I’ve seen two films recently:

Superbad: The dick-joke movie to end all dick-joke movies. Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick. Extraordinarily good. Now strike me down as a hypocrite for enjoying tasteless chaos in the extreme, but I found the bad-boy police subplot of this film to be a little too much glorification of reckless psychotic behaviour and have a little too little comedic payoff. There was no comeuppance for the cops, so the message of that part of the film came across as “driving and shooting when drunk is all good fun as long as you can gain the cooperation of anybody you happen to run over.” Hmm.

Atonement turned out to be excellent. They said it was genre-defying, but I’d say drama is its own genre. There is an amazing minutes-long scene halfway through where the cameraman walks around an encampment on a beach in France, taking in the (in-)action. It’s technically incredible, but I couldn’t help think of that other famous 4-minute long uncut sequence:

Films like this are total Oscar-bait, but however corrupt and self-serving the Oscars may be, the end result is a list of pretty damn good films; if a director seeks to emulate any of them, that’s fine by me.