(Beware spoilers if you haven’t seen the movie)
Best Imitation of The Exorcist on Red Bull
Once you’ve seen The Exorcist, no movie featuring an exorcism will ever be that original again. 
But I have to give the director credit for trying to amp down the gore and creep an audience out for most of the movie with simple sounds and movements, such as creaking doors, rustling sheets, clapping hands and jiggling closets. When you find out that the director was responsible for that pinnacle of torture porn, Saw, you just have to give him some props, even if they aren’t the ones that slice your own limbs from your body. Someone no doubt exorcised a few of his demons.
Best Donation to Celebrities’ Private Party
This Is the End, if you like guy humor, can be pretty damn funny. But at some point during this movie about a group of celebrity friends (Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Danny McBride, and Jay Baruchel) 
playing themselves hanging out with each other as the rapture and the apocalypse sucks up and destroys everything around them… you realize you just paid for them to hang out, drink, smoke dope and party together at your expense. This realization is only slightly dampened by the fact they portray themselves as self-entitled, narcissistic, clueless douchebags, which may or may not be true (but if that’s where they’re getting their improvisation humor from, it probably must have more than a kernel of truth) who are only left behind from the rapture because they are so uselessly sinful and unworthy. Still, they manage to deliver some of the best laughs of the summer, so maybe we shouldn’t feel so bad about donating at the door to their beer, bong and munchies run.
Best Donation to Celebrities’ Retirement Fund
Red 2 might work as a scenic stock shot travelogue of Moscow, Paris, London, and a promotional tool for wasting ammo as much expensive ammo as possible, but you won’t find any real thrills or suspense here other than wondering just how long these aging actors can keep going to the well and collecting a paycheck for the gimmick of seeing over-the-bankable actors play action heroes. Sure, it was a kick watching first class thespians such as Helen Mirren play a cold-blooded, two-handed hit woman, or 
John Malkovich look as dopey as possible in nerd hats, but at the end of the day and the machine gun clip, this barely qualifies as a pre-diabetic sugar rush. Anthony Hopkins has gone from such academy award-nominated performances as in The Remains of the Day, to the Remainders Bin, which is no doubt where this DVD will end up one week after release.
Best Movie of the Summer
The Way, Way Back is like a cool, friendly hug in a summer of movies trying to heat up theatres with mountains of money spent on CGI, noise, and meaningless action to bully you into submission. Great characters. Real emotions. Original dialogue. Heart in the right place. What the hell?! is this doing playing during the summer? (Other than the fact it’s about a pivotal summer vacation in the life of a 14 year-old kid trying survive his mother’s new boyfriend). Steve Carrel gives great asshole as the boyfriend. Toni Collete acts more with less than anyone with ten times as much dialogue. Alison Janey as the booze-injected gossipy neighbor in the beach resort town nearly steals the movie. But Sam Rockwell as the world wise water park employee the hero gets all his life lessons from is simply awesome, as usual. Even my 16 year-old son said he wished this movie, like summer itself, would never end.
– A. Wayne Carter
It might as well be a cartoon at this point, for all we care if we’re not invested in the story or characters. And Superman does something he’s never done in 70+ years before – he kills. He snaps Zod’s neck (you’d think throwing him through seven skyscrapers would have done the same trick) to protect a family from being fried by Zod’s laser beam eyes. Nevermind the countless thousands of people who must have died while they were knocking down skyscrapers pummeling each other forever and ever throughout the city. Yawn.
As I sit going deaf watching more loud and meaningless demolition, my mind drifts to trivial thoughts like, “I’m glad Idris Elba from The Wire is finally getting a big paycheck;” or “How do those little helicopters carry 700-ft robots out to sea on those itty bitty wires?” and, “I really miss the guys in the rubber monster suits stomping around on one of those awesome model cities. You knew something was at stake, then… hundreds of hours of painstaking work by a master model-maker.” Kinda cool sci-fi movie, though.
