Mini Reviews for February 10-16, 2020

As you may remember, I was sick last week, so this week's post is both filling in the stuff I didn't get a chance to cover from last week as well as writing about the new stuff I saw this week. Enjoy!

Movies

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
Gorgeous animation—in fact, it's one of the most stunningly rendered "traditional" (i.e. not Spider-Verse) CGI animated features in recent memory. That this is anywhere close to a positive review is entirely on the strength of those visuals. Aside from that, though, I remain completely unable to understand people's connection to the characters and mythology of this franchise; from where I sit, the character models are still ugly, Jay Baruchel's voice acting is still bad, and the larger sweep of the story trends toward convolution rather than gravitas. I'll say this, though: props to this movie for having what is almost certainly the longest sequence devoted to animal mating rituals in an animated movie since Bambi—landmark! Grade: B-

For Sama (2019)
It is pretty tacky to talk about how this movie is shakily edited together from video journals (of a woman in a situation unthinkably more terrifying than anything I've ever experienced), but to watch a movie is to put yourself in a place of privilege over its subject matter, so that's the critical thought that kept flickering through my head. The rest of the time, though, I was pretty deeply moved, and I don't know if I have ever felt a movie scene more viscerally than I did the emergency C-section sequence. Structural issues or not, this is a powerful document. Grade: B+

A Silent Voice (聲の形) (2016)
Meticulous animation that creates a frequently gorgeous effect—it's an oft-made observation, but this is the perfect example of how Japanese animation puts the full power of its technology behind even the most mundane scenarios, and I have nothing but respect for that. As the for the story itself, it felt a little too long and repetitive for my tastes, and the characters' reactions to the two suicide attempts in the movie seem artificial and strange (though perhaps this is just a cultural difference between the US and Japan?). But all that said, the movie finds a good intersection between the sweetness and sourness of its central relationship, and in examining its central ideas of forgiveness, depression, self-loathing, etc., A Silent Voice movingly resists a lot of the pat answers that other movies might lazily reach for. A thorny watch because of that, but not without some fruit. Grade: B

Step Brothers (2008)
Watched this bedridden with a 101 fever, and I honestly don't even know anything about anything. Time is a flat circle, and the "Sweet Child o' Mine" scene is great, but I dunno about the rest. Something else my fevered brain has been thinking about: Bob Dylan's "Isis," on repeat. I don't think that song is in this movie, but it's a good song. Would recommend. Grade: C

Paris Is Burning (1990)
Everything I liked about Climax with none of what I hated. Alternately, a vital and foremostly fun record of late-'80s NYC "ball" culture, and probably the most thorough and complex analysis of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in film history. Grade: A

Purple Rain (1984)
The narrative portions of this movie range from charmingly amateur to outright bad—not really sure what to do with either the bleeding-wound autobiographical elements or the copious misogyny here, either. But luckily, the movie is about 50% musical performances, and as every being, mortal and immortal alike, can attest, the music of Purple Rain slaps all the way to the moon and back. It may in fact be impossible to tear your eyes from the screen as Prince just tears up number after number up on that stage, and the decision to end the movie with about 20 consecutive minutes of music is the best one this movie makes. It's not hard to see why people flocked to this movie; it's also not hard to see why people don't really talk about the movie when they talk about this movie. It's Prince, y'all. Who cares what else there is? Grade: B-

Television

Joe Pera Talks with You, Season 2 (2019-20)
The second season of the best Adult Swim series of all time not only continues the soft-spoken, sincere nicety of its previous season; it also expands everything about what this show is, and in doing so, it becomes a masterpiece. Often eschewing the essayic digressions of its first season, Season Two increasingly deals directly with the psychological realities of its characters and the small and heartbreaking ways in which the march of time changes even the placidity of the show's Upper Peninsula. It's simple, but never simplistic, and almost always profound. I was openly weeping by the ends of half of these episodes. There's nothing like it on television right now, the unassuming beauty of this series and its quiet but hard-won aphoristic triumphs. Grade: A+

