Mini Reviews for May 25-31, 2020

One of the absolutely wild things about living in historic times is that you get to see exactly how full of it us white people were when we talked sanctimoniously about the Civil Rights Movement, as if we would have been there marching arm-in-arm with the folks at Selma. Here's what Mr. Golden Boy of peaceful protests, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had to say about riots:

"The policy-makers of the white society have caused the darkness: they created discrimination; they created slums; they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes, but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them, but they do not make them, any more than a prisoner makes a prison.

"Let us say it boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.

"To sum up the general causes of riots, we would have to say that the white power structure is still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality substantially intact while Negro determination to break through them had intensified. The white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting firmly and thus producing chaos because the force for change is vital and aggressive. The irony is that the white society ruefully complains that if there were no chaos great changes would come, yet it creates the circumstances breeding chaos."

A riot is an uprising, and to not at least sympathize with its members means you're going to have to come to grips with the fact that maybe you don't agree with its causes either. What do we actually value here, y'all: black lives or property? Radical change, or the oppressive status quo? Anyway, here are some reviews, if you want that. It feels kind of crass to post about movies right now, but here they are.

Movies

The Invisible Man (2020)
Probably my favorite film adaptation of The Invisible Man yet and also probably the best 2020 movie I've seen so far (as small a pool as that is). H. G. Wells's original novel (as well as the 1933 James Whale adaptation) works under the idea that the process of becoming invisible is what makes the titular man criminally insane, whereas this movie does basically the opposite, having him demonstrably malicious and abusive prior to any invisibility. With that change, as well as grounding the story not in the invisible man's perspective or that of a bystander (as the novel does) but rather in a victim of the invisible man's terror (Elizabeth Moss, great as usually), this movie makes the invisibility both a more frightening threat and also a cannier metaphor: the way that the strong and charismatic wield their power to make their abuses invisible to even their victims. People who worked under Steve Jobs talked about the "reality-distortion field" of his (extremely awful) personality, and I'd like to think that this movie's invisibility suit is a literalization of that phenomenon. The movie is clearly rich with ideas about gender, but in tandem with that, I think it also works really well as a mirror to the celebrity titans of the cult of Big Tech. Grade: A-

She Hate Me (2004)
Give or take Bamboozled, this is probably the beginning of Spike Lee's "outsider" period in earnest, and straightforwardly, it's not hard to see why. This film was a box office disaster, and on a conventional metric, it does not work at all—not just because it has the usual Spike Lee feature of feeling like a dozen movies crammed into one but also because a few of those movies crammed in here are questionable to the max. A bunch of lesbian couples pay $10,000 so they can get pregnant the "natural" way with Anthony Mackie? Anthony Mackie learns how to overcome his homophobia and reconcile with his ex-fiancé by having sex with a bunch of lesbians?  Anthony Mackie, despite having signed away all his parental rights, becomes the present father to all the children he sired for the lesbian couples because children need a father or something like that? Oof, my dude. Big oof. But this is also the kind of movie that's impossible for me to dismiss. There's the pharmaceutical plot where insider trading dooms a potential AIDS vaccine; the (somewhat disconnected) story of Frank Wills and Watergate; the interrogation of the use of black bodies as conduits for capitalism. It's a weird, wild stew of ideas that is compelling as often as it is misfired and offensive. Most of this, even the wacky stuff I mentioned earlier, works in that "earnest satire" mode that Spike Lee also goes to in Chi-Raq and Bamboozled, and like those movies, as flawed as this movie is, there's a bleeding-edge urgency to what it's ultimately about: the fundamental lie of upward mobility within a capitalist system premised on the exploitation of those promised mobility, chiefly black men. It's unfortunate that this thesis is inextricably linked to the honestly kind of loathsome misogyny and homophobia of the lesbian fertility plot, because that dooms what is otherwise one of Lee's more interesting experiments to the realm of just "failed experiment." Honestly, though, the only thing that feels truly out-of-place are the critiques of the Bush 43 presidency, as if these problems would somehow go away without George W. at the helm. Kind of makes me wonder how the Trump parts of BlacKkKlansmen will feel in a decade or two. Grade: C+

Final Destination 2 (2003)
An improvement over the original if only for the reason that it completely jettisons any pretensions of being serious. Final Destination 2 is way more overtly silly than its predecessor, which is good, because that silliness is precisely what I was hoping for out of these movies. There's a real impishness to the death setpieces here, often setting up an obvious method of death for its hapless characters before juking in ridiculous ways into a completely different death at the last minute, and it's honestly some Keaton-esque slapstick genius at its best. Call me sadistic, but I just want to watch a movie where a guy wins the lottery, uses that money to buy a gigantic gold wristwatch and ring, drops that ring into a garbage disposal while cooking frozen fish sticks on the stovetop, gets his hand stuck in the disposal trying to fish out the ring on account of the gigantic gold wristwatch, watches as the grease he's cooking the fish sticks in catches on fire, flicks a rag at the burning pan until it falls off the stove and the apartment catches on fire, finally gets his hand out of the disposal and runs down the fire escape, finds that the ladder to the ground had gotten jammed, falls the remaining dozen feet down to the ground and lands on his back, sees his building explode and knock the ladder loose, and then ends up impaled through the head by the falling ladder. The parts of the movie that aren't ridiculous death traps are okay, I guess, though there's more mythology to the "you cheated Death, now Death is out to get you!" stuff than I'd like. Grade: B+

