If I seem to have gotten suddenly stupider, it’s because I am watching the VMAs. Seriously, it’s more badly-produced than usual. At least Fall Out Boy is having a good time.

  1. Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995): I remember quite liking this movie when it came out, ie, when I was 12. Usually movies I liked when I was 12 turn out to be pretty bad, but this is still pretty great. I love how good-natured the whole thing is; as social satire, it’s, well, it’s not exactly harsh, but it doesn’t pull punches. But it is pretty kind to the actual people in the movie. Also? Alicia Silverstone was really, really great — she managed to be likeable and convey that Cher is secretly actually smart, but doesn’t know it. It’s way, way better than it needs to be, even if I’ve always thought it was responsible for that spate of high school movies that were adaptations of Shakespeare. (I might just be thinking of 10 Things I Hate About You.) Anyway, I love everything about this movie, including “Rollin’ With My Homies” and especially the fact that the makeover is treated as an attempt to assert control in an uncontrollable world, being therefore more about the makeoverer than the makeoveree, and furthermore as having mixed results, at best.
  2. 3:10 To Yuma (James Mangold, 2007): Holy wow. This is totally what I want from a Western: it’s a tiny, tense story about dudes and their moral codes, to which they stick the point of apparent absurdity. And those dudes are Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. I haven’t seen the 1957 version, but I can’t imagine that it was more brutal or more stark. They really get the brutish nature of life in the West, and you really get a sense of how isolated the towns are. Also, Ben Foster does a great job as the crypto-gay henchman, I thought to the point of making him sympathetic and three-dimensional, instead of just “dandy = evil.” But yeah, it’s a total dude movie, but it’s in a grand tradition of dudeliness that I find pretty fascinating. It was nice to see such a traditional, one dude against the world, doing the job he was hired to do, Western come out with such big stars. I love that shit.

Okay, when did Timbaland grow giant biceps? His arms are freakishly big. He looks like a pro wrestler.