Movies
As definitive a document of the simultaneously Kafkaesque and Orwellian horror of the post-9/11 surveillance state as CITIZENFOUR (though to be fair, there's not a lot in this documentary that couldn't also be found in the COINTELPRO days). I'm a little surprised that this didn't have the huge media splash of CITIZENFOUR, given the scale of the horror and the depth of the access the filmmakers get, except that I guess the international heist-ish scope of Snowden's story is just a lot more mass-audience ready than a sad, scary gaze into the mundane and even pathetic interplay between FBI informant and FBI target. Still, the access here is stunning: we see an active FBI case unfold from both the side of the informant (an ex-Black Panther) and the side of the target (basically a random Muslim dude in Pittsburgh with some academic interest in militias). This is probably the most intimate look I've ever seen at the U.S. intelligence state's ground-level methods, and it is, frankly, terrifying. There is a very real sense that American counterterrorism is based on nothing more than a never-ending cycle of manipulating vulnerable people into entrapping other vulnerable people, who then have few choices besides joining this cycle—the informant, for example, was initially approached to become an informant to avoid jail time for his involvement with a radical group, and despite the fact that being an informant has in a very real way destroyed his life, he continues to do so because the FBI pays him, and he needs the money. Pair all this with news like this from just down the road from where I live, and it's really hard not to get paranoid. Grade: A-
It's basically an R-rated, animated Speed Racer (2008), and like that movie, the style of this thing is completely wild. These stretchy hand-drawn characters (the whole movie is apparently hand-drawn, though I'd bet money that computers did the inking) whip through their sci-fi world with an abandon so reckless that it nearly breaks the cinematic form. The two racing sequences that bookend this movie are jaw-dropping sensory onslaughts, and I was having a great time as long as we were on the racetrack. Unfortunately, any time there isn't a race going on, this movie is kind of awful. The fifty-ish minutes between the two races are completely dull, fleshing out a narrative that is basically nonexistent during the races into some uninteresting archetypal beats and populating the movie with a convoluted but somehow still flat array of characters and noir-ish plots. This movie's relationship with its female characters is pretty bad, too, and there's like an entire scene where the love interest appears topless for no reason. So there's that, too. But those race sequences... golly, those races. Grade: B
Solidly entertaining, though a little goofier at times than it probably needed to be. I prefer the Japanese one for reasons I can't exactly articulate at the moment except that it strikes me as a cleaner execution than this one. That said, I love how, for all its reputation as a horror movie, the story both versions tell is much more just a Gothic mystery, and kudos to Gore Verbinski's direction for being extremely keyed into that wavelength. Grade: B
I'm of two minds with this one. On the one hand, the ascendancy of the automobile and highway systems is one of the most vile, destructive things to happen to the American city organism over the past century, and the second half of this movie gives an effective overview of those effects, from the cutting of public transit budgets to the destruction of neighborhoods for highway development. On the other hand, this movie is somewhat misleading in presenting the dismantling of the Los Angeles streetcar system as representative of how the country's mass transit got so terrible, and its nostalgia for the old streetcar systems completely ignores how those were usually private enterprises prone to their own abuses and often run by the very same people who built city suburbs—a ton of trolley lines were simply amenities built by developers, and since these developers were interested in real estate, not transit, they had a real incentive to encourage people to take automobiles instead of the streetcars once it became clear that that was the direction the larger corporate lobbies were leaning. On yet another hand, despite some really solid archival footage, this movie is an extremely 101 take on the history of public transit/car transit in America, and I was really hoping for something a little more detailed—maybe if the movie had just focused on either the Los Angeles streetcar system or the effects of highways on cities, instead of smashing those two topics together into two ungainly halves of a pretty short movie. So for anyone who's counting, that's two minds and three hands I have about this movie, which I think means that I think about urbanism too much and about metaphors too little. But anyway, I hate cars and motor companies, and this movie is great agitprop against those entities, so I'm trending more positively on this one than I should. Grade: B-
