My pain was soothed by Wild Flag, starring Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, whose debut album was rocktastically outstanding, but what I really wanted – nay, needed – was the return of The Voice.

(If anyone starts talking about televised singing competitions, they will be mocked, scorned, and excommunicated.)

Hearing Corin Tucker sing is one of those religious rock & roll experiences like no other. There’s power, emotion, energy, and fun. While her first album as the Corin Tucker Band was nice, it wasn’t what we expect – or demand – from Corin Tucker. Kill My Blues is much closer to what we want, and need, from the beautiful wailing banshee.

(Now if only someone could persuade Wild Flag and the Corin Tucker Band to merge and form a supergroup of some sort…)

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Bonus Corin Tucker: Sympathy is one of my favourite Sleater-Kinney songs, and this performance is wonderful:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Mladic isn’t entirely new – they were playing it on their tour last year – but it’s an amazing start to the new album, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!

Despite spending more than two decades of my life reading comic books, I don’t know much about Judge Dredd. I know he’s an icon, and many great British writers and artists have worked on his books, but they’ve had limited availability in North America. I read a Batmand-Dredd teamup book once, but that’s about it.

I’m not sure, after watching Dredd, if I know anything more. This is a film that seems largely removed from the source material: Outside of the concept of a paramilitary police force and a post-apocalyptic future, there’s not a lot here that say “Dredd!” beyond some occasional scenery and a few sci-fi props. This story could translate to present-day reality without losing much.

Dredd gets down to business quickly. We’re introduced to Judge Dredd (Karl Urban, whose gravelly voice and monotone delivery makes Christian Bale sound like Tiny Tim) and his ruthless pursuit of justice; the vicious gangs that run the city and the new drug they’re dealing; and the rookie psychic Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby, whose brightness & obvious attractiveness stand out in a film so covered with grime) that Dredd will be evaluating.

Dredd and his trainee are quickly dispatched to Peach Tree, a monolithic residential tower where drug lord Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) has made a show of disposing of some dealers who encroached on her territory. When Dredd and Anderson arrest one of Ma-Ma’s senior henchmen with the intent of interrogating him, Ma-Ma locks down the building and sets her criminal army on them.

From here, Dredd kicks into a standard action movie template. There are obvious similarities to The Raid, which opened Midnight Madness last year, but Die Hard is an equally valid touchpoint, particularly given the lack of martial arts in Dredd. Dredd and Anderson alternate running, hiding, and shooting. The action sequences are clear and well-executed, but not particularly creative or awe-inspiring; mostly, Dredd just shoots a bunch of people. There’s little variety or escalation in the dangers they face – the only challenge Dredd faces comes when he starts running low on ammo.

There are some occasional creative flourishes: The drug at the centre of the story, slo-mo, slows down the user’s perceptions of time, leading to some lovely looking shootouts that look like a more eloquent version of The Matrix‘s bullet time; it’s also where the film makes the best use of 3D. And Anderson’s psychic abilities provide an occasional respite from the ultraviolence, even if they do seem to vary in effectiveness depending on the demands of the plot.

Dredd runs on an even keel, lacking any particular highs or lows. It’s a perfectly entertaining film, even if it never offers the sort of Wow! moment you’d like from an action film. It maintains quick pace, and its 95-minute running time is downright heroic in this era of 3-hour blockbusters. It’s also mercifully short on life lessons, morality parables, or philosophical ruminations on the nature of justice. It gets in, does its job effectively, and gets out, just like its titular law enforcement officer.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This year, I went with a much more manageable 40-film package. My week is mostly planned, though I’m still contemplating some changes or additions. Here are a few of the things I’m particularly looking forward to.

But first, a caveat: Expectations are meaningless. Last year, I was looking forward to seeing Hick, because it had a solid cast and an interesting story. It turned out to be one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. On the flip side, I had no expectations for The Loneliest Planet at all – it fit in my schedule, and kind of looked interesting – and was one of my favourites of the entire festival. I may be cursing some of these choices a couple weeks from now.

Midnight Madness

Midnight Madness is probably the most fun you can have watching movies. If you think of film festivals as stuffy art films or elitist celebrity parties, you need to go to some Midnight Madness shows and watch some heads explode with the most enthusiastic and appreciative audiences you’ll ever find. As usual, the Midnight Madness lineup has some good-looking films, but the one I’m most excited about right now is Hellbenders. “Foul-mouthed, lewd and lecherous priests” who perform exorcisms? Hell yes. Even better: the leader of these badass priests is played by Clancy Brown, who was absolutely magnificent playing a badass/evil priest on Carnivale. As an added bonus, he’s joined by Andre “Bubbles” Royo.

Bonus Clancy Brown as a Priest Pick: John Dies at the End, in which he plays a former priest and supernatural expert. (At least, that’s the character in the book, which is crazy)

Scandanavian Misery

I don’t know why, but I really enjoy Scandanavian films. I really wanted to see Headhunters at the festival last year, but couldn’t get tickets; when I finally saw it a few months ago, I was quite impressed, and became a fan of lead actor Aksel Hennie. 90 Minutes reunites Hennie with director Eva Sørhaug, who worked with him in the delightfully bleak Cold Lunch. There is virtually zero chance over anyone ever describing 90 Minutes as a “feel-good” movie.

Bonus pick: All That Matters is Past.  The trailer starts with corpses, so you know good times are ahead.

Flirting with the Mainstream

As a general rule, I try to see films at the festival that I’ll have a hard time seeing later. I’m dying to see The Master, but it’ll be playing everywhere a week after the festival ends; many other films may not come back to Toronto for a year or more, if ever. But there are still some bigger films I want to see:

• The Iceman: Last year, Take Shelter was one of my favourite films of the festival and the year, thanks largely to Michael Shannon. The guy is an incredible actor in just about everything, so I’m naturally thrilled about Iceman, where he plays a contract killer.
• Much Ado About Nothing: You had me at “Joss Whedon” and “Shakespeare.” I’m not generally one to get excited about celebrities, but I may faint due to excitement if Whedon or any of his actors are at the screening. (I’m seeing the second screening, where appearances are likely, but not guaranteed)
• Byzantium: Because I like vampires, and movies where Saoirse Ronan gets to kill people.
• Dredd 3d: I’m not sure, under normal circumstances, how excited I’d be about this. But I think it’ll be tremendous fun to watch with a Midnight Madness audience on opening night.

I don’t know what that is

One of the great things about the festival is discovering movies you’d probably never hear of otherwise. Some films appeal to me because of their directors, writers, or stars, but some just reach out and grab me from the festival guide.

• Ghost Graduation: “Ghostbusters meets The Breakfast Club” is good enough for me.
• Color of the Chameleon: A Bulgarian spy satire? Why not.
• Mushrooming: I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a movie from Estonia before. This is about.. mushrooms? And reality tv? And politics and a rock star?

Danish cycling advocate Andreas Rohl attended the Ontario Bike Summit last week, and as a representative of a city with quite a lot of bicycle usage, he had a few things to say on the subject. In the National Post, he said:

“I like to say we have no cyclists in Copenhagen. We have citizens who use bikes to get from A to B.”

And he told The Globe & Mail:

“I think the main thing is treating cycling as nothing special.”

The idea of the bicycle an instrument of pure practicality is a growing one. It comes up a lot on Copenhagenize and other urban cycling blogs. A bicycle, the argument goes, is merely a tool for getting from Point A to Point B, and anything else – equipment, type of bike, clothing – is entirely beside the point. We shouldn’t call people cyclists, because no one needs to be identified by their transportation tool. And while I can appreciate the logic and intent of this extreme utilitarianism, I am nagged by this thought: Have these people never seen a car commercial?

The car is, by far, the dominant mode of transportation in North America. And it’s not just because cars are useful, that they can get us from Point A to Point B while carrying X pounds of cargo and meeting Standard Y for fuel efficiency. No one needs a Porsche to get from A to B; they want one to get from A to B in a certain style, and also to drive around points J through P on weekends. You can similarly question the utility of SUVs, jeeps, and pickup trucks – these vehicles can be incredibly practical, but there’s no guarantee that any given driver needs that utility.

Volkswagen is probably one of the more practical automobile manufacturers. They have commercials that highlight the comfort, convenience, and practicality of their cars. But they also have commercials like this:

The video cannot be shown at the moment. Please try again later.

Driving Can Be Beautiful, the commercial tells us, and golly, they may be right. This isn’t about getting anywhere; it’s about driving around in a (conveniently empty) parking lot at night because it’s cool.

Volkswagen also provided something of a rebuttal to Rohl’s point about there being no such thing as “cyclists”, just people who use a bike to get from A to B:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Drivers Wanted. The very act of driving is exhilarating and enjoyable, even if you’re just getting from A to B. Because some people do, in fact, identify with their mode of transportation. This is why politicians get so much mileage out of War on the Car rhetoric – many people are so attached to their vehicle, they take any measure that’s not actively pro-auto to be a personal attack.

