Mini Reviews for April 19 - 25, 2021

 It's the end of April, and I'm still wearing sweaters. What is this?

Movies

Bad Trip (2021)
It's an audacious concept—basically, a buddy road trip comedy with all the scenes being performed in public with real, unsuspecting people, hidden-camera-prank-style. Not being a huge fan of hidden-camera pranks, I wasn't sure I was going to like this at first, and definitely some of this doesn't quite work (I didn't find the Juice Bar scene to be very funny, for example). But by the end, this had won me over by just how committed this was to its concept. It's not just doing the typical Jackass-style skits; it takes every beat of a mainstream scripted comedy and puts it in public in front of people who don't realize it's a movie, even sentimental/maudlin elements like a tearful reunion after a fight or moments of character growth, and eventually, it becomes clear that this isn't about pranking anyone so much as experimenting with the good will of the public, and in that regard, it's very sweet and disarming. I wouldn't want every comedy to be like this, but for this movie, it works. Grade: B

Relaxer (2018)
A movie about a dude who—ostensibly because of a bet but realistically because of lack of emotional fortitude—never leaves his couch. And it's disgusting in a seriously impressive way; near the beginning of this movie, the protagonist pukes on himself, and the film takes care to make sure you never forget that he's done that as he sits on an increasingly dank and grimy couch. This is surely not for everyone, but I was kind of in awe of how well the movie evokes senses like touch and smell that are not native to cinema. I also really dig its very Buñuel-esque narrative, wherein this dude's quest to never leave his couch becomes a semi-allegorical voyage through time and space. That said, it also made me feel bad on an existential level, because it's not hard to equate the protagonist's attempts to self-actualize by doing increasingly absurd media-based challenges with the fact that I spend a lot of my time watching movies and reading books thinking it will make me an interesting, enlightened person. Thanks, Relaxer. Grade: A-

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016)
There's an element to any concert doc where your enjoyment of the whole thing is at least partially a factor of how much you enjoy the music being played. So, cards on the table, I'm only intermittently a JT fan, especially of his 20/20 Experience era, which (with the exception of "Mirrors," which is a top-ten 2010s pop song, imo) is my least-favorite Timberlake solo period before whatever that folk-ish album was that he did a couple years ago. I dunno, both JT and Daft Punk decided to swing majorly for the "our first album in a very long time is an hour-plus '70s R&B/disco revival!" story in the same year, and Justin just got smoked by those French dudes. So I was never going to love this as much as, say, Stop Making Sense, despite the obvious similarities. But be that as it may, what Jonathan Demme captures here is some seriously tight consummate musical professionalism, maybe the most impressively sleek and put-together pop concert I've ever seen, and it is to the movie's great benefit that as much as possible it avoids presenting Timberlake as a monolithic pop persona and instead foregrounds the collective effort of dozens (hundreds?) of people that is needed to put on a show like this. The best part of the movie by far is the final 15-ish minutes, when the show climaxes with Timberlake's two best songs ("SexyBack" and "Mirrors," of course) and then immediately cuts to footage of the road crew assembling the stage prior to the concert. It's a genuinely beautiful juxtaposition—perhaps an overly romanticized depiction of the relationship between a gigantic pop star and the "regular" people who created him, but I'd honestly prefer that romanticism way more to the way that gigantic pop stars tend to consume every bit of effort by their army of collaborators and render it invisible within their single, totemic persona. Such warmth in those final minutes here. Grade: B

