Movies
Us is bigger and much weirder than Get Out, which is both a blessing and a curse; Get Out felt, to me anyway, like a pretty conventional movie, just done extremely well and helmed by a writer/director with an extremely sharp thematic eye. Which is great—I love conventional movies done well. But it also meant that Get Out could only take us so far and surprise us so much; its convention placed something of a cap to where the movie could go. For better or for worse (mostly better), Us is much less beholden to convention than its predecessor. Parts of it flirt with established norms: for example, the middle (and best) section of the film is something like a home-invasion thriller; but even then, the genre conventions are filtered through the sensibilities of, like, a Borges short story, or at least the very weirdest, most inscrutable episodes of The Twilight Zone, and taken as a whole, the way the movie houses under one roof all these various individually familiar setpieces just makes Us feel all the more alien for the mix-and-match juxtaposition of genre modes. Which is to say, after a certain point, I had no clue where this movie was going, and that was exhilarating. Sure, the social commentary is a lot more opaque (or convoluted, depending on how charitable we're willing to be—that's the curse part) than Get Out's clean precision, if you want to engage with anything besides the most obvious class-based interpretation the plot offers, and without a doubt the film bites off way more than it can chew. But I dunno, there's this mad-scientist energy to this movie that reminds me of M. Night Shyamalan's output immediately following his first trio of conventionally successful films that I find very compelling; this is definitely from the same place of breathlessly inventive intellectual and artistic hubris that gave us The Village and Lady in the Water, which is sure to make Us divisive. However, the movie technically and dramatically holds together far more effectively than Lady (I wouldn't be surprised if Us is the best-looking film of 2019—this is a huge aesthetic step forward for Peele), and its core ideas are far stranger and more nightmarish and interesting than either of those Shyamalan films. Plus, Shyamalan never found a performance nearly so titanic and riveting as Lupita Nyong'o's here—I worry that Nyong'o faces the same fate as Toni Collette last year, where a career-best, Oscar-worthy performance gets forgotten because of its centrality to a messy, divisive mid-year genre flick. But make no mistake: she's amazing. Come to think of it, Shyamalan never really got a performance quite as good as Tim Heidecker's here either, a deeply douchey comedic role that recalls what Joaquin Phoenix was going for in Signs until Heidecker's leaves that all behind with a transcendently funny physical performance in the film's back half—probably the hardest I laughed in the whole movie. Anyway, your mileage may vary on the film as a whole, but hopefully we can all agree that this is a Movie To Contend With. Grade: A-
Though Jodie Mack's exquisitely tactile, stop-motion approach to filmmaking remains after Dusty Stacks of Mom (the other feature of hers I've seen), there are times when The Grand Bizarre feels almost like a video essay on the role of textiles as a sort of skeleton key to modern life. Mack's rapid montage finds lots of visual and conceptual analogies to fabric—modern agriculture, binary computer code, circuitry, shipping yards, alphabets—implying that the same key idea lies behind them all and thus describes the progress of human technology writ large. It's a fascinating little bit of implied anthropology, but also, this movie's just a lot of fun on a sensual level. Music and images collide in that typically playful Mack fashion; little visual jokes imbue the experience with a levity uncommon at this level of avant-garde abstraction. I can't say I'm an expert on experimental film, but based on what I've seen, Jodie Mack is definitely the most fun corner of that world. Grade: B+
The text of this movie is a pretty standard documentary, chronicling the process and struggles of the workers at the legacy Tedorigawa Brewery. But the form—my goodness, the form. The Birth of Saké is organized around the pure texture of saké brewing at least as much as it is the typical talking heads, and long sections of the film consist only of a saké recipe being read over loving, languishing shots of the brewing process in action. The experience of these sections is hushed, tactile, and mesmerizing. The director, Erik Shirai, is a cinematographer by trade, so the obsession with aestheticized process isn't surprising. But it is beautiful. Grade: B+
