Announcement for Those Who Get the Blog Via Email

Hi everyone! This post is only relevant for the... *checks clipboard* nine people who have subscribed to have blog posts emailed to them. If that's not you, disregard (though I would love it if I could get more people subscribed via email rather than funneling people through Facebook, so maybe read this post and consider subscribing).

Anyway, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was notified that the Blogger widget that has managed my email subscription is being phased out at the end of the month (i.e. in a couple days). Here's my solution: I'm going to start publishing the blog as a newsletter that can get emailed out to everyone. I'm going to be using Letterdrop to do this, which is basically like Substack (but hopefully without the support for right-wing extremists). I'm just going to put all the email addresses currently subscribed in the widget into a Letterdrop mailing list and go from there. The blog site will still be active and the hub for all my activity, but I'm going to copy-paste each post into the Letterdrop format and send them out as I publish them on the actual site. It'll look a little different from the emails you've been getting, but I've tested it out, and it doesn't look bad.

Sometime on Friday, I'm going to mail out a practice newsletter just to make sure everything works, so be on the lookout for that. It will be from blogmalley@post.letterdropmailer.com. When I tested this out on myself, it got sent to spam at first, so be sure to check your spam folder and make sure that email address is something your inbox isn't going to boot out. After that, I'm planning on just jumping into mailing out the blog posts via Letterdrop, starting this Sunday.

Fingers crossed that this works. I hate being forced to adopt new tech when the old tech was working fine for me, so I'm not thrilled that I have to make this change. But hopefully it'll just become an invisible part of my blog routine. Most importantly, I hope the people who want to are able to still read the blog.

As always, thanks to all you dedicated readers out there!

Oh, and if you want to preemptively subscribe to the newsletter, here's the link to the site, where it should be pretty straightforward to sign up!

Mini Reviews for July 19 - 25, 2021

 One more week of freedom.

Movies

The Ascent (Восхождение) (1977)
I was expecting to like this more. To be clear, I did like it, but "Soviet soldiers captured by Nazis are a subversive allegory for Jesus and Judas" seems like a sure-fire all-time-favorite for me rather than a movie I had a positive but measured response to. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

Across 110th Street (1972)
I didn't realize this would be basically The Wire, by which I mean a POV-agnostic investigation of a particular crime, giving equal weight to the stories of all parties involved, legal or otherwise, and so doing, also giving a city-scale overview of the inequalities at play in the interlocking worlds that make up an American urban landscape. It's pretty good, though as with The Wire, I had trouble keeping track of the sprawling cast of characters, and unlike The Wire, I didn't have a whole season of TV to get them all straight. This movie is also incredibly dimly lit, too, which also makes it kind of hard to keep track of people. I probably would have liked this a lot more if I hadn't been constantly a little confused about the secondary characters. Still, it's an engaging, incredibly grimy portrait of a city with some awesome location shooting, plus that Bobby Womack soundtrack, which slaps. Grade: B+

Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura) (1963)
Pretty good, spooky horror anthology that has the decency to put its segments in order of escalating quality. The first one is an okay thriller about a mysterious person who keeps calling this woman and saying menacing things over the phone; the second one is basically a vampire tale with lots of spiderwebs and Halloween-ish props; the final is psychological horror in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, involving a nurse who has to prepare a body for burial, and it's genuinely hair-raising at times. All three segments are a little creaky and low-budget-y (which the Boris Karloff framing device delightfully calls attention to in the final scene), so the more the movie leans into the arch B-movieness of its aesthetic, the better it gets, which is another reason the last segment is the best: it's willing to use some otherwise hokey makeup and sets in inventive ways, like you're in a particularly clever haunted house attraction. I dig that. Grade: B

He Ran All the Way (1951)
Interesting to compare this to The Hitch-Hiker, which has a similar premise and structure: a criminal on the run holds some people hostage in a confined area. Given that The Hitch-Hiker takes place in a moving car, while He Ran All the Way's hostage location is an apartment, it's surprising that it's He Ran All the Way that ends up being the more expansive and dynamic. Despite the fact that The Hitch-Hiker is literally finding new locations each scene, this movie builds a small world out of its apartment and the lives of the people who go in and out of it: we see people's daily schedules, where they work, etc.; basically, we learn who these people are outside of the immediate emergency in which we see them, which makes a pretty big difference to me. Also, John Garfield gives an absolutely ferocious performance (his final one, heartbreakingly). Grade: B

