What has Michael Keaton been up to lately?

I don’t know the answer to that. I know he’s appeared in a handful of movies I haven’t seen — and have no desire to see — such as RoboCop and Need For Speed. He voiced the hilarious Ken doll in Toy Story 3, a major and fairly recent blockbuster. I still think he’s the big screen’s Batman, in the big screen’s best Batman movies.

But on the whole, it doesn’t seem like Keaton’s been on the Hollywood radar since the late 90s. Thus Birdman feels like something of a comeback, even though I acknowledge that Michael Keaton never exactly went anywhere. (He always knew where he was, even if the rest of us didn’t.) At least Keaton’s still getting paid, which makes him better off than Riggan Thompson, the character he plays in Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance). Thompson and Keaton are both famous for playing superheroes named after flying animals, so it’s hard not to feel like this is a little autobiographical. But the superhero connection is hopefully all these two have in common… because Riggan Thompson is nuts.

Birdman is mostly a love letter to actors — both in its storyline and also in the sense that it gives so many actors juicy, quirky scenes to play with. Keaton is not playing himself, but in a way, he is playing all actors, everywhere, reduced to their basic form: an ego. A bundle of neuroses. A child in an adult’s body, desperate to be loved. An in this case, a man who has allowed inhabiting other people to take him over, so that now these other characters are free to come and go through his mind as they please.Riggan hears the voice of Birdman frequently throughout the film — it’s his own voice, but angrier and raspier and, it must be said, more like Christian Bale’s Batman voice than Keaton’s own. It makes sense that such a ridiculous-sounding character would be the one to manifest itself in an actor’s psyche. Birdman is a brash and invincible movie hero, the counterpoint to the fragile man Riggan Thompson has become. Birdman is beloved, and Riggan Thompson is, too, but only because the general public can’t tell the two apart. Riggan is approached by several fans in the film, and none of them have any regard for who he is as a person or what he might be going through at any given moment. To them, he’s still a costumed character, even when he’s dressed like any other person. He’s a photo op, an autograph, and — once he gets locked out of the theater in his tightie-whities — a meme. No wonder Riggan is losing his grip on who he is. Most of the people in the world are confusing him with Birdman, too.

But a real man can’t be a superhero. Perhaps being a stage actor is the closest a human being can get — dashing into the fray so many nights a week, wearing masks, hiding one’s true persona to please the masses. Actors hide underneath other personas, and Riggan is starting to lose his mind, but the people around him don’t know it, because they’re so used to actors; crazy behavior. Temper tantrums, delusions of grandeur, outrageous demands — what’s the difference between a star and a schizophrenic, anyway?In Birdman, Riggan Thompson is a 90s action star who has fallen off of Hollywood’s radar since turning down the fourth installment in the franchise. In an effort to be taken seriously as an artist, for a change, he writes, directs, and stars in a play based on Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” His co-stars are Lesley (Naomi Watts), an actress for whom this appearance on Broadway is the culmination of a lifelong dream to “make it in the theater,” Laura (Andrea Riseborough), his pregnant girlfriend with bisexual tendencies, and Mike (Edward Norton), a hotshot Thespian-with-a-capital-T whose ego practically shoots through the roof.

Birdman does not take place in real time but does, supposedly, play out in one continuous shot — there are no visible cuts, though it is obvious when an hour or a day has passed. That gimmick lends everything a distinctly surreal vibe, enhanced by Riggan’s imagined telekinesis and the voice of Birdman that occasionally intrudes into his reality. Riggan is obviously a pretty unbalanced dude when we meet him, and as the pressures surrounding his theater debut mount, that only gets worse. He gets into an All About Eve-style competition with Mike, who brings his own brand of crazy to the production, as Riggan’s assistant/daughter Sam (Emma Stone), lawyer Jake (Zach Galifankis), and ex-wife (Amy Ryan) grow increasingly worried about his erratic behavior. (But never as concerned as they truly should be.)Birdman is an impressive piece of filmmaking, particularly on a technical level. It wouldn’t have been possible to make the movie this way a decade — at least, not nearly so fluidly. It’s darkly comedic and, at times, straight-up dark, and gives its actors plenty of vibrant opportunities to poke fun at their profession. (There are also some sly digs at real-life celebrities like Robert Downey, Jr., Jeremy Renner, and Justin Bieber.) In one pretty incredible scene, Riggan faces off against a bitchy theater critic (Lindsay Duncan) who is determined to sink his passion project no matter how good or bad it is merely because she doesn’t like it when Hollywood stars try and take over the Great White Way. It’s a wonder real-world critics have flipped over Birdman, given Riggan’s acidic takedown of professional criticism.

Yes, Birdman is one of this fall’s most lauded releases, and could very well earn nominations for several of its stars — most likely, Edward Norton and Michael Keaton. (Edward Norton is fresher, funnier, and more exciting here than he has been elsewhere in years.) The story itself is not as novel as the filmmaking. It has the same “oh, fuck it” spirit as something like I Heart Huckabee’s, the madcap, half-grounded-in-reality satirical edge of Adaptation. We’ve seen criticism of critics in movies like Ratatouille, and the unhinged star at its center has quite a lot in common with Black Swan’s Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) — especially since both hallucinate giant bird-people at some point in the course of their stories.

But it’s a little easier to feel sympathy for the oppressed ballerina than it is for brash, gruff Riggan Thompson, whose trajectory is pretty obvious from the get-go. That doesn’t lessen the pleasure of watching his interactions with the other characters, all played by terrific actors at the top of their game. But it does mean that I was in awe of the movie more than I was emotionally invested in it.I can’t think of a single scene I didn’t take some pleasure in, but only a few truly resonated. My favorite was probably an exchange between Lesley and Laura, as the two attempt to validate each other as both women and actresses, because the self-obsessed men in their lives can’t be bothered to truly take notice of them. Birdman has five pretty fantastic parts for women, and they come off a lot better than the men — all jerks — do.

Birdman is a very different movie than any of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s previous efforts, which include prestige pics like 21 Grams and Babel, and I welcome the grim weirdness. It’s less of a Hollywood satire than you might expect from the premise, and much more about The Theater. Thus it is a movie that is probably most appreciated by actors and other theater-folk, who are both tenderly embraced and thoroughly mocked by this movie. Movies about tortured talent are big this year — Whiplash being the more slick and entertaining release currently in the theaters, and Frank being slightly more grounded in reality. Individual moments crackle with wit and originality — I wish the overall thrust of the story had the same originality.

Instead, it’s a slightly self-indulgent movie best enjoyed by the very people who made it. That’s not really a bad thing, but Black Swan ended on a surprising note of excellence, with a bloody Nina awash in lights and applause and one sublime line of dialogue: “I was perfect.” Birdman seems poised to end with a similar beat, and then goes on. Like Riggan, Birdman doesn’t quite know what its limits are and over-reaches trying to make a grandiose artistic point that it already made several times over. Less is not more here.

I don’t suppose Riggan would take too kindly to my criticism, however, so let’s wrap this up before I overstay my welcome. Riggan Thompson had no chance in hell of earning an Oscar nomination for playing Birdman, but the same can’t be said for Michael Keaton. He’s a very good Birdman, but still a better Batman. I’m glad he’s back in a starring role, still getting nuts after all these years.

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The secret is out.

If you don’t know the main twist in Gone Girl by now, then I feel sorry for you, because you will undoubtedly be spoiled any minute now, given the level of buzz the film has received. (And definitely by me, if you keep reading.)

David Fincher’s fantastic thriller has spawned countless articles claiming it is everything from another regressive and misogynistic entry in the psycho-bitch subgenre (joining the ranks of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct) to the most feminist film in years. It has prompted debates about women who cry rape, the roles of husbands and wives in a marriage, victims as portrayed by the media.

The debate has also launched discussions about how Fincher treats women in his films. His oeuvre is best remembered by titles like Fight Club, Zodiac, and Se7en, which feature smart, sophisticated roles for males and not a whole lot of women.

But what tends to be left out of the conversation are all the strong female characters that have appeared in Fincher movies. Not every one of his films is a feminist showcase, but on the whole he’s treated women a lot better than a lot of current filmmakers, especially those making the kinds of suspense thrillers Fincher is typically drawn to.

Sp here is my definitive ranking of Fincher’s films, from least to most feminist.

10. ZODIAC

Fincher’s best movie is pretty inarguably also his least feminist. The Zodiac killer murders people pretty indiscriminately, with male and female victims alike. A few of the female victims (or near victims) have satisfyingly tense scenes — in fact, they’re some of the most terrifying kill scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. That includes Darlene Ferrin, shot by the Zodiac at a lovers’ lane, who seems to think she knows the killer but dies before confirming that; it also includes Cecelia, whose lakeside picnic is thoroughly ruined by the infamous killer. In both cases, the men survive but the women are killed. Of course, that’s not Fincher’s doing — that’s just what happened.

None of these victims emerges as a major character, for obvious reasons. The only female character truly present here is Melanie (Chloe Sevigny), cartoonist-turned-Zodiac-hunter Robert Graysmith’s wife, but she has only a handful of scenes and basically becomes the naggy shrew wife archetype (though she’s being perfectly rational when she asks her husband to stop provoking a dangerous and unpredictable serial killer). Given that this movie is based on true events and takes place mostly in the 1970s, it makes sense that the film’s central trio would be entirely male (as played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr.). I don’t fault Zodiac for being a very masculine film, but it doesn’t help Fincher’s case when it comes to the debate over the female roles in his films, either. Next!9. THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Another (somewhat) true story in which males take up virtually all the major roles, The Social Network does have at least one memorable female who banters Sorkin-style with Mark Zuckerberg in the film’s indelible opening scene. That’s Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), in her breakout performance as the girl who inspired Facebook to happen. That’s arguably a powerful, world-changing role for a female, except Erica Albright is fictional, a device entirely invented by Aaron Sorkin to suggest Zuckerberg’s narcissistic loneliness. (Facebook is created after a rather misogynistic site that ranks the looks of female Harvard students gets shut down.) The Social Network has been accused of making up all but the broadest beats of its story, but the Erica Albright character nicely highlights how being just a few clicks away from the majority of the population doesn’t necessarily mean we feel any more connected to each other, especially in the fantastic final moments when Zuckerberg just keeps refreshing his Facebook page, hoping Erica will add him as a friend.

Beyond Erica, we also briefly meet Eduardo Saverin’s girlfriend Christy (Brenda Song), who goes into psycho-bitch mode when she feels marginalized, and the cute college girl that clues Sean Parker into Facebook. But the female roles are largely relegated to various hookups or love interests despite Sorkin’s usual knack for writing smart women. The exception is Marilyn Delpy (Rashida Jones), a lawyer on Zuckerberg’s team who attempts to get through to him about being more likable and fails pretty miserably. Still, all these women are essentially window dressing in a male-driven ensemble about the age of the internet and the advent of social media. Then again, it’s still a very male-driven field in real life as well, for which Fincher can’t be faulted. At least we get the sense that Erica Albright exits the movie because Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t deserve her — she is solidly in charge of that decision, and declining his friendship early on is probably the wisest thing she could do, given how he ends up treating his other buddies.

8. SE7EN

Se7en is another movie with a virtually all-male cast, centering on the detective duo played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman who eventually square off against a male killer played by Kevin Spacey. The film’s treatment of women — and all people, really — is dark, as the female victims are a prostitute who is raped to death by a killer sex toy and a model who chooses to commit suicide rather than live her life as a disfigured woman. Of course, all of the killer’s victims are meant to seem morally depraved in some way, representing lowlifes who abuse one or more of the seven deadly sins.

The lightest and most likable character in the movie is Detective Mills’ wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who strikes up a secret friendship with Detective Somerset after moving with her husband to a big city where she doesn’t know anyone. In most such thrillers, “the wife” is a barely-there presence who tends to nah her husband about working too much and not spending time with the family. Here, however, Tracy is a fully fleshed-out character who confides in Somserset that she’s pregnant and unsure about whether or not she should keep the child.

This might seem like a curious detour for a grim procedural like Se7en, but as it turns out, being sympathetic to Tracy is key for the film’s shocking denouement, when the killer has a delivery man drop off a special “package” containing Tracy’s pretty head. (The reason Se7en ranks as a favorite amongst Gwyneth-haters.) Because we got to know Tracy so well, the moment feels like a true tragedy, and we’re right there with Mills as his grief at the loss of his wife and unborn child causes him to kill the unnamed murderer. It’s gloomy stuff, but certainly not the last time Fincher dares to go where other filmmakers are less likely to. Unfortunately, the fact that the only female character in the film ends up decapitated doesn’t really give Fincher much credit as a feminist filmmaker, so, moving on…7. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Fincher’s most widely derided movie is also the one that is his least Fincher-esque. At first glance, it seems too heartwarming and benign to come from the man who made Fight Club and Se7en, but it has its share of grim moments and is all about death. Though Brad Pitt is the star, in a lot of ways the movie belongs to Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who ends up taking care of the reverse-aging Benjamin as he becomes an infant (in much the same way a woman might need to take care of an aging man as he grows senile). She’s the one reading Benjamin’s diary from her own deathbed in the film’s book-ending device (which happens as Hurricane Katrina rages).

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button also has strong female roles for Tilda Swinton and Taraji P. Henson (who was Oscar-nominated for her work), but none of them escape the overall storybook quality of this movie, which is more about sweeping themes than characters who break any sort of mold. The female characters are all pretty typical, functioning more as foils for the male protagonist than they do as women with their own agendas and inner lives. Still, as usual, Fincher tends to work with actresses who can elevate the material, and Cate Blanchett is more than capable of that. The decades-spanning story allows us to see her whole life unfold — a life that largely revolves around Benjamin. 6. THE GAME

The only major female role in 1997’s The Game is Christine, played by Deborah Kara Unger (a role that was originally intended for future Fincher collaborator Jodie Foster). At first, Christine seems like a hapless victim of “the game” unleashed upon the wealthy Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas) by the shady and elusive CSR as part of a bizarre gift from his brother Conrad (Sean Penn). However, Nicholas soon comes to suspect that Christine is in on it — and she is. Christine and Nicholas briefly join forces as she explains that CSR has relieved him of his finances, but then he realizes she’s drugged him and he’s back to suspecting her of foul play. In the climax, Nicholas holds Christine at gunpoint as she tearfully pleads with him to realize that this is all an elaborate put on — which is also a put-on, because Nicholas arriving with a gun was also a part of the ruse.

Christine ends up being our main source of information (and misinformation) about the culprit behind Nicholas’ wacky birthday present, and we suspect her of being both a victim and a villain multiple times before the final truth is revealed. It’s a fun twist on the typical sidekick girl/love interest we often see in such films, but she’s not exactly the femme fatale either. She’s just a woman doing her job, and doing it pretty damn well, and Deborah Kara Unger and Fincher keep us guessing about her allegiances all the way through. It’s a more complicated female role than anything Fincher offered any woman up until his recent book adaptations.5. FIGHT CLUB

Of all Fincher’s movies, Fight Club has to be the most masculine, because it’s all about men beating each other up to prove to themselves that they’re men. Our narrator, played by Edward Norton, feels emasculated by too much luxury and a cushy office job. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) enters his life to shake him out of his stupor, inspiring him to cause crimes and start an underground fight club where men ranging from pretty boy Angel (Jared Leto) to big-titted Bob (Meat Loaf) can duke it out ’til they’re left bruised and bleeding on the floor.

But the reason Fight Club ranks so highly amongst Fincher’s feminist films is because it has one truly awesome female character — the chain-smoking Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who seems perpetually on the verge of killing herself. We meet Marla at a support group for survivors of testicular cancer, and the lady does have balls — she’s fond of quotable gems like, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” It appears for a while that Marla has ditched our hero to fuck around with Tyler Durden instead, but when Tyler ends up being our narrator’s alter ego instead of a flesh-and-blood character, we realize it’s his erratic behavior that’s been hurting Marla, not the other way around. The finale of the movie, featuring Marla and the narrator holding hands and watching a city crumble to pieces around them, is one of the weirdest and most memorable romantic climaxes ever put to film.

4. GONE GIRL

Is Amy Dunne a regressive character? Or have we finally just progressed enough to let women be devious psychopaths, too? Gone Girl plays on gender stereotypes by posing a whodunit that automatically revolves around male suspects, because that’s how we’ve come to expect these things to play out. Men are the killers and women are their victims. Amy knows that, too, which is how she’s able to be so successful at playing the police and the media, allowing them to come to the conclusion that it must have been Nick Dunne who did away with his wife.

Of course, it’s Amy who has done away with herself, but when Nick starts playing along with her games, Amy changes her tune and decides to pin the blame on another former lover instead — Neil Patrick Harris’ Desi, who is graphically killed during an intense sex scene that leaves her covered in his blood. That Amy would go to such extremes — having sex with Desi just so she can claim he raped her — raises a lot of questions about how we deal with rape accusations in real life. It’s true that Amy Dunne is a horrible person, who expends most of her energy getting revenge against men she perceives to have wronged her (though those wrongs aren’t always so severe). But Nick ends up returning to her, not because he’s trapped (as some seem to believe), but because their partnership in deceit begins to make a weird kind of sense to him.

Amy is far from the first female psycho-killer to grace the big screen, but the fact that she gets away with it is much more novel. The killer in such films is no longer the lusty single woman who threatens the male protagonist’s family — she is the family herself. The reason Gone Girl gets away with making Amy such a total psycho is that writer Gillian Flynn grounds with film with an array of other colorful female characters, some wicked, some virtuous. (The film’s de facto hero Detective Boney is a woman.) Fincher has fun playing with stereotypes here, marrying the icy Hitchcock blonde and the knife-wielding psycho in a movie that makes the villain and the victim the same person. There’s no question that Amy is driving this story — she’s a woman you don’t want to fuck with, in any sense of that word. At its most basic level, Gone Girl can be read as an exploitation of men’s fears of rape accusations and controlling wives, but there’s much more to it than that.

3. ALIEN3

Alien3 is the weakest of the Alien series, and one of Fincher’s least-liked movies, largely because it feels like a betrayal of James Cameron’s spectacular Aliens to kill off little Newt off-screen. Due to the mother-daughter bond between Ripley and Newt — and the fact that the big bad villain, the Alien Queen, is also a female — Aliens definitely scores as the more feminist film in the series. (As does Alien Resurrection, which added Winona Ryder to the mix.) Alien3 sports the most masculine Ripley, head shaved and a sour attitude, the sole female amidst a ship of prisoners who face off against the aliens. Ripley eventually sacrifices herself because she’s carrying an alien inside her, another dour and disappointing plot beat after Ripley has come so far in the series.

However, it can’t be denied that Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is absolutely the most badass action movie heroine of all time, and she still manages to kick plenty of ass in the third installment, even if we end up liking her a lot better in the first two movies. Fincher can’t take too much credit for Ripley here, but he benefits from jumping into an awesome feminist franchise for his directorial debut (!). Alien3 might score a tad higher if it didn’t undo a lot of the feminism of Cameron’s Aliens in the process.   2. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

At first, Fincher’s decision to cast the girl who played Erica Albright as the autistic punk Lisbeth Salander in his adaptation of Steig Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed like madness. But as usual in Fincher’s films, the casting ended up being perfect. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth is tough, resourceful, and has no patience for politeness due to a rough upbringing that left her well-being in the hands of some shady government officials. In a controversial moment, Lisbeth’s guardian ties her down and forces anal sex on her, and Fincher lingers in the moment longer than other filmmakers might in order to depict the extent of her suffering. But Lisbeth is no mere victim. She exacts her revenge in a scene that is equally graphic as the rapist becomes the victim. A lot of filmmakers wouldn’t have handled this material with the right touch, but the way that Fincher depicts it, it feels icky in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones.

Any faults with the sexual politics in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo stem largely from the source material. Fincher’s adaptation actually tamps down some of the problematic elements in the novel, such as the way that just about every female in the book throws herself at the male protagonist. (He’s played by James Bond, AKA Daniel Craig, but here he’s supposed to be a down-on-his-luck middle-aged journalist, so it’s not quite so sexy.) Did this story really need Lisbeth to throw herself at Blomkvist and, in the end, grow jealous when seeing him return to his editor and lover (played by Robin Wright)? Not really, but it’s in the book, and it’s kind of cool that Lisbeth takes charge and dispenses with any foreplay or niceties when she decides she that wants him.

