Mini Reviews for April 1-7, 2019

Mervie rervierws.

Movies

Green Book (2018)
I'm not sure how much new I have to add re: all the problematic racial and historical controversy surrounding this movie's approach to adapting its specific historical events. To be honest, the whole discussion kind of breaks the part of my brain that usually insists that cinema doesn't have to be held to a textbook literalist invocation of historical fact; there's a more productive conversation than The Discourse is currently having as to why I give the willfully history-agnostic depiction of unknowable events a pass in something like Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman but not in Green Book—and no, I don't mean in some "Spike Lee is the real racist!" gotcha way; I'm talking about a fundamental interrogation of what cinema's hermaneutic of history needs to be and to what standards of factual and ideological responsibility do we hold film. Certainly a key component of that responsibility involves point of view, and not only does the movie's choice of protagonist and point of view flatter the modern-day status quo (as is arguably also the case in BlacKkKlansman), it also consistently lands the movie at glaringly uninteresting ways to dramatize this particular story even within the pretty thin and gentle version of mid-century American racial tension (not in any universe the case in BlacKkKlansman). There's no way I'm the first person to note how devastatingly obvious it is that Mahershala Ali's character should have been the point-of-view character, right? The movie is clearly obsessed with the mere existence of Don Shirley and entirely uninterested in the ethnic-Italian identity of its protagonist outside of the idea of big family dinners and Mortensen's (admittedly likeable) scene-chewing performance, so why not just write the movie from Shirley's perspective? Sure, the screenplay was written by Tony Lip's son, hence the focus on Tony, but that's what rewrites are for, right? Instead, the movie just views Shirley as this fascinating cypher, artificially locking us, the audience, inside the mind of a protagonist with absolutely nothing unique or interesting to tell us about this particular story and in fact a point of view that feels like an inherent liability for telling this story. We get the fun chemistry between the leads and some nice, character-based humor but there's nothing about those beats specific to our seeing the world according to Tony Lip, and this choice to appeal to some misbegotten "everyman mainstream" (in contrast to the "exotic" otherness of a gay black man) has found something dramatically inert, too, in its pursuit of its particular vision of adapting history. This is basically the movie all the way down, with a rigorous insistence on an assumed "universal" pleasantry that ultimately just feels limited by its dive toward the middle. The Sears-Roebuck-catalogue pristine of the sets, the the personality-free cinematography, the gentle humor of the screenplay and the even gentler drama, the fact that we have Peter Farrelly, of all people, in the film's director's chair and it still ends up feeling like an anonymous piece of awards-season filler and not, like, something with at least half the personality of Dumb and Dumber. It's not that there isn't anything to enjoy in this movie; it's that every piece of this movie feels poised to disappear into the cultural static at the intersection every other media depiction of the early '60s and be forgotten right alongside that Pan Am TV series from like seven or eight years ago. Forgotten right up to the moment it won the Best Picture Academy Award, I guess. Even on the bumper-sticker racial front this movie wants to operate on, this movie's pretty dull. Like most of these kind of nostalgic, reassuring parables about bygone racism, there's not a lot that's baldy offensive (to my white eyes, at least) about its politics outside of its perpetuation of certain pious and ahistorical tropes about the "good white people" of the past, and instead it goes way out of its way to comfort its audience with the broadest and softest possible platitudes. Green Book feels especially milquetoast even among its "friendship transcends racism" peers, and its complete and consuming fear of being anything approaching "provocative" robs it of even the interesting nuance of, say, the power dynamics of relative marginalization that Driving Miss Daisy gives its ethnic-but-white-coded co-lead in the context of its black co-lead. Bereft of even that, there are zero things on Green Book's mind besides a frail, frictionless view of the past and the easy chemistry between its co-leads, and for all the charms of the latter, I still am hard-pressed to think of a less-interesting version of this story told by these specific actors and this specific director. Is cinema's theory of history just a battle of who gets to tell the more engaging story? If so, Spike won this round. Grade: C

Tale of Tales (2015)
Tale of Tales attempts to revive the old, twisted spirit of the pre-Disney-fied fairy tales, and to be fair, the movie arrives at a wild, bizarre, structureless pandemonium that does a pretty good job of approximating the tales we attribute to Giambattista Basile. Only unfortunately, Basile's versions of fairy tales just aren't that good, and neither is this. Points for the set and costume design and for some richly out-there plot twists. But the interlocking organization of the individual tales does not work at all, and, as with the Basile stories, these stories are collections of very odd and sadistic incidents that have the rambling feel of something made up on the spot—nothing like, for those who are fans of the "old fairy tales," the grotesque precision of the Brothers Grimm collections. Come on, filmmakers! Give us the Brothers Grimm-style fairy tale revival you know we're all clamoring for. Grade: B-

