Movies
If you like the funny, kind of sadistic, creepy-but-not-quite-actually-scary vibe that sold things like Gremlins, Fright Night, and the opening half hour of Cabin in the Woods, then Krampus will be a blast. I like the aforementioned movies, so I had a blast with Krampus. The creature design is fantastic and, by the looks of it, about 80% practical, which is always neat, and the atmosphere rides the delicious edge between lush and camp. The human beings are mostly rather hate-able, which makes it go down pretty easy (dare I say: enjoyably?) when they start getting devoured by evil gingerbread men and the like, but as unlikable as they get, the screenwriting is sharp enough that it's still fun spending time with them before they start dropping off. Grade: B+
A tight, tense home-invasion thriller that's likely to be duking it out with The Witch at the end of 2016 for the best horror movie of the year. The obvious comparison is Halloween, albeit without the iconic score, but this is a lot more than the sum of its influences. For starters, Hush is way more interested in its protagonist than the John Carpenter classic ever is, and it's to its benefit: Maddie, who has lived without speech and hearing since her teens, is an enormously winsome, engaging heroine, and rooting for her (rather than waiting for her demise, as many horror movies ask us to) is one of this movie's distinct joys. Another is just how stripped down the whole thing is. This is a very small movie, obsessed with details, sounds, minute spaces, and it's all the better for it. Horror fans: see it. It's great. Grade: A-
I can imagine this movie being captial-G Great in the hands of someone like Werner Herzog, who could spin the balls-to-the-wall weirdness of the central facts (a woman mentions that a chimpanzee shows sexual desire for her, and she seemed surprisingly okay with that except for the fact that she considered the monkey "like a son") into something profound. As it is, with director James Marsh, whose work I've never found more than just moderately engaging, we're left with an absolutely fascinating story—a '70s experiment tries to raise a chimp as if it were human—wrapped in an overall uninteresting package. The events of the story are so engaging that it's still good, but would that this doc had been something more than just generic talking heads and TV-special-esque reenactments. Grade: B+
Shakespeare gets the Nicolas Winding Refn treatment, only this one is directed by some guy named Justin Kurzel. But seriously, this is pretty much Only God Forgives with Shakespearean dialogue and great acting (Marion Cotillard's surprisingly vulnerable Lady Macbeth is the best). So you've got lots of slow-mo, lots of violence, lots of attention to color, only this time, it makes some kind of sense, which is more than I can say of the cool, empty Only God. It's not all roses—I say "kind of sense" because the emphasis on visuals does slim down what was already a lean, mean play; it's Shakespeare with a lot of the connective tissue trimmed off, which does put a lot more burden on the actors and our own brains to stitch everything together. Also, (spoilers! [?]) Macbeth doesn't lose his head! What the heck, movie? Grade: B
It's like The Goonies, if The Goonies was actually good (and startlingly violent, and set in inner-city London, and more than happy to kill off its kids—not all, thank goodness, but some). The cast is entirely charming (a pre-Force Awakens John Boyega helms up the lead), and its a testament to chemistry between cast and screenplay that the movie opens with the main cast mugging a woman (Jodie Whittaker, who's great here, too) and not only manages to make us root for them not five minutes later but also convincingly sells a budding camaraderie between the boys and Whittaker's character in the middle act of the film. A great little creature feature. Grade: A-
Television
Finally embarking on this big one. Among the ranks of the innovative HBO dramas of the early 2000s, Deadwood has the same transitional growing pains that early seasons of The Sopranos had, where the tension between the newfound freedoms of serialization clash up against the episodic conventions of classically structured TV, leading to a few digressions (such as one involving a brother-sister criminal duo starring, of all people, Kristen Bell) that are entertaining but narratively slight. This isn't exactly a liability all the time; Deadwood is the least plotty of those early HBO dramas (certainly less so than The Wire, and even less than the notoriously plot-ambivalent Sopranos), and if anything, the show is less about what happens in Deadwood than who happens. The chief pleasure of the show so far is just spending time with this wonderful, grimy, profane set of characters as they rub up against each other and converse. And my goodness, the conversation—the show has a reputation as "Shakespeare with swearing," but even that doesn't quite capture the glorious feeling of just letting the colorful, elliptical poetry of the dialogue wash over you. Grade: A-
Music
I may be alone in ranking this album just slightly below The King of Limbs, the rock legends' divisive 2011 record—there's nothing quite so transcendent as the sequence of songs from "Lotus Flower" through the record's end. But TKoL comparisons are probably misguided; the Radiohead release that A Moon Shaped Pool most resembles is In Rainbows, primarily because 1) a significant portion of its tracks are long-awaited studio recordings of songs that have been floating around the band's live shows for more than a decade, and 2) it's much more a collection of songs than a unified album (as opposed to the hyper-sequenced, thematically linked OK Computer or even Amnesiac). Neither of those are bad things, especially when the songwriting and production is as tight as it is here. The emphasis on Jonny Greenwood string orchestrations is a particularly effective touch, and songs like "Burn the Witch" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief" come alive under his lush, idiosyncratic direction. And even though Radiohead is at the point in its career where it doesn't need to make an innovative statement with each album, A Moon Shaped Pool has its share of surprises: the cascading piano and marching strings of "The Numbers" are something legitimately new for Radiohead, as is the classical-tinged guitar in "Desert Island Disk." Overall, it's a solid, intermittently great entry from a band that, even nearly 30 years into its career, still manages to be one of the most vital, interesting music acts out there. Grade: A-
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