Finished! The Favorite Five Films I Saw (In 2011).

5. The Artist
Hey, we made it to the Best Picture winner already! This is flying by. 

I should mention early on that I don’t have any problem with The Artist winning Best Picture last year. Making a silent black-and-white movie in modern Hollywood is a ballsy thing, and the film is chock-full of energy and pathos in a way most modern films aren’t. I mean, sure, it’s a little like watching Singin’ In the Rain with the sound turned off and the chroma turned down, but honestly, most Hollywood films are much worse than watching Singin’ In The Rain with the sound turned off and the chroma turned down.

That said, this movie won’t age well. We’re not even a year past its big Oscar win, and it’s already all but forgotten. Director Michael Hazanvicius and star Jean Dujardin won their Oscars and returned to the screen again this year in The Players, and no one noticed. All the blathering about what a star-making turn it was by Berenice Bejo, and how we’ll be seeing her in everything shortly, has died out. They’re French stars, they returned to making French movies, and we’ll never hear from them again.

Still, I’m glad that The Artist won the Oscar. It was a fun movie to watch and a fun movie to talk about, and since our Oscar conversation this year is going to be dominated by the role of torture in movies about modern warfare, I’m glad that we got a small break of levity. I haven't seen Zero Dark Thirty yet, but there's no doubt it could be improved by the presence of a small, well-trained dog that mimics all the main character's actions.

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
I don’t enjoy horror movies. Not a bit. And particularly not slasher movies. I don’t enjoy the experience of deliberately causing myself fear, nor the sadomasochism of watching torture or pain. I’ve skipped dozens of Friday night movie invites (okay, this is an exagerration so you believe I am much more popular than I am) because I didn’t want to watch whatever the latest Eli Roth flick is. Not my thing.

But no matter how dark David Fincher goes (and in Dragon Tattoo, he ventures pretty far down the well), I always find it worth tracking with him. He doesn’t just take you to the darkness of the human mind, his films sit there and study it, waiting for you to accept what you’re seeing as part of the reality of human behavior. I thought I was prepared for this movie by his previous ventures into the minds of psychopaths (Seven, Zodiac), but the violence here is absolutely brutal, and on a number of levels, both mental and sexual. I generally prefer my films much less rape-y than this, but Dragon Tattoo was a film worth squirming in my seat through.

I know there’s been some Rooney Mara backlash since the picture was released, but it’s not based on her performance, certainly. The fresh-faced intellectual we met in Fincher’s Social Network is gone completely, and the transformation isn't just the physical mohawk-and-piercings that all the magazines gushed over. She disappears into the role, even varies her speaking cadence to match that of Swedish English speakers, a dedication that Daniel Craig doesn’t even pretend to bother with.

I’m a big fan of Craig’s, and he’s very good here, but he does that thing that drives me, as a former glasses wearer, up the wall. He’s wearing thick black glasses to try and knock down some of his Bond sexiness (unsuccessfully), and he responds to this new prop by fiddling with his glasses every waking second. You know, like people who wear glasses do.

Look, Craig: they’re eyewear. They go on your face. You forget about them. You don’t take them off and dangle them from one ear when you’re looking at something. Speaking of which, make a character decision and decide if you’re nearsighted or farsighted. Then, you can wear glasses to see things close up, or far away, depending on that disability. Don’t just wear the glasses “when you’re thinking about something.”

And for chrissakes, STOP DOING THIS.

These acting choices alone dropped this film two spots.

3. Moneyball 

It’s sort of funny, when you think about it, that Moneyball ranks this high on my list, and that it made such a strong Oscar run. Because Moneyball is such a small film.

Sports movies tend to be big – outsized, really. They like last-second dramatics, and the children of disabled small-town coal miners winning championships, because that’s the sort of sports movie we want to watch. But Moneyball is a sports movie with almost none of that. It’s the story of exploiting loopholes in conventional thinking to put together a baseball team a little better than the one they thought they could. That’s it.

