We all have our Oprah moments, memories of childhood upheaval or dysfunction that plague us beyond our ever advancing maturity. For some, it’s abuse. For others, it’s abandonment. In my case (true confessions time) it was discovering that Grandpa Johnson, the man who was my mother’s biological father, was not dead. You see, we all grew up thinking we knew the story of my mom’s side of the family. Grandma Ridgeway had married Mr. Johnson, had two children (the other being my wonderful Aunt Sarah) and then he died. We knew it. Mom knew it. Aunt Sarah knew it. After the war, my Grandmother married Sgt. Ridgeway and they had a son, Gary. “Sarge”, as he liked to be called, had an older boy named Ike as well.

Alternative title: Heart of Glass

POSITIVES:
Tight, quickly-pacd noir thriller.
Good performances and little melodrama.
Cool special effects.
There’s a hamster.
Everybody’s double-crossing everyone else (except the hamster, and I’m not totally sure about him).

Spoiler Warning…

It makes perfect sense. After all, you’ve seen Marvel muck it up a bit, only to straighten out their artistic agenda and turn their plethora of possible film franchises into a multi-billion dollar international phenomenon. Not that impressed. Think about it for a minute. Five years ago, Iron Man was a nobody, a frame of reference in rumored productions (Tom Cruise once flirted with the comic book character) that few could see holding his own. Now, the latest installment in his stand-alone cinematic efforts has broached the aforementioned nine digit club and fans are clamoring for another Avengers collaboration.

We love them. Obsess over them. Rant when they don’t work and get even angrier when they insult our intelligence or expectations. From the moment turn of the century audiences cringed at the sight of a locomotive coming straight at them, the movies have meant more to us than, perhaps, any other medium (settle down, TV—and you too, music). We adopt their dialogue, follow their mandates on fashion and fame. We enjoy the looks into lifestyles we could never envision for ourselves while eagerly tweaking emotions (anger, fear, laughter, sorrow) that we normally try to avoid. So it makes sense that, eventually artists involved in the craft would want to explore the meaning of movies. Take them apart. Reference and homage them. Perhaps, even go so far as add commentary on their creation. This movies about the movies become a Bible of sorts, a window into a world that, without filter, comes to mean so much to us.

Back in the salad days of late night TV, talk show hosts would often bring on celebrities and then ask the kind of questions that, today, would end up in a snit or a self-important tirade. Trying to give off the vibe that everyone in Hollywood is and/or was buddy buddy with everyone else, they’d probe about famous friends, infer unfounded relationships and links, and basically fuel the meaningless myth that everyone in the industry hangs out with each other as BFFs. Enter This Is the End, a wildly inventive comedy that takes Armageddon and centers it within a surreal, sensational take on the whole Friends of Apatow dynamic. In a year which has seen several supposed laughers start up and sputter, this one delivers in rowdy, raucous spades.