Mini Reviews for March 22 - 28, 2021

In case you missed it, here's the link to the Q&A I did on the blog earlier this week!

Also, I was on the Cinematary podcast chatting about Ratatouille this week!

Movies

Trolls (2016)
I remain gobsmacked at the inexplicable seven months that began with the release of this movie and ended following the release of Captain Underpants, when DreamWorks Animation briefly became the most formally interesting American animation studio by a considerably wide margin. This movie's screenplay is mostly garbage, but it's unbelievably, eye-meltingly incredible to look at—a legitimate masterpiece in terms of its use of texture and color. Outside of Pixar's god-tier run of Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up, those three DreamWorks features—this one, The Boss Baby, and Captain Underpants—form probably the most coherent treatise on the promises of a fully embodied CGI aesthetic that we've ever gotten, and God help me, I'm tempted to say that the DreamWorks trio is actually superior as a manifesto on account of its willingness to totally unshackle the animation from realism (something Pixar is still struggling to do). Get woke, Disney/Pixar! Grade: B+

Trolls World Tour (2020)
It is with great regret that I report that this movie's animation doesn't even come close to the original's—the textures are smoother, the designs are less articulate and inventive, and the character movements lack the springiness that made the original such a joy to watch in motion. Considering that I was basically only into the original movie on the merits of its animation, this is basically a death blow for my relationship with World Tour. It's not terrible; the movie occasionally has signs of life when it gestures toward the chaotic sugar-rush psychedelia of the first movie (I love the bit where the little worm-looking dude has a near-death experience and sees a Monty-Python-style worm god), and the pro-diversity, anti-colonial bent of the story is well-intentioned, if a little soft (like that other recent experiment in kids-entertainment anti-colonialism, Frozen 2, it basically wants to take an anti-colonial stance while also making sure to assure the colonizers that their culture—in this case, pop music—will remain the default). But these are paltry pleasures, nothing nearly engaging enough to make up for the gigantic aesthetic step downward. Grade: C+

Incident at Loch Ness (2004)
An intermittently fun mockumentary about an attempt to make a Loch Ness Monster hoax documentary with Werner Herzog. Herzog himself is incredibly game (he co-wrote/co-produced the thing, so why not), and there are some entertaining moments. But the whole seems a little too pleased with itself, and nothing here is sharp enough to overcome that. Still, an interesting little curiosity. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Insignificance (1985)
It's an interesting concept on paper, which is why I've been interested in watching this movie for several years: Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Joseph McCarthy all cross paths on the same sweaty NYC night and have long, philosophical conversations. Unfortunately, in practice, I don't think this really goes anyway. Both the script and the performances turn these people into knowing caricatures of themselves, almost as if to make them more archetypes than real people, which is alright I guess, except that the movie doesn't really do anything with these archetypes. It's trying to; this is supposed to be some treatise on celebrity, America, nuclear weapons, and the 20th century, but the way that this movie only really gestures at basic ideas and surface-level history makes this seem more like fan service for mid-century monoculture nerds: "Hey, what if all these famous people met each other? Wouldn't that be cool?" It's not quite as crass as that, but it's not particularly more insightful either, except in small flashes. The movie has a few great sequences: there's a bit where Monroe explains special relativity to Einstein, a scene that has just this wonderful, ecstatic energy (and the one scene in which Theresa Russell's otherwise kinda flat performances as Monroe comes into its own), and the movie's final five minutes or so are terrific, the one place where director Nicolas Roeg goes full "This is a Nicolas Roeg movie." Besides those things, though, I'm disappointed this wasn't something more special. Grade: B-

The Devil, Probably (Le diable probablement) (1977)
Really, truly bleak stuff—no surprise for a movie that opens announcing a suicide that might also be a murder and then flashes back six months to show us everything that led up to that event. That interplay between suicide and murder feels essential to this movie's project; I think there's a tendency to talk about the "doomer" ideology in a way that is kind of aggressive toward those who feel utter despair, the implication being that these people have done something wrong to end up in their state of mind. And I guess it's important to maintain a sense of personal agency on some level when it comes to our self-concepts. But also, it's also worth considering, as this movie does, the extent to which people who commit suicide have been murdered by their environment: a world so relentlessly de-enchanted and twisted by capitalism and its associated ideologies that it begins to feel unlivable (and indeed, is literally unlivable for many human beings and other lifeforms), and a world in which the most prominent resistance narratives offer little in terms of constructive alternatives. I imagine that some leftists would get a little bent out of shape at that last part, but I do think that modern leftism (at least the kind that white people from bourgeois backgrounds tend to find themselves in) is so busy critiquing our current oppressive structures that it ends up being deficient at imagining a more livable world outside of vague, often archaic theoretical categories, and moreover, it's not particularly good at communicating what it does constructively imagine to a lot of the people who face the most profound alienation from our capitalist world. Not that that's entirely the fault of "the left"—real revolutionaries have faced heinous opposition that plays a big role in the ways in which resistance can feel so ineffectual at times. The Devil, Probably is, like Out 1, describing the disorienting fog of a post-'68 counterculture that was struggling to hold itself together as a coherent whole, and while I don't know much about the specifics of France's counterculture, I think a lot about the impotence of America's counterculture following the killings of genuine, even utopian visionaries like Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the exile of Assata Shakur—people whose radical, collectivist visions were papered over by a watery movement that struggled to articulate anything more concrete than John Lennon's "Imagine" (obviously over-generalizing here, but still). There's that famous passage from Infinite Jest in which DFW says that the subjective experience of committing suicide is as internally rational as jumping out of the top floor of a burning building, and if we're using that analogy, I think it's important to recognize that there are two systemic things to indict: first and foremost, the fact that there is a fire to begin with, but also, the lack of any kind of structure to let people out of the building. An early scene in this movie involves the protagonist at a protest where he's asking people to articulate not just what they are fighting against but also what they are fighting for, and he basically just gets shouted down, which feels like a key moment in a movie otherwise preoccupied by how the horrible environmental collapse created by modern industry feels hopelessly inevitable. To be clear, I'm not saying that people are "to blame" for someone's suicide, but I do think a movie like this highlights the importance of holding abolition in one hand and creation in the other. The people I know who face the total alienation this movie depicts are not looking for theory; they're looking for belonging and community, two things that are brutally hard to find in a capitalist society like ours and are crucially important to build as we try to clear out the wreckage from the current system's abuses. This is one of the reasons I still find church and Christianity so compelling, actually. Anyway, maybe I'm just a bloviating gasbag, so thank you for coming to my TED talk—I guess as far as this movie is concerned, this fits pretty squarely into my experiences with Bresson, where I have some nagging reservations about the whole package (this is a very shaggy feature for being only 95 minutes, and I'm not sure all of those shaggy ends work) but also find its ideas fascinating to pick at. As always, I think I just need to watch more Bresson. Grade: B

