Movies
As advertised by the torrent of memes, Bee Movie is utterly demented in concept, tediously kitsch in execution. It's the absurd escalation of every building block of the first era of DreamWorks Animation's CG output: the distractingly on-brand celebrity voices, the stale pop culture references in lieu of jokes, the grafting of middlebrow adult entertainment tropes onto "children's" entertainment, the pathological impulse toward sexualization, the embrace of CG animation technology that renders all human forms as zombie-eyed and uncanny. This is all so bizarre, and my brain refuses to decide if it's charmed or repulsed by it. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't say this about the plot: an enslaved group is liberated and given reparations; under this newfound wealth, the formerly enslaved group ceases to work, which causes the region's agricultural system to collapse, so this group learns that they must work, or else society will crumble. None of the memes prepared me for a movie that could be read as a reactionary, century-late anti-Southern-Reconstruction screed. Jerry Seinfeld, man, what are you doing? Grade: C
It's pretty obvious that director Rodney Ascher (Room 237) wanted to make a horror feature, given that this documentary about a handful of terrifyingly extreme cases of sleep paralysis is 75% re-enactments of the often supernaturally charged testimonies. As a documentary, it's just kind of meh, and there are some instances of nearly criminal negligence on the part of Ascher as a documentarian, as far as leaving ripe material on the vine—in particular, one interviewee who says that her experiences with sleep paralysis led to her conversion to Christianity and refuses to accept any scientific explanation for sleep paralysis, whom Ascher questions not a bit on this point. But those re-enactments are good and spooky, and this movie overall does a good job of dramatizing just how existentially horrifying the idea of sleep paralysis is as a concept, so I'm mostly happy. Grade: B
The final scene is pretty chilling, but the rest of this Japanese found-footage is so reliant on layers of media parody and broad character types that it saps the sprawling mythology from the kind of gut-punch primal iconography that animates the best found-footage films. Grade: C+
If you'd like to hear more of my thoughts on this movie (or the thoughts of other, smarter people), listen to Episode 237 of the Cinematary podcast, which I was on. Here's a link.
It misses pretty much everything that made the original iconic and great, but it's a pretty fun ride nonetheless. Also, it's kind of charming that the makers of this movie didn't have a good enough crystal ball to foresee the goofy 2019 associations with "Mr. Sandman," which bookends the movie. Grade: B
Music
Hancock's 1973 masterpiece stands alongside Miles Davis's Tribute to Jack Johnson as one of the most conceptually pure jazz fusion records of the fusion era, sounding exactly like the intersection between the rock/r&b and jazz traditions. I don't know why I never really dove into it before now, because it absolutely slaps. Fusion has a reputation as this misguided, inaccessible dead-end in jazz history (paging Ken Burns), but with Head Hunters, you can genuinely hear this music in conversation with rock/r&b of the time, and if you listen to funk music from a couple years later, you can hear that music reciprocating, transformed. Stone-cold classic. Grade: A
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