Mini Reviews for January 25 - 31, 2021

RIP SOPHIE

Movies

Mangrove (2020)
I guess the people who said that this is just the prestige version of one of those movies you'd watch in social studies class are right. But I also found this pretty rousing—Steve McQueen movies tend to feel pretty considered, Mangrove included, so this movie doesn't really capture the thrilling liveliness of collective action, but it definitely captures the heart of it. And once the film transitions to the courtroom, it's basically all great, since the closed-off environments of a court of law play very, very well to McQueen's strengths as a director. Also, I don't know what social studies classes you were in, but none of mine had any interest in (or sympathy for) radical politics. Grade: B+

 

Lovers Rock (2020)
I'm not good at dancing, and I don't like dancing (these two are probably related), and I don't ever have very much fun at the kind of party this movie depicts, i.e. the kind where the whole point is to lose yourself in dance and song and not to have the boring, discursive conversations I'd rather be having. So it's a sheer testament to the filmmaking magic on display here that I watched this movie, where pretty much the entire thing is one such party, and spent the whole runtime wanting very badly to be there—not dancing, of course, but just soaking up the energy in the room, watching the liberation of the dance floor. The whole movie is electrifying and communicates better than most movies I've seen the sheer joy of being completely embodied in a moment shared by an entire community. Also, to whatever degree these Small Axe works are a series (television or otherwise), the best argument in favor of that is how this plays in immediate succession to Mangrove and the way it so thoroughly shows what Mangrove spends so long telling: the vital importance of these third spaces, especially within marginalized communities. I'd imagine you'd be completely fine watching either in isolation of the other, but there really is something to be said about the accumulation of meaning when viewing them in sequence. Grade: A-

Kajillionaire (2020)
The only other Miranda July work I'm familiar with, Me and You and Everyone We Know (this blog's second post ever! don't read it—it's terrible!), I like well enough, but this caught me completely off-guard. As with that other film, Kajillionaire is basically about finding love and connection in the context of a modern world that makes the traditional expressions of human connection either embarrassing or difficult, and this movie is also very much in Miranda July Mode, where everything is kind of just slightly off-kilter, like the dialogue and character version of a Dutch Angle, which could be theoretically alienating and apparently is for some viewers, based on reviews I'm seeing. But I dunno, I ended up finding this really moving, and I personally connected pretty strongly with the way that Evan Rachel Woods's character (Old Dolio) has to basically reprogram herself after an upbringing with parents who have given her this completely skewed, transactional view of the world (it's a family of grifters, more or less, who are constantly scamming, perhaps out of a paranoia that the world's end at the hands of an earthquake are imminent) in order to begin to form connections with people in the Real World. My parents are actually great and love and care about me and were (still are) always very open about that, but the idea that you can grow up within a community (conservative/evangelical Christianity for me) with a fundamentally warped understanding of the world that affects your ability to make real connections with people—that resonated. There's a specificity to July's vision that I don't want to take away from (it's female, it's queer, it's very Los Angeles), but evangelicalism, how I've been trying to shake it out of my brain for the past 10-12 years, is what I ended up thinking about here, and July's ethos is open-handed and compassionate enough that I can't imagine she'd be too alienated by that train of thought. Love each other, folks. Grade: A

Miss Juneteenth (2020)
Definitely feels like an indie movie that in some ways seems to the movie's detriment: the at-times shaky screenplay and the somewhat stiff performances (outside of Nicole Beharie, who is fantastic) make this movie a little rough around the edges. But as a quiet story about one generation unintentionally passing the toxicity of their upbringing onto the next, this movie works when it counts, and the relationship between the mother, who won the pageant when she was a teen, and her daughter, who is unenthusiastic about the pageant, is wonderfully realized—especially with Beharie as the mother, who, again, does great work. Also, this movie has a really terrific evocation of a very particular milieu, i.e. a black Texas community. The only other example of this I can think of is the last couple seasons of Friday Night Lights, and even that's filtered through a pretty white perspective. Nice to see a depiction that doesn't come from a place of difference. Grade: B

FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)
I mistakenly believed this was a Don Bluth feature, which means that I was expecting a mostly mediocre film with some signs of life in the animation. It is not a Don Bluth feature, and it is not mediocre. It is a truly dreadful, utterly uninspired film with animation that only rises above direct-to-VHS levels when it is focused on the Tim-Curry-voiced villain (the villain animation is actually quite good, as is Curry's extremely Curry-esque performance—possibly the only two good things about this movie). The movie substitutes dreary musical numbers in place of character development, the environmental mythology is paper-thin, the big sexy heart-throb human is a mullet-sporting bro named Zak, and Robin Williams honest-to-glob RAPS. Also, for a movie basically conceived as a delivery system for environmental messages, its environmentalism is pretty dopey in the way that a lot of '90s environmentalism aimed toward children tended to be—maybe I am just a callous monster, but "Pollution/industry makes the cute animals sad" is the flimsiest possible rationale for environmental justice I can imagine, and this movie shows absolutely zero interest in interrogating the reasons why industry happens. I'm not saying this has to go full anti-capitalist, but at least a Lorax-level acknowledgement of the role that the ideologies serving at the altar of Production and Expansion have in the destruction of the world would have been nice. Instead, all we got are some dumb dudes who think it's fun to chop things up. Really talking about the issues here, FernGully. Did not enjoy. Will not be checking out its actually direct-to-VHS sequel. Grade: D

