Still working on that Q&A. I should be done with in in the next week, so keep your eyes out for that!
Movies
Basically a twisted Bildungsroman in which our character becomes lonelier and more miserable as he becomes older and more successful. It's very pointedly a critique of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism, as Martin explicitly rejects the socialism that his working-class peers rally around (there are a couple great scenes in which Martin is invited to speak at a rally and then starts preaching the wonders of individualism and gets booed off the stage) until he's this ultra-rich, completely unhappy Milo-Yiannopoulos-looking dude. Apparently Jack London, who wrote the source novel, felt that his book was ultimately unsuccessful at conveying this idea (they never tell you in school that Jack London is a socialist, something I much rather would have learned about instead of reading one of his boring dog books), but I think it comes through loud-and-clear in the film. It's also much more than just a political treatise; in addition to being a pretty good story, it's also got striking visuals (there's a lot of Guy-Maddin-esque silent footage as wordless interstitials) and weird anachronisms (it's like the whole 20th century is collapsed into whatever time period Martin is supposed to be living in) that make the film a consistently interesting cinematic object. The movie goes on too long, and the ending becomes obvious long before the movie actually gets there, which made me feel a little restless for the final 30-ish minutes. But on the whole, this was a pretty engaging watch. I haven't seen that Harrison-Ford-starring Call of the Wild, but I'm going to go out on a limb and call this the best Jack London adaptation to hit the States in 2020. Grade: B+
Basically a haunted house movie in which the protagonists are Sudanese refugees resettled in the UK and the haunted house is the public housing that they are put in, haunted by their own trauma and survivor's guilt. It's a great premise unfortunately not executed as well as it could be. People who hate the tropes of "elevated horror" are probably going to lose their minds over how much this movie leans into them—there's a lot of the "look! everything is subtext!" here that drives people up the wall about this kind of message horror film, and even more pointedly, the movie is more or less lifting a lot of style directly from more famous Important Horror Movies of the past decade (in particular, The Babadook and Get Out, and maybe a little of Lights Out [if that one counts as an Important Horror Movie]). As a result, there's this effect where the scares feel parallel to the movie's themes rather than an organic part of them. That said, though, I did find the scares to be pretty effective, especially the one where you would hear the footsteps of one of the invisible ghosts running toward you until *BOO* the ghost all of the sudden was visible—really terrific sound design there. And I like the idea of the movie enough that I was mostly tracking with it even as it walked through some pretty familiar territory. Looking forward to director Remi Weeks, who definitely has some chops, finding his voice a little more in subsequent movies. Grade: B
It's maybe not surprising that a period romance is staid and uninteresting. But it is surprising to me just how little onscreen chemistry Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet have. How did they mess that up? This very dearly wants to be Portrait of a Lady on Fire, only with fossils instead of painting, and some of the shots and the ASMR-esque scratching-the-dirt-off-fossils sounds definitely start to get at some of the aesthetic successes of that other movie. But they forgot to evoke the part of Portrait of a Lady on Fire where it made me feel something. Grade: C-
I'm probably never not going to be disappointed that none of Masaaki Yuasa's other features even approach the formal radicalism of Mind Game (my introduction to his work). And I really wish he could find a screenplay that wasn't bad on some level. And so we have Ride Your Wave, which is neither as radical as Mind Game nor much better narratively than most of his other work (though this one is more just cheesy cringe than the rank dysfunction of some of his other movies). But holy cow, this movie looks incredible. Probably the most visually polished movie of his career. Yuasa's stretchy, eccentrically cartoonish style makes him an animation director particularly well-suited to watery environments, so it only makes sense that a movie about surfers was going to be front-to-back gorgeous. Really could have done without them singing that one song like 50 times, though. Grade: B+
I went into this thinking this was a Peter Weir-directed Harrison Ford vehicle, which it kind of is. But once I saw the name "Paul Schrader" in the credits as screenwriter, I just couldn't get out of my head how much this is completely Paul Schrader's movie. Harrison Ford's character spends the first thirty minutes of the movie giving Travis Bickle speeches, but instead of becoming a mass shooter in training, he becomes this wild white-savior Übermensch-type dude in Central America, and it's every bit a character in conversation with all those other iconic Schrader protagonists in terms of how they absolutely hate the practice of living within an American capitalist world but also are so corrupted by that ideology that they have no other framework through which to view others than through this totally sick individualism and delusions of grandeur. Also, Ford's character is a genius at refrigeration technology, and the refrigerator becomes a proxy for God? I guess that's a new wrinkle. Anyway, besides Schrader, the big draw here Harrison Ford, who is absolutely great. Maybe the most interesting performance of his career, taking the goofballisms and ironic smirks and dapper charm of Ford's iconic roles and turning it into a pathology. It's genuinely sad that the guy never was given (or never gave himself?) an opportunity to do more complex roles like this one again in his career, because it's incredible to watch. Grade: A-
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