Meanwhile, Chevy teaches us that a car isn’t just a way of getting from A to B; it’s for spontaneous adventures, good times with friends, and freedom.

The video cannot be shown at the moment. Please try again later.

This is the big thing about cars: They’re as much cultural as they are practical, if not more so. Cars are ingrained in our lives: Learning to drive, buying your first car, buying your first new car, road trips, moving, family trips… A car can certainly get you from A to B, but the destination isn’t always the most important part of the journey.

But bikes can be exactly the same. I ride my bike to work and back, and it’s perfectly practical, but it’s also fun: I love speeding down hills, climbing up other hills, getting some excercise while I’m commuting, and having the freedom to quickly and easily adjust my route in the face of busy traffic or road work.

And no, I don’t strictly need my road bike for a half-hour commute to work – though it certainly helps with the hills – but it’s not merely a tool for getting from A to B; it’s also a substitute for a gym membership, and a toy for long, aimless rides on weekends and evenings. It’s fun and exercise and transportation all rolled into one.

I see some people riding mountain bikes in Toronto, and I think, why would you bother riding something like that in the city? The big, treaded tires just slow you down on pavement, and the shocks suck away your forward momentum. But maybe getting from A to B is merely part of that bike’s purpose, and the rider’s just waiting for a chance to bust loose on the trails of the Don Valley or Blue Mountain. Or maybe not; maybe the rider just thought that bike was cool, or somehow suited their own style.

If a bicycle was merely a tool for getting from point A to B, there’d be a handful of different bicycle designs. But every rider has his or her own style, every bike has its own purpose. Some really are just for getting from A to B – even if it’s not particularly suited for that purpose – while for other, A to B is merely an incidental use.

Car commercials also have something important to teach us about safety, and possibly about bicycle helmets. Helmets, some people argue, actually discourage cycling, as the perceived need for safety equipment suggests cycling is inherently unsafe. Mercedes Benz would disagree with that philosophy:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This car can get thrown around like a toy and smashed to bits, and the people inside will still be safe. Discussions of safety are not off-limits to car companies; they’re embraced. They aren’t afraid that customers will become afraid of driving; many commercials specifically remind people that unexpected things can happen while driving, and it’s best to be prepared. It’s fair to question how effective a helmet may be in preventing injury, but completely dismissing them because they suggest danger is absurd.

This is, perhaps, the normalization of cycling Rohl speaks of. People are accepting – often freakishly so – of the negative consequences of driving. Most automobile accidents don’t raise an eyebrow in the news unless the death toll is particularly high, or the casualties were all children. Few people think of how dangerous driving can be when buckling their seatbelt – it’s just something you do – even when car companies are reminding them of the many things that could smash into their car at any moment.

Driving a car, at the end of the day, is normal, though there’s no such thing as a normal car; it’s something people do without thinking about it too much. They’re aware, on some level, of the risks involved, and the sensible safety precautions that can be taken to mitigate them.

There’s some value in marketing bicycles as being simpler and easier than cars – they’re certainly cheaper, and often more convenient in many environments.  But painting them as purely utilitarian neglects the relationships people have with automobiles, and also undersells the joy and versatility of a bicycle. A bicycle that is meant solely to go from Point A to Point B will always be an afterthought next to the excitement, adventure, and fun offered by the automobile.

That approach is on display in most of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books, where most of his characters are tormented in one way or another in the course of each book. But while Martin’s books are full of unpleasantness, it never overwhelms the story, often because the truly awful scenes seldom happen on-camera. In the television adaptation, though, Game of Thrones seems to be pushing much of the horrid behaviour up-front; the second episode spent nearly half its time abusing female characters in a variety of ways, and the fourth episode, The Garden of Bones, loosed a staggeringly sadistic scene upon a couple of nameless prostitutes.

Is there any question, at this point, that Joffrey Baratheon is a horrible person? He’s selfish, arrogant, and cruel, and it’s been demonstrated many times: the incident with Arya and the butcher’s boy, Ned’s fate, cutting out tongues, and having his fiancee beaten. In this very episode, we see him tormenting Sansa as punishment for her brother’s recent military victories, and we can be quite sure he would have done worse had Tyrion not arrived.

So why, then, was it necessary to follow that up with scene in which Joffrey orders two prostitutes – naked, of course – to beat and torment each other?

I enjoy Jack Gleason’s performance as Joffrey, but it’s not a subtle character: He’s a sadistic asshole. If you have been watching Game of Thrones and have not yet realized that, you either haven’t been paying attention or you are also a sadistic asshole.

For some reason the writers of the show felt we needed one more scene of Joffrey being horrible, one more example of a powerful man abusing anonymous women. When he mistreats Sansa, we can at least view the events through her eyes, understand what is happening in a different way; the scene between Joffrey and Sansa in the first season finale, where she finally realizes her fair prince is an inbred monster, is one of my favourites of the series, and the first time I really appreciated Sophie Turner’s work.

But when Joffrey has the prostitutes beat one another under threat of death, nothing new is learned, nothing is gained. There’s no insight into Joffrey’s character – he’s still a dick! – and neither woman will ever speak of the event, nor will we ever see the consequences of it for them. It’s little more than sadistic voyeurism, an attempt at shocking the audience with another act of cruelty in a series that’s already full of them. The  producers of Game of Thrones have assumed Joffrey’s position in their creative capacities, committing acts of cruelty and violence simply because they can.

To be fair, the more prevalent question was probably “Jessica? Who’s Jessica?” Or possibly “What’s the name of that woman Andy was dating?”

As Jessica, Eleanor Siegler had appeared in three episodes of The Office prior to this one: Pool Party, Christmas Wishes, and Special Project. I have vague memories of her in the first two, and no recollection of her being in the third at all. I can’t remember any memorable lines or scenes she may have had. The entire character was introduced off-camera, when Andy told Erin about a woman he’d been dating for several months. We’ve known virtually nothing about her, and the entire reason for her existence is as a barrier between Erin and Andy.

I don’t want to be one of those people who’s always comparing the show to how it used to be, but I’m going to do it anyway: In Season 3, The Office showed it knew how to set up a love triangle. From a pure plot point of view, Karen Filippelli was an obstacle between Jim and Pam, but she was also a real person: She was a perfect fit for Jim, and she developed a personality away from Jim, even becoming friends with Pam and interacting with other members of the cast. Even if you were cheering for Jim and Pam to get back together, you felt bad for Karen when the inevitable happened.

There’s no such empathy for Jessica. Granted, not every character has to be fully formed and three-dimensional; we need walk-ons and bit characters, too. But the idea of Jessica as a vague, distant person – a dating concept – doesn’t support the idea of dedicating half an episode to writing her out of the series, never mind introducing a bunch of her friends. There’s very little of Andy and Jessica’s breakup that couldn’t have been covered in a two-minute phone conversation, or a series of poorly-planned voicemails.

(Granted, part of the point of the scene was to allow Andy to demonstrate his affection for Erin. But we already covered that when he drove all the way to Florida for her.)

The attempted elevation of Jessica to Real Person status is even more puzzling in comparison to the show’s farewell to Cathy.

(Yes, yes: What farewell? Who’s Cathy? This is my point.)

Cathy was Pam’s maternity-leave replacement. She had almost nothing to do for the entire season, prior to announcing she was going to seduce Jim while they were in Florida. She got one episode in which to be semi-interesting, which is one episode more than Jessica ever got.

(I’ve heard that some more interesting Cathy scenes were cut and made it to deleted scenes, but I can’t verify that: NBC geo-blocks Canadian users, and Global doesn’t put any extra content up.)

It appears that Cathy didn’t return from Florida, or, if she did, she came back and quietly exited, neither noticed or mentioned by anyone. Which, under normal circumstances, would be perfectly fine: She had a near-zero impact on the show when she was there, so why should her exit be significant?

But along comes Jessica to remind us that every character, no matter how insignificant or uninteresting, deserves a proper sendoff. And now, all of a sudden, I am offended on Cathy’s behalf.

In light of Jessica’s spotlight, I must now demand equal treatment for whatshername. That woman, you know, the one who filled in for Pam, she deserves a Going Away Party, too.

At the very least, I should think the Consequences of Cathy deserve some followup. Did Jim tell Pam about her? Did Dwight ever figure out what was going on?

But alas, Cathy shuffles off into oblivion while Jessica rides off into the sunset, and I’m left wondering how I ended up writing over 600 words about two of the least-significant characters on television.

This is the question Game of Thrones struggles with, both on page and on screen. Westeros is unquestionably a male-dominated world, but George R.R. Martin has created more intelligent and interesting female characters than the average fantasy author, and for the most part he manages to treat characters of all genders terribly at one point or another.

