Sorry about not posting last week. I was out of town for the weekend and then got sick. Life's been hectic!
Movies
A somewhat shaggy comedy that's really only worth watching for Marc Maron. I've pretty agnostic on Maron as a personality/comedian, but between this and GLOW, he's developed this riveting screen acting presence that I think is genuinely great—a potent and seemingly effortless mix of world-weariness and sweetness that has lent itself to some pretty compelling performances, Sword of Trust among them. The rest of the movie is just kind of there, some sort of lightly satirical hijinks about trying to sell a Civil War sword to a group of conspiracy theorists who believe the South won the Civil War—honestly kind of a flippant treatment of a genuine threat (not this brand of conspiracy theorist per se, but just broadly the white-supremacist, right-wing militia), but Maron's performance is so good that it makes it all go down easy enough, I guess. Grade: B-
It's kind of incredible that David Lowery has exactly two modes: the icy, cosmic art-house mode (e.g. A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) and the gentle melancholy warm-blanket mode (e.g. Pete's Dragon, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, now The Old Man & the Gun)—and never the twain shall meet. If you told me that there were two completely different filmmakers both working under the pseudonym "David Lowery," I would believe it. I usually prefer the icy arthouse stuff, but last night, I was just wiped out after having been sick on Monday and Tuesday and then teaching on a sore throat the rest of the week, and I needed a warm blanket, and boy, did The Old Man and the Gun hit the spot. There's not much to the movie, but it hits every one of its unambitious, easy-going beats out of the park. Plus, Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford have unbelievable onscreen chemistry. Grade: B+
It's initially pretty captivated to have a movie set in a high school animated by images that look like they could have been drawn by the students at that high school, and the dreamy surrealism is cool (the title is not a metaphor). But the movie runs out of gas long before the end of its already slight 75 minutes, and having Jason Schwartzman voice the precocious main character is a meta bridge too far—like, Max Fischer, is that you? Still, there are some very, very cool bits in this movie—it's clear that the craft in terms of imagery and animation is here. I feel like a better screenplay could have elevated this into something actually very good. Grade: C+
A thoroughly white-washed, company-approved history of the Disney Renaissance, but it has some great footage, and it's appropriately disdainful of Jeffrey Katzenberg, though not nearly enough so of Michael Eisner, which is too bad, but I guess we'll always have Shrek. And anyway, it was Katzenberg, not Eisner, who wanted to cut "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid, and if there's a single opinion that can prove that someone is an artless buffoon worthy of a lifetime of contempt, he found the one. Grade: B
A pretty forgettable movie overall except that 1) it's directed by the same guy who did The Emperor's New Groove, and you can see Dindal carrying some of the sensibilities of this movie into that later masterpiece, which is fun, and 2) it's got that extremely frantic, rubbery animation that a lot of Warner-Bros.-affiliated animation in the '90s had, e.g. Animaniacs and stuff like that, and I like that style a lot. Otherwise, this is mediocre stuff, for sure. Grade: B-
Like the best Stephen King adaptations, John Carpenter's Christine streamlines a classically overwritten King novel into the primal story it should have been to begin with. It's interesting that both artists, Carpenter and King, at their white-hot prime couldn't wrestle this story into something on-par with their other work of the time. There's some mighty cool stuff in Carpenter's adaptation, like the scene where Christine is driving around on fire, but as with Stephen King, Carpenter has trouble finding a way to make this story play into his strengths—e.g. this is probably the least-consequential Carpenter score of his classic period. But at least Carpenter makes the story fun—more than I can say about King's novel, which I found to be a bit of a slog—and it is single-mindedly driven in a way that makes this movie move with this unstoppable sinister energy that Carpenter was so good at evoking. Grade: B
It's not nearly as purely transgressive as Pink Flamingos, which makes this... well, "boring" is the wrong word, but I guess comparatively docile in the pantheon of early John Waters—no explicit sex (in fact, the sex is pointedly, exaggeratedly simulated), no mutilated live animals, no licking scene. It's just generally a movie much less interested in using bodily stunts for gross-out extremes, which sands off both the best and worst parts of Pink Flamingos. In return, we get a slightly more coherent story and slightly higher production values, resulting in something that feels a little less like a shoestring production among friends and more like the good version of a Troma movie, which isn't a bad thing. Divine remains an unparalleled performer, the Waters brand of high camp remains very fun, the ability of his scripts to toss off seemingly effortless one-liners is intoxicatingly hilarious ("I'm going to Detroit to find happiness in the auto industry"), and the open disdain for normies (and in this case, specifically heterosexuals) remains inspiring. As a heterosexual myself, I can confirm that the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring one. Grade: B
Just an unassailable vibe. It seems crass to say that of a movie that is obviously freighted with huge social, historical, and personal themes, but honestly, I don't feel like I have the background knowledge to parse those themes when the movie is about an Armenian poet I knew nothing about before watching this movie (and still know basically nothing about), so most of what I'm left with is the exquisite feel of the movie. The movie itself seems uninterested in informing its audience about the specifics of Sayat-Nova's life, which apparently was a sticking point for the Soviet officials responsible for the release of the film, but ultimately that approach is probably for the best, as a more explicitly informative movie would have been more objectively educational while also being a far poorer viewing experience. Because what's actually here is rich: a parade of some of the most gorgeous imagery every put to film, set to some completely transfixing audio tracks that form a kind of proto-ASMR-type soundscape, all assembled into a rough symbolic arc of the artist's life. The collage of surreal images and religious spaces and the way that the movie interlocks everything into one incredible tableau after another evokes the subjective experience of reading poetry—I have no idea what Sayat-Nova's poetry is like, but this movie gives the impression of dwelling inside one of his poems. It's not unlike Andrei Tarkovsky's project in the more abstract corners of Mirror, but at the same time, The Color of Pomegranates is also unlike anything I've seen before. Beautiful, mesmerizing stuff.
