SPRING BREAK!
Movies
My feelings on this movie changed nearly every 10 minutes of this movie's runtime, but in the end, I think I'm vaguely (and barely) positive on this as a bizarro take on gender and body politics—the older I've gotten, the more I've felt deeply unsettled by the socially enforced linking of gender identity with the physicality of our bodies, and this movie does a pretty good job of tapping into that unsettlement. The more artsy and French this movie gets, the less it works on that visceral level for me, though. I also have no idea what's going on with the car stuff. Cars are bad, and I think this movie agrees with me there, but for very different reasons than I would cite. Grade: B-
Has a central conceit (an extended analogy between the city planning of Baltimore and the treatment/behavior of rats in the city) that makes Theo Anthony's subsequent feature, All Light, Everywhere feel downright conventional, but it also lacks anything even approaching the incredible footage that All Light, Everywhere manages to snag, like the guy giving a tour of the surveillance factory. There are some fun interviews here (the rat fishing guy comes to mind), but it all feels like metaphor rather than footage that directly illuminates our world. Don't get me wrong; I'm an English teacher—I love metaphors. This is still really interesting. But I think Anthony definitely found better material later. Grade: B
This has the bones of something much better—it's Hollywood melodrama boilerplate, and that's a good thing! I guess I'm just an old sap like the dude in the nursing home, but the longer contemporary Hollywood has forgotten how to do a romantic melodrama, the more I feel devoted to the format. I would have absolutely hated this movie in high school when there were a lot of movies lilke this, but now... I dunno, it feels charming and significant as a representative of a bygone era (an era I lived through—I can't believe I've lived through eras that are now bygone). But anyway, disappointingly, this kinda fumbles the melodrama elements. Just to pick one of the many examples in which this movie turns theoretically great material into something that's just okay: we're told in a montage that Ryan Gosling writes 365 letters to Rachel McAdams, and the reason why Rachel doesn't write back is that her devious mother stashes them away, and we see all this from Ryan's perspective, so we see him grow progressively more depressed about his allegedly unrequited love. Meanwhile, the movie shows Rachel discovering James Marsden (whom we're explicitly told comes from "old Southern money," which lends a really unsettling tension to the scenes in the jazz club, where you know that some of these musicians were probably sharecropping on James's cotton plantations and whose grandparents were probably enslaved by James's grandparents—not great!), and while Rachel's discovering James, we're not shown a lot of wistfulness on her part; she seems perfectly content to have moved on from Ryan to James, even as we've seen Ryan get all sad and grow a beard and go off to war because he's so sad. BUT THEN! Later in the movie, Rachel finds out that her mother has stashed away all of Ryan's letters, and there's this huge blowup between her and her mother where Rachel tells her tearfully how much she pined and wept for her lost love with Ryan and how she thought he didn't love *her* because he never wrote her. And this is a good tension, right? Kind of a Gatsby-ish thing where a rich woman settles into a marriage of comfort and convenience only because her romance of passion has been blocked by her uppity parents. Classic melodrama. But you know what you need to make this classic melodramatic tension work? Scenes in which the rich girl is pining for her lost love of passion! We don't see any of that. Until that scene with her mother, for all we know, her parents are right, and Rachel's relationship with Ryan is just a summer fling that she's gotten over. That scene with her mother comes out of nowhere and tries to retcon into the story more tension than we were shown, tension that would have made the story so much richer had it actually been dramatized as a narrative parallel to the montage with sad-sack Ryan Gosling. The movie is full of stuff like this, where it doesn't seem to have a good hold of how or when to dramatize its plot, and the result is a movie that's just barely okay. And yet, in spite of all this, there are pieces of this movie that are shockingly good, almost as if the production team stumbled across A+ material by accident. The opening credits, for example, which put the reddest sunset I've ever seen over some really lovely piano music. For a second, I thought I was watching a Jane Campion movie. For another example (one that everybody already knows, because it's on the poster), the kissing-in-the-rain--->having-sex-in-the-house moment, which is the one part of the movie that's legitimately steamy and also the one part where all the dramatic and romantic layers fall perfectly into place. These are glimpses of a much, much better movie that only call into relief how mediocre the rest of the movie is in execution. Also, the old people stuff sucks. It's corny in a bad way, and it's also a dumb depiction of dementia, and also, the core story is serviced not at all by showing the bitter end of this couple. Rachel showing up with her bags at Ryan's house after she's left James? Good ending. Watching her forget him because of the ravages of old age while he remains tragically devoted to her? Bad ending, and also way bleaker than this movie can support. It feels like Sparks didn't have enough faith in the core of his story, so he just had to add all this stuff to just twist the emotional knife. Booooo. Grade: C+
This isn't explicitly surreal, but there's this subtle undercurrent of uncanniness that makes the whole thing feel really singular and strange even as it goes through some on-paper conventional plot points. It's maybe a bit of hyperbole people comparing this to David Lynch, but it feels like it's not completely different from that guy's sensibilities either. Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino are both great here. Grade: B
An undeniably oddball pick for the Best Picture Oscar, and I am firmly in the camp that we need more movies adapting 18th-century literature. This movie does a reasonable job of approximating the general ethos of the era (I'm not familiar with Tom Jones specifically, but I know other books of its ilk), and it's charming on that front. But it's inescapable that the film is hemmed in by the content standards of the early '60s studio system from presenting this sort of story with the full bawdiness that makes the picaresque novel so outrageous, which is a major liability. We demand a hard-R-rated adaptation of an 18th-century novel! There are dozens of us! Grade: B-
Cary Grant has to decide between Irene Dunn and Gail Patrick (and maybe Randolph Scott). This is apparently based on a Tennyson poem, which is very goofy to me. Kinda runs out of gas by the end, but the second act of this movie is a lot of fun. Grade: B+
Music
One thing that was lost on me growing up with an awareness of Janet Jackson primarily through that (unfair, ridiculous) Super Bowl scandal is that Janet Jackson freakin' rocks. I don't know if it's sexism or what, but that never happened with Michael Jackson, who was embroiled in scandal (and much worse scandal, it hardly needs mentioning) at the same time—I always knew that Michael's music went hard. But somehow it's taken me until my thirties to discover the awesomeness of Janet. But she is awesome. This album is super good. It would probably be better if it were just a little tighter—it's got that early-CD-era runtime—but the highs are very high. Grade: A-
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