Sunday, October 30, 2016

Mini-Reviews for October 17 - October 30, 2016

Last weekend got crazy, so I didn't get around to the weekly review. That means this week's is a double-size issue! Woot woot!

Movies

Island of Lost Souls (1932)
Legendarily censored back in the day after its tales of animal vivisection horrified audiences back in the '30s (although it's not nearly as graphic [or great] as the H. G. Wells novel it's based on), Island of Lost Souls is grotesque and lurid in a way that feels transgressive even today. It's the sort of quick, sweaty thriller of which the world could use a lot more, and that's cool. There's nothing particularly great about the movie within the context of that vein of pre-grindhouse shockand in fact, the movie is quite a bit stripped down from the intricacies of the novel's philosophically minded explanations of the animal society. But there's a lot to be said for a simply well-put-together little bit of work like this one. Grade: B+


Deliverance (1972)
In what's a bit of a precedent for last year's The Revenant, here's another hyper-masculine film so convinced of its own importance and so prepared to deliver its themes of violence and civilization vs. nature with a heavy hand that it stifles any emotional response likely to have arisen from its already emotionally limited story. And that's to say nothing of the way it stacks the deck by creating a band of toothless sadists within its Georgian wilderness as an ostensible representation of "savage" rural life that's only given the abstractest of urban counterpoints in the discussions of suburban sprawl and environmental threat. It's not all bad: The Revenant has beautiful cinematography; Deliverance has "Dueling Banjos." And I suppose these themes are interesting in theory. But that's about it. Grade: C+

Taste of Cherry (طعم گيلاس...) (1997)
In something akin to David Bowie's climactic Ziggy Stardust declaration that "You're not alone!", Taste of Cherry ends with one of the most life-affirming fourth-wall breaks in the history of cinema, the triumphant, beautiful coda to what has been, prior to that moment, a methodical and creepingly lonely crawl through one man's quest to find someone to bury him once he's killed himself. Even by 1997, the exposing of the artifice of filmmaking was a tedious celebration of cleverness, but with Taste of Cherry, that break is vitally necessary, and without it, the film isn't much more than a joyless slog through an overly intellectualized premise. With it, thoughit's wonderful. So give me your hand. Grade: A-


Scream 2 (1997)
Scream 2 (and its predecessor, to be honest) mistakes merely identifying tropes for satire, meaning that it's not really doing anything nearly as clever as it wants towe get it, sequels have trends, okay? It's also worth pointing out that in 2016, we've had nearly twenty years of self-aware horror movies to sufficiently identify those tropes in even more detail, so Scream 2 was likely way fresher in '97 than it is now. Also, there's the question of how effective your supposed satire is if you indulge in the same archetypes you're ostensibly making fun of; Scream 2 definitely indulges in some pretty rusty horror archetypes. Sometimes (particularly in the film's extended spook sequence leading up to its unfortunately lackluster finale), that leads to some really nice moments of classical horror; the rest of the time, it's just this kind of awkward amalgam of self-awareness and mediocrity. Grade: B-

Fear(s) of the Dark (Peur(s) du noir) (2008)
I'm not afraid of the dark, and the primary irony of this movie is that it doesn't seem to be particularly afraid of it either. What's so effectively unsettling about the short films in this anthology isn't dark at all but light: the terrifying anticipation of hiding in the dark knowing that you'll have to face whatever grotesquery sits in front of you head-on as soon as someone illuminates the room. It's not the fear of the unknown here; it's the fear of what we might learn, and each film (all gorgeous and twisted works of animation by noted graphic novel designers) works this device masterfully, hinting at first at small, subtle horrors before pulling back to reveal even worse big pictures. Of course, that said, the scariest and best film of the bunch is the final one, a nearly silent ellipsis cloaked in darkness and mystery involving a man snowed into a large, empty house. I'm not afraid of the dark. Grade: A

In Fear (2013)
The premisecouple gets lost on their way to a BnB and drives around in a hedge maze foreveris fine on the metric of high-concept horror. The execution is what's dragging this thing down. Not only is it consistently unscary (its in-car camera wants to feel claustrophobic, but it ends up being a lot more... I dunno, Carpool Karaoke?), but the script also relies on self-evident accidental absurdities that feel more effective in theory than in practicethe movie assumes, for example, that our allegiances with a stranger the couple picks up in the maze will shift in unsettling ways, but it never gives us concrete reasons for feeling along for that ride. What this ends up being is the rare refutation of the "less is more" theory of horror movies: we just need more to go on here. Grade: C+

