There are a few things in this post that I would have reviewed last week if I'd had time.
Movies
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
More so than any Vietnam War movie I've seen,
Da 5 Bloods goes beyond the psyche-scarring, generational consequences of fighting in an unjust, unjustified war, instead becoming about the psyche-scarring, generational consequences of how imperialism forces its victims to fight one another rather than their oppressors. Out of the mouth of none other than Hanoi Hannah (one of several gigantic middle fingers this movie gives to the mainstream, U.S.-government-approved narrative of the war), Spike Lee broadcasts his electric thesis: that at the very same moment that the United States was crushing the civil rights uprisings of black Americans on its home turf, it was also drafting those same black Americans to crush a Vietnamese uprising that was closely tied to liberation from their French oppressors; this is a fracturing of identity and global solidarity that takes the work of decades to mend, if at all, and the trauma of imperialism (both of the classical European variety represented by the French colonizers and of the modern military-industrial kind represented by the United States armed forces) reverberates through the Vietnamese and the African-American in ways that take the damage inflicted upon them by their oppressors and iterate that damage upon each other. It's an extraordinarily complex piece of filmmaking, even for Spike Lee, and it's filled to the brim with brilliant touches that feed recursively into that thesis, like the way that the camera frames the Western capitalism towering over the modern Vietnamese cities, or the use of "Ride of the Valkyries,"
Apocalypse Now-style, as the American soldiers take a tourist boat down a river. It's also incredibly uneven in sections, as Spike Lee movies tend to be. The first hour in particular has a lot of material that could easily be cut, I think; maybe this is a hot take, but I actually don't think we need any of the flashbacks to the battle scenes—like, besides the (admittedly cool) aspect-ratio change, what do they add that the present-day meat of the movie doesn't already tackle? But even at its shakiest, Spike maintains a furious focus on his central cause, and by the time we get to the final stage of the film (which begins about fifty minutes from the end) and its thematic threads begin to pull tight, the movie has become flat-out great, at times almost entirely on the back of Delroy Lindo's incendiary performance as a self-loathing Trump supporter—instantly one of Spike Lee's best characters out of a career full of great ones and one whose totemic inferno without a doubt deserves to be ranked beside Brando in
Apocalypse Now and Vincent D'Onofrio in
Full Metal Jacket as the definitive cinematic portraits of the self-destructive rot that the American military complex in Vietnam wrought on individuals. In this one character rests the most compelling embodiment of the film's ideas about the cyclical violence of imperialism among the oppressed, and a long, almost stream-of-consciousness sequence in which Lindo directly addresses the camera may in fact be the movie's most vital approach to its thesis. Compared to Spike's re-emergence back into the mainstream with
BlacKkKlansman,
Da 5 Bloods is maybe less conventionally "good," and I don't think it ever arrives at anything as visually arresting as Alec Baldwin in front of the projector or as structurally stunning as the
Birth of a Nation cross-cutting. But as an object of cinematic derring-do, it's miles more ambitious, and as a thematic work (and particularly as those themes intersect Lindo's character), it's way knottier and more intricate than
BlacKkKlansman could ever hope to be, and ultimately more challenging, too. Appointment viewing, to be sure.
