Mini Reviews for March 23-29, 2020

Quarantine, Week 3: Let me out.

Movies

Bisbee '17 (2018)
A documentary that asks the descendants of those involved in the Bisbee Deportation to participate in a recreation of that event on its centennial. If I hadn't seen The Act of Killing, I would say this is probably the most innovative use of reenactment in a documentary since Errol Morris's Thin Blue Line, but given the existence of The Act of Killing, it becomes kind of clear that this is the exact intersection between The Act of Killing and Errol Morris, which is fine but also feels a little thinner than it should in comparison to those heavyweights; specifically, I would have liked to see more of the movie dedicated to showing the aftermath of the reenactment itself, since that's where the movie's thesis—that of what it means for a community to confront its collective memory (or collective amnesia, in this case) of an atrocity. But oh boy, is this an atrocity, and there's an inherent power in the documentary wrestling with it at all. I had zero knowledge of the Bisbee Deportation before watching this movie, and apparently a good portion of contemporary Bisbee residents didn't either, which might be one of the starker and more effective points this movie makes about the barriers to even getting a community (much less an entire country) to reckon with its own relatively recent horrors. There's this one part where one of the Bisbee residents rants about how nobody teaches labor history in schools, which is a point that I 100% felt as someone living in a modern Appalachia that has all but erased its considerable history in the labor movement. It is a damning indictment of the way we Americans are taught history that I learned more about the lives of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford—hell, about medieval England—than I did the entire labor movement, a movement that reached its height during a generation that has not yet completely died out, a movement whose outcomes shaped contemporary life as much as either of the World Wars. The movie strains to connect the Bisbee Deportation with the Trump-era immigration crisis, but there's a subtler point being made here, that much as Bisbee itself can't reckon with an injustice it refuses to acknowledge, a nation without a past is doomed to live in the unsustainable fantasies that historical amnesia grants. Grade: B+

Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)
Despite teaching it every semester to my students, I really don't have any special affection for Romeo and Juliet, which I would put easily in the bottom half of Shakespeare's output. So it's not so much that this defiles a sacred masterpiece as it is that this movie just sucks. Points for pissing on the piety toward Shakespeare's genius, further points for playing up how horny the Nurse (who is a thicc frog here, natch) is for Paris; but negative points for all the dumb pop culture references and especially negative points for that American Beauty homage. Also really not sure what to do with the "When She Loved Me"-esque flashback involving the flamingo (who is Friar Laurence... I think?). Near the end of the original Shakespeare version, the Prince declares, "Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished." I don't know if I'm feeling quite so magnanimous. Punish all those involved, I say—especially you, Sir Elton John, Executive Producer. Grade: C-

Sita Sings the Blues (2008)
I really wanted to love this creative re-telling of the Ramayana. There is some really inspired stuff here—the animation is very good (particularly the couple of wordless psychedelic musical sequences, which go hard), and the device of having some Adventures of Prince Achmed-style shadow puppets give a stammering, off-the-cuff narration the story, each narrator remembering the story a little differently and occasionally disagreeing on the subtext, is very clever and yields some very good bits. I would have actually loved if the movie were just that. But then you've got the director's autobiographical sections, which, in addition to my misgivings about the cultural dimensions of this (a Western, white woman revising an important text from an Eastern culture in order to reflect over her own life—ehhh), is far and away the weakest material in the movie. And about Sita singing those blues: having Sita sing Annette Hanshaw songs is pretty fun, but by the end of the movie, it's clearly become a way to pad out the movie's already svelte runtime, and it definitely got thin. But I really do like the animation, so I'm letting that coast this movie into a vaguely positive rating. Grade: B-

Down with Love (2003)
A pitch-perfect pastiche/parody of an early '60s romantic comedy—only with the added benefit of actually being funner, more clever, and more visually engaging than any '60s comedy of this ilk I've ever seen. Clever screenplay, relentlessly clever visuals (the split-screen "sex" scene is maybe the hardest I've laughed in a movie in a year—ditto for the sublime visual gag of Paulson and Zellweger taking off their coats to reveal cocktail dresses matching each other's jackets). I have literally no idea why this isn't as well regarded as, say, The Man Who Wasn't There, to name another Classical Hollywood pastiche from the early 2000s, except that I guess rom-coms aren't as lionized a genre as noir. I would be interested in how this movie would be received if it were released now, in a post-The Artist, post-La La Land world, where people seem to be more willing both to engage with pastiche as art and also with supposedly "dated" Hollywood formats. Grade: A

