Movies
Before we're plunged into early-19th-century Oregon Territory, First Cow opens on a single scene set in the present day, in which Alia Shawkat comes across two skeletons, and it's not apparent until two hours later, at the movie's end, just how quietly great that tiny scene is. This is basically how a lot of First Cow works: a movie filled with moments whose greatness didn't occur to me until much later, when a stray line of dialogue or a seemingly superfluous shot of foliage clicked some thematic piece into place that elevated some previously errant moment. Which isn't to say that First Cow is a puzzle movie or even all that difficult to understand; in a way that is much more forthright than director/co-writer Kelly Reichardt usually opts for in her films, First Cow is very straightforwardly a familiar kind of American story (with of course a familiar American tragedy climaxing it): two sensitive guys in the frontier trying to live out their dream of selling enough delicious cakes to start their own hotel. It's as wholesome and sweet as I imagine those cakes are. But thinking back on this movie a few hours later, what I'm most drawn to in retrospect are the moments like Shawkat's inscrutable facial expression that ends that opening modern-day frame, or the oddly compelling interpreter in the brief interlude where we see a wealthy European discussing the beaver hat business with a native leader, or the part where the cowherd misses out on getting an oily cake and apparently holds a grudge the whole film. It's not even a particularly shaggy movie, but the loose threads that are there are just fascinating to tug and tug. Grade: A-
The plot feels like a bunch of alt-lite kids media stitched together: a little bit of A Series of Unfortunate Events, a little bit of Henry Selick, a lot of Roald Dahl (I've not read the Lois Lowry book this is based on, but I have a hard time imagining the Lowry of The Giver and Number the Stars also producing something this whimsical and demented). This movie is so highly caffeinated that it has a very hard time ever sticking to one plot, which is a huge detriment to a film that includes a gem of a plot involving the central children attempting to "orphan themselves," and for a lot of the movie I wanted to shake the screenplay by the collar and yell at it to just settle down, for Pete's sake. I'm pretty much in love with the animation style, though, which is probably the best example I've seen of the recent trend of twisting CG animation into looking like something spun out of arts-and-crafts—this one even goes the extra mile to make its framerate look like stop-motion animation. I'd be willing to make peace with this whole "photorealistic rendering" thing if what was being photorealistically rendered weren't the characters themselves but the material the characters are made out of. The promise of CG anything is the ability to conjure the impossible, and I'd honestly kind of love it if CG were used to conjure impossible stop-motion films like this one. Grade: B-
Like a lot of these Japanese-to-American remakes go, this is a sort of slick and sleepy version of the more homespun original. The original isn't really that much more propulsive, but it's at least got an uncannier feel—maybe I'm just not as inured to Japanese makeup and effects as I am to Hollywood ones, but there's something kind of rote to the scares here. I will give major props to this one for sticking with a virtually dialogue-free finale, the only part of this movie that feels better than the original, and I'm glad that Takashi Shimizu (who directed both) got to have a second go-round with a bigger budget. Grade: B-
I don't know how I didn't know that Gore Verbinski's directorial debut was this little flick: an utterly deranged and caustic anti-capitalist film. The naked contempt this movie has for the two leads is a sight to behold, such that these guys are the villains of their own stories in whose grotesque punishment we viewers are supposed to delight. You know how the bad guys in '90s kids movies always suffer a ton of physical humiliation and pain and usually end up stepping in or being covered in poop at some point? Imagine those guys being the protagonists of the film—only they're also factory owners with bourgeois tastes and more interest in flipping a mansion than in little inconveniences like paying their workers. The '90s were a weird time for children's entertainment. Grade: B+
