Movies
Her Smell hits almost all the beats of a traditional musician biopic (on paper, there's not a lot separating the plot of this movie from, say, Walk the Line), but what sets it truly apart as something special, not just among the stale annals of musician biopics but among 2019 cinema in general is just how much it lingers over the unexplored margins of these beats. In fact, Her Smell does almost nothing but linger; consisting of just five protracted scenes, the movie takes pieces that usually amount to just a few minutes of screentime (the pre-show green room, the recording booth, the rural "sobering up" cabin, etc.) and spends dozens of minutes allowing these scenes to spool out in haphazard and unpredictable ways that force us viewers to reckon with characters caught in the ligature of their lives—always in motion, always unsteady, always precarious. And hoo boy, is it a ride. Those who squirm at Alex Ross Perry's typical chamber misery beware: Her Smell has all the excruciatingly detailed human cruelty of Listen Up Philip with the unflinching, fevered style of Queen of Earth; I started the movie assuming I was watching these characters (especially Elizabeth Moss's Becky) at their lowest, only to be shown again and again just how much lower they could all go—rendered both exhilarating and oppressive by the cavernous space Perry gives these scenes. And yet... somehow this manages to be Perry's most hopeful movie thus far. It's a movie that shows the true work of recovery in the way that those hoary biopic tropes so rarely do, and by the end, there's something legitimately uplifting about the film. Exhausting at every turn, for sure, but that's the point, isn't it? It can't be easy. Grade: A-
In the same way that Interstellar and Tarkovsky's Solaris consciously evoked 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to revise it in significant ways, Claire Denis pointedly recalls both of those movies with High Life and comes out the other side with something that feels both bleeding-edge fresh and also in conversation with a pretty rich tradition of arthouse sci-fi. Via these austere space epics, there's a real, decades-long discourse being had about the nature of humanity's relationship with itself and the way that relationship refracts inward and fractures in key places within the context of 1. sexual encounters, 2. reproduction, and 3. eons of time. Whereas 2001 positions humanity as a mere mythological construct and both Tarkovsky and Nolan advance an essentialist view of human nature, one reflected at every turn (sometimes to ironic/hollow effect, particularly in Tarkovsky's work) by the physical universe, Denis answers the question of the human identity with an absurdly tactile response, that human beings are sacks of fluid tenuously held together by some vertebrae and social constructs. I'm being kind of academic here, so let me be clear: this idea is very, very scary and gross as rendered here—it's a film rife with rape (really: two rape scenes, and a sort of systematic rape/destroyed body autonomy throughout) and despair and spilled guts. It leans into the trappings of sci-fi horror a lot more than its most immediate cinematic precedents, perhaps because of the intrinsic terror of considering human life as a purely biological growth, and there are long sections of this movie that feel like a waking nightmare in the vein of David Lynch cross-pollinated with Alien. At the same time, the cross-cutting of this horror with the benign purity of the scenes of a father (Robert Pattinson) with his daughter gives us an existentialism-brand hope in the sense that it basically argues that life's meaning isn't solely mired in the visceral muck of our biology but also in what we build on top of that biology; to put it another way, it matters whether or not our bodies create a sex-fascist sperm cult, or a nurturing family. For all the despair of the movie, there's a cock-eyed, urgent optimism at work here, not nihilism. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and it wasn't even always mine, but when it was mine, I loved it. Grade: B+
Basically takes the cultural meme of Spring Break and transforms it into this dreamy allegory for the predatory excesses of suburban, majority-white culture. There are a lot of gestures in a lot of interesting directions that I wish were explored more thoroughly, like the parallels between the traditional youth group experience and the ecstatic heights of Spring Break hedonism; there's also the whiff of "having cake and eating it, too" here regarding how the movie portrays both blackness and femininity that makes me uneasy at times—on the one hand pointedly showing the ways in which these folks are exploited and coerced into their ultimately self-destructive social roles by those with more cultural power, while on the other hand indulging in a pretty gazey camera that lingers salaciously over nude female bodies and "gangbanger" caricatured African Americans (this would maybe be a little easier to swallow except for my memories of the movie's ad campaign using these specific elements to sell the movie way back when this first came out). But you know, that hypocritical posture toward the marginalized people whose plight it explicates is something that's also true of The Great Gatsby, and that's one of my favorite novels of all time (and clearly a heavy influence on this movie), so what can I say. Besides, it's really hard to say no to a movie with THAT James Franco performance and THAT Britney Spears singalong. Grade: B+
As a documentary, it's haphazardly put together, and parts of this movie practically scream of the filmmakers having primed the pump in order to address the film's narrative. It also softballs its subject matter, not nearly digging deeply enough into the tragic, even self-destructive elements of Anvil's continued drive (or delusion, depending on who you're asking) toward heavy metal stardom. Also, I dunno, even for a movie that obviously baits a This Is Spinal Tap comparison, some of the stuff just feels too cute and... I dunno, setting off my baloney sensor? Like, they visit Stonehenge? Their drummer is named Robb Reiner? These are either the greatest coincidences in music-doc history, or there's something fishy afoot. But honestly, whatever; I'd be lying if I didn't find this (esp. the central figure of "Lips" Kudlow and his relentless Canada Nice) endearing to a surprising degree. For all the doc's faults and foibles, there's a beating human element that's irresistible. Grade B-
Though it's nowhere near as effective as Cléo from 5 to 7, the first feature from Agnès Varda most people seem to talk about, it's at least as interesting as that film is as an expression of the mid-century European New Wave. This predates Wild Strawberries by two years; The 400 Blows by four; Breathless and La Dolce Vita by five—and yet, it seems to anticipate a lot of what feels so distinctive about those films, from the abstraction of classic film tropes to the intentional, modernist shot composition. Getting somewhere first isn't worth everything, but just sayin', Varda arrives at the famous "Persona shot" in 1955. And plus, as a film divorced from its context, it's pretty good! The mix of traditional narrative film with pseudo-documentary footage is something I'm told Varda gets much better at later in her career, but as is, it's a really interesting, often compelling how this movie juxtaposes the discursive, very movie-ish conversations of the foregrounded marriage-in-crisis plot with the documentary-ish footage of the working-class goings on of the fishing village in which that plot takes place. I dig it. Grade: B+
Television
The end. It's a sad day for me and the twelve other people who watch this show. Not too sad—the show was clearly running out of gas, as evidenced by the relative dearth of songs this season as well as the increasingly spotting plotting for all the show's secondary characters. Even Rebecca's arc, one that centers on her efforts to create a stable, healthy life in the context of her mental health struggles, is hit-and-miss. But where else on TV would you even get a season-long plot about the work of creating stability within a mental-health context? Where else on TV would this have been told through song? Where else on TV would you have gotten this winning combination of snark and raunch and heart and soul? Whether or not Crazy Ex-Girlfriend should have continued (it probably shouldn't have, both because the creators said they were done and because the series was definitely running short on ideas by the end), the television landscape is much poorer without this show giving its burst of idiosyncrasy each week, and I'll miss it badly. We were lucky to get the four years we did. Grade: B-
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