Favorite Movies of 2023

I don't have a lot to say here, so I'll make it very brief. These are my favorite movies! I've (obviously) not been doing reviews on the blog this past year, but I am still updating my Letterboxd, so when it says "Read original review," it's linking to that.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! Feel free to share your own favorites!

Favorite Movies

1. May December
Stunning, unclassifiable cinema. I've liked a lot of what Todd Haynes has done in the 21st century, but the slipperiness of this film feels like a return to the complex semiotics he was playing with in his '90s work.

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2. The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki came out of retirement not just to make the best animated movie of the year and a dense, self-reflexive meditation on loss and creation but also to make sure that people remember that his movies can pivot from cute magical hijinks to grim nightmare fantasies full of bird poop and blood. The gooey-ness of Miyakazi films is underappreciated, but it's front and center here. I guess that might sound off-putting, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't enjoy this movie on some level, so don't knock it until you've tried it.

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3. Knock at the Cabin
Speaking of not knocking (hahaaa) until you try it, I feel like I still encounter a lot of people who still have not forgiven M. Night Shyamalan for his wilderness period. Those people are missing out majorly. Without expending a lot of energy, you could probably convince me to say that this is the best film of his career. Obviously the best performance of Dave Bautista's career.

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4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Replicates the slow, horrific march to the grave that Scorsese achieved in The Irishman, only this time, it's a genocide. I'm very much into this late-style Scorsese.

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5. Afire
People don't seem to like this one as much as the previous few Christian Petzold movies, and it certainly doesn't have the mythic, political overtures as, say, Transit, but in place of that, it is as vicious a character piece as he's ever done.

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6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The fact that this flopped at the box office is so incredibly depressing to me. This should be a family film instant classic; Rachel McAdams should be getting an Oscar; Kelly Fremon Craig should be getting Greta Gerwig money, acclaim, and household name status. I suppose prospects of it finding an audience streaming on [checks notes] Starz is unlikely, but I'm hoping.

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7. You Hurt My Feelings
Most of the time with Nicole Holofcener, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's what's nice about it. Good to see that her partnership with Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to bear fruit. Bonus points for tunneling into some very specific anxieties of mine this time around.

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8. The Holdovers
I thought for sure after the nostalgia-baiting trailer and opening stylistic pastiche that I would find this too cute, but no, it's very good! Sure to be a new sad-sack Christmas classic. It will probably be up for all sorts of awards, and I can get behind that.

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9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most technically and aesthetically adventurous mainstream American animated movie in years, more so than the first one by a considerable margin, and that alone was probably enough to land this in my top 10. On top of that, though, I was actually into the story, and while I am entirely prepared to eat crow if the sequel resolves all of the threads in this movie with a wet fart, for now, I am actually excited to see what happens next.

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10. Godzilla Minus One
In addition to just being a very entertaining monster movie, I want to highlight how great the design and effects are on Godzilla himself (itself? themself?): maintaining the lovably bulgy proportions of the old "dude in a rubber suit" Godzillas while also containing the scale and menace that CG can provide. The best effects of any effects-driven movie I saw this year, which should put American studios to shame.

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Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: BlackBerry—In the year of the "brand biopic," this caustic take on a brand doomed to fail stood out. Great performances all around, too: Glenn Howerton just screams the whole movie, and it is very watchable.

Would Have Been in the Top 10 If It Were Actually a Feature Film: That collection of shorts adapting Roald Dahl that Wes Anderson did for Netflix—I've enjoyed Wes Anderson's output of the past decade even as he has divided some of his fans while tunneling deeper and deeper into the hermeticism of his aesthetic. However, this is easily his best work since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel. An utter delight, and the "it's a stage play, but also an audiobook" format proves surprisingly flexible for telling four very different stories.

Best Documentary: In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50—A compelling rumination on mortality and Robert Fripp's dictatorial regime within the band. Terrific music, of course.

Best Action: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One—I mean, it's a new Mission: Impossible movie, so of course. There also wasn't a ton of competition. A very limp year for American action films.

Best Action Sequence: John Wick: Chapter 4—That said, I gotta give props to John Wick fighting his way up that staircase (twice!) near the end of this entirely too-long series finale. For as much as Cruise gets all the Keaton comparisons (mostly valid), that one sequence feels like the strongest evocation of silent comedy I saw in a mainstream American film this year. The train crash scene in Dead Reckoning comes at a close second, though.

Movie I Laughed Most Watching: Bottoms—This bizarro-world high school comedy is something of a return to the '90s/2000s heyday of the spoof movie, e.g. Not Another Teen Movie, though rather than parody anything specific, Bottoms instead just goes for the weird and the heightened. It doesn't all work, but most of it does.

Best Joke: Barbie—Ken mansplaining Pavement to Barbie is probably only funny for the very narrow swatch of boring, approaching-middle-age men that I consider myself a part of, but this was a big moment for us.

