Movies
Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018)
As a documentary, there's nothing particularly exemplary about Won't You Be My Neighbor? and its mix of historical footage and talking head interviews. Even as an archive of Mr. Roger's craft and demeanor, it's not really anything special, as the bulk of its content was already told in Tom Junod's 1998 Esquire profile on the man (Junod himself is one of the documentary's talking heads). But the point of the movie isn't really to be informative—I mean, that's there, and it's fine, but that's not why people are reacting to this as strongly as they are, or why I did either (and based on the sheer number of people who have told me throughout my life that Mr. Roger's Neighborhood is boring, I imagine people aren't really that interested in Fred Rogers, when you get right down to it). No, above all, Won't You Be My Neighbor? is a meditation on kindness and human dignity, and in our particular cultural moment that makes very little time for kindness or meditation, there's real power in that project, to be invited into a dark room and asked for an hour and a half just to think about the worth of human beings through the avatar of an exceptionally good man. There are precious few icons in modern society—icons in the old religious sense—and even fewer of them ask us to be as introspective as Fred Rogers does. It doesn't really matter if this movie will change the world (as its most enthusiastic proponents claim) or not. There's just something fundamentally therapeutic about what this movie invites us to participate in, and for goodness sake, that's valuable. Grade: A-
Leave No Trace (2018)
Sometimes, you just have to be alone. You step into a car or an empty room or a closet and feel the isolation surround you like a blanket, no one but you and your thoughts and the quiet ticking forward of the emptiness around you. More than any other movie I've ever seen, Leave No Trace understands both the joy and the self-destructiveness of this impulse, the tension between the fundamental sociability of the human race and the reality of just how excruciating it can get to be surrounded by other humans, even humans you love. The movie dramatizes this tension wonderfully and heartbreakingly through the relationship of a girl and her father, the contours of their dynamic astoundingly mapped out by the performances of Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Foster. That Foster is out-acted by McKenzie is less an evaluation of his performance than a testament to the stunning greatness of Thomasin's, but even so, both contribute essential pieces to the movie's sharp and emotive treatise on community, modernity, and family. Grade: A-
You Were Never Really Here (2017)
The movie never coheres into a functional whole (especially once it becomes apparent that this is more or less a genre exercise), but there are some magnificent pieces: Jonny Greenwood's score, the water burial scene, the security-camera fight/massacre scene. I don't know that Joaquin Phoenix's character—either through his performance or through the film's screenplay—merits quite the amount of sympathy the movie seems to want me to feel for him, and the implications that he may be suffering from PTSD from his military deployment sometimes seem like cheap justifications for what is a much, much ethically thornier character than just that. Grade: B
Mo' Better Blues (1990)
The plot just keeps ambling on and on in this aimless fashion, like a bad jazz musician trying to improvise. But everything else about the movie—the music, the acting (Denzel in his peak years, y'all!), the cinematography (and the lighting, my goodness the the lighting is amazing and colorful and great)—is just so good that it almost makes up for it. The years-spanning sequence near the end of the film, scored by John Coltrane's "Acknowledgement," is incredible. But golly, you have to wade through some tedious two hours of go-nowhere plot to get there. Grade: B-
Books
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (1979)
Taking all ten stories as a whole, it's easy to see the formula in Carter's modernist retellings of fairy tales: transpose them into a modern context, play up the sexual subtext (and make it no longer subtextual but merely textual), subvert the roles that women play in the stories. And at times, this formula wears thin—I'm thinking of the "Beauty and the Beast" analog, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," and the "Puss-in-Boots" retelling. But it's still a noble project, and when Carter's at the top of her game—as she is in the title story's revision of "Bluebeard" and the "Little Red Riding Hood"-connected "The Company of Wolves"—the results are stunning. Grade: B
Music
Jenny Hval - The Long Sleep EP (2018)
The last we heard from Jenny Hval, that Norwegian madame of weird and wonderful music, was her 2016 album Blood Bitch, a prickly concept album about menstruation and gender roles. 2018 finds her in a better mood. The Long Sleep's 23 minutes are considerably less fractured and avant-garde than Blood Bitch—it ends, after all, with Hval saying softly into the microphone, "I just want to say thank you; I love you" over a soundscape of strings and soft guitar noise. It's beautiful in all the ways that Blood Bitch was ugly, but don't take that to mean a slackening of Hval's aesthetic; she remains fascinatingly post-structural, and her compositions are still delightfully odd and unexpected, from the hypnotic chant of "The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream" to the nearly 11-minute ambient drone of the title track. The Long Sleep is as beguiling as any music put out in 2018, and I've probably listened to it more than any other single release this year. Grade: A-
Books
Taking all ten stories as a whole, it's easy to see the formula in Carter's modernist retellings of fairy tales: transpose them into a modern context, play up the sexual subtext (and make it no longer subtextual but merely textual), subvert the roles that women play in the stories. And at times, this formula wears thin—I'm thinking of the "Beauty and the Beast" analog, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," and the "Puss-in-Boots" retelling. But it's still a noble project, and when Carter's at the top of her game—as she is in the title story's revision of "Bluebeard" and the "Little Red Riding Hood"-connected "The Company of Wolves"—the results are stunning. Grade: B
Music
The last we heard from Jenny Hval, that Norwegian madame of weird and wonderful music, was her 2016 album Blood Bitch, a prickly concept album about menstruation and gender roles. 2018 finds her in a better mood. The Long Sleep's 23 minutes are considerably less fractured and avant-garde than Blood Bitch—it ends, after all, with Hval saying softly into the microphone, "I just want to say thank you; I love you" over a soundscape of strings and soft guitar noise. It's beautiful in all the ways that Blood Bitch was ugly, but don't take that to mean a slackening of Hval's aesthetic; she remains fascinatingly post-structural, and her compositions are still delightfully odd and unexpected, from the hypnotic chant of "The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream" to the nearly 11-minute ambient drone of the title track. The Long Sleep is as beguiling as any music put out in 2018, and I've probably listened to it more than any other single release this year. Grade: A-
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