I asked myself “are they really doing that?” no less than six times throughout Speed Racer, most of those within the first twenty minutes. (After that I found my groove.) Don’t get me wrong: It was a happy question, asked a little disbelievingly. You may think you’re ready for the sheer kinetic craziness of the movie’s style after seeing the trailer, but brother, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Some plot stuff before we get to the fun parts. Speed Racer (played by Emile Hirsch, and yes, both of those are his name) is an up-and-coming talent in the World Racing League. Speed, like his now-deceased brother before him, refuses to run under the banner of any sponsors; he just races for the Racers… and his gal Trixie (Christina Ricci), of course.

Corporate bigwig Royalton (Roger Allam) wants Speed in his stable of racers. Speed declines, and Royalton gives him a lesson in the “real” racing: the backroom deals worked up by guys like him, rigging races to control company stock. (In Speed Racer’s world, the WRL is the most popular sport in the world and can do this sort of thing.) Speed’s resolve hardens, and with the help of the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox), he sets out to win it all, and defy Royalton’s stable of cheating racers.

Okay, done. The real story here is the complete visual package the Wachowskis have created, essentially inventing an entire world for the Racer characters to inhabit. Once you get past the stylized costuming and broad acting style of the actors, absolutely nothing in the world they inhabit closely resembles anything in our own; they live in a world stuck halfway between ours and that of Looney Tunes. The riot of colors is what the phrase “eye candy” was created for. Speed is everything; the laws of physics and practicality need not apply.

What I’m talking about is a kid’s world, because ultimately this is a kid’s movie—but don’t let that turn you off. Your first real clue should be the shot of Speed as a boy, in school, filling his mind with fantasies of racing—and then that world comes alive around him, manifested as a living version of a kid’s picture. I suddenly remembered what it was like to be young again.

The racing itself is something else. The cars drift, slide, reverse in full speed, and use metal “feet” to send themselves flipping into the air. Their drivers race at incredible speeds along Hot Wheels-style curved and looped courses and talk into headsets at normal volume, as apparently no wind is rushing by their open cockpits. Cars that explode send their drivers harmlessly bouncing away in large gelatinous spheres. No death, no injury, no real consequence… except the shame of losing.

Good stuff. Not altogether flawless, however; some of that computer-generated racing is a little too weightless to carry much, er, weight, and there’s just no reason for an action movie aimed mostly at kids to tip the scales at over 2 hours long. The financial backroom dealing was murkier than necessary. The humor is so broad broad it’s flat. I wasn’t bothered by the fairly frequent exchanges of sincere dialogue about the strength of family, but I can’t speak for the kids in the theater.

But this is nonetheless a strong summer movie with sly statements about artistry lurking under its glossy, rainbow-bright exterior. Corporate overlords swearing they’re the real power behind the throne? Insisting that artists (Speed’s mom’s word) are merely tools to generate profits? Then Speed doing his own thing and fighting the odds to break through this cynicism and win the day for pure, unsullied, racing-for-the-sake-of-it? Hmm. Now what does that sound like to you?

If I may stroke a pet theory, it sounds like the sort of thing I thought Sin City opened the door on before 300 blew that door off its hinges. Namely: the ability of the artist to have it his way—exactly his way—and still generate tremendous buzz and enough profits to keep the overlords happy. They pointed the way toward creating “living painting” experiences that cannot be found in any other medium.

Whatever your thoughts on those two previous movies, they represent exactly those things. The Wachowskis have made exactly the movie they want to make, and it is a hell of a lot of fun. Good on them.

You might have forgotten this under the onslaught of Serious Business superhero movies like Superman Returns, Batman Begins, the Spider-Man trilogy, Daredevil, et cetera, but superhero stories are supposed to be fun. A good time. Something that makes you say “wow” at least a few times. The term “escapism” has come to have a negative connotation in recent years, but sometimes escapism can be a good thing: if only, for a couple hours, to step into the world of the near-possible. That’s Iron Man, a superhero movie that drops the albatross of intense emotional angst and replaces it with wit and a hero that remains charming even in his flaws. I’d forgotten such things were possible.

Iron Man doesn’t waste a lot of time, either. Within 20 minutes of the opening credits, billionaire weapons designer Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr., tailor-made for the role) is captured by mercenaries in Afghanistan and thrown in a cave. They want him to build them one of his missiles, and the bitterness of Tony’s situation deepens when he finds out these mercenaries are customers of his, after a fashion; every single rifle, box of ammunition, and rocket carries the Stark Industries logo.

But he’s not alone in that cave. With him is Yinsen (Shaun Toub), a fellow scientist and the man responsible for keeping Tony alive. There’s shrapnel in Tony’s chest, and left unattended that shrapnel will dig its way into Tony’s heart and kill him. Yinsen has worked up a sort of plug-n-play rig in Tony’s chest to, somehow, keep the shrapnel out. The whole process is a lot more fi than sci, but just go with it. It’s comics.

Tony pushes past despair and, with Yinsen’s help, instead builds a massive suit of armor that sees him out of the hands of his captors and back into safety. And that cave, it turns out, was Tony’s Road to Damascus: upon arriving home he declares that Stark Industries will no longer be designing or building weapons, much to the chagrin of his partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). Tony takes leave for PTSD and sets about building himself a better suit. He figures the only weapon worth building is one used to defend rather than kill people. Stane disapproves, pushes his hostile takeover bid into overdrive, and before you know it we’ve got one of those concrete-shattering superhero fights that always manages to work its way through a busy highway.

What’s surprising about Iron Man is how entertaining such a straightforward story can be, helped in no small part by a clever script from Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. The performances are just right, too, and Downey and Bridges are backed up by Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s personal assistant and Terrence Howard as Stark’s best friend and liaison to the military. Their performances don’t so much transcend the material as fully embody them; everyone has one or two dimensions, but they play those dimensions to the hilt. They’re also, believe it or not, a little surprising. More than once I found myself surprised by a sudden turn in what in another superhero movie would be a depressingly straightforward character arc.

What I appreciated most about Iron Man was its simple joy in the material, its lack of shyness, its simple joy in being what it is: a big, fun action movie that doesn’t have to dumb itself down to be enjoyable. It takes joy in what it is. Great big “wow” moments are coupled with just-as-enjoyable smaller “wows,” like watching Tony slowly rebuild the suit in his home laboratory… with the assistance of loyal robots and some Social Distortion on the boombox. Those small moments earn the big ones; the first time Tony truly flies, you feel it all: the exhilaration, the imminent danger. I know if I were an 8 year-old boy, my mind would have been blown. It’s all fun, in other words, and a good corrective to the depressing ground most superhero movies tread to gain mainstream credibility. And shouldn’t a movie about a billionaire playboy with a flying suit that makes him invincible be fun?

The best gauge for a comedy is to see how much fun the cast appears to be having with it. That’s a subjective measure, to be sure, but if you see enough comedies you can get an idea if the people making it are into it. Ask yourself: Does it look like these people start laughing when the camera stops rolling? Are they approaching this material like something to enjoy, or something to get done?

The first Harold and Kumar movie was a joy to watch for that very reason. It was basically a series of sketches tied together by a simple concept: two stoners in their mid-20’s (John Cho as Harold or “Roldy,” Kal Penn as Kumar) get really, really high on pot one night and decide to go get some White Castle burgers. (They’re the tiny burgers; Southerners, think Krystal.) Shenanigans ensue, and in the H&K universe “shenanigans” can and do involve escaped cheetahs, redneck swingers, and Neil Patrick Harris. It was light, it was breezy, it was funny and unafraid to get weird. Those guys were having a good time.

