This will be less a review of The Help and more a statement on why Viola Davis should win Best Actress in a couple weeks. Seeing as The Help came out six months ago and you’ve had plenty of time to form your own opinion of it, I can’t imagine you’ll mind.

We’re entering an Oscar season where very few of the films nominated are hits of any kind. This happens a fair bit these days, now that indie films have come to dominate the awards landscape. But there amidst Tree of Life ($13 million) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ($27 million) is The Help, a film about racism that is a certified box office success at $169 million. To have a film that is both an Important Movie as well as a Successful Movie? Bound for Oscar Gold.

Or not. The problem with The Help is that for a movie that deals with such a dark and difficult subject matter – exploring historical racism in the deep South at the dawn of the Civil Rights era – it is an astonishingly shallow movie.

From the very outset, the story exudes falsehood. Our hero, a young girl (Emma Stone) named Skeeter (a chestnut from the treasure trove of Endearing Protagonist Names), returns from college and is shocked – shocked! – to find that all of her friends and family are deeply racist. She gazes wide-eyed at their backwards attitudes, as if this behavior had sprung out of nowhere, unbidden, while she was eating lunch at the school cafeteria. She decides to write a book telling stories from the point of view of the help: a story no one has ever dared write. A story no one has ever imagined.

I’ll skip to the end. The book is finished, gets published, and cures the South of racism. I’m pretty sure it’s a true story, too, so we’ve all got to feel pretty good that Skeeter managed to solve that problem for us.

Oddly, innocent Skeeter is the least cartoonish of the character. There’s a trampy Jessica Chastain and a bug-eyed Octavia Spencer, doing all they can to sell you on their poorly realized characters. Bryce Dallas Howard is handed a villainess role so two-dimensional that she’s probably doomed herself to become some sort of ginger Glenn Close for the next ten years. Remember when she played dear, sweet Gwen Stacy in that Spider-man movie? By the end of the movie, Emma Stone has managed to take even that from her. The resolution is so ham-handed that four (four!) different characters, on four separate occasions, have to inform Howard they know her deep, dark secret to keep her from continuing to wage her bizarre, angry war against them. Her character is so unappealing that the movie spends most of the last act watching her get her comeuppance. It’s like a snuff film for people who hate prejudice.

And yet this film is nominated for an Academy Award, and I have no issue with that, because Viola Davis singlehandedly makes this movie into Oscar material. Every movie critic who’s reviewed The Help has said the same thing, but I’ll say it again because it’s impossible to come away from the movie with any other conclusion: Davis appears to be acting in her own movie. And it’s a movie much darker and more layered than The Help, and yet whenever she’s on screen, she makes the movie around her rise to her level.

I’ve seen actors out-act movies that they’re in, and I’ve seen them fail to match up to the depth of the film on which they’re working, but I’ve never seen an actor who changed the movie around her like Davis has. And that should win her the Oscar.

Her main competition is the always-otherworldly Meryl Streep, and while everyone is unanimous that she’s excellent as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (and when is she not?), everyone is equally unanimous that the movie doesn’t do nearly enough to meet the standard she’s set.

This is no slight on Streep, but maybe we should honor someone who refused to let that happen.

There was an announcement the other day that the Academy Award producers had decided the show would not include live performances of the two songs nominated in the Best Original Song category. While one part of me was sad that there would be no Muppets singing on the show, the other part of me (there’s only two parts of me) thought “well, it would seem pretty odd to have musical performances, but then only have two of them.” Because there are, as you might have guessed, only two songs nominated in that category.

That’s not hyperbole, or anything. I’m not saying “it’s a neck-and-neck race!” There are literally only two songs nominated this year.

I don’t understand the voting system in place for this category, nor do I care to. I understand that there are often not even five good original songs most years. Sometimes there’s not even three. The Age of Loggins is over.

But I’m perfectly fine with the Academy saying “we’re gonna have five songs nominated every year, and some years most of them will be terrible.” You know, like we do in every other category.

This year, voters will have a choice between a Muppet song that isn’t even the best in its own movie (“Man or Muppet” is great, but it doesn’t really compare to “Life’s A Happy Song”), and a Sergio Mendes song from a forgettable kid’s movie.

Both songs feature one or the other of the two members of Flight of the Conchords. It is not surprising to me the Oscar producers didn’t want to showcase the songs – it would just have made it more obvious how silly the category is this year.

