Movies
Mandy (2018)
I'm far from the first to observe that there is a prog half of this film and a metal half, and given that I have a whole section of my blog devoted to progressive rock, there's no surprise which half of this movie I prefer. That said, there's definitely a version of the movie's second half that I would enjoy very much: maybe it's all just for the memes, as some people have insinuated, but a movie in which Nicolas Cage gives a performance of loony Face/Off-style intensity while going on a cartoonishly violent rampage to kill lizard-people cultists sounds like a good time and a half to me. But here, being only half the movie, it feels somewhat cut off at the knees, and besides, juxtaposed with the far trippier, wilder first half of the movie, it feels like a disappointingly ordinary way to finish a film that opens with a bravura credits sequence set to King Crimson's "Starless." In fact, juxtaposed with director Panos Cosmatos's previous feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, which remains one of the great cinematic sensory experiences of the 2010s, even the first half of the movie feels disappointingly ordinary. I dunno, maybe the secret to Black Rainbow was that it was impossible to track the plot; even when Mandy is going full Yes album, it's never that difficult to follow, and it just becomes clear that there's not a lot going on beyond the diluted psychedelia. Inspired in spots but unsatisfying overall. Grade: B-
Roma (2018)
As with most of Alfonso Cuarón's output, there's a sort of nagging feeling that this dude is just showing off with all the precisely choreographed long takes and immaculately blocked cinematography (this time filmed and edited not by his longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki but by Cuarón himself—all the more reason to think he's simply flexing here). And the schematic screenplay, which somewhat contrivedly has grand character confessions and shocking revelations intersect at exactly the moments of highest cinematic sheen, bears this out. But honestly, I don't care one bit how artificial it feels when the results are this gorgeous. It's without a doubt the most visually stunning film I've seen all year, as well as the most pristinely constructed. And as much as the underwritten touches might undercut some of the character development, the cinematic style lifts it right back up again; those long takes tracking through crowded streets and violent tableaus become a sort of characterization of their own, crafting a grandly tragic emotional landscape nearly whole cloth from the film style alone, and as much as I can intellectually pick apart some of the decisions on paper, I didn't have much trouble getting swept up either. Grade: B+
The Green Fog (2018)
That something which, on paper, seems to amount to nothing more than an impressively-but-pointlessly difficult and theoretical archival project (recreating Hitchcock's Vertigo by stitching together footage from other films) actually adds up to a functional movie is sort of miraculous on its own. That it's not only one of the best movies of the year but also one of the funniest and also one of the most beautiful is nothing short of impossible. But here we are, with this amazing little impossible movie somehow existing and being great, having slipped in from another dimension or something. AND TO BOOT, it's got probably the best use of Michael Douglas in a decade, possibly in his whole career. Grade: A
Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)
I don't know why Michael Moore didn't just make a full movie about the Flint water crisis, since that's far and away the best part of this scattered, shambling movie. Moore's populist fury for what has been done to his hometown remains his most compelling characteristic, and the 30 minutes that the film devotes to the whole sordid disaster is borderline great and alone probably justifies Moore's sharp turn toward actual agitprop in this film. However, the rest of the movie is this whirlwind of what feels like a survey of Daily Beast headlines from the past 2-3 years, unified under the really vague umbrellas of "Donald Trump" and "activism." Full of Moore's typical bluster and stuntery (hey, you lip-synced Adolf Hitler footage with audio of a Trump speech, you sure owned the MAGA crowd, don't know how they'll recover from that one), it's this heap of a film that just kind of flops around under its own many-tentacled weight, and it just plain doesn't work. It's viscerally upsetting because watching footage of the Stoneman Douglas shooting or Trump's threats toward protesters is viscerally upsetting just by virtue of those events having occurred at all. But as a coherent take on the modern American political landscape or even as the call to revolution that the finale so dearly wants to be, this is just ineffectual thunder. Grade: C
Food, Inc. (2008)
