Mini Reviews for December 12 - 18, 2022

Three more days of school.

Movies

Emily the Criminal (2022)
A really watchable little indie, mostly because Aubrey Plaza is great in this. I don't think I've seen her try to be this straightforwardly naturalistic before, and it turns out that she's really good at it! The rest of the film is competent enough not to get in her way, and the writing, though a little telegraphed, ratchets the tension up enough that it's engaging as a thriller as well as a character piece. The ending was kind of deflating, though; while I'm not sure what the movie should have built to, it sure felt like it was building to something a little less by-the-book than that. Grade: B

 

 

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (偶然と想像) (2021)
The rare anthology film where every segment is a hit. The second one, in which, basically, some students find out that their professor's award-winning novel has some sexy parts, is clearly the best to me, and the way it just keeps unfolding and subverting itself and finding new shades of humanity in this scenario left my jaw on the floor. The other two segments are good, too, and they each have moments of profound lucidity that left me similarly bowled over, though those moments come basically one apiece for the segments rather than more or less the whole time for Part Two. Anyway, I think I need to go back and seek out everything that Ryusuke Hamaguchi has done, because between this and Drive My Car, he's creating a literary-minded cinema that I don't see anywhere else these days. Really scratches an itch for me. Grade: A-

 

In the Bedroom (2001)
I assume I'm like most people in that I saw TÁR and then decided to work back through Todd Field's other movies. This doesn't have the impish ambiguity of that film, and on the whole, it's kind of shockingly straightforward when using TÁR as the reference point. It's mostly just a very classy, very well-done version of the mythical "movies for adults" that are increasingly hard to find at the cinema. It's kind of an Ordinary People for the 21st century, but if Ordinary People turned into a Paul Schrader movie in its final act. As such, it's notable how willing to punch you in the gut this movie is. It seems stupid to worry about spoiling a 20+ year-old movie, but I don't want to spoil what the central tragedy of the film ends up being, because the sick feeling I got by being surprised by it is surely what Field was going for. Well, he got it, and it's kind of spectacular. Every time the movie feels like it's settling into a groove that's less interesting, it'll do another sucker punch with that same nauseating effect. It happens 3 or 4 times. Movie magic. Grade: B+

Super Mario Brothers: Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach (スーパーマリオブラザーズ ピーチ姫救出大作戦!) (1986)
Not particularly interesting as a film in and of itself, and it never really tries to be—this is very clearly a cash-in on a craze. The animation is fine, the voices are kinda weird, and the story is rote—sounds like a video-game-tie-in anime to me! As a piece of Mario media history, though, it's kind of intriguing. I was expecting something much further afield of what we now recognize as Mario canon, given that only the first two Super Mario Bros. games (and by that I mean: SMB and what we in the U.S. call The Lost Levels) had come out at this point, neither of which feel very in-touch with the characterizations that would become more formalized with Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) and Super Mario Bros. 3—e.g. Luigi being the gawky loser (though there are a few artifacts of those games being the basis of this, like Luigi's color scheme and the low-key disturbing factoid from the original SMB manual about the subjects of the Mushroom Kingdom being turned into the blocks in the game). But at the same time, there are some very weird narrative choices here, like Mario and Luigi playing a video game and then getting sucked through the TV into the Mushroom Kingdom, or the fact that Mario and Luigi have a pet dog that ends up being an enchanted prince (and Peach's fiancé!). Tracking the fossil record of the evolution of the Super Mario mythos is basically the only thing this movie is worthwhile for, though. Otherwise, a snooze. Grade: C-

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968)
A boring, confused, confusing, clearly compromised adaptation of a book I've never read. If you want to hear more thoughts on this, check out Episode 434 of the Cinematary podcast, where some friends and I attempt to find something to say about this movie. Grade: C-

Mini Reviews for December 5 - 11, 2022

Again, if you're reading this and normally get emails of each post in the blog, that's no longer happening because the service I use(d) eliminated their free tier without warning. Sorry about that.

