Bridge of Spies is an Academy Award nominated film that celebrates the patriarchal authority of a decent, liberal, middle-aged, white American male in a world full of right-wing extremists, thuggish German communists, bitchy women, and hysterical, brainwashed children. Naturally it stars Tom Hanks. Don’t get me wrong. There a lot to admire about Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama. Spielberg knows how to make a watchable movie. Mark Rylance won a Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the captured Russian spy Rudolf Abel. The screenplay by Ethan and Joel Coen argues for diplomacy over war. It champions democracy and the rule of law over the kind of unquestioning nationalism inspired by fear. As the film goes on, however, and on – it’s a long movie – you begin to realize you’re being told a story you’ve heard 100 times before. It’s still okay. It’s not that the man who’s sitting next to you at the pub is necessarily a bore. He knows how to tug at your heart strings, but you also wonder if that lump in your throat is genuine emotion, or if you’ve just had one too many shots of 11-year-old malt Spielberg.

I don’t know how many people these days are familiar with the Francis Gary Powers affair – it was way before my time – but it was a big deal in 1960, in the last year of the Eisenhower Administration and at the height of the Cold War. After Powers, a pilot flying a CIA U2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union, Eisenhower denied that U2, which flew at altitudes over 70,000 feet, even existed. In the event of getting hit by anti-aircraft fire, Powers was supposed to have blown up the plane in mid-air. Failing that, he was supposed to have taken a cyanide capsule to avoid capture. In any event, Francis Gary Powers chose to live, the Soviet government paraded him through the newsreels, and Eisenhower came away looking like a big, fat liar.

Three years before, a minor Soviet spy named Rudolf Abel had been arrested in Brooklyn, tried, and convicted of espionage. Having avoided the death penalty thanks to his lawyer James B. Donovan, and a courageous decision by an otherwise conservative judge, Abel is now a valuable commodity. Since the Russians don’t want Abel to tell the Americans what he knows and the Americans don’t want Powers to tell the Russians what he knows, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles decides that a prisoner exchange might be in the interests of both governments. He calls Donovan into his office and sends him on a secret mission to East Berlin to negotiate with the Soviets, who have Powers, and the East Germans, who have snatched a young man named Frederic Pryor, an American graduate student who got stuck on the wrong side of the newly constructed Berlin Wall, as a bit of extra leverage. The CIA wants Powers. They don’t much care about Pryor, but Donovan, being a liberal and a humanitarian, strongly believes that “every life counts,” and pushes hard for both. In reality, neither Powers nor Abel was very important. The Russians would never have let Powers go if he had anything left to tell them. They had the fragments of the U2, and they had made a fool out of Eisenhower. Releasing Powers was actually to their advantage since it would keep the whole incident in the news. Rudolf Abel, in turn, was a nobody who, during his stay in the United States, had not managed to get a single piece of useful information or recruit even one American to the Communist Party. If the Soviet government got a propaganda victory by parading Powers in front of the cameras, the United States government got a propaganda victory by giving Abel a lawyer, and not sentencing him to death after the rigged trial.

Bridge of Spies, to its credit, is aware of how Abel was basically just a harmless old man who liked to sit in the park and paint. Donovan did in fact make a courageous decision agreeing to defend him in court. The film is also full of historical errors, some harmless, and added for dramatic effect, others not only laughable, but evidence of a somewhat suspect ideological agenda.

