Mini-Reviews for April 24 - 30, 2017

A higher percentage of negative reviews this week than normal. Enjoy?

Movies

Your Name (君の名は。) (2016)
A drop-dead gorgeous film on a technical level that services a pretty okay plot (basically, a body-switch movie) with a screenplay that struggles to make that story move—though, to be fair, a gigantic step forward from Garden of Words, writer/director Makoto Shinkai's previous feature. It's a very good movie, but it's almost entirely carried by the visuals and pathos of the operatic teen romanticism; moment-by-moment writing is pretty weak. But sweet jumping Jehoshaphat, is it beautiful, especially toward the film's end, where the visuals get cosmically oriented and the silent moments where everything drops away and we're left to only contemplate a hanging piece of visual lyricism come plentifully. Seen on the big screen, it's transcendent. Grade: A-

A Monster Calls (2016)
Criminally ignored by audiences last fall (including by me, as I'm just now getting around to it via Netflix disc delivery [yes, that still exists]), A Monster Calls is a kind of movie that comes along very, very rarely, especially nowadays when the family film is virtually extinct: a piece of cinema aimed very specifically at precocious middle-school-aged children and their parents. Even rarer, it's a movie that wants precocious middle schoolers and their parents to cry their eyes out. This is a movie about death—not about avoiding or defeating it but coming to terms with the terrifying fact that every single person you love will eventually be pulled into its hungry maw. And it's not subtle about it; a recurring image in the film involves a boy watching his mother fall into a crumbing hole in grounds of a church graveyard. The movie is filled with such symbolically loaded images, particularly in the two luscious animated sequences that mime the slippery fables told by the titular monster (this is very much one of those stories were sublime fantasy and piercing real life collide). The end result is as moving as it is visually sumptuous. We all missed this in the theaters; let's not miss it again. Grade: A-

Sinister (2012)
In what turns out to be one of the best horror movies of the 2010s, Ethan Hawke is a struggling writer with demons of alcoholism taking his family to a house that may or may not be haunted by evil spirits that are either leftover from or caused a horrific tragedy at that same location. If this is all reminding you of The Shining, then you and I think a lot alike, and in a lot of ways, this is a stealthy re-adaptation of the King book—specifically the book and not the Kubrick movie, because Sinister is very much interested in the psyche of Hawke's character and the ways that it intersects the supernatural evil, something Kubrick was almost gleefully disinterested in. Anyway, I don't want to belabor the Shining comparisons (although this definitely feels like it could be a Stephen King short story), because Sinister ends up being quite its own animal by the end, mostly aesthetically: Frédéric Thoraval, the film's editor, deserves a mountain of awards for his work here, and the cinematography, music, and lighting all pull their weight beautifully, too. Until its final act (which, typical of even the best modern horror, kind of wets the bed), this is a languorously patient film, making its bump-in-the-night moments effective through an impressively tight control of craft that elevates its mostly typical ghost story underpinnings with something approaching a work of art. Grade: A-

Monkeybone (2001)
Monkeybone is a special kind of bad movie that we don't get too often anymore in this era of hyper-competent studio mediocrity and cinematic-universe house styles: a movie with a manic disregard for taste, continuity, and logic, all in the name of... style? Yeah, we'll go with that. This is a movie in which a man calls his penis "Monkeybone;" it's a movie in which Monkeybone is also the name of a main character, who is also a stop-motion animated monkey; it's a movie in which the souls of comatose humans congregate in some weird Freudian space visualized as the unholy love child of Mos Eisley Cantina and The Muppets; it's a movie in which one escapes that coma place via the open mouth of a CG rendering of the Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln; it's a movie in which Bob Odenkirk is a surgeon who chases after a reanimated corpse with a cooler in the hopes of being able to save any spare organs that drop out; it's a movie in which Brendan Frasier kisses an orangutan and watches with unfettered lust a nature documentary on monkey mating habits. If this sounds like zany fun, you're in the same boat I was before watching it. Oh, but it's dreadful. It's also bonkers to such a degree that I'm being kinder to this movie than it probably deserves, probably out of some sense of admiration that something this disastrously off-the-wall managed to be greenlit by a major Hollywood studio. There are also some pretty cool stop-motion effects, which is about the least backhandedly kind thing I can say about the movie. On the whole, though, this is a movie that has to be seen to be believed—but better yet, don't. Grade: C-

