It has become clear that seemingly everybody wants How I Met Your Mother to end. Cast member Jason Segel mentioned in a GQ interview that he kind of wishes it would go away, and if anybody was ever interested in interviewing Josh Radnor, I’m sure he would say the same thing. Even most fans of the show that I know seem to only continue to watch it out of some begrudging sense of duty, not unlike most of them probably felt during the final seasons of Lost. We’ve put so much time into the misdirections the show throws at us that we just need to find out what the conclusion will be, even though at this point we all suspect it will be underwhelming. I held out on joining the How I Met Your Mother hate train for as long as I could, talking up the great episodes and conveniently forgetting the bad, but as I watched the stunningly mediocre finale to the seventh season of How I Met Your Mother, I have started to put myself in the same category as the naysayers. Oddly, this does not change my general opinion on the show, as I still firmly believe it is wildly underrated… which is probably an impressive feat to accomplish, given that I’m no longer confident the show is actually good.

How I Met Your Mother’s first four seasons are, to put it mildly, awesome. When first watching the episodes, viewers tend to respond to the show’s non-linear method of storytelling, the puns and slang-based jokes, in addition to learning that Neil Patrick Harris seems to have been placed on earth exclusively to portray Barney Stinson*. Unfortunately, since the show used a laugh track and a multi-camera setup, when it debuted in 2005 I immediately wrote it off. (Keep in mind, this was at a time when watching a show staged similarly to Newhart was akin to claiming that MySpace is your favourite social networking site today. Arrested Development was winding up, 30 Rock was a year away from being a similarly great single camera sitcom, and The Office was the best show on network television.) It was clear that How I Met Your Mother was using an outdated format, and was therefore not worth my time. Of course, it would later become clear that these were the thoughts of an idiot.

*And/or host award shows.

When I finally began watching the show in 2008, at the behest of a friend who does not worry about the ideological implications of watching multi-camera sitcoms, it was immediately clear that this was a show for people like myself, if only because people like myself enjoy quality television. How I Met Your Mother was funny in a way few shows are; while most sitcoms were finding comedy from within actual situations, many scenes in How I Met Your Mother were based around little more than friends sitting around and telling legitimate, scripted jokes*. The use of wordplay in this show cannot be underrated; How I Met Your Mother is the best show since Seinfeld at implementing new terms into its audience’s vernacular, and whenever you’re the best at anything since Seinfeld, you’re doing something properly. What makes How I Met Your Mother unique, however, is its use of non-linear storytelling in a way that was at once obvious and so subtle most people never even think about it.

*Keegan-Michael Key, from the underrated sketch show Key & Peele, told a story on a March episode of the Nerdist podcast that upon reading third season scripts for Will & Grace, he found that there were almost no actual jokes; every line was entirely dependent on the character saying it to get the laugh. The writers had established the characters well enough as funny entities that the writers didn’t need to write them jokes so much as Karen-esque things for Megan Mullally to say in the character’s well-known voice. Key’s argument was almost entirely true, as late-run sitcoms often move into places where they stop writing jokes in as much as they just write funny things the established characters would say. How I Met Your Mother falls into this trap at times, certainly, but the show generally uses a lot more actual jokes than typical late-run sitcoms, and very often the show’s biggest laughs aren’t dependent on who says the actual punchline. It’s pre-modern comedy told in a post-modern fashion.

Despite the vast majority of the show’s actual conflicts existing in the general time period the episode is broadcast by CBS, How I Met Your Mother never actually takes place in the present. In the logic of the show, the setting rarely leaves a middle-aged Ted Mosby’s living room in 2030. We’re not watching these twentysomething (and then later thirtysomething) characters experience meeting the Slutty Pumpkin inasmuch as we’re watching somebody recount the story of doing so. Similarly, our narrator is unreliable, if only because memory is inherently unreliable, particularly across the amount of time the show covers. And since all of the characters on this show are basically high-functioning alcoholics, Ted’s memory must be seen as even less reliable. (Given that he seems to remember both himself and Barney keeping each of their bars stocked with a spray bottle of seltzer in 2012, Ted is clearly making some shit up*.) Unsurprisingly, memories are often clearly exaggerated while being retold by the show’s characters, as stories tend to be when one is telling them while sipping on a scotch that is old enough to order its own scotch. This may be the fake story of How Ted Met that Person with the Yellow Umbrella Who was Once in Ted’s Class and I Think Temporarily Lived with Rachel Bilson, but even in the show’s unreal world, the characters’ version of reality can’t be trusted entirely.

*Look for them. They’re there, and they’re perplexing.

