Note 2: Despite that, there were some really good flicks last year.

Note 3: Despite that, some unbelievably poopy movies came out too.

The Way Back
Implausible: A movie conveys just how awful Gulags actually were.
Plausible: Colin Farrell is nuts.

Limitless
Implausible: A drug that makes you think you are awesome and it isn’t cocaine.
Plausible: Bradley Cooper as an uninteresting douche.

Paul
Implausible: An alien from another galaxy whose biology enables him to enjoy pot.
Plausible: Sigourney Weaver kicking the shit out of Simon Pegg.

Sucker Punch
Implausible: The average moviegoing demographic appreciates how mind-blowingly awesome this movie is.
Plausible: Robert Rodriguez creates the first feminist rock anthem of the 21st century.

The King’s Speech
Implausible: A British monarch as good looking as Colin Firth.
Plausible: Geoffrey Rush is made of awesome.

Scream 4
Implausible: This franchise is still relevant.
Plausible: Nobody noticed that this movie came out.

Thor
Implausible: Kenneth Branagh can direct action sequences.
Plausible: Chris Hemsworth didn’t spend enough time with his shirt off.

X-Men First Class
Implausible: Michael Fassbender was actually in such a stupid movie.
Plausible: This movie was as awkward as watching Ewan McGregor impersonate Obi-Wan times 10.

Transformers – Dark of the Moon
Implausible: A Transformers movie was made that I didn’t want to see.
Plausible: Michael Bay might have ruined my childhood even more than George Lucas.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Implausible: A movie with bigger fan service has been made.
Plausible: This was an unnecessary sequel to what should have been just one film for book seven.

Cowboys and Aliens
Implausible: Cowboys would have actually beat Aliens.
Plausible: This movie is so awesome you just don’t care about the implausibility of it all.

Real Steel
Implausible: This movie could have had any sort of plot at all.
Plausible: Everyone saw the trailer and so didn’t need to see the movie.

Footloose
Implausible: That there was any reason to remake the original.
Plausible: That the studio was looking for a quick cash in on nostalgia.

Twilight – Breaking Dawn Part 1
Implausible: That somebody decided this movie should have ended with a dude noming on his dead wife after she gave birth.
Plausible: There are a lot of dumb chicks out there with disposable income.

Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Implausible: That moviegoers have forgiven Tom Cruise for being bonkers.
Plausible: That awesome stunts and special effects can make moviegoers forgive Tom Cruise for being bonkers.

The Knights Templar began as a religious order dedicated to guarding pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem after it had been captured in the crusades. Over the course of a few hundred years they became the world’s first multinational corporation and bank. They invented the ATM card, allowing customers to deposit funds in one bank, receive transfer papers, and withdraw cash from another Templar bank. It made traveling for rich people a lot safer, and it made the Knights Templar insanely powerful.

The Pope and King Philip of France became insanely jealous, and so concocted a ridiculous fairy tale of Satan worship, sodomy, and whatever nastiness was needed to execute every last templar and (ahem) steal righteously appropriate the order’s assets. Those who gave critical support to the coup against the Templar order conveniently were also promised a slice of the pie and on Friday the 13th, 1307, Philip rounded up as many Templars as he could for swift torture, execution, and purse-emptying. (And you thought IRS audits were bad.)

That’s right, kids. The source of all of our Friday the 13th superstition is merely the result of a medieval hostile takeover.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I have never believed in superstitious rubbish about numerology or luck or fate or anything else that claims correlation is causation.

Until now.

I went to go see Thor on Friday night (yes, Friday the 13th) and it was absolute crap. I was so angry and disappointed that only now can I list what was bad and good about this flick.

Bad:

• The CG looked more awful than anything George Lucas did in the Star Wars prequels, which may actually count as an achievement as considerable effort would be required to make something worse.
• There was nothing in the film that passed as an action sequence. When a film is based on an action comic, this is generally considered a bad move.
• Natalie Portman managed to play an empty-headed female love interest that was even more useless to the plot than Padmé Amidala
• While we’re on the subject of Natalie Portman, it is an astoundingly improbable phenomenon that she managed to have even less chemistry with Chris Hemsworth than she did with Hayden Christensen
• Kenneth Branagh strayed from the realm of directing himself in an ego-massaging lead role in a film with scenes that are never more complicated than three people sitting in a room spouting poetry at one another.