BoJack Horseman, Season 6 (2019-20)
All my shows are ending, y'all. Here's BoJack Horseman, ending its run on a mostly high note. There have been a lot of shows recently that have focused on personal growth and recovery in their final stretch (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend comes to mind), and that's the route that BoJack goes, too, in its closing season; its first half largely centers on the twin poles of BoJack's enrollment in rehab and Diane's struggle with depression that leads her to get psychiatric help, while the second half of the season is largely about the thorny, difficult pieces of life that happen after the formal steps of recovery: after medication, after you get out of rehab. And it's pretty good! Creator/showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg has said that he thought Netflix was going to give him more episodes to spread these arcs out over, and that's apparent: secondary characters like Todd get what feels like rushed send-offs that feel like all the show could fit in alongside the main attractions of Diane and BoJack. But allowing for that slightly rushed feel along the edges of the show, it's a mostly compelling conclusion to the series, giving some of the more complex wrestling with "#MeToo" and the idea of problematic protagonists I've seen in a show. It also provides some really stunning individual episodes, most notably the penultimate episode "The View From Halfway Down," which is probably the most frightening and bleak that the show has ever been. And alongside all this, there's of course also the supremely goofy animal puns and wacky humor on clear display, too; I am completely in love with the running gag of the His-Girl-Friday-esque pair of reporters, Paige Sinclair and Maximillian Banks, and there's half a dozen other jokes up to that caliber. This show was special; I'm going to miss it. Grade: B+

The Good Place, Season 4 (2019-20)
The Good Place has always been a show better at exploring ideas than it was developing characters. That doesn't mean that Eleanor, Chidi, etc., didn't have their charms, because they did. But at least for me, if you asked why I came back to the show, it wasn't because I cared particularly strongly for the central cast, winsome as they are. So it's somewhat disappointing that the show's final season leans so heavily on the affection we supposedly have for these characters. Long periods of the final 13 episodes are devoted to giving arcs to the main characters, especially the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, and while I never hated the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, I always appreciated it more as a sideshow to the much more interesting metaphysical ideas this show was batting around. Because when you get right down to it, these characters were not especially complex or interesting; they had an accumulation of traits that worked well for sitcom situations, which was especially helpful in the first season when this show was still halfway a metaphor for the creation of a TV show. But they simply cannot bear the weight of the entire show being put on their shoulders, especially when the characters' emotional arcs are meant also to carry home the ultimate metaphysical ideas the show settles on. About those ideas: I really wish they'd done something more than the whole "eternity is a prison, so the only ethical afterlife is one that eventually leads to annihilation" thing. Look, I know many very smart people have proposed this concept before (including Todd May, a philosopher who makes a cameo in the finale and who argues that life is only meaningful because we are mortal), but I've yet to see anything that convinces me that this whole idea is just unsubstantiated hypothesizing—we don't know anything but mortality, so it seems patently absurd to be so convinced that it is mortality that gives us meaning. Or at any rate, the show is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that an eternal paradise would eventually become hell. Death is a thief and a bastard, and the ability the choose when it happens only solves half of the problem. As long as we're inventing made-up fantasy heavens, I am willing to risk one without it, thank you. So anyway, it's a final season whose characters can't sustain the weight the show puts on them, nor can the show's ideas stand the scrutiny their placement in the finale engenders. It's not like this last season of The Good Place isn't enjoyable in a lot of the ways the show has been enjoyable since its beginning: it's still funny and goofy and absurd in some pretty fun ways, its zippy plotting keeps things interesting and resists settling into a status quo, etc. But on the deepest levels on which The Good Place has been entertaining in the past, Season 4 falls short, which is too bad. So long to one of network television's quirkiest and most thoughtful delights; I'll remember you for the good times, not the finale. Grade: B-

Silicon Valley, Season 6 (2019)
In its final year, the long-running tech satire finds a few new fresh directions, including some topical ones (Richard begins this season testifying before congress making promises about data privacy that he clearly has no idea the feasibility of), and in general, the final season's focus on tech ethics and data harvesting does give Silicon Valley some of the bite it lost in its mediocre last couple years. It's still not nearly as funny as it once was, and the finale bizarrely lands the show on a note of optimism that feels both weirdly out-of-sync for this show and also pretty disconnected from the inescapable hell that is real-world Silicon Valley (I would be shocked if there was a non-zero number of tech giants who intentionally destroyed a very cool piece of code because it had the possibility of destroying the world). But the journey to that note is a solid one, and I had a fun time taking a ride with this show one more time. So yay. Grade: B

