Mini Reviews for August 20 - 26, 2018

For some reason, I went on a "sprawling, imperfect visionary films" kick this week, with mixed results.

Movies

Blockers (2018)

I'm far too late to the game to feign surprise that Blockers is so good, but I am at least pleased that it lived up to the somewhat backhanded hype of "it's better than its trailer!" To continue the backhanded mood, I will say that the movie is never better than in its first hour, and while I'm exceedingly grateful that this is the rare modern American comedy somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 minutes, I do think that there isn't really enough movie to make the last act—a largely sentimental pileup of thin character moments—work nearly as well as I wished. Maybe it isn't the spry runtime so much as the fact that the movie barely characterizes its teen characters, who are largely frictionless players in an eyebrow-raisingly idealized night of binge drinking and 'shroom-eating; outside of a gross and somewhat unnecessary vomiting incident (followed by one of the most impressive alcohol-poisoning recoveries I've ever seen), there is not a lot that actually goes wrong on the teen end of things in this movie. Contrast this with Superbad (sorry to bring up such a dude-centric movie in comparison to such a female-centric film, it's just what came to mind first), where the escalating problems of the virginity-losing night help define each character pristinely—there just isn't enough for our Blocker teens to do for me to feel like I know them outside of some very broad personality traits, and while I realize the problem-free teen plot is part of the point (hey, I guess it's not so disastrous to give teens a tad bit of freedom—at least, upper-middle-class, uncannily responsible and savvy teens), it also doesn't do the mechanics of the film any favors. But lordy, I'm being so negative about a movie that is really quite good, so lemme talk about the parents in this movie, who are pretty much perfection and, unlike their kids, actually encounter a whole movie of problems (and a bunch of ass beer, a phrase that made me giggle far more than it should have). The Cena-Mann-Barinholtz trio has one of the best comic dynamics I've seen in an ensemble American comedy in a long, long time, and the script plays precisely to these actors' strengths in relation to one another. Unsurprisingly, John Cena is a fantastic physical comedian, and everyone already knows Leslie Mann is amazing, but I was actually really caught off guard how much I liked Ike Barinholtz's street-wise buffoon; there's an impressive amount of pathos in that performance, and while the movie has no shortage of great lines and deliveries, Barinholtz undoubtedly does the best in timing the comedic cadence of his dialogue. Anyway, the movie's very funny and at least half its cast is well-served, and I wish it were possible to mash this movie with Game Night, 2018's other strong American comedy, so I could make a super movie that was visually stylish in addition to being as comedically sharp as Blockers is. I dunno if that would solve either of the movies' third-act problems, though. Grade: B+

Byzantium (2012)

Byzantium isn't anything particularly new for vampire movies, but there's a floridness to the film that I really connected with, the feeling that immortality sprawls out before these characters in the same tortured, languorous way that the characters' speech spools from their mouths. This feels like what Angel and Buffy were always going for when they did the flashback episodes that showed us Angel and Spike running around in the 1800s and stuff, only it works much, much better here, likely because of the budget and the fact that Neil Jordan is twice the director—on a sheer spectacle scale—that anyone on those shows ever was. The overall story doesn't quite ever find its feet, but the feel of the movie is rich. It's bleak but sumptuous, and Saoirse Ronan is magnificent. Grade: B+

The Road (2009)

As a movie, it's fine, I guess—a little gray, which is the point, probably, and a lot grim, which is another point. But as an adaptation, it's a good case study in why exactly it can be a bad idea to be so slavishly faithful to a source material. First of all, it accentuates any minor deviation from the book (there are a few here, and they land like bombs); second of all, it highlights all the ways in which some specific stories are better suited to one medium than another: e.g. this dystopia, which, despite being more or less accurately transcribed into film, feels far more at home in McCarthy's lean, world-weary prose than in director John Hillcoat's sooty camera. It's honestly kind of boring onscreen. Grade: C+

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

In a sort of meta twist on the Punk'd / Jackass cultural landscape of the mid-2000s that clearly birthed this project, Borat isn't just about pranking the dumb schmucks onscreen that Sacha Baron Cohen encounters in-character on the streets of America; it's about baiting us, the audience members, into laughing at (or worse, not even questioning) Cohen's willfully reductive, inaccurate take on central Asia and thereby proving our own bigotry toward that region—xenophobia weaponized against xenophobia, Kazakhstan First to bring out all the America Firsties. It's a completely ballsy (uh, literally) gambit, and given the litany of my high school peers who, in 2006, incessantly guffawed and quoted "Very nice" and "Great success" in terrible accents, the bait was tremendously (horrifyingly) effective. It's all very punk rock and transgressive, and I think I'm seeing in this what a lot of my other cinephile peers are seeing in Jackass. That said, it's still a bit conceptual for my tastes, high-wire and impressive though the concept may be, and given that absolutely nobody I ever heard quoting the xenophobic shtick seemed to be in on the joke, it's just sort of depressing that all this meticulous work exposing American prejudice went into what ultimately became a decontextualized meme. Grade: B

Gangs of New York (2002)

Gangs of New York is a masterpiece of set design, and it captures with great detail something I'm always immensely interested in, which is the emergence of 20th-century American institutions and conventions out of the relative anarchy of the country's first century (see also: Deadwood). This doesn't prevent the film's nearly three hours from being a slog at times, though, nor does it make Cameron Diaz's or Leonardo DiCaprio's characters any more interesting. I keep seeing people praise Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, which is fine, I guess, but also, it mostly just made me want to watch There Will Be Blood. Basically, this is what happens when Scorsese doesn't have a good screenplay. Grade: B-

Dune (1984)

David Lynch attempts the impossible and tries to adapt Frank Herbert's notoriously unadaptable Dune. Of course he fails—it's a famous failure that anyone could (and should) have seen coming a mile away. The funny thing is, Dune is full of stuff I usually love in Lynch movies: transcendental mysticism, alternating body-horror and Freudian imagery, Kyle MacLachlan, opaque plotting involving otherworldly forces, goofy affection for old Hollywood norms (it feels very much like some mash-up between The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra, but in space), acting at a bizarre register, an acting cameo from ol' David Lynch himself. But somehow, when presented in a Dune context, this is all crushingly boring. When your score involves both Toto and Brian Eno but somehow ends up sounding generic anyway, that's the canary in the coal mine, my friends. Grade: C-

Television

Trial & Error, Season 2 (2018)

I'm hoping this (now cancelled) show gets picked up by Netflix or Hulu or someone à la Brooklyn Nine-Nine, because it's so good. Taking the lightly surreal elements of Season 1 and cranking them up significantly, Season 2 of Trial & Error is every bit the superior set of episodes, mining the increasingly strange small-town setting (something like Pawnee mixed with Monty Python) for some singular pieces of TV comedy. Some of it is fleeting—e.g. how each episode Anne is revealed to have a new psychological condition (my favorite: she has a condition that makes her eyes stay closed for long periods of time, so she has someone paint eyeballs on her eyelids, to hilarious and nightmarish effect); but other bits are recurring, and they accumulate in an impressive commitment to worldbuilding and continuity—like, for example, the Reed/Pecker feud that influences everything from the social dynamics of the town right down to the slang the characters use. And in the midst of this, the show somehow makes room for an engaging murder mystery and well-rounded characters who are likable and even sweet without ever really losing their essential comedic kernal. This is one of the better network sitcoms we've gotten in a while; come on, NBC, why would you give this up? Grade: A-

Books

Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (2018)

Like a lot of biographies/memoirs of celebrities who have gotten this level of success and artistic freedom (Bruce Springsteen's autobio also comes to mind), Room to Dream is at its most engaging when it's dealing with David Lynch's childhood and early career, where he feels much more within the chaos of bohemian life (there's an amusing/terrifying anecdote recounted in the book involving a young Lynch fending off burglars in his inner-city Philadelphia home with a sword) than later in his career, when he has a team of assistants who cook lunch for him and stuff. This is compounded by the format of the book itself, which is split between traditional biographical writing by Lynch's long-time friend Kristine McKenna and more memoir-ish recollections told in first person by Lynch himself; Lynch's recollections are far more interesting and poetic when he's dealing with events far in the past, which both raises the question of how much these events have been warped by the tricks of memory over decades but also illustrates with great detail exactly the kind of off-kilter mythologizing that Lynch's mind makes of the world around him. So not only does Lynch's life become more straightforward and comfortable as he gets older; his narration seems less steeped in Lynch's own sensibilities. That's not to say that the whole book isn't interesting, though, and fans of his films and other projects (i.e. yours truly) will find a lot of anecdotes and information to tickle their brains. I also wonder, though, what this book would be like if it weren't quite so cozy with Lynch himself; that McKenna has known the man for so long is surely a boon to the book in many ways, but also, it's a very genial biography, despite some bits that seem like they should be a bit more probing (especially when the book talks of his relationships with women, which is routinely depicted as somewhat messy but also quirkily, endearingly so—apparently his ex-wives have all made peace with Lynch's penchant for serial infidelity and work-before-family habits, but even so, I wonder what someone who wasn't Lynch's friend might have made of this). But I'm being unduly negative; David Lynch is an exceedingly interesting person even when he's older and more comfortable, and the behind-the-scenes information about his work is fascinating. Even if it isn't a great read, it's still a very good one, and one I'd recommend to Lynch fans. Grade: B+

Music

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids - An Angel Fell (2018)

A jazz and worldbeat fusion that's sort of a concept album in the vein of some of the spiritual jazz luminaries of the 1970s. I wish the album swung a bit more for the fences, musically—there are some touches of free jazz, but nothing nearly so ambitious as John Coltrane's Ascension, which makes the spiritual dimensions of An Angel Fell feel comparatively flat. This is an album that could do with a bit more transcendence. Maybe it isn't fair for me to connect this to some of the most notable spiritual jazz of all time, so I'll just say this: there are very good passages here (I love the incorporation of violin and classical guitar in the opening track, for example) as well as some places that feel kind of thin (the chant-like "Land of Ra" is a centerpiece, but not a particularly compelling one). Still, if '70s spiritual jazz is your thing, or jazz that's reaching for something a bit bigger and more mystical than your typical jazz record, you might want to check this out. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for September 11 - 17, 2017

Busy week, but I still made time for some stuff.

Movies

Raw (Grave) (2016)

There's some fun to be had in this movie's mix of off-beat social commentary and deadpan, gross-out horror/comedy. But somehow, I was expecting a movie about a vegetarian who goes to college and discovers that she has cannibalistic urges to be a bit more... rambunctious. Grade: B-

Reality (Réalité) (2014)

This film tries to show a world in which there is no meaningful separation between dreams and reality. It's called Reality, of course, and in it, a girl named "Reality" finds a tape inside of a gutted hog that ends up showing us footage from the movie itself. Also, it's a movie about filmmaking. The general effect is that of a film adaptation of a Möbius strip, if Möbius strips were stupid and boring dadaist constructions. In another age, I might have given this points for weirdness, but hot on the heals of watching Twin Peaks: The Return, I'm asking for more than half measures from filmed dream logic. Grade: C-

Beginners (2010)

Very much a dry run for Mike Mills's excellent 2016 20th Century Women, right down to the cataloging of history through clean montages of stock imagery, it's hard to view Beginners as anything but the slightly more boring older sibling of a much more accomplished film. So I'm not going to try to pretend I watched it as anything but that—which is not to say that there aren't still things to be enjoyed; as with 20th Century Women, there's a warmth and yearning to the film's twee that makes it work, even in the age of the post-American-indie-quirkfest exhaustion. Mills's direction remains as precise and thoughtful as ever, too. It's comfort-food melancholy, basically, but oh well. I dig it. Grade: B+

Rounders (1998)

