Favorite Movies of 2021

As with music, I don't have a lot to say about movies this year. I'm just exhausted by discourse of most kinds at the moment, and I don't really feel like adding to it in this little preamble. It was nice to be able to see movies in theaters again, but also, having a second child now (a good thing!) made going to the theater harder than ever, which made me sad: I would have loved to have seen Malignant or All Light, Everywhere or Pig in a big dark room with strangers. And then there are the theatrical experiences that streaming stole from us: The Power of the Dog, Luca, etc. As much as it deeply grieves me to say so, theatrical distribution seems to be on the way out, an outcome specifically engineered by studios and streaming platforms more so than by audience consent. But as long as theaters are there showing non-MCU movies, I'll be there. Here's to 2022, which will hopefully at least be a better year for movies, if not anything else in this world.

My usual disclaimer that I didn't get a chance to see all movies, including some movies I really wanted to, still applies, of course. Licorice Pizza [ed: since writing this but prior to publishing it, I saw Licorice Pizza, and it definitely would have made my top 5 if I'd felt up to changing my list last-minute], Drive My Car, A Hero, Titane, and many others I simply didn't get to, either because of the usual distribution wankery (why, in this era of digital distribution, we still have to go through the "exclusive to NYC and LA" dog and pony show rollout is beyond me) or because I couldn't get out to the theater in time.

As always, I would love to hear what movies other people enjoyed this year. Movies are best when shared, so share them!

Anyway, on to the list.

 

Favorite Movies

1. The Power of the Dog
This movie has only grown on me in the weeks since I first saw it. Truly top-tier work from everyone involved. We need more psychological thrillers that are westerns; we need more Benedict Cumberbatch performances that are this good. We need more Jane Campion movies in general.

[Read original review]

2. The Green Knight
Probably the movie I have thought most about this year. It's proven to be a divisive movie among audiences for reasons I can understand (and for some reasons I cannot—the anti-A24 brigade baffles me), but this revisionist take on a required-reading classic is catnip for overthinking English teachers such as yours truly. I yam what I yam.

[Read original review]

3. Benedetta
A fairly rigorous interrogation of church power dynamics and body theology, disguised as nunsploitation. Paul Verhoeven, you sly dog.

[Read original review]

4. The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson going completely ham on his fussy diorama sets and mid-century nostalgia. Maybe not his absolute best (the Frances McDormand character is a weak link, for sure), but it's certainly his absolute most, which is an unqualified good in my mind.

[Read original review]

5. West Side Story
I'm a little sad that this didn't end up finding much of an audience, becoming a pretty resounding flop; makes me wonder what the future is for movies like this. But whatever. At least Spielberg got his musical, and we got a great revival of the classical craft of the form.

[Read original review]

6. Dune
Just an impeccably designed, written, and acted space opera adaptation of a source material I never would have expected to be reproduced so coherently. I've grown increasingly cantankerous about franchise filmmaking as time has gone on, but I'm happy to sit back and enjoy this new franchise.

[Read original review]

7. Old
Silly and profound in equal measures. Mostly I'm just impressed at how much control Shyamalan has over His Thing these days. Dude is making the movies he wants to make, and he's making them well, daring you to like them in spite of (or because of) their idiosyncrasies. Where else in any media would you find a rapper named Midsized Sedan?

[Read original review]

8. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
Longtime (or probably even shorttime) readers will know that I don't go for modern comedies very often. My sense of humor is just too square/out-of-step with current trends to find a lot of film comedy that funny, and I've made my peace with that. But this, now this is a modern comedy I can get behind. Austin Powers if he were a pair of wholesome midwestern biddies. This movie has occupied more space in my head than any other movie this year.

[Read original review]

9. Malignant
This movie is completely bonkers in all the right ways. Three left turns make a right, and this movie has at least three left turns. James Wan making his career-best film by completely committing to this magnificently absurd little horror gem after having helmed Aquaman is my favorite flex of the year.

[Read original review]

10. maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore
A complex rumination on indigenous identity intertwined with an achingly beautiful mood piece about the natural world. If you're scared of the avant-garde, this is a great way to dip your toe in.

[Read original review]







Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Experimental Documentary Runner-Up: All Light, Everywhere—This was actually my #10 until Malignant bumped it, and it has a certain spiritual kinship with my current #10 in terms of style and status as an unconventional documentary. Like maɬni, this splits the difference between some exquisitely beautiful footage set to a terrific ambient score and a more high-minded essayic treatment of the topic. In All Light, Everywhere's case, it's mass surveillance. It wanders less than maɬni and therefore has less of a capacity for unexpected wonder (hence it not making the top-10 cut), but it's nonetheless stunning and 100% worth your time.

