Movies
This lives up to its reputation as a deeply weird, grotesque movie "for kids." I probably would have seen this sooner if its reputation had also been staked on its being an adaptation of the similarly deeply weird, grotesque Oz sequel novels by L. Frank Baum (which it gloriously is) rather than a sequel to the 1939 MGM musical (which it certainly is not). A lot of the freaky dream logic of this movie either comes directly from or is in the spirit of Baum's free-flowing, nonsensical world-building (we stick a deer head on a couch and turn it into a magical creature? Sure!), and the characters look almost exactly like John R. Neill's illustrations from the books, which makes this a very fun tribute to one of the more neglected corners of famous 20th century children's fantasy literature. There's a great sense of play to both the books and the filmmaking here; the movie's wild mix of stop-motion, green screen, and practical effects are a tribute to the idea that fantastical stories need fantastical cinematic style, and I'm very much here for that. Grade B+
I was on the Cinematary podcast talking about this movie and the original 1939 Wizard of Oz this week. You can listen to it here if you're interested.
A relatively major sophomore slump for the Qatsi trilogy. Worse on basically every metric than its predecessor: less impressive cinematography, less well-observed imagery, wackier pacing—and while I appreciate the general thesis about the exploitation of Western colonialism, there's something about the Third World imagery that feels a lot more touristy and exoticized than I'm completely comfortable with, which is probably a little counterproductive for that central idea. Even our main man Philip Glass is putting in comparatively minor work in the score. That said, it's only "relatively" a sophomore slump, and I liked a good deal of what's here, even if it doesn't nearly measure up to Koyaanisqatsi. There are some very, very cool sequences here; in general, Powaqqatsi is a lot more interested in doing interesting things with edits and cross-fades/double-exposures, and a lot of the best parts here are when the movie makes these incredible, semi-surreal images by laying footage over other footage. Grade: B
This one's use of stock footage and obvious digital effects makes it kind of a change of pace for the Qatsi trilogy, and I understand why people don't like it. But I thought this was really interesting. Some of the ideas are a little eye-rolling (starting your film about technology with a long zoom into a painting of the Tower of Babel? Really?), but on a formal level, this movie presents some fascinating tensions about genre—like, I feel like it's a reasonable question to ask if a movie with like 80% of its footage being digitally constructed even counts as a documentary anymore (which is ostensibly what the first two Qatsi movies were), and on the other side of that coin, I also think in 2002 it's a prescient position to basically argue that there's no other way to depict a life increasingly mediated through constructed digital environments than via constructed digital footage. And on top of that, there's also just some really dope images here. I may have felt differently about how this movie looks ten years ago, but in 2020, when a lot of the current meme internet has only just begun mining the aesthetic possibilities of the uncanniness of turn-of-the-millennium digital imagery, this movie's effects actually kind of come full circle and look cutting-edge to me. I dunno, I feel like consensus got this one wrong; definitely not the worst of the trilogy. Grade: B+
Within 5 minutes of the film's opening, I was laughing at just how dumb this thing was: the leaden dialogue that could have come from one of the movies my friends and I made in middle school, the "I'm a real man because I talk like I have a throat cold" acting, the way the movie apes everything about film noir except what made film noir interesting and profound. By the end, I wasn't laughing anymore, because the movie is such a bludgeon of dumb, masculine (and often chauvinist) posturing that two hours of it kind of just made me feel like my brain was going to roll out of my ear. Also, the whole reason I watched this (besides the old "it's expiring from Netflix" trap) is that I'm kind of interested in that period of like 4-5 years after the Star Wars prequels when there were all these wild experiments with color correction and green screens in Hollywood studio filmmaking (e.g. Speed Racer, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and I remembered this movie being a big moment in that mini-movement. But Sin City didn't even live up to that. I know a lot of people think this movie looks cool, and it does at times, but it's always in this extremely obvious, middle-of-the-road conception of cool that I just don't find that interesting. There's none of the uncanniness or weird beauty that some of those other mid-2000s CGI/greenscreen-extravaganza films achieve. Maybe this just has too much fidelity to Frank Miller's source material (which I haven't read), but Sin City feels more like pastiche or mid-tier fanart than a truly interesting use of that early-digital canvas. Grade: D+
Books
I went into this hoping to champion an unduly maligned classic, but sometimes, the consensus has it right. It pains me to announce what readers have known now for 203 years, which is that Northanger Abbey is no good. Austen seemed to be going for an Emma-esque story here in which an ingénue has to learn to recognize the realities of the social dynamics around her, but instead of the protagonist being blinded by privilege, she's grown an askew version of the world because she has bought too thoroughly into the Gothic novels she loves to read. It's not a bad premise, and it could be interesting to see an early torchbearer of the novel wrestle with the psychological implications of novelistic storytelling (even while she devotes a few passages of this book writing an uncharacteristic Austen-talking-directly-to-the-reader polemic about the snobbishness of those who decry novels writ large). But it's clear that Austen didn't really know how to make the whole novel embody this idea in the same way that Emma's story does, and only a few passages (most notably, the famous section where the heroine, Catherine, mistakenly believes she has uncovered a murder in a Gothic mansion) actually realize the quasi-satiric ambitions of the book. The rest is filled with placeholder plotting that feels like Austen on autopilot, spinning generic romantic intrigue and social politicking in a way that definitely feels Austenian but sapped of a lot of the wit and spark that usually characterize her work. And speaking of wit, a chief pleasure of most Austen books for me is just the sentence-by-sentence pleasure of Austen's delightfully funny, often slyly caustic writing—she's one of the most stylistically tight prose writers in the history of English literature, and even when I lose interest in the plotting, I can usually find a lot to enjoy in the writing itself. But that just isn't present here. Northanger Abbey is rarely funny, and it's the only novel of hers that I've read that shows Austen losing control over tone and generally having a kind of loose, inconsistent grasp on her prose. I would like to think that the book's posthumous publication meant that Austen didn't have a chance to work over the novel and tighten everything up in revisions. But apparently she finished it a couple decades before her death and even revised it a bit before she died, so... I dunno, nobody's perfect. Grade: C
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