Mini-Reviews for April 23 - 29, 2018

Yo, people, there are only TWO DAYS LEFT TO VOTE ON THE SUMMER PROJECT. If you haven't already done that, do so!

Movies

Isle of Dogs (2018)
Wes Anderson's latest is his weakest in quite some time (probably since The Darjeeling Limited, though it's a significant step above his career low, The Life Aquatic), but it has its typical Wes-Andersonian pleasures: its fussy precision, its deadpan dialogue, its cast. It has a few flaws that feel uncharacteristic of Anderson's usual efficiency, most notably the character of Tracy (I'm not sure why we needed a white character in this Japan-set story) and the gender dynamics in general (the female characters are so underwritten that I have to wonder why they're even there in the first place). Even laying aside those critiques, there's no denying that this film is minor—there's nothing of the epic sweep of The Grand Budapest Hotel, for example, or the painfully observed family dynamics of The Royal Tenenbaums or Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's basically just a story about dogs and why people love dogs; while I don't actually love dogs (I know, I know), I can appreciate what this movie is going for, but I can also observe that what it's doing is especially small-scale and somewhat silly. The movie at least has the decency to depict its small-scale silliness in some truly excellent animation, though. Its stop-motion feels less homegrown than that of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but the increased sophistication gives this movie a fluidity and an attention to detail that's never not captivating on a visual level. So if nothing else, we at least got what is likely to be the best animation in any American film this year. Grade: B

Zama (2017)
If Barry Lyndon were just a touch more surreal and set in Argentina, you'd have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this movie right up until the third act blows any previous expectations to very small bits. As with The Headless Woman, I suspect this movie will improve on rewatch, when I won't be so concerned with keeping up with character names and worrying which parts are intentionally confusing and which parts are just confusing because I couldn't keep character names right. But even now, with first-watch levels of comprehension, this is a rich movie in both aesthetics and ideas, one that I'll be rolling around in my head for a while. Come for the sumptuous period detail and brutal skewering of European colonialism, stay for the hypnotic sound design and llama photo bomb. Grade: A-

Hostiles (2017)
Remember that song "Savages" in Disney's Pocahontas that's terrible because it's all like, "But Native Americans and European colonizers were both equally bad"? This is basically the feature-length version of that (in that the movie flatters modern viewers with easy platitudes—this time about how the genocide of Native Americans was just an outcropping of the hierarchical structures of violence within the idea of government or whatever ["I'm a good guy, I'm just doing my job"]), only I guess writer/director Scott Cooper couldn't secure the rights from Disney, so they had to tweak the title just a tad. Disney sure is stingy with their intellectual property; makes you wonder who the real hostile is! Grade: D+

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
There's probably someone out there who'll hang me out to dry for saying this, but the Star Wars prequels' use of green screen and CG as a sort of futurist, deliberately nonrealistic merging of rear projection and matte painting was legitimately visionary and one of the more interesting aesthetic advancements of the past couple decades of blockbuster filmmaking. And here's Sky Captain, nearly a year prior to the release of Revenge of the Sith, beating Lucas at his own game, not just on the technological level but also in its appropriation of decades-old pulp tropes. The movie imagines, rather breathtakingly, a huge (and entirely green-screen-driven) world that's something like the mashing together of Metropolis, Buck Rogers, and the 1927 silent feature Wings, creating, like Lucas did for both of his Star Wars trilogies, a historically grounded but technologically modern pulp sci-fi idiom. Where the movie stumbles is in basically everything else, though none of it is catastrophic. Unlike Star Wars, the action scenes are disappointingly perfunctory, and the movie exhausts its whole bag of visual tricks by the end of the first act. And then there's Gwyneth Paltrow, who, while never exactly a riveting presence, flounders in any attempt to breathe life into the musty female archetype she's given, though I suppose the true fault goes to the screenplay for writing an archetype that musty to begin with. All that said, it's a completely fascinating movie with lots of weird corners and decisions—an alternate history not just for its steampunk postwar plot but also for the way it posits a modern cinema in which everyone else found Lucas's green screen art as engaging as I now do. Grade: B+