And they’re having a good time again in Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which picks up approximately two hours after the last one left off. (I think. Time is a little wonky in this movie, enough so that I actually noticed.) The boys are going to Amsterdam to chase down Roldy’s new lady fair (Paula Garcés)… or at least they are until Kumar lights up a “smokeless bong” apparatus in the plane’s lavatory. Crusty old white biddy a few rows up calls him a terrorist, and before you know it, an overzealous moron from the Department of Homeland Security (Rob Corddry) ships them off to Guantanamo. Whence the title.

They escape, work their way across the South to foil the wedding of Kumar’s old girlfriend (Danneel Harris) to a whitebread Abercrombie jerk, who just so happens to have connections to the President. Tricky. Especially when you factor in the shenanigans.

And the shenanigans are plenty. Escape from Guantanamo is a little clunkier than its predecessor—it takes awhile to get going, and in its aspiration to be weirder and wackier than the first movie it can often stray pretty far from what was funny about two stoners who like fast food. A few of the intended big laughs are telegraphed. But there are moments—sublime moments, the stuff from which comedy is made—that ultimately make Escape worthy. Look out for an unexpected cameo in a flashback.

The character that struck me was Corddry’s, the revealingly-named Ron Fox. The first movie’s racial humor came in from a lot of angles, but the Stupid White Guy really only manifested in one place: Officer Palumbo, played by Sandy Jobin-Bevans with perfect grown-up frat-boy belligerence.

Fox is a different beast, a clumsy wielding of American power and clichéd attitudes about people of other races. (He attempts to bribe Goldstein and Rosenberg with a sack of pennies, and a black man with a can of grape soda.) Uh, okay, so maybe he’s not all that different at all. Just take Officer Palumbo and give him federal funding. Fox is so bad that the NSA analyst (played by Roger Bart) becomes, by default, the good guy. What a world.

That may be a lot to put on a movie that features Neil Patrick Harris downing mushrooms like they were popcorn. And Escape makes no pretense at directly addressing or solving any of the larger problems of how our country behaves within and without (a couple awkward stoner-speeches aside.) It’s just a goofy comedy, but it’s a goofy comedy with some awareness of the world it operates in. It’s also, for the most part, breezy. Effortless. That’s enough to make it a cut above.

Also: Stay till after the credits.

This past week became the unofficial John Carpenter Appreciation Week at Casa de Lowery. It started with a late-night viewing of They Live, that awesome ode to blue collar revolt against crushing Reaganomics circa 1988. It wasn’t on purpose—I was, in fact, about to go to bed, as it was 11:30 at night and I had work the next morning—but They Live just isn’t the kind of movie you can turn away. (Also, I was chatting on AIM with Sims at the time. So it ended up being sort of a test of machismo to stay up and watch it.)

Next, I hit my favorite website for legally acquiring movies (mininova.org) and hooked myself up with a favorite from my adolescence: In the Mouth of Madness, starring Sam Neill. A couple nights in a row of reacquainting myself with that flawed masterpiece led me to also legally acquire John Carpenter’s Vampires, starring James Woods as a vampire hunter (!), and then Escape from LA, the sequel to Escape from New York, one of Carpenter’s most (in)famous movies (and a Sims recc).

That slice of the man’s career takes us from 1988 to 1998, generally considered to be a much weaker output than his previous critically-lauded work (Halloween, and, er, The Thing, maybe?) and his cult classics (Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and yeah, They Live.) I guess I can see their point; generally speaking, Carpenter’s films are a little on the shabby side, and the seams, weirdnesses, and outright groaners really began to manifest in full force throughout the 90’s. This is even more evident when you line them up against Halloween, the most critically accepted of his works (and probably the only one considered “essential”); compared to the rest of Carpenter’s work—and, indeed, most of American horror output—Halloween is austere, even minimalist. No one’s staking vampires or donning sunglasses to see past the disguises of yuppies.

They’re right, and I don’t care. It was They Live that set me off on this week-long mini-festival; not Halloween, with its oft-analyzed use of silence and the “menace of threat,” but the one where advertisements are revealed to say things like “OBEY” and “REPRODUCE.” The one, need I remind you, that starred a professional wrestler.

Why that one? I’m not sure, but I have some theories. There was Doomsday, seen a few weeks ago and written about so lovingly; the sheer ballsy fun of it likely planted a seed for a revisit to Carpenter’s work. This time of year also marks a bit of a recovery time from the holiday releases. Every November, December, and now January, the studios bombard us with what they consider their best, most award-worthy work, and in their minds “award-worthy” usually translates to “three hours where everyone wants to cry but nobody does.” And hey, sometimes the studios are right. But by the time I hit my birthday in early February, everything I’ve seen for the past 8 to 12 weeks kind of makes me want to die. It’s at those times that I’m most in need of a laugh or two.

These films are shabby, make no mistake. Their intentions are only half-serious, and Vampires has no reason to exist that I can see, other than the (admittedly vast) pleasure in seeing James Woods completely stake the hell out of some vampires and swear like a drunken sailor with Tourette‘s. But there is something at work, even in the clumsiest of the movies, bits and pieces of fascination that have stuck with Carpenter into his latter work for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series.

Consider In the Mouth of Madness. An insurance investigator checks out a claim by a major book publisher; their top writer, a horror scribe named Sutter Cane, has dropped off the face of the earth. The investigator isn’t really into this “horror crap,” but he likes a good challenge, so he’s off to find where this Cane fellow has gone. Cane’s work tends to have an effect on people, though; imagine the paranoia and mental devolution of the protagonist in your average H.P. Lovecraft story and you have the right idea. The concept of Cane and his works borrows quite a lot from Lovecraft, actually, him and a touch of Stephen King. The investigator’s world gets seriously wonky when he stumbles across the town Cane’s written so many stories about: Hobb’s End, a place that’s not meant to be real. It seems Cane has now become so popular that anything he wants to be real becomes real. Or maybe the investigator is just losing his mind.

Or They Live, surely one of the great pulpy movie titles of all time. A blue-collar working man just can’t seem to catch a break. His luck worsens considerably when he stumbles across sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it actually is: trickle-down yuppies are aliens who use Earth as their playground, and consumerist advertising is geared to dumb people down and direct their lives toward reproduction and consumption. There are even new-money Renfields selling out their own kind just to get a leg up with the aliens. What’s a working man to do but chew bubble gum and kick ass?

Or Escape from LA, which features such magical moments as Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, as if I had to tell you) surfing down Rodeo Drive with Peter Fonda, or descending on a Disneyland proxy on a hang glider next to Pam Grier, assault rifles blazing… all set against the backdrop of a nightmare-future United States run by the kind of president Mike Huckabee would be if he had less guile and a voter’s mandate. The closing minutes give us Carpenter’s most clear judgment on all that humanity has achieved in the past 400 years, but I wouldn’t dare spoil it for anyone who’s not seen it.

And Vampires, as previously stated, features James Woods killing vampires.

Seen back to back like that, and with several years between now and my last viewing of any of these movies, I was able to pinpoint themes and tropes in these works that’ve stuck with me and influenced what I consider to be good or worthy fiction. There’s the hold that art has over audience and creator alike and the postmodern notion that something doesn’t have to be factual to be real or true (In the Mouth of Madness). An instinctive siding with the poor over the rich, and the liberating righteous fury that results (They Live). And the punk rock anti-action hero, a guy who kicks every ass that gets within reach, has seen what the world has to offer him, and thinks you can keep it, thanks (Escape from LA).