This movie begins feeling very much like a cautionary tale, or at least a The Hustler-style noir-ish "dude gets it done, but at immense personal cost" kind of drama. But what we get is much closer to an underdog fairy tale, in which Matt Damon's card shark character accumulates poker skills until he's good enough to play with the big wigs. It's a movie bursting with archetypes and familiar plot devices, and now that I've sort of spoiled the narrative's general trajectory, you won't find a surprise in the film. But this is tremendous good fun anyway: the writing is crisp in that hammy '90s, voiceover-heavy sense of broadcasting just how smart all this movie's characters are, the acting is excellent (barring one John Malkovich, whose turn as a Russian villain comes very close to being so-bad-it's-good but ends up just being bad), and the plot, familiar as it is, is well-rendered. There's nothing mind-blowing here, but Rounders offers that distinct and all-too-rare pleasure of seeing something familiar executed skillfully. Grade: B+

Cinema Paradiso (Nuovo Cinema Paradiso) (1988)

The film's supposedly central relationship between a young boy and an aging film projectionist is beautiful, and as long as Cinema Paradiso is centered on the ways those two ambassadors from two generations bond over a mutual love of cinema, it's aces. But that barely occupies half the movie. The rest is a tiresome and undercooked coming-of-age story that focuses entirely too much on the boy and his forgettable romance and not nearly enough on the projectionist. Which is a pity. Thankfully, the movie pivots back around in its final minutes, ending on what is maybe one of the greatest film scenes of its decade—a montage cut from the decades of film throughout the projectionist's career. That last bit is reason enough to watch the movie, although you'd be forgiven for fast-forwarding a little to get there. Grade: B

Television

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
For anyone paying attention to David Lynch's career since we last saw the gang from Twin Peaks (that would be 25 years ago with the divisive theatrical feature, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), the form that Twin Peaks: The Return, the ostensible third season of the show, ultimately takes shouldn't be so surprising: elliptical and sometimes incongruous storytelling that fuses staples of detective fiction with aggressive narrative and formal experimentation, including the manipulation of intentionally cheap digital visuals into visceral psychological and even cosmic horror. In short, this return will be deeply frustrating for those people whose favorite part of Twin Peaks was Dale Cooper being quirky and eating cherry pie but right up the alley of someone (like me) whose favorite Twin Peaks textures were those found in Fire Walk With Me and the formal assault that was "Episode 29," the original series finale—you know, the parts that wallow in misery. Those looking for typical Twin Peaks quirk won't find themselves completely at odds with what this new series gives us (the characters of Dougie and Janey-E Jones, two particular delightful creations of this third season, feel very much a piece with old-school Twin Peaks sensibilities), but they'll have to put up with a good deal of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive-esque shenanigans along the way, as well as several sequences that have very little precedent in Lynch's filmography but are no less alien. What's amazing, then, is that for all its bizarre and patience-testing experimentation, The Return actually manages to tell a coherent story—more so, even, than the original Twin Peaks, since it lacks both the baffling creative upheaval that defined the second season and also has a good deal more explication of the cosmic mythology of the show's universe (honestly, probably a little too much explication—I prefer my Twin Peaks to be more inscrutable, although the shocking, baffling finale does a lot to restore that beloved inscrutability). This is, I realized as I watched, one of the things that makes Lynch one of America's most popular directors, despite his often alienating experimentation: there are always real stories, either human or metaphysical, behind all his out-there-ness, and Twin Peaks: The Return is probably his best showcase yet of being able to spin compelling narrative out of would-be incomprehensible absurdity. And as such, it's rather beautiful and unlike anything you're likely to have ever seen on TV. In fact, it's tempting to call The Return David Lynch's masterpiece, and while I'll have to sit on that a while to decide if I actually think that, there's no doubt that this is one of the most gorgeous, unsettling, moving, and significant works of motion picture art that we'll get this year—and likely that we'll get in any year any time soon. Grade: A

Books

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
I don't read a ton of mystery fiction, which might be my problem here. I also was familiar with this book's plot through a number of different film and stage adaptations I'd seen, so that knocks out the "mystery" part of this mystery novel. But I dunno, guys, for something that Wikipedia calls Christie's masterpiece, it's kinda... not a masterpiece? Or at least, not what I'm looking for when I describe a masterpiece, which, again, might be a liability of my not reading much mystery fiction—these things may work on different rubrics that I've not yet figured out. But as I see it, the prose is flat, the philosophical discussion of justice is unengaging, and the characters feel less like characters than pieces of a spreadsheet to be checked off as they all bite the dust, one by one. Usually, that progression of deaths would be the fun of a story like this, but it's hard to have fun with the death of things that are not human. Grade: C

Music

Pixies - Trompe le Monde (1991)
For a while, this was the last Pixies album (and it might as well still be for me—I haven't listened to Indie Cindy, and I've been told I shouldn't). So there's the temptation to read this as a career summing up. But honestly, there's not a lot here that sums up. It's a Pixies album, and although the production and songwriting are smoother and less abrasive than the band's '80s output, Trompe le Monde still has that same mixture of hummable and furious volume that made the band an alternative-scene favorite to begin with. And despite its smoother sound, it's maybe angrier than the band has ever been, with Black Francis's yelpy vocals growling through a remarkably bitter set of lyrics. So no summing up; just classic Pixies through and through—possibly the best way to sum up to begin with, reminding us all why we'll miss them. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for June 12 - 18, 2017

Summer. How I love thee.

