Movies
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 shot—no looking back indeed. Grade: A-
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 Johnson—to 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-
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 way—come 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
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 film—and I do mean bonkers—so 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
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+
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
It's emo-tinged indie punk. Maybe this is just me, but I'm getting a little tired of emo-tinged indie—we'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
No comments:
Post a Comment