There's a lot of "yikes" in this movie, from the persistent fat-shaming to the undercurrent of ableism. It's probably worst when some kid tells Billy to touch his teacher's chest, and Billy says, "That would be assault!" before being convinced by a double-dog dare to do it anyway—and then this somehow leads to a cute romantic interest. So yeah. There's all that. And it's bad. But hand to God, this would probably be a four-star movie for me without that. It's all just so dementedly weird and inventive, from the strange runners like the banana peel and the clown and Norm Macdonald/Mark Beltzman's absurdly clueless characters to the one-off things like the musical sequence and to the personified shampoo/conditioner argument. I could actually take or leave Sandler's central performance, to be honest (it never quite figures out what it intends to be, shifting incongruously from mode to mode, like a gas filling whatever container it finds itself in), but the rest of the movie is stuffed with indelible comedic acting, too—my favorite being Bradley Whitford, who takes the typical '90s-family-movie-villain tics and dials them up into something transcendently dickish. I'm really caught off-guard by it all, the life and personality that suffuses this movie. I remember hating this stuff when I was younger. Is this what it means to grow up? Measuredly enjoying an Adam Sandler movie? Grade: B-
In the wake of the Gulf War, Werner Herzog recontextualizes Kuwait's devastated oil fields as a literally biblical apocalypse. This film's images—consisting almost entirely of impossibly large pools of oil stretching from horizon to horizon and impossibly tall geysers of oil rocketing up into the sky (often aflame)—makes it hard to argue with Herzog's mythic scale. Even today, there's not a lot of media contending with the legacy of Desert Storm, which means that Herzog's take on it remains somewhat definitive. I'm not sure how I feel about that. There's a sort of terrifying admiration of the sheer magnitude of the destruction caused, terrifying both that destruction on such a cataclysmic scale could happen and that human nature is such that admiration is the involuntary response to such titanic acts of catastrophe when human beings are responsible. Lessons of Darkness finds the bleak intersection between the typical Herzogian "outsider" protagonist and war hawks, which is its own sort of terror in and of itself. Grade: A-
There was a really promising twenty minutes or so there at the beginning of the movie where Bill Murray and Harold Ramis are just these loser dudes palling around NYC, and it felt like a proto-Apatow thing, only with tightly scripted jokes, so, you know, better than Apatow. But then they join the army, and the movie fulfills its Apatow promise by promptly turning into an aimless, overlong, slackly improvised mess—only Apatow movies usually have, like, ideas, man. This has absolutely nothing. It's not really mocking the pieties of the U.S. military (what I was expecting) or even telling jokes in the traditional sense. It's just Bill Murray doing his old weird, camera-mugging shtick, just this time in boot camp. Plus all the requisite sexism and ridiculous, leering female nudity of your typical '80s comedy, of course—foolishly, I'd hoped to avoid that by being so early in the '80s, but alas, male chauvinism is the flavor of all corners of American cinema's worst decade. I dunno why I even watched this except for my perverse adult impulse to seek out all the movies I saw glimpses of on cable or box art of in some video rental store when I was a kid and my parents were all like "Nooooo" and changed the channel or redirected me back toward The Pagemaster at Blockbuster. My parents were right an astounding number of times, I have to admit. Grade: C-
A mid-century free-associative wet dream by way of a nightmare. Some of this is pretty tedious in its abstraction and poor image quality, made all the more tedious by the sometimes incomprehensible YouTube rip I watched this on. Nevertheless, the way that the sexual imagery mixes with weird cultural flotsam makes for occasionally transcendent moments (like the lipstick commercial parody, or the exuberant intrusion of "Be-Bop-A-Lula" near the movie's end), and that juxtaposition goes a long way toward evoking pretty viscerally the ways in which normative mainstream culture can feel so suffocating—all the more so, I'd imagine, for queer Americans in the early '60s. Grade: C+
Music
Thoughtful, mildly experimental electronica that occasionally bursts into other genres like chamber music or, in its final track, New-Order-style dance-pop. I like it. The beats sound interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised if the samples had been recorded in some pretty unconventional ways. But I should probably learn all the subgenres of electronic music so I can more precisely describe this music. Grade: B
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