Fritz the Cat (1972)
Unbearably juvenile. Probably the most juvenile feature that I've seen from Bakshi, which is saying something. Setting a precedent is setting a precedent, but in the wake of decades of much more impressive adult animation, I don't know why I'm supposed to be impressed by animals having a threesome in a bathtub. The movie has sketches of interesting themes, like the opening when some white girls are being performatively woke toward a black character and end up being incredibly patronizing, or the sequence when Fritz briefly becomes a radical leftist but then ducks out of town when his revolutionary rhetoric results in police violence against his (mostly black) followers—the film seems to halfheartedly be interesting in satirizing the way that white kids from middle-class backgrounds try on the aesthetics of revolution without actually investing in any of the work done by true leftists (usually people of color). But just as often, it also seems to be lampooning leftism as a whole, resulting in this mealy-mouthed centrism that's being provocative without being brave enough to truly take a political stance of consequence—I'd like to think if Bakshi was smart enough to recognize the shallow, fashionable radicalism among white kids he would be smart enough to see the parallel in the shallow, fashionable centrism of the edgelord postures in this movie, but apparently not. Anyway, per usual with Bakshi, this film is also super misogynist, and I'm not super inclined to be charitable to even what good politics are here since they're awash with the same bare contempt for women that animates a lot of Bakshi films (though not usually as strongly as it does here). And speaking of animation, there are some moments of visual inspiration, like the shot of the crow snapping his fingers to Bo Diddley, but this is by far the most stylistically tidy Bakshi movie I've seen, which means that it lacks the usually really interesting way that Bakshi turns his tiny budgets into go-for-broke transgressive mixing of media and styles. This one looks like any old '70s cartoon, just with more sex. I've been wanting to see this movie for a while because I have a weird fascination with Bakshi. But this was pretty much garbage. Grade: D+

 

Television

Steven Universe, Season 4 (2016-2017)
I still miss the focus on Beach City, but the way that the show continues to expand its mythology is at least consistently engaging. A lot of shows start to feel thinner as they get bigger, but Steven Universe does a good job of enriching itself as it grows. This season is focused most on exploring the series's villains and their underlying ideology of hierarchy and supremacy, and through that. The show plays around with some ethical dilemmas (Steven feels guilt about having been unable to turn a gem before it shattered, for example, and there's a little bit of angst about how Rose Quartz may have committed war crimes), but it never really truly commits to ambiguity, and at its heart, the show remains a story about a group of fundamentally good people changing the world through compassion and fighting those who won't change, which is good (and often very good), though probably not the most interesting version of itself it could have been. Grade: B+

 

Books

Luster by Raven Leilani (2020)
Given the crowdedness of the field, there's a real uphill climb for a debut novel about a young artist in the publishing industry who has sexual misadventures while learning stuff about herself and her own maladaptive tendencies. But Leilani's debut works by sheer verve of voice. This book is compulsively readable, a real page-turner by the standards of literary fiction, solely because Leilani's prose just shimmers and moves. The content of the book itself I am relatively indifferent to, though there are a few interesting dynamics re: the young black protagonist hooking up with an older white man who has recently adopted a black girl. The books energy flags quite a bit toward the middle and end, which is sort of appropriate thematically, as it represents a period in which the protagonist herself stagnates and becomes directionless. But after the salvo of the opening 100-ish pages, it's hard not to feel that the book is coasting somewhat. That said, Leilani's prose remains electric throughout, and the book is never not engaging, even when it slows down. I guess this isn't a glowing recommendation, but I enjoyed my time with the novel, so... Grade: B

Mini Reviews for January 18 - 24, 2021

T. S. Eliot is a liar. Obviously January is the cruelest month.

Movies

Set It Up (2018)
Living proof that cliché has nothing to do with whether or not a movie is good, because this movie is basically every rom-com cliché known to humankind and yet is somehow good. I've never been particularly impressed with Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell before either, but their onscreen chemistry together is off-the-charts here. Grade: B

 

 

 

Happy Feet (2006)
I would love to know which concept came first to the filmmakers: penguin karaoke or penguin prophets? Genuinely unclassifiable cinema, and I have no idea what inspired anyone to believe that a corny jukebox musical should be super-glued to a monomyth hero's journey about the spiritual awakening of a messianic penguin. Imagine the dark mysticism of Watership Down as told through the low-brow pop culture referentiality of a post-Shrek CG-animated family film. Oh, and on top of all of that, Happy Feet is also a really serious parable about environmental collapse. It's such an exquisitely bizarre object, and I wish I could get behind this movie more. But it's just not good. The character animation is really bad-looking in the way that most early computer-animated movies are bad-looking (though credit where credit is due, there is some stunning landscape imagery and particle effects); the plot just kind of lurches from one weird setpiece to the next without ever really finding the heart of these characters; oh, and Robin Williams is all over this doing bad racial stereotypes (is it still too soon after his death to argue that Williams was an extremely talented guy with, for the most part, absolutely trash output?). I'm scratching my head at this when I'm not in awe at the ambition. Grade: C

Happy Feet Two (2011)
But wait! There's more! Just as spazzed, if not more so, as the first movie. For one, Happy Feet Two doubles down on the environmental dread of its predecessor. I honestly cannot think of a movie outside of First Reformed that wrestles with the apocalyptic implications of climate change and the role of organized religion in it as thoroughly as Happy Feet Two, and there's no way I can sufficiently convey to you just how little I ever expected to type the previous sentence. For two, it also really doubles down on the sheet incongruity of its concept, basically abandoning even the wild, mythic structure of the first movie in favor of a highly episodic, ensemble feature that resembles the shambling, rambling quality of a (I kid you not) Robert Altman film. It's still not good! Robin Williams is still doing his bad thing, and the songs basically feel like George Miller just put his iPod on shuffle—like, seriously, this movie has Janet Jackson, the Rawhide theme song, an aria from a Puccini opera, and a version of Janelle Monáe's "Tightrope" with the Big Boi verse switched out for Lil' P-Nut doing a bunch of ice-themed rhymes. It's weird! I can't think of a more strikingly singular pair of movies in the entire pantheon of English-language family entertainment, and that's even considering the (also George-Miller-affiliated) Babe movies. I just wish these were anything close to as good as the Babe movies. Grade: C

