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 November 21 - November 27, 2016

I'm thankful for the arts.

Movies

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)
If it's hyperbolic to declare The Edge of Seventeen one of the best coming-of-age films of all time (maybe I should wait to come off the theatrical high before getting too superlative), there's no doubt that it's at least one of the best coming-of-age films of the new millennium and definitely one of the best movies, period, of 2016. Anchored by the phenomenally entertaining and layered performance of Hailee Steinfeld (remember how good she was in True Grit? Would you believe she's even better here?), the movie is the rare youth-centric one that doesn't shy away from complex emotional territory that doesn't fit within the usual teen tropes or veer toward easy resolution. The Edge of Seventeen brings each one of its characters—but particularly the principal trio of Steinfeld's Nadine, her brother, and her mother—to gasping, bleeding life. The phenomenally sharp writing of Kelly Fremon Craig's screenplay gives these characters both tenderness and bite, sketching them out with an eye observant enough to create humans hard to like but difficult not to love. I really can't stress this enough: The Edge of Seventeen is vital. It's funny. It's nuanced. It's brave enough to look adolescence in the eye and see the selfish, scared, wounded person looking back—not the convenient type of scared presented in teen melodramas, but the real, claustrophobic, utterly isolating panic that can only come from the dread of having to live the rest of your life with yourself. Grade: A

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)
The fact that I merely liked Taika Waititi's vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows puts me kind of in the minority among people of my film-going persuasion, who tend to love it relentlessly. My liking this movie on about the same level as Shadows probably does the opposite for me within that same crowd, but oh well. It's a film that manages to find fresh energy and heart in a thoroughly "mid-2000s indie-land" premise, largely due to the excellent (and hilarious) dialogue and cracker-jack editing—exposing, if anything, that the reason those indie tropes became musty to begin with had way more to do with a general passivity in filmmaking than anything with the tropes themselves. Long story short, Wilderpeople's good and, to boot, has the funniest boar disembowelment in cinema history. Grade: B+

The Roost (2005)
By my money, Ti West is one of the best working horror directors out there these days. The Roost is nowhere near his best, in large part due to the general looseness of the screenplay—a disappointment, since sharp dialogue and pacing tend to be givens in a Ti West feature. However, it's not all a wash; in fact, I give the movie huge props for just how meticulously and convincingly it recreates the atmosphere and aesthetic of '70s/'80s drive-in horror. The movie isn't great, but its look is. Grade: B

Quiz Show (1994)
Turning the Twenty One quiz show scandal into a searing inquisition into the nature of TV—and, relevant even now (especially now), the role of truth in a medium that most often styles itself as entertainment—must have been relatively easy. Have you read up on the Twenty One quiz show scandal? The themes pretty much develop themselves! Turning it into television's All the President's Men must have been a bit harder, though, because All the President's Men is a fantastic movie. Luckily, so is this one. Grade: A-




Television

You're the Worst, Season 3 (2016)
As a character study (and intermittently, that is exactly what You're the Worst wants to be), it's barely successful; each character has his or her own voice that remains relatively consistent, but the success of the growth of those characters remains frustratingly scattershot. Character moments that pierce deep (Edgar in particular gets a series-best episode focusing on his PTSD) are followed up with either indifference or absurdity (the PTSD thread becomes considerably frayed by the season's end). And that's just with the characters who work—the less said about the maelstrom of incoherence that is Lindsay, the better. So yeah. Character stuff: about the same as always. As a straightforward laughs-per-minute comedy, though, You're the Worst has never been better. The dialogue is as live-wire and audacious as it's ever been, and an increased attention to episode structure leads to some fantastic half-hour-comedy construction. So I guess ask yourself what you want out of the show: plot-wise, character-wise, it's a mess. Laugh-wise, though: top-notch. Grade: B

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016)
Let's make this clear up front: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life does, for the most part, a way better job at evoking the tone, texture, and emotional resonance of its original series than any ten-years-later revival of a beloved TV show can ever fairly be expected to do. Lorelei and Rory gab and quip, Luke grumbles and wears a backwards baseball cap, Emily snipes and steals your heart, Kirk engages in half-baked hijinks, and Stars Hollow is as lovably off-beat as ever. That the particular version of all of these things bears a closer resemblance to the later, pricklier seasons of the original Gilmore Girls run than it does the quieter early years, though, is the first in a litany of caveats that must come up when recommending this to series faithfuls. Some of this is good: the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons of the original series (let us never mention what came after) showed showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino diving into more complex emotional territory that enriched the characters and helped the show tackle subjects with more nuance than it sometimes could in those earlier seasons, and that nuance and fearless thorniness remains in this revival. Case in point: Emily Gilmore, the stealth best character of the original series and the one who benefits most from the later seasons' less cuddly approach, again gets the best material here. The strongest emotional through-line here is the way the show writes the passing of Edward Herrmann into the narrative—Richard Gilmore has died as well, and a good chunk of A Year in the Life involves the family's grieving, of which Emily takes front and center. It's beautifully done and some of the best work the show has done, ever. Of course, a lot of the later seasons' nuance turned to frustration and soapy twists that undercut a lot of the show's charm—the development of Rory into someone who has been so validated early in life that she has a difficult time coping with freedom and failure in the adult world remains both one of the smartest and one of the most unpleasant characterizations the show ever managed, and *sigh* that's here, too, and all that brings (the Huntzbergers, the Life & Death Brigade, questionable sexual choices). As before, it's both intelligently rendered and entirely irritating. All of this is in the realm of plot and character, which is to say nothing of the actual form the show takes, which is sort of a debacle. The dividing of the season into four 90-minute "episodes" that each span a single season of the year seems like it opens the door for some interesting structural experimentation. But the problem with 90-minute episodes is that that's basically movie-length, which wouldn't be an issue except that Gilmore Girls seems paralyzed by the prospect of structuring its episodes like movies, resulting in a half-committed attempt to stretch typical 45-minute episode fodder out double-length while otherwise trying to cover several episodes' worth of narrative. The results are a sputtering lack of momentum over the character arcs, the freedom to indulge in overlong dialogue interchanges and bizarre one-off sequences (a lengthy Moulin Rouge-esque musical montage with the ever repugnant Life & Death Brigade is among the series' low points), and a season that feels at once too long and too short. Kind of like this review. Grade: B

Books

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
While The Age of Innocence remains her masterpiece in my eyes, The House of Mirth is still further proof Wharton's position among American literature's greats. A savagely bleak portrayal of the New York upper-crust society that's something like Jane Austen filtered through the cynicism of late-19th-century Realism, The House of Mirth is insightful in its telling of one Lily Bart's downward spiral in a way that is both dripping contempt for the social mores of the upper class and careful not to let that contempt obscure the fundamental tragedy of that society's casualties. Lily Bart herself is a wonderful tightrope of a protagonist, a character whose stupidity and frivolity the novel roundly condemns while simultaneously managing to evoke deep sympathy for way that social pressures have pointed her in this direction. Grade: A-


Music

Preoccupations - Preoccupations (2016)
Lots of bands since the late '70s and early '80s have taken inspiration from the post-punk of that era, but with Preoccupations, the band formerly known as Viet Cong has come the closest to sounding exactly like those bands. I'm sure someone will make the argument that this is fruitlessly derivative, that Joy Division only needed to make Closer once and why bother recreate it here? But in my mind, Preoccupations is unequivocally a good thing, derivation and all. Mimicry is much more heinous in an era already flush with imitators, but for better or for worse, the 2010s are pretty short on post-punk revivalists, which makes Preoccupations a treat rather than a glut. Grade: A-