More People Should Talk About This One: The Starling Girl—Evokes its Christian fundamentalist milieu with more accuracy than anything I've ever seen in a movie even approaching mainstream, and while for me that alone would be enough to rush out to see this film, it also does a terrific job telling a very human story that I found riveting. Maybe the contours of this movie just appeal to me more than most people, but I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: Infinity Pool—In what may become an annual fixture of this list (MaXXXine may come out this year!), I have to shout out Mia Goth's performance here, which is far and away the best thing about Infinity Pool (a movie I enjoyed otherwise, I should stress). For Your Consideration: Mia Goth draped across the hood of a car, shouting the protagonist's name while reading negative reviews of his ill-begotten novel.

Best Audience Con: Skinamarink—Basically an avant-garde film marketed as a horror film, and it somehow made $2.1 million! I liked it, for what it's worth, but mostly, I respect the audacity.

Best Vibes: Rye Lane—A very fun, frothy rom-com with a tremendous sense of place, style, and music. Just a good time overall, I felt good watching it, and I have nothing but good memories about it.

Most Vibes: Enys Men—I almost gave this the "best" vibes award, but I don't think "best" is the best way to describe something that feels this mysterious and at-times threatening. Still, it's unparalleled in the thick atmosphere it creates. Good thing, too, because that's basically all it does.

"Not Her Best, But I Appreciate That She's Still Doing Her Thing" Award: Showing Up—Every Kelly Reichardt movie feels like a miracle for existing, especially in a film economy that doesn't make a lot of space (or funding) for these kind of without-a-marketing-hook pieces of gentle rumination.

"Good For Her" Award: Poor Things—I didn't love this as much as some people did, but Emma Stone did great work with out-of-left-field performances this year (see also: The Curse). Very interested to see what else she does now that she seems to be in her weirdo phase. Also, good for her character; seems like she had a great time.

"Good For Him" Award: Beau Is Afraid—Ari Aster, man, I think it's cool that you are comfortable enough to spend $35 million setting fire to all your good will you've earned so far. I genuinely respect that.

"Don't Know How to Work This In, But I Feel Like I Should Include This One" Award: No One Will Save You—Probably doomed to be forgotten as it lies buried on Hulu, but this is a very fun, exciting, clever alien invasion thriller.

Most Played in the Room Adjacent to Me: The Super Mario Bros. Movie—My son got majorly obsessed with Mario and Donkey Kong this year, so as soon as this got put on Netflix, it was curtains for my hopes of getting him into European arthouse cinema during his midday movie/rest time.

Worst Animated Movie of the Year: Nimona—Despite there being two animated movies in my top 10, this was a particularly bad year for feature-film animation, and this was the worst of the worst that I saw (consider yourself lucky, Disney's Wish). Thoroughly irritating, and it looks bad.

Worst Movie of the Year: Your Place or Mine—Probably not actually the worst movie of the year, but I watch so few streaming-dump "content" movies that it feels pretty egregious when I do happen to sit through one.

Best Non-2023 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2023: Theorem—This film simply refused to leave my brain since I saw it in March. A bourgeois family has a sexual encounter with the divine and the spirals into oblivion: the story all of us Christians living a middle class American existence should be wrestling with.

Mini Reviews for May 23 - 29, 2022

SCHOOOOOOL'S OUT FOR! SUMMER!

Movies

Top Gun (1986)
This is an impeccable piece of craft, and the dogfights are great. I also understand why people want to reclaim the movie based on its homoeroticism and Dudes Rock ethos, and more power to those people who can, but I kind of had trouble approaching the movie from that angle. The sincerity of the male camraderie in this film is very sweet, but what this movie unintentionally underlines for me are the ways in which this type of open affection among men is only really permitted in certain very specific settings in which you have to perform very aggro-male behaviors to be welcomed, among which is the military. If you try to approach these spaces without being willing (or able) to perform the masculine scripts, they can become very hostile, and this spills out into broader culture in general, where even among fairly nonconforming, progressive spaces, it's hard to have male-to-male interactions without a kind of stand-off-ish-ness that makes affectionate camraderie difficult. While it's certainly not specifically Top Gun's fault that this is the case, I personally found it pretty difficult to embrace the characters with the innocence and openness the story demands of viewers, knowing that the domineering, hyper-male environment depicted here is what gatekeeps the acceptance of close male friendship elsewhere. I had steeled myself for the blindly imperialist, rah-rah military stuff that permeates this movie, but I was caught offguard by the way I struggled with the gender stuff. Still, an incredible piece of filmmaking in terms of basically every technical aspect. This is the movie the '80s were made for. Grade: C+

