Movies
Solo is Disney's first major misstep in their curation of the Star Wars franchise, and it's a completely unforced error. They didn't have to make this movie. As the box office numbers show, few people are interested in a young Han movie—especially since, try as he might (and he does try), Alden Ehrenreich is not Harrison Ford, and if we're being honest, I think it's Harrison Ford that most of us love, not Han. I'll bet that even fewer people wanted a movie that's basically a SparkNotes version of A.C. Crispin's Han backstory trilogy from the old Expanded Universe novels (which I somehow remember with shocking clarity), certainly not one whose story is this lumpy nor whose emotional beats are this laden with doe-eyed sincerity nor whose special effects are this iffy—how is this one of the ten most expensive movies ever made?? The action setpieces at least have the decency to be a lot of fun, and I am absolutely here for Donald Glover's Lando (Glover is clearly having more fun than anyone else in front of or behind the camera). The alien design is also top-notch, and probably the most Lucas-esque thing in the whole Disney-Star-Wars franchise is the mid-movie gambling den where Han and Lando play sabacc with the Millennium Falcon at stake, populated with that same lovingly lurid marriage of rubber prosthetics and pulp sci-fi book covers that animated Mos Eisley Cantina and Jabba's palace. Still, to paraphrase our dearly beloved Harrison Solo, hokey casinos and hammy Donald Glovers are no match for a good movie on your screen, kid, and a good movie this is not. Grade: C
It's too long by at least half an hour (163 minutes? Really, Steven?), and that (and the accompanying slackness) is what separates this movie from the greats in Spielberg's filmography. But still, it remains a notable accomplishment, the first of Spielberg's mini-trend of using period pieces to comment on contemporary politics and the last of the most artistically sophisticated stretch of the man's career before he bent back around to his own cliches for a bit. Also, was there any other American movie in the period spanning 2001 to 2005 grappling so earnestly and rigorously with the moral thorns of the War on Terror as this one is? Grade: B+
Basically the best-possible outcome of the intersection between Michael Bay and Paul Verhoeven. I hope that doesn't make it sound like I'm downplaying just how tight Antoine Fuqua's direction is, because it's very tight, finding the ideal gear for this sort of walking-the-line-between-gritty-and-bombastic mainstream filmmaking. Denzel is, of course, great here—I wouldn't have picked this for his lead-actor Academy Award performance (Malcolm X is right there, guys), but it's a high-wire performance that's justly iconic. Oh, and shout-out to Terry Crews for being given basically nothing to do but stand quietly and look intimidating and KNOCKING IT OUT OF THE PARK. Grade: B+
Woody Allen and Julie Kavner have great chemistry together as the leads (probably the last time a leading Woody Allen had good chemistry with his co-lead until Scoop, another movie involving an amateur magician—coincidence??). In fact, this is probably the best Kavner has ever been in a Woody Allen feature—though that's probably because she's usually underutilized. It certainly isn't because this movie is much good, because it isn't. For a movie that was once a play now on its second adaptation, it's haphazardly scripted and only intermittently amusing, to say nothing of the uncomfortable racial dynamics. Xenophobia/nonwhite cultural caricature (the movie ends with Allen's character sneaking off in a Middle-Eastern "harem"—dressed in drag in what I'm sure is not at all an authentic garb) is a rare flavor for Allen, and it's an unsavory one. Grade: C
Paul Schrader's 1982 update of the 1942 classic is this weird mix of trash cinema and arthouse, and I gather that's kind of his thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any damn sense here. Cat People is an incomprehensible parade of nonsensical mysticism, male-gazey eroticism, and dull footage of the New Orleans zoo. The movie makes a litany of interesting and potentially rewarding decisions (setting the film in New Orleans, casting Malcolm McDowell, using that cinematography and that lighting), but it's at a complete loss as to how to put it all together. The result is a movie that's both bewilderingly bad and stultifyingly boring—a huge step down from the Tourneur original. At least the David Bowie main theme and Giorgio Moroder score are pretty good. Grade: C-
A great example of how a good movie is not just the accumulation of a lot of good ideas. New York, New York is made almost entirely out of good ideas: the lighting, the shot composition, the juxtaposition of New Hollywood grit with Old Hollywood musical artifice, the pairing of peak Liza Minnelli with peak Robert De Niro, the music, that nearly thirty-minute montage of Minnelli in out-of-context musical sequences belting out number after number—it's all good. But unfortunately, the movie is sunk by its lone bad idea, which is that all these elements should be crammed together indiscriminately into a movie nearly three hours in length. Grade: B-
Television
