Mini Reviews for June 21 - 27, 2021

I wasn't sure I was going to be able to post this blog today because my daughter was just born a few days ago (!!!!!), but I forgot how much newborns sleep, so here you go!

Movies

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)
I had decided that I was going to step off the MCU train with Endgame, but sitting in a hospital room for 48 hours straight (nothing serious, my wife just had a baby) will push you to worse extremes than this, and this movie was the only on-demand movie on the room's TV I was even close to being interested in, so here I am. My reaction to this is basically emblematic of my feelings on the MCU as a whole, which is that it's vaguely entertaining while also being completely frustrating in its insistence on muddying its own shape in the service of leadenly tying in to the larger MCU and its refusal to prod at its more interesting possible subtexts (in this case, the Mysterio / SFX-oriented movie-making connections). It also kind of sucks that these two MCU Spider-Man movies have such a winsome cast for the teen characters but then have those teen characters only do thin comic relief the whole time; one of the special things about Spider-Man to me was always that his web of civilian relationships were as interesting as his actual superhero stuff and even made the superhero stuff more compelling as a foil/dramatic wedge, and I think a movie that would actually give the space to let the cast develop these high school scenarios more would actually be really good. But instead the movie is more interested in who the next Tony Stark is than who Peter Parker and his friends are, which is what you get when the whole franchise is more narratively important than the individual movies, I guess. The Peter and MJ stuff was sweet at the end, though. Grade: C+

Grave Encounters (2011)
Pretty rote found-footage horror stuff. I'm not exactly sure why this has garnered a cult following, except that it's poking fun at those paranormal investigator shows, but that's something that Ghostwatch did way better decades prior to this, so I dunno. I did like some of the House of Leaves-type architectural horror, with the asylum looping around on itself in impossibly big spaces, but that's a relatively small part of the movie. Grade: C

 

 

 

Moolaadé (2004)
Feels a little too much like a "social issue" drama at times, though of course the social issue itself (female genital mutilation) is serious and worth making a movie against. But pleasantly, this movie feels a lot lighter than the typical issue drama; it's actually very funny given the subject matter, and the depiction of the community is vibrant and nuanced. This is also, by virtue of the local Burkinabe fashion, a wonderfully colorful movie, and because of that it's nice to look at throughout. I should watch more of Ousmane Sembène's movies—I should watch more African cinema in general, because I've seen embarrassingly few movies from that continent. Grade: B

 

The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971)
Just a truly stunning document, inspiring and brutally depressing in equal measure. Inspiring for the half of the film that lays out Hampton's vision: outside of the labor movement, probably the closest anyone ever got to realizing honest-to-God socialism in the industrialized United States, and as basically a teenager, too—it sucks so much that hippies are the cultural legacy of the '60s counterculture, because this is the counterculture that actually mattered. When Republicans accuse Democrats of being radical leftists or whatever (conservatives yet again threatening us with a good time), they should be made to watch the first half of this film to see what the real deal is. Depressing for the absolutely heinous assassination that is the focus of the second half of the doc: honestly astounding that the filmmakers got some of this footage, which, as I understand it, they obtained by just darting into the crime scene before they could be stopped. But nonetheless, it's beyond sobering to think about the lengths to which the United States will go to stop someone who envisions a world without racism or capitalism, and the apparatus against that sort of vision has only gotten stronger since. Hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this documentary and the COINTELPRO unveiling were released to the public within months of each other—like, how do you weather a one-two punch like that and not just immediately become a revolutionary? Grade: A

Mini Reviews for December 2-8, 2019

Just reviews.

Movies

The Irishman (aka I Heard You Paint Houses)
For about 2/3 of its gargantuan runtime, The Irishman plays into beats that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Scorsese's other gangster pictures, from Goodfellas all the way up through The Wolf of Wall Street (TELL me that Wall Street isn't organized crime, I dare you)—that is, lots of montage, wall-to-wall soundtrack, copious voiceover. And if that were all there is, it would be a very solid movie and remarkably engaging for a movie of its length, though I do have some gripes about the L.A. Noir-ishness of the de-aging CGI (though it's far and away superior to the horrorshow that is Clark Gregg's de-aging special effect in Captain Marvel, so that's 0 for theme park rides and 1 for ##TRUE CINEMA##). But that is not all that The Irishman is, and in its last hour or so, Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian pull the rug out from under the whole idea of a "Scorsese Gangster Picture," and the movie becomes something wholly transcendent. The music, montage, voiceover, and all the intoxicating forward motion of a Scorsese mob movie disappear, and in the bare frame of that type of movie, stripped of its plumage, we're given a death-soaked riff on Goodfellas's iconic "Sunday, May 11th, 1980, 6:55 AM" sequence that then breaks free of the genre completely with a hushed coda in a nursing home whose thundering silence is nothing less than apocalyptic. For the first time in his career, Scorsese allows his mob tropes to progress not just to their logical conclusion but also to their ultimate conclusion: the game is up, and all that remains is the empty shell of a life squandered by squandering oneself, nothing left to claw for as gravity brings the grave's icy mouth ever closer. It reminded me of aging family members and family members I've seen die—none as alone as the character at the focus of this sequence but with a similar sense of despair and loneliness as the crows of their demons come home to roost. This is what it means for a generation to die: moral compromises become an ideology, a perpetual motion machine that scrapes every bit of life out from its realm of influence until you sit alone, only half able to understand that your actions had such decaying consequences—if you're capable of mustering that level of self-awareness at all. It will happen to all of us who have any measure of power and movement; I'm sure it will happen to us Millennials and Gen-Z-ers. And so with The Irishman, Scorsese and co. have transformed the gangster picture into not just a specific cultural and sociopolitical document animated by a caustic moral vision (though it is certainly that alongside Goodfellas) but also an anguished treatise of universal human failing that links us all at our worst moments. It's hard to call a new Scorsese film a masterpiece in the context of a filmography that, admittedly, has a handful of better movies, but under another name, this would be a masterpiece indeed. Grade: A