It’s this lack of grandiosity that actually makes it a joy to watch on screen. It’s appropriate that Aaron Sorkin was snagged to do a rewrite on the script, since Moneyball is essentially “The West Wing” of baseball movies. It’s a couple guys in an office, tugging at strings behind the scenes, and waiting with bated breath to see if the world changes.

A quick Wikipedia search will tell you the answer to that question, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that it both does and it doesn’t. But it doesn’t really matter if it does or not. It’s enough fun just watching the dream.

2. Bridesmaids
I don’t know what I could say about Bridesmaids that hasn’t already been said. I do know that I don’t want to run myself into the “can women be funny?” argument that seems to spring up basicaly every time an article about Tina Fey has a comments section. It’s a boring, infuriating argument and it goes nowhere.

Because Bridesmaids, as you know, is raunchy and loose, just like movies that men make - whoa! Whoops, sorry, slipped up and turned into Entertainment Weekly for a second. I meant to talk about the movie on its own merits, for a change.

I really like Bridesmaids. It’s funny – wildly funny, in parts – and it’s honest and sharp. It probably didn’t deserve the Oscar nom it got for Best Screenplay, but I’m glad it landed it all the same. I think sometimes people think these movies’ dialogue just appears out of the ether, because everyone’s improving their brains out in comedies now (and you know it’s your fault, Judd Apatow). 

And I’m glad it exists just because I was getting worried about Kristen Wiig. She was wrapping up her SNL run, and she seemed like she was about to become the sort of performer who everyone agrees is talented and funny but no one can ever find a good part for. There’s dozens of these comedians floating about (for example: Rob Riggle, Will Forte, and the entire cast of “Up All Night”) and a lot of them are SNL alums who disappear once we don’t see them on our TVs every night. Often the only way these types break out of it is to make something for themselves that actually fits their gifts. I mean, look at Louis C.K., for pity’s sake.

Now that she’s made what is arguably – maybe even undeniably – the funniest movie of the past few years, some studio will give her $30 million to do whatever she wants. And that makes me happy to think about.

1. The Descendants

I don’t know if I have a unique angle to discuss The Descendants. I liked the movie (well, obviously), but there’s not much I could say about it that couldn’t be covered by copying over the description in Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. It’s a small movie. It’s about grief. George Clooney almost won the Oscar for it. Frankly, George Clooney should have won the Oscar for it, but he still gets to be George Clooney, so there’s not much to get worked up about there.

It’s a movie by a director that film critic-types love: Alexander Payne. He’s directed one film that I like and admire (About Schmidt), one film that was praised to the skies that I thought was decent (Sideways), and one film that’s considered hip to call your favorite Payne movie that I deeply, deeply hate (Election). So I wasn’t expecting to like this movie as much as I did.

But all the things that Payne’s done in his movies to keep the audience at arm’s length – the way he makes his characters do more and more unlikable things, the constant sabotaging of their own happiness – those things have disappeared. Or, maybe he’s just softened them: whenever he introduces new, bizarre, unlikable characters (which happens every ten minutes in this movie), he then works to make you understand them enough until you come to root for them. Some critics felt like he’d lost his edge. Me, I like this new, gentler Payne much better than the old one.

Sure, the movie’s wrapped around a pointless what-are-we-to-do-with-this-valuable-land? plot that’s well-nigh as obvious as Avatar’s, but it was comforting and familiar and I didn’t mind it. I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes it’s just best to give the people what they want.

Ha! I did it! I caught up. Now, on to 2012.

Daily postings for the rest of the week!

The Best Films of 2012. I'm Doing It!

Every year, I do a top-ten list of my favorite movies, and at some point, on a lark, I expanded it to include every movie I’d seen that year. It seemed fun at the time, since it meant I could write reviews of the movies I’d really been appalled by, like Red Riding Hood, or Gnomeo & Juliet, which are the fun ones to do.

A month and a half later, it’s mid-February and I’m on my 11^th favorite movie of the year, and just hating myself.

Maybe I should just write a “Ten Worst” list every year. I bet I could knock that out.

So this year, I’m keeping the spirit of the thing alive, but eliminating the busy-work element of it. I’ve assigned every movie I saw a “prize” of some kind – Most Unintentionally Hilarious, Movie Most Unnecessarily Savaged By Its Fans, Best Movie Where One of the Leads Was A Digital Tiger (spoiler alert: it’s Lincoln), etc. – and I’ll write up a brief piece about whatever that was. Some chunks will feel like full reviews, some will be brief paragraphs. I’ll start with the ones that seem the most fun to write about, rather than going in order. And if I haven’t gotten this done by the time the Oscars is broadcast, I’ll post my full film list, in order, on that Sunday (February 24^th), and be done with it.

Of course, now it’s time to face the elephant in the room: I never finished my movie reviews from last year. How can you possibly trust me this time if I failed so conspicuously last time?

I’ll have to do them all now. So, here we go, the thirteen (oh, man, I missed by thirteen last year?) best movies I saw in 2011.

13. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and 12. The Adventures of Tin-Tin
I checked my computer and discovered that I did manage to write reviews of both these films, just not to post them. My recollection was that I’d written so many reviews at that point that they’d lost any and all creative spark. However, I skimmed them, and they aren’t bad. I’ll post both right before I post this, so just scroll down after you finish this article.

11. X-Men: First Class
I’m a sucker for X-Men movies, and Bryan Singer’s first two movies in this series hit the sweet spot for me. Singer’s a gay Christian, and most of his films have characters who have “outsider status” all but branded on to them. This proved a good match for the X-Men mythos, even if he perhaps landed a touch too on-the-nose at times (the scene where one of the mutant teens is cast out by his family because they thought he “chose” to be a mutant looks a touch hacky in retrospect). But then Brett Ratner came along and ruined everything, the way that he does.

The brand seemed dead, until Matthew Vaughn was brought in to resurrect the franchise. He very ably directs this origin story, which frames the whole X-Men story around the Cuban Missile Crisis, a curious but surprisingly effective strategy. The realism gives a nice bit of grounding to what is unquestionably a silly concept, and as The Dark Knight has taught us, a little realism can sell even the silliest bat-voice.

The real credit goes to casting, though. The top-line cast – James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, Nicholas Hoult – is miles better than you’d expect for a film like this, and the interplay between McAvoy and Fassbender is so strong that it makes me excited that Lawrence became such a huge star that now they have to do a sequel.

10. Midnight In Paris
I have an idea: for fun, let’s do this review without talking about Woody Allen’s films as a whole! Wouldn’t that be exciting? Wouldn’t that be so novel?

I actually don’t even know if such a thing is possible. After all, most reviews are trying to tell you what a movie is like, and what Midnight In Paris is like is other Woody Allen movies. People are neurotic. They talk all the time. They wander city streets, looking for purpose. They find a dream girl, obsess over her, and usually don’t end up with her. The good ones feel crisp and the bad ones feel navel-gazing. You know what you’re getting into here.

Actually, the best part of the movie is watching people frantically Wikipedia-ing the historical characters that pop up in the film and then pretending that they understood all the references as they appeared. I’m not ashamed to admit that I followed all the Cole Porter and Pablo Picasso bits, and adored the Ernest Hemingway portions, but was totally unfamiliar with everything that Alison Pill was doing as Zelda Fitzgerald. I lack Woody Allen’s earnest longing to return to 1920’s Paris, if for no other reason than I’m much less convinced than him that everyone would speak such excellent English. 

That said, the film is a gentle, sweet meandering back in time, and paints as lovely a picture of Paris as anyone has attempted. I’m enjoying this long European hiatus Allen’s been taking the past few years, and if we can keep landing films like this or Match Point, I don’t think he ever needs to head back to Manhattan at all.

