I consumed a mess o' media this weekend, mostly film. Four movies in one weekend is a lot for me, especially lately, when I've been finding solace in devouring books nearly whole, chomping hundreds of pages at a sitting. They have, for the most part, been of little long-term value, but they buzz enough to create a kind of intellectual and emotional white noise, and that's what I'm after.

The movies this weekend served the same function, but without exacerbating myopia. They were, in order of viewing, The Fog of War, Lost in Translation, American Psycho, and Napoleon Dynamite. They came together randomly, just a set of movies toward the top of my to-be-seen list, but now all four of them are banging around in my head, a mix of smart and scary and bittersweet. Images of Japan from The Fog of War crash up against Lost in Translation; the Eighties of American Psycho are laid out as a series of excesses so extreme it takes a bloodbath to satirize them, and then the same decade is rendered goofy and harmless with a sideways ponytail and a pair of stirrup pants in Napoleon Dynamite. I'm thinking about the odd and delicate ways lonely people find each other in Lost in Translation and Napoleon Dynamite, and the relationship between wholesale killing in The Fog of War and the retail version in American Psycho. And so on, one juxtaposition after another, white noise to fall asleep to.