Movies
Silence (2016)
Martin Scorsese's long-gestating adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel isn't just one of Scorsese's best—right up there with After Hours, King of Comedy, if not quite to the level of Goodfellas—but also one of the best films about faith of all time. It's slow cinema for Scorsese, evoking more Bergman than any of his more kinetic influences that made works like the similarly lengthy The Wolf of Wall Street so propulsive. But what Scorsese gives up in movement he gains in fervor and rich, rich intellectual and emotional depths. The film's central question of ideological integrity vs. pragmatic compassion—in the film's thorniest ethical knot, Andrew Garfield's priest must choose between renouncing his faith or watching dozens of Japanese Christians tortured and killed—is one that's clearly deeply personal for Scorsese: what is it that defines a Christian? What does the atonement for sins really mean? Can you ever truly excise sincere faith from your identity? These are issues that ring deeply personal for me as well. I can't say how those who aren't Christian will react, but for this believer, Silence was as searing and profound a movie experience as I've had in years. Grade: A
Split (2017)
My theory is that forty, thirty, maybe even just twenty years from now, it's the depiction of mental illness that's going to date our art, politically. People will look back at our bevvy of movie-villain psychopaths and schizoids and feel the same way about that that we feel about, I dunno, blackface in '30s movies or callous, misogynist nudity in '70s films. That said, Split's world is set in such an obviously fanciful version of reality in general and DID specifically (probably a mistake to identify a real-world disorder, Shyamalan) that I don't have too many misgivings about James McAvoy's split-personalitied antagonist. Plus, it's clear that McAvoy is having an utter ball with the hammy grandiosity of his performance here—something that goes for the rest of the film, too. Split isn't as relentlessly clever as Shyamalan's most memorable work, which is both a blessing and a curse: it's good because it hinges the film's success not on some mind-blowing twist or subversion and instead on Shyamalan's film craft, which is always where his greatest strengths have lied anyway; on the downside, it does feel like just a B-movie thriller. But, I mean, to be simply a well-made thriller is hardly the worst thing to happen to your movie, and, in fact, Split feels quite at home in that distinction. I had fun. Grade: B
American Honey (2016)
Meandering and virtually plotless outside of the barest sketches of a scenario, American Honey is probably best experienced as a kind of meditative experience that uses its heady blend of sights and sounds—I can't stress enough just how fantastic the movie's soundtrack is, which deploys a vulgar mix of indie and contemporary pop/rap to evoke a more convincing evocation of youth culture than I've seen in ages—as a wedge into its pet themes of class and gender. It's a road trip movie that makes of point of putting boots on the ground not in picturesque road-trippy destinations but at the motels, fast-food joints, and gas stations that make up the majority of America; our characters greet the skyline of Kansas City, for example, with whoops and wonder, but after that moment, most of what we see of the city are green suburbs and greasy motel rooms. It's a romanticization of the mundane by characters who fall below even the broadest conception of the American middle class, and the various and picaresque explorations of the characters' intersections with the middle and upper classes, from evangelical Christians to workers on an oil field, are never less than fascinating. Like I said, this is more of a meditation than anything propulsive. Those going into this looking to enjoy the character relationships, for instance, are bound to be disappointing. But as an experience to let wash over you, you'll come out gasping on the other side. Grade: A-
Pete's Dragon (2016)
A lovely little film content to be nothing more than a lovely little film, which is cool. The stakes are refreshingly small for a movie with a dragon in it. There's nothing breaking convention here (the "fantastic creature brings joy to a child's life" genre remains intact, from the wistful small-town vibes to the eagerness of adults to hunt/study/profit from said fantastic creature—the movie is nothing if not formulaic), but as a gently crafted execution of the formula, it's nice. Grade: B
Enter the Void (2009)
Wow, I haven't hated a movie this strongly in quite some time. Where to start? The way it infantilizes its one female character? The way it feels the need to take five whole minutes of its already bloated 161-minute runtime to explain The Tibetan Book of the Dead, just to make sure we get it when it actually visualizes The Tibetan Book of the Dead? The puerility with which it approaches sexuality? The head-smacking idiocy of its oedipal implications? The shallow individualism of its own stoner logic? The use of legitimately interesting experimental camera techniques to depict a solipsistic, mundane, and utterly tedious version of the afterlife completely devoid of mystery or transcendence, which might be an interesting decision if the whole movie weren't so gobsmacked at what it assumes is its profundity? Ugh. I hate it. I hate how a movie so nominally interested in the afterlife is so terrestrial. I hate how its final ten minutes are basically just an orgy—but, like, a profound orgy, maaaan. I hate the waste of what I can tell is legitimate talent somewhere behind the camera. I hate it so much. Grade: D
The Kite Runner (2007)
The question of interiority is always the challenge of adapting a novel for the screen--written literature has, naturally, way more tools at its disposal for evoking the interior lives of its characters than film or television ever will have, and The Kite Runner suffers greatly for that. The movie runs aground in its mostly literal adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's fantastic novel by never really finding a good way to dramatize the rich emotional landscape of its protagonist. We're left with a tepid and often blank character, and with that, the story begins to fall apart, losing much of the Dickensian sweep and emotional complexity from the novel in the process. Grade: C+
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
The most inconvenient thing about this movie is that it's not very good. It's a matter of genre, really, not truth—climate change is a super true and super important issue, of course, but An Inconvenient Truth is essentially a feature-length TED talk, which would be fine if it were presented as such. As a movie, though (not to mention an Academy Award-winning documentary (for real, what's up with the 2000s and their documentary Oscars?), this one's a bore. Grade: C-
Books
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (1998)
One of the founding works of modern YA fiction turns out also to be one of the best. While it's not an absolute requirement for YA to be vigorously realistic, it sure helps when the protagonist's voice sounds exactly like something one of my students might write. YA lit is usually tied to hyper-witty Caulfield-esque precociousness, which makes it pleasantly disarming to have a narrator like Charlie here who actually feels like a real teenager. Even better is how Charlie's experiences ring so true to my own high school memories: rarely have the emotional beats of finding one's place within alternative culture been rendered with more compassion and understanding: the crafting of identity through music, the aimless hanging out, the minor intra-group personal tragedy, the confused lines between friendship and romance, the joy of discovering that other people think similarly to you and that you are not doomed to be alone. The book does edge a little close to romanticizing these feelings at times—e.g. the famous/infamous "We are infinite" moment—but in a book filled with such acute and precise pain, the feeling is more one of catharsis than empty nostalgia. Grade: A
Everything Is Teeth by Evie Wyld (2016)
I'm starting to realize that I really dig these graphic novel memoirs. In this one, Australian author Evie Wyld remembers her childhood obsession with sharks and shark attacks. It's a morbidly funny, tender, and at times tense coming-of-age plot, warmly illustrated by Joe Summer in cartoonish but emotive strokes, and even if it doesn't find something entirely mind-blowing to say, it at least says it with a memorable hook and frequent shark-gore fantasies. Grade: B+
Music
Bon Iver - 22, A Million (2016)
I've never been the biggest Bon Iver fan, so take this with the appropriate dosage of salt. But 22, A Million is far and away the best of Bon Iver's three albums. Working in samples and electronic beats that recall Vernon's work with Kanye West and largely (thankfully) eschew the weepy, beardy folk that defined the early Bon Iver sound, the album represents something of a cliché move for indie/post-indie artists these days, who stay relevant by adopting electronic and hip-hop textures, but it's an effective one, effectively emoting Vernon's wounded lyrics without feeling nearly so anemic as his earlier work. For the first time, Bon Iver sounds full and muscular, and I like it. Grade: B+
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