Mini Reviews for July 27 - August 2, 2020

Plague school begins tomorrow. Hurray.

Movies

Black Is King (2020)
More so than Beyoncé's other visual album, Lemonade, Black Is King feels like a collection of music videos stitched together rather than a cohesive narrative. Maybe I'm missing some of the symbolism here because of my relative unfamiliarity with the Afrocentric imagery compared to the Americana of Lemonade, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much going on in Black Is King, despite being substantially busier visually. That said, this film is very cool-looking, the themes on black identity, while not especially complex (at least not to this white guy), are clear and strong above the noise, and the music more or less slaps, so these complaints are mostly just petty comparisons, which isn't exactly fair to Black Is King. Also not fair: the fact that it's all stitched together by voiceover from the live-action Lion King remake, which is a very goofy feature to appease the Disney corporate overlords, though kudos to Beyoncé and co. for smuggling this weird, wild piece of work onto Disney+ under the auspices of a Lion King tie-in. Grade: B

She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
Imagine a world in which existential anxiety and a certainty of your imminent death were contagious: so of course this movie is both crushingly bleak and entirely appropriate. The film layers some impressively stressful lighting and editing over a basically mumblecore aesthetic, and the whole thing teeters right on the edge of being a complete freakout untethered by reality, though it never truly succumbs, staying just barely grounded in a tangible world—maybe the strongest (albeit still tenuous) note of optimism this otherwise desolate movie offers. Grade: B

Yes, God, Yes (2020)
A sincere and sweet though not particularly insightful exploration of female sexuality and Christianity. Its observations on conservative Christian ethics are well-trodden, especially how those ethics disproportionately shuffle responsibility onto women and girls while also denying those same women and girls pleasure, and its method of critiquing those beliefs falls a little too heavily on the "they're all hypocrites" trope—speaking from experience with these groups, I found that there are a lot of people who actually aren't hypocrites and are completely committed to these ethics (though of course there are plenty of craven liars, too), and for me at least, it would have been more interesting if the movie had had to critique those ideas in terms of the scarily intense integrity that animated some of the leaders I came across, rather than leaning back on the assumption that those who outwardly care most are those who cheat most. But as a gentle character piece, the movie works very well. Natalia Dyer is a minor miracle as the lead—the screenplay gives her maybe 200 words total to speak in the movie, as she mostly just observes and reacts to the world around her rather than participating directly, which means that the majority of her character's interior life has to be communicated via body language and reaction shots, so the fact that she is an intricately realized character is entirely a testament to the understated physicality of Dyer's performance and the incredible amount of information she is able to communicate with subtle facial expressions. This movie needed exactly this performance to work, so I'm glad it found it. Grade: B-

Doctor Sleep (2019)
Points for having some really interesting ideas re: cycles of trauma, addiction, etc., especially when they are manifested through Rebecca Ferguson's terrific villain. More points for director Mike Flanagan going 110% with interesting visuals. Lots of points deducted for the actual screenplay (and I suppose probably the source novel—I haven't read it) being filled with really uninteresting, tedious cul-de-sacs; I would have happily seen the movie do away with all of the young Danny flashback material, for example. So I don't now how many points are left, but this is basically where I land. A great movie being eaten alive by a bad one. Grade: C+

Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者) (1966)
Genuinely unsure what happened in this movie beyond a lot of cool colors and hilarious posturing (the central drifter sings his own theme song??), but it's always fun to run across one of the certified Tarantino lodestones. Grade: B

P.S. I talked about this movie with some folks on the Cinematary podcast, if you're interested.

Forbidden Planet (1956)
As a vibe, this movie is peerless: the painted backdrops of the alien geography, the dream-like flourishes of animation as special effects, and especially that electronic score create a seriously indelible aesthetic experience that feels genuinely otherworldly. As a story, though, this is kind of awful. Like, whose job was it to pay attention to the pacing of this movie? Structurally, this is a complete disaster, puttering around for a full hour with boring meatheads exploring the titular planet in the most meathead way possible (one of the men actually asks if the robot is a boy or a girl, like he's in kindergarten or something) while trying to seduce the lone female cast member, only to then introduce some seriously heady concepts in the last thirty minutes that probably needed to have been teased out more over the preceding hour to avoid being the exposition-dump gobbledygook that it is. It is super disappointing the extent to which the story harshes the aesthetic vibe. Grade: B-

Television

Angel, Season 4 (2002-2003)
This season has some truly baffling plot developments in the early goings (Connor and Cordelia hook up? Cordelia has amnesia? Cordelia is in a coma? Most of these developments involve Cordelia) that eventually give way to a very cool sustained serialized arc that lasts pretty much for the last half of the season, and if that arc doesn't quite make up for some of the dumb character moments early on (though it certainly tries to explain them away), it at least ends the season on a legitimately complex, exciting run with some big ideas on its mind: ideas about religion and cults and whether or not the collective happiness of the whole group gained via religion are worth the casualties of religion's procedures. None of this really makes up for what the show does (or doesn't do) with Cordelia, which, even after the big-picture arc at the end, still feels like a betrayal of the character. But at least it gives us something interesting next to this betrayal. A deeply imperfect season, albeit with some of the highest highs the show has ever delivered. Grade: B

Books

No Name in the Street by James Baldwin (1972)
A somewhat scattered memoir of James Baldwin's experiences within the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Sections of the book are piercing and clear, such as when Baldwin talks about his experiences as a Black American in France compared to the experiences of Algerians or the passages describing Baldwin's reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Other pieces don't hold my interest as well—I'm not terribly invested in Baldwin's interactions with Hollywood, for example. But even those sections are animated by Baldwin's fiery narrative voice, and being as sharp and as fervent as he is, he's able to mine fascinating essayic asides from everything he talks about; it's not uncommon for his observations and ideas to practically climb out of the page as they take a life of their own. Baldwin is such an uncompromising thinker who, at this point in his career, had little to gain from anything but complete candor and ruthless truth-telling about America's perennially insufficient reform of race relations and the white supremacy beneath it that Baldwin thrives on exposing. The book's biggest liability is the apparent difficulty Baldwin sometimes has in transitioning from one idea to another; it's often accomplished through inorganic lurches in the writing, suggesting an essay collection with the various essays simply jammed end-to-end without breaks. But between those transitions, the book can be luminous. Grade: A-

Music

Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020)
There's something so beautiful about the fact that Bob Dylan, at the twilight of his life, continues to plug on, making music like Rough and Rowdy Ways: defiantly unmodern, even square, but richly textured nonetheless. For Dylan, life post-Nobel Prize seems to go at about the same speed as it had been in the long late period of his career which has been in full swing since 1997's Time Out of Mind, a period now having occupied almost half of his time as a public figure. Musically, the quiet, traditional instrumentation of Rough and Rowdy Ways isn't that dissimilar from what you might here on Dylan's recent, divisive run of American songbook records, though lyrically, it's a somber throwback to Time Out of Mind; whereas Tempest, Dylan's last album of original material, was at least as death-obsessed as Rough and Rowdy Ways, it did so through crazed narrators and lurid tales of revenge, but this new album brings Dylan's late career full circle by sharing with Time Out of Mind self-reflexivity on Dylan's own mortality. Death personified haunts the record on songs like "Black Rider," and Death implicitly lurks at the corners of other songs like "Crossing the Rubicon," in which Dylan growls, "In this world so badly bent / I cannot redeem the time / so idly spent," half in anger, half in remorse. And then there's the clear masterwork of the album, "Murder Most Foul," a song whose 17 minutes are set apart on its own disc and whose lyrics are some of the most apocalyptic, mournful words Dylan has ever written—lyrics that take what might otherwise be Boomer kitsch (a 2020 song about JFK's assassination) and turns it into a postmodern dance macabre that finds a parade of 20th-century cultural flotsam marching into the abyss alongside the president whose death basically inaugurated Dylan's career. It's the morbid, often beautiful old-man inversion of Dylan's allusion-heavy electric period: soft piano backing over a gravelly collage of the collective mythology of mass media. If Bob Dylan never wrote another song, it would be the perfect ending to his career, and even if he does write more, "Murder Most Foul" will still linger as a eulogy long after this moment in his career has passed. For all those reasons, Rough and Rowdy Ways is as personal a record as we're likely to get these days from the notoriously cagey songwriter, and if it doesn't quite fit among Dylan's all-time best records (like a lot of late-period Dylan, his passion for individual songs seems to wane at times, and some of the instrumentation is a bit staid), it at least can proudly join the large repository of very good records bobbing just below the classics. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for July 15-21, 2019

HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Fireproof. Honestly not sure if I would have preferred another Adam Sandler movie. This next week is the last week of summer break for me, so it's the last week I'll be taking suggestions! I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to put in a suggestion for next week (or put in another one), here's the link:

Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post! Last week to do this!

Movies

Fireproof (2008) Reader Suggestion!
In the context of a world in which God's Not Dead and its combative ilk exist, it's tempting to look at a relatively more genteel Evangelical Christian movie like this or the megachurch-leaders-turned-film-auteurs Stephen and Alex Kendrick's previous movie, Facing the Giants, with gratitude. It's also a Christian movie that knows what a metaphor is and how to create one visually, which is a miracle that definitely should have been included in that final montage of Facing the Giants. But no! I refuse to fall under any kind of Stockholm Syndrome over the rare Evangelical movie that shows me the barest-minimum cinematic kindnesses. This movie is bad on such a fundamental level: the aforementioned visual metaphors are merely side-effects of a director whose only skill is knowing in which of the four cardinal directions to point the camera, and the movie is put together with such a ham-fisted and bone-headed ethos that the whole thing practically quivered to pieces the moment the first of its many K-Love-core music montages hits the screen. And then the story—when I was little, I remember being told quite a bit that God isn't a vending machine or Santa Claus, but this is precisely the paper-thin view of reality that this film is locked into. Like Facing the Giants before it, Fireproof cannot conceive of a world in which being a devout Evangelical Christian does not result in God's rewarding that fervor in the most direct way possible, and accordingly, it cannot conceive of a man who will not be rewarded with a woman provided he treats her nicely for forty days—which is ridiculous on a lot of levels, but especially considering how the husband in this movie is such a swinging dick with deeply toxic impulses (the sheer number of times he beats something to pieces with that baseball bat) and yet manages to "win back" his wife with only the most basic acts of decency like doing the dishes and fixing dinner and, like, not yelling at her. The pieces of the "Love Dare" we're shown in this movie do nothing to address the fundamental dysfunction of the marriage we see in the movie's rather harrowing opening scene, but Fireproof is so committed to the idea of the husband "earning" his wife's love that it never stops to consider that love isn't an exchange of kindnesses or a machine in which certain inputs automatically yield certain outputs, but rather a profound and messy entangling of two human beings. The movie makes a few gestures toward the unconditional love of Christ, which is both theologically problematic (I'm sure it doesn't mean to imply this, but the movie very much positions salvation as merely a step toward a happier marriage instead of anything spiritually significant—an egregious diminishing of the works of Jesus, to say the least) as well as just grossly patriarchal, since it by implication casts the husband as Jesus being battered for iniquity and the wife as the wayward sinner resisting his unconditional love. I realize this is a pretty common framing of marriage within Evangelicalism ("husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church," etc.), but 1. that interpretation misuses that verse when it becomes a roundabout justification for why wives should be obligated to love their husbands (definitely what this movie is going for), and 2. this movie is too stupid even to know how to make dynamic human drama within that framework anyway. It's all so dumb and boring and shallow, and I hate it. Grade: D

