Mini-Reviews for August 21 - 27, 2017

A good week for seeing movies in the theater. I'm building up those Regal Crown Club points like a pro.

Movies

Logan Lucky (2017)
In the same way that Magic Mike was basically an indie movie with stripper scenes, the film Logan Lucky ends up being is a lot more subdued than the raucous film promised by the advertising. It's as sweet and naturalistic a heist film as Soderbergh has ever done, electing for quietly observed character bits over slapstick laughs or crazy heist hijinks (although the third act does get pretty twisty). That's not to say that there aren't laughs or that these actors aren't trying their hardest to make these characters entertaining (Daniel Craig in particular is tremendous, as I'm sure numerous reviews have told y'all already). But Logan Lucky is just such an unassuming, easing-going, lived-in kind of film that it makes what it's doing seem easy and almost lazy, in the best way possible. It's a hangout movie, essentially, one with a heist in the center, and a tremendously fun one at that. Grade: B+

The Glass Castle (2017)
Critics have painted this as a movie that detrimentally sands off the edges of a harrowing true story in the interest of delivering a feel-good weepy. But sometimes critics are wrong. Granted, I haven't read the book this movie is based on, but any criticisms that this movie is shooting for empty sentiment over hard truths is ignoring the fact this this film is in dialogue with itself over the central two characters of Jeannette and her abusive, charismatic father, Rex—it's a feature-length exploration of the conflicting ways with which we are forced to relate to people close to us who have hurt us tremendously, buffeted between love and hatred, joy and pain, and the soft, warm moments come as lurching juxtapositions with the movie's numerous scenes of domestic horror. The movie isn't perfect by any means (Naomi Watts as the mother figure is sorely underused, and the score—a barrage of treacly inspirational movie cliches—is terrible), but there's something vital and complex going on here, and the effect is nowhere near as easy as some seem to think. Grade: A-

Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Not being the owner of a smartphone, I'll admit that there's an aspect of from-the-outside-looking-in to my enjoyment of Ingrid Goes West's wicked social media satire. Then again, I'm on Facebook every day, so the movie's depiction of the ways that interpersonal interactions are warped and even defined by the online currency of likes and followers isn't lost on me. Even if it was, there'd still be plenty to like here, not the least of which is a game cast, helmed by a deliriously unglamorous Aubrey Plaza performance (which, coupled with her work on Legion, positions her as one of the most watchably off-kilter performers in Hollywood, a sort of modern Shelley Duvall with fewer camp sensibilities). Even with the acting, not all of the characters really work here, but that's okay—the real character is the monstrous hydra of trendy ephemera that is the social media world itself. Ingrid's tongue-in-cheek riffing on this digital universe is the most well-observed depiction of social media I've yet seen in a movie, and its jabs at the characters' various vanities and online habits are informed such by a deep and current knowledge of the meter of the social-media discourse of the moment that in even a few months' time, this will likely be a fascinating and slightly alien capsule of what 2017 online interaction looked like. The ideas presented through this pitch-perfect depiction are maybe a bit too obvious to make Ingrid anything close to great, but you could do a lot worse with your psychological thriller-comedies. Grade: B+

Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Skull Island does so many things right—the special effects are great, the cast is solid, the creature designs are cool, and the visual style is distinctive—that it's a real shame that the total package is kind of a bore. This is, I think, a complete failure on the screenwriting level. None of the characters come alive but for the grace of their talented actors' performances, and even then, what we see are paper-thin meat sacks waiting to be destroyed by the film's vicious bestiary. There's not anything inherently wrong about that body-count approach to an action film, and many a great movie have basically revolved around the same concept. But without any life in these characters to begin with, it's not really all that fun to see them die. Grade: C+

Their Finest (2016)
The sort of polite, stiff-upper-lipped historical drama that serious cinephiles tend to hate and I tend to just find kind of okay, Their Finest is just kind of okay. The premise is hooky enough, and I'm willing to give this movie a pass just for that—during WWII, a female screenwriter struggles to find her place in the man's world of British film, and she finds work as a writer of British war propaganda, and honestly, that's great, because we need more movies about 1) female screenwriters, and 2) the making of war propaganda. And as long as the movie sticks with that, it's engaging. Unfortunately, the film decides to fill a good part of its runtime with thin romantic drama, which is not only not great but also frankly kind of tedious. Pair this with the relatively pedestrian film style, and you've got a movie that nearly squanders its good ideas. Grade: B-

The Summer of Sangailė (Sangailės vasara) (2015)
A completely superfluous piece of coming-of-age fluff. Not that there's anything specifically wrong with that, I guess, but, outside of a mildly interesting visual sensibility, there's not anything specifically right about it either. Grade: C

The Book of Eli (2010)
There are a lot of things that are kind of dumb about The Book of Eli, most notably its third-act twist that doesn't seem to accomplish anything for the movie beyond stretch the credulity of its protagonist's actions throughout the first 3/4 of the film. But the action is well-staged and exciting, executed with a subtle, smirking sense of humor that's welcome in the dour post-apocalyptic landscape that envelops the rest of the story, and while it's a bit ham-fisted, the movie's ideas about the role of religious texts in a society on the fringe is still kind of interesting. Put on top of this the fact that the movie is essentially a post-apocalyptic western (why aren't there more of these??) with a visual style that's way cooler than we have any right to expect from what's essentially a mid-budget B movie at the height of the high-contrast, digitally color-corrected wash-out era, and you've got a fun couple of hours. Grade: B

Television

Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later (2017)
As always, Wet Hot American Summer is inconsistent—perhaps more so here in Ten Years Later than ever. First Day of Camp, the Netflix years-after-the-fact prequel miniseries to the cult comedy film, was something of a minor miracle, justifying its existence by being way better than the original, doubling—nay, tripling—down on the film's penchant for absurdity by making the plot a borderline epic cornucopia of sci-fi, conspiracy thriller, coming-of-age tropes, lampooned to near-perfect comedic heights. Ten Years Later can't really compete with that, partially because the sheer shock of Netflix actually pulling this off has worn off, but also because it's just not nearly so successful. Ten Years Later makes an extended joke about how lame its ending is, and while that's kind of funny, it never really assuages the fact that the series really doesn't know how to build all its varying threads into a satisfying whole. Whole plots are basically dropped midway through the series (Paul Rudd in particularly is woefully underused this outing), and there are parts where WHAS's reliable it's-funny-how-sincerely-and-unskillfully-we're-playing-this-hacky-trope tone shows major cracks, especially in the various love triangles the series builds. Still, on a moment-to-moment basis, Ten Years Later can also approach the comedic sublime—everything involving Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush is hysterical, as is a plot involving a nanny-for-hire. And I will never not giggle uncontrollably at H. Jon Benjamin as a sentient can of vegetables. Grade: B