The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)
Boilerplate found-footage horror, but well-done boilerplate: familiar (to say nothing of the slightly ageist tropes of Scary Old People) but effective scares complete with that accidentally well-framed cinematography that can make found-footage such a great delivery system for subtle chills, even if the only truly chilling moment comes at one particular moment of body horror during its extended underground finale. Nothing that'll blow your mind, but still a fun little diversion. Grade: B





The Conjuring 2 (2016)
As a sequel, it's alright: nothing in 2 comes even close to the brilliant hand-clapping sequence from the first film, although it's got its own share of conceptually nifty scares, especially one in particular involving a shadow and a painting. The worst I can say about the movie is the same as of the first, only magnifiedit's just too dang long, y'all, and, even worse, this time around it's all too easy to see what needed to be cut. Look, Wilson and Farmiga clearly have chemistry as the gently fictionalized versions of the real-life Warren duo (and in fact, one of the movie's best moments is an unexpectedly sweet one between the two at the film's end), but it's clear that anything more than Mulder-Scully-esque "What seems to be the problem here?" professionalism from the two is just dead weight. We spent far too much time with these two outside of the case they are supposed to be solving, and when your horror movie's well over two hours, it's time to start asking yourself what went wrong. When the movie's focused on the meat-and-potatoes possession antics, though, it's still solid (if not particularly legendary) entertainment. Grade: B

Nerve (2016)
If we judged movies by the sheer volume of dolly zooms per minute, Nerve would be an instant classic. But being that film criticism also involves the consideration of plot, characterization, structure, shot composition, and stuff like that, Nerve doesn't quite leap into the modern pantheon. I'll say this much for the visuals: the wild, coked-up depiction of the lightly sci-fi version of social media depicted in the film's world is the best evocation of the subjective experience of the allures of social media I've ever seen in a movie. As for the rest, while the characters are broad and kind of dumb and the plot goes from 10 to 11 in its climax a bit too abruptly, it's overall an entertaining and, if not thoughtful, at least very earnest satire of our media age, and even with its considerable flaws, that's something I can get behind. Grade: B

Books

Gray Mountain by John Grisham (2014)
This is my first John Grisham book, and I've got to feel like this isn't the best place to start: not just with a novel late into his prolific, lengthy career but also one that's self-consciously set in unfamiliar territory (in this case, rural coal-country Appalachia). For much of the narrative, Grisham seems to expect readers to be intrigued just by the various legal and safety hassles coal miners face, as there's not much going on in the plot beside incident after incidentI'm chalking that up to the late date in his career. Eventually something resembling a thriller begins to form, but by that time, at least halfway through the novel, it's far too late to rescue the story and definitely not enough to justify the non-ending of a conclusion. Grisham clearly knows his way around popular fiction, and even as the plot drags, the book is still readable and quick. But just because it's fast doesn't mean it's interesting. Grade: C

Music

Regina Spektor - Remember Us To Life (2016)
Spektor's first album in four years is her best in ten. The latter half of the record in particular is one of the best string of songs that the singer-songwriter has ever had—all this from a relatively sedate tracklist. Regina Spektor acquired a reputation for quirk and Romantic impulses on her breakthrough album Soviet Kitsch, but her trend since that LP has been toward more and more straightforward pop sounds that downplay those elements of her musical personality. It's a direction I've disliked while still enjoying her records since, so one would think that Remember Us To Life, perhaps her most straightforward-sounding album yet, would feel like more of the same. But in a testament to the top-shelf songwriting skills on display here, the album manages to be absolutely transfixing. "Tornadoland" is one of my top-five Spektor songs ever, and it's not even that much better than most of the rest on the disc. Just to put it into perspective. Grade: A-

Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of Love (1987)
Comparing Tunnel of Love to its immediate Springsteen predecessor, Born in the U.S.A., in unfair on multiple levels—not only are the albums doing two completely different things, but one ranks easily within the top 20 rock albums ever cut. Fairness is overrated, though, so let's say this: Tunnel of Love is not among the top 20 rock albums ever. Far more buttoned-up than U.S.A. (a comparison between the two cover arts is instructive), Tunnel finds Bruce in a more introspective, narrative-oriented mood than the political fury of his preceding records. And though that's not as rousing, it suits the Boss pretty well. This is probably the first album where you can really feel Springsteen acknowledging and consciously leaning into his tropes: sad-sack working classers, love-sick idealists—these characters existed prior to Tunnel of Love in abundance across Bruce's discography, but the focus solely on these characters' interior lives feels purposeful and remains effective even as they verge on cliché. Not all the tracks land, but among those that do exist some of Springsteen's most purely human creations. Grade: B+

Monday, October 24, 2016

The Masters Make the Rules: Bob Dylan and Ignoring the Nobel


You may have heard that on October 13 of this year, the Nobel Committee for Literature announced that it would bestow this year's prize on one Robert Zimmerman, alias Bob Dylan.

