Mini-Reviews for January 22 - 28, 2018

Hey, all! I was on the Cinematary podcast this week, and I discussed several of the movies I'm reviewing here. If you're interested, you can listen here. I'll let you know in the reviews which movies I discussed, too.

Movies

Phantom Thread (2017)

So in a just world (which, I should stress, we do not live in), this should win all the Oscars, right? Picture, Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Supporting Actress (Leslie Manville), Director, Score (Jonny Greenwood's score—it's magical), Costume Design... and in an even juster world, it should have been nominated for even more (at least Screenplay and Actress [Vicky Krieps is terrific]). If it's not already abundantly clear, I am head-over-heels for this movie. It's as subdued and formally pristine a movie as Paul Thomas Anderson has ever crafted, but with a writhing, roiling underbelly that makes the ostensibly stuffy period trappings and muted acting choices all the more hilarious and fragile a shell to encase the truly unhinged psychosexual comedy that Phantom Thread actually is. The veneer of class and society that these characters inhabit is in each moment of the film at the brink of bursting at the seams to release the raging pathology at the heart of each individual. To be human is to be sick. Easily PTA's best film since There Will Be Blood and, if I were going to re-do my Favorite Movies of 2017 list, a shoo-in for #1. See it in a theater, folks, and let the exquisite composition of this work of art melt over you like so much butter over asparagus. Grade: A

Mudbound (2017)

A sprawling character drama that has a lot of good stuff—cinematography, acting, editing—but perhaps the best is the way that Mudbound crams what is surely 4 hours of regular movie plot into its relatively spry 2 hours and 15 minutes without sacrificing a bit of character depth. The secret sauce, I think, is the copious use of voiceover, something I would usually bristle at but here becomes a tremendous tool for the film to glide from POV to POV and time period to time period in a way that recalls Faulkner in general and As I Lay Dying specifically. The best Netflix movie I've seen yet, and perhaps the only one to get so close to greatness. (I talk about this movie in more detail on Episode 180 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.) Grade: A-

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

As with Guadagnino's previous feature, A Bigger Splash, I'm finding it very difficult to find an emotional doorway into this film, and also like A Bigger Splash, I only really felt things when those feelings were delivered via music—this time in a duo of terrific Sufjan Stevens songs, deployed appropriately at the film's two emotional climaxes. Call Me By Your Name is the kind of arthouse movie that's never been my favorite, the kind where the drama is super internal and everything is a symbol (memorably, an apricot), and while this is a particularly wistful version of that with some very nice shots, it's not enough to sustain interest over 132 minutes. And I mean, this thing kind of lives and dies by how much you root for the central couple, and I'm just not feeling it. It's not just me, right? Armie Hammer's character is kind of a prick, right? Well-acted, well-shot, fantastically soundtracked, but just not something I felt strongly for when Sufjan wasn't on. Grade: B-

Marjorie Prime (2017)

Very indie sci-fi, right down to the concocting of a premise that doesn't need any special effects (though I know it was the original play that cooked it up first). In this one, people have developed technology that allows for families to create holographic versions of deceased loved ones, only the family then needs to educate the hologram about what the original person was like. This is a movie that's about ideas, ideas I wasn't really finding all that compelling until the final stage of the movie, at which they become very compelling, so hang in there until the end. Grade: B

Eagle vs Shark (2007)

This is the laziest comparison to make, but really, I only needed one Napoleon Dynamite in my life, and my affection for that one is mostly running on nostalgia now. Given that I'm just now seeing it, I'm not nostalgic for Eagle vs. Shark, so sorry, movie! It's not entirely without its charms—the animations are nice, and some of the mundane back-and-forth and comedic self-delusion hint at the genuinely excellent and melancholically hilarious stuff Taika Waititi would do just a few years later in Boy. But as a movie on its own... ehhh. Grade: C

The Nutty Professor (1963)

