Sorry I've missed a few weeks! I just had a couple of really busy weekends in a row. But now you have a really, really long post! Enjoy!
Movies
The House (2022)
Does a major faux pas of anthology filmmaking, which is that it puts its segments in descending order of quality, which makes this movie initially very exciting (the first and most sinister segment is flat-out great) only to have that feeling dissipate over the subsequent hour. Put these in reverse order, and this movie would feel a lot more satisfying. But the stop-motion craft on display here is excellent: major Henry Selick vibes, only de-coupled from any Burton-esque cutesiness. It also continues the trend of Netflix being the greatest streaming service for original animated features—in a lot of (arguably most) ways, Netflix has really become kind of a picked-over bargain bin of a streaming service, but it continues to platform really, really striking animation, which I guess gives me a weird note of optimism about streaming.
Grade: B
Last Night in Soho (2021)
After reading all the negative reviews a few months ago, I can't say I'm disappointed. But it is sad to see an Edgar Wright movie that's so dysfunctional. Smarter people than me have talked about the problems of the screenplay, which are deep, but I think this movie's issues are even more fundamental than that. Wright was just the wrong guy for the job; his movies thrive on excessive formal precision, whereas the giallo movies he's clearly trying to evoke here have a ramshackle, shoestring quality where they achieve their magnificent visual overdrive as a function of the feeling that the whole enterprise is going to fly to pieces at any minute. Wright is simply too meticulous to make the hallucinogenic dream logic of a giallo story work, and while the film delivers some pretty cool-looking shots (esp. when the film is focused on dance—Edgar Wright musical, when?), the whole thing feels far too tightly controlled to have the impression that it sprung straight from a feverish psyche, which is so key to the kind of story the film is trying to tell. Sad to see the incredible
Persona-esque pairing of Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy squandered in such a compromised movie, so hopefully someone sees this and gives them the co-starring vehicle they deserve.
Grade: C
The Last Duel (2021)
The
Rashomon angle doesn't do anything for me, and given that this movie is already pretty long in the tooth by the end, it bears mentioning that this exact same story could have been told once, and the only thing lost would have been the literalizing of the extent to which each of the two principal male characters flatter themselves in their heads. But otherwise, this is pretty solid—I remain unconvinced that Ridley Scott is some Great Artist outside of his justifiably legendary
Alien /
Blade Runner back-to-back, but the dude clearly knows how to evoke a period setting, in this case a terrifically grimy medieval France, and the climactic duel is undeniably exciting. On the screenplay level, I enjoyed the writing here a lot outside of the
Rashomon conceit; Matt Damon, Nicole Holofcener, and Ben Affleck have done a pretty good job here of creating a morality play out of the trappings of a historical epic, and I dig the way that this deflates the mythology of chivalry, often in some very darkly comic ways that I have to imagine are Holofcener's touches (I guffawed at the title card immediately after Damon's triumphal exit from the arena that tells us his character died in the crusades soon after). I would be interested in what this movie would look like if it were just Holofcener at the writing desk—probably something I would like a lot better, though of course this isn't bad. I just wish it were shorter and punchier.
Grade: B
Halloween Kills (2021)
I'm tempted to play the so-bad-it's-good card here, because I was chuckling at my TV basically the entire time. But it's not good. Not on any metric. It's a movie only notable for its bravery to be a classic train-wreck bad movie in an industry where "bad" usually means soullessly competent IP management nowadays. Amazing that it only took two movies for a franchise reboot premised on classing up the bad sequels to end up producing a sequel as bottom-tier as anything I've seen from the original franchise.
Grade: D-
The Killing of Two Lovers (2020)
This movie's reliance on slow-cinema-adjacent long takes that fill its scenes with productive emptiness intrigued me, but ultimately, this fell apart on a screenplay level for me. We're given an interesting dramatic irony at the beginning (we know dude wants to murder his soon-to-be-ex wife and her boyfriend, but nobody else does), and then the movie proceeds to do nothing but hammer that same irony again and again over its runtime, with not a ton of development, just new scenes: oh, now this potential murderer is hanging around his wife, oh now he's around his kids (remember, he's potentially a murderer!), etc. It's tense at first, until it becomes clear that nothing is actually going to develop. Too bad, because the cinematic style really is enticing. Grade: B-
The Dead Don't Die (2019)
I've never been especially into Jim Jarmusch, so I'm not sure why I finally decided to watch a movie that almost everyone seemed to agree was minor Jarmusch at best. But here we are. I wasn't especially into it. The more explicitly comedic bits were things that other horror comedies have already done better, and the meta pivot at the end feels like just a lazier version of things that Jarmusch has done before. Not exactly sure why this movie was made, tbh, because it doesn't feel all that interested in doing anything new or even retreading ground well. Great cast, though, and great Sturgill Simpson song/bit. I also enjoyed Iggy Pop's cameo as a zombie. So the movie isn't entirely without its pleasures, I guess.
