Mini Reviews for December 9-15, 2019

One more week until school is over for the semester. Lord, hasten the day.

Movies

Marriage Story (2019)
In places, Marriage Story has the same vibe as Woody Allen's Interiors, in the sense that it showcases a director reaching just out of their comfort zone in a self-conscious attempt to make a Great Movie, and visibly straining in the process. The scenes unfold in artfully restrained long takes girded with stately camerawork focused on blood-letting performances—it's practically begging the Bergman Scenes from a Marriage comparisons, but here I am making the Allen-compared-to-Bergman comparison, so... I dunno. It's all just so deliberate and airtight, and all of its biggest flourishes feel like Baumbach sat down and said, "Now here's where I have to write an epic, ugly argument," and "Here's the big courtroom scene," and "This is the place where I put in the monologue about gender inequality," etc. With apologies to Baumbach, who it seems has very much lived this in real life, there's nothing of the spontaneity and molten hostility of the great "marriage on the rocks" films, i.e. Before Midnight, Allen's own Husbands and Wives, and the like, settling instead for grand gestures that approximate the form of these movies rather than coming up with a living document of its own. Which is not to say that this movie isn't good—it is! Very good at times! Johansson and Driver give top-tier performances, the writing is the bleeding-edge sharp typical of all Baumbach movies, and the movie is both hysterically funny and achingly sweet at times. But all of the best material occurs when the movie untenses its shoulders and unbuttons its collar, so to speak, and forgets about its ambitions: a lengthy comic interlude involving an accidental knife wound, a handful of scenes involving the screwball-paced casual sniping of creative-types hanging out with one another—basically, when the movie is content to be another Baumbach feature rather than trying to be the Baumbach feature. Unabashedly love Driver's character's barely reigned in contempt for driving, though—solidarity, brother. Grade: B

I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps) (2019)
A lot of people have already noted that the romantic half of this movie is a lot less interesting than the "I'm a disembodied hand trying to claw my way back to my body" half. Fewer people have mentioned that both halves are basically in the service of nothing but some melancholic mood piece fluff—the whole movie cross-cuts between these two timelines until we basically get to the inevitable reunion and then... that's basically it? There's a coda that makes a callback to a significant moment earlier in the film, and then there's a revelation about the protagonist's childhood. But the movie never gave me any reason to care about any of this. Maybe there's a metaphor here, but I dunno, I didn't see it. That said, the animation is amazing, and I am very partial to the hand's whole "Steadfast Tin Soldier"-esque journey, which is both familiar and strange in some delightful ways. Grade: B

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
I appreciate that a director with the stature of Linklater has been consistently willing to work on projects that defy conventional ideas of "importance." Where'd You Go, Bernadette isn't really the kind of movie people are mourning when they talk about the shrinking space for mid-budget films in the modern studio landscape, but it is absolutely the kind of movie most in danger of going extinct from this economic reality: crowd-pleasing, sentimental dramedies without much by the way of thematic ambition on their minds, imperfectly scripted but impeccably acted—you know, like We Bought a Zoo and that kind of thing. This is basically Linklater's We Bought a Zoo, only a little better because it's animated by a typically great Cate Blanchett and a ridiculously watchable Bill Crudup, as well as some pretty interesting material regarding architecture and mental health on the fringes of the plot. It's still a little goofy in places, and the last thirty minutes or so don't work in the slightest. But I had a good time with a lot of the other pieces here. Grade: B-

The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue) (2016)
It doesn't quite have the bite of some of the previous Dardenne brothers movies (side note: what's up with Kid with a Bike being virtually ignored in the end-of-decade lists? EXPLAIN, film critics community!), but The Unknown Girl is still an engaging little gumshoe movie with its boots planted in the textures of the Dardennes' social realism. I enjoyed it. Grade: B+

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)
It's clear that Scorsese and Co. put a lot of time into archival research, assembling this movie from mostly preexisting footage, some of it rarely seen before, others from better, more lively documentaries. It's fine that the movie is never as live-wire as something like Dont Look Back, because how could it be? The new interviews the movie gets—with old folkies like Joan Baez and some pretty obscure characters like the (extremely enthusiastic!) studio tech who helped record Highway 61 Revisited, as well as the man himself—are decently candid; Baez in particular is upfront about the extent to which Dylan personally hurt her with his erratic mid-'60s behavior, which is a perspective that's not often explored in the "Dylan goes electric" mythology, and I'll be honest that watching this documentary was the first time it occurred to me that I'd probably be a lot more fun to hang out with Joan Baez than with Bob Dylan. In fact, in general the movie walks a decently impressive tightrope between taking seriously the reasons why people felt betrayed by Dylan's abandonment of the folk revival scene while also not denying the small-minded stodginess that underlined a lot of that reaction, too. As a PBS-style piece of informative filmmaking, it's a great introduction to Dylan's early career, with enough obscure/new info sprinkled in to keep the veterans happy. As a piece of cinematic art, it's nothing special. Grade: B

