Movies
I thought the novel's ending was a bit too literal and let the air out of the sails a bit, so it's a really great feeling when this movie walks right up to the place where the novel tips its hand and then aggressively jukes left in a way that smudges the specifics of the plot in all the right ways. Like all Kaufman, it's a document of loneliness and self-loathing and existential dread filtered through an unreliable psychology rendered as unreliable cinematic style, and like all Kaufman since Synecdoche, New York, it's intent on condensing the entire breadth of a human life into an improbably small narrative space, which is a project I really, really dig. New for Kaufman, though, is that the arc of the film is an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt for that psychology to break out of its prison of myopia and truly understand another person, which makes it a lot sadder than it has any right to be. It's definitely a lot sadder than I would have ever expected of more or less a feature-length homage to Oklahoma! I have more thoughts, but I'll save them for a forthcoming review for Cinematary.com. Grade: A
There are so few movies that involve abortion that any time one actually comes along, there seems to be an unspoken assumption that it has to explain every facet of the issue within the text of the film or else risk missing yet another opportunity to explicate the subject. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is maybe the most thorough plot-as-explanation-of-the-abortion-process movie I've seen, to the point where it sometimes feels like it's supposed to represent a kind of universal ur-narrative: a teen with an unsupportive family who may or may not have been coerced into having the sex that got her pregnant goes first to a crisis pregnancy center, then tries to induce an abortion herself because she can't get one locally, then has to cross state lines to get to a clinic that will actually let her get an abortion, has to deal with the fact that she is running out of money but must somehow find lodging in the city because the procedure takes more than one day, etc. There are even a couple very long scenes where employees at the various clinics read out the rules and regulations of getting abortions and go through the required health questionnaires. It's incredibly detailed, and the minor miracle about this movie is that it somehow still feels like a movie. The film has an incredible ability to have its meticulous documenting of procedure also double as stealth characterization, like in the scenes where all the rules are explained and questions are asked, where the protagonist's reactions and answers flesh out her character with an impressive amount of nuance, even at times heartbreaking so. I wish the movie's style didn't feel so resolutely and generically "indie," which I found naggingly uninteresting, but as a feat of screenwriting and acting (the two leads are fantastic, especially Sydney Flanigan as Autumn), it's riveting. Grade: B+
Absolutely in love with the aesthetic of this movie: dynamic (computer-enhanced?) oil-painted landscapes backgrounding digitally animated characters. It is an endlessly arresting and fascinating blending of the tactile and the pixelated. The rest of the movie is fine, a political allegory about how people like Bolsonaro capitalize on fear—there's an actual pandemic of fear that results in some unnerving bodily mutilations. But I honestly was a little distracted by how incredible the animation looks to get very invested in the story. Grade: B
Warren Beatty writes/produces/directs/stars in a movie about a milquetoast neoliberal California Democrat who has a psychological breakdown that turns him into basically a socialist whose campaign strategy becomes laying bare the ways in which the Democratic party is an organization that pretends to fight the exploitative capitalist political ecosystem of the USA while it contributes to and feeds off that same system—and he does this by basically acting like a white suburban middle-schooler discovering rap for the first time? Kind of in awe that this movie exists, and it's extremely cathartic to watch in the year of Democratic presidential nominee Joe "You Ain't Black" Biden. If the activists are right and people really can pressure Biden into pivoting to the left, I think we probably need to brace ourselves for the rapping. By the end, Beatty probably gets high on his own supply—for a movie this cynical, I can't believe it's not cynical enough to understand that a guy who "goes Bulworth" would eventually 100% exploit his cred with the Black community. And it's a major misstep that the film gives Beatty's character's romantic entanglement with Halle Berry's character even a smidge of sincerity. But hooooo boy, at the early and middle stages, there are some moments where this movie is just *chef's kiss* Grade: B+
Cameron Crowe movies have such weird energy. These ungainly plots fueled by endless, almost expressionist runs of semi-related incidents in which characters speak from their mouths what sounds like their actual interior monologues in these weird lay-poetry grasps at street-smart profundity are squeezed into the mold of mainstream Hollywood crowdpleasers. The line that separates a good Cameron Crowe movie from a bad one is so fine and so reliant on the mysteriously unreliable alchemy of Crowe's ludicrous tics and tropes that I'm not sure I can really parse why Jerry Maguire works and something like We Bought a Zoo doesn't work, but man, one sure does and the other sure doesn't. Is it Tom Cruise? Talk about weird energy—Tom Cruise, who plays literally every scene in this movie (literally every scene in any of his movies) with the same intensity that he brings to, like, War of the Worlds. It is legitimately unnerving to see him play the role of a sympathetic romantic lead. This whole thing would work a whole lot better if the movie treated its two major supporting roles (Cuba Gooding Jr. and Renée Zellweger, both very good here) as actual co-leads instead of obvious accessories to Cruise's character's arc—an arc that in the hands of Cruise's performance kind of feels as if Patrick Bateman decided to hang up the ax and pursue sincere domestic bliss. Also, Tom Cruise very loudly shouts, "I love black people!!!" in one of the iconic scenes (I had no idea how packed this movie is with iconic scenes), which uncomfortably highlights the racial subtext of Cuba being an accessory to Cruise; no such moment for the movie's (somewhat less troubling) gender subtext, though we do get a literal highlight reel of women talking about how good Cruise's character is in bed, and it's somehow a big emotional turning point in the film. Like I said, very weird energy here. Compellingly weird, more often than not. Grade: B
Music
I'm not super familiar with Blur's broader body of work (I've always been more of an Oasis guy), so I'm sure this album's stylistic departure doesn't hit me like it would have the fans. But this music is pretty far out for a Britpop band. People talk about Radiohead deconstructing Britpop in the late '90s, but honestly, this albums extended noise passages and electronic jams feels way more openly deconstructive of the genre than OK Computer was. The album's structure is interesting in that it begins with its most conventional tracks (the all-time classic "Tender," the single "Coffee & TV"), after which it slowly lowers its listeners into more and more experimental tracks until we're up to our necks in the space electronica of a late-album track like "Caramel," giving the record the feel of a voyage into increasingly uncharted waters. It also feels like the necessary transition between Blur's '90s days and what Gorillaz would be doing in their first couple albums—it isn't hard to imagine some of those electronic sounds deep in the album being turned into beats for a Gorillaz track. But voyage or transition, Britpop or not, this is some good stuff. Grade: A-
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