Movies
I'm not sure how much new I have to add re: all the problematic racial and historical controversy surrounding this movie's approach to adapting its specific historical events. To be honest, the whole discussion kind of breaks the part of my brain that usually insists that cinema doesn't have to be held to a textbook literalist invocation of historical fact; there's a more productive conversation than The Discourse is currently having as to why I give the willfully history-agnostic depiction of unknowable events a pass in something like Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman but not in Green Book—and no, I don't mean in some "Spike Lee is the real racist!" gotcha way; I'm talking about a fundamental interrogation of what cinema's hermaneutic of history needs to be and to what standards of factual and ideological responsibility do we hold film. Certainly a key component of that responsibility involves point of view, and not only does the movie's choice of protagonist and point of view flatter the modern-day status quo (as is arguably also the case in BlacKkKlansman), it also consistently lands the movie at glaringly uninteresting ways to dramatize this particular story even within the pretty thin and gentle version of mid-century American racial tension (not in any universe the case in BlacKkKlansman). There's no way I'm the first person to note how devastatingly obvious it is that Mahershala Ali's character should have been the point-of-view character, right? The movie is clearly obsessed with the mere existence of Don Shirley and entirely uninterested in the ethnic-Italian identity of its protagonist outside of the idea of big family dinners and Mortensen's (admittedly likeable) scene-chewing performance, so why not just write the movie from Shirley's perspective? Sure, the screenplay was written by Tony Lip's son, hence the focus on Tony, but that's what rewrites are for, right? Instead, the movie just views Shirley as this fascinating cypher, artificially locking us, the audience, inside the mind of a protagonist with absolutely nothing unique or interesting to tell us about this particular story and in fact a point of view that feels like an inherent liability for telling this story. We get the fun chemistry between the leads and some nice, character-based humor but there's nothing about those beats specific to our seeing the world according to Tony Lip, and this choice to appeal to some misbegotten "everyman mainstream" (in contrast to the "exotic" otherness of a gay black man) has found something dramatically inert, too, in its pursuit of its particular vision of adapting history. This is basically the movie all the way down, with a rigorous insistence on an assumed "universal" pleasantry that ultimately just feels limited by its dive toward the middle. The Sears-Roebuck-catalogue pristine of the sets, the the personality-free cinematography, the gentle humor of the screenplay and the even gentler drama, the fact that we have Peter Farrelly, of all people, in the film's director's chair and it still ends up feeling like an anonymous piece of awards-season filler and not, like, something with at least half the personality of Dumb and Dumber. It's not that there isn't anything to enjoy in this movie; it's that every piece of this movie feels poised to disappear into the cultural static at the intersection every other media depiction of the early '60s and be forgotten right alongside that Pan Am TV series from like seven or eight years ago. Forgotten right up to the moment it won the Best Picture Academy Award, I guess. Even on the bumper-sticker racial front this movie wants to operate on, this movie's pretty dull. Like most of these kind of nostalgic, reassuring parables about bygone racism, there's not a lot that's baldy offensive (to my white eyes, at least) about its politics outside of its perpetuation of certain pious and ahistorical tropes about the "good white people" of the past, and instead it goes way out of its way to comfort its audience with the broadest and softest possible platitudes. Green Book feels especially milquetoast even among its "friendship transcends racism" peers, and its complete and consuming fear of being anything approaching "provocative" robs it of even the interesting nuance of, say, the power dynamics of relative marginalization that Driving Miss Daisy gives its ethnic-but-white-coded co-lead in the context of its black co-lead. Bereft of even that, there are zero things on Green Book's mind besides a frail, frictionless view of the past and the easy chemistry between its co-leads, and for all the charms of the latter, I still am hard-pressed to think of a less-interesting version of this story told by these specific actors and this specific director. Is cinema's theory of history just a battle of who gets to tell the more engaging story? If so, Spike won this round. Grade: C
Tale of Tales attempts to revive the old, twisted spirit of the pre-Disney-fied fairy tales, and to be fair, the movie arrives at a wild, bizarre, structureless pandemonium that does a pretty good job of approximating the tales we attribute to Giambattista Basile. Only unfortunately, Basile's versions of fairy tales just aren't that good, and neither is this. Points for the set and costume design and for some richly out-there plot twists. But the interlocking organization of the individual tales does not work at all, and, as with the Basile stories, these stories are collections of very odd and sadistic incidents that have the rambling feel of something made up on the spot—nothing like, for those who are fans of the "old fairy tales," the grotesque precision of the Brothers Grimm collections. Come on, filmmakers! Give us the Brothers Grimm-style fairy tale revival you know we're all clamoring for. Grade: B-
Lucretia Martel's vicious satire of the Argentinian bourgeoisie and its accompanying racism feels like Arrested Development by way of Buñuel, only somehow less funny than either. Instead, a suffocating dread cloaks every inch of the film, a dread that pays off both plot-wise and theme-wise. I'd need to spend a little more time with each of her films to be completely confident in this, but at the moment, La Ciénaga feels like something of a dry run for The Headless Woman and especially Zama in terms of how driven and realized its critiques of class and race in Argentina are, and as such, I probably made a mistake watching it last. Grade: B+
The title is maddeningly ambiguous. Who's talking: Bond or Amasova?? [*CinemaSins ding*] Anyway, it's kind of dull, kind of fun—a little more fun than dull. Bach is, unfortunately, completely lifeless as Agent Triple X, and I guess I need to watch more Roger Moore movies, because I kept confusing him for all the other dudes in suits onscreen. But also, the henchman in this film is named Jaws and bites people and deflects bullets with his teeth and then, climactically, bites a shark. It's hard to dislike a movie with that situation going on. Grade: B-
Television
The final season of You're the Worst sharpens its focus to just the series's core duo, which is probably for the best—most of the rest of the cast has long lost its utility as anything but people for our leads to bump against. This means the season does lack some of the shockingly sharp, out-of-nowhere depth that it would occasionally grant the supporting players (Edgar's PTSD, for example); but it also means that we're mercifully spared any of the time-wasting storylines that have sometimes plagued the show, too, e.g. Paul getting stabbed (and while we're on the subject, I find Paul's pivot away from the alt-right entirely unconvincing). Instead, we're almost (with a few exceptions early in the season) given a season entirely focused on the culmination of the show's central relationship: Jimmy and Gretchen. And it gets real in a sustained and panicked way that the show has rarely settled down enough to pull off in the past. I've dinged the show before for the way it tries to offset its sometimes mean comedic streak with sudden dramatic stakes and unearned forward movement. But this final season finally gets it, and the slow-moving train wreck that is the lead-up to Jimmy and Gretchen's wedding is as bracingly dark and uncomfortably real as the show has ever dared to become, and the final resolution of all that is as mature and poignant an evocation of love as I've ever seen a television show do. There are some bumps along the way—a season-long flash-forward tease is both awkward structurally and ultimately unsatisfying as anything but a cheap device. But on the whole, it's a surprisingly rich and graceful ending for what's been an enjoyable but inconsistent TV series. Grade: A-
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