Mini Reviews for September 19 - 25, 2022

In case you missed it, my wife and I released a new episode of our podcast The Newbery Chronicles. This time, we're discussing The Witch of Blackbird Pond! Listen to it here if you're interested.

 

Movies

Romancing the Stone (1984)
Not without its pleasures (principally, Danny DeVito and the croc-filled climax), but it's weirdly inert for an African Queen riff with a blood transfusion from Indiana Jones (though about as racist as that combo suggests). And it's especially inert for a Robert Zemeckis feature from this era. The ironic sleazeball tendencies of early Zemeckis just feel straightforwardly sleazeball here, probably not helped by the co-leading Michael Douglas (the sleazeballest of sleazeball screen presences from this era; truly baffling how much of an A-list star he was, given how consistently off-putting he is in his movies—'twas a different time, I suppose). Kathleen Turner is good, though, and much more keyed into the African Queen vibes than Douglas is. Grade: B-

 

The Alchemist Cookbook (2016)
I keep having to remind myself that I watched this movie, because it just keeps sliding off my brain. Ty Hickson and Amari Cheatom are both very good in their respective roles, and all of writer/director Joel Potrykus's proclivities for mixing bleak horror with the mundane ephemeral of male and geek culture are on full display (including one particularly striking scene involving cat food that feels like a dry run for the disgusting challenges of Relaxer). But I dunno, this feels minor compared to Buzzard and Relaxer, and I think there's just too much micro-indie "futzing around in the woods because we don't have sets otherwise" stuff for it to be as memorable as those other movies. Grade: C+

 

 

The Gate to the Mind's Eye (1994)
A lot less ineffable and a lot more music-video-y than the previous Mind's Eye films, but still pretty cool. There's a distinctly PS1-prerendered-cutscene vibe to these ones in particular that is fitting of the era. Also, the version I watched on YouTube was a LaserDisc rip, so there were a couple of load screens, which is a nice period detail. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

Ocean Waves (海がきこえる) (1993)
Easily my least-favorite Studio Ghibli movie I've seen that isn't Earwig and the Witch. I'm not against high school melodrama, and it's theoretically interesting to see Ghibli operating on that gear. But this movie is sooooo narratively inert. I have no idea why I'm supposed to care about anything that happens here, not because it's stupid and low-stakes (not necessarily a deal-breaker with high school melodrama) but because none of the emotions experienced by the characters are convincingly evoked by the movie. It's not even visually engaging; the animation is warm and competent, but it's thoroughly anonymous. This was kind of by design: the whole point of the project was for Ghibli to allow its younger animators to practice making a movie on the cheap, and I guess you get what you pay for. Grade: C

 

Capricorn One (1977)
Starts out as a fairly cool idea for a '70s paranoid thriller (what if the government didn't fake the moon landing but they faked a Mars landing to save face after the real mission ran into technical difficulties amid public-private corruption at the twilight of Watergate and the dawn of neoliberal creep?) that is just a bit too dumb to mine all the promise from that premise—the kind of dumb that thinks that you have to get on a plane to travel from Houston to Galveston, or that you should have a pivotal emotional scene involve a mother breaking down into sobs as she reads Fox in Socks to her kid (though as a parent, I can honestly say: same). Somewhere along the line, though, probably right around the 2/3 mark, when Elliott Gould becomes the protagonist (always a good move for a movie to make), this shifts gears into something a lot more openly goofy and thus makes what were intellectual and tonal liabilities in the front half of the movie actual virtues of the second half, and by the end, this has righted the ship into a dumb-fun blast. Gould is extremely good as a down-on-his-luck journalist who gets into increasingly absurd situations as a result of being two degrees of separation from the conspiracy, and the way his plot slowly drifts into full-on screwball comedy is really entertaining. The helicopter/crop-duster chase at the climax is legit great, too. What a weird movie. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for September 12 - 18, 2022

Pretty good movie week, all in all.