The movies hold up. They hold up well, which came as no small relief to the tender ego of my adolescent self. I had a lot of fun, a lot of smiles, a lot of laughs I knew were coming and some that surprised me. The movies are fun, exciting, invigorating, and still able to induce the occasional drop of the jaw. They’re ballsy movies, if only because they so clearly reflect the mentality of their filmmaker; and, unlike most idiosyncratic films, they’re a long way away from wanky. With the one exception, Carpenter generally doesn’t take up screen time unless he has a reason to.

Then the question: Why isn’t this guy making movies anymore? Well, he is, more or less. Cigarette Burns revisits some of In the Mouth of Madness’s territory. The other MoH work I’ve not yet seen. But consider that Carpenter made 8 movies in the 80’s, 6 in the 90’s (if you include the two Body Bags eps), and 3 so far in the 00’s. (IMDB lists two more in the works, but they’re far from a sure thing.) What happened? Age, for one thing; the man is now 60.

Then the next question: Who’s taking his place? Who out there is making genre fiction, setting the trends to be imitated and the dialogue to be re-quoted for years to come?

I couldn’t think of anyone.

Quentin Tarantino? Robert Rodriguez? Those guys are more like pop culture blenders than real creators, content to replicate and remix rather than make something new. Eli Roth? More of the same, with half the wit. Rob Zombie? Now that’s one with promise. If you know of anyone else, a filmmaker with a fiercely defined identity and the chutzpah to make any kind of movie he wants to, I’d dearly love to hear it.

When we first see him, Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is a lone, drunken wreck. He wakes up, vomits, cleans up, and grabs some liquor on the way to work. ‘Work’ turns out to be a straight drug deal: Ludlow taunts his buyers into assaulting him and stealing his car, then tracks the GPS locator on his car to find their hideout. He takes them out, recovers the drugs and a couple kidnapped schoolgirls, and becomes a hero. His CO Captain Wander (Forest Whitaker, loud and brash) and his fellow detectives congratulate him, pleased as punch. Another headline-grabbing caper for the LAPD. Ludlow’s old partner Washington (Terry Crews), still wearing blue, is less than impressed and smells something dirty on him.

But already there are story problems. Street Kings is partially written and based on a story by James Ellroy, and if you know Ellroy’s prose work, you can map out the movie’s remaining 105 minutes just by seeing what happens in the first 15. There are some twists and surprises, a few corruption-in-blue genre conventions turned on their ear, but for the most part the landscape will be clear to you. In a way, it’s amusing that a novelist known for complex plotting and multi-layered character connections turns out movies with such clearly delineated lines of morality: Who’s corrupt, who’s clean, and where the money trail leads you, laid out in a few embarrassingly conspicuous dialogue exchanges. In James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, the cops aren’t peacekeepers. They’re just criminals working the best angle in town.

So Ludlow is a cop teetering on the edge of complete moral breakdown, and his detective buddies can’t figure out why he’s angsting so bad about it. Worse, Washington may be ratting on him to Internal Affairs—right up until Washington is killed in a gangland hit in a convenience store, in Ludlow’s presence. That Washington was explicitly targeted by these “robbers” seems obvious from the beginning—they charge in, gun him down, and charge out again—that it’s a wonder that a few of the characters take so long to figure that out. Then again, maybe they haven’t read as many Ellroy books as I have; you pick up that intense violence is a cover or diversion from something else. Either that or it’s a revenge thing.

The captain urges silence on Ludlow’s part, and reworks the story: Ludlow was not present for the hit, but was instead first on scene. He then shuffles Ludlow off to the complaints department, which seems like an odd move, as this puts him directly under Captain Briggs (Hugh Laurie, who looks pretty odd clean-shaven), who’s looking for any angle to take down Wander and his whole cabal. Ludlow hooks up with rookie Detective Diskant (Chris Evans) and decides he’s going to figure out who killed Washington, and why. But you already know the answer to that, don’t you?

It’s not that Street Kings isn’t competently produced and executed, because it is. Look at that cast: Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Terry Crews, Naomie Harris, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans, Common, even a surprising turn by Cedric the Entertainer. Maybe not the first group of people I’d run to if I’m filming my gritty modern-day LA cop story, but they’re all sharp actors turning in good performances. The only stumbles, really, come from the clumsy writing. And the clumsy writing stems from—well, clumsy writing, for one thing, but more from the shifting (non?) morality Street Kings has at its core.

Ludlow leaves the first crime scene and Washington confronts him. You forgot about due process, says Washington. What about the victims’ families? “Suspects,” says Ludlow. “They’re suspects.” Okay, so something about due process and if it still works in the morally grey world of the cops. Ah, but then Washington bites it and there’s a lot of pressure on Ludlow to keep his trap shut so Wander’s unit stays intact. Loyalty trumps integrity, or maybe in their world loyalty is integrity. Insert Bush administration metaphor here.

Ludlow wants his revenge on Washington’s killers, but then there’s Washington’s widow Linda (Harris) telling him not to do it in her name. “Blood doesn’t wash away blood.” So we’re on to the spiral of violence. But later Ludlow saves Linda from death by a conspirator, and she smiles at him when it comes time for him to leave and set things “straight,” as this constantly shifting world defines it. What is “straight”? Revenge by murder? Revenge by exposure? I think the only lesson Street Kings may have at its core is that there is no “straight.”

In my younger years that would have been enough. But what used to feel like a dark revelation now only comes off as an exercise in setting the odds against corrupt characters and watching them crumble. The closing minutes reveal that there is a wheels-within-wheels logic to the goings-on, as in most Ellroy works, but there’s no greater comprehension or catharsis brought on by this knowledge. It’s just another twist and, as it turns out, the final one. There could be a great movie hidden somewhere in Street Kings, but they haven’t found it.

Hey, now this is how you make a big-monster movie: Get that big monster out there early and don’t be afraid to show it. If your material is good and your actors hit the notes, if the scares are solid and you build actual tension, then “the big reveal” doesn’t have to be the climax of your film to which all other content is subservient. (I’m looking at you, Cloverfield.) Get us attached to the people. Make us care about something more than what the monster looks like. Give us some laughs and choke us up. Make us afraid for these people. This is what people are referring to when they call a movie a “ride.”

That’s The Host, Korean horror sensation of 2007 and a thoroughly entertaining horror flick. It has no ambitions for greatness but satisfies itself with being very, very good. The scale is suitably smaller, too: Instead of some city-wrecking monstrosity of a Godzilla ripoff, The Host’s monster is relatively small in comparison; it’s not much bigger than a long double-decker bus. It confines itself to the Han river running through Seoul, South Korea. And its first attack is on tourists along the river, in broad daylight… and all the more frightening for it. Sometimes surreality trumps build-up in the fear department.

The monster—a mutation implied to have been created by the dumping of toxic chemicals into the Han—manages to snatch up young Hyun-seo in his opening rampage. Her family (slovenly father, Olympic-level archer aunt, unemployed college graduate uncle, and wise grandfather) regroup and set out to find the monster, wherever it may lair along the Han.

But the government issues a warning: contact with the monster imparts some kind of lethal virus, now responsible for the death of a U.S. serviceman. But the Park family will not be deterred, even though Hyun-seo’s father seems to have contracted the virus himself. Though they squabble and fight, the four of them show remarkable resourcefulness and willpower. This is not a weak family.

And that’s it, really; I’m actually kind of surprised how bare the story sounds when you lay it out, given how emotionally involving The Host became in its best moments. I actually—here comes the cliché—gave a damn about the Park family, cheered them on in their victories and feared for their lives. The creature, too, is something unique; its initial rampage isn’t pointlessly destructive like your typical big monster. It behaves something like you’d imagine an enormous, carnivorous creature would behave: willing to defend itself, monstrously strong, but not stupidly evil. It is what it is.

Maybe the reason The Host worked for me was because of its relatively small scale. Cheap CGI lets any filmmaker with two cents rub together create world-shattering effects and and global catastrophes, so much so that their ability to astonish or amaze is all but gone. Filmmakers no longer have to earn that kind of wonder, they can just create it. It’s just one bus-sized monster, it’s just one family, it’s just one river far away from you or me. But that’s why it works. This is a human-sized monster movie.

In the past few weeks, a couple critics I greatly admire have bitten the critical dust: David Ansen of Newsweek and Nathan Lee of the Village Voice. Lee was a pretty recent addition to the Voice, and his original voice was one I greatly admired. (Never have I felt more “I wish I’d said that!” moments than with some of his best work.) Ansen was a bit more mainstream, a bit more staid, but unerringly sharp and a master wordsmith. Anyone who’s seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated knows that Ansen’s wit and insight isn’t confined to his writing.

Sad, but not uncommon. Newspapers and magazines all over the country are offering buyouts (or simply firing, as the case was with Lee) to their critics and shuffling critical duties over to wire services. My own paper has two critics left: the servicable Chris Vognar and inoffensive-as-dry-toast Tom Marstaud. The rest of the critical workload is handled by agitator Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel and the less-than-amazing Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. Oh, and the offensively mediocre Christy Lamire of the Associated Press, who pretty well personifies the movies-as-product approach to criticism. This past weekend, the Morning News couldn’t even spare the manpower to review Leatherheads, that quiet little indie with little-known George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, and that guy from The Office.

I’m sure the story’s the same where you live. The internet and 24-hour news networks are bleeding newspapers dry, so upper management (once-independent publishers now beholden to an increasingly shrinking pool of media titans) cuts costs by axing whoever is deemed unnecessary. Why have one thirty-year veteran critic when you can just use the wire reports you’re already paying for? Or, if you don’t want to be a total drone, a critic from another city whose paper is owned by the same media titan that owns you. It’s all the same, right?

For that matter, why have one veteran reporter with decades under his belt and the paycheck to match if, for the same price, you can have two hungry journalism grads? Oh, sure, they don’t know shit, but they’re cheaper…

The problem isn’t unique to print media; radio isn’t doing much better. My buddy Joe is something like the self-aware Rosencrantz of radio; he’s spent half his life in radio, in one of the top 5 largest markets of the country. He’s seen what happened when the FCC’s restrictions on ownership were deregulated, allowing one media company to own multiple radio stations in the same market. Intense homogenization resulted, naturally, and now radio stations are in the same tailspin as newspapers: cut every non-essential job, where “non-essential” is a shifting variable. Pretty soon you’ve got DJs doing their own HTML for the station website and running their own boards. Smaller-market stations are essentially re-broadcasting posts for nationally syndicated shows.

Research and focus groups have hobbled the radio industry, but that’s what happens when accountants who hadn’t been within 50 yards of a studio 10 years ago are put in charge. Radio has been reduced to pure formula—and you should hear some of the nicknames different DJ mixes have—as if Corporate has decided that, you know, these 50 people in Des Moines like this ratio of music to chatter per hour… therefore everyone in the country must like that same ratio. The ratings keep spiralling, but that sure as hell isn’t their fault. Fire more disc jockeys!

But that’s just in lockstep with the media-wide commodification of entertainment. Don’t get me wrong: I know there’s always got to be patrons if there’s going to be art. But it seems as if the balance has swung too far in the patrons’ favor, and the public seems to be playing along. Favorite blogger Jim Emerson puts it this way:

What has changed? The expectations of the audience, for one thing. The more people have become accustomed to approaching art and entertainment as consumers (trying to get the optimal return on their investment of leisure time and money), the more they’ve come to think of reviews as buying guides. (And DVDs have made paramount the idea of movies or TV shows as not only products, but possessions that take up shelf space in your life.)

Commodification. Viewing art (or entertainment, if you prefer) as product, its players as court jesters, and its aspirations as nothing but distraction and escapism. It’s actually not too hard to imagine why this approach to entertainment is so prevalent: It’s easy to have an opinion about Brangelina’s latest antics. It’s easy to watch VH1 and laugh about all those silly one-hit wonders. It’s easy to swallow that one-two punch of scorn and envy served up by channels like E!. It’s easy to opt for Shrek 5 because you know exactly what you’ll be getting. It’s easy to point to a wall of DVDs and present that as “proof” that you are the biggest movie lover you know.

It’s less easy to identify, for example, why the eroticism in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution wasn’t actually all that erotic. Or why Michael Haneke’s Funny Games was a colossal failure—or a bold statement. Or whether Kevin Smith’s name is worth mentioning in the same breath as Richard Linklater’s. That stuff takes work and thought, and a lot of people are so drained by their work and social life that they don’t have the energy to care about the junk food they shovel into their eyes and ears. Couple this unkind reality with the reflexive (and distinctly American) distrust of expertise and you have a fatal dose for anyone whose job description is critical analysis of “mere” entertainment.

But here’s what happens when you cut all your unique voices voices in favor of “product” text that can be found in two, five, ten, or dozens of other sources: you give the average consumer less reason to pick up your product. The great thing about the internet is that it’s free, yes, and it’s true that this impacts a newspaper’s bottom line. But you’ll notice it’s not the dumbshit bland movie bloggers and internet critics that get the audiences, at least not in any great number. It’s the ones who offer a distinct voice that likely can’t be found anywhere else, which is Ain’t It Cool News’s sole saving grace: if you want to read dumbass fanboys compare genre movies to oral sex, there is no finer venue.

Which is, I think, the central irony: the media titan approach to staunching the flow is to cut out everything that makes their papers unique, thus giving consumers (ack, now who’s commodifying?) less reason to buy their product. They are in many ways guaranteeing their own slow death. It’s true there’s nothing new under the sun, but the one thing a Roger Ebert or a Nathan Lee or a Lisa Schwarzbaum or an A.O. Scott can give you that no one else can is Ebert, Lee, Schwarzbaum, and Scott. Once upon a time, a paper used to be proud to offer voices you couldn’t find anywhere else.

But no, that’s not enough anymore; you should see what the new tactics are for hooking younger audiences. Frex: the bloodless and embarrassing Dallas Morning News has in the past few years started up a publication called Quick. Quick is a free weekday paper, which is about right, as it is worthless. (Take a look at that print staff: one staff writer and seven people with the “copy editor & page designer” job title. I am betting not one of them was born in the 60’s.)

Every issue contains: dumbass lists that wouldn’t make the cut in Entertainment Weekly j.v., Dallas Morning News stories pared down to almost-worthless news bites, and truly insipid “nightlife” and “humor” columns by 25 year-olds who have nothing interesting to say. What’s worse is that Quick clearly wants to be the paper of choice for white-collar white people in their late 20’s and early 30’s with no kids and tons of disposable income, of which Dallas has plenty. But those people don’t read Quick. Working-class folks read Quick, because hey, it’s free, and it’s at every bus stop, tram station, and street corner in the city. Quick isn’t even hitting its demo; is not, in fact, hitting anywhere near its demo.

