Movies
Gorgeous animation—in fact, it's one of the most stunningly rendered "traditional" (i.e. not Spider-Verse) CGI animated features in recent memory. That this is anywhere close to a positive review is entirely on the strength of those visuals. Aside from that, though, I remain completely unable to understand people's connection to the characters and mythology of this franchise; from where I sit, the character models are still ugly, Jay Baruchel's voice acting is still bad, and the larger sweep of the story trends toward convolution rather than gravitas. I'll say this, though: props to this movie for having what is almost certainly the longest sequence devoted to animal mating rituals in an animated movie since Bambi—landmark! Grade: B-
It is pretty tacky to talk about how this movie is shakily edited together from video journals (of a woman in a situation unthinkably more terrifying than anything I've ever experienced), but to watch a movie is to put yourself in a place of privilege over its subject matter, so that's the critical thought that kept flickering through my head. The rest of the time, though, I was pretty deeply moved, and I don't know if I have ever felt a movie scene more viscerally than I did the emergency C-section sequence. Structural issues or not, this is a powerful document. Grade: B+
Meticulous animation that creates a frequently gorgeous effect—it's an oft-made observation, but this is the perfect example of how Japanese animation puts the full power of its technology behind even the most mundane scenarios, and I have nothing but respect for that. As the for the story itself, it felt a little too long and repetitive for my tastes, and the characters' reactions to the two suicide attempts in the movie seem artificial and strange (though perhaps this is just a cultural difference between the US and Japan?). But all that said, the movie finds a good intersection between the sweetness and sourness of its central relationship, and in examining its central ideas of forgiveness, depression, self-loathing, etc., A Silent Voice movingly resists a lot of the pat answers that other movies might lazily reach for. A thorny watch because of that, but not without some fruit. Grade: B
Watched this bedridden with a 101 fever, and I honestly don't even know anything about anything. Time is a flat circle, and the "Sweet Child o' Mine" scene is great, but I dunno about the rest. Something else my fevered brain has been thinking about: Bob Dylan's "Isis," on repeat. I don't think that song is in this movie, but it's a good song. Would recommend. Grade: C
Everything I liked about Climax with none of what I hated. Alternately, a vital and foremostly fun record of late-'80s NYC "ball" culture, and probably the most thorough and complex analysis of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in film history. Grade: A
The narrative portions of this movie range from charmingly amateur to outright bad—not really sure what to do with either the bleeding-wound autobiographical elements or the copious misogyny here, either. But luckily, the movie is about 50% musical performances, and as every being, mortal and immortal alike, can attest, the music of Purple Rain slaps all the way to the moon and back. It may in fact be impossible to tear your eyes from the screen as Prince just tears up number after number up on that stage, and the decision to end the movie with about 20 consecutive minutes of music is the best one this movie makes. It's not hard to see why people flocked to this movie; it's also not hard to see why people don't really talk about the movie when they talk about this movie. It's Prince, y'all. Who cares what else there is? Grade: B-
Television
The second season of the best Adult Swim series of all time not only continues the soft-spoken, sincere nicety of its previous season; it also expands everything about what this show is, and in doing so, it becomes a masterpiece. Often eschewing the essayic digressions of its first season, Season Two increasingly deals directly with the psychological realities of its characters and the small and heartbreaking ways in which the march of time changes even the placidity of the show's Upper Peninsula. It's simple, but never simplistic, and almost always profound. I was openly weeping by the ends of half of these episodes. There's nothing like it on television right now, the unassuming beauty of this series and its quiet but hard-won aphoristic triumphs. Grade: A+
All my shows are ending, y'all. Here's BoJack Horseman, ending its run on a mostly high note. There have been a lot of shows recently that have focused on personal growth and recovery in their final stretch (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend comes to mind), and that's the route that BoJack goes, too, in its closing season; its first half largely centers on the twin poles of BoJack's enrollment in rehab and Diane's struggle with depression that leads her to get psychiatric help, while the second half of the season is largely about the thorny, difficult pieces of life that happen after the formal steps of recovery: after medication, after you get out of rehab. And it's pretty good! Creator/showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg has said that he thought Netflix was going to give him more episodes to spread these arcs out over, and that's apparent: secondary characters like Todd get what feels like rushed send-offs that feel like all the show could fit in alongside the main attractions of Diane and BoJack. But allowing for that slightly rushed feel along the edges of the show, it's a mostly compelling conclusion to the series, giving some of the more complex wrestling with "#MeToo" and the idea of problematic protagonists I've seen in a show. It also provides some really stunning individual episodes, most notably the penultimate episode "The View From Halfway Down," which is probably the most frightening and bleak that the show has ever been. And alongside all this, there's of course also the supremely goofy animal puns and wacky humor on clear display, too; I am completely in love with the running gag of the His-Girl-Friday-esque pair of reporters, Paige Sinclair and Maximillian Banks, and there's half a dozen other jokes up to that caliber. This show was special; I'm going to miss it. Grade: B+