Books

March Series by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, Illustrated by Nate Powell (2013-16)
I was a little skeptical of these books at first, because my impression of them is that they were part of the whole "let's turn a school subject into a graphic novel so the kids these days will learn it!" movement, which isn't a movement without its merits but sometimes does lead to some prosaic stuff. The first book feels a lot like that, too, but each successive book gets increasingly complex in ways I wasn't expecting, eventually forming a cycle of books that gives a rich and difficult conversation about the push and pull between radicalism and centrism within political movements. A large part of this comes out of the grounding of the books within John Lewis's point of view, which gives the books a lot of personality and momentum that wouldn't be possible in a straight history. These books are as much memoir as history, which is great; that point of view also saves the books from a lot of the sanctimony that we often like to give history—it is fascinating, for example, how Martin Luther King, Jr., is presented not just as an important leader but also as both a distant celebrity and a frustratingly conservative (relatively) alongside Lewis's more radical vision from SNCC. It doesn't all work; there's a pretty hokey framing device involving Obama's first inauguration, hokey enough that I wonder if, by the end, there's a kind of bitter irony being engaged in (the book ends by talking about the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the late '60s, which then gets juxtaposed with Obama in ways that feel at-best ambivalent). But on the whole, I'm pleasantly surprised by how moving and powerful I found these books. Kids who won't read could do a lot worse than to learn about Civil Rights from this series. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for September 24 - 30, 2018

This week: going through all those expiring Netflix titles. Next week: HORROR MONTH BEGINS.

Movies

A Simple Favor (2018)

A Simple Favor is a movie premised on the idea that the best way to adapt a beach-read thriller into film is to compress a sprawling plot into into lightning-quick beats that zip through twist after twist without giving the audience a chance to collect its breath (there were several audible gasps in my theater). This is a movie that, about 2/3 of the way through, finds time for a five-minute interlude into a Gothic manor and then never looks back; that's just the kind of film this is. Oh, we're going to become an erotic thriller for ten minutes? Cool. What if we threw in a bit of corporate espionage? Neat. Can we satirize suburbia for a few minutes? Gotcha covered. NOW MAKE IT A FREAKIN' REFUTATION OF GENDER NORMS WITHOUT EVER BELITTLING THOSE OPPRESSED BY THEM. Sure thing! It's a wild, slightly unhinged ride, and while I like the Gone Girls of the world and their patient, high-brow(ish) take on this kind of story, A Simple Favor makes a very good case for its approach being the superior one. Enough credit cannot be heaped on Anna Kendrick (her best performance since The Last Five Years) and especially Blake Lively (her best performance ever?) for selling it—it's an inspired choice to have the acting exist at this register that's simultaneously high-camp melodrama and typical (if less improvisational) Paul Feig comedy, and Kendrick and Lively are more than up to the task. Utterly delightful. Grade: B+

The Assassin (刺客聶隱娘) (2015)

It's not true to say that nothing happens in The Assassin. But not a lot happens, and what does happen happens at a glacial pace. I'm sure there are people who will look at the movie's hard-to-follow plot (for as uneventful as the movie is, the plot is surprisingly labyrinthine, and I was certainly lost, narratively), but pish posh; I care so little about plot coherence when a movie is this beautiful. Each shot languishes over a pristinely framed landscape or a detail in the film's meticulous costuming and mise en scène or even just the poetry of a character in motion across the screen. Slow? Yes, punishingly so. But it's exquisite. And for the action hounds, there are also some of the most rivetingly choreographed fight scenes this decade has seen to sweeten all the two-minute static shots of mountains. Grade: A-

The Imitation Game (2014)

For being about such a smart man, The Imitation Game is shockingly dumb. It falls into the worse of cliches—the antisocial genius who doesn't understand humor but does understand some esoteric STEM subject; the closeted gay man who is coded straight for a nervous audience by the pairing with a "female best friend" romantic surrogate; the idea that One Man can Beat the Odds and the Ridicule of His Peers and save the world—all of which are, surprise surprise, the parts of this "Based on a True Story" narrative that aren't actually based on a true story. Also, I realize this is a movie for a mass audience, but surely this movie, a movie about a code-breaker, could have actually had some code-breaking in it? Code-breaking is arcane, sure, but people liked Moneyball, right? That movie was, like, half arcane mathematics. But here, all we get (with the exception of one short scene when Turing and Co. make a major breakthrough regarding the weather) are shots of Benedict Cumberbatch twisting gears and muttering vaguely mathematical-sounding things to his befuddled peers. I'll give the movie points for having an interesting structure and a good score by Alexandre Desplat, I guess; but on the whole, this movie is a colossal failure to trust the audience: failure to trust us with the actual history, with the field Turing worked so hard within, with the moral urgency of Turing's story itself, with the depiction of a genius that isn't a Sheldon Cooper rip-off. Grade: C

The Canyons (2013)

