Sorry I missed last week. I had such a busy few days that I neither watched anything nor did I have time for blogging even if I had watched anything. I made up for it this week, as you can see.
Movies
Henry Selick and Jordan Peele made a movie for the freaks and the weirdos and the people who care about the prison industrial complex and the people who don't care if your movie is too overstuffed to have structural or dramatic integrity. Really terrific stop-motion animation, of course. Nice to see that Selick is still making icky-looking movies after all these years. Grade: B
If you'd like to hear me (and some friends) talk about this movie at length, you can check out Episode 428 of the Cinematary podcast.
Enigmatic, and photographed with obvious deliberation, TÁR is likely to be one of the most "Cinema with a capital-C" movies that's going to get wide distribution this year, and there's something inherently exciting about that in a world where even my local "arthouse" Regal is blocking out several screens of Wakanda Forever. It's also deliciously perverse in its depiction of Lydia Tár, its central problematic genius, a figure who, we're assured, is more than deserving of the stratospheric accolades she has received and whose prickly personality and nastily barbed speech is so compelling to watch that we as viewers might be tempted to take her side even when allegations much more serious than the distilled assholery we've witnessed come to light. The movie has a real impish glee in its depiction of both the ways that Tár brutally humiliates those around her and also the eventual indignities that come for Tár herself (right up to the sublime cosmic joke that lands in the final scene), and in doing so, the movie becomes a seriously mean black comedy of a sort that reminds me of Phantom Thread before that movie's unexpected pivot (Cate Blanchett's wiry, feral performance here is every bit the equal of Daniel Day-Lewis's work with PTA). TÁR never really pivots, though, and even given the extent to which it's such a hugely entertaining watch (especially for the kind of art film it presents itself as), there's something maddening about the central arc of the film, too, that makes it a much more slippery watch than a lot of the self-destructive anti-hero media that the film's logline evokes. Some of the film's provocations are obvious (insert your favorite charismatic-but-morally-dubious celebrity comparison here), but there's a much more insidious provocation in the sense that the film withholds just enough information from basically every single plot development here that there's a plausible deniability to any interpretation you could have—not just interpretation in the sense of what it means but also in the sense of what actually, factually occurred. The most obvious example is how the film shows us just enough of Tár's behavior around her protégés that we know she's capable of the #MeToo-esque accusations leveled at her but not enough that we can be absolutely sure how much she's responsible for the catastrophic depths those accusations indict her in. But that "just enough to be suspicious, not enough to be sure" approach holds for everything in the film, right down to a fairly minor plot point involving an alleged attack against Tár that may in fact have merely involved Tár tripping on stairs. So much of this film's plot is related via people's personal accounts that we simply have no window into beyond their own words. It's a genuinely ballsy move to make a film about an over-enabled star accused of abusing their position and then make the fundamental building blocks of its reality this opaque and inscrutable (forming an accidental, instructive juxtaposition with the trailer for that Harvey Weinstein movie that played before my screening of TÁR), but whether or not this is constructive or merely a smokescreen for something more hollow and reactionary is something I cannot parse and gives me pause. I suppose there's something possibly profound about how the act of interpreting this movie mirrors our lived reality in the real-life versions of these "celebrity accused of bad behavior" scandals in which we're invited to make decisions about the guilt or innocence of people based entirely on personal accounts. As is the case in real life, this process in the film obscures the presumably real pain of the alleged victims, instead focusing on how such accusations might undermine the elevated position of the accused, and TÁR is so deliberate in lampshading the fact that we know absolutely nothing about the victim here that I have to imagine that this effect is intentional. To what end? I dunno. Maybe once the dust settles, I'll have a clearer idea of what's supposed to be going on here. But for now, I can't think of a film with an enigma this opaque wrapped in a character study this watchable. Grade: A-
Pretty fun, store-brand-Joe-Dante-style movie involving some gross little leech-looking things that turn people into zombies. Some really great line readings, especially from Tom Atkins, who gets to go delightfully arch in the film's climax. There's not a lot to the movie besides these simple pleasures, though, and the more the movie gestures away from them—for instance, in the middle section that is curiously focused on college Greek life politics—the less interesting it gets. Luckily, it's mostly focused on the good stuff! Grade: B
I put this on thinking it was the 1945 movie of the same title (I didn't realize the 1945 movie was made in 1945 or I would have recognized my mistake instantly), and by the time I realized it wasn't, the sunk cost fallacy had already gripped my brain. A near-complete dud of a TV-movie—it's an anthology film, and only the last segment works (the last one is pretty good, though—a mother raises her son from the dead, and he's a terror). But overall, a waste of time. The first movie I had time to watch in over a week, and I mess it up! Grade: C-
I thought there would be more songs in something the early-'30s called a "musical," but the songs here are super charming. I also wasn't prepared for just how unabashedly dirtbaggy Maurice Chevalier's character is, but that's pre-Code Hollywood for ya! A highly relatable film: I, too, would be frustrated if I was winking at Claudette Colbert but instead some stuffy monarch thought I was winking at her, so I had to pretend to be in love with her so I didn't get punished, so then we got married, but then she turned out to be a total square, which is a real turn-off, so I can't consummate the marriage until Claudette teaches her how to smoke and be all cool and sexy, and then oh boy, it's off to the races! Could happen to anyone! Grade: B+
An interesting, sharp comedy exploring gender fluidity. It's always amazing to see a film from 100 years ago dealing with ideas that would have been considered progressive within my own lifetime. A little bit depressing, too—liberation is not a linear or inevitable arc, I guess. Anyway, I don't know anything about anything with gender, but this movie gets one thing absolutely right about gender, which is that men's formal wear sucks. Grade: B
Television
The second season of How To is basically more of the same, though there are some subtle differences. Conner O'Malley is now part of the writing team, and while I can't say so for certain, some of the visual gags accompanying Wilson's narration seem to have his fingerprints—whatever the case, this season is slightly more jokey, but not in any way that changes the basic experience of watching an episode. You've got the same narration, the same video-essay conceit, the same out-of-left-field moments of profundity, the same commitment to finding the most absurd extensions of each episode's central idea. Still a fun and special little piece of the modern TV tapestry. Grade: B+
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