I am continually fascinated by the blogosphere—its odd blend of willful insularity and often-startling reach; its dominant personalities, at who’ve succeeded not so much at being larger than life, but at simply recreating parallel versions of themselves online, seemingly able to document every waking thought in real time; at the alliances and infighting that dominate, especially in political commentary; at the way it allows us to see the evolution of language, the spread of ideas, jargon, and stylistic modes, at a an amazingly rapid pace. In just the last few years, blogs have generated reams of material ripe for critical evaluation.

So I was rather disappointed by Sarah Boxer’s essay on blogs in The New York Review of Books, which seems written for people who have never—or only rarely—encountered blogs. The essay provides a cursory summary of how blogs work, notes a few of their literary tics, and suggests that they are popular because of the freedom they provide. It’s sort of “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” in 5,000 words. It’s a primer on blogging, but it suggests very little about the medium that isn’t patently obvious to a regular consumer. All this might have been fine in 2004, but in this case, it comes off as a marginally less awe-struck version of what Ross Douthat has called the “critic-as-fanboy style of criticism,” which he says usually come in the form of “extremely long critical essays that describe their subject, often in painstaking and florid detail, without bothering to interpret it.” I’m glad to see that writers are taking the internet seriously as a medium that deserves thoughtful examination, but if Boxer’s essay offers indication, the critical community has yet to figure out what to make of it.

Despite the consensus view that P.T. Anderson’s latest film is a searing, visionary work, numerous critics have complained about the final scene of There Will Be Blood. The New Yorker’s David Denby calls it “a mistake.” Ross Douthat writes in the most recent National Review that the film’s weakest part is its end. And Chris Orr, writing for The New Republic, argues that it “runs aground in its final act and, especially, its final scene.” But although the final scene is jarring, I think it’s a perfect close for both the director and the film’s central character. (As you might expect, spoilers lie ahead.)

A quick recap: After two and a half hours of quiet, tightly-controlled, poetic naturalism, in which Daniel Day Lewis’s fiercely independent oil baron Daniel Plainview manipulates and dominates everything and everyone around him, the film explodes into a wild—some might say unhinged—absurdism. He confronts Eli (Paul Dano), a wily spiritual huckster—and something of a competitor—who has come begging for help, and then, after growling and howling his way through a riveting, if borderline insane, monologue that features the line, “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE,” he begins hurling bowling balls at Eli and eventually kills him. It’s transfixing, brutal, uncomfortable, and defiantly weird.

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I’m on record as being an Oscar-cynic; as far as I’m concerned, the annual awards ceremony is, rather than a celebration of cinematic accomplishment, primarily an excuse for Hollywood to indulge in awesome displays of lavish narcissism. Everything about the night, from the $40,000 gift bags to the six-figure formal-wear to the clunky mechanical stage pieces, screams “Look at me! Look how wonderful I am! I deserve an award!“

But as often as not, those receiving the awards don’t deserve them. Any idea that the Academy is a reliable judge of cinematic merit should have gone out the window by the time the organization named Crash Best Picture.

Yet for movie fans, it’s nonetheless hard not to be swept up in the buzz and excitement. This year, that’s especially true, as the nominations are unusually strong, particularly in the Best Picture Category. There Will Be Blood, Juno, and No Country for Old Men are all worthy contenders, and even Michael Clayton was mildly enjoyable, if overrated. Only Atonement, the lackluster period picture based on Ian McEwan’s novel, stands out as a poor selection – and this was to be expected, as it was virtually assured it a slot by its literary pedigree.

A few people seem to be surprised by the nomination of Juno, a scrappy, sharp-witted film about teen pregnancy by Thank You for Smoking director Jason Reitman, but its nomination is in keeping with the Academy’s tradition of nominating one slightly edgy but successful indie-style (if not actually independent) film each year; think of Little Miss Sunshine, Fargo, Moulin Rouge, or Lost in Translation. Call it the Pulp Fiction nod.

Instead, the film that stands out as odd to me is Michael Clayton. Yes, it received generally favorable coverage, but beyond a marvelously dour star turn by George Clooney in the title role, there wasn’t much to it beyond dreary moodiness and a melancholy anti-corporatism, and neither the critical buzz nor the box-office returns were particularly notable. The only explanation I can come up with is that it was nominated as the token “political issue film” because none of the year’s hideous crop of Iraq-war movies could justifiably take the slot. But who knows what lurks in the minds of the Academy’s members.

Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead isn’t so much a heist picture as a post-heist picture, a film about the sad and deadly spiral of greed and evil that follows two brothers who plan a robbery of their own parents’ jewelry store. As a genre, this is a small one, and often overlooked; only a few films, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs among them, go after it with such gusto.

The novelty may explain the gushing critical reaction. It’s undoubtedly a strong film, gripping and tersely paced throughout, and many have compared it to Lumet’s classic, and undeniably brilliant, foray into the heist picture, Dog Day Afternoon. But though the subject matter is broadly similar—a holdup in New York goes deadly wrong—the two films are hardly of equal stature.

Dog Day earned its classic status not only though its taut pacing, but through its lovingly crafted cast of characters, and its subtle portrayal of the social frictions of 1970s New York. Rather than simply existing for their own sake, the genre elements fused into a framework by which to examine a place and an era. The film was, in other words, about more than the robbery, or even its aftershocks.

Devil, on the other hand, is content simply to wind up its ingenious little Rube Goldberg of a story and let it play out. A number of the supporting characters are flat, functional stereotypes who appear only so they can help keep Lumet’s narrative machine running. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, and the movie is still almost certainly one of the year’s best. But it’s just genre—albeit very, very cleverly constructed genre—and shouldn’t be mistaken for anything more.

Showtime’s Dexter, which just finished its second season, is up for a WGA award this year. Like most high-profile cable dramas that have appeared in the wake of The Sopranos, it balances upper middlebrow dramatic concerns—quirky characters, complex narrative lines, psychological questioning—with visceral, often vulgar elements. But the competing interests of these two strains has forced it into a series of ungainly, and sometimes ugly, moral contortions.

The show, which follows the exploits of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a Miami PD blood-spatter analyst who also happens to be a serial killer—albeit one who only targets other murderers—is high concept in the extreme, a cockeyed mash-up of American Psycho, Miami Vice, and CSI. Dexter, we learn, is a bona fide murderous sociopath—lacking a conscience and unable to experience normal emotions—but he lives by a code imparted to him as a boy by his adoptive father.

The code allows Dexter to control his bloody urges by killing those who “deserve it,” and requires him to blend in with society in order not to get caught. So he maintains a polite, even conciliatory persona, and has a perky girlfriend, a respectable job, and a sister for whom he has assumed responsibility. Meanwhile, Dexter, in voice-over, muses on his own humanity (or lack thereof) as a creature with no more moral compass than a rock.

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The fifth and final cut of Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction classic, Blade Runner, comes out this week in a variety of overstuffed DVD packages. Anyone interested in the film should read Gary Giddin’s very eloquent New York Sun piece on the film’s somewhat awkward juxtaposition of marvelous visuals and clunky storytelling. He gets the otherworldly quality of Scott’s compositions just right:

Every inch of the screen is answered for, indoors and especially outdoors, as horizons disappear into matte paintings, smoke pots, shimmering neon, giant screens, airborne vehicles, and crowds as opaque and variously dressed as in a Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. From the justly celebrated opening shot — a grotesque metropolitan hell with fireballs shooting into the starless night — we are drawn into an alternate world.

Giddin comes down hard on the story (maybe too hard), saying the script and characterizations “suggest directorial incompetence,” but his basic point stands: Blade Runner succeeds on the power of its meticulously created world. It’s a triumph of visual ingenuity that, even in the age of limitless CGI possibility, few films can match.

More than that, however, the film is a landmark because of how it opened up the genre of cinematic science fiction. Much science fiction, especially the low-grade junk that flourished in the decade before Blade Runner hit the screen, was cheap, rough, and carelessly assembled. That’s not to say that none of it was enjoyable in some adolescent way, but it was hardly serious; even the best efforts (Star Wars) rarely transcended their pulp origins.

Blade Runner, though imperfect, sought to be something more, something grand and thoughtful, and if its fraught production process (exhaustively detailed in Paul Sammon’s book, Future Noir) resulted in a less-than-focused final product, its outsized ambitions, and the talent behind them, were always completely clear. In the end, simply looking as stunning as it did was enough of an accomplishment, for it gave the often raw and jagged science fiction genre permission to be something more than a juvenile stomping ground—to be haunting, elegant, and yes, even beautiful.

