Movies
The Love Witch (2016)
Watch this movie. The Love Witch is beautiful to look at—populated with gorgeous people, eye-popping costumes, and a wonderfully tactile film grain, the movie never ceases to be visually stunning. A pastiche of '60s Technicolor thrillers in which all the lively sets and costumes have been designed by its mad genius director, Anna Biller, The Love Witch is a work of tremendous passion, only appropriate for a plot whose protagonist, played with hilarious deadpan by Samantha Robinson, is a witch in search of true love. There's clearly some social commentary going on here, but the film's delivery—a confident but sometimes disorienting blend of satire, parody, and straight-up exploitation—defies a clear interpretation along the lines of the gendered themes it engages in. Don't fear, though: even without any sort of "message" (and who wants that in their killer witch movies?), this movie is whip-smart and great fun. Grade: A-
The BFG (2016)
Spielberg's penchant for earnest sentiment makes a surprisingly effective companion to Roald Dahl's sardonic absurdity, and although I haven't read the book this movie is based on, the film is a nice reminder of just how odd Dahl stories can be (let's not forget that Charlie and a band of space aliens meet the POTUS himself in the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). It's all quite effective in its own narrow way, playing toward specific beats of family film and children's fantasy that might not be everyone's favorite and I'm not entirely sure is mine. That the film's effects are big and colorful and look great helps tremendously. Grade: B+
Little Men (2016)
As a commentary on gentrification, which this movie seems to nominally want to be, Little Men has little practical impact, being way too committed to the "both sides are equally wrong" argument to even consider that most of the historical factors driving gentrification have little to do with the events of this film, which involves a family inheriting a building. But as a gently tragic character drama, Little Men works quite well, if not quite as well as director Ira Sachs's previous stunner, Love Is Strange. Still, like that movie, it's infused with a fantastic sense of melancholy and an insightful eye for character details. Grade: B
Cameraperson (2016)
Long-time documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson gives a thoughtful overview of her career by assembling this collage of footage she's shot in everything from doc blockbusters like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizenfour to indies that you (or certainly I) have never heard of. The effect is something like the abstracting of the TV clip show format, and the results are frequently cool and occasionally haunting—one late-film montage is nothing but still shots of locations where human rights atrocities have occurred, and it's probably the film's best moment. As with any compilation of this nature, there's an inherent frustration in the format when the individual clips are too good and simply leave you wanting to see the original rather than the montage-ready version. But on the whole, it's an arresting parade of images and words. Grade: B
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
The enormous pretension of a filmmaker thinking that their movie set was anything close to a war zone is egregious, and this documentary has the good sense to point out the sheer pomposity of Francis Ford Coppola surrounding the production of Apocalypse Now is consistently both the movie's best punchline and horror. My favorite part comes when Coppola convinces his collaborator from the studio that Apocalypse Now will be the first film to win a Nobel Prize, but that's just one of a host of highlights, not to mention the sense of near catastrophe that informs most of what happens on set. Coppola's film didn't win the Nobel Prize, obviously, but it's a small miracle that we got even a good movie out of the disaster, much less one of the all-time greats. Grade: A-
Arachnophobia (1990)
This movie is sort of perfect. A monster movie whose creatures (killer spiders from Venezuela) push the boundaries of believability just enough—it's to this film's immense credit that not one of the spiders onscreen is bigger than spiders would be in real life—and whose characters, even minor ones, are painted with bright and bold colors, there's not a moment of Arachnophobia that doesn't entertain. It's the sort of movie we don't see a lot of these days: the warm, funny, scary, irony-free embrace of genre tropes executed masterfully. I don't have much else to say but that I had a fantastic time with it. Great, great fun. Grade: A
Television
Horace and Pete (2016)
Louis C.K.'s idiosyncratic, heartbreaking, and auteurist miniseries (which, for the record, he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in) is not going to be for everyone: it's far too brutal, too bleak, too vulgar, too haphazard, too meandering, too C.K. to ever reach a broad audience. But if you can get into it, there are immense riches waiting. Never—and I mean truly never, like, in the history of the medium so far as I've experienced it—has a scripted television series felt so politically vital; were you to condense 2016 into drama, this would be it. But even if you're uninterested in that, it's still among the boldest experiments in even an era in which television prides itself on bold experiments. With episodes ranging from nearly and hour to a mere thirty minutes in length, the show makes hay with the flexibility of its web format, making room for episodes comprised entirely of a single scene and for epic-length compilations of otherwise unrelated scenes that circle around the characters' loopy, offensive, impassioned discussions of everything from current events to philosophy to personal struggles. The structure is loose and slow and occasionally baffling, and it's great. Enabling this even further is the aesthetic. Filmed essentially like a stage drama, with minimal editing and mostly single-location settings, it's at once a revival of the old 1950s trend of live TV plays and an evocation of the half-dead multi-camera