Mini Reviews for April 27 - May 3, 2020

Quarantine, Week 8: I need a haircut.

Movies

John Carter (2012)
I was really into this for the first ten minutes, when I thought it was going to be some kooky meta-pulp thing with stuff like Edgar Rice Burroughs appearing as a character. I was still into it, if lessly so, when it becomes a less kooky but still fun pulp western thing—Stanton feels at his most playful here, and there are some great laugh-out-loud moments built from the editing. Unfortunately, the stage of this movie I was least into, and the one that takes up the bulk of the runtime, is the actual premise of the movie, i.e. when John Carter actually goes to Mars, as the movie quickly devolves into some really tedious Martian sociopolitical action epic. The effects and world/creature design are excellent, which is a saving grace, but the movie loses almost all of its sense of fun. Which is too bad, because if the Mars material had had some Valerian-like invention, I would be proclaiming this an unjustly maligned gem. Instead, I'm stuck with a movie that I only like in pieces, and small pieces at that. Grade: B-

God's Own Country (2017)
On the one hand, the aesthetic of this movie is a snooze, basically the driest kind of cinematic realism you can imagine. On that same hand, this movie doesn't do a ton with its characters who aren't the protagonist—the Romanian love interest is basically just a magically perfect immigrant, and the rest of the cast is even less filled in than that. On the other hand, this movie does an affecting (if a little broad) job of rendering the cage of traditional masculinity, and the final scene is great. So I dunno, I guess I sort of liked the movie as a whole. Grade: B-

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
A thoroughly mixed bag with the usual noxious mix of homophobia and misogyny that was the default garnish to the mainstream American comedy in the 2000s. But I also laughed really hard at the "battle shits" part and at Kumar's daydream where he marries a bag of marijuana, and the scene in the police station is top-to-bottom great, so... what can you do, you know? Grade: B-

Trouble Every Day (2001)
There's a lot to process here. Which do I process first? The cannibalistic sex acts? The (needlessly?) opaque plotting? The fact that I kept confusing the housekeeper with the other female characters in the film? Anyway, I'm on the record as saying that I like Claire Denis when she's at her most brutal and miserable, and I remain on that record now, so I guess I reap what I sow. This feels like every bit the thematic antecedent to High Life in the sense of treating sex in its juicy, bodily materiality and suffering as a sort of embodied existentialism. Kind of wish this movie were set in space, too, though I guess I can't have everything. Grade: B

Sling Blade (1996)
This movie's relative chronological proximity to Forrest Gump doesn't do it any favors, as it highlights that Billy Bob Thorton's protagonist really isn't any less of a hollow symbol than that other emblem of spiritual purity by way of mental disability. Which is too bad, because otherwise, Sling Blade is a haunting, even chilling evocation of existentialism via the American South. I'm particularly impressed with (and surprised by) Thorton's direction here, which is as patient as I've seen in an American mainstream release: shots just linger in a way that reminds me of some intersection between Bergman and Ozu—I wouldn't say that Thorton has a remarkable eye for imagery, but he has a tremendous sense of tone and pace, which renders this philosophical fable with striking clarity. I wish it worked better on the character level, but otherwise, there are some real aces up this movie's sleeve. Grade: B

Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
I'm not super familiar with the Troma world (outside Surf Nazis Must Die, which I saw years ago and hated), but this was as much a delight as an abomination. It's supremely gross, and the incest angle and occasional transphobic flavors (including a very unfunny [what other kind is there?] Ace Ventura riff) are transgressive bridges too far for me. The softcore veneer over everything is also kind of a buzzkill for me, though I think that people who are saying that it's some wild innovation on Shakespeare are forgetting just how sexually lurid the original text of Romeo and Juliet is. But I adore the general ethos of this thing; I've been waiting my whole adult life for a Romeo and Juliet adaptation that treats the Bard's worst major play with the contempt that it deserves, and Tromeo and Juliet gets closest to that ideal. The movie has the bones of a very good farce, and for as much as a lot of the moment-by-moment jokes don't land, a lot of them do land, provided you're willing to go to the juvenile, continuously extra place the film's tone demands—there's just something so funny to me about arbitrarily renaming the character Paris "London" here; sue me. I also appreciate that the juvenile and extra elements are grounded in, like, an actual literacy of the original play—anyone can make a face cheek / butt cheek pun, but only someone who is reasonably familiar with the play can craft a joke as terrific and terrifically dumb as the moment when Romeo swoons, "See how she leans her cheek upon her hand," and the movie cuts to a shot of Juliet's hand resting on her bare posterior. Grade: B

Matewan (1987)
The best thing here is the gorgeously dusky cinematography. The movie's depiction of the 1920 coal miner strike in the town of the same name is otherwise told excitingly enough, and it ticks its ideological boxes: an intersectional coalition of workers united against some truly nasty coal barons. There are some basic foundational things that are pretty shaky, though; the cast is uniformly excellent (including a lil baby Will Oldham!), but the screenplay is pretty indecisive on how to employ them. The striking miners themselves are mostly anonymous outside their respective big scenes, none of the female characters are given much to do, and James Earl Jones comes swaggering in as just about the coolest part of the movie for the first half hour before more or less disappearing for the rest of the film. None of this stops the movie from being a rousing depiction of labor solidarity, but it could have been a lot more effective for me if the character work came together better. Grade: B

Television

Barry, Season 2 (2019)
This is a pretty messy season, and it loses a lot of the considered, Shakespearean arc of its first year. This isn't all bad: the freedom from that structure allows for some interesting arcs for, for example, Sally, who struggles with the intersection (or lack of intersection) of emotional honesty with acting success. At other times, though, the season is tonally all over the place, and while that was also true of the first season, this season struggles to tie it all together in the way that the first season did. I enjoy NoHo Hank as a screen presence, but his sort of cheery self-help-obsessed mob guy feels like forced shtick this time around, as disconnected from the main plots as he becomes. And with this season's ending, it's glaring how much the show is contorting itself to preserve its central cast, even when the plotting would seem to demand, for example, the death of Fuches. I'm complaining a lot because this is such a step down from the first season, but there are still a lot of engaging elements being juggled here: Henry Winkler's performance, the light satire of the aspiring acting community, a completely bonkers fifth episode that's nothing like anything the show has done before. But that juggling is a lot less elegant this time around. Grade: B

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 7 (2020)
It's fine, just like every other season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The show is walking through the motions of an aging sitcom (characters getting pregnant!), but the remarkable thing about this show is that it seems incapable of showing age, and its quality has remained absolutely constant throughout its run. It began as a mildly funny workplace sitcom with a great cast and an iffy premise, and it remains precisely that—no more, no less. Grade: B

King of the Hill, Season 3 (1998-99)
The show dips its toe a little less frequently into issues commentary this time around, which is good, because that still feels as awkward a gesture as ever (and I'm not always sure whether it's a joke or serious—e.g. the episode "Love Hurts... and So Does Art," which resolves with Hank bringing in a sheriff to an art exhibit to enforce Texas's [fictional?] law against modern art). But on the whole, this season feels like a total maturation into King of the Hill as I remembered it, the sweet show about the light absurdities of its characters' small-town Texas psychologies, and even some things I didn't remember: there are full multi-episode arcs here, which are often very sweet (the best being Hank and Peggy's ongoing struggle with infertility, which culminates in a poignant finale). More so than most animated shows of its era, this season has a sense of continuity to it that caught me by surprise. The structure of this season is unexpectedly complex for the kind of series that it is, and everything and everyone just feels so much richer this time around, fully realizing the promise of those first two seasons. But it achieves this without ever losing touch with its core episodic structure, which you know I love. Very funny, very sweet television. Yup. Grade: A-

Music

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020)
If Fiona Apple is going to only release albums once a decade, they might as well keep being among the best of the decade. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is dazzling, a percussive, bewildering torrent of acid poetry. It's whimsical in the best ways (several dogs are credited as performers on the album) while also being a brutally serious engagement with the very texture of existence and what that existence means when overlapping with other people's existences. And the lyrics. Fetch the Bolt Cutters lacks the surrealism of The Idler Wheel's tumultuous words, but Fiona's no less considered of a wordsmith here; in fact, she's better than she ever has been in that regard. Simultaneously blunt and so razor-edged that they'll cut your fingers clean off without you even feeling the pressure of the blade if you aren't careful—I love these lyrics; I want to put them in a book; I want to put them on posters and paper my house walls with them. I would quote some of the standout lyrics, but every single word sung is its own universe. Anyway, this album is great. Believe the hype. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for April 13-19, 2020

Quarantine, Week 6: Hey, at least I did an interview! With a really good poet and friend! Read it here if you missed it.

Movies

Band of Robbers (2015)
Pretty dumb. Advertises itself as a modern-day-set adaptation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—in reality, it's 97% Tom Sawyer, with the only part from Huckleberry Finn being that bit at the end of the book that hardly anybody likes where Tom impersonates Sid to try to save Jim (Jorge here). The movie somehow simultaneously treats its story less seriously but also less irreverently than Twain's original, and the whole thing has a major case of Early2010sitis, full of low-rent Wes Andersonisms and forced twee. Parts of this were amusing, but on the whole, it's a pretty shoddy effort. Do you want to see Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (and Joe Harper—hey, good to see that dude get a shout-out for once) drinking craft beer? Then by all means, hit this movie up before it leaves Netflix. Grade: C

The Devil's Rejects (2005)
A pointedly and unbelievably cruel movie, the hicksploitation of something like The Hills Have Eyes or (less this time around than in the original House of 1,000 Corpses) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre blown out to the grand scope of America itself, a pointedly and unbelievably cruel country if there ever was one. It's an interesting and often compelling decision of Zombie's to refuse mythologizing its central Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque clan, who spend the majority of the movie literally torturing the people they encounter. We Americans love the idea of our outlaws, but this movie makes hay out of the way that that that love is a fair-weather facade that drops the moment we're confronted with outlawism's brutal realities. I'm not sure Zombie or this movie really do much to recognize that, for example, the sexual violence perpetrated by its central family is as totemic as the psychotic cop's embodiment of the faux-respectable post-'70s American Establishment, and I'm hesitant to embrace sincerely the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic that I've seen some people use when talking about the purportedly melancholy ending—or maybe the movie does recognize it, and the famous "Free Bird" finale is just a winking, ironic piece of nihilism showing one American demon brutalizing another. My relatively middle-of-the-road rating speaks to the fact that I'm not really that interested in the way the movie lingers lasciviously over this brutality, but the fact that I am thinking about it this much speaks volumes about how rich this movie can be at times. Also, God, please let me become that Groucho Marx enthusiast when I grow up. Grade: B

Joker (2019)
I liked it—just wanted to make that clear before I get into a list of complaints. I probably made a mistake by putting off seeing Joker for as long as I did, as almost every shot, it seems, I had already seen in some awards-season highlight reel. That said, it probably would have felt familiar anyway, since (as has been widely broadcast) this movie is basically conceived as the intersection of King of Comedy and Taxi Driver within an alternate DC universe. I don't know that Joker does much that those two movies don't already do other than to throw a coat of class warfare over the whole thing, a coat that begins well enough (the defunding of social services as a catalyst for social unrest and individual misery, for example) but kind of feels thin by the end, as the movie, for as much as its "You get what you deserve!" finale gestures toward a leftist rage, takes on a pretty dim view of the proletariat, presenting them as society's mindless id held in sway by a nihilistic icon (another example: the garbage collection strike is multiple times blamed for Gotham's filthy condition rather than whatever poor wages and working conditions these folks are presumably striking about). I did get a chuckle out of the Thomas Wayne / Mike Bloomberg parallels ("anti-rich sentiments!"), though speaking of that, what ultimately happens with the Wayne subplot feels merely like a DC genre obligation, which is disappointing for a movie loudly declaring itself as a work not beholden to the same rules as other superhero movies, and I would have liked to see something more unpredictable play out there; the same goes for the movie's setting in the early 1980s, which feels more like an impulse to appear within the same world as the Scorsese movies it's referencing than an artistically vital choice of its own—it's obviously futile to imagine versions of movies we never got, but I can think of a much more cutting iteration of Joker set in a gentrifying, post-Giuliani (or whatever the DC version of Giuliani is) Gotham, where the class issues are no less urgent but also significantly more papered over by the facade of the ruling class. But anyway, I did begin this review by saying I liked this movie, and I do; for as much as this movie's reach exceeds its grasp regarding all the above issues, it works tremendously as a character study. Joker understands the Joker as a human being more so than any other movie iteration of the character has, and the combination of Joaquin Phoenix's performance and the writing create a richly rendered person whose journey feels true. As much as I don't think the movie quite succeeds in scaling up the Arthur's personal issues to society-wide movements, I think it works great in the opposite direction, showing how broader social movements have personal effects on Arthur himself—it's been done before (again, Taxi Driver, King of Comedy), but Joker does a good job of showing how the Great Society's collapse manifests itself on the psychology of those already living on the margins, and his descent into destructive nihilism is entirely convincing, an effect that I don't think was necessarily a sure thing, even mimicking the movies it does. To end this scattered review on a different note: for as much as this movie's been talked to death in the discourse, I've not seen a ton of discussion about the score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, which is really solid and probably at least as worthy of acclaim as the Phoenix performance most people centered on. I don't know if I'd put it above Little Women's score (probably my pick of the Academy Award nominees), but there's definitely no shame in the Oscars picking this one. Grade: B

The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Starts really good with some strong "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" vibes before basically settling into a pretty typical grindhouse/exploitation second half. The movie does such a good job of establishing the "normal" family as a thoroughly unlikable locus of white, middle-class, anti-rural entitlement that it's really hard for me to get invested in those same people defeating the mutant hillbillies (who have, moreover, clearly seen the butt-end of the U.S. government a la nuclear testing, eminent domain, etc.). Not really sure how to reconcile those two halves, but maybe that's part of the point, I dunno. Anyway, pieces of this are strong enough that I'm landing positive on the whole. Grade: B

God Told Me To (1976)
An utterly deranged police procedural turned sci-fi pulp turned ecstatic messianic dystopia. Starts as a relatively straightforward investigation of mass killings whose perpetrators claim to be directed by God, and then becomes something else entirely very quickly, something wild and unclassifiable, with shades of The Last Temptation of Christ and preemptive shades of David Lynch. It does not—I repeat, does not—hang together on a moment by moment basis, with scene transitions often feeling like they leave out narrative in between. And it has a, to be charitable, problematic posture toward its African-American characters. But I also can't think of a movie prior to this one that has a more innovative and cosmic-minded approach to the crime thriller format except maybe Kiss Me Deadly. Whacked-out, messy, weirdly compelling. Grade: A-

Season of the Witch (1972)
I started laughing when Donovan's "Season of the Witch" started playing at one point, because it's such a hilariously on-the-nose choice to have that song play in a movie of the same name at the precise moment when the main character is getting into witchcraft. This became less funny when I found out that the movie's original title was Hungry Wives and was marketed as a softcore film ("Caviar in the kitchen, nothing in the bedroom"), but then again, that's funny in its own way, because this movie barely has any nudity and is mostly concerned with suburban couples at dinner parties arguing about if anyone is going to hurry up and smoke some weed already—very sexy, ya know. So I get that this movie was kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place w/r/t the title, but then again, the fact that the movie stuck between the rock and the hard place is a snore to begin with couldn't have helped. Sorry, George A. Romero. You make good movies—just not this one. Grade: C

Images (1972)
In a world where Repulsion exists, I guess it's not surprising that this has a reputation as something of an also-ran. But it is really good (though admittedly, not Repulsion good), anchored by a deliriously off-brand John Williams score (Academy Award nominated), some really tremendous editing by Graeme Clifford, as well as a dynamite central performance by Susannah York, without any of which the movie wouldn't have worked at all. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about the story—there's a lot regarding coercive men as well as the collateral damage of York's character's self-destructive tendencies, but I'm not particularly interested in the whole "woman has crippling guilt over infidelity" angle, which is what this movie is going for probably 50% of the time. But the whole package is freaky and disorienting enough that I'm willing to put style over substance if I have to. Altman's reputation is kind of staked on his use of shaggy, improv-y ensemble pieces, but between this and 3 Women, I think there's ample evidence that he was at least as good at assembling meticulously planned cinematic work, too. Grade: B+

Television

Barry, Season 1 (2018)
I was skeptical of Barry at first; "aspiring actor moonlights as a hitman" sounds like an unintentional parody of the typical post-Breaking Bad "Peak TV" series, and the first couple episodes didn't really make me feel more confident, either, as they're basically the most obvious way to play out that premise. But then it gets good. It's not that Barry does something radically different from what its premise promises—this is exactly that story. But the seriousness and dramatic complexity with which the show ultimately bears out the balls set in motion by its first couple episodes lend Barry a terrific weight, and as the show makes abundantly clear by having its last several episodes revolve around a stage performance of Macbeth, what Barry is ultimately going for (and ultimately succeeds at being) is Shakespearean tragedy. The final two episodes are as breathtaking and bleak as Act V of Macbeth, and in fact, I can't really think of a TV show that's been as successful at this format since Breaking Bad itself. Grade: A-

Music

Paul Simon - Stranger to Stranger (2016)
Paul Simon has, alongside Randy Newman, unobtrusively remained one of the more vital Boomer legacy artists still making new material, and 2016's Stranger to Stranger is probably the best of his legacy period. A quiet, quietly powerful rumination on love, class, despair, and hope, Stranger to Stranger finds Simon with some of his cleanest melodies of recent years, as well as some of his sharpest lyrical turns. Early in the record, he sings that "most obits are mixed reviews," and he's sure to get one when the inevitable happens (criticisms of cultural appropriation will no less dog this album than his earlier efforts); but for the positive portions of the eulogies, I hope people remember this record. Grade: A-