Movies
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
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-
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
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+
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
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-
No comments:
Post a Comment