Mini-Reviews for October 23 - 29, 2017

Sorry for the late post. Out-of-town trips are all well and good, but they jostle my blogging schedule.

Movies

The Big Sick (2017)

Cutesy to a fault and, as with about 10,000 other modern American comedies, the direction and editing are on life support (ha...). There's a much better movie that's got just a tad more of a visual sensibility and is about 8 minutes shorter—and not 8 minutes of content either, just enough of the slack between lines of dialogue to tighten up the timing and quicken the verbal pace. But this is pretty much every modern American comedy; the real news is that so help me, the movie is charming anyway—stratospherically charming, in fact. Biggest kudos to the actors, I think. Nanjiani and Kazan are fun, but the real MVPs are Ray Romano and Holly Hunter as Kazan's character's parents, and when they're onscreen, the movie comes alive. So much so that you almost forget about the slack timing and visuals. Almost. Grade: B

Same Kind of Different as Me (2017)

Yikes, what a boring movie. It didn't have to be this way. The filmmakers were handed a compelling true story on a silver platter in the form of the friendship between Ron Hall and Denver Moore (an art dealer and a homeless survivor of an abusive sharecropping background, respectively), but bafflingly, they throw all the most interesting material out in favor of the blandest inspirational movie pablum possible, complete with the whiff of white saviorism. This is perhaps no better summed up in the film's ostensible emotional climax (if this movie was actually, you know, capable of rousing strong emotions), when Greg Kinnear's Ron informs us in a brief monologue that he actually abandoned Denver in the storm of the doubt and anger he felt after his wife's death; the film does nothing to dramatize either the doubt or the anger, and instead jumps us forward to the returned status quo in the very next shot. Credit where credit is due, I suppose: in the Pure Flix pantheon, it's no God's Not Dead. But that's a mighty generous rubric that I'm not willing to extend. Grade: D+

Personal Shopper (2016)

The lesson here is that Kristen Stewart is a bona fide star (in case any of us Twilight haters needed any more convincing) and needs to be paid diligent attention to. Personal Shopper is no slack of a film, a strangle, transfixing little genre mashup (50% supernatural drama, 50% thriller, and 100% European arthouse), but Stewart absolutely carries it. Even when the movie gestures just a bit too literally (as it does in the aftermath of its remarkable climax), Stewart is never less than great, and thanks to that, the film is never less than very good. Grade: A-

Kuroneko (藪の中の黒猫) (1968)

It doesn't quite hit the depths of supernatural horror of Onibaba (the only other Shindo film I've seen), but it shares the dreamlike folktale vibes that makes that other film so entrancing. It also has one of the most devastating variations on "sex=death" I've seen in a horror movie. So you can look forward to that. Grade: A-

The Seventh Victim (1943)

I thought I had run out of Val Lewton masterpieces (especially having seen all his Jacques Tourneur collaborations), but lo and behold, here comes The Seventh Victim to prove me very, very wrong. It lacks the dreamlike ink-blackness of Cat People, instead favoring a slightly less baroque noir aesthetic, but on a screenwriting level, The Seventh Victim is even that early opus's superior, spinning a remarkably complex and deeply felt mystery within a blistering 71 minutes. It's a compellingly odd tale that features not just secret spouses and shady business dealings and all your regular noir trappings but also a coven of devil worshipers who all seem just a bit sorry that they're serving Satan, which is kooky and fun right up until the minute it isn't and instead reminds you that at its core, this is a film about what it feels to experience utter remorse, to look both life and death in the face and not know whether you prefer one or the other. It's that mix of the bizarre and the tragic (dare I say a Lynchian forebear?) that places The Seventh Victim proudly alongside both The Wolf Man and Lewton's own Cat People as one of the great American horror movies of the 1940s. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for October 16 - 22, 2017

Spooky times had this week at the movies. October is looking bright.

Movies

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
I remain enamored with Tom Holland's Peter Parker, pretty much the platonic ideal of the character (with apologies to Tobey Macguire, whose dopey vulnerability works tremendously in the context of the Raimi films but misses out on some of that essential Peter-Parkerness that Holland nails). Michael's Keaton's Vulture is also a delight, making this year's Marvel outings an astounding 2/2 for villains, and while this is certainly a low bar to clear, I'd be up to the argument that he's the best MCU baddie so far. And then there's the setting—Homecoming sketches Queens and Peter's Midtown high school broadly, but it sprinkles them with just enough specific detail (e.g. the hall pass Peter holds in a school scene late in the film) that they feel alive and lived in, a refreshing contrast to the MCU's usual mix of generic Euro-American urbanscapes and light-futuristic Manhattan science labs. Based solely on these elements, Homecoming has the feel of a much better movie than it is, and it's a frustrating thought experiment to consider just how good it could have been if this movie hadn't been beholden to the blandly competent filmmaking and scripting tropes that's increasingly becoming a low-key disease in the MCU. This movie is clearly more at home with the small-time personal scenes in Queens and the high school, and the imposition of Tony Stark and the rest of the MCU tie-ins just feels tired and unnecessary and dilutes what's actually good here. And let's talk about the climax, shall we? It's another pileup of weightless CGI action, which... snooze. These movies are focus-grouped to death, right? Hasn't someone told them that the climaxes in Marvel movies are almost invariably the least interesting parts of the films? Well, whatever. Homecoming is fine, and parts of it are way better than fine. After the suckfest that was The Amazing Spider-Man 1 & 2, I suppose I should be grateful the franchise is moving in a positive direction. Keaton and especially Holland are so good that I guess I am kind of grateful. It's certainly nothing to be embarrassed about. Grade: B

