Movies
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
It's beginning to look like the best I'm going to be able to do with most Marvel movies these days is to identify one or two fresh element that I enjoyed among the usual low-grade frustrations of this franchise. With Ragnarok, I have not one or two but three things to like here: 1. Taika Waititi, both as writer and performer—the off-the-cuff silliness typical of his screenplays breathes life into the film and is particularly well-suited to the character of Thor (not to mention when the words are uttered with Waititi's own beautiful delivery in the form of the Waititi-voiced rock alien, Korg); 2. Jeff Goldblum, who is at his Goldblummiest and, with apologies to an enthusiastic but altogether misused Cate Blanchett, the film's best villain, pound-for-pound the funnest and funniest part of the film; 3. The production design, which is delightfully colorful and kooky, continuing in Guardians 2's footsteps in moving the aesthetic of the MCU further into that sweet, sweet Jack Kirby style (though it's a firm step down from the visual splendor of that first 2017 Marvel film). These things are so good—better than the normal heights of Marvel fare—that they rescue the movie from a deeper well of narrative dysfunction than any Marvel movie has had since maybe Iron Man 2 (though if I ever get around to rewatching Doctor Strange, that might take the cake). What we have here is essentially two completely different movies smushed together—the first one comprised of Thor's imprisonment on the garbage planet Sakaar and featuring prominently all three elements I listed above, the second one a plodding drag encasing the first, featuring the titular Ragnarok as Blanchett takes over Asgard. I think I'm virtually alone in finding the Thor series's combination of arch high fantasy and silly humor as one of the chief pleasures of the MCU, and Ragnarok's bifurcated structure puts even my affection for that formula to the test. So thank goodness the rest is such fun. Grade: B
What Happened to Monday (2017)
It would be okay that What Happened to Monday's dystopian premise was almost comically elaborate if it resulted in a future that was either plausible or thematically interesting. But instead it's just kind of dumb. And even that would be okay if its sort of absurd premise that GMOs are causing a rise in multiple-child births was a vehicle for Noomi Rapace to indulge in some Tatiana-Maslany-style multi-character performances, and I guess that's sort of the case, as Rapace plays all seven characters in a set of septuplets. But in an unfortunate combination of shallow writing and a kind of listless Rapace, it's not really that engaging to witness (especially not when compared to Orphan Black, surely the gold standard in these kind of hijinks). And even still all that would be okay if the film's unrelenting focus on sci-fi action yielded some fun spectacle. But alas, this is some Syfy-level forgettability on that front. Three strikes you're out, movie. Grade: C
Manifesto (2017)
I guess between this and The Death of Louis XIV, I'm two for two with 2017 films that began as art installations. Cate Blanchett acts as 13 different characters who all, within their abstract vignettes, recite various artistic and political manifestos, from "The Communist Manifesto" to "Dogma 95," and it's her performances, recontextualizing the high speech of these texts within the cadences of everyday speech and in doing so, de-enshrining the language to show the grit-between-your-toes-ness of the spirit of these works, that are the main draw here. I can imagine this working better within its original gallery setting, but taken as a whole feature film, Manifesto is occasionally tedious but also frequently mesmerizing. Grade: B
Amour Fou (2014)
I mean, it's basically about a couple enmeshed in the preparations of a suicide pact, but for that hook, it's a remarkably restrained, occasionally plodding movie that spends at least as much time observing characters debate liberalism vs. feudalism as it does contemplating suicide. Knowing nothing of German author Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel (the real-life murder-suicide that this movie is based on), it's not always obvious to me the connection between the political philosophy discussed and the central couple, and the filmmaking, while handsomely constructed, is a touch more staid than I'd like. But by the end, the disparate threads of the movie have balled up into something that, if not quite cohesive, is definitely fascinating. Grade: B
Martyrs (2008)
This movie has a reputation as a maximally hard-to-watch torture-fest. And it's not like that's not there (although greatly more subdued than the conversation around it indicates). However, the conversation surrounding the film sells the philosophical preoccupations a bit short, which are very much concerned with the act itself of watching others experience great pain—it's a movie in dialogue with itself, with virtually diametrically opposed halves, one steeped in the tropes of sadistic horror and the other much more concerned with the cool contemplation of horror and its capacity for tremendous meaning, quoting more or less explicitly from what's probably the film urtext of finding meaning through extreme suffering, Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. It's all perhaps just a bit too obvious with its metaphors, especially in that first half, but there's no denying that there's something fascinating about this mix of schlock and metaphysics. Grade: B+
Pulse (回路) (2001)
This movie has both a retrospectively charming depiction of turn-of-the-millennium internet technology (a character furtively consults a manual, fumbles at phone cables, and uses one of those internet startup CDs in attempting to connect to the internet) and exquisitely constructed scares (not one of them jumps). Pulse is tremendous at using the language of film (editing in particular) to turn relatively small environmental details—for example, black smudges on walls—into terrifying imagery. If the irritating, '90s-TV-esque cold open and "flashback" to the main action of the film feel a bit cheap, nothing about the rest of Pulse does. This is tremendous filmmaking. Grade: A-
Television
Lore, Season 1 (2017)
The practice of converting a podcast into a TV series is, to my knowledge, a relatively novel one, so I guess we can forgive Lore of the occasionally clumsiness with which it does so. But it is a little clumsy, the way it juxtaposes Aaron Mahnke's bemusedly stilted narration from the podcast with live-action recreation of highly varying quality. Sometimes (as in, for example, the series's second episode, "Echoes," about Dr. Walter Freeman), there's a conscious recreation of classic horror aesthetics and a knowing camp to the way it frames the story that makes the dark depths all the more unsettling; other times, it feels a little amateur ("Black Stockings," for example), both on the cinematography and acting fronts. But no matter which of these categories it falls into, the highlight of any given episode will be the animated interludes that accompany some of Mahnke's narration—macabre, gruesome, and artistically distinctive in ways that not even the best live-action segments approximate. Outside of that, the pleasures of this series are virtually identical to the podcast's, i.e. the mix of horror, humor, and historical survey that informs Mahnke's writing. In fact, if you're a fan of the podcast, you'll recognize a lot of the series—the episode subjects are taken verbatim from some of the podcast's more memorable episodes. It's an interesting experiment, one I'm glad was taken, but as any of the variety of mad scientists from the annals of Lore could tell you, interesting experiments often have messy results. Grade: B-
Books
Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore (1988)
As with a lot of the grim-'n-gritty school of comic books, The Killing Joke is a bit too impressed by its own darkness, most notoriously in the way it sadistically maims Barbara Gordon but also just in the generally pompous, gee-look-at-me way it relishes every tidbit of the Joker's warped worldview. Still, all that is sandwiched between a truly great opening and closing act—the story is never better (or free from its own tiresome "darkness, no parents" hangups) than when it focuses on solely Batman and the Joker, and the final page is justifiably legendary. This is all bolstered by Brian Bolland's excellent, detailed artwork, the perfect complement to Moore's writing and probably at least as responsible for the book's success as Moore's words. Grade: B+
Music
Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference (2017)
Though technically an EP (32 minutes in length, practically the blink of an eye compared to 2015's three-hour The Epic), Harmony of Difference has the weight of an album. A concept album no less: a series of short, bright compositions named after various abstractions like "Desire" and "Knowledge" that then lead into the 13-minute "Truth," a soaring finale that feels both musically and philosophically the culmination of the small pieces that came before. Fans of The Epic know what they'll find here: an expansive and spiritually infused mash of post-bop, samba, choral all ribboned up with Washington's cosmic saxophone. It's a major work from a major artist, EP or not. Grade: A-
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