Essentially, Planet 51 is E.T. in reverse: kid befriends alien who has crash-landed on his planet, hides him from the authorities, and tries to help him return home. In this case, however, the alien is Captain Charles T. Baker (voiced by Dwayne Johnson), an astronaut sent on an exploratory mission from our own planet Earth. The world he finds is populated by little green men, including planetarium guide Lem (Justin Long), his buddy Skiff (Seann William Scott), and the girl of Lem’s dreams, Neera (Jessica Biel). While these teens quickly determine that Chuck means them no harm — as it turns out, they all speak the same language, so this isn’t hard to figure — the same can’t be said for the authorities, including General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and Professor Kipple (John Cleese), who have designs on capturing the captain and extracting his brain.

What follows is an escalating series of slapstick chase scenes that quickly reveal the poverty of imagination first-time directors Jorge Blanco and Javier Abad and screenwriter Joe Stillman (Shrek 1 and 2) have brought to the proceedings. The visuals are straight out of the “Bob’s Big Boy” style of retro-futurism, and although that’s appropriate to the setting — the planet appears to be stuck in its own Happy Days era — it’s a design that’s become very familiar in recent sci-fi animation. (See Astro Boy and Meet the Robinsons.) The celebrity voice fad has probably run its course, too; Cleese and Oldman know what they’re doing, but what’s the point in using physical specimens like Biel and the artist formerly known as The Rock for their indistinct pipes? Planet 51 promises an out-of-this-world experience, but it never really achieves liftoff.



The Twilight Saga: New Moon — As far as we know, there is no truth to the rumor that Entertainment Weekly is changing its name to Twilight Weekly… although at this point, it might as well. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson return for the second installment in the “OMG, my boyfriend’s a vampire! No, he’s a werewolf!” series.



The Blind Side — Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book about the evolution of offensive strategy in football gets the Hollywood treatment, somehow becoming Sandra Bullock’s bid for Oscar glory in the process. Bullock stars as a spunky Southern belle who takes in a homeless African-American teen (Quinton Aaron) and helps transform him into a first-round NFL pick.



Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans — Here’s yet a sixth reason Werner Herzog is more badass than Chuck Norris: he’s managed to transform his “non-remake” of Abel Ferrera’s pulp classic about an out-of-control cop from every film blogger’s punching bag (guilty as charged) into one of the most anticipated movies of the year.

The Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodovar burst onto the international scene in the late 1980s, with the happily transgressive comedies he made with his leading lady and muse, Carmen Maura (What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Almodovar, who fell in love with movies as a young boy in a rural small town, lit off for Madrid as a teenager, with hopes of studying at the national film school, which had just been shut down by order of the military dictator Francisco Franco. In 1974, the twenty-five-year-old Almodovar began making short Super-8 movies, little sex comedies that were shown in what passed for an underground film scene at the time. Irreverent, openly gay, and cheerfully provocative, Almodovar was everything that Franco had been determined to stamp out during his forty-year regime. The next year, Franco obligingly died, and Almodovar was off to the races. In 1978, he made his first — maybe the world’s first — Super-8 feature film, titled Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Tim. Although I have never seen it, I will continue to assume that it’s a prophetic behind-the-scenes look at Project Runway until someone persuades me otherwise.

This year, Almodovar released his seventeenth “official” feature film, Broken Embraces. The film, which opens in the U.S. on November 20, is a melodrama in Almodovar’s lush, color-drenched late style, with a movie director hero (Lluís Homar) who once had a great love affair with his beautiful star, played by Penelope Cruz in her fourth go-round with the director (after Live Flesh, All About My Mother, and Volver, his long-delayed reunion with Carmen Maura). It confirms that, at sixty, Almodovar still passionately enjoys what he’s doing as much as any old pro in the business, which, taken with his mastery of steamy emotions, makes him as much of a love expert as anybody around. What wisdom can we glean from his life and work?

1. Getting Off Is the Best Revenge: Almodovar’s early films, which seemed so giddy and light-hearted, were, in their original context, also political as hell in the way they flaunted everything Franco had tried to deny. But Almodovar didn’t see himself as delivering a rebuke to the dead dictator: that would have been giving the rotten son of a bitch too much credit. In a 1987 interview with the New York Times, the director said of Franco, “I refuse even his memory. I start everything I write with the idea ‘What if Franco had never existed?’” That’s really the strongest rebuke you could make to those who would shape the lives of others.

When Almodovar’s stuff first crossed into the States, it seemed to be set in a world where homophobia and AIDS simply didn’t exist, and at the time, this led to allegations that the director was an airhead. But he knew what he was doing, and like a lover who couldn’t care less that his beloved is dirt poor or from the wrong side of the tracks or is fond of karaoke, he knew what was and what wasn’t important to him. And what wasn’t important could take a hike.

