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One Georges Laphroig, an excellent fellow I’m sure, wrote to TellCliff recently to say that he disagreed with my positive take on the movie Up in the Air. “I found it soft,” he wrote. “Imagine, please, the same role played by the middle-aged Jack Nicholson, someone who takes positive pleasure in firing people. A mesmerizing bastard. Then you have a movie both intriguing and upsetting. A movie with edge that makes you question your own ethics as you watch. This was just feel-good disguised as angst-ridden.”

The other night, in the company of another fine chap — whose sensibility strikes me as being similar to Mr. Laphroig’s — I caught a showing of Five Easy Pieces (1970), directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Nicholson. Seeing it made me think about the parallels and differences between the two films, their main characters, and the eras in which they were made.

The first time I saw Five Easy Pieces, twenty-odd years ago, I didn’t take in the seemingly innocuous end credit “A BBS Production.” The B’s stand for Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the S for Steve Blauner, three men who led a brief, glorious revolution in American film, who showed up as the fuddy-duddy studios were hemorrhaging money and saved the day by making movies that reflected what Americans were actually feeling. (See Peter Biskind’s entertaining, invaluable book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.) Given the era in which Pieces was made, you might expect the songs used in it to be rock anthems, but they are two Tammy Wynette numbers, “Stand By Your Man” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” And there, in a nutshell, you have the two warring elements at the heart of this movie: the traditions of society versus the strong impulses that lead us to run from them when they turn out to be hollow, impulses that don’t, however, necessarily take us to anything better. It’s 1970, and you’re Joe American. What do you do? Go to Vietnam and die for nothing? Join the Weathermen? Or just do whatever the hell you feel like at any given moment — since, clearly, nothing you do will come to any good anyway?

Nicholson plays Robert Dupea, who has left the upper-middle-class world of his upbringing — everyone in the family, including Robert, is a classically trained musician — to roam the country; he works on oil rigs and falls in with the trailer-park, bowling-on-Friday-night crowd, to which he can’t help feeling superior. He lives with Rayette (Karen Black), a dim-witted waitress; when Robert’s not with Rayette, he runs around with other women, and when he is, he isn’t particularly nice to her. Robert is, basically, a selfish bastard, one who cares only about his own pleasure, which he can never pin down for very long.

George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham from Up in the Air is a bastard, too — a professional one: he fires people for a living. If Robert Dupea runs from mainstream society, Ryan Bingham is fused to its core, working in an industry that adds a sinister twist to the cold soul of capitalism, exploiting not only the worker but the worker’s inevitable, built-in misfortune.

What is Ryan himself like? His ability to do his job suggests, at best, an emotional detachment, and in fact he tells us via voiceover that he’s happiest when he is — as he mostly is — in the impersonal atmosphere of a hotel or an airplane. Ryan doesn’t want (or doesn’t think he wants) to get married or form any other kind of emotional attachment. What he wants, mostly, is to reach a million frequent-flyer miles. It’s hard to say who’s the sadder case: Robert, who has no goal he can think of, or Ryan, who has one that makes him seem too shallow for words.

Each man rejects monogamy, until he meets a special woman, who in turn rejects him. This does not prove them to be good guys underneath; merely human. (I quote the Saul Bellow novel The Dean’s December, which I happen to be reading: “People in reduced emotional circumstances set their affections on something or other. . . . Total misanthropes, true, absolute ones, were probably as rare as saints.”) Each man makes a rare visit to his family and is nice to his sister. But here Robert, unlike Ryan, maintains his jerk-ness: his family feeling apparently doesn’t extend to his brother, whose lover he beds.

The Robert Dupeas were not to reign over American film for long. Sometime in the late 1970s, viewers decided (with a nudge from Star Wars) that they wanted to root for the good guys again, and they have ever since, if with an occasional look back. (The 2007 Oscar for best picture, after all, went to No Country for Old Men.) For better or worse, mostly worse, we are still very much in the era of the blockbuster and the “uplifting” film, despite a national mood that’s every bit as bleak as it was in 1970.

And no question, Up in the Air is more uplifting than Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson’s Robert is a bastard at the beginning of Pieces, and he’s a bastard at the end. The ending of Air is ambiguous, but there is a glimmer of hope that Clooney’s Ryan is making a change. I would stop short, though, of calling Up in the Air a feel-good movie. Forrest Gump is a feel-good movie; its message is, So what if you’re not the smartest, hardest-working, best-informed guy in the room. You’re a good person. And that’s what counts, right? The elegantly written, well-acted Up in the Air is, by contrast, a do-good movie. We can do good, it seems to say — or at least stop doing bad — if we choose to. We can reject the evil around us, unless, of course, we accept the premise of the masterful Five Easy Pieces, which is that the evil is us: Run all you want, you won’t get away from yourself, you dog, you. Which of these messages is closer to the truth? That is not a rhetorical question.

Back in the ’90s I rented Philip Haas’s film The Music of Chance, starring Mandy Patinkin and James Spader and based on the novel by Paul Auster. It is an agreeably creepy and unsettling little movie, but the thing I remember best about it, which happens at the end, has nothing to do with the story. Auster has a cameo: he drives along a deserted road, stops his car, gets out, and speaks one line. I don’t remember what his five or six words are, but they may as well be, “I AM NOT AN ACTOR!”

It wasn’t Auster’s fault — he is, after all, a novelist, not a screen performer. And, actually, he provided a service, if only for me. Hearing his line reading was like watching as a Christmas tree is plugged in, seeing things illuminated that had been invisible before: I suddenly had an appreciation for every bit-part player in every film I’d ever watched. Every time I had accepted, for a few seconds, that one of those actors was a bank teller, grocery-store clerk, gas-station attendant, or bus passenger, he or she had done the job well. The first requirement of the actor had been met: not standing out from the pack, but simply seeming to be what you are not, making it look as easy as being yourself.

Those roles don’t bring Oscar nominations, of course. The actors who are so honored — or deserve to be, anyway — are those who meet that first simple requirement while also registering intensity if not range of emotion, making us think not “Wow, that guy can act” but “Man, that person is really suffering,” or happy, or confused, or you name it. A few off-the-beaten-path examples:

Jane Fonda in Klute. At the movie’s climax, Fonda, as a prostitute, listens to a recording of the voice of her dead friend, her heart breaking right in front of us.

Candice Bergen in Carnal Knowledge.  Bergen, as an undergraduate, has a night out with the two young men she is torn between, Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel. At one point she laughs hysterically. If there is better laughter captured on film, I’ve never seen it.

Adolph Caesar in A Soldier’s Story. In the segregated army of World War II, Caesar is a self-hating, evil s.o.b. of a sergeant in charge of soldiers including David Alan Grier, Denzel Washington, and Robert Townsend. After a bout of drinking, Caesar screams his regret at the choices he has made, just before being sent to his Maker by — whom?

Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Sheen’s drunken scene in a hotel room. This one may need an asterisk next to it, since Sheen, while playing a man breaking down, was . . . well, breaking down. (See the chilling and illuminating documentary Hearts of Darkness, on the making of Apocalypse Now.)

What else is there? Tell Cliff . . .

It used to be said about Bill Clinton that if he was in a room with 300 people, 299 of whom adored him, he could be found in a corner trying to win over the one who didn’t. Lord knows I ain’t Bill Clinton, but I sometimes think I practice an analogous folly. I chase down books I haven’t read, records I haven’t heard, films I haven’t seen as if hunting terrorists, to what ultimate purpose it occasionally occurs to me to wonder. I know that the point is the journey, etc., and anyway I’m not likely to stop anytime soon, but surely one benefit of all this culture-vulture stuff — if not the central purpose — is to take pleasure from time to time in the body of work you’ve already gotten to know, to visit, you might say, with old friends.

