Sunday, December 31, 2017

Mini-Reviews for December 25 - 31, 2017

Last post of 2017! Also, in case you missed them, I did my annual year-end lists this year: music and movies. I'd love to hear your feedback on those.

Until next year!

Movies


Lady Bird (2017)
Like last year's The Edge of Seventeen, Lady Bird understands the very specific ways that high schoolers can lie and pretend and be careless toward each other and their families. It's my favorite kind of coming-of-age, one that takes seriously the small joys and heartbreaks of the teen experience without letting those moments swallow the rest of the world but also recognizing the extent to which the teens absolutely let their own moments swallow everything. There are some narrative loose ends that don't really work as loose ends—most notably, a weird go-nowhere subplot involving a teacher crush. But the movie at least never loses sight of its protagonist, a luminous Saoirse Ronan as the titular Lady Bird, and it never strays too far from its central thematic axes of Lady Bird's self-actualization and her recognition that the hardest part of self-actualization is the appreciation of your upbringing at the very moment you're distancing yourself from it. It's a lovely tribute to family and place and friendship (Lady Bird's friend Julie [Beanie Feldstein] is every bit the non-Lady-Bird heart of the film), measured with equal parts poignancy and knowing humor. Basically, it's very good. Grade: A-


Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Okay, the acting is excellent, and the dialogue has some very nice zingers. But what on earth does this movie mean? It's certainly not about violence toward women; it seems like that's where it's going—Frances McDormand, a survivor of domestic abuse, is upset that the police have not solved her daughter's rape/murder—but Sheriff Willoughby says the case has no leads, and we're never given any reason to doubt him, so that's sort of a dead-end, thematically. It doesn't seem to be about racism. Though plenty of time is spent describing the police force's racist behavior (and I guess here's as good a place as any to say that I think the film's use of the N-word [and for that matter, the word "retard"] is irresponsible and flippant—giving the UK-born writer/director Martin McDonagh the benefit of the doubt, I suppose we could chalk this up to his being ignorant of the full American connotations of those words, but that doesn't change the shocking way the movie refuses to even comment on the use of these epithets beyond an assumed irony that I don't think we can safely assume in an audience), so little of the plot has anything to do with race and so few of the cast members are black that I can't imagine how McDonagh could have been trying to say anything about racism in modern policing. More likely foci are the moral and philosophical questions that the movie poses—ones of redemption, rage, retribution, and, most interesting to me, whether individual members of a group should be held culpable for the actions of every member of that group. But frustratingly, the movie intentionally cuts to credits right before the characters' actions can give any of those questions any concrete meaning, and while ambiguity is all fine and good, this is not a movie that necessitates ambiguity, especially when it throws down those gigantic questions like whole bucketful of gauntlets. Besides, I already experience plenty of ambiguity about those questions in real life—I didn't need to watch two hours of really elaborate profanity and mediocre cinematography to just be reaffirmed of that. It's a cop out. This whole movie is a cop out, and it's lucky that it's funny enough to not make me actively hate it. Grade: C


Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)
I mean, you know what you're signing up for with this movie, and just in case the title didn't clue you in, let me stress: there is a character whose name is Professor Poopypants; he rides in a giant toilet; the word "poopageddon" is uttered in sincerity by one character. But allowing that a movie can behave in this way (a dubious assumption for some, I know), this is actually rather delightful. As a longtime fan of the Dav Pilkey novels, I can say that this is an admirable shuffle of the first four books, complete with a Flip-O-Rama! sequence; beyond that, the animation is actually kind of great. Dreamworks has been trying to do this for a while, but I'd say that it's this year, with The Boss Baby and this film, that they've finally succeeded in making CG animation look like an honest-to-goodness cartoon and not some failed attempt at realism. Oh, there's also a sequence animated in sock puppets. The movie's not required viewing or anything, but it's not far from it. Grade: B+


Cemetery of Splendor (Rak Ti Khon Kaen) (2015)
I don't understand this movie. The extent to which this is a consequence of how little I know about Thai political history—upon which this movie is commenting in ways I am very poorly equipped to parse—or an intentional effect by the film itself is unclear to me, though it's definitely some mix of the two. Nevertheless, it's a hypnotic feature that, when it isn't a little boring (and honestly, it is kinda, at least in stretches), is utterly arresting in its dreamy, tactile approach to its narrative—something about soldiers falling asleep and spirits waking up, but that's not all that important; this movie's alchemy of sound and image made me feel a great sense of mystery and awe, and that's valuable. Grade: B+



I'm Still Here (2010)
I think it's pretty well-established now that I'm Still Here is mockumentary and not documentary. On the one hand, this is a relief—I remember watching Joaquin Phoenix's talk show appearances depicted here and being very sad and confused. On the other hand, knowing that this is all staged sucks the life right out of this movie. One of the things that was so weird and live-wire about Phoenix's behavior during the period depicted here was the insecurity about whether to laugh or cry. The lush ambiguity of this performance is gone when you realize that it was all a gag of sorts. The movie works in small doses, particularly near the end, as a parody of the lurid, washed-up-celeb docudramas that lurk in the corners of basic cable. But as a whole, its shtick quickly wears thin. Grade: C


The Queen (2006)
The central conflict of this movie—essentially the tension between the necessity of the traditional British monarchy as a political symbol and the pragmatic realities of modern Western representational democracy—is something I can't relate to; every time some character suggested that it was maybe time for (shock! horror!) the monarchy to be dissolved, I found myself nodding in agreement. However, I'm not from the UK, and this tension is clearly a deeply British one, so it's not really my tension to critique. And besides, the movie is still able to take those themes to effective places; the cinematography is nice (though not jaw-dropping), the acting is good, and the screenplay is pretty smart in how it handles the conflict between the Queen and new Prime Minister Tony Blair in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death. Grade: B


Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny (2006)
As with most Jack-Black-involved projects, there's an admirable level of enthusiasm here. But the core material just isn't there. A few setpieces are fun—the dream sequence of the duo's rock success is a highlight—but overall, this is just under-baked (ha). Also, I was under the mistaken impression that this movie contained "Tribute." It doesn't—talk about a disappointment. Grade: C







Dressed to Kill (1941)
Is screwball noir a thing? I don't think so, and I'm willing to blame this movie—an unfunny and dull combination of screwball comedy and noir mystery, Dressed to Kill is enough to have discourage anyone else from attempting the format. The only thing that really lands is the final scene, and that's more for how mean-spirited it is than for actually being funny. Grade: C








Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
The first third of this movie is straight-up myth-making silliness of the sort you might find in one of those children's picture books from the 1950s. Then the movie abruptly left-turns into a court drama (because Lincoln was a lawyer, y'see) before returning to the myth stuff in the final couple minutes. None of this is great Abraham Lincoln biography, I'm sure, but the lawyer section is pretty great. Grade: B






Television


Atlanta, Season 1 (2016)
It's possible this show is too patient, especially in the early-going, when it maybe assumes a bit too strongly that its quiet, slow depiction of Earn's life unadorned is fascinating. Earn (Donald Glover) is the least-interesting character here—though he's able to give a fantastic deadpan look of mixed fear and incredulity, and two of the season's best episodes, "Streets on Lock" and "Juneteenth," rely heavily on this look—so it's a breath of fresh air when the back half of the season begins to stray from relying on his POV alone and instead embraces the other characters are worthy storytelling vessels. Even better, the show develops a low-key surrealism as it progresses, and many of the funniest moments in this decidedly genre-fluid series (it's a half hour, but it's not always a comedy) come from this understated strangeness, e.g. Justin Bieber being played by a black actor without comment. My instinct is that this show is a tad overrated, but oh well. I still enjoyed it. Grade: B+

Books


The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus) by Isabel Allende (1982)
The most incredible thing about Allende's incredible debut (!!??!!) novel is the way it so effortlessly conflates the personal with the historical. The House of the Spirits is basically two stories—the lives of four generations of women in the aristocratic Trueba family and the political development of Chile over the course of the 20th century—but under Allende's confident plotting and beautifully efficient prose, these two threads become one. There's never the feeling that we've spent too long with the historical sweep of the country and we should return to the Truebas or that we've focused too narrowly on the Truebas and need to zoom out to the broader political context, because the novel is brilliantly meticulous in making those two one and the same. It's intimate and epic and exciting and gently funny until it turns bracingly tragic until it's sweetly nostalgic, and I loved it from cover to cover. Grade: A


A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
For a little while, it seems like A Raisin in the Sun isn't going much of anywhere, instead just willing to show symbolically freighted but dramatically low-impact slice-of-life events for the duration of its multiple acts. And that would have been fine—plenty of successful drama works in this way. However (and those of you who've read/seen the play know what I'm talking about), all of the sudden everything happens, and in that instant, the play doesn't just become symbolically weighted but also dramatically profound and, in gaining this dramatic heft, symbolically profound, too. This is the 20th-century black experience in microcosm, and it's powerful. I'm not blowing your minds—I'm probably the last person on earth to experience this required-reading staple for the first time, but... *shrug*. It's still great. Grade: A

Music


U2 - Songs of Experience (2017)
Let's not kid ourselves here (*cough*Rolling Stone*cough*): this is U2's worst album since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and while there's nothing here quite as bad as the worst bits on that album, we're not dealing with much of a margin above it. On Songs of Experience, U2 is determinedly non-experimental (it's looking more and more like No Line on the Horizon was our last chance to see a truly new-sounding U2 record, and they kind of mucked that up), and while that's not inherently a problem (Songs of Innocence, which I like a whole lot, is similarly stylistically staid), it's not doing the album any favors when most of the songwriting is this mediocre. It's not all bad; the two opening tracks ("Love Is All We Have Left" and "Lights of Home") are actually very good, and "13 (There Is a Light)" recontextualizes one of the weaker tracks on Songs of Innocence ("Song for Someone") and turns it into a pretty strong closer. But the ten tracks in between those are full of run-of-the-mill pop/rock and more lyrical Bono-isms than anyone should have to endure. Grade: C+

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Favorite Movies of 2017

Well, here we are again—another one of these lists. I'm not going to do one of those long preambles. As usual, this post is divided between my favorite movies (emphasis on "favorite," not "best," whatever that means) and other movies I thought were notable, either for good or ill. Also as usually, I admit that I (obviously) haven't seen every 2017 movie, and I resent that the elitist and outdated distribution schedules have kept some of my most-anticipated movies away from Knoxville (more importantly, The Post and Phantom Thread).

I hope y'all enjoy it. Please, disagree with me; share your own picks; discuss. I've said it before—I love discussing this list stuff.

Favorite Movies

1. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
It's all about death, when you get right down to it: our lives, our actions, our thoughts—whether or not we're conscious of it, they're all defined by that firm bookend. Warm and easy-going, The B-Side resembles that other Errol Morris masterpiece, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, by allowing a mix of editing and unfettered obsession over a craft (here, Polaroid portraitry) to accumulate into a towering treatise. I haven't seen a ton of people love this movie as much as I did, but more so than anything else I saw this year, The B-Side is profound.

[Read original review here]



2. Good Time
A damning character portrait disguised as a feature-length chase sequence, Good Time is fun until it's devastating. It's the sort of movie where you'll spend most of the runtime with your hand over your agape mouth, your eyes dazzled by the gorgeous nocturnal cinematography, your ears ringing from the assaultive score. If you haven't already seen it, the most viscerally exciting movie of the year is well-worth your time.

[Read original review here]





3. The Shape of Water
In the running for Guillermo del Toro's best English-language film, The Shape of Water is by turns swooningly romantic and gory, baroque and grimy, nostalgic and mythic; it's a blender of all of del Toro's best preoccupations, from classic Hollywood to B-movie trash, and it's great. You'll believe a fish-man can dance.

[Read original review here]






4. A Ghost Story
David Lowrey's hypnotic, unpredictable art film about grief is something of a feature-length remake of the "I got a rock" refrain from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, right down to the sheet ghost. The magic of this movie is that it's also heartbreaking, and not in that gentle Charlie-Brown-style way—it's legitimately staring-into-the-void-style sublimity.

[Read original review here]






5. mother!
If Darren Aronofsky wanted to just make provocative, stylistically adventurous Bible movies for the rest of his career, that would be a-okay with me. Whatever you think of the theology here, the sheer daring of this movie's scope is in a league of its own.

[Read original review here]







6. The Beguiled
Sweatiest movie of the year, bar none. This is supposedly set in Virginia, but this is definitely Louisiana, and rarely has humidity been so palpably captured on film. It's Sofia Coppola's best in quite some time, and it's no accident that it's also a tight, mean little thriller, Coppola's usually dreamy atmospherics morphing into something as sinister and phantasmagoric as it is beautiful.

[Read original review here]





7. A Quiet Passion
An exquisite tribute to Emily Dickinson couched in Terence Davies's usual visual splendor—a particularly good match of subject with director, as Davies's understated formalism complements Dickinson's own poetic style wonderfully.

[Read original review here]







8. Logan
The only superhero movie in this superhero-stuffed year I'd call "great," and while we've had plenty of movies with politics on their minds, this, with its apocalyptic squalor, is one of the few that really captures my fears of where we seem to be heading.

[Read original review here]







9. A Cure for Wellness
Something something good taste something bad script something something. I don't care. This movie looks awesome, and it's the best gothic horror we've gotten at the movies since Crimson Peak. Plus, there's no topping the compositions and lighting of the visuals here.

[Read original review here]






10. Your Name
It has all the gorgeous detail of previous Makoto Shinkai features and, a first for me with his work, a story I really bought into. The final half hour or so of the film is some of the most cosmic, beautiful film imagery, animated or not, of the year.

[Read original review here]






Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Best Zeitgeist-Defining Movie: Get Out—This is the 2017 movie, and I don't see many good arguments to the contrary. It's far from my favorite, but Get Out is still really freaking good, hilarious and frightening in equal measure, bolstered by a diverse cinematic tradition alluded to heavily in Jordan Peele's dense and frequently brilliant screenplay. But this is more than a spot-the-allusion film; it's a film that uses movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to genuinely subversive ends, playing off our familiarity with the beats and images of these movies to shock us. Also, it's about race; more specifically, it's about predatory white people. Let's not pretend like that isn't the most 2017 plot in all of cinema.

Best Drama: The Salesman—And I mean "drama" in the sense that it resembles a play. Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman isn't play-like in the derogatory way that movie critics usually mean when they compare the two media; rather, I'd just like to call attention to and celebrate that way that, like always, Farhadi brings a tense efficiency to the screenplay that recalls the immediacy of the stage. Farhadi's movies are as tight as drums, and while there are some elements in The Salesman that makes it less tight than, say, The Past, it still makes a mighty sound when struck.

Best Coming of Age: Lady Bird—I haven't had a chance to formally review this one yet (it's likely the final 2017 movie I'm going to see in a theater), but I love me some coming-of-age cinema, and this one is very good. Willing to be honest about the specific ways in which high school students can be various shades of pretentious and careless in a way that recalls last year's masterful The Edge of Seventeen, it's a tremendously well-observed film that, for all its plot shagginess (and there is that, sometimes to its detriment), is so sharp and specific in its characterization of Lady Bird herself that she practically jumps off the screen to shake your hand.

Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049—I get the thematic and narrative critiques of this movie, but I won't hear anyone dissing Roger Deakins's astounding, beautiful, lay-me-down-to-rest-because-I-have-seen-the-face-of-God visual work. Some kudos probably goes to the production design, too, without which this probably wouldn't have been so stunning. But come on; it's also Deakins we're talking about here.

Best Cry: Coco—Pixar, y'all. "Remember meeeee..."

Best Action: John Wick: Chapter 2—It's like dudes in suits shooting each other in art galleries in highly choreographed ways. What's not to like about that?

Best "Not Quite the Best Action, but Hey Look! Tarkovsky!": Atomic Blonde—Don't get me wrong: the action in Atomic Blonde is very good. It just isn't John Wick: Chapter 2 good. Still, there's a fight scene in front of a projection of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, so major points to this movie for making a cheap retro allusion that I am physically unable to resist. Take that, Ready Player One.

Best Action (Ape Division): War for the Planet of the Apes—Apes on horses! Apes with guns! Apes breaking out of concentration camps! Apes doing all sorts of things! All our movies should have more apes. (But all kidding aside, this really is a good movie)

Best Animation: The Boss Baby—Am I losing my mind? Pixar has the photorealism, Cartoon Saloon has the serious stylization, Illumination Entertainment has all the really crappy-looking stuff, but it's DreamWorks Animation—frikkin' DREAMWORKS—that's actually doing the animation I like best on an aesthetic level these days. This studio has finally done what I'd considered impossible and made CG animation as flexible and convincingly cartoonish as hand-drawn stuff, and for that, they have my sincere gratitude.

Animated Movie I'm Most Thankful For: The Breadwinner—This movie is flawed in significant ways, but, along with the DreamWorks output this year (?!?), it most pushes English-language animation in directions I wish the whole medium would all go: serious-minded, audience-trusting, culturally diverse, stylistically (not realistically) animated.

Best Opening Sequence: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—The first five minutes of this movie, set perfectly to David Bowie's "Space Oddity," are the best five minutes (opening or not) of any movie this year. It's a warm throwback to the optimism of sci-fi's 1940s/50s golden era, only flipped to show interplanetary contact to be an intrinsic element of this future utopia, not its greatest threat. Any other year, it wouldn't be a particularly political statement, but with every inter-species handshake, it's impossible not to feel that cooperative multiculturalism is a necessary piece of humanity's future, and also to feel the chasm between that ideal and our contemporary political discourse.

Best Opening Sequence (Non-David-Bowie Division): Baby Driver—Edgar Wright's crime caper never really delivers on the promise of this scene as an action movie intricately choreographed to pop music, but for its opening scene (and honestly, the decidedly more pedestrian second scene), Baby Driver is the perfect realization of this premise. It's wonderful.

Best Use of "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Logan Lucky—This movie's a lot of fun all around, but it's only a great movie in one moment, and that's at a children's beauty pageant, of all reprehensible things. People sing this song; it's moving.

Best Use of the Word "Poop": Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie—There's a lot of poop-centric stuff in this movie. It's great.

Worst Use of a True Story: Same Kind of Different as Me—Pure Flix strikes again! This time, they've skimmed over all the legitimately interesting stuff about the kind of amazing true story that informs the plot and instead left us with the most boring, cookie-cutter inspirational trash ever. Hurray!

Most Misunderstood: The Glass Castle—Critics saw a toothless weepy in a tremendously difficult, thorny film about what it means to feel love for a genuinely abusive person. This is not a movie of easily-arrived-at adages; it's a film that languishes on messy, complicated, intentionally problematic questions and doesn't suggest anything cheap about its film-ending catharsis.