Beginning my Jerry Lewis exposure with The Bellboy and then moving on to It's Only Money and then to The Nutty Professor is like being invited to the house of an acquaintance whom you'd long suspected was part of a pyramid scheme but when you arrive, he's really polite and even puts on a Radiohead album, so it can't be all bad, right? But then he's asking if you're happy with your job, and then all of the sudden he's pulling out pamphlets and telling you how much money you can make a year if you get ten people to sign up a month. The Nutty Professor is a muddled, unfunny Jekyll/Hyde riff that can't even seem to decide who much we're supposed to be rooting for Jekyll or Hyde, and what's worse, it can't quite commit—despite pegging a weirdly sincere, weirdly long speech to the movie's end that explains that it's not good to be a douchebag lounge-rat hipster—to putting its foot down that it's a bad thing that Hyde tries to rape women. The movie is undeniably amazing-looking—Lewis knows his way around a camera, and the primary-colored outfits and lab equipment make for a sweet backdrop for a sour movie—and his comedic worldview is certainly singular. But I'll leave the singular-but-wretched worldviews to the academic auteurists who've taken also to Michael Bay. As for me: goodbye, Jerry Lewis. (I talk about this movie in more detail on Episode 180 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.) Grade: D

Music

Funkadelic - Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow (1970)

The direct forebear to one of my favorite albums of all time, Free Your Mind feels every bit a stepping stone to Maggot Brain from Funkadelic's self-titled debut. Like most Funkadelic at this stage, the album begins with a 10-minute, spoken-word, space-funk-jam showcase for guitarist Eddie Hazel, followed by a series of shorter tracks tethered more closely to traditional song structures. Unlike Maggot Brain, however, Free Your Mind's shorter songs never really lose their shaggy psychedelia, and the result is an album that feels much looser and stranger than the one that succeeded it, if a bit less successful overall. This is strange stuff—a concept album of sorts about the intersection of money and liberty that's at once a salute to and a parody of African-American Christian spiritualism—and not all of it works ("Funky Dollar Bill," the album's most traditionally grounded song, feels kind of one-note, for example). But when it does, it's pretty special. Grade: B+

Favorite Albums 1-100

Not sure anyone cares/remembers, but back when this blog hit its 100th post, I celebrated by making a list of my 100 favorite movies at the time (which the morbidly curious can read here). Well, now this blog has reached its 200th post (fanfare! fireworks! you get a car! and you get a car!), so I thought I'd celebrate with another 100 list—this time my favorite albums.

As with the movie list, I just want to stress that this is not a list of the best albums; nor is it a list of the albums I have listened to most or have always loved the most. This is simply a catalog of the albums that, at this particular moment in time, I would count as my favorites. This was very difficult to whittle down to an even 100—ask me tomorrow, and you'd get a much different list, the day after and you'd get an even more different list still. Also as with the movie list, this list is alphabetized, not ranked (and even lazily alphabetized at that—if I were being rigorous here, I'd have organized the artists by last name, but instead, I just listed them in the order that they are on my iTunes: Kanye West right before Kendrick Lamar, etc.).

Another organizational note: In order that this list didn't consist entirely of R.E.M., David Bowie, and Miles Davis, I limited any one artist to no more than three albums. Otherwise, this list would have definitely been just R.E.M., David Bowie, and Miles Davis.

Anyway, I hope this inspires people to share their own favorite albums here. I'm a white male music nerd who has counted rock as his musical genre home base for most of his life, and this list definitely reflects that hardcore, so I'd love suggestions that push against my demo. As I've mentioned frequently, the point of lists (as I see it) is to share new or neglected works of art with others, so please view this list as an opportunity to do so! Or maybe you love all the same albums as I do, in which case we can just revel together in the awesomeness of Carly Rae Jepsen or Funkadelic. Or maybe you hate Carly Rae Jepsen and Funkadelic—that's cool, you can call out my taste for being bad, too. Really, when you think about it, all music is bad.

Some stats before we begin:

• The oldest album on this list is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959).
• The youngest album on this list is Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith's A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016)—list is bookended by jazz, woo, I'm a cool cat.
• The most represented decade is the 1970s, with 24 albums.
• The least represented decade is the 1950s (just Kind of Blue).
• The most represented artists are Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Miles Davis, R.E.M., and Radiohead, all of whom hit the three-album ceiling.