Television

Wormwood (2017)
Netflix Bloat is a real thing, and it's a shame to see it happen to my boy Errol. At its core, Wormwood is a classic Morris piece in the vein of The Thin Blue Line about epistemology and the hall of mirrors one walks down when you challenge the modern authority state for the truth—this one centered around the officially accidental death of CIA employee Frank Olson that was not unlikely an assassination on the part of the CIA. It's a gripping premise and yields some fascinating material, especially in its first and final episodes; Eric Olson, Frank's son, is the sort of tragic hero at the center of this series, whose quest for the truth is bound to be confounded by the tenacity of the powers that be in keeping an air of ambiguity, and Morris does a good job of showing just how broad a net "the powers that be" actually is, especially in the final episode, where Seymour Hersh, in a completely bananas interview, basically tells Morris to his face that he knows what Morris and Olson want to know but that he won't out of a commitment to standards of journalistic integrity—which of course raises all sorts of fascinating and bitter questions about the true purpose of journalistic standards and the extent to which they truly are capable of speaking truth to power. So that's all great. BUT. There's absolutely nothing here that warrants a six-episode, 256-minute miniseries. This would have been a great feature film, but at the length that it is, it's too long at least twice over, and large stretches of time are padded out with redundant and somewhat extraneous reenactments, seemingly just for the purpose of making this long enough to be a series rather than a rich feature. At times, Wormwood even becomes something I never thought I'd say about a Morris project: tedious. It's super unfortunate, because there is some terrific stuff here. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for December 2-8, 2019

Just reviews.

Movies

The Irishman (aka I Heard You Paint Houses)
For about 2/3 of its gargantuan runtime, The Irishman plays into beats that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Scorsese's other gangster pictures, from Goodfellas all the way up through The Wolf of Wall Street (TELL me that Wall Street isn't organized crime, I dare you)—that is, lots of montage, wall-to-wall soundtrack, copious voiceover. And if that were all there is, it would be a very solid movie and remarkably engaging for a movie of its length, though I do have some gripes about the L.A. Noir-ishness of the de-aging CGI (though it's far and away superior to the horrorshow that is Clark Gregg's de-aging special effect in Captain Marvel, so that's 0 for theme park rides and 1 for ##TRUE CINEMA##). But that is not all that The Irishman is, and in its last hour or so, Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian pull the rug out from under the whole idea of a "Scorsese Gangster Picture," and the movie becomes something wholly transcendent. The music, montage, voiceover, and all the intoxicating forward motion of a Scorsese mob movie disappear, and in the bare frame of that type of movie, stripped of its plumage, we're given a death-soaked riff on Goodfellas's iconic "Sunday, May 11th, 1980, 6:55 AM" sequence that then breaks free of the genre completely with a hushed coda in a nursing home whose thundering silence is nothing less than apocalyptic. For the first time in his career, Scorsese allows his mob tropes to progress not just to their logical conclusion but also to their ultimate conclusion: the game is up, and all that remains is the empty shell of a life squandered by squandering oneself, nothing left to claw for as gravity brings the grave's icy mouth ever closer. It reminded me of aging family members and family members I've seen die—none as alone as the character at the focus of this sequence but with a similar sense of despair and loneliness as the crows of their demons come home to roost. This is what it means for a generation to die: moral compromises become an ideology, a perpetual motion machine that scrapes every bit of life out from its realm of influence until you sit alone, only half able to understand that your actions had such decaying consequences—if you're capable of mustering that level of self-awareness at all. It will happen to all of us who have any measure of power and movement; I'm sure it will happen to us Millennials and Gen-Z-ers. And so with The Irishman, Scorsese and co. have transformed the gangster picture into not just a specific cultural and sociopolitical document animated by a caustic moral vision (though it is certainly that alongside Goodfellas) but also an anguished treatise of universal human failing that links us all at our worst moments. It's hard to call a new Scorsese film a masterpiece in the context of a filmography that, admittedly, has a handful of better movies, but under another name, this would be a masterpiece indeed. Grade: A

Captain Marvel (2019)
To the extent that I have strong feelings about Marvel movies these days (i.e. not much), I did have a small chip on my shoulder going into this movie regarding the way that this movie was the one where all the film folks started crying foul over the role of the American military in the production of this movie—the military has been funding/involved in the production of Marvel movies for a while now, but somehow it's the movie starring a woman where this finally goes too far? (SureJan.gif) And that's not not an issue here (to be clear, I'm not a fan of the military's role in the production of these movies either, but if we're going to start drawing a line in the sand over this, we should have done so long ago), but it's all kind of a moot point for me now that I've seen the movie and realized that it's just not good. Rare for a Marvel movie, the effects are actually kind of beautiful, and the buddy-road-trip vibes between Nick Fury and Carol Danvers are fun. But the film is a structural mess, and, also rare for a Marvel film, it's actually kind of hard to follow this movie on a beat-for-beat level—part of which is part of the design, as we're following the scrambled memories of Danvers as she's psychologically invaded, Eternal Sunshine-style, but part of it is just that the movie just has a hard time stringing events together in a way that make the basic point-A-to-point-B sense that Marvel movies usually do pretty well, and that also goes for the straightforward bits after the intentionally disorienting opening half hour. Plus, for a movie about Carol Danvers re-discovering herself, there's precious little about Danvers herself outside of how she acquired powers—like, what is going on with this character? Who is she? Beyond the fact that she was once in the USAF and got blasted with superpowers, I honestly have very little idea. To the extent that I enjoy Marvel movies these days (i.e. merely intermittently), I've got to give it to the disgruntled film folks on this one and concede that this is one of the weakest MCU features. Grade: C

