Movies
This animated feature begins as a kind of Castaway situation and ends as a moving and unspeakably gorgeous rumination on life itself. If that sounds pretentious, just wait until I tell you that there's not one jot or tittle of dialogue and that its plot involves a turtle that inexplicably turns into a woman. This is definitely one of those types of movies where you pretty much know from the outset if this will be your cup of tea or not, but good golly, is this ever my cup of tea, and I will gladly sip from this exquisite mug time and time again. This is the best animated movie I've seen in quite a while, and if I were to go back and revise my "Best of 2016" list, this film would land at the very top. At only 80 minutes, it's a blessed trifle of a watch, too, so even if it doesn't sound like your thing, I'd highly recommend checking it out anyway. And for anyone who's on the fence, I'll close by pointing out that the movie is a collaboration between Studio Ghibli and Dutch animation master Michaël Dudok de Wit, though I suppose that if you know who those are (particularly the latter), then you're probably already in the bag for this movie to begin with. Grade: A
This three-hour-and-fifteen-minute Turkish drama is too long by a significant margin, which makes it all the more impressive that it's able to be as powerful as it is, considering how diluted that power is by long, meandering scenes full of bourgeois misery and stark, striking, but altogether too lengthy shots of the Cappadocian wild. Depicting a class struggle between a wealthy and blindingly arrogant and self-possessed writer who owns some property and his tenants who are having difficulty paying the rent on that property, the movie is at its best in two centerpiece conversations the writer has between his sister and his wife, respectively. These conversations are riveting, pivoting from abstract philosophizing to trenchant social commentary to piercing character work to just plain old verbal sniping among the principal characters, and they form the backbone over which the movie is able to hang its rather cumbersome whole on without it collapsing entirely under the weight of the runtime. Grade: B
A wild, sprawling, maximalist documentary about the '80s/'90s Miami cocaine trade that itself feels cocaine-addled for all its frenetic energy: the film cuts from interview to interview, splicing together shot after shot into a furious, 2.5-hour montage of talking heads and archival footage. The component parts are great—the interviews are mostly with either law-enforcement officials from the era or, stunningly, with major players in the cocaine trade itself—but frequently, the way it's assembled, with its driving music and frantic cuts and incessant sound-biting, is just way. too. much. I would have preferred a much more methodical, structured documentary that allows its subject to breathe, but this is what we have. And it's decent as it is: informative and shocking as it is crazy, if a bit scattershot. Grade: B
It's directed by Alfonso Cuarón and filmed by Emmanuel Lubeski, one of the greatest director-cinematographer power couples in contemporary cinema, so you know it looks great. It's also a movie that adapts Charles Dickens's stone-cold 19th-century classic into a modern erotic romance starring Gwyneth Paltrow at her blankest and Ethan Hawke at his '90s brattiest. I guess you can't win 'em all. Grade: C+
Television
After a scattered and convoluted Season 3, everyone's favorite clone sci-fi series returns (correction: returned—I'm about a year behind, as you can see) with what's something of a course-correction, reigning in the discursive plots from the previous season to refocus on its core characters. Most notably, the season is centered around what happens when the main characters pull on the loose thread that is Beth's suicide, bringing the plot full-circle back to the very event that kicked off the show's first (and still best) season. This is a fantastic move by the series writers, deepening existing plots rather than crowding them out with new and emotionally flat mythos expansion (*cough*Proletheans*cough*). There's still the feeling that the show has reached the point The X-Files ran aground of in its fifth and sixth seasons, where the overarching series mythology feels too big for the characters themselves. But as long as the show is able to continue to ground its world-spanning themes in compelling moment-by-moment dramatic writing as it does here, this should only be a minor issue. Grade: B+
Music
One of the saddest facts of rock music history is that Big Star has only three albums, and only two with power-pop saint Chris Bell. And as much as the subsequent power pop descendants tried to mimic that band's particular charms, nothing has quite scratched that itch for me. Until now, that I've discovered 1991's Girlfriend. To quote one of the album's best songs, "I didn't think I'd find you perfect in so many ways." It's exactly that kind of sweet, catchy, and achingly melancholy pop/rock that I've been waiting for so long. At fifteen songs and over 60 minutes, the album is far too long, but that's pretty much the sole strike against it. Grade: A-
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