New duplicates

There's a lot I could say about Michael Shanks' Together, which has jumped up near the top of my 2025 rankings, but some of what I would say is deep into spoiler territory, as well as my own alternate reading of the film, which didn't occur to me until its very last shot.

But, I'm sick.

So I'll just set aside the really interesting stuff today and write my second straight post about movie titles.

July was an interesting month in that I added four titles to my big movie list that were already on it.

How is that possible, you ask? How can you add a movie to a list when it is already on the list?

I didn't say the movie was on the list. I said the title.

It's not so profound as my succession of short paragraphs makes it sound. I mean, it isn't a hugely surprising thing to see a movie that has the same title as another movie you've already seen.

It is, I would argue, somewhat unusual to see so many within a short period of time. 

As you recall from this post, in April I did a mini project of ranking movies by their titles. The project entailed me finding movies with the same title that were not remakes of or sequels to each other, and determining which shared titles represented the best collective quality between all the movies that shared that title, all the way down to the worst. Yes, I have too much spare time on my hands, apparently.

That project produced only 47 titles that qualified during my whole history of watching movies. So yes, it's unusual that I would have added four to that list in only a single month this year.

The first of those is Thirst, a 1979 Australian vampire film directed by Rod Hardy that I quite liked, which I watched on July 3rd. That made it a duplicate of Park Chan-wook's 2009 film Thirst, which I also quite liked, and is also a vampire film, but not a remake of the 1979 film -- believe me, I checked. Thirst is just a good title for a movie about creatures who desire blood.

Moving forward a little more than a week, on July 11th I watched The Avengers, Jeremiah S. Chechik's 1998 film that I watched on the plane when I could not watch any more 2025 films that I had to give my full attention. This was also the film that, when Joss Whedon's The Avengers was released in 2012, made me think "We already had a movie called The Avengers." Little did I know what kind of behemoth would be launched by Whedon's film.

The final two have come within the past week. Last Sunday night I watched Brick, a 2025 German language film directed by Philip Koch, which was sold to me by Netflix as in the same vein as Cube and The Platform. It is, sort of, but it is not as good as those movies. That made this a duplicate of Rian Johnson's 2005 film Brick, which is certainly technically a better film than Johnson's, but which I probably don't like as much because I had a pretty negative reaction to it when I first saw it, and a second viewing only improved my impression somewhat. 

Finally we have Together, the movie about a couple in a rut who start to get physically stuck to one another (and so much more), watched on the final day of the month. This shares a title with Lukas Moodysson's 2000 film Together, which I wrote about lovingly here, about Swedes living on a commune.

So what?

Yeah except I like to write posts like this. Hang with me. It's been an issue in my life a little bit lately, for reasons I'll explain.

I actually don't like watching movies with the same titles. I grumble and think that the second film should have tried harder to think of something distinctive. There are an unlimited number of possible combinations of words out there -- just think of a different one to describe the events that happen in your movie. Yes many repeated titles are the generic rather than the specific ones, and a generic title can be preferable because it can be easier to remember. But you know, then I have to include the year in parentheses after the title when I update a list that includes both movies, just to distinguish them from one another, when you could have done that yourself by just thinking about it for another 15 minutes and coming up with something else.

But you know what? I am actually taking the opposite position in a scenario I'm very tangentially involved in, in my real life.

I won't go into too many particulars to protect her privacy, but my wife is actually producing a film for a director trying to make his first feature film, whose short she produced about eight years ago. The title of this film is a woman's name. Or was. Or actually still is, but now it's a different woman's name.

See, the original title has been dropped because it shares the name of another film. This other film is not even a film I've heard of, though the director is well known. The sales agent argued, quite unfoundedly I think, that they can't use the original name because it would cause too much confusion with this other film -- this other film that I, a person who has seen 7,033 films, has never heard of. I'm not sure that my wife or the director were compelled to take this advice, but they'd have to have a fairly convincing reason not to, so they've taken it.

Now the original name, exotic but familiar enough to remember, has been replaced by a name that's very exotic and very hard to remember, because it's not a name I've ever even heard before.

I tried to convince my wife not to take the advice of the sales agent. That's how I'm tangentially involved. But there was never very much of a chance my opinion would provide them a perspective that they hadn't already considered themselves, and indeed, they are going forward with the new name for the main character and the movie proposed by the sales agent.