Movies

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
While it lacks the light touch of its 2014 predecessor (the script here is distressingly belabored, from the emotional beats to even a lot of the comedy—the film tries way harder to make a joke out of "Taserface" than it's worth), and overall, it's just not as fun. But Vol. 2 is superior to the original (and, in fact, the large majority of the MCU in general) in two important qualities. First, it has probably the best Marvel-movie villain in ages (though I'm afraid revealing who it is would spoil a certain part of the film)—clearly motivated, charismatically acted, and, moreover, integrated into the emotional stakes of the plot. But even more welcome than that is the film's visuals, which are some of the best in recent blockbuster history and certainly the best of any Marvel film to date; a rainbow-blasted cornucopia of cosmic pulp, it's the closest any movie in recent memory has come to looking like a comic book come to life. It's glorious and as big-screen-worthy as any movie this year. Grade: B+

The Salesman (فروشنده) (2016)
One of the lesser Farhadi films I've seen (it's certainly no A Separation or The Past, but really, what is?), but it's still tensely watchable. It takes a while to get going, but once we get toward the end, especially a final setpiece with an old man cornered by our increasingly adamant protagonist, it is thrilling and excruciating in equal measure. I'm continually amazed at just how much tension Farhadi is able to wring from low-key domestic situations. Grade: B+

Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013)
If you're expecting the broad treatment of history that renders events as simplified dramatic beats (as I was going into The Butler), you'll get it; this is basically the civil rights version of Forrest Gump, in which two characters are present for all the major events in the latter half of the 20th century, and naturally, in covering so much time, things get a little simplistic—worst is the parade of presidential impressions, which range from absurd (John Cusack's Nixon, James Marsden's JFK) to distractingly parodic (Liev Schreiber's LBJ). It doesn't help that the screenplay is frequently clumsy, stumbling over some very clunky dialogue and transitions. When we're dealing with the three principle actors (Forest Whitaker, David Oyelowo, and Oprah Winfrey), though, the acting is fantastic, especially Winfrey, who absolutely disappears into her role here and goes toe-to-toe with Whitaker in giving the best performance in the film. Between all three of them, they manage to breathe life into the script's programmatic sweep. And speaking of the sweep, the most notable difference from Forrest Gump (aside from race, of course) is an actual awareness of politics. As broadly as this movie casts history, it's still realizes that the way it renders history is implicitly political (as opposed to Gump, which I assert is not intentionally conservative, just merely thoughtless of how its framing of historical events communicates a political stance). This is most notable in how it treats African-American radical politics. Oyelowo's character isn't some ham-fisted tragedy/morality tale a la Jenny in Forrest Gump; he's a major player in the film's movement, and as the movie progresses, uses him as a fascinating foil to Whitaker's butler, shaping a narrative of the history of civil rights as the reconciling of radicalism with "respectable" integration. Nobody who's a student of this era of history is going to find that especially mind-blowing, but it's a narrative that the movie successfully imbues with a deep pathos that makes it work. And even besides that, how crazy is it for a mainstream American film to regard African-American progressive politics with so much sympathy and dignity? Grade: B+

The Straight Story (1999)
Nearly twenty years later, you'd think it would have sunk in that one of David Lynch's best (maybe even the best) is a Disney-studios family movie dedicated to the power of sincere human decency. But let's just marvel at this for a moment, okay? Because while many David Lynch films are similarly preoccupied with human goodness, they're generally showing how often the apparent presence of wholesomeness is a thin veneer over abject depravity, cruelty, and—if he's feeling frisky—an otherworldly abyss. But this is beautifully inverted in The Straight Story. The morality of Richard Farnsworth's Alvin and the spectrum of Midwest humanity that he meets while driving hundreds of miles on a lawnmower isn't uncomplicated—two of the film's aching conversational setpieces (one with a fellow WWII veteran, the other with a priest) make this abundantly clear—but the film insists that such complications don't offset the fundamental goodness at these characters' cores. Rarely has such a resolute testament to simple goodwill graced our movie screens. Grade: A

The Sure Thing (1985)
It says something about the state of teen comedies in 1985 that The Sure Thing could be heralded as a mature and smart take on the genre. "I didn't sleep with her" is such an insanely low bar of masculine gentility to clear, especially when "her" is someone you've only just met, that it's genuinely insulting that the film seems to regard John Cusack's character's first tepid step toward maturity as this world-conquering act of love (particularly when he's spent most of the rest of the film being a lousy student, shotgunning beers, and generally being an insufferable cad). And that's to say nothing of Daphne Zuniga's character, who leaves a doting boyfriend (admittedly, one who is presented as sort of a stick in the mud, but... I dunno, he does play a mean game of gin rummy) to hook up with this guy. And yet, it's a testament to the magic of a well-made film that I not only wasn't insulted by all this stuff (or even the suggestion that the only sensible alternative to being a stick in the mud is being a beer-shotgunning tool bag) but actually kind of got caught up in the whole thing. As far as Rob Reiner rom-coms go, this is no When Harry Met Sally. But the same principles are at play, and you know what? It's pretty good! Grade: B

Voyage in Time (Tempo di Viaggio) (1983)
Relative to classic making-of documentaries like Hearts of Darkness, there's not really a lot going on in Voyage of Time, a film in which Andrei Tarkovsky and script writer Tonino Guerra pal around Italy in search of good locations for the shooting of Nostalghia. But it has its low-key charms. Tarkovsky and Guerra spend most of the time shooting the breeze, and, being intellectuals who are about to produce a tour de force of cinematic philosophy, their shooting the breeze is pretty interesting as they discuss the nature of cinema and architecture. There's also a brief shot of Tarkovky in short shorts, which is its own sort of thrill. Grade: B



Television

Bob's Burgers, Season 7 (2016-17)
The second law of thermodynamics says that given enough time, everything turns to crap (I'm paraphrasing here). This seems accelerated on TV, where good shows usually have four or five good seasons before they are no longer good shows. Bob's Burgers seems determined to defy this law, though; in its seventh season, it's no less its fine self than in its fourth, and those who love the show will know exactly what to expect: sweetly maniacal family dynamics, silly wordplay, off-the-wall pop-culture parodies, tongue-in-cheek-but-actually-super-good musical interludes, H. Jon Benjamin's panicked intonation of "oh god." There isn't a bad episode in the bunch, and if it's slightly less exciting than earlier seasons, that's only because we've grown so accustomed to Bob's Burgers' perennial pleasures. Grade: B+

