Movies
Any evaluations of his art aside, Elvis Presley is a figure of such titanic stature for two reasons: 1. His life is so richly metaphoric and fundamentally Americana that he can't help but resonate deeply as a secular icon, and 2. Any part of his life that didn't innately align with the broader institutions and iconography of America became coerced into alignment anyway via the mass-media commercial forces of the last half of the 20th century. And so, for better or for worse, Elvis represents Institutions in a way that very few pop stars do—not the Beatles, not Dylan, not Sinatra, certainly not the rock-and-rollers of color that Elvis surpassed: your Chuck Berrys and Bo Diddleys. It's that representationalism that made me, a white dude growing up in the Memphis area, roll my eyes so intensely at Elvis growing up: Elvis was the cranky white people fighting for noise ordinances and gated communities, and the slightly crankier old white people waxing nostalgic about Jim-Crow Memphis; he was The Man. It's also what makes The King, the second of the major essay docs getting distribution this year (after Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?), tick—the idea of making Elvis Presley's life a metaphor for America in general is practically baked into the artist's legacy. When it sticks to that, The King is frequently dazzling, using a bevvy of shockingly good celebrity interviews: Mike Myers? Ashton Kutcher?? Both good, somehow. I love Ethan Hawke, but could anyone have predicted he'd be the most perceptive Elvis critic in the film? I certainly didn't. And then you have Chuck D, who is unsurprisingly great, as well as the random people in Tupelo and South Memphis the doc runs across who have fascinating things to say about Elvis's legacy on their region. And this kind of gets to the documentary's critical flaw—none of these fantastic interviews—especially those of the people in Tupelo and Memphis—get anywhere close to the screentime they deserve. Someone (usually Chuck D) will say something fascinating, and then the movie will cut to a different scene rather than pulling on that thread. Part of this is the runtime, which is a far too short 107 minutes (if anything, this material deserved the O.J.: Made in America treatment—and how great would that have been? The privileged white other side of the coin??). More damnably, though, is how much time The King spends making an extremely labored and at least 50% bogus parallel between Elvis's life and the 2016 presidential election. Elvis as a symbol of America is richly symbolic; Elvis as a symbol for Hillary vs. Trump is tedious and perfunctory and yields exactly one good moment in the film: Alec Baldwin looking directly into the camera and stating, dead seriously, "Trump won't win." The film has nothing to say about 2016 that hasn't already been said in a thousand different ways, and put together with the existing Elvis metaphor and the wealth of often too-cute archival footage the movie crams in, it's Just Too Much. As great as some of the individual moments are, The King just can't bring it all together [insert hackneyed old, fat Elvis joke]. Grade: B-
I am all for the idea of this film's exploration of middle-aged female sexuality—a refreshing change from the normal cinematic man's game of sexual conquest + ennui. And the film's methodical repetition as Juliette Binoche's character cycles from one man to the next allows for some precise attention to detail: a hand moving slightly over a leg, a winding conversation animated not by the participants' words but their stutters and silences. But... I dunno, the repetition also makes this movie a little tedious, too, and in practice, there's nothing in this movie that makes me feel anything too strongly, neither on a visceral level nor on an intellectual one. I've been thinking that maybe I need to give Claire Denis's filmography another chance after feeling the same way about Beau Travail a few years ago, but maybe the problem is just that Denis and I don't connect. This movie is fine, but fine isn't something I'm going to stand up and sing about. Grade: B-
There's not a lot to this movie besides it's viscerally intense depiction of domestic abuse, and honestly, it's somewhat frustrating that the film, for example, makes a dead end out of the daughter's plot. But the final thirty minutes are severely potent on a level that I wasn't at all ready for based on the relatively docile first hour of this film. And on an aesthetic note, I am overjoyed to report at least one European film with thoughtful compositions and a lack of dependence on handheld camera work. Grade: B
What an unbelievably tense movie, hoooooly cow. What gestures toward a somewhat typical "coming out" movie in its early goings (Ryder is going to visit "the Nebraska family," who doesn't know that he is gay) slowly morphs into something that's not not a coming out movie, exactly, but is also one of the most hair-pullingly uncomfortable thrillers I've seen in a long time. More so than most other movies that try to wring the "regressive backwoods" trope for tension, Take Me to the River understands the specific layers of social nuance that can make rural America so frightening to those who aren't part of it (or to those who can't fit in with it): the searing quiet, the disorientingly labyrinthine fields that stretch acres between the houses on a sprawling property, the intensely performative masculinity, the uncanny valley of feeling the difference in social mores without ever quite being able to pinpoint what exactly is different (and of course without anyone saying anything directly to you about it). More than anything, though, this movie understands the alien echo chamber of Family—the way that idioms and behaviors build upon one another until family becomes a world unto itself, and you don't realize it until you step out and then try to step back in and see everyone who's still inside, like tranquil frogs in a pot as the water creeps toward boiling. Grade: A-
