Mini Reviews for December 5 - 11, 2022

Again, if you're reading this and normally get emails of each post in the blog, that's no longer happening because the service I use(d) eliminated their free tier without warning. Sorry about that.

Movies

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
On a plot level, it's as ramshackle as any Pinocchio adaptation (and most Del Toro films, tbh), and somehow it's still not as phantasmagoric and gruesome as its source novel. But Del Toro is maybe the most qualified director of all time to bring to life the grotesque textures of the novel, which he does with aplomb, a thoroughly bizarre and at times upsetting vision (everything inside the whale is revolting—I literally felt nauseated) made all the more disquieting by the terrific stop-motion craft. In terms of medium/source-material synergy, I doubt you could find a piece of writing more suited to being put into stop-motion than Collodi's book, and this film captures what makes that true perfectly. The rest of the movie is a little shakier, but for every misstep, there's something delightful to offset it. For example, some of the celebrity voice acting is distracting (esp. Ewan McGregor as the cricket), but then you have Cate Blanchett just doing monkey sounds the whole time or Tom Kenny as Mussolini, both of which are sublime on both textual and metatextual levels. Speaking of Mussolini, you also have the anti-fascist part of this, which is another one of those shaky things. The plot is a little awkward in how it fits and the actual engagement with fascism is a little facile, but on the other hand, the idea of making all of Pinocchio's temptations be ones that funnel him into the fascist indoctrination pipeline, including a "Pleasure Island" sequence that's basically just fascist boot camp, is such a clever idea that the movie never really ran out of good will from me. Also, I found the ending, particularly the idea (implicit in some other versions of this story, including the Disney one) that to be a "real boy" is to have the capacity to die, tremendously moving, which isn't something I was expecting from the first hour of this film. It seems like we will never stop getting Pinocchio movies, which is weird considering how off-putting and odd the original story is, but if that's the case, they could all stand to be as thoughtful and beautiful as this one. Grade: A-

Benediction (2021)
It's not as if Terence Davies movies are usually thrill-a-minute or anything like that, but there are definitely stretches of this that are some of Davies's dullest filmmaking to date, both in terms of what it's trying to say with the characters as well as the film style (which is fairly reserved for such a usually sumptuous stylist as Davies is). As is the case with a lot of Davies movies, it's about loss and memory and the normative reinforcements of the modern world slowly grinding down an individual's humanity over the scope of a lifetime, but particularly the memory piece feels somewhat thin here, and most of the material with Peter Capaldi as the aged Siegfried Sassoon feels rote and disposable. The stuff with Jack Lowden as the young Siegfried is a lot stronger, though, and as the film ping-pongs between scenes of gay men insulting one another in florid and hilariously mean ways and scenes of gutting sadness when those defense mechanisms fall away, it achieves a kind of bleak momentum cruising through the wretched 20th century experienced by the Lost Generation. A deeply uneven film, but one that has enough power at times that it doesn't feel as though Davies has completely lost control. I wish I had rewatched A Quiet Passion before watching this, since it feels like those two must be in conversation with one another, at least conceptually: alienated, queer poets, etc. Grade: B

Decasia (2002)
An incredible collage of really old silent film stock that is actively decaying. Very cool-looking; literally thousands of industrial metal album covers to be mined from this. It's a tough sit, though, not just for the reasons why non-narrative film often is but also because moments of this are viscerally terrifying: the more legible the human figures are, the more we can see the ways that the rot has warped their features and created grotesque monsters of the past. When we get footage of faces is particularly unsettling, and watching them writhe around as the film stock twists and blisters is kind of like looking at photos of drown victims who have stayed in the water too long. I'm sympathetic to the argument that Michael Gordon's score for this is overbearing and a crutch for Morrison, but 1) this film was created to be visual accompaniment for Gordon's music, not the other way around, and 2) this music makes watching this feel like the end of the world. Grade: A- 

 

The Addams Family (1991)
One of the all-time-great casts in terms of actor-character synergy is unfortunately stuck in a fairly drab movie. There are a few entertaining visual gags, and the nonstop macabre punchlines are occasionally fun, but most of the time, it's a kind of hacky, sitcom-y screenplay that is pretty derivative of the '60s TV series and the comics (I imagine—I've not seen/read much of either) without really having a clear vision for how to adapt those sensibilities to the big screen. The pacing is just the worst in this movie, and moreover, neither of the film's modes feel fully realized; if it's going to be a "we're just telling random, knowingly hacky jokes within a kooky setting" movie, then those knowingly hacky jokes need to land with a lot more frequency, and if it's going to be a "we're doing a real plot that you're supposed to care about" thing, that plot needs to be actually substantive. Instead, we just get a movie awkwardly situated between both. That cast, though: truly spectacular, and whatever works about the movie works almost entirely on the backs of these performances—and literally all of the performances, too; I can't think of a single weak link, though Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia are the obvious best-in-show with their deranged, oddly tender evocation of Morticia and Gomez. But everyone brought their A game. Too bad it's otherwise a C movie. Grade: C+

