Mini Reviews for September 24 - 30, 2018

This week: going through all those expiring Netflix titles. Next week: HORROR MONTH BEGINS.

Movies

A Simple Favor (2018)

A Simple Favor is a movie premised on the idea that the best way to adapt a beach-read thriller into film is to compress a sprawling plot into into lightning-quick beats that zip through twist after twist without giving the audience a chance to collect its breath (there were several audible gasps in my theater). This is a movie that, about 2/3 of the way through, finds time for a five-minute interlude into a Gothic manor and then never looks back; that's just the kind of film this is. Oh, we're going to become an erotic thriller for ten minutes? Cool. What if we threw in a bit of corporate espionage? Neat. Can we satirize suburbia for a few minutes? Gotcha covered. NOW MAKE IT A FREAKIN' REFUTATION OF GENDER NORMS WITHOUT EVER BELITTLING THOSE OPPRESSED BY THEM. Sure thing! It's a wild, slightly unhinged ride, and while I like the Gone Girls of the world and their patient, high-brow(ish) take on this kind of story, A Simple Favor makes a very good case for its approach being the superior one. Enough credit cannot be heaped on Anna Kendrick (her best performance since The Last Five Years) and especially Blake Lively (her best performance ever?) for selling it—it's an inspired choice to have the acting exist at this register that's simultaneously high-camp melodrama and typical (if less improvisational) Paul Feig comedy, and Kendrick and Lively are more than up to the task. Utterly delightful. Grade: B+

The Assassin (刺客聶隱娘) (2015)

It's not true to say that nothing happens in The Assassin. But not a lot happens, and what does happen happens at a glacial pace. I'm sure there are people who will look at the movie's hard-to-follow plot (for as uneventful as the movie is, the plot is surprisingly labyrinthine, and I was certainly lost, narratively), but pish posh; I care so little about plot coherence when a movie is this beautiful. Each shot languishes over a pristinely framed landscape or a detail in the film's meticulous costuming and mise en scène or even just the poetry of a character in motion across the screen. Slow? Yes, punishingly so. But it's exquisite. And for the action hounds, there are also some of the most rivetingly choreographed fight scenes this decade has seen to sweeten all the two-minute static shots of mountains. Grade: A-

The Imitation Game (2014)

For being about such a smart man, The Imitation Game is shockingly dumb. It falls into the worse of cliches—the antisocial genius who doesn't understand humor but does understand some esoteric STEM subject; the closeted gay man who is coded straight for a nervous audience by the pairing with a "female best friend" romantic surrogate; the idea that One Man can Beat the Odds and the Ridicule of His Peers and save the world—all of which are, surprise surprise, the parts of this "Based on a True Story" narrative that aren't actually based on a true story. Also, I realize this is a movie for a mass audience, but surely this movie, a movie about a code-breaker, could have actually had some code-breaking in it? Code-breaking is arcane, sure, but people liked Moneyball, right? That movie was, like, half arcane mathematics. But here, all we get (with the exception of one short scene when Turing and Co. make a major breakthrough regarding the weather) are shots of Benedict Cumberbatch twisting gears and muttering vaguely mathematical-sounding things to his befuddled peers. I'll give the movie points for having an interesting structure and a good score by Alexandre Desplat, I guess; but on the whole, this movie is a colossal failure to trust the audience: failure to trust us with the actual history, with the field Turing worked so hard within, with the moral urgency of Turing's story itself, with the depiction of a genius that isn't a Sheldon Cooper rip-off. Grade: C

The Canyons (2013)

This is the sort of bad movie that has all these fascinatingly shaggy dead ends like this film's obsession with defunct movie theaters and the concept of the director as impotent voyeur—so talking about it doesn't really feel like a bad movie so much as a missed opportunity. But don't let that fool you; The Canyons is quite bad. It's pseudo-profundity mixed with maybe misogynist undercurrents ("Written by Brett Easton Ellis") is nonsensical, always approaching a sort of inspired lunacy while always remaining just a few notches shy of being actually entertainingly lunatic. That's at least better than the acting, which is tepid at best—Lindsay Lohan is the best in show, but that's more a testament to the utter blandness of the male leads than it is to any greatness on Lohan's part. This is exactly the sort of film you'd imagine the director of the Cat People remake would create, and not at all what you'd expect of the brains behind First Reformed, alas. Grade: C-

Narco Cultura (2013)

There's a version of this movie, I'm sure, that's great—one where the various threads involving Juárez, the drug wars, immigration, and media violence/complicity come together into a startling thesis. This isn't that movie, though, and as it is, Narco Cultura is a constellation of vignettes cross-cut to give the impression of cohesion without ever really coming into conversation with one another. I mean, some of these vignettes are great, don't get me wrong, and far be it from me to call any documentary that opens with such shockingly violent footage "frivolous" or "minor"—this movie is NOT messing around, and there's a moral urgency to the film that's compelling even in the absence of a more focused collection of images. A fascinating and revealing documentary, to be sure, but one that, with its pointed interviews with border patrol agents and corrido songwriters, seems to be aiming for a sort of rhetorical treatise that simply isn't there. Grade: B

Eat Drink Man Woman (飲食男女) (1994)

