Which is kind of liberating.  It’s one thing to pore over the science fiction of Primer (2004), a time-travel movie whose writer drew from existing academic work (Google the Meissner Effect or Feynman diagrams).  Attention to detail invites critical scrutiny.  Not so in 2012.  When an aircraft carrier, swept along by a tidal wave, crushes the White House, there’s no point in saying, “Aha!  The USS John F Kennedy was decommissioned in 2007 and is in Philadelphia!”  (Although that is true.)

2012 is more in the spirit of (read: rehashes) popcorn-chompers like Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), all three of which were directed by Roland Emmerich, have date-related titles and feature the widespread destruction of the United States (respectively by alien invasion, an instant Ice Age and solar explosions).  You know you’re in a rut when you’re obliterating the White House for the third time.

Emmerich revels in epic destruction.  All three disaster films spend time and most of their obscene budgets on wide shots of cities in peril.  In 2012, we see the last of Los Angeles, then Las Vegas, then Washington, then New York.  While this is good news for anyone who dislikes America, it does seem a bit… oh great, now we’re rehashing, too.

You’d think Emmerich, who is German, would be less prone to Hollywood’s narcissistic obsession.  A major part of the appeal of District 9, this summer’s alien-invasion flick, was that it took place in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Finally, a disaster movie didn’t have America at its geological or ideological epicenter.  For Jamaican audiences, a blockbuster full of black people is way more shocking than an erupting supervolcano.

2012, which has both an erupting supervolcano and black people, adheres to Hollywood’s unofficial miscegenation laws.  Thus Amanda Peet and John Cusack (both Caucasian) fall in love, as do Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor (both Negroid).  Any other combination, the thinking goes, and American audiences would really think the world was coming to an end.  (And if the word ‘Negroid’ bothers you, stop giving money to filmmakers who perpetuate its necessity.)

If you can ignore the loopy plot, the sense of deja vu, the American bias and the romantic segregation, 2012 is fun to sit through.  For the first hour.  Maybe you’ll last through the second.  But once it enters hour number three, you just want everyone to hurry up and die.  (Except Amanda Peet.)  With most of humanity lost, Emmerich can’t readily make a sequel to 2012.  While this is good news for everyone, it does seem a bit… oh, never mind.

But then there’s Michael.  To lift a phrase from “Dangerous”, the man is divinity in motion (assuming God considers crotch-grabbing to be kosher).  Although we see a dozen backup dancers in This Is It learning to be copycats, no one moves like him.  On stage he outshines them, though they’re half his age.  After more than forty years in the spotlight, he doesn’t have any new moves (as he did 25 years ago, at the 1983 Motown 25 concert) or any new songs (as he did at his 30^th Anniversary concert in 2001).  His act has been around long enough for current performers to count him as an influence—see Usher (born circa Off the Wall), Chris Brown (born circa Bad) et al.  None of that matters.  Now, as the New York Times said then (1984), “In the world of pop music, there is Michael Jackson and there is everybody else.”

At least, there was Michael Jackson.  Because we know both the backstory and how the story ends, This Is It has accidental emotional hits.  When Michael uses his hands to send little energy pulses to his dancers and stage crew, the genuine, innocent gesture creates empathy for a man twice accused of child molestation.  When he works out the introduction for “The Way You Make Me Feel” with his arranger—slowly, meticulously, until it feels just right—you can’t help but have renewed appreciation for the musical prowess of a man overshadowed by spectacle and sensationalism.  And when at the end of a spectacular, sensational dance routine, frozen in final position, right before the darkness steals him away, Michael smiles… you can’t help but smile with him.

And agree—the show was going to be awesome.  For the This Is It tour, Ortega and Jackson shot elaborate film sequences for “Thriller”, “Smooth Criminal” and other numbers.  These sequences segued into live performances with pyrotechnics, Orwellian screens, and dancers everywhere—dangling in the air, blasted from the stage floor, moving through the audience.  It would have been Jackson’s most expensive—and expansive—show, running through more than JA$1.8 billion and 30 years of music.  Jackson was one of a handful of singers with a catalogue deep enough to pick, choose and refuse between hit songs.

Following the months-long media frenzy surrounding his death, and coinciding with an album release, the film teeters on the edge of exploitation.  Sony, AEG Live and the Jackson estate are all a little bit richer thanks to This Is It.  But then again, having seen Michael’s last moonwalk, so are we.

A lot of children’s entertainment, including the original Land of the Lost series, is designed around the principle of recreating, or reflecting, the supposedly fantastical, untethered worldview of children themselves.  Hence the talking puppet monsters of Sesame Street, the androgynous playmates on Teletubbies and so on.  Whatever the merits of this approach for kids (a subject open to debate), pitching the same material at adults is insulting.

And Land of the Lost—the movie—is made for grown-ups, albeit grown-ups who haven’t quite grown up.  It aims for the college fraternity humour that currently dominates American film comedies—the province of Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, Michael Cera and, naturally, Will Ferrell.  This aesthetic, where men in their twenties and thirties are stuck in a perpetual adolescence, thrives on scatalogical jokes, male bonding with an undercurrent of homophobia, and the misogynistic pairing of pasty, paunchy men with attractive women.

Two men, on either side of the camera, epitomize this trend.  One is Judd Apatow, with a hand in every recent entrant in the genre—writer of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan and Funny People; producer of Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express and a half dozen more.

The other is Will Ferrell, who has marshalled a long list of not-so-funny comedies—Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, Step Brothers and now Land of the Lost.  The Ferrell type remains static—slightly dimwitted, overly masculine, out of shape, untanned, lacking social etiquette, childless, immature and overconfident.  In other words, a suburban teenager, just older.

