Sunday, December 29, 2019

Mini Reviews for December 23-29, 2019

Ahhh, Winter Break.

Movies

Little Women (2019)
There are minor spoilers in this review, so I guess if you don't want to be spoiled on the plot of one of the most widely known stories in American literature, beware.
To call this "Greta Gerwig's" Little Women undersells, as auteur theory always does, the tremendous collaborative authorship among the writer/director Gerwig, the composer Alexandre Desplat, the cinematographer Yorick Le Seaux, and what is undoubtedly one of the most perfectly assembled casts of the past decade—all of whom take their various roles and inhabit them to such a deeply magnificent extent that they feel like individual works of art of their own authorship. And yet the most impressive and marvelous feat about this particular adaptation of Alcott's oft-adapted novel seems directly attributable to Gerwig herself, and that is the way the movie positions itself in relationship to its source text. This movie is cinematic literary adaptation executed to perfection; Gerwig has scripted the film with a clear and earnest love for Alcott's work, but crucially, more than any other Little Women adaptation I've seen, she also understands this story deeply enough that she's not too precious with it to tweak and tighten in order to make it the best version of itself, underlining buried subtext, inventing incidents to fill in gaps, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated character beats, shuffling the structure to draw out the poignancy of its arcs, all while feeling 150% within the spirit of what Little Women has meant to its millions of fans for the past 150 years. It's Gerwig's structure in particular that's such a remarkable act of creation; rather than tell the novel's story chronologically, she's taken its two volumes and cross-cut between them, jumping back and forth between the March women's adulthood and idyllically remembered childhood. It's a seemingly simple creative decision, but the story flourishes around it. Little Women has always been a story about siblings, but with its cross-cut structure in this movie, it becomes—and whether this is in the book and lost in other adaptations or simply Gerwig's own spark, I'm not sure (I've never actually read the book)—it becomes a bittersweet rumination of the interplay of memory and the passage of time within a family unit and the ways in which adulthood transforms sibling relationships and inevitably scatters and isolates siblings from one another. This—along with some judicious tweaks of iconic scenes from Gerwig's screenplay, to say nothing of the cast's work in sculpting these characters—magically makes some of the story's more befuddling and flat choices (e.g. Amy and Laurie, Jo and Bhaer, etc.) feel like rich and melancholy realities of growing up. This is no more true than in its depiction of Beth's death, which, in most versions of Little Women I've seen, has always felt somewhat like a forced dramatic climax to a story that isn't really in need of a climax. But Gerwig's split structure gives Beth's fate a weight that goes far beyond the loss of a sibling; it is a manifestation of the unstoppable march of time and how it robs and pillages from childhood, how it fundamentally imbues memory and the self-identity built upon those memories with a twinge of pain. I found myself thinking a lot about my own brother, who died in October, and how the pain of his death was not just on the basis of his death in and of itself but also on the ways in which it bifurcated the lives of me and my siblings into a Before and an After and threw into relief the whole host of changes my family has undergone, both big and small, that have made life a little sadder, a little more complex, a little richer. There's a way that the wholesome purity of the Little Women story can feel a little precious and alien in relation to lived experiences, but the fundamental triumph of this particular version is that it's not just the story of this one family rendered in deep emotional hues but also so achingly real at every turn that it becomes, improbably, the story of families writ large. To turn to the old adage about how the specific becomes the universal in fiction would damn to the realm of cliché a movie that sails beyond the dichotomy of "original" and "cliché" into the realm of Truth. A complete triumph. As advertised, one of the best of the year. Grade: A 

Uncut Gems (2019)
Basically a two-hour stress attack. For those of you for whom that sounds unpleasant, don't worry: it's also a very funny, very exciting thriller that's also a tremendous showcase for both a magnificent, throbbing score by Oneohtrix Point Never and a towering tragicomic performance from Adam Sandler. Sandler in particular is a marvel; as with his iconic Punch-Drunk Love performance, he knows how to take the particular quirks of his comedic persona and twist that into a terrifying intensity that feels both of a piece with his broader body of work and also complements the particular vision of the directors (here, the Safdie brothers, whose vision feels very much of a piece with the nightmare anxiety cinema of Good Time and Heaven Knows What). It also bears mentioning that I probably laughed more during this movie than I did during any of those Adam Sandler movies I had to watch this summer. Grade: A

Atlantics (Atlantique) (2019)
For a deconstructive ghost story, Atlantics is not nearly as oblique as it could be. It is, in fact, a pretty straightforward forbidden-love romance with a pretty straightforward class conflict as the backdrop: a woman is engaged to be married to one dude, but she is in love with another dude (that her family doesn't approve of); this dude is a construction worker whose boss is exploiting him and his colleagues. Even when the supernatural stuff starts creeping into the story about halfway through the movie, these threads still follow familiar paths. It's just that these paths weave together in unexpected and completely striking ways that feel as indebted to the folkloric slow cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul as they do to, like, Ghost and stuff like that. This isn't slow cinema, though, and the movie remains accessible and briskly paced throughout, animated by a row of truly great performances from its main cast and some stunning cinematography by Claire Mathon (who also shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I haven't seen but by its reputation seems to be setting Mathon up for an all-time-great 2019). I was a little less thrilled about the conventional early stages of Atlantics, but once it gets going, it's spectacular. Grade: B+

