Mini Reviews for March 2-8, 2020

One week until Spring Break. One week until Spring Break. One week until Spring Break.

Movies

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019)
Céline Sciamma has made several good movies, but this is comfortably my favorite of hers, retroactively one of my top five movies of 2019, and likely the French director's masterpiece (I still haven't seen her debut, Water Lilies). A love story whose deep emotional contours mirror its sonic and visual ones in a way that melds form and narrative more thoroughly and organically than in any other 2019 movie I can remember. It's a swooningly lush aesthetic experience—I could have existed in this movie for hours more; in fact, those painting scenes alone could have lasted years, and I wouldn't have complained. The movie's hushed sound design emphasizes the smallest of details—the scratch of charcoal on canvas, the rustle of a dress, a hand brushing across a sprig of rosemary, a caught breath as one character meets the gaze of another—until they take on an otherworldly richness, and this is precisely the movie in a nutshell: capturing that specific magnetism that compels you to study every detail of someone you love. This is, of course, literalized by the plot itself, which involves a painter scrutinizing her subject for a portrait until this scrutiny blossoms into love, but this story wouldn't hold nearly so much weight without the full alignment of the cinematic style behind this philosophical/emotional thesis. As much as the history of cinema insists upon it, love isn't made of grand gestures; it's the accumulation of the smallest of sensory morsels: her eyebrows when she's upset, the water dripping from her nose as she shivers after an ocean swim; the timbre of her voice as she asks you about love. None of this would register without the film's exquisite quietness, nor would the two moments at which music bursts forth loudly be so powerful: once an ethereal folk song around a campfire, another a famous Vivaldi composition in a concert hall. These two moments occur at the emotional climaxes of the film, and after the silence we've become accustomed to, it's literally dizzying to be swept up in the maximalism of these moments, a cinematic out-of-body experience where the distance between viewer and subject functionally disappears in the same way that the space between painter and lady does in this story: to watch someone this closely means to be enveloped as soon as they gesture toward you. Two become one: viewer to characters, lover to lover. This movie is magical. Grade: A

Dark Waters (2019)
Do not understand at all the tepid response to this movie—it's every bit as paranoid and apocalyptic as Todd Haynes's previous "we're all being poisoned" freakout, Safe. This is definitely a mainstream legal thriller, but it's a cracking one, and while the script occasionally gestures toward the generic (poor, poor Anne Hathaway gets saddled with a completely unironic deployment of the "longsuffering wife" trope), the movie's style is covered with such thick layers of sickening despair that it transforms the film into nothing short of a horror movie. The yellow tint of the cinematography alone is grotesque enough to make you ill, and the VHS footage of cow tumors sees the film's reality practically melt under the evil knowingly perpetrated by DuPont. Our world is a hellscape whose contours were intentionally sculpted by capitalism, and I've seen few movies that capture the sheer malaise of knowing that fact like Dark Waters and its parade of reflections of branded billboards and fluorescent logos on car windows and wet pavement. A waking nightmare of a movie masquerading as a potboiler. Grade: A-

I Was at Home, But... (Ich war zuhause, aber) (2019)
I can't say that I understood this movie. It's a very scattered, often abstractly structured collection of incidents with sometimes only tenuous connections between them, and I couldn't summarize this movie if I tried because it's hard to hold all those incidents up together into a coherent whole. That said, I did find myself connecting pretty strongly to individual moments: a lengthy diatribe of a disgruntled theater-goer to the director of a film she watched; a strikingly tender tableau at a swimming pool; a mother with frayed nerves shouting at her children and then feeling quiet remorse as they leave the room. There's a cock-eyed compassion to the humanity of these little moments, and I guess enough of these moments added up to my feeling pretty positive about the movie as a whole. Grade: B

The Return of the King (1980)
In which Rankin/Bass try to cobble together a sequel to both their adaptation of The Hobbit and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. This movie does a couple of things well. The pre-Ghibli Ghibli folks are still supervising the animation, as they did for The Hobbit, and it leads to some cool character designs (the Witch-King of Angmar looks extremely dope) and of course those water-color backgrounds. I also dig the way this opens with a literal invocation of the muses and then goes on to do a whole bunch of other structural things informed by the tropes of epic poetry, which is interesting and feels in-line with Tolkien's original project. But otherwise, The Return of the King is an extremely dopey adaptation. The music sucks (unless we're going to ironically appreciate the orc-disco, "Where There's a Whip There's a Way") and slows down the pace to a crawl—the first ten minutes of this barely 90-minute movie is just a song recapping the plot of The Hobbit and the first part of Lord of the Rings, and that's not the only time that happens. Even ignoring the pacing issues, the storytelling is extremely haphazard, both as a continuation of the previous movies (if you watched this immediately after Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, you would have no idea how Frodo is suddenly captured inside of Cirith Ungol and Samwise is now the ringbearer, since it skips the whole Shelob thing in favor of starting immediately where Tolkien's book does) as well as a movie unto itself (one character has to very hastily explain who Éowyn is like thirty seconds before she kills the Witch-King because apparently the movie couldn't be bothered to introduce her earlier—like couldn't we have skipped one of the musical sequences to have her show up just once before she becomes crucial to the plot?). And with all respect to my soon-to-be Ghibli bros, outside of the cool bits, the animation is pretty lousy, too, somehow more technically accomplished than the previous two movies while looking several magnitudes dumber. It's not like the other animated Tolkien adaptations of this period were sterling masterpieces or anything, but they both had a kind of striking ambition to them, whereas this is just a muddled mess. Definitely the worst of the loose trilogy. Grade: C-

Snoopy, Come Home (1972)
This is the first Peanuts feature-length movie I've seen, and if this is any indication, the gang probably should have stuck to half-hour TV specials if they were going to venture from the funny pages at all. This movie is clearly padded, which leads to some fun, weird moments that might not have happened otherwise (Snoopy has a trippy dream sequence for no real reason, which is both incongruous for Peanuts but also charming), but it also leads to a lot of boring, overlong sequences without a ton happening—I don't know where my tipping point was, but I definitely got tired of the musical sequences, for example. There are some bright patches of classic Peanuts bleakness (Charlie Brown, after throwing a rock into a pond: "Everything I do makes me feel guilty"), but this is slack enough that I'd much rather be watching one of the specials—or really, just reading the comics. Grade: C

The Front Page (1931)
Took me a loooong time to stop the voice in my head that kept asking, "But why are they talking so slowly??"—my experience with this movie was definitely hurt by this movie not being its remake, His Girl Friday, and this version's marriage plot is definitely hurt by the fact that the lovers aren't working together in the newsroom (compare Peggy, sidelined for long sections of the film, to the constant, blistering back and forth between Hildy and Walter). But not all movies can be the greatest (and fastest) American comedy of all time, and so I finally was able to force myself to watch this movie on its own terms. It's got some pretty interesting editing, and the part where Hildy is walking out of the newsroom and shouts, "See ya later, you wage slaves!" made me laugh pretty hard. But on the whole, it's a much darker and more serious movie than His Girl Friday (as is, presumably, the original play on which this all is based), which is sometimes to its benefit: the pathological compulsion of these journalists stings a bit more than in His Girl Friday, and we're allowed to wallow in the ugliness and collateral damage a bit more, I guess that's a decent-enough substitute for the characters not acting at an amphetamine pace for the duration of the film. Grade: B

Music

Stevie Wonder - Music of My Mind (1972)
This album is more or less the beginning of Stevie Wonder's legendary run of records in the '70s, so it feels a little petty to complain that this isn't as good as something like Innervisions—like, between 1972 and 1976, Stevie made more great albums than most artists make in a lifetime, so who cares if he has one that's not quite great when it is still very good? Music of My Mind is very good. There are bum tracks ("Superwoman" isn't too great, and it makes up 1/6 of the album!), but there's gold, too: "Love Having You Around" is a stomping opener, "Keep on Running" is a terrific little groove, "Evil" is a soulful gospel finale. Plus, the album has some of the hippest use of the Moog synthesizer in pop history. And even if the record only hits a double as opposed to a home run, it's still kind of thrilling to know that this is the beginning of Stevie Wonderful, maestro. Grade: B+

On Christmas Movies

There are only two Christmas movies I like.

