Mini Reviews for August 15 - 21, 2022

In case you aren't following The Newbery Chronicles elsewhere, I just wanted to mention here that the podcast my wife and I are doing has a new episode! You can listen to it here.

Movies

DC League of Super-Pets (2022)
Pretty awful for a variety of reasons:
-That full title
-Really forced Lord-and-Miller-esque humor (Lord and Miller themselves are usually pulling it off by the seat of their pants, and this is a great example of what happens when it's not them and not good)
-Tedious comic book references
-A surprisingly dull Marc Maron vocal performance (surprising after his surprisingly good vocal performance in The Bad Guys just earlier this year)
-Cloying, unearned sentimentality (the movie begins with a tear-jerking destruction of Krypton for some misbegotten reason)
-A Chekhov's gun device that promises early in the movie that Superdog will poop out a piece of kryptonite, only to resolve itself off-screen and completely without fanfare (not sure what's worse: the fact that the movie forced me to look forward to Superdog pooping, or that all we get is a post-hoc "oh, I guess I pooped already, trust me, let's go").

Regardless, this was something of a rite of passage for me, as it's the first movie I've gone to solely because I knew my son would love it, even though I was fairly confident beforehand that I would hate it. A real bummer that the first weekend I've been able to take him to a movie since Encanto has nothing for kids but this playing. My son did indeed have a great time, so I guess I'm just taking one for the team here. He watches PBS Kids and My Neighbor Totoro at home, so here's hoping that this unexpectedly ribald feature isn't going to send him down a dark path. Grade: C-

Prey (2022)
This was pretty good, and of the three Predator movies I've seen, it's almost as good as the first one and significantly better than the second. The setting in 18th-century Comanche territory is a terrific touch, and I'm 100% with the memes calling for Predator sequels in other historic time periods. That said, this movie looks terrible, and I'm not sure who to blame; the shot compositions are fine, but something is very wrong with the lighting, which makes everything looks washed out in the daylight scenes and nearly incomprehensible in the nighttime scenes. Whatever has happened to night photography in the streaming era needs to stop, because this is such a widespread problem. Grade: B-

 

Of Time and the City (2008)
A frequently gorgeous, thoroughly bitter little essay film. Terence Davies hates Liverpool as only someone who knows a place intimately can, and the same goes for his clear affection for a certain version of the place. I know nothing about Liverpool, but like so many Davies movies, watching this dreamy, aesthetic object makes me feel as if I've been dipped in the consciousness of someone who does. Very much feels like the documentary corollary to The Long Day Closes, both in terms of how it looks as well as its slippery approach to the poetry of memory. Grade: A-

 

Topical Malady (สัตว์ประหลาด) (2004)
The bifurcated structure of this film really is one of the great rug-pulls in recent(ish) cinema history, especially if you're used to the typically languid pace of later Apichatpong Weerasethakul features. I spent the first half of this, which is a lovely, poignant love story, charmed but somewhat perplexed at the uncharacteristically straightforward and (relatively) conventional plot. But then after about 50 minutes we get a black screen, and BAM, we're neck-deep in the cosmic viscosity of one of film's greatest mystics, who is ready to crack your head wide open. That back half also simultaneously defamiliarizes the first half, recontextualizing it as the first act in a story about a longing that exists on the scale of myth. With apologies to an otherwise entirely unrelated author, every love story truly is a ghost story, and I've rarely seen a movie so thoroughly and mysteriously epitomize that. Grade: A-

Lilya 4-ever (Lilja 4-ever) (2002)
I'm not usually a "what's the point?" guy with movies, but man, what's the point of this other than misery? In the early goings, this is a fairly poignant portrayal of a girl on the margins of a crumbling post-Soviet society, and per usual, Lukas Moodysson has a good facility with young performers and the ping-ponging between reckless effervescence and the crushing realities of being young. But once the downward spiral starts, it's just so, so punishingly bleak with little to offer other than some vague sense of the world being a cruel place for young people, esp. young girls, and yeah, sure, but that's such a surface-level idea that I feel like I either must be missing something or Moodysson is just flush with the palpable sense of despair that suffuses the back half of the film. It's not even aesthetically interesting, save for a horrific montage of POV shots at one point. I dunno, I'm probably missing something here, because Moodysson usually seems better than this. Grade: C

