Mini Reviews for December 12 - 18, 2022

Three more days of school.

Movies

Emily the Criminal (2022)
A really watchable little indie, mostly because Aubrey Plaza is great in this. I don't think I've seen her try to be this straightforwardly naturalistic before, and it turns out that she's really good at it! The rest of the film is competent enough not to get in her way, and the writing, though a little telegraphed, ratchets the tension up enough that it's engaging as a thriller as well as a character piece. The ending was kind of deflating, though; while I'm not sure what the movie should have built to, it sure felt like it was building to something a little less by-the-book than that. Grade: B

 

 

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (偶然と想像) (2021)
The rare anthology film where every segment is a hit. The second one, in which, basically, some students find out that their professor's award-winning novel has some sexy parts, is clearly the best to me, and the way it just keeps unfolding and subverting itself and finding new shades of humanity in this scenario left my jaw on the floor. The other two segments are good, too, and they each have moments of profound lucidity that left me similarly bowled over, though those moments come basically one apiece for the segments rather than more or less the whole time for Part Two. Anyway, I think I need to go back and seek out everything that Ryusuke Hamaguchi has done, because between this and Drive My Car, he's creating a literary-minded cinema that I don't see anywhere else these days. Really scratches an itch for me. Grade: A-

 

In the Bedroom (2001)
I assume I'm like most people in that I saw TÁR and then decided to work back through Todd Field's other movies. This doesn't have the impish ambiguity of that film, and on the whole, it's kind of shockingly straightforward when using TÁR as the reference point. It's mostly just a very classy, very well-done version of the mythical "movies for adults" that are increasingly hard to find at the cinema. It's kind of an Ordinary People for the 21st century, but if Ordinary People turned into a Paul Schrader movie in its final act. As such, it's notable how willing to punch you in the gut this movie is. It seems stupid to worry about spoiling a 20+ year-old movie, but I don't want to spoil what the central tragedy of the film ends up being, because the sick feeling I got by being surprised by it is surely what Field was going for. Well, he got it, and it's kind of spectacular. Every time the movie feels like it's settling into a groove that's less interesting, it'll do another sucker punch with that same nauseating effect. It happens 3 or 4 times. Movie magic. Grade: B+

Super Mario Brothers: Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach (スーパーマリオブラザーズ ピーチ姫救出大作戦!) (1986)
Not particularly interesting as a film in and of itself, and it never really tries to be—this is very clearly a cash-in on a craze. The animation is fine, the voices are kinda weird, and the story is rote—sounds like a video-game-tie-in anime to me! As a piece of Mario media history, though, it's kind of intriguing. I was expecting something much further afield of what we now recognize as Mario canon, given that only the first two Super Mario Bros. games (and by that I mean: SMB and what we in the U.S. call The Lost Levels) had come out at this point, neither of which feel very in-touch with the characterizations that would become more formalized with Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) and Super Mario Bros. 3—e.g. Luigi being the gawky loser (though there are a few artifacts of those games being the basis of this, like Luigi's color scheme and the low-key disturbing factoid from the original SMB manual about the subjects of the Mushroom Kingdom being turned into the blocks in the game). But at the same time, there are some very weird narrative choices here, like Mario and Luigi playing a video game and then getting sucked through the TV into the Mushroom Kingdom, or the fact that Mario and Luigi have a pet dog that ends up being an enchanted prince (and Peach's fiancé!). Tracking the fossil record of the evolution of the Super Mario mythos is basically the only thing this movie is worthwhile for, though. Otherwise, a snooze. Grade: C-

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968)
A boring, confused, confusing, clearly compromised adaptation of a book I've never read. If you want to hear more thoughts on this, check out Episode 434 of the Cinematary podcast, where some friends and I attempt to find something to say about this movie. Grade: C-

Mini Reviews for December 5 - 11, 2022

Again, if you're reading this and normally get emails of each post in the blog, that's no longer happening because the service I use(d) eliminated their free tier without warning. Sorry about that.

Movies

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
On a plot level, it's as ramshackle as any Pinocchio adaptation (and most Del Toro films, tbh), and somehow it's still not as phantasmagoric and gruesome as its source novel. But Del Toro is maybe the most qualified director of all time to bring to life the grotesque textures of the novel, which he does with aplomb, a thoroughly bizarre and at times upsetting vision (everything inside the whale is revolting—I literally felt nauseated) made all the more disquieting by the terrific stop-motion craft. In terms of medium/source-material synergy, I doubt you could find a piece of writing more suited to being put into stop-motion than Collodi's book, and this film captures what makes that true perfectly. The rest of the movie is a little shakier, but for every misstep, there's something delightful to offset it. For example, some of the celebrity voice acting is distracting (esp. Ewan McGregor as the cricket), but then you have Cate Blanchett just doing monkey sounds the whole time or Tom Kenny as Mussolini, both of which are sublime on both textual and metatextual levels. Speaking of Mussolini, you also have the anti-fascist part of this, which is another one of those shaky things. The plot is a little awkward in how it fits and the actual engagement with fascism is a little facile, but on the other hand, the idea of making all of Pinocchio's temptations be ones that funnel him into the fascist indoctrination pipeline, including a "Pleasure Island" sequence that's basically just fascist boot camp, is such a clever idea that the movie never really ran out of good will from me. Also, I found the ending, particularly the idea (implicit in some other versions of this story, including the Disney one) that to be a "real boy" is to have the capacity to die, tremendously moving, which isn't something I was expecting from the first hour of this film. It seems like we will never stop getting Pinocchio movies, which is weird considering how off-putting and odd the original story is, but if that's the case, they could all stand to be as thoughtful and beautiful as this one. Grade: A-

