I saw Baghead yesterday, so I'll start with that.

Baghead is nearly perfect. It aspires to do little, but it manages to do more than most of the films in this era of no-budget films which conspicuously aspire to do little. At times Baghead is obvious--well, thin--but it's a film which doesn't pretend to be more than it is, and as far as I can tell the Duplass brothers, who wrote and directed Puffy Chair, have achieved everything they set out to achieve. A moderately perceptive critic might begin by saying that the relationships in Baghead are one-dimensional, even archetypal, and each of the four characters represents such a carefully constructed stereotype that we could safely assume we'd never see these people together in "reality." But who cares? It's a movie about a guy with a bag on his head.

Baghead wisely carries its cyanide capsule into the enemy territory of the multiplex. It explicitly (yes, thinly) makes fun of improvised no-budget films--while being an improvised no-budget film itself. Thin ice. Maybe there's a little too much italicized irony in the scene in which a disheveled no-budget director defends his film's ad-libbed dialogue: "When you wake up in the morning, do you think about everything you're going to say to people that day? Well, I don't think a film should be any different." Now we're not only making fun of improvised indie films but also the hokey self-justification of the casually earnest director before a gullible festival audience. In terms of meta properties, we're not too far from Barth or Coetzee here, and if that sounds pretentious, well, it's too THIN to be pretentious.

Yes, it's easier to make fun of something than to take it seriously and, yes, we're all tired of that, but there's something unique and courageous here: the Duplasses' impulse to make fun of themselves and their ilk is countered by a totally straight face. By letting you know what they're out to make fun of, you're that much more certain what they AREN'T making fun of. It's a nice dialectic, and it doesn't wear you out with over-use or heaviness of purpose. The film is a remarkably successful thriller above all else, and it reinforces my sense that what sets the Duplasses apart from, well, everyone else is their facility with the physical--they haven't spent too much time in their own heads or been stunted by interminable "deep" conversations on threadbare couches. There is a concrete, tactile quality to their style, a quality that is too integral to identify and analyze apart from the rest of it, an alchemy of hooded sweatshirts and blaring horns and baseball bats and chairs burning in hotel parking lots. They also have an impressive ability to follow through on a simple joke, whether it's sneaking from the van into the motel room in Puffy Chair or, in Baghead, holding a wallet like a cellphone against one's ear while trying to sneak into an exclusive party (sneaking is rampant). In certain kinds of films I can sense the gags before they arrive and I almost always feel cheated by the perfunctory execution. The Duplasses achieve the opposite effect--I don't always see the jokes coming (these boys are too clever for that) and they often make a bigger splash than I could have predicted. Most shockingly, these guys don't seem proud of themselves, they don't place themselves above the audience. Their films don't have the air of smug exclusivity which has terminally infected certain cells of no-budget filmmaking (a less pungent version of that Soderbergh-Clooney thing). If the Duplasses seemed as if they were trying to impress me, or if they seemed impressed with themselves, I'd be much less impressed. This brings to mind some lines from Emerson, but more to the point it brings to mind some other recent movie experiences.

I watched Keaton's The General the day after I watched Nolan's The Dark Knight. This unintentional juxtaposition allowed me to clarify some thoughts on The Dark Knight. The General has eye-popping action, whereas The Dark Knight has eye-popping editing. The Dark Knight is so proud of what it can do that it doesn't bother doing what it can do--it goes a step too far every time, editing its would-be achievements into oblivion, totally undermining the effect it wants to have. The General is exponentially more exciting than The Dark Knight. And this isn't the anti-blockbuster rant it might seem to be. The principles at work in The General are also on display in Favreau's Iron Man--for instance, the sequence in which the original clunky Iron Man gets his/its arm stuck in a cave wall. There's no flurry of close-ups and cross-cutting around it. Iron Man hits the wall with his arm; he struggles to free his arm; the arm comes loose. I believe it's all done in one medium shot. In any case, THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME SEE IT, MR. FAVREAU. As a result of the straightforward, even prosaic methodology which permeates Iron Man, I was left wanting considerably more--in a good way. At the end of Dark Knight, by contrast, I wanted that six hours of my life back.

The Dark Knight seems to be built on the assumption that excitement is purely physiological and can best be achieved by an attack on the senses. It seems to me that suspense is directly proportionate to coherence of onscreen action or to the ease with which I can interpret that action. There is a very simply realized foot chase in the middle of Tell No One. A fairly steady camera offers us a medium or long shot of Francois Cluzet running across a busy highway. It's just a man running in traffic, but it's absolutely gripping. The Dark Knight? I was so thoroughly unable to make sense of the mess that I found myself wondering what my kids were up to at home with their grandmother.