Lu Over the Wall (夜明け告げるルーのうた) (2017)
The story elements are pretty much garbage across the board—thin characters, lumpily structured screenplay, etc., although I think there are some interesting ideas here regarding grief and commercialization that get kind of buried in all the narrative flotsam. But oh man, the animation style—it's no secret by now that Masaaki Yuasa is one of the best, most forward-thinking animation directors out there, and while this is hardly his most formally dazzling movie, it does accomplish one of his most impressive technical feats in that it takes Flash animation and makes it legitimately gorgeous. The color, blobby, overly smooth textures of that style are uniquely suited to the extremely watery story, and it's a wonder to behold. Also, for a movie about a band, it's a welcome grace note that the music slaps. Grade: B

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
The character of Kevin being so one-dimensionally EVIL keeps this movie from anything close to a compelling thesis on parenting or child psychology or mass-shooter psychology or any of the number of interesting issues the film brushes past. There's always the implication that Tilda Swinton's character gives us an unreliable POV through the film's flashbacks, which might make a provocative point about how we retroactively rationalize tragedies by creating cartoon villains out of their perpetrators if the movie had decided to commit to the unreliability just a tad more—as it is, there isn't a ton about the present-day scenes that flags the memories as distorted, particularly the final scene with Kevin in the prison. Which means that this movie is, despite its fancy arthouse trappings, pretty much in the territory of The Omen: a horror movie by way of a miserable walk alongside an unspeakable evil manifested in the form of a child and reflected in the abusive actions of the parent. Oh, but it is exquisitely miserable, though; Lynne Ramsay fills the film (esp. in the early goings) with a litany of disorienting camerawork that focuses on obscure textural details like distorted reflections twisting the characters into their psychologically true forms or mundane objects cropping shots into diabolically sideways glances at violence. The device of cutting to red paint at the precise moment we would expect to see blood is a consistently rattling one, too, and Tilda Swinton + Ezra Miller is the hellish screen duo I never knew I wanted. Oh, and per usual, Lynne Ramsay brings an absolutely choice soundtrack to make this all slide down. Exceptional craft on all fronts in service of a frustratingly unserious engagement with its topic. Grade: B

American Gangster (2007)
Those who say that this movie doesn't add much to the "revisionist gangster picture" genre that the likes of The Godfather and Goodfellas didn't already cover are both right and also kind of missing the point. Yes, it is a rehashing of how the sociopolitical thrust of the 20th century in America has created a system in which a lot of the boundaries between law enforcement, organized crime, and corporate capitalism are merely ceremonial distinctions that annoint prejudice and capital as arbiters of morality. But I'd say the framing of this story within an explicitly African-American perspective (or at least halfway framing it that way—there is still the Russell Crowe half of the film, which is largely boring, I think)—and not just an African-American perspective but an African-American perspective explicitly in opposition to an Italian-American perspective—is a fundamentally new way to approach these themes, and even if the movie does kind of feel stylistically on autopilot for large pieces of it, it's still pretty interesting to see the tropes of the genre play out differently, even on a relatively small scale, e.g. the use of soul, funk, and disco on the soundtrack to mark the passing years instead of Sinatra and the Rolling Stones. It's also one of the first major films of this style to be made after the memeified popularity of De Palma's Scarface, as well as in the wake of HBO's The Wire, which gives the movie an interestingly elegiac stance toward its crime-lord subject. The story of, for example, The Godfather is the story of ethnicity clawing its way into whiteness and then embodying its worst attributes, while the fact of Denzel's character's blackness makes that sort of narrative into a Greek tragedy rather than the Shakespearean one that Pacino's Michael Corleone embodies; Denzel is not a victim of his own worst impulses but rather a system that capriciously punishes only some of its adherent's worst impulses, which makes the movie present the guy with a measure of sympathy that a lot of previous mob epics lack—a less nuanced narrative, for sure, but it also is a much more politically direct one re: the limitations of the American Dream for people unable/unwilling to assimilate into the default-respectable majority. I've spilled a lot of ink over a movie that, on the whole, is pretty solidly middle-of-the-road, so don't take this as a complete ringing endorsement or anything, but there's a spark here that won't die. Grade: B