Mädchen in Uniform (1931)
I was watching this expecting merely an object of historical interest (it's one of the first narrative feature films with queer representation), but I ended up being completely swept up in it, because it turns out that one of the first narrative feature films with queer representation is also extremely good. Set in an all-girls boarding school in the twilight of Wiemar Germany right when the Nazi party was about to take power (i.e. the same moment the movie itself was released, which makes the meta position of the film within its country's history extra heartbreaking), it's of course got a metaphorical political sting, and it also does that Portrait of a Lady on Fire thing where it gives these characters pockets of utopian worlds without the structures of oppression (in this case, the delirious liberation when the schoolgirls are left to their own devices when the authoritarian school administration isn't present), only to starkly impose those structures by the film's end, which is devastating, especially considering what we all know now ended up happening to Germany after the film's release. It's just this beautiful little gem of a movie, and in a world in which English speakers weren't so terrified of subtitles and people in general weren't so homophobic, this would have the same broad cultural cachet and ubiquity as things like Goodbye Mr. Chips and Dead Poets Society. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for July 12 - 18, 2021

Still working on a new way to email out my blog posts. Please stand by.

Movies

Alois Nebel (2011)
One of the things that I love about Czech animation is how fleshy and tactile it tends to be, so "Waltz with Bashir, but Czech" was probably never going to be my thing. The Flash/digital rotoscoping has none of the thematic resonance that it does in Waltz either. I was hoping that the hallucinogenic journey through personal and political history a la Tarkovsky's Mirror was going to win me over, and maybe it would have if that history meant more to me. But I definitely don't know enough about the political climate surrounding the Velvet Revolution to have anything coherent to say about the film's politics or its resonance, which I felt mostly locked out of. Grade: C

 

Waiting for Guffman (1996)
Just a good time and not a lot more: funny but not uproariously so, filled with colorful characters worthy of equal parts affection and mockery but not so much so that the movie teeters into either sentimentality or cruelty. This might have hit harder if I'd ever been involved in community theater, but as it is, it was a perfectly fun, frictionless 80 minutes to spend. Grade: B

 

 

 

Faust (Lekce Faust) (1994)
Probably the most a Jan Švankmajer has ever felt like a Terry Gilliam movie, which I realize is a little backwards to say, given that the former influenced the latter and not the other way around. But the specific way in which this movie has a single man (Dr. Faust, natch) trapped in a world whose otherworldly, absurd machinations (depicted via grotesque-yet-whimsical stop-motion special effects) inspire paranoia as well as a collapse in subjectivity between the camera and the character... I mean, it feels very Gilliam-esque. It's also extremely, extremely cool and tactile and gross in the way that only Švankmajer films can be, so guess who still has the edge, Terry? Grade: A-

Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy) (1958)
The story, a kind of greatest-hits medley of Jules Verne, is pleasantly nostalgic for me after having inhaled a bunch of Jules Verne as an early reader; the visual design of the film, basically woodcut-style illustrations come to life, is equally pleasantly nostalgic, given that these were the types of illustrations usually in the Verne library books I got. Outside of the nostalgia factor, the story is kind of meandering and forgettable, but the visuals legitimately rule. It's an intoxicating mix of stop-motion animation, optical illusions, elaborate studio sets, and double-exposure. Just super cool, and the vibes are incomparable. Grade: B+

 

