Too much

I am officially movie-d out. (For the moment, anyway.) I saw the strangest assortment of movies this weekend, the sum of which left me wanting to read a good book, or perhaps seek a purveyor of happy pills.

On Friday night it was Stephanie Daley, starring Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn. Swinton plays a forensic psychologist hired by a prosecutor to interview Tamblyn, a teen who gave birth to a baby found dead after the girl collapsed bleeding in the snow. Did the girl murder the infant? Did she even know she was pregnant? Good acting all around, particularly from Tamblyn and Timothy Hutton as the can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it-but-I-don't-trust-him husband of Swinton, but overall a downer.

Saturday's flick, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, was not exactly the feel-good movie of the year either, nor could it have been back in 1977, the year it was released. Diane Keaton stars as a woman who is a sweet teacher of hearing-impaired kids by day and a bar-hopping, chainsmoking, drug-experimenting, free love kind o' gal by night. All it takes is picking up the wrong guy just once to put an end to her freewheeling lifestyle. Besides being misogynistic and homophobic, Mr. Goodbar simply isn't a very good movie: the dialogue sounds artificial and the characters are not quite believable. You know a movie has gone around the bend when one of its most sympathetic characters is a stalker played by perennial irritant William Atherton. Despite its failings, the movie had an ending that really shook me up and convinced me not to stick around for the second flick on the double bill, Lipstick.

Wanting to escape all those sex-outside-of-marriage-is-destructive vibes, I saw Spiderman 3 this afternoon. Morose Spidey deals with cranky girlfriend, irrational former best friend, and some new foes, one of whom lacks motivation. Eh. At least it won't keep me awake tonight.