Movies
Eighth Grade (2018)
I was not an unusually unhappy middle schooler, but there were plenty of awful things that happened during those years. And boy, did Eighth Grade force me to remember each and every one of them. And if it wasn't hard enough just to be reminded of my own experiences, there's also the added vicarious pain of the way the movie shows again and again how its protagonist—Kayla, a sweeter and kinder middle schooler than I ever was—encounters one bad experience after another precisely because sweetness and kindness are not the currency of adolescence. Eighth Grade is an excruciating watch. I suspect this will be true for most viewers of the film. My wife had an even harder time (which makes sense—there is a lot of this movie that is specific to the particular social and sexual forces that torment young women, which I of course only recognized second-hand). Most middle schoolers are unhappy and lonely and confused and uncomfortable in their skins, trapped in the dissonance between their vibrant (and often silenced) interior lives and the reckless uncaring of the adolescent social structures around them. Like no other movie I've seen, Eighth Grade recognizes just how traumatic the litany of tiny tragedies that confronts all adolescents can be, despite their seeming inconsequentiality to adults (or even high schoolers) on the other side. Part of this is maybe just that Eighth Grade is mostly breaking new ground and the novelty can't help but be compelling (there are precious few movies that want to seriously depict the middle school experience); but also, I dare you to watch that pool party sequence and tell me that the movie isn't tapping into something deep and primal and utterly terrifying. Grade: A-
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
Madeleine L'Engle's original novel is primarily a book of ideas, the foremost being to point out the ways in which modern society's increasingly bureaucratic and "rational" structures create environments that value conformity over love and that encourage hostility toward outsiders. Disney's adaptation largely jettisons these ideas in favor of a more interior central thesis about the importance of self-love, which... *sigh* is fine, I guess, in theory, although it's mighty convenient for Disney, the most corporate of corporations, to repackage such an anti-corporate novel into something more consistent with the company brand. Still, it's not a completely terrible idea to change the gigantic brain IT from a symbol of modern society's cold, loveless machine of profit and social control into a metaphor for the ways your own psychology can be your worst enemy. But the problem is that in getting rid of some of the pieces of L'Engle's message (the foil characters of Meg's WASPy twin brothers, for example), it also gets rid of a lot of the important character-development devices in the book like the family dynamics at the Murry family, which makes Meg's culminating action of familial love through self-love completely theoretical rather than the earned moment of sincere reflection and affirmation that the movie surely means it to be. Also, the kid actors in this movie are uniformly terrible (though Storm Reid is definitely the best of them), which makes it hard for that thing to happen that sometimes does where actors can breathe life into lifeless screenplay pieces. So like, I hate to be That Guy, but I wish they'd stuck a little closer to the book regarding its main ideas (and speaking of fidelity to the source material, surely it's just trolling to include the part where the witches list off all the light warriors from earth but then have them very conspicuously not name Jesus, right? I know they're going for a secular humanist vibe here, which is fine, but come on, did you even need that scene? That would have been the perfect opportunity to name, like, I dunno, the Buddha alongside Jesus, if the movie was worried about wading too deeply into L'Engle's Christianity. But fine, whatever.). I'll give the movie this, though: if the Hollywood blockbuster is going to continue to be dominated by the green screen, A Wrinkle in Time seems like one of the better embraces of that feature(?) of mainstream filmmaking since George Lucas codified the approach in the Star Wars prequels—the movie's CG visuals are sumptuous and completely devoid of any devotion to realism or pandering "maturity," which is exactly how it should be. I wish more movies had this go-for-broke approach to their special effects and this level of unself-consciousness at its own childlike sense of anything-goes, no matter how goofy (Lettuce Witherspoon forever!). It's possible that this commitment to spectacle is part of what cuts off at the knees the movie's time to develop believable characters. Still, it's cool to look at. So the film is a mixed bag, to say the least. But at least it fails in honest, heart-on-its-sleeve ways that modern Hollywood (esp. Disney) blockbusters are rarely allowed to these days, which maybe makes it worth a watch. Grade: C
Sweet Country (2017)