A Ghost Story (2017)
I've been thinking this one over hard, and since I've seen it, I've come down a bit from my initial feeling that this was the best movie of the year. Not by much—David Lowrey's aching rumination on grief and loss is by turns heartbreaking, cosmic, and profound in the way that it uses a ghost's POV (one of those old-school Charlie-Brown-type ghosts that's just a sheet with eye holes cut in it, no less—certainly the most charming of the film's myriad lo-fi effects) to examine the impermanence of one's legacy, both in the relatively short-term context of your own loved ones lives and in the long-term view of the entirety of human history. It's borderline brilliant in places and never less than stunning visually. But through it all, there's a sort of fallacy of perspective that bumps it down a notch. The central idea here is that while a normal ghost story involves the resolution of some unfinished aspect of the ghost's life, and this film's ghost refuses to let the loose threads of his life resolve. It's compelling to watch everything change around a ghost insistent on not changing, but the film also doesn't quite interrogate this idea quite enough to escape the egotistic myopia of the way the ghost demands to be remembered even as its clear that it's time he moved on. This is compounded by an uncomfortable racial subtext to the film that wraps up a Hispanic family as well as (spoilers?) a scene of Native-American-on-European-pioneer carnage—again, interesting and occasionally compelling choices, but also ones that the film doesn't seem to want to engage in a way that eases the possible advocacy of white supremacy. The very presence of these questions and close readings in my mind is a testament to just how striking this film is, though, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tremendously moved (and even a bit awed), despite the movie's flaws. It's truly something special we have here. Grade: A-

Lady Macbeth (2016)
This movie's adept at showing the ways that oppressive social systems (here, rural Victorian England) corrupt individuals all along the social spectrum. It's not just Florence Pugh's titular Katherine and her desperately murderous attempt to cling to autonomy in the face of a literal patriarchy; it's also the hired help, even lower on the social ladder than Katherine's comparatively privileged position, who treat their fleeting moments of freedom like an anarchic sport; it's also the female servants, lower still, terrorized by the male help and exploited by Katherine. These groups form a multilayered web of uneasy alliances and out groups, and Pugh especially is excellent at selling it with an appropriate balance between nuance and ham. However, as good as that whole dynamic is, the movie can also be weirdly boring, too. It's all too obvious that this is a novel adaptation, as the story has not quite taken the shape of the cinematic medium, and as a result, there are quite a few slack patches. When it's good, it's very good. But it's not always that. Grade: B

The Falling (2014)
An odd and utterly unclassifiable blend of melodrama, psychological thriller, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and coming-of-age-by-way-of-The-Crucible, The Falling is completely entrancing and difficult to parse in that beautiful way that speaks more of untold depths than frustrating dead ends. The film hints at both the occult and the traditional sexual metaphors that accompany such tropes, but throws them into disarray through a resolute refusal to issue any sort of value judgement on the characters here. Instead, what we're left with is the rich landscape of the English girls school (a landscape that finds its emotional anchor in Maisie Williams's mesmerizing performance) presenting otherworldly occurrences with the heightened matter-of-factness of myth. It's kind of amazing. Grade: A

The Others (2001)
Right up to its final 10-ish minutes, The Others is very close to perfection (minus a sequence of scenes involving an absentee husband that constitutes the sole loose wheel in the set), but the movie sails right past the goal posts into merely very good territory with an ending that's thematically interesting but, in practice, deflating. But even that can't put a damper on the lavish sets (filmed in sort of the platonic ideal of a haunted manor) and eloquent lighting (probably the best-lit horror movie of the past 20 years, no joke), to mention nothing of a typically excellent Nicole Kidman. It's frustratingly close to being a masterpiece, and weirdly, that probably knocks it down a few more notches than a movie that didn't shoot so high to begin with. But there's a ton to enjoy here. Grade: B+

They Live (1988)
The only thing holding this movie back from being top-tier John Carpenter alongside The Thing and Halloween is the vagueness of its conspiracy plot, which is broad enough in its New World Order archetypes to accommodate pretty much any lens you want to put on it without really saying anything too meaningful about any of those lenses. However, everything else about They Live is a delight, from the retro B&W schlock of the "sunglasses" POV to the primal precision of the action beats to the typically laconic Carpenter wit ("...and I'm all outta bubblegum"). Grade: A-

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
The thing every The Phantom of the Opera adaptation must deal with is that the original novel kinda sucks, wanting to glom dark Romanticism's archetypal profundity without offering anything of substance of its own. The 1925 adaptation has at least two considerable benefits over its source material. First, it's able to actually show the rich imagery of its opera house and adjoined catacombs, and given this was 1925 and the height of the cash-flushed opulence that was the American silent film industry, you know it looks stupendous. Second, it sidelines Raoul for the majority of the film, which is great because Raoul is a drip. That doesn't quite solve the central problem that the story still isn't that interesting, but in describing this movie, I may have just talked myself up half a letter grade. Grade: B

Books

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)
It's frustrating that this novel isn't better than it is: the prose is inelegant, the story is way overplotted (sometimes to no apparent effect—e.g. a running subplot that involves sexual tension between Starr and her boyfriend, which culminates in... nothing), many of the characters fit stock types, and the happy shades of the ending feel unearned. Basically, it has all the usual shortcomings that plague the average YA novel. But those flaws are matched by some impressive strengths as well. Thomas has a fantastic command of setting and a real knack for using characters and various bits of cultural ephemera to illustrate vibrant communities, especially the African-American inner-city neighborhood that is the stage for the majority of the novel. And within this setting is embedded the novel's second great strength, which is the way it shows the exchanges and conflicts of ideas within this community. The characters in The Hate U Give aren't always well-drawn in the dramatic sense of having nuanced motives that evolve over time as they encounter conflict (with the exception of Starr and her father [the two best characters in the novel by a country mile], these are mostly static voices), but Thomas makes these characters tools for depicting the ways that communities dialogue within themselves—not in the sense that one character is right and the other character is wrong but in a way that shows how communities that are mostly united on a front (like the African-American community's unanimously grieved response to a cop's fatal shooting of a black teen) have diverse and often contradictory reactions within that front, often stemming from subtle but important differences in worldview and background. Through that act of community-wide discourse, these characters occasionally become compelling in a collective sort of way. It's undeniably exciting to see a low-income African-American community with its (often radical) political beliefs taken so seriously and respectfully in a YA setting. I just wish the entire package were something a bit more refined—the good things here are the sort of features I'd love to see blossomed in a masterpiece novel instead of trapped in a just pretty good one. Grade: B