Best Quote: The Big Sick—"This is why I don't want to go online, 'cause it's never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump." Terry (a great Ray Romano) gets it.

Best Use of Social Media: Personal Shopper—Briefly, the quiet psychological thrills of Personal Shopper get cranked up to sheer horror-movie levels, and it's all thanks to a clever playing off of what we know about texting and social media engagement.

Best Use of Outer Space: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—There's a lot about these Marvel movies that's getting stale, but I'll give them this: as long as they are making colorful, goofy, imaginatively designed space-opera visuals (see also: Thor: Ragnarok), I'll probably still watch them.

Best Shower: Alien: Covenant—You'll know it when you see it.

Best Kiss: Alien: Covenant—Again, you'll know it when you see it.

Best "Well, We're Going to Be Making These Movies Until Human Extinction, So We Might As Well Make It Interesting": Star Wars: The Last Jedi—This actually probably belongs again to Alien: Covenant again, but I'm not confident that they'll be making Alien movies for that much longer. Star Wars, though... Star Wars is forever. The Last Jedi is likely the most experimental that we're going to see Star Wars get for a while (though judging by some of the fan outrage, they need to get a lot more so—just rip that band-aide off, Kennedy), and even this isn't too dramatic of a departure (I can't be the only one who wanted Rey to join Kylo like he asked). However, it's by far the most interesting engagement with the series mythology since the prequels, and this is the first time since Lucas was at the helm that the Star Wars universe felt like a living, breathing place full of species and planets we haven't seen before. It's enjoyable.

"Good Try, I Guess" Award: Song to Song—Does Terrence Malick actually know what rock music is, or did he just read the Wikipedia page? QUESTIONS TO PONDER.

Worst Application of Corporate Synergy: Beauty and the Beast—We did not need this movie, and we certainly didn't need it to be as bad as it was. Disney's been pretty good at making questionable (and nakedly money-grubbing) decisions at least blandly enjoyable this decade, but NOPE. Not this one.

Best Slow, Monarchical Death: The Death of Louis XIV—The title says it all, and let me repeat: it is sloooooow. But it's also beautifully costumed, and there's something about the languorous, meticulous way that we watch the Sun King pass from this life that feels so profoundly conscious of the realities of death in a way that reminds me of Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.

Best Non-2017 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2017: Ordet—A dialogue between realist modernity and old-time supernatural religiosity that feels like a genuine expression of both worldviews and, more impressively, a genuine fusion of both. It's a majestic film, one of the best-ever about faith, right up there with Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Bergman's Winter Light though considerably more optimistic than either of those, and without a doubt the most fully I've been moved by a motion picture this year.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Favorite Music of 2017

As always, I feel like I need to emphasize that it's impossible to listen to everything, and it's even more impossible to give everything the time needed to truly appreciate it all. I'm also really bad at listening to metal and hip hop. So please let me know what I missed! Chances are I didn't even hear it.

Anyway, here's my list. As I did last year, I put links to the original reviews of the albums, if I'd reviewed them. And as always, feel free to share your own favorite music of the year. I love all this nerdy, list-trading stuff at the year's end.

Favorite Albums:

1. Björk: Utopia
Some years, the #1 spot is a no-brainer; others, it's hard to pick out one record above the rest. This year is the latter; any of these first four albums could have been my #1. But I'm giving it to Björk anyway because she freakin' deserves it. A companion of sorts to 2015's Vulnicura, Utopia takes everything that was compelling about that album and flips it—sweeping strings in place of broody electronica, ecstatically optimistic emotional landscapes instead of heart-rending pain. That's not to say this album is all sunshine, but it's so very full of life in a way that's world-shaking and contagious. Björk has called it her "Tinder" album... is this what Tinder is like?


2. Neil Cicierega: Mouth Moods
I'm still amazed at just how funny this album is, how seamlessly produced it is, how endlessly inventive with seemingly played-out pieces of pop music flotsam it is. It's a masterpiece, a call for all other works of mash-up artistry to stop because there's nowhere left to go from here.

[Read original review]





3. Harriet Tubman: Araminta
I've left way too much jazz rotting on the vine of my "I should listen to this more closely" list, but of the works I had time to spend with, Araminta is the far-and-away winner. It's tense and uncompromising in the spirit of the best jazz fusion, but it's also smooth enough to not get lost in the technical weeds.

[Read original review]





4. Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up
We had a lot of late 2000s indie rockers come back with albums this year, and most of them were pretty good. But only a few of them (I'd say this and the LCD Soundsystem album) actually feel like genuine evolutions of the band's output, and of those, only Fleet Foxes had the stones to make a freaky, elliptical, proggy puzzle of an album, and if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about proggy puzzle albums.

[Read original review here]



5. SZA: CTRL
"Love Galore" is the most well-deserved Top 40 hit of the year, and the rest of the album is at least as good. I liked the Solange record from last year a lot, but I think I'm feeling about this album what everyone else said they felt about that album.

[Read original review here]






6. Kendrick Lamar: DAMN.
Kendrick's fourth album is his darkest by a considerable stretch. For Kendrick, the world of 2017 is arbitrary and its God capricious, and most troubling of all is Lamar's sneaking suspicion that he might deserve it all. It's a profound and uneasy exploration of depression, and it's one that, even if I've never quite been able to embrace, I've never been able to shake either.

[Read original review here]





7. Spoon: Hot Thoughts
I mean, it's a Spoon album. Y'all know what this is.

[Read original review here]










8. Foxygen: Hang
Foxygen go glam and give us the great Queen album we never knew we needed in 2017.

[Read original review here]









9. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Polygondwanaland
King Gizzard released a lot of music in 2017. But only one of their many albums has "Crumbling Castle," the 10-minute psych rock opus that kicks off this album.

[Read original review here]








10. White Stag: Emergence
Local Knox-prog pride. The most ambitious and successful band in Knoxville's prog rock scene makes their most ambitious and successful album yet.

[Read original review here]







Great 2017 Songs Not On These Albums:

Arcade Fire: "Everything Now"—People made fun of the ABBA synths on this song, but Arcade Fire has always been a little cornball. Besides, the track's mix of cornball and earnest despair is one of the few places on the uneven Everything Now album that hits the exact tone the band is going for.