The Golden Globes managed to nominate five songs this year, from movies like The Help and Albert Nobbs and from musicians as varied as Elton John, Chris Cornell, Brian Byrne, Mary J. Blige, and Madonna, and none of those songs were nominated in this category. The Academy made 39 different songs eligible this year, including tracks from Jonsi, Robbie Williams, and nineteen-time Oscar nominee Alan Menken. Evidently there just wasn't room for artists of such limited talent or films of such little credibility.

I mean, after all, this is a category that has nominated such legendary performers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Three 6 Mafia, Eminem, Shel Silverstein (!), Janet Jackson, the dude from Fountains of Wayne, and the South Park guys. Randy Newman has been nominated twenty times. "Chim, Chim, Cher-ee," "I've Had The Time of My Life," and "You Light Up My Life" all won this award at one point. But evidently we can't have Elton John about mucking the place up.

Fix the category, Motion Picture Academy. But don’t feel the need to jam those songs into the Oscar ceremony every year. Because for every this…

 …there’s also this. This song won the Oscar that year.

Not to mention this. Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler was apparently not enough of a big name to sing at the Oscars, so the producers decided that a performance from Antonio Banderas and a possibly-hungover Carlos Santana was in order.

The Narrative in question? “If Eli Manning wins a second Super Bowl, does he surpass his older brother Peyton as the best Manning?” Or more worryingly, “How elite is Eli Manning? Is he the best quarterback alive?” Is he "A guaranteed Hall of Famer"? Apparently, if he wins tomorrow, it's a lock.

Slow your roll, talking heads. I recognize that Eli is “tough.” That he’s “just a winner.” That he won that NFC Championship Game “like a man.” That he has “the look.” That he’s playing “hotter than any other quarterback in the league right now.” That you’d “prefer him to Brady, yes, I said it!”

Let’s take a look at these questions with statistics. And yes, I know that Peyton Manning only has one Super Bowl win. And I also know that every quarterback with two Super Bowl wins other than Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, and Jim Plunkett is in the Hall of Fame. But just for fun, let’s use other statistics for a change. Not even advanced statistics, that measure his eyeline or quarterback rating in muggy weather. Just regular statistics.

Elisha Manning (I just found out today that’s his real name. Fun, right? How have we not been making fun of him for this?) entered the league in 2004 with the New York Giants. The Narrative goes that after a weak start, Eli turned it on and became a top-flight NFL quarterback. But that’s just not true.

Eli has led the NFL in interceptions twice, including 2007 (the year he last went to the Super Bowl), and last year. He’s never led the NFL in any other category. Since becoming a starter, he’s thrown 129 interceptions in 119 games, while throwing for only 27,579 yards and 185 touchdowns.

Alright, but what does that mean? Let’s put those numbers in perspective.

If you average together Eli’s numbers and create a standard Eli Manning season, it would look like this:

Average Eli Manning Season:
522 Att, 58% Cmp, 3,677 Yds, 25 TDs, 17 INTs, 228 Yds/game

Good numbers. A very solid quarterback line. So, how does that stack up against some of the other quarterbacks in the league? Let’s start with his matchup on Sunday, Tom Brady.

Average Tom Brady Season:
532 Att, 64% Cmp, 3,997 Yds, 30 TDs, 11 INTs, 248 Yds/game

Wow. That is dramatically better. Brady has him licked. Let’s compare Eli to his older brother, who he supposedly supplanting.

Average Peyton Manning Season:
555 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,217 Yds, 31 TDs, 15 INTs, 264 Yds/game

Well, that’s not close. Let’s compare him to Aaron Rodgers.

Average Aaron Rodgers Season:
514 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,259 Yds, 33 TDs, 9 INTs, 280 Yds/game

Ouch. Okay, Drew Brees, who was once released by the Chargers, after all.

Average Drew Brees Season:
548 Att, 66% Cmp, 4,072 Yds, 28 TDs, 15 INTs, 265 Yds/game

Well, okay, so he’s not as good as some of these other quarterbacks, it seems. But how does he stack up against some of the more average quarterbacks?

Average Ben Roethlisberger Season:
473 Att, 63% Cmp, 3,797 Yds, 24 TDs, 14 INTs, 233 Yds/game

A little less aggressive, but with better effectiveness. Now, Tony Romo.

Average Tony Romo Season:
540 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,285 Yds, 31 TDs, 15 INTs, 267 Yds/game

Romo is apparently much better. Okay, Matt Schaub.

Average Matt Schaub Season:
512 Att, 64% Cmp, 4,098 Yds, 22 TDs, 13 TDs, 256 Yds/game

Okay, when even Matt Schaub has a more effective average season than you do, I think that a second Super Bowl means almost nothing historically. Eli Manning is not The Greatest Quarterback Alive. He is not The Greatest Manning Alive. He is not even a top-ten quarterback in the NFL.

Give up The Narrative, guys. Can’t you guys just spend some more time talking about Ron Gronkowski’s ankle?

I agree, up to a point. I think there’s something to be said for a little bit of righteous outrage on behalf of the people and movies left behind. The ignored have a small window to complain about being unjustifiably forgotten, and everyone is very sympathetic during that time – and then a few months pass, everything dies down, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close get to have “Best Picture Nominee!” on its DVD cover for all time, and everyone forgets that people thought Young Adult even had a chance.

Sure, sometimes it’s better to be the jilted than the triumphant (anyone who thinks that Pulp Fiction losing to Forrest Gump for Best Picture was bad for that movie’s credibility long-term needs to have their head examined), but for every derided win (Crash, Shakespeare In Love), there’s a hundred more wins where no one even remembers who else was in the competition.

So let’s have a quick moment for those left behind.

Best Picture

We’ve covered these movies before, but let’s cover the half-dozen movies that didn’t snag a nomination that might’ve deserved to:

There were three or four movies that didn’t get nominated where the conventional wisdom is that the films were “too dark” for the Academy.  There’s a case to be made that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Drive, Shame, and Young Adult were all legitimate contenders that never made it out of the gate because they were thematically bleak or had disturbing violence. But I’m not sure I buy the premise. The Academy loves schmaltz, but it also loves being considered cutting-edge. If the studios of any of those films had tried to gather Oscar momentum for them, I don’t think their subject matter would have mattered.

More to the point, no one really feels that these movies were the best picture of the year, they just feel that they were better than three or four of the nominees who made it in. Would I feel better about the nominees this year if we lopped off Extremely Loud and War Horse and wedged in Dragon Tattoo and Young Adult? Sure. But none of those four films could win this thing, so what does it matter. There’s at least a handful of critics who loved the first two of those films, and as I mentioned last week: small pockets of belief that something is fantastic is much better than broad appeal from all quarters.

The Bridesmaids question is a different one. The argument for including it goes like this: it was critically beloved, a box office hit, and a breakthrough for women comedians (I’d argue this last point, and I imagine Lucille Ball, the cast of “Laverne and Shirley,” and anyone on SNL the last ten years would, too).  People arguing in favor of it say that comedy is much harder than drama (it is), say that comedy is underrated by the Academy (indisputably), and point out that if a comedy is this well-reviewed and successful and still can’t get nominated, what would it take for a comedy to get in? The answer to that last one, of course, is “it would have to be written by Woody Allen.”

Let’s separate from this and look at this more historically. Pretend for a moment that over the last ten years, the Academy had actually been biased towards big comedies. What would the award landscape look like then?

Well, we’d have to take a look at our most well-reviewed, successful comedies and see how we’d feel about them as Best Picture winners. Two years ago, The Hangover had a 78% score on Rotten Tomatoes and raked in $277 million at the box office. What would your response have been if it’d won Best Picture over The Hurt Locker? What about Borat? It had a 91% RT and made $128 million. Not to mention Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (72% RT, $148 million) and The Devil Wears Prada (76% RT, $124 million). Would you have picked any of those over The Departed?

Both of those years were weak ones for film. A comedy with some studio backing could have been in a real battle for the title.

Let’s keep going. Wedding Crashers over Crash? Anchorman over Million Dollar Baby? How about or Shrek 2? It made $436 million and had an 89% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, after all. Of course, let’s not forget the first Shrek, which came out the same year as Bruce Almighty. Would you pick either over A Beautiful Mind? Would you take My Big Fat Greek Wedding over Chicago? I might, actually. But I wouldn’t take Men In Black over Titanic. Or What Women Want over Gladiator. Or Austin Powers over American Beauty. Or Mrs. Doubtfire over Schindler’s List.

These are the best reviewed and most successful mainstream comedies ever made. And none of them seem like Best Picture winners.