Memories of Murder (살인의 추억) (2003)
It's nice to see a movie with cops who are as effective at solving cases of violent crime as cops in real life are, i.e. not very. I have no idea if real-life cops are as clueless as these guys, but it's a welcome correction to the typical police procedural beats that especially in the early going, this movie is very funny as it shows its leads pulling out wacky investigation technique after wacky investigation technique like they're trying to be Dale Cooper or something—I got an enormous laugh out of the part where one of the cops deduces that the killer must be someone without pubic hair, and his partner is like, "How does that help us? Are we supposed to just pull down people's pants and check?" and then there's a jump cut to the first cop at a bathhouse semi-stealthily eyeing people's crotches. Even in the movie's more serious beats, it's hilarious to see two people who basically don't know what they're doing at all go through motions of being Serious Detectives, and I appreciate that this movie punctures the pieties of police procedurals. A lot of people have made the observation that this pretty closely connected to the movie Zodiac, and I agree that the two are thematically parallel in their exploration of how investigation becomes obsession. But whereas Zodiac emphasizes the clinical, procedural elements, having its characters act precisely and carefully as they collect evidence, Memories of Murder shows its detectives as being fundamentally chaotic actors within their world—even at their most precise, they are still abusing people and violating civil rights and creating horrifying collateral damage, calling the whole endeavor into question in a way that I don't think Zodiac is brave enough to commit to. Grade: A

Godzilla (ゴジラ) (1954)
Filling in this monster-sized gap in my cinema viewing. I knew going in that the basic cultural memory this movie was drawing on was the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo/nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but for some reason, I wasn't prepared for how grim that would make this movie—I guess the longer legacy of the Godzilla movies always seemed to me a little sillier than what this movie is. But it's an astoundingly somber meditation on disaster and the terrifying capability of human beings for destruction. This movie also moves. I was prepared for a slow burn, but no, this plot moves at a breakneck pace that is really wild, especially in the early stages before we have real human characters and it's just a bunch of scenes depicting the escalating national crisis. Also, as I was watching this I suddenly remembered that I had watched the end of this movie (maybe the whole movie? I don't remember anything excepting the underwater ending) with my dad when this was on TV sometime when I was like 5 or 6. It's weird to feel nostalgia for a movie that I didn't think I had seen before. Grade: A-

Books

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)
It's far from Coates's first foray away from the nonfiction writing on which he made his name (he's had quite a run as a comic-book writer, for example), but that this is his first novel still feels surprising, given its scope: a long, fairly dense narrative involving a kind of folk-magical evocation of the Underground Railroad that feels heavily indebted to the more mystical impulses of both Stephen King and Toni Morrison in terms of how they treat memory, both personal and cultural, as a nexus for the metaphysical. To my tastes, Coates is still strongest as a nonfiction writer, and while his prose sings in the book's more ethereal passages, it struggles to render characters that jump off the page and a plot that moves with a meaningful structure. But it's to his credit that those flaws feel like somewhat minor inconveniences in the context of the grander, more powerful flourishes of the novel, so who am I to judge? Grade: B

Mini Reviews for April 12 - 18, 2021

For those of you who get emails of this blog: apparently the developer of that widget is discontinuing the service in July. I'll figure out some other way of getting y'all emails soon.

Music

Another Round (Druk) (2020)
I'm a little confused why this is getting so much, uh... buzz. Its engagement with alcohol consumption reads to me as unchallenging and trite—if you've seen the episode of The Simpsons where Homer toasts alcohol as "the cause of and solution to all of life's problems," you've basically got this movie summed up, though it's much less entertaining that that Simpsons episode. And Thomas Vinterberg's Dogma-95-adjacent style just doesn't have the verve to make this material pop cinematically. Another casualty of the profoundly dull house style of the European arthouse. The movie isn't without its pleasures. I got some chuckles out of it (the dude trying to check his BAC with a baby monitor, e.g.), and of course Mads Mikkelsen gives a typically robust performance that does a lot toward selling Vinterberg's affect. But I guess I'm unconvinced that this is anything other than a very average movie with a few highlights. Grade: C+

Tekkonkinkreet (鉄コン筋クリート) (2006)
Studio 4°C's first feature after the formally radical Mind Game, and it shows—though like almost every other animated movie that is not Mind Game, Tekkonkinkreet's animation feels fairly tame compared to that movie. Still, that doesn't mean that it isn't striking in its own way, and at times, it's very striking, especially near the finale, when the movie gets cosmic and End of Evangelion-esque. I honestly had a hard time following the plot—some urban hellscape yarn about yakuza and some very cute kids living on the streets. It's not altogether the movie's fault that I had a hard time following it; I had some distractions as I was watching it. But it's still a pretty dense movie narratively. Anyway, it's great to look at. I enjoyed it. Grade: B