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
We're long past the era in which having a female protagonist who swears and talks frankly about sex is anything close to groundbreaking, and even in 2001, Bridget Jones's Diary seems to be hanging on the coattails of Sex and the City. Where the movie still feels fresh (ish) is in its depiction of women navigating the masculine-enabling power dynamics of the workplace and dating scene, which is, after all, more in line with this movie's Jane Austen roots (it's based—loosely—on Pride and Prejudice). It's not exactly #MeToo conscious (there's a moment where a woman's boss jokes about sexually harassing her that's played very much as a haha comedy moment instead of a cringe comedy moment), and when you get right down to it, this movie isn't ultimately saying a ton that a lot of other movies haven't. But it has moments of sharpness, and although the rest of the cast is kind of hit-or-miss (Colin Firth is particularly inert), Zellweger has probably never been better in a role than she is here. Grade: B-

Music

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet - Landfall (2018)
Laurie Anderson teams up with Kronos Quartet for—what else?—an album of modern classical infused with mercurial electronics and haunting spoken word. It's a record-length meditation on environmental catastrophe that swings from almost mundane pieces of concrete detail ("CNN Predicts a Monster Storm," "It Twisted the Street Signs") to cosmic and even supernatural grandiosity ("Galaxies," "Gongs and Bells Sing")—all swirling around the album's eerie and elegiac 10-minute centerpiece, "Nothing Left but Their Names," in which a pitch-shifted voice reads out a meditative poem on all the animals that have gone extinct, sounding as much like a ghost as the croons of a humpback whale as it methodically takes apart, brick by brick, the idea that human experience has any centrality in the universe. Not everything on the album works; there are plenty of moments that feel overly literal or a tad too on-the-nose, and those moments usually coincide with the less interesting instrumental portions. But this album is on more than it's off, and at its very best (i.e. "Nothing Left but Their Names"), it's actually stunning. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 16 - 22, 2018

Hey, again! Don't forget to vote in the summer project poll! PLEEEEAAAASSEEE!

Movies

The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
Undercooked and overwrought, The Cloverfield Paradox takes about five ideas—all of them with potential but none of them really great either—and crams them together into the most uneven and structurally disastrous studio movie I've seen in a long time. There's a little Alien here, a little of Event Horizon there, a pinch of Evil Dead 2 (probably my favorite segment of the movie, involving Chris O'Dowd's arm, and it plays as accidental [?] comedy), and then out of nowhere a bit of Solaris. It's all very nutty and strange that all these parts are thrown into the same pot together, but also the execution of these individual parts are staid enough that the whole thing feels boringly and tediously nutty/strange rather than intriguingly or endearingly so. Grade: C-

Molly's Game (2017)
Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut is a solid caper/crime picture, but not nearly as solid as I thought it was going to be before the ending completely wets the bed—in particular, an entirely unearned late-film scene involving our protagonist's father that's condescendingly paternal in the way that only our man Sorkin can do. Elsewhere, the movie is filled with pleasanter Sorkinisms like elaborate sentences and florid verbal sparring, and Jessica Chastain is incredible as the lead. Sorkin the writer still hasn't figured out writing female characters (the fact that the titular Molly only really has agency in relation to the men she interacts with goes from being an intriguing bit of possible social commentary about women in traditionally male spaces to an embarrassing window into the screenplay's own narrowly masculine worldview), but Chastain plays her part so excellently that she practically carries the movie on her own, giving Molly a vibrant interior life that's completely outside the text of the script. Chastain's herculean feat of acting here is the real commentary on women in traditionally male spaces, let me tell you. Grade: B

Thelma (2017)
It's the sort of convergence of arthouse and pulp and religion that I normally find fascinating, and this movie is fascinating, even if it doesn't quite come together. I can't decide if paring itself down to make its metaphor cleaner (something about the effects of sexual awakening and repression in a conservative Christian environment) or if the movie should have gone even more for broke with its shaggy, chilling supernatural cul-de-sacs. Either way, the movie doesn't quite work, but it's never not riveting. Grade: B+

Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (2014)
The frame story is pretty lame, and I'll admit to being somewhat cold on Gibran's poetry itself. But the animated sections set to the poetry (each animated by a different artist) are breathtaking, maybe some of the best segments of animation of this decade, and that's enough to make me like this movie. Still, I'd rather this had been a collection of animated shorts rather than something that tried to tell a cohesive narrative. Grade: B

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) (2008)
Lucrecia Martel's puzzling, puzzle-like arthouse opus that I watched in preparation for a local screening of her new film, Zama, next week. It's very much in the tradition of some of Ingmar Bergman's more esoteric stuff, where there's lots of striking imagery and potent symbolism that's hard to get your head around all in one go, and it's interesting to see that in a modern context. I wasn't really getting much out of it when I was watching it (though the cinematography is very much my jam), but in the day since, it's grown on me quite a bit—a frequently striking, lightly but sharply satirical portrait of subjectivity and bourgeois insularity. Grade: B+

Field of Dreams (1989)
To my complete surprise, this movie feels very much like the ancestor to my old nemesis, the contemporary faith-based film. It's all there: the main character has a supernaturally inspired mission, flimsy conflict with people deluded by the corruption of contemporary culture, a sidelined supportive wife figure, dopey comedy, broad sentimentality, etc. Only this time, the corrupt culture is the '80s, not the modern bogeyman of secular humanism, and the religion in question involves the mythology of baseball, not Jesus. Also, there's this weird memeification of '60s radicalism that feels kind of admirable in the context of the post-Reagan '80s but also kind of nostalgic and pandering, but no matter, it also gives us the best use of long-suffering-wife Amy Madigan (and the highest comedic moment, though maybe I just like seeing people trying to censor books called "Nazi cows"). Actually—forgive me—this feels like the missing link between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the faith-based films I hate, pulling the teeth from Spielberg's deconstructive pursuit of the otherworldly in an attempt to make it huggable and distinctly worldly, on its way to the thoroughly wonderless faith-based genre that wouldn't even know true transcendence if it punched it in the mouth. Also, unlike virtually any modern faith-based movie, Field of Dreams is pretty okay. Not great; just okay. Grade: B-

Television

The X-Files, Season 11 (2018)
On an episode-by-episode basis (which is what any reasonable person should be evaluating The X-Files on in these meager revival days), Season 11 has a much higher batting average than the disheartening Season 10. To absolutely nobody's surprise, the Darin Morgan episode ("The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat") is, again, by far the best in show, a hilarious hour that says more about the show's history than all of the damnable mythology episodes put together. And then there are fun outings like "Rm9sbG93ZXJz," a nearly dialogue-less episode that puts Mulder and Scully into a Modern Times-esque fight against smart devices, and "Familiar," a slightly tropey but still chilly riff on killer clowns. But when I say damnable mythology episodes, I mean damnable. The book-ending "My Struggle" episodes are some of the worst gobbledygook tripe that the show's serialization has churned out (and given the track record of the mythology for the later seasons, that's saving a lot), saved only by the way they turn into unintentional parody—the line "I impregnated her! With science!" is uttered without irony, and it's kind of sublime. And even when we aren't dealing with the "My Struggle" struggle, the season's primary mytharc involves Mulder and Scully's mutant child, William, and please, Chris Carter, listen to me when I say that I have never cared about William! Not in Season 9 when he was a boring baby and certainly not in Season 11 when he's a moody teenager! Worst of all is what this does to Scully—long the heart of the show, this season bizarrely reduces her (as it always must, apparently, when William is involved) into a one-note maternal stereotype. I don't know why I even care about character fidelity at this point in the series, but it's a betrayal of the Scully I loved. Thankfully, the non-mytharc eps are pretty neat. Grade: B-