Captain Marvel (2019)
To the extent that I have strong feelings about Marvel movies these days (i.e. not much), I did have a small chip on my shoulder going into this movie regarding the way that this movie was the one where all the film folks started crying foul over the role of the American military in the production of this movie—the military has been funding/involved in the production of Marvel movies for a while now, but somehow it's the movie starring a woman where this finally goes too far? (SureJan.gif) And that's not not an issue here (to be clear, I'm not a fan of the military's role in the production of these movies either, but if we're going to start drawing a line in the sand over this, we should have done so long ago), but it's all kind of a moot point for me now that I've seen the movie and realized that it's just not good. Rare for a Marvel movie, the effects are actually kind of beautiful, and the buddy-road-trip vibes between Nick Fury and Carol Danvers are fun. But the film is a structural mess, and, also rare for a Marvel film, it's actually kind of hard to follow this movie on a beat-for-beat level—part of which is part of the design, as we're following the scrambled memories of Danvers as she's psychologically invaded, Eternal Sunshine-style, but part of it is just that the movie just has a hard time stringing events together in a way that make the basic point-A-to-point-B sense that Marvel movies usually do pretty well, and that also goes for the straightforward bits after the intentionally disorienting opening half hour. Plus, for a movie about Carol Danvers re-discovering herself, there's precious little about Danvers herself outside of how she acquired powers—like, what is going on with this character? Who is she? Beyond the fact that she was once in the USAF and got blasted with superpowers, I honestly have very little idea. To the extent that I enjoy Marvel movies these days (i.e. merely intermittently), I've got to give it to the disgruntled film folks on this one and concede that this is one of the weakest MCU features. Grade: C

American Dharma (2018)
In interviewing Steve Bannon, Errol Morris sometimes seems out of his depth—a first for Morris in his series of movies interviewing American villains. Bannon is an incorrigible figure without shame or morality, someone who (as this movie amply shows) cares about nothing but power and destruction. He excitedly outlines his philosophies and political successes with fists banging on the table as Morris walks through his history with Breitbart and then the 2016 Trump campaign, and he just grins as Morris occasionally interjects, sputtering with frustration and barely cloaked rage at the self-impressed evil coming out of Bannon's mouth. Morris doesn't seem to know quite what to do with him, interrupting to argue with Bannon at points that don't seem to need pushback and then remaining silent at places where obvious questions seem to present themselves. Not that I really blame Morris. Bannon is the architect—or at least claims to be (like most Morris subjects, there's a fair bit of self-mythologizing on the part of Bannon here that I think we can, as Morris does, view with at least one skeptical brow raised)—of so much that I hate, and I probably would be at a sputtering loss as to how to respond to him in person, too. But Morris's relative shakiness in engaging Bannon does make American Dharma the weakest of his American villain series, and it's not hard to imagine the richer movie that might have come out of this interaction. That's not to say that there isn't plenty good going on here. There are some tremendous moments that arise from the dynamic between Bannon and Morris, starting with the bizarre parasitic relationship Bannon himself has with Morris; The Fog of War apparently inspired Bannon as a filmmaker, and while Morris doesn't exactly dwell on this inspiration, there's a queasy camaraderie the two share over filmmaking, culminating in an incredulous Bannon asking Morris how he could have made The Fog of War and The Unknown Known and still voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, which is one of a few truly great self-reflexive moments in this movie. And the visual metaphor of the hangar that this interview takes place in and which, by the end of the film, is set aflame, works really well here—not a foregone conclusion in a movie by a filmmaker who, much as I love his work, has made more than a few overcooked visual metaphors—and strongly underlines the apocalyptic implications of what Bannon is saying. It seems patently absurd to argue, as some have, that Morris is somehow supporting Bannon's views in this documentary or that Morris is complicit in Bannon's views by giving him attention at all (these arguments conveniently ignore that Bannon and the alt-right in general largely rose to power in the first place while being ignored by liberal voices); but I do think that at points, Morris struggles to understand Bannon, and that just makes a documentary like this even more necessary, because I think most of us in the center and left are in Morris's position here of being apoplectic at Bannon while at the same time being somewhat befuddled. Those of us who can look should not look away. Confronting Bannon and his like is crucial, before, as the movie loudly argues, the world burns. Grade: B

Idiots and Angels (2008)
My second Bill Plympton feature (after Cheatin'), and my feelings remain about the same: intoxicating animation style mixed with an appealing mix of surreality and black comedy/misanthropy that simply cannot be sustained over a feature-length runtime, and it definitely sours for me around the halfway point. I probably just need to check out this dude's shorts, though this movie is not without its charms. Grade: B-

The Last Waltz (1978)
The interview footage is pretty tedious—the copy for this movie promises "probing backstage interviews," but all we get are dull chestnuts like, "Why are you called The Band?" Chalk it up to the cocaine, I suppose. But the concert footage is basically wall-to-wall bangers (give or take Eric Clapton and Neil Diamond, who both feel way out of place here), so it's a pretty masterful 90-100 minutes embedded inside the total 120. Also, Bob Dylan in his appearance here resembles Weird Al to a distracting degree, which gets this movie another half star, for sure. Grade: A-




Books

Epileptic (L'Ascension du haut mal) by David B. (2005)
A pretty harrowing graphic memoir about the author's experiences growing up with his brother, who has epilepsy. I appreciate the completely unsentimental approach that David B. takes here, and the violence and sheer resentment depicted here resonates with what I know about growing up with someone with a mental disability—sometimes it's just hard to be compassionate, and then you hate yourself for lacking that compassion but also lack the ability to figure out how to act any differently. I've never read a book that captured this before, much less so well. The parents' reliance on pseudoscience and esoterism in treatment for their child, on the other hand, is wild and wacky and something I cannot relate to at all, though it certainly makes the book more interesting and gives the starkly simple black-ink imagery here an infusion of mysticism that separates it from the likes of the Persepolis and a lot of those other cartoon-styled graphic memoirs. The book could probably have a tighter structure; there's definitely a meandering quality to the story, and I'm not sure whether this would work better if I had read it in installments as it was originally published instead of the complete edition I read, but for all its emotional intensity, it does feel like drudgery in stretches, all the more so for its prickly, dour emotional territory. But there's a lot to recommend about Epileptic, too, and for those willing to deal with its unflinching rendering of its subject matter, it's a rewarding read. Grade: B+

