Mini-Reviews for July 25 - July 31, 2016

Reviewing: all day, every day. Last one of these before school starts up again (heavy sigh). Let me know what you think of what's here.

Movies

Café Society (2016)
A melancholy romance that, if it weren't for the abundant morbidity in the rest of Woody Allen's career, would be rather startling in the lengths it goes to connect unrequited love with death. We see at least half a dozen onscreen deaths throughout the film, most played for laughs (Jesse Eisenberg's protagonist has an uncle in the mob, with predictable results ensuing), and at least a couple offscreen as well; the tone is light, but the themes weigh increasingly heavily on the movie's plot and style, culminating in a lengthy dissolve between two scenes in the film's final shot that's as aching an evocation of regret as Woody Allen has ever committed to film. "Live every day like it's your last, and one day you'll be right," one of the funnier lines in the movie goes, and that seems to be true of both life in general and time with lover in particular.  Make mistakes in your romances, and you've squandered the finite time you have before the end. I liked last year's Irrational Man a whole lot, but even so, my gut is that this is Allen's best film since Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or at the very least, Blue Jasmine. My wife says that Woody Allen has run out of stories to tell, and certainly, there are echoes of his past work here—Sweet and Lowdown and shades of Bullets Over Broadway, for sure, and maybe a touch of Annie Hall's sense of the passage of time. And I'll say this: the first 15-20 minutes are the movie's weakest, which gives the initial impression that what we're about to see is a retread of Allen's greatest hits (one scene in particular involving a prostitute feels ripped from his mid-'90s output). Woody has his tropes, that's for sure; but when he's able to spin new, interesting, and frequently moving permutations of those tropes (as he does mightily in the back half of this one), you'll hear no complaints from me. Grade: A-

Sing Street (2016)
Almost all of my issues with this movie—the queasy way the romantic fantasy never quite integrates with the indie realism, the way the songs seems a bit out-of-time and more akin to 2016 impressions of what 1985 New Wave must have sounded like, the thinly cartoonish way most of the characters are established and then never given any more context (or really, much to do at all) beyond their first scene—can all be waved away with the simple admission that, "Dude, it's a musical. Of course those things happen." I might be more amenable to that position if I thought the songs were more than just pleasant. I mean, they're fine; they're well-crafted. But they aren't, like, memorable. I like the undercurrent of melancholy that informs most of the movie (especially the scenes between the protagonist and his older brother), but it never squarely lands upon something that definitively works dramatically. Musical or no, I really do need one or the other: timeless songs or workable drama. Or maybe I'm just a grump. Grade: B-

The Aviator (2004)
It's not Scorsese's finest hour, but it's far from his worst, either. Howard Hughes is such a fascinating and perfect Scorsese protagonist—charismatic, troubled, adventurous, reckless—and our esteemed director's touch so nimble in painting him that it matters a lot less than it might have otherwise that this movie is about an hour too long or that the editing often commits that great Academy Awards fallacy of mistaking "most" for "best." I'm also not convinced Leo DiCaprio was the best man for the job here; the guy's certainly trying very hard to evoke Hughes's breezy recklessness, but, well, when you're trying to seem breezily reckless, it works a lot better when your effort to look so effortless isn't quite so visible. Grade: B

The French Minister (Quai d'Orsay) (2013)
I don't know a thing about French politics, so maybe a movie-length parody of French governmental figures was never going to be in my wheelhouse. Even so, I do think it's worth pointing out just how inconsistent the comedic tone is, a feeling no doubt bolstered by the fact that the editing only decides to get tight and interesting every once in a while. Grade: C+

Suspect Zero (2004)
It's really the worst kind of bad movie when the script requires the special stupidity of having Albuquerque be some podunk nowheresville, people from Dallas treat Frito pie as some mysterious foreign cuisine, and the CIA have a rogue, psychic agent, and still manages to be a bore. That's a real shame. Suspect Zero is so close to being entertainingly bad: the script is silly and portentous in equal measure, the cinematic style is almost mad-scientist in its impassioned attempts to artsy, the acting veers into the uncanny valley of not quite recognizably human behavior. We're just missing a level of intensity by a factor of two to make it actually fun. Grade: D+

