Mini-Reviews for September 18 - 24, 2017

"Mini," in the case of the mother! review.

Movies

mother! (2017)

There's not much point in talking about mother! without laying bare its whole game, so Spoilers Ahoy!. And here we go: Darren Aronofsky's latest film is basically an allegorical adaptation of the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, albeit through an idiosyncratic interpretive lens that I first thought was Gnostic and now think is probably closer to an environmentalist exploitation of Gnostic mythology. Because here's what we have: Javier Bardem as a frustrated artist (aka the Abrahamic God, it becomes clear soon enough) who cares more about his creation—both the actual text of his poetry and the rabid fandom that it spawns—than about his relationship with Jennifer Lawrence, his wife whose own artistry lies in the restoration of their beautiful home after a fire (basically a Mother Earth figure and clearly the one of the two who has anything like a sense of moral priorities). It's Lawrence's character, then, who bears the trauma of the ways that the increasingly unruly fans (aka humanity) Bardem invites into their house tear her work to pieces. And from this perspective, we get a parade of increasingly literal analogues for Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood, the life and death of Jesus, and more, all driving toward one resounding message: that humanity's presence on Earth is a costly mistake by an egotistical creator intent on exploiting the planet's profound beauty toward profoundly short-sighted ends. And if I already sound like an overly self-impressed divinity school egghead, that's just the kind of thing this movie is going to do to you and just the sort of naked grasp at showy profundity that people tend to hate Aronofsky movies for. I don't begrudge people for hating this movie. For the Christian crowd, it is blatantly and unapologetically heretical (essentially postulating that Christianity itself is an assault on the Earth—sort of the opposite message of 2014's Noah, for what it's worth); for others (and likely Christians, too), it's yet another movie that uses the cruelty of men toward women as a metaphor, and a metaphor that hinges on a brutally depicted assault that's likely to be the hardest-to-watch cinematic moment of this year; for others still, it's a solipsistic movie about Aronofsky himself (he's actually in a relationship with Lawrence, so...), and as self-critical as it is, there's no denying that he still casts himself as God Almighty; for even more others, it's an aggressively experimental movie that, rather bafflingly, someone somewhere convinced a major studio to produce and market as a mainstream horror flick. So I get it, and I even hold some of those reservations myself and even kind of wonder what the use of such an aggressively anti-human allegory is beyond pure head-trip academics, given that all those involved in making and experiencing this movie are, I assume, human themselves (and given that, I also assume, Aronofsky is not really advocating for a species-wide extermination). But still. I can't quite shake this movie. Goodness knows we need more movies interested in critical engagement with the Biblical narrative (as opposed to stifling and narrow-minded adaptation), and as much as I scratch my head at the idea that humanity should not exist, I'm all for knocking the human race from its presumption that it deserves a central and proprietary role in creation; the movie is, if nothing else, a veritable scream for the human race to recontextualize their place on this planet, and if the ideological means that it uses to get there are a little eyebrow-raising, it's at least a conversation I can get behind. Plus, there's no discounting Jennifer Lawrence's performance here, which is like a far more personal iteration of Catherine Deneuve's Repulsion tour de force; it's incredible, all the more so considering the fact that the camera spends approximately 80% of the film a few inches from her face. And speaking of the camera, it's worth noting that for all the narrative insanity, mother! is Aronofsky's most stylistically restrained film yet, and that precision pays off handsomely. It's a masterfully directed movie; we can argue about the ends to which that direction is devoted, but I will fight anyone who trashes the actual craft here. All of which is to say: I think I like this movie a lot. Grade: A-

It Comes at Night (2017)

I hate to be the "what's the point" guy, but... what's the point? It Comes at Night has some cool atmospheres and is across-the-board well-acted, sure, and I guess if you squint, you could call it some sort of examination of paranoia or humanity's tendency to mistrust to self-destructive ends or whatever. But this movie's genre Jenga game in which it takes out the conventional expository and narrative pieces we're used to leaning on in psychological thrillers has progressed so far that it's basically captured the exact moment that the whole structure is toppling in on itself. And besides, the one element that it needed to take out to make its commentary on paranoia have any weight at all—i.e. the certainty of the existence of "it," the threat of the title—is still right there staring us in the face in a mid-film plot point. I'm not sure what all the acclaim was about here, honestly. Grade: C

Rough Night (2017)

On paper, there's a lot here to like: a fun cast, gender-flipped comedy tropes, a screenplay that seldom relies on improv, physical humor involving corpses. And some of that pays off in brief flashes of success (e.g. the corpse comedy, because it's hard to get that wrong). But outside of those small moments, there's really not a lot going for this movie. It's not "bad" per se, but it's very, very forgettable. My ongoing distaste for mainstream American comedies is largely to blame, I'm sure, but this movie sure doesn't do a lot to be an ambassador to us hard-to-please viewers. Grade: C

The Double (2013)

There's nothing like a movie trying very, very hard and succeeding. With The Double, I'd say this is the case about 75% of the time, and as such, it's an often gratifying and exciting watch. I do feel like, as with the similarly inventive and energetic Cosmopolis (released within a year of this film's debut), I'm missing a piece here having not read its source material—in this case, an 1866 Dostoyevsky novella. It's all very interesting and engaging, but without the original novel, I'm having a hard time figuring out the starting line in this race. Grade: B+

The Chorus (Les Choristes) (2004)

I'll give the movie this: the rickety inspirational-teacher tropes bear a little more weight when they're put to use in a story that shows a teacher motivating troubled students through musical extracurricular activities instead of classroom instruction. But otherwise, I don't have a ton of positive things to say about Les Choristes, a movie that, when it isn't paint-by-numbers, is making some pretty baffling narrative decisions like making one of the troubled youths a legitimate sociopath who then conspires to destroy the school (there are many things that teaching movies don't capture about real-life teaching, but never once have I watched one and thought, "You know, the one thing this movie is missing is turning one of these students into a flat villain"). And of course the kid with the child with the most beautiful voice is the one who is also the one who looks most angelic. Because as we all know, soulful blue eyes are a direct contributing factor in singing ability. Grade: C-

Music

LCD Soundsystem - American Dream (2017)

