Movies
Of all the myriad things I can be thankful for, I now realize near the top must be the merciful blessing that this movie did not come out during my high school years and thus subject me to months and even years of having to hear this film's smarmy, self-impressed vulgarisms repeated from the mouths of my peers. Rather, I merely have the choice to endure this film's 108 minutes of juvenilia once, which is quite enough. I'm not sure if it's an indictment of the modern superhero blockbuster that a movie with all the flaws of the genre's most pedestrian works can feel fresh to so many by merely slapping on some R-rated violence, profane dialogue, and the flimsiest of metacommentary, but it sure isn't a ringing endorsement for the health of the form. Grade: C
The crushing sadness of Manchester by the Sea's shaggy plot would be suffocating if it weren't for the film's idiosyncratic and often gut-busting sense of humor—it's not black humor specifically, at least not in the satirical sense that the term often connotes. Rather, the jokes here are the only joy that our characters can find in the spaces surrounding the death of a family member and a whole host of other experiences and memories I can only assume would be absolute hell to live with. I'm being a bit vague here because the movie seems to want the specifics of these characters' lives to read as surprising reveals within the film's tightly edited flashback structure, so for now, just know that while the tragedy here would be bleak by any sense of the word, the movie itself is not bleak. That's not to say it's uplifting either--this is just life that Manchester by the Sea depicts, with all its little moments of connection and pain. It no doubt helps that every actor here—even Matthew Broderick, in a somewhat ill-conceived tangent from the film's generally rough-around-the-edges, working-class sensibilities into Christianized suburbia—play human beings of such vigor and life that there's no way not to care for every person onscreen. Grade: A-
The better of Jeff Nichols's two 2016 films is also the more grounded—literally, as it turns out. Instead of Midnight Special's multi-dimensional-alien sci-fi, Loving gives us a tender and altogether moving portrait of the couple whose Supreme-Court-decided lawsuit ended all laws prohibiting marriage on racial grounds. A lesser (or at least a less poignant) movie may have focused obsessively on the injustices the Lovings face and the legal procedure that lead to eventual justice, and those things are there to a certain extent. But first and foremost, this is a movie about its two central characters and the ebb-and-flow textures of their life together. In short, it's a romance, and a darn good one at that. Grade: B+
A "mostly true" documentary tries to mix historical fiction and nonfiction into a folk concoction that's reminiscent of the fibs of its central huckster, John R. Brinkley, who claimed to have cured impotence by transplanting goat testicles into human males. It's a funny, outrageous bit of historical oddity, but the film's approach—a mix of talking heads and shoddy, frequently glib animation—lacks the precision needed to make its fictionalized nonfiction work like it should. In the hands of more skilled filmmakers, this might have been gold. Instead, it feels like a half-baked internet flash animation. Grade: C
When Sofia Coppola is on her game, the results are often hypnotic, using music and images to imbue that space between mundane and just slightly alien with unexpected verve and beauty. When she's off... well, you get Somewhere, my least-favorite S. Coppola film that I've seen and something of a chunkily textured anti-character study. The feeling of deflation that the protagonist feels near the end of the movie when his daughter's visit ends rings true, but it's one of the only engagingly human moments in the film, the rest meandering through the irritations of minor celebrity and wealth with a stateliness that approaches staleness. Look to pretty much any other of Coppola's films for a more compelling take on these same themes. Grade: C+
Often clumsy and flimsy in its live-action segments, The Wall falls far short of the pedigree of its namesake album. However, when it works—and, like the album, it works most brutally in its latter half—the film is absolutely aces, as compelling a portrayal of misery and psychological anguish as the album itself, and even more effective as a slice of the British counterculture and its fallout. And let's not forget the animation, which is always excellent and the best part of the film, despite clocking in at just over fifteen minutes collectively. What I would have given to have had this entire movie animated. Grade: B+
As someone who's only seen the big three from Robert Altman (those being M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville), I found 3 Women to be pleasantly small turn from the guy's normal ensemble jigsaws. A psychological thriller very much in the vein of Bergman's Persona (if slightly less deconstructive) and what Roman Polanski was doing in the late '60s, it's a mesmerizing, head-scratching piece of filmmaking, made all the better by an all-time-great performance from already all-time-great performer Shelley Duvall. It's far too often that we forget that she pretty much batted 1.000 throughout most of the '70s and '80s. Grade: A-
