On the eve of the Golden Globe Awards and as we go through all the awards that lead up to the awards that end all awards, which would be this year’s Academy Awards, (until next year’s Academy Awards), I’d like to go back through the year and reminisce, ruminate, reflect on what theaters offered in 2011.  Some lists here, some ideas there and it’ll all wrap up with an Oscar preview.  Who will win, who should win and what to look forward to next year.

The first list consists of ten overlooked, smaller movies.  Movies that got lost in the mega-blockbuster mix of CGI, big budgets and big names that we wade through in the spring, winter, summer and fall only to realize that a small handful are worth watching (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol).  So in no particular order, when you get a chance, and you’re looking for something different to watch, get your hands on one of these.   With no more ado…here is part I.

Ten Movies That Need To Be Seen By More People..This Includes You

Beginners- Mike Mills’s second full-length feature is a bittersweet look at the nature of love and what it means to give yourself to somebody else.  Christopher Plummer gives a standout performance as a father coming out of the closet to his son and the world near the end of his life, and Ewan MacGregor gives his best performance in years as a young man who keeps trying to figure out what love means as his father finally experiences it.

Source Code- Duncan Jones’s second film is a mind-bender concerning a terrorist attack on a commuter train in Chicago and a soldier sent back to relive the same 8 minutes aboard said train until he finds out who is responsible.  Except that he was never actually aboard the train.  It sounds repetitive and confusing, but its how Jones plays with those 8 minutes, twisting and turning them till he finds his way through an entire story, that makes this one of the most thrilling movies of the year.

Hanna- In a year of strong women portrayed magnificently on screen (The Help, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Iron Lady) Hanna is surprisingly the most badass.  Joe Wright’s taut, focused directing and an eerily calm, near-zen performance by Saorise Ronan as the most unexpected assassin of all-time make this more than just your basic revenge flick.  Hanna proves that revenge is a dish not best served cold, but as a violent ballet by a highly trained 16 year old girl.

Attack the Block- Who would win in a fight?  A group of South London street punks or the furry, glowing-mouthed cousins of the aliens from Aliens?  Joe Cornish’s first feature answers that question in 88 breathless minutes that confidently shift from dark humor to electric intensity and somehow find a way, like the best of this genre (think Shaun of the Dead or Gremlins,) to do them both at the same time.    

50/50- A cancer comedy?  A comedy about cancer?  However you phrase it, it doesn’t sound right.  50/50 succeeds though with a starkly honest script, loosely based on writer Will Reiser’s own battle with cancer, that refuses to be maudlin and sharp performances by the entire cast, especially Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick.  Rogen charms as Reiser’s boisterous, selfish but big-hearted best friend and Kendrick is the deep soul of this movie.  She glows as an inexperienced therapist who fumbles her way to a connection deeper than patient-relationship with Reiser’s character, played on-screen by Joseph Gordon Levitt who becomes a more rewarding actor with every role.

The Debt- While its a thrilling, deft post-WWII spy movie, The Debt is also a great bit of sleight-of-hand.  All is not as it seems, and director John Madden moves seamlessly between two timelines to keep you guessing what the bitter, dangerous circumstances of hiding the truth really are.  Jessica Chastain (The Help, Tree of Life) continues a breakthrough year as the younger Mossad agent Rachel Singer, and Helen Mirren continues to be as great as always expected as the older, burdened former Mossad agent Rachel Singer.

Win-Win-Tom McCarthy is the most criminally underrated director working in Hollywood today.  Fact.  Maybe its because he makes quiet, unassuming films with quiet, unassuming characters (The Station Agent, The Visitor.) But what his movies say about how living in this country keeps driving people further apart when all we want is to find real, human connection is as loud as shattering glass.  Paul Giamatti is at his hangdog best as a lawyer and volunteer wrestling coach who makes an unethical decision and is forced to deal with some completely unexpected results.

Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil- Eli Craig’s debut feature took the idea of ‘hillbillies in the woods’ and turned it inside out, in the process making one of the funniest movies of the year.  Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are priceless as the good ol’boy duo who find themselves trapped by the fears and irrational behavior of the fraternity/sorority crew out looking to rough it and Craig’s direction is crisp and unfussy. 

The Adjustment Bureau- It seems like forever since Matt Damon was allowed to be charming on screen.  Not that Damon hasn’t been doing good to great work of late, its just that most of these roles required him to play down his inherent charisma.  That is not the case with The Adjustment Bureau.  Playing a politician who fights what the agents of fate, (the Adjustment Bureau of the title), hold for him in order to be with the woman he loves, Damon is at his best.  First time director George Nolfi keeps the pacing tight and Emily Blunt is ravishing as the ballerina Damon is willing to give everything up for.

Drive- Nicolas Winding Refn’s pulsing, violent story about a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver at night is carried by a confident, visceral performance by Ryan Gosling as the driver and a sly, against-character turn by Albert Brooks as the gangster who’s out to get him .  Shot in a style that is almost European in its minimalism, Refn punctuates these quieter moments with some of the best action sequences in recent memory.  The getaway chase at night, in particular, is an edge-of-your-seat masterpiece.