 
Music

Pink Floyd - The Final Cut (1983)
The Final Cut started out as a collection of The Wall leftovers, and that's pretty much what it sounds like in its final form, sharing the acerbic worldview (personified by Roger Waters's shrill, yelping vocals) and grandiose rock instrumentation as that prior albums while lacking most of the pathos and melodic sweep (to say nothing of conceptual vision) that made The Wall compelling. Look, I love anti-war protest songs as much as anybody, but by this time, Roger Waters had pretty much bled all the rest of the members of Pink Floyd dry, and there's none of the chemistry and sonic grandeur of Floyd's best work and all of the bile of Waters's most indulgent work. Still, there are solid moments: Gilmour's solo on "Your Possible Pasts," the saxophone on "The Gunner's Dream," the melodic, jazzy touches on the closer, "Two Suns in the Sunset." There are also a few great songs that actually do stand up to Pink Floyd's previous work: I'm thinking specifically of "The Hero's Return," a song written from the perspective of the schoolmaster in The Wall, and "The Final Cut," which uses orchestration heavily reminiscent of "Comfortably Numb" to drive that prior song's despairing alienation to a harrowing intensity devoid of any of the catharsis that Gilmour's two solos bring Pink in "Numb." I get why people like this album. But if I'm in the mood for what this album's going for, I can't ever imagine going for The Final Cut over The Wall. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for May 20-26, 2019

HEY EVERYONE! Don't forget to check out my announcement—this summer, you can recommend movies for me to review. Check out this post for details.

Here's where you submit recommendations for next week! Last chance!

Movies

Avengers: Endgame (2019)
There are moments of Endgame that I like quite a bit. The movie's playfulness with Marvel history is fun. The principle arcs for Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are satisfying and just the right amount of poignant. Paul Rudd's Ant-Man gets some pretty good audience-surrogate befuddlement humor. And while the movie is (somehow) both too sprawling and too rushed to have many moments of intimate character interactions of the kind we might get in Guardians of the Galaxy or even the first Ant-Man movie, the cast here is pretty much universally at the top of their respective games and sells some emotional moments that, on paper, feel very slight (particularly kudos to the original Avengers crew of Downey Jr., Johansson, Ruffalo, Evans, and Renner, who get about 90% of the screentime here). But all the things I like get completely buried beneath the lumbering, three-hour behemoth of the actual movie. It's of course possible to make a good movie at this length, but the way this movie ambles forward in its inscrutable, segmented structure makes that runtime just draaaagggg. It's a lot to swallow at once, lacking a consistent forward momentum and cross-cutting to death all of its most interesting sequences—would it have been too much to just let one of these setpieces play out uninterrupted without constantly checking in on every other character in the movie every two minutes? Can't we just get to these people's stories in a minute once this scene finishes? The central "Time Heist" sequence suffers most from this, which is a real shame because otherwise, that's my favorite part of the movie. I guess another way of saying this is that there is a lot of cool stuff here but so little artistry in stitching it all together that it becomes a tedious slog in execution. And about that execution: I like how kooky this movie is willing to get—time travel is invented in the space of a few hours by two separate characters—and it's nice to see the film drop the whole charade of scientific plausibility that the early Marvel movies indulged in. But for a movie that's supposed to be the dramatic culmination of all the franchise's conflicts and arcs, there's a lot of half-baked hand-waving away of those conflicts with, as Thor calls it, "space magic." Like how, for instance, in the space of about thirty seconds, Bruce Banner explains that he now uses Science to be himself and the Hulk at the same time without losing control; I mean, isn't that the whole thing about Bruce Banner? The Jekyll/Hyde conflict between the brain and the brawn? Ten years of this MCU character, and he just magically fixes his core personal conflict offscreen? Endgame has a dozen such moments. Don't even get me started on how Ant-Man gets out of the quantum realm. In a way, this movie is a microcosm for how I feel about the project of the MCU as a whole: lots of potential, some exhilarating moments, and a handful of endearing characters, but ultimately too structurally fractured and easily plotted and inconsistent in its engagement with its own most interesting ideas to make a compelling whole. Maybe Endgame was doomed with me from the start, since my enthusiasm for the MCU had mostly dried up by the time this movie rolled around; but I'd like to think that there was a version of this movie that I would have enjoyed a lot—alas, one undercut at every turn by the movie that Marvel apparently wanted to make. Grade: C

Booksmart (2019)
Pretty delightful overall. It has a lot of tonal problems—the movie lurches from some seriously melancholy stuff to goofy hijinks in the span of a cut, oftentimes with the characters shifting emotional tenor alongside the tone, which is pretty jarring, especially when the last act of the movie dials up the sadness and the hijinks at the same time. But the hijinks are very funny, and the sad stuff is legitimately affecting, so it's hard to complain too much. The performances are uniformly perfect, too; it would be easy to say that the onscreen chemistry between Feldstein and Dever carries the show, and they're both very good, but honestly, just focusing on them would be a disservice to the entire cast, among whom there's not a bum note even when some pretty cartoony characters are asked to pivot into emotional stakes and there's basically nothing but the performance to sell that turn. Hey, and Olivia Wilde, director: also good! In fact, there are some moments here that are positively sublime (I'm thinking in particular of an underwater pool scene that just soars); other parts feel somewhat cinematically pedestrian, which makes me look forward to a movie (her next?) when Wilde is able to make the stylistic touches this movie showcases more of a consistent aesthetic than merely a flourish. Again, hard to complain too much when what we got is still good. Plus, the teens in this movie listen to LCD Soundsystem and all the other music cool 28-year-old dads are into, which I thought was very considerate of them. Grade: B+