The cover of the library DVD on which I watched this movie has a pull-quote from an enthusiastic 4-star review that proclaims, "It's hard to tell where sex stops and food begins!" Well, it certainly didn't seem that hard to me—there are only two sex scenes, and they are nowhere near any of the (much more plentiful) food scenes. Also, I can very easily tell you a useful metric for deciding where the sex ends and the food begins: when the movie gets interesting. It's a reduction to say that none of the scenes that don't involve food are bad, but it isn't an exaggeration at all to say that all of the movie's best scenes involve food, from the exquisite, wordless sequences of food preparation (maybe the best minutes of cinema Ang Lee has ever committed to film) to the family dinner scenes, when all the various domestic and romantic strifes and insecurities of the film's characters are manifested in the ways that they cook and eat. It's wonderful. Unfortunately, not all the scenes in this movie involve food; fortunately, a whole lot of them do. Grade: B+

Television

BoJack Horseman, Season 5 (2018)
Increasingly, BoJack Horseman is a show that's more interested in the episodic format than the season one—not that there aren't season-long arcs but that (like its by-now obvious inspiration, Mad Men) a serialized push forward to a finale takes a backseat to experimental episode structures and a mosaic of character pieces. You'll hear no complaints from me on this front. Netflix (and streaming series in general, but especially Netflix streaming series—looking at you, Orange Is the New Black) has long had an issue with its flexible format allowing for indulgence and slack in the realm of episode craft, resulting in formal and narrative sludge, and it's great to see at least one of Netflix's flagship series really pushing toward a greater conscientiousness in the small pieces. The side-effect may be that the season-long arc feels a bit more archetypal than past seasons (not to spoil much, but it involves an urgently rendered but kind of rote depiction of drug addiction), but if that's the cost for such a high level of episode-by-episode, so be it. BoJack's S5 is filled with masterful pieces of episodic television, from the time-jumping "Mr. Peanutbutter's Boos" to the Princess Carolyn backstory "The Amelia Earhart Story" to, in particular, "Free Churro," which (with the exception of the opening scene) consists entirely of BoJack giving a eulogy at his mother's funeral. This season continues S4's experiment with collapsing the past into the present, and many of S5's episodes are fascinated with the idea of how character histories (both those we've experienced on the show in real time and those we're only informed of in flashback) intersect with the present day, a device that might have felt hacky in other hands but that feels practically literary under the guidance of this show's writers room. It's rich and inspired, both cuttingly of our real-life political moment (the usual "topical" episode this season—a riff on #MeToo—feels entirely more earned than it has in past seasons, integrated as it is within both the entire sweep of the season and the show's own past) and of this show's own language of lunacy. Plus, Todd's obligatory, silly season-long arc is practically transcendent in its layering of topicality, sexual innuendo, and absurdity. Blessed. Grade: A-

Music

Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (2015)
There's a certain perverse masochism in Sufjan Stevens's decision to take the soul baring and self-reflection of All Delighted People and The Age of Adz and not only double down on the personal details (it is, among other things, an album-length reflection on Sufjan's family in general and his parents specifically) but strips back all the unconventional instrumentation and studio wizardry to deliver an album of straightforward, finger-plucking folk (with a few instrumental flourishes here and there, I'll grant). No longer are there immense philosophies or symphonic motifs and arrangements to envelop the personal; it's just Sufjan's words—those futile devices—and his audience here, and you're left with not much else to do than to ruminate on Sufjan's complicated and sometimes embarrassing reflections (sample lyrics: "You checked your texts while I masturbated") dressed in indie folk—a choice, it bears mentioning, that was highly unhip in 2015, when Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers were only just beginning to slip from pop radio. But this is no beardy "whoa-aaoooaaaa"-along album of strummy anthems. It's simplicity is deceptive, and its emotions are probably the most complex and acutely evoked of Sufjan's career. It's masterful: the underbelly of Adz's high philosophizing and a deep well of humanity, warts and all. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for September 17 - 23, 2018

Kind of a meh week for movies.

Movies

Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993) (2017)

Reminded me very much of Ponette, that French film in whose primary draw is the incredibly compelling and sad performance by then-4-year-old child actor Victoire Thivisol. Summer 1993 mines a lot of this same territory, as a child (played incredibly compellingly and sadly by Laia Artigas) comes to terms with her parents' death of AIDS and what this means for her life. There's a lot here about how Frida's status as an orphan makes other adults uncomfortable and inconvenienced when they aren't consciously making themselves feel sorry for her, which is interesting, though I think this movie could (as with a lot of European arthouse these days) do with a tighter script. But maybe that's an impossibility when you're working with actors this young. Either way, as with Ponette, my biggest takeaway from the film is the naturalism of the child actors—and even then, Artigas is nowhere near what Thivisol was—and the rest of the movie kind of falls away when I try to think about anything besides the acting. Grade: B-

Iris (2014)

I don't really know or like high fashion that much, so I'm probably barking up the wrong tree with this movie. That said, Iris Apfel seems like a completely fascinating person and a breath of fresh air compared to the usual classist and taking-itself-too-seriously fashion standards—too bad she's so under-served by this oddly flaccid documentary. This is Albert Maysles making this movie. The dude did Grey Gardens; eccentrics are his home turf. What happened here? Why is this so bad at capturing Apfel's eccentricities? Grade: C

Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren) (2010)

I'm still not sure how I feel about found-footage movies that aren't firmly planted in horror. The technique's exploitation of seemingly lo-fi cinematic style and digital artifacts highlights the fragility of modern digital technology in the face of the supernatural and the ancient is something that I don't think has much footing outside the horror, where it works great for accentuating the terror, esp. of the cosmic variety. In a movie like Troll Hunter, though (or, to a lesser extent, Cloverfield, though I'd say that's the superior film), which is less a "horror" movie qua horror than it is a sort of creature-feature action film, I can't think of a compelling reason for the found-footage technique save that it kind of highlights the (admirably goofy) "science" of the film. That said, I did dig supremely just how devoted to its own wonky troll mythology this movie is—its own kind of deadpan; maybe I'm viewing this through the wrong lens and it's more mockumentary than proper found-footage, in which case I probably don't have a dry enough sense of humor. There are some nice setpieces, though, especially the one set inside the troll cave. Grade: C+

Coming to America (1988)

Surely it's no accident that this is virtually the inverse of the also-Landis-directed Trading Spaces right? This time, Eddie Murphy isn't a poor guy pretending to be rich; he's a rich guy pretending to be poor! And he's also from Africa! And he's also a sensitive(ish) romantic lead, not a wise-cracking firebrand! I dunno, it's a weird one, y'all. The opening half hour or so seem to set up a broad and often absurd parody of American (and often specifically African-American) culture, circa 1988, constructing this cock-eyed version of our world that feels a little like a softball version of what Sorry to Bother You or even RoboCop does with advertising as an expository device about the mechanics of this kaleidoscope iteration of our reality—there's a fine but definite line connecting the "Soul Glo" commercial we see early on in this movie and "I'd buy that for a dollar!" And this is all great fun, if much less interested in politics than the other films I've cited (and if a bit over-reliant on a strange motif of Eddie Murphy's character getting unsolicited hand jobs from strange women). But then, abruptly, the movie turns into a much more straightforward romantic comedy, and this stage of the story is not only less interesting and entertaining than the movie's setup; it also doesn't ever really make sense—especially in the climax, which cuts directly from a firmly downer note of rejection to a "happily ever after" epilogue without ever explaining how we got to the happily ever after. So, an uneven film overall: one that has enough charms that I can see how it's become a nostalgic favorite, but a mess nonetheless. Grade: B-

Shivers (1975)

There's a lot of rape in this movie, and it's of the schlocky, '70s-exploitation variety, which means that I look at the device askance. And the movie's plot is far too episodic to have the sense of mounting widescreen terror that it's aiming for. Still, there's something weirdly endearing about how go-for-broke this movie is in making everything about sex seem disgusting to the point of numb horror, bodies becoming abstracted sacks of meat slapping together, The joint fascination with eroticism and the critical distance from it feels so very Cronenbergian—impressive to evoke this early in the man's career. It's philosophically and executionally suspect, but it has the decency to be interestingly so. Grade: B-

Books

When We Wake by Karen Healey (2013)

As speculative fiction, When We Wake is alternatingly fascinating and frustrating. There are a couple of really strong ideas, but they're surrounded by a sea of half-baked world-building. The novel (centering on a girl who has been, via some amazing new tech, resurrected 100 years after her death) explores well the idea of scientific resurrection and the ways that the publicizing of that technology would ripple out into society (a society that, as this book shows, is facing increasing resource scarcity due to climate change and a refugee crisis exacerbated by isolationist policies—to say that this book has a finger to the pulse of current events would be an understatement, though I wonder if Karen Healey has, in the five years since this book's publication, reconsidered her stance that in 100 years, Islamophobia will be a relic of the past). Other elements of this future society don't seem nearly so considered, though; for example, in the novel's future, journalism has become a mere network of podcasts, presumably due to the crumbling of the fourth estate to new, personalized media, but it essentially treats these podcasts as news broadcasts in our own contemporary sense without exploring the way that the fracturing of media into increasingly tiny audiences has polarized information into ways that greatly undermine the communicative power of "mass" media. Also, I'll eat my hat if in 100 years, there are teens who are obsessed enough with The Beatles to bother hunting out Ringo Starr's solo discography—where are all my ragtime-loving teens in the year 2018, huh? Anyway, these gripes are all kind of window dressing to my bigger issues with the book, which involve the plot structure (which is meandering) and the characters (who are generic and bland—and also sort of defined in reductive ways, so much so that our protagonist falls in love with one black character, only to then fall in love with the only other black character in the book when she's resurrected 100 years later, mostly just because there is not much defining these characters outside their blackness and handsomeness, which makes the transfer of affection easy, which... yikes). I'm also getting tired of the stock YA narratorial voice—I know teenagers are snarky, but they are not all snarky in the same sub-Holden-Caulfield way! I'm rambling, and this certainly isn't a better-written review than When We Wake is as a novel, so far be it from me to judge too harshly. I think I just OD'd on YA dystopia a long time ago, and this didn't do much to help that. Grade: C+

Music

Sleep - The Sciences (2018)

If The Sciences, the first album in 15 years from the doom/stoner metal icons Sleep, lacks the totemic power of Dopesmoker, the last Sleep album, that's only because there isn't an hour-long song comprising the entirety of the record. But despite that, The Sciences is every bit worthy of the Sleep legacy, a tremendous collection of songs that are both hard-hitting, deeply primal metal songs anchored by positively prehistoric riffs and full of the typically playful stoner-metal mythology (the second song is called "The Marijuanaut's Theme," in case you had any hesitation of how seriously these folks are). It's lots of fun and one of my favorite albums of the year. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for September 10 - 16, 2018

Remember that Sheryl Crow line that goes, "I've been living on coffee and nicotine"? Well, this semester, I've basically been living on Adventure Time and Sufjan Stevens.

Movies

Upgrade (2018)
Lots of fun without ever becoming exemplarily so. I love the silly Eagle-Eye-meets-The-Six-Million-Dollar-Man concept, and even if the execution isn't always quite as go-for-broke silly in tandem with what its premise seems to demand, it's at least a handsomely made B picture with the decency to substitute good ol' fashioned energy for my longed-for goofiness. The movie also has one truly inspired technical mechanic: during the fight scenes, the camera tilts and rotates with each punch thrown, which makes each scene a lot more visceral and interesting than I imagine they would be otherwise, given the fight choreography. I probably won't remember much else about the movie, but at least that camera thing is cool. Grade: B

Minding the Gap (2018)
Minding the Gap is a movie that figures out what it is in real time as the film's 93 minutes unfold. The movie's opening sections amount to little more than home video footage of director Bing Liu recording the love he and his two close friends have for skateboarding, and you would be forgiven for finding those early pieces of the movie a little rote and tedious, because they kind of are. But then something happens: these three boys begin to grow up, and as the adult world encroaches on their lives, Liu slowly finds a purpose for this project and begins to interrogate the adults he and his friends are becoming—adults who are coming to grips with the systemic unfairness of the worlds in which they grew up and then participating in those same systems. It's not just the BIG ISSUE that rears its head in the film's harrowing back half—essentially, Liu starts documenting the cycles of domestic abuse in which he and his friends came of age—but the little things, too: the way that the boys' skateboarding landscapes become increasingly bedraggled as the infrastructure of their hometown of Rockford, Illinois, crumbles; the way that the camera catches the slow falling apart of one of the boys' houses over the course of the film; the way the boys still casually assume that each others' lives are the same as they've ever been long after we as viewers recognize that they are not. It all accumulates until the movie ends on profound disquiet, and the once-dull early skateboarding footage that plays over the credits is both a bitter nostalgia and a eulogy for the previously unquestioned mythology that shaped the boys' adolescence. It's a film about time and heritage in both their affirming and destructive modes, and, by the end, as moving a coming of age as I've seen in a long while. Grade: A-

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)
It's about the intersection of incompetence and Murphy's Law, and it should be a lot funnier than it is—though there's a moment near the end of the movie where P.S. Hoffman's character asks, at a very NOT GOOD time, "We good?" and Ethan Hawke's character gives a reaction shot worthy of an Academy Award all its own, and it's comedy gold. Apart from that, though, the movie is punishingly bleak, a mode that's not always a bad fit for the movie, especially when it's exploring the interlocking layers of dysfunction within the central family, and there's an almost sadistic glee that the movie takes in revealing even greater depths of dysfunction each time it switches POVs. But it's also not always a great fit, especially because, as I said, it takes just a tad too seriously a premise and plot that's begging for just a taste of black comedy. Anyway, Hoffman and Hawke are great, though, and the movie is quite a ride, even if it's a bumpy one at times. Grade: B

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
This documentary saga of the fight for the highest Donkey Kong score of all time is so very obviously constructed—amazing how the documentary crew was filming on both ends of Billy Mitchell's villainous phone calls, huh? But it doesn't really matter; Mitchell is a terrific heel, and to watch this doc is to experience the intersection of a mid-2000s indie documentary with, like, The Real Housewives. It's a lot of fun. Plus, this movie's a sort of unintentional artifact of the early speedrunning/competitive play community, which I'm low-key obsessed with. Grade: B+

Foreign Correspondent (1940)
If I'm going to be watching one of Hitchcock's WWII propaganda films, I prefer the high-concept high-wire of Lifeboat, and to be honest, neither film handles its propaganda elements particularly gracefully (though perhaps it's unfair to wish elegance on propaganda, and perhaps I'm not being grateful enough for the ways that these movies are so totally and shamelessly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi—TAKE NOTES, modern blockbuster media!). Still, Foreign Correspondent has two tremendously entertaining sequences, one set in a mill and one involving one of the most frightening plane crash sequences I've ever seen. It's hard to complain too much about a movie with those pieces. Grade: B


Television

Adventure Time, Season 9 (2017)
(note: I wrote this before watching the final season)
The series's commitment to surrealism, both in its use of imagery and in its use of pseudo-hip lingo, remains a delight, and the characters remain tons of fun. But at this point, it's clear that Adventure Time is winding down and, moreover, needs to be winding down. I'll miss the show, and it's not quite spinning its wheels, but there's nothing about this season that suggests that there's enough gas in the tank to continue on past its next (and final) season. There are no new characters, few surprises, and nothing about the series's penchant for strange non-sequitur that feels especially non-sequitur-ish in the context of what came before; even the miniseries that kicks off the season, "Elements," feels just like a shuffling of the pieces we've already been given, not anything entirely fresh. If it sounds like I'm being critical, please don't take it that way; I'm still enjoying these Land of Ooo hijinks a great deal. It's just that every show has its life cycle, and Adventure Time's is definitely coming to its logical expiration date. Grade: B

Adventure Time, Season 10 (2017-18)
There are a few ways to end a long-running series. One is to expand upon and subvert what has come before—you can see this in Lost and The X-Files, as well as some more beloved ending like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Another way is to make the ending a reunion of sorts, throwing in as many references and cameos to past plots and characters as possible—Cheers did this, as well as, uh, The X-Files again. As it turns out, Adventure Time elects to go out X-Files-style, adopting both approaches for its final episodes. Fortunately for all of us, Season 10 of Adventure Time is a lot better than The X-Files's original final season (its 9th). Its mythology expansions are both interesting and poignant—there's a cycle of episodes that reveal some pretty surprising stuff about Jake's past that somehow doesn't feel like the gigantic retcon that it is—and its reunions/payoffs are a beautiful salute to itself, one of the best TV series of the past decade, culminating in a finale that's both a climactic showdown and a moving tribute to everything that made Adventure Time so special. It's a little overstuffed and busy, and some of the plots feel like they probably should have been developed over the course of an old-school-Adventure-Time-style 20-40 episode season rather than the truncated 16 here. But on the whole, it's as thoughtful and sweet and inventive as I could have wanted the ending of this show to be, and there's one particular moment in the finale involving a song that I'd rank alongside the closing scene of "I Remember You" as one of the show's most emotionally effective minutes. It's fitting, I suppose, that a show with the word "Time" in its title would be, in the end, so preoccupied with the way that life changes over long eras and that it would recognize that the run of a TV show itself from pilot to finale is as much of an era as the eons that span this series's actual plot; but to have Adventure Time conclude with a rumination on the passage of time and the temporal nature of all things really caught me off guard in the best way possible. "Time is an illusion that helps things make sense, so we are always living in the present tense. It seems unforgiving when a good thing ends, but you and I will always be back then." So long, Adventure Time. Grade: B+

Music

Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People EP (2010)
Aw yeah, here we go. I was worried for a second after my measured feelings about Illinois that I wasn't going to get too excited about any future Sufjan released, but this is entirely my cup of tea. Something of a concept album (or EP, I guess, though it's an hour long, which I know is the point, he's playing around with our format definitions, but come on) involving the theological problem of evil/pain and the main melody of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence," a description that is not even scratching the surface of how bonkers and grandiose and effective this record is. Sufjan is using an orchestra again, but this time, he's turning the collective sound of the instruments into a veritable cacophony swirling around a dissonant electric guitar, against which a typical Sufjan chorus of voices must shout—as fitting a musical metaphor for the album's central ideas as any. It's a record that whips between the cosmic and the personal; on one end of the album are the grand abstractions of the title track, and at the other end, a direct address to Sufjan's own sister, Djoharia, and all the pain she has experienced, and the juxtaposition is as striking and beautiful as the music itself. I love every second of it, and while I suppose there are people who are going to look at the pomp of the album's instrumentation and the sprawl of its track length (we're dealing with an 11-minute title track and a 17-minute closer here), let me remind everyone that I have a long-running series on this very blog about my undying love for progressive rock. Grade: A

Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz (2010)
And to imagine that Sufjan would release something even better that very year. The Age of Adz is a masterpiece, full stop, a revisiting of the themes of All Delighted People (released just two months prior to Adz) but filtered through a confessional interiority; it's an album about Sufjan himself (his name is explicitly invoked at numerous times during the record), his sexuality, his own selfishness and sophomoric tendencies, and the imperfections of his belief in the power of language itself to reconcile these issues. This is an album whose first track ends with the line, "Words are futile devices," a searing self-critique by an artist who has often positioned his own words in a place of power over the world, using them to subjugate whole states at a time, to say nothing of his authoritative naming of his sister just a few months prior. It's blisteringly sad, a man chronicling the crumbling of his faith in the aesthetic institutions of his past at the same time he's using those aesthetics to interrogate the psychological trauma in his past that made him use that aesthetic philosophy as a refuse to begin with. "Stupid man in the window," Sufjan cries (presumably at himself) near the album's end, his voice fractured and masked by a vocoder, his own words mangled by the technology he's embraced. But in the end, the album argues, all this is solipsism, and solipsism is its own kind of trauma—a self-flagellation that only drives one further inward and further isolated. The real solution, not just to the interior problems of this album but also to the thorny theological ones in Adz's companion, All Delighted People, is not self-hate or isolation but collectivism—"Boy, we can do much more together," goes the album's extended, triumphant, singalong outro, and the message is clear: humanity, not words, is the true useful device. It's heaven, not hell, that's other people; the true potential of creation is in a radical embrace of togetherness, of community. It's an unlikely mirror image to Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, another 2010 album about the prison of one's own self-obsessed psychology; the difference is, Sufjan actually found a way out. Grade: A+

Mini Reviews for September 3 - 9, 2018

Unpaid promotion time: if you live in Knoxville, go check out Central Cinema, which is just about the most exciting thing going on in film culture in our city, the sort of thing that's only supposed to happen in big cities like Los Angeles: a small, locally run theater that screens a mix of classics, cult classics, and modern indie films. There's nothing else like it in Knoxville, and folks, we gotta keep this wonderful thing alive.

Movies

Support the Girls (2018)

A complete delight from beginning to end, edging right up to a greatness that I rarely see in this brand of small-stakes, low-aesthetic American independent cinema. The film captures beautifully that feeling of working a minimum wage job you hate with a bunch of people whom you (most of the time) love, something I haven't done enough to really speak on definitively but have done enough to identify with; there are several moments where Regina Hall's character steps out the back door into the alley behind the restaurant she manages, and I swear that could have been the alley behind movie theater where I worked in college, and she could have been my old manager (similarly beloved as Hall's character) taking a smoke. Also, this movie just gets suburban Texas in a way that no movie outside the oeuvre of Richard Linklater does, right down to the "highway sounds like the ocean" line—again, speaking from personal experience. But even though that's where my personal identification with the movie ends (I've never stepped foot in a "breastaurant," much less worked there as one of its servers, nor had to deal with the systematic sexism that faces the film's female cast at all turns), that's only the half of the film's greatness, whose generous characterizations and absolutely radiant cast give a deep well of pathos to Andrew Bujalski's already crackling, lightly satiric screenplay. Support the Girls is a warm, tragicomic character study, an off-handed-but-pointed critique of capitalism (and lord, especially corporate capitalism, geez, you'll know the scene when you see it), a workplace comedy, a slice-of-life observation, an ensemble drama, and about two dozen other marvelous things, all without ever feeling belabored or overstuffed, and I am over the sun, moon, and stars for this motion picture. Go see it, y'all. Grade: A

Lean on Pete (2018)

This is sad in a way that's often more numbing than it is incisive, and I feel like there's a nightmarishly tragic episode too many in this picaresque plot (especially *SPOILERS*the part near the end with the abusive drunk*END SPOILERS*). That said, Lean on Pete also often feels deeply human in its tragedy, and the American West is always a breathtaking locale for soulfully bleak emotional journeys. The cinematography and location shooting here are the MVPs, for sure, and they carry a lot more weight than anodyne lines like "When you don't have anywhere else to go, you're stuck." Grade: B

Revenge (2017)

Points for being as stylish as it is—Revenge is as handsomely crafted and visually thoughtful as it is a mean, muscular little action thriller, and that's rare enough that I'm willing to savor what's here. But I dunno, surely we're past the point where a rape-revenge story is subversive in any way, right? I don't really get the acclaim for this being some landmark in feminist film; all the gender stuff is thin and exploitative when it isn't outright gaze-y, and nothing about the gore-soaked back half of the film does much to actively take apart the premise of the (literally) nakedly horny, male-heterosexual camera movements in the film's opening half hour. I guess there's always the possibility that it's playing up the objectification to a parodic degree, but honestly, if I didn't already know it was a woman behind the camera, I wouldn't be reaching for such a generous reading. Grade: B-

The Measure of a Man (La Loi du marché) (2015)

Hey, it's another European arthouse movie whose aesthetic is based entirely around handheld camerawork and a drab, grey color scheme. Is the story meandering and grounded in a stultifying naturalism? Is the dialogue hushed and semi-improvised, and are the performances subdued? Is the poster an uninteresting still from the film with sans serif font plastered on top (with maybe a few stamps from festival awards)? You guessed it. It's not really The Measure of a Man's fault in particular; I'm just reaching a breaking point with this aesthetic right now, and this may have been the final straw. I honestly feel a little bad that I wasn't more engaged by the film's story of a man wandering through the various humiliations and mundane tediums that come with being out of work. At least the story has a built-in reason for why the movie's so boring. But jeepers creepers, thematically relevant boredom is still boredom. Grade: C

Blind Chance (Przypadek) (1987)

Typical Kieślowski metaphysics, which is cool, but kind of grimy and cheap-looking in that late-Cold-War style that I've never been a huge fan of. Kieślowski's best work usually pairs the big questions of fate and synchronicity and deity with a stunning aestheticism that reaches for transcendence, and I didn't quite realize how much the success of the philosophical inquiry was riding on his films being so visually gorgeous until I was confronted with this blandish bit of European austerity. So the hard look at the forces that form ideology (which this film posits as determined by reality's arbitrary yet programmatic cause-effect chain, which is an intriguing idea but also seems kind of simplistic to me, for what it's worth) never really gripped me as much as it should have. But philosophical inquiry is philosophical inquiry, and I'm nothing if not a sucker for a movie reaching far beyond its grasp into the fabric of the universe, so I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested at all. And the movie certainly deserves points for being the first of the Run Lola Run-type "what if fate hinged on small, random occurrences" experiments. Grade: B

