Movies
Baby Driver (2017)
When I call this the worst film of Edgar Wright's career, it's not that I didn't have a great time, because I did. This movie is tremendous fun. But for a movie (and director) with such a meticulous, tight technical craft, the narrative is surprisingly slack. I don't care that the movie is so tropey; that's fine, and at this point, there's nothing but a joyous smirk from me every time I hear a "one last job" line. But the characters are wafer-thin, and the movie is full of narrative inefficiencies and little shaggy threads that get pulled in rather messily in the third act. Good thing the movie is so much fun that you kind of forget about all that until the third act wets the bed. And the soundtrack remains excellent even through the rough patches. Edgar Wright's musical sense of timing is a beauty to behold, and if nothing else, with Baby Driver, he's perfected the art of pop-song soundtracking. That alone is enough to make the movie worth watching. Grade: B+
The Birth of a Nation (2016)
This is a movie of half measures: too broad to be pure history, too stately to be pure pulp (although there's no denying the catharsis of the rebellion scenes once they finally occur); too directed well enough to be impressive but not enough to make up for the weak writing; well-acted but never enough so to overshadow the essential egotism animating writer/director/star Nate Parker. Nat Turner's rebellion is a rich, complex piece of American history, and there's never been a better time to adapt it to film. But this movie is disappointingly tepid in doing so. Grade: B-
Wild Canaries (2014)
Basically a modern indie take on Manhattan Murder Mystery, with a dash of Rear Window. It's nowhere near as good as Hitchcock, of course, but it's a pretty good heir to the Woody Allen film. Lots of fun. Grade: B+
The Search for General Tso (2014)
An engaging (if a bit by-the-numbers) food documentary, the sort you might catch on a lazy afternoon on PBS or the Food Network. The ostensible goal here is to track the origins of the General Tso's chicken recipe, but this is really a Trojan horse for a bigger exploration of the role of Chinese culture within American society and the rise of the Chinese restaurant as a staple of American cuisine. So if you're into that, give it a watch. Grade: B
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Shaggy, sloppy, and endearing, The Blues Brothers pulls off this weird magic trick where everything about the film—from the acting (which frequently cracks from its supposedly deadpan reality) to the technical chops (the framing of shows is frequently just plain wrong, and the sound editing leaves something to be desired) feels just slightly less professional than it should be but works anyway. There's the real feeling that this movie is flying by the seat of its pants, which makes it all the more exciting when everything starts paying off in the legendary car chase that takes the majority of the climax. That doesn't stop the film from being at least 30 minutes too long or its characters from being underbaked to the point of neglect (Carrie Fisher's funny recurring murderess suffers worst from this paper-thinness, unfortunately). But as a messy concoction of comedy, musical, action, and Chicago love letter, it's a lot of fun. Grade: B
An American in Paris (1951)
The unfortunate thing about An American in Paris is that not a lot happens between its impressive and delightful musical sequences. This seems at least partly by-design; the film seems to be something of an attempt to abstract the components of the musical, creating a work that is more sensual and visceral than strictly fluid as a piece of narrative film. This works tremendously when there's actually music involved, most thrillingly in the film's final, 17-minute sequence that reinterprets the entire film as a wordless ballet (a device La La Land recently appropriated to great effect) but also elsewhere in the numerous scenes set to Gershwin classics like "I Got Rhythm." But when we're not dealing with music... this movie drags, a barely there story with unconvincing old-Hollywood romance. Luckily, the musical sequences are frequent and really, really, really good. Grade: A-
Television
Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, Season 1 (2012)
A wild, mean, and hilarious sitcom that never had a chance on ABC's docile comedy lineup, this show is basically a live-action mash-up of American Dad (for which creator Nahnatchka Khan has written for extensively) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. As that combination suggests, Apt. 23 sometimes mistakes sheer edginess for humor, but when it's on its game, the show is peerless among network comedies for its glorious absurdity and hysterical moment-by-moment joking. The cast, too, is to die for, perfectly pitched to the show's sensibilities, from Dreama Walker's determined aw-shucks-ness to James Van Der Beek's clueless and Dawson's-Creek-averse version of himself, to Krysten Ritter's series-MVP Chloe—no surprise there, as Krysten Ritter is amazing in pretty much everything. Grade: B
Books
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville (1851)