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
That the story of the Peoples Temple is upsetting is old hat at this point (see: any "lol don't drink the Kool-Aid" jokes), but for me specifically, there's something so viscerally horrendous about the entire thing that I doubt I'll ever shake it. The arc of Jim Jones and his followers is one of the few historical narratives that makes me truly despair: that revolution is a myth, that the premise of organized religion is fatally flawed—thoughts that I don't believe 99% of the time, but that this specific narrative forces me to confront anyway, whether I'm prepared to bat them down or not. The genius of this documentary is that its mix of archival footage and actual Peoples Temple member interviews refuses to let this story become old hat. It's a full-throated howl at the realization that any attempt to untangle the chaotic beauty of the Peoples Temple from its unspeakable evil is doomed to fail, and the remaining survivors of Jonestown speak with such clean enthusiasm and life that it drives home with painful precision just how real this movement was to everyone involved and how apocalyptic its end proved to be. Grade: A

Books

Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)
Toni Morrison's followup to the legendary Beloved maintains that novel's preoccupation with postbellum African-American history and heightened, magical vibes. It's not as good as Beloved, no, but that's an unfair standard to keep any literary work to, and Jazz has plenty to offer aside from its younger sibling status to one of American literature's recent(ish) masterpieces. Most notable is the novel's structure, which, true to the music of the title, follows characters into historical digressions and POV switches in a way that does often feel meandering but also frequently pays off by richly mirroring the "present-day" story of a man who has murdered his mistress. Typical of Morrison, the prose is absolutely pristine in a way that feels highly structured without sacrificing any of the spontaneity of the free-flowing jazz she's trying to evoke, and overall, the effect is pretty impressive. The very literary reality Morrison has constructed here does sometimes rob the story of stakes in favor of lyricism—the characters seem shockingly nonchalant and deliberate in their reactions to an uncontested murderer walking in their midst—and a lot of these characters feel very bookishly human rather than realistically human, if that makes sense. But the marvel of Morrison's work here is that that artificiality somehow ends up making the book more approachable than it might have been otherwise, and the emotions are never anything but searing. Grade: B+

Music

St. Vincent - Actor (2009)
St. Vincent's second album lacks the melodic precision of her debut, Marry Me, or the guitar flamboyance of the albums to follow, and as such, it's probably my least favorite of hers. That's not to say it isn't good—it is, and with the mid-record streak of "Black Rainbow," "Laughing with a Mouthful of Blood," and "Marrow," it's even great. Elsewhere, the string arrangements are maybe just a little too thick, and the baroque pop just a tad too baroque, to let the album truly breathe. Grade: B

PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)
I was excited enough to hear PJ Harvey's companion piece to 2011's career-best Let England Shake that I suppose a bit of disappointment is to be expected. A protest record dealing with poverty in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington DC is bound to be less specific than Let England Shake's critique of Harvey's homeland, England, and that's one of the main issues. The album opener, "The Community of Hope," describing DC's Ward 7, is a good microcosm of what doesn't work here: the climactic chant of "They're gonna put a Wal-Mart here" is a generic, heavy-handed complaint that could apply to pretty much any aging American city (including my own city of Knoxville), while the comment that "the school looks like a shit-hole" has the unintended effect of seeming to lash out against the school itself rather than the bureaucratic and social dysfunction that has made it that way. The tone is off, and the observations are rote, and the music isn't quite good enough to forgive either of those flaws. It's not all bad, though. In fact, the final three songs—and especially the climactic "The Wheel"—form a suite that ranks among the best work PJ Harvey has ever done. The rest of the album isn't quite there, but if only for those closing 15 minutes, the record's still worth at least a cursory listen. Grade: B

Prog Progress 1972: Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

Jethro Tull didn't start out in progressive rock. In fact, for one of the torch-bearing proggers of the early '70s golden age (outside of the holy trinity of Genesis, Yes, and King Crimson, Tull ranks alongside Pink Floyd as the most popular of the era), the band's entrance into the prog rock scene is remarkably sideways.

