Movies
Way more engaging as a thriller than Chaganty and Ohanian's previous feature, Searching, probably because it's way more formally confident. Everything about this film's style and most of the film's writing is optimized for tension, which is great for the most part. There are definitely times when it feels a little too winky for its own good—there's a fine line between being the charming carnival barker flamboyantly announcing a show like, "Ah, keep your eyes peeled, because everything might not be as it seems!" (good fun) and the opening sequence with the premature birth that so very clearly withholds information that it might as well be waving a big sign that says, "Attention! There will be a twist!" (irritating). But I mostly had a good time, and Kiera Allen is fantastic. Grade: B+
Zappa (2020)
Frank Zappa has over 100 studio albums to his name, so I can't imagine how hard it would be to condense his career into a two-hour film, much less his life outside of that. Nonetheless, Zappa does an admirable job of that, if incomplete; the doc does a reasonably good job in its focus on Zappa as an artist within the avant-garde and whose strong political convictions intersected his art, which is the side of Zappa I'm most interested in, and I appreciate the man's vision, even if I'm not always onboard with the results (I still mostly struggle with his post-'70s output). But at the same time, you just get some tossed-off bits like the frank but extremely brief conversation about how Zappa would sleep around on tour and bring home STDs to his wife, or how casually he just abruptly fired all the original Mothers of Invention lineup, and it inadvertently calls attention to the fact that this documentary shows a distinct disinterest in interrogating the more difficult areas of Zappa's life, such as the pervasive sexism throughout his music or the way he used his totalizing vision of art to mistreat people. As such, this movie is probably too enamored with the idea that Zappa is this inimitable genius. But even with all that, this is a tremendously engaging film. Director Alex Winter (the Bill S. Preston, esq.!) was given unprecedented access to the Zappa archives, and the result is some really tremendous archival footage, edited together with more energy and creativity than most musician bio-docs have any interest in. I would love to see the warts-and-all 10-hour miniseries that Zappa's life clearly merits, but until that, you could do a lot worse than this movie. Grade: B
I watched this because I liked director Patrick Brice's two Creep movies, which are clever and fun, and The Overnight, which is at least interesting. This is the first of his movies I've seen where he wasn't credited as a writer, and I guess that's the secret ingredient, because this was pretty weak, not very fun or very clever or very interesting. A corporate team-builder goes horribly awry, and the employees are stuck in a cave with their horrible boss, which I guess is a premise that has some potential. And it's not completely wasted; this is mostly worth watching for just how fearlessly this movie dives into some truly gross territory, with an impressive commitment not to blink at the darkest implications of this very dark comedy, but the moment-by-moment writing is broad and seems to mistake comedy for a goofy vibe instead of an actual sense of humor. I can't blame it all on the writing, though; I know from his other movies that Brice is a capable director, but it seems like he really struggled to figure out how to make a movie that 85% takes place in a barely-lit cave look like anything other than a dim muddle. Also, Isiah Whitlock Jr. in the cast and not one "sheeeeeeeit"? Come on. A disappointment all around. Grade: C
Any adaptation of a beautifully written novel has got to contend with the conspicuous lack of prose in the film format. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is among the maybe twenty most beautifully written American novels of the 20th century, and while Michael Coulter's cinematography and Bill Forsyth's direction are both very nice, boy did I miss Robinson's prose and boy do I wish they hadn't tried to pipe in some of it with clunky voiceover narration. Otherwise, though, this is great: a beautiful, aching rumination on the ways in which misfits create their own worlds. One of the lonelier movies I've seen recently. Grade: A-
Before I popped this in the DVD player, I had this snappy review all ready in my head, where I would say something about how Charlie Chaplin really struck out with all these movies with city names in their titles (A Woman of Paris and A King in New York being the other strikes, of course). But then I actually watched A Countess from Hong Kong, and lo and behold, it's actually good! It's not as good as Limelight, my favorite of Chaplin's talkie pictures, but it's probably his feature that most successfully translates the feel of his peak silent comedy into sound cinema, with lots of elaborate choreography aimed at using motion to characterize its cast and pick apart iterations of social etiquette. Also, there's some pretty good onscreen chemistry between Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, actors I'm not always extremely fond of. This movie isn't immune from Chaplin's tendency to suffocate his sound features with sentimentality, and there's a sluggishness to everything that Chaplin wouldn't have dared allow in his silent work. But this is pretty solid compared to the other two movies of his that name cities in their titles. Grade: B
Music
Sonic Youth's breakthrough finds the group with one foot still in the No Wave / experimental scene in which they cut their teeth and the other foot in the nascent alternative rock wave of the '80s/'90s that they would help canonize. It's hard not to compare this album to the bigger (and better) Sonic Youth albums to come, but divorced from that comparison, it's a solid album with intriguing textures and discursive experiments—for example, "Society Is a Hole" / "I Love Her All the Time," a drone-y two-track suite built around hypnotic guitar improvisations and Thurston Moore's deadpan vocals, a kind of surreal, nightmare variation on the Velvet Underground's "Heroin." As a fan of the band's later, more iconic work, it's fun for me to listen to the band in this primordial mode, and even in the context of those albums, Bad Moon Rising has this nocturnal, groggy feel to it that's entirely it's own and pretty riveting on its own. Grade: B+
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