The List

Against Me! – Transgender Dysphoria Blues (2014)

Alice in Chains – Jar of Flies (1994)

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (2010)

The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

The Beatles – Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

Belle and Sebastian – If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996)

Big Star – #1 Record (1972)

Björk – Homogenic (1997)

Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Bob Dylan – Modern Times (2006)

Brad Mehldau – Elegiac Cycle (1999)

Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A. (1985)

Bruce Springsteen – The River (1980)

Can – Tago Mago (1971)

Carly Rae Jepsen – Emotion (2015)

Carol King – Tapestry (1971)

Chance the Rapper – Acid Rap (2013)

The Clash – The Clash (1977)

Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

David Bowie – Hunky Dory (1971)

David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

David Bowie – Young Americans (1975)

David Crowder Band – A Collision or (3+4=7) (2005)

Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980)

Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest (2010)

Echo & the Bunnymen – Crocodiles (1980)

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear (2015)

Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (2012)

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic (2009)

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (2011)

Florence + The Machine – Lungs (2009)

Funkadelic – Maggot Brain (1971)

Genesis – Selling England by the Pound (1973)

Grimes – Art Angels (2015)

Iggy & the Stooges – Raw Power (1973)

Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid (2010)

Joanna Newsom – Divers (2015)

John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (1965)

Joni Mitchell – Court and Spark (1974)

Kanye West – Late Registration (2005)

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)

King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973)

The Knife – Shaking the Habitual (2013)

The La’s – The La’s (1990)

Lauryn Hill – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)

LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver (2006)

Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy (1973)

The Mars Volta – Frances the Mute (2005)

maudlin of the Well – Part the Second (2009)

Miles Davis – In a Silent Way (1969)

Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (1959)

Miles Davis – On the Corner (1972)

My Bloody Valentine – Loveless (1991)

The National – Boxer (2007)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

Nirvana – MTV Unplugged in New York (1993)

Oasis – Definitely Maybe (1994)

Patti Smith – Horses (1975)

Pavement – Wowee Zowee (1995)

Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here (1975)

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011)

PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love (1995)

Queen – A Night at the Opera (1975)

R.E.M. – Automatic for the People (1992)

R.E.M. – Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)

R.E.M. – New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996)

Radiohead – Amnesiac (2001)

Radiohead – In Rainbows (2007)

Radiohead – OK Computer (1997)

Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch (2003)

Robert Glasper – Black Radio (2012)

The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers (1971)

The Roots – Things Fall Apart (1999)

The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow (2003)

Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)

Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation (1988)

Spiritualized – Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space (1997)

St. Vincent – Strange Mercy (2011)

Sun Kil Moon – Benji (2014)

Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions (2009)

Talk Talk – Laughing Stock (1991)

Talking Heads – Remain in Light (1980)

Television – Marquee Moon (1977)

Tindersticks – Tindersticks (1995)

TV on the Radio – Dear Science (2008)

U2 – Achtung Baby (1992)

U2 – Pop (1997)

The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

The Verve – A Northern Soul (1995)

Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith – A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016)

Vince Guaraldi Trio – Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus (1962)

The White Stripes – White Blood Cells (2001)

The Who – Who’s Next (1971)

Wilco – A Ghost Is Born (2004)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Fever to Tell (2003)

Yes – Fragile (1972)

Mini-Reviews for January 15 - 21, 2018

Lots of snow days today means lots of reading, watching, etc. Woot woot!

Movies

The Post (2017)
A companion piece, of sorts, to Lincoln. If every 4-5 years Spielberg has to drop in and create a tightly scripted historical film stealthily (or not so stealthily, in The Post's case) about the state of the current executive branch, I'm cool with that as long as they're this good—good enough, even, that I'm willing to forgive how both of these movies have ended on final scenes that are entirely too cutesy. I'm also a sucker for movies about journalists doing journalist things, and honestly, I could watch a whole movie that was just shots of the Washington Post typesetting process and people with leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets shuffling through paper archives. Luckily for everyone who doesn't have my particular journalistic fetishes, The Post is all that plus electrifying plotting and dynamite actors chewing through some crackerjack dialogue. Grade: A-

Happy Death Day (2017)
"Groundhog Day, but a slasher" is a premise so easy and appealing that it's a wonder that it's taken this long to materialize (and apparently it's not been as long as it seems—this movie has been in production since 2007). Nevertheless, here we are, and the resulting film is consistently entertaining, though certainly not great—the characters, for starters, never really break out of the stock-character mold they're introduced in, and with the exception of one third-act twist that's incredibly fun and subverts the usual trajectory of these Groundhog Day movies perfectly, the movie isn't really doing a ton of new or interesting things with its format. Still, the script is entertaining enough throughout and the acting winsome enough that these quibbles are easy to dismiss in favor of just enjoying a moderately engaging variation on the familiar. Grade: B

