Mini Reviews for January 30 - February 5, 2023

Still (slowly) working on that 2022 music post. It will come out eventually, mark my words!

Movies

Infinity Pool (2023)
This was a lot of fun, and it seems like everyone making this movie had a lot of fun, too, including (especially!) Mia Goth, who basically crams every single impulse of her career into her character's arc here. She's having a five-course meal. It's also a much funnier movie than I was expecting. I suppose there's a way to make a satirical story about rich people behaving badly on a poor island nation into something scary, and the movie tepidly gestures toward that, but it's mostly just outrageous in an Old Testament kind of way that mixes its oddly archetypal premise (you can create clones to accept the capital punishment you deserve) with the extreme debasement that Alexander Skarsgård undergoes in response to his initial hubris of being enamored at finding a beautiful young fan of his writing. Watching Mia Goth just humiliate this dude over and over again is hilarious. Certainly not for everyone, but it is for me, for sure. Grade: B+

 

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
I went in expecting something weird and messy, and it is to a degree, but it's not manic in the slightest, which was really what I was geared up for. Instead, it's this thoroughly melancholy and pensive piece of theater about the passage of time and the ways that we use story to create meaning out of that passage. Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton have unexpectedly great screen chemistry, and the storybook framing of the movie is not nearly as twee as it should have been. I was really moved by the end. That last scene in the park with Idris and Tilda walking into the horizon is perfect. Grade: A-

 

 

Yes, Madam! (皇家師姐) (1985)
I watched this for this week's episode of Cinematary (listen to it here!), thinking it was a good, early Michelle Yeoh showcase. And it's about 30% that! The other 70% is a fairly unengaging film about some bumbling low-level thieves getting up to Three-Stooges-esque shenanigans. This was probably a victim of my expectations, and it may have been more engaging if I had approached the movie understanding what it would be like, but I came here for Michelle Yeoh, dangit! Anyway, Michelle Yeoh is very good in the scenes she's in. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Silent Movie (1976)
It's more of a pseudo-silent movie in the vein of Modern Times or a Tati film (has Mel Brooks watched Tati??) than a true silent film, and it's a bit too reliant on title cards for my tastes. But there are some good gags here, impressive considering that visual gags aren't usually Brooks's strong suit. My favorite is the scene with Burt Reynolds showering and slowly acquiring more hands (you'll know it when you see it). That said, this runs out of gas majorly by the end, and also, there's a running "joke" where the punchline is simply a character yelling the f-slur (plus a quick transphobic aside in another case), and while I know it's no fun to make the very innovative observation that an old Hollywood movie is queer-phobic, those bits definitely put a damper on this movie's charm for me, which is a problem when this movie coasts so heavily on the quaint charm of its concept. Grade: B-

 

L'Atalante (1934)
When I approach movies that are typically considered among the greatest of all time, they usually inspire one of two responses: 1) I am as enthusiastic about it as its reputation warrants, or 2) I like the movie fine but don't get why it's considered one of the greats. L'Atalante is definitely in the latter camp, and I'm not sure why people think this is so amazing, especially when Murnau's Sunrise beat this movie to its punch several years earlier. That said, this movie is often very lovely, and I'm glad I watched it. I like the ship's crew, who are fun to watch. Also, the underwater sequence is really good. Anyway, good movie. Not sure why it's so canonized. Grade: B+

 

 

Books

Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1928)
About as dull as its title suggests, though once the titular pigeon goes to WWI, the book gets strangely high-minded and philosophical about the nature of conflict. Still, most of this is about a young Indian boy training a pigeon, without a lot of development of either the boy or the pigeon. Beautiful illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff, though. Stay tuned for a Newbery Chronicles podcast in the next couple weeks. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for January 18 - 24, 2021

T. S. Eliot is a liar. Obviously January is the cruelest month.

Movies

Set It Up (2018)
Living proof that cliché has nothing to do with whether or not a movie is good, because this movie is basically every rom-com cliché known to humankind and yet is somehow good. I've never been particularly impressed with Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell before either, but their onscreen chemistry together is off-the-charts here. Grade: B

 

 

 

Happy Feet (2006)
I would love to know which concept came first to the filmmakers: penguin karaoke or penguin prophets? Genuinely unclassifiable cinema, and I have no idea what inspired anyone to believe that a corny jukebox musical should be super-glued to a monomyth hero's journey about the spiritual awakening of a messianic penguin. Imagine the dark mysticism of Watership Down as told through the low-brow pop culture referentiality of a post-Shrek CG-animated family film. Oh, and on top of all of that, Happy Feet is also a really serious parable about environmental collapse. It's such an exquisitely bizarre object, and I wish I could get behind this movie more. But it's just not good. The character animation is really bad-looking in the way that most early computer-animated movies are bad-looking (though credit where credit is due, there is some stunning landscape imagery and particle effects); the plot just kind of lurches from one weird setpiece to the next without ever really finding the heart of these characters; oh, and Robin Williams is all over this doing bad racial stereotypes (is it still too soon after his death to argue that Williams was an extremely talented guy with, for the most part, absolutely trash output?). I'm scratching my head at this when I'm not in awe at the ambition. Grade: C

