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-
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