-My favorite music of 2018
-My favorite movies of 2018
Movies
Lola Kirk is good as the lead, an amateur gumshoe investigating the murder of the celebrity she was assistant to, but I think that's more because I like Lola Kirk in general than anything to do with this movie in particular. A disappointingly listless neo-noir that gambles its paint-by-numbers plotting on a bafflingly open-ended resolution that makes no sense. Or maybe I'm just dumb. But regardless, I was bored. Also, I know that the neon-and-synths aesthetic is kind of the default for American indie right now, but it would be nice if movies like Gemini at least tried to make it fresh. Feels like a complete afterthought. Not a great outcome for my last movie of 2018. Grade: C
I've never seen a Joe Swanberg movie before, but this is almost exactly what I've always imagined a Joe Swanberg movie to be: young-ish adults working at a brewery dealing with confusing, low-stakes emotional dramedy; also, hand-held camera; also, Foxygen. Anyway, it's good. A wonderfully prickly performance from Olivia Wilde, which is exactly the sort of thing you need to make this material work. Grade: B
Jane Camion's John Keats biopic/period romance is gorgeously constructed at every level—especially on the metrics of cinematography, lighting, score, and Abbie Cornish's kind of transcendent performance. Still, maybe it's just that I've never been hugely enthusiastic about Keats's poetry (or poetry of the Romantic Period in general), but I didn't feel a thing watching this movie, and when you're dealing with Romantic poetry, a stony heart is pretty much the death of the form. But for the look and texture of this film and for Cornish's performance, I'm glad to have dropped in. Grade: B
Handsomely put together, and Roger Deakins's cinematography alongside Thomas Newman's score is frequently breathtaking. As with Sam Mendes's other "the suburbs suxxxx" film, American Beauty, Revolutionary Road's tendency to use its plot as a sledgehammer for a kind of solipsistic message is a liability; the chief irony of the suburbs, that a community design premised on the idea of escaping black people became a source of anguish and oppression for its own residents, is entirely lost on this movie in favor of a sort of vaguely aesthetic lifestyle critique ("the suburbs suck because we can't move to Paris!")—I've not read the Richard Yates novel this is based on, so maybe that was just baked into this story from the get-go. Anyway, the movie is much more effective when it focuses on the smaller-scale, more interior conflict between the movie's central husband and wife, which does a much more incisive job of showing the ways that the enforcement of nuclear-family norms disproportionately affect women than the movie as a whole does of showing the damage of the suburban system. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this movie would actually be great if it fully committed to the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style domestic drama that it so clearly wants to be about 30% of the time. DiCaprio and Winslet are already acting as if they're in an Albee play anyway. Grade: B-
Significantly more interesting than its reputation as Campion's disaster would indicate. On a moment-by-moment basis, the screenplay is mostly gobbledygook ("No sense of cock!"), which I suspect was part of the film's negative reception. The rest, I think, probably has to do with the discomfort of having one of these purportedly Basic Instinct-style erotic thrillers focus so intently on female sexuality as dictated by the female gaze, rather than the typically phallocentric, male-pleasure-centric ideas of sexuality (and the villainizing of that which doesn't fit into that). Although the Basic Instinct angle is something of a feint, too, as this quickly evolves into a film more reminscent of the exercises in interiority and subjectivity that Polanski's Apartment Trilogy brought to the screen more than a purely lurid thriller of the '90s variety (though that Verhoeven-esque feeling of being unable to tell whether or not the movie's stiltedness is intentional artifice or just lousy acting remains). Anyway, this is a genuinely fascinating feature; seeing Campion work through the intersection of violence and sex makes it, more so than any other film in her career, a companion to her masterpiece, The Piano, and the cinematic style is exquisite. It's far from perfect, even putting aside the frankly rotten script, but it's not anywhere close to Campion's worst. I'd actually probably rather watch this again than Bright Star, to be honest. Grade: B
It's a deceptively simple movie that manages a neat trick of becoming actually sentimental without ever giving up the dark, vulgarly tragicomic tone that defines the film, which saves it from the whiplash that sometimes plagues comedies that try to have serious emotional stakes. Billy Bob Thorton is also incredible here, plumbing some seriously impressive depths of self-loathing with his performance. So I understand why people like this movie as much as they do. But also, as much as I admire its sprightliness with project, this just isn't for me. Let me check my list twice for all this movie's naughtiness: 1) At the risk of sounding like someone who complains that Star Wars is set in outer space, the film just invests way too much energy into beat after beat of "golly, this Santa sure is bad!", which is both a cheap joke and a repetitive one after the film's first couple scenes. 2) Lauren Graham is criminally misused as this Santa-kink nympho—the movie gives her a half-hearted maternal turn in the movie's back half, which... am I supposed to be impressed by a single character straddling both sides of the Madonna/whore trope? 3) Then there are all the other non-Santa characters, who are sometimes mildly amusing (Bernie Mac's security chief—"HALF") but mostly just flat (Tony Cox as Santa's partner-in-crime elf, whose late-film turn may have worked better if he'd been better developed early on). 4) I'm also not a huge fan of all the casual homophobia and lovely 2003-ness here ("retarded" makes several appearances, as do a couple bits about the litigiousness of people of color/with disabilities). I suppose it's "period appropriate" (my gosh, 2003 is a "period" now), and the movie does have this sort of ironic distance where you're not exactly supposed to be in favor of all this. But I'm just not having fun with it. I realize that a large part of this movie's mode is to burrow so deeply into this darkly miserable comedic space that it comes around full circle and manages to be a sincere character piece, and it's moderately successful at that method, though I think the movie could commit a bit less to being a raunch comedy and a bit more to being a tragic character study if that's what it ultimately wants to become. But you'll forgive me for not really enjoying the trip through the misery, right? Grade: C+