Addams Family Values (1993)
Unbelievably superior to the first one in virtually every way. So little of the throat-clearing and empty space that I felt in the original; every moment is moving the plot forward in an interesting way or delivering macabre jokes that are way more ambitious and out-there than those in the first or doing some impressive combination of both. The cast is still top-notch, having finally found the good movie they were working so hard for in 1991, and Joan Cusack is a great addition as the villain. Plus, I was heretofore unaware of how attractive Joan Cusack is? Is this something that we as a society have reckoned with? Anyway, I went into this skeptical, as I'm usually skeptical of millennial nostalgia touchstones that I didn't experience at the right age to develop the nostalgia for, but this is great. Totally blown away. Grade: A-

 

Cluny Brown (1946)
I'm a little disappointed that the rest of the movie doesn't match the delirious heights of its almost Buñuelian opening scene, in which fixing a plumbing issue becomes a nexus of political and sexual allegory, but adjusting for that, Ernst Lubitsch's final feature film is delightful. Even if it's never as audacious as the first scene, the rest of the film remains resolutely committed to satirizing the pieties of the British bourgeoisie and to the idea of plumbing as a method of sexual innuendo delivery. The movie accomplishes this neat trick of being clearly a satire, and an often biting one at that, while never actually feeling mean or bitter—probably a testament to the warmth of the performances from Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, especially Jennifer Jones, who is magnificent and incredibly sweet in the titular role. I didn't realize Lubitsch was only 55 when he died—I had always assumed him to be much older—and with a final film like this, it's tragic that we didn't get to see what else he would have done. I would have loved to see the Lubitsch Touch applied to post-war America. Grade: A-

 

Television

Jane the Virgin, Season 2 (2015-2016)
I had been told that the love triangle got more interesting, which is false. I still don't care about whether Michael or Rafael gets with Jane, and the more energy this season devoted to that tension, the more I felt myself losing interest. Luckily, what does get more interesting are Michael and Rafael as characters in and of themselves, both of them becoming significantly more fleshed out as human beings because they get plots that are not inherently tied to their relationship with Jane. Making them more human at least makes it make more sense why Jane would want to be romantically involved with one or the other of them, even if that's still not a prospect I'm very invested in. That aside, though, this season feels a lot messier than the first one, and the balance between ridiculous plots and more emotionally grounded material is a little shakier. Some of it works great: a late-breaking story involving the arrival of Petra's long-lost twin sister is both entertainingly preposterous as well as a catalyst for some more sincere relationship dynamics surrounding Jane and Petra's different positions as mothers. Other plots, though, don't feel particularly insightful as far as helping us understand the characters: for example, an arc involving a long-lost lover seems mostly to be present to give Abuela something to do besides give Jane religious/sexual baggage in flashbacks, and the few episodes involving Rogelio being kidnapped don't do a whole lot for a character who otherwise still remains one of my favorites. Maybe my least-favorite subplot of the season are the trials and tribulations of Jane's grad school career, which were never very interesting and also felt like a satire of a kind of academia that doesn't really exist—surely some of the writers of the show have been to grad school, but it doesn't feel like they know anything about university politics. These are fairly minor critiques, though; the bones of the show are so good that it's hard to ever completely derail what makes the show so enjoyable on a moment-by-moment basis, which is the pleasure of seeing these cartoonish-yet-emotionally-nuanced people tumble through one crucible after another with each other. As long as that remains solid, a few errant storylines won't get in the way. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for August 15 - 21, 2022

In case you aren't following The Newbery Chronicles elsewhere, I just wanted to mention here that the podcast my wife and I are doing has a new episode! You can listen to it here.

Movies

DC League of Super-Pets (2022)
Pretty awful for a variety of reasons:
-That full title
-Really forced Lord-and-Miller-esque humor (Lord and Miller themselves are usually pulling it off by the seat of their pants, and this is a great example of what happens when it's not them and not good)
-Tedious comic book references
-A surprisingly dull Marc Maron vocal performance (surprising after his surprisingly good vocal performance in The Bad Guys just earlier this year)
-Cloying, unearned sentimentality (the movie begins with a tear-jerking destruction of Krypton for some misbegotten reason)
-A Chekhov's gun device that promises early in the movie that Superdog will poop out a piece of kryptonite, only to resolve itself off-screen and completely without fanfare (not sure what's worse: the fact that the movie forced me to look forward to Superdog pooping, or that all we get is a post-hoc "oh, I guess I pooped already, trust me, let's go").