 

Television

Better Call Saul, Season 6 (2022)
BCS has done an admirable job thus far at not positioning itself in relationship to Breaking Bad, but it's unavoidable as the show comes to a close, not just because of how it must connect the dots between the events of the show to the immediate before-and-after context of Breaking Bad but also because this show's final season ends with a structure that conspicuously mirrors the end of its predecessor. Both shows had final seasons broken in half by a hiatus, both present their protagonists as amoral shells of themselves where the primary question is not the fate of the protagonist but instead whether or not their more sympathetic partner will escape with their soul/life intact, both conclude with the protagonists doing something faintly noble that allows them to accept the consequences of their actions on their own terms. But Better Call Saul has long been the more ambitious show of the two, which makes its conclusion far more fascinating than Breaking Bad's. In terms of the "prequel" story that has occupied the lion's share of this show, it basically wraps up a few episodes after the hiatus with an incident of collateral damage so cataclysmic that it more or less shatters all of the existing dynamics of the series, which means that a large portion of this final season gets devoted to the black-and-white, post-Breaking-Bad Omaha storyline, which serves as both an epilogue to the Saul Goodman saga but also to Breaking Bad; it's in this section that we see that Saul and Kim have more or less "gotten away with it," improbably managing to slough off their old identities as scamming lawyers and put on a duller yet safer existence in anonymity in, respectively, Nebraska and Florida. Whereas the early seasons of BCS emphasized the precarity of Jimmy's life as his attempts at legitimacy were forever frustrated, the Omaha episodes show a man who has, like a cockroach, survived improbable peril and thus has convinced himself of his own invincibility; Kim, on the other hand, lives with crushing guilt at the idea of her survival. What this dichotomy eventually becomes is a climactic interrogation of the ultimate question of human relationships; the BCS/BB universe is preoccupied with power and its monstrous effects, but by setting a third of its final season after the events of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul is able to wrestle with something that its more breakneck forebear never had time to more than gesture toward: given that we live in a harsh world built upon corrosive power dynamics, what do we owe one another? It's kind of the "so what?" of the entire universe of these two series, and a perfect send-off to the world I've spent the last decade-plus inside. Grade: A

The Rehearsal, Season 1 (2022)
One of the wildest, most unpredictable seasons of television I've ever seen. What initially begins as a kooky but fairly straightforward follow-up to Nathan For You (in this case, Nathan Fielder offers the "service" of allowing people to rehearse difficult life situations before they happen) rapidly morphs into something far stranger. It's tough to describe, both because of how ridiculously elaborate and complex it becomes but also because half of the experience of the show is watching it transform on an episode-by-episode basis as new layers and complications are added to Nathan's concept of "rehearsal," but suffice to say, by the end The Rehearsal is a knotty interrogation of authenticity and control. How does one truly know another person? How can any of our social interactions be genuine when we are often enigmas to each other and ourselves? How can we make informed decisions in our lives when the world is such a chaotic, uncontrollable place? Can any of this even be ethically explored within the artifice of a TV show, even one that purports to be a "reality" show? Improbably, The Rehearsal is able to engage these questions in a way that is pretty rigorous and intense while also being hysterically funny for the majority of its runtime. Utterly deranged, compelling TV. I have no idea how there could be a second season of this, but apparently they're going to try, and I'll be there for it. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for June 13 - 19, 2022

Happy Father's Day! Happy Juneteenth!

