Here’s the list so far. What else do I need to see?

1) Drive
2) Attack the Block
3) A Dangerous Method
4) Beginners
5) Cave of Forgotten Dreams
6) Contagion
7) Young Adult
8) The Muppets
9) Bridesmaids
10) Weekend
11) The Descendants
12) Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
13) X-Men: First Class
14) Moneyball
15) Source Code
16) Margin Call
17) The Trip
18) Meek’s Cutoff
19) The Future
20) Captain America: The First Avenger
21) Paul
22) Super
23) 50-50
24) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II
25) Everything Must Go
26) Kung Fu Panda 2
27) Fright Night
28) A Very Harold and Kumar 3-D Christmas
29) Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
30) A Better Life
31) The Adjustment Bureau
32) The Help
33) Another Earth
34) Midnight in Paris
35) Hesher
36) Limitless
37) Drive Angry
38) Green Lantern
39) The Conspirator
40) Red State
41) Super 8
42) Win Win
43) Hobo with a Shotgun
44) Thor
45) The Devil’s Double
46) Rango
47) Battle: Los Angeles
48) Cedar Rapids
49) The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
50) The Green Hornet
51) Hall Pass
52) HappyThankYouMorePlease
53) Horrible Bosses
54) Gnomeo and Juliet
55) No Strings Attached
56) Transformers: Dark of the Moon
57) Atlas Shrugged, Part One
58) Just Go With It
59) The Beaver
60) Priest
61) Sucker Punch
62) I Am Number Four

The Beaver (2011, Jodie Foster)

“So, Mel Gibson is a depressed toymaker who finds a beaver puppet in a dumpster. He drinks himself unconscious one night, and a TV falls on him while he’s wearing the beaver. All of a sudden, he can only talk through the beaver, which has a cockney accent.”

“Why?”

“It just does.”

“No, not just the accent — why any of this?”

“Oh, better question. What I’m told is that a brilliant script had been sitting on desks, or shelves, or whatever scripts sit on — cocaine mirrors? — for years, and that Jodie Foster finally acquired it, turning it into a comeback vehicle for Mel Gibson.”

“Well, they’re both good actors.”

“They’re not alone! Anton Yelchin is Gibson’s depressed son. Jennifer Lawrence is convincing and button-cute as a cheerleader with a secret. Well, two secrets.”

“Which are?”

“Her brother died, and she used to be a graffiti artist.”

“Does everyone in this movie have totally stupid interests?”

“Yes. Stop interrupting. So, Gibson immediately turns his life around because the Beaver gives him amazing advice — usually along the lines of ‘shut up and do something constructive.’ He gives an inspiring speech to his failing toy company and it’s saved with a new product — Beaver-themed wood carving kits.”

“This is a child’s toy?”

“Yes. It sells out immediately. Gibson becomes a national celebrity. There’s one of those ‘cover of every magazine’ montages, and a Today Show interview.”

“So this solves his problems?”

“Sort of. He reignites his marriage for a while, having what appears to be great sex…”

“With the Beaver still on?”

“Yes. But he still can’t function without the puppet. Foster takes him out to dinner and he’s basically non-responsive. I’ll give it to him, Gibson is quite good at portraying the shame and resignation of someone suffering from extreme depression.”

“In a movie about a puppet.”

“Rub it in, huh? Anyway, everything works for a while, then falls apart. Gibson’s son screws things up by encouraging Jennifer Lawrence to pick up graffiti again as therapy and getting them both arrested. Gibson sinks back into depression, and the puppet attacks him. Or something. Gibson fights the puppet. He defeats him by taking him to the garage, building a coffin, and chopping off his arm with the puppet on it.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“This actually happens. Anyway, everyone learns something and the movie ends with the characters frolicking at an amusement park.”

“This sounds hilarious.”

“It is!”

Green Lantern (2011)

After all the hype about how terrible it was, it really wasn’t so bad.

“Limitless” (2011) – Surprisingly good sci-fi about a man who stumbles upon a drug that allows him to access his entire brain and become nearly superhuman. He recalls everything he’s ever learned or heard. He picks up languages just by half-hearing them. (Goddamn it, I need a drug that does this.) The movie loses me a bit by making the same mistake that “The Adjustment Bureau” did — assuming that political power is more useful than financial power!

