Mini Reviews for October 24 - 30, 2022

My wife and I released a new episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here if you're interested!

Movies

Lightyear (2022)
I went into this expecting it to be bad, and it was, but I think this actually would have been a tolerable, if forgettable, piece of children's sci-fi if it weren't for the fact that it's about the "real" Buzz freaking Lightyear. It's a weird bind that I'm sure the filmmakers found themselves in making this movie: scrubbed of its forced connections to the Toy Story franchise, the screenplay is not nearly good enough to make this movie be notable as a standalone film, but the Toy Story connections that make it notable unmistakably flag this movie as a piece of cynical corporate brand management as opposed to the sincere work of middlebrow family entertainment it wants to be. I'm sorry, but I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough that I can hear the characters in this movie on multiple occasions saying word-for-word memorable lines from the first Toy Story and not come to the conclusion that some middle-management Disney husk with an MBA ghost-wrote the film. It's like watching that unbearable pre-show Regal ad where everybody just says random famous movie lines, only at feature length. Also, on the animation front, this is a major step back from the past few Pixar films' attempts to broaden the studio's style outside of their familiar aesthetic. We're in mildly cartoony photorealismville again, baby, and it's boring. Complete dreck. Almost certainly the worst Pixar movie—or at least the most dispiriting. Grade: C-

Bride of Chucky (1998)
Easily the best Chucky movie up to this point in the series. Chucky as an entity was never particularly scary to me anyway (even when I was a kid), so this movie's abandonment of any semblance of "scary" plus its commitment to weird camp and outsider sensibilities helps it sail past every previous movie in the franchise. Explicitly tying itself to The Bride of Frankenstein should be a movie-ruining bit of hubris, but it's absolutely deserved here, as it embraces that early classic's penchant for the playful and absurd over the spooky. Plus, my god, the voice acting of the central duo: the addition of Jennifer Tilly as functionally the lead is an incredibly canny move, and Brad Dourif puts in his series-best performance. Also, barely related, but I just happened to click on Dourif's Wikipedia page when writing this up, and I realized he plays Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, which is kinda blowing my mind at the moment; I should have made that connection before the fourth entry in this series. Grade: A-

Seed of Chucky (2004)
What an absolute blast. Some of the running bits don't really work (e.g. the "Made in Japan" thing or Jennifer Tilly's eating disorder), but for the most part, this is intoxicating and ridiculously fun and has the good sense to realize that two Jennifer Tilly performances are better than one. Whereas Bride of Chucky explicitly presents itself as the Chucky analog to The Bride of Frankenstein, Seed openly claims to be the Glen or Glenda of the franchise, which is 100% the logical conclusion to the camp flourishes of the previous film. Along the same lines, I gotta hand it to this movie for having the guts to evoke one of the most repulsive parts of Pink Flamingos (the kidnapping/insemination plot). Speaking of insemination, people talk about weird Hollywood synchronicity like the time there were two Snow White movies in the same year, but I've never heard anyone talk about the much more improbable parallelism of 2004's duology of CGI sperms (i.e. this and She Hate Me). A true unicorn pairing. Grade: A-

Curse of Chucky (2013)
A soft reboot after the franchise reached the delirious heights of Bride and Seed was not at the top of the list of things I would want to see out of the follow-up. But allowing for that, this was really solid—probably the most overtly "scary" (relatively—Chucky's not very scary) Chucky movie since the first one, and it does a lot of good with that aim to return to the series's horror roots. It's set in a big, spooky house, which is a tremendous setting, and appropriately, the direction is the series's most baroque, filled with moody lighting and sweeping steadicam shots (maybe my favorite direction of the series). And for us lovers of post-Child's Play 3 Chucky, the last ten minutes or so does let us know that Don Mancini hasn't forgotten about us. So, a good time, if not the great time delivered by its immediate predecessors. Grade: B

 

Books

A Gathering of Days; A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32 by Joan W. Blos (1979)
What if a children's book looked exactly like a child's journal from the 1830s? Impressively committed to its conceit, to the point that it's willing to be extremely boring in the interest of looking like a historical document. If that sounds cool to you, you can listen to my wife and I talk about it on our podcast. Grade: D

