On SOPA and ignorance and needless yelling.

Late last night, I clicked over to Google and found the arresting image on the left. I’d known that Wikipedia was in the midst of an “information blackout” protesting the Stop Online Privacy Act that day, but hadn’t realized that Google was involved as well.

I clicked the link and found a short plea for support protesting SOPA, and would I please help by signing their online petition? An email address and a zip code later, I had made my voice heard and returned to the main page to continue my very important business (I was comparing the box office takes of No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, if you must know, so I had no time to just be messing around with petitions). Five minutes later, the whole event had completely disappeared from my mind. After all, this overview of sex-obsessed romantic comedies wasn’t going to write itself.

If your Facebook news feed is anything like mine, you saw at least a dozen links to Google’s infographic on spreading the news about protesting SOPA yesterday. I would bet I saw close to a hundred links to it over the course of the day, and on a day when I was at my computer a fair bit less than I normally am. Clearly, after a few months of disinterest among the general population (with the exception of Reddit aficionados), this relatively minor effort to create an online groundswell has worked. Or at least, worked among the under-30 crowd that – thanks to the wonder of smartphones – is now never not on Facebook. The word is out.

It was only after the day had passed and I was driving home that I really began thinking about SOPA again. I realized suddenly that I knew almost nothing of any substance about the bill. I had a vague understanding that there was a second bill in the Senate with similar goals, but if it wasn’t for our cultural obsession with the younger Middleton, I doubt I’d have remembered its name.

I would be naïve to think that I’m alone in this. In fact, if you look at the webpage that Google put up, there’s almost no information about the bills, or to sites that would have some information about them, or to the bills themselves. The infographic that they invite you to share is even less helpful: it just points out that if you tell a bunch of people about this, then they’ll tell more people and eventually we will have a groundswell. The message being that with a little work, a lot of people can have strong negative opinions about something they know very little about.

When Wikipedia went black yesterday, they were wise enough to leave the pages explaining SOPA and PIPA still active, so people could come and learn about the bills they were supposed to be protesting. Unfortunately, every other page on Wikipedia was blocked, so if I wanted to click some of the links and learn more about U.S. Copyright law, or the founders of the bill, or similar proposed bills in the past, they were out of luck (I mean, I suppose I could have tried using other websites, but who has time for that? There’s important games of Temple Run to be gotten to!).

I sat down last night and sorted through the hue and cry of my peers on Facebook. It was a depressing expedition. No matter where I looked, I found almost no data of any kind. It was all generic “Censorship is bad!” drivel, clearly dashed off by its author without the faintest need to look into what it is that they were complaining about. By the end of the night, I seemed to know less than I ever had about the issues at hand. In fact, my biggest takeaway was that people are very concerned about losing the ability to make GIFs of movies and television shows. It made me weep for my generation. And I love GIFs of movies and television shows. Here’s one now!

It’s ironic, really, that the thing that brought the issue to the attention of the masses was the blackout of Wikipedia, since the temporary loss of the ability to be casually informed was what motivated everyone to become casually informed about SOPA. If we’d lost Tumblr for a day, we’d probably all have created new SOPA memes by this morning. If we’d lost Facebook for a day, we’d have…. well, we’d probably have descended into madness and killed each other.

Oddly, the site that actually ended up linking to relevant, useful information was the most recent XKCD comic. I don’t know why a webcomic is able to outdo Google so easily, but it was.

I browsed through the liked pages and developed a better-than-cursory understanding of the two bills at hand. Took all of ten minutes.

I wonder how many issues pass by where I don’t even bother to do that. I should get involved more.

But until then, I’ll just stay here and stare at GIFs for a while.

Heh.

The 24th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Friends With Benefits

The two stars of Black Swan (Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis) both immediately followed up their strange, lesbian-tinged thriller by making movies with the exact same premise: two best friends decide to use each other for sex, with no emotion in it. Since Portman’s version, No Strings Attached, arrived in theaters first, its box office take is higher ($71 million to $55 million), confirming for the millionth time that if you have two movies with the same premise coming out, do whatever you must to make sure that your movie gets out first.

The best example of this: Capote was released about a year before the other Truman Capote movie, Infamous was. It made about $30 million at the box office and was nominated for 5 Oscars, including Best Picture. Infamous made barely a million and was immediately forgotten, despite getting similar reviews and having bigger stars. Sometimes timing is twice as important as quality.