That was 11 days ago. You may also have heard that Mr. Dylan has since refused to acknowledge his award. Well, "refused" seems like too active of a word; "ignored" may be more accurate. Hardcore ignored. Bob Dylan, it seems, has been screening calls from Sweden as if they were creditors collecting the mortgage and not, you know, granting him one of the most prestigious awards in the world.

The situation is not entirely unprecedented. Jean-Paul Sartre refused the award when he won it in 1964. Albert Einstein took the prize and money but skipped out on the award ceremony in 1922. But at least they acknowledged the fact that they'd won at all and, presumably, answered the Committee's notices. But outside of an opportunistic publication of his complete lyrics (one that was itself removed from Dylan's website recently), Bob's said nary a word, despite the fact that he's played several concerts since the announcement of his win and has been the center of a vicious media frenzy, which has led one member of the Nobel Committee to call him "impolite" and "arrogant."

All of this is hilarious and A+ entertainment for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that Dylan's being "impolite" and "arrogant" was an absolutely predictable outcome; in fact, anyone who knows Bob Dylan's career at all should have expected some major-league trolling from the guy. Thumbing his nose at those who consider themselves important is something that's defined Dylan's mystique since at least his mid-'60s electric turn. The Nobel Committee's sputtering disbelief that one of their laureates wouldn't find their award all that interesting or important bears no little resemblance to the the bevy of befuddled, self-important journalists who try to crack the Dylan enigma in Dont Look Back.

Because let's be honest: as much as the Nobel Prize in Literature is a valuable platform for giving a platform to important but little-known writers, it's also at least as much an instrument of academic elitism: a self-declared authority of taste, a metric for how cultured and/or educated one is ("But of course, as Kertész writes..."). And in fairness to the prize, selecting Dylan this year seems to be, in part, a gesture toward a more egalitarian award by inviting songwriting under the umbrella of poetry. But that doesn't change the fact that the prize is exactly the sort of inflated, arbitrary marker of upper-crustiness that feels great to tear down to size, which is (intentionally or not) exactly what Dylan's accomplishing here. Irreverence is awesome, cathartic, and fun. Seeing the self-assured hilariously robbed of their self-assuredness is a wonderful feeling, and it's exactly why we put principals, bosses, and mayors in the dunk tank and not, I dunno, janitors. Being sardonic and flippant is an essential and powerful equalizing force in a world with few legitimate equalizers.

So I'm rooting for Dylan here.

And yet.

A few of my friends have argued that awarding Dylan the Literature prize makes that prize meaningless by virtue of broadening the definition of "literature" beyond any helpful scope. I disagree with their reasons (you mean songwriting can be literary, too?), but it's with a sort of melancholy reluctant that the more I think about this situation, the more I think they're right in general: Dylan is edging the Nobel Prize in Literature toward meaninglessness. There's an "emperor's new clothes" quality to any award, especially artistic ones: these things are all important because enough people have agreed that they are important. I could invent an award tomorrow for any random thing (The O'Malley Award for Best Knoxville Area Transit Bus Route [debut laureate: Route 24: Inskip]), and if I somehow mustered up enough people worldwide to be passionate about excellence in KAT route service, it could conceivably become as important as the Nobel Prize without any shift in what exactly that prize is. Take away people's respect for the award and it magically becomes no longer important. There's nothing intrinsic to these awards (and heck, even the money Nobel laureates receive has a fiat value that we've all pretty much just agreed exists). So when Bob Dylan acts like Bob Dylan and gives the freakin' Nobel Prize an icy shoulder, he's making the whole enterprise look foolish and petty and reminding us that there's really no such thing as the freakin' Nobel Prize—without our feeding the award's prestige, the Nobel Prize in Literature is just another title someone made up. Does anyone else here notice how wrinkly and pale the emperor is?

