Movies
Damien Chazelle's last two features have been, to one degree or another, about the cost of success—what must a person give up to realize a great dream? First Man inflates this theme to a national scale, bludgeoning us with just what the United States had to sacrifice to put a man on the moon. We're treated to endless conversations of nervous NASA eggheads fearing government suits cutting the costly space program and sweating congressmen blustering about the billions of dollars the space race is costing the taxpayers and protesters (including Kurt Vonnegut!) shouting all the more pressing needs the Apollo program's funding could pay for—and not anything slight either, but things like a social safety net and food for the hungry. We're even shown human beings dying in the process of getting a man to the moon. And as such, for about 90% of its runtime, First Man is profoundly ambivalent on whether or not this national ambition is justified. This ambivalence is mirrored by Ryan Gosling's inscrutable, stoic (some might say empty) performance as Mr. "One Giant Leap For Mankind" himself, Neil Armstrong—who, it must be noted, has his own personal "cost of greatness" plot in the way his distance (both emotional and spatial) takes a toll on his wife, played by an excellent Claire Foy breathing way more life into this thankless "wife of a famous historical figure" role than the archetype usually receives. First Man is, to my knowledge, the only movie about the United States space program that really grapples with the ethical quandaries, to say nothing of the urgency of its interrogation, and the movie is worth seeing on those grounds alone. But then we get the moon landing itself, a sequence whose breathtaking beauty and bold silence and stark lighting and unshakable ethereality so firmly puts to bed the idea that it somehow wasn't worth it all in the end to get here that it's impossible not to feel deep in your gut that Chazelle's ambivalence was just theatrics and that he knew the answer all along—a decidedly less interesting ethical debate than originally presented. But there's no denying that the moon landing is magical, both as a real-life historical achievement and presented here as a cinematic showstopper, and Chazelle's direction captures really well that heady feeling of being so overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of something that all other concerns, however urgent in theory, fall away. And maybe I'm not giving the film enough credit for its ethical wrestling; in the afterglow of the moon landing, it's easy to forget that the movie's final scene is a profoundly irresolute one, as Foy's Janet Shearon welcomes her husband back to Earth not with a smile but with tense silence, a wall of glass separating one from the other—greatness from the human cost. Grade: B+
So my wife and I were going to see Crazy Rich Asians, but circumstances conspired against us, and we found ourselves in a screening of this movie instead: a movie that neither I nor my wife knew anything about. It's extremely rare for us to go into a movie as blindly as we did this one, which is its own kind of thrill, I'll admit; I wasn't even sure it was an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel. It turns out that it is, in fact, an adaptation (though one set in the modern day), and it's, uh, not a good movie in any conventional sense: the cinematography is flat and overlit, the editing is dysfunctional, the screenplay is trite, and the acting is generally pretty wooden—to say nothing of the usual pitfalls of adapting Little Women (if even Gillian Armstrong's 1994 classic couldn't find anything constructive to do with Beth and Professor Bhaer, then certainly it's unfair to expect anything more of this version, but nonetheless, Beth and Bhaer are still drips). But anyway, it was still pretty novel to watch an opening credits roll and to have zero idea of what I was about to see; I recommend that experience. And even setting aside our viewing context, to this specific movie's credit, it stumbles upon two minor strokes of genius. Firstly, making the March girls homeschooled is perfect, and as someone who was homeschooled for a number of years, I am pleased to report that the movie gets exactly right the kind of free-range, unself-conscious creative energy that often animates large homeschooled families—there's an organic warmth to the way the family scenes unfold that feels unforced in a way that's super rare in movies and even rarer in movies that depict homeschooling, and I dug that. Secondly, there's Sarah Davenport's prickly and antagonistic performance as Jo March, which is an incredibly effective counterpoint to the often-saccharine mechanisms of Alcott's plot. Having Jo be a selfish dick who just prattles on about her various high fantasy writing projects is a fantastic modernization of Alcott's character and, moreover, an even more specific depiction of a certain corner of the homeschooled world (not that yours truly was ever such as nerd as to prattle on about high fantasy writing projects, oh no, I would *never* do such a thing, definitely not, nope). Now, to be clear, neither of these pieces salvage the movie as a whole, which remains incompetent on both cinematic and writing metrics. But among the mediocrity, there's a curious spark of life that a lot of other movies lack. If a movie's going to be bad, it can at least be this kind of bad: an honest and personal kind. Grade: C