2. Don’t Fight Your Feelings: In Law of Desire, the character played by Antonio Banderas falls so hard for the hero after they’ve had a one-night stand that he goes berserk, kills the hero’s true love, then stages a hostage situation so that he can force the guy to give him one last night of bedroom passion before being gunned down by the cops. No doubt Almodovar would concede that this is going a little far. The same goes for the murderous lawyer and her embittered lover in Matador, who find mutual bliss in a murder/suicide.

But the sympathy he shows towards characters helpless with romantic longing was a real corrective to movies like Fatal Attraction and a general trend, in the post-sexual-revolution age, against thinking with your heart, let alone any lower organs. Like Tennessee Williams — another gay artist who grew up in a repressive environment — Almodovar knows that sexual and romantic fulfillment can’t be taken for granted when they remain so hard-won for so many. So he honors those who go all the way with it. Even if yielding to your passion turns you into a monster, that may be better than playing it safe.

3. Beauty Is Truth, and Neither Beauty Nor Truth Is Necessarily What the Crowd Thinks It Is: Reviewing Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pauline Kael wrote that its cast of fashionable women all “know they look great”, adding that “that’s not a small thing.” Truer words were never spoken, and part of Almodovar’s greatness lies in both his belief in the power of beauty and his appreciation of the beauty in people who might not first seem attractive.

Almodovar began his career as the bastard child of both underground punk culture and Technicolor romance and fashion magazines. Other filmmakers (such as John Waters) who’ve “appreciated” the subversive, striking impact of weird and even ugly-looking people may have given them star treatment in their movies, but they still presented them as weird and ugly-looking. When Almodovar put unusual-looking people (such as Rossy de Palma, who is invariably described as looking like a Picasso come to life) in his movies, he lavished them with the same kind of attention he’d give a Penelope Cruz, and they really did look beautiful. Which is, of course, how our loved ones want to appear in our eyes.

4. After You’ve Sown Your Wild Oats, It’s Time to Grow Something Else: There are plenty of Almodovar fans who miss the crazy charge of the movies he made during his first decade as a director, and plenty who found those movies ridiculous but admire the more poker-faced melodramas he’s turned out in the ten years since his 1999 comeback film All About My Mother. There are also a lot of fans of both his early and late periods. In between, there are the films he made in the early-to-mid 1990s. These have fewer partisans.

There’s a reason for that: Almodovar reached the peak of his early farcical style with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and he seemed ready to move on. But for a long time, he didn’t seem sure what to move on to, and movies like High Heels and Kika feel like calculated outrages by someone who had grown past his wild-child persona but wasn’t secure enough yet to discard it. When he conceded that he’d grown up a little and let his work reflect that, he, and his movies, suddenly became sexy again.

5. Look Back on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Giggle: Some saw the blond, gay movie director who drives Antonio Banderas mad with lust in Law of Desire as Almodovar’s fantasy self-portrait, and the Almodovar of Broken Embraces looks and acts a lot like that character a couple of decades further down the line. As if to clinch it, Embraces includes a scene from the fictional director’s long-ago masterwork, which plays like an excerpt from Women on the Verge…, but at the wrong speed.

Part of the fun of Almodovar’s fantasy self-portrait is how little common ground it shares with the actual Almodovar, whom any number of young filmmakers would love to be. He would apparently like to come across as a handsome dullard with a stately manner who has a mysterious sexual attraction for every man and woman who gazes at him. (Embraces opens with the director, who’s gone blind, performing an instant seduction of a stranger, a beautiful young woman, who’s volunteered to help him cross the street.) The people we love may look very different in their heads than they do to us, even if we wouldn’t change a thing about them. Which is both fine and funny. Just be smart and don’t bust them over it.

Who is the world’s biggest badass, the Ayatollah of awesome, he who bestrides our universe as a colossus? Just a couple of years ago, a lot of people thought it might be Chuck Norris, but it turned out that the kickboxing Mr. Potato Head couldn’t even get Mike Huckabee elected. Meanwhile, filmmaker Werner Herzog was turning out some of the best work of his career at a dazzling rate. One of these, the documentary Grizzly Man starring the tragic naturalist wackadoo Timothy Treadwell, was recently selected by the Times of London as the fourth best movie of the past decade.

Having resurrected Treadwell via the power of cinema, Herzog will next attempt to resurrect Nicolas Cage’s career with Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a Gulf Coast noir that Werner wants you to know is neither a sequel to nor a remake of the 1992 Bad Lieutenant. Herzog also has a book out, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, and in December, the IFC Center in New York will premiere his other new movie, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, about a San Diego graduate student who murdered his mother with a sword (possibly due to an overdose of classical Greek tragedy).

So the sixty-seven-year-old director is a busy man. But Herzog brings more than industry to the table. Here are five reasons Herzog is more badass than Norris will ever be:

1. Stole His First Camera. Threw Himself Into a Bed of Cactus. Ate His Own Shoe.

Herzog was fourteen when he decided he wanted to be a filmmaker and stole a camera from the Munich Film School, reasoning that it was okay because he had the moral right to lay claim to the tools he needed to fulfill his destiny. Some might see this kind of thinking as self-serving, but Herzog also believes in personal accountability. When a cast member on the desert set of Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small was accidentally lit on fire during a scene, Herzog paid penance by throwing himself into a bed of cacti. (Asked later if it was hard to do, he replied that the hard part turned out to be getting back up.) The same fellow who had to be treated for minor burns had already been run over by a van during filming, so Herzog then told the cast and crew that if they’d all be very, very careful from that point on, he’d let them film him throwing himself into the cacti.

