Disney Review: Sleeping Beauty, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

Here we go again!

You can read the previous post in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next post in this series here.

16. Sleeping Beauty (1959)

I've lamented before that Disney never really aspired to be High Art again after the financial failure of Fantasia, and I mostly stand by that. There are little bits of that same ambition—pieces of Bambi, for example, and some of the shorts in the package films—but the studio never really tried again to make a sustained, feature-length leap toward Serious Cinema. And Sleeping Beauty is not exactly a repudiation of that either. However, one of the things that makes this movie so fascinating (and, it must be added, one of the very best Disney movies of all time) is the extent to which it manages to Trojan Horse some of those lofty, Fantasia-esque objectives into what basically amounts to an archetypal Disney film. There is a thin layer of Disneyness in the foreground here: a love-sick, reductively feminine heroine, a thinly characterized prince, a wicked villainess, cutesy animals, slapsticky comic relief who help the heroine (the fairies)—I mean, this is almost exactly Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

But if you peel back that foregrounded layer, it becomes clear what the majority of Sleeping Beauty actually is: a feature-length experiment in making medieval tapestries dance to a Tchaikovsky ballet. And as that, it's stunning. There's a warm, Currier and Ives quality to most Disney animation, but Sleeping Beauty's aesthetic is every bit this strange Gothic recreation that makes the European neverwhere of Disney's fairy tale films feel primal and mythic, as if this film is clawing its way directly out of the collective unconscious of the past. Those towering ceilings in the castle, the knotty, ghostly tree trunks, the geometric foliage with leaf patterns painted over them, the impossible, cruel architecture of Maleficent's mountaintop lair—aahh, I could go on for ages and ages. It's all so staggeringly beautiful, each image blocked and choreographed with such immaculate precision (including what is probably the single most perfect shot in the entire Disney canon), and Tchaikovsky's rich, sweeping orchestral ballet is the perfect accompaniment. This is jaw-dropping, ambitious stuff, stately and magnificent, a cathedral of sound and vision, slipped into the sweet formula of Disney archetypes. It's not abstracted and non-narrative like Fantasia, but it's not far off from its aesthetic reach.

But even those archetypes are notable here. Rendered in this angular style that's heavy on evocative outlines and light on the cherub roundness typical of Disney, the film's characters feel of a piece with the film's broadly medieval aesthetic, looking like nothing so much as figures stepping out of the pages of an illuminated manuscript—stark and gorgeous. And the story itself, while (as I said) firmly within the realm of Disney fairy tales, is a strikingly serious-minded execution of those tropes. Things like Maleficent summoning the power of Hell in the movie's climax or the fairies bestowing their gifts on Aurora in the movie's opening scene seem to reject American cinema's dichotomy between entertainment for children and entertainment for adults and instead arrive at something that has the audience-swallowing grandiosity of the sweeping silent epics of the 1920s.

Some have called this film chilly; I'd say it just isn't pandering. It doesn't invite you; it merely exists, and you either get swept up in its worship of archetype and architecture or you don't. I do, and so I'd call it one of Disney's greatest artistic successes.

17. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)

It's a stark juxtaposition that One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the movie Disney released next after Sleeping Beauty. With Sleeping Beauty, you have the studio's lushest, most ancient-feeling film in its history; with One Hundred and One Dalmatians, you have a movie resolutely modern, from its jazzy score right down to its Saul-Bass-esque artwork. Sleeping Beauty is a movie about a time so bygone that it's myth, and Disney could conceivably have released it any time between 1937 and 2000, whereas One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a movie that only could have been released in the 1960s, so specific is its mid-century-modern milieu. We have characters writing pop standards; we have television (a lot of it, in fact—I'd forgotten how much of this movie amounts to basically just watching characters sit around in front of the boob tube [complete with great little pieces of made-up television programming like What's My Crime?]); we have a post-automobile London. In some ways, it's jarring to see stuff this contemporary in a Disney movie after decades of purposefully vague "olden days" settings (I suppose Lady and the Tramp has a similar setting, though it's less self-consciously modern). But in other ways, it's charming, and its approach to modern life is certainly less patronizing than, say, The Aristocats.

Another stark shift from Sleeping Beauty: the animation. Whereas Sleeping Beauty was one of the most expensive and expensive-looking Disney films to date, One Hundred and One Dalmatians is the first feature in another era of cost-cutting that, really, would last the studio until the very end of the 1980s. This is Disney's first feature film done entirely in xerography, which (as I understand it) uses photocopy technology to rapidly reproduce the drawn outlines of characters without the artists having to hand-paint the cels themselves, thus saving a ton of time (and money) in production. The effect is not exactly cheap-looking (though subsequent Disney features using the technology definitely would look pretty cut-rate), but the process's distinctly sketchy, drawn style is a huge difference from the painted animation of all previous Disney features (especially Sleeping Beauty). As a style, it works well for a movie so heavy on blacks and whites as One Hundred and One Dalmatians; the film looks very cool, and the sketchiness fits perfectly with the movie's mid-mod design. But it's hard to look at this film and not think about all the crappy Disney animation on the horizon, too.

But oh well; we aren't to those movies yet. Right now, what I have is One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and it's a good one to have. The movie looks good and plays well, and its cheeky hipness is a breath of fresh air after the 1950s, where even the best Disney films feel like they're wearing stiffly starched collars. This movie is jaunty and light on its feet; the dogs are cute; the adventure is fun. And then of course we have Cruella De Vil, one of the unqualified triumphs of Disney character design (the contrast between her skeletal frame and the voluminous furs she wears is stunning) and one of a long line of female villains with perfect voice acting performances from Tennessee actresses (Betty Lou Gerson, from Chattanooga). And for as much as we've had our Queen Grimhildes and Maleficents plotting black-magic murder and our Strombolis and Captain Hooks attempting kidnapping, slavery, and child trafficking, there's just something incalculably more evil about Cruella De Vil's plan to turn a litter of puppies into a fur coat. It's just so loathsome, and I love her.

18. The Sword in the Stone (1963)

At least we can thank the transition from Sleeping Beauty to One Hundred and One Dalmatians for letting us down easy before The Sword in the Stone, because I can't imagine the awful fall it would have been to have jumped right from the majesty of Sleeping Beauty's towering vision to a movie that, while set in almost exactly the same world as that former movie—a vaguely timeless, mythologized feudal Europe—is quite possibly the least-ambitious feature crafted under the oversight of Walt Disney himself (it was in fact the second-to-last feature produced before the man's death, so who knows how much oversight this actually got). That's not to say that I don't enjoy The Sword in the Stone; it's a perfectly fun, breezy little feature, and I like it quite a bit more than several of the studio's more prestigious classics (sorry, Cinderella). But I don't think it would be controversial to say that there is exactly nothing going on in this movie, neither on a story level (the movie's plotting is resolutely small-scale and episodic—even when Wart becomes king, it's treated as a minor Sunday-afternoon nuisance rather than some world-shaking event) nor on a technical level.