Good:

• The 3.45 seconds that Chris Hemsworth did not have a shirt on

If this doesn’t make me believe in Friday the Thirteenth, nothing will.

That was probably six months ago, and I didn’t get around to actually seeing it until it showed up as being available for streaming on Netflix. I’m not wasting a real DVD rental on that. I’ve got a queue of almost 100 movies to work through as it is.

All I’ve got to say is that it makes Spice World look like Citizen Kane.

1. Hold up all of your fingers
2. Pretend your fingers are penises
3. Wiggle the fingers on your left hand at the fingers on your right hand and say in a very gruff voice, “FUCK YOU”
4. Then wiggle the fingers on your right hand at the fingers on your left hand and say in an even gruffer voice, “FUCK YOU”
5. Clap your hands together while making explosion noises for an hour
6. Then high five yourself and shout, “THE END!”

In other words, this movie was awesome.

Beyond a pretty appearance and good line delivery, the story is an empty shell. The premise is that shared dreaming can be used to steal a person’s thoughts or plant ideas in their subconscious (called “inception”), and naughty crooks like Leonardo DiCaprio and that kid from Third Rock from the Sun can sneak into their targets’ brains. The plot consists of a Japanese businessman hiring an innocent man on the lam to commit psychological piracy with his elite team of baddies inside the brain of a billionaire heir with generic daddy issues. Corporate espionage is a pretty boring motive for a life-threatening endeavor, but pretty much all of the characters just do what is needed without much motive at all. Ellen Page’s character is particularly blank. For no reason other than being invited to join the team, she instantly goes from respectable university student to international criminal to Leonardo DiCaprio’s nanny, all without thought or struggle. We then follow the team through many lovely and dangerous dreamscapes as they pull off planting the seed of an idea that will destroy Japanese Businessman’s enemy’s empire. Or whatever. Seriously, there has got to be an easier way to be competitive in a global economy.

The team of psychological pirates accomplish their goal by falling asleep inside their dreams, delving down into three layers of dreaming until — EPIC PLOT TWIST — they’ve got to go down one more level and that’s way too far. Because unlike The Matrix where dying means real world death, in this dreamworld you have to die to wake up, and going too far into the dream makes you forget to die. Or whatever. So in addition to keeping track of too many boring characters, I also had to keep track of three or four iterations of boring characters in each level of the dreamworld. But like making a copy of a copy of a copy, each time they descended the characters sounded more and more like finger puppets on a toddler’s hand. I almost laughed out loud at the movie’s climax when Nolan’s subconscious crept into the script and had the main character apologize to a character in his subconscious for having created her so flat and lifeless.

But all this is just the vehicle for the larger point that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is trying to make. Nolan seems to have missed that human beings have articulately and elegantly addressed this topic for thousands of years, the most classic iteration coming from La Vida es Sueño by Calderón de la Barca. The awesome special effects and vacant personalities in the film were really meant to do the following:

1. Skim read a junior college-level psychology book.
2. Take a horse. Name it “Question Reality.”
3. Beat the horse to death.
4. Continue beating Question Reality long after the horse is dead.
5. Keep going. Yes, I know you’ve been going for two hours. Keep beating the dead horse.
6. When Question Reality has been beaten into little tiny bits, sweep them into a pile and jump on them for another half hour.

My boyfriend hated it. I now know for certain how well I understand him, because even though we were sitting silent in a darkened movie theater, I could feel the irritation radiating out from his skin as each passing moment went by. For my own part, I tried to enjoy the clever direction of scenes filmed in a gravity-free dreamscape and tried to figure out what shade of lip gloss Ellen Page was wearing because iwannit. I was also grateful because although there was naïve bullshit about existentialism, at least there wasn’t patronizing bullshit about causality like there was in the Matrix sequels. It’s pretty. It’s an interesting premise. But Nolan got too caught up in playing Freud to remember to create interesting characters with meaningful actions. It might be the best thriller of 2010, but when most of the films coming out this year are crap, that doesn’t mean much. Inception isn’t as good as his previous work breathing life back into the Batman franchise.

Sigh.

Have I mentioned that I can’t wait for The Expendables to come out?