Already tired of school.
Movies
Definitely my least-favorite of these Fear Street movies, though given that I haven't really enjoyed any of these movies, there's probably no point in ranking them. But the "1666" section of this movie is just so aggressively stupid, as if the only thing the filmmakers knew about Puritan life was The Crucible, and not even the play but the '90s movie version, and even then, their ambition exceeds their grasp with regards to making a believable, interesting environment for this key backstory to take place in. I love me some stupid in movies, but it has to be the fun kind, like the moment later in this movie when a character pumps a Super Soaker and for some reason it sounds like an actual gun cocking. But these movies (and this movie in particular, which strives to be Very Serious in its 1666 section) are mostly pretty short on that kind of stupid and instead do the kind of stupid that tries to make a serious character moment out of a recitation of the Konami Code. I've seen some people praising the progressive politics of these movies, and I'm of course not going to act as if there's not something gratifying about the films culminating in a realization that the cops have a pact with the devil to kill people periodically in exchange for the security and purity of their white-bread small-town community. But it would be cool if I cared about anything in these movies outside of their politics. Grade: C
Surprisingly joyless, given its component parts. "Before Sunrise, but make them horrible people wandering through a bougie wedding" isn't an inherently bad premise, and Keanu and Winona are actors whose idiosyncrasies work well together. But after a while, it's clear that writer Victor Levin doesn't really have a great handle on these characters beyond their quips and petty complaints, which means that this fails that essential rom-com pivot from comedic investment into emotional investment. I don't care anything about these people, and without that, their bickering just curdles into something unpleasant. Grade: C
Like The Polar Express and a bunch of other Robert Zemeckis-adjacent movies of the mid-2000s, this has some seriously uncanny motion-captured CGI that has aged like milk. However, unlike those other features, the plasticy grotesqueness of Monster House's characters almost works in the context of a kiddie horror film as a digital update of the stop-motion Henry Selick aesthetic, and it's not hard to imagine a version of this movie that drops frames like a bunch of 2020s CG-animated films are doing and it looking pretty cool as a result. But that's not what happened, so we're left with a movie that I guess in practice is actually scarier-looking in its ugliness than a real Henry Selick (or a modern CGI) animated movie might have been, which is something of a double-edged sword, given that it looks like absolute trash and is no fun to watch while also being kinda spooky because of it. The design of the house rocks, too. Grade: C+
Probably the most I've ever connected to a Kore-eda movie, and it has a killer hook: this is more or less a "band of misfits have to make a movie together" story, but in this case, the misfits are workers in the after life whose job is to recreate one memory from a recently deceased person's life that the person can experience on repeat as they fade into oblivion. It of course ends up being about filmmaking, but it's also about how we find meaning and value in our own lives and relationships with others. Key, I think, is that it focuses on the workers rather than the people who have just died, which steers this away from the kind of silly clichés that movies about "heaven" sometimes fall back on and more into the knotty mundanities of what it actually means to have a life after death. Kore-eda's down-to-earth docu-naturalism, which usually doesn't do a lot more me, actually shines here because of the way that it manages to make everything, even the after life itself, seem grubby and de-mystified. Grade: B+
I don't think I was ready for this to be the existential art-house version of Vanishing Point, and so until the end, I was kind of struggling to engage with it. But the end does snap this into focus quite a bit with its deliberate ambiguity, and while I'm not nearly interested enough in cars or car culture to be taken by these characters' gear-head interests, I'm pretty intrigued by the movie's relationship to these interests—by the end of the movie, the endless races and engine tinkerings and brags are problematized into these empty, meaningless constructs in a way that kind of makes the whole thing about th e human condition, which took me off guard. Still pretty slow-going at times, and I'm not in love with this like some people. But pretty interesting, as car movies go. Grade: B
Books
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
I'll be brief here because I'm planning on publishing a blog post about this book in a week or two. But suffice to say, this book is great, the best novel I've read in a long while, an unparalleled work of imagination both in terms of how it frames the formation of the postwar international order but also in terms of the unpredictability of its sex jokes: you turn every page, and what awaits you—a brilliant analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of proto-Cold-War geopolitics or an exploration of human excrement of shocking prurience? I think I had been undersold on how funny this book is. Something I was also undersold on: how sad this book is. People talk about postmodern novels as these cold, ironic tomes whose purpose is to thumb their noses at established power structures, but Gravity's Rainbow is bursting with incredible characters that I actually cared for in a deeply unironic way, and to see them adrift, grasping desperately for human connection in a Europe ravaged by WWII, made me feel things I wasn't prepared for in a book about how a dude's erotic connection to V-2 rockets. For all its bizarre games and head-spinning complexity, this book is incredibly human and even at times sentimental in a way that kind devastated me at times. Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to say more about the book in a separate post before too long. Really great stuff. Grade: A
Update: Here's the separate blog post!
Music
A beautiful, unassuming ambient album that I've been playing a ton since this summer when I first heard it. Hart's looping analog synths are, for lack of a less New-Age-y term, nurturing, and this record has given me a lot of peace during a pretty stressful few months. The second track, "Sun in the Dark," in particular is just a perfect ten minutes of music, warm and richly textured and unspeakably gorgeous. Grade: A-
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