The band's return from the shortest breakup ever more than justifies the questionable ethics of returning after such a high-profile and definitive exit. Leaning more heavily on post-punk textures than ever before, American Dream is an uneasy, atmospheric album that, while not a complete reinvention, is far from a retread either, and tracks like "How Do You Sleep?" and "American Dream" pulse with a sort of personal dark-night-of-the-soul feel that's relatively unprecedented even in the more emotionally forthright moments in group's coolly hip past. There's a sleek consideredness to even "All My Friends" that's mostly absent here; instead, Murphy's production and lyrics aim for a rawness that, though not really ragged in a punk sense, still feel more transparent and prickly than ever before. That said, it's probably LCD's least-compelling album since their self-titled debut, which isn't to say that there's anything expressly "wrong" with this album, but just because it doesn't reach the dizzying heights of Sound of Silver or This Is Happening (or even, for that matter, "Losing My Edge," though "Tonite" tries its darnedest). There are few tracks here I would rank among LCD's best, but that's an unfair standard to hold any album to. Grade: B+

The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding (2017)

What I remember and return to most in 2014's Lost in the Dream are the anthems: the moments when The War on Drugs filtered Born to Run through Tunnel of Love and arrived at something transcendent and huge. Very few moments on their new album approximate that diesel-fueled grandiosity. Instead, A Deeper Understanding goes for the slow burn, taking as many inspirations from '80s R&B and power ballads ("I Want to Know What Love Is" is a major touchstone here) as from Bruce Springsteen and heartland rock. This is never better than in the album's fourth song, "Strangest Thing," in which a slow, synthy riff builds to a stadium-sized climax. Still, without the speed of Lost in the Dream's peppier tracks, A Deeper Understanding lags a bit, and it's a far looser, occasionally dull experience as a result. They key is its length, I'm afraid; it's long, a full seven minutes longer than Lost in the Dream (an album that was already flirting with bloatedness). I can imagine an absolutely stellar 40-minute version of this album, but at 67 minutes, it's reminiscent of the CD long-windedness of that '80s era it clearly adores, which dilutes the undeniable greatness somewhat. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for September 11 - 17, 2017

Busy week, but I still made time for some stuff.

Movies

Raw (Grave) (2016)

There's some fun to be had in this movie's mix of off-beat social commentary and deadpan, gross-out horror/comedy. But somehow, I was expecting a movie about a vegetarian who goes to college and discovers that she has cannibalistic urges to be a bit more... rambunctious. Grade: B-

Reality (Réalité) (2014)

This film tries to show a world in which there is no meaningful separation between dreams and reality. It's called Reality, of course, and in it, a girl named "Reality" finds a tape inside of a gutted hog that ends up showing us footage from the movie itself. Also, it's a movie about filmmaking. The general effect is that of a film adaptation of a Möbius strip, if Möbius strips were stupid and boring dadaist constructions. In another age, I might have given this points for weirdness, but hot on the heals of watching Twin Peaks: The Return, I'm asking for more than half measures from filmed dream logic. Grade: C-

Beginners (2010)

Very much a dry run for Mike Mills's excellent 2016 20th Century Women, right down to the cataloging of history through clean montages of stock imagery, it's hard to view Beginners as anything but the slightly more boring older sibling of a much more accomplished film. So I'm not going to try to pretend I watched it as anything but that—which is not to say that there aren't still things to be enjoyed; as with 20th Century Women, there's a warmth and yearning to the film's twee that makes it work, even in the age of the post-American-indie-quirkfest exhaustion. Mills's direction remains as precise and thoughtful as ever, too. It's comfort-food melancholy, basically, but oh well. I dig it. Grade: B+

Rounders (1998)

This movie begins feeling very much like a cautionary tale, or at least a The Hustler-style noir-ish "dude gets it done, but at immense personal cost" kind of drama. But what we get is much closer to an underdog fairy tale, in which Matt Damon's card shark character accumulates poker skills until he's good enough to play with the big wigs. It's a movie bursting with archetypes and familiar plot devices, and now that I've sort of spoiled the narrative's general trajectory, you won't find a surprise in the film. But this is tremendous good fun anyway: the writing is crisp in that hammy '90s, voiceover-heavy sense of broadcasting just how smart all this movie's characters are, the acting is excellent (barring one John Malkovich, whose turn as a Russian villain comes very close to being so-bad-it's-good but ends up just being bad), and the plot, familiar as it is, is well-rendered. There's nothing mind-blowing here, but Rounders offers that distinct and all-too-rare pleasure of seeing something familiar executed skillfully. Grade: B+

Cinema Paradiso (Nuovo Cinema Paradiso) (1988)

The film's supposedly central relationship between a young boy and an aging film projectionist is beautiful, and as long as Cinema Paradiso is centered on the ways those two ambassadors from two generations bond over a mutual love of cinema, it's aces. But that barely occupies half the movie. The rest is a tiresome and undercooked coming-of-age story that focuses entirely too much on the boy and his forgettable romance and not nearly enough on the projectionist. Which is a pity. Thankfully, the movie pivots back around in its final minutes, ending on what is maybe one of the greatest film scenes of its decade—a montage cut from the decades of film throughout the projectionist's career. That last bit is reason enough to watch the movie, although you'd be forgiven for fast-forwarding a little to get there. Grade: B

Television

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
For anyone paying attention to David Lynch's career since we last saw the gang from Twin Peaks (that would be 25 years ago with the divisive theatrical feature, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), the form that Twin Peaks: The Return, the ostensible third season of the show, ultimately takes shouldn't be so surprising: elliptical and sometimes incongruous storytelling that fuses staples of detective fiction with aggressive narrative and formal experimentation, including the manipulation of intentionally cheap digital visuals into visceral psychological and even cosmic horror. In short, this return will be deeply frustrating for those people whose favorite part of Twin Peaks was Dale Cooper being quirky and eating cherry pie but right up the alley of someone (like me) whose favorite Twin Peaks textures were those found in Fire Walk With Me and the formal assault that was "Episode 29," the original series finale—you know, the parts that wallow in misery. Those looking for typical Twin Peaks quirk won't find themselves completely at odds with what this new series gives us (the characters of Dougie and Janey-E Jones, two particular delightful creations of this third season, feel very much a piece with old-school Twin Peaks sensibilities), but they'll have to put up with a good deal of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive-esque shenanigans along the way, as well as several sequences that have very little precedent in Lynch's filmography but are no less alien. What's amazing, then, is that for all its bizarre and patience-testing experimentation, The Return actually manages to tell a coherent story—more so, even, than the original Twin Peaks, since it lacks both the baffling creative upheaval that defined the second season and also has a good deal more explication of the cosmic mythology of the show's universe (honestly, probably a little too much explication—I prefer my Twin Peaks to be more inscrutable, although the shocking, baffling finale does a lot to restore that beloved inscrutability). This is, I realized as I watched, one of the things that makes Lynch one of America's most popular directors, despite his often alienating experimentation: there are always real stories, either human or metaphysical, behind all his out-there-ness, and Twin Peaks: The Return is probably his best showcase yet of being able to spin compelling narrative out of would-be incomprehensible absurdity. And as such, it's rather beautiful and unlike anything you're likely to have ever seen on TV. In fact, it's tempting to call The Return David Lynch's masterpiece, and while I'll have to sit on that a while to decide if I actually think that, there's no doubt that this is one of the most gorgeous, unsettling, moving, and significant works of motion picture art that we'll get this year—and likely that we'll get in any year any time soon. Grade: A