Regardless, this was something of a rite of passage for me, as it's the first movie I've gone to solely because I knew my son would love it, even though I was fairly confident beforehand that I would hate it. A real bummer that the first weekend I've been able to take him to a movie since Encanto has nothing for kids but this playing. My son did indeed have a great time, so I guess I'm just taking one for the team here. He watches PBS Kids and My Neighbor Totoro at home, so here's hoping that this unexpectedly ribald feature isn't going to send him down a dark path. Grade: C-

Prey (2022)
This was pretty good, and of the three Predator movies I've seen, it's almost as good as the first one and significantly better than the second. The setting in 18th-century Comanche territory is a terrific touch, and I'm 100% with the memes calling for Predator sequels in other historic time periods. That said, this movie looks terrible, and I'm not sure who to blame; the shot compositions are fine, but something is very wrong with the lighting, which makes everything looks washed out in the daylight scenes and nearly incomprehensible in the nighttime scenes. Whatever has happened to night photography in the streaming era needs to stop, because this is such a widespread problem. Grade: B-

 

Of Time and the City (2008)
A frequently gorgeous, thoroughly bitter little essay film. Terence Davies hates Liverpool as only someone who knows a place intimately can, and the same goes for his clear affection for a certain version of the place. I know nothing about Liverpool, but like so many Davies movies, watching this dreamy, aesthetic object makes me feel as if I've been dipped in the consciousness of someone who does. Very much feels like the documentary corollary to The Long Day Closes, both in terms of how it looks as well as its slippery approach to the poetry of memory. Grade: A-

 

Topical Malady (สัตว์ประหลาด) (2004)
The bifurcated structure of this film really is one of the great rug-pulls in recent(ish) cinema history, especially if you're used to the typically languid pace of later Apichatpong Weerasethakul features. I spent the first half of this, which is a lovely, poignant love story, charmed but somewhat perplexed at the uncharacteristically straightforward and (relatively) conventional plot. But then after about 50 minutes we get a black screen, and BAM, we're neck-deep in the cosmic viscosity of one of film's greatest mystics, who is ready to crack your head wide open. That back half also simultaneously defamiliarizes the first half, recontextualizing it as the first act in a story about a longing that exists on the scale of myth. With apologies to an otherwise entirely unrelated author, every love story truly is a ghost story, and I've rarely seen a movie so thoroughly and mysteriously epitomize that. Grade: A-

Lilya 4-ever (Lilja 4-ever) (2002)
I'm not usually a "what's the point?" guy with movies, but man, what's the point of this other than misery? In the early goings, this is a fairly poignant portrayal of a girl on the margins of a crumbling post-Soviet society, and per usual, Lukas Moodysson has a good facility with young performers and the ping-ponging between reckless effervescence and the crushing realities of being young. But once the downward spiral starts, it's just so, so punishingly bleak with little to offer other than some vague sense of the world being a cruel place for young people, esp. young girls, and yeah, sure, but that's such a surface-level idea that I feel like I either must be missing something or Moodysson is just flush with the palpable sense of despair that suffuses the back half of the film. It's not even aesthetically interesting, save for a horrific montage of POV shots at one point. I dunno, I'm probably missing something here, because Moodysson usually seems better than this. Grade: C

 

Television

Better Call Saul, Season 6 (2022)
BCS has done an admirable job thus far at not positioning itself in relationship to Breaking Bad, but it's unavoidable as the show comes to a close, not just because of how it must connect the dots between the events of the show to the immediate before-and-after context of Breaking Bad but also because this show's final season ends with a structure that conspicuously mirrors the end of its predecessor. Both shows had final seasons broken in half by a hiatus, both present their protagonists as amoral shells of themselves where the primary question is not the fate of the protagonist but instead whether or not their more sympathetic partner will escape with their soul/life intact, both conclude with the protagonists doing something faintly noble that allows them to accept the consequences of their actions on their own terms. But Better Call Saul has long been the more ambitious show of the two, which makes its conclusion far more fascinating than Breaking Bad's. In terms of the "prequel" story that has occupied the lion's share of this show, it basically wraps up a few episodes after the hiatus with an incident of collateral damage so cataclysmic that it more or less shatters all of the existing dynamics of the series, which means that a large portion of this final season gets devoted to the black-and-white, post-Breaking-Bad Omaha storyline, which serves as both an epilogue to the Saul Goodman saga but also to Breaking Bad; it's in this section that we see that Saul and Kim have more or less "gotten away with it," improbably managing to slough off their old identities as scamming lawyers and put on a duller yet safer existence in anonymity in, respectively, Nebraska and Florida. Whereas the early seasons of BCS emphasized the precarity of Jimmy's life as his attempts at legitimacy were forever frustrated, the Omaha episodes show a man who has, like a cockroach, survived improbable peril and thus has convinced himself of his own invincibility; Kim, on the other hand, lives with crushing guilt at the idea of her survival. What this dichotomy eventually becomes is a climactic interrogation of the ultimate question of human relationships; the BCS/BB universe is preoccupied with power and its monstrous effects, but by setting a third of its final season after the events of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul is able to wrestle with something that its more breakneck forebear never had time to more than gesture toward: given that we live in a harsh world built upon corrosive power dynamics, what do we owe one another? It's kind of the "so what?" of the entire universe of these two series, and a perfect send-off to the world I've spent the last decade-plus inside. Grade: A

