It's been several weeks since I've made a blog post, and for those of you who don't know, this is because my brother died two weeks ago. It's been a difficult time for my family, and even though I was still reading books, watching movies, etc., I really didn't feel like writing about them until just a few days ago. I don't know how much my brother read this blog, but my relationship with him casts a long shadow over my reviews. Who I am as a viewer and critic is inextricable from my relationship with him. A lot of our childhood together was spent—as is the case with most siblings, I'd guess—sharing movies, music, and television. We watched
Batman: The Animated Series and played "Batman and Robin" together (though neither of us liked being Robin); we rented
The Iron Giant from Blockbuster and liked to joke about "coco-lax"; we spent a lot of time doing
Toy-Story-inspired surgery on stuffed animals we had. When we were teens, there was a lot of arguing over media, particularly music: he was into blink-182 and Sum 41, whereas I was a budding indie-rock snob. We both liked
Dark Side of the Moon, though, and I remember loaning him my CD a lot in high school at night so he could go to sleep to that beating heart. The music fights died down once we were no longer living together and subjecting each other to each other's taste, but I still think about those fights sometimes and the ways in which I've decided he was right and I was wrong (Rage Against the Machine, for example: I of course realize now that they rock).
When somebody close to you dies, the impulse is to try to conceptualize the entire person in your mind, since that's all you have left, but it's hard to the point of impossible to fit a whole human being inside your head because when they're alive, there's no need—what forms in the mind is the organic outgrowth of life and the afterimages of experiences. So when I think about my brother now, it's only pieces of who he is that come to me at a time. Right now, as I'm putting together this blog post, it's these little fragments of shared media that bob to the surface. We are everyone we have ever known, and our relationships with art are part of that, since our experience of art is the collection of these relationships' intersections with the now. To write a review is to remember what fragments you can, as incomplete of a reckoning of a whole life as that is.
Anyway, here are the reviews.
Movies
The Lighthouse (2019)
Man, how do I even describe
The Lighthouse? I guess I can now call it a hallmark of writer/director Robert Eggers that his films are heavily steeped in a meticulous recreation of arcane English dialects; in the same way that
The Witch had its characters speak in Puritan English,
The Lighthouse has its Willem Dafoe character go full-on Captain Ahab/Mr. Krabs seaman English—whatever that's called. The degree to which that sounds goofier than
The Witch is a good indication of the difference between the two projects:
The Lighthouse is the unhinged-to-the-point-of-hilarity but no less frightening cousin to
The Witch's relatively serious drama of isolation. There's a lot to, uhh, behold in
The Lighthouse, from its deeply rattling evocation of post-Romanticism "weird" fiction like Melville and Lovecraft to its smotheringly lush late-1800s sea-shanty production to its fevered imagery and unstable reality to its (I kid you not) mermaid genitalia, but the absolute best of it all for me is the complete and total control Eggers and Dafoe have over the effect of this dialect. Long, careening scenes will take hairpin turns of tone bent around ornate speeches and turns of phrase: Dafoe goes from lamenting that Robert Pattinson's character doesn't like his cooking to delivering two minutes of the most elaborate, blistering maritime curse I've ever heard then finally to a small, tender word all in the space of like five minutes, and it's by turns riveting and funny and scary and kind of sad—amazingly, without ever feeling unnatural or out of place. It all just
is, spewing forth from this totemic force of a man inside this totemic force of a movie, high and low brows crashing together like waves whipped up by a nor'easter emanating from the deepest well of the masculine psyche. The movie is, among other things, about all the ways in which we humans—but especially we males—cloak our basest urges in all sorts of hierarchies and rituals and how quickly these hierarchies and rituals become indistinguishable from those base urges themselves when we cling to them tight enough. Dafoe's intricate dialect is a vehicle of both his rigid rules for keeping up the lighthouse and also these deeply ancient curses and superstitions that envelope his rules like a force of nature. It's bewildering, terrifying, and very, very funny. Martin Scorsese says that Marvel movies are like amusement park rides, but honestly, none of them ever took me on a ride as wild and thrilling as this.
Grade: A
The Raid: Redemption (Serbuan maut) (2011)
I care not a whit for any of the plot or human beings within this movie. But the action is very super good, y'all. I mean, that's the only thing people talk about with this movie, so it's not like I'm blowing any minds. Sometimes consensus is just right.
