In case you missed it, here's the link to the latest progressive rock post earlier this week, this time about Iron Maiden!
Movies
A lot of caveats here. As a movie musical, it feels like every other shot of choreography has some sort of cramped and wonky composition that obscures its imagery, and the editing is worse, twitchily cutting about twice as often as feels necessary. And as we all know by now, Lin-Manuel Miranda is an extraordinarily corny writer, and in long stretches, so is this movie. It's also got some big pacing issues, and the movie just kind of plods along once we get past the central plot point of the blackout. This is to say nothing of Miranda's politics, which pinball between a wide-eyed idealism in the American Dream and a simple "certain kinds of people have unique struggles"; while the latter isn't a terrible starting point, this movie never moves beyond that starting point, which makes it feel (despite the movie occasionally saying otherwise) that issues like gentrification and immigration injustice are just personal struggles to be overcome, and as the characters themselves overcome their personal struggles with that aforementioned wide-eyed idealism, the urgency of these issues falls away. But I still enjoyed this movie a ton. Maybe every other shot is wonky, but that also means the other 50% of the shots are dazzling (this is stupid math, but what if we cut out all the weird shots, editing only half as often and letting the good shots last twice as long? This movie becomes way better), and the choreography and performances are legitimately great, which makes it hard not to get caught up in the emotional sweep and sensationalism of it all, despite the indulgent pacing—isn't that what we want from a musical? And even with the editing, there are some grade-A unassailable sequences of movie musical magic, like the gravity-defying "When the Sun Goes Down" balcony scene, the impressionist personal history of "Paciencia y Fe," and the intoxicated whirl of "The Club." It's just all so lovely and, moreover, sincere; so many genre movies nowadays seem embarrassed of the genre they're in—Disney animated movies make jokes about being princess movies, Marvel movies have characters roll their eyes about how absurd their characters are—but In the Heights makes no apologies for what it is: a big, loud, schmaltzy spectacle in which characters break into song and dance to express their enormous feelings. Zero winks at the audience. Not a single one. It's incredible just how much that level of self-actualized sincerity can just pave over any reservations. I hadn't realized how starved I was for this kind of heart-on-sleeve big-tent show until certain moments gave me waves of euphoria, and while this isn't the first movie I've seen in a theater post-vaccine, it's the first movie that's given me that heady movie-theater feeling (impossible to know how much that buoyed this movie above its flaws for me, but it certainly was a factor). Oh, and re: the politics, they're still there, but they're a lot easier to take when they're in service of hometown pride rather than national history by way of Ron Chernow. I'm just a dumb ol' Tennessee boy who's never been to Washington Heights and spent a good part of the movie confused as to whether that neighborhood was in Manhattan or the Bronx, so who knows how this scans to the actual natives. But I thought this did a great job of warmly evoking a very specific community within its musical fantasia, and that sort of affection makes it hard for me to be too grumpy about Miranda's neoliberal tendencies. Grade: B+
Look, Rosemary's Baby and Get Out are both great, but I'm begging rookie indie-horror directors to watch some other horror movies or at least pretend like they have. I feel like I've seen this movie a dozen times already. Grade: C-
Radical honesty is a really cool idea that I think is worth aspiring to, but one of the central problems with it as a life-defining ethos is that I'm not sure we can ever know ourselves completely enough to be as honest as is necessary to fight deception, particularly self-deception. It's strikingly obvious that Caveh Zahedi sometimes (oftentimes) uses his "honesty" as a shtick to give an implicit post-hoc justification for his deeply, deeply harmful behavior, and the more I see of his work, the more I'm convinced that the question of whether or not Caveh realizes that he's doing this is one of the central tensions of his career. There's something to be said for the vulnerability of any one instance of Caveh's humiliating disclosures, and of course recovery from compulsion and addiction requires an ability to be straightforward about one's own actions. But I dunno, compiled as a feature-length (and then career-length) accumulation of such moments, there's something really uncomfortable for me about the way that Caveh's wide-eyed, seemingly guileless screen persona is able to in-the-moment ingratiate me to some really vile stuff. Maybe that's a Me problem, but regardless, I was never quite sure if I was intentionally being sold something here, right up to the inclusion of his actual final(?) marriage ceremony at the end, which is really disarmingly sweet but also exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about where it's using vulnerability to paper over the lack of reflection over all the people Caveh talks about having hurt along the way. Also, from the post-Show About the Show perspective of right now, it's pretty depressing to watch, knowing that Caveh's self-destructive drive for seemingly full disclosure is going to destroy this marriage, too. Grade: C