Outbreak (1995)
It's a serious social epic about a viral outbreak, but surprise! the last twenty minutes involve a helicopter chase, and the twenty minutes before that are about Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr. joyriding in military equipment (among them: a helicopter—lotso helicopters here, boys) to find a single monkey in a forest. Outbreak has too many pretensions of "realism" to be dumb fun, and it's too silly to ever have a hope of working as realism. The result is a movie that can't be enjoyed on any of the terms it's laid out for itself. It's also interesting to compare this pandemic to the one we're currently experiencing, most notably how little of the bureaucratic failure that exacerbated COVID-19 in real life is present here, while there is 100% more monkey theft to blame in this movie. Grade: C+

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
It only really has a few jokes, which quickly wear thin, and I was pretty bored by the end. There basically isn't much more here than two Mike Myers sketch-comedy-esque characters doing their shtick for 90 minutes. I did legitimately love the stuff between Dr. Evil and his son, though (Dr. Evil's monologue about his childhood in the group therapy scene is without a doubt the best minute of the movie), and even if I don't think Myer's performance in the titular role is all that funny, it's endearingly enthusiastic in a way that almost makes up for that. And as a movie comedy, this whole thing feels delightfully out-of-time—funny that a '90s movie making fun of '60s movies feels neither like a '90s movie nor a '60s movie. Grade: C+

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
It peaks early with the police car on the roller coaster and then the scene with O.J.'s escalating pratfalls after getting shot. The rest of the movie has its ups and downs, the downs usually having to do with gags playing out just a tad too long (that and whatever mileage you get out of some of the racial humor, e.g. the opening scene). The highs, though, are some solid Zucker-Abrams-Zucker gems, and I'm just a sucker for this kind of deadpan silliness, especially when focused on deflating the self-aggrandizement of the modern police procedural: "You killed five actors.... good ones!" Leslie Nielsen, my boy. Grade: B




Television

Bob's Burgers, Season 10 (2019-2020)
I feel like I say the same thing every time I review a season of Bob's Burgers, which is that the show is still great, firing on all cylinders. The grade only really fluctuates as a function of my mood on the morning I write the review. So anyway, Season 10 is no different, and it includes at least one all-time-great episode, "Poops!... I Didn't Do It Again." One of the consistently great things about Bob's Burgers is its ability to find the universal human experience minutia either too small or too embarrassing to be explored on TV and then devote an entire episode to it, and this one takes the cake: Louise (and Bob) must confront their difficulty with pooping in unfamiliar locations. I felt that. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for May 18-24, 2020

Quarantine, Week 10: Are we even doing quarantine anymore?

Movies

Emma. (2020)
I'm very excited that Jane Austen adaptations now seem to be interested in reclaiming just how acerbic and funny Austen is. I have a few reservations about how Emma. maybe tries a little too hard on some of its comedic moments (it's kind of weird to see these choreographed bits of mini-slapstick like people's heads turning toward someone in perfect sync), but I'd much, much, much rather see a movie overreach in that department than to commit to the over-starched piety of, like, Masterpiece Theatre. And anyway, the cast is pretty much perfect (Mia Goth and Anya Taylor-Joy in particular, who are as attuned to Austen's sensibilities as I've ever seen screen actresses), and the costumes and sets are to die for. Would happily see Autumn de Wilde take on Austen's whole body of work. Grade: A-

The Case for Christ (2017)
I went into this ready to dunk on the ideas, since I assumed this was going to be the usual Pure Flix grandstanding; the single-minded obsession within Christian apologetics on proving factual and historical claims about the Bible (an obsession for which Lee Strobel is the poster child) is at best a red herring for the Christian faith (and usually animated by fringe methodology at that), as misguided and simplistic an engagement with faith as the atheist practice of attempting to tear the faith down with a mountain of nitpicks and rigidly literal readings of scripture. As a Christian, I find it deeply alienating to see the beautiful, profound richness of my experiences and beliefs reduced merely to a checklist of factual claims. But then this movie turned out to be something of a biopic of Strobel himself, and since I think it's pretty gauche to ridicule someone's sincere faith journey, I'm deciding to review The Case for Christ as a character study/biopic (though as anyone who has read Strobel's mega-best-selling book of the same name would expect, the traditional biopic stuff is occasionally interrupted by the usual apologetics didacticism). So anyway, on that metric, this still isn't good: underwritten, overwrought, thinly intellectualized. The whole dramatic exigency for the plot is (as in real life) that the then-atheist Strobel (played passionately by a generally pretty good Mike Vogel) feels alienated by his wife's conversion to Evangelical Christianity, and relative to other Pure Flix movies (a generous curve if there ever was one), Strobel's status as a skeptic is treated with some dignity and sophistication—you know, he doesn't get hit by a car and convert with his dying breath or anything like that. But the movie does so little to dramatize why his wife's conversion is such a crisis that most of the movie is sapped of urgency. At one point, Strobel tells his wife that he doesn't recognize her anymore now that she's a Christian, yet the wife (played respectably by Erika Christensen) is written so weakly that it was hard for me to understand what exactly has changed about her. The movie simply assures us, by Strobel's reaction, that she has changed, without allowing much room for demonstration, and a lot of what we see of this relationship operates on the same dynamic, where we basically just see one side of a conflict (Strobel's), which, without the other side to react against, feels more hypothetical than material. And that's before the movie completely invalidates the relative sensitivity it's given to Strobel's journey of skepticism by trotting out the patently ridiculous claim (delivered by an incongruous Faye Dunaway cameo??) that the reason why Strobel can't accept Christianity is that he hates his own father—even more ridiculous because, from what I remember, that claim is never made in Strobel's own book. I'll give the movie this: it's surprisingly more competent than usual for a movie proudly bearing that Pure Flix banner—gone is the brittle "I just learned how this camera thing works" cinematography of the God's Not Dead movies, as well as the TV-movie-style flatness of Little Women; The Case for Christ looks like an honest-to-god professional product, not infrequently capable of producing some pretty nice combinations of image and sound. What tension does emerge from Strobel's struggle with the Christian faith in this movie I credit to the cinematic style (and Vogel's performance, which, as I mentioned earlier, is quite good). But to call something "better than a normal Pure Flix movie" is damning with the faintest praise I can imagine, and this is still pretty much garbage. I do think it's kind of hilarious that the movie prominently features a subplot that shows Strobel not being a very good journalist (his faulty investigative work gets a man wrongfully convicted—this happened in real life, too!) and then has the legitimacy for the titular "case for Christ" lean heavily on Strobel's skills as a journalist. I guess a movie that already dunks on itself didn't need me to dunk on its ideas after all. Grade: C-

Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)
Less overtly experimental than some of Morrison's other work, but that seems to bother me less than it does others. The images of recovered footage from the Dawson Film Find set to Alex Somer's music are unspeakably beautiful, and the first half of the movie, where we see the horrors and triumphs of trying to build a society from scratch on land stolen from indigenous people, is 100% my catnip. The second half of the movie is considerably less engaging, both because the story of Dawson City in the 20th century is less interesting to me and also because the archival footage used becomes a lot more prosaic. Nevertheless, there's a poignancy to the entire project that the movie never loses: watching the sweat of human endeavor pillaged by the robber baron Time, people's life work and livelihood unable to escape the ephemerality that faces all existence. It is legitimately depressing how short the memory of the American frontier is—most of the events of this movie occurred within the last 125 years and were scrupulously documented, and in the end, it's still all just rubble children are pulling out of the ground and setting on fire for fun in the 1970s. And that's saying nothing of the erasure of Native American life, an erasure even this movie feels a little complicit in. Grade: B+

Black Snake Moan (2006)
I remember Craig Brewer being a very hot commodity in the greater Memphis area when he first broke out into the (semi) mainstream, and even though neither of the movies I've seen of his are what I would call completely "good," I get it; there aren't a lot of movies about Memphis, and there are even fewer movies about the rural Midsouth directly surrounding Memphis, and both Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan have a real sense of local pride and attention to detail to them that reminds me of John Waters with Baltimore or Spike Lee with Brooklyn. As someone who spent a good chunk of his life in and around Memphis, I gotta say that it's inspiring. But man, what a weird, weird movie. When it works, it really works: Samuel L. Jackson playing the blues during a thunderstorm? The whole club scene where everybody is just losing themselves in the music? Transcendent. Probably better than any other movie on the subject that I've seen, this one understands the religious undercurrents of the blues, and at its best, the film becomes a kind of out-there ecstatic folk tale about the intersection of trauma and faith and music. But then you have the other 75% of the movie, in which Samuel L. chains Christina Ricci to a radiator to cure her of sex addiction, and like... I don't think that's how sex addiction works? And there are a thousand questionable moments that grow from that premise, particularly in the opening half hour establishing Ricci and Jackson's characters and the abundance of patriarchal and virgin/whore tropes in it. There are some moments of pure gold that I would love to bottle in isolation, but taken as a whole, oof. Grade: C

Hamburger Hill (1987)
I don't think I've seen an American war movie as fixated on tedium as this one is. The movie has exactly two types of scenes: 1. the boys sitting around some corner of the jungle in Vietnam squabbling and cracking wise (they're usually joking about hooking up with Vietnamese women, and sometimes they actually do just that), and 2. the boys trying to take the titular hill and one-by-one getting unceremoniously destroyed in the carnage. Neither mode is particularly engaging; the former is mundane and boilerplate "men at war" banter, while the latter is numbingly violent pandemonium. And they repeat, one after the other. They boys are bantering; the boys are being killed; the boys are bantering again; the boys are being killed. Over and over and over again: the relentless pointlessness of war (and particularly the Vietnam War) literalized by a directionless movie. It's not an art film or Slow Cinema—it's just a more-or-less mainstream American film set on a droning and endless loop, which honestly makes it one of the more philosophically coherent and structurally interesting anti-war movies I've seen, and the repetitive minimalism of Philip Glass's (criminally underused, imo) score is a perfect parallel to that structure. Unfortunately, though, the structure is the only thing that's interesting about it. I know this is The Point, but man, was I bored and unengaged in any of this. Grade: B-

Tampopo (タンポポ) (1985)
For a movie that consciously lampoons so many established movie genres (including most prominently the Hollywood Melodrama and Western), Tampopo isn't really like any movie I've ever seen, in that you have a main plot—a lady is helped by a scrappy band of outsiders to make amazing ramen—orbited by a bunch of wildly divergent and usually completely unrelated subplots and vignettes. It's like a dumpling in which the dough is a semi-parodic inspirational sports movie (complete with a training montage of ramen cooking!) and the filling is an anthology film. It's a weird combination that for the most part works; anything negative I have to say about the movie is mostly the stock criticism of any anthology film, which is that the various sections are kind of uneven, and a few flat-out don't work for me—e.g. the vignette where a guy gets a gangrenous tooth removed from his mouth and then enjoys an ice cream cone with a sweet li'l kid, as well as the last vignette with the recurring newlywed couple characters, where the husband's dying words are a recipe for making yam sausage out of the half-digested contents of a boar's intestines. On that note, I'm impressed by how unafraid this movie is to just dive right into some pretty gross territory, too, and swish it around confusingly with eroticism and sensuality, like when the same newlywed couple, in what appears to be a sex-game version of hot potato, pass a raw egg yoke between their mouths until it breaks (when one of them comes?), or the really, really nasty bit where a guy discovers that raw oysters taste better with human blood (I'll take his word for it) after he cuts his mouth on the oyster shell, so he just laps blood and oyster mucus out of this lady's hand. Humans are pretty much just sacks of fluid, and eating is just the process of making food squishy and slimy enough to slide down our throats into our bellies, where it all becomes more fluid in our fluid sacks; it's a real feat that this movie is able to be completely transparent about that reality while also unambiguously and successfully celebrating the sensual joy of food. Gonna have to pass on the egg foreplay, though. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for May 11-17, 2020

Quarantine, Week 9: I guess we technically aren't quarantined anymore. Fingers crossed, Tennessee.

Movies

Western Stars (2019)
It wouldn't be unfair to call this a vanity project: Bruce Springsteen (co)directing himself though footage of live performances of material from his most recent album, interspersed with Springsteen giving little homilies about the music over car-commercial cinematography. But Springsteen's earnestness remains irresistible to me (he's probably my favorite living musical artist), and the live arrangements do a fantastic job of highlighting just what a thoughtful and lovely collection of songs the album Western Stars is—probably Springsteen's most poetic work since Nebraska, and "Hello Sunshine" in particular would not be out-of-place ranked among his all-time best songs. Also, the decision to end the set with "Rhinestone Cowboy" reminds me a lot of Sufjan Stevens ending his Carrie & Lowell concerts with "Hotline Bling": a gesture that seems hair-brained on paper but makes a shocking amount of sense in practice. Grade: B

Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2019)
I have a lot of the same problems with Capital in the Twenty-First Century that I had with 13th when it first came out: namely, that its perpetual montage sacrifices depth for breadth and bends toward generalizations over specific information. In the years since, 13th has had a lot more legs with audiences than I would have guessed initially, though, and I'd hazard this is entirely due to DuVernay's masterful control over the images and editing of her film, which weaponize its cuts and imagery in service of a rich depth of cultural mythology and emotional weight that both recalls and rivals the triumphs of Eisenstein and Vertov a century prior. The same, I'm afraid, can't be said for Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Director Justin Pemberton has little of the formal mastery of DuVernay, and the movie struggles to leverage its parade of images efficiently enough to enrich its thesis about the history of wealth inequality and capital over the past four centuries of Western history—and in fact, Permberton is at a fundamental disadvantage here, since media and image are far less central to the story it's telling than they are to the history of race and incarceration that DuVernay is interested in. So you're left with a movie that feels kind of cheap and scattershot in its attempt to convey this grand historical narrative. What's worse, this historical narrative feels compromised significantly, either by time constraints (I get that this is trying to condense things for a general audience, but 400 years in 100 minutes is a tall task) or ideological ones (what on earth is Francis Fukuyama doing in a semi-critical history of capitalism and neoliberalism?). I'm not, like, super well-read in leftist theory and history, but it seems like academic malpractice to ignore entirely the influence that the Cold War and anti-colonial victories in the "third world" had on capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries—the Civil Rights movement (and its backlash's role in dismantling America's social safety net) is less than a footnote here, and the only mention we get of the Soviet Union is in the opening minutes of the film describing the nation's collapse and the rise of capitalism as the main economic ideology in the world, opening minutes whose presence seems entirely to be predicated on assuring the audience that don't worry, this isn't a communist film. Which, like, okay, whatever. I would settle for now for a progressive tax system resembling that of post-war America, as this movie advocates. But come on, this movie acts like there's no other possible solution. I do think that, like 13th, this movie could possibly be useful as an introduction for people who are already sympathetic but not quite converted to its general stance, but man, is the overall package a lot thinner than 13th's. Does anyone know if the book is better? Grade: C

Final Destination (2000)
I kind of wish we could see a movie with this premise go just a bit more gonzo with it—like, if we're going to make Rube Goldberg machines to kill off the characters in a movie, let's go for it, you know? But accepting that it's never going to be more than just moderately energetic with its ideas, it's pretty entertaining. There's a fascinating tension in the movie where we're both rooting for Death to succeed in killing the characters in these (somewhat) ludicrous chain reactions while also rooting for the characters to escape, not because we care for their lives (these are some pretty indifferently composed characters—by design, probably) but because the act of out-maneuvering the death traps makes those death traps more interesting. That's honestly the effective (if not intentional) tension of most teen slasher movies, so kudos for the meta flourish of making it the actual text of this movie. Also kudos for having the movie tip its hand in its final shot: after a lot of hemming and hawing, this ends definitively as a comedy, which seems just about right for the devilishly playful grin hiding behind the po-faced suspense of a lot of the film. Grade: B

Popeye (1980)
What a completely wild experiment. You could describe a lot of movies as "a live-action cartoon," but very few of them are trying to be a specific cartoon. By golly, though, Popeye is, and it succeeds to a mind-boggling extent. This is probably as close as is humanly possible to recreating a Popeye cartoon in live action, and it's kind of a wonder to behold. Absolutely all of the great things about this movie come from that project: Robin Williams's performance as Popeye has a stunning amount of fidelity to the cartoon character, the practical effects bringing cartoon slapstick to life in the "real" world are tons of fun, and I don't think there's ever been an actor in the history of cinema as genetically and dispositionally perfect for a role as Shelley Duvall is for Olive Oyl. So for all that, I salute this movie. But the rest is kind of exhausting and terrible. The songs, written by Harry Nilsson, are dreadful—though that's maybe part of the joke, because they're exactly in the spirit of the songs in old cartoons. But there are other things that are certainly not a joke: the movie has exactly one trick (it's just like the cartoon!) and has little else to its plot; the pacing is terrible, which shouldn't be a surprise given that the old Popeye cartoons are like ten minutes long and this is pushing two hours; and as it turns out, making real people into actual cartoons is actually pretty grotesque. Can you imagine the out-of-body experience of horror that someone would suffer if they watched this having no knowledge of the cartoons? Nightmare stuff, my dudes. Grade: B-

The Beguiled (1971)
A lot more overtly trashy than Coppola's adaptation, and along with that, a lot funnier, too: the movie begins with Eastwood's Union defector meeting a twelve-year-old girl and declaring her "old enough for kissing" (he then kisses her), which perfectly sets the table for the intersection of horror, smut, and rank hilarity that is this movie's register. It's a fundamentally different movie from Coppola's while at the same time following the same plot almost beat-for-beat, which does a great job of showing just how malleable a text this is. The biggest difference here is the presence of the enslaved Hallie, a character I was ready to cringe at but who proves to be so vital of a force that I'm ready to join the people who claimed her absence as the biggest flaw in Coppola's film. Grade: A-

The Southerner (1945)
This film presents a really weird dynamic wherein the central family is given almost every reason imaginable to leave their sharecropping farm and go work in one of the modern factories in the city instead, up to and including the complete and total destruction of a whole year's crops and the implication that their children will likely die of malnutrition if they stay. But then they choose the farm anyway because of the sheer indominability of Americana spirit and, like, "freedom" (whatever that word means when you're sharecropping), and the movie frames this as optimism rather than self-destruction. I'm not a starving sharecropper during the Depression, so maybe this is just one of those "you had to have been there" moments, but it is very dissonant to me. The movie is good overall, though! It is a genuinely moving tale of hardship and human connection, directed beautifully by none other than Jean Renoir, and I could have probably watched the big wedding sequence for hours. And for as much as I raise my eyebrows at the (misplaced?) optimism, the movie is a lot more complex than I indicated earlier. There are times when it shows a fairly sharp picture of the functional dead-end "choice" offered to someone like the central family who doesn't own property: either be exploited on a sharecropping farm or be exploited in a factory—and once you do scrape together enough to own a piece of land (as the family's neighbor does here), you operate under a perception of scarcity, where you fight tooth-and-nail to keep anyone else from being able to do the same as you and encroach on your piece of the pie. The American Dream, baby! Grade: B

Television

Superstore, Season 5 (2019-2020)
It doesn't feel quite as vital as it did in previous seasons, but Superstore is still probably my favorite live-action sitcom on TV right now. The show has become a fine-tuned machine for joke delivery, having learned how to utilize every inch of its cast, and its plotting is refreshingly off-format from the traditional sitcom trajectory of will-they-won't they --> dating --> marriage --> kids. I mean, that happens, too, but also, for example, Jonah and Amy's relationship in which Amy has kids from a previous marriage and their conflicts have to do with the power dynamics of their respective jobs and where those jobs will take them feels a lot more genuine and in-touch with how people live now than your typical sitcom. Grade: B+


Music

U.S. Girls - Heavy Light (2020)
Not quite as riveting as their previous album, In a Poem Unlimited, but not without its moments. In particular, "4 American Dollars," the opener, is great, a post-disco banger with a populist rage. The rest of the songs are good, too, if not as strong. I'm not getting a lot out of the spoken-word transitional tracks, and I think the album kind of runs out of steam as it approaches the end. But this is still worth a listen if you've enjoyed Meghan Remy's past work. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for May 4-10, 2020

Quarantine, Week 8: It's Mother's Day! An actual temporal landmark!