J Balvin & Willy William: "Mi Gente (feat. Beyoncé)"—I mean, "Despacito" is okay, but I've never been a huge Daddy Yankee fan, and I hope we can all agree that as long as we need English-language pop stars to ensure the crossover of Spanish-language songs, Beyoncé is a much better ambassador than the Biebs. Besides, this song owns; "Despacito" does not.

David Bowie: "When I Met You"—Unless there's some hidden trove somewhere, this is the last music we'll ever hear from David Bowie. He's not talking to us here, but it's hard not to feel like lines like "You have just everything/But nothing at all" are meant to usher us into a Bowie-less world. To paraphrase my wife's favorite movie, I am so uninterested in a world without Bowie. But it's the world we have now, and at least we have this song—everything and nothing at all.

Brockhampton: "Gummy"—It sounds like an M.I.A. song covered by West Coast rappers, and I dig it.

Cardi B: "Bodak Yellow"—I love a good rags-to-riches-self-love debut, and here we are with the catchiest one in years.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Cut to the Feeling"—Have we all agreed that CRJ is the pop queen of the 2010s? Because when the best pop song of the year comes from a tossed-off tie-in to a crappy animated movie, kept off the best pop album of the 2010s because it wasn't good enough, I think we need to start edging Taylor Swift off the stage to make room for Carly.

Coldplay: "All I Can Think About Is You"—It sounds like old Coldplay, and I love old Coldplay, so sue me.

Brian Eno & Kevin Shields: "Only Once Away My Son"—A collaboration between Eno and the My Bloody Valentine guy is obviously great on paper, but it's still remarkable to hear just how great it is in the flesh. A magnificent drone that soothes and shakes in equal measure.

Father John Misty: "Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution"—Considering we haven't had a major, society-upheaving revolution in the Western world (yet), it may be a tad premature for ol' J. Tillman to be having anxiety about the post-revolution world. Still, there's something affecting about the way his character recognizes our current system's inherent problems while still feeling a sort of melancholy about what might be lost if we overthrew it all.

HAIM: "I Want You Back"—This was knocking about with "Cut to the Feeling" as my Song of the Summer. The platonic ideal of that HAIM appropriation of '90s pop kitsch with millennial sensibilities.

Jay-Z: "The Story of O.J."—Possibly Jay-Z's best song, and definitely Jay-Z's best music video. Also: "You wanna know what's more important than throwing away money at a strip club? ... ... ... Credit."

LCD Soundsystem: "Other Voices"—I praised LCD up in the Crack-Up blurb for actually evolving their sound, and good on Murphy for that. But I guess my favorite American Dream track is the one that sounds most like their old stuff. Am I losing my edge? I'm probably losing my edge, right?

Lorde: "Green Light"—I like contemplative, moody Lorde as much as the rest of y'all, but come on, this song rocks. Lorde cuts loose and gives us the yearning pop song we'll never deserve.

The National: "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness"—I might be too far out of my indie rock 4 lyfe phase to deeply care about a The National album again, but this song has some very cool guitar work and even a guitar solo. It's really great and not at all weepy. I like weepy, but this is what I'm talking about.

Margo Price: "All American Made"—Price's sophomore record doesn't have anything as great as show-stoppingly great as "Hands of Time," but it does have "All American Made," a melancholy piece of social commentary that feels like it stepped of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. She says she wrote it during the Obama presidency, and a few of the lines bear that out (surely we don't need to wonder if Trump "sleeps at night"), but this piece is oh-so 2017.

St. Vincent: "Los Ageless"—Out of an album full of St. Vincent trying to be more melodically immediate, this song is the most melodically immediate, and with an absolutely killer chorus, too.

Sufjan Stevens: "Wallowa Lake Monster"—There's a persistent theme in my music-listening habits this year where I kept listening to isolated Sufjan Stevens songs and thinking, "Boy, that's really good; I should listen to one of his albums." I still haven't listened to one of his albums all the way through, but this song, a previously unreleased track from his Carrie & Lowell sessions, is really good.

Taylor Swift: "New Year's Day"—The old Taylor may be dead, but this is a convincing imitation of her. There are more forward-thinking songs on reputation, and if I'd spent more time with the album, I might have chosen one of them. Still, "Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere" is one of those perfectly realized lines that Swift shrugs off so effortlessly that it's easy to miss that she's one of the most talented pop writers of her generation.

The War on Drugs: "Strangest Thing"—Some of The War on Drugs's "lookatme, I'm '80s heartland rock!" thing wears thin at times, but on the other hand, there's "Strangest Thing," pretty much the best-case scenario for this aesthetic, a monster midtempo composition that starts big with its synths and guitars and just keeps getting bigger for its nearly 7 minutes.

Kamasi Washington: "Truth"—It's a 13-minute jazz composition that's both standalone and the culmination of a bunch of musical themes from Washington's Harmony of Difference EP. Beautiful and bright and lively, it's the sort of song that lives up to jazz's ideal as the most socially constructive American genre.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Mini-Reviews for December 18 - 24, 2017

Happy Christmas Eve to everyone who celebrates! Otherwise, happy Sunday of otherwise no importance!

Movies

The Shape of Water (2017)
God bless Guillermo del Toro and his weird, magical visions. This may not have been true a few decades ago when we had a more robust B-movie market, but right now, in our age of smarmily self-aware blockbuster posturing, del Toro's willingness to embrace even silly ideas with a clear-eyed sincerity that neither goes out of its way to make those ideas "respectable" nor pulls a muscle audience-winking over the silliness is peerless. Del Toro's yet to make a movie that wasn't flawed in some conspicuous way, and The Shape of Water isn't any different. There are character beats left hanging and lines of dialogue that feel just a tad too straightforwardly thematic, and it honestly feels like we're missing a scene or two near the beginning, given the pacing. But I don't care. The opening 10 minutes are a symphony of editing, image, and score, and even if it takes the movie until its late-breaking dream sequence in which Sally Hawkins dances, Astaire-and-Rogers-style, with her fish-man lover, for the movie to hit that level of classicist mojo again, the intervening 90 minutes are only a tad less wonderful in their fairy-tale rendering of the 1960s US military industrial complex as a backdrop for a genuinely heartfelt interspecies romance that involves both underwater sex and beheaded cats. If any of the previous sentence doesn't strike your fancy, I will have to ask you politely but firmly to leave, saddened by the fact that you're missing out on what is possibly del Toro's best English-language film, give or take Crimson Peak. Regardless of that, it's definitely one of the year's best, of any language. Grade: A

