Also, if you like weird slacker prog, don't forget to check out my new Prog Progress post on Dün's Eros.
Movies
Will write a more in-depth review for Cinematary in the next couple of days, but for now, I'll just say that this is a good—if unspectacular—documentary about all the various political and psychological tensions inherent in what it means to be Taylor Swift (and, more generally, any female celebrity). It's unabashedly in the pro-Taylor camp, and I imagine that people who aren't might accuse this movie of committing sins of omission; I myself would have liked for it to have been just a little thornier, too. But if the relatively unironic embrace of the Taylor brand is the price of having this close of access to Taylor herself, then I'd say it paid off. Grade: B
Edit: Here's the in-depth Cinematary review!
The music is good, of course (minus "End Game," an album highlight that loses a lot of its energy without that weird, compelling interplay between Swift, Sheeran, and Future). But the filmmaking made me want to pull my hair out. So much editing (did any single shot last longer than two seconds?), and that mixed with some astoundingly poor shot composition chops up the presumably impressive stage setup and dance choreography into a jumble of hard-to-contextualize imagery. I'm tilting slightly above the completely middle-of-the-road rating, though, because I want everyone to know that, two years later, the backlash is a lie: Reputation is one of Taylor Swift's best albums—good enough, even, to counteract filmmaking this aggravating. Grade: C+
As it turns out, Amber Tamblyn is a really good writer/director—I guess all the hard work that went into the "suckumentary" in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants really paid off, huh? Seriously, though, this is super solid: a taut indie that pivots effortlessly between warped psycho-drama and a tender exploration of grief, with a great eye for visuals/editing and a great ear for sound design. It's also the acting showcase that Alia Shawkat has deserved since forever. Grade: B+
The story and screenplay themselves have this kind of Argo-ish vibe that takes a real-life event (in this case, the advertising campaigns surrounding the 1988 vote to remove Pinochet) and spins a broad and bright yarn that alternates between humor and dead seriousness. It works well here, though it's nowhere near as deconstructive or bold as director Pablo Larraín's later features like Neruda, and I kind of missed that formal and thematic playfulness. The real draw here is Larraín's decision to film the whole movie on magnetic tape rather than celluloid. It's a choice that not only makes the movie's constructed scenes virtually indistinguishable from the archival footage Larraín often inserts (an effect that gives a striking power to scenes like the one where the police violently break up a "No" rally) but also gives the movie an uncommonly beautiful aesthetic as its rickety, slightly-color-separated video tape limitations collide with some world-class cinematography in breathtaking and unexpected ways. Grade: B+
Andrea Arnold's arrestingly beautiful and relentlessly patient cinematic style reinterprets Brontë's heavily Gothic/Romantic novel through the lens of crushing Naturalism, which obscures some of the primal power of its plot. At the same time, the film also complicates a lot of the novel's ideas about class by also highlighting the novel's very sub-subtext about race (Heathcliff is explicitly black in this adaptation and the subject of some unambiguous racism), which does a lot to bring out a lot of the under-explored geometries of the plot's drama. I'm not sure if it completely works (environmental determinism by way of racial hate definitely fits within the broader philosophical context of Naturalism, but does it work within this specific plot? Still mulling it over), and there are a few unambiguously bad choices—e.g. the fact that there is no way in heaven or on earth that young Catherine as Shannon Beer could have grown into adult Catherine as Kaya Scodelario—that make the film not quite work anyway, even if you buy the intersection of its aesthetic and philosophy. But it's a striking movie whose risks demand consideration, and more classic literary adaptations could stand to be as daring as this one. Grade: B
Really dug the musical sequences (especially the one on top of the train—y'all know I'm here for train musical sequences), and for a 2.5+ hour movie, this remains startlingly energetic throughout. I'm also very much interested in the romantic elements of this movie and how they intersect the ultimately deeply tragic ideas about the irreconcilability of moderate and radical politics—the shameless romance of the movie's early goings feels bitterly ironic and uneasily complicated by where this movie eventually goes, and that's really interesting. I'm honestly probably a little more positive on this movie than my rating indicates, but I'm hedging my bets with a kind of generically positive rating here because a lot of my positive feelings have to do with some hunches that I have about the way that the movie deconstructs Shah Rukh Khan's protagonist, hunches that I'm not entirely sure are correct, given my near total ignorance of contemporary Indian cinema and culture. Grade: B+
Anyway, if you'd like to hear me say a more in-depth version of the above or if you'd like to hear some other people say a few more interesting things, you can listen to Episode 284 of the Cinematary podcast, where a group of us talk about this movie!
Ridiculously entertaining and far stranger than at least I had been told: the first half is basically what I was expecting, albeit much sharper—a workplace comedy surrounding entrenched misogyny and generally dehumanizing conditions at a large corporation. But then in the second half, the ladies steal a corpse from a hospital, and it's somehow not the wackiest thing that happens. Through all the hairpins turns, though, it never loses its wicked sense of humor nor its focus on the wage theft and exploitation inherent in a corporation, and given the sheer number of comedies whose thematic and comedic ideas just spin out of control by the end, I have mad respect for the screenplay and all-star leads who keep all this together. I know that it's unlikely that Dolly Parton has kept her political views secret for so long because she's a red-blooded communist, and yet... and yet... Grade: A-
Music
I'm confused by the discussion surrounding whether it is this album or Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain that is Pavement's best—Crooked Rain is clearly better than this album in every conceivable way, while Wowee Zowee is obviously superior to them both. Slanted feels very much like the low-budget EP before their real albums, which isn't a criticism, really, but they would go on to do much more complicated and interesting work. I do like how noisy and lo-fi the album is, even compared to Pavement's famously fuzzy aesthetic throughout the rest of their career, but time and again I find myself drifting toward the songs like "Here" that manage to lift their heads and melodies above the static, and then I just find myself wanting to go to Crooked Rain again. Still, it's not without its moments. Grade: B
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