Movies
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 heroism—all 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
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 got—oh 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 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 objects—be 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-
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 original—the 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+
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 slight—it'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
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 judgment—not 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
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
BTTF: yes, I agree by the time the 3rd sequel comes around it loses its appeal a little. I prefer the original and part 2 most of all.
ReplyDeleteThe original is, in my mind, in a whole other ballpark than its sequels, but Part II at least still has that energy I was talking about. Part III is just fine.
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