Jethro Tull's 1968 debut, This Was, is a blues rock album very much in the vein of The Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin (though Zep wouldn't release their first album until a few months later in early '69), and any number of late-'60s British groups of the time. The one thing setting This Was apart from its British peers is the unmistakable presence of Ian Anderson in the mix. Anderson, by most accounts the life blood and central creative force of Jethro Tull, is a talented lyricist, songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist who happens, above all, to be a dedicated flautist known for playing perched just on one leg. So naturally Tull's early blues music is peppered with energetic flute piping, and the effect is a strikingly idiosyncratic, pastoral, almost whimsical flair to the otherwise generic set of songs. It became a key element in Jethro Tull's signature sound, enough so that even decades later, Breaking Bad could have one character excited to learn that another plays flute because it means he can play Jethro Tull, and it makes complete sense why he would think so.

Arguably, Ian Anderson's one-legged fluting sowed the seeds even in this first album for a progressive turn down the line (it was only a year later in 1969 that King Crimson included prominent flute on its genre-defining In the Court of the Crimson King), but prog seemed far from the band's ambitions. In its subsequent albums, Jethro Tull moved away from the blues toward more of a British folk/hard rock fusion, eventually perfecting the alchemy of those genres with their excellent and commercially explosive third and fourth records, Benefit[1] and Aqualung. It's these albums that Jethro Tull's legacy rests more prominently on these days; if you hear the band on your local classic rock radio station (and you probably will), chances are it's going to be one of several smash hits from Aqualung. Not a lot about these albums sounds much like the progressive rock we've heard up to this point in this retrospective—maybe an instrumental interlude here or a baroque flourish there suggest something of the discursive prog spirit, but certainly nothing that would make you mention them in the same breath as, for example, Van der Graaf Generator's wild, bizarre neo-classicism.

The watershed moment, however, came following the release of Aqualung, when critics noticed the way that the record's songs all revolved around the themes of religious hypocrisy and corruption and began proclaiming the LP a concept album—a prog staple. The band apparently had conceived the album as merely a collection of songs and not at all anything with a central, unifying concept and were somewhat amused that critics had read anything like that into the work. So for their next record, their fifth, Ian Anderson decided to have a bit of fun with the critics and show them a real concept album—one so over-the-top and high-concept that it would be unmistakable as a parody of what Anderson saw as an inherently silly concept anyway.

This album would become Thick as a Brick, an album so proggy and conceptual in nature that its entirety consists of just a one-song suite that stretches more than 40 minutes over both sides of the LP. You heard right: one song taking up the entire album. Prog bands like long songs on their albums? Okay, Jethro Tull said, we'll make the longest possible song that the LP format permits. It's the extension of one of prog's foundational values to absurd lengths: not just absurd because of the obvious silliness of a rock song lasting 43 minutes but also for the fact that having a song this long meant that you had to cut out in the middle of the tune when you ran out of room on Side 1 of the record. Duke Ellington had done things like this since the '50s; classical music inherited this problem when trying to figure out how to fit its hours-long compositions onto vinyl recordings. But Jethro Tull is the first rock group to see those issues and then be like, "You know, it'll be so epic it's worth it anyway." And it's a hoot.

It gets better. In setting out to create the concept album to end all concept albums, Ian Anderson comes up with this scenario: The Society for Literary Advancement and Gestation (S.L.A.G.) has held a literary contest for children ages 7 to 16, and 8-year-old Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock has won the prize for his dense, allusive, and sexually precocious epic poem entitled "Thick as a Brick"[2]. The album, then, is this fictitious poem set to music. You can laugh; this is supposed to be hilarious. And it mostly is. Anderson's execution of the concept is both silly and gloriously deadpan in a way that recalls This Is Spinal Tap or Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it's made all the funnier by the album's parody of prog's intricate LP packaging: Thick as a Brick comes wrapped in no less than a full newspaper reporting not just on SLAG's contest but also on equally newsworthy items such as "Mongrel Dog Soils Actor's Foot" and "Roller Skate Champ Passes Through." The level of commitment here is impressive. When I mean full newspaper I mean it: everything from Classifieds to a TV guide to a fully functional crossword puzzle is present. No half measures, I suppose.

In a lot of ways, Thick as a Brick is one of the earliest articulations of the anti-prog sentiments that would eventually energize the punk rock movement later in the '70s. Although critics like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau had been thumbing their noses at progressive rock since its inception (Christgau's searing and elegant D+ review of King Crimson's debut calls the record "ersatz shit"), there hadn't been anything so galling as an actual musician calling out the genre's pretensions. So here's Jethro Tull.

But the darnedest thing about the record is that Thick as a Brick isn't some novelty song or Weird Al parody; it's actually good at the very things it's making fun of. Really good. I'd go so far as to call it the second-best album I've reviewed yet in this project. Jethro Tull adopts the busy bass, keyboards, and irregular time signatures of progressive rock with remarkable proficiency that somehow never manages to lose the hard rock and folk touches that made Jethro Tull distinct to begin with, and of course Anderson's flute takes to prog like a fish to water. Even more impressive is the strong melodicism that runs throughout most of the album; prog sometimes prioritizes exploration over songcraft, which is fine and often even exhilarating, but man, it's great when both are given equal footing. With the exception of the few minutes that open Side 2 of the song (a weird collection of improvisation and soloing that should have been cut), it's a well-structured, intricate suite of hummable tunes that, edited into pieces, might have made for a handful of additional radio hits for Jethro Tull[3].

It's been said that a good parody can't be made without a healthy amount of affection for what you're skewering, and that's clearly what's going on in Thick as a Brick. The rhythms are too tight, the notes too perfect, the parody too specific, to be of a piece with the bitter punk screeds and dismissive reviews that increasingly plagued prog over the course of the '70s. There's sharp criticism in Thick as a Brick, but it's criticism that comes with the gentle touch of a friend, not the salt-sowing of an enemy, an approach made even clearer by the fact that the band's followup, A Passion Play, returns to this album's prog sounds and single-song structure while entirely ditching the parody—a completely serious progressive rock statement. And although subsequent records didn't dip quite so heavily into the genre as before, most of Tull's remaining '70s output has at least a few progressive nods.

Thick as a Brick is great. It's that rare prog album that's both innovative and playful, literate and funny, experimental and tuneful—sort of a "best of both worlds" distillation of Jethro Tull's discography. And it's now frequently ranked among the best prog albums ever. Parody never was received so rapturously.

Until 1973!


1] My personal favorite of the band's career.

2] Although a "last minute rumpus" later disqualifies Bostock due to the fact that four child psychiatrists have evaluated his mind as "seriously unbalanced." The prize is then given to the runner-up, 12-year-old Mary Whiteyard, for her essay on Christian ethics called, "He Died to Save the Little Children."

3] And in fact, the 3-minute edit of the folk-tinged "Really don't mind..." opening does get radio play from time to time.

Mini-Reviews for July 18 - July 24, 2016

Reviews, reviews, reviews. Let me know what you think!

Movies

Only Yesterday (おもひでぽろぽろ) (1991)
It's finally in America, and it's gorgeous. This quiet coming-of-age dramedy is at its best when it's entirely vignette-reliant, the bold, confident animation of the "present" (really, 1982, which would have been much closer to the present had Disney not stubbornly refused to release this gem in the States for so long) contrasting with the quiet, almost water-color tones of our protagonist's memories. We don't get nearly enough coming-of-age films based on inextricably female points of view, which only makes the distinctly female protagonist that much more endearing of a figure here, and every minute of the memories here is pitch perfect in its animation, scripting, and delicate balance of sweet and melancholy. The movie stumbles a bit with trying to stitch together the present-day adventures into a narrative to hang the memories on (complete with a mid-credits ending I don't quite buy), but on the whole, this is the kind of movie I wish American animation would realize is a possibility. Grade: A-

The Red Shoes (1948)
The ballet melodrama, the theatrical acting, the forced ambiguity of the ending of this British classic—I'm not so interested in those things, and at the points when it most focused on them, I had a hard time. But the look of this film is exquisite, lushly colorful and piercingly framed, and by golly, THAT'S what I want to see. If the whole movie had taken the form of the speechless impressionism of the mid-movie "Red Shoes" performance sequence, a fantastically surreal series of shots that evoke not so much ballet but a precursor to David Lynch, I'd have been ready to agree with the historical consensus hailing this a masterpiece. As it is, I get why it's a perennial favorite for hyper-stylizing directors like Brian De Palma. I just wish we had a bit less of the dead-weight plotting. Grade: B+