Practical Magic (1998)
The movie begins with these two witch aunts explaining to their niece that their family has a curse such that any time a woman in the family falls in love with a man, that man will meet an untimely death. Upon hearing this, that niece promptly swears off love forever, but then like five minutes later in the movie, the aunts give their niece a love potion that makes her fall in love with a man, and when he dies an untimely death, these aunts are like, "Oh wow, we had no idea that would happen." I was prepared for a whole movie in which the niece was going to have to come to terms with the fact that her aunts more or less killed this dude because they apparently couldn't remember the rules of the curse that they had just explained, but nope, that's just the first ten minutes of the movie, and the movie just kind of moves on from that, and before long, they're totally cool again and drinking tequila at midnight and dancing to Harry Nilsson (one of two scenes involving a conga line in this film). That's just the kind of movie this is, moving from one preposterous, logically suspect plot point to the next. It's pretty amusing in just how ridiculous the whole thing is, and Bullock and Kidman are undeniable screen presences, basically at their respective heights as bona-fide great movie stars before Bullock swung her career into overly broad directions and Kidman swung hers into more esoteric ones. And the relationship between Kidman and Bullock's characters is actually really sweet—I could imagine a much more functional and conventionally satisfying movie that was more focused on their sister love and less distracted by witch discrimination and resurrecting the dead and sexy store-brand Matthew McConaughey. I wouldn't call the iteration of the movie that we have "good." But there's something to be said for just how unself-conscious the film is about being the absolutely ludicrous, ungainly object that it is—in that regard, an unexpectedly fitting companion to my Happy Feet viewing earlier this week. Grade: C

The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
Preposterously energetic cinema, from the zooming, swooping camerawork to Jack Nicholson's performance to the enthusiasm with which the film pursues a recurring gag (literally!) involving people vomiting up cherry pits. It's never a boring movie, and often, especially near the end, its energy results in some ecstatic moments of over-the-top fervor. It's very fun to see Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon cast spells in feminist revenge against Jack Nicholson's odious Lucifer character. But on the other hand, it takes an hour and a half to get to that point, and up until that point, the movie's energy is more exhausting than elevating. A really deeply buried lede if there ever was one. Grade: C+

 

Music

CAN - Monster Movie (1969)
Significantly less avant-garde and significantly more rock-n-roll than I'm used to CAN albums being—which makes sense, given that apparently CAN had made another album previous to this one that apparently record labels deemed too experimental to release, so they intentionally made a more straightforward record (this one) in response. It's still not "mainstream" music by 1969 terms; of all the krautrock records I've heard, this is probably the one most obviously indebted to The Velvet Underground, which of course places Monster Movie pretty far left of "normal." It's not even particularly indebted to the accessible parts of The Velvet Underground's output either; the nervy opener, "Father Cannot Yell," sounds like it was recorded mid-"Sister Ray" jam, and "Outside My Door," with its cacophonous guitar noise, could easily slot into the "I Heard Her Call My Name" place on White Light/White Heat. There's something about all this that feels a little thin compared to the later CAN records. Maybe it needs to be just a little weirder. Maybe it's the lyrics—there's something deeply silly about Malcolm Mooney howling a rock-and-roll-ified version of the "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" nursery rhyme on "Mary, Mary So Contrary," and the 20-minute closing jam, "Yoo Doo Right," recalls The Monkeys in counterproductive ways as Mooney yells over and over again how "You made a believer out of me." It's not a bad record, and most of the time, it's quite good, finding a comfortable groove inside these slightly stilted takes on then-recent trends in experimental rock. If this had been the first CAN album I listened to, I probably would feel a bit more positively toward it. But as it is, I probably am always going to gravitate more toward Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for January 11 - 17, 2021

 Finally finished that Czech New Wave set.

Movies

Tenet (2020)
The idea of Christopher Nolan doing a time-travel heist movie based around some characters moving forward in time and others moving backwards in time feels like a director perfectly suiting a project to his strengths: lots of puzzle-y logistical games, very little by way of emotional engagement. And by the end, there are parts of Tenet that fulfill that promise, though it's pretty rocky getting there. I guess I thought that everybody was exaggerating when they said that this movie is hard to follow, but I definitely was in the dark at least 60% of the time, especially in the first half, when the movie is basically wall-to-wall exposition and setting up the chess pieces. I've never found Christopher Nolan movies to be particularly difficult to follow, but as his style has gotten increasingly chaotic concurrent with his increasingly... idiosyncratic approach to sound design, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I lost the plot in one of his movies. So here I am. The good news is that the core of this movie, as far as I can tell, is basically magical nonsense anyway (what does it even mean to "reverse the entropy" of an object, as if entropy is some distinct force?), so if you can power through the expository sections of the movie, it kind of doesn't matter if you didn't understand half of it, because the back nine of the film is pretty much just a sequence of action setpieces based around the undeniably cool mechanic of having some parts of these scenes progress forward in time while others progress backwards. Those parts are magnificent. They also clarify (to the extent that there is one) the emotional center of the film: an unstuck-in-time friendship between the characters played by John David Washington and Robert Pattinson. I dunno, there's a lot of noise in the movie around those good parts, and it definitely would have benefited from some streamlining (2.5 hours? Really?). But also, I have at least a little respect for how obtuse Nolan is willing to be in a nominally general-audience blockbuster, while still finding a way to be conventionally entertaining (eventually). Complexity isn't a productive end unto itself, nor is "nobody is making movies like this right now," but whatever combination of those two is in this movie is working for me. Grade: B

Possessor (2020)
A supremely, deliriously gruesome piece of cinema in which people inhabit other people's bodies in order to commit crimes. This being directed by Brandon "Son of David" Cronenberg, a lot of people have emphasized the horror elements of this movie, and those are certainly there: the idea that someone could invade your body and exploit it for their own profits (not like that would ever happen in 21st century capitalist America...) is very unsettling, and the movie's imagery complements that. But in some ways, the connections to Brandon's father's horror legacy has obscured that this is also a really terrific piece of cyberpunk sci-fi. David has spent a lot of his mid-to-late career adapting postmodern fiction for the screen; perhaps if Brandon has the same literary bent as his father, we'll get some cracking William Gibson adaptions. Grade: A-

The Girl Without Hands (La jeune fille sans mains) (2016)
Every few months it seems, I run across an animated film that looks like nothing I've ever seen before in cinema, and I wonder why I ever watch anything but animated movies. This is one of those. It has some of the most stunning animation I've ever seen, a film whose aesthetic is premised on the idea of bringing an ink wash painting to life and yet somehow transcends even that lofty goal to create a truly breathtaking array of textures from glistening ice to a rushing stream to a rippling field of grass—every individual frame a work of art in and of itself but also a work that fundamentally transforms into something wholly different in motion. It's also an unusually pure distillation of the ethos of the Brothers Grimm, whose story of the same provides the source material for this movie. The movie puts a striking feminist gloss over the story (I don't know that I've ever seen an animated movie so embodied in a female protagonist) while preserving the folk strangeness and unpredictability of experiencing an unfolding fairy tale. If you aren't here for the animation (and how could you not be???), there's certainly something here for students of fairy tales. Truly incredible stuff. Grade: A