Speed (1994)
One of the very best American action films of an era that produced an uncanny number of great American action films. Also a really great example of collective urbanism: a whole city coming together to make sure that a bus can go as fast as it can. In fact, once he gets on the bus, I don't think Keanu uses a private vehicle for the rest of the movie, which, by a certain metric, makes this the greatest movie of all time. He cheats a little by having the ambulance take him to the metro stop, but hey, this is America—a land where it is seemingly too much to ask for bus routes to actually connect to metro stops. Grade: A

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994)
Just a li'l old movie about a girl and her animatronic dinosaur boyfriend. You know, one of those. Tammy and the T-Rex probably prefigures the post-MST3K "intentionally so bad it's good" wave of the 2000s wherein a knowingly ridiculous premise is exploited for ironic yucks, e.g. Sharknado—only critically, this movie remembers that without some kind of sui generis innocent vision a la The Room or Plan 9 from Outer Space, "so bad it's good" still needs to be, ya know, good on some level. And oh boy, is this good. The gore effects are both ludicrous and enthusiastic, the plotting is brisk and surprising, and the acting is across-the-board excellent at bringing a professional sheen to a camp tone reminiscent of a goofy community theater troupe, particularly Denise Richards, who maybe gives the performance of her career here. Also, this is by the director of Mac and Me... does this mean I should listen to Paul Rudd and watch Mac and Me after all? Grade: A-

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
The most overtly goofy and sloppy of the Michael Myers Halloween movies I've seen so far (we'll just let that third one be its own thing). Scene by scene, this movie's tone slips wildly from something that's just kind of fluffy (the teen relationship drama) to some astoundingly mean character moments (the bullies laughing at Laurie's kid because she's an orphan... I mean, golly) to some almost over-the-top gore (someone gets stabbed... with a shotgun barrel). There's also the completely unremarked-upon scene with the alcoholic doomsday preacher that gives Loomis a ride into town, which is itself a sort of masterclass in wtf-ery as well as one-and-done character work. And also, there's a redneck militia in Hadonfield now? But it's all kind of fun in a way that the other direct sequel I've seen, Halloween II, was not, and the final twenty minutes or so do an admirable job of jettisoning all the goofy stuff to make room for a seriously bleak and lean finale—probably the best sustained Michael action the series has seen since the first movie. It's a largely dysfunctional movie, but I had a good time. Grade: B

Music

Talking Heads - True Stories (1986)
Finds Talking Heads basically in full pop mode, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (I'm a big fan of Little Creatures), but this is a pretty mediocre effort at that sound. "Puzzlin' Evidence" is a good Stop Making Sense-style rocker, and "Wild Wild Life" is probably the best pop Talking Heads on the album. The rest of the record is fine but forgettable, though, and the last three tracks in particular are just snoozers. Thin lyrics, thin sound. Nothing's terrible, but very little is great. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for March 16-22, 2020

Quarantine, Week 2: The library is closed. I want to go back to school.

Movies

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
I'm too late to this party to be surprised that this isn't a paint-by-numbers Mr. Rogers biopic (its reputation long preceded it), but I'm no less delighted by the legitimately complex interplay of cliché and ingenious, thoughtful invention. Like, this actually just goes whole hog into the clichéiest of clichés by giving our protagonist (not Mr. Rogers, I assume most people know by now, but a quasi-fictionalized journalist) certified Daddy Issues, but then it defamiliarizes that trope rigorously by contextualizing it all within this bizarre, Brechtian version of a Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood episode in which Tom Hanks (who looks and sounds nothing like the real Fred Rogers, but he works well in this movie) plays his soft-spoken iteration of a fourth-wall-breaking guide taking us through this story, a la Sam Elliot in The Big Lebowski or even the Leading Player in Pippin. And yet, even this defamiliarizing is refamiliarized by the meticulous fidelity to the aesthetic and set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood itself, and at least for someone like me who spent a not inconsiderable amount of my early childhood watching the show, it's both intensely nostalgic and a little uncanny to see the show's architecture, right down to the songs and the cardigan choreography, bent just slightly into the particular story this movie is telling. And somehow, through all this, the movie manages to transform its story's on-paper roteness into an unbelievably effective and deeply moving rumination on coming to terms with and ultimately expressing the thorny, twisted emotions that accumulate as a function of being human. Marielle Heller's direction is unbelievably creative, too, and the final shot of this movie is my favorite shot of 2019 from any movie not named Long Day's Journey into Night. An odd, beautiful gem of a film from top to bottom. Grade: A-