Grade: A-
A Hidden Life (2019)
Alongside a few Evangelical films, this is probably the definitive cinematic statement on how following Jesus is an inherently political gesture. The difference is that the politics of those Evangelical films always ultimately manifest themselves as self-defense: protection of the institution of Christianity (or at least their version of it). Though all three
God's Not Dead movies focus on different aspects of it (respectively: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly), they all hinge on the idea that Christian counter-cultural resistance is about defending the presence of a Christian institution that is """under attack""" in our modern world—even the duty to save souls is always framed in terms of who shows up to the church service or the Newsboys concert (the third
God's Not Dead movie is more complicated than this, but for the purposes of this review, oh well). Persecution is, under this framing of the Christian life, to be on the front lines of defending Christianity, and the sad irony of it all is the fundamental idolatry of it: they are followers of Christianity rather than followers of Christ, something Martin Scorsese's film (and Shūsaku Endō's novel)
Silence thoroughly explore and ultimately burn to the ground. Contrast that with what Terrence Malick shows of Franz Jägerstätter's resistance in
A Hidden Life. Jägerstätter takes a stand not for his Christianity but because of it, and the suffering he undergoes is not the result of people attacking his beliefs or an institution to which he belongs (what Evangelicalism would have you think persecution is) but the result of the political implications of actions he has committed because of his Christian beliefs: namely, that he refuses to fight for an army in service of Nazism. I can see how some people might ding this movie as being a slightly artsier version of the inspirational suffering fetishism that Christians have indulged in for centuries, at least, a la
Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
Silence is, after all, a much more complex look at Christian persecution, especially compared to the moral certitude of, you know, resisting Nazi Germany. But I can't just dismiss
A Hidden Life as that, because in addition to that beatific depiction of persecution, it also functions as the greatest positive declaration of what the Christian life is that the film arts have seen in a very long time. As one character states early in the movie, "Christ's life is a demand," and the movie spends the better part of its three hours exploring just what that demand is. Neighbors and city leaders are seduced by white supremacist nationalism and spread its lies in the commons as the solution to affliction, jackbooted soldiers march through the city demanding patronage, fascist leaders obligate fealty. The bells of the church are melted into bullets, but the echoes of their peals ring across this film, a reminder of what the institution that Evangelical films defend has wrought: complicity in fascism, racism, brutality, subjugation. Jägerstätter's Christian life is one that follows Christ's: refuses complicity, refuses fascism's blathering leader, stands on behalf of the immigrant and the marginalized, stands against oppression. This is a vital part of Malick's declaration of the Christian life, but that declaration is not complete until the final moments of the film, when, echoing the words of John the Revelator describing the New Jerusalem descending to Earth at the Bible's end, Jägerstätter's wife Franziska finishes the film's vision with our great collective hope in Christ: "A time will come when we will know what all this is for, and there will be no mysteries. We will know why we live. We'll come together. We'll plant orchards, fields. We'll build the land back up." This hope is God's Kingdom, our work here on Earth, the two sides of a Christian life: resistance and renewal. Any alternative is idolatry.
Grade: A
Ford v Ferrari (2019)
Cars are bad, but this movie is good, for the most part. It's kind of funny that a movie about the difficulty of being a craftsman within the soul-sucking machinations of a gigantic corporation ended up being more of a Ford itself than a Ferrari—which, while I don't know anything about cars (except that they are bad), this movie leads me to believe is a distinction based on vision and artistry (Ferrari) vs. dependability and profitability (Ford). This is like the definition of dependability: the kind of movie that nobody is probably going to say is their favorite but that they will reliably catch an hour of on cable from time to time and enjoy themselves solidly. It's way, way, way too long (2.5 hours? REALLY?? I was restless by the end, for sure), and Caitriona Balfe, who plays Mollie, Christian Bale's character's wife, is given a wildly uneven version of the already uneven trope of the Great Man's Nagging Wife. But generally, this is a pretty good time. Now someone needs to make the Ferrari version of this movie. Or maybe a movie about trains.
Grade: B
Allegro non troppo (1976)
It's kind of surprising that there aren't more
Fantasia knock-offs; syncing classical music (or music of any kind—still waiting for that progressive rock
Fantasia, world) to wordless animated shorts is a very cool idea, and as this movie explicitly says in its opening minutes, it's an animator's dream to be given a blank canvas of the kind that the
Fantasia model permits. The movie says this with its tongue unmistakably in its cheek, but I'm serious about it; anything-goes animation coupled with evocative orchestral music is a format with limitless possibilities, and it's a sad fact that the format is not quite commercial enough to get more iterations off the ground. Which is why, I think, that
Allegro non troppo positions itself as a parody of
Fantasia rather than a child of
Fantasia, as that's probably the more marketable angle. And in fairness, it works extremely well as a parody—a satire, even, lobbing relentless scorn at the sanctimony and labor abuses of Walt Disney, and bravo, I say, especially in this era of the entertainment-industry-gobbling tentacled empire of Disney. From this position of scorn, the movie not only includes but revels in crude punchlines and sexual humor to which stuffy Walt would never have dared "stoop," and the movie is better for it, a light and absurd bit of animated acid (in both the psychedelic and caustic senses) that has the devilish, anti-establishment sensibilities of Looney Tunes or Ralph Bakshi. But at the same time as it's a pretty good skewering of
Fantasia,
Allegro non troppo is also a great example of the form itself, and for as much as its anarchic personality makes it seem like this is all just a nihilistic farce, there is a real care to the animation that makes its individual sequences stunning, particularly the show-stopping sequence set to Ravel's
Boléro, in which life evolves from the sludge at the bottom of a littered bottle of Coke—it's an honest-to-goodness masterpiece, and even if the other shorts were trash, this one piece justifies the existence of the entire endeavor. Luckily, the other shorts are pretty great for the most part, with the exception of the opening sequence, which involves an unfunny and uninteresting parade of sexual imagery as an aging satyr tries to get his groove back. That one's not too good. But on the whole, this is some serious stuff, as irreverent as it can be.