La Ciénaga (2001)
Lucretia Martel's vicious satire of the Argentinian bourgeoisie and its accompanying racism feels like Arrested Development by way of Buñuel, only somehow less funny than either. Instead, a suffocating dread cloaks every inch of the film, a dread that pays off both plot-wise and theme-wise. I'd need to spend a little more time with each of her films to be completely confident in this, but at the moment, La Ciénaga feels like something of a dry run for The Headless Woman and especially Zama in terms of how driven and realized its critiques of class and race in Argentina are, and as such, I probably made a mistake watching it last. Grade: B+

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The title is maddeningly ambiguous. Who's talking: Bond or Amasova?? [*CinemaSins ding*] Anyway, it's kind of dull, kind of fun—a little more fun than dull. Bach is, unfortunately, completely lifeless as Agent Triple X, and I guess I need to watch more Roger Moore movies, because I kept confusing him for all the other dudes in suits onscreen. But also, the henchman in this film is named Jaws and bites people and deflects bullets with his teeth and then, climactically, bites a shark. It's hard to dislike a movie with that situation going on. Grade: B-




Television

You're the Worst, Season 5 (2019)
The final season of You're the Worst sharpens its focus to just the series's core duo, which is probably for the best—most of the rest of the cast has long lost its utility as anything but people for our leads to bump against. This means the season does lack some of the shockingly sharp, out-of-nowhere depth that it would occasionally grant the supporting players (Edgar's PTSD, for example); but it also means that we're mercifully spared any of the time-wasting storylines that have sometimes plagued the show, too, e.g. Paul getting stabbed (and while we're on the subject, I find Paul's pivot away from the alt-right entirely unconvincing). Instead, we're almost (with a few exceptions early in the season) given a season entirely focused on the culmination of the show's central relationship: Jimmy and Gretchen. And it gets real in a sustained and panicked way that the show has rarely settled down enough to pull off in the past. I've dinged the show before for the way it tries to offset its sometimes mean comedic streak with sudden dramatic stakes and unearned forward movement. But this final season finally gets it, and the slow-moving train wreck that is the lead-up to Jimmy and Gretchen's wedding is as bracingly dark and uncomfortably real as the show has ever dared to become, and the final resolution of all that is as mature and poignant an evocation of love as I've ever seen a television show do. There are some bumps along the way—a season-long flash-forward tease is both awkward structurally and ultimately unsatisfying as anything but a cheap device. But on the whole, it's a surprisingly rich and graceful ending for what's been an enjoyable but inconsistent TV series. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for April 23 - 29, 2018

Yo, people, there are only TWO DAYS LEFT TO VOTE ON THE SUMMER PROJECT. If you haven't already done that, do so!

Movies

Isle of Dogs (2018)
Wes Anderson's latest is his weakest in quite some time (probably since The Darjeeling Limited, though it's a significant step above his career low, The Life Aquatic), but it has its typical Wes-Andersonian pleasures: its fussy precision, its deadpan dialogue, its cast. It has a few flaws that feel uncharacteristic of Anderson's usual efficiency, most notably the character of Tracy (I'm not sure why we needed a white character in this Japan-set story) and the gender dynamics in general (the female characters are so underwritten that I have to wonder why they're even there in the first place). Even laying aside those critiques, there's no denying that this film is minor—there's nothing of the epic sweep of The Grand Budapest Hotel, for example, or the painfully observed family dynamics of The Royal Tenenbaums or Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's basically just a story about dogs and why people love dogs; while I don't actually love dogs (I know, I know), I can appreciate what this movie is going for, but I can also observe that what it's doing is especially small-scale and somewhat silly. The movie at least has the decency to depict its small-scale silliness in some truly excellent animation, though. Its stop-motion feels less homegrown than that of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but the increased sophistication gives this movie a fluidity and an attention to detail that's never not captivating on a visual level. So if nothing else, we at least got what is likely to be the best animation in any American film this year. Grade: B

Zama (2017)
If Barry Lyndon were just a touch more surreal and set in Argentina, you'd have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this movie right up until the third act blows any previous expectations to very small bits. As with The Headless Woman, I suspect this movie will improve on rewatch, when I won't be so concerned with keeping up with character names and worrying which parts are intentionally confusing and which parts are just confusing because I couldn't keep character names right. But even now, with first-watch levels of comprehension, this is a rich movie in both aesthetics and ideas, one that I'll be rolling around in my head for a while. Come for the sumptuous period detail and brutal skewering of European colonialism, stay for the hypnotic sound design and llama photo bomb. Grade: A-

