Mini Reviews for January 14-20, 2019

Probably will be a father by the end of the week, which means that Glass is the last movie I watch in a theater as a regular old non-father guy. This seems... appropriate.

Movie

Glass (2019)

I mean, I don't even know, y'all. It's earnest and dumb in the way that Shyamalan movies can sometimes be, but also a deeply, deeply strange piece of filmmaking, both as a mainstream studio release and as a continuation of Shyamalan's filmography. This is being marketed as the "Avengers Assemble" film of the Shyamalan Cinematic Universe, but what they're not telling you is that, like, 90% of it takes place in an authoritarian mental institution bent on gaslighting its inmates (i.e. the familiar super-powered faces from Unbreakable and Split). As such, it's this uneasy, almost structureless movie where you're waiting an hour thirty for the other shoe to drop and for it to be revealed what The Deal is with this institution; I hesitate to say this because it sounds like the kind of goofy movie-buff nonsense that ends with people seeing Godard's influence on Michael Bay or whatever, but dang it, Glass is almost like an Ingmar Bergman movie with all the tortured, philosophically minded chamber drama and lack of forward momentum. But at the same time, it's also a completely uninhibited parade of Shyamalan following just about every stylistic whim that occurs to him. The camera swoops and zooms and finds five different compelling compositions for each scene, and there's the sense that Shyamalan wanted each and every shot in the film to be the very best thing he ever committed to film—which makes the movie feel intensely kinetic, as if (combined with the static plotting) it's trying to invent the cinematic equivalent of running in place. It's wild. It's also not all that fun either. In fact, the movie is pretty joyless overall, and the film's climax, which belabors some of its death scenes to an exhausting degree, is straight-up tedious. But you'll likely not see an odder mainstream movie at the multiplex this year, and even if you do, it probably won't end by indicting the police as an arm of a fascist conspiracy. So there's that. Grade: B-

The Day After (그 후) (2017)

The most emotionally immediate Hong Sang-soo film I've seen, with a few scenes that (to continue my ongoing Woody Allen analogy) approximate the kind of scorched-earth relational rawness of Husbands and Wives. But then it veers into uncharacteristic screwball territory in its final act, which... okay. Despite being relatively straightforward, Hong-wise (I don't think we have any multiverse shenanigans going on here), The Day After is strangely frayed, almost compellingly so. But I dunno, yet again, I'm not really too excited about anything here, and it doesn't help that the b&w cinematography is all washed-out and dead-looking compared to the exquisite look of The Day He Arrives, the last Hong I saw. Grade: B-

Volcano (Ixcanul) (2015)

For a movie ostensibly committed to "realism," this is such a wonderfully tactile film, so thoroughly grounded in the hissing grass and grinding pebbles of its Guatemalan setting that it feels practically dreamlike in the way it becomes pure sensation at times. The story itself is crushingly grim and unforeseeably cruel, which is much more for-the-course for this sort of quiet, desperate drama—though that by-numbers social naturalism only barely dulls the impact of the film's tragedy, wherein the horrible exploitation of Indigenous peoples simmers under the surface of most of the film before completely boiling over in the climax. Grade: B

Cartel Land (2015)

This documentary is shocking in its inability to carry the weight of its own ethical questions. Trying to paint parallel pictures of both American and Mexican counter-cartel militia groups is a fundamentally flawed project to begin with, and the ways that the movie tries to highlight the flaws (e.g. the interviews with innocent Mexican civilians) carry almost no weight at all; the movie does a disturbingly effective job of drawing the Mexican end of the situation as nightmarish and virtually no job at all in depiction the American side of things as largely run by out-of-control nationalist fears—at least, not enough of a job to counteract the impassioned speeches by the American militia dude as he stares off nobly into the sunset. It's equally frustrating, then, to see the movie devote so much time to showing the Mexican militia devolve, somewhat expectedly, into corrupt, amoral chaos and then spend zero time deconstructing the American militia dude's explicitly fear-mongering nonsense about how "people all over the world" are afraid of foreigners coming across their borders. At the time of this movie's release, the Syrian refugee crisis was beginning to ramp up in Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the United States), and the Western world's response was basically to collectively lose our minds down a rabbit hole of xenophobia and borderline fascism—so I guess the American militia dude's not exactly wrong, but also, there's nothing in the movie besides a dubious parallelism with the Mexican vigilantes to suggest just how dangerous this rhetoric is. Maybe it's just a casualty of timing; if Cartel Land had been made just 12 months later, it would have basically been handed on a platter the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump as the absurd apotheosis of these ideas. So maybe this isn't all the movie's fault. But still, it's a hell of a bad feeling watching this movie now in 2019 while the federal government barely functions because people are irrationally terrified of what (who) lays beyond our national borders. Grade: C-

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

There are some extraordinarily questionable decisions in this movie, from the aesthetic (some of this CGI, woof) to the narrative (like, wtf is even going on in this movie?) to the more serious (the brief scene of blackface, the enthusiastic "The age of consent!" line right after Lily Cole's character establishes that she's pretending to be 12 but is really almost 16). But there are also some extremely compelling decisions here, too: Tom Waits plays the Devil! A group of policemen put on a musical burlesque! There's a balloon made of several iterations of Christopher Plummer's face stitched together! Even the CGI, while often dreadful, has this endearingly homespun quality to it—the digital backdrops and CG characters come off as intentionally rickety in the same way that Gilliam's cut-out animations in Monty Python do, and it has the same odd charm that I've begun to see in some of the washed-out digital effects of Lucas's Star Wars prequels. This is one of the most inventive and bonkers movies I've watched in a while, and as much as there are pieces that don't work (like, at all), the experience of following this head-trippy, funhouse Faust retelling is just too wild to dismiss. Yep, sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie alright. Grade: B+

Medicine for Melancholy (2008)

There's not a lot to these characters outside of how they intersect the various social issues they spend the majority of the movie discussing. On that basis, I feel like I should rate this movie lower on principle. But the depiction of San Francisco by way of desaturated digital cinematography is really vibrant. There's also a lot of talk about gentrification and the limitations of late-2000s indie culture and a scene in a public meeting where people talk about rent control, and y'all, I am but flesh. Grade: B

Books

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (2018)

Lisa Halliday's debut novel is an extremely tricky book, both on a structural and thematic level. Structurally, this book's division into two large sections and one quick epilogue gives the story its titular asymmetric shape and also makes it extremely hard to wrap your head around as a whole, given how seemingly standalone each section is. Thematically, Asymmetry is a veritable rabbit hole of truth and lies, recalling Atonement in its metafictional layers but as if Ian McEwan never tipped his hand in the book's final section. It is, among other things, a study in the distance an author takes from her subject, beginning with basically autobiographical material in the first section's depiction of a young woman's romantic relationship with a Philip-Roth-like "Great American Writer" (Halliday herself was romantically involved with Philip Roth in her twenties) before zooming out in the second section to the most distant possible character from Halliday's own experience, an Iraqi man being questioned by airport security as he attempts to fly to Iraq to visit his brother. Both of these sections seem to be openly bating, respectively, the tabloid-ready biographical critics and the socially conscious critics who urge authors to "stay in their lane" regarding marginalized voices, while the final section (a lengthy interview transcript in which the Roth-esque character openly flirts with the much younger [and married!] woman interviewing him) seems to be putting up a lightning rod for #MeToo. All this is nested in this niggling feeling that at least some of these characters have been written into existence by others, and it's hard to tell what really has happened and what is just fiction (within the larger fiction of the book, of course). It's all very bold and fascinating, and though I'm not sure if I completely get it yet. But it's definitely a novel to be reckoned with and one I'm glad I read. Grade: B+

Music

Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention - Absolutely Free (1967)

On their sophomore release, Zappa and the Mothers take the absurdist, non-conformist mosaic rock of Freak Out! and refract it even further into the proto-prog psychedelic shards that set the stage for later Mothers albums like We're Only in It for the Money. Each side of the album forms a mini-suite of music that culminates in a lengthy, genre-sprawling composition—Side 1 and its anti-Nazi, vegetable-conscious satire leads into the woodwind-heavy jam "Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin" (my favorite part of the album), while Side 2's "pageant" suite builds to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," which resembles a community musical theatre that has taken acid. The intentional fragmentation makes the album somewhat difficult (though not nearly as difficult as future Frank Zappa), and the satirical humor is oftentimes kind of repulsive (particularly on "Brown Shoes," which involves a dude fantasizing about his 13-year-old daughter—definitely a cornerstone of the pageant satire and not something we're supposed to think is good, but still... not fun to listen to). But also, Zappa's penchant for the weird is virtually unparalleled, even at this early point in his career, and his utter disdain for America's ruling class makes for a unifying and often compelling ethos. Also, there's a monologue about how vegetables keep you regular, and I'm not sure if we've seen anything like that in the world of rock music either before or since. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for January 7-13, 2019

School has begun. It's no fun.

Movies

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
I've not read the original James Baldwin novel, so this is just my hunch based on what I saw here. But I suspect that Barry Jenkins's movie is just a tad too reverent in adapting its source material, which explains the over-reliance of voiceover and the elliptical, literary-novel storytelling. There's never a moment where you forget this story came from a novel. The thing is, though—it works, and not just mildly so either but terrifically, totemically. Well, the voiceover hardly ever works, and it brings at least a few otherwise transcendent sequences down to earth. But the rest is magnificent. The movie's positioning of itself as synecdoche for the entirety of the 20th-century African-American experience somehow miraculously never smothers the intimacy of this film's specific story; every human who walks into the frame carries with them a whole teeming history, both of themselves and of society's relation to them—Brian Tyree Henry's character is on screen for maybe ten minutes total, and Emily Rios's character even less than that, but either one of them could fill an entire movie. The movie's delights don't end with its narrative, either: Nicholas Britell's score is probably the best film music that 2018 gave us, to say nothing of the exquisite sound mixing. And every movement of the camera is its own mini-masterpiece. I doubt if this will connect with people long-term as tenaciously as Jenkins's Moonlight did, being much more diffuse and by-design a lot less emotionally close. But the more I think about Beale Street, the more I think it's only one or two clicks below being that previous movie's equal. Grade: A

Mirai (未来のミライ) (2018)
It's not often that protagonists who are in the 4-to-6-year-old range appear in films and even less often that they regarded with as much empathy and insight as Mirai gives its protagonist. The movie's opening minutes—a gentle and naturalistic slice-of-life depicting Kun, our preschool-aged protagonist, meeting his baby sister as his parents arrive home with her from the hospital—are both a perfect introduction for the film's key concerns (the psychology of this young child) and also completely inadequate at preparing viewers for just how deeply seriously it will take Kun as a character nor how vibrantly inventive its rendering of Kun's psychology will be. Basically a series of disconnected scenes that set up domestic situations that we then see Kun deal with through colorful flights of fantasy (and occasionally horror), Mirai is the best cinematic dramatization of the interior life of a child this young I've seen since Where the Wild Things Are. Like that film, this one recognizes that the transition from early childhood into the middle years of the first decade is wracked by the severe identity crisis of realizing that, for better or for worse, you are defined in relation to those around you, and that with that definition comes a crushing set of responsibilities to the humans with whom you come in contact, especially your family—which, by tandem, you are also increasingly realizing isn't defined by the routines by which you have known it but rather the smashing together of histories and personalities into a larger whole. I think we adults tend to belittle or forget entirely this journey, but it is world-shattering for the children who experience it, and it's no wonder that kids spend so much time crying. All this is a long way of saying that I was not expecting to be in tears by this movie's end. Grade: A-

Assassination Nation (2018)
Reactionary cinema in ways that feel alternatingly cathartic and irritating. But mostly irritating. The frenetic style can be uproarious and kind of punk rock in a really fun way, but only in pieces. An early party scene uses some of the very coolest split-screen footage I've seen in a long time. Then there's the rest. Ironically detached violence? A joke at the expense of trigger warnings? How profound. I'm too out of touch with the vanguard of teen digital life to know if its depiction of high schoolers is sharply satirical or of the "kids these days" variety, but I do know that the film barely gives any depth to anyone here, and it honestly just kind feels like a pileup of the worst elements of A Clockwork Orange's busily nihilistic attitude, just with bass drops instead of the ol' Ludwig Van. Just as aggravating is the film's commitment to playing both liberal and conservative sides of the "online shaming is problematic!"; the movie's shotgun approach to social commentary, wherein it just rapidly fires sprays of charged ideas and modern internet slang into the air, largely negligent of how each piece actually lands in relation to the others, yields some occasionally interesting juxtapositions but just as often results in discourse salad or, worse, some legitimately edgelord-ish implications. What the movie gets right most consistently is the idea that whatever mixed feelings we all might have about internet mobs in general, they have been most dangerous when targeting women and the queer community, something the movie dramatizes very well. But lord, this movie just can't pull it together into a cohesive whole. Grade: C

The Overnight (2015)
An intermittently funny riff on that old indie staple of the "dinner party of strangers." The movie moves along at a good, reasonably interesting clip, and the cast is winsome (Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling, Jason Schwartzman, Judith Godrèche), which is far and away the best thing about the film. It doesn't really have the guts to get as weird or as prickly as it needs to to make its "crucible of marriage" back half have much impact, which is fine; the movie doesn't want to be much more than a low-stakes, pleasantly off-beat 79 minutes, and it succeeds. I probably won't remember much about it a few years from now, but I enjoyed myself enough while watching it. Grade: B-

From Up on Poppy Hill (コクリコ坂から) (2011)
There's something uncomfortable about how whenever Studio Ghibli releases a movie without fantasy elements, people are lukewarm on it—as if all we want from Ghibli is "Disney, but cooler." Seems like an unnecessary limitation for the medium of animation. Anyway, at the risk of immediately contradicting myself, I don't think there's any way I could muster up the enthusiasm to rank this with the studio's best. But at the same time, it's a lovely little period piece that deploys "Ue o Muite Arukô" perfectly, so I can't help but feel that people slept on this one. Grade: B

The Day He Arrives (북촌방향) (2011)
As if stuck in my own Hong Sang-soo film, I keep watching these strikingly similar but crucially different films one after the other, and the little minute variations slowly build into what seems like the whole thesis of my viewing. They all remind me of Woody Allen, but with each Hong iteration, the relationship between the two fluctuates: how key is the fact that Allen's foundational text is the work of Freud, while Hong's seems to be that of quantum physics? Is Hong's relative self-awareness of the limitations of his "auteur" archetype preferable over the often messy and inconsistently reflexive tropes of Allen's typical protagonist? Or is Hong's studied nuance-upon-nuance-upon-nuance a more dangerously calculated self-justification than Allen's apparent guilelessness to his own reactionary iterations of his own (equally self-serving) ideas? In the cases of both filmmakers, the answer lies not in one single film but in the accumulation of their life work, one minor variation piled upon another. The Day He Arrives finds Hong Sang-soo in something of a Shadows and Fog mode, not just for its vividly monochrome aesthetic but for its chronologically slippery, repetitive narrative of a man adrift in a city among psychological and sexual foils—which is different from the Deconstructing Harry of On the Beach at Night Alone or the Melinda and Melinda of Right Now, Wrong Then. Perhaps I'll find that my comparison between these two dudes is reductive, but having not experienced nearly enough iterations of Hong's central story, I can't say for sure yet. So I guess I'll keep chipping away at them until a clearer picture forms. My chilliness toward these movies remains, although this is probably my favorite since Right Now, Wrong Then, if only for the gorgeous b&w cinematography set in a curiously underpopulated and exquisitely snowy Seoul—the ideal aesthetic for a movie (for a filmography) this insular and interior. Grade: B

The Lord of the Rings (1978)
An unmitigated disaster on a storytelling metric, essentially pushing fast-forward through the first half of Tolkien's trilogy with a few judicious edits (bye, Tom Bombadil) alongside a few injudicious ones (Treebeard has, like, one scene, and a completely incongruous one at that). Whether or not this is also an aesthetic disaster probably depends on your feelings about Ralph Bakshi's obsession with perversely jamming together cel animation, rotoscoping, and live-action footage. I myself have mixed emotions about it, but I certainly cannot deny that it is an Aesthetic with a capital A, and at times—particularly regarding the Black Riders—it is stunning, though it is just as often stunningly ugly (the character designs of the principal cast are an abomination). This is all undoubtedly visionary, both in awe-inspiring and mad-scientist kinds of ways, and I'm apparently not the only one who thinks so; one of the biggest shocks of watching this now is realizing just how much of the film (especially in the Fellowship of the Ring sections) was lifted nearly whole-cloth for Peter Jackson's 2000s trilogy—not just specific shots and setpieces but also entire stylistic devices (e.g. the borderline camp use of slow-motion footage). It turned out better the second time around, I think we can all agree, but still, credit where credit is due. Grade: C

Television

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 2 (2018)
In some respects, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel's second season is a return to what everybody loved about the first: the rat-a-tat banter, the effervescently prickly characters, the roundabout pathos, the gorgeous sets and costuming, the long takes (those long takes!). But in other ways, Season 2 is oddly challenging—not in any sort of avant-garde way, but just for the sheer amount of off-format content (to the degree that a show with only one prior season has a format). For example, nearly a third of the season takes place at a resort in the Catskill Mountains (which, for the record, seems like the vacation from Hell—summer camp for adults, and isn't the whole point of summer camp is that the usual adults aren't there?); there's an ongoing subplot involving military espionage; Midge's parents live in Paris for a few episodes. It's an unpredictable, diffuse set of episodes without nearly the dramatic forward momentum that the first season had, which is both sort of frustrating but also admirable, that the show, just like its protagonist, will not rest on its laurels; nor will it, like so many direct-to-streaming series, allow its serialized stories to take over to the extent that its episodic structure turns to mush—say what you will about the season, but Mrs. Maisel still knows how to craft a tight hour of television, which is welcome. So this second season clearly is not just idly losing the thread of its series; there's a real intentionality to every weird decision it makes, and those decisions all pay off, even if it takes a meandering path to get to that payoff. It's purposeful television. Which is why (for now) I'm going to abide what the show is doing with Joel—for now. I would have been content to have had the Season One finale be the last we ever saw of him. But here he is back and whiny as ever, and his presence is the biggest liability in this season. The intent seems to be to give him something of a redemption arc after being such a total heel last season, and while that's interesting in theory, what this "redemption" actually boils down to is not giving him any sort of moral reckoning but instead making him more "marriageable" in that old, Jane-Austen sense—i.e. having him gain wealth so that he can "provide for his family" or some such nonsense. The fact that this seemingy ignores that the biggest problem with Joel's behavior was not his career stagnation or money problems but that he left his wife for his secretary. But... well, like I said, the show seems to know what it's doing, and maybe it's playing a long game here that's smarter than it seems. For now, though, he's reminding me a lot of Christopher from Gilmore Girls, which is a big red flag in this otherwise delightful season. Grade: B+

Music

De La Soul - De La Soul Is Dead (1991)
The legendary hip-hop trio's sophomore release is an intentional subversion of De La Soul's feel-good-classic debut, 3 Feet High and Rising—if the dead flowers and broken pot on the album cover didn't clue you in, then certainly the music makes it clear that these guys are leaving the D.A.I.S.Y. Age behind. There are songs about drug addiction and abuse ("My Brother's a Basehead" and "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa," respectively—both highlights on the album, too), and while the group maintains its sample-heavy approach to song structure, the results are decidedly less sunny. Then there are the skits, which bitterly mock "hardcore" hip-hop fans alongside De La Soul's previous fanbase. It's a sprawling, twisty album fragmented by this darkness, and the record is both intermittently compelling and quite a bitter pill. I can't blame them; to be hip-hop's ambassadors of peace and love is undoubtably wearying, but also, I can't help but prefer the fun times of 3 Feet High and Rising. Does that make me shallow? Grade: B+