Movies
I went into this movie pretty cynical. Not just about the prospects of my enjoying it but also about the mere premise of making a sequel to Mary Poppins—a film I consider (somewhat nostalgically, but I also think somewhat accurately) one of the Disney company's greatest accomplishments and whose sequelizing is a particularly galling example of Disney's concerning, hair-pulling trend of allowing its incessant franchising of its iconic IP to seep into its theatrical output. And Mary Poppins Returns gives plenty of validation for my cynicism, ranging from its slavish devotion to the structure of the original film (here's the part where they jump into an illustration! here's the part immediately after where Mary Poppins pretends it didn't happen and then sings the kids to sleep!) to some really dumb callbacks to the original (I nearly barfed when Michael says, "Let's go fly a kite"). The songs aren't nearly as good, either—no surprise, given that the Sherman brothers' music is arguably the finest set of songs ever assembled for a Disney musical, but did these songs have to be so forgettable? I just finished this movie half an hour ago, and I'll be damned if I could sing a single bar from any part of this movie. Worst for me is the sheer tastelessness of taking the original movie's message of "Banks suck! Go outside and play with your kids instead!" and turning it into a bizarre, third-act-twist parable about the importance of judicious investments (feat. Michael's feed-the-birds tuppence). So yeah. Lotso bad. BUTTTTTT.... I mean, y'all, there's some really infectious good here, too. The movie yields two unambiguously great sequences, the first in the requisite "inside an illustration" within the china bowl and the second in the requite "working class dance in the London streets" section with the gaslighters—both of whose charms are undoubtedly a testament to just how starved the modern American film landscape is for, respectively, traditional cel animation and well-choreographed musical ensemble dances, but whether we're grading on a "water in the desert" handicap or not, I just cannot deny how completely taken I was with both. There's also no denying the sheer giddiness of this movie, both in form and content. It ends with a choral singalong; it ends with half of London floating away on primary-colored balloons. It's just so hard to be too grumpy about a movie as swooningly sincere and goofy as that, much as my inner skeptic shouts all the movie's flaws. I hate parts of this movie. But I can't hate this movie. I guess it's that Disney Magic or whatever. Grade: B-
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's electoral success in the 2018 midterms is one of the very few validations of optimism within American politics over the past few years, so it's no mystery why Knock Down the House foregrounds her story among the four congressional-hopeful women this documentary crew followed. Still, I do think the documentary would have been a richer one had it given the same screentime to the other three women (all of whom lost their primaries) as it does AOC. That said, it's still a pretty interesting, engaging depiction of the feet-on-the-pavement experience of what it takes to run a grassroots campaign, and regardless of how much spotlight they give, all of the candidates focused on here are solidly charming and inspirational in their own ways, which, like, YES, I know I'm falling for a *gasp* inspirational documentary, but give me this one, okay? It's been a rough few years. Grade: B+
A pretty standard sports doc (talking heads mixed with archival footage) that has the singular grace of having exceptional interviews from the athletes who put so much on the line to integrate the sport. The documentary makes a lot of noise about how brave these coaches were, but I don't see any coaches getting spit on here, much less dying of complications from on-field racist aggression. Grade: B
Books
The Marvels is the third book in Selznick's loose trilogy of novels that experiment with storytelling through both purely visual black-and-white drawings and more traditional novelistic prose, which began with The Invention of Hugo Cabret and continued with Wonderstruck. I've not read Wonderstruck (big fan of the movie, though), but Hugo Cabret is one of my favorite children's books ever, a masterpiece of mood and pacing, which makes it all the more disappointing that The Marvels struggles to deliver a compelling narrative. It's a far more ambitious book than Hugo, combining metatextuality with a much more intricate visual scheme that, unlike Hugo, often foregoes linear images in favor of illustrations than can jump decades in a single page turn. Its story is a centuries-spanning family saga reminiscent of Dickens, and its focus on theater and Shakespeare makes for an interesting companion to Hugo's obsession with silent film and George Méliès. But scaling up the story to such a timeline makes it difficult for the book to ever get a real grasp of its characters, particularly the "modern-day" (read: 1990) character of Joseph, on whom the prose sections of the novel focus and whose personality is blank and crushingly dull. It's not, like, a disaster or anything, and sections of the novel are quite good. The illustrations are still top-notch, and the freedom from strict chronological storytelling allows Selznick to make some pretty cool juxtapositions and misdirections with concurrent images on either side of a page. I also like the way this story becomes a story about stories, weaving its own kind of mythology out of recurring motifs and phrases and images. But taken as a whole, it feels like the novel just bit off a bit more than it can chew, and as a consequence, I'm just left with pieces that I like instead of liking the whole thing. Grade: B-
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