Movies
As with the first Incredibles and Objectivism, this movie makes it uncomfortably easy to make a very uncharitable reading of Incredibles 2 re: support of a police state and the dismissal of BLM and other grassroots, media-driven law-enforcement critique as conspiracy. So I'll just leave that there for the grad students. More generously, I'd say Incredibles 2 simply lacks thematic cohesion, and the careful character arcs of the first movie are gone in favor of character chemistry, which is an adequate (if not entirely satisfying) substitute. But enough negativity; all gripes aside, I will sing from the rooftops that, after all the Marvel movies upon Marvel movies that end in incoherent, generic CG, we finally, finally, FINALLY have a movie that understands how to build an action scene with superhero teams—not just coherent action scenes but action scenes that positively sparkle with ideas and kineticism and the unbridled joy of the form that superheroes should encourage in our films but rarely do. When I complain about the punch-kick blandness of the fight scenes in something like Infinity War, Incredibles 2 is the sort of thing I have in mind as the polar opposite. Whatever other flaws this movie has (and it has them, for sure), there is always the exquisite poetry of this film in motion. Stand and salute the best-choreographed superhero movie, perhaps of all time. Grade: B+
The Endless (2017)
Like this film's sort-of prequel, Resolution, The Endless is a nice slice of cosmic horror mixed with metacommentary on filmmaking itself, though also like Resolution, this is maybe more clever than it is good. But the ideas are super interesting, and even if we don't ever get anything as cool as the movie poster, I enjoyed this more than not. Grade: B
Deathgasm (2015)
I watched this because I've had good experiences with New Zealand horror comedies, and I'm always down for some tongue-in-cheek riffing on heavy metal culture. But lord, this movie is dreadful. It's neither scary nor funny, though I suppose gore hounds may get a kick out of some of the splatter here, and worse, every female character (all two of them, three if you count the woman who only appeals to reveal that she's been performing fellatio on a guy under a desk the whole scene—this is the kind of movie Deathgasm is) seemingly exists solely to appear topless or otherwise be lusted after as a sexual object. Is it too much to ask that my demons-disemboweled-by-power-tools movie be free of ugly sexism? Grade: D
Crooklyn (1994)
It courses with life in the way the best Spike Lee joints do. Lee's beloved Brooklyn is rendered magical and dangerous through the PoV of Troy, a girl growing up with her brothers and parents in a brownstone—the camera captures her family life with the subjectivity of Troy's own experiences, the constant movement of imagery showing the vibrancy Troy's warm but troubled interior life, while the occasional lens manipulation and purposeful areality evoke key moments of alienation and trauma. Like the Radio Days of Lee's obvious inspiration, Woody Allen, Crooklyn is more a collection of memory flashes, nostalgia mixed with genuine heartbreak and strange loose threads, than it is a traditional story, and when the movie most gestures toward a firm narrative structure (the somewhat unsuccessful ending, in which tragedy feels like an artificial imposition of drama, however true to the autobiographical nature of the film), it stumbles. But at its best—and its best is some of Spike Lee's best in general—the film is tremendous. Scripted by Spike and his brother and sister, Crooklyn has the warmth of lived experience. Some moments, like the recurring scenes in which the young siblings sit in front of the television, singing along with the Partridge Family or cheering on the Knicks, could only be the product of shared memories, and they're wonderful—like we're hearing adult siblings reminisce and lightly bicker over an photo album. Grade: A-
Always (1989)
I'd have to go back and rewatch Hook and The Lost World to figure out if Spielberg has a worse movie. But why in the world would I want to do that? I can instead find comfort in the bitter ambiguity that Always, this tedious piece of lifeless schmaltz, just might be the worst thing my boy Steven ever directed. There are of course some nice shots and pieces of lighting, because we're dealing with one of the great formal masters of modern American filmmaking, but I could have just looked those up online and saved myself the tepid romance and unintentionally creepy dynamic of ghost Richard Dreyfuss setting up his ex-wife (Holly Hunter) with some rando he speaks through like a Cyrano de Bergerac demon possession. John Goodman isn't even good here. Grade: D+
More American Graffiti (1979)
I am completely shocked to report that the sequel to American Graffiti is, in fact, WORTH YOUR TIME. What I had assumed was going to be a Happy Days spinoff is actually an ambitious and somewhat complex interpretation of the mid-to-late '60s. Tracking the original cast (minus Richard Dreyfuss) through four cross-cut New Year's Eves from 1964 through 1967, the movie uses a different film format for each year (Super 16 for its Vietnam-set 1965, handheld split-screen documentary style for the psych-rock-scened 1966, etc.), mirroring the explosion of visual media in the back half of the decade as it captures protests, hippies, and a bunch of other hallmarks of the era. Some of this rings of "haha, remember The Sixties??", but far less of it than I would have suspected. The film's rollicking, hijinks-ish feel disrupts the profound melancholy of the original American Graffiti's ending, which is unfortunate. But this is way better than I thought it was going to be and occasionally profound in its own small way. Grade: B
Books
Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King (1992)
If this isn't Stephen King's finest novel, then it's very, very close to the top. I'm not sure why it isn't mentioned in the same breath as genre titans like The Stand and Carrie; perhaps it's because Dolores Claiborne is something of a formal experiment for King, not a novel with chapters and shifting points of view as in the standard King piece but more of a 300-page monologue by the titular character, without section breaks or chapter titles or anything novels usually use to demarcate physical space. It's just us and Dolores, and the result is one of the warmest, richest characters Stephen King has ever penned. The first-person narration allows King to indulge in his love for dialect and colloquialism—Dolores is nothing if not colloquial—and while this indulgence is often a liability in King's more traditional novels, as an unending stream from this one particular character without any breaks from that voice, the language becomes a world unto itself, this coiling, self-referential idiom that fits the central tragedy of the main character and conveys her experiences with an alternatingly brusque and intimate manner. And those experiences—the novel's plot isn't complex (essentially, it's a domestic drama disguised as a murder mystery), but what it gives us instead is an uncommonly generous, affectionate portrait of Dolores herself as she recounts the two major relationships of her life: those with her employer Vera and her husband Joe. The empathy and sweetness of the novel is breathtaking—in particular, in its depiction of the thorny bond between Vera and Dolores—and the way it shows the weight of life's accumulating tragedies on one's own soul is heartbreaking, to say nothing of the way this dovetails with the novel's discussions of gender dynamics in 20th century America. Even if you aren't a Stephen King person, I'd highly recommend seeking this out. It's a masterpiece. Grade: A
Music
Sufjan Stevens - Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001)
The early career of Sufjan Stevens is an odd one, in the sense that he seems to have hashed out all his wide-reaching stylistic preoccupations one by one before even attempting to make a truly good album. His debut, A Sun Came, sees Sufjan throwing together a collection of demos that show his various indie and rock-adjacent proclivities; five years later, he released Enjoy Your Rabbit, an album in which he makes a test run of all his electronic impulses. The resulting record is similarly meandering and overlong, and as in A Sun Came, not all the different experiments really work here. It's basically 80 minutes of glitch electronica, something I've never been a huge fan of, and the cluttered sound has the feel of Sufjan just throwing every production technique he can think of into the mix just to see what happens. But thankfully, this album has an organizing principle that gives it a structure (it's about the Chinese zodiac, basically), which makes it a more cohesive listen than A Sun Came. It's still an oddity, mostly for completists. But it's at least one conceived as an album, rather than the disjointed eclecticism of A Sun Came. Grade: B-
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