Mini Reviews for April 1-7, 2019

Mervie rervierws.

Movies

Green Book (2018)
I'm not sure how much new I have to add re: all the problematic racial and historical controversy surrounding this movie's approach to adapting its specific historical events. To be honest, the whole discussion kind of breaks the part of my brain that usually insists that cinema doesn't have to be held to a textbook literalist invocation of historical fact; there's a more productive conversation than The Discourse is currently having as to why I give the willfully history-agnostic depiction of unknowable events a pass in something like Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman but not in Green Book—and no, I don't mean in some "Spike Lee is the real racist!" gotcha way; I'm talking about a fundamental interrogation of what cinema's hermaneutic of history needs to be and to what standards of factual and ideological responsibility do we hold film. Certainly a key component of that responsibility involves point of view, and not only does the movie's choice of protagonist and point of view flatter the modern-day status quo (as is arguably also the case in BlacKkKlansman), it also consistently lands the movie at glaringly uninteresting ways to dramatize this particular story even within the pretty thin and gentle version of mid-century American racial tension (not in any universe the case in BlacKkKlansman). There's no way I'm the first person to note how devastatingly obvious it is that Mahershala Ali's character should have been the point-of-view character, right? The movie is clearly obsessed with the mere existence of Don Shirley and entirely uninterested in the ethnic-Italian identity of its protagonist outside of the idea of big family dinners and Mortensen's (admittedly likeable) scene-chewing performance, so why not just write the movie from Shirley's perspective? Sure, the screenplay was written by Tony Lip's son, hence the focus on Tony, but that's what rewrites are for, right? Instead, the movie just views Shirley as this fascinating cypher, artificially locking us, the audience, inside the mind of a protagonist with absolutely nothing unique or interesting to tell us about this particular story and in fact a point of view that feels like an inherent liability for telling this story. We get the fun chemistry between the leads and some nice, character-based humor but there's nothing about those beats specific to our seeing the world according to Tony Lip, and this choice to appeal to some misbegotten "everyman mainstream" (in contrast to the "exotic" otherness of a gay black man) has found something dramatically inert, too, in its pursuit of its particular vision of adapting history. This is basically the movie all the way down, with a rigorous insistence on an assumed "universal" pleasantry that ultimately just feels limited by its dive toward the middle. The Sears-Roebuck-catalogue pristine of the sets, the the personality-free cinematography, the gentle humor of the screenplay and the even gentler drama, the fact that we have Peter Farrelly, of all people, in the film's director's chair and it still ends up feeling like an anonymous piece of awards-season filler and not, like, something with at least half the personality of Dumb and Dumber. It's not that there isn't anything to enjoy in this movie; it's that every piece of this movie feels poised to disappear into the cultural static at the intersection every other media depiction of the early '60s and be forgotten right alongside that Pan Am TV series from like seven or eight years ago. Forgotten right up to the moment it won the Best Picture Academy Award, I guess. Even on the bumper-sticker racial front this movie wants to operate on, this movie's pretty dull. Like most of these kind of nostalgic, reassuring parables about bygone racism, there's not a lot that's baldy offensive (to my white eyes, at least) about its politics outside of its perpetuation of certain pious and ahistorical tropes about the "good white people" of the past, and instead it goes way out of its way to comfort its audience with the broadest and softest possible platitudes. Green Book feels especially milquetoast even among its "friendship transcends racism" peers, and its complete and consuming fear of being anything approaching "provocative" robs it of even the interesting nuance of, say, the power dynamics of relative marginalization that Driving Miss Daisy gives its ethnic-but-white-coded co-lead in the context of its black co-lead. Bereft of even that, there are zero things on Green Book's mind besides a frail, frictionless view of the past and the easy chemistry between its co-leads, and for all the charms of the latter, I still am hard-pressed to think of a less-interesting version of this story told by these specific actors and this specific director. Is cinema's theory of history just a battle of who gets to tell the more engaging story? If so, Spike won this round. Grade: C

Tale of Tales (2015)
Tale of Tales attempts to revive the old, twisted spirit of the pre-Disney-fied fairy tales, and to be fair, the movie arrives at a wild, bizarre, structureless pandemonium that does a pretty good job of approximating the tales we attribute to Giambattista Basile. Only unfortunately, Basile's versions of fairy tales just aren't that good, and neither is this. Points for the set and costume design and for some richly out-there plot twists. But the interlocking organization of the individual tales does not work at all, and, as with the Basile stories, these stories are collections of very odd and sadistic incidents that have the rambling feel of something made up on the spot—nothing like, for those who are fans of the "old fairy tales," the grotesque precision of the Brothers Grimm collections. Come on, filmmakers! Give us the Brothers Grimm-style fairy tale revival you know we're all clamoring for. Grade: B-

