Announcement! My wife and I started a podcast! The basic idea is that we're reading through each book that's won a Newbery Medal and then discussing each one. I know I don't review a ton of books on this blog, especially children's books, but if that sounds at all interesting to you, here's the link!
Movies
I've seen people complain that this movie has a messy structure and an overcooked screenplay, and while I guess I theoretically understand why they'd say that (it definitely feels like we're seeing either too much or too little of Steven Yeun's character, and this movie is biting off a lot thematically with all of its "society of the spectacle" + limits of anthropomorphism stuff), I was captivated the whole time here. I'm an easy target for UFO thrillers, but even so, the specific ways in which Jordan Peele approaches that topic makes it feel like he was interested in all the same weirdo Americana stuff that I was growing up, and combine that with his Shyamalan-esque "just go for it, dude" conceptual unself-consciousness and his formidable formal command, and you've got a movie that's pretty specifically calibrated to my precise wavelength. I just thought this was a crackjack time at the movies. Also, re: the dense web of metaphors and thematic threads that a lot of people have found overdetermined and overbearing—I guess I have incurable English-teacher brain, but I thought that was fun! Grade: A-
Of all the major studios, DreamWorks is still doing the most interesting things with CG animation. It's a fairly paint-by-numbers heist film with a villain "reveal" that's even got to be obvious to the kids who make up the film's target audience, but at this point, I ain't watching DreamWorks animated movies for the plot: this has an intensely cool style that basically mixes 3D animation with some intentionally flat texturing and broad color work that make it look like computer-assisted cel animation of the kind you might have seen in the late '90s, or maybe even a digitally-inked comic book set in motion. Slick, but in a way that leaves room for play and invention. With any luck, one of these days, DreamWorks is going to get their hands on a front-to-back legitimately great screenplay and make the greatest mainstream animated feature of the decade. Until then, at least they're pushing the medium forward aesthetically. Grade: B
Softballs everything you would expect a mid-2000s family film set in the small-town South to (e.g. entirely benign Baptists, zero racial tensions), but its sense of place is really terrific—the movie nails the feel of that specific small-town window of the post-industrial, post-NAFTA but pre-"everything is just a fast food franchise or gas station" milieu: crumbling, half-vacant main street full of old-timers desperately clinging onto what remains of the idiosyncratic life their town once had. Some real grit at the margins of each shot. It's also surprisingly melancholy for a movie about a dog curing everyone's malaise. Credit to two strong central performances from Jeff Daniels and AnnaSophia Robb; the movie's deep undercurrent of sadness is simple but never calculated in their hands, which almost never happens with "single-dad reconnects with daughter" movies like this. Similar to its rendering of the setting, the movie's characterization of their relationship (and their shared but at times incompatible grief over the wife/mother who left them) is not particularly difficult, but it's so purely and effectively felt that it doesn't matter if the brush is broad. It's easy to say this a lot because major studios really only make like two or three types of movies nowadays, but they really don't make movies like this anymore, which is normally not something I would mourn (who misses the sappy family film?) but this movie's a great example of what we've lost by removing the possibility of the once-in-a-blue-moon successful product of this little genre. Grade: B
More of an anthology of previously released animated shorts than it is a fully original movie on its own, and Only one of the shorts in the anthology has anything even resembling film noir ("Tale About the Cat and the Moon"). So anyway, here's a ranking of the shorts, sorted by favorite to least-favorite. "Abductees" is far and away the best here, a real masterpiece and also one of the best pieces of UFO media I've ever seen, but all the films are great. Feature-length adult animation has always had a spotty track record, so shorts are where it's at. There should be more compilations like this: NOW That's What I Call Music!, only for experimental adult animation.
