Mini Reviews for January 16 - 22, 2023

In case you missed it, here's my Favorite Movies of 2022 post! I'm hoping to get the 2022 music post out in the next week, too, so stay tuned!

Movies

Skinamarink (2022)
I was constantly pinging between scared, bored, and nostalgic here. Scared and bored are probably self-explanatory: the movie is very spooky at times, and also intentionally dull, too, and those two modes have a symbiotic relationship, for sure. I'm not sure the scares would be as effective if this wasn't incessantly switching among staticky shots of mundane stuff like Legos and ceilings, though I do agree with my friends I saw this with who felt that the movie was kind of impatient in the way it was channel-flipping between different images. The nostalgic feelings I had are weirdly specific; I've seen a lot of people talking about how this movie recalls the feeling of being a child in a dark house in the middle of the night, which is true, but also, when I was growing up my family had a VHS tape that contained most of the public-domain cartoons that are playing on the TV throughout the film, and it was bizarrely cozy to have those cartoons exhumed from deep in my early childhood memories. I'm positive that wasn't the intention of the filmmakers, but that's kind of the thing with childhood memories: the strange mix of fear and comfort, stupid sound effects and incomprehensibility. Also, gotta love that this film is in its own way a feature-length tribute to Archive.org, which the opening credits explicitly shout out. Anyway, good movie, pretty cool that something this out-there is getting a relatively big audience. Grade: B
 

Human Nature (2001)
What a bizarre failure of a movie. The screenplay by Charlie Kaufman certainly has ideas about the ways that bourgeois cultural values suppress more liberated ways of living, but embedding those ideas in a screwball farce framework in the model of Bringing Up Baby or The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is a fatal mistake because Kaufman simply does not know how to (or won't) fill his writing with the moment-by-moment jokes that usually sustain this kind of film. As a result, it's a deeply goofy movie that is only actually funny on a few occasions. It's interesting to see a Kaufman screenplay operating at this thoroughly silly tenor, but maybe the reason why his movies tend to be so much more lugubrious is that it doesn't work at all here. And if I hadn't seen Michel Gondry's name in the credits, I don't think I would have believed he directed this movie, because it's pretty much asleep at the wheel, stylistically. Incredible that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was only a few years away for both of these guys. Grade: C

Possession (1981)
Probably the best case scenario for "What if demon possession were a metaphor for the dissolution of my marriage?" It's as good as it is because of just how relentlessly committed the cast is to pushing this idea to the outer limits of what seems physically possible, screaming and writhing around for minutes on end. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of extreme metal or some other bruising kind of performance whose entire point is to see what aesthetic opportunities lie outside the realm of comfort and convention. A lot of this, I think, is meant to be subjective; when we see the couple screaming at each other in their apartment, we're supposed to be seeing what their argument feels like rather than what it actually literally is, and the same goes for any number of extreme sequences, including a notorious one in which Isabelle Adjani's character describes having a miscarriage in the Berlin metro and we cut to a surreal and deeply unsettling show of her flailing about in an empty metro station as unknown liquids spew from her body. It's wild, and I thought it was good in the sense of leaving me somewhat shell-shocked, though I can sympathize with people who find all of this off-putting. There's also a lot of stuff about espionage and the German political situation in the waning years of the Cold War that I'm not really equipped to dig into, but I enjoyed the way that they added a wacky paranoid conspiracy aspect to the movie. Sure, maybe your wife is harboring a demon in her apartment, but have you considered what that means for geopolitics? Grade: A-

Melvin and Howard (1980)
I had a hard time getting on this movie's wavelength. The DVD case and first ten minutes of the movie indicated that this was about a guy who allegedly met Howard Hughes and then believed he was a beneficiary of Hughes's will, but the film quickly drops that in favor of an extremely low-key ramble through the man's humble (but somehow incredibly volatile) life. The movie moves seamlessly between very radical life changes, and there were at least a couple of times that I didn't realize what was happening until it was already passed because the movie makes so little to-do about its many, many left turns. By the time the final fifteen-ish minutes bookended the film with more Howard Hughes will drama, the shape of the movie kind of came into focus for me as a deeply sympathetic meditation on the directionlessness of being a lower-middle-class person with little agency in your life, but even then, I'm not completely sure what to make of it except that I ultimately enjoyed it. I imagine if I ever rewatch it, my feelings on it will be clearer now that I know what's going to happen. Grade: B

