Movies
It's a modern action blockbuster, so it's like at least thirty minutes too long, and the plotting is convoluted. But thank heavens that it has the good sense to jettison anything resembling the cumbersome mythology of the original two sequels and focus on the humor and swashbuckling action. It's a saving grace that makes the movie more enjoyable than it should be, and I liked it overall, if a bit tepidly. Grade: B-
After the first (and still obviously best) Pirates of the Caribbean movie, there's been a bit of a trade-off, franchise-wise: the original two sequels that rounded out the trilogy had the madcap energy of gonzo director Gore Verbinski, but they also had a truly cumbersome plot deadened by everything to do with its convoluted maritime mythology and the lifeless romancing between Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. The fourth movie lacked Verbinski's weirdo charms but in exchange threw out the insipid mythologizing and instead offered a much lighter, more swashbuckling movie that hearkened back to the charms of the first. It was alright (see previous review). Now we have the fifth movie in the franchise, and shiver me timbers, the freaking mythology is back, and this time without Gore Verbinski in the director's chair. So what we're left with is something of the worst of both worlds: dour, byzantine, and shakily directed, not to mention dull. The movie can't even get Jack Sparrow right, which seems like the bare minimum we could expect of this franchise up to this point—gone is the winking irony and failing-upward luck, and in its place is something resembling emotional stakes and relentless backstorying (did you ever wonder where Jack got his compass? Well, fasten your seatbelt). Midway through the film, there's even a literal jumping-the-shark moment involving Sparrow; it's come three movies too late, of course, but it's never too late to listen. Grade: C
By feelings toward Jim Jarmusch usually fall somewhere within the realm of disinterested admiration: I can see the craft of his films, but they never do a whole lot for me. Now enter Paterson, and that trend seems to have changed. Centering on a married bus driver (Adam Driver) who writes poetry in his spare time, it's possible that this film just intersects too many of my own personal passions in real life to avoid awakening some strong feelings in me. The movie is a quiet, well-observed rumination on the creation and role of art within the repetition ebbs and flows of a life, and I found it tremendously moving. Grade: A-
This kind of history-as-drama-with-overly-broad-emotional-beats film isn't really my cup of tea anymore, but there's no denying that this is a particularly well-acted one of that kind. And I'm all for movies about space, especially those that shed light on (or at least adapt a book that sheds light on) new angles to the same familiar Space Race moments. Grade: B
"Mixtape" is exactly the right word for this: a hodge-podge of footage (taken by Swedish journalists, which... okay, I guess) of prominent Black Power Movement events and leaders that, collectively, makes a collage of the era. It's an interesting experiment, particularly in the way it uses modern-day audio by those same leaders (esp. Angela Davis) to comment on the decades-old footage, and I can't deny that it's successful at crafting evocative sights and sounds. But there is something vaguely frustrating about the way the movie has little interest in going beyond those sights and sounds—if you know anything about Black Power at all, there's nothing particularly new or enlightening here, while if you're looking for a decent primer on the subject, there are far better resources for that sort of education than this film. But still, as collages go, you can do worse, too. Grade: B
Well, here's something of a time capsule—an indie dramedy from the days in which Kristen Stewart was still coasting on those Twilight/girl-next-door vibes rather than being an art-house trailblazer and Jesse Eisenberg, pre-Social Network, still hadn't figured out that he was way better at playing sociopaths than Michael Cera clones. It's also an indie dramedy about a sensitive, literate guy with hip music taste who just really, really wants to get laid, a plot that's its own sort of time capsule. I used to eat these sorts of movies for breakfast, and I won't deny the charms of a movie that features this much Lou Reed. But I've also become way more sensitive to the tropes of this kind of film, and while I appreciate the low-keyness of everything, there's also something solipsistic and dull about the way it frames dude-in-his-20s life as a lackadaisical movement between super goofy comedy and angsty pathos. The performances are decent, and the screenplay is warm, but, like... is this all there is? Grade: B-
Television
