Movies
The sad story of a man's almost puppy-dog-like love for American institutions that betray him at every turn. Olivia Wilde's character is a mistake—both for having her depict a real journalist who apparently didn't act this way in real life (I would have liked to see her as a fictional composite of a lot of different journalists, tbh) and also for basically embodying some sexist stereotypes about femme fatales and stuff. But otherwise, this is mostly super solid, and Paul Walter Hauser in the lead gives one of the best performances of 2019. Grade: B
Admitting that this movie probably isn't for me, a lifelong Protestant, there's some surprisingly thin and hagiographic documentary work from Wenders here, though I guess he probably couldn't have gotten this much access to Pope Francis if he didn't go full Vatican-PR mode. Even so, while it's not surprising that the pope wouldn't be particularly excited about feminism or that he'd give strong moral condemnations but little systemic reform to the sexual abuse in the church, it's extremely frustrating that the documentary doesn't interrogate any of this more. One of the major reasons I am not Catholic is that I just cannot get behind the institutional hierarchy of having a pope or a single worldwide church leader like this, but on the other hand, I can't think of a single high-profile Protestant leader who speaks with as much frankness and passion about economic and environmental injustice as Pope Francis does, and they aren't particularly eager to embrace feminism or systematically address abuse either, so maybe I'm just closed-minded. Anyway, the PR might have worked a little here, because the parts of the movie that don't softball important issues I found pretty moving. The pope's words about wealth and the environment are potent coming from a leader of this stature, and even as just a symbolic gesture, the image of a pope (a South-American one at that) blessing those suffering in countries ravaged by centuries of colonialism and capitalism is undeniably powerful—it didn't occur to me until I was watching this that for a pope to take seriously the call of his position means shouldering and ministering to suffering on a global level, and I feel like a documentary that leaned more into the intensity of that idea would have been actually great. There's also something sad about it all, too, knowing the world in contrast to these ideals. Seeing the pope embrace Evo Morales and then go to the United States Congress to urge for the end of weapons trade is retrospectively heartbreaking; I guess even an endorsement from the pope himself can't protect a leftist, indigenous leader from a right-wing coup. Grade: C+
It's a bad sign when I know already that I will probably forget all about this movie within the month. There is absolutely nothing notable about this except for its indigenous protagonist (though even then, we spend more time with the American villains) and its setting within the War of 1812. We should have more (and more memorable) movies set in the War of 1812, because all I ever learned about that war in school was that that was how "The Star-Spangled Banner" was written. Educate me, cinema! Grade: C-
A good chunk of this, especially the flashbacks to when Gosling and Williams are falling in love, is pretty much peak Millennial Sundance Studio "Indie" (it's a Weinstein Co. production, but it just as easily could have been Fox Searchlight or whatever): the Grizzly Bear score, the use of recognizable Hollywood stars in an otherwise low-budget affect, the prominence of a mix CD, a cute little dance to old-timey music; Ryan Gosling plays a ukulele—in Brooklyn. I mean, wow. It lacks the Wes Anderson mannerisms, but that had kind of run its course by 2010 anyway. None of this is a putdown of the movie, by the way. It's really good and a lot more honest and complex than a lot of these kind of movies tended to be. It's genuinely moving, too, and ranks a little behind Before Midnight and A Separation (but not that far behind them) as one of the definitive marriage-dissolution films of the 2010s (it's way ahead of Marriage Story in that pantheon, btw). If I'd seen this in 2010, it probably would have been my second-favorite movie of that year behind The Social Network, and even though I'm far less into this aesthetic than I was in 2010, I was still blown away by some of the scenes here—the "drunken night in the hotel" sequence is frightening and heartbreaking in impressively equal measures. But at the same time, I also felt kind of outside myself watching this movie because I kept thinking about how of-its-time some of the specifics of this movie are and how weird it is that movies that came out when I was an adult now feel "of their time," with that "time" being "not now"—a weirdly thematically relevant dissonance to feel watching a movie in-part about the passage of time, now that I think about it. There are also some fascinating pieces that show Blue Valentine as an ever-so-slightly transitional work in the spectrum of American indie of its moment: the straight-blue hues of the central hotel room anticipate how monochrome and neon lighting would become the most important aesthetic signifiers of mainstream American indie filmmaking (and eventually some pockets of just straight American mainstream), and the "present-day" parts of this movie definitely feel like a definitive pivot away from the youth-obsessed indie 2000s and toward the "aging Millennial hipsters" 2010s in the same way that like LCD Soundsystem's last album and The National hit big (This Is Happening and High Violet were both 2010, too!). Gosling is definitely rocking that 'stache a few years ahead of time. I dunno. I know this is a lot of musing about cultural stuff that preoccupied a relatively small segment of the population of the United States. I'm having something of a Big Chill moment with this movie. Apologies. Grade: A-
