"What's it like to be stupid?"
"What's it like sitting by yourself at lunch every day?"
"It sucks."

Smart People is a typical story of a curmudgeon who softens when he finds potential in a new relationship. Lawrence Wetherhold is a widowed English professor at Carnegie Mellon who is uninterested in his students, alienated from his kids, and in general a smug, pompous windbag. After suffering from a trauma-induced seizure, Lawrence reluctantly allows his adopted brother Chuck to move in with him and his daughter Vanessa because he cannot drive a car for six months due to the seizure. Vanessa has inherited her father's pretensions, which haven't ingratiated her to her schoolmates. She doesn't seem to have any friends or a very close relationship with her college-aged brother. Having assumed something of a caretaker role for her father since her mother's death, Vanessa constantly seeks his approval through academic achievement. Chuck befriends Vanessa and tries to loosen her up while Lawrence begins to date Janet, a former student of his whom he encountered when she treated him in the hospital.

I liked this movie better when it was called Wonder Boys and had likeable characters. Lawrence is so detestable that I have little interest in his redemption, and Vanessa is only slightly less loathsome. Such caustic characters work best in minor roles but can work as leads if they can generate laughs. Most of Smart People's comedy fails, which isn't surprising considering that two comedic attempts consist of showing Thomas Haden Church's naked butt. Vanessa's wonderfully hideous wardrobe gave me more laughs than any of the few acerbic one-liners Ellen Page manages to land.

Lawrence's storyline is completely stale and derivative (see the above-mentioned Wonder Boys as well as The Squid and the Whale), which contributes to my apathy for his character. Vanessa's arc is far more interesting and unique although, yes, a little creepy. Vanessa has taken on a "housewife" role for her father, and her jealousy of Janet borders on that of a lover scorned than a daughter neglected. And perhaps because she has something of an Electra complex, Vanessa makes a pass at Chuck when he simply pays attention to her and tries to be her friend. I find a girl whose ideas about sexual relationships have become screwed up to the point that she tries to make out with her uncle so much more interesting than another burned out professor. Had I written this movie, I would have made Vanessa the center of the film. Instead, her character arc feels incomplete.

I found the acting to be on the whole merely adequate. Dennis Quaid probably does more with the role than the script really requires, adopting the physicality of a man 10-20 years his senior to really accentuate how battered his wife's death has left Lawrence. Page is fine, but Vanessa is so underdeveloped that it's difficult for her to really shine. Sarah Jessica Parker finds herself in a similar situation and is pretty forgettable as the love interest. Church is very likeable as Chuck, despite the unfortunate facial hair, and he provides some low-key humor at times.

Smart People was billed as being "From the producer of Sideways," and those type of taglines always make me nervous. Producers aren't screenwriters or directors. The fact that they produce a good movie one year doesn't mean that any of the other films they produce will be at all similar. So don't expect a Sideways-caliber character study just because this film shares a producer and a supporting actor.

Despite having two talented actors like Catherine Keener and Ellen Page as his leads, co-writer and director Tommy O'Haver has created a film that would feel at home on the Lifetime Movie Network. From the title to (the usually solid) Keener's underwhelming performance, An American Crime is as bland as these "portraits of a murderer" come. Though O'Haver did not approach the material with exploitation in mind, he fails to fascinate the audience with what fascinated him as a teenager growing up in Indianapolis, where the real crime occurred.

I suppose there's something grotesquely intriguing about how a woman managed to torture and abuse a young girl for two months in a household of ten people without anyone intervening, but I find the Lord of the Flies aspect of this case the most disturbing. The torments Gertrude visits upon Sylvia in the film are, for the most part, pretty tame, at least in comparison to what series like Law & Order: SVU and CSI can portray on television these days. The real Gertrude Baniszewski did much worse to Sylvia Likens, so O'Haver chose not to sensationalize the violence. But if he didn't intend to shock audiences with graphically depicted torture or suggested extreme abuse, then O'Haver needed to make a compelling, tense psychological thriller. Instead, he fails to create any atmosphere or dramatic tension, fails to explore the social and psychological conditions that enabled this crime, and fails to produce an intriguing representation of the perpetrators.

