Wish I were at Big Ears! Maybe next year.
Movies
All the pieces are here for a great satire, and I think there's at least a 50% chance that's what the filmmakers were going for. But the execution just isn't there. Entertaining enough, I suppose, and the ambiguous corners of Afleck and De Armas's relationship are pretty interesting throughout. But this is just a few clicks of intensity and/or camp away from something much better and funnier. The funniest part of this movie is that it's the first erotic thriller produced by a subsidiary of Hasbro. Grade: B-
There's a charming time-capsule quality to this movie—in the case of Cube, they truly don't make them like they used to (its closest modern parallel, the Escape Room movies, are bloated by a slick franchisability that this shoestring flick would never dare to aspire to). But it's also a movie that's so stupid that it will peel the skin off your face, and it sports a cast of some of the most aggressively irritating characters I've ever seen, not helped at all by the, um, inconsistent quality of the acting (not one ounce of charisma to be found). So I dunno, maybe it's good that they don't make them like this anymore. I watched this because of Grace Lee's excellent video essay, and I would probably recommend people pick that video over the actual movie. Grade: C
This is obviously a very personal film, and it's not hard to see how this gained traction in the mid-'90s when it first came out. The intra-community discussions on hyper-specific topics (e.g. the preferred slang for "vagina") are great, but like with a lot of hyper-talky, low-budget indies of this era—e.g. Clerks—I have a hard time making the transition from "they are talking about interesting things" to "I am emotionally invested in them." Probably a Me Problem, tbh. Grade: B-
More or less confirms my suspicion of Easy Rider as faux-revolutionary self-mythologizing. I don't know what Albert Brooks thinks about the movie itself, but it's a pretty withering indictment of the legacy of that film that Lost in America's plot revolves around a couple of entitled Boomer yuppies deciding to recreate the free-spiritedness of that movie's ethos, only in a Winnebago instead of a motorcycle, and with nearly $200k in cash. And that's even before we get to the scene where the couple talks their way out of a speeding ticket by bonding with a *cop* over their shared love of the film. I'm hard-pressed to think of a better film depiction of the lie of white hippie romanticism. It's not as funny as some other Albert Brooks movies, and it's definitely meandering to a fault in its middle sections. But as a thematic project, this is so extremely on my wavelength. Grade: A-
Jaw-dropping set designs and costuming, and I got a pretty good laugh out of how the movie goes out of its way to shove a montage of executions and torture (complete with full-frontal nudity!) into its first ten minutes. But I was just criminally, scandalously bored with this movie otherwise. Literally bored to tears. This is the first time in a long time that I've felt so philistine about a classic, but good lordy, I am not cinephile enough to endure 100 minutes of stagey, tedious Russian monarchy drama just for the (admittedly cool) Expressionist vibes. Grade: C
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