Movies
About halfway through Annihilation, I found myself wishing the movie were a bit weirder—up to that point, it had been a solid but unremarkable take on the "expedition into an unknown territory that turns into a slow-moving disaster" genre that includes previous torchbearers like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the first act of Alien (and Prometheus, for that matter, which is probably a more precise precedent for the first 2/3 of this film). Thankfully, by the end of the movie I had gotten my wish, and judging from the discussion I've been seeing online, that seems to be a sticking point for a lot of viewers. Not for me, though. With its ending, Annihilation finally becomes more than just a familiar sci-fi slow-burn with a good cast, terrible dialogue, and a dazzling visual scheme (more rainbows in serious sci-fi, please). It transforms into an intoxicating headtrip that evokes (I won't say "mimics," but it gets close) the metaphysical awe of films like Tarkovsky's Stalker and Soderbergh's Solaris, filtered through an acute sense of existential terror. It's not nearly as good (or as meticulous) as either of those films, but the vibes are there, along with an alien presence that's horrifically otherworldly and nonhuman in a way I've very, very seldom seen cinematic sci-fi attempt, and that' includes the aforementioned influences. Grade: B+
Libraries are THE great modern social institution, so yes please to a documentary that captures the ins and outs of the New York Public Library's events, patronage, and management. I had a great time with all three-plus hours of it (you heard that right—I love libraries, okay?). That said, the only other Wiseman I've seen is At Berkeley, and while this seems basically in the same mode, it's also a much less philosophically interrogative film; a major thread in At Berkeley is the questioning of the institution's image of itself and how much it's coasting on/undermining that image. In Ex Libris, on the other hand, the NYPL is portrayed as an absolute good, and while I generally agree that libraries (and this library in particular) are great, this movie maybe could have complicated the narrative a bit more; instead, we're treated to a lot of interesting characters and tensions about how to allocate resources, but the question of whether or not the library (or those working for the library) actually is this purely good is never raised. Also, the NYPL is one of the most resource-rich library systems in America, and that lends itself to a movie with a huge diversity of environments and activities we can observe. However, most library systems in the country can't book Patti Smith or tape their own personal audiobook recordings or give out wi-fi hot spots to patrons to keep for a year. This is all very cool and exciting, but I do wonder what this movie would have looked like if it had depicted a more beleaguered system that was more representative of what the average American library is like. Grade: B+
It begins promisingly enough as a gently comedic haunted-house horror—Kylie, a young woman caught robbing an ATM, is placed under house arrest with her estranged mother, and it seems like the family house is haunted and has been so for quite some time. Easy enough, right? Unfortunately, the movie shifts gears about thirty minutes in, along with, apparently, the skill of the screenwriter, and it devolves into a pretty tepid exercise in sleuthing and murder-mystery-solving. I'm not sure why the film takes something that's working and then turns it into something that it's clearly not nearly so adept at staging. This seems like preventable suffering. Grade: C+
If Noah Baumbach is, as I've often thought, the second coming of Woody Allen, then this is certainly his take on Allen's occasional attempts to create an Ingmar Bergman feature, a la September or Interiors. Importantly, though, Baumbach (unlike Allen) remembers that, for all of the psychological turmoil and claustrophobic settings, Bergman films could often be very funny, too, and such is the case with Margot, a black comedy in the blackest mode it can get without literal death being included here (though you know Bergman would've made sure at least one of these characters wouldn't make it through the film alive). Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh are great as the two chaotic poles of the film, and Zane Pais does fantastic work as an amalgam of Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline's characters from The Squid and the Whale, and Baumbach's writing is as caustic and precise as always. Grade: B+
I watched this because I wanted to be informed, and Alex Gibney's "Long New Yorker article, only a documentary" style of info doc is the best of its kind, even if I don't think there's a lot of artistry to this style. But it's hard to begrudge the film for doing what I approached it for and nothing more. Plus, there's a lot compelling dramatic irony to be reaped from the way that, three years prior to 2008, the doc's talking heads are all warning us that the Enron scandal is a wake-up call for the financial sector and that this could happen again, and a lot of fear to be gleamed from the way that the film discusses how Enron was able to convince the public it was an innovative, ethical company through a savvy PR campaign (*coughcoughApplecough*). It's almost as if corporate institutions don't have our best interests at heart or something. Grade: B