Probably my favorite Kelly Reichardt movie, which is saying something for a filmography that includes Meek's Cutoff and Wendy & Lucy, two of the best American films of the past two decades. Well, now I know that she's directed three of the best American films of the past two decades. The central relationship between two friends who reunite for a camping trip after not having seen each other in years is so absolutely perfectly well-observed that I want to cry just thinking about it, and I don't think I've ever seen a movie grapple so compassionately with the ways in which male friends inevitably bump against the isolation at the edges of masculine behavioral scripts—and when the two of them finally push past it into the beautiful liminal space beyond for just a few minutes before they have to return to their lives, it's breathtaking and beautiful in a way that I have trouble describing. It's also Reichardt's most meditative movie, with long passages consisting of nothing but shots of nature intercut with other shots of nature with the rhythm of slow intakes of breath. The film is bookended by lengthy sequences in which a character listens to political talk radio during a drive through a city, which is not a terribly unrepresentative distillation of a certain slice of my own life; the roughly 70 minutes in between those bookends, though, are a transcendental voyage into a deeply peaceful, spiritually profound, and (by virtue of its contrast with the alienation and anxiety of real life) ultimately sad space of camaraderie and intimacy. Exactly the movie I needed. Grade: A
It's very successful as a camp satire of gender roles/heteronormativity, a success mostly thanks to the tremendous sets/costumes inside the gay conversion center, their garish baby pinks and blues as if a gender-reveal party became sentient and built a commune. The central relationship between Lyonne and DuVall is very cute, too, which is nice: this movie was apparently compared to the work of John Waters when it came out, and I can see that in some of the broad skewering of oppressive hetero-normie life, but what I've seen of Waters's work never quite manages to pivot from seething satire into pure sweetness as handily as this movie does. The same goes for the film's serious undercurrents about the harm of conversion camps; it probably could have gone a little harder into the actual existential threat that these places pose to queer youth (the lifelong trauma and even suicide that comes from these places, god), but it does still manage to incorporate some truly horrific stuff, like parents abandoning their children because the children are gay, within its generally comedic/easygoing tone, which is impressive. That said, there are parts of this movie that are too broad for me, particularly its use of stereotypes to fill out its cast; it's making a point about how people aspire (or are forced to aspire) to social scripts and stuff, and at least a few of the secondary characters get complicated by the film (I really appreciate that at least one person inside the conversion camp is straight but told they are gay because they don't scan as traditionally female). But the movie doesn't have time to do that for everyone, and a lot of the rest of the cast just kind of has to sit on these pretty thin tropes. The "intervention" scene where Lyonne's character is revealed to be gay in a series of escalating lesbian stereotypes is hilarious, though (the Melissa Etheridge poster...), so what do I know. Grade: B+
Books
O'Neill's autobiographical, posthumously published final work is very much mid-century theater of the kind that Arthur Miller and the like were making, and at first, this struck me as just a particularly aimless and miserable iteration of that: a son has a terminal illness, a mother has a morphine addiction, a father grapples with the artistic impotence of his career—and they spend the whole play drinking and fighting about all of that. But the moments of piercing, profound clarity in the play's more intimate stretches, when the drunken sniping halts and the characters talk sincerely one-on-one, are so beautiful that they become heartbreaking for how fleeting they are; this is especially true of a late conversation between Edmund (the terminally ill son) and his father, where Edmund articulates basically that: life is a confused and miserable muddle where we wander about in a fog until we stumble upon shining instances of meaning that soon get lost in the haze. Dialogues like this snap the play into focus for me and make it a largely compelling exploration of the spiritual and epistemic alienation of modernity. In the end, this was pretty moving. Grade: A-
Music
I've never really given Enya a shot. Her reputation is mostly as a New Age artist, but this album kind of rocks. The New Age textures are here, but I'm also getting a lot of Kate Bush, too, which is very cool (and notably, Kate Bush integrates a lot of ambient/New Age sounds into her later work anyway). Very good stuff. I'm sorry to have slept on this artist for so long. Grade: A-
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