La Strada (1954)
Extremely depressing. Giulietta Masina has an incredible capacity for radiating innocence from her face, and most of the film involves us seeing that innocence betrayed time and time again once her character is sold to an abusive circus strongman "husband." For as much as Fellini is known for exploring the ideas of unfettered exuberance and life as a carnival-like bacchanal, this movie seems like a bitter refutation of anyone trying to find philosophical contentment within that view of life, as The Fool's "pebble" speech to Masina's character which tries to generate meaning and purpose into the chaos of life is the thing that convinces her to stay with her abuser, since her life must have "meaning" despite the pain. The movie kinda takes a long time to get there, and I'm not sure it quite needs to take that long, even though this movie is fairly short in terms of Fellini films (only 1h40m), but maybe that's a me problem, as I'm finding it increasingly difficult to give my undivided attention to movies I watch at home. Also, I feel dumb for not realizing before now that Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown is a remake of this. I know some people hate Allen for this, but I kinda love how often he's drawn from the well of "I'm going to remake a movie many people consider one of the greatest of all time." I wish more people would do that, because it's usually at least interesting when it happens. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for August 31 - September 6, 2020

I wrote a more in-depth review of I'm Thinking of Ending Things for Cinematary.com, which you can read here if you're interested!

Movies

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
I thought the novel's ending was a bit too literal and let the air out of the sails a bit, so it's a really great feeling when this movie walks right up to the place where the novel tips its hand and then aggressively jukes left in a way that smudges the specifics of the plot in all the right ways. Like all Kaufman, it's a document of loneliness and self-loathing and existential dread filtered through an unreliable psychology rendered as unreliable cinematic style, and like all Kaufman since Synecdoche, New York, it's intent on condensing the entire breadth of a human life into an improbably small narrative space, which is a project I really, really dig. New for Kaufman, though, is that the arc of the film is an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt for that psychology to break out of its prison of myopia and truly understand another person, which makes it a lot sadder than it has any right to be. It's definitely a lot sadder than I would have ever expected of more or less a feature-length homage to Oklahoma! I have more thoughts, but I'll save them for a forthcoming review for Cinematary.com. Grade: A

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
There are so few movies that involve abortion that any time one actually comes along, there seems to be an unspoken assumption that it has to explain every facet of the issue within the text of the film or else risk missing yet another opportunity to explicate the subject. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is maybe the most thorough plot-as-explanation-of-the-abortion-process movie I've seen, to the point where it sometimes feels like it's supposed to represent a kind of universal ur-narrative: a teen with an unsupportive family who may or may not have been coerced into having the sex that got her pregnant goes first to a crisis pregnancy center, then tries to induce an abortion herself because she can't get one locally, then has to cross state lines to get to a clinic that will actually let her get an abortion, has to deal with the fact that she is running out of money but must somehow find lodging in the city because the procedure takes more than one day, etc. There are even a couple very long scenes where employees at the various clinics read out the rules and regulations of getting abortions and go through the required health questionnaires. It's incredibly detailed, and the minor miracle about this movie is that it somehow still feels like a movie. The film has an incredible ability to have its meticulous documenting of procedure also double as stealth characterization, like in the scenes where all the rules are explained and questions are asked, where the protagonist's reactions and answers flesh out her character with an impressive amount of nuance, even at times heartbreaking so. I wish the movie's style didn't feel so resolutely and generically "indie," which I found naggingly uninteresting, but as a feat of screenwriting and acting (the two leads are fantastic, especially Sydney Flanigan as Autumn), it's riveting. Grade: B+