Well, that's not exactly true. I like Elf and A Christmas Story, some of the Rankin/Bass stuff, etc. But I enjoy those movies the same way I enjoy other movies, regardless of holiday affiliation. What I mean is that there are only two movies I like because they are about Christmas. A lot of movies that brand themselves as "Christmas movies" do so by treating the Christmas holiday as some intangible abstraction that's an entity unto itself—for example, Santa Clause cancelling Christmas in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV movie or the way that "Christmas Spirit" saves the day in Elf. It's fine if people find joy in that, but I don't. When I grasp at it, it becomes a hollow and vague mythology I don't quite understand. People don't seem to like this about me, and I get it; it's no fun when someone's unenthusiastic about your traditions.

Still, the two I'm thinking of are the only ones I've found (with the possible exception of my recent realization that Catch Me If You Can is maybe a stealth Christmas movie) that render the experience I know as Christmas with any sort of fidelity, enough so that they move me to tears every single stupid year. I'm not going to be blowing anyone's mind here: those two movies are 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1946's It's a Wonderful Life.

In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey has dreams. He wants a big suitcase. He wants to see the world. Time after time, he's offered the opportunity to realize those dreams, and time and time again, he chooses to stay home. This comes to a head one Christmas Eve when George—thousands of dollars in debt, still trapped in his falling-to-pieces home in his same small town full of provincial people and dead-end careers—surveys his life in despair and decides to end it.

We of course know how this turns out. But I think it's worth lingering on that moment of despair, because the movie itself does. People remember the movie's uplifting ending, but we sometimes forget this for the first 3/4 of the film, this is the story of an individual's dreams being systematically crushed by his own allegiance to the people he knows. It's a feature-length inquiry into the cost of ambition, and that cost is the human relationships you have in the present; it's also a feature-length inquiry into what it means to decide that cost is too high.

A gentler variation of the same happens in A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which Charlie Brown spends most of the film's 25 minutes reconciling himself to the fact that celebrating Christmas the way others tell him to makes him miserable and the holiday meaningless. He invests in playing out the conventions of the holiday season—decorations and trees and pageants and presents—in much the same way that George Bailey walks through the beats of a small-town domestic life, and both end up finding this path crushingly unsatisfying. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, this is perhaps best exemplified when he takes that twig of a tree, determined to do right by it, only to find it wilted by the weight of the single ornament he hangs. "I've killed it," he cries, followed by the most anguished sigh children's animation has ever produced. "Everything I touch gets ruined." He defers to what people ask of him, and he's given back a cold, quiet despair. "I know I should be happy, but I'm not," Charlie Brown tells Lucy near the movie's beginning; he knows he should be happy because that's the expectation when you are surrounded by friends at a holiday.

But that is life with people: an existence at times overwhelmingly defined by alienation, frustration, and despair. I know this sounds like stylish broodiness, but I mean it in the most sincere way I can muster. There's a shot in It's a Wonderful Life several minutes before George decides to kill himself when, as Mary explains to her husband all the holiday festivities the family has lined up, George grabs his son and hugs him, staring over the boy's shoulder into empty space, and James Stewart's face as he begins to sob shatters me every time; the in-the-moment explanation for his distress is that his uncle and business partner has just lost $8,000, but it's clear that it's not just this financial woe that's passing in front of his eyes—he's thinking of the honeymoon money, college, New York City, and every other time he passed up on what one character calls "the chance of a lifetime," every choice that's brought him to this exact moment, and he's crippled by the thought that he's made a mistake. That the choices he made that brought him his friends and the loving family around him, engaging in fun, kitschy Christmas traditions, have rendered his life meaningless. Unless you've had one of these moments yourself, I don't know that it's possible to know just how real that look is that flashes across James Stewart's face.

Neither of these movies end here, obviously.

The most common interpretation I've heard of when the angel swoops in and shows George what his life would be like if he'd never been born is that it's a celebration of altruism—i.e. affirming that George Bailey has been a good person and that his life has meaning. And the text of the movie bears this out. George is a saint, and the positive effects of his having lived his life the way he did are gigantic. But I don't think it's George seeing the sudden worsening of the quality of life of his family and friends without him that makes George choose life. What truly strikes terror into George's heart in the Pottersville sequence is the fact that nobody knows who he is. His wife screams as he tries to embrace her; his mother sneers "George who?" when he arrives at her door; "This is George Bailey! Don't you know me?" he asks his former employer, Mr. Gower, to which the doddering man confusedly replies, "No." The horror of Pottersville isn't that Bedford Falls has suddenly gotten a bunch of nightclubs and cool movie theaters; it's that George is given a glimpse of what life would be like without any of the human contact that has kept him from realizing his ambitions—in other words, to be alone. And it's Hell.

Likewise, a lot of people latch onto Linus's sermonette detailing the Christmas story as told in the Gospel of Luke as the sort of culminating message of A Charlie Brown Christmas. And that's definitely part of it. The religious significance of the holiday in contrast to the commercial ends to which modern life has twisted it is clearly central to Charles Schulz's thesis on Christmas. But that's not where Charlie Brown's despair resolves. His moment of anguish with the tree, his "I killed it" moment, is after Linus reads the Bible. The movie's resolution comes, as in It's a Wonderful Life, with a supernatural event that leads to an embrace of the worth of being part of a community of people. Charlie Brown's friends encircle the collapsed tree and, after musing that "maybe it just needs a little love," they grab some lights and Linus's blanket and transform the twig into the small but unmistakable form of a lush evergreen fir. Charlie Brown returns, and seeing him, they wish him a Merry Christmas and all together sing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" as a timid smile spreads across Charlie Brown's face.

This is what dissolves Charlie Brown's despair: this group of people who, only moments before, made him so very unhappy. Put another way, to answer Charlie Brown's insistent question, this is what Christmas is all about: neither cultural traditions like trees nor religious ideas like the birth of Christ, at least not in isolation—it's these things linked with the idea of communing with other human beings.

This is what makes Christmas one of the most difficult holidays: it forces the confrontation of the tension between individual fulfillment and communal connection. You may be deeply miserable around people, but it is existentially terrifying to have no one. The only thing worse than being with people is being with nobody. It never feels this way in the moment. It is blessedly tempting to choose isolated independence and personal ambition over the conservative warmth of a community. I want to do what I want to do, and people get in the way of that. Both movies show why exactly this is so appealing: in Wonderful Life, we see the lack of autonomy and existential frustration inherent in human relationships; in Charlie Brown, we see the alienation that comes out of incompatible approaches to life goals. But what makes these movies so quintessentially Christmas is that they don't let their protagonists stay there. They bring George Bailey and Charlie Brown to the idea that even though human connection is alienating and frustrating and restrictive, it is the better way to live. "It is not good for man to be alone," to quote Genesis, and even if the act of not being alone isn't necessarily a path to happiness, it's a path to meaning.

"No man is a failure who has friends," says the angel's final note to George at the finale of It's a Wonderful Life. It's easy to sentimentalize this, but that statement is one of the most hard-won ideas in all of American cinema—the idea that the people you know and love are more important than your own individual ambitions. It's an idea that nearly drives George to suicide. It's an idea I find incredibly difficult to wrangle. People are irritating and taxing; they are weights who make independence difficult; they are mean, and I am mean to them. But they matter. And that's Christmas. Christmas is a rebuke of the individual in favor of the loving collective. I am terrible at acting out this idea, but that's what it is.

Now of course, even being presented with this choice between people and individuals is a privilege, and even among those who have that choice, there are legitimately abusive and harmful communities that individuals should be able to separate themselves from. Christmas is not about an obligation to all communities. And I know that this isn't what Christmas means to everyone else, and that's fine. What I'm describing here is intensely personal to me specifically, and I'm honestly not sure how many peers I have in these ideas. And maybe this post is corny and maudlin and melodramatic. Maybe. But even considering all that, every year, without fail, I end up tearing up at the end of It's a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Being brought face-to-face with the compelling necessity of human communities, despite my most lonesome urges—that's the holiday for me.