But sometimes, the misogyny inherent in the world he created piles up too high, as it did in The Night Lands, the second episode of the second season.  In it, we see the following scenes:

• The men of the Night’s Watch crack jokes about Craster’s daughter-wives, and rejecting a plea for help;
• Theon explains how awesome he is while treating a woman like crap;
• Littlefinger explains the fate that awaits one of his whores if she can’t cheer up;
• A pirate agrees to fight for Stannis as long as he gets to fuck Queen Cersei;
• Shae is made a pawn in the machinations between Tyrion and Varys;
• Theon arrives home in the Iron Islands and fondles a nice lady who offers him a ride to his father’s castle;
• Cersei finds herself increasingly powerless as Tyrion asserts his power and Joffrey does things behind her back;
• Melisandre fucks Stannis.

Not all of these scenes feature full-on misogyny, but even the strong female characters are poorly treated; at best, their more interesting characteristics are overwritten by the role they must play for their men.

When Theon’s would-be lover is revealed to be his sister Yara (Asha in the books, which is one of the more puzzling bits of re-naming), there’s little sense that she enjoyed the joke she was playing on Theon, and it’s left to their father to explain how badass and powerful Yara has become in Theon’s absence.

Yara was an opportunity for Game of Thrones to toss some of its cliches on their heads: She appears as yet another submissive plaything for Theon, another chance for him to boast about how awesome he is, but then – bam! - she’s not. She’s having him on, egging on his chauvinism only to emasculate him later – both my making him recant his own flirtations and by being the true, Iron-born “son” his father really wanted. But on screen, Yara merely moves from being Theon’s plaything to her father’s, never showing any personality of her own.

(Perhaps I should bet my prejudices out of the way here: I alternate between loathing and boredom towards Theon, and generally skim any of the Iron Islands chapters. The entire Greyjoy storyline has always seemed like a diversion keeping Martin away from the good stuff.)

Stannis and Melisandre is a much more interesting scene, and it might not have bothered me so much if not for the rest of the episode. After all, we always get the sense that Melisandre is manipulating Stannis in one way or another, and it’s strongly implied that they have some carnal knowledge of one another. But she’s barely been introduced into the series – though I must admit it was a hell of an introduction – and already she’s been turned into a woman who uses sex to get what she wants. Last week she had some mean mojo going, but this week her strategy is based around showing her tits.

The scene between Littlefinger and his whore is particularly egregious, since it’s a creation of the TV show and didn’t need to be present for any faithfulness to the book; at least, it didn’t need to happen here and now.

Todd VanDerWerf at the AV Club sees this all as a thematic issue: “The monarchy of Westeros runs through men, and in many cases, maybe that’s a terrible idea.” But that’s hardly a subtle notion that needs more emphasis in the series: From day one, whichever medium you choose, women have been treated terribly by men. In the very first episode, Daenerys is sold by her brother to a warlord who rapes her. (Then, largely off-camera, she falls in love with him. It’s one of the worst bits of characterization in the books, and it’s redeemed only by the fact that Daenerys becomes totally awesome and badass later on.)

More importantly, all these men-treat-women-badly scenes emphasize the point of view of the men. What are Yara, Shae, or Ros experiencing in these scenes? We don’t know, because they’re props for the men. The scene in Littlefinger’s brothel might have been an opportunity to reflect on the woman’s role in Westeros, but it was just another showcase for a man of power being ruthless and cruel.

The TV series seems to be supporting the male-dominated political sphere: It’s early yet, but I’m concerned by the rise to prominence of Robb Stark, and the corresponding demotion of Catelynn. In the books, Robb’s adventures and victories occur largely off-screen, explained by letters and word-of-mouth. It’s a clever way for George R.R. Martin to subvert  traditional, male-dominated fantasy literature: Robb may be running around with his trusty pet wolf, winning battles, waging war, and falling in love, but the truly important work is being carried out by his mother: Forging alliances, negotiating deals, ultimately going rogue in her own fashion. And ultimately, Robb is the one that fucks it all up.

But so far in season two – that is to say, in the first episode, as neither character appeared in the second – Robb is calling the shots, and Catelynn falls into line. Robb’s confrontation with Jamie Lannister is far more generic, and more forgettable, than Catelynn’s similar scene at the end of the first season. Robb is being established as the new hero of the series, but the Action Hero was never meant to be the star of Game of Thrones.

(Granted, we’re only on the second episode, so I’m happy to be proven wrong.)

I really don’t know how The Night Lands came about, or what the writers were trying to accomplish. If VanDerWerf is correct, and the episode was a deliberate commentary on gender – and I suspect he must be, because it seems unlikely all the storylines would correspond like this by accident – it was a failed one. This isn’t an episode about male-female power dynamics or the flaws of a patriarchy. It’s an episode in which men treat women poorly-to-horribly with few repercussions and no attention given to the character of women themselves.

It’s all the more disappointing because we know Game of Thrones has some fantastic female characters and actresses. The first season had great scenes for Catelynn, Daenerys, Arya, and even Cersei; the second season has great promise with the debut of Melisandre and, at some point, Brienne. Martin has crafted an amazing tale of outcasts – cripples, bastards, broken things, and women – who rise above the roles society has chosen for them.

But for one episode, Game of Thrones decided to set all of those things aside. The Night Lands wasn’t just unpleasant; it was shallow and unimaginative.

Parks & Recreation defines its characters extremely well. Everyone has a role in the dynamic of the show, and while the nature of comedy & drama demands those roles be stretched and challenged from time to time, the show always knows what its characters are about.

The major exception to this rule is Ann Perkins. Ann started off as a plot device: She wanted the pit behind her house filled in. She volunteered to help Leslie get it done, and followed her through all the bureaucracy and crazy shenanigans that involved. Along the way she and Leslie bonded as friends, and Rashida Jones settled into the role of playing straight man to Amy Poehler’s insanity.

Once The Pit finally got filled in, it was harder to keep Ann on the show, since she had no reason to be at the office aside from occasionally meeting Leslie for lunch. So they made her a part-time public health officer, a role which has had absolutely nothing to do with anything that has happened on the show. It even seems more irrelevant now that Ann is a volunteer on Leslie’s campaign, since that gives her a much more logical reason to be hanging around.

While Ann is a presence in nearly every episode, it’s rare that we ever learn anything about her. We know she’s a nurse, even if we don’t see her at the hospital much any more; we know that one of the qualities that makes her a nurse – looking after people – is easily transferred to her relationships; we know that she’s probably never been dumped, and that she’s absolutely terrible at  meeting appropriate men.

The last part forms the basis for Operation Ann, as Leslie launches a plan to find her best friend a nice fella for Valentine’s Day. This being Parks & Recreation, the plan goes horribly awry as a variety of weirdos and losers are paraded in front of Ann.

Curiously, for an episode that’s about Ann, she has very little to do. She’s vaguely apprehensive about the whole thing, sits around while evaluating her prospects, and then leaves. Most of the focus is on Leslie’s scheming and her herd of would-be paramours. Which is disappointing, since Rashida Jones can be very funny when she’s given the chance – just watch her disastrous attendance at a singles mixer in Fancy Party, or her nights out drinking in The Master Plan and The Fight. Parks & Rec has hinted at Ann’s quirks on many occasions – like the fact she occasionally showed up at Leslie’s office with an errant blood sample or prescription – so it’s too bad the show didn’t use Operation Ann to do something more interesting with the character. The Comeback Kid was actually a better Ann-episode than this Ann-titled episode, since it had her attempting to do something new – manage Leslie’s campaign – and fail spectacularly. (I still maintain that “What about a layup?” is one of the funniest lines of the season.)

It’s perhaps fitting that she’s ultimately paired up with Tom, who’s a similarly problematic character. The essence of Tom Haverford is simple: He’s a nice, smart guy who overacts and exaggerates because he wants to be seen a certain way. The result of that approach is that he frequently ends up looking like a dick, occasionally to the point where you wonder why anyone would want to be around him.

Operation Ann is Tom Haverford in a nutshell: When he’s trying to help Ann through her terrible suitors, he’s sweet and funny. But once he’s actually on a date with her, he turns on the Tom Haverford Machine and covers up everything Ann found appealing about him.

(I appreciate the slightly ambiguous ending: Ann voices her clear displeasure with Tom’s moves, but doesn’t actually leave the date. Is it possible that Tom might read the signs correctly and call off the act?)

In the B-plot, Leslie left Ben an elaborate series of clues designed to lead him to their Valentines rendezvous. In addition to being the sort of thing that makes perfect sense for Leslie – and her brief worry that Ben wouldn’t figure them all out, and by extension didn’t take their relationship as seriously as she did was a lovely touch – it also provided a number of great gags and even more Pawnee culture:

• More violent murals! (I want to learn more about Eating the Reverend)
• The Snowglobe Museum, previously mentioned in… another episode. I can’t remember. However, it must be said that “Well, it’s working now” is likely the funniest thing ever said about a snowglobe.
• Not only is there a Li’l Sebastian Memorial, but there appears to be a 24/7 candlelight vigil at it.
• Sometimes I worry that Andy is just too stupid for even the internal reality of Parks & Recreation, but then I realize I don’t care because Chris Pratt is  so good. Does anyone on TV do physical comedy better? The scene with the Raccoon display should be showed alongside Chaplin movies.

