Sunday, December 27, 2020

Mini Reviews for December 21 - 27, 2020

In case you missed it, I made my a list of my favorite music of the year, which you can read here.

Movies

Soul (2020)
The comparisons to Inside Out are inescapable, from the premise that materializes abstractions into a slick, colorfully realized bureaucracy (in this case, it's the afterlife, souls, the "spark of life," etc.) to the Second City/SNL/NBC sitcom alum in a starring role (Tina Fey) right down to the person in the lead director chair (Pete Docter, who, in terms of where the thematic vision is in the studio, seems to be poised to become the new John Lasseter of Pixar, hopefully without the toxic work culture). I'd say that Inside Out has more raw emotional heft, but Soul 100% brings the stronger visuals and music. The sequences in the afterlife are visually sublime in a way that Pixar has never attempted before, experimenting with texture and particles in a way that feels more in-line with what DreamWorks Animation has been up to in the past few years than the usually photo-realistic commitments of Pixar (though it's of course executed a lot more expansively than in, say, Captain Underpants). And in terms of the music, the score is absolutely transfixing, making a definitive case that Pixar's musical identity has finally been able to evolve past the Randy-Newmanisms that it's leaned so heavily on in the past 2.5 decades; plus, it's definitely my favorite Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross work in a very busy year for that duo. And the fact that the movie is able to use all this to build a pretty compelling and complex thematic tapestry that connects jazz to a David-Foster-Wallace-ish version of existentialism scratches an itch that I never realized I had. But yeah, it's definitely a lot like Inside Out, and nothing here is completely surprising if you're familiar with Pixar's output at all. I know some people are going to use this as evidence that Pixar has devolved into shtick, and I guess it is a shtick in some respects. But it's a good shtick, and I remain unconvinced that the presence of tropes and formula in a studio's output inherently signals a decline in quality. Pixar certainly isn't redefining the medium like it did for a solid decade at the beginning of the 21st century; its median quality has certainly stabilized somewhat below its early peaks; but most studios have formulaic elements (and even something as revered as Studio Ghibli has its autopilot Onward-esque output), and I dunno, I suppose I think it's interesting that Pixar has a personality well-defined enough that a movie as distinctive as Soul can feel as much like a riff as it does something entirely new. And in the case of Soul specifically, the fact of its familiarity and potential banality in the context of repetition actually feels thematically relevant: the film argues that life is meaningful only as a function of someone's ability to appreciate the beauty of a mundane existence, and that works as much as a life philosophy as it does a lens for Pixar films in general. Increasingly, I'm finding Pixar's films to be enjoyed and even meaningful because of the pristine bits of craft within reliable plot patterns, and on that rubric, Soul is a veritable shower of beautiful little moments and aesthetic flourishes: the almost Looney-Tunes-esque way that Joe obliviously has near-misses with death for the film's first 15 minutes; the dazzling introduction to the afterlife, probably the most stylistically ambitious thing Pixar has done in a decade; the breathtakingly realized human forms, maybe the finest-ever example of CGI animation creating expressive but cartoonish human bodies; the way the exterior lines of the cubist afterlife custodians subtly pull in the grains of sand that form the ground of the afterlife; that entirely predictable but no less affecting moment in which Joe understands the truth about his life's "purpose." This has been the longest possible way to say: Soul is a Good Movie. And now that I've defended you, Pixar, please don't make me look stupid by making Toy Story 9 or something. Grade: A-

Feels Good Man (2020)
A wild, melancholy ride through the history of Pepe the Frog and Matt Furie, the artist who created the character and then watched helplessly as his work turned first into a malleable meme and then an icon of the alt-right. But it's also the story of memes in general and their constant push-pull of ownership and appropriation; it's also the story of a key group of people with a tragic inability to understand how the internet works and who were exploited by those who do; it's also the story of how Pepe became a form of cryptocurrency; it's also a story about occult symbology. This movie could have easily been twice its length, and it's probably to the film's detriment that it's not; a good portion of these ideas feel a little under-explored, and there's a much better version of this movie to be made that simply makes room to explore them more. But the version we got is still a pretty fascinating account, and it has tremendous access, not just to Matt Furie himself, who is the emotional core to the film, but to all number of talking heads, both eccentric (there's a professor of the occult, for example, and he looks exactly like you'd imagine a professor of the occult would), scary (a lot of space is given to a Trump campaign guy, who honestly seems to understand the internet better than anyone else in the film), and ludicrous (we meet a "Pepe millionaire" who made bank on Pepe cryptocurrency and now rides around in an ostentatious sports car blasting a customized version of the Pokemon theme song about "rare Pepes"). It's worth the watch for these people alone. Grade: B+

The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020)
I really wish this were better overall, because Radha Blank is so good as the lead, a somewhat satirical portrait of herself as she tries to navigate what it means to write something authentic when market forces and powerful people only seem interested in amplifying parts of that voice. But the writing and direction (also by Blank) are a lot dicier than her central performance. Like, I couldn't stop being distracted by the way that a movie about how clichés flatten the authentic experiences of minorities relies really heavily on an unironic deployment of a Gay Best Friend, and I feel like that goes for the movie overall, where some truly excellent bits (the entire first 30 minutes of the film, for example) are consistently undercut by some extremely trite or corny bits. But plenty of great writer/directors have dodgy film debuts, and I really hope Blank's cinematic career has enough legs to get her more films after this one inevitably falls into the the Netflix memory void. Because the way she bounces off her own screenplay is wonderful, even when the screenplay itself isn't pulling its weight. Grade: B-

