Movies
While the biggest question surrounding any entry in this series beyond the 2006 original remains, "Why?" (a close second to "What are they grilling at the Bar and Grill?"), Cars 3 at least returns to the warm Americana that ultimately made the first one endearing. In fact, the logically iffy globe-trotting of Cars 2 has been banished almost entirely to the realm of weird fevered dream, apparently, and Mater has mercifully been relegated to the small supporting role he deserves. In his place is Cruz Ramirez, the Adonis Creed to the aging Lightning McQueen's Rocky, if you will, and it works well enough, particularly in the film's rather graceful conclusion. It also bears mentioning that Cars 3 is the best-looking of the Cars films, all of which are technical marvels. It's gorgeous, actually, right down to the intricate lighting and surface textures that look practically photorealistic. It's still Cars, so you're not in for Pixar's best. But you could do a lot worse with children's animation this year. Grade: B
One half of this movie involves Pablo Neruda, in typical biopic trappings, on the lam as he avoids his political enemies. The other half, cross-cut with the first, involves a po-faced film-noir-ish plot in which a mustachioed Gael García Bernal plays what basically amounts to a Chilean-fascist version of Inspector Clouseau hunting down Neruda. Topping it all off is the fact that Bernal's character is entirely fictitious and seems aware of this fact. It's glorious and weird and complex in a way I'm still parsing out, and I loved it. Suck it, standard biopics. Grade: A
Isn't it funny how dads sometimes approach childcare differently from moms? Ha... Grade: C
This 2000 Best-Picture nominee (how??) is first a parable about inflexible morality and religious asceticism (unsuccessfully, I might add, as the film doesn't seem to understand anything about religion beyond "it tells you what to do, and that's bad"—there are so many things to criticize about religion, but it just seems silly and shallow to critique a system of morality for having the hallmarks of a system of morality). Then it's a more successful parable about tribalism and the fear of the other (hey there, younger, sexier Johnny Depp), and then it's back to being that first parable again. It's ineffective as a story, ineffective as social commentary, and uninteresting as anything other than chocolate porn (which is the one thing the film truly excels at—the chocolate looks scrumptious). Juliette Binoche is radiant, though, so I guess there's that, too. Grade: C
Beat-for-beat, this is about as archetypally '80s action as it gets, and with good reason, since with Escape from New York John Carpenter and Kurt Russell helped invent some of the most robust of that genre's tropes (later to send them up viciously just a few years later in Big Trouble in Little China). And as the OG to that archetype, it's basically perfection, if a bit retroactively rusty in its tropes. It also has a guy who's the self-appointed Duke of New York who drives around in a Cadillac with two chandeliers on the hood, but honestly, that's just gravy. Grade: A-
There's a moment about midway through the interminable Hello, Dolly! that feels representative of the whole: a sequence involving the title song (with Louis Armstrong, thank goodness—for a moment there, I was worried that this movie would omit the major player in the best version of that song) lasts for what must be ten minutes, runs its course, and the players begin to walk off the set. But without warning, Louis Armstrong, bless him, jumps back in and shouts, "Let's hear that again!" and the poor musical number limps along for another two-to-three minutes. Such is the movie: overlong, tired, gratuitous... and did I mention overlong? There are exactly three highlights: the women's dresses (which are gloriously over-the-top), Barbara Streisand, and Walter Matthau, and even those last two, theoretical love interests, spend so little time together at the hands of this movie's dysfunctional structure that there's no time for romantic chemistry. Plus, Matthau is Streisand's senior by over twenty years, which... yeah, no. The American musical has two dark ages: we're just now emerging from the most recent one, but Hello, Dolly! remains one of the most insipid artifacts from the technicolor, widescreen, every-musical-is-over-2.5-hours era that marked the bleakest days of the 1960s. No thanks. Grade: C
Television
Despite its title and prerelease reputation, Dear White People doesn't so much address white people as it does agonize over the best way to take action against people in power—of whom a large majority are white, of course, but more than anything, this show is about dialogues, not railing monologues. We get a few of those (as we did in the flawed-but-fascinating 2014 film on which this series expands and improves exponentially), especially with the college radio show one of the characters hosts, which she begins each time with a bitter, sardonic "Dear white people..." But as memorable as those monologues are, it doesn't take long to see that show-creator Justin Simien and his host of talented collaborators (most notably Moonlight writer-director Barry Jenkins, who directs a pivotal episode midway through the season) are playing a much more complicated and nuanced game than Aaron-Sorkin-ish theatrics that isolated clips of those monologues might imply. This is a show in which a lot of characters have a lot of opinions about what should be done with the very real problems in their society, but nobody seems to have the right answer or to agree. So in that light, the dramatic tension of the show isn't as much couched in the railing at the racist machine (although there is that) as it is figuring out how to coexist and collaborate with other activists. The series is set on a fictionalized ivy-league campus, and as such, it's probably the best depiction of contemporary campus politics as I've ever seen. But it also quite handily manages to be universal enough that it becomes a story that wrestles with just what it means to be an American progressive in the 2010s (and especially in the past year), and it does that brilliantly. This is the best Netflix series I've seen since BoJack Horseman, not to mention the TV series with the firmest grasp on the national discourse right now. Required viewing. Grade: A
This is what we might call a slump year for one of current television's best comedies. The plotting is ramshackle and questionable, and the formerly reliable minute-to-minute funniness stumbles a bit here and there. That's not to say it's bad, or anything: there are some absolute comedy gems here, from cat-eyes Gilfoyle to CEO Dinesh to pretty much everything Jared does (line of the year, from anything, is the way Zach Woods practically roars, "You reckless child!"), and the character moments this season are particularly nice. This season presents the most intriguing thematic thread for this show's future, which is the slow transition of Richard from nervous, humble idealist to morally compromised tech insider. We'll see where the show goes with this; I'm not sure how optimistic I am about the series's adjustment to a TJ-Miller-less horizon (he gets a very funny Jian-Yang sendoff, at least, followed by a weirdly thoughtless epilogue), but I'm at least intrigued by the plotting, which is something I couldn't have said of the show after even its best seasons. Grade: B
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