Case in point. The protagonist is this high school age girl, who apparently dislikes the sterility of suburban life.   So she gets involved in this project to… do something?  Who knows! How does she go about it? She goes to a hobby shop and buys 4 chemistry sets.  On the way home she starts ranting about how stupid and cheap the chemistry sets are, takes one out of her bag, and stomps it on the sidewalk.  When she gets home she pulls out a few chemical vials and throws the boxes away, still complaining about the chemistry sets!

Then, as the movie progresses, she does … things? … in the garage that have something to do with a blood sample from the hobby shop clerk, but it soon has nothing to do with the blood, or the guy, and evolves into her fiddling with crystals and crumpled lengths of copper wire.

Along the way several things happen:

• Her brother(?) is road racing with some other guy. He misses a turn, and knocks over a fire hydrant.
• some guy, not sure who, visits a campsite where random people sit around, in some sort of gobsmacked trance, and he plays the guitar for them.
• the protagonist’s friend, takes some sort of drug the protagonist has brewed up, and the posters on her walls become animated.
• Every so often someone in the movie looks really stoned and droning faux-East Indian music plays for a few minutes.

But … there’s no payoff! Nothing is ever made clear! The characters never converse or interact, they say obscure non-sequitirs past one another.  The most prominent actor in this movie Jesse Eisenberg (lead in Adventureland) enters every scene with a quizzical expression on his face like he’s wandered onto the wrong movie set, to deliver lines from some other movie.

This movie has all the markings of being made by someone afflicted with the twin towers of bad art: a complete lack of talent, and perfect imperviousness to outside criticism.  This is a surprisingly common template — in the past couple of years I’ve been sent review copies of two novels with  the same atmosphere of pure WTF-ness and lack of comprehensible meaning.  My mom worked for a guy who was writing ‘musicals’ with awful lyrics set to awful music, in service of a plot that made no sense populated by characters with no trace of normal human motivation. That guy’s arrogance was titanic, and so was the craptastic-ness of his ideas.

It’s a commonplace that a genius knows what to do, and knows not to pay attention to anyone who says otherwise.  Unfortunately there’s a certain kind of anti-genius, who thinks they can prove their genius doing the same thing. Only they have no talent except for ignoring useful criticism.  “One Day Like Rain” looks to be the product of just such a misguided auteur.

Sidewalks of New York was Ed Burns’ auteur turn as the post-milleneal answer to Woody Allen. Watchable but not fantastic. Murphy is decent and better than just watchable. She has a face that’s like a CNN crawl of her thoughts, and she’s a good enough actress that her thoughts when in front of the camera are what her character would be thinking.

In Ramen Girl, she plays an American girl stranded in Japan, who, for reasons not readily apparent to me, decides she must learn to become a Ramen Master. This was, I think, a movie originally for Japanese audiences (with Brittany’s English in subtitles) that got language-inverted and sent straight to DVD. She seems a little too gobsmacked and weepy in this movie, but she did her best to make an actual character out of a dishrag of a caricature. This reminded me of Tampopo, which had its basis in the same Japanese in-joke: Americans take at face value the reverence for ramen in the movie, but to a Japanese audience this is ridiculous — Ramen is fast food, and becoming a Ramen master is a little like becoming a French Fry master at Burger King.

The Dead Girl in which she plays the title role, is a movie that tells the story of a murder as the story of the people around the event. Murphy is only in the last segment, detailing her last day as a prostitute trying to deliver her child a birthday present, and of these three movies, this one is the best performance.

I’m sure in coming days we’ll find out all sorts of tawdry details of how she died, her less salubrious proclivities, her schlubby husband, etc. But for now I think it’s worth reflecting on her work, which on the whole was really good. A lot of mention has also been made of her voice work; her Luanne on “King of the Hill” was peerless. And if you peruse her filmography there is ample evidence (she worked A LOT) that she was without fear when choosing roles — she’d try anything once.

In the process, it pretty much tells you nothing at all about Iris Murdoch. And Jim Broadbent won for a grand job done as Iris Murdoch’s husband who nursed her in her latter years, but … he dodders, he stutters. So … he won an Oscar!