Books

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
I don't read a ton of mystery fiction, which might be my problem here. I also was familiar with this book's plot through a number of different film and stage adaptations I'd seen, so that knocks out the "mystery" part of this mystery novel. But I dunno, guys, for something that Wikipedia calls Christie's masterpiece, it's kinda... not a masterpiece? Or at least, not what I'm looking for when I describe a masterpiece, which, again, might be a liability of my not reading much mystery fiction—these things may work on different rubrics that I've not yet figured out. But as I see it, the prose is flat, the philosophical discussion of justice is unengaging, and the characters feel less like characters than pieces of a spreadsheet to be checked off as they all bite the dust, one by one. Usually, that progression of deaths would be the fun of a story like this, but it's hard to have fun with the death of things that are not human. Grade: C

Music

Pixies - Trompe le Monde (1991)
For a while, this was the last Pixies album (and it might as well still be for me—I haven't listened to Indie Cindy, and I've been told I shouldn't). So there's the temptation to read this as a career summing up. But honestly, there's not a lot here that sums up. It's a Pixies album, and although the production and songwriting are smoother and less abrasive than the band's '80s output, Trompe le Monde still has that same mixture of hummable and furious volume that made the band an alternative-scene favorite to begin with. And despite its smoother sound, it's maybe angrier than the band has ever been, with Black Francis's yelpy vocals growling through a remarkably bitter set of lyrics. So no summing up; just classic Pixies through and through—possibly the best way to sum up to begin with, reminding us all why we'll miss them. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for September 4 - 10, 2017

Several great movies and several movies I didn't like very much at all. This might be the most polarized set of scores I've had in a while.

Movies

It (2017)
This first entry in the duology adapting Stephen King's doorstop opus of coming-of-age horror has a lot of the same problems that recent adaptations of beloved literary properties have tended to have—namely, that it squanders pacing and characterization in favor of being slavishly devoted to visualizing every bit of the source material. This isn't always a bad impulse, and as a fan of King's work (and this novel in particular), I won't deny the thrill of certain iconic setpieces being recreated here; the mid-story fight with the monster in the decaying Victorian manor remains a highlight in both the movie and the book, as do the various surreal and horrifying impositions of IT into the children's day-to-day lives. However, what the faithfulness to the novel ends up meaning throughout most of this film is a heightened awareness of all the myriad ways the movie falls short of the novel's ambition, and it's not hard to begin imagining what a movie that took this story on its own terms would have been like. It almost certainly should have cut the number of kids down, for starters. The acting is uniformly excellent, but as with last year's It-indebted Stranger Things, the screenplay just isn't nimble enough to juggle the development of all seven characters in the Losers' Club. Most of them, in fact, are extremely shoddy personality types who give interesting quips from time to time but almost never show any life outside of that. This is most apparent with a barely there Mike, which is disheartening not just because he's the only black actor in the film's main cast but also because of his centrality to some of the historical atrocities of the town of Derry in the book, to which the movie only gives a passing nod (And it's also worth noting that the closer the movie sticks to the book, the harder it is to resist nitpicking the ways that it actually does change the book—case in point, Mike, whose role is probably disserviced most by the shifting of the action from the 1950s to the 1980s, burying the racial subtext to a lot of what happens to him—and in general, I'm not sure if the It story really works without the context of the urban decay that happened in that specific twenty-seven year period between the late '50s to the early '80s, although I guess we'll have to see how Chapter Two deals with this). Just as big of an issue is the way that, in a frantic need to hit every memorable part of the novel, the movie practically sprints through its plot. There's a fundamental lack of patience in the film that's bad for the character development and worse for the actual horror sequences, which flicker by with trigger-happy editing and lack the sort of intricate buildup that informs the best movie scare techniques. That said, as negative as I've been for the majority of this review, I want to stress that I had a good time with this movie. The acting, as I've said, is across-the-board great, a minor miracle when it comes to a cast as young as this one, and the kids are so good that they carry their characters a good deal farther than the thin screenplay has any right to earn; kudos also goes to Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise/IT pitch-perfectly through all the effects. And the scares consistently deliver arresting imagery, if not the patient construction of mood and pace required for truly great horror—this is a tremendously shot movie, which makes it all the bigger shame that it's not edited better. There's also no discounting the sheer fun of seeing, as I did, a crowd-pleasing horror movie like this one in a packed theater with a responsive audience—which is to say, if you're interested in seeing this, go see it now rather than on home media. So yes, It offers a lot to enjoy; it's just all too easy to see how much better it could have been. Grade: B

Before I Fall (2017)

Most Groundhog Day-premised movies revolve around the central character's journey to become a better person through the sheer monotony of a day repeated ad infinitum—which is part of what makes Before I Fall's high school setting so promising, as high school for both students and teachers can often feel like an endless loop of indistinguishable days. And in the early going, Before I Fall fulfills this promise, with a litany of nice observations about the general mundanities and cruelties suffered and caused by high schoolers toward one another. But the deeper the film gets into the journey of its main character (a girl heavily ensconced in the "in" crowd of popular kids who like to bully each other and especially those outside their group), the more it becomes apparent that the film has confused its protagonist becoming a better person with its protagonist feeling like a better person. This is a movie in which half measures of decency are considered apt atonement to right the wrongs of years of torment—the central plot soon revolves around the twin foci of preventing the victim of long-term bullying and slander (in which our protagonist has eagerly taken part) from committing suicide and learning to make sure it's the nice guys who get sex. Both of these plots reveal a film with no real interest in fighting the actual social structures that makes the cruelty of teenagers so acute to begin with, and through the focus on the self-actualization of the main character—instead of, I dunno, the actual pain she's caused (and, like, actual pain, not how that pain relates to her)—turns the movie into an appeasing of conscience, not a meaningful statement on teenaged interactions. Grade: C

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (2016)

Errol Morris is the best living documentary filmmaker, full stop, and The B-Side is quietly one of his very best. It's ostensibly a career retrospective of the renowned Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, and the film works perfectly well on that, chronically Dorfman's memories of photography all the way back to her childhood and all the way up to her 2016 retirement via Morris's typical "just let 'em talk" approach to his documentary subjects. But as Dorfman's observations accumulate, the movie deepens progressively until, in its final minutes, we're presented with a treatise on the ramifications of modern business infrastructure, the impact of the loss of physical media, and even mortality itself. It's that typical Morris trick, using oral recollection to imbue a seemingly straightforward premise with profound philosophical depth, and it's as effective as ever here. Grade: A

A Single Man (2009)

You can gussy up a mannequin with all the pretty clothes you want, but in the end, it'll still be plastic. A lifeless movie that I was so bored with that I couldn't even muster up the outrage to care about the utterly ridiculous ending. Grade: C-

RockNRolla (2008)

Douchebags, The Movie. The credits promise the cast's return in a sequel, but who cares? I certainly wouldn't want to spend another minute with these characters and their casual homophobia and glamorous disregard for pretty much every single good thing in the world. I suppose after Snatch, two Sherlock Holmes movies, and this, it's time for me to admit that I just don't like Guy Ritchie movies. Grade: D+

Come and See (Иди и смотри) (1985)

I've often said that part of the genius of Full Metal Jacket was the way it twisted war movie tropes into full-on horror movie tropes, but here comes this Russian masterpiece and doubles down on the whole enterprise two years prior to the Kubrick film. Come and See teeters on the razor's edge between hyperrealism and full-blown experimentalism, as its horrifically unblinking stare at the surreal atrocities of the Nazi occupation of Russia is scored by a shrieking cacophony of war machine noises, Mozart compositions, and actual human screams. It's an effect that, after 2.5 hours, might feel numbing if it weren't so morally impassioned. "This is war; nobody is to blame," a Nazi says near the film's end, and the movie is so crystal-clear in rebuking that claim that it's almost cathartic. Of course someone is to blame. But as a famous sequence very near the film's end asserts breathtakingly, there's no real catharsis in recognizing the face of evil; there is only terror. Grade: A

Music

White Stag - Emergence (2017)
The most interesting band in Knoxville's progressive rock scene continues to push the boundaries of its sound. Incorporating flute and saxophone along with the typical death metal, drone, and avant-garde textures, Emergence recalls, more than any of White Stag's previous releases, the canonized sounds of progressive rock's early-'70s golden age, specifically evoking Jethro Tull and King Crimson. That's not to say this is a nostalgic or throwback record in the neo-prog vein—in fact, this, their first full-length album, is as "out there" as the band has ever been. It's not all great; for as exploratory as they all are, a sameness creeps up on the album in its latter tracks, and the songwriting clearly takes a backseat to the atmospherics. Still, White Stag shows tremendous ingenuity, too, and with a debut this strong, I look forward to the ways the band will expand and innovate in the future. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for August 28 - September 3, 2017

Reviews, etc. Read on.

Movies

Good Time (2017)

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

Time Lapse (2014)

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

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

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

Frailty (2001)

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

You Can Count on Me (2000)

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

Bob Roberts (1992)

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

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

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

Books

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

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

Music

The Men - Tomorrow's Hits (2014)

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

Mini-Reviews for August 21 - 27, 2017

A good week for seeing movies in the theater. I'm building up those Regal Crown Club points like a pro.

Movies

Logan Lucky (2017)
In the same way that Magic Mike was basically an indie movie with stripper scenes, the film Logan Lucky ends up being is a lot more subdued than the raucous film promised by the advertising. It's as sweet and naturalistic a heist film as Soderbergh has ever done, electing for quietly observed character bits over slapstick laughs or crazy heist hijinks (although the third act does get pretty twisty). That's not to say that there aren't laughs or that these actors aren't trying their hardest to make these characters entertaining (Daniel Craig in particular is tremendous, as I'm sure numerous reviews have told y'all already). But Logan Lucky is just such an unassuming, easing-going, lived-in kind of film that it makes what it's doing seem easy and almost lazy, in the best way possible. It's a hangout movie, essentially, one with a heist in the center, and a tremendously fun one at that. Grade: B+

The Glass Castle (2017)
Critics have painted this as a movie that detrimentally sands off the edges of a harrowing true story in the interest of delivering a feel-good weepy. But sometimes critics are wrong. Granted, I haven't read the book this movie is based on, but any criticisms that this movie is shooting for empty sentiment over hard truths is ignoring the fact this this film is in dialogue with itself over the central two characters of Jeannette and her abusive, charismatic father, Rex—it's a feature-length exploration of the conflicting ways with which we are forced to relate to people close to us who have hurt us tremendously, buffeted between love and hatred, joy and pain, and the soft, warm moments come as lurching juxtapositions with the movie's numerous scenes of domestic horror. The movie isn't perfect by any means (Naomi Watts as the mother figure is sorely underused, and the score—a barrage of treacly inspirational movie cliches—is terrible), but there's something vital and complex going on here, and the effect is nowhere near as easy as some seem to think. Grade: A-

Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Not being the owner of a smartphone, I'll admit that there's an aspect of from-the-outside-looking-in to my enjoyment of Ingrid Goes West's wicked social media satire. Then again, I'm on Facebook every day, so the movie's depiction of the ways that interpersonal interactions are warped and even defined by the online currency of likes and followers isn't lost on me. Even if it was, there'd still be plenty to like here, not the least of which is a game cast, helmed by a deliriously unglamorous Aubrey Plaza performance (which, coupled with her work on Legion, positions her as one of the most watchably off-kilter performers in Hollywood, a sort of modern Shelley Duvall with fewer camp sensibilities). Even with the acting, not all of the characters really work here, but that's okay—the real character is the monstrous hydra of trendy ephemera that is the social media world itself. Ingrid's tongue-in-cheek riffing on this digital universe is the most well-observed depiction of social media I've yet seen in a movie, and its jabs at the characters' various vanities and online habits are informed such by a deep and current knowledge of the meter of the social-media discourse of the moment that in even a few months' time, this will likely be a fascinating and slightly alien capsule of what 2017 online interaction looked like. The ideas presented through this pitch-perfect depiction are maybe a bit too obvious to make Ingrid anything close to great, but you could do a lot worse with your psychological thriller-comedies. Grade: B+

Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Skull Island does so many things right—the special effects are great, the cast is solid, the creature designs are cool, and the visual style is distinctive—that it's a real shame that the total package is kind of a bore. This is, I think, a complete failure on the screenwriting level. None of the characters come alive but for the grace of their talented actors' performances, and even then, what we see are paper-thin meat sacks waiting to be destroyed by the film's vicious bestiary. There's not anything inherently wrong about that body-count approach to an action film, and many a great movie have basically revolved around the same concept. But without any life in these characters to begin with, it's not really all that fun to see them die. Grade: C+

Their Finest (2016)
The sort of polite, stiff-upper-lipped historical drama that serious cinephiles tend to hate and I tend to just find kind of okay, Their Finest is just kind of okay. The premise is hooky enough, and I'm willing to give this movie a pass just for that—during WWII, a female screenwriter struggles to find her place in the man's world of British film, and she finds work as a writer of British war propaganda, and honestly, that's great, because we need more movies about 1) female screenwriters, and 2) the making of war propaganda. And as long as the movie sticks with that, it's engaging. Unfortunately, the film decides to fill a good part of its runtime with thin romantic drama, which is not only not great but also frankly kind of tedious. Pair this with the relatively pedestrian film style, and you've got a movie that nearly squanders its good ideas. Grade: B-

The Summer of Sangailė (Sangailės vasara) (2015)
A completely superfluous piece of coming-of-age fluff. Not that there's anything specifically wrong with that, I guess, but, outside of a mildly interesting visual sensibility, there's not anything specifically right about it either. Grade: C

The Book of Eli (2010)
There are a lot of things that are kind of dumb about The Book of Eli, most notably its third-act twist that doesn't seem to accomplish anything for the movie beyond stretch the credulity of its protagonist's actions throughout the first 3/4 of the film. But the action is well-staged and exciting, executed with a subtle, smirking sense of humor that's welcome in the dour post-apocalyptic landscape that envelops the rest of the story, and while it's a bit ham-fisted, the movie's ideas about the role of religious texts in a society on the fringe is still kind of interesting. Put on top of this the fact that the movie is essentially a post-apocalyptic western (why aren't there more of these??) with a visual style that's way cooler than we have any right to expect from what's essentially a mid-budget B movie at the height of the high-contrast, digitally color-corrected wash-out era, and you've got a fun couple of hours. Grade: B

Television

Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later (2017)
As always, Wet Hot American Summer is inconsistent—perhaps more so here in Ten Years Later than ever. First Day of Camp, the Netflix years-after-the-fact prequel miniseries to the cult comedy film, was something of a minor miracle, justifying its existence by being way better than the original, doubling—nay, tripling—down on the film's penchant for absurdity by making the plot a borderline epic cornucopia of sci-fi, conspiracy thriller, coming-of-age tropes, lampooned to near-perfect comedic heights. Ten Years Later can't really compete with that, partially because the sheer shock of Netflix actually pulling this off has worn off, but also because it's just not nearly so successful. Ten Years Later makes an extended joke about how lame its ending is, and while that's kind of funny, it never really assuages the fact that the series really doesn't know how to build all its varying threads into a satisfying whole. Whole plots are basically dropped midway through the series (Paul Rudd in particularly is woefully underused this outing), and there are parts where WHAS's reliable it's-funny-how-sincerely-and-unskillfully-we're-playing-this-hacky-trope tone shows major cracks, especially in the various love triangles the series builds. Still, on a moment-to-moment basis, Ten Years Later can also approach the comedic sublime—everything involving Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush is hysterical, as is a plot involving a nanny-for-hire. And I will never not giggle uncontrollably at H. Jon Benjamin as a sentient can of vegetables. Grade: B

Music

Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
In the gradual weirdening of Joni Mitchell, one of the most rewarding and underappreciated artistic progressions of the 1970s, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a vital moment. Proving that the jazz inflection of Court and Spark was no fleeting lark, the relentlessly experimental and exploratory Summer Lawns is the point of metamorphosis, when Joni Mitchell transitioned from the confessional hippy of Blue into the artist who would make Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus. It's an unapologetically out-of-fashion album, embracing jazz at the precise moment when music culture was moving away from the genre, and as such, it was panned mercilessly upon release (though let's be real: '70s rock critics only ever begrudgingly accepted Mitchell's genius to begin with). But no matter; The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a masterpiece. Joni's lyrics have rarely been better here, shaping twisting, oblique character portraits wreathed in mystery and piercing social insight, and the music itself is gorgeous, not to mention influential—it's not hard to hear the genesis of both Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective in the album's discursive melodies, and the entire freak folk scene of the mid-2000s practically owes "The Jungle Line" a lifetime of royalties. Grade: A

Revisiting His Dark Materials: The Amber Spyglass

Hi, everybody! I'm rereading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and blogging about each book. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

You can read part one in this series, on The Golden Compass, here.
You can read part two in this series, on The Subtle Knife, here.

1. The Robinson Fallacy
Marilynne Robinson has an essay called "Puritans and Prigs." In it, she vigorously defends the reputations of Puritans in general and John Calvin specifically, whom she says modern individuals "disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged." The beliefs of Puritans and John Calvin bear little resemblance to what 20th/21st-century people refer to when they chastise "Puritanism" and "Calvinism" in modern society, so, Robinson goes to great lengths to argue, such criticisms are exercises in mislabeling. She goes on to make all sorts of analysis regarding modern morality from this case of mislabeling, which is great, but the obvious response to this essay is, "Sure, but does it really matter what Puritans and John Calvin used to do if the criticisms are responding to the actions those names are linked to now?" In other words, regardless of what John Calvin once did, if most people calling themselves Calvinists do something terrible, it seems beside the point to gripe about the Calvinist label instead of actually addressing the problems in modern Calvinism.

I bring this up not because I want to talk about Marilynne Robinson[1] or Calvinism (although it's worth mentioning that His Dark Materials does reference a Pope John Calvin, which is oh-so-perfect). But what Robinson does with John Calvin in her essay is a nice analogy for what is probably the easiest rebuttal to Philip Pullman's ideas about Christianity: that he gets it wrong. And not just in the details—it's relatively straightforward to argue that he misses the very foundation of Christianity, for out of the detailed metaphysics, dozens of characters, thousand-plus pages, and hundreds of thousands of words of His Dark Materials, there isn't one mention of Jesus Christ. It's very tempting (and for years I did so) to dismiss Pullman's critique of monotheism because of his apparently lack of understanding of the centrality of Christ to one of monotheism's biggest wings. But I want to start out this review by urging against this dismissal. Because as with Robinson, dismissing his views because his vision of Christianity isn't vigorously factual in its theology ignores one of the most urgent messages of His Dark Materials, which is that it's child abuse and oppressive authoritarian theocracy that Pullman sees in Christianity, not Jesus—as damning a critique of organized religion as any apologetic study. A semantic argument is beside the point when there's a social argument being made.

