Movies
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-
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-
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+
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
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
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
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