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Movies
In the context of a world in which God's Not Dead and its combative ilk exist, it's tempting to look at a relatively more genteel Evangelical Christian movie like this or the megachurch-leaders-turned-film-auteurs Stephen and Alex Kendrick's previous movie, Facing the Giants, with gratitude. It's also a Christian movie that knows what a metaphor is and how to create one visually, which is a miracle that definitely should have been included in that final montage of Facing the Giants. But no! I refuse to fall under any kind of Stockholm Syndrome over the rare Evangelical movie that shows me the barest-minimum cinematic kindnesses. This movie is bad on such a fundamental level: the aforementioned visual metaphors are merely side-effects of a director whose only skill is knowing in which of the four cardinal directions to point the camera, and the movie is put together with such a ham-fisted and bone-headed ethos that the whole thing practically quivered to pieces the moment the first of its many K-Love-core music montages hits the screen. And then the story—when I was little, I remember being told quite a bit that God isn't a vending machine or Santa Claus, but this is precisely the paper-thin view of reality that this film is locked into. Like Facing the Giants before it, Fireproof cannot conceive of a world in which being a devout Evangelical Christian does not result in God's rewarding that fervor in the most direct way possible, and accordingly, it cannot conceive of a man who will not be rewarded with a woman provided he treats her nicely for forty days—which is ridiculous on a lot of levels, but especially considering how the husband in this movie is such a swinging dick with deeply toxic impulses (the sheer number of times he beats something to pieces with that baseball bat) and yet manages to "win back" his wife with only the most basic acts of decency like doing the dishes and fixing dinner and, like, not yelling at her. The pieces of the "Love Dare" we're shown in this movie do nothing to address the fundamental dysfunction of the marriage we see in the movie's rather harrowing opening scene, but Fireproof is so committed to the idea of the husband "earning" his wife's love that it never stops to consider that love isn't an exchange of kindnesses or a machine in which certain inputs automatically yield certain outputs, but rather a profound and messy entangling of two human beings. The movie makes a few gestures toward the unconditional love of Christ, which is both theologically problematic (I'm sure it doesn't mean to imply this, but the movie very much positions salvation as merely a step toward a happier marriage instead of anything spiritually significant—an egregious diminishing of the works of Jesus, to say the least) as well as just grossly patriarchal, since it by implication casts the husband as Jesus being battered for iniquity and the wife as the wayward sinner resisting his unconditional love. I realize this is a pretty common framing of marriage within Evangelicalism ("husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church," etc.), but 1. that interpretation misuses that verse when it becomes a roundabout justification for why wives should be obligated to love their husbands (definitely what this movie is going for), and 2. this movie is too stupid even to know how to make dynamic human drama within that framework anyway. It's all so dumb and boring and shallow, and I hate it. Grade: D
The story elements are pretty much garbage across the board—thin characters, lumpily structured screenplay, etc., although I think there are some interesting ideas here regarding grief and commercialization that get kind of buried in all the narrative flotsam. But oh man, the animation style—it's no secret by now that Masaaki Yuasa is one of the best, most forward-thinking animation directors out there, and while this is hardly his most formally dazzling movie, it does accomplish one of his most impressive technical feats in that it takes Flash animation and makes it legitimately gorgeous. The color, blobby, overly smooth textures of that style are uniquely suited to the extremely watery story, and it's a wonder to behold. Also, for a movie about a band, it's a welcome grace note that the music slaps. Grade: B
The character of Kevin being so one-dimensionally EVIL keeps this movie from anything close to a compelling thesis on parenting or child psychology or mass-shooter psychology or any of the number of interesting issues the film brushes past. There's always the implication that Tilda Swinton's character gives us an unreliable POV through the film's flashbacks, which might make a provocative point about how we retroactively rationalize tragedies by creating cartoon villains out of their perpetrators if the movie had decided to commit to the unreliability just a tad more—as it is, there isn't a ton about the present-day scenes that flags the memories as distorted, particularly the final scene with Kevin in the prison. Which means that this movie is, despite its fancy arthouse trappings, pretty much in the territory of The Omen: a horror movie by way of a miserable walk alongside an unspeakable evil manifested in the form of a child and reflected in the abusive actions of the parent. Oh, but it is exquisitely miserable, though; Lynne Ramsay fills the film (esp. in the early goings) with a litany of disorienting camerawork that focuses on obscure textural details like distorted reflections twisting the characters into their psychologically true forms or mundane objects cropping shots into diabolically sideways glances at violence. The device of cutting to red paint at the precise moment we would expect to see blood is a consistently rattling one, too, and Tilda Swinton + Ezra Miller is the hellish screen duo I never knew I wanted. Oh, and per usual, Lynne Ramsay brings an absolutely choice soundtrack to make this all slide down. Exceptional craft on all fronts in service of a frustratingly unserious engagement with its topic. Grade: B