When I became mildly obsessed with How I Met Your Mother in the summer of 2009, I would drinking most of the time I would watch it. I was working for the government at the time, and when I wasn’t spending my time thinking about why I wasn’t a filmmaker of some sort or re-watching Josie and the Pussycats, I tended to be drinking with my friends. After I got home from meeting a friend for a drink, it just sort of felt right to watch a sitcom version of that same interaction made sense. (This must be how people who meet for coffee must have felt about Friends in the 1990s.) Art might imitate life, but I’m not going to pretend I never attempt the opposite. I would eat a sandwich and watch one or two episodes each night, and as I recall, I was perplexingly dedicated to this remaining a ritual for no real reason other than general absurdity. And while How I Met Your Mother was certainly good enough to watch sober, it always sort of felt right to have a drink while watching it. Of course, later seasons have turned the show into something I simply wouldn’t recommend watching while sober, like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, or Oprah, but until the fifth season the drink was more of an accompaniment than an actual necessity.

How I Met Your Mother has undoubtedly slipped in its later years, probably starting toward the end of the fourth season. Minus the great Barney-centric episode The Playbook, the fifth season is borderline worthless. The sixth season is a bit better (read: watchable), and the first half of the seventh season features some of the best moments in the entire series’ run. But the show should no longer be referred to as anything better than ‘mediocre.’ How I Met Your Mother is still Occasionally Great, but Occasionally Great will always be more disappointing than Consistently Shitty. Watching a good show like How I Met Your Mother, or The Office, in its later years, can be incredibly frustrating, if only because you remember how great the show once was.

I assume I started to like How I Met Your Mother as much as I do because I’m only slightly younger than the characters it focuses on. This is similar to why people in their late teens and early twenties helped make Garden State the most overrated movie of 2004: we see the Pineapple Incident, or Natalie Portman forcing people to listen to The Shins, assuming that’s what our life will be like in a few years. And that’s not only comforting to those of us who like to worry about the future, it’s borderline exciting. We’re watching people figure out the problems we assume we’ll have, and should we run into the same things, we now think we know the solution. It’s likely that when I’m 38, I’ll get really into reruns of Frasier, getting excited for my near future of drinking sherry, having David Hyde Pearce as a brother, and pontificating about the problems of my radio show’s callers*. But when we grow up, we realize that our mid-20s aren’t all about robbing graves with Peter Saarsgaard and listening to Zero 7, just like I’ll never spend all of my nights at a version of MacLaren’s with my four closest friends and a revolving door of sexy sitcom guest stars. But that probably didn’t happen for Ted Mosby, either. It’s all in how he (fake) remembers it.

*Also, casually using the word ‘pontificating.’

Despite this season’s dedication to mediocrity, one of the best episodes of How I Met Your Mother’s entire run aired earlier this year, an episode that is great mostly because it seems implausible that anything like this could ever happen. While at the Architects Ball, Ted runs into an ex-girlfriend of his named Victoria, a moderately adorable cake maker who went to Germany towards the end of season one to better learn how to make said cakes. The pair temporarily attempted a long-distance relationship, which failed when Ted decided that making out with Robin Scherbatsky was more fulfilling than talking to his actual girlfriend on the phone. When they see each other again, however, Ted decides to atone for his makeouts of betrayal by helping Victoria clean the dishes from the Ball, which she had been catering. While in Victoria’s kitchen, the two talk about what has changed in their lives; Victoria is now engaged to a German gentleman from her class named Klaus, with whom she was quite close while her and Ted were together. After various topics of discussion and a brief kiss, Victoria and Ted discuss why their own relationship didn’t work out, which leads Victoria to make some fairly ridiculous, sweeping statements about Ted’s friendship with Robin that end up defining the rest of the season.

The reason this episode is particularly interesting (aside from the fact that, you know, it’s funny) is because it seems exactly like the way Ted would recount the story of running into an ex, despite the fact that no run-in with an ex has ever gone this way. When people seem to have deep personal revelations like the ones Ted comes to here, they often tend to change the situation in which they learned them to better fit said revelation. This is like people that end up dating their best friend remembering Duckie and Andie getting together at the end of Pretty in Pink, despite the fact that the movie ends with Andie making out with Andrew McCarthy and his ludicrous wig. Of course you kissed her, Ted, and of course you learned something important about yourself in the process. Except for the fact that everybody you just told this story to kind of knew all of these things about you already, and you were simply the one that was slow to catch on.

Despite the show’s aforementioned laugh track and multi-camera visual aesthetic, How I Met Your Mother is not shot in front of an actual studio audience. As opposed to simply sweetening the laughs like most shows shot in this fashion do, How I Met Your Mother fabricates its laughs entirely. This seems odd upon initially thinking about it, but it also makes sense. These stories Ted is telling are a representation of something he experienced over a decade ago, and as details evaporate over the years, it seems appropriate that everything actually looks like a set, or an incomplete representation of the environment he’s talking about. If this were a single camera sitcom, shot the same way 30 Rock was, the locations would look too realistic as the camera moved around within them; they would look like places that actual people exist in, not sketches of people and places from your memory. Ted might not be conscious of this – he’s telling the story, not analyzing it – but the details will always be a little foggy in any story, particularly one that’s more than a decade old.