As portrayed by Rooney Mara, Lisbeth Salander is pretty badass; despite her Oscar nomination, the film wasn’t exactly a runaway hit, which means we probably won’t see Fincher and Mara reteam for the book’s two sequels. (This one clearly ends on a note that assumes the story continues.) Larsson’s follow-up books are even more problematic than this one, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed that this could be the bittersweet end of the girl with the dragon tattoo.1. PANIC ROOM

Didn’t Kristen Stewart learn anything from Jodie Foster? Before playing Bella in the regressive and problematic Twilight series, Stewart played Foster’s daughter in Fincher’s Panic Room, a female-driven suspense thriller. Jodie Foster has been defying gender stereotypes since childhood, so it’s sort of fun to see her as the mother of a tomboyish daughter here. Foster is Meg Altman, who sure isn’t hurting financially after a divorce that left her with enough bank to purchase an enormous four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Seriously?)

As luck would have it, Meg and Sarah end up being robbed on the very night they move in by a trio of guys looking for a payday located somewhere in the house. Fortunately, the house comes complete with a panic room, where Meg and Sarah lock themselves in as the robbers attempt to flush them out and break in. Complicating matters are Sarah’s diabetes and the fact that the money the bad guys want is in the panic room.

As usual, Jodie Foster plays a competent, compelling character. She’s also a relatable mother who is fucking terrified by the fact that there are dangerous men in her house, and she’s cool under pressure but just barely. Foster eventually manages to kick some ass, but this never falls outside the realm of believability, and when she calls her ex-husband for help, he shows up and becomes just another victim that Meg has to rescue. (A lot of movies would have had the male swoop in to save the day.) It is a change of heart from one of the robbers (Forest Whitaker) that ultimately saves Meg from the more murderous of the trio (Dwight Yoakam). Still, Foster’s tough fragility totally owns this film, and anyone who says Fincher isn’t a feminist would have a hard time explaining this one into such an argument.

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Birdman is one the year’s most critically beloved films. It features brilliant performances, breathtaking filmmaking, an off-the-beaten-path score, and unfolds in one long unbroken take (but not really).

And how about the story? Well, on a narrative level, it’s pretty much the same movie as Black Swan, which is why I admire the film but can’t get fully on board the Birdman train as so many critics have.

Don’t believe me? Below are 10 irrefutable reasons why Black Swan and Birdman are practically the same movie.

(Massive spoilers for both films ahead.)

10. New York City

Both films notably take place in New York City, the cultural capital of America. Black Swan is located on the Upper West Side and Lincoln Center, as is fitting for a ballet story, while Birdman is appropriately rooted around Broadway in the midtown theater district.

9. Adaptation

Birdman and Black Swan both center on stage adaptations of a previous work. In Black Swan, it’s a new interpretation of the classic ballet Swan Lake, and in Birdman, it’s Riggan’s adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

8. What is real?

Both films play with our perception of reality by depicting certain events as “real” that are later revealed to take place only in our protagonist’s minds. In both films, many scenes feel slightly surreal and “off,” tipping us off to their mental instability early on. Basically, we’re getting a taste of the crazy that’s running through Nina and Riggan’s minds.7. The Rivalry

Nina and Riggan both come up against a rival who threatens their star status. For Nina, it’s the ingenue Lily (Mila Kunis), who eventually worms her way into the role of Nina’s understudy and is praised by director Thomas Leroy as the perfect embodiment of the Black Swan. For Riggan, it is his outrageously vain co-star Mike (Edward Norton), who starts out by making suggested cuts to Riggan’s dialogue in the play and then engages in increasingly erratic antics, like breaking character to complain that his stage booze isn’t real booze and trying to have actual sex with his co-star during e performance (resulting in a very visible erection, much to the delight of the audience).

6. Duality

Duality is a major factor in Black Swan, as Nina perfectly embodies the White Swan but has a hard time channeling her inner Black Swan. (Probably because her inner Black Swan is a looney murderess.) She often sees alarming, evilly smirking reflections that suggest a darker side to herself. Riggan, too, is tormented by his on-screen alter ego Birdman, which a raspy inner voice constantly compels him to embrace. Like Nina, Riggan does eventually give in to his alter ego, further loosening his grasp on reality.

5. Opening Night

The narratives both Black Swan and Birdman build toward the opening night of their respective performances for their climaxes. 4. Lesbians!

In Black Swan and Birdman, two performers rather spontaneously engage in some steamy girl-on-girl hanky-panky — because dancers/actresses are just kind of like that, aren’t they? They’re not real out-and-proud lesbians, they just dabble in lesbianism. (Though in Black Swan’s case, the sapphic action turns out to be yet another hallucination.)

3. The Critic

The true antagonist in both films — besides the protagonists’ dark alter egos — is a bitchy female of a certain age who lives to criticize them. For Nina, it’s her mother Erica (Barbara Heshey), a former ballerina herself. For Riggan, it’s the cruel theater critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan). Nina and Riggan both explode in a fever-pitched rage at these women just before going completely bonkers, but that woman still ends up in the audience at their debut (and final) performance.2. Hallucinated bird-people.

What is it about crazy people and avians? Both Nina and Riggan’s main hallucination involves a human-bird hybrid. For Riggan, it’s himself as the costumed superhero he made famous in the 90s, and in later scenes, Riggan embraces Birdman and goes soaring before our eyes. For Nina, it’s the Black Swan. At one point, she sees (or thinks she sees) a menacing bird-man having sex with Lily (and then herself) backstage; she also sprouts feathers and literally becomes the Black Swan in her final performance. Embracing their inner birdness is an essential step on both Nina and Riggan’s pathway to crazytown.

1. Suicide on stage.

The inevitable conclusion in any story about a protagonist who is going irrevocably nuts is suicide. Both Nina and Riggan end up there, deciding to do the dirty deed on stage as the grand finale of their opening night performance. Riggan does so by replacing his prop gun with a real one, and Nina does so more accidentally, having stabbed herself in the belly with a shard of mirror while she thought she was attacking Lily. Nina’s suicide is apparently successful; Riggan succeeds in blowing his own nose off and winds up in the hospital, where he arguably makes a more successful attempt by jumping out the window. The ending of both films (Birdman in particular) is left somewhat open to interpretation as to what happens next, but the safest argument is probably that both Nina and Riggan are dead at the end of their respective films.

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“Renee Zellweger looks like she just got back from a long trip to a Cold Mountain.”

I thought that comment was mildly amusing, so I tweeted and put it on Facebook.

Less than a minute later, I deleted both.

I started thinking of the wave of negativity Renee Zellweger is experiencing right now. Not because she gave a bad performance in a movie, or said something in an interview she’d later regret. Simply because she walked out of the house and attended an event — ironically, Elle‘s Women In Hollywood, a night that is meant to empower females.

Yes, when you walk out onto a red carpet, and you’re a woman, you know you’re subjecting yourself to all kinds of scrutiny. For actresses in Hollywood, it is a (probably unfortunate) part of their job. It takes a lot of tenacity and a fair amount of confidence to even do such a thing. But we don’t think about that when we see the pictures. We just judge.

I’m not here to judge anyone who made a snarky comment about Renee Zellweger. I did it, too. Whoever first wrote a Renee Zellweger-specific post about the event obviously knew that people would freak out at the sight of her — because it’s been so long since we’ve seen her, and because she looks so different than when we last saw her. And there the bandwagon was formed. It is human nature to jump on.

When we tweet, Facebook, or otherwise post about a celebrity on the internet, we don’t think that celebrity will actually see it, and most of the time, we’re right. Celebrities have so many comments flying at them from all directions, it would be impossible to view them all. Our one little joke will be seen by, at best, however many of our couple hundred followers on Twitter happen to be reading tweets right now, or however many friends actually see what we post on Facebook. And that’s that. Done.

But the thing about the internet is you never know for sure who will see it. It is, in fact, possible that Renee Zellweger could stumble upon what I tweeted about her, and if she did, she’d no doubt feel really bad about it, the same way I’d feel awful if she tweeted the same thing about how I looked last night. And in the more likely event that she does not see it, I’m still contributing to the huge storm of bad press she’s getting right now just for having her picture taken.

Did Renee Zellweger get plastic surgery? Probably. And I imagine it must feel pretty lousy to go through all that trouble, then step out in public and still have people saying mean things about how you look. Paradoxically, people who change the way they look tend to receive more flack their appearance rather than less. If Renee Zellweger had not had plastic surgery, and aged naturally, many people would have made snarky comments about that, too. Why did Renee Zellweger get plastic surgery in the first place? Probably because, even at the height of her success, people made fun of the way she looked — the squinty eyes, the chipmunk cheeks. Basically, there’s not much Renee Zellweger could have done that would have avoided bad press at this point.

But Renee is far from the only celebrity to ever prompt the “did she or didn’t she?” discussion. Whether she did or didn’t is irrelevant, unless she also had surgery to make her immune to mean jokes. Most of us are not talking about Renee Zellweger because she looks different than she used to, or because she looks bad, or because she looks old, or anything like that at all. We’re talking about her because other people are talking about her. We saw someone else post about it, so we posted about it, too. We want to partake in the hot topic, gather around the virtual watercooler. We want to be like the cool kids. And today, the cool kids are making fun of Renee Zellweger.

Twitter and Facebook comprise different wings of a worldwide high school. We’re all attending Social Media High, and like most actual high school students, we can’t be so easily divided into camps like “nerds” and “bullies.” Because the nerds have snarky things to say about the jocks sometimes, too.

At Social Media High, negativity is rewarded. You can turn in all your assignments on time, have perfect attendance, and say a thousand nice things to the other kids in your class on a daily basis. But that one moment when the popular girl trips and falls on her face, and you make just the right joke with just the right timing, and everybody laughs? That’s when you’ll be rewarded.

Why did I post a moderately amusing but not terribly funny Renee Zellweger zinger? Simple. I wanted to be rewteeted. I wanted “likes” and comments that would validate how funny I was. Not because my comment was all that hilarious, but it was the first decent joke I came up with, hastily written and thoughtlessly posted. I could have come up with a dozen more.

We get a high off of positive reinforcement, but that’s hard to come by. More often, we’re told we’re too late, not quite there, not enough. We aren’t often rewarded for the good things we do, except internally. Break no laws, and nothing happens; break a law and go to jail. Retweets and “likes” of a disparaging remark are a fleeting, virtual version of positive reinforcement that might briefly feel like the real thing. But the high we get off that is nothing compared to the low feeling the person it’s about will experience when they read it.

I’d rather be retweeted for something positive, but that doesn’t happen as often. I’ve written several movie reviews and articles over the past week, and more often than not, they’re ignored. Like everyone else, I crave good feedback on what I do, especially when I put a lot of effort forth. But I don’t always get it. And it leaves this empty void in me that wants to be filled.

Then Renee Zellweger shows up to the Women in Hollywood gala, and it’s all over my Facebook. She’s trending. It’s a hashtag. I know, as we all know, that taking a quick swipe at a celebrity who has the bad luck to be the day’s top story is the fastest way to gain notoriety in social media — some favorites and likes, a few retweets, perhaps a new follower.

Or, more likely, that tweet still goes ignored, as most tweets do when you’re not a social media “presence.” Like a snide comment mumbled under your breath when everyone around you is pointing and laughing at someone else, it just vanishes into the ether, unheard. But the promise that someone might hear it, and love it, and repeat to everyone how hilarious you are, is reason enough to mutter it at all.

We don’t think celebrities will hear us way down here amongst the masses. And if they do, we don’t believe they’ll care. But it can’t ever feel good to read something mean that people are saying about you, and when you put that comment in public, there is a chance they will. And so, when we post a negative comment about somebody famous, we should always think about that moment. Image them stumbling upon it and guess at what their reaction would be. Can they take it? Is it worth it? If so, click “Post.”

Renee Zellweger showed up to school wearing something different today. And because she’s been out of town for a while, she made an easy target. I briefly joined everyone else in roasting her, but then I stopped to think about it. My deleted tweet will hardly be the last jab I take at a celebrity, and I think that’s okay, because there’s a time and a place to make fun of people. You have to put it in context.

But I decided that making fun of the way Renee Zellweger looked on that red carpet last night was neither the time nor place to be cruel to her. She’s far from one of Hollywood’s top starlets these days, and she was at an event celebrating women that ended up doing just the opposite for her. Renee Zellweger probably missed thousands or millions of horrible individual comments made about her, but I’ll sure as hell bet she got the gist. Thanks to us all, Renee Zellweger is probably having a pretty bad day today.

So, in the unlikely event that she does stumble upon my not-so-popular Twitter, or Facebook, or blog, I offer up an apology. Renee Zellweger, I’m sorry.

*

Marriage is hard work. Ben Affleck said it, rather awkwardly, in his Oscars acceptance speech for Argo, allowing us to wonder what hells he and Jennifer Garner had been through that caused him to profess such a sentiment in front of millions of viewers. And this year, Affleck stars in Gone Girl, a movie that has prompted a lot of discussion about men, women, and the holy matrimony between the two.

Marriage has been the topic of many movies this year, from one of the first films centered on a same-sex married couple (Love Is Strange) and the unconventional twist in marriage counseling found in The One I Love. Of course, marriage is such a broad topic that I’m sure every year has numerous movies exploring the subject, yet with Gone Girl bringing the topic directly to the center of the cultural conversation at the moment, it’s hard not to think of other new releases in similar terms.

With a title like The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, you’d be forgiven for confusing Ned Benson’s new two-hander with a thriller about a missing wife, something akin to Gone Girl. The films have some surface similarities — both tell stories very distinctly from both spouses’ perspectives, with subtle (or not-so-subtle) shifts in how similar events are remembered from both sides. And both feature married people taking drastic actions to get out of their relationships.

But Eleanor Rigby’s disappearance is more metaphorical than Amy Dunne’s. In the opening scenes of her segment in the two-part movie, Eleanor takes a flying leap off a bridge, hoping to end her life. It doesn’t work — or else her chapter of this story would be a really short movie — but it does signal a sort of rebirth, as she is given the chance to discover who she is outside of her marriage, something she hasn’t considered in a while.The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby is two movies — one from Eleanor’s perspective, the other following her husband Conor. (There’s also a studio-mandated spliced-together version that is to be avoided.) The word on the street is that Her is the more successful half of the film, and because I love Jessica Chastain so dearly, that is the segment I saw and the one I am reviewing. The segment follows Eleanor Rigby (named after the Beatles tune) as she reconnects with her parents (Isabelle Hupert and William Hurt) and little sister Katy (Jess Weixler), starts up some college classes, and tries to avoid her ex-husband and any mention of the recent tragedy in their past. There are a few flashbacks to happier times with Conor, including a perfectly lovely sequence in which the two dance by car headlights to OMD’s “So In Love.”

The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Her is a character piece with no plot to speak of. The film takes its time before cluing us in on what precisely happened to dampen Eleanor’s spirits so thoroughly. Is this just a rough patch in the marriage she’s overreacting to, or is her grief valid? Without a compelling and watchable actress like Chastain at the center, the film would probably be unbearable. Instead, it’s a pleasure just to watch Eleanor interact with the people around her, including Professor Friedman (Viola Davis), who plays an entirely different kind of professor on ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder. Here, she’s a lot more grounded, and a lot less hammy, and she reminds us why she’s a two-time Oscar nominee, even if her part here isn’t flashy enough to warrant such acclaim.

A less conventional look at a strained marriage comes in the Swedish film Force Majeur, which follows a happy family’s ski vacation as it goes from idyllic to fraught with tension and several moments of peril, turning potentially deadly several times. If that makes this sound like a thriller, it isn’t. At all. It’s a comedy. And yet, there are moments of genuine dread, as we can’t entirely rule out the death of some or all of these characters. It also features some absolutely gorgeous mountain cinematography, and the rare pleasure of seeing skiing depicted in a film. (This must’ve been a bitch to shoot.)

In Force Majeur, Tomas and Ebba seem to have an ideal marriage, and their kids Vera and Harry are cute as can be (though occasionally quite bratty). Then, during lunch one day, it suddenly appears that the entire family is about to be swallowed by an avalanche. Tomas and Ebba have extreme opposite reactions, and afterward, can’t agree on what really happened. Initially, it seems the couple can brush off the incident as a briefly terrifying situation that they can now look back on with humor, but that avalanche ends up lingering in both of their minds and causing major repercussions in their relationship.

I’m being rather vague because Force Majeur is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. The film is completely unpredictable, taking us in several unforeseen directions, some of which pan out better than others. A newer couple, Mats and Fanni, end up getting dragged into the drama and finding their own bond tested by what happened to their friends. It’s a funny detour that gets dragged out a bit too long, as many scenes in Force Majeur do — much of the film unfolds in unbroken takes with dialogue that feels improvisational, and while that gives many scenes a fresh and funny energy, it also sometimes drags and makes the film feel overlong.

Tomas and Ebba’s initial disagreement over the incident takes place in front of a different couple (it’s a surprise to see Brady Corbet pop up in a Swedish film), in a terrifically awkward encounter. But Ebba’s later conversation with that woman about her open marriage feels somewhat off-topic, the necessity of its inclusion here questionable when there’s so much more to delve into. There’s no one scene in particular that shouldn’t be here, but some trimming might have helped the pacing to match the offbeat energy of much of the humor. The film is basically a weird black comedy, but it’s paced like a contemplative drama, which doesn’t always work in its favor.

Force Majeur ends on a curious note — I’m not sure what to make of it, or of the climactic-seeming scene that comes before it involving a possible ski injury and the family’s separation in blinding whiteness. The movie that gives us a lot to think about, along with the most epically awkward scene of crying I’ve probably ever seen. It’s not often that you see a movie that is this funny, and still makes you wonder if the entire cast is going to be killed in a horrible bus accident at the end.

I may not have loved every second of Force Majeur, thanks mostly to the languid pacing, but I did love the offbeat tone of the movie, and I have nothing but praise for the way it bucks tradition and presents us with a totally unpredictable and surprising narrative. The cast is uniformly spectacular, from the pathetically emasculated Johannes Kuhnke as Tomas and especially Lisa Loven Kongsli as the strong-willed, woefully betrayed Ebba. As several characters in Force Majeur state, you never know how you’ll react in a crisis until you’re right in the thick of it, and a good many of us might be disappointed to discover our own lack of bravado when the moment comes.

Not everyone can be a hero, and in both The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby and Force Majeur, it is the female half of the central married couple that must bear the brunt of the brooding and figure out how to soldier on without the support of her man. Structure aside, Eleanor Rigby is a very conventional indie drama, while Force Majeur is a strange and original dark comedy. Both are anchored by terrific female performances and, like Gone Girl, deal with wives let down by their husband’s inferiority, with plenty to say about the realities of marriage once the honeymoon is over.

*

Comedy is hard. I know that to be true. It’s hard to make, and in the case of network sitcoms, it can also be extremely hard to sit through. There are few things more awkward than watching someone try to be funny and fail miserably at it, especially when a canned laugh track subs in for any actual human amusement.

I don’t generally expect a whole lot out of network comedies these days. Last season brought us The Goldbergs, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the unjustly canceled Trophy Wife, all of which did the trick for me.

What has this fall added to the mix? This season, I’m basically adding shows to my DVR all willy-nilly and dropping them when I get bored. Occasionally, I give up after one episode, and sometimes it’s hard to even get that far. My second Fall TV Roulette is focusing on the comedies — or at least, the shows that are trying to be funny. (Actual comedy not guaranteed.)

MULANEY

Well, this was just painful. Mulaney is clearly modeled after Seinfeld — a comedian whose show is his last name, who does bits of standup to begin the episode, and who can’t really act whatsoever. And that may have worked out okay for Jerry, but I think things will be different this time.

Since I’m sure this is being covered elsewhere, I’m not going to be the one to claim that the show is passively homophobic and actively misogynistic (as is the standup work of many male comedians). I can’t imagine many women will find this show funny, unless they hate themselves and/or each other. Some men may find it amusing in a brash, fratty sort of way, but anyone with a taste for humor more sophisticated than can be found in an average episode of Family Guy will be sorely disappointed.