Bastards (Les Salauds) (2013)
Probably my favorite Claire Denis movie I've seen after High Life, "favorite" being kind of loosely defined, since this is thoroughly miserable and scary in some pretty awful ways. Which admittedly is also true of High Life. I guess I just like Claire Denis movies to be scary and unpleasant. Grade: B+

Southland Tales (2006)
Came expecting to cheer on a fascinating train wreck, left having experienced a masterpiece. What a bewildering, jaw-dropping rush of apocalyptic sci-fi satirical whatever. Like, I get why people hate it, but man, y'all. Quantum entanglement, time travel, satire of moral-majority conservatism, etc.—100% the movie I would have expected the writer/director of Donnie Darko— to have directed with four times the budget, but also 100% funnier and more vital than I was prepared for. It's a fascinating artifact of the fears of the Bush era (terrorism emboldening a repressive [yet respectable-presenting] right-wing state; the Patriot Act re-shaping privacy and the internet as we know it—honestly, probably the most sincere and insightful reckoning with 9/11 as both a reality and a cultural symbol that this era of filmmaking produced), but there's also something perennially cogent about this movie's wild, wildly hilarious, brutally despairing take on the apocalypse. As someone sitting on the brink of what feels like some kind of low-grade apocalypse myself, I found a lot of this movie echoing pretty resoundingly in 2020 (geez, I already hate typing that number—more meme than calendar year by now), from the way the political battles of this movie condense around the magnetism of ineffectual celebrity (The Rock's performance here is so good, btw—don't ever think he's done anything this out-there before or since) to the way that otherwise noble revolutionary Marxists kind of lose the plot for a minute debating whether or not it is just that nature coerces all living things to defecate whether they want to or not. This movie just understands something constituent both about living in a world teetering on the brink in general and also about specifically the intersection of the American myth (or whatever sausage-mill version of that myth that comes out of the modern capitalist media landscape) with that general lived experience on the brink. I'm rambling (what else can you do about a movie as sprawling as this?), so I'll just close by saying that this is probably the most Pynchonian movie I've ever seen and definitely feels like a bizarro-world dry run for PTA's adaptation of Inherent Vice (Timberlake and Newsom basically play the same roles in their respective movies?)—each one being a borderline incomprehensibly plotted comedic whirlwind through the end of an era and the borderline incomprehensibly byzantine forces engineering that end. Neither movie runs out of ideas. Grade: A

Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ) (2006)
A hushed, often beautiful, usually just supremely calming rumination on rural vs. urban Thailand—though I'll admit that more so than any of the ideas in the movie, I just kind of coasted on the vibes, and for me, this movie's basically working in the same vein as ambient music. Probably the most immediately an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie has worked on me, and an ideal movie to put on at about 1 pm on an overcast afternoon while your son takes a nap—I definitely fell asleep during the last five minutes and had to rewind when I woke up, which normally would sound like a criticism but is absolutely praise here. Very nice to have my constant, low-grade anxiety about the fallout from a global pandemic cease for about 100 minutes, and the burden of consciousness slip away for about 5. Grade: A-

Police Story 2 (警察故事續集) (1988)
Much more of a traditional cop movie than the first one, which is bad because the cop elements were my least-favorite parts of the first one. It also has what strikes me as a very tasteless depiction of a deaf villain, which is also bad. But the good: the fight scenes are still great (the fireworks warehouse at the end rivals the best sequences from the original, and the playground brawl isn't too shabby, either). I also really enjoy that the movie opens with Chan's bosses chewing him out for all the damage he did in the first one, which is a good comedic note in a film that doesn't always seem to know where to put its comedy. Grade: B-

The Fog (1980)
Small town, sprawling cast, metaphorically rich threat, deep sense of history, lighthouses (and generally Maine-ish vibes, despite the California setting)—feels like a Stephen King novel, and at a mere 90 minutes, it more importantly feels like a Stephen King novel in fast-forward, the appeal of which I sometimes wish King's editors would take to heart more often. Anyway, this is tons of fun; on-paper, it's a little standard (the ghosts come every 100 years, ooOOOoo), but the movie's filled with great details that flesh out this world delightfully, from the undead sailors' glowing eyes to Carpenter's score to the fact that the hottest radio station in town is the one that just plays jazz standards. I probably wouldn't live in this town, on account of the ghost sailors, but I would definitely visit. Grade: B+

