• "See, son, there's a better movie playing over there."

SUTTON:
Hey, Henry, where were you on "the worst day"? Oh, that's right, you were sitting in the theater next to me while we watched September 11th grief porn Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a collective trauma-tapping drama about how that day's tragic events ravaged the innocence of a nation as pure as a precocious young boy with blond hair and deep blue eyes. Except, wait, protagonist Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn)—whose jeweler father Thomas (Tom Hanks), died in the attacks—is kind of a jerk, right? He may have Asperger's, he says, but he's also a compulsive liar, possibly a racist and traitor: he tells a black shopkeeper that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has been moved to a different date, and tells his Upper East Side co-op's doorman (John Goodman) that Presidents' Day has changed too. Irritating, fallible narration aside, Horn does a good job being a twerp. And in any case what's best about Extremely Loud are its small pleasures, like its strong supporting cast: Zoe Caldwell as Oskar's grandmother; Max von Sydow as his mute estranged grandfather; The Help's Viola Davis as Abby Black, the first stop on the boy's quest to discover the lock for a mysterious key found in his father's closet; and Jeffrey Wright as Abby's ex-husband. And how about all that location shooting? What was your favorite nod to New York City geography? And how do you think Philadelphians feel about being the butt of one of this adaptation's many clumsily over-emphasized metaphors?

• Superstar mathletes.

STEWART:
So, Ben, Moneyball is a story about baseball, which means it's a story about America, right? It's a redemption story, but more to the point an American Dream story, a practically Capraesque affirmation of America, though perhaps a bit more complex; Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) has the financial disadvantage as the general manager of the Oakland A's—they're the runts of capitalism, with one-third of the payroll of the Yankees—but he chips away at their hegemony through his determination and intelligence; or, at least, the smarts to employ and listen to people smarter than him (Jonah Hill). Strangely, Beane struck me as a Mitt Romney figure; his solution to solving baseball's "medieval thinking" sounded awfully Bain Capital-esque, making systems more efficient by breaking hoary shibboleths about prizing people over statistics. Moneyball sort of celebrates a profits (i.e. wins)-over-people approach, doesn't it? Although Beane also succeeds only when he becomes less like Romney (in affect if not ideology)—when he drops the cold and distant thing and connects with his players.

A host of Twitter comments from Sundance reveal that the screening was two-thirds empty, with audience members consistently filing out as it endured.

SUTTON:
Hey, Henry, do you think that, in spite of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's likely Oscar snubbing save a few secondary and tertiary noms (right?) its opening credits could be eligible for a Best Animated Short Oscar? Could we just talk about those three minutes of gloomy, gooey eyegasmic glory for the next thousand words? No? Oh well, worth a shot. The feature film that follows is likewise dark, though notably colder than the blazing oil of that opening. Fincher's latest frequently made me wish I were watching another film about an isolated author ostensibly writing a memoir for a powerful man on a beautifully shot wintry coast, The Ghost Writer. That may just be because Polanski's film is better, but I think it also has to do with its more straight-forward moral allegiances. There we were hopeful that the entrapped scribe would finally reveal the corrupt politician's unsightly past, until a typically pessimistic Polanski ending further justified our exasperation with evil rich white men. Here, as Mark and others have already noted, our enjoyment of this Gothic Scandinavian whodunit is predicated on our partial complicity as viewers in a character's rape—and, by parallelism, that of the many previous victims implicated in the case that Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) eventually investigate. The resulting retribution aims to be proportionate to the foregoing acts of sexual violence, which, it's implied, justifies their exceptionally explicit portrayal on-screen. See, Henry, this already seems too charged a conversation for Academy members to be having, especially when they could just go vote for morally uncomplicated trash like The Help instead. What do you think: does Fincher's way of forcing these issues actually make Dragon Tattoo more appealing?

The effort to convince may not be as worthwhile this time, though, because Joyful Noise, while better than it needs to be, is not quite as much fun as Bandslam, or Graff's indie debut Camp. But what I like about all three movies is the way Graff quietly, nonchalantly respects their status as actual non-integrated musicals with full performances, not sheepish half-musicals with some truncated songs playing over montages.

