In this movie, Katie Holmes has a group of friends that goes by The Romantics. It really seems like they ought to go by The Assholes instead:

Seriously, if I was this old, and my closest friends were a group of people who behaved this unattractively, I think my worst problem would not be who my ex-boyfriend was marrying. Sure it would be annoying if it were Anna Paquin, but it’s actively damaging to have friends who are this underminey and pretentious. Maybe I’m just being an unsympathetic whippersnapper, but I hope that were I in this position, I would turn down the invitation to the wedding, and take my newer, and better friends to another beach with a case of champagne instead. Ugh. It rarely is the case that I feel viscerally turned off by the characters in a movie that’s not a torture porn flick, but I want no part of this.

I finally caught Up In The Air on my Dulles-to-Dallas flight on the way to Anchorage, and while it’s not a bad little film, it seems to me like the buzz around it during Oscar season must mostly have been because it gave some attention to the emotional impact of the economic downturn. George Clooney is quite good, though he doesn’t have to show much range. Ditto with Vera Farmiga. Anna Kendrick is good, though here character spends so much time in the realm of deep annoyingness that it was difficult to connect with her, even while I thought the performance was generally strong. I appreciated the variety of an unhappy ending. The light blues of the palette are a good, consistent aesthetic, if not a daring or transporting one. But I don’t think the movie is nearly as good, or as interesting, for example, as Michael Clayton, another Sad Clooney movie, where the writing is transcendent, and not in a “the economy sucks and you’re evil!” kind of way, but in a way that touches the true strangeness of life. I feel like I ought to have more to say about the movie, but that’s the nature of solid but unremarkable movies. It was here, and now it’s gone. Much like Ryan Bingham.

I actually feel like there are a lot of false notes in the trailer for The Big C, which I will see as soon as it comes out on DVD or I take a deep breath and sign up for premium cable:

But that one line, where Laura Linney says “I want to be the one to spill the fruit punch” (in reference to punch Oliver Platt spilled, while Riverdancing, on their couch) really got to me. I know that feeling, that intense desire to be a spontaneous person with the full knowledge that you’re not, not remotely, and the sadness that comes with it. I don’t actually really believe that a cancer diagnosis is the way you liberate yourself from that tension, that inability to jump, or that the cost to your family of finding spontaneity in this particular way can possibly be worth it. But in a week when I’m feeling intensely attuned to the things in art that ring true, or that feel terribly false, that line gets at an emotion I think is often unexpressed but deeply felt, the wish to be be more authentically, joyfully free in your behavior.

And I liked it quite a bit. It’s all the good things critics say: visually innovative, full of some very good acting (Kieran Culkin is a major, major standout), and deeply felt. That said, it hit upon a couple of threads I’ve been considering for a while about superhero romance. I write at The Atlantic:

If conventional superhero movies say something compelling, true, and even beautiful our powerlessness against love, less conventional ones like Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim have a more depressing message. Dave invents a secret, super-heroic identity because he can’t find his way through the morass of social interaction on his own. Scott needs to be threatened by utter destruction and to win a series of escalating, supernatural battles in order to find the basic decency to apologize for cheating on two girls who love him. Are our heroes really so deficient of basic human values and social skills that they need to be wrenched into functionality by the extraordinary? And if it’s this hard for Dave and Scott, what does it mean for the rest of us, trying to figure out the difficult passage between adolescence and decent adulthood without the aid of miraculous events or talents?