And that, as I've already said, is great and hilarious and cool, but it's also kind of, like... sad? As much as these awards can be stuffy and elitist and whatever, there's also something undeniably cozy about everyone in the literary world (and, to a certain extent, the culture at large) upholding this one award as a standard-bearer to be lauded and scrutinized and aspired to. In an age of increasing media accessibility, this sort of aesthetic gate-keeping and sign-posting is pretty useful (given five authors to chose to read, I'm going to chose the Nobel-winning one), not to mention unifying. Awards can only exist where there also exist shared values, and shared values are nice. These are how groups are formed. Without shared values, any community is just a bunch of individuals existing adjacent to one another. At least we could be a bunch of individuals existing adjacent to one another who also happen to all care about the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan's hijinks make even this latter prospect less likely.

This is the casualty of irreverence, I guess.

The trajectory of postmodernism into whatever cultural moment it is we're having right now is democratization, the undermining of traditional demarcations of power and value in order to point out the essential arbitrariness of those demarcations—within the arts, this is the convergences of high and low culture, how traditional trash can mix it up with classical compositions; there's nothing inherently better about traditional literary fiction over popular horror paperbacks, only the different metrics we use to evaluate them. And that's a really, really important thing to do—metaphysics aside (I'm a practicing Christian after all, and my beliefs about God, while not irrelevant, are completely beyond the scope of this post), authorities have a tendency to be exclusionary and oppressive, and they need to be brought down to size. But there's also something to be said for what's lost when we do so. At times, I kinda miss what we're losing (have lost): canons, legends, prestige, the Cinderella parable of toiling away until you're recognized as meaningful. I mean, yeah, those things in abundance can crowd out life, and the smart alecks, satirists, and parodists. I love the smart alecks, satirists, and parodists, too.

But can't we have both?

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Mini-Reviews for October 10 - October 16, 2016

Nothing really to read up here, so move along to the actual reviews. Be sure to comment to let me know what you think.

Movies

Cat People (1942)
When we call a movie "black and white," we normally mean not specifically those colors but "shades of gray." Cat People exists as one of the few black and white movies I've seen that truly feels black and whiteemphasis on the blackand it's glorious. It's a movie of silhouettes, shadows, and darkness, beautiful and frightening to behold in equal measure. It helps that the movie is a "horror" movie, although those scare quotes (ha) are intentional; the movie takes at least half of its slim 70-minute runtime before anything nearing horrific happens, and even then, it never truly loses touch with the domestic drama at its core: a woman who has been trained to fear her own sexual desire coming to grips with the ostensibly reasonable but actually brutish male expectations of femininity. I'd be nice if I could say that thematic ground were dated. Grade: A

Curse of the Cat People (1944)
This movie notoriously has nothing to do with its far superior predecessor (which had its own inaccurate titlegiven the lack of a multitude of individuals turning into cats, shouldn't it have been called Cat Person?), and knowing that beforehand, I was prevented from the typical "Where's the cat person??" gripes that have plagued this movie since its initial box office disappointment. It's not Cat People, and, outside its studio-mandated title, it never tries to be, instead content to be a darkly psychological take on a sort of Christmas wish parable. The whole thing resembles one of those gentle but nonetheless spooky episodes of The Twilight Zone, and as that, it's pretty good. Let's say nothing more of its success as a proper sequel. Grade: B

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016)
Striking a tone that's much closer to the dramedy of M*A*S*H than anything like the biting neo-liberal satire I was expecting from the sheer pedigree of Tina Fey (who, as it turns out, is only acting and producing here, not writing), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is almost something specialthe ending scenes especially gesture toward a hard-nosed, character-based look at real world events through a poignantly black sense of comedy. The issue is the movie before those final scenes, which is never outrightly "bad" but also needs a much tighter editing job, a sharper and more consistent screenplay, or both. As it is, the movie is mildly amusing and mildly moving, but its potential, had it managed to get those character beats straight and its plot aligned, is much greater. Grade: B-

Triangle (2009)
It's a fool's errand asking for complete logical coherence in time travel movies. So on the one hand, it's not not really a problem that Triangle, a particularly (and deliciously) twisty entry in the time-travel genre, doesn't ultimately make enough sense to hold together its complex machinations. Then again, it's a movie that seems a little too proud of its own cleverness to let it completely off the hook. In a touch seemingly inspired by the terrific Spanish time travel flick Timecrimes, Triangle takes place over one large, tangled setpiece that loops back over itself again and again, but whereas Timecrimes makes this work through relentlessly mechanical devotion to continuity, Triangle aims for something much meaner and more profound and kind of whiffs. It's great fun along the way, though. Grade: B