• "This is where my heart should be."

STEWART:
Hey, Ben, all black women are wonderful and all white women are terrible—except for those who went to college, that is! Is that what you took away from The Help? If I were a woman, Ben, I would have left the theater feeling so much better about myself, whether black or white. (Not as a man, though. The movie's tangential males are either horny, boorish, violent, casually misogynistic, casually racist, and/or uxorious lily-livers.) For any black women in the audience, they can identify, or at least sympathize, with the film's wise, quasi-magical black women: so put upon by society, but so strong, so courageous! For the whites, they can take comfort in the fact that the white people (like them!) aren't at all so, so, so racist and mean anymore. Good for you, white people! Right? Well, except, aren't some women still treated similarly to the way those in The Help are? I mean, ok, state surgeon generals don't force Caribbean nannies to use separate bathrooms. But only a quarter of Park Slope nannies get paid overtime, for example, even though that's the very first right in New York state's recently adopted Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. What I mean is that I wish director Tate Taylor had acknowledged that there's still plenty of hired help all over America, and that though they're not treated monstrously, they can be treated less than ideally. Instead, he depicts it all as problems of the past since rectified. I also wish he hadn't portrayed black women as good because they're good mothers, and white women as bad because they're bad mothers. (Though he allows that unmarried women could go to college and become writers, so they can tell the stories of mothers.) How did you feel about the movie's handling of race, Ben?

Anyway. Robert Greene's documentary Fake It So Real, which plays for a week at the reRun starting Friday, is about the unfortunately acronymed Millennium Wrestling Federation (MWF), an independent semiprofessional league based out of Lincolnton, North Carolina, and it's not condescending—if anything, the editing demonstrates, even indulges the aspirations to glory or at least validation nurtured by the cubicle drones and exotic weapons connoisseurs who fight on Saturday nights in a ring they assemble themselves at the local VFW hall. But though Greene is simpatico, it's not at the cost of self-awareness; the frequently priceless film is a stream-of-consciousness from a self-selected corner of America that's weirder and more complicated than it knows.

I've written about this phenomenon before: horror audiences, at least in my New York-based experience, have made a ritual out of booing the end, bringing voice to a vague frustration that somehow this horror movie would offer, in its closing minutes, something far more interesting, satisfying, and/or mind-blowing than other horror movies (oddly, the first ninety percent of the movie being exactly like other horror movies rarely draws any ire). The Devil Inside brings these feelings to a boil; there have been accounts of people screaming, swearing, throwing food, and spitting on the floor in disgust.

The opening credits of Peter Whitehead’s The Fall depict midtown Manhattan through a furiously descending elevator shaft, the title emblazoned over skyscrapers whizzing out of frame. Its implication is clear enough: in a swirly, capricious jumble of on-site documentary footage, re-recorded news from TV, and awkwardly staged bits to provide something of a framing device, Whitehead aims to portray the 1968 edition of America as undergoing nothing short of a miasmic psychological curdle. Starring throughout as some kind of moody hippie journalist, Whitehead organizes his material in three sections: “Image”, “The Word”, and finally “Word & Image”. The aggressive disparity between idyll and reality, or between design and spontaneity, dominates the film—and, presumably, the times.

• "Whadya mean we don't look Hawaiian?!"

SUTTON:
I'm shocked, Henry; I really believed that life in paradisaical places was likewise heavenly all the time, no matter what. Matt King (George Clooney)—the puppy-faced patriarch descended from Hawaiian royalty in beach bum real estate melodrama grief porn The Descendants—helpfully squashes that assumption in his irksome opening voice-over: "Paradise can go fuck itself!" Whoa, hang loose bro! He's understandably upset after his thrill-seeking wife ends up in a coma following a boating accident, leaving him alone with his annoying daughters. He initially seems poised to persevere and emerge from near-tragedy a better man; he even says, in voice-over, "I'm ready to be a real husband and a real father." But, Henry, much like this movie, things in paradise don't always get better. What do you think, is The Descendants' condescending, plodding tone a result of sloppy literary adaption (by director Alexander Payne, with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, from the same-titled novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings), or is it the ludicrous put-on Hawaiian-ness?