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
If it's possible to be even more jingoist than the original, this one does it, with the central conflict orbiting around the question of whether it is better to blow up "the enemy" with drones or with human-piloted planes, and like, I know it's a metaphor for the film industry, but it also isn't, not with the Pentagon actively involved in your production. But anyway, coming to Top Gun expecting a critique of the American military is the most quixotic of quixotic film-viewing postures. More importantly, like a lot of these legacy sequels, this one isn't nearly as dramatically sturdy as the original: the well-defined bros-being-bros camaraderie between Maverick and Goose as well as the frenemy status of Iceman have been traded for a pretty anonymous cast of youngsters with very little chemistry neither as-written nor onscreen—the film is just a whole lot less energetic in building the connections between these characters, and considerably less homoerotic as a result, too, which takes away some of the interesting subtext from the original. The "Maverick has to reconcile with Goose's son" stuff is, though a lot clearer than the rest of the film's relationships, weirdly morose—this movie reminds me a lot of Rocky Balboa, aka "Rocky 6," in the degrees to which it takes a mostly triumphalist movie property and allows it to be thoroughly haunted by mortality, which maybe would play better for me if I had cared at all about the characters in the first Top Gun. I'm not sure how much I miss the bro-camaraderie aspect, though; this film is definitely less-textured without it (and without the evocative Tony Scott/Jeffrey L. Kimball pop-art cinematography), but the absence of that also saves me from the noxious, oppressive masculinity of the original, too, so I guess I can call that a draw. But why am I talking about the characters? All of that is, as it was in the original, immaterial to the real draw of the film, which is when the planes go vroom-vroom and pew-pew, and anytime Top Gun: Maverick puts its characters in a plane, God is my witness this becomes the best tentpole action film in years. There's just not a sophisticated way to explain the ways that the flight scenes tickled my lizard brain—I was enthralled, particularly during the magnificent climax. The whole movie is more or less one long training for the characters to do what basically amounts to the Death Star trench run but with F-18s, and when the movie finally got to the moment when they have to do the mission, I felt giddy. The flying is one of the only ways in which this movie improves on the original, and honestly, it's the only way that really counts, and it so completely blows the first movie out of the water in this regard that it kinda doesn't matter whatever else negative I could say about the film. The vroom-vroom parts freakin' rock, and the movie has the good sense to make the entire final 30 minutes full of vroom-vroom parts. My critical faculties just can't stand up to whatever sorcery this film is doing with planes. It's a good movie, y'all. Grade: B

The Velvet Underground (2021)
Begins as a five-star, A+ experience before ultimately settling into something pleasant but disappointingly conventional—which, to be fair, is basically the trajectory of the VU anyway, and given how meticulous and intentional a filmmaker Todd Haynes is, it's hard to know if this is on purpose or not. But boy, do I wish this had kept with the style of the opening 60-ish minutes, which finds Todd Haynes leaning heavily into his penchant for pastiche as he apes Andy Warhol and a bunch of that '60s avant-garde scene in depicting the cultural context of the Velvet Underground's rise. The film seems curiously incurious about the band itself, whose storied discography it practically sprints through over the course of about 45 minutes, but it makes up for it by having basically nonstop needledrops from the Velvet Underground and associated NYC acts. My music tastes have gone in a lot of different directions since I was a senior in high school falling in love with that scene, but that music remains a comforting home base for me, and you won't hear me complaining about hearing it for two hours. Grade: B+

Mission to Mars (2000)
I remember seeing the trailers for this when it was first coming out and being really intrigued by it. I was very into space mysteries and aliens at the time, and I read a bunch of Isaac Asimov and William Sleator and watched a bunch of The Twilight Zone and stuff like that. I never got to see it back then, and if I had, I probably would have been disappointed by how little it focused on the Mars mystery stuff compared to the relationships between the characters. Seeing it now, as an allegedly mature adult who likes feelings and relationships, I'm struck by how open-hearted and sentimental the relationships are. The big action setpiece in the middle, when they have to connect to that satellite and land it, is at least 50% just the characters crying and saying that they don't want to lose each other, which is kinda sweet. It would be even sweeter if it didn't have the same stilted flatness that you get when the hard sci-fi authors like Asimov tried to write emotional arcs, but that's definitely what this felt like. Still, I appreciate the effort. Also, I thought the Mars mystery stuff was cool, though I guess I'm still ten years old, because I wish there was more of it. Grade: B

 

Television

Bob's Burgers, Season 12 (2021-2022)
I somehow missed reviewing Season 11 last year, but it doesn't really matter because at this point, all Bob's Burgers's seasons are functionally the same. The show has its formula down to a science by now, to the point where even its off-format episodes have their tropes (an extended pop-culture riff, you say? elaborate musical sequences, you say?). It's been years since we learned something surprising about these characters or that the show did something genuinely unprecedented, but that's fine in my book; this is pure comfort-food viewing for me now, and I'm glad this show has found a stasis and has stuck to it rather than pushing for newer and more questionable beats like its Fox colleague The Simpsons was doing when it was Bob's Burgers's age. In the era of streaming and prestige television, the ability for a show to consistently deliver the same kind of mild entertainment week-in, week-out has become undervalued, but this is why I still love network sitcoms. I'm also stoked for the movie, so I guess we'll see how that turns out. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for May 2 - 8, 2022

Two and a half weeks until school lets out.