Movies

Pearl (2022)
A substantially messier movie than X, and large chunks of this simply do not work. It also runs into the same problems as X did with the character of Pearl, which is that it has a hard time landing its theoretical sympathy for Pearl while balancing the plot's need for her to be a Krazy Killer. That all said, this is some mad scientist filmmaking for sure, far and away the strangest thing that Ti West has ever attempted and about as far out of his wheelhouse as he's ever been. I don't know that it ever comes into something coherent, but the way that this film uses West's facility for pastiche to squeeze '50s melodrama, The Wizard of Oz, and silent film into an exploitation mode is a true maniac's project, and the fact that Mia Goth is 110% onboard with whatever the intent was here becomes a compelling glue to hold it all together. This wouldn't work at all without Goth, who is keyed into the specific wavelength of camp this movie requires to an astounding degree, and that the movie doesn't even consistently work with her A-tier performance should give you an indication of how uneven this movie is. But for every bit that's uneven, there's a moment that feels like a payoff that doesn't exactly redeem what doesn't work but at least makes it clear why you stuck it out with that thread—e.g. spending about half an hour wondering why in the world I was seeing all these Wizard of Oz references and then getting to the part where Goth humps a scarecrow to climax and going, "Ohhh, wow." Ti West doesn't really have any of the, uh, ex factor of someone like David Lynch, who works with a lot of the same reference points to create films that feel much more primordial, and West is just a lot more crass about it than Lynch ever is, but the uncanny juxtaposition of familiar Americana with a squirmy recognition of the extremes of human behavior feels at least in the same country as the Lynchian mode (or at least pre-Fire Walk With Me Lynch). Long story short, I had a good time with it, and in the long run it'll probably be more memorable for its wild ambition than the much more coloring-inside-the-lines X, even if X is definitely the better movie. Grade: B

The Black Phone (2021)
Has this weird quality of being simultaneously too ambitious while also provoking a "that's it?" reaction from me. It kind of reminds me of that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark adaptation from a few years ago that was somehow trying to be simultaneously a spooky campfire story and also some sort of treatise on the presidential election of Richard Nixon, and while this isn't as baldly political, it has this ersatz Stephen King undercurrent of trying to have this movie be about these battling metaphysical forces while at the same time being just a straightforward serial killer thriller. I dunno, it only barely works at its best, and at its worst it feels like an inauthentic accumulation of signifiers, not unlike its period setting (though at least we get some good, slightly unexpected needle drops—if you're going to do a Dark Side of the Moon track, "On the Run" is basically the only remotely interesting choice at this point). I love Ethan Hawke in general, but he really feels like he's just doing unflattering serial killer kitsch here. Just kind of an empty calories movie all around, and not even yummy calories either, because this movie is bleak and unpleasant on top of being uninspired. Grade: C-

Petite Maman (2021)
A purposefully small, warm blanket of a movie. A young girl's grandmother dies, and soon after, she discovers a friend who is magically a manifestation of her mother as a little girl, which allows her to process her loss. There are some scenes that are so emotionally precise that they made me cry, but mostly the movie involves just watching a couple of cute, convincing child actors genially play together. Very sweet, very cozy, only rips your heart out of your chest twice. Grade: B+

 

 

