THIEVES WHO PLAY BY THE RULES

I went into Takers with my brain clenched. I was expecting it to be terrible. I considered the casting of T.I., Chris Brown, Paul Walker and even Idris Elba to be warning signs. I've seen former castmembers of The Wire popping up in hip-hop videos lately, and Elba's done some other movies aimed at urban blacks—he co-starred with Beyoncé in 2009's Obsessed, remember, and he did a Tyler Perry movie, Daddy's Little Girls, too. So I was expecting it to be a 90-minute version of one of those hip-hop videos that finds the rappers and their friends and hangers-on reshooting one of their favorite gangster movies—an imitation of an imitation.

Well, Takers is much better than that. It's not original—it's a genre picture, a heist movie. Genre movies have rules, and Takers only breaks one, and when that surprise comes, it's a solid choice on the filmmakers' part.

There are two basic heist-movie stories, the "one last job" story and the "job too big to pass up" story. Takers is the latter, with some twists thrown in. Elba plays the leader of a five-man, high-end heist team; they pull off a Heat-style bank robbery as the movie begins, getting away by hijacking a news helicopter. Then they're contacted by T.I., the sixth member of the crew, who went to prison following a 2004 job. He comes out early, and returns offering an even bigger job than the one we just saw them complete, albeit on a rush schedule. It's an armored car robbery, not unlike the one in the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, a fact that's explicitly acknowledged in dialogue. There's about 30 seconds of "it's too quick...can we trust him?" dialogue within the group, before they're all in. As you knew they would be, 'cause otherwise there's no movie.

Meanwhile, there's a parallel narrative about the obsessed detective, played by Matt Dillon, who's tracking whoever was behind the movie-opening bank job. That's all pretty much straight out of Heat, except Dillon doesn't shout as much as Al Pacino. (In fact, he delivers most of his dialogue in a sullen mutter.) And while that story's not as interesting as the criminals' preparations for their big job, it's handled better than many writers would have done. Dialogue between Dillon and his partner is expository but not clunky. There are some decent twists along the way, too.

What I like best about heist movies is the part where the team does the actual physical work of preparing—dressing up like city workers and crawling through the sewers to lay charges, jackhammering through the floor of the building next door to the one they're going to rob, tapping into the alarm system and stealing the passcodes, that stuff. Takers does that stuff well. Some of the things it doesn't do well, like showing us how all the members of the crew save one get away from the second-act climax, or doing more to establish the power of a love triangle (it doesn't help that two-thirds of the characters involved in said triangle are given almost no motivation...not just to be together, but to exist at all), are forgivable in my eyes because the important stuff is handled efficiently and without showiness. The filmmakers also keep the thing I was most worried about having to endure—music video-style passages where the thieves stand (or sit) around looking cool, drinking expensive liquor with anonymous and underdressed women draped over them—to a relative minimum. Oh, and in general the movie is very well shot and edited—it's digital, but since it takes place in 2010, that's not a mood-shattering distraction the way it was in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, set in the 1930s but seemingly filmed on a Flip video camera.

Ultimately, to me, the most interesting character in the entire movie is played by, of all people, Paul Walker. He's an underrated actor, because he doesn't ever seem to be working very hard, and he allows everyone else in a scene to out-shout him, when they're not physically throwing him around or otherwise making the viewer forget he's there at all. Put him next to a cartoon character like Vin Diesel in the first and fourth Fast & the Furious movies, and he comes off like a paperweight. Put him next to Jessica Alba and her absurdly undersized bikini, in Into the Blue, and his presence is once again an afterthought. Here, he plays Idris Elba's #2 man, and while T.I. and Chris Brown and Hayden Christensen (playing his latest in a long line of smirking d-bags, this time with the addition of a silly hat and paint-on tattoos) are making spectacles of themselves, he hangs in the background and is silently competent. To paraphrase Mark Wahlberg's character in The Departed, he's the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy. And sure enough, when the movie reaches its final confrontation, it's Walker who emerges unscathed and...well, I'll let you go see it for yourself.

Like I said, Takers is a heist movie. Heist movies, like all genre movies, have rules, and this one plays by them, until it doesn't. It also nods to its predecessors in various ways, big and small, obvious (and acknowledged) and not. If I had to compare it to anything, I'd compare it to Heat, but without the pretentiousness that makes stretches of that movie a slog. Heat wants to be grand opera; Takers wants to be exactly what it is—a good genre movie, worth your ticket and your time if you're a fan of the genre. Period.

MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS ABOUT LADY GAGA

The new Lady Gaga video, "Telephone," appeared today. As with her last four clips, it's an elaborate spectacle framing a song that's decent at best. I like Gaga's videos and many of her costumes, and her live performances - the bloody MTV Awards one in particular - are excellent. But her music continues to be utterly dependent on the visuals. It's a total package of which the purely sonic component is still the weakest part. "Bad Romance," "Paparazzi" and "Love Game" are good songs; "Poker Face" is half a good song (the imitation-Peaches portions sink the rest); I can't remember what "Just Dance" sounded like and don't feel like looking it up on YouTube to remind myself. And right now, less than a half hour after watching the "Telephone" video for the first and so far only time, I can't remember the song. This is partly because unlike any previous Gaga video, the song is not allowed to play from beginning to end; it's chopped up and bracketed by several dialogue and action sequences, some of which (the women's-prison segments) work very well, some of which (everything with Beyoncé) don't work very well at all.

Honestly, Beyoncé's presence is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for me. I don't like her music at all - her ballads are histrionic and bland, and her attempts to be uptempo and "hard"/"street" are unconvincing, when they're not just plain boneheaded ("Diva") - and her visual style is nowhere near as interesting as Gaga's. And perhaps most importantly of all, she's not weird or shocking, ever, which makes me wonder why she's in this video/on this song. What she does and what Gaga does are almost totally opposed. And crucially, Gaga looks like the future, while Beyoncé looks like the past. Which makes me wonder if the idea of the collaboration was Gaga's...

Oh, well; at least Beyoncé isn't just doing her usual thing here. Instead, she's dressed/made up like a RealDoll and singing/reciting dialogue in a hyper-stylized voice...basically, playing Nicki Minaj. Who has in turn been playing Lil' Kim (specifically, the Lil' Kim of the "How Many Licks" video) for a couple of years now. So she's found a new, twice-removed way to be uninteresting. An achievement of some small sort, I guess.

As far as Gaga's part of this production, it's a step down from "Bad Romance" and "Paparazzi" despite being a dramatically higher-budget operation - and yeah, you can see it all on the screen. Director Jonas Åkerlund has abandoned the labored grittiness of his videos for The Prodigy and Metallica and gone full LaChappelle here - I'm surprised the thing wasn't shot in Technicolor. The first third or so, which takes place in a high-glam women's prison and features a hermaphrodite joke in its opening minute that actually made me laugh out loud, is the best part of the whole near-ten-minute thing. The costumes are great, mixing the aesthetics of porn, gang culture, and Broadway in a way that really works. Gaga's thinner than she's been in previous clips, and she's wearing even less clothing, at one point dancing in a studded bra and thong with her hair half-bleached and curled with Diet Coke cans (the most subtle product placement in a film bursting with it) and looking like a demonic Amy Winehouse.

When she leaves prison and hooks up with Beyoncé, driving away in Uma Thurman's "Pussy Wagon" from the Kill Bill movies, my heart sank a little.

Previously, Gaga's stolen everything that caught her eye - costumes from old Samantha Fox videos and The Night Porter, imagery and a general vibe from Matthew Barney, Alien and The Warriors, Japanese kegadol (girls in bandages) fetishism...not to mention all the occult symbolism...but she's always made it her own. Gaga-world has always been its own thing until now, with references to Earth that were recognizable, but not blatant and pandering. The presence of the "Pussy Wagon" is clumsy, lowering the whole video to the level of rappers reciting dialogue from Scarface.

The video pretty much goes off a cliff from there - Beyoncé goes to a diner, poisons Tyrese (things perk up again when Gaga is seen in the kitchen, poisoning everyone's food as a recipe appears onscreen), and then the two women dance and sing in a diner full of corpses before driving off in the "Pussy Wagon." The End.

The mini-movie-ness of "Telephone" (which, lyrically, has nothing to do with any of this, though both Gaga and Beyoncé are seen using telephones at several points during the clip) points out what's been becoming more and more obvious with each succeeding Gaga clip - she's not writing songs, she's writing musical numbers. Without the visuals, they're no more interesting than it would be to listen to a Busby Berkeley number on TV in another room. I may well watch this video another time or two, though I doubt it - it's just not as good as her last two or three have been. But would I listen to the song by itself? Absolutely not. As I said above, even right now I can't remember what it sounded like. That seems like bad news for her label, which almost certainly had to lay out some money for a production this elaborate, no matter how many product placements they shoehorned in.

MAN, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER

I think 2009 was the year I finally stopped caring about critical consensus. It was definitely the year I felt most distant from my “peers.” I clicked on Pitchfork dutifully every morning M-F, and at least four days a week was confronted with reviews of albums that meant less than nothing to me musically or sociologically. The same thing happened when I stumbled across a Slate piece or some random daily paper article trying to make me think and care about Beyonce or Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga (whose videos are frequently pretty awesome, but whose music has yet to be even half as good as the visuals that surround it). I was as disconnected from what the loudest critical voices were discussing with each other as I have ever been.

There was a time when I would have seen this as my fault, when I would have been upset with myself for not keeping up, when I would have felt like it was my responsibility as a critic to know what Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors (not to mention all the mainstream pop and country and hip-hop acts) sounded like. But this year, that didn’t happen. I finally internalized cultural atomization and the existential futility of generalist/broad-stroke music criticism.

When you try to go large-scale, you end up lost in a fog of platitudes and generalizations that offer no insight and may in fact impede real understanding of individual works of art. Art doesn’t fit into sweeping narratives. Each album or song must be taken on its own merits, instead of trying to contextualize it within a genre or, worse yet, hammer it into some imagined soundtrack to an equally ill-considered version of history.

The rewards of being a music critic are so low at this point – you don’t even get the free CDs anymore half the time – that trying to be an omniscient cultural arbiter only makes the striver look foolish and hubristic. Critics can’t make bands, and they can’t break them. It’s all just diary-keeping now. (If we're being honest, it always was.) Solipsism is the future – the ever-increasing use of the first person singular in reviews and even features is proof of this, and that’s a major psychological breakthrough every critic needs to make, soon. I’m comfortable with my tastes (metal, jazz and Latin music), but more importantly I’m at peace with my own insignificance. I know I’m having no measurable impact on the shape of pop culture. Technical death metal is never gonna top the charts, jazz is gonna keep selling jazz numbers, and Paulina Rubio is never gonna be as big as Shakira. And I don’t care. I’m just out here enjoying the music, and occasionally sharing my thoughts with whoever happens along. I hope my fellow critics will embrace their own insignificance in 2010. It’ll probably make their writing better.