Movies

C'mon C'mon (2021)
I sure do love 20th Century Women, so I'm super sad that this just didn't add up for me. Some very good component parts: Joaquin Phoenix is in sensitive dude mode, which is a refreshing fit for him, and Woody Norman (imagine being 12 years old and named "Woody") has an amazing ability to portray a precocious kid who isn't immediately grating onscreen, though I'm not sold on his performance being "good" so much as it is just good for what Joaquin is doing, but regardless, those two together are very watchable. But I had a hard time dialing into this movie until it started talking about how the incidents depicted in the movie will just be vague memories for the child, and that got me all verklempt because I started thinking about my own kids, with whom it already seems like I've spent a lifetime with but the oldest of whom is only just getting to the age where he's going to be remembering anything that happened. I think what this movie is short on that 20th Century Women has in spades (and what it turns out I'm most interested in with Mike Mills's feature filmography) are the moments like that, where the movie casually flips from the immediacy of the present into the hindsight at the scale of lifetimes—it's a kind of twee move at times, but when Mills nails it, he freakin' nails it and contextualizes the moments of our lives within these impossibly big timelines in a way that feels like a human-scaled Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot thing. This movie's okay, but it could have used a lot more of that, because if there's anything that makes the passage of time palpable, it's being around children. Grade: B-

The Doom Generation (1995)
Pretty unpleasant satire about a trio of alleged heterosexuals who blow up their lives in a spate of nihilism and as a result briefly find themselves with enough space to find meaningful connections in the fluidity outside of the hetero-monogamous paradigm before they inevitably get crushed by the hateful hegemony of the United States mainstream. It's intentionally unpleasant, I think, given the completely understandable contempt Araki had as a sexual minority for the United States government and for sexual squares at the time (continues to have?), and I usually dig this kind of abrasive punk ethos—very much in the vein of The Living End, in which the realization that the powers that be are indifferent to and in fact even might be advocating for your annihilation forces you to find a life outside of the state and the family and all the traditional structures that those powers use as crutches, and I really like that movie. But something about the fusion of that with a very manic sensibility that presages Kaboom (my least-favorite Araki I've seen so far) makes this a lot less compelling to me than The Living End. The particular despair at the core of this movie—the kind of horrified reaction to that '90s "End of History" moment where there's an apocalyptic, even cataclysmic sense of looking at the abuses of liberal democracy and capitalism and being told This Is All There Is—feels a lot more vivacious and urgent than whatever Araki is going for in Kaboom, and it funnily enough feels easier to transpose that sense of doom that Araki felt from the AIDS pandemic into a modern framework of desperation birthed from the climate change/late capitalism/fundamentalist religion/fascism stew we've got cooking in the 2020s than it is to connect to the theoretically much more contemporary doom in Kaboom. But nevertheless, something about the way this movie presents itself feels forced and postured in a very Kaboom-ish way that I find irritating. Also, while I don't dislike Diablo Cody, Rose McGowan's character feels like it was written by Diablo Cody, which is both kind of funny to me and also somewhat annoying in this context. Stoner James Duval is very sweet, though, and I genuinely loved him. I dunno, a mixed bag. Grade: B-

Nowhere (1997)
It's hard for me to describe why I found this movie to be so resonant when I somewhat bounced off the previous entry in Gregg Araki's "teen apocalypse" trilogy, The Doom Generation. But I thought this one was kind of beautiful in its chaos. It's no less bleak or filled with arch dialogue than The Doom Generation, but by the end, I had a gigantic lump in my throat. I dunno, maybe it's just the way that the movie frames itself around a single day culminating in a party, which is a structure I absolutely love in movies, or maybe it's the way that it positions its "end of history" despair within a chronological continuum that begins with a wild, liberatory abandon that slowly becomes sadder and more hellish. There's something about those final thirty-ish minutes in this movie that perfectly capture that morose, semi-panicky feeling of being at a party and slowly realizing that you don't want to be there and that you're too sober to even enjoy the people you came for and that it's too late to catch up even if you wanted to. Maybe it's the way that even this is positioned within a broader arc of James Duval's character reaching desperately for human connection of some kind through the haze, looking around at a world where nothing makes sense except the things whose cold logic feels so cruel that you have no chance but to reject it, and when suddenly out of nowhere he actually finds that connection for a fleeting moment despite literally everything else in the movie, it's this unspeakably sublime moment that I can only really connect to the ending of Mysterious Skin in the broader context of Araki's career. This is a lot less overtly political than the other two "apocalypse" movies, but the fluid reality of this film has a texture and an emotional landscape so deeply buried within the subjective experience of knowing you will live through the end of the world that it feels radically empathetic in a way that neither of the other two achieve. I was trepidatious about this one after not being over-the-moon about The Doom Generation, but wow, consider me over-the-moon here. Grade: A-

Poison (1991)
It makes sense that this is Todd Haynes's debut film, as it contains basically all of his interests (pastiche, camp, queerness, the fluidity of identity, the oppressive unlivability of modern society) packaged into a pretty scuzzy, rough-around-the-edges triptych of stories. It's pretty wild and radical and unbuttoned in a way that a lot of Haynes's future work would dial back, but also, I do prefer the pristine polish of his other movies compared to this. An undeniable landmark and the kind of movie you can probably only make once, but also exhausting for being that. Grade: B

 

 

To Sleep with Anger (1990)
To Sleep with Anger is folkloric in a way that is rare enough in the literary precedents this is pretty obviously drawing from (Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Zora Neale Hurston) and nearly unheard-of within cinema. It's at once fairly straightforward—an old family friend (an unparalleled Danny Glover) comes uninvited for a visit and throws off the equilibrium of the community—while swimming in the mirage-like ambiguity that is the province of myth, a dozen different meanings sprouting from any one line or character. A masterpiece of that uncanny kind that feels as though it's grown from something outside of itself, as if the frames of the film itself are just a flimsy veneer over some ineffable Beyond. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for March 2-8, 2020

One week until Spring Break. One week until Spring Break. One week until Spring Break.