Death Takes a Holiday (1934)
Pings wildly between spooky allegory and upper-crust melodrama, and the fact that this movie can't commit to just one dooms it to this ungainly, haphazardly paced story that is not nearly as engaging as a story literally about Death taking a vacation in a human villa should be. I definitely prefer the spooky parts; the first 10-15 minutes are surprisingly moody and kind of despondent in a compelling way, and I think there could have been a genuinely great movie about a bunch of rich people coming to terms with their own mortality and the empty artifice of their social structures. I also could have gotten into a feature-length version of the very brief section of the movie that turns into an outright comedy, wherein there's this montage of all manner of disasters in which everyone involved implausibly survives because Death is, you know, on holiday (wasn't this a Family Guy episode?), but unfortunately, that wasn't in the cards. Grade: C

Television

Steven Universe, Season 5 (2017-2019)
I've been halfway griping all along that Steven Universe prioritizes its ongoing story over pursuing interesting, standalone episodes, and now I'm going to make sort of the opposite criticism of its final season: it doesn't develop its main story nearly enough. Perhaps the world that Steven Universe had developed had just grown way too big for the show to wrap up in 32 episodes, but despite the fact that almost every episode here is devoted to advancing the main arc of the series, the results feel pretty rushed, as secondary characters are looped into the arc and then spun out into irrelevance. Lars, for example, becomes centrally important for like five episodes, during which his character transforms radically, but then we barely see him for the rest of the season, leaving his arc feeling rushed and unsatisfying (especially as it relates to Sadie). It's almost worse with Connie, who is present for most of the season but just doesn't get a lot of interesting material besides simply being present. I suppose the writers had to make some tough decisions on what to prioritize given the space they had to wrap this thing up, because an the other hand, all of the gem mythology is really well-developed, complex, and interesting this season—way more so than I found the previous explorations of it to be. The queer metaphors of course have always been there, but this season finds some really rich veins of dramatic tension within those metaphors, while at the same time making all of the gem-centric arcs bigger and more spectacular, until they all come together in an often breathtaking finale. That finale really is something—a lot of TV shows go big on their last episode, and I usually find that kind of flattening and deafening, but Steven Universe's finale is both epic in scale and spectacle (aided by some truly incredibly animation, some of it guest-animated by industry legend James Baxter) without losing the resonant emotional and queer subtext of the broader gems arc. Of course, this comes at the expense of basically sidelining or muting every single character that isn't explicitly tied to the gem storyline. Reflecting back over my complaints about serialization in the past few seasons, I think the frustrating I've actually been grasping at is that the show never truly found a way to reconcile its more whimsical, episodic Beach City environment with the galaxy-spanning epic of the gems, and this final season bears that out in a starker way than any of the previous seasons. But at least we got some great moments. I'm curious to see where the movie and the wrap-up miniseries takes it from here. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for July 5 - 11, 2021

For those of you who describe by email, I'm working on a new way for y'all to still get emails of each post after the current email-subscription feature goes away at the end of the month. Stay tuned.

Movies

A Glitch in the Matrix (2021)
It's honestly deeply frustrating to me that simulation theory, an unfalsifiable thought experiment with a huge leap of a first premise, has been embraced by a lot of the same extremely online techbros who (used to?) enjoy poking holes in religious belief for being an unfalsifiable thought experiment with a huge leap of a first premise. Points to this documentary, which at its best draws the line between religious mysticism and simulation theory pretty well. There is something to be said for the way that a rigidly rational, naturalist worldview of the kind promoted by the Enlightenment onward is ill-equipped to deal with the epistemological complexities of living a subjective existence—that's something that a lot of religious, literary, and philosophical thought has wrestled with since the Enlightenment itself, but if the only things you ever watched were The Matrix and Elon Musk interviews, I suppose simulation theory would seem like the only possible explanation for the human experience, and the movie is at its best when it's gently poking at the sad, pseudo-secular solipsism created by the alienating framework of post-religious digital capitalism. I wish the documentary burrowed into that idea more, though, or honestly any idea here—in typical Rodney Ascher style, the meat of the film involves letting a handful of true believers just meander through the wildest, far-flung regions of their ideas, but the difference between this and a movie like Room 237 is that Room 237 had a pretty whimsical and specific premise (people's interpretations of The Shining) that allowed the interviews to cluster into a natural geography in tension to one another, whereas simulation theory is such an all-encompassing idea that the movie just ends up skipping around and briefly lighting on these enormous ideas about consciousness and belief and epistemology and alienation without settling on one quite long enough to tease out the implications. Also, by virtue of being a grand theory about life, simulation theory is a bit more serious than wacky exegesis of a Stanley Kubrick movie, so A Glitch in the Matrix gets really grim at times, touching on sociopathy and murder in a way that is both scary but also frustrating in that it doesn't get any more in-depth investigation than any of the other two dozen loose ends this movie tugs on. A weird kind of movie that is endlessly fascinating in the moment while also being fairly empty as a whole. Here's hoping that Ascher can find a smaller subject for his next movie, because I don't think his style can really sustain something this big. Grade: B-

