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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+
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