Movies
A dynamite thriller that's got guts enough to show white supremacy as the province of not just rural skinheads but also wealthy urbanites who eat veggie burgers and build tree houses for their poor, brainwashed children. But perhaps Imperium's FBI-agent-undercover-with-white-supremacists premise sets up too many expectations to adequately satisfy, since beyond the admittedly challenging work of creating real human beings out of white supremacists, the movie doesn't end up being specifically about white supremacy in the sense that it seems to intend to make a political statement about that subculture in particular. But wanting a movie to be a polemic when it's not one is kind of self-defeating. It's really a very good movie: the drama feels lived-in, the thrills are thrilling, and Daniel Radcliffe is phenomenal. As a procedural, it's great. Grade: B+
Given how much he's actually directed by now, I feel a bit of a fool for not realizing that Tommy Lee Jones had become an accomplished director. But he has, and here we are with The Homesman, the best Western since the Coens' True Grit and one of the best films of 2014, period. Like True Grit, this movie has an affectionate May-December roadtrip pairing at its heart, this one between an excellent Hilary Swank playing off Tommy Lee himself. Thankfully, that's where the comparisons stop, and as the movie stretches into its unconventional structure ("Three acts be damned!" the screenplay practically crows), The Homesman becomes a gorgeous but utterly heartbreaking rumination on gender, class, and tiers of social outcasting. The beginning is slow, but by the end, the film has become huge. Grade: A-
We unfortunately reached the point long ago when any silent film released was bound to be seen as a gimmick that overshadows anything else about the movie. And Blancanieves's most striking feature is very much its impressive commitment to the idiom of silent cinema (much more so than its "Look, I'm a Silent Film!" contemporary, The Artist); the movie looks great, and it nails the feel of a movie circa 1928 or so (with even a few moments of synchronized sound). But at least there's another potential gimmick to distract us: setting the story of Snow White in the world of early 20th century bullfighting. Once you catch on to what it's doing, there's not a whole lot going for the story beyond a surprisingly comical wicked queen, the excuse to see some well-executed cinematic bullfighting, and an ending that zags in an unexpectedly bleak direction. But it's a fun enough movie, and one whose kind is rare enough that I feel compelled to celebrate regardless of only mild interest. Grade: B
Tremors is the perfection of its kind of cinema—that being the particularly '80s brand of B-movie creature feature that Jurassic Park would essentially kill off in the first half of the '90s. The creature effects (giant prehistorical monster worms, in case you were wondering) are wonderfully tactile and icky, the screenplay is tight and just touched enough with humor, and the leads (I've never enjoyed Kevin Bacon more) feel basically die cast for their roles. All of this results in tremendous fun of the highest order. And that's it. Grade: A
I knew the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont was bad, but after watching this stunning documentary, I'm convinced it was the apocalypse. Gimme Shelter is up there with Dont Look Back as one of the essential documents of the convergence between rock and the '60s counterculture, but whereas Dylan's doc captures everything that made the superstar rock-poet philosophy so captivating, the footage from Altamont here shows a horrifying dystopia in which the racism, sexism, and violence that lurked alongside the counterculture's more progressive ambitions comes to a head. To watch this film is to witness a movement coming apart at the seams, to gasp as that movement dies suddenly at the very moment a Hells Angels knife comes right down into Meredith Hunter's back. Grade: A
Music
Having the reputation as one of Bowie's most purely pop records, Let's Dance often gets dismissed as pandering. It's certainly not an adventurous album in the sense of the then-recent Berlin Trilogy, but in light of 2016 and the democratization of music taste, I think we've all realized that pop production doesn't necessarily equate "pandering" or "bad." In fact, Let's Dance contains some of Bowie's best work in the hit singles "Modern Love" and "Let's Dance," as well as one of his most successful covers ("China Girl," which he actually co-wrote with Iggy Pop, so its status as a cover is a little more complicated than, say, "Across the Universe") and one of his most fist-pumping anthems ("Cat People (Putting Out Fire)." The relatively less interesting tracks in between those highlights keep Let's Dance from being one of Bowie's absolute greatest, but it's still in the top third of his discography and would be his last great album until arguably the 2000s, not to mention one of his most enduring stamps on American radio. Grade: A-
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