Movies
Blockers (2018)
I'm far too late to the game to feign surprise that Blockers is so good, but I am at least pleased that it lived up to the somewhat backhanded hype of "it's better than its trailer!" To continue the backhanded mood, I will say that the movie is never better than in its first hour, and while I'm exceedingly grateful that this is the rare modern American comedy somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 minutes, I do think that there isn't really enough movie to make the last act—a largely sentimental pileup of thin character moments—work nearly as well as I wished. Maybe it isn't the spry runtime so much as the fact that the movie barely characterizes its teen characters, who are largely frictionless players in an eyebrow-raisingly idealized night of binge drinking and 'shroom-eating; outside of a gross and somewhat unnecessary vomiting incident (followed by one of the most impressive alcohol-poisoning recoveries I've ever seen), there is not a lot that actually goes wrong on the teen end of things in this movie. Contrast this with Superbad (sorry to bring up such a dude-centric movie in comparison to such a female-centric film, it's just what came to mind first), where the escalating problems of the virginity-losing night help define each character pristinely—there just isn't enough for our Blocker teens to do for me to feel like I know them outside of some very broad personality traits, and while I realize the problem-free teen plot is part of the point (hey, I guess it's not so disastrous to give teens a tad bit of freedom—at least, upper-middle-class, uncannily responsible and savvy teens), it also doesn't do the mechanics of the film any favors. But lordy, I'm being so negative about a movie that is really quite good, so lemme talk about the parents in this movie, who are pretty much perfection and, unlike their kids, actually encounter a whole movie of problems (and a bunch of ass beer, a phrase that made me giggle far more than it should have). The Cena-Mann-Barinholtz trio has one of the best comic dynamics I've seen in an ensemble American comedy in a long, long time, and the script plays precisely to these actors' strengths in relation to one another. Unsurprisingly, John Cena is a fantastic physical comedian, and everyone already knows Leslie Mann is amazing, but I was actually really caught off guard how much I liked Ike Barinholtz's street-wise buffoon; there's an impressive amount of pathos in that performance, and while the movie has no shortage of great lines and deliveries, Barinholtz undoubtedly does the best in timing the comedic cadence of his dialogue. Anyway, the movie's very funny and at least half its cast is well-served, and I wish it were possible to mash this movie with Game Night, 2018's other strong American comedy, so I could make a super movie that was visually stylish in addition to being as comedically sharp as Blockers is. I dunno if that would solve either of the movies' third-act problems, though. Grade: B+
Byzantium (2012)
Byzantium isn't anything particularly new for vampire movies, but there's a floridness to the film that I really connected with, the feeling that immortality sprawls out before these characters in the same tortured, languorous way that the characters' speech spools from their mouths. This feels like what Angel and Buffy were always going for when they did the flashback episodes that showed us Angel and Spike running around in the 1800s and stuff, only it works much, much better here, likely because of the budget and the fact that Neil Jordan is twice the director—on a sheer spectacle scale—that anyone on those shows ever was. The overall story doesn't quite ever find its feet, but the feel of the movie is rich. It's bleak but sumptuous, and Saoirse Ronan is magnificent. Grade: B+
The Road (2009)
As a movie, it's fine, I guess—a little gray, which is the point, probably, and a lot grim, which is another point. But as an adaptation, it's a good case study in why exactly it can be a bad idea to be so slavishly faithful to a source material. First of all, it accentuates any minor deviation from the book (there are a few here, and they land like bombs); second of all, it highlights all the ways in which some specific stories are better suited to one medium than another: e.g. this dystopia, which, despite being more or less accurately transcribed into film, feels far more at home in McCarthy's lean, world-weary prose than in director John Hillcoat's sooty camera. It's honestly kind of boring onscreen. Grade: C+
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
In a sort of meta twist on the Punk'd / Jackass cultural landscape of the mid-2000s that clearly birthed this project, Borat isn't just about pranking the dumb schmucks onscreen that Sacha Baron Cohen encounters in-character on the streets of America; it's about baiting us, the audience members, into laughing at (or worse, not even questioning) Cohen's willfully reductive, inaccurate take on central Asia and thereby proving our own bigotry toward that region—xenophobia weaponized against xenophobia, Kazakhstan First to bring out all the America Firsties. It's a completely ballsy (uh, literally) gambit, and given the litany of my high school peers who, in 2006, incessantly guffawed and quoted "Very nice" and "Great success" in terrible accents, the bait was tremendously (horrifyingly) effective. It's all very punk rock and transgressive, and I think I'm seeing in this what a lot of my other cinephile peers are seeing in Jackass. That said, it's still a bit conceptual for my tastes, high-wire and impressive though the concept may be, and given that absolutely nobody I ever heard quoting the xenophobic shtick seemed to be in on the joke, it's just sort of depressing that all this meticulous work exposing American prejudice went into what ultimately became a decontextualized meme. Grade: B
Gangs of New York (2002)
Gangs of New York is a masterpiece of set design, and it captures with great detail something I'm always immensely interested in, which is the emergence of 20th-century American institutions and conventions out of the relative anarchy of the country's first century (see also: Deadwood). This doesn't prevent the film's nearly three hours from being a slog at times, though, nor does it make Cameron Diaz's or Leonardo DiCaprio's characters any more interesting. I keep seeing people praise Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, which is fine, I guess, but also, it mostly just made me want to watch There Will Be Blood. Basically, this is what happens when Scorsese doesn't have a good screenplay. Grade: B-
Dune (1984)
David Lynch attempts the impossible and tries to adapt Frank Herbert's notoriously unadaptable Dune. Of course he fails—it's a famous failure that anyone could (and should) have seen coming a mile away. The funny thing is, Dune is full of stuff I usually love in Lynch movies: transcendental mysticism, alternating body-horror and Freudian imagery, Kyle MacLachlan, opaque plotting involving otherworldly forces, goofy affection for old Hollywood norms (it feels very much like some mash-up between The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra, but in space), acting at a bizarre register, an acting cameo from ol' David Lynch himself. But somehow, when presented in a Dune context, this is all crushingly boring. When your score involves both Toto and Brian Eno but somehow ends up sounding generic anyway, that's the canary in the coal mine, my friends. Grade: C-
Television
Trial & Error, Season 2 (2018)
I'm hoping this (now cancelled) show gets picked up by Netflix or Hulu or someone à la Brooklyn Nine-Nine, because it's so good. Taking the lightly surreal elements of Season 1 and cranking them up significantly, Season 2 of Trial & Error is every bit the superior set of episodes, mining the increasingly strange small-town setting (something like Pawnee mixed with Monty Python) for some singular pieces of TV comedy. Some of it is fleeting—e.g. how each episode Anne is revealed to have a new psychological condition (my favorite: she has a condition that makes her eyes stay closed for long periods of time, so she has someone paint eyeballs on her eyelids, to hilarious and nightmarish effect); but other bits are recurring, and they accumulate in an impressive commitment to worldbuilding and continuity—like, for example, the Reed/Pecker feud that influences everything from the social dynamics of the town right down to the slang the characters use. And in the midst of this, the show somehow makes room for an engaging murder mystery and well-rounded characters who are likable and even sweet without ever really losing their essential comedic kernal. This is one of the better network sitcoms we've gotten in a while; come on, NBC, why would you give this up? Grade: A-
Books
Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (2018)
Like a lot of biographies/memoirs of celebrities who have gotten this level of success and artistic freedom (Bruce Springsteen's autobio also comes to mind), Room to Dream is at its most engaging when it's dealing with David Lynch's childhood and early career, where he feels much more within the chaos of bohemian life (there's an amusing/terrifying anecdote recounted in the book involving a young Lynch fending off burglars in his inner-city Philadelphia home with a sword) than later in his career, when he has a team of assistants who cook lunch for him and stuff. This is compounded by the format of the book itself, which is split between traditional biographical writing by Lynch's long-time friend Kristine McKenna and more memoir-ish recollections told in first person by Lynch himself; Lynch's recollections are far more interesting and poetic when he's dealing with events far in the past, which both raises the question of how much these events have been warped by the tricks of memory over decades but also illustrates with great detail exactly the kind of off-kilter mythologizing that Lynch's mind makes of the world around him. So not only does Lynch's life become more straightforward and comfortable as he gets older; his narration seems less steeped in Lynch's own sensibilities. That's not to say that the whole book isn't interesting, though, and fans of his films and other projects (i.e. yours truly) will find a lot of anecdotes and information to tickle their brains. I also wonder, though, what this book would be like if it weren't quite so cozy with Lynch himself; that McKenna has known the man for so long is surely a boon to the book in many ways, but also, it's a very genial biography, despite some bits that seem like they should be a bit more probing (especially when the book talks of his relationships with women, which is routinely depicted as somewhat messy but also quirkily, endearingly so—apparently his ex-wives have all made peace with Lynch's penchant for serial infidelity and work-before-family habits, but even so, I wonder what someone who wasn't Lynch's friend might have made of this). But I'm being unduly negative; David Lynch is an exceedingly interesting person even when he's older and more comfortable, and the behind-the-scenes information about his work is fascinating. Even if it isn't a great read, it's still a very good one, and one I'd recommend to Lynch fans. Grade: B+
Music
Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids - An Angel Fell (2018)
A jazz and worldbeat fusion that's sort of a concept album in the vein of some of the spiritual jazz luminaries of the 1970s. I wish the album swung a bit more for the fences, musically—there are some touches of free jazz, but nothing nearly so ambitious as John Coltrane's Ascension, which makes the spiritual dimensions of An Angel Fell feel comparatively flat. This is an album that could do with a bit more transcendence. Maybe it isn't fair for me to connect this to some of the most notable spiritual jazz of all time, so I'll just say this: there are very good passages here (I love the incorporation of violin and classical guitar in the opening track, for example) as well as some places that feel kind of thin (the chant-like "Land of Ra" is a centerpiece, but not a particularly compelling one). Still, if '70s spiritual jazz is your thing, or jazz that's reaching for something a bit bigger and more mystical than your typical jazz record, you might want to check this out. Grade: B
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