In the same spirit of fellowship and extreme literal-mindedness, Herzog once told his friend, fledgling director Errol Morris, that if Morris ever completed a movie, Herzog would eat his shoe. Herzog made good on his vow by boiling his shoes with garlic and herbs and consuming one of them at the premiere of Morris’s first feature, Gates of Heaven. The event was recorded by documentary filmmaker Les Blank in a twenty-minute short, prosaically titled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, thus enabling Herzog to transform an off-the-cuff remark into a publicity stunt for two of his colleagues.

2. Made Films on Seven Continents. Dragged a Steamboat Over a Mountain.

You want to talk about your global viewpoints? There are seven continents on this planet, and Werner Herzog is probably the only director to have made a movie on every damn one of them. From the start of his career, he’s been a master at not just photographing exotic locations but practically turning them into characters in his movies. In his 1972 masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the mad conquistador played by Klaus Kinski seems to have moved beyond fighting against the people around him — unworthy opponents — to waging war against the very air he breathes, which in turn seems more than happy to meet him in the parking lot.

Back then, Herzog was renowned for the extraordinary physical demands he placed on himself and his crews, often in remote locations, with the locals hired for such labors as the dragging of a steamboat across a large hill in the Peruvian jungle for Fitzcarraldo. Les Blank’s feature documentary Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of that movie and includes indelible footage of Herzog standing in the jungle railing against the vileness of nature, was released at the same time as Fitzcarraldo and so gave the director the rare opportunity to upstage his own movie. Herzog’s ever-shifting attitude towards the surrounding world might be best summed up in a recent quote: “I love nature, but against my better judgment.”

3. Got Shot During an Interview and Insisted on Finishing. Once Threatened to Shoot His Leading Actor.

While promoting Grizzly Man, Herzog was being interviewed by a BBC reporter when he laconically pointed out that someone was shooting at them with an air rifle. Herzog was struck by a pellet but insisted on finishing the interview, noting of his wound that “it is not a significant bullet.” By then, all the years spent trying to hold unstable, underfunded productions together on some far corner of the Earth had left Herzog with a veneer of unflappability, and the fact that he had actually steered the notorious Klaus Kinski through five leading roles and lived to tell about it had made him seem immortal. (He also immortalized their, for lack of a better term, friendship, in the documentary My Best Fiend.)

Kinski was notorious for undermining weakling directors with his tantrums and stunts, but when he threatened to walk off the set of Aguirre, his first film with Herzog, the director, citing “the higher duty” they both had to their muse, urged him to stay and then promised that if he didn’t, “I would shoot him. He understood this was not a joke. He screamed for the police. The nearest police station was forty kilometers away. And for twenty dollars flat they would have testified to it being a hunting accident.” It must have been like when Harry met Sally. The two were made for each other, even though by the time of Cobra Verde (made in 1987 but not released in the U.S. until last year), Kinski’s favorite pet name for his fellow German was “Adolf Hitler.”

4. There Is a Very Real Possibility That He Might Sort of Be in on the Joke

With guys as weird as this, you hope that you’re laughing with them, but you can’t always be sure. When you see Chuck Norris in Dodgeball or Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD, you get an uneasy feeling that they’ve heard of this thing called “irony” and that it’s been explained that it’s supposed to be kind of funny to see them this way and that they’re happy to do whatever it takes to extend their fifteen minutes but don’t really grasp why anyone would find them funny. In recent years, as Herzog has begun to spend more and more time in front of the camera, he’s become a more openly comic figure, and while no one could call him the deftest comedian since vaudeville died, there’s something endearing about his willingness to make fun of himself in movies like Zak Penn’s Incident at Loch Ness (in which he played himself, hot on the trail of the elusive sea serpent) and the comedy The Grand (as a scarifying gambler called The German, stalking the halls of his Vegas hotel with a bunny rabbit tucked ominously under one arm).

There’s also been an element of humor creeping into his performances both as ringmaster in his own recent documentaries and in his interviews, where he sends up his image as an intensely cranky old motormouth. He seems quite a bit different from the ascetic, fiercely mustachioed young man in Burden of Dreams, who only seemed a few ranting minutes away from spontaneous combustion, or at least a plaque in the Ulcer Sufferers’ Hall of Fame. Maybe Kinski’s death — in 1991, at sixty-five, from a heart attack that he’d been rehearsing for since John Kennedy was President — was a real “there but for the grace of God” moment for Herzog.

5. So Badass He Can Make Even You More Badass

Next January, the man who taught himself to be a major world director will officially begin preparing the next generation to take his place with the inauguration of Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. The RFS, in the form of “weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals,” announces itself as “not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs and wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lockpicking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims.”

Well, for those who’ve gotten laid off from their jobs in sex clubs and lunatic asylums and have nothing else going on in what’s traditionally a pretty slow month anyway. Just keep in mind that “The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.” Or better yet, just go steal a camera, you wussies.

Then again, Emmerich might snub Allen for thinking too small. 2012 is like Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and The Poseidon Adventure, all wrapped into one, featuring special guest appearances by Airport, Volcano, and Emmerich’s own The Day After Tomorrow. This isn’t disaster porn, it’s a disaster gang-bang. The countdown begins in present-day India, where geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) learns of the imminent solar activity that will cause the earth’s core to overheat, resulting in massive tectonic plate shifts, polar reversal, dogs and cats living together, and the end of all life as we know it.

Before long, a massive hush-hush effort is underway to build enormous arks capable of sustaining the human race — or at least, those members of the human race able to afford the billion-dollar boarding passes. That’s a group that decidedly doesn’t include Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), failed novelist, failed husband, and failed dad, who stumbles upon the cover-up while vacationing with his kids in Yellowstone Park. Curtis gathers up his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), and her current squeeze, Gordon (Tom McCarthy), for a race against time, trying to reach the arks even as the world crumbles around them.

To Emmerich’s credit, he delivers some of the best world-crumbling money can buy. Those who enjoyed his destruction of recognizable landmarks in his previous work will be delighted to learn he was just getting warmed up. Every ten minutes brings a new cataclysm: Yellowstone is engulfed by volcanic lava, Los Angeles tumbles into the sea, an aircraft carrier demolishes the White House, and on and on it goes. Emmerich and his digital artistes attend to every little detail, so you can just make out the screaming office drones hanging from girders and dropping to their doom as two skyscrapers collapse into each other.

But who cares about those people anyway? 2012 is all about how the end of the world aids John Cusack’s personal growth as a husband and father — and he and his family are just so adorable together, you can’t help but think it was all worth it. Presumably that’s how Emmerich sees it, anyway, but for most of us, 2012 can best be appreciated as an unintentional comedy. Woody Harrelson nails the appropriate tone with his Dennis-Hopper-on-angel-dust performance as a conspiracy theorist who was right all along. This is the $200 million movie Ed Wood never got the chance to make.



Pirate Radio — Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as The Count, a DJ who keeps rock and roll alive in 1960s England by broadcasting illegally from a ship in the North Sea. Bill Nighy is the ship’s owner and Kenneth Branagh is the stuffed shirt trying to shut them down.



Fantastic Mr. Fox — Apparently even Wes Anderson has gotten to the point where all his films are starting to look alike to him. Hence this stop-motion animated rendition of the children’s book by Roald Dahl about three farmers plotting to rid themselves of crafty Mr. Fox (George Clooney), who’s been stealing their chickens to feed his family.



The Messenger — Woody Harrelson (him again!) and Ben Foster are a pair of soldiers tasked with the unenviable mission of informing next of kin that their loved ones have been killed in Iraq.

This week, Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in the new film Pirate Radio, the story of a ’60s DJ who takes to the seas to broadcast rock music in the face of stodgy government content restrictions. The movie’s mostly fictional, but in tribute to the true defiant spirit of headbangers everywhere, we present the fifteen greatest acts of rebellion in rock history. Why give the finger when you could give the horns? — Peter Smith

15. Bruce Springsteen performs “American Skin (41 Shots)” at Madison Square Garden, 2000

In February 1999, immigrant Amadou Diallo was shot forty-one times by undercover detectives in the Bronx. The murder inspired Bruce Springsteen to write a song about American identity, but his the final product was grossly misinterpreted. Springsteen debuted the song in June 2000, just days before a ten-date stand at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Countless officials asked that the song be removed from the set list, and The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of New York City President, Patrick Lynch, blasted the Boss, accusing him of trying to “fatten his wallet” and calling for all law enforcement to boycott the show, both as attendees and as security. Springsteen, who contested that the song is not only not anti-police, it’s partially from the point of view of the police, went on and played the song for all ten dates. Nobody tells the boss man what to do. — Greg DeLucia

14. Jim Morrison and The Doors get higher on The Ed Sullivan Show, 1967

The Ed Sullivan Show, the variety program famous for breaking acts like Elvis Presley and The Beatles, is almost as famous for censoring them. On September 17, 1967, The Doors were fresh off the success of their breakout hit, “Light My Fire,” and were about to perform the song on the show. The group was even set to sign a deal that would put them on seven more times. All they had to do was appease the show and its sponsors’  request for lead singer Jim Morrison to not sing the line “girl we couldn’t get much higher,” a supposed drug reference. Morrison sang the line as originally written, and not only was the group banned from the show, but Sullivan refused to shake the Lizard King’s hand at the performance’s end. Rumor has it that Ed Sullivan later saw 2 Live Crew perform “Me So Horny” from Heaven and gave Morrison a hug. — G.D.