While it’s quite possible, for example, that Donovan didn’t tell his wife why he was going to East Berlin, let’s not kid ourselves. She probably figured it out. What’s more, since he has no trouble disobeying the orders of his CIA handlers when it comes to Frederic Pryor, his choice to keep his wife in the dark about his mission to the Warsaw Pact during the height of the Cold War sends a clear message. Women are not to be trusted. Spying and diplomacy is game for men, not women and children. Some of this is obviously poetic license in the service of telling a good story. While in reality nobody shot at James Donovan’s house in Brooklyn in retaliation for his agreeing to defend a Russian spy, it makes for good drama. Donovan was a hero, trying to save the life of Rudolf Abel, an honorable adversary to the United States, even as his son was getting brainwashed in school by useless duck and cover drills, his daughter is dodging bullets, and his wife is giving him the cold shoulder. It also sets the stage for a wonderfully patriarchal moment at the end. Donovan has returned home after successfully negotiating the release of Pryor and Powers. His wife gives him a hard time. Where were you? Why did you take so long? And why did you pick up the wrong can of cherry preserves from the supermarket? His kids are beginning to see him as a curious and eccentric “dad” you night love, but not necessarily respect. Then the evening news flashes on their television set announcing that Francis Gary Powers was free and it was none other than James. B. Donovan who arranged his release. Patriarchal authority has been restored. Why was the old man in Berlin? Well he was doing important stuff you kids wouldn’t understand.

The real Frederic Pryor, who’s very much alive, and is currently a professor emeritus at Swarthmore College, has pointed out that Bridge of Spies gives us a distorted picture of the East German government. Wolfgang Vogel, played by the German actor Sebastian Koch as a surly pissed off, stereotypical Kraut, was actually a nice guy. Pryor had not been captured during the construction of the Berlin Wall. He was detained after his landlady in East Berlin defected to the west. Whether or not he was kept in a cell half flooded with freezing water is probably Spielberg’s invention. People certainly did got shot trying to get over the wall to West Berlin. Donovan never witnessed it. I’m perfectly willing to believe that Francis Gary Powers was water boarded and subjected to sleep deprivation – torture is what governments do – but there’s no question that Spielberg goes out of his way to portray the East Germans as Nazis.

Indeed, while it’s the Russians not the East Germans who torture Powers, Bridge of Spies is a tale of good commie – the Russians – and bad commie – the Germans. For Spielberg, Russians, especially Abel, are basically decent folk who just happen to be on the other side. Germans, on the other hand – even German Americans like Donovan’s CIA handler Hoffman – are, well, Germans. The whole movie makes me wonder just how much mileage Hollywood has left in the idea of the snarling, heel clicking Teutonic villain. The Second World War has been over for 70 years now and the Germans are our friends.  They’re nice to Middle Eastern refugees and they have a woman president. They’re not going to invade Poland.

It’s not that Spielberg has anything against Germans per se. He just wants to portray Abel, who has a sympathetic, if somewhat neurotic wife in Russia, as an East Bloc version of James Donovan. Abel likes to paint. He appreciates good music. He’s a cultured civilized man, exactly the kind of communist John F. Kennedy was talking about in his American University speech. He’s the kind of guy someone like Donovan could meet at the club after work while they both have a drink and talk about their family and their jobs. Unlike the Germans, who are thoroughly otherized, Abel is one of us. In fact, by the time the Russians and Americans meet at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin to arrange the exchange, we’re beginning to wonder why Abel just doesn’t stay in the United States. Donovan is worried that Abel might just get shot. When the East Germans balk at returning Pryor along with Powers, Abel disobeys his own government to side with the Americans. If the East Germans don’t return Pryor, he’ll stay in the United States and do his 30 years in prison. Abel is not only a Russian spy. He and James Donovan are soul mates. It’s easy too see why Mark Rylance won Best Supporting Actor. Tom Hanks is playing Tom Hanks, but Rylance manages to give depth to a man who, facing the next 30 years in jail, takes solace in painting and the music of Shostakovich. Good men, both Russian and American, disobey their own governments for the sake of their humanitarian principles.

