Mini Reviews for January 23 - 29, 2023

In case you missed it, there's a new podcast episode in the Newbery Chronicles: this time, the 2020 Newbery Medal winner, New Kid.

Movies

Crimson Gold (طلای سرخ) (2003)
This is way more narratively and thematically straightforward than I was expecting from a Jafar Panahi-directed, Abbas Kiarostami-written film: basically a crime film with a class commentary at its core. And it's really good at that! The transition from the scene in which the protagonist is invited, momentarily, into a ritzy apartment to the scene in which the climactic heist takes place is gutting, and the rest of the film does a good job of setting up that hinge moment. I guess I should put an asterisk by the word "straightforward," though, because it's entirely possible that my relative ignorance about early 21st-century Iran has made me miss some more thorny political context that's wrapped up in this; there are a few moments in the film—e.g. the motorcycle ride where the two guys talk about head coverings—that make me think that there's more going on there in that regard. The older I get, the more I just feel so ignorant about everything, especially things that happened during my lifetime that I should have at least a basic awareness of. Anyway, I may be a dummy about this movie. Grade: B+

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971)
Some truly vile Christian nationalist propaganda. This is great for a hate-watch laugh—the scene of the pedo-stached public school teacher (credited as "Comrade Teacher") instructing a class that "premarital sex is necessary" is the funniest thing I've seen in a movie in maybe years—but boy did it curdle for me by the end. 95% of this movie's outlining of the alleged threat of a communist takeover of the United States is so deranged that it's hard to take seriously, but there's something piercingly real about the final five-ish minutes, when the inevitable altar-call conversion happens. While every single performance in the film is sub-community-theater cornball acting, the scene where the woman breaks into sobs as she accepts Christ as her Lord and Savior is uncomfortably naturalistic, and the Rev. Estus Pirkle, who sounds like a huckster madman as he explains geopolitics, becomes disarmingly, insidiously down-to-earth as he counsels this woman to salvation. It's the one part of the movie that's not outrageously unhinged from reality, which is important because it's the only part of this movie that anyone in the pews could have conceivably experienced in real life. The verifiable thing, the conversion, has to be credible to open the door to the outrageous lies that populate the rest of the movie—as clear a document as I've ever seen of the intertwining of sincere religious experiences with a reactionary political project. Evil, evil stuff. Grade: D

The Burning Hell (1974)
Significantly less funny than If Footmen Tire You (that's bad), but it's also significantly less politically putrid (that's good), but it's also still foregrounding a psychologically abusive fire-and-brimstone, scare-people-into-the-sinner's-prayer preaching (that's bad), but it's got some fun, nightmarish imagery in the parts that depict hell (that's good). It's funny how much less sinister the Reverend Estus Pirkle comes across here than in the previous film. Rather than some deeply evil right-wing grifter, he mostly just comes across as a simpleton in this movie, saying things like one million is a 1 followed by 9 zeros and that Moses sent Korah to Hell in the Book of Numbers. So-called biblical literalists always show their asses when they stake so much on eternal conscious torment in hell. Some real "Michael Scott thinks there are dementors in prison" energy, all of them. Grade: D+

The Believer's Heaven (1977)
This third Estus Pirckle / Ron Ormond collaboration is weirdly beautiful in a way that the other ones couldn't be; the combination of hymns and '70s-style Baptist congregants with ghostly-looking home-grown special effects in depicting a folk-religion version of heaven makes it unexpectedly reminiscent of Spencer Williams's The Blood of Jesus, which is I think the gold standard for this kind of revival-tent cinema. There's also, as I've seen others point out, something accidentally proto-Lynchian about the tone here, especially when you get the (deeply uncomfortable) showcase of disabled people. But unlike the other Pirckle/Ormond flicks, this one is crushingly dull. Rev. Pirkle has cleaned up a lot, and with that fancy suit and shock of white hair, he's looking way more like a slick televangelist than a down-home country preacher, which is boring. Also, while we get a few scenes in hell, this film just has nothing interesting to say at all about eternal life. The same hateful, manipulative theology as The Burning Hell but with none of the brimstone that made it exciting. It reminds me how most people don't ever read the "Paradiso" part of Dante's Divine Comedy; it's just a lot more fun to see people in elaborate torture than to see people frolicking in fields or whatever. Maybe that's not what's in "Paradiso," but I stopped after "Inferno" like everyone else. Grade: D

The Monster and the Stripper (The Exotic Ones) (1968)
Extremely boring for something this weird: 10% travel brochure for New Orleans, 50% burlesque performances, 25% footage of a caveman-looking swamp monster who gets captured and put on display in the strip club, and 15% crime caper involving misappropriated money connected to the mob—100% couldn't hold my interest. After watching Ron Ormond's post-conversion movies with Estus Pirkle, I thought I'd go back to one of Ormond's older, heathen movies for context, and I gotta say, I think I found the one guy whose art got more interesting during his Jesus phase. Grade: D-

Mini Reviews for November 2 - 8, 2020

Nothing going on out there. Totally a normal week in America.