American Dharma (2018)
In interviewing Steve Bannon, Errol Morris sometimes seems out of his depth—a first for Morris in his series of movies interviewing American villains. Bannon is an incorrigible figure without shame or morality, someone who (as this movie amply shows) cares about nothing but power and destruction. He excitedly outlines his philosophies and political successes with fists banging on the table as Morris walks through his history with Breitbart and then the 2016 Trump campaign, and he just grins as Morris occasionally interjects, sputtering with frustration and barely cloaked rage at the self-impressed evil coming out of Bannon's mouth. Morris doesn't seem to know quite what to do with him, interrupting to argue with Bannon at points that don't seem to need pushback and then remaining silent at places where obvious questions seem to present themselves. Not that I really blame Morris. Bannon is the architect—or at least claims to be (like most Morris subjects, there's a fair bit of self-mythologizing on the part of Bannon here that I think we can, as Morris does, view with at least one skeptical brow raised)—of so much that I hate, and I probably would be at a sputtering loss as to how to respond to him in person, too. But Morris's relative shakiness in engaging Bannon does make American Dharma the weakest of his American villain series, and it's not hard to imagine the richer movie that might have come out of this interaction. That's not to say that there isn't plenty good going on here. There are some tremendous moments that arise from the dynamic between Bannon and Morris, starting with the bizarre parasitic relationship Bannon himself has with Morris; The Fog of War apparently inspired Bannon as a filmmaker, and while Morris doesn't exactly dwell on this inspiration, there's a queasy camaraderie the two share over filmmaking, culminating in an incredulous Bannon asking Morris how he could have made The Fog of War and The Unknown Known and still voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, which is one of a few truly great self-reflexive moments in this movie. And the visual metaphor of the hangar that this interview takes place in and which, by the end of the film, is set aflame, works really well here—not a foregone conclusion in a movie by a filmmaker who, much as I love his work, has made more than a few overcooked visual metaphors—and strongly underlines the apocalyptic implications of what Bannon is saying. It seems patently absurd to argue, as some have, that Morris is somehow supporting Bannon's views in this documentary or that Morris is complicit in Bannon's views by giving him attention at all (these arguments conveniently ignore that Bannon and the alt-right in general largely rose to power in the first place while being ignored by liberal voices); but I do think that at points, Morris struggles to understand Bannon, and that just makes a documentary like this even more necessary, because I think most of us in the center and left are in Morris's position here of being apoplectic at Bannon while at the same time being somewhat befuddled. Those of us who can look should not look away. Confronting Bannon and his like is crucial, before, as the movie loudly argues, the world burns. Grade: B

Idiots and Angels (2008)
My second Bill Plympton feature (after Cheatin'), and my feelings remain about the same: intoxicating animation style mixed with an appealing mix of surreality and black comedy/misanthropy that simply cannot be sustained over a feature-length runtime, and it definitely sours for me around the halfway point. I probably just need to check out this dude's shorts, though this movie is not without its charms. Grade: B-

The Last Waltz (1978)
The interview footage is pretty tedious—the copy for this movie promises "probing backstage interviews," but all we get are dull chestnuts like, "Why are you called The Band?" Chalk it up to the cocaine, I suppose. But the concert footage is basically wall-to-wall bangers (give or take Eric Clapton and Neil Diamond, who both feel way out of place here), so it's a pretty masterful 90-100 minutes embedded inside the total 120. Also, Bob Dylan in his appearance here resembles Weird Al to a distracting degree, which gets this movie another half star, for sure. Grade: A-




Books

Epileptic (L'Ascension du haut mal) by David B. (2005)
A pretty harrowing graphic memoir about the author's experiences growing up with his brother, who has epilepsy. I appreciate the completely unsentimental approach that David B. takes here, and the violence and sheer resentment depicted here resonates with what I know about growing up with someone with a mental disability—sometimes it's just hard to be compassionate, and then you hate yourself for lacking that compassion but also lack the ability to figure out how to act any differently. I've never read a book that captured this before, much less so well. The parents' reliance on pseudoscience and esoterism in treatment for their child, on the other hand, is wild and wacky and something I cannot relate to at all, though it certainly makes the book more interesting and gives the starkly simple black-ink imagery here an infusion of mysticism that separates it from the likes of the Persepolis and a lot of those other cartoon-styled graphic memoirs. The book could probably have a tighter structure; there's definitely a meandering quality to the story, and I'm not sure whether this would work better if I had read it in installments as it was originally published instead of the complete edition I read, but for all its emotional intensity, it does feel like drudgery in stretches, all the more so for its prickly, dour emotional territory. But there's a lot to recommend about Epileptic, too, and for those willing to deal with its unflinching rendering of its subject matter, it's a rewarding read. Grade: B+

 
Music

Pink Floyd - The Final Cut (1983)
The Final Cut started out as a collection of The Wall leftovers, and that's pretty much what it sounds like in its final form, sharing the acerbic worldview (personified by Roger Waters's shrill, yelping vocals) and grandiose rock instrumentation as that prior albums while lacking most of the pathos and melodic sweep (to say nothing of conceptual vision) that made The Wall compelling. Look, I love anti-war protest songs as much as anybody, but by this time, Roger Waters had pretty much bled all the rest of the members of Pink Floyd dry, and there's none of the chemistry and sonic grandeur of Floyd's best work and all of the bile of Waters's most indulgent work. Still, there are solid moments: Gilmour's solo on "Your Possible Pasts," the saxophone on "The Gunner's Dream," the melodic, jazzy touches on the closer, "Two Suns in the Sunset." There are also a few great songs that actually do stand up to Pink Floyd's previous work: I'm thinking specifically of "The Hero's Return," a song written from the perspective of the schoolmaster in The Wall, and "The Final Cut," which uses orchestration heavily reminiscent of "Comfortably Numb" to drive that prior song's despairing alienation to a harrowing intensity devoid of any of the catharsis that Gilmour's two solos bring Pink in "Numb." I get why people like this album. But if I'm in the mood for what this album's going for, I can't ever imagine going for The Final Cut over The Wall. Grade: B-

Favorite Movies of 2017

Well, here we are again—another one of these lists. I'm not going to do one of those long preambles. As usual, this post is divided between my favorite movies (emphasis on "favorite," not "best," whatever that means) and other movies I thought were notable, either for good or ill. Also as usually, I admit that I (obviously) haven't seen every 2017 movie, and I resent that the elitist and outdated distribution schedules have kept some of my most-anticipated movies away from Knoxville (more importantly, The Post and Phantom Thread).