Jurassic Park III (2001)
Two significant factors set the second Jurassic Park sequel above The Lost World (though still significantly below the quality of the original and even just the basic sea level of "good"). First is that it's a nearly forty minutes shorter, bringing the whole production into a brisk 92 minutes—an absolute game-changer after the lethargic, lumbering Lost World. Second is that director Joe Johnston, a modern master of sorts within this dubious genre of mid-budget pulp fare (for example, directing the sterling The Rocketeer and later the first Captain America film with Chris Evans) has absolutely none of post-Schindler's-List Spielberg's care for dignity and instead commits totally to this film's B-movie status. As I said, it's still not particularly good—characters, again, are an issues (we again have parents trying to reconnect with their kid, wtf), as is coherent plotting and anything resembling wonder or ambition. But at least Jurassic Park III knows what it is; I can respect that. Grade: C+

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Though the idea of taking the original Jurassic Park's comic relief character and overall thematic bludgeon Ian Malcolm and making him a protagonist creates its own structural issues for the movie—namely, the introduction of his gymnastics whiz kid (why oh why does every one of these movies have to be about people trying to reconnect with their children??), it at least means we have some solid Goldblum comedy throughout, which is one of the few bright spots in this otherwise dire sequel. The other bright spot is the cinematography, which captures the Cretaceous (these guys are not from the Jurassic era) imagery with a lush and evocative eye for lighting that bests even the original. As for the rest, well, like I said: dire. It's a movie that simultaneously takes itself far too seriously and not nearly seriously enough: characters we are supposed to care deeply about without the film actually having given the effort to imbue them with any humanity to care for; dinosaurs that supposedly pose even greater threats but without any of the sense of awe or grandeur that made the beasts so otherworldly and magnificent (and hence, terrifying) in the original. Worst of all, it's just terrifically boring. This, in fact, is the film's greatest crime: a movie about dinosaurs that's BORING. This is shooting fish in a barrel and missing. Grade: C-

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
A relentlessly tight psychological thriller, but what did you expect from Hitch? What's interesting here, beyond the usual formal mastery, is that Shadow of a Doubt seems to be, at least in part, a revision and rebuttal of Suspicion, Hitchcock's 1941 film that's similarly preoccupied with the possibility that a family member is a cold-blooded murderer. But whereas Suspicion remains an unsatisfying tease of a film, Shadow of a Doubt goes for broke with a fireworks finish that's every bit the fears-turned-to-cheers that Suspicion sadistically refused to be. They both have lame romances, though, so that's a strike against each. Grade: A-



Music

Spoon - Hot Thoughts (2017)
At this point, it almost goes without saying that a new Spoon album will be good. Of course Hot Thoughts is good; I'm reasonably confident it's impossible for a Spoon album to be bad. What's more interesting is that the specific pattern of the last decade of Spoon output seems to be alternating crowd-pleasers with more experimental work: 2007's pop-rock triumph Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga gave way to 2010's groovy, opaque Transference, and now Spoon has followed up 2014's warm, welcoming They Want My Soul for this, a mysterious, nervous album with few obvious hits and that ends with an out-of-nowhere jazz instrumental. The result is something funkier and dancier than Spoon have been in the past, while naturally still being recognizably Spoon. These guys continue to find variations and nuances on their core sound, and I'll be along for the ride for pretty much forever. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 17 - 23, 2017

Y'all know what it is.

Movies

Toni Erdmann (2016)
The buzz surrounding this movie was that it's "hilarious," "absolutely nuts," and "wildly inventive" (actual pull quotes from the movie's poster), and while I won't deny that this movie is entertaining—especially for a nearly 3-hour(!) German film—but come on: Toni Erdmann is only "absolutely nuts" in the context of the soundtrackless, handheld-camera'd austerity of contemporary European neo-realism, of which Toni Erdmann totally is one for most of its lengthy runtime. The glaring exception here is a climactic scene that's too wonderful to spoil except to say that it's probably the best use of cinematic nudity in at least a decade. That moment is made all the better by the far more conventional but uncommonly moving scene that immediately follows it and provides the image for the film's poster, a perfect culmination of the father-daughter relationship that animates the best ninety percent of the film. So yes, this is a good movie, and please don't take this review otherwise—I just feel like the buzz needs to be reigned in a bit. Grade: B+