Benediction (2021)
It's not as if Terence Davies movies are usually thrill-a-minute or anything like that, but there are definitely stretches of this that are some of Davies's dullest filmmaking to date, both in terms of what it's trying to say with the characters as well as the film style (which is fairly reserved for such a usually sumptuous stylist as Davies is). As is the case with a lot of Davies movies, it's about loss and memory and the normative reinforcements of the modern world slowly grinding down an individual's humanity over the scope of a lifetime, but particularly the memory piece feels somewhat thin here, and most of the material with Peter Capaldi as the aged Siegfried Sassoon feels rote and disposable. The stuff with Jack Lowden as the young Siegfried is a lot stronger, though, and as the film ping-pongs between scenes of gay men insulting one another in florid and hilariously mean ways and scenes of gutting sadness when those defense mechanisms fall away, it achieves a kind of bleak momentum cruising through the wretched 20th century experienced by the Lost Generation. A deeply uneven film, but one that has enough power at times that it doesn't feel as though Davies has completely lost control. I wish I had rewatched A Quiet Passion before watching this, since it feels like those two must be in conversation with one another, at least conceptually: alienated, queer poets, etc. Grade: B

Decasia (2002)
An incredible collage of really old silent film stock that is actively decaying. Very cool-looking; literally thousands of industrial metal album covers to be mined from this. It's a tough sit, though, not just for the reasons why non-narrative film often is but also because moments of this are viscerally terrifying: the more legible the human figures are, the more we can see the ways that the rot has warped their features and created grotesque monsters of the past. When we get footage of faces is particularly unsettling, and watching them writhe around as the film stock twists and blisters is kind of like looking at photos of drown victims who have stayed in the water too long. I'm sympathetic to the argument that Michael Gordon's score for this is overbearing and a crutch for Morrison, but 1) this film was created to be visual accompaniment for Gordon's music, not the other way around, and 2) this music makes watching this feel like the end of the world. Grade: A- 

 

The Addams Family (1991)
One of the all-time-great casts in terms of actor-character synergy is unfortunately stuck in a fairly drab movie. There are a few entertaining visual gags, and the nonstop macabre punchlines are occasionally fun, but most of the time, it's a kind of hacky, sitcom-y screenplay that is pretty derivative of the '60s TV series and the comics (I imagine—I've not seen/read much of either) without really having a clear vision for how to adapt those sensibilities to the big screen. The pacing is just the worst in this movie, and moreover, neither of the film's modes feel fully realized; if it's going to be a "we're just telling random, knowingly hacky jokes within a kooky setting" movie, then those knowingly hacky jokes need to land with a lot more frequency, and if it's going to be a "we're doing a real plot that you're supposed to care about" thing, that plot needs to be actually substantive. Instead, we just get a movie awkwardly situated between both. That cast, though: truly spectacular, and whatever works about the movie works almost entirely on the backs of these performances—and literally all of the performances, too; I can't think of a single weak link, though Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia are the obvious best-in-show with their deranged, oddly tender evocation of Morticia and Gomez. But everyone brought their A game. Too bad it's otherwise a C movie. Grade: C+

Addams Family Values (1993)
Unbelievably superior to the first one in virtually every way. So little of the throat-clearing and empty space that I felt in the original; every moment is moving the plot forward in an interesting way or delivering macabre jokes that are way more ambitious and out-there than those in the first or doing some impressive combination of both. The cast is still top-notch, having finally found the good movie they were working so hard for in 1991, and Joan Cusack is a great addition as the villain. Plus, I was heretofore unaware of how attractive Joan Cusack is? Is this something that we as a society have reckoned with? Anyway, I went into this skeptical, as I'm usually skeptical of millennial nostalgia touchstones that I didn't experience at the right age to develop the nostalgia for, but this is great. Totally blown away. Grade: A-

 

Cluny Brown (1946)
I'm a little disappointed that the rest of the movie doesn't match the delirious heights of its almost Buñuelian opening scene, in which fixing a plumbing issue becomes a nexus of political and sexual allegory, but adjusting for that, Ernst Lubitsch's final feature film is delightful. Even if it's never as audacious as the first scene, the rest of the film remains resolutely committed to satirizing the pieties of the British bourgeoisie and to the idea of plumbing as a method of sexual innuendo delivery. The movie accomplishes this neat trick of being clearly a satire, and an often biting one at that, while never actually feeling mean or bitter—probably a testament to the warmth of the performances from Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, especially Jennifer Jones, who is magnificent and incredibly sweet in the titular role. I didn't realize Lubitsch was only 55 when he died—I had always assumed him to be much older—and with a final film like this, it's tragic that we didn't get to see what else he would have done. I would have loved to see the Lubitsch Touch applied to post-war America. Grade: A-

 

Television

Jane the Virgin, Season 2 (2015-2016)
I had been told that the love triangle got more interesting, which is false. I still don't care about whether Michael or Rafael gets with Jane, and the more energy this season devoted to that tension, the more I felt myself losing interest. Luckily, what does get more interesting are Michael and Rafael as characters in and of themselves, both of them becoming significantly more fleshed out as human beings because they get plots that are not inherently tied to their relationship with Jane. Making them more human at least makes it make more sense why Jane would want to be romantically involved with one or the other of them, even if that's still not a prospect I'm very invested in. That aside, though, this season feels a lot messier than the first one, and the balance between ridiculous plots and more emotionally grounded material is a little shakier. Some of it works great: a late-breaking story involving the arrival of Petra's long-lost twin sister is both entertainingly preposterous as well as a catalyst for some more sincere relationship dynamics surrounding Jane and Petra's different positions as mothers. Other plots, though, don't feel particularly insightful as far as helping us understand the characters: for example, an arc involving a long-lost lover seems mostly to be present to give Abuela something to do besides give Jane religious/sexual baggage in flashbacks, and the few episodes involving Rogelio being kidnapped don't do a whole lot for a character who otherwise still remains one of my favorites. Maybe my least-favorite subplot of the season are the trials and tribulations of Jane's grad school career, which were never very interesting and also felt like a satire of a kind of academia that doesn't really exist—surely some of the writers of the show have been to grad school, but it doesn't feel like they know anything about university politics. These are fairly minor critiques, though; the bones of the show are so good that it's hard to ever completely derail what makes the show so enjoyable on a moment-by-moment basis, which is the pleasure of seeing these cartoonish-yet-emotionally-nuanced people tumble through one crucible after another with each other. As long as that remains solid, a few errant storylines won't get in the way. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for November 28 - December 4, 2022

My wife and I finally released another episode of The Newbery Chronicles! It's on Louis Sachar's Holes, and you can listen to it here if you're interested.