Mary and the Witch's Flower (メアリと魔女の花) (2017)
A good—if a bit generic—fantasy coming-of-age from Ghibli-alum Hiromasa Yonebayashi. Imagine Harry Potter, but if McGonagall was Dr. Eggman from Sonic. There are some gorgeous and inventive character designs in the woefully brief magical Endor College tour, and overall, the movie is nicely animated in exactly the way you would assume a film from ex-Ghibli-ers to be. There are some narrative problems—most notably, the way the movie has essentially two first acts and no second act, though I'm not sure which first act I'd cut to add a second, since they're both rather lovely—that make the movie feel slight and a little underdeveloped even within its pretty standard genre fare, but none of them are fatal, and the things that are nice about this movie are quite nice. Grade: B

Basic Instinct (1992)
Gender-flipping Psycho seems like a lateral movie, as far as LGBT sensitivity goes, and I'm honestly not sure of the point of it, thematically, though it does lead to some clever moments. Cleverer still is the way that the movie finds Psycho by way of Vertigo, and I won't lie that I find this kind of experimentation—not just genre experimentation but experimentation with the narrative forms of specific genre hallmarks—pretty fun. The movie might go over much better if Basic Instinct had anything better than a monumentally dumb screenplay, but, well, it's monumentally dumb. As it is, Sharon Stone (in a deliriously hammy villain performance), Michael Douglas (in a perfectly nasty noir-protagonist turn), and score composer Jerry Goldsmith are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I'd ultimately guess your enjoyment of this comes down to how you feel about Paul Verhoeven's trademark "This doesn't exactly feel like satire, but that's the only possible explanation for some of these directorial choices" approach. I like Starship Troopers, so that puts me in the positive camp. Grade: B

Duel (1971)
Gotta love a movie that knows exactly what it is—in this case, a movie about a killer truck—and leans way into that. Some really fantastic shot compositions and lighting, too. Be the best you you can be. Grade: A

The Bellboy (1960)
I don't know what I was expecting from my first Jerry Lewis feature, but a 70-minute series of barely related and often surreal sketches is not it. In a brief prologue, the supposed "executive producer" at Paramount Pictures assures us, the audience, that The Bellboy is a movie with "no story and no plot," and the film makes very good on that promise. At one point, Jerry Lewis plays himself, harangued by a crowd of sychophants—he has about two scenes, and then we never see him again. At another point, the protagonist, Stanley (the titular bellboy, also played by Lewis), takes a flash photograph at night, and the flash literally turns the nighttime into day, despite only being 3:30 in the morning. In another scene, Stanley finds himself in the middle of a marital spat and gets beaten by both husband and wife. Elsewhere, Stanley flies a plane. And so on. These bits are tied together only by the tenuous connection that they all take place at or around the same Miami Beach hotel and mostly involve Stanley, and many of them seem to be inspired by the goofy wordplay, physical humor, and flights of fancy of Lewis's vaudeville-performing childhood. The result is something like the intersection of Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, and the dream sequence in Sherlock Jr., though of the three of those, the overall sensibilities lean heavily in the Curly-Larry-Moe direction. It's all very silly, and as with anything as relentlessly episodic as this is, there's a lot of dead air. However, most of the bits are less than a minute long, so it generally skates by on the same principles that float Aaron Sorkin dialogue, moving fast enough that the bad patches are quickly replaced by the good ones before they linger too long in your mind. And beyond that, I don't think I can stress enough just how strange this movie is willing to get, often without any sort of explanation. There's a kitchen-sink approach to the comedy here that makes room for everything from musical interludes to meta humor, and the final package is endearingly bewildering. I can't say if this is representative of Jerry Lewis's output in general (his reputation suggests not), but I'm interested to see more. Grade: B

It's Only Money (1962)
Eh, okay. Lacking the go-for-broke absurdity of The Bellboy, all this Jerry-Lewis-starring feature is left with is Lewis's physicality, and that wasn't nearly my favorite thing about The Bellboy, though Lewis is admirably committed to it. I might be a little more admiring of it if Lewis wasn't so shouty and rapid-fire moron here, but I guess that's sort of his thing in his non-Bellboy performances. Honestly, the funnier part of the movie to me is the Ladykillers-style plot involving some no-gooders repeatedly failing in their attempts to murder Lewis's character. The escalating ridiculousness of it is fun, though the movie doesn't ever commit to it enough to make it actually Ladykillers-level enjoyable. Grade: C+


