Other movies I watched recently: The Terror of Tiny Town, the first (and, far as I know, only) all-midget Western, and Inventing the Abbotts, about the connection between two small-town families in the Fifties, one rich and one poor. Tiny Town is, obviously, laughable. I rented it as a part of an attempt to find bad movies throughout history, and I succeeded. IMDB users have seen fit to rank Tiny Town as the worst film of the 1930s, and it's not hard to see why. The plot and script are hackneyed (interesting when you consider that the film was produced in the 1930s, and Western conventions were already well established), the acting laughable and the concept so completely odd that I have to wonder what on earth possessed the studio to think this was a good idea. I suppose that Hollywood was still young and hadn't quite perfected the formula for crap that will put butts in the seats. (That formula still isn't perfected, but it's getting tweaked and improved upon daily.) The absurdity of Tiny Town wears off in about ten minutes, and you still have the better part of an hour to kill.

My brother, upon hearing that I planned to view this film, informed me that a neglected 16mm version of this was the party movie of choice back when he was in high school. Apparently, it's perfect for getting stoned to, and the copy at my high school was totally worn out by stoners looking for something to laugh at between runs to Taco John's. Sadly, I chose to watch this without any sort of herbal accompaniment, and I have no plans to repeat the experience, with or without mind-altering substances. (Good God, watching that on acid could very likely make your brain explode...)

Inventing the Abbotts was a welcome relief after that, particularly since it co-stars Jennifer Connelly, who could be in every movie ever made and I would never complain. The story, about two brothers who get involved with a trio of rich sisters, was sweet and more complicated than other movies of this genre (in a nice way), but by virtue of that complication, the central element of the story had a tendency to get lost, that being the main character's on-again-off-again relationship with the youngest Abbott, played by Liv Tyler.

It was the second movie in recent memory starring Joaquin Phoenix that I've seen in recent memory, the other being the Army black comedy Buffalo Soldiers, and he's gone from the creepy little punk from Gladiator (a movie I hated) to a decent leading man in my mind. He carried both films quite well, though it didn't hurt that both films had decent eye candy in the wings (Anna Paquin played the romantic lead in Soldiers).

None of the films I've seen recently, though, have really blown me away, or even come close. Everything seems to wind up being passable or slightly above passable, even so-called classics like Harvey. I suppose it's the writer's instinct in me, where I keep seeing parts and things I would have written differently. What I'm longing for is the kind of movie where I wouldn't have done anything differently, but where I also leave feeling like there's no way I could have done what they did in a million years.

In other words, the kind of movie that can make my inner critic shut the hell up.