Movies
Believe the hype. This is easily my favorite Bong Joon-ho movie, mostly because it takes everything that he's good at—vibrantly realized characters within a pointedly genre framework, mordant comedy that curdles into bitter pathos, scenes of barely-hanging-together mayhem, wild shifts in tone, scathing anti-capitalist themes, scenes involving people being trapped hidden in a room while a couple has sex and then having to sneak out undetected as the couple snoozes in the post-coital glow—and does it all extremely well, while at the same thing doing a few new things, like wrestling in a very tangible way with the present realities of climate change, which feels like a first not just for Bong Joon-ho but also for this recent wave of mainstream-ish anti-capitalist cinema as a whole. A tragedy wrapped in a satire wrapped in a cracking thriller more than worthy of its clear Hitchcock influences, this is the kind of movie that starts out small and unassuming (a poor teen takes a job tutoring the daughter of an obscenely rich couple) and then proceeds to open up further and further until its scope is nearly unimaginable in its ambition; saying more would spoil what truly is a movie that really should be experienced blind. Among my top three movies of the year so far and not likely to move from that tier by the end of next month. Grade: A
The whole hook of The Big Short was to render a subject too arcane or too boring for the general public to understand both engaging and capable of inspiring the populist, righteous anger that the subject clearly deserves. I know McKay's stock has fallen since, but I still think The Big Short is pretty successful at accomplishing that mission. The Laundromat, in its attempt to do for the Panama Papers what The Big Short did for the 2008 financial crisis, only has half the equation down, and it turns out that this sort of movie completely doesn't work without both halves in tandem. They got the righteous anger down pat; Soderbergh in the director chair and Burns in the screenwriter's... chair(?) are clearly pissed off about this whole situation. But somewhere along the way, this movie missed the part where it takes the arcane, boring ideas and makes them interesting. This movie is about a bunch of rich people going to absurd lengths not to pay their taxes; this should make me livid. It does when I read about things like this in the newspaper every day. But in The Laundromat, it doesn't. Here, it makes me yawn. The effect is curiously and unfortunately like listening to a friend go on a lengthy, furious tirade about a coworker you've never met from a job you're only barely familiar with. Points for passion, but... Grade: C
My feelings on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are pretty much identical to the other André Øvredal features I've seen, which are that it has some very good ideas wrapped in a dubious package. The good: the cinematography, the lighting, the capricious storytelling, the recontextualizing of the tales from Alvin Schwartz's book as mutating legends made real through pain and fear—oh, and of course the sequence in which the movie faithfully and horrifyingly recreates the eternally cursed image of the pale woman from Stephen Gammell's illustrations from the original book. This film's really not fooling around with the "horror" part of its quest to make a horror movie for kids, which is admirable. But then there's the bad/dubious. These characters have no life outside of the limited charisma its teen actors bring to them—debilitating for a story that revolves around turning these characters' fears into folk tales. And the setting is similarly undercooked: as far as I can tell, the movie is set in 1968 solely so it can use Donovan's "Season of the Witch" and make a strained metaphor out of Richard Nixon's election and the Vietnam War. Also, the obvious plug for a sequel at the end is dumb and forced. A mixed bag, for sure, but enough that I enjoyed to make me still curious about this Øvredal fellow. Grade: B-
**If you're interested in my take on the series that led up to this movie, scroll down to the "Television" section of this post**
Before I watched it, I was well-aware of this movie's reputation as an ambitious, genre-bending head-trip and a landmark of anime. Yet even knowing that going in, I'm still gobsmacked that this is a movie that exists: a daringly inventive sci-fi yarn merging mecha anime with the Christian and Jewish mythology of Adam, Eve, and Lilith (!!), using a mix of gorgeously traditional and blazingly avant-garde animation to tell a story that's simultaneously a cosmic saga encompassing the entire human race and a bracingly intimate exploration of one human being in particular and his frightened, solipsistic psychology—all while satisfyingly wrapping up the anime series that birthed it (and much more so than the similarly surreal but narratively non-sequitur final two episodes of the show that this movie replaces), and doing it all in less than 90 minutes! It's one impossible premise stacked upon another, and that this movie is real at all is almost as miraculous as the fact that it not only pulled it all off but also did it brilliantly. Grade: A
The plot barely hangs together, and I could barely tell you a thing that happens on a literal level. But the score—by Goblin, of course!—is great, and there are some exquisitely baroque kills. Breaking news: a classic giallo flick is classic giallo! Grade: B
