Movies
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
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-
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
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
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
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
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+
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