Creative nonfiction is only just now, in the past decade or so, gaining real traction as a distinct literary form, so it's only fitting that film would still be finding its footing regarding the genre. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? definitely skews along those lines, as much Southern Gothic literature and personal essay as it is a traditional documentary (reminiscent of last year's I Am Not Your Negro, which is actually based on an essay); documentarian Travis Wilkerson apparently envisioned this first as a performance, not a film, and it shows—I'm not sure if his self-serious, Batman narration would have worked on a stage either, but it sure isn't helped by the necessary filmic adaptation into voiceover. Yet for as much forced weight as the narration brings, there are also moments of absolutely arresting lyricism. In the film's best moments, wordless and starkly black-and-white footage of rural Alabama is set to garbled, wax-cylinder blues loops, and Wilkerson's investigation of the legacy of his great-grandfather (who killed a black man in cold blood and never faced legal consequences) becomes a ghost story. It's terrifying, and in the darkest corners of of the footage you can the specters of the past—the erasure of a black man, the unrepentant id of a white man; what persist are perverse, horrific inverses of each other: the void of the black man's legacy and the unmistakable, crowding largeness of the white man's. Those are just moments in a 90-minute film, but it makes the whole thing worth watching. Elsewhere, the movie isn't nearly so successful, especially as it increasingly relies on narration over pretty simple double exposures. Near the beginning of the movie, Wilkerson states that this movie is "radical," which is sort of pretentious anyway (how radical is it if you have to tell us it is?) but also set me up for a more formally adventurous movie—I could have done with something a bit more disruptive, or else just the pure horror of the B&W footage. Surely there's a great movie to be made out of this film's conception of creative nonfiction, but unfortunately, this movie isn't it—though it's certainly earnestly trying to be. Grade: B-
I keep accidentally watching these documentaries that double as horror movies, which I guess is appropriate, given the month and all. But jeepers creepers, this was rough. For some reason, the stories that resonate most against capital punishment with me are the ones that should argue least for mercy; In Cold Blood's account of Hickock and Smith—brutal murderers, both—thrashing for nearly twenty minutes in their nooses before finally dying shook me to the core when I read it in high school, and now, here's Werner Herzog's own In Cold Blood, which chronicles the crime and execution of a man who has committed similarly brutal murders. As in Capote's work, the first half of the film is dedicated to outlining all the grisly details of the murders committed, and make no mistake, they are horrifying. But there's something also deeply horrifying about watching the man guilty of these murders talk on camera just days before his execution—to see his eyes glisten, to hear his voice intone, to see his body move so full of life. Later in the film, we're shown a transcript and timeline of the man's lethal injection, and it's as frightening as the account of the murders—not that the injustice of an unprovoked murder and a state execution are the same, but just that the mere premise of the cessation of a human life (even one that has committed such vile actions) has an inherent terror. Herzog has said that this isn't a movie intended to take a stance on the issue of capital punishment, and in a way, he's right; it is, as Herzog himself says, "a gaze into the abyss of the human soul," not a polemic. But to gaze into a human soul, knowing that it will be (and already has been, by the time we see this documentary) annihilated—that's a horror that transcends the law. Each human life we encounter: that's the most terrifying of ghost stories. Grade: A-
I think I may be the only person left on the planet who still really digs Diablo Cody's intensely affected faux-hip dialogue, but God help me, I love it. Honest to blog, I'm ready for her to make a full-on screwball comedy. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, because Jennifer's Body is not really the best showcase for that Cody touch—I mean, the dialogue is still enjoyable (sample: "They went all Benihana on my ass with that knife"), if not perhaps as laugh-out-loud funny as Cody can sometimes be, though I did get a hearty chuckle out of Adam Brody's speech about how the late-2000s indie-rock boom left the market so over-saturated that "Satan is our only hope"; however, the surrounding movie has some pretty severe structural and thematic issues. The film's treatment of the indie-emo music circuit as home to some heinous sexual predation is eerily prescient of all the Warped-Tour/Brand New/Pinegrove stuff that's come out in recent years ("prescient" or just "paying attention to women's experiences"?), and I was excited to see that explored in the rest of the movie. But the film kind of loses the centrality of that thread by positioning Megan Fox's Jennifer as the primary threat. It's like a vampire story in which the main threat isn't Dracula but the women he attacks, and unlike, say, Teeth, this movie doesn't really seem to be trying to say anything about how the whole "female danger" archetype is a direct response to male oppression; it's just a spooky story about a demonic woman, and not even that spooky either. Also, Amanda Seyfried is at a mental institution or something. I dunno. This is all on top of some rather tepid cinematic style. I had a good time with this movie, but it was not the uproarious good time that "Diablo Cody wrote a horror-comedy" promised. Grade: B-