ALSO: If you're one of the 10 people who subscribe to this via Letterdrop email, I'm going to have to discontinue that because Letterdrop eliminated their free tier. I might switch over to Substack, but I may just not email these out anymore. I dunno. If you have strong feelings about that, let me know.

Movies

The Fabelmans (2022)
As I watched this, my gut was telling me that this was enjoyable but slight, a handsomely filmed and extravagantly performed feature (Paul Dano and Michelle Williams are both incredible) whose most prominent characteristic is the cute allusions to Spielberg's own filmography, e.g. the scorpion box from Hook, the monkey from Raiders, etc. But then a late-film scene—for those who have seen it, the one in the school hallway with the jock upset at how he's portrayed in the skip day film—came and hit me like a freight train, surely one of the best scenes in any movie this year and one of the best scenes in Spielberg's career as a whole, and it cracked this movie wide open for me, and the more time I've spent rolling this movie over in my mind, the more it's opened up (to the point where I started this review with one grade in mind and ended it with another, higher one). I don't think there's been a Spielberg film since A.I. that places this much tension between its thorny ideas and the facade of Spielbergian classicism and sentimentalism, and that earlier film's ersatz family dynamics by way of semiotics is the core allusion that informs everything else in this movie; yes, the movie seems like a wistful semiautobiography about the magic of movies, and the movie works perfectly well when taken as that, but The Fabelmans, with that school hallway scene, tips its hand: "movie magic" is just another way of saying "control," and Spielberg, long accused of being a "manipulative" filmmaker, completely leans into this accusation, laying bare the manipulation baked into the very premise of filmmaking, which this movie pretty explicitly depicts as a person's attempt to recreate life in his own image. What we've been watching—what we watch with every movie, but especially with this movie—is a mere simulation that creates the illusion of authenticity by sleight of hand and trickery. There's a fun, whimsical element to this idea that runs through the film, most notably how the movie shows the ingenuity of its not-Spielberg protagonist as he makes home movies recreating his favorite moments at the cinema, but there's also a deeply sad, even disturbing undercurrent to this: the longer I've sat with this movie, the more the film's depiction of the parents' divorce and particularly the mother's side of things feels like the achingly bleak ending of A.I. when aliens grant the mechanical boy a day of bliss with an artificial mother before allowing him to die. Only in this film, Spielberg is cast as both sides of that scenario, both the boy desperate for the childhood he was denied and also the magic aliens comforting this boy with a constructed image, an automaton. The way I'm describing it sounds dire and depressing, but the incredible thing about the movie is its nuance in depicting it: there are moments in which the film's drive to show filmmaking as a form of control and coercion is profoundly unsettling, most notably the scene with Michelle Williams dancing in front of the car headlights (or a later scene in which a film-within-a-film quotes from the work of Leni Riefenstahl—a truly wild allusion for a Spielberg movie to make but also probably the purest possible example of the insidiousness of film's ability to subjugate reality), but elsewhere in the movie, the results are just delightful, which is kind of the ultimate wrinkle in the movie's thesis on film (described breathlessly by Paul Dano in the opening scene), which is that the illusion of film is able to create real movement in our reality because we are able to be tricked—movies are fake, but the tears, the joy, the anger we feel as we watch them: those are real. Which brings me back to that scene in the school hallway, where an anguished school bully has realized that the illusion of himself depicted in the skip day film will have tangible effects on his real life, and the ambivalence The Fabelmans has about this epiphany is profound: there's something maniacal or even devious about the protagonist's realization of the kind of control he has sought for the previous two hours, but there's also a gobsmacked wonder about it, too. The people who hate Spielberg films (and boy oh boy, do some people haaate them) seem more conscious of this duality in his work than most fans, but it's amusing and even gratifying to know that Spielberg (or at least, Spielberg working with Tony Kushner) understands the haters enough to give them a scene like this. He's also not above making the hater a raging antisemite in the film, which is the sort of self-aggrandizing "manipulative" thing that I'm sure will drive people nuts even more. But I dunno, to me, a lifelong Spielberg fanboy whose first real concept of the "art" of film came from realizing when I was ten years old that Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. were directed by the same person, there is something wonderful and magical about all of this, made even more so by Spielberg's alternating aggrandizement and villanizing of his own profession. Maybe I'm just one of the chumps who wants to be sold a magic trick, but I'm ultimately okay with that. I can't deny the reality of what this made me feel. Grade: A

Child's Play (2019)
More of a reimaginging than a reboot, which is fine with me: if the original Child's Play is something of a response to the gross colonization of kids' imaginations by commercial advertising, then this is a pretty canny update of that concept for the fresh hell of surveillance and data collection that capitalism has brought to the act of play. It's also just a lot of silly, mean fun and does a great job of evoking the spirit of a Chucky movie (at least, the original three) without being overly familiar. Grade: B

 

 

 

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
As long as this stays true to its stated premise (a mockumentary about the killer in a slasher film), this is a great time. The mockumentary scenes show the killer, with the goofy enthusiasm of Michael Scott giving a tour of the Scranton branch, walking the documentary crew through his plan to manufacture the tropes of the slasher genre in his own prospective killing spree, and while by 2006, this was hardly ground-breaking commentary, it's fun and funny and charming to no end. Unfortunately, when the movie flips over to the actual movie that results from this plan, it turns out that following slasher tropes to a T doesn't result in a slasher that's notable in any way, and when the movie finally ends its mockumentary conceit entirely to permanently reside in the slasher mode (albeit in a transition that is pretty clever), Behind the Mask grinds to a halt. The good news is that this is a fairly small fraction of the movie, and the rest is so enjoyable that I'm willing to forgive the deflating ending. But still, it's too bad it has to end on its least-engaging note. Grade: B