Music

Bob Dylan - The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964)
I go back and forth on whether Blonde on Blonde is the weakest of Dylan's classic 1960s run of albums (search your feelings, you know it to be true). But when it's not that one, The Times They Are a-Changin' is definitely the alternate pick. That's not to say this is a bad album. But Times is certainly Dylan's most obvious and plodding record of the era, the one that feels most of the Folk Revival scene of the early '60s that he'd spurn only a year later. Dylan could be a caustic and compelling political writer (see both the preceding Freewheelin' and the soon-to-be-recorded Bringing It All Back Home), but his politics here are just kind of bluntly laid out, sans the elegance of his earlier work or the vitriol of his rock trio. His work as a Civil Rights ally on this album is significant, but in a kind of historical, abstract sense that's hard to feel in your gut. There are good—very good—songs here: I'm thinking specifically of "With God on Our Side" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." But the album doesn't have a ton that you can't find executed better on superior Dylan LPs. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for October 9 - 15, 2017

Fall Break is, sadly, now over. So long, beautiful week with loads of time for watching horror movies and reading. It was wonderful.

Movies

The Wailing (곡성) (2016)
Horror movies with subtext are good, and horror movies with metaphysical and/or religious subtext are the best. The Wailing is the latter, and it's a whip-smart one at that, operating not just as an impressively dense, twisty horror narrative but also a frightening religious fable about the seditious nature of evil and, if I'm not mistaken (I might be—I don't know nearly enough about Asian history/politics), a pretty piercing political allegory about xenophobia. It's a movie that, in depicting a single South Korean village, envelops the totality of the world stage without ever violating the reality of its small-time setting, suggesting the far-reaching consequences of the way that mythological and social powers engage with one another. What I'm saying is that The Wailing is pretty much brilliant. Grade: A

Inland Empire (2006)
One of the things that's helped David Lynch maintain such a devoted following is that as odd and experimental as his work tends to get, there's usually a concrete narrative to be sussed out upon repeat viewings—in other words, viewed in a certain way, they're puzzles. At least, until Inland Empire. I have no earthly idea what's going on on a narrative level in this movie, and I doubt that repeat viewings will help clarify this; for all the talk of that "dreamlike" Lynchian atmosphere, Inland Empire may be the only film of his that's completely untethered from from a grounding reality, its events progressing with the rhythm of a nightmare: the same actor plays an entirely different character in two consecutive scenes; a door in Poland opens in Hollywood; human figures contort into horrifying distortions; clips of incongruous music float in and out of the mix. Which is not to say that it's a haphazard film in the least. All its scenes circle around iterations of similar themes of violence, filmmaking, identity, and ambition, and it's almost as if Lynch is building a collage out of the tenuous logic of whatever narrative each moment gives us. The movie has the feel of something monstrous bursting through the barrier between subconscious and conscious, and as such, there's an elemental power to the film's cumulative effect, even if on a moment-by-moment basis it's kind of ugly and baffling. Plus, Laura Dern deserves all the awards for her performance here. Come for her, if for nothing else. Grade: A-

Them (Ils) (2006)
This movie's greatest strength is just how coy it plays with its antagonist(s)—basically, a horror movie of the home invasion variety in which the shots are specifically constructed to obscure what exactly it is that's afflicting our protagonists (for a long time, it's not even clear whether or not it's human). The effect is almost abstract, and it's mesmerizing in its obliqueness. Unfortunately, the movie throws all that down the toilet in its final minutes with an epilogue that not only reveals far too much but then punctuates it with several screens of explanatory text. I know, "based on a true story," blah blah. But come on—this was building to something great, and instead, it's just pretty good. Grade: B

Body Snatchers (1993)
When I was in elementary school, we lived on an Air Force base. My mom wanted to grow a vegetable garden, so she, my siblings, and I planted one with the help of my grandfather. It all went well enough until one day, we got a knock on the door. It was an officer telling us that we couldn't have a garden because the soil was filled with toxic chemicals that would get into the vegetables. So we had to destroy the plants. I say all this to explain why Body Snatchers, the third film adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, now relocated to a military base, resonated with me, perhaps even more than the revered 1978 version. My experiences on the Air Force Base were largely positive, but there's no denying the vague disquietude of living in a location where everyone dresses alike, where toxic waste resides in the soil beneath your feet, where armed guards and cement barriers greet you each time you leave and return, and where, in a heartbeat, you could be caught and quarantined within the small confines of the base (as actually happened on 9/11/01). It's not hard to imagine my warm childhood memories twisted into horror like that on display in this film. I'm a little iffy on some of the stuff that happens toward the film's end, but in general, it's a fantastic iteration on the Invasion evolutionary chain. Grade: B+

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
Nearly every review I've found of this movie talks about the way it makes a virtue out of the typical slasher movie fake-out cliches, and that's absolutely true; the jump scare has never been so perfected as when this movie lampoons its essential silliness and twists it into a metaphor for the violation of women's bodies through non-violent means (before the actual violent violation, of course). This is not a horror comedy, exactly, but it's very funny. The fake-out gags, sure, but there is a lot of the reverse, too, where we know something very bad is happening while the characters remain almost comically ignorant of it—in particular, one scene involving a refrigerator that seems to have heavily influenced the early main-character-clueless-of-horror-in-front-of-his-face goings of Shaun of the Dead. Even with all this genre subversion, the movie still hews a little closer to slasher tropes than I'd like—we're still dealing with scantily clad women being cut up, and while this is written/directed by women, which is a relief, I still wonder if this plays too much into the hand of the genre pitfalls. Regardless, mild trepidation aside, I enjoyed this quite a bit. Grade: B+

The Ghost Ship (1943)
The big joke about this is that there are no ghosts, nor anything even close to resembling one. So the RKO-mandated title is a gigantic bit of misadvertisement; what we're left with instead is a sort of thin psychological thriller about a ship's officer whose worried that his captain is insane. It's got some pretty good atmosphere and a few nicely tense scenes ("There are some captains who would hold this against you"), which make it entertaining enough that it's not a waste of time. But there's nothing all that remarkable about it, and the beginning portion of the movie is super weak. Grade: B-




Music

The Sugarcubes - Life's Too Good (1988)
I think, if we're being honest here, the only reason most of us still talk about The Sugarcubes is that the group was a jumping off point for Björk, who has totally Beyoncé'd the other fine members of this group with an all-eclipsing solo career. Life's Too Good, The Sugarcubes' debut, is a good record of post-punk energy, but I'm here for Björk, and, with apologies to the rest of The Sugarcubes (who I am sure are talented in their own rights), Björk totally steals the show here with her soaring vocals. The rest is fine. Grade: B

Prog Progress 1975: Queen - A Night at the Opera

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

Progressive rock wasn't dead in 1975. It's generally a bad idea to call any genre dead, given music's propensity for crate-diving and stylistic revivalism, but even by those caveats, prog was never as close to dead as, say, swing jazz or ragtime piano have been. Still, after the barrage of lineup changes, dissolutions, and critical pannings that assaulted prog in '73 and '74, it was clear that there would be a time in the near future when the genre would have to sink or swim. Enter Queen.

To be fair, Queen had entered quite some time before 1975. The band had existed in some form since 1968 (originally under the name "Smile"), and their classic lineup of singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, bassist John Deacon, and drummer Roger Taylor had all been playing together since 1971. Their first album, self-titled, had come out in 1973, and by the beginning of 1975, they had, in the grand tradition of '70s rock bands, released a second self-titled (Roman-numeraled, naturally) and Sheer Heart Attack, which had peaked at #5 and #2, respectively, on the UK charts. So it's not like these guys were some out-of-nowhere act. But 1975, and specifically the release of their fourth album, A Night at the Opera, was definitely the moment the band fully "arrived." Their most commercially successful act to date, A Night at the Opera hit #1 in not only the UK but also Australia and the Netherlands, and its lead single, "Bohemian Rhapsody," went #1 pretty much everywhere.

But why am I telling you all this? You know Queen. Everyone knows Queen. We can all head-bang to the guitar part of "Bohemian Rhapsody" together, and it'll be great. In fact, of all the bands covered thus far in this Prog Progress series, Queen is the most popular by a substantial margin. But I'm guessing at least a few of you are reading this and scratching your heads and drawing Venn diagrams between "Close to the Edge" and "Killer Queen" with big question marks above it and wondering, "They're prog?" Well, yes they are... were. But unless you'd dug into their first few albums, not that you'd know.

Queen was never purely progressive rock in the sense that the genre's heavyweights—Yes and Genesis and King Crimson—were, or even in the brief way that Jethro Tull was. There were no 20-minute epics or flights of avant-garde frenzy or Hindu shastra lyrics. They didn't even have a dedicated keyboardist, practically the cornerstone of the prog sound after guitars. Many sections of their first two albums flirt with heavy metal a la Black Sabbath, in fact. But when you get right down to it, Queen and Queen II and even most of Sheer Heart Attack are still basically prog, albeit a less ambitious and experimental variety than the most visible genre torchbearers. Brian May's knotty guitar passages (oftentimes composed on piano before hashed out on the axe), the meandering, multi-section melodies of their songs, the suite-like progression of their tracks—that's all prog. But while prog's sun begins to set in the mid-'70s, Queen's is ascendant. And that's not just the mysterious whims of music commercialism at play here; what Queen does in 1974 and especially 1975 is shrewd and savvy.

Starting with Sheer Heart Attack in 1974, Queen begins to sprinkle their heavy, proggy guitar rock with something that previously had little place in the prog canon: pop. You've heard it: it's called "Killer Queen," and it peaked at #2 in the UK. Filled with finger snaps, soaring Freddie Mercury vocals, doo-wop backing, and an infectious melody, this is likely the sound that came to your head when I first mentioned Queen. Either that or "We Will Rock You." Or "Fat Bottomed Girls." Or "Radio Ga Ga." That's because Queen's legacy is as a particularly operatic arena pop/rock band, not a progressive rock band.

And that's what makes 1975's A Night at the Opera so interesting. It catches the band at the exact moment when it makes that pivot from early-'70s guitar prog to late-'70s arena pop, and the result is a fascinating convergence of styles that makes the record both an artifact of this particular moment in the band's trajectory and a timeless piece of gonzo, sublime genre fusion. As successful and fresh as "Killer Queen" was, it's almost out of place on Sheer Heart Attack, which doesn't really have a song that even approaches that single's hummability, instead filling out the rest of the album with the same (if slightly more refined) type of guitar muscle that defined the first two albums. But A Night at the Opera is a completely different story. And it's awesome.