Adventure Time, Season 6 (2014-15)
Season 6 is the first time in Adventure Time's decorated run that you can feel a real step down in quality without any discernible reward. Season 5 had its downs, but it also represented such a thrilling step forward in terms of structure and theme for the show that it really didn't matter. But Season 6 doesn't have that—it arguably continues the show's increased devotion to continuity and serial plots (the final 6-ish episodes are all basically pieces of a single story that the show had been developing for the latter half of the season), but by this time, its mix of silliness, epic sci-fi/fantasy, and emotional arcs is nothing new. That's not to say that it's bad (except for, I'd argue, the stuff with Finn's dad, which is Daddy Issues boilerplate and doesn't really pay off in the otherwise excellent season climax); there are, in fact, quite a few excellent episodes throughout the season, and the end of the season continues the show's tradition of finales in sending the series in exciting new directions. But let's put it this way: this is the first season of the show that doesn't feature any episodes that I'd put in the Top 20 Adventure Time episodes. But I shouldn't be too negative—this is still a show of astounding energy and imagination, and we're lucky to have it. We've just been a tad bit luckier in the past. Grade: B+

Music

The Men - New Moon (2013)
The Men must have realized that "Candy" was the best song on their 2012 breakout, Open Your Heart, so the songs on New Moon are all countrified, to mixed-to-positive results. The opener, "Open the Door" welcomes us to the record with an honest-to-goodness piano, and it's actually lovely. But it's hard not to miss that punk energy from their first two records, which is absent on all but a few of the songs here. The rest are an intriguing whirlwind of genres, ranging from country ("High and Lonesome") to Americana ("Bird Song") to riff-stomping sludge ("I Saw Her Face") to jammy noise rock ("Supermoon"). It's fun to see the band try on so many different hats, and the effect is more or less engaging. But one gets the sense that The Men are drifting afield here. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for May 29 - June 4, 2017

Out-of-towning is making this post late, but I hope y'all enjoy it anyway. Peace!

Movies

My Life as a Zucchini (Ma vie de Courgette) (2016)

Everything about this movie works, but none of it works greatly—the Playdough-looking visuals, the warm characterizations, the lightly optimistic upturn to what should otherwise be a crushingly sad plot. In fact, this last one is the film's most impressive achievement, given that it deals with an orphan who has accidentally killed his mother, a mean and alcoholic woman whom he remembers with a revisionist kindness. This movie should, by rights, feel oppressively cruel, but instead, it simply feels rather melancholy; the way I've worded it makes it sound like it doesn't take its tragedy seriously, but that's not what I mean: it's just that the world of the movie is one where kindness exists alongside its unspeakable meanness, such that it's much less a wallow than it might be. Another example: Simon, another orphan in the orphanage who seems, based on his picking on our protagonist, to be set up to be a bully is given a wonderful humanity, too, that transforms him into something far richer than his presumed archetype. Simon is, by far, the best thing here outside the protagonist, and a big part of the movie never being more than "pretty good" is that none of the other characters or situations transcend their archetypes: we have the kindly cop, the inspirational teacher, etc. Perhaps if the movie were a bit longer (it's barely an hour now), the additional time with these characters would have granted them more life. But as it is, there are merely flashes of inspiration that make this any better than a run-of-the-mill inspirational picture. Grade: B

Li'l Quinquin (P'tit Quinquin) (2014)

Something of a murder mystery crossed with a philosophical treatise crossed with a very off-beat comedy, Li'l Quinquin is a strange duck. Probably the closest analogue here is Twin Peaks, for the way that it explores the dual absurdity and darkness hiding within small-town life through the eyes of an unconventional-but-wise detective. But even that doesn't really capture the bizarre, mesmerizing energy of the film—we are, after all, dealing with a mystery involving corpses found inside the digestive tracks of cows, not beautiful dead girls wrapped in plastic. It's utterly confounding, but there's a magnetic power to it as well, one that feels like it's tapping into something both goofy and elemental. Grade: B+

Billy Elliot (2000)

A very sweet coming of age film that strikes me in the same way that I think last year's Sing Street struck a lot of people (not me) last year, only with dance instead of song. The T. Rex-filled soundtrack makes it even sweeter, and the backdrop of working-class strife and a coal miner strike to all the ballet makes for some interesting social textures. There are some potentially worthwhile ideas left to wither on the vine—virtually every side character gets short shrift, but the worst is Billy's gay friend, Michael, who gets about two scenes of any weight; his other friend, Debbie (who gets what is probably the best image in the entire film as she drags her stick across a fence that then turns into police riot shields), receives even less screen time. But everything with Billy and his family is great, particularly the time spent between Billy and his father. Seeing the father's sympathies slowly turn toward Billy and his ballet ambitions is beautiful to behold and is the best this film has to offer. Grade: B+

Fire in the Sky (1993)

There are two very interesting premises embedded in Fire in the Sky. The first is a crime mystery involving a group of men who cite a flying saucer as the explanation for the disappearance of their friend and a highly dubious town and law enforcement cohort. This is a story about truth and the limitations of eye-witness reports, and it's fascinating. The second is a horror movie involving a man's abduction by aliens and the psychological fallout from that abduction as he attempts to reintegrate back into his former life after his return. This is a story about trauma and body autonomy and the terrifying smallness of humanity within the larger context of an uncaring universe, and it's also fascinating. But taking both of these stories and mashing them both into a 109-minute film does a disservice to both, and we're left with a muddled, confused movie that's never quite sure how to fit all its various lumps into its '90s middlebrow box. Grade: B-

Wild at Heart (1990)

David Lynch's follow-up to his indie smash Blue Velvet is, like Lost Highway, a transitional work between two career monuments: this time, between Blue Velvet's off-kilter crime thriller and the full-on affectation and absurdity of Twin Peaks. And it's nuts. It's a movie with Wizard of Oz obsessions (often to an absurd degree, mimicking specific iconic shots from the classic) and Nicolas Cage playing a character who has all the style and mannerisms of an alternate-universe Elvis who was born and raised in L.A., and those two things don't even begin to describe the frantic energy that animates every single shot—this is, without a doubt, Lynch's more frenetic film. It's goofy and grotesque in equal measure (I'm astonished that the film only had to alter one shot to avoid the X rating), but it's beautifully realized and, for all its proclivities for idiosyncratic parody and irony, also ends up being a sincere treatise on love and commitment that's quite moving. Laura Dern's character's wounded infatuation with Cage's aloof Elvis-impersonating makes for a truly great screen romance that only gets sweeter as the movie progresses. The film isn't perfect—a late-film subplot with Willem Dafoe is a misstep, for sure—but for any flaws, it hits eloquently the immaculate emotional range that only David Lynch can deliver. Grade: A-

