One more week until Spring Break!
Movies
A broadly upsetting and bleak depiction of a real-life massacre of black people in Rosewood, Florida. It's maybe a little broad in the ways that '90s Hollywood period pieces tend to be, but it's also smart about the way it simplifies things, drawing a much more rigorous understanding of racism (like, for instance, the generational feedback loop between the material conditions of this town and the ideologies that entrench those very conditions) from its broad archetypes than, say, Amistad, to name another Hollywood film from 1997 that tries to comment on race via historical events. I'm not sure how John Singleton feels about his increasingly journeyman career following this movie's box office failure, but I think it's a shame that he wasn't able to continue down the path of prestige that he was on in the early-to-mid '90s. I'd love to see what else he would have done if he were ever afforded this level of ambition again. Grade: A-
I've been stewing on this movie for almost a week trying to figure out how to review it, and I think I'm going to just have to throw in the towel, because I'm not sure. Visually, it's somewhere at the intersection of a PowerPoint presentation, an Errol Morris doc, and The X-Files theme song sequence, and narratively, it's an unspeakably bizarre tale that feels like Thomas Pynchon filtered through William S. Burroughs (appropriate, given that the latter makes a cameo): 80+ minutes of dense and psychedelic stream of consciousness that links the American military to beekeeping to the biblical Cain and Abel to space aliens. It's clearly a reaction/freakout to the kind of "End of History" American military hegemony that faced the world in the early '90s, and on that metric, it's more than just a curiosity. But also, this doesn't feel all that different from the kind of shoestring production YouTube "documentary" you might stumble across if your algorithm gets fed a few too many conspiracy theory clicks, which on one level makes this movie astoundingly prescient in terms of style but on another level makes it really uncanny to imagine that you could have seen this in a theater—in MoMA, no less! Utterly wild. Grade: B
Still not in love with a lot of Jarmusch's proclivities, but I am absolutely fascinated by this movie as a document of Memphis, Tennessee. This movie finds Memphis in the post-music-industry, pre-gentrification era that I saw the tail end of when I moved to the area in 2002, an era haunted both by the ghosts of the city's 1950s/'60s mythology (I kid you not, the local paper used to have a weekly column devoted to people sharing such Elvis encounters as Tom Noonan's character discloses here) and by the catastrophic white flight/disinvestment that devastated the city in the decades following the Civil Rights movement and MLK's assassination (I don't think I've ever heard a better, or more tragic, description of downtown Memphis than Masatoshi Nagase's character's observation that it looks like a regular city, just with 60% of the buildings missing—also, shout out to that character for being bored with Elvis and instead being a Carl Perkins stan; that dude knows what's up). I don't think I've ever seen a movie that so precisely nails the sensibility of this city's core, which to this day remains a fairly sleepy and scrappy downtown for a city its size, and whatever difficulties I continue to have with Jarmusch in general, I have to hand it to the guy for understanding things about that town that I've never seen others articulate in film. Grade: B+
Given Frederick Wiseman's usual thematic preoccupations, it's not hard to predict what it would look like for him to make a movie about U.S. Army basic training for soldiers about to go off to Vietnam. And that prediction would be right! It's the only Wiseman I've seen where the thesis of the movie didn't ultimately surprise me on some level. But that doesn't make it any less depressing to watch these goofy little 18-year-olds fed lies about their own combat agency as they become expendable pawns for U.S. imperialism. Grade: B+
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