I don't really have anything to say.
Movies
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+
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
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
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-
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
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
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