The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
Pretty fun Lovecraft adaptation. The whole thing is a silent-film pastiche, and it does a better job evoking the feel of an old silent film than a lot of these silent-revival movies do, which is impressive given that this was basically a fan film by enthusiasts in the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Also, the decision to make it a silent film is a good workaround to the obvious problems in adapting Lovecraft's cosmic horror for the screen, as the knowingly silly embrace of limitations actually makes it feel more otherworldly when Cthulhu finally shows up than it might have been otherwise (stop-motion Cthulhu is very cool, too). It's not perfect, and a lot of this feels a little too smooth—both in terms of the framerate as well as the costuming/props—to be completely credible as an expressionist film from the 1920s. But still, this is a lot better than it has any right to be. Grade: B

 

Shinbone Alley (1970)
It's not a good movie: it's haphazardly paced, its "spurned male lover" ethos is mean and dull, and the songs are terrible. That said, Shinbone Alley is an interesting historical document, not just for that way the its scratchy animation style so fully embodies the aesthetic preoccupations of what is probably the ugliest (not always in a bad way) era of American animation but also for the way it fits into the whole mini-trend of edgy animated animal movies. For example, this movie comes out a couple years before Fritz the Cat, but it's got some of the same bizarre predilections, i.e. the whole "animals, but make them hip and horny urbanites" thing. I mean, even Disney got in on this; 1970 is the same year that saw the release of The Aristocats, which, with its jazz cats and lecherous Thomas O'Malley and alcoholic geese, is definitely an iteration of the trend (albeit cleaned up for the Disney crowd), and while 1973's Robin Hood isn't quite the same, it's still got animals acting like people and being weirdly sexual at times. What was going on in the 1970s with animals and animators? Grade: C

Mildred Pierce (1945)
An incredibly bleak film about the world's abject refusal to allow the titular character to experience prolonged happiness. For as despairing as it ultimately is, the plot is a lot of fun (one turn near the end made me gasp so audibly that my wife called from the next room to check if I was okay), and Joan Crawford's performance is an all-timer—if the latent noir aesthetic were ratcheted up just a few clicks, the movie might be an all-timer, too. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for November 21 - 27, 2022

Yes I was without internet for part of this week and had to watch random movies I had on my laptop—why do you ask?

Movies

Bones and All (2022)
It's a lot of things, maybe too many things: a YA romance, a road-trip movie, a cannibal movie, a Badlands / Bonnie and Clyde "one step ahead of our past catching up with us" sort of thing, an '80s nostalgia movie (if what you're nostalgic for in the '80s is heartland rock, wood paneling, and everything smelling like cigarettes), a philosophical inquiry into the most ethical way to eat people if you are biologically compelled to do so, maybe a queer metaphor, maybe an addiction metaphor. I'm not sure if the extremely bummer ending satisfyingly ties up any of these threads or modes, but like a lot of road trips, the interesting part is how you get there, and this movie is certainly a journey: parts of it deeply unsettling with unexpected moments of terror, other parts evoking a profound loneliness, others a deep well of pathos. Whether or not this completely holds together thematically, it's able to make all of these disparate threads feel like a cohesive whole through a confident stylistic hand as well as some terrific performances (the entire principal cast is great). There's a strong emotional throughline, if nothing else, and some of these scenes are going to stay with me for a while. Grade: B+

Rosaline (2022)
A worst of both worlds situation: neither the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by way of Romeo and Juliet that I was hoping for, nor the sugary-sweet rom-com-revival fun that this movie thinks it is. It has the feeling of being written by someone who hasn't touched Romeo and Juliet since they read the SparkNotes summary in 9th grade English class; Tromeo and Juliet has a better literacy of the Shakespeare play than this one does, which is theoretically fine: so what if Paris is now Rosaline's gay best friend and that famous lines are misappropriated by characters in nonsensical contexts? If you're not trying to be deconstructive, there's no point in actually caring about your film's relationship to its source material. But you gotta give us something in the source material's place, and the watery gruel that we receive is a bunch of warmed-over rom-com clichés employed with a flimsy gloss of girl-power and sarcasm, not to mention a completely empty love interest. As uninterested in Romeo and Juliet as this movie is, it seems even less interested in the elements it's added, and I'm not sure why we're supposed to care about anything going on in Rosaline's life. Kaitlyn Dever is pretty good here, at least—a performance in search of a movie that has any idea at all how to use it. Grade: C-

Joshua and the Promised Land (2004)
It's basically unwatchable, but it's also fascinating because it so clearly is a product of evangelical Christianity while also being a work of outsider art, something you can't say about a lot of more visible evangelical media, which usually comes from a fairly large industry with established tropes and modes of discourse, almost none of which this movie even bothers with. For example, it's not uncommon for evangelical media to use the post-parting-the-Red-Sea stories of Moses and Joshua to justify genocide, but there's usually some tact or rhetorical sleight of hand that makes it seem like it's not justifying genocide. Like, Focus on the Family media has definitely said genocide is okay, but you usually have to analyze it a little to understand that that's what it's doing. This movie doesn't have the guile for that kind of decorum and literally just states outright that it's okay to exterminate a people group if God tells you to, and it does so by using some of the most amateur CG animation I've ever seen as well as some of the most head-scratching decisions in character modeling (if they're supposed to be lions, where are their tails??), which is kind of an out-of-body experience. There's such an incredible purity of vision here, a vile, cancerous, eye-melting vision. I'd love to hear what Phil Vischer thinks about this. Grade: C

