Happy Father's Day! Happy Juneteenth!
Movies
Memoria (2021)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movies usually stick with me in bits and pieces, with the dreamlike structures of his films being often too slippery for me to remember in whole. But the entirety of
Memoria has been absolutely dominating my conscious mind all day since I saw it—probably in no small part because it's the first of Apichatpong's movies I've seen in a theater. But also, there's something very specifically intriguing about the manifestations of Apichatpong's typical tropes here that I find just magnetic: the spiritual dimensions of the past intruding into the present, the urban-rural tensions, the languorous, lightly psychedelic slow cinema, the exquisite soundscapes—these are all present in the other movies of his that I've seen, but somehow, Tilda Swinton's character's quest to discover the source of a mysterious booming noise that only she can hear is immediately beguiling to me in a way that none of his other films have been. Ignorant Westerner that I am, it's probably also got to do with the rather embarrassing reality that I simply am more familiar with the Colombian setting (embarrassing because I am only barely familiar with Colombia) and especially the white, Scottish protagonist than I ever was with the Thai milieu of his other films, so I can more easily pinpoint the precise ways in which he plays with political subtext one moment, gentle absurdity the next, and then cracks reality wide open in the third. But whatever it is, this is an
exquisitely mind-bending film made all the more exquisite by the patience of Apichatpong's edits and the pristine intricacy of the sound design. The film is so slow that it's easy to be fooled into thinking that nothing is happening, but then you'll get something like the moment where, all in one shot, the film slips from being about one woman's walk through the woods into being about thousands of years of human history, and I can just feel my brain melting out of my ears. I can't remember the last film I saw in a theater that felt this profoundly mystical and intoxicated on the feeling of accepting the monumental incomprehensibility of the universe.
Grade: A
Mad God (2021)
In the Bible, the story of the Tower of Babel comes immediately on the heels of the flood story. This is funny because the flood is supposed to be God wiping humanity's squalor and evil from the face of the earth and starting the human race afresh with the righteous family of Noah, and yet, without skipping a beat, the text just jumps right from the optimism of Noah's surviving the flood to humanity being back in a state of depravity that must be decimated by God. Realistically, I have to imagine that the continuity between the Flood and the Tower of Babel sections is probably just an effect of an ancient editor trying to stitch together two separately composed stories, but taking the text at face value, this seems to suggest two things: 1) that the entire scope of human history is a cyclical pattern of human society trending toward monstrosity until God destroys it and starts over again; and 2) God is somewhat powerless to stop humanity from spiraling into a state that God views worthy of destruction. I bring all this up not just because
Mad God begins with a visual evocation of the Tower of Babel but also because in some ways, this film's whole project is taken up with those two suggestions from the Genesis primeval history. Like the Book of Genesis,
Mad God has been stitched together, though this one is all at least the vision of a single dude: legendary effects supervisor Phil Tippett, who apparently worked on and off for 30 years on the various sections that eventually were combined to become this movie, a completely stunning extravaganza of stop-motion animation bolstered by a kitchen sink of other practical effects. Knowing this (which I didn't until I read about it after seeing the movie) makes the lumpily recursive structure of the movie make a lot more sense, at least on a meta level, as the movie is less a coherent continuity than it is a collection of sequences, each an iteration on the same basic premise. That premise is one that more or less assumes those Genesis implications of the inevitability of civilization to become depraved and the inability of God to stop it. Everything we see is some extremely gross evocation of just how messed up the world is, some futile attempt of a divine(?) saboteur to blow up this civilization, or a combination of the two. But mostly the first. This is a truly disgusting piece of cinema, exhibiting a seemingly endless imagination for finding new configurations of misshapen bodies, guts, and poop to throw across the screen, and the fuzzy, gooey tactility of stop-motion animation makes it even more putrid, as if once every few years, Phil Tibbett had a new brainwave about a troll chortling poop from an electrocuted gremlin's butthole and put this film back into production to realize that vision. There's something kind of depressing about how a thirty-year passion project resulting in some of the most stunning animation in the history of the medium is all to the effect of making us repulsed by the fruit of that immaculate craft, and I could never bring myself to actually enjoy this movie. But it's also
such an incredible piece of craft that I cannot imagine anyone not being at least a little impressed by it, if not
what's onscreen then certainly
how it got there. I'm sure mileage will vary, but I found stretches of this to be strikingly beautiful, a sort of transcendent filthiness that's both kind of funny but also kind of sad—as if the movie keeps trying to be purely nihilistic but can't completely shake the impulse to mourn what the gift of life has become. There's a rather stunning sequence toward the end of the movie that flips us back to the movie's own little version of Genesis 1 as we see life being seeded on the planet, and that sequence makes plain the tragedy of the madness of a god who would (as in Genesis following both the flood and the Tower of Babel) want not to annihilate a creation so prone to suffering but to rebirth it with the hopes that
this time, the miracle of existence can occur without the curse of pain. The poignancy of a moment such as that makes it hard to dismiss this as simply a gross-out example of extreme cinema. Though lordy, it is gross.
