Movies
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 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
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-
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
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+
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
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
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