Mini Reviews for August 30 - September 12, 2021

Sorry about not posting last week. I was out of town for the weekend and then got sick. Life's been hectic!

Movies

Sword of Trust (2019)
A somewhat shaggy comedy that's really only worth watching for Marc Maron. I've pretty agnostic on Maron as a personality/comedian, but between this and GLOW, he's developed this riveting screen acting presence that I think is genuinely great—a potent and seemingly effortless mix of world-weariness and sweetness that has lent itself to some pretty compelling performances, Sword of Trust among them. The rest of the movie is just kind of there, some sort of lightly satirical hijinks about trying to sell a Civil War sword to a group of conspiracy theorists who believe the South won the Civil War—honestly kind of a flippant treatment of a genuine threat (not this brand of conspiracy theorist per se, but just broadly the white-supremacist, right-wing militia), but Maron's performance is so good that it makes it all go down easy enough, I guess. Grade: B-

The Old Man and the Gun (2018)
It's kind of incredible that David Lowery has exactly two modes: the icy, cosmic art-house mode (e.g. A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) and the gentle melancholy warm-blanket mode (e.g. Pete's Dragon, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, now The Old Man & the Gun)—and never the twain shall meet. If you told me that there were two completely different filmmakers both working under the pseudonym "David Lowery," I would believe it. I usually prefer the icy arthouse stuff, but last night, I was just wiped out after having been sick on Monday and Tuesday and then teaching on a sore throat the rest of the week, and I needed a warm blanket, and boy, did The Old Man and the Gun hit the spot. There's not much to the movie, but it hits every one of its unambitious, easy-going beats out of the park. Plus, Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford have unbelievable onscreen chemistry. Grade: B+

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016)
It's initially pretty captivated to have a movie set in a high school animated by images that look like they could have been drawn by the students at that high school, and the dreamy surrealism is cool (the title is not a metaphor). But the movie runs out of gas long before the end of its already slight 75 minutes, and having Jason Schwartzman voice the precocious main character is a meta bridge too far—like, Max Fischer, is that you? Still, there are some very, very cool bits in this movie—it's clear that the craft in terms of imagery and animation is here. I feel like a better screenplay could have elevated this into something actually very good. Grade: C+

 

Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)
A thoroughly white-washed, company-approved history of the Disney Renaissance, but it has some great footage, and it's appropriately disdainful of Jeffrey Katzenberg, though not nearly enough so of Michael Eisner, which is too bad, but I guess we'll always have Shrek. And anyway, it was Katzenberg, not Eisner, who wanted to cut "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid, and if there's a single opinion that can prove that someone is an artless buffoon worthy of a lifetime of contempt, he found the one. Grade: B

 

 

Cats Don't Dance (1997)
A pretty forgettable movie overall except that 1) it's directed by the same guy who did The Emperor's New Groove, and you can see Dindal carrying some of the sensibilities of this movie into that later masterpiece, which is fun, and 2) it's got that extremely frantic, rubbery animation that a lot of Warner-Bros.-affiliated animation in the '90s had, e.g. Animaniacs and stuff like that, and I like that style a lot. Otherwise, this is mediocre stuff, for sure. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Christine (1983)
Like the best Stephen King adaptations, John Carpenter's Christine streamlines a classically overwritten King novel into the primal story it should have been to begin with. It's interesting that both artists, Carpenter and King, at their white-hot prime couldn't wrestle this story into something on-par with their other work of the time. There's some mighty cool stuff in Carpenter's adaptation, like the scene where Christine is driving around on fire, but as with Stephen King, Carpenter has trouble finding a way to make this story play into his strengths—e.g. this is probably the least-consequential Carpenter score of his classic period. But at least Carpenter makes the story fun—more than I can say about King's novel, which I found to be a bit of a slog—and it is single-mindedly driven in a way that makes this movie move with this unstoppable sinister energy that Carpenter was so good at evoking. Grade: B

