Movies
I want the rom-com to come back, but I guess part of having the rom-com come back is coming to grips with the fact that I will not like a good chunk of them. I get why people enjoy this: it's light and sweet and wholesome, and the importance of its Asian-American protagonist cannot be overstated as a representational milestone within the genre. And it's absolutely no fun to trash on this kind of movie, but... I dunno, I need more than milquetoast sweetness and a genial cast to help me enjoy this. The restlessness I got watching To All the Boys is the same restlessness I get whenever someone shows me a beloved Disney Channel Original Movie, with all apologies to the many fine people who enjoy those, too. This movie's two biggest liabilities—having a strong screenplay and having interesting visuals—are things that the DC movies (and, if we're being honest, the lion's share of the last major rom-com wave—and I'm totally including the Apatow films in that, too) were never really interested in, which is fine but also means that what I want to see in a movie and what this movie wants me to enjoy will be incompatible. Also, I felt mildly attacked by the film's insistence that staying at home on a Saturday night to read and/or watch movies is the height of desperate loneliness. Some people just like doing that, movie! There are dozens of us! Grade: C
This has to be a joke, right? White God is basically agitprop, but with dogs instead of the working class—fetch, stay, heel... comrade. Or if I flip it around, it's sort of like the Hungarian New Wave version of those '90s family movies where an estranged parent has to learn to love their child, and there are cute animals involved who foil the villains in the end—didn't I see this same thing in Air Bud: Golden Receiver, just with less handheld camera and fewer pretensions of realism? Anyway, it's a bonkers concept that I can get behind, but one that doesn't really kick into gear until the final thirty minutes; up until then, it's just some really generic European austerity cinema. The dog footage is impressive (I'm not sure if a dog trainer or a sharp editor is responsible for the cohesive way the film builds its canine personalities, but whoever it is deserves a prize), but the rest of the movie is a real drag. Grade: C
There's the famous line in "Born to Run"—"the highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive"—but you've actually got to go back to the album's first song, "Thunder Road," to find out what happened to those heroes: "They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets." The automobile has never been about the automobile: it's about the false promises of freedom and autonomy in the modern American landscape, the lie of the American Dream. In the movie, Wendy (a name that actually makes a frequent appearance on Born to Run, if I'm going to fully commit to this analogy) doesn't have a Chevrolet; it's an Accord, the supposedly responsible car to own. But even that's a trap, a deceptive hope ("I'm just passing through") that distracts from the fact that the world, for all its small moments of kindness—and there are several in Wendy and Lucy, and they are beautiful—the world is structured in such a way that society's operating principle is swift punishment, not grace. It's fitting, if crushing, that Wendy sheds the pretenses of individualistic Americana throughout the movie—her car and her dog—and in the end adopts the older, collectivist Americana of the train, a collectivism built on the back of exploitation and coercion—but what other choice does she have? It's also fitting that her final action in the film is an acknowledgement that she will never live up to what the billboards promise or the car commercials dream. One broken engine, and the entirety of America's systematic cul-de-sacs is laid bare—that's the brilliance of what director/co-writer Kelly Reichardt does here. Grade: A
Watching Scorsese's post-Goodfellas "wall-to-wall music and lifestyle porn juxtaposed with toxic masculinity" movies (this and The Wolf of Wall Street) and feeling like they are just fine, nothing great, and significantly flawed makes me kind of wonder about my belief that Goodfellas is one of the greatest American films—like... what if it just got there first? Still, if I can battle through the haze of nostalgia, I do think a crucial difference between Goodfellas and Casino is not just that Goodfellas was first but that it has a much stronger moral point of view. Part of it might be the dueling voiceover narrations, which, I think, ground the movie much less firmly in an unreliable perspective than Goodfellas's does, but moreover, there's some magical tipping point where the glamorous excess of the rich and reprehensible protagonists of this film begins to crowd out the implicit critique of toxic masculinity and the just-slightly-legal world of the casino itself, and Casino jumps right over that point and tumbles into this weird space where it's clear that these dudes are "bad," but there's nothing that really makes you feel viscerally that they are. It also doesn't help that the person most affected by the protagonists is Sharon Stone's character, which, while Stone gives this performance 110%, is nonetheless a sort of harpy stereotype and moreover also a reprehensible character whose reprehensibility is, in the movie's logic, portrayed as at least as much of a problem as the mob bosses's terribleness. But I'm waxing long about this movie's flaws when, in fact, I think it's pretty alright, so here's this: the soundtrack is absolutely baller (though I could maybe do without Scorsese dropping "Gimme Shelter" in the exact same place in each of his movies), and the movie's cinematic energy would be impressive in a movie half Casino's length and is downright miraculous over this film's three hours, to say nothing of that magnificent shot from the POV of a straw as cocaine is snorted through it. And on a thematic level, as problematic as some of its mechanics are, it's fascinating to view this movie as the middle piece of an arc beginning with Goodfellas and culminating with The Wolf of Wall Street, wherein Scorsese draws increasing equivalency between legal behavior our whole society is complicit in and the despicable organized crime our society purports to fight. Grade: B
A really lovely little fable that takes some of the best of German Expressionism and gives it the ruddy phantasmagoria of something like The Canterbury Tales. I guess it kind of comes with the territory of European silent film, but there is a lot of brown and yellow face, as well as some pretty bad racial caricatures here (and some things I assume are racial caricature, like some of the Chinese characters having grotesquely long fingernails—is this a thing? I'm not super-informed about Chinese history and culture). But the film also gives great dignity and humanity to a lot of its non-white characters, too, and each of the film's vignettes is a carefully (if archetypally) composed to confront the pathos of human mortality head-on. And that imagery, y'all! It's Fritz Lang in the director's chair, so no surprises here, but the mix of Gothic, almost metal imagery (Death's room of candles that hold human souls, for example) with precise tableau of seriously impressive set design (kind of like Intolerance, but on a budget and more carefully composed) is perfect for the film's narrative(s). In fact, I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to say that the imagery carries the movie, given how broad the film's narrative archetypes are. Grade: B+
Music
The vibe I get from the Sufjan fanbase (and critics) is that Seven Swans is sort of the lesser release—almost a side project—that Sufjan occupied himself with between the Michigan and Illinois state projects. And I'm not exactly going to buck that consensus; at only 47 minute, it's certainly less sprawling than Michigan, and the song structures are a lot more conventional, free from the minimalist repetitions and the lengthy, multi-part epics of the likes of "Oh God, Where Are You Now?" But Seven Swans has a lot more to offer than just a signpost between larger records. It is, for one, a lot more surprising in its use of instrumentation than Michigan, which is an album whose stylistic proclivities are all pretty much laid out after its first few tracks; Seven Swans, on the other hand, has the chants at the beginning of "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" and the classic-rock electric guitar on "Sister" and and the organ on "We Won't Need Legs to Stand" all sorts of other one-off musical flourishes that are without precedent or posterity on the album. If Michigan is the structurally experimental album, then Seven Swans is (more mildly so, given the sedate folk-rock proclivities) the instrumentally experimental one. It is, moreover, a more literary and therefore a more mystical album than Michigan. Whereas the previous album is very much about spiritual malaise and nuanced expressions of interiority, Seven Swans is much more comfortable connecting those interior feelings to larger streams of human experience, using lyrical personas to navigate a host of songs based around either literary ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find") or biblical ("Seven Swans," "The Transfiguration"). On Michigan, the world is one where the holy is seen through meditations on the smallest details; the world of Seven Swans is one where the spiritual is practically bursting the seams of the physical world as it explodes into our vision. I like this idea a lot, though I think ultimately I'm always going to find Michigan's more meditative approach to be more interesting. But Seven Swans is no small potatoes. Grade: B+