Until next time.

Mini-Reviews for April 4 - April 10, 2016

This week's review brings you my first-ever A+ rating since I've started these posts! Such prestige! Such awe!

Movies

James White (2015)
A movie that at first masquerades as one genre (the handheld-cam indie drama about aimless self-destructive thirtysomethings) turns out to be a Trojan horse for another genre altogether (the dying relative drama). I just made it sound like a slog, and fair warning, this movie is no picnic to sit through: it's bleak, raw, and frazzled in not just a movie-tragic way but an actual, real-life, makes-you-feel-ill-with-grief kind of way. So there's that. It's also handily one of the best movies of 2015. This is thanks in no small part to Cynthia Nixon and Christopher Abbott as the central mother-son due, anchoring the film with two of the greatest performances of the decade and proving that it's not how uplifting you can make these dark scenarios: it's how much humanity you can find in them. Grade: A

Celebrity (1998)
I've seen Woody Allen features I've disliked both in part (Curse of the Jade Scorpion) and in whole (Melinda and Melinda), but this is the first I've seen that's this dire. It's an ugly film about small people treating each other horribly, and while one could argue that the petty ugliness is the point, it would be harder to use that to justify just how almightily boring it all is. The plot is meandering and overlong, and its script is lifeless, save for the occasional verbal turn that is the grace of even the worst Woody Allen work (and truly, this is among the worst). Couple that with an off-putting Kenneth Branagh performance that imitates Woody Allen's acting style closely enough to prove that the uncanny valley should be a concern not just for robots but for reportedly flesh-and-blood actors. Grade: C-

The Peanuts Movie (2015)
It's a largely de-fanged adaptation of the strip's striking melancholy, but really, there hasn't been a film adaptation that captured the ache of Schultz's strip since A Charlie Brown Christmas, and even that one ends with the resurrection of the murdered tree via love and Yuletide magic. No, what's important here is not how much it evokes Schultz's worldview but the fact that it deviates frequently from it without feeling at all like a violation of the source material. I'm gonna go ahead and give the bulk of the credit to the animation, which is a marvel of CG stylization—seriously, the idea of a CG adaptation of Peanuts sounds like a fatal mistake, so it's all the more amazing that the movie's art direction is not only not fatal but also now my preferred aesthetic for any potential followups. Grade: B+

Malcolm X (1992)
It's rare that a movie over 90 minutes long doesn't prompt me to think that it could have been a little shorter. And yet Malcolm X's 200+ minutes flew by; I've never been so riveted by a movie this long. But attention spans are boring: the real take-home here is that Malcolm X is a lively, moving, incendiary, important masterpiece, unquestionably the greatest biopic of all time and handily one of the greatest movies of all time, full stop. Maybe I'm still just coming off this movie's high, but I don't know: there's something special about a film made twenty-five years ago about events fifty years ago and still feeling very much about 2016. Spike Lee (hedging right up alongside Do the Right Thing with career-best work) crafts a masterful mosaic of genres, from the near-musical stylings of Malcolm's pre-conversion years to the statelier, talkier figurehead period, all of which may have risked becoming a showy stylistic exercise if it weren't for Denzel Washington's incredible performance that somehow casts Malcolm as both mythic and ground-level human. Grade: A+ (a grade well-worth violating my normal no-longer-than-the-poster-size length rule, by the way)

Books

Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817)
The first half is lots of fun, with protagonist Anne Elliot being a sort of proto-Charlie Brown: ignored by her family, saddled with unwanted tasks, weighted with a piercing lack of success. This being Austen, it's of course filled with a generous wit and not nearly so sad as even the opening passages of Mansfield Park, and the fact that Anne handles most of this with the 19th-century equivalent of eye-rolling keeps it from being mean-spirited. Once her life stabilizes and the central question of the novel shifts toward deciding which man to pair Anne off with, though, it loses much of its charm and becomes rather tedious. It's Jane Austen, so it's still got that wit, but plotting-wise, it's a little sloggy. At least we still have that first half. Grade: B