Movies

Where Is the Friend's House? (خانه‌ی دوست کجاست؟) (1987)
I'm used to heady meta games from Abbas Kiarostami, but the first movie in his Koker trilogy is beautiful in its straightforwardness. Where Is the Friend's House is exactly what the title indicates, and very little more: a kid's quest to find his friend's house so he can give him the notebook that his friend needs to do his homework. But from that simplicity emerges a pretty profound reflection over human decency and the kindness we owe each other. It's wonderful. Grade: A-

I talked about this movie (and the rest of the Koker trilogy) with some pals on Episode 324 of the Cinematary podcast, and if you're interested, you can listen to that episode here.

Life, and Nothing More... (زندگی و دیگر هیچ) (1992)
The second Koker trilogy movie is my favorite by far—a tremendously moving meditation on hope and community-building after disaster, filtered through Kiarostami's typical pseudo-documentary meta-commentary. In the film, as not-Kiarostami travels to Koker to check in on the stars of Where Is the Friend's House? in the aftermath of the devastating 1990 Iran earthquake, he again and again encounters small cells of people who have very little but each other and their faith in God, both literally and figuratively shaken by the earthquake but neither broken, and these encounters collectively present a towering tribute to humanity's ability to create meaning and beauty in the face of what could be an insurmountably chaotic world. One way this especially struck me is through the use of automobiles in the movie; more than perhaps any other figure in history (and certainly in film), Kiarostami over his career worked to reclaim the automobile from its legacy of individualism, capital, and destruction and turn it instead into a conduit of human connection. Life, and Nothing More... presents maybe the height of this project in his filmography, as the car the filmmaker travels in becomes a collective resource for the people he passes on his way to Koker, giving rides, towing cargo, facilitating dialogue—the collective human project in microcosm. Cars are still terrible, but the fact that Kiarostami is able to make me believe in them as a force for good for 90 minutes speaks to the sheer redemptive power of this film. Grade: A

Through the Olive Trees (زیر درختان زیتون) (1994)
Big step down for the Koker trilogy in its final installment, which is too bad. Kiarostami is usually able to wring something poignant or meaningful or at least interesting out of his metatextual stuff, so it's not an inherently failed premise that for this movie he pulls back another layer to make this movie a fictionalized version of the making of Life, and Nothing More.... But I'm having a hard time connecting to the specific way he does it. All of the Koker trilogy films center on a character on a quest, and usually that quest intersects some parable-like spiritual significance, but this movie's quest involves an actor from the previous film working through his feelings of completely unrequited love for his screen partner, and I just can't find any way to invest myself in this plot. The film has plenty of interesting individual moments—I love the opening scene, for example, in which a ton of women who are auditioning for a role in this movie cheer on the director, and the numerous retakes of the Life, and Nothing More... scene whose filming this movie focuses on are fascinating and hypnotic—but the core of the movie just feels impossibly cold to me. Why should I care if this guy who knows nothing about this woman convinces her to love him? Maybe that's the point, in which case I think that it's a kind of bleak and nihilistic conclusion to a trilogy that has otherwise been anything but, or maybe I'm missing some cultural context that would make this one-sided relationship more meaningful, in which case I guess I need to do some homework. But either way, I'm disappointed here. Grade: B-

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
It lacks a lot of the texture of Bradbury's prose (very difficult to pull off in screenwriting, imo, even for Bradbury himself), but the effect is still pretty good, the liminal, carnivalesque Americana evoked by Bradbury's novel twisting into a dreamy version of the "let's scare these kids to death" ethos of '80s children's fantasy. I remember the novel being kind of hard to follow in spots, and that's definitely the case here, too, and I don't care a thing about any of the characters. But that's beside the point, probably, for a movie that ranks up there with Return to Oz on the "traumatizing children" scale. Grade: B+

 

 

The King and the Mockingbird (Le roi et l'oiseau) (1980)
Very strange, fevered-dream animated feature that's more or less a satirical take on a mercurial, dictatorial French king, though with a heaping dose of surreal juxtapositions thrown in for good(?) measure: a gigantic, animatronic Spartan warrior controlled by a musical orchestra, portraits whose figures can step outside their frames and nonchalantly replace their real-life counterparts... it's all very strange, sometimes in a way that's a little exhausting. But there's never not something interesting to look at, and the craft of the animation is undeniable: Fleischer Brothers on acid, basically. Even if it doesn't narratively/thematically hold together at every moment for me, there's always that animation itself. Grade: B

 

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
A warm, charming golden-era MGM musical with a song about trolleys (good) and some absolutely demented children who spend Halloween throwing flour in adults' faces and burning random garbage they find in the street (great). Make Halloween like this again, please. Also, count me among the ranks of people who had no idea that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was from this movie. Grade: B+

 

 

 

Music

Bismuth - The Slow Dying of the Great Barrier Reef (2018)
I got this album on Bandcamp a year or so ago, and it languished on my hard drive until just a couple weeks ago when I added it to iTunes. Big mistake on my part—letting it languish, that is. Because this album rocks. It's one of those doom metal albums in the tradition of Dopesmoker or Earth 2 that takes a single guitar riff and just repeats it with various pedal/feedback effects over a very long track (in this case, the title track, a 32-minute epic) until it basically becomes an ambient record. It's an apocalyptic listen, full of huge sounds and wailing synths, and as bludgeoning as that can be, the environmental despair undergirding it all feels completely earned. This would have been one of my favorite records of 2018 if I'd listened to it then. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for December 30, 2019 - January 5, 2020

I've read a couple books and listened to some music, but I've also been traveling and thus didn't have a ton of time to write about them. I'll get to them later.

In the meantime, don't forget my pair of "Favorites of 2019" posts. You can find the movie one here and the music one here.

Movies

Cats (2019)
There was probably never going to be a good way to adapt the all-time-terrible Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway smash Cats (and please, can this movie be the moment when everyone collectively wakes up and realizes that it was never good? That's right, not even "Memory"), but this is definitely one of the worse ways to even attempt to turn that musical into a movie, starting with the choice to superimpose actors faces over CG cat-human hybrid bodies but continuing on down the line to every single filmmaking choice including just the basic shot composition and blocking (which obscures 90% of the CG choreography 90% of the time). Still, I'd be lying if I joined in with the chorus of people calling this the worst movie of 2019—or even if I just said I didn't like it. The worst movies are either ideologically toxic or boring, and Cats is neither. Especially in this age of hyper-cautious movie studios, it's a rare treat to get a movie that goes so disastrously awry at every single turn as this one, and I had a terrific time with it. I can't quite rate it highly enough that I might trick someone into thinking that I recommend this movie on its own terms (half of the theater walked out before the film's halfway point, leaving just me and my friends to have a collective freak out), but, like, as a movie working against itself at every turn on its own sui generis rubric, this is great. Grade: C+

Gosford Park (2001)
I've not watched a ton of post-'70s Robert Altman movies, so my main associations with the man are primarily American, primarily counterculturally informed. So it was interesting to see a movie of his so far out of that milieu: i.e. one that takes place in the intensely buttoned-up, intensely stratified world of early 20th century Great Britain. The verdict is that it's about 70% shaggy Altman-esque ensemble observational drama, about 30% murder mystery that kind of pays off all the kind of aimless observational drama in the preceding hour-plus. The buildup to the murder feels far too long, but then again, once that plot jumps in, it racks the movie into crystal-clear focus on the ugliest, saddest implications of the class tensions that have been waltzing in front of the camera the whole time. I like that. Grade: B

The Wind Will Carry Us (باد ما را خواهد برد) (1999)
As always with Kiarostami and his movies, there's a lot to unpack with The Wind Will Carry Us. My initial takeaway is that this is basically like Kiarostami's take on the whole Hallmark original movie thing where the city slicker goes to the quaint small town and learns to renounce their city-slicking ways and appreciate the slow, personalized pace of the small-time life—in fact, Kiarostami finds the correct way to frame this story, which hinges on the tense interplay between the urban exploitation of rural "quaintness" and the interlocking systems of contemporary life that affect us all. It's a gorgeously shot, strikingly funny movie that's of course a lot more complicated than what I've described, more of a dense modern text of potent symbols and richly evocative scenes than anything like the moralizing narrative I've just framed it as, and I've barely scratched the surface of it myself. But this is a good one, for sure. Grade: A-

Kundun (1997)
I'm 100% here for the Philip Glass score and Thelma Shoomaker editing, but I'm maybe only 50% here for the Martin Scorsese direction and Melissa Mathison screenplay. The music is stunning throughout, and there are some edits here (especially in the final, highly impressionist final fifteen minutes or so) that are just jaw-dropping in their beauty. As for Scorsese/Mathison, Kundun is the first feature for both of them that is outside a Western, Christian milieu, and both the screenplay and the direction have a stuffiness about them that feels like the sort of careful reverence you might use when approaching a tradition you are not a part of. It's stuffy and robs the material of anything like the more incisive moments of either artist's typical work, and it kind of makes me wonder how suitable either one was for this project in the first place (ditto with the choice to have everybody speak in English—come on, Scorsese, even your bud Schrader had his "Asian" film in the regionally appropriate language!). For Scorsese in particular, his beatific stance toward the Dalai Lama is basically the opposite of the thorny complexity he affords his Christian protagonists and even Jesus Christ Himself, and while I completely understand why an outsider wouldn't want to imbue complexity onto a religious/political tradition not their own, it really makes some of Scorsese's work here feel like a noble failure. But that music! Those edits! Grade: B-

Enter the Dragon (1973)
The last new-to-me movie I watched in 2019 (though I did rewatch Frances Ha with my wife sometime later in the evening). Anyway, it's a lot of fun. I've never seen a Bruce Lee movie before, and this seemed like an alright introduction. It was basically a Bond movie, which means that it has the boring stretches and tedious archetypes that usually plague Bond movies, but Bruce Lee kicking and punching his way through the baddies is way more fun than, like, Sean Connery sleeping his way through a small army of women. Also, I like that Bruce Lee's character is just named Lee. Grade: B+