Bottle Rocket, A Rumor of Angels, and Beat

I watched some older movies while on vacation this week. Bottle Rocket was made in 1996 and I watched it late Monday night. I drifted in and out of sleep, as parts of it caught my interest at times. Luke and Owen Wilson, in their first movie, starred as friends, who have energy and passion for committing petty crimes; actually it's Owen Wilson's character's enthusiasm and excitement about what he does, and he ropes in Luke Wilson and other people to go on crime sprees with him. I don't remember laughing, but maybe the funny parts happened when I was asleep. I do remember feeling mildly amused, but that was about all. Come to think of it, I felt the same mild amusement while watching the Royal Tenanbaums and the Darjeeling Limited. The movie was directed by Wes Anderson, the same guy who likes to put the Wilson brothers in other movies, like the Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited.
I only watched A Rumor of Angels because Ron Livingston is in it. It played out like a made-for-TV Lifetime movie about an older woman, a widow, and a 12-year-old boy who become friends and bond over the deaths of people who were very close to them. The widow, played by Vanessa Redgrave, is an interesting character with intelligence, quirky energy, and a touch of madness. As usual, Ron Livingston adds enough to keep me interested, but if you took him out, then the movie would have been the biggest waste-of-time movie since the last time I got accidentally hooked into a Lifetime movie (I think that was about four years ago).
I watched the movie Beat last week, with Ron Livingston as Allen Ginsburg, and Courtney Love as William Burroughs's wife, and Keifer Sutherland as William Burroughs (the guy who wrote Naked Lunch, among other writings). The Ginsburg character was my favorite, but he had a small part. However, the movie kept me interested and wanting to know more about the characters' lives. There was too much history to put it neatly into one two-hour movie, but I liked the pace of the movie and the struggles and conflicts the main characters were facing, and how the viewer could virtually put herself into their situations and feel the storylines.