Linking to Hemingway's monologue instead of the trailer, because the trailer's sort of a snooze.

9. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Even just a year later, this film’s only lasting legacy is that now “ghost protocol” means to walk around with your hood up. But who cares? This is an action film, and a good one. It doesn’t need a legacy.

I don’t know what else you’d want from a film like this, frankly. It succeeds in precisely the manner it tries to: it’s fast, fun, and instantly forgettable. Tom Cruise drives cars off ledges and climbs one of the world’s tallest buildings in the middle of a massive (and incredibly well visualized) sandstorm. Paula Patton and Lea Seydoux, both in slinky dresses, fight to the death in hand-to-hand combat. Simon Pegg says cheeky things. Jeremy Renner grunts and looks mysterious. What more could you people want? 

More of this, fortunately. Mission Impossible 5 is scheduled to come out 2015, with Jack Reacher director Christopher McQuarrie at the helm. I’m already looking forward to this.

8. Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part II
I said from the moment it premiered that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I is the strongest film of the HP franchise, and a couple years later, I stick by that assessment. Still, Part II is a fitting end to a journey that spanned 11 years, 8 movies, and the entirety of poor Rupert Grint’s awkward adolescence.

The movie opens a touch shakier than expected, as Harry and his friends’ escape from the bowels of a goblin bank never quite gels into the action set piece the creators were hoping for. That’s problematic, since early chunks of the movie descend into the complicated backstory-hunt that dominates the second half of Rowling’s last novel. If it bogged down the novel a hair, the transition to celluloid has not helped it. Here it drags and baffles, and only a real Potterphile is likely to grasp all the pieces as they pass by.

But no matter. In short order, the gang is back inside Hogwarts for the climactic battle scene, and while director David Yates has made some missteps in his tenure in charge of the Potter films, here he makes none. The fighting sizzles, and each character is given due attention as the battle rages. By the time Snape has passed along his memories for our last (and most moving) trip to the past, the film has done precisely what we asked of it: it gave us a fully fitting last goodbye to these characters we’d spent so much time rooting for.

7. The Muppets
Like most people over the age of 7 who attended this movie, I grew up on the Muppet movies as much as someone who lived in a house with no TV possibly could. If my affection was perhaps slighter than that of the film’s obsessive main characters, I was equal in my longing to see the whole gang back together.

While perhaps too much time has passed for someone to be able to truly resurrect the simple joy of the original films, Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller give it a game try. They’ve written a movie that is, if possible, ironically unironic. “We’re playing it straight here,” the movie seems to wink at us. “But we don’t have to.” Despite having been the one creating this whole endeavor, Segel’s the one who struggles to play it straight-yet-funny. Fortunately, he’s the only one with any difficulties. Amy Adams, naturally, remains as effortlessly wide-eyed as ever, and Chris Cooper is flawless as the hammy villain. Better still is Jack Black, who for all his trouble finding roles that fit his manic style, is an absolute shot to the arm here.

Ultimately, it’s a fitting and endlessly rewatchable trip back to the world Jim Henson created so long ago – one I would have assumed was unreachable now.

Oh, and I promised Margie after she accompanied me to the film last year that that she’d be a part of this review, and I’m a man of my word. Though I’m honestly appreciative, since it’s tough to find someone to trek to a Muppet movie with who can make it through without a knowing sneer. Innocence is, sadly, dead.

Posting my favorite of the parody trailers, one which will only make sense if you've seen the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trailer it's aping.

6. Super 8
Kid actors are tough. If you’ve ever watched a film or a TV show with kid actors, you know that we’re forced to hold them to different standards. They can play funny, or upset, or possessed, but we get only broad strokes, no shading. Generally, we can’t ask much more of them than precociousness. Sometimes, that’s enough: “Modern Family” has done a top-notch job of wringing every possible laugh from their younger cast by playing to each kid’s strength. Perhaps it’s the director, or the set, but generally young casts manage to deliver their lines and the general sense of emotion, but nothing else.

