Mini Reviews for August 17-23, 2020

Last blog post of quarantine. Students come to school tomorrow.

Movies

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020)
Mostly pretty disappointed with this. The first Shaun the Sheep Movie is just this perfectly realized gem, one of the best animated movies of the past decade, but this is merely fine. While it's still basically charming by virtue of it being Aardman Animations doing their Aardman thing, Farmageddon strays from the clockwork slapstick of its predecessor and makes a gigantic crutch out of allusions to other alien sci-fi movies, most heavily E.T., whose beats Farmageddon follows shockingly closely, including a final scene that is nearly a shot-for-shot remake of E.T.'s final scene. There are some fun sequences here, and I love the recurring "flying disc cuts through things and lands in the dog's mouth" motif. But this feels pretty empty for the most part. Plus, the UFO subject matter kind of let Aardman fudge their animation by including visible computer effects alongside the stop-motion, which makes this a lot less warm-looking and homespun than their past work. I was pretty lukewarm on Early Man, too, so I hope this isn't me losing touch with Aardman, which has been my lodestone in animation fandom since I was in like kindergarten. Grade: B-

Vivarium (2019)
Starts as with an intriguing premise (a suburban housing development has no exit!) with great satirical or sci-fi possibilities. Ends up going down the satirical and sci-fi routes simultaneously, yet somehow without yielding anything but a few kind of cool images and a few moments of creeping dread. I've never read a J. G. Ballard novel, but this feels like a failed attempt at a J. G. Ballard tribute. Grade: C

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
It's been a while since I did my old "I don't know why this is on my Netflix queue, but it's expiring soon, so I guess I should watch it" thing, so here we are. I basically knew nothing about this movie besides what the title told me (it's not inaccurate!), but within a minute of the movie's beginning, both a hockey stick and a hockey jersey had made an appearance, and I was like, "Wait a minute...", and sure enough, there it was: Written and Directed (and Edited??) by Kevin Smith. So it's not like I had particularly high expectations. This is mostly pretty bad, but incredibly, Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks have mad-great onscreen chemistry, which caught me completely off-guard and saved this movie from an even lower score. It's too bad that both of them have drifted into the autopilot mediocre-movie career phase that they're in now, because there's a legit spark of star power on display here (and honestly in a lot of their early-ish work), and it sort of feels like we lost whatever alternate universe could have been if they'd actually gone on to do stuff that lives up to the promise of their work in turd-level movies like this one. Grade: C-

Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)
I know basically nothing about Glenn Gould outside of his "Goldberg Variations" recordings, and maybe that's key for approaching a biopic of somebody? Being entirely outside of the sphere of references that a biopic would pander to, so you're able to process the movie as a movie? It also helps if the movie is a structural tour-de-force. The short-film anthology format just keeps giving and giving here, making room for animated excursions, fragmentary interviews, mini-symphony scenes like when Gould walks into the diner and orders, little poignant asides like Gould asking the stage manager about his retirement plans. It feels like a movie that has cut out everything but the absolute best parts and has laid them out side-by-side without the usual impediment of narrative cohesion. I could see myself easily becoming even more positive on this movie in repeat viewings. Grade: A-

The Flowers of St. Francis (Francesco, giullare di Dio) (1950)
A collection of parable-like vignettes about Saint Francis of Assisi and his immediate followers. Maybe the most sincere movie about Christian belief and practice that I've ever seen—almost maybe the funniest, too. Somehow, a 5-minute scene consisting of nothing but a leper walking by and Saint Francis just breaking down in anguished tears coexists with a 5-minute sequence of pure slapstick involving a Franciscan being harassed by a feudal tyrant and his goons (and somehow, said tyrant is trapped in a suit of armor suspended just a few inches off the ground). The whole project is so seemingly simple, but it just gets wilder and wilder the more I think about it, and in the end, there's something achingly tactile and real about the way this film frames the faith on display here—a true embodiment of the idea that a lot of modern Christians seem to have lost sight of: that at the end of the Bible, heaven is manifested on earth rather than the other way around. A really weird and really moving film. Grade: A-

Music

NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM - Éons (2020)
Two hours and three song suites about radical environmental mysticism as told by music that sounds like On the Corner era Miles Davis collaborating with Sunn O))). This is either very your thing or very, very not your thing. It is definitely my thing. Hands-down one of my favorite records of the year. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for January 30 - February 5, 2017

Another week. The world's still around, so why not have some reviews?

Movies

Gremlins (1984)

There are all sorts of subtexts to this movie (including a couple uncomfortable ones about race), but the one that feels most trenchant to me is its relentlessly masochistic relationship with American kitsch, especially that particular blend of greed, treacle, and pointless invention found most around Christmastime. The film takes a great deal of care setting up a rather affectionate portrayal of the secular Christmas traditions and the harmless but ultimately cheap toys and gadgetry that surrounds it. But there's also no denying the anarchic glee with which the film deploys its agents of mayhem in burning those traditions to the ground in ways that range from comical to sardonic to outright horrific (Phoebe Cates's character's explanation for not liking Christmas is straight out of a nightmare). Gremlins walks a fascinating, self-loathing, never-dull line that both celebrates and ridicules the implicit and often hokey texts we point to in identifying "American" and "foreign," and I loved every minute of it. Grade: A

Train to Busan (부산행) (2016)