Animated with the same xerographic technology of One Hundred and One Dalmatians but none of its cool style, The Sword in the Stone's world is a flat and an empty one, especially after the thundering Gothic spaces of Sleeping Beauty and the sketch-pad charm of Dalmatians's bustling frames; the environment that Wart and Merlin occupy seem more like a stage than a living universe (or even a living painting, as has often been the Disney aim), with a different set for each scene: here's the set for the fish sequence, here's the set for the jousting tournament, here's the set for the "let's use magic to make the kitchen clean itself" sequence (a strange and persistent Disney trope)—as if the studio has these things in a closet and can just roll them out when needed without any particular attention to craft (and in fact, there are quite a few animations re-used from previous Disney features, something One Hundred and One Dalmatians did as well but not nearly so noticeably nor extensively as Sword does). The movie doesn't look bad per se, but it does have the slap-dash feel of something that you might doodle on a scrap piece of paper during a boring meeting—which is to say, plain and quickly developed.

But as I said, I do like this movie, and for all its technical and narrative ambivalence, The Sword in the Stone skates by on pure winsome charm. As flat as the animation is, the character designs themselves are all either pleasingly gangly—Wart in particular is an adorable pileup of twiggy arms and knobby knees—or amusingly doughy. And as episodic as the story is, each of those episodes themselves are a lot of fun; the setpieces are gently comedic, infused with just enough (to break out some MPAA language) light peril to keep them moving quickly, and even if nothing really contributes too much to actual character development or progressive drama, the personalities of Merlin and Wart and the owl Archimedes are defined well enough that it's engaging to see them bounce off each other within these mini adventures.

It's basically the perfect example of a movie that does nothing exceptional but also nothing bad. Good enough for a mid-morning distraction, I suppose, or a just-a-tad-forgettable staple of your childhood. But a big-budget live-action remake? Errrrm...

Anyway, see y'all next time!

Disney Review: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

Sorry for the delay (vacations, weddings, etc.—you know, real-life stuff). But I'm back! Onward!

You can read the previous entry in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.

13. Alice in Wonderland (1951)

In the Disney pantheon, there are the unassailable masterpieces (of which so far we've encountered Pinocchio and Fantasia, I'd say). Alice in Wonderland isn't quite that, but if we allow for a tier just a hair below those earlier classics, this movie fits on that level comfortably. It is one of two Great Movies created by Disney in the 1950s (the other we'll get to next time), and to this day, it remains singular not just in the Disney canon but in American film in general. It's a film that looks simultaneously forward and backward; more than any other Disney feature up to this point (except maybe The Three Caballeros, though that's a different story entirely), Alice's loose and playful relationship with reality recalls Disney's early Silly Symphony shorts, and more than any mainstream American film I can think of prior to the late 1960s, Alice's penchant for surrealism and loopy faux philosophy anticipates psychedelia—this is the main thing that separates the movie from its Lewis Carroll source material, in that it accentuates the strangeness and putty-like world of Wonderland rather than the logical puzzles that Carroll was so fond of.

In that regard, it's not too hard to see why the movie was a critical failure and a box office disappointment at the time of its first release. It's a film resolutely out of time, and there's a persistent feeling of uncanniness throughout the film. The choral singing in the music and the rich, brightly drawn animation place the movie within a solidly '40s and '50s Disney tradition, but the bizarrely plotless accumulation of dreamlike imagery and chaotic, non-sequitur dialogue promptly create a dissonance with that tradition. This is a wild, phantasmagoric movie dressed in the formal wear of a straight-laced Disney film, a strange contrast that's subtly uneasy and strange—more so than if Disney had completely abandoned its house style altogether. We have some very good Disney movies to look forward to in the coming few posts, but all of them fit a kind of narrative template that's more or less conventional (or at least persistently concrete); there's virtually nothing like Alice in Wonderland as far as the eye can see into Disney's future, and I cherish this immaculate little bit of otherworldly anti-convention.

14. Peter Pan (1953)

If we're looking exclusively at narrative in the traditional sense (i.e. a consistent conflict that escalates to a climax at the film's end, which means we're excluding great but unconventional features like The Three Caballeros and Alice in Wonderland) Peter Pan is Disney's most successful feature film since Dumbo, nearly twelve years prior. It's a rollicking adventure story with exciting setpieces (the children flying through a nocturnal London is my favorite), a great villain (yoooooour aaaaa crook, Captain Hook), and fun protagonists (Peter Pan himself is a bit of a turd, but I suppose we should have expected that of anyone who literally never grows up). Like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan is also tasked with turning a dreamscape into a comprehensible animated feature—J. M. Barrie's original novel quite literally makes Never Land the product of the random flotsam of children's sleeping minds—but Peter Pan deploys that premise to almost the exact oppose effect, applying real-life logic to a dream rather than savoring the blissful profundities of dream logic itself. It's an effective strategy, and the movie ends up toeing just the right line between head-in-the-clouds wonder and feet-on-the-ground precision. "You Can Fly!" is also one of the truly classic Disney songs of the pre-Renaissance era, too. So this is a pretty good movie.

But oh loooord have mercy, the qualifications I have to put on that assessment. Okay, look, I know that every film is a "product of its time," and that it can be very tiresome to sit here in 2018 and take pot shots at movies from 65 years ago for not being made with 2018 sensibilities. But I have my limits, and by golly, Peter Pan's depiction of Native Americans is one of them. I'm not above this movie's racism; when I was a kid, I enjoyed this movie's whooping, stereotyping, condescending version of indigenous peoples as a fun, noisy trope of adventure stories without ever really thinking about the ways in which it so offensively condenses an entire continent of people into some feathers and face paint (and this is basically how it's presented in the book—i.e. these Native Americans exist as the flattened, de-humanized archetypes that stick in children's brains from media and thus make it into Never Land, which would be an interesting idea if the book/movie didn't so sincerely engage with these tropes as "fun"). And I absolutely did not register the parade of uncut racist horror inherent in "What Made the Red Man Red." But hoo boy, it's all there, and it's impossible to overlook now. Every second involving the Native Americans in this movie is a checklist of every awful, marginalizing thing that American media did to Native American representation in the 20th century (and in some ways, continues to perpetuate). It's bracing and ugly.