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)
American Graffiti cross-pollinated with Looney Tunes. It has that same feeling of nostalgia being weaponized against itself that Spielberg (producer here) would take to much zanier, often more cutting heights a year later in 1941 (there's a lot of cast overlap between those two movies, too, which makes me curious how much I Wanna Hold Your Hand influenced that one [Edit: As it turns out, the two movies have the same writers—surprise, surprise]). The results of all this are solidly entertaining, though a little thin at times—blame Robert Zemeckis's first-time jitters, I guess? Still a pretty impressive directorial debut. Surely someone out there somewhere has written something really insightful about Zemeckis's relationship to Boomer nostalgia (the line between this movie, Back to the Future, and then Forrest Gump is fascinating)—I'd love to read it. If this hasn't been written yet, you're welcome, culture writers of the world. I'll collect my finder's fee in Beatles CDs. Grade: B+

Television

Anne with an E, Season 3 (2019)
The third and final season of Anne with an E makes a good case for the show's cancellation. Back when this series began, I was enthusiastic about the ways in which the show revised its source material into interesting new shapes, but after a second season compromised by some silly turns, this third season finds the spark of that first season mostly dead and my enthusiasm entirely waned. The problems here are basically the same as in Season 2: ludicrous plot turns, heavily shoehorned-in 21st century progressive values (there's a whole out-of-nowhere #MeToo plot)—none of which I'm inherently opposed to, but they're handled clumsily here and have basically supplanted what made the show enjoyable in the first place, i.e. the seriousness with which it takes Anne's search for a community that helps her heal from her past (reduced here to a merely semi-recurring thread in which Anne looks for information regarding her parents). New to this season are some pretty deep structural issues, too, which makes the show even more dysfunctional; arcs come and go seemingly without forethought—the aforementioned sexual assault plot gets two episodes of intense attention before disappearing completely, and the same goes for a number of the stories told here—and the show has no idea how to incorporate its newer characters, such as Bash (whom Gilbert met in his improbable swashbuckling adventures last season) and his extended family as well as the people we follow from the Mi'kmaq nation (a real missed opportunity here, since the presence of indigenous peoples is something that could have organically yielded some interesting directions for the show—there are some good individual moments, but none of them help to make the plots feel like they're transmissions from an entirely different series). So this third season ends up just rushing from plot to plot without any structural integrity or even really a sense of how all these elements fit into the same universe. As much as it makes me sad to say this about a show I once had pretty positive feelings about, it's kind of insufferable. Grade: C

Books

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (2012)
Really solid bit of historical fiction. I was at first irritated by the YA-ness of the narrative voice here; like, the narrator is a prisoner of war in WWII being tortured by Nazis, so why is she talking all snarky and jokey like she's in The Fault in Our Stars? But the novel gets pretty clever with this voice as the story progresses, eventually playing around with narrative personas and unreliable narrators in some really interesting ways before veering into straightforward tragedy that feels appropriate for the weight of the subject matter. On a meta level, this book is kind of bittersweet for me because I was reading it for my school's student book club, and because of the school cancellations, not only will we not be able to discuss this book, it now seems unlikely that the book club will meet again before the end of the school year. It's a minor thing in the scope of everything else happening in the world with the virus, but I'm going to miss book club. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for March 9-15, 2020

Quarantine, Week 1: Rations running low. Ran out of milk and Kelly Reichardt DVDs today.

Movies

Wild Nights with Emily (2018)
The cinematic style itself is a little shaky, and this movie made me realize that it's kind of strange that the "letter is read by actor talking directly at the camera" technique has becomes something of a cliché for 18th/19th century period pieces trying to court modern sensibilities. But the screenplay and acting are both really tight, and the revisionist historical angle is enlightening—as an English teacher who has taught Dickinson poems in the past, I am embarrassed to admit that I didn't know half the things I discovered in my post-movie Wikipedia dive. Grade: B

Sacro GRA (2013)
Kind of like a Wiseman film if Wiseman were just a tad more interested in people than institutions. As cross-section of the people living along the biggest highway in Italy, it's a pretty interesting study of contrasts, from dudes bathing in literally golden tubs to people essentially living on the streets, and director Gianfranco Rosi gets some really evocative shots both of people living their lives (often filmed through their apartment windows) and of the highway itself. Gotta say, though, I dunno that it really justifies all of its 90 minutes, and I was restless by the end. Would have loved to spend a little more time with the guy making recordings of grubs than with some of the more anonymous folks here. Grade: B-

*Corpus Callosum (2002)
A playful, fun avant-garde feature that's basically just 90 minutes of goofing around with early digital film and digital effects. It feels historically significant that this came out the same year of Attack of the Clones (another landmark in digital cinema), and it makes me wonder what kind of movies George Lucas would have been making in 2002 if Star Wars hadn't ever taken off. Grade: B 

I talked about this movie (and Wavelength) on the Cinematary podcast, if you're interested in hearing about that. You can listen here.