Grade: B+
Elephant (2003)
Feeling kinda weird about this one. In 2022, this feels pretty thin as a treatise on school shootings. I can't really blame a twenty-year-old piece of media made in the shadow of the first modern school shooting for not speaking to the multi-faceted epidemic of school shootings that has evolved in the United States since its release, but suffice to say, it doesn't. Part of this is that it is just beamed in from another era—gun culture and school security are just in such wildly different (arguably worse) places than they were at the turn of the millennium, and besides that, this is such an artifact of how schools (presumably? I was in elementary school at the time) used to work in a pre-high-stakes-testing, pre-Columbine world, which is interesting as a piece of history but also kinda distancing as I try to engage with the Big Issue. More to the fault of the movie, the characters are all extremely flat, and while maybe this is an intentional effect (something about the mundanity of their final moments?), it just doesn't excuse the amateurish, frankly mean-spirited characterization of, say, the mean girl clique who have synchronized their bulimia, or the extremely lurid way the movie characterizes the shooters with all the sensationalist media tropes of a school shooter (violent video games, repressed homosexuality, etc.) and literally nothing else. On the other hand, this movie is undeniably unsettling and powerful in a way that transcends all of the above. It is a masterpiece of craft; the camera floats through the pointedly quotidian details of the school day in the minutes immediately preceding the shooting in a way that is hypnotic and eerie despite (maybe even because of) how ordinary and clichéd everything around it is. It's as if the mere fact of observing this is otherworldly, the setting already haunted by some force of evil even before the violence ensues. Forcing us viewers to sit, slow-cinema-style, through every minute, especially the unremarkable minutes that comprise the majority of the film, of this harrowing event gives the film a texture and a posture toward the central tragedy that simply would not have been possible through a more conventional dramatization of the shooting, and for all my issues with the finer points of the film, what this movie does aesthetically and how that impacts our relationship to what is actually happening is a really singular achievement. So... I dunno.
Grade: B-
Bent (1997)
As a movie about gay men being put into a Nazi concentration camp, this strikes all of the emotionally harrowing territory you would expect, albeit through a fairly distinctive lens of having it all filtered through this slightly Brechtian staging that foregrounds artificiality in the dialogue and almost abstract spaces. But I was also really distracted through a big chunk of this movie because after a little while, I suddenly remembered that my great uncle had described this movie (or, more accurately, the play it's based on) to me when I was like 16 or 17 when describing art that had been meaningful to him as a Catholic gay man. I had long forgotten the title of the play as well as this conversation with him, but it all just flooded back to me, during the first no-touching sex scene in fact, which is an added layer of weird, and I spent the rest of the movie thinking about him. My relationship with him is complicated now for reasons not worth getting into here, and I haven't seen him in person in years. He hasn't been doing too well recently, either. It's tough the things that time does to our connections with people, which is actually something of a theme in this film, too, so I guess that's appropriate.
Grade: B
The Masters of Time (Les maîtres du temps) (1982)
René Laloux's second feature after
Fantastic Planet, and it's basically the Saturday-morning-cartoon version of
Fantastic Planet: noticeably cheaper animation, bizarre pacing, stilted voice acting (though that one's maybe my fault, since the only version I could find was a frankly awful English dub). Famed French comics visionary Mœbius did the visual design for the movie, and it shows through the frequently excellent creature design (the faceless angels in particular are stunning). But unfortunately, only a few sequences in the film actually take these designs and put them into motion as they deserve, with the rest moving stiffly and awkwardly, like something on the tier of
Masters of the Universe. A disappointingly compromised film with just enough promise to make you long even more for the better version that obviously could have been had the finances panned out. Just give weirdo animators the budget to make their cool animation, okay?