Tonight for Sure (1962)
I know I'm supposed to think that Coppola's pre-fame work as a softcore director is an ignominious beginning for such an acclaimed director, and surely this isn't a "good" movie. But I didn't really find this that much of a step down from his early "respectable" work like Dementia 13 and You're a Big Boy Now. Sure, it's undeniably amateurish, and it has almost no stylistic ambition. But I actually thought this was really, uproariously funny before it settles into basically a long burlesque sequence for the back half of the movie, which I thought was tedious (as are most "erotic" films primarily interested in foregrounding the erotic, tbh). It's dumb, sure, but the opening 20-ish minutes of the movie where these two prudes recount in horror the ways that society has gone to the dogs is hilarious: a straight-shootin' moral conservative is cursed with involuntary hallucinations of naked women? a cowboy says he wants to get rid of all the strip clubs so the Wild West can become the "Decent West"? It's not a particularly insightful film, but when it isn't just boring eroticism, it's also a pretty fun goof on the same kind of anti-sex moral crusaders who are to this day acting as if the existence of things like "WAP" are a threat to civilization. Also, this movie is 69 minutes long, so... nice. Grade: C

Television

Superstore, Season 6 (2020-2021)
RIP to this wonderful little show. After America Ferrera's departure, the final season of Superstore feels a little more aimless than previous seasons, and the first few episodes back after its pandemic-truncated fifth season go for some low-hanging fruit re: COVID jokes. The finale swings a little too hard for sentimentality, too. But overall, this is still basically the same, delightful series it's always been, an incredibly well-observed, surprisingly innovative workplace sitcom with a terrific cast and sense of place. It's also kind of wild that we got a network sitcom as unapologetically anti-corporate and pro-worker as this one, and the penultimate episode before the two-part finale is a really vicious take-down of the veneration of "genius" rich people like Elon Musk, which is somewhat surprising on its own right. Superstore had clearly run its course by now, but I'm sad to see it go. It strikes me that I may never watch a network sitcom again after this one; I watch so few TV shows anymore anyway, and this kind of traditional, 22-episodes-per-season network sitcom is clearly a dying breed, making the odds of me watching another one seem slim. It was a good run, I suppose, me and the network sitcom, and Superstore is a great one to go out on. Grade: B

Music

Tindersticks - Distractions (2021)
Outside of their scores for Claire Denis's movies, I haven't really paid much attention to Tinderstick's output since the '90s. But in the meantime, it seems like the band's dusky, chamber-pop sound has matured into a smokey ethereality. Long compositions (particularly the 11-minute opening track, "Man Alone (Can't Stop the Fadin')") slink along unpredictable grooves with hypnotic, drum-machine rhythms, sounding not unlike Lambchop or maybe Tom Waits in his quieter moments, resulting in an album with a fantastic late-night atmosphere. It all feels remarkably of-a-piece with the whole, maybe too much so: most of the songs blend into one another and kind of lose their individual character, even the trio of covers in the middle of the record. But as a sustained vibe, it's great. Grade: B+

Q&A!

 Hi everybody! So, last week I talked about doing a Q&A for my 400th post provided I got enough good questions. Well, I got enough question, so here's the Q&A! A lot more people answered than I expected, and some people whose names I don't recognize responded, which is exciting for me—I mostly didn't realize anyone but friends and family read this blog. Thank you for reading, internet strangers!

Anyway, I hope y'all enjoy this. I had fun answering these questions.

The Q&A:

My good buddy Andrew asks: "If you were mayor of Knoxville for a day, what would you do?"
For those of you who don't know me personally, I live in Knoxville, TN, so I guess this is my chance to flex my civic imagination, right? I'm assuming that this means I am not limited by things like procedure and due process, because the realistic answer to this question is that if I had only a single day as mayor, I could do basically nothing. But let's say I'm living in a fantasy where I can get stuff done in a day. So here I am, rising bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the temporary mayor while otherwise Mayor Kincannon is on vacation or something. So I get to my office and start my ambitious agenda:

• I know Andrew wants me to say, "Put a sidewalk on the road his house is on," so I guess I'll start with that.
• I'm also going to end those inhumane police sweeps of homeless camps that the city seems so fond of lately. In fact, I'm going to reduce homelessness considerably by using eminent domain to seize the recently defunct Hotel Knoxville by the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and convert it into emergency housing.
• Next, I'll establish a program through the Office of Neighborhoods that gives neighborhoods the ability to create community land trusts for the properties in their neighborhoods; that program also creates a function where properties that the city reclaims because they are abandoned or owe back taxes or whatever are automatically put into that neighborhood's community land trust.
• Finally, I would re-extend the city bus express line out to Turkey Creek and create a new line that goes out to Strawberry Plains (that way I can ride the bus to work). Then I would create bus lanes on Magnolia, Kingston Pike, Broadway, and Chapman Highway. People are going to hate this, since it reduces each of those to only one car lane in each direction, so it's a good thing that I'm only mayor for a day and Kincannon can deal with the fallout while I cruise around Knoxville in the now much faster city buses.

My friend Chris asks, "What Academy-Award winning film for Best Picture would you call the most undeserving of the title in the last 15 years?"
The 15-year range is a little unfortunate, because it makes it so that there's only really one possible answer to this: 2018's Green Book, which is not only undeserving compared to the other movies nominated that year (The Favourite? Roma? BlacKkKlansman?) but is also just a bad, nonsense movie on its own terms. If it were a 16-year range, then I'd have to make some hard decisions about whether or not 2005's Crash is worse (Brokeback Mountain should have totally won that year). My instinct is that it's probably Crash that's worst. If I ignore those two obvious choices, though, it becomes a lot more difficult for me to pinpoint the least-deserving. My general approach to the Oscars is that I'm content as long as a movie I like wins, regardless of whether or not it would have been the movie I would have picked, and the past 15-16 years have actually been pretty good for the Best Picture winners on those terms. Almost none of them would have been my own choice (Moonlight is the only one I probably would have chosen from among the nominees), but except for Crash and Green Book, I've liked all of them. That said, I remember almost nothing about The Artist (2011, when Tree of Life would have been my pick) or Argo (2012, a pretty weak year for Best Picture nominees, though I think Lincoln would be my favorite of the bunch), which maybe is a sign of how comparatively weak they are.