Car Wash (1976)
There's something special about the way that this movie just stubbornly insists on never allowing its plot to expand beyond anything but a string of anecdotes. Literally just a movie about a bunch of people working in a car wash. I don't know what the screenplay (written by Joel Schumacher????) looks like on paper, but on the screen, this feels exactly like an ensemble cast just riffing for 90 minutes, and while I usually have a hard time with comedies that don't feel tightly scripted, I'd say it works here because 1. the cast is so incredibly winsome, and 2. more importantly, the aimless, only occasionally funny and sometimes even a little monotonous vibe of the movie really pointedly captures the mix of camaraderie, antagonism, boredom, and frustration that defines working a low-wage/hourly-wage kind of job like this one, right up to that quiet final scene where two characters break down because they're not sure they can take it anymore. The movie probably gets a little too cute at times in its efforts to include literally every social strata in this movie, but there's a generous spirit to even that cuteness that is rewarding and feels like an important antecedent to the kind of movies that Richard Linklater would go on to make about Austin. Anyway, it's a good time. Grade: B+

Capricious Summer (Rozmarné léto) (1968)
A bunch of horny middle-aged men come to terms with their middle-agedness as they are physically humiliated in their pursuit of a hot young woman who's come to town with the circus. I enjoy the physical humiliation parts, but overall, this feels like an unintentional experiment in making a sex comedy that is neither sexy nor funny. I've now watched four of the six movies in Criterion's Pearls of the Czech New Wave set and only enjoyed one of them fully (Daisies, for the record, because how could I not?). Beginning to think Criterion may have been overselling the movies here just a tad by calling them "pearls." Grade: C

 

The Joke (Žert) (1969)
I like Milan Kundera, so it's no surprise that a film adapting a novel of his (which I haven't read) would be my second-favorite of the Pearls of the Czech New Wave set. It's not amazing; parts of it are very slow, to a degree that I don't find entirely productive. But it had a wicked sense of irony that I really dug. I don't think I've seen a funnier riff on the futility of revenge, actually. Also, there's a grim humor in the idea that a guy who merely jokes that he is a Trotskyist would get put in a concentration camp by a communist government. Good to know that the left cannibalizing itself is nothing new, I guess. Grade: B

 

Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně) (1966)
After watching this whole Pearls of the Czech New Wave collection, I'm sad to report that the only director I'm really excited about of the bunch is Věra Chytilová (Daisies), and that's basically reflected in this anthology film, as Chytilová's short is the only one here I found truly great. Like, it's extremely good, the kind of short where every minute is better than the previous one until it ends on this dizzying high that lands the film in the ecstatic avant-garde that defined Daisies. Evald Schorm's short, "House of Joy," is pretty good, too, and also pretty funny, which is not something I would have expected from the director of the mostly straight-laced The Return of the Prodigal Son. The rest of the shorts did nothing for me, as is the case for the lion's share of this collection as a whole, I'm afraid. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for January 4 - 10, 2021

 What a boring week with absolutely nothing interesting in it to talk about going on in the world.

Movies

City Hall (2020)
Even for a Frederick Wiseman documentary, City Hall takes a looong time to reveal its shape. The whole film documents the activities of the titular Boston city hall, and like many a Wiseman film, we watch extremely long scenes of meetings chronicling these activities; admittedly, for the first half of this 4.5-hour movie, there are a fair number of these scenes that are pretty tedious, even for me, who watches public meetings for fun. But by the end, the film has become something rather stunning, one of the most comprehensive portraits of a public system in Wiseman's career. I realize that I sound like the boring version of one of those people who says that a television series gets really good after you get through the first five episodes, but you have to trust me that I've never seen a movie that so thoroughly articulates the limitations of the liberal capitalist urbanism that basically all major American cities seem to be operating under right now. It's a movie filled with dedicated public servants who undoubtedly have the best of intentions as they pursue equality and inclusivity, and the film has a certain admiration for their buttoned-up dedication to procedure and ideals. But by the end of City Hall, these public servants are shown to be altogether inadequate to address the very real material concerns that Boston residents bring to the numerous public forums depicted here because they are working within a system that has been structured to prioritize development over living conditions. You can have programs and outreaches and the purest of ideals, but at the end of the day, it's capital that calls the shots. This all comes to a head in a breathtaking sequence near the end of the movie, set at a public forum where the residents of a low-income neighborhood interrogate a representative from a company who intents to build a cannabis business in their area; the residents demand from the company meaningful systemic contributions to improving the lives of locals, and the representative heeds these demands with what seems like the utmost sincerity and says that they will take this all into account as they move forward with the project, and in the context of the other 4 hours of the film, it's crushingly apparent that regardless of whether or not this company actually intends to help the community, ultimately it's the company who will most benefit from this arrangement. In a world in which urban governance is premised first on the generation of revenue from land (we're shown a budget presentation at the beginning of the film), there is an extraordinary momentum granted to developers that residents must overcome to have their needs met, and simple "inclusion," however noble, can never be sufficient on its own in empowering regular people to be successful at organizing for their own interests. The tragedy is that Boston's mayor, Marty Walsh, seems to have niggling doubts about the efficacy of that the current system for everyday people (he talks about exploitative pharmaceutical prices at one point, for example) while also being seemingly unable to realize that his basic posture of capital-friendly liberalism is complicit in the factors that produce those very doubts. I can't watch a movie like this and not think of my own Knoxville, TN, which faces the exact same fundamental problem while also having a less inclusive ideology; in particular, a recent city council meeting saw the same elected officials passing a (long-overdue) resolution to pay reparations for urban renewal projects that decimated several black neighborhoods several decades ago, while also on that same night approving another resolution that moved the ball forward on building a baseball stadium in the same area of those urban renewal projects, despite the protestations of residents who asked for the process to be slowed down to ensure that benefits could be secured for the community. At this meeting, as with a meeting depicted in the film, community land trusts were briefly brought up before being lost in the noise about regulations and revenue, and that's basically my takeaway from this movie in microcosm, whether in Tennessee or Massachusetts: public ownership and true collaboration between governments and the people being elbowed out by this incessant and ultimately dehumanizing push for revenue from the supposed benevolence of much larger capital interests. Like, who serves whom, you know? Grade: A-

