I haven’t been posting much lately. Holiday-related mishegas, other writing and editorial tasks (some of it related to the the need to get through an ever-growing assortment of free DVDs still sitting in my living room), etc., and also real life and inevitable ickiness I feel everytime Israel drops bombs on people has, up to a point, have been distracting me.

In addition, I’ve recently rediscovered that written information can also be printed on paper or enjoyed in bed or on a couch (i.e., I’m really enjoying reading, after much delay and a lengthy break at about page 150, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay). Let’s face it — there something qualitatively very different from our ephemeral intertubular conversation and reading a book or even a magazine or newspaper, but I’m not McLuhan, nor am I likely to draw him out from behind a standee to settle an argument (and muff his line), any time soon.

I will say, however, that three movies I’ve seen — ending a long, DVD-driven recent exile from movie theaters — seem to defy words for me. Three are simply too small to bother with. Baz Luhrman’s Australia is actually, to me, a bit more good than bad and even got the tear ducts going with borrowed impact from other movies (most particularly, Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which gets me every time). Still, it’s mainly an exercise in bringing classic-era Hollywood westerns and romances over to Australia, which is very nice and intermittently enjoyable, but is kind of the same league as “Sex Farm.” A tune that, to quote indirectly from Nigel Tufnel/Harry Schearer, takes the idea of sex and puts it on…a farm.

Frank Miller’s travesty of Will Eisner’s The Spirit is another story entirely and utterly beneath contempt. A mean, small-minded, crude videofilm that misses (one sequence excepted) everything worthwhile in its source material and replaces it with stuff lifted and made stupider from Sin City and from other, much smaller spirits than Eisner’s, starting with Spillane.

It’s a tenet of my film writing faith that it’s not okay to judge a work by the politics of its creator. Yet, Miller (who, though many don’t know it, is a pretty open neoconservative) seems to make it impossible for me to ignore as he transforms Eisner’s pragmatic optimism to cynical depths that, as fearful as I was before seeing the film, I couldn’t begin to anticipate. So, yeah, this is the cinematic equivalence of the looting of Iraq that Rumsfeld permitted. Miller clearly went to film with the half-finished script he had, and wound up with a hideous companion to Robert Altman’s heretically brilliant re-engineering of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye which honored its source material in the breach, kind of, and which I really shouldn’t even be mentioning in relation to the film…except for the suspicion I have that Miller was deliberately swiping from that, too.  And why am I still writing about this?

I also nearly forgot that I saw Valkyrie yesterday…and it’s already evaporated completely. Nazis have never been more “meh”-worthy (though Kenneth Branagh squeezes some nervous laughs in with his segment and it’s always good to spend screen time with Terrence Stamp and Bill Nighy).

The other film, which I caught up with last night, was Charlie Kaufmann’s Synedoche New York which is the “too big” film and, perhaps, a too close to the bone for one viewing. I didn’t love it the way I think Roger Ebert loved it, but I also can’t ignore it for reasons both artistic and personal, though I may try — but I’m not at all sure it’s that’s a good thing to do.

Also, sorry as I am to have missed today’s Stinky Lulu supporting actress blogathon, Kaufmann’s directorial debut deserves some kind of special award for creating a reality so encompassing that, of the films’ several outstanding supporting actresses, I only recognized Catherine Keener and Dianne Wiest. It’s somewhat understandable that, having not looked over the credits beforehand, that I wasn’t quite able to place Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, or Hope Davis; all first rate actresses that I haven’t seen onscreen lately. But I have to give special credit to Jennifer Jason Leigh — a long time favorite of mine (she only missed out on my “20 Actresses” thingy because I didn’t happen to be thinking about her when I put the list together)  — who I failed to catch at all as she apparently became wholly absorbed in the character of Ms. Keener’s unpleasant German tatoo-artist friend.  It’s like magic.