Grade: C+
The Tale of the Fox (Le Roman de Renard) (1937)
Uproariously funny and bawdy—basically, stitching together the "Renard the Fox" cycle of folktales into an impish, anti-authority fable about the nature of power and its relationship to storytelling. Exactly what I would have expected from a feature film by the dude who did "The Cameraman's Revenge." It's also worth noting that this completely blows all the other early stop-motion feature films out of the water in terms of sheer craft. This is some of the most intricate and fluid stop-motion animation I've ever seen, all the more impressive that, even though it was released just a couple years after
The New Gulliver and a few months prior to
The Seven Ravens (i.e. the other two films with claims to inaugurating the stop-motion feature), the actual animation of
The Tale of the Fox was finished way back in 1930, making this handily the earliest stop-motion feature. On those terms, this movie feels similar to what
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (which also came out in '37—what a year for animation) did for the cel-animated feature: a proof of concept for the format that is so technically masterful that it embarrasses imitators for decades.
Grade: A-
Music
The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention (2022)
With production by Nigel Godrich and music by the two most visible members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood), this is more or less a Radiohead album in terms of the public-facing understanding of what a Radiohead album is (i.e. not a whole lot of attention to the pieces that Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway, and Ed O'Brien contribute). As it is, I'm not really sure what's going on with the other members of Radiohead that this
isn't an official Radiohead album, especially considering that the other musician here, Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, isn't really doing anything that's wildly divergent from what the percussion would normally sound like on a Radiohead release. I mean, Sons of Kemet are cool and I'm glad that Thom and Jonny are in their orbit, but if you'd told me this was Selway's drumming, I wouldn't blink. Whatever the case, this is a very good album, certainly the most fleshed out of Yorke's non-Radiohead work and of course a lot more rock-oriented and straight-ahead-banging than Greenwood's (excellent) film work. Tracks like "Pana-vision" have that woozy, off-kilter string swell that made
A Moon Shaped Pool so intoxicating, while "You Will Never Work in Television Again" and "We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings" are the most straightforwardly rocking Radiohead-adjacent songs have been since "Bodysnatchers" and "Jigsaw Falling Into Place." "We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings" in particular has these two incredible synths snaking through the track's background, one wailing, the other rumbling, giving the song a tremendous sense of urgency and scale—probably my favorite track on here, though there's steep competition throughout. This is sure to be near the top of my favorite albums list at the end of the year.
Grade: A-
Books
The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon (1922)
I read this, the first
Newbery Medal winner, for a podcast my wife and I are doing (stay tuned! more details to come soon!). It has all the hallmarks of a book written in 1922 by a European white man purporting to tell the whole history of mankind: i.e. disproportionally (read: nearly completely) focused on Western Europe, kinda white supremacist, misrepresents colonialism as a mostly benevolent operation, etc. On a more theoretical level, this is definitely written from the perspective of a kind of liberal progressivism that mostly died out in the wake of WWII and the Holocaust, which is the presumption that human history is a linear path from barbarism toward enlightened scientific rationalism. Subsequent editions that add to the post-1922 history (I read a version published in 1984) walk some of these things back a little by necessity as they recount more of the 20th century, though adding to the mix a heaping portion of Red-Scare-ish anti-communism and an undercurrent of American Exceptionalism (to van Loon's credit, he barely focuses on the United States at all in his original edition). So anyway, this is pretty compromised as a history book, really only worthwhile as a trapped-in-amber document of a certain worldview at a particular place and time. It's also pretty dull, though not as dull as it could be—van Loon's narration has a lot more personality than this kind of textbook-adjacent nonfiction necessitates, and as outrageous as his editorial asides can sometimes be (he has a habit of characterizing whole people groups with wry little sentences like "they didn't have any friends" or "these people had no moral code"), they are at least a little entertaining. But that's a fairly small comfort in the landscape of tedium that is the rest of the book. I imagine I'll have more to say about this in the podcast (again, stay tuned!), but overall, it's hard to imagine a child would want to read this book, and it would be hard to trust the judgement of an adult who would require a child to read it.
Grade: D