Female Trouble (1974)
It's not nearly as purely transgressive as Pink Flamingos, which makes this... well, "boring" is the wrong word, but I guess comparatively docile in the pantheon of early John Waters—no explicit sex (in fact, the sex is pointedly, exaggeratedly simulated), no mutilated live animals, no licking scene. It's just generally a movie much less interested in using bodily stunts for gross-out extremes, which sands off both the best and worst parts of Pink Flamingos. In return, we get a slightly more coherent story and slightly higher production values, resulting in something that feels a little less like a shoestring production among friends and more like the good version of a Troma movie, which isn't a bad thing. Divine remains an unparalleled performer, the Waters brand of high camp remains very fun, the ability of his scripts to toss off seemingly effortless one-liners is intoxicatingly hilarious ("I'm going to Detroit to find happiness in the auto industry"), and the open disdain for normies (and in this case, specifically heterosexuals) remains inspiring. As a heterosexual myself, I can confirm that the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring one. Grade: B

The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը) (1969)
Just an unassailable vibe. It seems crass to say that of a movie that is obviously freighted with huge social, historical, and personal themes, but honestly, I don't feel like I have the background knowledge to parse those themes when the movie is about an Armenian poet I knew nothing about before watching this movie (and still know basically nothing about), so most of what I'm left with is the exquisite feel of the movie. The movie itself seems uninterested in informing its audience about the specifics of Sayat-Nova's life, which apparently was a sticking point for the Soviet officials responsible for the release of the film, but ultimately that approach is probably for the best, as a more explicitly informative movie would have been more objectively educational while also being a far poorer viewing experience. Because what's actually here is rich: a parade of some of the most gorgeous imagery every put to film, set to some completely transfixing audio tracks that form a kind of proto-ASMR-type soundscape, all assembled into a rough symbolic arc of the artist's life. The collage of surreal images and religious spaces and the way that the movie interlocks everything into one incredible tableau after another evokes the subjective experience of reading poetry—I have no idea what Sayat-Nova's poetry is like, but this movie gives the impression of dwelling inside one of his poems. It's not unlike Andrei Tarkovsky's project in the more abstract corners of Mirror, but at the same time, The Color of Pomegranates is also unlike anything I've seen before. Beautiful, mesmerizing stuff.

If you're interested, I was part of a pretty fun conversation about this movie on the Cinematary podcast, and you can listen to that here.

Television

Lodge 49, Season 2 (2019)
Even better than the first season, which is great but also a shame because it's also when the show was cancelled. Here, the series's soft-hearted Pynchonisms have coalesced into a season of television that's at-once a lot weirder and more oblique than its previous year while also finding a resonance in these particular characters that is often profound. Increasingly, these characters are forced to deal with abject failure—of the lodge, of their ability to find answers, of even their beliefs themselves—and consequently, the show is constantly pushing these characters to re-evaluate their role in the show's world. But the result of such soul-searching is never despair, incredibly. What instead these characters find is connection; despite facing genuine hard times and some serious dark nights of the soul, the characters come out on the other side having found each other. I mentioned Lost in my review of the first season, and I'll evoke that show here, too, but for a different reason: as the world of Lost got more and more convoluted, the show increasingly leaned on the idea that the true weight of the series wasn't the ongoing mystery but rather the ways that the characters' connections with one another created profound meaning, and Lodge 49's second season does something similar, albeit in a way that isn't so nakedly sentimental as that earlier show. Lodge 49 is, at its core, a show about a world so bewildering that the only thing people can cling to is their ability to care for one another, and when the show hammers that home, it produces some of the most moving moments I've ever seen on TV: the culmination of a postmodern "Gift of the Magi" subplot between Ernie and Dud, Liz's plot involving who she believes is a surrogate mother figure, the whole-cast trip to Mexico—I was in tears. And somehow, the series finds a way to do this without ever losing its extremely off-beat sense of humor: for example, the warmth of that trip to Mexico is also a showcase for a truly hysterical late-season arc involving a character played by Paul Giamatti, and that's just one of many deliriously, hilariously absurd threads in the show. I dunno, as with everything involving this show, your mileage will vary, but the mix of really human moments with giddily goofy absurdity is so keyed in to my sensibilities that I felt extremely seen by the show. I could have watched five more seasons, and even though I knew it was coming, it was actually pretty upsetting to me when I got to the inevitably abrupt ending. In this era of "peak TV" where there's always another network or streaming service to pick up shows with small but dedicated fanbases, it's rare to see great TV shows cut down prematurely like this one was, which makes this one's early demise even more painful—not since the end of Pushing Daisies have I felt so dismayed at show so obviously special and with every indication of more greatness to come hitting the brick wall of a cancellation-forced ending. Wyatt Russell is still apparently out there campaigning for this series to be picked up by another company, which feels about right for a guy who played a character defined by his indefatigable optimism. I hope he's right. Grade: A+

Rick and Morty, Season 5 (2021)
I'm not really feeling this show anymore. When I reviewed the previous season of Rick and Morty, I indicated that I was tired of the show's somewhat haphazard and repetitive approach to character development, and that's still true here: we'll go episodes at a time with virtually no meaningful stakes for the characters, and then out of nowhere we're expected to, for example, care deeply about Morty being sad about his breakup with a superhero. It's not like other adult animation doesn't do something similar: both The Simpsons and Futurama are famous for their out-of-left-field sentimentalism, but neither of those shows are anywhere near as flippant about their characters' relationships or their emotional well-being during the episodes that we're not asked to care for them, which helps make the shift toward emotional stakes not feel so drastic and extreme as it does in Rick and Morty. It's also just simply the case that there are only so many times that a single character beat can be used for emotional resonance before its effect wears off on me—sure, it's theoretically sad how Rick alienates those close to him, but after five seasons, I'm going to need a more profound iteration on that than a lampshaded "dead kid" trope, which is what this season goes for. Anyway, my usually comfort in Rick and Morty is that the show has been at least funny even when the broader ambitions aren't working for me, but unfortunately, Season 5 is also where that's stopped working for me. At least part of this is the show increasingly stooping for ironically extreme violence and gross stuff in lieu of traditional jokes—an episode like "Rickdependence Spray" (in which Morty's sperm is used to create monsters) is cro-magnon levels of stupid and puerile, and I'm surprised that it even passed the muster of the show's usually pretty solid quality control filters. But another part—a bigger part, it must be admitted—is probably just a "me" problem. I think I don't really find the show's basic mode of "characters stammering through hyper-quippy, self-aware dialogue" very funny anymore. I guess we all outgrow things, so oh well. To the show's credit, it is still capable of being incredibly clever in terms of plotting and sheer complexity of sci-fi concepts: episodes like "Mortyplicity" and "Rickmurai Jack" have classically Rick-and-Morty-style head-spinning premises that play out with mathematical precision, and it's still pretty fun to watch the show excel in that mode. But 1) the show isn't going to that mode in every episode, and 2) without the humor or characters landing, the show's complexity isn't enough to make the show worth my time overall. Not sure if I'll keep watching. It just doesn't really seem like this is the series for me anymore. Grade: C

Mini Reviews for February 22 - 28, 2021

Better week this time.

Movies

Collective (Colectiv) (2020)
A mostly pretty engaging documentary about the investigative journalism that exposed all the healthcare fraud that came to light after the Colectiv nightclub fire in Romania. This is one of those situations in which, from a cinematic perspective, the filmmakers lucked into documenting an investigation that became much bigger than anyone could have guessed at the outset, and consequently, this movie has a you-are-there component that's pretty rare in these activist-journalism type of documentaries because that sort of thing is so hard to capture from the beginning as it's happening. It's wild to see all these tropes from Hollywood journalism movies like Spotlight or The Post or whatever show up in real life, too, like two journalists sitting in a room full of evidence summarizing what they knew until they both come to the same conclusion at the same time and then run to their phones to tell their editors. There's also a scene in which someone puts together two pieces of evidence and then exclaims, "They knew!" I could have sworn those tropes were pure screenwriting. But anyway, the other side of this being basically documented in real time is that it eventually starts to have the feel of reading a very long series of investigative articles in a newspaper, and if you've ever done that, you know that the experience involves having to read a lot of the same information over and over again as the slow trickle of new information gets sandwiched in the familiar stuff. After a while, this documentary struggles to avoid becoming a shapeless mass of threads. I guess it's unfair of me to expect, like, Real Life to be engaging and well-organized at all times, but also, isn't that what documentaries are for? Grade: B

Light from Light (2019)
I mostly bounced off of Something, Anything, the first feature film written and directed by Paul Harrill, but Light from Light really hit me. There's still some of the stilted emptiness and indiespeak dialogue that I didn't connect with in Something, Anything (the plot here about the two teens didn't do a lot for me), but far more often, Light from Light finds stillness rather than emptiness, and there's something really rich and beautiful about the way that Harrill allows the visual and sound environments of this film to fill with transcendental space. It's a quietly profound movie about grief and the way that the supernatural joins us in that—a central component of both personal loss and the metaphysical is the sense of mystery, that you will never be able to know enough to have it all make sense, and the dynamic between this movie's two main characters (Marin Ireland's paranormal investigator and Jim Gaffigan's widower who hires her to perhaps find his wife's ghost) embodies that very well. Also, Knoxville peeps will have fun identifying the McGhee-Tyson airport and pretty much no other notable Knoxville locales, which is how you know this is done by a true local. Get that Visit Knoxville whitewashing outta here! (JK, there's also some extremely beautiful Smokey Mountains locales, which are great, too) Grade: B+

UHF (1989)
This movie is definitely at its best when it's just a bunch of random stuff that Weird Al's character puts on his television station; I'm hard-pressed to think of the last thing I saw in a movie that made me laugh as hard as the "Wheel of Fish" segment. On the other hand, when UHF focuses on plot, it mostly stumbles, as a bunch of these kitchen-sink comedies tend to, but I gotta give this one points for having a finale centered around wrestling the TV station from corporate control and turning it over to public ownership, which is inspiring. Oh, also, Michael Richards, aka Cosmo Kramer, is in this? So few projects figure out how to reign in that dude's unbelievably intense screen presence, and I'm not sure if UHF consistently does, but the part where he gives his character's star-making monologue on mops is really something. Grade: B

In the Realm of the Senses (愛のコリーダ) (1976)
File this under "I Don't Get It." I was not expecting a movie that is basically wall-to-wall sex to be boring and academic and over-considered, but that's definitely my reaction to it. I dunno, I guess there's something potentially interesting to me about the idea of an employer and an employee entering into a sexual relationship whose power dynamics create a situation of mutually assured destruction, but in practice, I just got really tired of watching these people have sex, which is part of The Point, I suppose, something about the droning repetition of obsession and the patriarchal assumption that men are free to walk away from sexual encountered unencumbered by the humanity of the person they just slept with. But even with the increasingly inventive, uh, techniques in the movie, I found this more tedious than engaging. Why, you may ask, would I watch a movie notorious for tons and tons of sex if I didn't find that concept inherently interesting? I have no good answer for that. Sometimes you just want to check a canonical movie off the ol' list. I try to be an optimist going into that sort of obligation, but it let me down here. Grade: C

Dark Star (1974)
A movie that is more often boring than not, but whose charms are so charming that the whole experience registers as somewhat positive. It's a shaggy sci-fi comedy about a deteriorating spaceship manned by a bunch of blue-collar dudes who just wanna get stoned and have philosophical debates with a sentient bomb and fight beach-ball space aliens and listen to their made-for-this-movie country song about a space guy pining for Benson, Arizona, and it's all scored by some great early analog-synth sounds from John Carpenter (who also directs, of course). There's just a lot of empty space between these components, which is halfway a parody of the yawning chasms of cinema in 2001: A Space Odyssey but also just kind of an amateur venture to pad out the film—hence my occasional boredom. Much more the debut of screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (Alien) than it is the debut of the John Carpenter we all know and love, but it's fun to see those two fellas work together. Grade: B-

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
Slaughterhouse-Five should be one of those unadaptable novels, and I think this basically proves that it is, though it's pretty successful as a movie. The good parts are very good: the film is super clever in how it edits together the shots where Billy "jumps" in time, and the Dresden stuff is pretty much 100% great. But neither the time-jumping nor the postwar cynicism is what makes Vonnegut's novel difficult to adapt. It's the particular tone of the novel, the intersection of Vonnegut's wry narration and the whimsy alongside the cynicism; the movie obviously can't include the narration (thank goodness they didn't try voiceover), so it loses some of the most memorable stuff about the novel that would have been hard to capture on film anyway, like "So it goes," and it almost entirely flubs the whimsy, which too often veers into just thin silliness here (including the Tralfamadorians, unfortunately). And that's not even getting into the female characters—Vonnegut was never great at female characters, but to his credit, this movie is profoundly worse. Nevertheless, though it kind of fails in some of the specifics, this movie still succeeds at the novel's basic project of the sad existentialism born from the juxtaposition of breathtaking beauty and searing horror. Some moments here are so striking in evoking that project that it makes me wish they'd been able to land the whole thing. Grade: B

