Sorry for missing last week! Be sure to check out the next episode of the podcast my wife and I are doing if you're interested!
Movies
Cronenberg's back, baby, and I really dig how this time, he's just kinda riffing on the aesthetic possibilities of finding and then transcending the limitations of the human form. It's less "body horror" than it is "body avant-garde," which is interesting and cool. Of course, this being Cronenberg, who is as invested in exploring the tiers of power within hyperreal society as he is in exploring the vanguard of good taste, the movie is also a pretty fascinating what-if about what the politics of power would look like in a world in which radical politics and radical artistic statements simultaneously find their future in the human body. It's also a pretty funny movie. There's this whole long sequence in which we watch this dude who has surgically covered himself with ears dance around, and I was like, "Whoa, that's pretty cool," and then Viggo Mortensen shows up and is like, "Wow, this dude is such a poser," which made me laugh pretty hard—ya got me, Dave. Grade: A-
There's not really a ton going on here under the hood, and the plot twists are fairly obvious. But Mark Rylance is good in his role as a cutter whose store is being used as a meeting location by the mob, and this is an entertaining-enough one-room crime thriller that I feel like there are probably some people out there who will get a kick out of it. Plus, there is some nice footage of tailoring. Grade: B-
I watched that anthology called Cartoon Noir a little while back, but honestly this is the movie that should have had that title. A truly nasty bit of nihilistic film noir, only it's cats, and they're animated. The plot feels like it's stuck in fast-forward, and it probably leans a little too hard into its penchant for edgy violence (this is really violent—like, viscera and stuff). But it also doesn't necessarily feel like it's trying to impress anyone either, like so much of adult-oriented animation tends to feel. It's just what it is, and if you're at all into that, then this is for you. All others: probably best to stay away, because again, it's gruesome. Grade: B+
The "slasher, but make it a meathead hard-bodies commando movie" conceit is a lot of fun, and once we get to the "final girl" sequence with Arnie that occupies somewhere around the last 30 minutes of the movie, it becomes top-tier great. I really didn't have a ton of patience for the setup, though, where it takes forever to introduce exactly two very obvious things: 1) the CIA set these guys up, and 2) there are some really annoying guys in this group who are going to get got first. I guess the moral is that if you're going to make a slasher movie, you better give it a slasher-movie efficiency, even if you're going through the motions of another genre. Still, good times to be had once this finally gets rolling. Grade: B
I was briefly amused by the extremely cartoony (and extremely reactionary) depiction of 1997 Los Angeles as a war-torn hellscape where Jamaican "Voodoo" kings preside over militarized street gangs, but once this settles into basically a cop thriller, this is punishingly dull. I like the idea of a franchise choosing a new genre to riff on in each sequel, but the thing about that is that you've got to actually make a good riff on the genre you pick. Danny Glover is pretty cool, though. Grade: C-
A really mean, lean noir that somehow has a happy ending? Weird choice. I was very keyed into this movie, especially Thelma Ritter's character, but it loses some verve once she exits, and I don't know how I feel about the whole project. But it has some very good details. I can't believe how incredible it is that there's a character in here named Skip McCoy, and he's a professional pickpocket. If there's an American counterpart to Dickensian naming traditions, that's an example of it, for sure. Grade: B
I haven't read/seen performed the Shakespeare play in at least ten years, which makes this a weird watch. I remember enough to know that Welles isn't quite doing a traditional take on the material, despite staying true to the fundamental structure, but I also don't have whole scenes practically memorized in the way that I do of, for example, Macbeth or Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, so it's hard for me to pinpoint the finer details of how Welles is shaping the source material. Regardless, I don't really think Welles did the right thing casting himself in the titular role; he's just not right for the role, and his archly pompous screen presence never feels more than an affect (I saw someone say that he should have played Iago, which I think would substantially improve this movie). Anyway, aesthetically this looks pretty cool: all shadowy and tense, and there are some genuinely freaky moments, like when he smothers Desdemona. But compared to his Macbeth, this feels stylistically tame. I know that former film was made to look the way it was out of necessity, but it looked incredible and unlike any other Macbeth film, whereas this is just a slightly more stylized version of the kind of movie anyone would make. Maybe I would feel differently if I had a stronger memory of the play. Grade: B-
Books
It's become something of a personal tradition to read some canonical doorstop novel over summer vacation, and I have to admit, in the few years I've been doing this, Don Quixote is probably my least-favorite among the ones I've read. That's not to say it's not good—who am I to come along after 400 years of acclaim to say that no, Don Quixote is bad, actually? No, I think this is more a Me Problem. There are long stretches of this book (at least 60%-70%) that I found uproariously funny, or at least amusing, and as with the case with books this old and this revered, it's way bawdier and scatological than its reputation usually indicates, which I'm 100% in favor of. I also thought the meta games were fun: the whole second part (published a decade after the first part) involves Don Quixote and Sancho being aware of not only the first volume of Cervantes's novel but also of the fraudulent sequel written by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda in the interim between the Cervantes volumes, which is great fun and also surprisingly philosophical about the nature of storytelling. But the rest of the book I found not nearly as engaging (it's probably just the nature of reading a nearly 1000-page book, but as I got closer and closer to the end, I got less and less patient with the constant digressions that seemingly had little to do with Don Quixote or Sancho), and some of it I've got to admit that I just didn't get. I say this is a Me Problem because, as people are probably aware, Don Quixote is satire of/commentary on medieval romances, which is not a genre I'm particularly familiar with outside of the basic ideas about chivalry that everyone probably knows, so I'm not approaching this book with the knowledge that it assumes in its readers; I'm curious what I would have gotten out of some of these allegedly boring sequences if I were more well-versed in the conventions of the genre. At any rate, I was into enough of this to enjoy my time with the book overall, but I can't help but feel that I should have studied a little to get a richer experience with it. Grade: B
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