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
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-
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
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+
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-
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
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
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