Movies
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
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 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
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-
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 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
No comments:
Post a Comment