Movies

Memoria (2021)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movies usually stick with me in bits and pieces, with the dreamlike structures of his films being often too slippery for me to remember in whole. But the entirety of Memoria has been absolutely dominating my conscious mind all day since I saw it—probably in no small part because it's the first of Apichatpong's movies I've seen in a theater. But also, there's something very specifically intriguing about the manifestations of Apichatpong's typical tropes here that I find just magnetic: the spiritual dimensions of the past intruding into the present, the urban-rural tensions, the languorous, lightly psychedelic slow cinema, the exquisite soundscapes—these are all present in the other movies of his that I've seen, but somehow, Tilda Swinton's character's quest to discover the source of a mysterious booming noise that only she can hear is immediately beguiling to me in a way that none of his other films have been. Ignorant Westerner that I am, it's probably also got to do with the rather embarrassing reality that I simply am more familiar with the Colombian setting (embarrassing because I am only barely familiar with Colombia) and especially the white, Scottish protagonist than I ever was with the Thai milieu of his other films, so I can more easily pinpoint the precise ways in which he plays with political subtext one moment, gentle absurdity the next, and then cracks reality wide open in the third. But whatever it is, this is an exquisitely mind-bending film made all the more exquisite by the patience of Apichatpong's edits and the pristine intricacy of the sound design. The film is so slow that it's easy to be fooled into thinking that nothing is happening, but then you'll get something like the moment where, all in one shot, the film slips from being about one woman's walk through the woods into being about thousands of years of human history, and I can just feel my brain melting out of my ears. I can't remember the last film I saw in a theater that felt this profoundly mystical and intoxicated on the feeling of accepting the monumental incomprehensibility of the universe. Grade: A

Mad God (2021)
In the Bible, the story of the Tower of Babel comes immediately on the heels of the flood story. This is funny because the flood is supposed to be God wiping humanity's squalor and evil from the face of the earth and starting the human race afresh with the righteous family of Noah, and yet, without skipping a beat, the text just jumps right from the optimism of Noah's surviving the flood to humanity being back in a state of depravity that must be decimated by God. Realistically, I have to imagine that the continuity between the Flood and the Tower of Babel sections is probably just an effect of an ancient editor trying to stitch together two separately composed stories, but taking the text at face value, this seems to suggest two things: 1) that the entire scope of human history is a cyclical pattern of human society trending toward monstrosity until God destroys it and starts over again; and 2) God is somewhat powerless to stop humanity from spiraling into a state that God views worthy of destruction. I bring all this up not just because Mad God begins with a visual evocation of the Tower of Babel but also because in some ways, this film's whole project is taken up with those two suggestions from the Genesis primeval history. Like the Book of Genesis, Mad God has been stitched together, though this one is all at least the vision of a single dude: legendary effects supervisor Phil Tippett, who apparently worked on and off for 30 years on the various sections that eventually were combined to become this movie, a completely stunning extravaganza of stop-motion animation bolstered by a kitchen sink of other practical effects. Knowing this (which I didn't until I read about it after seeing the movie) makes the lumpily recursive structure of the movie make a lot more sense, at least on a meta level, as the movie is less a coherent continuity than it is a collection of sequences, each an iteration on the same basic premise. That premise is one that more or less assumes those Genesis implications of the inevitability of civilization to become depraved and the inability of God to stop it. Everything we see is some extremely gross evocation of just how messed up the world is, some futile attempt of a divine(?) saboteur to blow up this civilization, or a combination of the two. But mostly the first. This is a truly disgusting piece of cinema, exhibiting a seemingly endless imagination for finding new configurations of misshapen bodies, guts, and poop to throw across the screen, and the fuzzy, gooey tactility of stop-motion animation makes it even more putrid, as if once every few years, Phil Tibbett had a new brainwave about a troll chortling poop from an electrocuted gremlin's butthole and put this film back into production to realize that vision. There's something kind of depressing about how a thirty-year passion project resulting in some of the most stunning animation in the history of the medium is all to the effect of making us repulsed by the fruit of that immaculate craft, and I could never bring myself to actually enjoy this movie. But it's also such an incredible piece of craft that I cannot imagine anyone not being at least a little impressed by it, if not what's onscreen then certainly how it got there. I'm sure mileage will vary, but I found stretches of this to be strikingly beautiful, a sort of transcendent filthiness that's both kind of funny but also kind of sad—as if the movie keeps trying to be purely nihilistic but can't completely shake the impulse to mourn what the gift of life has become. There's a rather stunning sequence toward the end of the movie that flips us back to the movie's own little version of Genesis 1 as we see life being seeded on the planet, and that sequence makes plain the tragedy of the madness of a god who would (as in Genesis following both the flood and the Tower of Babel) want not to annihilate a creation so prone to suffering but to rebirth it with the hopes that this time, the miracle of existence can occur without the curse of pain. The poignancy of a moment such as that makes it hard to dismiss this as simply a gross-out example of extreme cinema. Though lordy, it is gross. Grade: B+

