Movies
Céline Sciamma has made several good movies, but this is comfortably my favorite of hers, retroactively one of my top five movies of 2019, and likely the French director's masterpiece (I still haven't seen her debut, Water Lilies). A love story whose deep emotional contours mirror its sonic and visual ones in a way that melds form and narrative more thoroughly and organically than in any other 2019 movie I can remember. It's a swooningly lush aesthetic experience—I could have existed in this movie for hours more; in fact, those painting scenes alone could have lasted years, and I wouldn't have complained. The movie's hushed sound design emphasizes the smallest of details—the scratch of charcoal on canvas, the rustle of a dress, a hand brushing across a sprig of rosemary, a caught breath as one character meets the gaze of another—until they take on an otherworldly richness, and this is precisely the movie in a nutshell: capturing that specific magnetism that compels you to study every detail of someone you love. This is, of course, literalized by the plot itself, which involves a painter scrutinizing her subject for a portrait until this scrutiny blossoms into love, but this story wouldn't hold nearly so much weight without the full alignment of the cinematic style behind this philosophical/emotional thesis. As much as the history of cinema insists upon it, love isn't made of grand gestures; it's the accumulation of the smallest of sensory morsels: her eyebrows when she's upset, the water dripping from her nose as she shivers after an ocean swim; the timbre of her voice as she asks you about love. None of this would register without the film's exquisite quietness, nor would the two moments at which music bursts forth loudly be so powerful: once an ethereal folk song around a campfire, another a famous Vivaldi composition in a concert hall. These two moments occur at the emotional climaxes of the film, and after the silence we've become accustomed to, it's literally dizzying to be swept up in the maximalism of these moments, a cinematic out-of-body experience where the distance between viewer and subject functionally disappears in the same way that the space between painter and lady does in this story: to watch someone this closely means to be enveloped as soon as they gesture toward you. Two become one: viewer to characters, lover to lover. This movie is magical. Grade: A
Do not understand at all the tepid response to this movie—it's every bit as paranoid and apocalyptic as Todd Haynes's previous "we're all being poisoned" freakout, Safe. This is definitely a mainstream legal thriller, but it's a cracking one, and while the script occasionally gestures toward the generic (poor, poor Anne Hathaway gets saddled with a completely unironic deployment of the "longsuffering wife" trope), the movie's style is covered with such thick layers of sickening despair that it transforms the film into nothing short of a horror movie. The yellow tint of the cinematography alone is grotesque enough to make you ill, and the VHS footage of cow tumors sees the film's reality practically melt under the evil knowingly perpetrated by DuPont. Our world is a hellscape whose contours were intentionally sculpted by capitalism, and I've seen few movies that capture the sheer malaise of knowing that fact like Dark Waters and its parade of reflections of branded billboards and fluorescent logos on car windows and wet pavement. A waking nightmare of a movie masquerading as a potboiler. Grade: A-
I can't say that I understood this movie. It's a very scattered, often abstractly structured collection of incidents with sometimes only tenuous connections between them, and I couldn't summarize this movie if I tried because it's hard to hold all those incidents up together into a coherent whole. That said, I did find myself connecting pretty strongly to individual moments: a lengthy diatribe of a disgruntled theater-goer to the director of a film she watched; a strikingly tender tableau at a swimming pool; a mother with frayed nerves shouting at her children and then feeling quiet remorse as they leave the room. There's a cock-eyed compassion to the humanity of these little moments, and I guess enough of these moments added up to my feeling pretty positive about the movie as a whole. Grade: B