What sort of hilarity ensues in the pilot? Well, none, but here are the attempts: a prostrate exam! A crazy ex-girlfriend insisting that she is not crazy! A black man named Motif who refers to women as “bitches”! Martin Short as a delusional, washed up TV star! Whereas most shows seem to bend over backwards to feel fresh, it’s kind of like this show was conceived specifically to play with the most cliche stereotypes available. None of this would be so bad if the show were actually funny, but… no.A TO Z

A To Z is a lot like Manhattan Love Story, but not as charming. I have nothing against the leads, except that Christina Milioti is exactly like Jennifer Love Hewitt in every way, and that’s rarely a good thing (unless you’re watching I Know What You Did Last Summer or Heartbreakers). The high concept of the show is maybe a little too high concept, as we are explicitly informed exactly how long these two will be together (in true rip-off-of-500-Days-Of-Summer fashion), and presumably will follow them through 26 episodes until they get to their breakup at Z. (Every episode is titled after a letter, which makes me wonder what “Z” word goes along with breakups.) However, I also doubt the show will leave us on such a sour note, so they’ll probably get back together in episode AA, or whatever. (Maybe in an episode titled “AA Is For Alcoholics Anonymous” after both have turned to drinking to cope with their grief? I’m overthinking it and I should be paid for this.)

Too much in A To Z is just too hard to buy. The leads have middling chemistry, the supporting cast is cartoonish, and it’s trying too hard to incorporate online dating and social media. A few moments amused me mildly, but I’m not at all invested in this couple, nor do they have any real obstacles in their way when it comes to getting together, which makes me think this show will have trouble even getting from A To D and holding our interest. Literally, the show could end after they kiss in the first episode. (I guess a show called From A To A isn’t quite as marketable.)

A To Z is not an aggressively bad show, and not one I wish to meet a swift cancellation, because it’s not as misbegottenly grating as Selfie or Mulaney. However, I am skeptical that A To Z will ever actually make it to Z, which seems a looong time from now for a show with so little going on. It’s more like from A To Zzzzzz... (I can’t be the first to make that joke… can I?) There’s some chatter on the internet that A To Z trumps Manhattan Love Story, but take it from me — that is blatantly wrong.

MARRY ME

Casey Wilson is funny. Ken Marino is funny. David Caspe, who created Happy Endings and then Marry Me, is funny. And Marry Me is sort of funny. The pilot follows Annie and Jake, a couple that experience a series of mishaps while attempting to get engaged — his proposal results in Annie accidentally insulting their friends and loved ones to their faces, her proposal results in Jake getting fired, and so on. In addition to the winning leads, there are some talented supporting players including John Gemberling and Sarah Wright doing riffs on the standard his-and-hers BFF, plus Tim Meadows and Dan Bucatinsky as Annie’s gay dads (diversity!).

None of that can save this show from a stereotype so well-worn it’s all but completely eroded. How many shrill, desperate-to-marry romcom heroines must we suffer through? Isn’t it time to put this archetype to bed for a little while? Weddings are a very tired romantic comedy cliche, so it’s rather difficult to imagine what ABC was thinking when they greenlit a whole show leading up to the big event. I doubt there’s much comedy to be mined from such staples as cake-tasting and flower-choosing anymore, and it’s a little sad to watch Marino and Wilson pan for gold in this way. Marry Me isn’t a bad show, but the subject matter feels beneath the smart writing and talented performers.

JANE THE VIRGIN

Jane The Virgin has an original and rather wacky premise, thanks in large part because it’s based on a telenovela. It’s not technically a sitcom, given that it’s an hour long rather than a swift half-hour, but it definitely plays up the comedy and tamps down the drama of Jane’s precarious predicament, which is that she is accidentally inseminated by a gynecologist when getting a pap smear. As you may have guessed from the title, Jane is a virgin, so this is particularly problematic for her — as well as her boyfriend and her religious grandmother, who sees this as a second coming of the immaculate conception.

Jane The Virgin has a lot going for it. As crazy as the central premise is, as it unfolds here, it’s actually fairly believable, and the characters similarly react in relatable ways. It’s particularly interesting to see how Jane’s boyfriend Michael reacts to this unconventional news. Gina Rodriguez is completely charming in the lead role, and there’s a lot going on with the supporting players (in true soap opera fashion) that suggests fun to come. I’m not sure Jane The Virgin has me hooked yet, but it’s nice to see the CW getting in on 2014’s diversity action, and yet in this show, the mostly Latino cast feels incidental rather than crucial to the premise.

MANHATTAN LOVE STORY

I praised this one in my first Fall TV Roulette. In fact, I called it my favorite new show of the bunch. I still like it, but I have to say that the premise is stretching itself a little thin. Analeigh Tipton and Jake McDorman are still talented leads with solid chemistry, but what’s with all the romantic comedy shows this season that have just waiting for the inevitable conclusion? Marry Me strings us along to prepare for nuptials, A To Z shows us every step on the road from meet-cute to breakup, and Manhattan Love Story pretty much guarantees that its leads will get together, and they already are sort of together, but they can’t be too together or there wouldn’t be a show, would there?

Episode 3 had Dana unwittingly bringing a gay man as her date to a dinner party, while Episode 4 saw bad oysters ruining a night of potential sexytime. Neither of these storylines felt particularly novel, and I’m not sure the series has quite figured out how to integrate its supporting actors, either. (In particular, the talented Chloe Wepper as Peter’s sister feels particularly underused.) I’m sticking with Manhattan Love Story, for now, but I do hope that the writing freshens up a bit.  CRISTELA

And the winner for “Most Improved” in the field of Diversity is… ABC! The network that brought us thae likable African-American family in Blackish has a different sitcom aiming, this time, for the Latino audience, and the formula is pretty similar. A crusty grandparent who constantly tries to get the younger generation to remember their roots heads up a colorful multigenerational household, with a spicy comedian mugging at the center. In this case, the mugging comes from the affable Cristela Alonzo, a welcome comedic presence on the fall lineup. Alonzo brings an energy and enthusiasm to the sitcom format that you’ll rarely see from more seasoned comedians — she looks really happy to be here.

Cristela features its star as a sassy law student crashing with her sister’s family while she slaves away at a no-pay internship, a strong and believable concept that makes a rare move: a realistic economic situation on a sitcom. The working-class angle of Cristela reminds me most of Roseanne, which is never a bad thing. There are many well-worn sitcom staples invoked here — the annoying neighbor with a crush on the lead, the disapproving mother, the jerky boss. Most of these are handled with just the right dose of ingenuity so that they don’t feel too stale. Cristela’s possible romance, possible just-friendship with co-intern Josh (Andrew Leeds) is, surprisingly, one of the strong suits thanks to their chemistry, and Cristela doesn’t overplay the comparisons between its star and the over-privileged white boss’ daughter (Justine Lupe).

Cristela is perhaps a touch too sitcommy for some, and it does take a bit of patience to suffer through the laugh track, but I have to say the appealing cast and overall goodwill of seeing something like this on network primetime makes it a hopeful in my book. I’m giving it a few more episodes.BLACKISH

And speaking of Blackish. The winner for “Most Improved Show After One Week” is… this one.

Do the writers of Blackish read my blog? No. But it kind of seems like they did, since the second episode was so much better than the first. In my initial review, I asked for more from Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross) and less from Anthony Anderson’s Andre, and in the series’ second installment, Rainbow gets a big, hilarious subplot in which she is so caught up in her own head about being the perfect mom, she completely tunes out what her kids are saying. The episode’s A story is about Andre walking in on his young son masturbating and the uncomfortable father-son bond that ensues, a storyline not predicated on the family’s race. The third episode struck a cleaner balance between the two, with just enough race-related humor and just enough that wasn’t.

Blackish is going strong, though Laurence Fishburne has yet to do much (maybe he’s just collecting an easy paycheck and prefers to sit in the background reading the newspaper). Tracee Ellis Ross is still the series’ MVP, and fortunately has been allowed to get as wild and wacky as Anthony Anderson, rather than relegated to the usual naggy sitcom wife role. The show’s race-specific humor now feels sprinkled in when appropriate rather than forced down our throats, as it was in the pilot. Blackish is a good reason to give a show at least one post-pilot viewing, just to be sure. As of now, it’s my favorite new sitcom of the fall (sorry, Manhattan Love Story, but you’re lagging).

*

The media is sleazy. We all know this. Films like Network and To Die For have highlighted the unscrupulous methodology of the news media in a way that, if you didn’t look carefully enough, might even feel like celebration. We hate the media, but we love to hate it. The talking heads, the sensational headlines, false urgency and faux concern. The movies that bring us behind the scenes of this industry tend to be splashy, morally bankrupt, and dripping with satire.

And now, here is their 21st century cousin, Nightcrawler, to do it all over again.

In 2014, it’s almost refreshing to see a movie about journalism that doesn’t also try to include the rapidly-changing world of social media and internet news. Nightcrawler is almost old-fashioned in that way. It is explicitly about the news we watch on our TV screens, when we wake up in the morning and before we go to sleep at night. For decades now, that’s been the primary delivery method of our daily digest of current events. These days, people are more likely to fire up a search engine than turn on their TV when a major story breaks, but Nightcrawler is not about momentous events. It’s about the daily news, the evening news, the nightly news — segments that need to be filled with content whether anything happened or not. It’s no different than any other programming. The advertisers have paid for their spots, the anchors are ready and waiting, you’re on in 3, 2…

Something has to fill those gaps. Does it have to be true? Not necessarily, as long as it can be sold as true. And if it’s on the news, people tend to believe just about anything.In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom doesn’t start out wanting to be a part of the news media. All he wants is a job — any job — and, like many Americans, he’s having a hard time getting one. Lou, however, is willing to sink to much lower depths than many of his unemployed brethren; his try-hard affect and vacant stare suggest either autism or sociopathy, perhaps both. Lou repeats motivational go-getter sound bites he’s probably picked up from self-help gurus and TED talks. When he happens upon a horrific accident and witnesses Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) running onto the scene with a camera to capture the carnage, he suddenly gets the bright idea to give Loder some competition. Lou feels nothing for the victim of this car accident, nor any of the other hurt or dead people he’ll come across in this line of work. He feels nothing for his co-workers, either. He feels nothing. Lou seems to realize that in today’s economy, sensitivity will get you nowhere. In fact, it’s liable to hold you back. All that matters is success.

Lou buys a police scanner and hand-me-down camcorder. It’s far from state of the art, but content trumps quality in broadcast news. Within a few hours of deciding on his new line of work, Lou is already hiring a gopher lackey, Rick (Riz Ahmed), who will work for next to nothing, and he’s talking up his company like he’s owned it for years. (“Fake it until you make it” is clearly one of Lou’s many mantras.)

Lou also strikes up a compelling work relationship with Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a former on-air talent who is now calling shots behind the cameras at KTLA, which we’re told has the lowest-rated news in Los Angeles. That means Nina is hungry for hits, and her new protegee is more than willing to bend the rules, ignore basic ethics, and even commit major crimes in order to get the top story. Nina matter-of-factly lays out what kind of news her viewers will tune in for — primarily, stories about well-to-do white people being affected by urban crime. The bloodier than better.The ruthlessness of the people who run the news media is hardly a novel concept. The fresh angle here is how Nightcrawler marries it with Lou, the entrepreneurial sociopath, an empty shell of a man spitting pearls of wisdom about the American dream. Nina is a direct descendent of the power-drunk Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) in Network, the carnivorous Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) in To Die For. In a word, she’s a bitch, but not necessarily because she was born that way. We sense that a lack of options shaped the woman we see today.

Lou Bloom’s cinematic cousins are less obvious and more numerous. You could go back to Taxi Driver for a story about a Caucasian misanthrope with no real place in American society until he endeavors to carve out a dangerous place for himself. There are more aesthetic echoes of the more recent Drive. (And all three films have something else in common: a lot of driving.)

Nightcrawler also has a lot in common with The Wolf Of Wall Street, my favorite film of last year, which some condemned for celebrating rather than condemning the hedonistic lifestyle of the men (and some women) who laughed all the way to the bank while fucking a good many Americans over. The same people may make similarly stupid claims about this movie, which isn’t interested in meting out a punishment that real life itself wouldn’t deliver. Like Jordan Belfort, Lou Bloom is a self-made man, but he is only allowed to succeed because he lives in a world that values money and image and grabby headlines, and looks the other way at greed and injustice. In both Nightcrawler and The Wolf Of Wall Street, there are law enforcing characters who represent a more idealistic school of thought. (In Scorsese’s film, it’s Kyle Chandler’s FBI agent, and here it’s Michael Hyatt’s Detective Fronteiri.) But there’s not a lot of time for justice when the clock is ticking and you’re on in 5.

Neither Lou nor Nina has any sympathy for the victims at the center of the crimes they’re exploiting, but they’re also struggling against a system that will chew them up and spit them out if they fail at their jobs. If they don’t do the dirty deeds, someone else will beat them to the story. In this movie, American capitalism is, perhaps, an even more vicious beast than the American media; they’re two mutant titans battling it out, and human beings are just little specks on the ground, running and screaming, trying to stay out of the way of the debris. No one in Nightcrawler is all-powerful, and no one does evil for evil’s sake. It’s all to get ahead, stay afloat, move forward. At one point, Lou stumbles upon a fresh crime scene that appears to be an innocent white family gunned down by Latino monsters. Eventually, we learn that this, too, was just a bit of bad business.

Nightcrawler was written and directed by Dan Gilroy, brother of Tony Gilroy, who brought us Michael Clayton. Like that movie, Nightcrawler has the bones of the standard studio thriller, but its flesh is something else entirely. These films elevate the standard genre material and dare to dig a little deeper into their characters, and into our souls. This is a movie that is saying something, not so much with words as with actions. Jake Gyllenhaal lost a significant amount of weight to portray the slimy-looking Lou Bloom, and he’s completely convincing and, in several moments, utterly creepy. We’re never quite sure what Lou is capable of, and we don’t put it past him to snap at any moment. (He could, maybe, be American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman’s less refined kid brother.) It’s one of Gyllenhaal’s best performances to date, and only one of several stellar showings from him recently. Enemy and Prisoners had extraordinarily impressive turns, but this one is Oscar-worthy. (Whether or not it actually nabs any attention from the Academy, we’ll see.)

It’s also a delight to see Rene Russo given plenty to do as the hard-edged but more vulnerable Nina, especially in one killer scene between these partners in crime set in a Mexican restaurant. Movies these days need more Rene Russo, especially if she’s feisty. For a film that seems to say so much about the American economy today, it’s surprising to note that Nightcrawler has only four characters of much significance, and focuses primarily on just two (though Rick becomes important in the film’s final act). Though it may not measure up entirely to the recent masterpieces of some of today’s finest auteurs, Nightcrawler has as much to say about Our Times as The Wolf Of Wall Street and The Social Network, as well a more recent David Fincher film: Gone Girl, which also hatefully and deliciously lambasted the American news media.

Nightcrawler will leave you disturbed about the news you watch and the country you live in, a place where a man like Lou Bloom can thrive at the expense of anyone who stands in his way. But that is the country we live in, a place where Jordan Belfort and Patrick Bateman and Mark Zuckerburg and Lou Bloom are calling the shots. Nightcrawler may be a work of fiction, but it rings truer than much of the “news” we’re fed. Because the news is brought to us by people, and all people have an agenda. Usually, that agenda is making money; other times, it’s just telling us the juiciest possible story.

*

(Throwback Thursday: A version of the following first appeared in INsite Boston in 2006. Forgive the dated references — including the very notion of sweeps overall, which is all but dead thanks to year-round programming and the diminishing importance of live ratings. The overall content here is still relevant! In fact, it’s interesting that many of the new shows I discussed became TV behemoths that are still discussed to this day. This is sort of a fun look back at a moment in time that may or may not have been a milestone.)

Life for a person with high-quality tastes can be hard. Because high quality isn’t always available! With the silver screen tarnished by an abnormally high suck factor this year, I recently found myself in need of an alternative to the late-summer doldrums of September and the horror schlock of October. I turned to television — that handy box that plays my DVDs for me, and is rumored to show live programming.

It had been a good long while since I caught up with TV. Perhaps the biggest losers and extreme makeovers of reality television scared me off… but never mind. All it took was one primetime gander and I was back like the skinny black pant — though in my absence, things have changed. Whereas TV was once a simple, even mindless medium, the stakes have been raised thanks to TiVo, iTunes, the rise of original cable programming, and possibly the lunar cycle. How else to explain the state of chaos on the tube these days?

Take a tally of the madness this season alone:

ABC scheduled The Nine at 10. NBC shows Friday Night Lights on Tuesday. CBS placed The Amazing Race, Cold Case, and Without A Trace on the same night and begat Must Rhyme TV. The WB and UPN birthed their lovechild The CW, which resuscitated 7th Heaven in spite of last May’s series finale. (I guess Somebody up there likes it!) And hark! What’s that sound o’er yonder? Why, it’s the good people at Fox drumming their fingers on their desks, killing time until the next American Idol. (Some things haven’t changed.) Now the networks gear up for November sweeps — luring viewers with stunts, guest stars, long-awaited couplings, and perhaps the demise of a beloved supporting player or two — all to woo advertisers, as if there were any shortage of commercials as is. (Is anyone else about to throttle poor, exploited Audrey Hepburn?) Yet I have to wonder how networks plan to top themselves in a season that has already held so many pleasant surprises.

The season’s champ in Best New Content Overall comes as a partial revelation — NBC has been in desperate need of buzz that rivals ABC’s (which itself was flailing just a few seasons back). The overbearing, pretentious promotion of Heroes would almost surely herald a belly-flop — so self-gratifying, you’d think the network had assembled an actual clan of superhumans — but the enthralling, exhilarating Heroes actually lives up to the hype. Kudos! Everybody’s watching your show! Now please shut up about it.

Perhaps to counterbalance the pomposity of Heroes, the Peacock mocked itself outright by gobbling up not one, but two heaping helpings of humble pie. I once thought The West Wing was so frenzied ‘cause it took place at the White House. Now, I’m pretty sure Aaron Sorkin would make shoe shopping look as stressful as imminent nuclear attack. For comedians, the folks at Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip are curiously gallant and tightly wound, marching in and out of scenes. Never before has “the huff” been such a popular mode of transportation. Even the skits center around controversies in politics and religion! As good as he is with drama, poor Sorkin is incapable of dumbing himself down enough to write what passes for sketch comedy these days.Happily, Tina Fey isn’t. Thus, 30 Rock feels more at peace with its SNL-inspired roots. The show is wildly uneven but certainly funny, making 30 Rock a perfect network-skewering supplement to Studio 60. And lest you forget which is the sitcom and which is the drama, remember each show contains its running time in the title. (Like I said — madness!)

On the off chance I find myself at a water cooler, I deemed it best to check out the ABC shows everyone’s nattering on about. Desperate Housewives remains an amusing trifle, but I found mega-hit Grey’s Anatomy overwrought and uninspired. At this point, I think shows are set in hospitals just to save on the wardrobe budget. I must also confess that, despite my best efforts, I don’t get Lost, which ironically puts me on an island with about thirteen other people in the world in terms of my pop culture relevance. The unlikely breakout hit Ugly Betty, on the other hand, managed to charm me even though it is often as awkward and mismatched as the Latina fea herself.

But nothing could have prepared me for the jolt I got upon viewing CBS’ Monday night sitcoms. I found them disturbingly watchable… funny, even. How I Met Your Mother pairs witty one-liners with quasi-believable characters worth investing in — no small feat in the same genre that produces Two And A Half Men (a CBS comedy I don’t recommend). The same can’t be said for The Class, which is as staged as they come. Maybe the producers are trapped in a hatch somewhere, forced to push the laugh track button every ten seconds whether the gags are funny or not. That said, approximately one in three jokes amuses, resulting in a respectable two chuckles per minute, or roughly 44 titters per half-hour episode.

Of course, TV’s biggest bombshells are too outrageous to find anywhere but cable. After an over-the-top third season, Nip/Tuck has undergone a much-needed facelift, retaining its trademark shock value while ensuring that this year, everyone who should have genitals does have genitals. (Presumably.) And if that doesn’t quite blow you away, would you believe a show called Battlestar Galactica on the Sci Fi network is brilliantly written, superbly acted, and one of TV’s finest?

You may not. But in this day and age, when even the exhumed corpse of Audrey Hepburn can be called upon to siren the return of 50s fashion… isn’t anything possible?

