*** Crazy Heart
* The Ten
*** The Way We Live Now
*** The Savages
** Leonard Bernstein: the Unanswered Question, six talks at Harvard
*** The Men who Stare at Goats
*** Exit through the Gift Shop

I liked Crazy Heart a lot more than I expected, given my lack of interest in alcoholism or country music, but it just worked and I got sucked in and enjoyed myself. Jeff Bridges as great. The surprise appearance of Colin Farrell as the country superstar helped as well.

I started watching The Ten, couldn’t even get through the first story. It was horrible.

The way we live now was part of our ongoing film series of literary costume dramas in miniseries form produced by the BBC or A&E. Also part of our ongoing Matthew Macfadyen series; he’s been very busy with the costume dramas in the last decade. I wish I could say it was also part of a Shirley Henderson series, because E and I love her, and we really should find some more stuff she’s been in. The BBC costume miniseries is almost the perfect thing for watching at home on DVD or netflix instant: long enough to be complex and sophisticated and keep you occupied for a while, but not so long you get sucked into a months-long commitment like a multi-season HBO series. Anyway, this one was quite good.

The Savages was good and seriously grim. I mean, middle-aged people dealing with their declining father, and also their own screwed-up lives. What could be more fun? Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman were great, and the movie was very good, but depressing as hell.

I wanted to like the Bernstein lectures more. The ones I watched were a little snoozy in places (though it could be that I only found time to watch them late at night, and I was doing it rather than sleeping). The bigger problem for me was his struggle to assemble a theory of music that is based on contemporary (in the 70s when he gave the lectures) theories of linguistics. Clearly, he’d spent some time learning about these linguistic theories, but at the same time the analogy didn’t end up seeming very useful. Aside from a convenient way to explain a few basic concepts, he didn’t seem to use anything from linguistic theory that actually helped make the musical theory more understandable, either to the lay audience or (I’m guessing) to someone deeply knowledgeable about music who wanted a new way to think about why some things are “good” music and some are not. Instead, he just ends up spending a good 1/3-1/2 of each lecture explaining a bunch of linguistics that is mostly irrelevant. I’d like to see more Bernstein lectures where he just tries to explain music on its own terms, or even just talks about what he likes or finds interesting; he didn’t need the linguistics analogy to be interesting or understandable.

The men who stare at goats was really funny but I think I wanted it to just be nuts. And after a while, it wasn’t. By the end it seemed kind of pedestrian. I wanted it to just go over the top and stay over the top and then either end with over the top or end with someone being clearly 100% nuts. Still, it was kind of funny.

I kind of half-watched most of Exit Through the Gift Shop, and it was pretty entertaining. I get the whole thing about how it may or may not be a hoax and how it almost doesn’t matter, since either way it’s pretty much a satire and finger in the eye of the art scene. Or something. So that’s nice.