My pal Logan actually submitted three questions. His first is: "Are there any movies you hated at first, but afterwards loved, or vice versa?"
I don't rewatch movies a ton, so I don't have this experience as often as I might otherwise. But one that comes to mind is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I read the Arthur C. Clarke book in high school and loved it, so I immediately sought out the movie and was really turned off by how slow it was and by what I saw as the cheap psychedelia of the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence. I rewatched it probably 5-6 years later when I was going through the filmography of Stanley Kubrick, and that's when I fell in love. I think by that time I had seen a lot more movies with that sort of deliberate pacing, so I was better-equipped to engage with it on its own terms. As for the vice-versa situation: this is kind of silly, but I loved the direct-to-VHS Aladdin sequel The Return of Jafar when I was 4 or 5 years old, but as an adult, I've realized it's a trash movie through and through. Terrible animation, cardboard voice acting, dumb plotting—I can't think of a single good thing to say about it.

Logan's second question is: "What's the movie you've watched the most?"
At this point, it's probably one of the movies my son is obsessed with watching over and over, so that would be either Charlotte's Web (the 1973 movie with Debbie Reynolds as Charlotte), Bambi, or The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. If I'm limiting this to just movies I've chosen to watch, though, it's probably The Emperor's New Groove. There was a time in middle school when I had the entire movie memorized—in fact, me and a friend were camping once and in the tent one night recited the whole thing from memory.

Logan's final question is: "What is the greatest comedy of the 2010s and why is it The Death of Stalin?
My rebuttal was almost In the Loop (same writer/director as Death of Stalin!) until I realized that it came out in 2009. So maybe The Death of Stalin is the best. Other contenders: Inherent Vice, Tangerine, The Nice Guys, Love & Friendship. I'm probably forgetting something else.

An anonymous reader asks, "What is your opinion on Red Velvet cake?"
I don't have a strong opinion. Like most cake, it is good. But it's not something I actively seek out when I get my dessert of choice.

Another anonymous reader (or maybe it's the same one from the last question) asks, "How have your tastes evolved since you first started this blog? Do your current favorite albums and films still include your initial favorites?"
I've been doing this blog in one form or another since 2013, and if you go back and look at my yearly top 10s in music and film, that's probably the best indication of how my tastes have changed. If I had to summarize, I'd say that for film, I've become a lot more interested in experimental and foreign cinema and a lot less patient with franchise filmmaking (particularly as the MCU has become so dominant and intent on interconnectivity, which I find a little tedious). I've also become a lot more forgiving of movies that are not traditionally "good" but are nonetheless ambitious or messy in interesting ways. For music, I'm much less invested in indie rock than I was in 2013, though even at that time, I was already kind of falling out of love with that scene, and on the other hand, I've become much more invested in contemporary jazz and electronic music. So in conclusion, I guess I've just become an old, pretentious fart. Do my old favorite albums/films lists still include my current favorites? If I made those lists again, I would probably keep about 75% of each. Some of those, especially in the films, were works I had experienced pretty recently at the time but since have kind of faded from my memory—for example, I probably wouldn't put City of God on a list now because I haven't revisited it since I initially watched it and don't have as strong feelings for it as I did in 2016 when I made the first list.

Another anonymous question (I'm just going to assume these are all from the same person; we'll name this person "Julia"): "What’s something you’ve never been able to do well?"
Oh boy, where to start? I guess I'll stick with things that lots of people tend to be good at. I'm a terrible singer. Also, most things involving hand-eye coordination, including my ill-advised dalliance with baseball in middle school. I'm also generally pretty terrible at fast-paced first-person shooters like Call of Duty. Cursive writing is another thing that's always been pretty hard for me, to the point where I would get so stressed out about having to write it in 2nd or 3rd grade that I would start crying. In college, I wrote a research paper about why we shouldn't teach cursive in schools anymore, and I still stand by that claim.

Anonymous Julia asks, "What's something you're really good at?"
Honestly, really boring things. I'm great at washing dishes. I'm very good at Super Mario World (though not speed-runner good). I'm good at using public transit (a surprisingly uncommon skill in Tennessee). I also think I'm a pretty good writer, though I've as-yet had much success at publishing my work, so maybe that's just a delusion of grandeur.

Julia asks another question: "If you could steal any one item with no consequences, what would you steal?"
Are those time-turner things Hermione used to take extra classes in Harry Potter real? Because I have become one of those boring adults for whom Time is my most valuable resource, and I would love to have more of it. If I'm sticking with real objects, I would steal one of the industrial trains that runs through Knoxville and convert it into a passenger train, reintroducing passenger rail to my town after several decades absence.

Julia again: "What makes you feel old?"
Earlier this semester, I overheard a student listening to Nickelback's "How You Remind Me," and I was like, Wow, what a throwback. Then I realized that the song was 20 years old, and I was like, Huh, that's pretty old. Then I got curious what popular rock songs were 20 years old when "How You Remind Me" came out, and the first thing I found was Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'"—this whole train of thought made me feel incredibly old. Other than that, I do feel pretty old when I look at kids on TikTok, but generally I find that platform delightful, so I don't feel like a bad kind of old person. But then I hear kids talk about, like, 6ix9ine, and it triggers this involuntarily moralistic response in me—like, I cannot believe the kids these days are listening to such reprehensible, trash people. And that does make me feel pretty bad, because that's just an insufferable kind of old person to be.

Anonymous Julia strikes again: "If you could change the ending of any famous movie, which movie would it be and how would it end?"
If I spent a lot of time thinking about this, I could probably come up with a better example. But right now, what comes to mind is My Fair Lady. It's absolutely ridiculous that Eliza comes back to Henry Higgins at the end; he's an arrogant, insufferable prick, and they should not be together. The narrative builds really satisfyingly to Eliza leaving him for good, and if I were writing the ending, Higgins would sit alone, listening to the recording of Eliza's voice, and then the credits would roll. None of this her popping back in to give a happy ending business. I realize this isn't the movie's invention; it's in the stage musical, too. But it's heinous and sullies an otherwise delightful experience.

