Mini-Reviews for August 22 - 28, 2016

Reviews. Read up.

Movies

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
There are good discussions to be had about the extent to which this movie appropriates Eastern culture to mostly Western ends, whether or not the characters are too trope-ish or one-joke, whether the plot is too video-game-ish (I'm far from the first to suggest that this may be the best Legend of Zelda movie we ever get). But when you get right down to it, one two things end up mattering to me in any gut-level way here, and both of them are towering and beautiful: the animation and the ending—the animation because this is hands-down the most intricate and gorgeous stop-motion that I've seen in my life, and the ending because it imbues the whole movie with such fantastic and thematically rich meaning about the nature of just what's going on in this movie that it snaps the preceding hour into sharp focus: a focus that turns the film into one of the most well-observed, provocative, and emotionally resonant commentaries on the power of storytelling in recent memory. I cried. Grade: A

High-Rise (2015)
This weird little dystopian satire involving an apartment building so self-contained that its increasingly Dionysian residents never need venture outside its walls proves something I already knew, which is that director Ben Wheatley makes technically fascinating movies that are a little hard to follow and a lot hard to love. This one's a little less aggressively off-putting than his last, the unapologetically surreal A Field in England, by virtue of having big-name stars (hey there, Mr. Hiddleston) and a satirical message so blunt (we live in a society that causes deep, dysfunctional class divides, y'all) that even when the plot gets a little hazy, there's always that frame to hang the scenes on. It's also his prettiest, most technically stunning movie to date: every single frame could be a groovy poster in your dorm. I'm not in love. But I liked it very much indeed. Grade: A-

Maggie's Plan (2015)
Throughout Maggie's Plan, Maggie (Greta Gerwig) has several plans, few of which are all that collected or grounded in much besides short-sighted impulse. I guess the same could be said about the movie as a whole, which flits through its oddly twisty (for this brand of indie dramedy) plot with as much breezy effervescence as Gerwig herself (who is typically fantastic). The result is a movie that is consistently entertaining all the way through without ever really cohering into anything that makes a lot of sense on a macro level. There's a sneaky sort of absurdity that's able to slip the phrase "ficto-critical anthropologist" alongside goofy sperm-donor hi-jinks and whatever on earth Julianne Moore is doing with that accent. Grade: B

Mind Game (マインド・ゲーム) (2004)
Imagine an animated movie that uses an early, metaphysical premise to eventually rope its protagonist into a slapstick middle half-hour set entirely in the belly of a whale, and you've only just begun to plumb the depths of unadulterated crazy that is Mind Game. Now imagine a movie animated in over a dozen styles that it rapidly switches between, often mid-scene: you're getting closer. The sensibilities of Mind Game are totally juvenile (the defining trait of the film's most prominent female character is that she has very large breasts, which have apparently kept her from realizing her childhood dream of being an Olympic swimmer [how could I make this stuff up?]), but those sensibilities, coupled with the completely gonzo animation, are piled up in such magnitude and intensity that the results toe the line between numbing and sublime. Grade: B+

Two Friends (1986)
Sort of like Memento, but with a friendship instead of murderous revenge. I'm being flippant—Jane Campion's debut feature (which aired on TV, her theatrical review still being three years away) is in turns sweet, poignant, and unapologetically harrowing in the emotional territory it mines. Maybe I'm just a softy, but the backwards-chronological sequencing of the sections makes this film's narrative of a friendship crumbling in reverse have the interesting and crushing effect of having each successively happier moment feel sadder and sadder. As it turns out, a friendship crumbling in reverse is even more painful than seeing one in the regular forward rush. Grade: B+


Music

Beyoncé - Lemonade (2016)
Lemonade is the sort of album we get every once in a while that seems to justify the pop music machine: an intensely collaborative, blockbuster record, the likes of which could never have been made without the piles of dollars and producers Columbia has at its disposal to throw behind its biggest stars, but one that nevertheless feels visionary and personal. This is every bit a commercial, big-label production while still being every bit Beyoncé's album: not just in the sense that she completely owns almost every minute of the record's 45 (I'm still on the fence about how well "Daddy Lessons" works) but also in that this is THE Beyoncé album, the one that's distilled the most potent parts of her identity into an adventurous, definitive statement. The album itself pales in comparison to the "visual album" feature film released alongside the music, and in fact, the record plays a lot like a soundtrack to the movie rather than a distinct work of its own, but as a soundtrack, it's killer. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for August 15 - 21, 2016

More reviews. They're getting longer, too; I'm sorry for the lack of discipline. Anyway, let me know what you think about these movies/books/shows/albums in the comments!

