Mini Reviews for January 14-20, 2019

Probably will be a father by the end of the week, which means that Glass is the last movie I watch in a theater as a regular old non-father guy. This seems... appropriate.

Movie

Glass (2019)

I mean, I don't even know, y'all. It's earnest and dumb in the way that Shyamalan movies can sometimes be, but also a deeply, deeply strange piece of filmmaking, both as a mainstream studio release and as a continuation of Shyamalan's filmography. This is being marketed as the "Avengers Assemble" film of the Shyamalan Cinematic Universe, but what they're not telling you is that, like, 90% of it takes place in an authoritarian mental institution bent on gaslighting its inmates (i.e. the familiar super-powered faces from Unbreakable and Split). As such, it's this uneasy, almost structureless movie where you're waiting an hour thirty for the other shoe to drop and for it to be revealed what The Deal is with this institution; I hesitate to say this because it sounds like the kind of goofy movie-buff nonsense that ends with people seeing Godard's influence on Michael Bay or whatever, but dang it, Glass is almost like an Ingmar Bergman movie with all the tortured, philosophically minded chamber drama and lack of forward momentum. But at the same time, it's also a completely uninhibited parade of Shyamalan following just about every stylistic whim that occurs to him. The camera swoops and zooms and finds five different compelling compositions for each scene, and there's the sense that Shyamalan wanted each and every shot in the film to be the very best thing he ever committed to film—which makes the movie feel intensely kinetic, as if (combined with the static plotting) it's trying to invent the cinematic equivalent of running in place. It's wild. It's also not all that fun either. In fact, the movie is pretty joyless overall, and the film's climax, which belabors some of its death scenes to an exhausting degree, is straight-up tedious. But you'll likely not see an odder mainstream movie at the multiplex this year, and even if you do, it probably won't end by indicting the police as an arm of a fascist conspiracy. So there's that. Grade: B-

The Day After (그 후) (2017)

The most emotionally immediate Hong Sang-soo film I've seen, with a few scenes that (to continue my ongoing Woody Allen analogy) approximate the kind of scorched-earth relational rawness of Husbands and Wives. But then it veers into uncharacteristic screwball territory in its final act, which... okay. Despite being relatively straightforward, Hong-wise (I don't think we have any multiverse shenanigans going on here), The Day After is strangely frayed, almost compellingly so. But I dunno, yet again, I'm not really too excited about anything here, and it doesn't help that the b&w cinematography is all washed-out and dead-looking compared to the exquisite look of The Day He Arrives, the last Hong I saw. Grade: B-

Volcano (Ixcanul) (2015)

For a movie ostensibly committed to "realism," this is such a wonderfully tactile film, so thoroughly grounded in the hissing grass and grinding pebbles of its Guatemalan setting that it feels practically dreamlike in the way it becomes pure sensation at times. The story itself is crushingly grim and unforeseeably cruel, which is much more for-the-course for this sort of quiet, desperate drama—though that by-numbers social naturalism only barely dulls the impact of the film's tragedy, wherein the horrible exploitation of Indigenous peoples simmers under the surface of most of the film before completely boiling over in the climax. Grade: B

Cartel Land (2015)

This documentary is shocking in its inability to carry the weight of its own ethical questions. Trying to paint parallel pictures of both American and Mexican counter-cartel militia groups is a fundamentally flawed project to begin with, and the ways that the movie tries to highlight the flaws (e.g. the interviews with innocent Mexican civilians) carry almost no weight at all; the movie does a disturbingly effective job of drawing the Mexican end of the situation as nightmarish and virtually no job at all in depiction the American side of things as largely run by out-of-control nationalist fears—at least, not enough of a job to counteract the impassioned speeches by the American militia dude as he stares off nobly into the sunset. It's equally frustrating, then, to see the movie devote so much time to showing the Mexican militia devolve, somewhat expectedly, into corrupt, amoral chaos and then spend zero time deconstructing the American militia dude's explicitly fear-mongering nonsense about how "people all over the world" are afraid of foreigners coming across their borders. At the time of this movie's release, the Syrian refugee crisis was beginning to ramp up in Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the United States), and the Western world's response was basically to collectively lose our minds down a rabbit hole of xenophobia and borderline fascism—so I guess the American militia dude's not exactly wrong, but also, there's nothing in the movie besides a dubious parallelism with the Mexican vigilantes to suggest just how dangerous this rhetoric is. Maybe it's just a casualty of timing; if Cartel Land had been made just 12 months later, it would have basically been handed on a platter the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump as the absurd apotheosis of these ideas. So maybe this isn't all the movie's fault. But still, it's a hell of a bad feeling watching this movie now in 2019 while the federal government barely functions because people are irrationally terrified of what (who) lays beyond our national borders. Grade: C-

