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
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
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