This is the sort of bad movie that has all these fascinatingly shaggy dead ends like this film's obsession with defunct movie theaters and the concept of the director as impotent voyeur—so talking about it doesn't really feel like a bad movie so much as a missed opportunity. But don't let that fool you; The Canyons is quite bad. It's pseudo-profundity mixed with maybe misogynist undercurrents ("Written by Brett Easton Ellis") is nonsensical, always approaching a sort of inspired lunacy while always remaining just a few notches shy of being actually entertainingly lunatic. That's at least better than the acting, which is tepid at best—Lindsay Lohan is the best in show, but that's more a testament to the utter blandness of the male leads than it is to any greatness on Lohan's part. This is exactly the sort of film you'd imagine the director of the Cat People remake would create, and not at all what you'd expect of the brains behind First Reformed, alas. Grade: C-

Narco Cultura (2013)

There's a version of this movie, I'm sure, that's great—one where the various threads involving Juárez, the drug wars, immigration, and media violence/complicity come together into a startling thesis. This isn't that movie, though, and as it is, Narco Cultura is a constellation of vignettes cross-cut to give the impression of cohesion without ever really coming into conversation with one another. I mean, some of these vignettes are great, don't get me wrong, and far be it from me to call any documentary that opens with such shockingly violent footage "frivolous" or "minor"—this movie is NOT messing around, and there's a moral urgency to the film that's compelling even in the absence of a more focused collection of images. A fascinating and revealing documentary, to be sure, but one that, with its pointed interviews with border patrol agents and corrido songwriters, seems to be aiming for a sort of rhetorical treatise that simply isn't there. Grade: B

Eat Drink Man Woman (飲食男女) (1994)

The cover of the library DVD on which I watched this movie has a pull-quote from an enthusiastic 4-star review that proclaims, "It's hard to tell where sex stops and food begins!" Well, it certainly didn't seem that hard to me—there are only two sex scenes, and they are nowhere near any of the (much more plentiful) food scenes. Also, I can very easily tell you a useful metric for deciding where the sex ends and the food begins: when the movie gets interesting. It's a reduction to say that none of the scenes that don't involve food are bad, but it isn't an exaggeration at all to say that all of the movie's best scenes involve food, from the exquisite, wordless sequences of food preparation (maybe the best minutes of cinema Ang Lee has ever committed to film) to the family dinner scenes, when all the various domestic and romantic strifes and insecurities of the film's characters are manifested in the ways that they cook and eat. It's wonderful. Unfortunately, not all the scenes in this movie involve food; fortunately, a whole lot of them do. Grade: B+

Television

BoJack Horseman, Season 5 (2018)
Increasingly, BoJack Horseman is a show that's more interested in the episodic format than the season one—not that there aren't season-long arcs but that (like its by-now obvious inspiration, Mad Men) a serialized push forward to a finale takes a backseat to experimental episode structures and a mosaic of character pieces. You'll hear no complaints from me on this front. Netflix (and streaming series in general, but especially Netflix streaming series—looking at you, Orange Is the New Black) has long had an issue with its flexible format allowing for indulgence and slack in the realm of episode craft, resulting in formal and narrative sludge, and it's great to see at least one of Netflix's flagship series really pushing toward a greater conscientiousness in the small pieces. The side-effect may be that the season-long arc feels a bit more archetypal than past seasons (not to spoil much, but it involves an urgently rendered but kind of rote depiction of drug addiction), but if that's the cost for such a high level of episode-by-episode, so be it. BoJack's S5 is filled with masterful pieces of episodic television, from the time-jumping "Mr. Peanutbutter's Boos" to the Princess Carolyn backstory "The Amelia Earhart Story" to, in particular, "Free Churro," which (with the exception of the opening scene) consists entirely of BoJack giving a eulogy at his mother's funeral. This season continues S4's experiment with collapsing the past into the present, and many of S5's episodes are fascinated with the idea of how character histories (both those we've experienced on the show in real time and those we're only informed of in flashback) intersect with the present day, a device that might have felt hacky in other hands but that feels practically literary under the guidance of this show's writers room. It's rich and inspired, both cuttingly of our real-life political moment (the usual "topical" episode this season—a riff on #MeToo—feels entirely more earned than it has in past seasons, integrated as it is within both the entire sweep of the season and the show's own past) and of this show's own language of lunacy. Plus, Todd's obligatory, silly season-long arc is practically transcendent in its layering of topicality, sexual innuendo, and absurdity. Blessed. Grade: A-