Here at the horizon, Dara Mandle wonders about the death of reading. Over at The New Republic, James Wolcott offers a lengthy and vastly entertaining piece on the decline of book reviewing (the piece itself is a review of Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America), a topic also explored recently by Steve Wasserman in the Columbia Journalism Review. All seem to agree that reading (and serious thinking on it) is in a state of flux, and probably on the wane. Mandle’s post, for example, ends with the question, “Do electronics like the Kindle have what it takes to save reading?” The underlying assumption is that reading needs saving, and that recent cultural and technological shifts are part of what’s killing it.

It’s an easy assumption to make, of course, but as Wolcott’s essay points out, it’s hardly a novel idea. Academics, intellectuals, and ordinary book lovers have been fretting over the decline of serious writing and serious thinking about writing for decades. As always, reactions vary. Many, like Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun, have simply given up, pronouncing the internet-dominated literary scene a total loss. Others, including critics like Terry Teachout and journalists like Megan McArdle (now of the Atlantic), are more enthusiastic.

I lean towards enthusiasm, but I think some of the worries and criticisms are valid, if somewhat misplaced. The danger to reading, it seems to me, is less of the lack of respect for books and book criticism, or the uninformed opinions of amateurs replacing the thoughtful screeds of professionals, or the diminishing number of book reviews in newspapers, but instead, the glut of written material fighting for our collective attention. Even the most robust literary scene would have difficulty keeping up with the truckloads of books published each year. And although newspapers may be publishing fewer book reviews, the internet, by giving free and easy access to all those with internet access, has actually expanded access to top-tier reviews for nearly everyone.

Book review pages in medium sized newspapers have fallen off in large part because they are unnecessary in a world where nearly everyone can easily browse the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times. Meanwhile, smaller publications, including blogs, but also established print journals, are flourishing on the web, creating a wealth of easy-to-access material for every niche. The difficulty with reading these days is not that there is too little being written, or that no one is doing it, or even that no one is doing it well. It’s that there’s too much to read, too much to process. We are not short for words. We are drowning in them.

In I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes takes the stale, conventional music biopic and runs it through a blender. The film claims to be inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan, and features six different performers, including Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Cat Blanchett as Dylanesque figures (none is actually named Bob Dylan). But one needn’t be a Dylanologist, or even more than a casual fan to wonder at the fantastic concoction he’s whipped up.

Gone are the genre’s usual forms. The familiar arcs of talent, love, addiction, stardom, and redemption that played out in Great Balls of Fire, Ray, and Walk the Line are nowhere to be found, and holiday audiences looking for those familiar patterns will almost certainly be confused and disappointed. Haynes doesn’t just dismiss the clichés; he seems unaware of them, as if he’s inventing everything in the film for the first time.

That’s not to say one can’t spot his influences. Haynes pulls from the fragmented narratives of Bunuel, the feverish and foggy visions of Fellini, and the cinematic playfulness of Godard. Haynes is a fussy formalist, mimicking a dozen or more distinct and easily identifiable styles throughout the film, but his grand scheme embraces a dreamlike expressionism. This isn’t a film about the life of Bob Dylan so much as a rock film fantasia, like Alice in Wonderland as reimagined by Hunter S. Thompson.

Much of the movie’s buzz has centered on the casting, especially Blanchett’s. And indeed, she’s remarkable in her role as Jude, a Dylanish ‘60’s rock hero given to rash behavior and elliptical pronouncements. She provides one point on the ever-spinning Dylan pinwheel, a dazzling array of characters. Between the manic stylistic riffing and the hall-of-mirrors approach to the central figure, Haynes seems to be gesturing toward the fluidity of identity in the media age, where the idea of the self has become fragmented and illusory, polluted by cross-talk and competing personae.

If this sounds a little murky, that’s because it is, but it’s also often exhilarating, and to ask for too much clarity would probably be a mistake. Any movie seeking to capture the essence of Bob Dylan that’s easy and simple to understand is almost certainly doomed to fail.

Robert Zemeckis’s computer-animated adaptation of Beowulf led the box-office this weekend, and it will likely continue to perform well over the Thanksgiving holiday. The film utilizes a high-tech animation process some say portends the future of filmmaking (James Cameron’s next feature will employ the same technology).