Under the Silver Lake (2018)
People have knocked this movie as derivative, but I dunno, "Inherent Vice for the internet age" seems like a fresh enough variation to me, not to mention a vital one. The movie's surreally timeless setting, in which it is seemingly every year between 1980 and now, combined with the conspiracy-theory-addled mind of a sexist male makes this movie feel almost like a personification of the internet itself, its glibly nostalgic leanings (Nintendo Power, of all damn things, plays a pivotal role in the plot), its pervasive sexism/male dominance, and its epistemological knots making it feel uncannily of a piece with what I feel every day when I log in to Facebook. I wish that the movie had a more trenchant critique of its protagonist's sexism, because that seems like one of the more urgent internet-era toxins out there, and the movie is definitely too long. But I found the movie compelling regardless. If Inherent Vice posits that the hippie movement failed because its culture of drugs broke down any sort of functional concept of shared reality, then Under the Silver Lake says the same about the endless, context-free information the internet gives us. When you know everything, how can you know anything? And when you know both everything and nothing, how can you not be a deluded prick? Grade: B+

Apollo 11 (2019)
One of the more bizarre elements of modern life is the way that the moon landing has become just historical background noise, just tacitly accepted as fact in the same mundane way that we acknowledge any figure in a textbook. So though it seems an obvious thing to do, it's no small achievement that Apollo 11 renders the moonshot with exactly the appropriate level of awe, turning a montage of archival footage into a justly gobsmacked expression of wonder at what is arguably the greatest technological and political feat of all time. More incredibly, the movie manages this nearly mythic depiction of the Apollo 11 mission through an obsession with the process that got us there. You get the famous "One small step for man" stuff, sure, but that's a relatively small moment set against dozens of minutes of NASA technicians feverishly running through tests and figures; we spend more time watching and listening to Neil Armstrong, et al, prepare coordinates and measure velocities on the approach to the moon than we do watch them on the actual moon, and even when on the moon, there are surprisingly long stretches devoted to small technicalities like the hassle of an astronaut trying to put an object in his suit's exterior pocket. It's myth-making through meticulous specificity, and it's edge-of-your-seat riveting. I could quibble with some of the showy musical choices (I would have rathered no music whatsoever), but what are quibbles when we made it to THE MOON?? Grade: A-

Alphaville (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution) (1965)
I really like how the traditional sci-fi/noir trappings interact with the more overt "Godard" touches like the abstract montages that occasionally pepper the movie. I don't know that outside of its aesthetic ambitions that the movie is doing anything super philosophically interesting, though, which is a shame, since that's like the whole thing about dystopian sci-fi. Like, okay, sure, modern society's emphasis on reason and logic and cold mechanical processes is ultimately antithetical to what human beings actually are, but that seems obvious, right? Maybe it's just that I'm watching this 50+ years after it came out, but that seems like a disappointingly straightforward and obvious idea for Godard. But man, at least this film has style. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for November 12-18, 2018

I guess it's awards season now? It doesn't feel like it. Anywhere, here are reviews.

Movies

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
It's, like, fine. I kind of dig that it treats "quantum" with the same sort of hand-wavy magical gobbledygook that sci-fi treated "radioactive" in the '50s and '60s. "Quick, we need some sort of vaguely sciencey rationale for telepathy! Uh... what about quantum entanglement?" It's fun in a very classically B-movie way. The rest is very much the kind of movie you got from the original Ant-Man, with maybe just a tad fewer inspired moments à la the cut from gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine to toy-sized Thomas the Tank Engine. A lot of the humor of the film feels a little too schematic, which was also true of the first one, and the mommy-daughter dynamics don't scan quite as well as the daddy-daughter emotional core of the first. But, like I said, it's fine. Nothing great; certainly nothing to justify why Marvel, after two movies, hasn't just jettisoned all this "ant-man" stuff and given the reigns entirely to Michael Peña's character, who remains the best thing about either of the films. But fine. Grade: B-

The Guilty (Den skyldige) (2018)
On a technical level, it's impressive the tension this film is able to wring out of its writers-workshop-prompt premise: it's a movie that takes place entirely in an emergency call center and whose action almost completely occurs via phone calls of which we only ever see the call-center side. It's not particularly showy in how it does it (though there's a bit with a red light near the end that is both obvious and beautiful), but The Guilty nearly perfectly balances shot length with editing in a way that's never ostentatious but always brutally effective in its drive toward a thriller intensity. On a thematic level, it's a remorseless little deconstruction of the hero impulse, showing at every turn how our protagonist's desire to be a hero in the traditional, individualist sense leaves crucial collateral damage—though impressively, manages that clear-eyed characterization without ever completely tipping its hand as to where the plot will go next. The movie isn't a revelation or anything, but it's a deftly executed experiment with just enough thematic edge to make it stick; it helps that it's a lot of fun to boot. Grade: B+

Cosmos (2015)
I'm not afraid to admit that I didn't really understand this. Maybe if I'd read more of the French existentialists I'd have been more on its wavelength, but as of right now, filtering Sartre through a slapstick comic lens with a dash of postmodern epistemology just didn't connect to my brain. I enjoy the sense of play (and the uber-cheesy score is reminiscent of what Twin Peaks did with the reappropriation of soap-opera-esque leitmotifs, which is cool); I would have enjoyed it more if I'd understood anything at all that the characters said. Uh huh, the universe is absurd; it's just a tad more absurd with this movie in it. Grade: C-

Blue Caprice (2013)
It's imbuing the perpetrators of the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks with a complicated humanity feels fairly radical, in the same vein (though obviously on a much less genocidal scale) as 2004's Downfall—refusing to relegate those who commit mass murder into the blanket, otherized category of "monster" or "criminal" means that the film refuses to engage in the flippant hand-washing that excuses society's greater forces from responsibility and that treats human depravity as a fluke event without cause or effect. "Terrorism" is the great absolver of American imperialism and American violence, and the film's rejection of the typical cinematic signifiers of this label dovetails nicely with the film's implication of American gun culture and conspiracy-prone mainstream-adjacent spaces. All that said, the film isn't nearly as complex as it wants to be—it's a remarkably static movie, sometimes by design but more often by failed attempts for lingering imagery and lyrical moments to carry thematic weight that they simply can't bear. As much as I admire some of the theoretical ambitions, the ideas are realized somewhat thinly, which is disappointing. Grade: B-

