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Please, if you have good cheer for your fellow man in your hearts, don't put any more Adam Sandler movies in there.
Movies
This movie is so bereft of good ideas. Like, I can't think of a single one here. The plot, in which Adam Sandler has to take care of an unaccompanied minor, is full of the stalest "haha, clueless parent does inappropriate things" tropes until it veers into some deep sentimentality, and neither mode works at all. The humor isn't funny, and it's disappointingly short on the madcap energy of something like Billy Madison; Sandler's typical '90s man-child performance is dialed down to a sleepy lull here, which is weird, given that he's playing opposite an actual child, and the few jokes that aren't hinged on this dynamic are bizarrely hung up on shaming Leslie Mann's character for having worked at Hooters. Then the sentiment feels cloying and unearned, not to mention wanting to have its cake and it eat regarding the level of knowing ironic distance from said sentiment. Also, it's a cheap shot because most kid actors are bad, but man alive are Dylan and Cole Sprouse bad here—this is, like, sub-Olsen-Twins-in-Full-House bad. I hope they let both of the Sprouse twins pee on the side of a building with Sandler, though, because that was probably a good time. A better time than I had watching this movie, to be sure. Grade: D+
You would think this would be exactly up my alley: a satirical domestic drama based on recurring motifs from the Bible and the visual arts in a completely audacious way that flirts with sacrilege before landing at deep piety. And when the movie gets to that moment in its final few minutes, it's pretty breathtaking. But the movie is just so suffocatingly affected in its style that I feel a thousand yards away from anything happening in this movie. I enjoyed La Sapienza, writer-director Eugène Green's 2015 feature, but that movie's self-conscious emphasis on architecture made a lot more sense with the static shots and direct camera addresses than the considerably more human subject matter does here. Grade: B-
A somewhat standard crime procedural—a mother must sleuth around to prove her accused son's innocence—until the final fifteen minutes make it something much bleaker and more heartbreaking, as unflinching a stare into the void as I've seen in a while. The movie probably hangs too much on the standard genre tropes being completely shattered by the existential and ethical terror of the movie's end as its hook, and for pretty decent stretches, it's only engaging in an autopiloted kind of way. But whew, when you get to the end, boy, that's rough. Grade: B+
Huh. So Bong Joon-ho's debut is this utterly bizarre dark comedy about a man who murders dogs and fights with his wife about whether it is 50 or 100 meters to the corner store. Didn't see that coming. Parts of it are very good (I really like the whole pissing match about the distance to the corner store, which culminates in a very weird toilet-paper-themed setpiece), but the pieces come together into such an ungainly whole that I can't say I enjoyed the experience overall. Also, there's certainly something satirical going on here, but I lack the context to understand what specifically. Grade: C+
Scorsese has always had a streak of economic populism, but it's stronger here than I've ever seen it. There are some absolutely all-timer bits here to that end—I'm a big fan of the scene where the big railroad capitalist gets robbed during a meeting in which he boasts about all the money he's made, and then he starts quoting the Bible to the robbers about how they should store up their treasures in heaven instead. Stuff like that is great. Less great: the characters, the pacing, and the whole "Bertha is a magic sex hobo woman" thing that takes up a pretty sizable chunk of the movie. I guess if you're getting money from Corman, ya gotta pay the piper, but still. Grade: B-
Television
So Phoebe Waller-Bridges created, wrote, and starred in a BBC television adaptation of her own stage play of the same name, and it's fantastic. The premise—in which a thirtysomething Londoner uses sex and unending snark to cope with the death of her mother, the death of her best friend, a toxic immediate family, and some crushing secrets related to all those things—sounds like a miserable experience, and if I tell you, accurately, that Waller-Bridges's protagonist (credited only as "Fleabag") is constantly breaking the fourth wall to smirk at the camera or give a cheeky aside to us viewers, I wouldn't blame you if you took a pass entirely. And the first episode or two definitely gesture toward the sort of painfully edgy series the premise suggests. But in the same way that the early episodes of BoJack Horseman's first season only do justice to the series's rich emotional landscape, to bail on Fleabag after its first episode or to never watch it at all is to miss an indelible work of tragicomedy of the likes I have never seen. It zigs where most shows would zag, its writing cuts effortlessly deep, the cast is tremendous, Waller-Bridges in particular is effervescent, and the finale made me feel in the best way possible like I could not breath. Like I said, the early goings are a little rocky until you can view them in retrospect, but by the end, it's become something magnificent and essential. Grade: A-
Books
David Foster Wallace's final short story collection is something of a résumé of Wallace's fiction-writing talents and aspirations. The byzantine corporate structures juxtaposed with drolly satirical speculative elements and bizarre characters of intense obsessions in "Mr. Squishy" recalls Infinite Jest in microcosm; "Incarnations of Burned Children" is a short, intense piece of the sort DFW occasionally rolled out to show off his virtuosic command of the structures of the English language; the confessional masculinity of "Good Old Neon" feels of a piece with the kinds of stories you might find in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; "The Suffering Channel," the novella that closes the collection, is yet another treatise on the intersection of irony, art, and mass media. Short fiction has never been my favorite mode for DFW, but nevertheless, some of these stories are great ("Mr. Squishy," "Good Old Neon"), only a couple are hard to get into beyond the audacity of the premise ("Another Pioneer," "Incarnations of Burned Children"), and most of them are good and worth reading. At least one story involves suicide, which gives the collection an (unintentionally?) morbid biographical appeal, which I'm not a huge fan of, but there's probably not a single piece of DFW's life work that isn't haunted by the fact that he eventually took his own life, so here we are. If we have to view it as the semi-prophetic last look into the living mind of one of the late 20th century's most fascinating writers, it could be a lot worse. Grade: B+
Music
It's not like there's nothing to recommend about this album. "Element" is a cock-eyed take on a fun rocker with a singalong chorus; "No One's Sleeping" feels like a lost jangle-pop song from the '80s with a jammy coda; "Greenpoint Gothic" is a moderately interesting instrumental detour. But even those positive moments are ones I ones recommend only half-heartedly, and honestly, y'all, I'm just finding it really hard to muster up any sort of enthusiasm here. It's just a sleepy, mid-tempo indie record from a band that I know as anything but sleepy. Or at least when they are sleepy, they usually have the good sense to give me evocative dreams when I drift off. Here, I'm getting nothing. Grade: C+
It's hard following up one of the greatest pop albums of the millennium, and Carly Rae Jepsen doesn't try to one-up herself. Dedicated lacks the swing-for-the-fences mega-pop moments like, for example, the exuberant saxophone that opened "Run Away With Me" as if Queen CRJ were entering the city gates riding a unicorn. It even pointedly leaves off some of the poppier singles Jepsen's released in the interim between these two albums, like "Party for One" or "Cut to the Feeling." In place of all that is a slightly dancier, groovier record that's no less full of hooks than Emotion but maybe positions those hooks just a little more cleverly and less immediately: the warbly synth breakdown that greets the final minute of "Julien," the way the melody in "Real Love" pivots from being reminiscent of the "Hush Little Baby" lullaby into the maturely ecstatic mirror image, etc. If Emotion didn't give Jepsen the superstar, headlining status that she deserves, Dedicated is, frustratingly, not going to do that for her either. But it's also a record replete with the kind of sincere, wholesome pop that only Carly Rae is making and for which she absolutely should be given renown on the level of Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande. The fact that that won't happen is pretty much the only disappointment here. Grade: B+
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