Animation Corner: The Mitchells vs. The Machines—In a strikingly weak year for English-language feature-film animation, it's sort of a backhanded compliment for me to call The Mitchells vs. The Machines my favorite animated film of the year, because truth be told (as it was in my original review), I wasn't in love with the movie. But the animation is tremendous, a genuine step forward for the medium, so I have to give it props for that.

Underrated Animation Corner: Luca—Pixar has gotten itself into a strange kind of bind where if it isn't some swing-for-the-fences ambitious, emotionally fraught film, it's a sign of the studio's retreat into mediocrity. But I thought this was really good, and really good in a solid, modest way that a lot of American animated films struggle to be. Normalize the value of making well-made, low-stakes movies.

Biggest Surprise: Bad Trip—It's well-documented how much I dislike Jackass/Punk'd-style hijinks, so I shouldn't have enjoyed this movie, a gonzo blitz of Jackass/Punk'd-style stunts taped together into a feature-film narrative. But I did enjoy it; a whole lot.

"Stressed Out, But in a Good Way" Award: Shiva Baby—A sublime pileup of dramatic tensions. It would be one of the year's funniest, too, if my heart rate weren't so high.

"Ya Gotta Hand It to Them" Award: Annette—This didn't end up being my cup of tea, but it so completely commits to being the bizarre object that it is that I have nothing but respect for everyone involved.

"Soderbergh's Still Soderberghing" Award: No Sudden Move—After a while, I run out of things to say about Steven Soderbergh, who so consistently delivers films that I enjoy a whole lot but never quite love enough to commemorate in my top 10. His most recent, a pitch-black crime caper starring a murderer's row of performers, is the latest in that line of "great but not quite top 10" material.

"Schrader's Still Schradering" Award: The Card Counter—Not his best by any measure, but Paul Schrader has definitely nailed his "God's lonely man" formula in the sense that he knows how to recycle the tropes over and over again while making little tweaks that help each one feel fresh in its own way. Also, I got an essay on this film published at Fare Forward, so I have a soft spot for this one.

"Making Me Squirm" Award: Red Rocket—I watched a lot of edgy stuff in 2021, but nothing made me more uncomfortable than watching the Simon Rex's character try to prey on Suzanna Son's character. The discomfort is entirely The Point, so I guess good job, Red Rocket.

Best Scene from a Movie Not in the Top 10: Pig—The scene where Cage's character meets a former employee, who has opened a trendy restaurant. It builds from what initially seems like a sad juxtaposition of Cage's isolated, lowly existence with the opulent world he left, only to then pivot to Cage's character gives the most withering dressing down possible of that poor guy, all while implicitly commenting on the devaluing of art and meaning within a capitalist system. Incredible.

Best Kill: Fear Street: 1994—Without a doubt my favorite part of all three Fear Street movies was when that poor girl's head goes through the bread slicer. I know I am a sick man.

Worst Movie of the Year: Fear Street: 1666—Looking back through my reviews for this year, 2021 had a fairly high floor in terms of how much I liked the movies I saw, hence this movie, which I thought was merely "meh" (along with all of the Fear Street movies) being my least-favorite.

Best Non-2021 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2021: The Rapture—This bizarre, frightening treatise on faith and God basically hasn't left my mind since I saw it back in October, and I probably haven't thought about a single movie this year more than this one, except maybe Noah (because I wrote that gigantic essay on it), which occupies some of the same thematic territory. What can I say: I love movies about spiritual anguish and movies that are weird adaptations of biblical material.

Mini Reviews for January 10 - 16, 2022

Should *finally* be publishing my post about my favorite movies of 2021, so be on the lookout for that if you're interested. Unfortunately, I wrote most of it before I made this post, and I'm too lazy to update it, so it will be sans Licorice Pizza and Macbeth, both of which would have had a good shot at being in my top 10.

Movies

Licorice Pizza (2021)
I was completely captivated by Paul Thomas Anderson's rambling, completely unpredictable nostalgia ode to a '70s Southern-Californian, showbiz-adjacent adolescence. A lot of people have compared this to Altman, and that's probably what's immediately in PTA's head here, but what this actually reminded me of is the fiction of Beverly Cleary and the other mid-century children's lit in that mode (I'm thinking also of Robert McCloskey's Homer Price and Keith Robertson's Henry Reed): mildly precocious children going through a series of episodic, idiosyncratic misadventures that over the course of a novel build to an emotionally nuanced character arc. Obviously Licorice Pizza is the aged-up, swearing version of that and is willing to go to far weirder places than the books I just mentioned (the incredible gas shortage/Bradley Cooper sequence being perhaps foremost among them—probably my favorite 15 minutes of any 2021 movie), but it has the same lackadaisical structure, sense of semi-improvised whimsy, and psychological precision that grounds those books (especially Cleary's), as well as being preoccupied with the same specific coming-of-age dynamic: that feeling of being out-of-place in your current age bracket but also struggling to adapt to the stage of life beyond it. Lots of people have already written about the pleasures of the top-tier cast and hyper-specific period details, and they're right, but I'm guessing I'm the first to make the Ramona Quimby connection. Regardless, I had a great time with this movie. Grade: A-

