Movies
I'm too late to this party to be surprised that this isn't a paint-by-numbers Mr. Rogers biopic (its reputation long preceded it), but I'm no less delighted by the legitimately complex interplay of cliché and ingenious, thoughtful invention. Like, this actually just goes whole hog into the clichéiest of clichés by giving our protagonist (not Mr. Rogers, I assume most people know by now, but a quasi-fictionalized journalist) certified Daddy Issues, but then it defamiliarizes that trope rigorously by contextualizing it all within this bizarre, Brechtian version of a Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood episode in which Tom Hanks (who looks and sounds nothing like the real Fred Rogers, but he works well in this movie) plays his soft-spoken iteration of a fourth-wall-breaking guide taking us through this story, a la Sam Elliot in The Big Lebowski or even the Leading Player in Pippin. And yet, even this defamiliarizing is refamiliarized by the meticulous fidelity to the aesthetic and set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood itself, and at least for someone like me who spent a not inconsiderable amount of my early childhood watching the show, it's both intensely nostalgic and a little uncanny to see the show's architecture, right down to the songs and the cardigan choreography, bent just slightly into the particular story this movie is telling. And somehow, through all this, the movie manages to transform its story's on-paper roteness into an unbelievably effective and deeply moving rumination on coming to terms with and ultimately expressing the thorny, twisted emotions that accumulate as a function of being human. Marielle Heller's direction is unbelievably creative, too, and the final shot of this movie is my favorite shot of 2019 from any movie not named Long Day's Journey into Night. An odd, beautiful gem of a film from top to bottom. Grade: A-
Probably my favorite Claire Denis movie I've seen after High Life, "favorite" being kind of loosely defined, since this is thoroughly miserable and scary in some pretty awful ways. Which admittedly is also true of High Life. I guess I just like Claire Denis movies to be scary and unpleasant. Grade: B+
Came expecting to cheer on a fascinating train wreck, left having experienced a masterpiece. What a bewildering, jaw-dropping rush of apocalyptic sci-fi satirical whatever. Like, I get why people hate it, but man, y'all. Quantum entanglement, time travel, satire of moral-majority conservatism, etc.—100% the movie I would have expected the writer/director of Donnie Darko— to have directed with four times the budget, but also 100% funnier and more vital than I was prepared for. It's a fascinating artifact of the fears of the Bush era (terrorism emboldening a repressive [yet respectable-presenting] right-wing state; the Patriot Act re-shaping privacy and the internet as we know it—honestly, probably the most sincere and insightful reckoning with 9/11 as both a reality and a cultural symbol that this era of filmmaking produced), but there's also something perennially cogent about this movie's wild, wildly hilarious, brutally despairing take on the apocalypse. As someone sitting on the brink of what feels like some kind of low-grade apocalypse myself, I found a lot of this movie echoing pretty resoundingly in 2020 (geez, I already hate typing that number—more meme than calendar year by now), from the way the political battles of this movie condense around the magnetism of ineffectual celebrity (The Rock's performance here is so good, btw—don't ever think he's done anything this out-there before or since) to the way that otherwise noble revolutionary Marxists kind of lose the plot for a minute debating whether or not it is just that nature coerces all living things to defecate whether they want to or not. This movie just understands something constituent both about living in a world teetering on the brink in general and also about specifically the intersection of the American myth (or whatever sausage-mill version of that myth that comes out of the modern capitalist media landscape) with that general lived experience on the brink. I'm rambling (what else can you do about a movie as sprawling as this?), so I'll just close by saying that this is probably the most Pynchonian movie I've ever seen and definitely feels like a bizarro-world dry run for PTA's adaptation of Inherent Vice (Timberlake and Newsom basically play the same roles in their respective movies?)—each one being a borderline incomprehensibly plotted comedic whirlwind through the end of an era and the borderline incomprehensibly byzantine forces engineering that end. Neither movie runs out of ideas. Grade: A
A hushed, often beautiful, usually just supremely calming rumination on rural vs. urban Thailand—though I'll admit that more so than any of the ideas in the movie, I just kind of coasted on the vibes, and for me, this movie's basically working in the same vein as ambient music. Probably the most immediately an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie has worked on me, and an ideal movie to put on at about 1 pm on an overcast afternoon while your son takes a nap—I definitely fell asleep during the last five minutes and had to rewind when I woke up, which normally would sound like a criticism but is absolutely praise here. Very nice to have my constant, low-grade anxiety about the fallout from a global pandemic cease for about 100 minutes, and the burden of consciousness slip away for about 5. Grade: A-
