Lifestyles of the rich and famous

The state of vegetation continues! A goal for the long gray January is to get my money's worth out of Netflix.

Igby Goes Down tried a little too hard to be Catcher in the Rye. Kieran Culkin was great in the Holden Caulfield-esque title role. After being kicked out of a string of elite prep schools, Igby runs away from military school, hangs out in New York with artists, and hooks up with Claire Danes.

A lot of the dialogue is bitingly clever, with well-placed literary references about youthful angst (e.g. "Letters to a Young Poet"). But other than that, it didn't really seem to have a point, and Igby's ennui comes across at times as an over-privileged tantrum. Ryan Philippe was great as the uber-preppie older brother that Igby can't live up to. The movie also has a weird, macabre subplot that goes largely unaddressed by the characters. In the end, Igby breaks free from money-fueled hypocrisy and goes-west-young-man to California. Rugged individualism reigns red, white, and blue again.

Coffee and Cigarettes, a series of vignettes that all take place over (what else?) coffee and cigarettes, might have been a bad movie to watch on Day 42 of No Coffee. But now that the shakes and the morning stupid people have gone, it wasn't so bad.

I thought the "Twins" sketch, with 2 of Spike Lee's younger siblings, was great, mainly because of the insights into sibling interactions: bickering, taking each others' sides, bickering, ranting, getting protective of each other, bickering. It was great to watch. "Cousins," where Cate Blanchett plays herself and an imaginary cousin, is amusing if only for its oh-so-meta content. "Cousins?" touches on some of the same themes of relatives and issues of fame and class: two famous people, Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, meet up and might be related, and engage in a passive-aggressive game of I'm-more-famous-than-you. "Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil," with the White Stripes duo, was intriguing because it was just plain bizarre.

But a lot of the rest of it bored me. I realize the role of art in both imitating and influencing life, and this film imitated it in all its awkward small talk quite well. In terms of art influencing reality, part of me wondered why I was watching semi-staged interactions and not meeting up with friends in a coffee shop or bar and making them. I appreciated the statement about the comfort derived from (and the obsession with) social rituals. I understood the repeated metaphor of Nikola Tesla's "earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance": similarities in conversations and social pitter-patter, echoing across different relationships, cafes, and cigarette smoke. It was all subtly brilliant.

But it's also January in the Northwest. The black-and-white film scarily resembled the weather outside. What I need are explosions, tear jerkers, and slap-your-knee hilarity.