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
As a direct adaptation of the play itself, this one's just fine; with the exception of an incredibly lively Stephen Root as the porter, all the other actors rise precisely to what is asked of them, but no higher—Denzel's performance, for example, is exactly what I would have expected from a "Denzel Washington is Macbeth" pitch, which is only disappointing in so far as I would have liked to have been surprised. Textually, it's a fairly standard interpretation of the Shakespeare material, with just enough twists to hold attention: McDormand and Washington are basically playing their respective roles with the exhaustion of middle age, and there's also the way the screenplay intentionally foregrounds the loose ends and ambiguities of the original play, e.g. Fleance's survival and Lady Macbeth's off-stage death. But as a cinematic object, this movie is absolutely superb. The academy-ratio B&W cinematography is exquisite, as is the penchant for directly evoking German Expressionism with its lighting. And the sets are magnificent; perpetually cloaked in fog (a Kurosawa reference?), the architecture of the soundstages this was filmed on flits in and out of view, Ozymandias-eque monuments to human ego that slip into the abyss as easily as a human life. And what architecture! These imposing slabs of what looks like concrete and stone give Castle Inverness the sense of a haunted Brutalism: empty, monumental, a mausoleum for those already living. I loved every single frame of this movie, and if the actual Shakespearean elements don't blow me away, the look of it more than makes up for that. Grade: B+

Cryptozoo (2021)
Accepting the animation style (basically, somewhat talented doodles of the sort Napoleon Dynamite may have put in his high school notebooks, animated in an extremely limited framerate plus psychedelic effects) is a huge ask for audiences, but I thought it was cool—it's obviously stilted at times, but it's also capable of some moments of striking beauty in a way that definitely makes it feel like a step up from Dash Shaw's previous feature, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea. It's got a better screenplay than that other one, too: a metaphorically freighted action-adventure involving the way an oppressed class (in this case, the mythical creatures, aka "cryptids"—kind of an iffy allegorical stand-in for oppressed peoples/animals, but you're going to have to roll with it alongside the animation if you want to enjoy this movie) ping-pongs between the ways that the U.S. government wants to use the creatures' powers to crush leftist movements and the ways bleeding-heart folks condescend to and commodify these creatures in the titular zoo in the name of "inclusion" and "representation." The movie bites off way more than it can chew, but it's reasonably thoughtful in doing so and also looks like absolutely no other movie you've seen (except for Dash Shaw's other work). Grade: B

MLK/FBI (2020)
This is right at the intersection of "a basic primer on information I already knew" and "I would rather have read a book on this," neither of which are my favorite genres of documentaries. But this is well-made on a subject that more people should always know about, and it's impressively unflinching (not a given in this type of documentary) about the connection between anti-communism and anti-racial equality, both institutionally in America and in the general white population more broadly. So completely predictable to see all the good white Christians who ostensibly idolize King turn frothing at the mouth with racialized anti-left hatred whenever Black Lives Matter or Critical Race Theory comes up, and I suppose there's value in anything that connects (if only implicitly, as this movie does) that sort of behavior to its truly unsettling historical parallels. Wish this movie would have done more to talk about the ways that the state still surveils dissidents, too, as if that all ended with COINTELPRO—get out of here with your "dark moment in FBI history" justifications, Comey. Grade: B

Finally Got the News (1970)
A memorable, if a bit basic document of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. What strikes me as I look back at these activist documentaries from the '60s and '70s is just how much was lost over the neoliberal 1980s onward (and especially the post-Cold War '90s/2000s) in terms of anticapitalist organizing in the United States. I'm under no delusions that groups like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were mainstream in the United States, but they were active and helped bring about effective change through a clear-eyed critique of capitalism that was basically nuked to hell by the unfettered power of capital during the eras of Reagan, Clinton, etc. It's taken decades for labor to build back a vocabulary of anticapitalism as precise as is articulated in this documentary, and even now, it's hard to imagine too many people walking around a workplace organizing by explicitly talking to people about surplus value or whatever. Maybe I'm just out of touch and people have more radical class consciousness than I'm giving them credit for, but I certainly don't have that, and there's something tragic about looking back at that astoundingly articulate vanguard '60s/'70s moment and knowing that it would go into retreat for so long—but also inspiring to know that even in the U.S., such a vanguard was possible (and maybe could be possible again). Grade: B