The title's a bit misleading, given that the giant woman doesn't attack until the last ten minutes of the movie (and isn't even giant for the majority of the preceding film). Also, characters repeatedly marvel at how the woman (and her male counterpart) must be "thirty feet tall." So that's strike two. Look, I'm probably not going to convince any haters that this is a good movie—there's plenty of ammunition there: titles aside, the special effects are startlingly bad, particularly the matte effects, and the dialogue is tepid. But I dunno, guys, I found this charming in all its raggedness, and from the way it's pretty much 80 percent domestic crime smut to the exaggeration of the "vengeful, wronged wife" trope to this level of sci-fi melodrama. Fans of second- (or third-) tier sci-fi from the era shouldn't miss it. Grade: B
Television
While its shorter episode count makes Season 2 feel a little less complete than Season 1—character arcs feel rushed, plots feel underdeveloped—the second year of what's likely TV's best comedy right now is bolder, more complex, and more sure of itself than the first, which had a slightly rocky beginning. The end result is just tremendous TV, consistently hilarious, often hummable, and completely hitting its stride. Rachel Bloom's Rebecca Bunch is no less frantic and unwell—if anything, she's more so—which makes it all the more impressive that the series is able to find so much tenderness and compassion within a character who should, by all logic, be a whirlwind of irritating tropes. But as we all know, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. Grade: A-
Woody Allen made it abundantly clear prior to the release of Crisis in Six Scenes that his undertaking a TV series was a colossal mistake. And now, having seen the finished product, I'm unfortunately compelled to agree with him. An aimless, horribly paced, unfunny six episodes of tired Allen tropes, Crisis is just over the length of his longest feature films (not coincidentally, among his worst), but the good material within amounts to little more than an hour's worth of watchable work—to say nothing of the horrible structural issues the show faces as Allen apparently has no idea of the concept of a distinct episode and instead sequences scene after scene until he hits twenty-plus minutes and cuts it off until the next episode, whether or not the drama requires it. I'll go to bat for the fifth episode, centered around a bungled crime that makes it reminiscent of the bumbling capers of Manhattan Murder Mystery or Scoop, and overall, Allen has fun with the lightly satirical depiction of 1960s counterculture, both with Miley Cyrus's anarcho-Marxist revolutionary and the escalating gag of the old-ladies book club who decides to read her literature. But there's very little here to recommend that isn't found in better form in any number of Woody Allen's cinematic work, and even then, it's encased in so much lard that it wouldn't be out of case in a frontier butcher shop. Skip it. Grade: C
Books
I was going to avoid referencing Kafka in describing this book (not the least because he's already mentioned in one of the critical blurbs on the book's back cover), but how else do you describe unsettling surrealism that at first feels satirical before turning heartbreaking? It's Kafkaesque, through and through: a woman decides to become a vegetarian after unsettling dreams (see??), and the book follows the escalating fallout on her husband, her father, her brother-in-law, her sister, and her own psychology. The gorgeous translation by Deborah Smith manages to evoke the strange proceedings with wit and kinetic energy that never loses track of either the central horror or underlying sadness that imbues the work with its magnetic power. Grade: A-
Color me disappointed. A cursory glance through The Sculptor promised a strikingly illustrated fable about an artist's bargain with Death. What it ends up being is a bit of a one-dimensional mix of romance and struggling artist clichés that indulge in the worst of Manic Pixie Dream Girl and "nobody understands my work" artist tropes. David is an artist who's of course above irony and instead wants to make people feel something; Meg is a woman whose sole purpose seems to be to brighten his existence with her quirky lust for life and the inevitability of her eventual sleeping with him. Also, she's bipolar but won't take her medication because she wants to "feel everything." If you can't tell, that's the sound of my eyes rolling. It's not all bad: the story gets pretty good toward the end, and the fantasy elements (pretty much everything to do with death) are both cool and poignant. And those striking illustrations the book's initial pages promised me are totally there and totally great. It's just frustrating that those elements couldn't have concealed into a more consistently good package. Grade: B-
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