Witching & Bitching (Las brujas de Zugarramurdi) (2013)
With a film like this, where women are literally witches looking to overthrow the male population of the earth, several questions pop immediately to mind, but one above all: just how serious is this? Oh, to be sure, this is a comedy, and an often very funny one at thatthe movie opens with a man dressed as Jesus robbing a bank, and the uproariously incongruous imagery only ratchets up from there; the dialogue is also frequently hilarious, as are several of the gross-out gags. So no, it's definitely not a serious movie in the sense of the serious/funny dichotomy. What I'm wondering is just how sincerely we're supposed to take the supposed ideology on display; the misogyny on display here is of such an extreme and grotesque measure that it's hard to believe that the movie isn't meant to be taken as a satire of misogyny. Measuring sincerity is frequently an issue when it comes to satire, so I've found that a good rule of thumb for determining if something is satirical or not is to think whether or not the film would look any different if it were legitimately advocating the ideas it's supposedly satirizing. In the case of Witching & Bitching... not looking good. Let's just give it points for manic energy and enthusiastic film style, okay? Because if this is a satire, it's a pretty ineffective one. Grade: C+

Television

Stranger Things, Season 1 (2016)
The issue with Stranger Things is not so much that, as some have suggested, it's merely a cobbling together of allusions and nostalgia (although allusions to the likes of Poltergeist, E.T., and especially Stephen King are rampant, and, to Stranger Things's credit, often handled cleverly). No, my problem here is that the series pays tribute to that whole body of '80s coming-of-age sci-fi with either disinterest or misunderstanding of those works' central emotional motifs of loneliness, abandonment, and outsider status. I mean, it definitely gestures toward those ideas, and some of the show's most successful moments are when those land sincerely: the scenes involving the young male protagonists' games of Dungeons & Dragonsthat specific brand of rambunctious camaraderie in a shared fringe interest—are among the series' warmest, and the scant moments with Barb, a shining star and by a large margin my favorite character in the show, capture acutely the adolescent pain and isolation that comes from the realization that your friends are less interested in you than they used to be. But those moments comprise not even enough screen time to fill out a brisk feature-length film, to say nothing of the multiple feature lengths that make up the eight episodes of Stranger Things, and even among those moments, nothing comes close to the utter loneliness that defines at least half of E.T. or even the similarly minded Super 8 from a few years back or (since this series really is relentless in its devotion to Stephen King, both in storytelling style and content) the elegiac notes of temporary friendship in "The Body"/Stand By Me or the desperate need for safe spaces in the light of peer antagonism in IT. Ultimately, the lack of real understanding in dealing with its outsiders would be alright if it were replaced by some other emotions to latch onto, but the fact that I'm fixating on Stranger Things's failure to find that outsider pain points to a larger problem in the show, which is that its adolescent characters, outsider or not, are not afforded enough characterization to grow beyond pleasantly bland personality types. There's just not a lot going on with them, which is maybe appropriate considering the long shadow The Goonies casts on the series (another work that fails to imbue its adolescent characters with much by way of real characterization), but come on, we can expect better things than The Goonies from our acclaimed Netflix series. The adult characters fare a little better: Winona Ryder's grieving mother and David Harbour's police chief are both vibrant and interesting characters that experience actual arcs; as Stephen King homage, they're also the best evocations of the particularly Kingian character tropes that define so much of his work: the angry but ultimately heroic male, the stiff-lipped female on the edge of madness, etc. The show's plot itself does alright, too, being creepy enough to radiate some nice, spooky vibes before its ultimate "The End?" conclusion. So it's not all bad. In fact, it's a lot of good, too. Stranger Things is a generally diverting, entertaining watch, which on a normal rubric would be fine. But that's the risk with nostalgia-based entertainment: "fine" is hardly a match for childhood obsessions. Grade: B-

Books

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Eric Larson (2003)
I'm still not sure how successful this nonfiction book is at resolving its central, often contradictory narratives: one of the rather detailed story of the logistical and bureaucratic hoops involved in the formation of the 1983 Chicago World's Fair, the other recounting the criminal life of Herman Mudgett, alias Henry Howard Holmes, noted serial killer. Both stories are absolutely true, both of them involve outrageous personalities and stranger-than-fiction events, and neither have much to do with each other besides a confluence of setting (Holmes lived and killed in Chicago during the Fair) and thematic echoes. One way to view this is the cynical way, which is to say that Larson uses the sensational details of the serial killing to Trojan-horse in a book about the much drier Chicago World's Fair formation; another (the way I'm choosing) is to view these stories as two sides of the same coin: to imply that the same manic, slightly deceptive impulses that inspired some of America's most outsized achievements are, when pushed just a bit further, also what motivates a serial killer. Either way, it's super entertaining, if maybe a bit too oblique and ambitious of a point to quite land. Grade: B+

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Mini-Reviews for October 3 - October 9, 2016

Fall break has begun. Praise the Lord. It's also firmly October, which means it's spooky movie season. Good times all around!