Disney basically buried Song of the South, its 1946 joint-live-action-and-animated feature-length adaptation of the Uncle Remus tales. I'm not here to defend that movie because 1) its depiction of African Americans in the Reconstruction-era South is not good, and 2) even putting that aside, the movie as a whole is not good either. But if Disney's really so serious about scrubbing its history of all its racism (instead of releasing well-contextualized academic versions of those racist works that actually show the company coming to grips with its history rather than pretending it never occurred, which is what I'd like to see happen), what's Peter Pan doing out there in the wide-open world as not just a readily available Disney movie but one of the company's flagship features? I don't necessarily want Peter Pan buried either, but the inconsistency in messaging is striking.

And that's not even mentioning the weird, troubling choice to sexualize Tinker Bell and make her something of a woman scorned archetype. Or the way that Peter himself treats Wendy, which feels like "bad boyfriend 101." I guess what I'm saying is that this is one of those times in the Disney canon where the troubling "product of its time" pieces of the movie feel inextricable from the things that make the movie good, which makes it hard for me to enjoy sincerely now. Which is a real bummer, and I can only imagine is even more of a bummer for the people who are directly marginalized by this movie's depiction of women and Native Americans. Peter Pan used to be one of my favorites. Stupid racism. Stupid sexism.

15. Lady and the Tramp (1955)

I really hate the Uptown Girl trope. "Oh, I'm so privileged and such, but thank goodness for the virtuous poor person to show me what life really is; and hurray for our true love conquering systematic prejudice!" Yeah, no thanks. These are stories with these grand pretentions of social commentary, but they almost invariably focus on the rich half of the romance at the expense of any real commentary on poverty, which makes it obvious how much the storytellers like to use poverty as scenery for a story that, in the end, just affirms the hierarchies it claims to want to comment on. So Lady and the Tramp, whose central romance hinges on exactly this trope, already has an uphill climb into my heart (made even sharper by the intrusion of that good-time Disney racism—i.e. "The Siamese Cat Song," which I won't belabor because I've already said my piece about Peter Pan, and anyway, it's not quite as heinous or pervasive as the racism in Peter Pan, but still... yerg).

I won't deny the movie its charms, though. For starters, it's not completely an Uptown Girl love story; a good part of the film involves positioning Lady as a sort of older sibling becoming jealous of a new baby in the house, which, as an older sibling, I think is a more interesting story; another section of the story involves the scariest rat of all time trying to murder that baby, which is yet another entry of "extremely dark and scary thing thrown into the middle of a happy Disney movie" (also, do rats really try to kill babies in real life? the movie certainly seems to take this as a given, and if it's true... hello, nightmares). Another thing I enjoy is the film's Bambi-like ability to draw its animal characters in a way that's both naturalistic and expressive—it certainly helps that dogs are already extremely expressive animals, but the way that the animators are able to take such a variety of breeds and make each of them its own cartoon personality simply by depicting them more or less how they are in real life is a lot of fun. Some of it is pretty obvious (oh the Scottish Terrier has a Scottish accent, ha ha), but it's never not amusing, especially in the standout sequence at the pound.

So anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that once I get past my reflexive gagging at some of the romantic tropes of this movie, it's not bad. It's right there with Cinderella as the worst of this run of post-package-era films, but it's got enough to offer that I think it edges out Cinderella pretty comfortably.

See y'all next time!

Mini-Reviews for June 11 - 17, 2018

Record-low number of movies. But I did finish up a bunch of books!

Movies

The Giver (2014)
In a bitter reminder that this movie was released in 2014, the height (nadir?) of the YA dystopia boom, the film adaptation of the children's lit masterpiece The Giver adds a bunch of stupid YA dystopia tropes (they're attractive teens now! there's a love interest! there's an evil dictator villain! there are action sequences! Taylor Swift is here for some reason!) to Lois Lowry's beautifully efficient sci-fi parable. Yet as much as those additions gall, the more bitter pill to swallow is just how lackluster the whole production is. The acting is languid—our lead, Brenton Thwaites, who plays Jonas (and yes, he utters the phrase "My name is Jonas" in this movie, because apparently that little chestnut was just too irresistible for our intrepid filmmakers), is worst in show, but even heavyweights like Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep are performing way under their potential here. Abysmally lazy production design makes a mockery of the film's attempt to make a pristine, utopian future (the movie's idea of a futuristic bike is just to replace the spokes with plastic discs). And the dullest cinematography and editing of all time try (unsuccessfully) to string all these things together into a functional narrative. I have to admit, even granting the infanticide, the idea of The Giver's hyper-regimented society doesn't sound too bad if it means never having to deal with the pain of a book as smart as Lowry's being adapted into a movie this stupid. Grade: D+

Super (2010)
A strange, bleak take on the uncomfortable subtexts of superheroism—the vigilantism, the violence, the male entitlement, the delusions of grandeur, etc. This sort of thing has been done before, sometimes to more consistent effect, but there's something about the particular tone this movie strikes—like the Deadpool movies, only if they were actually serious about deconstructing the tropes of superhero stories and if Deadpool himself was, instead of being aware that he's in a comic book movie, unaware that he wasn't in a comic book movie—that's pretty compelling in pieces. On top of this, Ellen Page is unsurprisingly great (basically Juno, only with blood lust instead of Michael Cera lust), and Rainn Wilson is surprisingly great (mercifully free of the camera-mugging of Dwight Schrute). It's a real shame, then, that the ending completely forgets what kind of movie this is, concluding the film with a bizarrely tone-deaf indie-quirk sentimentality that seems to posit, "What if Taxi Driver and its ironically heroic ending, but post-Wes-Anderson and sans irony?" Grade: B

Television

Black Mirror, Series 4 (2017)
Black Mirror has, like many Netflix series, a length problem. Say what you will about The Twilight Zone (and yes, references to the famous Rod Serling series are as inevitable in Black Mirror reviews as comments about Charlie Brooker's technophobia); at this that show's episodes—with the exception of the regrettable Season 4—got in and out within a brisk 25 minutes. Sometimes, a sci-fi parable just doesn't have enough ideas to go any further than that. Now that Black Mirror is on Netflix, it has virtually no restrictions as far as episode lengths, and half of the episodes in this fourth series comfortably hit the hour mark; the first episode in this set, "USS Callister," is the length of a short feature film. Unlike past series of Black Mirror, none of the episodes here are premised on a bad idea; however, almost all of the episodes overstay their welcome, stretching out their premise to cumbersome durations. It's not accident that the best episode of the bunch, "Hang the DJ," is one of the shortest (though to be fair, the worst episode here, "Metalhead," is the shortest). I like a lot of this season; in addition to "Hang the DJ," I enjoyed the very Tales-from-the-Crypt-esque "Black Museum" as well as "Arkangel" (the season's purest dose of the classic Charlie Brooker "technology is ruining our lives!"). But next time around, I hope there's a more judicious editor's eye for how these stories are told. Grade: B-

Arrested Development, Season 4 Remix: Fateful Consequences (2018)
I think I'm one of the few defenders of Arrested Development's fourth season, a fascinating and ambitious experiment with the formal flexibility of the Netflix platform that was uneven but fitfully brilliant. Netflix, in the run-up to its Season 5 release, decided that it would be a good idea to re-edit Season 4 into a more traditional season that progressed in chronological order and in standard 22-minute episodes. I've decided this was a bad idea. In addition to removing the structural experimentation that was one of the most interesting things about the original Season 4, this remix frequently doesn't make sense. Very early on in the season, it becomes clear how integral the structure of the original season was to this story; recurring jokes are prematurely deployed, the existential momentum of episodes like "Flight of the Phoenix" and "Colony Collapse" is destroyed as their plots are divvied out piecemeal over the course of a whole season, and the new episodes are burdened with loads of stilted exposition attempting to stitch the old plots into this new structure. We still have the best Season 4 bits (the "Sound of Silence" motif, Michael's elaborate roommate voting scheme, etc.), but we've got a whole lot of dysfunction along with it. I want family dysfunction when I come to Arrested Development, Netflix, not structural dysfunction. Grade: C+

Books

Why I Left, Why I Stayed by Tony and Bart Campolo (2017)
I wish there was more to this book. For the son of one of Evangelicalism's most prominent leaders to become an open secular humanist after years of Christian ministry is a major event, and the fact that these two men are willing to engage respectfully in a book-length conversation about their beliefs and the ways that the other's beliefs affect their own is a vital premise. But as slim as this book is (not even 200 pages), there really isn't much room for either party to give but the most familiar overview of their respective beliefs and talk past each other in the familiar ways that Evangelicals and secular humanists tend to do. We need books like these, but we need them to be willing to be a lot thornier and more raw and more in-depth than this one ever is. Grade: B-

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes (1997)
In comparison to the movie (which I can't help, since I saw it so recently), the original graphic novel's meandering, episodic structure feels much truer to life than the movie's offbeat strain of romanticism, and hence, the character moments land a lot more strongly (particularly with Rebecca, whose character is totally underserved by the film). But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a better time with the movie's plot, and in both, I'm left a little uncomfortable with the lackadaisical way that both film and book treat the casual homophobia and general dismissiveness of others in their protagonists (though I'd be lying again if I pretended that this attitude wasn't shared by me and my friends when we were adolescents). Regardless, it's a funny and poignant little capsule of late-Gen-X/early-Millennial white America, and I'm glad I live in a world with both the book and the film. Grade: B+

Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)
I hadn't read this in a very long time, so I guess my re-read deserves a review. Asimov's central idea here—following, via short stories set generations apart from one another, the gradual dissolution of a galactic empire into a dark age—is intoxicating, and it's reasonably well-executed. The book is lousy with great sci-fi ideas, too, like the way that a limited application of nuclear energy leads to the founding of a galactic religion. Still, as always when I read Asimov these days, I do wish there was more of a human element to his writing; we're mainly dealing in the realm of intelligent, unflappable men (and it's always men—where are you, Susan Calvin??) stroking their beards as they try to solve problems. It's never not engaging, but without a reason to care about the chin-stroking human beings we meet, it's rarely riveting. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for June 4 - 10, 2018

A little late (and a little short) posting today because I'm on vacation. Hope you enjoy regardless!

Movies

First Reformed (2018)
For Ethan Hawke's ailing pastor, Toller, it's the environment. "Will God forgive us for destroying His creation?" one character asks Toller, and it becomes the seed, the germ of an idea that won't let his mind go until that question has become a primal scream that Toller slings at his own church. But it's not just the environment. Will God forgive us—American Christians—for destroying the lives of immigrants, as much God's creation as the birds and the oceans and the snowy woods? Will God forgive us for exploiting the voiceless poor in other countries just so we can have a more convenient way to check our social media feeds? Will God forgive us for driving LGBT adolescents to suicide? And assuming, as orthodoxy encourages us, that He does, isn't there something fundamentally horrific about the fact that He would, that He would preserve an institution as corrupted as the American Evangelical Church? These are the questions that grip my mind, and I'll admit the appeal of the idea of destroying the Church altogether, as Toller eventually decides to do. I vocally wished for it on November 8, 2016. But the true power of First Reformed—the best film of the year and the best faith-based film since 2016's Silence—is not just that it articulates my darkest, most despairing thoughts about American Christianity; it's that it's able to contextualize these thoughts as horror, a that's as self-harming as they are self-righteous; a cage covered in thorns, one that, when shaken, hurts others as much as myself—Toller is as much Travis Bickle (to name another Schrader protagonist) as he is Tomas Ericsson from Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman's faith-in-crisis masterpiece and clearly an influence on this film). Because institutions are people. "Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind at the same time," Toller says early in the film, and that's it: institutions can be vile and worthy of destruction, but each one of them is the accumulation of human life, every life the image of God, every one God's creation. What to do with the wisdom of holding these two contradictory truths, I don't know, and the movie itself may not know either. There may not even be an answer to that oxymoron. Is this grace? Is grace so indecent? So unjust? Grade: A

The Treasure (Comoara) (2015)
A comedy, or maybe it's a satire, or maybe this is a straight drama—such tonal confusion seems endemic to my interactions with the Romanian New Wave—involving two men's search for buried treasure and the bureaucratic hassle involved with the government regulations of treasure-seeking. It's sort of interesting in parts, but the long, naturalistic takes and subdued acting are all a tad too dry for my tastes—honestly, the tonal confusion has more to do with this movie being somnolent than anything really radical. Plus, there's this out-of-nowhere ending that feels like a punchline—the most interesting part of the movie, for sure, and I could have done with more pointed thematics like that of the ending. Grade: B-

The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)
As a documentary, it's fine—a typical talking-heads-mixed-with-archival-footage affair, but elevated by just how interesting these talking heads are in the context of the film's subject of the political life of Muhammad Ali (e.g. Louis Farrakhan). Rendered this way, it's probably a better depiction of Ali's struggles than the Michael Mann movie, actually. Grade: B

Ponette (1996)
So this little girl has to come to terms with the death of her mother, and it's very cute and crushingly sad and amazingly well-acted for a movie that's approximately 90% child actors. It also made me deeply uncomfortable: did the filmmakers actually convince the 4-year-old Victoire Thivisol that her mother had died? It's easy to complain about bad child actors, but it's just as easy to forget how upsetting it is to watch a child seem convincingly grief-stricken. Grade: B