Television

A Series of Unfortunate Events, Season 1 (2017)
It's been about two years since I went through all of the books in this series, so it was fun revisiting them through this TV show, which is very faithful to the novels. The books' repetitive structure and slow-building (but never dominant) continuity makes them ideal for adapting into a TV series—though I kind of wish they'd done just one episode per book, since spreading each book over two episodes makes the series threaten to overstay its welcome at times (I'm not joking that you could probably read the entirety of The Bad Beginning in the amount of time it takes to watch the two episodes adapting it). I also have mixed feelings about how the show weaves in a lot more conspicuously the ongoing conspiracy/secret society context; on the one hand, it gives reprieve from the sometimes tired formula that the early books fall into, but on the other hand, it does kind of feel like the show is tipping the hand of the usually close-to-the-chest books and spoiling a little of the excitement of the later books' dot-connecting. And while I'm nitpicking, the tone is also a little less dry and a bit more outwardly silly than the books, too, which is mostly fine but also plays up some of the smarminess the books could dip into at times. But other than those things, this show is a lot of fun and makes some truly inspired choices in adapting the source material, the most inspired of them all being the inimitable Patrick Warburton playing Lemony Snicket himself, wandering the sets and occasionally talking to the camera to deliver the trademark word definitions and wry commentary that defined the book's narrative voice. It's great. There's impeccable casting throughout the show, and each one of them is perfectly in-tune with the blackly comic sensibilities of the series—a good thing, because without the performances being synced to the material, this probably wouldn't have worked. But it does, and of course, the basic material of the books, which this mostly doesn't deviate from except for introducing the broader mythology stuff and a few entertaining musical sequences, is strong indeed. I'm looking forward to checking out the other two seasons, as the source material gets even stronger. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for April 6-12, 2020

Quarantine, Week 5: I wrote a blog post about Asia (the band).

Movies

Sorry We Missed You (2019)
If you've seen any socially conscious working-class drama (or any Ken Loach movie), you basically know exactly where this going from the instant the boss corrects his new hire that "you don't work for us, you work with us" and then lays out all the fees and liabilities involved in his new position as a contract worker. But the inevitability is part of the point; it's a movie that thrives on dramatic irony, as we viewers can see just exactly how these characters are being caged in by the Kafkaesque machinations of specifically 2010s capitalism, but the joke is that even if these characters were as aware as us viewers—and perhaps they are and only trying to fool themselves into buying into the self-made mythology they talk at the movie's beginning—they couldn't do a single thing differently, so thoroughly and absurdly stacked is the deck against workers. A beaten and bloodied character screaming "I have to go to work!" over and over again as his family begs him to stay home and heal should rank up there in the cinematic canon with "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille" as a dissociative rant by someone out of touch with their surroundings, but the horrible truth of our world is that there's nothing out-of-touch about it. Grade: B+

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
A supremely freaky iteration of that type of movie that seemed to proliferate in the '90s—i.e. dude travels to a remote location, plots twist, reality bends, he questions his insanity, etc. This movie leaves a lot of doors open that similar movies might close, though, and is on the whole a lot looser and less concrete than Carpenter usually shoots for, which contributes to the freakiness. Some of the character work doesn't land for me, but that's kind of secondary to the freakiness. Grade: B+

For All Mankind (1989)
I spent the majority of the first decade of my life thinking I would probably be an astronaut, and a large portion of my time then was occupied in rapt imagination about the future of space exploration. Landing on the moon is the most inspiring feat of human history, and it was one of the first bitter disappointments of my life to realize that our world had experienced that and then just kind of collectively moved on from it, letting space programs wither; as an adult, it's an even more bitter disappointment to recognize that humanity (and the United States specifically) seems fundamentally incapable of leaving unbroken the promise of the plaque that Apollo 17 left on the moon's surface: "Here man completed his first explorations of the Moon December 1972, A.D. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind." This movie—alongside Brian Eno's absolutely perfect score—is as much an elegy for the collectivist idealism and optimism that undergirded the lunar missions as it is a celebration of those qualities. An achingly beautiful film for a crushingly ephemeral moment. Grade: A+

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
Boring and insubstantial and, above all, forgettable, which is something you can't say about any of the other Halloween sequels up to this point. I just finished the movie, and I can barely remember the plot. I did kind of love that Dr. Loomis has become this raving madman rushing around yelling at everyone, including children. I guess I probably would do the same thing if I were doomed to be a slasher franchise's Cassandra. Grade: C-