The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
This movie adds absolutely nothing new to the cinema of deconstructed toxic masculinity that wasn't already done by the likes of Fight Club and stuff. But there are some extremely solid jokes in its extremely arch rendering of male social codes, and Jesse Eisenberg is pitch-perfect as the lead—his thousand-mile mannequin stare has never been better suited. Grade: B







Another Year (2010)
Mike Leigh has a knack not just for achingly humanist stories but for finding richly specific nooks of the human experience that often go unexplored. Another Year is, in many respects, a film about class and the anxiety and insecurity that comes out of the financial and social precariousness of the lower-middle class. But Another Year goes for none of the tried-and-true tropes of depicting class struggle, instead focusing on one single sliver of that experience: the ways in which the disorienting unsteadiness of being lower-middle class and isolated from others by the grinding machine of living in a capitalist system intersects your relationships with those who are just slightly more stable and comfortable than you are. It's a warm, tender, quietly wrenching story that finds its beating heart in its human characters, rendered brimming with life by the core cast of Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, and Ruth Sheen. Here at the decade's end, it seems like people have gone a bit quiet on Mike Leigh, and he's certainly not the flashiest director out there. But movies like this are a perfect example of just how much of a treasure his work is. Grade: A-

Television

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 3 (2019)
This show's commitment to high-wire dialogue acrobatics and sweeping visual designs is still as on-target as ever, but Mrs. Maisel is running into some serious problems dramatically this season. It's increasingly clear that the series has no idea what to do with the privilege of its characters, which gets highlighted this season with Midge's arc on tour with a black (and closeted gay) musician, a plot with an intriguing premise but little payoff. It's also clear that the show has no idea how to grow these characters past the types established in the first two seasons; there's a lot of struggle on a scene-by-scene basis, but (with the exception of Susie, who this season gets probably the best arc of the show since Midge's back in Season 1) almost none of this coalesces into forward momentum or change, despite near-constant crises that would seem to warrant some kind of growth. The very final scene of the season seems to portend some pretty big changes on the horizon, and if Season 4 can use that to freshen up these characters, then great. But until that happens, we're left with a show comprised entirely out of scenes that are immensely enjoyable in the moment but have little dramatic tissue connecting it all together to move things forward. Grade: B

Books

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (1990)
I read this so I could teach it to my AP students this spring, but I'd been meaning to read it since forever anyway. I don't know why, but I'm surprised that it's as great as I'd heard. I was expecting an honest, emotionally intense short story cycle about the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam, which this totally is. But I was not expecting the metafictional elements at all, and they kind of blew me away, deflating a lot of the stodgy traditions of typical "vérité" war literature. So uhhh... if you're interested in taking AP Literature & Composition this spring, you'll get to hear me stan this book pretty hard. Grade: A

Friday, December 27, 2019

Favorite Music of 2019

Insert my usual caveat that I didn't listen to nearly enough metal or rap. I also probably listened to a disproportionate amount of jazz, hence marking my full transition into "Dad."

As with last year, there wasn't really an album that stood out to me as my definitive "favorite" in 2019, and in fact, the top 5 are probably interchangeable as far as preference goes. For the albums I reviewed, I linked to the original reviews. It's most of them.

Anyway, as you can tell, I don't really have much of a preamble to this one. Hope you like the picks. Enter list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love
Hypnotic, beautiful, conceptual, yet immediate. I've been a Jenny Hval fan for a while, so it was probably just a matter of time before she topped one of these lists.

[Read original review]







2. Holly Herndon: PROTO
"There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing," Holly Herndon says in the liner notes to PROTO. "We stand in contrast to that." Clearly; PROTO is an album created in collaboration with Spawn—an A.I. created by Herndon and her colleagues. It's far from the cold experiment that genesis implies, though, and as Herndon's notes indicate, it's an oddly tender and even spiritual work. Herdon's notes go on to compare this album to the Appalachian church music she experienced growing up, which is both an appropriate and a radical comparison to make: if the capacity for worship and wonder is part of what makes us human, what does that say about Spawn?

3. Ariana Grande: thank u, next
One of the best pop songs of the decade births one of the best pop albums of the decade. No surprise.

[Read original review]








4. Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ancestral Recall
Scott has been one of the best, most forward-thinking jazz musicians out there for a while now, so when I say that Ancestral Recall is just more of the same, know that that's the highest praise.

[Read original review]







5. William Basinski: On Time Out of Time
Black hole space ambient dronepossibly the most exciting string of nouns I've ever written.

[Read original review]








6. Xiu Xiu: Girl with Basket of Fruit
Unless you're looking in danker corners than I am, Girl with Basket of Fruit is probably the weirdest album you'll hear all year. Keep on keeping on, Xiu Xiu.