 

Town Bloody Hall (1979)
This is a really entertaining documentary in terms of just how raucous its subject is: in a public forum, a handful of second-wave feminists basically take Norman Mailer to task for having written a pretty contemptible essay on feminism in Harper's, and the result is basically a bunch of highly educated folks trading florid insults for an hour and a half. It's incredible how vacuous this entire debate is, though. The whole thing is basically theatre, with basically all the speakers talking in circles to try to justify what, in 2021, seem like basically nonsensical logical constructions all around. Mailer is, of course, ridiculous, probably a more perfect embodiment of patriarchal masculine fragility than the organizers could have ever hoped for, and it's great fun to see people dunk on him nonstop. But honestly, this is a pretty damning time capsule of early '70s "women's lib," too, and all the classism and gender essentialism baked into the feminists' statements is pretty appalling, too. Even putting aside the opening remarks that imply that women's liberation is the basis of racial liberation(??), there is some real proto-TERF stuff here, not to mention the overt exclusionism depicted on camera: there are would-be attendees who can't afford the tickets to this event, a fact which the speakers seem entirely indifferent to, and the one brave person who asks about how gay liberation could intersect with women's lib gets barely a response before the conversation winds around to some truly absurd Freudian claptrap about who penetrates whom. I guess it's somewhat encouraging to see that public discourse hasn't so much devolved as it has just always been the same sort of vapid spectacle. Grade: B

Law and Order (1969)
I'm not going to pretend like I watched this out of just idle interest. This past Monday, in Knoxville, TN, in the school district where I teach, just a few blocks from my house, in the high school where I plan on sending my son when he is of age, police attempted to apprehend a student who was reportedly carrying a gun, and that confrontation resulted in one of the officers shooting and killing the student and another officer shot (but still alive). Initially, this was reported by local media as an "active shooter" having been stopped by the police, with the implication that the shot officer was wounded by a shot from the student's gun; however, within days it was revealed that the student's weapon was not the one who wounded the officer and that the student was not truly an "active shooter," and a day after that, it was revealed that the officers who rushed into the bathroom at this student (that's where he was holed up, apparently) had done so without first bringing in the department's crisis negotiation unit that exists for just such situations. None of the bodycam or security footage has been released to the public yet (which is a whole other dimension of betrayal of the public's trust in this situation), but it seems almost certain that the officers in this situation escalated a potentially dangerous but as-yet nonviolent conflict into a fatal one and that, had the police never been involved, this student would still be alive. As Wiseman's Law and Order thoroughly shows, police cannot be trusted to de-escalate. Even putting aside the fact that some cops seem to relish the opportunity to inflict violence (which Wiseman documents here, most explicitly when one cop, with the disappointment of a child who didn't get to use his tickets to buy a toy at Chuck E. Cheese, laments to another cop that he didn't have a chance to fire his tear gas canister during a recent protest), there's just the "when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" principle—an interview of a prospective policeman shown here goes directly from, "Why do you want to be a police officer?" to "Do you think you could shoot somebody?", and that's exactly it: violence is the tool of the police, and any attempt to slot policing into nonviolent situations should be taken as an acceptance that the powers that be have implicitly condoned that the situation needs not remain nonviolent. The idea that police "keep the peace" is one of the most ludicrous grifts ever passed on to the public, a grift that's not only costly in real, financial terms on city budget ledgers but also costly in the much more important measure of human life. People are abused; people are dying. Get the cops out of our schools; get the cops out of our neighborhoods. Police don't keep the peace—they only keep "Order," and they do so by the heel of a boot and the point of a gun. It's really wild that between Law and Order and his previous feature, High School, Wiseman basically laid out the really sobering intertwining of school procedure and law enforcement—years before the highest escalation of the War on Drugs, the codified school-to-prison pipeline, the increased school "security" post-Columbine. The deadly results we see in Knoxville aren't the result of a system gone haywire; they're baked into the system. Grade: A-

