If you're interested, I was on a podcast talking about a trio of Lindsay Ellis videos about the Hobbit movies. It was a good time! You can listen to it here (and it's a better use of your time than actually watching those Hobbit movies).
Movies
I'm a public advocate of Pixar being capable of producing solid movies that don't necessarily "change your life," as well as Pixar diversifying their animation palette, and I'd say the last few features the studio has made have the future looking pretty bright in that regard (though it'd be a lot brighter if Disney would actually release these in theaters). This movie isn't without its flaws, especially on the screenplay/structural level: there are some howlingly bad lines in the film (the clear worst offender: "My panda, my choice," which was practically an out-of-body experience for me), and the battling pandas is one of the most out-of-place invocations of the "Pixar shoehorns an action setpiece into the third act" trope in the studio's history. But on the whole, this is really rather lovely. The generational conflict between mother and daughter so emotionally precise in a way that feels like a less compromised version of what Brave was going for, and for as much as I just complained about the fight finale, when the movie pushes through that into the much gentler emotional climax immediately following it, it's beautiful and resonant in a specific way that Pixar has never really tried before (and, it bears mentioning, does a much more effective and nuanced rendering of Encanto's clumsily broad-brushed treatment of virtually the same thematic territory). I also like the animation here quite a bit, which, like Luca, is doing this interesting experiment in cartoonishly rounded character models and flattened color gradients which suggest but don't overly conform to the conventions of the modern cel animation you might see on a kids show now (the dreaded "CalArts style," I suppose). Also, the fur animation on the pandas is some of the nicest I've ever seen—the extremely tactile way that you can sense the presence of skin and fat and muscle under the fur is very impressive and also very cuddly-looking. There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the past decade about Pixar's difficulty in producing the same kinds of masterpieces that they did in the '90s/2000s, and while I still stand behind my old assertion that there's value in sturdy formula, it's still exciting to me that it seems like 1) Pixar is no longer automatically chasing that formula (like, not everything has to be built around a high-concept world), and 2) in place of formula, Pixar is allowing for more idiosyncratic, personal stories, even when those stories are considerably messier and less polished than classic Pixar. Unless I'm completely misreading this new era of Pixar, and in a few years, we'll all have realized that the new Pixar formula was a reliance on body transformations, which *counts on fingers* has actually been the focus of the last four Pixar movies, soooo... uh oh. Grade: B+
A really weird, tricky film, maybe especially so for me. It's set in and dedicated to describing the very Houston suburb where my mom grew up and that I have visited countless times, and moreover, this suburb is depicted at the exact time that my mom (who is just four months older than Richard Linklater, I found out) lived there, too. On one level, it's just kinda surreal to see a major motion picture talking about NASA Road 1 and Clear Lake; but on a deeper level, a movie that is already about the kaleidoscopic nature of nostalgia becomes for me filtered through family history and a second-hand nostalgia from the things that my mom, her sisters, and my grandparents have told me. For a while, this was a major liability for my feelings about the movie; the first 30-40 minutes of this film are a minefield of the cringiest, Forrest-Gump-level Boomer clichés ("we were at war in Vietnam for some reason," Jack Black's entirely too precious narration says with little irony), made even worse for me since I'm hearing them echoed through the often insufferable, usually fairly reactionary way my extended family talks about the past, i.e. with a heavy dose of "back when men were men and people weren't so soft" alongside a tinge of "when [black] people knew their place" and "you kids don't know how easy you have it"—not really the ethos of this movie (hard to imagine Linklater ever buying into any of that) but inescapably linked in my mind. But as the film went on, my attitude got better as I started noticing the accumulation of really interesting, off-the-beaten-path details among the iconic stuff: the brief digression about Whipped Cream & Other Delights, for example, or Joni Mitchell dueting with Johnny Cash on The Johnny Cash Show, or a random snippet of Janis Joplin appearing on Dick Cavett—the kinds of media details that almost never make it into this type of "Boomer's greatest hits" piece. Like, sure, the protagonist goes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it blows his mind, but he also goes to the drive-in and sees a John Wayne movie called Hellfighters that I don't think anyone but Richard Linklater remembers, and the protagonist seems just as pumped about that movie as the iconic Kubrick one. As the movie went on, what occurred to me is that this isn't so much about the self-aggrandizing mythology that Boomer movies tend to lean into but instead it's about the interplay between the specific, granular, not particularly memorable experiences that comprise most people's lives and the gigantic collective memories like the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing that end up becoming generational myths. There's a line near the end of the movie (maybe the final line of the movie? I'd have to check) about how even though the protagonist had slept through the actual moon landing on television, the nature of memory is such that he'll remember it anyway: from the longview of an entire lifetime, the moonwalk is just as real (even realer) than schoolyard rounds of Red Rover or a trip to AstroWorld, even if you didn't actually experience it. And for as much as I reflexively rolled my eyes at the way the early goings of this movie reminded me of the irritating aspects of, like, my aunt telling me about "the good old days," the film as a whole kind of moved me because I couldn't stop thinking about how easily my mom or my grandfather or whoever could have populated the edges of this movie, which is not something I'm used to feeling in stories about this era. As always, Linklater has a real facility with making his creations feel lived-in and alive, but it's awfully strange how here he arrives at that through something so arch as a '60s Wonder Years-ish space race movie, and it's really strange that it halfway felt like I was watching my family. Grade: B+
I was vibing on this just being a Slackers-by-way-of-Godard-style film essay built out of vignettes, but then the last ten minutes came around, and I realized that there was a plot I was supposed to have been following, which made me feel a little dumb. I should probably watch this again. Grade: B
If I hadn't seen Peter Bogdanovich's name in the credits, I would have never in a thousand years guessed that he directed and co-wrote this extremely loose hang-out movie: a lot of Altman (specifically The Long Goodbye) in this, and virtually nothing of the melancholic nostalgia of something like Paper Moon or Nickelodeon other than the fact that this is halfway a remake of Casablanca, only with the decision to not cooperate with the CIA replacing the decision to help people escape the Nazis. But for the most part, this is a total change of pace for Bogdanovich, which is fine with me! Spread your wings, Pete! It has a terrific sense of place and an equally terrific central performance from Ben Gazzara, and if it's maybe a little too shaggy for my tastes in parts, those two things make up for that. Grade: B
Television
As with the second season, it's more of the same, only scaled up. The sheer number of absurd steps that Nathan Fielder has his schemes go through to get his clients to traditional measures of social and commercial success in our capitalist society is never not hilarious to me, and it's also vaguely profound (and even horrifying). It's not just that there's the whiff of desperation in Fielder's plots (though that's there, too)—it's also the broader context that provides the justification for these absurd scenarios: in a society in which validation and actualization is measured via profits and private ownership, any hustle to get you there becomes valid. Wild stuff. Grade: A-
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