Movies
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 white—emphasis on the black—and 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
This movie notoriously has nothing to do with its far superior predecessor (which had its own inaccurate title—given 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
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 special—the 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-
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
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 that—the 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
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 & Dragons—that 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
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+
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