School's back. Yay.
Movies
About as good as the Chucky reboot, and honestly weirdly similar in premise, like so similar that I'm surprised that this got made at all. But despite still being a movie about an animatronic A.I. doll that imprints on a child and goes to murderous lengths to preserve that child, it's different enough in execution, and the emotional throughline is surprisingly strong, re: the struggles of modern parenting (esp. the surrogate parent that Allison Williams's character becomes) and the way that digital technology complicates it. It was fun! If I saw it in another setting, I might have been a little cooler on it—it's not going to blow your mind—but Friday night (Friday the 13th, no less, baby!) in a theater moderately but boisterously full is the best way to see a movie like this, and I had a good time. Grade: B
This gestures toward some sort of class commentary and/or a critique of the "brilliant artistic genius" worship, which is cool I guess, but it gets lost along the way in its utter disdain for experimental art, which ends up kind of devouring the movie. If I'm being charitable, I'd like to think that the intent of this movie was to show how capital (both financial and social) ruins the integrity of art, an idea I can get behind 100%, but what comes across a lot more strongly is this fairly immature posture of, "If something isn't conventionally pleasant then it must have been made by some cynical, pretentious bastard who has lost his art up his ass," and I just think that is a profoundly annoying and intellectually incurious position. I get that "high" art is usually inextricable from the exploitation of the system that allows it, but the movie gets distracted from that point to act morally superior to being into abstract art in general. When everyone is complaining about not getting bread or when Anya Taylor-Joy is talking about cheeseburgers, it reminded me of people (including a younger me at times—I'm people!) who think they're nobly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when they declare that experimental literature has no plot or that you can't sing along to avant-garde music or whatever. Look, I like cheeseburgers, and I definitely prefer them to the kind of high-concept fine dining depicted here, but sometimes, it's okay to say that you just don't like something instead of proclaiming that anything abstract or convention-defying is fraudulent. Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees, because this particular abstract and convention-defying piece of art kills people, but I dunno, it took me out of the movie. Also, that attitude is presented in a way that has nothing to do with the class dynamics purportedly at play, and at the risk of being the poli-sci version of Anya's terrible foodie date (a legitimately hilarious character, by the way), this movie has no concept of the kind of dialectical materialism needed to actually talk about the relationships among workers, patrons, and capitalists. I kind of hate myself for writing that previous sentence, but I really can't see anything meaningful in this film's "eat the rich" attitude. I did love Ralph Fiennes's incredibly arch turn as the chef mastermind, and as I mentioned before, Nicholas Hoult is incredibly funny as the sycophantic culinary enthusiast. Even if there's not really a lot going on under the hood of this movie, I did enjoy some of the line readings from those two, especially Fiennes's monologues before each course. I kinda wish this didn't try to have social commentary at all besides being a droll, blackly comic revenge fantasy for the service industry, because it could have been a lot more enjoyable as something just purely that. Maybe this movie should have just been, you know, a cheeseburger. Grade: C
A reasonably fun little murder anti-mystery. There are three unambiguously great things about it: 1) Rachel Sennott's performance, which is consistently hilarious (her reading of the line "Your parents are upper-middle class" deserves an Oscar), 2) the footage of Pete Davidson's character at the end, which is almost as funny as Sennott's performance, and 3) the lighting; this has some of the best and most innovative lighting I've seen in a long time, which is all the more impressive with like 75% of the movie being pitch dark except for some glowsticks and cell phone screens—half of American filmmakers seem to have lost the ability to film legibly in the dark, so I really, really appreciate a movie that is both dark and legible. All of that said, I'm not sure if I completely understand what's supposed to be adding up here by the end. Young people are narcissistically attached to their phones? Young people use the language of therapy and online social justice movements in hyperbolic and inappropriate ways? This seem like fairly obvious, even vapid social commentary to me, and the fact that I don't have a lot of access in real life to the brand of wealthy, liberal-arts-educated, extremely online Gen-Zers depicted here makes it hard for me to know where on the spectrum of satire this is supposed to land. Maybe I'm overthinking it and this is just a fun goof riffing on contemporary language and habits, but the ubiquitous trailer to this movie definitely advertised the film as some sort of treatise on The Youth, so I don't think I'm completely out of line asking, "What's the point?" Whatever the case, this was enjoyable enough on a moment-by-moment basis that I'm giving it a thumbs up, but I'm faintly skeptical. Grade: B
It's really hard to dislike a movie so affable and enthusiastic and silly, but it's also really hard to like a movie that is quite literally a Funny or Die video stretched to feature length. I knew going in that this was telling an intentionally fabricated version of Weird Al's biography (which is a good premise! I had hopes for this!), but I also kinda expected it to have some deeper cuts from the dude's career. The only featured songs are the exact ones you'd predict: "Eat It," "Another One Rides the Bus," "Amish Paradise," etc. Nothing even remotely off the beaten path. Not even "Albuquerque." Grade: C
I've never really connected strongly with these suburban psycho-sexual ennui films, and this isn't really breaking new ground in that regard—it's basically American Beauty, but with a master's degree (which is at least a step up, considering that American Beauty is pretty sophomoric). This being directed by Todd Field, though, it's at least making some fairly interesting formal decisions, suffusing the whole thing in a sense of dread and paranoia rather than the usual emotional palate of these films, and the way it seemingly intentionally leans into but never quite commits to camp is certainly a choice that demands to be grappled with. The plot/acting end up going to some pretty questionable places by the end, though, and the bemused, voice-of-God narration is an abject disaster, and whatever interesting textures are here are swallowed by the rest. Grade: C+
Television
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (2022)
I love the idea of a horror anthology miniseries where every episode is done by a different director putting their unique stamp on the story. In practice, this basically lives and dies by the execution, and unfortunately, most of these episodes are pretty mediocre, even by people whose work I would otherwise be interested in, e.g. Ana Lily Amirpour and Jennifer Kent. That said, there are two unambiguous triumphs: "The Viewing," directed by Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy), which takes Cosmatos's '70s affectations and incredible eye for set design and applies them to a nightmare house party by a rich eccentric, and "The Autopsy," directed by David Prior (The Empty Man), which is a truly gross and terrifying account of a medical autopsy. "The Autopsy" in particular is just fantastic, easily the best episode in the series and one of the best visual media I ran across in 2022. Too bad the rest of the series couldn't hit that high. Grade: B-
Books
I was excited to read the first graphic novel to win a Newbery Medal. However, I found the book mildly disappointing only in the sense that this feels like it's missing the connective tissue between big events that would pace the novel better and flesh out these characters a little more. The author apparently based this on his own experiences as a black student at a rich, predominantly white private school, and it definitely has a lot of the expected beats re: racial/class microaggressions and having trouble fitting in, so I don't want to be too critical if this truly is how he experienced it. But it just feels a little incomplete, especially as the book rushes toward its conclusion. More thoughts to come on the podcast my wife and I are doing about the Newbery Medal winners! Stay tuned! Grade: B-
No comments:
Post a Comment