The first thing we hear on "Death on Two Legs (Dedicated To...)" [1] is a cascading piano ballooned by heavy, atonal guitar strokes over a screeching second guitar, and for a moment, it sounds like we're in for the proggiest thing Queen ever did. But then there's a scream, and all of the sudden, we're in the middle of a baroque (if furious) pop song framed by bouncy piano chords and Mercury's clean, precise vocals. Then the chorus hits, and Mercury's voice soars on a swell of what sounds like a practical orchestra of overdubbed voices. When the song ends, the record cuts abruptly to "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon," a jaunty, turn-of-the-century-showtune-esque number that somehow becomes a vehicle for an out-of-nowhere Brian May guitar solo that flips us into the absurd hard-rock pomp of "I'm in Love with My Car." This is A Night at the Opera in a nutshell: flitting from sound to sound, genre to genre, from irony to aching sincerity, with a reckless enthusiasm that's giddy and unhinged. It's delightfully weird, and while prog has never shied away from weirdness, this is a flavor of weirdness not often seen from the likes of Yes, et al: it's camp.

It's not that the progressive tendencies have disappeared, exactly—the guitar pyrotechnics are there, as are the stadium-sized sounds, multi-part suites, and sudden dynamic shifts; we've even got a self-serious, 8-minute epic inspired by the Bible ("The Prophet's Song"). But the album is not just prog, even by the loose Queen standards; there's also music hall and jazz and glam and pop and folk and skiffle and tap dance and soul. One of the central ironies of progressive rock that prog haters love to bring up is that the word "progressive" belies the fact that the genre tends to be kind of regressive, since it appropriates genres from the past like classical and jazz and grafts them onto rock in the name of "progress" rather than making true innovations [2]. On Opera, Queen seems to be goofing on this regression by adding these splashes of pre-rock genre pastiche (e.g. skiffle and tap dance, sounds not heard on a Queen album before or since) to its established prog rock sound—"Oh, you're going all prep-school artsy by quoting Bach in your rock epic? Well, here's some vaudeville atchya!" And even when Queen does go straight for the prog vein, it's as if they decided to double down on prog's sillier, theatrical elements and overwrought emotions (e.g. the aforementioned "I'm in Love with My Car," which is an all-holds-barred love letter to an automobile, complete with engine sound effects) or isolate elements of the genre from one another in order to cast those elements in sharp, sometimes humorous relief (e.g. "The Prophet's Song," which jumps right from heavy guitars to an extended a cappella section). Making an album that knowingly winked at the inherent silliness of prog's core features while still delivering complex, heady musicianship was probably the smartest approach to the genre at this point in prog's life cycle, and Queen, of all groups, had the depth of perspective to do so.

Queen isn't exactly making fun of prog, per se, but they're walking the genre up to the precipice of self-parody and then kicking it right off the edge, only in a way that also feels affectionate and sincere, as goofy as it can get. Like I said, Queen is diving full-bore into camp here, and it's camp mixed with a generous helping of straight-up humor, both sentiments rarities within prog that I welcome with open arms here because the music is an absolute blast. This of course all culminates in the defining Queen moment and (with the possible exception of "We Will Rock You" [3]) the band's most popular song: "Bohemian Rhapsody," a wild, ridiculous, hilarious, and strangely moving suite that crashes all the album's various impulses together into a dizzying climax where any such distinctions between musical tribes cease to matter. Is this a parody? Is it trying to say something profound? Does this even count as prog? Does this even count as rock? Who cares—it's friggin' Queen, and it's magnificent.

An important part of how successful this is has to do with just how nimble everything feels, especially when compared to prog's experimental vanguard. This is a spryer prog than we've seen up to this point, a prog that, for once, sets its sights on refining those elements of prog often placed on the back burner by the genre's more high-minded torchbearer: lyrics, melody, songcraft. A lot of genres have fused themselves to Queen's sound on this album, but the most prominent fusion of them all is the one that's really more of an ethos than any specific techniques: pop music, that relentless push toward catchy tunes and relentless earworms above all else. As I said earlier, this pop sensibility is a relatively new development for Queen. Not that they were a particularly impenetrable band before, but with A Night at the Opera, you see a clear ambition to follow up on "Killer Queen" instead of, for example, "In the Lap of the Gods." They are modeling themselves as a pop band, and in doing so, they twist progressive rock into the most amusing shapes they can before shaking it off completely in the second half of the '70s.

A Night at the Opera is a significant, one-of-a-kind album in rock music in general, but it's its specific role in Queen's evolution that makes it significant to prog instead of just some one-off oddity, because with it, Queen, intentionally or not, sets the path forward for most prog bands who had any intention of surviving into the late-'70s and beyond. Time and time again, you see prominent prog bands make this pivot from prog to pop: Genesis became a synth pop band, Yes became a new wave group, the Moody Blues reincarnated itself as a rock/pop outfit, Emerson, Lake & Palmer became whatever this is; even an obscure prog/jazz-fusion group named Journey got into the game and became, well, Journey. Not all of this was a planned trajectory by the bands. Often, these changes coincided with key members leaving the group or new creative voices joining. But the trend is there: as the '70s progressed and intellectual, complex rock compositions fell out of fashion, prog groups became increasingly pop-friendly. The popular narrative often cited is that punk killed prog, but the truth is, prog euthanized itself; rather than toil in obscurity on labyrinthine concept albums, they all just kind of decided to go where the market winds blew strongest.

That's not to suggest that these guys "sold out" or any of that credibility shibbolething that oftentimes makes music fandom so tiresome. A few of these bands produced legitimately good work in their pop phases. The best of these, by far, is Queen, whose string of albums following A Night at the Opera are, while never quite up to this classic's high water mark, as solid and inventive as any pop group of the era. To be honest, Queen were never all that great at the prog thing anyway. They just wanted to have fun. Some of these other guys, on the other hand... well, we'll get to that next time.

See you in 1976!


1] Dedicated to Norman Sheffield, it turns out—the band's first manager and all-around tool, if this song is to be believed: "You never had a heart of your own: kill joy, bad guy, big-talking small fry," goes the first chorus. Sheffield sued the band for defamation over the song.