[Read original review]







7. Thom Yorke: ANIMA
I've been a fan of pretty much all of Thom Yorke's solo output, so I didn't really connect to the "return to form" conversation a bunch of people were having around this album. But that doesn't mean it isn't still great, and it has that awesome Paul Thomas Anderson Netflix collaboration connected, too.

[Read original review]





8. Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride
Bloated and inconsistent, sure, but try telling that to me when that "Harmony Hall" piano hits.

[Read original review]








9. Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell!
If we're all still around in 2049 or whatever, people will probably think of this album (either that or "Old Town Road") when they think about 2019 music, or at least 2019 music culture. The disaffected despair, the meta games, the cutting, allusive lyrics, the brutal intimacy cloaked in a distancing persona—this just feels like what music in 2019 is all about. It's pretty sad. It's also pretty great.

[Read original review]




10. Elder Ones: From Untruth
Probably the more formally challenging album on this listan off-kilter, dissonant 47 minutes of avant-garde world music/jazz. But if you can get on its wavelength, it's powerful, and Amirtha Kidambi's intensity is infectious.

[Read original review]






Great 2019 Songs Not On These Albums:

Bobby Krlic: "Fire Temple"—From the Midsommar score. If you've seen Midsommar, then you know what happens here, and oh man. If you haven't seen the movie, well, that's fine. It's still one of the most stunning pieces of music you'll hear all year.

Bruce Springsteen: "Hello Sunshine"—Bruce was pretty open about his struggles with depression on his autobiography a couple years back, and "Hello Sunshine" feels like an extension of that honesty. "You know I always liked that empty road," he sings, "No place to be and miles to go." Springsteen often sings in characters, but this is maybe about as personal as The Boss has ever gotten.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Now That I Found You"—An absolutely buoyant pop gem from CRJ. So you know, business as usual.

Cykada: "Third Eye Thunder"—Despite being ostensibly jazz, this is one of the proggiest tracks I heard all year. Cykada's self-titled album was #11 on my list, and it's another great record from the London jazz scene.

Don Campbell: "All Too Well"—Covering a song as personal and beloved as Taylor Swift's best song is a tall order, but Don Campbell manages it by turning it into a sort of emo anthem. Taylor Swift has always been a couple steps from being an emo artist herself, so it works great.

Flying Lotus: "Fire Is Coming" (feat. David Lynch)—About as freaky as you'd want a David Lynch collaboration to be.

HAIM: "Summer Girl"—If my pattern tracks, I'll be lukewarm on the next HAIM album when it comes out, even after being over-the-moon about its lead single. But whatever; I've worn this magical, warm, slinky little track out in the months since its release, and its Paul-Thomas-Anderson-directed music video is probably my favorite of the year.

Lil Nas X: "Old Town Road" (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)—Undeniable. The two biggest pop songs of the year were off-format oddities by internet weirdos, and this is pretty much the only thing about the wider world of 2019 that made me feel hope.

Margo Price: "Cocaine Cowboy" (live on Jimmy Kimmel Live!)—"Cocaine Cowboys" came off Margo Price's 2017 record All American Made, where it's a brisk little blues stomp. But when Price performed it live on Kimmel's show, it became a Rolling-Stones-esque jam, the "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" of country music, if you will, and the result is some of the best music of Price's career.

Matmos: "Silicone Gel Implant"—Experimental duo Matmos is known for high-concept playfulness, and their 2019 album Plastic Anniversary is no different, an entire record crafted from sound samples made with plastic. This is my favorite track off that record, the most danceable, fun few minutes on the album.

Octo Octa: "I Need You"—I first listened to this warm, spacious electronic track late at night in the hospital after my son was born, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the best place to hear it. Hasn't left me since.

Powder: "New Tribe"—I also heard this in the hospital after my son's birth. It's the polar opposite of "I Need You": animated by an ominous, machine-like drive. It's just as infectious, though.

Sharon Van Etten: "Comeback Kid"—Van Etten pivots from a folksy sad sack to an anthemic sad sack. I can dig it.

Taylor Swift: "Cruel Summer"—The best purely pop moment on Swift's new album. In fact, the best moment in general.

Wilco: "Love Is Everywhere (Beware)"—Typical Wilco lyrics of oblique paranoia in relief against bright folk music. This elder-statesman stage of Wilco's career is a lot more complex than people are willing to give it credit for, and this track is a great example of that. It also has that effervescent guitar refrain.

Sunday, December 22, 2019

Mini Reviews for December 16-22, 2019

Pre-holiday week = little movie watching. Holiday travels = late posts.

Movies

It Chapter Two (2019)
After the first movie, Andy Muschetti and co. had three major problems in adapting the remainder of Stephen King's novel: 1. The adult material is far weaker than the kid material in the novel, 2. The adult material only really makes sense when it is cross-cut with the kid material (as it is in the book), and 3. The adult material features a good chunk of the super bizarre mythology that made people talk about the novel being "unadaptable." For problem #1, the filmmakers basically just threw up their hands and said, "What are ya gonna do?", as Chapter Two makes no real attempt to make the adult material any more compelling than it is in the book. For problem #2, Chapter Two decides to invent new material for the kids to cross-cut with the adult scenes, which is an inelegant solution, but the more elegant solution was to have planned the first one to account for the necessary cross-cutting, so now that they're stuck making just the sequel, again: "What are ya gonna do?" For problem #3, the movie basically jettisons all but the barest sketch of the book's mythology (goodbye, Cosmic Turtle, we'll miss you), which would probably have been the best decision had this movie had any good ideas on what to replace it with, and unfortunately, it doesn't; the finale is instead a protracted, CGI-heavy, repetitious slog tied together with some pretty weaksauce themes. So what you have with Chapter Two is a movie that's overlong, undercooked, and unfun. It has little of the complexity of the novel and none of the charm of Chapter One, and I didn't have a good time at all. Grade: C-

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019)
On the one hand, this is a great conceptual documentary centered around the idea of myth-making and the slippery concept of what "Bob Dylan" actually is—the insertion of intentionally misleading/false information here is getting all the attention, but just as important is the use of fictional scenes from Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara as if they are actual footage of conversations between Dylan and Baez, etc. It's all very interesting and funny and playful, and I dug it. On the other hand, this movie is just a great compilation of some truly stupendous concert footage—the "Rolling Thunder Revue" performances are much less iconic and well-worn than the folk/electric period Scorsese used in his other Dylan doc, No Direction Home, which means that this movie's live footage feels much more special and revelatory and fresh, especially if (like me) you hadn't heard the Bootleg Series release of this music beforehand. These particular renditions of old classics are incredible, and the intense performances of then-contemporary material from Desire and stuff stands toe-to-toe with the reinterpreted '60s material. Plus, you get an off-the-cuff moment of Joni Mitchell playing an early version of "Coyote" for a room of Dylan and his folks, which is beyond cool. So whether you're here for the weird thematic games or just some stellar concert doc material, you're going to have a blast. Grade: A

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)
Its lack of that Lord and Miller touch makes the humor feel forced rather than effortless, and the screenplay in general is just kind of dull and predictable (although "Evil Steve Jobs" is a fun enough [albeit redundant] concept for a villain). That said, though, the creature design is super fun—the movie never runs out of inventive ways to visualize food/animal puns, and I thought that was a hoot. Grade: B- 

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Mini Reviews for December 9-15, 2019

One more week until school is over for the semester. Lord, hasten the day.

Movies

Marriage Story (2019)
In places, Marriage Story has the same vibe as Woody Allen's Interiors, in the sense that it showcases a director reaching just out of their comfort zone in a self-conscious attempt to make a Great Movie, and visibly straining in the process. The scenes unfold in artfully restrained long takes girded with stately camerawork focused on blood-letting performances—it's practically begging the Bergman Scenes from a Marriage comparisons, but here I am making the Allen-compared-to-Bergman comparison, so... I dunno. It's all just so deliberate and airtight, and all of its biggest flourishes feel like Baumbach sat down and said, "Now here's where I have to write an epic, ugly argument," and "Here's the big courtroom scene," and "This is the place where I put in the monologue about gender inequality," etc. With apologies to Baumbach, who it seems has very much lived this in real life, there's nothing of the spontaneity and molten hostility of the great "marriage on the rocks" films, i.e. Before Midnight, Allen's own Husbands and Wives, and the like, settling instead for grand gestures that approximate the form of these movies rather than coming up with a living document of its own. Which is not to say that this movie isn't good—it is! Very good at times! Johansson and Driver give top-tier performances, the writing is the bleeding-edge sharp typical of all Baumbach movies, and the movie is both hysterically funny and achingly sweet at times. But all of the best material occurs when the movie untenses its shoulders and unbuttons its collar, so to speak, and forgets about its ambitions: a lengthy comic interlude involving an accidental knife wound, a handful of scenes involving the screwball-paced casual sniping of creative-types hanging out with one another—basically, when the movie is content to be another Baumbach feature rather than trying to be the Baumbach feature. Unabashedly love Driver's character's barely reigned in contempt for driving, though—solidarity, brother. Grade: B

I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps) (2019)
A lot of people have already noted that the romantic half of this movie is a lot less interesting than the "I'm a disembodied hand trying to claw my way back to my body" half. Fewer people have mentioned that both halves are basically in the service of nothing but some melancholic mood piece fluff—the whole movie cross-cuts between these two timelines until we basically get to the inevitable reunion and then... that's basically it? There's a coda that makes a callback to a significant moment earlier in the film, and then there's a revelation about the protagonist's childhood. But the movie never gave me any reason to care about any of this. Maybe there's a metaphor here, but I dunno, I didn't see it. That said, the animation is amazing, and I am very partial to the hand's whole "Steadfast Tin Soldier"-esque journey, which is both familiar and strange in some delightful ways. Grade: B