I hope y'all enjoy it. Please, disagree with me; share your own picks; discuss. I've said it before—I love discussing this list stuff.

Favorite Movies

1. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
It's all about death, when you get right down to it: our lives, our actions, our thoughts—whether or not we're conscious of it, they're all defined by that firm bookend. Warm and easy-going, The B-Side resembles that other Errol Morris masterpiece, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, by allowing a mix of editing and unfettered obsession over a craft (here, Polaroid portraitry) to accumulate into a towering treatise. I haven't seen a ton of people love this movie as much as I did, but more so than anything else I saw this year, The B-Side is profound.

[Read original review here]

2. Good Time
A damning character portrait disguised as a feature-length chase sequence, Good Time is fun until it's devastating. It's the sort of movie where you'll spend most of the runtime with your hand over your agape mouth, your eyes dazzled by the gorgeous nocturnal cinematography, your ears ringing from the assaultive score. If you haven't already seen it, the most viscerally exciting movie of the year is well-worth your time.

[Read original review here]

3. The Shape of Water
In the running for Guillermo del Toro's best English-language film, The Shape of Water is by turns swooningly romantic and gory, baroque and grimy, nostalgic and mythic; it's a blender of all of del Toro's best preoccupations, from classic Hollywood to B-movie trash, and it's great. You'll believe a fish-man can dance.

[Read original review here]

4. A Ghost Story
David Lowrey's hypnotic, unpredictable art film about grief is something of a feature-length remake of the "I got a rock" refrain from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, right down to the sheet ghost. The magic of this movie is that it's also heartbreaking, and not in that gentle Charlie-Brown-style way—it's legitimately staring-into-the-void-style sublimity.

[Read original review here]

5. mother!
If Darren Aronofsky wanted to just make provocative, stylistically adventurous Bible movies for the rest of his career, that would be a-okay with me. Whatever you think of the theology here, the sheer daring of this movie's scope is in a league of its own.

[Read original review here]

6. The Beguiled
Sweatiest movie of the year, bar none. This is supposedly set in Virginia, but this is definitely Louisiana, and rarely has humidity been so palpably captured on film. It's Sofia Coppola's best in quite some time, and it's no accident that it's also a tight, mean little thriller, Coppola's usually dreamy atmospherics morphing into something as sinister and phantasmagoric as it is beautiful.

[Read original review here]

7. A Quiet Passion
An exquisite tribute to Emily Dickinson couched in Terence Davies's usual visual splendor—a particularly good match of subject with director, as Davies's understated formalism complements Dickinson's own poetic style wonderfully.

[Read original review here]

8. Logan
The only superhero movie in this superhero-stuffed year I'd call "great," and while we've had plenty of movies with politics on their minds, this, with its apocalyptic squalor, is one of the few that really captures my fears of where we seem to be heading.

[Read original review here]

9. A Cure for Wellness
Something something good taste something bad script something something. I don't care. This movie looks awesome, and it's the best gothic horror we've gotten at the movies since Crimson Peak. Plus, there's no topping the compositions and lighting of the visuals here.

[Read original review here]

10. Your Name
It has all the gorgeous detail of previous Makoto Shinkai features and, a first for me with his work, a story I really bought into. The final half hour or so of the film is some of the most cosmic, beautiful film imagery, animated or not, of the year.

[Read original review here]






Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Best Zeitgeist-Defining Movie: Get Out—This is the 2017 movie, and I don't see many good arguments to the contrary. It's far from my favorite, but Get Out is still really freaking good, hilarious and frightening in equal measure, bolstered by a diverse cinematic tradition alluded to heavily in Jordan Peele's dense and frequently brilliant screenplay. But this is more than a spot-the-allusion film; it's a film that uses movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to genuinely subversive ends, playing off our familiarity with the beats and images of these movies to shock us. Also, it's about race; more specifically, it's about predatory white people. Let's not pretend like that isn't the most 2017 plot in all of cinema.

Best Drama: The Salesman—And I mean "drama" in the sense that it resembles a play. Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman isn't play-like in the derogatory way that movie critics usually mean when they compare the two media; rather, I'd just like to call attention to and celebrate that way that, like always, Farhadi brings a tense efficiency to the screenplay that recalls the immediacy of the stage. Farhadi's movies are as tight as drums, and while there are some elements in The Salesman that makes it less tight than, say, The Past, it still makes a mighty sound when struck.

Best Coming of Age: Lady Bird—I haven't had a chance to formally review this one yet (it's likely the final 2017 movie I'm going to see in a theater), but I love me some coming-of-age cinema, and this one is very good. Willing to be honest about the specific ways in which high school students can be various shades of pretentious and careless in a way that recalls last year's masterful The Edge of Seventeen, it's a tremendously well-observed film that, for all its plot shagginess (and there is that, sometimes to its detriment), is so sharp and specific in its characterization of Lady Bird herself that she practically jumps off the screen to shake your hand.

Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049—I get the thematic and narrative critiques of this movie, but I won't hear anyone dissing Roger Deakins's astounding, beautiful, lay-me-down-to-rest-because-I-have-seen-the-face-of-God visual work. Some kudos probably goes to the production design, too, without which this probably wouldn't have been so stunning. But come on; it's also Deakins we're talking about here.

Best Cry: Coco—Pixar, y'all. "Remember meeeee..."

Best Action: John Wick: Chapter 2—It's like dudes in suits shooting each other in art galleries in highly choreographed ways. What's not to like about that?

Best "Not Quite the Best Action, but Hey Look! Tarkovsky!": Atomic Blonde—Don't get me wrong: the action in Atomic Blonde is very good. It just isn't John Wick: Chapter 2 good. Still, there's a fight scene in front of a projection of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, so major points to this movie for making a cheap retro allusion that I am physically unable to resist. Take that, Ready Player One.

Best Action (Ape Division): War for the Planet of the Apes—Apes on horses! Apes with guns! Apes breaking out of concentration camps! Apes doing all sorts of things! All our movies should have more apes. (But all kidding aside, this really is a good movie)

Best Animation: The Boss Baby—Am I losing my mind? Pixar has the photorealism, Cartoon Saloon has the serious stylization, Illumination Entertainment has all the really crappy-looking stuff, but it's DreamWorks Animation—frikkin' DREAMWORKS—that's actually doing the animation I like best on an aesthetic level these days. This studio has finally done what I'd considered impossible and made CG animation as flexible and convincingly cartoonish as hand-drawn stuff, and for that, they have my sincere gratitude.

Animated Movie I'm Most Thankful For: The Breadwinner—This movie is flawed in significant ways, but, along with the DreamWorks output this year (?!?), it most pushes English-language animation in directions I wish the whole medium would all go: serious-minded, audience-trusting, culturally diverse, stylistically (not realistically) animated.

Best Opening Sequence: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—The first five minutes of this movie, set perfectly to David Bowie's "Space Oddity," are the best five minutes (opening or not) of any movie this year. It's a warm throwback to the optimism of sci-fi's 1940s/50s golden era, only flipped to show interplanetary contact to be an intrinsic element of this future utopia, not its greatest threat. Any other year, it wouldn't be a particularly political statement, but with every inter-species handshake, it's impossible not to feel that cooperative multiculturalism is a necessary piece of humanity's future, and also to feel the chasm between that ideal and our contemporary political discourse.

Best Opening Sequence (Non-David-Bowie Division): Baby Driver—Edgar Wright's crime caper never really delivers on the promise of this scene as an action movie intricately choreographed to pop music, but for its opening scene (and honestly, the decidedly more pedestrian second scene), Baby Driver is the perfect realization of this premise. It's wonderful.

Best Use of "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Logan Lucky—This movie's a lot of fun all around, but it's only a great movie in one moment, and that's at a children's beauty pageant, of all reprehensible things. People sing this song; it's moving.

Best Use of the Word "Poop": Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie—There's a lot of poop-centric stuff in this movie. It's great.

Worst Use of a True Story: Same Kind of Different as Me—Pure Flix strikes again! This time, they've skimmed over all the legitimately interesting stuff about the kind of amazing true story that informs the plot and instead left us with the most boring, cookie-cutter inspirational trash ever. Hurray!

Most Misunderstood: The Glass Castle—Critics saw a toothless weepy in a tremendously difficult, thorny film about what it means to feel love for a genuinely abusive person. This is not a movie of easily-arrived-at adages; it's a film that languishes on messy, complicated, intentionally problematic questions and doesn't suggest anything cheap about its film-ending catharsis.

Best Quote: The Big Sick—"This is why I don't want to go online, 'cause it's never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump." Terry (a great Ray Romano) gets it.

Best Use of Social Media: Personal Shopper—Briefly, the quiet psychological thrills of Personal Shopper get cranked up to sheer horror-movie levels, and it's all thanks to a clever playing off of what we know about texting and social media engagement.

Best Use of Outer Space: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—There's a lot about these Marvel movies that's getting stale, but I'll give them this: as long as they are making colorful, goofy, imaginatively designed space-opera visuals (see also: Thor: Ragnarok), I'll probably still watch them.

Best Shower: Alien: Covenant—You'll know it when you see it.

Best Kiss: Alien: Covenant—Again, you'll know it when you see it.

Best "Well, We're Going to Be Making These Movies Until Human Extinction, So We Might As Well Make It Interesting": Star Wars: The Last Jedi—This actually probably belongs again to Alien: Covenant again, but I'm not confident that they'll be making Alien movies for that much longer. Star Wars, though... Star Wars is forever. The Last Jedi is likely the most experimental that we're going to see Star Wars get for a while (though judging by some of the fan outrage, they need to get a lot more so—just rip that band-aide off, Kennedy), and even this isn't too dramatic of a departure (I can't be the only one who wanted Rey to join Kylo like he asked). However, it's by far the most interesting engagement with the series mythology since the prequels, and this is the first time since Lucas was at the helm that the Star Wars universe felt like a living, breathing place full of species and planets we haven't seen before. It's enjoyable.

"Good Try, I Guess" Award: Song to Song—Does Terrence Malick actually know what rock music is, or did he just read the Wikipedia page? QUESTIONS TO PONDER.

