I’ve been to see two touted independent films in the last 48 hours (Juno and The Savages) and despite the relative merits of each, I find myself jonesing for some big Hollywood style escapism. Not that the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise promises to be all that (Harrison Ford being older than Sean Connery was when he played Indy’s father in the last IJ movie, and tell me, does Shia LaBeouf own a piece of Vanity Fair (or vice versa)? It’s the second time he’s been on the magazine’s cover in a year and we all know what that kind of exposure did for Gretchen Mol…)

Juno, as you have doubtless heard, takes on the touchy subject of teen pregnancy with a fair amount of wit and sympathy, if a little too much fairy-tale gauziness for my taste. No harm, no foul is all I can say without giving away too much of the plot (that’s the trailer’s job). It’s at the soft end of the indy film rainbow, that previously inhabited by films like Little Miss Sunshine. Most of the women I know were more moved by it than that, for perhaps obvious reasons, though I can add that I was touched by the realtionship between the girl and her father. It’s the kind we all wished we’d had with our dads, and that I would like to emulate with my own daughter.

But between the dead-pan cinematography (a staple of ironic indy films elevated to some kind of formalism in the precious self-referential films of indy hero Wes Anderson and the cringe-inducingsongs by Kimya Dawson and the aptly named Moldy Peaches, I found myself getting what the cable commercials might call restless leg syndrome. Juno is supposed to be a punk rock fan, extolling the superiority of Iggy and the Stooges to the would-be adoptive father, a former indy musician who now writes advertising jingles. Fair enough — so why not throw some Stooges or Ramones into the mix to get this party started? And how about moving the goddamn camera?

The Savages, written and directed by Slums of Beverly Hills auteur Tamara Jenkins is about the grown children (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) of a nasty old man that are forced to care for him in his demented dotage. Dang, I just gave away the whole plot. It’s at the far more realistic end of the indy spectrum — the bed-pan end, you might even say. And as good as Hoffman and Linney are (as they are in everything), there is a lot left out of this tragicomic gruel. Dad was supposed to have been abusive and neglectful when they were kids (this is made explicit in a scene from one of Linney’s character’s autobiographical plays, which looks just bad enough to be a real off-off Broadway production) — but he also took care of them when their mother left. There is clearly some dimension to dad that is unexamined in this story — and it’s not like there isn’t pleny of opportunity in each real-time scene to explore those contradictions. (In one of the film’s best scenes, Dad reacts violently to a scene of an abusive father in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, hinting at his own troubled upbringing. But that’s all you get.)

This is probably the place to make some argument for the importance of independent film, how it allows artists to explore taboo subjects and difficult emotions that there is little room for in the kiss-kiss, bang-bang world of Hollywood cinema. And it certainly fills the theaters in cities in like New York, where people are always on the lookout for a representation of some life more miserable than their own. (Locations are played for laughs, too: though filmed in British Columbia, Juno is supposed to take place in Dancing Elk, Minnesota, while The Savages takes us from the retirement complex of Sun City, AZ to Buffalo, NY — from one vision of hell to another — presumably to make people paying $2000/mo to live on the Lower East Side feel better about their lot.) But couldn’t we get a shake with those fries? I know the budgets of such flicks prohibit things blowing up, and most Hollywood movies are nothing but — but is it too much to ask for a bit of adventure, action, intrigue even real romance (to say nothing of sex) in these still lifes? Between the dead pan and the bed pan I would settle for a little slapstick even. I’m all for being waken and shaken, but a different kind of human touch could take us from our daily concerns.

Tell you what: you throw me the idol and I’ll throw you the whip…