“Okay, Ken,” you say. “Clearly you feel very protective of your fellow critic. But could you please tell me why critics matter? Do we really need them?”

Thanks for asking, straw man!

“Need” is a strong word, but I’m going to assume we’re not talking about Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs and say yeah, we do need critics. In their ideal state, critics help an audience make educated decisions about how they’ll spend their time and money; more, they help audiences get more out of those decisions, so entertainment can go from being a passive mind-numbing experience to something enriching; you know, like art is supposed to be. A good critic benefits artist and audience alike, just as good art benefits critics and audiences, and just as an educated audience makes the whole exercise worth a damn. The ideal critic makes the audience smarter, which in turn keeps the artist honest.

So what is an ideal critic? Not someone you agree with all the time, heavens no. (How boring would that be?) Someone who knows what they’re talking about but isn’t elitist or aloof. Someone who writes with wit and humor. Someone who writes criticism useful to the converted and the casually interested alike, whether or not those audiences intend to view the art firsthand. A good critic is, in a way, a kind of reporter paid to be as subjective as possible: He or she keeps you abreast of trends and movements within films and the industry that creates them. Read enough of these critics and you can triangulate your own position on whatever today’s topic might be. And sometimes it’s just fun to nod your head enthusiastically or gripe at your newspaper or computer screen. Remember fun? Yeah.

This isn’t the death of all critics everywhere, of course; maybe just the death of the living-wage critic. Entertainment-as-commodity means the “middle class” critic, like the middle class reporter or DJ or band will be phased out in favor of dozens of small-time “copy editor & page designers” and titans of the field, like Ebert or Scott. Those middle-classers will migrate online if they haven’t already, and the conversation will continue.

It’s just too bad newspapers seem to want no part of it. But I’m sure they know best.

ADDENDUM: I have been pointed to this article, which also went live today, about similar circumstances among TV critics. Well worth the read, especially for the “critics talk back” section at the bottom.

Early in Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s concert film of the Rolling Stones performing over two nights at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, a special guest asks to visit with the Stones before the audience files in. That special guest is former president Bill Clinton, Hillary, and Hillary’s mother. The lot of them gather on stage for photo ops—Scorsese watches with a bemused expression from his control room—and mug for pictures. Here is a concentration of Baby Boomer power unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else: Clinton, the Stones, Scorsese. What’s even more fun is the subtle power dynamic at play. It’s Clinton asking for the photo op, and the Stones gamely playing along. Scorsese watches at a distance, but even he’s subject to the whims of the band’s schedule… and after all, without them, he has no film. It’s the Stones’ show.

And it is a show, less a documentary and more a concert film. Early segments paint a humorous picture of what it’s like when the carefully planned world of movies collides with the chaos of a rock show; Scorsese can’t even get a set list until seconds before the Stones take the stage. Scorsese intersperses archival footage every few songs, mostly interviews with journalists through the decades asking the same questions: “How much longer do you think you’ll tour?” “What do you get asked the most often?” And so on. I can’t say I’m too familiar with the Stones’ offstage personalities, but here, at least, they come off as humble and gracious showmen. It helps being humble if you’re just that good.

And they still are, all these years later. The joke, of course, is that the Stones are old; I saw the screening with my dad and he commented that Keith Richards looked like he was about to fall over. But I figure were we there that we’d fall over before he would. Yeah, the Stones are now in their 60’s, but you couldn’t tell it by the energy they put into their performance. Better: They are one of many redefining what it means to be in your 60’s. Maybe it’s time to retire the jokes.

But enough of that; we’re here for the music. Mick’s voice is as strong as it ever was, and the boys put in a strong two hours (actually two shows recorded over two nights). A few younger stars drop in for songs—Jack White comes out, guitar in tow, for one, and Christina Aguilera vamps it up with Mick—but the best cameo by leaps and bounds is by Buddy Guy. He and Mick share singing on the song “Champagne and Reefer,” and then there’s the sublime moment where Guy, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood riff off each other. Richards commemorates the moment by giving Guy his guitar.

The obvious comparison for Shine a Light is The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s 1978 documentary and concert film about The Band’s final show, and featured almost every 1970’s musical icon worth mentioning. But there’s no air of melancholy hanging over Shine, just a joy and energy the Stones bring to the show. They’re not phoning it in, even 40 years later.

Shine a Light will be showing on some 90+ IMAX screens across the company alongside regular screen showings. This, coupled with the release of U2 3D on IMAX in January, indicates that the IMAX people have finally figured out what to do with their technology and the heavy ticket price it carries. 40-minute films about fish and Mars expeditions are fine, but cities have science museums for those. But the Rolling Stones—in an intimate venue that seats maybe a thousand people? You’ll never see that live unless you’re very wealthy, very lucky, or the President. (Who are all very lucky and very wealthy, I suppose.) Seeing them for $10, larger than life, is a deal that’s hard to beat.

The key to enjoying Doomsday is to understand that it’s a mash-up. There’s some Michael Bay in there, some Fast and the Furious, even some Lord of the Rings. (Really.) But the influence that animates all these component parts is a deep and abiding homage to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. It’s most noticeable, not in the plot itself (Carpenterian though it is), but in its execution. The plotting is pure freewheeling punk rock, the kind of thing you see from Carpenter when he trusts his vision to make The Crazy work. That’s Doomsday: A hilarious, brutal, crazy movie. It’s brilliantly stupid, or maybe stupidly brilliant. It’s Grindhouse without all the winking and nudging. It’s also a blast, and touches on a certain kind of greatness.

In brief: A plague (the “reaper” virus) has struck Scotland, and in a fit of Britishness, London walls the whole country off. The pitch is that the British government will go back in once things are settled, but naturally that doesn’t happen.

Until…

Until the Reaper virus shows up again smack dab in the middle of London twenty-some years later. What’s more: satellite imagery has picked up signs of survivors in Glasgow, people who are obviously immune to the virus, or have been cured. There’s a 48-hour window to retrieve the cure before the center of London will have to be sealed off. The order comes down to cycloptic badass Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra): Get in, find the rogue scientist Dr. Kane (Malcolm McDowell), get the cure, and get out again. By any means necessary.

Easier said than done. The interior of Scotland has gone completely Lord of the Flies. Punked-out savage cannibals rule the city, led by a deliriously homicidal maniac named Sol (Craig Conway). The countryside is dominated by for-real men and women in medieval clothing living in old Scottish castles. (I have a feeling that if I grew up in Scotland, I’d get a much bigger kick out of that.) Neither side is particularly welcoming to Eden and her ever-dwindling team, but that’s okay; she’s Snake Plissken with fewer one-liners. She’ll be fine.

And who knew Rhona Mitra could pull off this kind of role? Previously she’s only appeared in movies as “the hot girl” and on TV shows you couldn’t pay me to watch. She’s a good cipher and a convincing badass, and holding her own against Conway’s Sol is no small feat. The man is a pure hysterical nightmare; fun to watch, but not someone you’d want within 500 yards of anyone you love.

Maybe it’s a sign that I see too many grim, dour little movies, but Doomsday lit me up like no movie has in quite some time. It was just about the time Sol prances on stage in front of a screaming horde of his depraved followers to dance and sing and caper about like a lunatic that I started grinning.

