Mini-Reviews for April 30 - May 6, 2018

Reviews, get 'em while they're hot.

Movies

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

I could go on and on about the narrative problems of a movie that—to name one particularly nagging instance—involves a stone that only allows one to rewind time when the plot requires it, but I imagine the internet has already hashed out those nitpicks. Instead, let's talk about the action scenes in this movie. Throughout most of the movie's 149-minute runtime (!!!!![!!!!!!{!!!!!!!}]), I was concentrating very hard on why the action in this movie felt so unsatisfying, and I think I've arrived at it. In this movie, we have:

1. A dude who can manipulate time and space

2. a reformed Russian spy

3. a mind-reading lady with insect antennae

4. a tech genius with an army of nano gadgets

5. a sentient A.I.

6. a sentient tree

7. a witch who can hypnotize people and move things with her mind

8. a teenager who shoots spider web out of his wrists

9. an ex-U.S. Air Force guy who flies around on a jet pack

10. a purple, Malthusian space god who, midway through the film, acquires an object that allows him to literally alter reality

11. and like a bazillion other folks, all with different abilities and backstories.

And yet in the action scenes, these powers manifest themselves (with very few exceptions) in one of two ways: punch or zap. Remember the ending of Doctor Strange, when he beats the bad guy by putting him in a time loop? That was pretty neat. But in Infinity War, there are no time loops; Doctor Strange just shoots orange mystical energy from his fists. In Infinity War's action scenes, there are only collision and explosion. Where are the exciting and creative stagings of fight sequences? Lost in a sea of generic punches and zaps. And it's really dull, y'all. I'm being overly harsh to prove a point: it's not the premise of this movie I'm against—it's that, at several key points, the movie's execution veers unnecessarily into this unimaginative territory that is disappointing for a movie about magic space rocks and muscular, green supercreatures. You'll notice by the grade that I'm not completely against this movie—I'm even skewing positive. I like a lot of what's here: Thanos is the next in the recent wave of really interesting MCU villains; the ending is genuinely surprising (even if it feels suspiciously like a Whedon-esque thing of having tragedy be more shocking than meaningful); the plot is propulsive; the character interactions are fun ("I am Groot"; "I am Steve Rogers"). I'm just saying that for a movie that's supposed to be the culmination of the MCU thus far, it feels oddly like a flattening of its possibilities. Grade: B-

The Commuter (2018)

I was really enjoying this B-grade mystery set on a train, because it's set on a train and it's a mystery—solid pedigree there. But then about 2/3 of the way through it ceases to be a mystery and becomes more of an action movie, and right around that time, the train derails. A fitting metaphor, maybe, but I was really just distressed that we didn't get to see the end of the line, which was what I was looking forward to. Grade: B-

Tully (2018)

This Jason-Reitman-directed, Diablo-Cody-written feature is something like the intersection of that pair's last two collaborations—the quippiness and domestic observations of Juno bumping up against the existential despair and psychological turmoil of Young Adult. Tully is a much darker film than advertised, though that's not really clear until the film's final, heartbreaking act. But when it gets there—oof. It's a movie at once about the toll of motherhood and about the malaise of becoming older and more boring in the interest of protecting your children, and if it doesn't all quite work (the movie is far too cagey about its actual endgame, for one), enough of it does that the end product is pretty affecting. Grade: B+

Arabian Nights (As Mil e uma Noites) (2015)

Whereas Miguel Gomes's previous film, Tabu (one of this decade's finest films, no less), seemed positively drunk with the way that cinema allows for a hermetically sealed, controllable version of reality, Arabian Nights swings hard in the opposite direction, replacing the pure-cinema flourishes of Tabu for an aggressively realist one—an impulse that's delightfully incongruous with the film's fantasy trappings (the title isn't a juke—it is, after all, a reinterpretation of The Arabian Nights). It's as much documentary as it is fantasy film, and more than either of those, this is a fiercely political film. Each story in these "Arabian Nights" is set in and critiques the world of Portugal's policies of economic austerity, and the film's grounding in a documentary (or at least documentary-like) format forces us to reckon with the reality of economic austerity's ugly consequences within the fantasy sequences. It's the opposite of fantasy escapism, and while I will cop to being bored for LARGE sections of this movie (and I will also cop to my being mostly ignorant of Portuguese politics, which may have influenced the boringness), I can't deny the power of its premise nor the scorched earth of its satire. Grade: B

Henry Gamble's Birthday Party (2015)

It's a movie that's honestly and critically engaging with the Evangelical Christian moral paradigm, which is something I very much appreciate. There are also some nicely lyrical moment involving underwater cinematography, which I also appreciate. But there's no getting around the way that the stilted writing and acting create line deliveries in that unnatural, modular way that often comes out of the low-budget indie realm (or even... *gulp* the faith-based film industry, whose aesthetic this movie echoes either unfortunately accidentally or slyly purposefully, I can't decide)—something writer/director Stephen Cone thankfully worked through much better in his follow-up, Princess Cyd. And as much as I do love the extremely self-conscious Evangelicalism on display, I can't help but feel that the film's plot may have been just a tad too eager to cram in every single buzz-worthy Christian-world critique out there—in this one 80-min movie, we get body image, sexuality, alcohol, trauma, infidelity, repression, suicide, pornography, and more, and it feels a little overstuffed. Still, I'd rather a movie try and not quite succeed at this kind of urgent Evangelical scrutiny than not have tried at all. Grade: C+

300 (2006)

[Michael Bluth looking into a paper bag labeled "Dead Dove"]—"I don't know what I expected." Grade: D

Television

A.P. Bio, Season 1 (2018)

You've seen this before: dude loses his job and becomes a teacher, only he's a bad teacher and doesn't really teach and instead manipulates his students for his own gains. I liked it better when it was called School of Rock, because at least that had Jack Black doing his intense guitar-playing thing. In A.P. Bio, we have Glenn Howerton and a bunch of supporting cast that the show never really figures out how to use and no guitar. I'll give the show this: its commitment to avoiding sentiment is nice, and the cast of kids playing the students is excellent. But as far as plots go, as far as genuine laughs go, this is pretty thin. Grade: C+

Music

Preoccupations - New Material (2018)

The band's... uh... new material doesn't have anything nearly as good as "Death" (is this band ever going to top that??) or even "Degraded" from their last album. But Preoccupations is admirably staying the course as the 2010s post-punk torchbearers, and New Material, despite lacking some of the highs of previous efforts, is not some slack effort. More so than on Viet Cong or Preoccupations, texture is at the front of the band's mind here, and there are some delicious, thick slices of production on this album involving synths and percussion. It's good stuff. Grade: B+