Comedies don’t age well. What seems like a real argument now seems sillier in retrospect. That’s why the more recent comparisons seems sort of plausible (Borat was groundbreaking, right? At least compared to The Departed), but the further back in time we go, the less and less acceptable these suggestions seem. Comedies have a shelf life. Most of the films that seemed hilarious in the 70’s seem slow and stagnant now. We still adore a good half dozen of them (Animal House, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, some of the Monty Python films). But the Best Picture winners from 1970-79 were, in order, Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather: Part II, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, and Kramer vs. Kramer. All of those films have held up over time. How badly do you need to wedge a Mel Brooks picture in there? Especially when you consider that I can name a baker’s dozen of other deserving nominees without breaking a sweat: The Clockwork Orange, Fiddler On The Roof, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Chinatown, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, All The President’s Men, Network, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now. Doesn’t leave a lot of room for Up In Smoke or Return of The Pink Panther.

So, take heart, Bridesmaids fans. Maybe you didn’t score a nomination you felt you deserved. But you definitely won’t be talked about in ten years as a ridiculous nominee for an award you’ll never win. And that’s something to be glad about.

Which isn’t – and I can’t say this enough – to say that the movie isn’t any good. I tweeted half a dozen quick potshots at the movie’s elaborate and increasingly unnecessary twists as our bus was plodding home, and most people took that as a sign that I hadn’t enjoyed the film. I actually enjoyed it a great deal, it’s a fun action caper, and I enjoy watching people argue while wearing waistcoats. I’ll watch Robert Downey, Jr. doing almost anything, and I’ve got a real soft spot in my heart for Jude Law. Really, any Guy Ritchie movie is a tremendously watchable affair (with one giant exception). I’d go see Sherlock 3: A Twist inside a Twist inside a Dream Sequence in a heartbeat.

But it seems that while Ritchie clearly put his whole heart into directing this movie (even as an experienced action director, he’s never been this on his game when it comes to all the whizz-bang of these turn-of-the-century gun battles), he doesn’t seem to have any interest in directing an actual Sherlock Holmes movie.

A Game of Shadows is really just a buddy cop movie set in old England, and two or three “Sherlock’s mind at work” cutaways in the world don’t make it anything else. We never really know what’s going on in Sherlock’s head from moment to moment, nor do we get the sense that any of this is really a slow-playing master plan. Sherlock seems purely reactionary, and a quick-cut “it was all on purpose!” sequence at the end is belied by the sheer magnitude of bullet-dodging and train car-diving it took to get there.

While part of me wishes Ritchie would drop the whole Sherlock façade and just make the tweedy, bare-knuckle action comedy he wants to, I know that:

a)    No one would go without that name recognition, though I’d bet pennies to petticoats that maybe six people who saw the movie ever read a Sherlock story.

b)   This whole strategy is just Ritchie’s way of reinventing and reinvigorating the drama.

The story goes that the first of these movies got greenlit when Joel Silver showed the studio heads a drawing of Sherlock Holmes leaning out of the shadows, holding a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. Their reaction was “oh, now we get it. Go for it!” Whereas my reaction would have been, “Sigh. Must we?”

For my money, if you want to see Sherlock Holmes done right, there’s only one place to go. 

The five nominations in this field are Janet McTeer for Albert Nobbs (a classic “woman playing a man” nomination, the Academy loves ‘em), Bérénice Bejo for The Artist (if The Artist makes as strong a push as I expect it to leading up to the Academy Awards, she'll end up with the victory here by default), Jessica Chastain and likely winner Octavia Spencer for The Help (both performances are a nice balance of comedy and melancholy, which always plays well in the Academy – not to mention The Help’s box office success and mild cultural importance, which’ll certainly sway voters), and Melissa McCarthy for Bridesmaids. And it’s McCarthy I want to talk about.

First off, I love Bridesmaids, and I loved McCarthy in it. And I’m not going to argue that her nomination is undeserved; good comedy is always woefully underrepresented at the Oscars. I’m just going to point out that a male comedian who had broken out in a bawdy comedy with physical humor, farting, sink-pooping, and overly aggressive sexual behavior would be a good deal more reviled by critics and would stand no chance of being awarded anything, least of all an Oscar. No one would deny this. So why is McCarthy nominated?

