Obligatory complaint about school starting.
Movies
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
A lot of people have gone on about how this is Tarantino's love letter to the classic Hollywood studio system, and it's not
not that; the film languishes over its vast array of period cinema details with a clearly loving eye. But one of the things that's so fascinating and slippery about the movie is those details themselves. Because when tasked with bringing up the things to love about the cinematic world of 1969, I think most of us would be inclined to talk about
Butch Cassidy or
Easy Rider, but that's not what Tarantino does. As these characters go about their daily lives, we see movie marquees and film sets, but they aren't for the stuff modern film buffs like. They're marquees for the forgotten, mediocre studio-picture pablum that fill most theaters most weeks in most eras; they're sets for television westerns, a genre with some legacy but hardly for what it was doing in 1969. On the one hand, Tarantino seems to be indulging in a kind of snide anti-revisionism, insisting on rubbing our noses in the sheer disposability of the majority of cinema—
this is the oft-mythologized studio system: dirty and dumb and square, a bloated self-parody. And yet, on the other hand, this movie is so warmly obsessed with the abject corporate garbage it depicts. I mean, there's even a scene in which the preparation of a dish of Kraft macaroni and cheese is given a meticulous step-by-step montage, complete with yellow "cheese product" powder packet stirred in with care. Tarantino's love of trash is well-documented, but this seems like something different, because it's not unadulterated love. Or at least, it's hard to imagine that it is. There's a scene—one of the film's best—in which Sharon Tate (played magnificently by Margot Robbie) goes to a screening of
Wrecking Crew, the Dean Martin vehicle that Tate herself also appears in, and we see an entire audience fall for this movie—laughter and applause and everything. The thing is, this Dean Martin movie looks dreadful. I've not seen it, but those who have assure me it is. That's this
Hollywood's tension in microcosm: not exactly one man's trash becoming another man's treasure but the ugliness and banality being part and parcel of treasure. This goes all the way down in every piece of the movie, and that open-handed posture that simultaneously de-mythologizes and revels in mythology can be really deeply troubling because it never allows you to fully settle in to any kind of peace with the world as presented. Stuntman Cliff (Brad Pitt) is both magnetically handsome and saves the day, and yet he also almost certainly murdered his wife; the screen violence that inspires the Manson family is the very thing that heroically stops them;
Wrecking Crew is stale and lousy, but it gives everyone in that theater joy. At every turn,
Hollywood shrugs off any clean interpretive (and moral) framework. Tarantino often makes his male characters his surrogates, imbuing them with his own loquacious tongue and deep love of pop-culture arcana. But at least in that
Wrecking Crew scene and in terms of his project with
Hollywood in particular, the Tarantino stand-in is absolutely Robbie's Tate, who (seemingly aware of her movie's shortcomings yet nonetheless optimistic) pores over the audience and measures her own emotions by the authentic human reactions around her. There's something so achingly human about
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's insistence on presenting joy and ugliness together in such a way that (given Tarantino's unusually unobtrusive hand this time around) refuses to defend or ignore either. It simply languishes in the tension between the two, finding an off-kilter beauty in watching human beings navigate that tension as it veers from queasy to intriguing to warm to downright frightening. I admire the moral fortitude of cancel culture, which can view the holistic social import of an artwork or artist with distilled clarity, but as someone who keeps getting tangled up in the magnetism of "problematic" favorites to an extent that the breaks are never so clean, I've got to admit that the muddy tension
Hollywood dramatizes is somewhere I spend a decent amount of time in my head, which makes the movie kind of profound to contemplate even while I acknowledge all the ways people are justifiably pissed at this movie. The interpretive slipperiness is the point, I guess is what I'm saying.
Grade: A-
Crawl (2019)
This movie knows exactly what it needs to be—an exciting 87 minutes about surviving a hurricane and a congregation of alligators at the same time—and is exactly that, no more, no less. There's maybe five minutes at the beginning of the movie setting up some of the emotional stakes and the skill set of the protagonist (she's estranged from her father, she's a swimmer), but then it's off to the races, and literally within thirty seconds of the hurricane/gators conflict resolving, *BLAM* cut to credits. It's a little dumb but a lot of fun.
Grade: B+
Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017)
At the end of this movie, my wife said that this movie felt like ten other movies she'd already seen, and all those movies were better, which is a pretty nice summation of what makes this movie so tedious. There are shades of
Finding Neverland here so thick that you can barely see the A. A. Milne biography through the tropes; like the worst biopics,
Goodbye Christopher Robin takes a person with a legitimately interesting, unique life and makes his story feel generic and schematic. It spends far too much energy on too-cute-for-their-own-good allusions to Winnie the Pooh (the characters often speak in iconic lines from Milne's books) and not nearly enough on, for example, exploring the actually fascinating and thorny ethical ramifications of Milne's having used his son's imaginative world to advance his own career. The movie gestures toward some complicated dynamics in this realm, I guess, but it's clear it's more interested in being cute and cozy than being engaging.
