Movies
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
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
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
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-
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-
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
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
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
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