Television

Orange Is the New Black, Season 4 (2016)
Finally a season of Orange Is the New Black without any glaring flaws. Oh, there are little ones, to be sure, most notably in the way it still insists on keeping one foot in sitcom mode when dealing with non-major characters (something that manifests itself most troublingly in the way it depicts the new crop of white supremacist characters, which, with the bitter aftertaste of 2017 still on my tongue, feels far too glib and divorced from the reality of the actual white supremacists who have been running amok in this country). But this sitcomminess isn't nearly the problem it was in previous seasons, and most of the rest of the recurring OitNB issues have been relegated to the periphery (Alex and Piper), gotten rid of entirely (Daya and Bennett—THANK YOU LORD), or incorporated as vital thematic units of the season arc (the racial stereotyping, which the show turns cleverly on its head by ratcheting up the racial tensions—and even intra-racial tensions—within the Litchfield environment and making them a function of the prison context and not the show's storytelling). In lieu of these usual stumbling blocks, we're left instead with the series's most structurally ambitious and thematically cohesive year yet, a deftly (and okay, occasionally clumsily—this is still OitNB, after all) woven narrative about corruption and innocence and idealism and privilege. It's the first season of the show that actually seems to be trying to say something about Society in general, and while after the previous seasons, I would have said that this is a show not nearly well-equipped enough to handle that sort of scope, Season 4 manages it commendably (the aforementioned hiccups aside), building a complex tragedy that argues as well as any TV series has since The Wire that The System is both an unstoppable force and an accumulation of individual actions and prejudices by autonomous people. Grade: A-

Books

The Idiot by Elif Batuman (2017)
A discursive and directionless novel about a Harvard freshman feels directionless and alienated by academic pretensions and undergraduate socializing. It's basically a comedy, but a very dry one, and while there's a ton to like here (the motif of our protagonist, Selin, nodding along as she listens to some self-impressed academic blather on about his pet theory while she internally feels deeply confused or gets distracted by errant thoughts feels deeply accurate to me and is never not hilarious), I do kind of wonder if the novel could have had a bit more direction—or at least something to grab onto among all the detached and wry observations. I kind of feel like a stick-in-the-mud here; maybe I'm getting old. It's an easy novel to walk through, but for all its humor and stylistic precision, it's a hard novel to get any closer to than arm's length. Grade: B-

Music

Margo Price - All American Made (2017)
My favorite new country artist doesn't write anything as immediately Great as "Hands of Time" on her sophomore release, but All American Made, a less showy album than Price's debut by most accounts, finds Margo Price and frequent co-writer Jeremy Ivey pushing their songcraft in exciting new directions this time around. The soul inflections of "Do Right By Me," the tempo shifts and structural strangeness of "Cocaine Cowboys," and pop-country string-based production of "A Little Pain" are all welcome additions to Price's retro vibes. The album stumbles a few times, most significantly on the mariachi-tinged "Pay Gap," which melds a questionable musical idea with bland social commentary, but all is forgiven when we get to the mournful and masterful closing title track, a stealth contender for Price's best song yet and easily one of last year's best songs, period. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for January 8 - 14, 2018

A student told me this week that January is the Monday of months. True words, and this week was probably the Monday of movie weeks—so many B-grade films.

Movies

I, Tonya (2017)

I, Tonya gets its best laughs out of being a sort of flippant farce that recreates the whole Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan drama (Paul Walter Hauser is never not hilarious as mastermind/masterboob Shawn Eckhardt); but I, Tonya gets its best material out of the sardonic tragedy of Harding's life trajectory—I don't know a ton about the real Tonya Harding, but this movie version of her is a fantastic character, the story of someone so entangled in cycles of abuse that it's hard to tell whether she's punching back or just manifesting signs of trauma. It's a shame, then, that that the movie's relentless cutting between these two modes—farce and tragedy—comes off as overly clever and smothers the heart of the film under a blanket of smarmy Scorsese-isms and a cloying soundtrack that gives us the late-1980s/early-1990s by way of the 1970s by way of American Hustle. Grade: B-

Lucky (2017)