Adam says, "Thank for your blog - it is an interesting and informative take on film. I do wonder, with a full-time job and family, how do you find time to watch so many movies a week?"
Very obsessive time management, I guess. I'm pretty good at getting into daily rhythms, and part of those rhythms usually ends up finding a 90-ish-minute pocket of time for movie-watching. The other day my students asked me if I would rather have more time or more money in my life, and I my answer is Time, in a landslide. I'm constantly running over in my head how I will have time for the things I want to do: not just watch movies, but write, read, spend time with my wife and son, play video games. I think everyone does this to an extent; I'm not going to pretend like there aren't people who are busier than I am, but also, a lot of the people I know just prioritize their time differently than I do. In the time that I would spend watching a movie, other people might be, say, on TikTok or binging a TV series or gardening or hanging out with friends (note: I do have friends, and I hang out with them [esp. in non-COVID times]—I'm not a total loser! But also, I'm much more introverted and content to stay at home than some people are). Another part of this is just the luck of my particular life circumstances right now—for example, I usually have about an hour to and hour and a half between when I get home from school and when my wife gets home from work, and because of where my son is currently at daycare, it makes more sense logistically for her to pick him up (I should also mention that it's key that my wife is accommodating of my hobbies)—last year, though, I was the one picking him up, so I had to find movie-watching time in the evening, after he went to bed. During the holidays, when I'm home with my son, I usually watch a movie during his afternoon nap. We have another kid on the way who will be born later this summer, though, so we'll see how well I can juggle all this when there are more than one little creature vying for my attention and care. Speaking of time management, I've spent a lot of time answering this question, so I guess I should move on.

Anonymous Julia pops back in again for another question: "This may be too personal and I understand if you don't desire to answer. But from reading your reviews, I feel we may share a common struggle with some tenets of Christianity. Would you still describe yourself as a Christian and if so, how does this view reflect the lens with which you view (and review) movies?"
If teenaged, Evangelical me were to time travel to the present day and ask me some theological questions, he would have some strong disagreement with my answers. I've come a long way from my Evangelical upbringing, and in a lot of ways, the mystical and socialist Christianity I practice now doesn't really resemble the conservative Christianity I grew up with. But I'm still a Christian, and I even attend a fairly orthodox church. It's just that now I have a much more open-handed approach to my faith than when I was younger. In particular, there are a few things that are central to my faith now that I either had no clue about a decade or two ago or would have outright rejected:
1) the importance of community and collective action (not necessarily the political kind, but not necessarily not the political kind either) in Christian life
2) the importance of people's material (not just spiritual) circumstances
3) the centrality of solidarity with the oppressed/marginalized within the gospel
So as far as how that affects my movie-watching lens, I guess first and foremost I deeply appreciate when films engage those ideas, both when it comes to movies that are trying to depict Christian faith in some way and also movies that don't seem particularly interested in faith. On Letterboxd, I made a list not too long ago about my favorite faith films of the 2010s, and if you look at that list, a significant chunk of those movies aren't explicitly faith-based; still, they were meaningful to me about faith on some level because of how they dialogued with facets of my beliefs. It's tough, though, because the vast majority of explicitly Christian movies are not in dialogue with my beliefs. Instead, they are either doing that kind of smug dunking on a strawmanned Christianity (I'm thinking of a movie like 2000's Chocolat, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) or they are basically preaching this extremely thin Evangelical morality whose sole purpose is to joust at culture-war windmills or get someone to say the Sinner's Prayer (think the Evangelical film industry: Facing the Giants, God's Not Dead, etc.). Particularly with that latter kind of movie, I can't stand the way that those films cheapen the profound meaning I find in Christianity into this stupid trinket of cultural identity that's supposed to get you into Heaven, and to add insult to injury, they're usually just dreadfully made, too. So I guess another big part of how this affects me as a Christian movie viewer is the fuming anger I feel when I watch, like, Pure Flix movies and that kind of thing, an anger I think will surprise nobody who has read my reviews of the God's Not Dead movies, for example. Funnily enough, what I just said is probably one of the few things the time-traveling, teenaged me would agree with modern-day me about with faith. I've always hated Christian™ movies.

Jenee asks, "What's the worst movie you have ever seen?"
This is a hard question, because I don't actually watch that many bad movies, since I usually watch movies I already have a good idea I'm going to enjoy. I'm tempted just to say God's Not Dead. That movie makes me miserable. But it's also too weird and too unintentionally hilarious in its hatefulness to truly be the "worst." So I think I'll instead go with another contender for worst-faith-based film of the 2010s: Sausage Party, which I gave a higher grade on this blog than God's Not Dead, but for the life of me I can't remember why.

Surf Knoxville (I'm guessing that this is a pseudonym, but I'm hoping it's not) has the next question: "Thank you for your blog, I look forward to it every Monday. Your reviews focus on box office films, with some foreign films thrown in and very rarely, if any, documentaries. Why is this?"
This question caught me off guard, because I feel like I do watch and review a fair number of documentaries. I love a good documentary. But glancing back over the movies I've watched in the last couple months, I actually haven't seen that many docs. So I guess I've been going through a dry patch recently. It's not an intentional one. Maybe part of the issue is that I choose around 60% of the movies I review on here by going to the library and walking the movie shelves until I see a movie that looks interesting—since my library sorts the documentaries separately from the narrative films, I usually am not grabbing documentaries on these library trips.

Marian asks, "Do you feel that films function as an avenue for a producer to deliver his or her worldview to a captive audience?"
I think all art communicates ideas, whether or not the artist intends to or not. So yes, I do think that movies convey ideas or worldviews, though I would push back against the "captive audience" part, since it implies that we as viewers are just passive empty vessels for people to pour ideas/worldviews into. Viewing can be a participatory activity, too, where we actively engage with the ideas presented by a movie. Whose ideas is a tricky question to answer, though, because movie-making is so collaborative. If by "producer" you mean the people credited as "Executive Producer," etc., in the credits, I think it's pretty rare for those people to be the central voice of a movie, though in big franchises like the Marvel movies, there does seem to be a fair bit of producer input. The stereotypical movie "author" that film critics tend to identify is the director of a movie, and there are certainly movies that seem to come with a particular director's stamp—movies directed by David Lynch definitely all feel like they strongly reflect something of the personality/ideology of Lynch himself, and certainly it's not an accident that Ingmar Bergman, the son of a Lutheran minister, made so many films about Christian faith. Other times, the writer is more the author (if that writer isn't already also the director). But then you have a movie like The Wizard of Oz, which has a pretty particular worldview but also has such a large stable of writers and directors who were involved with its making (to say nothing of the army of actors, costumers, musicians, and other folks who also helped make that movie such a singular piece of art) that it's hard to say who exactly is responsible for the perspective the completed film has. And then you have experimental movies without narrative, whose ideas are much more abstract, sometimes even just explorations of sounds or images—what does an audience get out of something like Stan Brakhage's "Black Ice" except just the sensory feeling of those flashes of color? I guess what I'm saying is that it's complicated.