Lion (2016)
At the movie's beginning, Saroo is a five-year-old living in India; he's soon separated from his family, and inadvertently takes a train hundreds of miles from his home, where he dodges various adult predators until finally being taken into government custody and put in an orphanage. This section of the movie is great, and it lasts over 40 minutes. The problem is that this movie still has another 80 minutes to go, and those 80 minutes take place in Saroo's adulthood as he searches for his hometown and his family. It's not an inherently bad idea, and given that it's based on a true story, there probably isn't much the film could have done differently, plot-wise. But Saroo is using Google Earth to locate his village, and this is a very bad thing—not for Saroo, who (spoilers? it's basically the entire reason this was made into a movie) finds his town—but the movie itself, which essentially becomes a very dramatic version of watching a guy click around on a laptop, with just a touch of Rooney Mara thrown in for flair. It's a film impeccably crafted throughout, both visually and aurally (the score is magnificent), which is why I'm rating it as highly as I am, and what the movie is dramatizing is a truly wonderful inspirational story. But as any spouse of a grad student (you're looking at one) can tell you, computer research just isn't interesting to watch if you aren't participating. Thank goodness for the rest of the movie. Grade: B

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
This Persian-American vampire movie is very stylish and cool, as all vampire movies should be. There isn't a lot of substance to it—the characters are sketched so broadly that it's occasionally difficult to tell them apart, and the themes of gender (the vampire is female and kills some greasy dudes, so, you know, feminism) are at least as broad—but that's by design. This isn't a movie that wants to be grand or big; it's a movie content with the little things, like moody b&w cinematography and chilling to cool music. I can respect that. Grade: B

Alien: Resurrection (1997)
In a franchise noted for icky body horror, it's worth noting that Alien: Resurrection is the series' grossest entry by a large margin. The other films have chest-bursting and blood/guts, sure, but do they have a guy's head being bitten in half? A room of demon-spawn fail experiment grotesqueries preserved in transparent vats of urine-like liquid? A creature sucked through a tiny hole in the ship that slowly strips it of flesh and skin as it pulls the poor thing into space all spaghetti-like? I think not. There are quibbles to make with the script and characters (though as always, the reveal of who is and isn't a robot is great), and apparently Joss Whedon was upset at the implementation of his screenplay. But when it's a movie as wall-to-wall disgustingly entertaining as this, who cares? Grade: B+

Books

Surviving Nashville by Stacy Barton (2007)
A brisk short story collection about Southern women: lots of screen doors, Ma's cooking, ice tea, furtive sexual encounters—you know the drill. It's very MFA-feeling, which can be both good and bad, and there are some pretty good stories in here (my favorites are the folk-tale-esque "On Tuesdays" and the religiously tragic "Hail, Mary"). But there are also a lot of stories that either don't have a lot of heft or mine such already thoroughly mined themes (housewifery is oppressive, etc.) that there's really not much left for Barton to carry away. Grade: C+




Music

Father John Misty - Pure Comedy (2017)
A lot of people (myself included) have assumed Josh Tillman's Father John Misty moniker to be a joke persona steeped in irony and affectation, and no doubt that has been true at various times in the past few years. But between 2015's I Love You, Honeybear and this year's sprawling, definitely overlong Pure Comedy, the FJM identity also seems like a device for trenchant self-reflection and self-critique. Take "Ballad of the Dying Man," one of the album's best and sharpest tracks, in which the eponymous dying man spends his last moments in self-important narcissism online—interesting, coming from a singer-songwriter with a habit of dropping in on the comments sections of his own Stereogum reviews (with a username, no less, of "Dying Man," created when he forgot the password for his old "J Tillman" account [yes, I might spend too much time reading the comments on Stereogum]). "Leaving LA," the album's meandering 13-minute centerpiece, is more directly critical, calling Misty/Tillman "another white guy in 2017 who takes himself so goddamn seriously." And yes, for all the jokes and quips on the album (and there are quite a few, many of them excellent), he absolutely takes himself seriously. Much as Tillman sneaks in some introspective barbs, this is very much one of those albums: about politics, about the state of the world, about God, etc. "Total Entertainment Forever," another of the album's best and brightest, describes an Infinite-Jest-ish world in which humans consume entertainment so voraciously that they cease to consume anything else and simply die; "When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay" is venom-filled critique of God Himself and the way that He structured the world. Your tolerance for this probably depends on how much you enjoy John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the work of Randy Newman (two obvious thematic and musical influences on the record) and how much you'll allow the frankly gorgeous guitar/piano arrangements to offset the bitterness of Misty's deeply cynical lyrics. There's an undeniable "Josh discovers Christopher Hitchens for the first time" vibe to a lot of the album's discussion of politics and religion, and on the whole, the perspective displayed here is one of trendy nihilism with commentary that's more blunt than insightful. But I dunno—there's something really cathartic in this sort of blunt contempt, and in a political season when I feel myself angrier and more frustrated by the day, I savor that catharsis, even when it comes by way of analysis with which I have strong reservations or even just I flat-out disagree. Plus, there's always the beautiful instrumentation and Tillman's unparalleled ability to turn a phrase, even if I tap out of the actual content. Not bad. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 10 - 16, 2017