Television

Angel, Season 3 (2001-2002)
Angel's third season is a considerable step forward for the series. The show's episodic structure melds the case-of-the-week elements with its serialized, mythological flourishes in a much more organic way than in previous seasons, and after the game-changing Pylea arc at the end of the last season, the mythology of the show has become both a lot more fun and whimsical while also becoming a lot deeper. Really kooky stuff happens here involving demon babies and curses and magic sex, and the third season is able to spin this into some powerfully tragic arcs involving Wesley and Angel. It's still a little uneven from episode to episode, and the "LA noir" aesthetic is still pretty bland. But this is the first time in this series where I've felt like the long-term plotting was anything close to as engaging as what Buffy was doing around the same time, and that's pretty exciting. Plus, there's a real corker of a cliffhanger at the end of the season, too. Grade: B+

Music

Lil Nas X - 7 (2019)
Haters may hate, but for this writer, the saga of "Old Town Road" and its ability to riiiiiiide the charts 'til it can't no more is the feel-good story of the year. It doesn't hurt that the song itself is a bop. The rest of the songs on this EP are respectable but not amazing, but it only works in this EP's favor that 25 percent of its songs are versions of "Old Town Road." Grade: B

Matmos - Plastic Anniversary (2019)
Like their previous album, Ultimate Care II, which was created entirely from sounds sampled from the washing machine of the same name, Plastic Anniversary is an album that shocks by how thoroughly it justifies its gimmicky concept. This time, the album is constructed entirely from sampled sounds made with plastic objects—plastic wrap, plastic tubes, plastic silicone gel implants for breast augmentation... it's all here. There's an ecological bent to some of this (e.g. the apocalyptic "Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom" and its visions of the earth's death by microplastics) and a more humanly political bent to other parts ("Thermoplastic Riot Shield"), but mostly, it's just an engaging experimental-electronic album. I caught this duo live a few weeks ago, and they were delightful and surprisingly hilarious; that extends to the album itself, which has this great sense of play beyond the other thematic aims I've already mentioned. It's a ludicrous concept for an album, and Matmos are having a ball. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for June 19 - 25, 2017

Sorry for the late post. Out-of-town fun, etc. But here it is!

Movies

The Lego Batman Movie (2017)
While the pile-up of WB-licensed allusions kind of run into the ground the fun surprise that was the cross-property smorgasbord from The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie is still lots of fun, from the "pew pew" sounds the gunfire makes to the film's deep and sincere love of all the goofy, obscure corners of the Batman universe. It's a tad too long, but hey, what movie isn't these days? Grade: B+

Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014)
I'm all for inscrutable arthouse cinema, but man, I don't know if I'm into it quite enough for Horse Money. An ambiguous, narratively murky feature that slips up and down the timeline of 20th-century Portuguese history and apparently incorporates characters from director Pedro Costa's other films. I'm an expert in neither Portuguese history nor Costa's filmography, and maybe if I were, this would have made more sense. But I was mostly just lost, and not in a good way. Grade: C+

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (西遊·降魔篇) (2013)
Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle) adapts a 16th-century Chinese novel that I know nothing about, and the results are very Stephen-Chow-ish, full of exaggerated kung-fu antics, physical comedy, and goofy, broad characterizations. And it's absolutely delightful for the first half of the film, and while the second half is still fun in the same over-the-top way, I got lost in the hairpin turns of plot and increasingly convoluted mythology. I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but I think I might have enjoyed this more if I were an expert in the background of the film's subject matter. Grade: B

TiMER (2009)
TiMER is a fun enough indie rom-com with a sci-fi twist (a new technology allows you to see the exact moment you'll meet your soul mate) and an excellently cast—Emma Caulfield (aka Anya from Buffy) is a tremendous lead, and the rest of the cast is all sorts of charming, too. It's kind of fascinating and frustrating, though, just how much the movie flubs the ending—it can't decide how wrong its premise (the timer tech) is, and that sets up this weird catch-22 for the film; if it has our protagonist fall in love with someone other than whom the timer has her with, then the entire premise of the movie's tech is incorrect (i.e. a whole movie about a technology "what-if" ends with "but what if that technology didn't really work?", which is fiendishly unsatisfying), but if the film has her end up with the guy the timer says is her soul mate, it's a complete betrayal of the movie narrative up to that point, since it's been building the romance between her and another character. There's no right answer here, and it's maddening. Grade: B-

Séraphine (2008)
There shouldn't be all that much remarkable about this film—it's a relatively straightforward and handsomely made biopic of notoriously troubled painter Séraphine Louis: good in all its aesthetic conservativeness, but not great. But given that we're living in a world scandalously short on good biopics and even shorter on good biopics about troubled artistic geniuses (I mean, it's pretty much this and Mr. Turner, right?), the success of Séraphine purely as a functional and effective depiction of its subject is near miraculous. What a blessing context can be. Grade: B+




Television

Master of None, Season 2 (2017)
In its second season, Aziz Ansari's Netflix dramedy series suffers from a protagonist problem: Ansari's Dev, while light and charming, is nearly dead weight in a season in which the ancillary characters (and, in the standout episode "New York, I Love You," even characters completely unconnected to Ansari's upper-middle-class web of acquaintances). The parents of the various characters are again highlights, as is Denise (Leva Waithe, who gets another standout episode, "Thanksgiving," probably the season's best); meanwhile, Dev bumbles about in pleasant but inconsequential plots involving his various romantic misadventures and his (nonromantic) relationship with a celebrity chef. The exception is the final pair of episodes, which, virtually out of the blue, introduce a deep, deep pathos to a romantic situation involving Dev's character that's achingly realized (and uncomfortably reminiscent of an experience of mine in high school) but, after the simple buildup, not well-enough developed in the season's front 4/5 to really land in any way outside my own memories. That said, it's an unceasingly agreeable show and one that goes down remarkably easily (I binged it in basically two sittings, which I virtually never do with shows), and both in the season-opening Italian episodes and in the aforementioned season-closing duo, both of which allude heavily to Italian cinema, Ansari shows himself to be a solid director with an eye for imagery that makes Master of None one of the best-looking comedies on TV. Worth a watch. Grade: B+

Better Call Saul, Season 3 (2017)
We all know that Better Call Saul will eventually result in Breaking Bad's Season 1, Episode 1—or at least some scenario that makes that episode possible. That's how prequels work. But Better Call Saul's third season is its most concerted push toward that endgame, sometimes to its detriment but often to its favor. When the show is merely throwing in pieces from Walter White's saga, it's a little tedious (as is, unfortunately, most often true of Mike's plot this season, which finds him increasingly bumping shoulders with the cartel and the drug-pushing characters that figure heavily into Breaking Bad), but when it plays with the dramatic irony inherent in prequelness, it's magnificent. The gold is, as always, in Jimmy's relationship with Chuck, a slow-boiling storyline that pays off majorly this season and works increasingly as an interesting experiment in audience sympathies. This is and always has been Jimmy's show; but as we see him pushed further and further, he eventually begins to embrace the push as his inevitable mandate, a move that brings him strikingly close to Walter-White territory in a way that I wasn't sure we'd ever see in this series—at least until this all culminates in a beautiful, heartbreaking zag in the finale that foregrounds a tragedy that I, at least, never thought to consider. It's as close to TV's finest currently airing drama as it's ever been. Grade: A-

Angel, Season 1 (1999-2000)
Similar to this week's other spin-off, Angel is at its worst when it's merely importing drama from its parent show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is especially problematic in the season's early going, where it skitters erratically between the show's new LA-noir tone and fan service from Buffy (I know a lot of people consider the Buffy-crossover "I Will Remember You" a series highlight, but it left me cold). But once the show settles into its groove—and, to be fair, it's much firmer on its feet from the start than Buffy ever was in its first season—it becomes an addicting supernatural crime thriller that I enjoyed a lot. Looking forward to Season 2 with this firm footing. Grade: B