Mini Reviews for July 1-7, 2019

HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Birdman! I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to put in a suggestion for next week (or put in another one), here's the link:

Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!

Movies

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) Reader Suggestion!
When I first saw this movie back in like 2015 or so (I think this was post-Oscar win, so I wasn't really involved in that whole debate, though for my money, it remains one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic Best Picture wins in recent memory), I was mostly caught up in the style and acting, both of which remain electric and intoxicating. This time, though, I had enough distance to pay attention a little more to the ideas, and what struck me is how totally slippery this movie is in the realm of theme. A lot of this has to do with tone—the percussive score, constantly moving camera, and gonzo acting all conspire really effectively to give the movie its relentless forward momentum, but none of them do much to tip the movie's hand regarding, for example, with just how much ironic distance we're supposed to regard Michael Keaton's character, who is either a sympathetic artist beset by his past, social expectations, and his own doubts or a self-aggrandizing, self-destructive man who mistakes pain for authenticity and old-fashioned literary signifiers for artistry. It's not like it can't be both, I suppose, but the movie risks mealy-mouthedness without more clearly defining its intent regarding the balance of these two things, and your interpretation of the final scene, which at first seems extremely dark but then, by virtue of Emma Stone's facial pantomime, becomes somewhat uplifting, but maybe only ironically so? I dunno, from where I stand, it's either saying A) that the 21st century media landscape surrounding artistic prestige links the attention economy and self-destructive behavior/performance art with artistic merit in a way that is toxic and dangerous, or B) that this very landscape creates a crucible by which the True Artists are found. It makes a qualitative difference to me which of those two the film wants me to land at, but at every turn, Birdman becomes intangible and ambivalent when I try to pin it down to that end. Like I said, slippery. A marvel of its kind, but slippery. Grade: B

Midsommar (2019)
I know my position is not exactly uncontested that Hereditary is a movie in which its sprawling, disparate narrative and aesthetic parts click into a satisfying and nuanced thesis, but at least from where I'm sitting, Midsommar, writer-director Ari Aster's follow-up, is far and away that earlier film's less-tidy cousin. It is a complete mess, in fact. The human element is almost entirely fumbled, with the traumatic family deaths (a huge mistep in execution to begin with) and the central relational toxicity between Florence Pugh's character and her boyfriend (which loses most of its psychological specificity once the film arrives in Sweden) only paying off in the most frustratingly generalized ways through the metaphorical connections to the Swedish pagan festival that makes up the majority of the film's 147-minute runtime (!?). So that doesn't really work. But taken as an accumulation of aesthetic choices, Midsommar is an absolute monster of a film. It threads this really fine needle that links horror and (delightfully, unexpectedly) comedy in a way that I don't think I've ever seen done before, and, coupled with Pugh's terrific performance, the sun-drenched cinematography, and grotesque folk horror, this tone makes a perfectly ghastly waking nightmare of an experience. Comparisons to The Wicker Man have already proliferated, but while it's nowhere near that movie's equal (for starters, The Wicker Man at least hangs together thematically), what Midsommar accomplishes on a sensory level feels a lot more ineffable and otherworldly, which I dig considerably. Grade: B+

The Beach Bum (2019)
An absolutely ridiculous movie in which Matthew McConaughey stumbles through a parade of bongs and beautiful women in the Florida Keys on his way toward writing a novel and achieving a stoner enlightenment. It's kind of bewildering at first, and writer/director Harmony Korine, as in Spring Breakers (this film's depressing cousin), never really figures out how to indulge in this without also indulging in some leery camerawork re: women. However, if you can get on the movie's wavelength (I was able to once Martin Lawrence showed up), it's very funny, maybe even one of the funnier movies of the year. It's interesting that "auteurs" like Korine so rarely go this full-bore into comedy; I'd be interested in more directors following suit. Grade: B

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
Unless you fell asleep during WWI day in your high school history class, They Shall Not Grow Old isn't going to be super informative for you—the audio recordings used voiceover (entirely veteran interviews, with no other narration) have been available to the public for decades. And the folks behind the movie's marketing seem to have been smart enough to recognize this, since the entire push behind the movie's trailers and posters has focused on the pretty pristine restoration, colorization, and audio synchronization used to transform the archival footage that comprises the entirety of the film's visuals. A lot of people seem to have gotten bent out of shape over what they view as unnecessarily technical exhibition here, and I might feel the same if the footage used were in any way exclusive to this movie—it's not, and Peter Jackson himself, in the lengthy making-of featurette, basically says he was interested in using the same stock footage everyone sees of WWI and helping people see it with new eyes. That old footage is still out there, so it's not as if Peter Jackson is airbrushing history a la George Lucas's Star Wars special editions. Besides, when this kind of restoration/colorization technology exists so readily, it seems as much of an aesthetic statement to leave footage b&w as it is to colorize it, at least when we're dealing with journalistic footage—to use a historical text is inherently to interpret it, etc. Anyway, it's pretty striking to see the colors and hear the sounds for this era of history, and at least for me, it did help me see stuff in a somewhat new light. Grade: B

The Void (2016)
Some truly spectacular special effects are wasted in a movie that has absolutely no idea how to script or direct. On paper, this is some really cool cosmic horror; in execution, it's rickety on a basic technical level, which makes it super difficult to figure out what I'm supposed to get from this. I mean, we have giant spider legs coming out of people's eyeballs, and forgive me for barking up the wrong tree if I want that to mean something. Grade: C

