Movies
This movie belongs to Tarell Alvin McCraney's crackling screenplay and the whole crowd of excellent acting performances that animate it so well. I don't pay attention to basketball at all, but this movie made me care about the specifics here in a way I really wasn't expecting, which is a minor miracle. And how about Steven Soderbergh? I could take or leave his intentionally flat iPhone cinematography experiment here, which strikes me as significantly less interesting than what he did in last year's Unsane, but as a piece of his larger filmography, High Flying Bird is a fantastic continuation of his now nearly decade-long fascination with the minutiae of the proletariat experience. Nowhere else in mainstream filmmaking are you going to find films so dedicated to dramatizing all the mundane legal and bean-counting details of what it means to be exploited labor in the 21st century than Soderbergh's run from Magic Mike until now. Credit, again, screenwriter McCraney for making this immensely engaging instead of tedious, even with at least half of the legal terminology sailing far above my head. Grade: B+
Of Lee Chang-dong's decades-long filmography, I've only seen Peppermint Candy, and compared to that film, this definitely feels like the more "mature" work in the sense that it's patient and withdrawn in contrast to the earlier movie's busy exuberance. That also makes Burning less thrilling as a viewing experience, lacking Candy's high-wire showmanship. It's also not nearly as ambiguous as people have been saying, is it? Like, I'm pretty sure it completely tips its hand—but maybe I'm missing some complicated element. Lemme know. Anyway, I'm being negative, but this is really very good. It has an elliptical, hangout quality that, somewhat magically, gives the film not the usually relaxed tone of a movie this easy-going but rather an eerie foreboding that suffuses every corner of the plot. Conversations wind on in discursive, always surprising ways as the world around the characters is populated by crumbling rural estates and uneasy city streets—unlike the plot, the hazy setting is never quite forthright about why it feels so "off," and the unknowing is indelible and unshakeable and plays perfectly into the clearly broken point of view of our protagonist. That's exactly the sickness at this film's core: a perspective warped into a self-validating feedback loop that violently rejects any complicating narrative, each conversation a building pressure for that ultimate rejection. Grade: B+
On the one hand, this is just a really impressive archival project: a montage of every effects shot of stars ever put to film. As such, there are a lot of fun, archival details, such as just how monumental and game-changing Star Wars was—no surprise, really, but it's still shocking when put into the whole context of cinema history like this. On the other hand, the movie is also pretty funny for the way the timeline juxtaposes bits of narration and dialogue, not to mention strikingly beautiful as an aesthetic and philosophical experience—there's something really profound about being in a dark room for 100 minutes just staring at these pinpoints of light that represent how human beings have framed their existence since the late 19th century. Grade: A-
It's a lot more inscrutable and weird than Rick Alverson's previous feature, The Comedy, which goes a long way toward making it more tolerable. It's a lot more outwardly surreal, and whatever point it's making is certainly a lot less obvious. It's also, like, watchable. At least, at parts. There's a real, mesmerizing quality to the central comedian's intentionally hacky, offensive anti-comedy routine—sort of like watching whatever's between a complete trainwreck and an Andy Kaufman bit about a complete trainwreck. But I dunno, it's still a pretty miserable experience, and while Alverson's vision is for sure a singular one, I'm not sure if I have the energy to peel back all the layers of irony I need to to find the movie's emotional core. It's a lot more for me than The Comedy, but we're still pretty close to the Not For Me border. Grade: B-
A hyper-Freudian voyage through some really delicious body horror. I don't know that there's a literal sense to make out of this movie, and that's perhaps a liability, setting, as it does, the symbolic engine of the film on such unsteady ground. But also, in its essential unknowability on any rational level, the movie also completely nails its point of view as that of a child trying (and failing) to understand scary adult stuff and the ways that confusion manifests in his own body and the bodies of others. Bodies are really freaking scary things, especially when you're young and seemingly in a constant state of flux and adults don't give you a ton of body autonomy. So it makes a weird sort of instinctual sense that adults might actually be harvesting your organs to birth a bizarre human-mermaid hybrid. Or something. I don't even know. Grade: B
I imagine this movie might be more fun if in the intervening twelve years between 2007 and now there hadn't been such an onslaught of similarly ironically so-bad-it's-good, over-the-top knowing pulp trash in the vein of Sharknado or what have you. As it is, the idea of Rose McGowan with a machine gun for a leg is fun enough, but the execution is pretty tedious, buried in so many layers of forced "haha, isn't this stupid and/or awesome?"-brand humor that it can barely breathe. There are some nice effects, particularly a supremely gross one near the end involving an otherwise unwelcome Quentin Tarantino acting cameo, but then that gets to another thing—what's with all the good effects? Tarantino's half of Grindhouse at least leaned into the lo-fi, homespun charm of real exploitation films with some care for verisimilitude, but here's Robert Rodriguez in his half with an obviously robust FX budget and a complete disregard for the ramshackle nature of exploitation cinema, as if digitally superimposing a scratchy film grain over everything and then doing an unfunny "reel missing" gag is enough to evoke the whole grindhouse experience, which strikes me as pretty cheap. Kinda wish Rodriguez had ditched the whole grindhouse affectation entirely and instead picked up the "2000s direct-to-DVD" affectation he's clearly more interested in pursuing. Grade: C
I'm shocked at how similar this is to The Dark Knight (or rather, vice versa). Either I've never heard about the two in relation to one another or I just tuned it out (likely). Both are about the symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and law breakers and how this blurs the line between the two; both are about the personal costs of getting involved in either side of that dichotomy; both are heavily reliant on cross-cutting; both are extremely sound-driven, with driving scores and action scenes animated by sound mixing more than visual cues. And I'll eat my hat if Christopher Nolan didn't watch the bank robbery scene here and think, "Needs more zip-lines." The biggest difference is that in Heat, all the characters aren't big symbols for poli-sci abstractions. Anyway, Heat is very good, very exciting, very complex in this cerebral way that's never so cerebral that it loses the sheer earthy impact of its story. De Niro is excellent; Pacino is very near the end of his tolerable years, with his absurdly big performance here only working because of how all the other characters spend the whole movie awkwardly uncomfortable at how extra this dude is all the time. So yeah. It's good. I know this is supposed to be THE Michael Mann movie, but I think that one's still Manhunter for me, y'all. Grade: A-
Television
On paper, this should be exactly my thing. An animated coming-of-age TV series about the awkward, painful adolescent experience that doesn't shy away from sexuality and family drama and the gross body details and all the really interesting stuff that stories about middle schoolers often like to sweep under the rug? And it's also prone to flights of whimsy and even absurdism? There's a runner about a guy getting his pillow pregnant and the pillow running off with their lovechild? And there are musical sequences? And it also does this Peanuts-esque thing where a lot of the humor comes from the slight uncanniness of having adult-sounding voices and sentiments come out of the characters who look like children? Sign me up. Except... well, it's just not very good, is it? Look, there is some fertile soil here, and maybe the second season takes some of that promise to better places. But as of right now, this is a huge disappointment to me. The last couple episodes build some dramatic steam and interesting conflict, but for the majority of the season, the episodes just circle around the same few ideas: "gosh, boys sure masturbate a lot!" "golly, hormones sure do make girls emotional!" "did we mention semen? you know, semen!" Like, okay, I like that the show isn't afraid to plunge into the deeply embarrassing ways that adolescent bodies and impulses seem to be conspiring against themselves, but also, it's just not written very dynamically—almost invariably, scene after scene seem to be premised solely on the triggering of one of the hormone monsters to appear and say something grotesquely sexual or irresponsibly impulsive (or both), and the tension is supposed to arise from how these characters have to basically act like well-adjusted, nice middle schoolers while these monsters are shouting disgusting things in their ears, which, like a lot of the show, is interesting in theory but quickly wears thin in practice, especially since the show is so firmly grounded in the straight(ish) male perspective (it does give some voice to the girls, though none of it is that engaging, to be honest—or maybe that's just because I'm just a straight dude myself? I dunno, it didn't work for me). Pieces of the show work super well—the whole pillow baby-mama thing is hysterical, and at times the series gets at some of the deep insecurities that the strangely out-of-sync puberty experiences among peers create. I also just really love the character of Missy, both from a visual design sense and a dramatic sense. But so much of this show feels like it's just trying too hard without actually having a lot of ideas as to how to make that hard work pay off. Andrew Goldberg, one of the show's creators, used to be a writer and producer on Family Guy, and I hate to say it, but that's actually kind of the vibe I get from this show (sans a bunch of MacFarlane's edgelord sensibilities)—not altogether uninspired but also far too trusting in its relentless puerility as enough to carry it through its mostly limited ideas. Grade: C+
Books
I complain somewhat frequently on here about YA literature's reliance on pedestrian prose and a narrow set of tropes. For the most ascendant literary genre in the past decade, it often feels hamstrung by both genre expectations and the myopia of its own ambition. Neither of these things, thankfully, can be said about Camp So-and-So, a wildly strange and fascinating novel. I could tell you that it's based very loosely on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that would not at all prepare you for just how out there the book is. The opening pages at first feel boilerplate: there's a summer camp, and parents are dropping off their children, who have a pretty stock set of neuroses and insecurities; however, as this opening sequence progresses, it becomes clear that this book is something else completely when all manner of odd things start happening: based on which of the camp's five cabins the narration focuses on, the storytelling changes drastically, moving from a typical teen romantic drama to a backwoods slasher to a chosen-one epic quest to a sports competition to a survival tale—each cabin seemingly occupying its own little world. And then these storytelling types begin to overlap, and, for example, the slasher story intrudes on the epic quest, and the survival story begins disrupting the romantic drama. And then there's the writing itself, which involves a self-aware narrator and a bunch of stage directions in addition to the typical plot-centric prose. It's all deliciously meta and unpredictable and inventive—a YA story about YA stories, told with an eye for the demented and the bizarre and (eventually) the uncannily beautiful. The cure for the common YA novel. Grade: A-
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