Already hate this time change. Give me back my evening light!
Movies
There was no way I was ever going to be able to resist this. Wes Anderson at his most visually hermetic, romanticizing the glory days of print periodicals by basically adapting fictitious New Yorker features into poignant, incredibly dense vignettes? I'm tempted to rate it even higher, because I was absolutely transported. But I'm hedging my bets until a rewatch, when the shine sometimes comes off Wes Anderson films for me. As for now, though, I thought this was stunning and put me in a great mood all evening, even after a somewhat bad day at work. Also, Alexandre Desplat's score is great, especially the piece that recurs throughout the final vignette—there's a moment in that vignette when a character picks up a guitar and idly strums it in a way that syncs up to the piece, and it made everything in my brain shudder with satisfaction. Grade: A-
I feel like it's not too controversial to say that this is extraordinarily regressive and transphobic while also noting that it taps into something a lot more powerful than those things. Most slasher movies have casually cruel teenagers, but this one takes that cruelty so seriously that it's hard to dismiss, even when it goes into full-on Fox-News-Covering-a-Bathroom-Bill territory at the end. I wouldn't blame anyone for hating this movie, but I get the love, for sure. Grade: B
Very cool stuff. Really cranks up the upper-class squalor of the short story by making the rich dude at the center of this a literal devotee of Satan (which I think is a fair characterization of all ultra-wealthy folks, but it's nice to hear one say it out loud) and on top of that being an enormous abusive cad. Probably the first Vincent Price performance I can remember where I genuinely loathed the character he played instead of being caught up in the magnificent camp of the performance, which goes to show how much range Price had beyond mere camp. Also, the colors are super cool, which I'm beginning to realize must be a thing with these Corman/Poe adaptations. Grade: A-
Very cool sets and colors, very very cool Vincent Price performance (is there any other kind?), drippy protagonist, only barely perfunctory plot, which is premised on a kind of dopey premise of "What if we did 'Fall of the House of Usher,' but scotch-taped 'The Pit and the Pendulum' to the end?" But still, Vincent Price and the visuals! Lots of fun. I wish I'd have gotten this Corman/Poe set from the library at the beginning of October, instead of that Friday the 13th set—curse you, slow holds queue! Grade: B
Television
I guess I'm going to have to watch all these Mike Flanagan miniseries, huh? I thought this was great. It really scratches my itch for classic Stephen King, and it also scratches my itch for anguished Christian deconstruction (something classic Stephen King never does), and it does both modes with aplomb. The series is a deeply sincere wrestling with the idea that the Christian faith, though comforting and meaningful for some, is inescapably a tool for mass complicity in oppression, the promise of eternal life, however beautiful, becoming a literally vampiric idea to justify suffering at the hands of the powerful. There was a time in my life where I would have probably been offended by that idea, and given that I'm still a Christian, I clearly don't think it's an inescapable truth; but as I become more and more aware of Christianity's role in the spread of white supremacy, capitalism, and hierarchy in the United States (and elsewhere, I suppose, but I'm most familiar with the USA) and as it becomes clearer and clearer that, despite whatever lies I had been fed about the repentance of White Christianity after the Civil Rights Movement, an enormous portion of contemporary Christianity in the States is still in the thrall of those demons to the point of the destruction of their own communities on their altars, it's increasingly hard not to resonate with the despair at the core of this show. People have talked a lot about the optimism of Flanagan's work, and I suppose there is a kind of humanist optimism to this on a certain level, but none of that optimism is found in its depiction of religion, which, by the end, is sweet but irredeemable. Everyone's talking about Hamish Linklater as the central priest, and rightly so: it's a virtuosic performance, imbuing what is already the best character in the series with an incredible humanity that straddles the series's two modes regarding religion: sweet, bounding idealism ultimately crushed by horrible guilt and then ideological defeat. The rest of the cast is almost as good (though with condolences to Alex Essoe, who has to endure some of the worst old-age makeup in recent memory, and Zach Gilford, whose arc is purposefully but nevertheless unsatisfactorily cut short), but it's Linklater who forms the heart of this piece. I've seen some complaints about the series's reliance on lengthy monologues, but 1. those are where Linklater shines brightest, and 2. I sure hope nobody complaining ever has to watch an Ingmar Bergman movie, which is very much what these reminded me of (in a good way). Anyway, good stuff. Made me feel bad at times, but that's horror for ya, I guess. Grade: A-
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