Movies
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
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
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
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 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
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
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-
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