The Good Place has always been a show better at exploring ideas than it was developing characters. That doesn't mean that Eleanor, Chidi, etc., didn't have their charms, because they did. But at least for me, if you asked why I came back to the show, it wasn't because I cared particularly strongly for the central cast, winsome as they are. So it's somewhat disappointing that the show's final season leans so heavily on the affection we supposedly have for these characters. Long periods of the final 13 episodes are devoted to giving arcs to the main characters, especially the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, and while I never hated the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, I always appreciated it more as a sideshow to the much more interesting metaphysical ideas this show was batting around. Because when you get right down to it, these characters were not especially complex or interesting; they had an accumulation of traits that worked well for sitcom situations, which was especially helpful in the first season when this show was still halfway a metaphor for the creation of a TV show. But they simply cannot bear the weight of the entire show being put on their shoulders, especially when the characters' emotional arcs are meant also to carry home the ultimate metaphysical ideas the show settles on. About those ideas: I really wish they'd done something more than the whole "eternity is a prison, so the only ethical afterlife is one that eventually leads to annihilation" thing. Look, I know many very smart people have proposed this concept before (including Todd May, a philosopher who makes a cameo in the finale and who argues that life is only meaningful because we are mortal), but I've yet to see anything that convinces me that this whole idea is just unsubstantiated hypothesizing—we don't know anything but mortality, so it seems patently absurd to be so convinced that it is mortality that gives us meaning. Or at any rate, the show is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that an eternal paradise would eventually become hell. Death is a thief and a bastard, and the ability the choose when it happens only solves half of the problem. As long as we're inventing made-up fantasy heavens, I am willing to risk one without it, thank you. So anyway, it's a final season whose characters can't sustain the weight the show puts on them, nor can the show's ideas stand the scrutiny their placement in the finale engenders. It's not like this last season of The Good Place isn't enjoyable in a lot of the ways the show has been enjoyable since its beginning: it's still funny and goofy and absurd in some pretty fun ways, its zippy plotting keeps things interesting and resists settling into a status quo, etc. But on the deepest levels on which The Good Place has been entertaining in the past, Season 4 falls short, which is too bad. So long to one of network television's quirkiest and most thoughtful delights; I'll remember you for the good times, not the finale. Grade: B-
In its final year, the long-running tech satire finds a few new fresh directions, including some topical ones (Richard begins this season testifying before congress making promises about data privacy that he clearly has no idea the feasibility of), and in general, the final season's focus on tech ethics and data harvesting does give Silicon Valley some of the bite it lost in its mediocre last couple years. It's still not nearly as funny as it once was, and the finale bizarrely lands the show on a note of optimism that feels both weirdly out-of-sync for this show and also pretty disconnected from the inescapable hell that is real-world Silicon Valley (I would be shocked if there was a non-zero number of tech giants who intentionally destroyed a very cool piece of code because it had the possibility of destroying the world). But the journey to that note is a solid one, and I had a fun time taking a ride with this show one more time. So yay. Grade: B
Books
I was a little skeptical of these books at first, because my impression of them is that they were part of the whole "let's turn a school subject into a graphic novel so the kids these days will learn it!" movement, which isn't a movement without its merits but sometimes does lead to some prosaic stuff. The first book feels a lot like that, too, but each successive book gets increasingly complex in ways I wasn't expecting, eventually forming a cycle of books that gives a rich and difficult conversation about the push and pull between radicalism and centrism within political movements. A large part of this comes out of the grounding of the books within John Lewis's point of view, which gives the books a lot of personality and momentum that wouldn't be possible in a straight history. These books are as much memoir as history, which is great; that point of view also saves the books from a lot of the sanctimony that we often like to give history—it is fascinating, for example, how Martin Luther King, Jr., is presented not just as an important leader but also as both a distant celebrity and a frustratingly conservative (relatively) alongside Lewis's more radical vision from SNCC. It doesn't all work; there's a pretty hokey framing device involving Obama's first inauguration, hokey enough that I wonder if, by the end, there's a kind of bitter irony being engaged in (the book ends by talking about the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the late '60s, which then gets juxtaposed with Obama in ways that feel at-best ambivalent). But on the whole, I'm pleasantly surprised by how moving and powerful I found these books. Kids who won't read could do a lot worse than to learn about Civil Rights from this series. Grade: A-
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