Mini Reviews for September 23-29, 2019

Middling movie week, but I did finish the book I was reading (reviewed below) before it was due at the library, which was a major accomplishment for me.

Movies

Shazam! (2019)
I didn't check, but this movie's third act feels like it lasts for half the runtime of the movie itself, which is far larger a proportion of its host movie than any single act should shoulder, particularly when we're dealing with generic CGI action climaxes. But with that out of the way, I've got to say that this is probably the most I've been entertained by a live-action superhero movie in a year at least. It's funny and sad and human in all the right proportions, and it's satisfyingly thematically consistent in its search for surrogate familyhood. And more so than a lot of movies that try to immitate that wistful '80s family movie milieu, Shazam! does a good job of evoking the emotional beats of a movie from that era without making me actively compare it to those older movies. If you're going to derive, that's how you do it. Grade: B

Cold Pursuit (2019)
I don't know why I watched this. I've not particularly been a fan of Liam Neeson's other action movies, and I don't think I enjoyed a single moment of this smarmy, pseudo-comedic riff on that type of movie. Grade: D+

Observe and Report (2009)
I watched this because I was morbidly curious what a Seth Rogen comedy vehicle would have to say about cops, and I was also interested in what a woman writing and directing a Seth Rogen comedy would do with the format. Turns out that "Jody Hill" is actually the name of a man, so that second reason is a no-go. As for cops, the movie isn't really about that either as much as it is that gun culture and toxic masculinity and the media culture surrounding cops affect the worldview of a sad, mentally ill outsider—more Taxi Driver than The Thin Blue Line (or whatever cop commentary movie we're going to evoke). It's probably the most thematically ambitious comedy I've seen of the Apatow era (of which this movie is definitely a part of, even though Apatow himself seems not to have laid a finger on it), and a fascinating facet to this movie's project is taking the bro outsider persona that's the bread and butter of the Apatow-style movies and twisting its intensity just barely to show how easily that archetype can curdle into full-on psychopathy. But, like.... ahhh, I dunno, y'all, I already think that Taxi Driver has some problems with its tone's relationship with its themes, and making this movie so fully commit to the aesthetics and beats of a comedy while essentially following the same waking-nightmare plot (and occasionally even worse—e.g. the [intentionally, I hope] horrifying date rape scene) only further muddies the water. There's this weird thing that happens in this movie that's kind of like that old chestnut about putting a frog in a pot of water and turning up the heat gradually enough that the frog doesn't realize it's in hot water before it's boiled to death; Seth Rogen's character is reprehensible from the moment the movie begins, but in the early stages, he's reprehensible in a way that's often passively embraced by comedy audiences because it's A) the starting point from which character development will gradually uplift the character, and B) it's ultimately a means to an end, i.e. the laughs (think Jonah Hill's character at the beginning of Superbad, who is rather appalling but somehow endearingly so for some people if you look at him in the context of the movie). There's a lot to say about the ethics of enjoying bad behavior at all that I'll just let slide now, but what I will say is that at least for me, beginning the movie where a conventional comedy would and then slowly making Rogen's character more and more dangerous felt basically like the movie equivalent of the frog-pot parable, in that while I of course could identify Rogen's character's behavior as "bad" the whole time, I was acclimated enough in the comedy aesthetics that I didn't really contextualize on a gut level that the film was careening toward a far bleaker and darker place than the actual film style indicates. To put it another way, I never felt like Observe and Report stopped being a regular comedy, even though my brain could objectively tell me that I was watching significantly more horrifying content than a typical comedy. Whereas the subset of Taxi Driver's legacy that celebrates Travis Bickle feels like an accident born from a miscalculation on Scorsese/Schrader's part regarding how intoxicating and aggrandizing the medium of cinema can be, that aggrandization and intoxication seem to be the point in Observe and Report: weaponizing the audience's enjoyment of comedy tropes toward a truly unpleasant experience of being bludgeoned by their darkest iterations while we reflexively laugh all the way. It's a wild, fascinating project, and I appreciate what this movie's going for. But the results prove one of two things, neither of which I particularly like: either that the film isn't up to the challenge of realizing this project to its best effect (and thus tacitly inviting audiences to enjoy Rogen's character's actions), or that my own lizard brain won't let me feel horrified if it thinks I'm supposed to be laughing. Grade: C

