church plants, mission work, disaster relief, and do it all gladly – because that’s what we’re called to do.

And our reward is to be treated as less than worthy. As inherently sinful, above and beyond the sin that every person carries and is constantly at war with. So the question becomes, why do we pay in, if we’re not going to be treated the same as everyone else? Why are we expected to do our part if we are not afforded the same grace and love as every other member of the church?

I know how angry this issue makes me, even though as a straight white male, I have nothing personal at stake. (Well, there’s the well-being of my loved ones at stake, but you know what I mean.) So I cannot imagine the fear, hurt and fury of LGBT people (and their family members) who live under the very real possibility that the tantrums of emotional and moral dinosaurs could very well destroy their homes and families. That is a monstrous kind of terrorism, an expression of ugliest Empire, and a black mark on the legacy of the Church (all the churches, in all parts of the world, in all stripes) that should never be forgotten.

So my conversation with both Allison and Richard was this: do I just say “fuck it” and go? Because honestly, life is too short to spend time reasoning with people who will scream “faithful living” when they mean “dogma” or, worse, “fear,” and who are gladly murdering a generation of potential families right in the crib because that isn’t how things were when I was a young man/woman. So why not shed the intellectual rot of outdated ideas and old thinking and get on with doing some righteous, forward-thinking work?

Or do I stay, because dammit, this is my church too? I have as much a claim to this legacy as anyone else, so why should I cede ground to the people who do not seem to know they are killing the very thing they love because they believe they have nothing left to learn? Why abandon ship to go where people may end up, when I’m already where people are?

In short, should I stay, or should I go?

This decision is not easy for me. I’ve strayed from the church for awhile now because I have core issues with denominational belief, and with all religion in general – namely, the belief (whether explicitly stated or merely implied) that significant revelation stopped for all time sometime in the past. That 2,000 or 500 or 100 years ago, we learned every major thing there is to learn, and now all there is to do is to memorize what came before and interpret that as rigidly possible and basically just wait to die.

Excuse me, but: that is not living. That is not using the gift of life to grow and to change the world. That is a recipe for calcification and division. For failure. For intellectual straitjacketing. It’s comforting, sure, to feel like all the heavy lifting has been done and all the big questions settled long before you were born, but no thanks. You shouldn’t commit to a religion because it’s the easy way out.

The term I know for what I am (or was, or may be again, or who even knows) is “postmodern Christian,” though I don’t know if that’s the correct or fashionable term anymore. In simplistic terms, that means I don’t really need the Bible to be factual to be true. If you follow me.

But I think even that stance is a little limp, a little noncommittal. I do not think you can know even the most basic facts of how the Bible was canonized and still believe it to be the inerrant word of God. I do not believe you can look at what we know of when, where and how Christianity was born and think that we, somehow, have a monopoly on redemptive living. (At this point you may no longer consider me a Christian, but the nice thing for me is that that call isn’t yours to make.)

More to this particular point, I do not believe you can look at the Greatest Commandment (and its companion commandment) and decide some horse shit passage in Leviticus trumps it. I do not believe you can hide behind “love the sin, hate the sinner,” because that requires you to think that homosexuality is an act and not an irreducible state of being, and basic biology’s not going to let you get away with that one.

I do not believe you can claim to be a “faithful” Christian who “believes in the Bible” because you have to know, you have to know, that you are already ignoring thousands of rules, proclamations, imperatives and commandments just to live the kind of life that enables you to read a fucking blog post. To claim otherwise is to plead ignorance or admit a lie.

None of us are literal believers in the Bible. And that’s a good thing. Because interpretation is always subjective. Leaving aside the massive complications of translations, missing fragments, imperfect interpretations, and this or that bishop exercising realpolitik to push one book over another at exactly the right time, and you’ll still never get any three people to agree on the meaning of any one chapter in any book in the Bible. We are not prisms through which the Bible is interpreted. The Bible is a prism to help interpret who we are and can be.