Elephant (2003)
Feeling kinda weird about this one. In 2022, this feels pretty thin as a treatise on school shootings. I can't really blame a twenty-year-old piece of media made in the shadow of the first modern school shooting for not speaking to the multi-faceted epidemic of school shootings that has evolved in the United States since its release, but suffice to say, it doesn't. Part of this is that it is just beamed in from another era—gun culture and school security are just in such wildly different (arguably worse) places than they were at the turn of the millennium, and besides that, this is such an artifact of how schools (presumably? I was in elementary school at the time) used to work in a pre-high-stakes-testing, pre-Columbine world, which is interesting as a piece of history but also kinda distancing as I try to engage with the Big Issue. More to the fault of the movie, the characters are all extremely flat, and while maybe this is an intentional effect (something about the mundanity of their final moments?), it just doesn't excuse the amateurish, frankly mean-spirited characterization of, say, the mean girl clique who have synchronized their bulimia, or the extremely lurid way the movie characterizes the shooters with all the sensationalist media tropes of a school shooter (violent video games, repressed homosexuality, etc.) and literally nothing else. On the other hand, this movie is undeniably unsettling and powerful in a way that transcends all of the above. It is a masterpiece of craft; the camera floats through the pointedly quotidian details of the school day in the minutes immediately preceding the shooting in a way that is hypnotic and eerie despite (maybe even because of) how ordinary and clichéd everything around it is. It's as if the mere fact of observing this is otherworldly, the setting already haunted by some force of evil even before the violence ensues. Forcing us viewers to sit, slow-cinema-style, through every minute, especially the unremarkable minutes that comprise the majority of the film, of this harrowing event gives the film a texture and a posture toward the central tragedy that simply would not have been possible through a more conventional dramatization of the shooting, and for all my issues with the finer points of the film, what this movie does aesthetically and how that impacts our relationship to what is actually happening is a really singular achievement. So... I dunno. Grade: B-

Bent (1997)
As a movie about gay men being put into a Nazi concentration camp, this strikes all of the emotionally harrowing territory you would expect, albeit through a fairly distinctive lens of having it all filtered through this slightly Brechtian staging that foregrounds artificiality in the dialogue and almost abstract spaces. But I was also really distracted through a big chunk of this movie because after a little while, I suddenly remembered that my great uncle had described this movie (or, more accurately, the play it's based on) to me when I was like 16 or 17 when describing art that had been meaningful to him as a Catholic gay man. I had long forgotten the title of the play as well as this conversation with him, but it all just flooded back to me, during the first no-touching sex scene in fact, which is an added layer of weird, and I spent the rest of the movie thinking about him. My relationship with him is complicated now for reasons not worth getting into here, and I haven't seen him in person in years. He hasn't been doing too well recently, either. It's tough the things that time does to our connections with people, which is actually something of a theme in this film, too, so I guess that's appropriate. Grade: B

The Masters of Time (Les maîtres du temps) (1982)
René Laloux's second feature after Fantastic Planet, and it's basically the Saturday-morning-cartoon version of Fantastic Planet: noticeably cheaper animation, bizarre pacing, stilted voice acting (though that one's maybe my fault, since the only version I could find was a frankly awful English dub). Famed French comics visionary Mœbius did the visual design for the movie, and it shows through the frequently excellent creature design (the faceless angels in particular are stunning). But unfortunately, only a few sequences in the film actually take these designs and put them into motion as they deserve, with the rest moving stiffly and awkwardly, like something on the tier of Masters of the Universe. A disappointingly compromised film with just enough promise to make you long even more for the better version that obviously could have been had the finances panned out. Just give weirdo animators the budget to make their cool animation, okay? Grade: C+

The Tale of the Fox (Le Roman de Renard) (1937)
Uproariously funny and bawdy—basically, stitching together the "Renard the Fox" cycle of folktales into an impish, anti-authority fable about the nature of power and its relationship to storytelling. Exactly what I would have expected from a feature film by the dude who did "The Cameraman's Revenge." It's also worth noting that this completely blows all the other early stop-motion feature films out of the water in terms of sheer craft. This is some of the most intricate and fluid stop-motion animation I've ever seen, all the more impressive that, even though it was released just a couple years after The New Gulliver and a few months prior to The Seven Ravens (i.e. the other two films with claims to inaugurating the stop-motion feature), the actual animation of The Tale of the Fox was finished way back in 1930, making this handily the earliest stop-motion feature. On those terms, this movie feels similar to what Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (which also came out in '37—what a year for animation) did for the cel-animated feature: a proof of concept for the format that is so technically masterful that it embarrasses imitators for decades. Grade: A-

 

Music

The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention (2022)
With production by Nigel Godrich and music by the two most visible members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood), this is more or less a Radiohead album in terms of the public-facing understanding of what a Radiohead album is (i.e. not a whole lot of attention to the pieces that Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway, and Ed O'Brien contribute). As it is, I'm not really sure what's going on with the other members of Radiohead that this isn't an official Radiohead album, especially considering that the other musician here, Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, isn't really doing anything that's wildly divergent from what the percussion would normally sound like on a Radiohead release. I mean, Sons of Kemet are cool and I'm glad that Thom and Jonny are in their orbit, but if you'd told me this was Selway's drumming, I wouldn't blink. Whatever the case, this is a very good album, certainly the most fleshed out of Yorke's non-Radiohead work and of course a lot more rock-oriented and straight-ahead-banging than Greenwood's (excellent) film work. Tracks like "Pana-vision" have that woozy, off-kilter string swell that made A Moon Shaped Pool so intoxicating, while "You Will Never Work in Television Again" and "We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings" are the most straightforwardly rocking Radiohead-adjacent songs have been since "Bodysnatchers" and "Jigsaw Falling Into Place." "We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings" in particular has these two incredible synths snaking through the track's background, one wailing, the other rumbling, giving the song a tremendous sense of urgency and scale—probably my favorite track on here, though there's steep competition throughout. This is sure to be near the top of my favorite albums list at the end of the year. Grade: A-

 

Books

The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon (1922)
I read this, the first Newbery Medal winner, for a podcast my wife and I are doing (stay tuned! more details to come soon!). It has all the hallmarks of a book written in 1922 by a European white man purporting to tell the whole history of mankind: i.e. disproportionally (read: nearly completely) focused on Western Europe, kinda white supremacist, misrepresents colonialism as a mostly benevolent operation, etc. On a more theoretical level, this is definitely written from the perspective of a kind of liberal progressivism that mostly died out in the wake of WWII and the Holocaust, which is the presumption that human history is a linear path from barbarism toward enlightened scientific rationalism. Subsequent editions that add to the post-1922 history (I read a version published in 1984) walk some of these things back a little by necessity as they recount more of the 20th century, though adding to the mix a heaping portion of Red-Scare-ish anti-communism and an undercurrent of American Exceptionalism (to van Loon's credit, he barely focuses on the United States at all in his original edition). So anyway, this is pretty compromised as a history book, really only worthwhile as a trapped-in-amber document of a certain worldview at a particular place and time. It's also pretty dull, though not as dull as it could be—van Loon's narration has a lot more personality than this kind of textbook-adjacent nonfiction necessitates, and as outrageous as his editorial asides can sometimes be (he has a habit of characterizing whole people groups with wry little sentences like "they didn't have any friends" or "these people had no moral code"), they are at least a little entertaining. But that's a fairly small comfort in the landscape of tedium that is the rest of the book. I imagine I'll have more to say about this in the podcast (again, stay tuned!), but overall, it's hard to imagine a child would want to read this book, and it would be hard to trust the judgement of an adult who would require a child to read it. Grade: D

Mini Reviews for March 16-22, 2020

Quarantine, Week 2: The library is closed. I want to go back to school.

