Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: King Solomon's wines

While the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise started with a fun, fresh take on a notoriously stale brand of box office poison, eight years and two directors later, the plastic surgery is finally catching up to it. Like the unintended consequences of a genie’s wish, the children’s adventure serial has achieved immortality at the cost of its integrity, which I don’t mean spiritually—this whole shebang is based on a roller coaster, after all—so much as physically: On Stranger Tides is an unnaturally sagging, surgically distended mess. But beneath the aging collagen flab and melting silicone balloons is a fun next episode, and unlike most of today’s unfocused blockbusters, at least On Stranger Tides tries to have a point beyond keeping its studio in the black.

Bridesmaids: Funny girl

I’m shocked—shocked!—to find the big, dirty bone of contention with Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids is the centerpiece gross-out scene, when whole mailing lists of people expecting a nice, polite feminist comedy were driven to conniptions because pretty, sweet Ellie Kemper vomited on Wendi McLendon-Covey and poor, put-upon Maya Rudolph was reduced to a curbside bowel movement. My stars! A thousand teeth-gnashers left early to write their headlines: How is toilet humor a win for feminism?

Thor: Norwegian wood

If you only see one small-town American story with an Oedipal skeleton enveloping space and time and prehistoric beasts this summer, please, for the love of all that is cinematically holy, make it Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, because Kenneth Branagh’s nominally Norse still-life Thor is so cosmically incompetent it features as its climax of pathos a single tear that provokes laughter more booming and powerful than all the thunder this antispectacle could muster. What is with the CGI, these days? Even if Branagh weren’t senselessly cutting from cloesup to closeup in action scenes less comprehensible than a Donald Trump press conference, we still wouldn’t know what’s going on because apparently $150 million of CGI only buys a dark and blurry playground in the Uncanny Valley. If my jaw dropped during Thor, it had nothing to do with the intended Lovecraftian beauty that I’m sure the production art and a nice matte painting would have provided and everything to do with the epic waste on display.

Why I Still Love Glee

Being the only person on the planet still excited about Glee has its advantages. For one, my “Trouty Mouth” ringtone is still underground hip. For another, less competition for Trouty Mouth himself. But I’m honestly perplexed—not for the first time when it comes to Glee’s audience—why so many camel’s backs are breaking now, during the show’s strongest run of episodes.

Justified: A conscientious objection

At a climactic second-act moment in the Justified finale, a few days after the extrajudicial punishment of Osama bin Laden for his confessed crimes, Timothy Olyphant’s trigger-happy Kentucky marshal Raylan Givens swaggers away from—let’s simplify—his defenseless enemy and his gun-toting friend saying, “I didn’t pull the trigger, but I’ll sleep like a baby knowing he will.” It’s a coincidence with uncanny resonance. The show is, in name anyway, about the justified use of physical force, particularly gun violence, but this scene, this moment, this line is the distilled expression of a nation’s unburdened catharsis. Dickie hurt our buddy Raylan, he was this close to killing him, and he’s only out of bars because of his greasy fur. Who could possibly object to the execution that’s coming one way or another?

Golden Age of TV Drama: Why so serious?

I can’t remember the last time I laughed watching a television drama. Retracing, there's this supermassive black hole and then Dawson crying. In the eleven years since, television drama got a little attention and suddenly needed to be the most important artform on the planet, throwing out everything except its black turtlenecks, showily toting around Franzen, and demanding to be taken seriously through sheer force of how seriously it was taking itself. It’s like it learned nothing from Hank Kingsley.

Scream 4: All about Neve

If you’re wondering what horror tropes are left for Wes Craven, Kevin Williamson, and blonde TV starlets to skewer with the resurrected corpse of the Scream franchise, Scream 4 isn’t much help. First there’s the old anything-goes rule that’s been trotted out for each sequel and politely put back in the cupboard by the unkillable Sidney, Dewey, and Gale who beg to differ. Next we have the central conceit of Scream 4, that VHS tapes and landlines have given way to iPhones and webcams, so a modern take on the Woodsboro murders would see the killer filming his crimes. Nevermind that Michael Powell was doing this fifty years ago. Finally we have the silliest rule: “Only surefire way to survive a modern horror, you pretty much have to be gay.” With no basis in American horror, it’s an obvious invention for the sole purpose of calling back to it later, art pretending to imitate life. Nothing gets murdered so thoroughly in Scream 4 as postmodernism.

The Office: Michael Scott, we hardly knew ye

I’m not surprised by the raves for Thursday’s misty farewell to television icon Michael Scott. (Though I do think we're missing the big picture, that Pam couldn't sit through The King's Speech.) “Goodbye, Michael” was full of powerful stuff: one last return to Michael’s paternal relationship with Erin (a still tolerable character played by a still great performance), one last connection between Michael and Pam (the show’s bedrock relationship), and one last look at the office before Michael is gone forever. What I am surprised by is everyone’s acceptance that the past seven years has brought us fluidly to a place of Michael Scott, self-aware man.