Grade: C+
Smiley Face (2007)
I've now seen three Gregg Araki movies (this,
Splendor, and
Mysterious Skin), and none of them feel anything like one another, and yet they all share a kind of spiritual connection just in terms of complete purity of commitment to whatever concept undergirds the movie: in
Smiley Face's case, a stoner comedy. I don't think I've ever seen a movie more single-mindedly invested in depicting the mechanics and outcomes of stoner logic—and virtually nothing else. Jane starts the movie high, and literally everything else in the movie follows from there, somehow digressive and yet never straying from its singular concentration on the fact that Jane is high. In one sense, that makes the movie kind of empty: nothing is learned, nothing is "commented on," there's no real character development to speak of. But on the other hand, the distillation of a movie genre to nothing but its most fundamental elements and then putting those elements on full blast for a feature film makes
Smiley Face short-circuit the pleasure centers of my brain to a degree that it's impossible to deny how good a time I had here. Credit where credit is due: as talents as Araki obviously is as a director, none of this would have worked in the slightest without a ridiculously committed performance from Anna Faris, who is so completely in-the-pocket here that it makes me sad that (to my knowledge) she's never been given this much free reign before or since. Also, why are stoner comedies so much better when they focus on female characters?
Grade: A-
Lovely & Amazing (2001)
I have to respect Nicole Holofcener for writing a movie that looks you dead in the eyes and triple-dog dares you to like any of its characters. To an extent, all of the Holofcener movies I've seen are an experiment in mining pathos from unlikability, but
Lovely & Amazing takes that to another level, which is perhaps paralleled in the loathing these women have for themselves. It is very much an unflinching interrogation of the immense damage that beauty standards do to the female psyche, whether those be based on size, shape, age, race, or some intersection of all of the above, and it's honestly excruciatingly tragic to see these characters go through genuine anguish and body dysmorphia and then externalize it in the ways they treat others. Nominally a comedy, but it mostly made me sad.
Grade: B+
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Genuinely floored to discover that this movie is set in the early 1960s. I'd seen isolated scenes of this movie on TV when I was growing up, and based on the hair, the clothes, "(I've Had) The Time of My Life," and everything about Patrick Swayze's appearance and demeanor, I'd assumed this was set sometime around the film's production, but then the opening line of this movie is a voiceover telling us how it was the summer of '63, before the JFK assassination and the Beatles, like we're about to watch
Happy Days or something, for reasons I can only imagine have to do with justifying the abortion subplot, because otherwise, this movie feels completely uninterested in its period setting beyond only the broadest gestures. Far be it from me to act as if we're living in some comparatively enlightened age, given that we've been stuck in a fairly vapid '80s nostalgia cycle for what feels like my entire adult life, but wow, was that late-'50s/early-'60s nostalgia thing sure could be insipid. The period music absolutely bangs, though, and when it's not butting up against the bland limpness of '80s adult contemporary (what mullet-headed music supervisor thought that the likes of Eric Carmen could go toe-to-toe with The Ronettes and Otis Redding?), it creates a real sense of yearning when mixed with the sweaty, sweaty dance sequences, which are this movie at its absolute best. I found it hard to be very invested in a romance that's trapped inside a screenplay as haphazard as this one, but there is some bona-fide Movie Magic happening anytime the music sets bodies to motion, especially in the justifiably iconic climax. I would have loved it if the rest of the movie had stuck with period-appropriate music and that final scene was this glorious, out-of-nowhere anachronism in which the sheer sweep of the dance's sex energy broke reality itself to bring "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" into 1963, rather than the movie foreshadowing that moment on its soundtrack throughout the preceding 90 minutes. But whew, still a great moment.
Grade: BP.S. I also was part of a Cinematary podcast discussing this episode. You can listen to it here if you're interested!
Hollywood Shuffle (1987)
Conceptually interesting: more or less an anthology of sketches illustrating the systemic discrimination within the Hollywood machine and double conscious required for black actors to navigate it. It's a very angry film, and satirically, it's got good ideas. But the problem is that very few of its jokes actually land. This wouldn't be a problem if it were more of a satiri-tragic blast of righteous fury in the vein of
Bamboozled, a movie with which this movie shares a good bit of DNA. But for as angry as it can be,
Hollywood Shuffle also seems to find itself funny, and unfortunately, I just don't. As a result, the skits just amble on for far too long without having much to offer beyond their original satiric idea. I did think the
There's a Bat in My House thing was pretty funny, but otherwise, this was mostly falling flat for me.
Grade: B-
Desperately Seeking Susan (1987)
I was a little perplexed at its diffuse, rambling plot until I read afterwards that the movie was inspired by
Céline and Julie Go Boating, and then it all clicked. This is absolutely about two women sharing a mystical connection as they drift through a major city. It's not nearly so strange nor as transcendent as the Rivette movie at its best, but it's also half as long and has "Into the Groove," one of the GOAT Madonna songs, which isn't nothing. I had no idea that it was from this movie until it came on during a gloriously meta moment of Madonna (in her peak "hot Madonna" era, no less) bopping to her own song in a club. So of course this movie is good. Shout out also to Rosanna Arquette—the whole cast, actually, which is unilaterally great, but especially Arquette, who is the soul of this movie and is able to go toe-to-toe with an exceptionally magnetic Madonna.
