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Movies
The heavy film grain and high-wire threading of black comedy, sentimentality, and a fascination with outsiders is vintage '90s American indie. Like a lot of those movies, I'm not sure how successfully on a moment-by-moment basis the movie walks its balance between making its clearly-traumatized-yet-creepy protagonist the butt of our ridicule/disdain and inviting our investment in the guy regardless. But by the end of the movie, it's clear that the holistic thrust of the film is one of compassion. Mike White (who also wrote the movie) stars as a mostly closeted gay man whose only connection as a child to a loving world growing up in his (it is implied) abusive household is his both emotional and physical relationship with his friend Buck, a relationship he desperately and obsessively clings to as an adult. Though the movie doesn't shirk from extreme discomfort with the actions White's protagonist takes in pursuing this relationship, the film also has a deep regard for the work he must do to create a happy life virtually ex nihilo, and when he finally manages to do so by the movie's end, it's a meaningful and sweet conclusion to an otherwise hair-raising journey. Grade: B
Asghar Farhadi movies usually hinge on critical moments of ambiguous epistemology: how do we know what we know, and how many pieces of that process can we remove before we have to relinquish certainty? As the title implies, Everybody Knows involves a twist on that concept in the sense that it's an exploration of what happens at critical moments of certain epistemology: what happens when enough people know for certain information that had once been considered secret? When a child is kidnapped from a wedding reception, the movie's crisis is (in addition to the kidnapping itself) how this traumatic event reveals just how many people knew the supposed "secret" of this child's parentage—a sort of inverted About Elly. It lacks the brutal precision of some of Farhadi's more iconic films (including About Elly), but it's also a clear attempt by Farhadi to do something fundamentally new within his normal genre trappings, which I think is admirable and at times super effective. It is a thriller, after all, and while it's too long to be the punch to the gut Farhadi's other thrillers are, I can't say that I wasn't thrilled at times nonetheless. Grade: B+
Julianne Moore is a stunning light at the center of this movie, playing the titular "woman of a certain age" with a barbed sensitivity. Barring some really nice, expressionistic lighting, there really isn't a whole lot going on with this movie, though—the plot is aimless, the divorcée drama feels a little forced, and none of the secondary characters (including one played by a disappointingly staid John Turturro) make much of an impact, though credit where credit is due, the script puts some sharp dialogue in these characters mouths occasionally. So it's all the more impressive that Moore is able to carry the movie as far as she is. Grade: B-
Basically The Godfather as seen from the other side of the border: a years-spanning Colombian crime epic that depicts the way that assimilation with the craven relentlessness of North American capitalism rots a society and destroys an indigenous culture. The film's ideas are striking, as are its depictions of indigenous traditions and practices in the context of the encroaching Westernness, which does a lot to spice up the pretty staid crime epic patterns that the movie otherwise falls into. But the movie still is beholden to some pretty rigid patterns, and the style is probably a little too chilly-arthouse for its own good, so there's a good portion of the film that's neither exciting on a plot level nor energetic enough to make the predictable plot exciting either. Nevertheless, I appreciate the new perspective this brings to the old crime epic genre. Grade: B
Red Hook Summer is messy in the way that Spike Lee's 2010s output has often been. There are stylistic flourishes and scenes and plot threads and whole performances that just kind of amble forward without a ton of momentum or seeming purpose; most naggingly of all that is how Jules Brown and Toni Lysaith give two entirely wooden performances, and I can only imagine that their stammering, stiff line deliveries and postures are intentional for effect, but I'll be damned if I can parse what that effect is supposed to be. But this is also Spike Lee's most dedicated engagement with religion in general and Christianity in particular, and specifically, how Christianity intersects community writ large and its role as a deeply ingrained institution and also as something of a relic of the past that the community is evolving past. It is, in short, a dissection of faith by way of a dissection of a lushly vibrant community, a dissection built on bold contradictions and juxtapositions—cresting with the image of an abusive pastor contorted like Jesus, wearing his own tambourine as a crown of thorns—maybe the most audacious image of Spike's career. And if y'all think I can resist that, you folks are sorely mistaken. There's a late-breaking plot development that makes the whole movie, messiness and all, snap into focus. It's maybe not a focus I can entirely articulate right now, but it's one with a tremendous aesthetic and theological thrust, a story of a Christ who just happens to be white in his paintings and a pastor who just happens to lead a church in decline and a Brooklyn that just happens to be pushing its poorest residents to the far tip of the borough until they can see Lady Liberty's face—and how none of this actually "just happened" after all. I won't go so far as to put it among Spike Lee's very best (to my mind: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, The 25th Hour), but it's certainly among his best of this decade—maybe the best. Grade: A
There are some really interesting ideas about the concept of racial passing at the heart of this film, and the movie is smart to hinge its emotional weight on those ideas. But also, it's convoluted and tedious in the way that a lot of Micheaux movies can be, so it's not like it's a rollicking ride or anything. Grade: C
Easily the best Oscar Micheaux feature I've seen thus far. It's not that the movie is less flawed than the director's other movies: Within Our Gates still has that propensity for tediously convoluted domestic drama, it still feels painted with an overly broad moralism, the acting and writing are still stiff as boards. However, the movie also shares Micheaux's frequent obsession with all facets of the early-20th-century African-American experience, an obsession that links the domestic stretches of this movie to a series of the most well-observed character vignettes of his career, involving small indignities oriented around assimilation, uplift, education, class, and racism of all stripes—all of which culminates in a climactic depiction of a lynching that makes absolutely clear that every piece, no matter how small, of a racist society is ultimately complicit in horrific violence. It's by far the most bracing thing I've seen in Micheaux's work, and one of the most bracing things I've seen in silent cinema in general. Grade: B+
P.S. I (and a couple of folks much smarter than I am) talked about Within Our Gates on episode 252 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.
Television
The second (and presumably final) series of Phoebe Waller-Bridges's Fleabag is an improvement over its first at every turn: funnier, sadder, more profound. It opens with a gonzo single-scene Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-esque family dinner episode that surely cements Waller-Bridges's place among the current pantheon of electric television writers, maybe the best episode of TV I've seen all year this side of Russian Doll (and even then, perhaps it tops even that), and while none of the subsequent episodes are as viscerally wrenching as that opening salvo, they're all every bit as smart and considered. The series opens with Waller-Bridges's Fleabag character, nose mysteriously bloodied, looking into the camera and telling us that "This is a love story," and she's not wrong. This year (three years after the airing of the original Fleabag but only "371 Days, 19 Hours & 26 Minutes Later" in the show's time), Fleabag has fallen for a Catholic priest, a setup that is Shakespearean in its tragedy, given Fleabag's sexual thirst and the priest's obvious celibacy. But the depths this season plumbs are far more profound than the sacriligious carnal/sanctified dichotomy that her pairing with the priest initially suggests; this series's six episodes take love not just as the material intersection of two people but also in its holistic emotional, spiritual, and even transcendent dimensions of two people who find connection with one another. The religion invoked by the presence of a priest character is not simply the setup to a sexual conflict but also the beginning of a serious exploration of the ways that existential meaning, the search for the divine, and the true understanding of who another human being is all intersect in messy and otherworldly ways, and one of the most shocking moments of television I've seen in years—as shocking as the edgiest twist in the tightest thriller—is built from a brief instance of profound connection that wraps together love and interiority and the divine all in one fleeting glance. I won't spoil that moment, but I literally gasped out loud. This is Great Television, folks. Grade: A
Books
Stephen King's first short story collection is, alongside his run of '70s novels, sort of the ur-text for understanding King's place in pop culture. A lot of these stories were adapted into movies, and often quite famous ones at that: to name just a few, "Children of the Corn," "The Lawnmower Man," "The Mangler," "Graveyard Shift," "Quitters, Inc.," and "The Ledge" (the last two of which formed sections of the 1985 anthology film Cat's Eye). So yeah, this collection casts a long shadow on King's legacy. Like his '70s novels, the stories in this collection often lack the nuance and complexity of his later work and instead evoke a sort of bemused, b-movie sensibility that's meaner than later King would be, and that's not always a bad thing, given how cumbersome and self-impressed some of King's work could get during the worst impulses of his writing in the '80s and especially the '90s. There's something to be said for the quick-and-dirty ethos that goes into these stories, the complete lack of futzing around. Some of it is kind of dumb—I'm astounded that "Trucks," easily the worst story here, is the one King decided to adapt into his sole effort at directing a film, Maximum Overdrive—but the majority of the stories are at least fun, and a few of them are quite chilling. My two favorites, "Graveyard Shift" and "The Lawnmower Man," are both really great at being kind of laughable in premise but get-under-your-skin creepy in execution. Like any short story collection, there's a bit of unevenness from tale to tale, but on the whole, it's a solid read. Grade: B+
Uh... wut. Easily the most bizarre play attributed to Shakespeare that I've read (and even that attribution has a lot of asterisks by it, as the historical record is unclear—but he probably wrote at least part of it). Its meandering, picaresque plot jumps ridiculously through time and space by ease of one ridiculous plot twist after another, plot twists involving presumed dead-characters being discovered alive, pirates hitherto unmentioned storming the stage to kidnap a character about to be murdered, and more shipwrecks that you can count. Honestly, it feels like every time the story was getting boring, the playwright was just like, "Hey, let's throw in a shipwreck to spice things up." It's wild and not particularly good outside of how wild it is. "Exit, pursued by a bear" ain't got nothing on this one. Grade: C+
Music
An ambient drone made from processed space sounds—specifically, as Basinski says in the liner notes, "recordings from the interferometers of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) capturing the sounds of the merging of two distant massive black holes, 1.3 billion years ago." I don't have much more to say about this; I like space and black holes, and I like this album a whole lot. Grade: A-
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