The Company of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan does his typical thing by bringing storybook material to lurid, lushly gothic life—impressive, considering that this is only his second feature, that he already had his "typical thing" down this pat. As screenwriter, Angela Carter does an admirable job of translating her excellent short story to film; the phantasmagoric Freudian imagery of the story's transgressive take on Little Red Riding Hood becomes literally nightmarish here, which is in concept a little too cute (the frame device clarifying that this is a dream is entirely unnecessary), but in practice, it's often stunning—and bonus points for the two incredible (and incredibly gory) werewolf transformations here. As the film's vignettes pile up, the movie does start to become a little muddled, both on a plot level (which was never really intended to come together with much precise sense anyway) and a thematic one. But taken as a broad generalization, it's a nice companion to the original story's refutation of coddling, misogynist norms. Grade: B+

In a Lonely Place (1950)
As distasteful as it can be, history repeatedly rewards cynicism, which has made film noir one of the most enduring of the classic studio genres. Its deep distrust in social institutions effortlessly waltzes itself into modern progressive politics, and so here you have In a Lonely Place, a film not only grounded by a pair of titanic performances (Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham both vying for their career-best performances, though I'll cop to only having seen Grahame in It's a Wonderful Life prior to this) but also in a bracing interrogation of how the Hollywood system enables violent men, which... uh, yeah, still working on that one, aren't we, Hollywood? That similarly industry-critiquing peers like Sunset Boulevard have lingered more strongly in the popular imagination is less a testament to Wilder's film being the superior one (though it is, by a teensy bit), but more that this tier of cynicism—that a man empowered by Hollywood's system might still be deeply dangerous even if he's not guilty of literal murder (the great scapegoat of morality)—is still a less comfortable fit with our broader social archetypes than the spectacle of a formerly glorious woman used by the industry flaming out in middle age via the throes of mental illness. In a Lonely Place is maybe a little more straightforward and obvious than it ideally should be: it's a megaphone of a film, sometimes to the muting of its non-Bogart, non-Grahame characters. But I guess nearly 70 years later, a megaphone is still the tool for the job. Grade: A-

Music

St. Vincent - MassEducation (2018)
Last year's Masseduction was probably the most self-consciously "produced" album of St. Vincent's career, crafted by a whole team of sound engineers helmed by none other than pop heavyweight Jack Antonoff. With MassEducation, St. Vincent reworks the same songs into basically their polar opposites: quiet, acoustic, and mostly piano-based pieces. It's an interesting experiment in theory and one that pays off intermittently. The whole album was apparently recorded in an afternoon, which shows: none of this is particularly elaborate, and while that's the point, it sometimes leaves the songs more anemic and musically reductive than the clarifying simplicity that Annie Clark was likely going for. "Happy Birthday, Johnny," already one of the quieter Masseduction tracks, becomes practically a whisper here, and the lack of volume doesn't really do anything to enhance the song; "Pills" is even worse, highlighting just how much of that song was just intricate instrumentation propping up some truly facile lyrics. Other parts of MassEducation work tremendously, though. "Hang On Me" comes alive in its piano version here, a truly beautiful ballad lifted by one of Clark's best recorded vocal performances; "Sugarboy," the lone bit of intricate instrumentation on the reworked album, is a nervy, oppressive piece of chamber pop; and on the whole, the reworked songs do a good job accentuating the emotional core of Clark's lyrics (some of the best and most personal of her career, "Pills" excepted) that sometimes got washed out in Masseduction's loud production. It's a mixed bag, for sure, but curious fans (yours truly) will find gems. Grade: B-

Mini-Reviews for April 30 - May 6, 2018

Reviews, get 'em while they're hot.

Movies

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

I could go on and on about the narrative problems of a movie that—to name one particularly nagging instance—involves a stone that only allows one to rewind time when the plot requires it, but I imagine the internet has already hashed out those nitpicks. Instead, let's talk about the action scenes in this movie. Throughout most of the movie's 149-minute runtime (!!!!![!!!!!!{!!!!!!!}]), I was concentrating very hard on why the action in this movie felt so unsatisfying, and I think I've arrived at it. In this movie, we have:

1. A dude who can manipulate time and space

2. a reformed Russian spy

3. a mind-reading lady with insect antennae

4. a tech genius with an army of nano gadgets

5. a sentient A.I.

6. a sentient tree

7. a witch who can hypnotize people and move things with her mind

8. a teenager who shoots spider web out of his wrists

9. an ex-U.S. Air Force guy who flies around on a jet pack

10. a purple, Malthusian space god who, midway through the film, acquires an object that allows him to literally alter reality

11. and like a bazillion other folks, all with different abilities and backstories.

And yet in the action scenes, these powers manifest themselves (with very few exceptions) in one of two ways: punch or zap. Remember the ending of Doctor Strange, when he beats the bad guy by putting him in a time loop? That was pretty neat. But in Infinity War, there are no time loops; Doctor Strange just shoots orange mystical energy from his fists. In Infinity War's action scenes, there are only collision and explosion. Where are the exciting and creative stagings of fight sequences? Lost in a sea of generic punches and zaps. And it's really dull, y'all. I'm being overly harsh to prove a point: it's not the premise of this movie I'm against—it's that, at several key points, the movie's execution veers unnecessarily into this unimaginative territory that is disappointing for a movie about magic space rocks and muscular, green supercreatures. You'll notice by the grade that I'm not completely against this movie—I'm even skewing positive. I like a lot of what's here: Thanos is the next in the recent wave of really interesting MCU villains; the ending is genuinely surprising (even if it feels suspiciously like a Whedon-esque thing of having tragedy be more shocking than meaningful); the plot is propulsive; the character interactions are fun ("I am Groot"; "I am Steve Rogers"). I'm just saying that for a movie that's supposed to be the culmination of the MCU thus far, it feels oddly like a flattening of its possibilities. Grade: B-

The Commuter (2018)

I was really enjoying this B-grade mystery set on a train, because it's set on a train and it's a mystery—solid pedigree there. But then about 2/3 of the way through it ceases to be a mystery and becomes more of an action movie, and right around that time, the train derails. A fitting metaphor, maybe, but I was really just distressed that we didn't get to see the end of the line, which was what I was looking forward to. Grade: B-

Tully (2018)