The Cat Returns (猫の恩返し) (2002)
Disappointingly dissimilar to Cordell Barker's 1988 masterpiece of Canadian animation, "The Cat Came Back." But in all seriousness, The Cat Returns is some truly bonkers cinema, especially as a spin-off of Whisper of the Heart. That the whole plot hinges on an arranged marriage between a cat and a human doesn't even crack the top ten bizarre things in this movie. Delightfully bizarre, though—probably nobody's idea of top-tier Studio Ghibli, but nonetheless a nice reminder of how comfortable children are with utterly weird stuff and how much adult entertainment loses when it tries to equate maturity with so-called realism. Grade: B



Books

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (2019)
I don't normally review non-narrative nonfiction books, but given the subject matter and the fact that I spent most of my free reading time during the past three weeks plowing through it, I just wanted to give the book a shout-out on here. Half historical survey, half philosophical treatise, Zuboff's tome (comfortably over 500 pages, over 600 if you count the end notes) is a roundly damning refutation of the current digital status quo. A lot of the individual pieces will likely be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to Google and Facebook controversies in recent years (the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the fight over Google Maps Street View), but Zuboff connects the dots in a way that I've never seen before, as well as brings in primary sources from the early stages of Google and Facebook that I was entirely unaware of. The results are a frankly terrifying manifesto on the dehumanizing and insidious implications of the data harvesting practices normalized by the digital giants that rule our world today. The book makes a lot of comparisons to the lawless and shameless exploitation of Native Americans by early European colonizers, and while I'm not sure how far that analogy should be taken, the ideas clearly match in disturbing ways: radically self-interested men taking advantage of ignorance and the ambiguity of legal jurisdiction to dehumanize its subjects and redefine social norms in a way bent around their own toxic and abusive utopian visions for the world. My one reservation is with Zuboff's weird affection for early-20th-century capitalists like Henry Ford. She clearly would be against some of these guys' more extreme practices and beliefs, and I suppose it's hard not to feel at least a little nostalgic for a world in which companies like Google didn't exist. But those dudes were tearing their society apart in their own ways, which I'm sure Zuboff realizes, but tone, Madam—your tone. Otherwise, I highly recommend this one if you can carve out the time and mental space. And yes, I realize the irony of writing about this on a blog hosted by Google. Grade: A-

Music

I Am... Sasha Fierce by Beyoncé (2008)
This is definitely the weakest of Beyoncé's pure pop albums (her first four records, I'd say), which is surprising because I remember this CD being a really big deal when it came out. I guess I can see what the fuss is about—I Am... Sasha Fierce is obviously a bid to be taken seriously, what with its pseudo-conceptual structure (a double disc in its original release hinging on different aspects of Beyoncé's persona) and, relative to her previous work, more subdued and adult-contemporary style. The thing is, she's not especially good at doing adult-oriented stuff here, and I would argue that she never really got the hang of that style until her self-titled album; songs like "Ave Maria" and "Satellites" sound a lot more like schmaltz than maturity, and big arena-ready tracks like "Halo" feel pretty generic and personality-free. Where the album shines is in its second (shorter) disc, which is pretty much front-to-back bangers: "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" is, of course, one of Beyoncé's very best songs and naturally the best in show here, but pretty much all of the pop-oriented half is lots of fun, culminating in "Video Phone," not quite a deep cut (it was a charting single) but definitely my pick for the best Beyoncé song that doesn't get the top-tier recognition of your "Single Ladies" and "Love on Top"s. I'd splurge for the Deluxe edition of the album just for the extended "Video Phone" remix with Lady Gaga alone. So it's not like it's a bad album, but when sandwiched between B'Day and 4 in her album chronology, it's hard not to see the weak link in that chain. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for September 16-22, 2019

Finally got to get to the theater to see a new release! First time in a while!

