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
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+
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
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
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+
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-
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
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
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-
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