My point in telling you this is: I'm inconsistent as hell.

But in terms of movies I'm actually watching, I won't let a movie having the same title as another movie prevent me from seeing it. I even intentionally complicated things for myself by watching two different movies called Swan Song that were both released in 2021, meaning I had to include the director's name in parentheses when I listed them in my year-end rankings that I published for you to read. I guess that was preferable to seeing only one of the two movies, and leaving you, the educated viewer who knows all the movies released in any given year, to wonder which of two movies of approximately equal prominence I was actually ranking. 

In terms of the month of July, both the best movie I saw that month (Together) and the worst (The Avengers) were new duplicates. 

I promise I won't hunt out more new duplicates in August just so I can write another post like this a month from now.

Why so convoluted, film noirs?

Noir is not one of my favorite genres, and after Monday night's viewing of Inherent Vice, I'm starting to piece together why.

I just don't want to do the work.

It seems to be a hallmark of the genre that plot is completely incoherent, or in some cases, even an afterthought. Big noir fans will tell you that it's not supposed to be coherent, that that's not what you're supposed to take away from a successful noir. Well, I'm sorry if this makes me hopelessly conventional, but I like to know what's going on in a story, and have some hope of following its twists and turns to the conclusion.

Inherent Vice, I'm sorry to say, is a shining example of the narrative mess that is allowed to go unchecked in a movie with thugs, private dicks and femme fatales. It's also an example of something I discussed in yesterday's post -- how a much beloved director has started to lose me in his (or in that case, her) last two films. Lynn Shelton lost me with Touchy Feely and Laggies after Your Sister's Sister, and now Paul Thomas Anderson is doing the same by following up There Will Be Blood (my #1 movie of 2007) with The Master and Inherent Vice.

But it may not be Anderson's fault, as confusion seems to be the inherent vice of the noir genre.

I think most notably of the example of The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks' 1946 film of the Raymond Chandler novel, in which Humphrey Bogart stars as Phillip Marlowe. This film is consistently larded with praise, so when I finally saw it in 2013 it seemed long overdue. After I watched it, I wish I had snoozed on it longer. I had no idea what the hell was happening in that movie, and famously, neither did the people who made it. Whole narrative threads have no conclusion, satisfactory or otherwise, and it's a lot of who did what with whom, where. Names are strung together in a meaningless succession of actions and consequences, none of which can be sorted out. I suppose it might be okay if there were anything interesting dramatically or technically going on, but I felt The Big Sleep to be particularly challenged in those areas as well.

Rian Johnson's Brick is another noir I did not like, though I do appreciate it more after a second viewing. In that case, the technique is great, as Johnson's film at least looks good. But the obnoxious noir patter (seeming worse when coming out of the mouths of teens, and stylized to sound like the 1940s, even in the 21st century), with where this guy saw that guy and what connection that girl has to that other guy ... well, I just don't know that I have the energy to figure if it all works out, or even if I care whether it all works out.

As I think about this, I wonder if it's overly detailed plotting in general that I just don't care for.

This is going to be a pretty poor comparison, but I think it makes a certain amount of sense, so bear with me for a moment.

More than 15 years after it debuted, with a rate of two seasons per calendar year, I am still watching the reality show Survivor, and can count the number of episodes I've missed on one hand. (It helps that there's gambling involved, as I've been involved in a Survivor pool for about 30 of the 32 seasons.) One of the core parts of Survivor is its challenges, usually a reward challenge (which brings the contestants food or other luxuries) and always an immunity challenge (which helps determine which contestants are safe from the vote). Like noir movies, these challenges themselves can be pretty convoluted, and I often tune out during the 45 seconds or so when the object of the challenge is explained prior to actually competing in said challenge. I figure, I don't need to understand every rule of what they're trying to do -- I just need to see how it all plays out, as I will appreciate the drama of seeing contestants gain and lose leads, get angry at each other, and potentially hurt themselves.

Noir movies -- The Big Sleep in particular -- are like 90% challenge explanation and 10% the resulting drama. I simply don't care to devote such a high percentage of the time I'm watching a movie to learning about how this off-screen character might be connected to/have double crossed/have been killed by this off-screen character. Especially because then, when I do see those characters, I have to remember which names match up to which faces. If I'm wrong, I might make the situation all the worse for myself. I mean, cinema is a show-don't-tell medium. Noir spends way too much time telling me things -- The Big Sleep in particular.

