Mini-Reviews for August 28 - September 3, 2017

Reviews, etc. Read on.

Movies

Good Time (2017)

This is the first Great 2017 movie I've seen, and given Heaven Knows What, the directing Safdie brothers' previous feature, that shouldn't have been a surprise. What did surprise me, though, is how much fun Good Time is—"fun" being a word I would have never used within hearing distance of the excellent but misery-filled Heaven Knows What. There's not a lot of misery in Good Time, and that's part of its con; make no mistake, these characters are miserable. But we don't see it—at least, not at first. Connie, played memorably by a Robert Pattinson still apparently looking to salvage his street cred after Twilight, spends most of the movie's 99 energetic minutes manipulating everyone—including, most significantly, his mentally handicapped brother—in his ever-getting-out-of-hand scheme to rob a bank and staying just a step ahead of the collateral damage he causes, and the majority of the film consists of the lengthy and rigorously cause-and-effect-driven sequence of crime-thriller setpieces. It's all terrifically exciting and tense and frequently hilarious, too, right up until the abrupt ending that sees a terrible pile-up of that deferred collateral damage. In all the chases, mistaken identities, and off-handed scheming, it's easy to forget that the movie opens with a scene with Connie's brother reluctantly recounting a particularly painful family memory to a therapist, but the ending, which returns us to this brother's POV, slaps us back into this reality. Connie is a black hole of a human being, and Good Time is a compelling portrait of just how jointly exhilarating and destructive his particular brand of self-involvement is—nihilism disguised as survival. Grade: A

Time Lapse (2014)

There's a lot that's sloppy or kind of stupid about Time Lapse, both from a writing and a filmmaking perspective. The acting is mediocre, too. But more than any movie I've seen since Timecrimes, Time Lapse evokes the kind of unpretentious, clever, punchy sci-fi short fiction that I used to read by the bucketful in middle school. Among a film landscape of high-minded and/or high-budget sci-fi epics, it's a distinct pleasure to run across something as straightforwardly small and grimy as this. Grade: B

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

I'm sure some of my musical-loving friend will razz me for this, but the music isn't all that great in Sweeney Todd. Granted, I haven't seen the original stage show, so maybe the fault lies with Tim Burton's adaptation—and given Burton's lackluster (who are we kidding—bad) run of films in the past ten years, I'm willing to give him a good portion of the blame for this movie being just kinda okay instead of the made-in-heaven, peanut-butter-and-chocolate slam dunk it should have been having Tim Burton direct this particular story. Music aside, the movie just kind of plods along its straightforward plot, spending entirely too much time building up to the moment we all know the movie is really about—i.e. when Sweeney Todd and Nellie Lovett start slicing throats and putting them into meat pies. It's only sometimes that, in moseying through this plot, the movie arrives at something interesting or arresting, visually-speaking (the final shot is a major keeper, and pretty much any time Depp's titular barber is slicing throats, it's riveting), but the costuming and set design is consistently wonderful, though considerably dialed back from Burton's usual German-Expressionism-but-wryly-funny extremes, electing for a more muted, grimy twist on a early industrialized London. So the movie's not a total wash, and I enjoyed it more often than not. But it's not hard to feel like this is something of a missed opportunity. Grade: B-

Frailty (2001)

I'm not sure the copious voiceover is quite the necessary storytelling evil that this movie seems to think it is, and in general, the way the plot is given in expository chunks feels clumsy. But by the end, this movie has gone some places I truly didn't expect it to—a twisty piece of true crime that gradually transforms into something else entirely that I won't spoil. I've already compared one movie I've watched this week to short fiction, and this movie fits that distinction, too, which is great—because as we all hopefully know by now, it's the short story, not the novel, that is the closest literary antecedent to the feature film. Grade: B

You Can Count on Me (2000)

The relationship at the core of this movie, the prickly sibling sparring of Laura Linney's and Mark Ruffalo's characters, is gold—a sweet and very human look at two individuals orbiting each other's lives in their disparate attempts to find agency in their respective worlds. The movie surrounding that relationship, though, is shaggy to a fault. This is nothing out of the ordinary for writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose work in Manchester by the Sea and especially Margaret shows a proclivity for circuitous, rambly, inefficient narratives as a way of exploring the human condition. This movie, Lonergan's debut, is the least-high-minded of his three directorial features, and it's also the least convincing in proving its shagginess worthwhile. That's not to say the movie is a disaster or that the marvelous success of the Ruffalo/Linney relationship doesn't make the watch worthwhile. But it's a relatively humble debut from a creator who would go on to much, much more interesting work. Grade: B