13. Jarvis Cocker interrupts Michael Jackson, the BRIT Awards, 1996

While performing his new “Earth Song” at the British awards show, Michael Jackson rose above the stage on a construction worker’s crane, striking poses that were more King James than King of Pop while a chorus of children (and a rabbi!) danced below. Jarvis Cocker, lead singer of alt-rock band Pulp, rushed the stage, pointed his ass in Jacko’s general direction, smirked for the camera, waved at Michael, and ran in circles to avoid security. Cocker was eventually held by police on suspicion of assault, but never charged. The rocker said he did it because Michael’s Jesus act was “not right” and “rock stars have big enough egos,” though Cocker probably didn’t mind the boost in Pulp record sales. He insisted that rock ‘n’ roll was meant to stick it to “The Man,” and in this case “The Man” was Michael Jackson.  — Eric Larnick

12. The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young” video, 1986

The Replacements always had a knack for giving the finger in the funniest way possible. Among their capers: stealing their own master tapes and hurling them into the Mississippi; sandwiching the heartrending track “Unsatisfied” between a Kiss cover and something called “Gary’s Got a Boner”; capping a drunken SNL performance with a shouted “motherfucker!” But perhaps most legendary was their response to their record company’s request for a video. (Remember that at this point many indie bands still considered MTV an enemy worth fighting.) The resulting clip, for the anthemic “Bastards of Young,” consists of an unbroken three minutes of a stereo playing the song. Some allege that this gag was simply the result of a band too hungover to shoot a real video; plausible, but what’s the difference? — P.S.

11. The Sex Pistols play “God Save the Queen” at the House of Parliament, 1977

From the moment groundbreaking punk rockers The Sex Pistols wrote “God Save The Queen,” the song was marred in controversy. On March 10, 1977, the band was signed by A&M Records — then released from their contract just six days later, leaving 25,000 copies of the single to be destroyed. In May, Virgin Records signed the band, but the song’s lyrics and album cover — featuring the Queen’s face with the title over her eyes and mouth — offended employees at the pressing plant, who then refused to work. The single eventually was released on May 27. In June of that year, to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, her majesty was to set sail down the River Thames, past the House of Parliament. Two days before the procession, the Pistols stole the Queen’s thunder by chartering a boat for same route, while blasting their “tribute” to her. Eleven people were arrested as a result — but that’s a small price to pay for lasting rock ‘n’ roll infamy. — G.D.

10. Pearl Jam’s Fights Ticketmaster, Congress, Everybody

When Pearl Jam’s Ten debuted in 1991, the group (and the world) had no idea what they were in for. With constant radio play, the “Jeremy” video  in heavy rotation on MTV, and Eddie appearing in thousands of glossies across the globe, the group used their fame to stood up for a variety of progressive issues, as they have ever since. They backed a woman’s right to choose (see Eddie write “pro-choice” on his arm during the “MTV Unplugged” segment above); they testified against Ticketmaster’s venue monopolization in front of Congress; and they vehemently protested the Iraq war (Vedder would mockingly wear a George W. Bush mask during concerts in 2003). Sure, the band might have alienated some fans along the way, but nearly twenty years after their debut, Pearl Jam has a worldwide fan base, and they’ve been copied by everyone from Creed to Nickelback. If only credibility could be mimicked. — G.D.

9. Public Enemy pen “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” 1992

Believe it or not, it wasn’t until this millennium that all fifty states recognized Martin Luther King, Jr., Day as a national holiday. In fact, as late as 1991, Arizona governors Evan Mecham and Fife Symington didn’t feel it was important enough to put on the books. Fed up and angry, Chuck D and company put out “By The Time I Get To Arizona” just before the 1992 celebration of the civil-rights hero. With lyrics like “I urinated on the state while I was kickin’ this song” and a video that featured Mista Chuck and the rest of PE assassinating the governor and other politicians, the video played only briefly on MTV. It drew much outrage, but the point was made: that same year, Arizona voted in favor of recognizing the holiday. — G.D.

8. Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” Video, 1989

Before Britney banked her multi-million-dollar deal with Pepsi, Madonna broke new ground by being the first recording artist to release a song through a TV ad. In the ad, a grown-up Madonna watches a black-and-white home video of herself coming of age while “Like a Prayer” chimes in the background. It’s a sweet little scene, which is why Pepsi was stunned when the actual music video came out. The antithesis of commercially viable, it featured Madonna writhing on a church floor, romancing a statue of a black Jesus, bearing the stigmata and dancing on a field of burning crosses. After the American Family Association had a near-meltdown over the video, Pepsi pulled the commercial version from the air, explaining that the video tarnished the wholesome spirit of the ad. Madonna still walked away with five million, empowering religious dissenters and filthy rich iconoclasts everywhere. Of the reaction, she remarked, “When I think of controversy, I never really think people are going to be half as shocked as they are at what I do.” And she’s humble, too! — Lindsay Cutler