*

Last year, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity blew us away. Not everyone loved the film, but most could agree that it was dazzling to behold on the big screen (especially in 3D) and one giant leap forward in cinema on a technical level. It was a thrill ride as much as a movie, anchored by one single magnetic performance by Sandra Bullock. Gravity went on to become one of two frontrunners for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, winning Best Director for Cuaron and conceding the top prize to 12 Years A Slave, quite rightly. Gravity was an experience, but 12 Years A Slave was a film.

At 91 minutes, Gravity was lean and mean, basically nonstop action from start to finish. Interstellar is not so concise. That should come as no surprise — Christopher Nolan has not made a film that clocks in at under two hours since 2002’s Insomnia. Most of his recent films have hovered around the two-and-a-half-hour mark, while The Dark Knight Rises was even longer. Interstellar is his longest yet, coming in at 169 minutes (nearly three hours). It doesn’t feel that long, though. Nolan’s films are propulsive, even if they wobble a little getting wherever they’re trying to go.

Paramount has done a good job of not spoiling Interstellar, to the extent that many people still don’t know what it’s about. It’s probably better that way, because it’s more fun to watch a movie unfold having no idea where it’s headed, except a reasonable assumption that at some point, it’s headed into space. To preserve that experience, I will be similarly vague in setting this up.The film stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts named Cooper (no first name that we know of) and Amelia Brand, respectively; it also stars Jessica Chastain, Wes Bentley, John Lithgow, and Michael Caine, as other humans. It takes place in the future, following a rough patch in our planet’s history. A number of people seem to have died of famine, but we don’t know how many. Technology has not advanced. Food is harder to come by. It’s hard to tell what the rest of the world is like, since we’re bound to what seems like a Kansas farmhouse in the 1990s. (I don’t know why it seems like the 90s. Maybe because it reminded me of Twister.) Only a few tech advancement seem even as advanced as 2014, let alone many years into the future. (It seems Apple did not survive the collapse.)

I’m all for the less-is-more explanation of what went wrong on the planet, except for a bit where Murphy Cooper’s teachers try to tell her that space exploration never happened. (Cute meta nod to Kubrick’s 2001, though.) It seems impossible that enough time has passed to allow that theory to be introduced into the public school system, especially if there are still living astronauts amongst the population. (Cooper himself is one, we are told.) In moments like this, we wish for either more or less world-building to explain the state of mind these people are in. (Also inexplicable: why NASA decided to relocate to an underground Kansas-like location.)

I’m also fairly certain that there is a character named Cooper Cooper in this film, but I can’t say how without spoiling a major plot point.Interstellar packs an emotional wallop and has a few killer concepts up its sleeve. As often happens with Nolan, his reach exceeds his grasp. As the filmmaker who is probably least likely to be told “no” in Hollywood at the moment, the screenplay (co-written with his brother Jonathan) could have used a little more scrutiny before production. There are a number of leaps in logic one must take in order to get on board with Interstellar. Some are easier to ride along with than others. Though the fate of all mankind depends on the success of the crew’s mission, Cooper and Brand seem to be winging it an awful lot of the time, making decisions on the fly that you’d think they would have discussed before shuttling off to Saturn. Many characters are scientists and engineers and the like, but actual scientists and engineers would probably go insane trying to make sense of this film. This might be why a lot of the science exposition seems to be mumbled or swiftly cut away from. Nolan definitely doesn’t care about the actual science; his approach to science exposition is basically: “Mumble mumble relativity… look over here! Pretty!”

Interstellar owes plenty to previous science fiction entries ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Signs, but it is closest in spirit to 1997’s Contact, which McConaughey also starred in. Like that Robert Zemeckis film, it explores the love between a father and a daughter stretching from infinity to beyond, while also giving us some time to ponder our small place in a vast universe. For all its wanderings in the cosmos, like Contact, Interstellar brings space exploration down to Earth. Space is a wondrous thing in all its majesty, but the human heart even moreso, as Nolan tells it. Parts of Interstellar play in the same mind-bending surreal realm as Nolan’s Inception, and you probably won’t want to think too hard about them. This is not a movie to think about, but to feel.That might comes as a surprise to some, since Nolan’s movies tend to be more cerebral than moving. (Or faux-cerebral, at least.) The performances are strong across the board, and why wouldn’t they be? Nolan has cast various Oscar winners and nominees, including many recognizable faces in relatively small roles, plus at least one surprise movie star. McConaughey could find himself with an Oscar nod if the competition isn’t too fierce. He’s wonderfully emotive, and he’s giving quite a lot of emoting to do. (Hathaway and Chastain are good, but their characters may be a tad too thin to warrant awards buzz.) The special effects are impressive because they don’t often look like special effects. The score by Hans Zimmer is exactly as bombastic as you’d expect it to be.

Like The Dark Knight Rises and Inception, Interstellar has more supporting characters than it knows what to do with, and we get little sense of who these people are or even what their function in this world is. Character remains one of his weaknesses. Interstellar feels like a lot of Nolan films do: like a really superb outline that somehow made it into production without ever being a screenplay. The broad beats are here, but the details aren’t, quite, and neither are the answers to my many questions. His stories defy the laws of logic the same way a wormhole defies time itself; instead of connecting Point A to Point B, he just bends the rules and smooshes them together. Nolan is essentially thrusting us all into a wormhole, saying: “It doesn’t matter how you get there, if you do indeed get there! Just go with it, okay?”

Okay, Christopher Nolan. Interstellar is an epic with big ideas and bigger emotions. It’s a thoroughly entertaining journey through space. Is it remotely coherent? Not really. I still admire Nolan for being one of few filmmakers who can transform an original idea into a blockbuster. We need more movies like Interstellar, and more movies like Interstellar need more input from someone who knows how to write a screenplay.

Gravity wasn’t a perfect film, either, but it was ambitious in all the right ways, while the actual story couldn’t have been simpler. It was, essentially, one character versus tremendous odds, and we followed her singularly from the beginning of her ordeal to the end. That’s all. Interstellar wants to do what Gravity did, and also so much more — it has similar action scenes and a few familiar emotional beats, but it also cuts between life on Earth and what’s happening in the far reaches of space, including a lot of manufactured silliness taking place on the Cooper family farm that could’ve been a lot shorter. Many of the events that unfold are episodic, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though it seems Nolan is delivering the action beats mainly because a budget of this magnitude requires him to.

For all its vastness, Gravity kept things simple — one woman’s life at stake. That was it, but it was enough. Interstellar is the anti-Gravity — bloated and sprawling, caring little about the physical experience of being adrift in space, more caught up in earthbound drama. Cuaron’s take ends up being more grounded — which is ironic, given that much less of Gravity takes place on Earth. (Though, to be fair, even Gravity couldn’t resist one rather silly dream sequence indulgence.)

Gravity is a more cohesive film, one of 2013’s best. Interstellar is impressive, but far from a masterpiece. Like the universe itself, it is a beautiful mess. There is life inside it. It may be Nolan’s most moving film yet. It is not his best, but it is more personal and more alive than most blockbusters. This one is worth getting sucked into.

*

“Well, I’m mad. And this is about to get messy.”

Hello, hello, hello!

Note to everyone: The Comeback came back.

In 2005, The Comeback was ahead of its time. So ahead of its time, in fact, that no one in the present watched it. It took me only a matter of months to discover Valerie Cherish, but by then the series had already been unjustly canceled following its debut and final season.

The Comeback is the smartest TV series ever made about the entertainment industry. It gets every detail just right, even though those details are comically exaggerated. Room And Bored isn’t that much more awful than a real sitcom, reality TV isn’t that much more shameless than it really was in that era, and we all know plenty of real-life celebs who are as starved for attention as Valerie Cherish. The cancellation was a lame move on HBO’s part, severely lacking foresight, because in the coming months and years, so many of us discovered and adored Valerie Cherish. (Let’s face it: the gays especially.) She paved the way for awkward, borderline abrasive sitcom heroines like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon and Parks And Recreation’s Leslie Knope. When sprinkled into the right conversation, her catchphrases are still funny.

That’s why Valerie Cherish is coming back to TV in 2014, nearly a decade after she was given the axe. HBO is correcting a nine-year-old mistake and we, the Cherished, can finally reunite with Red and the gang. This kind of thing was practically unheard of back in 2005, but now we live in a world that occasionally resurrects the long-dead corpses of our old favorites — Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, and now The Comeback. The risk, of course, is that some of the magic will be gone. The new material won’t hold up to the old stuff, and furthermore, we like that old stuff so much that it’s impossible for the new stuff to come close. Is that the case with The Comeback?

I think my feelings about the all-new second season of The Comeback are best expressed in the following GIF.

Yep, The Comeback has still got it. I’m not sure yet if The Comeback is just as good as it ever was, because I’ve found that Season One only got better on subsequent viewings, and I only had time to watch this episode twice. (Yep, twice. And it was better the second time around.) Valerie’s schtick becomes funnier the more you see her resort to the same desperate maneuvers over and over — repetition is how so many of her signature lines became modern comedy classics. (Saying “Jane! “Jane!” while making your hands into a “T” is never not funny.) Will Season Two’s “Valerie Makes A Pilot” be as amusing with repeat viewings? Who can be sure?

What I do know is that the season premiere satisfied me, a longtime fan, and I’m not an easy critic. Valerie has evolved (slightly), now taking the reigns and filming a reality show of her own. (Actually, it’s a pilot presentation.) In the lengthy opening scene, we get a glimpse at what Val has been up to in the decade since The Comeback debuted. (I’m referring here to the show-within-a-show Comeback, not the HBO series, but I suppose either works.) She guest starred on a medical procedural, got bloodied in a low-quality student film, endorsed her own line of redhead hair products (because “why should blondes and brunettes get all the attention?”), and tried to warn a Real Housewife about the booby-trapped world of reality TV. In the Season One finale, Val learned that being a reality star meant sacrificing her dignity and laughing at herself, and in the years since, plenty of stars, on Bravo and elsewhere, have laughed all the way to the bank on such a philosophy.

As usual, a scene that might seem like a throwaway pseudo-celebrity cameo (Lisa Vanderpump) is actually a sly meta commentary thanks to The Comeback‘s shrewd writing. Valerie Cherish was a (fake) version of a Real Housewife before the housewives were (slightly less fake) versions of themselves. (Valerie supposedly walks off the set of the first season of Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills, though I am now salivating over an alternate reality where she was one of those crazy Bravo bitches.) Yet they, like the rest of the world, must not have been watching, or else they just don’t care. That’s the reality Valerie Cherish faces in 2014: looking like a vain, pompous asshole on television isn’t embarrassing anymore. It’s expected. In fact, it’s totally en vogue.

In the new season of The Comeback, many of our favorites are back, with more on the horizon. Marky-Mark (Damian Young) is still ever-so-patiently putting up with his wife’s shenanigans, and Mickey is of course always by her side (or running after her, panting, comb and hairspray at the ready). Season One surprised us by making the hot blonde starlet Juna a sweet and genuine person, one of Val’s few true allies, and just when it seems that Juna has become too big a star to hobknob with Val anymore, the episode’s sweetest scene arrives when Juna has her driver stop and rushes out of the limo to give her old co-star a big hug. (Meta alert: Malin Akerman is now the star of her own failed one-season wonder,  Trophy Wife, which also deserved a kinder fate.) Yes, I did get a little emotional at this moment.

The 2005 Comeback was meta in that it starred an actress known for a wacky supporting turn on a network sitcom (Friends) as the washed-up star of a network sitcom (I’m It). Valerie Cherish was never a doppelganger of Lisa Kudrow, because everyone knows Kudrow is one of the sharpest comediennes in the business, probably the most respectable of the Friends sextet. (That’s debatable, but she’avoided the pitfalls most of her co-stars fell into, and is there anyone out there who doesn’t like her?) But the 2014 Comeback is even more meta, as the two Room And Bored stars who went on to be stars really did go on to be stars (Malin Akerman and Kellen Lutz), while Valerie Cherish finds herself desired by, of all the unlikely brands in the industry… HBO. Not bad, for an actress whose two claims to fame are a monkey shitting on her head and vomiting in a cupcake costume. “It’s a dramedy. That’s a comedy without the laughs,” is one of this episode’s pointed meta quotes. (The Comeback certainly has laughs, but it’s not an out-and-out comedy, and the humor proved to be too uncomfortable for many viewers back when it debuted.)

(Also: there’s nothing more meta than the comeback of a show called The Comeback, but if I think too hard about it, my brain may explode.)

As in the Season One finale, Val tries to take a stand for herself and ends up getting lured back into the limelight instead. She walks into HBO, all huffy because Paulie G (Lance Barber) has written an unflattering script called Seeing Red about their inharmonious time together. (Technically, it’s about another writer’s inharmonious time on a sitcom with “Mallory Church,” but even Valerie isn’t fooled.) Valerie has a bone to pick with HBO just like Lisa Kudrow does (they cancelled her show!), but all is forgiven in “Valerie Makes A Pilot” when Valerie reads for the part and knocks it out of the park (Just as I assume all is forgiven now that The Comeback is back.)

Smartly, Paulie G’s script doesn’t sound at all like anything we heard behind the scenes of Room And Bored, because his point of view wouldn’t be anything like what we saw on The Comeback. And Paulie G has turned a new leaf, no longer the pompous writer asshole he used to be, instead a more “enlightened” (and sober) individual who constantly sucks on an e-cigarette. It would be easy fan service to make Paulie G the same jerk-off he was in Season One, and allow us to love to hate him again. But The Comeback doesn’t do that. It’s smarter than that, and it’s moving forward.

The Comeback is still The Comeback, updated for 2014 by having Val take a DIY approach to her own image rather than waiting for a network to package her themselves. (One of her crew is a USC student majoring in… Urban Planning.) That’s what’s happening with celebrities nowadays — many of them take their brand into their own hands, for better or worse. Otherwise, we’ve got cameos from reality TV stars (RuPaul, Andy Cohen), physical comedy (Val getting punched in the stomach by Chateau Marmont staff), and moments that blend awkward humor with pathos (Valerie auditioning to play herself, Valerie desperately joining the paparazzi shouting at Juna). As before, the show’s best lines are often so off-the-cuff, it’ll take a few viewings to really pick up on all the comedy. (“That’s right. Privacy’s gone, yeah,” is one of my new faves.) Val has (unfortunately) lost her annoying ringtone but is otherwise the same as ever.

I expect The Comeback to reach even higher heights as this season unfolds. The devil is in the details, and the details are spot on. Valerie Cherish has both evolved and stayed exactly the same, and that is also true of The Comeback. It’s a spoof of life in Hollywood, of the scripted TV business and the unscripted TV business (which are two different beasts entirely). It holds a mirror up to itself first and foremost, and in so doing, holds a mirror up to the rest of us. Most of us will never audition to play ourselves in an HBO project, but now more than ever we can relate to a thirst for approval from the masses. For every moment that Valerie is rubbing elbows with RuPaul, there’s an equally relatable moment when she’s fighting with an unintelligible voice in a parking garage, having lost her validated ticket. I’m not sure how this plays outside of Los Angeles, but if you live here, it’s basically a documentary.

I’m 100% on board with the new Comeback. It’s already hilarious, heartbreaking, and quotable, everything we could ask for. I’ll be back with further thoughts next week. But for now, I’ll leave you with one of this episode’s most memorable lines:

“I’m not just a real person. I’m an actress!”

Welcome back, Val.

“Valerie Makes A Pilot” A-

*

Do you want to cry like a baby?

Then boy, have I got a pair of films for you.

Julianne Moore is one of the most reliable actresses in Hollywood. I daresay she’s never turned in a bad, or even close to bad, performance, even when she’s in films that are beneath her talents. There was a period when she fell into that Kevin Spacey-esque rut of choosing prestige projects that seem like awards contenders, but end up flopping both creatively and commercially — projects like The Shipping News and Blindness, largely forgotten — which came after her heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But she was always perfectly good in them.

Her big breakout as a capital-A Actress was Boogie Nights, which earned her the first of four Oscar nominations. Shortly after, she was a dramatic dynamo in Magnolia, a comedic force to be reckoned with in The Big Lebowski, the only woman who could fill Jodie Foster’s shoes and not be laughed out of Hollywood in Hannibal, and a cog in unusual artistic experiments like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake. Her most recent Oscar nominations were both in 2002, as Best Supporting Actress in The Hours (even though she had more screen time than Best Actress winner Nicole Kidman) and Best Actress in Far From Heaven, which should have been a win.

It has been over a decade since Julianne Moore was an Academy Award nominee, which seems crazy when you look at her body of work over those years. Children Of Men. A Single Man. The Kids Are All Right. She was terrific in all of them. The Golden Globes and Emmys awarded her for playing Sarah Palin in Game Change, but the Academy has drastically undervalued her over the past decade. Recently, she’s been in quirky, small-scale fare like Don Jon and The English Teacher, though she reliably pops up in standard studio fare, too, turning in solid performances in everything from The Lost World: Jurassic Park to Non-Stop to the Carrie remake to the upcoming Hunger Games: Mockingjay. She lends such films a touch of class that they wouldn’t get from most other actresses. And though she’s been in a number of films that didn’t hit the mark, Moore herself always nails it.

My point is simple: it’s criminal that this woman does not possess an Oscar.But there’s good news: thanks to Still Alice, this very well might be Julianne Moore’s year to step up to the podium.

Still Alice is, in a sense, Oscar bait — which is not a knock against it. It’s based on a book by Lisa Genova, who I’m sure did not write the novel with a mind to win Julianne Moore an Academy Award. It’s just the kind of story that makes so much sense to adapt into a movie, and if you’re going to adapt this story into a movie, you’re going to want to cast someone like Julianne Moore, and if you cast Julianne Moore in anything, she’s going to be fucking phenomenal. So there it is.

Moore plays Dr. Alice Howland, a brilliant linguist with an equally brilliant life. She lives in New York City. She is married to John, a fellow doctor who also works at Columbia. (Moore reunites with her 30 Rock paramour Alec Baldwin here, in a very different romance.) She has three extremely good-looking children — Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish), and Lydia (a very solid Kristen Stewart, finally shedding her Twilight pall and allowed to be a real actress again). Her two eldest are on the fast-track to success, while Lydia has moved to Los Angeles to be an actress, which Alice doesn’t so much approve of. Still, Alice’s problems are distinctly upper-middle-class problems, the kind you can disparagingly hashtag — until she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.It starts slowly. In the first scene, Alice is briefly confused at 50th birthday dinner, but it’s the sort of mistake anyone might make. Then she gets disoriented on a jog. Certain words slip her mind. Alice sees a neurologist who suspects that she could have Alzheimer’s before he says it aloud. Further tests confirm that. Worse news: Alice’s form of Alzheimer’s is hereditary, meaning there is a high likelihood that she will pass it on to her children.

Still Alice is a fairly by-the-numbers affair about a person struggling with an affliction. It touches on how Alice’s diagnosis affects her family, the highs and lows of her health, a sense of impending doom at the ultimate outcome. It could be a movie about cancer, AIDS, or any other illness, except in Alice’s case, this is a death of the mind rather than the body. That somehow makes Alice’s illness even more terrifying, and particularly ironic, because Alice is a brilliant women who has devoted her entire life to enriching her brain. And though we expect our bodies to betray us at a certain age, most of us hope that we will still be “ourselves” when we reach such a point. We can lose our bodies and still feel whole, but if we lose our minds, who are we?

The direction by Richard Glatzer and West Westmoreland finds a few competent ways to share the experience of gradually losing one’s faculties without doing anything particularly innovative or daring. Their script takes a pretty obvious course to the inevitable conclusion, but does so fairly elegantly. The story is heartbreaking and perfectly relatable, even if you’ve never known anyone with Alzheimer’s. Still Alice is a film about loss, the kinds of loss we will all face — the loss of a parent, and the loss of our own lives, and the loss of all the many things that have given our time on Earth meaning over the course of a handful of decades.

Yes, I spent a good portion of my time watching Still Alice choking on a sob, which is unusual given the number of pedestrian disease-du-jour films I’ve been subjected to over the years. This isn’t the sort of material that usually gets me, but this one did. Still Alice manages to find an angle that is just fresh enough, while still adhering to the usual tropes and tone we find in films about a person slowly dying. The bulk of the credit goes to Julianne Moore, who turns in another fearless, flawless performance as Alice. (Her triumphant moment, which involves a heartfelt speech made fairly late in her bran’s regression, makes remaining dry-eyed impossible.)

