Movies
I'm retroactively calling this the best documentary of 2018. The film creates a sense of place not, as others might have done, by outlining the social structures of a community or having residents explain their existence; instead, Hale County captures the subjective experience of being there, the sensory textures of living in one place for long enough that streets become abstractions and sunsets become like the front of a statue, worn greasily smooth by the eons of hands being laid upon it, and somehow, magically, it also evokes the entire sweep not just of this community but of the entire history of the rural American South, and specifically of the intersection of blackness within it—not with methodical thoroughness, but through beautifully incomplete gestures. Magnificent. If I ever made a documentary, this is what I would want it to be like. Grade: A
Well, it certainly feels like the mid-'90s, both from a verisimilitude standpoint (it has the clothes down) and a filmmaking standpoint (you could tell me this came out in 1996, and I probably wouldn't bat an eye except for that one crane [drone?] shot during the "Gyöngyhajú lány" sequence). It's not really a nostalgia exercise, as some have said; I'd say Jonah Hill has about the same attitude toward this milieu as Linklater has toward the '70s in Dazed and Confused—i.e. "painful memories." But also, it's conspicuous that we only ever hear these boys listening to Nirvana and A Tribe Called Quest and other retrospectively cool music and not the veritable avalanche of terrible '90s music that any adolescent at the time would have undoubtedly listened to as well, which calls into question some of Hill's comments about the film's authenticity toward the mid-'90s adolescent experience (and the use of some highly charged... uh, "historically accurate" language). But after all, this all becomes kind of academic once you realize that, regardless of whatever critiques you might have of the movie's sensitivity or realism, it's really just a pileup of extremely dusty coming-of-age cliches not really worth a ton of thought one way or the other. And not just dusty cliches—really ham-fistedly executed ones at that. There's a whole sequence of scenes toward the beginning of the film's second half that has about all the delicacy of that whole "THIS IS A DARK PERIOD!!" part from Dewey Cox. Grade: C
A crushingly sad account of a day in the life of a recovering addict. It lacks the formal derring-do of director Joachim's subsequent feature, Louder Than Bombs, but it shares with that later film a similar preoccupation with the sheer, unshakable weight of existence and how the only way to escape this is to buy into the temptation of living in a sort of perpetual present that accepts new days as legitimately new experiences rather than the accumulation of everything that has come before—difficult for some in ordinary circumstances, steeply difficult for someone attempting sobriety. The way the film contextualizes its protagonist's struggle within the sweep of history—first, in the film's opening montage, within the history of Oslo as a city and second, in a later sequence, within the personal history of the protagonist's parents—makes it clear that such self-deception is ultimately off the table for the protagonist. As a result, the movie is a dreadful (yet beautifully empathetic) wait for the other shoe to drop. Grade: B+
A much better version of the story that the film version of Revolutionary Road is trying to tell—better, mostly, because it grounds its story in the actual historically oppressed people victimized by the white hegemony of the mid-20th century (read: gay people, people of color, etc.) rather than the bland lifestyle critique of the suburbs that Revolutionary Road offers. It's also just jaw-droppingly gorgeous at every turn. Todd Haynes's strengths in stylistic pastiche yield great results throughout his career, but they've never produced images of such raw beauty as his rich, autumnally colorful Douglas Sirk evocation here. Grade: B+
A lot has been said over the years about the way that Audition takes what a lot of movies would construe as a romantic premise and twists it into abject horror (after, of course, playing it straightly romantic for an hour—the perverse delights of this movie never end). And that's great; a deconstruction of cinematic chauvinism that's perhaps a tad obvious in retrospect but nonetheless fierce and unblinking to an unparalleled degree. I don't see many people talking about the utterly strange games this movie is playing with PoV, though, which is a shame, because they are deeply strange. Aoyama knows things in this movie that logically he should have no knowledge of, which gives the feeling that the very reality of the movie itself is collapsing alongside the horrific imagery that animates the finale. Very unsettling, very good. Grade: A
There are a lot of really bad things about this movie, but to single out the one that made me the most frustrated throughout: it has some of the worst editing I've ever seen in a mainstream release. But really, the whole package is just dreadful. I want to say that it's ripe for a remake, being that it's an intriguing premise (Run Lola Run/Blind Chance, but a rom-com) executed horribly, but you know, I don't know if anyone's going to do any better than that one episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that parodies this. Grade: D+
I'm surprised how much I was taken by this film, given how I responded to Hellbound Train, the last openly proselytizing film I saw. But even though both movies have ostensibly the same purpose (and have the same rather hilarious view of jazz music), only one—this one—has any sort of artistic power. The Blood of Jesus captures with striking beauty the folk religion and essential Americana of the very early goings of the Evangelical movement: the near-constant congregational hymnal singing, the fuzzy double-exposure shots of souls making their way to the pearly gates, the looming, almost ominous presence of a conspicuously white Jesus—this movie understands something fundamental about American Christianity on an aesthetic level that I've very rarely (if ever?) seen evoked in a film. And the way that everything is just slightly out-of-focus and garbled (an unintentional consequence of the film's age and upkeep?) gives the movie the same eerie, ethereal quality found in Pete Drake's cover of "Forever" or, as this review points out, Carnival of Souls. Pretty stunning stuff, especially for how ostensibly straightforward this film's ideas and plot are. Grade: B+
It feels a little mean to give a rating at all to an independently produced African-American film from 1930—much less one that's more interested in religious proselytizing than artistic merit (apparently Christian films have learned nothing in 90 years); but I've also never not rated a movie, which would make unrating this one feel a little condescending—which is why I'm sticking it exactly in the middle of the grading scale. Its mere existence is an achievement, both for having the wherewithal to be filmed in 1930 at all and also for having been essentially snatched from oblivion and reconstructed by film preservationists, and as a kind of backdoor document of early-20th-century black American life, it yields some pretty interesting moments, like footage of a black church service and a poor train yard. But other than those fleeting moments and a few chuckles at the quaint morality on display (it's an evangelical anthology film that outlines a bunch of the vices that its moral-crusading filmmakers were most up-in-arms about, vices which include jazz music and skipping church), this feature is mostly just of historical interest. Also, I hope we all realize that it's an automobile, not a train, that's going to take everyone to the Lake of Fire—it's called the Highway to Hell, after all. Perhaps that jazz section should have been switched out for the vice of America's car idolatry. Grade: C
Television
Nadia is curiously death-prone, but luckily, death is not the end; it's just an excuse for the universe to boot her back to the same day and the same Harry Nilsson needle drop (you will hear "Gotta Get Up" a lot in Russian Doll). Every time she dies, she must relive her birthday and the days following it, depending on how long she makes it until death finds her again. It's basically a much more morbid Groundhog Day, and for as much as we've seen this concept reiterated in the twenty-plus years since that Bill Murray classic, there's still a lot of freshness to be found in the premise. For one, while there have been distinct episodes of shows devoted to a Groundhog Day scheme, I'm pretty sure Russian Doll is the first TV series entirely premised on the structure, which alone makes it something of an experiment. And that's even before you get into its utterly beguiling thematic ambitions, which stretch the show from questions of metaphysics and spirituality to a deconstruction of family and trauma to a meditation on the ghosts left by the casualties of the gentrification of NYC's Lower East Side. It's also very funny and very moving, anchored by a transfixing performance from Natasha Lyonne (who also co-created the series and occasionally writes and directs it, too). The best TV series I've seen so far in 2019, and it'll be a steep challenge to best it by the year's end. Grade: A
Kimmy's farewell season is handily its weakest. Like Season 3, this season struggles to find a consistent throughline for its characters in its multitude of plots, and unlike any other season of the show, there isn't a single recurring plot that really works at all. The #MeToo-centric stuff with Titus is an inconsistent and uneasy fit with the show's absurd universe (and has at least one too many Muppet penises), while the fact that everything to do with Kimmy's bunker past was mostly wrapped up by previous seasons means that Kimmy is adrift as a character who has mostly fully actualized, and the show doesn't always know what to do with that. The fact that the season was bizarrely broken into two parts and released months apart from one another doesn't really help the feeling that the season is disjointed and slight, as that break absolutely kills any forward momentum the early episodes have. As always, the moment-to-moment dialogue is still hilarious, and at least two episodes (the mockumentary "Party Monster: Scratching the Surface" and the Sliding Doors parody "Sliding Van Doors"—interestingly, both episodes that involve Kimmy and Titus sitting down to watch Netflix) are fantastic. But I guess now, at the end, is as good a time as any to come to grips with the fact that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has never really been a capital-G Great series, and each subsequent season has had a little less gas in the tank. So it's only fitting that the final season sputters to a stop with the gauge on empty. Grade: B-
Books
This is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read, which isn't exactly saying much, considering the number of graphic novels I've read. But don't let that dilute my praise for this book (the first of two volumes). Ferris's story is a two-pronged coming-of-age narrative, nesting a searing memory of Weimar Germany within the more immediate diary of the ten-year-old Karen, a girl growing up in 1960s Chicago and who identifies more with creepshow monsters than human beings. The Germany flashbacks are the showiest and heaviest parts of the book, but the "present" of Karen's Chicago is hardly slight, and both sides of the story serve as sharp and utterly human renderings of pain and warmth and the audacious optimism that children always seem to find—made all the more endearing by the book's intentionally sketch-like graphic style, interspersed with thematically relevant recreations of classic horror magazine covers. It's all so beautiful and full of life, and I cannot wait to get my hands on Volume Two when it comes out later this year. Grade: A
I remember hearing a bunch of these spooky stories when I was growing up, which creates a sort of chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. This is an unexpectedly academic collection of folk anthropology (seriously, how many children's books have a lengthy bibliography that cites not just preexisting anthologies but actual academic journals?) is clearly drawing from a rich tradition of American oral tradition, but also, did I encounter these stories as organic folklore, or did the popularity of this collection canonize these specific stories and spread them via commercial means into my young ears? Anyway, it's cool to see stories whose origins are clearly on the American colonizing frontier rubbing shoulders with more modern urban legends like "The call is coming from inside the house!", blurring the line between contemporary media and folklore. And beyond the mere text of these stories, it's clear that at least half of this collection's spookiness comes from Stephen Gammell's nightmarish illustrations, which are impressively macabre for a book with this young a readership demographic. There's a lot to like here. But maybe I'm just too old for it, or I'm just already too familiar with these stories from the schoolyard grapevine; either way, there's nothing (except maybe those illustrations) that blew me away. In fact, the collection is maybe too academic for its own good, putting guardrails on where these stories can go. It doesn't help that Schwartz's prose style is so... well, so boring. There's a line between deceptively simple and just plain dull, and Schwartz flirts with the wrong side of that line far too often. Grade: B
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