There's plenty that's trite and obvious and just kind of mediocre in Lucky—the movie is far too fond of punctuating scenes with lines of dialogue that are ostensibly part of the preceding conversation but are obviously only in the movie to hammer a theme (Pet store lady: "Would you like to give this dog a permanent home?" Lucky, squinting into the wind: "Nothing's permanent"). But there's at least as much in the movie that's flat-out amazing, including a mid-film dream sequence that comes out of nowhere but is absolutely stunning. Then of course there's Harry Dean Stanton, doing what will surely become one of the canonical final artistic statements alongside Bowie's Blackstar and Richard Farnsworth's The Straight Story performance—and with Lynch acting in a (great) supporting role, this may as well be a Straight Story revision with Stanton in the lead instead of the periphery. An imperfect Straight Story, to be sure, but capable of some of the same humbly profound heights. Grade: B

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)

Anyone who saw writer/director/composer S. Craig Zahler's previous film, Bone Tomahawk, and its adaptation of the whole "unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps" Macbeth routine shouldn't be surprised at the level of violence in this movie, but I'm still a little shocked. Some of this is the sound design (which goes out of its way to make sure we hear every bone break), but there's no denying the stomach-churning visual immediacy of seeing a dude's face scraped on on a concrete floor until all that's left is a grinning skull. And it's all done in immaculately staged practical effects. Whether this all makes the movie better or worse depends on your sensibilities, I suppose, and me, I'm inclined to like it, though only barely, and as it is, I do wish this movie were about thirty minutes shorter. As is, it's paced like a B-movie trying to pass as an arthouse flick, and well, when we're dealing with face-flaying, I think it's best to throw off all pretension and cut right to the chase. There's a lotta buildup here. Grade: B

Sworn Virgin (Vergine giurata) (2015)

It's a movie about a Balkan sworn virgin (look it up—I had to), and it's absolutely obsessed with bodies. The camera lingers over the human form in a way that even more obviously objectifying films don't, and this movie, being from the POV of someone who has existed outside the gender continuum of her country's society, presents those bodies with the curiosity and strangeness of someone from the outside looking in. The obvious pitfall here is that this curiosity could have come across as either leering or clinical, but neither is the case. It's a warmly human movie, and even if all the interpersonal relationships don't feel quite as fleshed out as they should, plenty of emotional weight alone comes from the geometry of muscles and bones. Grade: B+

Gone Baby Gone (2007)

The score is boilerplate, and the cinematography is forgettably workmanlike. And thank goodness we've all been saved from the "you know it's a flashback because we've got all this color correction and grainy effects" overload of the mid-2000s. But presuming you're willing to put up with the conventions of mainstream American cinema from last decade (and Casey Affleck), Gone Baby Gone is an engaging enough crime drama. I'm not nearly familiar enough with Boston to know if this is an accurate portrayal of the city, but the movie has a tremendous sense of place—fantastical or not—that lends a specificity to the film's drama, and the plotting follows the trappings of traditional crime thrillers closely enough that it's surprising when it dances onto the razor's edge of moral doubt at the end. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for January 1 - 7, 2018

New year, new reviews.

Movies

Beatriz at Dinner (2017)
This movie lays down on the table a corker of a premise pillared by some truly excellent acting—most notably, Salma Hayek as a Mexican-American healer and John Lithgow as basically Donald Trump with complete sentences, though Connie Britton does some quietly excellent work, too, at this movie's periphery. But after maybe an hour of tense dramatics, it becomes clear that the movie has absolutely no clue what to do with these gifts, and the ending just kind of tapers off into a big ol' puff of air. Sad! Grade: B-

V/H/S (2012)
It's been a while since I've seen a movie so openly misogynistic as V/H/S is. Not "the representation of women is problematic within the 2018 political climate" misogynistic; no, I'm talking about an anthology movie in which a theme of pretty much all of its shorts is "women are duplicitous and will probably kill you, but hey, at least they have breasts." That kind of misogyny. Some of this is self-aware, and the multiple allusions to amateur pornography are surely not accidental, although the connection between VHS tapes and homemade, digitally distributed porn is... conceptually muddled, let's say. But whatever intentions about the ethics of ambushing a woman into being in pornography this movie may have do nothing to mitigate the definitely terrible thematic effects of the finished product. The movie is somewhat interesting for a few inventive and interesting uses of digital and analog static in the films (probably one of the better uses of the "found" aspect of found footage that I've seen), and in isolation, any one of these shorts would be "okay"—none great, and they all are about 30% too long, resulting in a movie that feels way more bloated than it should. But as a cumulative feature film, it quickly becomes a slog, made even worse by the gender politics. I want to love a horror anthology, but geez, why do they all have to be so not good? Grade: C-

The Host (괴물) (2006)
This is definitely a Bong Joon-ho film—unsubtle political message, wildly divergent tones, structural insecurities in the plot—but of the ones I've seen, it's definitely the one that exercises the most restraint in terms of those tonal and plotting zig-zags. As a result, it feels slightly more conventional than, say, Snowpiercer. Which is sort of good and bad; on the one hand, you don't have to approach this movie as existing at a different level of cinematic reality the way you have to with his more outlandish features, because there aren't so many bizarre performances, etc., but on the other hand, I do kind of miss the weirdness. Great monster design and solid action setpieces, though, and that covers a multitude of sins. Grade: B+

The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
This certainly looks like a great movie, full of sumptuous costuming, exquisite framing, and artsy stylistic flourishes (such as the mystifying modern-day intro and the silent-movie-esque travel sequences). It's the most lavish Campion movie I've seen, and good on her for that, even if there's the niggling feeling in the back of my mind that maybe Campion went mad with power after the unqualified success of The Piano. But geeeeeez, everything to do with the narrative is awful. It's boring and stilted and devoid of human emotion. While some of this could be attributed to the original Henry James novel (I haven't read it), John Malkovich (whom I'm beginning to suspect is not a good actor) and his lifeless brood certainly cannot be. Grade: B-

Pom Poko (平成狸合戦ぽんぽこ) (1994)
There are "flaws" here—the movie's too long by a comfortable margin, and its environmental messaging feels more nostalgic than actually constructive. But it's beautiful, wistful nostalgia, and that gets at the magic of this movie: none of the flaws really matter when the movie feels this strongly. Pom Poko is about as funny as you'd expect a movie about tanuki (dog-like creatures who, in Japanese culture, are depicted as tricksters with shape-shifting abilities and gigantic testicles [the Disney English dub misidentifies these creatures as "raccoons"]) to be, and it's pretty funny when the tanuki community fights off humans as Tokyo suburban development destroys their native forest. But Pom Poko is also much more somber than its tanuki premise suggests, and the film is as soon a chronicle of a marginalized group and a fable of violent insurgency and a eulogy for pre-WWII Japan as it is a warm comedy with silly animals. It's all so strange and wonderful, one of the most moving animated features of the 1990s. Grade: A

Grease (1978)
People point to Star Wars as the movie that maimed the American New Wave and Heaven's Gate as the one that killed it for good, and maybe that's true, I dunno. But I'd say there are few movies as symbolic of the end of the New Hollywood as Grease, a movie that takes one of the key texts of '70s American cinema, American Graffiti, and fills it full of bad writing, flat cinematography, horrifying gender politics, rape jokes, nonsensical sentimentality, and ugly nostalgia that can't decide if it thinks the '50s were the best or the worst. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you mainstream American filmmaking of the 1980s! Grade: D



Books

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (1993)
It's essentially a nonfiction manifesto in comics form, and it's sort of brilliant for being so. While it may seem like an obvious flourish to make your manifesto on comic-book style a comic book itself, the ingenuity and energy with which McCloud executes this idea are consistently impressive and engaging. We can quibble with some of his conclusions—and honestly, in 2018, his defensive tone ("comics aren't for kids, guys, come on!") feels played out, although that's more a function of twenty-five years of academic engagement with the comics art form since this book's publication than any flaw of McCloud's writing here—but on the whole, this is a significant work of criticism that, even several decades later, still has bite and insight. Grade: A-

Music

Adele - 19 (2008)
I'd been putting this one off for a while, and I'm not sure why. While I maintain that 21 is still Adele's best album overall (and maintain even more that Adele isn't really an album artist), 19 has several of her best songs, including "Best for Last," "Right as Rain," and especially "Hometown Glory." In that respect, 19 is similar to Fiona Apple's debut, Tidal—an album that's still searching for an artistic identity (Adele tries on several genres here, but, like Apple, also defaults a little too often to retroisms—in Adele's case, Dusty Springfield-style blue-eyed soul) but has moments of jaw-dropping self-actualization. Shame Adele's career looks to be nothing as interesting as Apple's, but hey, we'll always have those wonderful singles. Grade: B+