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Movies
There are a lot of well-observed dynamics and moments in Spanglish of the sort that only a smart writer like James L. Brooks could pen. The central relationship between Flor (the Mexican single mother who is ostensibly the movie's protagonist) and her daughter Cristina is the best in show, built on a complex web of tensions regarding class and race and identity and personal psychology specific both to these characters and their larger social milieu of undocumented immigrants, but even smaller-scale bits like how Adam Sandler's character and his daughter share moments of understated, elliptical conversations that communicate a lot more than what is actually said have a great deal of heart and nuance. Unfortunately, the movie has just as many dysfunctional pieces, pieces so ill-conceived that only a writer as comfortable and privileged as James L. Brooks in the mid-2000s could have allowed them past his inner critic, and these begin to crowd out and undermine what should otherwise work well. Téa Leoni works thanklessly and unsuccessfully in a bizarrely and erratically written role as the wife of Sandler's character, John, a role so harpy-ish and shamelessly "hysterical" in the Victorian sense of the word that it flirts with open misogyny, and while Sandler himself gives a pretty strong dramatic performance, John's relationship with Leoni's character—easily the least-interesting and actively bad part of the movie—gets so much screentime that it upstages the much more engaging relationship between Flor and Cristina, to agonizing effect. And I don't think I need to spell out just what is so uncomfortable on a macro-social level about a movie that purports to be the story of an undocumented family but gets distracted and sidelines that family in favor of airing the petty problems of the rich, white family who employs them. And this is all before the romantic tension between John and Flor develops, a would-be affair between employer and employee that is Woody-Allen levels of ick without Woody-Allen levels of wit. These are the worst of the bunch but far from the only things that turn this movie into a gnarled, frustrating mess—a real shame, because the pieces of the movie that are good hint at a much richer, more compelling movie than the movie I found on this library DVD. Grade: C
I recently complained that Kaili Blues, director Bi Gan's previous feature, loses some magic when it transitions into its 40-minute single-take shot in its back half. So by all means, I should be leveling the same complaint against Long Day's Journey into Night, a movie with almost the exact same structure as Kaili Blues, only about forty minutes longer: an opening sixty-ish percent of the movie involving a man's personal search is transformed both thematically and formally by a ridiculously long take that occupies the rest of the movie and that blows the movie's plot up to mythic proportions that accentuate a dream-like geography. And yet here I am, left completely stunned by Long Day's long take (as well as with pretty much everything else here). It's not just that this movie's long take is a much more technically virtuosic feat than Kaili Blues's, though it most certainly is; it's nearly a full hour long and involves the camera following characters into increasingly tricky spaces like a zipline and even the sky itself, to say nothing of the incredibly risky bits of choreography like a character having to make difficult billiard play that show up late in the shot. There are some parts of the shot that actually seem logistically impossible to me, and I have no idea how some of this was filmed. But there's also the substance of the shot itself. Extraordinarily long takes like the one in Kaili Blues or the entirety of Victoria, the single-take German heist film from a few years ago, tend to have a lot of emptiness as characters move in transit from location to location, which results in these takes often becoming about the spaces in between the shots of a conventionally edited scene. The characters in Long Day's shot spend a lot of time in transit as well, but part of the magic of what Gan accomplishes is that every moment of this shot feels like a piece of a real scene with form and function, without any of the dead air that often accompanies intense shot length. All this comes together to make the magic of Gan's camera movement merge with the literal magic we see onscreen to make the single most mystical and transcendent hour of cinema I've experienced all year. And that's not even bringing up the first 80 minutes of the movie, which, while consisting of more conventional shot lengths, is its own kind of magical cinematic experience, its editing cutting across time and space in a way that's mesmerizing. Like Andrei Tarkovsky before him, Gan takes the central plot of this movie (straight out of a classic Hollywood film, a man searching for his lost love) and builds it from time sculpted into striking shapes and images molded into psychologically and spiritually profound frames. In a manner not unlike Nostalghia or Mirror, Long Day languishes on those thin places where the boundaries between our own material world and the world of transcendent spirituality become porous; it's very much an Art Film, but like the films of Tarkovsky, there's a gut-feeling immediacy to this movie entrancingly sensual style that both rewards intellect and also makes that sort of chin-stroking entirely unnecessary in the face of such a majestic audio-visual experience. I was swept away. My favorite film of the year so far by a considerable margin. Grade: A
A fun thriller with a tremendous central performance by Isabelle Hupert. A lot of Neil Jordan's normal florid directorial flourishes have been honed down to simple, mean neo-noir edges, which suits this movie just fine—a simple, mean neo-noir itself, about which there isn't a lot surprising other than just how solidly executed everything is. It's a little distracting how it justifies Chloë Grace Moretz's character's naivety by acting like Boston is some down-home backwater where people are good and kind and trusting ("Where I'm from, we return lost purses," is a real line that she says, and when it's finally revealed that it's Boston and not, like, Sweetwater, Tennessee, I almost fell out of my chair), and the movie walks a razor's edge of being tropey enough to be comfortable and too tropey to be engaging, but in the end, its feet are planted pretty firmly in the right places. Grade: B