Music

Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
In the gradual weirdening of Joni Mitchell, one of the most rewarding and underappreciated artistic progressions of the 1970s, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a vital moment. Proving that the jazz inflection of Court and Spark was no fleeting lark, the relentlessly experimental and exploratory Summer Lawns is the point of metamorphosis, when Joni Mitchell transitioned from the confessional hippy of Blue into the artist who would make Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus. It's an unapologetically out-of-fashion album, embracing jazz at the precise moment when music culture was moving away from the genre, and as such, it was panned mercilessly upon release (though let's be real: '70s rock critics only ever begrudgingly accepted Mitchell's genius to begin with). But no matter; The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a masterpiece. Joni's lyrics have rarely been better here, shaping twisting, oblique character portraits wreathed in mystery and piercing social insight, and the music itself is gorgeous, not to mention influential—it's not hard to hear the genesis of both Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective in the album's discursive melodies, and the entire freak folk scene of the mid-2000s practically owes "The Jungle Line" a lifetime of royalties. Grade: A

Revisiting His Dark Materials: The Amber Spyglass

Hi, everybody! I'm rereading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

You can read part one in this series, on The Golden Compass, here.
You can read part two in this series, on The Subtle Knife, here.

1. The Robinson Fallacy
Marilynne Robinson has an essay called "Puritans and Prigs." In it, she vigorously defends the reputations of Puritans in general and John Calvin specifically, whom she says modern individuals "disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged." The beliefs of Puritans and John Calvin bear little resemblance to what 20th/21st-century people refer to when they chastise "Puritanism" and "Calvinism" in modern society, so, Robinson goes to great lengths to argue, such criticisms are exercises in mislabeling. She goes on to make all sorts of analysis regarding modern morality from this case of mislabeling, which is great, but the obvious response to this essay is, "Sure, but does it really matter what Puritans and John Calvin used to do if the criticisms are responding to the actions those names are linked to now?" In other words, regardless of what John Calvin once did, if most people calling themselves Calvinists do something terrible, it seems beside the point to gripe about the Calvinist label instead of actually addressing the problems in modern Calvinism.

I bring this up not because I want to talk about Marilynne Robinson[1] or Calvinism (although it's worth mentioning that His Dark Materials does reference a Pope John Calvin, which is oh-so-perfect). But what Robinson does with John Calvin in her essay is a nice analogy for what is probably the easiest rebuttal to Philip Pullman's ideas about Christianity: that he gets it wrong. And not just in the details—it's relatively straightforward to argue that he misses the very foundation of Christianity, for out of the detailed metaphysics, dozens of characters, thousand-plus pages, and hundreds of thousands of words of His Dark Materials, there isn't one mention of Jesus Christ. It's very tempting (and for years I did so) to dismiss Pullman's critique of monotheism because of his apparently lack of understanding of the centrality of Christ to one of monotheism's biggest wings. But I want to start out this review by urging against this dismissal. Because as with Robinson, dismissing his views because his vision of Christianity isn't vigorously factual in its theology ignores one of the most urgent messages of His Dark Materials, which is that it's child abuse and oppressive authoritarian theocracy that Pullman sees in Christianity, not Jesus—as damning a critique of organized religion as any apologetic study. A semantic argument is beside the point when there's a social argument being made.

All this is to say that there is much more to Pullman's relationship with Christianity than his simply being "wrong."

2. Plots Upon Plots
Near the end of The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, the nun-turned-experimental-physicist-turned-exposition-device Dr. Mary Malone says, "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that is all." If you've been paying attention to the subtext of the previous two novels, that statement shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the decidedly villainous way Pullman has characterized Christian believers. But it's only in The Amber Spyglass that the full extent of that particular characterization of Christianity is laid bare, and even having prepped with The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife beforehand, it's still a remarkable shock to find that the villainy of Pullman's world goes all the way up to God Himself.

With that pull quote (and the help of the fact that the God of Abraham actually dies in this book), the articles practically wrote themselves—Peter Hitchens called Pullman "the most dangerous author in Britain," while Pete Vere called Pullman a "seducer of children" and the novel's plot "blasphemy," adding that "Christians should be offended." It's as easy to characterize Philip Pullman as anti-Christian as it is to declare his view of Christianity "inaccurate," and many other authors have also done so. In fact, Pullman cops to that himself, having once said, quite matter-of-factly, "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." The amazing thing about all the anti-Pullman rhetoric in Christian circles is that it's not a baseless or manipulative claim, as is far too common in these "Christians are morally outraged and want to ban this author" kinds of debates; it's simply a quotation of Pullman himself. As he quite readily admits, he is an enemy of the faith.

So that's not really a claim I'll be contesting here. I do think, however, that it does Pullman's work a disservice, as much so as arguing semantics, to, as many do, simply state his stance on Christianity[2] and end the conversation at that. Because while there are many qualities of this bloated, bewildering, occasionally grandstanding, occasionally beautiful novel to discuss, simplicity is not one of them.

Really, I mean it. Complexity is the name of the game in The Amber Spyglass. The book is the longest in the trilogy by a hefty margin (120 pages longer than The Golden Compass), and those pages aren't filled with mindless fluff either; it's all either straight philosophy or unrepentantly dense plot—especially plot. I'm not kidding here, and if I'm making a laundry list of this book's flaws, right there near the top is just how overstuffed the whole thing is. There's an entire subplot involving some vehicle called an "intention craft" whose point I'm still unsure of, and that's to say nothing of the dozens of new characters (and whole species[3]) Pullman adds to this series's already crowded roster. It's cool to see Pullman go full-on Tolkien with unbridled high fantasy world-building, but there just. so. much. I've struggled to sufficiently summarize the previous two novels in these reviews, but with The Amber Spyglass, any sort of comprehensive overview without taking this post to novel lengths itself becomes nigh impossible.

But stripping away every conceivable extremity of this novel, three basic plot pieces remain as the central pillars to understanding what Pullman is trying to accomplish in this series:

First: Lyra and Will's journey into the the underworld—apparently a real place[4] that can be accessed by the Subtle Knife; it's a world created by the Authority (aka "God") to enslave the souls of the dead, and although Lyra has originally purposed to travel here to find and free Roger (whom she does find, in a touching moment, along with Will's father and Lee Scoresby), she's so troubled by these souls in misery that she and Will cut a whole in the world and let all the souls out into the open air, where they each dissolve into Dust and become one with the natural world.