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
I appreciate that a director with the stature of Linklater has been consistently willing to work on projects that defy conventional ideas of "importance." Where'd You Go, Bernadette isn't really the kind of movie people are mourning when they talk about the shrinking space for mid-budget films in the modern studio landscape, but it is absolutely the kind of movie most in danger of going extinct from this economic reality: crowd-pleasing, sentimental dramedies without much by the way of thematic ambition on their minds, imperfectly scripted but impeccably acted—you know, like We Bought a Zoo and that kind of thing. This is basically Linklater's We Bought a Zoo, only a little better because it's animated by a typically great Cate Blanchett and a ridiculously watchable Bill Crudup, as well as some pretty interesting material regarding architecture and mental health on the fringes of the plot. It's still a little goofy in places, and the last thirty minutes or so don't work in the slightest. But I had a good time with a lot of the other pieces here. Grade: B-

The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue) (2016)
It doesn't quite have the bite of some of the previous Dardenne brothers movies (side note: what's up with Kid with a Bike being virtually ignored in the end-of-decade lists? EXPLAIN, film critics community!), but The Unknown Girl is still an engaging little gumshoe movie with its boots planted in the textures of the Dardennes' social realism. I enjoyed it. Grade: B+






No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)
It's clear that Scorsese and Co. put a lot of time into archival research, assembling this movie from mostly preexisting footage, some of it rarely seen before, others from better, more lively documentaries. It's fine that the movie is never as live-wire as something like Dont Look Back, because how could it be? The new interviews the movie gets—with old folkies like Joan Baez and some pretty obscure characters like the (extremely enthusiastic!) studio tech who helped record Highway 61 Revisited, as well as the man himself—are decently candid; Baez in particular is upfront about the extent to which Dylan personally hurt her with his erratic mid-'60s behavior, which is a perspective that's not often explored in the "Dylan goes electric" mythology, and I'll be honest that watching this documentary was the first time it occurred to me that I'd probably be a lot more fun to hang out with Joan Baez than with Bob Dylan. In fact, in general the movie walks a decently impressive tightrope between taking seriously the reasons why people felt betrayed by Dylan's abandonment of the folk revival scene while also not denying the small-minded stodginess that underlined a lot of that reaction, too. As a PBS-style piece of informative filmmaking, it's a great introduction to Dylan's early career, with enough obscure/new info sprinkled in to keep the veterans happy. As a piece of cinematic art, it's nothing special. Grade: B

Television

Wormwood (2017)
Netflix Bloat is a real thing, and it's a shame to see it happen to my boy Errol. At its core, Wormwood is a classic Morris piece in the vein of The Thin Blue Line about epistemology and the hall of mirrors one walks down when you challenge the modern authority state for the truth—this one centered around the officially accidental death of CIA employee Frank Olson that was not unlikely an assassination on the part of the CIA. It's a gripping premise and yields some fascinating material, especially in its first and final episodes; Eric Olson, Frank's son, is the sort of tragic hero at the center of this series, whose quest for the truth is bound to be confounded by the tenacity of the powers that be in keeping an air of ambiguity, and Morris does a good job of showing just how broad a net "the powers that be" actually is, especially in the final episode, where Seymour Hersh, in a completely bananas interview, basically tells Morris to his face that he knows what Morris and Olson want to know but that he won't out of a commitment to standards of journalistic integrity—which of course raises all sorts of fascinating and bitter questions about the true purpose of journalistic standards and the extent to which they truly are capable of speaking truth to power. So that's all great. BUT. There's absolutely nothing here that warrants a six-episode, 256-minute miniseries. This would have been a great feature film, but at the length that it is, it's too long at least twice over, and large stretches of time are padded out with redundant and somewhat extraneous reenactments, seemingly just for the purpose of making this long enough to be a series rather than a rich feature. At times, Wormwood even becomes something I never thought I'd say about a Morris project: tedious. It's super unfortunate, because there is some terrific stuff here. Grade: B-

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Mini Reviews for December 2-8, 2019

Just reviews.

Movies

The Irishman (aka I Heard You Paint Houses)
For about 2/3 of its gargantuan runtime, The Irishman plays into beats that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Scorsese's other gangster pictures, from Goodfellas all the way up through The Wolf of Wall Street (TELL me that Wall Street isn't organized crime, I dare you)—that is, lots of montage, wall-to-wall soundtrack, copious voiceover. And if that were all there is, it would be a very solid movie and remarkably engaging for a movie of its length, though I do have some gripes about the L.A. Noir-ishness of the de-aging CGI (though it's far and away superior to the horrorshow that is Clark Gregg's de-aging special effect in Captain Marvel, so that's 0 for theme park rides and 1 for ##TRUE CINEMA##). But that is not all that The Irishman is, and in its last hour or so, Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian pull the rug out from under the whole idea of a "Scorsese Gangster Picture," and the movie becomes something wholly transcendent. The music, montage, voiceover, and all the intoxicating forward motion of a Scorsese mob movie disappear, and in the bare frame of that type of movie, stripped of its plumage, we're given a death-soaked riff on Goodfellas's iconic "Sunday, May 11th, 1980, 6:55 AM" sequence that then breaks free of the genre completely with a hushed coda in a nursing home whose thundering silence is nothing less than apocalyptic. For the first time in his career, Scorsese allows his mob tropes to progress not just to their logical conclusion but also to their ultimate conclusion: the game is up, and all that remains is the empty shell of a life squandered by squandering oneself, nothing left to claw for as gravity brings the grave's icy mouth ever closer. It reminded me of aging family members and family members I've seen die—none as alone as the character at the focus of this sequence but with a similar sense of despair and loneliness as the crows of their demons come home to roost. This is what it means for a generation to die: moral compromises become an ideology, a perpetual motion machine that scrapes every bit of life out from its realm of influence until you sit alone, only half able to understand that your actions had such decaying consequences—if you're capable of mustering that level of self-awareness at all. It will happen to all of us who have any measure of power and movement; I'm sure it will happen to us Millennials and Gen-Z-ers. And so with The Irishman, Scorsese and co. have transformed the gangster picture into not just a specific cultural and sociopolitical document animated by a caustic moral vision (though it is certainly that alongside Goodfellas) but also an anguished treatise of universal human failing that links us all at our worst moments. It's hard to call a new Scorsese film a masterpiece in the context of a filmography that, admittedly, has a handful of better movies, but under another name, this would be a masterpiece indeed. Grade: A

Captain Marvel (2019)
To the extent that I have strong feelings about Marvel movies these days (i.e. not much), I did have a small chip on my shoulder going into this movie regarding the way that this movie was the one where all the film folks started crying foul over the role of the American military in the production of this movie—the military has been funding/involved in the production of Marvel movies for a while now, but somehow it's the movie starring a woman where this finally goes too far? (SureJan.gif) And that's not not an issue here (to be clear, I'm not a fan of the military's role in the production of these movies either, but if we're going to start drawing a line in the sand over this, we should have done so long ago), but it's all kind of a moot point for me now that I've seen the movie and realized that it's just not good. Rare for a Marvel movie, the effects are actually kind of beautiful, and the buddy-road-trip vibes between Nick Fury and Carol Danvers are fun. But the film is a structural mess, and, also rare for a Marvel film, it's actually kind of hard to follow this movie on a beat-for-beat level—part of which is part of the design, as we're following the scrambled memories of Danvers as she's psychologically invaded, Eternal Sunshine-style, but part of it is just that the movie just has a hard time stringing events together in a way that make the basic point-A-to-point-B sense that Marvel movies usually do pretty well, and that also goes for the straightforward bits after the intentionally disorienting opening half hour. Plus, for a movie about Carol Danvers re-discovering herself, there's precious little about Danvers herself outside of how she acquired powers—like, what is going on with this character? Who is she? Beyond the fact that she was once in the USAF and got blasted with superpowers, I honestly have very little idea. To the extent that I enjoy Marvel movies these days (i.e. merely intermittently), I've got to give it to the disgruntled film folks on this one and concede that this is one of the weakest MCU features. Grade: C


American Dharma (2018)
In interviewing Steve Bannon, Errol Morris sometimes seems out of his depth—a first for Morris in his series of movies interviewing American villains. Bannon is an incorrigible figure without shame or morality, someone who (as this movie amply shows) cares about nothing but power and destruction. He excitedly outlines his philosophies and political successes with fists banging on the table as Morris walks through his history with Breitbart and then the 2016 Trump campaign, and he just grins as Morris occasionally interjects, sputtering with frustration and barely cloaked rage at the self-impressed evil coming out of Bannon's mouth. Morris doesn't seem to know quite what to do with him, interrupting to argue with Bannon at points that don't seem to need pushback and then remaining silent at places where obvious questions seem to present themselves. Not that I really blame Morris. Bannon is the architect—or at least claims to be (like most Morris subjects, there's a fair bit of self-mythologizing on the part of Bannon here that I think we can, as Morris does, view with at least one skeptical brow raised)—of so much that I hate, and I probably would be at a sputtering loss as to how to respond to him in person, too. But Morris's relative shakiness in engaging Bannon does make American Dharma the weakest of his American villain series, and it's not hard to imagine the richer movie that might have come out of this interaction. That's not to say that there isn't plenty good going on here. There are some tremendous moments that arise from the dynamic between Bannon and Morris, starting with the bizarre parasitic relationship Bannon himself has with Morris; The Fog of War apparently inspired Bannon as a filmmaker, and while Morris doesn't exactly dwell on this inspiration, there's a queasy camaraderie the two share over filmmaking, culminating in an incredulous Bannon asking Morris how he could have made The Fog of War and The Unknown Known and still voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, which is one of a few truly great self-reflexive moments in this movie. And the visual metaphor of the hangar that this interview takes place in and which, by the end of the film, is set aflame, works really well here—not a foregone conclusion in a movie by a filmmaker who, much as I love his work, has made more than a few overcooked visual metaphors—and strongly underlines the apocalyptic implications of what Bannon is saying. It seems patently absurd to argue, as some have, that Morris is somehow supporting Bannon's views in this documentary or that Morris is complicit in Bannon's views by giving him attention at all (these arguments conveniently ignore that Bannon and the alt-right in general largely rose to power in the first place while being ignored by liberal voices); but I do think that at points, Morris struggles to understand Bannon, and that just makes a documentary like this even more necessary, because I think most of us in the center and left are in Morris's position here of being apoplectic at Bannon while at the same time being somewhat befuddled. Those of us who can look should not look away. Confronting Bannon and his like is crucial, before, as the movie loudly argues, the world burns. Grade: B