The Bible is, in a word, epic. It contains fierce truths, scalding imagery and ageless wisdom. It is a wonderful, transcendent and ultimately incomplete treatise on how to stop acting like complete animals to each other. That’s it. That’s all. Great truths can be gleaned from it at every stage in life, but the Bible is not the sum total of what human existence is and can be. To believe that is to endorse the stagnation, decay and collapse of the human spirit.

So you can’t hide behind your Bible. You can’t hide behind this or that piece of scripture. I’m going to put a radical idea up here: If a piece of antediluvian literature is telling you to treat your fellow man as abhorrent for being who they are; if you think you must ignore, twist or fight empirical science to keep believing what you believe; if you need to disengage from the world you are called to heal through church compounds, special colleges or insular communities, then your beliefs suck and they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on. Toss that shit out the window and start over.

I cannot for the life of me imagine Jesus Christ – or anyway, my subjective interpretation of a laughably imperfect portrait of a basically unknowable person, right? – honestly wanting us to value a cobbled-together book (an unrivaled tome of human experience and learning, sure, but bound paper with some ink on it all the same) over our living and breathing brothers and sisters who are in pain and need us RIGHT NOW. I do not think you can be an honest and clear-eyed adult with functioning critical skills and believe that Scripture is more important than people.

Richard and Allison both feel I should stay, not go. My local church is good, and so are the people in it. The UMC as a whole is not lost; as with any large group there are many people trying to do good who are feeling as hamstrung, voiceless and powerless as I am. I know that those who perform actions of bigotry are often acting out of fear, or ignorance. I know I am asked to reach out to them out of love – there’s that Greatest Commandment again, so pesky with its complete absence of caveats – and so I will try to do so.

Sticking with it is better than quitting. Please try to help me remember that.

I co-created the Web series The Variants with my friends Joe Cucinotti and Richard Neal. The premise is simple: The Variants centers on the lives and travails of four people who work at Zeus Comics in uptown Dallas. It’s a retail comedy with absurdist tones similar to 30 Rock or Arrested Development.

We’ve completed the first season and are currently in the process of putting together the DVD. We are now outlining and scripting the second season. Though the three of us write most of the episodes together, I wrote and directed episode 6, “The Heist,” solo.

Our work ethic ensured we never missed a deadline.

The Variants has received accolades across the comics and Web series Internet:

“Zeus Comics is home to an entertaining cast of characters that generates plenty of laugh-at-loud moments for both the geek-initiated and society-at-large.” - Alterna-TV.com

“It’s really very simple: The Variants makes me laugh. A lot.” - PopSyndicate.com

The Variants has also gotten attention on the home front:

A Dallas Observer “Best of Dallas” 2009 Award.

“I’ll be there the first Wednesday of every month.” - The Dallas Voice

“Ink and color us impressed.” - DFW Quick

DFW Quick also had a nice two-page spread interview with us when we wrapped up our first season.

In October 2009, a friend and I were talking in Gmail Chat about the Associated Press Stylebook’s Twitter feed. I was a copy editor at the time and he used to be a journalism student, so it had some relevance to us as word nerds. He said something like “Gee, I can’t tell if I’m glad or sad this isn’t a fake account,” fake jokey accounts being something of a specialty for us. (At the time I was running @zombiehorde and @thisreallyhurts).

This seemed as good an idea for a joke as any, so the two of us created the joke account and some friends joined in the fun.

One day later, the account had 10,000 followers.

Five days later, the account crossed 30,000 followers, officially surpassing the real AP Stylebook Twitter feed.

Now, the account is heading north of 160,000 followers, and is now considered one of the established “Twitter success stories,” alongside accounts like “Shit My Dad Says,” which has been turned into a sitcom starring William Shatner.

The phenomenon was noticed, and we were contacted by several agents and publishers looking to capitalize. We picked an agent, put the book proposal up for bidding, and found our publisher. The book is slated for an April 2011 release.

I oversee the daily operation of the Twitter feed, which is essentially joke writing, wrangling and editing and making sure the feed updates at least a couple times every week day. We do original jokes and also answer questions, which has been a big part of building our fan base.

I’ve noticed that Fake AP Stylebook has entered the journalist’s lexicon as a shorthand for absurdity, much like The Onion. “In what sounds like an entry in Fake AP Stylebook…” is becoming a common refrain in the journalism trade.

Some places we have been written up or mentioned, in no particular order:

TIME Magazine

Paste Magazine

We were also invited to copy-edit an entire issue of Boston’s Weekly Dig, where we left red-pen markings, notations and tips all over that publication’s pages.

Hilariously, the real AP Stylebook has only acknowledged our existence (indirectly) once.

Your enjoyment of The Virginity Hit may well be dictated by how easily the teenage version of obscenities rolls off your back. I don’t, as a rule, oppose vulgarity; I love a good, creative obscenity-fest as much as anyone. (Big, big fan of Deadwood, right here.) But teenage vulgarity is not the same as regular vulgarity: it really is just the thudding repetition of the Seven Dirty Words (and some cousins) over, and over, and over again. It is artless, and a little numbing.

I suspect that’s how many people will describe The Virginity Hit’s filming technique, too. It’s a faux-documentary filmed in digital, made to look and play like a series of YouTube videos posted by a group of four teenage boys who, like so many of our generation, have elected for a life of constant self-surveillance. Having a frequently-updated Twitter account and a largish back catalogue of audio and video tapes me and my friends filmed throughout our adolescence, I understand the impulse.

I didn’t find this technique as cloying and unpleasant as I thought I would. In fact, under the steady hands of director-writers Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, the unpolished YouTube look is the best thing The Virginity Hit has going for it… even if it’s ultimately no less fabricated than standard feature filmmaking. Within minutes, I found myself utterly disarmed and able to engage with these characters in a way you rarely experience with subject matter like this.

That’s because on paper The Virginity Hit is exactly what it sounds like: a raunchy teen sex comedy about a bunch of guys (well, one guy this time) trying really damn hard to lose his virginity. Hijinx inevitably ensue, family drama rears its head, and all the boys—authentically schlubby and not terribly attractive—hang out with girls who are out of their league by several orders of magnitude. You have seen this many, many times before.

But you have not seen it presented this way. Filmed straight, that material is as old as the hills and not easy to relate to. Funny, sure; authentic human experience, no. The Virginity Hit hews much closer to real life simply due to its lack of pretension. Botko and Gurland have made artifice feel completely natural, and that is genuinely something.

But beyond that, The Virginity Hit mostly stalls. It isn’t terribly funny; mostly it’s just the repetition of genital names that pass for punch lines, and while that’s pretty much how teenage boys talk, it doesn’t make for great or engaging cinema. Its drama is actually its strength, and there are moments of greatness sprinkled throughout. The scenes between the lead, Matt (Matt Bennett) and his father are surprisingly raw. The scenes where Matt encounters his favorite porn star and her boyfriend would make a fine short film on their own.

But it isn’t funny and it doesn’t stick with you, and those two things are fatal to the enjoyment of any movie. As a comedy, The Virginity Hit fails. As an experiment in format, it’s a qualified success. Botko and Gurland have taken the “found footage” phenomenon of horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity and demonstrated it can be used effectively in drama and comedy. Though I cannot recommend their movie, there’s something to be said for the accomplishment.

Twelve films and nearly twenty years later, I’ve come to accept the fact that Robert Rodriguez is simply not as good as he’s billed to be. He’s had some highlights to his career, true; Planet Terror was infinitely more entertaining than Death Proof, its Grindhouse companion, and From Dusk Till Dawn remains one of the most entertaining movies I have ever seen.

You’ll note that Planet Terror is very short and From Dusk Till Dawn is filmed from a script by Quentin Tarantino, who was also on set. Even adaptations are no safe bet: I initially thought Sin City was brave, but its thudding, wooden adherence to its source material has diminished it on repeat viewings so severely that I can’t stand to watch it anymore. For all his directing, “chopping” and scoring cred, the man simply can’t tell a story.

So you would think Machete would be different: here is a Mexploitation film, a blatant throwback to an earlier time where plot and dialogue were the things you put in between boobs and murders to get an 80-minute running time. And, as with most Rodriguez movies, for the first half hour or so you think it’s going to work. It’s a pleasure to watch several disparate plot elements come crashing together, and in Machete it’s pretty familiar stuff for this native Texan: Mexican drug lords, border-patrol zealots, pandering politicians and day laborers all play a part, giving the whole thing a “ripped from the headlines” feel even if, current political climate aside, none of these things are particularly new.