Bob Roberts (1992)

Bob Roberts is technically a mockumentary, but outside of a few obviously silly bits (the titular Roberts being a conservative goof on Bob Dylan, right down to the album titles and covers [e.g. The Times Are Changin' Back]), it doesn't feel that far removed from the reality we see every day. This is, I'm sure, a commonplace and rather dull observation made already by millions of others also suffering from Trump angst. But that doesn't change the fact that Bob Roberts plays a lot more like a political drama than it does a jokey satire—whether this is because it was forward-thinking enough to anticipate shifts in American culture (a la Network, a movie that also increasingly feels like a drama than the bitter, exaggerated satire it was conceived as) or because writer/director/star Tim Robbins simply was interested in caustic commentary more reflective of reality than comedic sensibilities, I can't tell. What I can tell you is that the movie is a marvelous construction, definitely worth a watch; but lord, it's a bitter pill. Grade: B+

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

It's overwrought, overlong, and shaggy in the way that Old Hollywood epics tend to be, but golly is it beautiful to look at. This shouldn't be surprising, given that it's directed by David Lean, who brought us Lawrence of Arabia, nothing if not one of the most gorgeously crafted and meticulously formed epics of the era. Lawrence is a much better use of 200+ minutes, admittedly, especially given the lopsidedness Doctor Zhivago's story suffers from (there's so much buildup to what should be the narrative lynch pin of Russia's collapse into post-Bolshevik poverty), but Zhivago may in fact be the better-looking movie. The camera is inventive and observant, and the mis-en-scène is to die for—the clean geometry of Lawrence's desert is replaced by a lush evocation of both urban and natural Russia that feels almost fantastical in its construction; a scene featuring a house encased in ice is breathtaking, and the entire movie is full of moments nearly as grand. The story... well, the story is just kind of okay—well-acted, I supposed, but the romance is never really engaging enough to justify 3.5 hours of it, and it progresses in fits and starts that seem to skirt over important sequences and languish on less-dynamic moments of stasis, creating a plot that at once feels too long but not quite long enough. And for a movie that positions itself in the decades surrounding the rise of Lenin and the fall of the Romanovs, this movie has precious little to say about Communism or revolution or tsars or anything of political important. But all is forgiven once you see this movie in motion; its aesthetics are truly a wonder to behold. Grade: A-

Books

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

George Saunders's first novel is, I'm guessing, unlike most novels you've read. Set up almost like an oral history of sorts, the book renders the death and afterlife of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie through a series of dialogues among both fictional and nonfictional sources (including, in one instance, the recent-ish Team of Rivals), and the result is one of the most effective depictions I've seen of what the process of history making actually entails—the accumulation of stories and information from personal accounts. Through this device, Saunders is able to spin a surprisingly moving treatment of death and grief through the cross-cutting of the actual history of the Lincolns' mourning with the fictional history of Willie Lincoln's experiences in the "bardo," a limbo borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism and here mixed with Christian and other religious iconography. Early on, this is all sort of abstract and academic-feeling, but as the novel progresses, it becomes a much smoother ride and ends with a series of beautiful scenes in which the residents of this afterlife begin to realize that they are, in fact, dead. It's a strange, often funny, and ultimately profound journey, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Grade: A-

Music

The Men - Tomorrow's Hits (2014)

2013's New Moon was a turning point for Brooklyn group The Men, shrugging away the punk sounds of their first few albums and leaning into the country and soft rock textures that the band hinted at in their 2012 breakthrough, Open Your Heart. With Tomorrow's Hits, the band seems to have smoothed out some of the kinks that made New Moon the slightly uneven album that it was, and in doing so, they've arrived at a sound that's almost like power pop, full of bright, loud guitars and hooky melodies. This is a far cry from the punk of their early days, but it's a good fit for the band here, foregrounding the group's strength as pure songwriters. Every song is raucous enough to be fun but disciplined enough to hold together as a close approximation of guitar pop, even the chaotic, Chuck-Berry-meets-honky-tonk-meets-noise-rock "Pearly Gates," the most rambunctious track of the bunch. It's a fantastic collection of songs and one of the band's best full-lengths. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for June 12 - 18, 2017

Summer. How I love thee.