On paper, Paranormal Activity represents a lot of why I love horror movies: the grassroots advertising, the ingeniously shoestring productions, the way the relatively low-budget productions allow for completely unknown creators, actors, and intellectual properties to reach wide audiences to an extent that's practically unheard of in all other modern movie genres, how the tireless hunt for novelty in scares leads to some shockingly experimental filmmaking making its way to multiplexes and hundred-million-dollar box-office grosses. I mean, Paranormal Activity is practically a mumblecore movie when it isn't a straight-up slow-cinema exercise, letting shots of nothing but sleeping bodies linger for long periods with no payoff but a door slowly creaking from side to side or a shadow flickering across the wall—perhaps the film's real ghost is the specter of Andrei Tarkovsky?That a major studio release got people to raptly watch static footage of a dark bedroom for like two or three minutes at a time is charming and gives me hope for mainstream American cinema. So I love all that in theory, and there are some really great moments in here (a sequence involving powder on the floor is a standout, and some of the jump scares are exquisite, given how patient they are). But y'all, I gotta admit, the moments that aren't great are really kind of tedious—both scenes with with the psychic are dull exposition dumps, and while I know that empathy isn't the only metric by which we can measure a horror movie's effectiveness, I really did not care one bit about the central couple, neither on a traditionally empathetic level nor on the horror-movie, schadenfreude-ish level of being interested in watching annoying people being terrorized. Thank goodness the good parts are so good, because the rest is like 75% of the movie. Grade: B-
For a movie that's essentially a feature-length Twilight Zone episode, there's a lot going on. The Twilight Zone's biggest asset was its ability to hone in, to the exclusion of all other distractions, on one particular concept or idea (most successfully, over the span of a thirty-minute episode—let's not talk of that season of hour-long eps). Perversely, Jacob's Ladder takes the opposite approach; there are extended stylistic digressions, nested hallucinations, subplots, and all sorts of other inefficient stuff that The Twilight Zone would never have bothered with (or when it did, it usually resulted in a tedious mess). And yet, when at its end, Jacob's Ladder reveals that the movie really only has one thing on its mind, and that one thing is a central idea so simple that it could have been told (and essentially was told in at least one Twilight Zone episode I can think of) easily over one quarter of the film's runtime, it somehow miraculously feels less like a pulled thread unraveling a sweater than it does a single string drawing all the movie's divergent pieces into a coherent whole. It's not really a mind-blower or anything (familiarity with The Twilight Zone and one particularly famous American short story you might have read in high school makes it pretty easy to guess where this is going by the movie's halfway point), and the movie is, at times, a bit too cute in seeding its final reveal. But overall, it's a tightly executed bit of storytelling that, moreover, never loses the human element of its story to the thematic and structural games it's playing—both chilling and poignant in its depiction of the American military machine and its remorseless devouring of human life. Grade: B+
There's a certain salt-of-the-earth earnestness about Terry O'Quinn that makes him perfect for those roles that allow him to tip wholesome archetypes over into the unhinged implications of following those archetypes to their most intense convictions. His survival-man/man-of-faith deconstruction as Lost's John Locke is an all-time-great example of this, but The Stepfather, the 1987 slasher by way of Night of the Hunter, rivals the perversity of that deconstruction (if not with the nuance). The Stepfather is strewn with the scenery of typical patriarchal fatherhood, from the lumber and tool-stocked basement to the entrepreneurial breadwinner spirit of O'Quinn's titular character to a very knowing "Father knows best" line delivery form O'Quinn himself—not to implicate any one of these signifiers specifically but merely to imply the dark current in taking patriarchal norms to their fullest conclusions. The movie, honestly, could stand to give its female characters a little more to do, and the film overall would be much-improved if it granted even a fraction of the thoughtfulness it devotes toward the development of O'Quinn's stepfather character. But as a confrontation of masculine archetypes, The Stepfather is as sharp as they come. Grade: A-
Television
With Chuck gone from the cast and Vince Gilligan mostly gone from the writers' room, it was unclear just what direction Better Call Saul was going to take this season. And to be fair, what we ended up getting isn't exactly a new direction. But it is an intensification of the thematic push that's been the show's centerpiece since episode one: that in the face of an intensely arbitrary and unfair universe, individuals sell off bits of their soul in exchange for success until, inevitably, there's nothing left. This is, of course, true of Jimmy, whose embrace of opportunistic hucksterism is taking him closer and closer to the hollow man hiding behind salesman masks that we know from Breaking Bad, but this also goes for Mike, too, whose increased complicity with Gus (this season goes hard on the Breaking Bad prequelness, sometimes in ways that are a little too cute, I'll admit) forces him to forego his principles in a slow-motion trainwreck that feels downright biblical—but when has anything in this whole Gilligan world felt anything but? And then there's Kim—dear Kim, whose Achilles's heel, it's becoming clearer and clearer, is her affection for Jimmy, culminating in the season's absolutely crushing final minutes. There's a slow, methodical intentionality about each piece of this season that makes the moments where it all snaps into place all the more tragic; whereas Breaking Bad got, with each successive season, more reckless and breakneck in its pacing, Better Call Saul has never been slower, relying increasingly on extremely lengthy takes of characters in abandoned spaces working out problems whose solutions we are not yet privy to, or lengthy conversations that end with subtle shifts whose effects aren't apparent for episodes at a time. It's all very meticulous and rewards patience—but more so than any previous season, it makes that patience a prerequisite to viewing the show. Moreover, it makes the season's inefficiencies stand out starkly; I love Nacho, but it's clear this season that the show doesn't really know what to do with him anymore. But on the whole, this is another very good season from one of television's best. Grade: B+