Movies

Dont Look Back (1967)
With the benefit of several decades of hindsight and Dylan canonization, it's kind of hard to imagine this documentary not turning out great: fly-on-the-wall footage of Robert Zimmerman in 1965, at his most artistically vital, at his most culturally relevant, at his most personally prismatic, at his most publicly surreal (Interviewer: "What's your real message?"; Dylan: "Keep a good head and always carry a lightbulb."). In '65, that inevitable greatness was perhaps less apparent; by '67, when the movie was released, it seemed a surer shotno looking back indeed. Grade: A-



A Bigger Splash (2015)
The movie has an acute case of mistaking "interesting" for "good," one that it's ultimately unable to shake. in general, the characters are icy and perverse in ways that are ultimately more dull than fun, and the plot spends way too much time foreshadowing its conflicts instead of actually letting them play out. Still, there are moments: a late-film music cue involving a Harry Nilsson tune is top-notch music cue-ery, and the phenomenal stable of actors (Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnsonto name a few) are having an absolute field day with the low-frequency psychopathy of their characters, something that alone almost saves the movie. Almost. Grade: B-


Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
There is a sequence of about twenty minutes, beginning at the opening credits and lasting up until the end of the first "synchronized hypnotism" session, when The Heretic is a good movie: tense, off-kilter, even mesmerizing. Then it just gets boring, man. Super boring. Blame it on the film's decision to focus on increasingly convoluted mythology surrounding Regan's demon, because by the end, so little of this movie makes sense that it's hard to even care when we get to the actual exorcism part (which takes forever to get to, by the waycome on, y'all, it's in the title!). The movie has a reputation for being one of the worst ever made, and, if only for that first twenty minutes alone, it doesn't deserve quite that ignominy. But the movie itself isn't doing its reputation any favors either. Grade: C

House (ハウス) (1977)
Japanese film company Toho approached experimental filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi with the task of creating the Japanese response to Jaws. This was Toho's first mistake. Their second was somehow believing that the Japanese Jaws would involve not a killer shark but a very haunted house. Lucky for all us people not staking money on the expectation that the movie will be anything like Jaws, both of these mistakes play into exactly what makes this bonkers filmand I do mean bonkersso great. Crafted with an experimental impulse that's both aggressive and playful to such an extreme extent that logic and, you know, story coherence cease to matter, House is one of the most deliriously insane movies I've ever seen, equal parts hilarious, meta-textual, and, against all odds, kind of scary anyway. Oh, and the film ended up being a financial success, too, so everyone, surrealists and Jaws-hopefuls alike, can go home happy. Grade: A

The Body Snatcher (1945)
A delicious morsel of vintage spookiness. Apparently based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story (which I have not read), The Body Snatcher deals with a 19th-century doctor who must resort to unsavory means of procuring cadavers for dissection when the flow from the morgue turns slow. This is something that happened more commonly than you'd think in real life (even as late as the early 20th century), and the scenario is rendered about as grisly and sensuous as you're likely to get in 1945. Director Robert Wise and cinematographer Robert De Grasse craft each shot in gorgeous black and white and hang it before the paint is dry, leaving the entire film dripping with an atmosphere that plays wonderfully into the hands of a delightful post-Mummy Bela Lugosi. It's great fun and can go toe-to-toe with anything Universal did in the same period. Grade: B+

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
That lurid title is vintage B-movie glory, but much to my surprise (and then disappointment and then delight), the movie itself turns out to be an incognito Gothic romance of the Jane Eyre vintage, complete with ghostly former wives and Byronic men. It's all atmospheric and evocatively filmed (the repeated imagery of the statue of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows haunts the film and is a consistent visual highlight) enough that by the film's climactic euthanasia, it's less sensational and more tragic than it should have any right to be. I'm saying "euthanasia" here, but another unexpected delight of the movie is just how adamant it is in its maintaining of ambiguity regarding voodoo's role in the events (minor spoilers: it may or may not be responsible for everything that happens). The film's greatest liabilities are its actors, who are nowhere near up to the task of carrying the melodrama into the either brooding profundity or high camp that it require. It's a steep weakness in the movie, and one that costs it greatness by virtue of letting tons of possibly incredible moments land as merely good. But it's still always a treat to see a movie with such stealthy ambition emerge from the B-movie vault, imperfections and all. Grade: B+

