In addition to this stuff, I also rewatched The Prince of Egypt and chatted about it on this podcast, if you're interested!
Movies
A very sweet, low-key revenge thriller (what a combo of adjectives, huh?) about a man who just really loves his truffle-hunting pig, but what's haunting me about the movie is the mid-film scene inside a trendy Portland restaurant in which retired, off-the-grid ex-chef Nicolas Cage interrogates one of his former employees, who is now the chef at said restaurant, about abandoning his culinary ambitions in order to cave to the tastes of vapid gentrifiers. The rest of the movie is good, but that one scene in particular cuts deep. Grade: B+
It's not as oblique and mysterious as Jane Campion's best (e.g. The Piano), but it's every bit as feral an interrogation of power and human sexuality. Besides, it's best not to look a gift horse in the mouth, because it might cause us to lose sight of the celebratory fact that at long last we have a new Jane Campion movie! And a really excellent one, too—a tensely written psycho-sexual western sturdily supported by a terrific batch of performances, none greater than Benedict Cumberbatch's seething, animalistic turn as a brooding bully turned sociopathic by his desperate clawing at the mustiest of masculine tropes for protection. I am hit-and-miss on Cumberbatch, so I'm extremely impressed here. He's so good that his character is still manacing even after calling a piano a "pinano" the whole movie. I wonder what it would have been like if this character had shown up in The Piano. Grade: A-
A great Robert Duvall performance (and several great supporting performances) in search of a great movie. But if the movie it found isn't great by any stretch of the imagination (it's meandering and overlong to a significant fault), it's at least a fascinating one for me nonetheless. The Baptist-inflected evangelicalism of suburban comfort that I grew up with is a far cry to the charismatic revival style of Christianity depicted here, so I don't know if I'm any less of an outsider viewing this as your garden-variety nonbeliever, but it's often riveting to see a completely unvarnished depiction of rural Pentecostalism, free from judgement or condescension. I grew up fairly skeptical of charismatic Christianity, both because of theological prejudices picked up from the churches I attended (and, it must be said, prejudices grounded in my own whiteness, since as this movie shows, charismatic traditions tend to be much more multi-racial than the white enclaves of the less spirit-filled evangelical traditions) and also because the most visible examples I had of these strains of Christianity were of megachurch pastors on TV who obviously were peddling something. But this movie does a pretty good job of showing just what is so meaningful about this sort of tradition, while also not sugar-coating the reality of it or trying to assimilate it to more mainstream tastes—I would say it's a "warts and all" depiction, but the movie seems completely uninterested in leveraging any judgement here that might identify warts at all, including of the iffy atonement theory and afterlife obsession that the churches in the film share with my own upbringing. It's not at all the approach I would have had given the subject matter, but I respect the commitment to the ethos. I wish the narrative of this movie had more going for it. The transformation Duvall's character goes through from ousted pastor to "apostle" is theoretically interesting, but the movie is just so episodic that it's hard to get into it as an arc; meanwhile, the movie seems a lot more impressed with the implications of the character's maniacal possibilities (the film's inciting incident is him more or less killing a man) juxtaposed with his ecstatic piety than feels earned; it kind of just presents these warring impulses in Duvall's character without comment, with little development or interplay (he more or less leaves behind his violent tendencies the moment he's re-baptized, except for the scene in which he beats up a racist dude), which leaves the irony of his character and the catharsis of his redemption arc as more of a conceptual dare than anything truly felt. Which is a shame. The concepts of forgiveness and redemption are some of the thorniest and least-convenient and frankly offensive in Christianity, ones that enrich the faith as much as they scandalize it, and this movie treats them with the same sociological neutrality as it does every other bit of faith here. Duvall's performance is clearly up to the task of that complexity, too, and any life his character has is entirely from the way that he plays the central figure as someone whose fanatical proselytizing and seething fury are drawn from the same ambiguous energy. But without more in the text itself (text which Duvall himself wrote!), that tremendous performance is left twisting in the wind. Too bad, because even with its shortcomings, this movie feels important, at least on a ecumenical level; 1997 is probably the latest moment when this story could be told without being forced into a period setting, and even in '97, it was clear that the totalizing force of the Hillsongs and the Purpose-Driven Churches and that whole white-middle-class homogeneous evangelical mainstream machine were sucking these kinds of regional faith traditions dry, in a mirror to the free trade and globalization at the same time destroying the economies of the communities in which these traditions lived—hell, Steven Curtis Chapman even makes an appearance on the soundtrack, an acknowledgement of the inevitable terminus of this Christian moment. But this movie just feels dry outside of its obviously valuable depiction of a particular milieu. I desperately wish it weren't the case. Grade: B
An utterly deranged movie. Starts unassumingly enough (punk sells out, starts repossessing cars) only to then stack bizarre detail upon bizarre detail until the sheer accumulation of it all turns it into something that's primal and intuitive while also being heady and complex. Or maybe it's just convoluted and this doesn't really add up to anything, and if that's the case, it only helps the movie's jaded cause of depicting the world as corrupt systems run by jerks on top of corrupt systems run by even bigger jerks... on top of aliens? I dunno. A wild time. Grade: A-
Television
I don't know how much there is to say about this show five seasons in. Bobby remains great, as are the episodes that focus on his adolescent trials, the episodes that unironically present Hank's worldview as noble are still pretty eye-roll-y, as are the episodes where the show tries to Say Something, but overall the show remains pretty consistently gently funny with the occasional hilarious gag/episode. At this point, the show seems like it was getting some clout, as it features some notable celebrity guest stars (Brendan Fraser, Snoop Dogg, Paul Giamatti) as well as some Texas royalty in the form of former Texas governor Ann Richards (a limp-wristed George W. Bush also makes an appearance as a character, though the read Dub apparently declined an invite to dub his own voice work); as with its Fox lineup mate The Simpsons, these guests tend to be hit-and-miss in terms of how well they fit into the universe of the series (the governor especially feels inorganic—not the least because she's not a great voice actor). But even so, these don't feel like seismic shifts for the series. It's basically what you'd expect from the series at its height, which is mostly a good thing in my book. Grade: B
Music
Sufjan Stevens and some dude named Angelo make a single-songwriter record inspired by a bunch of different movies, so obviously this is very specifically catered to my tastes. This is going to appeal to people who like Sufjan's earlier folk work like Seven Swans, and while I do wish this were a little more aesthetically ambitious, there's no denying the songcraft here. A few feel a little shoehorned into the broader film concept, but the range of influences is impressive (Hellraiser III?), and most of the songs here are extremely solid, clever, even emotionally resonant at times, no more so than in the opener, "Reach Out," easily my favorite track here (inspired by Wings of Desire, which I haven't seen). Grade: B+
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