Movies
While the pile-up of WB-licensed allusions kind of run into the ground the fun surprise that was the cross-property smorgasbord from The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie is still lots of fun, from the "pew pew" sounds the gunfire makes to the film's deep and sincere love of all the goofy, obscure corners of the Batman universe. It's a tad too long, but hey, what movie isn't these days? Grade: B+
I'm all for inscrutable arthouse cinema, but man, I don't know if I'm into it quite enough for Horse Money. An ambiguous, narratively murky feature that slips up and down the timeline of 20th-century Portuguese history and apparently incorporates characters from director Pedro Costa's other films. I'm an expert in neither Portuguese history nor Costa's filmography, and maybe if I were, this would have made more sense. But I was mostly just lost, and not in a good way. Grade: C+
Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle) adapts a 16th-century Chinese novel that I know nothing about, and the results are very Stephen-Chow-ish, full of exaggerated kung-fu antics, physical comedy, and goofy, broad characterizations. And it's absolutely delightful for the first half of the film, and while the second half is still fun in the same over-the-top way, I got lost in the hairpin turns of plot and increasingly convoluted mythology. I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but I think I might have enjoyed this more if I were an expert in the background of the film's subject matter. Grade: B
TiMER is a fun enough indie rom-com with a sci-fi twist (a new technology allows you to see the exact moment you'll meet your soul mate) and an excellently cast—Emma Caulfield (aka Anya from Buffy) is a tremendous lead, and the rest of the cast is all sorts of charming, too. It's kind of fascinating and frustrating, though, just how much the movie flubs the ending—it can't decide how wrong its premise (the timer tech) is, and that sets up this weird catch-22 for the film; if it has our protagonist fall in love with someone other than whom the timer has her with, then the entire premise of the movie's tech is incorrect (i.e. a whole movie about a technology "what-if" ends with "but what if that technology didn't really work?", which is fiendishly unsatisfying), but if the film has her end up with the guy the timer says is her soul mate, it's a complete betrayal of the movie narrative up to that point, since it's been building the romance between her and another character. There's no right answer here, and it's maddening. Grade: B-
There shouldn't be all that much remarkable about this film—it's a relatively straightforward and handsomely made biopic of notoriously troubled painter Séraphine Louis: good in all its aesthetic conservativeness, but not great. But given that we're living in a world scandalously short on good biopics and even shorter on good biopics about troubled artistic geniuses (I mean, it's pretty much this and Mr. Turner, right?), the success of Séraphine purely as a functional and effective depiction of its subject is near miraculous. What a blessing context can be. Grade: B+
Television
In its second season, Aziz Ansari's Netflix dramedy series suffers from a protagonist problem: Ansari's Dev, while light and charming, is nearly dead weight in a season in which the ancillary characters (and, in the standout episode "New York, I Love You," even characters completely unconnected to Ansari's upper-middle-class web of acquaintances). The parents of the various characters are again highlights, as is Denise (Leva Waithe, who gets another standout episode, "Thanksgiving," probably the season's best); meanwhile, Dev bumbles about in pleasant but inconsequential plots involving his various romantic misadventures and his (nonromantic) relationship with a celebrity chef. The exception is the final pair of episodes, which, virtually out of the blue, introduce a deep, deep pathos to a romantic situation involving Dev's character that's achingly realized (and uncomfortably reminiscent of an experience of mine in high school) but, after the simple buildup, not well-enough developed in the season's front 4/5 to really land in any way outside my own memories. That said, it's an unceasingly agreeable show and one that goes down remarkably easily (I binged it in basically two sittings, which I virtually never do with shows), and both in the season-opening Italian episodes and in the aforementioned season-closing duo, both of which allude heavily to Italian cinema, Ansari shows himself to be a solid director with an eye for imagery that makes Master of None one of the best-looking comedies on TV. Worth a watch. Grade: B+
We all know that Better Call Saul will eventually result in Breaking Bad's Season 1, Episode 1—or at least some scenario that makes that episode possible. That's how prequels work. But Better Call Saul's third season is its most concerted push toward that endgame, sometimes to its detriment but often to its favor. When the show is merely throwing in pieces from Walter White's saga, it's a little tedious (as is, unfortunately, most often true of Mike's plot this season, which finds him increasingly bumping shoulders with the cartel and the drug-pushing characters that figure heavily into Breaking Bad), but when it plays with the dramatic irony inherent in prequelness, it's magnificent. The gold is, as always, in Jimmy's relationship with Chuck, a slow-boiling storyline that pays off majorly this season and works increasingly as an interesting experiment in audience sympathies. This is and always has been Jimmy's show; but as we see him pushed further and further, he eventually begins to embrace the push as his inevitable mandate, a move that brings him strikingly close to Walter-White territory in a way that I wasn't sure we'd ever see in this series—at least until this all culminates in a beautiful, heartbreaking zag in the finale that foregrounds a tragedy that I, at least, never thought to consider. It's as close to TV's finest currently airing drama as it's ever been. Grade: A-
Similar to this week's other spin-off, Angel is at its worst when it's merely importing drama from its parent show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is especially problematic in the season's early going, where it skitters erratically between the show's new LA-noir tone and fan service from Buffy (I know a lot of people consider the Buffy-crossover "I Will Remember You" a series highlight, but it left me cold). But once the show settles into its groove—and, to be fair, it's much firmer on its feet from the start than Buffy ever was in its first season—it becomes an addicting supernatural crime thriller that I enjoyed a lot. Looking forward to Season 2 with this firm footing. Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment