Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic 1/5 monads: It's very hard for me to imagine anyone being either shocked or amused by Jesus is Magic. Silverman's formula is mind-numbingly repetitive: lead into clichéd platitude, then transition into a socially unacceptable take on said platitude. How would it be possible to be offended by her? Her whole act is to say the offensive thing for no reason save that it be offensive. How would it be possible to be entertained by her? Her shockingness contains terribly little content. Her delivery is so slow and paced that the entire movie seems to have hardly more text than would fill a written page. It's hard for me to see how intelligent people are taken in by Silverman or by any stand-up comedy, so much of which relies upon being able to steadfastly persevere in the shallow, unreflective pool of consciousness it requires. (I'll be the first to admit that I was pretty good at this when I was fourteen, at which age I, too, loved stand-up.) (Also: I will, of course, grant exceptions. Steven Wright leaps to mind.) The title really had me expecting something deliciously mordant: the titular joke was about five seconds long, and dead on arrival.

Margot at the Wedding, by Noah Baumbach 2/5 monads: The problem with pain is its impetus toward specificity. It isolates us and rips us away from the center and sends us spinning out into space, unable to be or comprehend anything but our own pain. The particular and wonderful redemption of art about pain is that it has the power to transform that pain and turn us back toward the center: to experience it and reorient it, not to obliterate it or expunge it. But Margot at the Wedding lacks any idea about where that center is. It only has the power to communicate its own pain and disorientation.

Also, I'm sad to say, it suffers from some significant technical failures, most notable of which is the casting of Jack Black. I have some fondness for Black; I also was excited about the possibility that he could turn out to be brilliant in the hands of an artful director in much the way that Adam Sandler was magnificent in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. Sadly, he falls apart in his ability to portray a unified character just when the script desperately needs him. I blame Baumbach more than Black, honestly, as his script makes demands of Black's character that I'm not sure Baumbach fully understands.

I'm Not There 4/5 monads: I'm no Dylan aficionado, though I'm slowly becoming a Dylan fan, at the rate of about one song a year. By the time I die, I'll have come around to about 1/23 of his corpus. Happily, I'm Not There, a work of poetry reflecting on Dylan's life and art, is a magnificent film that stands on its own merits. Like much poetry, it's too dense and too complicated to be easily parsed: I won't claim to have even really experienced all of the first level of the movie. Too often I was still entranced in the emotional space of an earlier segment while another rolled past unseeing eyes. The movie's reflections on Dylan's words, music, and perhaps even personhood are jarringly sophisticated, complex, and often pained.

Some segments are more successful than others. Predictably, Richard Gere, leading candidate for the least interesting actor of all time, failed to inspire any reaction from me whatsoever. As predictably, Cate Blanchett is mesmerizing and provides the most essential connection to Dylan himself. Less predictably, Christian Bale plays a hilariously jokey and bizarrely emotionally evocative Dylan clone.

Regardless, I'm Not There is significant art, art that takes its subject as a muse and not a lump of facts to be somehow reproduced.

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