Movies
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-
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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+
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