Quarantine, Week 8: It's Mother's Day! An actual temporal landmark!
Movies
Becoming (2020)
Basically a puff piece, but I came for the Kamasi Washington score, and while it played less of a role than I would have liked, it was still good.
Grade: B-
Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019)
Exquisitely filmed—those colors!—and beautifully acted. The story only worked for me in fits, though, which I guess is kind of baked into a movie as fragmented as this one is: the remembered childhood material, the scene where Banderas's character talks to his old lover—and talk about sticking the landing, because the final scene is magnificent. But I had a hard time pulling this together into the stately emotional arc this is trying to be, re: an aging filmmaker coming to terms with his career and his own mortality. Maybe I'll just have to wait a few decades for it to sink in.
Grade: B
Speed Racer (2008)
There was a span of about thirty minutes at the beginning of
Speed Racer when I thought I might be watching the greatest movie of all time. Then there was still like 110 minutes left of the film, though, and the movie's runtime is absolutely the biggest liability here, letting the movie get tied up in all its gobbledygook wheels-within-wheels plotting, and giving its actors time to get tripped up on the arch cadence the movie requires of them (I'd say only about 30% of the movie's cast really hangs with the "live-action anime" thing this movie is going for, with Christina Ricci being far and away the most tuned in to it). But what emerges at the end of that bloated runtime isn't the greatest movie of all time, but it's still easily my favorite film from the Wachowskis, and probably the most visually dazzling blockbuster of the 21st century until
Mad Max: Fury Road (and maybe more dazzling than that one, even). It's a movie about the pure love of a craft and the ingenious lengths scrappy outsiders have to go to snatch that craft away from the cynical influence of corporate interests, and it's not hard to extrapolate what this movie has to say about race car driving into a thesis on the Wachowskis' filmmaking ethos, especially from a movie so exuberantly, overwhelmingly crafted. This is a symphony of lights and edits that verges into the otherworldly in its pure embrace of color, shape, and movement, and at the climax of the movie, when we're basically just falling into a spinning tunnel of fluorescent bursts and red and white stripes, my head almost exploded from sheer sensory joy. Whoosh.
Grade: A
Miracle Mile (1988)
Starts as a rom-com, ends as a nightmare, almost literally—I have nightmares about nuclear war all the time, and the final twenty-ish minutes of this movie are probably the most brutal evocation of what those nightmares feel like that I've ever seen committed to media: the twin sadness and despair of seeing human society tear itself apart in a panic as Lovecraftian violence rains from the sky. This is a weird movie, though, because in order to get to that place, it has to take a couple left turns that make the whole thing feel kind of duck-taped together. There's the aforementioned rom-com at the beginning, which is probably the thinnest section of the movie, which then shifts gears into a thriller in which our protagonist has to rally help within the titular Los Angeles neighborhood to escape the city, which finally melts into the straight-up terror of that final act. The juxtaposition of that second and third act is particularly sobering: not only is it deeply tragic to see the lovingly (if roughly) sketched cast of kooks from the middle of the movie dissolve into the mindless panicking masses of the climax, the whole arc argues that collective solidarity is fundamentally incompatible with violence on the scale of a nuclear attack, and as much as I'd like to think that that is incorrect, I don't know if I can really compellingly take that position.
Grade: B+
León Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, prêtre) (1961)
A bisexual communist woman debates a hip, hot priest about Marxism, materialism, Christian salvation, and resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII. There's no way this movie wasn't going to be good, and it
is good. Its central ideas (especially the tension between collective action and the individualistic ideas of salvation in Christianity) are some of the most potent of 20th century Western religious thought. But for a guy who was so influential on the French New Wave, director Jean-Pierre Melville's cinematic style is distinctly lacking the cool that was a staple of the New Wave, and while there is some tremendous light/shadow interplay, I gotta say that a good portion of this felt kind of stodgy, not helped by the fact that this movie's somewhat heavy-handed voiceover and start-stop pacing underlines thickly that this was adapted from a novel. But what's good is good, and I could watch forever the scenes between Barny and the priest, which luckily comprise a good portion of the film.