Movies

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
I'm too late to this party to be surprised that this isn't a paint-by-numbers Mr. Rogers biopic (its reputation long preceded it), but I'm no less delighted by the legitimately complex interplay of cliché and ingenious, thoughtful invention. Like, this actually just goes whole hog into the clichéiest of clichés by giving our protagonist (not Mr. Rogers, I assume most people know by now, but a quasi-fictionalized journalist) certified Daddy Issues, but then it defamiliarizes that trope rigorously by contextualizing it all within this bizarre, Brechtian version of a Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood episode in which Tom Hanks (who looks and sounds nothing like the real Fred Rogers, but he works well in this movie) plays his soft-spoken iteration of a fourth-wall-breaking guide taking us through this story, a la Sam Elliot in The Big Lebowski or even the Leading Player in Pippin. And yet, even this defamiliarizing is refamiliarized by the meticulous fidelity to the aesthetic and set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood itself, and at least for someone like me who spent a not inconsiderable amount of my early childhood watching the show, it's both intensely nostalgic and a little uncanny to see the show's architecture, right down to the songs and the cardigan choreography, bent just slightly into the particular story this movie is telling. And somehow, through all this, the movie manages to transform its story's on-paper roteness into an unbelievably effective and deeply moving rumination on coming to terms with and ultimately expressing the thorny, twisted emotions that accumulate as a function of being human. Marielle Heller's direction is unbelievably creative, too, and the final shot of this movie is my favorite shot of 2019 from any movie not named Long Day's Journey into Night. An odd, beautiful gem of a film from top to bottom. Grade: A-

Bastards (Les Salauds) (2013)
Probably my favorite Claire Denis movie I've seen after High Life, "favorite" being kind of loosely defined, since this is thoroughly miserable and scary in some pretty awful ways. Which admittedly is also true of High Life. I guess I just like Claire Denis movies to be scary and unpleasant. Grade: B+

Southland Tales (2006)
Came expecting to cheer on a fascinating train wreck, left having experienced a masterpiece. What a bewildering, jaw-dropping rush of apocalyptic sci-fi satirical whatever. Like, I get why people hate it, but man, y'all. Quantum entanglement, time travel, satire of moral-majority conservatism, etc.—100% the movie I would have expected the writer/director of Donnie Darko— to have directed with four times the budget, but also 100% funnier and more vital than I was prepared for. It's a fascinating artifact of the fears of the Bush era (terrorism emboldening a repressive [yet respectable-presenting] right-wing state; the Patriot Act re-shaping privacy and the internet as we know it—honestly, probably the most sincere and insightful reckoning with 9/11 as both a reality and a cultural symbol that this era of filmmaking produced), but there's also something perennially cogent about this movie's wild, wildly hilarious, brutally despairing take on the apocalypse. As someone sitting on the brink of what feels like some kind of low-grade apocalypse myself, I found a lot of this movie echoing pretty resoundingly in 2020 (geez, I already hate typing that number—more meme than calendar year by now), from the way the political battles of this movie condense around the magnetism of ineffectual celebrity (The Rock's performance here is so good, btw—don't ever think he's done anything this out-there before or since) to the way that otherwise noble revolutionary Marxists kind of lose the plot for a minute debating whether or not it is just that nature coerces all living things to defecate whether they want to or not. This movie just understands something constituent both about living in a world teetering on the brink in general and also about specifically the intersection of the American myth (or whatever sausage-mill version of that myth that comes out of the modern capitalist media landscape) with that general lived experience on the brink. I'm rambling (what else can you do about a movie as sprawling as this?), so I'll just close by saying that this is probably the most Pynchonian movie I've ever seen and definitely feels like a bizarro-world dry run for PTA's adaptation of Inherent Vice (Timberlake and Newsom basically play the same roles in their respective movies?)—each one being a borderline incomprehensibly plotted comedic whirlwind through the end of an era and the borderline incomprehensibly byzantine forces engineering that end. Neither movie runs out of ideas. Grade: A

Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ) (2006)
A hushed, often beautiful, usually just supremely calming rumination on rural vs. urban Thailand—though I'll admit that more so than any of the ideas in the movie, I just kind of coasted on the vibes, and for me, this movie's basically working in the same vein as ambient music. Probably the most immediately an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie has worked on me, and an ideal movie to put on at about 1 pm on an overcast afternoon while your son takes a nap—I definitely fell asleep during the last five minutes and had to rewind when I woke up, which normally would sound like a criticism but is absolutely praise here. Very nice to have my constant, low-grade anxiety about the fallout from a global pandemic cease for about 100 minutes, and the burden of consciousness slip away for about 5. Grade: A-

Police Story 2 (警察故事續集) (1988)
Much more of a traditional cop movie than the first one, which is bad because the cop elements were my least-favorite parts of the first one. It also has what strikes me as a very tasteless depiction of a deaf villain, which is also bad. But the good: the fight scenes are still great (the fireworks warehouse at the end rivals the best sequences from the original, and the playground brawl isn't too shabby, either). I also really enjoy that the movie opens with Chan's bosses chewing him out for all the damage he did in the first one, which is a good comedic note in a film that doesn't always seem to know where to put its comedy. Grade: B-