Atomic Blonde (2017)
There's a fight scene in front of a projection of an Andrei Tarkovsky movie, not one but two Bowie needle drops on the soundtrack, neon-lit fight scenes, Charlize Theron in a trench coat—I know when I'm being pandered to, and congratulations, Atomic Blonde, you win. I'm honestly not sure whether this or John Wick: Chapter 2 is the best action movie of 2017, but by golly, this one is certainly courting my affections more effectively. Grade: A-






Whose Streets? (2017)
Collected from what seems like hundreds of iPhones and cameras, Whose Streets? is a montage of footage of the 2014 Ferguson protests and aftermath. Most of these clips are presented without context, and whatever we're going to call "proper" documentary methodology, this movie probably breaks it. But in doing so, the movie also arrives at what I'd imagine Werner Herzog would call the "ecstatic truth" of the events in Ferguson. The events captured here are some of the most significant moments in recent American history, and the documentary evokes with a sort of startling effectiveness the subjective experience of the African-American participants in those events. I'm also pretty sure I teared up when Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" played over the credits. I suppose you could out-think this movie, but that's entirely beside the point. Grade: B+

Nocturama (2016)
In a lot of respects, this plays like a French remake of the Kelly Reichardt Night Moves, only with a banging soundtrack and a tremendously bleak ending—this in the sense that it's a patient and often very quiet depiction of violent radicalism (i.e. terrorism, in case you were wondering). I'd say this movie has a much greater sense of the visceral moral tension at the root of violent activism, but it's Night Moves that has the interesting character work, and in a movie as dependent on quiet character moments as Nocturama, that makes all the difference. There's a lot of cool posturing by these people, but precious little in the way of anything resembling interesting psychology. Grade: B-


Sleepwalk with Me (2012)
Every once in a while, I go back and watch one of those quirky little dramedies that dominated American independent film for the decade following the release of The Royal Tenenbaums. Why do I do this to myself? Maybe it's some irrepressible nostalgia in myself that keeps wanting to replicate the cinematic experiences I had in my late teens, even though I've apparently exhausted the well of good movies in this subgenre. Anyway, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Sleepwalk with Me (a film made on the tale-end of this era) isn't good; it's solipsistic and unfunny and has a casual disregard for its female characters and has a metric ton of ukuleles in the score. You know, the usual. It's also about an aspiring standup comic, so we've got a bit of a Ghosts of Christmas Past and Future thing going on here, as far as representing tiresome trends in American independent film goes. Grade: C-

Thursday, December 21, 2017

On Christmas Movies


There are only two Christmas movies I like.

Well, that's not exactly true. I like Elf and A Christmas Story, some of the Rankin/Bass stuff, etc. But I enjoy those movies the same way I enjoy other movies, regardless of holiday affiliation. What I mean is that there are only two movies I like because they are about Christmas. A lot of movies that brand themselves as "Christmas movies" do so by treating the Christmas holiday as some intangible abstraction that's an entity unto itself—for example, Santa Clause cancelling Christmas in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV movie or the way that "Christmas Spirit" saves the day in Elf. It's fine if people find joy in that, but I don't. When I grasp at it, it becomes a hollow and vague mythology I don't quite understand. People don't seem to like this about me, and I get it; it's no fun when someone's unenthusiastic about your traditions.

Still, the two I'm thinking of are the only ones I've found (with the possible exception of my recent realization that Catch Me If You Can is maybe a stealth Christmas movie) that render the experience I know as Christmas with any sort of fidelity, enough so that they move me to tears every single stupid year. I'm not going to be blowing anyone's mind here: those two movies are 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1946's It's a Wonderful Life.

In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey has dreams. He wants a big suitcase. He wants to see the world. Time after time, he's offered the opportunity to realize those dreams, and time and time again, he chooses to stay home. This comes to a head one Christmas Eve when George—thousands of dollars in debt, still trapped in his falling-to-pieces home in his same small town full of provincial people and dead-end careers—surveys his life in despair and decides to end it.

We of course know how this turns out. But I think it's worth lingering on that moment of despair, because the movie itself does. People remember the movie's uplifting ending, but we sometimes forget this for the first 3/4 of the film, this is the story of an individual's dreams being systematically crushed by his own allegiance to the people he knows. It's a feature-length inquiry into the cost of ambition, and that cost is the human relationships you have in the present; it's also a feature-length inquiry into what it means to decide that cost is too high.

A gentler variation of the same happens in A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which Charlie Brown spends most of the film's 25 minutes reconciling himself to the fact that celebrating Christmas the way others tell him to makes him miserable and the holiday meaningless. He invests in playing out the conventions of the holiday season—decorations and trees and pageants and presents—in much the same way that George Bailey walks through the beats of a small-town domestic life, and both end up finding this path crushingly unsatisfying. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, this is perhaps best exemplified when he takes that twig of a tree, determined to do right by it, only to find it wilted by the weight of the single ornament he hangs. "I've killed it," he cries, followed by the most anguished sigh children's animation has ever produced. "Everything I touch gets ruined." He defers to what people ask of him, and he's given back a cold, quiet despair. "I know I should be happy, but I'm not," Charlie Brown tells Lucy near the movie's beginning; he knows he should be happy because that's the expectation when you are surrounded by friends at a holiday.


But that is life with people: an existence at times overwhelmingly defined by alienation, frustration, and despair. I know this sounds like stylish broodiness, but I mean it in the most sincere way I can muster. There's a shot in It's a Wonderful Life several minutes before George decides to kill himself when, as Mary explains to her husband all the holiday festivities the family has lined up, George grabs his son and hugs him, staring over the boy's shoulder into empty space, and James Stewart's face as he begins to sob shatters me every time; the in-the-moment explanation for his distress is that his uncle and business partner has just lost $8,000, but it's clear that it's not just this financial woe that's passing in front of his eyes—he's thinking of the honeymoon money, college, New York City, and every other time he passed up on what one character calls "the chance of a lifetime," every choice that's brought him to this exact moment, and he's crippled by the thought that he's made a mistake. That the choices he made that brought him his friends and the loving family around him, engaging in fun, kitschy Christmas traditions, have rendered his life meaningless. Unless you've had one of these moments yourself, I don't know that it's possible to know just how real that look is that flashes across James Stewart's face.