Movies

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
While it lacks the light touch of its 2014 predecessor (the script here is distressingly belabored, from the emotional beats to even a lot of the comedy—the film tries way harder to make a joke out of "Taserface" than it's worth), and overall, it's just not as fun. But Vol. 2 is superior to the original (and, in fact, the large majority of the MCU in general) in two important qualities. First, it has probably the best Marvel-movie villain in ages (though I'm afraid revealing who it is would spoil a certain part of the film)—clearly motivated, charismatically acted, and, moreover, integrated into the emotional stakes of the plot. But even more welcome than that is the film's visuals, which are some of the best in recent blockbuster history and certainly the best of any Marvel film to date; a rainbow-blasted cornucopia of cosmic pulp, it's the closest any movie in recent memory has come to looking like a comic book come to life. It's glorious and as big-screen-worthy as any movie this year. Grade: B+

The Salesman (فروشنده) (2016)
One of the lesser Farhadi films I've seen (it's certainly no A Separation or The Past, but really, what is?), but it's still tensely watchable. It takes a while to get going, but once we get toward the end, especially a final setpiece with an old man cornered by our increasingly adamant protagonist, it is thrilling and excruciating in equal measure. I'm continually amazed at just how much tension Farhadi is able to wring from low-key domestic situations. Grade: B+

Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013)
If you're expecting the broad treatment of history that renders events as simplified dramatic beats (as I was going into The Butler), you'll get it; this is basically the civil rights version of Forrest Gump, in which two characters are present for all the major events in the latter half of the 20th century, and naturally, in covering so much time, things get a little simplistic—worst is the parade of presidential impressions, which range from absurd (John Cusack's Nixon, James Marsden's JFK) to distractingly parodic (Liev Schreiber's LBJ). It doesn't help that the screenplay is frequently clumsy, stumbling over some very clunky dialogue and transitions. When we're dealing with the three principle actors (Forest Whitaker, David Oyelowo, and Oprah Winfrey), though, the acting is fantastic, especially Winfrey, who absolutely disappears into her role here and goes toe-to-toe with Whitaker in giving the best performance in the film. Between all three of them, they manage to breathe life into the script's programmatic sweep. And speaking of the sweep, the most notable difference from Forrest Gump (aside from race, of course) is an actual awareness of politics. As broadly as this movie casts history, it's still realizes that the way it renders history is implicitly political (as opposed to Gump, which I assert is not intentionally conservative, just merely thoughtless of how its framing of historical events communicates a political stance). This is most notable in how it treats African-American radical politics. Oyelowo's character isn't some ham-fisted tragedy/morality tale a la Jenny in Forrest Gump; he's a major player in the film's movement, and as the movie progresses, uses him as a fascinating foil to Whitaker's butler, shaping a narrative of the history of civil rights as the reconciling of radicalism with "respectable" integration. Nobody who's a student of this era of history is going to find that especially mind-blowing, but it's a narrative that the movie successfully imbues with a deep pathos that makes it work. And even besides that, how crazy is it for a mainstream American film to regard African-American progressive politics with so much sympathy and dignity? Grade: B+

The Straight Story (1999)
Nearly twenty years later, you'd think it would have sunk in that one of David Lynch's best (maybe even the best) is a Disney-studios family movie dedicated to the power of sincere human decency. But let's just marvel at this for a moment, okay? Because while many David Lynch films are similarly preoccupied with human goodness, they're generally showing how often the apparent presence of wholesomeness is a thin veneer over abject depravity, cruelty, and—if he's feeling frisky—an otherworldly abyss. But this is beautifully inverted in The Straight Story. The morality of Richard Farnsworth's Alvin and the spectrum of Midwest humanity that he meets while driving hundreds of miles on a lawnmower isn't uncomplicated—two of the film's aching conversational setpieces (one with a fellow WWII veteran, the other with a priest) make this abundantly clear—but the film insists that such complications don't offset the fundamental goodness at these characters' cores. Rarely has such a resolute testament to simple goodwill graced our movie screens. Grade: A