Whatever Works (2009)
Whatever Works is not a good movie; it's ugly, condescending, and smugly misanthropic in ways that I find absolutely grating, which is all the more a shame, given that writer/director Woody Allen is uniquely positioned to critique just such East-Coast condescension (and has in other, better films). And yet, two things made me laugh: the recurring gag of Larry David's character over-the-top chastisement of his chess students and the brief shot of a concert marquee featuring a rock band apparently named "Anal Sphincter" (Allen's most effectively and hilariously curmudgeonly dig at rock music since Annie Hall). Maybe I'm being overly charitable, but those two bits save this movie from being the absolute worst in Allen's filmography. Grade: C+

Green Room (2015)
The sudden and merciless gore of what turns out to be much more of a horror movie than the thriller advertised is not for the faint of heart. You're unlikely to find a more brutal cross-section of human potential this year. Happily, you're also unlikely to find a more tightly edited, a more deftly acted, a more edge-of-your-seat plotted movie this year; Green Room is great, a sort of mash-up of Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 with Halloween that manages to be better than at least the former. If you can stomach the moments of extreme violence (which is a higher bar to clear than I ever thought it would be going into the movie), this tale of punks vs. Nazis—yes, that's what it's about, and it's great—is every bit of a fantastic cinematic experience. Grade: A

Hollywood Ending (2002)
Its reputation as Allen's absolute worst is way exaggerated (Celebrity resides yet on its ignominious throne). Hollywood Ending is a good movie with a great movie buried within its 114 minutes (and not all that deeply). With the lone exception of the all-time-great Match Point, Woody Allen movies that step past the 100 minute mark invariably lumber across the finish line slack and defeated. Trim 15-20 minutes off this picture and tighten up some of the character work—particularly the stuff surrounding Val's ex-wife and estranged son—and Hollywood Ending sails easily into "very good" territory. Grade: B



Television

Better Off Ted, Season 2 (2009-2010)
While its early cancellation still stings, it's not hard to pick out the show's flaws, especially in this relatively uneven second season. The absurdity feels somewhat formulaic, the one-off guest stars ("hey look, it's that coworker we've always known but will never reference again!") seem forced, and the characterization is never quite fully baked, especially when it comes to Portia de Rossi's Veronica, someone the writers don't ever quite manage to make convincing in her combined iciness and vulnerability. Whether or not these were signs of structural issues or merely growing pains for what was still a very young show remains a mystery, but this much I do know: regardless of its imperfections, Better Off Ted was a fun, idiosyncratic show to its end, and I'm glad to have watched it. Grade: B

BoJack Horseman, Season 3 (2016)
Whether it's TV's saddest comedy or funniest tragedy remains a matter of perspective, I suppose, but two things are as true of this show as they've always been: it's both riotously funny and crushingly, oppressively tragic, often both within the span of minutes. Case in point: a season finale that includes both the show's most despairing plot development yet juxtaposed with a supremely silly Rube Goldberg machine of an incident that pays off a litany of the season's seemingly throwaway gags in one fell swoop. In a way, that's all a bit rote: as off-the-cuff and wild as BoJack Horseman can be in its dual surrealism and abyss-staring philosophizing, there's an increasingly obvious formula at work that doesn't mitigate the searing pain of its depiction of self-destruction and depression (surely the most well-observed treatment of both since Mad Men left the air) but does sort of make the season an exercise of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Which is why the most exciting thing by far about this season is the numerous ways in which the show stretches its legs with formal experimentation. BoJack has always been a series with an eye for animated flair and imagery, but this season is its most conscious effort to expand its visual vocabulary, with stylized flashbacks that use varying frame rates and art direction, montages that play with time dilation and sound, and just a general greater attention to lighting and "camera" placement (or whatever the animation-world equivalent of that is). And that's to say nothing of the show's increasing willingness to try new things with episode form and structure, most notably with season's striking fourth episode, which takes place almost entirely underwater and without dialogue—all of which makes the show, even if slightly less than perfect (one particular mid-season episode involving an abortion feels forced and topical in a way that BoJack usually manages to sidestep), the best animated (and best-animated) TV series out there right now. Grade: A-