Orange Is the New Black, Season 5 (2017)
This season begins on track to become Orange Is the New Black's best, as the aftermath of S4's ending escalates into a full-on prisoner revolt that upends the show's status quo in a major way. It's fascinating to watch these characters we know adjust to the new, radical normal, and the factions that form give some of the fresher character development we've gotten in quite a while (though the flashback structure continues to be a major liability). On the plottier side of the season, the central device of the prisoner protest leads to a riveting exploration of the power dynamics of revolution and the logistics of affecting true social change through radical politics (to say nothing about the way it allows the actors to stretch their wings a bit—Danielle Brooks in particular is great). However, in typical OItNB fashion, the season struggles to juggle all these balls, and in particular its tonal control as the plots veer recklessly from comedy to high drama (to serial killer pastiche?) makes for a seriously slack middle third of the season that has a hard time giving a consistent gravitas (or sensitivity) to the number of violent and sexual hierarchies raised by the season's plots. By the time the inevitable tragedy of the season's finale hits, Season 5 has become yet another OItNB season compromised by its deep flaws. What we get is one of the more interesting iterations on this, and props to the show for trying something this new. But it's hard not to wish for the masterpiece that could have been. Grade: B

Books

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (1999)
I'm almost twenty years late, but I'm finally getting on that Series of Unfortunate Events train. And it's pretty great. Playful and drolly hilarious in ways that I wasn't expecting, I can't help but compare this to Harry Potter, that other late-'90s-debuting series of influential children's books. Both series begin with relatively unambitious first entries that bank most of their success on authorial voice and the reappropriation of children's lit tropes into genre-lit tropes. But whereas Rowling's voice is cozy and her plotting and archetypes very hearts-on-sleeves, Snicket's is prickly and sardonic, despairing and ironic and, even twenty years later, singular within the world of children's lit for the way it embraces metafiction and authorial distance and other modernist devices. Which isn't to say that The Bad Beginning is devoid of emotion—there's a deep well of empathy for the Baudelaire siblings and the ways that the adult world (even the so-called "good guys") care very little for them. But the way that the book backs into this emotional resonance by way of ironic distance is somewhat stunning. Grade: A-

The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket (1999)
There's not a lot to say about this book that I didn't already bring up for the Bad Beginning, and that's mostly because this is, in a lot of ways, a retread. The characters are all in their same basic forms, the plot advances in basically the same way, and the resolution is similarly despairing. And that's fine—the goal here seems to be the refining of a formula rather than the breaking of new ground, and it's fun to see some of the formulaic elements of the series plotting and voice being toyed with (for instance, the narrator's habit of defining words continues to find new ways to make that device fresh and surprising). It's slightly more sophisticated than The Bad Beginning, but it's also nowhere near as thrilling as the debut, which, to further my Harry Potter comparison, you can basically say about The Chamber of Secrets in relation to The Sorcerer's Stone. Grade: B+

The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket (2000)
I'm told the series eventually breaks its formula, which is good—The Wide Window is by far the least interesting of the first three Series of Unfortunate Events books, the book that feels most negatively affected by its formulaic elements. By this time, there's this nagging awareness that these characters are all basically one-note and that the tropes of despair and, well, unfortunate events might be something of a narrative crutch than a bold thematic choice on the agency of children in the world. It's still enjoyable—the characters may be one-note, but the series is at least consistently introducing a few new one-noters per book, and the timid Aunt Josephine (whose fate is impressively grisly, not just for a children's book but for anyone's book) is another fine addition in that regard), and Snicket's narrative voice still hasn't gotten old. But I'm hoping to see something new out of this series pretty soon, or else this is going to be a long 13-book journey. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for April 9 - 15, 2018

Hey, again! Don't forget to vote in the summer project poll! Democracy is good! You are a human being with rights!