The Orphanage (El orfanato) (2007)
This movie has a really rich setting in its central haunted house/orphanage, and the ending is surprisingly great. But the movie just takes forever getting there, with some fairly generic spooky atmosphere padding out places that either should have had more engaging drama or more hair-raising scares—as a mushy middle ground between those two, the vibes of this movie don't really work for me until the aforementioned ending, which, again, is super good. Too little too late, though. Grade: B-

 

 

Mysterious Skin (2004)
I was severely under-prepared for what this movie was, and I don't know if that was just because I was cavalier enough to have not done more than read the logline or because the movie's advertising was intentionally playing coy about a subject that would have almost certainly been impossible to market (which kind of calls into question how crass the whole enterprise of commodifying art is, right?). Regardless, this movie should come with the biggest content/trigger warnings imaginable, and I'm rating this movie in terms of how well it's made rather than my usual way of how I feel from having watched it—Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet alone make this a masterclass, giving what have to be two of the greatest, most human performances of the cinematic century so far. But whew, I probably would have skipped this one if I'd known more about it. Sending as much love as I can muster to anyone who has experienced sexual abuse. Grade: A-

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (봄 여름 가을 겨울 그리고 봄) (2003)
Begins as something of an anthology film of Buddhist parables and eventually coalesces into a much larger spiritual/monastic journey. It's told through this patient but still conventional style that seems to be trying to evoke the effects of slow cinema without actually using the techniques of slow cinema. Both the storytelling and the cinematic style have moments that left me a little restless and unfulfilled, but the overall effect is so strong that it ends up not really mattering that every moment doesn't work. Grade: B+

 

Johnny Corncob (János Vitéz) (1973)
So, Hungary's first animated feature is extremely racist/nationalist—almost fascist, even, which was a real unfun surprise for me. There are like thirty straight minutes of this that are just the hero with an army mowing down dozens of caricatured Asians and Africans. I guess that's what you get when the government commissions an adaptation of an epic nationalist poem, as I assume a lot of this is just baked into the source material. Luckily, the story structure has that fun, dream-logic folktale shape that Marcell Jankovics would explore more in his later masterpiece, Son of the White Mare, and the animation here is truly spectacular, a really engaging midpoint between Yellow Submarine (which Jankovics cites as a direct inspiration) and White Mare (a purer achievement of the aesthetic this movie is gesturing toward). So I guess I'm going to shake out positive on this one, which maybe reflects poorly on the strength of my opposition to fascism. One last thing: why on earth is the English title of this "Johnny Corncob"? As best I can tell, the literal translation of the Hungarian title is "John the Knight," which makes sense with the actual story instead of the hicksploitation vibe we got in the English title. Grade: B