The biggest “what the fuck moment” in Bridge of Spies comes with Spielberg’s resurrection of John Forster Dulles, who actually died in 1959, to serve as the United States Secretary of State during the Francis Gary Powers Affair. The real Secretary of State in 1960, Christian Herter, has been forgotten by history. He seems to have been a relatively inoffensive figure, as far as American Secretaries of State go. Dulles, on the other hand, was a flat out villain, a snarling anti-communist fanatic who organized the coups in Guatemala and Iran and repeatedly brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. I’m not exactly sure why Spielberg went with Dulles instead of Herter – who as a Harvard graduate would have served nicely as a figure of the liberal WASP patriarchy– but the ideological intention is clear. Spielberg wants to rescue American history from itself, to white wash its sins on the big screen, to portray even irredeemably evil figures like the Dulles brothers as fundamentally benevolent. It’s nothing new. Spielberg has always been a syrupy American nationalist. Indeed, when Dulles summons Donovan to the State Department, it’s a remake of a very similar scene in his earlier film Saving Private Ryan. Back in the 1990s, George Marshall summoned Captain Miller, also Tom Hanks, to his headquarters, then sent him on a mission to rescue Private First Class James Francis Ryan behind German lines. In the 2010s, it’s John Foster Dulles and James B. Donovan. Indeed, if you wanted to, you could probably rename Bridge of Spies as “Saving Graduate Student Pryor.”

Matt Damon, thank God, was probably too old for the role.

Straight Outta Compton is a good movie that almost gets away.

Its main weakness isn’t the acting, the lighting, the costume design or the soundtrack, all of which are excellent. It’s the editing. Straight Outta Compton tries to do too much in too little time. It has a compelling story to tell. In fact, it has three, maybe four, maybe even five compelling stories to tell. I just wish it hadn’t tried to tell them all in 147 minutes. It would have been a much better movie if it had picked just one and stuck with it, but it’s still more entertaining than at least half the movies that got nominated for Best Picture.

NWA, or “Niggers With Attitude,” was an important rap group that came out of Los Angeles in the late 1980s. To give you an idea of how important they were, I’ve not only heard of them. I’ve sung “Fuck the Police,” their most famous song, on the way to jail in the paddy wagon. The movie begins in 1986. Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre are three teenagers growing up in Los Angeles, all working overtime to prove their manhood in the violent, gang-ridden culture of Compton. The actors do an excellent job of presenting them as individuals. Eazy-E is sensitive, perhaps even “soft.” Dr. Dre is businesslike and intellectual, the “brains” of the group. Ice Cube is angry, rebellious, and immensely talented. While all three might appear to be trying just a little too hard to be “hard,” they’re really just living by the rules of their society. Acting like a “gangsta” is as normal in Compton as going to football games is in Texas.

The biggest gang in Compton isn’t the Crips or the Bloods. It’s the Los Angeles Police Department. Similar to the way they’re portrayed in Walter Hill’s classic film The Warriors, the police in Straight Out of Compton seem to be as much a part of the landscape as they do a man made institution, a force of nature the people of Compton have to deal with just like earthquakes or droughts. It’s an aesthetic strength and an aesthetic weakness. It conveys the ubiquitous quality of their presence, but it also it fails to get beneath the surface. The police are just there. In the real world  they defend capitalism. In Since Straight Out of Compton, which has ambiguous, even confused views about capitalism, they remain part of the landscape, a mass of jackbooted fascists whose only purpose in life seems to be to harass black people.

One of the film’s best scenes shows the members of NWA being stopped and frisked on the side walk outside the recording studio where they’re cutting their first album. Jerry Heller, their white Jewish manager comes out and loudly defends them. The most viciously fascist cop is a black man who hates rap music. It’s great drama. It also points to the central ideological theme of the film, one that sometimes gets buried in the script’s lack of focus. Screenwriters Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff have set up a confrontation between a fascist black police officer – I don’t know how many black sergeants and lieutenants there were in the LAPD in 1989 but I wouldn’t guess very many – and a white capitalist who later turns out to be a sleazy, manipulative cheat. In other words, capitalism and the fascist state both exploit and oppress black musicians and artists owe it to one another to stick together in solidarity against both. It’s an excellent point, and one the film should have focused on more tightly. Indeed, if Straight Outta Compton had organized itself around the song Fuck the Police the way Godard’s film Sympathy for the Devil organized itself around the song Sympathy for the Devil, it would have been the masterpiece Sympathy for the Devil wasn’t.

