Mini-Reviews for September 18 - 24, 2017

"Mini," in the case of the mother! review.

Movies

mother! (2017)

There's not much point in talking about mother! without laying bare its whole game, so Spoilers Ahoy!. And here we go: Darren Aronofsky's latest film is basically an allegorical adaptation of the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, albeit through an idiosyncratic interpretive lens that I first thought was Gnostic and now think is probably closer to an environmentalist exploitation of Gnostic mythology. Because here's what we have: Javier Bardem as a frustrated artist (aka the Abrahamic God, it becomes clear soon enough) who cares more about his creation—both the actual text of his poetry and the rabid fandom that it spawns—than about his relationship with Jennifer Lawrence, his wife whose own artistry lies in the restoration of their beautiful home after a fire (basically a Mother Earth figure and clearly the one of the two who has anything like a sense of moral priorities). It's Lawrence's character, then, who bears the trauma of the ways that the increasingly unruly fans (aka humanity) Bardem invites into their house tear her work to pieces. And from this perspective, we get a parade of increasingly literal analogues for Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood, the life and death of Jesus, and more, all driving toward one resounding message: that humanity's presence on Earth is a costly mistake by an egotistical creator intent on exploiting the planet's profound beauty toward profoundly short-sighted ends. And if I already sound like an overly self-impressed divinity school egghead, that's just the kind of thing this movie is going to do to you and just the sort of naked grasp at showy profundity that people tend to hate Aronofsky movies for. I don't begrudge people for hating this movie. For the Christian crowd, it is blatantly and unapologetically heretical (essentially postulating that Christianity itself is an assault on the Earth—sort of the opposite message of 2014's Noah, for what it's worth); for others (and likely Christians, too), it's yet another movie that uses the cruelty of men toward women as a metaphor, and a metaphor that hinges on a brutally depicted assault that's likely to be the hardest-to-watch cinematic moment of this year; for others still, it's a solipsistic movie about Aronofsky himself (he's actually in a relationship with Lawrence, so...), and as self-critical as it is, there's no denying that he still casts himself as God Almighty; for even more others, it's an aggressively experimental movie that, rather bafflingly, someone somewhere convinced a major studio to produce and market as a mainstream horror flick. So I get it, and I even hold some of those reservations myself and even kind of wonder what the use of such an aggressively anti-human allegory is beyond pure head-trip academics, given that all those involved in making and experiencing this movie are, I assume, human themselves (and given that, I also assume, Aronofsky is not really advocating for a species-wide extermination). But still. I can't quite shake this movie. Goodness knows we need more movies interested in critical engagement with the Biblical narrative (as opposed to stifling and narrow-minded adaptation), and as much as I scratch my head at the idea that humanity should not exist, I'm all for knocking the human race from its presumption that it deserves a central and proprietary role in creation; the movie is, if nothing else, a veritable scream for the human race to recontextualize their place on this planet, and if the ideological means that it uses to get there are a little eyebrow-raising, it's at least a conversation I can get behind. Plus, there's no discounting Jennifer Lawrence's performance here, which is like a far more personal iteration of Catherine Deneuve's Repulsion tour de force; it's incredible, all the more so considering the fact that the camera spends approximately 80% of the film a few inches from her face. And speaking of the camera, it's worth noting that for all the narrative insanity, mother! is Aronofsky's most stylistically restrained film yet, and that precision pays off handsomely. It's a masterfully directed movie; we can argue about the ends to which that direction is devoted, but I will fight anyone who trashes the actual craft here. All of which is to say: I think I like this movie a lot. Grade: A-

It Comes at Night (2017)