Much more of a traditional cop movie than the first one, which is bad because the cop elements were my least-favorite parts of the first one. It also has what strikes me as a very tasteless depiction of a deaf villain, which is also bad. But the good: the fight scenes are still great (the fireworks warehouse at the end rivals the best sequences from the original, and the playground brawl isn't too shabby, either). I also really enjoy that the movie opens with Chan's bosses chewing him out for all the damage he did in the first one, which is a good comedic note in a film that doesn't always seem to know where to put its comedy. Grade: B-
Small town, sprawling cast, metaphorically rich threat, deep sense of history, lighthouses (and generally Maine-ish vibes, despite the California setting)—feels like a Stephen King novel, and at a mere 90 minutes, it more importantly feels like a Stephen King novel in fast-forward, the appeal of which I sometimes wish King's editors would take to heart more often. Anyway, this is tons of fun; on-paper, it's a little standard (the ghosts come every 100 years, ooOOOoo), but the movie's filled with great details that flesh out this world delightfully, from the undead sailors' glowing eyes to Carpenter's score to the fact that the hottest radio station in town is the one that just plays jazz standards. I probably wouldn't live in this town, on account of the ghost sailors, but I would definitely visit. Grade: B+
American Graffiti cross-pollinated with Looney Tunes. It has that same feeling of nostalgia being weaponized against itself that Spielberg (producer here) would take to much zanier, often more cutting heights a year later in 1941 (there's a lot of cast overlap between those two movies, too, which makes me curious how much I Wanna Hold Your Hand influenced that one [Edit: As it turns out, the two movies have the same writers—surprise, surprise]). The results of all this are solidly entertaining, though a little thin at times—blame Robert Zemeckis's first-time jitters, I guess? Still a pretty impressive directorial debut. Surely someone out there somewhere has written something really insightful about Zemeckis's relationship to Boomer nostalgia (the line between this movie, Back to the Future, and then Forrest Gump is fascinating)—I'd love to read it. If this hasn't been written yet, you're welcome, culture writers of the world. I'll collect my finder's fee in Beatles CDs. Grade: B+
Television
The third and final season of Anne with an E makes a good case for the show's cancellation. Back when this series began, I was enthusiastic about the ways in which the show revised its source material into interesting new shapes, but after a second season compromised by some silly turns, this third season finds the spark of that first season mostly dead and my enthusiasm entirely waned. The problems here are basically the same as in Season 2: ludicrous plot turns, heavily shoehorned-in 21st century progressive values (there's a whole out-of-nowhere #MeToo plot)—none of which I'm inherently opposed to, but they're handled clumsily here and have basically supplanted what made the show enjoyable in the first place, i.e. the seriousness with which it takes Anne's search for a community that helps her heal from her past (reduced here to a merely semi-recurring thread in which Anne looks for information regarding her parents). New to this season are some pretty deep structural issues, too, which makes the show even more dysfunctional; arcs come and go seemingly without forethought—the aforementioned sexual assault plot gets two episodes of intense attention before disappearing completely, and the same goes for a number of the stories told here—and the show has no idea how to incorporate its newer characters, such as Bash (whom Gilbert met in his improbable swashbuckling adventures last season) and his extended family as well as the people we follow from the Mi'kmaq nation (a real missed opportunity here, since the presence of indigenous peoples is something that could have organically yielded some interesting directions for the show—there are some good individual moments, but none of them help to make the plots feel like they're transmissions from an entirely different series). So this third season ends up just rushing from plot to plot without any structural integrity or even really a sense of how all these elements fit into the same universe. As much as it makes me sad to say this about a show I once had pretty positive feelings about, it's kind of insufferable. Grade: C
Books
Really solid bit of historical fiction. I was at first irritated by the YA-ness of the narrative voice here; like, the narrator is a prisoner of war in WWII being tortured by Nazis, so why is she talking all snarky and jokey like she's in The Fault in Our Stars? But the novel gets pretty clever with this voice as the story progresses, eventually playing around with narrative personas and unreliable narrators in some really interesting ways before veering into straightforward tragedy that feels appropriate for the weight of the subject matter. On a meta level, this book is kind of bittersweet for me because I was reading it for my school's student book club, and because of the school cancellations, not only will we not be able to discuss this book, it now seems unlikely that the book club will meet again before the end of the school year. It's a minor thing in the scope of everything else happening in the world with the virus, but I'm going to miss book club. Grade: B+
