Movies
To say that BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee's best movie in years—however true that is—undersells the merits of Lee's other recent output and understates some of the flaws of this film: most significantly, how its characters—and not just its white supremacist ones either but also its black activists and even its protagonist—are all kind of broadly painted and undercooked, given ideological speeches instead of interior depth. But on the other hand, BlacKkKlansman is without a doubt Lee's most driven film in years and the most Lee has had his finger to the pulse of the national mood since maybe The 25th Hour (a welcome change from, for example, the weirdly out-of-sync Chi-Raq). Animated with a punk-rock fury that rages at everything from 1910s Hollywood racism all the way up to the evils of the current Oval Office, the film is a polemic that truly burns, one whose narrative constantly reminds us of the connection between the past and the present (it would be too cute a touch that these 1970s characters keep spouting contemporary catchphrases like "America First" and "Make America Great Again" if it didn't feel like such a punch to the face every time), and whose ending montage feels like the universe of the film being rent in two, Persona-style, by our current political moment. That ending (I won't spoil it, but fair warning: it involves documentary footage of a very recent and public death) walks right up to the line of being exploitative, I think, but it fits with the directive of this movie, which, for as much as it couches its beats in humor (it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call at least 60% of this movie a straight-up comedy), is to upset viewers and shake them out of the complacency that Hollywood period pieces invite. "Wake up" is a phrase Lee has used throughout his career, and it makes another appearance here. In this case, though, the irony is that you can't wake up. It's all nightmare, all the way down. Grade: A-
There isn't a lot to this movie, and what there is, the movie spells out again and again: Brady is a bronco rider who, due to a recent head injury, must never ride again, but who also, because of the various social and psychological pressures of being a poor man with few career prospects, desperately feels he must ride again. It's a fine idea, but the movie is far too eager to make sure we all understand it and doesn't really give much to think about except the inevitability of Brady's self-destructiveness once you get the film's thesis. Then there's how Brady is played by actual rodeo rider Brady Jandreau, and the rest of the movie is similarly thinly veiled documentary. I've been knocked for saying things like this before, but given the vacancy of Brady's performance in the film's dramatic pieces and the fact that the most interesting parts of the movie are the wordless footage of these actors just existing in their everyday lives both within the rodeo and without, I truly think this movie would have been much stronger if it had just gone full documentary. Still, there is some amazing landscape photography in the film's cinematography, and the pieces of the movie that gesture most toward documentary are very good indeed, probably worth enduring some of the script's clunkier bits of thematic exposition. Grade: B
Being a sucker for animation can lead you into some dark alleys. I may have found the darkest alley of them all in Sausage Party. I hated every minute of this stupid, juvenile movie, from its hideous, sub-Illumination-Entertainment animation to its atrocious character designs to its pointlessly vulgar script to its incongruous reliance on racial stereotypes (which, like—wtf, movie; you'd think a story about sentient groceries would be the one place guaranteed to be free of racist humor). This is the sort of movie where a bagel and a lavash fighting is a parody of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and where the visual similarities between genitalia and a hot dog/bun form a central piece of the plot (and confusingly, the sex positions in the movie's orgiastic finale seems to posit that these groceries are not just genitalia themselves but also possess genitalia, which just raises further questions), and I just... there's just no other way to put this: man, I hated it. Its humor (assuming we allow talking vegetables saying R-rated profanities and talking about sex to count as "humor," since that's about all this movie has by way of "jokes") is vapid and tediously unfunny and far too impressed of its own ability to say "fuck," and the themes are, uh, shall we say, undercooked. About those themes, too: since this movie wants so desperately to be taken seriously in its theology (I know, right?), I think it's entirely fair to complain that the movie's insistence that hedonism is the best response to theism (I can't believe I'm typing this about an insipid talking hot dog movie) is the least-interesting critique of organized religion possible, especially when said theism is a cover for gods who literally devour you and your peers; seriously, the most pressing issue here is sexual gratification? Not that sexual liberation is a worthless endeavor, but this movie isn't really about sexual liberation (though there are a few gestures toward the way that organized religion shames sexuality, esp. for women); it's about dudes getting their rocks off, which makes the film's narrative bereft of even the significance of liberation. This movie's characters face an existential threat of literally biblical proportions, and the best alternative is just to have a gigantic orgy? What about individual dignity? What about human (grocery?) rights? What about justice? What about the unstoppable entropy of the universe? What about beauty, art, and meaning? This is the thing I hate most about this movie, that it dares to reach beyond its sordid premise of hot dog = penis into the realm of some very prickly philosophy, only then to say, "Who cares; at least we can have sex"—how very college freshman of the movie, and what a completely boring answer to the problems of theism. And we didn't even get any funny dick jokes out of it. Grade: D-
I guess given that Saoirse Ronan is a delight and Joe Wright is usually at least stylistically interesting and the Chemical Brothers are pretty cool that I should have expected a movie starring Saoirse Ronan, directed by Joe Wright, and scored by the Chemical Brothers to be more than the generic action thriller I was preparing myself for. There are some legitimately breathtaking moments of cinematography/mis-en-scène synergy in this film, and any movie that stages the climactic showdown between heroine/villain with the villain coming out of a tunnel shaped like the jaws of a gigantic wolf is going to get positive marks from me. That said, given the director, there's really no excuse for the number of generic visuals and action beats existing right alongside some of the really cool visuals, and the editing is really choppy—you can do better than some of this, Joe! Moreover, I'm not sure that all the cool fairy-tale visual flair adds up to a complete picture—which, (again) given the director, I guess I should have expected, too. Still, when it's good, it's mighty good, and I am all for idiosyncratic blockbuster fare like this, even when it isn't entirely successful. More wolf mouths, please. Grade: B
Airplane II: The Sequel apparently decided that the funniest parts of the original movie were the parts that have aged the least well—the sexual humor, some of the racial dynamics, the random topless women (seriously, does this movie set a record for boobs in a PG movie, even in the pre-PG-13 era?)—so of course this movie doubles down on all that. It might have been able to pull off at least something decent if it were at all tuned into the specific goofy wavelength of its predecessor. But alas, Airplane II: The Sequel steps over that weird invisible line that divides Airplane!'s transcendently straight-faced silliness from the desperate zaniness of hoping that something, anything sufficiently absurd will be funny. It again might have pulled it off if it was willing to go to some truly absurd places, but this movie is just kind of lazy about that, too, and we're just left with a movie that wants very badly to hit upon something even half as brilliant as "don't call me Shirley" but can't muster anything more sophisticated than the dialogue equivalent of drawing mustaches onto the pictures in a magazine. Grade: C-
Television
This revisionist take on Anne of Green Gables continues to have the strengths and weaknesses of last year's debut season, only even more so. The cast is on-point, especially Amybeth McNulty (who plays Anne with the perfect balance of enthusiasm and desperation—and kudos to the show for making Anne as occasionally irritating as she would likely be in real life), and the series's gestures toward infusing its characters with modern psychological concepts like PTSD and trauma often yields moving character beats. But at the same time, that impulse to modernize its characters also contributes to the series's occasional ludicrousness, too, especially when dealing with social issues, which the show tackles with a definitely "let's have the characters approach this from a 2018 perspective but pretend it's still the early 20th century" kind of way that's irritatingly anachronistic. More ludicrous still is the show's penchant for melodrama and even pulp, two things I'm not inherently opposed to but that are ill fits for the more soft-spoken dramedy this show is going for. Like, for example, did we need a multi-episode arc involving grifters faking a gold rush in Avonlea? Did we need Gilbert Blythe to go all Captains Courageous and sail to the Caribbean and fight slavery and aide romances and deliver babies (apparently, Gil knows how to do everything, which is another aspect of the show's ludicrousness)? Anne with an E's wild veering between tender, small-stakes coming-of-age and somewhat outrageous adventure serial plotting reminds me a lot of the Little House on the Prairie TV show from the '70s, and my overall response to this is similar to what I've always felt about that other one: good enough that it's not a pain to watch, but clearly too devoted to silliness to actually measure up to its full potential. Grade: B-
As much as I enjoyed the supernatural police procedural elements of Angel's Season 1, I've got to admit, once it became clear that this was all Season 2 was going to be, I was a little disappointed, especially since Angel's Monsters of the Week are never nearly so inventive as their parallels on Buffy (which was, concurrent with Angel's second year, in the midst of its very good Season 5—there ain't no "The Body" here, folks). Plus, Angel himself is just not that interesting of a character, a mere pileup of brooding male archetypes that's only sometimes engaging and rarely fun. That said, the other characters (gotta love Cordelia and Wesley) are a good enough time that I stuck it out, which is good, because the ending of this season throws off all semblance of procedural and quickly becomes bonkers in the best way possible, transforming the show from a Perry Mason analogue into some strange beast that resembles none other than Xena: Warrior Princess. It's great. Great enough that I guess I'll stick around for Season 3. Grade: B
Music
In what is shaping up to be a very good year for jazz, Collagically Speaking may just be the best of the bunch. R+R=Now, a supergroup featuring Terrace Martin, Christian Scott, and Robert Glasper, among others, plays a tight fusion that intersects jazz with contemporary R&B and hip-hop (even trap) punctuated by occasional spoken word pieces from celebrities like Terry Crews, resulting in a vibrant, inventive hour-plus that's frequently stunning and never boring. People talk about modern jazz being old and dying and out-of-touch, and maybe some of it is. But there's no better exhibition of how the current wave of young jazz musicians is putting the genre in conversation with other commercial genres that R+R=Now. Jazz isn't dead. It's reborn. Grade: A-
I'm finally out of the woods (the mildly pleasant woods, at that) of Sufjan's early albums and now emerging into the sunlight of his output that everyone seems to like. Count me in on that. Michigan (or, at iTunes and the CD cover want me to call it, Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State) is an extremely good album that tones waaaay down the dissonance and structural experimentation of Sufjan's first two albums and instead refines his folk-rock flourishes. Only it's not really folk rock; I mean, some of it is ("Romulus," for example—a very good song), but the majority of it is filled so fully to the brim with lush, unconventional instrumentation and swirling arrangements that it transcends the Americana roots of Sufjan's singer-songwriter foundations and becomes almost orchestral. In fact, large sections of this album's music relies on repetition and looping measures to such a degree that it resembles a Philip-Glass-style minimalism as much as it does folk music, and I dig that quite a bit. On a different note, I guess I was expecting Sufjan Stevens's touted "Fifty States Project" to be a bit more gimmicky, but the songs here are real songs, not just the postcards impressions of the album's song titles and cover—I'm not sure if I'm disappointed that Sufjan didn't go in that kitsch direction or not. But anyway, this is good stuff. Grade: A-
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