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
The only thing I knew about Mishima before watching this movie was how his life ended, and that lack of knowledge was probably a liability for me. So what I got was a very stylish, very striking film (those sets! that lighting!) about the political and artistic philosophy of a man whose art and philosophy I know nothing about. I dug the look and structure of the film, but I'm guessing that having read some of the dude's novels (at least the ones re-enacted in this movie) would have helped me to get into the pretty conceptual, pretty monotonous dialogue scenes. Grade: B+

Song of the South (1946)
What they don't tell you about Song of the South is that it's really boring in addition to being really racist—and it's worth interjecting here that the racism of Song of the South is the worst sort of movie racism, too, wherein the creators actually thought they were doing something progressive (and, to be fair, it was so unusual to have so many African-American actors cast so sympathetically in a mainstream movie in 1946 that there is a sort of argument for the movie's progressivism, in a cock-eyed, representational sense) while perpetuating condescending and racist stereotypes about African-Americans and highly rose-colored depictions of the Reconstruction-era American South. But everybody knows about this movie's racism; what everybody also needs to know about this movie is that it's not the happy-go-lucky collection of Br'er Rabbit stories it's been construed as. No, it's the stiflingly dull story of how Uncle Remus helps the world's most tedious rich white kid overcome the bullying of his white-trash neighbors and come to terms with the fact that his parents are having marital problems. The animated sections starring Br'er Rabbit take up barely 20 minutes of the movie's 90. Song of the South is an undeniable landmark; its animation is some of the most fluid and technically accomplished that Disney did in the dark age between Bambi and Cinderella, and the way the animation interacts with the live action (something the studio experimented with throughout the 1940s, not always this successfully) is stunning. Then there's James Baskett, who, as Uncle Remus, deserves to be recognized with Gone with the Wind's Hattie McDaniel (who also appears in this movie) for breathing an astonishing amount of life into the most reductive of stereotypical roles. And nobody who hates on "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" is a friend of mine. But the pieces that make this movie a landmark for Disney are hardly the majority of the movie, and the other pieces, unfortunately, run this movie right into the ground. Grade: C

Disney Review: Melody Time, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

The package films this time were actually good, but thank heavens we're at the end of this era of Disney.

Remember, first-time watches are marked with an asterisk.

You can read the previous entry in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next entry here.

10. Melody Time (1948)

At this point, I'm not sure that I have a lot left to say about these package films other than to compare them to one another. And on that note, I suppose this is where I call Melody Time easily the best of the whole set—at least, the best of the ones that aren't The Three Caballeros, and really, that one's working on a different rubric altogether. Unlike virtually all the other package films, Melody Time doesn't actually have a bad short in its runtime; some are clearly better than others (I don't know that the sleepy "Once Upon a Winter Time" is ever going to be anyone's favorite), but overall, there's a consistency of quality in these shorts that sets the movie as a whole above the others.

And even including The Three Caballeros, Melody Time is the finest-looking Disney feature in motion since Bambi. The animation is certainly more inventive in Caballeros, but it's still obviously a shoestring affair. Melody Time, on the other hand, has a fluidity and range of expressiveness in all its characters that the package films have usually reserved for celebrity characters like Mickey and Donald; it's the first movie in quite a while that has the feel of Disney animation being on its technical A game, from the nocturnal lighting in "Blue Shadows on the Trail" to the water animation in "Little Toot" to the triumphant amiability of the protagonist in "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed" to the nightmarish, "Pink Elephants on Parade" style freakout of "Bumble Boogie" (my favorite short of the bunch).

Don't hear me saying that this movie is any kind of classic. There's a good deal of American mythologizing that veers from cloyingly wholesome in that mid-century way I hate (such as appears in "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed," to say nothing of the short's heinous propaganda for the red delicious apple, i.e. the worst apple) to horrifyingly racist in a way I hope we can all hate (the "painted desert" section of "Pecos Bill")—either way, a bunch of Manifest Destiny baloney. It's also, curiously, the only Disney feature I can think of (correct me if I'm wrong, internet) that's openly religious, and of course that means this white-bread Christianity that's as boring and nutrient-free as unbuttered toast. On the less-ideological side, there's still a stiltedness to the package film format that never lets Melody Time truly break free into something as wildly creative as my old buddy The Three Caballeros (or even Fantasia, for that matter, though Melody Time really wants to be Fantasia at times). But as far as these package movies go, Melody Time is firmly in the "enjoyable" camp, and that's about all I can ask.

11. *The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Like Fun and Fancy Free, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (THE LAST OF THE PACKAGE FILMS, praise be!) is a double feature, pairing two lengthy stories that had been, in the post-war cost-cutting, been pared down from planned features into completed shorts. Unlike Fun and Fancy Free, however, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is actually quite good throughout, though also like Fun and Fancy Free, Adventures leads with the weaker of the two shorts. The first short, a jaunty half hour adapted from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, is the only one of any of the package-era shorts that feels worse-off for having been cut down from feature-length. Its recounting of Mr. Toad's misadventures from the novel is charming (Toad and Moley in particular are extremely cute in the best way possible), but it's also rushed and doesn't quite do the novel justice, even as an obviously condensed version of the plot. It's never boring like "Bongo," and overall, I'd call it a success. But it also is conspicuously incomplete.

The second short, though, is magnificent. Disney's adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is one of the few unqualified successes of the package era, and likely as good an adaptation of Washington Irving's comic ghost story novella as we'll ever need. Ichabod himself is bar-none the best-designed human character of any Disney output in the 1940s, a perfect amalgam of Irving's absurdly angular description of the man in the book with Disney's cuddlier sensibilities, and to watch this strange bird human in motion is to be mesmerized. The rest of the cast has more great character design (if not quite on the level of Ichabod), especially Ichabod's antagonist, Brom Bones, who radiates with brutish cunning that the movie twists deftly from oafish to frightening in equal measure. And of course there's the movie's climax, the famed nocturnal chase through the woods as Ichabod tries to outrun the Headless Horseman; it's a strange sequence that walks a fine line between horror and comedy (it honestly reminded me of the dreamlike tone of Evil Dead 2), a strangeness best illustrated by the way that the Horseman's steed is lit from below with a hellish red light while Ichabod himself gawkily struggles with his own bony, cartoony horse—and it's fantastic. This is probably the last time for a while I'll see Disney's penchant for terrifying children rear its head, so I'm going to savor it.