That point was brought home to me on Saturday morning, as I painted while listening to — sorry to mention it again — my iPod. I was thumbing through lists of artists and songs, trying to decide which vocalist’s stylings to explore this time, when I came across an old instrumental-jazz favorite of mine, Ben Webster’s twenty-minute version of “In a Mellowtone.” I listened to it, and then I listened to another, the fifteen-minute 1952 version of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” with Charlie Parker and other greats, which, in my humble judgment, may be the finest jazz performance ever captured on record. Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe it. (For one thing, I already have, in one of the four pieces under “Essays” on this blog.) The point is that it was wonderful to check in with these “friends” I know so well. And it even helped motivate me in the painting I was doing, almost as if Bird, Ben, and the boys were blowing to cheer me on. That painting will not hang next to a Matisse, but I felt I was giving it my best. What else can we do? And that’s one thing about old, good friends: they spot what’s best in you, and inspire you to bring it out.

Many moons ago on the Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live, Bill Murray did run-downs of Oscar-nominated films — never mind that he hadn’t watched them all. Here to perform a latter-day version of that dubious service is your very own Cliff Thompson. Avatar? The Hurt Locker? Haven’t seen ‘em! But here are thoughts on three movies I did manage to catch, in the order I saw them:

Inglourious Basterds. There is an odd emotional imbalance to this film. In the first segment Christoph Waltz gives a surpassingly good performance as evil on two legs, a Nazi officer who pays of visit to the home of a farmer with three daughters. The farmer is hiding Jews in his cellar; the Nazi knows it full well, and the farmer knows he knows it. Like a cat who has cornered a family of mice, the Nazi proceeds to play a game whose horror lies in the certainty of the outcome.

Cut to the American officer Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his Basterds, a squad of Jewish soldiers whose uncomplicated delight in slaughtering Nazis brings to mind football players dancing in the end zone. It’s as if we’ve been watching Schindler’s List and then Bugs Bunny shows up to save the day.

And yet it worked for me. The closest analogy I can think of is that of a parent whose child falls and skins her knee; the worst thing the parent can do is make a face that mirrors the child’s — if the child gets the message that things are as bad as she thinks, you can count on some crying. Better, much better, to be matter-of-fact, even upbeat. That seems to be Quentin Tarantino’s guiding principle here. You don’t dwell on the power of evil in the world; rather, you acknowledge it just long enough to wipe it out, preferably with a smile on your face. I don’t know what I’d think of this message if I were a Holocaust survivor. As an audience member, I was riveted, entertained, satisfied.

Up in the Air.  (SPOILER ALERT.) It’s a sign of how good this movie is that its few flaws stand out like chocolate chips in pancake batter. George Clooney is a professional fire-er and proud commit-o-phobe who is happy to spend most of his life on airplanes or in hotels. In a hotel bar he meets a woman (Vera Farmiga) who travels nearly as much as he does — who appears, indeed, to be a female version of Clooney himself, as they make a game of getting laid in the cities where their paths intersect.

Now for those chocolate chips. How could Farmiga spend so much time with Clooney without once, at any moment, giving even a hint about the other areas of her life? And if we accept that degree of secrecy and compartmentalization and the delicate balancing act they suggest, then how — and why — would she accept a spur-of-the-moment invitation to Clooney’s sister’s wedding?

These are minor quibbles. This is a thoughtful, graceful, bittersweet film that sidesteps cliché and hits you harder than you may realize at first. Clooney manages to turn on star power while fully immersing himself in the cad he plays — and making you care about him.

 Precious.  Speaking of sidestepping, that is what I am going to do with the controversy surrounding this movie. Ishmael Reed wrote a New York Times piece saying that Precious makes black people look bad. He’s right. Sapphire, on whose novel the movie is based, responded that she is a creative writer, not a sociologist. She’s right. Let’s call it a draw.

Onto the movie itself, then. I’m still not sure what I think of its narrative arc, but its power is undeniable. Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) is, of course, a startlingly overweight sixteen-year-old who is pregnant for the second time by her father and lives with her mother (Mo’Nique) — a woman who can be called “abusive” the way Einstein could be called “bright.”