sitcom, particularly Cheers. And appropriately, the bar (i.e. Horace and Pete's) is filled with barflies and one-off guests that give the location a lived-in, colorful feel. It's a veritable murderer's row of performers, too, with everyone from the co-starring Steve Buscemi to the semi-regular Alan Alda and Jessica Lange (both of whom, in a just universe, deserve Emmys for their roles here) to guest stars like Amy Sedaris and Laurie Metcalf (who probably deserves an award, too). But this is no sitcom. C.K. has accurately described the series as a tragedy, and it should be engaged as nothing but. This works in a few ways, but most notably, as a social tragedy in how it shows the absolutely dysfunctional ways that the diverse members of American society react to one another, and, more bitingly, as a personal tragedy focusing on the trajectories of Buscemi's Pete and C.K.'s Horace. I really don't want to spoil it; a blind watch is probably best. If what I've said here appeals to you, go for it. I think it might be one of the great television achievements of this decade. Grade: A
The Good Place, Season 1 (2016-2017)
High-concept TV shows rarely have legs—they too often lean on its central conceit to the detriment of important things like characters and writing. This is compounded with comedies. But here comes The Good Place to stand proudly alongside Fox's The Last Man on Earth as a high-concept show that actually works. Really well, in fact. Focused on Eleanor (a hilarious Kristen Bell), who finds herself dead and in "The Good Place," despite her having been, at best, a "medium person" in her previous life, the show prods ethics, metaphysics, left-turn plot twists, and fun fantasy hijinks while, most importantly, being really, really funny. It's sweet, it's breezy, it's mysterious, and it's got the best Ted Danson performance in ages, to say nothing of the rest of the entirely great cast. The ratings for this first season have been low. Please watch it. The world needs a Good Place, Season 2. Grade: B+
This movie is sort of perfect. A monster movie whose creatures (killer spiders from Venezuela) push the boundaries of believability just enough—it's to this film's immense credit that not one of the spiders onscreen is bigger than spiders would be in real life—and whose characters, even minor ones, are painted with bright and bold colors, there's not a moment of Arachnophobia that doesn't entertain. It's the sort of movie we don't see a lot of these days: the warm, funny, scary, irony-free embrace of genre tropes executed masterfully. I don't have much else to say but that I had a fantastic time with it. Great, great fun. Grade: A
Television
Louis C.K.'s idiosyncratic, heartbreaking, and auteurist miniseries (which, for the record, he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in) is not going to be for everyone: it's far too brutal, too bleak, too vulgar, too haphazard, too meandering, too C.K. to ever reach a broad audience. But if you can get into it, there are immense riches waiting. Never—and I mean truly never, like, in the history of the medium so far as I've experienced it—has a scripted television series felt so politically vital; were you to condense 2016 into drama, this would be it. But even if you're uninterested in that, it's still among the boldest experiments in even an era in which television prides itself on bold experiments. With episodes ranging from nearly and hour to a mere thirty minutes in length, the show makes hay with the flexibility of its web format, making room for episodes comprised entirely of a single scene and for epic-length compilations of otherwise unrelated scenes that circle around the characters' loopy, offensive, impassioned discussions of everything from current events to philosophy to personal struggles. The structure is loose and slow and occasionally baffling, and it's great. Enabling this even further is the aesthetic. Filmed essentially like a stage drama, with minimal editing and mostly single-location settings, it's at once a revival of the old 1950s trend of live TV plays and an evocation of the half-dead multi-camera sitcom, particularly Cheers. And appropriately, the bar (i.e. Horace and Pete's) is filled with barflies and one-off guests that give the location a lived-in, colorful feel. It's a veritable murderer's row of performers, too, with everyone from the co-starring Steve Buscemi to the semi-regular Alan Alda and Jessica Lange (both of whom, in a just universe, deserve Emmys for their roles here) to guest stars like Amy Sedaris and Laurie Metcalf (who probably deserves an award, too). But this is no sitcom. C.K. has accurately described the series as a tragedy, and it should be engaged as nothing but. This works in a few ways, but most notably, as a social tragedy in how it shows the absolutely dysfunctional ways that the diverse members of American society react to one another, and, more bitingly, as a personal tragedy focusing on the trajectories of Buscemi's Pete and C.K.'s Horace. I really don't want to spoil it; a blind watch is probably best. If what I've said here appeals to you, go for it. I think it might be one of the great television achievements of this decade. Grade: A
High-concept TV shows rarely have legs—they too often lean on its central conceit to the detriment of important things like characters and writing. This is compounded with comedies. But here comes The Good Place to stand proudly alongside Fox's The Last Man on Earth as a high-concept show that actually works. Really well, in fact. Focused on Eleanor (a hilarious Kristen Bell), who finds herself dead and in "The Good Place," despite her having been, at best, a "medium person" in her previous life, the show prods ethics, metaphysics, left-turn plot twists, and fun fantasy hijinks while, most importantly, being really, really funny. It's sweet, it's breezy, it's mysterious, and it's got the best Ted Danson performance in ages, to say nothing of the rest of the entirely great cast. The ratings for this first season have been low. Please watch it. The world needs a Good Place, Season 2. Grade: B+
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