7. Rockers rage against censorship and the PMRC, 1985

Dee Snider, John Denver and Frank Zappa might not be the ideal super group (Vanilla Ice, Pat Boone and Satan makes more sense). But they banded together in 1985 to resist Tipper Gore’s PMRC, a group of D.C. wives dedicated to stomping out the “porn rock” of Motley Crue and Cyndi Lauper (seriously). During a Senate hearing, Zappa attacked the PMRC’s motives and even suggested the only reason the Senate agreed to the hearings was their wives’ willingness to perform oral sex. Less controversial but equally surprising was “safe” folk rocker Denver’s testimony that censors often misinterpret lyrics, as they had with his hit “Rocky Mountain High.” And Dee Snider, making history as the only witness to appear in front of the Senate dressed like Dee Snider, explained that Twisted Sister’s “Under The Blade” was actually about undergoing surgery and “the only sadomasochism, bondage, and rape in this song is in the mind of Ms. Gore.” The parental-advisory stickers seen on albums today are a result of these hearings, but these three musicians proved you can fight all the way to the top to protect your art, even if that art is “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” — G.D.

Some years ago, driven to the brink of doleful and giddy insanity after copious Zimas and VHS viewings of Say Anything, my best friend and I decided it would be a good idea for the school system to offer, along with its standard curriculum in Human Growth and Development (our clumsy, fundamentalist Christian-friendly term for Sex Ed), a class geared toward our male classmates, instructing them in one subject: how to be like John Cusack.

“They’d teach them how to express their feelings, how to be sincere and loving,” I said. “You know. How to be men. Good men.”

“It wouldn’t have to be required,” my friend agreed. “It could be an elective. But when they all see how much pussy those guys are getting, they’ll all want to take it.”

Needless to say, our school board didn’t go for this idea, perhaps worrying that if it was implemented, the teen pregnancy rates in Omaha would skyrocket to rural Mississippi levels. But they were wrong, because John Cusack would always use a condom if you wanted, and never pressure you into doing anything you weren’t ready for. John Cusack was perfect, or rather, perfectly imperfect. He was obsessively romantic without being creepy, smart without being pompous, handsome, but not intimidatingly so. The kind of guy who might sit beside you in study hall, unnoticed, scribbling Smiths lyrics in ballpoint pen on the manila dividers of his Mead five-subject notebook, until one day you locked eyes and you realized that you loved him.

But then something happened. I didn’t know this then, but John Cusack’s appeal — his oversized trenchcoat, the eyes like two smears of day-old mascara, the raspy voice of an over-caffeinated cartoon fox — was never going to age well. I saw him a couple of years ago, loping down University Place in an NYPD baseball cap which topped a face that looked suspiciously like it was wearing base. And he stopped making movies, or rather, started making only the kind of movies that you make for money. And I’d fallen in love with him in the early ’90s, before we knew money mattered. That was a long time ago. Now I’m older, and I’ve started to have recurring sexual dreams about Jack Donaghy — not even Alec Baldwin, but Jack Donaghy.  I no longer want someone who loves me enough to stand outside my bedroom window with a boombox in the middle of the night, but someone who loves me enough to let me watch the Real Housewives when the Yankees are on. Someone who pays the Time-Warner bill on time and doesn’t give me a well-intentioned lecture on global poverty when I feel like I need a $900 handbag.

And I guess John Cusack doesn’t want to be that sweet, well-intentioned, self-improving guy anymore, or he wouldn’t be starring in a we-are-all-doomed-paranoia-fest like this week’s 2012. Because the old John Cusack didn’t think mankind’s destruction was inevitable. The old John Cusack was the kind of guy who, when he grew up, was going to (sweetly, well-intentionedly) break through the soulless murk of the Reagan years towards something tender and real. If he was cynical, or grouchy, it was for sake of self-preservation, not because he was trying to keep up with some preening nihilist shithead like Bill Maher on late-night cable television. The old John Cusack believed in things. And we believed him.

But none of this is really John Cusack’s fault. It’s not his fault that his current existence reminds us how much our teenage selves would hate the people we’ve become. For better or for worse (and mostly for the worse) we all grow up. But there’s one thing that no matter how I try I can’t erase from my mind. One insistent, unignorable thing that seems to indicate that the old John Cusack was perhaps not all I thought he was.

John Cusack, however indirectly, is responsible for Jeremy Piven.

I can forgive him for getting old. I can forgive him for Runaway Jury. I can forgive him for Must Love Dogs. I can even forgive him for Con Air. And while I love him, just like I love all the men who sweetly broke my heart, I can’t, I just can’t, quite forgive him for that.

Forget Scientology or Heaven’s Gate. Today, the biggest cult in our country may very well be the teeming masses anxiously awaiting the return of Arrested Development. After years of rumors and dashed hopes, it seems the beloved TV show will finally be reincarnated, this time on the big screen.

But don’t break out your Cornballers yet: the film isn’t set to hit theaters until 2011. How will you last that long? While you can treasure your DVD collection of all three seasons, you’ll probably want to vary things up in the year-plus before we get sweet relief. Off the top of your head, you might know to watch Michael Cera in Juno, but where can you find Judy Greer in a role as crazy as Kitty Sanchez? Will Arnett as a man as bumbling and self-involved as Gob? Or Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman having more comical (and sexual) misunderstandings than they did as Rita Leeds and Michael Bluth? Nerve and IFC have joined forces to give you all the help you need — here are the Top 20 films to Give You Your Arrested Development Fix*.

