I often think that the careers of folks who started out as Daily Show correspondents is illustration of why supporting actors are so important. Take Cedar Rapids, in which Ed Helms is clearly the supporting actor in his own movie:

Without that slight blank, cheerfulness, though, the other characters wouldn’t have the catalyst they need to turn in what looks like a reasonably amusing series of performances. On the opposite end of things, John Oliver is just a genius of disruptiveness as Professor Ian Duncan on Community:

His character doesn’t fully gel with the dynamic of the cast, and his persistent loopiness might be too much if it was on the show all the time (I think Community‘s achieved a nice balance, after basically ignoring the character for most of last season). But it’s excellent leavening, a reminder that the characters have turned a lot of weird things into a fairly consistent level of normal, but that the world around them is stranger still. It’s beautifully proportioned.

I know everyone wants to be a star, for both one-off pecuniary and consistent-level-of-employment reasons. But artistically, there’s a lot to be said about providing either the canvas or the splash of color that makes the work pop.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a sucker for slightly dilapidated amusement parks and mini-golf courses, but the trailer for Hanna looks rather visually gorgeous, doesn’t it?

And that’s before we actually get to the substance of the movie, Saoirse Ronan’s ethereal teenaged (and perhaps genetically engineered) assassin. I loved the father-daughter dynamic in Kick-Ass, though I think it remains to be seen if this movie has the same unforced, loving naturalism to the relationship despite the enormously warped circumstances.

I do find this micro-trend of fathers-training-pint-sized-killers interesting, though. I wonder if it would be harder for the movies to portray fathers schooling their sons in extreme violence, conjuring up images of everything from John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo’s deadly campaign around the Beltway in Washington to families of violent white extremists. When a man hands his son a gun and tells him to kill, he’s recreating ancient tragedies and evils. But when a father hands his daughter a weapon, he gives her power, he himself defies gender expectations: in the semantics of our culture, they become admirable rebels, elevated by their deviance, rather than stunted cowards shrunken by their violence. It says a lot about the pace of our journey towards gender equality that giving a woman any kind of power is supposed to be liberating, no matter what she does with it.

On what makes a movie so bad it’s good, and why Showgirls is just bad.