Movies
A beautiful collage essay on Jamaican identity and the women who inhabit it. The movie's style makes this somewhat of an inherently spiritual film, with on-the-street voiceovers floating over footage of Jamaica like priests giving homilies, all framed by the biological liturgy of pregnancy trimesters, which the movie explicitly structures itself after. But the last fifteen minutes especially are transcendent, an ecstatic prayer by a woman who says that Jesus has called her away from the church into the world, followed by a childbirth sequence intercut with majestic shots of churning water. The rest of the movie is interesting, but those last minutes I found extremely moving. Grade: B+
Probably the most overtly revisionist I've seen a Jane Austen adaptation be: sexually frank (is this the first Jane Austen movie to have a sex scene [with nudity]?), queer leaning (lots of lesbian subtext, plus [I think??] some polyamory at the end), and it uses a somewhat throwaway detail from the novel to make a whole subplot about slavery/abolition. Very cool, interesting stuff. I wish the movie were more adventurous in its form, or even interesting at all—this is some pedestrian filmmaking, and the only thing notable about it is that it has an early incarnation of the "actor talking to the camera to read a letter instead of using voiceover" device that has become apparently the industry standard for Austen adaptations. Grade: B
This is a completely overwhelming sensory experience: stunning music, colors, choreography, locations. Some really interesting ideas about what it means to live in a country as a non-native, too—the movie opens on a lovely lyrical moment of an aging Indian man feeding pigeons in London, reflecting on his alienation within the UK even after decades of living there, and while it seems weird for a while that we open on this character of whom we see maybe five minutes of over the course of the first half of the movie, the importance of that opening scene immediately snaps into focus the instant we see him arrive back in India—his body language changes, his face softens, he even becomes part of one of the dance sequences. I also really like the extremely goofy streak this movie has, like how Shah Rukh Khan's character basically turns into Bugs Bunny for a minute to snare his rival in an elaborate trap in the woods. But speaking of SRK, I hate to say it, but his character is the one keeping me at somewhat of an arm's length from this movie. I had a really hard time feeling anything for his character, and when he's half of the central romance that forms the emotional core of this movie, that means I'm having a hard time accessing that emotional core. This all intersects the fact that I am not at all a part of the Indian culture this movie depicts (or even very familiar with it), so I'm going to pose my feelings as questions rather than make any value statements about the plot, but these two issues are basically what's locking me out: 1. How am I supposed to care about a character who is 100% a douchebag for the part of the movie in which he and Simran (his co-protagonist/love interest, played excellently by Kajol) fall in love? Like, he actively ruins her European vacation, harasses her when she begs him repeatedly to leave her alone, grabs her when she asks him not to, rips her clothes, and "jokes" about having raped her while she was drunk, which gives her a mild panic attack the next morning—I had a difficult time flipping the switch into seeing him as a heartthrob to root for in the second half of the movie, especially since there didn't really seem to be any change-of-heart moment or character development to warrant that switch? 2. Why is it supposed to be romantic that, when not just Simran but also her sister and her mother are begging him to elope with Simran because her father is such a domineering man and will never approve of the marriage, SRK's character is determined to play by the rules and convince Simran's father to "give" her to him in marriage? He's such an anarchic force of nature for most of the movie, and it was jarring to see him play so hard into (patriarchal?) family values in this one aspect, especially when all the other characters we like are telling him to do otherwise and also especially because just like an hour before in the movie, he'd been asking Simran to have an affair with him. Tl;dr - for me, DDLJ is a cinematic feat and a truly captivating experience until I have to engage with SRK's character, but maybe I just don't understand the culture enough? Grade: B
People talk about this being Scorsese's B-picture/Hitchcock/DePalma tribute, and it is gloriously that, with the Hermann score and all the camera tricks, the pure pulp of its premise and its thrills-and-chills-style slow-burn-into-literal-burn climax. But I don't see enough people talk about the weirdly ambitious thematic stew that's simmering right below the surface of this movie. Unless I'm forgetting something, this is the only Scorsese movie that deals directly with Protestantism, and the way that he overlays it with the American South (another Scorsese rarity) is fascinating—DeNiro's character, a rapist and inhuman monster, speaks in tongues and snake-handles, quotes the Bible endlessly, and enforces a sadistic atonement-style justice, while at the same time driving a car with one of those "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God" bumper stickers; Confederate flags are all over this movie, usually in association with DeNiro's character, and there's even a scene in which none other than Gregory Peck defends DeNiro in court—an allusion to the original Cape Fear, sure, but with Peck's southern-fried lawyer defending