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