Finian's Rainbow (1968)
Weird that a film this idiosyncratic and odd can also be so tedious. A racially integrated community (in Kentucky? they mention Fort Knox) has to fight off some land-grabbing, racist, capitalist sheriff's department, and in the process, an Irish family immigrates to that community and accidentally brings a leprechaun, who turns the (white, obvs.) sheriff into a black man, who then helps rid the town of its oppressors. It's also a big, roadshow-style Hollywood musical. It's also directed by Francis Ford Coppola. That plot and all of those facts in proximity to one another are definitely the most interesting thing about the movie, though, because otherwise, this thing is a slog. It's got the pacing of a lot of '60s Hollywood musicals (i.e. the pacing sucks), and it really doesn't have any good tunes to speak of, nor does it actually have anything interesting to say about race or capital, despite those two things being integral to the plot—I imagine that in 1947, when the original stage play was first performed, there was a transgressive weight to the mere fact of this film's depiction of integration, but I dunno, by 1968, there were several more incisive movies about race (and in fact were in the 1940s, too, though generally not marketed to mass white audiences). It's definitely hard not to think of this movie and then think of Melvin Van Peebles's Watermelon Man, which came out a couple years later and has the exact same plot turn wherein the racist white dude magically gets turned into a black man—a much more interesting treatment of the idea. Anyway, this is for Coppola completionists only. I'm beginning to feel like I've made a mistake by deciding to become one, given the quality of the last few movies of his I've watched. Grade: C-

When Worlds Collide (1951)
I first heard about this movie on an episode of The Magic Schoolbus that I saw when I was probably 7 or something—Ms. Frizzle picks up a film reel and reads off the title, maybe even calls it a classic? Anyway, it's the title that struck me. Even at the elementary-school age I was, I assumed that the title was a metaphor—like, the "worlds" colliding were an alien civilization in conflict with a human civilization. But nope, it's literally about a planet (plus a whole star!) colliding with Earth. A weird kind of letdown, honestly. The movie's not bad, and at parts, it's even kind of thrilling. But it never exactly lives up to either the premise in my head nor its actual premise—the movie opens more or less declaring itself to be a riff on the Noah story from the Bible, but in the end, it's just a bunch of very golden-age sci-fi square-jawed scientists stroking their chins about how to best save the human race. It gets into the ethics of creating an "ark" a little bit, but it's never more than a surface treatment of the most obvious ethical issues. I should have just watched Aronofsky's Noah again. Grade: C+

Music

Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders, & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises (2021)
The legendary Pharaoh Sanders collaborates with the excellent ambient musician Floating Points, both of whom collaborate with the London Symphony Orchestra. I mean, this is just a murderer's row of talent, and it seems unlikely that it wouldn't be great. But what we got is a masterpiece, on par with any of Pharaoh Sanders's legendary '70s output and the best-yet from Floating Points. It's one composition split into nine movements: Floating Points's Sam Shepherd provides the bedrock, repeatedly playing the same (or close variations of) open-ended sequence of notes on a variety of melodic percussion (harpsichord, piano, etc.) over a synthy soundscape, while Sanders builds upward, improvising with his tenor sax over this lush background, and eventually, the orchestra creeps in, softly punctuating everything with beautiful string hits. It's such a big record, multifaceted and cosmic, constantly reshuffling itself, revealing new corners and nooks, even on relisten. Album of the year for me so far, easily. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for April 5 - 11, 2021

I don't really have anything to say.

