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