All this is to say that there is much more to Pullman's relationship with Christianity than his simply being "wrong."

2. Plots Upon Plots
Near the end of The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, the nun-turned-experimental-physicist-turned-exposition-device Dr. Mary Malone says, "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that is all." If you've been paying attention to the subtext of the previous two novels, that statement shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the decidedly villainous way Pullman has characterized Christian believers. But it's only in The Amber Spyglass that the full extent of that particular characterization of Christianity is laid bare, and even having prepped with The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife beforehand, it's still a remarkable shock to find that the villainy of Pullman's world goes all the way up to God Himself.

With that pull quote (and the help of the fact that the God of Abraham actually dies in this book), the articles practically wrote themselves—Peter Hitchens called Pullman "the most dangerous author in Britain," while Pete Vere called Pullman a "seducer of children" and the novel's plot "blasphemy," adding that "Christians should be offended." It's as easy to characterize Philip Pullman as anti-Christian as it is to declare his view of Christianity "inaccurate," and many other authors have also done so. In fact, Pullman cops to that himself, having once said, quite matter-of-factly, "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." The amazing thing about all the anti-Pullman rhetoric in Christian circles is that it's not a baseless or manipulative claim, as is far too common in these "Christians are morally outraged and want to ban this author" kinds of debates; it's simply a quotation of Pullman himself. As he quite readily admits, he is an enemy of the faith.

So that's not really a claim I'll be contesting here. I do think, however, that it does Pullman's work a disservice, as much so as arguing semantics, to, as many do, simply state his stance on Christianity[2] and end the conversation at that. Because while there are many qualities of this bloated, bewildering, occasionally grandstanding, occasionally beautiful novel to discuss, simplicity is not one of them.

Really, I mean it. Complexity is the name of the game in The Amber Spyglass. The book is the longest in the trilogy by a hefty margin (120 pages longer than The Golden Compass), and those pages aren't filled with mindless fluff either; it's all either straight philosophy or unrepentantly dense plot—especially plot. I'm not kidding here, and if I'm making a laundry list of this book's flaws, right there near the top is just how overstuffed the whole thing is. There's an entire subplot involving some vehicle called an "intention craft" whose point I'm still unsure of, and that's to say nothing of the dozens of new characters (and whole species[3]) Pullman adds to this series's already crowded roster. It's cool to see Pullman go full-on Tolkien with unbridled high fantasy world-building, but there just. so. much. I've struggled to sufficiently summarize the previous two novels in these reviews, but with The Amber Spyglass, any sort of comprehensive overview without taking this post to novel lengths itself becomes nigh impossible.

But stripping away every conceivable extremity of this novel, three basic plot pieces remain as the central pillars to understanding what Pullman is trying to accomplish in this series:

First: Lyra and Will's journey into the the underworld—apparently a real place[4] that can be accessed by the Subtle Knife; it's a world created by the Authority (aka "God") to enslave the souls of the dead, and although Lyra has originally purposed to travel here to find and free Roger (whom she does find, in a touching moment, along with Will's father and Lee Scoresby), she's so troubled by these souls in misery that she and Will cut a whole in the world and let all the souls out into the open air, where they each dissolve into Dust and become one with the natural world.

Second: Lord Asriel's battle against the forces of the Authority. God [5] has become old, weak, and senile, and the rule of the Kingdom of Heaven has been assumed by Metatron (who is, in keeping with apocryphal traditions, the angelic form of Enoch after his ascension to Heaven in Genesis). Asriel and Coulter team up to kill Metatron, both losing their lives in the process. In the battle, the glass cage that houses God gets knocked to the ground, trapping the being, and Will and Lyra, just emerging from the Land of the Dead, come across him. They see that he's miserable and, taking pity on him, set him free. God is apparently too fragile to be out in the open air, though, and he promptly dissolves.

Third: The culmination of the entire series and, after the death of God in this same book, the most theologically provocative moment in all of children's literature: Lyra and Will eventually find themselves in a small, natural garden where fruit is growing—basically, the Garden of Eden. They're apparently unaware of this, though, and take to feeding each other the fruit, and as they eat, they both experience a sexual awakening of some sort (it's heavily implied that they have sex, although the language is very much the Hays-Code, curtains-blowing-in-an-open-window sort). In doing so, they inadvertently recreate the Fall of Man, solidifying the end of God's reign over the multiverse.

The Amber Spyglass makes no mention
of conveniently chaste fig leaves.

3. Freedom and Materialism
All of this is, of course, appropriately calibrated to transgress most facets of Christian orthodoxy and appall the PluggedIn crowd of cultural gatekeepers. In case you weren't keeping track, that's a rejection of the afterlife, original sin, the sanctity of marriage, and God Himself, all in this one volume. A lot of it is grounded in the series's already well-documented disdain for the ways that authoritarianism breeds human suffering and abuse—time and time again throughout the series, we see characters use obedience to authority as a priority over basic virtue and compassion[6], and The Amber Spyglass finally takes this idea all the way to its fullest metaphysical implications, that concepts like afterlife and original sin represent the adherence to an authority whose subjugation of human life extents to the very foundation of existence. So it's no accident that Will and Lyra accidentally kill "The Authority" just after freeing life from an afterlife and just before recasting original sin as an event of profound freedom and beauty. These two acts are subversions of the fundamental ways by which oppressive authority gains power over humanity, thus ushering in a new age of freedom.