As with its first season, Dear White People's second season's most impressive and distinctive achievement is how it manages to personify and dramatize with shocking fidelity the contemporary political discourse surrounding race and progressive politics, while at the same time making its characters characters and not merely symbols or mouthpieces for certain political archetypes. This season has the added bonus of including several conservative and alt-right voices as well, and the effect is something like watching a Twitter thread come to life—when the characters aren't actually on social themselves, which happens in several extended sequences. That may sound unappealing (I certainly find Twitter unappealing in real life), but in practice, Dear White People is (yet again) simultaneously one of the most vital depictions of the ways modern-day ideologies interact and a razor-sharp character-based dramedy. So you get episodes like "Chapter VIII," where the entire episode revolves, bottle-episode-style, around an argument between Sam and Gabe, and it's both a bracing character moment and a breathtaking examination of the conflicts between people of color's trauma and the role of white allies' "good intentions." It's not all great. The season as a whole isn't quite as cohesive or consistent as the show's first; lacking central organizing events like the blackface party or the gun being pulled on Reggie, Season 2 has the characters drift in disparate directions that don't always tie back together, leading to the underdevelopment of some of the season's threads (Tessa Thompson shows up, e.g., but her character is far too briefly examined to have her climactic moment have weight), and though I enjoy the historical scope of this season, an extended subplot involving Ivy League secret societies is something I found hard to take seriously, right up to the strange, baffling finale. But taken as a whole, Dear White People remains audacious and riveting. There's no show on right now doing stuff like this; it's electrifying. Grade: A-
Books
The narrative voice is as fun and morose as ever, and the details of this world are still surreal and great—my favorite this time around is that the mill workers only get chewing gum to eat at lunch. However, this book is suffocated under the series's increasingly rigid formula. The narrator seems more and more aware of this formula with each successive entry, but self-awareness and meta-commentary doesn't really make it any more interesting to read the same plot beats for the fourth time in a row. Grade: B-
But now this is more like it. The Austere Academy isn't a complete break with the Series of Unfortunate Events formula, but it's enough to spice it up enough that I'm back onboard. The introduction of the Quagmire triplets as well as hints of a broader conspiracy/mystery (V.F.D.?) are relatively small additions, but they broaden the scope of the series in pleasantly evocative ways. Also, maybe it's just my profession talking, but the school-by-way-of-Kafka depiction of the titular academy is a highlight of my read-through of this series so far. There's something so very familiar about a school putting so much faith in an "advanced computer system" that ultimately fails spectacularly. Grade: B+
To say that The Ersatz Elevator is the best book in A Series of Unfortunate Events since Snicket kicked the whole thing off with The Bad Beginning isn't a statement meant to disparage the intervening four books (well, except maybe The Miserable Mill); it's more just me gushing about how big and alive and absolutely packed with ideas Elevator is. Everything the series does well is at its best in this book. The setting is hilarious, morbid, and surreal (this time, the Baudelaires are living with trendy rich people in a big-city high rise obsessed with what is "in" and what is "out"—ocean decorating becomes "in," so they spread sand and shells about their penthouse); Count Olaf's plan is arch and byzantine (involving an auction that is a front for child trafficking, basically?); Lemony Snicket's increasingly intrusive narrator is bone dry and Eeyore-ish (and he's apparently on death row?); the breadcrumbing of the series's mystery is tantalizing and effectively staged (a moment late in the novel involving a secret passage is thrilling in exactly the same way that text adventure games like Zork can be, and while I'm sure I'm the only person in the world excited by this, I'll take it); and for those playing Spot the Literary Reference with this series, there's an allusion to none other than Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which seems as much of a statement of purpose for the series as we've ever gotten. This book is the series bursting into color. This book is great. Grade: A
Music
One of the year's most fascinating and engrossing jazz records comes from Great Britain of all places. In the year of yet another royal wedding, it's cathartic and brash for Sons of Kemet to declare what they do in this album's title, and the music within is in the same spirit, each track's declaration of "My Queen" a triumphant and angry counterpoint to the title's dismissal of "Your Queen." "My Queen Is Angela Davis" one track says; "My Queen Is Harriet Tubman," says another, and yet another screams, "My Queen Is Albertina Sisulu"—each track a celebration of black women both well-known and obscure to white Western audiences (or at least to me), each track a winding groove set to the furious Afrobeat drive of the percussion and the fire of the occasional lyrics. I'm not sure if this is jazz's future or just one of its many, many historical and political tendrils that I'm only just now discovering, but it's definitely one of the definitive recordings of 2018. Grade: A-
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