Lost In Translation.

(Spoiler alert: If you haven't seen "Lost In Translation" and plan to, don't read this.)

Just saw this while waiting for my road trip buddy's sister to get home. I find my movie expectations to have changed in the recent past. I don't even like happy endings anymore. I actually find them unrealistic. So at the end, when Bill Murray stops his car on the way to the airport to find Scarlett Johansson walking in the street, I actually thought, "Oh no. Are they seriously going to--? Really?"

But no. And I liked the movie much better for that. It's more fitting, realistic. I thought about Bill Murray's character and instead of thinking, "Get out of your dead-end marriage, dude," all I could think was, "You have a wife! You have kids! You have a family and a home! Why would you throw it away for blond and busty?!"

Yeaaaah. Where did my inner kid go? Where will I find her again?

The Time Traveler's Wife.

The Time Traveler's Wife--I awaited this movie with bated breath. Adapted from the novel by Audrey Niffenegger, it promised to be . . . something else. A sci-fi romance is awfully risky business in book form, even riskier on the big screen. There really is just too much that could go wrong.

Especially for Niffenegger's little darling of a premise, things could go terribly awry. A guy with time-traveling seizures, somehow capable of meeting and keeping his One True Love? Walking the streets naked, pick-pocketing, engineering winning lottery tickets, picking locks . . . -- it all works on the page, when imaginary circumstances don't have to come to three-dimensional life.

But Rachel McAdams is real. But Eric Bana is real. But, as one critic notes, the depiction of a supposedly 40-year-old man forcing himself on a teenage girl: a little too real for comfort, even if he's actually her future lover displaced in time.

At worst, the entire thing could seem ridiculous and cheesed-up--unconvincing, absurd, stitched together. This is what the critics reacted to, the sheer improbability of it all (really, a genetic basis for his condition seems too conveniently pop-science-y to be relevant). And granted, the movie doesn't try all that hard -- or even at all -- to win you over. Opening scene: enter six-year-old Henry, disappearing from his mother's car only seconds before the inevitable car crash that kills her. He reappears outside the car, shivering in the cold, as perplexed as we are, but in two or three sentences from a randomly appearing older Henry, everything is explained!

. . . Or it's not. Or it must be, because the movie takes off from there, any confusion be damned.

Uhm.

In any case, I'd already read the book, thankfully--you must, I think, in order to be genuinely moved by the film (in order to be genuinely moved by the movie? Hm). Once you suspend your disbelief (and your discombobulation), however, the true power of Niffenegger's themes overwhelms you. For Henry, time-traveling is a cruel imposition, tearing him from his wedding ceremony, from his wife, ultimately from his happiness. But it's also an inconvenience that forces the purest of human experience on its victims. It allows Henry and Clare to live life distilled, never forgetting the brilliance of new romance (how could they, when younger Henries are always traveling forward to smooth any ruffles in their relationship?). Henry's time seizures lend a certain immortality to his love: it never begins, it never ends. It just is, popping up unexpectedly years after his death, always passionate, always as though brand new.

If I envy Henry and Clare anything, it is this: they never forget. They're always so painfully aware of every second, every moment. If modern society is always accused of being distracted while the really important things slip away, then Henry and Clare exist in the opposite extreme. They only live in each other, to the point of amorality. Their tragedy is something different from the plight of every other love story, because they don't forget, because their affections never peter out or fade away or get lost. They're always reminded of the immediacy of their love, whereas the rest of us are stuck with the mere memory of idealism. Yes, they never had a true choice in the matter, but those of us with free will (or the illusion of it?) can only hope that memory is enough--and that we will all eventually make the right choices anyway.

Closer.

I'm massively fatigued due to an international flight, but I will forget everything if I don't remember it now.

The 2004 film Closer boasts an all-star cast and a plot so psychologically twisted as to be inscrutable. I've seen it twice now but have come to differing conclusions both times.

Clive Owen's character is at once animalistically sexual and brutally honest--I think that if we are to sympathize with any of the movie's characters, we would have to root for him. He's tough, he's real. He doesn't skirt around issues of infidelity. He doesn't hide behind false modesty. There's something admirable in that, right?--even in the crude way he approaches human intimacy, in his fits of violent rage?

Maybe. Meanwhile, I kind of wish we could all be Natalie Portman, and we could all giggle and make bold assumptions of permanence and innocence. Why is she a stripper? What is there in her commodification of sexuality that allows her to idealize romance so? (Some random critic says that her vitality brings out both the best and worst in her costars, but I'm not sure if this is true. It seems more to me that her simplicity is easy for others to essentialize.)

--And Julia Roberts and her martyr complex, Jude Law the obscure and sometimes all-too-witting romantic-hero freak with moral pretenses shoved up his ass. These people are so complex that I can't make any sweeping generalizations of anything, but I would like so badly to dissect their characteristics and make sense of the "subtext." All I know is that it's a movie about deception vs. honesty, love, sexual politics. Things are cruel, but life is cruel, and splayed out on the screen, human nature is not much better than animal nature (perhaps even worse in its potential for duplicity?).

"Have you seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood!" -- what Clive Owen says to Jude Law, pityingly. We are all flesh and blood, flesh and blood and passion and pain. Writers like Law might try to make things better, smooth over the edges, but art (so we are told by both Portman and Owen) is a lie. It makes ugly things beautiful. Closer isn't a beautiful movie, but its atavism and its cruelty are both much more intriguing than beauty could ever be.