I could forgive coming out of the theater still questioning why Baniszewski tortured Sylvia Likens or why so many children became complicit in her abuse if the characters and performances were memorable, but the script and O'Haver's direction also fail here. I understand why Catherine Keener would choose a more subdued approach to Gertrude, but it's disappointing that she never lets a little bit of insidiousness or villainy shine through. I'm puzzled why Ellen Page would choose to play Sylvia, unless a large chunk of the film was cut for some reason. Little is required of her except to seem completely innocent and play the passive victim. Though apparently Page really committed to the part: supposedly she chose not to eat much during filming because Sylvia wasn't being fed. But if you're in the mood to see Page in a disturbing thriller, pick up Hard Candy instead.

Director Bruce McDonald seems to think that his approach to this material is avant garde or some shit, but The Tracey Fragments looks like a bad film school project. Maureen Medved's script, based on her book of the same name, details the experiences of 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz, "just a normal girl who hates herself," and whose sanity rapidly disintegrates after a traumatic incident. McDonald tries to duplicate that experience of psychological "fragmenting" by using split screens in practically every shot, which annoys more than anything else. The split screens manage to be visually interesting a couple times, but not frequently enough to justify their use throughout the entire film. Used sparingly, they might have worked better, but after five minutes the audience gets what McDonald is going for and the onslaught of largely banal visual information loses its emotional resonance. However, I admit that I do like how McDonald repeats bits of scenes from time to time.

Medved presents what little plot there is in a nonlinear fashion, a storytelling device that could effectively portray Tracey's fractured mental state without the help of split screens. While bits of the film work, the overall narrative is rather flaccid and uninteresting. Medved leaves all the supporting characters underdeveloped, and much of what Tracey says to the camera is overwritten and overly dramatic.

I doubt that this film would have made it outside the film festival circuit if not for Ellen Page and her current marketability. Though Page filmed The Tracey Fragments before Juno, it was only released in theaters after the latter film became so successful. Her performance makes The Tracey Fragments bearable to watch, but even she falters at some of the more purple bits of dialogue. Most of the supporting actors failed to impress me. Though his performance is solid, I enjoyed seeing Maxwell McCabe-Lokos mostly because he inhabits such a different character from the one he plays in the other movie he made with Ellen Page, 2005's Mouth to Mouth. I also liked Julian Richings as Tracey's transgendered therapist.

I'm disappointed that this material doesn't receive better treatment, because I think The Tracey Fragments could have made a powerful statement about the practically socially sanctioned degradation of young women's sense of self through the sexualization and objectification of their bodies and pressure to conform to social standards of beauty, just for example. Many teen-aged girls endure most if not all of what Tracey experiences, so it's amazing that more of them don't end up wrapped in only a shower curtain, "on [a] bus, looking for someone."

I worry a little for people who might pick up Hard Candy because they see Ellen Page's name on the cover, because this film is about as far from her star-making turn in indie darling Juno that one can get. Director David Slade's debut feature film is an intense, disturbing psychological thriller of the highest caliber. Brian Nelson's script does not shy away from addressing a controversial topic in a controversial manner, leaving plenty of room for questions and ambiguity.

Having been chatting online for a few weeks, 14-year-old Hayley Stark meets thirtysomething photographer Jeff Kohlver at a local coffee shop to finally see each other face-to-face. The pair returns to Jeff's house, where Jeff will presumably follow through on the pedophilic tendencies their online and coffeehouse conversations suggest. But before he can attempt anything Hayley reveals that she has her own agenda. The entirety of the film plays out as an extended cat-and-mouse pursuit, with Hayley and Jeff slipping in and out of the roles of predator and prey.

Hard Candy reminds me not just a little bit of Richard Linklater's excellent 2001 film Tape. Linklater's film is another psychological suspense that involves a protracted dialogue between a small number of characters in a confined space. Where the two films diverge is their treatment of characters. Tape is very much a character study. At the end of the film, the audience feels as though it knows Vince, Jon, and even Amy a little better than when the film began. The events of the film create a catharsis intended to change the characters in some tangible way. However, when Hard Candy's credits roll, I don't know that we know Hayley or Jeff any better. In fact, in Hayley's case one could argue that the audience knows even less about her. The characters go through the film's events for the sake of going through them. Of course, Nelson explores the emotional journey that parallels the physical one, but ultimately Hard Candy is a purely visceral experience that exposes raw human emotions not often seen in cinema. Slade and Nelson give enough hints to cover the holes one might poke into the plot, but they by no means fill them, which ultimately doesn't really matter. If you're wrapped up in discerning character motivation or consumed with dissecting the probability of some of the film's physicality, you are watching the wrong movie.

Of course, the success of a film this intimate and character-driven rests on the shoulders of the leading actors. Patrick Wilson is a musical theater veteran who has recently beefed up his film resume with appearances in movies such as The Phantom of the Opera, Evening, and Little Children. He plays Jeff with a perfect combination of menace, callousness, and vulnerability that keeps the audience at a distance sometimes and draws them in unexpectedly at others. Though undeniably a physically taxing shoot for both him and Page, Wilson takes the brunt of the physical discomfort, filming the majority of the movie bound in some way. At one point, Jeff's hands appear blue, deprived of blood by the binds at his wrists. No make-up was used for that scene — Wilson's hands had really turned that color. He passed out from overexertion at one point when filming Jeff's attempts to free himself from the ropes. Wilson also very effectively changes the quality of his voice throughout the course of the film, going deeper and more gravelly as Jeff is forced into darker territory and finally speaking in an almost feral growl when he emerges at his darkest.

Her charming performance as the titular character in the much-hyped, very likable Juno may have garnered her an Oscar nomination, but Ellen Page's work in this film affirms that she belongs on that short list. Of course, Jeff needed to be played adeptly by an accomplished actor, but had Hayley been played by an actress of lesser talents than Page the film would not have worked. As one of the producers has said, Hard Candy's plot rests essentially on a gimmick: a potential victim of a pedophile turns the tables on her would-be aggressor and victimizes him instead. If the filmmakers can't sell the gimmick, then they can't sell the film. Page sells the gimmick in spades. Some critics of the film say that a 14-year-old wouldn't be capable of planning and executing what Hayley does. But, again, it doesn't really matter if any 14-year-old could perpetrate Hayley's actions. It only really matters that the audience believes Hayley could do it. Not once throughout the entire film did I doubt that Hayley had control of the situation, and only an actress of Page's depth and intelligence could have created that sense of dominance over a man more than twice her size. Here Page uses the worldliness and sardonic wit that made Juno so appealing to create a truly cold and calculating anti-hero. I also love that by chance Page had something of a pixie cut during filming, because she had shaved her head for a previous role. Combined with her slight build, the effect lends her something of an androgynous appearance. Given that Hayley posits herself as a potential "every victim" of molestation, her almost sexless physical presence underscores that suggestion powerfully.

While ably assisted by Wilson and Page's dynamic performances, Slade offers some fine direction and some lovely photography with the help of cinematographer Jo Willems. Slade mirrors the emotional journey of the characters and creates dramatic tension through effective use of focus and color correction. He films the actors against a lot of solid backgrounds, often solid blocks of color. The effect is an interesting one, sometimes creating a sterile environment devoid of emotion or feeling, sometimes underscoring Hayley's black-and-white worldview, sometimes creating a false sense of warmth. Jeff's house is chillingly uncluttered, free of moral and ethical boundaries that would inhibit the "justice" that Hayley serves.

As I watched the film, I began to consider that the writer or director might be Asian. Though neither are, Hard Candy certainly resembles much of the cinema that has come to the United States in the past decade from Asia, particularly Korea and Japan. Along with the work of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Mel Gibson, this body of work uses violence as a vehicle to explore the psychologies of extremely violent people, which in the best case scenario somehow humanizes them. However, in the case of these other films I have always felt as though the violence was either gratuitous or manipulative, designed to illicit a certain emotional response. With Hard Candy, I didn't feel as though anyone associated with the film really cared if I felt one way or the other about the characters as along as I found the story compelling. Perhaps because I'm a woman, I connected with Hayley for most of the film, but I was allowed — not encouraged but allowed — to sympathize with Jeff when I felt so impelled. And as for gratuitousness, for an arguably quite violent film very little violence and even less blood actually makes it onto the final print. During the most violent scene, all of the violence occurs off-screen and, ultimately, is only suggested rather than committed.

Hard Candy is certainly not a film for everyone, but it provides a rewarding film experience for those looking for challenging psychological exploration of two compelling characters.