Grade: A-
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
For a 3.5-hour movie that is 95% still shots of a woman doing chores in her own house,
Jeanne Dielman is surprisingly riveting. Even before its somewhat infamous turn in its final minutes, it is legitimately fascinating to watch in great detail our protagonist go about her routines, in the same way that Frederick Wiseman's fly-on-the-wall chroniclings of lengthy bureaucratic meetings fascinating: give any procedure enough context and its inherent drama reveals itself. Mundane human life isn't usually boring to those involved in it because those involved tend to have a deep sense of what is at stake in those habits; movies have a hard time capturing these stakes because their necessarily hedged perspective lacks the infinite continuity of a subjectively lived life.
Jeanne Dielman (and the work of Frederick Wiseman, for that matter) fixes this somewhat by giving as much immediate context as possible, letting these actions exist within long (for a movie) stretches of time inside lengthy, unedited takes. The more we see of a life, the more interesting it becomes because the importance of these details is magnified by the amount of time we spend with them, and by the accumulation of these details' significance, the gendered and economic dimensions of her life become more immediately lived by the viewer than they would be in a more conventionally edited movie, where the hyper-condensed information of a life necessitates a heavy hand and bold shapes to communicate the same information. That's not to say this movie isn't boring for large stretches; oh lordy, it can be a snooze. But as in so much slow cinema, that boredom is itself a feature of the text by which the movie builds its stakes, and paradoxically, it would be less exciting if it were less boring. Weird, wild stasis.
Grade: A-
The Black Cat (1934)
This is waaay plottier than I was expecting from an early-sound feature adapted from a pretty brief Poe short story. You got train rides, you got satanic cults, you got mad scientists, Lugosi and Karloff playing chess over a guy's life, Lugosi and Karloff going fisticuffs, Russian conspiracies—all in an hour and change. A wild, wild movie that probably could have slowed down a tad and played up the atmosphere a hair more (and maybe done a little more with its female characters than make them swoon and die). But some very cool stuff on the whole, no doubt.
Grade: B+
I was part of a conversation
discussing this movie on the Cinematary podcast, if you're interested in listening.
7th Heaven (1927)
I was really tracking with this movie for its front half, when it's this somewhat kooky fantasy with exaggerated urban landscapes ("I work in the sewers but live in the stars!") that morphs into a slightly less kooky romantic comedy. It completely lost me when it became a WWI melodrama in the back half. The beginning is super good, though, and I don't think I could ever completely lose goodwill for a movie that includes the scene where the protagonist explains that he's an atheist because God owes him 10 francs.
Grade: B-
Body and Soul (1925)
In one sense, this movie is fatally compromised by the censor's mandated changes. A story about a literal criminal uses religion to manipulate, exploit, and even assault his congregants that ends with a completely haphazard "but it was all a dream!" twist masking-taped onto the end is a failure at a fundamental level to achieve its goal of criticizing religion. On a meta level, though, this is a gut-punch—the censor's insistence that the very real abuse at the hands of the church is "just a dream" is documentary evidence of the gaslighting that so often happens to suppress allegations of abuse, particularly in church communities. I would have really liked to have seen the unedited version of this movie, but there's something compelling about the fact of this version's existence.