Mank (2020)
Lots of surface pleasures here, from the performances (except for Tom Burke, who is inexcusably bad at playing Orson Welles) to the slightly anachronistic Reznor/Ross score to some of the images (though I do think that this is kind of a failure at b&w digital photography trying to look like b&w film photography, and when it doesn't look good, the movie often looks muddy and underlit). But as a lot of people have already noted, there are some pretty big problems with Mank under the hood. If the point is to give us a biopic of Herman Mankiewicz, it's a hopelessly scattered film, dividing time in a way that doesn't always make sense between some pretty vapid scenes about the screenwriting of Citizen Kane in the early '40s and downfall of Mankiewicz as a studio cog as both his alcoholism and hatred of Louis B. Mayer and William Randolph Hearst intensify. If the scatteredness is the point, a reflection of Mankiewicz's increasingly self-destructive, fractured life, then the screenplay really doesn't do enough to undercut Mankiewicz himself besides relying on alcoholic clichés. If this isn't a biopic at all but rather an anti-nostalgia screed about the beautiful but destructively deceptive myth-making powers of the Hollywood studio machine (the strongest thematic throughline in the movie, I think, and certainly the one that yields the best scenes, e.g. the election-night GOP party), then it spreads the most potent arc (the Hollywood executives plot against Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign) far too thin in favor of the material about the making of Kane, which is absolutely the wrong framing device for those thematic ends. So it's a mess. I guess all this makes it sound like I should give this a lower grade than I am, and perhaps I should, but all issues aside, the truth is that I really did have a pretty good time with this anyway, and it's the kind of movie where it actually feels productive to think about its flaws. So I dunno. It's worth a watch, I guess, if you haven't already. And you better watch it before it disappears into the Netflix memory void and people forget it exists in two weeks. Grade: B

The Wolf House (La casa lobo) (2018)
I know next-to-nothing about the Chilean history this movie is supposed to represent, so I'm mostly approaching it as a purely aesthetic object. And as such, it's stunning: a kind of meta stop motion in which the objects and characters are constructed in front of us as part of the animation, where the objects themselves become the canvas for moving images that slide off one surface onto another. I've never seen another movie that looks like this one does. It's also abjectly terrifying, probably as a direct result of the movie looking so singular—unfamiliarity breeding fear. A nightmare-fuel film if there ever was one. Grade: A-

 

Television

The Queen's Gambit (2020)
The seams are pretty evident in this orphan-to-chess-champion miniseries. Like a lot of streaming series, The Queen's Gambit feels like it could have benefited from a few more drafts in the writers room: character development happens in somewhat unearned lurches (the protagonist goes from socially awkward misfit to über-cool chic icon in practically the blink of an eye, for example, and the same goes for the arguably more significant transformation from rock-bottom addiction to clear-headed sobriety), and the series's structure as a literally episodic Bildungsroman means that secondary characters pop in and out of the plot at seemingly the narrative's convenience, resulting in a cast that, while always tremendously acted, feels somewhat thin—this is particularly egregious for Jolene, the lone black character and one who appears only in the first and final episodes, both times to give crucial aide to the protagonist without much interior life of her own. But all of these issues are offset by the fact that this is such an eminently watchable series. I tend to be pretty slow going through television, especially television whose episodes are in the 45-60 min. range, but I had no trouble at all watching two of these per night (with the urging of my wife, of course), and as much as I may have misgiving about the bigger picture, on a moment-by-moment basis, this is tremendously exciting. It's a great mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, too: I've seen rags-to-riches sports dramas before, but not about chess; I've seen problematic protagonists stumbling through the mid-century on the wings of their own preternatural talents while narrowly escaping their own personal demons, but rarely starring a female protagonist. It also bears mentioning that Anya Taylor-Joy is a bona-fide star, and her mesmerizing performance basically single-handedly makes this whole thing work at all. I can see this series falling completely flat with another actress cast in that role, but in her hands, it soars. Grade: B+

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Favorite Music of 2020

These list preambles get harder to write each year, and as the world gets increasingly complicated, I find myself struggling more and more to say anything about it. What on earth am I even supposed to say about 2020 that hasn't been said ad nauseum? At any rate, a silver lining is that we had great music to listen to while the pandemic raged (continues to rage).

I still don't listen to enough metal or hip-hop, and instead, I listened to a larger proportion of jazz and electronic music than in probably any year prior. Plus, I still have probably a hundred albums I want to listen to more but haven't done so enough to justify putting them on this list. Let me know what your favorite music was this year, too, because that's always fun!

Anyway, here's the list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
This seems like a pretty consensus pick, to be honest, at least among music critics, so I'm not going to pretend like I have anything new to say about Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Such chaotic yet elegant music. It's the album I've returned to most this year, and it still gives me chills at times.

[Read original review]



2. NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM: Éons
Not much has changed since I wrote my review. Still definitely my thing: a 2-hour noise-jazz epic. Wonderful.

[Read original review]






3. Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song
Boss beats and terrific tunes. The best fusion of electronic music and pop music I've heard in a while.

[Read original review]






4. Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI
This is a late-year find for me: a single, 45-minute track that builds from a choral chant into an extended improvisation and then back into the chant. It's utterly transfixing and beautiful, indebted to minimalism and jazz but also unclassifiable in its own right. Building from Peggy Seeger's song "Reclaim the Night," the chant itself offers a meditation on gendered violence, and the music connects this idea to something much more cosmic as it dissociates from melody into soaring dissonance. I've not listened to much of the other entries in Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain project (as the title indicates, this is the sixth one), but they all apparently follow variations on this format. I guess I should listen to more, because this is great.

5. Taylor Swift: folklore
I still need to listen to evermore more, but I've listened to this one a lot. It's very good (of course)—Taylor's most songwriterly album since Red and proof, if we needed it, that she hasn't lost those chops since her pivot into full-on radio pop. A lot of albums this year have been billed as "quarantine records," but this is the only one I've heard that makes me feel happy.

[Read original review]



6. Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: Shaman!
Throwback spiritual jazz-fusion. Moving and personal and enormous-sounding. A lot of the albums on this list are improvisatory and elaborate, but I haven't heard one all year that does a better job of connecting those instrumental flourishes with small personal resonances.

[Read original review]



7. Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Bob Dylan's been playing the part of old man for longer than he's actually been an old man (he wasn't even 60 when he released the record that inaugurated his "I've seen things, and now I'm on death's door" phase, 1997's Time Out of Mind). But Rough and Rowdy Ways finds him as an actual old man (he's nearly 80), and he's eulogizing like never before: eulogizing himself, his career, and even the 20th century itself.

[Read original review]


8. Lyra Pramuk: Fountain
The liner notes call this "future folk music," which seems about right. For most folk music, the human voice is a foundational instrument, and Fountain is a record consisting entirely of samples of Pramuk's voice. A lot of people consider electronic music to be cold and robotic, but this very concept collapses the distinction between electronic and organic music, if there ever was one. It's hypnotic, warm, peaceful, and beautiful.



9. Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
This one's grown on me a lot since I first reviewed it, and it contains some of Grimes's best songs to date, especially "Delete Forever."