That’s not the case here. The kids at the center of J.J. Abrams’ extremely Spielbergian alien movie (Spielberg himself is a producer here, and his stylistic choices are all over the film) are sad and scared and brash and uncertain all at the same time, and the shades they manage to convey – leads Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning in particular – would be remarkable in an actor three times their age.

The movie does their performance justice – it’s both a taut, dark mystery and a moving coming-of-age story, and if the film lets its foot off the gas pedal just a hair at the end, but that’s not nearly enough to justify the way the movie’s disappeared from the public consciousness. More than worth a rental or a download if you’re looking.

Only 5 to go! I'll have the rest up shortly.

The Twelfth Best Movie I Saw (in 2011): The Adventures of Tintin

There’s an action sequence midway through The Adventures of Tintin, where the characters battle for control of some papers that lead to a hidden treasure. They race through an Arabian city on cars and motorbikes, into buildings, along clotheslines, through fences. The scene continues for several minutes – all in one continuous tracking shot. It is – and I do not say this lightly – the most best and most well-conceived action shot I have every seen. And it received almost no attention of any kind. People who complain that motion-capture gets no credit are right. In a year almost devoid of good action movies, how does a movie this fun get this ignored? How did A Cat In Paris and a Kung Fu Panda sequel get an Oscar nod over this?

Really, how many of you saw The Adventures of Tintin? Anyone? This is an adventure movie directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Peter Jackson. It was written by a screenwriting dream team: Joe Cornish (Attack of the Block), Steven Moffat (Sherlock, Dr. Who, the original Coupling), and Edgar Wright (Shawn of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World). I had very good reviews. It’s based on a popular comic book. And it made significantly less money than Just Go With It did this year. I do not understand how the movie business works sometimes. Or, ever, really.

What’s not to love, people? A boy goes on adventures all over the world, peering at treasure maps, sinking ships and shooting planes down from the sky with a revolver. His best friend is a dog smarter than literally anyone in Real Steel. They leap from motorbikes to cars to swirling rivers in a fraction of a second. They get into a fight with a falcon. Have you ever seen a boy and a dog fight a falcon in 3-D before? It is awesome. You all missed out.

Not that I didn’t have some issues with Tintin, too. It gives little in the way of introduction of its main character, and so it feels a bit like we’ve stumbled into the movie partway through, or are watching the third sequel of a familiar franchise. But that’s a minor quibble, and certainly not big enough to explain its lethargic domestic gross (it made a sterling $300 million internationally, which probably softens the blow a bit). I know parents complained about its oddly pro-alcohol stance (for one of the characters, it serves as a sort of Popeye’s spinach, a strange choice for a kid’s movie). If I were a parent, though, I’d be perhaps more bothered watching a character gunned down by a tommy gun and then mark down his dying message with his own blood (the scene plays out in a very PG-way, of course, but it’s still a shocking). That’s just me, though.

But I didn’t get the sense that people didn’t go see Tintin because they were concerned about its content. I got the sense that people didn’t go see it because they just didn’t care.

Too bad. Some movies, like Star Wars, and Avatar, are made for the big screen. You just missed a good one.

The 13th Best Movie I Saw (in 2011): Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I got in a debate with a junior high student earlier this year over whether or not Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was an “awesome” movie or not. The battle raged loudly for a minute or two before it occurred to me that there was little, maybe nothing I could say that would mean anything to this poor kid. He liked the second Transformers movie for all the reasons you like a Transformers movie, I’d hated it for all the reasons you don’t. And, in my defense, there’s a twenty-minute section where an old plane explains the mythology of the Primes, which remains a stupid thing no matter who you are. 