The grin didn’t leave me; in fact, that grin only grew. Are they really doing this? I kept asking myself. And yeah: They were really doing that.  The punk savages roasting and eating one of Eden’s comrades? Why not. Faux medieval knights wearing smelted-metal armor? Sure! Increasingly spectacular car chase shot in the sun-bleached California tones of Fast and the Furious? Well, we have to get some exploding cars in here somehow…

It’s a kitchen-sink approach to filmmaking, which may explain a lot of the, er, confused reactions I’ve seen to the movie. It can be easy to see the patchwork lunacy and decide that what’s on screen is a starvation of imagination, laziness, or worse, a paint-by-numbers substitute for the actual act of creation. Me? I think it takes skill and a half to stir up the B-movie detritus of the past thirty years into something greater than the sum of its parts. Following the conventional, predictable beats everybody knows: That would be lazy, not to mention forgettable. Doomsday is neither.

Ever wonder what kind of movie the Judd Apatow crew (The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad) would make if they aimed squarely at the 15-year-old set? Me neither. But that is precisely what Drillbit Taylor is: the comedy of Superbad regressed a few years to be slightly more palatable, if no less “real,” to the mid-teen set. If nothing else, it’s refreshing to see that magic demographic (teenage boys) targeted explicitly, rather than implicitly. And isn’t it interesting that while Apatow shifts his focus chronologically forward (from relationships to marriage to starting a family), frequent Apatow star and writer of Superbad and Taylor Seth Rogen moves backward?

So who is Drillbit Taylor? He’s Owen Wilson, doing his “let’s be reasonable” voice in the role of a homeless man who may or may not be a veteran. A trio of high school freshmen (Nate Hartley as the skinny one, Troy Gentile as the fat one, David Dorfman as the nerdy one) hire Drillbit to protect them from high school bully Filkins (Alex Frost), a sociopath-in-training if ever there was one. Drillbit’s plan is to stay on as bodyguard just long enough to afford a ticket to Canada, his latest escape fantasy.

Yes, this is Romantic Comedy Plot #1A, retrofitted for a movie about teenage boys. (Hmm, did that sound creepy to anyone else?) Person enters into relationship under false pretenses, genuine attachment overshadows mercenary ambitions, falsehood is discovered, and the principals are separated and then united triumphantly. There’s even a romantic subplot between Drillbit and one of the school teachers (Leslie Mann) to mirror the formula.

The problem is that Drillbit Taylor isn’t very funny. The boys do not meet up with Taylor for approximately 30 hours, and when they do, the main thrust of the plot—the only reason anyone is there to see the movie at all—unfurls its rusty, well-worn chassis at a snail’s pace. Every Apatow and Rogen movie could benefit from some trimming, but none of them have been so obviously in need of editorial control.

Wilson is tailor-made for roles that require he act serious about being ridiculous, but few scenes just let him riff; for the most part he has to play off the boys (whose comedic talents simply aren’t up to task) or the laugh-free subplot involving Drillbit’s thieving homeless buddies.

But ultimately it comes down to the boys. Perhaps their casting is too perfect; in finding actors to portray kids at that most awkward stage of adolescence, the filmmakers have found three actors who are awkward to watch. The skinny one’s got some gumption, but the fat one’s got an abrasive Bronx personality and the nerdy one’s just grating. They do not possess the natural comic timing of Michael Cera or Jonah Hill from Superbad. Cera and Hill delivered lack of confidence with supreme confidence; Hartley, Gentile, and Dorfman come off as exactly what they are: young boys who want very badly to be funny. Perhaps ironically, Hartley is best when he plays it dramatic.

Movies like Drillbit Taylor are the hardest to write about. If it were actually terrible, I could work up a few hundred words of amusing vitriol. If it were made by people I disliked, that’d be good for another hundred words or more. But no. Drillbit is merely a mediocre movie made by talented people who have done better work. 15-year-old boys may like it just fine, but as Drillbit himself discovers, they don’t have nearly the pull movie marketers think they have.

The Proposition is a Western set in Australia. Though the only reason you can tell where it’s set is the occasional accent, name-check by character, or the appearance of Aborigines. Beyond those relatively minor distinctions, almost everything else plays out the same; the Aborigines didn’t seem to have a much better lot than black men in the South, and the urge to “civilize at any cost” still strikes the sanctimonious and the greedy. If anything, director John Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave’s vision of 19th century Australia is every unforgiving art house Western you’ve ever seen—only much more so.

The Burns brothers are a notorious Irish gang ripping through the Australian outback. Charlie (Guy Pearce, gaunt as he’s ever been) is on the run with his simple younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson). They’ve recently left the rest of the gang, led by the eldest and most vicious brother Arthur (Danny Huston, unlike you’ve ever seen him.) When the movie begins, Charlie and Mikey have been cornered by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), an army man with an urge to tame the wildness out of Australia. He gives Charlie the proposition: Hunt down and kill Arthur, or he’ll execute Mikey. Brutal, yes, but as with so many characters in The Proposition, the good Captain is only as brutal as he believes he needs to be. Australia is unforgiving. What many of the players don’t seem to realize is that it’s so unforgiving because they make it so.

Charlie treasures Mikey and, like so many others, considers Arthur a lost cause, so the choice for him is simple. He’ll follow the trail of his brother and the remnants of their gang into the bad lands of Australia, far beyond where even bounty hunters dare go. Stanley stays behind to guard Mikey from the vengeful intentions of the townfolk and his own tender-footed wife (Emily Watson). The Burns gang raped and killed a well-loved family, and though there are hints that this atrocity took place after Charlie and Mikey left them, there’s little doubt they’d committed similar crimes in the past. Charlie and Mikey are every bit as guilty as everyone believes them to be.

Which is, ultimately, my main issue with The Proposition: Most of the characters are genuinely awful people, with a few whose saving grace is that they are simply naïve or mentally deficient. These are bad men pursuing worse men because that is the game they’ve locked themselves into. Knowing the writer was Nick Cave and the star was Guy Pearce in full-on Haunted Cipher mode, along with the premise, indicated a hearty dark streak. But I still don’t think I was prepared for just how dark, just how grim, just how remorseless.

In seventh grade, I remember asking my English teacher—even then, someone I could identify as a very sharp lady—if she liked Stephen King books. (I’d just started reading The Stand right around that time.) No, she said, somewhat firmly. “Life has enough horror in it already.” The statement floored me and gave me food for thought (still does, obviously) and was not the last time I’d been confronted with that sort of logic, horror fan that I am. (Most recently I’ve seen that charge leveled—not without cause—at There Will Be Blood. My first reaction was to balk and repeat the argument so fondly used by schlockmeisters like Eli Roth: Through art we can look atrocity in the face, this sort of thing goes on all the time, yadda yadda. And there is some truth to that; using an argument to peddle bullshit does not necessarily make the argument itself bullshit.

But I find that, as the years go on, I understand the “life has enough horror in it already” argument more and more.

Which feels like a betrayal to my horror roots. But I’m beginning to see the difference between “nihilistic horror with a point” (observe No Country for Old Men or Ravenous, easily one of my favorite horror movies of all time), and “horror for horror’s sake.” Horror for horror’s sake isn’t without merit, but those merits tend to skew pretty young: To shock someone out of a comfort zone, to leave someone reeling, to strip their defenses away and shake them at their core. I would equate the appeal of the experience to skydiving. Both are cathartic experiences, and horror for horror’s sake can be as nuanced as any of its “higher” brethren.