Second: Lord Asriel's battle against the forces of the Authority. God [5] has become old, weak, and senile, and the rule of the Kingdom of Heaven has been assumed by Metatron (who is, in keeping with apocryphal traditions, the angelic form of Enoch after his ascension to Heaven in Genesis). Asriel and Coulter team up to kill Metatron, both losing their lives in the process. In the battle, the glass cage that houses God gets knocked to the ground, trapping the being, and Will and Lyra, just emerging from the Land of the Dead, come across him. They see that he's miserable and, taking pity on him, set him free. God is apparently too fragile to be out in the open air, though, and he promptly dissolves.

Third: The culmination of the entire series and, after the death of God in this same book, the most theologically provocative moment in all of children's literature: Lyra and Will eventually find themselves in a small, natural garden where fruit is growing—basically, the Garden of Eden. They're apparently unaware of this, though, and take to feeding each other the fruit, and as they eat, they both experience a sexual awakening of some sort (it's heavily implied that they have sex, although the language is very much the Hays-Code, curtains-blowing-in-an-open-window sort). In doing so, they inadvertently recreate the Fall of Man, solidifying the end of God's reign over the multiverse.

The Amber Spyglass makes no mention
of conveniently chaste fig leaves.

3. Freedom and Materialism
All of this is, of course, appropriately calibrated to transgress most facets of Christian orthodoxy and appall the PluggedIn crowd of cultural gatekeepers. In case you weren't keeping track, that's a rejection of the afterlife, original sin, the sanctity of marriage, and God Himself, all in this one volume. A lot of it is grounded in the series's already well-documented disdain for the ways that authoritarianism breeds human suffering and abuse—time and time again throughout the series, we see characters use obedience to authority as a priority over basic virtue and compassion[6], and The Amber Spyglass finally takes this idea all the way to its fullest metaphysical implications, that concepts like afterlife and original sin represent the adherence to an authority whose subjugation of human life extents to the very foundation of existence. So it's no accident that Will and Lyra accidentally kill "The Authority" just after freeing life from an afterlife and just before recasting original sin as an event of profound freedom and beauty. These two acts are subversions of the fundamental ways by which oppressive authority gains power over humanity, thus ushering in a new age of freedom.

One of the things that makes The Amber Spyglass so thematically rich, though, is that it finally reveals that Pullman isn't a libertarian, not even a moral one. The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife both flirt with the idea that freedom from authority is a moral end in and of itself. We hear a lot of rhetoric about Lord Asriel's "noble" war against the Authority, and it's not that difficult to extrapolate that we're supposed to identify Asriel as a "good guy" simply because of his opposition to "bad" authority (this was one of my critiques of The Subtle Knife, you might remember[7]). The inherent good of freedom is, after all, one of the most common takeaways from the Enlightenment philosophy that Pullman very clearly loves—"man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains," etc. However, when I complained that The Subtle Knife seemed to have forgotten that Asriel was an unrepentant child murderer, I made the caveat that The Amber Spyglass might walk this back somewhat, and that caveat has paid off pretty handsomely, if I may say so, because the Lord Asriel of this novel is a despicable cad who cares very little for life and beauty in light of his obsessive quest for freedom. This is most viciously demonstrated in his attitude toward Lyra, his own daughter; when one of Asriel's battles separates Mrs. Coulter from Lyra, Coulter cries, "What have you done?...She was safe with me, safe, and now where is she?" To which Asriel replies, "Frankly, I don't care." He is more concerned with how his daughter has interfered with his ambitions than with her own safety. His is a battle of ideas completely divorced from any sort of real human meaning. He is most definitely not one of the good guys, and this is made damningly clear by his ultimate fate as essentially superfluous to any of the real victories in the novel; Will and Lyra emancipate the dead, dissolve The Authority, and subvert original sin almost entirely without his aid, and Asriel's ultimate fate places him roughly parallel to his evil authoritarian nemesis, Metatron, as both throw each other into the abyss during a battle of egos[8], a final act of mutually assured destruction by two powers more obsessed with winning than with the value of life. People make a big deal about how this series is about "the murder of God," but they ignore the fact that the figure intent on God's demise neither succeeds in killing The Authority nor is even relevant to God's death.

The ultimate foundation of His Dark Materials is not, as some have said, absolute freedom. Regarding, as one interviewer puts it, the philosophy of "As long as I don’t hurt anyone else...you can just leave me alone," Pullman is clear: "I'm against that."

As becomes clear in this novel, closer to the series's heart is a variation on materialism, the idea that what is most important is the here and now, what can be touched and tasted, not some mystical higher reality to aspire to. This is central to why Lyra and Will must free the souls from the underworld. Their cutting an opening into the open air certainly doesn't do anything to free them on a spiritual level, as each soul essentially faces annihilation when it exits the underworld, dissolving into the air. Eternal life isn't something to aspire to in Pullman's world, and in fact, eternity is quite literally a prison. What's much more important is a reunion with the natural world after death. "You'll drift apart," Lyra tells the souls, "but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again." This dovetails with all the idea of Dust, a material manifestation of consciousness (a phenomenon many ascribe to the supernatural), and also with the reinterpretation of the Fall of Man, which is firmly grounded in the material experiences of Lyra and Will as they realize the full extent of what their bodies are built for: the material acts of eating and sex. In Pullman's world, an emphasis on the supernatural is toxic, distancing you from the real consequences of your actions, an idea taken to a grotesque extreme by the Magisterium and the Oblation Board, which actually murders children in the name of a greater supernatural good, and to a slightly less horrifying but still misguided end by Asriel himself, who also murders children as he focuses his ambitions so much on supernatural battles that he completely misses the actual lasting work done by his daughter.

4. The New Republic
Throughout the book, various characters refer to the ultimate goal of establishing "The Republic of Heaven" that will replace the Authority's tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven, and the contrast in the context of the "freedom" discussion is clear—a state ruled by the people and not by an abusive autocrat. But the idea of a republic is also key to Pullman's materialism, and republicanism requires a permanent connection to the material world. "We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere," one character says, and this seems to be the cornerstone of the trilogy's philosophy, that we should not abandon the material world for some sort of transcendent higher power because there is no transcendence, only the world around us, which, remember, Pullman believes to be "an extraordinarily beautiful place."