Lastly, I don’t have a lot to say about Sad Chris, aside from “It was awesome.” When he’s happy, he’s happy, but when he’s sad, he’s sad.

I also dig his music selections.

Battlestar Galactica was, in large part, about democracy. How effectively can humanity balance the competing needs of a brutal war and remaining a civilized, fair society? Politics was an occasional extension of that: President Roslin seems to be some sort of supreme executive, but she still has to face a democratic process now and than.

The presence of the media was an interesting aspect of Galactica, but it rarely became a thing unto itself. It was an audience for the political characters to play to, and occasionally worry about, but seldom had any characteristics beyond being “The Media”.  (Season Two’s Final Cut was significant, but for different reasons.)

Who are these journalists? Who are they reporting for? Are there news organizations and affiliations, or are all of the reporters just on their own? At the beginning of the episode, an interviewer introduces “two of the only legitimate journalists left in the universe.” Who are the others?

Instead, they’re merely a minor Greek chorus, there offer expositions and ask questions that allow the main characters to deliver their important speeches. At the very least, it seems that all the good journalists were killed by the Cylons.

Too much of Colonial Day is devoted to storylines that never really worked: Tom Zarek’s political-terrorist conspiracy, and the continued sinister implications of Ellen Tigh. Zarek never paid off as a villain: While he was an effective political rival for Roslin, his sinister implications never seemed that threatening. He has a couple of guys who look like extras from The Sopranos on his side, but that’s about it; hardly a threatening presence next to the Cylons.

Colonial Day might have been more effective if it had abandoned the conspiracy elements, because what we see of the political process is interesting: Baltar gets to be charming and awesome, and Zarek makes a surprisingly valid point about how everyone is still clinging to the standards of the pre-genocide days.

There could have been more: How does this system of government work? What did Roslin have to do to ensure her win? Part of the point of the episode is that she’s a skilled politician, but it appears she did little more than realize that people think Baltar is awesome. By that standard,  I could be president. A couple scenes of negotiations – both Roslin’s and Zarek’s – might have made both characters more interesting, and added background depth to the entire society of the series.

On the other hand, there’s very little to be done to make Ellen Tigh more interesting. After spending an entire episode on “Maybe she’s a Cylon” implications, she begins to make her transition into Lady Macbeth, imposing her own ambitions on her husband. Is she a Cylon, or is she just a bitch? I still don’t know, and I don’t think I ever cared.

Colonial Day was an opportunity to do some world-building, to establish some of the rules and players in the political process which, we are told, is so incredibly important. Instead, it’s just there, a bridge episode that takes the increasingly famous Baltar and puts him in a position of genuine power so he can fuck things up later on. As we’ll see again, Battlestar Galactica could be very focused on its main themes and characters, but could be pretty sloppy and lazy with some of the background details.

Potpourri Galactica:

• Starbuck and Apollo are back in their role of being awesome at everything. Pilots, sharpshooters, interrogators, and now… security detail? They even seem to be supervising security, which would be another thing entirely, as well as playing detective. Wouldn’t it be bad if there was a Cylon attack while Galactica’s two top pilots where on another ship, completely separated from their vipers? Couldn’t you have a police-type character who was at least officially in charge of security stuff, even if the two heroes were destined to take charge?
• I was going to write something about Helo and Boomer’s adventures on Caprica, but I still don’t care. While both actors improve, Grace Park and Tamoh Penikett are two of the weakest cast members, and keeping them together with no one else to work with just emphasizes that.
• We’re told at the beginning, by the expository media, that Wallace Grey has been playing a major part in President Roslin’s administration. So it’s a little funny that we’ve never seen him before now.

But the more I think about it, the less it bothers me.

Don McPherson makes the point that this is nothing new: The entire superhero comics industry is built on reusing old creations. Why should Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ creations  - which were themselves based on the Charlton line of superheroes – be considered sacred when Superman and Spider-Man have been passed around from one creative team to another for decades?

It’s different, of course, because it’s been treated differently. We have 50 years of Superman comics, many of them terrible, that have diluted any notion of artistic purity when it comes to the character. Everyone knows Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman, but few people think of Superman as belonging to any one character.

If DC had launched Before Watchmen in 1988, and followed it up with even more spinoffs, sequels, and prequels, the notion of “ruining” the original would be old news. Watchmen would be just another thing that used to be awesome, but was subsequently driven into the ground through overuse and careless brand management.

But DC knew Watchmen was something different, and DC managed to leave it alone for twenty years, though the temptation to publish more material with the characters must have been overwhelming. At a certain point, Watchmen became a monolithic achievement that demanded reverence, and while it has been imitated many times, no one has ever attempted to expand its canon. To do so would be to invite almost automatic scorn and comparisons to the original that would be impossible to escape.

Darwyn Cooke, who’s a pretty smart and talented guy, originally declined to participate in the Before Watchmen books, before agreeing to write two and draw one:

I said no out of hand because I couldn’t think of a story that would measure up to the original — and let’s face it, this material is going to be measured that way — and the other thing is, I frankly didn’t want the attention. This is going to generate a lot of a particular type of attention that’s really not my bag.

But then he changed his mind, and maybe it’s not so bad. Minutemen suggests obvious comparisons to his retro-JLA of The New Frontier, and his collaboration with Amanda Conner on Silk Spectre also seems like a perfect match.

Brian Azzarello seems like a similarly perfect fit for The Comedian and Rorschach. And while I’m not a fan of J. Michael Straczynski, at least he’s a big name with some heavy street cred. (Len Wein does seem out of place here; as much as he’s an influential veteran of the comics industry, I don’t know of any significant contributions he’s made in the past decade.)

On the other hand, do any of these stories need to be told? Is there anything you can say about Rorschach or Dr. Manhattan that Moore and Gibbons didn’t already do better? Cooke’s Minutemen, and to a lesser degree Silk Spectre,  has more flexibility, since those characters weren’t fully explored in the original. But Rorschach and Manhattan are such icons of the medium that even if the new stories are good, they’ll surely feel unnecessary.

But then, DC isn’t really in the business of necessary. Publishing 52 comics a month surely isn’t necessary, nor half a dozen slightly different takes on Batman. They’re in the business of making money, with a minor in looking cool.

Before Watchmen will likely succeed on both of those fronts. The books should be successful on the basis of audience curiousity at the very least, with the high profile team of creators ensuring that DC looks like they’re taking the Watchmen legacy seriously.

Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson frames it as a creators’ rights issues:

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, meanwhile, created Watchmen under the impression that the rights would be returned them eventually. Within a year after it was concluded, in fact. …  Due to the nature of the deal that had been agreed upon by Moore, Gibbons and DC Comics, it was widely discussed. It was a genuine victory for creators’ rights.

But then the book was kept in print forever, and the rights to Watchmen never reverted back to Moore and Gibbons.

So Watchmen isn’t just a case of a work-for-hire creator being neglected like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, but creators being specifically screwed over. I’m not sure I agree – DC certainly benefited from a contract that failed to anticipate the idea of a comic being kept in print for more than a few months, but if there were an actual violation of the contract, Moore and Gibbons surely would have had their lawyers on it by now. While I agree with Stephenson when he says he’d rather see new projects by the Before Watchmen creators, that seems to be beside the point – neither DC nor the creators involved seem particularly interested in originalwork.

Alan Moore was predictably annoyed by the whole thing:

I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.

But as much as I agree with Moore’s assertion that DC is fairly unoriginal, it’s hard to get to excited about it. Moore’s hardly been interested in creating anything new for at least a decade, devoting himself to either public domain characters like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or retro-homages like Tom Strong. It’s hard to take his complaints about originality and creativity seriously when a large portion of his recent work has been devoted to literary crossover sex.

What happens next? If these Watchmen spinoffs are successful, surely there will be more. Perhaps next time the creative lineup won’t be quite so good, and the one after that will slip even more. Before you know it, there’s an ongoing Watchmen series, then a Watchmen-JLA crossover, then they’re rebooting Watchmen to clean up continuity issues…

But ultimately, that doesn’t matter. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, will remain a great book. It was still a great book after someone made a pretty bad film adaptation of it, and it’ll be a great book regardless of how good or bad any subsequent prequels, sequels, and spinoffs may be. If you hold Watchmen up as some sort of sacred cow, or expect corporate superhero publishers to value originality or creativity over profits, you’re doomed to disappointment. Before Watchmen will likely be just like everything else DC does: Some of it will be good, some of it will be bad; the good will be worth recognizing, and the bad will be easily ignored.

So it comes as a bit of a shock that I find myself annoyed by the accolades bestowed upon his latest film, Midnight in Paris, up to and including three Oscar nominations. It’s a fine film, and easily one of the best he’s made in the past ten years, but seems grossly out of place when talking about the best films of 2011.

In other circumstances, Midnight in Paris is the sort of film that gets nominated for awards because the filmmaker’s never won anything. But Woody Allen’s already won three Oscars personally, was obviously the main factor in Annie Hall‘s Best Picture win, and been nominated 17 times, so there’s no danger of him dying without achieving the proper amount of recognition and respect.

But Midnight in Paris is all about nostalgia, and it’s fair to say that nostalgia – both for the era depicted in the film and the days when Allen was a great filmmaker – has played a part in generating affection for for the film.

Perhaps you’re nostalgic for the time Woody Allen made consistently good movies on a regular basis. Depending on your tastes, that could be the seventies (Sleeper, Love & Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan), the eighties (Hannah and Her Sisters, Zelig, Crimes & Misdemeanors), or even the nineties (Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Sweet & Lowdown).

It’s fair to say, however, that no one will ever be nostalgic for the Woody Allen films of the 21st century. He’s made some good films (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Match Point, and yes, even Midnight in Paris), but they’re outnumbered by the forgettable (Whatever Works) and the downright awful (Curse of the Jade Scorpion).

Midnight in Paris marks a return to form for Allen, but only by the standards of our lowered expectations. It has many of the hallmarks of a great Woody Allen film, but also the flaws of a filmmaker who didn’t bother to fully develop his ideas or characters.

Hitting the nail on the head, over and over

Midnight in Paris is all about nostalgia and romance. Gil (Owen Wilson) loves Paris, and wants to be a humble novelist instead of a successful screenwriter. His fiancee (Rachel McAdams) thinks it’s all rather silly, and enjoys the material comforts provided by a successful screenwriter. Somehow – it’s never explained, and I’m fine with that – Gil travels back in time to the 1920s, where he meets all of his literary heroes and embraces the life of a true artist. He meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful woman  who loves artists, so that works out quite well.

So the past is great, as long as you get to hang out with cool people and don’t have to deal with influenza or a world war. But then, through equally unexplained means, Gil and his love interest travel back in time again to the turn of the century, which is Adriana’s ideal of the perfect era. They meet her artistic heroes, who, in the least surprising twist ever, are nostalgic for yet another era.

The idea that no one is ever really happy is hardly foreign to a Woody Allen film – everyone’s either miserable or horrible, as he said in Annie Hall - but it’s made in the clumsiest, least interesting way possible here. I’d almost call it a running gag, except for the fact that it’s not even funny the first time it happens, let alone the third. The entire plot revolves around a deus ex machina, but resolving it with one seems particularly lazy, and it’s disappointing that a filmmaker who’s been described as “cerebral” as often as Allen has feels the need to hit the audience over the head with his message.

What happened to the women?

There have been fifteen Oscar nominations for actors appearing in Allen’s films, not including Woody’s own Best Actor nomination for Annie Hall. A solid majority of the nominations went to actresses, and five of the six winners were women (including Dianne Wiest twice). Allen has consistently written interesting and entertaining female characters, so it’s surprising and disappointing that the female cast of Midnight in Paris is so dull.

Rachel McAdams’ character is shallow, materialistic, and utterly unsuited to Gil. She is, to anyone who sympathizes with Gil, a horrible person. There are no redeeming qualities on display, or even any sort of explanation as to why she and Gil were attracted to each other in the first place.

Marion Cotillard fares little better as her opposite: She loves artists.  She’s kind, intelligent, sympathetic, and, being Marion Cotillard, gorgeous and elegant. But that’s all there is; she’s as perfect as McAdams’ character is awful.

Not every character needs to be fully-rounded and three-dimensional – it’s not like Jennifer Tilly got an Oscar nomination for being nuanced and subtle – but it would help if they were at least interesting or entertaining. They sit on the fence between actual characters and entertaining stereotypes, blandly signalling plot points and themes like extremely attractive highway signs.

What happened to Allen’s ability to get great performances out of his actresses? Just three years ago, he helped Penelope Cruz to a Best Supporting Actress win. It can’t be about talent – McAdams and Cotillard are both strong actresses, and Allen’s elevated lesser talent to excellence.

One of Midnight in Paris’ greatest strengths is its variety of small, entertaining performances – Corey Stroll’s Hemingway is perfect, Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali is hilarious, and I want to see an entire film about Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill (the sole female standout) as the Fitzgeralds. They show up, nail their characters, and move on. So why are the main characters, aside from Owen Wilson’s Woody stand-in, so uninteresting?

The Woody Allen Sketch Comedy Hour

Perhaps it’s because Midnight in Paris feels as though it was conceived around those small, one-joke performances. Woody Allen’s interest in his literary heroes goes back some time, so it’s not surprising he’d eventually want to make a film about them. But the thing that makes the film memorable – a guy goes back in time and meets a bunch of famous artists – also reduces the amount of time for a coherent plot and character depth. Ultimately, it suffers from too much of a good thing – Hemingway is great, and even relevant to the central theme, but at a certain point it’s all too much.

Do Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, or even Dali add anything, or are they merely a never-ending parade of one-note jokes? It’s perfectly fine if they are jokes, since many of them are quite funny, but that interpretation contradicts the idea that Midnight In Paris is a particularly artistic film worthy accolades and awards. Yes, it’s funny and well-executed but so are many other films. (Bridesmaids, for example, was both funnier and more effectively dramatic.) And if we’re handing out awards for loving historical homages, Captain America deserves some recognition.

Memories of Woody

Midnight in Paris is the sort of movie we think Woody Allen used to make: It has clever dialogue, literary references, a great ensemble cast, a distinctive sense of place, and  philosophical debates about things like the eternal conflict between art versus commerce.

But nostalgia seldom holds up to scrutiny: Woody Allen made a lot of movies like this, but most of them were quite a bit better.  He made silly, clever comedies like Love & Death, but always undercut any attempts at being genuinely profound and meaningful. He made more serious dramas like Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters, and humorous-yet-serious films like Annie Hall, but he never let the jokes overwhelm the story or characters. Midnight in Paris isn’t funny enough to be a great comedy, and it has too many weak characters and plot holes to be taken seriously as a drama.

Woody Allen has clearly passed the point in his career where he’s interested in experimenting – Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the most creative film he’s made in the past decade, and that’s largely due to the fact that some people speak Spanish in it. Midnight in Paris is one of the most comfortable films Woody Allen has ever made, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it does a lot of things well, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with nice, safe entertainment. I left the theatre quite pleased with the film, and a DVD viewing left me with the same feeling.

But that alone doesn’t make it a great film. If you’re going to play things safe, you’d better execute them perfectly. Allen apparently didn’t care that the film deteriorates into painful obviousness in its final act, or that the romantic interests have nothing interesting about them.

Midnight in Paris is a pleasant film, and a reminder that Woody Allen hasn’t completely lost his touch. But when people plan their Woody Allen retrospectives a decade or two from now, Midnight in Paris will be nowhere to be seen, and it’s equally out of place in a discussion of the best films of 2011.

Tomorrow morning, the Oscar nominations will be announced. It is possible I will respond by swearing at my computer, television, or the bird outside my window.

It shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that my tastes rarely line up with the Oscars. I wasn’t offended last year when The King’s Speech won everything, but I was still disappointed that Black Swan was more or less shut out.

So before disappointment can set in, here are my picks for the best films & performances of 2011. Nothing is listed in any particular order, beyond the fact that they were listed in the order I thought of them. These aren’t any sort of attempt at predictions, and any resemblance between my list and reality is purely coincidental, and possibly a cause for concern.

(A brief note on some obvious omissions: I haven’t seen We Need To Talk About Kevin or My Week with Marilyn yet, and have no interest in The Iron Lady, so Best Actress is lacking. I’ll probably get around to watching Hugo, Ides of March and The Descendents eventually, though I don’t feel any rush to do so. Moneyball was merely okay, and most of Tree of Life was fairly dull. I have no interest in watching The Help, and have already watched one too many adaptations of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.)

Best Picture

There’s no reason to have 10 nominations. I could come up with another five if you really want, but I’d have a tough time arguing passionately for any of them.

• Bridesmaids: The funniest film of the year, but also one of the most depressing ones. It’s unfortunate that the food poisoning scene may have overshadowed the cupcake scene, or Kristen Wiig’s nervous breakdown at the bridal shower, both of which showed the fantastic mixture of comedy and pathos the film showcased. (Full Review)
• Take Shelter: The first time I saw Jeff Nichols’ film about mental illness and paranoia, I wasn’t sure about the ending. The second time I saw it, I loved it without reservations. Michael Shannon gives an incredible performance, Jessica Chastain isn’t too far behind, and the entire film drips with dread and suspense.
• Meek’s Cutoff: The opposite of a guilty pleasure, director Kelly Reichardt  makes you work for your gratification. One of the slowest films of the year, but also one of the tensest and most rewarding, the story of a group of settlers lost in the Oklahoma desert is beautiful and haunting. (Full Review)
• Shame: If there were an award for “Most Uncomfortable Film,” Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender would have it locked up. It’s not merely about sex addiction, but dysfunction and isolation, and it’s all painted slowly and immaculately.
• Martha Marcy May Marlene: I said last year that I respect ballsy film makers, and MMMM certainly qualifies. Sean Durkin’s first feature film is disorienting and ambiguous, and gives the audience as little resolution as possible. He built a film around Elizabeth Olsen, who hadn’t acted since she appeared in her sisters’ film when she was five, but who nonetheless turned in one of the roughest and most harrowing performances of the year.