I can't shake the feeling that this movie (and maybe Paul Schrader's career in general?) has some unresolved gender issues that it persistently neglects to work out—at least some other Schrader films have interesting female characters, which this one does not. But otherwise, this movie is white-hot. A bleak little parable about how those in power divide the working class against itself, culminating in one of the most shocking sequences of scenes to end a movie I've seen in a while. The three principal leads are all putting in really good work, too; of course Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto bring their somewhat natural gravitas, but Richard Pryor especially is a real treat here, somehow doing basically his familiar comedic persona but also making that persona capable of some incredible dramatic intensity and desperation that I've never seen from his standup. Grade: B+
Maybe because I don't know a ton about the whole French/Algerian history, I got a little lost following the moment-by-moment details of the plot, but as a whole, this is a pretty striking piece of work and maybe the most effective rendering of the escalating cycle of violence during revolutions that I've seen in a movie. It shows compellingly how each side rushes to increasingly brutal tactics in response to the other side's violence. Crucially, it never let's you forget who started this whole thing; you don't open your movie with a scene of a French officer ruthlessly torturing an Algerian rebel (is Zero Dark Thirty recreating this in its opening scene?) and expect your audience to come away thinking that there were some good points made on both sides of the rebellion. Good. French colonialism kind of sucks. Grade: B+
Television
I know the production cycles of these Cartoon Network shows don't really position them to being watched in "seasons," but that said, I'm not sure where Season 2 really ends and Season 3 begins, since Hulu and Wikipedia put different episodes in different seasons. Oh well. Whatever the boundaries of the season, it's still a good time. This season is much more focused on the mythology and big-picture plot than the first season was, which means we get a lot less Beach City hijinks and standalone episodes. In fact, most of the latter half of the season is one continuous serialized arc. The arc is awesome, and the mythology is pretty impressive in that even as it gets bigger and deeper, it still remains rooted in the central psychological and emotional tensions that ground the show in a very real space, even as it becomes cosmos-spanning large: tensions about identities and bodies and gender and coming of age in a world in which adults lack the ability (either by absence or by incompatibility) to understand what that coming of age means and the urgency of compassion even in that space of incompatibility and absence. So it's good. Often really good. But at the time time, I do also miss the more balanced focus on small-scale stories, too, that I saw in the first season. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this, since a lot of people seem to get extremely excited when TV shows go into hyper-serialized mode, but I don't think TV series are always necessarily better when they work hard to link all of their episodes into a larger narrative, and I think it would be cool to see more of the standalone episodes come back in the future (those who have already watched this show already know if I'll be disappointed or not, but I guess I'll be surprised as I pretend to watch this show as if it's still airing). But oh well. Like I said, this season is still good! Grade: B+
Music
In my head, this was the first "modern" Beyoncé album, kicking off the more expansive, ambitious period of Beyoncé the Important Artist that we're currently living in. And the context of this album is certainly backs that, with an increased autonomy for Beyoncé in the crafting of the record after sacking her dad as her manager. Listening to this album front-to-back for the first time since 2011, though, I think I had that wrong as far as the actual album goes; 4 has a lot of the same issues that I Am...Sasha Fierce has, namely the indiscriminate track sequencing and an occasional over-reliance on some broad anthemic songwriting. Apparently Beyoncé presented 72 songs to her label, and I have a hard time imagining that none of those were more interesting than "I Care" (sonically, "Halo, Pt. 2"?) or "Start Over." But there are some delirious highs on this album, too, and on the whole, despite a little bit of diversification of sounds and production, 4 actually feels more like the crowning sendoff of Beyoncé's pop era before the inauguration of her Important Artist era. "1+1" is a great old-school slow-burn showcase for Beyoncé's overpowering ability to just belt melodies, and the Frank-Ocean-penned "I Miss You" is a pulsing R&B highlight with probably my favorite production on the record. But of course, the real peak is the one-two punch of now-wedding-reception staple "Love on Top," the best pop-soul song in Beyoncé's whole career, and the wild, densely hooky "Countdown," a top-five Beyoncé song for me and completely unlike anything she has done before or since. This would be a better album than Sasha Fierce even if its only two good songs were "Love on Top" and "Countdown." Grade: B