The Land of Steady Habits (2018)
In the movies of hers that I've seen, Nicole Holofcener always focuses her movies on terrible people, but this one might take the cake. Usually a Holofcener protagonist is just low-grade terrible, saying insensitive things and acting self-interestedly but within the broad boundaries of polite society. In The Land of Steady Habits, the protagonist (played with impressive misery and self-loathing by Ben Mendelsohn) has more or less absconded himself from polite society before the action of the film proper begins, having left his wife and decided to live in bachelor squalor while occasionally swooping into his old life to cause anguish. The movie makes a point of showing that so-called polite society is just a papering over of this rather nihilistic self-interest anyway and basically invites the humiliation it suffers at Mendelsohn's hands in this movie, but also, the collateral damage of Mendelsohn's actions here is staggering and bleak, and by the time that we get to the requisite "dude shows some measure of self-awareness and personal growth" ending, in the context of the destruction that has just elapsed, that growth feels entirely hollow and itself an obligation to the expectations of polite society—to the point where I would not be surprised if Holofcener intended it as a caustic, ironic embrace of convention rather than a good-faith use of it. It's a truly feel-bad movie, and I felt bad after watching it, but there are also some terrific scenes, almost all of which hinge on fleeting moments of honesty and human connection, brief illustrations of what is lost in a world premised on the solipsism displayed here. Grade: B

Real Women Have Curves (2002)
The sweetness of America Ferrara's really vulnerable performance (her feature-film debut??) is cut by the somewhat bleak tragedy of her mother, who to the bitter end of the film is unable to disentangle her love for her daughter from her internalized body shame. It leans a little hard on dialogue that states its themes just a tad too on-the-nosedly for my tastes ("I want to be respected for what I think, not for how I look"), but it at least doesn't feel out-of-place with a movie that refuses to pull its punches in depicting the relationship between mother and daughter here. Grade: B+

 

 

Shock Treatment (1981)
As far as sequels to The Rocky Horror Picture Show go, this is definitely the only one of them! I have mad respect for the idea of this movie. As a narrative, it's conceptually bold (basically Brad and Janet, who somehow responded to the events of the original Rocky Horror by getting married and turning into normal schmucks, get put on this proto-reality-TV show that traps them in this nightmare version of normie America), and as a piece of cinema, it's striking (especially the garish, almost expressionist sets that comprise the reality show). But in practice, this movie just isn't very much fun, and while this movie intentionally frustrates any and all comparisons to Rocky Horror, the one thing that original movie never felt like was a slog; Shock Treatment is pretty sloggy at times, especially toward the end as the conceptual stuff escalates. The music is at least lively, though the few times near the beginning that the instrumentation interpolates parts of "Time Warp" do kind of call attention to just how much more I enjoy the music from the other film more. Part of this obviously is tied up in the fact that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the most iconic movies of the past half century, whereas Shock Treatment mostly languishes in obscurity and lacks cultural osmosis to buoy its ambitions. But also, this just isn't as good. Obviously. I mean, to the extent that this movie has a reputation, that's it. But also, this movie is way too ambitious and weird to simply relegate to the shadow of its cooler older sibling. I realize I've spent most of this review doing just that, but as much as this movie didn't completely work for me, it's definitely worth checking out and definitely worth a minor cult status of its own. I wish more sequels would take erratic left turns from their predecessor. Grade: C+

Daisies (Sedmikrásky) (1966)
Such an infectious sense of mayhem. There is an important political context to this movie's Czech release, but the spirit feels universal, and it's inordinately cathartic to watch these two women chaotically dance on the grave of every stupid, elitist bit of etiquette out there. It's so universal that when I watched this with two toddlers in the house, they were both absolutely enraptured. I mean, who doesn't want to trash a fancy dinner with their bare hands and feet? The art house is for the children, I tell you. Grade: A

 

A Report on the Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech) (1966)
I'm not going to pretend like I understood this movie, because I didn't. Something about a critique of authoritarian Communism—might have made more of an impact on me if I knew literally anything about Czech history. The thing about Buñuel-style satires is that they only really work if you understand the target of the satire or enjoy the absurd premise on its face. I had neither going for me here. Grade: C

 

 

The Return of the Prodigal Son (Návrat ztraceného syna) (1967)
Of the three movies I've watched so far from Criterion's Pearls of the Czech New Wave set, this is by far the most grounded in reality and the least prone to the appealing sense of anarchy and humor that has characterized the rest. I at least understand this movie significantly more than I did A Report on the Party and Guests. This one is a pretty straightforward depiction of the psychological malaise brought on by the advances of the 20th century (which, in the case of this protagonist, includes the conformity brought on by the communist system of Czechoslovakia—I know nothing about Czech history, so I have no comment on the politics of this) and of the ways that the then-current mental health institutions are inadequate in treating that malaise. Stretches of this movie are pretty interesting, especially the last 15 minutes or so, which veer the movie toward the more metaphorical style of the other two Czech New Wave movies I've seen. But for other long stretches, this movie just feels kind of staid: mid-century European cinematic drama on autopilot. So mixed feelings here overall. Grade: B-

 

Music

Taylor Swift - evermore (2020)
I've heard a lot of people say that Taylor Swift's second surprise release of 2020 is basically just folklore part two, which I think is overstating the similarities between the two. Definitely both share the same broad autumnal "indie folk" sensibility anchored by Aaron Dessner collaborations and containing a Bon Iver duet. But to say that evermore is the same as folklore overlooks the presence of "dorothea," a piano ballad with a big singalong chorus; "no body, no crime," a full-on country-pop murder ballad; "cowboy like me," another country song that bears a lot of kinship to Taylor's first two albums, "closure," which contains a percussion track that sounds like it came from Bon Iver's 22, A Million. For sure, there is overlap with folklore, but evermore, appropriate for an album with full-color cover art after its predecessor's tasteful monochrome, is a much more varied, scattershot listening experience than folklore. This means that folklore is the more cohesive record as far as front-to-back unity and thematic connections go, but it also means that evermore is a much more surprising album with interesting little nooks to explore. Being the "listen to an album front-to-back" guy that I am, I prefer folklore (and I think the mean songwriting quality is just a tad higher in that one, too). But evermore doesn't feel so much like a sequel as it does a really solid b-sides/odds-and-ends compilation—messier and less considered than a Taylor Swift album proper, but also maybe more interesting and revealing because of that. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for December 28, 2020 - January 3, 2021

 Happy New Year! In case you missed it, here's my list of favorite 2020 movies.

