I'm out of town next week, so I'm not sure if I'll be posting here. But we'll see.
Movies
A really lovely little film about a woman trying to overcome sexual shame and internalized misogyny late in life. It's generous and spacious in terms of how its screenplay allows its four scenes to play out over 20-30 minutes apiece and how it lets Emma Thompson's character meander through conversations that eventually poke at some deep wells of pain. Thompson's obviously got a killer résumé, but this honestly might be one of my favorite roles of hers; she so winsome and funny while also subtly wielding the barbs of a patriarchal, anti-sex society that she is trying to slough off but also reflexively prodding at herself and others. She's great. It's not a perfect movie—the attempts to flesh out "Leo Grande" into a character rather than simply a device feel a little thin, and the visual style of the filmmaking is fairly flat. But I was surprised by how moving I found the movie by the end. Grade: B+
A reasonably fun update of Pride and Prejudice into a gay milieu that I know literally nothing about (Duckduckgo tells me that "Fire Island" is a real place, but I couldn't have even told you that until a minute ago), so I'm probably not really the right person to be writing about this. With that caveat, I do like that it's class-conscious in exactly the right way for a Jane Austen adaptation, which isn't a given in these sorts of things: here we have people who are all fundamentally materially comfortable but in meaningfully different strata of comfort and antagonism toward each other's relative power within that comfort, and the queer gloss fits surprisingly well over Austen's heterosexual gender binaries. I couldn't ever get over how annoying the voiceover is, though, and the guy playing the Mr. Darcy character is a huge swing-and-a-miss within a cast who is otherwise pretty solid, unfortunately. Grade: B-
I'm a little confused why this exists—it adds basically nothing to the story that was pretty satisfyingly capped off at the end of the last season, and it also doesn't really evoke the comfortable rhythms of the show, since there's almost no interaction with the townsfolk and the gems are all reset to factory setting soon after the film begins. But it's a pleasant, gentle-hearted hour and a half (hard to imagine a Steven Universe property not being) with some great character animation (esp. the villain), and as a musical, it's actually pretty great. The show always flirted with a musical format, but this is one of the few times it fully committed, and the only time it committed to a feature-length musical, and it's delightful as that. I can't remember where, but I saw someone lamenting that the Bob's Burgers movie didn't go full musical, and judging by how much the music elevates what's otherwise a kinda meh story, I am retroactively sad about that, too. Grade: B
It's bookended by two great scenes: first, a live-wire meeting between white and black student activists and last, a slow-motion sequence of a bunch of signifiers of American capitalist consumerism being blown up, set to Pink Floyd's "Careful with that Axe, Eugene." In between, the movie's a kind of boring series of scenes of a boring white couple meandering around the desert, and while there's a theoretically interesting throughline between the black activists in the first scene accusing the white activists of being merely fair-weather activists with radical chic and the remainder of the movie in which these two more or less bear out that characterization by abandoning class/race struggle and embracing a bunch of empty hippie utopianism, it's just not that interesting to watch. That said, this movie's reputation as one of the worst of all time is ludicrous. I truly can't understand the embrace of something like Easy Rider and the rejection of something like this. Grade: C+
A whole lot of fun and a lot more darkly comic than I was expecting. It feels like a proto-Coen-Brothers film more than anything else: a dude creates this meticulous plot to murder his boss and then things just slowly start spiraling out of control after he makes one stupid mistake that involves him getting stuck in an elevator. I don't think I was expecting the title of the movie to be quite so literal. The Miles Davis music is great, too. I'm curious if there's an earlier film noir with the whole "pensive jazz score over moody b&w cinematography" thing that's become a cliché for parodying the genre, or if this is the inception of that trope. Grade: A-
An absolutely devastating anti-war film that's seldom been matched in the near-century since in American film—maybe the only parallel is that other WWI-set masterpiece, Paths of Glory. Like Paths, All Quiet uses surgical precision to cut through the lie that allegiance to a nation-state has value; Paths is much more interested in the bureaucratic labyrinths that protect the privileged and the powerful from caring about the brutality that these systems inflict upon those on the front lines, whereas All Quiet basically is entirely from the perspective of that meager class who gets ground through the grist mill of the state's vanguard. That final double-exposure shot of the soldiers looking back over their shoulders as they are superimposed on a cemetery made me so sad. Patriotism: what a sham. Grade: A
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