 

 

 

 

Music

Taylor Swift - Midnights (2022)
I've heard people call this album a "grower," and it certainly has the hallmarks of that: low-key production, murmured melodies, few open bids for radio play. However, after having spent a week with this album, I'm feeling like it's the opposite... a shrinker? I'm sad to report that the more I listen to it, the thinner Midnights feels. Everything on here is something that Taylor Swift has done elsewhere (and better): the nocturnal Antonoff production hearkens back to the simmering, weary back-half of Reputation and the warmth of the Lover deep cuts; the semi-ironic self-critique of "Anti-Hero" is a less sardonic revision of "Blank Space"; "Vigilante Shit" and "Karma" again evoke Reputation, but this time the cringey, forced "bad girl" camp villainy. I wouldn't mind as much if the writing on these songs were actually good, but a lot of these lyrics feel like first-drafts, with a main idea only barely developed (and certainly not as idiosyncratic and nuanced as I'm used to hearing from Swift). That's to say nothing of the outright howlers, like the already infamous "sexy baby" line on "Anti-Hero" or how Taylor Swift still seems to employ the word "fuck" like a middle-schooler giddy about saying grown-up words. The melodies on the tracks fare better, but there isn't a single song where I enjoy both the melody and the lyrics, which is disappointing coming from Taylor Swift. It's disappointing after folklore seems to usher in a new phase of maturity and hindsight for Taylor Swift that she's come up with an album that feels like ersatz Taylor Swift, mimicking the rhythms and themes of past successes without the spark of what made those earlier works cook. I guess we'll see how I feel after spending a little more time with this—maybe this will prove to be a true grower after two weeks, or ten. But right now, this strikes me as one of Taylor Swift's weakest album, if not her outright worst. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for October 17 - 23, 2022

Nothing new to report up here. Here's an obligatory link to the podcast episode my wife and I released last week.

Movies

The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018)
A perfectly serviceable (and no more than that) piece of family entertainment that is directed by Eli Roth for some reason. There are some fun, distinctive bits (I liked the evil pumpkins!), but I'm finding it hard to have much to say about a movie that is mostly pretty anonymous. Still, if you'd like to hear me try to say something about it, I was part of Episode 426 of the Cinematary podcast, which discussed it as part of the "Horror for Kids" series. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
This movie opens with a hilarious premise that had me hoping for the best: it is ten years in the future, and Freddy has killed literally every teenager in Springfield except one, and he's out to get that one. Gold. The rest of the movie is really dull, though; a weird mix of unbearably try-hard goofy (Freddy trapping a dude in a video game and then killing him using an actual Nintendo Power Glove) and incongruously dark (the protagonists are all kids from a shelter for homeless or troubled teens, and they have some too-real, un-fun issues, e.g. one of them is suffering from PTSD after having been raped by her father repeatedly as a child). Nothing here is scary, and it's really hard to care about anything that happens, given how the movie can never decide how much contempt it wants to regard these characters with. And the effects aren't even that fun or inventive either. Definitely earns its reputation as the series low point. Grade: C

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
The only one of this franchise after the first one that's even remotely scary, and there's no way not to attribute this directly to the presence of Wes Craven again. I do miss some of the sillier, go-for-broke bonkers setpieces that animated a lot of the sequels, but the consummate professionalism and virtuosic control of tension on display here really can't be beat, especially after so many of the other sequels feeling cinematically complacent outside of the elaborate death scenes. The meta stuff obviously begs comparisons to Scream, and while the latter movie is certainly more clever, I've always found its commentary to be smug and vaguely irritating (despite film being solid overall); New Nightmare is a lot messier and probably not as good holistically, but it's also a lot more lovable—the regard the film has for Heather Langenkamp is genuinely sweet at times, which does a lot to endear the film to me. Anyway, I'm glad the Nightmare series got this little coda, because it would have been a bummer to end the series on a stinker like Freddy's Dead. Grade: B+

Child's Play 3 (1991)
A pretty big step down from the first two entries in this series. Andy goes to military school—pretty boring! I really liked the opening credits (we get to watch Chucky unmelt, which is very cool-looking), and Chucky himself remains a fun presence. But I just am so bored with Andy. Too bad Kyle didn't show up in this movie, because I liked her! On top of that, the movie is pretty tepidly staged—I guess military schools are by-design bland environments, and it feels like even the filmmakers realized they picked a bad setting because they set the climax in a random carnival that appears out of nowhere. Grade: C

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (鉄男) (1989)
I had heard about the gnarly body horror in this movie, which is indeed gnarly (and if I were slowly turning into metal, I would probably rip up my flesh picking at the metal, too, so it's oddly relatable). But I don't think I was prepared for how stylistically out-there this is, which was a fun surprise. I was ready for a lo-fi gross-out, but the way the film has one foot in the avant-garde makes this a lot more engaging than it would have been for me otherwise. Also, terrific sound design—some just incredible squishy noises. Made my skin crawl. Grade: A-

 

 

 

Books

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)
As one of the seminal postmodern novels, I expected this to be a little more out-there than it was, and so reading this fairly dry, sardonic book grounded in middle-class alienation caused by the absurdities of postwar American consumerism required a little bit of a mental readjustment to get into. It still wasn't exactly my thing, but I had come around to it by the end. At first, the wry narration, which felt like DeLillo was smirking or rolling his eyes at every sentence, was a little grating to me, but eventually, I felt in on the joke, e.g. the "Hitler Studies" professor whose most pressing concern is whether or not the fact that he doesn't know German undermines his credibility to talk about the fascist leader. Everything is surface and self-presentation. By the end, the book finds a melancholy groove in the hollowness of everything the characters do, until that hollowness has become an abyss with the grave at its bottom. That's the good stuff. I'm curious how I will feel about this book if (when?) I read more Don DeLillo. Anyway, for now: Grade: B

Mini Reviews for October 10 - 16, 2022

Horror movies! Also, if you're interested, my wife and I have a new podcast episode out, this time about Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

 

Movies

Don't Worry Darling (2022)
Exactly the movie, no more, no less, you would imagine if I told you to picture the intersection of The Stepford Wives and the first act of The Matrix. There are very few—if any—surprises here if you have seen the right antecedent movies, and given that those antecedents are super popular, you probably have seen them. Obviously the problem with so openly aping such famous movies is that you're inviting comparison, and there's nothing about this movie that's better or even just more interesting than the movies it calls to mind. Nonetheless, it's not bad, assuming you aren't expecting it to be great. Olivia Wilde continues to be a director with an eye for striking imagery, even if she still doesn't let herself (isn't allowed?) to let that instinct fully flourish into something more striking; the production design, especially the costuming, is very good; Florence Pugh is, per usual, selling the crap out of her performance and probably carrying the whole movie in terms of acting, but the rest of the cast is no slouch either—I'm not sure what I was expecting out of Harry Styles, but he's good at playing a dude who is clean-cut and handsome enough to scan as vaguely menacing (though I do wonder what welcome chaos the originally planned Shia LaBeouf casting would have brought). It's just weird to see this level of prestige and budget brought to the kind of movie that probably would have gotten like $4 million and a late-January release like fifteen years ago. Grade: B-

Knock Knock (2015)
A "happily married" dude is coerced (maybe?) into sex with two strangers, who then spend the rest of the film refusing to leave his house, which they are intent on trashing. I wish I had written this review before watching the 1977 film it's based on, because I'm already forgetting how I felt about this without the '70s context. But anyway, I guess when I get to Death Game I'll talk about the rest, but what stands out as distinct about Eli Roth's remake is the absolutely sublime Keanu Reeves performance. Like the other Roth films I've seen, the film style of this movie feels premeditated and precise to an extreme degree, this time to a fault that undermines the chaos of the two female leads (this is my experience with the '70s one bleeding in already, sorry). But as a counterpoint, the technique of Keanu's acting here is really wacky in a way that is kinda surreal and unpredictable. Whether or not this is an intended effect I have no idea, but the feeling I got was that as Keanu's character has more and more of his "good guy dad" persona stripped from him by the physical and psychological humiliation he experiences, the further out of Keanu's acting range he goes, to the point where by the time he's giving the absolutely demented "free pizza" monologue, he's in some really dicey territory in terms of the actor's ability to even match what the movie is asking of him, which is bizarrely compelling in the context of a movie that is very much about taking a genteel presentation of masculinity and baiting it further and further outside of its self-satisfaction until it transforms into something feral and raw but also deeply silly and humiliating. I don't feel like it's a coincidence that this is the funniest movie I've seen from Roth, and more so than anything else of his I'm familiar with, this one has this really impish sensibility that is constantly tip-toeing around boundaries before bludgeoning those boundaries completely all at once, and that centerpiece Keanu performance feels key to that sensibility. This movie is a perfect encapsulation of one of the things people find so infuriating about Roth, i.e. the way it dances around big political topics (in this case, a bevvy of issues regarding gender, sex, age, and power) while defying clean, safe thematic readings outside of its obvious provocations—its '70s predecessor is a lot clearer in intention, and it's a fascinating effect that Roth is able to stay almost entirely faithful to the plot of the original while muddying the waters considerably in terms of what it actually means. There's at least a 50% chance that this movie really is as gross as it seems to want to bait us into thinking it is, but also, I thought it was very funny, so I dunno what to do with that. Grade: B

Death Game (1977)
A completely deranged movie on virtually every level. I'm not sure it's fair to Eli Roth to say that his remake is weaker for not having captured the pure chaotic spirit embodied by this film, because that clearly wasn't what he was after (maintaining the dirtbag ethos of grindhouse films while replacing their taped-together cheapness with a clean precision impossible in an earlier era seems to be a big part of Roth's thing, and godspeed to him on that quest, I suppose). But of the two films, this one is absolutely the superior one thanks to the ramshackle energy. Part of this seems like a happy accident of the era and the occasion of its production—as I understand it, this was stitched together from a reportedly unpleasant shoot in which nobody got along and which was plagued by money issues, and the result is a film that takes the typical amateurish messiness of exploitation films and, probably out of necessity, cranks it up to a ludicrous degree to the point of accidental psychedelia. Out of that haze come screaming the two central performances by Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, and what proceeds from there is a bewildering kaleidoscope of extreme human behavior that feels almost otherworldly as it dementedly mixes camp with sadism. Even if Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo had had any interest and/or ability in recreating that tone in Roth's remake (as they are, their performances are merely serviceable, probably the biggest liability in the remake), I can't imagine that working well within Roth's smirking, detached mode, and what Camp and Locke achieve here feels like something that could only be achieved within the specific era of smut/fringe cinema that birthed this film. Both Roth's film and this original are playing with the idoms of porn from their respective eras, and while there's something to be said for the way Roth takes a porn premise and uses Keanu's goofy mannerisms to explore the shame and puritanical impulses of a modern masculinity that nonetheless is willing to indulge in erotic play, this movie's invocation of porn feels way more productive in the end, ironically because of the lack of Keanu (the one element of the remake that is unequivocally better than this version). Seymour Cassel's character here is such a nonentity, both as written and as performed, and in that relative emptiness, it's much clearer that this dude's self-satisfaction in his station in life is a character flaw, an icky dude who has won the game of life (probably at the expense of others) to such an extent that he has lost all understanding of the precarity that exists in most people's lives, and as such, the Bugs-Bunny-esque madness visited upon him by Camp and Locke has the feeling of an uprising, a kind of youth in revolt picture, a vestige of '60s counterculture cinema only with the perspective flipped, and the only way this gross man can interpret a youth revolt is through porn and the sexual pleasure it can bring to him. I saw a bunch of people comparing this to the Czech New Wave film Daisies, and before I watched it, I felt like that had to be a stretch, but I'm shocked to report that it's really not a stretch at all. We gotta get Eli Roth to watch some Věra Chytilová. Grade: A-

Hard Boiled (辣手神探) (1992)
I haven't seen a lot of John Woo movies, but I do know that I'm supposed to get swept up in the melodrama. That didn't happen to me here; the friendship (romance?) between the two cops was fun enough, but I mostly felt distant from the movie when guns weren't blazing, which is probably a Me Problem. When the guns are blazing, though, this is of course a blast, and once they get to the hospital, this movie is basically nonstop blazing guns. This John Woo guy knows how to film gunplay, huh? Grade: B+

 

 

 

Child's Play (1988)
This movie's a lot of fun and much more patient in doling out the camp than I was expecting. Honestly, though, as good as the doll effects are, the best part is when an unattended six-year-old kid is able to skip school by getting on a train that takes him from his bougie neighborhood to some bombed-out hive of villainy across town, which is really the kind of future us transit advocates dream about for American cities. Grade: B+

 

 

 

Child's Play 2 (1990)
About as much fun as the first one, even if it sweats just a little bit to try to reset with a new family at the beginning of the movie. The foster care angle pays off pretty well, though, if only for the addition of Kyle and her very sweet dynamic with Andy, and the movie in general does a great job of basically revisiting the most memorable beats of the original, including Andy almost taking the rap for Chucky's mayhem, without it ever feeling stale. The finale at the factory is pretty cool, too, and I like that it gives the kids the tools to dispatch of Chucky in some fun, inventive ways (multiple times, of course, since "He's dead—no wait, he's back again!" fakeouts seem to be a staple of this series). It makes sense that the series eventually juked into kookier territory, though, because I'm not sure how much more juice this formula has. Grade: B+

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
When everybody says that Rob Zombie based his career on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I guess I thought they meant the first one, but this one is definitely the germ of stuff like The House of 1,000 Corpses. Cranks up the waking nightmare element of the first movie until it wraps around to being overtly goofy but also still kinda scary. Weird, bonkers stuff that, aside from the central family, only feels of a piece with its predecessor by virtue of having this ineffable thisness about it that is hard to describe but nonetheless makes it feel weighty and sinewy in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for October 3 - 9, 2022

Busy week, so there's not a lot here. But if you're just craving more, don't forget about the new podcast episode from my wife and I.

Movies

The Final Destination (2009)
Dumb even for one of these movies, and the deaths aren't nearly as elaborate as the best in the previous films. But I got a real chuckle out of the part when the guy's guts got sucks out of his butthole by the pool drain, so it's not as if this is irredeemable. Grade: C

 

 

 

 

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
I have nooo idea what to do with this. It's all kind of ugly and dumb and nonsensical, but on purpose? You don't just have Joe Berlinger direct and co-write something and have it accidentally end up like this. There's something here about how this purports to be a dramatization of real events, as opposed to the original Blair Witch Project's claims of being actual footage of real events, and it's theoretically interesting the way that the film is littered with scenes presented through viewfinders and screens until finally the "reality" of the film breaks with what is presented on those screens. But I just don't know, in practice this movie is so joyless and dull, and whether or not it's purposeful, it looking like a cheap TV movie just never works for me. It's beside the point that this lacks the primal, cursed power of the first movie, but well... Grade: C

 

Threads (1984)
I guess one of the central questions with any eschatological story is whether humanity will ultimately fall back upon its communal tendencies for mutual aid or instead resort to isolating, resource-hoarding shows of strength and dominance—i.e. will the "good" or the "bad" human psychologies survive. But one of the things that is so deeply horrifying about the prospect of nuclear war (and, to a not dissimilar degree, the climate crisis) is that the very premise of there being powerful nation-states in possession of weapons with the capability of making our planet unlivable for vast swaths of the population means that those in global power have on some level already given up on the idea of a collective good. In Threads, we never see these powerful people, who presumably have already retreated to their Dr. Strangelove bunkers. Instead, the first half of the film is focused on the predominantly working-class population of Sheffield watching helplessly (and in some measure of denial) as the United States and the USSR escalate toward nuclear conflict over proxy control of the Middle East—nations these poor people are neither part of nor can control. It's obvious what's so horrifying about the second half of the film, after the bombs have been dropped and we are subject to possibly the most graphic visual account of the effects of nuclear war ever put to film (if there's a more graphic one, don't tell me about it, please—this one at least has the levity of the slightly goofy way that human beings apparently forget to speak in full sentences a decade into the nuclear apocalypse), but I actually found the first half of the film even more sickening because it takes that all-too-familiar feeling of panickedly watching world leaders act with impunity as they ruin the lives of millions and cranks it up to nightmarish levels with the literal threat of nuclear annihilation. Only the worst part is that it's not a nightmare. The madmen who control nation-states are still sitting on a stockpile of nukes, and if that doesn't get us, there's the game of chicken the wealthiest nations are playing as they watch the climate crisis wrecking the formerly colonized world as they wait for the bottom to fall out for the rest of us. I don't think I'm an anarchist, but I've never so profoundly felt what anarchists mean about the ethical illegitimacy of the modern state than I have contemplating, as this movie forces you to, that every single world government with nukes knows that holding onto their arsenal means leaving the door open to a future like the one depicted in this film, and yet they keep their nuclear weapons anyway. I'm not sure how healthy it is to mildly traumatize myself with movies like this, but there is a kind of catharsis in seeing my absolute worst fears put up onscreen, which I suppose is one of the roles of horror media. Yay, October? Grade: A

Mini Reviews for September 26 - October 2, 2022

October has arrived! It's horror movie time, baby! Also, there's a new episode out from the podcast my wife and I do, if you're interested. We're talking Up a Road Slowly.

Movies

Moonage Daydream (2022)
It never really figures out whether it wants to be an informative overview of David Bowie's career or an impressionistic film essay on the monumental mythology and music birthed from his public persona. Frankly, the movie is pretty tedious when it's in "let's give you facts about Bowie" mode, and the shape of this film project that emerges from these sections is a fairly lazy hagiography that presents Bowie at his most sanitized and shamanistic: lots of interest in his loudly proclaimed '70s bisexuality but only the fleetingest of glances at his later assertion that he was actually straight; a representation of his strung-out L.A./fascist-curious period as Bowie himself tended to, i.e. euphemistically filtered through the imagery of The Man Who Fell to Earth; a reduction of his '80s pop period to only the obvious highs of Let's Dance and the Glass Spider tour with nary a Tin Machine nor Never Let Me Down in sight; glowing coverage of his marriage with Iman but literally zero mention of his decade-long and acrimoniously ended first marriage to Angie Barnett. It's all very flattering to the comfy alt-grandpa image that Bowie embraced in his last couple decades of life, and to be clear, I looove David Bowie and still get sad that he's not out there anymore existing in the world as the coolest person alive. But that said, we're long past the time when this kind of surface-level worship of the dude is at all interesting, and imo, there's no point in even just gesturing down the info-doc route if you're not going to get into the thornier elements of his life. Good thing that the considerable part of the movie that isn't that actually is a total blast. There's nothing particularly profound about the way that it blends up archival interviews, concert footage, and symbolically related film clips into an overcranked rush of sound and vision (Todd Haynes's Velvet Underground doc from last year kinda beat this movie to the punch), but wow, is it a lot of fun just to bliss out to a trippy montage while, like, a jammy live recording of "Aladdin Sane" chugs into eternity. You've got some of the obvious touchstones here (e.g. "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" from D. A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust movie, because how could you not?), but there's also some really good, more off-the-beaten-path stuff, like "Hallo Spaceboy" from (I think?) the '90s Nine Inch Nails tour, as well as some demos from the Berlin sessions that I'd never heard before. There's also some very cool and clever recontextualizations of classic songs, like how it intercuts like three or four different, decades-apart performances of "Space Oddity." I would have loved it if the movie made even more room for stuff like that, or was able to incorporate more material from the eras this movie basically ignores, like the plastic soul stuff (only one cut from Station to Station? NOTHING from Young Americans??) or the '90s/2000s. The imaginary version of this film that jettisons all pretenses of informing us about Bowie's life/career and fully devotes itself to doing a dope sonic symphony of his music is a five-star, grade-A experience for this slobbering fan, but even in the more compromised form we ended up getting, I still had a good time. Hard to imagine someone not having a good time, given... [gestures enthusiastically at probably the greatest body of music in rock history]. Grade: B+

Ape (2012)
This movie, which is kinda a millennial-burnout riff on The King of Comedy, probably wouldn't work if it weren't for Joshua Burge's ability to evoke a wavelength of repulsiveness that's also doe-eyed and pitiable. It also wouldn't work without director Joel Potrykus's willingness to just marinate for minutes on end on Burge's character's bombing stand-up sets. But both of those things appear in the movie in spades, and even if there's not a lot else going on, the movie is oddly entrancing as a result. Grade: B

 

 

 

The Future (2011)
Watching Miranda July movies is a weird experience for me, because I always spend the first half of them bristling against the extremely 2000s indie-quirk flavors and being on the verge of dismissing them for being yesteryear's Sundance quirk, only to then have the second half knock me flat as it slides into more surreal, more emotionally fraught territory. I don't know why I keep forgetting that July is the Real Deal, but whatever the ostensible whimsy of her films, she is not messing around; the last forty-ish minutes of this movie are some Charlie Kaufman levels of harrowing interiority and existential dread. It's definitely the weakest of her three features, and someone needs to face charges for the (mercifully brief) interludes with the cat voice. But it's also startling in its clarity in connecting the human drive for connection to the human fear of death, and it does so in a way I've never seen before. Grade: B

The Other Guys (2010)
For about thirty minutes, this is one of the funniest movies of the 2010s ("Aim for the bushes" and the whisper fight at the funeral both had me in stitches), but somewhere along the line, it follows in the unfortunate footsteps of a lot of buddy-cop comedies, in that it becomes more interested in its fairly basic plot than its own jokes. The rest of the movie isn't "bad," but it is somewhat generic outside of the thoroughly winning onscreen chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (is this the last good performance of Wahlberg's career to date?). Also, the plot itself, which focuses on Wall Street financial crimes, makes this a little bit of an awkward transitional work from Adam McKay's Bush-era comedies into his modern edutainment mode, to the point where the movie credits are set against literal infographics about wealth inequality and Ponzi schemes. Like, yes, the financial sector is evil, but 1) the movie's insistence that we understand the social ramifications of what's happening dilutes the comedy quite a bit, and 2) we're doing this critique in the context of how Wall Street hurts police benefits? Whatever, if McKay hadn't gone on to make the movies he did following this one, I probably wouldn't bat an eye, because lots of comedies have trouble balancing jokes with plot, and this movie is still funnier than most of them. Grade: B+

Hostel (2005)
I'm not super familiar with Eli Roth outside of his uneven debut, Cabin Fever, so maybe this isn't true of his broader filmography, but two movies in, it seems like His Thing is to create characters who embody the absolute worst American bourgeois traits to be grist for the inevitable mill of violence that climaxes the kinds of movies these are. In Cabin Fever, you've got the college-educated upper-middle class's open contempt for the rural communities they are exploiting, and now in Hostel, you've got these vacationing swinging-dick chauvinists parading around Europe as if they owned it (and the women who live there). There's definitely something retributive and political about the ways both movies eventually torture their protagonists, and there's no way that a movie in 2005 involving this specific kind of violence isn't intentionally invoking the war crimes perpetrated by the U.S. military during the War on Terror. The whole thing has a kind of self-inflicted nightmare quality where it takes the ugliest, most reductive fears that Americans have of "foreigners" (not an accident that this is set in Eastern Europe, i.e. one of the regions on the globe it's still widely PC to be openly xenophobic toward) and says, "Yeah, you should be afraid of foreigners, because they're as bad as YOU." Throw in some vague references to the role of the shadowy cabals created by international finance, and you've got yourself a stew going. Like I said, I don't know a lot about Roth, not enough to know if this is all some muddled attempt at an intentional treatise on American intervention in the Bush years or just an accidentally interesting artifact of that specific global environment, but I guess it doesn't matter. There are enough threads here to make the movie interesting to pick at, but not enough to make it cohere into anything too compelling for me. As a movie, I thought this was solidly, if unremarkably made outside of the political signifiers. Some good intrigue and a few fun, unexpected bits of slapstick in the midst of all the violence. Honestly campier than I was expecting after all the grim sadism promised by the film's notorious (and specious, imo) reputation as "torture porn," though I still found this to be largely unpleasant—but mostly because of how repulsive the protagonists were rather than the violence. That said, I liked how that one dude kept saying "Of course, my horse." Grade: B-

Hostel: Part II (2007)
A lot slicker and more stylish than its predecessor, probably because Eli Roth had roughly double the budget, and it's also a lot more pointed in its politics, specifically the way that global capital uses violence to coerce us into complicity in its system. I'm not sure how I feel about the way the film makes this point and then allows the American character who buys her way out of death to have some victoriously badass violence—like, the structure of the film kind of necessitates it, but it also feels like a weird Lean In moment from a film that seems like it would otherwise be too cynical for that. But oh well. Like a lot of people, I enjoyed this more than the first one, mostly because of the broader scope (we spend a lot of time with the people buying the violence, which isn't as deflating and John-Wick-y as it sounds) and the way that Roth has let go of his tick for making his protagonists as loathsome as possible. Some of the primal simplicity of the first film is lost by making the movie bigger and more expensive and (relatively) nicer, but it gains enough in watchability and thematic clarity that I'm willing to call it a tradeoff worth making. Grade: B

The Pink Panther (1963)
I was a huge fan of A Shot in the Dark when I was growing up (still am, theoretically, though I haven't watched it in a decade), but my dad, who had first shown me A Shot in the Dark, always cautioned me against watching The Pink Panther. I should have listened to my dad, because this was super boring. Turns out that when you don't foreground Peter Sellers, these movies don't actually have a ton to offer! Literally everything good about this movie occurs when Clouseau is onscreen and/or being referenced (the lone good setpiece involves Clouseau's wife inviting several men into her bedroom, including eventually Clouseau himself, at the same time but trying to keep each of them from knowing the others are there). No surprise that the sequel would throw out basically everything except Sellers. Oh, actually, there is one other good thing: the animated credits at the beginning of the movie, which features Henry Mancini's immortal high-school-jazz-band staple, "The Pink Panther Theme," and also introduces the animated Pink Panther character who otherwise has nothing to do with this movie but provided the basis for the numerous Pink Panther cartoons I have fond memories for (are those any good? I remember thinking they were good when I was like five years old!). I was going to do a whole run of the Pink Panther series, but I'm kinda scared to now, because what if A Shot in the Dark is the only good one, and I have to put up with dull tripe like this for the rest? Grade: C

 

Books

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor (1976)
A surprisingly unflinching depiction of racism in rural Jim Crow Mississippi. If this were published a couple decades later, this would be a YA novel in which the protagonist would be aged up to a teenager, and she would be given a love interest that would occupy a tedious amount of space in the book, but what we got instead is, thankfully, something like a foil to To Kill a Mockingbird: a coming-of-age loss of innocence in which its protagonist gains a racialized consciousness in response to the immeasurable cruelty she sees around her. Unlike the Lee novel, though, this book sidelines the do-gooder white lawyer (who ends up being about as effectual as Atticus Finch in preventing white supremacist violence—i.e. not very) and instead focuses on the experience of living in the apartheid South from the perspective of black children, many of whom are living among families trapped by sharecropping, and this shift in perspective gives the book a much more nuanced and human depiction of its black characters, as well as a much more robust understanding of the interplay of economics and racism (funny how an author whose family actually experienced this oppression is able to do this, huh). The march toward its queasy, grim finale is fairly brutal, and I'm honestly kind of shocked at the way the book refuses to soft-pedal any aspect of white supremacy, to the point where I'm curious if I could even teach this book in a Tennessee middle school classroom under our new anti-anti-racism laws. More thoughts to come when my wife and I do our podcast episode on this. Grade: A-