Movies
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
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-
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+
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+
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 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+
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