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+
Movies
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 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
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
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+
Didn't know you had a blog. I will be a regular reader after seeing this. Thanks for the insight.
ReplyDeleteYup! Been blogging on and off for almost four years now.
Delete(dang, I didn't realize how long I'd been doing it until I just checked)