1. "Abductees" (1995, dir. Paul Vester)
2. "A Gentle Spirit" ("Lagodna") (1987, dir. Piotr Dumała)
3. "Joy Street" (1995, dir. Suzan Pitt)
4. "Ape" (1992, dir. Julie Zammarchi)
5. "Tale About the Cat and the Moon" ("Estória do Gato e da Lua") (1997, dir. Pedro Serrazina)
6. "Club of the Laid Off" ("Klub odložených") (1989, dir. Jiří Barta)
Grade: B+
For as much as this depicts misery and squalor (a crumbling city, endless rain, isolation in a pandemic [yike]), I found this to be deeply beautiful and human and even sweet. I have no idea how this would have played for me before having gone through several years of a pandemic characterizes by intermittent houseboundness and relative isolation (I at least have family at home), but the alienation these two characters feel from the broader world as well as the desperation with which they eventually cling to each other—right up to that transcendent ending in which the distance between the two is recklessly, compassionately pulled away—had me tearing up. I also watched it with my three-year-old, and that kind of drove home how lucky anyone is to have another person in their life who cares about that. I have no idea what he thought about it, he did watch quietly all the way through to the end (it was better than the alternative, I guess, i.e. taking a nap). His lone comment: "That's a lot of rain." Grade: A
Flagrantly misogynist, which kind of comes with the territory, and for as much fun as Glenn Close has, it sometimes feels like she's hemmed in a bit. Some parts are weirdly slow, too, as if the movie can't make up its mind how artful it wants to be. Still, there's some good, nasty fun to be had once this gets cooking (er... literally in the case of that poor bunny). I think my problem is that I want to find an erotic thriller that is as good as Gone Girl, and maybe there just isn't one. Grade: B-
Good fun for the most part, and not nearly as smutty as I'd been led to believe. The opening and closing are great, but it does get somewhat draggy in the middle. Except for the beautiful women, it kinda feels like John Waters took everything I love about this movie—the dialogue, the arch line deliveries, the post-morality ethos, the sheer camp of it all—and nuclear-charged them, making much more front-to-back engaging (not to mention truly smutty) movies in the process, but you've got to respect an original, and compared to Waters's films, this movie is shockingly competent in the technical department. It's also glaringly obvious how much Quentin Tarantino loves this movie, too, though he kinda takes the opposite tact of Waters, making slicker and less weird versions of this movie. Grade: B
As is to be expected with Mikhail Kalatozov directing, this movie is visually stunning, with a camera that's practically taken flight, swooping and panning madly in a seeming attempt to take in every possible bit of scenery and human life in each scene. It's incredible. It's also great at being an anthology film, with only the last segment falling flat (the one with the guy who initially declines to join the revolution, which only really fails because of its leaden didacticism, since the film style is still as vibrant as ever). It's also nice that this movie is actually hopeful; the other two Kalatozov features I've seen, The Cranes Are Flying and Letter Never Sent, are both major bummers, which parallels the anachronistic creep of pessimism that hangs over every Soviet film because I know that that state will eventually fail. Cuba, on the other hand, for all its problems, remains a relative beacon for leftists worldwide as a socialist project that hasn't collapsed on itself or been undone by counterrevolutions (though not for lack of trying, of course), so it feels poetic to me that a film full of such national optimism in the radical then-present remains uplifting to a certain extent to this day. This is probably not exactly the right word for a movie that is pointedly agitprop, but it's almost sweet how much this loves the concept of a revolutionary Cuba. Grade: A-
Accattone (1961)
This mostly just seemed bleak. I was intrigued by the dream(?) sequence at the end, but overall, I'm not 100% sure what I'm supposed to get out of this, which is weird because the subsequent Pier Paolo Pasolini movies have, whatever their faults, crystal-clear intentions. Part of this must, as always, be chalked up to the fact that I simply don't know as much about mid-century Italian history as I need to to get the most out of the Neo-Realist films I've watched. But also, probably the biggest reason I don't know what to do with this movie is that the version I watched had absolutely terrible white subtitles that were illegible 30-40% of the time (they were hard-coded into the film, too). I really owe it to this movie to rewatch on a better transfer. Grade: C
Television
Russian Doll, a kind of perfect little one-off jewel, didn't really need a second season, something I'm still confident of even after having watched this crazy-ambitious, wonderfully weird second season. But since we got one, at least it's good. After the first season, there really wasn't a ton left to do with the "Groundhog Day, but with NYC-based mystical stuff," so it makes sense that we'd get a different time problem here: this time, Natasha Lyonn's Nadia discovers that a train that takes her back to 1982, where she inhabits the body of her mother. At least, that's initially what the concept is. What it eventually becomes is an epic that spans generations and continents, leaning even more into the mystical stuff from the first season in order to spin a yarn about fate and the fundamental traumas at the root of family mythologies. It's considerably messier than Season One, and it's clear that the show doesn't have a clue what to do with Charlie Barnett's character here, who gets some tantalizing but underexplored threads that don't end up earning where his story eventually goes. But even so, the show can still be very funny and unexpectedly moving, and Lyonn's performance, which masterfully dances around but never lands on shtick, is still riveting. Honestly, I'm cool just hanging with Nadia while weird stuff happens. It seems that as long as this show lasts (Lyonn has indicated in some interviews that there will be a third season), we're at least always going to get that. Grade: B+
Books
At times really well-observed literary realism, at other times tediously moralized. I read this for the podcast, so keep an eye out for the episode if you're interested in more fleshed-out thoughts. Grade: B-