 

Television

A Series of Unfortunate Events, Season 2 (2018)
I'm not sure I have much more to say on this show now than I did for its first season. All of the same strengths apply (great cast, terrific fidelity to the wit and thematic arc of the books, etc.) as well as some of the same misgivings (particularly the foregrounding of the conspiracy elements rather than keeping them as intriguing breadcrumbs at the story's margins, though this is slightly less of an issue as the series get to adapting the books where the conspiracy began to take a more prominent role). What strikes me this time is that this series is much, much more focused on the adults of this universe than the books are, which is either an effect of centering the conspiracy or the cause of centering the conspiracy—either way, doing so kind of wrests large portions of this story from the Baudelaires; the realization that you aren't the main characters in the world but merely pieces of a larger whole is something the books eventually include, too, but it's interesting that the show's fixation on the adults forces this realization much earlier in the series than in the books, where it was a slowly dawning revelation over the course of the series's back half. I guess as with the conspiracy, I prefer the slow reveal rather than the all-at-once thing the show does, but these are mild complaints. On the whole, I enjoy this series, despite whatever Snicket says. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for January 3 - 9, 2022

Hey, I got HBO! I'm cool now.

Movies

Malignant (2021)
A deranged, no-holds-barred throw-down against any sense of "respectability" that horror as a genre has tried to gain for itself in the past decade. James Wan goes absolutely bonkers with his camera, whipping that thing around in wild, virtuosic spins, and everything else in the movie follows suit. The plot kind of resembles one of those toothpick-and-marchmallow towers you had to build in middle school science class, where the facts at how ludicrously this thing is assembled and how shakily it reaches its heights aren't problems but the entire premise of the appeal, and if you aren't going to cackle gleefully as the movie pulls rug after rug out from under you, you're not going to like this movie. I was on-board as soon as it starts getting silly after its admittedly tepid warm-up half hour, though, so I had a great time. Really wish I could have caught this in a theater. Grade: A-

No Sudden Move (2021)
A quirk in my phone plan got me HBO Max*, so now I finally get to check out Soderbergh's two movies he did for them (and that HBO probably wouldn't have put out on physical media for years). This one's good! A really, really terrific film noir screenplay from Ed Solomon, who wrote things like the Super Mario Bros. movie, the Bill & Ted movies, etc.—surprise of the century that he has a movie this grimy and menacing and tightly written in him. It's no surprise that this material attracted Soderbergh; he's been directing crime thrillers about the perils of capitalism since I was in elementary school, so it probably would have been more of a shock if it hadn't turned out good. People don't seem to like the fish-eye lens used throughout, but I thought it looked cool. Grade: A-

*Also, I've been out of the HBO ecosystem for most of my life, so I'm open to suggestions on what series to watch. Assume I've already seen the big ones like The Sopranos, because I have!

Cry Macho (2021)
Too cute by half and doesn't have anything real to say about the US-Mexico border, despite that figuring prominently into the plot. But it is nice to see Clint palling around rural Mexico and making friends, and this movie has its low-key charms as long as it sticks to that. Grade: B-

 

 

 

 

Let Them All Talk (2020)
Second HBO Soderbergh I've seen! This one is also very good. It's basically a distillation of Soderbergh's proclivity with talented ensembles, and almost nothing else. Allegedly, most of the scenes in this movie were improvised, and you can kind of tell because of all the stammering, but also, it's an incredible exhibition of just how magnetic a great actor can be with a character given the right framing. Dialogue wanders with inventively circuity around the characters' relational dynamics, but always lands exactly where it needs to to advance to the next scene or plot beat; I've seen a lot of people compare it to jazz, and that sounds exactly right to me, capturing that same live-wire energy and virtuosity that can make a jazz performance so riveting. It's a spacious, generous movie, but also a tight one in its own way, and I was never bored. This is pretty near top-tier Soderbergh for me, though given that almost all his movies are hovering in the B+/A- range for me, it's not a super high ceiling to clear. Grade: A-

S He (女他) (2018)
An incredibly inventive stop-motion film using shoes and other found objects as stand-ins for oppression under the modern state; given its cycle of revolution-->oppressive new normal, I don't know that it would be accurate to classify it as anti-capitalist, as I've seen some people do—maybe anti-industrial and anti-hierarchical, but it seems to be going broader than a specific political system. Whatever; it's still cool. I wish I could be as over-the-moon about this as some people are, but I think the version I watched (tried both Amazon and Tubi) is broken. I can't be sure that this isn't intentional, given the already experimental nature of this thing, but it looked like the film's frames got slightly jumbled in the conversion to whatever file these streaming services are using, and as a result, the whole thing has this jittery, almost strobe-like look that was kind of hard to watch. Would love to know if other people had this experience and if this is the intended effect. If it is, then I don't like that effect.