The Wiseman touch to the public high school. As a high school teacher myself, I was fascinated at the time capsule this is. On a tangible level, there are the hallway alcoves full of phones for students to use and the typewriters in the classrooms that feel completely alien to my own high school experience, and on a philosophical level, you have the brusque, authoritarian temperament of a lot of the teachers, which, while not completely gone from modern secondary education, is certainly not nearly so much the norm. Most striking, though, (and this hasn't changed one bit in the intervening decades) is the way that the school as an institution is so bent toward instilling conformity and unthinking allegiance to certain social institutions. The final scene, where a principal reads a letter from a former student who has gone off to Vietnam, is a real punch to the gut; the student is clearly scared out of his mind and talks about how he wants to donate his life insurance to create a student scholarship if he is killed in Vietnam, which is just horrifying, crushing stuff, but all the principal does is smile with pride and say something to the effect of, "When you get letters like this, you know our school is working." Cut to black, credits roll. I try not to be someone who teaches my students blind allegiance to ideals or authorities, but even so, there's a certain amount of authoritarianism to my teaching on a logistical level (as I'd imagine is true of most teachers). This documentary really makes me wonder how much I should even be doing that. The connection between schools and the military has always made me uncomfortable (there's something exploitative about how recruiters come to the schools directly), but I hadn't even thought about how the philosophy of public education itself might compel students toward their possible deaths. Grade: A-
Television
While I'm still sensing a little bit of the complacency with the standalone episodes as I felt in Season 7, Season 8 sees Adventure Time also stretching its wings into a more straightforwardly sci-fi realm. It's a season preoccupied with the past, with standalone episodes calling back to previous seasons (James Baxter, that beautiful horsey, makes a return) and the ongoing serialized plots obsessing over the planet's tumultuous backstory—in clearer terms than we've ever been given before, Season 8 explores what exactly happened to the planet following the Great Mushroom War, answering questions you may have been wondering for quite some time (if Finn the Human is human, what happened to all the other humans?) and others that may never have crossed your mind (was Princess Bubblegum a person before she was bubblegum?). Somewhat surprisingly, this commitment to filling in gaps in the show's mythology doesn't take the air out of the series; as I said, it's presented in a mostly straightforwardly sci-fi way, free from a lot of the absurdity and elliptical goofiness that's defined the show's storytelling up to this point, and while in theory this sounds like a bad idea (the absurdity and goofiness are some of AT's greatest strengths!), in practice this ends up being mostly satisfying because the show always grounds it in its typically wistful character work—this is particularly true of the Islands miniseries that ends the season, which explores deeply personal material for both Finn and Susan. I'm not sure if they'd announced the Season 10 endgame at this point in the run, but it's clear that in Season 8, the show is winding down; if this is the direction in which it chooses to send itself out, I'm alright with that. Grade: B+
Music
As recursive, eerie, and confounding as its title implies, A Night Walking Through Mirrors is an album of mood and ethereality, one entirely transportive but also maddeningly intangible. Motifs turn to mist when you turn your ear toward them; the quartet has that cicada quality where you can hear each member clearly without ever being able to pin down any of their locations, and from time to time, one or two or three of them will wink out of existence to leave you alone with the others (usually Chad Taylor's drums or Rob Mazurek's cornet). In fact, forget cicadas: you're on an empty city street at night, and you hear the urban sounds from blocks away—car horns and subway rumblings and wind and indistinct voices and cracklings you can't quite place. This sort of avant-garde jazz isn't for everyone (80 minutes of it, no less—four compositions, each at least 15 minutes a piece), but for me, it's transfixing. Grade: A-
I think about my classroom rules all the time. Am I helping them by being so strict? A lot of the rules are unnecessary. I'd never worried conformity would lead to their death, but that's powerful stuff. Thanks, as always, for posting!
ReplyDeleteYeah, totally, I worry about classroom rules quite a bit. Because with each rule is a lesson, and it may not always be the lesson I want them to take away--they may learn whom to trust and mistrust, for example, or not just conformity but conformity to certain types of people or institutions. Then again, I dunno; maybe I'm giving the teaching professor too much power in my head and all this stuff doesn't actually have as much sway over student psychology as I'm thinking it does.
DeleteThanks, as always, for reading!
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