Movies

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
On a plot level, it's as ramshackle as any Pinocchio adaptation (and most Del Toro films, tbh), and somehow it's still not as phantasmagoric and gruesome as its source novel. But Del Toro is maybe the most qualified director of all time to bring to life the grotesque textures of the novel, which he does with aplomb, a thoroughly bizarre and at times upsetting vision (everything inside the whale is revolting—I literally felt nauseated) made all the more disquieting by the terrific stop-motion craft. In terms of medium/source-material synergy, I doubt you could find a piece of writing more suited to being put into stop-motion than Collodi's book, and this film captures what makes that true perfectly. The rest of the movie is a little shakier, but for every misstep, there's something delightful to offset it. For example, some of the celebrity voice acting is distracting (esp. Ewan McGregor as the cricket), but then you have Cate Blanchett just doing monkey sounds the whole time or Tom Kenny as Mussolini, both of which are sublime on both textual and metatextual levels. Speaking of Mussolini, you also have the anti-fascist part of this, which is another one of those shaky things. The plot is a little awkward in how it fits and the actual engagement with fascism is a little facile, but on the other hand, the idea of making all of Pinocchio's temptations be ones that funnel him into the fascist indoctrination pipeline, including a "Pleasure Island" sequence that's basically just fascist boot camp, is such a clever idea that the movie never really ran out of good will from me. Also, I found the ending, particularly the idea (implicit in some other versions of this story, including the Disney one) that to be a "real boy" is to have the capacity to die, tremendously moving, which isn't something I was expecting from the first hour of this film. It seems like we will never stop getting Pinocchio movies, which is weird considering how off-putting and odd the original story is, but if that's the case, they could all stand to be as thoughtful and beautiful as this one. Grade: A-

Benediction (2021)
It's not as if Terence Davies movies are usually thrill-a-minute or anything like that, but there are definitely stretches of this that are some of Davies's dullest filmmaking to date, both in terms of what it's trying to say with the characters as well as the film style (which is fairly reserved for such a usually sumptuous stylist as Davies is). As is the case with a lot of Davies movies, it's about loss and memory and the normative reinforcements of the modern world slowly grinding down an individual's humanity over the scope of a lifetime, but particularly the memory piece feels somewhat thin here, and most of the material with Peter Capaldi as the aged Siegfried Sassoon feels rote and disposable. The stuff with Jack Lowden as the young Siegfried is a lot stronger, though, and as the film ping-pongs between scenes of gay men insulting one another in florid and hilariously mean ways and scenes of gutting sadness when those defense mechanisms fall away, it achieves a kind of bleak momentum cruising through the wretched 20th century experienced by the Lost Generation. A deeply uneven film, but one that has enough power at times that it doesn't feel as though Davies has completely lost control. I wish I had rewatched A Quiet Passion before watching this, since it feels like those two must be in conversation with one another, at least conceptually: alienated, queer poets, etc. Grade: B

Decasia (2002)
An incredible collage of really old silent film stock that is actively decaying. Very cool-looking; literally thousands of industrial metal album covers to be mined from this. It's a tough sit, though, not just for the reasons why non-narrative film often is but also because moments of this are viscerally terrifying: the more legible the human figures are, the more we can see the ways that the rot has warped their features and created grotesque monsters of the past. When we get footage of faces is particularly unsettling, and watching them writhe around as the film stock twists and blisters is kind of like looking at photos of drown victims who have stayed in the water too long. I'm sympathetic to the argument that Michael Gordon's score for this is overbearing and a crutch for Morrison, but 1) this film was created to be visual accompaniment for Gordon's music, not the other way around, and 2) this music makes watching this feel like the end of the world. Grade: A- 

 