Worst Application of Corporate Synergy: Beauty and the Beast—We did not need this movie, and we certainly didn't need it to be as bad as it was. Disney's been pretty good at making questionable (and nakedly money-grubbing) decisions at least blandly enjoyable this decade, but NOPE. Not this one.

Best Slow, Monarchical Death: The Death of Louis XIV—The title says it all, and let me repeat: it is sloooooow. But it's also beautifully costumed, and there's something about the languorous, meticulous way that we watch the Sun King pass from this life that feels so profoundly conscious of the realities of death in a way that reminds me of Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.

Best Non-2017 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2017: Ordet—A dialogue between realist modernity and old-time supernatural religiosity that feels like a genuine expression of both worldviews and, more impressively, a genuine fusion of both. It's a majestic film, one of the best-ever about faith, right up there with Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Bergman's Winter Light though considerably more optimistic than either of those, and without a doubt the most fully I've been moved by a motion picture this year.

Mini-Reviews for September 4 - 10, 2017

Several great movies and several movies I didn't like very much at all. This might be the most polarized set of scores I've had in a while.

Movies

It (2017)
This first entry in the duology adapting Stephen King's doorstop opus of coming-of-age horror has a lot of the same problems that recent adaptations of beloved literary properties have tended to have—namely, that it squanders pacing and characterization in favor of being slavishly devoted to visualizing every bit of the source material. This isn't always a bad impulse, and as a fan of King's work (and this novel in particular), I won't deny the thrill of certain iconic setpieces being recreated here; the mid-story fight with the monster in the decaying Victorian manor remains a highlight in both the movie and the book, as do the various surreal and horrifying impositions of IT into the children's day-to-day lives. However, what the faithfulness to the novel ends up meaning throughout most of this film is a heightened awareness of all the myriad ways the movie falls short of the novel's ambition, and it's not hard to begin imagining what a movie that took this story on its own terms would have been like. It almost certainly should have cut the number of kids down, for starters. The acting is uniformly excellent, but as with last year's It-indebted Stranger Things, the screenplay just isn't nimble enough to juggle the development of all seven characters in the Losers' Club. Most of them, in fact, are extremely shoddy personality types who give interesting quips from time to time but almost never show any life outside of that. This is most apparent with a barely there Mike, which is disheartening not just because he's the only black actor in the film's main cast but also because of his centrality to some of the historical atrocities of the town of Derry in the book, to which the movie only gives a passing nod (And it's also worth noting that the closer the movie sticks to the book, the harder it is to resist nitpicking the ways that it actually does change the book—case in point, Mike, whose role is probably disserviced most by the shifting of the action from the 1950s to the 1980s, burying the racial subtext to a lot of what happens to him—and in general, I'm not sure if the It story really works without the context of the urban decay that happened in that specific twenty-seven year period between the late '50s to the early '80s, although I guess we'll have to see how Chapter Two deals with this). Just as big of an issue is the way that, in a frantic need to hit every memorable part of the novel, the movie practically sprints through its plot. There's a fundamental lack of patience in the film that's bad for the character development and worse for the actual horror sequences, which flicker by with trigger-happy editing and lack the sort of intricate buildup that informs the best movie scare techniques. That said, as negative as I've been for the majority of this review, I want to stress that I had a good time with this movie. The acting, as I've said, is across-the-board great, a minor miracle when it comes to a cast as young as this one, and the kids are so good that they carry their characters a good deal farther than the thin screenplay has any right to earn; kudos also goes to Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise/IT pitch-perfectly through all the effects. And the scares consistently deliver arresting imagery, if not the patient construction of mood and pace required for truly great horror—this is a tremendously shot movie, which makes it all the bigger shame that it's not edited better. There's also no discounting the sheer fun of seeing, as I did, a crowd-pleasing horror movie like this one in a packed theater with a responsive audience—which is to say, if you're interested in seeing this, go see it now rather than on home media. So yes, It offers a lot to enjoy; it's just all too easy to see how much better it could have been. Grade: B

Before I Fall (2017)

Most Groundhog Day-premised movies revolve around the central character's journey to become a better person through the sheer monotony of a day repeated ad infinitum—which is part of what makes Before I Fall's high school setting so promising, as high school for both students and teachers can often feel like an endless loop of indistinguishable days. And in the early going, Before I Fall fulfills this promise, with a litany of nice observations about the general mundanities and cruelties suffered and caused by high schoolers toward one another. But the deeper the film gets into the journey of its main character (a girl heavily ensconced in the "in" crowd of popular kids who like to bully each other and especially those outside their group), the more it becomes apparent that the film has confused its protagonist becoming a better person with its protagonist feeling like a better person. This is a movie in which half measures of decency are considered apt atonement to right the wrongs of years of torment—the central plot soon revolves around the twin foci of preventing the victim of long-term bullying and slander (in which our protagonist has eagerly taken part) from committing suicide and learning to make sure it's the nice guys who get sex. Both of these plots reveal a film with no real interest in fighting the actual social structures that makes the cruelty of teenagers so acute to begin with, and through the focus on the self-actualization of the main character—instead of, I dunno, the actual pain she's caused (and, like, actual pain, not how that pain relates to her)—turns the movie into an appeasing of conscience, not a meaningful statement on teenaged interactions. Grade: C

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (2016)

Errol Morris is the best living documentary filmmaker, full stop, and The B-Side is quietly one of his very best. It's ostensibly a career retrospective of the renowned Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, and the film works perfectly well on that, chronically Dorfman's memories of photography all the way back to her childhood and all the way up to her 2016 retirement via Morris's typical "just let 'em talk" approach to his documentary subjects. But as Dorfman's observations accumulate, the movie deepens progressively until, in its final minutes, we're presented with a treatise on the ramifications of modern business infrastructure, the impact of the loss of physical media, and even mortality itself. It's that typical Morris trick, using oral recollection to imbue a seemingly straightforward premise with profound philosophical depth, and it's as effective as ever here. Grade: A

A Single Man (2009)

You can gussy up a mannequin with all the pretty clothes you want, but in the end, it'll still be plastic. A lifeless movie that I was so bored with that I couldn't even muster up the outrage to care about the utterly ridiculous ending. Grade: C-

RockNRolla (2008)

Douchebags, The Movie. The credits promise the cast's return in a sequel, but who cares? I certainly wouldn't want to spend another minute with these characters and their casual homophobia and glamorous disregard for pretty much every single good thing in the world. I suppose after Snatch, two Sherlock Holmes movies, and this, it's time for me to admit that I just don't like Guy Ritchie movies. Grade: D+

Come and See (Иди и смотри) (1985)

I've often said that part of the genius of Full Metal Jacket was the way it twisted war movie tropes into full-on horror movie tropes, but here comes this Russian masterpiece and doubles down on the whole enterprise two years prior to the Kubrick film. Come and See teeters on the razor's edge between hyperrealism and full-blown experimentalism, as its horrifically unblinking stare at the surreal atrocities of the Nazi occupation of Russia is scored by a shrieking cacophony of war machine noises, Mozart compositions, and actual human screams. It's an effect that, after 2.5 hours, might feel numbing if it weren't so morally impassioned. "This is war; nobody is to blame," a Nazi says near the film's end, and the movie is so crystal-clear in rebuking that claim that it's almost cathartic. Of course someone is to blame. But as a famous sequence very near the film's end asserts breathtakingly, there's no real catharsis in recognizing the face of evil; there is only terror. Grade: A

Music

White Stag - Emergence (2017)
The most interesting band in Knoxville's progressive rock scene continues to push the boundaries of its sound. Incorporating flute and saxophone along with the typical death metal, drone, and avant-garde textures, Emergence recalls, more than any of White Stag's previous releases, the canonized sounds of progressive rock's early-'70s golden age, specifically evoking Jethro Tull and King Crimson. That's not to say this is a nostalgic or throwback record in the neo-prog vein—in fact, this, their first full-length album, is as "out there" as the band has ever been. It's not all great; for as exploratory as they all are, a sameness creeps up on the album in its latter tracks, and the songwriting clearly takes a backseat to the atmospherics. Still, White Stag shows tremendous ingenuity, too, and with a debut this strong, I look forward to the ways the band will expand and innovate in the future. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for August 1 - 7, 2016

School's started again, but I still had time for a few things. Enjoy!

Movies

April and the Extraordinary World (Avril et le Monde truqué) (2015)
This animated steampunk movie spends a bit too many of its opening minutes justifying its steampunk setting, and the character models (apparently based on the work of cartoonist Jacques Tardi) are just slightly too rounded and New Yorker-ish for me to completely love. But the animation is very nice overall, and, what's more, the plot turns some admirably weird corners toward the end that transform the movie from a middling steampunk trope-fest into something original and very, very odd in its final act. Saying anything specific would spoil the sublime surprise of the movie's destination, and I'll say this much more on the negative: even though April's ostensibly dealing with missing parents, the film doesn't have an emotionally resonant bone in its body. But it's a lot of fun regardless. Grade: B+

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)
As with the books, there's a gap between portent and execution: the world-building isn't quite complex enough to justify its epic scope and indie-realist aesthetic, the names and games aren't quite cool enough to justify the rapt Panem media obsession, the social commentary isn't quite astute enough to justify just how serious and dour everything is. But that doesn't change the fact that the series is still hitting the acting out of the park; say what you will about the effects (I will, and they're sub-par) and the story, but the cast is knocking it out of the park. I'm also still rather taken by the frankness of the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" cynicism that the ending adapts from Collins's novel. It's not great, and there's nothing at all here that justifies the choice to tell this story over two movies and four hours. But it's competent. Grade: B-

The Haunting (1963)
This is, I believe, what people call "cheesy." It's acting certainly isn't winning prizes for anything but honey-baked ham. Ham and cheese is delicious, though, and this movie can be delightful fun and even spooky when it's not lingering too much on its characters (because lordy, they're annoying). The movie's an admirable and often successful experiment at making a movie scary entirely on the basis of camera movement and lighting, and even if "the scariest movie ever made" tag is a bit overblown, I'll go to bat for this kind of horror movie any day. Grade: B+

The Thing from Another World (1951)
My familiarity with (and love for) the 1982 remake prior to watching this movie has turned out to be a liability on two counts since 1) Carpenter's The Thing is far superior, and 2) it also has very little in common with this original beyond the Arctic setting and the presence of scientists, dogs, and a malicious space alien. On the rubric of borderline B-movie '50s sci-fi, it's reasonably entertaining, and especially toward the beginning the dialogue is sharp enough that I was willing to believe that Howard Hawks did a little more than just produce. But don't go looking for cool prosthetics or intense paranoia or the alien doing anything more interesting than being just a generically sinister movie monster. Grade: B

Gates of Heaven (1978)
I am not a pet person. But this documentary, a hilarious and sad and utterly unshakeable rumination on death and the metaphysical value we ascribe to the significant nonhuman presences in our lives, is one of the first times I've felt like I've come close to understanding pet people. Errol Morris has rarely been better than in his debut, although thankfully he's been frequently just as good in the nearly forty years since. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for April 18 - 24, 2016

Hey! This week I actually have media besides movies!