The original Tommy album by The Who has some highlights but isn't something I have a ton of affection for, so I'm probably less offended than most that Ken Russell takes the album and makes a movie adaptation that is balls-to-the-wall bananas from front to back, a wild cornucopia of bonkers psychedelia, over-the-top Freudian imagery, homoeroticism, and almost certainly intentional self-parody (e.g. Roger Daltrey with that White-Jesus hair hang-gliding in shirtless to save the say). It is intoxicating, and honestly the only thing holding this movie back from unfettered greatness is the original Tommy album itself—not so much the music (which is often improved by this movie's musical-theater approach, e.g. Tina Turner as the Acid Queen—I know this is sacrilege, but I don't care) but the story, which is just kind of stupid at best and pretty tacky at worst. This movie also makes the completely unforced error of adding one really unnecessary bit of homophobia regarding Uncle Ernie, which is a shame and also kind of unbelievable given how gay the rest of this movie feels. But past those caveats is one of the most maximalist and fevered movie musicals I've ever seen, and I legit love that. Grade: B+
I had gotten used to early Wiseman documentaries being seethingly angry, depicting broken institutions hurting people. But Hospital took me completely by surprise by depicting the titular hospital with such openly humanist love—maybe not for the hospital itself but for the workers there and the patients seeking treatment. It's so bursting with human life in this liminal way that blurs the line between this world and the next. I found this tremendously moving, especially in the couple of scenes where doctors desperately advocate for their patients in ways that try to circumvent the limitations of the (mostly unseen) broken health and law bureaucracy that rules over all of this. Would make for a profound (if queasy) double feature with Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes. Grade: A-
I guess if I were being charitable, I could chalk up this movie's reputation as "one of the worst of all time" to the fact that it's rife with pseudo-science and outdated terminology/ideas about gender and genderqueer & trans identities. There are some Not Good things articulated here, for sure, like linking gender nonconformity to a bad childhood, and whatever the historical context of this movie and Ed Wood's own life, it's undeniable that some parts of this feel pretty bad nowadays. But I'm not feeling particularly charitable right now, so I'm just going to assume that this movie's "worst of all time" legacy is largely due to some noxious mix of laughing at Ed Wood's idiosyncratic and borderline amateur filmmaking choices and just straight-up dismissively laughing at the trans and genderqueer people depicted in this movie. For the latter, it's worth pointing out that the movie itself assumes its audience is laughing, as the narrator literally says so before pleading for love and understanding for the people depicted here, which is heartbreaking considering the film's eventual disgraced legacy. And regarding the former, I can see how a low-budget, fully camp, at times nearly avant-garde personal essay in the guise of an educational sexploitation film would perplex people who are used to watching only Hollywood narrative films, but it's inexcusable for a professional critic like Leonard Maltin to act as if this is unwatchable dreck when it's a genuinely interesting and even visionary use of the form, however amateur Ed Wood's outward trappings seem. Considering what a YouTube video essay looks like now, it's impossible for me to watch this and not find it decades ahead of the curve. Anyway, besides all that, I just found this to be really moving at points, too. It's just this achingly sincere appeal for acceptance from someone who clearly experienced a lot of suffering regarding his gender identity, and in a way, the retrospectively dated ideas about gender kind of reinforce that, too, because for someone's mind to be so colonized that they view their identity (an identity that this deeply conflicted film at times argues should be normalized and destigmatized) as something to be "cured," they must have faced some truly oppressive reinforcement of gender norms. Like, I almost started crying at the part where Glen wants to wear a dress to a Halloween party, and his dad won't let him until his mom saves the day and lets Glen go dressed how he wants. There's just so much pain in this movie, and people have really spent decades pointing at that pain and going, "lol, wow, this movie sucks." After watching both this and The Room within about a week of each other, I feel like there's something about really sincere depictions of pain onscreen that makes people just want to ridicule, as if vulnerability is something to be mocked. I'm not saying that there's not funny stuff in either of these movies or that either movie is above criticism, but there's a fine line between the culture of ridiculing bad movies and reinforcing oppressive norms. Grade: B