EDIT: Okay, I rewatched this on Plex (never heard of that streaming service? Me neither!) and confirmed that the Amazon and Tubi versions were broken. Plex is the way to go! Seeing this with a lot more clarity now. On the one hand, I'm even more in awe of the technical prowess on display here; truly jaw-dropping craft, so much so that I'm bumping this up from what I had originally rated it. On the other hand, now being able to follow the story a lot better, I think I am going to have to change my take and agree with the consensus that this is anti-capitalist—though of a kind of Animal Farm variety that's ultimately not so much concerned with the theory of deconstructing capitalism as much as it is with the ways that the oppressions and hierarchies present within capitalism can manifest themselves in other systems, too, so long as they are reliant on the same kind of industrialism that subjugates bodies and the planet. So far so good, except that this movie frames it in gendered terms, which is kind of cool for the way that it shows the limitations of the "more female CEOs" line of thinking and how the enforcement of gender roles is a way of upholding modes of production but also feels pretty iffy in the ways that it evokes trans identity (especially given the English title and tagline). I genuinely don't know what to do with this movie's relationship with transness, and the film is opaque enough that I couldn't say for sure that it's transphobic, but I can't say for sure that it isn't transphobic either. For that reason, I'm hedging my bets by not rating this even higher, but know that this is absolutely amazing in most other aspects—heavily reminiscent of The Wolf House and 1986's The Pied Piper in terms of its grotesque, mind-melting animation, so if you were at all into those movies, SEEK IT OUT (but on Plex, though). Grade: B

The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985)
It's more or less a Twain anthology, and the decision to focus on Twain's later, less-read works like The Mysterious Stranger (which provides the film's lone top-to-bottom great segment) is extremely cool. But given that, it's pretty disappointing how aggressively dopey the execution of so much of it is. This is a fairly niche reference, but the writing and voice acting (esp. for the vapid children—character from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for some reason) reminded me of those episodes of Adventures in Odyssey where the kids would jump in the Imagination Station to live through some edges-sanded-off depiction of American history or The Bible or whatever, and while it's impossible to turn Twain (and especially his unrelentingly cynical late career) into something as leadenly wholesome and whitewashed as Focus on the Family's radio-drama versions of beloved white Christian myths, there's an aw-shucks folksiness to this movie's relationship with Twain that overlaps a little bit with that, mixed with those "Read" library posters and an anachronistic dash of The Pagemaster. Even so, the general thematic arc of the film is kind of wild in its obsession with mortality (if I'm still on my Odyssey analogy, it's basically "The Mortal Coil" with a secular-humanist gloss—why do I remember so much about Adventures in Odyssey?), and the claymation yields some genuinely incredible imagery, especially near the end with the Halley's Comet sequence. It's kind of sad that outside of the extreme polish of Aardman, clay-based stop-motion has basically gone extinct, because in its heyday, the medium's capacity for rough-edged phantasmagoric worlds was something special. Grade: C+

The Wiz (1978)
The pacing and some of the creative decisions early on (why is Munchkinland so dimly lit?) make it pretty clear why short-sighted audiences and critics didn't respond well to this upon release. But holy cow, this movie is magnificent for long stretches, including the entire last 45 minutes. Michael Jackson is a revelation to me as the Scarecrow, the colors, set design, and choreography are jaw-dropping, and the cinematography does the thing that a lot of '70s musicals did, where it mixes scuzzy '70s grime with the aesthetic maximalism of the musical genre's 1950s heyday. I wasn't initially sold on Diana Ross as Dorothy, but good lord does she sell it by the end, especially in the final song, "Home." It's incredible that in a movie as ostentatious in its style makes its most ostentatious stylistic flourish in its final minutes with that one-take medium close-up of Ross decontextualized from any scenery, just absolutely belting "Home" at the top of her lungs as tears pour down her face—maximalist minimalism of the highest order. This is kind of a tangent, but I'd also be shocked if the "Home" sequence wasn't a direct inspiration for the "Fools Who Dream" sequence in La La Land, and I'm also shocked that for as much as The Discourse surrounding La La Land involved people excavating its influences and pointing and sneering at how La La Land was allegedly a weaker/less pure pastiche of its predecessors (unfair, but whatever), nobody mentioned The Wiz and how much "Home" and Ross completely and totally eclipse anything "The Fools Who Dream" and Stone are capable of. Not sure if it's fair to say that The Wiz needs to be reclaimed, given as I understand it that it was never really lost on the black audiences it was made for. But it certainly surprised me. Grade: A-

