School starts for real tomorrow. Boo.
Movies
On a moment-by-moment basis, this is a better, more competent movie than the first Fear Street movie, but not by much, and it also doesn't have the bread slicer, so overall these shake out about the same for me. Also, it's incredibly irritating to me how many needle drops there are and how short each one lasts. Did they not have access to anything but the 30-second iTunes Store previews of the songs? Grade: C
Kind of unique among horror movies in the way that this is so single-mindedly a character piece and not all that interested in conventional horror theatrics. It's pretty good as a character piece, depicting a very specific kind of lonely person that Angela Bettis's performance lends a ton of humanity to the character. When the horror elements do kick in, there's something a little otherizing about them, and the movie struggles to find a consistent balance between the empathy generated by the character's desperation for human contact and the grotesquery of where her desperation eventually leads. I guess if this were just purely a character drama it would be unbearably bleak, whereas the horror trappings at least give a constructiveness to the bleakness. But the character beats are so strong and do such a good job of getting me to care about May that I do wonder what that other hypothetical movie would be like. As it is, this is still pretty good, despite being compromised a tad. Grade: B
Man, what was it about '80s prestige pictures and being stupefyingly boring? I realized almost instantly that I was confusing this movie with The Apostle when I decided to put it on, but I'm no quitter, so I soldiered on. The good: Ennio Morricone's score is incredible, the locations are exquisite, and the movie questions colonialism. The bad: it barely questions colonialism, mostly just criticizing the brutality of the proto-capitalist extraction by secular powers while giving the Catholic missions a pass on principle of their supposed good intentions (I mean, there's a little critique of the missions, but we're mostly focusing on the Good Missionaries here, which seems to be missing the forest for the trees). I mean, basically everything except the score and locations is a non-starter here, either blandly competent (most of the acting, tbh—sorry, baby Liam Neeson!) or actively irritating (most notably, the fact that this is trying to tell the story in support of the Guaraní without having a single Guaraní character of note). It's hard to wrap my mind around this winning the Palm d'Or at Cannes—maybe the attendees fell asleep and Morricone's score gave them such good dreams that they thought this was a masterpiece instead of a truly middling piece of dull sanctimony. The history trying to be told here is incredibly important, though, so hopefully one day we'll actually get a good movie about it. Grade: C
Has little of the complexity and absurdity I was led to expect of a Tati film, and for the first hour, I found this low-key and gentle to a fault. It's not bad, but I was seriously struggling to find anything to hold my interest. The final 20-30 minutes where the mailman is jetting around on his bike trying to deliver fast "like the Americans do" are pretty great, though—much more (maybe intentionally so) like a Keaton movie and therefore something I was much more plugged into. But I would have been happy to have just watched that part as a short instead of having to wade through a whole feature to get to it. Not the best entry point into Tati's filmography, it turns out. Grade: C
If you're interested in hearing my gripes more fully fleshed out and contrasted against the much more thoughtful analyses of two long-time Tati fans, then this week's episode of the Cinematary podcast is for you, because that's what happens on it. Here's the link to listen.
I was able to tune into this movie's wavelength much better than Tati's debut, Jour de fête. It's basically working in the same wheelhouse: Tati's bumbling, slightly out-of-touch protagonist pratfalling his way though a minutely detailed provincial community. But everything is just so much sharper and more elaborate here. Gone are the empty spaces of movie just kind of idly observing the community—in this movie, even the more observational, slower parts of the movie are layered upon each other in a way that allows them to interact with each other, either physically or just visually, and the result is a movie in which, unlike Jour de fête, there is always something happening, always something to look at, and its layering effect allows gags to pile up to much more complicated and delightful setpieces, e.g. the boat sequence or the car chase sequence, both of which find Tati's Hulot wrestling with vehicles that just won't work how they are supposed to (I've been told a thematic throughline in Tati's career). Anyway, I'm feeling much better about watching the rest of Tati's movies than I was after Jour de fête. Hopefully will get to the rest soon. Grade: B+
Television
A sprawling, occasionally very funny, occasionally very bizarre, sometimes very moving series about a quasi-mystical social club (The Order of the Lynx) and a nebulous conspiracy behind it. The show it reminds me most of is the early stages of Lost where it was impossible to tell exactly what kind of show you were watching because of the way the series was completely comfortable throwing unexpected, incongruous elements together. One minute in Lodge 49, the show is a serious character piece about processes grief and death; the next, characters are having ecstatic visions; the next, there's a gross-out gag involving a tapeworm. The constant throughline is the shows obsession with debt: all our characters are saddled with crippling debt of some kind here, and broadly, the entire season (and, I'm assuming, the whole series) is about just how nefarious and exploitative modern financial institutions are and how difficult it is to untangle the web of connections that enslave us in debt in order to keep the status quo intact. It's openly influenced by the work of Thomas Pynchon (the title is a Crying of Lot 49 reference), so you've got a lot of that kind of thing going with the conspiracy angle and also with the way the show ricochets back and forth between high-brow and low-brow, esoteric and open-hearted, serious realism and wild genre tangents. Maybe unlike Pynchon (depending on your relationship to his work), this remains super approachable and always grounded at least in some sort of emotional stakes to pull us through the weird stuff, an effect achieved largely thanks to the excellent cast and especially the three main leads: Wyatt Russell and Sonya Cassidy as respectively wide-eyed and cynical siblings and Brent Jennings as an aging plumbing salesman. I'm sure this series isn't going to work for everyone, but it worked tremendously for me, and I'm truly stoked to dive into the second (and sadly final) season. Grade: A
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