I hate to be the "what's the point" guy, but... what's the point? It Comes at Night has some cool atmospheres and is across-the-board well-acted, sure, and I guess if you squint, you could call it some sort of examination of paranoia or humanity's tendency to mistrust to self-destructive ends or whatever. But this movie's genre Jenga game in which it takes out the conventional expository and narrative pieces we're used to leaning on in psychological thrillers has progressed so far that it's basically captured the exact moment that the whole structure is toppling in on itself. And besides, the one element that it needed to take out to make its commentary on paranoia have any weight at all—i.e. the certainty of the existence of "it," the threat of the title—is still right there staring us in the face in a mid-film plot point. I'm not sure what all the acclaim was about here, honestly. Grade: C

Rough Night (2017)

On paper, there's a lot here to like: a fun cast, gender-flipped comedy tropes, a screenplay that seldom relies on improv, physical humor involving corpses. And some of that pays off in brief flashes of success (e.g. the corpse comedy, because it's hard to get that wrong). But outside of those small moments, there's really not a lot going for this movie. It's not "bad" per se, but it's very, very forgettable. My ongoing distaste for mainstream American comedies is largely to blame, I'm sure, but this movie sure doesn't do a lot to be an ambassador to us hard-to-please viewers. Grade: C

The Double (2013)

There's nothing like a movie trying very, very hard and succeeding. With The Double, I'd say this is the case about 75% of the time, and as such, it's an often gratifying and exciting watch. I do feel like, as with the similarly inventive and energetic Cosmopolis (released within a year of this film's debut), I'm missing a piece here having not read its source material—in this case, an 1866 Dostoyevsky novella. It's all very interesting and engaging, but without the original novel, I'm having a hard time figuring out the starting line in this race. Grade: B+

The Chorus (Les Choristes) (2004)

I'll give the movie this: the rickety inspirational-teacher tropes bear a little more weight when they're put to use in a story that shows a teacher motivating troubled students through musical extracurricular activities instead of classroom instruction. But otherwise, I don't have a ton of positive things to say about Les Choristes, a movie that, when it isn't paint-by-numbers, is making some pretty baffling narrative decisions like making one of the troubled youths a legitimate sociopath who then conspires to destroy the school (there are many things that teaching movies don't capture about real-life teaching, but never once have I watched one and thought, "You know, the one thing this movie is missing is turning one of these students into a flat villain"). And of course the kid with the child with the most beautiful voice is the one who is also the one who looks most angelic. Because as we all know, soulful blue eyes are a direct contributing factor in singing ability. Grade: C-

Music

LCD Soundsystem - American Dream (2017)

The band's return from the shortest breakup ever more than justifies the questionable ethics of returning after such a high-profile and definitive exit. Leaning more heavily on post-punk textures than ever before, American Dream is an uneasy, atmospheric album that, while not a complete reinvention, is far from a retread either, and tracks like "How Do You Sleep?" and "American Dream" pulse with a sort of personal dark-night-of-the-soul feel that's relatively unprecedented even in the more emotionally forthright moments in group's coolly hip past. There's a sleek consideredness to even "All My Friends" that's mostly absent here; instead, Murphy's production and lyrics aim for a rawness that, though not really ragged in a punk sense, still feel more transparent and prickly than ever before. That said, it's probably LCD's least-compelling album since their self-titled debut, which isn't to say that there's anything expressly "wrong" with this album, but just because it doesn't reach the dizzying heights of Sound of Silver or This Is Happening (or even, for that matter, "Losing My Edge," though "Tonite" tries its darnedest). There are few tracks here I would rank among LCD's best, but that's an unfair standard to hold any album to. Grade: B+

The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding (2017)

What I remember and return to most in 2014's Lost in the Dream are the anthems: the moments when The War on Drugs filtered Born to Run through Tunnel of Love and arrived at something transcendent and huge. Very few moments on their new album approximate that diesel-fueled grandiosity. Instead, A Deeper Understanding goes for the slow burn, taking as many inspirations from '80s R&B and power ballads ("I Want to Know What Love Is" is a major touchstone here) as from Bruce Springsteen and heartland rock. This is never better than in the album's fourth song, "Strangest Thing," in which a slow, synthy riff builds to a stadium-sized climax. Still, without the speed of Lost in the Dream's peppier tracks, A Deeper Understanding lags a bit, and it's a far looser, occasionally dull experience as a result. They key is its length, I'm afraid; it's long, a full seven minutes longer than Lost in the Dream (an album that was already flirting with bloatedness). I can imagine an absolutely stellar 40-minute version of this album, but at 67 minutes, it's reminiscent of the CD long-windedness of that '80s era it clearly adores, which dilutes the undeniable greatness somewhat. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for September 11 - 17, 2017

Busy week, but I still made time for some stuff.