 

Television

Dear White People, Volume 4 (2021)
Conceptually, one of the most baffling final seasons of a show I've ever seen. There are a couple of things here that defy explanation. Firstly, the season is given a framing device where the characters are sitting around sometime in the future (I think it's supposed to be the late 2020s/early 2030s, though I don't remember it ever being clarified) reminiscing about the events of Volume 4 as we see them unfold—I suppose we get to see where these characters ended up in their careers, but none of that proves to be particularly illuminating, and anyway, the framing mostly is an outlet for tired jokes about Zoom and "oh no, the pandemic never ended." The second and far harder bizarre creative decision to swallow is that as the characters flash back to the events of the season, they remember them as a '90s R&B jukebox musical, complete with reality-breaking choreography. And, like..... what?? Dear White People has always been a stylistically arch series, but having characters suddenly break into song (and not just any song but distractingly famous songs) is such a radical break from the show's normal that I have to ask: why? We get a few clever recontextualizations of lyrics, some nice dances, but that's about it. It's an extremely tall request for an audience to go along with the series blowing up its format like this, and in return, there's no immediate thematic payoff or urgency to it, much less a suitable explanation. I do kind of admire the sheer audacity of the concept, but the concept itself is just never justified enough to warrant the dissonance of its inclusion. People joke about Community's "gas leak year," but this genuinely feels like the writers were in a chemical-induced fugue state. I might be more charitable about this stuff if the season didn't also feel like a major step down in terms of writing. There's a thematic throughline about the tensions between working within the system vs. tearing the system down, and the season does a reasonable job of showing why someone would choose the former despite believing in the latter. However, the moment-to-moment dialogue and character development feels strained and thin, diluted by the musical sequences and the constant flashing back and forth between the framing device. Plus, the catalyst for this tension is a new character named Iesha Vital, a freshman activist who attacks the cast (especially Sam) from the left. It's not a theoretically bad catalyst, and like most of the characters on the show, Iesha is premised on a contemporary political archetype. But Iesha never feels like she's given the life and messy humanity that the rest of the show's cast is afforded, and on a political level, the show seems unduly skeptical of her political motivations. In fact, the series makes the questionable decision to have her be somewhat disingenuous in her critiques of the older cast, being propelled by what the series explicitly labels as "immaturity" and emotional confusion. In the past, Dear White People has done a great job having imperfect people in ideological dialogue with one another, and oftentimes the show uses interpersonal psychology to inform its characters' politics. But Iesha's characterization feels strikingly slim on generosity, and even at the end of the season, when she's made more sympathetic, she's still a fairly flat character. I dunno, it's just a weird look for a show that's usually so sharp in terms of evoking current extremely online political discourse that it fails to believably render this dynamic. Just another miscalculation in a season full of them. An exceptionally disappointing end to what has perennially been one of Netflix's freshest shows. Grade: C

 

Books

Appleseed by Matt Bell (2021)
Wildly ambitious climate change fiction (a real genre now, it seems). The novel tells three parallel stories: one of a mythical faun and his human brother in late-1700s Ohio, another of ecologically collapsing late-21st century when the world's resources are owned by a tech giant run by a Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk analog, and the third thousands of years in the future as a 3D-printed cyborg searches for the last remnants of human civilization—all three tales riffing on Johnny Appleseed, the Orpheus myth, and biblical echoes to form an arc of North America under human industrialism. It's clear that Bell knows exactly what he's doing; the novel's plausibility is extremely stressful (as are all clear-eyed looks at the titanic realities and frightening possibilities of climate change), and its mythological preoccupations are inventive and often profound. I was sure that a novel with so many threads and sweeping ideas would spin out of control by the end, finishing on an unsatisfactorily tangled attempt to tie everything together, but astoundingly, Bell lands this incredible machine with the most elegant series of pages in the entire novel as he dovetails all three stories in the book's finale. The novel isn't perfect (it has a habit of over-explaining itself in the late-21st century story), but it's compelling nonetheless, not to mention impressive: a fully realized treatise on the fatal incompatibility of our planet's health with humanity's compulsion to subjugate, which reads not like a treatise but like a myth. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for December 20, 2021 - January 2, 2022

Finally got around to a reviews post. Sorry for the delay! Anyway, in case you missed it, here's the link to my favorite music of 2021 post.