River of Grass (1994)
It's pretty jarring to think of this movie's Badlands-by-way-of-'90s-indie in the context of Kelly Reichardt's broader career, to which it bears little resemblance. But I think if you can put that aside, it's a solid, occasionally lovely picture. I don't know if it's any more than the sum of its influences (a little bit of Breathless, a little bit Drugstore Cowboy, a lot of bit the aforementioned Badlands), but you could say the same of a lot of auspicious, slightly off-format '90s indie debuts: Hard Eight, Bottle Rocket, etc. There's something about the grimy, pre-Pulp Fiction American indie aesthetic that I just can't get enough of, and River of Grass delivers that in spades while also being Reichardt's funniest feature (the last scene is one of the great moments of black comedy in the '90s, on par with "You shot Marvin in the face"). Plus, it has that really awesome jazz score. Grade: B

Police Story (警察故事) (1985)
There are exactly three parts in this movie where I was more entertained than by any other action movie I've watched in recent memory: the opening sequence in the shanty town, the mid-film bit where Chan has to answer all the phones in the police station at once, and (of course) the legendary mall fight at the film's finale. The rest I thought was mostly tedious (with some pretty iffy gender politics to boot). But those three scenes are A+ territory, and Jackie Chan is a freaking Movie Star, so this shook out pretty great on average for me. Grade: B+

Wavelength (1967)
Really hate to be the guy who doesn't like the greatest avant-garde movie of all time, but I didn't like the greatest avant-garde movie of all time. I didn't get a thing out of it, and while I kind of appreciate some of the choices here (the "Strawberry Fields" part is neat, though for me that's likely just because I enjoy the song; some of the color tints are cool; I like where this ultimately ends up re: letting the waves go out of focus; also, that random dude who drops dead in front of the camera is Hollis Frampton??), I mostly just wish I didn't feel like the sound design had actually damaged my hearing. Was thinking I was going to be a Michael Snow head after digging *Corpus Callosum, so color me disappointed. Grade: C


Television

The Show About the Show, Season 2 (2019)
The first season of The Show About the Show was one of the great gems of the "Peak TV" era, a gonzo, hilarious experiment in self-reflexivity with a legitimate edge to it. I suppose it was only natural that a show as recursive as this one would eventually fold into itself and become not about the show itself but the people who make the show, and that's exactly what happens in this season, which essentially becomes a video diary of how Caveh Zahedi's commitment to the show has more or less destroyed his life. The show still has that same live-wire energy and compellingly playful unpredictability as its first season, but it's also excruciating and legitimately uncomfortable to see Caveh just dive into suffering with the abandon he does here. As this season shows, the central conceit of having real-life people recreate the ways in which they have interacted with the show creates a feedback loop that can end in nothing but chaos—interactions that, under normal circumstances, may have been tense but ultimately have dissipated with time become scabs that the show's recreations pick at and pick at until they become infected and even gangrenous. Added to this is the fact that the show now seems much less self-reflexive of its own limitations than it was in its first season; we are stuck in Caveh's point of view as he narrates his own memories, and while the first season did some work to explore the unreliability of this POV, the second season allows for no windows out of this solipsistic, at times genuinely sociopathic perspective, which renders central figures like Caveh's wife sort of incomprehensible as real people, either because Caveh chooses to portray them in fractured, illogical ways or because he doesn't understand these people himself. It's kind of horrific and monstrously sad. The first season was fun; this one is just kind of miserable, and while it's no less fascinating than its first season, I can't get too enthusiastic about this one. Grade: B

Music

Grimes - Miss Anthropocene (2020)
There's a somewhat muddled concept to Miss Anthropocene that you can explore if you want, but I'll be honest that I really just like the sound of this album. It sounds like what I imagine Visions-era Grimes would sound like if she had the Art Angels-era budget, and the result is a beguiling collection of songs, from the ambitious production of something like the opener, "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth," to the hazy space-pop of "Delete Forever" or "Violence." It's a really solid record, and sure, it lacks some of the punch of Art Angels, but what doesn't? Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for March 2-8, 2020

One week until Spring Break. One week until Spring Break. One week until Spring Break.