Movies

Ad Astra (2019)
This movie is about space exploration and the search for extra-terrestrial life, so you know I'm there. But also, it's about daddy issues—which at first I was like, "Ehh, I dunno, my dad's alright" but then the movie went, "Oh, we meant your heavenly daddy, too," and then I was back onboard. I kind of wish this movie was weirder than it is (it doesn't have to be 2001, but when you're making a movie about the Meaning of Life, I dunno, maybe untuck your shirt just a little), but it ticks a lot of my boxes and in a pretty convincing way, too. The movie's depiction of our solar system is gorgeous (the orange lights and claustrophobic spaces on Mars are particularly great), and the depiction of a near-future space-traveling society as one ravaged by both corporate capitalism and international violence over the contested ownership of space resources is one of the more (depressingly) plausible takes on what space travel will actually look like in the next century that I've seen in a movie. And for a space movie in the lineage of something like 2001, it's curiously fascinated by politics—we always get someone's rank/position alongside their name when we're introduced to them, and the way that power is distributed among these ranks is a quiet but consistent thread throughout. I wouldn't say that 2019 has been a great year for movies in general, but the fact that we've gotten two major, ideas-driven auteurist space films in the past few months (I usually have to wait years between these things!) makes me feel a little better about it. Grade: B+

Hustlers (2019)
A lot of people have tried to remake Goodfellas, including Martin Scorsese himself (twice!), but I don't think any of those movies have gotten quite what makes this genre—we can call it a genre now that there are like a dozen movies doing this, right?—tick as well as Hustlers does. Having the 2008 financial crisis be the dividing line between the golden years and the dark years in the same way that the introduction of hard drugs in Goodfellas and the 1980s in general in Boogie Nights are is a stroke of structural/thematic genius, and grounding this movie in milieu of 1. women 2. of color who are 3. sex workers plants Hustlers in that lived-in, sociopolitical sense of operating within the experiences of a marginalized people that hangs so heavily over the early parts of Goodfellas (in fact, that sense is even stronger here)—something that Wolf of Wall Street, the other Goodfellas riff on 2008, sorely lacked and that propels an already extraordinarily entertaining film toward greatness in Hustlers's case. It doesn't *quite* get there, largely due to a few glaringly bad bits of dialogue in this generally strong screenplay—the final line of the movie is almost embarrassing in how much it bends over backwards to unnecessarily explain the film's themes—but this movie is very good nonetheless, buoyed by a terrific cast (that is, to a subtly devastating effect, basically halfed once 2008 rolls around) and some of the best editing and camerawork I've seen in years. This will in all likelihood be the best mainstream American studio movie of the year, so get it while it's hot, folks. Grade: A-

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (2018)
A decently directed thriller that has an admirable patience—basically Reservoir Dogs without the smirking irony and meta references, which is maybe missing the point of Reservoir Dogs, though I'm open to this premise being a good idea. But unlike Reservoir Dogs, the screenplay is dumb, and after a while, that accumulates into some pretty face-palming twists in the back half of the movie. Also, given that the movie does not mention ideology or racism or literally anything specific to white supremacy, I can't think of a single reason why this movie had to be centered on a far-right militia group other than just sheer shock value. So edgy. Grade: C+

Frankenweenie (2012)
Completely whitebread comfort food, and Burton is basically on autopilot here—Danny Elfman, too (he almost quotes his own Batman theme, like, a lot here). But it's autopilot set to the configurations of their good output, and familiar or not, it's an entirely pleasant ride. Probably the most conventionally successful of Burton's 2010s output? Given his 2010s output, that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I really did enjoy this. Grade: B+

Wanda (1970)
The movie opens with the image of a mountainside completely turned to coal dust by the hulk of industry, and it doesn't really get any cheerier from there on out. When we first see the titular Wanda (played note-perfect by writer/director Barbara Loden herself), she's listlessly abandoning her marriage, which might tempt viewers to take an antagonistic stance toward her if the movie didn't make so clear just how mind-numbingly plain her life is, a life caged by those coal mines and desolated mountains. And in no time after that, Wanda is thrown into situation after situation that show just how little agency and control she has—none of which are intended to excuse her behavior so much as it is to contextualize it within the larger purgatory of mundane lower-middle-class existence on the fringes of American society. It's relentlessly unsentimental—and, to that end, a little meandering at times until it arrives upon its bank robbery finale—but we could do with de-sentimentalizing rural American life. Grade: B+

The Hobbit (1977)
At least 50% of this movie looks pretty shoddy: the character designs for the dwarfs are not great, for example, and a lot of this movie could have used a few more animated frames per second. The music is pretty goofy, too, and though the same must be said of many of Tolkien's original songs, those at least didn't have '70s soft-rock folk for backing instrumentation. That said, there are also some terrific pieces here, including some great character designs for Smaug and Gandalf (also, John Huston voicing Gandalf is wholly inspired) as well as consistently incredible watercolor-inflected backgrounds—created by a bunch of future-Studio Ghibli animators, so of course. It's not exactly a functional movie or even a great adaptation of its source (whose episodic structure makes it tougher to adapt to film than I think a lot of people give it credit for), but it's certainly not bad. Grade: B-

Music

Jenny Hval - The Practice of Love (2019)
The Norwegian singer-songwriter and experimentalist returns for what's probably her most immediate album in a decade: a soothing, trance-indebted collection of songs that form a concept album about Love—a conceptual far cry from the same artist's work a few years ago about menstruation and vampires. But typical of Hval, her take on Love isn't programmatic or thinly cliché in the least; this is an album obsessed not with romanticized love as some sort of transcendental concept but more with the strange corners of mundane existence within love, a complicated treatise that's both philosophically weighty and also compellingly banal. And the music itself, sounding like Hval's take on what Grimes was doing on Visions, is hypnotic and lovely. One of my favorite albums of the year so far. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for September 9-15, 2019

Not a great week at the movies, gotta say.

Movies

Dumbo (2019)
Even putting aside my substantial philosophical/aesthetic opposition to the idea of these "live-action" Disney remakes, it's clear this is a huge miscalculation. I watched this pretty much because Burton doing Dumbo feels like one of those peanut-butter-and-chocolate pairings, and while late-period Burton and archvillain-period Disney are far from the ideal context for this union, there are some signs of life in the production design in general and a satirical riff on Walt Disney and Disneyland specifically (which ultimately proves toothless because duh, this is itself a Disney movie, but there's at least a hint of bitterness in it, which is fun within the rubric of this movie). But oh man, the narrative. What a mess. Disney has made PR hay out of the fact that they virtuously cut the notorious bit with "Jim Crow," but in their eagerness to do so, they've also left a pretty significant gap in the story's plot. This movie's solution is to make Dumbo not about Dumbo at all but rather about the two human children who teach Dumbo to fly in lieu of the crows, and also about their father who, as is contractually mandated of all fathers in live-action Disney films, is emotionally distant and just can't relate to his kids. And it doesn't work at all. It's not just that the human drama isn't engaging (though it isn't); it's also that recentering this story on human beings who are sympathetic and nice fundamentally misses one of the pillars of what makes this story tick in the first place, which is the depiction of the circus as a rotten, awful place for animals that exists only because of human beings' propensity for cruelty and mean-spirited amusement. Instead, the movie totally softballs this message by making it maddeningly ambivalent, where there are the Good Humans who understand the animals and the Bad Humans who want to exploit them. To call this movie's revision of the original's cynicism about human nature "both-sides-ism" would overstate the political ramifications of this issue, but it's definitely that for the world of Disney remakes. I'm not saying this movie needed an animal minstrel show at its climax, but it needed some animals in general, and it needed them to be real characters (if not speak). I'm as big a fan of humanism as the next guy, but interposing that ideology into a story that is, in many respects, Disney's parallel treatise alongside Bambi on the ways that humankind is irredeemably abusive toward animals... well, re-centering it on human daddy issues feels a little gauche, to say the least. Grade: C-

Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes (2018)
An unlikely (and often ungainly) mix of James Joyce, John Prine, and Brechtian techniques: "Two Gallants" turned into a Prine jukebox musical with deliberate moments of theatrical/cinematic artifice. It's (despite that Brechtian stuff) very sweet and, for stretches, pretty great, although the whole package didn't quite work for me. There's just too much stuff going on here, and the mix of irony and melodrama never quite gels—particularly the framing device where the movie is all part of a radio show, which is a meta bridge too far for me (a shame that this part specifically doesn't work for me, since the guy who voices the DJ is a friend of mine—it's not your fault, Nathan!). Also, I know that Sonny Carl Davis has a long and illustrious career, but all I can think of when I see him now are those anti-Ted Cruz ads that Linklater directed. Which actually works well for this movie. Grade: B-

Last Men in Aleppo (De sidste mænd i Aleppo) (2017)
It is deeply upsetting on a visceral level to watch living and dead children pulled from rubble, which is precisely what this documentary hinges on. I honestly don't know what really this documentary has to offer in the face of that—it feels pedantic to comment too much on this movie's structural issues or its unimpressively journalistic cinematic style, as if it's the job of a movie like this to entertain or wow me. I clearly responded to the visuals more strongly than I would have to an article covering the same material, which speaks to its value as cinema, though. Grade: B+

Helter Skelter (1976)
A friend of mine loaned this to me after we talked about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and I guess it's not his fault that I think that the mystique of the Manson Family is kind of dull, but man, three hours of made-for-TV (in every pejorative that implies) cinema specifically about the Manson Family really didn't do it for me. It doesn't help just how lurid this thing is. I know that's the whole point of a movie like this (made slap-dash from the book of the same title), but there's something pretty skeevy and uninteresting about just how procedurally this movie lingers over the details of the sex and murder perpetrated by the family at Manson's behest, with everyone involved (including the victims of the murders) feeling like wooden props by which we get access to this wild story. The whole thing oversells the grossness of the Manson endeavor while somehow not taking his motivating ideology seriously enough, which is a weird tension. Believe me, I still have some reservations about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and particularly its ending, but it's movies like this that really throw into relief just how lovely it is that Tarantino's movie lets Sharon Tate exist as a human being apart from her status as a casualty of a cult massacre. Grade: C-

Television

Dear White People, Volume 3 (2019)
It would be overstating the case to say that the third season of Netflix's incendiary Dear White People is its first major misstep, but it is undeniably a step down from the previous two seasons. Part of this seems by design; there's a lot of this season (especially early on) devoted to meta jokes about Netflix shows in their third seasons becoming tired. On a deeper level, this is, in a lot of ways, a season about exhaustion and aimlessness. These characters are burned out: by their financial insecurities, by the relentless push for excellence, by the power hierarchies of Winchester, by the oppressive awfulness of the world around them. So they have become adrift. Sam has quit her radio show; Troy has quit Pastiche; Lionel is exploring the new (to him) world of the university's LGBT community; Gabe faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles on his thesis. It's a completely understandable development for the show. Dear White People was forged in the crucible of America's mid-to-late 2010s political and identity turmoil, and though that turmoil persists, a palpable feeling of exhaustion has set in among progressives—we're tired of marching, of writing representatives, of being outraged: tired of doing the things we're supposed to do in the face of a situation that only seems to become more dire by the day. So it only makes sense for the show to reflect this. The problem is that it never quite finds a way to make all its variations on this idea cohere. Dear White People is as attuned to the nuances of The Discourse among progressives and of the political climate in general (a subplot about the unionizing of teaching assistants feels very much an outgrowth of the labor fights of the past couple years), but unlike the blackface party of Volume 1 or the alt-right social media mystery of Season 2, none of the plots form a central structure for this third volume to hand its assorted pieces on. A plot involving sexual assault allegations feels like an attempt to provide a backbone for the season, but it's too late-breaking to make it work as that. It may be thematically appropriate for a season about aimlessness to itself lack structure, but as a viewing experience, there's definitely something missing. None of this is to say that this season is unwatchable or even just bad; it is still good, sharp-tongued television. But for a series with as sterling a pedigree as Dear White People, it's just a tad disappointing not to have it quite live up to its predecessors. Grade: B

Music

Flying Lotus - Flamagra (2019)
With a track list nearly as long as the White Album's and a title like a Final Fantasy spell and a cast of collaborators like the invite list for a Hollywood wrap party (George Clinton? Denzel Curry? DAVID LYNCH???), Flamagra is certainly one of the more bizarre and sprawling releases of Flying Lotus's career. It careens from genre to genre, R&B melding into fusion melding into electronica melding into neo-soul melding into unclassifiable sonic experiments. It doesn't cohere in the slightest, nor does it ever try to. Instead, it is basically the musical version of its own cover art: a baffling hodge-podge. Any one moment is fascinating (my favorite is the strange, scary David Lynch collab, "Fire Is Coming"), but good luck making sense of any of this from a bird's-eye view. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for September 2-8, 2019

More reviews this week than last week: enjoy!

Movies

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
This movie is ramblier and kinder than I would have liked it to have been, and it is yet another movie about gentrification that dramatizes it as solely the actions of individuals rather than those (often white) individuals' dance with the trickle-down effects of poor (or malicious) urban planning and infrastructural investment by municipal governments. I dunno how to dramatize that well, but my urbanist-wonk heart want to see a movie that does it. That said, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is gorgeously filmed and acted, and regardless of my nitpicks on the sociopolitical specifics, it gets at the emotional heart of the modern American gentrification crisis: that the technically correct history that (in general) people of color have only temporarily occupied inner cities built for white people belies the reality that people of color have, in both a material and symbolic sense, built the neighborhoods given to them by mid-century white flight, and that the 21st century's enforcement of the technical history is a piercing betrayal of that felt reality. I say this as basically a white gentrifier myself, a now-established identity I don't really know what to do with other than to as best I can rage along with this movie and my own neighbors. Grade: B

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
Large pieces of this movie are good enough to make the case for this movie being one of last year's best, and I'm sorry I slept on it until now. The based-on-a-true-story premise (Lee Israel's infamous embellishing/forgery of famous literary letters) is outrageous and fun enough already, and the screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty simmers with vibrant-yet-melancholic acid in exactly the best ways you'd imagine a collaboration between those two writers to. The bristly friendship between Melissa McCarthy's Israel and her partner-in-crime, played by Richard E. Grant, is both a wicked sparring match between two terrible people and also shockingly disarming in its underlying tenderness, and I could have watched them for a great deal longer than this movie actually lasts. It's not a perfect film by any means; the plot itself lurches almost audibly from act to act, and the ending in particular feels undercooked. But I'd happily trade all the clunky story structure in the world for scenes as good as the ones between McCarthy and Grant here. Grade: A-

Kronk's New Groove (2005)
It's hard to say that I'm disappointed with this movie, given the wretched track record of direct-to-home-media Disney sequels, but there is something particularly disheartening about taking one of the most delightful animated characters of all time and giving him daddy issues and a very poorly structured screenplay to work through. Seriously, what is up with this movie's structure? It's basically three discrete parts linked with the most tenuous of connective tissue, which probably means that Disney planned to chop it up to run within half-hour TV slots on Disney Channel. Two lessons were learned today, one for me and one for the suits: for the suits, don't plan movies based on how they will air piecemeal on TV; for me, DON'T WATCH DIRECT-TO-HOME-MEDIA DISNEY SEQUELS, ya fool! Grade: D

Touki Bouki (1973)
Take away the numerous cutaways to animals being slaughtered, and I really dig this aesthetic—and I guess as long as I'm eating meat, I probably deserve to see like a dozen cows' throats cut. Yeah, but at any rate, the colors, the shot composition, the extremely interesting sound collages and loops this movie puts on its soundtrack—those things are all great, and the plot, which devotes itself to constructing a myth of freedom and assimilation that it then vigorously deconstructions, is engaging, even in its loopy and discursive execution, and that's all pretty interesting. It might even be flat-out great without the presence of a pretty ugly gay stereotype right in the middle of the movie. Grade: B

House of Wax (1953)
A perfectly enjoyable bit of old-school horror. There's nothing really exceptional here (except for Vincent Price, of course, and his character's ludicrously convoluted system of beakers and glass tubes apparently needed for pouring a boiling vat of wax onto a human subject), but pretty much everything is good enough: the period details, the patient pacing, the completely lurid and silly plotting, etc. Plus, this 88-minute-long feature has a 10-minute intermission midway through, which is the kind of user-friendly experience I can really get behind in cheap '50s horror. Grade: B




Books

Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi (2017)
So much of fantasy is defined by European and specifically Christian tropes that it's always a breath of fresh air when a work of fantasy comes along that doesn't rely on these ideas. Beasts Made of Night is a YA fantasy based heavily on the practices of Islam and the Nigerian heritage of its author; Tochi Onyebuchi has created a fascinating, vibrant world in this novel, shaping distinctly non-Western ideas into exciting forms—all the more exciting for my relative unfamiliarity with the influences he's drawing on. The book centers on Taj, a teen who belongs to a class of people called "sin-eaters," who must, as the name implies, literally devour the sins of others (which take on dangerous physical representations) and thereby carry the psychological burdens of their actions. It's a strong idea rooted in a world full of interesting mythological gestures that hint at a much richer historical and philosophical background than the book ever really gets into (presumably, the sequels will get into these topics more thoroughly). But for a first book, it's fine that we only get flavors of the whole meal, because what resides within this book's environment is delicious. I wish I could say the same for the plot and characters, which stumble through the book's pages with little structure or dynamism; the world these people live in is so alive that it's a disappointment that the actual humans in the story feel kind of flat. Come for the worldbuilding, stay for the worldbuilding, I suppose. Grade: B