Music

Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (2015)
There's a certain perverse masochism in Sufjan Stevens's decision to take the soul baring and self-reflection of All Delighted People and The Age of Adz and not only double down on the personal details (it is, among other things, an album-length reflection on Sufjan's family in general and his parents specifically) but strips back all the unconventional instrumentation and studio wizardry to deliver an album of straightforward, finger-plucking folk (with a few instrumental flourishes here and there, I'll grant). No longer are there immense philosophies or symphonic motifs and arrangements to envelop the personal; it's just Sufjan's words—those futile devices—and his audience here, and you're left with not much else to do than to ruminate on Sufjan's complicated and sometimes embarrassing reflections (sample lyrics: "You checked your texts while I masturbated") dressed in indie folk—a choice, it bears mentioning, that was highly unhip in 2015, when Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers were only just beginning to slip from pop radio. But this is no beardy "whoa-aaoooaaaa"-along album of strummy anthems. It's simplicity is deceptive, and its emotions are probably the most complex and acutely evoked of Sufjan's career. It's masterful: the underbelly of Adz's high philosophizing and a deep well of humanity, warts and all. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for October 2 - 8, 2017

This is the first time in forever that I've had movies, music, TV, and a book to review. Take a picture to prove to your kids that you were actually here!

Movies

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

The absolute best thing about this movie is something you probably already knew from the trailers: it is just about the best-looking piece of AV media you're likely to put into your eyeballs all year (and, with Alien: Covenant and Guardians of the Galaxy 2, this has already been a great year for high-budget visual splendor). Roger Deakins, the legend, helms some terrific cinematography that languishes over the already stunningly designed world of the film, and the result is nothing short of breathtaking. Honestly, that's probably what's carrying me through this film with as much enthusiasm as I'm feeling here (I'm pretty enthused). For starters, the movie has no business being within spitting distance of 3 hours, and while it's smart enough I suppose, the story left me feeling mostly cold, as did the acting—Harrison Ford gives probably the best performance of his latter years, but I mean, come on, it's still latter-day Harrison Ford, which means that he's still got one eye cocked toward cranky retirement (to say nothing of Ana de Armas in her role as a Her-style AI, who might do something interesting if the movie actually followed through with her character instead of the frustrating dead end it gives her). Lest it suddenly start to sound like I think otherwise, I must stress that this is a Good Movie, a VERY Good Movie, even—it's a way better execution of the inherently bad idea of a Blade Runner sequel than I was expecting, carefully evoking images and sounds from the original while still building new creations of its own (which is to say, the happy medium I wish The Force Awakens had found). But when your sequel to a masterpiece is merely very good and not a masterpiece itself, it's all too easy to nitpick all the various ways that it falls short of masterpiecedom, which is a terribly unfair way to view a movie, especially one this meticulously constructed and deftly executed. In the sequel-obsessed landscape we're living in right now, this is probably the best possible outcome. Grade: A-

Certain Women (2017)

Kelly Reichardt is one of the most exciting working directors out there, and I base that opinion largely on Meek's Cutoff, one of the true masterpieces of 2010s cinema (her 2013 follow up, Night Moves is no slouch either). Certain Women is, following Night Moves's lead, nowhere near as good as Meek's Cutoff but still pretty freaking good on its own right. It's essentially an anthology film in Reichardt's beloved American Northwest (focusing on three different, unrelated storylines), which is perfect, given Reichardt's facility with cinematic ellipsis—feature films are usually telling short-story-type narratives anyway, and this movie leans into that hard, spinning its trio of stories with an aching precision without ever really needing to punctuate any of them too neatly (save for a misguided and ultimately fruitless montage of all three stories near the film's ending). This works the absolute best in the final of the three, a quietly tragic story about loneliness and the desperate need for human connection, starring Lily Gladstone and Kristen Stewart; the thiry-ish minutes devoted to this story are, in fact, among the best cinema of the year. The rest of the movie doesn't quite hit that sweet spot, but I suppose that's just how it goes with anthologies. Grade: A-

The Boss Baby (2017)

So like... this is the most inventive piece of American animation of the year so far. I know. It's called The Boss Baby; it's a DreamWorks picture—that's DreamWorks Animation of Shrek and Madagascar fame, movies which reasonable people, I suppose, can enjoy but I don't think stand as anyone's idea of animation milestones in terms of craft. But here we are. The Boss Baby's animation is stylish and fun, a magnificent evocation of classic Tex Avery anarchy by way of CG and, delightfully, '90s Cartoon Network. The story is no great shakes, though it's admirably weird in getting to its relatively standard "older sibling has to accept younger sibling" destination (some babies are sent to families—others run a corporate bureaucracy in heaven [?] that's in competition with the existence of puppies for some reason), and the jokes are about the same mix of references and scatological humor you'd expect from any DreamWorks film. But I mean, wow—the way it approaches all of this looks so fresh, and I dig it. Grade: B

Death Note (2017)

