Movies
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 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-
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
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+
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
(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
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
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
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+
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