Movies
This movie exists to justify the climactic, 15-ish minute climbing segment, and don't get me wrong: that is riveting cinema and a technical marvel to boot. But I kinda wish this had been a short film of just that piece, because the rest of the movie is majorly Just Fine. There's really nothing revelatory about the exploration of Alex Honhold's death wish that occupies roughly 75% of the runtime, and the fact that the movie never quite figures out with just what ratio of badass and psychopath we are supposed to regard Honhold feels less like thematic tension and more like the documentary wants to have its cake and eat it too re: the emotional/physical toll of the rawly impressive, extremely dangerous, and fundamentally stupid hobby of free solo climbing. As such, it's (crucially) a major disservice to Honhold's long-suffering girlfriend that she's basically every significant other in every Great Man biopic—i.e. holding our intrepid hero back with Emotions and Domesticity. The documentary walks right up to actually validating her point of view, but ending as it does with the truly thrilling climb, the documentary sort of completes its thought by pointing out that she's wrong, which seems, to me, an irritating structure to take. I, for one, would have loved to see what happened in the months after Honhold had managed such a Herculean feat, and I feel like that's where the truly interesting relationship drama would occur: in interrogating the extent to which his ability to succeed at these ridiculous feats of strength actually underwrites his position in opposition to his girlfriend. But whatever, that climbing sequence was really great. Grade: B-
I think this is basically the movie I was hoping Mandy would be, which is to say: I was left nearly giddy by some of the imagery but couldn't even begin to tell you what "happened" in the film. This also feels about halfway like the movie that The Holy Mountain already is, which is to say: it's suffused with the same sort of "baby's first sacrilegious imagery" as Jodorowski's film and a kind of leering male gaze that I grew quickly bored of. When you lose the thread of a movie about halfway through, though, it's pretty easy to compartmentalize the pieces you like, so here's a positive rating for this movie. Grade: B
In documenting his mostly black, mostly homeless subjects, director Khalik Allah shows not synced video with the numerous, vibrant interview audios that comprise the film but instead footage slowed to a rich, molasses crawl. It's a simple but profound technique, and it transforms these Harlem humans into something almost akin to religious icons, inviting viewers to find transcendence simply in the presence of another human being, the image of God. The movie is bursting at the seams with ecstatic, mundane life, but it's also a deeply spiritual experience, too—and honestly, one is no different from the other. Grade: B+
So... this is amazing? I enjoyed the first movie quite a bit, but truth be told, it's a pretty dry, dour affair once you get past the uproarious dance sequences—and justifiably so, given that it's ground zero for Great Recession Cinema. But it also makes a kind of logic to jettison all the depressing stuff altogether and just focus exclusively on the dancing, and that's exactly what Magic Mike XXL does, becoming essentially a musical revolving around some of the most ridiculously fun, intricately choreographed movie sequences I've seen in years. There's also something fairly formally (if not ideologically) radical about the movie's final thirty minutes, which basically amount to nothing more than one long, elaborate dance party over which a woman monologues about female sexual agency. The movie itself comments on the low bar it has to clear in order to be "progressive"—"all we have to do is ask women what they want," one character says at one point, somewhat incredulously. And that is a mighty low bar, similarly low to the one cleared by 2015's other pop-progressive masterpiece, Mad Max: Fury Road ("All we have to do is call the patriarchy... bad"). But in a landscape where so few movies actually do that bare minimum, why not celebrate those that do? And if you're going to hop over so low a bar, you might as well do it as exuberantly as possible, and Magic Mike XXL is possibly the most exuberant movie I have ever seen. Grade: A