* Until they actually make the movie.

Amy Poehler (Bride of Gob): Angie in BABY MAMA (2008)

Poehler’s Arrested Development character — who never had an actual name that we (or her on-screen husband) were privileged to learn — met Gob while out partying and essentially married him on a dare. Like the white-trash menace whom Tina Fey hired to carry a child for her in Poehler’s leading-lady movie debut, she was a feisty, impulsive gal who preferred to make her most life-altering decisions while drunk.

Michael Cera (George Michael Bluth): America Hoffman in STEAL THIS MOVIE (2000)

In his post-A.D. movie roles (Superbad, Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Year One), Cera has maintained his ownership of a certain character type: the paralytically shy, lovestruck guy with romantic angst raging beneath his soft-spoken exterior. If this is understood as the defense strategy of someone who grew up in insane circumstances, in a bizarre family beset by legal difficulties, it all might have its roots in his pre-teen appearance in this Abbie Hoffman biopic. He plays Abbie’s son, who has to contend with the pains and sorrows of having a celebrity fugitive for a father, not to mention having that name.

Tony Hale (Byron “Buster” Bluth): James Epstein in THE INFORMANT! (2009)

Surprisingly enough, no Arrested Development regular has shown greater range in other roles than Hale, and in his small role as Matt Damon’s lawyer in Steven Soderbergh’s gonzo true-crime story, he finds himself in the non-Blusterish position of being perhaps the sanest person in the room. On the other hand, he’s in the very familiar situation of having to deal with a mess made by someone who might possibly be just the teeniest bit unhinged. By the end, he’s wearing the expression that, with Buster, always signaled a strong recurring desire to retreat to the safety of his mother’s womb.

Dave Thomas (Uncle Trevor): Boris Badunov in BORIS AND NATASHA (1992)

Before playing the strange, menacing figure keeping a watchful eye on Rita Leeds in Arrested Development, Thomas had the chance to duck around corners and consort with a beautiful, mysterious woman in this live-action feature based on the villains from the classic Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Although this was in some ways a masterstroke of casting, the movie itself has been seen by so few people that the CIA would have done well to rewrite the script as a hiding place for state secrets.

Charlize Theron (Rita Leeds): Mary Embrey in HANCOCK (2008)

In this twisty superhero story, Theron had to stretch to play a woman with a loving family, a deep, dark secret — and the ability to throw Will Smith through a wall. She got to warm up for the part with her story arc on Arrested Development, playing a mystery woman with an English accent, which also gave her a chance to practice being inscrutable, foreign, and badly misunderstood by Jason Bateman.

So it comes as no surprise that director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan have taken some liberties in an effort to pull a narrative thread from Ronson’s book. They aren’t entirely successful — the third act is especially problematic — but at its best, Goats maintains a giddy Dr. Strangelove-via-the-Coen-Brothers vibe, with a strong assist from Jeff Bridges as a Lebowski-esque Special Forces officer turned hippie acidhead.

Ewan McGregor and his shaky American accent play Bob Wilton, a journalist (and obvious Ronson stand-in) looking for the biggest scoop of his life. He finds it in Iraq in the person of Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a former Army intelligence operative who claims to have been part of a top-secret unit known as the First Earth Battalion. Under the command of New Age military man Bill Django (Bridges), Cassady and his fellow psychic soldiers (or “Jedi knights,” as he insists on calling them in the presence of the man who was Obi-Wan Kenobi) were trained in unconventional warfare techniques like remote viewing, walking through walls and yes, stopping a goat’s heart with their minds.

The project turns sour when the military brass begins applying Django’s “warrior monk” methods toward more nefarious means of psychological warfare, including the torture of prisoners. At this point (which is more or less when Kevin Spacey enters the picture as a smug rival of Cassady’s), Goats begins to lose its way, as the refreshing absurdist tone of the first hour gives way to unconvincing action. For the most part, however, Goats is such nutty, trippy fun that it’s easy to forgive its missteps.



A Christmas Carol — Technology can be used for either good or evil, and unfortunately Robert Zemeckis has chosen the latter, turning his Polar Express/Beowulf performance-capture software towards plaguing us with an animated adaptation of the Dickens classic populated almost entirely by Jim Carrey.



The Fourth Kind — If Paranormal Activity didn’t satisfy your insatiable hunger for genuinely fake “found footage,” this allegedly fact-based thriller starring Milla Jovovich as a psychologist investigating alien abductions in Alaska should do the trick.



The Box — Will Cameron Diaz press the button that will make her a millionaire at the cost of someone’s life? Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly follows up the disastrous Southland Tales with this Twilight Zone-ish sci-fi fable based on the short story by Richard Matheson.