To all those who celebrate and remember: Happy Easter! He is risen indeed.

Unrelated: here are some reviews.

Movies

Melancholia (2011)
I think about the end of the world a lot. Whether or not you think this is helpful probably depends on how likely you think an existential threat to humanity is, and the answer to that question is beyond the scope of this review. But supposing that it does happen, we should all be so lucky for it to be as beautiful as Lars von Trier's massively pessimistic yet unquestionably gorgeous-looking depiction of an apocalypse via Earth's collision with another planet. That's not a spoiler—a jaw-dropping opening montage shows how this is going to all end right up front, and so when we flash back to the weeks (months?) immediately prior to the interplanetary collision, we're left with no choice but to see the cast's petty squabbles and neuroses in an even pettier light. Convincing us that humanity is essentially worthless before destroying them in totality is a bridge too far, philosophically, for me, but I'll be jiggered if this movie isn't chock full of some of the most perfectly composed and lushly illustrated shots of the past twenty years of cinema. And that counts for a lot—regardless of how withering von Trier's contempt is against the world, it's undercut just the slightest by the immense value of the images on display, so it's hard not to feel the slightest bit sorry to see it all go. Grade: B+

Letter Never Sent (Неотправленное письмо) (1959)
Letter Never Sent very nearly verges on—in fact, let's not beat around the bush: it pretty much is—Soviet nationalist propaganda. A group of geologists go on a horrifically fatal expedition to find diamonds in Siberia, and their deaths are unambiguous heroic goods in the face of the Greater Good of their country and how the USSR won't have to rely on foreign trade to get their industrial diamonds. So yeah, there's that. But given that this is a mostly benevolent form of nationalism and not the purge-all-impure-races-and-destroy-all-other-countries variety, maybe we can just let bygones be bygones here and instead focus on the towering twin successes of this film's tense adventure narrative and its brilliant cinematography. Regarding the former, Letter Never Sent is an absolute winner, providing a taught man vs. nature story that never relents in its intensity, regardless of some of the more nationalistic tones to our protagonists' suffering at the hands of nature. On the latter, let's again avoid that poor, beaten bush: this movie contains some of the most astounding images I have ever seen captured on film. It's never not a marvel to look at, particularly (as with cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky's other famous picture, The Cranes Are Flying) the way it renders camera movement into nearly abstract impressions of action. It's beautiful. Besides, what's a little Soviet propaganda among comrades, anyway? Grade: A

Television

Legion, Season 1 (2017)
I should be overjoyed that a show features musical sequences set to The Who, Radiohead, and Pink Floyd all in one season. This is what I've been waiting for for years! But there's something oddly deflating about a work of art that meets you exactly where you are, taste-wise, and no farther. In fact, there are things about this show that ostensibly hew so closely to my sensibilities that I'm a little suspicious that I may have been the subject of covert observation by the powers that be at FX: showy cinematography, deadpan humor, Aubrey Plaza in a magnificent villainous turn (the best part of the show, hands down), 1970s affectations, slow-motion footage, nonlinear plotting. In another show, I might be overjoyed—and actually, Legion resembles most a more conventionally plotted version of Hannibal (a show I am overjoyed about) with less of a fixation on drone metal—but in the service of what is covertly an entry in the X-Men cinematic universe, I'm frankly wary. Don't get me wrong: nearly every element of the show is good-to-great, and as a whole, the series is admirably weird (its best episode is entirely devoted to the psychological interiors of its characters over just a few seconds of real time). It's just that these various good-to-great elements are assembled with seemingly little care, to the effect that the final product, though impressive on a moment-by-moment basis, gives the impression of a blender where the creators kept throwing in more things they thought were awesome without worrying how they would complement the rest. This is most detrimental when it comes to the characters, whom we are supposed to approach as these sort of psychological cyphers of trauma and contradiction but are really just kind of broad archetypes with quirks that are interesting but not enough to make them actually humanly interesting. It's all very cool, but there's really not a lot running under the hood either. Grade: B