2] This criticism is silly, of course, because it assumes that musical innovation is some magical thing that comes out of the air without any precedent. But we'll let the haters have their moment here, I guess.

3] Sports arenas have put their thumb on the scales a bit here, I think.

Mini-Reviews for October 2 - 8, 2017

This is the first time in forever that I've had movies, music, TV, and a book to review. Take a picture to prove to your kids that you were actually here!

Movies

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

The absolute best thing about this movie is something you probably already knew from the trailers: it is just about the best-looking piece of AV media you're likely to put into your eyeballs all year (and, with Alien: Covenant and Guardians of the Galaxy 2, this has already been a great year for high-budget visual splendor). Roger Deakins, the legend, helms some terrific cinematography that languishes over the already stunningly designed world of the film, and the result is nothing short of breathtaking. Honestly, that's probably what's carrying me through this film with as much enthusiasm as I'm feeling here (I'm pretty enthused). For starters, the movie has no business being within spitting distance of 3 hours, and while it's smart enough I suppose, the story left me feeling mostly cold, as did the acting—Harrison Ford gives probably the best performance of his latter years, but I mean, come on, it's still latter-day Harrison Ford, which means that he's still got one eye cocked toward cranky retirement (to say nothing of Ana de Armas in her role as a Her-style AI, who might do something interesting if the movie actually followed through with her character instead of the frustrating dead end it gives her). Lest it suddenly start to sound like I think otherwise, I must stress that this is a Good Movie, a VERY Good Movie, even—it's a way better execution of the inherently bad idea of a Blade Runner sequel than I was expecting, carefully evoking images and sounds from the original while still building new creations of its own (which is to say, the happy medium I wish The Force Awakens had found). But when your sequel to a masterpiece is merely very good and not a masterpiece itself, it's all too easy to nitpick all the various ways that it falls short of masterpiecedom, which is a terribly unfair way to view a movie, especially one this meticulously constructed and deftly executed. In the sequel-obsessed landscape we're living in right now, this is probably the best possible outcome. Grade: A-

Certain Women (2017)

Kelly Reichardt is one of the most exciting working directors out there, and I base that opinion largely on Meek's Cutoff, one of the true masterpieces of 2010s cinema (her 2013 follow up, Night Moves is no slouch either). Certain Women is, following Night Moves's lead, nowhere near as good as Meek's Cutoff but still pretty freaking good on its own right. It's essentially an anthology film in Reichardt's beloved American Northwest (focusing on three different, unrelated storylines), which is perfect, given Reichardt's facility with cinematic ellipsis—feature films are usually telling short-story-type narratives anyway, and this movie leans into that hard, spinning its trio of stories with an aching precision without ever really needing to punctuate any of them too neatly (save for a misguided and ultimately fruitless montage of all three stories near the film's ending). This works the absolute best in the final of the three, a quietly tragic story about loneliness and the desperate need for human connection, starring Lily Gladstone and Kristen Stewart; the thiry-ish minutes devoted to this story are, in fact, among the best cinema of the year. The rest of the movie doesn't quite hit that sweet spot, but I suppose that's just how it goes with anthologies. Grade: A-

The Boss Baby (2017)

So like... this is the most inventive piece of American animation of the year so far. I know. It's called The Boss Baby; it's a DreamWorks picture—that's DreamWorks Animation of Shrek and Madagascar fame, movies which reasonable people, I suppose, can enjoy but I don't think stand as anyone's idea of animation milestones in terms of craft. But here we are. The Boss Baby's animation is stylish and fun, a magnificent evocation of classic Tex Avery anarchy by way of CG and, delightfully, '90s Cartoon Network. The story is no great shakes, though it's admirably weird in getting to its relatively standard "older sibling has to accept younger sibling" destination (some babies are sent to families—others run a corporate bureaucracy in heaven [?] that's in competition with the existence of puppies for some reason), and the jokes are about the same mix of references and scatological humor you'd expect from any DreamWorks film. But I mean, wow—the way it approaches all of this looks so fresh, and I dig it. Grade: B

Death Note (2017)

You know what's awesome? Willem Dafoe's voiceover performance in this movie. He voices a very CG'd, malicious genie-type character who will kill anyone by whatever method specified by whoever writes the victim's name in a specific magic notebook, and Dafoe is having a great time with it, a sort of revision of his Green Goblin hamming, but somehow even less subtle. But you know what's not awesome? The rest of the movie. At first, it seems that the movie is going to be one of those stories where some hapless human makes wishes that a mischievous genie fulfills in the most unfortunate way possible, and in the early goings, when it seems like this will be the case, it's fun enough. But, typical of Adam Wingard, a perfectly fun premise is made altogether too busy through a distracting attempt at stylistic cleverness, and the plot (I haven't read the manga this is based on, but I assume this is also an issue there?) quickly bloats to worldwide proportions in this tedious way that swallows any personality whole. Bummer. Grade: C

The Invasion (2007)
Remaking Invasion of the Body Snatchers yet again, only this time as an action thriller with little political subtext, is a bad idea, and the best I can say is that this isn't the worst way it could have panned out. Nicole Kidman gives a great performance, and the way that the movie sets a majority of its action in a world that's already mostly overrun by the infected is a plot structure that pays off in some moderately interesting ways—most notably the way that surviving humans have to pretend to be emotionless zombies in order to elude detection. So it's not a wash. But those elements are diluted with generic action beats and an overeager editing style that screams 2007. It's not "bad," I guess, but it's certainly not good either. Grade: C+

The Leopard Man (1943)

