Movies
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-
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-
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 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-
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+
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-
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
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+
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