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-
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