This Jason-Reitman-directed, Diablo-Cody-written feature is something like the intersection of that pair's last two collaborations—the quippiness and domestic observations of Juno bumping up against the existential despair and psychological turmoil of Young Adult. Tully is a much darker film than advertised, though that's not really clear until the film's final, heartbreaking act. But when it gets there—oof. It's a movie at once about the toll of motherhood and about the malaise of becoming older and more boring in the interest of protecting your children, and if it doesn't all quite work (the movie is far too cagey about its actual endgame, for one), enough of it does that the end product is pretty affecting. Grade: B+

Arabian Nights (As Mil e uma Noites) (2015)

Whereas Miguel Gomes's previous film, Tabu (one of this decade's finest films, no less), seemed positively drunk with the way that cinema allows for a hermetically sealed, controllable version of reality, Arabian Nights swings hard in the opposite direction, replacing the pure-cinema flourishes of Tabu for an aggressively realist one—an impulse that's delightfully incongruous with the film's fantasy trappings (the title isn't a juke—it is, after all, a reinterpretation of The Arabian Nights). It's as much documentary as it is fantasy film, and more than either of those, this is a fiercely political film. Each story in these "Arabian Nights" is set in and critiques the world of Portugal's policies of economic austerity, and the film's grounding in a documentary (or at least documentary-like) format forces us to reckon with the reality of economic austerity's ugly consequences within the fantasy sequences. It's the opposite of fantasy escapism, and while I will cop to being bored for LARGE sections of this movie (and I will also cop to my being mostly ignorant of Portuguese politics, which may have influenced the boringness), I can't deny the power of its premise nor the scorched earth of its satire. Grade: B

Henry Gamble's Birthday Party (2015)

It's a movie that's honestly and critically engaging with the Evangelical Christian moral paradigm, which is something I very much appreciate. There are also some nicely lyrical moment involving underwater cinematography, which I also appreciate. But there's no getting around the way that the stilted writing and acting create line deliveries in that unnatural, modular way that often comes out of the low-budget indie realm (or even... *gulp* the faith-based film industry, whose aesthetic this movie echoes either unfortunately accidentally or slyly purposefully, I can't decide)—something writer/director Stephen Cone thankfully worked through much better in his follow-up, Princess Cyd. And as much as I do love the extremely self-conscious Evangelicalism on display, I can't help but feel that the film's plot may have been just a tad too eager to cram in every single buzz-worthy Christian-world critique out there—in this one 80-min movie, we get body image, sexuality, alcohol, trauma, infidelity, repression, suicide, pornography, and more, and it feels a little overstuffed. Still, I'd rather a movie try and not quite succeed at this kind of urgent Evangelical scrutiny than not have tried at all. Grade: C+

300 (2006)

[Michael Bluth looking into a paper bag labeled "Dead Dove"]—"I don't know what I expected." Grade: D

Television

A.P. Bio, Season 1 (2018)

You've seen this before: dude loses his job and becomes a teacher, only he's a bad teacher and doesn't really teach and instead manipulates his students for his own gains. I liked it better when it was called School of Rock, because at least that had Jack Black doing his intense guitar-playing thing. In A.P. Bio, we have Glenn Howerton and a bunch of supporting cast that the show never really figures out how to use and no guitar. I'll give the show this: its commitment to avoiding sentiment is nice, and the cast of kids playing the students is excellent. But as far as plots go, as far as genuine laughs go, this is pretty thin. Grade: C+

Music

Preoccupations - New Material (2018)

The band's... uh... new material doesn't have anything nearly as good as "Death" (is this band ever going to top that??) or even "Degraded" from their last album. But Preoccupations is admirably staying the course as the 2010s post-punk torchbearers, and New Material, despite lacking some of the highs of previous efforts, is not some slack effort. More so than on Viet Cong or Preoccupations, texture is at the front of the band's mind here, and there are some delicious, thick slices of production on this album involving synths and percussion. It's good stuff. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for March 5 - 11, 2018

SPRING BREEEEEAAAAAAAAAKK.

Movies

Black Panther (2018)
Typical of the Marvel-Disney mold, Black Panther is positioned to feel more political than it is. The movie's relationship to real-world politics is slippery at best (Michael B. Jordan's radically positioned villain uses colonialist tactics, Chadwick Boseman's heroic Black Panther is a nationalist and an autocrat at that, and most bafflingly, the CIA is represented by a lovably bumbling sidekick), and its narrative is unusually (for an MCU film) lopsided in favor of its charismatic villain. But putting the specifics aside, at the film's heart is an intensely sincere dialogue about a nation's relationship to the world at large that feels in some ways like the other side of the coin that Thor: Ragnarok flipped when it questioned Asgard's use of military conquest to achieve its might (and Black Panther's interrogation of this topic is much less tossed-off than Ragnarok's was), and the resolution of that thematic thread is as graceful a note a Marvel film has ended on as last year's moving Guardians of the Galaxy finale. Bolstered by this thematic ambition, the rest of the movie has a weight that your typical Marvel film—usually feather-light affairs—lacks. Even though we don't see much of Wakanda (for a movie that stresses how urban and futurist the nation is, we really don't get much beyond the rustic settings for the film's action setpieces and the token science lab), this is a place that the film successfully inspires us to care deeply about, and when Killmonger talks wistfully about the Wakandan sunsets, it's legitimately poignant, laden with a generation of idealism and longing that does more to make Wakanda real than all the mid-tier CGI this movie can muster. Honestly, Black Panther belongs to Jordan's Killmonger, who is perhaps the best MCU character since Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark and the true beating heart of the film. The movie's not perfect, but Killmonger is. Grade: B+