You know what's awesome? Willem Dafoe's voiceover performance in this movie. He voices a very CG'd, malicious genie-type character who will kill anyone by whatever method specified by whoever writes the victim's name in a specific magic notebook, and Dafoe is having a great time with it, a sort of revision of his Green Goblin hamming, but somehow even less subtle. But you know what's not awesome? The rest of the movie. At first, it seems that the movie is going to be one of those stories where some hapless human makes wishes that a mischievous genie fulfills in the most unfortunate way possible, and in the early goings, when it seems like this will be the case, it's fun enough. But, typical of Adam Wingard, a perfectly fun premise is made altogether too busy through a distracting attempt at stylistic cleverness, and the plot (I haven't read the manga this is based on, but I assume this is also an issue there?) quickly bloats to worldwide proportions in this tedious way that swallows any personality whole. Bummer. Grade: C

The Invasion (2007)
Remaking Invasion of the Body Snatchers yet again, only this time as an action thriller with little political subtext, is a bad idea, and the best I can say is that this isn't the worst way it could have panned out. Nicole Kidman gives a great performance, and the way that the movie sets a majority of its action in a world that's already mostly overrun by the infected is a plot structure that pays off in some moderately interesting ways—most notably the way that surviving humans have to pretend to be emotionless zombies in order to elude detection. So it's not a wash. But those elements are diluted with generic action beats and an overeager editing style that screams 2007. It's not "bad," I guess, but it's certainly not good either. Grade: C+

The Leopard Man (1943)

The best way to approach this movie is to avoid comparing it with Cat People, the flat-out masterpiece produced by the same producer/director pairing of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur just a year prior to their release of The Leopard Man. Unfortunately, the focus on menacing felines doesn't really make that an easy task (especially when the literal exact same leopard as we saw in Cat People is re-cast for this film [his name is "Dynamite," in case you were wondering]). What we get is fine, if unremarkable outside of the nighttime killing sequences, which luxuriate in that same coal-black darkness that made Cat People such a visual treat. If I hadn't already seen Cat People, in fact, I might call this a neat little B-film, and I suppose it is. I've just seen so much more. Grade: B

Television

BoJack Horseman, Season 4 (2017)

Lacking a lot of the running jokes and season-long C-plots that have made the previous seasons of BoJack Horseman so cohesive, the show's fourth season is the series's most scattered yet. Some of this is a function of the fact that the show is actually trying to do something different than its previous years did, which feels like absolutely the right decision—it was, after all, at the end of its third season that Mad Men blew up its setting and closed the trajectory of its first three years, and BoJack is nothing if not indebted to Mad Men. Because whereas the first three seasons of this show seem to be all about establishing just how self-destructive one (horse) man can be, Season Four seems to have shifted gears a bit to move in, of all things, a more optimistic direction. All of BoJack's seasons have shown BoJack grow, but this is the first time that we've actually seen positive growth, and in the face of some truly harrowing bitterness in both BoJack and those around him (this season delves into his mother's life, as well, and... good lord), the disarming sweetness of the season's end is kind of beautiful. That's not to say that everyone's favorite talking animal comic tragedy isn't still, well, tragic—just that the show has delegated it more democratically among its characters. The biggest structural change here is that there are long stretches of the season not dedicated to BoJack at all, instead giving the rest of the cast episodes dedicated to their own struggles. Some of these are hilarious, such as Mr. Peanutbutter's ill-advised run for public office; others are the source of the season's still readily available heartache, the most crushing of which is reserved for Princess Carolyn, whose spotlight episode this season is one of the best the show has done. I'll admit: I do kind of miss the pristine structure and payoff of the previous seasons; this new approach to BoJack just doesn't work quite as well. But the ambition to change is admirable. Grade: B+

Rick and Morty, Season 3 (2017)

Very subtly, I can feel this show diverging from what drew me to it to begin with. It's the characterization, I think—Morty's trajectory toward cynicism and anger is well-done, but my instinct is to be very wary of what they're doing with Rick, which involves a wild vacillation between frankly lazy hands-washed "welp, he's just an inherently irredeemable prick" characterizations to explicit diagnoses of all the various insecurities that make him an irredeemable prick (there's a scene in which a psychologist monologues for like a solid minute about Rick's psyche, which... ugh). And it's all just so terrestrial—Rick can't be an analogue to normal human pathology because, as the show is very fond of reminding us, he's had completely otherworldly experiences that have fundamentally altered his point of view. It's a boring and trite way to approach this character, and I worry how much more the show will delve into it. Plus, I just can't shake the feeling that, deep down, the series wants us to identify with Rick and his nihilistic, superior view of the world. When, late in the season, he tells another character that she's not evil, just smart, it feels like a concession to the worst impulses of internet culture (many of whose residents make up the vile subsections of the show's fanbase), which refuses self-reflection on the justification that life is miserable because they're so much better than everybody else (I'm getting weird flashbacks to Jeff on Community, one of my least-favorite television characters of all time, and doggonit, Harmon, can we please not go to that well again?). I'm being extremely negative here, and that's mostly apprehension of the show's future and how much more it will indulge these habits. But on an episode by episode basis, Rick and Morty is still one of the funniest shows around, not to mention pound-for-pound one of the cleverest. Harmon and Roiland haven't lost it yet. But I'm worried about the cracks I'm seeing. Grade: B

Books

Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert (2011)

Life Itself finds Ebert in a pensive, philosophical mode; the biting wit of his most memorable reviews and Siskel repartee has softened to a kind of grandfatherly bemusement with life's various cycles. Funnily enough, the book is least engaging when he's discussing the movies, and the middle portion of the book, filled with accounts of his relationships with all manor of show business veterans, from Russ Meyer to Martin Scorsese to Werner Herzog to even John Wayne, not really tremendously interesting, maybe because we've already heard shades of this all through his decades of journalism. No, where this book shines is when Ebert takes the long view, looking back to his childhood, the beginning of his career, his parents, his beloved Steak n' Shake, his memories of his hometown Urbana, or (as in the book's moving conclusion) forward toward infinity. Ebert, writing in the wake of the series of surgeries that took away his jaw and his ability to speak, writes informed with an acute awareness of mortality, not morbidly so but with the newfound perspective of the ways that being conscious of death's future greeting imbues life with its most profound angles. "I will not be conscious of the moment of passing," Ebert writes; death is not an experience. It's merely a dimension that blurs the line between finitude and the beyond, a lens through which to view that which means everything—that is, life itself. Grade: A-

Music

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers (2017)

For an album that flirts with anarchy and chaos in its song titles (e.g. "Bosses Hang," "Anthem for No State"), Luciferian Towers contains some of the most orderly and melodic compositions of Godspeed's career. As such, it's missing a little of that transcendent power that's imbued their best work—it's, all things said, a very straightforward album with little sense of mystery or sublime. Still, there's a lot to enjoy here, particularly in the longer (15+ minutes) pieces, all of which are crescendos that get exciting and very loud. But minor Godspeed, to be sure. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for July 18 - July 24, 2016

Reviews, reviews, reviews. Let me know what you think!

Movies

Only Yesterday (おもひでぽろぽろ) (1991)
It's finally in America, and it's gorgeous. This quiet coming-of-age dramedy is at its best when it's entirely vignette-reliant, the bold, confident animation of the "present" (really, 1982, which would have been much closer to the present had Disney not stubbornly refused to release this gem in the States for so long) contrasting with the quiet, almost water-color tones of our protagonist's memories. We don't get nearly enough coming-of-age films based on inextricably female points of view, which only makes the distinctly female protagonist that much more endearing of a figure here, and every minute of the memories here is pitch perfect in its animation, scripting, and delicate balance of sweet and melancholy. The movie stumbles a bit with trying to stitch together the present-day adventures into a narrative to hang the memories on (complete with a mid-credits ending I don't quite buy), but on the whole, this is the kind of movie I wish American animation would realize is a possibility. Grade: A-

The Red Shoes (1948)
The ballet melodrama, the theatrical acting, the forced ambiguity of the ending of this British classic—I'm not so interested in those things, and at the points when it most focused on them, I had a hard time. But the look of this film is exquisite, lushly colorful and piercingly framed, and by golly, THAT'S what I want to see. If the whole movie had taken the form of the speechless impressionism of the mid-movie "Red Shoes" performance sequence, a fantastically surreal series of shots that evoke not so much ballet but a precursor to David Lynch, I'd have been ready to agree with the historical consensus hailing this a masterpiece. As it is, I get why it's a perennial favorite for hyper-stylizing directors like Brian De Palma. I just wish we had a bit less of the dead-weight plotting. Grade: B+

Whatever Works (2009)
Whatever Works is not a good movie; it's ugly, condescending, and smugly misanthropic in ways that I find absolutely grating, which is all the more a shame, given that writer/director Woody Allen is uniquely positioned to critique just such East-Coast condescension (and has in other, better films). And yet, two things made me laugh: the recurring gag of Larry David's character over-the-top chastisement of his chess students and the brief shot of a concert marquee featuring a rock band apparently named "Anal Sphincter" (Allen's most effectively and hilariously curmudgeonly dig at rock music since Annie Hall). Maybe I'm being overly charitable, but those two bits save this movie from being the absolute worst in Allen's filmography. Grade: C+

