Movies
This movie wants to be a few different things: the kind of breathtaking fly-on-the-wall depiction of Julian Assange that Citizenfour was for Edward Snowden, a self-reflective text on why the sort of hero narrative Edward Snowden got out of Citizenfour is impossible for a man as compromised as Assange, a history of WikiLeaks behavior beginning in 2011, an Errol-Morris-type character piece defined by revealing Assange talking heads. All of these objectives are interesting to varying degrees, but none of them end up being super compelling, partially because the documentary is being pulled in so many different directions but mostly (I suspect) because filmmaker Laura Poitras's relationship with Assange was crumbling as the movie entered its second half, thus severing a lot of access to the man. There's a lot of voiceover by Poitras herself in this movie that tries to reflect on the act of documenting a man like Assange and the ethical/professional quandaries that presents, but honestly, it mostly just comes off as a thin attempt to salvage a project that was falling apart as it was being made. She got some good footage and interviews out of it, but it doesn't hang together as a whole. Grade: B-
To be clear, my tepid grade of this movie has everything to do with my experience with this documentary as a documentary and nothing to do with critiquing the information it presents. Sexual assault on college campuses needs to be taken seriously, and The Hunting Ground takes it very seriously—I applaud that. The information and testimonies presented here are important. People need to be educated on this stuff if it's going to get better. HOWEVER: 1) as an educational experience, I didn't get a ton out of this, given that the documentary is now over two years old and I've done a decent amount of reading on the topic already; 2) as a documentary experience, it feels very much like a feature-length episode of 60 Minutes or something of that nature, and that's pretty much what it is, having aired on CNN—the talking head/infographic format doesn't do a ton to engage me, even if it's a reasonably clear method of presenting this info, and the few times the doc tries to capture, vérité-style, the experiences of the activists fighting against college administrations are too few and far between to create a weighty picture of activism in the modern age. I realize I'm basically critiquing this movie for being what it tries to be, but I believe I've made my ambivalence toward activist docs pretty clear on here, and the TV aesthetic really isn't helping things. Still, you probably shouldn't listen to me. This movie is good at doing what it does. Grade: B-
It's probably not going to blow anyone out of the water, but this little horror film does a great job with its extremely modest production budget, essentially creating a modern fusion of Rosemary's Baby with any number of "out in the woods alone" horror movies. The scares are rarely (if ever) jumpy, and the pacing is very good, patiently doling out increasingly unsettling turns of events until it escalates in its impressively gross body-horror finale. A promising debut from director/co-writer Leigh Janiak. Looking forward to whatever she does next. Grade: B
This movie's a minor miracle, because: 1) It's a mainstream American comedy that's consistently funny throughout; 2) It's a mainstream American comedy in 2007 that's only 96 minutes long; 3) It's a mainstream American comedy in 2007 that's tightly scripted; and 4) It's a mainstream American comedy in 2007 that's a parody that's actually good. The film's main mode is lampooning musician biopics (which, in 2007, was a much riper subject for ridicule than it is today, I'll grant) by bending their drippy sentimentality and predictable beats toward absurdity as the titular Dewey Cox goes through every musician biopic plot ever—drugs, daddy issues, love affairs, reunions with his children, a misguidedly ambitious studio session in the late '60s, etc. What's especially impressive here (besides the aforementioned miraculous elements) is that the film, while never really breaking its parody mode, manages to muster up some sincere emotions by the film's end, and I'd largely credit this to just how good the music is; this is as much a musical as it is a parody, and not only are the songs pitch-perfect mimicry of the various eras Dewey stumbles through (including, hilariously, an anachronistic moment of punk rock), they're also just good songs. There are times when the jokes in this movies are more of the "I see what you did there" variety than the laugh-out-loud kind, but even when that happens, the music provides a consistent through line and tone. In case you missed it back in 2007 (and, given its box office returns, you probably did), seek it out now; it's a good one. Grade: B+
There's a bus crash that kills 14 children. I thought I was going to be alright watching this movie, and then I saw the school bus disappear under the ice and I just lost it. This is strange, upsetting, and otherworldly cinema in the same way that The Virgin Suicides was all of the above. Some of the stuff with the pushy lawyer stirring up a class-action lawsuit against the school bus company feels a little stale (lawyers gonna lawyer, I guess), but even that is justified enough for the way it allows the bitter, spellbinding saga of the lawyer's relationship with his daughter. It's a diffuse movie in which not a ton happens outside of the central crash, but it's all tied together with a genuinely unnerving extended Pied Piper analogy and a score—an out-of-time fusion of medieval music with contemporary keyboard atmospherics—that's one of the best and strangest of the past few decades. Grade: A
For the first five minutes of this movie, you could be forgiven for assuming you were watching one of the myriad Star Wars imitators that rushed into cinemas following 1977—there's this Space Jesus dude in a Jedi robe, trippy space effects, the whole nine yards. But then it becomes a basketball drama, before becoming something of a rip-off of The Omen scored with the funk-soul brass flourishes of a blaxsploitation film. And then Space Jesus comes back. This is a weird one, y'all—not so much for any specific piece (most of the movie's beats, after all, have pretty obviously antecedents) but more for the fact that somebody thought to mash them all together into this transfixing suicide drink of a film. Grade: B
Television
This season has some of the incontestable classics of Seinfeld's late-run era (most notably "The Strike," which contains Festivus, and "The Voice" [helloooooooooo]), and its willingness to get strange is basically unparalleled among network sitcoms of any era—for example, a major plot of the season premiere involves Newman fantasizing about cannibalizing Kramer. But as with the eight season, the post-Larry-David show is just far too dependent on silliness and forced catchphrases and parody to rival any of Seinfeld's peak. Which is okay, because no show (even this show) can be expected to produce the best American sitcom episodes week after week for its entire run. The final year of Seinfeld is still lots of fun. Still, it's hard not to wish for those earlier seasons at times, especially in the series-ending one-two punch of a clip show followed by one of the most notoriously unfunny sitcom series finales of all time. Grade: B
Books
I'll be brief here, since it's entirely likely I'll someday revisit this to follow up on my His Dark Materials series from last summer. The first book in Philip Pullman's new companion trilogy to His Dark Materials has some very fun adventuring that mashes up a Cold-War-type espionage intrigue with folk magic in the novel's latter half. However, so much of this is tied to the original trilogy (and in ways that undermine the tension in this book's plot) that it sort of begs the question of why this story is being told—not enough fan service to reward attentive fans and too much interconnection to work entirely as a standalone. The next two books are supposed to take the story into timelines that aren't parallel to the original series, though, so I'm still holding out hope for Pullman to strike gold again. Grade: B-
Music
The album's mix of shout-along punk and power pop is fun, and the touches of shoegaze/ambient are unexpected and nicely textured. I can't imagine this having much staying power with me over the course of the next year—it's a bit inessential, to be honest—but as of right now, this is by-default my favorite album of 2018. Grade: B
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