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
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
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+
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
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+
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+
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-
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-
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+
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
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+
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