The Sure Thing (1985)
It says something about the state of teen comedies in 1985 that The Sure Thing could be heralded as a mature and smart take on the genre. "I didn't sleep with her" is such an insanely low bar of masculine gentility to clear, especially when "her" is someone you've only just met, that it's genuinely insulting that the film seems to regard John Cusack's character's first tepid step toward maturity as this world-conquering act of love (particularly when he's spent most of the rest of the film being a lousy student, shotgunning beers, and generally being an insufferable cad). And that's to say nothing of Daphne Zuniga's character, who leaves a doting boyfriend (admittedly, one who is presented as sort of a stick in the mud, but... I dunno, he does play a mean game of gin rummy) to hook up with this guy. And yet, it's a testament to the magic of a well-made film that I not only wasn't insulted by all this stuff (or even the suggestion that the only sensible alternative to being a stick in the mud is being a beer-shotgunning tool bag) but actually kind of got caught up in the whole thing. As far as Rob Reiner rom-coms go, this is no When Harry Met Sally. But the same principles are at play, and you know what? It's pretty good! Grade: B

Voyage in Time (Tempo di Viaggio) (1983)
Relative to classic making-of documentaries like Hearts of Darkness, there's not really a lot going on in Voyage of Time, a film in which Andrei Tarkovsky and script writer Tonino Guerra pal around Italy in search of good locations for the shooting of Nostalghia. But it has its low-key charms. Tarkovsky and Guerra spend most of the time shooting the breeze, and, being intellectuals who are about to produce a tour de force of cinematic philosophy, their shooting the breeze is pretty interesting as they discuss the nature of cinema and architecture. There's also a brief shot of Tarkovky in short shorts, which is its own sort of thrill. Grade: B



Television

Bob's Burgers, Season 7 (2016-17)
The second law of thermodynamics says that given enough time, everything turns to crap (I'm paraphrasing here). This seems accelerated on TV, where good shows usually have four or five good seasons before they are no longer good shows. Bob's Burgers seems determined to defy this law, though; in its seventh season, it's no less its fine self than in its fourth, and those who love the show will know exactly what to expect: sweetly maniacal family dynamics, silly wordplay, off-the-wall pop-culture parodies, tongue-in-cheek-but-actually-super-good musical interludes, H. Jon Benjamin's panicked intonation of "oh god." There isn't a bad episode in the bunch, and if it's slightly less exciting than earlier seasons, that's only because we've grown so accustomed to Bob's Burgers' perennial pleasures. Grade: B+

Adventure Time, Season 6 (2014-15)
Season 6 is the first time in Adventure Time's decorated run that you can feel a real step down in quality without any discernible reward. Season 5 had its downs, but it also represented such a thrilling step forward in terms of structure and theme for the show that it really didn't matter. But Season 6 doesn't have that—it arguably continues the show's increased devotion to continuity and serial plots (the final 6-ish episodes are all basically pieces of a single story that the show had been developing for the latter half of the season), but by this time, its mix of silliness, epic sci-fi/fantasy, and emotional arcs is nothing new. That's not to say that it's bad (except for, I'd argue, the stuff with Finn's dad, which is Daddy Issues boilerplate and doesn't really pay off in the otherwise excellent season climax); there are, in fact, quite a few excellent episodes throughout the season, and the end of the season continues the show's tradition of finales in sending the series in exciting new directions. But let's put it this way: this is the first season of the show that doesn't feature any episodes that I'd put in the Top 20 Adventure Time episodes. But I shouldn't be too negative—this is still a show of astounding energy and imagination, and we're lucky to have it. We've just been a tad bit luckier in the past. Grade: B+

Music

The Men - New Moon (2013)
The Men must have realized that "Candy" was the best song on their 2012 breakout, Open Your Heart, so the songs on New Moon are all countrified, to mixed-to-positive results. The opener, "Open the Door" welcomes us to the record with an honest-to-goodness piano, and it's actually lovely. But it's hard not to miss that punk energy from their first two records, which is absent on all but a few of the songs here. The rest are an intriguing whirlwind of genres, ranging from country ("High and Lonesome") to Americana ("Bird Song") to riff-stomping sludge ("I Saw Her Face") to jammy noise rock ("Supermoon"). It's fun to see the band try on so many different hats, and the effect is more or less engaging. But one gets the sense that The Men are drifting afield here. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for February 27 - March 5, 2017

Reviews. Y'all know the drill.

