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
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