I’m sorry, but some movies try too hard to be serious, and forget to be satisfying entertainments. Sometimes even Kate Winslet getting naked isn’t enough.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Charles Hogg, and Radha Mitchell plays Lee Pearson, a nurse of sorts. Leaving aside the fact that the movie white-washes Hoggs’ commitment to Communism, this film is marred by some of the worst dialog I’ve ever heard, and Meyers’ delivery of such claptrap as though it was Hamlet’s soliloquy is howlingly bad.

It reminded me of the animated Beowulf, that I saw the last night I was in Berlin. I should have seen it in German, which would have improved on the frightful script. “Huang Shi” would have been improved by being unintelligible. Not the least because the movie is visually beautfiul, and like every movie I’ve seen that features it, makes me want to visit rural China. The acting of the Chinese boys is so much better than the Hollywood stars they surround, not that Meyers and Mitchell are given much to work with.

The best part of the movie for me was the end, which features interviews with some of the boys from Hogg’s school. Their real-life admiration and gratitude to a man who saved their lives only underlines the tin ear of this movie’s writers. And it underlines what a great story the movie has to tell. Too bad it tells a different story entirely, and does so badly.

With a tagline like that how can you resist? And if that doesn’t get you excited, it also has Dabney Coleman, Catherine O’Hara, and Roscoe Lee Browne. Those 3 are the the utility infielders of 80s and 90s cinema — rarely the star, but in dozens of movies and tv shows.

And what other movie has Donald Sutherland and Suzanne Somers laying in bed talking about how many orgasms they had? They also drive a VW bug into the Reflecting Pond in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Quit possibly a benchmark in cinematic absurdity.

Roscoe Brown — cast member of “Soap”, acted in Roots, was a voice actor for “The Real Ghostbusters!”

I liked the setting in Kwazulu Natal, and hearing Zulu spoken. It was beautifully filmed. Those two things kept me from getting up 20 minutes in and turning it off. After 40 minutes, I wanted to see if it ever found a way to redeem itself. In the end, though, it is an example of how fundamentally some people misunderstand how to make religious art.

Case in point — the protagonist is driving a tractor, carrying his brother’s son. They hit a bump, and the child gets run over by the tractor. He dies, and both the protagonist and his brother go into deep, demonstrative mourning. The protagonist weeps and wails about how he feels responsible. Maybe a bit over the top but not inconsistent with the reality of the situation.

Then one night, the brother has a dream, where he sees his son again, and the son tells him he’s OK, he’s waiting for him in heaven. The brother calls the protagonist to tell him, they both cry tears of joy, and the movie moves on; the kid isn’t mentioned again until the credits, where they dedicate the film to the real-life kid who died.

The problem here, and the problem in a lot of religious ‘art’ is that it is arguing from its own conclusions. The idea that a) the dream is accepted as a literal supernatural contact with the dead kid and b) that since the kid is in heaven, everything’s hunky dory just doesn’t ring true. It’s what the film-makers, and presumably some Christians wish was true, but it is completely at odds with actual human experience.

A very similar event — the accidental death of a child — occurred in my family. My mom’s family are deeply religious Mormons, who believe in eternal life as sincerely as is possible. Yet the entire family — not just my uncle’s family, but all the cousins, my grandmother, everyone — were and are affected deeply by the wound this accident left. It is one of the seminal hurts around which the whole family curls. My Grandmother died unable to mention the child’s name without tears brimming in her eyes.

There is great religious art. That’s why people go to Europe and haunt old churches. There’s Marian Anderson singing spirituals. There’s Bach’s B Minor Mass. There’s Aretha Franklin testifying in the pulpit of her father’s church. There’s religious art that makes a stubborn, confirmed agnostic like me wish I could share that faith in God. There’s Chaucer’s “Canturbury Tales” — humorous, scatalogical, irreverant; but he states in the preface “all that is writen is writen for oure doctrine.”

Unfortunately there’s the ‘art’ religious people create that seeks to cleave to doctrine in ways that turns it polemic or Pollyanna. The real impulse to religious art is unruly and heterodox and disturbing, but stuff like “Faith Like Potatoes” has more in common with Socialist Realism than it does real art. The love of God can be one of the most beautiful impulses in art, but it gets turned into bathos and kitsch by artistic cowardice. Which is a shame.