Mini Reviews for December 10-16, 2018

It's 2018-catch-up time, y'all.

Movies

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

I'm not an avowed superhero movie hater, but I have been pretty frustrated at the Marvel corner of the genre's insistence on doubling down on some of the more irritating aspects of superhero comics (the convoluted interconnectivity of stories, the increasingly burdensome continuity, the reliance on "game changing" plots that just actually mask a commitment to the storytelling status quo) while ignoring some of the best elements (the visual splendor, the playful fluidity of characters and storytelling types allowed by decades of different writers piling storylines onto the same universe). Into the Spider-Verse reverses this to great effect, being not just the best-looking superhero movies of this year (of all time??) but also being the one superhero movie that truly capitalizes on the fact that, by golly, comics are weird as hell so let's just lean into that as hard as we can and see what happens. It's great. Visually, it's the rare polygonal, computer-animated feature that actually uses CG animation for every inch of possibility that the format is worth. The film's mixed-media, collage approach is some of the most formally radical animation I've ever seen in a mainstream American animated feature; it's closer to the work of Masaaki Yuasa than anything I can think of in North America, and the film's climax, which is basically a fight scene set within a complete abstraction of computer rendering, filled with free-floating polygons and digital noise, feels entirely without precedent. On a storytelling level, Into the Spider-Verse feels a lot like The Lego Batman Movie's approach to superhero mythology, diving right into the weirdest, most uncool corners of the superhero's past with gleeful abandon—it's one thing to make fun of the way the Amazing Spider-Man storylines have trended toward wallowing self-pity; it's an entirely different ballgame even to acknowledge the existence of Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham, and that's the game Into the Spider-Verse is playing. Like Lego Batman, there are parts of this plot that feel like they're held together with string, and the movie is, frankly, overstuffed to the point of shortchanging far more characters than I'd like. But to its credit, it's also got much more serious things on its mind than Lego Batman, using this bizarre confluence of all the various Spider-Man bric-a-brac not just to tell a compelling story for the in-movie characters (Miles Morales's plot is legitimately moving in a way that gets at the real heart of Spider-Man like no other film since the second Sam Raimi Spider-Man film) but also to gently nudge its own fandom into realizing how absurd it is to gripe about the changing (and diversifying) superhero landscape when there are things like Spider-Ham and Spider-Man Noir rumbling out there in canonized past that so-called purists want to preserve; what the film does with Kingpin is as effective (and subtle) a take on white male internet rage as anything I've seen recently—take that, Ralph Breaks the Internet! Grade: A-

The Favourite (2018)

Watching this movie, I thought for sure it was using quasi-historical figures to make a parable about modern authoritarianism and the self-motivated sycophancy politics that springs up in its wings. But no, this movie is shockingly historical, at least more so than I realized when I was watching it—emotionally ill-adjusted tyrants and their aspiring puppet masters are just evergreen, I guess. But anyway: you could do a lot worse with adapting the Queen Anne/Sarah Churchill/Abigail Hill scenario for the screen than the razor-witted insult comedy fronting a deeply twisted sexual power game that The Favourite is: All About Eve for the 18th century, you could say. The three leads (Olivia Colman as the queen, Rachel Weisz as Sarah, Emma Stone as Abigail) are all tremendous, chewing over the screenplay's wicked turns of phrase with visible delight; the costumes and set design are exquisite; the camerawork, restless and often filtered through a fish-eye lens that serves the pervert the setting's ostensible "high class" even further than the characters themselves do, feels like a pointed subversion of Barry Lyndon, the inevitable (only?) 18th-century-set film to which this one will inevitably be compared; the film's disdain for the monarchy and aristocracy is never not great. This movie ticks a lot of my boxes, and if it's sadistic to say I had a great time with it, I think I at least had an engaging time with it, which is more than I can say for The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Grade: B+

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018)

The other heavily-CGI Jungle Book movie of recent years. Disney being Disney of course was able to muscle its way into a mainstream theatrical release, leaving this one to float around from medium to medium before landing on Netflix, and while I remember Disney touting the 2016 Favreau adaptation as something of a return to the darker tone of the original Kipling book, don't be fooled: Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is far more in-tune with Kipling's sensibilities than anything Disney could muster. There are no songs, only the folk-myth power hierarchies and jungle battles that Kipling evoked of his beloved (if patronized) India. It's a strange and somewhat ethereal movie grounded only by its strikingly brutal PG violence, though there are some tonal and structural issues; people forget that Kipling's Jungle Book is essential a short story cycle, and Mowgli sometimes struggles to figure out how to stitch those stories together into a coherent film—the iconic monkey palace scene feels entirely expendable and disconnected from the larger thrust of the plot. If I were making this, I'd abandon the idea of a coherent plot altogether and just go full anthology film. But I didn't make the film, so here we are. More fascinatingly flawed than truly "good," but probably worth a watch anyway for those interested in the project of adapting Kipling to screen. Grade: B-

Shirkers (2018)

The opening minutes of Shirkers—a montage of abstract footage, often upside-down and/or reversed and/or in photonegative—promise a much more formally wild film than we ultimately get, which is both disappointing and something of a relief (I love me some avant-garde, but on a school night? In this economy?). What Shirkers actually is is something like a cross between a personal essay and a twisty docu-drama mystery not all that different from this year's Three Identical Strangers or 2009's Art of the Steal), in which Singapore-born filmmaker Sandi Tan recounts the very strange saga of how her debut feature was stolen by a French-New-Wave-obsessing con man. It's as much an autobiography as it is a mystery, and the best parts of the movie have nothing to do with the central yarn at all and have more to do with Tan's friends (who were involved with the making of her debut) reminiscing about their prickly relationship with Tan herself. Grade: B

The Meg (2018)

Everyone's least-favorite part of Titanic is the framing device where all the douchey treasure hunters are using the submersible to explore the ocean depths, but let me ask you this: what if we made a whole movie about that framing device? Not sold? Well, what if we added a gigantic prehistoric shark to the mix? Hm? HMM?? This is definitely a "They don't make 'em like they used to" type of movie, though I suppose your excitement about this particular film is based on how much you wish they still made dumb '90s action movies. I'm mostly ambivalent, but there is something charmingly quaint about it all. Grade: C+

The Voices (2014)

A strange little black comedy whose tonal slips effortlessly (and disorientingly) among actual horror, indie-dramedy quirk, animal reaction shots, and borderline-surreal gore humor. It doesn't cohere at all, but it's an interesting little experiment with a knock-out performance by an unsettling Ryan Reynolds (maybe not his BEST role, but certainly his most impressive). It also saves its most sublime surprise for the end, with the credits, "Directed by Marjane Satrapi." I guess I knew in theory that she did more than Persepolis, but I'll be damned if I could have guessed that her name was going to pop up here, of all places. Grade: B-

Music

Szun Waves - New Hymn to Freedom (2018)

Sorta this jazz-fusion/space-rock/ambient thing. You know, for as much as I listen to jazz, I still really don't have the vocabulary to describe it very well, and that goes doubly for some of the more fusion-y, unconventional stuff, of which New Hymn to Freedom definitely qualifies. Consisting of six entirely improvised compositions performed by a trio—Luke Abbott on synths, Laurence Pike on drums, Jack Wyllie on saxophone—it's a real journey, feeling like the intersection of Sun Ra and Aphex Twin and John Coltrane. In fact, the opening motif of "Constellation," the first track, feels like a synth version of Coltrane's "Acknowledgement" from A Love Supreme, and if you can imagine A Love Supreme as filtered through those influences and slowed down a bit, you'd have a pretty good idea of what to expect here. Whatever it is, I like it a lot. Grade: A-