Green Room (2015)
The sudden and merciless gore of what turns out to be much more of a horror movie than the thriller advertised is not for the faint of heart. You're unlikely to find a more brutal cross-section of human potential this year. Happily, you're also unlikely to find a more tightly edited, a more deftly acted, a more edge-of-your-seat plotted movie this year; Green Room is great, a sort of mash-up of Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 with Halloween that manages to be better than at least the former. If you can stomach the moments of extreme violence (which is a higher bar to clear than I ever thought it would be going into the movie), this tale of punks vs. Nazis—yes, that's what it's about, and it's great—is every bit of a fantastic cinematic experience. Grade: A

Hollywood Ending (2002)
Its reputation as Allen's absolute worst is way exaggerated (Celebrity resides yet on its ignominious throne). Hollywood Ending is a good movie with a great movie buried within its 114 minutes (and not all that deeply). With the lone exception of the all-time-great Match Point, Woody Allen movies that step past the 100 minute mark invariably lumber across the finish line slack and defeated. Trim 15-20 minutes off this picture and tighten up some of the character work—particularly the stuff surrounding Val's ex-wife and estranged son—and Hollywood Ending sails easily into "very good" territory. Grade: B



Television

Better Off Ted, Season 2 (2009-2010)
While its early cancellation still stings, it's not hard to pick out the show's flaws, especially in this relatively uneven second season. The absurdity feels somewhat formulaic, the one-off guest stars ("hey look, it's that coworker we've always known but will never reference again!") seem forced, and the characterization is never quite fully baked, especially when it comes to Portia de Rossi's Veronica, someone the writers don't ever quite manage to make convincing in her combined iciness and vulnerability. Whether or not these were signs of structural issues or merely growing pains for what was still a very young show remains a mystery, but this much I do know: regardless of its imperfections, Better Off Ted was a fun, idiosyncratic show to its end, and I'm glad to have watched it. Grade: B

BoJack Horseman, Season 3 (2016)
Whether it's TV's saddest comedy or funniest tragedy remains a matter of perspective, I suppose, but two things are as true of this show as they've always been: it's both riotously funny and crushingly, oppressively tragic, often both within the span of minutes. Case in point: a season finale that includes both the show's most despairing plot development yet juxtaposed with a supremely silly Rube Goldberg machine of an incident that pays off a litany of the season's seemingly throwaway gags in one fell swoop. In a way, that's all a bit rote: as off-the-cuff and wild as BoJack Horseman can be in its dual surrealism and abyss-staring philosophizing, there's an increasingly obvious formula at work that doesn't mitigate the searing pain of its depiction of self-destruction and depression (surely the most well-observed treatment of both since Mad Men left the air) but does sort of make the season an exercise of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Which is why the most exciting thing by far about this season is the numerous ways in which the show stretches its legs with formal experimentation. BoJack has always been a series with an eye for animated flair and imagery, but this season is its most conscious effort to expand its visual vocabulary, with stylized flashbacks that use varying frame rates and art direction, montages that play with time dilation and sound, and just a general greater attention to lighting and "camera" placement (or whatever the animation-world equivalent of that is). And that's to say nothing of the show's increasing willingness to try new things with episode form and structure, most notably with season's striking fourth episode, which takes place almost entirely underwater and without dialogue—all of which makes the show, even if slightly less than perfect (one particular mid-season episode involving an abortion feels forced and topical in a way that BoJack usually manages to sidestep), the best animated (and best-animated) TV series out there right now. Grade: A-

Books

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene (2003)
If Greene's purpose here is to present a non-technical, plain language outline of the development of superstring cosmology over the past hundred years, then he's halfway there. The first couple hundred pages of the book contain the best, most accessible explanations of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories of relativity (and, more impressively, the reasoning behind these ideas) that I've ever read. But there's a point—and unfortunately, it's not long after he gets to string theory itself—when Greene seems to throw up his hands and say, "Welp, you made it this far; might as well throw you into the deep end," and out go all the helpful, plain-language explanations and in come all the arcane mathematical proofs. Maybe it's that once you get into string theory, the concepts are just too abstract to get any plainer than he does; maybe it's that enough of string theory remains an untested mystery that it's impossible to get any less technical than this; maybe I'm just dumb. Regardless, something of the magic gets lost, although the first half of the book is unqualified excellence. Grade: B