The Fog (1980)
Small town, sprawling cast, metaphorically rich threat, deep sense of history, lighthouses (and generally Maine-ish vibes, despite the California setting)—feels like a Stephen King novel, and at a mere 90 minutes, it more importantly feels like a Stephen King novel in fast-forward, the appeal of which I sometimes wish King's editors would take to heart more often. Anyway, this is tons of fun; on-paper, it's a little standard (the ghosts come every 100 years, ooOOOoo), but the movie's filled with great details that flesh out this world delightfully, from the undead sailors' glowing eyes to Carpenter's score to the fact that the hottest radio station in town is the one that just plays jazz standards. I probably wouldn't live in this town, on account of the ghost sailors, but I would definitely visit. Grade: B+

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)
American Graffiti cross-pollinated with Looney Tunes. It has that same feeling of nostalgia being weaponized against itself that Spielberg (producer here) would take to much zanier, often more cutting heights a year later in 1941 (there's a lot of cast overlap between those two movies, too, which makes me curious how much I Wanna Hold Your Hand influenced that one [Edit: As it turns out, the two movies have the same writers—surprise, surprise]). The results of all this are solidly entertaining, though a little thin at times—blame Robert Zemeckis's first-time jitters, I guess? Still a pretty impressive directorial debut. Surely someone out there somewhere has written something really insightful about Zemeckis's relationship to Boomer nostalgia (the line between this movie, Back to the Future, and then Forrest Gump is fascinating)—I'd love to read it. If this hasn't been written yet, you're welcome, culture writers of the world. I'll collect my finder's fee in Beatles CDs. Grade: B+

Television

Anne with an E, Season 3 (2019)
The third and final season of Anne with an E makes a good case for the show's cancellation. Back when this series began, I was enthusiastic about the ways in which the show revised its source material into interesting new shapes, but after a second season compromised by some silly turns, this third season finds the spark of that first season mostly dead and my enthusiasm entirely waned. The problems here are basically the same as in Season 2: ludicrous plot turns, heavily shoehorned-in 21st century progressive values (there's a whole out-of-nowhere #MeToo plot)—none of which I'm inherently opposed to, but they're handled clumsily here and have basically supplanted what made the show enjoyable in the first place, i.e. the seriousness with which it takes Anne's search for a community that helps her heal from her past (reduced here to a merely semi-recurring thread in which Anne looks for information regarding her parents). New to this season are some pretty deep structural issues, too, which makes the show even more dysfunctional; arcs come and go seemingly without forethought—the aforementioned sexual assault plot gets two episodes of intense attention before disappearing completely, and the same goes for a number of the stories told here—and the show has no idea how to incorporate its newer characters, such as Bash (whom Gilbert met in his improbable swashbuckling adventures last season) and his extended family as well as the people we follow from the Mi'kmaq nation (a real missed opportunity here, since the presence of indigenous peoples is something that could have organically yielded some interesting directions for the show—there are some good individual moments, but none of them help to make the plots feel like they're transmissions from an entirely different series). So this third season ends up just rushing from plot to plot without any structural integrity or even really a sense of how all these elements fit into the same universe. As much as it makes me sad to say this about a show I once had pretty positive feelings about, it's kind of insufferable. Grade: C

Books

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (2012)
Really solid bit of historical fiction. I was at first irritated by the YA-ness of the narrative voice here; like, the narrator is a prisoner of war in WWII being tortured by Nazis, so why is she talking all snarky and jokey like she's in The Fault in Our Stars? But the novel gets pretty clever with this voice as the story progresses, eventually playing around with narrative personas and unreliable narrators in some really interesting ways before veering into straightforward tragedy that feels appropriate for the weight of the subject matter. On a meta level, this book is kind of bittersweet for me because I was reading it for my school's student book club, and because of the school cancellations, not only will we not be able to discuss this book, it now seems unlikely that the book club will meet again before the end of the school year. It's a minor thing in the scope of everything else happening in the world with the virus, but I'm going to miss book club. Grade: B+