Movies

The Death of Stalin (2017)

While not quite as tight and rolling-on-the-floor funny as In the Loop, The Death of Stalin is an order of magnitude darker and more ambitious, which counts for a lot in my book. Seeming to take the premise that the USSR at the time of Stalin's death was roughly in the same state of political cravenness and strong-manning sycophancy as In the Loop's chaos left the UK's government by the end of that film (give or take a few state-sanctioned executions), The Death of Stalin explicates what happens when death—not election—is part of the mundane political procedure, and it's fascinating and hilarious, though the fascinating stuff and the hilarious stuff usually take turns, meaning that this movie is for long stretches a kind of cock-eyed historical thriller more than it is a comedy. Which in itself is fascinating. Its Russian setting also allows a bit of distance for us Westerners, lacking the "this is YOUR government" immediacy of In the Loop and thus making this movie's thesis about human nature and the piggish brutality of politics's quest for power a bit more metaphorical and less gut-punchy than Iannucci's last film. But this is all relatively small quibbling: The Death of Stalin is a tremendous movie, black as a gulag cell and as deft at balancing its tone between the horror of its political satire and the lithe comedy of its dialogue as any mainstream English-language movie has been since Doctor Strangelove. Grade: A-

Wonderstruck (2017)

The story is clunky almost to the point of complete dysfunction, but that doesn't really matter, honestly, since Wonderstruck seems to aspire to that especially rare category of "art films for children." As such, it's pretty much a mood piece, and the best moments in it are the ones that are wordless and basically plotless: kids exploring cryptic urban spaces with that sublime combination of mystery and awe that animates the best of children's lit—think the early stages of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or the better entries in The Chronicles of Narnia. It all leads up to a finale involving a scale model that, for all the creaking narrative structures that it takes to get us there, is breathtaking in its low-key surrealism and raw emotional potency. And if nothing else, the movie's a sumptuous Who's Who of Todd Haynes cinematic flourishes: stylistically grounded evocations of historical periods, miniatures, multiple actors playing the same characters, gorgeously hip music selections (Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's "Evening Star" is something of a motif, so hook this soundtrack right to my veins). I don't know if any of this works for children, but it sure works for me. Grade: B+

The Wedding Plan (לעבור את הקיר) (2016)

I found Fill the Void, Rama Burshtein's other feature, to be kind of dull, and such also is The Wedding Plan. But at least Fill the Void had engaging stylistic features like its attention to framing and costuming. The Wedding Plan, by comparison, looks like pretty conventional television. Interesting setting (we need more movies focusing on religiously devout Jewish women in Israel), but not really much to offer otherwise. Grade: C

22 Jump Street (2014)

As with the first movie, there are a few bits that work extremely well (the credits gag is an all-timer and added at least half a star to this review), while the rest of the movie is merely just mildly amusing. Still, I enjoyed it; the meta humor is surprisingly not terrible, and and Hill and Tatum continue to be having the best time ever, which is contagious. I'm not sure if all the "haha, bromance=gay" jokes are endearing for the way that they thoroughly and unjudgmentally embrace the homosexual subtext of the scenes or still covertly homophobic for the way that they are after all couched in the idea that homosexuality is somehow inherently funnier than heterosexuality, but either way, it's an interesting flavor for the movie that Jonah Hill's character is thoroughly unashamed of Tatum reaching up Hill's pants and feeling his junk. Grade: B

The Sugarland Express (1974)

A great deal of fun right up until it isn't, and the ending becomes almost unbearably tragic. Obviously, this is Spielberg's theatrical debut, and it's fascinating to look at this younger, scrappier Spielberg in comparison to Dignified Spielberg of the last couple decades. Spielberg has always been a "liberal" with a soft spot for those outside the establishment (even his "institution" pieces like Lincoln and The Post have a lot to do with the righteous transgression of procedure's traditional boundaries by outsiders), but the way that Sugarland Express positions outlaws as heroes and police as murderers feels so far afield from anything 21st-century Spielberg would touch. Spielberg has never been a radical; nevertheless, this is his politically radical movie, or as close as he ever got to one. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for April 2 - 8, 2018

Hey, everyone! Don't forget to vote in the summer project poll! You have a voice! You are important!

Movies

Ready Player One (2018)
It's not the references that make this one of Spielberg's worst. Let's not be sanctimonious, cinephiles; our medium is the most unashamedly referential media out there—we love it when Scorsese references Ozu or Cabin in the Woods does a Where's Waldo of the horror movie bestiary or Kubrick recreates 18th-century paintings, and while I realize that all those movies have significantly more substance than Ready Player One, I see an awful lot of people gushing about how fun it is to spot the allusion in those, too. No, it isn't the references, but the listless, perfunctory way the references are deployed, banking far too much on crowded, freeze-frame-encouraging moments wherein the movie rather artlessly crams four dozen characters on the screen at once, because "LOOK AT ALL THE REFERENCES, REMEMBER BATTLETOADS AND HALO AND AKIRA AND SONIC THE HEDGEHOG AND FIREFLY AND CHAPPIE [serious, wtf about that one]??" I would have loved a movie that took to heart the idea of making the spectrum of late-20th-century pop culture the sandbox for an anarchic, playful action film (and honestly, isn't The LEGO Movie already kind of this?). Unfortunately, Ready Player One doesn't really play with or even address its myriad allusions, instead going for what essentially amounts to glimpses at a locked, stocked display case in the form of a contemporary action blockbuster. A much, much better version of this movie can be seen in one of the film's two bright spots (the other being the zero-grav club scene): the Second Challenge sequence, in which the reality of the movie comes crashing into the world of a particularly iconic '80s film—it's funny, it's creative, it's a spectacularly clever riff on a certain intellectual property that actually engages with that movie's iconography. Alas, the rest of the film is just a traditional action flick with familiar scenery. Also not insignificant to my non-enjoyment of the film is the terrible screenplay and inch-deep characterizations, but I think that probably goes without saying for an adaptation of the original Ernest Cline novel. Not gonna lie, though, I do kind of miss the Zork part from the book. Grade: C

A Quiet Place (2018)
For a movie that marketed and plotted itself around the importance of a lack of sound, there certainly is a lot of noise in this movie—mostly through a frequently overbearing and thoroughly generic musical score. The movie has some good scares, and it ratchets up tension well enough. But I can imagine a much better version (or at least a version with more integrity) that let itself actually be quiet. Grade: B-

Starry Eyes (2014)
I'll give Starry Eyes credit for some truly gross body horror in the late stages, and the concept of the movie—an aspiring actress's humanity is stolen by a sexually exploitative movie producer—feels especially vital in the context of #MeToo. However, that doesn't mean that the movie is good. In fact, it's not good at all. The characters are flat and uninteresting, and the pacing (going for a Ti West-style slow burn) is uneven and ham-fisted. Plus, that #MeToo connection becomes more of a liability as the movie goes on and turns the victim of this sexual exploitation into a literal villain. It's not quite as simple as all that (she's always very clearly a victim), but it's enough to make me uneasy and disappointed. Grade: C

Hustle & Flow (2005)
Gritty urban realism of this particularly brutal strain and conventional Cinderella-story narrative beats make for strange bedfellows. Even stranger is the way the movie pointedly undercuts Terrence Howard's aspirational character by having him, alongside that starry-eyed musicianship, commit acts of stunning and horrific cruelty—such as when he throws a woman and her baby out of his house onto the street or when he forces a woman to prostitute herself in exchange from a microphone he needs to record his music. These acts go basically uncommented on by the movie, though it's clear from the stomach-churning intensity of these women's reactions that we're meant to feel viscerally their pain at his hands. There's a possibly brilliant commentary on the inextricability of an artist's sins with his art (take that, "separate the art from the artist" people), and I appreciate the movie's dedication to not gloss over this character's deep, deep flaws. But on the other hand, you're also just kind of stuck with a by-the-numbers Cinderella story (complete with happy-ish ending) that's just populated by uncommented-upon cruelty, and you have to wonder how much that cruelty is just set dressing. (I talk about this movie in more detail on Episode 190 of Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.) Grade: B-

