Mavis didn't really learn very much, in the end

I think there's something pretty brave about having us watch a character for an entire film and then ultimately not have her get what the point of the film was.

It'd be much more common to have a dickhead reform out of being a dickhead, but that isn't what happens with Mavis Gary in Young Adult, and it's the better film for it.

I watched Jason Reitman's film for only the second time on Friday night, my first since the year of its release in 2011. (And looking back on my star rating from that time, what a monster I was to give it only 3.5 stars. I've softened now. It's at least a four-star movie.)

It's truly a great portrait of malignant narcissism. It follows Mavis (Charlize Theron) through thick and (mostly) thin during three or four days coming home to her Minnesota home town from "the big city" (Minneapolis), after a picture of her ex-boyfriend's new baby appears in her email. Paradoxically, she views this as a sign -- from the universe, from him, it's not entirely clear -- that she is meant to be with him and that this is the time to reclaim him.

Mavis is truly a dickhead, a prom queen who never really grew out of being bitchy to people even though she is now in her 30s. Over the course of the narrative we learn that there is a reason, maybe, that she hates her life and life in general, and sees something better that slipped through her fingers. Yet she still treats people with casual awfulness, only really receiving a sympathetic ear from a high school loser and hate crime victim (Patton Oswalt) who was, in his own words, "born in love with people like her," and, paradoxically, from the wife (Elizabeth Reaser) of the very man (Patrick Wilson) she's trying to steal.

Theron makes Mavis an extremely interesting character, both because she's a great actress and because Diablo Cody has written her really intelligently. In fact, I think this may be Cody's most mature and, yes, adult screenplay in terms of her holding back on her showier instincts toward cleverness, even though other of her scripts have also made excellent movies (Juno and Tully, in particular). We don't really like Mavis as a person, but we like her as a character, and therefore we do hope she will learn something from all the indignities she puts herself and others through during this trainwreck invasion of her old stomping grounds.

She doesn't, but she almost does. That's the smart thing about this film. We get to see Mavis almost, for a moment, realize the effect of her own failed choices and resentments, and the alternately entitled and bitter attitude that has grown out of them, on the others around her. That includes her parents, who seem like decent people just trying to find the good person buried inside her.

In the end, though, she doubles down on the idea that her home town of Mercury is a shithole and that anyone who didn't leave is a loser.

I love this, because it's an honest admission that people are who they are, and they don't usually change their perspective on their entire life from a few meaning-intensive days in which they look themselves in the mirror. When people are told to check themselves before they wreck themselves, it's a lot more likely that they wreck themselves.

It distinguishes Young Adult from something like last year's Her Smell, which I obviously loved (it was my #6 of the year) but which has, you could argue, a far more simplistic and traditional redemption arc. I won't give away all the movie's secrets, but let's just say that Elisabeth Moss' Becky Something starts off far worse than Mavis, and ends up far better. That's over the course of a couple years, though. Maybe Mavis will get there after more time to think about it, but I doubt it. So while I probably like Her Smell better as a film -- hey, I'm a sucker for characters redeeming themselves, just like we all are -- I'd say Young Adult is more true to life.

The cool thing about Young Adult is that Mavis' failure to become a better person does not actually make the movie a bummer. There's a kind of jauntiness to the very ending, even though Mavis is clearly miserable. Maybe that's feeding the part of us that wants to see the prom queen bitch live with her mistakes for the rest of her life.

I was trying to think of other prominent examples of this redemption near-miss, and I did come up with a couple, though pretty rarely in the case of the main character.

One involving a member of an ensemble cast is Ron Howard's Parenthood, and it's the forever scheming black sheep played by Tom Hulce. Despite Jason Robards' best efforts to bring his son back into the fold and help him live an upstanding life in which he is responsible for the well being of his son, including a solid job free from the whims of literally and figuratively gambling away his future, he ultimately has to cut him loose. This is because Hulce's Larry, just a few moments after accepting the offer on the table, tells his dad about this one last scheme he has in mind. It's at this point Robards' Frank realizes his son is a lost cause. Larry almost got the point, but because he was constitutionally unable to change who he was, in the end he missed it.

It kind of makes me think of that great episode of Seinfeld where Jerry temporarily gets in touch with his emotions. By episode's end, the status quo must always be restored, and this episode is no exception. George tries genuinely to play along with this new version of Jerry, not realizing Jerry has already flipped the switch back to detached irony, and tells him he loves him. Jerry smirks and says "Right back at you, slick."

Jerry and Larry and Mavis can never learn, not really. It may make them frustrating human beings, but it makes them great characters -- and what's more, true ones.

This screener will self destruct in 10 seconds

We got to watch Young Adult last night, but it was a close call. For a moment there I thought the screener had destroyed itself.

As I've written about several times in the past, I have a friend who's in the Writer's Guild, who tries to either loan me one of his screeners, or watch one with me, every Christmas season. I was over at his house the other night, and I thought it would happen then, but the topic never came up. Then a couple days later he texted me and asked me if I'd seen Young Adult yet. A strange question, because it was the very day the movie was opening, and not even all that late in the evening. He said that he'd loan it to me when he saw me at one of two parties we were both planning to attend this past weekend.

Since my wife and I were both eager to see it, the DVD made its way into our BluRay player the very next night.

And was quickly ejected. Forcibly ejected.

The BluRay player attempted to read it, then spat it out. The screen flashed "Disc Error."

Uh oh.

Now, this has never been a problem in the past with his screeners. In fact, I know for a fact that his screeners have the potential for multiple viewings, because I've watched several of his movies that he'd already watched. In fact, I've even come into possession of one from about five years ago, and have watched that particular copy twice myself.

But there are warnings all over the disc that talk about prosecuting the person if the disc is found to have been uploaded to the internet and traced to this copy, and there are explicit instructions given for returning the disc to the studio if the recipient cannot agree to the viewing terms. (So let's hope no one is reading this who would have the motivation to trace things back to my friend. And if you are, hey, I'm a film critic, which means I might see an advanced free screening of this movie anyway.)

Plus there's an actual request for the recipient to physically destroy the movie by February 26, 2012. Yeah, like anyone actually does that.

Since I can't ever remember our BluRay player rejecting a disc, we thought there was a pretty good chance the disc had been designed to compromise itself once the film had already been screened once. But we tried to play it in my laptop anyway.

At which point it played through without a problem. Whew.

Well, there was one problem: I couldn't seem to get the DVD control menu -- which includes the volume, pause button, etc. -- to exit the bottom of the screen. I even took the disc out and reinserted it. That menu came on after I paused to adjust the volume, then it just wouldn't leave. For a second there we thought we'd have to pay this smaller price -- a distraction at the bottom of the screen for the duration of the running time -- for the right to watch this movie.

Turns out I just needed to move the cursor to anywhere on the top 80% of the screen.

Shows you how many movies I watch on my laptop.

As for the movie itself? Well, I know some of my readers are excited about this movie and would not want me to either confirm their excitement with a positive appraisal or curdle it with a negative one. Besides, as I learned from watching Charlize Theron on Jay Leno last night, the movie is only in limited release right now -- it doesn't even open nationwide until Friday.

So if I'm not going to give Paramount the money to see Young Adult in the theater, at least I'll help them out by maintaining a self-imposed reviewing embargo. You've probably heard about reviewing embargoes recently with regards to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, where Columbia Pictures was furious with David Denby of The New Yorker for posting his (positive) review in the magazine too many days before the movie was set to release.

Where that ranks as an offense next to unauthorized viewings of awards screeners, I'm not so sure.

December movies I can safely avoid

This time of year, it feels like we're being assaulted with new releases that demand our attention in the form of a theatrical screening. (Last week notwithstanding.) That is, they demand our attention if we want to be up on what may be getting Oscar nominations a month from now.

So it can be a real relief to make a determination about certain films that you just aren't going to prioritize -- whether they are Oscar contenders or no.

Two such movies are coming out next week -- Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. Neither of which are Oscar contenders, really. I might have been a candidate to see Holmes in the theater, except I still haven't seen the first one. (Call me old-fashioned, but I do my best to see these things in order.) And with Alvin and the Chipmunks, well, I think my disinterest in that goes without saying.

But next week's low-priority December releases are not, well, the priority for this post, because there are three coming out today as well.

Entertainment Weekly stole my idea!

You could look at it one of two ways:

1) Entertainment Weekly took a really good (if somewhat obvious) joke out of my hands, or

2) Entertainment Weekly saved me a heckuva lot of work.

See, the sheer quantity of celebrities on the posters for Garry Marshall's last two films -- Valentine's Day, and now New Year's Eve, which releases today -- gave me an idea a couple weeks back. Like I said, it wasn't a particularly original idea. But I wanted to mock up a poster for an imaginary movie called St. Patrick's Day, which would feature a grid of pictures of so many movie stars, the pictures would be too small to even identify them.

Then EW gets out ahead of me by making a parody poster in last week's issue for a fictitious movie called Arbor Day -- and for suggesting a half-dozen other holidays that Garry Marshall could make into movies, including plot outlines for these theoretical movies, a couple of the many stars who would appear in them, and a role in each movie for longtime Marshall collaborator Hector Elizondo.

There was some disappointment that I couldn't go ahead with my idea once I saw theirs, but the more dominant feeling was one of relief. I mean, if you saw this fledgling first attempt at manipulating images on Microsoft Paint, you'd know that I'd have to spend a really long time on this to make it look good. And come on, it's the holidays -- who has a really long time to spend on anything?