If, on the other hand, you’re already up to speed with the 1974 Pelham, it can’t hurt to give Scott’s take a whirl. It’s never better than it has to be, but as bone-rattling, state-of-the-art action movies go, you could do a lot worse. Travolta takes over the Robert Shaw role as the lead hijacker of the subway train, while Washington fills Matthau’s shoes as dispatcher Walter Garber. Calling himself “Ryder,” the hijacker cuts loose one subway car and holds its nineteen occupants hostage, demanding a ten-million-dollar ransom from the city of New York. If he doesn’t receive the money within one hour, he’ll start killing the hostages — one per minute until the ransom arrives.

Scott employs his usual array of techno-trickery to goose the suspense — freeze-frames, super-slow motion that suddenly bursts into super-speed, a music score set to a jackhammer beat and volume — but he also employs a strong supporting cast, including John Turturro as a hostage negotiator and James Gandolfini as the mayor. He and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) attempt to stir up some comic-book psychodrama between Garber and Ryder, but it’s the suspense inherent in the original scenario that keeps this Pelham on the fast track.



G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra — Not satisfied with being bludgeoned senseless by Michael Bay’s Transformers sequel this summer, the American moviegoer also embraced this CGI overdose based on the line of Hasbro toys. What, you thought we were going to say “based on the novel by Tolstoy”?



I Love You, Beth Cooper — What happens when the geeky valedictorian (Paul Rust) declares his love for the hottest girl in school (Hayden Panettiere) during his commencement address? Another formulaic teen comedy happens, that’s what.



Wings of Desire — Just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Criterion Collection comes through with a deluxe two-disc edition of Winged Desire, Wim Wenders’ lyrical meditation on angels hovering over a city divided by the Cold War. Features include the 2003 documentary The Angels Among Us and a commentary by Wenders and star Peter Falk.

They say love is blind, and while we may find that old axiom falls just short of true in real life, it certainly rules in the land of television and film. The “couple that shouldn’t work but does” is a romantic comedy staple – she works in an independent bookstore, but he’s the son of a chain that threatens her livelihood! Or, she’s a pediatric nurse, but he develops high-grade child-vaporizing technologies for the military! Somehow, those crazy kids just go together so well. But what about when the movies convince us to root for a couple whose union we’d see in reality as immoral, irresponsible, or even illegal? These are the ten couples that we love on screen, but would greet with a general chorus of “Ewwwww” if they moved in next door.

10. Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and the Beast But wait, you say, this is a magical and beautiful parable about looking past a person’s outward appearance. He was so mean, and she was so scared, but eventually they learned to love each other through the charming machinations of possessed dinnerware! Tale as old as time! Okay, sure – that’s all true. But can we get a mock-up at what that famous dance would actually look like in real life?

Don’t worry, once they make out that dog will totally become a hot dude.

9. Buffy and Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer This relationship has issues on both sides. When they first meet, Buffy has the mind and body of a sixteen-year-old, while Angel has the body of at least a twenty-four-year-old and the mind of a two-hundred-year-old, which means their affair is totally illegal. (Not to mention the fact that Angel first saw Buffy when she was fifteen.) On Buffy’s end, there’s the fact that Angel is dead (and, like any good corpse, cold and pale), and her mission to kill every one of his kind. Of course, this all made for wonderful drama and epic romance, but if a teenage girl were dating a seventy-year-old in real life? The officers have some questions they’d like you to answer, Mr. Angel.

8. Dexter and Rita, Dexter She, a divorcee and survivor of domestic abuse; he, a serial killer guided by a strict code of only killing people he was taught to dislike. Maybe if they can make it work, they will both help each other grow as people. Or maybe Rita will make a spectacular lampshade; who can say? The show is good at getting us to root for these two, but when you take a step back it’s a bit uncomfortable. The baseline for a successful relationship should be just a bit higher than “did not kill significant other today.”

7. Will Schuester and Emma Pillsbury, Glee As part of the musical-cartoon fantasy world of Glee, these two characters are as cute as a sack of puppies when they’re together, whether that means cleaning the science wing after hours, doing well-choreographed dances to hip-hop from the ’90s, or convincing the kids in glee club that their futures hold more than and endless river of purple slushies thrown in their faces. The one small hitch with their relationship is, of course, Will’s wife and Emma’s fiance. Now, the former has often come off as maddeningly self-involved and crazy (she’s faking a pregnancy), leading to often-intense dislike among the show’s audience. But we still wish they would dump the chumps and have adorable, wide-eyed, musically talented babies together.

6. Benjamin Braddock and Mrs. Robinson, The Graduate The cougar before there were cougars, the MILF before MILFs, Anne Bancroft’s portrayal of the mature and sexy Mrs. Robinson is legendary. And for good reason: they may not have ended up together at the end, but the chemistry between Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman, as the aimless young man she seduces, was palpable throughout the film. Given the ambiguous ending of the film, you have to admit: there’s a part of you that wanted young Benjamin to forget the daughter and devote himself completely to the mom. Nothing like the combination of a cad and an adulteress to really get the blood flowing, right?