I was expecting more horror and less melodrama from this Swedish gothic classic, but oh well—the melodrama is good, and the double-exposure effect that creates the ghostly image of the titular carriage and the lost souls that drive it is simply but extremely effective. The movie is moralizing to a fault—it's as much a morality play as it is a melodrama, with saintly Christian women and reprobate sinners and everything. But as heavy-handed as it is, that moralizing is also inextricable from the movie's power. I think if we're honest, we can all relate to the central anguish of the protagonist; we're not all horrible men who have ruined the lives of women and children, but most of us—or at least me—feel at least a little bit that horrible feeling that the movie strikes in its climax of realizing that some of our actions (however small) have caused actual pain in others that can never really be undone. The way The Phantom Carriage then intertwines that feeling with a rumination on death hits deeply at what is most disconcerting about mortality for me: not the idea that I will die in general but rather that there will be a point at which a period will be placed at the end of my life's work, and thenceforward there will be nothing I can do to alter what came before nor the effects that will stretch on after. I suppose this is a rather solipsistic approach to life and death, and neither the movie nor I let that be the only thesis regarding life and death on the table. But when The Phantom Carriage manages to contort its moralizing into this kind of existential horror, it's tapping into something primal. Grade: A-
Television
I'm not super well-versed in anime, but I know enough to recognize how much the early-to-middle parts of Neon Genesis Evangelion give themselves over to the tropes of mecha anime. The first 3-4 episodes are pretty much exactly what I was expecting from a series lauded for its ambition and its subversiveness: beautifully drawn, compellingly realized, off-beat, and deeply human. But once the series starts getting deeper into the school hijinks and the "monster-of-the-week" format, it risks feeling a little stale as everything congeals into familiar shapes, even within its decidedly weird "Christian mysticism meets Ultraman" world: the gang does something wacky at school; there's a new "Angel" to fight; maybe Shinji has some interpersonal conflict at home with Asuka; repeat. It's never not fun to watch, but I definitely was scratching my head for a good stretch of episodes there, wondering why this series was so well-regarded and considered so groundbreaking. But as longtime fans of the show no doubt know, these gestures toward conventionality is just the calm before the storm of the final ten episodes, which radically alter the show and make it into the sprawling, cosmic, mind-bending Freudian psychodrama it's reputed to be. Arguably, the show needs to establish conventionality before blowing it up, and I guess that does give an artistic purpose to that middle stretch, though I don't think the series ever quite feels like a cohesive whole, more resembling a Frankenstein series stitched together from competing impulses rather than a unified thesis; this is even true within those last ten episodes, especially the final two, which plunge the series finale into high abstraction comprising of half-drawn frames and even just shapeless lines—either a "when the budget gives you lemons, make it avant-garde" flourish out of necessity or just a complete breakdown of vision on the part of director Hideaki Anno, I can't tell. Whichever the case, those final two episodes are a huge left turn, and maybe I'm stupid, but to my eyes it seems like a total departure from any sort of continuity the show had built up. It's really out-there, which I dig, but also, I can't help but feel that the movie The End of Evangelion (which is supposed to replace these final two episodes anyway—see my review above) does a much better job of this sort of abstraction while still remaining coherently connected to the arc of the series. Anyway, I dunno if Real Anime Fans will taunt me for this, but Neon Genesis Evangelion feels compromised in a lot of ways and not really the masterpiece I was led to believe it was. But the ways in which it is compromised are fascinating, and it's endlessly rewarding to think about, so if you're going to make a big mess like this, it might as well be this kind of beautiful mess. Grade: B+
Music
I'm sorry, Mom. That's just the title of the album.
I've liked bits and pieces of Lana Del Rey's output before, but this album is a gigantic step forward, perfecting that sort of damaged kitsch / Americana-on-Xanax aesthetic she's been working on this whole time. Her dystopian chamber-pop squalor and Nancy Sinatra swagger come together to form this endlessly mutable environment in which both ten-minute lovelorn epics and wry, coffee-house covers of Sublime songs not only coexist but feel deeply personal. And all this is buoyed by some of the sharpest lyrics I've seen from any artist all year, which reveals her to be something like a female counterpart to the barbed-tongue, persona-obscured pathos that Father John Misty has been going for this decade. The album is entirely too long, and I probably would have cut "The Next Best American Record" and a couple other songs to bring this thing closer to 50 minutes. But even with the occasional slack in pacing, you're unlikely to find a sharper vision elsewhere in 2019. Plus, the title track is maybe the song of the year. Just sayin'. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment