Spooky season has ended. Alas. In case you missed it, I'll link here to the post I made earlier this week, which is a new entry in my prog series!
Movies
Easily my favorite movie of the year so far and probably my favorite Cartoon Saloon feature now (sorry, Secret of Kells, you're still great!). If nothing else, this is just a tremendous aesthetic leap forward for Tomm Moore and his studio; previous Cartoon Saloon features have had to make virtues out of the limitations of the noticeably digital animation tools the animators had to work with, creating films that are geometric and smooth and dependent on crisp, clean lines at the edges of characters, and while those movies all do great work with that look, Wolfwalkers finds the Saloon with a much larger budget and hence a much more dynamic set of techniques at their disposal. The result is something that maintains the basic geometry of their earlier work while also finding ways to make the animation miles more textured and dynamic. It's just stunning, gorgeous work, the best-looking 2020 movie I've seen, animated or live-action, and what's even better is that it's in service of a terrific anti-imperialist tale that maps a variation of werewolf mythology onto the English occupation of Ireland and the intertwined birth of capitalism and English Protestantism, all bound up in an intense and often achingly sweet coming-of-age/coming-out story surrounding the friendship of an English girl with a "wolfwalker" girl. The movie is practically bursting with incredible narrative turns illuminated by breathtaking aesthetic flourishes, but my favorite is the visual motif of having the wolves' character models preserve the pencil-sketch lines around their edges, giving the wolves a noticeably freer visual palette compared to the English and occupied Irish in the town. The more I think about this movie, the more I like it, and I'm really tempted to pull the trigger on that A+. I can't imagine anything else this year captivating me like this. Grade: A
I remember when this first came out hearing a lot of people dismiss it as "just a kids' movie," and 1. Good kids' movies are really hard to do, and Ponyo is a very good kids' movie; 2. It's also a pretty complex movie with a lot of different thematic angles to its environmental/apocalyptic themes, so it's not as if by being a kids' movie, this shows Miyazaki soft-balling any of his usual preoccupations; 3. It looks incredible, a colorful and surprisingly rich transition of Miyazaki from his usual ornateness into something that resembles the cartoonish fluidity of, like, Masaaki Yuasa. So yeah, I feel like those people I heard really made the wrong call on this one. Grade: A-
An extremely early found-footage example in the style of Orson Welles's infamous War of the Worlds radio program (this one was actually broadcast on the BBC!). It's a little aimless and goofy for the first hour or so, but that only makes it all the scarier when the real deal starts happening, revealing a close attention to pacing and structure all along. And the final fifteen minutes or so are VERY scary—if not on the scale of, say, the ending of Blair Witch Project then definitely just a few clicks below that. Grade: A-
This feels like the closest thing I've ever seen to an animated Tarkovsky movie: a meditative, oblique, spiritual movie involving two characters walking through a landscape of ruins and biblical allusions. The mid-film monologue recounting the revised version of the Noah's Ark story feels like it could have come right out of Stalker or something. The film's an incredible experience. The film is co-created by Yoshitaka Amano, whom I'm sure a lot of people know through his artwork for the Final Fantasy games, and as much as those games can be great, they're often busy and over-explained in ways that openly contradict what makes this movie so powerful, and I wish that Amano would have more of a chance to work in this mode, because his world clearly thrives on the slow, deliberate pace here. To wrap back around to Tarkovsky, my one wish for this movie is that it were even slower; a late-film shot of a campfire lasts for nearly a minute, and it's one of the best parts of the movie. Imagine a movie filled with shots like that. Even so, this is great. Grade: A
The ending is so famous that I don't feel like I really need to warn people that this review spoils it. I'm actually kind of curious why it's such a famous twist, considering that it's not any more surprising than an average Twilight Zone twist, though I suppose that years of allusions to "It's people!" made me kind of primed to look for clues. What I'm surprised isn't as famous is the scene where riot-control cops scoop of crowds of people into big tanks, presumably to turn them into soylent. It's by-far the most haunting thing in the movie, and it's kind of wild that a movie would be that openly anti-cop—like, the cops in this movie are literally there to protect the state's process of turning political dissidents into crunchy food tablets. Hm. Makes ya think. Other than that, though, I actually think this movie is just kind of okay? It's way more of a neo-noir detective thing than I was expecting, kind of like Blade Runner without the philosophy and stunning production design (which is just run-of-the-mill '70s grime here), and not a particularly interesting central mystery either, though Heston gives 110% in his performance, as he was wont to do in these '60s/'70s dystopian films. It's a movie with striking moments but also long sections of drag. Grade: B-
Television
My issues with Season 2 basically continue unabated in Season 3, mainly that some of the mythology overrides some of my favorite elements of the show's wonderful Beach City setting. I said this in my review of Season 2 also, but I really enjoy the small-scale Beach City storytelling that the first season balanced so well with the big, dramatic stuff. That balance is all out-of-wack here, most notably for the way that the first 20% of the show take place in a barn outside of Beach City, an arc that I didn't actually enjoy that much, especially because they focus so heavily on Peridot, a character whose thematic/dramatic purpose is clear (to show a character basically deprogramming after having been trained to follow a cold, abusive authority) but whose presence I never actually enjoy. The later arc-heavy episodes that end the season are much stronger, but they're often stronger not because they advance the contemporaneous plot but because they deal with the central characters' pasts with one another—this season deals a lot with, for example, the dynamics of Amethyst's being so much younger than the other Crystal Gems, and it's rich character work with that vein of melancholy that Steven Universe does so well. The same goes for the more standalone episodes in the middle of the season when the characters have returned to Beach City. Increasingly, the show is drawing from the past to inform the present as the denizens of the city mingle with one another, from the relatively inconsequential ("Restaurant Wars," which has two restaurateurs rekindling an old conflict) to the more serious (everything to do with the ongoing relationship between Lars and Sadie). In fact, my favorite episode of the season, the musical episode "Mr. Greg," is purely about characters dealing with the past, as Pearl and Greg come to grips with their complicated relationship with each other in the context of their past relationships with Rose Quartz; it's funny and fleet and sad and moving—Steven Universe at its very best. Grade: B+
Music
Internet savant and spicy meme lord Neil Cicierega returns with another of his "Mouth" mixtapes. These mixtapes are some of my favorite things on the internet, so it's a little disappointing that Mouth Dreams is uncharacteristically hit-and-miss for Cicierega. There are some truly great songs on here in the classically devilish Cicierega mode: songs such as "Just a Baby" (which mashes up Hoobastank's "The Reason" with Justin Bieber's "Baby" with Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" in a way that makes Cash's opening line "When I was just a baby" not just a flashback but the entire premise of the song), "Fredhammer" (miraculously turning Limp Bizkit's noxious "Nookie" into a certified bop by the addition of a beat made from a sample of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer"), and "10,000 Spoons" (Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" set to the Knight Rider theme). Elsewhere on the album, Cicierega is legitimately pushing himself into new territory, finding interesting textures and sounds seemingly as an end to themselves without the usual jokiness undergirding his work, and these are often rewarding: "Aammoorree," for example, or "Cannibals." But outside of these high points are some serious low ones, sometimes as Cicierega wrings far too much time out of an iffy or overwrought idea ("My Mouth," a mashup of Green Day with Aerosmith, is pretty weak, and it's far from the only such weaksauce mashup here), other times as Cicierega tries to expand his palate and it just plain doesn't work (the Beethoven's 5th with Britney Spears "Brithoven," for instance). More so than any of the other "Mouth" tapes, Mouth Dreams is something of a slog to get through, and its best moments are best in isolation rather than what they are in the context of the record: oases in the middle of a desert. The highs are certainly high, though, and I'm glad I have them, even if I'll probably not listen to the whole record all the way through that much. Grade: B-
