Movies
Based entirely on his 2004 feature Mind Game (the only other film of his I've seen), Masaaki Yuasa is one of the most interesting animation directors currently working. Night Is Short, Walk on Girl feels just ever so slightly like a compromise compared to the wild, ungainly, and often purposefully grotesque Mind Game. Maybe that's for the best. The radical edges, particularly in the gleeful, perverse mixing of media, have mostly been sanded off here, instead giving a mostly unified (if exuberant) aesthetic, which makes this film feel something like a comedown from that earlier film. But this movie's kinetic animation could only be called "conventional" in contrast to a style as outré as Mind Game's, and there's no arguing that taken holistically, Night Is Short is far and away the more functional film on a narrative level and actually manages to create a coherent emotional landscape for its characters (though even here, there is some dead air, particularly with the theater sequence that makes of the bulk of the film's middle half-hour). The movie's eye for the gently absurd matches perfectly with its plot, which is comprised almost entirely of a drunken night on the town that, amusingly and profoundly, takes on cosmic significance, and it depicts the reckless, youthful abandon of that sort of hazy urban wandering with a beautiful precision. Yuasa no longer feels as though he's tearing the medium apart with his bare hands, so that thrill's gone. But we got a pretty good movie in trade! Grade: B+
Guy goes under cover in a community of what basically amounts to a Syrian chapter of al-Qaeda and observes the way that the terrorist-aspiring fathers radicalize their children. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a more extreme example of documentary chutzpah, and there's a basic level of visceral terror inherent in the premise that the doc never loses—both in the vicarious fear for the wellbeing of the undercover director and in the deeply tragic, pit-in-the-stomach feeling of watching these children learning radical hate (in many ways, the escalated counterpart to Jesus Camp, of all things). As with Jesus Camp, there's a sort of uncomfortable feeling that these children are merely pawns for the documentarian to use in indicting the clearly villainous adults, and also like Jesus Camp, the lack of social or historical context keeps the film a bit closer to exploitation cinema than I'd like. But you're unlikely to see a scarier documentary in the near future either, and as a pure piece of craft intersecting reality, it's intense. Grade: B
There's barely enough story here for a documentary half the length of Finders Keepers—bad news for the film's final 30 minutes, which hardcore run out of gas. But the true story of a legal fight between a man trying to reclaim his amputated leg and the man who (unintentionally) bought the leg at an auction is quite a yarn and entertaining while it's in motion. There's the sense (hinted at by the film itself) that some of these people are folksing it up for the camera, and even if not, it's still somewhat cartoonish (until it gestures toward social seriousness with the talk of opioid addition and such)—but no complaints from me as long as this movie is engaging. Grade: B-
In a wildly inventive documentary involving stop-motion animation, collage, and clever pop-culture references, Jodie Mack chronicles the decline of her mother's college-dorm-room-poster business in the most college-dorm-room-y way possible, by turning the whole thing into a note-for-note send-up of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Being that I spent many years of my life believing that DSotM is the greatest album of all time and that my college dorm room wall was decorated with a Pink Floyd poster that very well could have been part of Mack's mother's business's inventory (though that one was of Wish You Were Here—the other greatest album of all time, naturally), this film is uniquely—almost uncannily—positioned to be ecstatically received by me. And low and behold. In addition to the raw dopamine hit of hearing the uber-familiar Pink Floyd music recontextualized like this, it's funny and whip-smart and one of the best times I've had watching a movie in ages. But what makes it truly special is the way that it finds its heart as a kind of eulogy, not just for this specific poster business but for small family businesses in general and the "work hard/get ahead" capitalist myth writ large—which oddly makes the final effect of the film less of a parody than a companion piece to Pink Floyd's jaded, lefty output of the '70s. It's a lot more playful than anything the band did with ol' Roger Waters at the helm, but it's animated by a similarly sardonic, bitter regard for the ways that the powerful create lies that both beguile and entrap the working class. Maybe I'm just leaning too hard into my new role as "dad" (hey, kids, ya wanna hear some Steely Dan?), but this strikes me as a deeply profound reflection of the '70s masterpiece that inspired it, and I'm (go-go-gadget dad joke) over the moon here. Grade: A+
It's (I think?) the consensus now that Denzel's character and not Matthew Broderick's Colonel Shaw should have been this movie's protagonist, and oh boy, ain't that the truth. Even putting aside the obvious issue of telling what is really these black soldiers' stories through the avatar of a white dude (granted, the white dude who helped empower these soldiers), there's a real question of dramatic exigency here. Whose story sounds more filmworthy to you: a man who runs away from slavery and then joins the Union Army to fight and kill the Confederates who enslaved him and then, in response to the racism he faces within the Union Army, organizes a strike to leverage fair wages for his fellow soldiers of color and then sacrifices his life to a cause he believes is futile but whose strength of will compels him forward anyway, or the white man who is his commanding officer and faces mild mental anguish about the racism of his peers? That's to say nothing about the execution of the thing, too, which, aside from the excellent costuming and set design, putters around in some buttoned-up '80s-prestige style. To boot, Washington gives a rich, deservedly Oscar-winning performance, whereas Broderick always seems slightly out of his depth. It's mismatched all the way down, and the result is a disappointingly staid and mis-prioritized picture. Grade: C+
Its deconstruction of slasher tropes is less studied than the 1982 original, opting for a broad, almost zany phantasmagoria over the original's smart, winking, occasionally dry send-up of familiar beats and imagery. That's cool, though, because this one is much more fun. Part of this is preference; I've always found the sort of reality-bending, kitchen-sink '80s horror (Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead II) that this movie traffics in to be a lot more engaging than the lean, mean slashers that occupy the original's headspace. But also, I find this movie's psycho-sexual preoccupations a lot more interesting than the typical slasher hangups—preoccupations that include music culture and urban planning and grief and loss and generational divides (ticking a lot of my boxes here). Plus, the villain is like this rockabilly dude from hell who quotes classic rock as he murders the film's cast with a guitar that looks like what Yngwie Malmsteen's music sounds like—end of cinema, Q.E.D. Grade: A-
Music
Xiu Xiu isn't exactly known for making mainstream music, but Girl with Basket of Fruit takes the cake, lemme tell you. An album whose driving, abrasive opening title track includes the line "her boob gets so floppy she uses it as a fan to wave away his sickening B.O." really isn't here to make friends, and whether or not you're up for the rest of the album is probably tested well by how much you can stand that first song's string of unhinged, grotesque absurdities. The other eight songs aren't so much reliant on bizarre lyrical turns as the first one, but they are all equally sonically out there, feeling, in some ways, like the Millennial answer to Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica or Scott Walker's Bish Bosh. It's not for everyone, and I'm not sure it "means" anything in the traditional sense of the word. But if you're in the mood, it's a fascinating and compelling voyage into the weird. There are sounds here that I've never heard elsewhere. Grade: B+
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