Mini Reviews for November 18-24, 2019

A thoroughly meh week at the movies, aside from watching The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and Inside Llewyn Davis, two of the best movies of the decade.

Movies

House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
My first Rob Zombie movie. Based entirely on this, I understand why his filmography has the rapturous following that it does, but I couldn't really get entirely onboard myself—though I'm given to understand that this isn't really the best of his anyway (we'll see, I guess). The hallucinatory vibes / psychedelia of the film style is memorable, and the conceit of taking the nightmare Americana of the infamous dinner scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and making it the movie's entire thrust is definitely a choice with lots of potential to be harvested (and presumably Zombie's more acclaimed films do just that). As it is here, though, whatever striking effects Zombie gets out of these features eventually gets run into the ground by the film's somewhat exhausting, busy cinematic energy and its oddly meandering, structureless screenplay, and it definitely feels more like shtick by the end than anything truly inspired. Parts of it are legitimately cool, though (I deeply dug the Murder Ride, for example), and Zombie's got a good finger on the pulse of just what can make something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (or honestly, while we're on it, The X-Files, which I think this movie strongly evokes, too) so unshakeably chilling—that visceral fear that the warped histories and environments America has willfully forgotten in its drive toward modernization have curdled into unspeakable malice. Looking forward to seeing how Zombie approaches that idea in a more overall successful package. Grade: B-

Grotesque (1988)
A supremely weird slasher-ish movie, though it's not really clear how weird it is at first. The early goings play like a proto-home-invasion film, involving a special effects artist and his family being terrorized by a group of "punkers" while on vacation. And then it takes a turn. Several turns. By the end, it's become this goofy treatise on the nature of film and its role in flattening/distorting reality itself. Whether you're in the movie's meta final act or the relatively more conventional first two thirds, it's pretty consistently entertaining, elevated by some truly gonzo performances (particularly Brad Wilson, who plays the leader of the punk gang and gives the most intense iteration of that archetype this side of Wild at Heart) and a devilishly unpredictable plot. It of course doesn't all work, but the whole package is something to behold. Grade: B

Heavy Traffic (1973)
Probably the most Bakshi film I've seen, which means that you've got this awesome mix of urban grit with jazzy alt-comics character models and a singularly feverish ambition to re-invent the language of animation itself. This one also has some really great music, too—pretty much wall-to-wall songs, including a sublime recurring cover of "Scarborough Fair" performed by Sérgio Mendes and Brasil '66—and Bakshi's attempt to capture the vibrancy, beauty, and terror of '70s NYC results in a deeply evocative film that pulses with an organic life uncommon within animated features. But unfortunately, being the most Bakshi film I've seen also means that Bakshi's usual fixation with unquestioned sexism, racism, and puerile sex acts for the sake of """transgression""" gets dialed up to the nth degree. It ruins a would-be great movie, and that ain't no fun. Also, given how much Bakshi has griped about the pat sentimentality of Disney films, it's pretty dumb that this movie goes with the dopey happy ending that it does. Still on the hunt for a Bakshi movie that isn't heavily compromised in some way. Grade: C

Music

Pink Floyd - More: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1969)
The older I get, the more I'm interested in that odd transitional period Pink Floyd went through in the late '60s and early '70s, after Syd Barrett left but before they found their role as rock odyssey philosophers. More (the soundtrack for a movie I've never seen) is a pretty good encapsulation of the spirit of that era: a hodgepodge album in search of an identity that flirts with hard rock, ambient, and the early sounds of what would eventually be kosmische musik, but that nonetheless coasts along on vaguely unified psychedelic vibes. It is slight and messy, but it is also appealingly cozy in that particular way that this period of Pink Floyd's career tends to be. I dunno, I like it. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for November 11-17, 2019

Weird movie week. Lots of documentaries. Mixed results.