Movies

Raw (Grave) (2016)

There's some fun to be had in this movie's mix of off-beat social commentary and deadpan, gross-out horror/comedy. But somehow, I was expecting a movie about a vegetarian who goes to college and discovers that she has cannibalistic urges to be a bit more... rambunctious. Grade: B-

Reality (Réalité) (2014)

This film tries to show a world in which there is no meaningful separation between dreams and reality. It's called Reality, of course, and in it, a girl named "Reality" finds a tape inside of a gutted hog that ends up showing us footage from the movie itself. Also, it's a movie about filmmaking. The general effect is that of a film adaptation of a Möbius strip, if Möbius strips were stupid and boring dadaist constructions. In another age, I might have given this points for weirdness, but hot on the heals of watching Twin Peaks: The Return, I'm asking for more than half measures from filmed dream logic. Grade: C-

Beginners (2010)

Very much a dry run for Mike Mills's excellent 2016 20th Century Women, right down to the cataloging of history through clean montages of stock imagery, it's hard to view Beginners as anything but the slightly more boring older sibling of a much more accomplished film. So I'm not going to try to pretend I watched it as anything but that—which is not to say that there aren't still things to be enjoyed; as with 20th Century Women, there's a warmth and yearning to the film's twee that makes it work, even in the age of the post-American-indie-quirkfest exhaustion. Mills's direction remains as precise and thoughtful as ever, too. It's comfort-food melancholy, basically, but oh well. I dig it. Grade: B+

Rounders (1998)

This movie begins feeling very much like a cautionary tale, or at least a The Hustler-style noir-ish "dude gets it done, but at immense personal cost" kind of drama. But what we get is much closer to an underdog fairy tale, in which Matt Damon's card shark character accumulates poker skills until he's good enough to play with the big wigs. It's a movie bursting with archetypes and familiar plot devices, and now that I've sort of spoiled the narrative's general trajectory, you won't find a surprise in the film. But this is tremendous good fun anyway: the writing is crisp in that hammy '90s, voiceover-heavy sense of broadcasting just how smart all this movie's characters are, the acting is excellent (barring one John Malkovich, whose turn as a Russian villain comes very close to being so-bad-it's-good but ends up just being bad), and the plot, familiar as it is, is well-rendered. There's nothing mind-blowing here, but Rounders offers that distinct and all-too-rare pleasure of seeing something familiar executed skillfully. Grade: B+

Cinema Paradiso (Nuovo Cinema Paradiso) (1988)

The film's supposedly central relationship between a young boy and an aging film projectionist is beautiful, and as long as Cinema Paradiso is centered on the ways those two ambassadors from two generations bond over a mutual love of cinema, it's aces. But that barely occupies half the movie. The rest is a tiresome and undercooked coming-of-age story that focuses entirely too much on the boy and his forgettable romance and not nearly enough on the projectionist. Which is a pity. Thankfully, the movie pivots back around in its final minutes, ending on what is maybe one of the greatest film scenes of its decade—a montage cut from the decades of film throughout the projectionist's career. That last bit is reason enough to watch the movie, although you'd be forgiven for fast-forwarding a little to get there. Grade: B