Tito and the Birds (Tito e os Pássaros) (2018)
Absolutely in love with the aesthetic of this movie: dynamic (computer-enhanced?) oil-painted landscapes backgrounding digitally animated characters. It is an endlessly arresting and fascinating blending of the tactile and the pixelated. The rest of the movie is fine, a political allegory about how people like Bolsonaro capitalize on fear—there's an actual pandemic of fear that results in some unnerving bodily mutilations. But I honestly was a little distracted by how incredible the animation looks to get very invested in the story. Grade: B

Bulworth (1998)
Warren Beatty writes/produces/directs/stars in a movie about a milquetoast neoliberal California Democrat who has a psychological breakdown that turns him into basically a socialist whose campaign strategy becomes laying bare the ways in which the Democratic party is an organization that pretends to fight the exploitative capitalist political ecosystem of the USA while it contributes to and feeds off that same system—and he does this by basically acting like a white suburban middle-schooler discovering rap for the first time? Kind of in awe that this movie exists, and it's extremely cathartic to watch in the year of Democratic presidential nominee Joe "You Ain't Black" Biden. If the activists are right and people really can pressure Biden into pivoting to the left, I think we probably need to brace ourselves for the rapping. By the end, Beatty probably gets high on his own supply—for a movie this cynical, I can't believe it's not cynical enough to understand that a guy who "goes Bulworth" would eventually 100% exploit his cred with the Black community. And it's a major misstep that the film gives Beatty's character's romantic entanglement with Halle Berry's character even a smidge of sincerity. But hooooo boy, at the early and middle stages, there are some moments where this movie is just *chef's kiss* Grade: B+

Jerry Maguire (1996)
Cameron Crowe movies have such weird energy. These ungainly plots fueled by endless, almost expressionist runs of semi-related incidents in which characters speak from their mouths what sounds like their actual interior monologues in these weird lay-poetry grasps at street-smart profundity are squeezed into the mold of mainstream Hollywood crowdpleasers. The line that separates a good Cameron Crowe movie from a bad one is so fine and so reliant on the mysteriously unreliable alchemy of Crowe's ludicrous tics and tropes that I'm not sure I can really parse why Jerry Maguire works and something like We Bought a Zoo doesn't work, but man, one sure does and the other sure doesn't. Is it Tom Cruise? Talk about weird energy—Tom Cruise, who plays literally every scene in this movie (literally every scene in any of his movies) with the same intensity that he brings to, like, War of the Worlds. It is legitimately unnerving to see him play the role of a sympathetic romantic lead. This whole thing would work a whole lot better if the movie treated its two major supporting roles (Cuba Gooding Jr. and Renée Zellweger, both very good here) as actual co-leads instead of obvious accessories to Cruise's character's arc—an arc that in the hands of Cruise's performance kind of feels as if Patrick Bateman decided to hang up the ax and pursue sincere domestic bliss. Also, Tom Cruise very loudly shouts, "I love black people!!!" in one of the iconic scenes (I had no idea how packed this movie is with iconic scenes), which uncomfortably highlights the racial subtext of Cuba being an accessory to Cruise; no such moment for the movie's (somewhat less troubling) gender subtext, though we do get a literal highlight reel of women talking about how good Cruise's character is in bed, and it's somehow a big emotional turning point in the film. Like I said, very weird energy here. Compellingly weird, more often than not. Grade: B

Music

Blur - 13 (1999)
I'm not super familiar with Blur's broader body of work (I've always been more of an Oasis guy), so I'm sure this album's stylistic departure doesn't hit me like it would have the fans. But this music is pretty far out for a Britpop band. People talk about Radiohead deconstructing Britpop in the late '90s, but honestly, this albums extended noise passages and electronic jams feels way more openly deconstructive of the genre than OK Computer was. The album's structure is interesting in that it begins with its most conventional tracks (the all-time classic "Tender," the single "Coffee & TV"), after which it slowly lowers its listeners into more and more experimental tracks until we're up to our necks in the space electronica of a late-album track like "Caramel," giving the record the feel of a voyage into increasingly uncharted waters. It also feels like the necessary transition between Blur's '90s days and what Gorillaz would be doing in their first couple albums—it isn't hard to imagine some of those electronic sounds deep in the album being turned into beats for a Gorillaz track. But voyage or transition, Britpop or not, this is some good stuff. Grade: A-