Mini Reviews for September 20 - 26, 2021

I didn't mean to watch multiple movies starring Richard Gere, but I guess sometimes the stars align to be over-exposed to a sexy-but-mediocre actor.

Movies

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
I saw a review that called this "the empty man of 2002," and that's not wrong: it's got the same cosmic unease arising from the way one man's procedural quest leads him to peel back a corner of the fabric of the universe and glimpse something otherworldly in the beyond. The Mothman Prophecies lacks the savoir faire that makes The Empty Man feel so big, but this is good enough that it doesn't feel like it deserves its semi-forgotten status. Grade: B

 

 

 

American Gigolo (1980)
Except for the impeccably evoked neon environments and Giorgio Moroder score (and wow, are they impeccable!), there's not really a ton going for this movie when we have several decades of Schrader tweaking (and usually improving on) its "God's lonely man" format. Also, this definitely says more about me than about the movie, but for a film so full of now bygone-era lifestyle porn, the most appealing to me is the three-story record store that Gere walks through. Grade: B-

 

 

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)
A bunch of online chuckleheads like to call this one of the worst movies of all time, and that's just madness. For one, the premise given in the title (which the movie plays very straight) is just too much intrinsic fun to ever make this movie even close to the "worst" anything, and for two, this movie is super stylish. It's riding that ambiguous line between cheapness as a virtue and cheapness as a liability, and definitely some of the decisions here are kind of laughable: the narrator imprisoned behind a painting, for one, or the preponderance of dubbed dialogue. But some of the other techniques in the movie, whether intentional artistic flourishes or cost-saving necessities with incidental effects, make this movie strikingly surreal and feel pretty fresh, even 40+ years after its release. People like to bring up that the director himself doesn't even have strong memories of making the film, such was the haphazard, quickie B-film atmosphere of its creation, but authorial intent is overrated, imo—who cares if the filmmakers made this interesting and cool on purpose? It's still interesting and cool. Grade: B+

Twentieth Century (1934)
A screwball comedy that reminds me a lot of the moment-by-moment speed and chaos of His Girl Friday but without the relentless momentum of that masterpiece, nor the ability to make me care even a little bit about what is going on with the characters. It's fun to see the toxic power dynamics see-saw back and forth between a controlling director and a prima donna actress, but in the end, I just kind of felt like I was impassively watching these characters behind glass. Grade: C+

 

 

Television

Tuca & Bertie, Season 2 (2021)
Bless Adult Swim for rescuing this show from cancellation (and a pox upon Netflix for cancelling it in the first place). Those who watched the first season (there are dozens of us! dozens!) will know what to expect: millennials living in a city, but it's an animal city brimming with playful and also just downright surreal world-building, which also extends to a wildly elastic animation style that often manifests emotions and symbols into physical objects the characters can interact with. This season is maybe just a tad less surreal and weird, and the stories get just a tad bigger: climate change and gentrification are now key concerns alongside the usual "thirtysomethings navigating life in the city." But at its core, it's still basically the same show, despite the switch in networks, and if you dug the first season (which I did), you'll dig this one. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for September 13 - 19, 2021

 Just a Paul Schrader kind of week, I guess.