So they brought in a writer from the TV series Lost, and scaled the last act down to Brad Pitt alone in a haunted house – er, I mean a World Health Organization lab – trying to retrieve a possible vaccine amid loitering, teeth-clacking zombies. I hope more films get the message that less can be more when you reduce finales back to human scale, where one person surviving or succeeding just resonates louder than countless CGI humans, buildings or worlds blowing up.
Fortunately, most of the 5 year-old girls at the matinee I went to didn’t care and were there to just laugh at the minions. Next time, just skip the plot, characters or story and give us two hours of minions or Scrit. Oh… that’s what they’re actually going to do: The Minions Movie is coming next summer.
Then there were the infamous “Twilight Zone” episodes. Think of the most memorable ones and chances are some were episodes he wrote, including: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” where William Shatner can’t convince the crew of the passenger plane he’s flying on that a monster gremlin has been peeling back the wing fuselage. Or “Third from the Sun,” where two families desperate to escape a big brother government flee in a rocket targeted for a planet called… Earth. Or 
“The Invaders” episode, where a mute farm woman fends off the relentless attack of tiny spacemen with ray guns until she beats them and their spaceship to pulp with an ax and we hear their final distress signal calling… Earth. These perspective-shift stories might seem predictable today, but they weren’t back in the fifties and sixties when writers such as Matheson, Rod Serling and Charles Beaumont invented them.
Spielberg even directed a TV movie based on a Playboy magazine story by Matheson called “Duel” about a hapless driver stalked by a maniacal truck driver along barren stretches of desert highway. These were stories derived from our own deepest anxieties and experiences – dangerous truckers on highways, fear of small town speed traps – but played for maximum suspense and unexpected pay offs.
The truest version is 1964’s “The Last Man on Earth” with Vincent Price. It maintains the ultimate creepy quality of the book, where the plague vampires flail with planks beating against your boarded up house all night trying to get in while you hole up listening to classical music on vinyl. That version preserves Matheson’s own devout appreciation and love of a composer’s music (he was a huge fan of Richard Wagner) as something still worth living for in an apocalyptic world.
I went to Alfred Hitchcock’s funeral (I first read some of Matheson’s stories in collections published under Hitchcock’s name). I arrived in L.A. too late to meet Rod Serling or attend one of his writing classes before he died. But I haunted the bookstores and studios that housed original copies of Matheson’s books, or that filmed versions such as, “Somewhere in Time,” “What Dreams May Come,” “A Stir of Echoes,” “Hell House,” or “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”
By the 1960’s, no one could take such one-dimensional altruism seriously and he was played for a joke by pudgy Adam West in bright Technicolor on national television. Crash! Boom! Pow! He was later reclaimed in the 80’s as a brooding, nihilistic vigilante in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight series, and that’s the vision our present culture chose to embrace in a trilogy culminating with The Dark Knight Rises last year.
Don’t get attached to any characters on Game of Thrones because, as George R. R. Martin constantly reminds us; noble acts are futile, justice is blind, and everyone dies randomly without purpose or redemption (but we’ll cut him more slack than his characters get until we get to the final body count by Book Six).
Rumor has it he wants to do a spin-off on the slimy, moral-free, self-serving lawyer, Saul Goodman. Here’s an idea for a twist: How about going the opposite direction with that show and taking this unredeemable ambulance chaser and transforming him into a respectable Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court by the end of his character arc? Couldn’t we believe that twist is possible?
I’m not suggesting our culture need return to the carefree optimism of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Happy Days, or even the truth, justice and American way of Superman. Shit, even George Reeves, the original TV Superman, blew his own brains out for some dark-shrouded reason. But, Jesus, can’t we have a little bit of sunlight as a cultural trend for a while; heroes who aren’t mentally tortured more by their own self-doubts than by this week’s villain? (Don’t even get me started on the new brooding, bloated take on Superman in Man of Steel.)
The people who create our movies, television shows, and literature enjoy the rarified privilege of making big money doing something fun that they love. So why are they so fucking pessimistic? Shouldn’t their output somehow reflect their good fortune rather than projecting some deep, often misperceived, collective funk?
