Movies
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-
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-
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
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+
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+
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
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'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
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
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