The best scenes in Straight Outta Compton come towards the middle of the film. Ice Cube, the most radical member of NWA, and the mostly clearly defined character in the movie, continually pushes, not only against the police, but against the record companies. When the FBI sends a threatening letter to Jerry Heller demanding that they no longer play their signature song, Fuck the Police, Ice Cube angrily rejects Heller’s advice that they censor themselves to avoid trouble. Easy-E and Dr. Dre then point out that that letter is “an opportunity not a threat,” that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, especially when it gives them the chance to pose as defenders of free speech. It works. In what should have been the film’s climax, NWA plays a concert in Detroit. The Detroit Police don’t send a threatening letter. They show up to make their threats in person. If NWA plays Fuck the Police they will be arrested, and sued by the state. Of course they go on stage and play Fuck the Police. It’s an incredibly heavy-handed and oppressive demand that any self-respecting artist would defy. As Ice Cube begins to sing, the drama shifts to the potentially violent conflict between the Detroit Police and NWA’s audience. The crowd is huge. How can the police possibly shut it down. Ice Cube continues singing until a shot conveniently rings out somewhere in the auditorium. We never really find out who it was but of course the police did it. The band members run off the stage. The crowd riots, and the film is successful at capturing the rowdy, almost insurrectional atmosphere that characterized the best rap concerts in the late 80s and early 90s.

To be honest, I don’t think the director realized what a great scene he filmed. He cuts it short, drops the whole issue, and moves on to the conflicts that eventually lead to NWA’s breakup. Therein lies Straight Outta Compton’s major weakness. While NWA’s dissolution is a worthy subject for a movie, a screenplay about a breakup has to be tightly constructed. It has to make it easy, even for someone unfamiliar with the history of NWA or rap to understand what’s going on. The second half of Straight Outta Compton feels as if it’s been written for rap aficionados, not the general public. We get a glimpse of the Rodney King riots, a glimpse of the East Coast vs. West Coast feud, and a glimpse of Suge Knight, but none of it really comes together. It feels as if the film is falling apart at the same time the band is falling apart. Straight Outta Compton regains some of its momentum at the end when Easy-E finds out he has AIDS but it’s too little too late. It’s a good, if not great film, but it’s also a lost opportunity.

I used to call it white trash suicide.

Part of the reason I’m an unemployable loser and a good for nothing bum is how much I love quitting jobs in in anger. I suggest that everybody try it at least once. It’s better than sex. One moment you’re a miserable wage slave in the gigantic soul crushing machine of the capitalist economy. Only a few seconds later, you’re a free man, outside the system, and outside of society. One moment the boss has his foot on the back of your neck. As soon as you quit, you’re looking him straight in the eye, and daring him to step outside for a fight. I have never had a boss take me up on the offer to step outside and settle it like men, although one did report me to the FBI to accuse me of trying to hack his e-mail server, and another called me at home and threatened to kill me. I gave him the address but he never showed.

For the first few days after you quit your job in anger, you feel genuinely alive. You enjoy food. You enjoy music. You enjoy wine. You often fall madly in love with the first attractive member of the opposite sex who crosses your path. The best time of the year to quit a job in anger is the Spring. You can take long walks in the glorious April or May weather, stroll through the park, and actually be able to smell the flowers. You pet dogs. Cats don’t run away. The birds in the trees seem to be singing their songs just for you. You fall into a deep sleep almost immediately after your head hits the pillow. You wake up at dawn, throw open the window, and greet the morning air. You start to plan your walking tour of Europe. You have absolutely no urge to turn on the TV set. Something about the world just feels right. You wonder why it all took so long. Then you remember.

You have to get another job.