The best way to approach this movie is to avoid comparing it with Cat People, the flat-out masterpiece produced by the same producer/director pairing of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur just a year prior to their release of The Leopard Man. Unfortunately, the focus on menacing felines doesn't really make that an easy task (especially when the literal exact same leopard as we saw in Cat People is re-cast for this film [his name is "Dynamite," in case you were wondering]). What we get is fine, if unremarkable outside of the nighttime killing sequences, which luxuriate in that same coal-black darkness that made Cat People such a visual treat. If I hadn't already seen Cat People, in fact, I might call this a neat little B-film, and I suppose it is. I've just seen so much more. Grade: B

Television

BoJack Horseman, Season 4 (2017)

Lacking a lot of the running jokes and season-long C-plots that have made the previous seasons of BoJack Horseman so cohesive, the show's fourth season is the series's most scattered yet. Some of this is a function of the fact that the show is actually trying to do something different than its previous years did, which feels like absolutely the right decision—it was, after all, at the end of its third season that Mad Men blew up its setting and closed the trajectory of its first three years, and BoJack is nothing if not indebted to Mad Men. Because whereas the first three seasons of this show seem to be all about establishing just how self-destructive one (horse) man can be, Season Four seems to have shifted gears a bit to move in, of all things, a more optimistic direction. All of BoJack's seasons have shown BoJack grow, but this is the first time that we've actually seen positive growth, and in the face of some truly harrowing bitterness in both BoJack and those around him (this season delves into his mother's life, as well, and... good lord), the disarming sweetness of the season's end is kind of beautiful. That's not to say that everyone's favorite talking animal comic tragedy isn't still, well, tragic—just that the show has delegated it more democratically among its characters. The biggest structural change here is that there are long stretches of the season not dedicated to BoJack at all, instead giving the rest of the cast episodes dedicated to their own struggles. Some of these are hilarious, such as Mr. Peanutbutter's ill-advised run for public office; others are the source of the season's still readily available heartache, the most crushing of which is reserved for Princess Carolyn, whose spotlight episode this season is one of the best the show has done. I'll admit: I do kind of miss the pristine structure and payoff of the previous seasons; this new approach to BoJack just doesn't work quite as well. But the ambition to change is admirable. Grade: B+

Rick and Morty, Season 3 (2017)

Very subtly, I can feel this show diverging from what drew me to it to begin with. It's the characterization, I think—Morty's trajectory toward cynicism and anger is well-done, but my instinct is to be very wary of what they're doing with Rick, which involves a wild vacillation between frankly lazy hands-washed "welp, he's just an inherently irredeemable prick" characterizations to explicit diagnoses of all the various insecurities that make him an irredeemable prick (there's a scene in which a psychologist monologues for like a solid minute about Rick's psyche, which... ugh). And it's all just so terrestrial—Rick can't be an analogue to normal human pathology because, as the show is very fond of reminding us, he's had completely otherworldly experiences that have fundamentally altered his point of view. It's a boring and trite way to approach this character, and I worry how much more the show will delve into it. Plus, I just can't shake the feeling that, deep down, the series wants us to identify with Rick and his nihilistic, superior view of the world. When, late in the season, he tells another character that she's not evil, just smart, it feels like a concession to the worst impulses of internet culture (many of whose residents make up the vile subsections of the show's fanbase), which refuses self-reflection on the justification that life is miserable because they're so much better than everybody else (I'm getting weird flashbacks to Jeff on Community, one of my least-favorite television characters of all time, and doggonit, Harmon, can we please not go to that well again?). I'm being extremely negative here, and that's mostly apprehension of the show's future and how much more it will indulge these habits. But on an episode by episode basis, Rick and Morty is still one of the funniest shows around, not to mention pound-for-pound one of the cleverest. Harmon and Roiland haven't lost it yet. But I'm worried about the cracks I'm seeing. Grade: B

Books

Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert (2011)

Life Itself finds Ebert in a pensive, philosophical mode; the biting wit of his most memorable reviews and Siskel repartee has softened to a kind of grandfatherly bemusement with life's various cycles. Funnily enough, the book is least engaging when he's discussing the movies, and the middle portion of the book, filled with accounts of his relationships with all manor of show business veterans, from Russ Meyer to Martin Scorsese to Werner Herzog to even John Wayne, not really tremendously interesting, maybe because we've already heard shades of this all through his decades of journalism. No, where this book shines is when Ebert takes the long view, looking back to his childhood, the beginning of his career, his parents, his beloved Steak n' Shake, his memories of his hometown Urbana, or (as in the book's moving conclusion) forward toward infinity. Ebert, writing in the wake of the series of surgeries that took away his jaw and his ability to speak, writes informed with an acute awareness of mortality, not morbidly so but with the newfound perspective of the ways that being conscious of death's future greeting imbues life with its most profound angles. "I will not be conscious of the moment of passing," Ebert writes; death is not an experience. It's merely a dimension that blurs the line between finitude and the beyond, a lens through which to view that which means everything—that is, life itself. Grade: A-

Music

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers (2017)

For an album that flirts with anarchy and chaos in its song titles (e.g. "Bosses Hang," "Anthem for No State"), Luciferian Towers contains some of the most orderly and melodic compositions of Godspeed's career. As such, it's missing a little of that transcendent power that's imbued their best work—it's, all things said, a very straightforward album with little sense of mystery or sublime. Still, there's a lot to enjoy here, particularly in the longer (15+ minutes) pieces, all of which are crescendos that get exciting and very loud. But minor Godspeed, to be sure. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for September 25 - October 1, 2017

It's that time of the month, when I scramble to watch all the various flotsam expiring on my Netflix queue. Next week: horror movies. God bless October.