Let’s start with Bridesmaids’ box office success. The overarching media storyline in the following weeks of its big open was “See? Women can be funny and bawdy too!” That was immediately followed by a backlash storyline of “whoever said that they couldn’t?” Now, every actress in a comedy movie has to answer questions about Bridesmaids and the comedic differences between men and women. Every woman-centric comedy that’s followed has been compared to Bridesmaids, as if there had never been women comedians before this summer.

I grew bored with both storylines pretty quickly, frankly, and I’d like to move on from them. What I want to talk about is that both storylines agree that Bridesmaids’ was a very good movie, and pretty much everyone agrees that women comedians don’t get a lot of credit, and all of those people assume that no one else had noticed until now. It’s the same cultural momentum that gets people like Sandra Bullock and Reese Witherspoon Oscars - they rode a crest of likability and general approval and “this is her time!” to an award that seemed somewhat undeserved just a few months later. Welcome to the Bridesmaids’ Oscar campaign. 

Melissa McCarthy is at the forefront of this movement, because she’s so good in the movie, a scene-stealing comedy force. And it really is more daring (I try to avoid using the word “brave” at all costs when talking about acting, because it's a ridiculous word to use. I also managed to avoid using tour de force in this paragraph's first sentence, a show of restraint I feel I should be commended for) to be a vulgar physical comedian as an actress than as an actor. It’s not socially acceptable, for whatever reason, and there’s no point in pretending it is.

So her performance of puppy-stealing and public defecation is viewed as a form of social progress, which is why award shows are desperate to honor her. McCarthy won the Emmy award for Outstanding Lead Actress this year, ostensibly for “Mike and Molly”, but actually for Bridesmaids.

But that doesn’t change the fact that honoring McCarthy for her broad comedy just widens the gap between male and female comedians. If McCarthy is awarded trophies for having the audacity to do “male” comedy, it just pronounces that such behavior is unexpected and extraordinary. A bad assertion to make, I think.

If people really wanted to make a statement, they wouldn’t honor her at all. The awards would go to actresses playing cross-dressers or suicidal parents or whale riders or whatever, and McCarthy would be watching the awards from home. Nothing to see here, folks. Just another woman, doing whatever she can to make us laugh. Nothing out of the ordinary.

We remember these films because they expose what seemed important to us at any one time, and when we look back on those years, we use the Academy Awards as a barometer for how people felt at the time. The Oscars, as overhyped and overblown as they are, matter.

So, with the nominations releasing today, I’ll be taking a look at each the categories over the next week and trying to sift out what the nominations mean.

Let’s start with the big one.

Best Picture

I know it’s a dull thing to start on, but because of a rule change in the voting, we need to cover a quick bit of Oscar history before we begin. I promise I’ll keep it brief.

The Academy Awards created the Best Picture award in 1931 (it was named “Outstanding Picture” then, and went through a number of name changes before settling on “Best Picture” in the sixties) and created a system where ten films a year would be nominated for the slot. In 1944, they sliced that number to five, where it stayed until 2008. That year, a number of smart, artistic films (Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Reader) had taken up all the Best Picture slots, leaving no room for populist fare like The Dark Knight. Deciding that opening up more spots would make room for more audience-friendly movies, they moved the number back to ten.

The decision backfired almost immediately. In 2009, there were five clear-cut Best Picture nomination locks (The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglorious Basterds, Precious, and Up In The Air), and the rest of the category was filled up with interesting indie non-contenders (An Education, A Serious Man) plus at least one clearly undeserving film (The Blind Side). So the decision swung the other way, and this year they developed a sliding scale for the movies: there would be between five and ten movies nominated every year, with the number of the movies on the list being determined by this incredibly complicated sliding scale.

If you don’t want to bother reading the linked article (and I don’t blame you), take this away: in order to be nominated, a film needs a certain amount of first-place votes from Academy voters. So a movie can’t just be considered “very good” by a lot of critics, be placed fourth or fifth on most ballots, and skate onto the list that way. It has to have a significant number of supporters who believe that this movie was the best movie of the year. And so we come to this year’s list. 

There are nine movies nominated for an Academy Award this year, including a couple that a lot of critics (and most of America) hated: Tree of Life and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The former is viewed as overlong, overly ambitious, and underplotted, while the latter is seen as treacly and contrived. But it doesn’t matter – they’re going to the Kodak! Meanwhile, the well-reviewed and financially successful Bridesmaids and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo are left on the outside looking in.

