Movies
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 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 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+
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
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
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
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
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
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