If you're interested, I was part of a pretty fun conversation about this movie on the Cinematary podcast, and you can listen to that here.
Television
Even better than the first season, which is great but also a shame because it's also when the show was cancelled. Here, the series's soft-hearted Pynchonisms have coalesced into a season of television that's at-once a lot weirder and more oblique than its previous year while also finding a resonance in these particular characters that is often profound. Increasingly, these characters are forced to deal with abject failure—of the lodge, of their ability to find answers, of even their beliefs themselves—and consequently, the show is constantly pushing these characters to re-evaluate their role in the show's world. But the result of such soul-searching is never despair, incredibly. What instead these characters find is connection; despite facing genuine hard times and some serious dark nights of the soul, the characters come out on the other side having found each other. I mentioned Lost in my review of the first season, and I'll evoke that show here, too, but for a different reason: as the world of Lost got more and more convoluted, the show increasingly leaned on the idea that the true weight of the series wasn't the ongoing mystery but rather the ways that the characters' connections with one another created profound meaning, and Lodge 49's second season does something similar, albeit in a way that isn't so nakedly sentimental as that earlier show. Lodge 49 is, at its core, a show about a world so bewildering that the only thing people can cling to is their ability to care for one another, and when the show hammers that home, it produces some of the most moving moments I've ever seen on TV: the culmination of a postmodern "Gift of the Magi" subplot between Ernie and Dud, Liz's plot involving who she believes is a surrogate mother figure, the whole-cast trip to Mexico—I was in tears. And somehow, the series finds a way to do this without ever losing its extremely off-beat sense of humor: for example, the warmth of that trip to Mexico is also a showcase for a truly hysterical late-season arc involving a character played by Paul Giamatti, and that's just one of many deliriously, hilariously absurd threads in the show. I dunno, as with everything involving this show, your mileage will vary, but the mix of really human moments with giddily goofy absurdity is so keyed in to my sensibilities that I felt extremely seen by the show. I could have watched five more seasons, and even though I knew it was coming, it was actually pretty upsetting to me when I got to the inevitably abrupt ending. In this era of "peak TV" where there's always another network or streaming service to pick up shows with small but dedicated fanbases, it's rare to see great TV shows cut down prematurely like this one was, which makes this one's early demise even more painful—not since the end of Pushing Daisies have I felt so dismayed at show so obviously special and with every indication of more greatness to come hitting the brick wall of a cancellation-forced ending. Wyatt Russell is still apparently out there campaigning for this series to be picked up by another company, which feels about right for a guy who played a character defined by his indefatigable optimism. I hope he's right. Grade: A+
I'm not really feeling this show anymore. When I reviewed the previous season of Rick and Morty, I indicated that I was tired of the show's somewhat haphazard and repetitive approach to character development, and that's still true here: we'll go episodes at a time with virtually no meaningful stakes for the characters, and then out of nowhere we're expected to, for example, care deeply about Morty being sad about his breakup with a superhero. It's not like other adult animation doesn't do something similar: both The Simpsons and Futurama are famous for their out-of-left-field sentimentalism, but neither of those shows are anywhere near as flippant about their characters' relationships or their emotional well-being during the episodes that we're not asked to care for them, which helps make the shift toward emotional stakes not feel so drastic and extreme as it does in Rick and Morty. It's also just simply the case that there are only so many times that a single character beat can be used for emotional resonance before its effect wears off on me—sure, it's theoretically sad how Rick alienates those close to him, but after five seasons, I'm going to need a more profound iteration on that than a lampshaded "dead kid" trope, which is what this season goes for. Anyway, my usually comfort in Rick and Morty is that the show has been at least funny even when the broader ambitions aren't working for me, but unfortunately, Season 5 is also where that's stopped working for me. At least part of this is the show increasingly stooping for ironically extreme violence and gross stuff in lieu of traditional jokes—an episode like "Rickdependence Spray" (in which Morty's sperm is used to create monsters) is cro-magnon levels of stupid and puerile, and I'm surprised that it even passed the muster of the show's usually pretty solid quality control filters. But another part—a bigger part, it must be admitted—is probably just a "me" problem. I think I don't really find the show's basic mode of "characters stammering through hyper-quippy, self-aware dialogue" very funny anymore. I guess we all outgrow things, so oh well. To the show's credit, it is still capable of being incredibly clever in terms of plotting and sheer complexity of sci-fi concepts: episodes like "Mortyplicity" and "Rickmurai Jack" have classically Rick-and-Morty-style head-spinning premises that play out with mathematical precision, and it's still pretty fun to watch the show excel in that mode. But 1) the show isn't going to that mode in every episode, and 2) without the humor or characters landing, the show's complexity isn't enough to make the show worth my time overall. Not sure if I'll keep watching. It just doesn't really seem like this is the series for me anymore. Grade: C
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