Those who say that this movie doesn't add much to the "revisionist gangster picture" genre that the likes of The Godfather and Goodfellas didn't already cover are both right and also kind of missing the point. Yes, it is a rehashing of how the sociopolitical thrust of the 20th century in America has created a system in which a lot of the boundaries between law enforcement, organized crime, and corporate capitalism are merely ceremonial distinctions that annoint prejudice and capital as arbiters of morality. But I'd say the framing of this story within an explicitly African-American perspective (or at least halfway framing it that way—there is still the Russell Crowe half of the film, which is largely boring, I think)—and not just an African-American perspective but an African-American perspective explicitly in opposition to an Italian-American perspective—is a fundamentally new way to approach these themes, and even if the movie does kind of feel stylistically on autopilot for large pieces of it, it's still pretty interesting to see the tropes of the genre play out differently, even on a relatively small scale, e.g. the use of soul, funk, and disco on the soundtrack to mark the passing years instead of Sinatra and the Rolling Stones. It's also one of the first major films of this style to be made after the memeified popularity of De Palma's Scarface, as well as in the wake of HBO's The Wire, which gives the movie an interestingly elegiac stance toward its crime-lord subject. The story of, for example, The Godfather is the story of ethnicity clawing its way into whiteness and then embodying its worst attributes, while the fact of Denzel's character's blackness makes that sort of narrative into a Greek tragedy rather than the Shakespearean one that Pacino's Michael Corleone embodies; Denzel is not a victim of his own worst impulses but rather a system that capriciously punishes only some of its adherent's worst impulses, which makes the movie present the guy with a measure of sympathy that a lot of previous mob epics lack—a less nuanced narrative, for sure, but it also is a much more politically direct one re: the limitations of the American Dream for people unable/unwilling to assimilate into the default-respectable majority. I've spilled a lot of ink over a movie that, on the whole, is pretty solidly middle-of-the-road, so don't take this as a complete ringing endorsement or anything, but there's a spark here that won't die. Grade: B
Television
Angel's third season is a considerable step forward for the series. The show's episodic structure melds the case-of-the-week elements with its serialized, mythological flourishes in a much more organic way than in previous seasons, and after the game-changing Pylea arc at the end of the last season, the mythology of the show has become both a lot more fun and whimsical while also becoming a lot deeper. Really kooky stuff happens here involving demon babies and curses and magic sex, and the third season is able to spin this into some powerfully tragic arcs involving Wesley and Angel. It's still a little uneven from episode to episode, and the "LA noir" aesthetic is still pretty bland. But this is the first time in this series where I've felt like the long-term plotting was anything close to as engaging as what Buffy was doing around the same time, and that's pretty exciting. Plus, there's a real corker of a cliffhanger at the end of the season, too. Grade: B+
Music
Haters may hate, but for this writer, the saga of "Old Town Road" and its ability to riiiiiiide the charts 'til it can't no more is the feel-good story of the year. It doesn't hurt that the song itself is a bop. The rest of the songs on this EP are respectable but not amazing, but it only works in this EP's favor that 25 percent of its songs are versions of "Old Town Road." Grade: B
Like their previous album, Ultimate Care II, which was created entirely from sounds sampled from the washing machine of the same name, Plastic Anniversary is an album that shocks by how thoroughly it justifies its gimmicky concept. This time, the album is constructed entirely from sampled sounds made with plastic objects—plastic wrap, plastic tubes, plastic silicone gel implants for breast augmentation... it's all here. There's an ecological bent to some of this (e.g. the apocalyptic "Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom" and its visions of the earth's death by microplastics) and a more humanly political bent to other parts ("Thermoplastic Riot Shield"), but mostly, it's just an engaging experimental-electronic album. I caught this duo live a few weeks ago, and they were delightful and surprisingly hilarious; that extends to the album itself, which has this great sense of play beyond the other thematic aims I've already mentioned. It's a ludicrous concept for an album, and Matmos are having a ball. Grade: B+