Music

Elder Ones - From Untruth (2019)
The composer and bandleader of Elder Ones, Amirtha Kidambi, calls music "a way to tap into the abstract and mystifying aspects of the universe," and that's certainly present in spades on From Untruth, a challenging, aggressive, and often transcendent collection of music that feels like the intersection between the spiritual and free jazz traditions and the Indian folk music that Kidambi calls her own personal "blues." But what makes this music special is that this abstract mysticism is rarely left untethered from material reality; it's an album that understands that the abstract and otherworldly only has meaning in a lived context, which for Kidambi clearly means a political one: there is a song here called "Eat the Rich," for goodness sakes, and it's kind of awesome. Kidambi's shrieking vocals and swirling harmonium blend with her band's percussion and brass to form rich soundscapes that are as dissonant as they are beguiling and anti-capitalist, anti-imperial political statements as urgent as they are blunt. It's not always an easy listen, and this isn't always to the record's benefit—"Decolonize the Mind" in particular feels stretched thin by discordant digressions. But when it's on, it is often thrilling. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for August 26-September 1, 2019

Short and sweet week. Enjoy.

Movies

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)
This movie is pretty dumb, but if in the twenty-seventh century, some archaeology grad student is scraping the bottom of the barrel for a thesis topic and arrives at the like seven-year window during which the highly corporatized "American indie" aesthetic was ascendant, that student really wouldn't need to look much further than Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist for a complete facsimile of that whole moment's most obvious signifiers: iPods and Brooklyn and cool needle drops and blog-rock mixtapes positioned as the well-kept secret keys to the center of the universe and a sad boy's problems solved with cute sex and vaguely misogynist characterizations of "popular girls" who Just Don't Get It—it's all here to an embarrassingly exhaustive degree. There's a scene in which Michael Cera brags about having known a band before they were cool; this same character has sex with with Kat Dennings in literally the real Electric Lady Studios. It's just so comically, absurdly Indie. It's like the most itself version of this kind of filmmaking—let's call it "The Shins Changed My Life" Cinema. It makes sense that the genre kind of hit its logical conclusion the year following Nick and Norah's release, with the release of (500) Days of Summer, a movie that's both a bitter indulgence in and a sly rebuttal of these very tropes, and a movie I have no idea of how well it's aged—if Nick and Norah is any indication, I'm probably better off leaving that one preserved in amber. Man, I loved this stuff in high school/early college. What was I thinking? Grade: C-

Street Fight (2005)
A lot of politicians are at their most compelling when they're fighting on the ground level as scrappy underdogs. This is absolutely true of Cory Booker, a man whose presidential candidacy hasn't grabbed me much but whose first (unsuccessful) run for mayor of Newark is pretty riveting, at least as depicted in this documentary. It's pretty unapologetically an advertisement for Booker's second mayoral campaign (the one he would ultimately win in 2006), and the movie assiduously avoids the issues, making a case for Booker based on his tenacity and response to opposition rather than on policy proposals, which in a sense makes this a lightweight doc of political theater more than it is a comprehensive portrait of Booker himself. But it's great theater, and I found it hard not to get swept up in the drama of it all. Grade: B

Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)
I had no concept of what this was other than "that Ramones movie," so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this completely rules. It's roughly divided into thirds, and each third makes perfect sense for a Ramones musical and that band's crazed Americana: the first a high-camp bizarro-world high school in which the football players are all dweebs and the popular kids all listen to the Velvet Underground and Devo; the second a long sequence that is virtually nothing more than a Ramones concert video; the final a climax of total and cathartic anarchy. I am but a humble English teacher, but I'd like to think that I, too, would be on the right side of history and embrace the violent occupation of my school building by a bunch of kids who just want to dance to rock records and have a good time. Grade: A-