Movies

The Card Counter (2021)
It's impressive that even after 45 years of making these "lonely man" movies (and however many years before that that Robert Bresson was making the movies that inspired them), Paul Schrader is still finding new corners to explore in the format. The tropes are all here in The Card Counter, right down to specific scenes: the late-night journal-writing with a dark glass of booze, the date with the would-be redemptive woman who doesn't realize how in-over-her-head she is with the protagonist, the finale of morally ambiguous, religiously freighted violence (of course), etc. But even so, it doesn't feel like Schrader is repeating himself so much as he is meaningfully iterating, finding new life within the rhythms—the protagonist of The Card Counter himself talks about this with his endless parade of poker games in identically anonymous conference rooms across America, stating with a sort of zen calm about the peace that such loops bring in life. As always, though, there's not a lot of peace beneath the surface, though. This time, the demons wrestling within "lonely man" are his past as a torturer at Abu Ghraib and that fact that he and other rank-and-file soldiers took the fall while the architects of the war crimes went on to become respected consultants. It has to be said that one of the "new" things that Schrader finds in this version of his lonely man films is not just new to his career but to American movies in general: unless I'm missing something, this is one of the first (if not the first) American feature films that confronts the monstrosity of America's War on Terror head-on as an absolute evil of which we as a country need to atone, and at a moment in which George W. Bush has rehabilitated his image into a respectable Never-Trump Republican and the war in Afghanistan gets revised into a nobly tragic story of the United States military temporarily saving a country from extremists, The Card Counter feels like it's genuinely at the bleeding edge in terms of mainstream-ish films. There's also some cool new stuff in terms of style as Schrader continues to lean into more overtly transcendental style like he did in First Reformed—a sequence involving a park lit up with thousands of Christmas lights feels meditative in a way that it's hard to imagine the Schrader who wrote Taxi Driver or Hardcore leaning into. At the same time, I don't know if I'm quite ready to embrace this as one of his high-water marks, as interesting as the individual pieces are. For starters, the cast is pretty weak: Oscar Isaac is good enough, though he's hardly an Ethan Hawke or a Robert De Niro, but Tye Sheridan and especially Tiffany Haddish feel really out of their depth in finding life in Schraders as-always somewhat stilted dialogue. And on a more structural level, I'm not exactly sure what the ending is going for or if it even works: the decision to put the climactic violence off-screen feels tasteful in a way that doesn't quite square with the explicit extreme violence depicted in the Abu Ghraib flashbacks, and thematically, Schrader is going to the Bresson / Crime and Punishment redemptive well in a way that feels a little half-baked this time around. There's enough here to make this movie worth watching (and I haven't even talked about the hilarious kitsch of the poker games, which is perfectly evoked ["U-S-A! U-S-A!"]). But I wish it landed the whole endeavor a little better. Grade: B

Zola (2020)
There's something vaguely "off" about Zola that I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's just the fundamental sloppiness of a movie like this, where in-the-moment thrills are prioritized over a movie having good bones to hang those thrills (like, what on earth is the point of the one-off dramatization of the reddit thread written by Stefani?); or maybe it's just that I find the breathless linguistic style of a Twitter thread (one of which this movie is apparently based on) just a little irritating. I dunno what it is. But outside of that slightly unsatisfying feeling, I thought this was really captivating. The style of the movie—kind of Sofia Coppola filtered through the visual and aural cues of iOS and social media—is capable of some absolutely stunning imagery, and specifically a type of imagery I don't think I've seen in a movie before, and the cast is top-to-bottom great, especially the central duo of Taylour Paige and Riley Keough. I don't think I'm quite tuned-in enough to the social media world this film depicts to know if its thesis on the intersection of race, sex work, exploitation, and the attention economy holds water, but it at least has the feel of something insightful, and whether or not it is just prioritizing in-the-moment thrills over solid construction, it at least does have some solid in-the-moment thrills. Grade: B

Undine (2020)
Not nearly as cool or interesting or radical as Phoenix or Transit, but Undine still has some neat things going on. The connection between the GDR and the undine myth is good, but honestly, I would have liked the movie a lot better if it consisted just of the museum lectures about the urban design of East Berlin. Grade: B

 

 

 

Hardcore (1979)
Probably the most Paul Schrader premise of all time (a midwestern Calvinist finds out that his daughter has gotten wrapped up in the adult film industry, so he decides to head to California to get her/give God's judgement to all those involved). There are some really astute threads here: for starters, the way that the exceptionally by-the-book five-point Calvinism of George C. Scott's character makes him fundamentally incapable of compassion toward those trapped in the very depravity from which he hopes to liberate his daughter (why bother with compassion when God has it all worked out, right?), and then how this maps so well onto the then-nascent Religious Right/Moral Majority, whose horror at America's so-called slide into depravity is only matched by their contempt for the people in that world who need material help. In fact, the whole "daughter runs away and gets into pornography" was practically a Moral Majority meme, one that I heard a lot growing up and was almost always used as a backdoor into reactionary, anti-liberation politics, and the idea of having this square-jawed, devout Calvinist basically re-enact that true fantasy of the Religious Right (which has always been more interested in punishment than redemption—because again, when you're just a cog in "God's plan," why bother with compassion?) is a really great encapsulation of how the theology of right-wing Christianity has allowed for it to go through some truly terrifying "ends justify the means" deals over the years, even taking at face value that their stated beliefs and values are sincerely and not even the slightest bit hypocritically held, which few movies grant religious conservatives but which of course Paul Schrader knows better than to second-guess. I just wish the movie itself was better. There's so much of this movie that's almost really good without ever quite getting there. George C. Scott's performance is good, but he just doesn't quite have the sociopathic duality of devout belief and frightening indifference that the role truly calls for; the writing flirts with the kind of ambiguous subjectivity that makes Taxi Driver such a live wire, but never fully commits to it; the cinematography has some inspired flourishes that hint at but not quite deliver a movie that rises above a pedestrian realism. It's hard not to be frustrated with a movie that could have been great being merely good. So much interesting stuff going on here, though. Grade: B

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974)
At 192 minutes instead of 773 minutes, Céline and Julie Go Boating doesn't have quite as much time to test its audience's patience as Out 1, Jacques Rivette's other early-'70s metaphysical epic. But it still does test patience at times. It takes a looong time for the true nature of the plot to reveal itself, and even once it does become clear what the story is (basically, two women find out that they can slip in and out of an alternate universe), the alternate universe itself just isn't interesting enough to prevent me from becoming restless as we watch long sequences of its Henry-James-inspired melodrama. I feel confident in being a Philistine about that here because Céline and Julie themselves decide that it's boring, too, and what they decide to do once they declare it boring is one of the most magical things about this movie, which I won't spoil. Like Out 1, this movie rewards those who stick it out, as the final forty-five minutes or so of the movie are absolutely intoxicating, but unlike Out 1, even at its most patience-testing, Céline and Julie Go Boating always has Céline and Julie for audiences to fall back on: two of the most winsome screen presences of all time. However slow the movie got, I never felt frustrated, because it was always fun to just watch these two characters just exist with each other, and once you get to the part of the movie where they actually start becoming active agents in the story, the movie becomes a great time. All the otherworldliness of later metaphysical arthouse classics like Mulholland Drive, but with twice the charm. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for August 30 - September 12, 2021

Sorry about not posting last week. I was out of town for the weekend and then got sick. Life's been hectic!

Movies

Sword of Trust (2019)
A somewhat shaggy comedy that's really only worth watching for Marc Maron. I've pretty agnostic on Maron as a personality/comedian, but between this and GLOW, he's developed this riveting screen acting presence that I think is genuinely great—a potent and seemingly effortless mix of world-weariness and sweetness that has lent itself to some pretty compelling performances, Sword of Trust among them. The rest of the movie is just kind of there, some sort of lightly satirical hijinks about trying to sell a Civil War sword to a group of conspiracy theorists who believe the South won the Civil War—honestly kind of a flippant treatment of a genuine threat (not this brand of conspiracy theorist per se, but just broadly the white-supremacist, right-wing militia), but Maron's performance is so good that it makes it all go down easy enough, I guess. Grade: B-

The Old Man and the Gun (2018)
It's kind of incredible that David Lowery has exactly two modes: the icy, cosmic art-house mode (e.g. A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) and the gentle melancholy warm-blanket mode (e.g. Pete's Dragon, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, now The Old Man & the Gun)—and never the twain shall meet. If you told me that there were two completely different filmmakers both working under the pseudonym "David Lowery," I would believe it. I usually prefer the icy arthouse stuff, but last night, I was just wiped out after having been sick on Monday and Tuesday and then teaching on a sore throat the rest of the week, and I needed a warm blanket, and boy, did The Old Man and the Gun hit the spot. There's not much to the movie, but it hits every one of its unambitious, easy-going beats out of the park. Plus, Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford have unbelievable onscreen chemistry. Grade: B+

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016)
It's initially pretty captivated to have a movie set in a high school animated by images that look like they could have been drawn by the students at that high school, and the dreamy surrealism is cool (the title is not a metaphor). But the movie runs out of gas long before the end of its already slight 75 minutes, and having Jason Schwartzman voice the precocious main character is a meta bridge too far—like, Max Fischer, is that you? Still, there are some very, very cool bits in this movie—it's clear that the craft in terms of imagery and animation is here. I feel like a better screenplay could have elevated this into something actually very good. Grade: C+

 

Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)
A thoroughly white-washed, company-approved history of the Disney Renaissance, but it has some great footage, and it's appropriately disdainful of Jeffrey Katzenberg, though not nearly enough so of Michael Eisner, which is too bad, but I guess we'll always have Shrek. And anyway, it was Katzenberg, not Eisner, who wanted to cut "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid, and if there's a single opinion that can prove that someone is an artless buffoon worthy of a lifetime of contempt, he found the one. Grade: B

 

 

Cats Don't Dance (1997)
A pretty forgettable movie overall except that 1) it's directed by the same guy who did The Emperor's New Groove, and you can see Dindal carrying some of the sensibilities of this movie into that later masterpiece, which is fun, and 2) it's got that extremely frantic, rubbery animation that a lot of Warner-Bros.-affiliated animation in the '90s had, e.g. Animaniacs and stuff like that, and I like that style a lot. Otherwise, this is mediocre stuff, for sure. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Christine (1983)
Like the best Stephen King adaptations, John Carpenter's Christine streamlines a classically overwritten King novel into the primal story it should have been to begin with. It's interesting that both artists, Carpenter and King, at their white-hot prime couldn't wrestle this story into something on-par with their other work of the time. There's some mighty cool stuff in Carpenter's adaptation, like the scene where Christine is driving around on fire, but as with Stephen King, Carpenter has trouble finding a way to make this story play into his strengths—e.g. this is probably the least-consequential Carpenter score of his classic period. But at least Carpenter makes the story fun—more than I can say about King's novel, which I found to be a bit of a slog—and it is single-mindedly driven in a way that makes this movie move with this unstoppable sinister energy that Carpenter was so good at evoking. Grade: B

Female Trouble (1974)
It's not nearly as purely transgressive as Pink Flamingos, which makes this... well, "boring" is the wrong word, but I guess comparatively docile in the pantheon of early John Waters—no explicit sex (in fact, the sex is pointedly, exaggeratedly simulated), no mutilated live animals, no licking scene. It's just generally a movie much less interested in using bodily stunts for gross-out extremes, which sands off both the best and worst parts of Pink Flamingos. In return, we get a slightly more coherent story and slightly higher production values, resulting in something that feels a little less like a shoestring production among friends and more like the good version of a Troma movie, which isn't a bad thing. Divine remains an unparalleled performer, the Waters brand of high camp remains very fun, the ability of his scripts to toss off seemingly effortless one-liners is intoxicatingly hilarious ("I'm going to Detroit to find happiness in the auto industry"), and the open disdain for normies (and in this case, specifically heterosexuals) remains inspiring. As a heterosexual myself, I can confirm that the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring one. Grade: B

The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը) (1969)
Just an unassailable vibe. It seems crass to say that of a movie that is obviously freighted with huge social, historical, and personal themes, but honestly, I don't feel like I have the background knowledge to parse those themes when the movie is about an Armenian poet I knew nothing about before watching this movie (and still know basically nothing about), so most of what I'm left with is the exquisite feel of the movie. The movie itself seems uninterested in informing its audience about the specifics of Sayat-Nova's life, which apparently was a sticking point for the Soviet officials responsible for the release of the film, but ultimately that approach is probably for the best, as a more explicitly informative movie would have been more objectively educational while also being a far poorer viewing experience. Because what's actually here is rich: a parade of some of the most gorgeous imagery every put to film, set to some completely transfixing audio tracks that form a kind of proto-ASMR-type soundscape, all assembled into a rough symbolic arc of the artist's life. The collage of surreal images and religious spaces and the way that the movie interlocks everything into one incredible tableau after another evokes the subjective experience of reading poetry—I have no idea what Sayat-Nova's poetry is like, but this movie gives the impression of dwelling inside one of his poems. It's not unlike Andrei Tarkovsky's project in the more abstract corners of Mirror, but at the same time, The Color of Pomegranates is also unlike anything I've seen before. Beautiful, mesmerizing stuff.

If you're interested, I was part of a pretty fun conversation about this movie on the Cinematary podcast, and you can listen to that here.

