In case you aren't following The Newbery Chronicles elsewhere, I just wanted to mention here that the podcast my wife and I are doing has a new episode! You can listen to it here.
Movies
DC League of Super-Pets (2022)
Pretty awful for a variety of reasons:
-That full title
-Really forced Lord-and-Miller-esque humor (Lord and Miller themselves are usually pulling it off by the seat of their pants, and this is a great example of what happens when it's not them and not good)
-Tedious comic book references
-A surprisingly dull Marc Maron vocal performance (surprising after his surprisingly good vocal performance in
The Bad Guys just earlier this year)
-Cloying, unearned sentimentality (the movie begins with a tear-jerking destruction of Krypton for some misbegotten reason)
-A Chekhov's gun device that promises early in the movie that Superdog will poop out a piece of kryptonite, only to resolve itself off-screen and completely without fanfare (not sure what's worse: the fact that the movie forced me to look forward to Superdog pooping, or that all we get is a post-hoc "oh, I guess I pooped already, trust me, let's go").
Regardless, this was something of a rite of passage for me, as it's the first movie I've gone to solely because I knew my son would love it, even though I was fairly confident beforehand that I would hate it. A real bummer that the first weekend I've been able to take him to a movie since
Encanto has nothing for kids but this playing. My son did indeed have a great time, so I guess I'm just taking one for the team here. He watches PBS Kids and
My Neighbor Totoro at home, so here's hoping that this unexpectedly ribald feature isn't going to send him down a dark path.
Grade: C-
Prey (2022)
This was pretty good, and of the three Predator movies I've seen, it's almost as good as the first one and significantly better than the second. The setting in 18th-century Comanche territory is a terrific touch, and I'm 100% with the memes calling for Predator sequels in other historic time periods. That said, this movie looks terrible, and I'm not sure who to blame; the shot compositions are fine, but something is very wrong with the lighting, which makes everything looks washed out in the daylight scenes and nearly incomprehensible in the nighttime scenes. Whatever has happened to night photography in the streaming era needs to stop, because this is such a widespread problem.
Grade: B-
Of Time and the City (2008)
A frequently gorgeous, thoroughly bitter little essay film. Terence Davies hates Liverpool as only someone who knows a place intimately can, and the same goes for his clear affection for a certain version of the place. I know nothing about Liverpool, but like so many Davies movies, watching this dreamy, aesthetic object makes me feel as if I've been dipped in the consciousness of someone who does. Very much feels like the documentary corollary to
The Long Day Closes, both in terms of how it looks as well as its slippery approach to the poetry of memory.
Grade: A-
Topical Malady (สัตว์ประหลาด) (2004)
The bifurcated structure of this film really is one of the great rug-pulls in recent(ish) cinema history, especially if you're used to the typically languid pace of later Apichatpong Weerasethakul features. I spent the first half of this, which is a lovely, poignant love story, charmed but somewhat perplexed at the uncharacteristically straightforward and (relatively) conventional plot. But then after about 50 minutes we get a black screen, and BAM, we're neck-deep in the cosmic viscosity of one of film's greatest mystics, who is ready to crack your head wide open. That back half also simultaneously defamiliarizes the first half, recontextualizing it as the first act in a story about a longing that exists on the scale of myth. With apologies to an otherwise entirely unrelated author, every love story truly is a ghost story, and I've rarely seen a movie so thoroughly and mysteriously epitomize that.
Grade: A-
Lilya 4-ever (Lilja 4-ever) (2002)
I'm not usually a "what's the point?" guy with movies, but man, what's the point of this other than misery? In the early goings, this is a fairly poignant portrayal of a girl on the margins of a crumbling post-Soviet society, and per usual, Lukas Moodysson has a good facility with young performers and the ping-ponging between reckless effervescence and the crushing realities of being young. But once the downward spiral starts, it's just so, so punishingly bleak with little to offer other than some vague sense of the world being a cruel place for young people, esp. young girls, and yeah, sure, but that's such a surface-level idea that I feel like I either must be missing something or Moodysson is just flush with the palpable sense of despair that suffuses the back half of the film. It's not even aesthetically interesting, save for a horrific montage of POV shots at one point. I dunno, I'm probably missing something here, because Moodysson usually seems better than this.
Grade: C
Television
Better Call Saul, Season 6 (2022)
BCS has done an admirable job thus far at not positioning itself in relationship to
Breaking Bad, but it's unavoidable as the show comes to a close, not just because of how it must connect the dots between the events of the show to the immediate before-and-after context of
Breaking Bad but also because this show's final season ends with a structure that conspicuously mirrors the end of its predecessor. Both shows had final seasons broken in half by a hiatus, both present their protagonists as amoral shells of themselves where the primary question is not the fate of the protagonist but instead whether or not their more sympathetic partner will escape with their soul/life intact, both conclude with the protagonists doing something faintly noble that allows them to accept the consequences of their actions on their own terms. But
Better Call Saul has long been the more ambitious show of the two, which makes its conclusion far more fascinating than
Breaking Bad's. In terms of the "prequel" story that has occupied the lion's share of this show, it basically wraps up a few episodes after the hiatus with an incident of collateral damage so cataclysmic that it more or less shatters all of the existing dynamics of the series, which means that a large portion of this final season gets devoted to the black-and-white, post-
Breaking-
Bad Omaha storyline, which serves as both an epilogue to the Saul Goodman saga but also to
Breaking Bad; it's in this section that we see that Saul and Kim have more or less "gotten away with it," improbably managing to slough off their old identities as scamming lawyers and put on a duller yet safer existence in anonymity in, respectively, Nebraska and Florida. Whereas the early seasons of
BCS emphasized the precarity of Jimmy's life as his attempts at legitimacy were forever frustrated, the Omaha episodes show a man who has, like a cockroach, survived improbable peril and thus has convinced himself of his own invincibility; Kim, on the other hand, lives with crushing guilt at the idea of her survival. What this dichotomy eventually becomes is a climactic interrogation of the ultimate question of human relationships; the
BCS/
BB universe is preoccupied with power and its monstrous effects, but by setting a third of its final season after the events of
Breaking Bad,
Better Call Saul is able to wrestle with something that its more breakneck forebear never had time to more than gesture toward: given that we live in a harsh world built upon corrosive power dynamics, what do we owe one another? It's kind of the "so what?" of the entire universe of these two series, and a perfect send-off to the world I've spent the last decade-plus inside.
Grade: A
The Rehearsal, Season 1 (2022)
One of the wildest, most unpredictable seasons of television I've ever seen. What initially begins as a kooky but fairly straightforward follow-up to
Nathan For You (in this case, Nathan Fielder offers the "service" of allowing people to rehearse difficult life situations before they happen) rapidly morphs into something far stranger. It's tough to describe, both because of how ridiculously elaborate and complex it becomes but also because half of the experience of the show is watching it transform on an episode-by-episode basis as new layers and complications are added to Nathan's concept of "rehearsal," but suffice to say, by the end
The Rehearsal is a knotty interrogation of authenticity and control. How does one truly know another person? How can any of our social interactions be genuine when we are often enigmas to each other and ourselves? How can we make informed decisions in our lives when the world is such a chaotic, uncontrollable place? Can any of this even be ethically explored within the artifice of a TV show, even one that purports to be a "reality" show? Improbably,
The Rehearsal is able to engage these questions in a way that is pretty rigorous and intense while also being hysterically funny for the majority of its runtime. Utterly deranged, compelling TV. I have no idea how there could be a second season of this, but apparently they're going to try, and I'll be there for it.
Grade: A