Anonymous Julia's back again with the tough question: "Can a movie be appreciated solely on its merit, or do the life choices of the producer and any prominent actors/actresses need to be taken into consideration (i.e. Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein)?"
I have no good, comprehensive answer to this. But I do think that as a general principle, the behavior of artists should be taken into account, even if it doesn't stop you from actually watching the thing. Let's use Woody Allen specifically as an example. The way I see it, there are varying tiers of movies when it comes to a problematic creator like Woody Allen:

• First, there are Woody Allen movies that (besides Woody's involvement in the production) have basically nothing to do with the fact that the man almost certainly abused Dylan Farrow—for instance, Broadway Danny Rose is a great movie, and besides the presence of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, it more or less has no connection with any of Allen's more troubling behaviors/tropes. So it's not like I can completely separate it from Woody Allen and what I know about him—it's definitely in my mind. But I don't usually have much angst about watching movies like that. Those who do get bothered by them will say that seeing any movie by a terrible person contributes economically or culturally to that terrible person's power, which is a position I'm definitely sympathetic to, but I also get so overwhelmed thinking about how to make sure my cultural engagement doesn't enrich the powerful and oppressive that I basically can't engage with that. I guess that's a lazy response, ethically, but there you go.
• Then there are Woody Allen movies that have a thematic or meta connection to his behavior—take, for example, how so many of his movies involve an older man in a relationship with a woman much younger than he is (Mighty Aphrodite, Magic in the Moonlight, etc.) and especially the one in which Allen himself plays a character in a predatory relationship with a minor (Manhattan). I struggle with these, and something like Husbands and Wives (made around the time of the dissolution of his relationship with Mia Farrow [some of which hinged on the allegations surrounding what he did with Dylan] and intended to closely mirror it) becomes excruciating when viewed with the real-world context in which it was made in mind. If it's ever possible to "separate the art from the artist," these are definitely cases where that's basically impossible. That said, I do think it's possible to get some pretty profound meaning out of the tensions such movies create, so I guess my wishy-washy answer is that my posture toward a movie like this involves evaluating just how fruitfully the film can be viewed through that lens. This is outside of the Woody Allen sphere, but Rosemary's Baby is probably the definitive example of this category in my mind: a deeply anti-rape, even feminist movie directed by a man (Roman Polanski) who within the decade would himself rape a girl (I'm not being colloquial; she was only 13). This biographical information makes the movie much more upsetting, but I think it's also constructive to think about how someone who could make a movie like Rosemary's Baby could also go on to rape someone (a minor, no less). There are a lot of people who simply cannot or do not want to dwell in this tension with a movie, and I certainly understand that position, because I can't always do that myself. I'm pretty inconsistent about this one, so it's not like I have some well-thought-out ethos guiding my approach.
  
• Then there are movies in which the making of the film itself is the product of misdeeds or otherwise tied up in the misdeeds of its creator somehow. As far as I know, there aren't any Woody Allen movies that fit this category, so I'm going to have to go outside his filmography for an example. Let's take The Shining; it bothers me deeply that Shelley Duvall was more or less abused on set in order to get the onscreen reactions Kubrick wanted from her (this is also true of the production of The Exorcist—horror movies have a pretty bad track record re: treatment of its cast/crew). In fact, it bothers me to the extent that, while I respect the movie overall, I really don't particularly like the movie anymore or even want to think about it much now that I've come to understand what went into making it. I mean, there are movies (famous movies) where people have died because of unsafe filming conditions, and that shakes me. But again, I'm not very consistent about this, and I can't claim to have strong scruples about it. The production of The Wizard of Oz involved some pretty bad mistreatment of the little people who played the munchkins, but I love that movie, and learning about that hasn't changed how I feel about the movie. If I were a completely moral person, I probably wouldn't have anything to do with these movies, and I do feel like that about some movies—but not all of them, and I can't give you a good reason why.

Coming back around to the original question, I guess my point is that in all of these cases, I don't think it's possible to appreciate a movie "solely on its merit," because what the merit of a movie is in the first place is relative to its context. A. O. Scott has a pretty insightful essay on Woody Allen that I think about a lot in this regard, and the ideas there seem relevant to a lot of creators, I think. Basically, I think the question is formed on a false dichotomy between "merit" and biography—the two are often inextricable. I just don't have consistent rules about whether or not this means I engage with or experience a movie like that. I respect people who have more a rigorous stance on this issue, though, because I think they probably have a more coherent ethical framework on the issue than I do (though I'd bet everyone has their arbitrary lines they draw for stuff they really love). Anyway, I have typed a lot of words in answer to this, so I hope this ramble makes sense.

Hot on the heels of that epic question comes Anonymous Julia again: "What is the most thought-provoking movie you have ever seen? One where after viewing, you just had to sit there and contemplate for hours?"
This probably won't surprise anyone who knows the preoccupations that rule my spiritual life, but the two movies that immediately came to mind when I saw this question were 2017's First Reformed and 2014's Noah. They're both movies about what it means to be a person of faith in a world that is deeply broken by seemingly immovable powers of oppression (powers that we might also be complicit in), and the questions these movies pose are still rolling around in my mind. Both of them (especially First Reformed) are also pretty heavily informed by the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman, so I would be remiss if I didn't also give a shout-out to Winter Light, Through a Glass Darkly, and Nostalghia, movies that have also left me breathless and challenged and which I still think about a lot. But I'm an English-speaking philistine, so of course it's the English-language movies I think about more.

Another one from Anonymous Julia: "I am a fan of older movies where a single camera followed the action. Sure, the action may not be as fast-paced as today's films, but that is part of the appeal for me. With today's rapid cut scenes and shaking cameras, I feel as though I'm having a seizure. Do you prefer the slower-paced, more conversation and relationship-driven movies, or ones with the fast action and rapid cut scenes?"
I'm a little confused by parts of this question. Older movies still used multiple cameras and plenty of editing; the Psycho shower scene has something like 50 cuts in under two minutes, and that movie's 60 years old. Older movies weren't necessarily relationship-driven either—look at a Marx Bros. movie or a lot of Chaplin's films. I think there are also plenty of modern movies that are slower-paced and/or are relationship-driven, and audiences are still watching them (for example, Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Little Women was one of the most popular movies of 2019). But I do think that the major studios (especially Disney) are increasingly disinterested in doing big promotional pushes of movies that aren't action blockbusters, and action filmmaking is certainly more chaotic and fast-paced on average than it used to be, so I guess I understand the spirit of the question. I'm afraid that I don't have a particularly interesting answer, though. I don't really have a preference between the two types of movies mentioned in the question: there are conversation-/relationship-driven movies I love, but there are plenty I find insufferable, and the same goes for modern action movies. I thought Red, White and Blue was excellent but found Wild Mountain Thyme to be dreadful; I'm pretty tired of the Marvel movies, but I've really enjoyed the last few Mission: Impossible movies. That's not to say that I don't have tastes and preferences; they just don't tend to fall along a relationship-driven/action-driven dichotomy. That said, I do get really tired of pointless handheld/shaky camera, though I would also point out that this isn't limited to just action movies—slow-paced European dramas are terrible about relying on some misguided idea of "realism" as signified by handheld camera. But I like a lot of those, too, so I dunno.

Okay, and now the final question. This one comes from Louis: "Not really a specific question, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on Robert Cormier since two of his books are in your top 100. Chocolate War was incredibly formative for me in middle school. I think some of his books are too dark and mean-spirited (Beyond the Chocolate War and The Rag and Bone Shop), but others are deeply humane (I Am the Cheese, Heroes) and I love how he doesn't condescend to young adults at all. He also seemed like a sweet, mild-mannered Catholic man, which sort of calls to mind the disparity between David Lynch's personality and his work."
Oh yeah, you're speaking my language. It sounds like you and I have pretty similar experiences with Robert Cormier. I first ran across him when I was in 9th grade (I Am the Cheese was on an ALA list that I ran across), and it's probably not an exaggeration to say that that was the single biggest turning point in my reading habits I've ever experienced. I was immediately captivated and read almost all of his books over an 18-month span. I had never read anything like them: these dark, brutal, often unapologetically bleak novels with big ideas and, as you say, a steadfast unwillingness to condescend to young adults or even moralize plots. His work completely changed the way I viewed literature, and it definitely set the stage for how I would react to the stuff I would read in my Honors and AP English classes in high school, which expanded my view of literature even further. I definitely agree that his books could be pretty mean-spirited (Beyond the Chocolate War in particular feels borderline sadistic in the way it wrings characters through some extremely miserable, triggering situations), and back in 9th/10th grade, I struggled with this a good deal, since at the time these were far and away the most explicit books I had ever read involving sex and violence—I remember quitting Fade multiple times because of the content (there's an incest subplot that's pretty awful, if I remember right) before ultimately finishing it because I found the book so magnetic anyway. In the short term, this helped cultivate a (thankfully temporary) unhealthy streak in me where I thought that good literature had to be grim/depressing/edgy. But long-term, I have pretty positive feelings about Cormier, and even today, when YA is exploding in terms of the types of stories it tells, his work still feels revolutionary on some level. So much modern YA is explainy and has these heart-on-the-sleeve postures toward social issues, and while I see a lot of value in that, I do sometimes wish we had more authors who would have the kind of hands-off trust in YA readers to wrestle with thorny ideas that Cormier often showed. That part of his work still feels very vital and unique to me in the world of YA. That said, I haven't returned to many of his books as an adult, and I do wonder how much a lot of them would hold up for me. I did try once to teach The Chocolate War, which I still maintain is a great book, to my students as a text in conversation with the ideas about individualism and civil disobedience presented by the Transcendentalists (this was an 11th-grader class), and a few female students expressed some discomfort with the overwhelmingly heterosexual and male POV of the book (e.g. the multiple instances of the book describing not just the boys ogling girls but also the body parts of the girls that were being ogled). It's not that there's not a place for that, especially in a novel that is so much about the abuses of the hetero-male posture, but my students pointing that out did make me realize that even though Cormier does occasionally have female characters/protagonists, he's still coming at most of his stories from a male-coded perspective that's limited in some ways.

And that's it! The end of the Q&A! Thank you, everybody, for your questions. I had fun writing these answers, and I hope y'all have fun reading them. Maybe I'll do this again sometime.

Mini Reviews for March 15 - 21, 2021

 Still working on that Q&A. I should be done with in in the next week, so keep your eyes out for that!

Movies

Martin Eden (2020)
Basically a twisted Bildungsroman in which our character becomes lonelier and more miserable as he becomes older and more successful. It's very pointedly a critique of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism, as Martin explicitly rejects the socialism that his working-class peers rally around (there are a couple great scenes in which Martin is invited to speak at a rally and then starts preaching the wonders of individualism and gets booed off the stage) until he's this ultra-rich, completely unhappy Milo-Yiannopoulos-looking dude. Apparently Jack London, who wrote the source novel, felt that his book was ultimately unsuccessful at conveying this idea (they never tell you in school that Jack London is a socialist, something I much rather would have learned about instead of reading one of his boring dog books), but I think it comes through loud-and-clear in the film. It's also much more than just a political treatise; in addition to being a pretty good story, it's also got striking visuals (there's a lot of Guy-Maddin-esque silent footage as wordless interstitials) and weird anachronisms (it's like the whole 20th century is collapsed into whatever time period Martin is supposed to be living in) that make the film a consistently interesting cinematic object. The movie goes on too long, and the ending becomes obvious long before the movie actually gets there, which made me feel a little restless for the final 30-ish minutes. But on the whole, this was a pretty engaging watch. I haven't seen that Harrison-Ford-starring Call of the Wild, but I'm going to go out on a limb and call this the best Jack London adaptation to hit the States in 2020. Grade: B+

His House (2020)
Basically a haunted house movie in which the protagonists are Sudanese refugees resettled in the UK and the haunted house is the public housing that they are put in, haunted by their own trauma and survivor's guilt. It's a great premise unfortunately not executed as well as it could be. People who hate the tropes of "elevated horror" are probably going to lose their minds over how much this movie leans into them—there's a lot of the "look! everything is subtext!" here that drives people up the wall about this kind of message horror film, and even more pointedly, the movie is more or less lifting a lot of style directly from more famous Important Horror Movies of the past decade (in particular, The Babadook and Get Out, and maybe a little of Lights Out [if that one counts as an Important Horror Movie]). As a result, there's this effect where the scares feel parallel to the movie's themes rather than an organic part of them. That said, though, I did find the scares to be pretty effective, especially the one where you would hear the footsteps of one of the invisible ghosts running toward you until *BOO* the ghost all of the sudden was visible—really terrific sound design there. And I like the idea of the movie enough that I was mostly tracking with it even as it walked through some pretty familiar territory. Looking forward to director Remi Weeks, who definitely has some chops, finding his voice a little more in subsequent movies. Grade: B

Ammonite (2020)
It's maybe not surprising that a period romance is staid and uninteresting. But it is surprising to me just how little onscreen chemistry Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet have. How did they mess that up? This very dearly wants to be Portrait of a Lady on Fire, only with fossils instead of painting, and some of the shots and the ASMR-esque scratching-the-dirt-off-fossils sounds definitely start to get at some of the aesthetic successes of that other movie. But they forgot to evoke the part of Portrait of a Lady on Fire where it made me feel something. Grade: C-

 

Ride Your Wave (きみと、波にのれたら) (2019)
I'm probably never not going to be disappointed that none of Masaaki Yuasa's other features even approach the formal radicalism of Mind Game (my introduction to his work). And I really wish he could find a screenplay that wasn't bad on some level. And so we have Ride Your Wave, which is neither as radical as Mind Game nor much better narratively than most of his other work (though this one is more just cheesy cringe than the rank dysfunction of some of his other movies). But holy cow, this movie looks incredible. Probably the most visually polished movie of his career. Yuasa's stretchy, eccentrically cartoonish style makes him an animation director particularly well-suited to watery environments, so it only makes sense that a movie about surfers was going to be front-to-back gorgeous. Really could have done without them singing that one song like 50 times, though. Grade: B+

The Mosquito Coast (1986)
I went into this thinking this was a Peter Weir-directed Harrison Ford vehicle, which it kind of is. But once I saw the name "Paul Schrader" in the credits as screenwriter, I just couldn't get out of my head how much this is completely Paul Schrader's movie. Harrison Ford's character spends the first thirty minutes of the movie giving Travis Bickle speeches, but instead of becoming a mass shooter in training, he becomes this wild white-savior Übermensch-type dude in Central America, and it's every bit a character in conversation with all those other iconic Schrader protagonists in terms of how they absolutely hate the practice of living within an American capitalist world but also are so corrupted by that ideology that they have no other framework through which to view others than through this totally sick individualism and delusions of grandeur. Also, Ford's character is a genius at refrigeration technology, and the refrigerator becomes a proxy for God? I guess that's a new wrinkle. Anyway, besides Schrader, the big draw here Harrison Ford, who is absolutely great. Maybe the most interesting performance of his career, taking the goofballisms and ironic smirks and dapper charm of Ford's iconic roles and turning it into a pathology. It's genuinely sad that the guy never was given (or never gave himself?) an opportunity to do more complex roles like this one again in his career, because it's incredible to watch. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for March 8 - 14, 2021

Don't forget that if you want to submit a question to my 400th post Q&A, you can do so here! If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read my post about it here.

Movies

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020)
The performances are great (Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, so duh), as is the writing itself (August Wilson, so duh). But boy, this is just completely baffling on a technical level. I guess aesthetic is subjective, but I have no idea who thought it was a good idea to take a play-to-film adaptation that imo ideally would have been full of long takes and long shots and instead make it consist almost entirely of erratically edited-together close ups. Maybe this is just some artsy vibe that I'm not keyed into, but as I experienced it, this movie is at war with its best elements, which is a shame given those elements. Grade: B-

 

 

Wild Mountain Thyme (2020)
I can't say there's much of my Irish heritage left beyond a residual disdain for British monarchs and some memories of my grandfather singing "Londonderry Air." I guess there was also that one time that my boss jokingly called me a "mick." But that's about it. I'm going to guess that John Patrick Shanley has about the same connection to Ireland as I do, because what in the world is this? It's like one of those "generic decades songs" from Bojack Horseman, only a movie and about Ireland: there are pub singalongs, green hills, salt-o'-the-earth musings about the countryside, really bad "tope o' thuh marnin" accents from a central cast who is almost exclusively not Irish (Christopher Walken???), a pivotal scene involving a pint of Guinness—like, come on, the only thing missing is flaming red hair and lots of children subsisting on potatoes. And then there's the writing, which contrives a romance so ludicrous and overcooked that it's almost surreal—given that this is the same dude who wrote and directed Joe Versus the Volcano, maybe I shouldn't rule out surreality as an intentional effect, but also, John Patrick Shanley did We're Back and Congo, too, so maybe he's just this chaotic neutral filmmaking presence that's impossible to trust. As it is, this is probably the most incredible mainstream cinema disaster since Cats, though unfortunately it does not even begin to approach that other movie's pileup of fevered-dream bad decisions. Mostly, this is just bad. Also, I was very disappointed to find out that Jon Hamm was not one of the actors in the cast doing a preposterous Irish accent. Grade: D-

A Rainy Day in New York (2019)
For a while there, I thought that people were intentionally under-rating late-period Woody Allen because of his insufferable public persona and what he ("allegedly," I guess) did to Dylan Farrow—which is fair, though not exactly how I engage with movies. And I still think that's probably the case for stuff like Irrational Man and Café Society. But at the same time, these last couple features have really seen Woody settling into exactly the things people have accused his late-period of being: a complacent parade of self-plagiarism, stale cultural references, phony bourgeois posturing, and dodgy sexual dynamics. It's not like these things haven't been present in pieces throughout most of Allen's career (or even all together in, e.g., Whatever Works). But Wonder Wheel and now A Rainy Day in New York represent a particularly somnolent turn from Allen, movies with almost no spark of life at all, embodying these tropes out of sheer laziness and retroactively flattening a filmography that, on par, is somewhat more complex than people tend to give it credit for these days. Which I guess makes it easier to dismiss Allen as a filmmaker, because at this point, he's just not good. It's contagious, too. The cast is wringing incredibly weak performances out of some of the most tepid writing of Allen's career (Timothée Chalamet in particular, whose character is named "Gatsby Welles," in case you wanted to know what level of unintentional self-parody Allen is working on here), and the whole film is a structureless blob that nobody involved seems to know what to do with except maybe Selena Gomez, who is at least fun to see onscreen (a surprise to me, I'll admit), and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Allen's only productive collaborator nowadays and whose work gives an artificial, soundstage-y quality to what I think are on-location shoots here, which is interesting. But unlike some of Allen's bad movies in the past, neither of those positive notes makes a good case for watching this movie despite the movie. If anyone's still on the Allen train, now might be the time to get off. Grade: C-

Dementia 13 (1963)
Francis Ford Coppola's first non-erotic feature film is basically a Psycho riff, only if Psycho made no sense on a plot level and was about a woman who was trying to commit inheritance fraud instead of embezzle money from an employer. This is basically proto-giallo in terms of how it values style over plot coherence, though this might have worked better if the style were just a little more developed and the plot made just a little more sense. But I guess you gotta start somewhere, right? Grade: B-

 

 

 

You're a Big Boy Now (1966)
Coppola's second "respectable" feature is a French-New-Wave-style screwball comedy about a recently adulted man (and virgin, the film is sure we understand) who is forced to live on his own for the first time. There's a kind of sweetness to the movie in the way that movies like Superbad can be sweet even at their raunchiest, where it finds bemused sympathy for a straight male interested in sex but flummoxed and befuddled at performing the patriarchal, chauvinist masculine scripts that our society says must be embodied in order to access sex. The film definitely wears out its welcome, though, as it becomes clear that it doesn't have enough jokes or enough subtle pathos to fill its 97 minutes, and a lot of what feels fun and zany at the beginning unfortunately just becomes grating by the end. Coppola's got a really interesting style here, though: a lot looser and less considered than what he would become known for (lots of rambling, urban long takes here), but also a lot slicker than his previous, almost shambling feature, Dementia 13. Progress, I suppose, though this movie isn't demonstrably more entertaining for it. Grade: B-

400th Post and Q&A Call!

