Movies
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
This is basically the epitome of a movie that's "interesting" without actually piquing my interest much. It's not for lack of trying. There are parallels to Greek drama, the Bible, and just plain ol' ethics a-plenty here, all filtered through the register of Lanthimos's typical black-comic absurdity with impressive deadpan—the fact that the characters all speak in the flattest of monotones, regardless of whether they are talking about murder, masturbation, or mundanity, feels like self-parody of the highest order, and it's probably the one Lanthimos technique that I felt invested in at all here (though I'll also go to bat for the bleached, angular cinematography, which doesn't feel as quintessentially Lanthimosian but fits the chilly humor of the film perfectly). The rest, sadly, is just not drawn with the razor precision of his earlier work, at least not enough to make the film much to wade through. "Don't you understand? It's a metaphor," one character says at one point, and you gotta admire the gumption it took to put a line like that in here but also, like, yes, I do understand but I just don't care—the movie in a nutshell. Grade: C+
Princess Cyd (2017)
It's a movie full of great incident and generous characterizations, and there are so many moments that I watched and found so precisely human. So I enjoyed it a ton based on those pieces. I mean, some of this stuff seems genetically engineered to appeal to me: for example, the characters have a soirée in which people tell stories and read excerpts from "The Dead" (though to be fair, at least two of the characters are totally bored by this, which seems about right). However, it's also a movie so strangely devoid of conflict that when conflict does appear, it feels really joltingly out of place—e.g. there's a subplot about a murder-suicide that I'm really not sure at all belongs in this movie. Still, it's great on a hang-out-type rubric, and the two leads (Jessie Pinnick as the titular Cyd, a by-turns endearing and monstrously inconsiderate teenager, and Rebecca Spence as Cyd's aunt, who hosts the soirée and that's probably enough to let you know about her) are tremendous and have this wonderful natural chemistry. However meandering it was, I definitely don't begrudge my time spent with the film. Grade: B
Lost in Paris (Paris pieds nus) (2016)
It's pretty much a Chaplin movie, only every character is a Chaplin character. Plus Wes Anderson's visual sensibilities. Your mileage with this movie is probably going to depend exactly on how much you like either of those filmmakers (and especially how appealing you find the prospects of their combination to be), but I'm digging it a lot. Grade: B+
The Last Unicorn (1982)
It's really obvious what isn't good about The Last Unicorn: the songs are bad, sounding like the kind of music '70s prog rockers would have made in 1982 if they hadn't discovered New Wave; the animation is undeniably cheap-looking; the score is overbearing and schmaltzy. But there's a lot to like here, too, or at least a lot that I like. First of all, the voice acting is great, particularly Mia Farrow as the titular unicorn and Christopher Lee as the late-breaking villain. And then there's the screenplay, which, written by Peter S. Beagle (who wrote the excellent novel on which this movie is based), is quietly poetic and melancholic in a way that children's fantasy rarely is. And best of all are the character designs, which don't look great in-motion due to the aforementioned cheapness but do look great as designs; this was sort of a golden age for idiosyncratic character designs in American animation, the sole moment in the history of American animation when Disney's dominance over the market waned for long enough that animators didn't feel like they needed to aspire to the round, cuddly Mouse-House templates. This is the same environment that allowed for the brief, bright flourishing of Ralph Bakshi, and the images we're presented in The Last Unicorn are similar: lumpy and stern characters that range from the innocent (the aspiring magician) to the grotesque (Angela Lansbury's witch character) to the viscerally frightening (the harpy, the red bull), all superimposed over elaborate backgrounds—though instead of Bakshi's urban decay, The Last Unicorn goes for evocative, medieval-art-influenced landscapes. It's a strange and uneven movie, but it's also capable of striking beauty, too. Grade: B
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
This movie flat-out wouldn't work without Bowie. Everything about him—his mid-'70s otherwordliness, the casually dashing costuming draped over his cocaine-drained body, his oddly vulnerable line readings, that carrot-orange hair—is perfectly calibrated for the specific needs of The Man Who Fell to Earth, and if there was one role David Jones was born to play, it was that of a mesmerizingly handsome alien lost among the strangeness of human routine. Don't get me wrong: Roeg is doing great work here as director, and Graeme Clifford is maybe even doing better work as editor—this is a film full of, if nothing else, arresting imagery, and it's strung together compellingly (if at times a little shakily). But Bowie grounds the movie; while the plotting and other characters can be opaque, it's his performance that gives the film its form, weighing the character with a heavy sense of tragedy. This is, above all, a movie about how the bizarre rituals of modern human life are inherently corrupting, and Bowie, who in his own personal life was on a particularly rough downswing from the excesses of modernity, embodies that sentiment more profoundly than any stunt-casted celebrity has in a film role before or since. Grade: B+
How to Steal a Million (1966)
Lots of fun, though much more so in the early goings when the power dynamics between Hepburn and O'Toole are more evenly distributed. Once the heist begins, O'Toole definitively takes the reigns of the plot, and the film loses a lot of that repartee in favor of wide-eyed adoration toward O'Toole's character. It's still enjoyable, and the heist sequence is by turns tense and funny. But something of the spark gets lost along the way, mostly on the Hepburn end. That's said, if all a movie gives you is Hepburn's egg-shaped driving hat and goggles, then it's still a win in my book. Grade: B
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
An early Irwin Allen disaster film. The premise is amusingly ludicrous (a meteor makes the sky catch on fire across the world, and a super submarine must shoot a cruise missile into the sky to blow the fire into space), and for a while, I was thinking that I'd be happy just watching this stupid science play out. But alas, it quickly devolves into a reeeally dull chamber drama with the submarine crew, and aside from a few sort of exciting setpieces (there are not one but two sequences involving tentacled sea creatures), it ended up being a drag. Grade: C
Television
The Good Place, Season 2 (2017-18)
Improving everything that was good about Season 1 and pretty much jettisoning the few things that didn't work, The Good Place's second year is a phenomenal testament to everyone involved in its creation. With the first season's twist out of the bag, the series's second season has been able to spend a lot more time world-building and exploring the bizarre mechanics of the fanciful afterlife that the characters inhabit, and the absolute best moments of this season are when the show pushes its premise right up to a cliff and then jumps—for example, in the season's third episode, "Dance Dance Resolution," in which Michael reboots the show's world literally hundreds of times, or in the last few episodes of the season, in which the show unexpectedly turns itself into a low-key thriller. Most impressive is that as chameleonic as The Good Place has proven itself to be, it never feels like it loses its identity, and this is largely a credit to the actors, who ground the show in an increasingly warm and slightly melancholic emotional space. Ted Danson remains the best in show, of course, but the rest of the cast steps up tremendously as the show throws increasingly complex character entanglements at them. It's all very lovely and hilarious and still like nothing else on television right now, and I can't recommend it enough. Grade: A
Music
Air - Moon Safari (1998)
The thing about Air is that they really just want to be the French electronica version of Pink Floyd, if Pink Floyd were considerably less morose. Moon Safari is Exhibit A, beginning with what basically amounts to an upbeat "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" and hitting those same vibes several more times over the course of the record's 44 minutes. Once you figure this out, there really isn't that much to the album besides the prog-blues antecedent, so your enjoyment of the album is couched almost entirely on whether or not you find this prospect interesting. Lucky for me, I love this sound. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment