T. S. Eliot is a liar. Obviously January is the cruelest month.
Movies
Living proof that cliché has nothing to do with whether or not a movie is good, because this movie is basically every rom-com cliché known to humankind and yet is somehow good. I've never been particularly impressed with Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell before either, but their onscreen chemistry together is off-the-charts here. Grade: B
I would love to know which concept came first to the filmmakers: penguin karaoke or penguin prophets? Genuinely unclassifiable cinema, and I have no idea what inspired anyone to believe that a corny jukebox musical should be super-glued to a monomyth hero's journey about the spiritual awakening of a messianic penguin. Imagine the dark mysticism of Watership Down as told through the low-brow pop culture referentiality of a post-Shrek CG-animated family film. Oh, and on top of all of that, Happy Feet is also a really serious parable about environmental collapse. It's such an exquisitely bizarre object, and I wish I could get behind this movie more. But it's just not good. The character animation is really bad-looking in the way that most early computer-animated movies are bad-looking (though credit where credit is due, there is some stunning landscape imagery and particle effects); the plot just kind of lurches from one weird setpiece to the next without ever really finding the heart of these characters; oh, and Robin Williams is all over this doing bad racial stereotypes (is it still too soon after his death to argue that Williams was an extremely talented guy with, for the most part, absolutely trash output?). I'm scratching my head at this when I'm not in awe at the ambition. Grade: C
But wait! There's more! Just as spazzed, if not more so, as the first movie. For one, Happy Feet Two doubles down on the environmental dread of its predecessor. I honestly cannot think of a movie outside of First Reformed that wrestles with the apocalyptic implications of climate change and the role of organized religion in it as thoroughly as Happy Feet Two, and there's no way I can sufficiently convey to you just how little I ever expected to type the previous sentence. For two, it also really doubles down on the sheet incongruity of its concept, basically abandoning even the wild, mythic structure of the first movie in favor of a highly episodic, ensemble feature that resembles the shambling, rambling quality of a (I kid you not) Robert Altman film. It's still not good! Robin Williams is still doing his bad thing, and the songs basically feel like George Miller just put his iPod on shuffle—like, seriously, this movie has Janet Jackson, the Rawhide theme song, an aria from a Puccini opera, and a version of Janelle Monáe's "Tightrope" with the Big Boi verse switched out for Lil' P-Nut doing a bunch of ice-themed rhymes. It's weird! I can't think of a more strikingly singular pair of movies in the entire pantheon of English-language family entertainment, and that's even considering the (also George-Miller-affiliated) Babe movies. I just wish these were anything close to as good as the Babe movies. Grade: C
The movie begins with these two witch aunts explaining to their niece that their family has a curse such that any time a woman in the family falls in love with a man, that man will meet an untimely death. Upon hearing this, that niece promptly swears off love forever, but then like five minutes later in the movie, the aunts give their niece a love potion that makes her fall in love with a man, and when he dies an untimely death, these aunts are like, "Oh wow, we had no idea that would happen." I was prepared for a whole movie in which the niece was going to have to come to terms with the fact that her aunts more or less killed this dude because they apparently couldn't remember the rules of the curse that they had just explained, but nope, that's just the first ten minutes of the movie, and the movie just kind of moves on from that, and before long, they're totally cool again and drinking tequila at midnight and dancing to Harry Nilsson (one of two scenes involving a conga line in this film). That's just the kind of movie this is, moving from one preposterous, logically suspect plot point to the next. It's pretty amusing in just how ridiculous the whole thing is, and Bullock and Kidman are undeniable screen presences, basically at their respective heights as bona-fide great movie stars before Bullock swung her career into overly broad directions and Kidman swung hers into more esoteric ones. And the relationship between Kidman and Bullock's characters is actually really sweet—I could imagine a much more functional and conventionally satisfying movie that was more focused on their sister love and less distracted by witch discrimination and resurrecting the dead and sexy store-brand Matthew McConaughey. I wouldn't call the iteration of the movie that we have "good." But there's something to be said for just how unself-conscious the film is about being the absolutely ludicrous, ungainly object that it is—in that regard, an unexpectedly fitting companion to my Happy Feet viewing earlier this week. Grade: C
Preposterously energetic cinema, from the zooming, swooping camerawork to Jack Nicholson's performance to the enthusiasm with which the film pursues a recurring gag (literally!) involving people vomiting up cherry pits. It's never a boring movie, and often, especially near the end, its energy results in some ecstatic moments of over-the-top fervor. It's very fun to see Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon cast spells in feminist revenge against Jack Nicholson's odious Lucifer character. But on the other hand, it takes an hour and a half to get to that point, and up until that point, the movie's energy is more exhausting than elevating. A really deeply buried lede if there ever was one. Grade: C+
Music
Significantly less avant-garde and significantly more rock-n-roll than I'm used to CAN albums being—which makes sense, given that apparently CAN had made another album previous to this one that apparently record labels deemed too experimental to release, so they intentionally made a more straightforward record (this one) in response. It's still not "mainstream" music by 1969 terms; of all the krautrock records I've heard, this is probably the one most obviously indebted to The Velvet Underground, which of course places Monster Movie pretty far left of "normal." It's not even particularly indebted to the accessible parts of The Velvet Underground's output either; the nervy opener, "Father Cannot Yell," sounds like it was recorded mid-"Sister Ray" jam, and "Outside My Door," with its cacophonous guitar noise, could easily slot into the "I Heard Her Call My Name" place on White Light/White Heat. There's something about all this that feels a little thin compared to the later CAN records. Maybe it needs to be just a little weirder. Maybe it's the lyrics—there's something deeply silly about Malcolm Mooney howling a rock-and-roll-ified version of the "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" nursery rhyme on "Mary, Mary So Contrary," and the 20-minute closing jam, "Yoo Doo Right," recalls The Monkeys in counterproductive ways as Mooney yells over and over again how "You made a believer out of me." It's not a bad record, and most of the time, it's quite good, finding a comfortable groove inside these slightly stilted takes on then-recent trends in experimental rock. If this had been the first CAN album I listened to, I probably would feel a bit more positively toward it. But as it is, I probably am always going to gravitate more toward Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi. Grade: B
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