In order of interest.
1. The Hangover – All movies set in Vegas are inevitably an advertisement for tourism. A place where men can be made unconscious about their conscious desire.
2. Star Trek – The series reboot: a mechanism that allows for a franchise to disavow its own history through a form of self-prescribed amnesia. That is to say, if the defeat of a past menace (the Cold War) was merely a fantasy, then the imagination of that victory will be forcibly suppressed in order for new conflicts (the Great Recession) to be creatively won over.
3. Inglourious Basterds – If the movie presents itself as a fable (Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France...) and all fables are morality tales, then the film is deeply amoral – yet knowingly so: a movie made for the pleasure of an audience watching an alliance killing Nazis while also featuring within it a movie audience of Nazis taking pleasure in the killing of an alliance.
4. The Hurt Locker – The exploding psychotherapist: like Freud on the Irish – the war in Iraq is impervious to analysis.
5. I Love You, Man – The gay brother who understands men better than men.
6. Terminator Salvation – After 25 years, 3 films and a tv series: all loops must be closed.
7. Funny People – Stand-up comedy as hegemony: Adam Sandler as archaeology of Seth Rogen's future.
8. Moon – A literary certainty: all encounters between doppelgängers must escalate into a fight. Also, future lunar exploration will be monopolized by korean corporations.
9. Public Enemies – Michael Mann following the Alfred Hitchcock adage: if the making of a film is analogous to the perfect crime, then a heist film is cinema-par-excellence.
10. District 9 – Annoyingly explicit Apartheid allegory does nothing but signal its lack of metaphor. More strikingly, the disappearance of subtext is the film's text.
11. Wolverine – The unchanging canadian landscape.