Song of the Miraculous Hind (Ének a csodaszarvasról) (2002)
I know so little of Hungarian history and folklore that this film's plot (a telling of ancient Hungarian "history" as seen through its mythology) quickly lost me. Basically the only parts I understood were the pieces that had widespread mythological tropes like the "cosmic hunt" that makes up one early section of the movie. So I would probably have a drastically different reaction to this movie if I were Hungarian or even just knew anything at all about Hungarian history—I dunno, I would definitely have some strong opinions about a movie that tried to dramatize the national mythology of the United States, so this seems like the kind of movie that is fraught with political implications that I have no access to. But from where I sit, it doesn't matter that I couldn't follow the plot, because the film is directed by Marcell Jankovics, which means that it has dazzling animation. It's a lot more stylistically experimental than his masterpiece, Son of the White Mare, which makes sense given this movie's episodic format, and not everything is a home-run here; in fact, there are sections with animation that is surprisingly prosaic for Jankovics. However, other pieces of animation here are incredible in ways that aren't exactly superior to White Mare but also are far more intricate and complex than anything that the other movie attempts, sequences that are overtly psychedelic or even strobe-like, playing around with kaleidoscopic color variations and unstable character forms in a way that is as mesmerizing as it is bewildering. The early sequence with the cosmic hunt is pretty great in this regard, as is the final sequence of the film when Jesus Christ appears to a medieval king. There's something about this kind of stylistic kitchen-sink that, when it works, approaches the sublime when paired with mythological storytelling that I don't understand. Again, I'm sure I would have a much different reaction if I actually did understand the mythology. Grade: B+

Rock and Rule (1983)
The kind of movie that is probably best reviewed by listing out its component parts and just basking in the miracle of the existence of something this bizarre: a nuclear war has destroyed the human race and in the human's place grow a society of animals mutated into character designs I can only describe as "edgy Goof Troop," among whom is the rock star Mok, who needs to find the magical voice that can release a demon who will help him rule the world and gain immortality. This story is told as a rock musical with a plot that doesn't make a lot of sense and with compositions and performances from Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Earth, Wind & Fire, and assorted configurations of Cheap Trick, and it's visual style has a blending of the kind of squishy character animation you might see on children's programming with a less-abrasive form of Ralph Baskshi's urban mixed-media approach for the backgrounds, plus another technique I can't quite identify for Mok's demon that reminds me of Yuri Norstein in its earthy textures. Everything in this movie has these smirking comic-book naming conventions, e.g. Mok Swagger, Carnage-y Hall, Nuke York, etc. A real stew, this movie. A complete meal. Grade: B

The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
This is an amazing story about a man's sociopathic drive to destroy his marriage on his honeymoon, and as a depiction of monstrous self-destruction, it's about as hilarious as something like that can get (which is: very). Truly one of the great evocations of masculinity at its most pathetic and loathsome. But also... also... the incredible coup that this movie pulls is that by casting Cybill Shepherd as the object of this man's desire, there's a part of me, not a significant part but a part nonetheless, that watches her in this movie and thinks, "You know, I get it." Audience-implication sometimes feels like a cheap shot, but this one totally got me. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for November 14 - 20, 2022

This week I was on the Cinematary podcast talking about the 1931 Ernst Lubitch film The Smiling Lieutenant. Here's the link if you're interested!

Movies

Barbarian (2022)
It spends a good portion of its first half pretending to be a much more serious movie than it is (the movie it pretends to be: a slow-burn thriller about two strangers accidentally booked at the same Airbnb), but after a particular point, it drops the mask so quickly that the abruptness in and of itself is hugely entertaining. It does this a couple more times, and by the end, Barbarian is thoroughly goofy, albeit of the grimy, ugly sort that characterizes the work of, say, Wes Craven. This isn't anywhere near as clever as a Craven movie, but that veneer of seriousness barely containing a mean-spirited glee at others' misfortunes definitely feels like it's in the same wheelhouse. I found this thoroughly entertaining, though by the end, as it's become clear that the film is kind of a one-trick pony in terms of how it doles out its reveals, there are diminishing returns to what it's attempting on a thematic level (some muddled ideas about gender and motherhood and morality). But it's a masterclass in executing that one trick, and I had a great time hootin' and hollerin' at the screen with my wife as we watched this. Grade: B+

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
Really, shockingly good. I don't hate Martin McDonagh, but it's been a while since he's done anything I particularly cared for, and this far surpasses the distant, pleasant memories I have of In Bruges. Moreover, this is the first McDonagh screenplay (I've never seen one of his stage plays) that doesn't feel like it's bending over backward trying to prove something with its cleverness; the screenplay here simply is clever in this understated yet confident way that bowled me over. If I'm not mistaken, there's some Irish political history metaphor going on with the plot that I am unequipped to unpack, but that's okay, because it's also just a very human story of pain and loss as two former friends drift apart. Whatever the allegory that's happening here, McDonagh does the very graceful and very difficult task of also making it not feel like an allegory, and the entire thing works just as well (perhaps better) if you assume that Colin Ferrell and Brendan Gleeson's characters are real, psychologically complex human beings instead of simply being analogs for the sides of the Irish Civil War or whatever is supposed to be going on there. Career-best work from Ferrell, too. He takes his "affable goofball with hidden complexity" thing and imbues it with a deep well of sadness and vulnerability that ends up pervading the entire film. I can imagine having a good, cathartic cry over this movie if it caught me in the right mood, and I mean that as a compliment. Grade: A-

My Father's Dragon (2022)
The first half of this movie, which is split pretty evenly between the social-realist(ish) beginning involving the struggle of a mother and her son to make it in a new city and the wildly inventive fantasy of the boy's flight from the city to a magic island, is terrific, utilizing a dream logic undergirded by a strong emotional core in a way reminiscent of the Where the Wild Things Are movie. The back half of the movie unfortunately falls apart as it fails to maintain the emotional clarity through the dream logic, and the climax hinges on an emotional epiphany that is almost completely unearned. Narratively, it's the weakest of the Cartoon Saloon features, and it's not even close. Visually, however, this is as stunning as any of the studio's other work, maintaining the rich texturedness of Wolfwalkers as well as the luminous use of color present throughout the studio's work. In the face of that, it's hard to feel grumpy about the film. Grade: B

 

Cult of Chucky (2017)
My least-favorite, I think, of the "...of Chucky" stage of this franchise, but Mancini continues to have a tight grasp of fundamental horror mechanics as well as the specific idioms that make his Chucky movies special—at this point, watching these characters and tropes return is something akin to watching a soap, and it's great fun just to see, for example, Jennifer Tilly show up again in some new, ridiculous role. Some great practical gore effects here, too. The psychiatric hospital setting isn't nearly as evocative or well-deployed as the old mansion in Curse, and the film relies just a little too much on movie-crazy-people-isms in fleshing out the secondary cast, and as a whole, the movie lacks the verve or the mad-scientist coherence that animates the best in the series. But I guess in the short span of time I've been watching the series, I've become a lifer with these movies, because I still had a good time and can't wait to hop into the TV series. A cult indeed. Grade: B

 

Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
If I wasn't already familiar with the source material, it would be unbelievable that a movie this smutty and this mean came out of the stuffy '80s costume drama world. The closest thing I can think of to this is The Favourite, which of course arrived from a much different milieu in cinema. But here's this movie, a brutally spiteful satire of 18th-century ruling class with only a few of the edges sanded off from the French novel on which it is based (I'm unfamiliar with Christopher Hampton's 1985 play that is the more direct source for this movie). This is probably the best I've ever seen Glenn Close and John Malkovich, two actors I'm not overly fond of, and the way they slowly reveal the utter despair that they cloak in the abject evil of their actions is kind of masterful. The film's pacing gets a little dicey by the end as the plot turns from being outrageous to being just bleak, and as with basically every other version of the story, I'm not sure how to feel about its treatment of sexual assault. But on the whole, this is pretty good. I want to live in the alternative universe in which all Masterpiece Theatre-ish productions are this cruel and sick. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for October 31 - November 13, 2022

Sorry I missed last week. I had such a busy few days that I neither watched anything nor did I have time for blogging even if I had watched anything. I made up for it this week, as you can see.

Movies

Wendell and Wild (2022)
Henry Selick and Jordan Peele made a movie for the freaks and the weirdos and the people who care about the prison industrial complex and the people who don't care if your movie is too overstuffed to have structural or dramatic integrity. Really terrific stop-motion animation, of course. Nice to see that Selick is still making icky-looking movies after all these years. Grade: B

If you'd like to hear me (and some friends) talk about this movie at length, you can check out Episode 428 of the Cinematary podcast.

TÁR (2022)
Enigmatic, and photographed with obvious deliberation, TÁR is likely to be one of the most "Cinema with a capital-C" movies that's going to get wide distribution this year, and there's something inherently exciting about that in a world where even my local "arthouse" Regal is blocking out several screens of Wakanda Forever. It's also deliciously perverse in its depiction of Lydia Tár, its central problematic genius, a figure who, we're assured, is more than deserving of the stratospheric accolades she has received and whose prickly personality and nastily barbed speech is so compelling to watch that we as viewers might be tempted to take her side even when allegations much more serious than the distilled assholery we've witnessed come to light. The movie has a real impish glee in its depiction of both the ways that Tár brutally humiliates those around her and also the eventual indignities that come for Tár herself (right up to the sublime cosmic joke that lands in the final scene), and in doing so, the movie becomes a seriously mean black comedy of a sort that reminds me of Phantom Thread before that movie's unexpected pivot (Cate Blanchett's wiry, feral performance here is every bit the equal of Daniel Day-Lewis's work with PTA). TÁR never really pivots, though, and even given the extent to which it's such a hugely entertaining watch (especially for the kind of art film it presents itself as), there's something maddening about the central arc of the film, too, that makes it a much more slippery watch than a lot of the self-destructive anti-hero media that the film's logline evokes. Some of the film's provocations are obvious (insert your favorite charismatic-but-morally-dubious celebrity comparison here), but there's a much more insidious provocation in the sense that the film withholds just enough information from basically every single plot development here that there's a plausible deniability to any interpretation you could have—not just interpretation in the sense of what it means but also in the sense of what actually, factually occurred. The most obvious example is how the film shows us just enough of Tár's behavior around her protégés that we know she's capable of the #MeToo-esque accusations leveled at her but not enough that we can be absolutely sure how much she's responsible for the catastrophic depths those accusations indict her in. But that "just enough to be suspicious, not enough to be sure" approach holds for everything in the film, right down to a fairly minor plot point involving an alleged attack against Tár that may in fact have merely involved Tár tripping on stairs. So much of this film's plot is related via people's personal accounts that we simply have no window into beyond their own words. It's a genuinely ballsy move to make a film about an over-enabled star accused of abusing their position and then make the fundamental building blocks of its reality this opaque and inscrutable (forming an accidental, instructive juxtaposition with the trailer for that Harvey Weinstein movie that played before my screening of TÁR), but whether or not this is constructive or merely a smokescreen for something more hollow and reactionary is something I cannot parse and gives me pause. I suppose there's something possibly profound about how the act of interpreting this movie mirrors our lived reality in the real-life versions of these "celebrity accused of bad behavior" scandals in which we're invited to make decisions about the guilt or innocence of people based entirely on personal accounts. As is the case in real life, this process in the film obscures the presumably real pain of the alleged victims, instead focusing on how such accusations might undermine the elevated position of the accused, and TÁR is so deliberate in lampshading the fact that we know absolutely nothing about the victim here that I have to imagine that this effect is intentional. To what end? I dunno. Maybe once the dust settles, I'll have a clearer idea of what's supposed to be going on here. But for now, I can't think of a film with an enigma this opaque wrapped in a character study this watchable. Grade: A-

Night of the Creeps (1986)
Pretty fun, store-brand-Joe-Dante-style movie involving some gross little leech-looking things that turn people into zombies. Some really great line readings, especially from Tom Atkins, who gets to go delightfully arch in the film's climax. There's not a lot to the movie besides these simple pleasures, though, and the more the movie gestures away from them—for instance, in the middle section that is curiously focused on college Greek life politics—the less interesting it gets. Luckily, it's mostly focused on the good stuff! Grade: B

 

 

 