Orange Is the New Black, Season 2 (2014)
In some respects, Orange Is the New Black's second season represents a significant improvement over its first: foremost, Piper has become no longer a main character and pandering audience surrogate but rather just another inmate and as such gets (with the exception of an excellent episode involving furlough) about as much screen time as any other character; the series has either figured out or finally got around to its full potential as an ensemble piece without borders, and when it buckles down to that, it's routinely exceptional. On the other hand, Season Two has sprouted a couple new problems of its own, primarily the introduction of Vee, an organized-crime-aspiring new inmate whose plot (which ends up occupying a gigantic portion of the season) tries and fails to be the sort of top-to-bottom drug trade exegesis that The Wire was—again, this show's strength is as an ensemble dramedy with social subtext, not as an intricately plotted crime saga. A second (but possibly longer-term problematic) issue that crops up is the same as that other great flashback-heavy series, Lost, eventually had to wrestle with, too, which is that it's become increasingly unsure of how to utilize its flashback structure once the general character exposition is finished. On Lost, the flashbacks became increasingly irrelevant to the show's trajectory, while on Orange, they are used as ham-fisted storytelling bludgeons, mostly for the Vee plot, of which, again, I'm not a huge fan. Regardless, it might be time for a format shakeup here. So I'll call it a draw with Season One. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 3 - 9, 2017

I actually have a few non-movie reviews this week! How about that!

Movies

20th Century Women (2016)
When movies go to depict the tensions between generations, they typically approach it loudly, often through the device of ultra-conservative parents who hate their progressive children's freedom. So it is just one of 20th Century Women's multitude of lovely touches that it couches the changing mores of generations through the gentler (but no less piercing) dynamic of a son and his already open-minded mother who, for all her open-mindedness, still feels left behind. It's beautiful and nuanced and textured with arresting moments of self-reflection. What is ostensibly (and, I suppose, is still) a coming-of-age tale set in the late '70s becomes, under this relationship and the myriad other equally gentle, equally textured human bonds (among whom are perfectly cast Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning [who, between this and The Neon Demon, had quite the 2016]), becomes this lived-in collage of what it means to find community from within the larger noise of the culture of a given historical moment. And speaking of culture: a mix of post-rock-ish ambient motifs and period-specific punk and post-punk tunes (Talking Heads feature prominently, as does Black Flag), the film's soundtrack is absolute catnip for me. So of course that affects the grade here (as if this weren't A-grade to begin with). Grade: A

Elle (2016)
If, after the film's open thirty minutes, you're left wondering about the proprietary of having a movie about a rape survivor then reveal said survivor to be a raging sociopath, that's exactly the trap that director Paul Verhoeven, legendary confounder of good taste, means for us bourgeois simpletons to fall into. It's not so much that the movie is outrightly trash; it's that the movie plays its cards so close to its chest regarding what exactly it's trying to say about sexual assault that it's tough to tell if Elle is some smart satire or just an exercise in lurid shock. The film gestures toward both readings without committing strongly enough to either to make its endgame clear even after seeing the entire film once (who knows what repeat viewings will offer). Verhoeven's film's tend to make a lot more sense with a little distance from their specific cultural moment (e.g. Starship Troopers), so maybe it'll take a few years for this one to sink in. As for now... ? Grade: B

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001)
Very much coasting on the vibes of your average PBS TV doc, it's nevertheless a good—if a bit hagiographic (understandably; the man was barely cold in the grave when the film was made)—source of info on one of cinema's greats. There's some cool footage here (child Kubrick is adorable, btw), and the talking heads—a diverse cross-section of his collaborators and admirers--have smart things to say. None of it is particularly groundbreaking, particularly if you're at all familiar with the critical discourse surrounding Kubrick's work, but it's a solid watch with an infectious enthusiasm for the work of a filmmaker whose work I'm already pretty enthusiastic about. Grade: B