I don't hate this like I hated Enter the Void, mostly because 1) it is an hour shorter than Enter the Void, and 2) the early dance scenes are some of the most hypnotic filmmaking I've seen all year. But I still don't like the movie as a whole. It shares that same faux-profound cinematic flexing that made Enter the Void noxious at 161 minutes (*bong hit* "What if the last ten minutes of the movie were, like, upside-down, maaaaan"), as well as the same dead-end, performative nihilism and provocateurism. I realize that the dissonance between the sensory euphoria of the first half of the movie and the hellish cinematic assault of the back half of the movie is kind of The Point (ominous title cards tell us, alternatingly, that "Birth is an interesting opportunity" and "Death is an interesting opportunity"), but I resent that being The Point, especially when it's in service of such a doggedly myopic and unimaginative philosophy of birth and death. And especially when I have to watch *spoilers* a pregnant woman kicked in the stomach until she miscarries, solely for the shock value. Wow, what a brilliant subversion of the dichotomy of birth and death Gaspar you've really done it this time mind blown this might be your masterpiece oh my gawd so deep bro why can't all filmmakers be deep auteurs like you. Grade: C
The last film by the late, great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is one of his most experimental. Consisting of just 24 shots, each a mostly static image with a few (often digitally superimposed) moving pieces, it's an obvious play on the fundamental building blocks of cinema itself, and a strikingly beautiful one at that, with the starkness of each image contrasting wonderfully with the life communicated by the movement and immersive sound design. It's oddly engaging, too, given its component parts; the premise makes this movie sound non-narrative, but Kiarostami slyly curates small stories within each shot, presenting wordless conflicts among its mostly animal cast that develop and then resolve in the space of each shot's 4.5 minutes. Even without these conflicts, though, I think I would have still found this mesmerizing. With its often obvious digital superimposition and ambient natural sound, 24 Frames strongly recalls '90s PC CD-ROM point-and-click games/edutainment in a way that I found deeply relaxing. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call this movie a naturalistic adaptation of, say, Myst, or at least the vibes of a game like that, and watching this unearthed some very dear memories of sitting on the floor just staring at screensavers or the looping FMV of game waiting for a click input. This is a completely subjective reaction to this movie, I know, but whatever. Objectivity in art is an illusion, even with something as "objective" as a static image. Grade: B+
This film's characters are so gloriously full of life that I'm disappointed that they aren't contextualized within a story that I found more engaging. The elliptical nature of the film's storytelling is definitely an intentional choice on the part of Claire Denis, and I understand why that choice was made, but it routinely did not work for me. People are going to tell me I'm wrong, and I probably am, because this is the most pedestrian critique ever to make of a movie, but I do think I would have been more engaged if the plot were just a hair more propulsive and cohesive. The reason I know I am probably wrong is that my favorite pieces of the movie—and, to be clear, these pieces are resplendent—are the least-plotty ones: the late-night party set to the Commodores' "Nightshift," the strike/protest bits, the shots of the pressure cooker. Part of me wishes that the movie committed to a complete lack of forward narrative, though that would probably break the movie entirely. Anyway, I feel really weird about High Life now being my highest-rated of the four Denis pictures I've seen, since in some ways, it's the least-interesting. But I dunno. Taste is a fickle friend, and it's the only one of her movies I've seen where I've not been periodically restless. Maybe I just like spaceships. Grade: B
Oscar Micheaux's talkie remake of his (now lost) silent film of the same name is stilted and ham-fisted, and its plot is bonkers in the sense that it just careens from point to point without much regard for structure. In most regards, this is pretty tedious, though at times, it's kind of wild and delightful in its blunt-force craft. There are, in particular, a few line readings by some evil white dudes that are all-timers, my favorite being the way one chortles, "Let's have a Coca-Cola!" in celebration of a black man being swindled (honorable mention to the other evil white guy who convinces a black man to "let [his] seed wither" rather than marry a black woman). The movie has a real "no-B.S." policy when it comes to the racist South, and this is particularly refreshing when it comes to cutting through all the pretense of the stock phrases of Southern politeness to reveal the racism often masked underneath—even if it takes turning characters into mustache-twirling villains to do it! Grade: B-
Television
It's SpongeBob; whaddya need, a road map? Its production being interrupted by the development of the 2004 theatrical film, the third season feels a little more reliant on the time-wasting Patchy the Pirate segments and gimmick episodes like "The Lost Episode" than previous seasons. But the average quality here is still insanely high, and there are some absolutely classic episodes in the season, including "Chocolate with Nuts" and "Ugh" (i.e. SpongeBob B.C.). This season (and the feature film that followed it) represent the end of that fevered first era of SpongeBob (and in fact, it was initially the planned ending of the show), after which the tone of the show changed somewhat, and as such, it feels like a finale of sorts. And it's a fitting finale, if only a temporary one. Grade: A-
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