Comparing it to its source material is of little use. It’s been streamlined and modernized, and now bears more resemblance to a computer game than an ancient epic. And despite a number of favorable reviews, the best that can be said about it is that it is an empty spectacle, devoid of substance and unconcerned with providing even the barest cinematic pleasure. There’s plenty of bloody fighting, and yet nothing much happens. The movie is not so much a real battle as a military parade—a carefully orchestrated show of arms more notable for the power and technology on display than for any real movement.

Shot using a process called motion capture, in which the performances of real actors are captured by computer sensors and then digitally rendered and presented in 3-D (you even get to keep the glasses), Beowulf shows off its digital wizardry at every opportunity. Mostly this means a parade of gory imagery pushing out from the screen, demanding attention in the way of a small child tugging on your shirt. There are flying 3-D arrows, thrusting 3-D swords, severed 3-D heads, and buckets of 3-D blood oozing out toward the audience. Like the cheap, crude 3-D films of the 1950’s, the presentation is pure gimmickry.

The technique seems intended to add weight and substance, to heighten the drama and add intensity to the action by making everything seem more real. But the computerized animation only serves to make everything seem hollow and fake. The detail on the animated humans is impressive—every hair and facial pore is visible—but such detail fails to impart a convincing sense of human presence. Instead, the people move awkwardly, like expensive toys controlled by remote.

In fact, the entire production has the disconnected feeling of watching a video game being played by someone else. It seems content to engage the audience solely through technology, and, as a result, lacks even the shallow visual pleasures of a bombastic Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps more worrisome are the desires of the production team to attain an impossible standard of perfection and of the movie-going public to disengage from anything approaching reality. What does it say when even the face and figure of Angelina Jolie must be digitally nipped, tucked, smoothed, and polished? If this is the future of film, does that mean it will lose all touch with what is physical, human, imperfect, real?

It’s possible that Southland Tales, the apocalyptic satire from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, is not actually as stultifying and incomprehensible as it seems, that somewhere amidst its frantic mess of pop-culture allusions and political reference points, there is a coherent narrative, or at least a reasonably cogent idea or two. Of course, it’s also possible that Dennis Kucinich will be the next President of the United States. But I wouldn’t bet on either.

The film’s influences are easy enough to spot: the paranoiac science fiction of Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick, the surrealist menace of Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. But it musters neither the cohesion nor the sustained mood of any of their work. Attempting plot summary would likely prove a fruitless endeavor, though I think David Edelstein makes a valiant effort in his review:

World War III has erupted; Middle Easterners nuke Texas (Why Texas? Why not?); the government is run by totalitarians, among them Miranda Richardson as Cruella De Vil; mutant Iraq-war vets hover like lifeguards over Venice Beach; Wallace Shawn in transvestite makeup invents “fluid karma energy” to solve the energy crisis; and Nora Dunn masterminds a “neo-Marxist” rebel group with the aid of hard-core porn star Sarah Michelle Gellar. There’s time travel, too, as well as a paranoiac screenplay that begins to blur with reality—or is the screenplay the real reality?

I think it’s a safe bet that neither reality—nor, for that matter, anything approximating it—is among the film’s chief concerns. What’s clear, though, is that Kelly thinks his film is saying something, and probably something important. Any movie that kicks off with a nuclear cataclysm on U.S. soil, quickly moves on to news reports about America going to war with Syria and North Korea, employs Sarah Michelle Gellar to play a combination porn star/talk show host, and features Wallace Shawn as a demented (probably evil) environmentalist who shouts things like “No longer can even the most jaded neocon fatcat deny the majesty of our mother ocean!” clearly aspires to some sort of socio-political relevance.

Sadly, there’s not a shred in evidence. It’s all a hazy, manic jumble, in which dream sequences with pop-singer Justin Timberlake as a scarred, drug-dealing Iraq-war veteran make just as much (which is to say as little) sense as any other scene.

In a strange way, however, it’s refreshing. After a season full of smug, irritating political diatribes posing as prestige pictures, it’s almost pleasant to see a film that tackles current events—the energy crisis, terrorism, the war, just to name a few—without an air of smarmy self-satisfaction. Discombobulated as it all may be, it’s a step up from insolence and dimwitted self-certainty. Southland Tales obviously has no idea what it wants to say about the state of the nation’s politics. But at least it’s bold enough to own up to its confusion.