Hm.
Movies
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
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
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+
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
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
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+
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