Nothing going on out there. Totally a normal week in America.
Movies
I'm used to heady meta games from Abbas Kiarostami, but the first movie in his Koker trilogy is beautiful in its straightforwardness. Where Is the Friend's House is exactly what the title indicates, and very little more: a kid's quest to find his friend's house so he can give him the notebook that his friend needs to do his homework. But from that simplicity emerges a pretty profound reflection over human decency and the kindness we owe each other. It's wonderful. Grade: A-
I talked about this movie (and the rest of the Koker trilogy) with some pals on Episode 324 of the Cinematary podcast, and if you're interested, you can listen to that episode here.
The second Koker trilogy movie is my favorite by far—a tremendously moving meditation on hope and community-building after disaster, filtered through Kiarostami's typical pseudo-documentary meta-commentary. In the film, as not-Kiarostami travels to Koker to check in on the stars of Where Is the Friend's House? in the aftermath of the devastating 1990 Iran earthquake, he again and again encounters small cells of people who have very little but each other and their faith in God, both literally and figuratively shaken by the earthquake but neither broken, and these encounters collectively present a towering tribute to humanity's ability to create meaning and beauty in the face of what could be an insurmountably chaotic world. One way this especially struck me is through the use of automobiles in the movie; more than perhaps any other figure in history (and certainly in film), Kiarostami over his career worked to reclaim the automobile from its legacy of individualism, capital, and destruction and turn it instead into a conduit of human connection. Life, and Nothing More... presents maybe the height of this project in his filmography, as the car the filmmaker travels in becomes a collective resource for the people he passes on his way to Koker, giving rides, towing cargo, facilitating dialogue—the collective human project in microcosm. Cars are still terrible, but the fact that Kiarostami is able to make me believe in them as a force for good for 90 minutes speaks to the sheer redemptive power of this film. Grade: A
Big step down for the Koker trilogy in its final installment, which is too bad. Kiarostami is usually able to wring something poignant or meaningful or at least interesting out of his metatextual stuff, so it's not an inherently failed premise that for this movie he pulls back another layer to make this movie a fictionalized version of the making of Life, and Nothing More.... But I'm having a hard time connecting to the specific way he does it. All of the Koker trilogy films center on a character on a quest, and usually that quest intersects some parable-like spiritual significance, but this movie's quest involves an actor from the previous film working through his feelings of completely unrequited love for his screen partner, and I just can't find any way to invest myself in this plot. The film has plenty of interesting individual moments—I love the opening scene, for example, in which a ton of women who are auditioning for a role in this movie cheer on the director, and the numerous retakes of the Life, and Nothing More... scene whose filming this movie focuses on are fascinating and hypnotic—but the core of the movie just feels impossibly cold to me. Why should I care if this guy who knows nothing about this woman convinces her to love him? Maybe that's the point, in which case I think that it's a kind of bleak and nihilistic conclusion to a trilogy that has otherwise been anything but, or maybe I'm missing some cultural context that would make this one-sided relationship more meaningful, in which case I guess I need to do some homework. But either way, I'm disappointed here. Grade: B-
It lacks a lot of the texture of Bradbury's prose (very difficult to pull off in screenwriting, imo, even for Bradbury himself), but the effect is still pretty good, the liminal, carnivalesque Americana evoked by Bradbury's novel twisting into a dreamy version of the "let's scare these kids to death" ethos of '80s children's fantasy. I remember the novel being kind of hard to follow in spots, and that's definitely the case here, too, and I don't care a thing about any of the characters. But that's beside the point, probably, for a movie that ranks up there with Return to Oz on the "traumatizing children" scale. Grade: B+
Very strange, fevered-dream animated feature that's more or less a satirical take on a mercurial, dictatorial French king, though with a heaping dose of surreal juxtapositions thrown in for good(?) measure: a gigantic, animatronic Spartan warrior controlled by a musical orchestra, portraits whose figures can step outside their frames and nonchalantly replace their real-life counterparts... it's all very strange, sometimes in a way that's a little exhausting. But there's never not something interesting to look at, and the craft of the animation is undeniable: Fleischer Brothers on acid, basically. Even if it doesn't narratively/thematically hold together at every moment for me, there's always that animation itself. Grade: B
A warm, charming golden-era MGM musical with a song about trolleys (good) and some absolutely demented children who spend Halloween throwing flour in adults' faces and burning random garbage they find in the street (great). Make Halloween like this again, please. Also, count me among the ranks of people who had no idea that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was from this movie. Grade: B+
Music
I got this album on Bandcamp a year or so ago, and it languished on my hard drive until just a couple weeks ago when I added it to iTunes. Big mistake on my part—letting it languish, that is. Because this album rocks. It's one of those doom metal albums in the tradition of Dopesmoker or Earth 2 that takes a single guitar riff and just repeats it with various pedal/feedback effects over a very long track (in this case, the title track, a 32-minute epic) until it basically becomes an ambient record. It's an apocalyptic listen, full of huge sounds and wailing synths, and as bludgeoning as that can be, the environmental despair undergirding it all feels completely earned. This would have been one of my favorite records of 2018 if I'd listened to it then. Grade: A-
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