La Ciénaga (2001)
Lucretia Martel's vicious satire of the Argentinian bourgeoisie and its accompanying racism feels like Arrested Development by way of Buñuel, only somehow less funny than either. Instead, a suffocating dread cloaks every inch of the film, a dread that pays off both plot-wise and theme-wise. I'd need to spend a little more time with each of her films to be completely confident in this, but at the moment, La Ciénaga feels like something of a dry run for The Headless Woman and especially Zama in terms of how driven and realized its critiques of class and race in Argentina are, and as such, I probably made a mistake watching it last. Grade: B+

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The title is maddeningly ambiguous. Who's talking: Bond or Amasova?? [*CinemaSins ding*] Anyway, it's kind of dull, kind of fun—a little more fun than dull. Bach is, unfortunately, completely lifeless as Agent Triple X, and I guess I need to watch more Roger Moore movies, because I kept confusing him for all the other dudes in suits onscreen. But also, the henchman in this film is named Jaws and bites people and deflects bullets with his teeth and then, climactically, bites a shark. It's hard to dislike a movie with that situation going on. Grade: B-




Television

You're the Worst, Season 5 (2019)
The final season of You're the Worst sharpens its focus to just the series's core duo, which is probably for the best—most of the rest of the cast has long lost its utility as anything but people for our leads to bump against. This means the season does lack some of the shockingly sharp, out-of-nowhere depth that it would occasionally grant the supporting players (Edgar's PTSD, for example); but it also means that we're mercifully spared any of the time-wasting storylines that have sometimes plagued the show, too, e.g. Paul getting stabbed (and while we're on the subject, I find Paul's pivot away from the alt-right entirely unconvincing). Instead, we're almost (with a few exceptions early in the season) given a season entirely focused on the culmination of the show's central relationship: Jimmy and Gretchen. And it gets real in a sustained and panicked way that the show has rarely settled down enough to pull off in the past. I've dinged the show before for the way it tries to offset its sometimes mean comedic streak with sudden dramatic stakes and unearned forward movement. But this final season finally gets it, and the slow-moving train wreck that is the lead-up to Jimmy and Gretchen's wedding is as bracingly dark and uncomfortably real as the show has ever dared to become, and the final resolution of all that is as mature and poignant an evocation of love as I've ever seen a television show do. There are some bumps along the way—a season-long flash-forward tease is both awkward structurally and ultimately unsatisfying as anything but a cheap device. But on the whole, it's a surprisingly rich and graceful ending for what's been an enjoyable but inconsistent TV series. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for November 13 - 19, 2017

All of a sudden, the movie theaters have gone from having no movies I'm interested in to having like two billion. Must be the end of the year [insert rant about movie distribution practices].

Movies

The Florida Project (2017)

As far as finding humanist beauty in the intersection of modern kitsch and poverty exploitation goes, The Florida Project is doing nothing nearly as interesting or affecting as last year's American Honey. And as far as Sean Baker movies go, this is no Tangerine. It's rambling and loose in every way that Tangerine's chaos was tight and thrilling. But as with Tangerine, even this comparatively weaker material is absolutely elevated by the sheer strength of performance—not just Willem Dafoe (though he's excellent) but especially the six-year-old Brooklyn Kimberly Prince, who delivers (though copious improvisation and a very good eye in the editing room) one of the best onscreen child performances I've ever seen, capturing as movies rarely do the shambolic sense of play that animates children's interactions with the world. She's amazing, and the film has the good sense to place her directly at the film's center as she flits through a fantastically realized extended-stay motel—the setting is the film's second star, for sure, though of course fans of Tangerine shouldn't be surprised that Baker is able to capture the alternatingly warm and desperate character of an off-beat, real-world setting. It's a movie with enough successes that I'm relatively forgiving of its more egregious missteps: the slack middle third of the film, the somewhat obvious way with which the plot thuds toward its conclusion, and particularly the flabbergastingly bad and cheap-looking fantasy sequence that makes up the film's final seconds. But those performances, man... Grade: B+