The Rehearsal, Season 1 (2022)
One of the wildest, most unpredictable seasons of television I've ever seen. What initially begins as a kooky but fairly straightforward follow-up to Nathan For You (in this case, Nathan Fielder offers the "service" of allowing people to rehearse difficult life situations before they happen) rapidly morphs into something far stranger. It's tough to describe, both because of how ridiculously elaborate and complex it becomes but also because half of the experience of the show is watching it transform on an episode-by-episode basis as new layers and complications are added to Nathan's concept of "rehearsal," but suffice to say, by the end The Rehearsal is a knotty interrogation of authenticity and control. How does one truly know another person? How can any of our social interactions be genuine when we are often enigmas to each other and ourselves? How can we make informed decisions in our lives when the world is such a chaotic, uncontrollable place? Can any of this even be ethically explored within the artifice of a TV show, even one that purports to be a "reality" show? Improbably, The Rehearsal is able to engage these questions in a way that is pretty rigorous and intense while also being hysterically funny for the majority of its runtime. Utterly deranged, compelling TV. I have no idea how there could be a second season of this, but apparently they're going to try, and I'll be there for it. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for July 4 - 10, 2022

In case you missed it, I published a post about Kate Bush's Hounds of Love as part of my series on progressive rock. You can read it here, if you're interested!

Movies

On the Rocks (2020)
Pleasant. Doesn't have the dreamy It factor of Sofia Coppola's best, but Bill Murray and Rashida Jones make a ridiculously charming father-daughter duo, and I enjoyed their low-key hijinks here a lot. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

The House of Mirth (2000)
Terence Davies does a great job of capturing the brutality of the Edith Wharton novel (my favorite of hers that I've read, for what it's worth), and Gillian Anderson specifically is 100% keyed into the very specific kind of detached, diorama-like spin Davies is putting on the material. Anderson is really, really terrific here, probably the technical best performance I've ever seen from her (I'm sorry, Scully!); the way that in the early goings she is able to let us understand the terrified insecurities of her character without letting slip one bit the mask of pretensions to high-brow society is masterful, multi-tiered acting—and when that mask does slip as she hits rock-bottom near the movie's end, it's some true fireworks. As for Davies, this isn't anywhere as ornate as his work in the '90s, but it's still beautiful, this time in a suffocating way that feels appropriate to the early-20th-century upper-crust-NYC setting. Overall just a very well-done costume drama. Grade: A-

The Color of Money (1986)
I was honestly a little bored whenever they weren't playing pool, and Tom Cruise is actively annoying here. But the pool sequences (especially those in the run-up to the finale, when Paul Newman's character is basically high on gambling—for a movie that goes out of its way to sneer at cocaine, this definitely has that "Marty remembers how good coke felt" feel) are electric. The very '80s atmosphere and Scorsese's occasional flashy new-wave touch make this feel ages removed from The Hustler, but about halfway through this, I realized that there are only 25 years separating this from The Hustler, while there are a full 36 years between Top Gun (which came out the same year as The Color of Money, by the way) and Top Gun: Maverick, which seems impossible to me because those movies feel way closer to one another than this and The Hustler. I don't know if that's just a testament to my screwed up perception of time and era proximity or if there's truly a much bigger shakeup in Hollywood ethos between the early '60s and the mid-'80s than between the mid-'80s and now. Grade: B-

Eat the Document (1972)
Just an hour of footage of Bob Dylan mumbling his way through his '66 tour, the clips strung together by what could generously be called experimental editing, intercut with concert footage of music that for the most part would be mercifully rescued and restored by the Bootleg Series Vol. 4. There are some really great kernels of scenes, almost none of which last long enough, but what's here is great (esp. the famous bit with John Lennon griping at Dylan for being too mopey). Warts and all, I found this kind of hypnotic and fun. Grade: B

 

 

 

Music

Arcade Fire - WE (2022)
This album was initially positioned as a return-to-form after the uneven Everything Now, ditching a lot of the disco/kitsch interests of that 2017 album for a sound more in-line with Neon Bible or The Suburbs. However, Arcade Fire ironically end up with basically the same two issues as they did with Everything Now on WE: occasionally embarrassing, obvious social commentary and an deeply uneven quality control throughout. Incredibly, the worst of these issues are clustered all on one track, the epic multi-part suite "End of the Empire," which plods along with boring observations about Society(TM) and the impending collapse of America until finally climaxing with the triumphant(?) declaration that "We unsubscribe, fuck season five." I say this as someone who is both deeply anxious about the collapse of America as well as generally an apologist for Arcade Fire's heart-on-sleeve brand of self-serious cringe: this is awful. Just truly, truly awful. At over nine minutes in length, "End of the Empire" takes up nearly a quarter of the whole album, and like the "Peter Pan" --> "Chemistry" --> "Infinite Content" --> "Infinite_Content" sequence on Everything Now, it forms a wretched centerpiece that nearly derails the whole record. I guess on the plus side, making it just one track means that you only have to press the skip button once this time? Anyway, the rest of the album is much better: occasionally great, even. "Age of Anxiety I" is an effectively nervy, groovy opener with a dancefloor pulse, "The Lightning I, II" is a terrific song in the classic Arcade Fire model, beginning with a folky mid-tempo melody that builds to a lose-your-mind ecstatic anthem of a climax, and "Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)" is Arcade Fire being corny is the right way. And that's more or less it; there's not a lot to the album, and if it weren't for the totemic black hole that is "End of the Empire," WE would be unremarkable, a solid but hardly earth-shattering release showcasing Arcade Fire returning to the safe territory of what they do best after a few records trying to push their sound forward. I'm hoping this doesn't signal the beginning of their "U2 in the 21st Century" phase, because they've not made nearly enough music to justify that sort of coda. Maybe I'm the problem, though, because I do really enjoy their back-to-basics tracks here. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for June 20 - July 3, 2022

Sorry for missing last week! Things got busy!