Movies

Western (2015)

Did you know that building a wall along the Mexican-United-States border harms residents of both Mexico and the United States? That's a point that I suspect is meant to be the focal point of this documentary, as it depicts the destruction of a trans-border cattle trade as a wall is built. And that's a compelling focus. But honestly, it gets a little crowded out by the film's laconic and kind of mesmerizing depiction of the details of the day-to-day life in the Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras community—it's a community bursting with vivacity and idiosyncrasy. The doc is scattered and a little aimless, but it also includes footage of a cow being disemboweling that I can only describe as adorable, which is really something. Grade: B

In the Loop (2009)

The less snide, more humanist younger sibling to Burn After Reading, In the Loop is at once a hilarious send-up of the essentially meaningless, decontextualized noise of large human systems and a heartbroken cry that such important mechanisms become so nihilistic to begin with. It's very much a thinly veiled satire of the incitement of the Iraq War, and lest I sound too sanctimonious, I'll just admit that in 2003, I wasn't paying enough attention to politics to have much of an opinion on the impending war, and if you'd asked me directly about it, I'd likely have tacitly supported it because that was the message that had trickled down to me from the media. In short, I was part of the problem. But that said, the Iraq War was/is, I'm sure it's not too controversial to say, one of the most significant and horrific exhibitions of the meaningless grind of Western inertia in recent memory, and this movie makes comedic hay out of it all. But make no mistake: this is a tragedy. Unlike Burn After Reading, which at the end smirks at the audience out of the dust of its chaos and chides, "Well, what else did you expect of human beings?", In the Loop presents a raw and crushed desire for things to get better. Out of all the biting wordplay, the exquisite profanity, and the hysterical comedy of errors, the moment that cuts deepest is near the end, as the gears of war gather unstoppable momentum, when Tom Hollander's character wails, "This is the exact opposite reason I got into government." That particular sentiment expressed at that particular moment—that feeling of having become the enemy you sought to destroy—is bracing in its despair, one that is likely to be familiar to any public servant. The laughs are belly ones, but the anguish is lethal. Grade: A

Kagemusha (影武者) (1980)

Another step on my quest to find a Kurosawa movie that I think is legit great instead of just "good." No luck here, although on the positive side, I have seen another good movie—my first Kurosawa in color, no less, and the movie takes full advantage of that, with lush, deep hues in the backgrounds and bright, detailed costumes. The film looks great, and I like the story as well, a kind of rags-to-riches redemption arc for a common thief whose execution is stopped when it is realized that he looks exactly like the daimyō of the Takeda clan and can therefore serve as his body double. I just... don't feel anything here, and my admiration for the film is all very cool and distant. So mad props to Kurosawa for putting together a movie so clearly considered as this one. Sorry I couldn't be more actively engaged. Grade: B

Out 1 (1971)

Cut from the same cloth as the fiction of Thomas Pynchon (and the scraps of which David Foster Wallace would later craft into Infinite Jest), Jacques Rivette's sprawling, paranoid Out 1 is probably best described in relation to those two authors and not film, per se (although Wikipedia informs me that Balzac's fiction is a pretty big influence as well [there is, in fact, a subplot involving something of a Balzac cult, so I'll buy the influence, though I've never read any of his work]). Preoccupied, over its 12+ hours, with the ways that the byzantine and conspiratory structures of post-war society make meaningful human connections fleeting and even illusory, the film is, at times, devastating. It is also, like the aforementioned Pynchon and DFW, prone to testing audience patience as well, via both rewarding and rather confounding methods. I'll not be high-minded here: watching forty straight minutes of wordless rehearsal of avant-garde theatre isn't my idea of fun, and Rivette plays this particularly provocatively by front-loading Out 1 with the movie's most challenging material. This is offset, eventually, by the fact that Rivette and his co-writer Suzanne Schiffman also stock the film with some of the most endearing characters in the French New Wave. For all the movie's idiosyncrasies, it is, ultimately, a story about fundamentally likable human beings, vibrant with insecurities and personal missions and interior life, they are a fantastic cast that ultimately makes the weird, circuitous 12 hours of this movie enjoyable and solidify the sharp tragedy of the ending. You want to root for these people, even as you watch the world around them treat them with cold indifference. So if you can buy into the first few hours, there are riches waiting on the other side, though I'd be lying if I said that the film entirely justified some of that early going. Grade: B+

Laura (1944)

Not, I think, one of the great noirs, but a really good one nonetheless. It has the interesting feature of having its ostensibly protagonist detective be almost completely unnecessary to its plot, which heightens the usual noir feeling of a reality indifferent to human aspirations to agency to nigh despairing levels until its conclusion wraps it all up with a bit too much of a bow. The ride to that bow is a frequently wild one, particularly in its second half, which upends a central part of the film's premise. Also, the Vincent Price performance is delicious, as if you needed me to tell you that. Grade: A-

Music

The National - Sleep Well Beast (2017)

I honestly don't think I've listened to Trouble Will Find Me since I named it one of my favorite albums of 2013, and that's probably the best encapsulation of the way that I've grown indifferent to The National (and a lot of that stately, polite indie rock in general) in the years since. It's not that I dislike it or anything—I just don't feel compelled to seek it out (of course, I've also recently reviewed the new Arcade Fire album, The War on Drugs, Fleet Foxes, and others, so maybe I'm just making up this narrative—let me know if I'm full of crap here, y'all). Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying that Sleep Well Beast is a far more interesting record than I was expecting from The National. Grounded by probably their best songwriting since 2007's Boxer and their sharpest production since... well, Boxer (it's a high water mark, okay?), Sleep Well Beast is full of fascinating and surprising textures, from the screeching guitars of "Turtleneck" to the lengthy, electronic-tinged instrumental outro of "I'll Still Destroy You," there's a lot of energy here (particularly in relation to the sleepy Trouble Will Find Me) and a commendable willingness to whip songs into unexpected directions. I don't know if this will convert The National agnostics, but it's certainly enough to get backsliding National fans like myself back in the pew seats. Grade: B+