It's the end of April, and I'm still wearing sweaters. What is this?
Movies
It's an audacious concept—basically, a buddy road trip comedy with all the scenes being performed in public with real, unsuspecting people, hidden-camera-prank-style. Not being a huge fan of hidden-camera pranks, I wasn't sure I was going to like this at first, and definitely some of this doesn't quite work (I didn't find the Juice Bar scene to be very funny, for example). But by the end, this had won me over by just how committed this was to its concept. It's not just doing the typical Jackass-style skits; it takes every beat of a mainstream scripted comedy and puts it in public in front of people who don't realize it's a movie, even sentimental/maudlin elements like a tearful reunion after a fight or moments of character growth, and eventually, it becomes clear that this isn't about pranking anyone so much as experimenting with the good will of the public, and in that regard, it's very sweet and disarming. I wouldn't want every comedy to be like this, but for this movie, it works. Grade: B
A movie about a dude who—ostensibly because of a bet but realistically because of lack of emotional fortitude—never leaves his couch. And it's disgusting in a seriously impressive way; near the beginning of this movie, the protagonist pukes on himself, and the film takes care to make sure you never forget that he's done that as he sits on an increasingly dank and grimy couch. This is surely not for everyone, but I was kind of in awe of how well the movie evokes senses like touch and smell that are not native to cinema. I also really dig its very Buñuel-esque narrative, wherein this dude's quest to never leave his couch becomes a semi-allegorical voyage through time and space. That said, it also made me feel bad on an existential level, because it's not hard to equate the protagonist's attempts to self-actualize by doing increasingly absurd media-based challenges with the fact that I spend a lot of my time watching movies and reading books thinking it will make me an interesting, enlightened person. Thanks, Relaxer. Grade: A-
There's an element to any concert doc where your enjoyment of the whole thing is at least partially a factor of how much you enjoy the music being played. So, cards on the table, I'm only intermittently a JT fan, especially of his 20/20 Experience era, which (with the exception of "Mirrors," which is a top-ten 2010s pop song, imo) is my least-favorite Timberlake solo period before whatever that folk-ish album was that he did a couple years ago. I dunno, both JT and Daft Punk decided to swing majorly for the "our first album in a very long time is an hour-plus '70s R&B/disco revival!" story in the same year, and Justin just got smoked by those French dudes. So I was never going to love this as much as, say, Stop Making Sense, despite the obvious similarities. But be that as it may, what Jonathan Demme captures here is some seriously tight consummate musical professionalism, maybe the most impressively sleek and put-together pop concert I've ever seen, and it is to the movie's great benefit that as much as possible it avoids presenting Timberlake as a monolithic pop persona and instead foregrounds the collective effort of dozens (hundreds?) of people that is needed to put on a show like this. The best part of the movie by far is the final 15-ish minutes, when the show climaxes with Timberlake's two best songs ("SexyBack" and "Mirrors," of course) and then immediately cuts to footage of the road crew assembling the stage prior to the concert. It's a genuinely beautiful juxtaposition—perhaps an overly romanticized depiction of the relationship between a gigantic pop star and the "regular" people who created him, but I'd honestly prefer that romanticism way more to the way that gigantic pop stars tend to consume every bit of effort by their army of collaborators and render it invisible within their single, totemic persona. Such warmth in those final minutes here. Grade: B
It's nice to see a movie with cops who are as effective at solving cases of violent crime as cops in real life are, i.e. not very. I have no idea if real-life cops are as clueless as these guys, but it's a welcome correction to the typical police procedural beats that especially in the early going, this movie is very funny as it shows its leads pulling out wacky investigation technique after wacky investigation technique like they're trying to be Dale Cooper or something—I got an enormous laugh out of the part where one of the cops deduces that the killer must be someone without pubic hair, and his partner is like, "How does that help us? Are we supposed to just pull down people's pants and check?" and then there's a jump cut to the first cop at a bathhouse semi-stealthily eyeing people's crotches. Even in the movie's more serious beats, it's hilarious to see two people who basically don't know what they're doing at all go through motions of being Serious Detectives, and I appreciate that this movie punctures the pieties of police procedurals. A lot of people have made the observation that this pretty closely connected to the movie Zodiac, and I agree that the two are thematically parallel in their exploration of how investigation becomes obsession. But whereas Zodiac emphasizes the clinical, procedural elements, having its characters act precisely and carefully as they collect evidence, Memories of Murder shows its detectives as being fundamentally chaotic actors within their world—even at their most precise, they are still abusing people and violating civil rights and creating horrifying collateral damage, calling the whole endeavor into question in a way that I don't think Zodiac is brave enough to commit to. Grade: A
Filling in this monster-sized gap in my cinema viewing. I knew going in that the basic cultural memory this movie was drawing on was the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo/nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but for some reason, I wasn't prepared for how grim that would make this movie—I guess the longer legacy of the Godzilla movies always seemed to me a little sillier than what this movie is. But it's an astoundingly somber meditation on disaster and the terrifying capability of human beings for destruction. This movie also moves. I was prepared for a slow burn, but no, this plot moves at a breakneck pace that is really wild, especially in the early stages before we have real human characters and it's just a bunch of scenes depicting the escalating national crisis. Also, as I was watching this I suddenly remembered that I had watched the end of this movie (maybe the whole movie? I don't remember anything excepting the underwater ending) with my dad when this was on TV sometime when I was like 5 or 6. It's weird to feel nostalgia for a movie that I didn't think I had seen before. Grade: A-
Books
It's far from Coates's first foray away from the nonfiction writing on which he made his name (he's had quite a run as a comic-book writer, for example), but that this is his first novel still feels surprising, given its scope: a long, fairly dense narrative involving a kind of folk-magical evocation of the Underground Railroad that feels heavily indebted to the more mystical impulses of both Stephen King and Toni Morrison in terms of how they treat memory, both personal and cultural, as a nexus for the metaphysical. To my tastes, Coates is still strongest as a nonfiction writer, and while his prose sings in the book's more ethereal passages, it struggles to render characters that jump off the page and a plot that moves with a meaningful structure. But it's to his credit that those flaws feel like somewhat minor inconveniences in the context of the grander, more powerful flourishes of the novel, so who am I to judge? Grade: B
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