The performances are uniformly good (Mo’Nique’s is damn frightening), but to my mind it is Mariah Carey ’s carefully shaded turn as a social worker, Ms. Weiss, that gives the film a dimension if might otherwise lack. In contrast to the other major figures in Precious’s life, Ms. Weiss is neither a human disaster nor an angel with her heart on her sleeve; she has her own motivations, but it is unclear what they are, beyond a weary commitment to her work. In her one-on-one sessions with Precious, the air of mystery about Ms. Weiss works like a magnet for the intriguing bits of Precious’s own personality, drawing them to the surface, leading this girl to say things that hint at depths unrevealed as she struggles to read in her GED or gets abuse heaped on her at home.

And the Oscar goes to . . . I don’t know, what do you think?

I know black people who read only books by other blacks. In part they want to support the work of black writers — a laudable goal. Partly they enjoy seeing themselves, their experiences and concerns, reflected in what they read. (Who doesn’t?) And the choice is also partly about self-protection. There are enough casual displays of white racism, privilege, and entitlement in the real world, the thinking goes, so why risk encountering them while relaxing with a novel? These readers cast a wary eye on works by contemporary nonblack writers. Books by dead white authors? Forget it.

As a black reader, I understand that attitude. I just don’t share it. This statement will make me sound like — perhaps reveal me to be — the world’s original sap, but I look on books as representatives of the best that the world of human thought has to offer. Greedy fellow that I am, I want unfettered access to that thought. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t read Virginia Woolf or John Cheever, just as I wouldn’t want to live in one that was missing Zora Neale Hurston or Ishmael Reed.

Over the years my openness has been richly rewarded. From time to time, of course, my reward is to read a sentence like this one, from Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh: “With or without her nigger, Mrs Beste-Chewynde was a woman of vital importance.”

What am I supposed to do when I come across a passage like that? Do I rip the book in half at the spine and throw the pieces across the room, feeling that to continue reading would be an act of self-hatred? Do I sigh heavily and plod on, seeing the need to accept the book for what it is — a product of a different time? Do I recognize the separation between author and narrator and give the author the benefit of the (wafer-thin) doubt? Or do I remember my rule about separating any work of art from the artist? I love, for example, the music of Miles Davis, a man not exactly on the cutting edge of feminism. (Of course, his misogyny didn’t come through in his records.)

I’m interested in people’s thoughts on this. Not that I’m likely to change the way I read. I guess I look on the world of books as an adventure; adventure suggests unpredictability – and a certain amount of risk.

When it comes to jazz, I tend to prefer instrumentals to vocals, which is a shame in that it cuts me off from women’s biggest contribution to the genre.

That said, I do have a couple of the greats in my collection. Not long ago I was listening to a Jazz at the Philharmonic record that has Ella Fitzgerald on it. My eleven-year-old daughter heard her singing and said, “Ella’s cool.”

I said, “Have you heard any Billie Holiday?” She shook her head, so I put on one of Holiday’s records next. My daughter listened to the first two songs and said, “I like her voice. She sounds kind of like a woman and a little girl at the same time.” A moment later, she added, “She sounds kind of like she’s singing the words but her mind is on something else.” A future critic, that one.

A short time later I was painting while listening to my new iPod. (See my thoughts on the iPod two posts back.) I had it on Shuffle, and a Billie Holiday song came up. And that’s when I discovered the perfect time to listen to her. If I have on instrumental jazz while painting, I find I’m concentrating too hard on what I’m doing to take in the intricacies of the music, but I can listen to Lady Day and paint at the same time. That is not to put down her artistry; if anything, it is a testament to her forcefulness. That voice of hers, at once tinny and grainy, could bend a note like nobody’s business; and when she is backed up on tenor sax by the gossamer tones of Lester Young (she’s the one who gave him his nickname, The President, or Pres), you’re hearing one of the greatest pairings in all of jazz. Check out the album A Musical Romance.

So: who else should I listen to as I paint? Which jazz/blues divas do YOU like? And which of their records?

While I await your answer, I’ll keep listening to Ms. Holiday.

I won’t, of course, be sending my daughters to her records for guidance on relationships. (If I’m beat up by my poppa / I ain’t gonna call no copper . . . Wooogh.) But man, what her voice could do with lyrics like: Now, love is like a faucet / It turns off and on / I say love is like a faucet / It turns off and on / But when you think it’s on baby / It’s turned off and gone . . .

Who knew Woody Allen and I had so much in common? I will explain in a minute. But first, a story:

About a decade ago I thought very seriously about trying to write a biography of the pioneering tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. What ultimately dissuaded me as much as anything else was reading a piece in the New York Times Book Review about a new biography of Louis Armstrong. The reviewer made mincemeat of the book. Whether it was cowardice or wisdom I don’t know, but I had a vision of myself spending years of my life writing about somebody else’s, only to have one review send up my hard work in a puff of smoke.

This Christmas my sister gave me a copy of Pops, a new biography of Armstrong, written by Terry Teachout . . . the man who wrote that review. Ponder that a moment.

I’m enjoying the book. I just got to the part about “Potato Head Blues,” probably my favorite of Armstrong’s tunes, and was happy to see that Teachout seems to share my opinion.

Which brings me, believe it or not, back to Woody Allen. “Potato Head Blues,” Teachout writes, “was cited by Woody Allen in Manhattan as one of the things that make life ‘worth living,’ along with Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, ‘Swedish movies,’ the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, and Paul Cezanne’s apples and pears.”

A Sentimental Education, that wonderfully vivid, completely unsentimental novel! Brando, of The Godfather and On the Waterfront!Those great reds, yellows and greens of Cezanne’s apples! I leave it to Woody to explain his personal life, and you could count the black actors in his films on the fingers of one thumbless hand, but when it comes to taste in art, the man and I are linked. Now to see Manhattan again . . .

My wife and I gave each other iPods for Christmas. So ended a three-year period when, in terms of how I listened to music, I had one foot in the 21st century and the other back in the 20th: I would download stuff from iTunes, and then . . . burn it to CDs. (My friends laughed at me.)

I have to say, I’m digging this iPod. The most surprising thing about it is the Shuffle feature — not that it exists, but that it actually enhances the experience of hearing some tunes. When you play an album knowing when a particular tune is coming, part of you doesn’t even listen, taking for granted that you know what it sounds like. But hearing music unexpectedly can be like hearing it for the first time.

And then there’s the pleasure of hearing something you haven’t listened to in a while and might not have thought to put on yourself. Something like . . .

Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot, Volumes 1 and 2, from 1961. Man, what great jazz records. You know Dolphy? He played alto sax, bass clarinet, and flute; whatever he played, he was instantly recognizable, his style showing through like the same muscular body under different clothes. His sound had a touch of eccentricity, to my mind prefiguring the last records of Coltrane and the chaos of Albert Ayler. Mostly, though, it was dazzling — quick, wild, exciting. Here, Ed Blackwell’s martial-sounding drums give the tunes shape; Mal Waldron on piano (whom I also have on the great album Teddy Charles Tentet) adds some sweetness; Richard Davis’s bass is in there somewhere; and then . . . there’s Booker Little on trumpet. Little died four months after this performance, at the tender age of 23. (Dolphy died in 1964, at 36.) That is a great shame, because, I want to tell you, Little smokes on these records.

After hearing these, I got a record Little made as a leader, Out Front, which I didn’t like as well. It reminded me of when a funny supporting character on a sitcom gets his own series and falls flat. But that probably means I just need to listen to it some more, look into its mysteries. Maybe it’ll come up on the Shuffle . . .