Dead of Night (1977)
I put this on thinking it was the 1945 movie of the same title (I didn't realize the 1945 movie was made in 1945 or I would have recognized my mistake instantly), and by the time I realized it wasn't, the sunk cost fallacy had already gripped my brain. A near-complete dud of a TV-movie—it's an anthology film, and only the last segment works (the last one is pretty good, though—a mother raises her son from the dead, and he's a terror). But overall, a waste of time. The first movie I had time to watch in over a week, and I mess it up! Grade: C-

 

 

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
I thought there would be more songs in something the early-'30s called a "musical," but the songs here are super charming. I also wasn't prepared for just how unabashedly dirtbaggy Maurice Chevalier's character is, but that's pre-Code Hollywood for ya! A highly relatable film: I, too, would be frustrated if I was winking at Claudette Colbert but instead some stuffy monarch thought I was winking at her, so I had to pretend to be in love with her so I didn't get punished, so then we got married, but then she turned out to be a total square, which is a real turn-off, so I can't consummate the marriage until Claudette teaches her how to smoke and be all cool and sexy, and then oh boy, it's off to the races! Could happen to anyone! Grade: B+

 

I Don't Want to Be a Man (Ich möchte kein Mann sein) (1918)
An interesting, sharp comedy exploring gender fluidity. It's always amazing to see a film from 100 years ago dealing with ideas that would have been considered progressive within my own lifetime. A little bit depressing, too—liberation is not a linear or inevitable arc, I guess. Anyway, I don't know anything about anything with gender, but this movie gets one thing absolutely right about gender, which is that men's formal wear sucks. Grade: B

 

 

 

Television

How To with John Wilson, Season 2 (2021)
The second season of How To is basically more of the same, though there are some subtle differences. Conner O'Malley is now part of the writing team, and while I can't say so for certain, some of the visual gags accompanying Wilson's narration seem to have his fingerprints—whatever the case, this season is slightly more jokey, but not in any way that changes the basic experience of watching an episode. You've got the same narration, the same video-essay conceit, the same out-of-left-field moments of profundity, the same commitment to finding the most absurd extensions of each episode's central idea. Still a fun and special little piece of the modern TV tapestry. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for October 24 - 30, 2022

My wife and I released a new episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here if you're interested!

Movies

Lightyear (2022)
I went into this expecting it to be bad, and it was, but I think this actually would have been a tolerable, if forgettable, piece of children's sci-fi if it weren't for the fact that it's about the "real" Buzz freaking Lightyear. It's a weird bind that I'm sure the filmmakers found themselves in making this movie: scrubbed of its forced connections to the Toy Story franchise, the screenplay is not nearly good enough to make this movie be notable as a standalone film, but the Toy Story connections that make it notable unmistakably flag this movie as a piece of cynical corporate brand management as opposed to the sincere work of middlebrow family entertainment it wants to be. I'm sorry, but I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough that I can hear the characters in this movie on multiple occasions saying word-for-word memorable lines from the first Toy Story and not come to the conclusion that some middle-management Disney husk with an MBA ghost-wrote the film. It's like watching that unbearable pre-show Regal ad where everybody just says random famous movie lines, only at feature length. Also, on the animation front, this is a major step back from the past few Pixar films' attempts to broaden the studio's style outside of their familiar aesthetic. We're in mildly cartoony photorealismville again, baby, and it's boring. Complete dreck. Almost certainly the worst Pixar movie—or at least the most dispiriting. Grade: C-

Bride of Chucky (1998)
Easily the best Chucky movie up to this point in the series. Chucky as an entity was never particularly scary to me anyway (even when I was a kid), so this movie's abandonment of any semblance of "scary" plus its commitment to weird camp and outsider sensibilities helps it sail past every previous movie in the franchise. Explicitly tying itself to The Bride of Frankenstein should be a movie-ruining bit of hubris, but it's absolutely deserved here, as it embraces that early classic's penchant for the playful and absurd over the spooky. Plus, my god, the voice acting of the central duo: the addition of Jennifer Tilly as functionally the lead is an incredibly canny move, and Brad Dourif puts in his series-best performance. Also, barely related, but I just happened to click on Dourif's Wikipedia page when writing this up, and I realized he plays Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, which is kinda blowing my mind at the moment; I should have made that connection before the fourth entry in this series. Grade: A-

Seed of Chucky (2004)
What an absolute blast. Some of the running bits don't really work (e.g. the "Made in Japan" thing or Jennifer Tilly's eating disorder), but for the most part, this is intoxicating and ridiculously fun and has the good sense to realize that two Jennifer Tilly performances are better than one. Whereas Bride of Chucky explicitly presents itself as the Chucky analog to The Bride of Frankenstein, Seed openly claims to be the Glen or Glenda of the franchise, which is 100% the logical conclusion to the camp flourishes of the previous film. Along the same lines, I gotta hand it to this movie for having the guts to evoke one of the most repulsive parts of Pink Flamingos (the kidnapping/insemination plot). Speaking of insemination, people talk about weird Hollywood synchronicity like the time there were two Snow White movies in the same year, but I've never heard anyone talk about the much more improbable parallelism of 2004's duology of CGI sperms (i.e. this and She Hate Me). A true unicorn pairing. Grade: A-

Curse of Chucky (2013)
A soft reboot after the franchise reached the delirious heights of Bride and Seed was not at the top of the list of things I would want to see out of the follow-up. But allowing for that, this was really solid—probably the most overtly "scary" (relatively—Chucky's not very scary) Chucky movie since the first one, and it does a lot of good with that aim to return to the series's horror roots. It's set in a big, spooky house, which is a tremendous setting, and appropriately, the direction is the series's most baroque, filled with moody lighting and sweeping steadicam shots (maybe my favorite direction of the series). And for us lovers of post-Child's Play 3 Chucky, the last ten minutes or so does let us know that Don Mancini hasn't forgotten about us. So, a good time, if not the great time delivered by its immediate predecessors. Grade: B

 

