Movies
There's a lot to love about Arrival, from the quiet but gorgeous special effects to Amy Adam's incredible and life-giving performance. It's also the rare jewel of big-blockbuster sci-fi that's also hard sci-fi, and whip-smart hard sci-fi at that (although it probably belongs in the Interstellar category of ultimately subordinating its science preoccupations to a sneaky character study). But as with The Witch earlier this year, what's most appealing to me here is the parts that awaken the language nerd in me—it is a very, very easy sell to tell me that a movie that spends a majority of its runtime puzzling out the intricacies of communication between humans and aliens will be great, and lo and behold, Arrival is great. Linguists save the world! Grade: A-
As someone who finds the modeling industry absolutely reprehensible ("hey guy! let's base an entire profession on how well individuals conform to arbitrary social beauty standards!"), The Neon Demon, a vicious and hilariously fanged satire of that very industry, is catnip for me. For someone who also loves stylistic excess and immaculate framing in film, The Neon Demon, a colorful formalist showcase by the guy who brought you Drive (let's not speak of Only God Forgives), is again catnip. Awesome on both counts. Grade: A-
A thriller and very little else. The Shallows doesn't bother with subtext or lyricism or anything that we normally use to justify film as art (with the possible exception of a micro-plot dealing with Lively's character's reconciliation with her mother's death, but I'd be shocked if this occupies even 10 percent of the film's already brisk 86 minutes), but it's such a well-oiled machine of a survival thriller that it makes a convincing case for flawless genre execution as an art form. And even if this isn't art, it's still a blast. Shark vs. Person—it's really not that hard to love. Grade: B+
On the heels of my liking The Homesman so dang much, some friends recommended this movie, Tommy Lee Jones's directorial debut. But maybe because The Homesman was such a surprise whereas The Three Burials already comes highly recommended, this one didn't quite bowl me over like the other one did. Which is not to say that it's not good, because it most certainly is. Funny, exciting, and literary in equal measures, it's a movie that fits comfortably alongside the Coens more humanist output, while its plot (the transportation of the titular M. Estrada's body to its burial place) and the ensuing mix of black comedy and underlying tragedy intersects nicely with Faulkner. The movie may be more episodic for its own good, and the structural unpredictability that made The Homesman so thrilling comes across as slightly less considered here. But as far as modern westerns go, you can't really go wrong with this one. Grade: B+
As is the case with a lot of early Bergman, Thirst is a movie with its heart in the right place, but the technique is still a bit stiff. Bergman's having a lot of issues structurally here, likely because of the differences between stage and screen; a lot of the time jumps and transitions, for example, are just thrown into the movie with a clumsiness that sometimes makes the plot more difficult to follow than it should have been—and I mean that on a technical level, not in the artful obscurity sense that I.B. would perfect in later years. The optimism of the ending, too, suffers from this clumsiness of technique, coming down as kind of a hammer instead of a light, uplifting caress, which is a shame because at Thirst's core lies an affecting portrait of a marriage on the hinge of transition. The pieces are there, and by virtue of raw dramatic material, the movie manages more successes than failures. But with a surer touch, the film could have been considerably more successful. Grade: B
Music
That Cheap Trick leads off the album with the power pop all-timer "Surrender" is perhaps inevitable, but the front-loading of that one song can't help but do the record a slight disservice. That's not to say that there isn't very good music on Heaven Tonight, but "Surrender" is the best Cheap Trick song by such a wide margin that it sets the record on this weird downward trajectory that it never quite recovers from. This isn't really meant to be an Album album, though, so some skipping around is totally within the record's parameters: take pit stops at your favorites ("On Top of the World," "Auf Wiedersehen," and "Stiff Competition" for me), and don't worry about the rest. Grade: B+
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