The Addams Family (1991)
One of the all-time-great casts in terms of actor-character synergy is unfortunately stuck in a fairly drab movie. There are a few entertaining visual gags, and the nonstop macabre punchlines are occasionally fun, but most of the time, it's a kind of hacky, sitcom-y screenplay that is pretty derivative of the '60s TV series and the comics (I imagine—I've not seen/read much of either) without really having a clear vision for how to adapt those sensibilities to the big screen. The pacing is just the worst in this movie, and moreover, neither of the film's modes feel fully realized; if it's going to be a "we're just telling random, knowingly hacky jokes within a kooky setting" movie, then those knowingly hacky jokes need to land with a lot more frequency, and if it's going to be a "we're doing a real plot that you're supposed to care about" thing, that plot needs to be actually substantive. Instead, we just get a movie awkwardly situated between both. That cast, though: truly spectacular, and whatever works about the movie works almost entirely on the backs of these performances—and literally all of the performances, too; I can't think of a single weak link, though Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia are the obvious best-in-show with their deranged, oddly tender evocation of Morticia and Gomez. But everyone brought their A game. Too bad it's otherwise a C movie. Grade: C+

Addams Family Values (1993)
Unbelievably superior to the first one in virtually every way. So little of the throat-clearing and empty space that I felt in the original; every moment is moving the plot forward in an interesting way or delivering macabre jokes that are way more ambitious and out-there than those in the first or doing some impressive combination of both. The cast is still top-notch, having finally found the good movie they were working so hard for in 1991, and Joan Cusack is a great addition as the villain. Plus, I was heretofore unaware of how attractive Joan Cusack is? Is this something that we as a society have reckoned with? Anyway, I went into this skeptical, as I'm usually skeptical of millennial nostalgia touchstones that I didn't experience at the right age to develop the nostalgia for, but this is great. Totally blown away. Grade: A-

 

Cluny Brown (1946)
I'm a little disappointed that the rest of the movie doesn't match the delirious heights of its almost Buñuelian opening scene, in which fixing a plumbing issue becomes a nexus of political and sexual allegory, but adjusting for that, Ernst Lubitsch's final feature film is delightful. Even if it's never as audacious as the first scene, the rest of the film remains resolutely committed to satirizing the pieties of the British bourgeoisie and to the idea of plumbing as a method of sexual innuendo delivery. The movie accomplishes this neat trick of being clearly a satire, and an often biting one at that, while never actually feeling mean or bitter—probably a testament to the warmth of the performances from Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, especially Jennifer Jones, who is magnificent and incredibly sweet in the titular role. I didn't realize Lubitsch was only 55 when he died—I had always assumed him to be much older—and with a final film like this, it's tragic that we didn't get to see what else he would have done. I would have loved to see the Lubitsch Touch applied to post-war America. Grade: A-

 

Television

Jane the Virgin, Season 2 (2015-2016)
I had been told that the love triangle got more interesting, which is false. I still don't care about whether Michael or Rafael gets with Jane, and the more energy this season devoted to that tension, the more I felt myself losing interest. Luckily, what does get more interesting are Michael and Rafael as characters in and of themselves, both of them becoming significantly more fleshed out as human beings because they get plots that are not inherently tied to their relationship with Jane. Making them more human at least makes it make more sense why Jane would want to be romantically involved with one or the other of them, even if that's still not a prospect I'm very invested in. That aside, though, this season feels a lot messier than the first one, and the balance between ridiculous plots and more emotionally grounded material is a little shakier. Some of it works great: a late-breaking story involving the arrival of Petra's long-lost twin sister is both entertainingly preposterous as well as a catalyst for some more sincere relationship dynamics surrounding Jane and Petra's different positions as mothers. Other plots, though, don't feel particularly insightful as far as helping us understand the characters: for example, an arc involving a long-lost lover seems mostly to be present to give Abuela something to do besides give Jane religious/sexual baggage in flashbacks, and the few episodes involving Rogelio being kidnapped don't do a whole lot for a character who otherwise still remains one of my favorites. Maybe my least-favorite subplot of the season are the trials and tribulations of Jane's grad school career, which were never very interesting and also felt like a satire of a kind of academia that doesn't really exist—surely some of the writers of the show have been to grad school, but it doesn't feel like they know anything about university politics. These are fairly minor critiques, though; the bones of the show are so good that it's hard to ever completely derail what makes the show so enjoyable on a moment-by-moment basis, which is the pleasure of seeing these cartoonish-yet-emotionally-nuanced people tumble through one crucible after another with each other. As long as that remains solid, a few errant storylines won't get in the way. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for November 28 - December 4, 2022

My wife and I finally released another episode of The Newbery Chronicles! It's on Louis Sachar's Holes, and you can listen to it here if you're interested.

ALSO: If you're one of the 10 people who subscribe to this via Letterdrop email, I'm going to have to discontinue that because Letterdrop eliminated their free tier. I might switch over to Substack, but I may just not email these out anymore. I dunno. If you have strong feelings about that, let me know.

Movies

The Fabelmans (2022)
As I watched this, my gut was telling me that this was enjoyable but slight, a handsomely filmed and extravagantly performed feature (Paul Dano and Michelle Williams are both incredible) whose most prominent characteristic is the cute allusions to Spielberg's own filmography, e.g. the scorpion box from Hook, the monkey from Raiders, etc. But then a late-film scene—for those who have seen it, the one in the school hallway with the jock upset at how he's portrayed in the skip day film—came and hit me like a freight train, surely one of the best scenes in any movie this year and one of the best scenes in Spielberg's career as a whole, and it cracked this movie wide open for me, and the more time I've spent rolling this movie over in my mind, the more it's opened up (to the point where I started this review with one grade in mind and ended it with another, higher one). I don't think there's been a Spielberg film since A.I. that places this much tension between its thorny ideas and the facade of Spielbergian classicism and sentimentalism, and that earlier film's ersatz family dynamics by way of semiotics is the core allusion that informs everything else in this movie; yes, the movie seems like a wistful semiautobiography about the magic of movies, and the movie works perfectly well when taken as that, but The Fabelmans, with that school hallway scene, tips its hand: "movie magic" is just another way of saying "control," and Spielberg, long accused of being a "manipulative" filmmaker, completely leans into this accusation, laying bare the manipulation baked into the very premise of filmmaking, which this movie pretty explicitly depicts as a person's attempt to recreate life in his own image. What we've been watching—what we watch with every movie, but especially with this movie—is a mere simulation that creates the illusion of authenticity by sleight of hand and trickery. There's a fun, whimsical element to this idea that runs through the film, most notably how the movie shows the ingenuity of its not-Spielberg protagonist as he makes home movies recreating his favorite moments at the cinema, but there's also a deeply sad, even disturbing undercurrent to this: the longer I've sat with this movie, the more the film's depiction of the parents' divorce and particularly the mother's side of things feels like the achingly bleak ending of A.I. when aliens grant the mechanical boy a day of bliss with an artificial mother before allowing him to die. Only in this film, Spielberg is cast as both sides of that scenario, both the boy desperate for the childhood he was denied and also the magic aliens comforting this boy with a constructed image, an automaton. The way I'm describing it sounds dire and depressing, but the incredible thing about the movie is its nuance in depicting it: there are moments in which the film's drive to show filmmaking as a form of control and coercion is profoundly unsettling, most notably the scene with Michelle Williams dancing in front of the car headlights (or a later scene in which a film-within-a-film quotes from the work of Leni Riefenstahl—a truly wild allusion for a Spielberg movie to make but also probably the purest possible example of the insidiousness of film's ability to subjugate reality), but elsewhere in the movie, the results are just delightful, which is kind of the ultimate wrinkle in the movie's thesis on film (described breathlessly by Paul Dano in the opening scene), which is that the illusion of film is able to create real movement in our reality because we are able to be tricked—movies are fake, but the tears, the joy, the anger we feel as we watch them: those are real. Which brings me back to that scene in the school hallway, where an anguished school bully has realized that the illusion of himself depicted in the skip day film will have tangible effects on his real life, and the ambivalence The Fabelmans has about this epiphany is profound: there's something maniacal or even devious about the protagonist's realization of the kind of control he has sought for the previous two hours, but there's also a gobsmacked wonder about it, too. The people who hate Spielberg films (and boy oh boy, do some people haaate them) seem more conscious of this duality in his work than most fans, but it's amusing and even gratifying to know that Spielberg (or at least, Spielberg working with Tony Kushner) understands the haters enough to give them a scene like this. He's also not above making the hater a raging antisemite in the film, which is the sort of self-aggrandizing "manipulative" thing that I'm sure will drive people nuts even more. But I dunno, to me, a lifelong Spielberg fanboy whose first real concept of the "art" of film came from realizing when I was ten years old that Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. were directed by the same person, there is something wonderful and magical about all of this, made even more so by Spielberg's alternating aggrandizement and villanizing of his own profession. Maybe I'm just one of the chumps who wants to be sold a magic trick, but I'm ultimately okay with that. I can't deny the reality of what this made me feel. Grade: A

Child's Play (2019)
More of a reimaginging than a reboot, which is fine with me: if the original Child's Play is something of a response to the gross colonization of kids' imaginations by commercial advertising, then this is a pretty canny update of that concept for the fresh hell of surveillance and data collection that capitalism has brought to the act of play. It's also just a lot of silly, mean fun and does a great job of evoking the spirit of a Chucky movie (at least, the original three) without being overly familiar. Grade: B

 

 

 

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
As long as this stays true to its stated premise (a mockumentary about the killer in a slasher film), this is a great time. The mockumentary scenes show the killer, with the goofy enthusiasm of Michael Scott giving a tour of the Scranton branch, walking the documentary crew through his plan to manufacture the tropes of the slasher genre in his own prospective killing spree, and while by 2006, this was hardly ground-breaking commentary, it's fun and funny and charming to no end. Unfortunately, when the movie flips over to the actual movie that results from this plan, it turns out that following slasher tropes to a T doesn't result in a slasher that's notable in any way, and when the movie finally ends its mockumentary conceit entirely to permanently reside in the slasher mode (albeit in a transition that is pretty clever), Behind the Mask grinds to a halt. The good news is that this is a fairly small fraction of the movie, and the rest is so enjoyable that I'm willing to forgive the deflating ending. But still, it's too bad it has to end on its least-engaging note. Grade: B

The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
Pretty fun Lovecraft adaptation. The whole thing is a silent-film pastiche, and it does a better job evoking the feel of an old silent film than a lot of these silent-revival movies do, which is impressive given that this was basically a fan film by enthusiasts in the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Also, the decision to make it a silent film is a good workaround to the obvious problems in adapting Lovecraft's cosmic horror for the screen, as the knowingly silly embrace of limitations actually makes it feel more otherworldly when Cthulhu finally shows up than it might have been otherwise (stop-motion Cthulhu is very cool, too). It's not perfect, and a lot of this feels a little too smooth—both in terms of the framerate as well as the costuming/props—to be completely credible as an expressionist film from the 1920s. But still, this is a lot better than it has any right to be. Grade: B

 

Shinbone Alley (1970)
It's not a good movie: it's haphazardly paced, its "spurned male lover" ethos is mean and dull, and the songs are terrible. That said, Shinbone Alley is an interesting historical document, not just for that way the its scratchy animation style so fully embodies the aesthetic preoccupations of what is probably the ugliest (not always in a bad way) era of American animation but also for the way it fits into the whole mini-trend of edgy animated animal movies. For example, this movie comes out a couple years before Fritz the Cat, but it's got some of the same bizarre predilections, i.e. the whole "animals, but make them hip and horny urbanites" thing. I mean, even Disney got in on this; 1970 is the same year that saw the release of The Aristocats, which, with its jazz cats and lecherous Thomas O'Malley and alcoholic geese, is definitely an iteration of the trend (albeit cleaned up for the Disney crowd), and while 1973's Robin Hood isn't quite the same, it's still got animals acting like people and being weirdly sexual at times. What was going on in the 1970s with animals and animators? Grade: C

Mildred Pierce (1945)
An incredibly bleak film about the world's abject refusal to allow the titular character to experience prolonged happiness. For as despairing as it ultimately is, the plot is a lot of fun (one turn near the end made me gasp so audibly that my wife called from the next room to check if I was okay), and Joan Crawford's performance is an all-timer—if the latent noir aesthetic were ratcheted up just a few clicks, the movie might be an all-timer, too. Grade: A-