Movies

Marona's Fantastic Tale (L'Extraordinaire Voyage de Marona) (2019)
I never saw A Dog's Purpose, but the story here kinda feels like maybe a slightly bleaker version of that, with a dog narrating her life as she transitions between a variety of owners. I'm mostly indifferent to that. But wow, the animation is incredible. I've realized that one of the most interesting things that digital animation tools have allowed people to do is mix media—Masaaki Yuasa's Mind Game is the movie that most immediately comes to mind when I think of the possibilities of digital tools to just smash animated things together that otherwise for technical reasons couldn't share space in a movie, and Marona's Fantastic Tale definitely feels like it's in the tradition of that earlier touchstone. Objects and characters obviously drawn with crayons and markers are put into the same spaces as 3D polygons and digital Flash-looking animation, and the impossible juxtaposition of these different media creates this pretty stunning kaleidoscope of swirling colors and textures that I found intoxicating. Very, very cool. B+

Hillbilly (2018)
I never wanted to be Southern, and given the amount of times I've been told I'm not a "real Southerner" (despite my having lived exclusively in the south my whole life), the South didn't want me to be Southern either, which gave a special flavor to the resentment and the self-loathing I would feel when people in the North would regard my native region as a curiosity and ask me where my accent was or tell me how they "could never live down there." So even though I'm not strictly "Appalachian," it's impossible for me not to feel a little kinship with the deep well of pain this documentary captures as it chronicles the ways that Appalachians (and particular poor Appalachians) have been dehumanized and taken advantage of by those who are wealthy, powerful, and have a voice in the national media. The parts where Appalachians discuss the emotional/psychological impact of the "hillbilly" stereotype are truly excellent, as are the parts of the film that discuss the exploitation of the region by outsiders; I'm struggling to think of a bleaker image than that of the commemorative certified gold record for "Dueling Banjos" on the wall of the home of the actor who only got paid $500 for playing the kid in the iconic banjo scene in Deliverance—he works at Wal-Mart now, in case you're wondering. Outside of that, Hillbilly is scattered and stretched a bit thin, and in particular, I didn't really get a lot out of the parts of the movie that are focused on the 2016 presidential election. I think this movie makes the same mistake a lot of the post-election "Trump country" investigations did, which is that it has a hard time threading the needle between depicting the real marginalization experienced by rural white people and depicting the deep racism often animating at least some of their politics (Hillbilly touches on this a little, but it waaay softballs it, imo). But the rich vein of emotions the movie finds at its best moments makes up for any of this. Grade: B

Crash (1996)
A devoted partisan of public transit, I, too, get horny about smashing cars, though I think it's fair to say for different reasons than the people in this movie do. A fascinating thing about David Cronenberg is his ability to take seemingly any subject matter and bend it around to the exact same effect: the abstraction and contortion of the human body within the context of the contemporary, technological state. In this case, I don't think I've ever seen a movie with so much sex be so dedicatedly unsexy—the focus on the fluids and unflattering mechanics of actual sex that movies tend to airbrush away makes a pretty good argument for the human body, devoid of any other transcendent meaning, being just another machine with a pretty mundane function, which turns the sex here into something alien and mechanical (both tonally and also literally, as they're always humping each other over literal mechanical car parts). Tbh, once I got past the rush of the first half hour, this became kind of droning and dull in stretches, and I'm not sure that the movie knows what to do with its thesis once it finds it during the first act. But as a technical piece of craft committed to evoking a certain effect, this is maybe Cronenberg's best, at least on those terms? It helps that the music, scored by Howard Shore (who went on to do the LotR scores—probably the least-similar work imaginable to this movie's queasy tunes) absolutely whips. Grade: B

Kwaidan (怪談) (1964)
This hulking, doom-y anthology epic is really something to behold. Four stories, stretched over three hours, blown up to impossible size by basically nonstop cosmic visuals and some incredibly spacious, eerie sound design/music. I admit that sometimes the whole experience became a little numbing and I zoned out for stretches. But taken individually, any of the four stories is fantastic, and put together, they're kind of overwhelming—appropriate for a movie so focused on the ways in which the ineffable spirit world overwhelms the material world. Grade: A-

 

Gigi (1958)
So this is a movie about a teenage girl who reaches marrying age and wears a sexy dress for the first time, which causes the 30-year-old man who had heretofore regarded her as basically a little sister to fall in love with her. The politics of this plot are complicated a considerable amount, and the final decision that the two protagonists would rather be miserable together than miserable apart is an intriguing wrinkle that suggests that a sharper screenplay than the meandering, tonally inconsistent one we get here could have mined some pretty good satire about marriage norms out of this. But the bones of the plot are still what they are, bones which, in 2021, I probably don't need to explain why they are somewhat appalling. There's even a song called "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," and though it seems fairly absurd to call it pedophilic, as some have, it is still about girls being valuable only in so much as their potential to grow into marriable women, which is pretty rotten if you ask me. Anyway, though, this is probably way more palatable than it should otherwise be because of some really tremendous set/costume design and some pretty fun direction, both of which turn 1900 Paris into a pastel phantasmagoria that is mesmerizing to look at. The leads are also super charming, too, though it seems like a waste that the movie's choreography keeps them so static the whole time. It's hard to wrap my mind around how this swept the Oscars that year, but looking at the other nominees, it seems like it was a pretty weak year in terms of what got nominated, so I guess Gigi was just a slightly bigger-than-average fish in a small pond. Also, I know this is a Me problem, but I was so incredibly distracted the whole movie by how much Maurice Chevalier looked, sounded, and acted like Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast, and sure enough, I looked it up afterward, and the talking candelabra was apparently designed as a tribute to Chevalier. There needs to be a name for that feeling when you realize something you've known your entire life is just an allusion to another thing. Grade: C

Television

The End of the F***ing World, Series 1 (2017)
A moderately charming little black comedy. This series definitely has its crutches: the whole thing has this Wes-Anderson-ish ironic mid-century pastiche, and it relies waaaay too much on the "obscure oldie needledrop + establishing shot/characters walking" thing. In fact, the whole thing kind of feels like an aged-up, less affected Moonrise Kingdom, with its two "youth in revolt" characters on the lam in a by-turns whimsical and dark journey into maturity. It's not nearly as good, though, and it's at its worst when its trying hardest to approximate the Andersonian ironic sincerity. The early episodes are the weakest, where the show leans most heavily into its pastiche thing and its try-hard "these kids are disaffected and edgy!" bits of characterization that feel more thin and posturing than interesting, and in some respects, the series never quite recovers from the first few episodes—I don't think the show ever found a way to make sense of James, who claims to be a psychopath who just wants to know what it's like to kill a human being but turns out to have a heart of gold instead. Alyssa, the other lead, fares much better, her flailing toward rebellion because she can't trust anyone else, and it's on the back of her character development that the show becomes very good in its back half as it edges away from the postures of the first episodes and more into the idea that Alyssa is a very sad, very lonely person adopting such postures as a defense mechanism. In the end, that's what won me over, and I guess I'll watch the second (and final) series. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for March 29 - April 4, 2021

 Sorry for posting a day late! Easter was busy. By the way, Happy Easter to those who celebrate! He is risen!

Movies

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)
A movie of impeccable craft on a technical level but of barely passable craft on a narrative one. This is a stunning movie to look at, probably the pinnacle of the specific aesthetic Disney CG animation has been chasing since Tangled, with detailed particle effects and landscapes that would seem photorealistic if they weren't obviously impossible fantasies and smooth-skinned, doll-like characters rendered expressive by vibrant (but never too exaggerated) character animation. It very much feels like the coming-of-age for the "house style" of Disney's last decade in the same way that Beauty and the Beast was for the '90s Renaissance. The big difference between Raya and the Last Dragon and Beauty and the Beast is that there is absolutely nothing going on in Raya besides the animation craft. Seemingly assembled entirely from component parts of other movies and sequenced into a video-game-like episodic quest for crystal shards, Raya and the Last Dragon would be frightfully generic if it weren't for the considerable strengths of the visuals, and even with those visuals, this movie left me pretty restless by the end. Unlike other recent animated Disney movies, Raya doesn't have shaggy detours or nagging abandoned plot threads—instead, it's so pristinely "Screenwriting 101" that it sucks all the life out of the story. Every character and scene is fine-tuned to contribute its own special piece of the plot, but in making this such a sleek machine, the filmmakers forgot to make any of this emotionally resonant or make its characters have any complexity. Say what you will about other recent Disney films, but their protagonists at least had recognizable internal conflict and identifiable personalities. Raya, by contrast, just feels like a personified screenwriting tool going through the motions of having an arc and theme, and Sisu (the last dragon herself and the only other possible main character) has a bad case of "Disney comic-relief sidekick." Namaari, the sort-of antagonist, has the potential to be a lot more interesting, given the apparent conflict between her and her mother, but that only gets, like, two scenes, so instead, she's as underdeveloped as the rest. Thank goodness for the animation to hold my attention. Grade: B-

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)
I have no real-world emotional attachment to bars—I'm not much of a drinker, personal experiences have given me I exactly zero romanticism for people being drunk, and I also have the incredibly old-man-ish posture of disliking how all barside conversations have to be conducted with raised voices. But the dive (along with social clubs and union halls and neighborhood churches) is yet another cornerstone of "third spaces" crumbling in America, and I care deeply about that erosion, so this hit me pretty squarely in the feels regardless. And this is just such a warm, beautiful depiction (fictional or not—I'm a little fuzzy on the production here) of the kinds of communities that can form in those spaces. It's like Cheers with all the dopey stuff stripped away—people even call regulars' names in unison as they enter the bar, as if they're NOOOOORM or something. I love it. Grade: A-

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
When people talk about Hollywood's new wave, they tend to focus on the ways that people like Scorsese and Coppola took Hollywood genres like the gangster film and roughed them up with shagginess and European cinematic techniques. I like those movies, but I wish people would also talk about movies like this, which also feel European (the long, talky takes and editing feel indebted to Truffaut or maybe a more down-to-earth Fellini) but are a lot less self-consciously grand and mythologized than your Bonnies and Clydes and Mean Streetses. There are a lot of really specific, everyday cultural details in a movie like this that tends to get lost in the revisionist genre impulses of the more famous New Hollywood movies—the Esalen Institute retreat, for example, or the part where Robert Culp's character is unironically wearing something that looks like the Seinfeld Puffy Shirt, or the Tex-Mex restaurant's drive-through speaker, or just generally the unadorned depiction of upper-middle-class So-Cal life at the time. I dunno, I just found that really interesting. Besides that, I think it's a shame the way that this movie's legacy is staked on the supposed "orgy" at the end—not because that isn't an important, tender moment in the movie but because the way I've heard some people talk about it kind of marginalizes what's meaningful about that part and dismisses the movie as a sexual-revolution curiosity rather than as the strikingly honest, lovely treatise on the ways in which people find connection and love that it is. Also, this has maybe my favorite Elliott Gould performance—the whole central cast is great, but he in particular is just so vulnerable and real here in a way that I don't think I've ever seen him before. Grade: A-

The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962)
Just awful. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Boring, flimsily made, and deeply, deeply sexist on a level that I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie be on before—the whole movie is either some dude peeping into a hotel room full of women, and a director lecturing an actress about the history of horniness so he can coerce her into doing a sex scene on camera. It's vile. I watched this because I've decided to be a Francis Ford Coppola completionist, but that was a mistake because: 1) this was a tedious waste of my time, and 2) he only directed (co-directed, at that) a small part of the movie; this is one of those "let's do a hilarious dub of a foreign film and put in some nudity so we can run it on the porno circuit" things, which was just the worst trend in American cinema. Coppola's other early, pre-"respectable" feature, Tonight for Sure, had enough of a spark of fun that I was willing to give this a shot, but I regret that now and am actually kind of mad that Tonight for Sure was good enough to seduce me into watching this. Boo. BOOOOOO. Grade: F