A supremely strange animated rumination on domesticity and marriage. I can't claim to really know much about Hungarian animation, but this film's style, in which the character models and backgrounds are in constant motion, stretching and twisting and ballooning in concert with the emotional register of the characters (or, sometimes, seemingly just on a whim), feels pretty radical to me—like a proto-Bill Plympton but on a metric ton of acid. There are also songs. It's a lot: fascinating, confounding, inventive, good. Grade: B
Finds something of a midpoint between Grand Hotel and The Lady Vanishes while being neither as funny at Hitchcock's film nor as rich in pathos as Grand Hotel. It's diverting, and there are some moments ("Shanghai Lily" shrouded in darkness, looking up to God) that are exquisitely lit. But on a technical level, it's full of those kind of restless moments of silence you tend to see in early talkies where they clearly didn't know how to inhabit the sonic space they created, and on a screenwriting level, the central romance is doing precisely nothing for me. Grade: B-
Television
Free from a lot of the setup and introductions that made the first season slow to start, GLOW's second season finds time to deepen the character relationships and make the plot beats a lot more poignant, and the results are wonderful. It's still not really a "message" show in the vein of its Netflix counterpart, Orange Is the New Black, but it does ground its pathos more in the unequal power structures of the showbiz industry, which gives the solidarity that the Gorgeous Women of Wrestling inevitably find a lot more weight. Moreover, this season does a much better job of sorting its characters into primary, secondary, and tertiary groups, which means we get a lot less of the kind of wheel-spinning dead air spent with characters who don't end up amounting to much of the course of the season. But that's not to say that the show is dismissive of any of its characters; with its second season, GLOW realizes its promise as a true ensemble show and, vitally, one of the warmest series on television at the moment. Grade: A-
Books
As much a philosophical dialogue as it is a novel, Motherhood is comprised almost entirely of conversations: ones the protagonist has with her friends, her husband, herself, and even the universe at large (via an I Ching-inspired coin flip system)—all centered on the idea of motherhood, something the childless protagonist, who is quickly aging out of her thirties, is mulling over with increased frequency these days. In the process, the book relentlessly interrogates the assumptions and pressures put on women, even in the 21st century, and while it doesn't always feel exactly new (a lot of this intersects stuff Virginia Woolf was writing about a century ago), it does always feel urgent. There's a part of me that wishes that the book was more explicitly in conversation with its philosophical antecedents (the novel is intensely solipsistic, which is both a feature and a bug), but as someone who is about to be a parent himself, I can't deny that regardless of how much it cites its sources, it was incisive enough to feel like commentary on my own life at times. Grade: B+
A classic humorous travelogue of three men (and their dog)'s boating trip down the Thames. The humor feels a lot like a 19th-century Dave Barry, and as with Barry's work, a lot of this struck me as just mildly amusing—though sections of it are uproariously funny, such as an extended passage in which the narrator describes living in a house with a young couple, where it is frustratingly difficult not to walk in on them making out (and how maybe this was what it was like for the people of England when Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn first met). Honestly, the boating trip itself is pretty dull, but whenever the narrator goes on essay-like digressions like the above one or another highlight in which he muses about how the kitsch of one era becomes the valuable artifact of the next, it's great. Grade: B
The eleventh book in A Series of Unfortunate Events tones down some of the ethical and metafictional elements that had come to dominate the most recent entries in the series, and the book feels a little slight for it. Its setting inside the submarine named the Queequeg isn't nearly as inventive as past books either, lacking both the satirical bite of something like the high rise in The Ersatz Elevator and the delirious absurdity of The Miserable Mill (though as a whole, the novel is probably about on par with Mill as far as quality goes). The new characters (Captain Widdershins and his step-daughter, Fiona) don't make much of an impact, either, which is a problem for the book's back half and its reliance on these characters' actions for dramatic weight. On the other hand, the book also has some of the tensest setpieces in the series, which makes it a sprightly read despite its relative lack of shine compared to the other entries in the series. So it's kind of a mixed bag. Grade: B-
Music
The debut of the famed folk duo has some early highlights, like the original stripped-down version of "The Sound of Silence" and the deep-ish cut "Bleecker Street." But outside those few high marks, the album as a whole is pretty unremarkable, a forgettable collection of folk-revival covers and remade arrangements of traditional songs. "Silence" and "Bleecker" are both Paul Simon originals (as well as a couple others on here), and there's no question that Simon's songwriting is where this duo's strength lies, and the instant Simon & Garfunkel albums became good is the precise moment when they began structuring them around his compositions—i.e. not here. Grade: C+
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