Television

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
For anyone paying attention to David Lynch's career since we last saw the gang from Twin Peaks (that would be 25 years ago with the divisive theatrical feature, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), the form that Twin Peaks: The Return, the ostensible third season of the show, ultimately takes shouldn't be so surprising: elliptical and sometimes incongruous storytelling that fuses staples of detective fiction with aggressive narrative and formal experimentation, including the manipulation of intentionally cheap digital visuals into visceral psychological and even cosmic horror. In short, this return will be deeply frustrating for those people whose favorite part of Twin Peaks was Dale Cooper being quirky and eating cherry pie but right up the alley of someone (like me) whose favorite Twin Peaks textures were those found in Fire Walk With Me and the formal assault that was "Episode 29," the original series finale—you know, the parts that wallow in misery. Those looking for typical Twin Peaks quirk won't find themselves completely at odds with what this new series gives us (the characters of Dougie and Janey-E Jones, two particular delightful creations of this third season, feel very much a piece with old-school Twin Peaks sensibilities), but they'll have to put up with a good deal of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive-esque shenanigans along the way, as well as several sequences that have very little precedent in Lynch's filmography but are no less alien. What's amazing, then, is that for all its bizarre and patience-testing experimentation, The Return actually manages to tell a coherent story—more so, even, than the original Twin Peaks, since it lacks both the baffling creative upheaval that defined the second season and also has a good deal more explication of the cosmic mythology of the show's universe (honestly, probably a little too much explication—I prefer my Twin Peaks to be more inscrutable, although the shocking, baffling finale does a lot to restore that beloved inscrutability). This is, I realized as I watched, one of the things that makes Lynch one of America's most popular directors, despite his often alienating experimentation: there are always real stories, either human or metaphysical, behind all his out-there-ness, and Twin Peaks: The Return is probably his best showcase yet of being able to spin compelling narrative out of would-be incomprehensible absurdity. And as such, it's rather beautiful and unlike anything you're likely to have ever seen on TV. In fact, it's tempting to call The Return David Lynch's masterpiece, and while I'll have to sit on that a while to decide if I actually think that, there's no doubt that this is one of the most gorgeous, unsettling, moving, and significant works of motion picture art that we'll get this year—and likely that we'll get in any year any time soon. Grade: A

Books

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
I don't read a ton of mystery fiction, which might be my problem here. I also was familiar with this book's plot through a number of different film and stage adaptations I'd seen, so that knocks out the "mystery" part of this mystery novel. But I dunno, guys, for something that Wikipedia calls Christie's masterpiece, it's kinda... not a masterpiece? Or at least, not what I'm looking for when I describe a masterpiece, which, again, might be a liability of my not reading much mystery fiction—these things may work on different rubrics that I've not yet figured out. But as I see it, the prose is flat, the philosophical discussion of justice is unengaging, and the characters feel less like characters than pieces of a spreadsheet to be checked off as they all bite the dust, one by one. Usually, that progression of deaths would be the fun of a story like this, but it's hard to have fun with the death of things that are not human. Grade: C

Music

Pixies - Trompe le Monde (1991)
For a while, this was the last Pixies album (and it might as well still be for me—I haven't listened to Indie Cindy, and I've been told I shouldn't). So there's the temptation to read this as a career summing up. But honestly, there's not a lot here that sums up. It's a Pixies album, and although the production and songwriting are smoother and less abrasive than the band's '80s output, Trompe le Monde still has that same mixture of hummable and furious volume that made the band an alternative-scene favorite to begin with. And despite its smoother sound, it's maybe angrier than the band has ever been, with Black Francis's yelpy vocals growling through a remarkably bitter set of lyrics. So no summing up; just classic Pixies through and through—possibly the best way to sum up to begin with, reminding us all why we'll miss them. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for September 4 - 10, 2017

Several great movies and several movies I didn't like very much at all. This might be the most polarized set of scores I've had in a while.

