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Movies
I love the idea that John Boorman's immediate response after the success of Deliverance was to rush off and make this tripped-out sex odyssey, The Holy Mountain by way of (anachronistically) The Man Who Fell to Earth by way of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Truly one of the most singular and bizarre movies to come out of that bananas window between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, when a lot of film sci-fi was stretching toward these sort of singular and bizarre statements already. Like a lot of that '70s sci-fi, Zardoz is a shaggy social satire bursting with ideas, striking imagery, and a ton of really off-beat costuming choices. Also like a lot of '70s sci-fi, it only barely hangs together on a plot level, and its reach exceeds its thematic grasp, especially toward its muddled conclusion. In some ways, its structure, where the first half is basically a character getting a tour of this weird future world and the second half is devoted to that character tearing that future world to shreds, feels more of a piece with Brave New World and other talkier socially conscious sci-fi novels of the mid-20th century than it does with '70s sci-fi cinema; in other ways, it bears exactly zero resemblance to anything, literary or cinematic. Not even the James Bond movies showed us this much sweaty Sean Connery skin. Thanks to whomever it was who recommended this movie to me, because that was something. Grade: B
I was completely in the palm of this movie's hand for about the first hour, enough so that I was thinking about revising my rough "best of the decade" list I've started secretly compiling for the end of the year. Then the 40-minute single-take shot happened, and somehow, that jarred me out of the movie a bit. The shot takes what is initially one man's mystically infused personal quest and then blows it up into the story of the city of Kaili as a whole—which, normally that kind of "personal is a synecdoche of the communal" thing I would be a huge fan of, but there's just something about the way that that element of the movie interacts with those other elements that rubs me wrong, and the movie loses some of its unpredictable magic by tying the film down to what can be attained in a single shot. But make no mistake: this is still very good. It's got that Tarkovsky energy where every frame (that isn't part of the long take) vibrates with this spiritual potential energy that only bursts into something tangible once or twice during the film, but when it does, even subtly, it explodes. There was a shot early in the movie involving a projector and a train where I thought my head was going to melt it was so magical, and the movie ends on a similar effect. The whole thing is profound in this ineffable way that you so rarely get even in this kind of slow cinema, and I had a blast. Grade: A-
A macabre, mean little thriller that violently riffs on the titular sleepover game. This gets commonly compared to Cheap Thrills (the reason I watched it, tbh), both being game-based metaphors for America's wealth divide released just a few months apart. Would You Rather has a much sharper political subtext, with the protagonist entering the game because of healthcare debt rather than just generic unemployment and with a much cleaner understanding of how the wealthy/powerful use the violence of the state to coerce the lower classes into a modern capitalistic game that they might otherwise rebel against (there's a butler literally holding everyone at gunpoint here, and it's revealed early on that he used to work for Mi6, so...). But also... Would You Rather just isn't as good as Cheap Thrills. Jeffrey Combs's sadistic gamemaster is about as compellingly watchable as David Koechner's parallel character in Cheap Thrills, but otherwise, the cast here is pretty cardboard and play barely sketched characters who are even less interesting than the performances, to say nothing about the even-less-engaging cinematic style. Plus, the lack of any sort of black-comic edge makes this movie just straight misery, and maybe I'm just a bourgeois loser for wanting my bleak class commentary to be just a tad bit more fun than this, but what can I say? Grade: B-
This is a remarkable making-of documentary on a number of counts, including the way it has virtually no interviews and instead presents a kind of fly-on-the-wall/Frederick Wiseman approach onset, giving us viewers a tremendous look at the moment-by-moment process of making The Phantom Menace. But more than anything, with the dramatic irony brought on by watching this in 2019, a deeply sad tragedy undergirds nearly every minute of this movie. Watching, for example, a young Jake Lloyd so genuinely excited to land a role for which he would be mercilessly harassed to such an extent that he would essentially renounce Star Wars forever; Ahmed Best throwing himself so completely and jovially into the physicality of Jar Jar Binks, a performance that would for all intents and purposes end his acting career; George Lucas himself working so dedicatedly to expand and challenge the Star Wars franchise, a vision for which he would receive so much hate that he would sell it off to Disney a mere decade later. This was Lucas's passion project, a bizarre little experimental film that just happened to have a budget of millions and an audience of billions, and regardless of how you feel about the final product of the prequels—I haven't watched them recently enough to have stronger feelings besides the notion that they don't deserve to be the whipping boy for the franchise—there's no denying just how singular the whole Lucas-led Star Wars series was: the most lucrative independent film project of all time, probably the most personal movie franchise to have ever made as much money as it did. In a lot of ways both technical and business-related, The Phantom Menace has proven itself to be one of the most important works of American mainstream filmmaking of the past twenty years, but perhaps the biggest one is how the fallout from this movie (alongside, much later, the Hobbit movies) made studios hit the brakes hard on this sort of blockbuster auteurism and eventually land at the bland competence of, for example, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Lucas's own words, Jar Jar is the key—a blessing in the specifics of how we rarely get characters this baldly terrible anymore, a curse in what it means that studios put up the bumpers so high that we can't get a character this baldly terrible again. To watch this documentary is to watch the movie industry change right before your eyes. Grade: A
