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-
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