Machete himself (played by Danny Trejo) is a former Mexican federale now working as a day laborer in Texas. A political fixer (Jeff Fahey) notes his ability to fight and hires him to assassinate a Mexico-bashing senator up for re-election (Robert De Niro). Things go south almost immediately, and Machete finds himself caught between hired assassins, the drug lord who killed his wife and child (Steven Seagal), an ICE agent (Jessica Alba), the head of a revolutionary “network” of day laborers (Michelle Rodriguez), and a few other heavies besides.

And, as you might have guessed, Machete solves his problems with machetes.

And you know what? That should be a lot of fun. Saturate that mix with sex and blood and don’t overstay your welcome, and you’ve got a good time at the movies. Nothing epic, nothing groundbreaking – throwbacks are rarely ever those things – but it’s certainly shelter from the ongoing storm of generic 3D kid epics raining down on multiplexes every single month of the year.

Ah, but were it anything but a Rodriguez production. He is the most frustrating of filmmakers because I can see what he’s trying to do and I can see where he’s trying to go, and at times I even admire his audacity or choice of material. He is probably a hell of a guy to have a beer with.

But good intentions do not a good movie make. His are some of the emptiest contemporary mainstream(ish) movies I have ever seen; at times I have quite literally forgotten that yes, I actually did see Desperado or Once Upon a Time in Mexico. (In the latter’s case, I’d forgotten I’d seen it a mere week later. Such is the power of a Robert Rodriguez narrative that his movies feel like extended trailers and not actual storytelling.) Machete, like those others, was an empty experience; artlessly painted up with charismatic actors and the occasional good one-liner, but ultimately void of anything like a solid narrative hook or even a compelling reason for being.

The writing is really where it falls apart. Consider the Senator McLaughlin character, played by Robert De Niro. We see a couple of his campaign commercials throughout the movie, comparing illegal immigrants to roaches and vermin who must be wiped out. Not bad.

But like Mr. Rodriguez, I’ve been in this state a long time, and I’m in agreement with Molly Ivins that Texas politics is the greatest spectator sport ever devised. This is the state with Senators who want to ban their state’s colleges from participating in the Bowl Championship Series because they prefer a playoff system; this is a state with Representatives who want to curb “sexually suggestive” cheerleader routines and who advocate cutting off drug dealers’ fingers. McLaughlin, played timidly and without any passion or that trademark aura of proud Texas B.S., wouldn’t last thirty seconds in the chamber with these guys.

Concepts are not enough; they must be executed smartly and with a sense of the greater structure. Rodriguez may be admired for his ability to stick to his vision, but it’s worth asking: is his vision worth seeing?

Give the advertising campaign credit: “Who is Salt?” isn’t just a marketing tagline, but the question you’ll find yourself asking over and over as Salt unreels before you. At first Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) appears to be a CIA agent with a loving husband and a normal life, but it isn’t long before she’s crossing and double-crossing people without explaining to anyone, least of all the audience, why she’s doing what she’s doing.

And on paper, that’s kind of a nifty idea. Salt is undeniably the protagonist of the movie; we follow her almost exclusively through her many daring escapes, assaults and flashbacks. We see that she is whoever she needs to be in a given moment, which can be anything from a charming lady to a badass martial artist. But we never know where she stands. Is she hero, or villain?

The points of contention: Salt is on her way home to celebrate her anniversary with her husband when an ex-Russian spy comes in claiming that a rogue Russian intelligence agent wants to reignite the Cold War with a countless host of sleeper agents planted all throughout the United States. Who’s going to kick it off? Why, none other than Evelyn Salt, who’ll light the fire by assassinating the Russian president in New York City. This comes as something of a surprise to Evelyn, but her peers take it seriously enough to force Evelyn to flee. Only her boss (Liev Schreiber) still believes she is who she says she is.