The argument echoed the conversation I occasionally have with people who are bewildered by the attention I pay to movies. “Can you ever just, like, watch a movie? For fun?” They ask. I give my standard answer, the answer every film student and movie critic has ever given: delving into movies doesn’t decrease my enjoyment of movies, it increases it. Does it make me a touch superior and condescending? More than a touch? No doubt. But I love diving into a good movie, or a bad movie, and if I spend thirty minutes afterwards on the drive home complaining about camera angles and plot holes, well, that’s part of the fun for me. If you don’t like it, go see Marmaduke with someone else.

And then, we come to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a movie it may be possible to like only if you are like me. It is unrepentantly old school, a film for people who love and miss the slow, taut pace of 70’s thrillers. People gaze off into the distance for long periods of time, and the director contents himself with a wide shot, not bothering to give us a the visual crutch of a close-up. What is the character thinking? Who can tell? Guess! We spend much of the movie watching the back of Gary Oldman’s head. If I hadn’t read the book prior to seeing the film, I doubt I would’ve had the faintest idea what was going on.

Oldman plays George Smiley, who despite being in the British secret service, is a sort of anti-James Bond. He does everything slowly, methodically. He spends much of his time on paperwork. All his legwork is done by other people. He lives a life of the mind, sitting back and watching the chess pieces move about the board, trying to deduce their strategy. There’s no glitz to his spy game, it’s a deliberately plodding movie, so that you pay attention to every detail that swings across the screen. I’ve never been so mentally conflicted about a film while watching it, I was simultaneously fascinated and bored out of my mind.

What kept my attention, though, was Gary Oldman’s performance. I’ve long been a staunch fan of Oldman’s, who’s made a career of bringing gravitas to every project he touches (both The Dark Knight and Harry Potter benefitted greatly from his appearance), no matter how silly (this is a man who was in Red Riding Hood, The Fifth Element, and Lost In Space, after all). Here, his performance is center stage, the camera permanently fixed on him, and Oldman takes that mantle and does… nothing at all. He pulls back, keeping all emotion shrouded, making you watch him carefully the whole movie, waiting for the gaps and breaks that you know have to appear at some point. It’s a credit to the Academy that a performance this subtle won an Oscar nomination, there’s nothing Oldman does this whole picture that ever feels like acting.

Which, I suppose, is a pretty great compliment when you think about it.

The Hunt For The Most 90's Song of All Time III

I haven't gotten to do one of these for about a month. But I have a good half-dozen built up now! Here's the first.

“You Only Get What You Give” – New Radicals (1998)

90’s Band Name: The name “New Radicals” makes it seem like there actually is a band here, but the title is just a cover for the band’s only member, Gregg Alexander. This is a classic late-90’s trope: the one-man band. Examples include Aphex Twin, Fatboy Slim, Pedro The Lion, and maybe The Magnetic Fields, depending how much you believe there’s really anyone in that band besides Stephin Merritt. This should be a slam dunk for tons of 90’s points, except that the pattern continued into the early 2000’s: Five for Fighting, Iron and Wine, LCD Soundsystem. You can argue that this a clear case of a 90’s trend continuing on past the decade that started it (the late-90’s boy band phenomenon is another good example of this), but that doesn’t change the fact that a one-person band doesn’t scream “90’s” at you. (4/10) 

90’s Musical Stylings:  The guitar lick, the production, the vocal howl on the ends of the verses, the hurry-up quasi-rap on the bridge; there’s a lot here the hints at 90’s, even if it’s not explicitly from the decade. Fortunately, the lyrics more than make up for this in their complete 90’s-ness (90-ocity?). Allow me to present the lyrics of the bridge, unedited except to distribute points:

Health insurance rip off lying
FDA big bankers buying
Fake computer crashes   dining (+1)
Cloning  (+2) while they're multiplying
Fashion mag shoots Beck (+1) and Hanson  (+1),
Courtney Love  (+1) and Marilyn Manson (+1)
You're all fakes, run to your mansions
Come around, we'll kick your ass in!