It’s hard to imagine who could beat out Moore for an Oscar this year, unless her curse continues: she’s always so reliably good that is hardly surprising to see her deliver an Academy Award-worthy turn, and awards often go to those who shock us with how good they can be. (Not always, of course, which is how Meryl Streep keeps getting nominated.) Her competition isn’t terribly formidable this year — most of the actresses up for this year’s race are either too new to pull off a win or already have one. Of course, it’s a bit early to the call race now, but if any of the four performance categories are to be called now, I’d say your safest bet was on Best Actress. (Moore might find herself again pulling double-nomination duty thanks to a supporting turn in David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars.)

Still Alice won’t be one of my very favorite films of this year, but I do want to see Julianne Moore get an Oscar. She’s earned it, dammit. Let’s give her an Oscar and then another Oscar, and ten more retroactive Oscars for all the years we missed.Unfortunately, I won’t be able to hold up Julianne Moore as my undisputed champion for favorite leading performance this year, because I also happened to catch Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, starring Anne Dorval as a mother who shares almost nothing in common with Dr. Alice Howland, except that they are both Going Through It. Unlike Julianne Moore, Anne Dorval is not an actress I am very familiar with, and not an actress who has narrowly missed several golden opportunities at the Oscars podium. She has, of course, never been nominated, and probably will remain unnominated this year, because Mommy is a Canadian film with dialogue in French that doesn’t feature any stars recognizable to U.S. audiences.

Its biggest star may be the man behind the camera, Xavier Dolan, an actor himself, though he does not appear in Mommy. He is a 25-year-old releasing his fifth feature; Mommy is likely his most mature and accomplished film to date, but they’ve all been well-received and buzzy on the indie/arthouse circuit. Mommy is Canada’s hopeful for a Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and it stands a good chance at a nomination. (It was a big hit at Cannes.) It’s somewhat rare to see a non-English-speaking performance nominated by the Academy, though not unprecedented — some, like Marion Cotillard and Roberto Benigni, have even won. Dorval probably doesn’t have the clout it’ll take to go toe-to-toe with this year’s more likely nominees, Julianne Moore, Reese Witherspoon, Felicity Jones, Amy Adams, and Rosamund Pike, but stranger things have happened. Let’s just make this clear: it certainly won’t be because Dorval’s work here isn’t worthy of a nomination.In Mommy, Dorval plays Die, a woman many might dismiss as “white trash” — she’s loud, brash, and swears like a sailor, most often dressed provocatively, the kind of woman who’s son you’d expect to be found in a juvenile detention center. And he is. Steve is a deceptively cherubic fifteen-year-old prone to explosive fits of anger that often escalate violently. Die and Steve can’t help but push each other’s buttons, even when they know that doing so can and will result in destruction of property, serious injury, and neighborly intervention, as one memorable encounter in this film does. They love each other, but neither has enough self-control to avoid hurting the other, which only ends up hurting themselves in the long run. Mommy is as much about a sado-masochistic relationship as it is about a maternal one. The film begins just as mother and son are reunited following his exile from a program that was meant to help him.

What is Mommy about? That’s a tricky question to answer, because it is partially about Die and Steve’s fraught dynamic, but a third character becomes significant, too — that’s Kyle (Suzanne Clement), a neighbor who has developed a difficulty speaking. (She is also a mommy.) We get the sense that Kyla’s time away from her teaching career has been pretty damn boring, which is why she’s attracted to the odd pairing across the street, even though they’re so self-destructive and prone to outrageous domestic disturbances. Kyla becomes a tutor to Steve and a pal and a confidante to Die, which might unfold fairly predictably in a story by a less ambitious filmmaker, but Dolan doles out several narrative surprises. Die and Steve can’t help but wear their hearts on their sleeves — everything they feel practically bursts out of them — but Kyla is a wild card, and we’re never entirely certain what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, or how her relationship with these two will develop.The base story of Mommy follows Die as she struggles with how to manage her own mess of a life with the considerable needs of her son, who seemingly can’t be left alone for very long without wreaking havoc. She hates the idea of institutionalizing him, but is there any other option? His rage will only intensify as he gets older; it’s practically a given that he’ll end up in prison at some point. There are moments in Mommy where Steve is terrifying, flying off the handle at the drop of a hat, uncontrollable and capable of almost anything. And yet there are also moments in which he is astoundingly sweet and couldn’t be more likable. Because of Steve, Die can neither work nor date, so we really do have to wonder if this mother would be better off without her offspring. There are moments when the two connect beautifully and seem like the only people in the world they could possibly belong with, and moments in which we’re hoping they break free from one another and end the cycle of misery they’re caught up in. These are real relationships. You take the good with the bad, and there’s no telling which side you’ll see at any given moment.

As good as Anne Dorval is, she’s boosted by two other stellar performances (who of course have even less of a shot at Oscar nominations). Antoine-Olivier Pilon is magnetic as Steve, running the gamut of human emotions. One moment he’s a wide-eyed innocent boy, the next he’s a moody, sexually frustrated teenager, the next he’s a man whose violent outrage could turn deadly. It’s reminiscent in many ways of Jack O’Connell’s rage-in-a-cage role in Starred Up, except that Pilon is given a little more range to play with, including a standout scene in which he, Kyla, and Die sing and dance along with “On Ne Change Pas” by Celine Dion. (More on that later.) Pilon’s range, as displayed here, is pretty incredible.And then there’s Suzanne Clement. In many moments, she’s barely able to get a single word out, but she’s so perfectly expressive that she doesn’t need to. So much goes unsaid by Kyla, yet by the end of this story we feel like we know everything about her. Yet Kyla shows a very different and totally unexpected side during one tutoring session, which is a showstopper as delivered by Clement.

But back to the music. Dolan’s music choices throughout are curious; I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing, and these songs have a different life in Canada than they’ve had in the states, or he’s deliberately chosen music from the late 90s and the early 2000s that feels played out. Most filmmakers consciously avoid songs that we associate with other movies (unless making a direct reference), or, worse, associate with a desire to gouge our eardrums out with a fork to avoid ever hearing again. But Eiffel 65′s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” is featured here, probably ironically, during an intense interaction between Kyla and Steve. That’s not too unusual, but other significant moments use Dido’s “White Flag” and Sarah Maclachlan’s “Building A Mystery” essentially as score. One beautiful sequence uses Counting Crows’ “Colorblind” (which will never not remind us of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe gettin’ busy in Cruel Intentions, and is therefore almost unusable in cinema forever after). Mommy‘s “calm before the storm” montage is set to, of all things, Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” You could hardly find a more cliche choice.

The Mommy soundtrack could easily double as an album called Songs I’m Sick Of And Hope Never To Hear Again, or perhaps Now That’s What I Call Music: French-Canadian Auteur Who Grew Up In The 90s Edition. But in context, it works somehow. You have to admire Dolan’s boldness in just going for it; how many other Canadians would so shamelessly include a lip sync Celine freakin’ Dion? Mommy contains three or four moments that are practically musical numbers, and they’re absolutely indelible. I would have been perfectly content watching two hours of Xavier Dolan directing music videos for his favorite songs from adolescence, but there’s a lot more to Mommy than just visual and aural panache.Mommy eventually gets around to a climactic moment, but it’s slow-building and takes a lot of detours getting there. Its pleasures are more about watching three people interacting. The film is shot almost entirely in a very rare 1:1 aspect ratio. (That’s a square, for those who failed geometry.) It’s distracting at first; at times I desperately wanted to the screen to open up and show me more, as it is so tightly focused on these people’s faces. But that’s the point. The constrained frame forces us to watch these performances and only these performances. There’s little chance we’ll be distracted by anything in the background. Movies weren’t always as wide as they are now, so Dolan’s choice feels as much like a throwback as it does a modern millennial choice. The shots of these characters have an intimate, selfie-like quality. It’s like Instagram: The Movie.

Dolan has said that the aspect ratio wasn’t an artistic choice, but one that felt appropriate given how character-focused this drama is. Yet there are two moments in which the screen opens up for us, and I couldn’t help but notice that they were the two key moments that depict these people as free, unburdened by the constraints society and economics place on them. Being initially frustrated by the 1:1 only makes the first time the frame widens out all the more glorious. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s set to that soaring, still-good Oasis song.) And the second one, Mommy‘s emotional climax, is just devastating. (I wouldn’t want to spoil it here, but you’ll see what I mean when you see the movie.)That sums up Mommy by the end of it. The actors are so good that our sympathy sneaks up on us. Die and Steve are not people we initially expect we’ll connect with, but then, much like Kyla, we do. Life is funny that way. The people we spend time with are not necessarily the people we think we’d spend time with, or the people we’d choose to. You don’t choose your mother, and you don’t choose your son, and you sort of choose your friends, but only sort of. Life throws people together at random times, in unforeseen ways, sometimes for a limited time only. Location, circumstance, and happenstance bring people into our lives that would otherwise never be there.

If Mommy were exclusively focused on Die and Steve, then a late segment of this film wouldn’t have made it to the final cut. The friendship between Die and Kyla, two very different mothers, is equally important, and explored in a way that we don’t often see in a movie. Not many films examine the course of a friendship from beginning to end without some kind of artifice, like sex or death or a love triangle, wedging its way in to force things to come to a boil and make the “plot” happen. Mommy has dramatic moments, but ultimately it’s just about two kinds of relationships — the kind that are bonded in blood, from which we can never escape (even if we take great pains trying to), and the kind that we form by choice — and dissolve by choice, too.

If there were justice in cinema, all three of this film’s outstanding trio would be lauded for these performances, and Xavier Dolan would be recognized outside of the Foreign Film race, too. But that’s not going to happen, so if Julianne Moore finally getting her Oscar is the consolation prize, I’ll be perfectly content living in that world, too.

  *

“Nice to meet you, Jane Benson, Jewish lesbian with an Oscar!”

If you want to quote The Comeback, you have an arsenal at your disposal. Chances are you’ll go with, “I don’t need to see that!”, or perhaps a simple “Hello, hello, hello!”

But nothing is more signature Valerie Cherish than crossing your hands into a “T” and protesting: “Jane! Jane!” (Best followed by a “We’re not going to be able to use that!”)

Episode Two of The Comeback‘s new season brings Laura Silverman’s Jane back into the fold in a big way, as someone at HBO suggests that she be asked to return to produce… whatever Val is filmng. (Val calls it “BTS for SR,” meaning behind-the-scenes for Seeing Red, though she was filming that even before she knew about Paulie G’s HBO series.) Jane isn’t interested, but that doesn’t stop Val from relentlessly pursuing her, because as Jane herself puts it: “You never give up.” (Val’s response: “You do.”)

But Valerie’s right. Jane has changed. When we met her, she was young and ambitious and determined to get the most demeaning footage of Val at any cost. She wasn’t a malicious person, but she knew that the success of her reality show rested on Val going down on the Room & Bored ship. (Of course, the fact that we knew so little about her reflected how often self-involved Valerie thought about Jane’s personal life — never.)

When we meet her in “Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back,” Jane is a wealthy but bitter lesbian who lives in isolation making goat butter, trying to finance issue-driven documentaries, finding little success or satisfaction despite the fact that she’s an Academy Award winner. She’s also, not so surprisingly, a big pothead. Season One’s Jane was always in the background, but she played a relatively small part in the action until the final episode when Val finally confronted her (dubbing her “spider-eyes” and showing up at Jane’s pad with the camera crew, trying to give her a taste of her own medicine). By the end of this episode, Jane is back behind the camera, mostly invisible but steering the ship when needed.HBO also gets a chance to poke itself in the ribs as Valerie visits the offices and declares that Sex & The City started it all… then declaring that The Sopranos also started it all… then looking at a poster for The Wire and declaring that she’s never heard of it. It’s a series of in-jokes about the network’s legacy (as chronicled by the book Difficult Men, which I just finished, which focuses extensively on The Sopranos and The Wire, only fleetingly mentions Sex & The City, and does not even mention The Comeback). Val also mistakes Mad Men for an HBO show, as many do; these are jokes that many people outside of the TV business might miss out on, but that’s how The Comeback has always worked. General audiences could miss about 50% of the humor; luckily, there’s such a high humor quota that they’ll still get plenty. Valerie’s so very excited to be a part of HBO’s prestige, and yet clearly is only glancingly familiar with their properties. (Anyone who thinks I’m It was a television classic is bound to have a lower threshold for quality.)

“Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back” also sees Val meeting with Brad Goreski, a fellow reality TV personality, to dress for the Golden Globes, which she intends to attend with her husband, her hairdresser, and her publicist. Instead, she and Mark end up with Jane and the camera in tow at a mere “HBO viewing party” (a room full of women who may or may not be Russian hookers), where they have an awkward run-in with Paulie G.

“Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back” is a bit scattered in its focus compared to other Comeback episodes. The HBO stuff is savvy and hilarious, and seeing Valerie share a doobie with Jane is sort of like Season One fan fiction come to life. (There’s got to be some Val/Jane slash fiction out there somewhere on the internet, right?) From there, though, Jane disappears behind the cameras again and the focus is on the Golden Globes visit, which is played a shade darker than The Comeback usually is, as Paulie G apologizes to Valerie while still clearly wanting to see as little of her as possible.

The episode’s funniest moments are the throwaway gags, like Val’s housekeeper realizing that Val is about to ditch Mickey and Billy to have her cameras with her at the Globes, or Val stating that she’s “hogging the Bogart” by taking too long with the joint at Jane’s place. I watched this episode several times, and it did indeed get funnier upon each viewing, as this show tends to do. The humor is so subtle at times that I don’t pick up on a joke until the third viewing.

While Season Two of The Comeback still mostly feels like Season One, there is one crucial difference thus far — Valerie is less desperate for her comeback. She still wants to be on top of the world, but she doesn’t really need this the same way she used to. The show-within-the-show Comeback earned her that validation. And now, with Val in charge of her own crew, she’s much less worried about the cameras picking up her most awkward and vulnerable moments. There’s less looking at the camera, wondering how all this will be perceived. There are no “Jane! Jane!” time-outs, because Valerie is (sort of) in control of her own destiny this time around.

It’s an interesting switch, but it does deflate the momentum a bit. Season One episodes tended to revolve around a clear goal for Val. This episode didn’t so much have that. Valerie tries on a somewhat outrageous dress, but she isn’t talked into actually wearing it to the Globes; she’s disappointed that she ends up at a viewing party, but she and Mark leave without much of a fuss. “Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back” sure has its highlights, but hopefully the second coming continues to move forward in addition to revisiting comedic high points from the first season. Is it too much to ask for a new character for Season Two as dynamic as Mickey, or Juna, or Gigi? What is Val really up against this season?

I’m satisfied enough for the time being, but I hope the next episode sees the resurgence of something we need even more than the return of Jane the Jewish lesbian. This time, it’s Val’s dire desperation that needs a comeback.

“Valerie Tries To Get Yesterday Back”: B for first viewing, B+ after

*

(Throwback Thursday: A glimpse back at my reasonably short-lived days as a production assistant, and what it taught me about making movies. First published in INsite Boston in April 2006.)

Astronauts and firemen, ballerinas and princesses. These are the professions we choose as kids to conclude that all-important statement, ”When I grow up I want to be…”

Granting power and prestige, filled with excitement and adventure — is it any wonder these lives appeal to five-year olds?

What could be better?

In reality, however, very few of us end up pursuing those careers we glamorized in our youths. Most end up setting our sights on more readily available occupations — doctor, lawyer, teacher, fry cook. These are practical jobs with everyday necessity. The naïve, egocentric fantasies of our formative years give way to more imminently pressing concerns — like fiscal responsibility, familial obligation, and man’s inherent urge to give something of himself back to humanity.

And then there are those of us who decide to make movies.Filmmakers are grownups who still want to make a living blasting off to the moon, delighting the masses in a frilly pink tutu. (But maybe without the intense training and sacrifice that comes with actually chasing down such coveted pursuits.) Early on we discover that the real world, with its 9-5/Monday-Friday/lather-rinse-repeat routine, is no place for us, so we pilfer a few extra years of make-believe and extend those juvenile daydreams to include special effects, bombastic soundtracks, and hootenannies with the stars. Pity the fool who trades fire engines for stock options; we’re the kids who never outgrew the desire to be princesses.

But there’s a rude awakening in store for dreamers awaiting a super-sized movie life. Sooner or later, every slumber must submit to a blaring alarm.

Though we like to pretend that it’s confidential, Hollywood wants the general public to be aware of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into its product, the behind-the-scenes drama that often trumps what we pay to see on screen. They know as well as we do: it’s all part of the show, the magic of movies. So recently, I went undercover to unveil what they don’t want us to see. Something that’s been kept off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush… until now.

My wakeup call sounded loud and clear on my first day as production assistant on an independent film:

Eyes open, sleepyhead, and leave those dreams behind.For the uninitiated, a PA is known throughout the industry as the lowliest position on a film crew, and possibly the planet. It’s a crash course in everything that sucks about moviemaking, an experience that will not only crush your dreams but also back up over them twice just to make sure they’re good and smooshy. The day rate seems sufficient until you realize that you’re logging 75 hours a week, so your paycheck breaks down to less than minimum wage hourly; the job itself embraces the least enviable aspects of careers such as mailman, secretary, chauffeur, housekeeper, and pizza delivery guy. (Please note that five-year olds seldom yearn to be any of these.) Which brings me back to that dirty, filthy, naughty little secret Hollywood truly doesn’t want you to know:

It’s boring.

Sure, only a child would imagine filmmaking to be as easy, breezy, beautiful as it looks on TV. I spent my whole life bracing for a bumpy ride. As a PA, I certainly didn’t expect red carpets rolled out for me, never indulged in fantasies of the director pulling me aside to say, “Hey, you seem pretty bright, why don’t you take a turn this time?” I went in expecting the worst, prepared to hate PAing spectacularly — with violins screeching violently, bolts of lightning reflected in my bloodshot eye. I ended up just hating it the normal way… sitting in traffic for six hours, in the rain, at rush hour, on my way to set, and on my way back, and then to set again because someone forgot to mention they needed those copies on buff-colored paper. (“What the hell is the color ‘buff’?” you’re asking. I asked, too — and no one had a satisfactory answer.) It turns out the entertainment industry is just the real world with a vengeance; I work longer hours for less pay than anyone I know with a “real” job, and have yet to behold the teensiest poof! of movie magic.

What a crock.While the rest of the world looks to filmmakers for escapism, there’s no escape for us. As children, we watched our cinematic counterparts defy the daily grind through danger and mystery, and promised ourselves that we would, too. Unable to actually live inside a movie, we pursued the next best thing — a life on the cinematic sidelines. But there’s a price to pay for every fantasy we hold onto. Rent in the bubble I live in is not cheap, and with expenses like car insurance, clothing, and Special Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVDs released right after I bought the single-disc version, I can no longer afford it without seriously working. Like so many heroes and heroines before me, I wake to discover that my would-be adventures were only just a dream all along. And so begins my worst nightmare.

It’s strange and disappointing to be so close to everything I dreamed of, but nowhere near the reasons I pursued it. To struggle in vain as the Technicolor world I envisioned is sapped of sparkle, becoming a little more like drab Kansas every day. Perhaps most frustrating of all is that I know everyone faces this — the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the fry cooks. Probably even the astronauts and princesses. I went so far to evade the trappings of a normal life, and now my growing pains couldn’t be more universal.Still, sometimes I walk on set and realize that, although it’s nothing like what I imagined, I am exactly where I set out to be. I’ve adjusted to the grueling schedule, the thankless tasks. I’ve made friends with coworkers who are as tired and stressed out as I am. I’ve started to see moviemaking as a collaborative process, one that I’m a part of. Now and then something interesting happens, like the day they were short on high school kids and put me in two scenes as an extra. (After a couple hours of standing around, I discovered that that, too, is boring.) The rest of the time, I get through the day like I always have: daydreaming of a life less ordinary.

Roughly a year after graduating from cinema school, exactly a year after I began this column, I’m finally on the inside of this industry. And, if you look deep enough in the background, I’m also inside a movie.

It may not be a good movie. It may not be a successful movie. And my contribution to it is about as minimal as they come. But if I squint at my current life, I can kind of almost see it as something like what I always wanted.

*

“I got you, Gingersnaps.”

“Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” introduces us to “Mallory,” the not-so-thinly veiled character Valerie is playing “loosely” based on her time on Room & Bored. She’s got a stinky trailer Mickey can’t stop talking about and can’t remember the first AD’s name because there “no reference point.” She spars with the line producer over the $7,000 wig that looks identical to her actual hair and the fact that she needs an extra hair person (Marianina!) just to place it on her head properly. And her nephew Tyler is such a bad PA that he doesn’t even know what a PA is, and Jane refuses to acknowledge him as part of the crew.

And then Valerie meets Seth Rogen, her co-star, and sets to work trying to make him her new BFF.

As usual, Val has a bad habit of over-gifting. She not only buys flowers for Seth (“MacFarlane,” as she calls him, not long after spilling water all over him), but also gifts him with a ham based on an off-the-cuff joke he barely even remembers. And she gets an awkwardly sweet gift for Paulie G that causes one of the episode’s most uncomfortable moments. Lots of shows these days do awkward comedy, but it’s rarely as painful as this. Val has made a nice gesture, but probably the wrong gesture, and she discovers it at an opportune moment as Paulie G just stares at her in befuddled silence. Fortunately, Seth Rogen jumps in to make a joke of it and lighten the tension, but if ever we needed confirmation, here it is: Paulie G is still a jerk. Case in point: he has written a fantasy scene in which Valerie blows him, for no good reason except to literally bring the redhead comedienne to her knees. That’s the major focus of this episode (and the title’s inspiration), which takes the gag to an extreme by quite rightly pointing out how exploitative Hollywood is of women. In the truly unsettling fantasy sequence, Val has to stand still between two buck naked, fully-shaved porn stars who are moaning in orgasmic ecstasy, and just to add insult to injury, she’s back in Aunt Sassy’s running suit during the whole thing. The fact that Paulie G would even write such a thing tells us everything we need to know about how much he hasn’t evolved in his sobriety, yet there are plenty of writers just like Paulie G out there who would write the exact same thing.

It’s also another token of HBO’s willingness to take jabs at itself. We, like Jane, feel uncomfortable about how the women in this episode are treated, but it’s not a lot different from the double standard we see on so much of HBO’s programming, from The Sopranos to Game Of Thrones. Leave it to The Comeback, one of the network’s most frivolous and least lauded shows, to finally stick it to ‘em. That’s why I love The Comeback — because between the laughs, it aims for the bull’s eye with deadly precision. It’s merciless, biting the hand that feeds it with tongue-in-cheek. (30 Rock similarly lambasted NBC. May I suggest Season Three centers on Tina Fey creating a network sitcom for Valerie Cherish?) It’s somewhat predictable that Seth Rogen would be the one to suggest to Paulie G that Val discreetly duck out of the frame rather than exaggeratedly mime fellatio — Seth Rogen is playing himself, and Seth Rogen probably does not want to tarnish himself by looking like a jerk on The Comeback. But when he tosses it aside with an, “I got you, Gingersnaps,” it’s a genuinely touching moment that truly does endear us to him. Because any show can do awkward comedy, but not many pull off the rare triumphant moments when Valerie really does rise above the Hollywood muck she’s wading in. This is one of the most blatantly demeaning positions Val’s been in, and therefore, she’s earned the tiny vindication that comes at the end of the episode, even if it somewhat bucks The Comeback‘s tradition of not providing any easy outs or out-and-out happy endings.

“Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” is the new season’s strongest episode yet, because it is the first episode more concerned with moving the story forward rather than taking a nostalgic look back at Season One highlights. I like looking back, too, but I also want The Comeback to tackle new territories, and “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” does it. I can’t think of any TV show that has made a sharper or more direct critique of the way women are objectified in TV and film (especially on premium cable). There is a maybe-unnecessary (but totally in character) moment in which Jane tries to stop filming because she feels this wrong, but otherwise, no one needs to come out and say that Paulie G’s script is pretty fucked up. It’s obvious. This episode also features fewer callbacks to old jokes and instead brings us all new ones, which somehow made me feel like I was watching classic Season One Comeback than either of the previous episodes. It’s odd to see someone as famous as Seth Rogen on The Comeback playing himself. I’m not sure that Rogen’s Apatowian comedic universe quite aligns with the awkward orbit of Valerie Cherish, who exists on a planet of her own most of the time. Rogen has practically made a career out of playing himself at this point, often quite literally, and his presence naturally requires a certain pull of focus away from Valerie. (You don’t hire Seth Rogen to not do Seth Rogen.) But Rogen’s This Is The End self-referential comedic stylings aren’t of quite the same brand as Lisa Kudrow’s meta-comedy. Ultimately, it works, though I hope Rogen is used sparingly from here on out, merely because The Comeback is The Valerie Cherish Show, and having a good-natured movie star there to bail Red out of jams isn’t how this show operates.

I’d rather see more of Valerie’s interactions with the vapid bimbo who plays Juna (or April, based on Juna), who is exactly the sort of snob ingenue we thought Juna would be in the first season. More of Jane, now an Oscar winner who feels less of a need to hold her tongue and stay out of it. And more of Paulie G, who thinks he has written a soul-baring confessional that is probably just misogynist tripe like his sitcom. (We get some pretty awesome barely-bad dialogue from Seeing Red, like “Why don’t you put up a sign that says, ‘Watch out for falling lamps!'” His writing has evolved, but barely.)Valerie is still a pest in this episode, which is how we can’t totally fault Paulie G for mocking her when she insists on reminding everyone that she did not actually blow Paulie G. She tries her best to keep up with Seth Rogen’s “network jizz” improv. (Meanwhile, the script supervisor needs to make sure Val knows that she switched the interchangeable “keep out” and “stay out” in her own dialogue.) At one point, she reverts back to her sitcom roots by playing directly to the camera. Valerie has come a long way since the first season, yet that “long way” has brought her literally to her knees to perform oral sex on Seth Rogen. (Her previous attempts at stepping out of her comfort zone had her making out with Alan Thicke and playing a brunette with migraines.)

The episode is full of priceless moments, from Val doing her trademark schtick (“Hi, Simpsons? We want to shoot drugs in front of your characters!”) to Mickey defiantly telling the props guy that Val doesn’t need knee pads. Val’s straight-to-camera “Walk? It’s been a long day! Why don’t you just rape me?” is like her HBO version of a Room & Bored blow, and it fails spectacularly.

As much as I loved getting reacquainted with Jane, Mickey, Juna, and yes, even Paulie G in the first two episodes, this is the one that gives me full confidence in The Comeback‘s new season. I hope HBO has the good sense (and sense of humor) to keep it running longer than just this second season, but even if not, this episode alone has made its resurrection worth the effort. Valerie Cherish is back in full glory, everyone — which, in her case, is a lot more shameful and embarrassing than glorious.

“Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees”: A

*

“I don’t know what kind of candy you’re making, but I’m a coal miner!”

As comedies go, The Comeback rides a fine line between the light and the dark. The breezy tone suggests screwball comedy, yet the way it skewers every facet of Hollywood is so biting and dead-on that it really does, at times, feel like a docudrama. The way we squirm and cringe through each awkward day in the life of a C-list actress makes viewing as uncomfortable as it is hilarious. Yet even in its darkest moments, like Paulie G’s drug use or last week’s battle with misogyny, The Comeback has eschewed truly grim material.

Until Season Two’s fourth episode, “Valerie Saves The Show,” which tackles an entirely new subject for the series — death.

Things start off light enough. In “Valerie Saves The Show,” the cruelties of the television industry continue to plague Valerie Cherish, beginning with some fairly mundane ones — budgetary restrictions — which means her character Mallory (who she still constantly confuses with herself) will be drastically cut back and thus rendered less sympathetic to the audience. (Seeing Red contains some crucial drinking alone, crying in the tub, finding a stray cat scenes, apparently, which sounds exactly like the kind of hack work Paulie G would insert into this story.) Apparently, HBO didn’t feel the urge to bless Seeing Red with the same production value afforded to, say, Game Of Thrones.

Val’s creative solution: to allow the production to use her own home as Mallory’s, further blurring the line between fact and fiction.

This is, of course, a major imposition on Val’s loveball, Marky-Mark, who finds his home overrun by strangers, his precious espresso maker moved out of reach. “It’s not a crime scene!” Val explains of his reluctance to interfere, a prophetic foreshadowing of things to come later in the episode. But first? A trip to the the Groundlings, where Valerie can hone her improvisational skills (actually: show off how little she knows about improv).

Last week, Val made a pretty killer direct-to-camera improv involving rape that was entirely inappropriate for the moment; this week, she tries to mine some humor out of cancer, and fails yet again. She also tries to mine some humor out of actual mining, as she stiffly plays a coal miner opposite a taffy-maker and then asks the instructor: “Now what?” Improv is all about teamwork, so it comes as no shocker that Valerie Cherish is lousy at it. She can’t lose herself in the moment or consider a scene partner her equal. She assumes the Groundlings will be intimidated by her because “I’m a professional” — but yeah, no, they are not.

Unfortunately, during the break, Val gets some disturbing news from her loyal sidekick. Mickey may have cancer. And while Val ordinarily tends to shrug off or completely ignore Mickey’s feelings, especially when they might drag down the mood of her reality show, this time she’s truly rattled by the thought of losing her faithful companion, which is how this line creeps into her improv: “Only two reasons to be out of work: bad economy or cancer. Do you have cancer?”

This brings us right to the heart of Valerie and Mickey’s curious friendship, which has always been one of the show’s strongest yet subtlest anchors. Mickey is more than just Val’s hairdresser — most of the time, he’s treated like a glorified assistant. (At times, not even so glorified.) His true role in her life, of course, is that he’s her biggest fan. Notice how he’s the only one laughing during her terrible improv? And yet it doesn’t seem like a courtesy laugh. He really does think she’s funny.

Mickey must love Valerie in order to put up with her for all these years, getting so little in return. He must believe in her talent. He seems totally content playing second-fiddle to her at every turn. What’s not so readily apparent is how Valerie feels about Mickey — we know she depends on him, but is this because she truly enjoys his company, or because he’s the only person in her life willing to put up with all her shit?

People get exasperated to varying degrees with Valerie Cherish. Not all of them call her out on it, but even those on Team Valerie defect every so often, as Mark does in this episode. (And not without reason.) Mickey is the only one who has never turned his back on Red, not even for an instant — though some telling looks to camera let us know he’s hip to Val’s least likable moments. Mickey is an essential part of Valerie’s life because he sees her the way she wants to be seen, allowing her to buy into all those delusions she carries around about her own importance. Without Mickey, Val wouldn’t have the validation she needs to invest as strongly as she does in her own brand. Mickey is constantly selling her on the story she wants to believe, the one she is trying (and failing) to tell via reality TV. Is this a true friendship, or just a narcissist’s gross misuse of a doting fan? I think the jury’s still out on that.

No matter the reason, Val is visibly shaken up by Mickey’s possible bout with cancer, which is how the Big C continually creeps up in her improv (and causes her to drop her fictional baby). Val is told by her instructor that cancer is not funny, and tellingly, “Valerie Saves The Show” takes on a heavier tone than usual once that topic is broached, even if the C-word is mostly absent from the rest of the episode. Val’s nephew Tyler is starting to “go Hollywood,” mouthing off to his boss and deciding he’d be just as good a star as Seth Rogen. (Probably false, buddy.) Val’s selfishness takes a holiday when she decides to use Tyler as Mickey’s gopher, a nice reversal of the way she usually has Mickey fetch for her. (In Valerie’s universe, there’s always someone who has nothing better to do than cater to her every whim — though she’s right that it’s in Tyler’s job description.)

Mark gets star-struck by Seth Rogen and makes a Valerie-like snafu in front of the wheelchair-bound line producer Ron. (Rogen is wisely underused in the episode, following a big role in last week’s episode.) TV production is depicted as the headache-inducing nightmare it usually is, rather than something that tends to bring Valerie joy. Even she is more pessimistic than usual. Valerie goes on a rant about Tyler’s self-congratulatory generation and explains how Ron got injured; paired with Mark’s foul attitude and Mickey’s medical diagnosis, this whole episode feels almost oppressive in its cynicism and gloominess, despite the levity offered by Val’s stabs at improv.

And that’s before someone commits suicide.

“Valerie Saves The Show” first introduces the very real possibility that Mickey could be facing death in the near future, then ends up somewhere darker as Val and Mark stop by their property to stay the night (because of Seeing Red‘s takeover of their own home). Jane is up to her old wily tricks, spying on Val after she’s asked them to turn the cameras off, and just when filming is about to wrap for the night, a gunshot startles the crew. A man has killed himself in the next apartment.

This isn’t a character we’ve met before, but it’s still the darkest moment of the series thus far, and it doesn’t seem accidental that it comes in an episode that already has us thinking about our beloved Mickey’s mortality. This gives Valerie a chance to call upon her vast CSI knowledge (she once had a guest spot) and to coin her new version of “Jane! Jane!” time-out hands: “N.G.,” which stands for “no good.”

Ironic: Val and Mark are refugees of a production about a drug addict, and go to stay in a place where a real drug addict has just offed himself. One of the cops who responds to the scene offers an unknowing warning to Val about drug users who turn their lives around — that tends to be when they snap, bringing the people around them down, too. Is this a harbinger of an even darker turn from Paulie G? Will his villainy resurface? I’d say that’s a safe bet.

We’re midway through The Comeback‘s (criminally short) Season Two now, and I’d also wager that this is likely the darkest the series will get. I don’t anticipate a wrenching chemo arc for Mickey or any more gunplay, though there’s still a feeling of dread created by what happens here. Nothing goes according to plan, everything falls apart, everyone is cranky (except, ironically, Mickey), and though Valerie tries to save the show, her fix is just a Band-Aid on a production with much larger problems.

To sum it up, basically everything that happens in “Valerie Saves The Show” is N.G., a somewhat sour half-hour with a few comedic high points. (Curiously, even the title is a mystery, since “Valerie Saves The Show” was also the title of a Season One episode. Is this an oversight, or an intentional callback?) Perhaps the death of a stranger is meant to put the stresses of production into perspective — though in this episode, for once, it’s Valerie who is concerned about real-world problems while everyone else is freaking out about more superficial concerns.

When revisited, this episode takes on a sweetness that offsets the bitter visit by the Grim Reaper. This is maybe the most we’ve ever seen Valerie care about anybody. For once, there’s nothing in it for her, unless you believe that she only cares about Mickey as her one-man fan club and not as a human being. Last week’s “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” was the high point of the season, the sharpest of the new episodes. This one is the most subtle and character-driven, from the genuinely empathetic look on Jane’s face when Mickey delivers troubling news to Val chewing out Tyler for not respectfully grabbing his elder a snack when he needs one.

The Comeback is all about Valerie Cherish, but in this episode, we are forced to take a moment to truly consider the little people. Valerie fails to disappear into character during her improv, but all around her, real feelings are felt, from Mark’s anger to Mickey’s optimistic joy and a solitary drug addict’s wish to die. Even Valerie connects with her humanity more than usual. Cancer may not be funny, but it can bring out an unexpected poignancy where you’d least expect, which is a curious but not entirely unwelcome turn for The Comeback.

“Valerie Saves The Show”: B+

*

In its most extreme realizations, the American dream means being the best. Foxcatcher is about three men who already are the best, and want to be better.

It is the based-on-a-true-story story of Mark and Dave Schultz, Olympic champions from the mid-80s, who are fixing to return to the ring in 1988, with a little help from the very wealthy John du Pont. John first lures Mark into his staid privileged world, promising glory and admiration (and a little cocaine), but it’s possible that he only does so to bait Mark’s brother. At some point, Mark and John’s curious relationship goes sour, and Mark feels betrayed by his actual brother as well as the father-like figure of John du Pont. (John seems to be playing friend, brother, father, and mentor roles simultaneously… and possibly another role as well? It’s hard to ignore the film’s total lack of sexuality.)

Dave and Mark are already Olympic gold medal winners. John du Pont is heir to one of the great “old money” fortunes in America. They’ve already achieved the dream other Americans long for. Still, they want more. Mark (Channing Tatum) claims he wants to be the best wrestler in the world — an itch which you’d think an Olympic gold medal might have scratched already — and John (Steve Carell) wants to soak up that glory through osmosis, by sponsoring Mark and his brother as wrestlers. Though both brothers are formidable, older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo) has accumulated the majority of the fame, at least in Mark’s eyes. So Mark wants to be even better. He wants more championship titles, more gold medals — just as the du Ponts want more pointless trophies to put in their pointless trophy room. In Bennett Miller’s America, too much is never enough.But what’s the point? Who really cares who funded a gold medalist? Does that fairy dust ever really rub off on the sponsor? And at a certain point, after you’ve already won a gold medal, isn’t enough enough? Mark wants to prove that he’s his own man, to crawl out from under his brother’s shadow — but the problem is that he’s trying to do it by wrestling, the very thing Dave is famous for. A smarter guy would have picked another sport, or another platform entirely. Mark’s wrestling skills will eventually fade, one way or another, and what then? You can’t move out of your brother’s shadow if you’re following his every motion.

As for John du Pont? We’re left to guess somewhat at the life he led before Mark Schultz met him, but it’s easy to see that John feels emasculated by his cold, controlling mother (Vanessa Redgrave). We can guess that he didn’t get a lot of opportunities to roughhouse with other boys as a youth, which might be why wrestling in particular appeals to him. The du Pont family has strength in their bank accounts, but John is a tiny, bird-like man (with a bird-like beak for a nose, and a probably-not-coincidental obsession with ornithology). He’s not a strong man in any sense of the word, which might be what attracts him toward a hulk of a man like Mark Schultz. He’s a leech.

Foxcatcher doesn’t give us much insight into any of these characters’ interior lives, but the easiest to understand, by far, is Dave. Dave is a simple family man and that’s what he cares about — wrestling is something he’s good at, something he can make money doing, but it’s all about his family. John has only his chilly mother, not far from death, and a mountain of money awaiting him. Mark has even less — no friends to speak of, no love interest, and no money until John enters the picture. These men chase after being the best because without such a pursuit, they are nothing at all. Foxcatcher unfolds in a sad, bleak little universe where getting better only means getting progressively worse.Wrestling and collecting weapons are John’s hobbies, his way of playing at being a tough guy, but it is an actual killing that ultimately undoes the bond between these three men. America loves violence. It was founded on it (as John reminds us, showing off his Revolutionary War-era home). Men like to watch other men wrestle each other. They like tanks and guns. They especially like tanks with guns attached to them. Foxcatcher may not connect all the dots on how America’s obsession with military and violent sports lines up with the murder that unfolds in this story, but it does give us the dots, and says: make of these what you will. It has an almost ambivalent attitude toward its thematic content, so you can easily leave the theater asking questions like, “Why?” and “So what?”

Miller quite obviously has the American dream on his mind, perhaps even more than the actual facts about these three real-life men. The real story is fascinating, but you’ll find only stray slivers of it here. What we do learn is that John is obsessed with military weapons, which he collects like the trophies his mother has devoted an entire room in the estate to. John has never fought in a war, but he’s content to acquire the accoutrement, the same way he’s content to collect wrestling medals he has only bankrolled, while other “real” men put the physical sweat into earning them. Merely owning symbols of powerful and masculininty makes John du Pont feel like a man.

For a while.

Until it doesn’t.

John du Pont is an overgrown boy, not a man, and when a spoiled child doesn’t get his way? Watch out.

Channing Tatum is solid as Mark, but Mark isn’t a terribly deep or interesting individual, and we have to wonder why this twentysomething is hanging out with a much older skeezy rich dude all the time. Sure, du Pont’s financial support is a factor, but we rarely see Mark socializing with anybody else, and never once does he display any interest in women or sex of any kind. And the dude looks like Channing Tatum. Yes, Channing Tatum with cauliflower ear, but still Channing Tatum. The homosexual undercurrent is never explicitly suggested by this film, but it’s impossible not to wonder about. (Discuss.) Mark Schultz’s book about these events probably gives us more insight into what’s going on here, but in terms of this film, it’s hard to say for sure.

Steve Carell is noticeably unshowy, despite that fake schnoz, underplaying his character to such a degree that the character is frequently lifeless and ultimately soulless. Mark Ruffalo rounds out the cast as Dave, exactly the sort of guy you’d expect to shrug off a gold medal. The kind of guy who has to write “Pick Up Kids” in black marker on his hands just to remember this daily errand. The kind of guy who doesn’t get that the Very Rich need to be treated like they’re Very Special. He’s the film’s simplest character, but Ruffalo plays him expertly, the only character here we really get to know.

