Movies
I like the film's deconstruction of, uh, damsel tropes quite a bit, and the acting is pretty solid across the board—you'll of course hear no complaints from me about Mia Wasikowska being in more films. But the screenplay—a pileup of forced absurdity and wittily florid banter—is the definition of "trying too hard," and it's frequently grating. I get it; we all love the Coen brothers' True Grit. But you know who isn't making Coen brothers movies? Everyone who isn't Joel or Ethan, and that includes you, David and Nathan Zellner, I'm afraid. Grade: B-
The vagina dentata, as a folk myth, usually comes with the implication (or sometimes the explicit moral) that female sexuality is dangerous, particularly for men. Teeth, a movie about a teenager with a vagina dentata, doesn't exactly shy away from that subtext—it in fact revels in it, delighting in chomping sound effects and gooshy gore as male members succumb to the teeth. Where Teeth diverges from the folk tales, though, is in its depiction of the men who lose their penises—these are no tragic victims of predatory feminine sexuality; they are rapists and creeps and, in general, just terrible people—high school boys, in other words (one of the things the movie does best, actually, is portraying the spectrum of of teen sexuality—everything from abstinence culture to hedonistic male libido, with a lot of nuance in between), whose encounters with the teeth are entirely the consequences of their own toxic, predatory masculinity. In fact, the movie conjures a world (a fictional one, I hope... please?) in which every man seems stricken with this toxicity, and in doing so, the movie argues that, in a world without male allies, dangerous female sexuality is a necessity. It's an interesting twist, if a bit bludgeoned by its own propensity for smirking at its own violence and the plot's lopsidedness (everything to do with the protagonist's family is undercooked to the max, for example). But overall, it's an engaging parable; one could say that there's a lot here to chew on, and it's a better man than I who could resist ending this review on that note. Grade: B+
So this is what Joel Schumacher was doing before making bad Batman sequels. Certainly a cut above Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, though it's animated by the same lovably square visual sensibilities and nonsensical editing. Nothing in the film does much to argue for it being a particular good movie, but it's the sort of movie where the specific beats—the cantankerous grandfather (who gets the film's final line, the film's best line), the Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander as the Frog brothers (sort of like if the "raw animal magnetism" kid from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes discovered The Cure at the same time he hit puberty, only two of him), Keifer Sutherland's aggressively unglamorous performance—are this precise mix of strange and inoffensive that it's hard to really call it a bad movie either. It just sort of is, and while I suspect that a large part of this movie's staying power with particular Gen-Xers has more to do with when it came out and how old they were when they saw it, I can sort of get it as the kind of movie you watch in bits in pieces on cable throughout the '90s until you know every line. Grade: C+
The film's juxtaposition of mundanity with horrific serial killer/rapist stuff (they don't tell you how much rape is in this movie—there's a lot) is, I'll warrant, not as fresh now as it surely was thirty years ago in the '80s, and the movie probably prioritizes shock in a way that, out of the culture war context in which it was created, doesn't feel super helpful or constructive. But it is a tremendously stylish movie in construction, from the way it frames its killer in relation to media and mirrors to how the bodies of the murdered women literally cry out with the tales of their deaths. I mentioned that this movie's blows don't land as sharply as they probably once did, but that doesn't mean that they don't still pack a punch. And the sheer lack of sentimentality or even reason given its titular monster—this dude just is, and there's no apology or rationalization of it beyond just the fact of the humanity's intense drive for destruction—is laudable. Grade: B+
This movie belongs to Gene Tierney, who gives a nuanced and riveting performance as sort of a cross between a femme fatale and a domesticity-oppressed housewife—a straddling of categories which itself is a good microcosm for the way that the movie lives both in the worlds of film noir and classic melodrama. So it's no surprise that the film falls off considerably when (not to spoil too much) Tierney's character has little involvement with the movie's final twenty-ish minutes—though as a consolation prize, she's replaced by a delightfully intense (and young!) Vincent Price. Regardless, the film's a good time, landing-sticking or not. Film noir and melodrama are two classical Hollywood genres that were particularly adept at manipulating their respective tropes to develop rich subtexts that compliment the genre thrills without completely disrupting them; Leave Her to Heaven in general and Tierney in particular form a nice exhibition of this thematic flexibility. Grade: A-
I guess I just prefer my silent comedies to come in the package of grown men tumbling around narrowly escaping certain injury, but It—basically a romantic comedy and utterly devoid of tumbling men—is entirely too reliant on title cards for its laughs. Some of the title cards definitely are very funny, though, especially in the ways that they take advantage of how they can only basically give one line of dialogue at a time, making a humor out of the necessary terseness of a title card. "She's positively top-heavy with IT" one reads, and there's really not a lot of context to that—beyond the knowledge that "it" refers basically to "sex appeal" (the movie has, in an almost proto-Seinfeldian turn, invented a term and then resolutely refuses to allow its characters to use any other terms but the invented one), we as the audience are just left to stew in the discomfort and stiltedness of that particular diction. It's fun, if not an all-time classic, and the movie even works its way to some visual comedy toward the end, which is even more fun. Grade: B
Music
People talk about Nevermind setting the sound for the '90s, and I suppose that's true. But I think that's at least true of Tracy Chapman's debut, which predates the '90s by a couple years but absolutely sets the tone for soft rock in that next decade. I'm not the biggest fan of '90s soft rock, but I'll grant that Tracy Chapman is a particularly good iteration of it—especially the lead single, "Fast Car," which is justly deserving of its iconic status. Also, as is also the case with Nevermind and Nirvana in general, Tracy Chapman's status as the prototypical work of a new wave of mainstream pablum belies just how striking and political a record it is—I mean, the opening song is called "Talkin' 'bout a Revolution," and it's literally that: a call for class warfare. With the exceptions of the Born to Run-isms of "Fast Car" and the love songs "Baby Can I Hold You" and "For You," this is an album of political unrest and protest, a stark contrast to the softly plucked guitars of the instrumentation and the gentle timbre of Chapman's voice. I guess this isn't anything new in pop music, to use instrumentation as a counterpoint to the lyrics, but given all I knew about Chapman before listening to this album was "Fast Car" and "Give Me One Reason," color me surprised. Grade: B
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