Woodstock (1970)
It's hard not to look bitterly at this as a bunch of future Reagan voters cosplaying as revolutionaries, and to that end, the documentary scans as a lot more ambivalent toward its subject than I was expecting from such a mythologized text, right down to the final Hendrix solo playing over post-festival footage of the area that looks positively bombed-out—a wildly conflicted image to end this depiction of an ostensibly celebratory event. There are a few other pointed jabs at the shaky integrity of the festival, such as the darkly ironic juxtaposition of the nominally anti-war sentiments uniting the crowd with the fact that the U.S. Army supplied medical aid to the crowd once it became clear that the festival organizers themselves were incapable of maintaining an event at this scale. On a less ideological note, I guess I was expecting the music here to be better, but it's wildly inconsistent. The famous performances, i.e. the ones I'd already seen, are justly famous, especially the film-ending run of Santana --> Sly and the Family Stone --> Janis Joplin --> Jimi Hendrix. But a good portion of the acts here are a bunch of white blues groups of the kind that were popular in the UK at the time, and that's just such a tedious little subgenre of music to me. That Ten Years After set felt like an eternity, and there were at least a few more like it. The music was one of the few things I'd always figured I gotta hand to the hippies, but boy oh boy, not here. With any concert doc, there's a certain "you just had to be there" element, especially with one as ragged and sloppy as Woodstock, so I guess I've just got to assume that these bands just sound better when you're tripping on that subpar brown acid the festival staff kept warning people about. But anyway, probably the best thing about this documentary is how close it does actually get to helping its viewers understand what being there was like, and outside of the Santana, et al, finale, the best parts are the delightful little details the roaming cameras and mics pick up, like the wholesome dude servicing the toilets or the random loudspeaker announcements about somebody's wife having a baby or whatever. It's a deeply grimy and tactile film, and the breadth and specificity of sensory experiences it manages to capture is truly impressive. Probably could have done without nearly four hours of it, though; it's too bad that the 1994 "Director's Cut" is now basically the only version you can get, because the three-hour theatrical cut sounds much more manageable (though admittedly, that one cuts out a lot of the Hendrix stuff). Grade: B

Monterey Pop (1968)
With the exception of the haunting use of light in the Otis Redding sequence, this is much less of a cinematically interesting object than Woodstock (the obvious comparison point, given that the former inspired the latter), and it has virtually none of the sensory immediacy that defines so much of the film document of the latter festival. But the music is several orders of magnitude better in this movie, which covers a multitude of inferiorities. Furthermore, nowhere in the four hours of Woodstock does Jimi Hendrix pleasure his guitar before setting it on fire, so I think I rest my case on the (admittedly only barely) superior film experience. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for September 5 - 11, 2022

Hm.

Movies

SubUrbia (1996)
Feels like the Venn diagram created by the overlapping of Dazed and Confused with Gregg Araki's Teen Apocalypse trilogy. It's very much the bucket of cold water that Dazed mercifully withholds: whereas Linklater is happy to let the characters in the older film live with the self-aggrandizing lie that they have been given a future by our country (the only real pushback is the joke the teacher makes at the beginning about the founders not wanting to pay taxes), the teens of Linklater's follow-up teen all-nighter absolutely see America for the deception that it is and thus live in a kind of sad nihilism that feels very much like the heterosexual parallel to what Gregg Araki was exploring around the same time—and of course by virtue of occupying the white and straight ends of alienation, these characters more often than not become the aggressors in the oppressive ecosystem struggling to survive under the American neoliberal boot. The kids here are no more above hectoring and bullying and hazing than their more triumphalist predecessors in Dazed, but whereas those '70s kids' behavior comes out of a kind of raw sense of entitlement, the '90s kids here are clearly acting out of pain. It's not a very fun movie, but of all of Linklater's often romanticized depictions of Gen X, this is probably the realest he ever got about the political ecosystem animating that generation (probably no accident that this happens in an Eric Bogosian screenplay and not a Linklater one). There really aren't very many movies about latent fascism in disaffected '90s suburban teens, but there should be. Grade: B

Blind (2014)
Pretty clever exploration of how the nature of consciousness forces us to fill in details that we aren't privy to so we can build coherent narratives of what we experience, and the fact that by the end it becomes basically impossible to tell what is "real" and what is merely a depiction of our protagonist's possibly false assumptions about what is happening around here seems like an appropriate conclusion to the film. I'm not sure at all how respectful to the blind community it is to use a protagonist's blindness as a way to poke at these ideas, so maybe this is tone deaf. It's just now striking me how old-fashioned it is to use a disability as a metaphor for some philosophical concept. Grade: B

 

My Own Private Idaho (1991)
A very sad movie about unrequited love—or at least, that's what it eventually turns into, though it takes a strange, circuitous route through a bizarre adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard/Henry tetrology. The film has that rich, earthy idiosyncrasy that textures a lot of this wave of American indie cinema, and it always feels to me that there's something meaningful going on with the movie's weirdness, even if I'm not always very clued in to what it is. That said, I wonder how this would scan for me if I was even a little familiar with the Shakespeare plays it draws from. Regardless, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves are both incredible here, especially River. Gives the movie's emotional core a little extra oomph knowing that this vibrant, beautiful person baring his soul only had a couple years to live. Grade: B+

 

Juvenile Court (1973)
My engagement with this movie vacillated wildly as the film ping-pongs between depicting tedious legal proceedings and harrowing emotional landscapes—which I suppose is true to the actual experience of court. Watching how often these kids just plead to go home rather than go to foster care or a residential center or (when the horrific specter of "being tried as an adult" comes up) the penitentiary is truly hard to watch in a way probably only matched by Titicut Follies in Frederick Wiseman's filmography up to this point. Unlike Titicut Follies, though, or most of Wiseman's early features, it's not immediately clear the extent to which this film is meant to be a critique of the Memphis Juvenile Court; early in the film, a psychologist administers a Rorschach test to one of the kids in custody, and in a lot of ways, the film functions as kind of a Rorschach test for viewers to measure their own trust in the system as portrayed here, with the actions of the adults in the court accumulating layers of either bureaucratic menace or hard-won compassion depending on how you feel about the ecosystem that produces this actions. On a completely unrelated note, I wonder if there has been a linguistic study of how dialect in the American South has shifted over time, because as someone who grew up in the Memphis area, I can confirm that in my time there, I heard none of the Scarlett O'Hara-core accents that populate this film. Grade: B

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sen noci svatojánské) (1959)
I mean, the appeal here is pretty straightforward: A Midsummer Night's Dream done by Czech stop-motion "puppet" animation master Jiří Trnka. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, then definitely avoid this. Even with a built-in interest, I found the beginning and end kind of dull, but when everybody's in the forest, this becomes truly special (incidentally, this is how I feel about the Shakespeare original). The dream-like effect of stop-motion and especially the particulars of Czech stop-motion is a perfect fit for the play's fantasy, and Trnka never runs out of ways to make the film look truly magical when it's in that liminal forest space. Grade: B

 

Gulliver's Travels (1939)
When I was a kid, someone gave us a DVD with this movie on it, and my family tried to watch it but bailed about halfway through when we found it relentlessly dull. I reapproached this as an adult with optimism, thinking of all the films I'd reassessed with age. And I will say this: the animation really impressed me; the mix of rotoscoping on Gulliver with the rubbery 1930s Fleischer style on the Lilliputians works really well, and the Lilliputians themselves have some terrific character animation that makes this go down easier than it would have otherwise. But as good as the animation is, I've got to admit that my family and I were right the first time. This is terribly boring. Just absolutely nothing interesting going on musically, narratively, or even on the voice-acting level. I'm sorry. I really want these Fleischer films to be good so I can declare the Disney hegemony over the early American animated feature film to be a corporate lie, but alas, they really aren't. You hate to hand it to Walt Disney and his animators, but you gotta. Grade: C-

 

Television

How To with John Wilson, Season 1 (2020)
Kind of the intersection of Joe Pera Talks with You and Nathan For You—each episode is a little film essay on a different mundane "how to" topic (examples: "How To Split the Check," "How To Cover Your Furniture") that becomes elevated through Wilson's Joe-Pera-esque ability to find idiosyncratic corners to explore within the topic as well as his Nathan-Fielder-esque facility with finding the weirdest, most fascinating interview subjects. The tendency for silly visual puns seems all John Wilson, though. The sum total of this is a curiously profound treatise on how the web of bizarre and insignificant details of our lives accumulate into larger webs of social and personal meaning, and the season finale, in which Wilson contemplates the relationship between himself and his aging landlady, is deeply moving. It's cool how the sprawling landscape of modern television can make room for an off-beat, small-scale show like this (though unfortunately, apparently not for my dearly departed Joe Pera Talks with You). Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for August 29 - September 4, 2022

COVID finally got me (a relatively mild case, thankfully), but on a positive note, my wife and I published a new episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here.

Movies

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021)
Captures extremely well that particularly brand of loneliness represented by grainy bedroom online video uploads, a kind of cry for help that seems to have transcended the ebb and flow of tech platform whims—I remember seeing this kind of stuff on YouTube and Google Video and other early forums, and you can apparently still find it on TikTok and Discord servers. In addition to that, the movie really does a great job of evoking the way that the "real" world gets all smeary and overlit after a long session of peering into the internet. What I'm most taken by, though, is the premise, where the protagonist (played by Anna Cobb, who is truly great here) gets involved in some kind of role-playing/ARG-type viral video thing that requires her to post videos of herself pretending(?) to lose herself to some mind-and-body-altering power, which is a spooky enough idea for this to justify its (slightly misleading) designation as a horror film but also is a smart way of dramatizing the ways in which the internet forces us to launder our humanity through the mediation of a persona that may or may not accurately reflect aspects of our psychological wellbeing, not necessarily because we want to keep the truth secret but because true, radical openness is hard enough in in-person interactions and even harder online where we are personally responsible for curating facts about ourselves. Knowing yourself enough to craft a virtual representation of your true self is one of these impossible tasks foisted upon us by our contemporary way of being, and that's not even keeping into account the reasons (usually out of self-preservation) why someone might not even *want* to present their true self to the internet. There's a particularly harrowing moment later in the film when one character tries to cut through the pretext of the game to simply ask the girl directly if she is okay, and the act of doing so is such a violation of the social contract of the majority of online spaces that the girl responds with rage and fear—and maybe it's right for her to do so, since after all, the internet is full of weirdos and creeps in addition to well-meaning folks, and the movie has given us no way of knowing which this person is at this point. But at the same time, that vulnerability, that directness sans the irony and refraction inherent to digital life, is the only way for genuine human interaction, whether online or in person, and if we can't find the ability to reach through the screen, as it were, and find each other's personhood and worth on the other side, we're doomed. Whatever the case, I found this utterly captivating, more sad than scary as we watch this teenage girl try to navigate all these conundrums while also dealing with the deep loneliness endemic to teenagerdom. My internet access as a teen was fairly limited, so my sympathies go out to all the kids now for whom having to survive this stuff is basically a given. Grade: B+

Josie and the Pussycats (2001)
The meta-commentary is fun, and the cast is pitch-perfect (I'm begging you, movies: bring back regular Parker Posey appearances). But mostly what I was struck by is how much of a blast the soundtrack is. The Adam Schlesinger-penned "Pretend to Be Nice" is my favorite, but "3 Small Words" (co-written by the movie's directors!) would make a great double-A-side single with it, and really, all the music is just a great time. I wish "power pop" were the early-aughts flavor of mall-punk that was coming back, instead of whatever MGK and the like are peddling. Also, the Netflix DVD of this was scratched, so midway through I had to bail and finish watching it on the Internet Archive, where the movie is listed under the topic of "MK Ultra," which gave me a chuckle. Grade: B

 

Beyond the Mind's Eye (1992)
Somehow kitschier and also cooler than its predecessor. The tech is a little better in the found-object renders, but it still has that early-CGI abstraction that is very, very entrancing. It's hard to say a lot about these movies because they are pretty much the platonic ideal of "pure cinema" in the sense that there's no satisfying way to communicate what is meaningful about them without having experienced first-hand their visual and aural textures. It's very silly, but also, its status as an artifact of an indelibly precise slice of a cultural moment really strikes a chord in me. Transporting. Grade: B+

 

 

Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959)
Unbelievably good. My sweet spot for jazz is about ten years later than this, but this film captures a special energy that probably wouldn't have been present at whatever fusion/free-jazz freakout would have resulted from a circa 1970 concert of jazz luminaries. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a movie so effectively observe the liberatory joy of jazz while also so convincingly evoking the banality of a music festival. It is legit hilarious how this doc will show some musician in the throes of the profoundly spiritual ecstasy of their performance and then cut to someone chomping unglamorously on an ice cream bar, but it's also kind of beautiful, too, that these two expressions of humanity coexist in the same space. Grade: A