Grade: B
Television
The Midnight Gospel, Season 1 (2020)
An intriguing concept: take a podcast and edit it into psychedelic animated odysseys that give a surreal narrative context to the podcast conversations. The animation is arranged by Pendleton Ward (i.e. the
Adventure Time guy), and it is stunning, unpredictable and funny and unbelievably detailed—this is among the very best animation work ever done for television. On the other hand, the podcast being animated is
The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, hosted by this series's co-creator and main voice actor, Duncan Trussell, and I found the conversations gleaned from the podcast to be sophomoric and self-satisfied in the worst ways. So I'm basically 98% here for the animation, with the major caveat that the last two episodes form a mini-masterpiece: the penultimate episode features an interview with a mortician, while the final episode is centered around an interview Trussell did with his own mother just weeks before she died of breast cancer, and I can guarantee that you've never seen nor heard anything like the hour created by these episodes—the most visionary, bracing, and bruisingly honest meditation on death I've ever seen in a television show. So come for that, if nothing else. I kind of hated a lot of the rest, but the animation carried me through.
Grade: B
Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander) (1982)
This television miniseries (later recut into a much shorter [though still three hours long!] theatrical film) was apparently supposed to be the last thing Ingmar Bergman worked on before retiring, and that makes sense. It's at once the culmination of the filmmaker's entire body of work, from the warm group dynamics of
Smiles of a Summer Night to the anguished anti-theodicy of his God trilogy to the tortured domestic hell of
Scenes from a Marriage to even the use of the stage and stage magic as a figurative investigation of faith from
The Magician, while at the same time feeling completely different from anything Bergman had done before: a lush, semiautobiographical coming-of-age epic in which the spirit world bursts from every piece of reality. It's funny (there are fart jokes!) and freaky and sad and, above all, ridiculously ambitious, an attempt to capture the entire spectrum of the human condition, not just from cradle to grave but also beyond the grave. It's also far plottier and immediate than Bergman is typically known for: as much as I've pontificated about the metaphysics of this work,
Fanny and Alexander can more or less be experienced as a straightforward Gothic drama about a boy and his sister and their mother as they navigate the trials of their aging aristocratic family, and this series is twisty and conventionally exciting for long stretches in a way that you really can't say of, for example,
The Seventh Seal or
Cries and Whispers. The whole work stands with the very best that Bergman ever did. Magnificent.
Grade: A
Books
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (2019)
A romance between a fictional First Son of the United States and the Prince of Whales: this is really not my type of book for a lot of reasons, both political and aesthetic, but I was prepared to put that all aside and try to enjoy this as an escapist fantasy. But it's really hard to enjoy something as escapist when it insists on grounding itself within actual real-world (or real-world adjacent) politics with a kind of
West-
Wing-esque liberal dream, e.g. a left-center woman winning the presidency in 2016 and reelection in 2020, a controversy with a private email server not actually making a difference in the presidential election, etc. Like, can I just read a Tumblr-ish YA romance without the book constantly underlining how much worse the real world is? Can I enjoy the First Son and the Prince hooking up without jokes about Netanyahu and Mitch McConnell? And as long as we're inventing improbable political fantasies like Texas going blue in 2020 or a cool gay independent senator going undercover in a Republican
presidential candidate's campaign in order to bring it down from the
inside, why even bother with a depressingly realistic Democratic president? Couldn't we have just gone the whole nine yards and made the dream-world president a democratic socialist or something? Anyway, I tried. But on every other page, my concentration was shattered by some political thread my sick brain picked up on. The point of escapist fiction is to escape this hellish reality, and I just couldn't. I know, I know—my brain is broken, and I am incapable of experiencing fun.
Grade: D+