Movies

Spectre (2015)
The action—particularly the Mexico City sequence involving Day-of-the-Dead imagery, an epic tracking shot, and a fistfight in a helicopter doing barrel rolls (yes, every bit as amazing as that sounds)—is some of the best the Bond series has ever formed, which, I mean, thank goodness, because the rest of the movie sure doesn't have much to offer. Spectre is overlong, convoluted, illogical, and hampered by, of all things, relentless series continuity (something that should be at the absolute bottom of any checklist of Bond essentials). And I don't believe for one minute that Léa Seydoux's Dr. Swann is somehow Bond's soulmate, especially, especially in a movie that so tirelessly reminds us that a woman named Vesper Lynd once existed. That action is so good, though. Let's stay positive here. Grade: B-

Midnight Special (2016)
I wasn't prepared for the extent to which this movie is basically E.T. except with a psychic boy whose eyes glow in place of a psychic alien whose finger glows. Of course, being written and directed by Jeff Nichols and not Steven Spielberg (and Melissa Mathison), the film is a bit more elliptical and oblique than E.T. ever was, which is both to its benefit—there's an otherworldliness to Midnight Special that's entrancing—and its detriment—the specific and painful emotional beats that make E.T. on of the great American pictures are largely gone in favor of indie-esque stammers and withheld confessions. That said, the movie is still one of the sharper sci-fi pieces you're likely to see this year, and well-worth your time, great American film or not. Grade: B+

Flirting With Disaster (1996)
Very funny and also very good at achieving something pretty rare in American comedy, which is the ability to have its characters experience growth without having to stop the laughs to do so. Look, I like comedies that turn suddenly and unrepentantly sentimental, and that goes for everything from The Apartment to Superbad. And I like movies that don't really care about characterization at all, at least not to the extent that they're willing to take them seriously enough to develop them beyond joke delivery machines: I'm talking our Dr. Strangloves and Airplane!s. But there's something entirely satisfying and impressive about Flirting with Disaster, which sends multiple characters through complete and compelling arcs without actually halting the funny. Grade: A-

The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) (1939)
A blistering critique of the 1930s French upper class that posits, to amusing effect, that the rich are only interested three things: killing animals, sleeping with others' significant others, and killing those who sleep with their own significant others. That this critique is anything more than a gentle "silly rich people" slap on the wrist isn't clear for most of the film's duration, but when it finally does pull the rug out on the silliness to reveal the utter moral decay beneath, it's startling. I might feel a bit more invested in this movie if I were at all connected to '30s French society and privy to its social nuances (a lot of this satire rings only in theory for me), and I'll be honest that I'm not quite sure what all the "greatest movie of all time" hubbub is about with this one. Still, it's fun and vicious in equal measure and definitely not time I regret spending. Grade: A-

Television

Deadwood, Season 3 (2006)
Prior to seeing the third (and final) season, I'd been mulling over the idea that Deadwood is the only of HBO's trio of great early-2000s drama series (alongside The Sopranos and The Wire) that could be reasonably said to have optimism programmed into its DNA. This is, after all, a show about how a group of criminals, cheaters, and liars managed to slowly but surely purge their baser instincts and form a functional society out of the wilderness and lawlessness of the American West. But alas, that optimism doesn't carry over into Season 3. The difference is, tellingly, the arrival of Big Business (in the form of cutthroat mogul and real-life evil dude George Hearst), which compromises the idealism that informed even the rougher of this show's characters, up to an unintentionally final episode that presents a thoroughly depressing future for the integrity of Deadwood's (and America's, because this is that kind of show) principles. There's an argument to be made that this is altogether too heavy-handed and blunt, and I'd be open to that if the show weren't still so consistently well-written: as always, it's the florid, winding dialogue that shines brightest here. Plus, it's kind of hard to call this too heavy-handed, when the speech is so arcane that it's often a challenge just to keep up with the plot, much less ruminate on its implications. Grade: A-

Books

But What If We're Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman (2016)
I'm only familiar with Klosterman's writing through the handful of pieces I've read of his on the internet, so who's to say if this is a potential critique of most of his work, but here: the biggest strength of Klosterman's speculative nonfiction book is also its biggest liability, that Klosterman seems way more interested in making his book "interesting" than with actual, sound methodology for crafting his ideas. Part of this is baked into the premise: imagining contemporary culture's legacy on the distant future, specifically through thinking through what assumptions we as a culture hold today that will seem ludicrous hundreds of years from now in the same way that Aristotle's theory of gravity (the rock "wants" to be closer to the earth) seems preposterous now. Of course, as Klosterman stressed throughout, the very nature of these sorts of assumptions is that it's nearly impossible for any culture to recognize from the inside, and the progression of human thought has not always moved forward according to the logic of previous ages. This idea that what seems logical now might not be what's logical in the long term frees up Klosterman to make some truly out-there speculation. At its best, it makes for some fascinating discussion that ignores pat, consensus answers, such as when his lengthy chapter on what rock musician/group will come to represent the genre in a thousand years ignores the low-hanging, obvious answer of "The Beatles" until the very end, instead musing on the potential role of Journey and Bob Dylan as avatars of rock to the thirtieth century. At its worst, Klosterman's thoughts come off as dilettante-ish and baseless, as is the case in his chapter on the progress of science that basically finds several dozen pages worth of ways to say that nobody knows if we're reaching the limits of human knowledge. The result in total is that But What If We're Wrong is endlessly readable, provocative, and consistently fascinating without actually meaning all that much in the end. It's the equivalent of listening to a very smart person ramble on a hodge-podge of subjects: Klosterman's a world-class rambler, but it's hard to shake the feeling that he's just kind of making this up as he goes along. Grade: B