Television

Lodge 49, Season 2 (2019)
Even better than the first season, which is great but also a shame because it's also when the show was cancelled. Here, the series's soft-hearted Pynchonisms have coalesced into a season of television that's at-once a lot weirder and more oblique than its previous year while also finding a resonance in these particular characters that is often profound. Increasingly, these characters are forced to deal with abject failure—of the lodge, of their ability to find answers, of even their beliefs themselves—and consequently, the show is constantly pushing these characters to re-evaluate their role in the show's world. But the result of such soul-searching is never despair, incredibly. What instead these characters find is connection; despite facing genuine hard times and some serious dark nights of the soul, the characters come out on the other side having found each other. I mentioned Lost in my review of the first season, and I'll evoke that show here, too, but for a different reason: as the world of Lost got more and more convoluted, the show increasingly leaned on the idea that the true weight of the series wasn't the ongoing mystery but rather the ways that the characters' connections with one another created profound meaning, and Lodge 49's second season does something similar, albeit in a way that isn't so nakedly sentimental as that earlier show. Lodge 49 is, at its core, a show about a world so bewildering that the only thing people can cling to is their ability to care for one another, and when the show hammers that home, it produces some of the most moving moments I've ever seen on TV: the culmination of a postmodern "Gift of the Magi" subplot between Ernie and Dud, Liz's plot involving who she believes is a surrogate mother figure, the whole-cast trip to Mexico—I was in tears. And somehow, the series finds a way to do this without ever losing its extremely off-beat sense of humor: for example, the warmth of that trip to Mexico is also a showcase for a truly hysterical late-season arc involving a character played by Paul Giamatti, and that's just one of many deliriously, hilariously absurd threads in the show. I dunno, as with everything involving this show, your mileage will vary, but the mix of really human moments with giddily goofy absurdity is so keyed in to my sensibilities that I felt extremely seen by the show. I could have watched five more seasons, and even though I knew it was coming, it was actually pretty upsetting to me when I got to the inevitably abrupt ending. In this era of "peak TV" where there's always another network or streaming service to pick up shows with small but dedicated fanbases, it's rare to see great TV shows cut down prematurely like this one was, which makes this one's early demise even more painful—not since the end of Pushing Daisies have I felt so dismayed at show so obviously special and with every indication of more greatness to come hitting the brick wall of a cancellation-forced ending. Wyatt Russell is still apparently out there campaigning for this series to be picked up by another company, which feels about right for a guy who played a character defined by his indefatigable optimism. I hope he's right. Grade: A+

Rick and Morty, Season 5 (2021)
I'm not really feeling this show anymore. When I reviewed the previous season of Rick and Morty, I indicated that I was tired of the show's somewhat haphazard and repetitive approach to character development, and that's still true here: we'll go episodes at a time with virtually no meaningful stakes for the characters, and then out of nowhere we're expected to, for example, care deeply about Morty being sad about his breakup with a superhero. It's not like other adult animation doesn't do something similar: both The Simpsons and Futurama are famous for their out-of-left-field sentimentalism, but neither of those shows are anywhere near as flippant about their characters' relationships or their emotional well-being during the episodes that we're not asked to care for them, which helps make the shift toward emotional stakes not feel so drastic and extreme as it does in Rick and Morty. It's also just simply the case that there are only so many times that a single character beat can be used for emotional resonance before its effect wears off on me—sure, it's theoretically sad how Rick alienates those close to him, but after five seasons, I'm going to need a more profound iteration on that than a lampshaded "dead kid" trope, which is what this season goes for. Anyway, my usually comfort in Rick and Morty is that the show has been at least funny even when the broader ambitions aren't working for me, but unfortunately, Season 5 is also where that's stopped working for me. At least part of this is the show increasingly stooping for ironically extreme violence and gross stuff in lieu of traditional jokes—an episode like "Rickdependence Spray" (in which Morty's sperm is used to create monsters) is cro-magnon levels of stupid and puerile, and I'm surprised that it even passed the muster of the show's usually pretty solid quality control filters. But another part—a bigger part, it must be admitted—is probably just a "me" problem. I think I don't really find the show's basic mode of "characters stammering through hyper-quippy, self-aware dialogue" very funny anymore. I guess we all outgrow things, so oh well. To the show's credit, it is still capable of being incredibly clever in terms of plotting and sheer complexity of sci-fi concepts: episodes like "Mortyplicity" and "Rickmurai Jack" have classically Rick-and-Morty-style head-spinning premises that play out with mathematical precision, and it's still pretty fun to watch the show excel in that mode. But 1) the show isn't going to that mode in every episode, and 2) without the humor or characters landing, the show's complexity isn't enough to make the show worth my time overall. Not sure if I'll keep watching. It just doesn't really seem like this is the series for me anymore. Grade: C