Movies

Fyre (2019)
The whole Fyre Festival debacle is inherently compelling for a variety of reasons, one of which is the one this movie leans into, which is that a feat of hubris this great is just too magnetic not to look away—especially when it fails. A major theme of the whole situation is the way that Billy McFarland is (because of white, male privilege, because of our society's grotesque obsession with "disruption" and The Next Big Thing) so charismatic that the world seems to reflexively justify his obviously pathologically grandiose sense of self, and even the act of watching this movie itself kind of plays into that, given just how much of its watchability this movie milks from the enabling of McFarland's shameless ego—even (particularly) when he's losing, he's still kind of winning on some subconscious level, which is infuriating. This movie isn't really about that deeper level; it's just about the bald spectacle of it all, which would be a shame if it weren't such a magnificently horrible spectacle. You have some great first-hand accounts, and plenty of opportunities for the schadenfreude over the humiliation of the the eminently hateable "influencer" culture that made the Fyre Festival fallout such a lightning rod on the internet. It also isn't really about the real story here: the countless Bahamians who never got paid for their work on the festival and for whom the loss of dozens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars is far more than the galling inconvenience that it is for the parade of ungodly rich people this documentary is mostly focused on. The best moment here by far involves one of these Bahamian workers recounting how much of her life savings she lost because of the festival, and it really throws into relief just how damaging the foibles of the rich truly are—not for the rich, of course, but for all the people they run over along the way. If there's a great Fyre Festival documentary to be made, it's about this woman and her peers. Until then, we've got the surface-level antics of a doc like this. Grade: B

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary (2019)
Typical of a lot of documentaries that don't have enough raw material, the director of The Amazing Johnathan Documentary inserts himself relentlessly into the material, making the documentary about a go-nowhere conflict involving the extent to which the titular Johnathan is just messing with this documentarian, and then about (I kid you not) the friends the documentarian made along the way. It's incredibly indulgent and dull and does nothing to pull on any of the myriad interesting threads raised by the actual footage. Grade: C-

American Factory (2019)
American Factory has a lot of really good raw material about the fresh evils of multi-national corporations and the ways in which labor gets exploited by global capitalism. Its central fight for unionization at the Fuyao factory in Dayton, Ohio, is rousing and vital. All of that is why I've given American Factory anything close to a positive rating. But the rest... woof. The fact that this movie frames the whole conflict of the situation as some sort of American vs. Chinese clash is reprehensible and grossly nationalist, using China as a scapegoat for the problems of capitalism writ large while aggrandizing this weird fantasy narrative of unions and labor rights being somehow a key part of what makes America "America." I'm no apologist for the Chinese government, but China has the largest trade union in the world right now; the Soviet Union had over 100 million union members before that government's dissolution, concurrent with Reagan's rampant union-busting in the good ol' US of A. Whether or not these institutions are/were successful or pure or even good is beside the point, which is that it's complete nonsense to (as this movie does) conflate unions or labor rights with any specific nation, especially the United States—I mean, have y'all checked in with Amazon lately? The movie has this bizarre nostalgia and elegiac tone for the GM factory that Fuyao replaces, but what the movie doesn't show is the copious extent to which GM itself has done exactly what the Chinese corporation in this movie is so scathingly critiqued for: i.e. moving production to other countries in order to exploit labor away from home by skirting local laws. These practices are of course horrendous and should be stopped, but the movie time and time again frames its critique in the context of Fuyao being a Chinese company bringing its Chinese ways into America and marginalizing Americans with their Chinese culture. It's such poisonous baloney, absolving America of any culpability in the abuses of global labor exploitation while baiting xenophobia at the same turn. China is not the problem; capitalism is the problem. Grade: C

Batman Ninja (ニンジャバットマン) (2018)
I watched this because I heard the animation was amazing, and it didn't disappoint: probably the best and more innovative use of that "3D polygons, but cel-shaded to look like traditional animation" thing that's been gaining traction in anime and some corners of American animated television. It's gorgeous and ornate and has some truly surprising stylistic flourishes that evoke the kind of fluid, multi-media instability that Masaaki Yuasa has been up to in the past decade or so. But even outside of the visuals, Batman Ninja is just a delightful and delightfully silly little one-off wherein Batman and a bunch of his villain gallery get sucked into Feudal Japan. It takes itself exactly as seriously as it should (i.e. not much), and it's a ton of fun. Wildly, I think this needs to be in the conversation of best Batman movies—maybe not The Dark Knight or Batman Returns, but at least up there with Mask of the Phantasm. Grade: A-

Time Walker (1982)
I've heard a lot of people talk about how Jaws is great because it withholds any clear shots of the shark until really late in the movie; what Time Walker taught me is that the great part about Jaws is that it withholds so much and still manages to be super tense. Because there's a frickin space alien mummy running around killing people that Time Walkers barely lets you see until the end, and it's not tense at all; it's completely boring. I would say it is charmingly bad, only I almost fell asleep, which isn't something charming movies do to me. Also, I didn't realize this was on MST3K until just now, which makes me feel silly. Grade: D+