Other nominees include several with no chance at all of winning (The Help, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, War Horse) two likely also-rans (Hugo, the most-nominated picture with eleven, and Golden Globe winner The Descendants), and the almost certain winner, The Artist.  The Oscars are over a month away, so there’s still time for things to change, but I’m pretty sure I can lock that prediction down right now. It’s The Artist’s year. It just is.

I’ll break down why I think it’s the winner in my Oscar prediction column in a few weeks, but let’s talk about the field at large, and what it means about moviemaking this year. 

Most Oscar predictors hedged their bets on Oscar predictions, but the vast majority assumed that there would be at most seven Best Picture nominations. Why? Because most of the movies outside those seven just weren’t that good, or were good but flawed, or were solid but not remarkable. There just didn’t seem to be that many “wow, you’ve got to see this” movies outside the top five or so.

But here’s the thing: there weren’t that many “wow, you’ve got to see this” movies in the top five. It just wasn’t that year. How many movies premiered this year that were unmissable? I enjoyed The Artist and The Descendants a great deal, but they aren’t really memorable, not for the long term. They’re good, and I recommend you see them. But they don’t wow.

Last year was a battle between an emotionally resonant Hollywood biopic (The King’s Speech) and the zeitgest-hitting origination of Facebook (The Social Network). The story, going in to the Oscars, was new school vs. old school (I’ve dismissed this theory before, so I won’t go into it here). The year before that was Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker (also known as Star Wars vs. Annie Hall part II). Great stories, great movies, great matchups. Made for a fun Oscar telecasts, or would have if James Franco hadn't slouched his way through it.

But this year… is anyone so tied to The Artist that they’ll throw a fit if it doesn’t win? Does anyone feel The Descendants  or Hugo is so deserving it must be awarded an Oscar? Did anyone feel The Help, or Midnight In Paris, or Moneyball, was anything else other than a very solid, watchable movie?

Actually, did anyone besides me actually watch those movies?

The reason other movies snuck into the list is that if a voter liked a movie, there was no reason for them not to put them into their top slot. I mean, what else deserved to be there?

But let's press onward to my appropriately exclamation point-laden review of Transformers 3: We Have Almost No Understanding of Lunar Cycles.

This movie is exactly what a Michael Bay movie is supposed to be to be – fast-paced, exciting, and packed with some of the most spectacular action sequences you’ve ever seen. The weighty, exposition-heavy storytelling is gone, replaced by characters doing things for no logical reason because we don’t have time to talk about it there are things to blow up! Lots of things, in fact: by the end of the movie, most of Chicago has been leveled in Bay’s constant hunger for bigger and more extensive explosions. I’m not complaining. When it comes to spectacle, action directors should always go for the jugular.

That doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t impossibly silly. I mean, even if you accept the premise of talking robots from outer space that transform into cars and fight other talking robots who also turn into cars as totally logical, it’s still impossibly silly.

As we start the movie, the Autobots are kept mostly secret by our government, even though they’ve now blown up a good portion of the planet at one time or another from their battle with the Decepticons. The Autobots discover… y’know, I can’t even get into it. It’s too silly. Here’s an actual paragraph from the Dark of the Moon Wiki:

The Autobots assist the United States military in preventing conflicts around the globe. After learning of the top-secret mission to the Moon, the Autobots travel there to explore the Ark. They discover a comatose Sentinel Prime – Optimus' predecessor as leader of the Autobots – and the Pillars he created as a means of establishing a Space Bridge between two points to teleport matter. After returning to Earth, Optimus uses the energy of his Matrix of Leadership to revive Sentinel Prime.

You see? Why on earth does Michael Bay think we need all this backstory? Does he worry that if he’s not true enough to the original canon, the Transformers nerds will be angry with him? It’s a movie based on a Saturday morning cartoon from the 80’s! The only thing anyone remembers from those is Law and Order telling them to properly douse their campfires.

For all its effort, though, the movie makes little use of all this mythology. There’s plot, but it’s all just there to speed us along to the next big action sequence, or to shoehorn in another eccentric, fast-talking character. Nothing that happens in the movie happens for any other reason. So why is there so much backstory? Everything that happens in this movie is just a massive plot device to get more angry space robots onto earth to fight the space robots that are already here, preferably in an area that they can do as much damage as possible.