Like any noir movie, Inherent Vice spends quite a lot of time on introducing new characters, introducing new subplots, introducing new wrinkles, and then failing to connect them all up. Or, it connects them up in a way that might hold water, or it might not, but by then I just don't care anymore. By then I just want the thing to be over ... especially when it meanders past the two-hour and twenty-minute mark, like Inherent Vice does.

There's a scene near the end of the movie when some important stuff starts to happen, some real action to set off all the talking. I did sit up in my seat at that point. However, it's worth noting that I failed to understand how the characters involved fit into the larger plot, especially since they were introduced so late in the narrative that I didn't even really know who they were. I understand you don't want everything to be a Scooby Doo plot, where the guy you met briefly at the start ends up being the one who did it, but there's a reason Scooby Doo was plotted that way. You want it to matter, to be meaningful, who did the thing and why.

Now, at least one thing I can say for Inherent Vice, which I can say for all Anderson movies, is that it looks good. There's this shot where Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterston run off into the rain searching for an address that isn't there after a Ouija board told them to do so that I'm still thinking about today. Plus it is completely authentic in terms of its 1970s look. I'd almost say that Phoenix's appearance, with that mop of curly hair and those big mutton chops, is so distinctive that it would make him into kind of an iconic character -- if only the movie were better.

As I'm trying to explore my feelings about noir in general, what interests me now is the exceptions to the rule. If you combined The Big Sleep and Inherent Vice you might get Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, in which Phillip Marlowe is updated to the 1970s and played by Elliott Gould. Yet I love The Long Goodbye. I don't know that the plot of The Long Goodbye is heaps more coherent than these other two, but I did follow it better, perhaps because I liked what was going on around the margins more. (Interestingly, Altman is probably one of the biggest influences on Anderson, as felt most noticeably in Magnolia. I wonder if Inherent Vice was supposed to be Anderson's tribute to Altman?) I also really like some other famous noirs like Double Indemnity and Chinatown, though I think in both of those cases, the plot is done better justice.

But if I'm looking at another film that is at least superficially similar to Inherent Vice in terms of its stoner themes, my antipathy toward noir could also weigh into why I don't care for The Big Lebowski as much as your average person does. A couple years ago, when the Filmspotting podcast used to schedule annual or bi-annual double features at a Chicago-area drive-in, they ended up pairing Lebowski with either The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye -- one was ultimately unavailable, so they chose the other one. So it's seeming even more and more like The Long Goodbye is an exception to my rule. On the other hand, staying within the Coens' own oeuvre, I like Miller's Crossing and The Man Who Wasn't There, which can both be seen as noirs if you do a little squinting.

Maybe I just need to conclude that Inherent Vice didn't work for me and just leave it at that.

The hyper-stylization of Joseph Gordon-Levitt

What have they done to Joseph Gordon-Levitt??

Whatever it is, I like it.

The first time I saw the trailer for Rian Johnson's Looper -- which was not the other night, though that second or third viewing inspired me to write this post -- I thought there seemed something a little off about the young actor's appearance. His features seemed sharper, his eyes wider. There was an airbrushed quality to him.

I thought it might just be that the actor worked out for this role, or that the man who has always looked sort of like a little kid (perhaps because we met him as a little kid on Third Rock from the Sun) was finally maturing. But the changes still looked a bit too extreme. He looked like a cartoon character or something.

After this last viewing, I decided I had to investigate.

It turns out that during the Looper shoot, the actor had to submit to three hours a day in a makeup chair in order to achieve the appearance you see above. Much of that had to do with grafting on a larger chin.

So what was wrong with Gordon-Levitt the way he was, babyface notwithstanding?

Here's the cool part: They are trying to make him look like a younger version of Bruce Willis. Not just because they wanted him to have a "Bruce Willis aura" to him -- but because he actually plays a younger version of Bruce Willis.

And don't tell me that you aren't getting a Bruce Willis vibe from those eyes. I don't know how they did it, but to me, it seems clear as day.

I find all the trouble they went to to be especially interesting, because that's usually the last thing anyone cares about in a movie: whether the actor they got to play the younger version of a character (or the older version) really looks like the actor they got to play the older version (or the younger version). Actors are usually hired because they are right for the part, and they bear at least a passing resemblance to the actor who has already been cast. Like, they need to have the same hair color, though that itself is not an insurmountable obstacle. Being the same race certainly helps.