Ferrell, like fellow alums Sandler, Schneider and Mike Myers, honed his craft on the sketch show Saturday Night Live, whose stock-in-trade is the five-minute skit.  But five minutes, stretched to fill 90 minutes, should only get you one or two movies.  After cashing in with a few easy hits, the comedians struggle to stay fresh and relevant.  Adam Sandler has had mixed success with more serious roles (Punch-Drunk Love, Reign Over Me).  Ferrell’s attempts to escape his persona (Melinda and Melinda, Stranger than Fiction) failed at the box office—thus more tired retreads like Land of the Lost.

In addition to (or perhaps subtraction from) Ferrell, Land of the Lost has Danny McBride as yet another pudgy deadbeat, and Anna Friel as cheesecake (she spends most of her time in pigtails, a tank top and cut-offs).  This one should be deliberately lost in the Universal film archives.

Not that the title is inappropriate.  The multiple meanings, pursuit and intent of the law—and those who profess to uphold it—form the cerebral cortex of Law Abiding Citizen (at least, the parts of it where no one gets blown to bits).  Jamie Foxx, as Nick Rice, is a young, handsome, pitch-perfect lawyer with a great conviction rate and an eye on the district attorneyship.  You know he’s good at his job because his suits are impossibly well-tailored and he likes to converse while descending big marble staircases.  Can’t go wrong there.

Gerard Butler plays the victim of most of the crimes in the first paragraph, Clyde Shelton.  Rice settles, on Shelton’s behalf, for one death sentence and one get-out-of-jailbird, enough for his stats but not enough for Shelton.  Thus with the revenge motive firmly in place, the movie transposes into a head-to-head between the two men.

Vengeance, like love, is an inexhaustible font for storytellers.  Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) featured legendary knockabout Charles Bronson as a gunslinger whose brother had been hung.  His relentless pursuit of the murderer righted that wrong, but also represented citizen resistance to corporate greed.  Death Wish (1974) starred (who else?) Bronson as a Manhattan architect whose wife and daughter are raped and killed by street thugs.  His vigilante justice satisfied his personal loss and stood in for the real class anxiety and bourgeois fears in 1970s New York.

Law Abiding Citizen, by contrast, lacks originality, a topical social context, and Charles Bronson, any one of which might have saved the picture.  Shelton’s quest, while entertaining, seems wildly disproportionate to his loss and highly improbable (the script makes him rich just so he has enough money to keep blowing stuff up).  In addition, his system of retribution has the same evils as the marble-encrusted one he despises, killing relative innocents and meting out uneven punishments.

Crucially, in a film rife with transgressions, Law Abiding Citizen adheres to every tired law of Hollywood thrillers—black guy vs white guy (Crimson Tide, Along Came a Spider); criminal mastermind in jail (Silence of the Lambs); races against the clock (Nick of Time, 16 Blocks); car bombs (The Pelican Brief); loved ones in danger (12 Rounds, Die Hard); lots and lots of police vehicles (The Fugitive, Enemy of the State).

Butler is no Bronson, but he delivers a much more energetic performance than Foxx, who merely squints and grimaces his way through the film.  Although Foxx may have been thinking about the mediocrity of Law Abiding Citizen, and how he could recover from it… without breaking any laws of celebrity.

Little movies with big ideas are easy to love, and big movies with little ideas easy to hate.  High art, low art.  Simple.  So when a big movie tackles big ideas, as in The Matrix (1999), Wall-E (2008) and now Surrogates, it’s a little disorienting.

Feeling disoriented is intrinsic to Surrogates, which extrapolates advances in prosthetic limbs, along with our current penchant for creating virtual selves, to a time when everyone navigates the world via humanoid-robot versions of themselves.  Just like the Internet, everyone makes their alter ego more attractive than in reality.  Living vicariously through their beautiful surrogates, people experience the upside of life—like sexual promiscuity—without the nasty downside—like viral diseases.  Fail-safe mechanisms prevent extreme pain—running into a bus, for example—from transmitting to the operator.

The real upshot of surrogacy, however, is that societal evils and violent crimes have all but disappeared (since all the real people are ensconced at home).  No racism, no sexism, no murder.  Bruce Willis plays Tom Greer, an FBI agent without much to do until he grabs a rare homicide.  His investigation provides the narrative arc for Surrogates; the emotional arc stems from his ambivalence towards the technology.

The big idea being tossed around (while Greer gets tossed around) reflects that ambivalence.  One of the central tenets of post-industrial societies, and the driving force behind much of the global economy, is that newer, better technology inches us towards a more perfect world.  Apple unveiled newer, better iPods in September, as they did last September, as they will next September.  Email, then instant messaging, then texting, and now Facebook provides newer, better ways to connect with anyone you’ve ever known.  Your computer, if you’re reading this on one, is already obsolete.

All of which is supposed to be unequivocal good news, allowing us to do more while doing less, and work smarter, and other productivity clichés.  You probably have an iPod, and a Facebook account, and a computer.  Surrogates asks, at what cost?  In the film, the cost is clear—without actual contact, people have forgotten, or lost, an essential part of their humanity.

One of the cleverer aspects of Surrogates is how it visually represents that loss by flipping a Hollywood convention.  From its opening frames, the film is filled with extraordinarily fit, beautiful people, the kind of anatomical exceptions American movies are known for.  Except in Surrogates, they’re everywhere, a relentless inundation of plucked eyebrows, chiseled chins and tucked tummies.  You’re so sick of seeing perfect breasts that whenever someone unplugs their surrogate and stands up, their imperfections, their sheer ordinariness—mussed hair, dimpled skin, fatigued faces—becomes stunning.

Of course, plot holes abound, the heroes are white, and things work out in the end.  But for a highly imperfect, ordinary big movie, Surrogates is a little, well, appealing.