This trio will undoubtedly all be a part of the awards conversation, though Carell has the best chance at a nomination (and even a win) — if audiences don’t find him too understated and removed to warm up to. (Then again, the Academy loves a big, fake nose — just ask Nicole Kidman.)

Bennett Miller’s original cut of the film was more than four hours long, which might have been brilliant or excruciating. At two hours and fifteen minutes, it feels too long. Foxcatcher begins slowly, in Miller’s well-composed but unhurried shots. It’s like a fly on the wall who has ceased buzzing. It feels like all the juiciest interactions have been cut out of the film, leaving competent but not utterly compelling scenes.

Foxcatcher is interesting almost in spite of itself. It may only be an interesting film because America is an interesting place. Bring your own magnifying glass to examine the subtext, because Bennett Miller doesn’t do it for us. Steve Carell’s John du Pont is a sad, worthless, empty black hole of a person, and Carell plays him that way. We want nothing to do with him. Then again, according to this film, neither did anyone else who got to know him. It’s hard to tell if we’re meant to think that extreme privilege made him this way, or if it’s just where this human cipher happened to land in the cosmic lottery — but either way, just looking at him is depressing.

Foxcatcher isn’t such a troubling movie because we’re invested in what happens in the characters, or because what happens is much darker than we’d see in any other movie, but because it’s so hopeless. There’s nothing we especially want for any of these characters, except maybe that they all go very far away from each other and never speak again.

*

Much has been made of the weak Best Actress race this year. The Best Actor field is filled to the brim with potential nominees, enough to fill ten slots with worthy performances from 2014.

The Best Actress race? Not so much.

The obvious frontrunner is Julianne Moore in Still Alice. Beyond that, there are not really any leading female performances that have set the screen on fire. (Some of my own favorites are lesser-known foreign actresses with virtually no shot at grabbing the Academy’s attention.) With four more slots to fill, obviously four more women will receive nominations, and these women — who very well might be Felicity Jones, Rosamund Pike, and Amy Adams — are certainly deserving of acclaim. Still, it’s a shame that there haven’t been enough dynamic female-driven roles to make this category feel like a real race.

At this point, Moore’s strongest competitor is likely Reese Witherspoon, a previous Best Actress winner (for Walk The Line) who sounds off a gamut of emotional frequencies in her latest cinematic endeavor — she sobs, she screams, she despairs, and she also perseveres in the face of hardships offered up by the Pacific Crest Trail, facing possible starvation and dehydration and other perils of nature as well as potential threats from her fellow man. It’s the kind of role that seems destined to capture the Academy’s attention, aided by the fact it’s based on a true story. (Oscar just loves that.) In short, the film lets Witherspoon go Wild… a journey that took her subject from California to Washington on foot, and may take the woman who plays her up to the podium to collect another Oscar.

Wild is based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, which I read recently in anticipation of the film. It is not one of those tales of a person up against the great odds of nature, as you might expect. Strayed faced some elemental obstacles, but nothing so extreme that it’s worth making a movie about. This isn’t Into The Wild or All Is Lost or 127 Hours. Cheryl Strayed may have walked 1,100 miles in too-small boots, but the journey Wild depicts is her inner journey. She does not get lost in the woods — she is lost when the story begins, and her trek across the west coast is to find herself. That may sound maudlin, and perhaps at times it borders on that, but it’s a true and inspiring story, at once very specific and universal.

Wild begins with Cheryl on the trail and then flashes back to reveal what drove her there, as does the book. The failure of her marriage, a flirtation with heroin, and primarily, her mother’s battle with cancer. As in the book, these flashbacks are often more vivid than what we learn of her time on the trail. Strayed is a woman hiking alone across almost the entire length of California and the entire length of Oregon. Not many women do this on their own. It makes sense that the movie version somewhat skimps on Strayed’s “alone time,” and instead looks to her interactions with fellow hikers and flashbacks to provide the most compelling narrative. Those looking for an adventure film may be disappointed, but having read the book, I knew what I was in for — a story about losing and then finding oneself.

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is a poignant read. Her prose is forthright and honest. She isn’t a terribly subtle writer, as she easily spells out her epiphanies and the themes she bumps up against, but the story is incredibly moving and, at times, invigorating. I’ll say the same for the movie, which was adapted by Nick Hornsby — who is primarily known as a novelist, and I must say, a surprising choice to adapt this story. There are moments in his script where the dialogue is too on-the-nose, where something left unsaid might have been better than what was on the page. Cheryl spends a lot of time muttering to herself, which isn’t always necessary. (Though I imagine she really did this to keep herself company.) The movie uses all kinds of tricks to get around the supposed lack of chatter we’d find in a one-woman story like Wild — quotes from famous authors, inner monologue voice-over, voices from the past in voice-over, Cheryl talking to herself, and a bit of narration from the book (though not as much as expected). Most of this works, though in a story about finding peace amidst the majesty of nature, there is an awful lot of talking.

Wild is quite faithful to the book, and thus to the actual events of Strayed’s hike. A few side characters are cut, and a few stops along the way go unmentioned, but the film manages to cram in more encounters than I thought it would. (I was initially dismayed that the Three Young Bucks had been excised, since they were some of Strayed’s most memorable companions, but luckily they appear at a later point in the story.) It is especially deft in the way it handles Strayed’s flashbacks, which never feel jammed in for the sake of exposition. The film doesn’t flinch at the less savory aspects of Cheryl’s life: the many anonymous sex partners she had while still married to her doting husband Paul, an abortion, heroin injections. (An upsetting sequence involving the execution of a horse is necessarily toned down for the screen.)

Witherspoon’s take on Strayed is a bit surlier than the prose of the book, but that mostly works, and perhaps makes it clearer that Cheryl needs this hike to get away from the waste of a woman she’s become. The real centerpiece of Wild (both the movie and book) is Strayed’s mother Bobbi, lovingly and strikingly captured by the book and wonderfully recreated in the film by Laura Dern. With only a handful of relatively short scenes, Laura Dern creates a whole character we feel like we know instantly, a figure so maternal, so flawed but so optimistic, that we can easily see how her absence might rip a hole in a person. At this point, Laura Dern is one of the most fabulous actresses around, and Bobbi’s smallish but significant role is fantastically written. Dern could elevate almost any material, and Bobbi the character alone elevates this story — the credit for which ultimately probably goes to Bobbi the woman, Strayed’s actual mother. But we can also credit Strayed and Hornsby as writers, and especially Laura Dern, for bringing her to life in the movie. Witherspoon gets the job done, but Dern should absolutely get an Oscar nomination for this.

The rest of Wild is a worthy venture, too. The film is surprisingly impressionistic, with striking editing that gives us glimpses of memories before we know what they mean exactly. (Unless we’ve read the book.) The subliminal cues create a sense of Strayed’s inner damage, the wounds she’s hiking to heal. Cheryl’s physical body takes on bruises and cuts as she makes her way northward, but inside she’s healing all the while.

The film is well-directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who made last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, the visual style of which transcended the limits of the screenplay, which is akin to what’s happening here. It’s impossible to know what I’d have thought of Wild had I not had such a deep connection to Strayed’s journey thanks to my enjoyment of the memoir. I knew already what every step of Cheryl’s journey had in store, and also what thematic significance each moment would have for her. The fun, for me, was in seeing how these elements were rearranged and executed in the film version.

Wild has moments of tremendous beauty and grace. Cheryl travels through extreme arid heat in the desert, through chilling snow, through sopping-wet rain, but the emotional terrain she covers is even more fraught with peril. The movie is more about this than it is about a woman alone against the elements. Its most memorable scenes are about the ways people interact, the little hurts and the little kindnesses that accumulate in our memories along the way.

It’s strange, the moments we remember most. Things that don’t seem important in the moment might be what lingers most heavily in our minds in years to come. Wild comes off like that — you’re more likely to recall the stray fragments of the film that stick with you than the story as a whole, the little moments Wild gets just right. There are enough of them that make it worth the journey.

*

“I don’t care if you’re available or unavailable. I don’t care if you just found out that you have have herpes or hepatitis C from one of those whores that you pay to come to your room on show nights. I’ve been in this business a lot longer than you have, and I will be in this business long after they take you out in a body bag, because you are gonna OD on some shit that you pump into your veins because you hate yourself. And guess what? I’m your way out. And you’re too fucking stupid to even know it.”

There’s a lot of danger in reviving a dormant TV series. These days, more than ever before, it is possible to resurrect a show that left us too soon, which is how we got movie version of series like Firefly and Veronica Mars and witnessed the return of Arrested Development and 24.

But the results are spotty. It’s all but unheard of for the revival to match the quality of the original in such cases, because if it was beloved enough to have fans clamoring for more, the reason is probably that it was really good. Reception of Arrested Development‘s fourth season on Netflix was mixed, but I don’t think anyone would claim that the latest season outdid the first two. It had been off the air for seven years, and in those years Arrested Development was hailed as one of the great TV comedies of all time. That’s a lot to live up to. A hit TV show arrives at a moment, and it is exceedingly difficult to recapture that moment two or seven or nine years later.

Exceedingly difficult, but not impossible.

As a major fan of Valerie Cherish, I was looking forward to — but in a way, almost dreading — the comeback of The Comeback. For years I proclaimed that it was the sharpest skewering of the entertainment industry I’d ever seen, that it was pretty much my favorite TV comedy — ever. (Alongside a series about the desperate and degrading shenanigans of another showbiz-mad redhead, I Love Lucy.) Following such hype, it seemed likely (and almost inevitable) that Season Two of The Comeback would fail to fly at such high heights, and might turn out to be merely adequate, good enough but not brilliant. I had faith in Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King and everyone else returning in front of and behind the cameras, but I am also a realist, and after talking up The Comeback for the past nine years, I didn’t want it to come back and be fine and make me look like a dumbass.

Season Two’s third episode, “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees,” justified the return of Valerie Cherish by matching the quality of Season One’s best episodes. It was fresh and smart and incisive and most of all, it was fucking funny. But what we really want when a show returns to our TV screens nine years after its cancellation is not just for it to be as funny as it was previously, but for it to evolve into something else — its own thing, a series that acknowledges the decade that has passed in the interim. While watching Season Two’s fifth episode, “Valerie Is Taken Seriously,” I suddenly had the feeling that I wasn’t watching my old favorite comedy from nine years ago, but another show entirely. A series that was made in 2014, not a series that was dressing up 2014 like 2005 and hoping no one noticed.

We still have a handful of episodes left before we can judge Season Two in it entirety, to really see how it measures up against the first season, but “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” might as well be titled “The Comeback Is Taken Seriously” because it is the first episode to make it explicitly clear that Season Two has an entirely separate agenda. All of the old stuff still applies; yes, Valerie Cherish is still an oblivious narcissist who can’t get out of her own way, but the relationships are different now, in a way I wasn’t expecting. Maybe things will take a turn, and the next three episodes will have Valerie again facing humiliation after humiliation and everyone else faring better… but I don’t think so. I think I’m onto what The Comeback is really doing in its second season, and I’m loving it. But more on that in a moment.

“Valerie Is Taken Seriously” first gives us some bickering between Valerie Cherish and Jane the producer (and Academy Award-winning Jewish lesbian). It’s reminiscent of several scenes from the first season (most memorably: “Well, I got it!!”), except the power dynamic in this relationship has shifted and Valerie is more argumentative than she ever would have been nine years ago. In the end, she does end up caving to Jane’s demand that Val arbitrarily make up which episode of Seeing Red she’s shooting, which seems like a mere comedic beat when it happens (but ends up being crucial later).

Next, Val heads to set, where she’s filming what she thinks will be a return to her Room And Bored roots. Instead, she’s working entirely without props or other actors to bounce off of, and the “studio audience” is about twenty hired actors who laugh when they’re told to, not when they actually think Valerie is funny. (That’s not all that different from a real studio audience, but Val isn’t happy.) HBO’s Rada and Connor return to explain as kindly as possible that Paulie G is falling behind on his writing duties and will be temporarily replaced by Andie, a female director who in so many ways is the anti-Paulie. For one, she doesn’t hate Valerie on sight, and she’s only mildly miffed when Val steps on her toes to tell her that the “studio audience” will be too jealous of her to chuckle appropriately. (Once they start laughing on command at everything Mallory says, Val’s tune changes.)

Andie is a dancer in addition to a director, so she occasionally busts a move on set, creating a goofy vibe that Valerie tries half-successfully to imitate. Valerie is a little awkward here, but so is Andie, and the two have a funny rapport together. (Are Andie’s dance moves any less embarrassing than Val’s Annie Hall? Not really.) We don’t often see Valerie interact with women who have power over her in the same way we’ve seen her constantly undermined by guys like Tom, Paulie G, and James Burrows in Season One. Val and Andie have a fun chemistry that’s unlike anything we’ve seen on the show before, and though there’s no reason to think that we’ll see Andie in the future (she’s only directing two Seeing Red episodes), she’s probably the best new character we’ve gotten this season. (Possible exception: Seth Rogen, who doesn’t count because he’s playing Seth Rogen.) We can probably bet that the blow job in “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” would’ve played out a lot differently had Andie been in charge; as in that episode, there’s some interesting stuff about women’s roles in Hollywood happening here. (More on that later, too.)

This is the densest of The Comeback‘s new episodes, which also has the production of Seeing Red overseen by The New York Times, which pisses off publicist Billy because his own stabs at interviews have been nixed for this “classy” exclusive. This causes temperamental Billy to have a total meltdown, going all Russell Crowe and throwing his phone at one of our little-seen cameramen, then firing himself as Val’s publicist. This is not long before Paulie G explodes when he learns Valerie has seen seen the dailies and she again tries to backseat direct by suggesting he light her scenes differently. At this, Paulie G’s biggest freakout yet, Valerie becomes so concerned with his well-being (and moreso, the well-being of her bid at being a serious actress on a serious premium cable network) that she hunts down a showrunner who hates her a little less. And this is where things get really interesting.

(For me, it was the turning point of this entire season.)

I’d been hoping Tom would return in Season Two. As far as I can remember, his character has gone unmentioned, which made some sense because Paulie G was a much more formidable villain, and his return to The Comeback was absolutely essential — more essential than any other character besides Valerie. (On a story level, at least — though I have a hard time imagining any of this working without Mickey constantly peering over Val’s shoulder, fussing with her hair at inopportune moments. As last week’s episode proved, Valerie can’t function without her best gay, and not just because he’s the only guy who can get her hair to look so very 80s.) It seemed plausible that if Robert Bagnell wasn’t readily available to reprise the Tom role, The Comeback would easily move forward without him — or even that they wouldn’t have reached out to him at all. These eight episodes are already stuffed with returning favorites like Jane and Juna, and a handful of new characters. Tom didn’t have to come back, but I was really hoping he would, because he was such an essential part of the first season. We see him squirming to keep it together every time Val makes an obnoxious request. Though he’s never outright unkind, it’s written all over his face in every moment of Season One what he thinks of her.

And poor, poor Tom — he is now on his fifth season executive producing a pretty wretched Nickelodeon show while his ex-partner is creating a series for HBO. Paulie G was a total dick back in the day, and he’s gotten only marginally better. He may be a halfway decent comedy writer (according to this show’s standards), but now that we know he was shooting heroin all through Room And Bored‘s production, we have even more reason to believe that it was Tom holding that show together all along, and how is he thanked for it? Fate is cruel, and nowhere is it crueler than in Los Angeles.

We learn more about Tom in this one scene than we learned about him all last season, and though he once played the peacekeeper, he’s now much too miserable to hold those emotions in when Val comes traipsing onto his candy-colored Nicky Nicky Nack Nack set. “You’re the monster!” Paulie G announces to Val earlier in the episode, pointedly and probably unfairly; he’s talking about Mallory becoming a CGI creature in a fucked up Seeing Red fantasy sequence, but he’s really talking about the way he’s brainwashed himself into seeing Valerie Cherish as the devil, to such an extent that he had to write a whole series about it. But when Valerie confronts Tom with her well-meaning request to bail Paulie G out of an impending relapse, Tom looks like he wants to dive under a table, like he really has seen a monster. At first, Paulie G telling Val that she’s a monster seems like just another way that he’s a pompous asshole, but Tom’s similar sentiment forces us to really consider: is she?

Season One of The Comeback was all about Valerie Cherish’s degradation. We caught little snippets of what was going on with everyone else, but ultimately, it was all about Valerie. She was the victim and her own worst enemy, and we mainly saw things from the point of view of how they affected Valerie. She was at the lowest point on the totem pole, so painfully unaware of how she was being perceived. Everyone else had this power over her: they knew she was making an ass of herself long before she did, and so, of course, did we.

Season Two still has plenty of that flavor, but it’s added a flip-side. Seeing Red is all about what Paulie G went through, a dark addiction that neither we nor Valerie were privy to. It’s somewhat comical that Paulie G thinks Valerie was such a thorn in his side, when we saw pretty clearly that he was a big fat jerk to her from the get-go. Of course a guy like that would paint the annoying but harmless actress as the bad guy. Of course he would write a self-aggrandizing series that degrades her again and again and colors himself the victim. But adding the more reliable Tom to the mix makes this all more complex.

A decade ago, Tom was a pretty level-headed and reasonable guy. Now he’s a live-wire who will push a man in a worm costume without much provocation. He’s kind of turned into a Paulie G (copping to his own issues with substance abuse). Both Tom and Paulie G are utterly traumatized by their time on Room And Bored, and while Tom paints Paulie G as the Big Bad in his version of the story, we are now forced to consider Valerie’s role in that sitcom in a whole new light. I don’t think it’s fair to say that she drove either Paulie G or Tom to madness — Paulie G would’ve been a heroin-shooting jackass regardless. But Valerie came out of that moment with a hit show (the reality show The Comeback, not Room And Bored) and has gone on to star opposite Seth Rogen on an HBO series.

When Season One ended, Val’s success seemed more like a compromise than a triumph, but in Tom and Paulie G’s eyes, she got the better deal and they got rehab and Nickelodeon. Juna became a movie star, Jane won an Oscar, and none of these people are as happy as they should be, but this isn’t just about Valerie Cherish looking foolish while everyone else winces anymore. In some ways, Valerie actually has the power here — the mere sight of her can make grown men regress into tantrum-throwing children. This season, there are many ways in which Valerie Cherish is really, truly winning, and that’s not something I expected from The Comeback. It’s a totally different M.O., and maybe it’ll change in the next episode. For now, Valerie Cherish is kinda fucking crushing it, and I’m very excited.

Thanks to a little visit from the Grim Reaper, last week’s “Valerie Saves The Show” was The Comeback‘s darkest episode yet, but “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” is also pretty menacing. Shayna the First AD wears a shirt that says “City of Angels,” and that’s no accident — this episode is all about how merciless Hollywood is. A once-promising comedy writer and Emmy winner is barely holding on as the producer of a kids’ show he can’t stand, and the cast of that series isn’t any happier, as evidenced by Gary the fury-filled worm. Tom hates his former partner, also an Emmy winner, who cleaned up his heroin habit and got a show on the most prestigious network around and is utterly joyless. A publicist flies into a rage at the drop of a hat, throwing a hissy fit and quitting his job because he’s been upstaged by the network publicist.

These are funny moments, but they’re sad, too — Billy cries! And while his rant is, on the one hand, rather infantile, it’s also heartfelt and raises a solid point. People like Billy and Tom and Paulie G made sacrifices that allowed Valerie to get where she is, and now it’s not just Red who has fallen prey to the monster that is Hollywood — they’re all in the same boat. In fact, her delusions of grandeur might be the very thing that is saving her from being as despondent as the rest of these people. (Remember: Jane is pretty down on herself, too.) Val’s still the same character, but Season Two has found a new spin on Valerie Cherish’s oblivious optimism. Rather than using it to make her the butt of every joke, this time she may be the luckiest out of any of these characters. (Seth Rogen seems pretty chipper, but again: that’s because he’s just Seth Rogen.)