Alexander said he wrote the verse as a test; to see whether the media would focus on the important political issues of the first few lines, or the petty celebrity-dissing   (+1). Man, that guy was really sticking it to the man. As a bonus, at one point, he also uses the word “frenemies.” Frenemies!   (+2) (10/10)

90’s Cred: I assumed that this category would get a low score, but I hadn’t realized these two very important points:

1. When asked what song he was most jealous of by Time, The Edge named this song. (+2)
2. When asked what he'd heard in the last few years that really grabbed him, Ice-T listed this song and this song only. (+3)

What am I missing about this song? It’s the Newcastle United (unofficial) anthem (+1). It made Blender’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born (+1). In the liner notes of one of her albums, Joni Mitchell praised this song for "rising from the swamp of 'McMusic' like a flower of hope." (+2). Steven Strasburg said the song inspired him to become the pitcher he is today. "The simplicity of the thought, you get what you give, is easy to grasp and use in your day to day life." (-1).  (8/10)

Pop Culture: It came to late to be featured on the soundtracks of any 90’s movies, though it was used on the trailers of a few 90’s films (Big Daddy, Bubble Boy). And it was in 2000’s The Flinstones in Viva Rock Vegas, which we should really consider a 90’s movie. Or pretend it never happened. Yeah, let’s pretend it never happened. (3/10)

Music Video: Oh, holy hell.

We start on Alexander, wearing the stupidest hat (+1) seen on MTV until Jason Mraz showed up.

Well, this is his first music video, after all. You can’t hold sartorial choices against a scrappy young fellow like this, freshly arrived to the music scene. Maybe later, after he’s made some cash off this single and can afford a proper milliner, we’ll see him properly be-hatted. Let’s take a look at his next video, “Someday We’ll Know.”

Fun fact: in this video, Alexander never takes off his hat, nor allows the director to get a single close-up of him. I’m not totally convinced that is Alexander there.

Back to the video. Alexander is in a large, austere shopping mall (+1)  – chosen, it turns out, because “he sees the shopping mall as a metaphor for society—a fake, controlled environment engineered to encourage spending.” (+2) At a nod from Alexander, teenagers all over the mall riot, grabbing passing shoppers and shoving them into dog cages, catching them with nets. (+2)

Let’s talk about this. There comes a point in everyone’s life where he stops identifying with the “troubled upstarts” and “misunderstood teens” and starts to identify with the stuck-in-the-mud adults they encounter. Perhaps I’ve passed this point, and that’s why I’m so horrified by this whole video. But I don’t think that’s it.

In one scene, teenagers grab a passing businesswoman, redress her into a fast food uniform, and force her to make fries and take orders while the teenagers press in on all sides, yelling and throw things at her. See how you like it! seems to be the message. Now, I don’t miss my days as a fry cook, but I don’t look back on the stretch I worked 15 hours a week as the time when I had it really rough.

Thank God the adults are out of the way! Now we’re free to do this!

And let’s go ahead and mention that Gregg Alexander looks like someone raised at a Aryan Youth convention. No one has ever looked happier to be a part of an angry mob.

I cannot overstate how creepy Alexander is in this video. He looks like that white power activist who shoots at President Bartlet’s black aide in “The West Wing.” (wastes 15 minutes unsuccessfully looking for a picture of that character) Okay, well, he does.  

Alexander might actually be creepier. He does this eyebrow twitch when everyone’s getting really violent that says, “isn’t this great?” By the end, he’s singing seductively into the sneeze guard. 

And then the hat’s back (+1).

I hate everything about this video. But it is super-90’s. And, as the video’s top YouTube comment notes, “The 90's were great. Awesome bands, songs, clothes, movies, no 9/11... It was great!” I guess I can’t argue with that. (7/10)

Final Score: Somehow, reviewing this song made me both respect it more and like it less. It ends up with a very respectable (32/50).