Music

Margo Price - Midwest Farmer's Daughter (2016)
When I tell people that I don't like radio country, this is the alternative that I'm looking for: witty, colloquial, personal, heartbroken. The album makes the mistake of leading with its best song by a mile, the world-weary and small-time tragic "Hands of Time," but that's not to say that Price and her endearing mix of cynicism and melancholy sweetness don't consistently deliver great work throughout the album. The only real dud is "Tennessee Song," a bluesy stomper that, despite the home-state pride I deeply appreciate, is the sole moment that verges into the generic. The rest is good stuff, full of personality and sincerity that's likely to win over even country skeptics. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for August 8 - 14, 2016

Read on. Nothing to see up here.

Movies

Miles Ahead (2015)
In true jazz spirit, Miles Ahead takes the component parts of an existing genre—in this case, the biopic—and chops it up in order to spin something new from the pieces. This is, ostensibly, a Miles Davis biopic, and we're certainly treated to a lot of the familiar biopic tropes: copious recreation of Davis records (the film is scored gorgeously by Robert Glasper), through-the-ages snapshots of Davis career highlights, an ill-fated romance. But not only are these moments thread, stream-of-consciousness style, through a 1970s-set framing device that occupies the lion's share of the movie, it's a framing device that very obviously and intentionally is composed of things that never happened. The movie might feint toward providing an origin-story for some of Davis's seminal work, but for about 70% of its runtime, it's mainly concerned with some weird, alternate-universe version of Miles Davis running around with a gun trying to get his session tape for Agharta back from some low-level crooks. It's weird, it's funny, it's a cock-eyed commentary on the myth-making that comes with being a once-in-a-generation musician, and it's full of awesome music. Miles ahead of other biopics, that's for sure. Grade: A-

Cooley High (1975)
As the black answer to American Graffiti, the differences between Cooley High and Lucas's earlier film are stark: it's not just teenaged ennui and go-nowhere small town life on the line here; its the ability of these characters to navigate the balance between their own youthful indiscretions and the hostility of the real world. So when the meandering occasions of the story inevitably pull tight into a plot in the film's final fifteen-ish minutes, the results are dark and Greekly tragic, retribution for things the cast of American Graffiti would have merely gotten fun hi-jinks out of hitting these black, Chicago teens with disproportional force. The film is far from perfect: the comedic first half isn't nearly as effective as the dramedic-to-straight-drama of the film's latter stages, and the female characters are slight enough that it's hard to shake the feeling that the film at least identifies a little with the casual sexism of the male protagonists. But it's an immensely fascinating film nonetheless, and one that hides a magnificent emotional wallop around the corner. Grade: B+

Inside Man (2006)
A meat-and-potatoes thriller given just enough of director Spike Lee's idiosyncratic touch—characters addressing the camera, film stock changes, that part where Denzel Washington appears stationary as the rest of the world moves by—that you don't really care that it's only meat and potatoes you're eating. It's solidly written, convincingly acted, and fun to watch, even if by the end it's never really established itself as anything all that special. Grade: B

Proxy (2013)
This is trash, through and through: Proxy's plot involves obsession, perversion, a fully-explicit C-section of a still birth, a jealous and abusive lesbian lover, and not one but three gory deaths by shotgun. Please note that trash is not necessarily meant to denigrate here: cinema has a rich tradition of trash masterpieces. There's something undeniably transcendent about the sheer depths of old-fashioned, exploitation-style tastelessness that the film plumbs, and you know who you are if this is going to be your jam. For my part, I love a good, twisty, trashy thriller enough to appreciate those aspects here while not quite being gung-ho enough about the exploitation to ignore the painfully stiff acting, showy-for-showiness's sake cinematography, and troubling political subtext. Grade: B-