What begins as a western in the vein of The Ox-Bow Incident, only agonizingly slow (and set in Australia) eventually, in its final 30-40 minutes, turns into a sort of twist on To Kill a Mockingbird directed by an aboriginal man and following the accused person of color as its protagonist rather than cute kids whose innocence is being shattered by the cruelty of their society. And like To Kill a Mockingbird, the ending is utterly devastating, but unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, the focus on people of color leaves very little room for optimism in race relations. I can only approach this from an American point of view, but that this movie ends with the raising of a church steeple cross-cut with a man wailing at the heavens, "What chance has this country got?", it feels like an apocalypse that echoes still to this day. It's possible I'm letting this ending weigh too heavily on my overall evaluation of the film (the preceding hour-plus is really kind of dull for long stretches, despite the gorgeous cinematography), but I can't lie about how I'm feeling right now with the credits rolling. Grade: B+
13 Assassins (十三人の刺客) (2010)
I guess this is sort of like 300, just without the gratuitous stylistic flourishes or xenophobia. But like 300, I had a hard time with the masculine posturing of the violence, and I found it difficult to care much about the characters when so much of the movie is forward motion and chest-thumping (the fact that there are thirteen heroes just compounds this—I have no idea who these people are beyond their archetypes). That said, the finale is a legitimately great and elegant tapestry of fight choreography, particularly the very end when the lone villain faced down our lead hero. What happens with the villain in particular is haunting and surprising, and honestly, he may be the best character in the film? Grade: B-
Marie Antoinette (2006)
It probably leans too hard into the charms of its anachronistic alt-rock/ambient soundtrack (though I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a gigantic grin on my face seeing a bunch of 18th-century French aristocrats dance to Siouxsie and the Banshees). But the cinematography and the production design are legendary, and I really, really dig the emotional undercurrent of the film's emotions. Recontextualizing Marie Antoinette into a sexually awoken women whose sexuality is nevertheless exploited is inspired, and turning her into a semi-tragic female scapegoat for the entirety of the abuses of the French royalty is bold. Grade: B+
Animal Farm (1954)
The animation--a dark combination of drawn and painted that looks by turns cheap and breathtaking; the visibly painted fire effects are incredible, and the pigs are marvelously cunning in appearance, even if the rest of the animals are a bit too loosely designed for their own good. It's a decent adaptation of Orwell's original novel, too, the "cute" animal slapstick juxtaposed with the narrator's delivery of Orwell's writheringly satirical prose creating just the right amount of dissonance, though I'm loathe to accept the film's criminally dishonest ending. If the film had been made in 1989 or 1990, the idea of a second animal uprising overthrowing the pigs may have been a nice update of Orwell's mid-century depiction of the USSR; in 1954, it just feels like a lie. But the rest of the movie is mostly unimpeachable, though. Grade: B
Television
Trial & Error, Season 1 (2017)
A strange, fun mash-up between true crime and Parks & Recreation (just without the idealism), Trial & Error isn't blowing my mind, but familiar as it is, what it does, it does well. John Lithgow as a defendant who has guilelessly stumbled into literally the worst possible case against him (e.g. there is security footage of him buying a ski mask along with quicklime and a shovel) is never not entertaining, and Sherri Shepherd's spacey secretary beset by a host of increasingly off-the-wall psychological conditions adds a nice dose of surrealism to the otherwise naturalistic mockumentary format. My favorite, though, is Steven Boyer's cheerful, Gomer-Pyle-esque ignoramus, who delivers his stupid lines with such enthusiastic sincerity that it's hard not to love the guy. Like I said, it's nothing too mind-blowing, but this brisk season is good for a few days' entertainment. I'm looking forward to diving into the (currently airing) second season. Grade: B+
Books
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)
Ada is a Nigerian woman and also an Ogbanje, a chaotic spirit who, according to Nigerian mythology, is repeatedly born into the same family. Though to use "spirit" (singular) is a bit misleading—a whole host of spirits lives within Ada, running through her psyche as if it were an open-air edifice and taking control of her behavior from time to time. The resulting novel, which chronicles, though these narrating spirits, Ada's childhood and early adulthood, is something like a much pricklier literary-fiction rendition of Pixar's Inside Out, using intricate interior landscapes and characters as a way of depicting the psychological growth and developing identity of its protagonist. The novel's opening, which describes Ada's birth and early childhood, is breathtaking, and it's honestly a bit of a disappointment that the novel never regains that bewildering, bold mojo after that section passes. But the novel is also never not challenging and fascinating, and even when it's dealing with more traditional literary-fiction subject matter (e.g. going to college, dealing with trauma, etc.), the central device of the Ogbanje narrators always makes it feel fresh. This is an astoundingly confident and engaging debut novel, and I'm excited for what more Emezi will do. Grade: B+