Person to Person (2017)

Well, this is a throwback. The 16mm film, the jazz and soul soundtrack, the (parodic) emphasis on hard-boiled print journalism, even the costuming suggests something of a sanitized '60s/'70s NYC. The easy-going character quirk, the low-stakes ensemble plotting, that specifically mannered humor that comes from characters acting recognizably emotive but not exactly human says 2000s American indie. It's sort of a cross between Robert Altman and a less surreal version of Me and You and Everyone We Know, and it's absolutely the lightest-weight version of that combination I can imagine. But it's so warm and fun that I have a hard time imagining someone not feeling good about having seen the movie either. Grade: B

The Ornithologist (O Ornitólogo) (2016)

The movie is supposedly a metaphor for the life of Saint Anthony of Padua. Being Protestant, I of course know jack squat about saints, so a lot of the explicit parallels sailed right over my head (and continued to fly even after the movie, when I looked up the patron saint of lost things [see, I learn things!] on Wikipedia and still had troubling finding the parallels). Not that it really matters, since regardless of the specific connections to Anthony, this is still very obviously the story of a man becoming a saint, and what's most interesting about it is the way that sainthood seems thrust upon him without his consent—for example, early in the film, our protagonist is tied up and made into something of an unwilling icon for two young tourists, who use him to feel secure against possible pagan forces, which, to my Protestant, not-canon-oriented brain, has all sorts of interesting things to say about the practice of canonization and the way that the legacies of individuals are exploited by future generations of believers. I suppose this is a little sacrilegious, but it's subtly and smartly so, something that can't be said for some of the movie's more explicitly sacrilegious (and even blasphemous) ideas, e.g. a character named Jesus who never doesn't feel like a clumsy attempt at transgression whenever he's onscreen. It's all fascinating and beautifully shot, but not always in the most successful way. If that makes sense. Grade: B

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Look, there's no arguing that "Johnny Guitar" is a baller title for a movie. But you know it; I know it; the poster even knows it: this movie belongs to the magnificent Joan Crawford as Vienna, not the titular guitarist (who, despite some romantic subplots, is almost a secondary character). Crawford's is a powerful performance, deep with subtext and nuance, and thematically, her character is a striking icon to the ways that women must grasp and claw their way forward if they are to make any progress against the hoards of angry men who scream at any change to their society. The movie softballs the gender dynamic, I'd say, by having a woman lead this band of villains (as if our heroine couldn't have faced off against just men), but only a little—Emma, our chief villain, is a truly nasty creation who serves as a very watchable (and detestable) foil to Vienna, regardless of the way that she serves perhaps as too much of a feminine counterpoint to Vienna. Grade: A-

Television

You're the Worst, Season 4 (2017)

This season of You're the Worst does the impossible in that it makes Lindsay a believably redeemable character, a television miracle of sorts after the stabbings and, uh, cuckolding of last season. By largely jettisoning Paul (though he does make a couple of hilarious cameos), the show is able to ground Lindsay in an emotional reality that feels absolutely true to the character and unexpectedly makes her plot the more affecting of the season. The same goes for Vernon, weirdly, and the show manages to wring a surreal tragedy out of him. The same cannot, alas, be said for the remainder of the cast. They each have their moments, but Jimmy and Gretchen's will-they-won't-they is entirely dull, considering how unlikely it is that the show will end without these crazy kids together, and Edgar's storyline with his new writer friend (admittedly played perfectly by Johnny Pemberton) is pedestrian when it isn't a total afterthought. The show's as funny as ever, and per usual, it manages to deliver at least one episode that completely knocks my socks off ("Not a Great Bet," in which Gretchen returns to her hometown—for all my gripes with this season, it's one of the best TV episodes of the year). But the unevenness with which the series approaches its characters' forward movement has become bumpy to the point of discomfort. Grade: B-

Music

St. Vincent - Masseduction (2017)

Masseduction is St. Vincent's weakest since Actor (still my least-fav, don't hurt me), but instead of that album's angular, off-beat guitar passages, Masseduction finds Annie Clark melodically and instrumentally forthright in a way that recalls her St. Vincent debut, Marry Me. This cuts both ways; lyrically, Clark is more personal than she's been in years, despite the persona-heavy ad campaign, again recalling Marry Me's introspection and emotional transparency, but musically, the Jack Antonoff production, while clean and immediate, lacks a lot of the layered complexity that's made previous St. Vincent releases to rewarding to revisit, and even after only a few weeks of listening, I'm starting to find moments on the album worryingly thin. It's still St. Vincent, and there are still tremendous moments. But the whole is having a difficult time coming together as a complete work of ownage. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for November 21 - November 27, 2016

I'm thankful for the arts.