Books

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene (2003)
If Greene's purpose here is to present a non-technical, plain language outline of the development of superstring cosmology over the past hundred years, then he's halfway there. The first couple hundred pages of the book contain the best, most accessible explanations of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories of relativity (and, more impressively, the reasoning behind these ideas) that I've ever read. But there's a point—and unfortunately, it's not long after he gets to string theory itself—when Greene seems to throw up his hands and say, "Welp, you made it this far; might as well throw you into the deep end," and out go all the helpful, plain-language explanations and in come all the arcane mathematical proofs. Maybe it's that once you get into string theory, the concepts are just too abstract to get any plainer than he does; maybe it's that enough of string theory remains an untested mystery that it's impossible to get any less technical than this; maybe I'm just dumb. Regardless, something of the magic gets lost, although the first half of the book is unqualified excellence. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for July 11 - July 17, 2016

More reviews. Lots of B-grade entertainment this week. Be sure to tell me what you think in the comments.

Movies

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Richard Linklater has said that Dazed and Confused, his early-career coming-of-age dramedy, is based on painful memories of his own during high school. He's also said that Everybody Wants Some!! (yes, Virginia, there are exclamation points) is the spiritual successor of Dazed, although I think it's important to butt in here to stress that this movie is suspiciously devoid of pain. The hazing, cruising for chicks, the drinking: in Dazed and Confused, these are activities made jagged and cruel by the ruthless dynamics of high school society, whereas in Everybody Wants Some!!, those same elements are just rowdy (but ultimately harmless) college fun. The extent to which that idealization of college jock behavior is irresponsible (especially in the context of the spate of horrifying, criminal, rapey behavior by college athletes that has come to light recently), I'll leave up to the reader. This much is true, though: the movie is fantastically funny, and the fact that it's able to make spending extended amounts of time with a group of people I'd have very little patience for in real life (athletes who explicitly tell us they're only in college for the babes, beer, and baseball) not only tolerable but actually fun (heck, lots of fun) is a marvel of Linklater's characteristically unjudgemental screenwriting. Grade: A-

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
Billy Wilder sex comedy, you had me at "hello." Ah, but it's late-period Billy Wilder sex comedy, which means that it's bitter and misanthropic to a fault—something that's (admittedly) true of even the golden-era Wilder of the '50s, but this one's got the extra kicker of featuring an ending so absurd and character-breaking that the film never really has a chance at being anything other than a curiosity. It's Wilder, so you've still got a generally entertaining film on a moment-by-moment scale. But hang together narratively, tonally, or thematically, this movie does not. Grade: B-

Cassandra's Dream (2007)
I'm always pleased to see Woody Allen in philosophical-thriller-involving-murder mode, even for a movie like this that adds relatively little to the conversation between other, superior features like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point (and unfortunately, Cassandra's proximity to the latter film in Allen's filmography does it no favors). The ending wets the bed, but on the whole, it's a decent, if unremarkable, little movie that at least gestures toward some interesting ideas. It's also a great example of using thoroughly non-Woody-Allen-esque actors to enliven Allen clichés (the casting of Farrell and McGregor is inspired and pays off well). Grade: B

The Invitation (2015)
It takes a long time for The Invitation to reveal itself as a horror movie rather than the psychological drama that it feints toward for so long that maybe I'm spoiling the film by revealing that, by gum, all the characterization and troubled flashbacks are ultimately red-herrings to what ends up being a feature-long buildup to a supremely unsettling final fifteen minutes. The issue is that the psychological drama stuff really isn't very interesting—it's all just boilerplate dealing-with-trauma narrative, and only mediocre execution of it at best. I'm giving this a pass for the ending, though, and especially the final shot, which ranks among some truly great last images in the history of cinematic chillers. Grade: B

