This week was that time of year again! Long story short, as explained last year with copious superfluous details: thanks to my generous employers, I have enough vacation days every year to take time off for our family road trip and to take another separate week later just for myself. My usual staycation activity of choice is a DVD marathon.

This week’s marathon was hobbled a bit by a sick day, wasted on long bouts of napping and angst. We’re currently taking steps to correct the condition responsible in ways that won’t require immediate medical bills. Hopefully nothing further occurs on this front that becomes interesting enough to inspire follow-up entries. Let’s all assume I get better and live happily ever after. THE END.

Otherwise the week was relaxing and fruitful in a stress-relief sort of way, and a sizable chunk was carved out of the viewing pile. This week’s staycation feature presentations were, in order of viewing:

* Young Adult: The high school prom queen escapes her Midwest hometown and ages into a published young-adult-novel ghost-writer, but remains a spoiled brat who thinks her shallow life won’t be complete unless she can lure her high school sweetheart back into her clutches, even though he’s a happy husband and new father. Charlize Theron is believable and unsettling as the unreliable protagonist who denies any reality that doesn’t support her empty, self-worshipping worldview. Standard movie everyman Patrick Wilson works well as the unrefined old beau who’s satisfied with his modest fortunes. Patton Oswalt largely wins the film as a nerdy classmate who was horrifyingly bullied into lifelong bitterness, and who’s therefore the only person in town who shares our anti-heroine’s sense of contemptuous entitlement. For anyone who regrets some of their past decisions but found contentment in life anyway, this film lets you peer into the dark side of those who haven’t and who aren’t aware how much blame they deserve. Bonus points for Oswalt’s custom action-figure workshop and copious use of Teenage Fanclub on the soundtrack, among several other early-’90s alt-rock singles from the best musical years of my life.

* Gone Baby Gone: Ben Affleck figures out the simplest way to direct your first film: pick an outstanding script (in this case, novelist and The Wire contributor Dennis Lehane adapting his own book), assemble a top-tier cast, point the camera, and stay out of the way. Amy Ryan was justly nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as the wildly unfit mother of a missing girl, but she’s also surrounded by Ed Harris (always good for some manly bellowing), Morgan Freeman as Police Captain Morgan Freeman, Amy Madigan as the grandmother who cares more than Mom does, Titus Welliver (despite hiding behind the most distracting handlebar mustache ever), and leading man Casey Affleck, fusing grimness with uneasy nobility, and dumping the “Ben’s kid brother” label once and for all as the most morally forthright character I watched this week, though the consequences of his actions proved a wrenching, frequently disturbing experience. Bonus points for use of The Wire‘s Michael K. Williams (Omar!) in a small, atypical role as a beat cop. That was weird.

* Ingenious: I was one of many Kickstarter campaign backers for this film based on the true story of two novelty-item inventors, played by the ubiquitous Jeremy Renner and also Dallas Roberts (Milton from season three of The Walking Dead), and their rags-to-riches quest to create just one groundbreaking, ridiculous item that would change the world, or at least make the world snicker. If you’re a fan of the familiar winning-underdog movie pattern, here one is. Not much about this is revolutionary, but I’m relieved to confirm that their mysterious winning invention wasn’t a Spencer Gifts sex toy.

* Dark Star: What began as a 1974 student venture turned into a low-budget feature film for first-time director John Carpenter and first-time screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, who found later success with the original Alien. It’s my understanding that many older sci-fi fans have a soft spot for this ostensible spoof of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to me it was like reading a forty-year-old humor magazine, in that I could spot the punchlines as they occurred, but they were far too time-displaced to reach my funny bone. Some of the jokes, including a scene in which a ship’s captain tries to defeat a sentient computer with the James T. Kirk logical circumlocution method, have been overdone to death since then. I think it was during the ten-minute sequence of O’Bannon himself (as one of the ship’s crewmen) struggling with a beach-ball alien that I switched from fully watching to half-watching and picked up a book to pass the time between noticeable parts. Favorite bit in all of this: Carpenter’s own musical score, not too far removed from his more iconic work on Halloween.

* L.A. Story: I first saw writer/star Steve Martin’s west-coast answer to Woody Allen’s Manhattan when it debuted on pay-cable two decades ago. Now that I know more about pretentious Los Angeles stereotypes than I did at that age, I have a wider context and the movie was ten times funnier than I recall. It’s also arguably the best Sarah Jessica Parker movie I’ve ever seen.

* Heat: In which Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino shared a scene for the first time in their careers. And what a scene it is — no yelling, no bug-eyed scenery-chewing, just two old pros on opposite sides of the same fence, begrudgingly admitting their admiration for each other’s talents while candidly, quietly agreeing that one of them is going down. Surrounding this little marvel is a nearly three-hour-long cop drama whose multiple-storyline format seems like a precursor to The Wire, but feels like any given TV drama once all the pieces are laid in place. While DeNiro’s half of the film is a study in subtle, controlled villainy, Pacino’s half is full-bore bug-eyed scenery-chewing. A dozen-plus great actors are stacked around them to varying degrees of usefulness — Val Kilmer as a henchman with a gambling problem, unusually reserved Tom Sizemore, a thuggish Dennis Haysbert, teenage Natalie Portman, typically smarmy William Fichtner, and more more more. It ultimately didn’t add up for me, and I scoffed at the scene where Pacino screams for instant wiretaps and unilateral surveillance on all the suspects, accommodated with a fake Hollywood effortlessness that would make McNulty and Freamon howl with laughter.

* Dirty Harry: I’ve never sat through one of these till now. I was curious to see young Andy Robinson as the psychopathic Scorpio, devolving from seething deliberation into bug-eyed scenery-chewing by the bitter, inevitable end. Robinson is better known in our household as the deceptively devious Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. My wife and I watched him in a rare live performance with Alexander Siddig at a Trek convention several years ago and were blown away by the results. He was the main reason I had this movie on hand, given to me by a family friend who received the 2-disc DVD set for Christmas but didn’t want it. The rest of the movie is pretty much what I expected — gruff Clint Eastwood gets angry at The Powers That Be, who require him to follow certain procedures and only seem to employ a total of four whole cops, so he goes a little extreme from intense stress. It’s interesting to see certain long-standing pop-culture catchphrases in their original context, and I was intrigued to see setups that would later be reused or ripped off in Lethal Weapon and Die Hard with a Vengeance. That said, I’m not a fan of repeated gratuitous nudity, and I’m even less a fan of movies that so obviously stack the deck against The System in order to convince us that our hero’s tactics are cool vigilante justice and not police brutality.

* X-Men: First Class: I’d already seen this in theaters, but finally popped the disc into our player for an encore. It’s my favorite X-movie to date, a definitive rendition of the former friendship between Magneto and Charles Xavier, each compelling in their own ways while slowly separated by a widening moral gulf. Also, dig the pandemonium of that last half-hour’s worth of set pieces and physics-defying stunts of colossal magnitude. That being said, I lament the lost opportunities in the army of underused second-tier characters, wish they hadn’t wasted Havok in a position so trivial and out of context, still wince at the miscasting of Emma Frost, and have a tough time believing that Mystique would be so quick to forgive and forget how Darwin and numerous agents were all murdered by guys she’s now planning to join. Or did I miss a scene where Darwin killed her favorite pet and therefore deserved to die by her revised standards?

* Plan 9 from Outer Space: I’ve heard the stories. I’ve read the reviews. I’ve seen Ed Wood at least three times. So I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, but it had to happen sooner or later. Alas, not even the addition of a 2006 commentary track by Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s Mike Nelson was enough of a buffer to shield me from the debilitating side effects of the unimaginable ineptitude, the negative-budget shlock, the inexplicable spectacle that is this quote-unquote “movie”. To be honest, I still think Manos: the Hands of Fate is worse, and Nelson’s gags could’ve been funnier and denser. Even so: UGH. NO. WHY DID THIS HAPPEN.

To be continued next year!