Music

Sufjan Stevens - Come On Feel the Illinoise (2005)

Call me crazy like Mary Todd (who went insane, but for very good reasons), but to me, Illinois (or, okay, Come On Feel the Illinoise) feels like a considerable step down from both Michigan and Seven Swans, which I guess puts me in opposition to the general consensus, which seems to regard this as one of Sufjan's very best. Jettisoning the interesting, spare arrangements of Michigan, Illinois's orchestral instrumentation is busy (often overly so) and conventional, and the lyrics are similarly overbearing, often belaboring the state connections instead of building the organic stories and introspections that Michigan did. I'm thinking particularly of "The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts," which seems to have pulled a muscle trying to rope Illinois and Jesus into the same song, to say nothing of the sort of silly loud-soft dynamic between the chanty, raucous chorus (and are those the horns from the All Things Considered theme?) and the whispery, guitar-plucked verses. "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!" doesn't fare much better, a song that is basically none other than a long list of Illinois allusions and some obvious string arrangements. It's not bad exactly, but it's nowhere near as visionary nor engaging as either of Sufjan's previous two albums, nor is it as weird as Michigan or especially not Enjoy Your Rabbit and A Sun Came (though it's similarly eclectic as the latter), and overall, this strikes me as exactly what I had assumed Sufjan's State Project would amount to: a kind of gimmicky record that feels like it was conceived from a tourist brochure and doesn't add up to much more than just a musical version of that with some random Christianity thrown in. In the interest of not being too harsh on an album that is still pretty okay, though, I will say that there are some excellent songs on the record in the midst of the more eye-rolly stuff; in particular, "Casimir Pulaski Day," which is about as heartbreaking a song as Sufjan Stevens ever wrote, and "Jacksonville," which is one of the few times that the full orchestration on the album feels like it's adding something more than just clutter. I also really like "Chicago," a song that basically does the same thing as "The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts" (i.e. loud-soft orchestral instrumentation in service of an Illinois-allusive theology), but for whatever reason, it works way better for me here than in the other song. So I mean, it's still an alright record. I just was expecting more after the last two. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for August 27 - September 2, 2018

It's that time of the month: when all the Netflix movies start expiring from streaming and I watch a random hodgepodge of stuff. Enjoy.

Movies

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)
I want the rom-com to come back, but I guess part of having the rom-com come back is coming to grips with the fact that I will not like a good chunk of them. I get why people enjoy this: it's light and sweet and wholesome, and the importance of its Asian-American protagonist cannot be overstated as a representational milestone within the genre. And it's absolutely no fun to trash on this kind of movie, but... I dunno, I need more than milquetoast sweetness and a genial cast to help me enjoy this. The restlessness I got watching To All the Boys is the same restlessness I get whenever someone shows me a beloved Disney Channel Original Movie, with all apologies to the many fine people who enjoy those, too. This movie's two biggest liabilities—having a strong screenplay and having interesting visuals—are things that the DC movies (and, if we're being honest, the lion's share of the last major rom-com wave—and I'm totally including the Apatow films in that, too) were never really interested in, which is fine but also means that what I want to see in a movie and what this movie wants me to enjoy will be incompatible. Also, I felt mildly attacked by the film's insistence that staying at home on a Saturday night to read and/or watch movies is the height of desperate loneliness. Some people just like doing that, movie! There are dozens of us! Grade: C

White God (Fehér isten) (2014)
This has to be a joke, right? White God is basically agitprop, but with dogs instead of the working class—fetch, stay, heel... comrade. Or if I flip it around, it's sort of like the Hungarian New Wave version of those '90s family movies where an estranged parent has to learn to love their child, and there are cute animals involved who foil the villains in the end—didn't I see this same thing in Air Bud: Golden Receiver, just with less handheld camera and fewer pretensions of realism? Anyway, it's a bonkers concept that I can get behind, but one that doesn't really kick into gear until the final thirty minutes; up until then, it's just some really generic European austerity cinema. The dog footage is impressive (I'm not sure if a dog trainer or a sharp editor is responsible for the cohesive way the film builds its canine personalities, but whoever it is deserves a prize), but the rest of the movie is a real drag. Grade: C

Wendy and Lucy (2008)
There's the famous line in "Born to Run"—"the highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive"—but you've actually got to go back to the album's first song, "Thunder Road," to find out what happened to those heroes: "They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets." The automobile has never been about the automobile: it's about the false promises of freedom and autonomy in the modern American landscape, the lie of the American Dream. In the movie, Wendy (a name that actually makes a frequent appearance on Born to Run, if I'm going to fully commit to this analogy) doesn't have a Chevrolet; it's an Accord, the supposedly responsible car to own. But even that's a trap, a deceptive hope ("I'm just passing through") that distracts from the fact that the world, for all its small moments of kindness—and there are several in Wendy and Lucy, and they are beautiful—the world is structured in such a way that society's operating principle is swift punishment, not grace. It's fitting, if crushing, that Wendy sheds the pretenses of individualistic Americana throughout the movie—her car and her dog—and in the end adopts the older, collectivist Americana of the train, a collectivism built on the back of exploitation and coercion—but what other choice does she have? It's also fitting that her final action in the film is an acknowledgement that she will never live up to what the billboards promise or the car commercials dream. One broken engine, and the entirety of America's systematic cul-de-sacs is laid bare—that's the brilliance of what director/co-writer Kelly Reichardt does here. Grade: A

Casino (1995)
Watching Scorsese's post-Goodfellas "wall-to-wall music and lifestyle porn juxtaposed with toxic masculinity" movies (this and The Wolf of Wall Street) and feeling like they are just fine, nothing great, and significantly flawed makes me kind of wonder about my belief that Goodfellas is one of the greatest American films—like... what if it just got there first? Still, if I can battle through the haze of nostalgia, I do think a crucial difference between Goodfellas and Casino is not just that Goodfellas was first but that it has a much stronger moral point of view. Part of it might be the dueling voiceover narrations, which, I think, ground the movie much less firmly in an unreliable perspective than Goodfellas's does, but moreover, there's some magical tipping point where the glamorous excess of the rich and reprehensible protagonists of this film begins to crowd out the implicit critique of toxic masculinity and the just-slightly-legal world of the casino itself, and Casino jumps right over that point and tumbles into this weird space where it's clear that these dudes are "bad," but there's nothing that really makes you feel viscerally that they are. It also doesn't help that the person most affected by the protagonists is Sharon Stone's character, which, while Stone gives this performance 110%, is nonetheless a sort of harpy stereotype and moreover also a reprehensible character whose reprehensibility is, in the movie's logic, portrayed as at least as much of a problem as the mob bosses's terribleness. But I'm waxing long about this movie's flaws when, in fact, I think it's pretty alright, so here's this: the soundtrack is absolutely baller (though I could maybe do without Scorsese dropping "Gimme Shelter" in the exact same place in each of his movies), and the movie's cinematic energy would be impressive in a movie half Casino's length and is downright miraculous over this film's three hours, to say nothing of that magnificent shot from the POV of a straw as cocaine is snorted through it. And on a thematic level, as problematic as some of its mechanics are, it's fascinating to view this movie as the middle piece of an arc beginning with Goodfellas and culminating with The Wolf of Wall Street, wherein Scorsese draws increasing equivalency between legal behavior our whole society is complicit in and the despicable organized crime our society purports to fight. Grade: B

Destiny (Der müde Tod) (1921)
A really lovely little fable that takes some of the best of German Expressionism and gives it the ruddy phantasmagoria of something like The Canterbury Tales. I guess it kind of comes with the territory of European silent film, but there is a lot of brown and yellow face, as well as some pretty bad racial caricatures here (and some things I assume are racial caricature, like some of the Chinese characters having grotesquely long fingernails—is this a thing? I'm not super-informed about Chinese history and culture). But the film also gives great dignity and humanity to a lot of its non-white characters, too, and each of the film's vignettes is a carefully (if archetypally) composed to confront the pathos of human mortality head-on. And that imagery, y'all! It's Fritz Lang in the director's chair, so no surprises here, but the mix of Gothic, almost metal imagery (Death's room of candles that hold human souls, for example) with precise tableau of seriously impressive set design (kind of like Intolerance, but on a budget and more carefully composed) is perfect for the film's narrative(s). In fact, I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to say that the imagery carries the movie, given how broad the film's narrative archetypes are. Grade: B+

Music

Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans (2004)
The vibe I get from the Sufjan fanbase (and critics) is that Seven Swans is sort of the lesser release—almost a side project—that Sufjan occupied himself with between the Michigan and Illinois state projects. And I'm not exactly going to buck that consensus; at only 47 minute, it's certainly less sprawling than Michigan, and the song structures are a lot more conventional, free from the minimalist repetitions and the lengthy, multi-part epics of the likes of "Oh God, Where Are You Now?" But Seven Swans has a lot more to offer than just a signpost between larger records. It is, for one, a lot more surprising in its use of instrumentation than Michigan, which is an album whose stylistic proclivities are all pretty much laid out after its first few tracks; Seven Swans, on the other hand, has the chants at the beginning of "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" and the classic-rock electric guitar on "Sister" and and the organ on "We Won't Need Legs to Stand" all sorts of other one-off musical flourishes that are without precedent or posterity on the album. If Michigan is the structurally experimental album, then Seven Swans is (more mildly so, given the sedate folk-rock proclivities) the instrumentally experimental one. It is, moreover, a more literary and therefore a more mystical album than Michigan. Whereas the previous album is very much about spiritual malaise and nuanced expressions of interiority, Seven Swans is much more comfortable connecting those interior feelings to larger streams of human experience, using lyrical personas to navigate a host of songs based around either literary ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find") or biblical ("Seven Swans," "The Transfiguration"). On Michigan, the world is one where the holy is seen through meditations on the smallest details; the world of Seven Swans is one where the spiritual is practically bursting the seams of the physical world as it explodes into our vision. I like this idea a lot, though I think ultimately I'm always going to find Michigan's more meditative approach to be more interesting. But Seven Swans is no small potatoes. Grade: B+