Movies

Spiderhead (2022)
Pretty dumb by the end, and specifically the action climax (set to Hall & Oates) is no good whatsoever. But before that, it's a mostly fun little sci-fi thriller in the vein of Ex Machina, i.e. "futuristic tests in an enclosed environment with a charismatic mad-scientist type." Chris Hemsworth (the mad scientist-type) is extremely entertaining, actually—of all the Marvel people who primarily exist as Marvel people (as opposed to, say, Scarlett Johansson, who has a robust career elsewhere), Hemsworth has always struck me as the most movie-star-ish, and performances like this make it clear how much of a shame it is that his career has not really made space for him to be characters who aren't Thor. Grade: B-

 

RRR (రౌద్రం రణం రుధిరం) (2022)
I am not qualified in the slightest to comment on the politics of this movie, which are complicated, but hey, I had a good time with Top Gun: Maverick, whose politics are not complicated at all (they're bad!), so who am I to say anything? Anyway, as a piece of action movie craft, this completely rules. For a full 100 minutes, you get a non-stop, rip-roaring, fist-pumping onslaught of some of the most banana-pants wild action choreography I've ever seen, even within the already fairly banana-pants-wild world of Asian action cinema. Everything's just flying across the screen, usually in slow-motion, in these incredible comic-book-ish tableaux. The film slows down a little in the subsequent hour-plus, but only a little. I was a little disappointed how the Komaram Bheem character kind of fades into the background as we're given a somewhat awkwardly structured info-dump about Alluri Sitarama Raju's backstory, but only a little. For the most part, this just rocks and rolls like no other three-hour movie I've seen. Also, some British colonizers get killed in some really nasty ways, and whatever the politics of the rest of the film, I gotta give this movie props for that. Also also, as awesome as the action sequences are, the best scene of the movie is the amazing dance-off early in the film. The British not just being literally killed in battle but also figuratively killed on the dance floor. Fantastic. Grade: A-

The Long Day Closes (1992)
Terence Davies movies always have this floating, ethereal quality that makes them more dreamlike than narrative, but this is the first of his that I've seen that decouples narrative almost entirely and instead leans into the free-associative possibilities of Davies' style to depict a just-barely-prepubescent childhood in postwar Liverpool. This is, more than any film I can think of outside of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, a film that understands how our human minds process the passage of time less as a story and more as a collection of images, sounds, and emotions that capture the atmosphere of given periods of our lives without necessarily tying those in to a rigorous timeline of "when" and "how." Just absolutely stunning filmmaking on display here, too, which is pretty much a given with any Davies film but especially so here, where it far eclipses that of any of his other movies I've seen. Kinda wild how most of the rest of his later films are so much more heavily narratively driven, given that it kinda feels like he unlocked his secret weapon with the dream style here. Grade: A

Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒) (1992)
I wish I liked this more than I do. I mean, I do like it, but I was gearing up for another slow-cinema opus in the vein of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and instead, it's just a low-key drama about some young adults having ennui and doing crimes, which is good but kind of a letdown. I should probably rewatch with my expectations appropriately recalibrated, but even so, I can't imagine preferring this to, for example, the movies where Wong Kar-wai does something similar. That said, the vibes are pretty immaculate for what this is. Grade: B

 

 

The Cosmic Eye (1986)
An animated movie that looks like the cover of Don Cherry's Organic Music Society put into motion, which is fitting because the music in this movie sounds a lot like the kind of music Don Cherry and the rest of that whole spiritual jazz wave in the 1970s were making. Which of course means that the music absolutely owns. The animation is also very, very cool, completely ambivalent to hiding the drawing streaks and strokes that a lot of more traditional animation tries to smooth away, and the result is something that is constantly shimmering with organic motion. The basic, hippie-ish "why can't we all get along?" text of the film (the whole movie basically consists of aliens looking down on earth and wondering why there is so much conflict and violence when human beings share so much in common) is pretty shallow in that new-age-y way that sometimes comes out of well-meaning social-justice sentiments without a lot of concrete basis in material specifics, but it's at least a broadly nice sentiment. I'm mostly just here for the very cool music and animation, though. Grade: B

The Last Detail (1973)
The kind of movie that spends its first 90-ish minutes building up this really sweet, warm male camaraderie just so it can show the system (imperialist, patriarchal, judicial—take your pick) crush it in its final 15 minutes. A real bummer of a movie, but my kind of bummer movie. Also, maybe my favorite Jack Nicholson performance? The real star here is Randy Quaid, though, who is adorable beyond measure. Grade: A-