Movies

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019)
Céline Sciamma has made several good movies, but this is comfortably my favorite of hers, retroactively one of my top five movies of 2019, and likely the French director's masterpiece (I still haven't seen her debut, Water Lilies). A love story whose deep emotional contours mirror its sonic and visual ones in a way that melds form and narrative more thoroughly and organically than in any other 2019 movie I can remember. It's a swooningly lush aesthetic experience—I could have existed in this movie for hours more; in fact, those painting scenes alone could have lasted years, and I wouldn't have complained. The movie's hushed sound design emphasizes the smallest of details—the scratch of charcoal on canvas, the rustle of a dress, a hand brushing across a sprig of rosemary, a caught breath as one character meets the gaze of another—until they take on an otherworldly richness, and this is precisely the movie in a nutshell: capturing that specific magnetism that compels you to study every detail of someone you love. This is, of course, literalized by the plot itself, which involves a painter scrutinizing her subject for a portrait until this scrutiny blossoms into love, but this story wouldn't hold nearly so much weight without the full alignment of the cinematic style behind this philosophical/emotional thesis. As much as the history of cinema insists upon it, love isn't made of grand gestures; it's the accumulation of the smallest of sensory morsels: her eyebrows when she's upset, the water dripping from her nose as she shivers after an ocean swim; the timbre of her voice as she asks you about love. None of this would register without the film's exquisite quietness, nor would the two moments at which music bursts forth loudly be so powerful: once an ethereal folk song around a campfire, another a famous Vivaldi composition in a concert hall. These two moments occur at the emotional climaxes of the film, and after the silence we've become accustomed to, it's literally dizzying to be swept up in the maximalism of these moments, a cinematic out-of-body experience where the distance between viewer and subject functionally disappears in the same way that the space between painter and lady does in this story: to watch someone this closely means to be enveloped as soon as they gesture toward you. Two become one: viewer to characters, lover to lover. This movie is magical. Grade: A

Dark Waters (2019)
Do not understand at all the tepid response to this movie—it's every bit as paranoid and apocalyptic as Todd Haynes's previous "we're all being poisoned" freakout, Safe. This is definitely a mainstream legal thriller, but it's a cracking one, and while the script occasionally gestures toward the generic (poor, poor Anne Hathaway gets saddled with a completely unironic deployment of the "longsuffering wife" trope), the movie's style is covered with such thick layers of sickening despair that it transforms the film into nothing short of a horror movie. The yellow tint of the cinematography alone is grotesque enough to make you ill, and the VHS footage of cow tumors sees the film's reality practically melt under the evil knowingly perpetrated by DuPont. Our world is a hellscape whose contours were intentionally sculpted by capitalism, and I've seen few movies that capture the sheer malaise of knowing that fact like Dark Waters and its parade of reflections of branded billboards and fluorescent logos on car windows and wet pavement. A waking nightmare of a movie masquerading as a potboiler. Grade: A-

I Was at Home, But... (Ich war zuhause, aber) (2019)
I can't say that I understood this movie. It's a very scattered, often abstractly structured collection of incidents with sometimes only tenuous connections between them, and I couldn't summarize this movie if I tried because it's hard to hold all those incidents up together into a coherent whole. That said, I did find myself connecting pretty strongly to individual moments: a lengthy diatribe of a disgruntled theater-goer to the director of a film she watched; a strikingly tender tableau at a swimming pool; a mother with frayed nerves shouting at her children and then feeling quiet remorse as they leave the room. There's a cock-eyed compassion to the humanity of these little moments, and I guess enough of these moments added up to my feeling pretty positive about the movie as a whole. Grade: B

The Return of the King (1980)
In which Rankin/Bass try to cobble together a sequel to both their adaptation of The Hobbit and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. This movie does a couple of things well. The pre-Ghibli Ghibli folks are still supervising the animation, as they did for The Hobbit, and it leads to some cool character designs (the Witch-King of Angmar looks extremely dope) and of course those water-color backgrounds. I also dig the way this opens with a literal invocation of the muses and then goes on to do a whole bunch of other structural things informed by the tropes of epic poetry, which is interesting and feels in-line with Tolkien's original project. But otherwise, The Return of the King is an extremely dopey adaptation. The music sucks (unless we're going to ironically appreciate the orc-disco, "Where There's a Whip There's a Way") and slows down the pace to a crawl—the first ten minutes of this barely 90-minute movie is just a song recapping the plot of The Hobbit and the first part of Lord of the Rings, and that's not the only time that happens. Even ignoring the pacing issues, the storytelling is extremely haphazard, both as a continuation of the previous movies (if you watched this immediately after Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, you would have no idea how Frodo is suddenly captured inside of Cirith Ungol and Samwise is now the ringbearer, since it skips the whole Shelob thing in favor of starting immediately where Tolkien's book does) as well as a movie unto itself (one character has to very hastily explain who Éowyn is like thirty seconds before she kills the Witch-King because apparently the movie couldn't be bothered to introduce her earlier—like couldn't we have skipped one of the musical sequences to have her show up just once before she becomes crucial to the plot?). And with all respect to my soon-to-be Ghibli bros, outside of the cool bits, the animation is pretty lousy, too, somehow more technically accomplished than the previous two movies while looking several magnitudes dumber. It's not like the other animated Tolkien adaptations of this period were sterling masterpieces or anything, but they both had a kind of striking ambition to them, whereas this is just a muddled mess. Definitely the worst of the loose trilogy. Grade: C-