That’s the case here, too, as the strong opening for No Strings Attached covered up its less-than-ecstatic reviews (49% on Rotten Tomatoes), while Friends With Benefits was met with surprising acclaim for a featherweight romantic comedy (its Tomatometer is a robust 71%). And as for star power, it’s not like anyone was clamoring to see Ashton Kutcher in this. Or, anything.

Friends With Benefits is exactly what you expect a standard romantic comedy to be. It’s funny that the characters in it protest that rom-coms are silly and unrealistic, because the film couldn’t be more formulaic in how it sets up its pieces. Justin Timberlake is the head of some mercurial web site who gets an interview for the art director job at GQ. Kunis is the head hunter who brings him out to New York and talks him into taking the job. Both jobs are clearly semi-ludicrous choices for these actors, and despite the characters talking constantly about how their life is their work, we rarely actually see them at their offices. They seem to have plenty of time to simply gad about the city and riff on the fickle nature of love. Both talk at a frantic pace, as if their characters are auditioning for a particularly lightweight Aaron Sorkin movie (yes, yes, Timberlake was in Social Network, I know). It features two flash mobs, for chrissakes.

Still, for all its formula, Friends With Benefits is exactly what a romantic comedy should be. It’s frothy and fun and light, and both leads are immensely likable and easy to root for. The movie zips right along to their deciding to become, y’know, “screwfriends”, and doesn’t slow down for a moment after. The supporting pieces are all played by pros doing their best work: Patricia Clarkson playing the horny mother in her second consecutive Will Gluck movie, Woody Harrelson goofing off as Timberlake’s unconventional gay friend, and especially Richard Jenkins as Timberlake’s Alzheimer’s-stricken father, providing a relatively undeserved level of emotional resonance to a silly story. My favorite, though, was Emma Stone playing against type as the bitchy ex-girlfriend, a role she absolutely proved (adorably) unsuited for.

There’s been plenty of complaints about Timberlake as an actor of the “stick to making music” category (oddly, mostly from people who don’t seem to listen to his music at all), but he’s just as good here as any of the bland Kutcher-Zac Efron-Robert Pattinson types that keep getting thrown at us in these movies. I feel he’s better suited to play a supporting type similar to his role in Social Network, but his star’s on the rise and if he wants to spout ridiculous one-liners while firing a handgun for a little while, good for him. Have fun.

Let’s just make sure we see plenty more of Mila Kunis in movies like this. She’s both gorgeous and relatable, a fairly rare combination. She should milk that all she can, because that quality is the reason why people like Meg Ryan and Reese Witherspoon are rolling in dough.

Just don’t let her play a hard-driving headhunter again. It’s just silly.
 

Best Matt Damon Cameos

I was swinging past a newsstand the other day and caught sight of this ridiculous GQ cover. Hollywood's Smartest Actor? For the briefest of moments, I thought of doing a post that showed how insane this proclamation was, with appropriate video links. And then I immediately rejected that idea because I love Matt Damon. I love him in the Bourne movies, I love him in the Ocean's movies, I love him in Good Will Hunting, I love him in True Grit, I love him in Syriana, I love him in The Informant. I even love him in Stuck On You (I actually really like Stuck On You. I know, I know...). He's great.

But even more than Damon in movies, I love the way Damon pops up in things. So I thought I'd do a "Best Of" of Matt Damon cameos.

I'll start with some of the best bits from Jimmy Kimmel. For a long stretch, Kimmel always ended his show with apologizing to Matt Damon that they didn't get to him. Then Damon came on the show to continue the bit, and was so convincing in his animosity that a lot of people were fully convinced that the joke was real:

It launched a series of Jimmy-screwing-with-Matt-Damon bits, including this Bourne Ultimatum trailer, and climaxing with Sarah Silverman's surprise gift to Jimmy during one of his shows (it really was a surprise for him, too, that's not a bit):

And finishing with a cameo in The Handsome Men's Club:

Outside of Kimmel, I'd be remiss not to mention Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:

His recent, strange appearance on SNL:

His dynamite Matthew McConaughey impression:

Playing Kristen Kreuk's hard-rocking secret lover in Eurotrip (how can you not appreciate an Academy Award nominee who cameos in Eurotrip?):

And, of course, Liz Lemon's boyfriend on 30 Rock:

Lastly... this doesn't really count, but I couldn't not include it: his appearance in Team America: World Police.

The 25th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Captain America: The First Avenger

It’s really been the year of colons, huh? Well, it’ll be even worse this year, when we all see Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace: The 3D Experience. When I review that movie, I promise to only refer to it by its full title (Boy, isn’t that review going to be fun? I can see it already. “This Jar-Jar character is terrible. And he’s coming right at me!”)