Movies

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)
If it's hyperbolic to declare The Edge of Seventeen one of the best coming-of-age films of all time (maybe I should wait to come off the theatrical high before getting too superlative), there's no doubt that it's at least one of the best coming-of-age films of the new millennium and definitely one of the best movies, period, of 2016. Anchored by the phenomenally entertaining and layered performance of Hailee Steinfeld (remember how good she was in True Grit? Would you believe she's even better here?), the movie is the rare youth-centric one that doesn't shy away from complex emotional territory that doesn't fit within the usual teen tropes or veer toward easy resolution. The Edge of Seventeen brings each one of its characters—but particularly the principal trio of Steinfeld's Nadine, her brother, and her mother—to gasping, bleeding life. The phenomenally sharp writing of Kelly Fremon Craig's screenplay gives these characters both tenderness and bite, sketching them out with an eye observant enough to create humans hard to like but difficult not to love. I really can't stress this enough: The Edge of Seventeen is vital. It's funny. It's nuanced. It's brave enough to look adolescence in the eye and see the selfish, scared, wounded person looking back—not the convenient type of scared presented in teen melodramas, but the real, claustrophobic, utterly isolating panic that can only come from the dread of having to live the rest of your life with yourself. Grade: A

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)
The fact that I merely liked Taika Waititi's vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows puts me kind of in the minority among people of my film-going persuasion, who tend to love it relentlessly. My liking this movie on about the same level as Shadows probably does the opposite for me within that same crowd, but oh well. It's a film that manages to find fresh energy and heart in a thoroughly "mid-2000s indie-land" premise, largely due to the excellent (and hilarious) dialogue and cracker-jack editing—exposing, if anything, that the reason those indie tropes became musty to begin with had way more to do with a general passivity in filmmaking than anything with the tropes themselves. Long story short, Wilderpeople's good and, to boot, has the funniest boar disembowelment in cinema history. Grade: B+

The Roost (2005)
By my money, Ti West is one of the best working horror directors out there these days. The Roost is nowhere near his best, in large part due to the general looseness of the screenplay—a disappointment, since sharp dialogue and pacing tend to be givens in a Ti West feature. However, it's not all a wash; in fact, I give the movie huge props for just how meticulously and convincingly it recreates the atmosphere and aesthetic of '70s/'80s drive-in horror. The movie isn't great, but its look is. Grade: B

Quiz Show (1994)
Turning the Twenty One quiz show scandal into a searing inquisition into the nature of TV—and, relevant even now (especially now), the role of truth in a medium that most often styles itself as entertainment—must have been relatively easy. Have you read up on the Twenty One quiz show scandal? The themes pretty much develop themselves! Turning it into television's All the President's Men must have been a bit harder, though, because All the President's Men is a fantastic movie. Luckily, so is this one. Grade: A-




Television

You're the Worst, Season 3 (2016)
As a character study (and intermittently, that is exactly what You're the Worst wants to be), it's barely successful; each character has his or her own voice that remains relatively consistent, but the success of the growth of those characters remains frustratingly scattershot. Character moments that pierce deep (Edgar in particular gets a series-best episode focusing on his PTSD) are followed up with either indifference or absurdity (the PTSD thread becomes considerably frayed by the season's end). And that's just with the characters who work—the less said about the maelstrom of incoherence that is Lindsay, the better. So yeah. Character stuff: about the same as always. As a straightforward laughs-per-minute comedy, though, You're the Worst has never been better. The dialogue is as live-wire and audacious as it's ever been, and an increased attention to episode structure leads to some fantastic half-hour-comedy construction. So I guess ask yourself what you want out of the show: plot-wise, character-wise, it's a mess. Laugh-wise, though: top-notch. Grade: B