a rapist from vigilante justice, there's no way it's not also a really sick inversion/deconstruction of To Kill a Mockingbird, too. I have no idea if all these elements hang together, but the movie seems to be presenting some sort of idea about the Southern identity as a crucible of religious ecstasy intertwined with fear: of the Other, of the oppressed, and (if you're an Other or an oppressed person) of the monstrous oppressors and the legal/policing system and "civilized" Southern gentility that allow them to continue to create an atmosphere of terror—where the law of the South is defined less by the book (though that book is certainly systemically bent to protect a certain white protestant hegemony—time and again demonstrated by DeNiro doing technically legal things that are still terrifying) than by the overbearing cultural weight of a Christian theology obsessed with pain and judgement (embodied by DeNiro's tattoos). If that's really what this movie is going for, it would probably carry a lot more weight if the central terrorized family were anything other than suburb-y liberal white people. But still, for an ostensible paycheck job from a team just off the height of Hollywood prestige with Goodfellas, this is a weird, wild posture, and an intriguing piece of the ongoing conversation within Scorsese's filmography about Americanism and Christianity. Grade: B+
There isn't much to Winter Soldier besides the experience of for 90 minutes listening to American soldiers confess to the war crimes they and their peers committed in Vietnam. It's nauseating and horrifying, of course, but also, in their testimonies, the soldiers also give one of the starkest and most clear-eyed accounts of the indoctrination of nationalism and white supremacy on a cultural scale that I've ever seen. Consistently, these soldiers talk about how the very structure of the military machine trained them to dehumanize the Vietnamese (not just the Viet Cong): the body count tallies as mission objectives, the language (always slurs and animal vocabulary, never just "the Vietnamese"), the tail-wagging-the-dog logic of the violence ("How do you know they were VC?" "Because they're dead"). These were not just individual soldiers cracking toward sadism (which is what I was taught in school); the whole endeavor from the top down was shaped to produce racist, supremacist, sadistic actions creating senseless slaughter. So obviously, this movie is an essential document of the Vietnam War. But I guess what I'm saying is that what's ultimately profound about it is the way that it also transcends its historical moment and becomes about the whole project of American white supremacy/imperialism in general. Hot take: it's not a good project, y'all! Grade: A
Exquisite style and poignant tragedy—a beautiful 19th-century Japan bent around the abject destruction of a woman who just wants this dude not to suck so much at acting. I never felt that invested in the central romance, but maybe that's the point? Grade: B
I was part of the conversation about this movie on this week's episode of the Cinematary podcast—if you're interested, you can listen here.
Someone should have been fired for making a two-hour-long Marx Bros. movie. Even adjusting for that, it's definitely not their best. Some good bits: I like Chico's book con and the part where Harpo smashes the piano and plays it like a harp. But there's a disappointing shortage of good Groucho material (the horse pill bit notwithstanding), and at two hours long, pieces of this movie just draaaagggggg, which is absolute death for the Marx Bros. style of comedy. As an aside, I spent a good part of this movie wondering if Queen intentionally modeled the Marx Bros. by following up their groundbreaking A Night at the Opera album with the baggy, inconsistent A Day at the Races. Grade: B-
Television
Lisa Hanawalt (whose human-animal-hybrid work you probably recognize from BoJack Horseman) has created a show about two Millennial women trying to navigate adulthood in a big city, and that would be a major yawn from me (we have like ten shows with that premise, right?) except that this is like the Looney Tunes version of that concept: a totally buckwild and anarchic execution of urban ennui that keeps the delirious animal puns and "yes, and" escalation of absurd jokes from BoJack Horseman but jettisons any pretensions to realism at all, opting instead for an anything-goes visual aesthetic where reality is rubbery and unpredictable. Character dialogue can appear as words on the screen, whose letters act as objects that the characters interact with; scenes connect to each other with a kind of fevered-dream logic conveyed with phantasmagoric intertitles; characters' bodies stretch and twist into elaborate visual puns. The story itself is just okay, but the animation is the most fun, inventive TV animation I've seen, maybe ever. Between this and The Midnight Gospel, I would say that Netflix has the most exciting television animation happening right now. But then Netflix went and cancelled this. Booooooooooooo. Grade: A-
Music
Yves Tumor has shaved off a lot of his experimental impulses for this album, which isn't a bad thing. The result is a record that sounds a lot like peak TV on the Radio, if that band had leaned a little more heavily into neo soul. "Kerosene!", the lush, anthemic fourth track that samples Uriah Heep of all things, is undoubtedly the standout here, and the rest of the album doesn't even get close to that high. But it's all solid throughout. Between this an the new Moses Sumney album, 2020 is turning out to be a pretty good year for ambitious psychedelic soul. Grade: B+
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