The first scene of the movie is indicative of everything about the movie to follow. We meet the new girlfriend (Victoria’s Secret supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whitley) of our hero, Sam (Shia LaBeouf). The camera tracks smoothly behind her at waist height as she climbs the stairs to their bedroom, wearing only her underwear. She’s standing on extreme tiptoe the whole time. Why? Is she sneaking upstairs quietly? No, it’s because the camera’s following behind her and it’s important that her legs look as good as possible, logic be damned. 

Sam is still in bed, because he doesn’t have a job. Sam is a bright, well-spoken fellow who knows lots about computers. Why doesn’t he have a job? Because… something something Transformers something. It’s not important. How did he manage to get a girlfriend as attractive and supposedly smart as Huntington-Whitley (when they meet, she is employed, impossibly, a political aide for the British embassy. You can tell she’s smart because she’s wearing glasses) with no job ? It doesn’t matter! He has no job and a very smart beautiful wealthy girlfriend and let’s just move on!

As the movie starts up and Sam continues his job hunt, we’re treated to a series of camera-mugging performances by the very best camera-muggers in the business. John Malkovich! Ken Jeong! And here’s John Turturro again! Who can win this weirdness contest? (spoiler alert: Jeong definitely wins. At one point in a scene, he actually starts eating paper.)

And then the explosions start.

Why did I enjoy this movie, where characters stand in carefully-arranged triangle formations whenever they look at things, as if posing for an album cover? Because this movie doesn’t need realism to be good. In fact, realism would only hurt it. This movie understands what Transformers 2 didn’t: that we’re here to watch people shoot machine guns at giant robots from collapsing skyscrapers, and everything else is pointless.

Is it a bit sad that after the movie, I said “hey, Rosie Huntington-Whitley was pretty good!”, then realized that I couldn’t recall her actually saying or doing anything at any point in the movie? Sure. Can I recall any aspect of the plot, including what the “Pillars” were or why they chose to destroy Chicago instead of a different city? I cannot. My description of the plot would go something like this: Tiptoe? Job hunt. Ken Jeong acting crazy! We’re going to the moon! Secret alien technology? It’s a trap! Explosions! Robot worm! Collapsing skyscraper! City in ruins. Robots thank humans for helping even though they mostly just got in the way. Credits.

I don’t know how much effort the writers of this movie put into crafting a grand new Transformer universe, but I can promise them it was all in vain. So, Mr. Bay, if there is a Transformers 4: Now The Earth’s Core is an Autobot, Too! (and this film made well over a billion dollars at the box office, so I don’t see why not) then please, please, please back it down some. Give us fighting robots and explosions and Shia LaBeouf shouting at things and Tyrese Gibson shouting louder and models pretending to be actresses, but don’t bother with all the mythos and the grandiose statements and the rewriting of history to fit your needs. 

We don’t need it. I promise. I mean, look at the box office numbers for Real Steel this fall. It’s pretty clear that America is more than willing to show up just to watch robots fight.

I have problems when I watch “The Office” sometimes. Not because of the dull, plodding mess that it’s become (though that hasn’t helped), but because of its love affair with awkwardness. I cringe whenever someone launches into a scene where they make fool of themselves. Sometimes I’m forced to cover my face, or take a lap around my room. I empathize with the characters so powerfully that I physically can’t take it. Oftentimes, if the remote’s in reach (I try and chuck it across the room so I can’t do this), I’ll pause a scene several times, working through it in little bits and pieces. I can’t help myself.

This condition is known as vicarious embarrassment, and man, do I have it. It’s better when I watch these shows in a room with other people, and the embarrassment is abated by having people there with me.  But it’s always there.

I had a little bit of trouble getting through Crazy, Stupid, Love. It’s not the characters are placed in scenes that are overwhelmingly embarrassing – it’s more that the scenes are unnecessarily embarrassing. People keep announcing personal things in front of large groups for no reason. Every display of affection is a public one. The title of this movie is supposed to indicate that love is lived out loud, but after watching this movie, I’m less and less convinced about that. Everyone seems like their life would be better if they had a quiet talk about how they felt over a cup of coffee somewhere. But they don’t, not when there’s loud displays of affection to be announced in the midst of middle school graduation ceremonies! The plot of this movie hangs on the belief that enough shouting and passionate makeouts with strangers can awaken love. That is a fragile frame upon which to hang a film.

