If watching movies were an Olympic sport, I would’ve medaled last week. If watching movies were a ancient martial art, I would’ve gotten a black belt and the keys to my own dojo. If watching movies were a mountain of buttery pancakes, then I would’ve…

Well, okay. The point is that I saw a lot of movies last week, both in the theatre and on DVD. The latter were watched while I was doing core workouts on the yoga mat that Andrew got me for Christmas one year. Nothing helps me feel more connected to the current Oscar race like contemplating Diablo Cody’s dialogue while attempting a diamond push-up.

Sadly, my stab at “the diamond” was about as successful as most of the films I saw. Below, I offer capsule reviews of The Hangover, Jennifer’s Body, Crazy Heart, and Nine (the musical… not the cartoon about potato sacks that spring to life and sound like Elijah Wood.)

(1) Crazy Heart

Let’s begin on a high note, shall we? Crazy Heart tells a straightforward, dust-covered story about Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges), a washed-up, alcoholic country singer whose relationship with a reporter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her young son helps him crawl out of his hole. He stops drinking, he resumes writing songs, and his eyes flicker back to life.

This story has been told many times. Replace country music with wrestling, and you get The Wrestler. Replace Bridges with Robert Duvall (who has a small part here) and you get Tender Mercies. But Crazy Heart spruces up its cliches with authentic details (the crappy equipment Bad uses at a bowling alley; the drunken sweat that soaks his shirt) and specific performances (Gyllenhaal’s simultaneous rage and relief after a scary incident with her son; Bridges’ heartbreaking thirst for friendship.)

I was especially stirred by the film’s  hush. There’s a restraint that makes the movie pulse, as though every moment has left something unsaid… something that we have to lean forward and hear for ourselves. The feeling is there, but the explicit descriptions are not.

Does that make sense? I guess I’m using words like “hush” and “restraint” because I’ve been inundated recently with loud films. And not just “volume loud,” but “intensity loud,” as though the filmmakers think they have to yell at me until I accept that every blue-skinned alien and soft-hearted football hero and middle-aged woman falling in love is important, dammit.

Crazy Heart, conversely, doesn’t push itself on me. It doesn’t try to sell Blake as a mythic hero. He’s just a guy who has fallen on hard times, and I’m welcome to notice him or not. And that’s the kind of attitude that gets my attention.

p.s. — “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” is one of the best songs of the year (it’s embedded above). Written by Ryan Bingham, who performs the version heard over the credits, it not only anchors the movie’s story, but also stands alone as one of those whiskey ballads that makes alt country a genre worth caring about.

2. Nine

Unlike Crazy Heart, Nine is a music-based movie that feels dishonest and overblown.

That’s not because of the performances, however. The cast of this musical, about Italian filmmaker Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the many women who inspire and frustrate his attempts to create his latest film, is pretty stellar. Marion Cotillard especially impressed me as Guido’s wife. In her two big numbers, she masters the tricky task of acting and singing at the same time, communicating the anger and frustration of being a once-rising actor who has given up her life to be the pretty wife of a philanderer. Also? Fergie gives a killer vocal performance as a prostitute. I repeat my argument from the Critters: Her career in the Black Eyed Peas is not challenging her enough. Someone get her a real song to sing, people!

The greatest singing in the world, however, couldn’t spare us from Rob Marshall’s direction. Unsuccessfully recycling the conceit of Chicago, he rips every musical number out of the film’s present moment, so that songs are always supposed to be happening in characters’ imaginations. And apparently, everyone’s imagination involves a proscenium stage, because that’s where all the numbers are set.

In other words, Marshall turns a musical about a filmmaker into a flat, stagey bore, as though he can only imagine song and dance in one location. What worked and made sense for Chicago, which is about stage performers, drains the energy out of Nine.

But then, I’m not sure anyone could have made me care about this musical, which is adapted from Fellini’s film 8 1/2. I don’t know the stage version, but in the film, we’re asked to accept that a petty, narcissistic artist is rilly rilly deep and that his problems rilly rilly matter. But really, Guido? You’re struggling to create your ninth movie because the women in your life are just too complicated and pushy? And the producers and designers who keep hurling resources at you are just putting too much pressure on you? Boo fucking hoo. I hate this self-aggrandizing, art-is-hard stuff. I’m an artist. I work around artists. And yes, being an artist can be difficult and inspiring and all-consuming, but as much as we might like to pretend, this does not make artists saints. Guido Contini is a grown-up child, and the film rewards him for it. The final image even suggests that he has the right to manipulate and frustrate everyone in his life because he is a genius and that’s what geniuses do. Ugh. Whatever. Shut up, Guido. You’re not that special.

3. The Hangover

No surprise that I didn’t like this movie. I know that there are straight men who want to behave this way, who want to escape to some fantasy world where faggot jokes and extramarital affairs and willful immaturity are celebrated, but I don’t want to know about it. More than just a straight boy adolescent fantasy, though, The Hangover is mean. Especially to women. Any woman who isn’t a stripper is a shrew, but the stripper (played by Heather Graham)? She’s awesome! She lets dudes be dudes! The movie is basically saying that women should sit back and chuckle while fellas do whatever they want… or else they’ll be total bitches.

And look… I know that straight men can feel constricted by their lives. But you know what? So can everyone else. There are ways of comically expressing that frustration that don’t dehumanize other people. (I should say, too, that there are plenty of movies about women and gay men that dehumanize the Other just as immaturely. But I didn’t watch one of those movies last week.)

4. Jennifer’s Body

On the opposite end of the gender spectrum, we’ve got Jennifer’s Body, which is an almost-successful horror movie about a high schooler, Jennifer(Megan Fox), who becomes a succubus who eats her male classmates. Her best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), gets wise to her plan and tries to stop her… with bloody results.

Written by Diablo Cody (Juno), the movie has plenty of clever ideas and funny lines, but they all get mired in the yawningly predictable tropes of teen movies. Ooh, the popular girl is a bitch! Ooh, the nerdy girl is the true hero! Ooh, jocks and geeks and dorky teachers! Maybe it’s because I’m in my thirties or because I’ve seen 6,000 high school movies, but I’m tired of seeing this road get driven over and over again. Adolescents will never tire of seeing these movies, but me? It’s gonna take something special to make me care about another nasty cheerleader.

Jennifer’s Body also suffers from choppy writing and direction. Cody and director Karyn Kusama lurch awkwardly from one plot twist to another, never providing the connective tissue that makes actions feel like they’re arising naturally out of a story. When Needy starts sensing what Jennifer is doing, for instance, there’s no explanation for her sudden psychic ability.

Movies like this always make me appreciate the careful storytelling of horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Sixth Sense. Fear that rises from a world we understand is much more chilling than assorted scary moments that are thrust onto the screen for no reason.