Pink Flamingos (1972)
It's so rare to get a film with a vision this radical make it to the screen this uncompromised. But holy cow, here we go. I don't think I've ever seen a more transgressive movie in my life. Explicitly a contest of escalating hostility between two groups (two bourgeois posers vs. drag legend Divine and her crew) to see who can be "the filthiest person alive," and every minute of this movie is a direct engagement with that conflict, whether that's the unbroken shot of a butthole lip-syncing (sphincter-syncing?) to "Surfin' Bird," the unbroken shot of Divine just chomping on some dog poop fresh from the dog anus, the unbroken shot of a couple bashing to death a real-live chicken with their bodies as they have sex, or the unbroken shot of... well, I could go on, but for once, the MPAA got it 100% right by giving this the single greatest content descriptor of all time when they rated it NC-17 for "a wide range of perversions in explicit detail," a description which I imagine writer/director/cinematographer/editor/narrator/pervert extraordinaire John Waters was ecstatic to receive. I'm sure he would also be excited to hear that I was pretty turned off by the animal cruelty and really, really excessive sexual assault in this movie. Transgression as an end to itself is a two-edged sword maybe never better embodied than by this movie—on the one hand liberating from oppressive social forces, on the other hand lacking an ethos coherent enough to avoid hurting the vulnerable, I guess. I know it's a losing game to accuse a movie premised on poor taste of having poor taste, and maybe I'm a bourgeois poser myself, but I really didn't find that stuff fun at all. But the rest of this is really magical. There's this frothing contempt here for all hierarchy and social convention that I found super appealing, and its delivery through Waters's exquisite, borderline dreamlike sense of camp makes the parts of this movie that I didn't find actively risible to be transcendent—and in a turn that should be impossible, that transcendence finds a rich humanity and even a kind of affection within its anarchy. Plus, of course Divine is one of the most compelling screen presences of all time. Grade: B+

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Feels like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone stretched out to feature length, which makes sense given that Ida Lupino, the director, went on to direct episodes of those shows. But like both of those series, this movie has a terrific sense of atmosphere that simply isn't sustainable as the primary engine for a feature film (or even, in the case of The Twilight Zone's fourth season, an hour as opposed to a half hour). But for a while at least, this is pretty gripping. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for June 28 - July 4, 2021

Happy birthday to this sham of a country that mythologizes its own liberation from colonial oppressors but has ignored or actively opposed every other anti-colonial liberation movement since.

Movies

Luca (2021)
I think I'm probably more positive on this than a lot of the critics I follow, which makes sense to me because I usually go to bat for the minor Pixar releases (e.g. The Good Dinosaur). I dunno, I just thought this was very sweet and very lovely; it has none of the weird edges of The Good Dinosaur, but it's similar in the sense that it's a pointedly low-key movie that does narrative and visual things that are off-format for the studio. In this case, it's about a friendship among three outcasts, two literal fishes out of water and one figurative one, probably the smallest story Pixar has ever told in terms of thematic ambition. Familiar character beats abound, but it's told with such confidence in its small stakes (the entire movie hinges on a children's triathlon) that it feels graceful and fleet rather than thin, and I'm confident it would have been 100% the wrong decision for this story to have replaced its lightly wistful character beats with a trademarked Pixar big tear-jerking moment at the climax. Plus, those small stakes dovetail nicely with the animation itself, which is the breeziest and most overtly cartoonish aesthetic that Pixar has ever used at feature-length—in fact, it has a lot of the visual sprightliness of Pixar's short films, crossed with a particular eye toward evoking hand-drawn animation, and I found it really refreshing how light and colorful everything is here. It's not entirely clear to me why a studio would spend dozens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars developing computer animation technology that approximates (with a lot more lighting and particle detail, of course) what a group of artists with pen and paper could have achieved at a fraction of the cost, but I do really love the animation here, so maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyway, this is good. Didn't deserve to be dumped on streaming in the service of brand management. Wish I could have seen it in a theater. Grade: B+

The Wanted 18 (2014)
I was led to believe this had more animation than it does—I thought this would be a Waltz with Bashir-type situation, where all or most of the documentary was going to be animated, but it's really just a few comic interludes that get some (admittedly charming) stop-motion. Otherwise, this is a standard, somewhat ragged, but clearly passionate documentary about the First Palestinian Intifada and specifically how some Palestinians collectively owning a bunch of cows and distributing the milk to counter-occupation Palestinian revolutionaries came to be considered a national threat by the Israeli government. Some great interviews with some of the revolutionaries themselves, but overall, this documentary feels muddled by the very thing that drew me to it to begin with: the animation. I'm not sure what's gained by having the movie turn into basically Chicken Run for a minute or so at a time as it recounts an otherwise fairly serious and inspiring incident of self-governance and collective action, and what's lost by having those sections is a coherent sense of tone and structure. Grade: B-