The Big Kahuna (1999)
Three businessmen contemplate life and death in the lead-up and aftermath of a pivotal social mixer. This is the kind of movie where you don't need to look at the production credits to know that it's based on a play (Hospitality Suite, Roger Reuff [the film's screenwriter, in fact])—single-location setting, dialogue that takes the most winding path to get to its destination and loves repeating itself ("Are you mad?" "Am I mad?"), cinematography that mostly sticks to the point-and-shoot variety. As play adaptations go, it's a particularly play-like one, and were it not for a few sequences of ambient interludes, we'd be in the territory of Richard Linklater's Tape. Luckily for The Big Kahuna, though, is that its play is much, much better than Tape's, and its depiction of white male ennui (evoked marvelously by Danny Devito with probably the best performance I've seen from him) has, if not something new to say about that well-trod subject, a uniquely dark and complicated pathos in communicating it. Grade: B+

Hurlyburly (1998)
A meandering, aimless movie about how its characters are meandering and aimless has a hard time justifying its meandering aimlessness beyond the straightforward thematic concerns. There are perks to the ride, though: the acting is generally excellent, both for those playing type (Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey) and those playing very against it (Gary Shandling and a frankly shocking Meg Ryan), and the cinematography does a good job of transcending the film's stage roots (based on a 1984 play of the same title). There are, too, a few moving moments within the mostly tropey treatment of hedonistic aimlessness, notably a tortured Chazz Palminteri navigating a life that is clearly crumbling into some kind of abyss. Nothing spectacular, but nothing altogether awful either. Grade: B-

The Cranes Are Flying (Летят журавли) (1957)
A Soviet film about a woman whose fiance must leave to fight in WWII while she stays behind and deals with the crushing destruction of her home through the German blitzkrieg. So of course it's an exercise in heartbreak. More surprising, though, is the way that director Mikhail Kalatozov is able to sneak some startling abstract imagery into what initially seems to be a straightforwardly naturalistic style—during action scenes, the camera moves with a rapidity that smears out each frame into a kind of Impressionism that's as gorgeous as it is unsettling in its transformation of the warm, domestic landscapes. Did I mention this is super sad, though? Because really, it's going to break your heart. Grade: A-


Books

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (2013)
I sometimes find Neil Gaiman's approach to fantasy to run a bit abstract. This cuts both ways: it can make his stories feel at times frustratingly oblique and sometimes hard to follow, but at its best, it can also lend his work a fantastic sense of the sublime that's virtually unparalleled among authors playing the same game. The Ocean at the End of the Lane has a bit of the former, occasionally exhibiting that frustrating immateriality that makes the story and characters hard to grasp on a tangible level. But at its best—and it is, more often than not—Ocean is wonderfully otherworldly and inventive. Like Coraline (my favorite Gaiman novel and one that Ocean parallels in quite a few ways, right down to its fixation on ominous/demonic female caregivers), the more abstract pieces of Gaiman's prose latch onto tangible details in the story's world in a way that grounds the supernatural in a way that is both frightening and fantastic, obliterating the usual dichotomy between magic and mundane. Grade: B+

Music

Radiohead - Pablo Honey (1993)
People like to critique this album on the basis that it's derivative and straightforward, which is unfair on two counts: 1) Radiohead is always derivative, only now it's modern classical and Aphex Twin, not the Pixies and the Smiths (their ability to synthesize is, in fact, a crucial part of their genius), and 2) of course it's straightforward—clearly these guys were, at this point, more interested in making an alternative rock album than a work of murky dance grooves and pristine art rock. I don't want to overstate this; Pablo Honey is only barely not mediocre, and there are quite a few tracks that are undercooked—"Vegetable," "I Can't," and a couple others. But people pile on this record in a way that ignores that "Creep" is a classic of its angsty kind, "You" is an opener every bit as good as "Planet Telex," and "Blow Out" is the birth of the Jonny Greenwood, guitar experimenter extraordinaire, that we all know and love today. Grade: B-

Mini-Reviews for March 27 - April 2, 2017

This week was that time of the month where I frantically work through the expiring Netflix titles. So it's a bit of a mix bag.

