BAD WORDS

It's not impossible to make a comedy centered on an angry, sullen, emotionally inaccessible bastard, as Oscar Isaac recently proved in Inside Llewyn Davis. In that film, however, Isaac had a Coen-brothers script and a bunch of sensational folk songs to help carry him through. In Bad Words, director/star Jason Bateman merely has a half-workable comic conceit and access to unlimited profanities. The anger, sullenness, and inaccessibility, I'm sorry to say, win out.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

There are some Coen-brothers movies - Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and True Grit come immediately to mind - that, because they exude such palpable filmmaking energy and are so spectacularly quotable, I wanted to talk about immediately after first seeing them. Then there are the rarer Coen-brothers movies, among them The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading, that I didn't feel much like talking about afterward, mostly because I didn't enjoy them much on a first go-round. (Though I've consequently become a big fan of Joel's and Ethan's Hudsucker and Burn, in the case of Intolerable Cruelty, second and third go-rounds did nothing to improve matters.)

And then there are Coen-brothers movies such as the new Inside Llewyn Davis, a work that is, I think, so good that I don't want to discuss it for fear of not coming close to doing it justice.

ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

I've read critics who have described Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential as nihilistic, sour, and mean-spirited. They're saying it like that's a bad thing. Working with screenwriter Daniel Clowes - adapting the film from his comic book, and again collaborating with the director who helmed 2001's Clowes-scripted Ghost World - Zwigoff has, here, fashioned a wonderfully nihilistic, sour, and mean-spirited comedy; it might take easy potshots at the politics and posturings of the art community, but those potshots are funny and clever, and the film's refusal to sentimentalize any of its characters (even our protagonist) is incredibly refreshing. Still, the movie has been met with much dissatisfaction, if not outright annoyance. Art School Confidential seems, to me, the most thoroughly misunderstood movie of the year.