12. Cinderella (1950)

I've always found Cinderella to be one of the weakest of the "princess" films. The songs aren't good—"Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" and "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" are the ones Disney seems most intent on making "classics," and if those snoozers are your golden girls, you know you're in trouble (and let's say nothing of the truly bad "So This Is Love" and "Sing Sweet Nightingale"). The characters aren't good—Cinderella is, typical of these early princess movies (my beloved Sleeping Beauty has the same problem), personality-free and gratingly virtuous, and the villain cast, while at least more distinctive, are all more irritating than menacing (though the movie does play some good work with light and shadow on Lady Tremaine); I'll grant that the mice are fun most of the time, but even then, they're too cutesy by half and not always interesting. And then there's the movie's greatest sin, one that not even the worst princess movie makes—the animation is drab. Cinderella, in addition to being boring on a narrative level, has the most anonymous character design in the Disney princess canon, and at times, she has the impression of being a moving mannequin; elsewhere, there's none of the technical wizardry or depth of field that made the early Disney features so breathtaking, not any of the shambolic poetry in motion of the studio's shorts (though again, I'll grant that the mice have some good animated sequences).

But when I've traditionally said all this, what I've usually been doing is comparing Cinderella to either the early Disney classics or the later Renaissance titles that solidified the princess brand. What I haven't typically done is view the movie with the historical context in mind, i.e. the fact that Disney hadn't made a proper narrative studio feature in eight years. Leave it to the package films to make one of the weaker Disney movies feel like a breath of fresh air. To be sure, Cinderella is still all of the above re: its characters, animation, and music; but relative to the package films (though, it should be clarified, not the above two in this post), there's a professionalism and high-budget quality to Cinderella that feels like a real return to form, even if the movie is mostly free of the experimentalism and playful spirit that energized the best of the package shorts. And on a structural level, it's just a relief to see a Disney movie stick to one coherent narrative the whole way through.

Thankfully, the studio's features would get much better than this in the subsequent years. But for now, I, like a starving prisoner of the package era emerging back into free society, will take whatever bread crumbs I can get.

Disney Review: The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

Package films... fun times.

Movies I'm watching for the first time (i.e. all of them this time) are marked with an asterisk.

To see the previous post in this series, go here.

UPDATE: To see the next post in this series, go here.

7. *The Three Caballeros (1944)

In most cases, a studio saying, "Hey, what if we make a sequel to our moderately entertaining, culturally pandering anthology film?" would be a red flag. To that end, I wasn't expecting much of The Three Caballeros, which is, in some obvious ways, a sequel to Saludos Amigos, importing the premise (making a "package" movie about Latin American ostensibly for Latin American audiences) and some of the characters (Donald Duck and his Cuban friend, José Carioca). And The Three Caballeros has some of the same problems that dog Saludos Amigos, especially the condescending "look at how cute this foreign culture is!" tone.

But I say it's a sequel in "some" ways because in others, Saludos Amigos does nothing at all to prepare audiences for the cavalcade of utter strangeness and raging formal experimentation that is The Three Caballeros. The movie begins with a pair of self-contained shorts—"The Cold-Blooded Penguin," about an Antarctic penguin who wants to move to a warmer environment, and "The Flying Gauchito," about a boy with a flying donkey—that are odd in how intrusive their narrators are but otherwise fit reasonably well within the tradition of 1940s Disney whimsy. But then José Carioca shows up, and all hell breaks loose as the film proceeds to tear itself apart, piece by piece. I mean this almost literally; beginning with "Baía," a short introduced by José about the Brazilian state of Bahia (Disney apparently doesn't know how to spell the name of the region it wants to portray?), each successive segment of the movie breaks down more and more the barriers between animation and live action, first as Donald Duck and José Carioca jump through a movie projector into a live-action samba that stars Brazilian actor and singer Aurora Miranda, then later as the pair's adventures escalate into a series of mixed-media adventures involving Donald and José (plus a new tagalong, Panchito Pistoles—i.e. the third "caballero") riding a flying sarape through an alternatingly animated and live-action landscape, and finally as Donald Duck begins to hallucinate and the whole movie devolves into a blender of disembodied live-action heads, kaleidoscope swirls, and animated pieces of incongruous Latin American imagery.

If this all sounds completely unhinged, it is, and I haven't even described the half of it and won't; this is truly one of those situations where words can't do justice to what the film sets in motion. It's by far the most aggressively weird thing Disney ever did in one of their features (unless Dinosaur is going to surprise me in a few weeks), and not just that: it's one of the weirdest things I've seen in any animated cinema—feature or short—from this era. In fact, the easiest comparison that comes to mind when describing the movie's hallucinatory climax is Hausu, that monument of horror incomprehensibility—only The Three Caballeros is much more playful than it is horrific.

It bears mentioning that the movie is fairly regressive in its sexual politics; Donald Duck's thing the whole movie is basically to be an unrepentant horndog and chase every woman he sees, because Latina women are sexy, amirite fellas?, which is pretty gross conceptually; that said, the movie is so surreal and formally off-the-wall that it makes the sexism feel sort of distant and abstract, as if Donald Duck is tripping peyote more than he is actually lusting. Nevertheless, there's my caveat. Otherwise, this is my first big surprise in this Disney project, a movie that I expected almost nothing from but that actually delivered something bonkers and otherworldly. It's definitely the most interesting Disney feature since Bambi, and I'm tempted to call it the best movie Disney had made since Fantasia. Even if it isn't, it's still one wild ride.

8. *Make Mine Music (1946)

So as I'm sure you've seen, the first two package films are unified both internally and with each other by a friendliness toward Latin America. In this sense, they at least have a certain logic and consistency to them that, even if it doesn't always produce top-notch work, at least makes sense. But what do you do once your cultural tourism material runs out and you're still reeling from the financial and personnel costs of WWII? Disney's answer to that was to slap together this package of shorts, where the unifying premise is... music, I guess? It's not a bad premise, necessarily; Fantasia made hay (if not money) out of it. But bless its heart, Make Mine Music is not Fantasia. It is, rather, the laziest and most slap-dash feature of this era of Disney.

Credit where credit is due: the "Peter and the Wolf" segment is fantastic, utilizing Sergei Prokofiev's then-recent orchestral piece of the same name (except in Russian) to create a wonderfully animated fairy tale in miniature. I have fond memories of renting this short (which I guess Disney packaged individually?) from the local Hollywood Video as a kid, and those memories have not betrayed me. It's great, and it's no coincidence that when Fantasia was re-released in 1946, Disney included this short along with it. The rest of the movie, though, that's a different story. "Blue Bayou" imagines what the stultifying pacing of Bambi would be like if it had no cute animals and instead was set to a really boring mid-century pop ballad; "Casey at the Bat" takes that annoying poem you had to read in elementary school and sets it to clearly Looney-Tunes-inspired caricature (as it turns out, Disney animators are still far too reverent to make this work); "Two Silhouettes" features, you guessed it, two silhouettes (definitely rotoscoped, or at least animated through some similar effect) dancing to another boring mid-century pop ballad; "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met" is about what it says on the can, and while the whale itself is charmingly animated (probably the best non-"Peter and the Wolf" character in the film), the plotting is turgid and the tone cloying.