Television

Superstore, Season 1 (2015-16)
I didn't pick up many new shows during the last TV season, but I'm glad I finally caught up with this one. It's a charming, sharp sitcom, and even though, as a former Kroger employee, I'm maybe uniquely positioned to be captivated by its grocery-store setting (although it's more along the lines of Costco than a true grocery store), I'd also venture to claim that it's got something for everyone, too. The humor is both warm and absurd (the gently funny interactions between the main cast are punctuated by wordless, incongruous footage from around the store, such as a pantsless man in the bathroom) without ever becoming cloying or acidic. The pilot is weak, the only place where the show breaks toward unmitigated and unearned sentiment, but the rest of the season is breezily good, especially a fantastic late-season episode involving the cast spending the night in the store that seems to hint that this show has not just breezy goodness but actual greatness in it. Looking forward to the second season starting this week. Grade: B+

Music

Father John Misty - Fear Fun (2012)
Last year's I Love You, Honeybear is one of the great singer-songwriter albums in recent memory. Fear Fun, the 2012 debut of the Father John Misty persona (Josh Tillman actually has a slew of albums as "himself" before becoming this bearded, social media sage, none of which I have heard), is not. Lacking Honeybear's swooning idealism and romance that conflicted compellingly with Misty's innate irony, Fear Fun is merely ironic, which, especially after "Holy Shit" and "Bored in the USA," just doesn't seem like enough. That's not to say it's bad: Tillman's voice remains like honey, and the psych-country stylings of the music itself are great fun. It's also frequently hilarious, evoking Bob Dylan's sillier absurd moments (one song is even called "Misty's Nightmares 1 & 2," which has to be a direct allusion to the similarly weird and joking "Bob Dylan's Dream" series on Zimmerman's '60s albums); the best of the lot is "Tee Pees 1-12," which begins with the lines, "Well, you took me to the movies; you took me to the dance/You took me to your warehouse tied up in the back of your van." So I guess I can't complain too much, especially considering that this is Honeybear's predecessor. I guess I can forgive an artist some artistic growth. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for August 1 - 7, 2016

School's started again, but I still had time for a few things. Enjoy!

Movies

April and the Extraordinary World (Avril et le Monde truqué) (2015)
This animated steampunk movie spends a bit too many of its opening minutes justifying its steampunk setting, and the character models (apparently based on the work of cartoonist Jacques Tardi) are just slightly too rounded and New Yorker-ish for me to completely love. But the animation is very nice overall, and, what's more, the plot turns some admirably weird corners toward the end that transform the movie from a middling steampunk trope-fest into something original and very, very odd in its final act. Saying anything specific would spoil the sublime surprise of the movie's destination, and I'll say this much more on the negative: even though April's ostensibly dealing with missing parents, the film doesn't have an emotionally resonant bone in its body. But it's a lot of fun regardless. Grade: B+

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)
As with the books, there's a gap between portent and execution: the world-building isn't quite complex enough to justify its epic scope and indie-realist aesthetic, the names and games aren't quite cool enough to justify the rapt Panem media obsession, the social commentary isn't quite astute enough to justify just how serious and dour everything is. But that doesn't change the fact that the series is still hitting the acting out of the park; say what you will about the effects (I will, and they're sub-par) and the story, but the cast is knocking it out of the park. I'm also still rather taken by the frankness of the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" cynicism that the ending adapts from Collins's novel. It's not great, and there's nothing at all here that justifies the choice to tell this story over two movies and four hours. But it's competent. Grade: B-

The Haunting (1963)
This is, I believe, what people call "cheesy." It's acting certainly isn't winning prizes for anything but honey-baked ham. Ham and cheese is delicious, though, and this movie can be delightful fun and even spooky when it's not lingering too much on its characters (because lordy, they're annoying). The movie's an admirable and often successful experiment at making a movie scary entirely on the basis of camera movement and lighting, and even if "the scariest movie ever made" tag is a bit overblown, I'll go to bat for this kind of horror movie any day. Grade: B+

The Thing from Another World (1951)
My familiarity with (and love for) the 1982 remake prior to watching this movie has turned out to be a liability on two counts since 1) Carpenter's The Thing is far superior, and 2) it also has very little in common with this original beyond the Arctic setting and the presence of scientists, dogs, and a malicious space alien. On the rubric of borderline B-movie '50s sci-fi, it's reasonably entertaining, and especially toward the beginning the dialogue is sharp enough that I was willing to believe that Howard Hawks did a little more than just produce. But don't go looking for cool prosthetics or intense paranoia or the alien doing anything more interesting than being just a generically sinister movie monster. Grade: B

Gates of Heaven (1978)
I am not a pet person. But this documentary, a hilarious and sad and utterly unshakeable rumination on death and the metaphysical value we ascribe to the significant nonhuman presences in our lives, is one of the first times I've felt like I've come close to understanding pet people. Errol Morris has rarely been better than in his debut, although thankfully he's been frequently just as good in the nearly forty years since. Grade: A