Movies

Doctor Strange (2016)

The rare Marvel movie where the special effects are far and away the best part. I'll forgive the movie for wasting "Interstellar Overdrive" on a completely mundane sequence, because it more than makes up for it with the outlandish, otherworldly visuals later on, and I like the way the action sequences look like a cross between a kaleidoscope and the first Ellen Page dream sequence in Inception. The rest of the movie has some major problems, though, mostly in the realm of characterization; the Doctor himself is a nobody, and the movie loses the plot of his anguish over losing his hands so quickly it's almost embarrassing. The villain(s) are, per usual in Marvel movies, generally wastes of space, too, and poor Rachel McAdams gets the Natalie Portman treatment in a really bad way—she's pretty much a non-presence, which is such a shame. Still, it's so cool to look at, relative to other Marvel movies, that I'm feeling charitable: it's a pretty good movie. Grade: B

Approaching the Elephant (2014)

Formally, this is a pretty standard—even haphazard—documentary, wherein the structure seems to be a roughly chronological splicing together of fly-on-the-wall footage. And as tends to be the case with that sort of doc, Approaching the Elephant lives and dies by its subject matter. Luckily, its focus—the first year of a newly founded "free school" (read: Montessori cross-bred with anarchy)—is a fascinating one, and watching the kids' psychology in this unusual and almost Edenic scenario play off not just each other but also the increasingly harried school staff is never uninteresting, right up to and including the moment when this experiment in childhood development turns lightly Lord of the Flies-ward. Grade: B+

Menace II Society (1993)

The hard thing about movies like  this and the similarly themed Boyz N the Hood is that, at least for this middle-class white viewer (and my race and class seem essential to mention in my reviewing this film), they are the height of "eat your vegetables" cinema: the depiction of Southern California ghetto life is vital social commentary, and that's really the point of the movie. And it's a good point—one of the most powerful possibilities of film is its ability to evoke setting and transport viewers, and the co-opting of this ability to promote social awareness is an important application of cinematic language. So is it a flaw that on a character and narrative level, Menace II Society works in very broad archetypes and tropes? I dunno—it's cool that the film uses these archetypes toward fatalistic tragedy, but I can't help but feel that the tragedy might have been just a bit more trenchant if it had been bolstered by characters that feel just a tad less like educational tools. Still, there's an earnestness behind the film's commentary that gives it a compelling energy. And I'd be curious to know how a movie like this plays for someone who's a native of the environment depicted here—I have no pretensions to having any sort of insight into this life, so there should be a big asterisk by this review. Grade: B

Caddyshack (1980)

It's always a bit of a rude shock to discover just how douchey so many beloved comedies of the '80s are. Take Caddyshack, a movie so amused with the reprehensibility of its own cast of country-club jerks that its ostensible ribbing of them wraps around into a sort of astounded admiration of them in the vein of "Wow, isn't it hilarious how awful these people are, and isn't that kind of cool?" It's turtles all the way down with character douchebaggery, I'm afraid, with even our ostensible POV character, Michael O'Keefe's Danny, a caddy in need of a college scholarship, is so single-mindedly intent on bedding the few young women at the club that he cares very little about the effects of his cavalier attitude toward them (and, to be fair, neither does Caddyshack as a whole: never is this movie's misogyny more apparent than in the fact that Cindy Morgan's character plays a central role right up until her topless scene, after which, her boobs having been some sort of erotic Chekhov's gun in the grand tradition of '80s nudity, the movie has apparently expended her use and gives her not a single line for the remainder of its runtime). And yet in spite of how enormously off-putting everything is, the movie is almost saved by its performances, which are across-the-board (outside of Michael O'Keefe, who's a drip) fantastic at line delivery and physical comedy—most notably, Bill Murray's groundskeeper and Ted Knight's astounding, acerbic club dignitary, both of whom drag several of the movie's structureless, slack scenes into actual comedy gold. They certainly try their best, but it's too late: the movie commits the double sin of being unpleasant and not being quite funny enough to justify it. Grade: C+

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

I should have been having a lot more fun with a movie that's essentially a sneakily pulp yarn about an attempt to stop a nefarious Nazi plot to clone Hitler (complete with an American clone that talks by way of Holden Caulfield: "Far out" and "Phew, man," being prominent among his vocabulary). But this movie's sheen is respectable enough—directed competently by Franklin J. Schaffner (notably of Patton and Planet of the Apes, and The Boys From Brazil is every bit the cross-pollination of those two)—that it's unclear just how ludicrous this movie is willing (nay, hoping) to be until well into its two hours. So half the film, I felt a deep frustration at just how easy these Nazis were: they twirl their mustaches, plot literal genocide, they create scientific experiments to turn brown eyes blue, they pontificate in cleanly evil monologues that cast the plot in appealing blacks and whites—in short, a far cry from the far more insidious, nefarious Nazism that we face in real life and sits perilously close to our state department. Current events have a way of making fun movies no fun, turns out. Grade: B-