One of the things that makes The Amber Spyglass so thematically rich, though, is that it finally reveals that Pullman isn't a libertarian, not even a moral one. The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife both flirt with the idea that freedom from authority is a moral end in and of itself. We hear a lot of rhetoric about Lord Asriel's "noble" war against the Authority, and it's not that difficult to extrapolate that we're supposed to identify Asriel as a "good guy" simply because of his opposition to "bad" authority (this was one of my critiques of The Subtle Knife, you might remember[7]). The inherent good of freedom is, after all, one of the most common takeaways from the Enlightenment philosophy that Pullman very clearly loves—"man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains," etc. However, when I complained that The Subtle Knife seemed to have forgotten that Asriel was an unrepentant child murderer, I made the caveat that The Amber Spyglass might walk this back somewhat, and that caveat has paid off pretty handsomely, if I may say so, because the Lord Asriel of this novel is a despicable cad who cares very little for life and beauty in light of his obsessive quest for freedom. This is most viciously demonstrated in his attitude toward Lyra, his own daughter; when one of Asriel's battles separates Mrs. Coulter from Lyra, Coulter cries, "What have you done?...She was safe with me, safe, and now where is she?" To which Asriel replies, "Frankly, I don't care." He is more concerned with how his daughter has interfered with his ambitions than with her own safety. His is a battle of ideas completely divorced from any sort of real human meaning. He is most definitely not one of the good guys, and this is made damningly clear by his ultimate fate as essentially superfluous to any of the real victories in the novel; Will and Lyra emancipate the dead, dissolve The Authority, and subvert original sin almost entirely without his aid, and Asriel's ultimate fate places him roughly parallel to his evil authoritarian nemesis, Metatron, as both throw each other into the abyss during a battle of egos[8], a final act of mutually assured destruction by two powers more obsessed with winning than with the value of life. People make a big deal about how this series is about "the murder of God," but they ignore the fact that the figure intent on God's demise neither succeeds in killing The Authority nor is even relevant to God's death.

The ultimate foundation of His Dark Materials is not, as some have said, absolute freedom. Regarding, as one interviewer puts it, the philosophy of "As long as I don’t hurt anyone else...you can just leave me alone," Pullman is clear: "I'm against that."

As becomes clear in this novel, closer to the series's heart is a variation on materialism, the idea that what is most important is the here and now, what can be touched and tasted, not some mystical higher reality to aspire to. This is central to why Lyra and Will must free the souls from the underworld. Their cutting an opening into the open air certainly doesn't do anything to free them on a spiritual level, as each soul essentially faces annihilation when it exits the underworld, dissolving into the air. Eternal life isn't something to aspire to in Pullman's world, and in fact, eternity is quite literally a prison. What's much more important is a reunion with the natural world after death. "You'll drift apart," Lyra tells the souls, "but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again." This dovetails with all the idea of Dust, a material manifestation of consciousness (a phenomenon many ascribe to the supernatural), and also with the reinterpretation of the Fall of Man, which is firmly grounded in the material experiences of Lyra and Will as they realize the full extent of what their bodies are built for: the material acts of eating and sex. In Pullman's world, an emphasis on the supernatural is toxic, distancing you from the real consequences of your actions, an idea taken to a grotesque extreme by the Magisterium and the Oblation Board, which actually murders children in the name of a greater supernatural good, and to a slightly less horrifying but still misguided end by Asriel himself, who also murders children as he focuses his ambitions so much on supernatural battles that he completely misses the actual lasting work done by his daughter.

4. The New Republic
Throughout the book, various characters refer to the ultimate goal of establishing "The Republic of Heaven" that will replace the Authority's tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven, and the contrast in the context of the "freedom" discussion is clear—a state ruled by the people and not by an abusive autocrat. But the idea of a republic is also key to Pullman's materialism, and republicanism requires a permanent connection to the material world. "We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere," one character says, and this seems to be the cornerstone of the trilogy's philosophy, that we should not abandon the material world for some sort of transcendent higher power because there is no transcendence, only the world around us, which, remember, Pullman believes to be "an extraordinarily beautiful place."

This idea culminates in the ending of the series, when, though some (to be honest) convoluted mechanisms, Will and Lyra realize that they must choose to return to their own worlds forever or else forfeit their lives. This returns us back to the idea of His Dark Materials as the anti-Narnia. Pullman once gave this great interview in which he said, "This, incidentally, is one of my quarrels with Lewis: the children in the Narnia books who have gone through all these experiences aren’t allowed to stay in the world and make it better for other people – they’re whisked off to heaven," and, while I'd say he's oversimplifying the Narnia books[10], he's right on Lewis's ultimate worldview that the true home of the human soul is on some high plane, not our world. I mean, The Last Battle ends in apocalyptic fashion with the destruction of the Narnia we know and the revelation that there is a better, truer Narnia more fitting our protagonists, a conclusion that I find both beautiful and traumatic. Pullman resolutely refuses this sort of Neoplatonic eschatology, to the point where he, maybe to a similarly traumatic effect as Lewis, only reversed, insists on landing his characters in their own material worlds where they can make the world better for other people. It's not a happy ending exactly, and in some ways it's rather cruel in how it seems to drive apart Lyra and Will at their moment of peak bliss. But it's the ending Narnia denies, and one that's at least philosophically consistent with what His Dark Materials has been building toward.

That drive to make the world a better place is what ultimately informs both Pullman's materialism and his stance on freedom. Because the material world is important, it should be improved, and it can only be improved by people of their own free will accepting to improve it. And through this lens, His Dark Materials arrives at virtue. In the words of one angel near the end of the book: "By helping [everyone in your worlds] to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing the how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious... Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost." You look at that passage, and you're one "thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent" away from the Boy Scout Law, and only a few apples short of the full Fruit of the Spirit list. After all that—after fighting the Church and killing God and reappropriating original sin—Pullman arrives right back at traditional virtue.

Philip Pullman, basically, at the end of the book.

5. The Book of Virtues
And, while we're on the subject, it's important to look at how the series gets here. The fight against the Church is in the name of protecting human life and preventing human suffering against needless cruelties like the Oblation Board. The killing of God is the result of an act of compassion—"The poor thing," Lyra cries sympathetically when she comes across the imprisoned God. "We can help you hide," Will tells the Almighty. "We won't hurt you." It's this pity, this kind desire to help a living thing, that causes God to dissolve (in a manner not unlike the souls as they leave the underworld). God isn't murdered; he's cared for[11]. And even the inverted Fall of Man is done as an affirmation of human kindness and affection; it's technically an act of rebellion on the cosmic scale, but Lyra and Will are ignorant of this fact, instead focused on how much they care for one another, the convergence of human affection with the material realities of their bodies and worlds.

This is why I think it's vital not to just end the conversation with a dismissal of Pullman's imperfect encapsulation of Christianity or his anti-Christian rhetoric. It's not as though Pullman wrote this trilogy as some sort of villain, twirling his mustache as he made all rights wrong. He's not a moral relativist or even a nihilist looking to undermine absolute truth or morality as a construct or anything like that. He's someone who, at least in his artistic output, cares deeply for values like love and kindness and compassion and truth and beauty and mercy and camaraderie—values that, if not exclusively Christian in nature[12], are definitely ones that we Christians have to agree that we share with him. Even his fierce critique of the Christian religion is one based not in some abstract antipathy for organized religion but in a righteous anger informed by a love for traditional virtue and the way that some Christian institutions have violated that. Frankly, if Pullman sees a lack of virtue in Christianity, that's a problem with Christianity's loudest voices more than it is a problem with His Dark Materials.

