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Movies
Pieces of this movie are vying for that same professionally ridiculous energy that made last year's Mission Impossible movie so intoxicating. There's a horseback chase down the streets of Manhattan; a swordfight that happens on motorcycles; a brutal mano a mano brawl in a hall of mirrors and glass. Other pieces have a cockeyed humor unique to this particular franchise: the sheer amount of glass that gets shattered in this movie is practically an aesthetic unto itself, to say nothing of the advances Parabellum makes in "dog bites man in the crotch" cinema. It's wild and great and entirely an Experience. I imagine this movie will be a breaking point for a lot of people regarding the franchise's escalating devotion to an increasingly involved mythology and the draconian honor codes that form the spine of the series's world, and I honestly didn't 100% love that stuff this time around either. But at the end of the day, a bit of gravely intoned silliness about the High Table is a small price to pay for the gory cornucopia that makes up the rest of the film. Grade: A-
There's definitely not any musical artist today exploring the paradox of being a celebrity artist as directly as Beyoncé is right now, and I'm not sure there ever has been in the modern music era. The tension of any artist of sufficient fame and privilege is how to remain "universal" as your personal surroundings become increasingly exceptional; Homecoming (and, of course, the Coachella performances at its core) is basically a textbook of this tension, and Beyoncé's solution is, as it has been the entirety of this decade, to position herself as the platonic ideal of American black womanhood, identifying herself as the synechdoce of that experience while being pointedly and unassailably above it. I've personally always felt that there was something maddeningly hierarchical about this (e.g. easy for one of the most beautiful women in the country to say "I woke up like this," esp. when the point of so much of the music is that you can't wake up like this, i.e. like Beyoncé), but at the same time, who am I to tell people by whom and how they should be empowered? Because as the emphatically intense crowd reaction shots in this film communicate so well, people find Beyoncé and her music deeply meaningful, and given the stunning concert footage on display here, there's no mystery why. I'd be a fool to deny the power of the whole package, tensions at all. When the world's most charismatic pop artist stages one of the most visionary concert performances of all time—a richly historied, magnificently choreographed, and virtuosically executed piece of performance art captured rivetingly by a Bey-directed camera—somehow the fabric of the world folds in on itself, and in the ecstasy, it's the easiest thing in the world to believe that this is both the sum total of an identity and its godlike avatar. Grade: A-
A supremely weird sequel that pushes the "Groundhog Day slasher movie" premise of the original way past the breaking point until it fractures into all sorts of odd little cul-de-sacs, including, amusingly, a riff on the old "college dean is a mean ol' killjoy, let's trick him" chestnut. I appreciate just how bonkers this all is, and a montage of rapid-succession deaths is easily the best thing from either movie. But in all the noise, 2U absolutely loses the heart and the precision of the original, and what it puts in its place feels just a tad thin. Grade: C+
It's as much a profile of an aging Orson Welles as it is the making-of doc for The Other Side of the Wind that it was billed as, and the movie is all the better for it. There are some interesting details about the production of Wind, my favorite being the footage of Peter Bogdanovich doing a ultimately cut character who is a cross between Jerry Lewis and a film journalist. But the best bits of the documentary are the ones that lay out the rich, pathetic tragedy of what Welles ultimately became. The documentary is too cute by half, and the parts of the film that shallowly try to mimic F for Fake are actively irritating. But there's a lot of gold here, too. Grade: B+
Jemaine Clement brings a ton of charm, per usual. Honestly, the whole acting crew here is pretty charming, from Regina Hall to Jessica Williams, which makes it all the more of a shame that it's put to such pedestrian ends. Less than pedestrian, even. It's another one of these breakup movies where a guy gets dumped and has to figure out how to do life alone but oh no he has to figure out keeping the kids, too, when will the indignities stop? The movie goes out of its way to (clumsily) rebuke some of the more misogynist tropes of this kind of movie, but these rebukes just feel like window dressing in an overall pretty conventionally structured/executed indie comedy, and there's not enough lip service in the world that could give life to the incomprehensible, one-note, harpy-ish stereotype of Clement's character's ex, which means that an important half of this movie is just dead on arrival. Even beyond that, while some of the dialogue has a pretty fun repartee, it's just overall a bland experience with nothing new to say about relationships or parenthood or gender roles or anything, really. The acoustic guitar plucks; the dudes mope. You know the drill. Grade: C+