Movies

Get Out (2017)

Jordan Peele's debut writer/director outing (yes, Key & Peele Jordan Peele) is a work of horror love: the shots are lovely and allusive (both Rear Window and, if I'm not mistaken, Night of the Living Dead get shout outs), the tension is smart and earned, the core mechanics are frightening and emotive. But let's also take some time to appreciate that it's also basically a feature-length Key & Peele sketch, its first 2/3s playing out the various permutations of its clever, socially conscious premise (basically, The Stepford Wives, but about the black experience rather than the female one) before veering into a crazy, borderline absurd finale. It's all great fun, and I adored every minute of it. Grade: A-

London Road (2015)

I guess I shouldn't be surprised when a head-scratching premise leads to head-scratching results, but here we are: a murder mystery musical that culminates with a large flower sale and features a slew of actors, both recognizable and anonymous, and singers, both tone-deaf and talented. The results, I'm afraid, are just kind of pasty and dry in their weirdness, and while I'm all for nontraditional singing styles in musicals, so many of the singers here struggle to hit the already kind of iffy notes (the songs are dinner-theater-caliber) that the effect is kinda numbing. Grade: C

Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton: This Is Stones Throw Records (2013)

I'm not as familiar with the output of experimental hip-hop label Stones Throw as I probably should be for this film to have its full impact, but even so, it's cool to have the history of MF Doom, etc., laid out like this. The structure is a bit scattershot at times—there's not really much of a narrative besides "And then this happened"—but it's got a busily engaging visual style that sets it apart from your standard talking heads/stock footage doc. Also, some great music (from Stones Throw's catalog, of course) underlines everything. Grade: B

The Ghost Writer (2010)

A super tight political thriller in the vein of The Parallax View, complete with a haunting, evocative ending. Ewan McGregor, playing the ghost writer for the memoir of a former Prime Minister who has been accused of war crimes, does great work as a guy who's in way over his head but doesn't know he's in over his head, so he's kind of foolishly confident, and Pierce Brosnan makes for a surprisingly compelling slimy politician as the Prime Minister. The sense of dread ratchets up consistently over the film's two hours until it reaches an almost unbearable climax by its end, which is both colossally depressing and too aesthetically marvelous to dismiss as mere nihilism. Good stuff. Grade: A-

Hard Candy (2005)

A tremendously mean little thriller that, in flipping the script by having a teen psychologically torture a presumed pedophile, maybe encourages too much sympathy in a man who may in fact be a monster. But that implications are just details. Hard Candy is breathless and tense throughout, culminating in a moment that's not exactly unexpected but shocking nonetheless. And thus the career of Ellen Page was born. Grade: B+

Point Break (1991)

Very stupid, but deliciously so. Faced with the revelation that a notorious band of bank robbers are, in their less criminal personas, surfers, new rookie Keanu Reeves must himself become a surfer in order to bag the baddies, and oh yes, you'd better believe he's the "methods are unconventional but dammit, you get results" kind of rookie (shoutout to John C. McGinley as a particularly fine specimen of the disgruntled superior). In a way that seems specific to the late '80s/early '90s era of big-budget action heroics, Point Break manages to leverage its mountain of silliness into something almost sublime through the sheer power of its sincerity and gonzo disregard for reality. So naturally the final product is both eye-rolling and a great time. Grade: B+

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

The worst thing about the worst of the original Planet of the Apes series isn't its tepid, interminable battle scenes (although they are interminable and woefully tepid). It's that it all but abandons the myriad of thoughtful questions it poses. Can the future be altered? Is violence justified if it results in good? Is the subjugation of the human race by the apes a result of the violence inherent in the ape society? If you're interested in knowing the film's take on any of these questions, too bad! It manages to sidestep each and every one of them on its way to its clumsy anticlimax. A disappointingly safe (and entirely unsatisfying) ending to one of the most recklessly ambitious sci-fi series of all time. Grade: C

Television

Adventure Time, Season 5 (2012-14)

