Movies
Was definitely not expecting Aardman Animation's prehistoric feature to turn out to be a slobs vs. snobs soccer comedy, and I'm not sure it needed to be. It's reasonably cute, the ducks are fun, and the stop-motion craft is of course impeccable. But I dunno, I was kind of hoping for something that didn't so strictly adhere to such a well-trodden narrative structure—maybe something that was a bit more creative with its prehistoric setting than that Flintstones "modern Stone Age" thing. Definitely Aardman's weakest feature. Grade: C+
I never believed in Santa Claus, but really, isn't believing in the Richard Kelly of the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko the same thing? The Box is the cinematic equivalent of sneaking downstairs late December 24th and seeing your parents eating the cookies you left for Santa. It's a frustrating half measure of a movie—not enough of that mad scientist energy to make me forget the script's abysmal clunkiness (though a mid-film sequence involving the same psychedelic, sci-fi water from Donnie Darko is a step in the right direction); too explainy and literal to hide the stupidity of that mad scientist energy to begin with. I suppose this is all there in Donnie Darko, too, but in exactly the right proportions to make that movie great. But after seeing this movie's po-faced silliness, it's hard not to think of Donnie Darko as the most improbable of accidents. Grade: C+
I hate to say that they don't make this kind of movie anymore, but... they kind of don't, at least not with the acclaim and publicity that greeted Michael Clayton in 2007. Whether or not you think that's a bad thing probably depends on how much you like this sort of stiff-lipped, male-centric, upper-middle-class-lawyers-do-thriller-stuff thing. I can take them or leave them, but I'll take Michael Clayton, a movie that's propulsive and thoughtful and unrepentantly adult-targeted without actually being high-brow, which, like, I dunno. That feels like a rarity. It's not a great achievement or anything, but it is a handsome, engaging one. Grade: B
This movie's lone new idea is the way the terminators (classic Ahhnold and the new, female-coded T-X [Kristanna Loken]) play with gender—Arnold donning the sparkly star-shaped glasses he's borrowed from a male stripper, Loken's T-X exploiting conventional beauty standards for evil, etc. This abandoned almost before it starts, though (Arnold disappointingly tosses away the stripper glasses in favor of his iconic black ones), and what we're left with instead is a paint-by-numbers approach to the thematic and action beats of the first two Terminator movies, with an assist from some sub-par turn-of-the-millennium CGI (which, as it goes with these franchises [just ask Jurassic Park] somehow looks worse than anything in its early '90s entry). It's not bad, but it's got none of the inventiveness—neither narrative nor visual—that made the first two movies sci-fi action classics. We're left instead with a movie that feels generic and familiar rather than innovative and exciting. Plus, there's an egregious waste of Claire Danes, which is somewhat unforgivable (if not to be expected). Grade: C
At this point, there's basically nothing left of the Scream series besides self-reflexivity. Scream 3 isn't scary, its mystery is convoluted and uninteresting, but the whole movie is about the in-world movie adaptation of this movie being made as the events are happening; there's also bit where Neve Campbell walks through the set of the original Scream film in an inversion of that movie's narrative beats. None of this is particularly smart or even makes much of a point. But there's something impressive about the sheer pileup of meta. Grade: C+
Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn's obligatory coming-to-grips-with-our-mortality movie, and while I don't really understand the enormous heap of awards the movie garnered upon release (come on, y'all, this is basically a Lifetime movie), there fact that this stars Fonda and Hepburn cannot be undersold. They're quite fun. Some of the cinematography is quite nice, too, in a Currier and Ives sort of way. Shame about that score, though—I guess waiting rooms need to get their music somewhere. Grade: C+
Television
It's possible that I'm just getting tired of this show. I've seen a lot of people calling Season 5 a return to form for Silicon Valley after the uneven Season 4. But at least unevenness means there are some highs, and by my money, S5 is basically all mediocrity. The moral inquiry of Season 4 is largely jettisoned in favor of making all the characters preening douchebags (which they kind of always were, but at least they were reliably funny in the earlier seasons), and while it seems to have ultimately been for the best for the show's publicity and work environment that T. J. Miller has left, his absence leaves a weird imbalance that turns Jian Yang—always a questionable character, though reliably funny as a karmic thorn in Erlich's side—into this uncomfortable villain character that doesn't work at all. There's also the issue that with Cambridge Analytica and the litany of social irresponsibilities that have plagued the tech industry for the past year or so, the rest of the world has finally caught up with the show's cynicism about the tech world, which makes the series's skewering of Silicon Valley sanctimony feel less fresh than in the past. More than anything, while the show isn't terrible, it isn't really that funny anymore, which, given that for four years it was one of the most reliably funny things on TV, is a big disappointment. Grade: B-
Books
This is a book of Big Ideas, and its main one in particular—a pair of immortal African shape-shifters crashing through American history as they breed a family of super-powered African-Americans—is a great one. It's thoughtful and frequently intriguing, but, like most Big Ideas books, it also feels a little cold. Butler—though a strong plotter and philosopher—never quite manages to rouse her prose to the task of breathing passion into the story. Even at its most emotionally charged, the story feels told at a distance. When you're dealing with the sweep of hundreds of years of history, I suppose that's inevitable. Grade: B
Music
I didn't end up doing this guy's discography for my summer project, so I may as well give little capsule reviews here. Anyway, his debut. A mostly forgotten record, and not without reason—it's an eclectic and wildly uneven collection of songs that veers from Celtic-sounding folk to jazz fusion to strummy singer-songwriter stuff to experimental indie pop to parody rock to ????, forming an album that's less an album than it is 73 minutes of demos slapped together onto a CD (which it kind of is). That said, there are very few debuts that so thoroughly establish the exact spectrum of sounds that an artist will touch in his career (The Velvet Underground & Nico is another). Within this album's jarring tonal shifts and formless mix-matchery, it's possible to hear almost everything that will eventually endear Sufjan to the wider world: his literary preoccupations, his deconstructive Age of Adz tendencies, the orchestral folk of his States albums, the quiet finger-picking of Carrie & Lowell. I mean, it's nowhere near as good as any of those later records, but it's fascinating to hear the seeds of all these ideas here. Grade: B-
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