Also of note, though, is that I read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World in Me, which is a book that practically begs discussion but is also so personal and live-wire that it feels like an ill-fit for a traditional blurb-with-grade book review. But if you want to talk about that one, too, please do!
Movies
Popstar is a strange beast in that it's both a satiric mockumentary of a very Justin Bieber-like character and a showcase for a typical (and typically hilarious) batch of Lonely Island songs, resulting in the plot requiring this clueless rube to have risen to pop superstardom by performing accidentally hilarious Lonely Island song. Which doesn't quite make sense, even in this film's reality. The obvious forebear here is This Is Spinal Tap, a movie which manages the extremely difficult task of making the music both side-splittingly funny while also believably outgrown from these particular musicians in these specific circumstances. Popstar doesn't ever do this, and, to its credit, it never pretends to. The lack of a rigorous reality doesn't change the fact that the movie is, after all, very funny. Grade: B+
In ten (heck, maybe even five) years' time, Lo and Behold, the newest Werner Herzog documentary, may look prophetic; there's also just as much chance that it'll look as goofy as some of the predictive sci-fi from the '50s does now. Herzog's making a gamble by making a movie full of people analyzing and prognosticating something as volatile and rapidly evolving as the internet. Even now, for someone as ignorant of cutting-edge technology as myself, it's hard to sort the kooks from the genuine experts among Herzog's colorful menagerie of interview subjects. Do we face a future of isolation within an augmented reality? Will a solar flare fling our internet-oriented society into an apocalyptic hellscape? I don't even know if its silly or prudent to contemplate these questions. Of course, Herzog has an out for the prospective silliness, though: as always, he's at least as much interested in talking to vibrant and off-beat personalities as he is the actual content of his films, and Lo and Behold certainly doesn't skimp on that angle, filled to the brim with excited and slightly unhinged talking heads that range from the comically gruff early-internet pioneers to the world's leading hacker. In fact, this large cast presents the film's largest flaw, which is that each of these people are so intriguing that I wish Herzog had maybe adopted a less panoramic ambition (the movie is divided into a handful of small, titled sections) and instead focused more in-depth on one of these people, Grizzly Man-style. As it is, the film is a whirlwind trip through some very interesting ideas that maybe don't get the depth they warrant. I, for one, would have watched a feature-length doc on the hacker alone. Still, as food-for-thought documentaries go, the one we got is pretty good. Grade: B+
Writer/director David Duchovny is a better writer than director, and he's not a great writer to begin with. So what you've got here is an inconsistently written film full of shots and directorial flourishes that try their hardest to imbue the film with cinematic personality but only manage to call attention to Duchovny's clumsy touch with a camera. But, as evidenced by the Duchovny-scripted X-Files episodes (particularly the baseball/E.T. fantasy, "The Unnatural," which feels in a weird way like this movie's precedent), the guy can also have a great ear for nostalgia and sentiment, which results in some absolutely lovely coming-of-age plotting and tender emotional beats, bolstered by a great performance by a young Anton Yelchin (R.I.P.). A lot of this movie doesn't work at all—the framing device starring Duchovny himself goes on for far too long and, at the end, dials back so hard some of the actual climax's emotions that it seems like the movie is ashamed of its own tragedy, and then we're treated to a scene of Robin Williams' mentally handicapped character explaining the movie's themes (urg...). But a lot of it does, and when it works, it works very well. Call it a draw. Grade: B-
It's a testament to the electricity of Christian Bale's performance that this movie doesn't become tedious. The satire is thuddingly obvious—those white-collar financial dudes sure are brutal, aren't they?—until the movie's final act, when it morphs into something different and almost poignant (again, still largely thanks to Bale's performance), and the plotting, even in the end, is straightforward and repetitive without always putting that repetition to analytical use. More than most other movies I can think of, American Psycho works by virtue of individually phenomenal scenes rather than any sort of greater whole. But those scenes are awesome. Do you like Huey Lewis & the News? Not really, but I love watching Christian Bale talk about them. Grade: B+
Two movies into his filmography, and I'm still not quite on director Nicolas Roeg's wavelength, in that many people seem to think his movies are the best things ever whereas I've just been merely coolly impressed. As with Don't Look Now (the other one I've seen), Walkabout teeters on the edge of full-on experimental film with tons of unconventional freeze-frames, cross-cutting, and symbolic imagery. This time, however, its relatively conventional story—girl and her brother must survive in the Australian wilderness—pulls it back from that precipice a few paces, and by the end of the movie, we're in comfortable enough filmmaking territory that Roeg sees fit to include a poem in voiceover over the film's final shots. An engaging, striking movie if not one to go straight to the record books. Grade: A-
Music
This is only the second Newsom I've heard, the other being last year's superb Divers, with which it's a fascinating companion. That same lyrical density that, I'm assuming, stretches throughout Newsom's whole career highlights this whole record, but gone are Divers's melodic sensibilities and intricately arranged atmostpherics, replaced instead by labyrinthine, almost classical instrumentation, fronted by Newsom's mesmerizing harp, that winds these songs around themselves in fantastic mazes of narrative, both lyrical and musical. Oh yeah, and all the songs are over 7 minutes long—this record's pretty much got my name on it. Grade: A-
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