I knew a documentary that essentially only exists as a cash-in on David Bowie's death wasn't going to be stellar, but nothing prepared me for just how wretched this is. On a technical level, this is a borderline amateur production, with at-times borderline incomprehensible sound mixing and distractingly cheap digital backgrounds and transitions—to say nothing of the music, generic instrumental tracks that feel as if whoever was editing this movie put in Garage Band templates as placeholders until they could license Bowie's music and then forgot to ever call his label. On a purely informational level, it's a nonsensical, shambling shuffle through Bowie's career, with little flow or narrative logic or even legibility; for example, the documentary talks about Station to Station and the Thin White Duke persona before talking about Young Americans, implying that his plastic soul era came after his L.A. era, and that's the most sense the film's trajectory ever makes. Amusingly, though, the only new interviews the doc seems to have gotten (the rest being pretty widely available archival interviews) are from people on bad terms with Bowie, like Angie Barnett (his first wife), which gives some of the documentary a kind of scandalous, combative tone completely at odds with the otherwise hagiographic overtures of the rest of the film—honestly, that tension is the only pleasure to be had here. Oh, and you also get to hear Dana Gillespie describe what Bowie looked like naked and remark that he had good birthing hips, so there's that. Grade: D
Some fun practical effects alongside the comic-panel aesthetic, and the whole thing has a mean streak that impressively walks a delicate balance between cosmic irony and sadism. But Creepshow is also about as uneven as any anthology movie, and this is compounded by the fact that several of the segments are adapted from Stephen King short stories by King himself—I haven't actually read any of these stories on the page, but it's clear that a lot of these would work a lot better in a prose format than they do as dynamic screen experiences (I'm thinking especially of "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," a great example of how King's colloquial interiority works in stories but not onscreen). This is to say nothing of just how badly King's idiosyncratic grasp of New England idioms sounds when spoken out loud. The movie has personality to spare and is frequently entertaining, but its flaws are baked deeply into its very premise. Grade: B-
Television
The most remarkable thing about Bob's Burgers is that is remains virtually identical year to year without ever becoming stale. In its ninth year, the show is pretty much the same show as it has been since it founds its legs in its second season, and that's a great thing. There's very little experimentation or format-breaking, but why fix what isn't broken? I look forward to watching this every week, and that's something I can't say right now about any other show approaching its second decade. Grade: B+
Superstore became the best show on TV so gradually, I don't think anyone noticed. Each season has been an improvement on the last, funnier and sharper and more assured and ambitious, and Season 4 is the absolute peak of what the show has done so far. As its characters have grown beyond their original dynamics, the show has found complex, entertaining, and often emotionally thorny new ground, from Jonah and Amy becoming an official couple to Glenn shifting job prospects to the fleshing out of the secondary cast like Sandra and Marcus—with each of these changes, Superstore does what the best sitcoms do, simultaneously developing comedy and pathos from the same character development. It's also a show that, increasingly, is fascinated and horrified by the power structures and hierarchies of the modern American workplace; rarely has a workplace sitcom so dedicatedly explored the corporate and societal factors that make modern retail hell, and as the season progresses, the show's various plots masterfully converge on a storyline focusing on an attempt at unionization that rolls the personal and political preoccupations of the show into one while at the same time expanding the mythology of the series (if we can call it that) by exploring the Cloud 9 corporate environment. This season's tragicomic development of the mind-numbing existential, philosophical, and personal hierachies of the modern workplace recalls UK version of The Office as well as the early seasons of the US iteration of it, only much more pointedly so, and where this season ends up feels like the closest thing to the crushing claustrophobia of the UK Office's pre-"Christmas Special" finale that English-language television has produced since. I'm making this sound super heavy and depressing, but the magic of Superstore is that it tackles all this heavy stuff without ever feeling heavy itself. The show is fleet and hilarious and entirely charming, and everyone needs to go watch it. Grade: A
That Bowie biopic has been on my list a long time, and I was afraid to watch it in case it was terrible. Thanks for braving it for me haha.
ReplyDeleteIt's more of a documentary than a biopic, but given the Queen and Elton John biopics we've gotten in the past year, I imagine a Bowie one is just around the corner. Unless it stars Tilda Swinton, I am not excited.
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