Movies
I spent about three of this movie's four hours being mostly worn out by the relentless misery of the plot. It is every bit the product of someone who was the actual student of Béla Tarr—a slow endurance test of a film that obsesses over meticulously detailed depictions of human anguish, though Hu Bo makes his movie markedly more eventful and quick than what I've seen of Tarr's (and less aesthetically striking, too, tbh). But the final hour reaches some magnificent pay-offs for the preceding 180 minutes, and its final sequence arrives at such a graceful note of optimism and human connection that it retroactively made me feel pretty kind about the other 75% of the movie. For all the talk about the bleakness of this movie and of its director's death (Hu Bo committed suicide prior to the release), An Elephant Sitting Still really is a hard-won celebration of life, and the endurance it takes to even get to that celebration is entirely the point. Grade: B
I only watched this movie a few days ago, but already I'm having trouble remembering which parts were from this movie and which were from 35 Up. It's also becoming apparent to me just how much the runtimes of these movies are padded by recapping footage from previous installments. Both of those are kind of my fault in a sense, because these movies were designed to be watched seven years apart, and if I'd done that (instead of watching two in four days), I probably would have needed all the reminders from the previous films (I already was struggling to remember a lot of stuff after a several-years-long break between 28 Up and 35 Up), and I probably also would have had a stronger sense of what happens in each entry. But at the same time, given the magnificent scope of the project, I do kind of wish the individual pieces were a bit more consistently magnificent on their own. That said, it is genuinely heartening to see Neil back on his feet, and I really truly do wish that guy the best, so if these movies just become opportunities to drop in to cheer for Neil, I guess I'm okay with that. Grade: B
I never watched a ton of Beavis and Butt-Head, but the fact that my sheltered pre-adolescent self even knew these guys existed in the '90s is a testament to the mindnumbing miracle that a creation this grimy and weird became so ubiquitous. In my head, I usually associate Mike Judge with King of the Hill and Office Space, the two works of his that I've spent the most time revisiting, but both of those have a sort of humanity and cock-eyed sincerity to them that Beavis and Butt-Head utterly lacks (and in fairness, King of the Hill is probably more Greg Daniels than Mike Judge), and it's worth reminding myself every once in a while that, as with Matt Groening, the purest distillations of Judge's sensibilities had both feet planted in the often kind of off-putting and dissonant world of '80s alt-comedy and alt-comics—this movie's bizarrely exaggerated character animations and picaresque, occasionally surreal shaggy-dog storytelling have as much in common with, like, Bill Plympton as they do with other popular animated media from the same era, and Beavis and Butt-Head themselves feel almost Lynchian in their total surrender to barely human, disconcerting tics. But somehow millions of people in the '90s lapped this stuff up; monoculture may have been a cruel mistress, but you gotta admit that it was an occasionally surprising one, too. Watching this in 2020, I can't really get my head out of the space of viewing this pretty exclusively as a fascinating cultural artifact (in mostly a positive sense, though there is a current of sexism here that's ironic but not very fun), but I did get some genuine laughs out of this one—and a legitimately loud one at that part when all the senators start chuckling, Beavis-and-Butt-Head-style, at the mere mention of boobs. Quality cinema, right there. Grade: B-
This is basically an ideas movie wrapped in the shell of a '90s thriller, and if I'm being charitable about those ideas, I'd summarize them as being a somewhat ambivalent critique of the way that a certain brand of white and male privilege knows how to do nothing but express violent and sometimes self-destructive rage at the pileup of indignities forged by post-war, post-Reagan neoliberalism. I say "ambivalent" because I think there's an extent to which the protagonist's anger is supposed to be righteous anger, (albeit misapplied into terrorist violence), and even though the main character is compared to a literal Neo-Nazi at one point, there's a kind of petty sympathy this movie is raising for the "we live in a society" grievances that its protagonist monologues incessantly about—which is kind of interesting, since it in theory draws a line from feelings some of the audience themselves may have felt at one time or another toward either nihilistic vigilantism or even full-on Nazism, and invites people to consider the latent aggression (and even racism) in commonly stated aphoristic complaints. But I say I'm being "charitable" here not just because a lot of this does just reads as unironic "angry white guy screed" with minimal social commentary, but also because the "grievances" expressed in this movie are comically broad and petty: "Coca-Cola is more expensive than it used to be!" "Sometimes fast-food places won't let me buy from the breakfast menu, even when I'm only a couple minutes past the cutoff between breakfast and lunch!" I dunno, it's just hard to take seriously even to the slightest extent with the idea that these complaints are connected with homicidal rage. Maybe this is a satirical point about the absurdity of male entitlement or something, but if so, I would have liked to see the movie put a finer point on it. And when the grievances aren't trifling, they're just short-sighted and empty: "There are gangs!" "The ocean is polluted!"—basic, blunt descriptions of modern problems that anyone who has skimmed news headlines could come up with, with absolutely zero hint at any sort of broader context or nuance to explain, for example, why young men of color sometimes get into gangs or why corporations are able to pollute the oceans, etc. You could also probably argue that the myopia is another part of the point, but lord, couldn't this point have been made within a more probing screenplay? And besides, I'm skeptical that it actually is part of the point, at least to the extent that I think it needs to be, given that the movie has a dignified member of the LAPD explicitly state the moral of the film at the end, which, in 1993, not even a year after the heinous acquittal of the boys in LAPD blue who assaulted Rodney King, strikes me as the height of white myopia. I probably could have guessed all of the above based solely on the fact that this is one of those "angry white dude" '90s movies, but what I'm actually disappointed is that as a thriller (or hey, even an ideas movie) how completely bland and anonymous every piece of filmmaking in this movie is. I've only seen three Joel Schumacher-directed movies prior to this: The Lost Boys and his pair of Batman movies, and say what you will about those movies (I have: didn't really care for them), but they are anything but anonymous. Grade: C-
Books
A young woman is adrift in late-19th-century New Orleans; she has dark secrets, but oh look! She meets a sexy, mercurial bad boy who might have dark secrets of his own! But oh no! He might be a werewolf or a vampire! I've not read a ton of Anne Rice, but this strikes me as basically Anne Rice, but boring. Very boring. At the very least, it could have done something interesting with its New Orleans setting, but aside from place names, this could have been set in New York or London or Paris or Berlin or literally anywhere else. My school librarian has said she's going to stop letting students pick the book for our school book club for a while and start choosing the books herself, and with choices like this, I say: take the power back, Emily! Please! Grade: C-
Music
Yet another very cool fusion/world beat album to come out of the London jazz scene. As I mentioned in my year-end list for 2019, the highlight is the closing track, the 11-minute "Third Eye Thunder," which takes the tropes of fusion and goes full-on progressive rock with them, but the rest of the album is song, too: a percussive, heavy record with a particularly exploratory guitar sound that at times feels like it reaches nearly to outer space. It's a debut, so its energy makes up for some of its compositional murkiness, and I'm exciting to see what this six piece does in the future. Grade: B+
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