[Read original review]





10. Frédéric D. Oberland & Irena Z. Tomažin: ARBA, DÂK ARBA
This random Bandcamp find hasn't lost an ounce of its power for me. Modern classical drone, that's where it's at.

[Read original review]





Great 2020 Songs Not On These Albums:

Ariana Grande: "positions"—I didn't have a chance to listen to Ariana's new album much, but I do love this song, a slinky, slick piece of pop R&B, smoother than I'm used to hearing from Grande but all the better for it.

Bruce Springsteen: "If I Was the Priest"—Bruce Springsteen got the E Street Band back together and recorded some songs the old-fashioned way, live in the studio, for his new album, Letter to You. To inaugurate the event, the band recorded some songs that Springsteen wrote in the '70s but never put to tape, and those songs are definitely the highlight of the album. "If I Was the Priest" is the best of that bunch, hailing from the Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. days; like most of that album, it's a fire-hose of words and metaphors and melodies, intoxicated on the possibilities of rock music and trying to cram all of those possibilities into one song. I've liked a good deal of Springsteen's output in the 21st century, but boy is it nice to hear him in his classic mode like this.

Cardi B: "WAP" (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)—I mean, what else is there to say? Slaps. Most clever rauch-rap lyrics since CupcakKe retired (ed. to say: she's apparently un-retired now?). Share your favorite lines in the comments. Mine is the one about the "dangly thing in the back of my throat."

Cracka Khan: "Cardi B - WAP (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) But It's Dire, Dire Docks"—Exactly what it says. Best "WAP" remix in a year full of them.

Fleet Foxes: "Sunblind"—Fleet Foxes at their most lovely and effervescent.

Frances Quinlan: "Your Reply"—Really catchy mid-2000s-throwback indie rock song by Hop Along's Frances Quinlan. I've kind of fell out of love with a lot of mid-2000s indie rock, but this makes me feel like I haven't.

HAIM: "The Steps"—Major Shania Twain vibes on this song. Between this and their work on Taylor Swift's evermore, I think I'm ready for HAIM to go '90s pop country.

Illuminati Hotties: "Lucky"—A cover of (easily!) Britney Spears's best song by the plucky, self-proclaimed "tenderpunk pioneer" Illuminati Hotties. I like Illuminati Hotties just okay, but I wish I loved them, because this is great.

Jeff Rosenstock: "Scram!"—"I've been told for most my life / 'Try to see the other side' / By people who have never tried to / See the other side," this song goes, a perfect lyric for the year of the disingenuous centrism of Joe Biden's Democratic party. Rosenstock's shout-along punk has never been more cathartic.

Lianne La Havas: "Weird Fishes"—2020 was apparently the year for Radiohead covers (I can't count how many of those "artist in the bedroom" livestreams included Radiohead songs), and between this and the song on Kelly Lee Owens's Inner Song, 2020 was apparently the year for covering this specific Radiohead song. La Havas's version is a slow-burn soul take on the record, which is the perfect mode for In Rainbows covers, I think.

Megan Thee Stallion: "Shots Fired"—I don't know what actually went down between Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez, but I know whose music makes a better case for their version of the story. Lanez never had a chance. The best diss track all year, which is saying something in a year that also included Noname's J.-Cole-withering "Song 33."

Neil Cicierega: "Fredhammer"/"Limp Wicket"Mouth Dreams was a little disappointing for me, but this mini-suite in the middle of the album was among my favorite minutes on any album this year. Cicierega mixes Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" with Limp Bizkit's "Nookie" and (eventually) a Star Wars Ewok rap, and it improves on all of them.

Sufjan Stevens: "The Ascension"—Hands-down the best song on the new Sufjan album, as pained and beautiful an exploration of faith as he's ever written. Sufjan is another of my favorite artists who underwhelmed at the album length in 2020, but this song can stand up to anything he's ever done.

U.S. Girls: "4 American Dollars"—Extremely catchy economic-downturn disco.

Yves Tumor: "Kerosene!"—Yves Tumor has grander ambitions than to just be a rock star, but this song is truly a rock star turn: a wailing, bleak anthem of twisted love, anchored by a wicked guitar solo. 2020's "Gimme Shelter."

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Mini Reviews for December 14 - 20, 2020

I don't usually put re-watches on here, so I'll just mention up here that I was on the Cinematary podcast to talk about Son of the White Mare, i.e. one of the great animated films of the last half-decade. Here's the link, if you're interested.


Movies

Tesla (2020)
Of Michael Almereyda's biopics, I've only seen this and Experimenter, and both rely heavily on these anachronistic, distancing devices like intentional facade and characters being seemingly self-aware of their futures in order to transform the traditional historical biopic into something more unpredictable and artful. Of the two, I'd say Tesla feels less essential than Experimenter. Though both focus on a problematic innovator pushing the boundaries of social mores and ethics as he experiments with the vanguard of his field (Nikola Tesla in this one, Stanley Milgram in the other), Tesla has a considerably more difficult time convincing me that the film's stylistic games are thematically necessary; like, it's cool that J.P. Morgan's daughter can talk to the camera about her father's relationship with Tesla, but... to what end? This all culminates in a scene near the end of the film in which Tesla sings karaoke, and it's maybe the biggest cinematic swing-and-a-miss I've seen in the past five years. All that said, though, I did enjoy this movie a lot. If Ethan Hawke as Tesla is good casting, Kyle MacLachlan as Thomas Edison is positively bespoke casting, and while the film doesn't make a great case for all of its tricks, it does build a pretty interesting dialogue about what it means to be a "pioneer" in a field that requires as much capital as electrical engineering does. Grade: B

Bad Hair (2020)
Typical of Justin Simien's work, there's a lot of interesting material here, and also typical of Simien's work, Simien isn't quite enough of a stylist or screenwriter to make it all work—though untypical of Simien's work, there's not enough here that does work to make the whole project tip over into "I liked it, despite its flaws" territory. Which is a shame, because there's a lot of potential in the idea of a woman getting a (literally!) killer weave and how this intersects the colonization of black voices and representation. There are some good laugh lines, and the hair effects are pretty cool, I guess, but overall, this feels too ungainly and inelegant to land. Also, I'm obviously not a black woman (neither is Justin Simien, it bears mentioning), so I don't feel qualified to weigh in on the politics of their hair—but that said, this review has some misgivings about the way the themes are handled in this movie that seem pretty valid to me. So take that for what it's worth. Grade: C

