Hall Pass (2011)

My obsessive need to see movies that come out in the calender year led me to this, the latest and most mediocre of the Farrelly brother films. Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis play suburban dads who think they could get some action if they only weren’t TIED DOWN TO THESE BORING WIVES JESUS CHRIST ALREADY. Their wives, inspired by Joy Behar (I’m serious), decide to give them both weeklong “hall passes” to prove that they wouldn’t enjoy single life anymore. They waste half of this time on moronic adventures with their friends (including Stephen Merchant, whom is inexplicably allowed to keep his British accent and wear ascots), then have ONE CRAZY NIGHT of near-sex before realizing their mistakes. The film still finds a way to be incredibly sexist, as the only infidelity occurs when Sudeikis’s wife fucks a baseball player, then gets into a car crash while crying about it. Spoiler, like you care.

Cedar Rapids (2011)

We’ve got ourselves a mini-genre — “one crazy night” films starring middle-aged people instead of sexy teens. In this one, Ed Helms plays a naive moron who’s never left his small Wisconsin town, but has to present his insurance firm’s award submission at a conference after the company’s star kills himself while masturbating. (This is the second-best comedy of the last four years that hinges on a character’s autoerotic asphyxiation, after “World’s Greatest Dad.”) Helms ends up getting corrupted with record speed, before discovering… oh, some lesson or another. Whatever. There’s some amusing “lol, rubes!” comedy featuring John C. Reilly (who is hilariously convincing as an ugly divorcee who thinks he can fuck anything that hovers in his field of vision) and the guy who played Clay Davis on “The Wire.” The movie’s best joke is that he’s a black nerd who’s obsessed with “The HBO program ‘The Wire.’”

Sucker Punch (2011)

If you told me that no one involved with the film’s production had ever seen a movie, but were instead basing their project on what someone described a “movie” to entail, I’d buy it.

It includes this line: “Sweet Pea, Baby Doll is right!”

It’s not cool to feel nostalgic for chain stores. There was a time in the 1990s when the thing to do was resent massive chains for driving mom-and-pop places out of business.

Still, though. My memory of visiting my first Borders, a hideous brick complex off I-95 in Delaware, is surprisingly vivid. My parents, who had always been overly generous about letting me buy books and music, drove me over to the store and let me loose. I was 15 or so, just getting into weird texts about religion and forgotten power pop and punk bands. This store, so quiet and well-appointed, had all of it. There were CDs on sale that I’d only read about online. I grabbed some stuff, marveled at the discount, and headed up.

It was tough to fabricate reasons to head up that way on I-95, but soon enough another store opened up 10 minutes from our house. Already, I was into politics, but didn’t know much about the world outside Time and Newsweek. Here was a store with six magazine racks and unfamiliar offerings like The Nation and National Review and In These Times and Reason.

I just loved walking through the store. I loved browsing new books that hadn’t made it to the library. I loved seeing which magazines had come in. When I was 17 I applied for a job at the store, failed the interview (I didn’t know what the protocol was for dealing with a hostile customer), and settled for some temp job in a bank. It was a bummer; that employee discount would have been used and abused by a college-bound quasi-snob who would read anything he could get his hands on, and watch any weird movie that got a good write-up online.

When I moved to Washington in 2004, I would kill time in Borders. If there was a sale on, I’d buy fresh stuff. I’d pick up magazines that I wanted to pitch stories to. When I visited my parents, and wanted to hang out with my dad, we’d drive to the store, grab coffee, and sift through a pile of new age religion books (him) and comics or political bios (me).

Ah, well. In 2011, no one needs to search for slightly-off-mainstream books or movies anymore. Anything can be bought on Amazon. Most things can be rented on Netflix. The thousands of dollars I spent at Borders were mostly given over to things I don’t use anymore. But the place educated me, despite myself, and it gave my family an outlet for its nerdy, introverted kid, and a place to hang out with my brother. I’ll miss it.

If I were ever stupid enough to believe in karma, that would have ended last night.