Music

Greys - Outer Heaven (2016)
It's emo-tinged indie punk. Maybe this is just me, but I'm getting a little tired of emo-tinged indiewe're pretty firmly within an emo revival of sorts, and I'm ready for it to have run its course. So the parts of Outer Heaven that lean a little more heavily in the emo and indie directions ("Cruelty," "No Star," parts of "Complaint Rock") leave me cold. The good news is that the album also has a foot very firmly planted on noise-rock ground, and the noisier and more raucous the music gets, the better it sounds, which is why the last four songs, which double down on the feedback, are the record's best. It's still not going to be blowing anyone's mind, but it's good listening regardless. Grade: B

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Mini-Reviews for September 26 - October 2, 2016

Got around to lots of stuff this week! Woohoo!

Movies

Sully (2016)
Sully's biggest problem is how obviously better it could have been: a tense "inspired" by a true story chamber drama surrounding the (somewhat embellished in the film) investigation surrounding the Hudson River landing, a psychological portrait of the mental trauma faced by our pilot in the throes of both PTSD and self-doubt despite his ostensible success, a critique of the media tendency to anoint singular "great men" in situations where whole teams of people contributed to the heroismall of these would have been more interesting narratives for the film to have wholly embraced. Sully's second-biggest problem is that it's all those things at once, feinting toward lots of potential dramatic ideas without ever really sinking its teeth into one. The result is a somewhat frustrating movie whose structure and tone are scattered across the screen like debris. And yet, thanks to an excellent performance by Tom Hanks and some fantastic staging and attention-to-detail in the plane scenes, Sully manages to be effective enough anyhow. But it's a close one. Grade: B

Weiner (2016)
When directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg began this fly-on-the-wall documentary project, I suspect they would have been content to capture the honest struggle of former Congressman Anthony Weiner to build a successful NYC mayoral campaign from the ashes of his obliterated-by-sexting-scandal political career. What they gotoh my word, what they got!is a horrifying twist out of only the wickedest of documentarian daydreams: capturing the gutted reactions of the Weiner family and staff as a new Weiner sexting scandal breaks right in front of the cameras. "Why are you letting us film this?" one of the filmmakers asks at one point, and that's certainly the question most of this documentary begs; the ethics of publishing this project are certainly murky enough that even Weiner's flagrant (and possibly sociopathic) arrogance doesn't make this an easy watch, and as a whole, the project ends up being the purest distillation of the UK's version of The Office ever captured in real life, with all the tragicomic (and mostly tragic) pathos that goes with that. Few movie experiences have made me more pained from cringing. But golly, it's riveting. Grade: A-

The Innocents (Les Innocentes) (2016)
The sheer fact of The Innocents being, hands down, the most gorgeously photographed movie I've seen all year would be enough to give me a great affection for it: the repeated visual motif of patchy, white snow giving stark outline to darker objectsbe they trees, crumbling buildings, or pregnant nuns (yes)is an evocative, breathtaking sight that never grows thin, and the real triumph is the film's ability to make winter dimness actually look fantastic and interesting, which is a good thing, since much of the movie seems to have been filmed outdoors in late-afternoon winter light. It's even more exciting that the actual content of movie almost manages to match the visual splendor. This riveting true story of a Polish convent recovering from the Soviet pillaging at the end of WWII is full of emotional weight and powerful thematic grounds, although trickily so for the latter: the movie feints toward tackling the Problem of Evil and the existence of God, but the true heart of the movie is rooted much smaller, ultimately focusing on that existential human ability to imbue events with meaning rather than have those events' meaning be forced up them, and the unlikely and wholly earned happy ending here is the perfect microcosm of this idea. The movie isn't perfect: out side of one or two, the nuns are a bit too anonymous and lacking personality, and the protagonist, a French Red Cross worker, is a bit of a blandly competent audience surrogate. But those are small concerns in the context of the towering success of the rest of the film. Grade: A-