Neither of these movies end here, obviously.

The most common interpretation I've heard of when the angel swoops in and shows George what his life would be like if he'd never been born is that it's a celebration of altruism—i.e. affirming that George Bailey has been a good person and that his life has meaning. And the text of the movie bears this out. George is a saint, and the positive effects of his having lived his life the way he did are gigantic. But I don't think it's George seeing the sudden worsening of the quality of life of his family and friends without him that makes George choose life. What truly strikes terror into George's heart in the Pottersville sequence is the fact that nobody knows who he is. His wife screams as he tries to embrace her; his mother sneers "George who?" when he arrives at her door; "This is George Bailey! Don't you know me?" he asks his former employer, Mr. Gower, to which the doddering man confusedly replies, "No." The horror of Pottersville isn't that Bedford Falls has suddenly gotten a bunch of nightclubs and cool movie theaters; it's that George is given a glimpse of what life would be like without any of the human contact that has kept him from realizing his ambitions—in other words, to be alone. And it's Hell.

Likewise, a lot of people latch onto Linus's sermonette detailing the Christmas story as told in the Gospel of Luke as the sort of culminating message of A Charlie Brown Christmas. And that's definitely part of it. The religious significance of the holiday in contrast to the commercial ends to which modern life has twisted it is clearly central to Charles Schulz's thesis on Christmas. But that's not where Charlie Brown's despair resolves. His moment of anguish with the tree, his "I killed it" moment, is after Linus reads the Bible. The movie's resolution comes, as in It's a Wonderful Life, with a supernatural event that leads to an embrace of the worth of being part of a community of people. Charlie Brown's friends encircle the collapsed tree and, after musing that "maybe it just needs a little love," they grab some lights and Linus's blanket and transform the twig into the small but unmistakable form of a lush evergreen fir. Charlie Brown returns, and seeing him, they wish him a Merry Christmas and all together sing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" as a timid smile spreads across Charlie Brown's face.


This is what dissolves Charlie Brown's despair: this group of people who, only moments before, made him so very unhappy. Put another way, to answer Charlie Brown's insistent question, this is what Christmas is all about: neither cultural traditions like trees nor religious ideas like the birth of Christ, at least not in isolation—it's these things linked with the idea of communing with other human beings.

This is what makes Christmas one of the most difficult holidays: it forces the confrontation of the tension between individual fulfillment and communal connection. You may be deeply miserable around people, but it is existentially terrifying to have no one. The only thing worse than being with people is being with nobody. It never feels this way in the moment. It is blessedly tempting to choose isolated independence and personal ambition over the conservative warmth of a community. I want to do what I want to do, and people get in the way of that. Both movies show why exactly this is so appealing: in Wonderful Life, we see the lack of autonomy and existential frustration inherent in human relationships; in Charlie Brown, we see the alienation that comes out of incompatible approaches to life goals. But what makes these movies so quintessentially Christmas is that they don't let their protagonists stay there. They bring George Bailey and Charlie Brown to the idea that even though human connection is alienating and frustrating and restrictive, it is the better way to live. "It is not good for man to be alone," to quote Genesis, and even if the act of not being alone isn't necessarily a path to happiness, it's a path to meaning.


"No man is a failure who has friends," says the angel's final note to George at the finale of It's a Wonderful Life. It's easy to sentimentalize this, but that statement is one of the most hard-won ideas in all of American cinema—the idea that the people you know and love are more important than your own individual ambitions. It's an idea that nearly drives George to suicide. It's an idea I find incredibly difficult to wrangle. People are irritating and taxing; they are weights who make independence difficult; they are mean, and I am mean to them. But they matter. And that's Christmas. Christmas is a rebuke of the individual in favor of the loving collective. I am terrible at acting out this idea, but that's what it is.

Now of course, even being presented with this choice between people and individuals is a privilege, and even among those who have that choice, there are legitimately abusive and harmful communities that individuals should be able to separate themselves from. Christmas is not about an obligation to all communities. And I know that this isn't what Christmas means to everyone else, and that's fine. What I'm describing here is intensely personal to me specifically, and I'm honestly not sure how many peers I have in these ideas. And maybe this post is corny and maudlin and melodramatic. Maybe. But even considering all that, every year, without fail, I end up tearing up at the end of It's a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Being brought face-to-face with the compelling necessity of human communities, despite my most lonesome urges—that's the holiday for me.

Until next time.

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Mini-Reviews for December 11 - 17, 2017

I'm not really sorry my Star Wars review is so long, but I suppose it deserves an admittance that calling such a review "mini" is sort of laughable. So laugh away.

Movies

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Let's get this over with: The Last Jedi has the worst John Williams Star Wars score by a comfortable margin, and it's the first Star Wars movie that, despite some very nice imagery late in the film, doesn't strive for visual grandeur. The extent to which these two things will hamper your enjoyment of the film is entirely dependent on how much you value those things in Star Wars, and unfortunately for The Last Jedi, score and visual grandeur are two of the things I want most out of Star Wars, which makes their relative weaknesses two of three things that keep me from crowing with the rest of y'all that this is the first great Star Wars movie since the original trilogy. The third thing that keeps it from greatness is, I think, a bit less personally subjective and a bit more critically substantive, and that's the way that The Last Jedi glibly punts all its thorny philosophical questions in its finale. And oh boy, are there thorny philosophical questions—The Last Jedi wants to be a ruthless interrogation of several of the key philosophical frameworks of Star Wars, including the value of individual heroism and the necessity of the Jedi to defeat darkness. The fact that the movie is asking these questions in the first place and actually walks them right up to the brink of something truly radical within the franchise is a testament to how smartly writer/director Rian Johnson is engaging with this intellectual property, and the fact that he doesn't actually jump off that ledge is either a crippling moment of trepidation on Johnson's part or an exhibition of the exact length of the leash Kathleen Kennedy is keeping him on—I can't decide which. Regardless, there's no question that the movie, twisty and emotionally potent, is the most narratively engaging Star Wars movie since the original trilogy (which is, I suspect, what a lot of people mean when they call a movie "great" anyway), and it's the most seriously any Star Wars property has taken the franchise mythology since Lucas was in charge—i.e. engaging the series ideas as ideas and not sacred texts to emulate. It's also the least-seriously any Star Wars movie has taken the franchise since Lucas was in charge, by which I mean that there is very little reverence for the form that Star Wars has taken up to this point (which is why my above critiques of visuals and score strike me as possibly a missing of the point on my part); it has absolutely no fear of yanking the film into genres heretofore never explored in the franchise (there's a brief casino heist, e.g.), nor is it too timid to engage with the elements of slapstick and B-movie goofiness that people often like to forget has been a staple of the series since 1977. I mean, there's an honest-to-goodness allusion to "Hardware Wars," the 1978 parodic short film that Lucas considered his favorite Star Wars send-up. The tone of The Last Jedi is all over the place in the best way possible, and it's the life blood of this movie (and shout-out to Domhnall Gleeson, who is legitimately great in bringing the sort of Laurel-and-Hardy comedy to his role as villain that the Star Wars villainy has always teetered on the edge of). In this regard, The Last Jedi feels a lot like—God help me—the prequel films, which (intentionally or not) are on a narrative level a pretty dedicated repudiation of the Hero's Journey and Jedi mythos and on a tonal level a grab bag of silly aliens, operatic character types, and genre experimentation. This isn't a bad thing, and you know what? The prequels aren't really that bad either, at least not on the hysterical level that an overly incensed nerd culture has made them out to be. I bet Rian Johnson would have put midi-chlorians in this movie if Disney had let him. Grade: B+