Music
Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth (2018)
I guess Heaven and Earth is technically smaller than Washington's last full-length release, the triple album The Epic. But it doesn't feel that way. Sure, I guess Heaven and Earth is only two discs, but it's only a scant twenty minutes shorter (a mere blink when we're talking about 2-3 hour records here). More importantly, Heaven and Earth just sounds bigger than The Epic. The vocals, used as accents to The Epic's mostly Coltrane-ish jazz, have taken center stage here alongside a booming orchestra, which, again, was on The Epic a flavor added to Washington's central saxophone. As a result, the compositions on Heaven and Earth feel much more, well, epic than The Epic's, and they are also much more conspicuously constructed, with clear crescendos and movements and fewer opportunities for improvisation. This is simultaneously a savvy way of sidestepping the common criticism that Washington isn't really that great of an improviser to begin with and also a doubling down of what has become Washington's signature: high-concept, spiritual, and enormous. It, in fact, wouldn't be inaccurate to call Washington more this record's conductor than its lead performer, and I think the role serves him marvelously. Grade: A-
A strange, fun mash-up between true crime and Parks & Recreation (just without the idealism), Trial & Error isn't blowing my mind, but familiar as it is, what it does, it does well. John Lithgow as a defendant who has guilelessly stumbled into literally the worst possible case against him (e.g. there is security footage of him buying a ski mask along with quicklime and a shovel) is never not entertaining, and Sherri Shepherd's spacey secretary beset by a host of increasingly off-the-wall psychological conditions adds a nice dose of surrealism to the otherwise naturalistic mockumentary format. My favorite, though, is Steven Boyer's cheerful, Gomer-Pyle-esque ignoramus, who delivers his stupid lines with such enthusiastic sincerity that it's hard not to love the guy. Like I said, it's nothing too mind-blowing, but this brisk season is good for a few days' entertainment. I'm looking forward to diving into the (currently airing) second season. Grade: B+
Books
Ada is a Nigerian woman and also an Ogbanje, a chaotic spirit who, according to Nigerian mythology, is repeatedly born into the same family. Though to use "spirit" (singular) is a bit misleading—a whole host of spirits lives within Ada, running through her psyche as if it were an open-air edifice and taking control of her behavior from time to time. The resulting novel, which chronicles, though these narrating spirits, Ada's childhood and early adulthood, is something like a much pricklier literary-fiction rendition of Pixar's Inside Out, using intricate interior landscapes and characters as a way of depicting the psychological growth and developing identity of its protagonist. The novel's opening, which describes Ada's birth and early childhood, is breathtaking, and it's honestly a bit of a disappointment that the novel never regains that bewildering, bold mojo after that section passes. But the novel is also never not challenging and fascinating, and even when it's dealing with more traditional literary-fiction subject matter (e.g. going to college, dealing with trauma, etc.), the central device of the Ogbanje narrators always makes it feel fresh. This is an astoundingly confident and engaging debut novel, and I'm excited for what more Emezi will do. Grade: B+
Music
I guess Heaven and Earth is technically smaller than Washington's last full-length release, the triple album The Epic. But it doesn't feel that way. Sure, I guess Heaven and Earth is only two discs, but it's only a scant twenty minutes shorter (a mere blink when we're talking about 2-3 hour records here). More importantly, Heaven and Earth just sounds bigger than The Epic. The vocals, used as accents to The Epic's mostly Coltrane-ish jazz, have taken center stage here alongside a booming orchestra, which, again, was on The Epic a flavor added to Washington's central saxophone. As a result, the compositions on Heaven and Earth feel much more, well, epic than The Epic's, and they are also much more conspicuously constructed, with clear crescendos and movements and fewer opportunities for improvisation. This is simultaneously a savvy way of sidestepping the common criticism that Washington isn't really that great of an improviser to begin with and also a doubling down of what has become Washington's signature: high-concept, spiritual, and enormous. It, in fact, wouldn't be inaccurate to call Washington more this record's conductor than its lead performer, and I think the role serves him marvelously. Grade: A-
Eighth Grade was a fantastic movie. Loved reading your review, too!
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed it--both movie and review.
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