The past few times I've hit a new 100-post milestone, I've made some sort of grand list: movies, albums, books. Well, now I've hit 400 (I actually hit 400 a few weeks ago, but I didn't realize it), so I guess it's time for another milestone post.

I don't know if I could make a good list of TV shows or video games, the two other media I engage with a lot, so I don't feel like attempting either. So I'm going to do something different this time.

What I'd like to do instead is an AMA/Q&A, where readers get to ask questions about literally anything within reason that I'll answer in a follow-up post. I'm not sure if enough people are interested in that to make a good Q&A post, so this is something of an experiment. I've made a form where you can submit a question, and if I get enough good questions to make a post, I'll make it. If not, I'll just quietly slide this project into a drawer and forget about it.

So here's your job: if you'd like to read a Q&A, gimme some Qs! Click the link below to submit some (hopefully I've not made a huge mistake by allowing people to submit multiple questions).

Here's that link! Click away, and we'll see what happens! Thanks for reading the blog for 400+ posts!

Mini Reviews for March 1 - 7, 2021

 Please let spring be here.

Movies

The Empty Man (2020)
It's a major bummer that this got buried in the pandemic and, even before that, Disney's acquisition of Fox (though hilariously, they apparently forgot to take out the old 20th Century Fox graphic at the beginning). This is one of the best and scariest mainstream horror movies in recent memory, and not just scary like "boo!" but on a much more fundamental level. The movie starts as one thing (a ghost/possession story wrapped in a police procedural) and then just keeps picking at it and picking at it like you would a small chip of paint on a wall until it eventually has flaked off enough that it's revealed something huge and otherworldly and horrifying beneath, becoming both a metaphysical treatise and an unsettling psychological portrait while showing that there's no real distinction between the two. This strikes me as the sort of effect that the first season of True Detective (I never watched the others) was aiming for, including the pristine digital-cinematography aesthetic, but The Empty Man has none of the issues that compromised that show and has quite a few other things going for it that the show didn't, like an ability to pull on supernatural events, or the fact that it's a (relatively) concise film instead of a haphazardly paced miniseries. I'm looking forward to this inevitably gaining classic status in a decade or so. Grade: A

I Am Love (Io sono l'amore) (2009)
I'm not the kind of person who is inherently repelled by plots about rich people and their problems, but I was so profoundly bored by the plot of this film that I found myself looking everywhere else in this film but the plot. As it happens, the cinematography is incredible, and the score (by John Adams!) is only a notch or two below that—sort of Herrmann meets Philip Glass. So this movie skates by on those two things and exclusively those two things; sorry, Tilda, I still love you. That said, I do wonder what I would have thought about A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name (both better movies overall, though in the case of the former, barely) if I'd known when I saw them that each are built from component parts of this movie while also not having nearly so interesting music or visuals. Grade: C+

Rumble Fish (1983)
Very much the dark-side companion to Coppola's adaptation of The Outsiders: both released in the same year, adapting S. E. Hinton novels (and in the case of Rumble Fish, Hinton herself was screenplay co-writer), starring Matt Dylan, filmed in Tulsa with the same production team. But whereas The Outsiders is classicist and romantic (if ultimately tragic), Rumble Fish is experimental and bleak, a cutting-edge use of film technology to empower an exceptional eye for b&w cinematography and impressionist editing to tell a sweaty, grim parable. It's understandable why this movie flopped; I certainly would have been initially perplexed if I were expecting something in the vein of The Outsiders. But holy cow, is this movie beautiful. That said, while I know that the tide has mostly turned and people prefer Rumble Fish nowadays, I think the two movies are stronger together as a diptych about the tensions of telling a story about troubled adolescents (the romance of youth mixed with the despair of destitution) and, on a more meta level, the competing tensions within Coppola's filmography (the maximalist classicist and the brain experimenter). On a completely separate note, the score here (by Stewart Copeland of The Police[!]) is incredibly good. Grade: A-

Targets (1968)
Peter Bogdanovich's nostalgia can sometimes be a little irritating, and "my movie about a mass shooter is a metaphor for the coarsening of American society concurrent with the demise of Old Hollywood" is really, really close to tipping over into that. But this ends up working well despite itself. First of all, despite its thesis, Targets actually appropriates a lot of those European-influenced New Hollywood techniques extremely well—most notably in the shooter sequences themselves, which are without score and have some impressionistic cuts and are generally just scary and unnerving in a pretty modern way. But also, the parts that are mourning the death of The System (particularly the stuff surrounding Boris Karloff) are so affectionate that the sentiment is contagious. Bogdanovich's career was, to a degree, underwritten by Orson Welles and Henry Fonda and people like that from the older generation, and there's something almost sweet about this movie's ode to that type (even if Bogdanovich himself were still a few years out from, for example, befriending Welles). Grade: B+

 

Books

Little Eyes (Kentukis) by Samanta Schweblin (2018)
A very fun, lightly sci-fi novel. An unnamed tech company creates a gadget called a "Kentuki": a little robotic animal that a person buys and lets live in their home, but the catch is that it's not an AI or program controlling the creature; it's another human being on the other side, a person who has been randomly paired with the specific household after purchasing access. From this relatively straightforward premise, Schweblin spins a surprisingly complex book about the ways in which technology affects our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world as a whole. The novel doesn't have a single plot; rather, it's a series of vignettes connected only by the common feature of the presence of kentukis, and while the book opens with a tense scene of exploitation, the rest of the novel is more measured in its treatment of technology—Little Eyes is ambivalent in the true sense of the term, investigating the ways that small intrusions of new tech can spin out into both positive and harmful changes in behavior. It's a quick, constantly surprising read and pretty insightful about the role of technology in human life. I should probably read more by Schweblin, because this is very interesting. Grade: B+