Two more weeks until Spring Break.
Movies
I don't know how much this Princess Diana biopic has going for it other than Kristen Stewart's performance as Diana and Jonny Greenwood's performance as one of the best composer of film scores of our time, but wow, both of them are knock-outs. Especially Greenwood's score. Easily the best film score of 2021. Grade: B
Watched the "Encore" director's cut (which Coppola found on an old Betamax, which... lol). No idea what the original movie was like, but this one is, like most Coppola pictures, an absolute marvel on a formal level, just flex after cinematic flex playing out onscreen for the entire 139 minutes. It's something of a backdoor musical, and a great one at that, with large portions of the film being set to some absolutely stunning dance sequences in the old Cotton Club—probably the best post-Jazz-Age media I've ever seen at depicting the raw magnetism of jazz as bringing-down-the-house party music, and I felt like hootin' and hollerin' along with the in-movie crowd when, for example, Cab Calloway shows up. The immense surface pleasures of all this kind of overwhelm what is ostensibly the movie's point, which is the contrast between the absolutely banging club atmosphere and the mechanisms of racism, abuse, exploitation, and outright violence that make the club possible in the first place. Coppola rarely met a bad screenplay he couldn't will into competence by sheer force of cinematic razzle-dazzle, and this one is certainly nowhere close to the worst screenplay in his filmography. But it's also not nearly good enough to pull off the downer thematic coup on that beautiful movie magic that it wants to. I would honestly have preferred a plotless movie that just had random characters hanging around the club, which is basically what this movie is for the first half hour at least. Grade: B
It's not hard to see this film as a political parable for the ways that the encroaching right-wing moral crusade across the United States in the early 1980s destroyed the measure of gender and sexual liberation won in the throes of the 1960s/1970s, particularly the queer liberation that was already marginalized even within second-wave feminism. It's not hard to see it because it's basically the explicit text of the film—though the heterosexual pleasures of the titular house are centered, there's a persistent vein of queer activity, from the high camp of the costumes and musical sequences like the nude all-male locker room dance, to the off-handed comment that lesbians were welcomed at the Chicken Ranch, to the casting of Jim Nabors as a knowing narrator. I've never seen the stage musical this is based on, so maybe this is just baked into the source material, but it's hard not to see the movie's attempts to twist a heterosexual exterior into a queer-affirming ethos as personally meaningful for co-writer and director Colin Higgins, an openly gay man who would die from AIDS six years after this film's debut. The film is deeply imperfect both as a political text and as a movie, but there's a strain of exhilarating freedom and also tragic loss working alongside the queer reading of the film that gives this a heft I was not expecting. Also, this is maybe the most I've ever enjoyed Burt Reynolds, which I attribute solely to the magic of Dolly Parton—the two have a certifiably electric onscreen chemistry that makes the sequences in which they're hanging out with each other (a not insignificant part of this probably too-long runtime) inordinately charming. Grade: B+
As an exploitation film, juxtaposing erotic imagery with violence is part of the project, and I dunno how I feel about that, even if it's situated within a nominal empowerment narrative (an empowerment narrative that situates "empowerment" within a world animated by a fundamentally nihilist will to power, which is pretty interesting). Regardless, Pam Grier is incredible, as is Roy Ayers's score (from where I sit, every bit the equal of Isaac Hayes's more iconic work in Shaft), and overall, this is at least plotted fairly tightly and scripted fairly rigorously compared to other blaxsploitation films I've seen. I'm still waiting for a blaxploitation movie to really knock my socks off. This got close at times, though. Big bonus points for the scene where the dude is explaining that the world is so corrupt that you can't kill all of the bad guys, and Grier's just like "Why not?" More bonus points for Grier having the guts to field that absolutely terrible Jamaican accent. Grade: B+
It remains astounding to me how many movies that were incredibly popular in the 1970s are basically just shaggily plotted and edited stories of characters meandering through textured environments as cool soundtracks play. Big portions of movie-going audiences were truly okay with just vibing at the movies, which is charming to me. Kind of wish we had more of that now. Maybe my brain has been poisoned by 21st century cinema, and maybe if I were back in the 1970s, I would have been a little more into this, but despite being charmed by the idea of people regarding this as an exciting action blockbuster, I just couldn't muster up much excitement myself for it as a whole. The Isaac Hayes soundtrack is extremely dope, and Richard Roundtree is justifiably iconic in the title role. But also, this movie feels awkwardly positioned between being more purely a neo-realist urban mood piece and a film noir, either of which could yield a very good movie if it committed to one but right now feels like half measures of both. If I'm going with foundational blaxploitation films from 1971, I would much rather watch the more politically and stylistically radical Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song over this any day. Grade: C
Television
Basically more of the same from Season 1, which is an unalloyed good in my mind. The schemes presented to the businesses get a little more elaborate in this season (perhaps most notably in the souvenir shop episode, where Nathan creates an entire film festival to justify the fake movie he's set up, as well as the "Dumb Starbucks" episode, which got national media attention as it unfolded), and Nathan as a character is a little more of a sad sack than he was before. But for the most part, this is taking everything that made the first season good and leaning into that. So of course it's still good. Grade: A-
Books
This story collection is of course most famous for "Story of Your Life," which won a whole bunch of awards and was eventually adapted into the movie Arrival. But the stories I connected to most were "Tower of Babylon," which is basically a story that assumes that ancient near-east cosmology is literally true, and "Hell Is the Absence of God," a story in which God, angels, heaven, and hell are all physically manifested in our material world. Chiang has a great knack for giving his stories one fairly simple idea and then burrowing deeper and deeper into the implications of that idea until you end up somewhere surprising. This of course makes him a good fit for sci-fi, but it's also great for these more religious stories. A lot of religious literature is either invested in doing apologia for a certain hermeneutic of scripture or making elaborate metaphors out of scripture, but Chiang's approach takes religious concepts at face value without a lot of the underlying assumptions that often go into purportedly literal readings of scripture, and the result is an often beautiful, often frightening defamiliarization of ideas that I grew up with. Fascinating stuff. Grade: A-
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