In which Rankin/Bass try to cobble together a sequel to both their adaptation of The Hobbit and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. This movie does a couple of things well. The pre-Ghibli Ghibli folks are still supervising the animation, as they did for The Hobbit, and it leads to some cool character designs (the Witch-King of Angmar looks extremely dope) and of course those water-color backgrounds. I also dig the way this opens with a literal invocation of the muses and then goes on to do a whole bunch of other structural things informed by the tropes of epic poetry, which is interesting and feels in-line with Tolkien's original project. But otherwise, The Return of the King is an extremely dopey adaptation. The music sucks (unless we're going to ironically appreciate the orc-disco, "Where There's a Whip There's a Way") and slows down the pace to a crawl—the first ten minutes of this barely 90-minute movie is just a song recapping the plot of The Hobbit and the first part of Lord of the Rings, and that's not the only time that happens. Even ignoring the pacing issues, the storytelling is extremely haphazard, both as a continuation of the previous movies (if you watched this immediately after Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, you would have no idea how Frodo is suddenly captured inside of Cirith Ungol and Samwise is now the ringbearer, since it skips the whole Shelob thing in favor of starting immediately where Tolkien's book does) as well as a movie unto itself (one character has to very hastily explain who Éowyn is like thirty seconds before she kills the Witch-King because apparently the movie couldn't be bothered to introduce her earlier—like couldn't we have skipped one of the musical sequences to have her show up just once before she becomes crucial to the plot?). And with all respect to my soon-to-be Ghibli bros, outside of the cool bits, the animation is pretty lousy, too, somehow more technically accomplished than the previous two movies while looking several magnitudes dumber. It's not like the other animated Tolkien adaptations of this period were sterling masterpieces or anything, but they both had a kind of striking ambition to them, whereas this is just a muddled mess. Definitely the worst of the loose trilogy. Grade: C-
This is the first Peanuts feature-length movie I've seen, and if this is any indication, the gang probably should have stuck to half-hour TV specials if they were going to venture from the funny pages at all. This movie is clearly padded, which leads to some fun, weird moments that might not have happened otherwise (Snoopy has a trippy dream sequence for no real reason, which is both incongruous for Peanuts but also charming), but it also leads to a lot of boring, overlong sequences without a ton happening—I don't know where my tipping point was, but I definitely got tired of the musical sequences, for example. There are some bright patches of classic Peanuts bleakness (Charlie Brown, after throwing a rock into a pond: "Everything I do makes me feel guilty"), but this is slack enough that I'd much rather be watching one of the specials—or really, just reading the comics. Grade: C
Took me a loooong time to stop the voice in my head that kept asking, "But why are they talking so slowly??"—my experience with this movie was definitely hurt by this movie not being its remake, His Girl Friday, and this version's marriage plot is definitely hurt by the fact that the lovers aren't working together in the newsroom (compare Peggy, sidelined for long sections of the film, to the constant, blistering back and forth between Hildy and Walter). But not all movies can be the greatest (and fastest) American comedy of all time, and so I finally was able to force myself to watch this movie on its own terms. It's got some pretty interesting editing, and the part where Hildy is walking out of the newsroom and shouts, "See ya later, you wage slaves!" made me laugh pretty hard. But on the whole, it's a much darker and more serious movie than His Girl Friday (as is, presumably, the original play on which this all is based), which is sometimes to its benefit: the pathological compulsion of these journalists stings a bit more than in His Girl Friday, and we're allowed to wallow in the ugliness and collateral damage a bit more, I guess that's a decent-enough substitute for the characters not acting at an amphetamine pace for the duration of the film. Grade: B
Music
This album is more or less the beginning of Stevie Wonder's legendary run of records in the '70s, so it feels a little petty to complain that this isn't as good as something like Innervisions—like, between 1972 and 1976, Stevie made more great albums than most artists make in a lifetime, so who cares if he has one that's not quite great when it is still very good? Music of My Mind is very good. There are bum tracks ("Superwoman" isn't too great, and it makes up 1/6 of the album!), but there's gold, too: "Love Having You Around" is a stomping opener, "Keep on Running" is a terrific little groove, "Evil" is a soulful gospel finale. Plus, the album has some of the hippest use of the Moog synthesizer in pop history. And even if the record only hits a double as opposed to a home run, it's still kind of thrilling to know that this is the beginning of Stevie Wonderful, maestro. Grade: B+
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