Music

Wilco - Ode to Joy (2019)
Wilco is long past the stage of their career where they are going to surprise anybody. Even the band's best work in the past decade (2011's The Whole Love, 2015's Star Wars) are grounded in a sound thoroughly predictable for anyone who knows Wilco's previous output. That's not necessarily a problem; this is just a band that has entered middle age—and done so a lot more gracefully than others of their generation, I might add. With the band's lineup basically stabilized after a tumultuous '90s and 2000s, Jeff Tweedy has increasingly steered the band with few of the obstacles and conflicts that made Wilco's early work both thrilling to listen to but also excruciating to make, so good for them for finding peace, and good for them for still managing to make good music regardless. Like a lot of Wilco's (and Jeff Tweedy's solo) output recently, Ode to Joy is mellow arguably to a fault; gone are the noisy jams and sonic adventures of a younger Wilco, and Tweedy's vocals are almost a whisper. But this breeziness is nowhere near as lackadaisical as on Schmilco (the band's previous album), where it almost congealed into coffee-house muzak; Ode to Joy is animated by a low-grade unease that creates a dissonance with the otherwise gentle sounds of the record. There are a few outrightly inharmonious moments, like the late-album highlight "We Were Lucky," in which Tweedy's easy-going vocals are overwhelmed by nervous guitar noodling (one of the few places in the album where guitarist Nels Cline breaks into the guitar theatrics characteristic of his live performances). But more often, the album's unease takes a subtler form, like in the opaque second track, "Before Us," where Tweedy sings "Alone with the people who have come before" over and over, an already opaque statement that, even with (because of?) a basically easy-listening sonic background, becomes menacing within such repetition, like a Pleasantville-style '50s household whose inhabitants hold a smile for just a bit too long. The same goes later in the album for "Love Is Everywhere (Beware)," whose sunny, chiming guitars inflate the titular omnipresence of "love" to a creeping oppressiveness, until Tweedy himself ominously croons—still in that easy-going whisper—"I'm frightened." Ode to Joy is far from the band's best work, and the contrast between its music's bright instrumentation and the lyrics' side-eyed paranoia is sometimes more interesting than it is compellingly listenable. But it's also an album with way more going on than Wilco—who could spend the next couple decades merely touring their greatest hits—has any obligation to make at this stage, and I liked it nonetheless. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for November 4-10, 2019

You know the drill. Reviews.

Movies

Parasite (기생충) (2019)
Believe the hype. This is easily my favorite Bong Joon-ho movie, mostly because it takes everything that he's good at—vibrantly realized characters within a pointedly genre framework, mordant comedy that curdles into bitter pathos, scenes of barely-hanging-together mayhem, wild shifts in tone, scathing anti-capitalist themes, scenes involving people being trapped hidden in a room while a couple has sex and then having to sneak out undetected as the couple snoozes in the post-coital glow—and does it all extremely well, while at the same thing doing a few new things, like wrestling in a very tangible way with the present realities of climate change, which feels like a first not just for Bong Joon-ho but also for this recent wave of mainstream-ish anti-capitalist cinema as a whole. A tragedy wrapped in a satire wrapped in a cracking thriller more than worthy of its clear Hitchcock influences, this is the kind of movie that starts out small and unassuming (a poor teen takes a job tutoring the daughter of an obscenely rich couple) and then proceeds to open up further and further until its scope is nearly unimaginable in its ambition; saying more would spoil what truly is a movie that really should be experienced blind. Among my top three movies of the year so far and not likely to move from that tier by the end of next month. Grade: A

The Laundromat (2019)
The whole hook of The Big Short was to render a subject too arcane or too boring for the general public to understand both engaging and capable of inspiring the populist, righteous anger that the subject clearly deserves. I know McKay's stock has fallen since, but I still think The Big Short is pretty successful at accomplishing that mission. The Laundromat, in its attempt to do for the Panama Papers what The Big Short did for the 2008 financial crisis, only has half the equation down, and it turns out that this sort of movie completely doesn't work without both halves in tandem. They got the righteous anger down pat; Soderbergh in the director chair and Burns in the screenwriter's... chair(?) are clearly pissed off about this whole situation. But somewhere along the way, this movie missed the part where it takes the arcane, boring ideas and makes them interesting. This movie is about a bunch of rich people going to absurd lengths not to pay their taxes; this should make me livid. It does when I read about things like this in the newspaper every day. But in The Laundromat, it doesn't. Here, it makes me yawn. The effect is curiously and unfortunately like listening to a friend go on a lengthy, furious tirade about a coworker you've never met from a job you're only barely familiar with. Points for passion, but... Grade: C

