Movies
The premise here seems to be to fuse an E.T.-esque girl-and-her-sentient-pet sentimentality with the gonzo capitalist satire of Bong Joon-Ho's previous feature, Snowpiercer. The result is a bizarre, tonally rambunctious piece that doesn't ever find a good way to cohere its halves. But through the magic of Bong Joon-Ho, it somehow works anyway. The relationship between the girl and her genetically modified pig is tender (meat pun unintended... or is it? mwahaha), and the commentary on the horrors of capitalism on the food industry is appropriately grotesque. Plus, Tilda Swinton plays twins, which, as anyone who saw Hail, Caesar! can tell you, is reason enough to see this. Grade: B+
There's nothing especially new about this mash-up of Alien and Gravity, but considering that both those movies are excellent in their own rights, Life ends up being a fun, tight little thriller in the vein of both. Couple with that a legitimately chilling ending, and you've got a solid piece of sci-fi. Grade: B
At a certain point here, I'm going to have to stop talking about the biopic as a genre in crisis, because A Quiet Passion marks the latest in an encouraging trend of films that have spun new and exciting things from the husk of that awards-glomming film type. But whereas movies like Neruda have found fresh things to say through postmodern hijinks and deliberate ahistoricity, A Quiet Passion, a biopic of the life of Emily Dickinson, finds its voice in the more traditional realm of pristine formal beauty (no surprise coming from writer/director Terence Davies). There are times when the film gets a little too cutesy with its habit of reading Dickinson poetry in voiceover (I'm unconvinced that we needed to be read "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" over footage of Dickinson's funeral), but on the whole, it is a gorgeous exploration of the figure behind those poetic verses. Grade: A-
For that rarefied subset of folks who found Dumont's Li'l Quinquin not nearly absurd enough, here comes Slack Bay. There's grotesque acting, spontaneous levitation, a consistent motif of characters tripping and falling, casual cannibalism (a mother asks her children if they would like more foot, as she waves, yes, a human foot in the air), and Juliette Binoche in a kamikaze performance as this cross between upper-class fuddy-duddy and amateur opera singer. It's very weird and only sometimes funny, but through it all, a plot involving the romance between a trans adolescent and one of the cannibals (what am I even writing here?) actually reveals an acutely human emotional undercurrent to the film. Not everyone's cup of tea, to be sure, but it's somebody's, and that somebody may just be me. Grade: B+
Now, to be fair, I haven't seen the original Ganja and Hess, of which Spike Lee's Kickstarter-funded Da Sweet Blood. And also to be fair, this film is full of the typical Spike Lee technical excellence and thematic ambition, colliding Christianity with African heritage, horror, and eroticism to craft an evocative, lush aesthetic that makes for a more minute-by-minute engaging experience than the dire script and overlong runtime should allow. But good golly, is this film clumsy by pretty much every other metric. The thematic ambition is admirable, as I said, but it's as if Spike doesn't trust the ramifications of his own story. The film is full of moments like the one where two archaeologists discuss an ancient nation that fed off human blood, and one character actually states something to the effect of, "But America is the true blood-feeding nation because of slavery" (I'm only barely paraphrasing here), and, I mean, yes, that's true, and subtlety is overrated, I agree, but sweet merciful heavens, we don't need a two-by-four to the face when there's already a flashing billboard! This is to say nothing of the tepid characterizations that fail to enliven any of this beyond the level of merely "huh, interesting." Spike had the opportunity to create something singularly great here, and it's disappointing to see him fall so far from the mark. Grade: C+
This film has a reputation as the sole notable instance in which Charlie Chaplin played a villain, though that's not quite right, not only because he also plays a villain in at least one of his early shorts but also because Monsieur Verdoux patently refuses to actually make Chaplin's character its villain. Oh, to be sure, he does some bad things, including but not limited to a sort of male black-widowing as he seduces, marries, and then murders wealthy elderly women. But the film can't seem to make up its mind whether or not this behavior is actually a problem, and, in fact, by the time we're openly asked to sympathize with this guy—he's been forced into this line of work in order to support his real wife and child, and after all, as Chaplin's climactic speech reminds us, his murdering of a few rich folks isn't nearly as heinous as the systematic brutality of America's ruling class. That sort of moralizing only really works through a broadly fable-like lens, one that the movie doesn't stick to with any consistency to speak of. But that doesn't stop the film from being one of the more thematically complex and fascinating works in Chaplin's oeuvre, despite its lack of structural integrity. Grade: B+
Television
The show's third year has its same crop of recurring issues (can Alex and Piper go away, pleeeease? See also: Daya and Bennett, though to a lesser extent) as well as a few new ones (Ruby Rose's character is likely the worst character the show will ever see, not just for Rose's wooden acting but for the nakedly [heh] contrived role as a catalyst to Alex/Piper drama). This is all compounded against the show's larger structural issue of year-to-year being basically a dozen plots pinging around in search of a season. But Season 3 also has some of the very best material I've seen in the show yet, from the way it finally figures out what to do with Doggett (whose pairing with Boo, of all people, is one of the most unexpected and resonant relationships in the series) to Black Cindy's quest for the Jewish faith to Caputo's struggle against Litchfield's new corporate overlords. Caputo especially shines here, and his spotlight episode, "We Can Be Heroes," is one of the best, most thematically cohesive hours the show has ever produced, interrogating the mix of self-gratification, hero complex, and idealism that motivates the guy. In fact, the guards in general (minus Bennett—get outta here, dude) all shine, and with the pressures put on them by the corporate buyout of the prison, their storylines are at least as compelling (arguably more so) than any of the inmates'. It's far from a perfect season of television, but for a show as scattershot as this one, thankfully there are more hits than misses. Grade: B
Books
In the future, an AI has been charged with governing the earth, and under its powerful leadership, the earth's population flourishes. In order to prevent overpopulation, a group of human beings, called Scythes, are appointed to kill (or "glean") a certain quota of humans every year. Our teen protagonists are Scythe apprentices. If this sounds like the typical YA dystopia with its belaboredly-symbolic-to-the-point-of-absurd premise, you're on the right track, but Shusterman fills out this world with enough detail and wrinkle that it's way more interesting than your typical post-Hunger-Games piece: excerpts from Scythe journals at the beginning of each chapter tug at the philosophical boundaries of the world, a bizarre religious cult worshiping musical tones runs mysteriously throughout the novel's background, human beings (capable of being revived through future technology) jump off buildings to "splat" as a sort of twisted pastime. For all its heavy-handed symbolism, the novel has a strong worldbuilding at its foundation, and honestly, if the plot didn't deflate itself so drastically in its last 75-ish pages, I would probably be saying something similar about the book as a whole. Grade: B
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