Snoopy, Come Home (1972)
This is the first Peanuts feature-length movie I've seen, and if this is any indication, the gang probably should have stuck to half-hour TV specials if they were going to venture from the funny pages at all. This movie is clearly padded, which leads to some fun, weird moments that might not have happened otherwise (Snoopy has a trippy dream sequence for no real reason, which is both incongruous for Peanuts but also charming), but it also leads to a lot of boring, overlong sequences without a ton happening—I don't know where my tipping point was, but I definitely got tired of the musical sequences, for example. There are some bright patches of classic Peanuts bleakness (Charlie Brown, after throwing a rock into a pond: "Everything I do makes me feel guilty"), but this is slack enough that I'd much rather be watching one of the specials—or really, just reading the comics. Grade: C

The Front Page (1931)
Took me a loooong time to stop the voice in my head that kept asking, "But why are they talking so slowly??"—my experience with this movie was definitely hurt by this movie not being its remake, His Girl Friday, and this version's marriage plot is definitely hurt by the fact that the lovers aren't working together in the newsroom (compare Peggy, sidelined for long sections of the film, to the constant, blistering back and forth between Hildy and Walter). But not all movies can be the greatest (and fastest) American comedy of all time, and so I finally was able to force myself to watch this movie on its own terms. It's got some pretty interesting editing, and the part where Hildy is walking out of the newsroom and shouts, "See ya later, you wage slaves!" made me laugh pretty hard. But on the whole, it's a much darker and more serious movie than His Girl Friday (as is, presumably, the original play on which this all is based), which is sometimes to its benefit: the pathological compulsion of these journalists stings a bit more than in His Girl Friday, and we're allowed to wallow in the ugliness and collateral damage a bit more, I guess that's a decent-enough substitute for the characters not acting at an amphetamine pace for the duration of the film. Grade: B

Music

Stevie Wonder - Music of My Mind (1972)
This album is more or less the beginning of Stevie Wonder's legendary run of records in the '70s, so it feels a little petty to complain that this isn't as good as something like Innervisions—like, between 1972 and 1976, Stevie made more great albums than most artists make in a lifetime, so who cares if he has one that's not quite great when it is still very good? Music of My Mind is very good. There are bum tracks ("Superwoman" isn't too great, and it makes up 1/6 of the album!), but there's gold, too: "Love Having You Around" is a stomping opener, "Keep on Running" is a terrific little groove, "Evil" is a soulful gospel finale. Plus, the album has some of the hippest use of the Moog synthesizer in pop history. And even if the record only hits a double as opposed to a home run, it's still kind of thrilling to know that this is the beginning of Stevie Wonderful, maestro. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 9 - 15, 2018

Hey, again! Don't forget to vote in the summer project poll! Democracy is good! You are a human being with rights!

Movies

The Death of Stalin (2017)

While not quite as tight and rolling-on-the-floor funny as In the Loop, The Death of Stalin is an order of magnitude darker and more ambitious, which counts for a lot in my book. Seeming to take the premise that the USSR at the time of Stalin's death was roughly in the same state of political cravenness and strong-manning sycophancy as In the Loop's chaos left the UK's government by the end of that film (give or take a few state-sanctioned executions), The Death of Stalin explicates what happens when death—not election—is part of the mundane political procedure, and it's fascinating and hilarious, though the fascinating stuff and the hilarious stuff usually take turns, meaning that this movie is for long stretches a kind of cock-eyed historical thriller more than it is a comedy. Which in itself is fascinating. Its Russian setting also allows a bit of distance for us Westerners, lacking the "this is YOUR government" immediacy of In the Loop and thus making this movie's thesis about human nature and the piggish brutality of politics's quest for power a bit more metaphorical and less gut-punchy than Iannucci's last film. But this is all relatively small quibbling: The Death of Stalin is a tremendous movie, black as a gulag cell and as deft at balancing its tone between the horror of its political satire and the lithe comedy of its dialogue as any mainstream English-language movie has been since Doctor Strangelove. Grade: A-

Wonderstruck (2017)

