Movies
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-
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-
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+
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
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-
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+
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