Interestingly, “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” pretty squarely focuses the onus of its misery on the men. Paulie G, Tom, and Billy fly into major rages, while Mark (in his brief appearance) is also pretty cantankerous, and even Mickey seems a little pissier than usual. (Who would have guessed he’d have such beef with The New York Times crossword puzzle?) In contrast, Jane remains pretty level-headed when she and Val spar, and Andie either genuinely likes Valerie Cherish or at least does a better job of hiding her annoyance than Tom and Paulie G ever did. “Valerie Is Brought To Her Knees” had some pretty on-point criticism of how Hollywood’s boys’ club treats women, but in this episode, the ladies get the last laugh while the men are off sulking. It’s not coincidental that the critic character is also a woman — the sisters are all Team Valerie in this one, while none of the boys do her any favors. (Assuming we can safely count Mickey amongst the sisters.)

Also of note: here Valerie is obsessively worried about her appearance (even moreso than usual). She covers up that awful green body suit with a robe, she battles Paulie G over the unflattering dramatic lighting in Seeing Red, then refuses to let Jane shoot the behind-the-scenes footage with the docu-like lack of luminescence HBO prefers. (And this time, she puts her foot down.) When the New York Times critic refers to her portrayal of Mallory as “brave,” Valerie assumes it is a backhanded compliment that is somehow judging the way she looks. (Which, again, astutely highlights the double standard actresses face in this business. Men who look unattractive in movies are never called “brave.”) It turns out that this woman is giving her an actual compliment, something Valerie Cherish isn’t used to (and probably doesn’t often deserve). That’s why it takes her so long to catch on, worried about how she looks physically when she’s never come off looking better. Valerie is so used to spinning everything she hears into a compliment that she’s become totally deaf to genuine praise. After all her ego trips, what a twist for Valerie to be in denial of her talent, deflecting in the one moment she earns kudos.

Valerie watches the dailies with her “It wall” in the background, a reminder of all the fluffy vanilla material she’s known for. She thinks the scene is too dark, and no one — not even Mickey — agrees with her. Is this a meta-commentary, a way of staving off naysayers who might wish that The Comeback was more goofy fun, less biting and incisive? Maybe, maybe not, but it is telling of Valerie’s character that the first thing she sees when she watches her own tour-de-force performance is that the lighting isn’t flattering, and her I’m It fans don’t want to see her that way. This is the diametric opposite of almost every other episode of the series, where Valerie thinks she’s great and others have a different take on the matter. The script has been flipped, people.

The debate over the lighting is an on-the-nose but apt metaphor for what this episode is about: light-as-a-feather Valerie afraid of going “too dark,” of straying from her sitcom roots, when ironically, everyone else thinks she’s never been better. She’s actually good. (See above, re: Valerie Cherish crushing it.) The whole episode is full of contrasts between light and dark — like when a silly kiddie program takes on a very profane and adult tone, revealing the crushed dreams of its producer. “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” begins with Val bathed in the garish, cheesy reality lights she’s always reveled in; a multicamera sitcom, too, by necessity, has very bland and direct lighting. That’s the world Valerie knows, but she’s moving into darker, more serious territory. And so is The Comeback.

I’m not sure what lesson, if any, Val will take from all this, but it seems like another turning point for this series. If The New York Times genuinely thinks Valerie Cherish has given a raw, revealing performance, then there’s no reason to think the rest of the world won’t agree. We could see Valerie Cherish as a sought-after hot commodity in serious dramatic roles. We could see Valerie Cherish win an Emmy.

Would that ruin the delicious dynamic The Comeback has cooked up thus far, with Val dwindling down on the D list? I don’t think so. I see no reason the show couldn’t be just as funny if Valerie Cherish was working opposite Matthew McConaughey in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. I think that’s a natural evolution, a smart way for The Comeback to do more than just replay Valerie Cherish’s Greatest Hits from Season One. It would be a nice echo of the way Season One spent thirteen episodes preparing us for the humiliating debut of her reality series, only to surprise us at the very end and turn Valerie’s degradation into her salvation.

But I don’t think The Comeback has to go this route. Maybe Paulie G’s shortcomings are a sign that Seeing Red is going to flop. Valerie’s small victories in this episode could be a blip on the radar. I’m on board regardless. “Valerie Is Taken Seriously” truly surprised me, and though I’ve often said that The Comeback is the smartest and most (unfortunately) accurate dissection of Hollywood I’ve seen, this episode widened the scope in a way I’d never considered. True to its title, it made me take Valerie Cherish seriously. For all the comedy we get from Valerie’s miming of child-dismemberment in a hilariously hideous motion capture suit, this is a serious episode — even more serious than last week’s. There’s a lot of drama here.

My days of fearing that Season Two of The Comeback would be but a pale imitation of its glory days are long gone. The Comeback is doing what it has always done: taking risks and taking no prisoners, while still presenting a deceptively light tone overall. Here Valerie Cherish is asked to portray a monster that eats Paulie G’s inner child, but we all know that the monster is really the profession he’s chosen — the same monster that devoured Billy and Tom’s inner children, and who knows how many others? I feel bad for Tom and Billy and maybe even Paulie G, but it’s also nice to see Red on top of the world by episode’s end for a change. She gets a sweet gift from Seth Rogen and proclaims that it’s a good day, and for Valerie Cherish, it is. As dark as this episode goes at times, it also has one of the series’ sunniest endings.

We don’t yet know if Valerie Cherish’s portrayal of Mallory on Seeing Red is Emmy-worthy, but I can say with certainty that this episode of The Comeback is. It’s unlikely that the Hollywood monster really will take this little-watched but much-loved comedy seriously, but I do. This is one of The Comeback‘s very best episodes.

“Valerie Is Taken Seriously”: A

*

If you live in or around Hollywood, you’re likely to see open-top buses filled with tourists, taking a tour of your home like it’s Disneyland. I happen to live near a lot of the attractions on these tours — places that are pretty ordinary to me, but can still be sold as part of the Tinseltown mythos. The lookie-loos in these buses and vans want to see where the stars live — or, stranger still, used to live — because, as legend has it, such figures are larger than life, gods amongst men, living out their fabulous, unimaginable lives on a plane of existence we mere mortals can only dream of.

The truth is a far cry from that — and if you live here, you know it. But you’ll still see those buses full of people, their eyes glancing briefly at you, just in case you might be a celebrity, and then darting quickly away when they realize you’re just another person. Like animals in cages at a zoo, we don’t pay much mind to these tourists invading our natural habitat — which is not, in fact, our natural habitat, but an enclosure built up to vaguely resemble our former way of life. Our unnatural habitat. In Los Angeles, it’s a constant reminder that people are fascinated by our way of life here, even if that way of life loses its luster to those who actually live here. At some point, even glitz and glamor begin to look ordinary. I look at those tourists sometimes and try to remember what it’s like to be just thrilled by all this.

David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars is a lot like those “star tours,” except in addition to showing you gaudy homes, celeb hotspots, and a glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous, it will also show you incest, prescription drug abuse, the ghosts of multiple children, self-immolation, and at least one dead pet.

Welcome to Hollywood, folks!

Maps To The Stars begins, as most cliche Hollywood stories do, with a young woman stepping off a bus in Los Angeles. But if you think you’ve seen this one before, think again. Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) wears long black gloves to cover the burns on her arms. A less severe burn marks her face. Agatha requests a limo driven by Jerome (Robert Pattinson), who is — you guessed it! — an aspiring actor and screenwriter. Agatha, on the other hand, has not come to Los Angeles to make it as an actress. She’s come to make amends.

But first, she’s come to meet her Twitter buddy, Carrie Fisher (no, really, it’s Carrie Fisher), who helps her get a job as personal assistant (AKA “chore whore”) to an aging actress named Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). Havana is desperately, desperately, desperately attempting to procure a role in the remake of a film her mother, Hollywood legend Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), won a Golden Globe in. Clarice was later killed in a fire, which makes Havana’s meeting with burn victim Agatha feel predestined. And maybe it is! Around the time Agatha arrives in the City of Angels, Havana begins having visions of her dead mother — in the bath, in bed with her during a threesome — and let’s just say mommy isn’t playing nice. Havana is not the only celebrity who’s seeing things — child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) has visions of a recently deceased teen girl who was a major fan of his. (She’s not such a fan in the afterlife, though.)

Are these real ghosts? Or just figments of these warped celebrity imaginations? Maps To The Stars isn’t so interested in a plausible explanation, but seems to suggest that celebrity minds are already so fragile, and damaged, and used to lying to themselves, that adding visions of the dead on top of all tht is hardly a stretch. Its vision of Los Angeles is of a bizarre, interconnected world where there are many coincidences but no accidents. Benjie’s father Stafford (John Cusack) is a loopy self-help guru who treats Havana for the sexual abuse she (supposedly) suffered as a young child (in sessions that come off more like child rape fantasies than therapy). Benjie and Havana also have the same manager, Genie (Dawn Greenhalgh), though Benjie’s career is really run by his steely mother Christina (Olivia Williams).

Despite constantly sunny skies, there’s a foreboding sense of doom hanging over these characters’ heads from the very beginning, as if all of these people were poisoned by prosperity and fame long ago and are only now getting around to actually expiring from it. Benjie and Havana both grew up privileged, both began acting at a young age, and now are both insufferable narcissists. Benjie may still be a young teenager, but he’s also just 90 days out of rehab and is paranoid that his younger co-star (a mere moppet) is stealing scenes. Meanwhile, Havana pops just about every kind of pill there is and rejoices when a personal catastrophe strikes the younger actress who got the part she wanted. At her very lowest point, she lays bare her insecurity in a sickening seduction that has her asking Jerome if she has better skin than a burn victim. This is not the behavior of a happy person. Maps To The Stars is both a very funny satire of celebrity as well as a seriously fucked up tragedy. As in many of Cronenberg’s films, the real world feels “off” somehow — even for Los Angeles. It’s not quite as bizarre as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, though the two films not surprisingly have plenty in common. It’s also not technically set in a post-apocalyptic time like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, but it has a similar surreal quality that mixes nicely with the heightened reality of celebrity life. It is rather akin in tone to Cronenberg’s last film, Cosmopolis, which had Robert Pattinson riding around in the back of a limo instead of driving one. Cosmopolis, like Maps To The Stars, was about the gross and sometimes homicidal extremes that soulless rich people will sink to just to feel alive. (Sarah Gadon also returns from Cosmopolis, and after her recent appearance in Enemy, I’m starting to wonder if she has any interest in movies that take place in our actual reality.)

Maps To The Stars is the twisted nightmare version of sightseeing in Los Angeles, and like those star tours, it’s obsessed with the mythos of celebrity and ultimately quite critical of this city and this industry. David Cronenberg has been making movies for a long time, so it’s possible that he has an axe to grind with the kinds of people you find in this business, but it’s equally likely that he’s just having a laugh at our expense. Virtually every character in Maps To The Stars is ludicrously despicable, and that’s before some of them start killing people. We’re meant to laugh at the shallow words that come out of their mouths, we’re meant to pity them (but not sympathize).  None of these characters seems too closely based on a real person, but Benjie is the right age to display a foul Bieber-like ‘tude that instantly renders him a teenage monster — though we also sense that he’s had little choice in the matter, due to a disturbed childhood and some seriously freaky parents. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that Julianne Moore, in her Golden Globe nominated performance, was playing an overgrown Lindsay Lohan — maybe just because she looks so much like Lindsay Lohan — although by the end, even Lilo would look at her and say, “What a raging bitch!” It’s a credit to Moore that the character comes off as sympathetic as she does, before she takes a turn for the truly vile. (I would wager that that turn takes place in a brilliant gross-out sequence set in the bathroom.)

By the end, so many gruesome things happen to these people that Maps To The Stars becomes impossible to take too seriously as a tragedy. We feel a little sorry for them, but mostly these people have brought it on themselves. Nearly everyone in this story is a vulgar freak; the ones that aren’t might not be merely because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough. It’s hard to imagine that Cronenberg and screenwriter Bruce Wagner think they’re delivering an accurate representation of Los Angeles — it’s too extreme to take seriously — and yet it does play right into the stereotypical view of Hollywood so many people have. I’m a little uncomfortable with the way Maps To The Stars demonizes each and every corner of Los Angeles, without displaying a single corner worthy of redemption. I’m in on the joke, but will everybody else be? Or will this just serve as more fuel for the fire of L.A. haters? Personally, I happen to think Maps To The Stars is a satire of the way people think about Los Angeles than the city itself. There’s some truth in here, but it’s also a shallow, tourist’s point-of-view, one that scratches just barely below the surface and finds nothing but a void underneath. The movie’s title suggests a tour of Hollywood life, and the response is a movie that throws ugliness and depravity back in our faces.

You want to see celebrities? We’ll give you celebrities! Cronenberg seems to say. But then he won’t let us look away. We have to live in the grimy cannibalistic black hole these famous people do, and I’m not sure this is meant to reflect a real place so much as it is meant to mirror our fascination with gawking at the most shallow of celebrities. Stars would be nothing without their adoring fans, and that’s us. We’re their enablers. We’re the ones who allowed them to become such vicious monsters. Maps To The Stars just may be our punishment for that.

*

“That’s a cautionary tale, huh? That’s what happens, though, you know, when you make show business your whole life, right? You know? Next thing you know, you’re eating kale chips out of a shopping cart.”

The Comeback has had a rather dark streak the past few episodes, touching on misogyny, suicide, cancer, and explosive anger stemming from a deep well of unhappiness in several of these characters who’ve had their showbiz dreams dashed to pieces. “Valerie Cooks In The Desert” lightens up a smidge, although there’s a rather grim interlude in the middle (also involving shattered illusions).

The episode begins with Val glowing from her (first ever?) positive reviews — The New York Times has praised the performances in Seeing Red, though Paulie G’s writing gets disparaged. Marky Mark is less a fan of Valerie Cherish at the moment, since her re-shoots are getting in the way of their dinner at Nobu, not to mention tearing up the floors in their home. As foreshadowed in previous episodes, when Mark got so fed-up with Val’s production(s) that he defected to a rental home, there’s serious trouble in paradise between Mr. and Mrs. Cherish. (Valerie’s maid, Esperanza, on the other hand, is finally easing up in front of the cameras — or at least trying to, doing a stiff variation on the sassy housekeeper stereotype she thinks viewers will buy into. Let’s just say it needs work.)Mark and Val’s home being tarnished by production is an apt metaphor for the damage it’s done to their marriage. Valerie spends this whole episode trying to repair what’s broken, making a big gesture of cooking dinner for her man as an excuse for why she wants to wrap up her portion of production; unfortunately, no one else gets why this is such a big deal, because an average wife would be making meals for her mister on the regular. Paulie G has yet another freakout at Val when she suggests that the reviews for the Seeing Red premiere were mixed, which sends him into retreat mode as he tries to punch up the final episode, leading to further delays. Whereas Val once lived to be in front of the cameras, here she just wants it to be over.

Valerie is beckoned to the desert, where reshoots have her filming an insane kidnapping sequence in the trunk of a car, co-starring a bunch of snakes, with her mouth taped shut (a dream come true for Paulie G, surely). Meanwhile, Paulie G attempts to crank out pages, taking a break for a massage that Val bursts in on in an attempted drug bust, thanks to Tyler’s guess that he’s shooting up in there. (“You’re not a writer!” Val accuses of Tyler’s storytelling.) The heat is getting to everyone, which leads Valerie to display her diva actress side in an interaction with Ron and Shayla that ends with Val on the receiving end of “the middle finger” from the wheelchair-bound line producer. It’s never good to be flipped off by a guy in a wheelchair.Predictably, Valerie doesn’t make it out of the desert until well into the evening, stopping by Mark’s rental house to leave dinner at the door because he’ll be too mad to let her in. (Aww. You can tell Jane really feels for her in this one.) A well-intentioned “pebble” thrown at the bedroom window changes that when it smashes the glass and rouses Mark from bed. (“So cute!” Val says, moments before we hear glass breaking.) Mark lets Val in with her dinner (partially eaten by dogs Valerie mistakes for coyotes), but it’s clear that this relationship is in jeopardy, especially once we learn that Mark has “plans” with the woman he rented the house from. He’s enjoying his bachelor pad a bit too much, it seems, while his wife has forsaken him for the former heroin addict who was at one time her biggest nemesis.

“Valerie Cooks In The Desert” doesn’t introduce any new ideas. It pushes forward storylines that have been simmering for a while now. Mostly, the rockiness of Val and Mark’s marriage now that the cameras are back, but also Mickey’s illness and Paulie G’s continual spiral toward relapse. We already knew that Valerie was getting a good review from the Times. Val’s sparring with Ron and Shayla isn’t new, either — it’s just that here, it reaches a boiling point.

“Valerie Cooks In The Desert” has plenty of amusing throwaway comedy. Mickey has a gross-out moment when Rada stops by and he can’t make it all the way to the outside bathroom — apparently, his medication has led to some rather explosive moments on the toilet (and we have a remix of Season One’s similar gag, when it was Mark on the porcelain throne during one of Val’s confessionals). Valerie riffs on an old Wendy’s commercial, asking “Where’s the meat?” and announcing “Here’s the beef!” (Both wrong.) Mickey makes a rather lewd comment about how much fun one can have with beef (even I’m not sure what exactly he means). Valerie’s quip about the dragons on Game Of Thrones not being real as a live snake is locked in the trunk with her is also a winner, though Billy’s Orange Is The New Black reference goes over her head. (“Now you’re just saying colors!”) Val may be hip to HBO now, but she’s not caught up with Netflix.So it’s official — Valerie has gotten the acclaim she’s always wanted, but it hasn’t really gone to her head because she never noticed that she wasn’t acclaimed before. Sure, Valerie is more uppity here than usual, trying to use her good review to earn her a table at Nobu, but is that really because she’s gotten good notes from The New York Times? Or is it because the demands of the Seeing Red crew are pretty unreasonable? It’s hard to imagine Seth Rogen being asked to wait around in sweltering heat, locked in a trunk with a snake. Val has met success in the entertainment industry at last, but that’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.

As Mickey grows less and less able to keep up with Red’s heavy production schedule, and Mark is less and less willing to let showbiz become the mistress in their marriage, it seems we soon may see Valerie Cherish faced with a choice: her personal life, or her dreams of fame and adulation? This becomes clearest in the episode’s centerpiece scene, when Valerie runs into good ol’ Gigi at the supermarket.

Gigi was one of many highlights in Season One — the lone female writer Valerie took under her wing (for mostly selfish reasons). Gigi had a bad habit of eating her feelings and frequently burst into tears when things didn’t go her way (which was always). In many moments, she was even more pathetic than Valerie. And not much has changed. Gigi has gained a significant amount of weight (even Mickey makes a catty comment about it!). When we re-meet her, she’s munching on a bag of kale chips. She also looks like she’s aged about thirty years.Valerie observes with embarrassed pity as Gigi claims to be living it up as a writer on Pretty Little Liars and expectant (adoptive) mother… before collapsing into sobs as she explains that she owns four empty homes, doesn’t get along with her co-workers, can’t get enough time off work for a root canal, and even hates her bitch of a dog-walker. She, too, had a dream of having a show on HBO, except unlike Val and Paulie G, she never made it. (They picked up Girls instead — ironically, also about a less-than-svelte lady who is fond of snacking.) Gigi’s in the same camp we learned Tom was in last week — technically successful, but hating every minute of it. Once again, Valerie Cherish is one of the unlikely lucky ones to come out of the Room And Bored debacle.

Valerie doesn’t offer to heal Gigi’s wounds this time around — how could she? Gigi’s personal damages may be beyond repair at this point, and Valerie is only one woman. She doesn’t have a lot of pull at HBO. But she does see a lesson about the dark side of success — and the dangers of being a single woman who only has “the business” to keep her warm at night, for Hollywood is a fickle lover. Valerie may be having fifteen more minutes of fame at the moment, but how long will that last? Is it worth sacrificing her marriage for? Aside from sharing some laughs with director Andie (who returns, with more bonkers dance references) and Seth Rogen (absent in this episode), Valerie hasn’t made any new friends despite her newfound success — and as of this episode, she’s clearly made a few enemies.

Valerie now has more or less what she always wanted — but how bad does she really want it? Bad enough to sabotage her own marriage, bad enough to leave Mickey behind in the dust? Stay tuned — there’s just two episodes left of The Comeback‘s second season! (And that just might be all we get, thanks to poor ratings. Television is a cruel mistress, indeed.)

“Valerie Cooks In The Desert”: B+

*