Clearly, as a Christian, I believe in a different source for these virtues—the Kingdom of Heaven/Republic of Heaven dichotomy, of course: is the foundation of our moral frameworks set through divine transcendence or a community of humans working together? Pullman and I likely disagree on metaphysics, but, for all his talk of gods and angels, Pullman isn't really making a metaphysical statement with His Dark Materials. He's making a very roundabout statement of how virtues should inform human freedom within a materialist world. So to quibble with his metaphysics is sort of an exercise in missing the point, and to argue that his moral vision is wrong because it doesn't include God turns us into Marilynne Robinson defending John Calvin.

6. Yeah, but...
Does that mean I don't think The Amber Spyglass has flaws? Of course not. It's riddled with flaws, both philosophical and artistic. For one (and I alluded to this earlier), there's just way way way more stuff going on in this book than there needs to be. Pullman's clearly in love with his own creative potential here, which is sometimes fun to watch, but there's no real narrative need for him to introduce as many new characters, locations, and species as he does. Not only is it occasionally convoluted, but all the noise tends to crowd out the characters we already know and love. To its credit, The Amber Spyglass does a better job of bringing back preexisting characters than The Subtle Knife does (Iorek is back! And the witches, although I was never in love with them to begin with). But the book could have been much more streamlined if Pullman had just figured out a way to make these old friends companions to Lyra and Will this time, too, instead of inventing, for example, the pair of Gallivespian spies who follow the two around for most of the novel (and for whom I have exactly zero emotional investment). And while we're talking about characters, it's also worth griping that the series never quite gets its groove back, character-wise, after the shake toward archetype in The Subtle Knife. There is plenty of excellent character work here, to be sure—Mrs. Coulter has never been better, and her tension between love for Lyra and maniacal power plotting is rich with depth, while the dive into full-on myth in this novel serves characters like Asriel and Will well, not to mention the pair of angels[13], Balthamos and Baruch, who aid Will and Lyra early in the book. However, despite giving her some backstory, Pullman never really figures out how to make Mary Malone work as anything more than a plot device, which is a real liability here due to the sheer number of pages given to her adventures with the Mulefa (another kind of dead-end species I wish had less time). And there's still something a little uncomfortable about how the series treats its female characters. Ever since Will's arrival in The Subtle Knife, Lyra's agency seems to have decreased, and The Amber Spyglass doesn't fix this much, as time and time again, Lyra defers to Will's "better" judgement. And then there's Mrs. Coulter, who I maintain is the series's best character, but it's still an uneasy fact that the trilogy's most powerful woman is also its most villainous.

And while we're on gender, I might as well mention that Garden of Eden scene. As beautifully rendered as it is (some of the best prose in the series, I'd say), I do think it's misguided to make that moment—the moment the entire universe hinges on, apparently—a sexual one. I mean, I get it: it's a coming-of-age that rejects the sexual paradigm the church of His Dark Materials is so obsessed with preserving. But, first of all, sex as the pinnacle of coming-of-age isn't just a tired trope; it's tedious and old-fashioned in a way that feels of that same hippy misguidedness as the idea that taking drugs is somehow a productive act of social reform. Not only that, but it's one of the few times this book lets the idea of transgressing Christianity take precedence over any sort of constructive moral position, and in doing so, it invests in the same Puritanical obsession over sex that Pullman seems so intent on dismissing.

7. In the End
So no, the journey His Dark Materials takes us on isn't perfect, not by a long shot. But something that so often gets lost in these conversations is that, as far as our relationship with the material world goes, Christians and Pullman basically arrive at the same place. It's a place rooted in compassion and decency and the idea that we should care for our fellow humans. And if we can't agree on that as something worthwhile, Pullman was more accurate about Christianity than any of us have been willing to admit.

*****

And that's it, folks. That's the end of my His Dark Materials series, which was far more difficult to write and took way longer to complete than I thought it would be. Thanks for reading all the way through. As you might have been able to tell from these posts, the trilogy was far more complex and flawed than I remembered, but it was also far more beautifully written and dazzlingly ambitious than I cared to notice back in high school, and I still rank it as one of modern YA literature's most significant works. I've enjoyed revisiting these books tremendously, and I hope you've enjoyed taking this journey with me.

Now to get on those prog reviews again (ha...).

Until next time!

1] I'd actually love to talk about Marilynne Robinson, just maybe not in the context of a His Dark Materials review.

2] Or, more precisely, monotheistic religion as a whole, which he believes inevitably "ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him [God]."

3] Including insect-sized people called Gallivespians, who have this whole backstory about being persecuted by tall people in their own world, and these utterly strange, elephant-ish creatures called Mulefa, whose main mode of transportation is to ride around on these greasy seed pods, unicycle-style.

4] Complete with its own suburbs. No joke: there is actually a chapter called "The Suburbs of the Dead," although I suppose it should be no surprise that the literal gates of Hell are wreathed in poor urban planning.

5] Who, the angels are quick to point out, is not the creator but simply the first being to have gained consciousness, having then deceived all the subsequent beings into thinking that he created the rest of them. Pullman once named Gnosticism in the same breath as his series, and this is pretty much textbook Gnostic heresy, which is, intriguingly, sort of at odds with the larger materialist bent of the series as a whole (more on that later).

6] Most chillingly in The Amber Spyglass represented by Father Gomez, a character who has performed enough "preemptive absolution" to make murder morally and spiritually neutral in the Church's eyes.

7] Or you might not. I don't know how memorable that post was.

8] Along with, it must be said, Mrs. Coulter, who is painted much more complexly in The Amber Spyglass than she is in the previous two volumes[9] but who still ultimately expends her life in that same battle of wills that wastes Asriel and Metatron.

9] In light of this novel, she's probably got my vote for series-best character.

10] After all, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ends with the Pevensies ruling Narnia for decades and generally making it a great place before they return to their lives in our world.

11] And as such, His Dark Materials becomes one of the very few fantasy fantasy series (alongside most of The Chronicles of Narnia) that does not force its heroes to violence as a means of achieving victory for the "good guys."

12] In interviews, Pullman fights again and again against the idea that virtue is exclusive to the Christian worldview, and I agree with him.

13] Gay angels at that, and you can practically hear Pullman cackling at his typewriter as he imagines the conservative-Christian outrage.