Similarly, close friends tend to have an odd memory attached to the time they’ve spent together. Ted seems to remember having been drinking with his friends at MacLaren’s pretty much every night he’s not on a date with an aforementioned sexy sitcom guest star, but that seems impossible. Robin, Marshall, Barney, and Lily do have lives, lives that involve teaching kids or litigiously saving the world or putting up with Sandy Rivers, so they can’t be together constantly. Besides, we’re only getting twenty or so adventures from the gang in each calendar year, so they must be doing other things that Ted simply deemed weren’t worth remembering, let alone retelling. And like the How I Met Your Mother crew, pretty much everybody seems to think this way about their own lives. There was a time when I was sure I was constantly hanging out with the person that introduced me to How I Met Your Mother, which can’t possibly have been the case. I’m sure we saw each other a lot compared to our other friends, but we also had separate lives that didn’t involve the other. We just remember things this way because these are the things in our lives that were meaningful; everything else has just sort of been forgotten with time, like nights when Ted decided to rewatch Annie Hall for the forty-third time, or when Robin goes right from work to the gun range to shoot off some rounds before bed. It seems unreasonable that I actually watched How I Met Your Mother every night for four months in the summer of 2009, but I got so attached to it that I certainly remember it as such. And the memory of what happens, despite its inherent flaws, often ends up being more important than the actual event itself.

How I Met Your Mother will end, and given that everybody’s contract expires after the end of season eight, I assume we only have one more year of the show before it becomes financially unreasonable for CBS to keep it going. I’m fine with this, but I’m certain I’ll still miss the show when it’s actually gone, regardless of how I feel about its recent level of quality. The end is on the horizon, and we all know that’s a good thing, but the memory of what it once was makes it seem like something we don’t want to go away. It almost needs to disappear out of necessity, to allow the people in the show to grow into the budding rom-com writer/directors or S.H.I.E.L.D. superspies that they’re capable of being. And I know How I Met Your Mother isn’t as good anymore as it once was, but I know that I may be more emotionally attached to it than ever, possibly for entirely unreasonable reasons. I’m remembering the show falsely in a way, but since I’m in charge of these memories, I’m also remembering it properly. Personal attachment elevates anybody’s feelings about a media product, just like Ted meeting up with Victoria seems more meaningful because he figured something out about himself during it. These might be unhealthy attachments, but all it does is show that the thing we’re talking about meant something, that it’s something that will forever be worth thinking about and remembering, even if what was so meaningful one day no longer actually exists. We’re all Ted Mosby until we realize our memories are just as flawed as his. But then we realize those flaws in life are what make anything worth remembering in the first place.

A little while ago, Alex and I were writing some hilaaaaaarious jokes for the intro to our Judd Apatow-approved video podcast. As Alex (and large sections of the moviegoing public) is wont to do, he suggested one along the lines of “This episode is brought to you by Adam Sandler jokes. Remember? Those movies you liked when you were 7?” This seems to be the general consensus on Adam Sandler, that he makes immature movies for either kids or immature adults. Actually, the more recent general consensus is that Sandler makes bad immature movies for either kids or immature adults, but also made some at least decent movies many years ago. Film fans have a special attachment to the movies they watch a number of times when they’re young, and will continue to like them more than their current tastes would normally dictate as a result. At a point, nostalgia, memories and familiarity bleed through our judgment and become more important than our current tastes when judging a movie. As much as I want to say that Happy Gilmore is a ‘good’ movie, all I can say with confidence is that I’ve always enjoyed it, which sounds like the same thing, but is entirely different. I think a lot of people my age feel that way about that movie, that its quality does not come from its merits but from its place in their personal and emotional memories. For a number of reasons, this is the way I feel about Adam Sandler as a whole.

Now, I understand what I’m getting into here; defending Adam Sandler is an uphill battle. I get this. I saw Jack and Jill. (Okay, no I didn’t. That movie looked like total shit.) And to be accurate, I’m not really defending him in the sense that I’m going to try explain to you that you’re wrong if you think Jack & Jill is a bad movie. It probably is. That’s not my point, however. I’m not really defending him as a good actor, or an actor that makes good choices, or somebody who consistently writes funny movies. I’m also not just going to say that we should forgive his poor films because he seems to be a pretty decent human being in real life. But there has to be something more to Sandler’s films, something we simply haven’t been looking at closely enough to see.

I can’t recall the first time I saw Billy Madison, but I know I was pretty young; definitely well below whatever the ratings guide thought was appropriate. It was a movie I found very funny then, even though I knew I didn’t understand all of the jokes. I wasn’t sure why Billy thought it was so funny when the teacher asked the class to go to page 69, but I knew a lot of the other jokes made me laugh. Happy Gilmore followed, occupied a similar role in both film comedy and my heart. Those were probably two of the first movies that I quoted the way that I continue to quote movies that make me laugh. Sure, all genres have famous quotes, but it’s the comedies that give us the lines that are most fun to say over and over to our friends. It’s a shorthand that conveys a whole situation in just a few words, and is almost guaranteed to make your friend laugh. “Mrs Lippy’s car… is green,” is certainly not funny on its own, but to those who have seen Billy Madison, you’ll probably get a laugh. It was a way to tell your friends that outside of this immediate situation, there is something we both find funny. Comedy is one of the most subjective things in the world, and to find someone with the same sense of humour is a powerful thing, particularly at a young age.

Another piece of media that tended to turn me into a walking Sandler quote machine was not a movie, but his 1993 comedy album They’re All Going to Laugh at You. And considering that it went double platinum and was nominated for a Grammy, I guess I wasn’t the only one. There was something even more free and whimsical about a comedy CD than there was in a ninety-minute movie. Things changed quickly. No characters were around for more than 5 minutes. Children have particularly wild imaginations, and this constant change of scenery, story and people throughout Sandler’s comedy album continued to allow me to use mine to further enjoy the jokes about Fatty McGee.

I’m certain I couldn’t appreciate it at the time, but themes of youth and growing up were major parts of both Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore, as well as the lesser-known Airheads, a movie that came out earlier but I didn’t see until later. As the third lead in Airheads, Sandler is part of a band that takes a radio station hostage until the station agrees to play the band/domestic terrorist faction’s music. The band may be young and misunderstood by older men wearing suits, but they know their way of doing things is how they want to live forever, which is not an unfamiliar sentiment for young people. In Billy Madison, Sandler’s titular character is a partyer without ambition who must go through school again to prove to his father that he can run the family business when his father dies, an oedipal exercise with comedic results. Happy Gilmore continues this trend to an extent, as it is about (a notably fatherless) Sandler as an aspiring hockey player who proves to be an incredible, slapshot-wielding professional golfer. As golf is traditionally a middle-aged or older man’s sports, Gilmore must quell his youthful energy and temper to fit in and conquer the most conservative old man sport ever invented. It’s easy to see how all these movies make nice little metaphors for the changes we’re expected to make when growing up which are pretty universal, but the situation in Happy Gilmore may have some broad connections to Sandler’s life personally.

Sandler has discussed in interviews that his father had a pretty serious temper. If the amount of yelling we see his characters do is any indication, the younger Sandler may have had some of this passed down to him as well. Besides an explosive temper being central to Happy Gilmore, I don’t think I need to explain the plot of his later movie Anger Management to show how it applies in that case. The Waterboy is a movie about channeling excessive amounts of anger (curiously fuelled by an overbearing parent) into something positive. Little Nicky, in a broad way, is similar to Billy Madison in that it’s about taking over his father’s business, but instead of running hotels, Sandler is about to run Hell because his father is Satan. Mr. Deeds is similarly about taking Sandler’s character taking over a family company, this time from a deceased male relative. Most of his movies up until this point are about taking over for/becoming your father in a general way, and sprinkled in are some more Sandler-specific issues of anger and temper control. 

The later part of Sandler’s career, however, has a decidedly different set of struggles. Even if you think that the jokes in his films are not maturing, it must be noted that the subject matter that he’s dealing with certainly is. He may continue to approach the themes in a juvenile way, and there are still too many dick, fart and poo jokes for you, but there has at least been a transition as Sandler has aged. His soon-to-be-released That’s My Boy features Sandler what appears to basically be his character from Billy Madison, if Madison hadn’t turned things around at the end of the movie (and didn’t come from a rich family). Sandler’s character still loves to party, but is now middle-aged and broke, and tracks down his son in order to borrow money to pay back the IRS. I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I’m going to guess that it’s a father-son version of She’s All That: at first Sandler fakes the relationship and growth for selfish reasons, but ends up feeling the way he sets out to pretend he’s feeling leaving everybody better off in the end. The final message will be positive, but the source is likely a little darker: Sandler’s fear of being a bad father. Of course this is exaggerated and no way a reflection of who he is, but functions of a fear of who he could be. Sandler’s character will likely work towards a redemption the real Sandler hopes he never needs for his daughters.

We see something similar in Grown Ups, Sandler’s most financially successful movie to date and the only one of his films to spawn a sequel. The movie is about a middle-aged group of men whose high school basketball coach dies, leading them all to reunite in order to attend the funeral. But deeper down, the movie actually seems to be about Sandler’s apprehensions about the job he’s doing as a father. In the film, Sandler plays a successful Hollywood agent who has spoiled his kids, kids whose brattiness is painfully apparent when they deal with Sandler, his friends, and hometown citizens. This is something that is the other side of the parental fears of That’s My Boy. Instead of doing nothing and providing nothing in that film, in Grown Ups, Sandler’s character has given his kids everything and made them appreciate nothing, a fear I imagine to be potent among nice rich people with kids. Similarly, the entire plot of Click is set off by Sandler’s role as an overworked parent who has no time to see his family, a blanket concern that is perhaps closest to Sandler’s real life.

There is one theme that is present throughout much of Sandler’s career, both within the narrative of his films and how they are made and marketed: playing the role of an outcast of sorts. I have already discussed how Airheads, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore show Sandler’s respective characters struggling to gain acceptance into a certain world, often being pressured to change something about himself to do so. Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy both depict him as a constantly picked-on and desperately lonely person, with the exception of an elderly person and, eventually, the romantic attention of a female. Little Nicky, Punch Drunk Love, Eight Crazy Nights, Reign Over Me and Funny People all show his characters as entirely or almost entirely friendless, at least at the start of the film. Outside the narrative of his films, we can find a few possible causes for these feelings if they are rooted in reality. First is his Jewishness he clearly has no problem reminding us with, with hits like The Hanukah Song and frequent references to his heritage in interviews. Jewishness has been a particularly powerful source of isolation in American comedy for a long time. It has also been pointed out by many that contrary (for some reason) to most people’s assumptions, Sandler appears to be politically conservative, having donated funds to Republican candidates which in Boston (where he grew up), New York or Los Angeles (where we’ve known him to work) again puts you in the minority.

Sandler has found a great and frequently used solution to this problem of being on the outside: use your pull to surround yourself with friends. We constantly see Sandler on-screen with the same people. David Spade, Kevin Nealon, Rob Schneider, Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, Chris Rock, John Turturro, Jon Lovitz, Clint Howard, Norm Macdonald, Nick Swardson can all be seen in multiple Adam Sandler movies. It is not rare to see people who have achieved a certain level of status in Hollywood use this to work with actors they like to work with with but what is a bit exceptional is his working relationship with Allen Covert, Peter Dante, and Jonathan Loughran. These three were college friends of Sandler whose combined filmographies contain almost no credits in movies that Adam Sandler neither acts in or produces. These are just his group of friends that he gets work for. I’m not saying Adam Sandler is some kind of loser who needs to hire his friends to work with him because no one else likes him, but everything I’ve read or heard makes it seem like he is a well-liked man who is easy to get along with. He appears to be genuine, grounded, sweet and funny. What’s interesting to me is the lengths he goes to not to be left out, while making movies that explore just that. 

Vulnerability is the root of all comedy and when we feel vulnerable, we feel like kids again. Sandler is someone I remember when I was a kid and I see his career as a showcase of how I felt when I was that age. And now I can see him dealing with problems of different ages but it all shows up to me through that lens, just as I said about movies you watch when you’re young. He could make bad movies for the rest of his life, or great ones, but my sense of him will be the same. It’s not about him or his work being good or bad. Too many things are wrapped up in it for those words to really apply.

Our podcast on The Dark Knight Rises will be up soon enough, and it makes no mention of what happened in Aurora. That is not because we don’t care about what happened; it’s because it’s simply not our place to comment on it.

Every summer, we are supposedly inundated by blockbuster cinema, with no way of escaping it. Weekend after weekend, we find ourselves with a new Spider-Man, or Batman, or Generic Action Man movie being released into the fray that is the multiplex. These past couple weeks, however, we saw a little bit of a calm before the Batman-y storm that is to come. And since we’re about to discuss Christopher Nolan movies almost exclusively for the next week of MacGuffin Men content, it’s high time to discuss some of the lesser-known but equally notable films in theatres right now.

To Rome with Love, Woody Allen’s latest film, is not a particularly good film, but it’s also not a bad one. It’s like most of Allen’s more mediocre late-career comedy work: it’s funny enough to be passable, takes place in Europe, and never totally comes together. Simply seeing the man who once played Alvy Singer onscreen seems to bring an inordinate amount of joy to a certain kind of person (read: me), and that Allen has only lost half a step in his comic timing as a performer is enough on its own to make the movie worthwhile. Alec Baldwin, Ellen Page, and particularly Jesse Eisenberg all feel like people that should be acting in Woody Allen movies constantly, and their scenes together are the highlight. As a whole though, the film isn’t particularly strong; its message is too blatant, which makes it significantly more difficult to be interesting. The film is remarkably (thematically and structurally) similar to The Lizzie McGuire Movie, which is an odd realization to make, particularly when you are the youngest person in your screening by about 40 years.

Sarah Polley’s sophomore film Take This Waltz is a better movie than To Rome with Love, but that is not to say it isn’t without its problems as well. Despite the movie being an interesting examination of a married woman’s desire for transition even though she seems to be living a pretty happy existence, only parts of it work as well as they should. The film goes a little overboard with some of its metaphors, what with the car crashes and the rehabs and the connecting flights, but what it does right it does spectacularly. Michelle Williams plays a confused married woman well, even in films like this that are less intense than Blue Valentine, and both Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen do a lot with little screen time. The movie is extraordinarily well put together, from music to cinematography, and the couple particularly clever dashes in the writing* more than make up for any dips into a drunk character instantly becoming sober and coherently explaining everything that is happening. Which is the worst, always.