Movies

Red Rocket (2021)
Simon Rex is extremely good at playing someone who is simultaneously charming and bitterly loathsome—like, lots of characters in lots of movies try to walk this tightrope, but Rex's Mikey Saber is one of the most I've ever believed a character could charm his through his insidious behavior. It's a great tension in the film, and the movie is overall a pretty captivating exercise in waiting to see if the other shoe will ever drop, with regards to Saber's dancing around the collateral damage he blithely causes. It's raucous and funny and also kind of horrifying, with Baker's typical affinity with nonprofessional actors particularly shining here in their roles as both caustic counterbalances to Saber as well as some of the best (only?) depictions of coastal Texans I've seen. In fact, the whole movie is a vibrant and ultimately kind of beautiful rendering of one of the ugliest landscapes in the United States (one I have the pleasure[citation needed] of being fairly familiar with)—that brackish swampland punctuated by industrial towers becomes an essential, often otherworldly backdrop to Saber's arc, the reckless exploitation at which industrial petroleum and gas have colonized the wetlands a macrocosm of Saber's story here. I would probably rate this a lot higher except for two things. First, the 2016 election stuff going on in the background is kind of insufferable; "What Mikey Saber Can Tell Us About Donald Trump" is like a bad Slate headline, but this movie insists on making it its explicit thesis, which I could never stop rolling my eyes at. And second, I don't think I've been more uncomfortable in a movie this year than in this movie's sex scenes between Saber and Strawberry, the 17-year-old he's trying to traffic into the porn industry. I know it's The Point that he's a creep using porn's fixation on "barely legal" girls to manipulate her at the same time that he's too self-impressed to understand that she's a fairly self-actualized person staying a step or two ahead of him, but I had a really hard time accepting the sex and nudity in the context of that point. I'm sure this is going to vary from person to person, but for me it just seems really gross to make that point while at the same time depicting nudity and sexual acts that would be considered statutory rape in most of the U.S. (they aren't in Texas, but only barely not). I know that Suzanna Son, who plays Strawberry, is actually in her mid-twenties (and she's really good in this film!), but I just can't get past that we're seeing nudity that the film wants us to believe is of someone who is only 17. I dunno. I'm probably being puritanical here. But it really took me out of the movie, tbh. Grade: B

The Lost Daughter (2021)
Parenting can be incredibly hard; the way kids just completely cage in any sense of independence or control is both profound and often claustrophobic, and in the thick of the difficulty, I think most people end up thinking and wishing (or even doing) some things they may feel guilt about later on. I mean, I've been at home with my two kids full-time for the duration of the school winter break, and I've had some very bleak moments just staring down the barrel of hours and hours of tantrums and tedium and open-ended play, even while in my heart knowing I love these two little creatures deeply. I know most parents go through these same arcs, but I've been struck by how very, very unnerving it is to feel like these children are capable of completely unraveling your curated life or even your mental stability, because in the moment, it feels incontrovertibly like they can, and there's a real guilt in feeling that, too. It's so rare to see any media about parenting deal honestly with this kind of thing, which is a big part of what makes The Lost Daughter such a treat. The other part is the cast, which is uniformly excellent, especially in communicating the unspoken through ambiguous glances or body language. The movie's cross-cutting between present-day and flashbacks feels clumsy at times, and the shades of evoking Clair Denis or Lucrecia Martel (the two filmmakers I thought of constantly watching this) sometimes tempt unfavorable comparisons with obviously better movies. But on the whole, this is a tough subject done very well. Olivia Colman probably deserves another award, and Maggie Gyllenhaal deserves to write/direct a lot more movies. Grade: B+

Passing (2021)
The black and white cinematography would feel a lot more on the nose for a movie about characters navigating the spaces between racial signifiers if it weren't so visually effective. Rebecca Hall has filled her film with some of the most striking compositions of the year, off-kilter and asymmetrical shots that show characters trapped in uneasy spaces that reflect their psychologies. The same goes for Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, who play the film's main duo; their performances are stilted and odd, a complement to the stilted performances that racialized America has them play. The story itself feels not-quite-there—it's apparently based on a 1929 novel, which is fascinating in concept, but in execution, it has the kind of elliptical, stuffy feel that sometimes plagues overly reverent literary adaptations. I should probably read the novel; by virtue of its 1920s setting and interest in who is deemed to "belong" in white society, this recalls The Great Gatsby quite a bit, and while the film mostly suffers from that comparison to one of the great American novels, I wonder if the novel Passing, published just a few years after Fitzgerald's, has a more interesting relationship with Gatsby; for a novel whose chief project involves white gatekeeping and racial oppression, Gatsby is remarkably weak in depicting its few explicitly nonwhite characters, and perhaps a biracial author such as Passing's Nella Larsen is just what this story needs. As exciting as it is to see Rebecca Hall pivot from being a great actress to a good director, I don't know if she's quite the person to crack this narrative. Grade: B