Movies

Becoming (2020)
Basically a puff piece, but I came for the Kamasi Washington score, and while it played less of a role than I would have liked, it was still good. Grade: B-

Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019)
Exquisitely filmed—those colors!—and beautifully acted. The story only worked for me in fits, though, which I guess is kind of baked into a movie as fragmented as this one is: the remembered childhood material, the scene where Banderas's character talks to his old lover—and talk about sticking the landing, because the final scene is magnificent. But I had a hard time pulling this together into the stately emotional arc this is trying to be, re: an aging filmmaker coming to terms with his career and his own mortality. Maybe I'll just have to wait a few decades for it to sink in. Grade: B

Speed Racer (2008)
There was a span of about thirty minutes at the beginning of Speed Racer when I thought I might be watching the greatest movie of all time. Then there was still like 110 minutes left of the film, though, and the movie's runtime is absolutely the biggest liability here, letting the movie get tied up in all its gobbledygook wheels-within-wheels plotting, and giving its actors time to get tripped up on the arch cadence the movie requires of them (I'd say only about 30% of the movie's cast really hangs with the "live-action anime" thing this movie is going for, with Christina Ricci being far and away the most tuned in to it). But what emerges at the end of that bloated runtime isn't the greatest movie of all time, but it's still easily my favorite film from the Wachowskis, and probably the most visually dazzling blockbuster of the 21st century until Mad Max: Fury Road (and maybe more dazzling than that one, even). It's a movie about the pure love of a craft and the ingenious lengths scrappy outsiders have to go to snatch that craft away from the cynical influence of corporate interests, and it's not hard to extrapolate what this movie has to say about race car driving into a thesis on the Wachowskis' filmmaking ethos, especially from a movie so exuberantly, overwhelmingly crafted. This is a symphony of lights and edits that verges into the otherworldly in its pure embrace of color, shape, and movement, and at the climax of the movie, when we're basically just falling into a spinning tunnel of fluorescent bursts and red and white stripes, my head almost exploded from sheer sensory joy. Whoosh. Grade: A

Miracle Mile (1988)
Starts as a rom-com, ends as a nightmare, almost literally—I have nightmares about nuclear war all the time, and the final twenty-ish minutes of this movie are probably the most brutal evocation of what those nightmares feel like that I've ever seen committed to media: the twin sadness and despair of seeing human society tear itself apart in a panic as Lovecraftian violence rains from the sky. This is a weird movie, though, because in order to get to that place, it has to take a couple left turns that make the whole thing feel kind of duck-taped together. There's the aforementioned rom-com at the beginning, which is probably the thinnest section of the movie, which then shifts gears into a thriller in which our protagonist has to rally help within the titular Los Angeles neighborhood to escape the city, which finally melts into the straight-up terror of that final act. The juxtaposition of that second and third act is particularly sobering: not only is it deeply tragic to see the lovingly (if roughly) sketched cast of kooks from the middle of the movie dissolve into the mindless panicking masses of the climax, the whole arc argues that collective solidarity is fundamentally incompatible with violence on the scale of a nuclear attack, and as much as I'd like to think that that is incorrect, I don't know if I can really compellingly take that position. Grade: B+

León Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, prêtre) (1961)
A bisexual communist woman debates a hip, hot priest about Marxism, materialism, Christian salvation, and resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII. There's no way this movie wasn't going to be good, and it is good. Its central ideas (especially the tension between collective action and the individualistic ideas of salvation in Christianity) are some of the most potent of 20th century Western religious thought. But for a guy who was so influential on the French New Wave, director Jean-Pierre Melville's cinematic style is distinctly lacking the cool that was a staple of the New Wave, and while there is some tremendous light/shadow interplay, I gotta say that a good portion of this felt kind of stodgy, not helped by the fact that this movie's somewhat heavy-handed voiceover and start-stop pacing underlines thickly that this was adapted from a novel. But what's good is good, and I could watch forever the scenes between Barny and the priest, which luckily comprise a good portion of the film. Grade: B

Television

The Midnight Gospel, Season 1 (2020)
An intriguing concept: take a podcast and edit it into psychedelic animated odysseys that give a surreal narrative context to the podcast conversations. The animation is arranged by Pendleton Ward (i.e. the Adventure Time guy), and it is stunning, unpredictable and funny and unbelievably detailed—this is among the very best animation work ever done for television. On the other hand, the podcast being animated is The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, hosted by this series's co-creator and main voice actor, Duncan Trussell, and I found the conversations gleaned from the podcast to be sophomoric and self-satisfied in the worst ways. So I'm basically 98% here for the animation, with the major caveat that the last two episodes form a mini-masterpiece: the penultimate episode features an interview with a mortician, while the final episode is centered around an interview Trussell did with his own mother just weeks before she died of breast cancer, and I can guarantee that you've never seen nor heard anything like the hour created by these episodes—the most visionary, bracing, and bruisingly honest meditation on death I've ever seen in a television show. So come for that, if nothing else. I kind of hated a lot of the rest, but the animation carried me through. Grade: B

Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander) (1982)
This television miniseries (later recut into a much shorter [though still three hours long!] theatrical film) was apparently supposed to be the last thing Ingmar Bergman worked on before retiring, and that makes sense. It's at once the culmination of the filmmaker's entire body of work, from the warm group dynamics of Smiles of a Summer Night to the anguished anti-theodicy of his God trilogy to the tortured domestic hell of Scenes from a Marriage to even the use of the stage and stage magic as a figurative investigation of faith from The Magician, while at the same time feeling completely different from anything Bergman had done before: a lush, semiautobiographical coming-of-age epic in which the spirit world bursts from every piece of reality. It's funny (there are fart jokes!) and freaky and sad and, above all, ridiculously ambitious, an attempt to capture the entire spectrum of the human condition, not just from cradle to grave but also beyond the grave. It's also far plottier and immediate than Bergman is typically known for: as much as I've pontificated about the metaphysics of this work, Fanny and Alexander can more or less be experienced as a straightforward Gothic drama about a boy and his sister and their mother as they navigate the trials of their aging aristocratic family, and this series is twisty and conventionally exciting for long stretches in a way that you really can't say of, for example, The Seventh Seal or Cries and Whispers. The whole work stands with the very best that Bergman ever did. Magnificent. Grade: A

Books

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (2019)
A romance between a fictional First Son of the United States and the Prince of Whales: this is really not my type of book for a lot of reasons, both political and aesthetic, but I was prepared to put that all aside and try to enjoy this as an escapist fantasy. But it's really hard to enjoy something as escapist when it insists on grounding itself within actual real-world (or real-world adjacent) politics with a kind of West-Wing-esque liberal dream, e.g. a left-center woman winning the presidency in 2016 and reelection in 2020, a controversy with a private email server not actually making a difference in the presidential election, etc. Like, can I just read a Tumblr-ish YA romance without the book constantly underlining how much worse the real world is? Can I enjoy the First Son and the Prince hooking up without jokes about Netanyahu and Mitch McConnell? And as long as we're inventing improbable political fantasies like Texas going blue in 2020 or a cool gay independent senator going undercover in a Republican presidential candidate's campaign in order to bring it down from the inside, why even bother with a depressingly realistic Democratic president? Couldn't we have just gone the whole nine yards and made the dream-world president a democratic socialist or something? Anyway, I tried. But on every other page, my concentration was shattered by some political thread my sick brain picked up on. The point of escapist fiction is to escape this hellish reality, and I just couldn't. I know, I know—my brain is broken, and I am incapable of experiencing fun. Grade: D+

Mini Reviews for April 27 - May 3, 2020

Quarantine, Week 8: I need a haircut.

Movies

John Carter (2012)
I was really into this for the first ten minutes, when I thought it was going to be some kooky meta-pulp thing with stuff like Edgar Rice Burroughs appearing as a character. I was still into it, if lessly so, when it becomes a less kooky but still fun pulp western thing—Stanton feels at his most playful here, and there are some great laugh-out-loud moments built from the editing. Unfortunately, the stage of this movie I was least into, and the one that takes up the bulk of the runtime, is the actual premise of the movie, i.e. when John Carter actually goes to Mars, as the movie quickly devolves into some really tedious Martian sociopolitical action epic. The effects and world/creature design are excellent, which is a saving grace, but the movie loses almost all of its sense of fun. Which is too bad, because if the Mars material had had some Valerian-like invention, I would be proclaiming this an unjustly maligned gem. Instead, I'm stuck with a movie that I only like in pieces, and small pieces at that. Grade: B-

God's Own Country (2017)
On the one hand, the aesthetic of this movie is a snooze, basically the driest kind of cinematic realism you can imagine. On that same hand, this movie doesn't do a ton with its characters who aren't the protagonist—the Romanian love interest is basically just a magically perfect immigrant, and the rest of the cast is even less filled in than that. On the other hand, this movie does an affecting (if a little broad) job of rendering the cage of traditional masculinity, and the final scene is great. So I dunno, I guess I sort of liked the movie as a whole. Grade: B-

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
A thoroughly mixed bag with the usual noxious mix of homophobia and misogyny that was the default garnish to the mainstream American comedy in the 2000s. But I also laughed really hard at the "battle shits" part and at Kumar's daydream where he marries a bag of marijuana, and the scene in the police station is top-to-bottom great, so... what can you do, you know? Grade: B-

Trouble Every Day (2001)
There's a lot to process here. Which do I process first? The cannibalistic sex acts? The (needlessly?) opaque plotting? The fact that I kept confusing the housekeeper with the other female characters in the film? Anyway, I'm on the record as saying that I like Claire Denis when she's at her most brutal and miserable, and I remain on that record now, so I guess I reap what I sow. This feels like every bit the thematic antecedent to High Life in the sense of treating sex in its juicy, bodily materiality and suffering as a sort of embodied existentialism. Kind of wish this movie were set in space, too, though I guess I can't have everything. Grade: B

Sling Blade (1996)
This movie's relative chronological proximity to Forrest Gump doesn't do it any favors, as it highlights that Billy Bob Thorton's protagonist really isn't any less of a hollow symbol than that other emblem of spiritual purity by way of mental disability. Which is too bad, because otherwise, Sling Blade is a haunting, even chilling evocation of existentialism via the American South. I'm particularly impressed with (and surprised by) Thorton's direction here, which is as patient as I've seen in an American mainstream release: shots just linger in a way that reminds me of some intersection between Bergman and Ozu—I wouldn't say that Thorton has a remarkable eye for imagery, but he has a tremendous sense of tone and pace, which renders this philosophical fable with striking clarity. I wish it worked better on the character level, but otherwise, there are some real aces up this movie's sleeve. Grade: B

Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
I'm not super familiar with the Troma world (outside Surf Nazis Must Die, which I saw years ago and hated), but this was as much a delight as an abomination. It's supremely gross, and the incest angle and occasional transphobic flavors (including a very unfunny [what other kind is there?] Ace Ventura riff) are transgressive bridges too far for me. The softcore veneer over everything is also kind of a buzzkill for me, though I think that people who are saying that it's some wild innovation on Shakespeare are forgetting just how sexually lurid the original text of Romeo and Juliet is. But I adore the general ethos of this thing; I've been waiting my whole adult life for a Romeo and Juliet adaptation that treats the Bard's worst major play with the contempt that it deserves, and Tromeo and Juliet gets closest to that ideal. The movie has the bones of a very good farce, and for as much as a lot of the moment-by-moment jokes don't land, a lot of them do land, provided you're willing to go to the juvenile, continuously extra place the film's tone demands—there's just something so funny to me about arbitrarily renaming the character Paris "London" here; sue me. I also appreciate that the juvenile and extra elements are grounded in, like, an actual literacy of the original play—anyone can make a face cheek / butt cheek pun, but only someone who is reasonably familiar with the play can craft a joke as terrific and terrifically dumb as the moment when Romeo swoons, "See how she leans her cheek upon her hand," and the movie cuts to a shot of Juliet's hand resting on her bare posterior. Grade: B

Matewan (1987)
The best thing here is the gorgeously dusky cinematography. The movie's depiction of the 1920 coal miner strike in the town of the same name is otherwise told excitingly enough, and it ticks its ideological boxes: an intersectional coalition of workers united against some truly nasty coal barons. There are some basic foundational things that are pretty shaky, though; the cast is uniformly excellent (including a lil baby Will Oldham!), but the screenplay is pretty indecisive on how to employ them. The striking miners themselves are mostly anonymous outside their respective big scenes, none of the female characters are given much to do, and James Earl Jones comes swaggering in as just about the coolest part of the movie for the first half hour before more or less disappearing for the rest of the film. None of this stops the movie from being a rousing depiction of labor solidarity, but it could have been a lot more effective for me if the character work came together better. Grade: B

Television

Barry, Season 2 (2019)
This is a pretty messy season, and it loses a lot of the considered, Shakespearean arc of its first year. This isn't all bad: the freedom from that structure allows for some interesting arcs for, for example, Sally, who struggles with the intersection (or lack of intersection) of emotional honesty with acting success. At other times, though, the season is tonally all over the place, and while that was also true of the first season, this season struggles to tie it all together in the way that the first season did. I enjoy NoHo Hank as a screen presence, but his sort of cheery self-help-obsessed mob guy feels like forced shtick this time around, as disconnected from the main plots as he becomes. And with this season's ending, it's glaring how much the show is contorting itself to preserve its central cast, even when the plotting would seem to demand, for example, the death of Fuches. I'm complaining a lot because this is such a step down from the first season, but there are still a lot of engaging elements being juggled here: Henry Winkler's performance, the light satire of the aspiring acting community, a completely bonkers fifth episode that's nothing like anything the show has done before. But that juggling is a lot less elegant this time around. Grade: B

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 7 (2020)
It's fine, just like every other season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The show is walking through the motions of an aging sitcom (characters getting pregnant!), but the remarkable thing about this show is that it seems incapable of showing age, and its quality has remained absolutely constant throughout its run. It began as a mildly funny workplace sitcom with a great cast and an iffy premise, and it remains precisely that—no more, no less. Grade: B

King of the Hill, Season 3 (1998-99)
The show dips its toe a little less frequently into issues commentary this time around, which is good, because that still feels as awkward a gesture as ever (and I'm not always sure whether it's a joke or serious—e.g. the episode "Love Hurts... and So Does Art," which resolves with Hank bringing in a sheriff to an art exhibit to enforce Texas's [fictional?] law against modern art). But on the whole, this season feels like a total maturation into King of the Hill as I remembered it, the sweet show about the light absurdities of its characters' small-town Texas psychologies, and even some things I didn't remember: there are full multi-episode arcs here, which are often very sweet (the best being Hank and Peggy's ongoing struggle with infertility, which culminates in a poignant finale). More so than most animated shows of its era, this season has a sense of continuity to it that caught me by surprise. The structure of this season is unexpectedly complex for the kind of series that it is, and everything and everyone just feels so much richer this time around, fully realizing the promise of those first two seasons. But it achieves this without ever losing touch with its core episodic structure, which you know I love. Very funny, very sweet television. Yup. Grade: A-

Music

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020)
If Fiona Apple is going to only release albums once a decade, they might as well keep being among the best of the decade. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is dazzling, a percussive, bewildering torrent of acid poetry. It's whimsical in the best ways (several dogs are credited as performers on the album) while also being a brutally serious engagement with the very texture of existence and what that existence means when overlapping with other people's existences. And the lyrics. Fetch the Bolt Cutters lacks the surrealism of The Idler Wheel's tumultuous words, but Fiona's no less considered of a wordsmith here; in fact, she's better than she ever has been in that regard. Simultaneously blunt and so razor-edged that they'll cut your fingers clean off without you even feeling the pressure of the blade if you aren't careful—I love these lyrics; I want to put them in a book; I want to put them on posters and paper my house walls with them. I would quote some of the standout lyrics, but every single word sung is its own universe. Anyway, this album is great. Believe the hype. Grade: A