The show has had better—much better—seasons, but its bizarre, sprawling (52 episodes!), heartbreaking, ruminative, uneven, intermittently brilliant fifth season is, I think, what establishes Adventure Time as an all-time great TV series, no longer the type of show that people will say, "Oh yeah, I remember that one," but will instead interrupt people rhapsodizing on the merits of The Simpsons and The Wire to say, "But have you seen this??" With Season 5, Adventure Time proves that the structural gamble of sections of its fourth season—unannounced plot arcs and symbolic character studies intermingled with the normal standalone adventures and outright technical experiments—can work stellarly as a conceit for an entire season, not just intermittent sections. I've expressed unease at the increasing serialization of the show before, and while Season 5 is easily the most serialized yet, it also does what I was afraid the show wouldn't, which is to effectively recontextualize its playful absurdity within a more logically consistent world required of more series continuity. What's more, it's able to find great poignancy within that recontextualized, serialized absurdity, probably best exhibited by the out-of-nowhere epic quest two-parter "Lemonhope," but more conventionally presented in the now-standard Ice King weepfests "Betty" and "Simon & Marcy," the swashbuckling-cum-coming-of-age of "Mystery Dungeon," and the art criticism of "James Baxter the Horse." And that's not even accounting for the weird, stylistic experiments that the show's expanded episode count allows for, like the intentionally buggy 3D animation in "A Glitch Is a Glitch" or the one-off noir "Root Beer Guy." And of course we've got a handful of the best episodes the show has ever produced, most notably the Lump Space Princess-centric "Bad Timing," a time-travel episode that easily fits among the stylistic innovators of "A Glitch Is a Glitch," with its Don Hertzfeldt-inspired visuals while also doing some of the most inventive storytelling and poignant character work in the show's history. The season doesn't always work, and at times it really doesn't—far too much time is spent on Finn's romance/breakup with Fire Princess, to the point that our once protagonist is easily the weakest link in the show. But make no mistake: this is greatness. This is legend. This is one of the greatest shows of all time. Grade: A-

Music

The Men - Open Your Heart (2012)

It's easy enough to see Open Your Heart, The Men's sophomore LP, as a mere sum of its influences. The opening one-two punch of "Turn It Around" and "Animal" wouldn't have sounded out of place on an album from The Jam or even early Foo Fighters, and later tracks sound very much like, for example, country-rock Rolling Stones ("Candy") or Oasis ("Open Your Heart") or Sonic Youth ("Presence"). And I know bands who wear their influences this flamboyantly can be kind of hit-and-miss with people looking for new sounds, which... fine. But I dare you to listen to this album and not marvel at least at the sheer colorfulness on display, the reckless abandon with which the band jumps from one genre to the next, the tireless energy with which they derive their chord changes and sonic textures, the overall excellence in the songwriting, regardless of precedent. It's hard. Originality is overrated anyway. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for February 13 - 19, 2017

Last week, I had more negative reviews that I think I've ever hard. Well, this week, I'm pretty sure I have a higher concentration of A reviews than I've ever had. A nice turn of events, to be sure.

Movies

Passion (2012)
This relatively typical Brian De Palma erotic thriller is almost dumb enough to work. Almost. There's an admirable straight-facedness to the silliness here that might read a little more readily as deadpan if De Palma were just a tiny bit nuttier with his style—we've of course got a split-screen segment, and Rachel McAdams in villain mode is something I wasn't aware I needed so badly. But in between the fireworks, the film is just kind of dull and tepid, making at least 75 percent of the movie generic trash (and not the good kind). Grade: C+

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
As a musical about the survivor of a botched sex-change operation in East Germany, the film has plenty of poignant and surprising things to say about gender identity and the specifics of Hedwig's experience. However, the biggest success of the film is that it's music is comprised entirely of glam rock songs that really and truly rock. I've seen my fair share of musicals that attempt to exist within rock aesthetic—from Memphis to Hairspray—and often, the truth is that it's only rock in the vaguest of touches, instead sticking closely to native show tune archetypes. Not so with Hedwig, whose songs sound everything like the peers of Lou Reed, David Bowie, and T. Rex in the early '70s, only if all of those artists had collectively decided to eschew any semblance of coyness and innuendo and instead gone right for the sexually explicit melodrama. It's all delightfully funny, raucous, and full of feelings—likely the greatest crop of songs in a 21st-century film yet, animating a truly great 21st-century film. Grade: A