Movies

Ed Wood (1994)
That Ed Wood is the best Tim Burton movie by such a wide margin (beating my other favorite, Big Fish, by a country mile) leads me to the uncomfortable idea that Burton is way better without the things that we normally associate with Good Burton: showily Expressionist scenery, Gothic fantasy, S&M, Danny Elfman. To be sure, the first couple of those tropes exist in Ed Wood, but they are pared waaaay down when compared to other Golden-Age-Burton output—it's by no means a subtle movie, but Ed Wood is perhaps the closest we've ever gotten to subtlety in this famously flamboyant director's filmography. So, maybe Burton is better when he's just a little less obviously himself than usual? It's a disheartening revelation in a movie that features such an unapologetic affection for the supposed worst director of all time; there's an easy possible version of this movie that depicts Ed Wood with all sorts of condescension: he's a fool, ignorant of his own shortcomings, filled with pretension and myopia. But Burton's version (and Depp's, who plays Wood with tenderness and empathy—rarely has Tim's favorite actor been so vital to the impact of Tim's film) says something different: that maybe it doesn't matter how good something is, just that it's done sincerely, with the kind of dorky passion that only a true outcast can muster. So maybe I've just missed the big fat point with my Burton critique? Grade: A

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
This one snuck up on me. Leave it to Errol Morris, ever the docu-philosopher, to turn an ordinary documentary (well, "ordinary") about a robot scientist, a naked-mole-rat expert, a topiary trimmer, and a lion tamer into a treatise on consciousness and individuality. It's talking-head documentary-making taking to the abstract expressionist edge, and it's riveting. I had to take a walk afterward—it's not necessarily heavy viewing, but the ideas slowly envelope your mind like creeping vines until you can't shake them. Grade: A

Beau Travail (1999)
A loose, artsy adaptation of Melville's Billy Budd, apparently, which might mean more to me if I had read Billy Budd. As it is, we've got a movie that's hard-to-follow and kind of boring (in a meditative, considered way that's boring nonetheless) but also mercifully beautiful, albeit in that "handheld, accidentally beautiful" way that I don't particularly enjoy all that much. I demand for film compositions to be stable and intentional-looking, dang it! Grade: B-

Buffalo '66 (1998)
A great example of how style, not plot, is cinema's most valuable commodity. Because honestly, the plot here kind of sucks, particularly when it comes to Christina Ricci's woefully underdeveloped and possibly fetishized Layla, the kidnappee/love interest (I know, right?) for Vince Gallo's infinitely more interesting and alternatingly scary and hilarious Billy. But on a style level, we've got a nearly masterful combination of film grain, editing, music, lighting, and framing that pretty much single-handedly rescues the film from its male-centric tropes and turns it into one of the most distinctive-looking indies of the past couple decades. I mean, it's still not great, but it's hard to hate a movie with both Yes and King Crimson so skillfully deployed on its soundtrack. Grade: B+

Books

Reality Boy by A. S. King (2013)
Now that I'm teaching high school, I've decided to make a more diligent effort to keep up with YA lit outside the blockbuster Hunger Games/Harry Potter field, as most of my experience with that genre comes from at least a decade back (and most often begins and ends with Robert Cormier). This was my first stop on that journey. It's pretty good—A. S. King evokes a fantastic voice in her protagonist/narrator, and the basic premise, examining the psychological fallout of a child from one of those "Emergency Nanny"-type reality shows appeals a lot to my general loathing of that kind of show. The ending doesn't work at all: it stares right into the abyss so compellingly in its middle hundred pages that the sudden shift toward positivity and self-actualization at the conclusion feels under-cooked. But the journey there is funny, scary, and all kinds of readable. Grade: B

Television

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 1 (2015-2016)
Anyone paying attention to Rachel Bloom's fantastic video work prior to last fall (I wasn't) would have had no problem anticipating the Bloom-starring/co-created/co-written CW musical comedy, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as the sharp, gutsy, laugh-out-loud hilarious show it turned out to be, not to mention just how hummable the songs are. But I think what caught everyone off-guard was the depths of the emotional stakes here. Bloom deserves pretty much all the awards for imbuing what even the theme song acknowledges is a sexist term with wonderful, aching human life. It's sharp, laugh-out-loud, etc., yes, but it's also a moving, messy examination of what it means to be happy in modern life. Which is, like, amazing considering the really kooky premise of the show. The first few episodes are kind of duds, but once you get to the one with the "Sex With a Stranger" song and the Astaire-Rogers homage (that both of those can exist in the same series should give you an idea of just how wonderful this show is), it's pretty much gold through the end. If you're only going to catch up with one new show from the past TV season, make it this one. Grade: A-

Music

Black Mountain - IV (2016)
Black Mountain and their signature Pink Floyd/Black Sabbath revival sound with an album that is particularly Floydian and Sabbath-ish, in equal measures. The long, atmospheric passages and guitar solos (and heck, that cover art) is vintage Wish You Were Here, while the punchier, crunchier songs are straight Master of Reality. Plus, there's the gloriously unironic use of sci-fi imagery and proggy synths throughout, which, come on, we need more sci-fi songs these days. Like most revival-type albums, some of the stuff here ventures a little too close to pastiche at times, and the music can seem a little thinner than the legends it's trying to evoke. But when you get right down to it, this is either going to be your thing or not, and your love of Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath is pretty much going to determine that thingness. Grade: B+