Movies
This relatively typical Brian De Palma erotic thriller is almost dumb enough to work. Almost. There's an admirable straight-facedness to the silliness here that might read a little more readily as deadpan if De Palma were just a tiny bit nuttier with his style—we've of course got a split-screen segment, and Rachel McAdams in villain mode is something I wasn't aware I needed so badly. But in between the fireworks, the film is just kind of dull and tepid, making at least 75 percent of the movie generic trash (and not the good kind). Grade: C+
As a musical about the survivor of a botched sex-change operation in East Germany, the film has plenty of poignant and surprising things to say about gender identity and the specifics of Hedwig's experience. However, the biggest success of the film is that it's music is comprised entirely of glam rock songs that really and truly rock. I've seen my fair share of musicals that attempt to exist within rock aesthetic—from Memphis to Hairspray—and often, the truth is that it's only rock in the vaguest of touches, instead sticking closely to native show tune archetypes. Not so with Hedwig, whose songs sound everything like the peers of Lou Reed, David Bowie, and T. Rex in the early '70s, only if all of those artists had collectively decided to eschew any semblance of coyness and innuendo and instead gone right for the sexually explicit melodrama. It's all delightfully funny, raucous, and full of feelings—likely the greatest crop of songs in a 21st-century film yet, animating a truly great 21st-century film. Grade: A
At the risk of seeming foolish through absolutist statements, Taxi Driver is the most spiritually bereft of any work by the legendarily spiritual Martin Scorsese. Maybe this is (along with its troublesome social subtext) why it's the only acclaimed Scorsese that I've never really felt much about. So imagine my joy upon discovering that, among other things, Bringing Out the Dead is a sort of corrective to the aspirituality of Taxi Driver. Set in the same (albeit two decades removed) New York underbelly, populated by much the same cast of misfits, criminals, destitutes, social outcasts, the movie again stars a man obligated to roam the city nightlife and pick up strangers—this time, he's driving an ambulance, and that redemptive role, rather than the purgatorial taxi, seems to have made all the difference. Bringing Out the Dead is practically ecstatic in its spirituality, and the line between here and hereafter has never been so porous in Scorsese's work: everywhere, the streets are haunted by the memories (but come on, we know [heck, we're told] they're ghosts) of those souls lost under the watch of Nicolas Cage's ambulance driver. The dead walk and talk, and even the living speak openly of of Jesus, imbuing something as profane as the revival of a heroin overdose with implication of holy resurrection. And then there's the final shot, which is, for all intents and purposes, the spitting image of a Renaissance devotional image. I don't know why people don't talk about this one more; it's one of Scorsese's masterpieces. Grade: A
It's minor Studio Ghibli fare, lacking the depth of texture and wonder that characterizes the studio's best work. But minor is far from bad, and Whisper of the Heart is a savory little slice-of-life film, chronicling a low-stakes but heartfelt coming of age. I love how small everything is: the story, under most circumstances, would have been a micro-budget live-action indie, but under director Yoshifumi Kondo (his sole director credit before his death in 1998), it's languished over in lavish detail that brings its myriad poignancies and trivialities to life. Like I said, it's not among the studio's best—a few last-minute gestures ring a little false, stretching the smallness a bit too much—but it is the sort of modest work that it seems only Ghibli would put out with this care. Grade: B+
Ordet is, to vaguely spoil its simple plot, a film about recontextualizing the idea of a miracle. Set in that ever-fertile environment for religious dialogue, postwar Europe, the movie focuses intently on the problems of modernity and science within Christian supernatural belief. Characters grapple with God's silence; they experience crushing hardship; they stare in horror at the abyss of losing belief—this is about 90% of the film before the humble yet powerful insertion of the supernatural into this context. In doing so, Ordet is able to simultaneously set its story within a rational, mid-century perspective that wouldn't feel out of place within one of the more cynical post-belief Bergman films or any number of the "death of God" European art films from the '50s and '60s and also preserve its supernatural underpinnings as legitimately supernatural and not just a convenient quirk of the film's world. If you've been raised in Christianity and read the Bible at all, you'll know the tendency for the stories of miracles to take on a mundane quality through sheer repetition ("Well, of course Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, I know that already"). Ordet, then, with its viciously realist, doubting setting, becomes a compelling reminder of the sheer wonder of the miraculous that I think we've lost through our familiarity and distance from the events depicted in scripture. The result is one of the most beautiful and affirming ruminations on faith I've ever seen committed to film. Grade: A
Music
We could use more glam in what's left of the indie rock scene, so it's a nice evolution to have Foxygen, former Velvet Underground torchbearers, follow in Lou Reed's footsteps toward poppier, more theatrical ground. With the lush strings and chamber pop production, though, Lou Reed probably isn't the best point of reference anymore; "Follow the Leader" feels a bit like a T. Rex strut, while the singalong "Avalon" has the hallmarks of a great Queen track. And that's just the opening two songs. It's not groundbreaking music, but, especially after the double-album dud, ...And Star Power, it's lively, boisterous, and, most of all, lots of fun. Grade: B+
The debut by prolific punk rockers The Men has all the mean ferocity of the band's best work with little of the spacey fluff that's padded out some of their more recent releases. The first song, "If You Leave..." is sedate and fuzzed out, the weakest track here, but don't let that fool you; track two, "Lotus," with its "ONE TWO THREE FOUR" count off and subsequent guitar theatrics, kicks the album into a high gear it seldom leaves and often betters later on, particularly in the scorching mid-album duo, "L.A.D.O.C.H." and "()." It's solid, high-energy punk throughout and worth checking out if you're looking for that sort of thing. Grade: B+
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