All Light, Everywhere (2021)
A really interesting documentary essay on surveillance, including some incredible interview footage with the spokesperson of a manufacturer of police bodycams. I probably couldn't say it better than my buddy Andrew does in his review of the movie, though, so check that out if you're at all interested in the subject. Grade: B+

 

 

 

maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2021)
A lovely, thoughtful, and often strikingly beautiful experimental documentary about Chinookan identity and the push-and-pull between the radical and assimilationist choices a colonized person must make, all in the backdrop of a natural world that stands in ancient defiance of that colonization. As with a lot of avant-garde filmmakers, I think I prefer Sky Hopinka's short films to this feature, but this is still one of the best 2021 movies I've seen. The soundscape this movie creates is unbeatable. Grade: B+

The Nowhere Inn (2020)
Some terrific St. Vincent concert footage spliced into a faux-documentary that feels like a remix of Persona and Mullholland Drive, to the point where it almost feels like a tribute to those films. Since at least Strange Mercy, Annie Clark's music has been premised on taking a somewhat pastiche-ish reverence for visionary predecessors and slicing it through structural games and pedal effects to turn it into something that feels fresh and compelling, so I guess it makes sense that she'd be drawn to something like that in her movie stardom, too. Given that I never really connected to her Daddy's Home album this year, it's started to feel to me like this approach doesn't have as much gas in the tank as it used to, as her spins on familiar material read as increasingly strained to me. The Nowhere Inn has something of the same problem; I'm just not really sure what this movie has to offer that other, earlier films haven't explored at length. It's not "bad"; Clark remains a fascinating screen presence, and there are some great moments, such as when Carrie Brownstein confides in Annie that she feels like she's in the stage of her career where people are sick of her so everything she does is deemed a misstep. But the film just doesn't ever cross the line from having interesting moments to being interesting as a whole. The concert footage is fantastic, though. This movie clearly isn't interested at all in being a concert film, but I would love a St. Vincent concert film. Grade: B-

The Messiah (بشارت منجی) (2007)
A Jesus movie from the Islamic world (Iran, in this case), which is conceptually interesting enough if only for the fact that this world has been used as a usually voiceless filming location for plenty of Christian Jesus movies; on top of this, there's the ending, which gives you the traditional Christian conclusion (minus the resurrection, interestingly) before cutting to the Muslim version of the crucifixion, thus playing up the tension between this movie and Christian Jesus depictions. Unfortunately, there's not a lot else going for this film. It looks pretty cheap in terms of filmmaking and acting, and the story itself is suffocatingly pious, treating Jesus as an otherworldly figure with zero human psychology (despite the Qu'ran's position that Jesus is not divine). More than a lot of Jesus movies I've seen, most of the narrative's tension here comes from the politics of first-century Judea under Roman occupation, which might make this movie more appealing to me if it weren't couched in such grotesque antisemitism. It's not as if you can't interpret an undercurrent of antisemitism in some of the New Testament gospels, but this movie seems several degrees worse than that. Apparently the director of this movie was inspired by The Passion of the Christ in the making of this movie, which is maybe all the explanation we need. Grade: C-

eXistenZ (1999)
Like pretty much every reviewer ever, I think it's funny that this came out the same year as The Matrix. Whereas The Matrix is, in a way, about the interplay between projected transcendence of the material plane and the squishy materiality itself, Cronenberg never even entertains the idea that you can get away from the gross, gooey meat sacks we're encased in—even in the VR game, the characters still have those nasty little butthole VR sockets in their backs, and even in the game, the characters have to use lube to plug things into those holes. It's just fleshy orifices all the way down, and whether or not you're "in the game," you're going to have to contend with biology. Meat guns, teeth bullets—the idea that technology exists as a separate category from "natural" flesh is a fallacy. Grade: B+

Splendor (1999)
It gets a little too broadly goofy in its wedding-ceremony climax, and the talking-to-the-camera voiceover was aggressively annoying to me. But it's otherwise a sweet, fun lil rom-com. There's also something really special about how Araki takes the flat sheen of the typical late-'90s/early-2000s rom-com aesthetic and makes it something beautiful and textured without losing the specificity of that era/genre. The soundtrack is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that regard; so many good, out-of-left-field cuts here, e.g. that Spiritualized remix. Some mad-scientist soundtracking, for sure. Grade: B

 

Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
Katharine Hepburn in drag is fun, and it seems for a while that the movie is going to be focused on that. But the movie ends up changing gears into a more traditional kind of rom-com, and it never really recovers what was interesting about its premise to begin with. Grade: C+