Movies
If it's hyperbolic to declare The Edge of Seventeen one of the best coming-of-age films of all time (maybe I should wait to come off the theatrical high before getting too superlative), there's no doubt that it's at least one of the best coming-of-age films of the new millennium and definitely one of the best movies, period, of 2016. Anchored by the phenomenally entertaining and layered performance of Hailee Steinfeld (remember how good she was in True Grit? Would you believe she's even better here?), the movie is the rare youth-centric one that doesn't shy away from complex emotional territory that doesn't fit within the usual teen tropes or veer toward easy resolution. The Edge of Seventeen brings each one of its characters—but particularly the principal trio of Steinfeld's Nadine, her brother, and her mother—to gasping, bleeding life. The phenomenally sharp writing of Kelly Fremon Craig's screenplay gives these characters both tenderness and bite, sketching them out with an eye observant enough to create humans hard to like but difficult not to love. I really can't stress this enough: The Edge of Seventeen is vital. It's funny. It's nuanced. It's brave enough to look adolescence in the eye and see the selfish, scared, wounded person looking back—not the convenient type of scared presented in teen melodramas, but the real, claustrophobic, utterly isolating panic that can only come from the dread of having to live the rest of your life with yourself. Grade: A
The fact that I merely liked Taika Waititi's vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows puts me kind of in the minority among people of my film-going persuasion, who tend to love it relentlessly. My liking this movie on about the same level as Shadows probably does the opposite for me within that same crowd, but oh well. It's a film that manages to find fresh energy and heart in a thoroughly "mid-2000s indie-land" premise, largely due to the excellent (and hilarious) dialogue and cracker-jack editing—exposing, if anything, that the reason those indie tropes became musty to begin with had way more to do with a general passivity in filmmaking than anything with the tropes themselves. Long story short, Wilderpeople's good and, to boot, has the funniest boar disembowelment in cinema history. Grade: B+
By my money, Ti West is one of the best working horror directors out there these days. The Roost is nowhere near his best, in large part due to the general looseness of the screenplay—a disappointment, since sharp dialogue and pacing tend to be givens in a Ti West feature. However, it's not all a wash; in fact, I give the movie huge props for just how meticulously and convincingly it recreates the atmosphere and aesthetic of '70s/'80s drive-in horror. The movie isn't great, but its look is. Grade: B
Turning the Twenty One quiz show scandal into a searing inquisition into the nature of TV—and, relevant even now (especially now), the role of truth in a medium that most often styles itself as entertainment—must have been relatively easy. Have you read up on the Twenty One quiz show scandal? The themes pretty much develop themselves! Turning it into television's All the President's Men must have been a bit harder, though, because All the President's Men is a fantastic movie. Luckily, so is this one. Grade: A-
Television
As a character study (and intermittently, that is exactly what You're the Worst wants to be), it's barely successful; each character has his or her own voice that remains relatively consistent, but the success of the growth of those characters remains frustratingly scattershot. Character moments that pierce deep (Edgar in particular gets a series-best episode focusing on his PTSD) are followed up with either indifference or absurdity (the PTSD thread becomes considerably frayed by the season's end). And that's just with the characters who work—the less said about the maelstrom of incoherence that is Lindsay, the better. So yeah. Character stuff: about the same as always. As a straightforward laughs-per-minute comedy, though, You're the Worst has never been better. The dialogue is as live-wire and audacious as it's ever been, and an increased attention to episode structure leads to some fantastic half-hour-comedy construction. So I guess ask yourself what you want out of the show: plot-wise, character-wise, it's a mess. Laugh-wise, though: top-notch. Grade: B
Let's make this clear up front: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life does, for the most part, a way better job at evoking the tone, texture, and emotional resonance of its original series than any ten-years-later revival of a beloved TV show can ever fairly be expected to do. Lorelei and Rory gab and quip, Luke grumbles and wears a backwards baseball cap, Emily snipes and steals your heart, Kirk engages in half-baked hijinks, and Stars Hollow is as lovably off-beat as ever. That the particular version of all of these things bears a closer resemblance to the later, pricklier seasons of the original Gilmore Girls run than it does the quieter early years, though, is the first in a litany of caveats that must come up when recommending this to series faithfuls. Some of this is good: the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons of the original series (let us never mention what came after) showed showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino diving into more complex emotional territory that enriched the characters and helped the show tackle subjects with more nuance than it sometimes could in those earlier seasons, and that nuance and fearless thorniness remains in this revival. Case in point: Emily Gilmore, the stealth best character of the original series and the one who benefits most from the later seasons' less cuddly approach, again gets the best material here. The strongest emotional through-line here is the way the show writes the passing of Edward Herrmann into the narrative—Richard Gilmore has died as well, and a good chunk of A Year in the Life involves the family's grieving, of which Emily takes front and center. It's beautifully done and some of the best work the show has done, ever. Of course, a lot of the later seasons' nuance turned to frustration and soapy twists that undercut a lot of the show's charm—the development of Rory into someone who has been so validated early in life that she has a difficult time coping with freedom and failure in the adult world remains both one of the smartest and one of the most unpleasant characterizations the show ever managed, and *sigh* that's here, too, and all that brings (the Huntzbergers, the Life & Death Brigade, questionable sexual choices). As before, it's both intelligently rendered and entirely irritating. All of this is in the realm of plot and character, which is to say nothing of the actual form the show takes, which is sort of a debacle. The dividing of the season into four 90-minute "episodes" that each span a single season of the year seems like it opens the door for some interesting structural experimentation. But the problem with 90-minute episodes is that that's basically movie-length, which wouldn't be an issue except that Gilmore Girls seems paralyzed by the prospect of structuring its episodes like movies, resulting in a half-committed attempt to stretch typical 45-minute episode fodder out double-length while otherwise trying to cover several episodes' worth of narrative. The results are a sputtering lack of momentum over the character arcs, the freedom to indulge in overlong dialogue interchanges and bizarre one-off sequences (a lengthy Moulin Rouge-esque musical montage with the ever repugnant Life & Death Brigade is among the series' low points), and a season that feels at once too long and too short. Kind of like this review. Grade: B
Books
While The Age of Innocence remains her masterpiece in my eyes, The House of Mirth is still further proof Wharton's position among American literature's greats. A savagely bleak portrayal of the New York upper-crust society that's something like Jane Austen filtered through the cynicism of late-19th-century Realism, The House of Mirth is insightful in its telling of one Lily Bart's downward spiral in a way that is both dripping contempt for the social mores of the upper class and careful not to let that contempt obscure the fundamental tragedy of that society's casualties. Lily Bart herself is a wonderful tightrope of a protagonist, a character whose stupidity and frivolity the novel roundly condemns while simultaneously managing to evoke deep sympathy for way that social pressures have pointed her in this direction. Grade: A-
Music
Lots of bands since the late '70s and early '80s have taken inspiration from the post-punk of that era, but with Preoccupations, the band formerly known as Viet Cong has come the closest to sounding exactly like those bands. I'm sure someone will make the argument that this is fruitlessly derivative, that Joy Division only needed to make Closer once and why bother recreate it here? But in my mind, Preoccupations is unequivocally a good thing, derivation and all. Mimicry is much more heinous in an era already flush with imitators, but for better or for worse, the 2010s are pretty short on post-punk revivalists, which makes Preoccupations a treat rather than a glut. Grade: A-