I don't know if this gets said enough about this supposed Great American Novel, but Moby-Dick is one weird book. As much a compendium of whaling science as it is the recounting of its famous Ahab-vs.-the-whale adventure yarn, the novel is something like an experimental whaling manual crossed with a comic book. But even more than that, Moby-Dick feels like myth—Melville's manic insistence throughout the book that whaling is a metaphor for literally everything in the human experience makes the pages in this novel feel dark and ancient in a way that few novels (much less American novels) manage to be. It's the nexus of human life itself, and if that isn't a recipe for a great book, I don't know what is. Grade: A
Music
Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up (2017)
After the release of the career-best Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes took a six-year hiatus during which Robin Pecknold went to school and the rest of the culture slowly but surely fought the good fight of purging the hoard of beardy, folky Fleet-Foxes imitators from the mainstream discourse. Now, in 2017, they return to a music world that feels nearly unrecognizable from the sunnier, guitarier days of 2011, and their music feels both fresh and adventurous. Crack-Up is an album indebted to the first two Fleet Foxes albums, with warm, pristine harmonies and literate lyrics, but it's also something new and strange, knottier and more opaque than we've ever seen the band. Twisting, multi-sectioned songwriting has always been a hallmark of the band, but never have their songs been more willing to juke into unseen corners and odd alcoves: "Third of May/Ĺdaigahara" opens with that traditional Fleet-Foxes strum before, a few minutes later, diving into murky ambient sounds; the second and third tracks, "Cassius, -" and "- Naiads, Cassadies," for a suite of sorts that morphs from moment to moment, an intangible, slippy thing that makes a melody difficult to articulate. The album loves these kinds of structural experiments, and as an unabashed prog-rock lover, so do I. But this is not immediate music, and at times, the melodic transparency of their earlier albums is missed. But the Fleet Foxes that has emerged in 2017 is sophisticated and deep and willing to push forward in new directions, and the album they have delivered to us, while sometimes difficult to crack, is interesting and compelling in ways that this band has only hinted at before—not to mention being one of 2017's best. Grade: A-
Television
A wild, mean, and hilarious sitcom that never had a chance on ABC's docile comedy lineup, this show is basically a live-action mash-up of American Dad (for which creator Nahnatchka Khan has written for extensively) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. As that combination suggests, Apt. 23 sometimes mistakes sheer edginess for humor, but when it's on its game, the show is peerless among network comedies for its glorious absurdity and hysterical moment-by-moment joking. The cast, too, is to die for, perfectly pitched to the show's sensibilities, from Dreama Walker's determined aw-shucks-ness to James Van Der Beek's clueless and Dawson's-Creek-averse version of himself, to Krysten Ritter's series-MVP Chloe—no surprise there, as Krysten Ritter is amazing in pretty much everything. Grade: B
Books
I don't know if this gets said enough about this supposed Great American Novel, but Moby-Dick is one weird book. As much a compendium of whaling science as it is the recounting of its famous Ahab-vs.-the-whale adventure yarn, the novel is something like an experimental whaling manual crossed with a comic book. But even more than that, Moby-Dick feels like myth—Melville's manic insistence throughout the book that whaling is a metaphor for literally everything in the human experience makes the pages in this novel feel dark and ancient in a way that few novels (much less American novels) manage to be. It's the nexus of human life itself, and if that isn't a recipe for a great book, I don't know what is. Grade: A
Music
After the release of the career-best Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes took a six-year hiatus during which Robin Pecknold went to school and the rest of the culture slowly but surely fought the good fight of purging the hoard of beardy, folky Fleet-Foxes imitators from the mainstream discourse. Now, in 2017, they return to a music world that feels nearly unrecognizable from the sunnier, guitarier days of 2011, and their music feels both fresh and adventurous. Crack-Up is an album indebted to the first two Fleet Foxes albums, with warm, pristine harmonies and literate lyrics, but it's also something new and strange, knottier and more opaque than we've ever seen the band. Twisting, multi-sectioned songwriting has always been a hallmark of the band, but never have their songs been more willing to juke into unseen corners and odd alcoves: "Third of May/Ĺdaigahara" opens with that traditional Fleet-Foxes strum before, a few minutes later, diving into murky ambient sounds; the second and third tracks, "Cassius, -" and "- Naiads, Cassadies," for a suite of sorts that morphs from moment to moment, an intangible, slippy thing that makes a melody difficult to articulate. The album loves these kinds of structural experiments, and as an unabashed prog-rock lover, so do I. But this is not immediate music, and at times, the melodic transparency of their earlier albums is missed. But the Fleet Foxes that has emerged in 2017 is sophisticated and deep and willing to push forward in new directions, and the album they have delivered to us, while sometimes difficult to crack, is interesting and compelling in ways that this band has only hinted at before—not to mention being one of 2017's best. Grade: A-
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