Boy & the World (O Menino e o Mundo) (2013)
The rough, hand-drawn look that makes this movie look something like a child's scrapbook is fantastic. In stills especially it's wonderful, even if the technology that animates it does end up being a little too smooth and obviously CG to sustain the illusion. But at the movie's best, it's an evocative, imaginative, slightly abstracted rendering of the typical rural-to-urban coming-of-age story. One sequence involving real-life footage of deforestation in action makes the movie a little more literal than is for its own good, and the story never quite hits that precise balance between melancholy and whimsy that it aims for. Clearly, it's the weakest of the 2015 Best Animated Oscar-nominated features. But last year was an extremely strong showing for that category. Grade: B

Television

Deadwood, Season 2 (2005)
The plot is still the least-interesting thing about the show, and the lush language is still by-far the most interesting. All this means that I'm less engaged by the showy, grim, serial-killer-esque story arc involving newcomer Francis Wolcott (pawn of real-life business threat, George Hearst) and the generically cable-drama domestic-strife arc of Sheriff Bullock with his newly arrived wife, Martha (Anna Gunn, whoo!). No, man, as with Season 1, Deadwood's Season 2 is at its best when it's just hanging out with these loquacious, eloquently smutty characters and luxuriating in the beautiful contours of the dialogue. The show is a love letter to the English language, and as a lover of the language myself, I couldn't be happier to bask in its glow. Grade: A-

Music

Logan Richardson - Shift (2016)
Cool, modern jazz that's not going to blow your mind or anything but that's still pretty solid stuff. The miscalculated "Locked Out of Heaven" cover aside, it's a seamless, energetic, and entrancing trip through some gorgeous soundscapes. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for July 4 - July 10, 2016

This week was bad on pretty much every national metric I can think of, and in the face of lost life and systematic racism and completely dysfunctional national discourse, pop culture doesn't even register on the list of things we should be caring about right now.

And yet.

I keep coming back to Spike Lee's two best films—Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X—and thinking about just how hopeless those two movies should feel and just how emphatically not they both (especially Malcolm X) are. Pop culture is fake: it can poke and prod and moan like ghosts; you can never really hold it in your hand. You finish an album, and you're just left with an empty room. You finish a movie, and you're left with popcorn crumbs and whatever fleeting neurological reaction the moving images have stirred up. But somehow, with those movies, Lee created something real, something that bounces around, alive in our world, shakes us the same as if we'd been hit by a fist or a bowling ball. On paper, they are crushing movies, ones that should destroy, but in the electric air, they fill emptiness. Movies are an illusion, but the very best of them can make ideas that aren't.

That's what we're looking for when we watch, listen, read, whatever: that rare straw-into-gold occurrence, when we've finished a book or a TV series and the dust clears and in front of us on the floor is something staring back at us. Not everything I ran into this week left that, but a few did. They didn't make the black deaths or the police deaths or anything any less awful; they didn't "fix" anything. But we can look at what they gave us and take some measure of comfort in the fact that their mere existence is proof that somewhere, there exists creation where there should be void, meaning where there should be static.

Movies

Finding Dory (2016)
It's Pixar, so you're guaranteed at least two things: jaw-dropping CGI and tears. There's no denying the sheer technical mastery of the images on display: this time, the sand in particular looks amazing, with what seems to be every individual grain animated. Whether or not you find the tears to be cashing in on the film's predecessor, the all-timer Finding Nemo, probably depends on how cynical you are on Pixar's sequel-making process. In this movie, Dory's looking for her parents, who never seemed much of a concern for her previously, and while that's narratively justified (she's basically forgotten them), it does have the whiff of Disney direct-to-DVD-ness. The good news is that the execution of that dubious idea is pretty much flawless: Ellen DeGeneres, whose voice acting continues to be the MVP in the now-franchised Finding movies, breathes into Dory as much pathos and humor as ever, and the host of newcomers—including Ed O'Neill's cranky octopus, Kaitlin Olson's nearsighted whale shark—all deliver on what was also the most enjoyable aspect of Finding Nemo, which is Pixar's ability to create hilarious character types from marine life. In the annals of Pixar sequels, Finding Dory's less emotionally involving than the Toy Story films, less thematically interesting than Monsters University, but significantly funnier than all of the above (not to mention Cars 2)—meaning that it's very good, and you should see it. Grade: A-