Movies

Splice (2009)
Basically Frankenstein, but with genetic engineering and a much more active role for Elizabeth. It's an exceptionally gross and legitimately shocking movie, which I appreciate in theory but don't particularly enjoy in practice here. I want to love this weird, wild thing, and the thematic threads it starts unspooling are some pretty bold questions about the ethics of experimentation and scientist's responsibility toward their breakthrough and a creator's responsibility toward its creation when consciousness is involved. But these threads become hopelessly tangled by the end of the film, and it's never clear (to me at least—maybe I'm just dumb) what exactly the movie is trying to say about any of this. It would help if the film featured recognizably human behavior from either of its protagonists. Huge decisions are made with motivations so murky that they mostly derail any attempt to make the human (and trans-human) drama of this film coherent. Why don't they just kill the creature at the very beginning when it nearly kills Sarah Polley's character? Why do they think it's a good idea to keep the creature in a barn in the middle of nowhere? And how on earth does it only take one scene for Adrian Brody's relationship with the creature to transition from his being completely repulsed by it to his being willing to [redacted]??? The movie nominally provides answers for all of these questions, but they do not compute with what is seen onscreen. That said, it's hard for me not to at least admire the gumption of this movie and the sheer disregard of good taste it has in pursuing its narrative. And the institutional support that was behind this movie is absolutely bonkers. This is a movie that was distributed by Warner Bros. and given a major summer theatrical release! What in the world were they thinking? I mean, to be fair, one of the other June 4, 2010, wide releases alongside Splice in the United States was Marmaduke, so maybe there was just a gas leak in Hollywood or something. Grade: C+

Tetro (2009)
I was ready to call this the most conventional of Francis Ford Coppola's 21st century films, and perhaps it is. But man, I was just completely bowled over by the final 30 minutes, which creates something rich and literary and cutting-edge in a way that I totally wasn't expecting. There's an almost Shakespearean weight to the way the film's characters fold in on each other: the wheels within wheels that the central family is revealed to be, the high drama of fathers against sons against fathers that this eventually becomes. I have some misgivings about the first half of the movie, particularly Maribel Verdú's character, who feels extremely under-served by this film. But when this film focuses on the dynamic between Alden Ehrenreich and Vincent Gallo (is this the best-ever use of Gallo's seemingly un-turn-offable intensity?), the film is golden. Grade: A-

Barbershop (2002)
I love the environmental project of this movie, which is to depict the vibrant life of a South-Side Chicago neighborhood by way of how it intersects a single barbershop, and for good stretches of the movie, it's basically just that: people from different social strata and walks of life just riffing from the barber chair. The cast absolutely excels at this sort of thing, too, with every single actor here doing terrific work sketching out these broad but energetic personalities—not a weak link in the bunch. There are a couple other gears this movie shifts to that don't work nearly as well, though. Nothing about the "stolen ATM" plot does anything for me, despite the best efforts of Anthony Anderson. On a more fundamental level, this movie's hectoring relationship with women is pretty tiresome, and even beyond that, there's a somewhat annoying strain of conservatism that the film settles into when it gets pensive—lots of "kids these days" and "benevolent black capitalism saves the neighborhood" vibes here, and there's an actual unironic "here's what's wrong with your generation" sermon delivered at one point. So it's a somewhat uneven ride. But at its best, this movie is really a lot of fun and has that rambunctious spirit of communal life that I love seeing in cinema. Grade: B-

He Got Game (1998)
Probably Spike Lee's most overtly spiritual film after Red Hook Summer, which I was not expecting out of a movie about a high school basketball star deciding which college to sign to. But that high school star is named Jesus, and the movie basically runs with it from there, turning the whole college recruitment hustle into a Last-Temptation-of-Christ-style revision of Christ's desert temptation—when a (white) agent tells the (black) high schooler that he's just making a business proposition and that he doesn't see any color but green, it legitimately feels like Satan offering Jesus authority over the whole earth in exchange for him bending the knee to the Prince of Darkness. This is also one of Spike Lee's most visually expressive movies, with some truly masterful editing and lighting that constantly bathes the characters in rich greens and blues and reds. This would easily be one of the GOAT Spike Lee movies if it weren't for the frankly embarrassing way it deploys its female characters. Every single one of them fits on a pretty simply defined "Madonna-Whore" spectrum that the movie unfortunately feels compelled to tie in to its larger spiritual themes, especially in a pretty cringe plot involving Denzel Washington's character finding spiritual and sexual redemption by rescuing an abused sex worker. That's by far the worse offender, but not a single female character here has any sort of interior life, and they all exist as obstacles to or tools for male spiritual journeys. Though in fairness, there are parts of the Bible that basically do the same thing, so I guess there's a "comes with the territory" element to that here. Grade: A-