Dennis Hopper may not have fully understood the high you get from committing white trash suicide. He wasn’t a member of the working class, after all. But in his utterly bleak, nihilistic 1980 film Out of the Blue, he demonstrates just how well he understands the consequences, the hangover that comes after you realize that all you’ve done is tighten your chains. You can’t list your old employer as a reference. You are now less marketable in your chosen field. If you’re lucky to get an interview for a new job, you have to explain why you quit the old one. Eventually you join the underclass. You become unemployable. That high you once got quitting your job is no more. You begin to feel lucky if someone will hire you for a few days at minimum wage washing dishes. You start to drink. You start to take drugs. You begin to consider the most efficient way of killing yourself. Should you jump off a bridge? Should you take sleeping pills. Should you do it like a man and a Samurai and disembowel yourself? Or should you buy an illegal gun and blow your brains out? In the end, you probably just get by the best you can until you die of old age.

It takes a lot of balls to chose the time and place of your death.

Hopper plays Don Barnes, a Vancouver truck driver back in the days before Vancouver got too expensive for anybody but a billionaire to live there. Sharon Farrell plays his wife Kathy, a heroin addict. Don Gordon plays his best friend Charlie, a sleaze bag and a borderline pedophile who likes teenage girls. Raymond Burr plays Dr. Brean, a psychoanalyst. No, I’m not kidding about that. Most importantly of all, Linda Manz, who cinophiles will recognize from Days of Heaven, The Wanders, and Gummo, plays Don’s daughter Cindy, or “CeBe,” who lives in a room covered with posters of Elvis and Johnny Rotten, dreaming of being a rock star.

If you’re not a late Boomer or an early Gen Xer you have no idea just how much “my generation” looked up to rock stars. It was almost like a cult. In reality, it was about how America in the 1970s, while not exactly a “failed state,” was certainly a “failed culture.” Nobody believed in anything. There was no authority figure you could trust. If you were a teenage boy, everything was fake. If you were a teenage girl, 40-year-old men were constantly trying to get inside your pants. You spent as much time away from home as you could. When you came home, you ran up to your bedroom and buried your face under the pillow, lest you hear your mother and your father screaming at each other. If you caught your mother shooting up, it was just the way things were. If your father tried to molest you, you had no idea that what he was doing was wrong, even if it felt that way. When Johnny Rotten shouted “no future” in God Save the Queen, you knew exactly what he meant. If you lived, even if you survived well into middle age, nothing really changed. If you want to go back in time and figure out what all those white, 45 to 55 year old non-college graduates currently drinking and drugging themselves to death looked like when they were teenagers, you could do a lot worse than Linda Manz as CeBe in Out of the Blue.

Out of the Blue opens with a school bus stalled out in the middle of what appears to be a half deserted road. We see Don and CeBe in Don’s 18-wheeler, father and daughter kissing each other on the mouth, speeding down the highway unaware of the tin can full of 12 year olds just ahead. You can guess what happens next. Don ends up in prison for manslaughter. CeBe ends up under the “care” of her mother, who gets a job working for some guy she’s fucking, Johnny Rotten and Elvis. CeBe thinks she’s a rebel, but she’s not. She’s really just a lost little girl, her fetish for punk rock and Elvis just the longing for the possibly incestuous and abusive biological father locked up in prison. When Elvis dies, it almost feels as if her real father abandoned her all over again. She runs away from her dilapidated house in suburban Vancouver to the big city. She gets picked up by a hippie cabdriver who tries to get her high so he can fuck her. She escapes. She goes to a punk concert, steals a car, gets caught, and after a brief consultation with Raymond Burr, winds up home back under the care of her mother.

When Don comes back home everything seems better, at least at first. Whether or not he molested her, CeBe genuinely loves her father. They go on a picnic. They drive carelessly. They seem happy. It all seems too easy. After all, only 6 years before, Don killed an entire school bus full of children. Surely he has enemies. He does. Eventually we realize Don, Kathy and CeBe are pariahs in their suburban neighborhood, and they don’t have the money to leave. Don gets a job at a garbage dump. The father of one of the children he killed tries to get him fired. He quits first. It’s a great scene. Don won’t give his boss the satisfaction of firing him, or even seeing him walk off the job peacefully. Instead, he demolishes half the work site in his bulldozer, causing hundreds of dollars worth of beautiful damage. But the writing is on the wall. He has committed white trash suicide. After the rebellion comes the hangover. Kathy shoots up. Don gets drunk, then commits a violent crime. Charlie not only tries to molest CeBe. He asks, and receives, Don’s permission. CeBe knows she’s damned, that however long she lives, she’ll never fit in, anywhere. Everything is spireling downward and out of control. The walls are closing in on the Barnes family. They’re not long for this world. Then CeBe chooses the time and place, not only of her death, but of the death of her mother and father, and it’s glorious.

