Movies
A lightly sci-fi western set in Brazil. A movie split in two between a "realistic" half and a "Hollywood" half. The first half of the movie is one of the best naturalistic social dramas I've seen in a while, depicting the culture of this village in rural Brazil with a vibrancy that's mesmerizing—in particular, a funeral procession is probably my favorite movie scene of the year so far. The second half of the movie, when it becomes much more self-consciously mannered, works considerably less well for me; while I can't claim to know much about the sociopolitical situation in Brazil besides very broad strokes re: Bolsonaro, etc., unless I'm missing some nuance (very possible), this movie's back half basically just boils down to a message about as nuanced as Ready or Not's assertion that rich people suck, only this time about Western colonialism. And as with Ready or Not, I've got to hand it to Bacurau that Western colonialism does suck. But I do wish the second half of the movie had been as lush as the first half. Still, don't let my reservations hold you back; it's a very solid, conceptually bold movie taken as a whole, one of the better new ones I've seen from this very, very weird cinematic year. Grade: B+
A ridiculously charming zombie movie in three parts, the second and third of which I really don't want to spoil, because that's part of the fun. Just know that the first part is a single-take zombie short film that's both impressive and also endearingly sloppy in parts, reminiscent of the kind of low-budget zombie flick you might have gotten out of Italy or the American video market in the early '80s. As for the rest, like I said, I won't spoil the next two parts; but I will say that they get increasingly meta in increasingly delightful ways, up to a final thirty minutes that are a hilarious and deliriously sweet take on filmmaking itself—as evocative of my own memories making dumb little videos with my friends in high school as of the zombie tropes it's connected to. It's super fun, and the only thing that's knocking it down even a little bit for me is that the middle part leans a little too heavily on broadly comedic characterizations. Otherwise, this is great. Grade: A-
I almost turned this off in the first five minutes because it was so upsetting—I almost never do that, but hearing 9-11 calls from the elementary school shooting in Newtown is a punishingly difficult gauntlet to throw down in your movie's opening minutes. The rest of this documentary isn't nearly so visceral, focusing as it does on the aftermath of the shooting and how the survivors deal with the grief and activism in its wake, but on a philosophical level, there's something just as upsetting about the way that our country collectively shrugged off any responsibility toward the victims of its own criminally negligent approach to gun violence; the burden of grief was laid entirely on the people of Newtown itself, just as the burden of safety in the aftermath of this (and any number of other school shootings) was laid entirely on the nation's individual schools. I have to sit in meetings at the school where I teach in which the cops come and tell us the most effective way to throw a textbook at a shooter to stop him; I would bet money that U.S. Senators don't have to do that same training. As a documentary, Newtown is content just to skim the surface of its own format and subject matter, but as a thinkpiece on the implications of probably the most capricious and incomprehensibly bleak tragedies of my lifetime to happen within the United States, it's urgent. Grade: B
Like Fort Maria, the other Thom Southerland-directed feature I've seen, Proud Citizen is a warm, loose movie centered around a Linklater-esque sense of time and an excellent Katerina Stoykova performance. This time, she's a Bulgarian playwright whose play has won second place in a contest, which earns her a trip to Lexington, Kentucky, to see her play performed by a local theater (the winning playwright got to go to NYC, which is kind of hilarious). There's a Lost in Translation-ish quality to this movie, wherein Stoykova feels alienated by a city and culture she's unfamiliar with, and in addition to the sweetness of this movie's well-observed moments, on a macro level Proud Citizen does a better job than any other movie I've seen of showing just how inherently inhospitable the modern American city is with its wide highways and underpopulated urban spaces. Down with urban sprawl, up with sensitive Bulgarian playwrights finding unlikely companionship with tour bus guides. Weird observation, though: from this movie, I learned that Lexington has the exact same trolley buses as Knoxville does, which gave me a disorienting moment where I was like, "Wait, are they filming in Knoxville?" Grade: B+
Even at just 90 minutes, this movie feels stretched thin. But the basic concept of turning the archetypal '80s action hero into basically what they always were (psychopaths) is a solid one, and there are some great jokes sprinkled in here and there—got a good chuckle out of MacGruber driving around bumping yacht rock from his car stereo and a genuinely gigantic chuckle out of the sex scene(s). Shooting from the hip here with this opinion, but those sex scenes are probably the best sex scenes in cinema history. Grade: B-
The combination of Mike Newell's pedestrian direction and the strong Pacino performance comes this close to having this movie reach a kind of Sopranos-esque mob picture that finds organized crime trapped within the same mundane forces of late-20th-century modernity that make us all miserable: the scene where Pacino is trying to break open a parking meter feels deeply significant. But then again, Mike Newell's pedestrian direction is, well, pedestrian, and anything that isn't the relationship between Pacino and Depp feels thin and tropey (especially all the material between Depp and his character's wife, which... oh boy), and the whole thing becomes just mundane and dull instead of interestingly mundane. I wasn't expecting a ton out of this movie to begin with, but it barely made the minimum of what I was expecting. Grade: C+
Legitimately love the idea of Bergman sitting down after making Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage—possibly his two most bracing explorations of human misery—and deciding to make this: as exuberantly joyful as those previous two are lacerating. It's just such a sweet movie; Sven Nykvist, who shot Cries and Whispers in all its brilliant hues, delivers some truly astonishing cinematography here, transforming the theater stage into a Méliès-esque fantasy, and the directorial surrogate of the enraptured little girl in the audience of the theater (Bergman apparently saw The Magic Flute performed as a child and loved it) is one of the most purely innocent gestures in all of Bergman's movies. The whole thing is also up there with Persona and The Passion of Anna as the most formally radical movie he ever made; Bergman is occasionally criticized (fairly at times) for bringing too much of his stage background to his movies, but the fantastical blending of the two mediums here makes hay out of the discontinuities between the two forms, giving this movie an otherworldly aura that feels like something on the level of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Based on this movie's reputation, I was expecting a curiosity, but I got a stone-cold classic. Really blown away by all this. Grade: A
Books
In a way, The Incendiaries is another one of those stories that obsess over cults—it is, after all, about a couple of students at a fictitious East-Coast university who become drawn in to a cult lead by a man who claims to have found God in a North Korean gulag, and it ends with an FBI investigation and everything. But while it's definitely situated within that subgenre, The Incendiaries also reaches far beyond that whole scene entirely with its brutal yet empathetic interrogation of belief, becoming great literature in the process. Kwon's debut novel has this Gatsby-esque precision in which the short novel's plotting progresses in a way that's both masterfully efficient and also incisive to the point of blood-letting prose—evoking great swatches of the human experience through a sequence of experiences very specific to this set of characters. Kwon's prose is gorgeous and understands profoundly the way that loss and faith waltz together through a person's psyche; the novel's principal couple is made up of two deeply wounded people whose opposite trajectories (one having lost faith, the other gaining it) find them meeting in the middle for a few blessed moments of human connection before drifting toward the novel's inevitable tragedy. After Gilead, it's probably the best modern novel I've read about faith. I'm not making that Gatsy comparison lightly; like that book, it's a formally perfect and emotionally rich journey that should be held up as an example of what the medium of the novel is capable of. I'm beyond excited for what Kwon will do next. Grade: A
Music
In her solo venture, Hop Along's Frances Quinlan finds a playful, literate sound that's reminiscent of those mid-2000s ladies like Regina Spektor or Kate Nash, only replacing those artist's baroque tendencies with a kind of indie singer-songwriter sensibility. It's immanently catchy and listenable, and I've probably spent more time with this album than any other record released this year, even though it probably isn't even my favorite of the year so far. Good stuff. Grade: B+
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