But weirdly, the movie works. And the reason it works is because the actors in it are absolutely, totally sold out to their characters. You believe every word they say, no matter what it is. I’m a fan of all the actors in this picture, but there’s no question that directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa managed to get their very best performances out of them. They also managed to work in a fairly shocking reveal at the end without ever tipping their hand earlier in the film, showing real storytelling deftness.

After seven years as Michael Scott, Steve Carrell is perhaps now unparalleled among modern movie stars as the master of awkward comedy. But this movie shows why he doesn’t have to be. I’ll watch him in almost anything.

Also, I’m trying to avoid awkward comedies these days. I’m gonna break the remote one of these days if I keep chucking it across the room.

This is a science fiction movie built around a central conceit, that after a massive train explosion outside of Chicago, they have the technology to send someone back into the memory of one of the passengers for the eight minutes before the explosion. It’s not time travel, it’s simply reliving the past. So they send the consciousness of a severely wounded soldier kept alive by breathing machines (Jake Gyllenhaal) into the man’s memory to try to figure out who the bomber is, in order to catch him before he can blow anything else up.

It’s clear from the get go the creators of the technology have no real concept of what they’ve tapped into. When Gyllenhaal is sent into the passenger’s memory, he also inhabits the man’s body.  He doesn’t just relive the person’s life, he’s able to control it – to walk up and down the train, speak to people, investigate rooms the man had never visted before.

So clearly Gyllenhaal isn’t simply living in the man’s memory, he’s somehow ended up in an alternate universe: one where the explosion can still be prevented. The movie does not acknowledge this viewpoint through most of the movie, but logically, there’s no other explanation.

Now, up until this point, I haven’t given you too many spoilers, but this is where things are about to go off the rails (ha!) of standard movie reviewing. Let’s talk about the ending. Get out now if you want to watch the movie someday.

All right, everybody ready to move on? Are you sure? Let’s go.

At the end of the movie, after numerous failures, Jake Gyllenhaal finally figures out who the bomber was (shocking, I know), but he isn’t able to stop the train from exploding. He’s certain that with another trip, he can succeed at stopping the bombing. The operators of the Source Code are reluctant to send him back in again – they already have the information they need, so what’s the purpose of the sending him back? He can’t change the past. Gyllenhaal, understanding that the trips he’s being sent on are not to the past, begs until one of the engineers (Vera Farmiga) finally obliges.

Once back on the train, Gyllenhaal defuses the bomb and captures the bomber. Eight minutes pass and…. nothing happens. The train arrives in Chicago. The passengers exit, and Gyllenhaal continues on, living in the man’s body in this alternate timeline.

…wait. So, what happens to the guy whose body it was beforehand? I don’t know. He disappears. Every other passenger on the train survives and continues on with their lives, and this poor guy is up in Heaven, trying to explain things. “Yeah, Jake Gyllenhaal is living in my body now, hitting on my girlfriend. Don’t really know what happened.”

Not to mention, there’s already a version of Jake Gyllenhaal in this timeline. So Gyllenhall writes a note to Farmiga, thanking her for sending him back into the Source Code (in another timeline that she isn’t aware of). He tells her that the efforts of her alternate timeline-self helped stopped a train explosion this morning, and asks her to mercy-kill the version of Gyllenhaal living there in that timeline as a favor. This seems mean of him, because he’s ruining any chance of this-timeline’s-Gyllenhaal getting to get put into the body of some other poor sap and resurrected in a different timeline, but it is his own life (sort of), so I guess I’ll allow it.

She obliges, which means that in this new timeline, we have a living Gyllenhaal (in someone else’s body), a dead Gyllenhaal (in his own body), plus the soul of this train passenger that’s still out there somewhere. In the original timeline, we now have no Gyllenhaals (not even Maggie!) – just a wounded body with no consciousness. Odd place to leave a movie.

Not to mention that, if the movie’s ending means that we’ve established that Gyllenhaal was tapping into a series of alternate timelines. So each time he failed to solve the puzzle, all of those people died. If he’d figured things out faster and spent less time trying to call his dad, several thousand more people would be alive. That’s a lot of times he allowed Michelle Monaghan to die. More than I can really forgive. 

End spoilers.

All that said, it was a pretty good movie (you weren’t expecting that, were you?). Gyllenhaal, Monaghan, and Farmiga are all really good in it, and the film feels the way thrillers are supposed to feel: like a puzzle slowly being put together in front of you. It’s a very well-directed picture, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. Go ahead and see it.

Just… try not to think too much. It’s only gonna bug you.