Final Note: For a ruling-class version of CeBe, check out Mia Wasikowska in the sadly neglected 2013 film Stoker.

Joy, David O. Russell’s biographical drama about inventor and entrepreneur Joy Mangano, is a love letter to neoliberal, “lean in” feminism. Like a motivational speech by Tony Robbins, Joy makes the case for the American dream. If you believe in yourself, if you ignore the naysayers, if you build a better mousetrap, you too can become rich and famous. Joy is a rare example of a mainstream Hollywood movie that wears its conservative politics on its sleeve.

I loved every minute of it.

David O. Russell makes interesting casting choices. I’m not really sure if any of the actors brought their A game to Joy, but none of them really had to. They work together as an ensemble. Robert DeNiro has a minor role as Joy’s father. Isabella Rossellini is quietly believable as a moneyed, eccentric and authoritarian Italian immigrant, De Niro’s girlfriend and Joy’s first investor. I dislike Bradley Cooper for his work in American Sniper, especially for his willingness to shill for Clint Eastwood’s fascist politics, but there’s no question he’s a good actor. He perfectly nails the role of Neil Walker, a charismatic cable TV executive, a charming, but fundamentally shallow man who convinces Joy to take out a second mortgage on her house, then coldly drops her the next day when her product doesn’t sell. While Russell’s decision to cast Jennifer Lawrence, a 25-year-old WASP from Kentucky as Joy Mangano, a 33-year-old Italian American from Long Guyland, may raise a few eyebrows, it makes the film work. We want to see Lawrence grow into the role of a 30-something as much as we want to see Joy grow into the role of a successful capitalist and entrepreneur. Lawrence’s likability makes us root for her. Her youth and vulnerability lend an attractive, and even a glamorous air to the fundamentally drab idea of selling a plastic mop on the QVC network.

The film opens with Joy, a divorced mother of two, working at a low-paying job as a ticket clerk for Eastern Airlines, entombed inside her extended, dysfunctional family, watching the early promise of her life disappear into the rear view mirror of her 20s. A nagging sense that you haven’t lived up to your potential is something we all feel in our early 30s. In Joy’s case the gulf between what she thinks she can be and where she’s actually ended up is the size of the Grand Canyon. She was the valedictorian of her high school. She was supposed to go to college. She invented a no-choke dog collar she failed to patent and later saw being sold by a major pet supply company. She lives in a ramshackle old house in Quogue with her mother, a depressed woman played by Virginia Madsen who spends all day watching soap operas on TV, her two kids and her ex-husband, who still lives in the basement two years after the divorce. A crisis is reached when Joy is fired from her job as a ticket agent. I’m not sure anybody would fire someone who looks as good in an Eastern Airlines outfit as Jennifer Lawrence does unless she’s a very difficult employee, and probably not even then, so you have to suspend your disbelief. Things get worse even when her father Rudy gets dumped by his live in girlfriend, and moves back “home.” Before long, Joy realizes that she’s not only the mother of her two children, but also of her father, her mother, and her ex-husband. Her only real emotional support, her grandmother, convinces her never to give up her dreams.