I don't think I've ever seen a cops-and-outlaws movie be so sad about the cops winning. Sad not just that Pat Garrett gets Billy the Kid, but that the cops win on a societal level: that the cops side with land-owners who abuse immigrants and native people; that the "taming" of the American West means the concentration of power that forms a true underclass as sure as it forms a ruling class. This all requires some dubious American mythology to work as existing within a real historical moment, but taken as a kind of parable, it's a pretty effective little tale about a man whose choice to become law enforcement has caused his soul to rot. A really elegiac bummer with (duh) some contemporary resonance both in '73 (I imagine this is how it felt for Peckinpah to watch the cops win the 1960s) as well as in good ol' 2020 A.D. That said, you've got the typical marginalized/objectified roles for women in a Peckinpah flick, which I'm never a fan of—there's only so many times you can show abused women as shorthand for "gee, masculine scripts sure are violent" before it comes off as a cheap crutch. And even though he's the whole reason that I watched this movie to begin with, I gotta admit that Bob Dylan is pretty distracting here. There isn't a single moment when he's onscreen when I wasn't thinking, "Wow, it's really Bob Dylan," and the fact that his character is super cagey about his real name ("Alias") doesn't help. Someone really needs to isolate the audio of him reading the general store inventory and set it to a sick beat, though. Grade: B+
A relentless, dryly hilarious satire in which Buñuel justly heaps burning scorn on the titular social class for an hour and forty minutes. SPOILERS—There isn't much charm to the bourgeoisie at all. The central conceit that these clueless rich folks are forever in search of a dinner party but never actually eating is great, but my favorite part is how these people somehow still keep getting invited to dinner parties at all—and who invites them is telling (and damning). Major props to the part where the army sergeant declares war on radicals and then, with his next breath, cordially invites the bourgeoisie to dinner the following week, which feels like Buñuel inventing and then completely torching that Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad—this one moment is probably the most withering takedown of the whole "we could solve systemic social problems if we could just sit down and get to know each other" ethos that I've ever seen. Grade: A-
I honestly did not know they made movies like this in the 1940s. The closest contemporaries operating anywhere near this wheelhouse are the Marx Brothers with their vaudevillian anarchy and animators like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, whose irreverent chaos and rubbery physics somewhat approximate what happens here. But more than anything, this movie feels like a forerunner to the absurd, sarcastic meta-humor of much later film comedy like Mel Brooks, Zucker-Abrams-Zucker and early Robert Zemeckis, though even at their giddiest (Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand/1941), those movies are still too beholden to plot to really be quite in the same wheelhouse as Hellzapoppin', whose already tenuous rom-com/musical revue structure is gleefully torn to pieces by its actors, who seem to actively resent the plot they are in. Gremlins 2 is probably the closest I've seen a mainstream studio feature come to this level of delighted self-destruction. It has to be seen to be believed, and maybe even then, you won't believe it. Grade: A
Books
The visceral impact of this graphic novel's innovations is mostly lost on me, reading it now almost twenty years after its final volume's publication and having already read a lot of comics that take its approach (most notably Persepolis). That said, this is extremely well-done, and I don't have any substantial critiques other than the anachronistic one that it feels overly familiar because of its influence. The one part that legitimately surprised me, though, was the frame narrative, where Spiegelman captures with admirable frankness the frustrating, often sad process of trying to interview his father to get the Holocaust survival narrative that makes of the bulk of this novel; his father (who died while Spiegelman was finishing the series—another surprising wrinkle) is obstinate and antagonistic and even bigoted himself, all of these characteristics having complicated roots in his survival and the ripple effects it had on his psyche and his family. I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for Spiegelman to wrestle with this, especially in the context of a Holocaust story, and the book, messy and complex, never really tries to reconcile all the threads of his father into a neat thesis; it's all the better for it. Grade: B+
Music
I bought this album entirely on the virtue of its cover art, and I wasn't disappointed. An intoxicating slurry of ambient drone and modern classical—when the vocal chants start up in the back half of the record, I get chills. This probably won't be for everybody, but if you're at all into the genres I named earlier, this is definitely worth a listen. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment