Movies
Get Out (2017)
Jordan Peele's debut writer/director outing (yes, Key & Peele Jordan Peele) is a work of horror love: the shots are lovely and allusive (both Rear Window and, if I'm not mistaken, Night of the Living Dead get shout outs), the tension is smart and earned, the core mechanics are frightening and emotive. But let's also take some time to appreciate that it's also basically a feature-length Key & Peele sketch, its first 2/3s playing out the various permutations of its clever, socially conscious premise (basically, The Stepford Wives, but about the black experience rather than the female one) before veering into a crazy, borderline absurd finale. It's all great fun, and I adored every minute of it. Grade: A-
London Road (2015)
I guess I shouldn't be surprised when a head-scratching premise leads to head-scratching results, but here we are: a murder mystery musical that culminates with a large flower sale and features a slew of actors, both recognizable and anonymous, and singers, both tone-deaf and talented. The results, I'm afraid, are just kind of pasty and dry in their weirdness, and while I'm all for nontraditional singing styles in musicals, so many of the singers here struggle to hit the already kind of iffy notes (the songs are dinner-theater-caliber) that the effect is kinda numbing. Grade: C
Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton: This Is Stones Throw Records (2013)
I'm not as familiar with the output of experimental hip-hop label Stones Throw as I probably should be for this film to have its full impact, but even so, it's cool to have the history of MF Doom, etc., laid out like this. The structure is a bit scattershot at times—there's not really much of a narrative besides "And then this happened"—but it's got a busily engaging visual style that sets it apart from your standard talking heads/stock footage doc. Also, some great music (from Stones Throw's catalog, of course) underlines everything. Grade: B
The Ghost Writer (2010)
A super tight political thriller in the vein of The Parallax View, complete with a haunting, evocative ending. Ewan McGregor, playing the ghost writer for the memoir of a former Prime Minister who has been accused of war crimes, does great work as a guy who's in way over his head but doesn't know he's in over his head, so he's kind of foolishly confident, and Pierce Brosnan makes for a surprisingly compelling slimy politician as the Prime Minister. The sense of dread ratchets up consistently over the film's two hours until it reaches an almost unbearable climax by its end, which is both colossally depressing and too aesthetically marvelous to dismiss as mere nihilism. Good stuff. Grade: A-
Hard Candy (2005)
A tremendously mean little thriller that, in flipping the script by having a teen psychologically torture a presumed pedophile, maybe encourages too much sympathy in a man who may in fact be a monster. But that implications are just details. Hard Candy is breathless and tense throughout, culminating in a moment that's not exactly unexpected but shocking nonetheless. And thus the career of Ellen Page was born. Grade: B+
Point Break (1991)
Very stupid, but deliciously so. Faced with the revelation that a notorious band of bank robbers are, in their less criminal personas, surfers, new rookie Keanu Reeves must himself become a surfer in order to bag the baddies, and oh yes, you'd better believe he's the "methods are unconventional but dammit, you get results" kind of rookie (shoutout to John C. McGinley as a particularly fine specimen of the disgruntled superior). In a way that seems specific to the late '80s/early '90s era of big-budget action heroics, Point Break manages to leverage its mountain of silliness into something almost sublime through the sheer power of its sincerity and gonzo disregard for reality. So naturally the final product is both eye-rolling and a great time. Grade: B+
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
The worst thing about the worst of the original Planet of the Apes series isn't its tepid, interminable battle scenes (although they are interminable and woefully tepid). It's that it all but abandons the myriad of thoughtful questions it poses. Can the future be altered? Is violence justified if it results in good? Is the subjugation of the human race by the apes a result of the violence inherent in the ape society? If you're interested in knowing the film's take on any of these questions, too bad! It manages to sidestep each and every one of them on its way to its clumsy anticlimax. A disappointingly safe (and entirely unsatisfying) ending to one of the most recklessly ambitious sci-fi series of all time. Grade: C
Television
Adventure Time, Season 5 (2012-14)
The show has had better—much better—seasons, but its bizarre, sprawling (52 episodes!), heartbreaking, ruminative, uneven, intermittently brilliant fifth season is, I think, what establishes Adventure Time as an all-time great TV series, no longer the type of show that people will say, "Oh yeah, I remember that one," but will instead interrupt people rhapsodizing on the merits of The Simpsons and The Wire to say, "But have you seen this??" With Season 5, Adventure Time proves that the structural gamble of sections of its fourth season—unannounced plot arcs and symbolic character studies intermingled with the normal standalone adventures and outright technical experiments—can work stellarly as a conceit for an entire season, not just intermittent sections. I've expressed unease at the increasing serialization of the show before, and while Season 5 is easily the most serialized yet, it also does what I was afraid the show wouldn't, which is to effectively recontextualize its playful absurdity within a more logically consistent world required of more series continuity. What's more, it's able to find great poignancy within that recontextualized, serialized absurdity, probably best exhibited by the out-of-nowhere epic quest two-parter "Lemonhope," but more conventionally presented in the now-standard Ice King weepfests "Betty" and "Simon & Marcy," the swashbuckling-cum-coming-of-age of "Mystery Dungeon," and the art criticism of "James Baxter the Horse." And that's not even accounting for the weird, stylistic experiments that the show's expanded episode count allows for, like the intentionally buggy 3D animation in "A Glitch Is a Glitch" or the one-off noir "Root Beer Guy." And of course we've got a handful of the best episodes the show has ever produced, most notably the Lump Space Princess-centric "Bad Timing," a time-travel episode that easily fits among the stylistic innovators of "A Glitch Is a Glitch," with its Don Hertzfeldt-inspired visuals while also doing some of the most inventive storytelling and poignant character work in the show's history. The season doesn't always work, and at times it really doesn't—far too much time is spent on Finn's romance/breakup with Fire Princess, to the point that our once protagonist is easily the weakest link in the show. But make no mistake: this is greatness. This is legend. This is one of the greatest shows of all time. Grade: A-
Music
The Men - Open Your Heart (2012)
It's easy enough to see Open Your Heart, The Men's sophomore LP, as a mere sum of its influences. The opening one-two punch of "Turn It Around" and "Animal" wouldn't have sounded out of place on an album from The Jam or even early Foo Fighters, and later tracks sound very much like, for example, country-rock Rolling Stones ("Candy") or Oasis ("Open Your Heart") or Sonic Youth ("Presence"). And I know bands who wear their influences this flamboyantly can be kind of hit-and-miss with people looking for new sounds, which... fine. But I dare you to listen to this album and not marvel at least at the sheer colorfulness on display, the reckless abandon with which the band jumps from one genre to the next, the tireless energy with which they derive their chord changes and sonic textures, the overall excellence in the songwriting, regardless of precedent. It's hard. Originality is overrated anyway. Grade: A-
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