Movies
I'm usually an aesthetic maximalist with film, but The Assistant is one of the most thematically resonant uses of filmmaking minimalism I've seen recently: a film about a mundane setting (the nondescript, visually drab office of some entertainment production company) hiding untold depths of cruelty as told through a pointedly mundane filmmaking aesthetic yielding depths of insight. I legitimately don't think this story could have been told as well with even the slightest bit more visual panache, because that would be a betrayal of the fundamental corporate tedium that props up the insane abuses of power. There's this recurring motif in the movie, where following the titular assistant being verbal harangued by her very Weinstein-esque boss, she is forced to write a boilerplate apology email for whatever extremely minor faux pas triggered the harassment, and that's exactly it—volcanic evil dressed in boring office decorum. Grade: A-
An exceptionally poignant film of well-observed humanity. Its premise (old man befriends friendless kid next door) feels insufferably twee, but the movie itself is much more quiet and warm than that. There are pieces of this movie that are a little too low-key to completely work, but other parts are entirely effective. The whole birthday party sequence alone had me near tears because it's just such a perfect encapsulation of a particular type of loneliness and embarrassment, succeeded by probably the sweetest scene I've seen in a movie this year. Feels like the movie Up would have been if Mr. Fredricksen had been out of balloons. Grade: B+
It's hard to fault a movie like this for being exactly what it sets out to be: Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and co. just having a good time in the Napa Valley while they riff about middle age. I just didn't find it particularly funny. That said, the film walks a fascinatingly fine line between these characters being sympathetic and these characters being just the absolute worst kind of people—probably no better exemplified than by the scene in which they all crash a young person's art show and complain loudly about millennials, which is an inscrutable intersection of legitimately crotchety and slyly self-satiric. I'm also a little disappointed that nobody ever got to take molly or try Jason Schwartzman's paella, though, both of which are heavily foreshadowed. Grade: C
I don't think I've ever seen an entire movie carried by a 2-minute pop song until now. That Thing You Do! has almost nothing going for it: a pretty dopey screenplay that manages to zig-zag around interesting conflicts instead of actually engaging them, a cast of characters that are likeable enough but mostly forgettable and broad archetypes (Tom Everett Scott's jazz-head drummer is the only thing approximating an engaging character here), a largely toothless early attempt at Tom Hanks playing the type of prickly streetwise presence that he'd perfect in something like Catch Me If You Can but here is stumbling out the gate. But the movie has exactly two things in its favor, and those two things mean the world. First, it has probably THE greatest fictional-band pop song of all time (the titular song), and second, it has the good sense to get out of the way of this song when it needs to. Everything good in this movie happens in conjunction with the song "That Thing You Do," and the gamble this movie makes is that if it plays the song enough times, it will elevate itself into being an enjoyable movie. Incredibly, that's exactly what happens. The song plays probably a dozen times over about 100 minutes, and the tune just gets better every go-round. Unbelievable. Grade: B
A delicious stew of ideas (systemic racism, housing projects, sexism in academia, misguided white saviorism, and urban legends all intersect each other) served up with some really terrific, gross gore and giallo-esque style-over-coherence storytelling—plus bee horror, i.e. one of the scariest horrors known to humankind. It's the kind of movie where professors give literal lectures about the film's themes, but amazingly, those lectures don't diminish the movie one bit; in fact, they improve it, because of how interesting these ideas are in conversation with one another. The more I think about this movie, the more it just keeps opening up. Grade: A-
One of the grimiest movies of all time. You can practically feel the mud and motor oil. Like any human being with a beating heart, I more or less hyperventilated during the bridge scene. On a more holistic note, I know this is basically a remake of The Wages of Fear, but the whole time I was watching this movie, I couldn't stop thinking about how a year prior to Sorcerer's release, the Little House on the Prairie TV show had done its own episode with the same plot about transporting nitroglycerine in a vehicle over unsteady terrain—I'd kind of like to imagine that Friedkin was doing a gritty Little House remake instead (hey, this one's at least a little more honest than the show about the white people's relationship with indigenous people). Grade: A-
Books
On the one hand, it's a comic novel about a misfit teacher with an outsized personality at a girls school in Scotland, and as that, it's very funny. Spark is a terrifically efficient writer who can turn a phrase on a dime and a scene in just a paragraph, and she makes this story just pop with hilarity. But by the same turn, it's also a deconstruction of that Dead Poets Society trope of the misfit teacher with an outsized personality (was this a trope in 1961?), turning it into a fable about the rise of fascism in Europe that gives the humor a striking, heart-in-the-throat edge. I loved it—a nearly perfect novel. Grade: A
Music
A lot of the press surrounding folklore has focused on the idea that this is Taylor Swift's "indie" album, and there admittedly is a generally pan-indie sound here that feels like the line of best fit from the indie cohort that was cresting around 2007-2009: a little bit of Seven Swans-era Sufjan here, a little bit of Death Cab for Cutie there—not to mention the presence of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon on the song "exile" (doing a rare non-falsetto vocal, I might add, which is wonderful) and The National's Aaron Dessner credited as co-writer and producer on more than half the tracks. But less commented on is how folklore is a different kind of throwback, one to the kind of music Taylor Swift herself was making during that same era as those indie touchstones were breaking into the mainstream. In a lot of ways, this album feels like a revival of Taylor Swift the Songwriter that blossomed on Fearless and Speak Now. She's never not been a songwriter's songwriter on any of her records, but the pop idiom that she's embraced since Red has been increasingly persona-driven and self-referential and universal—its own pleasure, to be sure, but with folklore, Taylor Swift as storyteller and Taylor Swift as chronicler of personal detail return in full force, but with the twist that she's looking at her own life and especially the character-driven teen narratives later in folklore from the perspective of a thirtysomething instead of as a teen herself. To put it another way, she never sounds like anything but an adult on the record and specifically like the adult version of the public and artistic face of the Taylor Swift seen on a record like Fearless (unlike her other recent albums, which often seemed to be interested in progressing the concept of "Taylor Swift" into a new kind of person: for instance, 1989 and reputation represent evolution rather than simple growth). It lacks the diaristic intimacy of her early work, but the aged point of view turns familiar Swiftian tropes into thornier and more elliptical shapes, a kind of large-scale deployment of the teenagerdom-as-hindsight premise of something like "Fifteen." This album's "betty," for example, feels both like a song that Taylor might have written for Speak Now (that key change in the final chorus) but also unmistakably colored by the fact that Taylor Swift is writing as someone twice the age of the song's protagonist. It's incredibly satisfying, rewarding attention to Taylor Swift lore and meta-narrative without ever getting lost in the weeds that might obscure just how pristine and craftsman-like these songs are just as songs. Like most Taylor Swift albums, folklore could probably have been a stronger whole if it had shed a few tracks, particularly in the back half (to name one, I'd happily give up "hoax" so the album could end on the much better closer, "peace"). But this is some good, comfy music anyway, so on the other hand, it feels kind of appropriate that it would be billowy. Grade: A-
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