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
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-
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
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-
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-
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
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
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'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-
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