In approaching this series, it's important for diehard fans of the original book series (and the superb 1985 TV miniseries) like myself to realize that Anne with an E (or simply Anne, as it was released in its original run in Canada) is much more of a reinterpretation and modernization of the original Anne story than it is a straight and faithful adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. This can be a little hard to swallow at times such as the second episode, where a wholly new plot digression alters the relationships among the principal three characters (Marilla, Matthew, and Anne) in a way that feels almost like a deliberate attempt to encourage hand-wringing among Green Gables purists; the same goes for the decidedly more mature content of this series (which includes semi-direct discussions of sexuality and abuse), which aims this show more at a teen audience than the traditional elementary-aged audience of the books. However, this looseness with the source material is also the key to this series's success, too. Any adaptation of a work that already has a successful and beloved adaptation in wide circulation has to contend with the completely reasonable question of why it even needs to exist in the first place, and the same goes doubly for Anne with an E in its opening hour, as it runs through familiar beats and verbatim lines from the book as if it were going through a fandom checklist. It's only when the series digresses in tone and content from the book that it becomes clear that Anne is doing something interesting and rather compelling with its source material: using the familiar, lackadaisical warmth of the novel as a stark counterpoint for the striking psychological realism it gives Anne. A subtext of the novel was the way that Anne's vivid imagination and flights of fancy were coping mechanisms for her impoverished and traumatic life as an orphan before coming to Green Gables, and that idea basically becomes the text of Anne; the cruelty she has experienced in her prior life is depicted unflinchingly here, and it stands in such vivid contrast to the sunny loquaciousness of Anne Shirley that it's not hard to see the heartbreaking desperation behind that cheer (an effect bolstered by a fantastic performance from Amybeth McNulty). The show uses this vantage point to inform all the various wrinkles of Anne's relationships with her new family and peers, from the ways that it causes her varying levels of trust and mistrust of the Cuthberts to how her extreme experiences at society's bottom rung have deteriorated her frame of reference for what is and isn't appropriate human behavior, something that manifests itself most potently in the ways that Anne struggles to make friends in the context of the post-Victorian propriety of the Prince Edward Island middle class. There are things about this series that don't work—the frequent discussion of gender politics and progressive values feels, at times, anachronistic and on-the-nose, and the introduction of a pair of villains in the series's final episode feels way off-base. But on the whole, Anne with an E is way more vital than I was expecting it to be, worthy of its source material even as it innovates on it. Grade: B+
Not a lot to say here: Brooklyn Nine-Nine has long been a pleasure, and this season represents no great change in that paradigm. The show's pursuit of consistency over ambition is less a liability (though it does continually keep this show short of greatness) than simply a commitment to classic sitcom craftsmanship, but that said, I'll be interested in seeing how the show restores its status quo after the cliffhanger in this season's finale. Grade: B
Books
As with most autobiographies, Bruce Springsteen's autobiography has dead zones that line up with the ebb and flow of the high points of interest in his life. Most exiting are what's expected—his rough-and-tumble childhood, early bar-band career, assembling of the E Street Band, relationship with his father, struggle with clinical depression, etc.; least exciting is his 1990s, i.e. the era of Human Touch, Lucky Town, and domestic stability. The depressing fact remains that as happy as I am that the Boss was so content in these years, it's just not that interesting to read about someone whose life is going very, very well. But even these dull spots are ameliorated by Springsteen's voice, which is about exactly as you'd expect it to be: thoughtful, down-to-earth, idiomatic, impassioned, charismatic. And when the autobiography is at its best (as it frequently is), the pages fly by. Overall, it's an engaging intersection of an artist's life with an artist's voice. Grade: B+
Music
Complex, nervy jazz-fusion for complex, nervy times. This is a political record in the style of old-school political jazz records from the '60s and '70s, more implicating politics and philosophy through dissonant rule-breaking than making any clear text within the album (though Wadada Leo Smith's contribution, "President Obama's Speech at the Selma Bridge" comes close). So what we're left with is a work that feels important in indefinable but grimily tangible ways that make for one of the year's best. Grade: A-
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