Movies

It (2017)
This first entry in the duology adapting Stephen King's doorstop opus of coming-of-age horror has a lot of the same problems that recent adaptations of beloved literary properties have tended to have—namely, that it squanders pacing and characterization in favor of being slavishly devoted to visualizing every bit of the source material. This isn't always a bad impulse, and as a fan of King's work (and this novel in particular), I won't deny the thrill of certain iconic setpieces being recreated here; the mid-story fight with the monster in the decaying Victorian manor remains a highlight in both the movie and the book, as do the various surreal and horrifying impositions of IT into the children's day-to-day lives. However, what the faithfulness to the novel ends up meaning throughout most of this film is a heightened awareness of all the myriad ways the movie falls short of the novel's ambition, and it's not hard to begin imagining what a movie that took this story on its own terms would have been like. It almost certainly should have cut the number of kids down, for starters. The acting is uniformly excellent, but as with last year's It-indebted Stranger Things, the screenplay just isn't nimble enough to juggle the development of all seven characters in the Losers' Club. Most of them, in fact, are extremely shoddy personality types who give interesting quips from time to time but almost never show any life outside of that. This is most apparent with a barely there Mike, which is disheartening not just because he's the only black actor in the film's main cast but also because of his centrality to some of the historical atrocities of the town of Derry in the book, to which the movie only gives a passing nod (And it's also worth noting that the closer the movie sticks to the book, the harder it is to resist nitpicking the ways that it actually does change the book—case in point, Mike, whose role is probably disserviced most by the shifting of the action from the 1950s to the 1980s, burying the racial subtext to a lot of what happens to him—and in general, I'm not sure if the It story really works without the context of the urban decay that happened in that specific twenty-seven year period between the late '50s to the early '80s, although I guess we'll have to see how Chapter Two deals with this). Just as big of an issue is the way that, in a frantic need to hit every memorable part of the novel, the movie practically sprints through its plot. There's a fundamental lack of patience in the film that's bad for the character development and worse for the actual horror sequences, which flicker by with trigger-happy editing and lack the sort of intricate buildup that informs the best movie scare techniques. That said, as negative as I've been for the majority of this review, I want to stress that I had a good time with this movie. The acting, as I've said, is across-the-board great, a minor miracle when it comes to a cast as young as this one, and the kids are so good that they carry their characters a good deal farther than the thin screenplay has any right to earn; kudos also goes to Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise/IT pitch-perfectly through all the effects. And the scares consistently deliver arresting imagery, if not the patient construction of mood and pace required for truly great horror—this is a tremendously shot movie, which makes it all the bigger shame that it's not edited better. There's also no discounting the sheer fun of seeing, as I did, a crowd-pleasing horror movie like this one in a packed theater with a responsive audience—which is to say, if you're interested in seeing this, go see it now rather than on home media. So yes, It offers a lot to enjoy; it's just all too easy to see how much better it could have been. Grade: B

Before I Fall (2017)

Most Groundhog Day-premised movies revolve around the central character's journey to become a better person through the sheer monotony of a day repeated ad infinitum—which is part of what makes Before I Fall's high school setting so promising, as high school for both students and teachers can often feel like an endless loop of indistinguishable days. And in the early going, Before I Fall fulfills this promise, with a litany of nice observations about the general mundanities and cruelties suffered and caused by high schoolers toward one another. But the deeper the film gets into the journey of its main character (a girl heavily ensconced in the "in" crowd of popular kids who like to bully each other and especially those outside their group), the more it becomes apparent that the film has confused its protagonist becoming a better person with its protagonist feeling like a better person. This is a movie in which half measures of decency are considered apt atonement to right the wrongs of years of torment—the central plot soon revolves around the twin foci of preventing the victim of long-term bullying and slander (in which our protagonist has eagerly taken part) from committing suicide and learning to make sure it's the nice guys who get sex. Both of these plots reveal a film with no real interest in fighting the actual social structures that makes the cruelty of teenagers so acute to begin with, and through the focus on the self-actualization of the main character—instead of, I dunno, the actual pain she's caused (and, like, actual pain, not how that pain relates to her)—turns the movie into an appeasing of conscience, not a meaningful statement on teenaged interactions. Grade: C