There are a few other shorts in the package, but honestly, none of them deserve much commentary, and I'm already tired of talking about this movie. A real low-point of this project so far.

9. *Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

Unlike the other package films, Fun and Fancy Free is not a group of a half dozen or so shorts; it is instead just a pair of lengthy shorts (each over thirty minutes in length, so one has to question the efficacy of calling something that approaches the runtime of Saludos Amigos a "short"), surrounded by an odd framing device involving a poorly animated Jiminy Cricket putting on an LP record and visiting a live-action ventriloquist (the integration of live action and animation pays off in exactly one instance—a very cool effect in which Jiminy drinks a live-action soda). The less said about that framing device the better; ventriloquism is weird on any day, and it's even weirder when it's intruding on what is supposed to be an animated film.

Let's talk instead about the actual pair of "shorts." Good news first: the second short here is "Mickey and the Beanstalk," one of the unqualified classics of the era and a short that, if you spent any time around Disney merchandise as a child, you probably ran into. For those who didn't, the lowdown is that it's basically "Jack and the Beanstalk," retold as a caper starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy (the short's title gives way short shrift to Donald and Goofy, who are most definitely co-stars alongside Mickey). There's nothing especially groundbreaking about the film, but it's incredibly fun and focuses (to great effect) on that guileless, bouncy slapstick that animates the best Disney shorts of the era. It's delightful, sullied only by the way that the ventriloquist framing device keeps interrupting the story to let the dummies comment on the action (presaging MST3K, but in a bad way).

But alas, "Mickey and the Beanstalk" is only the back half of the feature. The first, "Bongo," is the story of a bear who escapes his unhappy captivity in the circus (say what you will about Disney's politics, but the studio was at least privy to the rampant ring of sanctioned animal abuse that is the circus) to go live in the forest, where he finds love and friendship and a whole bunch of other Disney baloney. And... I'm sorry, it's terrible. There's nothing redeemable about this movie. The character animation is bad, this unfortunately murky cartoonishness that's at once unrealistic in this very rubbery and distancing way and also incurably dull and anonymous. The story is unstructured, a feature which makes this already lengthy short feel even lengthier, and the film has a habit of feeling like it is wrapping up before lurching into another story beat. The songs are bad; I won't blame Dinah Shore, who is forced to sing some gratingly anonymous tunes here, but her very 1940s-style trill doesn't help. And that's to say nothing of "Say It with a Slap," a song that posits that wild bears love each other by slapping one another in the face—my wife thought this seemed to be advocating for domestic violence, and while I won't deny the implications, I'm not sure the film has thought through the subtext of this song so thoroughly; it leans so heavily into the supposed silliness of this concept that I have to assume that some storyboarder at Disney thought it would be funny to animate bears slapping one another and then ran with it. Either way, though, it's bad.

At the very beginning of Fun and Fancy Free, Jiminy Cricket tells us, the audience, of the benefits of optimism. "Just look at the morning paper," he says. "Turn to any page; you'll find the whole world worrying about some future age." In true Disney tradition, he tells us to put aside our worries and just have fun. Well, Jiminy, it'd be a lot easier to have fun if your movie wasn't so inconsistent. It's not the future age I'm worrying about—the future brings Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty and a whole host of good Disney features; no, it's this package-film present that's getting me down. These are dark times.

Mini-Reviews for May 28 - June 3, 2018

Don't forget to read my Disney retrospective if you haven't already. So far, there's the first post (featuring Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia) and the second post (Dumbo, Bambi, and Saludos Amigos).

Movies

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Solo is Disney's first major misstep in their curation of the Star Wars franchise, and it's a completely unforced error. They didn't have to make this movie. As the box office numbers show, few people are interested in a young Han movie—especially since, try as he might (and he does try), Alden Ehrenreich is not Harrison Ford, and if we're being honest, I think it's Harrison Ford that most of us love, not Han. I'll bet that even fewer people wanted a movie that's basically a SparkNotes version of A.C. Crispin's Han backstory trilogy from the old Expanded Universe novels (which I somehow remember with shocking clarity), certainly not one whose story is this lumpy nor whose emotional beats are this laden with doe-eyed sincerity nor whose special effects are this iffy—how is this one of the ten most expensive movies ever made?? The action setpieces at least have the decency to be a lot of fun, and I am absolutely here for Donald Glover's Lando (Glover is clearly having more fun than anyone else in front of or behind the camera). The alien design is also top-notch, and probably the most Lucas-esque thing in the whole Disney-Star-Wars franchise is the mid-movie gambling den where Han and Lando play sabacc with the Millennium Falcon at stake, populated with that same lovingly lurid marriage of rubber prosthetics and pulp sci-fi book covers that animated Mos Eisley Cantina and Jabba's palace. Still, to paraphrase our dearly beloved Harrison Solo, hokey casinos and hammy Donald Glovers are no match for a good movie on your screen, kid, and a good movie this is not. Grade: C

Munich (2005)
It's too long by at least half an hour (163 minutes? Really, Steven?), and that (and the accompanying slackness) is what separates this movie from the greats in Spielberg's filmography. But still, it remains a notable accomplishment, the first of Spielberg's mini-trend of using period pieces to comment on contemporary politics and the last of the most artistically sophisticated stretch of the man's career before he bent back around to his own cliches for a bit. Also, was there any other American movie in the period spanning 2001 to 2005 grappling so earnestly and rigorously with the moral thorns of the War on Terror as this one is? Grade: B+

Training Day (2001)
Basically the best-possible outcome of the intersection between Michael Bay and Paul Verhoeven. I hope that doesn't make it sound like I'm downplaying just how tight Antoine Fuqua's direction is, because it's very tight, finding the ideal gear for this sort of walking-the-line-between-gritty-and-bombastic mainstream filmmaking. Denzel is, of course, great here—I wouldn't have picked this for his lead-actor Academy Award performance (Malcolm X is right there, guys), but it's a high-wire performance that's justly iconic. Oh, and shout-out to Terry Crews for being given basically nothing to do but stand quietly and look intimidating and KNOCKING IT OUT OF THE PARK. Grade: B+