Idiots and Angels (2008)
My second Bill Plympton feature (after Cheatin'), and my feelings remain about the same: intoxicating animation style mixed with an appealing mix of surreality and black comedy/misanthropy that simply cannot be sustained over a feature-length runtime, and it definitely sours for me around the halfway point. I probably just need to check out this dude's shorts, though this movie is not without its charms. Grade: B-






The Last Waltz (1978)
The interview footage is pretty tedious—the copy for this movie promises "probing backstage interviews," but all we get are dull chestnuts like, "Why are you called The Band?" Chalk it up to the cocaine, I suppose. But the concert footage is basically wall-to-wall bangers (give or take Eric Clapton and Neil Diamond, who both feel way out of place here), so it's a pretty masterful 90-100 minutes embedded inside the total 120. Also, Bob Dylan in his appearance here resembles Weird Al to a distracting degree, which gets this movie another half star, for sure. Grade: A-




Books

Epileptic (L'Ascension du haut mal) by David B. (2005)
A pretty harrowing graphic memoir about the author's experiences growing up with his brother, who has epilepsy. I appreciate the completely unsentimental approach that David B. takes here, and the violence and sheer resentment depicted here resonates with what I know about growing up with someone with a mental disability—sometimes it's just hard to be compassionate, and then you hate yourself for lacking that compassion but also lack the ability to figure out how to act any differently. I've never read a book that captured this before, much less so well. The parents' reliance on pseudoscience and esoterism in treatment for their child, on the other hand, is wild and wacky and something I cannot relate to at all, though it certainly makes the book more interesting and gives the starkly simple black-ink imagery here an infusion of mysticism that separates it from the likes of the Persepolis and a lot of those other cartoon-styled graphic memoirs. The book could probably have a tighter structure; there's definitely a meandering quality to the story, and I'm not sure whether this would work better if I had read it in installments as it was originally published instead of the complete edition I read, but for all its emotional intensity, it does feel like drudgery in stretches, all the more so for its prickly, dour emotional territory. But there's a lot to recommend about Epileptic, too, and for those willing to deal with its unflinching rendering of its subject matter, it's a rewarding read. Grade: B+

 
Music

Pink Floyd - The Final Cut (1983)
The Final Cut started out as a collection of The Wall leftovers, and that's pretty much what it sounds like in its final form, sharing the acerbic worldview (personified by Roger Waters's shrill, yelping vocals) and grandiose rock instrumentation as that prior albums while lacking most of the pathos and melodic sweep (to say nothing of conceptual vision) that made The Wall compelling. Look, I love anti-war protest songs as much as anybody, but by this time, Roger Waters had pretty much bled all the rest of the members of Pink Floyd dry, and there's none of the chemistry and sonic grandeur of Floyd's best work and all of the bile of Waters's most indulgent work. Still, there are solid moments: Gilmour's solo on "Your Possible Pasts," the saxophone on "The Gunner's Dream," the melodic, jazzy touches on the closer, "Two Suns in the Sunset." There are also a few great songs that actually do stand up to Pink Floyd's previous work: I'm thinking specifically of "The Hero's Return," a song written from the perspective of the schoolmaster in The Wall, and "The Final Cut," which uses orchestration heavily reminiscent of "Comfortably Numb" to drive that prior song's despairing alienation to a harrowing intensity devoid of any of the catharsis that Gilmour's two solos bring Pink in "Numb." I get why people like this album. But if I'm in the mood for what this album's going for, I can't ever imagine going for The Final Cut over The Wall. Grade: B-

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Mini Reviews for November 25 - December 1, 2019

Holiday week = posting this late. Sorry!