Grade: B
The Happening (2008)
I'm not going to say that people "misunderstood"
The Happening upon its release, because so much of what's here defies the typical sort of appraisal: the dialogue has the almost-human surreality of one of those AI-generated scripts ("We ate tiramisu together, that is it"); Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel give two of the most idiosyncratic and unnatural performances of 21st-century mainstream cinema; the score is ham-fisted to the point of self-parody; Shyamalan's motif of wind blowing through trees feels laughably flimsy. There's nothing here that's conventionally entertaining, that's for sure, and it's no surprise that audiences and critics bristled at this deeply off-beat horror-melodrama-thriller oddity. But I dunno... I kind of liked it. Kind of. I'm not fully with the re-appraisers who want to call this an outsider masterpiece or whatever, but like most of Shyamalan's movies, there's this undeniable energy to the whole thing that's pretty compelling when it isn't just confounding. The way this threads the needle between an evocation of '50s-style B-movie kookiness, an almost arthouse level of seriousness regarding the lived experience of humanity on the brink, and (intentional?) absurdist comedy is just so undeniably its own thing. To be honest, the alchemy of it all feels just a few clicks away from the otherworldly camp that David Lynch taps into, and if people hadn't taken
The Sixth Sense so po-facedly seriously and did the whole "Next Spielberg" jig, we might be talking about Shyamalan more in that vein. Maybe. Like Lynch, it's easy to chuckle at the window dressing, like the off-kilter dialogue and weird acting, but its themes (in this case, ecological collapse and the horrifying unpredictability of human self-destruction) are so unrelentingly bleak and unshakeably tethered to my own real-world terrors that it's hard to feel comfortable sitting unambiguously in the "so-bad-its-good" enjoyment mode. Tell me, what on earth are you even supposed to do with
First Reformed as filtered through
Plan 9 from Outer Space?
Grade: B-
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
This movie definitely bites off more than it can chew as far as ideas go. There's so much crammed into this gleefully dark satire that there are a lot of elements that feel half-baked—including the titular people under the stairs themselves, who are never as engaging or interesting or developed as the children protagonists or the maniacal villains. But holy moly, what works here
works. I'm all about this movie's hatred of vulture landlords, and I'm
especially all about this movie's villains as the Reagans from Hell. Plus, the "'80s family movie, but a Hard R rating" is a very fun vibe. As a movie, it's a LOT, but gloriously so.
Grade: B+
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Demented and gonzo to an absurdly delightful degree: I almost died of happiness when the gremlins break out into a big musical number to the tune of "New York, New York." The chief pleasure here is just how anarchic it is (
very); the movie opens with an animated bit involving the classic Looney Tunes opening, but with Bugs and Daffy fighting for control over the segment, and this is a pretty great microcosm for the level this is working on—quite explicitly a live-action cartoon. As a result, the movie is a little less sharp in its satirical targets than its predecessor's shredding to pieces of Christmas Americana, but '80s NYC yuppies and real estate barons are still worth the chaos that's wreaked on their world here. In a 2019 in which Donald Trump is leading a quasi-fascist regime seemingly bent on destroying everything I like about America, I can see how some people might feel like this movie softballs its depiction of its very Donald-Trump-in-the-'80s-esque villain (he has a semi-sympathetic redemption arc); however, it is a marvelously bitter pill that
The New Batch ends with this theoretically reformed villain cashing in his newfound goodwill by deciding to profit from the mass-manufacturing/exploitation of the first movie's small town. It's not just (as the first movie argues) that the concept of "Americana" is flimsy kitsch that can bear none of the weight of reality; it's that this kitsch is a pandering lie cooked up by a craven corporation, and any humanity that once existed within this concept has been wrung out for all the shareholder value it's worth. It's a good thing this movie is an all-time blast, or the cynicism would collapse under its own weight.
Grade: A
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
This movie's reputation as the supreme oddball of the
Halloween franchise (taking place in a universe outside the continuity of the Michael Myers entries) led me to believe that it was going to be a lot more meta and self-reflexive in its posture toward the series as a whole. Instead, its relationship with the rest of the series boils down to a few cheeky references, and otherwise, this is a fun little one-off sci-fi horror movie reminiscent of
The Stuff and that kind of thing. Most slasher franchises would probably be improved if they eventually just became anthology series like
Season of the Witch was apparently trying to make of the
Halloween series, so I applaud the attempt here, however unsuccessful. I guess there are already a couple other
Halloween continuities we could try this with again, though—get on it, Universal!
Grade: B+
Ganja & Hess (1973)
The first Capital-G Great horror movie I saw this October. Spike Lee of course remade
Ganja & Hess in 2014, but Lee's somewhat terrestrial preoccupations never manage to hook the deep mysticism of this original. Actually, it's 2012, with
Red Hook Summer, that shows ol' Spike most dedicatedly carrying forward this movie's torch—a sprawling, searingly fervent reckoning of Christianity's role in colonialism and slavery, set to wall-to-wall gospel music. Bitter and evocative: eternal life is the price of vampirism, resurrection its perverse horror. But the magic is that oppression never overwhelms the film itself, which blooms into a liberated beauty from the husk of its plot. It is a profoundly spiritual experience—neither the social treatise of Spike's
Red Hook Summer nor the neutered eroticism of his remake two years later—but rather inventing its own sublime cinematic language of cross-fades and double-exposures and slow-mo, seemingly from the ground up. Its radical freedom of style and substance forms the perfection of blaxploitation; Curtis Mayfield and stuff form the cultural memory of that movement, a monolith of groovy bass and bottomless cool for semi-ironic appropriation. But at least to me, the elliptical mysticism and self-made mythologizing of this movie (and, to a different degree,
Sweet Sweetback) form a much more compelling soul to the whole scene. If you couldn't tell, I loved this.
Grade: A
The Blood Spattered Bride (La novia ensangrentada) (1972)
The marketing promises a kind of Spanish giallo, but it plays like a grindhouse take on a Val Lewton picture. Ancient curses and lesbian vampires cooked in a visually rich slow-burn. I'm not always the biggest fan of exploitation cinema, but this is kind of the platonic ideal of it for me: in which it's a trojan horse for the marginalized to wield the lurid tropes of the genre as weapons against its own audience, right up to that final shot, which is probably the most shocked I've been by a movie this whole horror season. It's a pretty nasty movie, and I wish it had made as much space for onscreen queer sexuality as it makes for onscreen sexual violence, but as an indictment of masculine sexual entitlement/aggression, it's damning—not to mention pretty riveting.
Grade: B+
Daughters of Darkness (Les lèvres rouges) (1971)
I'm writing this review a couple weeks after I actually saw this movie, and I honestly don't remember the plot hardly at all. But I
do remember Delphine Seyrig's wonderful performance—a more sympathetic, vampire iteration of Mrs. Danvers from
Rebecca—and I
do remember the pretty lush scenery and cinematography, which itself feels like a vampire old-soul version of cinematic styles gone by. Anyway, I remember enjoying this overall.
Grade: B
The Velvet Vampire (1971)
A really dope score and some very cool hallucinogenic/dream imagery buoy this movie a bit for me, and there's a deep sadness to the ending that I wasn't expecting. But I guess I'm not really invested enough in vampire stories to begin with to be all that entranced by a revisionist one. Then again, I did love
Ganja & Hess, so I dunno why I'm not more excited.
Grade: B-
Music
Lover by Taylor Swift (2019)
The first half of this album is fantastic, and things like "Cruel Summer" and "Miss America and the Heartbreak Prince" are some of the best Taylor Swift's ever been at pure pop music: shiny, pristine, hooky, thoughtful. But there's a lot of pretty weak material buried deep in this record, too, material like the lead single "Me!" and the honestly pretty dumb pileup of Britishisms that is "London Boy," and the fact that anything can be buried deep in this album speaks to the biggest issue, which is that it's just too long and, with that, has some really awful track sequencing—the supremely goofy "London Boy" goes right into "Soon You'll Get Better," a song about her mother's battle with breast cancer? Who thought that was a good idea? I'm probably in the minority in thinking that
Lover as a whole is a step down from her previous record,
Reputation; it lacks that album's thorniness or the arch-villain camp or the thematic complexity. But it's certainly not a weak album, and if we're going just on the basis of high points,
Lover has several very high ones.
Grade: B
