Not much to say here. Read on.
Movies
This was nice. A lot of sitcoms struggle when they try to break out of the half-hour format (including Bob's Burgers, whose two-parters have always felt ungainly to me), but I actually thought this did a good job of preserving the rhythms of the show while also still making it feel plotted and paced like a movie. Ditto the animation, which is noticeably more fluid and dynamic than a typical episode of the show without ever really being distractingly different from the show. My one real quibble is that making the Belchers and the Fischoeders allies here feels weird, but there are a dozen great little character beats to outweigh that—I don't know why, but Teddy calling the food cart "Bob Burger" made me chuckle every time I saw it. Anyway, I wasn't going to be hard to please with this movie; Bob's Burgers has been comfort television for me for basically a decade at this point, so all this really had to do is not be terrible, and it's not. It's good, actually, and it made me feel good to see it. Grade: B+
Knowingly ridiculous but also About Stuff (in this case, the lack of privacy in the digital/social media age), which makes it a tad frustrating that it isn't quite what it would be if Paul Verhoeven were actually directing instead of the movie just really, really wanting to pretend he's directing. Just imagine what Sydney Sweeney's kinda forced performance here could have been under the for-real Verhoeven magic? Anyway, regardless, this is still fun, and there's a plot beat that happens about half an hour from the end of the film that's so audacious and bananas that it made me want to stand up and cheer. I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how nice it is to have eroticism back in a mainstream movie, too, though I'm having a hard time figuring out if the movie is sexy or if these actors are just sexy, which is a distinction I want to believe is meaningful? Anyway, something is sexy here. Good time. Grade: B
Pretty unremarkable folk horror only remarkable for its cast (Timothy Spall! Aidan Gillen!) and for the fact that it's a Hammer production. There's nothing particularly wrong with the movie—it's basically Pet Sematary but Irish—but it never quite tips over from "vaguely unsettling" to "pit-in-stomach scary," which is what I'm usually waiting for with folk horror. Grade: B
Really unpleasant, which I probably should have braced myself for, given that it's based on a novella by the notoriously unpleasant Harlan Ellison—but seriously: what if Lassie, but it's in a post-apocalyptic world and the dog helps his boyish owner by helping him find women to rape? This is just gross, pointlessly edgy nonsense for a good chunk of its runtime. It gets a lot better when the boy enters an underground biosphere run by a fertility cult nostalgic for the rhythms of small-town America, which, credit where credit is due, is actually something with satirical bite (maybe more so now than in 1975). This part actually is close to great, but boy oh boy, I just hated the first 45 minutes or so of this. Grade: C
Points for the audacity of the concept and the purity of vision, i.e. a nearly dialogue-free movie mostly involving Steve McQueen just zooming around in European race cars as his character participates in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It's occasionally very striking, especially when this leans into a fractured, almost experimental European New Wave/New Hollywood style to depict the racing (and especially the handful of crashes that happen during the race). But I gotta be honest here: I'm not nearly interested enough in cars to feel very strongly about this film. Remake this movie but about trains instead, please. Grade: B-
Pasolini isn't, like, an unfunny director, but I was pretty shocked to see something as openly jokey and hilarious as this is from him. This is extremely funny to me. For example, there's this one bit where this talking crow is telling this story about a couple of Franciscan friars who are told by St. Francis to preach to hawks and sparrows, so the two of them go through this years-long process of learning how to speak to birds, and once they have, they preach the gospel to them and are dismayed to see that the hawks are still killing and eating the sparrows, and when they tell St. Francis about it, he's all like, "Oh here's your problem: you didn't put enough Marxism in your gospel," and then the parable ends, and there's this intertitle tells us that just so we know, the crow is a left-wing intellectual. I dunno, writing it out like this, it doesn't actually sound that funny, but trust me: it is! The movie is also a pretty direct satire of Italy's relationship to communism at the time, which is maybe a little more obvious from my summary of this one scene. Oh, and it's also a send-off to the career of an Italian clown named Totò, for whom this was his final role, and honestly, I probably need to learn more about him and rewatch this, because some of this feels like watching Limelight without knowing who Charlie Chaplin is. But I at least know a little about communism, so I'm good on the rest of the movie! Grade: A-
Orson Welles going ham on some Shakespeare, as he was wont to do. He's apparently (as a cost-cutting measure) repurposing material from his own stage production of the Scottish play, but this feels undeniably cinematic, as informed by German Expressionism and the abstractions of the silent era as Joel Coen's adaptation, only whereas the Coen film feels hermetically sealed, Welles's has a barely contained manic energy born from its limitations. Both films have very cool depictions of the Weird Sisters, though—here, they're these faceless, shadowy figures, which are super unnerving. Grade: A-
Television
Props to the Atlanta team for just doing whatever the heck it is that they want. I'm not sure it's exactly what I want. On paper, this sounds awesome: Paper Boi is doing a European tour, and the fractured experience of touring in different countries also fractures the show itself, which pivots unpredictably this season from existential vignettes involving the main cast to episodes without any of the characters we know at all, usually centered around speculative concepts or thought experiments. It's the sort of audacious, episode-focused television that should be right up my alley, but it never quite adds up for me. The main-cast episodes feel about right, precise little stories about the intersections of race, class, and fame, this time inflected with ex-pat experiences reminiscent of James Baldwin's writing about Europe. But the standalone episodes without the main cast, which comprise four out of the ten episodes, feel a little thin. It at first feels bewildering and exciting that the show will zag into new directions like this, but eventually, once it becomes clear that each one is going to be basically a fairly obvious parable about the same themes that the regular episodes handle with a lot more subtlety and strangeness, the shine wears off. There's an episode imagining reparations; there's another one about a white family attending the funeral of their son's black nanny; etc. It's not like they're bad, but a lot of them have a kind of Black-Mirror-esque quality of being able to be reduced to its thesis, and after a while, I would have rathered the show process these ideas through its normal storytelling modes, which end up being much more interesting. Any one of these episodes is pretty cool, but collectively, as 40% of the season, they feel like less than the sum of their parts, I guess. Kudos for Atlanta just going for it, though. More shows should do that. Grade: B-
I still enjoy some of the ambitious aesthetic and writerly flourishes: the show always looks great, and the dialogue can still be very fun. But I'm mostly just tired of this show, I think. The characters are constantly circling around the same beats and conflicts iterated again and again in ways that promise us that this time, the drama will actually have consequences and matter, only to have it not matter and not have consequences. On top of this, the writers seem to have forgotten how to plot a season of television. Mrs. Maisel has never been a super-plotty show, but it's usually had consistent plot threads throughout. This season, however, picks up and drops plots at random, and it's never clear what is significant and what isn't. I don't mind shows that are purely episodic, but this show isn't structured episodically, either; it treats its plot threads as if they will be significant later on rather than one-and-done episode plots or even just series of incidents for character flavor. As a result, the bottom completely falls out of the drama, and frankly, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about anything happening in this show anymore. Grade: C+
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