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
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-
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+
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
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
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
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
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