God's Not Dead 2 (2016)
I'm not too proud to admit that I hate-watched this. Unfortunately for the cause of hate-watching, there's slightly less to hate in the sequel than there was in the original, as this movie doesn't involve atheists being straight-up murdered by God. However, the dead-eyed acting and nonsensical Evangelical celebrity cameos (we're spared the Duck Dynasty crew save a very brief Sadie Robertson, though the Newsboys are still there to save the day with bad music and corporate prayer, and otherwise, Lee Strobel shows up, as does Mr. Awful himself, aka Pat Boone) persist, as does the insipid anti-education worldview. And then there's the franchise-staple strawman arguments, best exemplified by the film's own credits, which claim that the events of this movie are based on real court cases, but if you actually pause the credits to read the descriptions of the court cases, as you know your intrepid reviewer did in due diligence, you'll find that almost every one of these real-life cases involved instances of actual proselytizing by teachers or students within a public school setting and not the benign case this movie centers on, which is about the ACLU suing a Poor, Innocent history teacher for answering in class that yes, Martin Luther King, Jr., was inspired by the teachings of Jesus (and while I'm at it, can we please for a moment recognize how this movie full of white Protestants invokes "Letter from Birmingham Jail," seemingly ignorant that the letter is largely written in critique of white Protestants, and like, I can't even, guys, please, what is wrong with these peopleeeeee *wraith-like screaming while clawing my own eyes out*). It's about as terrible as you can imagine, but even so, I was prepared to give the film a D+ based entirely on Ray Wise's delightful, campy performance as the ACLU lawyer from hell. But then I saw how one of the protesters in the film got the Dark Side of the Moon album cover wrong on her sign, and that's just a bridge too far. Grade: D-

The Forbidden Room (2015)
My first Guy Maddin. On a moment-by-moment basis, Maddin/Evan Johnson's early cinema pastiche by way of heavy postmodernism and digital (?) blurring and manipulation (the effect is largely that the film stock is, at any moment, about to warp and melt, Persona-style) creates a constant barrage of indelible and otherworldly imagery that feels like silent cinema beamed from a distant galaxy. But on a whole-movie level... well, there's a lot of movie here. I'm not talking about its runtime (although two hours does seem to be pushing it) as much as I am the nauseating feeling of consuming all of these images at once. It's a lot to take in, and I found my brain shutting down more often than not at the sheer incomprehensible barrage of it all. Maybe that's a feature instead of a bug, though? Grade: B

From Afar (Desde allá) (2015)
From Afar is a sufficiently "edgy" movie, though to describe exactly the ways it is so spoils a crucial and surprising plot point from very near the film's end. But edge doesn't really do a lot for me if it isn't pointed at something in particular, and that's, as far as I can tell, pretty much what's going on in this movie. It's an interesting movie and one that's shocking and nervy in a way that you probably wouldn't guess from the plot synopsis (a lot of critics have called this a "romance," and I suppose that's true, though not at all in any of the cinematic ways you might assume). But it also feels like a narrative exercise in making a particular sort of manipulation work, and for me, it doesn't quite. Grade: B-

Victoria (2015)
Doing a thriller in one take (i.e. the primary reason to see Victoria) is an interesting experiment because of the way it calls attention to the parts of a narrative than an edit can hide—the length of time it takes a character to walk from one side of the room to the other, for example, or just how much time these characters spend in transit between official locations. That is, admittedly, a pretty academic way to view this and probably sounds not at all fun for a thriller, and honestly, this movie isn't a ton of fun. The one-takeness stretches out what would probably have been a very lean story into nearly 2.5 hours, and not a lot of "thrilling" thriller stuff happens until the last half hour. That said, when the thrills start, they are pretty visceral and exciting, and the ending itself is top-notch. Just prepare for a sloooow build to that. Grade: B-

Jackass Number Two (2006)
What if Jackass: The Movie, but more intense and tasteless? Unbelievably, it's actually possible. Oh yes. Lots of poop. Lots of puke. A dude intentionally pierces his cheek with a fish hook. A guy dresses up as a terrorist of unclear national origin, and another guy pretends to murder that dude's friends. So, like... mission accomplished? In all seriousness, there's a lot of behavior here—the self-flagellation, the obsession with injuring genitalia, the frequent inducing of vomit, the aforementioned terrorist "gag"—that would raise a lot of red flags in any other context, but under the guise of "boys being boys," it's just laughed off as a hilarious joke, to increasing levels of cognitive dissonance, which, as far as I'm concerned, is pretty much the definition of white, male privilege. No thanks. Grade: D-

Jackass 3D (2010)
If I'm being "objective" (whatever that means), this is probably the best of the Jackass movies. It's much more whimsical and committed to playing up the more surreal, visually engaging sides of the gang's stunt work (lots of slow-mo, lots of strange props, e.g. a gigantic, spring-loaded hand that slaps anyone unfortunate to walk down a particular hallway). But I don't feel like being objective. I watched three of these movies in two days, and I'm tired. Grade: C-

Mini-Reviews for October 30 - November 5, 2017

Halloween has come and gone. Goodbye, spooky season; hello, desperately-clinging-to-the-beauty-of-Thanksgiving-before-the-onslaught-of-Christmas season.

Movies

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

It's beginning to look like the best I'm going to be able to do with most Marvel movies these days is to identify one or two fresh element that I enjoyed among the usual low-grade frustrations of this franchise. With Ragnarok, I have not one or two but three things to like here: 1. Taika Waititi, both as writer and performer—the off-the-cuff silliness typical of his screenplays breathes life into the film and is particularly well-suited to the character of Thor (not to mention when the words are uttered with Waititi's own beautiful delivery in the form of the Waititi-voiced rock alien, Korg); 2. Jeff Goldblum, who is at his Goldblummiest and, with apologies to an enthusiastic but altogether misused Cate Blanchett, the film's best villain, pound-for-pound the funnest and funniest part of the film; 3. The production design, which is delightfully colorful and kooky, continuing in Guardians 2's footsteps in moving the aesthetic of the MCU further into that sweet, sweet Jack Kirby style (though it's a firm step down from the visual splendor of that first 2017 Marvel film). These things are so good—better than the normal heights of Marvel fare—that they rescue the movie from a deeper well of narrative dysfunction than any Marvel movie has had since maybe Iron Man 2 (though if I ever get around to rewatching Doctor Strange, that might take the cake). What we have here is essentially two completely different movies smushed together—the first one comprised of Thor's imprisonment on the garbage planet Sakaar and featuring prominently all three elements I listed above, the second one a plodding drag encasing the first, featuring the titular Ragnarok as Blanchett takes over Asgard. I think I'm virtually alone in finding the Thor series's combination of arch high fantasy and silly humor as one of the chief pleasures of the MCU, and Ragnarok's bifurcated structure puts even my affection for that formula to the test. So thank goodness the rest is such fun. Grade: B

What Happened to Monday (2017)

It would be okay that What Happened to Monday's dystopian premise was almost comically elaborate if it resulted in a future that was either plausible or thematically interesting. But instead it's just kind of dumb. And even that would be okay if its sort of absurd premise that GMOs are causing a rise in multiple-child births was a vehicle for Noomi Rapace to indulge in some Tatiana-Maslany-style multi-character performances, and I guess that's sort of the case, as Rapace plays all seven characters in a set of septuplets. But in an unfortunate combination of shallow writing and a kind of listless Rapace, it's not really that engaging to witness (especially not when compared to Orphan Black, surely the gold standard in these kind of hijinks). And even still all that would be okay if the film's unrelenting focus on sci-fi action yielded some fun spectacle. But alas, this is some Syfy-level forgettability on that front. Three strikes you're out, movie. Grade: C

Manifesto (2017)

I guess between this and The Death of Louis XIV, I'm two for two with 2017 films that began as art installations. Cate Blanchett acts as 13 different characters who all, within their abstract vignettes, recite various artistic and political manifestos, from "The Communist Manifesto" to "Dogma 95," and it's her performances, recontextualizing the high speech of these texts within the cadences of everyday speech and in doing so, de-enshrining the language to show the grit-between-your-toes-ness of the spirit of these works, that are the main draw here. I can imagine this working better within its original gallery setting, but taken as a whole feature film, Manifesto is occasionally tedious but also frequently mesmerizing. Grade: B

Amour Fou (2014)

I mean, it's basically about a couple enmeshed in the preparations of a suicide pact, but for that hook, it's a remarkably restrained, occasionally plodding movie that spends at least as much time observing characters debate liberalism vs. feudalism as it does contemplating suicide. Knowing nothing of German author Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel (the real-life murder-suicide that this movie is based on), it's not always obvious to me the connection between the political philosophy discussed and the central couple, and the filmmaking, while handsomely constructed, is a touch more staid than I'd like. But by the end, the disparate threads of the movie have balled up into something that, if not quite cohesive, is definitely fascinating. Grade: B

Martyrs (2008)

This movie has a reputation as a maximally hard-to-watch torture-fest. And it's not like that's not there (although greatly more subdued than the conversation around it indicates). However, the conversation surrounding the film sells the philosophical preoccupations a bit short, which are very much concerned with the act itself of watching others experience great pain—it's a movie in dialogue with itself, with virtually diametrically opposed halves, one steeped in the tropes of sadistic horror and the other much more concerned with the cool contemplation of horror and its capacity for tremendous meaning, quoting more or less explicitly from what's probably the film urtext of finding meaning through extreme suffering, Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. It's all perhaps just a bit too obvious with its metaphors, especially in that first half, but there's no denying that there's something fascinating about this mix of schlock and metaphysics. Grade: B+

Pulse (回路) (2001)

This movie has both a retrospectively charming depiction of turn-of-the-millennium internet technology (a character furtively consults a manual, fumbles at phone cables, and uses one of those internet startup CDs in attempting to connect to the internet) and exquisitely constructed scares (not one of them jumps). Pulse is tremendous at using the language of film (editing in particular) to turn relatively small environmental details—for example, black smudges on walls—into terrifying imagery. If the irritating, '90s-TV-esque cold open and "flashback" to the main action of the film feel a bit cheap, nothing about the rest of Pulse does. This is tremendous filmmaking. Grade: A-

Television

Lore, Season 1 (2017)

The practice of converting a podcast into a TV series is, to my knowledge, a relatively novel one, so I guess we can forgive Lore of the occasionally clumsiness with which it does so. But it is a little clumsy, the way it juxtaposes Aaron Mahnke's bemusedly stilted narration from the podcast with live-action recreation of highly varying quality. Sometimes (as in, for example, the series's second episode, "Echoes," about Dr. Walter Freeman), there's a conscious recreation of classic horror aesthetics and a knowing camp to the way it frames the story that makes the dark depths all the more unsettling; other times, it feels a little amateur ("Black Stockings," for example), both on the cinematography and acting fronts. But no matter which of these categories it falls into, the highlight of any given episode will be the animated interludes that accompany some of Mahnke's narration—macabre, gruesome, and artistically distinctive in ways that not even the best live-action segments approximate. Outside of that, the pleasures of this series are virtually identical to the podcast's, i.e. the mix of horror, humor, and historical survey that informs Mahnke's writing. In fact, if you're a fan of the podcast, you'll recognize a lot of the series—the episode subjects are taken verbatim from some of the podcast's more memorable episodes. It's an interesting experiment, one I'm glad was taken, but as any of the variety of mad scientists from the annals of Lore could tell you, interesting experiments often have messy results. Grade: B-

Books

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore (1988)

As with a lot of the grim-'n-gritty school of comic books, The Killing Joke is a bit too impressed by its own darkness, most notoriously in the way it sadistically maims Barbara Gordon but also just in the generally pompous, gee-look-at-me way it relishes every tidbit of the Joker's warped worldview. Still, all that is sandwiched between a truly great opening and closing act—the story is never better (or free from its own tiresome "darkness, no parents" hangups) than when it focuses on solely Batman and the Joker, and the final page is justifiably legendary. This is all bolstered by Brian Bolland's excellent, detailed artwork, the perfect complement to Moore's writing and probably at least as responsible for the book's success as Moore's words. Grade: B+

Music

Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference (2017)

Though technically an EP (32 minutes in length, practically the blink of an eye compared to 2015's three-hour The Epic), Harmony of Difference has the weight of an album. A concept album no less: a series of short, bright compositions named after various abstractions like "Desire" and "Knowledge" that then lead into the 13-minute "Truth," a soaring finale that feels both musically and philosophically the culmination of the small pieces that came before. Fans of The Epic know what they'll find here: an expansive and spiritually infused mash of post-bop, samba, choral all ribboned up with Washington's cosmic saxophone. It's a major work from a major artist, EP or not. Grade: A-

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