Books

Still Life with Tornado by A. S. King (2016)

Last year's release from the prolific and frequently excellent A. S. King may be her best. To say that this novel is a painfully sharp depiction of domestic abuse makes it sound like a miserable experience that it absolutely is not (though its depiction of its subject matter is very sharp), so I'll instead frame it this way: given how crushing being a teenager can actually be, YA lit is a genre that is almost laughably in love with self-actualization for brooding, existentially adrift adolescents, but Still Life with Tornado is one of the few that actually manages to build its protagonist's self-actualization with weight and meaning. Yes, she's an artsy teen wandering through urban landscapes (Philadelphia, in this case), but way she finds her way out of that headspace is earned and real. This is a book in which victories are not a foregone conclusion but an actual extension of who these characters are. I dig it. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for December 12 - 18, 2016

Second-to-last reviews post of the year! Excitement!

Movies

Moonlight (2016)
The first narrative section of this movie's three isn't much different from what you've seen from other inner-city-set indies (or even TV's The Wire). No, where Moonlight's brilliance is to be found is in its two subsequent parts, which explore how human beings both change and remain static over time with a nuance and piercing insight that I've seldom seen (and of all things, Mad Men seems the closest corollary as far as how it handles human relationships over long periods of time—and honestly, the same goes for the dialogue, which walks a wonderful line between literary and achingly human). This is the story of Chiron: gay, African-American, projects-raised—the movie smartly doesn't make any of those characteristics a central premise for the character (although he would be greatly changed were any of those things to be different), and what we're left to grapple with instead is the titanic beauty and pain of the human experience in general, and the way that those two (beauty and pain) can occur within the space of the same moment or drawn out over years. Don't miss this one. Grade: A

Into the Inferno (2016)
We've been lucky enough to have two Werner Herzog documentaries in 2016, and I don't want to spit on that. Both are good, engaging films, but I've got to give the edge to Lo and Behold over this one. Although both films are scattered, Lo and Behold makes this a feature of its structure, employing intentionally episodic section breaks, Into the Inferno just meanders forward without any clear structure to hang its scenes on. This movie feels fitfully too long and pointless, and that's unfortunate, considering that there are some tremendous, classic Herzog humans to be found here (a late-film fossil hunter that feels like a Jeff Goldblum character come to life is a particular highlight). And the footage of the magma flows is never less than awe-inspiring. That's less true of a detour into North Korea. Grade: B

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la Luz) (2010)
A documentary that finds thematic connections between astronomy and the horrors within the Pinochet dictatorship should be a bit too far-reachingly literary for its own good. And Nostalgia for the Light probably is, honestly. That doesn't stop it from being an engaging watch, though, and its depiction of human grief and obsession is pretty great. Grade: B+

Lost Highway (1997)
The basic critical breakdown on Lost Highway seems to be that Lynch diehards regard it as a masterpiece, while everyone else just sort of dislikes it. I'm feeling in the middle—this is nowhere near Lynch's magnum opus, and while the filmmaking on display is certainly no slack, the overall effect is way more muddled than it should be (the soundtrack [usually a Lynch highlight] does the movie no favors, either, what with the abundance of mid-'90s hard rock screamers that, given my age, I'm in no position to decide whether have aged poorly or were simply no good to begin with). Also, let the record show that this is the first Lynch movie I've seen that I found genuinely troubling in its depiction of women, particularly one woman: Patricia Arquette, who, for the movie's primary female avatar, spends entirely too much time engaged in twisted coital scenarios and general femme fatalery. That said, Lynch movies are unparalleled in their ability to unsettle and bend standard noir plots toward the metaphysical, and this one does not disappoint on either of those counts. In fact, through a certain lens, Lost Highway feels like an early draft of Lynch's later actual masterpiece, Mulholland Drive, and the intertextual ideas between those two films are rich. They might be richer if this movie's execution were just a little tighter, though. Grade: B

Television

Adventure Time, Season 4 (2012)
Season 4's major innovation is the weaving of the previous season's loose collection of threads into a coherent (and even intermittently serialized) world. I'm mostly ambivalent on this forward momentum as a whole, because while it pays off wonderfully in this season, there's no denying that it also tames the show a bit, or at least has the potential to—once you give characters consistent motivations and ongoing arcs, the opportunities for the free-wheeling, adventurous absurdity that have been the show's bread-and-butter grow smaller, and the pieces available to sacrifice for whimsical shock diminish. Basically, we probably aren't going to be getting another episode like the one where Tree Trunks disappears with a *poof*/cut to credits. But as I said, the intensified focus on character development and mythology growth works like gangbusters in this season, and as a result, we're gifted with some mighty fine television indeed. The Princess Bubblegum-Finn-Fire Princess love triangle is sweetly mature; the season-ending multiverse cliffhanger is appropriately nail-biting; and the Ice King/Marceline-focused "I Remember You" is simply one of the most beautiful episodes of TV I've ever seen. In fact, don't mind my griping; this season's great. Grade: A-

Music

Maps Need Reading - Mapsynapse (2016)
Knoxville's burgeoning progressive rock scene is at the exciting phase where the groups who first expanded the scene with promising debut singles, EPs, and live shows are beginning to release full-lengths. White Stag had their long-ish EP Eos Crux earlier in 2016 (and, given their FB activity, looks to be on the brink of releasing something else in the near future), and now we have Maps Need Reading with their own LP. While White Stag seems to be carving out their sound in the prog metal tradition and Lines Taking Shape are doing their math-y King Crimson thing, Mapsynapse seems to position Maps Need Reading more along the lines of Steven Wilson's prog-revival sound: a mix of soft rock, folk, Pink Floyd atmospherics, and full-on laser-light-show guitar jams. The album is clearly a step forward for the band, and as a collection of proggy setpieces, it's accomplished and ambitious. That said, there's still quite a bit to tighten up as far as production and songwriting goes (Steven Wilson, let's not forget, is an absolute master mixer, and these guys are not Steven Wilson). So what this feels like is less a definitive statement than it is another stepping stone toward some later, greater work. And that's okay; historically, prog bands have taken several albums to fully bloom. Maps Need Reading is getting there. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for May 23 - June 12, 2016 (aka "Sorry for more delay!")

So, I've been in the middle of a move, which means that I haven't had a whole lot of time to blog. Again, sorry! I promise (I think...) that I won't have to make this feature a once-a-fortnight thing. Anyway, here's a super-sized post to make up for the missed week. Enjoy!

Movies

Bridesmaids (2011)
This movie is funny—at times, very funny. Jon Hamm's louse of a friend-with-benefits is hysterical; Rose Byrne's shade-throwing villainy is pitch-perfect; Kristen Wiig's gentler, tragicomic turn is the best she's ever been, before or since this movie. But damn it all, this movie falls for that same post-Apatow horror of being over two hours long, and that just really topples the whole thing. There is nothing about this movie that justifies its runtime, and in fact, there are several moments that actively argue against its long cut: I'm thinking specifically of the rehearsal dinner toast scene, which pivots distressingly quickly from funny to "why haven't they cut to the next scene yet?" Funny is funny; it's true. But given the option between one slice of cake and ten, it's generally better to play it safe. Grade: B

The New World (2005)
The New World, Terrence Malick's second post-hiatus movie after The Thin Red Line, has several things going for it over its immediate predecessor: First, it's uncommonly beautiful, visually speaking, even by the already high Malick metric. It's hard to call this a career best from a cinematographer as legendary as Emmanuel Lubezki, so I won't, but his fantastic work in The New World is definitely up there. Second, (and this gets a huge "Praise the Lord" from me), Malick's trademark interior monologues/voiceovers are grounded in the concrete events that the characters experience, a merciful change from the meandering, half-poetic philosophizing that bloats lesser Malick like The Thin Red Line and the later To the Wonder. The result is that The New World is Malick's plottiest film since probably Days of Heaven, which gives these characters an immediacy that even superior Malick features have lacked. Plot isn't a necessary feature of any movie, of course, but nonnarrative film can be a tough beast to tackle, so it's a nice surprise to go in expecting a bull and to get a delicious dairy cow instead (don't read too much into that analogy). That said, this movie still meanders, and even as artfully done as it is here, did we really need another John Smith/Pocahontas story onscreen? Mileage may vary, naturally (and it has, with the critics being mostly split between lukewarm and ecstatic reviews back in '05), but my mileage runs pretty low on this kind of story these days. Grade: B

The Thief and the Cobbler (1993)
Speaking strictly of the animation, this is one of the smartest, funniest, most creative animated movies of all time: the way the action plays around with the geometry of the backgrounds and forced perspectives, creating spaces where there seems to only be generic patterns, is wonderful in a way that's difficult to describe without just linking to clips of the movie itself, and the fact that this was all hand-drawn is seriously, seriously impressive. Speaking of everything else besides the animation, though, this movie is a train wreck. Cobbled (ha) together from over twenty years' worth of fragments, the movie is clearly unfinished, and in an attempt to stitch everything together into something that vaguely (and ultimately unsuccessfully) resembles a completed whole, we're subjected to awful narration and heinous celebrity voice acting that litters the story with irritating, sub-Dreamworks anachronism and pop cultural references. Never has the chasm between technical craft and narrative execution been so wide or so disastrous. But man, that animation is something to behold. Grade: A-

Mulholland Drive (2001)
It's as great as its sterling reputation suggests—a nightmarish thriller about the nature of reality and filmmaking with just enough metaphysics thrown in to make that sort of investigation more interesting than the Vertigo/Persona pastiche that the plot synopsis suggests. I do wonder if maybe all the discussion about it being incomprehensibly mysterious is a tiny bit overblown, though. Surely there are opaque edges here and there, as there are with most of David Lynch's work, but the central plot seems straightforward enough: the first 2/3 are a dream that the main character wakes up from in the last 1/3. Although maybe my confidence in that interpretation is misplaced, and I just haven't got far enough down the rabbit hole... erm, blue box. Grade: A

Anomalisa (2015)
Probably worth watching for the animation alone, which ranks among the most technically impressive and thematically resonant uses of stop-motion ever. If it weren't for that (and maybe even still), Anomalisa isn't quite the heavyweight that Synecdoche, New York was, nor is it the brain-bender of Being John Malkovich nor the well of pathos of Eternal Sunshine—what I'm saying is that among the major works of screenwriter (and co-director here) Charlie Kaufman, this ranks as relatively slight, although that doesn't keep it from being both tender and terrifying by turns in that typically Kaufman-type way. Probably the single most enduring touch to the movie (besides having Tom Noonan voice nearly every character) is the way the stop-motion models have seams left deliberately visible, which has the tremendous effect of making these character all seem as brittle as their psyches. This is not a happy movie—in fact, it shares quite a lot with late-period Mad Men, where Don Draper was at his most both narcissistic and fearfully aware of the catastrophic effects of that narcissism. But it's a striking, intimate, even frightening one that's not bound to leave your mind soon. Grade: B+

The Revenant (2015)
Oh, it's exquisitely made, for sure. The "we're only going to shoot with natural light, and oh yeah, in the actual wilderness, maaan" actually pays off with a nearly nonstop parade of gorgeous imagery that almost justifies the conceit of a ra-ra, fist-pumping, pulp remake of The New World. Almost. It would help if the whole thing weren't so criminally boring or if every scene between the admittedly impressive action set pieces weren't another redundant iteration of either DiCaprio doing hardcore wilderness survival stuff or Hardy making his way back to civilization looking villainous. Grade: C

Godzilla (2014)
The structure is lumpy, perhaps even broken: there's nothing inherently wrong with focusing on the human drama in a Godzilla story, but there is something wrong with focusing on drama that's so inert and tepid. But once you get to the creature-feature back half of the movie, all that doesn't matter. The design, direction, and mood surrounding the monster battles are so captivating that you're likely to forget all about the boring character drama (and maybe even who the characters are to begin with). I can't think of another recent blockbuster that's managed to achieve a sense of just how titanic its monsters are and just how insignificant its humans are in comparison. Godzilla is the most artfully directed, atmospherically immersive blockbuster of its size in years, so lumps and all, it's worth your time. Grade: B+

Television

Bob's Burgers, Season 6 (2015-16) 
If you aren't watching Bob's Burgers yet, well, why not? You're missing out on some of the most potent combination of silly, sweet, and gleeful anarchy to hit Fox's animated programming since the heydays of Futurama and The Simpsons, although the best point of comparison is probably the gentle realism of King of the Hill (given that Bob's Burgers has a far longer absurdist streak than Hank's adventures ever did). If you're already watching it, well, congratulations! We got another great season! I suppose if you're keeping count, the hit-to-miss ratio is just slightly smaller than in the past, which might be either a statistical blip or a sign of the show's age. But whatever minuscule dip in quality we've seen is only noticeable if you're looking hard. This show is still a weekly delight for me. Grade: A-

SpongeBob SquarePants, Season 1 (1999-2000)
I've seen it before; you've probably seen it before, too, if you're anywhere near my age. Just in case you had any doubts: yes, it holds up. Gloriously. A big part of what's so incredible here is how much it takes advantage of the fact that children have few fully formed ideas about what constitutes "weird" and "normal." A sponge lives in a pineapple at the bottom of the Bikini Atoll? Well, okay! It's occasionally narrated by an anonymous French-accented voiceover? Sure! The show plumbs some sublimely surreal depths, sometimes to hilarious effect, sometimes to nightmarish effect, often to both, as in the series-best contender, "Rock Bottom." Beautiful stuff. Grade: A


Books

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
In the ranks of Virginia Woolf novels, it's slightly Mrs Dalloway's inferior, largely due to the lengthy opening section, "The Window," which occupies nearly half of the novel and is saddled with the unglamorous task of setting the table for the final two sections, both of which are sublime. "Time Passes," the second section, is a particularly moving passage that delivers just what its title implies, reversing the languorous pace of "The Window" by fast-forwarding through the lives of each of its characters until gut-punching consequence after gut-punching consequence hits the reader in succession as the characters hurtle toward the end of time. "The Window" is almost surely too long and too lyrical, but I'll forgive it since it allows for that wonderful, heartbreaking middle. Grade: A-

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (2007)
Almost any contemporary YA novel owes at least a little to Catcher in the Rye, but Sherman Alexie's breakout novel is one of the few that I've come across that seems to understand just how important the relative aimless and episodic plotting was to the oblique pathos and wounded voice in Salinger's work. Modern YA is plotty, which sometimes has the effect of turning its world into mechanical structures with "trauma" on the front end and "self-actualization" on the back. There are few mechanics in The Absolutely True Diary, at least not ones as angular and squeaky as those in, say, a John Green novel. Thankfully, Alexie allows his protagonist lyrical moments; he lets the characterization breathe. It's wonderful. The last few moments of the book are some of the best YA pages I've read in ages. Grade: A

Music

Chance the Rapper - Coloring Book (2016)
Chance the Rapper has long been modern hip-hop's resident cornball, which is both an asset when he's releasing work like last year's exquisite "Sunday Candy" or this tape's "Finish Line" and a liability when it leads him to incongruously silly lines promising to "give Satan a swirly" (actual quote from Coloring Book). Coloring Book is a tad more consistent than previous Chance the Rapper releases—it lacks the immediacy of a clear masterwork in the vein of "Sunday Candy" or "Pusha Man," but it also doesn't get nearly as silly as some of his least successful work from last year's Donnie Trumpet collaboration, Surf—although those looking for a fulfillment of Acid Rap's scrappy promise are probably going to be disappointed. It's a slick, gorgeously produced mixtape that focuses way more intently on Chance's Christianity than his drug-related neuroses (unlike with Kanye, that Kirk Franklin collaboration actually means something here—Coloring Book is the first secularly released album I've heard that trades in on CCM influences [seriously, there's a very prominent Chris Tomlin allusion], which is kind of cool, but it's also CCM, which... urg). The music is idiosyncratic, personal, and sincere, and even if it's not always successful, there's a lot of value in those qualities. Grade: B

Grimes - Art Angels (2015)
I really haven't much listened to Grimes before this, so I have no stake in the battle of whether or not this is her sellout record. What I do think is that it's this lovely, trash-can-punch mix of '90s Euro-dance, noise, and K-pop that's every bit as infectious and strange a confection as I could want from 2010s pop music. The album has a few duds (I love Janelle Monáe passionately, but her guest track, "Venus Fly" is pretty thin), but on the whole, this is probably the best possible product of poptimism. Grade: A-

TEEN - Love Yes (2016)
Love Yes fills a very St. Vincent-shaped hole in my heart. I haven't heard any of the band's other albums, but man, if TEEN is going to tread the St. Vincent territory, they might as well do it in this much style. I do miss Annie's guitar theatrics, though, which makes TEEN a slightly less interesting inhabitant of the St. Vincent world. Grade: B

Suede - Suede (1993)
If Oasis were the Beatles of the Britpop era, then Suede was the David Bowie, albeit a considerably narrower version of Bowie than Bowie himself ever allowed, and without the sense of humor to boot. Comparisons aside, though, these are stupendously crafted songs, and if there was one thing that mattered about Britpop, it wasn't all the allusions to British Invasion rockers; it was each band's proficiency with razor-sharp songwriting precision. Suede's got that in spades (suedes?). Grade: B+