Movies
Very much an Oz Perkins horror movie, meaning that it's a little stilted, a little opaque, a little off-beat, and a lot spooky. Perkins is making a pretty good résumé (if not reputation—go see these movies, people!) for himself of movies that are just left-of-center enough to be interesting, undergirded by a strong visual eye and a refreshing recognition of mood as the primary building block of horror, not scares. As with most of these movies, there are things that don't work: in this case, I think the synth-core/Stranger-Things-y score is a mistake, an odd choice for a movie whose setting's sole concession to the 20th century is a delightfully incongruous playground slide. But on the whole, this is a really solid late-winter release with some awesomely thick atmosphere and tremendous set design. Also, Alice Krige is quite good. Grade: B+
I've enjoyed Ira Sachs's other movies (Love Is Strange a lot, Little Men somewhat), and Frankie does has a little of that infectious wistfulness that I love. But it's a movie with too many protagonists when, in fact, there should be exactly two—Marisa Tomei and Isabelle Huppert—and that spreads out the emotional resonance perilously thin over some unnecessarily convoluted dramatic geography. I just want Huppert and Tomei walking around the Portuguese countryside together! Beautiful final shot, though. Grade: C
I remember being four or five and wanting to wear a dress to preschool, and my parents wouldn't let me, and I was a little upset about that. There have been a few moments like that in my life. I don't think I'm nonbinary or anything, and I certainly wouldn't want to equate my mild experiences with the much more severe ones the main character experiences here. But I say all this to explain why the beautiful liberty the protagonist of Tomboy experiences in the movie's early stages resonated with me. Sciamma renders with an artful matter-of-factness the unobstructed self-ness of simply being able to exist within the gendered space you feel you belong, and it's gloriously free. This is of course only a temporary freedom within a society so thoroughly bent around an obsession with matching genitalia with gender, which is the completely obvious but no less heartbreaking tragedy at the core of this movie. Gender normativity freaking suck. Cisgendered normativity is a cancer. Burn it down. Grade: B+
I was significantly undersold how strange this movie is. There's a major character who is a giant glove with an eyeball on its thumb and a big, toothy mouth between its fingers; there are doppelganger Beatles we're told are the real Beatles who meet the real Beatles we're told are the doppelganger Beatles; there's a creature with a vacuum cleaner for a nose who sucks up the whole movie before sucking up itself; there is a sea full of holes in the animation. A lot of people might say that a movie that structures its plot entirely around the prospect of creating cool images to animate is wagging the dog, but no sir, not me; this is delightful, a movie completely drunk on the boundless possibilities of animation, so intoxicated by its own aesthetic that it literally cares about nothing else except the discography of The Beatles. The only other movie I can think of that's so in love with the pure texture and geometry and whimsical play of animation is The Thief and the Cobbler, and Yellow Submarine is considerably less compromised than that movie ended up being. An animation fan's dream. I guess The Beatles are pretty good, too. Grade: B+
I had a really difficult time following this movie—partly because it's a fairly complicated plot created with some very threadbare early-sound equipment and sensibilities (Micheaux never really acclimated to sound cinema, and it's punishingly obvious here), partly because I was so bored that I couldn't keep my mind from wandering. But the musical sequences were fun! Grade: C-
Television
It's not that the seventh and final season of Orange Is the New Black doesn't have good moments. It does, and it's overall a much stronger season than the abysmal sixth season. But the scars left by that sixth season remain, and much as the writers try to add ripped-from-the-headlines plots (Litchfield becomes an ICE detainment facility) and return the show to a pre-Season-Six status quo (Badison gets shipped off to another prison, e.g.), Orange never really rights itself. Part of this is because most of these characters are too far gone—there's only so much backpedaling you can do, and it's not enough to make these characters interesting again after all the stupid storylines and wasted time in the past year. Another part of it is that the show's creative team, either through apathy or befuddlement at how to tie all the show's many, many threads together, has all but abandoned any semblance of dramatic coherence: new characters are introduced willy-nilly before being sidelined again for the main cast; flashbacks (long a liability in this show) are thrown in inconsistently and for the thinnest reasons; storylines