There comes a time in every young film-goer’s life when he must ask himself one simple question- “Why the fuck am I watching Eminem yell at Ray Romano in a 140-minute comedy about Adam Sandler playing Rob Schneider with cancer?” I really have no idea what it is I just watched. All I know is it was interminable and strangely light on the, you know, jokes, which is a problem since writing jokes is basically all the Apatow/Rogen/Jonah Hill/Paul Rudd axis can do well.

Movie critics have a tendency to lump any and all humor that is related to sex organs or the fluids they produce into one big pile of locker room jokes, but that’s because most movie critics have never stepped foot inside a locker room, let alone successfully cracked a joke in one, and thus have no idea why Seth Rogen is funnier than Rob Schneider or anyone involved in any capacity with any of the American Pie movies. I don’t know who the fuck writes each of these movies (I can’t be bothered to figure out who exactly wrote Superbad and who wrote Pineapple Express or Knocked Up or Role Models), but whoever does accurately captures the way that guys who are relatively intelligent despite not having read the latest Houellebecq novel talk about sex and bust each other’s balls. This shouldn’t be that hard to do, but it apparently is since no one else in Hollywood seems to have a fucking clue how to do it.

Until Funny People, the problem Apatow and company consistently ran into is that they would often end up sacrificing the credibility of whatever movie they were making in the name of one or two jokes that it could easily stand to lose. Whatever sympathy Apatow hoped to generate for Steve Carrell’s plight in The 40-Year-Old Virgin was thrown out the window when it was revealed that his virginity and nerdfuckery were merely the result of some INCREDIBLY COMIC SEXUAL MISHAPS in his late teens (Dude, he totally just kicked that chick in the face when she was about to fuck him, that totally always happens!). Seth Rogen somehow surviving on 15 grand for 3 years despite the fact that he goes out on the town and buys 10-dollar beers at clubs and then finding a web design job in like 3 days when he GETS SERIOUS despite the fact that he has no marketable skills or training whatsoever in Knocked Up was some of the most ridiculous shit ever. And while I don’t find it as ridiculous as many bitter nerds do that Rogen’s characters often get pussy in these movies (after all, he credibly played one of the jock bullies in Donnie Darko), I draw the line at Jonah Hill landing a hot chick who doesn’t even drink at the end of Superbad, especially since he delivered every line in the movie by yelling like an autistic child.

Apatow manages to avoid these pitfalls in Funny People by refusing to put more than 10 jokes into his 2-hour plus take on the eternal tale about comedians who get cancer and think they’re gonna die and then end up not dying, and about 5 of the jokes rely on Apatow’s time-tested “deliberately cast a character who is odd-looking and then have all your other characters make fun of him,” gambit. Judd, it might be funny if your doctor randomly turned out to be a long-haired Teutonic giant in real life, just like it might be funny if your friend grew a really long beard for no reason, but all the clever lines lobbed in their direction seem a little less spontaneous when we know you just had your casting director find a big German guy and you told your no-name actor buddy to grow a beard if he wanted to eat this year.

A common criticism leveled at the movie seems to be that the last half-hour, after Adam Sandler finds out his cancer is in remission and treks up to San Francisco to try and win back his ex-girlfriend who is now married to Eric Bana with two children, is tacked on and feels like a different film. There’s some merit to this criticism, but I think it could have worked if Apatow had managed to lose some of the unbelievably boring middle section wherein Sandler just mopes around and Seth Rogen acts like a bitch over Jason Schwartzman fucking this girl who is one of the worst actresses I have ever seen. Sandler actually gives an impressive and ballsy performance in this film. His George Simmons is a legitimate dick, and not in a Dr. House, “this man ignores social conventions and is not afraid to tell it like it is and does not easily show affection,” kind of way, either. Simmons is a self-absorbed, petulant, unkind son of a bitch, and Sandler only lets the audience see brief glimpses of a slightly more decent human being. Of course, Apatow, never one for tact or subtlety, tries to drive this point home by showing Sandler failing to find any interest in Apatow’s real-life daughter’s rendition of a song from Cats, because he is a sappy piece of shit with a weird conservative bent (just ask pasty, beady-eyed ghoul Ross Douthat ).

God, this movie is a fucking mess. Apatow just doesn’t give a shit, he keeps doing whatever the hell he wants without putting any thought into it and the studios keep on dropping 55-gallon barrels of money off at his front door for him and his annoying family to roll around in. There’s a scene where Sandler decides to tell his ex-girlfriend he has cancer, and then they cut directly to the two of them sitting down in his house and they have a long conversation where it’s not even clear if he’s told her he’s sick yet for like 5 minutes. Have some fucking respect for your craft, Judd. Janusz Kaminski is still shooting his movies so that every fucking light source seems radioactive.

Eric Bana and the RZA were funny. Adam Sandler needs to make Happy Gilmore 2. I’m going to kill myself tomorrow.

