Movies
This movie is about space exploration and the search for extra-terrestrial life, so you know I'm there. But also, it's about daddy issues—which at first I was like, "Ehh, I dunno, my dad's alright" but then the movie went, "Oh, we meant your heavenly daddy, too," and then I was back onboard. I kind of wish this movie was weirder than it is (it doesn't have to be 2001, but when you're making a movie about the Meaning of Life, I dunno, maybe untuck your shirt just a little), but it ticks a lot of my boxes and in a pretty convincing way, too. The movie's depiction of our solar system is gorgeous (the orange lights and claustrophobic spaces on Mars are particularly great), and the depiction of a near-future space-traveling society as one ravaged by both corporate capitalism and international violence over the contested ownership of space resources is one of the more (depressingly) plausible takes on what space travel will actually look like in the next century that I've seen in a movie. And for a space movie in the lineage of something like 2001, it's curiously fascinated by politics—we always get someone's rank/position alongside their name when we're introduced to them, and the way that power is distributed among these ranks is a quiet but consistent thread throughout. I wouldn't say that 2019 has been a great year for movies in general, but the fact that we've gotten two major, ideas-driven auteurist space films in the past few months (I usually have to wait years between these things!) makes me feel a little better about it. Grade: B+
A lot of people have tried to remake Goodfellas, including Martin Scorsese himself (twice!), but I don't think any of those movies have gotten quite what makes this genre—we can call it a genre now that there are like a dozen movies doing this, right?—tick as well as Hustlers does. Having the 2008 financial crisis be the dividing line between the golden years and the dark years in the same way that the introduction of hard drugs in Goodfellas and the 1980s in general in Boogie Nights are is a stroke of structural/thematic genius, and grounding this movie in milieu of 1. women 2. of color who are 3. sex workers plants Hustlers in that lived-in, sociopolitical sense of operating within the experiences of a marginalized people that hangs so heavily over the early parts of Goodfellas (in fact, that sense is even stronger here)—something that Wolf of Wall Street, the other Goodfellas riff on 2008, sorely lacked and that propels an already extraordinarily entertaining film toward greatness in Hustlers's case. It doesn't *quite* get there, largely due to a few glaringly bad bits of dialogue in this generally strong screenplay—the final line of the movie is almost embarrassing in how much it bends over backwards to unnecessarily explain the film's themes—but this movie is very good nonetheless, buoyed by a terrific cast (that is, to a subtly devastating effect, basically halfed once 2008 rolls around) and some of the best editing and camerawork I've seen in years. This will in all likelihood be the best mainstream American studio movie of the year, so get it while it's hot, folks. Grade: A-
A decently directed thriller that has an admirable patience—basically Reservoir Dogs without the smirking irony and meta references, which is maybe missing the point of Reservoir Dogs, though I'm open to this premise being a good idea. But unlike Reservoir Dogs, the screenplay is dumb, and after a while, that accumulates into some pretty face-palming twists in the back half of the movie. Also, given that the movie does not mention ideology or racism or literally anything specific to white supremacy, I can't think of a single reason why this movie had to be centered on a far-right militia group other than just sheer shock value. So edgy. Grade: C+
Completely whitebread comfort food, and Burton is basically on autopilot here—Danny Elfman, too (he almost quotes his own Batman theme, like, a lot here). But it's autopilot set to the configurations of their good output, and familiar or not, it's an entirely pleasant ride. Probably the most conventionally successful of Burton's 2010s output? Given his 2010s output, that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I really did enjoy this. Grade: B+
The movie opens with the image of a mountainside completely turned to coal dust by the hulk of industry, and it doesn't really get any cheerier from there on out. When we first see the titular Wanda (played note-perfect by writer/director Barbara Loden herself), she's listlessly abandoning her marriage, which might tempt viewers to take an antagonistic stance toward her if the movie didn't make so clear just how mind-numbingly plain her life is, a life caged by those coal mines and desolated mountains. And in no time after that, Wanda is thrown into situation after situation that show just how little agency and control she has—none of which are intended to excuse her behavior so much as it is to contextualize it within the larger purgatory of mundane lower-middle-class existence on the fringes of American society. It's relentlessly unsentimental—and, to that end, a little meandering at times until it arrives upon its bank robbery finale—but we could do with de-sentimentalizing rural American life. Grade: B+
At least 50% of this movie looks pretty shoddy: the character designs for the dwarfs are not great, for example, and a lot of this movie could have used a few more animated frames per second. The music is pretty goofy, too, and though the same must be said of many of Tolkien's original songs, those at least didn't have '70s soft-rock folk for backing instrumentation. That said, there are also some terrific pieces here, including some great character designs for Smaug and Gandalf (also, John Huston voicing Gandalf is wholly inspired) as well as consistently incredible watercolor-inflected backgrounds—created by a bunch of future-Studio Ghibli animators, so of course. It's not exactly a functional movie or even a great adaptation of its source (whose episodic structure makes it tougher to adapt to film than I think a lot of people give it credit for), but it's certainly not bad. Grade: B-
Music
The Norwegian singer-songwriter and experimentalist returns for what's probably her most immediate album in a decade: a soothing, trance-indebted collection of songs that form a concept album about Love—a conceptual far cry from the same artist's work a few years ago about menstruation and vampires. But typical of Hval, her take on Love isn't programmatic or thinly cliché in the least; this is an album obsessed not with romanticized love as some sort of transcendental concept but more with the strange corners of mundane existence within love, a complicated treatise that's both philosophically weighty and also compellingly banal. And the music itself, sounding like Hval's take on what Grimes was doing on Visions, is hypnotic and lovely. One of my favorite albums of the year so far. Grade: A-
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