Apparently I’m zero for two on my quest to become movie literate. Tonight’s entry: Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard, which leaves a viewer in 2006 feeling as jaded and disillusioned as its main characters.

Cinema studies professors and students like to write about Breathless almost as much as French people like to be smug. For me to try to come up with anything new to say about the movie would be like a high school English student trying to find some untapped vein in The Scarlet Letter. I imagine there’s even a template for writing cinema studies term papers about Breathless: mention the birth of French New Wave, jump cuts, breaking the Hollywood establishment while paying homage to it, the combination of high art and pop art, artifice vs sincerity, emphasis on disillusioned youth culture, post-film noir, etc. As you’re waiting the hour and a half for the movie to end, the points just fly up at you. Hand it in, get a B+.

That’s not to say that all that isn’t there, or that it wasn’t important at the time. It’s just that watching this movie in 2006 is a little like going to see the Mona Lisa in person; you’re seeing it because it’s an Important Work of Art, not because of what made it an important work of art.

At this point, though, I can’t even conceive of a world in which Breathless would be shocking or groundbreaking. Whether it’s because it was so influential that every movie I’ve seen has picked everything innovative out of its carcass, or because its influence has been overstated by years of film reviewers, I can’t say. Either way, the end result is the same: you feel as if you’ve seen it all before, and done much better.

Back when I was being forced to watch Important Films, the example of French New Wave we were shown was Le Week-end by Jean-Luc Godard. At the time, it really was mind-altering. It was completely unlike anything I’d ever seen before, it showed new things possible in movies that I may never have considered before, and it was entertaining. If you read up on that movie, you see tons of criticism that it was insufferably pretentious and overly political, and that it exists at this point only as a historical document.

The lesson to be learned, as far as I can make out, is this: making a set of Important Films that everyone must see to be culturally (or at least cinematically) literate, is as misguided as, well, making high school students read The Scarlet Letter. Self-obsessed thugs in 60s Paris are as irrelevant to me as dockworkers and communists in the 50s (On the Waterfront), or William Randolph Hearst and the politics of the 30s (Citizen Kane), or social conventions in pre-WWII France (The Rules of the Game). And the filmmaking techniques that each of those movies revolutionized have been adapted and modified into hundreds of movies with more relevance, even if not as much innovation.

I’ve got no doubt that there’s some group who’s coined a simple term to describe everything I’ve written in this post — it’s probably something like “anti-post-structuralist modernism” or some such. It could all be really discouraging, convincing you that you’ve seen everything there is to see. But instead, it’s a sign that movies are evolving. There are still some truly timeless movies — His Girl Friday stands out for me as one that still seems even more contemporary than 99% of the movies Nora Ephron makes, and definitely more relevant than any of its remakes. But more often than not, going back to the well of Important Films means seeing something whose subject matter is lost without the right context, and whose style, the truly relevant part, has already been appropriated 100 times over.

I should point out that as I was writing this, the movie Raptor was playing on TV, and green berets and Corbin Bernsen were being killed by a rubber dinosaur puppet. That made me rethink my theory on the evolution of movies, but not abandon it.

I was surprised that For Your Consideration had such a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes until I started following the links. Some of the reviews, like the one from The Onion’s AV Club are critical of the movie but still give it a recommendation. I guess that’s a sign that a pass/fail rating isn’t suitable for a Serious Art Medium like The Cinema.

The AV Club gives it a B-, which is about accurate. The people who are going to see it anyway (fans of Best in Show and A Mighty Wind) are probably going to like it, even if it doesn’t attract any new fans. The performances are great as usual, but a lot of the cast is under-used. And the movie has enough laughs to warrant a recommendation, but as a whole the movie feels dated and off-center.

It feels like the usual Christopher Guest/Eugene Levy cast getting together to do an old SCTV sketch, without updating it from the original. One of the reasons A Mighty Wind seemed “off” was that it was stuck between character story and comedy/satire; they liked the characters too much to really make fun of them. The same is true here, but the result is that the movie feels as outdated and out-of-touch as its characters are intended to be. In 2006, who really doesn’t know what the “interweb” is?

And a lot of it is so subtle that you know it seemed brilliant when they were coming up with it, but it doesn’t have enough weight in the final movie. The biggest example is the movie-within-a-movie, a story about a Jewish family in the south in the 40′s which one review calls “Tennessee Williams meets Neil Simon,” a great description. So the characters switch between Yiddish and southern accents, “Oy gevalt! What have I done?” and comedy ensues. They take it a step further in an interview with the screenwriters, played by Michael McKean and Bob Balaban, where McKean admits he’d never heard of the Purim holiday before working on the screenplay. And then that goes a step further later, when a producer suggests they tone down the Jewishness of the movie, and McKean goes off on an indignant tirade about how they’re compromising the integrity of his work. It’s a clever concept, material for great satire, but it just doesn’t come across as funny.

So you end up watching the movie for the cast. As you’d expect, Catherine O’Hara is great, John Michael Higgins is great, and everybody else is good but underused. Fred Willard always stands out in these movies, and in this one he’s doing basically the same so-clueless-he’s-cruel schtick from Best in Show, this time with a faux-hawk and fake earring.

But I couldn’t be a bigger fan of Jane Lynch. She steals every movie she’s in, and she always does it with the littlest gesture or best-delievered line. In A Mighty Wind, it was her winking description of her past in adult movies. In The 40-Year Old Virgin, it was her unbelievably creepy seduction of Steve Carrell. In For Your Consideration, she plays a Mary Hart-style co-host to Fred Willard’s character, and she steals the scene just in the way she stands and walks. It’s just brilliant, and one of the few laugh-out-loud moments in the movie is just her standing there. I’ll go see any future Christopher Guest movies as long as she keeps appearing in them.