“Shameless” (2004) – The Showtime remake of this show was modestly amusing, even if I didn’t buy the winsome, moneyed-looking Emmy Rossum as a poor family provider. Some Twitter pals convinced me to rent the British series that got ripped off. It’s… pretty great, mostly because it drinks so deep in the dark, grimy, hopeless side of modern British life. (I liked Rose, Doctor Who’s first reboot companion, for this very reason.) Somebody adapt a fantasy novel into a big budget film so David Threlfall can make big bucks.

This bottled coming of age story set inside a mental hospital rose and sank without a trace. Marketers were unable to translate the new megastardom of Zach Galifinakis into some buzz of their own. Such a shame, because this is a perfectly cute and adequate movie, adapted from a young adult novel and perfect for a certain kind of young adult.

I might have been one of those at one point. My depression, at this point, is gentled and tamed, but on one day in 2002 I cracked under the pressure of school and reporting and girls and (if I remember correctly) a computer error and I checked myself into a Chicago mental hospital. This movie nails it — the patient’s confusion about what he needs is interpreted by specialists as the need to put him up for three or five days. My roommate was a smart guy who slept all day and night; so’s the roommate of our hero, Craig. I didn’t meet any girls, but Craig, the lucky little geek, meets-cute with Noelle, played by the winsomely normal Emma Roberts. They bond over how nice he is (although you could read his behavior as patronizing) to other patients and draw each other pictures of flowers and faces and “brain maps.” Craig bonds and occasionally escapes (to other parts of the hospital, like a gym) with Bob, the Galifinakis character, whose problems are smartly left obscure.

Having revealed too much about myself (although I did write about this nine years ago), I should say whether the movie’s credible. It is. A mental hospital is an easy place for a non-crazy, just depressed person to navigate. When Craig arrives, Bob is a sort of local legend and fixer. In glimpses, we see that this is the only place where he’s not hopeless. He’s interviewing for a spot in a community home, and has a daughter that his wife is trying to protect him from. The saddest moment of the movie comes when Craig, who’s 16 and has no real problems, gives Bob a painting with his number on the back. “We can meet up,” he says, “play some table tennis.” Galifinakis shoots him a look that says this will never happen. Of course it won’t. There is no special rejuvenating power in the hospital. The man with the broken life returns to it, several thousand dollars poorer; the kid with the rich family got a nice girl and a vacation.

Hall Pass (2011) – eponymous
The Bucket List (2009) – eponymous
Pay It Forward (2000) – eponymous
She’s Out of My League (2010) – “Moodle”

Red (2010) – Never read the Warren Ellis comic it’s based on, but it probably wasn’t as frothy and fun as this entry in the Happy Hitman genre. Bruce Willis plays the Retired, Extremely Dangerous (GET IT?????) hitman Frank Moses, who is being targeted by assassins for reasons I still don’t understand. Mary Louise Parker plays his accidental girlfriend — a bored bureaucrat/harlequin romance fan who quickly gets used to high-stakes spy work — with her patented braininess and habit of never keeping her eyes on the person she’s talking too. John Malkovich is the drug-fried paranoiac who’s actually totally right. (“He was secretly fed LSD every day for 16 years,” explains Moses.) And Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss, and Rebecca Pidgeon (!!) make appearances. No one seems to be working particularly hard, but they’re happier blowing shit up and shooting guns than they might be in a Harry Potter movie.

Captain America (2011) – Surprisingly good, corny, fun, although I think the long Hydra set-up might be dull on future viewings. Chris Evans, who has specialized in playing flashy jerks, is actually cool, humble, and convincing as the skinny short guy who’s Serumed into superherodom. (I’m sure Transformers will win the special effects Oscar, but the CGI that puts Evans’s head on a shrimpy guy is really something.) Hugo Weaving plays the Red Skull with a Werner Herzog accent. There are just enough scenes of a dude flying off a ramp on a motorcycle as stuff blows up behind him.