Normally, I would damn with faint praise by lumping this in with the rest of that tedious activistcore wave of documentaries from the mid-2000s. And... it's not like this isn't that (though it has good taste lacking in every other activist docs, in that it forgoes the obligatory ironic animated sequence). But this film's argumentation against industrial farming is particularly ruthless and cleared-eyed—impressively so. It also yields two legitimately great documentary moments. One involves a beef farmer cutting a hole in the side of a living cow and excitedly showing the camera how he can reach his hand into one of the cow's stomachs like it's the greatest thing since the microchip. The enthusiasm is infectious, both figuratively and literally (being part of a whole segment involving E. coli in meat). Errol Morris would be proud. The other, much more in-tune with the doc's overall rhetorical aims and almost without a doubt the most pointed and effective use of the film's take-no-prisoners posture, is when footage of immigrants being shoved into vans by immigration officials after raids of meat-packing plants plays over audio of an impassioned interview which tells us relentlessly that this is the real cost of our holiday hams and turkeys. It's the film's most bracing deployment of pathos, or at least it is for me eight months after a mass-scale version of that footage occurring just a county over from my house. Grade: B
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
I mean, this is certifiably pro-cop in this really icky "ends justifying the means" way, to say nothing of the '80s trademark homophobia on display in a few key scenes (apparently the only thing more villainous than a vaguely Russian drug dealer is a vaguely Russian drug dealer who might be gay). But Eddie Murphy is extremely good in this movie—so good that he does a decent job of papering over some of the more objectionable qualities of his character. This is maybe the best Murphy performance that I've seen, and while that's not exactly saying much, given that I've seen only a handful of pre-Shrek Murphy roles, it is pretty stunning what he's doing here. Grade: C+
Vanishing Point (1971)
I'm of two minds regarding this film. Well, of many minds, actually. The film is complete and utter worship of the automobile, which my train-loving spirit objects to strongly, to say nothing of the mythologizing of the Ruggedly Individual American Male, which just sort of bores me. But also, as something of a 20th century folk tale, with all the kaleidoscopic cul-de-sacs and slippery meanings that come with the genre—I mean, is it a lionizing of the Ruggedly Individual American Male, what with that self-destructive ending and all? It's not as simple as it seems. But also, it falls handily into the fallacy of reducing the counterculture to a mere quest for Freedom, Maaaaan, wherein anti-authority sentiments are an end to themselves, which is the same kind of thinking that landed the movement at Altamont and later Ronald Reagan. So screw that. But also... maybe this movie is aware of that? But not enough to avoid casting its almost arbitrarily defiant (and of course white—they're always white, the salvific figures of these counterculture movies) protagonist as some sort of larger-than-life hero of the people? But also, the car goes vroom, and the rock music kicks, and the cinematography is brilliant. I dunno, man, I gotta lotta feelings here, and most of the time, I was feeling like I was having a good time. Grade: B
Television
Joe Pera Talks with You, Season 1 (2018)
I don't even know where this came from. Seemingly out of the clear blue sky (or, more likely, the cold, overcast sky of Michigan's Upper Peninsula) appears this beautiful little Adult Swim gem, featuring none of the aggressive weirdness that's characterized the Adult Swim brand, instead going for a quiet, contemplative wholesomeness that feels more in-line with, like, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood or The Joy of Painting—only infused with an idiosyncratic philosophic impulse and a deep well of melancholy that makes every one of its 11-minute episodes feel like something of a soft-spoken treatise on the human experience. I barely know how to describe it; what I'm saying here barely conveys the wonderfulness of Joe Pera Talks with You. When people talk about "Peak TV," they're usually referring to the explosion of ambitious content on streaming services, but honestly, this is the Peak TV I'm here for: these graceful little pockets of brilliance in the odd corners of the television landscape, both a piece of television tradition and curiously apart from it. Seriously, go watch this, folks. Grade: A
Books
The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket (2003)
The tenth book in A Series of Unfortunate Events is something of a transitional book. Being set on a relatively nondescript mountainside for its entirety, the novel lacks the inventiveness and little satirical microcosm societies that the best books in the series often develop; it's also something of an info-dump as far as the ongoing mysteries in the series go, which feels uncharacteristically inelegant for these books. But it's still that same wonderful wit as the other books, and Snicket's metafiction is both funny and interesting in the ways it's developed here. The payoff to all the ethical questions of the previous few books feels earned, too. Grade: B
Music
Noname - Room 25 (2018)
Chicago rapper's sophomore effort (or debut, if we're counting 2016's Telefone as a mixtape instead of an album, which... is confusing, but okay) is jazzy in production and quietly profound in its exploration of both the personal and the social. But let's take a moment just to appreciate how uproariously funny Room 25 is: "My pussy teaches 9th-grade English/My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism" is maybe the funniest lyric in any music anywhere this year. Grade: A-
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