Joy gets a break when Rudy starts dating Trudy, a wealthy Italian played by Isabella Rossellini. Trudy is a difficult, eccentric person – life everybody else in the movie – but she has one thing every aspiring entrepreneur needs, access to capital. After Joy designs a plastic, self-wringing mop, and convinces Trudy to put up the money to manufacture a small initial run of the prototype, Joy runs into her next problem. Where to sell it? The local hardware store isn’t interested. Kmart doesn’t want it. It’s too good. People won’t have to buy a new mop every few months. When she tries to set up her own kiosk in the parking-lot of a local mini-mall, she gets arrested. David O. Russell demonstrates his understanding of the culturally liberal side of the American Dream with the characters of Tony, Joy’s ex-husband, and Jackie, Joy’s best friend from high-school. They’re both Hispanic. They both support Joy’s dreams in a way nobody in her family but her grandmother does. It’s Tony – a would be singer who we initially think is a bit of a loser – who suggests that Joy should try the QVC network, a home-shopping network set up by Barry Diller in 1986, and made feasible by cable television and the newly expanded availability of credit cards.

Neil Walker, the head of the QVC network, is as charming, volatile and shallow as capitalism itself. He’s initially skeptical, but Joy not only manages to convince him to sell her mop. She convinces him to convince her to manufacture a run of 50,000. It’s only later, to her horror, that she learns he had never really been behind her idea at all. She hadn’t sold him on her mop. He had sold her on QVC. The moment when Joy realizes that all her effort has been for nothing, that she got one 30 second spot on Walker’s network in exchange for $200,000 dollars, is the kind of gut punch to your dreams that few movies ever manage to dramatize so well. Suddenly Joy is all alone, nothing but an unemployed, divorced mother of two children who had put up her family’s house for the frivolous delusion that she could be a successful capitalist.This is also the moment that Russell sells us on capitalism. Joy is too strong, too motivated, to go down without a fight, and she becomes a surrogate for us all, for her husband, the would-be singer, for the failed writer, the failed artist, the athlete who never made it to the big leagues, the politician who loses an election, the unrequited lover. Joy the high-school valedictorian has been broken. Joy the entrepreneur, the lean in feminist, the artist of the plastic mop and the no choke dollar, has risen Phoenix like from the ashes. Capitalism destroys the individual. Capitalism also makes it possible for the individual to be reborn.

Joy ends with Joy, older and successful beyond her wildest dreams, give a break to a young mother who reminds her of herself. Who needs socialism when you’ve got benevolent, socially progressive millionaires like Joy Mangano running the show? Why would you give up on the American dream when it looks like Jennifer Lawrence in a white Oxford shirt, long blond hair, and tight black slacks hugging her long legs? God bless the United States of America even if, in the end, it’s just a self-wringing plastic mop on sales for 20 dollars on the QVC network.

Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s newsroom drama about pedophile priests in Boston, will probably go down as one of the weakest films ever to win Best Picture. It’s not as bad as Crash, or as insipid as The King’s Speech, but it’s not great, or even good film making. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a competently written and directed TV movie of the week that calls attention to a horrible epidemic of child abuse inside the Catholic Church, and the rotten establishment that covered it up. Giving it the Best Picture award, however, was an appalling act of political cowardice designed to draw attention away from the far superior The Big Short. Did some calls go out from the Clinton campaign to the Academy voters to urge them to give the Oscar to Spotlight “for the children?” Probably not, but let’s not kid ourselves. This was about protecting Wall Street.

Calling out pedophile priests was dangerous thing to do in the early 1990s.  Sinead O’Connor’s magnificent act of performance art on Saturday Night Live almost destroyed her career. In 2016, it’s a pretty safe political bet. Nobody in Hollywood, or for that matter Boston — Massachusetts is the least religious state in the country – cares very much about protecting the Catholic Church. The religion of the United States of America is not Roman Catholicism. It’s capitalism. What’s more, there have already been two far superior movies about the evils of Catholic patriarchy and child abuse, 2003’s The Magdalene Sisters and 2013’s Philomena, neither of which won Best Picture. Philomena also featured a great lead performance by the brilliant Judi Dench.

The Oscars are always political. This year, the main debate, at least on social media, focused on the lack of awards for black actors and for other people of color. While it’s a rather strange charge to level at the Academy this year, when a Mexican director won his second straight award for Best Director and Mexican cinematographer got his third straight award for Best Cinematography, the Oscars can always use a more diverse set of nominees. Perhaps Creed should have gotten a nomination for Best Picture instead of Brooklyn. Perhaps Straight Out of Compton or Chi-Raq should have at least gotten some recognition, but let’s call attention to the elephant in the room. Hillary Clinton, a right-wing Wall Street connected Democrat, has weaponized political correctness in general, and the black vote in particular, to attack Bernie Sanders, a solidly liberal Democrat from a mostly white state in New England. Declaring the Oscars to be “so white” and giving the Best Picture award to a film with a rogues gallery of pasty faced Irish Catholic villains from Boston is not going to get you ostracized from your Pilates classes in West Hollywood. It’s going to get you a pat on the back.

As pure film making, Carol should have won Best Picture. Feminists might have preferred Mad Max Fury Road, but both are such different films from Spotlight it’s a case of apples and oranges. The Big Short, however, not only the same thing twice as well as Spotlight does. It’s has a politically riskier, far more subversive narrative, and, while no truly great performances, far better acting. What makes The Big Short a more accomplished film than Spotlight is the way it takes a complex subject and boils it down to a compelling, and quite frankly suspenseful narrative. It doesn’t take a genius to convince people that child abuse is wrong. If a priest seduces a 12-year-old boy from a disadvantaged background into giving him a blow job, I think we can all pretty much agree that this priest is a villain and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. The bankers who destroyed the economy in 2008, however, got away with it mainly because credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages are not only difficult to figure out. The corporate media refused to report the truth. In the Big Short, Director Adam McKay does what the journalists couldn’t, or wouldn’t do themselves. In Spotlight, Tom McCarthy just repeats the same, Pulitzer Prize winning story the Boston Globe had already told more than 10 years ago.

As far as acting goes, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Steve Carrell don’t have to do very much, but they enjoy every moment of what they do. There were no “heroes” in The Big Short. The men who expose the conditions that caused the housing bubble were unlikeable assholes who were doing it for the money. The Big Short is a fun movie to watch because the actors are having so much fun making it. The only newspaper man we see is a spineless hack unwilling to risk his job. The credit reporting agencies are not only out and out frauds. They haven’t sued. That pretty much guarantees that everything the movie says about them is true.

Spotlight could have done more with the acting talent it had.

Since the Boston Globe was complicit in the vast conspiracy to cover up the child abuse in the Catholic Church right along with Cardinal Law, the screenplay gives Michael Keaton, who plays Walter V. Robinson, the Globe editor who buried the original story back in 1993, every opportunity to express some kind of emotional anguish, to help us understand his decision to expose an institution that had been so important a part of his upbringing and education. He mostly just walks around looking as if he has a bad case of indigestion. Rachel McAdams doesn’t have much to do at all. A scene with her grandmother, a religious Catholic, just falls flat. Another scene, where she interviews a victim of a pedophile priest, just strikes me badly written and even homophobic. He remarks how handsome a sleazy lawyer is. She sympathetically puts her hand on his shoulder. She comes off like “the attractive young district attorney” from a Law and Order SVU episode. He comes off like a nervous fag. Mark Ruffalo at least tries, but the results don’t quite match the effort he puts into the role. One emotional outburst might best be compared to the satirical “Oscar Clip” from the original Wayne’s World film. He cares about child abuse and lets us know that goddammit he’ll never be able to go to church again. The problem is I never for a moment believed that he was a Portuguese American Catholic from Boston having a crisis of faith. He came off exactly like what he is, an earnest, progressive, and secular Hollywood actor playing the part of a man having a crisis of faith.

Final Note: Interestingly enough, Spotlight never mentions that Cardinal Bernard Francis Law escaped prosecution in the United States because the Pope reassigned him to the Vatican, which is its own country with its own laws. Will Spotlight push the Obama Administration into demanding his extradition? My guess would be no. Unlike Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning, Cardinal Law will die quietly in his bed without ever having to face any kind of justice other than hell (which doesn’t exist).