Here though, Johnson and his crew decided it would add to our appreciation of the film if JGL and Willis really looked like the same person. I'm sure there's something about this intriguing story that will make us appreciate all the more that they made that decision.

We'll find out on September 28th.

Looper -- about a present-day hitman who is hired to kill the future incarnation of himself -- is the kind of big idea movie that would ordinarily shoot straight to the top of my "most anticipated" list. It hasn't, which is primarily because in the maybe two years since I first heard about it, I have known it was from the creative team (writer-director and star) behind Brick.

I've mellowed on my dislike of Brick after a second viewing, but I still feel like it contains altogether too much posing and posturing for my tastes, and it turned me against JGL for a number of years. I refused to see Johnson's follow-up, The Brothers Bloom, just because of his involvement.

But this is a new and improved Gordon-Levitt -- literally -- and I have since heard Johnson appear as a guest host on my favorite film podcast, Filmspotting. So I'm ready to open my arms to him again as well.

There will be no teenagers tripping over their noir jargon, so at least there's that.

Hey you kids, get off my lawn

My Second Chances series, in which I revisit popular films that underwhelmed me, runs on Tuesdays.

This will be the sixth movie I've reconsidered as part of my Second Chances series. I envisioned the series as a genuine opportunity to reconsider some acclaimed movies that other people liked more than I did. But I also thought it would be a good opportunity to bang on some movies I dislike. Writing negative things is much easier than writing positive things.

But the project has been skewed much more toward the former than the latter. I didn't think it would be that way when I ended up disliking the first movie I reconsidered, Gangs of New York, just as much as I disliked it the first time. But since then, from Hoosiers to A History of Violence to The Others to No Country for Old Men, I've liked each film better than the first time, and in some cases, a lot better.

So for my sixth second chance, I thought I'd give myself a softball, and I'd hate it out of the park. Rian Johnson's Brick was supposed to be that softball.

So much for best intentions. Or maybe, in this case, for worst intentions.

When I first saw Brick with my wife at our house a couple years back, we were instantly against it. One look at Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Brendan, and it was hate at first sight. I didn't like the way he looked. I didn't like the way he talked. I didn't like the way he dug his hands into his jacket pockets in every scene, no matter how improbable, even running that way at one point. I didn't like the way he used exclusively pay phones to talk to people, since you can't even find pay phones anymore these days, especially not standing alone on empty roads. I didn't like his stupid, bratty face. In fact, I didn't like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, period, for a long time after seeing Brick.

But in that last list of dislikes, I skimmed over the thing that really distanced me from Rian Johnson's movie: I didn't like the way he, or anyone in the movie, talked. Brick is obviously supposed to be a neo-noir, and it's heavily stylized because of that fact. For me, it was too stylized, and the dialogue was the most irritating part of that. These 21st century teenagers were talking to each other in a kind of 40's slang that I found highly distancing, and if finding it pretentious weren't enough, it also made it significantly harder to follow (or care about) the action. A sample line of dialogue:

"See The Pin pipes it from the lowest scraper for Brad Bramish to sell, maybe. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said 'Show your hands' if any of them've actually seen The Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets."

And this line of dialogue is spoken by a character named The Brain.

Or how about this:

"I didn't shake the party up to get your attention, and I'm not heeling you to hook you. Your connections could help me, but the bad baggage they bring would make it zero sum game or even hurt me. I'm better off coming at it clean."

That one was Brendan himself.

To me, this all amounted to Rian Johnson trying to make a bunch of teenagers look too cool ... well, literally, too cool for school. And if there's one thing I hate, it's young people posturing. I'm only 36, not over the hill, but I've been quick to embrace the generation divide between myself and kids who wear their hair like the guys in My Chemical Romance. (I now know there is a word for this: "emo.") No one has hair like that in Brick, but the way they all behave like adults and act super arrogant and dismissive just rubbed me the wrong way. Especially that Gordon-Levitt fellow. I thought if only Johnson had a sense of humor about any of it, it would be that much more tolerable. I didn't think it was a badly made film -- worse, I thought it was a badly conceived film.

In fact, so much did I dislike Brick and all it stood for, I developed a two word dismissal that I used whenever possible:

"Fuck Brick."

Okay, thanks for indulging me -- I've gotten that out of my system.

And now I can shock even myself by saying that I liked Brick better this time.