Best Actor

Best Supporting Actress

One of the things I love about Parks & Recreation is its sense of continuity. The writers have created a mythology for Pawnee and its citizens that makes everything just a little bit more real, albeit also more ridiculous. Running gags like the terrible history of Pawnee, often depicted in its murals, absurd media personalities like Perd Hapley, and the utter horribleness of the library show up in bits and pieces; while any given bit may or may not be a winner, they have a cumulative benefit to the show.

For instance, when you watched Season 3′s Ron & Tammy Part Two, you probably noted Ben Wyatt’s preference of calzone instead of pizza, and how absolutely everyone thought that was a terrible idea. Maybe you didn’t come away from the episode thinking “Hey, I hope Parks & Rec explains more about Ben’s attitude toward Italian fast food,” but then, BAM, this week comes along and gives you even more about Ben’s attitude toward Italian fast food and how it’ll lead to financial and personal success, and it is awesome.

Well, it would be awesome, if not for the fact that calzones are stupid and everyone hates them. Even Chris Traeger finds them fatty and unnecessary, and he loves everything. But Ben and Calzones are a thing on Parks & Rec, and not a totally irrelevant thing: Calzones are one of the things that makes Ben an outsider; maybe his idea for a calzone franchise would fly in other cities, but not Pawnee, where everyone still uses Alta Vista, a little horse is a celebrity, and everyone knows calzones are terrible.

The Comeback Kid is a fairly simple episode with an obvious goal. When the show broke for Christmas, it left with a new status quo: Leslie was still going to run for city council, but with the help of her friends and co-workers instead of the professional political consultants; and Ben was unemployed after his resignation and subsequent refusal to take a safe, boring accounting job. It was mildly surprising that when everyone pledged their support to Leslie and her campaign, Ben was nowhere to be found.

After all, Ben is a smart guy. He’s practical, good at planning, and knows his way around a budget. He’s also in love with Leslie, and has literally nothing else to do with his life. He’s a natural fit to take part in her campaign, if not outright lead it.

So if you left Parks & Recreation wondering “What is the deal with Ben?”, Comeback Kid is here to answer your question with two perfectly executed storylines:

1. Leslie and her crew are well-meaning, but really have no idea what they’re doing;
2. Ben tries to redefine his life, but he has no idea what he’s doing.

In the first part, Leslie and her team try to organize the first big event of her campaign. They rent an arena, gather supporters, and try to win an endorsement from local high school basketball icon Pistol Pete. Needless to say, it all collapses in a spiral of disappointment, traffic infractions, red carpet shortages, inadequate stages, and an ice rink.

It’s possible everyone is just a little too incompetent. After all, these people put together massive, successful events like the Harvest Festival and the Li’l Sebastian Memorial, so a simple speech shouldn’t be impossible to organize.  But the climactic scene of everyone trying to walk across an ice rink to Leslie’s stage was too perfect to criticize.

But the more interesting thing about Comeback Kid is that it was largely about Ben Wyatt, who has primarily been defined by his relationships with other characters. He was introduced as an adversary for Leslie, a government axe man who thought more about the budget than the services it provides. At the same time, he was the shadowy mirror image of the relentlessly positive Chris Traeger. Even after he became part of the team, he was still the outsider, the guy who didn’t get Pawnee and was there to point out how weird the town was. Then his relationship with Leslie began – and subsequently ended – and that became the primary role for Ben.

Comeback Kid is the first time we’ve seen Ben on his own, with no interaction with the regular cast aside from short scenes at the beginning and end. Instead, he spends most of the episode with Chris, which seems appropriate since they’ve known each other a long time.

Ben, as it turns out, is a lot like Leslie: without his job to define him, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. But unlike Leslie in Citizen Knope, Ben is dealing with the actual end of his job, as opposed to Leslie’s two-week suspension. He resolved to take some time for himself to explore his interests, but unfortunately his interests are terrible.

At least they’re terribly hilarious. The Lo-Cal Calzone Zone sounds about as useful as another salad restaurant. His foray into the tedious and pain-staking field of stop-motion animation is as marvelously anticlimactic as anything I’ve ever seen on television.

Looked at from a certain point of view, this is kind of a depressing episode: Ben Wyatt has nothing at all going for him in his life aside from his job. (And Leslie, obviously, though she’s wisely kept away from Ben for most of the episode.) Absolutely no one is interested in his hobbies or entrepreneurial ideas. He was going to take some time and rediscover himself, but all he discovered is that he is awful at many things, and that’s not even considering the fact that he doesn’t understand how useless calzones are.

But perhaps that’s beside the point, as Ben ultimately finds a purpose as Leslie’s new campaign manager, making everyone happy. It was inevitable, but Comeback Kid was a nice pause of sorts before establishing the real new status quo, and spending some time with a character no one knows all that well.

Etc…

• “He’s really bad at digging.” April accurately points out one of the few limitations of a three-legged dog. Are we really going to get three-legged dog jokes every week?
• “How about a lay-up?” Ann’s attempt to negotiate with Pistol Pete, who doesn’t want to continue living in the past.
• I know Ron is a staunch libertarian, but surely even he could understand that driving around with stuff falling out of your truck is a bad idea?
• I would really like to watch all of Requiem for a Tuesday some time.

But with four Oscars and another nine nominations between them, the cast makes spending 90 minutes with these assholes as enjoyable as humanly possible.

The teams, at first, are easily defined: Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet) pay a visit to Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) to discuss a violent altercation between their sons. But while everyone can agree, pleasantly and civilly, about the need for apologies and accountability, minor disagreements spiral out of control and the tone escalates from cooperative to snarky to aggressively hysterical.

Penny preaches forgiveness and mutual respect while continuously exaggerating the severity of the incident. Nancy is initially open to taking responsibility for her son’s actions, but grows to resent the increasingly accusatory tones and looks to spread the blame. Alan is completely disinterested in the whole affair and spends a third of the film talking on his cellphone, descending into the conversation every now and then to assert his superiority. Michael is mostly along for the ride, supporting his wife in theory without sharing her passion and intensity.

Christoph Waltz is great fun to watch as he cruises through the film, deflating Penny’s passive-aggressive martyrdom, ignoring his wife, and patronizing Michael’s career in hardware sales. At times, it seems as though he only takes an interest in the proceedings when he has the opportunity to demonstrate how superior he is to everyone else, how much more significant his life is.  If Carnage was an M. Night Shyamalan film, Alan would be revealed to be the devil, or possibly an alien, in the final scene, a supernatural and/or extraterrestrial interloper sent to degrade everyone else’s humanity.

Winslet has more of a slow burn: Nancy doesn’t do a whole lot for the first two thirds of the movie, which makes her final-act explosion all the more spectacular. She tries her best to  be good-natured and accommodating under increasingly difficult circumstances, withstanding her husband’s indifference,  Penelope’s guiltmongering, and a peach cobbler that may have been past its prime.

Meanwhile, I’m still not certain whether Penelope is the most sympathetic character or the most irritating one. She clearly means well, but she can’t quite put aside her notions of superiority; at least Alan is up front about his self-importance. Penny wants so badly to be good and right, and have someone acknowledge it, but no such recognition is forthcoming.

Everyone clashes: The upper and middle class, victim and abuser, husbands and wives. The only common ground to be found is that everyone hates Alan’s cellphone. Peeling away civility is a common literary theme, but normally you have to strand your protagonists on an island to get this sort of descent into savagery.

Carnage is based on a play, and it certainly feels like one at times: The entire film, aside from a brief prologue and epilogue, takes place in Penny and Michael’s apartment. But Polanski makes it all work, taking what could be stolid and unimaginative staging and keeping the camera moving with the characters, alternately isolating them and forcing them much closer than they’d like. Carnage has a tremendously well-defined sense of place; by the end of the film, it feels like you’ve been stuck in the apartment for the whole time.

The language is often theatrical, though it flows much better when taken as a whole than when edited together into the trailer.

By the time the credits roll, Carnage is all blood and bile as hysterical accusations and insults fly wildly in the tiny apartment, sometimes hitting their target (Waltz tends to be the most precise, and most often deliberately nasty), sometimes spraying them randomly into the crowd.

For some reason, it all reminds me of Ralph Steadman’s interpretation of the lounge lizards in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas:

"We're right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody's giving booze to these goddamn things! It won't be long before they tear us to shreds."

