Movies
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-
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
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+
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
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+
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
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-
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
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-
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+
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
I was surprised at how much I liked Field of Dreams (I just saw it a few months ago). I also didn't think it great, but I would've given it a B+ prior to you pointing out its similarity to the "thoroughly wonderless faith-based genre." I like that point about the faith movies.
ReplyDeleteI liked the movie a lot more than I thought I would (I watched it basically just to say I had). I appreciate just how quickly it gets down to business--10 minutes into the movie, the dude hears voices and makes the field, which is a plot I thought would take the whole movie.
DeleteI wonder if the thing separating my lukewarm take from your more enthusiastic one is how Midwestern the movie is. Maybe being from the Midwest is an essential part of really liking this movie, ha.