There is an uneasy agreement in my house regarding movie rentals. I wish it could go unspoken, but if I forget about it, I hear about it, so it does me a world of good to always keep it in mind. We get two films from Netflix at a time, one of which I get to choose and one of which my lady gets to choose. Snob that I can be, oftentimes I don’t want to watch the latest big-time Hollywood blockbusters. Normal person that my girlfriend is, she wants to see what’s going on beyond the art houses. So we each pick a movie at a time, and I mess with the arrangement in our Netflix queue at my own peril.

More often than not, it’s a good thing to get both sides of the coin. Even if the big movies prove terrible, at least they provide a respite from the emotion-shattering profundity of the little ones. And, by contrast, if the little ones prove indulgent/boring/disappointing, it can be nice to watch ridiculously good-looking people run from explosions in a situation bearing little resemblance to reality.

I’m still no great fan of Hollywood, but sometimes not having to think can be a blessing. I watched nothing but independent movies for an entire year once, and not only did I have little to discuss with the average movie-goer, but by the end of that year I thought I was a depressed and homicidal closeted lesbian artist with intimacy issues and a predilection for primary colors and mumbled speech patterns. Such is life when the biggest movie you watch is Capote.

I’m over that now, but I still appreciate the emotional insights, bravura acting, and actually interesting direction that independent cinema offers. My girlfriend, on the other hand? Not nearly so much. Black and white is a no-no, and it better be damn good if she’s going to read subtitles. If a movie filmed prior to 1991 doesn’t feature someone she’s heard of, she has little use for it. But we’ve come to the understanding that, if I want to watch Band of Outsiders or The Brown Bunny, then those will be doubled up with The Blind Side and Law-Abiding Citizen (the latter of each is up next on the queue).

Just the way it goes around these parts. And it’s not so bad.

Which brings us to last weekend, when the mailman delivered In The Loop alongside 2012. For weeks I’d been hearing raves about the dry humor and biting wit of the former, but I wasn’t getting away with that and, say, Withnail and I arriving at the same time. Therefore, I threw 2012 on the queue with it, the biggest blockbuster of the period prior to Avatar’s arrival and something with John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, and enough other character actors we’d recognize to pass the time on a slow Saturday night afforded by crummy Chicago weather and a certain level of brain-deadedness brought on by hours upon hours of non-stop Luke Wils-…I mean, NCAA basketball.

2012 made $166 million dollars domestic last fall and cost $200 million. Roland Emmerich, the man behind such blockbusters as Stargate, Independence Day, The Patriot, and Godzilla, directed, littering his film with scenes of St. Peter’s Basillica toppling over onto gathered masses and the White House being destroyed by a huge tidal wave. Cusack and his family drive through the streets of LA as the ground beneath them cracks and buckles and take off in a Cessna from the Santa Monica airport just before the entire airfield is pulverized by a roiling ash cloud and an earthquake of immeasurable magnitude.

Throughout the movie, people stare with steely eyes into coming catastrophe or lament the fact that, as it definitely will be when the world comes to an end, the rich are afforded refuge while the poor and middle class are forced to burn and drown amid the cataclysm.  By the end of the movie, some 3-400,000 people are saved to start a New World after the other 8.5 billion of us died agonizing deaths on our way to what would be a horribly gridlocked afterlife. Danny Glover played the President, though, which was kind of awesome.

There’s plenty of internal family drama and superhuman feats of breath-holding (you’ll know what I mean if you see it) throughout the film’s bloated 158 minutes, as well as contrived coincidence and vast swaths of scene-chewing by the film’s protagonists. As 2012 rolled into the meat of hour #2, at a steady clip and with a surging score, the oceans taking over the Himalayas and a Buddhist monk left to fend for himself against the coming onslaught (what causes the End Times? Some hullabaloo about tectonic plates and an overheated Earth’s core, resetting poles and…well, it doesn’t matter, really), it becomes too much devastation and not enough fun. 2012, when boiled down to its base elements, is disaster-porn to the Nth degree, the seeming culmination of Global Warming and Revelation-courting discussion, a film in which billions of people die and yet no real human connection is made to anyone but the survivors, and only them because they’re given face time, not because we enjoy their company (except for Chiwetel Ejiofor, who’s always good).

It had been some time since I’d seen Cusack in anything, but on this one he just took the paycheck and did his best, which was not nearly enough to save the movie.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, In the Loop made just over $2 million domestic and production costs are unavailable. I can assure you, however, it almost definitely recouped what had to be a modest price tag. Steve Coogan drops by briefly in a hilarious cameo, and James Gandolfini shows up from time to time with a steady performance that points to his perhaps finally escaping Tony Soprano’s immense shadow. Otherwise, there’s really no one recognizable in the film, unless you count Anna Chlumsky, the girl from My Girl, now a woman and back acting on a regular basis. There are a few other character actors you might recognize, many of them British, but no one big. No need to splurge on big names when the script’s this good.

Rapid-fire, vulgar riffs fly from all angles and whether or not you are always on-point with what’s happening in the film’s plot (you have to pay attention, and it’s easy to miss something amidst the rat-a-tat-tat), a stray filthy metaphor (usually related to horse cocks) or perfectly-timed insult gets you back up to speed with who’s who and where they stand in relation to everyone else, who’s the boob and who’s the dick and what is the deal with the creepy sycophantic dude you’ll recognize from this season’s Office.

Most films about politics get bogged down with wonkish details or try to fly too high on sentimental rhetoric about the glorious aims of whatever country/state is under fire. Director Armando Iannucci, however, doesn’t give his charges time to be sentimental or leave them room to aspire to be anything more than the coolest kids in the Washington, D.C., lunchroom. Everybody wants to know what someone else is doing and everyone wants to get out ahead of a scandal or direct the conversation while aspiring to a position beyond the one which they have attained.

Everyone but Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, who really likes his job as the Prime Minister’s protocol enforcer. Some of the funniest insults you’ll ever hear are levied by this man, at everyone from low-level assistants to American generals (early on he ends a phone conversation with, “Fuckety Bye!”). It’s a hilarious movie with memorable characters that provides a more pointed look into what things very well may be like in the mid-echelons of government than tacky tripe like The West Wing could ever hope to.

More than simply hilarious, it’s a good movie, that’s all, not a series of explosions set to thunderous violins in which 99% of the world’s population is massacred but at the end you’re supposed to be uplifted. I’m not sure what you call that second thing, but people zipping around Washington and London wearing their insecurities on their sleeves proved more entertaining than worldwide cataclysm. Or it did this week at my house, anyway.

And, to her credit, my girlfriend agreed with me. We take the bitter, we take the sweet, we try them both, one after the other, and we see where that gets us.

Compromise: it doesn’t get enough credit, really.