This idea culminates in the ending of the series, when, though some (to be honest) convoluted mechanisms, Will and Lyra realize that they must choose to return to their own worlds forever or else forfeit their lives. This returns us back to the idea of His Dark Materials as the anti-Narnia. Pullman once gave this great interview in which he said, "This, incidentally, is one of my quarrels with Lewis: the children in the Narnia books who have gone through all these experiences aren’t allowed to stay in the world and make it better for other people – they’re whisked off to heaven," and, while I'd say he's oversimplifying the Narnia books[10], he's right on Lewis's ultimate worldview that the true home of the human soul is on some high plane, not our world. I mean, The Last Battle ends in apocalyptic fashion with the destruction of the Narnia we know and the revelation that there is a better, truer Narnia more fitting our protagonists, a conclusion that I find both beautiful and traumatic. Pullman resolutely refuses this sort of Neoplatonic eschatology, to the point where he, maybe to a similarly traumatic effect as Lewis, only reversed, insists on landing his characters in their own material worlds where they can make the world better for other people. It's not a happy ending exactly, and in some ways it's rather cruel in how it seems to drive apart Lyra and Will at their moment of peak bliss. But it's the ending Narnia denies, and one that's at least philosophically consistent with what His Dark Materials has been building toward.

That drive to make the world a better place is what ultimately informs both Pullman's materialism and his stance on freedom. Because the material world is important, it should be improved, and it can only be improved by people of their own free will accepting to improve it. And through this lens, His Dark Materials arrives at virtue. In the words of one angel near the end of the book: "By helping [everyone in your worlds] to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing the how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious... Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost." You look at that passage, and you're one "thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent" away from the Boy Scout Law, and only a few apples short of the full Fruit of the Spirit list. After all that—after fighting the Church and killing God and reappropriating original sin—Pullman arrives right back at traditional virtue.

Philip Pullman, basically, at the end of the book.

5. The Book of Virtues
And, while we're on the subject, it's important to look at how the series gets here. The fight against the Church is in the name of protecting human life and preventing human suffering against needless cruelties like the Oblation Board. The killing of God is the result of an act of compassion—"The poor thing," Lyra cries sympathetically when she comes across the imprisoned God. "We can help you hide," Will tells the Almighty. "We won't hurt you." It's this pity, this kind desire to help a living thing, that causes God to dissolve (in a manner not unlike the souls as they leave the underworld). God isn't murdered; he's cared for[11]. And even the inverted Fall of Man is done as an affirmation of human kindness and affection; it's technically an act of rebellion on the cosmic scale, but Lyra and Will are ignorant of this fact, instead focused on how much they care for one another, the convergence of human affection with the material realities of their bodies and worlds.

This is why I think it's vital not to just end the conversation with a dismissal of Pullman's imperfect encapsulation of Christianity or his anti-Christian rhetoric. It's not as though Pullman wrote this trilogy as some sort of villain, twirling his mustache as he made all rights wrong. He's not a moral relativist or even a nihilist looking to undermine absolute truth or morality as a construct or anything like that. He's someone who, at least in his artistic output, cares deeply for values like love and kindness and compassion and truth and beauty and mercy and camaraderie—values that, if not exclusively Christian in nature[12], are definitely ones that we Christians have to agree that we share with him. Even his fierce critique of the Christian religion is one based not in some abstract antipathy for organized religion but in a righteous anger informed by a love for traditional virtue and the way that some Christian institutions have violated that. Frankly, if Pullman sees a lack of virtue in Christianity, that's a problem with Christianity's loudest voices more than it is a problem with His Dark Materials.

Clearly, as a Christian, I believe in a different source for these virtues—the Kingdom of Heaven/Republic of Heaven dichotomy, of course: is the foundation of our moral frameworks set through divine transcendence or a community of humans working together? Pullman and I likely disagree on metaphysics, but, for all his talk of gods and angels, Pullman isn't really making a metaphysical statement with His Dark Materials. He's making a very roundabout statement of how virtues should inform human freedom within a materialist world. So to quibble with his metaphysics is sort of an exercise in missing the point, and to argue that his moral vision is wrong because it doesn't include God turns us into Marilynne Robinson defending John Calvin.

6. Yeah, but...
Does that mean I don't think The Amber Spyglass has flaws? Of course not. It's riddled with flaws, both philosophical and artistic. For one (and I alluded to this earlier), there's just way way way more stuff going on in this book than there needs to be. Pullman's clearly in love with his own creative potential here, which is sometimes fun to watch, but there's no real narrative need for him to introduce as many new characters, locations, and species as he does. Not only is it occasionally convoluted, but all the noise tends to crowd out the characters we already know and love. To its credit, The Amber Spyglass does a better job of bringing back preexisting characters than The Subtle Knife does (Iorek is back! And the witches, although I was never in love with them to begin with). But the book could have been much more streamlined if Pullman had just figured out a way to make these old friends companions to Lyra and Will this time, too, instead of inventing, for example, the pair of Gallivespian spies who follow the two around for most of the novel (and for whom I have exactly zero emotional investment). And while we're talking about characters, it's also worth griping that the series never quite gets its groove back, character-wise, after the shake toward archetype in The Subtle Knife. There is plenty of excellent character work here, to be sure—Mrs. Coulter has never been better, and her tension between love for Lyra and maniacal power plotting is rich with depth, while the dive into full-on myth in this novel serves characters like Asriel and Will well, not to mention the pair of angels[13], Balthamos and Baruch, who aid Will and Lyra early in the book. However, despite giving her some backstory, Pullman never really figures out how to make Mary Malone work as anything more than a plot device, which is a real liability here due to the sheer number of pages given to her adventures with the Mulefa (another kind of dead-end species I wish had less time). And there's still something a little uncomfortable about how the series treats its female characters. Ever since Will's arrival in The Subtle Knife, Lyra's agency seems to have decreased, and The Amber Spyglass doesn't fix this much, as time and time again, Lyra defers to Will's "better" judgement. And then there's Mrs. Coulter, who I maintain is the series's best character, but it's still an uneasy fact that the trilogy's most powerful woman is also its most villainous.

And while we're on gender, I might as well mention that Garden of Eden scene. As beautifully rendered as it is (some of the best prose in the series, I'd say), I do think it's misguided to make that moment—the moment the entire universe hinges on, apparently—a sexual one. I mean, I get it: it's a coming-of-age that rejects the sexual paradigm the church of His Dark Materials is so obsessed with preserving. But, first of all, sex as the pinnacle of coming-of-age isn't just a tired trope; it's tedious and old-fashioned in a way that feels of that same hippy misguidedness as the idea that taking drugs is somehow a productive act of social reform. Not only that, but it's one of the few times this book lets the idea of transgressing Christianity take precedence over any sort of constructive moral position, and in doing so, it invests in the same Puritanical obsession over sex that Pullman seems so intent on dismissing.