Movies

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019)
Céline Sciamma has made several good movies, but this is comfortably my favorite of hers, retroactively one of my top five movies of 2019, and likely the French director's masterpiece (I still haven't seen her debut, Water Lilies). A love story whose deep emotional contours mirror its sonic and visual ones in a way that melds form and narrative more thoroughly and organically than in any other 2019 movie I can remember. It's a swooningly lush aesthetic experience—I could have existed in this movie for hours more; in fact, those painting scenes alone could have lasted years, and I wouldn't have complained. The movie's hushed sound design emphasizes the smallest of details—the scratch of charcoal on canvas, the rustle of a dress, a hand brushing across a sprig of rosemary, a caught breath as one character meets the gaze of another—until they take on an otherworldly richness, and this is precisely the movie in a nutshell: capturing that specific magnetism that compels you to study every detail of someone you love. This is, of course, literalized by the plot itself, which involves a painter scrutinizing her subject for a portrait until this scrutiny blossoms into love, but this story wouldn't hold nearly so much weight without the full alignment of the cinematic style behind this philosophical/emotional thesis. As much as the history of cinema insists upon it, love isn't made of grand gestures; it's the accumulation of the smallest of sensory morsels: her eyebrows when she's upset, the water dripping from her nose as she shivers after an ocean swim; the timbre of her voice as she asks you about love. None of this would register without the film's exquisite quietness, nor would the two moments at which music bursts forth loudly be so powerful: once an ethereal folk song around a campfire, another a famous Vivaldi composition in a concert hall. These two moments occur at the emotional climaxes of the film, and after the silence we've become accustomed to, it's literally dizzying to be swept up in the maximalism of these moments, a cinematic out-of-body experience where the distance between viewer and subject functionally disappears in the same way that the space between painter and lady does in this story: to watch someone this closely means to be enveloped as soon as they gesture toward you. Two become one: viewer to characters, lover to lover. This movie is magical. Grade: A

Dark Waters (2019)
Do not understand at all the tepid response to this movie—it's every bit as paranoid and apocalyptic as Todd Haynes's previous "we're all being poisoned" freakout, Safe. This is definitely a mainstream legal thriller, but it's a cracking one, and while the script occasionally gestures toward the generic (poor, poor Anne Hathaway gets saddled with a completely unironic deployment of the "longsuffering wife" trope), the movie's style is covered with such thick layers of sickening despair that it transforms the film into nothing short of a horror movie. The yellow tint of the cinematography alone is grotesque enough to make you ill, and the VHS footage of cow tumors sees the film's reality practically melt under the evil knowingly perpetrated by DuPont. Our world is a hellscape whose contours were intentionally sculpted by capitalism, and I've seen few movies that capture the sheer malaise of knowing that fact like Dark Waters and its parade of reflections of branded billboards and fluorescent logos on car windows and wet pavement. A waking nightmare of a movie masquerading as a potboiler. Grade: A-

I Was at Home, But... (Ich war zuhause, aber) (2019)
I can't say that I understood this movie. It's a very scattered, often abstractly structured collection of incidents with sometimes only tenuous connections between them, and I couldn't summarize this movie if I tried because it's hard to hold all those incidents up together into a coherent whole. That said, I did find myself connecting pretty strongly to individual moments: a lengthy diatribe of a disgruntled theater-goer to the director of a film she watched; a strikingly tender tableau at a swimming pool; a mother with frayed nerves shouting at her children and then feeling quiet remorse as they leave the room. There's a cock-eyed compassion to the humanity of these little moments, and I guess enough of these moments added up to my feeling pretty positive about the movie as a whole. Grade: B

The Return of the King (1980)
In which Rankin/Bass try to cobble together a sequel to both their adaptation of The Hobbit and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. This movie does a couple of things well. The pre-Ghibli Ghibli folks are still supervising the animation, as they did for The Hobbit, and it leads to some cool character designs (the Witch-King of Angmar looks extremely dope) and of course those water-color backgrounds. I also dig the way this opens with a literal invocation of the muses and then goes on to do a whole bunch of other structural things informed by the tropes of epic poetry, which is interesting and feels in-line with Tolkien's original project. But otherwise, The Return of the King is an extremely dopey adaptation. The music sucks (unless we're going to ironically appreciate the orc-disco, "Where There's a Whip There's a Way") and slows down the pace to a crawl—the first ten minutes of this barely 90-minute movie is just a song recapping the plot of The Hobbit and the first part of Lord of the Rings, and that's not the only time that happens. Even ignoring the pacing issues, the storytelling is extremely haphazard, both as a continuation of the previous movies (if you watched this immediately after Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, you would have no idea how Frodo is suddenly captured inside of Cirith Ungol and Samwise is now the ringbearer, since it skips the whole Shelob thing in favor of starting immediately where Tolkien's book does) as well as a movie unto itself (one character has to very hastily explain who Éowyn is like thirty seconds before she kills the Witch-King because apparently the movie couldn't be bothered to introduce her earlier—like couldn't we have skipped one of the musical sequences to have her show up just once before she becomes crucial to the plot?). And with all respect to my soon-to-be Ghibli bros, outside of the cool bits, the animation is pretty lousy, too, somehow more technically accomplished than the previous two movies while looking several magnitudes dumber. It's not like the other animated Tolkien adaptations of this period were sterling masterpieces or anything, but they both had a kind of striking ambition to them, whereas this is just a muddled mess. Definitely the worst of the loose trilogy. Grade: C-