But there is no visceral thrill or id-shock in The Proposition. It is a grim, joyless film, mired in depression, forced to watch bad men do terrible things. I do not believe every movie must have a shred of hope or a happy ending, but there is a point where a filmmaker has simply stacked the deck and rigged the game. If the message of The Proposition is that folks were pretty terrible to each other in bygone days, and their actions are what built our society, then I can only say we’ve seen that done better, elsewhere. Unforgiven or Deadwood manage to couple illumination with their grim tidings. The Proposition is beautifully shot, well-acted, and at times mesmerizing. But in service to what?

It seems surreal, but it’s true: IFC and Blockbuster Video have cut a deal. Blockbuster will carry the exclusive rights to rent and then sell IFC Films movies when they hit the home market. Blockbuster gets the first 60 days of release to rent the movie, and in that 60-day period the movies will not be available anywhere else, to rent or buy. After that 60-day period passes, any retailer can then sell the movie—but Blockbuster still retains exclusive rental rights for 3 years after street date. In theory, you will not be able to rent any IFC movie that hits DVD from any place besides Blockbuster until 2011. At the earliest.

Yes, that’s IFC and Blockbuster, shaking hands on a deal. This would be the same Blockbuster that regularly cuts and edits NC-17 films to be more acceptable (though mainstream “unrated” DVDs generally get by just fine). No problem, says IFC, we’ll cut our own movies and let Blockbuster decide which one they want to make available to their customers, which must thrill its stable of directors all to pieces. Considering Blockbuster is the company that wouldn’t carry Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ until the launch of its online service, we can assume which cut they’ll go for.

No, I don’t know what the hell is going on either. Only people with titles like “Vice President of Sales and Marketing” can think that restricting the rental and purchase avenues of a title will increase its exposure and market presence. But PR people are in the business of selling you crap and calling it gold.

Now, for Blockbuster, this makes some sense . . . and actually reflects their long-standing corporate policy of trying to stall the advancement of the movie rental market. The company fought widescreen DVDs tooth and nail until they turned around and declared it their “preferred” format—in 2004.

Blockbuster also actively tried to stop or slow down the production and release of DVDs for sale, ostensibly because their cheapness compared to VHS videos—that often cost upward of $90 per copy—undermined the rental market. This was in the late 90’s and early 00’s; The Matrix had just come out at an astonishing sub-$20 price tag and DVDs were officially coming into their own. I was a teenager then, working at a Hollywood Video directly across the street from a Blockbuster (in Blockbuster’s hometown of Dallas!), and I can tell you it wasn’t the DVDs hurting them. Their troubles were easily diagnosed, and still stand today: Lousy selection, restrictive rental windows, and the not-unjustified concern that the movie you rented may not be the edit that showed in theaters.

And now Blockbuster is sticking its fingers in its ears and going “LA LA LA” all over again. I hate to use the cliché, but it holds here as it did for the baloney HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray “war”: This company is simply re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Brick-and-mortar video rental places are on their way out, ground under the heel of vastly more convenient (and diverse) digital and mail distribution methods like Netflix and OnDemand. (Not to mention the less, mm, legal methods for acquiring TV shows and movies.)

I’m not saying video stores will disappear altogether, but it’s clear the days of B&M hegemony are gone. And have been, for several years, as Blockbuster may have noticed while annually closing hundreds of stores in favor of their online service. The less said about this online service the better; imagine a second-rate Netflix with a worse selection and you’re there.

(And it’s true: Thanks to the first sale doctrine, Netflix et al can simply purchase the videos from other sources and then rent those second-hand, and the law will smile on them. Blockbuster has plans to deter that, however.)

But what of IFC’s involvement? What are we to make of that? They have to know that their audience above all others is the one that will care about where they get the videos. As Jim Emerson puts it, IFC folks are exactly the ones who will make a conscious choice to avoid a place like Blockbuster, just as they wouldn’t order a Domino’s Pizza or shop at Wal-Mart.

There’s some indication that IFC may be doing as poorly as Blockbuster, and that the two are essentially clinging to each other as a sort of mutual buoy in the storm of their increasing obsolescence. To Blockbuster I can only say “good riddance”; they ran almost every video store worth a damn in Dallas out of business and put pressure on filmmakers to cut genuinely artistic NC-17 films in the interests of being “family-friendly” while having no qualms about carrying a wide variety of soft-core porn and gory horror movies. To IFC I can only say . . . damn, man. I remember when you used to be a contender.

Where does that leave us, the consumer? A little more put out, but no more inclined to shop at Blockbuster. I spent some time in one recently, on a Friday night—and believe me, the rank and file there aren’t interested in Lust, Caution or The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and an enthused voice-over running on perpetual loop won’t change that. And what do the artists—you know, the people whose work is being shuffled around by their distributor like the Red Queen in a game of three-card monte—have to say about it? We don’t know yet. But likely we will know soon.

Oh well. Think I’ll pull The Proposition from the red envelope and pop it in. Or maybe I’ll download a movie and hook my computer up to my TV? Or I could just browse OnDemand, or the truly silly number of movie channels I have on cable. Or just hit Amazon and buy a cheap, used DVD . . .

Or read a book or hit up iTunes for some music, or check the hundreds of stations on satellite radio playing 24/7. Life is pretty good in the 21st century, where we can watch or read or listen to what the hell we want when the hell we want to.

When Midnight (Jonathan Haagensen) wants to head to the beach on a hot day, it’s part parade and part military maneuver. Midnight is a crime lord in one of the many, many dirt-poor favelas (slums) of Rio. The gangs rule the favelas like gods, able to move and kill with impunity. The citizens watch them, admire them, talk about them—and keep their distance. The gangs war regularly, and none of their members walk the streets without at least one gun. The police only show up for bribes or in large tactical squads. Anyone who’s seen producer Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, to which City of Men (adapted from a mini-series) is a companion piece, will know the terrain. It’s a testament to both Meirelles and Men director Paulo Morelli that they can take such potentially grim material and inject it with a sense of vitality and frequent joy.

City of Men is not a crime story; it is a life story that features crime. The war between Midnight and his mutinous lieutenant Fasto (Eduardo BR) are a backdrop to the story of Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darlan Cunha), two teenagers so close they are de facto brothers. Ace has a wife and a son he feels locked into supporting. Wallace wants to know, once and for all, who his father is. Neither feels particularly trapped by the place they grew up in, but they are nonetheless straining against its social boundaries. This can’t be all there is to life, can it?

Both boys are turning 18 soon, and Wallace doesn’t want “father unknown” to appear on his official papers. But the boys catch a lead and head off in search of Wallace’s father with such haste that they unwittingly abandon Ace’s son at the beach—not one of City of Men’s subtler moments. Their search eventually leads them to Wallace’s ex-con father and the surprising connection he has to Ace and Wallace both, a connection that may divide them for the first time in their lives. But other things are going on too: Ace’s wife wants to go to Sao Paolo for a year to make extra money toward buying a house, and Wallace is in love with a girl that has family ties to Fasto. Wallace himself is Midnight’s cousin (“everybody is somebody’s cousin,” one sullen teenager with an assault rifle observes). When the gang war hits, those connections, tenuous as they may be, are enough to get any of them harassed or killed.