Movies

Frozen II (2019)
Frozen II has a lot of the same liabilities that the original Frozen had: messy plot structure, boring throwaway songs aplenty, no idea whatsoever what to do with Kristoff, etc. But all of these liabilities are much worse in Frozen II, and none of the highs are nearly so high as the original's, resulting in a movie that's desperate to please and dysfunctional to the max. The movie is at its best when it is a psychologically weighted dark fantasy quest into an unknown wilderness; all of the best songs in the movie revolve around this, as does Elsa's whole character arc, and it leads to some really arresting imagery and increasingly abstract landscapes that culminate in a nifty and pretty resonant sequence involving Elsa alone in a cave with the literally materialized collective memories of her family. Outside of that, though, the movie is a complete mess. The movie opts to take the Pirates of the Caribbean approach to making a sequel, which means that it takes every single detail from the first movie and invents a byzantine mythology connecting them all (including, I kid you not, the chanting motif that plays over the title card of the original film). It's cumbersome and convoluted, no thanks to the screenplay, which is, frankly, a disaster: characters are yanked from one location to the next with only the barest of connective tissue, subplots are shoved in solely to give all the main cast from the original stuff to do (Kristoff is, to dust off my intimate knowledge of this Disney deep cut, basically doing the Bernard arc from The Rescuers Down Under, and it is extremely out-of-place), and the main plot is tangled in a (to put it charitably) half-baked analogy to the conflicts between indigenous peoples and colonizers. The whole thing operates under the deus-ex-machine-esque logic of Magic Portents and Spirit Energy, which works really well for the Elsa material but renders absolutely everything else here as contrived and silly, not to mention structurally incoherent. It's not irredeemable; there is good material in here. But if 2010s Disney animation was a revival of the '90s Renaissance spirit, then Frozen II (and Ralph Breaks the Internet, let's be honest) put us squarely within the post-Tarzan hinterland. Grade: C

Amazing Grace (2018)
This long-shelved Aretha Franklin footage has a relentless physicality to it—both in terms of the actual film style, shaking and out of focus and smudged by stray hairs and the grime of the film stock itself, and the performances captured by that style, awash in sweat and thunderously alive. It's certainly an effect, oftentimes an evocative one but sometimes unnecessarily distracting in a way that obscures the performances themselves—probably inevitable, given the way this movie was cobbled together. But at its best, Amazing Grace has preserved one of the most striking and vibrant American art forms, the communal gospel experience, with all its verve and beauty, performed to near-perfection by one of America's great artists. Imagine music like this existing and white people still just singing Chris Tomlin at church. Grade: B+

Tuesday, After Christmas (Marți, după Crăciun) (2010)
This movie has two great scenes. The first is the first scene of the entire movie, in which we see an unbroken 7-8 minutes of a couple in post-coital bliss, as playful and intimate a depiction as I've ever seen of the affectionate goofiness that loving couples engage in. The second is about an hour later, when the wife of the man in that first scene finds out about the woman in that scene (who is, of course, not the wife). This scene is excruciatingly long and ranks among the similarly scorched marital fights of Before Midnight and Scenes from a Marriage. But the rest of this movie... ehhh, I dunno. It's really boilerplate Romanian New Wave, which for me means that I struggled to get too excited about the improv-y dialogue and bare-bones, naturalistic camerawork (this is a personal problem, I know, but I've yet to encounter a Romanian New Wave movie I love). It doesn't help that I don't really relate to the central conflict at all—"OH NO, I love two women at the same time, one of whom I am married to! Whoops!" I dunno, it's just not something that I intrinsically connect with, and while there are plenty of movies about anguished infidelity that I find extremely moving (Carol, Brief Encounter, etc.), the cavalier libidinousness of cheating on your wife with your kid's dentist just makes it hard for me to get too invested in the handwringing here. Grade: B-

Alien Autopsy: (Fact or Fiction?) (1995)
I wouldn't normally review a TV special, but this is such a primo example of the sort of '90s conspiracy theory programming I absolutely devoured as a kid that I kind of felt obligated to mark the occasion of a rewatch—because I'm reasonably sure I watched this as a child, though I would have been far too young to have watched it without parental supervision when it first aired (and there's no way my parents would have been watching this stuff—my dad, who was in the Air Force for over twenty years, scoffed when I once asked him about Roswell [but isn't that what they would have trained him to do???]). Perhaps I just gleaned it from the dozens (hundreds?) of conspiracy theory books I read back then, since I remember stills of the autopsy footage featuring prominently in their pages. Even twenty years removed from my obsessed heyday with this stuff, this is still a solidly enjoyable hour of endearingly po-faced dopiness; there's something so pure about this special's approach to its subject matter as opposed to its winky History Channel offspring: this sort of curiosity-shop-style sowing of "reasonable" doubt—"What if? What if?" Also, props to the audacity of the guy who created this hoax for getting one of his talking heads to say that if this is a hoax, it's the greatest hoax of all time. Grade: B-

The Pied Piper (Krysař) (1986)
A flat-out masterpiece and maybe the best animated feature of the '80s (at least, of the ones I've seen). This movie belong to that exceedingly rare genre of movie—the animated horror film—that I am always delighted to come across. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is already one of the darker stories we tell our children, and filtered through the notoriously nightmarish Czechoslovak stop-motion style (think Jan Švankmajer, only with woodcut puppets), it becomes a work of primal terror. Cloaked with a deeply macabre atmosphere and an expressionist set design that warps the central town in on itself in an impossibly crooked way, this movie burrows deep into your mind and won't let go until its haunting final minutes—even more so because of the sadness this movie imbues the piper's otherworldly aura with. Horrifying to behold, but impossible to look away. Grade: A