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
I.e. "Collateral Damage? What's That?": The Movie. Honestly, for a film that knows how to make its killing so tactile and viscerally impactful, it cares shockingly little about human life outside of that of John Wick and his antagonist, Santino D'Antonio, whose lives seem to hold nearly cosmic importance within the increasingly byzantine world of this franchise. "The man, the myth," one character greets our hero, and he's basically right; John Wick has essentially become Achilles (or is it Macbeth?) and the world around him some sort of Olympian stage made entirely of penthouse suites and art galleries, upon which he battles other limber deific actors as he lumbers through the motions of some grand drama (or perhaps tragedy). In that sense, the heightened levels of myth-making position Chapter 2 much better to comment on its own violence than its more grounded predecessor, as the narrative's own grandiose aims excuse us from caring about anyone but our principal players, in the same way that only pesky humanists care about the way Hamlet sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern gleefully to their deaths. But I'm sort of getting ahead of myself—who cares about all this moral philosophizing when the movie looks so freaking COOL? If the whole cinematic tradition of hall-of-mirrors finales was merely a decades-long breadcrumb trail to get us to John Wick: Chapter 2's climax, I'd say that sounds about right. Grade: A-

Columbus (2017)
Surely I'm not the first person to have gotten Lost in Translation vibes from Columbus, right? Ennui and low-key heartbreak set against an often alien-seeming geography? No matter—it's the sort of achingly beautiful work of film that deserves to be discussed on its own terms. From the exquisite framing of Columbus, Indiana's distinctive modern architecture to the warm but slightly prickly companionship that forms between our two protagonists through their small, intimate conversations, this is a movie that invites us to let its textures wash over us, small pieces making a small story with large feelings. Some of the plot feels a little by-the-numbers, but it's never not sincere in them, and there are moments of transcendence, too—e.g. when a character is asked to explain not the academic but the emotional reasons that make her love a particular edifice, and we're suddenly transported with the camera to the building's interior, watching her mouth through the glass as it emits words we'll never hear, the film's ambient score swelling for the first time. Grade: B+

On the Beach Alone at Night (밤의 해변에서 혼자) (2017)
To make what is probably a problematic comparison, this feels like Hong Sang-soo's Deconstructing Harry—a fragmented film that takes the director's tropes and cuts them into vignettes in the service of something that's halfway between penance and apologia for his sexual misdeeds (though admirably, Hong foregrounds the woman involved [Kim Min-hee, who absolutely owns this movie] and the effects of his behavior on her, as opposed to Allen's male-centric POV). Also as with Harry, there's a pretty sizable gap between the great success of individual scenes and the kind of shaky effect of the film's whole. The absolute best moments of the movie are a pair of long, liquor-fueled dinner-table conversations in the film's back half, live-wire sequences that play to the very best of Hong's abilities; the less pointed and kind of draggy connective tissue that ties these scenes (and a few other conversational setpieces) together works much less well, and I'm just not sure what to do with the flights of surreal metatextuality a la the repeated sleep/theater imagery (is this all a dream? just film fantasy?) and the recurring appearance of a mysterious man who really needs to know the time and can clean windows like nobody's business. It's an interesting experiment, one that feels decidedly less schematic than last year's Right Now, Wrong Then (the other Hong film I've seen) but also much less warm and approachable. Grade: B-

Che (2008)
Sort of American Indie's response to Spike Lee's Malcolm X, in the sense that it's an epic biopic of a controversial, martyred radial leader. Che has little of the sensuality of Lee's ecstatic humanism, Soderbergh instead opting for a vérité digital cinematography that, for all its you-are-there POVing, has a sort of chilly distance to it that rarely tries to dramatize the experience of Che's passion in the same way that we all become Malcolm. There's beauty in that starkness, though, particularly in Part One, which juxtaposes the grainy b&w of Guevara's UN visit with the broad political sweep of his Fidel-collaborating actions in Cuba. Part Two, a beat-for-beat breakdown of his fatal involvement in Bolivian guerrilla warfare, is much more formally straightforward and not nearly as interesting to me; still, the slow dismemberment of the Bolivian revolution is compellingly meticulous and thrilling in parts, so I can't complain too much. Taken as a whole, this is a pretty striking accomplishment. Grade: B+

Music

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland (2017)
The fourth (!) of five (!!!) albums released by King Gizzard, and though they've all been good, Polygondwanaland is my favorite. It's possible that I'm just cheap—Polygondwanaland (how many times do I have to type that name?) was released online for free, and hey, I like free things. But more than that, (here we go again) Polygondwanaland seems particularly curated to my specific interests. It's not that King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard with their psych-rock silliness are ever too far afield of my interests. But the way that this album doubles down on the proggy legacy of psychedelia delights me in a way that I imagine not all modern listeners can relate to, and with the cover looking like a trippy screenshot from Ultima Underworld, I'm basically in heaven here. I do wish the band would reach a little beyond the same psych-prog palette that's existed for over 40 years now—look, y'all are already weird, but can we get freaky weird?—but that's a minor gripe, considering how good the Gizzard boys are at what they do. Grade: A-