Movies
In a bitter reminder that this movie was released in 2014, the height (nadir?) of the YA dystopia boom, the film adaptation of the children's lit masterpiece The Giver adds a bunch of stupid YA dystopia tropes (they're attractive teens now! there's a love interest! there's an evil dictator villain! there are action sequences! Taylor Swift is here for some reason!) to Lois Lowry's beautifully efficient sci-fi parable. Yet as much as those additions gall, the more bitter pill to swallow is just how lackluster the whole production is. The acting is languid—our lead, Brenton Thwaites, who plays Jonas (and yes, he utters the phrase "My name is Jonas" in this movie, because apparently that little chestnut was just too irresistible for our intrepid filmmakers), is worst in show, but even heavyweights like Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep are performing way under their potential here. Abysmally lazy production design makes a mockery of the film's attempt to make a pristine, utopian future (the movie's idea of a futuristic bike is just to replace the spokes with plastic discs). And the dullest cinematography and editing of all time try (unsuccessfully) to string all these things together into a functional narrative. I have to admit, even granting the infanticide, the idea of The Giver's hyper-regimented society doesn't sound too bad if it means never having to deal with the pain of a book as smart as Lowry's being adapted into a movie this stupid. Grade: D+
A strange, bleak take on the uncomfortable subtexts of superheroism—the vigilantism, the violence, the male entitlement, the delusions of grandeur, etc. This sort of thing has been done before, sometimes to more consistent effect, but there's something about the particular tone this movie strikes—like the Deadpool movies, only if they were actually serious about deconstructing the tropes of superhero stories and if Deadpool himself was, instead of being aware that he's in a comic book movie, unaware that he wasn't in a comic book movie—that's pretty compelling in pieces. On top of this, Ellen Page is unsurprisingly great (basically Juno, only with blood lust instead of Michael Cera lust), and Rainn Wilson is surprisingly great (mercifully free of the camera-mugging of Dwight Schrute). It's a real shame, then, that the ending completely forgets what kind of movie this is, concluding the film with a bizarrely tone-deaf indie-quirk sentimentality that seems to posit, "What if Taxi Driver and its ironically heroic ending, but post-Wes-Anderson and sans irony?" Grade: B
Television
Black Mirror has, like many Netflix series, a length problem. Say what you will about The Twilight Zone (and yes, references to the famous Rod Serling series are as inevitable in Black Mirror reviews as comments about Charlie Brooker's technophobia); at this that show's episodes—with the exception of the regrettable Season 4—got in and out within a brisk 25 minutes. Sometimes, a sci-fi parable just doesn't have enough ideas to go any further than that. Now that Black Mirror is on Netflix, it has virtually no restrictions as far as episode lengths, and half of the episodes in this fourth series comfortably hit the hour mark; the first episode in this set, "USS Callister," is the length of a short feature film. Unlike past series of Black Mirror, none of the episodes here are premised on a bad idea; however, almost all of the episodes overstay their welcome, stretching out their premise to cumbersome durations. It's not accident that the best episode of the bunch, "Hang the DJ," is one of the shortest (though to be fair, the worst episode here, "Metalhead," is the shortest). I like a lot of this season; in addition to "Hang the DJ," I enjoyed the very Tales-from-the-Crypt-esque "Black Museum" as well as "Arkangel" (the season's purest dose of the classic Charlie Brooker "technology is ruining our lives!"). But next time around, I hope there's a more judicious editor's eye for how these stories are told. Grade: B-
I think I'm one of the few defenders of Arrested Development's fourth season, a fascinating and ambitious experiment with the formal flexibility of the Netflix platform that was uneven but fitfully brilliant. Netflix, in the run-up to its Season 5 release, decided that it would be a good idea to re-edit Season 4 into a more traditional season that progressed in chronological order and in standard 22-minute episodes. I've decided this was a bad idea. In addition to removing the structural experimentation that was one of the most interesting things about the original Season 4, this remix frequently doesn't make sense. Very early on in the season, it becomes clear how integral the structure of the original season was to this story; recurring jokes are prematurely deployed, the existential momentum of episodes like "Flight of the Phoenix" and "Colony Collapse" is destroyed as their plots are divvied out piecemeal over the course of a whole season, and the new episodes are burdened with loads of stilted exposition attempting to stitch the old plots into this new structure. We still have the best Season 4 bits (the "Sound of Silence" motif, Michael's elaborate roommate voting scheme, etc.), but we've got a whole lot of dysfunction along with it. I want family dysfunction when I come to Arrested Development, Netflix, not structural dysfunction. Grade: C+
Books
I wish there was more to this book. For the son of one of Evangelicalism's most prominent leaders to become an open secular humanist after years of Christian ministry is a major event, and the fact that these two men are willing to engage respectfully in a book-length conversation about their beliefs and the ways that the other's beliefs affect their own is a vital premise. But as slim as this book is (not even 200 pages), there really isn't much room for either party to give but the most familiar overview of their respective beliefs and talk past each other in the familiar ways that Evangelicals and secular humanists tend to do. We need books like these, but we need them to be willing to be a lot thornier and more raw and more in-depth than this one ever is. Grade: B-
In comparison to the movie (which I can't help, since I saw it so recently), the original graphic novel's meandering, episodic structure feels much truer to life than the movie's offbeat strain of romanticism, and hence, the character moments land a lot more strongly (particularly with Rebecca, whose character is totally underserved by the film). But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a better time with the movie's plot, and in both, I'm left a little uncomfortable with the lackadaisical way that both film and book treat the casual homophobia and general dismissiveness of others in their protagonists (though I'd be lying again if I pretended that this attitude wasn't shared by me and my friends when we were adolescents). Regardless, it's a funny and poignant little capsule of late-Gen-X/early-Millennial white America, and I'm glad I live in a world with both the book and the film. Grade: B+
I hadn't read this in a very long time, so I guess my re-read deserves a review. Asimov's central idea here—following, via short stories set generations apart from one another, the gradual dissolution of a galactic empire into a dark age—is intoxicating, and it's reasonably well-executed. The book is lousy with great sci-fi ideas, too, like the way that a limited application of nuclear energy leads to the founding of a galactic religion. Still, as always when I read Asimov these days, I do wish there was more of a human element to his writing; we're mainly dealing in the realm of intelligent, unflappable men (and it's always men—where are you, Susan Calvin??) stroking their beards as they try to solve problems. It's never not engaging, but without a reason to care about the chin-stroking human beings we meet, it's rarely riveting. Grade: B
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