Regarding New Year's Eve, the jokes make themselves. I will say that I think it looks like a slightly better movie than Valentine's Day, if only because New Year's Eve is a slightly more exciting, cinematic holiday. (Even if Hollywood has failed to realize that by making more movies about Valentine's Day than New Year's Eve -- which has entirely to do with box office viability, since there's less competition in February than December.) When you come right down to it, though, all of the numerous plots in both films are probably about love, which limits their potential to really surprise us.

The interesting thing about these movies is that the casts are so large, every film fan should be able to find at least one cast member whose participation in this movie is disappointing. For me it's not Robert DeNiro, who jumped that shark a long time ago. Oddly, I'd have to say that Seth Meyers disappoints me the most. Not because he's got some stellar film career going -- in fact, he rarely appears anywhere outside the Weekend Update desk on Saturday Night Live. It's because as a funny guy who both writes and delivers funny lines, he should know better.

Stinker, Failure, Moldier - Why?

You can disregard any meaning in that subheading. I just thought it was a funny play on words. I'm sure Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a good movie, especially since it's directed by Tomas Alfredson, who brought us Let the Right One In.

But I'm down on the movie nonetheless because I've decided in the past couple years that I don't like spy movies. And I'm using the release of this film to tell you about that.

I didn't necessarily know I had a problem with spy movies, until I recognized a pattern of feeling dissatisfied upon finishing a spy movie. I won't go through a list of examples, but I will tell you about one in particular that helped bring home the realization: The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert DeNiro (making his second appearance in this post, in two totally different contexts). The movie is a semi-fictionalized take on the origins of the CIA, and it just left me cold.

What I realized during The Good Shepherd is that narratives involving double or triple crosses and people who speak 14 different languages just don't interest me. I don't find anything relatable in them.

You might think that's ridiculous -- how do I relate to a mob movie, a superhero movie or a political thriller? Well, I have actual answers for those questions. Mob movies interest me because they are all about the bottom line -- achieving an end by whatever means necessary. There's something primal about that. Superhero movies usually involve regular people who are suddenly bestowed with irregular powers. I'm a regular person, so that could happen to me. And a political thriller is interesting because I find the machinations of politics interesting, if often frustrating.

But I don't really care about characters in spy movies, because frankly, spies don't seem like real people to me. Especially movie spies, who are almost incapable of making mistakes -- they are preternaturally talented at what they do. While this should fascinate me, it sort of doesn't. They seem more like narrative constructs than real people.

Another thing is that spy movies often seem to revolve around periods in history from which we have already emerged unscathed. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is supposed to give us a sense of tension and urgency in its drama, but it takes place during the Cold War -- a conflict we have already satisfactorily resolved. We are supposed to gasp the way Gary Oldman gasps in the trailer, when he says "Tinker ... tailor ... soldier ... (gasp!) ... spy!" As if a spy is the most unholy abomination you could imagine, and should fill you with dread. The violins that kick in at that point of the trailer are meant to underscore that feeling. But I don't feel unsettled by a spy. I just feel frustrated.

In case you were wondering, James Bond gets a pass. He's a different story. He's more like an action hero than a spy. But I wouldn't be surprised if he does speak 14 languages.

The latest rehash of After Hours

They keep remaking Martin Scorsese's After Hours, don't they?

This time it's with Jonah Hill as a babysitter who takes his charges out on an ill-advised booty call that ends up involving all sorts of criminal enterprises and other shenanigans.

Meh.

Then again, I did end up really liking the most recent remake of After Hours, which was last year's Date Night, starring Tina Fey and Steve Carell. Against all odds and all prejudices I brought into it, I laughed a lot and really liked it.

Note -- The Sitter may be your last opportunity to see the Jonah Hill you've come to know and love. From here on out, he may be waaay too skinny for his body, and continue to look as weird as he looks in anything filmed in the last couple months.

How did that work out for Seth Rogen, Jonah?

However ...

I definitely do have one of this week's new releases on my priority list.

You can't look at this picture of Charlize Theron in Young Adult and not get your hopes up for a gonzo comedic performance, equal parts bitchy and pathetic. The trailers seem to promise as much.

Also looking forward to Young Adult as the fourth feature from Jason Reitman, who seemed like he might veer off toward serious material with Up in the Air. Even Juno and Thank You For Smoking dealt with hot-button issues (teen pregnancy and the tobacco industry). I like that this movie seems content to be just a comedy -- a smart comedy, but not necessarily an important one.

And come on, Diablo Cody doesn't deserve the crap everybody gives her. You liked Juno when you first saw it, admit it. Only in retrospect has her dialogue taken on the reputation of being too cutesy.

But I probably won't actually be getting to the theater at all this weekend. It's a busy one for me. Next scheduled theater trip will probably be Tuesday, when my wife and I plan to make use of a newly discovered babysitter (not Jonah Hill) by going to dinner and then The Artist.

However, don't be surprised if Young Adult sneaks in and steals The Artist's spot.