 

 

 

Love in the Afternoon (L'amour l'après-midi) (1972)
I've had this on my watchlist for years entirely on the basis of its being referenced in a St. Vincent song ("Chloe in the Afternoon," i.e. its original title in America). So when I popped this in and the opening title card informs me it's the last in a series, I was like, "Uh oh." Luckily, it seems like the entries in Éric Rohmer's "Six Morality Tales" are fairly standalone, and if there was any of this that I was supposed to connect to previous entries, it went completely over my head as I blissfully enjoyed this pretty straightforward little fable about a man being tempted into infidelity. I know this already has an English remake (starring Chris Rock??), but tbh, Eyes Wide Shut already feels like it's picking up the baton and taking it to the finish line. Grade: B

 

The More the Merrier (1943)
A movie about a very relatable situation in which you have sublet your apartment to a guy who is trying to set you up with the guy he sublet his sublet to, just so he can destroy a political opponent. 100% a delight. Also, surprisingly steamy for a studio movie of its era. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for May 16 - 22, 2022

One half week until school let's out. Home stretch, buddy.

Movies

Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas) (2021)
I've not seen a ton of Pedro Almodóvar's movies, but of the few that I've encountered, this is definitely my favorite. His incredible use of color is back, and the costuming is next-level while never really being the main focus, which is almost always firmly on the twisty plot that intertwines a "switched-at-birth" potboiler with a rumination on the legacy of Franco's Spain. I've seen a lot of people talking about that the connections between the maternal plot and the reckoning with fascism being kind of forced, and I suppose I will ultimately defer to people who know more (read: pretty much anything beyond the equivalent of an opening paragraph of a Wikipedia article) about the Spanish Civil War and the decades that followed. But I found the resonances between those two threads pretty moving, especially in that absolute banger of a final scene. Grade: A-

The Neon Bible (1995)
An incredibly bleak little Southern Gothic, in a way that often feels as cruel as it does cathartic. But it's directed by Terence Davies, so you know every minute of this is incredibly beautiful. I was kind of slaw-jawed at how stunning this movie looks, even with the crappy library DVD I was watching it on, and under Davies's mesmerizing aesthetic, the story takes on a dream-like quality that turns the bleakness into something more primordial than it might otherwise be, as if it bubbled up from a collective nightmare of the Southern United States. I'm told that Davies considers this movie a failure, and I can't believe someone can be so wrong about their own work. Grade: A-

 

Hansel and Gretel (1954)
In terms of creating the first stop-motion feature film, the USSR had the USA beat by almost 20 years and made the better movie overall, too. So that's a point for communism, I guess. But both movies are a snooze. Some really, really nice sets and backgrounds in this one, but the opera (did you know there was a "Hansel and Gretel" opera?) kinda sucks, and the voice acting is some real early-Sunday-morning-public-access-television-core. I gotta stop watching these early stop-motion movies. Grade: D+

 

 

The New Gulliver (Новый Гулливер) (1935)
"Communist revision of Gulliver's Travels" and "possibly the first stop-motion feature ever made" should have yielded a way more interesting movie than this is. The stop-motion craft is very cool and also a little unnerving, too, with how expressive the characters' faces are on top of fairly nondescript bodies. But otherwise, really boring. Sometimes technical innovation arrives with a bang, but other times, it's just something perfunctory like this. Grade: C

Favorite Movies of 2017

Well, here we are again—another one of these lists. I'm not going to do one of those long preambles. As usual, this post is divided between my favorite movies (emphasis on "favorite," not "best," whatever that means) and other movies I thought were notable, either for good or ill. Also as usually, I admit that I (obviously) haven't seen every 2017 movie, and I resent that the elitist and outdated distribution schedules have kept some of my most-anticipated movies away from Knoxville (more importantly, The Post and Phantom Thread).

I hope y'all enjoy it. Please, disagree with me; share your own picks; discuss. I've said it before—I love discussing this list stuff.

Favorite Movies

1. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
It's all about death, when you get right down to it: our lives, our actions, our thoughts—whether or not we're conscious of it, they're all defined by that firm bookend. Warm and easy-going, The B-Side resembles that other Errol Morris masterpiece, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, by allowing a mix of editing and unfettered obsession over a craft (here, Polaroid portraitry) to accumulate into a towering treatise. I haven't seen a ton of people love this movie as much as I did, but more so than anything else I saw this year, The B-Side is profound.

[Read original review here]

2. Good Time
A damning character portrait disguised as a feature-length chase sequence, Good Time is fun until it's devastating. It's the sort of movie where you'll spend most of the runtime with your hand over your agape mouth, your eyes dazzled by the gorgeous nocturnal cinematography, your ears ringing from the assaultive score. If you haven't already seen it, the most viscerally exciting movie of the year is well-worth your time.

[Read original review here]

3. The Shape of Water
In the running for Guillermo del Toro's best English-language film, The Shape of Water is by turns swooningly romantic and gory, baroque and grimy, nostalgic and mythic; it's a blender of all of del Toro's best preoccupations, from classic Hollywood to B-movie trash, and it's great. You'll believe a fish-man can dance.

[Read original review here]

4. A Ghost Story
David Lowrey's hypnotic, unpredictable art film about grief is something of a feature-length remake of the "I got a rock" refrain from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, right down to the sheet ghost. The magic of this movie is that it's also heartbreaking, and not in that gentle Charlie-Brown-style way—it's legitimately staring-into-the-void-style sublimity.

[Read original review here]

5. mother!
If Darren Aronofsky wanted to just make provocative, stylistically adventurous Bible movies for the rest of his career, that would be a-okay with me. Whatever you think of the theology here, the sheer daring of this movie's scope is in a league of its own.

[Read original review here]

6. The Beguiled
Sweatiest movie of the year, bar none. This is supposedly set in Virginia, but this is definitely Louisiana, and rarely has humidity been so palpably captured on film. It's Sofia Coppola's best in quite some time, and it's no accident that it's also a tight, mean little thriller, Coppola's usually dreamy atmospherics morphing into something as sinister and phantasmagoric as it is beautiful.

[Read original review here]

7. A Quiet Passion
An exquisite tribute to Emily Dickinson couched in Terence Davies's usual visual splendor—a particularly good match of subject with director, as Davies's understated formalism complements Dickinson's own poetic style wonderfully.

[Read original review here]

8. Logan
The only superhero movie in this superhero-stuffed year I'd call "great," and while we've had plenty of movies with politics on their minds, this, with its apocalyptic squalor, is one of the few that really captures my fears of where we seem to be heading.

[Read original review here]

9. A Cure for Wellness
Something something good taste something bad script something something. I don't care. This movie looks awesome, and it's the best gothic horror we've gotten at the movies since Crimson Peak. Plus, there's no topping the compositions and lighting of the visuals here.

[Read original review here]

10. Your Name
It has all the gorgeous detail of previous Makoto Shinkai features and, a first for me with his work, a story I really bought into. The final half hour or so of the film is some of the most cosmic, beautiful film imagery, animated or not, of the year.

[Read original review here]






Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Best Zeitgeist-Defining Movie: Get Out—This is the 2017 movie, and I don't see many good arguments to the contrary. It's far from my favorite, but Get Out is still really freaking good, hilarious and frightening in equal measure, bolstered by a diverse cinematic tradition alluded to heavily in Jordan Peele's dense and frequently brilliant screenplay. But this is more than a spot-the-allusion film; it's a film that uses movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to genuinely subversive ends, playing off our familiarity with the beats and images of these movies to shock us. Also, it's about race; more specifically, it's about predatory white people. Let's not pretend like that isn't the most 2017 plot in all of cinema.

Best Drama: The Salesman—And I mean "drama" in the sense that it resembles a play. Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman isn't play-like in the derogatory way that movie critics usually mean when they compare the two media; rather, I'd just like to call attention to and celebrate that way that, like always, Farhadi brings a tense efficiency to the screenplay that recalls the immediacy of the stage. Farhadi's movies are as tight as drums, and while there are some elements in The Salesman that makes it less tight than, say, The Past, it still makes a mighty sound when struck.

Best Coming of Age: Lady Bird—I haven't had a chance to formally review this one yet (it's likely the final 2017 movie I'm going to see in a theater), but I love me some coming-of-age cinema, and this one is very good. Willing to be honest about the specific ways in which high school students can be various shades of pretentious and careless in a way that recalls last year's masterful The Edge of Seventeen, it's a tremendously well-observed film that, for all its plot shagginess (and there is that, sometimes to its detriment), is so sharp and specific in its characterization of Lady Bird herself that she practically jumps off the screen to shake your hand.

Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049—I get the thematic and narrative critiques of this movie, but I won't hear anyone dissing Roger Deakins's astounding, beautiful, lay-me-down-to-rest-because-I-have-seen-the-face-of-God visual work. Some kudos probably goes to the production design, too, without which this probably wouldn't have been so stunning. But come on; it's also Deakins we're talking about here.

Best Cry: Coco—Pixar, y'all. "Remember meeeee..."

Best Action: John Wick: Chapter 2—It's like dudes in suits shooting each other in art galleries in highly choreographed ways. What's not to like about that?

Best "Not Quite the Best Action, but Hey Look! Tarkovsky!": Atomic Blonde—Don't get me wrong: the action in Atomic Blonde is very good. It just isn't John Wick: Chapter 2 good. Still, there's a fight scene in front of a projection of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, so major points to this movie for making a cheap retro allusion that I am physically unable to resist. Take that, Ready Player One.