Bamboozled (2000)
There are a few moments in Spike Lee's blistering satire of American media racism in which the concept feels a little unsteady, but Lee's conviction in his vision is so strong that it doesn't really matter if all the metaphors don't line up in neat little rows. This is furious filmmaking filled to the brim with ideas, capped by the best classic-cinema montage this side of Cinema Paradiso. Grade: A-






Music

Julien Baker - Turn Out the Lights (2017)
How have I been sleeping on Julien Baker? We're both from the Memphis suburbs; we're both Christians with little interest in Christian music; she started a punk band in high school, which is basically the premise of my novel. We should be friends, Julien and I. Or if not that, I should have been enjoying her (great!) music earlier than just a few weeks ago. Turn Out the Lights is a sadcore indie rock album with a focus on lyrics—lyrics that (with confessional lines like "When I turn out the lights, there's no one left between myself and me") form the album's connection to Baker's early emo-punk days—and if you're tuned in to this kind of singer-songwriter indie at all, I can't imagine not being moved just a bit. It moves me, that's for sure. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for March 26 - April 1, 2018

SOME EXCITING STUFF BEFORE THE REVIEWS:

• Firstly, don't forget to vote on what project you'd like me to do over this summer! If you voted on the Blogger widget yesterday, you'll have to vote again on the Google Form... I'm sorry for the terribleness of that Blogger poll.
  
• Secondly, as I mentioned last week, I went to the Big Ears festival. I'm now excited to announce that my first piece of coverage has been published (view it here), and the podcast in which I recap the festival in more general terms with my friend Andrew is live here.

Okay, now onto the reviews.

Movies

Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage) (2014)

Though it lacks the highest highs of the other two 21st-century Godard movies I've seen (e.g. the Carnival Cruise sequence on Film Socialisme), Goodbye to Language holds together much better, and it *thankfully* finds a meaningful philosophical position beyond the political nihilism of some of Godard's other movies. Even better is the way that though the movie is essentially plotless, it still finds a way to endear me to its two central human characters (whose relationship I feel weirdly invested in, even though it largely consists of them being naked and the dude pooping) and even the dog (who becomes the doggiest of audience surrogates). This movie made me feel things besides the impulse to roll my eyes, which is an enormous step up from Film Socialisme. Also, the 3D is pretty neat. Grade: B

Atari: Game Over (2014)

What I assumed was going to be a goofy puff piece about the investigation of the "Atari dumped millions of E.T. cartridges into a landfill" urban legend turns out also to be part familiar history of the Atari company (sans all the sexual harassment allegations, so okay) and part weirdly sentimental defense of the E.T. game. It's quite boring. Also, Ernest Cline is all over this movie, and he wants you to know the E.T. game is great. Grade: C

Death Proof (2007)

Tarantino's half of Grindhouse is mesmerizing in that Tarantino way of long, long, talky tension and then sudden release. There's not a lot to Death Proof beyond its studied commitment to certain old-school aesthetics (both the opening slasher-like half and the twisted-metal chasing of the second half are unapologetic throwbacks, right down to the grainy film and freeze-frame ending), its rambling-but-measured pacing, and its blunt-force feminism/rape-revenge metaphor, and people who call the movie "slight" aren't wrong. But it's a good time. (I talk about this movie in more detail on Episode 189 of Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.) Grade: B