The Witches (1990)
This has a reputation for being one of those "horror movies for kids" things that we get every once in a while (shout out to Cinematary for the recent series on the phenomenon). But on balance, I'd say this is more gross than scary—though it is very gross, in a way that feels about right for the intersection of Roald Dahl, Jim Henson, and Nicolas Roeg(?!?). Props for the fearlessness of truly going for it with the body manipulation and fluids and icky textures. It only works intermittently for me, though. Anjelica Huston is great, but the rest of the cast seems to be hanging onto this movie's vibe by barely a thread, and the plotting is all over the place. But it's certainly something, and I'm glad it exists in the world. Grade: B-

 

Cocoon (1985)
Went in thinking this would be a "we found a mysterious alien artifact / made contact!" sci-fi thriller in the vein of Sphere or Contact or something. Was not prepared for it to actually be a movie about aliens helping the senior citizens in a retirement community regain their youthful vitality so they could have sex and go cruising in sports cars again. The comedic elements of this movie (a good 60% of the film) kind of overwhelm the larger project that this movie is halfway committed to, which is a rumination on aging and how relationships are affected by the way the body and mind change in someone's twilight years, though I'm not sure if I would have preferred this movie going full bore into the serious subtext or just fully committing to being a wacky comedy. I would have liked to see it commit to something. Grade: C+

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Possibly the horniest movie I've seen, which I was not prepared for. Other things I was not prepared for:
-Those lips in the intro? Is it weird to call them "haunting"? Because they are.
-This movie rhymes "heavy petting" with "seat wetting"?
-This is Tim Curry's first movie?? What an entrance. I know he'd been a stage actor already, including playing this very role in the Rocky Horror stage musical, but still, it's not nothing to transfer this kind of energy to film.
-Susan Sarandon is GREAT in this??? She's the best non-Tim-Curry part of this movie, and this is probably my favorite performance of hers ever.
-This movie is about space aliens???? I would have watched it sooner if someone had told me that.
-Meatloaf is in this????? I would have definitely watched it sooner if someone had told me that.
-The stretch from "Dammit Janet" to "Hot Patootie" is, like, the most deliriously good stretch of pure musical filmmaking of the second half of the 20th century?????? This is a little bit of a hot take, but not that hot.
Anyway, I have dodgy experiences watching cult-favorite movies by myself at home in the middle of the day; usually these kinds of movies don't translate too well outside of their midnight-movie contexts. But the unstoppable energy and verve of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is undeniable, and I'm fully prepared to name this among the best movies of the '70s over many, many other canonical classics of that era. It's also a nice affirmation that glam rock was the absolute best thing happening in mainstream rock music in the first half of the '70s, because the music here just doesn't quit. Grade: A

 

Television

Harley Quinn, Season 1 (2019-2020)
I'm not always a huge fan of edgy humor for the sake of itself, and Harley Quinn definitely traffics in that—I remember the first trailer for this, and that was basically the selling point ("wow, superheroes use the f-word!"). Thankfully, there's more here besides that. The series is genuinely funny (and not just edgy-funny), thanks in large part to the fun cast of b-list Batman villains (Clayface is my fav), and addition to that, the show is also grounded by a legitimately solid relationship: not Harley/Joker (I'm clearly not invested enough in the comics to completely feel that relationship here, which leans a lot into prior knowledge that I only know second-hand) but rather the dynamic between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. The arc that Harley and Ivy go through here is a pretty nuanced, engaging analog for what friendship means in your early twenties, when longer-term romantic relationships and career ambitions begin to put tension on the regular ebbs and flows of friendship. I wish the show had had more time to build its climax out a little more, which feels rushed over the last couple episodes and doesn't quite land the Harley/Ivy plots as solidly as it could. But overall, this is a pretty solid season of television. Grade: B

 

Books

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener (2020)
A pretty fascinating memoir in which Wiener details her journey from New York copy editor to Silicon Valley tech insider. There has been a lot of writing done on the structural problems of the startup tech culture, but Wiener's take feels fresh because it focuses not so much on the systemic way in which tech has benefited from (and even rigged) our exploitative capitalist world (though there's a little of that here), but rather on an analysis of the psychology of the individuals who drive tech startups. Being from NYC and having an arts degree makes Wiener somewhat of an outsider in San Fransisco, a status she uses in the book to explore her own process of assimilation as well as the alien-to-her behavior she observes in her (almost exclusively male) higher-ups. I knew some of the stuff in this book already, but there are times when the people she describes seem literally like they are from another planet to me—I truly can't imagine being in proximity to the wild, ego-centric libertarian excess that Wiener talks about, and it made me realize, nauseatedly, that the HBO comedy Silicon Valley was far less fictionalized and goofy in its treatment of the industry than I'd imagined when I was watching it. These are some of the most powerful people in the world. God help us. Grade: A-

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Mini Reviews for December 7 - 13, 2020

Virtual school, here I come.


Movies

Run (2020)
Way more engaging as a thriller than Chaganty and Ohanian's previous feature, Searching, probably because it's way more formally confident. Everything about this film's style and most of the film's writing is optimized for tension, which is great for the most part. There are definitely times when it feels a little too winky for its own good—there's a fine line between being the charming carnival barker flamboyantly announcing a show like, "Ah, keep your eyes peeled, because everything might not be as it seems!" (good fun) and the opening sequence with the premature birth that so very clearly withholds information that it might as well be waving a big sign that says, "Attention! There will be a twist!" (irritating). But I mostly had a good time, and Kiera Allen is fantastic. Grade: B+

 

Zappa (2020)
Frank Zappa has over 100 studio albums to his name, so I can't imagine how hard it would be to condense his career into a two-hour film, much less his life outside of that. Nonetheless, Zappa does an admirable job of that, if incomplete; the doc does a reasonably good job in its focus on Zappa as an artist within the avant-garde and whose strong political convictions intersected his art, which is the side of Zappa I'm most interested in, and I appreciate the man's vision, even if I'm not always onboard with the results (I still mostly struggle with his post-'70s output). But at the same time, you just get some tossed-off bits like the frank but extremely brief conversation about how Zappa would sleep around on tour and bring home STDs to his wife, or how casually he just abruptly fired all the original Mothers of Invention lineup, and it inadvertently calls attention to the fact that this documentary shows a distinct disinterest in interrogating the more difficult areas of Zappa's life, such as the pervasive sexism throughout his music or the way he used his totalizing vision of art to mistreat people. As such, this movie is probably too enamored with the idea that Zappa is this inimitable genius. But even with all that, this is a tremendously engaging film. Director Alex Winter (the Bill S. Preston, esq.!) was given unprecedented access to the Zappa archives, and the result is some really tremendous archival footage, edited together with more energy and creativity than most musician bio-docs have any interest in. I would love to see the warts-and-all 10-hour miniseries that Zappa's life clearly merits, but until that, you could do a lot worse than this movie. Grade: B

