Movies
La La Land (2016)
The criticisms come easily: it's style over substance, it's referencing better movies, it's full of mostly unmemorable music. But what style! And what delirious evocation of those classics! And you know what other great musical doesn't really have great music? The Umbrellas of Freakin' Cherborg, that's what! Because please, La La Land cares so little about standing up to any sort of intellectual criticism; no, this is all about the exuberant, unrestrained love of classic movie musicals, only with the cheeseball factor turned down just a notch and the melancholy heightened. And La La Land is masterfully devoted to this end, from its sumptuous use of color to its meticulous and often unedited choreography (the music may be unmemorable [okay, except for "City of Stars" and "The Fools Who Dream," both of which are quite good], but the way that music moves these actors is never less than stunning) right down to the traipse through intentionally fake-looking sets in its jaw-dropping final dance number—it's to this film's tremendous credit that it ends on its highest note. Look, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not an instant sell on film musicals, even when it comes to the classic era that La La Land recalls with stars in its eyes. But when the result is so winsome, so sincere, so enthusiastic, so beautiful—there's never a moment here that doesn't look crafted for the max possible visual enjoyment—it's hard not to find this whole endeavor thrilling. Grade: A-
Ti West's latest—a sort of departure for him, as he leaves horror for the western—had me cackling at the gleeful exuberance with which the film frolics through its pulpy genre fun. We've had a resurgence of serious-minded revisionist westerns for some time now, but In a Valley of Violence is the first I've seen that taps into the western's considerable heritage of plain ol' fun. And oh boy, is it fun. Typical of West's other output, Valley would be at risk of being an exercise in pastiche if it weren't so fantastically crafted. Not to be missed. Grade: A-
A fascinating and beguiling little rumination on art, empire, and specifically the Louvre. It's a film that's maybe a bit more "video essay" than traditional documentary, and its affectations—the relentless historical re-enactment and displacement (none other than Napoléon Bonaparte himself appears as a character wandering through the Louvre, commenting, of course, on pictures of himself)—might strike someone as either cutely or irritatingly clever, depending on his/her mood. But it caught me in a good mood. Grade: B+
Imagine you have one train, and it's somehow a train that is Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Now imagine you have another train, only this one's Psycho. Now let's imagine that you set both of these trains headed in opposite directions down the same track as fast as they'll go, and they collide at the track's center in a brilliant fireball of twisted metal and gore. The resulting carnage is pretty much Sisters in a nutshell, give or take some casual nudity and split-screen takes. It's trash, through and through, but gloriously fun-to-the-point-of-near-transcendence trash. Grade: B+
Books
Imagine a tree that, when told a lie, produces a fruit that will bestow anyone who eats it with secret knowledge. The Lie Tree does, and the biblical connections are not lost on Frances Hardinge, who expertly crafts this plot around a litany of both explicitly and sneakily subversive devices that in no small way feel like commentary on that famous Eden story, or at least the ways that people have used the Garden of Eden to inform their views on gender. Faith, our protagonist, is a girl with growing scientific ambitions during Victorian times, and, predictably, the pushback against her intellect is considerable. It's not a subtle story, ultimately focusing on the intersection of gender, science, and religion in a way that's not all that surprising from that premise, but it's fantastically smart about its purpose and told with elegance by Hardinge, whose prose is a gorgeous and intricate house for this tale. That's not even mentioning the loving detail with which Hardinge describes the world of Victorian science—icing on an already delicious cake, for sure. Grade: A-
Music
If you liked Blackstar (which I did), this is going to be right up your alley: a trio of spacey, nervous, death-obsessed songs that once again reinforce just how much of a tragedy it was that we lost Bowie at the onset of what seems to have been a late-career renaissance. Even if you didn't like Blackstar, this still might have something for you. The songs are considerably less jazz-inflected and abstract than that album's—the first, "No Plan," is the most Blackstar-like, but the other two, "Killing a Little Time" and "When I Met You," are propulsive rockers reminiscent of Bowie's mid-'90s work or maybe even the rock halves of his Berlin records. Fear not: the last Bowie songs we have are good ones. Grade: B+
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