A Mighty Wind (2003)
Relative to the other Christopher Guest mockumentaries, this one is pretty light on the "mocking" part; it's a really interesting choice to make this so gentle, more a warm character study than the acidic comedy of, say, This Is Spinal Tap, and the fact that large parts of this forgo jokes entirely makes it an interesting note in Guest's career. But also, I just didn't find it all that engaging? The characters aren't funny enough to completely work as parody (except, of course, Fred Willard's character, who is the only person truly positioned to receive the hearty mockery so prevalent in the other Guest films), nor are they nuanced enough to completely captivate as objects of character study. Plus, the fact that this movie ends on a pretty transphobic note leaves a bitter aftertaste, as well as feeling at-odds with the generally kind vibes of the movie as a whole. Otherwise, it's a pleasant enough 90 minutes, but nothing I'm bound to look back on with much enthusiasm. Grade: B-

Funny Ha Ha (2002)
Maybe this would seem more radical in its time, and for sure, there's still something at least a little formally bold in making a movie as unadorned as this one is. But I was overall not into this stammering, unpolished movie about stammering, unpolished post-grads. I guess there's a kind of admirable form-content synergy in making the movie itself share the same qualities as its characters, but mostly, this just felt like a boring version of Kicking and Screaming or Frances Ha (or alternately, Slacker but about boring people), which maybe tells you how I like my post-grad ennui served. Andrew Bujalski would go on to write/direct movies that I think are much more interesting and engaging riffs on some of the same ideas as this movie, so I'm glad he moved past this. Grade: C

Greed (1924)
I've known about the wild production of this movie and its legendary lost cuts for ages, but I actually didn't know that much about the movie itself. So it was fun to finally get around to this, one of the few headliner movie history classics that I have left. People don't talk enough about that early stage of cinephilia when it feels like there are hundreds of really famous movies to watch, that overwhelming, intoxicating feeling of a world opening up that you get to share with a community; nowadays, I don't feel like I have any fewer movies to watch, but increasingly I feel like those movies reside in relative obscurity, and the fun is the sense of discovery. In some ways, it's more rewarding to be in this stage, but I do sometimes miss the communal feel to going through all the big Hollywood classics, so it was nice to have a taste of that again with this movie. Grade: B+

Anyway, if you're interested in more thoughts on Greed, I was part of a conversation on Episode 358 of the Cinematary podcast. Here's the link, if you want to listen!

Television

Love, Victor, Season 2 (2021)
This has some good innovations over the first season. The show continues to problematize some YA conventions by virtue of Victor's gay Latino identity—Victor's ongoing struggles with his family's acceptance of his sexuality is knotty and specific, and there's an interesting racial tension, between the reflexively liberal white families and the more complicated politics of the families of color, for example, and while I'm not convinced that's exactly the right tension to explore in a show that ostensibly takes place in Atlanta (white people in the South are reflexively liberal? I missed that one—and at any rate, the show clearly is filmed in LA, something that frequently rubs off on the actual writing of this increasingly ersatz Southern setting), it's an interesting tension nonetheless. This season also gives Felix a lot more to do besides just pine for Lake, and his arc involving his mother's bipolar disorder is far and away the most compelling part of the season. But unfortunately, Felix and some of the more engaging elements of Victor's story are also forced to share space with storylines for the rest of the main cast, and a lot of that other material is either dumb (Benji is rich and has a band, apparently), undercooked (everything with Mia, whose presence on the show feels more like an obligation to her actress's contract than an organic character arc), or both (the sudden appearance of Pilar's friend Rahim as a series regular that has little to do besides be a gay Greek chorus for the show's relationship drama). Plus, the show is increasingly relying on trite relationship drama like love triangles, which I guess comes with the territory of watching a teen dramedy but still bores me and flattens these characters into storytelling tropes. It's frustrating, because things like Felix's arc show that this series is capable of being way smarter than some of its other arcs bear out. You can do better than this, Love, Victor! Grade: B-