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016)
Let's make this clear up front: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life does, for the most part, a way better job at evoking the tone, texture, and emotional resonance of its original series than any ten-years-later revival of a beloved TV show can ever fairly be expected to do. Lorelei and Rory gab and quip, Luke grumbles and wears a backwards baseball cap, Emily snipes and steals your heart, Kirk engages in half-baked hijinks, and Stars Hollow is as lovably off-beat as ever. That the particular version of all of these things bears a closer resemblance to the later, pricklier seasons of the original Gilmore Girls run than it does the quieter early years, though, is the first in a litany of caveats that must come up when recommending this to series faithfuls. Some of this is good: the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons of the original series (let us never mention what came after) showed showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino diving into more complex emotional territory that enriched the characters and helped the show tackle subjects with more nuance than it sometimes could in those earlier seasons, and that nuance and fearless thorniness remains in this revival. Case in point: Emily Gilmore, the stealth best character of the original series and the one who benefits most from the later seasons' less cuddly approach, again gets the best material here. The strongest emotional through-line here is the way the show writes the passing of Edward Herrmann into the narrative—Richard Gilmore has died as well, and a good chunk of A Year in the Life involves the family's grieving, of which Emily takes front and center. It's beautifully done and some of the best work the show has done, ever. Of course, a lot of the later seasons' nuance turned to frustration and soapy twists that undercut a lot of the show's charm—the development of Rory into someone who has been so validated early in life that she has a difficult time coping with freedom and failure in the adult world remains both one of the smartest and one of the most unpleasant characterizations the show ever managed, and *sigh* that's here, too, and all that brings (the Huntzbergers, the Life & Death Brigade, questionable sexual choices). As before, it's both intelligently rendered and entirely irritating. All of this is in the realm of plot and character, which is to say nothing of the actual form the show takes, which is sort of a debacle. The dividing of the season into four 90-minute "episodes" that each span a single season of the year seems like it opens the door for some interesting structural experimentation. But the problem with 90-minute episodes is that that's basically movie-length, which wouldn't be an issue except that Gilmore Girls seems paralyzed by the prospect of structuring its episodes like movies, resulting in a half-committed attempt to stretch typical 45-minute episode fodder out double-length while otherwise trying to cover several episodes' worth of narrative. The results are a sputtering lack of momentum over the character arcs, the freedom to indulge in overlong dialogue interchanges and bizarre one-off sequences (a lengthy Moulin Rouge-esque musical montage with the ever repugnant Life & Death Brigade is among the series' low points), and a season that feels at once too long and too short. Kind of like this review. Grade: B

Books

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
While The Age of Innocence remains her masterpiece in my eyes, The House of Mirth is still further proof Wharton's position among American literature's greats. A savagely bleak portrayal of the New York upper-crust society that's something like Jane Austen filtered through the cynicism of late-19th-century Realism, The House of Mirth is insightful in its telling of one Lily Bart's downward spiral in a way that is both dripping contempt for the social mores of the upper class and careful not to let that contempt obscure the fundamental tragedy of that society's casualties. Lily Bart herself is a wonderful tightrope of a protagonist, a character whose stupidity and frivolity the novel roundly condemns while simultaneously managing to evoke deep sympathy for way that social pressures have pointed her in this direction. Grade: A-


Music

Preoccupations - Preoccupations (2016)
Lots of bands since the late '70s and early '80s have taken inspiration from the post-punk of that era, but with Preoccupations, the band formerly known as Viet Cong has come the closest to sounding exactly like those bands. I'm sure someone will make the argument that this is fruitlessly derivative, that Joy Division only needed to make Closer once and why bother recreate it here? But in my mind, Preoccupations is unequivocally a good thing, derivation and all. Mimicry is much more heinous in an era already flush with imitators, but for better or for worse, the 2010s are pretty short on post-punk revivalists, which makes Preoccupations a treat rather than a glut. Grade: A-

Whatcha Doing? Mini-Reviews for March 7 - 13, 2016

Here are the reviews for this week! Apparently I watched a lot of movies this week, which I didn't realize until I started tallying everything up. Oh well. Let me know what y'all think of the movies and stuff!