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
One of the very few movies with an "omg so messed up" legacy that has actually lived up to that reputation for me when I finally got to it. This is truly revolting on a number of levels—watching a live sea turtle for-real hacked to pieces is one experience I could actually go forever without seeing again, and there is no question that the depiction of indigenous people is deeply racist in its trafficking of "primitive" stereotypes—to say nothing of alllll the rape in the movie. At the same time, though, this movie also presents maybe the most intense and dedicated criticism of colonialism I've ever seen in a movie not written and/or directed by a person of color, and by the time our protagonist delivers his laughably on-the-nose final line (it is, I kid you not, "Who are the real cannibals?"—makes ya think), it's brutally apparent that the movie's title carries a simultaneously clever and sick double meaning. I guess the argument here is that the abject sadism of colonialism could only be communicated with integrity to white Western audiences through a vehicle as grotesque and loathsome as this movie is, which I respect in theory but probably would respect a lot more if this movie felt as if at least one of the dozens of indigenous people in the cast had been asked for their input during its filming. But good lord, the results. Will not forget some of these images any time soon. Grade: C+

Salesman (1969)
Sales pitches make me intensely uncomfortable, and the commodifying of religious belief is one of the most unsavory things ever to me. So I spent a good portion of this movie—a documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen—in intense discomfort. But it's great. Salesman is the story of 20th century Christianity in microcosm, while also being a cinéma vérité counterpart to Miller's Death of a Salesman. It's also, for all its squirm-inducing tension, quite funny, too. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for March 16-22, 2020

Quarantine, Week 2: The library is closed. I want to go back to school.

Movies

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
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-

Bastards (Les Salauds) (2013)
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+

Southland Tales (2006)
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

Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ) (2006)
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-

Police Story 2 (警察故事續集) (1988)
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-

The Fog (1980)
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+

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)
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

Anne with an E, Season 3 (2019)
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

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (2012)
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+

Mini-Reviews for October 16 - 22, 2017

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

Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books

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

Music

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

Mini-Reviews for June 26 - July 2, 2017

I watched a lot of movies this week, and most of them were kind of not great. Oh well.

Movies

Cars 3 (2017)
While the biggest question surrounding any entry in this series beyond the 2006 original remains, "Why?" (a close second to "What are they grilling at the Bar and Grill?"), Cars 3 at least returns to the warm Americana that ultimately made the first one endearing. In fact, the logically iffy globe-trotting of Cars 2 has been banished almost entirely to the realm of weird fevered dream, apparently, and Mater has mercifully been relegated to the small supporting role he deserves. In his place is Cruz Ramirez, the Adonis Creed to the aging Lightning McQueen's Rocky, if you will, and it works well enough, particularly in the film's rather graceful conclusion. It also bears mentioning that Cars 3 is the best-looking of the Cars films, all of which are technical marvels. It's gorgeous, actually, right down to the intricate lighting and surface textures that look practically photorealistic. It's still Cars, so you're not in for Pixar's best. But you could do a lot worse with children's animation this year. Grade: B

Neruda (2016)
One half of this movie involves Pablo Neruda, in typical biopic trappings, on the lam as he avoids his political enemies. The other half, cross-cut with the first, involves a po-faced film-noir-ish plot in which a mustachioed Gael García Bernal plays what basically amounts to a Chilean-fascist version of Inspector Clouseau hunting down Neruda. Topping it all off is the fact that Bernal's character is entirely fictitious and seems aware of this fact. It's glorious and weird and complex in a way I'm still parsing out, and I loved it. Suck it, standard biopics. Grade: A

Daddy Day Care (2003)
Isn't it funny how dads sometimes approach childcare differently from moms? Ha... Grade: C

Chocolat (2000)
This 2000 Best-Picture nominee (how??) is first a parable about inflexible morality and religious asceticism (unsuccessfully, I might add, as the film doesn't seem to understand anything about religion beyond "it tells you what to do, and that's bad"—there are so many things to criticize about religion, but it just seems silly and shallow to critique a system of morality for having the hallmarks of a system of morality). Then it's a more successful parable about tribalism and the fear of the other (hey there, younger, sexier Johnny Depp), and then it's back to being that first parable again. It's ineffective as a story, ineffective as social commentary, and uninteresting as anything other than chocolate porn (which is the one thing the film truly excels at—the chocolate looks scrumptious). Juliette Binoche is radiant, though, so I guess there's that, too. Grade: C

Escape from New York (1981)
Beat-for-beat, this is about as archetypally '80s action as it gets, and with good reason, since with Escape from New York John Carpenter and Kurt Russell helped invent some of the most robust of that genre's tropes (later to send them up viciously just a few years later in Big Trouble in Little China). And as the OG to that archetype, it's basically perfection, if a bit retroactively rusty in its tropes. It also has a guy who's the self-appointed Duke of New York who drives around in a Cadillac with two chandeliers on the hood, but honestly, that's just gravy. Grade: A-

Hello, Dolly! (1969)
There's a moment about midway through the interminable Hello, Dolly! that feels representative of the whole: a sequence involving the title song (with Louis Armstrong, thank goodness—for a moment there, I was worried that this movie would omit the major player in the best version of that song) lasts for what must be ten minutes, runs its course, and the players begin to walk off the set. But without warning, Louis Armstrong, bless him, jumps back in and shouts, "Let's hear that again!" and the poor musical number limps along for another two-to-three minutes. Such is the movie: overlong, tired, gratuitous... and did I mention overlong? There are exactly three highlights: the women's dresses (which are gloriously over-the-top), Barbara Streisand, and Walter Matthau, and even those last two, theoretical love interests, spend so little time together at the hands of this movie's dysfunctional structure that there's no time for romantic chemistry. Plus, Matthau is Streisand's senior by over twenty years, which... yeah, no. The American musical has two dark ages: we're just now emerging from the most recent one, but Hello, Dolly! remains one of the most insipid artifacts from the technicolor, widescreen, every-musical-is-over-2.5-hours era that marked the bleakest days of the 1960s. No thanks. Grade: C

Television

Dear White People, Volume 1 (2017)
Despite its title and prerelease reputation, Dear White People doesn't so much address white people as it does agonize over the best way to take action against people in power—of whom a large majority are white, of course, but more than anything, this show is about dialogues, not railing monologues. We get a few of those (as we did in the flawed-but-fascinating 2014 film on which this series expands and improves exponentially), especially with the college radio show one of the characters hosts, which she begins each time with a bitter, sardonic "Dear white people..." But as memorable as those monologues are, it doesn't take long to see that show-creator Justin Simien and his host of talented collaborators (most notably Moonlight writer-director Barry Jenkins, who directs a pivotal episode midway through the season) are playing a much more complicated and nuanced game than Aaron-Sorkin-ish theatrics that isolated clips of those monologues might imply. This is a show in which a lot of characters have a lot of opinions about what should be done with the very real problems in their society, but nobody seems to have the right answer or to agree. So in that light, the dramatic tension of the show isn't as much couched in the railing at the racist machine (although there is that) as it is figuring out how to coexist and collaborate with other activists. The series is set on a fictionalized ivy-league campus, and as such, it's probably the best depiction of contemporary campus politics as I've ever seen. But it also quite handily manages to be universal enough that it becomes a story that wrestles with just what it means to be an American progressive in the 2010s (and especially in the past year), and it does that brilliantly. This is the best Netflix series I've seen since BoJack Horseman, not to mention the TV series with the firmest grasp on the national discourse right now. Required viewing. Grade: A

Silicon Valley, Season 4 (2017)
This is what we might call a slump year for one of current television's best comedies. The plotting is ramshackle and questionable, and the formerly reliable minute-to-minute funniness stumbles a bit here and there. That's not to say it's bad, or anything: there are some absolute comedy gems here, from cat-eyes Gilfoyle to CEO Dinesh to pretty much everything Jared does (line of the year, from anything, is the way Zach Woods practically roars, "You reckless child!"), and the character moments this season are particularly nice. This season presents the most intriguing thematic thread for this show's future, which is the slow transition of Richard from nervous, humble idealist to morally compromised tech insider. We'll see where the show goes with this; I'm not sure how optimistic I am about the series's adjustment to a TJ-Miller-less horizon (he gets a very funny Jian-Yang sendoff, at least, followed by a weirdly thoughtless epilogue), but I'm at least intrigued by the plotting, which is something I couldn't have said of the show after even its best seasons. Grade: B