Beautiful actors are learning what beautiful actresses like Charlize Theron discovered a while ago - that they get taken more seriously when they trash the same beauty that got them taken seriously to begin with.
Like all paradises, Topanga is pitched at the tipping point of promise and peril.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the supreme nut jobs in movie history, and of course I mean that in the nicest way.
To an extent, our relationship with the movies is always subjective. Our capacity to be involved says as much about each of us; I've never fathomed why anyone would want to spend four hours in the company of the exceedingly tiresome Scarlett O'Hara.
It's not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it.
As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.
'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.
Nothing manifests more persuasively the American contradiction than that the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner, wrote an antislavery clause into the document - as if to compel himself to be better than he was - which then had to be edited out so the Southern states, including Thomas Jefferson's own, would sign it.
White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.
Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.
Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' believe it's a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren't altogether wrong.
Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result.
When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.
For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.
The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.
Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son's favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.
In retrospect, 'Pulp Fiction' isn't just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another.
If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.
'Lincoln' is impressive enough to almost make you forget how much Daniel Day-Lewis dominates the endeavor.
Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.
