In case you missed it, there's a new podcast episode in the Newbery Chronicles: this time, the 2020 Newbery Medal winner, New Kid.
Movies
This is way more narratively and thematically straightforward than I was expecting from a Jafar Panahi-directed, Abbas Kiarostami-written film: basically a crime film with a class commentary at its core. And it's really good at that! The transition from the scene in which the protagonist is invited, momentarily, into a ritzy apartment to the scene in which the climactic heist takes place is gutting, and the rest of the film does a good job of setting up that hinge moment. I guess I should put an asterisk by the word "straightforward," though, because it's entirely possible that my relative ignorance about early 21st-century Iran has made me miss some more thorny political context that's wrapped up in this; there are a few moments in the film—e.g. the motorcycle ride where the two guys talk about head coverings—that make me think that there's more going on there in that regard. The older I get, the more I just feel so ignorant about everything, especially things that happened during my lifetime that I should have at least a basic awareness of. Anyway, I may be a dummy about this movie. Grade: B+
Some truly vile Christian nationalist propaganda. This is great for a hate-watch laugh—the scene of the pedo-stached public school teacher (credited as "Comrade Teacher") instructing a class that "premarital sex is necessary" is the funniest thing I've seen in a movie in maybe years—but boy did it curdle for me by the end. 95% of this movie's outlining of the alleged threat of a communist takeover of the United States is so deranged that it's hard to take seriously, but there's something piercingly real about the final five-ish minutes, when the inevitable altar-call conversion happens. While every single performance in the film is sub-community-theater cornball acting, the scene where the woman breaks into sobs as she accepts Christ as her Lord and Savior is uncomfortably naturalistic, and the Rev. Estus Pirkle, who sounds like a huckster madman as he explains geopolitics, becomes disarmingly, insidiously down-to-earth as he counsels this woman to salvation. It's the one part of the movie that's not outrageously unhinged from reality, which is important because it's the only part of this movie that anyone in the pews could have conceivably experienced in real life. The verifiable thing, the conversion, has to be credible to open the door to the outrageous lies that populate the rest of the movie—as clear a document as I've ever seen of the intertwining of sincere religious experiences with a reactionary political project. Evil, evil stuff. Grade: D
Significantly less funny than If Footmen Tire You (that's bad), but it's also significantly less politically putrid (that's good), but it's also still foregrounding a psychologically abusive fire-and-brimstone, scare-people-into-the-sinner's-prayer preaching (that's bad), but it's got some fun, nightmarish imagery in the parts that depict hell (that's good). It's funny how much less sinister the Reverend Estus Pirkle comes across here than in the previous film. Rather than some deeply evil right-wing grifter, he mostly just comes across as a simpleton in this movie, saying things like one million is a 1 followed by 9 zeros and that Moses sent Korah to Hell in the Book of Numbers. So-called biblical literalists always show their asses when they stake so much on eternal conscious torment in hell. Some real "Michael Scott thinks there are dementors in prison" energy, all of them. Grade: D+
This third Estus Pirckle / Ron Ormond collaboration is weirdly beautiful in a way that the other ones couldn't be; the combination of hymns and '70s-style Baptist congregants with ghostly-looking home-grown special effects in depicting a folk-religion version of heaven makes it unexpectedly reminiscent of Spencer Williams's The Blood of Jesus, which is I think the gold standard for this kind of revival-tent cinema. There's also, as I've seen others point out, something accidentally proto-Lynchian about the tone here, especially when you get the (deeply uncomfortable) showcase of disabled people. But unlike the other Pirckle/Ormond flicks, this one is crushingly dull. Rev. Pirkle has cleaned up a lot, and with that fancy suit and shock of white hair, he's looking way more like a slick televangelist than a down-home country preacher, which is boring. Also, while we get a few scenes in hell, this film just has nothing interesting to say at all about eternal life. The same hateful, manipulative theology as The Burning Hell but with none of the brimstone that made it exciting. It reminds me how most people don't ever read the "Paradiso" part of Dante's Divine Comedy; it's just a lot more fun to see people in elaborate torture than to see people frolicking in fields or whatever. Maybe that's not what's in "Paradiso," but I stopped after "Inferno" like everyone else. Grade: D
Extremely boring for something this weird: 10% travel brochure for New Orleans, 50% burlesque performances, 25% footage of a caveman-looking swamp monster who gets captured and put on display in the strip club, and 15% crime caper involving misappropriated money connected to the mob—100% couldn't hold my interest. After watching Ron Ormond's post-conversion movies with Estus Pirkle, I thought I'd go back to one of Ormond's older, heathen movies for context, and I gotta say, I think I found the one guy whose art got more interesting during his Jesus phase. Grade: D-
No comments:
Post a Comment