Coming in Part II:  The best performances of 2011!

I’m single.

This doesn’t upset me.  It doesn’t keep me up at night.  If anything its like a plane flying overhead.  Most of the time its something off, way off in the distance.

But every once in awhile, and this Friday was a once in awhile, I can hear it booming, rumbling towards the runway right over my head.

This is what happens when you see someone you used to be happy with and they’re happy with someone else.  You’re already in an outward state of cool distance but inside you’re in a boiling rage for multiple reasons.

And you think you can go home and forget about it because she made it a point to say ‘hello’ to you, and the conversation was short and you were unusually reserved.

So small victories, right?

But then they insist on texting you at one o’clock in the morning saying things the person they’re happy with now probably wouldn’t want them texting to an ex-boyfriend.

Let’s say Friday was a 747.

But then I wake up on Saturday and I’m not sad or confused or sad and confused.  Instead I’m angry and fed up and I think to myself:

‘Man, I really need to meet a girl.”

Now at 32, even with my outgoing nature and willingness to throw myself into most any available social situation, meeting a girl is harder than you’d think.

Meeting a girl at a bar is complicated on multiple levels:

A:  The presence of booze makes all decision-making dubious at best.  Your hormones are heightened and your sense of self-worth is either comically bloated or depressingly low.  This usually makes for regret and shame and your friends making fun of you.

B:  You tend to go to the bars with a group of friends and while you might, a la a Venn diagram, mix groups every once in awhile; the majority of your time is spent in your own little circle floating from bar to bar.

C:  Bars are generally loud.  Conversations becomes an issue.  And while you can decide you want to go home with a girl for the night based on appearances, its hard to decide if you’ll want to have breakfast with them in the morning when you can’t really make sense of anything that’s coming out of their mouth because the DJ’s decided to play some shitty David Guetta song too loud.

Then there’s the smiling faces and success stories in the online dating ads I see on TV.  But I can’t get my head around certain aspects of online dating:

A:  The first steps of getting to know someone are always the most exciting.  The more common ground you find the more attractive the person becomes.  Each instance is like a spark and eventually you’ve got a fire.  Online dating takes the mystery out because its essentially your dating resume.  Am I qualified for the job of dating you or not?  Do I need to look at other opportunities?

B:  At heart, I’m a romantic.  The idea of trolling through an endless amount of online profiles until I find the right one seems so tedious and whatever the opposite of romantic is.  I want the magic of the ‘wow’ moment when you meet someone and realize she’s not just another pretty face.  Online dating seems so clinical and cold; completely lacking in magic.

So I’m at a loss.  And then I started thinking of all my friends, of all of you out there that value me as a person and thought maybe there’s a middle ground between the chaos of bar life and its long odds and the cool efficiency of online dating. 

Find me a girlfriend. 

Actually, you all don’t have to find me a girlfriend.  Introduce me to a girl and I’ll do the rest. 

For those of you who call me friend and have any attractive, single acquaintances in the greater Indianapolis area; think of me when they’ talk about how lonely they are and can’t meet any good guys.

Think of me when its ‘girls night out’ and your newly single friend who just got out of a bad relationship wishes she could just find one guy who’d treat her right.

Think of me.

Think of me lonely on my sofa, my sharp wit and dusky good looks going to waste.

Think of me writing for my blog and playing video games when I could be showing a friend of yours a spectacular time.

Think of me my friends. 

Because I’m ready to get back on the plane.

Halloween’s a strange holiday.

When I was younger I was never fully vested in the Halloween spirit.

I’m partial to one type of candy, Snickers bars, and I wasn’t willing to settle for lesser candies.  So I picked through my pillowcase full of loot and sifted through for the diamonds, leaving the lesser gems, Reese’s Pieces, Milky Ways etc for my friends.  And if you had Snickers to trade, I’d go as high as 4 pieces to one.  I was as gullible as the French when they agreed to the Louisiana Purchase.

As long as I got my hands on all available Snickers bars though, be it bite size, fun size, or full size, I was the happiest kid in the room.

And the idea of dressing up never really screamed to me.  In retrospect, considering the years I spent on stage from high school through college, I think its that people never completely invested themselves in the role they were playing.  Instead of being Dracula, complete with accent and seductive danger, kids just wore the fangs and the cape and were content with candy, not the blood Dracula craves.  Or when dressed as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle I wanted surfer-dude talk and an overwhelming desire for pizza on display.

I remember once my mom, who refused to let me succumb to corporate trappings, dressed me up as a hobo for Halloween in some tattered old clothes found around the house and put some mascara on my face and rubbed it in to make it look like dirt. 

She called it a hobo to make it sound a bit more old-timey, because there’s something romantic about the notion of a hobo, moving from town to town, seeing our beautiful country with nothing but the clothes on his back. 

In actuality though, by1987, they were no longer called hobos.  At that point they were just bums. 

