I'm a TV guy, not a movie guy. I always have been. The buildup for movies, blitzes of television commercials, full-page newspaper ads, the whole act of actually going out and going to the theater and shelling out for ludicrously priced tickets and concessions, almost always ends in disappointment for me. Reflecting today, I remember exactly when I packed it in as far as being a movie fan was concerned: The Matrix Reloaded. I drove miles out of my way to see the damn thing in Imax, and 45 minutes in I was saying to myself "This is it? This is what all the wait was for? I could be watching 'The Simpsons' right now and it wouldn't have cost eleven dollars and half a tank of gas." I never even went to see the third Matrix movie. I still haven't seen it. (And for what it's worth, I never even saw the first one in the theater -- my first glimpse of Neo and Morpheus came on an illegally downloaded version displayed on one of my sophomore year roommates' computer.)

On the comment boards here, I've bragged(?) a couple of times about the fact that I've been to the movies exactly three times in 2006. The year is almost over, and there isn't a single in film in theaters I am even remotely interested in seeing, so it looks like three will be the final tally. It's pretty amazing. I used to sneak out of high school early on Fridays to be the first person in my clique to see whatever that weekend's big opening was. In college I would take the BART to the Metreon theater, buy a ticket to whatever the first thing showing that day was, and theater-hop through four or five movies in a single day. I'm always an early adopter, but I can't be the first to realize that the twin spectres of broadband access and HDTV are going to change the movie industry as we know it in the next decade. Why should I go to the movies? I've got better picture and sound right here in my living room, and I don't have to miss anything or climb over anyone if I need to go to the bathroom. And Diet Cokes, sunflower seeds, and Mike & Ikes are cheap and plentiful.

I do end up seeing most things, but in a random and haphazard fashion. Mostly I wait for things to show up on the premium channels, and then I TiVo them and watch them at my leisure. I have some bad habits in this area. For example, if I have Monster's Ball, Mystic River, and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle all queued up on the DVR, I am going to watch Harold and Kumar first every single time. I have seen RoboCop 2 something like 25 times and I still haven't made it all the way through Brokeback Mountain. I'm only human! (Besides, RoboCop 2 is a highly underrated movie. Also, Blade Trinity.) Once in a great while if I feel particularly inspired I will rent something, but it doesn't happen often.

Wally Shawn and Silent Bob. I was curious enough to rent Clerks II last week, and I've really struggled to find a way of expressing how I feel about it. I didn't dislike the movie completely. Like every Kevin Smith film, there were a couple of parts that were completely misguided and unwatchable (like the completely arbitrary go-kart sequence). Like every Kevin Smith film (except Jersey Girl), there were some inspired dialogue passages. I find it a little unsettling that despite being married with a daughter Smith is if anything more completely clueless as to how to write believable female characters. Rosario Dawson's character in Clerks II is just a boy with breasts, and the movie treats its only other female role (played, weirdly, by Kevin Smith's wife) as such a plot convenience that she even wears a T-shirt announcing it. If Smith had any guts at all he wouldn't use Dawson as a go-between, he'd just have Randal and Dante go ahead and start making out at the climax. But that would offend the core audience of 15-year-old boys and 15-year-old boys-at-heart who are the only folks still caring about Smith and his characters at this point.

Clerks II has a weird tone. On the "technical commentary" (the very existence of which, if you're familiar with Smith's work, is pretty funny) Smith and Scott Mosier discuss how they wanted the film to have a grainy, washed-out look like Spike Lee's 25th Hour, of all movies. It does indeed have a bleak undertone of characters moving forward simply by ceasing to complain about the lack of direction in their lives. It's surpisingly mean-spirited, compared to the relentlessly stupid but entirely harmless Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which is sadly one of Smith's better films. Clerks II isn't just sexist and homophobic, but it's also racist and religiously intolerant. Look at the angry black people! Laugh at the Christian kid getting his morals corrupted! Smith seems to think that just using these devices in such an over-the-top way somehow absolves him of any guilt. "This is so obviously racist that it clearly can't be read as racist" is not an acceptable defense.

But, still. I've seen films in much more questionable taste (even the much-hyped donkey show scene, when it rolls around, is pretty tame) that managed to justify their transgressions by making the audience face old issues in new ways. Clerks II is if anything a surrender. At the end, its heroes realize that all they want to do is keep working at the Quick Stop and the video store for the rest of their lives. Having been justly raked over the coals for trying to branch out with the direly formulaic Jersey Girl, Smith so much as announces with this movie that for the rest of his career he's going to just do minor variations on the same theme. Why not? That's where the money is.

