Movies
As the rare American film not only to float a viciously satirical premise but to actually follow that satirical mode all the way to its end credits, Sorry to Bother You is noteworthy; as a film crammed to the brim with a consistently inventive aesthetic—especially with costuming and mis en scène, which overflow with righteous anger and barbed metaphors—Sorry to Bother You is pristine; as a satire able to maintain not just its political messaging but also consistently hilarious dialogue and incident throughout (even if that hilarity is often of the sticks-in-the-throat kind), Sorry to Bother You is worth your time; as the sharpest middle finger to the American capitalistic ruling class I've seen in years, Sorry to Bother You is essential. In what is proving to be an exceptionally good year for film, Sorry to Bother You is easily one of the best. If it scares you between the laughs, good. I was scared. You guys know that Amazon is still ducking its taxes, right? Grade: A
Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy are utterly fantastic as the leads, a pair of, uh, thoroughbred rich kids who plot to kill an irritating stepfather. They're good enough to justify the time spent on this movie, though the dialogue helps, too, a succession of quips and verbal sparring matches you could practically cut your fingers on if you aren't careful. That said, the movie is oddly languid in its pacing, given its content, and it lacks the satiric bite of Heathers, the movie Thoroughbreds desperately wants to be. Still, it's a good enough, mean enough time. Grade: B
A particularly raw and inventive coming-out story whose cinematography and lighting are frequently gorgeous and whose score—while maybe butting against self-parody in its relentlessly earnest evocation of M83-esque '80s revival—is lush and evocative. The flights of dark fantasy this movie gives its narrative to mirror its protagonist's state of mind (e.g. one particularly memorable scene in which he vomits what seem to be dozens and dozens of metal screws) is something I really liked, though I'm not sure we needed a talking hamster. Grade: B+
Basically Polanski's Repulsion, which is cool—I love that movie, and I'm glad to have another movie revisit its stylistic and thematic flourishes, even at a slightly less compelling register. Darling is too reliant on its strobe effects and its habit of doing little musical stings at edits gets old. I'm also not really sure how much empathy the movie affords to our protagonist, which is a key piece of Repulsion's success. But this film also has some tremendous b&w cinematography, and Lauren Ashley Carter is a great lead. Grade: B
Lives up to its reputation as the series weak link. There is exactly one good setpiece here, the part in Seville when Tom Cruise meets Thandie Newton, and even that's less of a setpiece than a sort of intricate ASMR experiment, what with the rustling of dresses and tapping of dancing feet. The gun play isn't even that good, and isn't that supposed to be John Woo's thing? Grade: C
I won't say I wasn't ever bored or restless during this 78-minute feature by avant-garde pioneer Stan Brakhage, because I was, especially during the interminable "Part I." I also don't know what I would have made of this movie if before watching it I hadn't listened to Brakhage himself explain his envisioned narrative framework of a dude and his dog climbing a mountain and then cutting down Yggdrasil for firewood. But given all that, I did find this movie more captivating than not; the imagery that flickers across the screen is frequently stunning, and there's a deeply mythic, even apocalyptic feel to the juxtaposition of solar flares, barren mountainsides, and footage of live, sticky human organs. Grade: B
Music
Some very lush, slightly ominous ambient music with an entrancing backbone of house beats. I fell asleep to this guy's music at the Big Ears festival in March, and it was like being swaddled in the middle of a deep, nocturnal forest—i.e. a great experience. Grade: B+
A step down from Bowie's weirdo '90s renaissance, but it's alright. "Thursday's Child" is a solid album opener, and late-album tracks like "New Angels of Promise" and "The Dreamers" take pretty standard '90s AOR tropes and makes them just strange enough to feel like Bowie's own thing (are those flutes at the beginning of "New Angels"?). Anyway, the middle of the album is maybe a bit more paint-by-numbers than it should be, but it's never actively bad like Bowie's worst can be, and at times it's quite good. So I'm counting this a win, despite some all-time-terrible album artwork. Grade: B
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