Hostiles (2017)
Remember that song "Savages" in Disney's Pocahontas that's terrible because it's all like, "But Native Americans and European colonizers were both equally bad"? This is basically the feature-length version of that (in that the movie flatters modern viewers with easy platitudes—this time about how the genocide of Native Americans was just an outcropping of the hierarchical structures of violence within the idea of government or whatever ["I'm a good guy, I'm just doing my job"]), only I guess writer/director Scott Cooper couldn't secure the rights from Disney, so they had to tweak the title just a tad. Disney sure is stingy with their intellectual property; makes you wonder who the real hostile is! Grade: D+

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
There's probably someone out there who'll hang me out to dry for saying this, but the Star Wars prequels' use of green screen and CG as a sort of futurist, deliberately nonrealistic merging of rear projection and matte painting was legitimately visionary and one of the more interesting aesthetic advancements of the past couple decades of blockbuster filmmaking. And here's Sky Captain, nearly a year prior to the release of Revenge of the Sith, beating Lucas at his own game, not just on the technological level but also in its appropriation of decades-old pulp tropes. The movie imagines, rather breathtakingly, a huge (and entirely green-screen-driven) world that's something like the mashing together of Metropolis, Buck Rogers, and the 1927 silent feature Wings, creating, like Lucas did for both of his Star Wars trilogies, a historically grounded but technologically modern pulp sci-fi idiom. Where the movie stumbles is in basically everything else, though none of it is catastrophic. Unlike Star Wars, the action scenes are disappointingly perfunctory, and the movie exhausts its whole bag of visual tricks by the end of the first act. And then there's Gwyneth Paltrow, who, while never exactly a riveting presence, flounders in any attempt to breathe life into the musty female archetype she's given, though I suppose the true fault goes to the screenplay for writing an archetype that musty to begin with. All that said, it's a completely fascinating movie with lots of weird corners and decisions—an alternate history not just for its steampunk postwar plot but also for the way it posits a modern cinema in which everyone else found Lucas's green screen art as engaging as I now do. Grade: B+

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
We're long past the era in which having a female protagonist who swears and talks frankly about sex is anything close to groundbreaking, and even in 2001, Bridget Jones's Diary seems to be hanging on the coattails of Sex and the City. Where the movie still feels fresh (ish) is in its depiction of women navigating the masculine-enabling power dynamics of the workplace and dating scene, which is, after all, more in line with this movie's Jane Austen roots (it's based—loosely—on Pride and Prejudice). It's not exactly #MeToo conscious (there's a moment where a woman's boss jokes about sexually harassing her that's played very much as a haha comedy moment instead of a cringe comedy moment), and when you get right down to it, this movie isn't ultimately saying a ton that a lot of other movies haven't. But it has moments of sharpness, and although the rest of the cast is kind of hit-or-miss (Colin Firth is particularly inert), Zellweger has probably never been better in a role than she is here. Grade: B-

Music

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet - Landfall (2018)
Laurie Anderson teams up with Kronos Quartet for—what else?—an album of modern classical infused with mercurial electronics and haunting spoken word. It's a record-length meditation on environmental catastrophe that swings from almost mundane pieces of concrete detail ("CNN Predicts a Monster Storm," "It Twisted the Street Signs") to cosmic and even supernatural grandiosity ("Galaxies," "Gongs and Bells Sing")—all swirling around the album's eerie and elegiac 10-minute centerpiece, "Nothing Left but Their Names," in which a pitch-shifted voice reads out a meditative poem on all the animals that have gone extinct, sounding as much like a ghost as the croons of a humpback whale as it methodically takes apart, brick by brick, the idea that human experience has any centrality in the universe. Not everything on the album works; there are plenty of moments that feel overly literal or a tad too on-the-nose, and those moments usually coincide with the less interesting instrumental portions. But this album is on more than it's off, and at its very best (i.e. "Nothing Left but Their Names"), it's actually stunning. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 16 - 22, 2018

Hey, again! Don't forget to vote in the summer project poll! PLEEEEAAAASSEEE!

