Movies
Gerrymandering and the modern Republican Party are both awful, and I'm glad there's a whole film dedicated to those two unshakable facts. But that said, this movie includes a brief clip of the Last Week Tonight episode about gerrymandering, which made me realize that the whole movie kind of feels like that John Oliver segment stretched to feature length, with very little to show for the extra length. These kinds of activist documentaries are never going to engage me formally, but I'd at least like to think they aim to be more informative than a half-hour HBO clip. On the plus side, though, this movie is entirely free of Oliver's extremely forced jokes, so maybe this would have actually been my preferred method of getting this information if I'd seen it before the Last Week Tonight episode. Grade: C+
Honestly, it's just nice to spend an hour watching Johnny Greenwood jam with his pals from India (plus one pal from Israel) while Paul Thomas Anderson does basically the equivalent on the filmmaking side. I don't have any deep thoughts. This was just pleasant, and I enjoyed it. Grade: B+
A delightful, mostly frothy salute to William Castle (literally everything with a very Castle-esque John Goodman is a great time) that also somehow manages to argue by the end that movies acclimate people to the horrors of nuclear proliferation and the military industrial complex? Some seriously wild thematic turns, especially in the penultimate shot of the film, where a cutesy coming-of-age moment occurs in the context of a military base with literal armed helicopters and jets flying overhead. Having grown up partly on an air force base, I can testify first-hand to the astounding degree to which living within walking distance of industrial death machines can be normalized, and in conjunction with that, there's really something to Goodman's final monologue about how films help people accept almost certain annihilation at the hands of the kinds of people who populate Dr. Strangelove—if not the b-movie schlock peddled by William Castle then certainly the likes of your average U.S.-military-affiliated action blockbuster like Independence Day or whatever. Wild thematic turns, I say. Mad. Grade: B+
A bunch of college kids get into Maoism and try to start a revolution. Basically a feature-length exploration of the limitations of bourgeois folks to instigate radical change—the revolution in this movie fails, in part, because these kids' backgrounds (their parents are all like bankers and stuff) give them no organic class solidarity with the people they actually need to link up with to start a movement (and, as a side note, it's probably worth pointing out that arguably Godard runs into this problem himself with his writing and direction, given the somewhat iffy way that, for example, a Black character is briefly tokenized by the film). It's a strikingly clear-eyed film, too. College activism can be so inspiring and important, but I also don't think I've ever seen a more apt deconstruction of that kind of activism, either, and what this movie depicts is uncomfortably close to the ways in which I've seen mini-movements surrounding people like those in this film (including myself) fail. I mean, I haven't seen botched assassination attempts, but the basic group dynamics and ultimate collapse ring extremely true—a bunch of college-educated white people failing to realize systemic change because they are busy yelling at each other about theorists and whether or not Johnny Guitar is problematic hits very close to home for me and likely does for a lot of people on the internet, I'd guess. Grade: A-
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