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
My feelings on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are pretty much identical to the other André Øvredal features I've seen, which are that it has some very good ideas wrapped in a dubious package. The good: the cinematography, the lighting, the capricious storytelling, the recontextualizing of the tales from Alvin Schwartz's book as mutating legends made real through pain and fear—oh, and of course the sequence in which the movie faithfully and horrifyingly recreates the eternally cursed image of the pale woman from Stephen Gammell's illustrations from the original book. This film's really not fooling around with the "horror" part of its quest to make a horror movie for kids, which is admirable. But then there's the bad/dubious. These characters have no life outside of the limited charisma its teen actors bring to them—debilitating for a story that revolves around turning these characters' fears into folk tales. And the setting is similarly undercooked: as far as I can tell, the movie is set in 1968 solely so it can use Donovan's "Season of the Witch" and make a strained metaphor out of Richard Nixon's election and the Vietnam War. Also, the obvious plug for a sequel at the end is dumb and forced. A mixed bag, for sure, but enough that I enjoyed to make me still curious about this Øvredal fellow. Grade: B-

The End of Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン劇場版 THE END OF EVANGELION) (1997)
**If you're interested in my take on the series that led up to this movie, scroll down to the "Television" section of this post**
Before I watched it, I was well-aware of this movie's reputation as an ambitious, genre-bending head-trip and a landmark of anime. Yet even knowing that going in, I'm still gobsmacked that this is a movie that exists: a daringly inventive sci-fi yarn merging mecha anime with the Christian and Jewish mythology of Adam, Eve, and Lilith (!!), using a mix of gorgeously traditional and blazingly avant-garde animation to tell a story that's simultaneously a cosmic saga encompassing the entire human race and a bracingly intimate exploration of one human being in particular and his frightened, solipsistic psychology—all while satisfyingly wrapping up the anime series that birthed it (and much more so than the similarly surreal but narratively non-sequitur final two episodes of the show that this movie replaces), and doing it all in less than 90 minutes! It's one impossible premise stacked upon another, and that this movie is real at all is almost as miraculous as the fact that it not only pulled it all off but also did it brilliantly. Grade: A

Deep Red (Profondo rosso) (1975)
The plot barely hangs together, and I could barely tell you a thing that happens on a literal level. But the score—by Goblin, of course!—is great, and there are some exquisitely baroque kills. Breaking news: a classic giallo flick is classic giallo! Grade: B

The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen) (1921)
I was expecting more horror and less melodrama from this Swedish gothic classic, but oh well—the melodrama is good, and the double-exposure effect that creates the ghostly image of the titular carriage and the lost souls that drive it is simply but extremely effective. The movie is moralizing to a fault—it's as much a morality play as it is a melodrama, with saintly Christian women and reprobate sinners and everything. But as heavy-handed as it is, that moralizing is also inextricable from the movie's power. I think if we're honest, we can all relate to the central anguish of the protagonist; we're not all horrible men who have ruined the lives of women and children, but most of us—or at least me—feel at least a little bit that horrible feeling that the movie strikes in its climax of realizing that some of our actions (however small) have caused actual pain in others that can never really be undone. The way The Phantom Carriage then intertwines that feeling with a rumination on death hits deeply at what is most disconcerting about mortality for me: not the idea that I will die in general but rather that there will be a point at which a period will be placed at the end of my life's work, and thenceforward there will be nothing I can do to alter what came before nor the effects that will stretch on after. I suppose this is a rather solipsistic approach to life and death, and neither the movie nor I let that be the only thesis regarding life and death on the table. But when The Phantom Carriage manages to contort its moralizing into this kind of existential horror, it's tapping into something primal. Grade: A-

Television

Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン) (1995-96)
I'm not super well-versed in anime, but I know enough to recognize how much the early-to-middle parts of Neon Genesis Evangelion give themselves over to the tropes of mecha anime. The first 3-4 episodes are pretty much exactly what I was expecting from a series lauded for its ambition and its subversiveness: beautifully drawn, compellingly realized, off-beat, and deeply human. But once the series starts getting deeper into the school hijinks and the "monster-of-the-week" format, it risks feeling a little stale as everything congeals into familiar shapes, even within its decidedly weird "Christian mysticism meets Ultraman" world: the gang does something wacky at school; there's a new "Angel" to fight; maybe Shinji has some interpersonal conflict at home with Asuka; repeat. It's never not fun to watch, but I definitely was scratching my head for a good stretch of episodes there, wondering why this series was so well-regarded and considered so groundbreaking. But as longtime fans of the show no doubt know, these gestures toward conventionality is just the calm before the storm of the final ten episodes, which radically alter the show and make it into the sprawling, cosmic, mind-bending Freudian psychodrama it's reputed to be. Arguably, the show needs to establish conventionality before blowing it up, and I guess that does give an artistic purpose to that middle stretch, though I don't think the series ever quite feels like a cohesive whole, more resembling a Frankenstein series stitched together from competing impulses rather than a unified thesis; this is even true within those last ten episodes, especially the final two, which plunge the series finale into high abstraction comprising of half-drawn frames and even just shapeless lines—either a "when the budget gives you lemons, make it avant-garde" flourish out of necessity or just a complete breakdown of vision on the part of director Hideaki Anno, I can't tell. Whichever the case, those final two episodes are a huge left turn, and maybe I'm stupid, but to my eyes it seems like a total departure from any sort of continuity the show had built up. It's really out-there, which I dig, but also, I can't help but feel that the movie The End of Evangelion (which is supposed to replace these final two episodes anyway—see my review above) does a much better job of this sort of abstraction while still remaining coherently connected to the arc of the series. Anyway, I dunno if Real Anime Fans will taunt me for this, but Neon Genesis Evangelion feels compromised in a lot of ways and not really the masterpiece I was led to believe it was. But the ways in which it is compromised are fascinating, and it's endlessly rewarding to think about, so if you're going to make a big mess like this, it might as well be this kind of beautiful mess. Grade: B+

Music

Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019)
I'm sorry, Mom. That's just the title of the album.

I've liked bits and pieces of Lana Del Rey's output before, but this album is a gigantic step forward, perfecting that sort of damaged kitsch / Americana-on-Xanax aesthetic she's been working on this whole time. Her dystopian chamber-pop squalor and Nancy Sinatra swagger come together to form this endlessly mutable environment in which both ten-minute lovelorn epics and wry, coffee-house covers of Sublime songs not only coexist but feel deeply personal. And all this is buoyed by some of the sharpest lyrics I've seen from any artist all year, which reveals her to be something like a female counterpart to the barbed-tongue, persona-obscured pathos that Father John Misty has been going for this decade. The album is entirely too long, and I probably would have cut "The Next Best American Record" and a couple other songs to bring this thing closer to 50 minutes. But even with the occasional slack in pacing, you're unlikely to find a sharper vision elsewhere in 2019. Plus, the title track is maybe the song of the year. Just sayin'. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for October 28 - November 3, 2019

Spooky movie season has sadly come to a close. Eleven more months of non-spooky entertainment, I suppose.

Movies

Toy Story 4 (2019)
None of the Toy Story sequels ever had a reason to exist, but Toy Story 4 is unique among them in that doesn't ever figure out a convincing way to pretend to need to exist during its runtime. So I guess it's to its credit that it isn't actively bad, given its lack of conviction. It's a collection of reasonably good ideas—Forky, the carnival setting, the Key & Peele-voiced plush prizes, etc.—but most of these simply remain good ideas unto themselves without ever cohering into a thematic whole. To be fair, this was also true of at least Toy Story 3 (I think people tend to forget its kind of wacky second act in the daycare), but the momentum of that movie's existential dread was so powerful that it kind of made everything cleave together by sheer force of will. Toy Story 4, on the other hand, has a much gentler emotional core, teasing out the implications of the final scene of Toy Story 3 by turning toy ownership into a religious/ideological framework by which toys form meaning—something touched on by the other movies but much more centered here. It's never as intense as either of the two previous Toy Story sequels, which is fine, since I like the relative subtlety of the first movie better; but unlike even that first movie, none of the existential concepts become a true backbone for the movie to hang itself on; these themes just exist alongside all the other pieces of the movie as simply "good ideas" that haven't done the work to fit with one another. Toy Story 4 is certainly near the bottom of the Pixar canon, and while it's not quite the studio's weakest or even just the weakest of the sequels, at least Cars 2 has a cohesive emotional core and story structure, ya know? On a completely different note, as weird as it is to say, I think Pixar's CG rendering technology is getting too good; the limitations of the tech in the previous three entries gave their worlds a cartoony look, while Toy Story 4 is as photorealistic as a Pixar movie has ever been outside of the landscapes in The Good Dinosaur, and honestly, it's distracting to a fault how different these characters look from their previous iterations when they have minutely detailed textures and lighting—everything's just so shiny and fuzzy in ways that my brain refuses to acknowledge. The worst is in a flashback of a young Andy, and while I never would have said I had any affection for the dead-eyed animatronic doll that was Andy in the first two movies, the realistically proportioned and textured boy we see in this flashback is almost unrecognizable as the character he's supposed to be, and it's more unsettling than any of the poorly aged CGI of the earlier movies ever was. Take it easy, Pixar. Grade: B-

Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)
Ugh, not another one of these zombie Christmas musical movies—enough is enough, Hollywood! But in all seriousness, it's a pretty good execution of that batty premise. I was never really feeling that connected with the character beats, so when the movie tries for some emotional gravitas toward the end, it doesn't do a lot for me. It's also got some pretty connect-the-dots music—but the lyrics are great. Also great is the cast, who are super charming even though the screenplay never got me that invested in the characters themselves. There are also some of the most fun gore effects I've seen in a zombie movie in a while. The zombie parts of the movie crib maybe a bit too liberally from Shaun of the Dead, but then again, my favorite moment of the film by far is basically a musical reworking of the Shaun gag where he's always improbably looking in just the right direction that he never notices the zombies around him. Good stuff, for the most part. Grade: B

Hocus Pocus (1993)
Finally catching up with this one, I guess. Bette Midler is having a great time, and that's contagious to an extent—which is saying something for me, who usually isn't too entertained by Bette Midler. And there are some kind of fun, old-fashioned effects, which are charming. The rest is pretty drab and mediocre, though. I don't hate anything here, but there's also not a whole lot for me here either. Millennials have terrible taste in their nostalgic favs, so the best I can say (and I am very thankful for this) is that Hocus Pocus at least isn't the worst of those. Grade: C+

Lady Frankenstein (1971)
A boilerplate Frankenstein story, only imagine that Dr. Frankenstein is killed by his monster at the beginning and his daughter decides to enact revenge by taking her aging romantic interest whom she will not have sex with on account of his aging flesh and putting his brain into a younger, more bang-able body that will, in addition to rocking her world, also allow said love interest to kill her father's monster, sating her vengeful spirit. Wild, right? But oh no! The boring boilerplate elements of the story basically overwhelm everything until like the last 30 minutes! Too bad. Grade: C




Books

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006)
The way this book combines typical coming-of-age tropes (first crush, new friends, new school, etc.) with a really complex wrestling with ideas like double consciousness is fascinating and compelling, and I love the tri-part storytelling structure, which breaks the novel into one third a realistic narrative about Chinese-American boy's experiences in a mostly white school, one third a pseudo-sitcom involving exaggerated racist tropes, and one third a re-telling of part of Journey to the West. Even before the ending ties all these together, it's not hard to understand how these three are all related thematically, each exploring the nuances of being a minority in a majority-white society. Very good stuff. The ending does end up linking it all—in a device I don't really find convincing, to be honest, and it's super-rushed, to boot. I wonder if the book would have worked better just leaving the connections between the three parts implicit, as I really don't think the book sticks the landing. Which is a shame. Grade: B+

Music

Chance the Rapper - The Big Day (2019)
After several mixtapes that were basically albums by another name, Chance the Rapper finally released what he's calling his debut album, The Big Day. It's sort of a worst-case scenario in some respects, as Chance takes the absolute worst elements of the past couple decades of big-budget mainstream rap albums (77 minutes long! too many features! freakin' skits!) and at the same time loses a lot of the ebullience and sonic personality of his mixtapes. Chance the Rapper has never been boring before, so I guess you could call this a new direction? It's not a total wash, though; people like to make fun of Chance the Rapper for his corniness, but I do think that's an asset here; The Big Day is pretty short on posturing and pretension, which I appreciate—if the most important things in your life are your family, your child, and God, then by golly, sing about that (and he does, a lot). There are also a few tracks that hint at the lush heights of Coloring Book, most notably the closer, "Zanies and Fools," which uses a gospel choir to interpolate "Impossible; It's Possible" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella alongside some pretty strong verses, and it's great. Wish I could say so of the album as a whole. Grade: C+