City of Men is not as uniformly strong as City of God. That comparison may be unfair, as City of God is quite simply one of the best crime films ever made, and had the added advantage of being the first glimpse of favela life worldwide audiences had. Both are about two young men who grow up and occasionally grow apart, but City of Men is kinder to its subjects. It’s also less blisteringly kinetic, though no less adept at introducing a host of new characters quickly and precisely. Its actors are convincing. The gang war is both exciting and repellant, as it should be. The slums of Rio are so well-rendered they’re virtually tactile.

But the movie’s general sweetness may work against it. I hesitate to call City of God grim, because it’s certainly not; what it is is a movie that burns into your brain with its unflinching presentation of casual brutality juxtaposed with the quieter, recognizably mundane aspects of growing up. City of Men flips that formula and relegates the gangs to a force of nature, one that acts as catalyst and forces everyone’s hand. Perhaps it’s just my individual palette talking (in a subjective movie review, of all places), but that switch in dynamic and focus gives City of Men less impact. The movie has heart and soul, and is told with confidence and skill marred by only a few baldly expository dialogue exchanges. But it did not seize me like its predecessor did. It is simply good, and not great.

Early in Sunshine, a scientist on board a ship headed for the sun sits in his cabin, basking in the glow of sunlight. The sun is close enough to make out its shape and the texture of its surface, but not so close that the pure brightness of it overwhelms the senses. The scientist sits in justifiable awe for a moment, and then asks the ship’s computer what percentage of the sun’s full power he’s seeing.

“Two percent,” it tells him. It then tells him that showing just 3.4% of the sun’s power at this range would permanently blind him.

The scientist, caught in something like religious fervor, slips on a pair of sunglasses and asks to be hit with 3.1%. Just for thirty seconds. The white light surrounds him, burns him, cleanses him—as the character more or less says later, the sun’s light and power envelopes him. It’s simply that overwhelming, and the awe transfers to us: It’s one brief glimpse of the sheer power and scale of the universe we inhabit. The scientist can be nothing but humbled. This is Sunshine in its best moments.

Further humbled is the scientist’s mission: He and his crewmates are flying a massive shielded ship toward the sun to fire a bomb into the heart of it. The sun is dying and Earth is freezing over, and it’s the dim, distant hope of the crew that their bomb will rejuvenate the sun anew. That their ship is named the Icarus II indicates they are not the first crew to attempt the mission. The first crew and ship, we find out, simply disappeared.

When we come to them, the crew has been in space for 16 months. They’re fast approaching their target, and stress levels are running high. Some are more obviously stressed than others: bomb designer Capa (Cilliam Murphy) and pilot Mace (Chris Evans) often come to blows, while Searle (Cliff Curtis), ostensibly the ship’s psych officer, spends more and more time staring at the sun. One minor course-correction—and one chilling beacon from the dim hulk of the Icarus I—topples the fragile house of cards. Docking with the Icarus I only makes it worse.

Sunshine is the second collaboration between director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, third if you count The Beach, based on the Garland novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by John Hodge. The other is 28 Days Later, a zombie film with ambitions to be more than just a zombie film. 28 Days Later was a flawed but worthy production, and its final act was like a compression of George Romero’s Day of the Dead. But its well-rendered characters and willingness to treat the subject matter seriously carried it into the halls of semi-cult classic status.

Sunshine has some of the same problems in its third act. Suspense and mortal peril (the kind created by human hands) makes an appearance, and though this touch is thematically sound it can’t help but feel like a substantial gear-shift from the previous hour. Sunshine is also ambiguous in many scenes, sometimes to great effect but often simply due to confusing editing. I’ve seen a hell of a lot of movies from a hell of a lot of countries, eras, and filmmaking schools, and yet more than one sequence left me completely baffled.

Less clear, too, is the film’s message. The crew of the Icarus II is quite literally trying to save their world from a catastrophe that, for once, was not caused by human hubris. But something like a debate rages through much of the film’s final moments: Is trying to literally restart the sun—an action so outsized in scope it seems absurd on the face of it—ultimate hubris or desperate courage? No, not every science fiction film needs to have a message at its heart… but Boyle and Garland always put theirs front and center. The results are, as with much of the movie, ambiguous.

But it is a beautiful film, beautiful enough that I was kicking myself for not seeing it on the big screen. A big HDTV with ambient lighting helps, but it was, to paraphrase the great sage, the difference between a lightning bug and a lightning bolt. Sunshine is a movie that instills in you a sense of the vastness, the stillness, and (yes) majesty of space. It is powerful in unexpected ways, surprising in others. Sunshine is no perfect movie, but it’s not time wasted.

Semi-Pro is what happens when the same 15 people make every major comedy for several years. It’s like that guy who has that one really good, very involved “story” joke. The first time you hear it you nearly choke from laughter. The second or third time, you pay more attention to the beats and laugh anew. The fourth and fifth time, it’s still funny to see people who are new to the joke laugh. After that . . . Jesus, man, get a new routine.

The joke—loud and oblivious Will Ferrell stumbles his way through a quasi-sport, or some other partially ridiculous profession—has been told many times now, with occasional efforts to spice up the visuals with anachronistic settings (It’s the 70’s! Look at those ties!) for extra flair. The diminishing returns are obvious: Anchorman is objectively great, Talladega Nights was a little worn but still possessed great moments, and Blades of Glory was like a cash-grab reunion tour. Balls of Fury and Dodgeball, though created by mostly different folks, only added to the deluge of silly sports movies. By now, the standard reaction to the description of a new Will Ferrell movie is “another one?”

Semi-Pro is indeed “another one.” Will Ferrell is Jackie Moon, one-hit-wonder disco sensation and owner and player for his American Basketball Association team, the Flint Tropics. Yes, that’s Flint, Michigan, grim industrial wasteland from Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me. Jackie’s team is actively terrible, but that doesn’t bother him so much. As long as he gets to do zany promotions and go about town as the owner of the basketball team, he’s just fine.

But many of the other ABA teams are doing terribly as well, and the fans have noticed. The NBA wants to buy out the league, and only four teams will get to keep their identity. The Tropics aren’t one of them. The NBA has chosen the four teams, but Jackie rallies and counters: The four best teams should be the ones to join. The other owners agree.

The problem is, the Tropics are dead last. So Jackie brings in a washed-out NBA player (Woody Harrelson) to shape the team up and maybe cultivate the one truly talented player on the team, Clarence Black (André Benjamin). It’s Harrelson’s job to play the straight man, and there are long, joyless segments of Semi-Pro where we revisit the hoariest of sports movie clichés out of some subconscious need to fulfill them. It’s weird to see ostensible satirists beholden to what they’re satirizing.

The movie does have one new thing going for it: Whereas Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Blades of Glory were rated PG-13, Semi-Pro is R. It is paradoxically both more and less “adult” in its humor, though it is refreshing to see PG-13 mavens like Ferrell and Tim Meadows pass off casual obscenities around a game of poker. There’s a certain edge to that scene in particular (or another, quite memorable one involving Rob Corddry) that’s missing in a lot of other places; it ends up feeling like an island in an ocean of sameness.

Which is not to say I didn’t laugh. I did. Will Ferrell, Will Arnett, Andy Richter, David Koechner, and (when the script allows it) Woody Harrelson are all very funny people. Jackie’s increasingly crazier promotion tactics provide the needed beats to inject some random craziness and start up a few recurring jokes. But these guys, along with Judd Apatow’s crew, have had the microphone for a little too long now. We know them, we know what kind of humor they produce, and we know how they do it. The novelty is gone. It’s time for some new jokes.