Goodness knows I don't want this to become my mantra, but... the action scenes sure are the best thing about this movie. The film's "zombie apocalypse on a train" premise gives it a linear is inspired, surely, by 2013's Snowpiercer, but the zombies themselves feel like a much-improved version of World War Z's mounding hoards. In its most breathtaking moments, Train to Busan reimagines zombie survival as a matter of fluid dynamics, the infected piling up against dam-like structures, applying pressure, rushing flood-like when released. The father-daughter dynamics going on with our protagonist here are a bit yawn, but the zombie action is immensely entertaining. Grade: B+

Black Hawk Down (2001)

Can there be a great war movie that isn't at least a little preoccupied with the ethics of war? My gut says yes, but only in theory—I've yet to encounter one. Saving Private Ryan comes close, though, both to being a great movie and to not being preoccupied with the ethics of war, and Black Hawk Down is definitely a film inspired by the unflinching carnage and intense combat of that then-recent Spielbeg film. But there's an admirable attention to detail in Black Hawk Down that sets it apart from Saving Private Ryan, giving the Battle of Mogadishu a meticulous, boots-on-the-ground feel. Here's the thing, though: it's all super boring. It shouldn't be: this movie is pretty much wall-to-wall action, but I guess action without reprieve lends itself to numbness, which lends itself to boredom. And also absent of any sort of social commentary or ethical interrogation, there's really not a lot going on here beyond the blow-by-blow battle detail. Maybe if I'd been in the military, this would be more interesting to me. But I wasn't, and this was tedious. Grade: C+

Clerks (1994)

There's about half this movie that works really well--the conceit, two bored employees of adjacent go-nowhere stores shooting the breeze during a particularly long day, is enormously appealing to me, and when Clerks sticks to just that spooling out of conversation about low-grade philosophizing about daily mundanities and the comic absurdities that come from long hours in retail, it's pretty fun. Writer/director Kevin Smith has a good ear for the naturalistic-but-stylized speech that makes the lengthy soliloquizing of Richard Linklater characters similarly listenable. But when this movie goes anywhere near a plot, it's a disaster. Tonally clumsy, start-stop pacing makes the plotting feel half-baked, and its treatment of its plot-centric characters (all of whom are women) is casually mean to the point of near cruelty, not to mention a late-movie joke that's so dark it almost consumes the film whole. There's good stuff here, but given Smith's reputation these days, the fact that the flaws in his nearly universally agreed-upon best movie stand out so starkly makes for a big warning light. Unless someone gives me a great case otherwise, I'll probably not seek out the rest of his work. Grade: B-

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

In our age of seemingly effortless cinematic spectacle, Jason and the Argonauts is a nice reminder why such spectacle was appealing to begin with. Every one of its meticulously stop-motioned action sequences practically flies off the screen, not for any sort of realism but just out of the sheer thrill of having a movie show off impossible wonders—outside of the mythology it's based on, the only thing I knew about this movie was the climactic skeleton fight, and man oh man, is it justifiably legendary. Outside of these thrilling kinetics, though, the movie is a total drag, complete with the typically leaden dialogue and acting that seemed to be the price of admission for pretty much any epic of this era of filmmaking. Luckily, the movie is more action than cardboard drama, so it's pretty fun. Grade: B+

Television

The Legend of Korra, Season 4 (2014)

If The Legend of Korra's series finale doesn't quite match the towering heights of its predecessor's, Avatar: The Last Airbender's legendary "Sozin's Comet," we can forgive it for nothing else than for Nickelodeon's criminal undercutting of the show's financing. Up to its end, Korra remained, as it always was, often by monetary necessity, a smaller, more intimate show than Avatar, and in the character moments, the smaller scale paid off in spades, giving more nuanced and mature arcs than the admittedly younger-skewing Avatar ever did. That payoff remains true in this fourth and final season, with particularly Korra's battle with something resembling PTSD and Bolin's goofy but heartfelt coming-of-age. The climactic battle isn't quite up to the mind-melting Avatar finale, and that's where the Nickelodeon scope stretches a bit thin, with obviously CG-ed giant mechas distracting a bit from the always excellent character animation. It helps that Korra's fourth season has a tremendous villain in the fascist Kuvira, which does a ton to ameliorate the limitations of the series, and when all is said and done, Season 4 contains some of Korra's best work. Grade: A-

Music

Neil Cicierega - Mouth Moods (2017)

In what may in fact be the Sgt. Pepper of the mash-up album, longtime remixer and internet jokester (and apparently creator of Potter Puppet Pals?) Neil Cicierega has crafted a record of ingenious and frequently genius pop-culture mixing. Every single track bursts at the seams with invention and audacity, be it turning "Wonderwall" into a club stomper by mixing it with "You Spin Me Round" or shuffling the lyrics to "Eye of the Tiger" to engineer a tribute to an actual tiger (complete with Tony the Tiger's "They're grrrrreat!" soundbites). Mash-ups are often brutish, cramming two disparate pieces of pop music together with all the gentleness the name implies. Cicierega, however, works with grace and precision, most often to comedic effect (a pitch-corrected Barenaked Ladies's "One Week" over the "Stand By Me" instrumentals, for example) but occasionally to the sublime (the album's best moment by far—and probably the year's best song yet—involves the Inception soundtrack and the "Y.M.C.A."). I suppose you could argue that Mouth Moods is an exercise in gimmickry and meme-ing ("All Star" and "One Week," fixtures of online musical memes for a while now, do feature prominently), but I dunno, there's something about this album that transcends mere jokes or internet culture repetition—the care of the sample selection, the artistry of the production, the sheer joy of the amazingly effective incongruity. It is, frankly, brilliant. Grade: A