Movies

Brazil (1985)
Okay, now I get the cult of Terry Gilliam. I mean, don't get me wrong: I like 12 Monkeys and Time Bandits and Baron Muchausen and the animations in Monty Python and all the rest. But Brazil is where all the charms of those other things merge into a truly compelling whole for me. It's what's transformed Gilliam from an interesting filmmaker into a great one in my eyes. Maybe I should have started with this one. It's a moving, desperate, funny, visually stunning, and utterly bonkers experience that totally justifies the "what if we adapted 1984, but with, like, carnival-inspired imagery" premise. Grade: A

Day of the Dead (1985)
The third of George A. Romero's Living Dead trilogy turns out to be the second best, but only by a hair—nothing's touching the absolute masterwork of the original Night of the Living Dead. The thematic complexity of Dawn has been scaled back a bit, but in exchange, we've got far and away the most stomach-churning gore effects in the series (perversely, I've got to count this a plus—it's a triumph of practical effects, y'all, and come on: who doesn't want to see the villain meet his end in that way?). Also, as much trouble as it's caused the zombie genre over time, I appreciate how much this movie spends dealing with the science of zombies. That scene with all the dismembered zombies is awesome, and it's not just the practical wowee-zowee of the animate body parts. Grade: A-

Room (2015)
Some of the sharpest, most emotionally harrowing thriller filmmaking in recent memory gives way to something looser, more ambitious, and frankly less interesting in the film's second half. That's not to say it's bad; the movie is just cut in two, and the transition between both sides is jarring in a way that must have been intended to echo the characters' own feelings regarding what happens to them. I'm being slightly vague because the wrenching tension that ends the first half is just too indelible to spoil. Just know that the movie's linchpin event shakes everything out of place so joltingly that they never quite get back to working as smoothly again. Oh, and is it common knowledge by now that Brie Larson is amazing? 'Cause she is. Grade: B+

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015)
Having only a barely working knowledge of the Black Panther party, I found this documentary fascinating. Director/writer/producer Stanley Nelson Jr. has assembled some stunning interview footage, and the absolute best parts are when you can see the subjects still struggling with what they've experienced: retired police remembering collaborating with the FBI manipulation, party members recounting the pulling apart of the Panthers at the seams. But I could see the argument that it's a largely surface-level work. I wonder if there's a longer director's cut floating out there somewhere: it's definitely the kind of movie that would benefit from an hour or two extra, which, yes, I realize is crazy coming from "all movies should be 90 minutes" me. Even at 115 minutes, though, the whole thing feels a bit rushed. Grade: B+

For the Bible Tells Me So (2007)
The most egregious artifacts of 2000s "indie" cinema are not, as many have said, quirky dramedies but rather the leftist issue documentary: the children of Michael Moore. For the Bible Tells Me So has a lot of the hallmarks of the genre: manipulative musical cues, clear "bad guys," a snide animated sequence. But it's worth noting that the movie does dodge some of the pitfalls: it's decidedly good-natured and interested in pointing out just how many different ways that Christians respond to homosexuality. It doesn't hurt that I'm also on the doc's side regarding acceptance of homosexuality. Even so, we're still dealing with an issue doc, which means that it's cinematically boring and often tips toward ideologically smugness. Which I guess begs the question of why I keep watching these things. Grade: C 

Television

The X-Files, Season 10 (2016)
When Fox announced that The X-Files would return, I suppose it would have been reasonable to assume that it would return at the same level of quality that it left us—which was, unfortunately, the show's ninth (and worst) season (or, even worse, the go-nowhere theatrical flop, I Want to Believe). But... I dunno. I had hope. Maybe I was too much of a super-fan to do anything but hope. After all, Darin Morgan was going to be writing an episode! James Wong and Glen Morgan were coming back for multiple episodes! And yet, in the end, what we got was exactly where Season 9 left us: with one true classic (the delightful Darin Morgan-penned third episode), a handful of mediocre monsters of the week, and some truly abysmal mythology arcs. At least we had Mulder this time. Grade: C+

You're the Worst, Season 2 (2015)
When I snarkily reduced the first season to "terrible people struggle to cope with their flaws until they become sad enough to be sorta sympathetic," I'm not sure that I thought the show's solution to that reduction would be to make its characters slightly less terrible and a whole lot more sad. But that's what they've done, and it's worked reasonably well. Not that You're the Worst has lost its whip-smart comedic edge (there's a lot of mileage gotten out of the "I didn't know it was a school" joke), the show has found its firmest footing in drama, especially the small, crushing drama that comes from picking the scab at supposed domestic content—best evidenced by the stunning mid-season downer, "LCD Soundsystem." It's still a bit sloppier and familiar than I wish it were, but it's definitely not the worst. Grade: B+