Snoopy, Come Home (1972)
This is the first Peanuts feature-length movie I've seen, and if this is any indication, the gang probably should have stuck to half-hour TV specials if they were going to venture from the funny pages at all. This movie is clearly padded, which leads to some fun, weird moments that might not have happened otherwise (Snoopy has a trippy dream sequence for no real reason, which is both incongruous for Peanuts but also charming), but it also leads to a lot of boring, overlong sequences without a ton happening—I don't know where my tipping point was, but I definitely got tired of the musical sequences, for example. There are some bright patches of classic Peanuts bleakness (Charlie Brown, after throwing a rock into a pond: "Everything I do makes me feel guilty"), but this is slack enough that I'd much rather be watching one of the specials—or really, just reading the comics. Grade: C

The Front Page (1931)
Took me a loooong time to stop the voice in my head that kept asking, "But why are they talking so slowly??"—my experience with this movie was definitely hurt by this movie not being its remake, His Girl Friday, and this version's marriage plot is definitely hurt by the fact that the lovers aren't working together in the newsroom (compare Peggy, sidelined for long sections of the film, to the constant, blistering back and forth between Hildy and Walter). But not all movies can be the greatest (and fastest) American comedy of all time, and so I finally was able to force myself to watch this movie on its own terms. It's got some pretty interesting editing, and the part where Hildy is walking out of the newsroom and shouts, "See ya later, you wage slaves!" made me laugh pretty hard. But on the whole, it's a much darker and more serious movie than His Girl Friday (as is, presumably, the original play on which this all is based), which is sometimes to its benefit: the pathological compulsion of these journalists stings a bit more than in His Girl Friday, and we're allowed to wallow in the ugliness and collateral damage a bit more, I guess that's a decent-enough substitute for the characters not acting at an amphetamine pace for the duration of the film. Grade: B

Music

Stevie Wonder - Music of My Mind (1972)
This album is more or less the beginning of Stevie Wonder's legendary run of records in the '70s, so it feels a little petty to complain that this isn't as good as something like Innervisions—like, between 1972 and 1976, Stevie made more great albums than most artists make in a lifetime, so who cares if he has one that's not quite great when it is still very good? Music of My Mind is very good. There are bum tracks ("Superwoman" isn't too great, and it makes up 1/6 of the album!), but there's gold, too: "Love Having You Around" is a stomping opener, "Keep on Running" is a terrific little groove, "Evil" is a soulful gospel finale. Plus, the album has some of the hippest use of the Moog synthesizer in pop history. And even if the record only hits a double as opposed to a home run, it's still kind of thrilling to know that this is the beginning of Stevie Wonderful, maestro. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for February 24 - March 1, 2020

March is here. Please go away, winter. You've never been welcome, but your lease is up now.

