Movies
More so than Beyoncé's other visual album, Lemonade, Black Is King feels like a collection of music videos stitched together rather than a cohesive narrative. Maybe I'm missing some of the symbolism here because of my relative unfamiliarity with the Afrocentric imagery compared to the Americana of Lemonade, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much going on in Black Is King, despite being substantially busier visually. That said, this film is very cool-looking, the themes on black identity, while not especially complex (at least not to this white guy), are clear and strong above the noise, and the music more or less slaps, so these complaints are mostly just petty comparisons, which isn't exactly fair to Black Is King. Also not fair: the fact that it's all stitched together by voiceover from the live-action Lion King remake, which is a very goofy feature to appease the Disney corporate overlords, though kudos to Beyoncé and co. for smuggling this weird, wild piece of work onto Disney+ under the auspices of a Lion King tie-in. Grade: B
Imagine a world in which existential anxiety and a certainty of your imminent death were contagious: so of course this movie is both crushingly bleak and entirely appropriate. The film layers some impressively stressful lighting and editing over a basically mumblecore aesthetic, and the whole thing teeters right on the edge of being a complete freakout untethered by reality, though it never truly succumbs, staying just barely grounded in a tangible world—maybe the strongest (albeit still tenuous) note of optimism this otherwise desolate movie offers. Grade: B
A sincere and sweet though not particularly insightful exploration of female sexuality and Christianity. Its observations on conservative Christian ethics are well-trodden, especially how those ethics disproportionately shuffle responsibility onto women and girls while also denying those same women and girls pleasure, and its method of critiquing those beliefs falls a little too heavily on the "they're all hypocrites" trope—speaking from experience with these groups, I found that there are a lot of people who actually aren't hypocrites and are completely committed to these ethics (though of course there are plenty of craven liars, too), and for me at least, it would have been more interesting if the movie had had to critique those ideas in terms of the scarily intense integrity that animated some of the leaders I came across, rather than leaning back on the assumption that those who outwardly care most are those who cheat most. But as a gentle character piece, the movie works very well. Natalia Dyer is a minor miracle as the lead—the screenplay gives her maybe 200 words total to speak in the movie, as she mostly just observes and reacts to the world around her rather than participating directly, which means that the majority of her character's interior life has to be communicated via body language and reaction shots, so the fact that she is an intricately realized character is entirely a testament to the understated physicality of Dyer's performance and the incredible amount of information she is able to communicate with subtle facial expressions. This movie needed exactly this performance to work, so I'm glad it found it. Grade: B-
Points for having some really interesting ideas re: cycles of trauma, addiction, etc., especially when they are manifested through Rebecca Ferguson's terrific villain. More points for director Mike Flanagan going 110% with interesting visuals. Lots of points deducted for the actual screenplay (and I suppose probably the source novel—I haven't read it) being filled with really uninteresting, tedious cul-de-sacs; I would have happily seen the movie do away with all of the young Danny flashback material, for example. So I don't now how many points are left, but this is basically where I land. A great movie being eaten alive by a bad one. Grade: C+
Genuinely unsure what happened in this movie beyond a lot of cool colors and hilarious posturing (the central drifter sings his own theme song??), but it's always fun to run across one of the certified Tarantino lodestones. Grade: B
P.S. I talked about this movie with some folks on the Cinematary podcast, if you're interested.