But as entertaining as Carnage’s hysteria is to watch, one ultimately wonders what the point is. There are few developments to speak of: The characters start out bad, get worse, and then get even worse than that. If the point is Human beings can be tremendous assholes, then it’s well-delivered, but point was made amply well in the first ten minutes. There seems nowhere to go at the end, and so Carnage simply ends; while I can appreciate an ambiguous or depressing ending as well as anyone, Carnage doesn’t do anything to stay with you after you leave the theatre.

Carnage does all the little things well: It has a lot of snappy, clever, and vicious dialogue, delivered with great enthusiasm by a fantastic cast. It’s surprisingly fast-paced and visually compelling for a movie without much action and one of the tiniest sets you’re likely to see. But like a Michael Bay film, it simply piles explosion upon explosion, following an exploding car with an exploding helicopter and calling it development.

There’s a lot of sound and fury, but ultimately Carnage isn’t terribly significant. It’s a perfectly fun film, but you can’t help feeling like there should be something more.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It’s a slow, occasionally meandering film that doesn’t offer a lot of definitive plot points for the first 45 minutes or so. A group of settlers travelling west in 1845 takes a shortcut that gets them lost. Soon, getting to their destination has taken a back seat to finding water.

Director Kelly Reichardt follows the group as they trudge solemnly through the desert, slowed by seemingly mundane tasks: replacing a broken wagon axel, camping for the night, feeding their oxen teams. They’ve been led astray by their guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who boasts of his many experiences but may have no idea where he is.

Dialogue is sparse, and often difficult to make out: The story is largely told through the eyes of Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), and the womenfolk aren’t typically involved in the decision-making processes. As such, they listen to the men debating their fate from a respectful distance, understanding only fragments of the conversation.

But then, at some point, Meek’s Cutoff reveals itself as an incredibly tense and compelling piece of cinema. It’s hard to identify the exactly when this happens, but before you know it a group of 19th-century settlers carefully easing their wagons down a steep hill is one of the most riveting scenes you can imagine. By this point, everyone in the film feels real, and the stakes are impossibly high: If things go any more wrong, or don’t start to go right, people are going to die.

It’s a lot like watching The Wire: you go along with the first few episodes because they’re interesting, if not particularly eventful. But then, before you know it, people are dropping dead, no one knows where Wallace is, and you couldn’t stop watching if you wanted. Meek’s Cutoff takes hold of you the same way, except that there’s less violence since it takes everyone a minute to reload their gun after shooting it.

The film’s dynamic certainly changes when the group crosses paths with a native (Rod Rondeaux). Most of the settlers are afraid, while Meek advocates killing the man, backing up his opinion with tales of bloodthirsty savage depravity. But he probably knows where to find water, and ultimately a bargain is struck – or as much of a bargain as can be struck when the parties speak different languages. Urged on by promises of blankets, and not being shot, he takes them in a new direction, though the party continues to debate whether he’s leading them to salvation or merely waiting for the opportunity to murder everyone.

Rondeaux gives an interesting performance. He speaks no English – and is, appropriately, never subtitled – and you could interpret his actions as a man who expects to die, who’s plotting his escape, or is making the best of a bad situation and honestly leading the strange white people to water. No one gets overly chummy; even when Emily helps and defends him, it’s out of self-interest: having decided that Meek is leading them to their death, she has little choice but to believe the savage indian will lead them to salvation.

Along the way, Reichardt presents some lovely scenes of the American West’s wasteland, creating some surprisingly compelling sequences of people merely travelling. Meek’s Cutoff isn’t really about plot developments and action, nor is the ultimate destination of the party all that important. It’s about the journey, and the amazing things that can happen along the way. If you have a little patience, and don’t require that easily discernible and eventful things happen at regular, frequent intervals, this is an incredibly rewarding film.

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The Debt begins by revealing one of its climactic scenes: A Nazi war criminal escapes from his Israeli captors, brutally assaulting one of them in the process. She recovers from the beating just in time to shoot him dead before he escapes into hiding forever.

The heroic scene is recounted 30 years after it happened by Rachel Singer (played by Helen Mirren in 1997, and Jessica Chastain in 1965), at the launch of a book detailing the Mossad mission to identify a suspected Nazi war criminal and return him to Israel to stand trial. But not all of the team is basking in heroic glory: One member commits suicide, suggesting that something happened on the mission that no one wants to talk about.

The first half of The Debt is an excellent caper film, though one with a more somber tone than  Oceans 11: Three Israeli agents have been sent to East Berlin to identify and kidnap a suspected Nazi war criminal. Rachel arrives for the final steps of the plan: with the suspected Nazi doctor working as a fertility doctor, a female agent has the best opportunity to get close enough to verify his identity and put the extraction plan into action.

In a series of increasingly creepy appointments – if you think spying on a Nazi is tense, just imagine doing it while he’s probing your cervix – Rachel verifies that the friendly doctor is, in fact, Dieter Vogel, the Surgeon of Birkenau (an obvious stand-in for Josef Mengele). The team is faced with their next problem: Getting him out of Soviet-controlled East Germany and then on to Israel to stand trial. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as planned, and they’re forced to hide out in their ratty apartment with an unplanned hostage while they wait for another opportunity to escape. Then the thing happens, and everyone agrees never to speak of it again.

To this point, The Debt is a pretty snappy film: It’s tense, it has some well-executed action sequences, and the cast manages to squeeze some genuine emotion in between plot points. Jesper Christensen manages to be scary and vile without crossing over into mad supervillain territory, and his scenes with Chastain and Sam Worthington are riveting. And when the big plot twist happens, it turns the entire film on its head; I feel fairly confident saying you won’t see it coming.

That sets off the second half of the plot, as Rachel and Stephan debate how they’re going to set things right. The modern-day element of the film isn’t nearly as satisfying as the first half; it’s much more straightforward and plot-driven, as though the filmmakers were in a hurry to get everything tied up neatly. It’s unfortunate, since the modern-day cast of Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciarin Hinds don’t get much to do. Wilkinson is particularly wasted, with most of his role reduced to exposition and direction. (And while the old/young casting of Mirren/Chastain and Wilkinson/Csokas holds up well, it’s hard to imagine Worthington aging into Hinds.)

There are a lot of compelling developments in the second half, but it all happens much too quickly, as characters discover new information, decide on a plan, discover new information again, and wrestle with their feelings about it all in time to wrap things up. It’s mostly Mirren’s work, with Wilkinson and Hinds playing devil and angel on her shoulder, the former arguing for the status quo and the latter talking about morality.

The second half of The Debt also begins to strain credulity, as Rachel – despite being a rookie on the Berlin mission and established as not working as an operative for most of the time since – jumps back into the espionage field like James Bond, accepting both its dubious moral aims and challenging operational requirements with ease.

(One might similarly wonder about the effectiveness of the team in 1965. The film points out how young they were, but omits any explanation of why some more seasoned operatives wouldn’t have been sent on such a vital mission. Rachel’s inexperience is understandable – a female operative who spoke fluent German might have been hard to come by – but surely they could have included one experienced agent?)

It’s unfortunate, because the themes of the second half – guilt, pride, and coming to terms with the past – are powerful, and the cast was certainly well-equipped to handle them. As it stands, The Debt does its hour of action and suspense quite well, before attempting to tidy everything up far too quickly.

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How I Met Your Mother is unique among TV shows for its approach to narrative and storytelling. The entire show is conceptually a flashback, a father telling his children stories of his youth. That alone isn’t particularly unique – it’s basically The Wonder Years - but even within that framework, there are stories about stories.  Events are described by multiple characters, often tainted by perspective or memory, there are flashbacks within flashbacks, and more than one narrator has been revealed to be entirely unreliable.

It doesn’t always work. How I Met Your Mother is frequently lazy, with characters explaining events they should have little-to-no knowledge of. The central concept of the story of how Ted met the mother of his children fades in and out of effectiveness, depending on whether you think it’s cleverly subverting viewer expectations or merely dicking around and drawing out the series far longer than it needs to be.

But when it works, it can be  great show. The episode that won me over to the series was Season Two’s Ted Moseby, Architect, in which Ted spends the night partying and picking up women after a fight with Robin. Except he didn’t, really – it was just Barney, pretending to be Ted, proving that women would find an architect attractive and compelling. It worked because all the stories about “Ted” were told by people who didn’t know Ted or Barney, even if they were heard – and therefore envisioned – by people who did. (It was further sold by the fact that Marshall’s dialogue made sense if he was speaking to Ted or Barney, whether he was scolding Ted for cheating on Robin or Barney for impersonating Ted.)

How I Met Your Mother enjoys playing with audience expectations, and when it does it well, the audience feels in on the joke – they were tricked, but its a fun trick. It’s like reading a mystery: Even if you can’t solve the crime on your own, you want to be able to say you could, if only you’d bothered.

But with Symphony of Illumination, the show crossed a line. How I Met Your Mother lied to us.

It gets off to a great start by playing with the central concept of the show: Instead of Future Ted telling his kids a story, it’s Robin telling her kids the story of how she met their father. The male child bears a conspicuous resemblance to Barney, and there’s a Stormtrooper costume in the background. She proceeds to tell them the story of the episode: That she thought she was pregnant, then she found out she wasn’t pregnant, then she found out she couldn’t ever have kids at all. That leaves us to wonder who these kids are, and how they came to be… until Robin tells them they don’t exist.

There’s no trick. The entire episode was told in an imaginary conversation.

On the one hand, one of the major points of the episode is that Robin doesn’t want to tell her friends about her bad news, so the imaginary children provide a storytelling outlet. But the episode closes with the return of Future Ted’s narration, which suggests either a) she did tell someone, or b) it’s all bullshit.

An unreliable narrator can be a wonderful device – think Tyler Durden or Patrick Bateman, for example. But it needs to be executed carefully. The clues need to be there, even if they aren’t completely obvious on the first viewing. Symphony of Illumination offers no such clues as to the nature of Robin’s children. Is Robin delusional? Is there some evidence that, despite not wanting children to begin with, she’d be overcome with hysteria upon finding out she couldn’t have them? Does she have an established track record of talking to imaginary people?

I admit that I know little to nothing about infertility, so I’ll throw out a little room for doubt: Is it standard for women to talk to imaginary children upon finding out they can’t have a baby? That this is all totally plausible and I’m only missing out because I lack a uterus?

I suspect not. The children are there for a very specific purpose: To get the audience’s hopes up. When the doctor tells Robin she can’t have kids, the children are an emergency flotation device for the audience: The news isn’t that bad, since Robin clearly does have kids after all. The question then becomes how does she get from infertile to motherhood. Was the doctor wrong? Does she find some experimental treatment?

Nope, she doesn’t. Suckers.

And now that the writers have established that it’s okay to simply make shit up for the sake of misdirection, what developments will we see next? Maybe Ted’s kids aren’t real, either. Maybe Lily isn’t really pregnant. Maybe Barney is really a Yorkshire Terrier. Maybe everyone died, and Ted’s kids are actually God.

What makes it even worse is that the kids didn’t need to be imaginary to further the story. Robin says she’s telling the kids the story of how she met their father, not how her egg was fertilized by his sperm. Instead of concluding by revealing the kids don’t exist, she could say they’re adopted, or even just her step-children; the latter option doesn’t even conflict with her desire to not have kids, and neither scenario requires explicitly stating who the father is.

It’s unfortunate because, aside from the part where the show flat-out lied, Symphony of Illumination was a pretty good episode: It had a strong performance by Cobie Smulders, who often doesn’t have much to do on the show, and her journey from maybe-pregnant to not-pregnant to can’t-be-pregnant felt right. There was more than enough drama and emotion without foisting a narrative fraud upon the audience.

In Goodbye Michael, the series bid farewell to Steve Carrell with a sweet and funny episode that not only summed up the character and his relationships with his co-workers, but in many ways closed the book on the entire series.

Alas, Goodbye Michael wasn’t even the last episode of the season, never mind the series. A search to find a new manager took up the last few episodes; when Season Eight began, Robert California, a steely and successful businessman, had not only taken the job, but got himself promoted to CEO, leaving Andy Bernard in charge of Dunder Mifflin Scranton.

Filling the shoes of Steve Carrell (and, by extension, Michael Scott) is a daunting prospect. Carrell largely defined The Office with his blundering, selfish, if well-intentioned boss. If you replace him with another Michael Scott, it looks unoriginal, but if you replace him with someone too different, you risk breaking the dynamics of the show. But while The Office may have been successful with the casting of the new boss amalgam – you could do a lot worse than basing your show around Ed Helms and James Spader – the dynamics and energy have been sorely lacking in the eighth season.

The Office always had a number of storylines and themes that gave the series some forward momentum, even when they were only happening in the background:

• Michael Scott thinks he’s a great boss despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary;
• Jim is in love with Pam, but Pam is engaged to Roy; Pam is in love with Jim, but Jim is dating Karen;
• Michael attempts to find love with Jan/Carol/Holly/Chair Model;
• Dunder Mifflin is facing tough economic times, with a constant threat of layoffs or branch closures.

None of these elements remain. Michael Scott found true love and left town, Jim and Pam are happily, if boringly, married, and Dunder Mifflin appears to be on stable financial ground since being bought by Sabre. So what’s left? What is The Office about in its eighth season?

• Andy wants to be a good boss, and everyone more or less agrees that he is;
• Andy wants to impress CEO Robert California; Robert thinks he’s doing okay, even if there’s room for improvement;
• Robert California is eccentric and enigmatic.

In other words, things are mostly pretty okay. There’s a vague hint of a romantic subplot – Erin kind of holds  a torch for Andy, who isn’t interested in her at all until he sees Robert California possibly taking an interest in her. But involving California a romantic subplot one week after introducing his wife – who he subsequently divorced not only off-camera, but off-episode – seems bizarre.

But anything is possible where Robert California is concerned, if only because The Office doesn’t know what to do with him. His very existence is almost anticlimactic: Season seven based its last few episodes around Who Will Be The New Boss, but when Season eight began, Robert California wasn’t really the new boss. An intensely driven and successful businessman running Dunder Mifflin could have provided conflict and comedy, but almost nothing has come of it. It’s as though the writers loved James Spader’s performance as a job applicant – and rightfully so – but couldn’t get him to commit to a full-time role and didn’t know what to do with him when he was around.

His only business interactions on the show are with Andy, and he spends the rest of his screen time wandering around the office being inspirational and/or weird. There’s a lot of potential for the character, but he varies from week to week, depending on what role the show needs him to fill: He started as a no-nonsense businessman, he’s also played the part of the inspirational leader, duplicitous husband, and jam musician, all without saying anything meaningful about the character.

Andy Bernard, as a boss, has turned into a relatively normal character. He started off as a jackass and a suckup, went to anger management and came back as a doofus, then gradually became one of the more sympathetic and likable characters on the show. In a way, he parallels Michael Scott’s evolution from his original Ricky Gervais imitation to a more palatable lunatic, but the Andy Bernard of Season Eight may be too normal for his own good; certainly too normal for Ed Helms, who hasn’t done anything funny all season.

It’s understandable that neither the writers nor Ed Helms want to create another Michael Scott, but is there anything that makes Andy interesting? He’s a nice guy. He wants to be a good boss, and is concerned what people think about him. Lucky for him, everyone more or less does, at least in a professional capacity: They told him as much in the second episode of the season, and demonstrated it by surprising him with a fun tattoo instead of a humiliating one. That’s a pretty big deal, considering how prickly, and occasionally downright unpleasant, some of his employees are.

All things considered, Andy is probably the sort of boss you’d appreciate having in real life, but that doesn’t make him a very interesting TV character. The logical contrast for a level-headed and rational boss would be a particularly unruly staff, but the employees of Dunder Mifflin Scranton seem even less interesting than before.

Jim and Pam haven’t had anything interesting to do for almost two years, and it feels like there’s little to be done with the characters short of a divorce. Dwight feels similarly exhausted, with  most of his screen time being devoted to rehashing his prank wars with Jim.  Kelly and Ryan, arguably the two zaniest characters, only show up for a couple of minutes each week, and other characters like Kevin, Meredith, and Angela exist only for the one or two standard jokes their characters provide. The Office has boasted a great supporting cast, but it seems to have failed when the show needed it the most.

The best  thing The Office has going for it at the moment is Ellie Kemper’s performance as the naive receptionist Erin. Kemper’s terribly funny, but it also helps that as one of the shortest-tenured members of the cast, her character is still fairly unexplored. The Andy-Erin relationship may not be necessary, but the end of the relationship is great stuff: Kemper made her first real impact in Season Six’s Secretary’s Day when she snapped on Andy after finding out about his engagement to Angela.

Kemper has provided most of the bright moments for Season Eight, from her misguided attempts to balance the childish and adult aspects of a Hallowe’en party to this week’s bitter boozefest upon meeting Andy’s new girlfriend. Erin’s naive, occasionally childlike attitude brushing up against unpleasant real world situations is one of the few interesting conflicts the show provides, and Kemper makes it work. But perhaps it’s more important that of all the characters, Erin is the only one who is clearly unhappy about something.

But as much as I love her, Ellie Kemper alone cannot keep The Office afloat. Something needs to be done to change the dynamic and give the show a reason to exist, whether it’s Robert California, Andy, Jim and Pam, or some other combination of characters. I’m optimistic about the return of Catherine Tate later this season, but the show failed to do anything interesting with Maura Tierney in her turn as Robert California’s soon-to-be-ex-wife; who’s to say they’ll know what to do with Tate?

The Office needs more than a handful of good performances, it needs a reason to exist. It needs someone to do anything that has meaning beyond one particular scene or episode. It needs conflict, momentum, and interesting dynamics – the things that made the show great in the first place.