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