Please let spring be here.
Movies
It's a major bummer that this got buried in the pandemic and, even before that, Disney's acquisition of Fox (though hilariously, they apparently forgot to take out the old 20th Century Fox graphic at the beginning). This is one of the best and scariest mainstream horror movies in recent memory, and not just scary like "boo!" but on a much more fundamental level. The movie starts as one thing (a ghost/possession story wrapped in a police procedural) and then just keeps picking at it and picking at it like you would a small chip of paint on a wall until it eventually has flaked off enough that it's revealed something huge and otherworldly and horrifying beneath, becoming both a metaphysical treatise and an unsettling psychological portrait while showing that there's no real distinction between the two. This strikes me as the sort of effect that the first season of True Detective (I never watched the others) was aiming for, including the pristine digital-cinematography aesthetic, but The Empty Man has none of the issues that compromised that show and has quite a few other things going for it that the show didn't, like an ability to pull on supernatural events, or the fact that it's a (relatively) concise film instead of a haphazardly paced miniseries. I'm looking forward to this inevitably gaining classic status in a decade or so. Grade: A
I'm not the kind of person who is inherently repelled by plots about rich people and their problems, but I was so profoundly bored by the plot of this film that I found myself looking everywhere else in this film but the plot. As it happens, the cinematography is incredible, and the score (by John Adams!) is only a notch or two below that—sort of Herrmann meets Philip Glass. So this movie skates by on those two things and exclusively those two things; sorry, Tilda, I still love you. That said, I do wonder what I would have thought about A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name (both better movies overall, though in the case of the former, barely) if I'd known when I saw them that each are built from component parts of this movie while also not having nearly so interesting music or visuals. Grade: C+
Very much the dark-side companion to Coppola's adaptation of The Outsiders: both released in the same year, adapting S. E. Hinton novels (and in the case of Rumble Fish, Hinton herself was screenplay co-writer), starring Matt Dylan, filmed in Tulsa with the same production team. But whereas The Outsiders is classicist and romantic (if ultimately tragic), Rumble Fish is experimental and bleak, a cutting-edge use of film technology to empower an exceptional eye for b&w cinematography and impressionist editing to tell a sweaty, grim parable. It's understandable why this movie flopped; I certainly would have been initially perplexed if I were expecting something in the vein of The Outsiders. But holy cow, is this movie beautiful. That said, while I know that the tide has mostly turned and people prefer Rumble Fish nowadays, I think the two movies are stronger together as a diptych about the tensions of telling a story about troubled adolescents (the romance of youth mixed with the despair of destitution) and, on a more meta level, the competing tensions within Coppola's filmography (the maximalist classicist and the brain experimenter). On a completely separate note, the score here (by Stewart Copeland of The Police[!]) is incredibly good. Grade: A-
Peter Bogdanovich's nostalgia can sometimes be a little irritating, and "my movie about a mass shooter is a metaphor for the coarsening of American society concurrent with the demise of Old Hollywood" is really, really close to tipping over into that. But this ends up working well despite itself. First of all, despite its thesis, Targets actually appropriates a lot of those European-influenced New Hollywood techniques extremely well—most notably in the shooter sequences themselves, which are without score and have some impressionistic cuts and are generally just scary and unnerving in a pretty modern way. But also, the parts that are mourning the death of The System (particularly the stuff surrounding Boris Karloff) are so affectionate that the sentiment is contagious. Bogdanovich's career was, to a degree, underwritten by Orson Welles and Henry Fonda and people like that from the older generation, and there's something almost sweet about this movie's ode to that type (even if Bogdanovich himself were still a few years out from, for example, befriending Welles). Grade: B+
Books
A very fun, lightly sci-fi novel. An unnamed tech company creates a gadget called a "Kentuki": a little robotic animal that a person buys and lets live in their home, but the catch is that it's not an AI or program controlling the creature; it's another human being on the other side, a person who has been randomly paired with the specific household after purchasing access. From this relatively straightforward premise, Schweblin spins a surprisingly complex book about the ways in which technology affects our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world as a whole. The novel doesn't have a single plot; rather, it's a series of vignettes connected only by the common feature of the presence of kentukis, and while the book opens with a tense scene of exploitation, the rest of the novel is more measured in its treatment of technology—Little Eyes is ambivalent in the true sense of the term, investigating the ways that small intrusions of new tech can spin out into both positive and harmful changes in behavior. It's a quick, constantly surprising read and pretty insightful about the role of technology in human life. I should probably read more by Schweblin, because this is very interesting. Grade: B+
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