Mark Duplass in Safety Not Guaranteed.

Well, the year has just passed the halfway mark, and while it hasn’t offered a ton of big screen gems, there have certainly been some performances worth remembering. Below, I present my superlatives for the best performances of the half-year:

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Mark Duplass, Your Sister’s Sister and Safety Not Guaranteed

In this duo of similarly-themed indie films, Duplass is a man-child crippled by emotional stasis. In the former, his depression causes him to make one relationship mistake after another. In the latter, he makes us believe that he can create a time machine and head back to 2001. And yet no matter what, we remain onboard with him.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Rosemarie DeWitt, Your Sister’s Sister

No one plays a screw-up as piercingly brilliantly as DeWitt, whether it’s onstage in Family Week or on Showtime’s sadly cancelled The United States of Tara. The fierce actress channels brittle fragility as Hannah in Sister. Watching her and Duplass together, you pray that whatever damage they may have done to their relationships with each other and with her sister Iris (Emily Blunt) is reparable.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role: Tom Cruise, Rock of Ages

Rock has such a silly premise, and is such a terrible movie beyond that, that it’s easy to disregard everything about it. Except then Cruise saunters in, rock star attitude coating lone star sadness, and provides a backbone for this weak crowd-pleaser. It’s not just that he filled the film’s loudest moments so wonderfully; it’s that he also provided the film’s quietest, most intense ones as well.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: Eva Green, Dark Shadows

Playing bad treated Green real good in Shadows, a weak TV update that gave her plenty of flaky baroque scenery to chew as she simultaneously seduced and antagonized Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins. This was perfect over-the-top acting, in which she both let loose without ever losing control. And it’s proof that great acting can be found regardless of role size and genre of film.

Here’s hoping there are more gems to discover in the second half of the year!

Hill) in 21 Jump Street.

The duo have not outgrown their adolescent rivalry or immature sense of amusement that began in high school. Seven years later (after a police academy training session ridiculously scored to The Clash’s version of Junior Murvin’s reggae classic “Police and Thieves”), they’re sent back to high school as undercover cops. Less audience representatives than pandering role models, they want moviegoers to laugh at class clowns and cop clowns.

This nonsense comes from rebooting the 1980s TV series 21 Jump Street, minus the cop-drama gravitas. Ironically, it exhibits the lowbrow humor currently found on both network and cable TV shows—forms geared to the juvenile taste of 12-year-old boys, the gullible demographic desperately sought after by advertisers. Adults now embrace their
inner brat as a sign of cool, longing for the irresponsibility of childishness. They accept TV mediocrity and smuttiness in movies like Knocked Up, The Hangover and Bridesmaids. The downward spiral continues with 21 Jump Street.

Refashioning TV junk as if it were enriched our cultural heritage, Hollywood diminishes it. As that misappropriated reggae song demonstrates, any possibility that pop culture can address socially, morally, politically important experience is denied. 21 Jump Street’s idiocy is personified in Tatum’s tall-drink-ofretardation, Hill’s rotund schmuck (a role he should have outgrown after David Gordon Green’s The Sitter) and later in a cameo by Johnny Depp, star of the original TV series, who is only fooling himself if he thinks this meta-comic turn is equivalent to Marlon Brando spoofing Don Vito Corleone in The Freshman.

Consider: Brando seized the opportunity to comment upon The Godfather’s cultural phenomenon that proved less conscientious than he had hoped when signing on to its gangster-movie allegory for corporate greed. (Could even Brando’s genius have intuited that The Godfather would inspire a new cultural standard of thievery and ruthlessness that even politicians such as The Sopranos fans Bill and Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama would eventually endorse?)

Tatum, Hill and Depp are less conscientious stars; they simply overlook the consequences when trash ignores the crisis of police brutality—a problem producer Stephen J. Cannell had addressed in his exploitative TV mogul way by giving cop drama a hip-hop spin.

Now the spin is out of control. 21 Jump Street is aggressively stupid farce. Its directing team, Phil Lord and Chris
Miller, can’t cohere the tone of a single scene, jumping from teen sap to grossout humor almost schizophrenically. The relentless hodge-podge resembles a LMFAO music video—without the delirium that gives LMFAO their party-animal style. Frequent video game intertitles steal from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; dance scenes, stunt scenes and explosions are mistimed, while the overly violent shootouts imitate Pineapple Express.

This mess of dishonest intentions and cultural decline epitomizes the lack of sincerity and imagination now passing for entertainment. 21 Jump Street has gotten better reviews than Jack and Jill, probably because it has nothing to do with real experience; because it substitutes narrative development with explosions and uses dick jokes for the repressed tensions of male bonding, as in Tatum’s homoerotic puzzlement when Schmidt befriends a
narc played by Dave Franco.

Perhaps the lowest point is Jenks and Schmidt’s singsong
trivialization of the Miranda rights advisory; it’s insulting to current urban sensitivities and reveals Hollywood’s ongoing juvenile comedy phase to be mindlessly offensive. 21 Jump Street is so obtuse it’s as if the social satire of Hot Fuzz never happened.