Exotica (1994)
I've been trying for days to write a review that explains what's so powerful about this movie, and I keep coming up blank, which I think is a testament to how fundamental cinematic language is to the impact of this film as opposed to, say, the language of literature—though Exotica is also thoroughly literary, so much so that as I was watching it, I thought this was probably based on a novel (it's not). This is ostensibly one of those "everyone is connected" movies (the first one ever?), but whereas movies like Magnolia end up eventually going a kind of sentimental, mystical route in defining their characters' connections with each other and movies like Crash end up being unbearably corny in their eagerness to show the ripple effects of people's actions on each other, Exotica finds a way that gestures at the metaphysics of Magnolia (some of the match-cuts here feel literally transcendent in the way that they link otherwise disconnected people, places, and sounds) while also grounding those connections in some of the most precisely articulated material anguish I've ever seen in a movie. It's really hard to describe what this movie is about without making it sound stupid ("So, uh, there are these dudes who are obsessed with this particular dancer at a strip club..."), and I was initially skeptical of it as well. But the way in which it eventually finds compassion among characters who are all basically prisoners of themselves or of others is so tremendously moving, and on a purely plot level, the way all the disparate threads of the film eventually loop in to one another is exquisite and satisfying in a way that these kinds of movies generally aren't. I should probably see it again before I declare it one of the best movies of the '90s, but... this is one of the best movies of the '90s? Grade: A+

 

Television

Love, Victor, Season 1 (2020)
I don't have a ton to say about this series. It was a breezy, mostly enjoyable watch, and for the most part, I feel about this about the same way that I feel about the movie Love, Simon (for which this is a sequel of sorts)—i.e. it's a nice, not-particularly mind-blowing riff on coming-of-age teen dramedy tropes whose main innovation is to grace them upon a gay protagonist. Love, Victor in fact hits a lot of the same plot points as Love, Simon, including the dorky wingman, for example, and the protagonist's confused role leading on a female character's interest in him, and when the show is at its best, it shakes these up by removing some of the privileges that Simon inherited in the movie (Victor is Latino, lower-middle-class, and has parents who are sometimes openly homophobic). Most of the time, though, it's kind of on autopilot navigating through a bunch of standard teen show set-ups, and stretched out to the length of a television season, the goofiness of these set-ups and the seams in the storytelling reveal themselves more than they did in a tight feature film. But regardless, I had a good-enough time and will probably watch the second season whenever it comes out. Grade: B

 

Books

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru (2020)
Kunzru's novel is pretty self-consciously "a novel for our times." In 2016, a man gets a fellowship to go on this academic retreat at this German institution, and while there, he runs into some very alt-right-type white supremacists and has a mental breakdown as he horrifiedly tries to understand their caustic dismissal of him. He ultimately can't. It's basically a book about the ways that contemporary American liberalism is fundamentally unequipped to handle an openly fascist threat to democracy, which is a theme I can get behind and is rendered intriguingly here. The novel's final scene takes place at an election-night party with some Hillary canvassers, which feels way too self-congratulatory a note to end the book on (it's way easy to show these out-of-touch NYC liberals four years after the fact), but before that point, the book is precise in its evocation of internet white supremacy while also being unpredictable in how it gets there: lots of talk about 19th-century German Romantics and GDR-era East-Berlin surveillance. And its depictions of conversations between insulated liberals and the alt-right gave me a pit in my stomach because of how familiar they sounded. Grade: B+

Favorite Movies of 2020

I began last year's favorite movies post talking about how much 2019 sucked, and wow, did just a few months of context expose that for the wild naivete it was. This isn't the post to rehash everything that was even worse about 2020 (and will likely continue to be awful into 2021, since chaos and evil and disease don't tend to follow the Gregorian Calendar), but the one thing specific to this post that is worth bringing up is how much I miss going to movie theaters. It's probably clear to anyone who reads this blog that going to the movies is one of my very favorite things in the world, and while movies certainly aren't leaving my life (I still have the local library and streaming), one dispiriting thing this year has demonstrated is just how poorer the cinematic arts are without the option to sit in a dark, over-air-conditioned room with several dozen strangers.

It's not just the aesthetics of the experience (though, for example, I am deeply grieved that I cannot hear the score for Soul on theater sound equipment); movie culture and discourse is basically on life support without theaters because the streaming giants have not yet figured out how to be good distributors of cinema, despite being currently the biggest distributors of the art form. Big, expensive movies from major filmmakers like Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola, and David Fincher were released directly to streaming and promptly disappeared from the discourse (and streaming services homepages) after a week or two, and these weren't isolated incidents. Movies on streaming services exist basically in a big heap of content with only the most cursory of curation and organization, and it turns out that relying entirely on rifling through that heap to find the gems is actually pretty bad for any sort of shared or communal experience, which is the lifeblood of film culture.

Steaming and its boundless access have a vital role within the film world. I've seen films via streaming that I probably would never have been able to find otherwise. But theaters force people to experience something together across a city, nation, or even sometimes the globe, and as much as that could sometimes be frustratingly gate-kept (why would Knoxville not get major awards-season films until January??), it could also be powerful, too: the last vestige of a shared culture in an era that has fractured (seemingly irreparably) into splinters. I want to hear people in the row behind me get excited about a movie trailer that I think looks pretty dumb; I want to laugh awkwardly when no one else in the theater did; I want to wait in line outside of the Downtown West theater and look at the posters for those silly movies that would be about boomers going on road trips and falling in with a community of competitive Rubik's cubers or whatever. This bizarre, kitschy, collective liturgy—I just miss it all.

In last year's post, I mentioned that I hoped to one day share the movies on the list with my son. This year, I hope to one day still be able to share a theater-going experience with my son. It's looking grim for theaters, but my fingers crossed.

Anyway, here's the list. Per usual, everything on here is something that got a streaming or (unlikely, I suppose, but possible) theatrical release in the United States during this calendar year. I certainly haven't seen everything, so feel free to share your own favorites, too!

Favorite Movies

1. Wolfwalkers
A gorgeously animated anti-imperialist fable that is firing on all cylinders at all moments. I sometimes have second thoughts about my #1 pick, but I don't think I've ever been more confident about one as I am about Wolfwalkers. It's a masterpiece.

[Read original review]

2. I'm Thinking of Ending Things
A truly feel-bad movie in every conceivable way, simultaneously the logical endpoint of writer/director Charlie Kaufman's inventive, meta career and also the nightmare alternate-universe version of the man in a world without the whimsical acidity of early work like Being John Malkovich. The way I'm describing it probably makes this movie seem like it isn't for everyone, which is certainly true, but it's also the sharpest depiction of loneliness that I've seen in a movie in a long time, and in the year of COVID quarantines, there's probably something universal in that.