Music

King Crimson - THRAK (1995)
Aging musicians putting out late-career excellence is something I never get tired of. Unfortunately, you don't get much of that in prog, since most of the early flagship bands either crumpled at the end of the '70s or morphed into something that paved the way for the Phil Collins solo career. All of this means that I am delighted to find out that my old prog favorites King Crimson have put out some great material as the group slid into old age. Exhibit A: THRAK, every bit the heavy, intricate record you hope those prog grandfathers still have in them. It's maybe not quite up to the lofty standards of the band's '70s work, but whatever. It's still good stuff. Grade: B+

Whatcha Doing? Mini-Reviews for Feb. 15 - 21, 2016

Another post of mini-reviews for the pop culture I've run into over the past several days! It's Week Two, and I'm having fun with this project. As always, let me know down in the comments, on Facebook, in person, wherever, what you think about any or all of this; I'm always up for some friendly discussions about movies, books, TV, and music! (Note: I'm publishing this a day early because I already know I'm not going to get to anything else tomorrow. Normally my plan is to release these posts on Sunday afternoons.)

Movies

Blazing Saddles (1974)
Maybe it's time to admit that I just don't like Mel Brooks all that much. But wait! I like The Producers and Young Frankenstein quite a bit! Alas, no such luck with Blazing Saddles, though. The central satire here is pretty great—land-grabbers try to evacuate an all-white town by appointing a black sheriff; I'm all for revising the western to acknowledge the racism of both 19th century America and classical Hollywood. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired. It's not just the casual '70s-style meanness (we probably could have gone without a mentally handicapped villain and at least a few of those "faggot" jokes); it's how that's coupled to a sloppiness approaching the lazy winks of post-prime Brooks like Spaceballs. At least we still get that shot of Alex Karras KO'ing the horse. Grade: C+

The Imposter (2012)
Riveting documentary about the craziest scam/case of mistaken identity you've ever heard. I know it's real life, but seriously, The Imposter is probably best experienced slack-jawed and shocked. If it weren't for the leaden re-enactments, this film would be absolutely top-shelf. Look, I know Errol Morris made re-enactments cool and all that, but I'm really not a fan here, especially when the re-enacted shots are used to as self-conscious and as literary effect as they are here. Looking at you, final shot. Grade: B+

Fantastic Planet (La Planète sauvage) (1973)
What I imagine would happen if the Borrowers dropped acid. To be clear, this is a good thing. The plot just kind of sits there (until it jumps to a conclusion in the rushed finale), but the real allures here are the avant-garde score (compliments of Alain Goraguer) and the surreal, inventive animation that fleshes out the flora and fauna of the titular planet. There are some truly delectable creatures created here. The whole thing is definitely one of those "mileage may vary" experiences, depending on your tolerance for post-'60s psychedelia, but I had a ball.    Grade: A-

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Even among its class—the '70s gritty urban crime thriller—this movie is remarkable for how stripped down it is. Honestly, it's more of an atmosphere than a full-on action film: by my count, there are somewhere around fifteen minutes of action spread out over the 90-minute runtime. The rest is mostly grim setup and spare (but precise) characterizations of our stiff-lipped heroes, which is all good fun but mighty meditative for a movie that's acquired the reputation as one of the greatest action films ever. Typical of John Carpenter, there's a great score and some gorgeous nighttime cinematography, and the whole thing is put together solidly, so to complain that it doesn't quite reach the heights of The Thing or Halloween seems a little unfair. But... well, I guess that's my complaint. Grade: B+

* * *

Books

David Foster Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
After fully embracing my mid-20s-with-a-liberal-arts-degree masculinity last summer with Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, I thought I'd go ahead and plunge into his short fiction. DFW's exceptionally clever, but that's leaving me cooler and cooler. After 1100 pages of IJ, you'd think I'd have already gotten this sorted out by now: what's so exciting about Wallace is his ability to riff on personalities. He's able to take just slightly left-of-center characters and the smallest of premises and play out all the fascinating permutations of thought that run through those characters' brains in the most riveting and human ways. So I'll take the Interviews, "On His Deathbed...," "The Depressed Person," "Forever Overhead." I'll say "no thanks" to the stories about writing stories. Grade: B+

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Television

You're the Worst, Season 1 (2014)
The whole "terrible people struggle to cope with their flaws until they become sad enough to be sorta sympathetic" conceit has seen a lot of play recently, and I can't say that You're the Worst adds anything new to that formula other than a few fresh faces and a colorful (albeit improbably whitewashed? Non-Cali resident speaking here) east-L.A. setting. Still, the writing is sharp—at times scathingly, hilariously so—and that covers a multitude of banalities. Grade: B