Corporate Animals (2019)
I watched this because I liked director Patrick Brice's two Creep movies, which are clever and fun, and The Overnight, which is at least interesting. This is the first of his movies I've seen where he wasn't credited as a writer, and I guess that's the secret ingredient, because this was pretty weak, not very fun or very clever or very interesting. A corporate team-builder goes horribly awry, and the employees are stuck in a cave with their horrible boss, which I guess is a premise that has some potential. And it's not completely wasted; this is mostly worth watching for just how fearlessly this movie dives into some truly gross territory, with an impressive commitment not to blink at the darkest implications of this very dark comedy, but the moment-by-moment writing is broad and seems to mistake comedy for a goofy vibe instead of an actual sense of humor. I can't blame it all on the writing, though; I know from his other movies that Brice is a capable director, but it seems like he really struggled to figure out how to make a movie that 85% takes place in a barely-lit cave look like anything other than a dim muddle. Also, Isiah Whitlock Jr. in the cast and not one "sheeeeeeeit"? Come on. A disappointment all around. Grade: C

Housekeeping (1987)
Any adaptation of a beautifully written novel has got to contend with the conspicuous lack of prose in the film format. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is among the maybe twenty most beautifully written American novels of the 20th century, and while Michael Coulter's cinematography and Bill Forsyth's direction are both very nice, boy did I miss Robinson's prose and boy do I wish they hadn't tried to pipe in some of it with clunky voiceover narration. Otherwise, though, this is great: a beautiful, aching rumination on the ways in which misfits create their own worlds. One of the lonelier movies I've seen recently. Grade: A-

 

A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
Before I popped this in the DVD player, I had this snappy review all ready in my head, where I would say something about how Charlie Chaplin really struck out with all these movies with city names in their titles (A Woman of Paris and A King in New York being the other strikes, of course). But then I actually watched A Countess from Hong Kong, and lo and behold, it's actually good! It's not as good as Limelight, my favorite of Chaplin's talkie pictures, but it's probably his feature that most successfully translates the feel of his peak silent comedy into sound cinema, with lots of elaborate choreography aimed at using motion to characterize its cast and pick apart iterations of social etiquette. Also, there's some pretty good onscreen chemistry between Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, actors I'm not always extremely fond of. This movie isn't immune from Chaplin's tendency to suffocate his sound features with sentimentality, and there's a sluggishness to everything that Chaplin wouldn't have dared allow in his silent work. But this is pretty solid compared to the other two movies of his that name cities in their titles. Grade: B

 

Music

Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising (1985)
Sonic Youth's breakthrough finds the group with one foot still in the No Wave / experimental scene in which they cut their teeth and the other foot in the nascent alternative rock wave of the '80s/'90s that they would help canonize. It's hard not to compare this album to the bigger (and better) Sonic Youth albums to come, but divorced from that comparison, it's a solid album with intriguing textures and discursive experiments—for example, "Society Is a Hole" / "I Love Her All the Time," a drone-y two-track suite built around hypnotic guitar improvisations and Thurston Moore's deadpan vocals, a kind of surreal, nightmare variation on the Velvet Underground's "Heroin." As a fan of the band's later, more iconic work, it's fun for me to listen to the band in this primordial mode, and even in the context of those albums, Bad Moon Rising has this nocturnal, groggy feel to it that's entirely it's own and pretty riveting on its own. Grade: B+

Sunday, December 6, 2020

Mini Reviews for November 30 - December 6, 2020

blah.

Movies

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
Like all of the Bill & Ted movies, this very belated threquel is genial and has some great bits, and it's clear that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are having a great time. Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine are great additions, too, as Bill and Ted's daughters. But these movies have always been far better at incident that they are at plot, and this one leans way too heavily on plot for its own good—far too many schemes and villains and mythologies. It kind of bogs down the otherwise very enjoyable moments, like Mozart meeting Jimi Hendrix, Bill and Ted meeting themselves, and everything meeting Kid Kudi. Grade: B-



Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)
I was going into this expecting that the whole movie would be the kind of tongue-in-cheek gallows humor described in the film's premise, where filmmaker Kirsten Johnson confronts her father's mortality by staging a bunch of imagined death scenes for him. And the movie's not not that, and a bunch of those scenes are pretty funny/engaging, if occasionally a little too mannered (I go back and forth on whether or not the sequences where she depicts her dad in heaven are moving flights of fancy or irritatingly twee). But I wasn't expecting that during the course of filming this movie, Dick Johnson would actually begin to succumb to dementia, and that aspect of the movie is absolutely gutting. I've seen several family members go through this (and I'm honestly terrified that I will, too, one day), and it's just a punishingly bleak thing to witness, to say nothing of how angry and scared the people actually losing their cognitive function feel as they descend into the fog. In that light, even the most twee aspects of the film become retroactively kind of rebellious: a furious refusal to let one of the worst parts of human aging steal her father's sense of play. Very moving. Grade: B+

 

Over the Moon (2020)
Really fascinating animation here, which was exactly what I was expecting from a feature directed by legendary Disney character animator Glen Keane. This is one of the only CG-animated movies that I've seen that uses the technical tools of CG—lighting, surface texture, etc.—as techniques not for photorealism but for achieving these impossible effects like having light come not from an external source but inside the characters themselves. The result is some really arresting, semi-abstract imagery that I dig quite a bit. The rest of the movie is not good, though. I guess it would make sense that Keane would care more about animation technique than narrative, but you'd think a few of the literally hundreds of people working on this film would have thought better than to try to cram every single trope of children's animated films into this movie. The movie is all over the place, introducing new conflicts while barely resolving the old ones, yearning desperately for its emotional beats to land without ever staying narratively still enough to give these moments any kind of firm footing. Some of the 2010s Disney animated movies suffered from a kind of modular storytelling, where the films' narrative approach is something like a perpetual present, where individual sequences work really well in isolation but have trouble creating a completely cohesive larger context, and Over the Moon (not a Disney movie, though certainly not for lack of trying) feels like the logical escalation of this trend, with a movie so focused on its own present that almost nothing connects to anything that just elapsed. It's really weird to be pulled along by a narrative like that, though it does work pretty well as a showcase for the animation, since it's literally the only thing I care about here. Grade: C+