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (2016)

Errol Morris is the best living documentary filmmaker, full stop, and The B-Side is quietly one of his very best. It's ostensibly a career retrospective of the renowned Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, and the film works perfectly well on that, chronically Dorfman's memories of photography all the way back to her childhood and all the way up to her 2016 retirement via Morris's typical "just let 'em talk" approach to his documentary subjects. But as Dorfman's observations accumulate, the movie deepens progressively until, in its final minutes, we're presented with a treatise on the ramifications of modern business infrastructure, the impact of the loss of physical media, and even mortality itself. It's that typical Morris trick, using oral recollection to imbue a seemingly straightforward premise with profound philosophical depth, and it's as effective as ever here. Grade: A

A Single Man (2009)

You can gussy up a mannequin with all the pretty clothes you want, but in the end, it'll still be plastic. A lifeless movie that I was so bored with that I couldn't even muster up the outrage to care about the utterly ridiculous ending. Grade: C-

RockNRolla (2008)

Douchebags, The Movie. The credits promise the cast's return in a sequel, but who cares? I certainly wouldn't want to spend another minute with these characters and their casual homophobia and glamorous disregard for pretty much every single good thing in the world. I suppose after Snatch, two Sherlock Holmes movies, and this, it's time for me to admit that I just don't like Guy Ritchie movies. Grade: D+

Come and See (Иди и смотри) (1985)

I've often said that part of the genius of Full Metal Jacket was the way it twisted war movie tropes into full-on horror movie tropes, but here comes this Russian masterpiece and doubles down on the whole enterprise two years prior to the Kubrick film. Come and See teeters on the razor's edge between hyperrealism and full-blown experimentalism, as its horrifically unblinking stare at the surreal atrocities of the Nazi occupation of Russia is scored by a shrieking cacophony of war machine noises, Mozart compositions, and actual human screams. It's an effect that, after 2.5 hours, might feel numbing if it weren't so morally impassioned. "This is war; nobody is to blame," a Nazi says near the film's end, and the movie is so crystal-clear in rebuking that claim that it's almost cathartic. Of course someone is to blame. But as a famous sequence very near the film's end asserts breathtakingly, there's no real catharsis in recognizing the face of evil; there is only terror. Grade: A

Music

White Stag - Emergence (2017)
The most interesting band in Knoxville's progressive rock scene continues to push the boundaries of its sound. Incorporating flute and saxophone along with the typical death metal, drone, and avant-garde textures, Emergence recalls, more than any of White Stag's previous releases, the canonized sounds of progressive rock's early-'70s golden age, specifically evoking Jethro Tull and King Crimson. That's not to say this is a nostalgic or throwback record in the neo-prog vein—in fact, this, their first full-length album, is as "out there" as the band has ever been. It's not all great; for as exploratory as they all are, a sameness creeps up on the album in its latter tracks, and the songwriting clearly takes a backseat to the atmospherics. Still, White Stag shows tremendous ingenuity, too, and with a debut this strong, I look forward to the ways the band will expand and innovate in the future. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for August 28 - September 3, 2017

Reviews, etc. Read on.

Movies

Good Time (2017)

This is the first Great 2017 movie I've seen, and given Heaven Knows What, the directing Safdie brothers' previous feature, that shouldn't have been a surprise. What did surprise me, though, is how much fun Good Time is—"fun" being a word I would have never used within hearing distance of the excellent but misery-filled Heaven Knows What. There's not a lot of misery in Good Time, and that's part of its con; make no mistake, these characters are miserable. But we don't see it—at least, not at first. Connie, played memorably by a Robert Pattinson still apparently looking to salvage his street cred after Twilight, spends most of the movie's 99 energetic minutes manipulating everyone—including, most significantly, his mentally handicapped brother—in his ever-getting-out-of-hand scheme to rob a bank and staying just a step ahead of the collateral damage he causes, and the majority of the film consists of the lengthy and rigorously cause-and-effect-driven sequence of crime-thriller setpieces. It's all terrifically exciting and tense and frequently hilarious, too, right up until the abrupt ending that sees a terrible pile-up of that deferred collateral damage. In all the chases, mistaken identities, and off-handed scheming, it's easy to forget that the movie opens with a scene with Connie's brother reluctantly recounting a particularly painful family memory to a therapist, but the ending, which returns us to this brother's POV, slaps us back into this reality. Connie is a black hole of a human being, and Good Time is a compelling portrait of just how jointly exhilarating and destructive his particular brand of self-involvement is—nihilism disguised as survival. Grade: A