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

I won't tell you that Tim Burton's adaptation isn't a disaster, because it most definitely is. But that disaster is mitigated by the saving grace that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is at least a fascinating train wreck, full of bizarre and intriguing ideas that more often than not just plain don't work together but in isolation are dazzling to think about: the garish, colorful set design that's something akin to Disney World by way of German Expressionism, the rollicking Oompa-Loompa musical sequences (each in their own musical style from across the spectrum of 20th century music), the way the film really embraces the nastiness of the book (nobody ever hated children quite so deliciously as Roald Dahl, but John August's screenplay comes pretty close), the utterly strange and uncomfortable decision to lampshade the evils of capitalism (Charlie's dad loses his low-wage factory job to automation, for example) and the fact that Willy Wonka is basically a colonizing capitalist who uses slave labor while at the same time maintaining the story's wide-eyed adoration for the Wonka brand—I could go on and on. None of this works in concert with one another, and not all of it even registers as "good" when taken in isolation. But the fact that Burton decided to mash it all together into one big nauseating gobstopper of a film remains endlessly entertaining to consider. It's one of the last glimmers (however faint) of Burton the Visionary before Burton the "I'm Trapped in a Prison of My Own Design, and Oh Please, Why Alice in Wonderland" fully overtook his career. We also hadn't quite reached the point where Johnny Depp's "celebrity impression, but with funny hats" thing had worn thin yet (to say nothing of the uncovering of his abusive behavior, which is of course inescapable now), and his Willy Wonka is a riveting, profoundly alien presence (though the Wonka Daddy Issues subplot is a huge part of why this movie doesn't work). So no, this is not good. But ask me about it—I'd love to talk. Grade: C

Whale Rider (2002)

This film's depiction of a young girl's fight against her community's patriarchal structure is maybe a bit staid, but Keisha Castle-Hughes is really, really good as the lead, Paikea, and New Zealand's Whangara community is a fascinating and (to me) unfamiliar setting in which to tell this story, however sedate. Grade: B

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

It's a movie about drug users, so you know what to expect. There's not a lot going on thematically in Drugstore Cowboy that, at this point, you wouldn't have already seen in Trainspotting or the less hysterical parts of Requiem for a Dream, though I suppose Cowboy deserves points for getting there first. It's also considerably less self-consciously "cool" and show-off-y than the aforementioned movies and a lot less ponderous than something like Leaving Las Vegas, which are also marks in its favor. Plus, the cast is excellent from top to bottom, and I appreciate the clear-eyed way in which the screenplay views its characters—affectionately, but never under the delusion that the drug-rustling protagonists nor the cops in pursuit are heroes. Grade: B

Polyester (1981)

Having seen only Hairspray years ago and now Polyester, I'm sort of backing my way into John Waters's legendarily uproarious filmography (at least, I'm led to believe). I can only imagine what lays in store for me as I explore the rest of his work, because Polyester is plenty uproarious: a relentless parody of the nuclear family that feels like the unholy lovechild of a live-action cartoon and a Ramones song. It's consistently hilarious and also oddly sweet and sad in ways I wasn't expecting. My screening also came with scratch-and-sniff Odorama cards, as John Waters intended. All ten scents all just kind of smelled like a cross between B.O. and petroleum byproduct, but maybe that was the point. Grade: A-

Property (1979)

This (criminally under-seen) movie checks a lot of my boxes: economic critiques of urban renewal, depictions of community organizing, activism, '70s bohemianism, long discussions about city planning. Property is rambly and very '70s American indie in the Altman vein, but it's also much more intimate than, say, Nashville or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or any of Altman's community-focused features. I credit the cast, which depicts this Portland, OR, community with a liveliness that threatens to pop right off the screen and join me in the meetings I go to in my own neighborhood. I relate deeply to the scenes in this movie that involve block residents just sitting around a table and trying to get stuff done in that chaotic, incredible way that anyone who's been involved in community organizing will recognize. The movie isn't perfect—most notably, it ends with an ellipsis when it should by all means have concluded pointedly with a period. But it's my favorite discovery from my time at the 2018 Big Ears festival, and it gets a big ol' thumbs up from me. Grade: A-