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
Television
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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment