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Music
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+
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
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
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-
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-
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
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
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