Thank you to everyone who submitted picks! It's been a wild, Sandler-heavy summer, movie-viewing-wise.
Movies
Being a mostly traditional rom-com in the '90s/2000s model, The Wedding Singer lacks a lot of the usual abrasiveness of Adam Sandler's tendencies. Both a blessing and a curse, actually, since it means we do escape some of the uglier habits of his vehicles (though the movie does make time for a Boy George riff that's both unfunny and more than a little transphobic), but in the process of excising that material, the movie becomes somewhat forgettable and generic, save for the '80s nostalgia (pretty irritating and obvious nostalgia from my perch, but I guess in 1998, the tropes of '80s revivalism hadn't quite become as ubiquitous as they are in 2019) and Sandler's performance himself in the titular role. This actually brings up something I really didn't think about until this movie, which is that it's a little strange that so few of his movies trade on Sandler's musical talents, given that music is a cornerstone of his stage legacy ("The Thanksgiving Song," "The Chanuka Song," etc.). It's legitimately enjoyable to see Sandler ham up some '80s ballads here, and I have no idea why his movies don't go to this well more often. Grade: B-
I haven't seen a ton of Jia Zhangke's movies, but I have seen enough to have a sort of nagging feeling that Ash Is Purest White is double-dipping on some of his previous work, most notably Mountains May Depart. The triptych structure, the isolating push of a plot that omits years in a single edit, a somewhat out-of-nowhere sci-fi flourish connecting the second and third parts of the movie—that's all there (and better) in Mountains May Depart. Actually, I like the sci-fi flourish better in this movie, and that particular moment is truly lovely. And it's not as if this movie's familiarity ruins it; far from it in fact, and it's honestly a nicely done character study of a woman whose life is thrown into complete turmoil and must rebuild on the other side and how her particular vulnerabilities on either side of that turmoil lend her to be exploited. It's just not all that surprising, and surprise was, though hardly the only thing Mountains May Depart had going for it, certain a big thing it had going for it, something this movie feels just a bit poorer for missing. Grade: B
My standard line with Soderbergh movies is that they are super easy to like but usually kind of hard to love, but, uhhh.... I love this? It kind of feels like a Tom Clancy novel in fast-forward, but somehow without ever feeling rushed: a world-spanning epic about a global threat told via a large handful of POV characters that flesh out the unfolding catastrophe from a variety of angles, including the political, the scientific, the journalistic, and the personal. It's a deliriously big film that somehow manages to convincingly evoke global politics and scenes of expository medical charts and then make time for a purely personal moment like one girl's private prom with her boyfriend and miraculously have that micro-personal moment hit with a ton of bricks' worth of emotional heft that rivals the geo-thriller stuff—and Contagion does all this while coming in easily under two hours in runtime, breaking nary a droplet of sweat. It's incredible. Also, it's a pretty wicked meta-joke to have a movie depicpt Gwyneth Paltrow contracting a fatal disease while also that same movie prominently features a quack profiting off the pandemic by peddling homeopathic treatments. Grade: A
Pretty much peak pre-Star Wars '70s American sci-fi in the sense that it has some very neat (if charmingly chintzy) production design that slightly buoys an interesting premise that otherwise doesn't quite give the movie enough gas in its tank to make it to the end. Here, we're shown a world in which people live in perfect pleasure but only until they turn 30, at which point they have to undergo a "rebirth" process in this big stadium known as the Carrousel. It doesn't take a genius to guess that this rebirth process is really just a ruse for mass-killing, which raises some questions regarding just how good a purely hedonist lifestyle is for one's intellect; it also means that the movie's biggest shock moment (the first "rebirth" sequence—very trippy, very cool sequence) hits relatively early in the film and leaves the rest of the movie somewhat adrift as to what to do with a story that's already hit its climax within its first thirty minutes. But like I said, the design of everything is baller, and that offsets the back half considerably. We need more real-life holograms used in movies. Grade: B-
It's Ozu, so it's a wonderfully observed portrait of domestic Japan with a deeply melancholy strain. Late Spring in particular, more so than other Ozu movies I've seen, seems to regard societal expectations of that domesticity as not just an obligation but also a kind of cage—the issue in this movie revolving around the "necessary" marriage of a daughter, the pursuit of which neither the father nor his daughter want but they move toward regardless. It's so heartbreaking, and as affecting a portrayal as I've ever seen of the self-fulfilling prophecies that are societal norms. Grade: A-
P.S. I (and a bunch of other people) talk about this movie in a lot more depth in Episode 257 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.
Music
U.K. Subs often play second-fiddle to the bigger bands of the first wave of British punk, like the Sex Pistols and The Clash, but their sophomore album, Brand New Age, can absolutely go toe-to-toe with Give 'Em Enough Rope. And the Sex Pistols couldn't even cobble together a second album, so I guess we know who won the battle there. Brand New Age is also an early step forward toward hardcore punk—as in their debut, the songwriting is still a little inelegant, but in moving toward a more muscular, aggressive sound, the band makes their material work through sheer brute force. Grade: A-
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