Not at first. At first, as I heard that highly stylized dialogue tumble out of the characters' mouths, I tuned out all over again. I didn't try to glean meaning from the tortured sentences, and I didn't try to give it a second chance. In fact, I was on my laptop for much of the first hour. That didn't mean I wasn't paying attention, but it definitely meant my attention was divided.

But as Brick moved along, I started to appreciate the actual filmmaking more. One thing I noticed liking was the way Johnson filmed his stylized action. For example, the scene where Tug continues punching Brendan in the face next to his (Tug's) car. It plays at somewhere around one-and-a-half times normal speed, and it gains a real comical physicality as a result. I also appreciated the foot chase that Brendan ends by turning the corner, then reversing his steps and executing a sliding trip that sends his pursuer flailing into a metal pole. It worked for me.

The next thing to rehabilitate itself in my eyes was that too-cool-for-school attitude that I initially disliked so much. Implied in my criticism was that I was expecting some kind of realism from Johnson, that I wanted the kids to be goofy and unconfident, like some real teenagers are. That's simply not his intention. The film has a specific style for a specific reason. The characters in Humphrey Bogart movies are too cool for school. So why shouldn't these kids be? I started to view them as the genre archetypes they were supposed to be, not the real teenagers I once wanted them to be.

Then there's the idea that Johnson didn't have a sense of humor. In fact, quite the contrary. No, it doesn't show up too often, but when it does show up, that may make it all the more effective. If my complaint was that these kids were too mature and too cool, Johnson does all he can to deflate that in one funny scene in which Tug, Brendan and The Pin are all meeting for the first time at the house where The Pin lives with his parents. To underscore the fact these are kids, and perhaps even to make it seem like this is all some melodramatic role-playing game they're involved in, Johnson forces these three super-cool character to endure a scene with The Pin's mom, where she offers them juice and cookies. As powerful as they all are, in their own right, none of them are bigger than the etiquette and politeness involved with parental interactions.

For the record, I still don't like the dialogue.

Second Chance Verdict, Brick: It's not my favorite movie, but I will no longer slag it off to my friends.

Weak memories, strong memories

As I was revisiting Scott Frank's excellent crime thriller The Lookout last night, it occurred to me how strange our memory can be about movies we've seen. Liking a movie does not necessarily mean you remember it, and hating a movie does not necessarily mean you forget it -- even if you tell everyone you're doing your best to repress the memory. In fact, the opposite can be true more often. Hate can be a much stronger emotion than love, depending on the circumstances.

But it's especially strange with this movie, because this movie is about a guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who gets into a serious car accident that causes brain damage and memory loss. He functions pretty well as a regular person, holding down a janitorial job. He's even allowed to drive a car, though my wife thought that seemed unlikely -- if he weren't prohibited because of his mental impairment, then he'd definitely be for having caused an accident with two fatalities, in which he turned off the headlights as a game. But he has terrible problems sequencing ordinary events, he can't figure out how to open a can of soup without instructions, he confuses lemons for tomatoes, and has a bit of a memory problem. He remembers everything from before the accident, but the stuff that's happened since is a bit jumbled, such that he has to keep track of things in his notepad in order to remember them.

This is strange because I, too, had memory problems when it came to The Lookout.

I saw the movie on March 3, 2008. Just 20 months ago. I was over at my friend Dave's house. I remember really liking it. He did too.

But only a few months, maybe even a few weeks, later, I could remember almost nothing about what had happened in that movie. It's as though it made almost no impression on me, other than the fact that I would enthusiastically recommend it to a friend.

I wouldn't have dwelled on the issue except that the movie was available for review on my website. I like to put in for any movie I've seen that isn't reviewed, and The Lookout was no exception. Except I didn't do it right away. I held off as a result of my selective Alzheimer's about The Lookout. (As a tie-in with the film's subject matter, I like to imagine that a beam shot out of the screen and wiped my memory, like the "flashy thing" in Men in Black.) And if I didn't remember the movie, I couldn't review it. The Lookout became just like any movie I hadn't seen that's unreviewed: I'd have to see it before I could review it. So it ceased to be a priority.

But I guess it kind of gnawed away at me, this inability to remember. I had to figure out what it was that was causing the memory blockage. I didn't think it was just the overload of watching as many movies as I do. I didn't think it was the equivalent, in computer terms, of reaching the last few kilobytes of available space on a hard drive, then losing what you're working on because something needs to be deleted, or the system needs to be rebooted, before you can continue.

There are plenty of movies I've seen whose details are this fuzzy, but not things I've seen within the last couple years. Should I be worried about an actual diminished capacity of my memory? I expect this kind of thing from a movie that is lame and genuinely unmemorable, but a movie as good as The Lookout? It didn't make sense. I had to see it again, and besides, I wanted to show it to my wife, who loves films in the thriller genre.

So I finally got approved to review it, and this weekend, we watched it. It didn't feel like I was watching it for the first time, but I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten. For example, I didn't remember that Gordon-Levitt's character has a blind roommate played by Jeff Daniels. I didn't remember that Isla Fisher plays his love interest. And I didn't remember what happens in acts two or three, though it also didn't strike me as virgin footage to my eyes. It was just temporarily misplaced in my head. In fact, you could almost say that I remembered nothing after the car accident, which takes place in the film's first five minutes and is a pretty jarring start to the action. I'm like the film's protagonist, in that way.

Coincidence? I think so.

(Wait a minute ...)

Although I never truly identified why the details slipped through my mental fingers, I'm really glad I watched The Lookout again, because this is a fantastic movie -- well-acted, tightly scripted, clever, and extremely gratifying. And also, because it helped redeem Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

And here's where the "strong memories" part of this post comes in.

I saw Rian Johnson's Brick on September 24, 2006, about 18 months before seeing The Lookout. And hated it so much, that not only do I remember the details clearly, but have allowed the film to permanently stigmatize Joseph Gordon-Levitt, its star.

I guess I've never been the biggest fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He was always a bit of a curiosity to me. He appeared in Third Rock from the Sun, then suddenly graduated from "little kid on annoying sitcom" status to "leading man on the big screen" status. There was no time in between for me to mentally integrate Joseph Gordon-Levitt into this community of serious adult actors. What's more, perhaps because of a physical similarity, he seemed like he was trying to become the next Heath Ledger. And I didn't like that, even when Ledger was alive, but especially now.

But Brick was what really turned me against Gordon-Levitt, even though that film's failure probably had little to do with him.

Now, if you don't know Brick, I will do it the courtesy of telling you that a lot of people seem to like it. Those of us who hate it, though, hate it something good.

It's a stylized detective-noir film that occurs in and around a suburban high school and the town where its students live. It features almost exclusively teenagers, or more realistically, 28-year-old actors playing teenagers.

This could have been a really great idea, but we'll never know, because the way Johnson decided to execute it was insipid, obnoxious, self-important and self-indulgent. The actors' stylized way of speaking is supposed to be a throwback to the gumshoe movies of the 1930s and 1940s, but it hit my ear as incredibly false and misguided. This kind of thing can be successful if it's done smartly, but a real failure if it's done too smartly -- as in, overwritten to the point of linguistic strangulation. That's the case here. Maybe I just can't accept conceits like this -- I consider the massive failure of Joss Whedon's Serenity to be largely the result of a similar problem with the dialogue.

Okay, so the dialogue is bad, and the idea feels really dumb as a result. It's neither funny, which it's sort of trying to be, nor clever, which it's desperately trying to be -- making matters worse. But worst of all is how much pretension there is in the characters, how much of a strained effort to be as cool as humanly possible. And this is where Gordon-Levitt really comes in. Sure, this is how he was directed by Johnson -- the actor proves in The Lookout, among other places, that he's just as happy to play shy and uncertain. But by being the main character, who spoke more of that terrible dialogue, and struck more of those poseur postures, than anyone, Gordon-Levitt became the personification of what I hated about Brick.

And I carried that hate around with me. Hate has a long memory.

I hated Shadowboxer, and thought it probably had something to do with Joseph Gordon-Levitt having a small role. His presence made me less excited to see (500) Days of Summer, and true enough, I liked it about a third as much as it was hyped. And though his face was obscured for much of the time, and his role was relatively small anyway, Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander had to have something to do with why G.I. Joe sucked so much, right?

But seeing The Lookout again reminds me that the actor is only doing the bidding of his director. He's essentially clay, waiting to be molded. There's good clay and bad clay, to be sure. But Joseph Gordon-Levitt is not bad clay. Rian Johnson is just a bad molder, whereas Scott Frank is a good one.

That's something I'm sure to remember this time around.