[Read original review]

3. Bad Education
Upon a couple months' reflection, I've decided that this definitely my favorite Hugh Jackman performance. In a walk. Like, no contest.

[Read original review]

4. First Cow
It's strange to call a movie that ultimately takes the shape of a pretty bleak tragedy as "cozy," but this little story of two dudes on the frontier just trying to steal some milk so they can bake some sweet oily cakes definitely feels cozy for long stretches. That Reichardt touch, I suppose.

[Read original review]

5. The Wolf House
Extremely close runner-up to Wolfwalkers for my favorite animation of the year. Wolfwalkers's imagery not being viscerally terrifying probably gave it the edge in the long run, to be honest. But this movie has the benefit of looking like no animation I've ever seen before. It's stunning. And yes, very scary.

[Read original review]

6. Emma.
I feel like people forgot about this one—among the last theatrical releases, a real visual treat, and an exceptionally sharp Jane Austen adaptation. Also, between this and The Queen's Gambit, I'd say Anya Taylor-Joy is really knocking it out of the park finding films with terrific costuming.

[Read original review]

7. Residue
This is the kind of movie I was talking about when I mentioned movies disappearing into streaming services up in the prologue. I don't know anyone who saw this movie except me and the people I watched it with. Take it from me, because Netflix sure isn't going to tell you about it: watch this movie!

[Read original review]

8. Soul
A beautiful little piece of children's entertainment existentialism, with probably my favorite score of the year, split between the pristine Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross electronics and John Batiste's sprightly jazz arrangements.

[Read original review]

9. The Invisible Man
Just a really tight sci-fi thriller that works basically across the board. There's some interesting, surprisingly thorny subtext about gaslighting and what it means to believe a survivor of abuse, which is cool, but I think this mostly hits as hard as it does because it's just an impeccable piece of craft.

[Read original review]

10. Palm Springs
I love a good Groundhog Day riff, and this is probably the best, most self-aware Groundhog Day movie since the original.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Documentary Corner Award: Time—This was my #10 until I saw Soul. I wish I'd had time to watch City Hall, which I have a feeling would have beaten out this movie, but that's no slight to Time, a moving, urgent documentary on its own right focusing on a woman's years-long fight to get her husband released from prison. Deeply sad.

Taylor Swift Documentary Corner Award: Miss Americana—It's been a big year for Taylor Swift fans: two albums and two movies. Miss Americana is one of the less-guarded chronicles of Taylor Swift we've ever gotten, and I've definitely thought a lot more about this documentary this year than my original review suggests.

"Last 2020 Movie I Saw in a Theater" Award: Gretel & Hansel—I'm fudging a little bit on this one, since it means not counting Portrait of a Lady on Fire (the actual last movie I saw in a theater) as a 2019 release, even though it didn't open in Knoxville until 2020. Anyway, Gretel & Hansel is a solid film whose existence I completely forgot about until I was compiling movies for this post. More notable is that I saw it in a small, local theater that almost certainly won't survive the pandemic, which is sad. Boy, do I miss going to the movie theater.

"More People Should See This" Award: The Assistant—I mean, I know why more people didn't see this. It's an extremely quiet, often uncomfortable indie film than came out in Jan/Feb, when most people aren't going to movies (back in the days when people actually did, you know, go to movies). But it's really worth it; believe me. It may be quiet, but it's gripping.

Best Revisionist-Historical Depiction of a Mid-Century Genius: Shirley—I kind of just invented this category so I could pointedly not give it to Mank, but also, Shirley is a really interesting, really sour take on the private life of Shirley Jackson, anchored by an indelible Elizabeth Moss performance. Runner up: Tesla.

Best Anxiety: She Dies Tomorrow—In which anxiety and existential dread literally spreads like a disease among a group of increasingly isolated people. Hm, what an outlandish idea for a film.

Biggest Disappointment: A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon—I loooved the first Shaun the Sheep Movie, so I was pretty crestfallen that this follow-up did nothing for me.

Best Low-Rent Direct-to-Streaming Thriller: Run—A surprising number of direct-to-streaming movies are low-rent thrillers, but this one edges ahead of the pack. A ridiculously tight film about a girl who begins to suspect that her mother is intentionally poisoning her. Very fun.

Best Spike Lee / Best Soundtrack: Da 5 Bloods—In 2020, Spike Lee released a short film, a concert doc, and this movie, a sprawling mash-up of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Apocalypse Now filtered through the lens of black anti-imperialism. They're all worth your time, but this is the best, and the Marvin Gaye soundtrack is TOPS.

"Disney, Can You Lay Off the Corporate Synergy for Just Like One Minute?" Award: Black Is King—My opinions of the Walt Disney Company have never been lower, and it seems like everything they put their grubby little mouse paws on this year got just a little bit worse. Exhibit A: Black Is King, Beyoncé's idiosyncratic musical art film / music video cycle that just haaaaad to tie in narratively to the live-action Lion King remake. Like, come on, Disney! Let Beyoncé be Beyoncé!

Movie I Most Wish Were Just a Little Better: The Forty-Year-Old Version—The screenplay is too reliant on corny turns and character clichés to be completely good, but the best parts of Radha Blank's semi-autobiographical dramedy are so good that it makes me wish for the great movie that could have been.

Worst Movie of the Year: The Turning—Not just the worst movie but easily the worst ending of any movie. It's not like the movie were anything close to good before the final 5-10 minutes, but those final 5-10 minutes are astonishingly incompetent and completely nonsensical to a degree that the tedious mediocrity of the preceding 80 minutes did not prepare me for at all. It's a failure of such magnitude that it has to be seen to be believed.

Best Non-2020 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2020: Exotica—This movie snuck in at the very last minute and completely clobbered me. I watched this on December 31, and it was immediately apparent that I'd watched an all-timer. I haven't had a chance to write it up yet for the blog on account of having only watched it yesterday, but this is just an astonishing work, a hypnotic, achingly compassionate story of wounded people linked together by tragedy, featuring one of the best examples of disparate plot pieces clicking into place to form a coherent whole in the movie's final minutes that I've ever seen.