The story is clunky almost to the point of complete dysfunction, but that doesn't really matter, honestly, since Wonderstruck seems to aspire to that especially rare category of "art films for children." As such, it's pretty much a mood piece, and the best moments in it are the ones that are wordless and basically plotless: kids exploring cryptic urban spaces with that sublime combination of mystery and awe that animates the best of children's lit—think the early stages of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or the better entries in The Chronicles of Narnia. It all leads up to a finale involving a scale model that, for all the creaking narrative structures that it takes to get us there, is breathtaking in its low-key surrealism and raw emotional potency. And if nothing else, the movie's a sumptuous Who's Who of Todd Haynes cinematic flourishes: stylistically grounded evocations of historical periods, miniatures, multiple actors playing the same characters, gorgeously hip music selections (Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's "Evening Star" is something of a motif, so hook this soundtrack right to my veins). I don't know if any of this works for children, but it sure works for me. Grade: B+

The Wedding Plan (לעבור את הקיר) (2016)

I found Fill the Void, Rama Burshtein's other feature, to be kind of dull, and such also is The Wedding Plan. But at least Fill the Void had engaging stylistic features like its attention to framing and costuming. The Wedding Plan, by comparison, looks like pretty conventional television. Interesting setting (we need more movies focusing on religiously devout Jewish women in Israel), but not really much to offer otherwise. Grade: C

22 Jump Street (2014)

As with the first movie, there are a few bits that work extremely well (the credits gag is an all-timer and added at least half a star to this review), while the rest of the movie is merely just mildly amusing. Still, I enjoyed it; the meta humor is surprisingly not terrible, and and Hill and Tatum continue to be having the best time ever, which is contagious. I'm not sure if all the "haha, bromance=gay" jokes are endearing for the way that they thoroughly and unjudgmentally embrace the homosexual subtext of the scenes or still covertly homophobic for the way that they are after all couched in the idea that homosexuality is somehow inherently funnier than heterosexuality, but either way, it's an interesting flavor for the movie that Jonah Hill's character is thoroughly unashamed of Tatum reaching up Hill's pants and feeling his junk. Grade: B

The Sugarland Express (1974)

A great deal of fun right up until it isn't, and the ending becomes almost unbearably tragic. Obviously, this is Spielberg's theatrical debut, and it's fascinating to look at this younger, scrappier Spielberg in comparison to Dignified Spielberg of the last couple decades. Spielberg has always been a "liberal" with a soft spot for those outside the establishment (even his "institution" pieces like Lincoln and The Post have a lot to do with the righteous transgression of procedure's traditional boundaries by outsiders), but the way that Sugarland Express positions outlaws as heroes and police as murderers feels so far afield from anything 21st-century Spielberg would touch. Spielberg has never been a radical; nevertheless, this is his politically radical movie, or as close as he ever got to one. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for July 31 - August 6, 2017

Last day before students come back. Exciting stuff, sure, but I'll miss all that spare time.

Movies

Song to Song (2017)
Points to Terrance Malick for just how far off-brand he goes in Song to Song. This movie's 129 minutes show us scenes of graphic nudity, prostitution, lots of rock music, very little classical music, Flea and Patti Smith (both playing themselves), zero natural imagery, crowded urban spaces, and the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms (though honestly, it's amazing that it's taken so long for psychedelics to make it into a Malick film). However, if you've been paying attention to this director's post-Tree-of-Life output, this might not be all that strange to you, although Song to Song is certainly the most committed iteration of this new Malick, which generally involves a sort of feature-length video-essay on the intersection of contemporary urban/suburban design with modern psychological malaise. It's all very pretty and interestingly shot (as with last year's stellar Knight of Cups, this is all shot in digital, another new Malick quirk), the concrete, glass, and water of the modern city yearning for mystic grandeur like a hollow mimicry of the lush nature of The New World or Days of Heaven. But this is, by far, the most narrative-heavy of the recent Malick trilogy, and while I'm all for Malick returning to narrative film, there's just not a lot under the hood here. Knight of Cups turned its scenes into literal archetypes, with its convergences of Pilgrim's Progress with the Tarot deck, and Song to Song seems to have done the same thing but forgotten to tell us so—Ryan Gosling is an almost comically saintly figure (he's principled! he doesn't sell out his music! he cares for an aging relative!), Rooney Mara is adrift in a sexual odyssey of sorts as she works through the various ways modern society has made experiences hollow, and while there are some interesting wrinkles in the characters played by Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman (who have a profoundly twisted relationship, especially for a Malick film), the movie never really works through the trope-ish flatness of Gosling and Mara's characters. It ends strong with a tremendously sweet conclusion, but getting there is frequently cold and uninteresting. A noble attempt, to be sure, but it doesn't really amount to anything substantially successful. Grade: B-

The Lost City of Z (2016)
The film described in the reviews of The Lost City of Z's small village's worth of vocal advocates is recognizable enough to what I saw to let me know that I didn't watch a completely different movie. But... I dunno, guys. I see the pieces of a masterpiece, but they're never really coming together in the most powerful way. I'm not sure whether to blame the editing or the screenplay, both of which, I think, flub on the admittedly difficult task of compressing years of real history into something of a mystically charged tale of a man determined to find an ancient ruin in the heart of the Amazon. Or maybe it's that writer/director James Gray is hamstrung by being tied to actual history. Whatever the case, this movie's sweep feels weightless when it should be grand, and its philosophical impulses bump up against but never quite nail down profundity. The visuals are splendid, and on a scene-by-scene basis, the film is powerful. Coming together into a cumulative thing bigger than the sum of those parts, though, is something that still feels just outside the movie's grasp. Grade: B

The Hunter (2011)
This movie should be a lot better than it is—a spare, pristine ethics thriller about the intersection between commerce and violence and the natural world. And it kind of is that, in theory. But Willem Dafoe's mercenary hunter protagonist (hired, in the movie, to kill the last few Tasmanian tigers that keep the species from total extinction) remains a dark nothing at the center of the film that keeps anything from actually catalyzing, and the movie never really figures out his psychology on a holistic level. So we're stuck with this, mildly entertaining and not altogether "bad" but still not particularly compelling either. Grade: B-

Knowing (2009)
The film's numerology-mixed-with-Ancient-Aliens-mixed-with-the-Book-of-Revelation-mixed-with-M.-Night-Shyamalan screenplay is too sincerely dumb for most of the movie to transcend it. But I'll give it this: the final 15-ish minutes are absolutely breathtaking, mainly in a visual sense but also thematically—a demented inversion of Close Encounters of the Close Kind that's simultaneously horrifying and kind of wonderful, undergirded by some unconvincing but nevertheless breathtaking CGI. Too bad there are nearly two mediocre hours attached to that ending. Grade: C

I'm Not There. (2007)
An obvious companion to Haynes's Velvet Goldmine, I'm Not There is an impressionist, heavily art-house-ified treatment of the creative life of a cornerstone figure in rock history, as much cultural commentary as biopic. But whereas Velvet Goldmine is about the experience of rock fandom, filtering its not-quite David Bowie through the lens of journalists and, more significantly, young and impressionable teens, I'm Not There is a rendering of the experience of actually being the focus of that immense scrutiny and the various ways that celebrity and idolization fractures identity and compromises message—Bob Dylan is played by a whole host of actors ranging from kooky (Richard Gere, playing Dylan as Billy the Kid [whose allusion to Dylan's role in the Peckinpah movie does nothing to make the out-of-nowhere western scenes any less bizarre]) to brilliant (an Academy-Award-nominated Cate Blanchett plays the electric-era Dylan with an astounding fidelity to the Dylan seen in Dont Look Back and other artifacts from the era). Unlike with Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes was actually able to secure the rights to use the artist-of-focus's songs, so we're treated to a wall-to-wall Dylan soundtrack, which is an aural pleasure but might end up being the film's biggest misstep—the lack of actual Bowie songs in Velvet Goldmine lent a mythic, shape-shifting quality to the film that complicated its narrative's relationship to history, but while I'm Not There, with its intentional surreality and actor-jumbling, is much more forthrightly shape-shifting, the tying of it all to Dylan's actual music somehow makes the film a bit too literal in its approach to the artist, transforming his life into something of a solvable jigsaw puzzle of symbolism rather than the inscrutable mystery of Velvet Goldmine's central character. Which is not to say this is "bad" or even just "okay." It's very good, and you're unlikely to find a more interesting and visually distinctive depiction of celebrity in film. It's just the slightest bit frustrating to see a double instead of a home run, given the subject and style. Grade: B+

It Came From Outer Space (1953)
Despite the assertions of its poster, It Came From Outer Space is a mostly un-amazing, un-exciting, and un-spectacular sci-fi cheapie with fairly hoaky 3D effects. Its shape-shifting alien does feel like an antecedent to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter's The Thing, which is worth something, I guess. But beyond historical curiosity, there's not a lot to be excited about her—certainly not the plot, whose third act wavers from "the aliens are evil!" to  "the aliens are just misunderstood!" to "the aliens are evil again, sort of!" to "but we kind of root for them anyway!" so quickly you'll barely have time to say, "Make up your mind already!" Grade: C+



Music

Arcade Fire - Everything Now (2017)
There's been something of a critical piling-on with indie stadium/art rockers Arcade Fire's fifth studio album, and I don't think that's quite fair, especially because the record contains some of their career-best material. I'm talking specifically about the triumphant title cut, the ABBA/Bowie fusion of our dreams, and the controversial "Creature Comfort," a nervy exploration of the ways the band may be complicit in the social structures that lead people to suicide that also has the best beat of the album. That said, the core critiques of the album aren't entirely off-base either; Everything Now is very much a concept album—and one insistent on dissecting the social ills of the melding of predatory capitalism with the "infinite content" of the Internet age. Arcade Fire have positioned themselves as something like 21st-century prophets since at least Neon Bible, so it's not as if that socially conscious reach is the problem in and of itself. However, no matter the intelligence of the ideas, the success of any concept album always lives and dies with the music, and there are definitely sections of Everything Now (the pretty weak middle "Peter Pan"-"Chemistry"-"Infinite Content/Infinite_Content" trio especially) where the album becomes more of an exercise in "I see what you did there" than anything truly felt. The good strongly outweighs the bad, but the bad is almost certainly the worst of their career. It's a solid effort but also the least-essential in Arcade Fire's discography. Grade: B