7. In the End
So no, the journey His Dark Materials takes us on isn't perfect, not by a long shot. But something that so often gets lost in these conversations is that, as far as our relationship with the material world goes, Christians and Pullman basically arrive at the same place. It's a place rooted in compassion and decency and the idea that we should care for our fellow humans. And if we can't agree on that as something worthwhile, Pullman was more accurate about Christianity than any of us have been willing to admit.

*****

And that's it, folks. That's the end of my His Dark Materials series, which was far more difficult to write and took way longer to complete than I thought it would be. Thanks for reading all the way through. As you might have been able to tell from these posts, the trilogy was far more complex and flawed than I remembered, but it was also far more beautifully written and dazzlingly ambitious than I cared to notice back in high school, and I still rank it as one of modern YA literature's most significant works. I've enjoyed revisiting these books tremendously, and I hope you've enjoyed taking this journey with me.

Now to get on those prog reviews again (ha...).

Until next time!

1] I'd actually love to talk about Marilynne Robinson, just maybe not in the context of a His Dark Materials review.

2] Or, more precisely, monotheistic religion as a whole, which he believes inevitably "ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him [God]."

3] Including insect-sized people called Gallivespians, who have this whole backstory about being persecuted by tall people in their own world, and these utterly strange, elephant-ish creatures called Mulefa, whose main mode of transportation is to ride around on these greasy seed pods, unicycle-style.

4] Complete with its own suburbs. No joke: there is actually a chapter called "The Suburbs of the Dead," although I suppose it should be no surprise that the literal gates of Hell are wreathed in poor urban planning.

5] Who, the angels are quick to point out, is not the creator but simply the first being to have gained consciousness, having then deceived all the subsequent beings into thinking that he created the rest of them. Pullman once named Gnosticism in the same breath as his series, and this is pretty much textbook Gnostic heresy, which is, intriguingly, sort of at odds with the larger materialist bent of the series as a whole (more on that later).

6] Most chillingly in The Amber Spyglass represented by Father Gomez, a character who has performed enough "preemptive absolution" to make murder morally and spiritually neutral in the Church's eyes.

7] Or you might not. I don't know how memorable that post was.

8] Along with, it must be said, Mrs. Coulter, who is painted much more complexly in The Amber Spyglass than she is in the previous two volumes[9] but who still ultimately expends her life in that same battle of wills that wastes Asriel and Metatron.

9] In light of this novel, she's probably got my vote for series-best character.

10] After all, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ends with the Pevensies ruling Narnia for decades and generally making it a great place before they return to their lives in our world.

11] And as such, His Dark Materials becomes one of the very few fantasy fantasy series (alongside most of The Chronicles of Narnia) that does not force its heroes to violence as a means of achieving victory for the "good guys."

12] In interviews, Pullman fights again and again against the idea that virtue is exclusive to the Christian worldview, and I agree with him.

13] Gay angels at that, and you can practically hear Pullman cackling at his typewriter as he imagines the conservative-Christian outrage.

Mini-Reviews for August 14 - 20, 2017

Maybe it's just the impending eclipse, but it sure seems like I watched more mediocre/bad movies than I usually do this week—not to mention that long-coveted F review.

Movies

God's Not Dead (2014)

From a distance, God's Not Dead is great fun—my wife and I enjoyed immensely our time heckling this movie's relentless strawmanning and sanctimony, not to mention its laughable grasp of philosophy and opportunistic celebrity cameos (Duck Dynasty's Willie Robertson makes a particularly shameless cameo, while there's enough buildup to the baffling Newsboys concert climax that it wouldn't be far off-base to call the film a gigantic advertisement for everyone's favorite trend-chasing Aussie CCM-ers). But that fun dies the precise moment you remember just how sincerely the Evangelical Christian world regards this movie's worldview, how this is the most lucrative ($62.6 million at the box office??) iteration yet of the memefied misinformation campaign that's plagued Evangelicals for decades, and how this is a particularly vengeful—even hateful—iteration at that. The sheer sadism through which the movie doles out its inevitable conversion scenes (one via a fatal hit-and-run, the other via cancer [because we wouldn't want to be too tasteful]) is condescending and vile to the max, betraying a startling, ugly antipathy toward every character who is not Christian and showing that, at least for the Christian filmmakers behind this movie, the core of the modern American Christian is that winning an argument trumps any semblance of compassion for other human beings. There's something to be said for viewing this movie as a The-Room-esque pile-up of the sheer surreality of every possible mistake being made on the craft and screenwriting level, but unlike the mind of Tommy Wiseau, the world of God's Not Dead is too firmly rooted in a toxic social reality that I, as a fellow Christian, loath to retain any of that so-bad-it's-good charm. Grade: F

Casting JonBenet (2017)

This documentary's clever concept—having actors audition for roles in a film adaptation of the notorious JonBenét Ramsey murder speculate on the truth behind the real-life players in that mystery—is blessed to have an equally clever follow-through. This is a movie that's ostensibly about the sensational death of a young girl, but by the end, it's become a meditation on how the public at large responds to such tragedies, with its cast of aspiring actors forming a chorus of the mortified solipsism with which we approach them. So it's all very clever and interesting, but it's perhaps a little too conceptual to be anything but that. Grade: B+

Get Me Roger Stone (2017)

At its best, this documentary recalls Errol Morris's political duology of The Fog of War and The Unknown Known, wherein powerful political players are essentially allowed to monologue on their strategies and thus reveal far more about the political process and their own character than a more traditional doc would have been able to. Get Me Roger Stone does something similar, and the most engaging parts of the movie by far are the ones in which the titular political strategist and bona fide sleazeball just talks, betraying the rotten core of everything he's ever touched. Unfortunately, those talky segments are nested within the structure of a far less interesting documentary that feels something like a TV special about Roger Stone's history, regurgitating familiar soundbites from famous campaigns in the past and leaning far too heavily on the 2016 Trump campaign. But those Roger Stone talking heads are to die for. Grade: B

The Girl with all the Gifts (2016)