The ethics of this documentary are dicey, to say the least; I'm not saying that director Crystal Moselle is taking advantage of the hyper-reclusive homeschooled family that she chronicles here, exactly, but seeing these kids—and most of them are kids, if not by age (I think at least two of the siblings here are legal adults) then definitely by temperament, talk frankly about the borderline-abusive upbringing they've experienced at the hands of their father while their father lumbers around in the back of the frame raises some real questions about the documentarian's role in a situation like this. But assuming you can put those questions on the back burner, there's something kind of profound—albeit rough-cut—going on in this documentary. There's the cynical way of looking at this, I suppose, that views these secluded folks become a walking IMDB forum in their film enthusiasm ("The best movie of all time is definitely Godfather: Part Two," says one of them, dressed in the black-tie attire of Reservoir Dogs) and thinks about the invasive power of toxic masculine film culture. But there's also the broader, much more idealistic idea of the transformative, even liberating power of film, the way that wide-eyed individuals use film to contrast the boundaries of their own homes with the wider, more wonderous world of cinema—the way we crave cinema as a way of modeling behavior, as a way of educating ourselves about the world as a whole because we are terrified that our own context is too small to do so on its own, so small that on its own, it will leave us hopelessly ignorant and helpless abroad. I wasn't brought up anything like the boys in this documentary, but I'd be lying if I didn't see at least a little of myself in them and the role of film in their lives; I suspect the same is true for a lot of us. Grade: B
Probably the most delightful I've ever seen a hyper-meta, post-structuralist, experimental arthouse movie be. Aesthetically, you can practically see the birth of Errol Morris here in the film's use of re-enactment for documentary purposes and the loquacious, essayist impulse in the film's pileup of tangentially connected images and words (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control-style Morris in particular). But Orson Welles flips the Morris script—or, I suppose, Morris flips Welles's script, given the chronology: instead of an a faceless documentarian bending the magnetically showman and storytelling impulses of his subjects into profound philosophies, Welles steps in front of the camera himself, caped and hatted in a magnificently flamboyant black, to be his own documentary's showman and storyteller. In that regard, it feels a little bit like an experimental documentary iteration of vaudeville, with Welles as the extraordinarily camp and completely magnetic MC tying everything together with a winking, sonorous presence. It's of course a work of high ego (because it's Welles), and it's a thematic snake eating its tail (because hyper-meta post-structuralism). But it's entirely great, I promise. Grade: A
Television
I've always wanted Amy Sherman-Palladino to just go full-on Howard Hawks and write a screwball comedy, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is probably as close as I'm ever going to get. I'll take it. Lead by an effervescent Rachel Brosnahan playing Midge Maisel, a woman in late-1950s Manhattan who, when her husband leaves her, decides to take up a career in standup comedy, the show is a cascade of barbed and frequently hilarious dialogue in the same rat-a-tat cadence that animated the best of Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls—and miraculously, none of this is undercut by the involvement of Sherman-Palladino's husband, Daniel, whose contributions are somehow not irritating this time around. Even more miraculously, unlike so many shows centered around a fictionalized entertainment act, Brosnahan-as-Maisel-as-standup-comic is actually quite funny, and it requires little imagination to see how Mrs. Maisel could actually find success as a comic. On a writing level, all this is girded by a strong emotional core and mercifully nuanced depiction of class and family—those worried that Sherman-Palladino had lost her ability to pierce with her writing the subdivisions of the middle and upper classes after Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (me) need worry no longer. It helps that Marin Hinkle and Tony Shalhoub, who play Midge's wealthy, straight-laced parents, are superb in their roles as a jointly satiric and emotionally resonant presence. And on a cinematic level, this is all depicted through an unusually thoughtful attention to camera movement and lighting (even for our current "peak TV" moment), most notably in the dialogue-free musical interludes wherein the characters move in the naturalistically choreographed rhythms of their day-to-day lives as the camera glides around them as if on skates—put together with the dialogue, it's scratched my screwball comedy itch with aplomb. This is the most consistently good thing that Sherman-Palladino has done since maybe the third season of Gilmore Girls, and I'm retroactively calling this one of my favorite shows of last year. It's wonderful. Grade: A-
Music
Joni Mitchell was already an accomplished songwriter by the time her debut album dropped ("Both Sides Now" had been a hit for Judy Collins, for example, though Mitchell herself wouldn't record her own version until her sophomore album, Clouds), but Song to a Seagull is her entrance as a performer. In some regards, Song to a Seagull is a good establishment of who Joni Mitchell is: it's a sturdy collection of ethereal and literary-minded folk songs, sung with Mitchell's typically winding vocals. But this is still very clearly a debut, and Mitchell is either holding back on some of her more adventurous impulses or has not yet fully realized them—either way, not her best work and more than a little hippy-ish in a way that Mitchell would reject in the coming years. But to say that Mitchell has not yet achieved the heights that she would reach in the '70s (some of the greatest music of the 20th century) is not to say that she has failed, and Song to a Seagull is a fine sequence of late-'60s California folk with at least one great song (the closing track, "Cactus Tree"). Not essential, but certainly not a waste of time. Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment