Mini Reviews for July 4 - 10, 2022

In case you missed it, I published a post about Kate Bush's Hounds of Love as part of my series on progressive rock. You can read it here, if you're interested!

Movies

On the Rocks (2020)
Pleasant. Doesn't have the dreamy It factor of Sofia Coppola's best, but Bill Murray and Rashida Jones make a ridiculously charming father-daughter duo, and I enjoyed their low-key hijinks here a lot. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

The House of Mirth (2000)
Terence Davies does a great job of capturing the brutality of the Edith Wharton novel (my favorite of hers that I've read, for what it's worth), and Gillian Anderson specifically is 100% keyed into the very specific kind of detached, diorama-like spin Davies is putting on the material. Anderson is really, really terrific here, probably the technical best performance I've ever seen from her (I'm sorry, Scully!); the way that in the early goings she is able to let us understand the terrified insecurities of her character without letting slip one bit the mask of pretensions to high-brow society is masterful, multi-tiered acting—and when that mask does slip as she hits rock-bottom near the movie's end, it's some true fireworks. As for Davies, this isn't anywhere as ornate as his work in the '90s, but it's still beautiful, this time in a suffocating way that feels appropriate to the early-20th-century upper-crust-NYC setting. Overall just a very well-done costume drama. Grade: A-

The Color of Money (1986)
I was honestly a little bored whenever they weren't playing pool, and Tom Cruise is actively annoying here. But the pool sequences (especially those in the run-up to the finale, when Paul Newman's character is basically high on gambling—for a movie that goes out of its way to sneer at cocaine, this definitely has that "Marty remembers how good coke felt" feel) are electric. The very '80s atmosphere and Scorsese's occasional flashy new-wave touch make this feel ages removed from The Hustler, but about halfway through this, I realized that there are only 25 years separating this from The Hustler, while there are a full 36 years between Top Gun (which came out the same year as The Color of Money, by the way) and Top Gun: Maverick, which seems impossible to me because those movies feel way closer to one another than this and The Hustler. I don't know if that's just a testament to my screwed up perception of time and era proximity or if there's truly a much bigger shakeup in Hollywood ethos between the early '60s and the mid-'80s than between the mid-'80s and now. Grade: B-

Eat the Document (1972)
Just an hour of footage of Bob Dylan mumbling his way through his '66 tour, the clips strung together by what could generously be called experimental editing, intercut with concert footage of music that for the most part would be mercifully rescued and restored by the Bootleg Series Vol. 4. There are some really great kernels of scenes, almost none of which last long enough, but what's here is great (esp. the famous bit with John Lennon griping at Dylan for being too mopey). Warts and all, I found this kind of hypnotic and fun. Grade: B

 

 

 

Music

Arcade Fire - WE (2022)
This album was initially positioned as a return-to-form after the uneven Everything Now, ditching a lot of the disco/kitsch interests of that 2017 album for a sound more in-line with Neon Bible or The Suburbs. However, Arcade Fire ironically end up with basically the same two issues as they did with Everything Now on WE: occasionally embarrassing, obvious social commentary and an deeply uneven quality control throughout. Incredibly, the worst of these issues are clustered all on one track, the epic multi-part suite "End of the Empire," which plods along with boring observations about Society(TM) and the impending collapse of America until finally climaxing with the triumphant(?) declaration that "We unsubscribe, fuck season five." I say this as someone who is both deeply anxious about the collapse of America as well as generally an apologist for Arcade Fire's heart-on-sleeve brand of self-serious cringe: this is awful. Just truly, truly awful. At over nine minutes in length, "End of the Empire" takes up nearly a quarter of the whole album, and like the "Peter Pan" --> "Chemistry" --> "Infinite Content" --> "Infinite_Content" sequence on Everything Now, it forms a wretched centerpiece that nearly derails the whole record. I guess on the plus side, making it just one track means that you only have to press the skip button once this time? Anyway, the rest of the album is much better: occasionally great, even. "Age of Anxiety I" is an effectively nervy, groovy opener with a dancefloor pulse, "The Lightning I, II" is a terrific song in the classic Arcade Fire model, beginning with a folky mid-tempo melody that builds to a lose-your-mind ecstatic anthem of a climax, and "Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)" is Arcade Fire being corny is the right way. And that's more or less it; there's not a lot to the album, and if it weren't for the totemic black hole that is "End of the Empire," WE would be unremarkable, a solid but hardly earth-shattering release showcasing Arcade Fire returning to the safe territory of what they do best after a few records trying to push their sound forward. I'm hoping this doesn't signal the beginning of their "U2 in the 21st Century" phase, because they've not made nearly enough music to justify that sort of coda. Maybe I'm the problem, though, because I do really enjoy their back-to-basics tracks here. Grade: B

Favorite Music of 2020

These list preambles get harder to write each year, and as the world gets increasingly complicated, I find myself struggling more and more to say anything about it. What on earth am I even supposed to say about 2020 that hasn't been said ad nauseum? At any rate, a silver lining is that we had great music to listen to while the pandemic raged (continues to rage).

I still don't listen to enough metal or hip-hop, and instead, I listened to a larger proportion of jazz and electronic music than in probably any year prior. Plus, I still have probably a hundred albums I want to listen to more but haven't done so enough to justify putting them on this list. Let me know what your favorite music was this year, too, because that's always fun!

Anyway, here's the list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
This seems like a pretty consensus pick, to be honest, at least among music critics, so I'm not going to pretend like I have anything new to say about Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Such chaotic yet elegant music. It's the album I've returned to most this year, and it still gives me chills at times.

[Read original review]

2. NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM: Éons
Not much has changed since I wrote my review. Still definitely my thing: a 2-hour noise-jazz epic. Wonderful.

[Read original review]

3. Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song
Boss beats and terrific tunes. The best fusion of electronic music and pop music I've heard in a while.

[Read original review]

4. Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI
This is a late-year find for me: a single, 45-minute track that builds from a choral chant into an extended improvisation and then back into the chant. It's utterly transfixing and beautiful, indebted to minimalism and jazz but also unclassifiable in its own right. Building from Peggy Seeger's song "Reclaim the Night," the chant itself offers a meditation on gendered violence, and the music connects this idea to something much more cosmic as it dissociates from melody into soaring dissonance. I've not listened to much of the other entries in Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain project (as the title indicates, this is the sixth one), but they all apparently follow variations on this format. I guess I should listen to more, because this is great.

5. Taylor Swift: folklore
I still need to listen to evermore more, but I've listened to this one a lot. It's very good (of course)—Taylor's most songwriterly album since Red and proof, if we needed it, that she hasn't lost those chops since her pivot into full-on radio pop. A lot of albums this year have been billed as "quarantine records," but this is the only one I've heard that makes me feel happy.

[Read original review]

6. Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: Shaman!
Throwback spiritual jazz-fusion. Moving and personal and enormous-sounding. A lot of the albums on this list are improvisatory and elaborate, but I haven't heard one all year that does a better job of connecting those instrumental flourishes with small personal resonances.

[Read original review]

7. Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Bob Dylan's been playing the part of old man for longer than he's actually been an old man (he wasn't even 60 when he released the record that inaugurated his "I've seen things, and now I'm on death's door" phase, 1997's Time Out of Mind). But Rough and Rowdy Ways finds him as an actual old man (he's nearly 80), and he's eulogizing like never before: eulogizing himself, his career, and even the 20th century itself.

[Read original review]

8. Lyra Pramuk: Fountain
The liner notes call this "future folk music," which seems about right. For most folk music, the human voice is a foundational instrument, and Fountain is a record consisting entirely of samples of Pramuk's voice. A lot of people consider electronic music to be cold and robotic, but this very concept collapses the distinction between electronic and organic music, if there ever was one. It's hypnotic, warm, peaceful, and beautiful.

9. Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
This one's grown on me a lot since I first reviewed it, and it contains some of Grimes's best songs to date, especially "Delete Forever."

[Read original review]

10. Frédéric D. Oberland & Irena Z. Tomažin: ARBA, DÂK ARBA
This random Bandcamp find hasn't lost an ounce of its power for me. Modern classical drone, that's where it's at.

[Read original review]

Great 2020 Songs Not On These Albums:

Ariana Grande: "positions"—I didn't have a chance to listen to Ariana's new album much, but I do love this song, a slinky, slick piece of pop R&B, smoother than I'm used to hearing from Grande but all the better for it.

Bruce Springsteen: "If I Was the Priest"—Bruce Springsteen got the E Street Band back together and recorded some songs the old-fashioned way, live in the studio, for his new album, Letter to You. To inaugurate the event, the band recorded some songs that Springsteen wrote in the '70s but never put to tape, and those songs are definitely the highlight of the album. "If I Was the Priest" is the best of that bunch, hailing from the Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. days; like most of that album, it's a fire-hose of words and metaphors and melodies, intoxicated on the possibilities of rock music and trying to cram all of those possibilities into one song. I've liked a good deal of Springsteen's output in the 21st century, but boy is it nice to hear him in his classic mode like this.

Cardi B: "WAP" (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)—I mean, what else is there to say? Slaps. Most clever rauch-rap lyrics since CupcakKe retired (ed. to say: she's apparently un-retired now?). Share your favorite lines in the comments. Mine is the one about the "dangly thing in the back of my throat."

Cracka Khan: "Cardi B - WAP (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) But It's Dire, Dire Docks"—Exactly what it says. Best "WAP" remix in a year full of them.

Fleet Foxes: "Sunblind"—Fleet Foxes at their most lovely and effervescent.

Frances Quinlan: "Your Reply"—Really catchy mid-2000s-throwback indie rock song by Hop Along's Frances Quinlan. I've kind of fell out of love with a lot of mid-2000s indie rock, but this makes me feel like I haven't.

HAIM: "The Steps"—Major Shania Twain vibes on this song. Between this and their work on Taylor Swift's evermore, I think I'm ready for HAIM to go '90s pop country.

Illuminati Hotties: "Lucky"—A cover of (easily!) Britney Spears's best song by the plucky, self-proclaimed "tenderpunk pioneer" Illuminati Hotties. I like Illuminati Hotties just okay, but I wish I loved them, because this is great.

Jeff Rosenstock: "Scram!"—"I've been told for most my life / 'Try to see the other side' / By people who have never tried to / See the other side," this song goes, a perfect lyric for the year of the disingenuous centrism of Joe Biden's Democratic party. Rosenstock's shout-along punk has never been more cathartic.

Lianne La Havas: "Weird Fishes"—2020 was apparently the year for Radiohead covers (I can't count how many of those "artist in the bedroom" livestreams included Radiohead songs), and between this and the song on Kelly Lee Owens's Inner Song, 2020 was apparently the year for covering this specific Radiohead song. La Havas's version is a slow-burn soul take on the record, which is the perfect mode for In Rainbows covers, I think.

Megan Thee Stallion: "Shots Fired"—I don't know what actually went down between Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez, but I know whose music makes a better case for their version of the story. Lanez never had a chance. The best diss track all year, which is saying something in a year that also included Noname's J.-Cole-withering "Song 33."

Neil Cicierega: "Fredhammer"/"Limp Wicket"—Mouth Dreams was a little disappointing for me, but this mini-suite in the middle of the album was among my favorite minutes on any album this year. Cicierega mixes Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" with Limp Bizkit's "Nookie" and (eventually) a Star Wars Ewok rap, and it improves on all of them.

Sufjan Stevens: "The Ascension"—Hands-down the best song on the new Sufjan album, as pained and beautiful an exploration of faith as he's ever written. Sufjan is another of my favorite artists who underwhelmed at the album length in 2020, but this song can stand up to anything he's ever done.

U.S. Girls: "4 American Dollars"—Extremely catchy economic-downturn disco.

Yves Tumor: "Kerosene!"—Yves Tumor has grander ambitions than to just be a rock star, but this song is truly a rock star turn: a wailing, bleak anthem of twisted love, anchored by a wicked guitar solo. 2020's "Gimme Shelter."

Mini Reviews for July 27 - August 2, 2020

Plague school begins tomorrow. Hurray.

Movies

Black Is King (2020)
More so than Beyoncé's other visual album, Lemonade, Black Is King feels like a collection of music videos stitched together rather than a cohesive narrative. Maybe I'm missing some of the symbolism here because of my relative unfamiliarity with the Afrocentric imagery compared to the Americana of Lemonade, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much going on in Black Is King, despite being substantially busier visually. That said, this film is very cool-looking, the themes on black identity, while not especially complex (at least not to this white guy), are clear and strong above the noise, and the music more or less slaps, so these complaints are mostly just petty comparisons, which isn't exactly fair to Black Is King. Also not fair: the fact that it's all stitched together by voiceover from the live-action Lion King remake, which is a very goofy feature to appease the Disney corporate overlords, though kudos to Beyoncé and co. for smuggling this weird, wild piece of work onto Disney+ under the auspices of a Lion King tie-in. Grade: B

She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
Imagine a world in which existential anxiety and a certainty of your imminent death were contagious: so of course this movie is both crushingly bleak and entirely appropriate. The film layers some impressively stressful lighting and editing over a basically mumblecore aesthetic, and the whole thing teeters right on the edge of being a complete freakout untethered by reality, though it never truly succumbs, staying just barely grounded in a tangible world—maybe the strongest (albeit still tenuous) note of optimism this otherwise desolate movie offers. Grade: B

Yes, God, Yes (2020)
A sincere and sweet though not particularly insightful exploration of female sexuality and Christianity. Its observations on conservative Christian ethics are well-trodden, especially how those ethics disproportionately shuffle responsibility onto women and girls while also denying those same women and girls pleasure, and its method of critiquing those beliefs falls a little too heavily on the "they're all hypocrites" trope—speaking from experience with these groups, I found that there are a lot of people who actually aren't hypocrites and are completely committed to these ethics (though of course there are plenty of craven liars, too), and for me at least, it would have been more interesting if the movie had had to critique those ideas in terms of the scarily intense integrity that animated some of the leaders I came across, rather than leaning back on the assumption that those who outwardly care most are those who cheat most. But as a gentle character piece, the movie works very well. Natalia Dyer is a minor miracle as the lead—the screenplay gives her maybe 200 words total to speak in the movie, as she mostly just observes and reacts to the world around her rather than participating directly, which means that the majority of her character's interior life has to be communicated via body language and reaction shots, so the fact that she is an intricately realized character is entirely a testament to the understated physicality of Dyer's performance and the incredible amount of information she is able to communicate with subtle facial expressions. This movie needed exactly this performance to work, so I'm glad it found it. Grade: B-

Doctor Sleep (2019)
Points for having some really interesting ideas re: cycles of trauma, addiction, etc., especially when they are manifested through Rebecca Ferguson's terrific villain. More points for director Mike Flanagan going 110% with interesting visuals. Lots of points deducted for the actual screenplay (and I suppose probably the source novel—I haven't read it) being filled with really uninteresting, tedious cul-de-sacs; I would have happily seen the movie do away with all of the young Danny flashback material, for example. So I don't now how many points are left, but this is basically where I land. A great movie being eaten alive by a bad one. Grade: C+

Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者) (1966)
Genuinely unsure what happened in this movie beyond a lot of cool colors and hilarious posturing (the central drifter sings his own theme song??), but it's always fun to run across one of the certified Tarantino lodestones. Grade: B

P.S. I talked about this movie with some folks on the Cinematary podcast, if you're interested.

Forbidden Planet (1956)
As a vibe, this movie is peerless: the painted backdrops of the alien geography, the dream-like flourishes of animation as special effects, and especially that electronic score create a seriously indelible aesthetic experience that feels genuinely otherworldly. As a story, though, this is kind of awful. Like, whose job was it to pay attention to the pacing of this movie? Structurally, this is a complete disaster, puttering around for a full hour with boring meatheads exploring the titular planet in the most meathead way possible (one of the men actually asks if the robot is a boy or a girl, like he's in kindergarten or something) while trying to seduce the lone female cast member, only to then introduce some seriously heady concepts in the last thirty minutes that probably needed to have been teased out more over the preceding hour to avoid being the exposition-dump gobbledygook that it is. It is super disappointing the extent to which the story harshes the aesthetic vibe. Grade: B-

Television

Angel, Season 4 (2002-2003)
This season has some truly baffling plot developments in the early goings (Connor and Cordelia hook up? Cordelia has amnesia? Cordelia is in a coma? Most of these developments involve Cordelia) that eventually give way to a very cool sustained serialized arc that lasts pretty much for the last half of the season, and if that arc doesn't quite make up for some of the dumb character moments early on (though it certainly tries to explain them away), it at least ends the season on a legitimately complex, exciting run with some big ideas on its mind: ideas about religion and cults and whether or not the collective happiness of the whole group gained via religion are worth the casualties of religion's procedures. None of this really makes up for what the show does (or doesn't do) with Cordelia, which, even after the big-picture arc at the end, still feels like a betrayal of the character. But at least it gives us something interesting next to this betrayal. A deeply imperfect season, albeit with some of the highest highs the show has ever delivered. Grade: B

Books

No Name in the Street by James Baldwin (1972)
A somewhat scattered memoir of James Baldwin's experiences within the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Sections of the book are piercing and clear, such as when Baldwin talks about his experiences as a Black American in France compared to the experiences of Algerians or the passages describing Baldwin's reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Other pieces don't hold my interest as well—I'm not terribly invested in Baldwin's interactions with Hollywood, for example. But even those sections are animated by Baldwin's fiery narrative voice, and being as sharp and as fervent as he is, he's able to mine fascinating essayic asides from everything he talks about; it's not uncommon for his observations and ideas to practically climb out of the page as they take a life of their own. Baldwin is such an uncompromising thinker who, at this point in his career, had little to gain from anything but complete candor and ruthless truth-telling about America's perennially insufficient reform of race relations and the white supremacy beneath it that Baldwin thrives on exposing. The book's biggest liability is the apparent difficulty Baldwin sometimes has in transitioning from one idea to another; it's often accomplished through inorganic lurches in the writing, suggesting an essay collection with the various essays simply jammed end-to-end without breaks. But between those transitions, the book can be luminous. Grade: A-

Music

Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020)
There's something so beautiful about the fact that Bob Dylan, at the twilight of his life, continues to plug on, making music like Rough and Rowdy Ways: defiantly unmodern, even square, but richly textured nonetheless. For Dylan, life post-Nobel Prize seems to go at about the same speed as it had been in the long late period of his career which has been in full swing since 1997's Time Out of Mind, a period now having occupied almost half of his time as a public figure. Musically, the quiet, traditional instrumentation of Rough and Rowdy Ways isn't that dissimilar from what you might here on Dylan's recent, divisive run of American songbook records, though lyrically, it's a somber throwback to Time Out of Mind; whereas Tempest, Dylan's last album of original material, was at least as death-obsessed as Rough and Rowdy Ways, it did so through crazed narrators and lurid tales of revenge, but this new album brings Dylan's late career full circle by sharing with Time Out of Mind self-reflexivity on Dylan's own mortality. Death personified haunts the record on songs like "Black Rider," and Death implicitly lurks at the corners of other songs like "Crossing the Rubicon," in which Dylan growls, "In this world so badly bent / I cannot redeem the time / so idly spent," half in anger, half in remorse. And then there's the clear masterwork of the album, "Murder Most Foul," a song whose 17 minutes are set apart on its own disc and whose lyrics are some of the most apocalyptic, mournful words Dylan has ever written—lyrics that take what might otherwise be Boomer kitsch (a 2020 song about JFK's assassination) and turns it into a postmodern dance macabre that finds a parade of 20th-century cultural flotsam marching into the abyss alongside the president whose death basically inaugurated Dylan's career. It's the morbid, often beautiful old-man inversion of Dylan's allusion-heavy electric period: soft piano backing over a gravelly collage of the collective mythology of mass media. If Bob Dylan never wrote another song, it would be the perfect ending to his career, and even if he does write more, "Murder Most Foul" will still linger as a eulogy long after this moment in his career has passed. For all those reasons, Rough and Rowdy Ways is as personal a record as we're likely to get these days from the notoriously cagey songwriter, and if it doesn't quite fit among Dylan's all-time best records (like a lot of late-period Dylan, his passion for individual songs seems to wane at times, and some of the instrumentation is a bit staid), it at least can proudly join the large repository of very good records bobbing just below the classics. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for December 16-22, 2019

Pre-holiday week = little movie watching. Holiday travels = late posts.

Movies

It Chapter Two (2019)
After the first movie, Andy Muschetti and co. had three major problems in adapting the remainder of Stephen King's novel: 1. The adult material is far weaker than the kid material in the novel, 2. The adult material only really makes sense when it is cross-cut with the kid material (as it is in the book), and 3. The adult material features a good chunk of the super bizarre mythology that made people talk about the novel being "unadaptable." For problem #1, the filmmakers basically just threw up their hands and said, "What are ya gonna do?", as Chapter Two makes no real attempt to make the adult material any more compelling than it is in the book. For problem #2, Chapter Two decides to invent new material for the kids to cross-cut with the adult scenes, which is an inelegant solution, but the more elegant solution was to have planned the first one to account for the necessary cross-cutting, so now that they're stuck making just the sequel, again: "What are ya gonna do?" For problem #3, the movie basically jettisons all but the barest sketch of the book's mythology (goodbye, Cosmic Turtle, we'll miss you), which would probably have been the best decision had this movie had any good ideas on what to replace it with, and unfortunately, it doesn't; the finale is instead a protracted, CGI-heavy, repetitious slog tied together with some pretty weaksauce themes. So what you have with Chapter Two is a movie that's overlong, undercooked, and unfun. It has little of the complexity of the novel and none of the charm of Chapter One, and I didn't have a good time at all. Grade: C-

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019)
On the one hand, this is a great conceptual documentary centered around the idea of myth-making and the slippery concept of what "Bob Dylan" actually is—the insertion of intentionally misleading/false information here is getting all the attention, but just as important is the use of fictional scenes from Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara as if they are actual footage of conversations between Dylan and Baez, etc. It's all very interesting and funny and playful, and I dug it. On the other hand, this movie is just a great compilation of some truly stupendous concert footage—the "Rolling Thunder Revue" performances are much less iconic and well-worn than the folk/electric period Scorsese used in his other Dylan doc, No Direction Home, which means that this movie's live footage feels much more special and revelatory and fresh, especially if (like me) you hadn't heard the Bootleg Series release of this music beforehand. These particular renditions of old classics are incredible, and the intense performances of then-contemporary material from Desire and stuff stands toe-to-toe with the reinterpreted '60s material. Plus, you get an off-the-cuff moment of Joni Mitchell playing an early version of "Coyote" for a room of Dylan and his folks, which is beyond cool. So whether you're here for the weird thematic games or just some stellar concert doc material, you're going to have a blast. Grade: A

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)
Its lack of that Lord and Miller touch makes the humor feel forced rather than effortless, and the screenplay in general is just kind of dull and predictable (although "Evil Steve Jobs" is a fun enough [albeit redundant] concept for a villain). That said, though, the creature design is super fun—the movie never runs out of inventive ways to visualize food/animal puns, and I thought that was a hoot. Grade: B- 

Mini Reviews for December 9-15, 2019

One more week until school is over for the semester. Lord, hasten the day.

Movies

Marriage Story (2019)
In places, Marriage Story has the same vibe as Woody Allen's Interiors, in the sense that it showcases a director reaching just out of their comfort zone in a self-conscious attempt to make a Great Movie, and visibly straining in the process. The scenes unfold in artfully restrained long takes girded with stately camerawork focused on blood-letting performances—it's practically begging the Bergman Scenes from a Marriage comparisons, but here I am making the Allen-compared-to-Bergman comparison, so... I dunno. It's all just so deliberate and airtight, and all of its biggest flourishes feel like Baumbach sat down and said, "Now here's where I have to write an epic, ugly argument," and "Here's the big courtroom scene," and "This is the place where I put in the monologue about gender inequality," etc. With apologies to Baumbach, who it seems has very much lived this in real life, there's nothing of the spontaneity and molten hostility of the great "marriage on the rocks" films, i.e. Before Midnight, Allen's own Husbands and Wives, and the like, settling instead for grand gestures that approximate the form of these movies rather than coming up with a living document of its own. Which is not to say that this movie isn't good—it is! Very good at times! Johansson and Driver give top-tier performances, the writing is the bleeding-edge sharp typical of all Baumbach movies, and the movie is both hysterically funny and achingly sweet at times. But all of the best material occurs when the movie untenses its shoulders and unbuttons its collar, so to speak, and forgets about its ambitions: a lengthy comic interlude involving an accidental knife wound, a handful of scenes involving the screwball-paced casual sniping of creative-types hanging out with one another—basically, when the movie is content to be another Baumbach feature rather than trying to be the Baumbach feature. Unabashedly love Driver's character's barely reigned in contempt for driving, though—solidarity, brother. Grade: B

I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps) (2019)
A lot of people have already noted that the romantic half of this movie is a lot less interesting than the "I'm a disembodied hand trying to claw my way back to my body" half. Fewer people have mentioned that both halves are basically in the service of nothing but some melancholic mood piece fluff—the whole movie cross-cuts between these two timelines until we basically get to the inevitable reunion and then... that's basically it? There's a coda that makes a callback to a significant moment earlier in the film, and then there's a revelation about the protagonist's childhood. But the movie never gave me any reason to care about any of this. Maybe there's a metaphor here, but I dunno, I didn't see it. That said, the animation is amazing, and I am very partial to the hand's whole "Steadfast Tin Soldier"-esque journey, which is both familiar and strange in some delightful ways. Grade: B

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
I appreciate that a director with the stature of Linklater has been consistently willing to work on projects that defy conventional ideas of "importance." Where'd You Go, Bernadette isn't really the kind of movie people are mourning when they talk about the shrinking space for mid-budget films in the modern studio landscape, but it is absolutely the kind of movie most in danger of going extinct from this economic reality: crowd-pleasing, sentimental dramedies without much by the way of thematic ambition on their minds, imperfectly scripted but impeccably acted—you know, like We Bought a Zoo and that kind of thing. This is basically Linklater's We Bought a Zoo, only a little better because it's animated by a typically great Cate Blanchett and a ridiculously watchable Bill Crudup, as well as some pretty interesting material regarding architecture and mental health on the fringes of the plot. It's still a little goofy in places, and the last thirty minutes or so don't work in the slightest. But I had a good time with a lot of the other pieces here. Grade: B-

The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue) (2016)
It doesn't quite have the bite of some of the previous Dardenne brothers movies (side note: what's up with Kid with a Bike being virtually ignored in the end-of-decade lists? EXPLAIN, film critics community!), but The Unknown Girl is still an engaging little gumshoe movie with its boots planted in the textures of the Dardennes' social realism. I enjoyed it. Grade: B+

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)
It's clear that Scorsese and Co. put a lot of time into archival research, assembling this movie from mostly preexisting footage, some of it rarely seen before, others from better, more lively documentaries. It's fine that the movie is never as live-wire as something like Dont Look Back, because how could it be? The new interviews the movie gets—with old folkies like Joan Baez and some pretty obscure characters like the (extremely enthusiastic!) studio tech who helped record Highway 61 Revisited, as well as the man himself—are decently candid; Baez in particular is upfront about the extent to which Dylan personally hurt her with his erratic mid-'60s behavior, which is a perspective that's not often explored in the "Dylan goes electric" mythology, and I'll be honest that watching this documentary was the first time it occurred to me that I'd probably be a lot more fun to hang out with Joan Baez than with Bob Dylan. In fact, in general the movie walks a decently impressive tightrope between taking seriously the reasons why people felt betrayed by Dylan's abandonment of the folk revival scene while also not denying the small-minded stodginess that underlined a lot of that reaction, too. As a PBS-style piece of informative filmmaking, it's a great introduction to Dylan's early career, with enough obscure/new info sprinkled in to keep the veterans happy. As a piece of cinematic art, it's nothing special. Grade: B

Television

Wormwood (2017)
Netflix Bloat is a real thing, and it's a shame to see it happen to my boy Errol. At its core, Wormwood is a classic Morris piece in the vein of The Thin Blue Line about epistemology and the hall of mirrors one walks down when you challenge the modern authority state for the truth—this one centered around the officially accidental death of CIA employee Frank Olson that was not unlikely an assassination on the part of the CIA. It's a gripping premise and yields some fascinating material, especially in its first and final episodes; Eric Olson, Frank's son, is the sort of tragic hero at the center of this series, whose quest for the truth is bound to be confounded by the tenacity of the powers that be in keeping an air of ambiguity, and Morris does a good job of showing just how broad a net "the powers that be" actually is, especially in the final episode, where Seymour Hersh, in a completely bananas interview, basically tells Morris to his face that he knows what Morris and Olson want to know but that he won't out of a commitment to standards of journalistic integrity—which of course raises all sorts of fascinating and bitter questions about the true purpose of journalistic standards and the extent to which they truly are capable of speaking truth to power. So that's all great. BUT. There's absolutely nothing here that warrants a six-episode, 256-minute miniseries. This would have been a great feature film, but at the length that it is, it's too long at least twice over, and large stretches of time are padded out with redundant and somewhat extraneous reenactments, seemingly just for the purpose of making this long enough to be a series rather than a rich feature. At times, Wormwood even becomes something I never thought I'd say about a Morris project: tedious. It's super unfortunate, because there is some terrific stuff here. Grade: B-

Mini-Reviews for October 16 - 22, 2017

Spooky times had this week at the movies. October is looking bright.

Movies

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
I remain enamored with Tom Holland's Peter Parker, pretty much the platonic ideal of the character (with apologies to Tobey Macguire, whose dopey vulnerability works tremendously in the context of the Raimi films but misses out on some of that essential Peter-Parkerness that Holland nails). Michael's Keaton's Vulture is also a delight, making this year's Marvel outings an astounding 2/2 for villains, and while this is certainly a low bar to clear, I'd be up to the argument that he's the best MCU baddie so far. And then there's the setting—Homecoming sketches Queens and Peter's Midtown high school broadly, but it sprinkles them with just enough specific detail (e.g. the hall pass Peter holds in a school scene late in the film) that they feel alive and lived in, a refreshing contrast to the MCU's usual mix of generic Euro-American urbanscapes and light-futuristic Manhattan science labs. Based solely on these elements, Homecoming has the feel of a much better movie than it is, and it's a frustrating thought experiment to consider just how good it could have been if this movie hadn't been beholden to the blandly competent filmmaking and scripting tropes that's increasingly becoming a low-key disease in the MCU. This movie is clearly more at home with the small-time personal scenes in Queens and the high school, and the imposition of Tony Stark and the rest of the MCU tie-ins just feels tired and unnecessary and dilutes what's actually good here. And let's talk about the climax, shall we? It's another pileup of weightless CGI action, which... snooze. These movies are focus-grouped to death, right? Hasn't someone told them that the climaxes in Marvel movies are almost invariably the least interesting parts of the films? Well, whatever. Homecoming is fine, and parts of it are way better than fine. After the suckfest that was The Amazing Spider-Man 1 & 2, I suppose I should be grateful the franchise is moving in a positive direction. Keaton and especially Holland are so good that I guess I am kind of grateful. It's certainly nothing to be embarrassed about. Grade: B

A Ghost Story (2017)
I've been thinking this one over hard, and since I've seen it, I've come down a bit from my initial feeling that this was the best movie of the year. Not by much—David Lowrey's aching rumination on grief and loss is by turns heartbreaking, cosmic, and profound in the way that it uses a ghost's POV (one of those old-school Charlie-Brown-type ghosts that's just a sheet with eye holes cut in it, no less—certainly the most charming of the film's myriad lo-fi effects) to examine the impermanence of one's legacy, both in the relatively short-term context of your own loved ones lives and in the long-term view of the entirety of human history. It's borderline brilliant in places and never less than stunning visually. But through it all, there's a sort of fallacy of perspective that bumps it down a notch. The central idea here is that while a normal ghost story involves the resolution of some unfinished aspect of the ghost's life, and this film's ghost refuses to let the loose threads of his life resolve. It's compelling to watch everything change around a ghost insistent on not changing, but the film also doesn't quite interrogate this idea quite enough to escape the egotistic myopia of the way the ghost demands to be remembered even as its clear that it's time he moved on. This is compounded by an uncomfortable racial subtext to the film that wraps up a Hispanic family as well as (spoilers?) a scene of Native-American-on-European-pioneer carnage—again, interesting and occasionally compelling choices, but also ones that the film doesn't seem to want to engage in a way that eases the possible advocacy of white supremacy. The very presence of these questions and close readings in my mind is a testament to just how striking this film is, though, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tremendously moved (and even a bit awed), despite the movie's flaws. It's truly something special we have here. Grade: A-

Lady Macbeth (2016)
This movie's adept at showing the ways that oppressive social systems (here, rural Victorian England) corrupt individuals all along the social spectrum. It's not just Florence Pugh's titular Katherine and her desperately murderous attempt to cling to autonomy in the face of a literal patriarchy; it's also the hired help, even lower on the social ladder than Katherine's comparatively privileged position, who treat their fleeting moments of freedom like an anarchic sport; it's also the female servants, lower still, terrorized by the male help and exploited by Katherine. These groups form a multilayered web of uneasy alliances and out groups, and Pugh especially is excellent at selling it with an appropriate balance between nuance and ham. However, as good as that whole dynamic is, the movie can also be weirdly boring, too. It's all too obvious that this is a novel adaptation, as the story has not quite taken the shape of the cinematic medium, and as a result, there are quite a few slack patches. When it's good, it's very good. But it's not always that. Grade: B

The Falling (2014)
An odd and utterly unclassifiable blend of melodrama, psychological thriller, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and coming-of-age-by-way-of-The-Crucible, The Falling is completely entrancing and difficult to parse in that beautiful way that speaks more of untold depths than frustrating dead ends. The film hints at both the occult and the traditional sexual metaphors that accompany such tropes, but throws them into disarray through a resolute refusal to issue any sort of value judgement on the characters here. Instead, what we're left with is the rich landscape of the English girls school (a landscape that finds its emotional anchor in Maisie Williams's mesmerizing performance) presenting otherworldly occurrences with the heightened matter-of-factness of myth. It's kind of amazing. Grade: A

The Others (2001)
Right up to its final 10-ish minutes, The Others is very close to perfection (minus a sequence of scenes involving an absentee husband that constitutes the sole loose wheel in the set), but the movie sails right past the goal posts into merely very good territory with an ending that's thematically interesting but, in practice, deflating. But even that can't put a damper on the lavish sets (filmed in sort of the platonic ideal of a haunted manor) and eloquent lighting (probably the best-lit horror movie of the past 20 years, no joke), to mention nothing of a typically excellent Nicole Kidman. It's frustratingly close to being a masterpiece, and weirdly, that probably knocks it down a few more notches than a movie that didn't shoot so high to begin with. But there's a ton to enjoy here. Grade: B+

They Live (1988)
The only thing holding this movie back from being top-tier John Carpenter alongside The Thing and Halloween is the vagueness of its conspiracy plot, which is broad enough in its New World Order archetypes to accommodate pretty much any lens you want to put on it without really saying anything too meaningful about any of those lenses. However, everything else about They Live is a delight, from the retro B&W schlock of the "sunglasses" POV to the primal precision of the action beats to the typically laconic Carpenter wit ("...and I'm all outta bubblegum"). Grade: A-

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
The thing every The Phantom of the Opera adaptation must deal with is that the original novel kinda sucks, wanting to glom dark Romanticism's archetypal profundity without offering anything of substance of its own. The 1925 adaptation has at least two considerable benefits over its source material. First, it's able to actually show the rich imagery of its opera house and adjoined catacombs, and given this was 1925 and the height of the cash-flushed opulence that was the American silent film industry, you know it looks stupendous. Second, it sidelines Raoul for the majority of the film, which is great because Raoul is a drip. That doesn't quite solve the central problem that the story still isn't that interesting, but in describing this movie, I may have just talked myself up half a letter grade. Grade: B

Books

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)
It's frustrating that this novel isn't better than it is: the prose is inelegant, the story is way overplotted (sometimes to no apparent effect—e.g. a running subplot that involves sexual tension between Starr and her boyfriend, which culminates in... nothing), many of the characters fit stock types, and the happy shades of the ending feel unearned. Basically, it has all the usual shortcomings that plague the average YA novel. But those flaws are matched by some impressive strengths as well. Thomas has a fantastic command of setting and a real knack for using characters and various bits of cultural ephemera to illustrate vibrant communities, especially the African-American inner-city neighborhood that is the stage for the majority of the novel. And within this setting is embedded the novel's second great strength, which is the way it shows the exchanges and conflicts of ideas within this community. The characters in The Hate U Give aren't always well-drawn in the dramatic sense of having nuanced motives that evolve over time as they encounter conflict (with the exception of Starr and her father [the two best characters in the novel by a country mile], these are mostly static voices), but Thomas makes these characters tools for depicting the ways that communities dialogue within themselves—not in the sense that one character is right and the other character is wrong but in a way that shows how communities that are mostly united on a front (like the African-American community's unanimously grieved response to a cop's fatal shooting of a black teen) have diverse and often contradictory reactions within that front, often stemming from subtle but important differences in worldview and background. Through that act of community-wide discourse, these characters occasionally become compelling in a collective sort of way. It's undeniably exciting to see a low-income African-American community with its (often radical) political beliefs taken so seriously and respectfully in a YA setting. I just wish the entire package were something a bit more refined—the good things here are the sort of features I'd love to see blossomed in a masterpiece novel instead of trapped in a just pretty good one. Grade: B

Music

Bob Dylan - The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964)
I go back and forth on whether Blonde on Blonde is the weakest of Dylan's classic 1960s run of albums (search your feelings, you know it to be true). But when it's not that one, The Times They Are a-Changin' is definitely the alternate pick. That's not to say this is a bad album. But Times is certainly Dylan's most obvious and plodding record of the era, the one that feels most of the Folk Revival scene of the early '60s that he'd spurn only a year later. Dylan could be a caustic and compelling political writer (see both the preceding Freewheelin' and the soon-to-be-recorded Bringing It All Back Home), but his politics here are just kind of bluntly laid out, sans the elegance of his earlier work or the vitriol of his rock trio. His work as a Civil Rights ally on this album is significant, but in a kind of historical, abstract sense that's hard to feel in your gut. There are good—very good—songs here: I'm thinking specifically of "With God on Our Side" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." But the album doesn't have a ton that you can't find executed better on superior Dylan LPs. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for July 31 - August 6, 2017

Last day before students come back. Exciting stuff, sure, but I'll miss all that spare time.

Movies

Song to Song (2017)
Points to Terrance Malick for just how far off-brand he goes in Song to Song. This movie's 129 minutes show us scenes of graphic nudity, prostitution, lots of rock music, very little classical music, Flea and Patti Smith (both playing themselves), zero natural imagery, crowded urban spaces, and the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms (though honestly, it's amazing that it's taken so long for psychedelics to make it into a Malick film). However, if you've been paying attention to this director's post-Tree-of-Life output, this might not be all that strange to you, although Song to Song is certainly the most committed iteration of this new Malick, which generally involves a sort of feature-length video-essay on the intersection of contemporary urban/suburban design with modern psychological malaise. It's all very pretty and interestingly shot (as with last year's stellar Knight of Cups, this is all shot in digital, another new Malick quirk), the concrete, glass, and water of the modern city yearning for mystic grandeur like a hollow mimicry of the lush nature of The New World or Days of Heaven. But this is, by far, the most narrative-heavy of the recent Malick trilogy, and while I'm all for Malick returning to narrative film, there's just not a lot under the hood here. Knight of Cups turned its scenes into literal archetypes, with its convergences of Pilgrim's Progress with the Tarot deck, and Song to Song seems to have done the same thing but forgotten to tell us so—Ryan Gosling is an almost comically saintly figure (he's principled! he doesn't sell out his music! he cares for an aging relative!), Rooney Mara is adrift in a sexual odyssey of sorts as she works through the various ways modern society has made experiences hollow, and while there are some interesting wrinkles in the characters played by Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman (who have a profoundly twisted relationship, especially for a Malick film), the movie never really works through the trope-ish flatness of Gosling and Mara's characters. It ends strong with a tremendously sweet conclusion, but getting there is frequently cold and uninteresting. A noble attempt, to be sure, but it doesn't really amount to anything substantially successful. Grade: B-

The Lost City of Z (2016)
The film described in the reviews of The Lost City of Z's small village's worth of vocal advocates is recognizable enough to what I saw to let me know that I didn't watch a completely different movie. But... I dunno, guys. I see the pieces of a masterpiece, but they're never really coming together in the most powerful way. I'm not sure whether to blame the editing or the screenplay, both of which, I think, flub on the admittedly difficult task of compressing years of real history into something of a mystically charged tale of a man determined to find an ancient ruin in the heart of the Amazon. Or maybe it's that writer/director James Gray is hamstrung by being tied to actual history. Whatever the case, this movie's sweep feels weightless when it should be grand, and its philosophical impulses bump up against but never quite nail down profundity. The visuals are splendid, and on a scene-by-scene basis, the film is powerful. Coming together into a cumulative thing bigger than the sum of those parts, though, is something that still feels just outside the movie's grasp. Grade: B

The Hunter (2011)
This movie should be a lot better than it is—a spare, pristine ethics thriller about the intersection between commerce and violence and the natural world. And it kind of is that, in theory. But Willem Dafoe's mercenary hunter protagonist (hired, in the movie, to kill the last few Tasmanian tigers that keep the species from total extinction) remains a dark nothing at the center of the film that keeps anything from actually catalyzing, and the movie never really figures out his psychology on a holistic level. So we're stuck with this, mildly entertaining and not altogether "bad" but still not particularly compelling either. Grade: B-

Knowing (2009)
The film's numerology-mixed-with-Ancient-Aliens-mixed-with-the-Book-of-Revelation-mixed-with-M.-Night-Shyamalan screenplay is too sincerely dumb for most of the movie to transcend it. But I'll give it this: the final 15-ish minutes are absolutely breathtaking, mainly in a visual sense but also thematically—a demented inversion of Close Encounters of the Close Kind that's simultaneously horrifying and kind of wonderful, undergirded by some unconvincing but nevertheless breathtaking CGI. Too bad there are nearly two mediocre hours attached to that ending. Grade: C

I'm Not There. (2007)
An obvious companion to Haynes's Velvet Goldmine, I'm Not There is an impressionist, heavily art-house-ified treatment of the creative life of a cornerstone figure in rock history, as much cultural commentary as biopic. But whereas Velvet Goldmine is about the experience of rock fandom, filtering its not-quite David Bowie through the lens of journalists and, more significantly, young and impressionable teens, I'm Not There is a rendering of the experience of actually being the focus of that immense scrutiny and the various ways that celebrity and idolization fractures identity and compromises message—Bob Dylan is played by a whole host of actors ranging from kooky (Richard Gere, playing Dylan as Billy the Kid [whose allusion to Dylan's role in the Peckinpah movie does nothing to make the out-of-nowhere western scenes any less bizarre]) to brilliant (an Academy-Award-nominated Cate Blanchett plays the electric-era Dylan with an astounding fidelity to the Dylan seen in Dont Look Back and other artifacts from the era). Unlike with Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes was actually able to secure the rights to use the artist-of-focus's songs, so we're treated to a wall-to-wall Dylan soundtrack, which is an aural pleasure but might end up being the film's biggest misstep—the lack of actual Bowie songs in Velvet Goldmine lent a mythic, shape-shifting quality to the film that complicated its narrative's relationship to history, but while I'm Not There, with its intentional surreality and actor-jumbling, is much more forthrightly shape-shifting, the tying of it all to Dylan's actual music somehow makes the film a bit too literal in its approach to the artist, transforming his life into something of a solvable jigsaw puzzle of symbolism rather than the inscrutable mystery of Velvet Goldmine's central character. Which is not to say this is "bad" or even just "okay." It's very good, and you're unlikely to find a more interesting and visually distinctive depiction of celebrity in film. It's just the slightest bit frustrating to see a double instead of a home run, given the subject and style. Grade: B+

It Came From Outer Space (1953)
Despite the assertions of its poster, It Came From Outer Space is a mostly un-amazing, un-exciting, and un-spectacular sci-fi cheapie with fairly hoaky 3D effects. Its shape-shifting alien does feel like an antecedent to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter's The Thing, which is worth something, I guess. But beyond historical curiosity, there's not a lot to be excited about her—certainly not the plot, whose third act wavers from "the aliens are evil!" to  "the aliens are just misunderstood!" to "the aliens are evil again, sort of!" to "but we kind of root for them anyway!" so quickly you'll barely have time to say, "Make up your mind already!" Grade: C+



Music

Arcade Fire - Everything Now (2017)
There's been something of a critical piling-on with indie stadium/art rockers Arcade Fire's fifth studio album, and I don't think that's quite fair, especially because the record contains some of their career-best material. I'm talking specifically about the triumphant title cut, the ABBA/Bowie fusion of our dreams, and the controversial "Creature Comfort," a nervy exploration of the ways the band may be complicit in the social structures that lead people to suicide that also has the best beat of the album. That said, the core critiques of the album aren't entirely off-base either; Everything Now is very much a concept album—and one insistent on dissecting the social ills of the melding of predatory capitalism with the "infinite content" of the Internet age. Arcade Fire have positioned themselves as something like 21st-century prophets since at least Neon Bible, so it's not as if that socially conscious reach is the problem in and of itself. However, no matter the intelligence of the ideas, the success of any concept album always lives and dies with the music, and there are definitely sections of Everything Now (the pretty weak middle "Peter Pan"-"Chemistry"-"Infinite Content/Infinite_Content" trio especially) where the album becomes more of an exercise in "I see what you did there" than anything truly felt. The good strongly outweighs the bad, but the bad is almost certainly the worst of their career. It's a solid effort but also the least-essential in Arcade Fire's discography. Grade: B

The Masters Make the Rules: Bob Dylan and Ignoring the Nobel

You may have heard that on October 13 of this year, the Nobel Committee for Literature announced that it would bestow this year's prize on one Robert Zimmerman, alias Bob Dylan.

That was 11 days ago. You may also have heard that Mr. Dylan has since refused to acknowledge his award. Well, "refused" seems like too active of a word; "ignored" may be more accurate. Hardcore ignored. Bob Dylan, it seems, has been screening calls from Sweden as if they were creditors collecting the mortgage and not, you know, granting him one of the most prestigious awards in the world.

The situation is not entirely unprecedented. Jean-Paul Sartre refused the award when he won it in 1964. Albert Einstein took the prize and money but skipped out on the award ceremony in 1922. But at least they acknowledged the fact that they'd won at all and, presumably, answered the Committee's notices. But outside of an opportunistic publication of his complete lyrics (one that was itself removed from Dylan's website recently), Bob's said nary a word, despite the fact that he's played several concerts since the announcement of his win and has been the center of a vicious media frenzy, which has led one member of the Nobel Committee to call him "impolite" and "arrogant."

All of this is hilarious and A+ entertainment for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that Dylan's being "impolite" and "arrogant" was an absolutely predictable outcome; in fact, anyone who knows Bob Dylan's career at all should have expected some major-league trolling from the guy. Thumbing his nose at those who consider themselves important is something that's defined Dylan's mystique since at least his mid-'60s electric turn. The Nobel Committee's sputtering disbelief that one of their laureates wouldn't find their award all that interesting or important bears no little resemblance to the the bevy of befuddled, self-important journalists who try to crack the Dylan enigma in Dont Look Back.

Because let's be honest: as much as the Nobel Prize in Literature is a valuable platform for giving a platform to important but little-known writers, it's also at least as much an instrument of academic elitism: a self-declared authority of taste, a metric for how cultured and/or educated one is ("But of course, as Kertész writes..."). And in fairness to the prize, selecting Dylan this year seems to be, in part, a gesture toward a more egalitarian award by inviting songwriting under the umbrella of poetry. But that doesn't change the fact that the prize is exactly the sort of inflated, arbitrary marker of upper-crustiness that feels great to tear down to size, which is (intentionally or not) exactly what Dylan's accomplishing here. Irreverence is awesome, cathartic, and fun. Seeing the self-assured hilariously robbed of their self-assuredness is a wonderful feeling, and it's exactly why we put principals, bosses, and mayors in the dunk tank and not, I dunno, janitors. Being sardonic and flippant is an essential and powerful equalizing force in a world with few legitimate equalizers.

So I'm rooting for Dylan here.

And yet.

A few of my friends have argued that awarding Dylan the Literature prize makes that prize meaningless by virtue of broadening the definition of "literature" beyond any helpful scope. I disagree with their reasons (you mean songwriting can be literary, too?), but it's with a sort of melancholy reluctant that the more I think about this situation, the more I think they're right in general: Dylan is edging the Nobel Prize in Literature toward meaninglessness. There's an "emperor's new clothes" quality to any award, especially artistic ones: these things are all important because enough people have agreed that they are important. I could invent an award tomorrow for any random thing (The O'Malley Award for Best Knoxville Area Transit Bus Route [debut laureate: Route 24: Inskip]), and if I somehow mustered up enough people worldwide to be passionate about excellence in KAT route service, it could conceivably become as important as the Nobel Prize without any shift in what exactly that prize is. Take away people's respect for the award and it magically becomes no longer important. There's nothing intrinsic to these awards (and heck, even the money Nobel laureates receive has a fiat value that we've all pretty much just agreed exists). So when Bob Dylan acts like Bob Dylan and gives the freakin' Nobel Prize an icy shoulder, he's making the whole enterprise look foolish and petty and reminding us that there's really no such thing as the freakin' Nobel Prize—without our feeding the award's prestige, the Nobel Prize in Literature is just another title someone made up. Does anyone else here notice how wrinkly and pale the emperor is?

And that, as I've already said, is great and hilarious and cool, but it's also kind of, like... sad? As much as these awards can be stuffy and elitist and whatever, there's also something undeniably cozy about everyone in the literary world (and, to a certain extent, the culture at large) upholding this one award as a standard-bearer to be lauded and scrutinized and aspired to. In an age of increasing media accessibility, this sort of aesthetic gate-keeping and sign-posting is pretty useful (given five authors to chose to read, I'm going to chose the Nobel-winning one), not to mention unifying. Awards can only exist where there also exist shared values, and shared values are nice. These are how groups are formed. Without shared values, any community is just a bunch of individuals existing adjacent to one another. At least we could be a bunch of individuals existing adjacent to one another who also happen to all care about the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan's hijinks make even this latter prospect less likely.

This is the casualty of irreverence, I guess.

The trajectory of postmodernism into whatever cultural moment it is we're having right now is democratization, the undermining of traditional demarcations of power and value in order to point out the essential arbitrariness of those demarcations—within the arts, this is the convergences of high and low culture, how traditional trash can mix it up with classical compositions; there's nothing inherently better about traditional literary fiction over popular horror paperbacks, only the different metrics we use to evaluate them. And that's a really, really important thing to do—metaphysics aside (I'm a practicing Christian after all, and my beliefs about God, while not irrelevant, are completely beyond the scope of this post), authorities have a tendency to be exclusionary and oppressive, and they need to be brought down to size. But there's also something to be said for what's lost when we do so. At times, I kinda miss what we're losing (have lost): canons, legends, prestige, the Cinderella parable of toiling away until you're recognized as meaningful. I mean, yeah, those things in abundance can crowd out life, and the smart alecks, satirists, and parodists. I love the smart alecks, satirists, and parodists, too.

But can't we have both?