Books

A Gathering of Days; A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32 by Joan W. Blos (1979)
What if a children's book looked exactly like a child's journal from the 1830s? Impressively committed to its conceit, to the point that it's willing to be extremely boring in the interest of looking like a historical document. If that sounds cool to you, you can listen to my wife and I talk about it on our podcast. Grade: D

 

 

 

 

Music

Taylor Swift - Midnights (2022)
I've heard people call this album a "grower," and it certainly has the hallmarks of that: low-key production, murmured melodies, few open bids for radio play. However, after having spent a week with this album, I'm feeling like it's the opposite... a shrinker? I'm sad to report that the more I listen to it, the thinner Midnights feels. Everything on here is something that Taylor Swift has done elsewhere (and better): the nocturnal Antonoff production hearkens back to the simmering, weary back-half of Reputation and the warmth of the Lover deep cuts; the semi-ironic self-critique of "Anti-Hero" is a less sardonic revision of "Blank Space"; "Vigilante Shit" and "Karma" again evoke Reputation, but this time the cringey, forced "bad girl" camp villainy. I wouldn't mind as much if the writing on these songs were actually good, but a lot of these lyrics feel like first-drafts, with a main idea only barely developed (and certainly not as idiosyncratic and nuanced as I'm used to hearing from Swift). That's to say nothing of the outright howlers, like the already infamous "sexy baby" line on "Anti-Hero" or how Taylor Swift still seems to employ the word "fuck" like a middle-schooler giddy about saying grown-up words. The melodies on the tracks fare better, but there isn't a single song where I enjoy both the melody and the lyrics, which is disappointing coming from Taylor Swift. It's disappointing after folklore seems to usher in a new phase of maturity and hindsight for Taylor Swift that she's come up with an album that feels like ersatz Taylor Swift, mimicking the rhythms and themes of past successes without the spark of what made those earlier works cook. I guess we'll see how I feel after spending a little more time with this—maybe this will prove to be a true grower after two weeks, or ten. But right now, this strikes me as one of Taylor Swift's weakest album, if not her outright worst. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for October 17 - 23, 2022

Nothing new to report up here. Here's an obligatory link to the podcast episode my wife and I released last week.

Movies

The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018)
A perfectly serviceable (and no more than that) piece of family entertainment that is directed by Eli Roth for some reason. There are some fun, distinctive bits (I liked the evil pumpkins!), but I'm finding it hard to have much to say about a movie that is mostly pretty anonymous. Still, if you'd like to hear me try to say something about it, I was part of Episode 426 of the Cinematary podcast, which discussed it as part of the "Horror for Kids" series. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
This movie opens with a hilarious premise that had me hoping for the best: it is ten years in the future, and Freddy has killed literally every teenager in Springfield except one, and he's out to get that one. Gold. The rest of the movie is really dull, though; a weird mix of unbearably try-hard goofy (Freddy trapping a dude in a video game and then killing him using an actual Nintendo Power Glove) and incongruously dark (the protagonists are all kids from a shelter for homeless or troubled teens, and they have some too-real, un-fun issues, e.g. one of them is suffering from PTSD after having been raped by her father repeatedly as a child). Nothing here is scary, and it's really hard to care about anything that happens, given how the movie can never decide how much contempt it wants to regard these characters with. And the effects aren't even that fun or inventive either. Definitely earns its reputation as the series low point. Grade: C

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
The only one of this franchise after the first one that's even remotely scary, and there's no way not to attribute this directly to the presence of Wes Craven again. I do miss some of the sillier, go-for-broke bonkers setpieces that animated a lot of the sequels, but the consummate professionalism and virtuosic control of tension on display here really can't be beat, especially after so many of the other sequels feeling cinematically complacent outside of the elaborate death scenes. The meta stuff obviously begs comparisons to Scream, and while the latter movie is certainly more clever, I've always found its commentary to be smug and vaguely irritating (despite film being solid overall); New Nightmare is a lot messier and probably not as good holistically, but it's also a lot more lovable—the regard the film has for Heather Langenkamp is genuinely sweet at times, which does a lot to endear the film to me. Anyway, I'm glad the Nightmare series got this little coda, because it would have been a bummer to end the series on a stinker like Freddy's Dead. Grade: B+

Child's Play 3 (1991)
A pretty big step down from the first two entries in this series. Andy goes to military school—pretty boring! I really liked the opening credits (we get to watch Chucky unmelt, which is very cool-looking), and Chucky himself remains a fun presence. But I just am so bored with Andy. Too bad Kyle didn't show up in this movie, because I liked her! On top of that, the movie is pretty tepidly staged—I guess military schools are by-design bland environments, and it feels like even the filmmakers realized they picked a bad setting because they set the climax in a random carnival that appears out of nowhere. Grade: C

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (鉄男) (1989)
I had heard about the gnarly body horror in this movie, which is indeed gnarly (and if I were slowly turning into metal, I would probably rip up my flesh picking at the metal, too, so it's oddly relatable). But I don't think I was prepared for how stylistically out-there this is, which was a fun surprise. I was ready for a lo-fi gross-out, but the way the film has one foot in the avant-garde makes this a lot more engaging than it would have been for me otherwise. Also, terrific sound design—some just incredible squishy noises. Made my skin crawl. Grade: A-

 

 

 

Books

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)
As one of the seminal postmodern novels, I expected this to be a little more out-there than it was, and so reading this fairly dry, sardonic book grounded in middle-class alienation caused by the absurdities of postwar American consumerism required a little bit of a mental readjustment to get into. It still wasn't exactly my thing, but I had come around to it by the end. At first, the wry narration, which felt like DeLillo was smirking or rolling his eyes at every sentence, was a little grating to me, but eventually, I felt in on the joke, e.g. the "Hitler Studies" professor whose most pressing concern is whether or not the fact that he doesn't know German undermines his credibility to talk about the fascist leader. Everything is surface and self-presentation. By the end, the book finds a melancholy groove in the hollowness of everything the characters do, until that hollowness has become an abyss with the grave at its bottom. That's the good stuff. I'm curious how I will feel about this book if (when?) I read more Don DeLillo. Anyway, for now: Grade: B