Lemonade (2016)
The music video has long flirted with experimental film, but with Lemonade, it's gone full-on art cinema. The results are stunning, teasing out themes from the album by manipulating the iconography of Beyonce-Jay-Z into an inventive, time-hopping, gorgeous hour of breathtaking narrative. The use of poetry in voiceover and the alternating color/b&w palettes alongside slow-motion imagery calls to mind none other than Andrei Tarkovsky (albeit a considerably more foot-tapping version of him). I love Tarkovsky. I love this video. Or movie. Or whatever we're calling it. Grade: A

The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986)
Speaking of Tarkovsky... It seems to be a common theme with me and the man's films where I spend the first 30-60 minutes slightly bored and wondering if this is going to go anywhere, only later to be smacked in the face with the realization that yes, this is going somewhere, and it's going there. The Sacrifice is no different, and man, once you exit that "what's the point" phase, it hits hard. The central "setpiece" (if we can call it that) involving a possible witch and desperate pleas to God and the freakiest sex scene I've ever seen is riveting, as is the provocative ending that hints at that all-time worst cop-out—it was all a dream!—with such utter strangeness and towering horror as to redeem even that hoary trope. The reputation of this film as weaker Tarkovsky isn't entirely off-base (I'd rank it with Solaris near the bottom), but that's only a consequence of just how immaculate the man's filmography is. Grade: A-

Swiss Army Man (2016)
I watch a lot of strange movies, but it wasn't until Swiss Army Man that I realized how few exuberantly strange movies I watch—usually, there's some degree of straight-facedness or horror to the weirdness in something like, say, The Lobster. But golly, Swiss Army Man just has the cinematic equivalent of a big, goofy grin on its face the entire damn time, and it's wonderful. The final fifteen minutes almost topple the whole thing, both in a good way that punctures indie movie romantic tropes and in a bad way that risks making the film's resolution just a bit too literal. But the very final moments return the movie to its delirious weirdness, and it's so much fun. Grade: A-

What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
Its gentle absurdity (as McGuffins go, the world's best egg salad recipe is up there) is good for a few chuckles. A few. The lack of real belly laughs is good for kicking Allen's worst feature, Celebrity, while it's down: Celebrity's even worse than that fumbling, uneven debut! People talk about Woody Allen's "early, funny" ones, but well, I've also found his early, unfunny one (ones, if we're counting the generally terrible What's New Pussycat). Tiger Lily is never out-and-out bad; it's never actually good, either, and moments (the stripping over the disclaimer at the end, for example) trip over the same "hubba-hubba" masculine leering that infects a lot of Hollywood comedies from the era. Grade: C


Television

Better Off Ted, Season 1 (2009)
It's like scientists in a lab (perhaps a Veridian Dynamics lab?) managed to take Scrubs, isolate all the cheerful absurdity and goofy dialogue from the maudlin stuff, and give it a shot of light sci-fi, bestowing us with inspired silliness from a show that was cancelled all too soon. I suspect that if it had aired on NBC during the same period, it might have made it, but getting 2-3 million viewers on the much more profitable ABC was pretty much a death warrant in the last conceivable moment before streaming became a viable threat to the networks. Oh well. At least we got what we did (which includes also a second season which I will be moving on to promptly). Grade: B+


Books

The Children's Home by Charles Lambert (2016)
A dreamy story that at different moments gestures toward being both a fairy tale and a horror story, though never fully committing to either. Some parts move really well—everything we find out about the protagonist's family history is great. Other parts feel underdeveloped and vague, such as pretty much everything about the mysterious children who show up at the protagonist's home. It's alright. Grade: B






Music

U2 - Zooropa (1993)
U2's stranger, more adventurous followup to their career-best Achtung Baby lands about halfway between the misunderstood masterpiece that its biggest cheerleaders claim of it and the dead-end experiment that the band now largely dismisses it as. I'm not the biggest fan of the fuzzy "Numb" or the placeholding "The First Time," but other places, gambles that seem like straight-up disasters on paper pay out immensely: the falsetto-R&B jam "Lemon" is stirring in a sideways way that few U2 songs aspire to, and the entirely Johnny-Cash-sung "The Wanderer" ends up being arguably the best album closer in the band's discography. Grade: A-