An intriguing twist on zombie tropes, The Girl with All the Gifts is the first zombie movie I can think of that's really embraced the post-human implications of most zombie stories—it's not just that the zombies here are destroying human society; they are creating things to replace human society, culminating in a ballsy finale that rivals The Night of the Living Dead in its despairing grandeur. In this world, a second generation of zombies has been born that is fully sentient, which ends up being a cool exploration of the question of what to do with deadly flesh-eaters when they are able to develop their own moral compass, feel pain, etc. The craft of the movie isn't quite up to making this a great movie, and the child-actor lead is unfortunately way out of her league here (thankfully offset by a fantastic Glenn Close villain). But there are enough interesting ideas at play here that it's worth a watch regardless. Grade: B+

Colossal (2016)

There are a couple of metaphors going on in the situation Anne Hathaway encounters (i.e. realizing that returning to the confines of her childhood playground triggers the appearance of a monster in Seoul that mirrors her every move, wreaking havoc on poor South Korea). The first is one of childhood memory and the cycles of childhood trauma; the second is the idea of the actions of clueless Westerners destroying Asia. Neither one is particularly interesting, but I'll at least give Colossal credit for trying to make them so—it's just such a bizarre concept for a movie that it's hard not to admire it in concept, if not in practice. There really isn't a lot going on here, though, so... oh well. The best-laid plans, etc. Grade: B-

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

The movie's vision of a world facing certain and imminent destruction is observant enough and funny enough that the movie's never not pleasant (at least, as pleasant as the end of the world can be). But I'm not buying the central relationship one iota; both Carell's and Knightley's characters are well-formed enough, but the film manages to do that almost entirely irrespective of anything that might connect these two in an actual meaningful bond. I mean, I get it: it's the end of the world, people are desperate for human companionship, etc. But this is triggering my major pet peeve against the depiction of new romances as somehow world-conquering and transcendent-to-the-end-of-time. Grade: B-

Snowtown (2011)

This movie is pornographic—not in a sexual sense (although there is a rape) but in the sense that it seems to be about nothing but the sensual experience of witnessing serial killers do their serial killing. Based on the true story (of course) of a group of guys who decided to torture and kill first pedophiles and then homosexuals, this film points its camera directly at the actions of these men and rarely looks away. What I'm supposed to be getting out of this, I'm not sure, except now I know what it looks like to see a toenail pulled off a big toe. Grade: C-

Television

Adventure Time, Season 7 (2015-16)

After the increasingly serialized and high-minded fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons of Adventure Time, Season 7 feels like a stripped-down, back-to-basics sort of outing, resulting in what's probably the show's least-exciting season since its first. That's not exactly a criticism, as there are some delightful one-offs and silly-for-silliness's-sake episodes like "Cherry Cream Soda" and "The Hall of Egress," not to mention the strangely compelling horror experiment, "Blank-Eyed Girl," all of which make great use of the deep roster of minor and major characters developed over the series's run. The season also gives us at least a few new explorations of the series lore, one of which, "Stakes," is a whole eight-part miniseries devoted to Marceline, and I'll never complain about giving her more screen time. So it's not as if this season is joyless or bad; in fact, it's probably a necessary step for the series, re-establishing its fundamentals after pushing its boundaries to the max. But I'd also be lying if I said that there wasn't something missing here, the way a balloon feels all floppy and wrinkled when you deflate it. There's good stuff here, for sure, but it kind of feel like Adventure Time is no longer aiming for greatness, which is a little bit of a letdown. Grade: B

Music

Grimes - Visions (2012)

I'm sort of backing my way into Grimes's discography, starting first with Art Angels and now going to her next-to-last, 2012's Visions, and doing so, it's fascinating to see all the pieces of Art Angels's greatness intact, just slightly submerged, as if Grimes is slowly excavating them. On Visions, it's the ambient electronica textures that take the foreground, slightly swallowing the '90s-pop/Euro-club melodies that would come roaring to life on the next record. As a result, Visions is, despite it's crazy-awesome cover art, a somewhat more ethereal presence than Grimes's subsequent work, and as such, it's frequently a work of delicate beauty—never more so than on the late-night-driving all-timer, "Oblivion," which ranks as not just Grimes's best-ever composition but one of the finest pop music creations of recent years. I'm looking forward to seeing what she did before this. Grade: A-

Public Enemy - Nothing Is Quick in the Desert (2017)

Thirty years into their career, Public Enemy's music is throwing punches with as much force as ever, although its targets are maybe a bit more questionable. There are the typical rabble-rousing, truth-to-power shout-alongs—"sPEak," "Beat Them All," "Toxic"—and it's here that the album's at its best. However, other sections of the album also betray the ages of the band members, and it's not uncommon for Chuck and Flav's lyrics to come off as the musical equivalent of that Grandpa Simpson "Old Man Yells at Cloud" moment; this hits its nadir in "Yesterday Man," which rants at all sorts of petty and distasteful grievances with modern culture, including Kanye West/Kim Kardashian and Caitlyn Jenner (whom they insist on calling "Bruce"). I guess it wouldn't be a Public Enemy album without a little bit of regressive sexual politics. It's not that there isn't good stuff here; you'll just have to sift through the bad and the tedious to get to it. Grade: C+

Mini-Reviews for August 7 - 13, 2017

In the very limited way that it means anything to say this on a movie reviews blog, I can't stress enough just how important it is to push back against white nationalism and supremacy. Whether or not neo-Nazis have a right to assemble is completely secondary to the fact that they want to assemble to begin with, and that the events of yesterday and Friday occurred at all is an indication that there is something deeply sick with American culture in general and white culture specifically. In particular, my fellow white Christians (many of whom I know read this blog), there should be absolutely no debate about our relationship to Richard Spencer, et al—there are few things that it's completely defensible to say that a Christian should believe, but that nationalism or racial supremacy of any stripe is antithetical to everything Jesus ever did or said is one of them, and we need to recognize and rebuke the ways that we've allowed it to fester within mainstream (or at least mainstream-adjacent) discourse by facing it with either silence or hand-waving as a supposed "fringe" issue rather than something with deep ties to white (and particularly white youth) identity. Obviously, words on a blog whose readership is in the dozens aren't really going to change much, but I thought I'd use the platform I have to say my piece.

