Movies
If you've seen any socially conscious working-class drama (or any Ken Loach movie), you basically know exactly where this going from the instant the boss corrects his new hire that "you don't work for us, you work with us" and then lays out all the fees and liabilities involved in his new position as a contract worker. But the inevitability is part of the point; it's a movie that thrives on dramatic irony, as we viewers can see just exactly how these characters are being caged in by the Kafkaesque machinations of specifically 2010s capitalism, but the joke is that even if these characters were as aware as us viewers—and perhaps they are and only trying to fool themselves into buying into the self-made mythology they talk at the movie's beginning—they couldn't do a single thing differently, so thoroughly and absurdly stacked is the deck against workers. A beaten and bloodied character screaming "I have to go to work!" over and over again as his family begs him to stay home and heal should rank up there in the cinematic canon with "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille" as a dissociative rant by someone out of touch with their surroundings, but the horrible truth of our world is that there's nothing out-of-touch about it. Grade: B+
A supremely freaky iteration of that type of movie that seemed to proliferate in the '90s—i.e. dude travels to a remote location, plots twist, reality bends, he questions his insanity, etc. This movie leaves a lot of doors open that similar movies might close, though, and is on the whole a lot looser and less concrete than Carpenter usually shoots for, which contributes to the freakiness. Some of the character work doesn't land for me, but that's kind of secondary to the freakiness. Grade: B+
I spent the majority of the first decade of my life thinking I would probably be an astronaut, and a large portion of my time then was occupied in rapt imagination about the future of space exploration. Landing on the moon is the most inspiring feat of human history, and it was one of the first bitter disappointments of my life to realize that our world had experienced that and then just kind of collectively moved on from it, letting space programs wither; as an adult, it's an even more bitter disappointment to recognize that humanity (and the United States specifically) seems fundamentally incapable of leaving unbroken the promise of the plaque that Apollo 17 left on the moon's surface: "Here man completed his first explorations of the Moon December 1972, A.D. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind." This movie—alongside Brian Eno's absolutely perfect score—is as much an elegy for the collectivist idealism and optimism that undergirded the lunar missions as it is a celebration of those qualities. An achingly beautiful film for a crushingly ephemeral moment. Grade: A+
Boring and insubstantial and, above all, forgettable, which is something you can't say about any of the other Halloween sequels up to this point. I just finished the movie, and I can barely remember the plot. I did kind of love that Dr. Loomis has become this raving madman rushing around yelling at everyone, including children. I guess I probably would do the same thing if I were doomed to be a slasher franchise's Cassandra. Grade: C-
One of the very few movies with an "omg so messed up" legacy that has actually lived up to that reputation for me when I finally got to it. This is truly revolting on a number of levels—watching a live sea turtle for-real hacked to pieces is one experience I could actually go forever without seeing again, and there is no question that the depiction of indigenous people is deeply racist in its trafficking of "primitive" stereotypes—to say nothing of alllll the rape in the movie. At the same time, though, this movie also presents maybe the most intense and dedicated criticism of colonialism I've ever seen in a movie not written and/or directed by a person of color, and by the time our protagonist delivers his laughably on-the-nose final line (it is, I kid you not, "Who are the real cannibals?"—makes ya think), it's brutally apparent that the movie's title carries a simultaneously clever and sick double meaning. I guess the argument here is that the abject sadism of colonialism could only be communicated with integrity to white Western audiences through a vehicle as grotesque and loathsome as this movie is, which I respect in theory but probably would respect a lot more if this movie felt as if at least one of the dozens of indigenous people in the cast had been asked for their input during its filming. But good lord, the results. Will not forget some of these images any time soon. Grade: C+
Sales pitches make me intensely uncomfortable, and the commodifying of religious belief is one of the most unsavory things ever to me. So I spent a good portion of this movie—a documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen—in intense discomfort. But it's great. Salesman is the story of 20th century Christianity in microcosm, while also being a cinéma vérité counterpart to Miller's Death of a Salesman. It's also, for all its squirm-inducing tension, quite funny, too. Grade: A
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