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Movies
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
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-
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+
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
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
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