After watching Captain America, I referred to it as “a slow-witted Indiana Jones movie,” and I see no need to reverse my opinion now. Still, that’s not as much of an insult as it sounds. It may lack Indy’s sardonic wit, but it’s long on adventure and explosions and features a perfectly acceptable number of people gadding about in stiff 1940s cotton. It’s a solid, watchable summer popcorn film, with all the Pirates and Green Lanterns swamping the summer multiplex, solid and watchable are all I ask for. In fact, I require that the films that shouldn’t take themselves seriously don’t try to. Have you ever seen Michael Bay take himself seriously? Watch The Island sometime. Or Transformers 2. Vomitous.

The story unfolds like an origin story should. We meet our hero (Chris Evans’ head attached to a scrawny digital body. They could’ve made the exact same movie with me, but the digitizing would just have to be done in reverse.), a scrappy, deserving fellow waylaid by a frail mortal shell. He meets a miracle worker, who sees his potential. A mysterious, “scientific” process of supersizing muscles and bones begins, but after a successful test on Evans, the equipment is (shockingly!) destroyed by the Nazis. Let events vaguely similar to World War II commence!

The best part of the story happens after: in a shocking bit of realism, the commanders of the U.S. Military don’t send him out on secret missions only he can manage. Instead, they make him a figurehead and send him on a USO tour to cheer up the troups. He spends several months criss-crossing the country, glumly rallying support. It’s a neat bit of storytelling, and if I were a pastor, I bet I could get three weeks of sermons out of the metaphors there. But no matter. There are Nazis to kill! And some of them have the evil version of the serum or whatever that Captain America has! Will the Army let him go fight them, or will he have to strike out his own? That’s a mystery that… oh, well, you know the rest. Good news: it involves zip lining onto a train!

Joss Whedon has mentioned that The Avengers (the long-awaited combined sequel to Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, and Captain America) will mostly be told from the point of view of Captain America, and after seeing this movie I see no problem with that. Evans is handsome and muscular and big-chinned and all that, but he’s also wryly funny and surprisingly relatable. He lacks that movie star emptiness we’ve grown accustomed to in action flicks. It’s hard to root for a good-looking guy carrying a shield and wearing a goofy suit while espousing the value of American democracy, but Evans sells it better than anyone should, and the movie works pretty well because of it.

Not to mention: zip lining onto a train!

The 26th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Limitless

Limitless is a pretty good movie. But more than that, it’s a great idea for a movie. Our hero (Bradley Cooper) is bright but lazy – slovenly, even, barely holding his life together. A random run-in with an old acquaintance leads to him testing a miracle drug that makes his brain operate far above its normal capacity by, what else, tapping into his “subconscious” (the old “we only use 10% of our brains myth” in action again. ). He’s instantly hooked. For a few weeks, he lives the sort of life you’d want to with that sort of supermind – writing a novel in only a few days, playing the stock market for patterns, impressing people at parties. But he starts to notice mysterious men tailing him, watching. And then the side effects start to kick in…

The first half to two-thirds of this movie is exactly what it should be. Outside of maybe BBC’s “Sherlock”, Limitless shows us better than any other film the way a brilliant mind works, whipping from zooming shot to zooming shot, with careful sound design for each, making the viewer into the protagonist. We are caught up with Cooper in the trance of this new power, watching each mystery fit neatly together like a puzzle. Then the gloom of the degrading effects of the mysterious drugs takes over, and the movie descends into darkness.

It’s here that things a rough patch. What made the film so watchable at first – the way the film let you see Cooper’s mind at work – has now disappeared as Cooper abandons the medicine and tries to muddle through on his own. We feel his frustration, but the absence of the movie’s gimmick makes it plain that without it, the film is simply a generic, by-the-numbers thriller.

Worse is the rushed, let’s-tie-this-up-quick ending. We jump several months ahead in time, and all of the mysteries of the film are answered – but off screen, during the point we weren’t watching. All that’s left is for Cooper to tell the villain (and by extension, us) what happened in the meantime. It’s hugely unsatisfying, and even if it’s not exactly clear how the movie could’ve gotten around its awkward coda, it’s certainly clear that they should have tried harder. The film does exactly what it had done such a good job of not doing earlier: leaving us outside of our hero’s magnificent brain. A victory’s no fun if you’re not there to be a part of it.