Movies
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-
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-
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+
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-
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
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
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
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+
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