Grade: C-
Golden Exits (2017)
With things like
Queen of Earth and
Her Smell, Alex Ross Perry has gotten something of a reputation for creating characters with these explosive psychologies that blow up in frantically caustic scenes. What's fascinating about
Golden Exits is how it inverts that, having characters repress their psychological impulses to such extreme degrees that the drama of the film kind of folds in on itself to create a series of ellipses more than the exclamations of ARP's other recent output. We're still dealing with acerbic upper-middle-class white folks, but the decision for most of the characters to leave most of their feelings unrequited (even the few that physically consummate immediately become emotionally disconnected) turns that acid into something really poignant and suggestive—all the more so because ARP's other movies have made it absolutely clear that for characters this bitter, the alternative (tortured shouting matches) offers no fulfilling answers either. More than any of ARP's other work,
Golden Exits sketches the full tragedy of this particular brand of immaturity: caught between the (verbal) violence of action and the maddening infinitude of possible outcomes born out of passivity. It's the least-hooky of his movies, but it's also probably my favorite.
Grade: A
Dark Night (2016)
Like Tim Sutton's previous film,
Memphis,
Dark Night has a terrific eye for imagery and shaggy place-setting. Also like that earlier film,
Dark Night never really coheres into much more than a ambling collection of its parts. Unlike
Memphis, though, it has a concept audacious enough (making this about the Aurora
Dark Knight Rises shooting) that it's hard to let it slide how little this adds up to anything—congratulations, you've made a film about a mass shooting that never holds together enough to say something about that mass shooting. Either that, or I'm missing something. But the imagery is super nice, and there are a few pretty good moments.
Grade: C+
The Devil's Candy (2015)
Solid horror movie with a really great use of both heavy metal and oil paintings, which is not a combination I was imagining I'd see in a movie any time soon.
The Devil's Candy is at its best when it's dealing with the hallucinogenic montages that inform its protagonist's paintings and at its worst when it focuses on its pretty by-the-book human villain, and honestly, there's probably a little more screentime given to that villain than I would have liked. But luckily, it's a movie more about scary paintings than an evil, mentally ill man (sigh), so the scales tip in the right direction overall.
Grade: B
Books
The Porpoise by Mark Haddon (2019)
Any novel that sets out to adapt Shakespeare's
Pericles, Prince of Tyre has to deal with the unavoidable problem that it has to adapt
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a decidedly strange and not all that good play. Mark Haddon (
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) tries to solve this issue in two ways. First, he rights the play's somewhat cavalier disregard for its female characters (who are basically disposed of an act-by-act basis) by making the majority of the POV characters these women and fleshing out what happens to them once the play is done with their involvement; for example, a large part of the novel involves the chronicling of the life of Antiochus's daughter, who does not even get a name in the play (she's called "Angelica" here), after Pericles leaves her with her abusive father. This works reasonably well, and the story feels better off for its efforts in this regard. On top of this, though, is the second way that Haddon tries to patch together a novel from
Pericles, which is that he adds layers upon layers of metatextuality and postmodern anachronisms that result in a novel that seems self-aware and conscious of the play's shortcomings. There is, for example, a Russian-nesting-doll structure of who is telling the story that creates increasingly fanciful plotting and settings as you get deeper into the structure; there is also, for another example, a sizeable sequence that involves the ghost of William Shakespeare escorting a recently dead George Wilkins (who likely wrote a good chunk of the
Pericles play) into the afterlife. It's all very interesting, but at least from where I'm sitting, it's not interesting in a way that actually ameliorates the narrative shortcomings of the original story, and as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that these structural games are the conceit of the novel and that the book doesn't have a ton to offer outside of that. Don't get me wrong: there are some
fantastic sequences, and the seventy-five-ish pages of the book are gripping (uncoincidentally, these are the ones that deal most with Angelica, who is the most compelling character here by a mile). But I just don't find the whole coming together in any satisfying way.
Grade: B-
Music
Miles Davis - Tutu (1986)
Wikipedia tells me that this was originally supposed to be a Prince/Davis collab, which makes sense given the extent to which synths and drum machines hang over the compositions here. I kinda wish Prince had been on this album, because as it is, these instrumentals have that oil-slick '80s smoothness without a lot of the human grit that someone like Prince could do with that sound. I'm not as familiar with Miles's '80s output as I'd like to be, but even just from this album, it's kind of wild that Davis, who not only survived but thrived on a number of sea changes in the music industry prior to this, including the rock-and-roll explosion that killed many of his post-bop peers' careers, is pretty clearly playing catch-up with the 1980s, the decade that fell Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, and a number of other musicians of similar '70s muscularity who imploded artistically in the Spandex Decade. Must have been something in the water.
Tutu is no
Never Let Me Down, and there's a lot to recommend about its electro-pop iteration of jazz fusion. I like the record. But as a synecdoche for the ways that established artists tried to adjust their posture toward new recording technology, it's telling.
Grade: B