It sure didn't take the Best Picture Oscar long to find its penchant for nostalgic period pieces, and this one gets extra points for being one of those "generational collage" pictures that's even bigger Oscar catnip. I am not kidding at all when I say that it's pretty much Forrest Gump, only a lot less fun and for aging Victorians instead of Boomers. It's the usual tedious tripe typical of this kind of film, with all the regressive and reactionary tendencies of the genre to boot. A movie that ends with an old British couple at the tail end of the 1920s staring off into the distance wondering if their country will ever return to its former "dignity," pausing for a montage of jazz singers and flappers and all sorts of modern "atrocities," and then nobly fading out as "God Save the Queen" plays over the credits—well, this movie certainly knows where it's bread is buttered. It's handsomely filmed and has a pretty cool, almost Expressionist montage for WWI, but otherwise, Cavalcade is relentlessly mediocre. The fact that seemingly every generation falls for one of these movies should make all us Millennials quiver in dread of the 110th Academy Awards or whatever, when there will inevitably be some film that regards the invention of the iPhone and the release of Space Jam with the same hushed, "birth of a generation" piety. Grade: C
Television
The gentlest of Fox's adult animation begins as a decent approximation of what it always will be. The completely unassuming nature of the show always belies the level of difficulty in achieving that result, so of course the first season is a deceptively mundane achievement—and in fairness, there's nothing particularly great about this first season. But it's no small feat for a show to find its bearings as quickly as King of the Hill does, which is pretty much from the get-go. The dead air between the pieces of dialogue feels a little more dead than an important part of the easy-going naturalism the show would perfect later on, and some of the characters and plotting feel just a tad off from what the show would do in its prime. But the basic pieces are here (at least, as far as I can remember from my only occasional viewing of the show when it was actually airing), and the show's central conflict of the conservative Hank Hill learning, bit by bit, not to be so reactionary in his conservatism as the world changes around him is already astoundingly sharp. Not all of it works; the pilot, for example, in which a misunderstanding leads to Hank being suspected of abusing Bobby, is both a pretty unfunny episode of television and also a really dark, bitter piece of work to begin a show that was rarely dark and never bitter—to say nothing of its complete loss as to how to use Luanne (an issue the first season never quite figures out, actually). And then there are the little bits that have not aged as well as we would have hoped: for example, the Laotian neighbors, the Souphanousinphones, are depicted in a way that's decent for 1997 television, developed beyond stereotypes with nuanced relationships with the other characters, but watching in 2019, there's an unmistakable Apu-like quality to their role in the show—i.e. these are definitely characters measured by their differences in relation to their white counterparts. Part of that's an intentional limitation (and subversion) of the show's white, Southern, middlebrow point of view, but other parts of it just feel like an indulgence in microaggressions. So there's a groundwork laid here: a groundwork both for the great little observational comedy that the series would excel at later, and also the groundwork to either fix or let fester some of these early problems. I never watched enough of the show to know which of the latter I'm in for as I head through the rest of this series. But here's hoping... Grade: B
Books
It's always interesting to read horror fiction from decades ago, given how frequently the mode has changed over the years. The Haunting of Hill House is, by modern metrics, not "scary," and in fact, it's actually mostly just funny—I was not expecting a comic novel when I picked it up, but I'd argue that about 70% of it is, built around the bickering eccentricities of its central characters as they try to figure out the weird happenings at Hill House. Especially once Dr. Montague's wife shows up and begins to systematically critique everything the cast has done thus far as hokey baloney, there are some pretty deep guffaws to be had. But there's also this creeping thread throughout the novel of our point-of-view character, Eleanor, becoming less and less of a reliable point of view, which distorts the comedy further and further into something darker. The effect is much more akin to the light touch of something like The Turn of the Screw than, I dunno, Stephen King, the horror being built not on blunt force trauma but on the unseen, the ambiguous spaces between the words on the page. Still, it's also not hard to draw the line between this novel and something like The Shining, which similarly twists initially comic(ish) dynamics like Jack Torrance's withering interior anger into something much more horrific. If I were writing this, I probably wouldn't have taken quite so long with the comedic portions, but in the end, it's a decently affecting read. Grade: B
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