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

There are some extraordinarily questionable decisions in this movie, from the aesthetic (some of this CGI, woof) to the narrative (like, wtf is even going on in this movie?) to the more serious (the brief scene of blackface, the enthusiastic "The age of consent!" line right after Lily Cole's character establishes that she's pretending to be 12 but is really almost 16). But there are also some extremely compelling decisions here, too: Tom Waits plays the Devil! A group of policemen put on a musical burlesque! There's a balloon made of several iterations of Christopher Plummer's face stitched together! Even the CGI, while often dreadful, has this endearingly homespun quality to it—the digital backdrops and CG characters come off as intentionally rickety in the same way that Gilliam's cut-out animations in Monty Python do, and it has the same odd charm that I've begun to see in some of the washed-out digital effects of Lucas's Star Wars prequels. This is one of the most inventive and bonkers movies I've watched in a while, and as much as there are pieces that don't work (like, at all), the experience of following this head-trippy, funhouse Faust retelling is just too wild to dismiss. Yep, sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie alright. Grade: B+

Medicine for Melancholy (2008)

There's not a lot to these characters outside of how they intersect the various social issues they spend the majority of the movie discussing. On that basis, I feel like I should rate this movie lower on principle. But the depiction of San Francisco by way of desaturated digital cinematography is really vibrant. There's also a lot of talk about gentrification and the limitations of late-2000s indie culture and a scene in a public meeting where people talk about rent control, and y'all, I am but flesh. Grade: B

Books

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (2018)

Lisa Halliday's debut novel is an extremely tricky book, both on a structural and thematic level. Structurally, this book's division into two large sections and one quick epilogue gives the story its titular asymmetric shape and also makes it extremely hard to wrap your head around as a whole, given how seemingly standalone each section is. Thematically, Asymmetry is a veritable rabbit hole of truth and lies, recalling Atonement in its metafictional layers but as if Ian McEwan never tipped his hand in the book's final section. It is, among other things, a study in the distance an author takes from her subject, beginning with basically autobiographical material in the first section's depiction of a young woman's romantic relationship with a Philip-Roth-like "Great American Writer" (Halliday herself was romantically involved with Philip Roth in her twenties) before zooming out in the second section to the most distant possible character from Halliday's own experience, an Iraqi man being questioned by airport security as he attempts to fly to Iraq to visit his brother. Both of these sections seem to be openly bating, respectively, the tabloid-ready biographical critics and the socially conscious critics who urge authors to "stay in their lane" regarding marginalized voices, while the final section (a lengthy interview transcript in which the Roth-esque character openly flirts with the much younger [and married!] woman interviewing him) seems to be putting up a lightning rod for #MeToo. All this is nested in this niggling feeling that at least some of these characters have been written into existence by others, and it's hard to tell what really has happened and what is just fiction (within the larger fiction of the book, of course). It's all very bold and fascinating, and though I'm not sure if I completely get it yet. But it's definitely a novel to be reckoned with and one I'm glad I read. Grade: B+

Music

Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention - Absolutely Free (1967)

On their sophomore release, Zappa and the Mothers take the absurdist, non-conformist mosaic rock of Freak Out! and refract it even further into the proto-prog psychedelic shards that set the stage for later Mothers albums like We're Only in It for the Money. Each side of the album forms a mini-suite of music that culminates in a lengthy, genre-sprawling composition—Side 1 and its anti-Nazi, vegetable-conscious satire leads into the woodwind-heavy jam "Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin" (my favorite part of the album), while Side 2's "pageant" suite builds to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," which resembles a community musical theatre that has taken acid. The intentional fragmentation makes the album somewhat difficult (though not nearly as difficult as future Frank Zappa), and the satirical humor is oftentimes kind of repulsive (particularly on "Brown Shoes," which involves a dude fantasizing about his 13-year-old daughter—definitely a cornerstone of the pageant satire and not something we're supposed to think is good, but still... not fun to listen to). But also, Zappa's penchant for the weird is virtually unparalleled, even at this early point in his career, and his utter disdain for America's ruling class makes for a unifying and often compelling ethos. Also, there's a monologue about how vegetables keep you regular, and I'm not sure if we've seen anything like that in the world of rock music either before or since. Grade: B+