So when I was 9 my mother dressed me up like a bum and sent me out on the streets to beg for candy.

But even then, at an early age, there was a part of me that wanted to live in a cardboard box, pee in outdoor places that weren’t bathrooms, root around in trash cans to find scraps of food to survive on. 

All of this so that when I went to Mr. and Mrs. Ramer’s behind our house they’d not just give me candy because I was dressed like a bum on Oct.31st, but that they really sensed my desperation, my need for candy.

And if what bothered me about Halloween when I was younger was a lack of commitment to the role, its almost as if the opposite were true now.

Grown men and women giving in to playing make-believe.  Only now that we’re older and have money, there’s no end to how elaborate costumes can get.  And all we’ve done is trade candy for booze, because ultimately booze is like candy for adults. 

It also seems like as we’ve gotten older, most women have come to the conclusion that the less they wear on Halloween, the better. 

Now, as a single, eligible bachelor I’m not opposed in anyway to women dressing, shall we say, provocatively on Halloween.  Actually, I’m a big fan and wouldn’t mind if we celebrated Halloween more than once a year. 

But you have to wonder about the message it sends to little girls across the country when their sisters, cousins, heck maybe even their mothers, decide to wear a hot-cop outfit and hit the street on Oct.31st. 

It probably skews what most little boys expect from their local law enforcement as well.

But then this whole thing came full circle when I heard a line from the Halloween episode of The Office, oddly enough, when James Spader says its so odd that we celebrate fear on Halloween.

But I think it should’ve been rephrased.

We celebrate Halloween because of fear.

It’s a scary, sinister world we live in.  From the war in Afghanistan we still find ourselves stuck in and the violent repression of the Arab Spring by oppressive regimes in North Africa and the Middle East, to the  economic breakdown in the U.S. and Europe that came about due to greed and mismanagement. 

These larger issues coupled with the individual horrors we hear about on the news everyday make for some bleak times.

So maybe once a year we need to dress up like things we’re supposed to fear and be able to laugh at them.  We take the bogeymen from pop culture, creatures capable of unstoppable terror like Jason from the ‘Friday the 13th’ movies and Mike Myers from the ‘Halloween’ movies and bring them hilariously to life with our makeup and patchwork costumes. 

We all dress up and laugh at each other and with each other so that for one night we don’t have to fear all the things in this world that deserve our terror. 

For one night we can laugh at fear. 

I turn 32 on Saturday.

I turn 32 on Saturday.

I turn 32 on Saturday.

This mantra’s been chanted endlessly for the last few weeks.  I think its my brain’s way of creating a gentle wave for me to ride to the one immutable fact of my life.  

I’m getting older.

I watched one of my best friend’s get married this past weekend.  He is, in many ways, a mirror image of myself.  A mirror image who happens to be a few years younger than me.

When my direct peer group started getting married left and right I willingly played the part of hard-partying bachelor friend.  A dancing, drunk reminder of the life my friends were leaving behind.

Now I find myself at the weddings of kids who still took recess in the playground when I was taking geometry in high school.  The music being played is popular, but I don’t know anybody who listens to it. 

Almost all the people my age can’t make it to the after-party because they’ve got to put their kids to bed.  But here I am at the after-after-party, the only person in the room who can quote ‘Pulp Fiction’ line for line and dance to Sir Mix-A-Lot and Naughty By Nature during the reception in earnest, not in some arch, ironic way.

So I go the whole night playing at being young until the next morning when my brother and his friend are up talking and laughing about the night before.  Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep my head from ripping apart and find the right position to curl up in to drive away the overwhelming nausea.  My body is betraying my spirit, laying the truth out for anyone who walked in the room and saw me in my weakened state, leading them to one conclusion.

Man, he is getting old.

Sometimes though the mantra is not so soothing.  More like an alarm clock that I can’t turn off.

It’s not that I need a wife right now or burn with an urgent desire to be woken up in the early hours of the morning by a screaming child whose current and continued existence is my responsibility.  Its just that at some point I want these things in my life, and at an age when most are already engaging in them or can see them right on the horizon, I feel like they are as close as the moon.

And this feeling, this rift in the life I have and the life I expected led to an ennui, a waning of my spirit.  I felt listless, a piece of trash in the wind with nowhere to land.

And as such, I found it hard to put words on paper, to organize my thoughts into coherent statements worth stating.  Because who wants to listen to what a 32-year old man with no moorings, no tether, has to say about anything?

So yes, I disappeared for a little bit. 

But I am back now. 

I’ve accepted 32 as another number.

And maybe, just maybe, my lack of accomplishment in grown-up affairs makes me the perfect person to comment on them. 

I’m not a 32-year old man with no tether. 

I’m a 32-year old man with no strings tying me down.

I’m not a piece of trash in the wind. 

I’m a kite that a little boy lost his grip on and now I’m floating on the current. 

Let fate keep carrying me where it may.

So the rest of you can carry on with the getting married, baby making and establishing viable credit history and building equity that will exist for generations.

Cause dammit,

I turn 32 on Saturday.