For anyone who missed me posting this on social media, here's the really long essay I wrote on 2014's Noah movie that was published this week! I was also on the Cinematary podcast talking about the same movie! Great week for my Noah obsession.
Movies
The animation is fun and colorful, and it contains some of the nicest-designed characters in recent Disney animation—especially the protagonist, Mirabel, who, with her perpetually wobbling eyeglasses, comes as close to approximating the language and ethos of a traditionally hand-drawn cartoon character as any character I can think of in one of these Disney CG features (which of course just raises the obvious question of "then why didn't they just make it a hand-drawn feature to begin with?", though I guess I should just resign myself to losing that battle). So it's not like this is a "bad" movie. But good lord, the writing. There are all sorts of problems with the screenplay, from the fact that nobody but the protagonist has any indication of an internal life until the plot necessitates it to the way that the movie stresses a "you're important because you're you, not because of your abilities" message while at the same time reducing about 75% of its cast to their magical abilities. But probably the single most dysfunctional part of the film is the extreme dissonance between the film's exposition, which depicts a family so toxic that it ostracizes our protagonist for what seems like probably a decade and compels her uncle to go into hiding for the same period of time, and the film's resolution, which acknowledges that toxicity while also presenting its solution as essentially "hug it out." I can't decide if the writers have underestimated just how awful the beginning of the film makes the family look or if they've overestimated the heavy-lifting ability of the ending's symbolism to account for the beginning, but regardless, there's been a major miscalculation somewhere, and the result is a movie that feels at first daringly mean before revealing itself to be disappointingly empty. I ask the people of Walt Disney Animation Studios: is it so hard to find a functional screenplay? This has been a perennial problem since basically the Walt years, but it's felt especially urgent in the past 10-ish years, now that Disney films are intent on being "about" something. I'm begging you: write better. Grade: B-
Utterly scathing satire of the way that film/TV production destroys souls on either side of the camera. The whole thing is amazing, but Albert Brooks in particular is just astounding. Incredibly audacious, especially for a feature debut, to write such an unflattering role for yourself and have that be the point—perhaps the only thing more audacious is having this movie exist and then the first major reality television program of note be named what is essentially a synonym of this movie's title. Maybe I just run in the wrong circles, but why don't people talk about this movie more? Grade: A
Literally felt like I was losing my mind watching this. Sometimes the relentless Too-Muchness of the movie is numbing, but it's also kind of incredible, too. Where did this Brian De Palma go? Because this is like no other Brian De Palma movie I've ever seen. The "Psycho shower scene but the knife is a plunger instead of a knife" has got to be the best De Palma Hitchcock homage, right? Grade: B+
A Vincent Price who uses a turn table to speak kills people in ways inspired by the ten plagues from the Exodus story. It's like the funny, colorful version of Seven, only if that movie had bumbling British cops clicking their tongues every time they came across a victim, like, "Blasted shame the locusts ate that bloke's face off. Blasted shame." Big fun. Grade: A-
Music
It's a pretty unassuming release: spoken-word lyrics (by Havadine Stone) droning over an experimental soundscape (by Ben Baker Billington). Apparently Stone did the spoken-word all in one 30-minute take and then sent it to Billington, who creates the sounds to match on a custom modular synthesizer, so even the process of making this itself is unassuming. But I've probably listened to this album more than any other 2021 release; I've been putting it on during my planning block at school almost daily, and it's just the best vibe for that: comfortable sonic textures for when I'm working, with plenty to pay attention to when I want my mind to wander from lesson plans and grades. The scratches and gurgles of Billington's soundscape are great to get lost in, and Stone's lyrics are surreal, dryly hilarious, and occasionally profound (sometimes all three at the same time: there's a whole aside about how the air that keeps us alive was once in someone's bleached asshole, which is as contemporary an update of the "water is dinosaur pee" as I can imagine). Anyway, I imagine this is most definitely not for everyone, but I think it's really cool. Grade: A-
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