I didn't really put my finger on how uncomfortable Clerks II made me until a few nights later, when I was watching My Dinner with Andre for the first time. I'd heard about the famous Louis Malle film many times, and while paging through the TiVo movie listings a week or so ago, I figured I'd give it a try. I ended up loving it. You've heard the old aphorism, the way to critique a film is by making another film, right? I don't know if Kevin Smith has seen My Dinner with Andre (his tastes usually run to more mainstream fare, unless it's an indie film helmed by a cute lesbian), but he ought to take a look at it. Dinner is a movie about two guys talking, like most of Smith's movies. Smith points the camera and has his actors run lines. Malle directs. The timing of his cuts, pull-ins, and reaction shots don't just serve to keep the action from becoming static, but they somehow provide the missing ingredient in visualizing Andre Gregory's rambling flower-power shaggy dog stories and, just as tangibly, Wallace Shawn's politely exasperated confusion. (Roger Ebert makes this point much more elegantly than I in his Great Movies piece on Andre.) My Dinner with Andre is a sharp rebuke to people who say well, what more can Smith do, it's the limitations of his style. You can make an exciting and compelling movie about two people talking. You can shoot a film in a studio that's set in a restaurant and actually make it look sort of like a real restaurant. The fast-food joint in Clerks II must be the least labor-intensive burger place in cinematic history.

What's more, Wally and Andre are questioning their lives and values at every turn. Dante and Randal are still hung up on which is better, Empire or Jedi?

It's a wicked life, but what the hell. I used to love The Last Waltz. Sure, it's a little dated, some of the guest performers are as random as they come (Neil Diamond???), and the band member interviews establish a standard for banality that Spinal Tap clearly channeled, but for my money there's no more emotional musical performance captured on film than the version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" Levon Helm sings in it. Well, heaven help me, I needed to know more, and after reading Helm's autobiography (This Wheel's on Fire) I went back to watch the thing again and now it's pretty much ruined.

Helm claims (and there's a lot of evidence to support it) that Robbie Roberton broke up The Band because shady album credits had given him a hugely disproportionate chunk of the group's royalties. With a big chunk of coin in the bank, Robertson was perfectly happy to settle down in Hollywood for a life of ease getting loaded with his new buddy Martin Scorsese. Indeed, Scorsese's camera lingers on Robertson lovingly for the whole film, all but ignoring Richard Manuel (The Band's heart and soul) and Garth Hudson (the group's best musician by a wide margin, easily crushing the overrated Robertson, who spent months of his life painstakingly re-recording all of his solos for the movie). Watching The Last Waltz from Helm's perspective, a lot of the joy was drained right out of the film. After "the end" of The Band the remaining four members toured to ever-decreasing audiences until the stress of the road killed first Manuel and then Rick Danko. And the Neil Diamond question is answered in Helm's book too. Robertson had just produced Diamond's new album and figured giving Neil a spot in The Last Waltz would goose its sales. Boy, what a putz.

Scare tactics. It's not technically a movie, but the point I want to make about last week's episode of "Supernatural," "Croatoan," ties in to the big-screen theme. I'm a horror buff. I like being scared, and if there's anything I've learned watching literally hundreds of low- to no-budget 70's and 80's horror movies, it's that what the imagination can conceive is always, always, always scarier than what can be accomplished with practical effects and CGI. That's why every "X-Files" episode is always scary up until the point where you actually see the monster and seldom after. In any event, horror movies despite a run in popularity have started to suck beyond the telling of it in recent years. There is no longer any surprise or tension whatsoever in these gore-porn films like Hostel, the Saw trilogy, and The Passion of the Christ. They're not scary, they're just gross. There's a huge difference.

Anyway, back on television, where standards and practices haven't quite devolved to the point where you can show naked minors taking turns dismembering each other (yet), a little show called "Supernatural" has picked up the neglected flag of psychological horror and is running with it. The show leaned a little bit too heavily on very standard horror devices in its first season, but it's improved by leaps and bounds in Season Two (helped along by a large infusion of former "X-Files" talent on both the writing and production departments). I don't want to say too much about "Croatoan" because really you ought to be able to see it the way I did, just knowing it was a "Supernatural" episode and not much else. Oh man, I was scared. A few times I had to remind myself to breathe. Almost wanting to turn it off but not being able to, being acutely aware of my heightened pulse and the suddenly oppressive tension of the air around me -- now that's good horror. It was one of the last holdouts, comedy, drama, and science fiction having moved over a long time ago, but now the standout horror storytelling lives on the small screen as well.