Movies

Knives Out (2019)
Not sure why the movie farts around for half an hour as an Agatha Christie parody when it is, for most of its runtime, more in line with something Alfred Hitchcock might have done. Knives Out is a lumpily structured movie, and there are several moments when you can practically hear the movie's gears grinding as it delivers one of its several left turns. The tremendous cast is also pretty inconsistently utilized, too, especially Jamie Lee Curtis and Don Johnson, who are given such a vibrant showcase in the opening Agatha Christie section before becoming essentially irrelevant for the next 90 minutes as the movie takes its true form as a Craig/Evans/de Armas show. Yet that said—what a show, you know? It's really easy to list off this movie's flaws, but it's just as easy to forgive them, because everything after the movie's first reveal (i.e. the shift from Christie to Hitchcock) is such a delight on a moment-by-moment basis. Sometimes people talk about movies that are fun to watch being "effortless," and that's certainly not the case for Knives Out, which goes out of its way to highlight all the work that went into its cleverness—in the typical mystery/thriller manner, it explains multiple times the motivations and timelines central to its plot, and the loopy dialogue really underlines its sharp turns of phrase. Usually I would dock a movie for this kind of showiness, except that I must invoke the Fun Principle here: I just had a great time, y'all. That Daniel Craig accent? That nasty, nasty Chris Evans character? That Ana de Armas sweetness? That breezy plotting that keeps the movie galloping along unfailingly through 130 minutes and several tonal shifts? *chef kiss* The same goes for its thematic ambitions, which aren't particularly complex but that I found cathartic regardless: as much as I think the movie could have given a lot more complexity to its thoughts on class/immigration, it's hard not to cheer at the final minute. This is just a really great confection. Grade:B+

Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
Deeply delightful in a way I was not expecting. I was ready for a silly adventure and some fun Hanks/Ryan chemistry; I was NOT ready for a Brazil-esque satire of capitalism, nor an occasionally profound reflection on existentialism, both of which Joe Versus the Volcano also is. I was DEFINITELY NOT ready for Meg Ryan in this movie, who plays her three roles with more vim and careening recklessness than I've ever seen in a Ryan performance—hilarious, wonderfully unhinged, and also strikingly sad at times, too, and I'm prepared to die on the hill that this movie is the best she's ever been. The movie would be a total masterpiece if it didn't lose itself somewhat once it arrives at the titular volcano, but given the trifle I was expecting, I can forgive the shaky landing when the experience is so rich otherwise. Grade: A-

Son of the White Mare (Fehérlófia) (1981)
This was something of a feat to track down, but I'm glad that I did, because it's absolutely incredible. Probably the most consistently visually inventive animated movie I've ever seen—imagine that poster in motion, for the entire movie; there's never a moment where something new or dazzling isn't happening onscreen, and for as much as the aesthetic of this movie is unified, every motion of every character is a wonderful surprise. On a plotting level, it's also the most purely folkloric movie I've ever seen, maintaining the iterative repetition and completely slippery sense of reality that a lot of world mythology has. How cool is this kind of European mythology, too? It's a real shame that Greek/Roman mythology casts such a long shadow over Europe's collective identity, given that Greek/Roman is one of the worst mythologies qua mythology, overcooked and schematic as it is. Gimme that weird, primal Central Europe stuff (but not in a white-supremacist way, pleaseandthankyou). Grade: A

Belladonna of Sadness (哀しみのベラドンナ) (1973)
I found this to be pretty gross, tbh—specifically for the way it constantly conflates scenes of sexual violence with eroticism. The movie gestures toward nominally feminist ideas, but it seems completely unlikely to me that anything but horniness was in the driver's seat here, which is troubling, given the subject matter. The ending connecting the story to the French Revolution is mega-dumb, too. And yet, I would be lying if I said I was into animation for anything other than the art style, and Belladonna of Sadness has that by the ton. Its art nouveau + psychedelia + watercolors aesthetic is frequently stunning, and there are at least two sequences (the introduction of the Black Plague and the village orgy) that rank among the coolest animated scenes I've ever seen. The acid-prog score really works for me, too. I just wish I weren't so repulsed by most of what happens. Grade: C+

Ten Nights in a Barroom (1926)
Decently engaging on a moment-by-moment basis, though like a lot of moral parables of the time, some of the connective tissue between the big setpieces feels a little thin. Also, it's pretty messed up that the movie basically says that God killed a little girl so her father could learn his lesson and become mayor. The Lord works in mysteriously violent ways, I suppose. Grade: C+






Music

Janet Jackson - Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989)
If there's a ground zero for the 21st-century conception of a blockbuster pop album, Rhythm Nation 1814 is almost certainly it. A genre-blending style unified by a social consciousness and a deep dancefloor sensibility; a blurred line between producer and artist; there was even a tie-in short film that aired on MTV (surely 1989's YouTube). Sure, pieces of this all existed before—many pioneered by Janet's brother Michael—but this is where it all came together. It's astonishingly forward-thinking. Oh, and it straight-up rules. Like a lot of modern pop albums, it's too long, and and like pop albums throughout the ages, it peaks early (very early—"Rhythm Nation," the first proper track after the opening interlude, is 100% the best song here. Some of the interludes are a little slight, too. But otherwise, it's a great time. If you somehow still need encouragement to check out Janet Jackson, here's my endorsement. Grade: A-