 

Taylor Swift - Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions (2020)
The interludes where Taylor Swift is talking with Jack Antonoff don't illuminate the songs on folklore nearly as much as this movie seems to think they do. Like a lot of great artists, as erudite a songwriter as Swift is, she's often not especially interesting to listen to talk about her own music. But folklore is one of my favorite albums of the year, and this movie was a major good vibe because of that. I need good vibes these days, so thank you, Taylor Swift. Grade: B



 

The Monkey King (aka Havoc in Heaven) (aka Uproar in Heaven) (大闹天宫) (1961)
I don't think I've ever watched a Chinese animated feature before, so I was basically going in blind to this one. But man, I sure got lucky, because this rocks. A revisionist take on the early part of Journey to the West that foregrounds the monkey Sun Wukong as this agent of pure chaos—like, this movie is basically wall-to-wall antics and mayhem that give a gigantic middle finger to the divine hierarchy ruling over the world, which is consistently hilarious and entertaining while also making sense as a product of a Chinese society on the eve of Mao's Cultural Revolution. On top of this, there's some seriously lush animation, and I love the way that the film moves in this constant dance with the almost constant accompaniment of the traditional Chinese music in the score. Something I don't think people talk enough about is how animation completely revolutionized film's relationship with music; my son has been watching a lot of Bambi recently, and that movie's dynamic approach to music is so sophisticated and forward-thinking and like nothing else in live-action American cinema of the time. The Monkey King feels like it's doing something similar, basically making the score not just a mood but a lively participant in the film's action, a spry partner to the visuals. Anyway, this is very good. It would have been even better if some of the fight scenes were maybe a tad shorter (I watched the 114-minute cut, so maybe I'd think the more widely available 90-minute cut is superior?), but as an introduction to Chinese animation, I think this served me pretty well. Grade: A-

P.S. I was part of a discussion about this movie on the Cinematary podcast. If you're interested, you can listen here.


Books

Paradise by Toni Morrison (1997)
So it's a novel about liberation ideology and the formation of a community over decades, which means it's absolutely up my alley. Whereas something like Beloved tries to embody history through individual characters, Paradise tries the opposite, using the collective evolution of the black-separatist town of Ruby as a synecdoche for the post-Reconstruction history of Black America. It's a fascinating, sometimes mysterious, often compelling work reminiscent of sprawling magical-realist history novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and House of the Spirits, and there are sections of this that I would count among some of the best work of Morrison's career. The novel sometimes stumbles when it tries to scale down to the individuals that make up this town, though; the way the novel jumps throughout history has the effect of obscuring some character conflicts, particularly for characters who only directly show up a few times, like Dovey and Soane Morgan, who play pivotal roles late in the novel but remained something thin on the ground for me because of the relatively small amount they were engaged in the plot early on. Maybe a re-read would fix this, now that I'm familiar with the whole picture. Either way, it's a small gripe in an otherwise absorbing novel. Grade: A-

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Mini Reviews for November 23 - 29, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving, etc.

Movies

Time (2020)
An incredibly moving documentary of prison abolitionist Sibil Fox Richardson's fight to get her husband released from prison. To the extent that it's trying to portray the fight itself (only occasionally), Time isn't really that effective, and the details of the case remain hazy throughout. But as a deeply subjective (I don't think there's a shot in the film that doesn't include Richardson) exploration of not just the passage of time but also the way that prison compresses enormous fractions of a person's life into lonely captivity, this movie is a powerhouse. The decision to color-match home-video footage to the modern-day original b&w footage is a masterstroke, and the way the movie uses this simple aesthetic choice to blend the past with the present is one of the best formal decisions I've seen in a documentary in years. Grade: A-

I Am Greta (2020)
I would have been interested in learning a bit more about her family and the dynamics through what is obviously an incredibly difficult time for them, and the glimpses we do get of her father hint at some really complex tensions among the parental roles of caregiver, protector, and advocate (though given the amount of vitriol Greta has received as a public figure, it's understandable that the family might not have wanted to invite a more intimate depiction of their lives). As such, it's a somewhat surface-level treatment of Greta Thunberg's activism leading up to her famous UN address. Luckily, the surface of her activism is still pretty inspiring, and I'm pretty impressed with the extent to which she is able to immediately recognize her inclusion on the global political stage as merely virtue-signaling theater. I kind of wish the movie had done a little more of a deep-dive into that idea, too. Grade: B-

First Love (初恋) (2020)
I was really tracking with this at first (the idea of two down-on-their-luck folks getting unintentionally swept up into organized crime drama is solid stuff), but I lost interest hard in the second half as this devolves into some pretty tired crime violence and some forced humor. I know the guy has like two billion movies and I've only seen three of them, so maybe this is premature of me to say, but I'm starting to wonder if Takashi Miike just isn't for me. Audition is great of course, but the other two I've seen (this and 13 Assassins) have been middling experiences for me. Grade: B-

 

 

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2020)
Catches Herzog in a rare sweet and sentimental mood. The film is basically an elegy of sorts for writer Bruce Chatwin (who died of AIDS in 1989), and Herzog himself is (despite his explicit denials) as much the film's protagonist as Chatwin, as the film basically involves Herzog's spiritual and thematic communion with his deceased friend as he travels to various significant locations from Chatwin's career. More so than a lot of Herzog's work, much of this movie only really works in conversation with Herzog's past films (a lot of it involves him recounting stories from productions of his films), which has the unintentional(?) effect of highlighting this movie's comparatively minor achievement in the context of a towering filmography, but also, there's an enormous, beating heart put on the film's sleeve that makes it feel kind of unique as a Herzog work in and of itself. If nothing else, it's really disarming to see Herzog actually get choked up on camera. Grade: B

Rio Bravo (1959)
Rio Bravo is a movie in which a bunch of good guys have to make sure a bad guy stays in jail, so it's a movie almost premised on hanging out and stasis. For that purpose, it's got an almost perfectly calibrated screenplay: a bunch of characters are set up at the beginning of the movie and allowed to ping against one another for the subsequent couple of hours as the drama from both internal and external forces escalates in the closed environment of the small Texas town, and the pleasures of seeing those characters in motion around each other is immeasurable (though rest assured, I'll try my best to measure it with my grade on this movie). It's also the rare Hollywood western that is entirely free from any Manifest Destiny baloney, which makes it a lot easier to enjoy these characters without the ironic distance I sometimes feel like I need to keep in old westerns. It's a pretty long movie, though—too long, actually, and I know exactly what I'd cut: that dumb romance between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson. It adds nothing but bloat to a movie that's otherwise impressively svelte, and it's got some of those trademarked iffy John Wayne gender dynamics, to boot. Single-handedly brings this movie down from a higher rating. Grade: A-

 

Music

Joni Mitchell - Wild Things Run Fast (1982)
This is basically Joni's emergence from her highly experimental, jazz-inflected period of the mid-to-late '70s, and she's definitely staking a claim here as an artist that can be trusted with, like, conventional pop song structure and melody again—perhaps no better communicated than by the fact that Mitchell includes an uptempo Elvis Presley cover on here. I far prefer her wild experiments in the '70s, but this isn't bad. It might be easy to forget when you're in the thickets of "Paprika Plains" or something, but Joni is pretty good at conventional pop song structure and melody, and this record is imminently listenable and even catchy, without completely leaving behind the jazz spirit. And yeah, that Elvis cover is pretty good. Grade: B

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Mini Reviews for November 16 - 22, 2020

 I'm already tired of being cold when I wake up.

Movie Reviews

Residue (2020)
This movie is incredibly good, one of the best movies of the year, and also probably the best film depiction of gentrification that I've ever seen as well as an absolutely gutting take on the trope of returning home and finding yourself an outsider after everyone else's lives have moved on. The low-ish budget and occasional on-the-nose screenplay (this is the kind of movie that drops its title conspicuously in dialogue) make sense with this being Merawi Gerima's debut feature, but also, this is a tremendously assured debut, and for any minor quibbles I have with the screenplay, there are a dozen more moments of technical and aesthetic bravura that are honestly breathtaking—to say nothing of the clearly personal connection Gerima has to the subject matter (he's a DC native himself). This movie should have generated major buzz, and the fact that it didn't is yet another indictment of Netflix, where this film languishes; people have a lot of justified criticisms of Netflix's business model and monopolistic tendencies and occasional artistic bankruptcy, but I think one of the absolute worst things about Netflix is how completely dysfunctional it is as a distributor. Things pop in and out of the algorithmic lottery with no clear rhyme or reason, and the effect of it is that everybody with Netflix knows about the same half-dozen lowest-common-denominator titles Netflix is promoting at a given moment, but the rest of the literally thousands of catalog titles get hidden in this gigantic Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouse that's impossible to browse or search with any sort of effectiveness unless you're going in looking for a particular title you've already heard about—and Netflix almost never does the work to ensure you've heard about a title. Like, come on; this movie is basically Michael Catnip; Netflix's algorithm should have been recommending this to me HARD. Instead, I was completely ignorant of this movie's existence until tonight. I follow a lot of people on Letterboxd, critics and casual users alike, and only one of them has even logged this movie, which makes me think that most cinephiles are basically in the same boat I am. I'd probably never have watched this movie if a friend hadn't randomly told me about it after he'd just happened to stumble across a review of the film. And now it's probably going to be in my top 10 films of the year. This should have been a slam-dunk for Netflix—recommend this to the same people who watched Da 5 Bloods or Atlantics and get some good word-of-mouth promotion. This isn't even a remotely hard marketing decision for a distributor. But instead, Netflix just sends me emails about Tiger King or whatever, and this movie flies under everybody's radar. BOOOO. Go watch Residue, folks! Grade: A-

Greener Grass (2019)
This certainly isn't for everyone; it definitely tries WAY too hard to hit the intersection between David Lynch and Adult Swim, and stretches of this are pretty tiresome in the way that someone who strains too much to be "weird" can sometimes be. But a lot of the more overtly absurd/fantastic elements of this movie struck me as deeply hilarious, too. Like, in the movie there's a TV show called Kids with Knives that comes on after Little House on the Prairie reruns, and it's just kids waving around knives, and the show is such a bad influence that it instantly turns any kid who watches it into a major delinquent—I dunno, stuff like that I'm still giggling about days later. Grade: B

 

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
I was not expecting a movie with this title to actually be a serious, melancholy exploration of a woman's struggle with mental illness. It's one of those slow-burn horror movies that's basically just a single acting performance set against a strong vibe, and I'm good with that for the most part. Grade: B+

 

 

 

 

A King in New York (1957)
A movie that doesn't really have a lot on its mind besides Charlie Chaplin's seething rage at the United States' mid-century red scare. And while Chaplin certainly has every justification to be mad at that, I wish there was more to this movie than that plus a few limp gags. It's not terrible; the melodrama hits better than the humor—luckily, since the drama overtakes the humor entirely by the end—but there are a few good comic bits. I like that when the kid character (Chaplin's son!) first shows up, he basically just launches directly into a bunch of anarchist talking points without much preamble, and the facelift part is funny. But overall, the movie is like a lot of Chaplin features in that it's pretty disjointed and episodic, and unlike most Chaplin films, this movie has a hard time making enough of its disparate parts work well enough to justify the haphazard structure. Grade: C+

A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923)
Easily the worst Chaplin feature I've seen. The fact that Chaplin himself doesn't even appear in the movie (as a disclaimer warns the audience at the beginning) is a problem, as it leaves basically a charisma void in the middle of the movie. But a far bigger problem is the fact that the characters in this supposedly serious-minded drama are incoherent outside the most basic immediate motivations. The titular woman decides to leave the dude of her dreams at the beginning of the movie because he didn't show up at the train station on time, but why? The former dude of her dreams becomes a starving artist who pines for this woman, but why? Like, in any given scene, the characters' actions can be explained, but none of this ever adds up to complete human beings who make sense as a whole. Normally, this wouldn't matter so much in a Chaplin feature because of the way that (as I mentioned in my A King in New York) Chaplin movies tend to rely on semi-standalone setpieces rather than holistic character development, but this movie explicitly presents itself as a drama and barely includes any comic setpieces, so it's as if Chaplin took the best parts of his normal filmmaking instincts out without replacing them with anything good. There are a few good moments, and I'll never get tired of Chaplin's complete and utter disdain for rich people (the movie's epilogue, where this disdain most openly raises its head, kind of comes out of nowhere, but it's probably my favorite part of the movie). But overall, this is pretty drab. Grade: C