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
At the risk of seeming foolish through absolutist statements, Taxi Driver is the most spiritually bereft of any work by the legendarily spiritual Martin Scorsese. Maybe this is (along with its troublesome social subtext) why it's the only acclaimed Scorsese that I've never really felt much about. So imagine my joy upon discovering that, among other things, Bringing Out the Dead is a sort of corrective to the aspirituality of Taxi Driver. Set in the same (albeit two decades removed) New York underbelly, populated by much the same cast of misfits, criminals, destitutes, social outcasts, the movie again stars a man obligated to roam the city nightlife and pick up strangers—this time, he's driving an ambulance, and that redemptive role, rather than the purgatorial taxi, seems to have made all the difference. Bringing Out the Dead is practically ecstatic in its spirituality, and the line between here and hereafter has never been so porous in Scorsese's work: everywhere, the streets are haunted by the memories (but come on, we know [heck, we're told] they're ghosts) of those souls lost under the watch of Nicolas Cage's ambulance driver. The dead walk and talk, and even the living speak openly of of Jesus, imbuing something as profane as the revival of a heroin overdose with implication of holy resurrection. And then there's the final shot, which is, for all intents and purposes, the spitting image of a Renaissance devotional image. I don't know why people don't talk about this one more; it's one of Scorsese's masterpieces. Grade: A

Whisper of the Heart (耳をすませば) (1995)
It's minor Studio Ghibli fare, lacking the depth of texture and wonder that characterizes the studio's best work. But minor is far from bad, and Whisper of the Heart is a savory little slice-of-life film, chronicling a low-stakes but heartfelt coming of age. I love how small everything is: the story, under most circumstances, would have been a micro-budget live-action indie, but under director Yoshifumi Kondo (his sole director credit before his death in 1998), it's languished over in lavish detail that brings its myriad poignancies and trivialities to life. Like I said, it's not among the studio's best—a few last-minute gestures ring a little false, stretching the smallness a bit too much—but it is the sort of modest work that it seems only Ghibli would put out with this care. Grade: B+

Ordet (1955)
Ordet is, to vaguely spoil its simple plot, a film about recontextualizing the idea of a miracle. Set in that ever-fertile environment for religious dialogue, postwar Europe, the movie focuses intently on the problems of modernity and science within Christian supernatural belief. Characters grapple with God's silence; they experience crushing hardship; they stare in horror at the abyss of losing belief—this is about 90% of the film before the humble yet powerful insertion of the supernatural into this context. In doing so, Ordet is able to simultaneously set its story within a rational, mid-century perspective that wouldn't feel out of place within one of the more cynical post-belief Bergman films or any number of the "death of God" European art films from the '50s and '60s and also preserve its supernatural underpinnings as legitimately supernatural and not just a convenient quirk of the film's world. If you've been raised in Christianity and read the Bible at all, you'll know the tendency for the stories of miracles to take on a mundane quality through sheer repetition ("Well, of course Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, I know that already"). Ordet, then, with its viciously realist, doubting setting, becomes a compelling reminder of the sheer wonder of the miraculous that I think we've lost through our familiarity and distance from the events depicted in scripture. The result is one of the most beautiful and affirming ruminations on faith I've ever seen committed to film. Grade: A

Music

Foxygen - Hang (2017)
We could use more glam in what's left of the indie rock scene, so it's a nice evolution to have Foxygen, former Velvet Underground torchbearers, follow in Lou Reed's footsteps toward poppier, more theatrical ground. With the lush strings and chamber pop production, though, Lou Reed probably isn't the best point of reference anymore; "Follow the Leader" feels a bit like a T. Rex strut, while the singalong "Avalon" has the hallmarks of a great Queen track. And that's just the opening two songs. It's not groundbreaking music, but, especially after the double-album dud, ...And Star Power, it's lively, boisterous, and, most of all, lots of fun. Grade: B+

The Men - Leave Home (2011)
The debut by prolific punk rockers The Men has all the mean ferocity of the band's best work with little of the spacey fluff that's padded out some of their more recent releases. The first song, "If You Leave..." is sedate and fuzzed out, the weakest track here, but don't let that fool you; track two, "Lotus," with its "ONE TWO THREE FOUR" count off and subsequent guitar theatrics, kicks the album into a high gear it seldom leaves and often betters later on, particularly in the scorching mid-album duo, "L.A.D.O.C.H." and "()." It's solid, high-energy punk throughout and worth checking out if you're looking for that sort of thing. Grade: B+