I was a little worried that, with this season's focus on poop-centric crimes perpetrated by a mysterious "Turd Burglar" (including a mass-pooping incident appropriately named "The Brownout"), American Vandal would be leaning a little too easily into scatological humor. And it's not as if the season doesn't revel in the hilarity of its own premise; "Poop is funny," one character remarks at one point, and like... it is. So while there's never anything quite as sublime as S1's investigation of "ball hairs" and dick-drawing technique (I honestly could have done with a bit more of that kind of straight-faced forensics with these poop crimes), S2 does manage to milk the humor of its premise without tipping it over into lazy jokes. More importantly, as with S1, this premise is really a Trojan Horse for a shockingly astute investigation of teen social dynamics, following through on last season's treatise on identity and social expectations by broadening its umbrella to cover class, race, and especially the ways in which people project identity over social media. It never quite obtains that deep soulfulness or bracing tragedy that undergirded S1's finale, nor is it nearly as self-interrogative about the series's methodology—Sam and Peter have traveled to a school out of state to cover this case, and as such, their biases are much less entangled in the filmmaking than they were last season, when they were documenting their own friends; this unfortunately has the effect of making them much less interesting as characters, and the show misses several opportunities to question their involvement with the case, especially in the game-changing finale. But even if it doesn't quite measure up to the first season, Season 2 is in no way a disappointment; this is still one of the smartest TV series out there, and its depiction of contemporary teen behavior is unparalleled. Grade: A-
Orange Is the New Black has always been a messy show. If you've been following my review of the series, you'll know that I've had deep issues with each season. Offsetting that, though, has been that each season has also had great pieces, too, from the deeply complicated depiction of the prison riot last season to the moving treatment of faith in Season 3 to the generosity of the show's empathy throughout the series. But let it be known that Season 6, in the year of our Lord 2018, is when I finally ran out of patience with OITNB's flaws; let it also be known that this loss of patience is not without reason, for Season 6 is where the show also seems to have run completely out of ideas. The shakeup at the end of last season, sending some characters to max while having others leave the show completely, now seems less like a bold narrative decision than an act of desperation. The new characters are grating and boring repetitions of what the show has already given us much more effectively in the past: Badison's alpha-dog posturing, Barb and Carol's evil nemesis masterminding, etc. And the old cast we do stick with (the ones in max) are so aggressively Flanderized that little of the nuance or respect given to them in the show's finest hours remains: Luschek is in a love triangle with two prisoners; Alaida is working for a vitamin-supplement pyramid scheme; Morello is... still pregnant, I guess; Alex and Piper, where (even in the best seasons) good storylines go to die, are planning a prison wedding. Only Taystee is given anything interesting to do, as she has become the legal scapegoat for last season's riot, and even that spins its wheels from time to time. It's all so tedious and pointless, made even worse by the per-usual flabby episodic structure and runtimes that plagues most Netflix shows—geez, did we really need a 1.5-hour finale? Did the individual episodes really need to be an hour-plus apiece? Here's hoping the seventh season is the last, because I don't know how much more of this I can take. Grade: C-
Books
Finally a YA novel without the tired first-person sardonic narration. Jaclyn Moriarty writes A Corner of White in a wonderfully removed third-person that's like a bath of cool water on a hot day. There's a lot more to enjoy than just a relief from my personal hangups with YA tropes, though. Set alternatingly in our "real" world and a parallel universe in which there are magic fairies and hostile colors attacking villages and realms with funny dialects and pumpkin pyramids, the novel's kitchen-sink invention hearkens back to an older era of YA fantasy less preoccupied with explaining every last detail of the fantasy mechanics or creating a flatly coherent universe, when writers like Diana Wynne Jones were interested in the unbridled embrace of fun ideas and the characters' sincere interactions with those ideas. I found myself connecting more with the real world protagonist here, Madeleine, whose interest in Isaac Newton and a parking meter that leaves her cryptic letters felt more immediate than the more heavily fantasized trappings of the alternate Kingdom of Cello, where a boy named Elliot searches for his missing father and a pair of cops try to solve mysteries in a cock-eyed, hilarious way that seems to indicate that they just jumped out of an episode of Twin Peaks. It's all enjoyable, though, and each of the characters feels both precise and interesting while at the same time managing emotional arcs that feel genuine and human, even if the resolutions of their various mysteries do seem a little tossed-off and haphazard at times. I'll definitely be seeking out the other two books in this trilogy. Grade: B+
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