Happy Feet Two (2011)
But wait! There's more! Just as spazzed, if not more so, as the first movie. For one, Happy Feet Two doubles down on the environmental dread of its predecessor. I honestly cannot think of a movie outside of First Reformed that wrestles with the apocalyptic implications of climate change and the role of organized religion in it as thoroughly as Happy Feet Two, and there's no way I can sufficiently convey to you just how little I ever expected to type the previous sentence. For two, it also really doubles down on the sheet incongruity of its concept, basically abandoning even the wild, mythic structure of the first movie in favor of a highly episodic, ensemble feature that resembles the shambling, rambling quality of a (I kid you not) Robert Altman film. It's still not good! Robin Williams is still doing his bad thing, and the songs basically feel like George Miller just put his iPod on shuffle—like, seriously, this movie has Janet Jackson, the Rawhide theme song, an aria from a Puccini opera, and a version of Janelle Monáe's "Tightrope" with the Big Boi verse switched out for Lil' P-Nut doing a bunch of ice-themed rhymes. It's weird! I can't think of a more strikingly singular pair of movies in the entire pantheon of English-language family entertainment, and that's even considering the (also George-Miller-affiliated) Babe movies. I just wish these were anything close to as good as the Babe movies. Grade: C

Practical Magic (1998)
The movie begins with these two witch aunts explaining to their niece that their family has a curse such that any time a woman in the family falls in love with a man, that man will meet an untimely death. Upon hearing this, that niece promptly swears off love forever, but then like five minutes later in the movie, the aunts give their niece a love potion that makes her fall in love with a man, and when he dies an untimely death, these aunts are like, "Oh wow, we had no idea that would happen." I was prepared for a whole movie in which the niece was going to have to come to terms with the fact that her aunts more or less killed this dude because they apparently couldn't remember the rules of the curse that they had just explained, but nope, that's just the first ten minutes of the movie, and the movie just kind of moves on from that, and before long, they're totally cool again and drinking tequila at midnight and dancing to Harry Nilsson (one of two scenes involving a conga line in this film). That's just the kind of movie this is, moving from one preposterous, logically suspect plot point to the next. It's pretty amusing in just how ridiculous the whole thing is, and Bullock and Kidman are undeniable screen presences, basically at their respective heights as bona-fide great movie stars before Bullock swung her career into overly broad directions and Kidman swung hers into more esoteric ones. And the relationship between Kidman and Bullock's characters is actually really sweet—I could imagine a much more functional and conventionally satisfying movie that was more focused on their sister love and less distracted by witch discrimination and resurrecting the dead and sexy store-brand Matthew McConaughey. I wouldn't call the iteration of the movie that we have "good." But there's something to be said for just how unself-conscious the film is about being the absolutely ludicrous, ungainly object that it is—in that regard, an unexpectedly fitting companion to my Happy Feet viewing earlier this week. Grade: C

The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
Preposterously energetic cinema, from the zooming, swooping camerawork to Jack Nicholson's performance to the enthusiasm with which the film pursues a recurring gag (literally!) involving people vomiting up cherry pits. It's never a boring movie, and often, especially near the end, its energy results in some ecstatic moments of over-the-top fervor. It's very fun to see Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon cast spells in feminist revenge against Jack Nicholson's odious Lucifer character. But on the other hand, it takes an hour and a half to get to that point, and up until that point, the movie's energy is more exhausting than elevating. A really deeply buried lede if there ever was one. Grade: C+

 

Music

CAN - Monster Movie (1969)
Significantly less avant-garde and significantly more rock-n-roll than I'm used to CAN albums being—which makes sense, given that apparently CAN had made another album previous to this one that apparently record labels deemed too experimental to release, so they intentionally made a more straightforward record (this one) in response. It's still not "mainstream" music by 1969 terms; of all the krautrock records I've heard, this is probably the one most obviously indebted to The Velvet Underground, which of course places Monster Movie pretty far left of "normal." It's not even particularly indebted to the accessible parts of The Velvet Underground's output either; the nervy opener, "Father Cannot Yell," sounds like it was recorded mid-"Sister Ray" jam, and "Outside My Door," with its cacophonous guitar noise, could easily slot into the "I Heard Her Call My Name" place on White Light/White Heat. There's something about all this that feels a little thin compared to the later CAN records. Maybe it needs to be just a little weirder. Maybe it's the lyrics—there's something deeply silly about Malcolm Mooney howling a rock-and-roll-ified version of the "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" nursery rhyme on "Mary, Mary So Contrary," and the 20-minute closing jam, "Yoo Doo Right," recalls The Monkeys in counterproductive ways as Mooney yells over and over again how "You made a believer out of me." It's not a bad record, and most of the time, it's quite good, finding a comfortable groove inside these slightly stilted takes on then-recent trends in experimental rock. If this had been the first CAN album I listened to, I probably would feel a bit more positively toward it. But as it is, I probably am always going to gravitate more toward Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi. Grade: B