Saturday afternoon, I agreed to meet up with some friends at Standard downtown. I saw some downtime ahead of me, so I packed my iPad and a couple of books in my messenger bag. Just when I was headed out the door, I heard a ring, quite rare in my neighborhood. The ringer was a volunteer for the UN’s refugee program, a tall man with an unpronounceable name and thick accent.

“I am, ah, raising money for refugees,” he said. He handed me a laminate with background on the program, and another laminate of different donation plans. “This is what you can give.”

I was skeptical, because — as my friend remarked when I told him why I was held up — who still fundraises door to door in D.C.? I don’t ever donate like this, and I told the man I preferred to give online. He stared me down with huge, plaintive eyes. “This is how, ah, our work is assessed… if we get people to give.”

Fuck it, I thought. It was a good cause. I make good enough money. I was about to blow $14 on a movie. I signed up for the $15/month plan via the rubber-encased iPad the man had been assigned to use. A few minutes later, I got an e-mail confirming the legitimacy of the exchange. This was a pleasant experience. I’d done a good deed.

Around 10 hours later, someone noticed that I had left my messenger bag next to friends in a D.C. bar, Dodge City.

Some context. Normally, I’d have been next to my bag. But two different groups of friends had appeared at the bar that night, and one of them, for all the usual twentysomething reasons of sexual angst and betrayal, did not want to make nice with the other. So my bag was nestled next to the bench where the first friends were sitting as I talked to the second friends. After a while, I walked to the bar to get a drink, after which I’d rejoin the first friends.

In this interval of time, someone noticed the bag, probably noticed that the people who knew its owner were focused on drinks and talk and cell phones, and he/she stole it. He got a $849 iPad, a $40 Philip K. Dick hardcover, some assorted pens, and — oh, this is the good part. Because this was one of the rare times I’d locked up my keys to the fob inside the bag, he got those keys. House. Office. Bike. Parent’s house. Lock box. Gym. Everything.

I would soon tell my friends, in between bouts of punching a pillar until my hand went numb, that I would have been happy taking the character-building lesson of the iPad theft had I only not lost my keys, too. There were sentimental and practical reasons for this. The practical reasons I was discovering straightaway. My bike was hitched to a bus stop sign and unusable. I realized that my lock-maker had a program under which I could register the key, and get the lock easily cracked in a situation like this. But of course I’d never done that. (I’d never taken the time to set up “Find my iPad” on that machine, either, and my mind wandered to the millions of time-wasting things I’d done instead of something that could have saved me $1000+ dollars and some untold number of wasted hours.) I called a cop, because that’s what I was supposed to, and I held an incredibly naive hope that cops have some sort of answer for questions like “how do I get my locked bike so I can go home?”

The cop was not helpful. I told him my story, stone sober at this point.

“You realize that you shouldn’t have done that, right?”

I did realize that! I realized that I shouldn’t have brought my expensive iPad out that day — that, in fact, I had wavered over whether to keep it charging or to grab it for the possibility of using it for 10-20 minutes as I waited for a friend. I realized that I should have put my keys in a pocket instead of the bag. I realized that I should have and could have put it closer to the center of the table where my first friends were sitting. Move it six, seven inches and it would have become prohibitively hard to steal without anyone noticing.

But smart people take advantage of situations, and stupid people let them. I was stupid.

It was some time after the cop had lectured me, after I realized that getting my bike freed would cost at least $120, after I realized that if I wasn’t such a slob I’d have registered the key, that I thought back to the UN donation. One way that people cope with being robbed is imagining that they’re happier than the robbers. On Saturday, I had a perfect little Goofus/Gallant fable set up. I’d just opened a checkbook to help some refugees stay alive, theoretically. Someone had lifted my messenger bag (which is itself $140 to replace, for a new and inferior model). Which of us is happier, really?

I would say the thief is happier. Congratulations: You have committed a perfect crime. You understand completely that Millennials who work in the media don’t pay attention to their surroundings, because they’re either wrapped up in themselves or wrapped up in their cell phones. (This is a distinction without a difference.) You get to play with a shiny electronic toy, read some fine science fiction stories, and perhaps even steal a bike, if you’re clever enough to find mine. Perhaps you can break into a house or office, though because those are crimes that take a little more effort, I doubt you’ll do it. You don’t need to go there — you can relish in the feeling of having humiliated someone and ruined a few days of his life. Believe me, you’re very happy. You should be.

- The Black Eyed Peas are clearly trying to wrest the “Most Annoying and Omnipresent Wedding Song” trophy away from Marcia Griffiths.

Whose bright idea was it to cast January Jones in this? Oh, sure, I get it. The 1960s prequel idea is easier to sell because of the popularity of “Mad Men.” Jones went from also-ran status (I remember her from “American Wedding”) to star because of her role as Betty in “Mad Men.” There is a problem: Jones is so wooden as Emma Frost that I was checking the screen for splinters. Frost, as recently rewritten by Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon, is a smart, funny, and — sigh, I’ll say it — bitchy character. Jones is bland, bland, and more bland. She fills out a white Playboy getup nicely, but I doubt she’s the only actress who can pull this off.

But hey, the first three “X-Men” had Halle Berry as Storm, and she was dreadful,* so one lame performance does not drag this movie down. It’s actually pretty fantastic, precisely because it can’t lean on popular characters. The closing action sequence is the best of any of these films,** and yes, that’s partly because Matthew Vaughn doesn’t have the crutch of tossing Wolverine at things. Flying looks cool. Teleportation looks cool. Tossing missiles with the power of magnetic field manipulation looks cool. All of these actions are deployed. Caleb Jones, who plays Banshee, is a real delight — the sonic scream plays much better on film than it ever did in the funny papers.

Since I mentioned Jones, let me salute Vaughn et al for figuring out what the producers of “The Practice” once figured out — when in doubt, replace your cast with a bunch of unknowns and has-beens. Kevin Bacon is rescued from whatever the hell he’s doing to play a perfectly creepy (forcing Frost to get him ice from an iceberg!) Sebastian Shaw, whose kinetic energy absorbing power looks damn cool. The whole young cast is fantastic; Beast and Mystique have a genuinely sweet meet-cute romance that erases some of the weirdness of the Mystique-Xavier relationship.

So, see it. And read on if you want more nitpicking.

- It’s really quite odd that this and the horrendous “Wolverine” end the same way — with the hero catching a bullet that sets up the physical flaw that will define his character.

- Why does every X-movie have a silent hitman character on the villain team? In “X-Men,” it’s Sabretooth, who just looks menacing. In “X-Men: The Last Stand,” it’s the transexual fishnet-wearing guy thing. In this, it’s the wind power guy who looks like Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas.***

- At first I rolled my eyes at the killing of the one black character, but the more I thought about it, the more I enjoyed the cliche. After all, Darwin is introduced in a montage of far better known characters. Banshee! Havok! Guy You’ve Never Heard Of! Also, apparently there’s a post-credit sequence in which Darwin resurrects himself, but I didn’t see it.

- In “The Last Stand,” a non-crippled Xavier scouts Jean Grey. In “Wolverine,” a young blonde mutant basically has Frost’s diamond power. I assume this movie has retconned both of those movies. Hooray!

*Speaking of Whedon, he is responsible for Berry’s infamous line “Do you know what happens to a toad when it’s struck by lightning? IT EXPLODES.” But the leaden delivery is all Berry.

**You remember how the first and the second both involve huge, stupid MacGuffins that shoot lots of special effects? That sucked.

***Oh, it’s Riptide. Whatever.

I am spending a week in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It’s my third season here, the third since I followed a group of friends down here and realized that lounging in a house that walks out onto an Atlantic Ocean beach is a good way to reconfigure your brain and read the books you’ve been meaning to read.

The Imperfectionists — Fantastic novel that’s more than its component vignettes. Extremely poignant for journalists.

Doctor Strange: The Oath — Brian K. Vaughn’s fun take on the character, which doubles as an origin story.

Chew (vols 1-3) — Surreal!