A Festivus for the Rest of Us

I'm already sick of Christmas. I've done Christmas. It should end when you're nine, like Easter. Sure, when I was a kid I got a lot of cool Star Wars shit when it was brand new, but I immediately took it out of the packaging so I could play with it (like every kid), so it's worthless now.

Anyway. I sat through a couple movies this weekend, and I might as well make you people sit through my reactions. First, Buffalo '66. Written, starring, and directed by Vincent Gallo, who is seriously in love with himself. There's no plot at all, just the outline of a story about a guy getting out of jail and immediately grabbing some random hot girl, played by Christina Ricci, and dragging her to his abusive, neglectful parents' house to tell them how successful he is (they've been too engrossed in Buffalo Bills football to notice he was arrested). I had to fight with myself to sit through the whole thing, and I lost. I watched it all. Gallo builds and builds this film to either one sort of climax or the other and ends up with neither. He gives you both the happy ending and the sad ending, then tells you which one was real. A depressingly Hollywood anticlimax to what could have been a nice indie setpiece flick.

The other film I saw was Lost in Translation, which got enough hype from the Academy Awards that I don't have to say anything about it, other than it was much better than I thought it would be. Again, there's no real plot to speak of, and it's extremely slow, but it's never, ever boring. The cinematography is excellent and the pacing works. The acting is believable, and the dialogue is instinctive and genuine. What's more, the ending is somehow satisfying and inconclusive, an almost impossible feat. The only disappointment came when the credits came up and I remembered that Sophia Coppola wrote and directed it. Somehow you just want privileged kids to fail, you know?