Two and a half weeks until school lets out.
Movies
I sure do love 20th Century Women, so I'm super sad that this just didn't add up for me. Some very good component parts: Joaquin Phoenix is in sensitive dude mode, which is a refreshing fit for him, and Woody Norman (imagine being 12 years old and named "Woody") has an amazing ability to portray a precocious kid who isn't immediately grating onscreen, though I'm not sold on his performance being "good" so much as it is just good for what Joaquin is doing, but regardless, those two together are very watchable. But I had a hard time dialing into this movie until it started talking about how the incidents depicted in the movie will just be vague memories for the child, and that got me all verklempt because I started thinking about my own kids, with whom it already seems like I've spent a lifetime with but the oldest of whom is only just getting to the age where he's going to be remembering anything that happened. I think what this movie is short on that 20th Century Women has in spades (and what it turns out I'm most interested in with Mike Mills's feature filmography) are the moments like that, where the movie casually flips from the immediacy of the present into the hindsight at the scale of lifetimes—it's a kind of twee move at times, but when Mills nails it, he freakin' nails it and contextualizes the moments of our lives within these impossibly big timelines in a way that feels like a human-scaled Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot thing. This movie's okay, but it could have used a lot more of that, because if there's anything that makes the passage of time palpable, it's being around children. Grade: B-
Pretty unpleasant satire about a trio of alleged heterosexuals who blow up their lives in a spate of nihilism and as a result briefly find themselves with enough space to find meaningful connections in the fluidity outside of the hetero-monogamous paradigm before they inevitably get crushed by the hateful hegemony of the United States mainstream. It's intentionally unpleasant, I think, given the completely understandable contempt Araki had as a sexual minority for the United States government and for sexual squares at the time (continues to have?), and I usually dig this kind of abrasive punk ethos—very much in the vein of The Living End, in which the realization that the powers that be are indifferent to and in fact even might be advocating for your annihilation forces you to find a life outside of the state and the family and all the traditional structures that those powers use as crutches, and I really like that movie. But something about the fusion of that with a very manic sensibility that presages Kaboom (my least-favorite Araki I've seen so far) makes this a lot less compelling to me than The Living End. The particular despair at the core of this movie—the kind of horrified reaction to that '90s "End of History" moment where there's an apocalyptic, even cataclysmic sense of looking at the abuses of liberal democracy and capitalism and being told This Is All There Is—feels a lot more vivacious and urgent than whatever Araki is going for in Kaboom, and it funnily enough feels easier to transpose that sense of doom that Araki felt from the AIDS pandemic into a modern framework of desperation birthed from the climate change/late capitalism/fundamentalist religion/fascism stew we've got cooking in the 2020s than it is to connect to the theoretically much more contemporary doom in Kaboom. But nevertheless, something about the way this movie presents itself feels forced and postured in a very Kaboom-ish way that I find irritating. Also, while I don't dislike Diablo Cody, Rose McGowan's character feels like it was written by Diablo Cody, which is both kind of funny to me and also somewhat annoying in this context. Stoner James Duval is very sweet, though, and I genuinely loved him. I dunno, a mixed bag. Grade: B-
It's hard for me to describe why I found this movie to be so resonant when I somewhat bounced off the previous entry in Gregg Araki's "teen apocalypse" trilogy, The Doom Generation. But I thought this one was kind of beautiful in its chaos. It's no less bleak or filled with arch dialogue than The Doom Generation, but by the end, I had a gigantic lump in my throat. I dunno, maybe it's just the way that the movie frames itself around a single day culminating in a party, which is a structure I absolutely love in movies, or maybe it's the way that it positions its "end of history" despair within a chronological continuum that begins with a wild, liberatory abandon that slowly becomes sadder and more hellish. There's something about those final thirty-ish minutes in this movie that perfectly capture that morose, semi-panicky feeling of being at a party and slowly realizing that you don't want to be there and that you're too sober to even enjoy the people you came for and that it's too late to catch up even if you wanted to. Maybe it's the way that even this is positioned within a broader arc of James Duval's character reaching desperately for human connection of some kind through the haze, looking around at a world where nothing makes sense except the things whose cold logic feels so cruel that you have no chance but to reject it, and when suddenly out of nowhere he actually finds that connection for a fleeting moment despite literally everything else in the movie, it's this unspeakably sublime moment that I can only really connect to the ending of Mysterious Skin in the broader context of Araki's career. This is a lot less overtly political than the other two "apocalypse" movies, but the fluid reality of this film has a texture and an emotional landscape so deeply buried within the subjective experience of knowing you will live through the end of the world that it feels radically empathetic in a way that neither of the other two achieve. I was trepidatious about this one after not being over-the-moon about The Doom Generation, but wow, consider me over-the-moon here. Grade: A-
It makes sense that this is Todd Haynes's debut film, as it contains basically all of his interests (pastiche, camp, queerness, the fluidity of identity, the oppressive unlivability of modern society) packaged into a pretty scuzzy, rough-around-the-edges triptych of stories. It's pretty wild and radical and unbuttoned in a way that a lot of Haynes's future work would dial back, but also, I do prefer the pristine polish of his other movies compared to this. An undeniable landmark and the kind of movie you can probably only make once, but also exhausting for being that. Grade: B
To Sleep with Anger is folkloric in a way that is rare enough in the literary precedents this is pretty obviously drawing from (Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Zora Neale Hurston) and nearly unheard-of within cinema. It's at once fairly straightforward—an old family friend (an unparalleled Danny Glover) comes uninvited for a visit and throws off the equilibrium of the community—while swimming in the mirage-like ambiguity that is the province of myth, a dozen different meanings sprouting from any one line or character. A masterpiece of that uncanny kind that feels as though it's grown from something outside of itself, as if the frames of the film itself are just a flimsy veneer over some ineffable Beyond. Grade: A
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