As a vibe, this movie is peerless: the painted backdrops of the alien geography, the dream-like flourishes of animation as special effects, and especially that electronic score create a seriously indelible aesthetic experience that feels genuinely otherworldly. As a story, though, this is kind of awful. Like, whose job was it to pay attention to the pacing of this movie? Structurally, this is a complete disaster, puttering around for a full hour with boring meatheads exploring the titular planet in the most meathead way possible (one of the men actually asks if the robot is a boy or a girl, like he's in kindergarten or something) while trying to seduce the lone female cast member, only to then introduce some seriously heady concepts in the last thirty minutes that probably needed to have been teased out more over the preceding hour to avoid being the exposition-dump gobbledygook that it is. It is super disappointing the extent to which the story harshes the aesthetic vibe. Grade: B-
Television
This season has some truly baffling plot developments in the early goings (Connor and Cordelia hook up? Cordelia has amnesia? Cordelia is in a coma? Most of these developments involve Cordelia) that eventually give way to a very cool sustained serialized arc that lasts pretty much for the last half of the season, and if that arc doesn't quite make up for some of the dumb character moments early on (though it certainly tries to explain them away), it at least ends the season on a legitimately complex, exciting run with some big ideas on its mind: ideas about religion and cults and whether or not the collective happiness of the whole group gained via religion are worth the casualties of religion's procedures. None of this really makes up for what the show does (or doesn't do) with Cordelia, which, even after the big-picture arc at the end, still feels like a betrayal of the character. But at least it gives us something interesting next to this betrayal. A deeply imperfect season, albeit with some of the highest highs the show has ever delivered. Grade: B
Books
A somewhat scattered memoir of James Baldwin's experiences within the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Sections of the book are piercing and clear, such as when Baldwin talks about his experiences as a Black American in France compared to the experiences of Algerians or the passages describing Baldwin's reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Other pieces don't hold my interest as well—I'm not terribly invested in Baldwin's interactions with Hollywood, for example. But even those sections are animated by Baldwin's fiery narrative voice, and being as sharp and as fervent as he is, he's able to mine fascinating essayic asides from everything he talks about; it's not uncommon for his observations and ideas to practically climb out of the page as they take a life of their own. Baldwin is such an uncompromising thinker who, at this point in his career, had little to gain from anything but complete candor and ruthless truth-telling about America's perennially insufficient reform of race relations and the white supremacy beneath it that Baldwin thrives on exposing. The book's biggest liability is the apparent difficulty Baldwin sometimes has in transitioning from one idea to another; it's often accomplished through inorganic lurches in the writing, suggesting an essay collection with the various essays simply jammed end-to-end without breaks. But between those transitions, the book can be luminous. Grade: A-
Music
There's something so beautiful about the fact that Bob Dylan, at the twilight of his life, continues to plug on, making music like Rough and Rowdy Ways: defiantly unmodern, even square, but richly textured nonetheless. For Dylan, life post-Nobel Prize seems to go at about the same speed as it had been in the long late period of his career which has been in full swing since 1997's Time Out of Mind, a period now having occupied almost half of his time as a public figure. Musically, the quiet, traditional instrumentation of Rough and Rowdy Ways isn't that dissimilar from what you might here on Dylan's recent, divisive run of American songbook records, though lyrically, it's a somber throwback to Time Out of Mind; whereas Tempest, Dylan's last album of original material, was at least as death-obsessed as Rough and Rowdy Ways, it did so through crazed narrators and lurid tales of revenge, but this new album brings Dylan's late career full circle by sharing with Time Out of Mind self-reflexivity on Dylan's own mortality. Death personified haunts the record on songs like "Black Rider," and Death implicitly lurks at the corners of other songs like "Crossing the Rubicon," in which Dylan growls, "In this world so badly bent / I cannot redeem the time / so idly spent," half in anger, half in remorse. And then there's the clear masterwork of the album, "Murder Most Foul," a song whose 17 minutes are set apart on its own disc and whose lyrics are some of the most apocalyptic, mournful words Dylan has ever written—lyrics that take what might otherwise be Boomer kitsch (a 2020 song about JFK's assassination) and turns it into a postmodern dance macabre that finds a parade of 20th-century cultural flotsam marching into the abyss alongside the president whose death basically inaugurated Dylan's career. It's the morbid, often beautiful old-man inversion of Dylan's allusion-heavy electric period: soft piano backing over a gravelly collage of the collective mythology of mass media. If Bob Dylan never wrote another song, it would be the perfect ending to his career, and even if he does write more, "Murder Most Foul" will still linger as a eulogy long after this moment in his career has passed. For all those reasons, Rough and Rowdy Ways is as personal a record as we're likely to get these days from the notoriously cagey songwriter, and if it doesn't quite fit among Dylan's all-time best records (like a lot of late-period Dylan, his passion for individual songs seems to wane at times, and some of the instrumentation is a bit staid), it at least can proudly join the large repository of very good records bobbing just below the classics. Grade: B+
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