Best Action (Ape Division): War for the Planet of the Apes—Apes on horses! Apes with guns! Apes breaking out of concentration camps! Apes doing all sorts of things! All our movies should have more apes. (But all kidding aside, this really is a good movie)

Best Animation: The Boss Baby—Am I losing my mind? Pixar has the photorealism, Cartoon Saloon has the serious stylization, Illumination Entertainment has all the really crappy-looking stuff, but it's DreamWorks Animation—frikkin' DREAMWORKS—that's actually doing the animation I like best on an aesthetic level these days. This studio has finally done what I'd considered impossible and made CG animation as flexible and convincingly cartoonish as hand-drawn stuff, and for that, they have my sincere gratitude.

Animated Movie I'm Most Thankful For: The Breadwinner—This movie is flawed in significant ways, but, along with the DreamWorks output this year (?!?), it most pushes English-language animation in directions I wish the whole medium would all go: serious-minded, audience-trusting, culturally diverse, stylistically (not realistically) animated.

Best Opening Sequence: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—The first five minutes of this movie, set perfectly to David Bowie's "Space Oddity," are the best five minutes (opening or not) of any movie this year. It's a warm throwback to the optimism of sci-fi's 1940s/50s golden era, only flipped to show interplanetary contact to be an intrinsic element of this future utopia, not its greatest threat. Any other year, it wouldn't be a particularly political statement, but with every inter-species handshake, it's impossible not to feel that cooperative multiculturalism is a necessary piece of humanity's future, and also to feel the chasm between that ideal and our contemporary political discourse.

Best Opening Sequence (Non-David-Bowie Division): Baby Driver—Edgar Wright's crime caper never really delivers on the promise of this scene as an action movie intricately choreographed to pop music, but for its opening scene (and honestly, the decidedly more pedestrian second scene), Baby Driver is the perfect realization of this premise. It's wonderful.

Best Use of "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Logan Lucky—This movie's a lot of fun all around, but it's only a great movie in one moment, and that's at a children's beauty pageant, of all reprehensible things. People sing this song; it's moving.

Best Use of the Word "Poop": Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie—There's a lot of poop-centric stuff in this movie. It's great.

Worst Use of a True Story: Same Kind of Different as Me—Pure Flix strikes again! This time, they've skimmed over all the legitimately interesting stuff about the kind of amazing true story that informs the plot and instead left us with the most boring, cookie-cutter inspirational trash ever. Hurray!

Most Misunderstood: The Glass Castle—Critics saw a toothless weepy in a tremendously difficult, thorny film about what it means to feel love for a genuinely abusive person. This is not a movie of easily-arrived-at adages; it's a film that languishes on messy, complicated, intentionally problematic questions and doesn't suggest anything cheap about its film-ending catharsis.

Best Quote: The Big Sick—"This is why I don't want to go online, 'cause it's never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump." Terry (a great Ray Romano) gets it.

Best Use of Social Media: Personal Shopper—Briefly, the quiet psychological thrills of Personal Shopper get cranked up to sheer horror-movie levels, and it's all thanks to a clever playing off of what we know about texting and social media engagement.

Best Use of Outer Space: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—There's a lot about these Marvel movies that's getting stale, but I'll give them this: as long as they are making colorful, goofy, imaginatively designed space-opera visuals (see also: Thor: Ragnarok), I'll probably still watch them.

Best Shower: Alien: Covenant—You'll know it when you see it.

Best Kiss: Alien: Covenant—Again, you'll know it when you see it.

Best "Well, We're Going to Be Making These Movies Until Human Extinction, So We Might As Well Make It Interesting": Star Wars: The Last Jedi—This actually probably belongs again to Alien: Covenant again, but I'm not confident that they'll be making Alien movies for that much longer. Star Wars, though... Star Wars is forever. The Last Jedi is likely the most experimental that we're going to see Star Wars get for a while (though judging by some of the fan outrage, they need to get a lot more so—just rip that band-aide off, Kennedy), and even this isn't too dramatic of a departure (I can't be the only one who wanted Rey to join Kylo like he asked). However, it's by far the most interesting engagement with the series mythology since the prequels, and this is the first time since Lucas was at the helm that the Star Wars universe felt like a living, breathing place full of species and planets we haven't seen before. It's enjoyable.

"Good Try, I Guess" Award: Song to Song—Does Terrence Malick actually know what rock music is, or did he just read the Wikipedia page? QUESTIONS TO PONDER.

Worst Application of Corporate Synergy: Beauty and the Beast—We did not need this movie, and we certainly didn't need it to be as bad as it was. Disney's been pretty good at making questionable (and nakedly money-grubbing) decisions at least blandly enjoyable this decade, but NOPE. Not this one.

Best Slow, Monarchical Death: The Death of Louis XIV—The title says it all, and let me repeat: it is sloooooow. But it's also beautifully costumed, and there's something about the languorous, meticulous way that we watch the Sun King pass from this life that feels so profoundly conscious of the realities of death in a way that reminds me of Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.

Best Non-2017 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2017: Ordet—A dialogue between realist modernity and old-time supernatural religiosity that feels like a genuine expression of both worldviews and, more impressively, a genuine fusion of both. It's a majestic film, one of the best-ever about faith, right up there with Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Bergman's Winter Light though considerably more optimistic than either of those, and without a doubt the most fully I've been moved by a motion picture this year.