Back to the Future Part II (1989)
I've revisited the iconic original about as much as you would expect of a young, male movie nerd, but somehow, I'd never gotten around to either of its sequels. Color me pleasantly surprised: not that I thought Part II would be terrible, but I was not expecting the creative energy that's on display here. It's not a classic on the magnitude of the originalthe humor is more that of gentle chuckles than guffaws, and the whole Jennifer thing is just weird (even the filmmakers have admitted as such, finding themselves written into a corner by her having stepped into the Delorean in the final scene of Part I). But Part II resides in that small pantheon of time travel stories that takes full advantage of the loopiness of the time travel mechanic without sentencing the plot to incoherent nonsense; the movie is famous for its 2015 sequence, but the real pleasure here is how complexly yet cogently the plot leaps all over the timeline from the original film, recontextualizing familiar moments in new and fun ways. I wonder how Part III will stack up... Grade: B+

Back to the Future Part III (1990)
After about ten minutes of that inventive use of time travel dynamics that made Part II so charming, Part III settles into a much more sedate structure more akin to the original's "Let's travel to this one specific time period and nowhere else so we don't have to have too many sets" approach, which is a slight disappointment. Emphasis on slightit's still an enjoyable, smartly scripted caper that puts it only barely in little sibling status to the other two parts. Its flaws are relatively small, the worst of which being that the humor is even more in the gentle chuckle vein than before (possibly even verging on the smiling-and-shaking-head variety) and that I can't decide if its tendency to remake the same scenes in every movie (e.g. Marty wakes up in a bed being cared for by a female relative, thinks his time traveling has been a dream) is an agreeable playfulness with series tropes or an exercise in diminishing returns. The weakest of the three, no doubt. But not anything that'll make you want to travel back, Delorean-style, to tell yourself to save your time. Grade: B

Television

O.J.: Made in America (2016)
I wasn't old enough to care about the O.J. Simpson trial when it was happening, and as far as I'm concerned, these sorts of high-profile media-obsessed events are best viewed through the lens of hindsight anyway. And man, does this ESPN-produced documentary miniseries take the benefit of hindsight and runs with it, giving, in its five episodes and nearly eight-hour runtime, the most meticulously researched, nuanced treatment of the situation that the O.J. trial is likely to ever see. Beginning with Simpson's early life in poverty and the L.A. police brutality and resulting riots and not ending until Simpsons jail sentence ten years ago, Made in America tackles a scope that might have led to information overload and tedious slogging through archival footage if the whole thing weren't so rhetorically coherent: the series follows an impressive number of parallel threads (to name a few: the history of the LAPD, the effects of the LAPD's brutal actions on African-American communities, O.J. Simpson's complicated relationship with his own racial identity, the interplay of power and subservience in celebrity) and every interview, statistic, and mundane fact in the entire series clearly and purposefully advances the narrative of at least one of these threads, culminating in the documentary's final and overarching judgmentnot on the trial itself (it lets its excellent roster of interviewees [including, most notably, Simpson's prosecutor and a lawyer from the Cochran firm] speak for themselves on that one)of O.J. Simpson as a uniquely American tragic hero of the same magnitude as King Lear or (more likely) Macbeth. And, given the sensational nature of the trial itself, tragedy is probably the most responsible way to depict these events; the luridness is still there, but it's shown with an almost mournful demeanor, free from as much leering and opportunism as is possible in this sort of scenario. It's a searing treatise on media, celebrity, power, and, above all, American race relations, and the deeply tragic implication underpinning ever moment of the series is that this is not just twenty years ago; it's today. Grade: A

Music

Wilco - Schmilco (2016)
The easy thing to do with Wilco releases at this stage is to embrace the noisy, experimental work and dismiss the quieter, rootsier output: hence the critical adoration of The Whole Love and last year's Star Wars and the shrugs in response to records like Sky Blue Sky and now Schmilco. Don't get me wrong: I definitely prefer Star Wars to Schmilco. But I also think it's a mistake to tune out as soon as we hear the acoustic guitars. In a lot of ways, Schmilco is a sister record to Star Wars, sporting that same tossed-off, ragged vibe that positions them somewhere between an indie-rock version of the Grateful Dead and Neil Young, only this time in the context of Wilco's quieter half. The experimentation is just a little sneakier this time around: the unplugged jam "Common Sense" and the almost ambient outro to "Quarters" are just as exploratory as anything on Star Wars, just through the vehicle of soft guitar picking rather than noise rock. And let's not forget that, experimentation aside, Wilco has always been great at just crafting fine songs"If I Ever Was a Child," "Cry All Day," and "We Aren't the World (Safety Girl)" are all vintage Tweedy songwriting and great songs in their own right. It's not Wilco's best, and the second half of the album does have a bit more slack passages than is good for it (it's not a great sign that, even at a slight 36 minutes, the album could still stand to be shorter). But it's nowhere near bad or boring. Grade: B