Movies
"Warm" is an adjective that gets thrown at any halfway-sincere coming-of-age film, but Love, Simon is doubly deserving of the qualifier. The plotting and film style aren't going to blow anyone's mind, but that doesn't matter one bit in the face of a film that regards its characters with such affection and has the decency to imbue them all with vibrant life. Even while painting within the lines of the archetypes typical of your Hollywood teen movie (the best friend, the nerd, etc.), Love, Simon gives its cast a wealth of personality and pathos that pulls off that neat movie trick of having them all feel universally familiar (I'm positive I've had at least five versions of Logan Miller's nerd/bully amalgam in my classes) while also making them feel like distinct people. The movie flubs the ending a bit, but only in the way that most Hollywood coming-of-age movies trip over their own grand gestures at one point or another, and I guess what I'm saying overall is that we can all let out a collective sigh of relief: the first major studio release focusing on a gay teen romance is not only representationally important but also quite good. Grade: B+
A Big Ears movie. I never could quite get on this movie's wavelength, and given that this was an almost completely abstract 3D avant-garde feature, it was sometimes difficult for me to tell if this was because: 1. I was sitting in the very front row of the theater and thereby experienced a small measure of physical discomfort while watching; or 2. I'm truly just not tracking with what the film is doing. That said, this movie's use of archival footage of the 1900 Galveston hurricane and aftermath creates some occasionally indelible imagery, most notably during two sequences, one involving the layering of TV screens within the film's 3D space and the other concerning a completely abstract static of distorted imagery that slowly fades into footage of ocean waves. The latter has probably the coolest texture I've ever seen in a 3D movie. Grade: B-
Another Big Ears movie. What the avant-garde collective of filmmakers behind this movie have done here is taken a field recording of a single trip on the New York subway and used some digital process to convert that sound into this abstract imagery. That's the whole movie: sometimes it looks like a wave form, and other times it looks like a tunnel or electrical lines or the rails of the train tracks themselves. This is the kind of movie that you have to be in a very particular kind of mood to enjoy, but luckily, that's where I was, and I found it frequently breathtaking, especially once I got tuned into enough the movie's hypnotic flow that the subtle changes the movie makes to its premise felt like bombs going on, or ghost reaching out their icy hands. Grade: B+
I'm not really a cat person, so I'm not sure why I watched this, a documentary about stray cats in Istanbul. But it was on my Netflix queue, and so here I am. It was pretty boring. What can I say, I'm a monster. Grade: C
More Big Ears. An experimental feature that, in the most obvious ways, is more a collection of shorts than a proper feature, all unified by the striking style: making collages of cutouts from old comic books and animating them to tell stories of varying levels of abstraction. The early goings get pretty dull at times, to be honest, but about midway through, it becomes apparent that aside from style, what's also unifying these pieces (particularly a lovely short set to "Clair de Lune" followed by a silent short completely devoid of any human figures) is the feeling of loneliness that pervades them—in particular, the loneliness you feel when you ruminate on memories and the ways life has changed and left you isolated from that past. The loneliness of nostalgia, I suppose you could call it. Grade: B-
Ghibli's heavy hitters are the visionary fantasies, and I love those, too, but honestly, I feel like the more consistent bet are the nostalgic, quietly sad coming-of-age flicks like this and Only Yesterday. So anyway, I finally filled in this blind spot in my Miyazaki viewing, and of course, it's very good and well-observed and small-scale melancholic in the best way, right down to its surprisingly stressful finale. Grade: A-
The premise—telling the story of 20th-century American pop music through four generations of a single family—is interesting, but the execution indulges in the absolutely worst of musty music industry lies, the most notable being that the apex of American pop music is some white dude with a guitar (playing, to add insult to injury, Bob Seger, nonetheless). Even giving the film the tremendous benefit of the doubt that, in 1981, playing "Freebird" over the ending credits to your rock history movie was not yet a deeply unfortunate act of unintentional self-parody (to say nothing of the other Forrest Gump-level song choices), we're still left with a film that completely erases the role of people of color in American pop music. This is the kind of pass-the-Budweiser revisionism that makes me dislike Elvis and wish I didn't like Led Zeppelin so much, and it's putrid. That said, the movie looks amazing, and Ralph Bakshi was absolutely the right person to tell if not this story then a better execution of the same premise. Bakshi's usual parade of pop-art rotoscoping and mixed-media collage and the way that it captures both the weary grime and the irrepressible energy of the American urban landscape is never less than stunning on a visual level here. Shame about the rest of the movie, though. Grade: C
Books
Adam Rex's alien-invasion novel veers between satire and farce in ways that aren't always beneficial to the satire end of things (a major thread depicting the invading Boov as a satirical analog to European colonialism is smart but muddled later in the novel by the introduction of a second race of alien invaders). But given how much Rex's prose and worldbuilding is indebted to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that scatteredness shouldn't be surprising, given how much that original book is obsessed with incident and wordplay over consistent plotting or theme. Smekday isn't nearly so good as Hitchhiker, of course, but it shares that same rambling charm and goofy hilarity. The True Meaning of Smekday is very funny, especially in its details—a map of the "United State" of America, Arizona (where the alien race has relocated all Americans), is filled with renamed AZ cities like "The Democratic People's Republic of Phoenix" (ruled by harsh dictators and constantly torn by revolution, naturally) and "Las Vegas Dos," and mid-novel comic interlude tells the story of the Boov race, which involves a lot of asphyxiation. The quest of our protagonist, Gratuity Tucci, may not always hang together on the level of characterization or motivation, but the book itself is consistently entertaining and a great delight. Grade: B+
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