Movies

The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
Undercooked and overwrought, The Cloverfield Paradox takes about five ideas—all of them with potential but none of them really great either—and crams them together into the most uneven and structurally disastrous studio movie I've seen in a long time. There's a little Alien here, a little of Event Horizon there, a pinch of Evil Dead 2 (probably my favorite segment of the movie, involving Chris O'Dowd's arm, and it plays as accidental [?] comedy), and then out of nowhere a bit of Solaris. It's all very nutty and strange that all these parts are thrown into the same pot together, but also the execution of these individual parts are staid enough that the whole thing feels boringly and tediously nutty/strange rather than intriguingly or endearingly so. Grade: C-

Molly's Game (2017)
Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut is a solid caper/crime picture, but not nearly as solid as I thought it was going to be before the ending completely wets the bed—in particular, an entirely unearned late-film scene involving our protagonist's father that's condescendingly paternal in the way that only our man Sorkin can do. Elsewhere, the movie is filled with pleasanter Sorkinisms like elaborate sentences and florid verbal sparring, and Jessica Chastain is incredible as the lead. Sorkin the writer still hasn't figured out writing female characters (the fact that the titular Molly only really has agency in relation to the men she interacts with goes from being an intriguing bit of possible social commentary about women in traditionally male spaces to an embarrassing window into the screenplay's own narrowly masculine worldview), but Chastain plays her part so excellently that she practically carries the movie on her own, giving Molly a vibrant interior life that's completely outside the text of the script. Chastain's herculean feat of acting here is the real commentary on women in traditionally male spaces, let me tell you. Grade: B

Thelma (2017)
It's the sort of convergence of arthouse and pulp and religion that I normally find fascinating, and this movie is fascinating, even if it doesn't quite come together. I can't decide if paring itself down to make its metaphor cleaner (something about the effects of sexual awakening and repression in a conservative Christian environment) or if the movie should have gone even more for broke with its shaggy, chilling supernatural cul-de-sacs. Either way, the movie doesn't quite work, but it's never not riveting. Grade: B+

Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (2014)
The frame story is pretty lame, and I'll admit to being somewhat cold on Gibran's poetry itself. But the animated sections set to the poetry (each animated by a different artist) are breathtaking, maybe some of the best segments of animation of this decade, and that's enough to make me like this movie. Still, I'd rather this had been a collection of animated shorts rather than something that tried to tell a cohesive narrative. Grade: B

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) (2008)
Lucrecia Martel's puzzling, puzzle-like arthouse opus that I watched in preparation for a local screening of her new film, Zama, next week. It's very much in the tradition of some of Ingmar Bergman's more esoteric stuff, where there's lots of striking imagery and potent symbolism that's hard to get your head around all in one go, and it's interesting to see that in a modern context. I wasn't really getting much out of it when I was watching it (though the cinematography is very much my jam), but in the day since, it's grown on me quite a bit—a frequently striking, lightly but sharply satirical portrait of subjectivity and bourgeois insularity. Grade: B+

Field of Dreams (1989)
To my complete surprise, this movie feels very much like the ancestor to my old nemesis, the contemporary faith-based film. It's all there: the main character has a supernaturally inspired mission, flimsy conflict with people deluded by the corruption of contemporary culture, a sidelined supportive wife figure, dopey comedy, broad sentimentality, etc. Only this time, the corrupt culture is the '80s, not the modern bogeyman of secular humanism, and the religion in question involves the mythology of baseball, not Jesus. Also, there's this weird memeification of '60s radicalism that feels kind of admirable in the context of the post-Reagan '80s but also kind of nostalgic and pandering, but no matter, it also gives us the best use of long-suffering-wife Amy Madigan (and the highest comedic moment, though maybe I just like seeing people trying to censor books called "Nazi cows"). Actually—forgive me—this feels like the missing link between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the faith-based films I hate, pulling the teeth from Spielberg's deconstructive pursuit of the otherworldly in an attempt to make it huggable and distinctly worldly, on its way to the thoroughly wonderless faith-based genre that wouldn't even know true transcendence if it punched it in the mouth. Also, unlike virtually any modern faith-based movie, Field of Dreams is pretty okay. Not great; just okay. Grade: B-

Television

The X-Files, Season 11 (2018)
On an episode-by-episode basis (which is what any reasonable person should be evaluating The X-Files on in these meager revival days), Season 11 has a much higher batting average than the disheartening Season 10. To absolutely nobody's surprise, the Darin Morgan episode ("The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat") is, again, by far the best in show, a hilarious hour that says more about the show's history than all of the damnable mythology episodes put together. And then there are fun outings like "Rm9sbG93ZXJz," a nearly dialogue-less episode that puts Mulder and Scully into a Modern Times-esque fight against smart devices, and "Familiar," a slightly tropey but still chilly riff on killer clowns. But when I say damnable mythology episodes, I mean damnable. The book-ending "My Struggle" episodes are some of the worst gobbledygook tripe that the show's serialization has churned out (and given the track record of the mythology for the later seasons, that's saving a lot), saved only by the way they turn into unintentional parody—the line "I impregnated her! With science!" is uttered without irony, and it's kind of sublime. And even when we aren't dealing with the "My Struggle" struggle, the season's primary mytharc involves Mulder and Scully's mutant child, William, and please, Chris Carter, listen to me when I say that I have never cared about William! Not in Season 9 when he was a boring baby and certainly not in Season 11 when he's a moody teenager! Worst of all is what this does to Scully—long the heart of the show, this season bizarrely reduces her (as it always must, apparently, when William is involved) into a one-note maternal stereotype. I don't know why I even care about character fidelity at this point in the series, but it's a betrayal of the Scully I loved. Thankfully, the non-mytharc eps are pretty neat. Grade: B-

Orange Is the New Black, Season 5 (2017)
This season begins on track to become Orange Is the New Black's best, as the aftermath of S4's ending escalates into a full-on prisoner revolt that upends the show's status quo in a major way. It's fascinating to watch these characters we know adjust to the new, radical normal, and the factions that form give some of the fresher character development we've gotten in quite a while (though the flashback structure continues to be a major liability). On the plottier side of the season, the central device of the prisoner protest leads to a riveting exploration of the power dynamics of revolution and the logistics of affecting true social change through radical politics (to say nothing about the way it allows the actors to stretch their wings a bit—Danielle Brooks in particular is great). However, in typical OItNB fashion, the season struggles to juggle all these balls, and in particular its tonal control as the plots veer recklessly from comedy to high drama (to serial killer pastiche?) makes for a seriously slack middle third of the season that has a hard time giving a consistent gravitas (or sensitivity) to the number of violent and sexual hierarchies raised by the season's plots. By the time the inevitable tragedy of the season's finale hits, Season 5 has become yet another OItNB season compromised by its deep flaws. What we get is one of the more interesting iterations on this, and props to the show for trying something this new. But it's hard not to wish for the masterpiece that could have been. Grade: B

Books

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (1999)
I'm almost twenty years late, but I'm finally getting on that Series of Unfortunate Events train. And it's pretty great. Playful and drolly hilarious in ways that I wasn't expecting, I can't help but compare this to Harry Potter, that other late-'90s-debuting series of influential children's books. Both series begin with relatively unambitious first entries that bank most of their success on authorial voice and the reappropriation of children's lit tropes into genre-lit tropes. But whereas Rowling's voice is cozy and her plotting and archetypes very hearts-on-sleeves, Snicket's is prickly and sardonic, despairing and ironic and, even twenty years later, singular within the world of children's lit for the way it embraces metafiction and authorial distance and other modernist devices. Which isn't to say that The Bad Beginning is devoid of emotion—there's a deep well of empathy for the Baudelaire siblings and the ways that the adult world (even the so-called "good guys") care very little for them. But the way that the book backs into this emotional resonance by way of ironic distance is somewhat stunning. Grade: A-

The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket (1999)
There's not a lot to say about this book that I didn't already bring up for the Bad Beginning, and that's mostly because this is, in a lot of ways, a retread. The characters are all in their same basic forms, the plot advances in basically the same way, and the resolution is similarly despairing. And that's fine—the goal here seems to be the refining of a formula rather than the breaking of new ground, and it's fun to see some of the formulaic elements of the series plotting and voice being toyed with (for instance, the narrator's habit of defining words continues to find new ways to make that device fresh and surprising). It's slightly more sophisticated than The Bad Beginning, but it's also nowhere near as thrilling as the debut, which, to further my Harry Potter comparison, you can basically say about The Chamber of Secrets in relation to The Sorcerer's Stone. Grade: B+

The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket (2000)
I'm told the series eventually breaks its formula, which is good—The Wide Window is by far the least interesting of the first three Series of Unfortunate Events books, the book that feels most negatively affected by its formulaic elements. By this time, there's this nagging awareness that these characters are all basically one-note and that the tropes of despair and, well, unfortunate events might be something of a narrative crutch than a bold thematic choice on the agency of children in the world. It's still enjoyable—the characters may be one-note, but the series is at least consistently introducing a few new one-noters per book, and the timid Aunt Josephine (whose fate is impressively grisly, not just for a children's book but for anyone's book) is another fine addition in that regard), and Snicket's narrative voice still hasn't gotten old. But I'm hoping to see something new out of this series pretty soon, or else this is going to be a long 13-book journey. Grade: B