*See: the film’s use of Video Killed the Radio Star.

But easily the best movie to see right now is Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild. There seems to be one independent movie each year that is kind of simple, but is executed so well that I (and legitimate film critics) happen to fall in love with it. It was Beginners last year, Winter’s Bone the year before and I assume Beasts of the Southern Wild will remain that film for the rest of 2012. The movie is deceptively simple, and despite the filmmakers’ insistence that the film is entirely personal and not at all political, the movie is just as much about the division between the rich and poor in America as it is the father/daughter relationship, particularly since the movie takes place in a flooded Louisiana. At its core, however, Beasts is basically a fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm story with a killer soundtrack. It takes place in a slightly different version of our reality, and it creates wonderfully potent scenes by playing off that and building to fantastical moments that make it feel like a Guillermo del Toro movie for people who never understood the Guillermo del Toro hype. By the time the movie is over, you feel like everything is the best, and all you want to do is watch it again. Time will tell if this is a great movie, but it’s certainly a very good one, and that should be enough.

One thing that is particularly striking about Beasts of the Southern Wild is its composition; the editing of the film is pretty great, as is its use of sound. When the movie ends and cuts to black, the viewer is ready to take on the world as the most triumphant of trumpets escort you out of the theatre. Basically, it’s like the end of one of Christopher Nolan’s last three blockbusters. There are good elements in both kinds of summer movies, and I’m unsure whether I’ll like Beasts of the Southern Wild more than whatever my favourite blockbuster ends up being this year, but I’ll know they were both good movies that co-existed in the summer. If I had to spend a little bit longer on public transit to get to Beasts than I will to get to Batman, so be it. I don’t care about summer cinema inasmuch as I care about good cinema, and there is plenty of that to be found in the months of July and August. You just have to find it, is all.

I just got out of a showing of The Amazing Spider-Man. Like, just. For all I know, the credits for all the people who did the awkward Lizard CGI are still rolling. I loved parts of the movie, and hated others, but that’s immaterial information here. What matters is that it taught me why I go to the movies at all, despite the fact that I thought I already knew why.

As a person who has gone to a movie theatre, on average, at least once a week for close to a decade now, I thought I loved the actual process of going to the movies. The purchasing of the ticket, sneaking in whatever I decided I wanted to eat during the film (this used to be something as exotic as steak, but these days I eat Miss Vickies like a little bitch who doesn’t want to spill steak juice in his backpack), and choosing the seat that will allow me to optimally stretch out onto the seats in front of me. These are all very important, enjoyable aspects of going to the movies, but I doubt I ever thought I liked selecting a seat or box of Count Chocula for in-cinema consumption more than the process of actually watching a movie. I might be somebody who goes to the movies more often than anybody would deem logical, but I’m not a lunatic. I go see Prometheus to see Prometheus, not to select an optimal seat in which to watch some pro-choice sci-fi. And when I have to go a while without getting a chance to see a movie, I get antsy.

This week, I’ve been out of the city in which I reside and on the other side of the country in Whistler, British Columbia. The visit is not recreational; I would not be here if I wasn’t being paid to shoot a video. (If only because I never have any money.) It’s been an extremely hectic week, most of which has involved carrying heavy camera equipment across Whistler Village and up and down mountains, as well as spending evenings listening to ad agency people I don’t know monologue positively about the more Orwellian aspects of FourSquare. While the parts not involving the incredible soreness that will continue to destroy my less-than-considerable physique for the next five days or so have been great, tonight I was so tired that all I wanted to do was sleep. Or go to a movie.

NO.

As I walked past a small, basement theatre in Whistler earlier that afternoon, I checked the movie listings that were taped to its front door, to see what I wish I was doing instead of carrying around 100 pounds of camera equipment. (I assume this is the lazy person’s version of window-shopping.) The Amazing Spider-Man was playing, a movie I was so interested in that – for approximately ninety seconds – it made me almost not want to go on this job at all. I assumed I wouldn’t get time to go see it until I got back into Ontario, but then I got lucky/just kinda fucked off for two hours.

When I actually went down into the theatre, I was first struck by how fucking old everything was. This theatre certainly remains unchanged from the last time a Spider-Man franchise began, and it looked like it probably hasn’t changed since Spidey animators in the 1960s used odd colour palettes to give six-year-old kids pseudo-acid nightmares. After buying a ticket, I had to walk down a weird, long hallway with faded James Dean and Marilyn Monroe paintings to get to my actual cinema, and the chairs in the room were so comically gigantic that two of me could have fit in one. The floor was sticky, I could tell the sound was probably going to screw up a bit at some points during the movie, and the pre-movie advertisements consisted of promotions for local clothing stores that inexplicably encouraged cheating on your spouse. I also wondered why the theatre’s left section was designed to only have rows of two seats, practically begging couples to give each other handjobs. But whatever, I was about to watch a movie. And regardless of the fact that I was pretty sure said movie would be aimed at the Twilight crowd, I was excited.