I'm sure this has been said before, but it just clicked with me while I was watching this movie just how important the late '30s were for establishing certain norms in American mainstream entertainment. Among this movie, The Wizard of Oz, and *sigh* Gone with the Wind, there is an enormous innovation in how Hollywood films approach spectacle—no longer the majestic tableau of the silent era or the hushed theatricality of the early sound era but a bombastic-yet-fleet style defined by kineticism and color and musical sweep and actor charisma. The Adventures of Robin Hood is incredibly watchable in a way that feels distinctly modern compared to some of its immediate peers. Errol Flynn is pitch-perfect as Robin, the swashbuckling action is impressively staged and tensely executed, and every bit of this movie is a joy to experience. I had no idea that Disney's Robin Hood movie was basically 80% cribbed from this movie, but it makes sense, given how well this whole package works; why reinvent the wheel? That said, as is the case with most Robin Hood stories, it is a huge deflation that all the simmering populist energy is ultimately in service of propping up a monarch more than it is about the protection of the poor and that the central injustice to be righted in these stories always lands on the wrong person being on the throne rather than the poor being oppressed. So all the bit with King Richard in the movie's climax feels pretty dull to me. On a related note, it's kind of amazing that the 2010s, with all its discourse about wealth inequality and populism, still hasn't managed to make a good Robin Hood movie. Be better, filmmakers. Grade: A-
Television
Still fun enough, I suppose, and the cast is, as always, extraordinarily engaging and winsome. But at this point, I'm mostly sticking with the show out of sunk cost. I've stuck with it this long; why not see it through to the end? I think I'm just tired of it; it's basically the same show it's ever been (the move to NBC doesn't seem to have made any huge creative changes to the show, although it feels just a tad sillier than it used to be—not sure if that would have happened at Fox anyway). But whereas something like Bob's Burgers is off-beat enough that even its recurring tropes don't wear thin, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is so conventionally a workplace sitcom that the longer some of its manners continue, the staler they feel because it's apparent that, aside from the amazing cast, we've been here before. Like I said, it's basically the same it's ever been, so this is more me than the show. But I'm wearing out on the Nine-Nine. Grade: B-
Music
Vampire Weekend isn't aiming for new fans with their first new album in six years. If you hated the preppy cosmopolitanism and Paul Simonisms of their first three albums, you're not going to be swept off your feet by Father of the Bride; if you enjoyed the wry lyrical turns, sharp hooks, and subtle melancholy of their first run, you'll probably find something to like here. I'm mostly in the latter camp, though unfortunately, most of what I found to like were things I'd already found; the best material ("Harmony Hall," "This Life," "Sunflower") the band dropped as singles long before the album's release. It's not as if the songs beyond the pre-release material are bad, but it's disappointing that there isn't a "Hannah Hunt" hiding deep in the tracklist. I suppose some might attribute this to the departure of Rostam Batmanglij from the band prior to this album's recording, and without Batmanglij playing instruments or producing, there's definitely a looser feel to the music. The tight precision of the previous album's production has sometimes been traded for some intentionally messy choices, like including studio chatter or burying melodies in off-format mixing or making the album 18 tracks long (!) or just overall letting the band slow down and sound more jammy, in the style of Grateful Dead or some other '70s FM rock. I gotta say, it's telling that the best song by far here, "Harmony Hall," has a Batmanglij writing credit. It's not that these new styles don't yield good songs or even that these are that radical of changes (like I said, if you liked their previous material, you'll like this), but it's clear to me that the band's strengths lie more in the highly affected production and tight songwriting of their past than in their apparently whoolier future. But the band is hardly adrift without Rostam. As always, their lyrics are barbed in unexpected ways and slyly political. It's fascinating to see what may be the quintessential Obama-era indie band deal with a distinctly post-Obama world, definitively on the other side of the ambivalence of Modern Vampires of the City and into a much more studied weariness; "I know pain is as natural as the rain, I just thought it didn't rain in California," Ezra Koenig sings on "This Life," his duet with Danielle Haim that sums up pretty neatly the intersection of self-aware privilege and regretted idealism at this album's emotional core. There were probably more concise, more disciplined ways to get us to that emotion, but the fact that they made it to begin with is something. Grade: B+
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