At the movies: Portrait of Jason.

Something awesome that I for some reason didn't update in the miasma following the holiday insanity.

At the movies: The Help.

Writing about race is difficult.

There's some outtakes of a sort from this piece coming. My editor and I are trying to figure out the best way to present them, but it's good stuff. Call it a nice dessert after the main meal of this, my thoughts on The Help.

At the movies: Precious.

Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe, in a remarkable and untraditional performance- like Summer Phoenix in Esther Kahn) is a sixteen year-old girl. She weighs over three hundred pounds, and she’s just become pregnant with her second child, both children the result of having been raped by her father. She lives with her physically and emotionally abusive mother Mary (Mo’Nique), and she is trying to find her way through alternative education systems as she is almost completely illiterate.

It’s 1987 New York, but it could be anywhere that there’s suffering. And Gabourey Sidibe may not look like the kind of girl we usually see in movies, but it could just as easily be your story.

After triumphing at Sundance back in January, both Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry came on to help promote awareness of the film. Based on Sapphire’s bestseller Push, Precious has since been on a snowball of success, winning audience awards and accolades left and right, creating intense discussions about the responsibilities of portraying black life onscreen between it adorers and detractors, and setting records for box office business during its limited five-screen release.

“It’s this year’s Slumdog Millionaire,” some are saying, like that's a compliment. “It’s the film to beat,” say others. "It's the most racist film since The Birth of A Nation," or something to that effect, says critic Armond White, who pretty much called Tina Turner a race traitor (read his collection of early work The Resistance if you think I'm kidding) back in the 90s. So opinions, as you can imagine, are divergent.

Here’s the thing about Precious that nobody is really saying- it’s bonkers. It is near-operatic in its vision of oppression and liberation, feeling like a Douglas Sirk film that’s been stuffed into a Vittorio de Sica set (a connection made explicit by one of director Daniels' setpieces), and it understands that when you’re dealing with big emotions, sometimes you have to walk a fine line with camp. That precariousness adds much to the film’s impact, as do the central performances from Sidibe and Mo’Nique (who is destined for much awards love).

Add in a supporting cast that feels like a demented version of The Love Boat and Director Lee Daniels’ unorthodox choices, and you have a film that is absolutely singular in every way imaginable. The first time I saw it, I was impressed with the acting but didn't really see much else there. Now that the film has had time to grow in our national dialogue, now I get it. Precious is whatever it has to be to provoke an impassioned response from the viewer, and in that, it is wildly successful.

At the movies: Tropic Thunder.

Any discussion of Tropic Thunder must begin and end with Robert Downey Jr. He plays Kirk Lazarus, an Australian multi-award winning actor who undertakes a controversial surgical process to darken his skin to play a black soldier in a war film. Thematically and semiotically, he’s like a one-man boxed narrative focusing on performance, race, and the fluidities of identity with each line he delivers. I foresee dissertations focused exclusively on this performance popping up throughout academia over the next decade or so, and even if there had been nothing else worthwhile in Tropic Thunder, it would have been worth it just for this.

Fortunately, though, Tropic Thunder is kind of great. It’s an overblown spectacle about overblown spectacles that’s meant to read as a Hollywood insider movie. These kind of films are usually excruciating to anyone not in the film industry, and are often tonally confused as to what kind of message they are trying to convey. But Director/co-writer/star Ben Stiller finds the razor-sharp balance of the material, using the structure of the action event film as the perfect scaffolding on which to layer all of the horror and hilarity of big-budget filmmaking. Take the opening of the film; displaying an understanding of the contemporary moviegoing experience much deeper than anything seen in theatres in years, we are hit by a commercial and trailers set within the universe of the film. We are given context, backstory, and metatextual action before the film even properly starts, but it works, and beautifully.

Matthew McConaughey and Tom Cruise do great supporting work as two sides of the Hollywood coin, both relaxed and trying something different to an impressive yield. Know at least that no one will ever be able to hear Flo Rida’s “Low” again without thinking of Tom Cruise dancing his way into the dark heart of the human soul. Similarly, there’s a relaxed and breezy interplay amongst the entire cast that deflates the unspoken yet near-palpable tension that comes from making (and watching) a big summer blockbuster, making this the most effervescent 100 million dollar-plus action flick since Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 masterpiece Starship Troopers. Stiller has made something truly unique in the realm of the event movie: a film that rewards knowledge. You don’t have to know anything about the movie industry or semiotics or action films to enjoy Tropic Thunder, but if you do, you’ll find a film with as much hardcore arthouse truth-telling as it has big summer action.

If Pineapple Express is the quieter, scruffy egghead takedown of the action genre, then Tropic Thunder is the amped-up, Senior Varsity takedown. Just as funny, just as smart, but in completely different ways. It’s been long overdue, this expansion of the action film, and it bodes incredibly well for moviegoers.