</soapbox>

Movies

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

I don't know if I've ever seen a movie have so many good ideas without ever coalescing into anything very good. Seriously, nearly every scene has something commendably interesting, from the one-off little character bits like Elijah Wood's character's religious beliefs to the rich housewife who entertains our protagonists because she's bored to the touches of sudden and hilarious gore intercut throughout the film's numerous action sequences. It's clear that writer/director Macon Blair has good instincts both in the screenplay and behind the camera. But unfortunately, most of these good ideas remain only ideas, trotted out for their one scene and not contributing much to the ongoing arc of the film. All this adds up to a weird effect where each individual scene is tightly entertaining, but the movie as a whole is tedious and meandering. The exception (and it's a fairly large one) is the film's female lead, played tremendously by Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures)—she's the one character with anything like a fleshed out arc, and it's actually kind of lovely. Too bad the movie around that arc can't support it. Grade: B-

The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015)

Oz Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins—yes, Anthony "A boy's best friend is his mother" Perkins!) writes and directs this unsettling, terrific little horror flick that gestures toward exploitation—teenage girls trapped in an abandoned boarding school—before juking toward something a little more otherworldly. Kiernan Shipka (aka Sally Draper) is the MVP here, delivering a performance that merges a tremendous uncanniness with a deep, oblique sort of pathos, and it's entirely likely that without her, the movie wouldn't have been nearly so successful. As it is, there are chunks of the film that don't quite work; the Emma-Roberts-starring passages in particular are the movie's weakest, not the least of which for being kind of a narrative cheat in the end. That said, Perkins is no slouch, and the film is just left-of-the-dial enough to give familiar horror trappings an artful obliqueness and distinct visual flair without sacrificing its essential horror payoffs (a balance Perkins's second feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, essentially fails at). If nothing else, it got under my skin. Grade: B+

Stage Fright (2014)

I really wanted this movie—a refugee from the very underserved genre of horror musical—to work. And sections of it do; the musical sequences near the film's beginning are alive with musical and lyrical wit (if a bit too dependent on an unfunny joke about repressed homosexuality... haha, theater people are sometimes gay, wow). But the unfortunate truth is that outside of that catchy onset, the movie's really not that good of a musical, and no matter how you slice it, it's never a good slasher, which becomes even more of a problem once the musical elements take a complete backseat in favor of the slasher plot in the film's final third. Hopefully in a decade or two, some aspiring and much more talented director will look at this and see the potential for a majorly reworked remake. Grade: C+

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)

It's possible that I'm not quite Irish enough for this movie—depicting a fictional faction within the fight for Irish independence—to land with as much emotional resonance as it should. There are stretches of the film that only really work in the abstract for me, and it's a little too often that the characters get subsumed into the larger sociopolitical ramifications of the events onscreen. But that's only part of the movie. The rest is a push-pull between the sheer brutality of the British occupation and the ethical quandaries inherent in violent revolt, and as difficult to watch as that is, the film is never more compelling in those moments—all the more compelling, in fact, for its hard-to-watch-ness. It's the rare film about rebellion that both argues for its necessity (the film is never ambiguous in its sympathies for the IRA) and remains intensely uncomfortable with the violence inherent in that rebellion. This is no rah-rah war movie. Grade: B+

Peppermint Candy (박하사탕) (1999)

A protagonist's suicide at the beginning or end of the movie tends to orient the entire movie about itself—everything about the film becomes about explaining the suicide. Not so with Peppermint Candy, whose opening suicide is less a cipher to be dissected and more an overture to the meat of the film, which begins in earnest in the second scene, a flashback from just days prior, where we see a thoroughly miserable man visiting a comatose childhood friend and then tearing apart a canister of film. This is indeed a movie about a man's life destroyed, but the literal end of life is almost superfluous (maybe even gratuitous)—the remainder of the film spirals these dual pillars of our protagonist's life, the camera and the lost friend, around and around in increasingly devastating iterations as each successive scene flashes back earlier into his life. The end result is a shocking and deeply tragic picture of the conscious and unconscious ways that human beings pose increasingly corrupt images of themselves over time, a Xerox copied over and over again until all that's left is grainy darkness. Grade: A

Heaven Can Wait (1943)

On the rubric of Ernst Lubitsch features, this one's pretty far down there. It starts off promisingly enough, with a drolly hilarious scene involving a man who, having just died, is intent on convincing Satan to let him into Hell. Unfortunately, the afterlife hijinks only last to the end of that scene (and return in the fart of a conclusion) before we're subjected to terrestrial flashbacks for most of the rest of the film, as the man presents his case as to why he should be admitted to Sheol. I dunno, maybe the modern R-rated shock comedy scene has thrown my morality way out of wack, but the resulting misdeeds are so tame (he has an affair! he pays off people!) that it all but squanders that tantalizing hook. What we're left with instead is a mildly amusing comedy-melodrama, which is good enough, I suppose, except that we've got that legendary name behind the camera. So I'm calling it a disappointment. Grade: B

Television

Fauda (فوضى), Season 1 (2016)

This Israeli political/spy thriller is a series that very rarely lets up on its grim intensity, and that's both its greatest asset and biggest liability. Following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with protagonists on both sides of the issue as well as the various civilian individuals who get swept up in the cat-and-mouse games (a la The Wire), Fauda weaves a complex and multilayered narrative that never really tilts its sympathies toward either Israel or Palestine—I don't know enough about the political context to know if such both-sides-ism is as problematic here as it would be in depictions of, say, American politics, but it sure makes for exciting television. That said, it's maybe at times too exciting; this plot moves fast, and while that's not inherently bad, this speed doesn't leave enough time to flesh out its large-ish cast of characters beyond just one or two dimensions (with a few exceptions). It also has a slight numbing effect, and with every scene played at 10/10 intensity, some of the high moments in the series don't quite land with the impact that they should. Still, these are relatively minor complaints in what is, overall, a captivating show whose second season I look forward to quite a bit. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for July 31 - August 6, 2017

Last day before students come back. Exciting stuff, sure, but I'll miss all that spare time.

Movies

Song to Song (2017)
Points to Terrance Malick for just how far off-brand he goes in Song to Song. This movie's 129 minutes show us scenes of graphic nudity, prostitution, lots of rock music, very little classical music, Flea and Patti Smith (both playing themselves), zero natural imagery, crowded urban spaces, and the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms (though honestly, it's amazing that it's taken so long for psychedelics to make it into a Malick film). However, if you've been paying attention to this director's post-Tree-of-Life output, this might not be all that strange to you, although Song to Song is certainly the most committed iteration of this new Malick, which generally involves a sort of feature-length video-essay on the intersection of contemporary urban/suburban design with modern psychological malaise. It's all very pretty and interestingly shot (as with last year's stellar Knight of Cups, this is all shot in digital, another new Malick quirk), the concrete, glass, and water of the modern city yearning for mystic grandeur like a hollow mimicry of the lush nature of The New World or Days of Heaven. But this is, by far, the most narrative-heavy of the recent Malick trilogy, and while I'm all for Malick returning to narrative film, there's just not a lot under the hood here. Knight of Cups turned its scenes into literal archetypes, with its convergences of Pilgrim's Progress with the Tarot deck, and Song to Song seems to have done the same thing but forgotten to tell us so—Ryan Gosling is an almost comically saintly figure (he's principled! he doesn't sell out his music! he cares for an aging relative!), Rooney Mara is adrift in a sexual odyssey of sorts as she works through the various ways modern society has made experiences hollow, and while there are some interesting wrinkles in the characters played by Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman (who have a profoundly twisted relationship, especially for a Malick film), the movie never really works through the trope-ish flatness of Gosling and Mara's characters. It ends strong with a tremendously sweet conclusion, but getting there is frequently cold and uninteresting. A noble attempt, to be sure, but it doesn't really amount to anything substantially successful. Grade: B-