In the cases of The General, Iron Man, and Tell No One, the directors seem to place emphasis on the action itself, rather than placing emphasis on how the action is presented. That sounds like a sophism, given that any camera angle or series of edits is "presenting" the action. Nonetheless The Dark Knight egregiously over-presents its action: split-second close-ups accrue until the larger action and the context of that action is lost altogether. Action sequences become a matter of a fist fighting with a cheek instead of a hero fighting with a villain. Masks and make-up have already depersonalized everything--surely further depersonalization through bodily fragmentation is inadvisable. Favreau's technique of showing Tony Stark's face within the Iron Man mask was a great way to counter the effects of depersonalization which afflict the masked superhero film (and the ambiguous syntax there is appropriate--both the superhero and the film itself are masked in most cases). Add Bale's silly Batman voice to the mix, and I find myself so distanced from the person in that suit that I just don't care about the character. However, I do like Bale as Bruce Wayne and I find it odd that Nolan seems almost embarrassed of him: to wit, as Wayne arrives at a benefit he's hosting in support of Harvey Dent, there seems to be a jump cut from Wayne's flashy entrance to his speechifying. Long shots and medium shots reduce him to a handsome young man in a tux, which becomes just another costume to distance me from the ostensible person. If he's a tux standing in a thicket of tuxes, shouldn't the camera make that much more effort to distinguish him from the rest? It provides a great analog to the opening sequence which contains a flurry of fake batmen. Boy, what a mistake.

The Dark Knight is made up of set pieces stretched so far beyond their utility that the rhythm and structure of the film are compromised before twenty minutes has passed. The Hong Kong sequence, which comes fairly early, upstages the rest of the movie by a long shot, and even if we take away the structural mistake, why expend so much bat-energy on a character who is so insignificant in the grand scheme? He's not a supervillain; he's an accountant. To me this was such an egregious error in judgment that I assumed Nolan--not a stupid person--was intentionally sabotaging the film. In the same way, his brutal dismissal of Bale as Wayne has about it the stench of a director-star feud--especially when he puts undue emphasis on Nicky Katt desperately spackling the holes of an action sequence with tonally aberrant asides (no "relief" has ever felt less comic). What an insult to Bale.

But many good films suffer from structural problems. In Tell No One, the spell is broken by a ten-minute monologue in which everything is neatly explained. What Baghead offers as a denouement doesn't quite work (you have permission to roll your eyes), but at least it doesn't belabor its resolution. It doesn't systematically dismantle the cumulative effect of the preceding seventy minutes.

Included with my private Baghead experience (I was alone in the auditorium) was the trailer for In Search of a Midnight Kiss. I first became aware of this film through a BBC podcast on which the director, Alex Holdridge, was interviewed. Like Pilate looking over Christ, I found no fault with the man. But for some reason Anthony Lane decided Holdridge should die for all the sins of the indie film universe.

I had a bad feeling when I saw that Lane had dedicated his entire column to Midnight Kiss. I anticipated an Amy Taubin-like outcry, and I wasn't far off. Lane calls Midnight Kiss "a neat distillation of what we mean by American independent cinema: the compulsion to proceed by nudges and sidelong glances, to build a character through the accumulation of quirks, and to gesture toward the deep end of human behavior and then dart quickly away." Of the characters themselves, Lane concludes: "Their bodies may have grown up, but their spirits, as shown in their tantrums and tiny attention spans, are still half formed, and I, for one, find it hard to summon much sympathy for their unimportant plights."

I'm curious to know who provoked Lane so deeply. Certainly not Holdridge, who might be a handy scapegoat but is hardly the poster boy of, well, anything.

Lane credits Richard Linklater with our current crop of indie underachievers (interesting in part because Holdridge admits he was shaped by the Austin film scene which Linklater largely shaped). Lane says that Linklater "could hardly have dreamed that slackerdom--the reluctance not merely to get a life but to give a damn on any score whatsoever--would be the base-level approach of a hundred movies to come." Lane is giving Linklater too much power while not giving him enough credit. First of all, Slacker does not provide us with a protagonist about whose plight we are meant to give a damn--and that's an important distinction. If we are asked to give a damn about people who don't give a damn, we recoil. Linklater merely presented a few dozen people who colorfully reasoned out their inability to give a damn. None of them was presented according to the conflict/resolution model, so identification was impossible. Slacker is a milestone, a perfect, inimitable film. None of the successful indie films of today resemble Slacker. Is Lane so out of touch with non-industry films that his only reference point is Slacker? He goes on to praise Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, hoping that indie directors will aspire to "that." Is he unaware of the buzz around such films as Quiet City and Medicine for Melancholy? Certainly it's not the responsibility of a New Yorker film critic to immerse himself in the fickle and harried world of film festivals, but if that's the subject he chooses to address, maybe he should be a little better informed. I'm not sure his sidelong glance at the festival "situation" qualifies him to hold forth on the subject.

"Some films never break free of the festival circuit; some, indeed, seem to have been designed expressly for the titillation of festival audiences and nobody else," Lane writes. Clearly he has seen some of these festival films, and he cannot get this minuscule bee out of his bonnet. His indie-itis is so bad he needs two full pages to scratch it. I'd like to know which films designed expressly for the titillation of "festival audiences" (what a strangely venomous phrase!) have failed to titillate him--certainly not the very, very titillating ones? For whom should insignificant, upstart directors make their films if not for festival audiences? God forbid we make them for Anthony Lane!

In a climate in which The Dark Knight earns a 95% approval rating among serious critics, can't we cut small films some slack? The distributor crisis should be galvanizing critics who have any regard for pluralism--does Mr. Lane really want The Dark Knight playing on twenty screens at each theater in town? Baghead may be one of the last scruffy little homemade films we ever see in a theater in this country. Maybe that's why I was in a hurry to see it. Maybe that's why I liked it so much.

Yeah, so?