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-
Television
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
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
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-
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