Movies
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
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+
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-
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-
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
I would be very much obliged if you could tell me how to see Krysař, like, right now.
ReplyDeleteThis is the version I watched. It's not the greatest image quality, which is a shame, but I don't know how else to get Czech animation, haha.
Deletehttps://vimeo.com/257047826
Thanks!
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