flare up for an episode or two before being more or less ignored; episodes themselves become structureless blobs of one scene ambling after another until the runtime is up and they can do the credits needle-drop. All of these problems have been issues to some degree since the show began, but they become especially apparent now that the show has to work double-time to clean up its sloppy storytelling into some semblance of a finale. And speaking of the finale: it is, like many series finales, something of a curtain call for all its characters, and this means bringing back a lot of the characters we lost at the end of Season 5 when the cast was halved, and I can think of no greater indictment of how the show managed its last two seasons than the feeling of warmth I felt seeing all these old characters, followed by the feeling of deep frustration that I was watching freakin' Daya do whatever she was doing these past two years instead of spending time with these old friends. Orange Is the New Black skated through its inconsistent storytelling for years by the skin of its teeth and the strength of its character bench, and the parts of this season that work function on the same kind of character-above-all magic: Doggett's arc, Ramos's ICE experience, the chicken farm, Nichols's growth, etc. But these are relatively few and far between moments, and with the diminishing effectiveness of these characters, it becomes pretty clear how thin this show could be. Probably the worst case for a finale: I was glad to see this show go. Grade: C+
Books
The second book in Pullman's companion trilogy to His Dark Materials is not only a huge improvement to the first one, La Belle Sauvage, but also retroactively helps some of the creative decisions in that book make sense. After Book One, I was left wondering why this story was being told, and The Secret Commonwealth answers that question thoroughly by pulling this trilogy into focus: Pullman's thesis here is centered on the limits of reason as a guiding principle for a worldview and the ways that reason-obsessed skeptics sometimes excise compassion, beauty, and other intangible but vital human qualities from their experiences. A not inconsequential subplot involves Lyra (this book takes place several years after the end of The Amber Spyglass) becoming infatuated with the ideas of a trendy Ayn-Rand-ish philosopher, and it's not hard to map this plot metaphorically onto our world in the same way that readers did the alternate-history Magisterium and Authority onto our real-world ideas about church authority and God in His Dark Materials. The titular "Secret Commonwealth" (i.e. the world of the spirits) serves as a counterpoint to the obsessively "rational" perspective that tempts our characters, and in this light, it becomes absolutely clear what exactly Pullman was up to in La Belle Sauvage, contrasting the relatively realist espionage with a blown-out fantasy finale full of fairies and magic that serves as a kind of foundational event for The Secret Commonwealth. More than just ideas, though, this book is just a rip-roaring adventure story, probably the closest thing to the scope and tone of The Golden Compass we've gotten; here again, Lyra must travel into an unknown world in search of a dear companion: this time she must journey east to find her own daemon, Pan. But it's a much darker and more complex journey than that told in The Golden Compass, much more interested in politics and in particular colonialism than Lyra's earlier trip into the relatively untouched North was, which makes sense. I do wonder if Pullman leans a little bit too hard into Orientalist tropes when describing places like Syria, but he at least goes out of his way to explain that these regions are as war-torn and corrupt as they are because of the influence of Western commerce and religion. But with that aside, it's a completely thrilling ride in the tradition of the best of His Dark Materials, balancing a sharp fantasy imagination with a deep interest in Big Ideas, and I was legitimately sad when I reached the last page. I've read that Pullman hasn't even started the third book, which makes me inordinately sad, because I have to know what happens next. I can't remember the last time I've felt like this about a series. Grade: A
Music
Most of the time, the "fusion" in jazz fusion is with rock or R&B, and it's not like Don Cherry's music is free of those influences. But what's so mesmerizing and compelling about Brown Rice (and, it bears mentioning, the rest of his '70s output) is that rock and R&B are just drops in the bucket of influences that form a kind of pan-Eurasian folk music with its mix of not just North American and British musical forms but also Indian and African and Near-Eastern. It's an album that pivots from ambient chants and hypnotic grooves to molten free-jazz solos—a truly adventurous listening experience that transportive and deeply spiritual. I've been obsessed for the past few weeks. Grade: A
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