I was ready to give up on Moon pretty early on in the second act. Things had been going reasonably well up until that point. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) was nearing the end of his three-year stint as the one-man crew of a lunar mining station who spent most of his time making videos to send back to his wife and kid on earth, scratching his unkempt beard, talking to a robot with Kevin Spacey’s voice, and having hallucinations of this broad in a yellow dress. The writing was good, the set design, shot composition, and overall direction was impressive, and Rockwell was turning in a great performance. I’ve always liked Rockwell- he’s like Phillip Seymour Hoffman only without being insufferable. Congratulations, Phil, you’re ugly and you have a scratchy voice. That makes you a serious actor!

Then Bell got distracted by one of his hallucinations while driving his moon-rover around and he crashed it and woke up in the station’s infirmary with no memory of the accident. Spaceybot told him some bullshit story and wouldn’t let him leave the base, but he distracted Spaceybot and got into one of the rovers and drove out to the crash site, where he found Sam Bell trapped in the wreckage of the first rover. He brought the old Sam back to the base and asked Spaceybot what the fuck was going on, but Spaceybot was less than forthcoming. It seemed that instead of trying to rescue the first Sam Bell, Spaceybot just left him there to run out of oxygen and die and whipped up a clone back at the base. Holy shit, bro.

The two Sam Bells started bickering. The freshly-baked Sam quickly realized they were both clones, but the older model refused to accept it at first. The new Sam overheard a conversation between the Spaceybot and some energy company bureaucrats back on earth, which was upsetting because realtime communication was supposed to be down. The Sams got in a fight over an exacto-knife, and the older Bell’s hair and teeth started falling out. This is where I really started to get worried.

We had two clones, one of whom was starting to reach his expiration date (although we weren’t sure if one of them was a hallucination). They were stuck in a remote location in space in the employ of a mega-corporation with dubious ethical standards, they were starting to get a little unstable, violence was in the air, and they were under the watchful eye of a robot that couldn’t be trusted. Also, they were playing ping-pong with each other. Basically, the film was a weird combination of 2001, Blade Runner, Fight Club, Alien, and any movie where a guy is alone for a long time and grows a beard and starts flipping out. And The Parent Trap.

Now, Parent Trap excepted, all of those are pretty fucking good films, and, up until that point, the filmmakers had done an excellent job keeping Moon fresh despite its derivative nature, but I had the sinking feeling that I knew where the film was going, and I was none too pleased about it. The two Sam Rockwells would end up fighting it out in the corridors of the station. Everything would be ultra-intense and claustrophobic. Maybe they’d end up uniting against the Spaceybot, maybe it would turn out one of them was a hallucination, maybe the entire film would be a hallucination, maybe they’d find the cloning machine and it would be like the time Calvin and Hobbes turned the transmogrifier into a duplicator, maybe it would turn out that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time, I couldn’t be certain. All I could be certain about was that I didn’t give a fuck. I was contemplating getting up and utilizing the free refill to which my large popcorn entitled me, but then something wonderful happened- the two Sam Rockwells started getting along, not just with each other, but with the Spaceybot, too. I’ll leave out what happened after that, I’ll just say this- see this fucking movie.

It seems that the filmmakers were actually interested in making an original, thought-provoking movie, one that is refreshingly understated and refuses to rely on cheap pseudo-horror or overly theatrical hysterics. Rockwell, as the only actor with lines not spoken over a video screen or radio, needed to give an outstanding performance, and he came through. His characters come to grips with their nature in a sardonic yet melancholy manner that never crosses the line into inauthentic movie cynicism, and the film is infinitely stronger for it.

Moon deals with questions of identity and what makes a human in a remarkably straightforward way, never stooping to some kind of Richard Linklater/Wachowski Brothers stupidity, but making a statement all the same. The Sam Bells learn that they are clones of the original Sam Bell with his memories implanted in their brains, but their humanity is never in question. They have working minds, their memories are real to them, and they regularly make decisions that attempt to subvert what the Spaceybot calls their, “program.” When the Spaceybot uses this term, Bell immediately informs the robot that he is a human and he has no program. There is no wondering about whether or not he has a soul or what it all really means- everything is real to him, and he has more important shit to worry about right now. How could he look at the situation any other way?

I still got my popcorn re-filled on my way out of the theater. I ate it all in the car.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is fucking atrocious. I have no problem admitting that I enjoy well-made comic book movies. Comic book superheroes are part of the American cultural fabric. If the guy who made Raise the Red Lantern can retain his artistic credibility while making movies about flying Kung Fu masters who fuck Zhang Ziyi without ever letting us see her tits, then Hollywood directors can churn out a few superhero movies without everyone getting shards of glass in the folds of their labia. At least white people don’t really believe Batman walks the earth, whereas Chinese people all have a great uncle who used to float around and flick bullets through foreheads.

The two most common criticisms leveled against comic book movies are 1) that they are strictly for nerds, and 2) that they are nothing but excuses for elaborate action scenes. The first criticism falls apart after a quick examination of box office receipts, and the second is only a problem for people with a stick up their ass. From Achilles and Ajax to Gilgamesh and Enkidu to D’Artagnan and his buddies to John Matrix, humans, or at least men, have always enjoyed tales of great warriors killing the shit out of a bunch of other warriors and/or monsters. The superhero movie just continues that tradition, and if the filmmakers want to tell us that Superman is a Christ figure and Magneto is Malcolm X, well, I’m all right with that as long as things don’t get out of hand and there isn’t some Frenchman walking in and delivering five-minute lectures on causality before 2 men who have never had sex try to write a scene that centers around a female orgasm. As long as the filmmakers keep that kind of shit to a minimum, the superhero movie is an improvement on the more conventional action movie, since there is at least some explanation for why the characters are able to outfight scores of men without someone just shooting them in the face.

I thought the first X-Men movie was pretty good. That speech at the beginning that tried to link humans spontaneously developing telekinetic powers and the ability to shoot lasers out of their eyeballs to Darwinian evolution was retarded, but the film’s plot was refreshingly low-key and logical– the villain’s plan and motivations for carrying it out actually kind of made sense, his objective was reasonable, and the film’s climactic scene only had like 7 mutants battling it out. It was nice to see Captain Picard again, and Hugh Jackman was a great find. Things quickly fell apart in the second film, though (IF HE THINKS TOO HARD, HE WILL KILL EVERYONE ON THE PLANET), and the third movie somehow managed to poochify things even further when Wolverine, Frasier Crane, and fucking Juno managed to kill like 200 mutants by themselves before Wolverine stabbed a suddenly ugly Famke Janssen to stop her from, once again, killing everyone on the planet because she was super-evil or something.

I was hoping that the series would recover with the solo Wolverine movie. Jackman’s wisecracks always helped me feel less embarrassed during the other films, and presumably the whole fucking planet wouldn’t be in grave danger this time, so I hoped this would be more like the first X-Men movie. However, Wolverine’s wife gets clawed to death like fifteen minutes into the movie, and that comes on the heels of a terrible child actor murdering his father, a Vietnamese woman about to get raped by Wolverine’s mutant half-brother, Sabretooth (played by Liev Schrieber), and some innocent civilians getting slaughtered on a soundstage that is supposed to be the forests of Nigeria, so humor is out of the question for awhile. When Logan starts trying to crack jokes again it is just out of place. Also, his straight man is fucking will.i.am.

To their credit, the writers do come up with a much more reasonable broad story outline than the last two X-Men movies, but the more detailed writing is so fucking bad in every scene that watching the film just makes me feel awkward, like I feel listening to deaf people try to speak. Danny Huston and his Asian valet come to ask Wolverine to re-join his elite mutant strike force, and when Logan’s wife asks why they want him, he explains, “because I’m the best at what I do.” It’s a pretty standard action-movie cliché, except the writers seem to have forgotten that before he makes this pronouncement, Wolverine has done nothing except skulk while watching Ryan Reynolds, Liev Schrieber, the aforementioned Asian valet, and one of the fucking hobbits kill a bunch of African mercenaries. They also seem to have forgotten that Sabretooth beats the shit out of Wolverine like ten minutes later, so really he isn’t the best at anything, that is, until he gets all the metal grafted to his bones.

After Wolverine gets the surgery from Danny Huston, he breaks out of the military compound and jumps down a waterfall. He knows that he is being tracked by an elite team of military agents who are fucking pissed, so naturally he decides to hide out like 20 miles downriver in some farmhouse where this old couple adopts him as their son after like 2 days. Wolverine is so grateful to the old couple that he stays in their house for a completely unreasonable period of time, ensuring that they will both get shot through the chest when the army team catches up with him.

Wolverine is super-pissed that his new dad got shot, even though it is his fault since he was basically using him as a human shield, so he gets will.i.am to take him to a soundstage that is supposed to be New Orleans because Gambit is waiting there, and Gambit knows where Danny Huston’s super-secret lair is. Gambit doesn’t trust Wolverine and suspects him of being in league with Sabretooth. 5 minutes later, Gambit comes upon Wolverine stabbing the fuck out of Sabretooth in an alley, but for some reason, that’s not proof enough that Wolverine is on his side, so he fucks everything up by fighting Wolverine and Sabretooth gets away. Then Gambit decides to take Wolverine to the secret island fortress which is on… Three Mile Island. For some reason, Gambit had to fly Wolverine there instead of just telling him, “hey, the base is on Three Mile Island,” because otherwise Wolverine would never have found it. Wolverine discovers like 50 teenage superheroes who are somehow being successfully held in a base with like 5 guards because they are in cages made out of chicken wire. Then for some reason, Wolverine’s wife isn’t really dead, she had some kind of deal with Danny Huston and Sabretooth, but then they betray her, which makes one wonder why they didn’t just kill her for real, and then… fuck it, you get the point. This movie fucking blows.