From there Salt takes some genuinely surprising, topsy-turvy turns that you leave you genuinely questioning who it is Evelyn works for and who, exactly, you should be rooting for. I’m not convinced this works as the audience’s sole perspective for an entire movie, and Salt does not make the case well; it so thoroughly undermines Evelyn’s identity—already pretty scant due to a script that is 80% chase sequences—that it is, in fact, impossible to care about what happens to anyone. Jolie’s ability to switch from house cat to tiger in a manner of seconds is the only thing that keeps Salt from simply floating away into the ether.

Not that I didn’t enjoy the movie’s baser pleasures. For all her prestigious star power, I think Jolie is most at home in action roles. There’s something visceral about her presence; when she’s kicking someone’s ass you feel the sheer physicality of it. She stalks through her scenes with true menace and frightening competence.

Director Phillip Noyce occasionally succumbs to the shaky-cam chaos that you see in a lot of spy movies these days, but occasionally he remembers to pull back and show us what’s going on. Was it Mamet who said that audiences enjoy watching competent people do things well? That’s a sentiment that I think applies to action directors as much or moreso than anyone else. Don’t confuse the audience; take the chance to luxuriate in the proficiency and coolness of all those martial arts consultants, all that stunt work, and all those special effects. Why spend all that money and all that time if you’re going to obscure most of it?

In short, give people the show.

Salt mostly does. It’s a pretty movie when it remembers to be, its action is entertaining and occasionally inventive. It also contains a few genuine surprises, not least of which is the moral ambivalence of its lead. But there is clumsiness on display; the husband-in-peril thread is so thin as to be transparent and the opening info-dump given by the Russian spy was, oh, a little embarrassing. Salt’s stakes are good—and refreshingly old-school in a James Bond kind of way—and Jolie makes a great dramatic action lead. It’s a pity, then, that the movie’s central premise is also its downfall.

P.S. “Evelyn Salt” is a dumb name for a character.

Christopher Nolan’s characters live in a world of ideas. They’re trapped by them, enslaved by them, dominated by them and ruled by them. They are fallible people who externalize every lash on their souls; their gestures change the world and they know it, but they know also that they will never live up to the abstract ideals they forever chase or evade. They are haunted by dreams dashed, lost, or inadequately conceived.

Therefore it seems predestined that Nolan would eventually tap Leonardo DiCaprio to play one of his leads. DiCaprio has built his career around playing fiercely intelligent men with deeply compromised mental integrity who chase oblivion to find peace. He does so again in Inception, which plays as a striking companion piece to this year’s other DiCaprio head trip, Shutter Island.

It’s good that DiCaprio is such a natural at this sort of thing, and better still that Nolan’s cast—so uniformly strong that any quarter of them could headline a great movie—gives so strong an impression of character and intent. On paper, these people are ciphers. See the movie and ask yourself: what do we really knowabout Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s staid sidekick, or Ellen Page’s honest and talented dream architect? The answer is nothing more than I just told you. The roles are simply embodied, and the actors’ charisma does the rest. It’s too bad, really, that in creating his most idea-driven movie, Christopher Nolan has left his characters behind.

But what ideas they are. DiCaprio plays Cobb, leader of a team of people who are able to enter a person’s mind via their dreams in order to steal valuable data. They call it extraction, but “they” also talk about a much more dangerous maneuver: inception, or the introduction of an alien idea into someone’s mind. It’s this latter they’re hired to do by an energy mogul (Ken Watanabe) who wants to stop the son of his chief rival (Cillian Murphy) from monopolizing the field worldwide once the rival (Pete Postlethwaite) dies, which should be any day now. Most of the movie is taken up with the business of Cobb recruiting his team and then delving into his target’s mind three layers deep: a dream within a dream within a dream, and a flirtation with delving even deeper into the chaotic and bottomless subconscious. Complicating the matter is that Cobb can’t seem to keep a guilt-driven projection of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) from popping up and sabotaging his work. And she’s getting more dangerous all the time.

So much of Inception is spent in surreal atmospheres with flexible rules and plenty of paradoxes. If I’m being honest, this—more than the good cast and intriguing premise—is why I wanted to see the movie so much. Mainstream filmmaking has been “safe” for as long as it’s existed, but the past few years especially it seems that formula, contrivance, and dim versions of the high concept have ruled every major release of every weekend. Most filmmakers (and consequently most moviegoers) forget that in movies, you can do and show anything.

Some remember, sometimes, and you get the occasional glorious success (300, Dark City, most of Pixar’s catalogue) or brilliant failure (Speed Racer, Sin City). The filmmakers remember that the empty soundstage and the green screen are canvases, and that there aren’t—or shouldn’t be—any fetters between their conception of the story and its execution.

All of which is a high-falutin’ way to say that every now and then, a filmmaker decides to show us things we’ve never seen before and can never see in any other medium. By this gauge Inception is an unqualified triumph. It is quite simply an amazing thing to behold; the glimpses you’ve seen in trailers only hint at the construction of interlocking chains of logic, consequence and action that Nolan has constructed, even if most of it is washed in that teal light filmmakers are so fond of, and so much of the dialogue is given over to simply explaining what is happening. There is one extended action sequence that takes place on three levels of consciousness, one affecting the other which affects still yet another. I guarantee you have never seen anything like it before.

Nolan’s preoccupation with city spaces dominates, as well. Cities tend to be great lurking beasts in his movies, as much a character as a setting, but never more so than here; each real-world city is introduced with establishing shots that show building after building eating up the horizon, and almost every dream construct we see is some spin on a city. In The Dark Knight, Gotham City was an endless maze for human rats to play in. In Inception, the rats build and embrace the maze themselves: for instance, in the decades spent in the dreamspace of his own subconscious, Cobb and his wife built miles of geometric cityspace and little to no wildlife. I can’t tell if this is a statement of some kind, or merely Nolan unintentionally revealing something about himself. Either way, I sympathize with his fascination.

Among all that awe, it came as a surprise to me that the more intimate moments with Cobb and Mal are so affecting. More than that, they’re frightening: Cobb’s head is a haunted place, and Ariadne’s few forays into his dreamscape feel more dangerous than any other peril presented in the movie. I felt the peril there, in a quiet and ransacked hotel room, far more than I did in some of the later action sequences. I wish we could have spent more time there.

If I have a complaint about Inception it is that it is so very plot-heavy, and its central premise for getting to the meat of it—the dream-diving—is loaded down with specialized language and the mechanics of the thing that when Ariadne at one point asks in exasperation, “whose subconscious are we diving into?” the audience laughed in recognition. There’s enough jargon here to populate a David Mamet film, and like a Mamet film, you have to pay close attention if you don’t want to get left behind.

In terms of coherence, forward motion and characterization, Inception is in many ways a step down from The Dark Knight. In terms of virtuosity, it has no modern peer: here is, quite simply, an engine built to show you wonders. Amidst the endless array of explanations and exposition, Christopher Nolan has built a movie that is impossible not to look at.

John’s got a problem: ever since his wife left him seven years ago, his life has been one long, slow spiral into the gutter. He’s functional and continues to work, but that’s about all that can be said for him. So when his ex (Catherine Keener, whose presence always improves a movie’s charisma) invites him to her engagement party with the stated purpose of meeting women, he accepts. Grudgingly. His pick-up technique involves long, intense spiels about the hopelessness of his life and how finding someone to connect with may be the only thing that can save him. If there’s one thing John (played by John C. Reilly) is incapable of doing, it’s filtering his feelings.

Which is what draws Molly (Marisa Tomei) to John, played with beautiful restraint by John C. Reilly. They hit it off at the party despite his drunken state and kick off one of those intense left-field romances where everything clicks and you want to spend every waking moment with this wonderful new stranger in your life. The catch? Molly never stays the night, and is reluctant to share anything about her life.

The reason is Cyrus (Jonah Hill), her 21-year-old son, who still lives at home and seems perfectly content to spend the rest of his life with his mother. If sexless incest is a thing, then that’s what Molly and Cyrus have: a relationship through which they try to fulfill all or most of their emotional needs without much contact with the outside world. When John enters theirs, Cyrus feels threatened, and a minor showdown of epic proportions begins.