Again, the movie itself was far from stellar. The parts that were good were incredible, but even the good scenes never really flowed into one another – it was like a series of good three page scenes in a comic, but none of them ever totally tied together. Certain scenes made me extremely happy, and others pissed me off to no end. Somehow, though, at one point in the first half of the movie, I completely forgot where I was. Not like when people hyperbolically claim that they got lost in the metaphorical wilderness of good fiction, but I was literally confused as to where I was. After a particularly good scene ended and a worse one began, I realized I did not recognize the room I was in. Of course, I quickly clued in, and then realized that this brief moment was precisely the reason I go to the movies at all. People always over-romanticize the idea of movies as escapism or a way to truly lose yourself in something, but I never believed Peter Travers or Roger Ebert when they said these things. I assumed these were childhood feelings that they wish would still happen, but never actually do. Now, however, I might.

I cannot stress enough how rarely this feeling happens. In fact, I can only think of two other times in my adult life that this has occurred, and I feel like only the memory of one of those occurrences remains unembellished. It’s a weird, unknowable feeling, and whenever it happens, I’m perplexed. A similar feeling can occur when you find yourself moved emotionally in some way by a piece of art, particularly by an idea you didn’t realize you agreed with, or a piece of score that doesn’t seem like something you should even like. All emotions are like this; laughter, sadness, and excitement all have to hit you when you don’t expect it in order to deliver any sort of potent punch. If you can see the joke coming, or hear the John Williams music swell as a horse solves Nazism, the emotions simply don’t hit you as hard as they would if you weren’t expecting them. Since we’re all media literate beings in a world that often treats us otherwise, we’re rarely surprised anymore. And the only reason to repeatedly do something is to hope to be surprised by anything.

The Amazing Spider-Man is a movie about Peter Parker trying to find his place in the world: not necessarily as Spider-Man, even, but as the teenaged Parker, as we are in the post-Batman Begins era and this is how it is now. Despite having always self-identified with Pete (minus the murdered uncle, superpowers, and good grades in science classes) I never really felt like him when I was a teenager. I was a nerdier teenager to an extent, but I was always confident in that aspect of my personality. I was never good at sports, but I took gym because I liked it regardless of my lack of skills, and I shrugged off the consistent defeat at the hands of the better athletes. Nobody disliked me in high school, so I disliked nobody. I didn’t have a goth phase, because I didn’t feel I earned it, having lived a remarkably easy life. I still feel this way, but I’m far more confused about where I’m going now than I ever was as a teenager. When I was Peter Parker’s age, going to the movies a few times a week after school, I assumed I would graduate, find a job I liked and just do that until I die. Now that I’m about ten years older than my favourite teenaged superhero, I know I found that job, but I don’t know how to make a living doing it. It probably shouldn’t have to involve being deliriously tired from a paying job I’m not entirely into, but it might have to. So be it. Maybe I just need to continue to try to lose myself at the movies in order to figure out where it is I should be headed when I leave the theatre.

Ice Cube has been doing interviews discussing another sequel in his Friday series, which now contains Friday, Next Friday and Friday After Next. The film will start shooting as soon as Cube can convince everyone to call a movie Friday A Month From Now.

Although The Hunger Games doesn’t hit theatres for a few more weeks, it’s already looking like it could be the next big Thing. The movie is tracking so well that many analysts are saying it may have a bigger opening than Twilight, largely because more males will likely show up to a dystopian action movie than a female-led romance. So if you thought the whole Twilight thing got annoying and out of hand, imagine both genders acting that way. #TeamKatniss

Angelina Jolie reportedly rejected the latest draft of a sequel to Salt. Perhaps that explains her Oscars appearance: we all know she had given up eating food years ago, but now she won’t even consume seasoning.

The new trailer for The Avengers hit the internet this week and shattered The Dark Knight Rises’ total with 13.7 million downloads in the first full day after it was released. More amazing than the new record is the fact that 13.7 million was also the number of movies Samuel L. Jackson had to appear in to properly set up the story of The Avengers.

Michael Bay’s comparatively low-budget film Pain & Gain has added Tony Shaloub to its cast, ensuring that the movie has its vaguely ethnic character to treat in a racist manner.

Also, this.

Paramount, the studio that released The Godfather film series is attempting to stop a new prequel from being published. Paramount states that it purchased the copyright to Mario Puzo’s classic in mobster literature in 1969, and is trying to “protect the integrity and reputation of The Godfather trilogy” by blocking the book’s publication. So wait… you’re trying to protect the reputation of the Godfather films and you already know about the third one?

