Just counting the days until this winter is over.
Movies
At what point do I throw up my hands and admit that I just don't connect to Romanian movies? It seems so absurd that an entire country's cinematic output feels at arm's length from me, but every time I watch a Romanian movie, I just feel my brain smooth over, and the movie slides right off it. I don't know what's wrong with me. This is a lot more conventionally exciting than a lot of the New Wave, being basically an explicit neo-noir with gunplay and backstabbing and everything. And it's also a lot more stylistically considered than a lot of the New Wave films I've seen (I don't think there is any handheld camera here!), which should mean that this is a lot more accessible to my tastes than the others. There are some admittedly very cool sequences, and I was pretty entertained throughout those. But I dunno, I just couldn't get into this as a whole. The nonlinear storytelling feels like an unnecessary wank, the characters feel like shells walking through a bunch of tropes, and there are out-of-nowhere quotes of, like, Psycho and stuff that I don't really understand the purpose of. Also, this has the most interesting premise (people using an obscure whistle-based language to perform a heist) that it buries in all its clever hard-boiledness. I hate to be the philistine who just wants things to be "cool," but I wish they had done cool stuff with the whistles instead of making it basically a subplot after the first 30 minutes. Grade: C+
I didn't know what was happening about 60% of the time, compounded by the fact of the very busy sound mixing and that the DVD I watched this on didn't have captions. But that said, this is pretty good as basically a feature-length application of music video techniques and highlights the extent to which music videos are basically fevered-dream psychedelia. I feel like music videos usually being only like 3-4 minutes long kinda sneaks the wild craft past our conscious minds, but at 90+ minutes, this movie makes you just sit there and confront how seriously radical the music video style can be. Grade: B
There's a lot of latent hostility in blockbuster films that show you a bunch of stuff being destroyed in some sort of apocalypse, so it makes sense that under the directorship of Tim Burton, whose classic work harbors a lot of latent hostility itself, such a movie would become almost explicitly a celebration of humanity's destruction. Once the violence starts, it's basically wall-to-wall scenes of barely contained glee as the kinds of people Burton and screenwriter Jonathan Gems hate (e.g. patriots, businessmen, politicians) meet their grisly demise. Not every moment works, but like a lot of good Tim Burton, the movie as a whole has this ineffable something about it, a vaguely sinister sense of camp and mayhem, that just works for me. It's probably the last Burton film to have that X factor, unfortunately. He'd make good movies after this, but nothing that really taps into that particular feeling. Grade: B
Derek Jarman's grieving elegy to the pre-Thatcher, pre-HIV queer England and his scorched-earth middle finger to everything else. It's moving and sad in a way that I don't usually see from the avant-garde, and even though I came here for Tilda Swinton and was surprised at just how little she figures into the movie, she definitely makes the most of the maybe 7 minutes total she's onscreen. A completely wild, fiercely experimental experience that I dug completely. Grade: A-
A slow but nevertheless chaotic rendering of the life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, full of intentional anachronisms and extremely good-looking cinematography. It's nice to see an example of irreverent cinema that's not bratty and bro-ish. It's also nice to see baby Tilda Swinton and baby Sean Bean in this—both of their film debuts, apparently! Of the two Jarman movies I've seen, I think I prefer The Last of England, but this is such a different thing than that film that it's honestly kind of hard to compare beyond a general sense of fury simmering beneath the surface of both. Grade: B+
I was part of a conversation about this movie on the Cinematary podcast this past week, if anyone is interested in that! Here's the link.
Basically what I imagine would have happened if Georges Méliès had made a feature film. Predictably, the plot is entirely secondary to the movie's unfettered fantasy imagery and logic, and I actually had a pretty hard time following it. It would probably have made more sense to me if I were more familiar with the original Baron Munchausen stories. But honestly, it doesn't really matter, because you don't come to a dream for the plot. Grade: B+
Books
There are probably other examples, but this is the first novel that I've read that I would call "Climate Change Fiction," in the sense that it is explicitly about the dangers of climate change and the psychological toll of climate anxiety. A group of children vacationing with their parents have formed an autonomous society apart from their parents, having become fed up with their parents' hedonistic, solipsistic behavior, and just when they do this, a hurricane of biblical proportions tears through the United States, forcing the kids to fend for their survival as society comes apart at the seams. And I do mean biblical proportions, because alongside a somewhat straightforward apocalypse plot, the book has this magical-realist sensibility wherein the events the children experience start to mirror stories from the Bible. By mixing the mythical with the contemporary, Millet is able to be playful enough with the subject to avoid turning A Children's Bible into an "issues novel" while at the same time taking climate change seriously on a level I can't think of in narrative art outside of Darren Aronofsky's Noah movie, folding it into the very fabric of some of our oldest stories until the two become indistinguishable. For those afraid of the world-rending potential of climate change (most of us at this point, I hope), large sections of this book should, by all rights, be feel-bad disaster porn, and I guess on some level, they are, but Millet's blending in of religious signifiers makes it feel a lot less nihilistic than the subject matter might tempt the book to be. It's also very funny at times, in ways that specifically de-fang climate nihilism; the narrator, one of the children, is a hilarious voice animated by an open contempt for her parents' impotent despair at the state of the world, and this is counterbalanced by a sincere sense of wonder, too—another effect of the integration of biblical iconography. Despite a plot that, on paper, should scan as pessimistic, there's a keen sense of humor and hope in A Children's Bible, if not that human civilization can be redeemed then certainly that there is beauty to be found in the twilight of our world, which is its own sort of redemption. I would call this a masterpiece if it weren't for a somewhat bizarre section involving some one-dimensionally evil dudes who feel like they walked out of a more conventional apocalypse novel (and whose depiction traffics in some ableist characterizations, I think). I'm not really sure what to do with that part, and until the heavily magical resolution to this subplot, I'm not sure what to do with this part. But otherwise, this is great, and hopefully more fiction can wrestle with climate change with the grace that this one does. Grade: A-
Music
A random Bandcamp find. It's a single 36-minute track that forms a dreamy soundscape out of some droning loops and scattered piano musings. Also, in the middle of it, a phone notification goes off, which I'd like to think was a perfect little accident that Ishibashi decided to keep in. The album is beautiful anyway, but there's a sense of humor about that phone sound in the middle of this otherwise ethereal album that I find delightful. Grade: B+
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