For the record, I am younger than the three main characters on the TNT comedy-drama Men of a Certain Age – but not by enough to matter. Weeks ago my wife mentioned that she wanted to watch the premiere and asked if I wanted to join her. I declined, having read Alessandra Stanley’s article about the show in the New York Times, in which she referred to the characters as “losers.” Just what I needed: to watch this show, recognize myself in these men of a certain age, and stand condemned — by implication – as a loser in the eys of the obviously all-knowing Times.

Well, so, I wandered into the bedroom while my wife was watching, and I ended up watching. And then we watched the next week, and the week after that. I found myself entertained, even charmed. The three protagonists, friends from college, are decidedly ordinary, decent guys: Ray Romano’s character owns and runs a party-goods store, Andre Braugher’s sells cars, and Scott Bakula’s plays an underemployed actor who supports himself by temping. (I guess what makes them losers is that none of them writes for a major metropolitan newspaper. Get a life, Ms. Stanley.)

To be sure, they have issues. Romano’s character’s gambling has cost him his marriage; Braugher’s has spent his life under the thumb of his blowhard, know-it-all father (who is also his boss); and Bakula’s is a 49-year-old who, in terms of his professional accomplishments and ability to commit to a woman, might as well be 19. But the actors are so good, and their characters played so sympathetically, that rather than looking down on them we pull for them to win out over their difficulties — which, to our delight and the show’s salvation, they occasionally do. Their victories are not major life accomplishments; mostly they amount to breaking even. Romano, who sometimes goes hilariously off the rails when trying to give advice to his children, finds his eloquence when confronting the lovesick teenage boy who won’t leave his daughter alone; Braugher brings his salesmanship to forming a bond with a city bureaucrat, long enough to the power turned back on in his family’s home. When he stands on the city agency’s steps and raises both fists in a parody of the famous scene from Rocky, we laugh with him, not at him.

Some minor quibbles: Braugher’s character, Owen, is 48, but his father doesn’t look older than 62 (the actor who plays him, Richard Gant, is 65); the youngest of Owen’s three children is shown in a high chair. Owen might be 38, but 48? As for Terry, played by Bakula, he is (at least for me) a little harder to root for, maybe because — unlike Joe (Romano) or Owen — he does not have significant others to reveal his various dimensions; his closest relationships seem to be with Joe and Owen, whom he banters with over coffee.

On the up side: is Braugher the odd man out because he plays the only black character? Or is it Romano, because he’s divorced and has an addiction? Or is it Bakula, because he has no kids? The answer, of course, is none of the above. They’re all odd, and they’re all normal, because normal, the show lets us know, is simply what happens in your life.

A few months back, at the Guggenheim, I saw an installation by an artist I won’t name, since the work left me mostly unimpressed. I say “mostly” because on one wall was the cover of a book: Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer. Seeing the cover led me, a bit later, to pick up the book itself. I’m glad I did.

Let’s not blow a fuse trying to sum up Schopenhauer’s contributions to German and Western philosophy. (For one thing, R.J. Hollingdale’s wonderfully illuminating introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Essays and Aphorisms makes anything I would put here superfluous.) I will just let the brief passages below speak for themselves. They do not represent the best or deepest writing in the book — only the most quotable. But they do give a hint of Schopenhauer’s wit and, it must be said, dark outlook — which grew, I think, from a compassion for the human condition:

“Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.”

“Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.”

“The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.”

“Newspaper writers are, for the sake of their trade, alarmists: this is their way of making themselves interesting. What they really do, however, is resemble little dogs who, as soon as anything whatever moves, start up a loud barking.”

“The unalterability of our character and the necessary nature of our actions will be brought home with uncommon force to anyone who has on any occasion behaved as he ought not to have behaved, who has been lacking in resolution or constancy or courage or some other quality demanded by the circumstances of the moment. Afterwards he honestly recognizes and regrets his failing, and no doubt thinks: ‘I’ll do better next time.’ Another time comes, the circumstances are repeated, and he does as he did before - -to his great astonishment.”

Read anything good lately? Tell Cliff . . . and happy new year.