Time Lapse (2014)

There's a lot that's sloppy or kind of stupid about Time Lapse, both from a writing and a filmmaking perspective. The acting is mediocre, too. But more than any movie I've seen since Timecrimes, Time Lapse evokes the kind of unpretentious, clever, punchy sci-fi short fiction that I used to read by the bucketful in middle school. Among a film landscape of high-minded and/or high-budget sci-fi epics, it's a distinct pleasure to run across something as straightforwardly small and grimy as this. Grade: B

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

I'm sure some of my musical-loving friend will razz me for this, but the music isn't all that great in Sweeney Todd. Granted, I haven't seen the original stage show, so maybe the fault lies with Tim Burton's adaptation—and given Burton's lackluster (who are we kidding—bad) run of films in the past ten years, I'm willing to give him a good portion of the blame for this movie being just kinda okay instead of the made-in-heaven, peanut-butter-and-chocolate slam dunk it should have been having Tim Burton direct this particular story. Music aside, the movie just kind of plods along its straightforward plot, spending entirely too much time building up to the moment we all know the movie is really about—i.e. when Sweeney Todd and Nellie Lovett start slicing throats and putting them into meat pies. It's only sometimes that, in moseying through this plot, the movie arrives at something interesting or arresting, visually-speaking (the final shot is a major keeper, and pretty much any time Depp's titular barber is slicing throats, it's riveting), but the costuming and set design is consistently wonderful, though considerably dialed back from Burton's usual German-Expressionism-but-wryly-funny extremes, electing for a more muted, grimy twist on a early industrialized London. So the movie's not a total wash, and I enjoyed it more often than not. But it's not hard to feel like this is something of a missed opportunity. Grade: B-

Frailty (2001)

I'm not sure the copious voiceover is quite the necessary storytelling evil that this movie seems to think it is, and in general, the way the plot is given in expository chunks feels clumsy. But by the end, this movie has gone some places I truly didn't expect it to—a twisty piece of true crime that gradually transforms into something else entirely that I won't spoil. I've already compared one movie I've watched this week to short fiction, and this movie fits that distinction, too, which is great—because as we all hopefully know by now, it's the short story, not the novel, that is the closest literary antecedent to the feature film. Grade: B

You Can Count on Me (2000)

The relationship at the core of this movie, the prickly sibling sparring of Laura Linney's and Mark Ruffalo's characters, is gold—a sweet and very human look at two individuals orbiting each other's lives in their disparate attempts to find agency in their respective worlds. The movie surrounding that relationship, though, is shaggy to a fault. This is nothing out of the ordinary for writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose work in Manchester by the Sea and especially Margaret shows a proclivity for circuitous, rambly, inefficient narratives as a way of exploring the human condition. This movie, Lonergan's debut, is the least-high-minded of his three directorial features, and it's also the least convincing in proving its shagginess worthwhile. That's not to say the movie is a disaster or that the marvelous success of the Ruffalo/Linney relationship doesn't make the watch worthwhile. But it's a relatively humble debut from a creator who would go on to much, much more interesting work. Grade: B

Bob Roberts (1992)