Don't Drink the Water (1994)
Woody Allen and Julie Kavner have great chemistry together as the leads (probably the last time a leading Woody Allen had good chemistry with his co-lead until Scoop, another movie involving an amateur magician—coincidence??). In fact, this is probably the best Kavner has ever been in a Woody Allen feature—though that's probably because she's usually underutilized. It certainly isn't because this movie is much good, because it isn't. For a movie that was once a play now on its second adaptation, it's haphazardly scripted and only intermittently amusing, to say nothing of the uncomfortable racial dynamics. Xenophobia/nonwhite cultural caricature (the movie ends with Allen's character sneaking off in a Middle-Eastern "harem"—dressed in drag in what I'm sure is not at all an authentic garb) is a rare flavor for Allen, and it's an unsavory one. Grade: C

Cat People (1982)
Paul Schrader's 1982 update of the 1942 classic is this weird mix of trash cinema and arthouse, and I gather that's kind of his thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any damn sense here. Cat People is an incomprehensible parade of nonsensical mysticism, male-gazey eroticism, and dull footage of the New Orleans zoo. The movie makes a litany of interesting and potentially rewarding decisions (setting the film in New Orleans, casting Malcolm McDowell, using that cinematography and that lighting), but it's at a complete loss as to how to put it all together. The result is a movie that's both bewilderingly bad and stultifyingly boring—a huge step down from the Tourneur original. At least the David Bowie main theme and Giorgio Moroder score are pretty good. Grade: C-

New York, New York (1977)
A great example of how a good movie is not just the accumulation of a lot of good ideas. New York, New York is made almost entirely out of good ideas: the lighting, the shot composition, the juxtaposition of New Hollywood grit with Old Hollywood musical artifice, the pairing of peak Liza Minnelli with peak Robert De Niro, the music, that nearly thirty-minute montage of Minnelli in out-of-context musical sequences belting out number after number—it's all good. But unfortunately, the movie is sunk by its lone bad idea, which is that all these elements should be crammed together indiscriminately into a movie nearly three hours in length. Grade: B-



Television

Dear White People, Volume 2 (2018)
As with its first season, Dear White People's second season's most impressive and distinctive achievement is how it manages to personify and dramatize with shocking fidelity the contemporary political discourse surrounding race and progressive politics, while at the same time making its characters characters and not merely symbols or mouthpieces for certain political archetypes. This season has the added bonus of including several conservative and alt-right voices as well, and the effect is something like watching a Twitter thread come to life—when the characters aren't actually on social themselves, which happens in several extended sequences. That may sound unappealing (I certainly find Twitter unappealing in real life), but in practice, Dear White People is (yet again) simultaneously one of the most vital depictions of the ways modern-day ideologies interact and a razor-sharp character-based dramedy. So you get episodes like "Chapter VIII," where the entire episode revolves, bottle-episode-style, around an argument between Sam and Gabe, and it's both a bracing character moment and a breathtaking examination of the conflicts between people of color's trauma and the role of white allies' "good intentions." It's not all great. The season as a whole isn't quite as cohesive or consistent as the show's first; lacking central organizing events like the blackface party or the gun being pulled on Reggie, Season 2 has the characters drift in disparate directions that don't always tie back together, leading to the underdevelopment of some of the season's threads (Tessa Thompson shows up, e.g., but her character is far too briefly examined to have her climactic moment have weight), and though I enjoy the historical scope of this season, an extended subplot involving Ivy League secret societies is something I found hard to take seriously, right up to the strange, baffling finale. But taken as a whole, Dear White People remains audacious and riveting. There's no show on right now doing stuff like this; it's electrifying. Grade: A-

Books

The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket (2000)
The narrative voice is as fun and morose as ever, and the details of this world are still surreal and great—my favorite this time around is that the mill workers only get chewing gum to eat at lunch. However, this book is suffocated under the series's increasingly rigid formula. The narrator seems more and more aware of this formula with each successive entry, but self-awareness and meta-commentary doesn't really make it any more interesting to read the same plot beats for the fourth time in a row. Grade: B-

The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket (2000)
But now this is more like it. The Austere Academy isn't a complete break with the Series of Unfortunate Events formula, but it's enough to spice it up enough that I'm back onboard. The introduction of the Quagmire triplets as well as hints of a broader conspiracy/mystery (V.F.D.?) are relatively small additions, but they broaden the scope of the series in pleasantly evocative ways. Also, maybe it's just my profession talking, but the school-by-way-of-Kafka depiction of the titular academy is a highlight of my read-through of this series so far. There's something so very familiar about a school putting so much faith in an "advanced computer system" that ultimately fails spectacularly. Grade: B+

The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket (2001)
To say that The Ersatz Elevator is the best book in A Series of Unfortunate Events since Snicket kicked the whole thing off with The Bad Beginning isn't a statement meant to disparage the intervening four books (well, except maybe The Miserable Mill); it's more just me gushing about how big and alive and absolutely packed with ideas Elevator is. Everything the series does well is at its best in this book. The setting is hilarious, morbid, and surreal (this time, the Baudelaires are living with trendy rich people in a big-city high rise obsessed with what is "in" and what is "out"—ocean decorating becomes "in," so they spread sand and shells about their penthouse); Count Olaf's plan is arch and byzantine (involving an auction that is a front for child trafficking, basically?); Lemony Snicket's increasingly intrusive narrator is bone dry and Eeyore-ish (and he's apparently on death row?); the breadcrumbing of the series's mystery is tantalizing and effectively staged (a moment late in the novel involving a secret passage is thrilling in exactly the same way that text adventure games like Zork can be, and while I'm sure I'm the only person in the world excited by this, I'll take it); and for those playing Spot the Literary Reference with this series, there's an allusion to none other than Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which seems as much of a statement of purpose for the series as we've ever gotten. This book is the series bursting into color. This book is great. Grade: A

Music

Sons of Kemet - Your Queen is a Reptile (2018)
One of the year's most fascinating and engrossing jazz records comes from Great Britain of all places. In the year of yet another royal wedding, it's cathartic and brash for Sons of Kemet to declare what they do in this album's title, and the music within is in the same spirit, each track's declaration of "My Queen" a triumphant and angry counterpoint to the title's dismissal of "Your Queen." "My Queen Is Angela Davis" one track says; "My Queen Is Harriet Tubman," says another, and yet another screams, "My Queen Is Albertina Sisulu"—each track a celebration of black women both well-known and obscure to white Western audiences (or at least to me), each track a winding groove set to the furious Afrobeat drive of the percussion and the fire of the occasional lyrics. I'm not sure if this is jazz's future or just one of its many, many historical and political tendrils that I'm only just now discovering, but it's definitely one of the definitive recordings of 2018. Grade: A-