Grade: B+
Nickelodeon (1976)
Not without merit, and the first half in particular is filled with some glorious tribute/pastiche of early silent-era filmmaking, including a bunch of gags and pratfalls that wouldn't feel out-of-place in a Harold Lloyd picture. But boy, does Bogdanovich's fixation on a sentimentalized history cut both ways. On the one hand, the affection for this era of filmmaking is contagious, and it's hard not to be caught up in the period detail and scrappy outsider stories this film depicts. But on the other hand, Bogdanovich's unfettered love for the era completely obliterates any judiciousness in editing, and as this movie's second hour swells with historical anecdote after historical anecdote one after the other, the entire film just deflates until its own shapeless weight. And that's to say nothing of Bogdanovich's uncritical eye toward the movies at the time. I can understand the impulse to only barely comment on the black/brownface and anti-indigenous storytelling prevalent at the time (I'm not sure how a direct condemnation of those things would have fit into this movie, which I guess is probably part of the problem), but to wholly embrace the thoroughly-debunked mythology of
The Birth of a Nation and moreover frame your entire climax around a bunch of white people enraptured in what is called, without challenge, "the best movie that will ever be made" feels like willful apathy toward the consequence of that film. There's "maybe this film is a little dated" and then there's "this movie was used at a recruitment tool for the KKK," and
Nickelodeon completely doesn't care about the difference between those two. Movies don't have to be historical critiques of course, and there's a place for a movie existing in a fantasized past. But there's something irritating about Bogdanovich's insistence on making a movie self-consciously from the perspective of his being a student of film history while also being fairly cavalier with the history itself. To be honest, though, I probably would have been more forgiving of that ending if the preceding hour hadn't been such a slog, so who am I to judge?
Grade: C
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo) (1964)
I often find Italian neo-realism to be a little dry, and
The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Italian neo-realist Jesus movie, is a little dry, especially for the way that it is basically adapting the titular gospel verbatim (with a few omissions and restructurings). But also, its status as an Italian neo-realist feature is what makes this movie so striking at times, too. Its use of nonprofessional actors and dusty 20th-century Italian landscapes do more to ground the life of Jesus to the universal struggle of common people against oppressors than any other cinematic version of Jesus that I've seen, an effect reinforced by the stunning collection of anachronistic musical choices, which range from Civil Rights hymns to Bach to Congolese liturgy to Southern blues. Taken as a whole, it feels like the movie is arguing that for Jesus to be resurrected means not just a traditional bodily resurrection but also the resurrection from being entombed in the specifics of a particular time period and the text. Pasolini's assertion that this movie is "the history of Christ plus two thousand years of Christian storytelling" foregrounds Christ's democratization, the collective ownership of Christ: Christ is everywhere and belongs to everyone and as such is intrinsic in the work of collective justice, not unlike what Richard Rohr would call the "Universal Christ." On a more personal note, it's also really inspiring to see such great unibrown representation. To everyone who told me to shave it in twain: if the single brow was good enough for the Son of God, the Only Begotten of the Father, Emmanuel, well then by golly it's good enough for me.
Grade: B+
Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion) (1937)
Renoir's WWI POW melodrama is a lovely salute to pan-European (and specifically European, unfortunately) solidarity in contrast to nationalism, and it's got a great roster of characters who are hard not to love. I've always loved
The Great Escape, which obviously takes a lot of cues from this movie but also ends up with a far less rosy and idealized depiction of humanity, which maybe makes sense in the context of something like WWII (and implicitly the Holocaust/atomic bomb, whose consequence casts an incredibly long shadow over common human solidarity in the 20th century and beyond). So I think I'm maybe feeling a little distanced from the optimism of this movie, but as an ideal, it's beautiful.
Grade: B+
Television
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, Seasons 1 & 2 (2019-2021)
I'm not really sure how to review a sketch comedy show, or even how to review its seasons individually, but I thought this was a good one. Tim Robinson's characters' tendency to double down on a mistake rather than simply own up to it and move on is very funny, and I'm sure there have been essays written about how this is "about Our Current Moment." Not sure if I could write those essays, but I laughed a lot.
Grade: B+
Nathan For You, Season 1 (2013)
I know I'm behind the times watching this, but I've got HBO Max now, so the world is my oyster, baby! So anyway, everything I've ever heard people say about this is on the money: a convergence of prank show with the "let's help a failing business" reality TV that's gut-bustingly hilarious while also being occasionally profound and poignant. You will believe that people will hike a mountain and camp overnight solving riddles and sharing their fringe medical beliefs and forge friendships in the process, just to get an $11.93 rebate on gas!
Grade: A-
Eastbound & Down, Season 1 (2009)
This wasn't for me. I'm bummed, because I've been hearing positive things about it since it aired. But I guess in the end, I've seen enough shows involving a washed-up anihero narcissist trying to navigate a life in which they have increasingly less control that I'm going to need them to be a cut above the rest to pique my interest—like, say,
BoJack Horseman, which is not only a much funnier show but also in a context that I am much more prepared to understand the inside jokes for (Hollywood, as opposed to professional baseball). One day, I will find a Jodi Hill/Danny McBride project I will connect with! Unfortunately, this one wasn't it.
Grade: B-
