Movies
A movie that at first masquerades as one genre (the handheld-cam indie drama about aimless self-destructive thirtysomethings) turns out to be a Trojan horse for another genre altogether (the dying relative drama). I just made it sound like a slog, and fair warning, this movie is no picnic to sit through: it's bleak, raw, and frazzled in not just a movie-tragic way but an actual, real-life, makes-you-feel-ill-with-grief kind of way. So there's that. It's also handily one of the best movies of 2015. This is thanks in no small part to Cynthia Nixon and Christopher Abbott as the central mother-son due, anchoring the film with two of the greatest performances of the decade and proving that it's not how uplifting you can make these dark scenarios: it's how much humanity you can find in them. Grade: A
I've seen Woody Allen features I've disliked both in part (Curse of the Jade Scorpion) and in whole (Melinda and Melinda), but this is the first I've seen that's this dire. It's an ugly film about small people treating each other horribly, and while one could argue that the petty ugliness is the point, it would be harder to use that to justify just how almightily boring it all is. The plot is meandering and overlong, and its script is lifeless, save for the occasional verbal turn that is the grace of even the worst Woody Allen work (and truly, this is among the worst). Couple that with an off-putting Kenneth Branagh performance that imitates Woody Allen's acting style closely enough to prove that the uncanny valley should be a concern not just for robots but for reportedly flesh-and-blood actors. Grade: C-
It's a largely de-fanged adaptation of the strip's striking melancholy, but really, there hasn't been a film adaptation that captured the ache of Schultz's strip since A Charlie Brown Christmas, and even that one ends with the resurrection of the murdered tree via love and Yuletide magic. No, what's important here is not how much it evokes Schultz's worldview but the fact that it deviates frequently from it without feeling at all like a violation of the source material. I'm gonna go ahead and give the bulk of the credit to the animation, which is a marvel of CG stylization—seriously, the idea of a CG adaptation of Peanuts sounds like a fatal mistake, so it's all the more amazing that the movie's art direction is not only not fatal but also now my preferred aesthetic for any potential followups. Grade: B+
It's rare that a movie over 90 minutes long doesn't prompt me to think that it could have been a little shorter. And yet Malcolm X's 200+ minutes flew by; I've never been so riveted by a movie this long. But attention spans are boring: the real take-home here is that Malcolm X is a lively, moving, incendiary, important masterpiece, unquestionably the greatest biopic of all time and handily one of the greatest movies of all time, full stop. Maybe I'm still just coming off this movie's high, but I don't know: there's something special about a film made twenty-five years ago about events fifty years ago and still feeling very much about 2016. Spike Lee (hedging right up alongside Do the Right Thing with career-best work) crafts a masterful mosaic of genres, from the near-musical stylings of Malcolm's pre-conversion years to the statelier, talkier figurehead period, all of which may have risked becoming a showy stylistic exercise if it weren't for Denzel Washington's incredible performance that somehow casts Malcolm as both mythic and ground-level human. Grade: A+ (a grade well-worth violating my normal no-longer-than-the-poster-size length rule, by the way)
Books
The first half is lots of fun, with protagonist Anne Elliot being a sort of proto-Charlie Brown: ignored by her family, saddled with unwanted tasks, weighted with a piercing lack of success. This being Austen, it's of course filled with a generous wit and not nearly so sad as even the opening passages of Mansfield Park, and the fact that Anne handles most of this with the 19th-century equivalent of eye-rolling keeps it from being mean-spirited. Once her life stabilizes and the central question of the novel shifts toward deciding which man to pair Anne off with, though, it loses much of its charm and becomes rather tedious. It's Jane Austen, so it's still got that wit, but plotting-wise, it's a little sloggy. At least we still have that first half. Grade: B
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