The Lost City of Z (2016)
The film described in the reviews of The Lost City of Z's small village's worth of vocal advocates is recognizable enough to what I saw to let me know that I didn't watch a completely different movie. But... I dunno, guys. I see the pieces of a masterpiece, but they're never really coming together in the most powerful way. I'm not sure whether to blame the editing or the screenplay, both of which, I think, flub on the admittedly difficult task of compressing years of real history into something of a mystically charged tale of a man determined to find an ancient ruin in the heart of the Amazon. Or maybe it's that writer/director James Gray is hamstrung by being tied to actual history. Whatever the case, this movie's sweep feels weightless when it should be grand, and its philosophical impulses bump up against but never quite nail down profundity. The visuals are splendid, and on a scene-by-scene basis, the film is powerful. Coming together into a cumulative thing bigger than the sum of those parts, though, is something that still feels just outside the movie's grasp. Grade: B

The Hunter (2011)
This movie should be a lot better than it is—a spare, pristine ethics thriller about the intersection between commerce and violence and the natural world. And it kind of is that, in theory. But Willem Dafoe's mercenary hunter protagonist (hired, in the movie, to kill the last few Tasmanian tigers that keep the species from total extinction) remains a dark nothing at the center of the film that keeps anything from actually catalyzing, and the movie never really figures out his psychology on a holistic level. So we're stuck with this, mildly entertaining and not altogether "bad" but still not particularly compelling either. Grade: B-

Knowing (2009)
The film's numerology-mixed-with-Ancient-Aliens-mixed-with-the-Book-of-Revelation-mixed-with-M.-Night-Shyamalan screenplay is too sincerely dumb for most of the movie to transcend it. But I'll give it this: the final 15-ish minutes are absolutely breathtaking, mainly in a visual sense but also thematically—a demented inversion of Close Encounters of the Close Kind that's simultaneously horrifying and kind of wonderful, undergirded by some unconvincing but nevertheless breathtaking CGI. Too bad there are nearly two mediocre hours attached to that ending. Grade: C

I'm Not There. (2007)
An obvious companion to Haynes's Velvet Goldmine, I'm Not There is an impressionist, heavily art-house-ified treatment of the creative life of a cornerstone figure in rock history, as much cultural commentary as biopic. But whereas Velvet Goldmine is about the experience of rock fandom, filtering its not-quite David Bowie through the lens of journalists and, more significantly, young and impressionable teens, I'm Not There is a rendering of the experience of actually being the focus of that immense scrutiny and the various ways that celebrity and idolization fractures identity and compromises message—Bob Dylan is played by a whole host of actors ranging from kooky (Richard Gere, playing Dylan as Billy the Kid [whose allusion to Dylan's role in the Peckinpah movie does nothing to make the out-of-nowhere western scenes any less bizarre]) to brilliant (an Academy-Award-nominated Cate Blanchett plays the electric-era Dylan with an astounding fidelity to the Dylan seen in Dont Look Back and other artifacts from the era). Unlike with Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes was actually able to secure the rights to use the artist-of-focus's songs, so we're treated to a wall-to-wall Dylan soundtrack, which is an aural pleasure but might end up being the film's biggest misstep—the lack of actual Bowie songs in Velvet Goldmine lent a mythic, shape-shifting quality to the film that complicated its narrative's relationship to history, but while I'm Not There, with its intentional surreality and actor-jumbling, is much more forthrightly shape-shifting, the tying of it all to Dylan's actual music somehow makes the film a bit too literal in its approach to the artist, transforming his life into something of a solvable jigsaw puzzle of symbolism rather than the inscrutable mystery of Velvet Goldmine's central character. Which is not to say this is "bad" or even just "okay." It's very good, and you're unlikely to find a more interesting and visually distinctive depiction of celebrity in film. It's just the slightest bit frustrating to see a double instead of a home run, given the subject and style. Grade: B+

It Came From Outer Space (1953)
Despite the assertions of its poster, It Came From Outer Space is a mostly un-amazing, un-exciting, and un-spectacular sci-fi cheapie with fairly hoaky 3D effects. Its shape-shifting alien does feel like an antecedent to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter's The Thing, which is worth something, I guess. But beyond historical curiosity, there's not a lot to be excited about her—certainly not the plot, whose third act wavers from "the aliens are evil!" to  "the aliens are just misunderstood!" to "the aliens are evil again, sort of!" to "but we kind of root for them anyway!" so quickly you'll barely have time to say, "Make up your mind already!" Grade: C+



Music

Arcade Fire - Everything Now (2017)
There's been something of a critical piling-on with indie stadium/art rockers Arcade Fire's fifth studio album, and I don't think that's quite fair, especially because the record contains some of their career-best material. I'm talking specifically about the triumphant title cut, the ABBA/Bowie fusion of our dreams, and the controversial "Creature Comfort," a nervy exploration of the ways the band may be complicit in the social structures that lead people to suicide that also has the best beat of the album. That said, the core critiques of the album aren't entirely off-base either; Everything Now is very much a concept album—and one insistent on dissecting the social ills of the melding of predatory capitalism with the "infinite content" of the Internet age. Arcade Fire have positioned themselves as something like 21st-century prophets since at least Neon Bible, so it's not as if that socially conscious reach is the problem in and of itself. However, no matter the intelligence of the ideas, the success of any concept album always lives and dies with the music, and there are definitely sections of Everything Now (the pretty weak middle "Peter Pan"-"Chemistry"-"Infinite Content/Infinite_Content" trio especially) where the album becomes more of an exercise in "I see what you did there" than anything truly felt. The good strongly outweighs the bad, but the bad is almost certainly the worst of their career. It's a solid effort but also the least-essential in Arcade Fire's discography. Grade: B