Cyrus treads a fine line for a comedy, wavering between laugh-out-loud duels between Cyrus and John and sincerely sweet soul-baring moments. In lesser hands this would be tiresome material, and I could very well see myself twiddling my thumbs through those soul-baring moments to get to the yuks. But lo, everyone is just so gosh darn likable and authentic that I ended up caring about them. It’s not so much that I know these people. It’s just that I believe them.

A lot of that’s to do with Reilly and Hill, whose duel for Molly’s affections so often takes the slow-burning path over the explosive one. Reilly is an immensely talented performer, able to convey so much while coming off as nothing more than a likable schlub. I was reminded of his performance in The Promotion, a quiet little comedy about quiet little men whose customer-service-uber-alles mentalities were the only things keeping smiles on their faces while they hurtled toward unavoidable confrontation. Reilly frequently takes absurdist comedic roles, but the man has a gift for the low key. One he doesn’t explore often enough.

He’s matched by Hill, who speaks with great kindness and politeness throughout the movie’s first half … and who clearly doesn’t mean a word of it. His Cyrus is clearly smart and mature, but there’s something off about him all the same: His congeniality masks a sinister intelligence and mountains of insecurity. Tomei has less to do with her part, but what she does give—a warm and genuinely loving presence stunted by years of emotional isolation with her son—she does effortlessly.

Cyrus really is a very simple movie, completely beholden to relationship dynamics both loud and subtle. There are perhaps ten sets, with only a handful that dominate, and three actors who occupy something like 80% of the running time. But for the heavy reliance on subtle gestures and glances, Cyrus could be a stage play. And a marvelous one at that.

A comment on the digital camera techniques of writer-directors Jay and Mark Duplass. Cyrus is filmed in digital with a pervasive use of snap-zooms to focus on actors, gestures and bits of scenery throughout. This is jarring at first, and seemingly at odds with digital’s main virtue: The purpose of digital is to remove the staginess from film—to remove excess cuts and give an overall more “natural” feel, as if we’re peeking in on actual events. (That sensation is artificial, but hey, moviemaking is about lying in creative new ways.)

So why the snap-zooms? The digital says “slice of life,” the zooms say “hey, check out our camera work!” But after awhile, I got it: each quick-zoom was a re-framing, taking a scene and drawing attention to glances, movements and setting in a scene. I thought of polyptych paintings, or of how some comic book artists draw a full scene and then frame panels throughout it to guide the eye and tell a story within a single shot. It’s a hell of a thing to pull off well, and the Duplass brothers do. In that, Cyrus’s form and function are one.

Of all the supernatural powers and companions Jonah Hex possesses, his horse may be the most impressive. Consider that in the first scene, Hex’s horse is forced to carry or drag three dead bodies, two mounted Gatling guns, and Jonah himself, which probably totals up to over a thousand pounds of steel and dead weight. Now consider that this same horse can handle both the whiplash and noise generated by having those two Gatling guns firing from either side of its neck and I think you’ll agree: That’s some horse.

You’ll note that I began a review about an Old West gunslinger who revives corpses and shoots dynamite crossbows by talking about his horse, and that should probably tell you something. Jonah Hex is a faint gesture of a movie, so hobbled and reliant on narrative shorthand that I’m halfway convinced audience members should get a cut of the box office for filling in the blanks. How do characters get from one place to another without any connecting scenes in between? What happens in the movie’s many fight scenes? What the hell does Megan Fox’s character have to do with anything? Friends, Jonah Hex has more pressing matters at hand, such as the devising of a dozen ways for a legendary gunslinger to not actually sling his damn guns.

In brief, Hex (Josh Brolin) is a bounty hunter and former Confederate officer hired by the U.S. government to track down his old general, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), who wouldn’t you know it also killed Jonah’s family in revenge for Jonah killing his son blah blah blah. Turnbull, previously thought dead, has turned himself into a homegrown terrorist bent on tearing down the Union. Such people and factions did exist after the Civil War (and well into the 20th century), and, come to think of it, that’s not a half-bad plot for a Western.

But Jonah Hex is paradoxically both more and less convoluted than this bit of simple business, though God knows why. Sergio Leone made legendary Westerns with half as much plot, but screenwriters Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor thought they also needed to give Jonah the ability to speak to the dead (which doesn’t add a whole lot), an assortment of goofy steampunk weaponry (kind of a letdown when the guy’s supposed to be amazing with just a pistol), and a love interest in the prostitute Lilah (Megan Fox), a character that apparently exists only because there are no other women in this movie.

(Incidentally, Will Arnett—GOB of Arrested Development fame—fills out one of the movie’s many threadbare roles and deadpans the whole thing. And yes, it’s true, my friend Joe and I hummed “The Final Countdown” more than once while he was on-screen. In our defense, he says the word “magic” and is involved with the sinking of a ship. We are only human.)

What the hell kind of movie is Jonah Hex? I’m not sure, but it’s no Western. The very best Westerns have little to do with plot and everything to do with attitude, scenery, and atmosphere; in a Western, the setting is the MacGuffin, not the plot. Jonah Hex operates on an inverse property, where no one says or does anything not directly related to the plot and a few scenes just lay there, not adding anything to character or story. What attitude it has it borrows from Mastodon’s hilarious metal soundtrack and, I don’t know, the screenwriters asking their 14-year-old nephews what they think is “awesome.”

When I think of latter-day Liam Neeson movies, I think of a line Steve Martin used in Bowfinger to justify filming a guerilla movie around an unwitting and paranoid action star (played by Eddie Murphy): “Tom Cruise didn’t know he was in that vampire movie for two years!” Just so with Neeson. I do not believe Taken or The A-Team are movies, exactly; I think a crew just followed Neeson around and recorded his day-to-day activities.

Or maybe that’s just his value to movies like this one. Something about Neeson’s presence—the grave, wise voice, the unflinching stare—makes him, if not an everyman, at least a guy you can trust. Instinctively you believe him, whether he’s neck-chopping bad dudes in France or using the Force to cheat at a game of dice.

The A-Team needs his presence. It’s a movie that is exactly what it appears to be: dumb, moderately fun, full of crazy action and occasionally plausible master plans that conflate extreme luck with cleverness. It’s also a movie that trusts its audience as far as it can throw it: There are three callbacks to previous scenes in the film’s final reel, and two of those, spaced but minutes apart, call back to the same scene. Does that tell you something? I think that should tell you something.

Here are the motions: The A-Team is a ragtag band of four Army Rangers who specialize in doing the absolutely impossible. They are B.A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) the brawler, Murdock (Sharlto Copley) the crazy pilot, Face (Bradley Cooper) the con man, and Neeson as Hannibal, the tough and brilliant leader who, as he says many times lest you forget, loves it when a plan comes together.

The A-Team is betrayed by a band of Blackwater-style nasties and, after getting thrown in jail, they bust right back out and get their revenge. They are sometimes pursued and sometimes aided by Face’s ex, a Department of Defense intelligence officer (Jessica Biel). Biel’s stuck with the thankless task of always being one step behind Our Heroes and not enjoying any of it, but at least she’s written as smart. Most women in these kinds of movies can’t even say that much.

The rest is not worth remarking on. The movie’s remaining 90 minutes will by obvious to you by the end of the first 30, but no one’s here for surprises or revelations. They want to see the boys crack jokes, shoot guns and throw punches. They want to see the sexy girl in tight clothes. They want to see explosions and action parceled out in a formula as rigid and formalized as any romantic comedy. There was much ado about the irresponsible, brainless pleasure-stroking of Sex and the City 2, but the truth is summer movie houses are chock full of that shit every single Friday; the only difference is that these exercises in escapist fantasy are usually made for men. We’re simply so inundated with “mindless fun” for dudes that we never stop to ask if months-long binges on empty movie calories are doing us any favors.

Look, The A-Team is fine as these things go, but I’m going to be honest with you: If I didn’t have a Friday deadline to fill I wouldn’t have bothered . . . and I sure as hell wouldn’t have paid for it. (If nothing else, this year’s quota of witty action guys doing witty action things was already filled—and better—by The Losers.) You know how the movie goes, I know how the movie goes, and in two months we’ll all have forgotten about it. You can do better.