Movies
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-
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-
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
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
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
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
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+
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