School year's almost over. The end cannot come fast enough.
Movies
I went into this with absolutely zero expectations, and to my absolute delight, it's actually one of the best Hollywood studio comedies in years. It feels like a transmission from the era in the late-'90s/early-2000s immediately before every American comedy decided it wanted to be an Apatow-style thing: a movie that grounds its tightly scripted structure in a ridiculous comedic persona as it throws as many jokes as it can against the wall to see what sticks. It's very much in the vein of Austin Powers and Billy Madison and Zoolander, only filtered through a post-2000s good-naturedness that jettisons the latent hostility that sometimes animated those male-centric projects. Like those movies, Barb and Star has a real penchant for the absurd alongside conventional humor within a broadly colorful visual design and visual sensibility, and even though the jokes don't always land, it's just such a winning vibe (especially with the absolutely superb central performances from Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) that I had a great time regardless. And a lot of the jokes do land, especially the tossed-off ones like the "sexy" sunblock thing or the villain telling her minion to be sure not to steer straight. I was gently chuckling the whole movie. Just a solid good time that I haven't gotten from even technically "better" movies in a while. Grade: B+
Before I saw this, I was worried it was going to be Oscarbait (esp. given that the bait actually produced an Oscar). It is certainly Oscarbait in terms of being about a Serious Topic and for giving a beloved actor a showy display of his chops. But outside of that, this such a squirmy, consistently surprising, and uneasy movie that I couldn't dream of labeling it with that pejorative. Honestly, the biggest surprise for me is that The Father lands squarely in the unsettling thematic and structural legacy of things like Polanski's Apartment Trilogy and Memento: a claustrophobic, recursive exploration into deep subjectivity. In fact, I can't think of a narrative movie other than Memento that so thoroughly uses its own cinematic language to put us viewers in the subjective experience of being inside its protagonist's head; just as the reverse chronology of Memento's editing made the viewers by necessity live in the main character's amnesia, this movie does the same with Anthony Hopkins's character's dementia, switching out actors for the same character, looping scenes back in on themselves in impossible chronologies so we see the same events transpire twice, having time jump unclear amounts of days or months without warning, writing intentional, irreconcilable contradictions into the plot. It is deeply unnerving and even frightening at times, and at all other times it's either darkly comic (a recurring bit about a lost watch gets some pretty good chuckles) or unbearably sad. If the comparisons to genre movies like Memento make this sound exploitative in the context of a serious movie about dementia and elder care, then the performances—literally all of them A-tier—humanize every bit of this to such a degree that all it feels like is a profound invitation for radical empathy, to recognize the elderly as still human, and not only human generically but human because they are ourselves. Also, I know this is the exact selling point of the movie and not a surprise, but I cannot stress how good Hopkins's performance is here. I sometimes think he's overrated as an actor, but then he pulls out this tour de force—almost certainly the best performance in his career and easily the best performance in a new movie I've seen in the past year. If this is Oscarbait, then so be it, because this is incredible work, Oscar or not. Grade: A-
I've never seen an animated feature from India before, and I'm happy to have this be my first one. I'm guessing this isn't representative of the animation of the subcontinent as a whole, given the relatively shoestring production here; 60 artists are credited, but overall this seems to be pretty significantly the product of one artist in particular, director Gitanjali Rao. It's gorgeous, this faux-painted digital look that's intricately and warmly drawn and inked, especially when you get these magical flourishes like two characters literally melting when it starts to rain. At times, the motion feels a little stiff, but even then, it never feels overly smooth or geometric, like 2D digital animation sometimes can. Anyway, the movie's story itself is where this falters; you're going to see every reviewer out there say this exact thing, but the movie is just too narratively scattershot. There's a central story involving a Hindu woman and a Muslim man falling in love in a sort of star-crossed lovers situation, but orbiting around that are a satellite fleet of secondary characters and side plots, and as a result, there's just too much pulling at this film's attention for anything to be more than at least a tad underwritten. It's pretty unsatisfying in that regard. Luckily the visuals are plenty satisfying. Would love to see more from Gitanjali Rao when she has more of a budget (and maybe a more coherently structured story to tell). Grade: B-
A movie that is almost wall-to-wall people yelling excitedly at each other. And to be fair, if I were living through the incredible parade of preposterous events that comprises this movie's plot, I would probably be constantly yelling excitedly, too. I mean, seriously, just go read the plot synopsis. Or go into this blind and experience the bewildering cavalcade with mouth agape like I did. It's honestly a little numbing after a while, and this movie is definitely more zany than it is funny in stretches. But at times it is very funny, too, and it's great fun seeing a movie that should have no business existing under the Hays Code exist under the Hays Code nonetheless. As James Agee memorably put it, it's "a little like taking a nun on a roller coaster" (a better line than any of the actual lines in the movie, though barely better than the "What's wrong with bigamy" bit). Grade: B+
Music
It's weird going back to old Green Day, which I'm specifically (and maybe unhelpfully) categorizing in my mind as "Green Day before Dookie" after having so much of the canonical, famous Green Day burned into my brain during my middle school years. These guys were always slicker and hookier than their other punk peers, so if you compare this to, like, Bikini Kill's debut from that same year, it sounds like silk. But compared to Green Day's own Dookie, which came out just three years after Kerplunk! and was probably their least slick of all their subsequent albums, this music feels disorientingly shaggy and homespun. There's a snarky BDSM honky tonk lark ("Dominated Love Slave"), a middle-of-the-road Who cover ("My Generation," natch), and even some tape hiss here and there. Even just listening to "Welcome to Paradise," which of course got re-recorded for Dookie, it sounds comparatively like a demo. This isn't to say that Kerplunk! is bad. I mean, it's not the greatest pop-punk album of all time, but there can only be one Dookie, and anyway, a lot of what makes Dookie so good—the strong sense of melody, the teen angst, the impish sense of humor—is present here, albeit in test-run form. It doesn't all work (I really wish they'd left "Dominated Love Slave" off), but it's a good listen and a fascinating look into an alternate universe in which Green Day remained a spunky indie band instead of becoming one of the most popular rock bands in the world. Grade: B
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