Grade: B
Television
Rick and Morty, Season 4 (2019-2020)
There are some standout episodes in this season that indicate there's still plenty of gas in the tank for
Rick and Morty: my favorites are "Rattlestar Ricklactica," a hilarious recreation of the first
Terminator movie with a race of sentient snakes, and "The Vat of Acid Episode," in which Morty gets a re-do button for life. The show remains unparalleled at creating wildly clever (sometimes even parable-like) sci-fi yarns that double as joke machines. But there is a higher rate of weaker episodes this season than in previous seasons (neither "Chidrick of Mort" nor "Never Ricking Morty" did much for me), and on a more holistic level, the series seems to have run out of ideas for its characters as far as their humanity goes; we're not quite at the point of
Flanderization, but for a show that seemed for a while at least nominally interested in delivering character insights and development, this season is curiously free of them. The characters just kind of live in the same stasis as they were left in at the end of Season 3, and any sincere moments they're given don't do much to expand beyond things we already know about them. Or even when there are a few new things, there's just nothing
surprising or
interesting about any of that. This is especially true of Rick. The show knows one emotional beat for Rick by heart: that his drive toward incredible material and scientific success doubles as both an attempt at connection with his friends and family and a method by which he drives those family and friends away, a destructive contradiction that leaves Rick miserable and bitter. And Season 4 plays this beat over and over again, occasionally to great effect (the end of "The Old Man and the Seat" is maybe the definitive image of this central conflict in Rick) but increasingly to diminishing returns. There are only so many times I can see Rick do something abusive or alienating that he feels bad about as the end credits roll and still be invested in that character trait. I had my complaints with the blunt and overly diagnostic approach to Rick's character in Season 3, but at least that was pushing the character in new directions. I don't see a lot of new direction here, and while I can see how some people may still find those familiar directions engaging (or find the stasis of a character like Rick to be a compelling depiction of how he is stuck in the same psychological cycles), for me it makes the show's character beats feel increasingly like afterthoughts to the main attraction of the wild, irreverent sci-fi adventures. I guess there's a version of the show just settling into a sci-fi adventure comedy that I would enjoy, but under the current version of the show, it kind of feels like if it's not going to engage critically with its characters, especially Rick, then it's just using the (increasingly rote) character moments as justification for its incredibly mean sense of humor. That humor can be funny, but the less it becomes tethered to characters who are developed, the less I'm interested in it.
Grade: B-
Steven Universe, Season 1 (2013-2015)
A complete joy. It's very much the child of
Adventure Time in the sense that it uses the 11-minute-episode Cartoon Network setup to create a kind of low-stakes sense of absurdity and pre-adolescent happy-go-luckiness within a warm world whose possibilities and format are flexible enough to pivot between serious mythological arcs and standalone bits. It also feels very much post-
Adventure Time in the way that it immediately jumps into a fully formed environment (it took the Land of Ooo a couple seasons to really fill out, but this show's Beach City feels fully realized from the jump) and foregrounds the melancholy from the get-go:
Steven Universe trades
Adventure Time's dadaism for a much more direct engagement with the emotional lives of its characters, who are all dealing indirectly and directly with the loss of Steven's mother, Rose, particularly Steven, who must navigate his life, his family, and his own body without the guidance that his mother would have given him—a potent metaphor for puberty, for queerness, for general childhood heartbreak, but also on a literal level a potent storytelling device. The child's point of view gives the show's stories a beautiful poignancy and a vulnerability that television doesn't always allow in itself. It's also just a really fun time. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of the series.
Grade: A-
Books
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
A horror story wrapped in layers of meta-narrative wrapped in a formalist exercise—Lovecraft by way of Borges by way of the language poets. Danielewski is impressively committed to the central bit here (it's basically the novel equivalent of a found-footage film, taking the form of an academic text [complete with footnoted citations!] analyzing a possibly fictional home movie turned Hollywood movie, and there's an argument to be made that this goes up its own rear end in terms of its stylistic flourishes—though some moments are very funny and lack any real pretension of high art, like a sequence in which a lot of famous people (Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Derrida, etc.) are interviewed about what they thought of the home movie in question. But at the core of this novel is both a kind of sweetness paired with a deep sadness, both of which kind of transcend the formalist and pastiche games of the immediate aesthetic of the novel. The core horror story of the house that is (much) bigger on the inside than it is on the outside is more or less the story of a family desperately trying to hold itself together as their own traumas and neuroses tear it apart, and it ends on a note of real love, while the meta stories (i.e. the people compiling the academic analyses) present people plunging into the abyss as encroaching mental illness and obsession isolates and maybe even ultimately kills them. There's both an optimism and a tragedy to this story that feels hard-won. I don't know how much each individual moment works (after a while, the joke about the meticulous literature review and withdrawn tone of academic writing wears thin, and I don't exactly know what to do with the formatting games later in the novel), but this book at least has heart.
Grade: B+
