I wasn't sure I was going to be able to post this blog today because my daughter was just born a few days ago (!!!!!), but I forgot how much newborns sleep, so here you go!
Movies
I had decided that I was going to step off the MCU train with Endgame, but sitting in a hospital room for 48 hours straight (nothing serious, my wife just had a baby) will push you to worse extremes than this, and this movie was the only on-demand movie on the room's TV I was even close to being interested in, so here I am. My reaction to this is basically emblematic of my feelings on the MCU as a whole, which is that it's vaguely entertaining while also being completely frustrating in its insistence on muddying its own shape in the service of leadenly tying in to the larger MCU and its refusal to prod at its more interesting possible subtexts (in this case, the Mysterio / SFX-oriented movie-making connections). It also kind of sucks that these two MCU Spider-Man movies have such a winsome cast for the teen characters but then have those teen characters only do thin comic relief the whole time; one of the special things about Spider-Man to me was always that his web of civilian relationships were as interesting as his actual superhero stuff and even made the superhero stuff more compelling as a foil/dramatic wedge, and I think a movie that would actually give the space to let the cast develop these high school scenarios more would actually be really good. But instead the movie is more interested in who the next Tony Stark is than who Peter Parker and his friends are, which is what you get when the whole franchise is more narratively important than the individual movies, I guess. The Peter and MJ stuff was sweet at the end, though. Grade: C+
Pretty rote found-footage horror stuff. I'm not exactly sure why this has garnered a cult following, except that it's poking fun at those paranormal investigator shows, but that's something that Ghostwatch did way better decades prior to this, so I dunno. I did like some of the House of Leaves-type architectural horror, with the asylum looping around on itself in impossibly big spaces, but that's a relatively small part of the movie. Grade: C
Feels a little too much like a "social issue" drama at times, though of course the social issue itself (female genital mutilation) is serious and worth making a movie against. But pleasantly, this movie feels a lot lighter than the typical issue drama; it's actually very funny given the subject matter, and the depiction of the community is vibrant and nuanced. This is also, by virtue of the local Burkinabe fashion, a wonderfully colorful movie, and because of that it's nice to look at throughout. I should watch more of Ousmane Sembène's movies—I should watch more African cinema in general, because I've seen embarrassingly few movies from that continent. Grade: B
Just a truly stunning document, inspiring and brutally depressing in equal measure. Inspiring for the half of the film that lays out Hampton's vision: outside of the labor movement, probably the closest anyone ever got to realizing honest-to-God socialism in the industrialized United States, and as basically a teenager, too—it sucks so much that hippies are the cultural legacy of the '60s counterculture, because this is the counterculture that actually mattered. When Republicans accuse Democrats of being radical leftists or whatever (conservatives yet again threatening us with a good time), they should be made to watch the first half of this film to see what the real deal is. Depressing for the absolutely heinous assassination that is the focus of the second half of the doc: honestly astounding that the filmmakers got some of this footage, which, as I understand it, they obtained by just darting into the crime scene before they could be stopped. But nonetheless, it's beyond sobering to think about the lengths to which the United States will go to stop someone who envisions a world without racism or capitalism, and the apparatus against that sort of vision has only gotten stronger since. Hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this documentary and the COINTELPRO unveiling were released to the public within months of each other—like, how do you weather a one-two punch like that and not just immediately become a revolutionary? Grade: A
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