Movies
Last Flag Flying (2017)
Not having seen/read The Last Detail, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what's Ponicsan's and what's Linklater's here. But it's an enormously generous film in the way that only Linklater films tend to be—so generous, in fact, that it finds room for compassion for none other than Saddam Hussein. This is a movie about the horrific cost of war: not just the deaths that result but the lies we tell ourselves about those deaths, lies that perpetuate the national myth that lures our young to their deaths to begin with. Last Flag Flying spits in the eye of the patriotic rhetoric of "heroes" and "patriotism" that American governments use to prevent people from questioning that cost, but what makes it ultimately as compelling as it becomes is the way that even the characters doing the spitting—a trio of bitter and shaken Vietnam veterans—can't escape the allure of the aesthetics of military prestige. As cynical as Linklater and Ponicsan are about the greater powers motivating and commanding the military, they are resolutely ambivalent on the profound meaning that veterans (or at least, these veterans) find in their military identity. It's all lies—the uniforms, the stories, the "character-building,"—and damaging lies at that, but to what extent should we condemn these lies when they clearly mean so much to those who actually experienced the truth of military service? The movie refuses to answer this question, and while I'm sure this ambiguity (some might say "mixed-messaging") won't work for some, it worked for me. This is narrative generosity in its most difficult form. Grade: B+
Better Watch Out (2016)
For a horror comedy, Better Watch Out is willing to get extremely sadistic, and unlike a few other reviewers, I count that as a plus—it's threading a pretty familiar needle here, but the extent of the ruthlessness in the film's villain remains the film's most reliable surprise, even when it's clear what the movie's game is (which, not to spoil too much, happens about half an hour in). I'm not sure if the way the movie juggles the staring-into-the-abyss nihilism of its villain with the winky appropriation of famous holiday movie beats (the movie has an extended homage to Home Alone, e.g., and on the non-holiday side, there's a conversation piece involving Adventure Time characters that's like the adolescent hell version of Reservoir Dogs's "Like a Virgin" bit) is entirely cohesive, but it works more often than not, even if the characters are either incoherent plot devices or staid archetypes. Fun and cringey times to be had by all, I'm sure. Grade: B
Empire of the Sun (1987)
I guess we can call this a "problem" film? The movie's first hour, as the Shanghai International Settlement is sacked and occupied by the Japanese and young Christian Bale's Jim is forced to live alone in the ruins of his spoiled, imperialist upbringing, promises a masterpiece. It's a miracle of visual storytelling, featuring some of the best imagery in any Spielberg film ever. The middle hour, however, drops the ball majorly; the plot slows way down for an interminable internment camp sequence that not only tones down that incredible imagery but also begins to lose Bale's character in a crowd of dull secondary ones—it's maybe thematically relevant, given the drudgery and dehumanization of the camp, but lord is it booooring. Thankfully, the final half hour recovers a bit, ending the movie on a strong and complicated note that foreshadows where Spielberg's dramatic output would go in the '90s and especially the 2000s. In fact, it's not hard to view this movie as ground zero for some of Spielberg's future endeavors—the Japanese occupation scenes feel like Spielberg's audition for Schindler's List, while a lot of the crowd scenes and the itinerant children with morally complicated adult companions feels like a test run of A.I. (dunno if Kubrick was watching this or not, but it sure feels like it). Both of those movies hang together a lot better than Empire does, which is maybe part of my disappointment here. But also, there's enough greatness in Empire that I feel like we don't really need to critique it solely in relation to other films. It's a big, complicated movie in a way that, to me, more often feels complicated in a flawed way than it does complicated in a rich or complex way, but I'll give Spielberg this: it's his first attempt at interrogating his own sentimentalism, and it does so brilliantly and in a way that he has never been able to recapture since, for as much as he's tried to replicate it—when Bale's character sees (perhaps supernaturally) the flash of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, he assumes it's someone's spirit going to heaven, which is such a bitter, ironic inversion of E.T. and Close Encounters and every other "messianic bright light from the sky" moment in his filmography. In a way, the film as a whole is an attempt to stretch this feeling out to a full 2.5 hours (even, if I'm going to be really generous, using John Williams's cloying and frankly awful score as a counterpoint to the misery we see onscreen); it's not successful at all in doing so, but there are glimmers of the success that could have been. Grade: B
Watermelon Man (1970)
An outrageous satirical comedy from Melvin Van Peebles: racist white man wakes up as a black man one day, and the majority of the film is him trying to turn himself back white. It's a lot more grounded in traditional narrative cinema than Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the only other Van Peebles I've seen—this is Van Peebles's only studio film, and it shows. But for a studio film, even one made in 1970, this movie is pretty strange. For example, Godfrey Cambridge, the lead, is in white face for the opening sequence of the movie before he "turns" black, and there are multiple points where the screen flashes strange colors or has these weird title cards, for no other reason except to be disorienting, in a way that anticipates Sweet Sweetback. It's also pretty unflinching about race—the (excellent) tagline is, "It won't happen to you, so you can laugh," which just feels like a gigantic middle finger to any white audience who might enjoy this movie. Grade: B+
Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (1962)
My first Agnès Varda movie, and I LOVED it. It's not much else besides a woman waiting two hours for the results of a potentially fatal medical diagnosis and the ways all the people around her react to her dread, but why would you need more? The casual surrealism underpinned by some truly harrowing emotional ground, all bound up in this vigorous existential philosophy that's at once clear-eyed and serious without ever taking itself too seriously... this is extremely my thing. Also, how is Corinne Marchand not an international star? She's radiant and wonderful in this. Grade: A
Television
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 3 (2017-18)
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's always had, to paraphrase its first season's theme song, a nuanced relationship with the "crazy" in its title, and Season 3 basically makes that relationship its thesis. The show's third year is very pointedly and single-mindedly about Rebecca Bunch's realization and acceptance that she has mental health concerns—this is signaled by nothing less than the conceptually clever (if musically weak) theme song for the season, which plays with the various and conflicting definitions of the word "crazy" in pop culture. That Crazy Ex-Girlfriend takes Rebecca's struggle seriously should be no surprise, but it's disarming and often harrowing just how seriously it takes it, giving the most clear-eyed look at the realities of mental illness I've ever seen in a TV series, bar none. At this point, we all know what Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's tricks are—bawdy comedy, piercing emotional insight, jaunty and parodic musical sequences—but the directions these tricks steer the show are consistently fresh. Last season's finale, with Rebecca swearing bloody vengeance on Josh, did nothing to prepare us for a season-long exploration of the personal and social implications of a mental health diagnosis, and I expect this season's finale (involving Rebecca going to jail [??]) to be entirely unrepresentative of where the show's fourth season will take us (there will be a fourth season, CW... right?). To be fair, this season could do a bit more with its increasingly crowded roster of secondary characters, and Paula in particular feels given short shrift. And while I'm at it, is it just me, or is this season less focused on the musical sequences than past seasons? Season 3 is the show's most inconsistent, but its highs are so high that despite that, it doesn't feel like much of a step down. Grade: A-
Books
Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley (2004-2010)
I didn't feel like reviewing all six volumes of this series one by one, so here's them all in lump sum. O'Malley's graphic-novel treatise on love, emotional baggage, and personal responsibility is a lot more fun than I just made it sound. In fact, it's great fun. Set in some surreal version of Toronto that's a confluence of mid-2000s twentysomethings' personal experiences and the culture they have internalized—especially video games, and the series tends to operates on video-game logic (Scott gets a 1-Up at one point and levels up at multiple points)—Scott Pilgrim is the sort of stylized, endlessly inventive narrative that the comics form was created to support (though to be fair, the Edgar Wright film adaptation of the series does a great job with it, too). At least as good is the characterization, which relies on slacker archetypes as its foundation but then builds each of its principals into full-bodied, complicated humans within that framework and, impressively, without losing any of that surreal, comedic voice until the final volume, which perhaps gets a little too video-gamey and high concept to make room for the small, well-observed character moments that made the first five volumes so rich. Best of all is the series's no-nonsense approach to its protagonist, Scott Pilgrim himself, and the way it's not shy about the uglier aspects of Scott's personality; I don't know if I've ever read a book that depicted the insidious ways in which meek passivity gets conflated with niceness and how that passivity can be just as douchey as some preening jock, but if I have, it's certainly never been as scathing as Scott Pilgrim is. Grade: A-
Music
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky (2007)
Back in 2007, some people saw this album as a disappointment, and I suppose after the art-rock freakout that was A Ghost Is Born, I can see how this might have felt like a step down at first blush. I certainly don't remember being very impressed the few times I listened to it back then. But guys, we were wrong. So wrong. So wrong, in fact, that we missed the part where Sky Blue Sky was one of Wilco's best, most mature releases. It lacks the noisy fireworks of Ghost (though Sky's songs are more deconstructive than they seem—they just unexpectedly bloom into pop-adjacent blossoms rather than scuzzy feedback; Nels Cline's guitar here is a lot more precise and clean than Tweedy's in the previous album, but it's no less exploratory [see the Cline showcase, "Impossible Germany"]), but in its place is a lyrical precision mixed with soul-music underpinnings that occupies an emotional and sonic space distinct from anything Wilco has done before or since. This is "dad rock" only in the sense that it captures the way that (I assume) it's a complicated and beautiful things to be a father. Grade: A
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