Bob Roberts is technically a mockumentary, but outside of a few obviously silly bits (the titular Roberts being a conservative goof on Bob Dylan, right down to the album titles and covers [e.g. The Times Are Changin' Back]), it doesn't feel that far removed from the reality we see every day. This is, I'm sure, a commonplace and rather dull observation made already by millions of others also suffering from Trump angst. But that doesn't change the fact that Bob Roberts plays a lot more like a political drama than it does a jokey satire—whether this is because it was forward-thinking enough to anticipate shifts in American culture (a la Network, a movie that also increasingly feels like a drama than the bitter, exaggerated satire it was conceived as) or because writer/director/star Tim Robbins simply was interested in caustic commentary more reflective of reality than comedic sensibilities, I can't tell. What I can tell you is that the movie is a marvelous construction, definitely worth a watch; but lord, it's a bitter pill. Grade: B+

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

It's overwrought, overlong, and shaggy in the way that Old Hollywood epics tend to be, but golly is it beautiful to look at. This shouldn't be surprising, given that it's directed by David Lean, who brought us Lawrence of Arabia, nothing if not one of the most gorgeously crafted and meticulously formed epics of the era. Lawrence is a much better use of 200+ minutes, admittedly, especially given the lopsidedness Doctor Zhivago's story suffers from (there's so much buildup to what should be the narrative lynch pin of Russia's collapse into post-Bolshevik poverty), but Zhivago may in fact be the better-looking movie. The camera is inventive and observant, and the mis-en-scène is to die for—the clean geometry of Lawrence's desert is replaced by a lush evocation of both urban and natural Russia that feels almost fantastical in its construction; a scene featuring a house encased in ice is breathtaking, and the entire movie is full of moments nearly as grand. The story... well, the story is just kind of okay—well-acted, I supposed, but the romance is never really engaging enough to justify 3.5 hours of it, and it progresses in fits and starts that seem to skirt over important sequences and languish on less-dynamic moments of stasis, creating a plot that at once feels too long but not quite long enough. And for a movie that positions itself in the decades surrounding the rise of Lenin and the fall of the Romanovs, this movie has precious little to say about Communism or revolution or tsars or anything of political important. But all is forgiven once you see this movie in motion; its aesthetics are truly a wonder to behold. Grade: A-

Books

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

George Saunders's first novel is, I'm guessing, unlike most novels you've read. Set up almost like an oral history of sorts, the book renders the death and afterlife of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie through a series of dialogues among both fictional and nonfictional sources (including, in one instance, the recent-ish Team of Rivals), and the result is one of the most effective depictions I've seen of what the process of history making actually entails—the accumulation of stories and information from personal accounts. Through this device, Saunders is able to spin a surprisingly moving treatment of death and grief through the cross-cutting of the actual history of the Lincolns' mourning with the fictional history of Willie Lincoln's experiences in the "bardo," a limbo borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism and here mixed with Christian and other religious iconography. Early on, this is all sort of abstract and academic-feeling, but as the novel progresses, it becomes a much smoother ride and ends with a series of beautiful scenes in which the residents of this afterlife begin to realize that they are, in fact, dead. It's a strange, often funny, and ultimately profound journey, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Grade: A-

Music

The Men - Tomorrow's Hits (2014)

2013's New Moon was a turning point for Brooklyn group The Men, shrugging away the punk sounds of their first few albums and leaning into the country and soft rock textures that the band hinted at in their 2012 breakthrough, Open Your Heart. With Tomorrow's Hits, the band seems to have smoothed out some of the kinks that made New Moon the slightly uneven album that it was, and in doing so, they've arrived at a sound that's almost like power pop, full of bright, loud guitars and hooky melodies. This is a far cry from the punk of their early days, but it's a good fit for the band here, foregrounding the group's strength as pure songwriters. Every song is raucous enough to be fun but disciplined enough to hold together as a close approximation of guitar pop, even the chaotic, Chuck-Berry-meets-honky-tonk-meets-noise-rock "Pearly Gates," the most rambunctious track of the bunch. It's a fantastic collection of songs and one of the band's best full-lengths. Grade: A-