Movies
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
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+
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
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
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
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-
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