 

Music

Kelly Lee Owens - Inner Song (2020)
Kelly Lee Owens doesn't sound at all like New Order, but the formula is basically the same as the legendary UK group: music that pivots with grace from art-pop to synth-pop to no-bones-about-it club bangers. Opening with an instrumental IDM cover of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes / Arpeggi" (this has apparently been the year for great covers of that song), Inner Song announces itself as a record that, like the best New Order releases, straddles the familiar and the exploratory, and those impulses continue throughout, as Owens goes from spare synth-pop ballads like "L.I.N.E." to the 6-minute electronica odyssey "Jeanette" to the smooth, soul-tinged closer "Wake-Up." It's a fantastic journey, and I've been putting this on heavy rotation in my life. Definitely going to make my list of favorite albums of the year. Grade: A-

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Mini Reviews for November 9 - 15, 2020

Random transmission from my life: if I were accurately representing my media-watching activities here, I would have to include like half a dozen watches of Bambi and The Lion King, which my son insists on watching daily. I'm actually finding Bambi to go down a lot easier than The Lion King on extreme repeat, which is something I never would have thought I'd say (Bambi has always mildly bored me). It's low-key slow-cinema/ambient impulses make it much easier just to vibe to than The Lion King's constant LOUD, IMPORTANT DRAMA.


Movies

Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) (2007)
Céline Sciamma writes/directs a remarkably cutting screenplay about the ways in which teen girls have to reconcile the politics of their bodies with the politics of their peers. As with all of Sciamma's work, it's laser-focused on its theme while also finding ways to be consistently generous and unpredictable in its stance toward its characters; for example, Adèle Haenel more or less becomes a kind of villain in the second half of the movie, but rather than make her a thinly sketched Mean Girl, Sciamma (and Haenel herself) make her development into that antagonist role a kind of tragedy born from social pressures and psychological anxieties that are really deftly laid out by the movie's opening half, and as a result, nothing here feels so simple as the straightforward protagonist/antagonist binary that another movie might have been tempted to make it. Water Lilies is Sciamma's feature debut, though, and it's clear that, unlike in, say, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma is still working out her style here, and it's a little more home-grown in terms of camerawork and lighting than I'm used to seeing from her films. That said, there are some pretty strong images that crop up here from time to time, and if the only thing that changes as you go back to the early stages of Sciamma's career is that it just feels a little more low-budget and indie-ish, then I think she's got to be one of the great directors working today, right? Grade: B+

Weathering with You (天気の子) (2019)
I'm never coming to Makoto Shinkai movies for the plots, which is good because this one is irritating. Even laying aside some of the niggling inconsistencies in the plot mechanics and characters themselves, it's pretty dumb that this movie presents its plot as a symbolic analogue to climate change—not just for the way that it shyly celebrates the protagonist's choice to destroy Tokyo with climate change just so he can get with his girlfriend (it's a long story), but also for the fact that the movie sets up this trolley-problem-type scenario in the first place (as if climate change really hinged on individual [ir]responsibility in choosing one lifestyle over another instead of multi-national corporations and nation states exploiting half the global population). But like I said, I'm not really here for the plot; I'm looking for that shimmering, detailed, achingly colorful animation that forms the backbone of everything I like about Shinkai movies. And Weathering with You delivers that and more. It's probably the best-looking Shinkai movie to date; the setting's constant rain pierced by only intermittent rays of sunshine is the perfect conduit for some of the most breathtaking animated flourishes in Shinkai's career: the flashes of deep green as a beam of sunlight plays over raindrop-bejeweled grass, the swirling azure depths of the towering clouds, the stark gloss of a waterlogged Tokyo—it's all just so beautiful and striking. I'm really having a hard time figuring out what to do with a movie whose plot I dislike so strongly but whose aesthetic I love so much, sooo... Grade: B-

One Sings, the Other Doesn't (L'une chante, l'autre pas) (1977)
I've seen a lot of reviews complaining about this movie's didacticism and its focus on bad, second-wave feminist folk music, but I feel like those criticisms are kind of missing the forest for the trees. Admittedly, most of the songs are pretty bad (though I gotta stan "Papa Engels Was Right"), but I really don't think they're a vehicle for tidy lessons about feminism; from where I'm sitting, they're clearly an extension of the character of Apple's arc as a woman finding a meaningful framework for her gender through explicit political action, and while the songs' ideas about female liberation and bodily autonomy aren't exactly antithetical to this film's worldview, I also don't think they really represent the film laying bare every stitch of thematic ambition it has. Specifically, the presence of the entire other half of the film that focuses instead on Suzanne, who ends up living a much more domestic life in which she also finds meaning, does a lot to, if not problematize, then definitely enrich the absolutism of the folk songs, and whatever holistic thesis the movie has on the female experience, it emerges from the juxtaposition of these two stories, not simply the overt political slogans we hear. And what emerges is complex and beautiful and poignant. So says I, a man who definitely understands everything that there is to know about femininity. Anyway, I do think the screenplay is a little shoddy at times, particularly in its use of overlapping voiceovers (the "narrator" sections always felt extremely artificial and jarring to me), and it feels a tad too long, too. But this movie's core relationship between Apple and Suzanne is so strong that none of that ever becomes too big of a problem for the movie's overall impact. Anyway, after all this rambling, I guess my take is that the best thing about this movie is that core friendship, which is so good. Grade: B+

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Outside of the special effects, there's not a lot to recommend about this movie. The cast is alternatingly bad and bland (and in the case of Sinbad himself, badly bland), the script is leaden, the aesthetics are hardcore orientalist (and very reliant on brownface). But the effects, by legendary stop-motion effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, are great, if (in retrospect) a little too obviously doing a beta for the much more technically impressive Jason and the Argonauts—there's even a skeleton sword fight. If I'd seen this movie first, I'd probably be a little bit more positive toward it, but I made the mistake of watching Jason before this, so this can only pale in comparison. Dragon vs. Cyclops was very cool, though. Grade: B-