The nominations for the Razzie awards were announced this week, and Adam Sandler picked up a record 11 nominations. The head of the Razzie Committee has been quoted as saying, “Wait – don’t we hand out at least 12 awards a year?”

We really didn't want to look for Adam Sandler pictures, so you get this instead. You're welcome.

This week, an Amazon.com Gold Deal of the Day was a 59% savings on the Lord of the Rings series on Blu-Ray. Unfortunately, it was 59% off the price, not the running time.

Box office receipts are showing disappointing numbers for The Phantom Menace 3D re-release. I don’t really care, but I just wanted to see ‘disappointing’ and ‘Phantom Menace’ in the same sentence again.

Wes Anderson has directed two ads for Hyundai… which probably isn’t the Wes Anderson/Jeff Bridges collaboration you’ve been hoping for.

Singer Chris Brown and WWE wrestler CM Punk have become engaged in a public feud. In other ‘We Totally Didn’t Make This Up’ news, Chris Brown has also been accused of stealing an iPhone out of a fan’s hand.

Act of Valor, an action film starring real soldiers, was number one at the box office this weekend. The MacGuffin Men would like to take this chance to thank the brave men and women of America who were courageous enough to sit through all of Acts of Valor.

Also, this.

Safe House narrowly edged out The Vow to top the box office this weekend. Which is coincidental, because Safe House continues to reaffirm the vow Denzel Washington made years ago to exclusively play morally ambiguous badasses.

People like Joan Rivers, Regis Philbin, and Ed Asner have been announced as upcoming guest stars on Hot in Cleveland, further cementing the show’s reputation as THE place to see actors you thought were already dead.

Pictured: Somebody who is totally still alive.

Alexander Payne, the director of The Descendants, said this week while accepting an award for the film, that film editing is disguising how bad a film really is… So I guess somebody forgot to edit Warrior.

Whitney Houston’s funeral took place on Friday. The service was aired on Sirius XM Radio which, given the somber tone of the event, was a much more tasteful choice than Just Goofin’ Around JK Radio.

It has come to light that the British intelligence was spying on Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s, at the request of the FBI, including watching his home and tapping his phone lines. The files have been made available to the public, but they contain no one speaking, just old timey piano music.

Saturday Night Live announced last night that Lindsay Lohan will host its March 3rd episode with Jack White. It is as yet unknown whether ‘Jack White’ refers to the musician formerly of the White Stripes or if that’s just a nickname for Lohan’s stash of cocaine.

Also, this.

Todd Phillips, director The Hangover series, has re-upped his deal with Warner Bros. with 4 different projects being kicked around as his next directorial gig. Judging by The Hangover and The Hangover Part II, this ‘four picture deal’ thing essentially means he has one script that he’ll just be making four times.

This week, details emerged about the collapse of a deal between Hasbro and Universal for the studio to turn many of Hasbro’s famous board games into feature films. Instead of producing movie versions of Ouija, Candy Land and other board games, Universal has instead opted to pay a multi-million dollar settlement to Hasbro simply to get out of the commitment to produce the films. Universal Studios: paying not to make movies you’d pay not to see. In related news, even Universal thinks Battleship looks like a terrible movie.

This week in frighteningly ambiguous Hollywood headlines: Stallone and Schwarzenegger Join Each Other in The Tomb, which is the name of a movie they will star in, not a place where they have both gone for eternal sleep.

If you thought we weren't going to post this picture, you're out of your mind.

Cormac McCarthy, the author of the source material for No Country for Old Men and The Road, wrote the script for his latest project, The Counselor, which Ridley Scott is set to direct. Apparently, even authors hate those people who insist every book was better than the movie, as McCarthy clearly wanted to avoid his ideas getting in the hands of Akiva Goldsman.

JADS International is releasing a line of colognes to correspond with the release of The Avengers this May. Because when I see a Viking, someone from the 1940s, an alcoholic and a mutant put on heavy armour and work up a sweat, all I can think is: “I want to smell like that.”

It's these ACTORS that drive the ladies wild, not their god damn scent.

In an odd case about profits from The Last Samurai, a number of high-profile lawyers went digging through the garbage in order to obtain DNA evidence to win their case. Along the way, these lawyers happened to find approximately 20 copies of The Last Samurai on DVD.

Lionsgate Films is currently developing a Rambo 5, the development of which Sylvester Stallone is heavily involved. The film will either be ‘a passing of the torch’ or be Stallone’s version of Unforgiven, and judging by the fact that neither of those ideas appeals to even Alex, this movie is surely going to Ram-blow.

AGAIN! It's like the N****s in Paris for old ass action stars.

The Lego toys for The Avengers have been revealed, and it appears some of them might spoil key plot points. We here at the MacGuffin Men love comic book movies being taken seriously, but the idea of an adult superhero fan being up in arms about Lego sets spoiling a movie will never not be funny to us.

Also, this.