The Look of Silence (2014)
There's a lot going on in Joshua Oppenheimer's follow-up to The Act of Killing, but what struck me most is just how familiar the responses are when the film's anonymous protagonist approaches the men who were responsible for his brother's death in the 1965 Indonesian communist purge/mass murder: "Why are you talking politics right now?" "What's the point in bringing up the past?" To be clear, these aren't responses to academic queries like, "Is communism better than capitalism?" or "Is Indonesia a better place under the current state?" No, he's straight-up asking these men, "Why did you kill my brother?", and they're acting like he's bringing up a provocative Slate article at dinner. Which really throws into relief the fact that "politics" isn't just the abstract dance of concepts and tribal affiliations that we like to pretend it is in polite society—it's a tooth-and-nail struggle in which people's lives are literally at stake, and to deflect it as something more benign than that is to be complicit in that death toll. It's easy to look at the death mongers gleefully re-enacting their kills here and feel superior, but I think history has shown time and time again that whether or not we've actually killed someone with our bare hands, when someone comes knocking whom we've hurt, directly or indirectly, we deflect. I mean, just ask yourself honestly: what was your gut response to the line, "The Americans taught me to hate the communists?" Grade: A

Mini Reviews for April 22-28, 2019

Rervierws.

Movies

Her Smell (2019)
Her Smell hits almost all the beats of a traditional musician biopic (on paper, there's not a lot separating the plot of this movie from, say, Walk the Line), but what sets it truly apart as something special, not just among the stale annals of musician biopics but among 2019 cinema in general is just how much it lingers over the unexplored margins of these beats. In fact, Her Smell does almost nothing but linger; consisting of just five protracted scenes, the movie takes pieces that usually amount to just a few minutes of screentime (the pre-show green room, the recording booth, the rural "sobering up" cabin, etc.) and spends dozens of minutes allowing these scenes to spool out in haphazard and unpredictable ways that force us viewers to reckon with characters caught in the ligature of their lives—always in motion, always unsteady, always precarious. And hoo boy, is it a ride. Those who squirm at Alex Ross Perry's typical chamber misery beware: Her Smell has all the excruciatingly detailed human cruelty of Listen Up Philip with the unflinching, fevered style of Queen of Earth; I started the movie assuming I was watching these characters (especially Elizabeth Moss's Becky) at their lowest, only to be shown again and again just how much lower they could all go—rendered both exhilarating and oppressive by the cavernous space Perry gives these scenes. And yet... somehow this manages to be Perry's most hopeful movie thus far. It's a movie that shows the true work of recovery in the way that those hoary biopic tropes so rarely do, and by the end, there's something legitimately uplifting about the film. Exhausting at every turn, for sure, but that's the point, isn't it? It can't be easy. Grade: A-

High Life (2019)
In the same way that Interstellar and Tarkovsky's Solaris consciously evoked 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to revise it in significant ways, Claire Denis pointedly recalls both of those movies with High Life and comes out the other side with something that feels both bleeding-edge fresh and also in conversation with a pretty rich tradition of arthouse sci-fi. Via these austere space epics, there's a real, decades-long discourse being had about the nature of humanity's relationship with itself and the way that relationship refracts inward and fractures in key places within the context of 1. sexual encounters, 2. reproduction, and 3. eons of time. Whereas 2001 positions humanity as a mere mythological construct and both Tarkovsky and Nolan advance an essentialist view of human nature, one reflected at every turn (sometimes to ironic/hollow effect, particularly in Tarkovsky's work) by the physical universe, Denis answers the question of the human identity with an absurdly tactile response, that human beings are sacks of fluid tenuously held together by some vertebrae and social constructs. I'm being kind of academic here, so let me be clear: this idea is very, very scary and gross as rendered here—it's a film rife with rape (really: two rape scenes, and a sort of systematic rape/destroyed body autonomy throughout) and despair and spilled guts. It leans into the trappings of sci-fi horror a lot more than its most immediate cinematic precedents, perhaps because of the intrinsic terror of considering human life as a purely biological growth, and there are long sections of this movie that feel like a waking nightmare in the vein of David Lynch cross-pollinated with Alien. At the same time, the cross-cutting of this horror with the benign purity of the scenes of a father (Robert Pattinson) with his daughter gives us an existentialism-brand hope in the sense that it basically argues that life's meaning isn't solely mired in the visceral muck of our biology but also in what we build on top of that biology; to put it another way, it matters whether or not our bodies create a sex-fascist sperm cult, or a nurturing family. For all the despair of the movie, there's a cock-eyed, urgent optimism at work here, not nihilism. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and it wasn't even always mine, but when it was mine, I loved it. Grade: B+

Spring Breakers (2012)
Basically takes the cultural meme of Spring Break and transforms it into this dreamy allegory for the predatory excesses of suburban, majority-white culture. There are a lot of gestures in a lot of interesting directions that I wish were explored more thoroughly, like the parallels between the traditional youth group experience and the ecstatic heights of Spring Break hedonism; there's also the whiff of "having cake and eating it, too" here regarding how the movie portrays both blackness and femininity that makes me uneasy at times—on the one hand pointedly showing the ways in which these folks are exploited and coerced into their ultimately self-destructive social roles by those with more cultural power, while on the other hand indulging in a pretty gazey camera that lingers salaciously over nude female bodies and "gangbanger" caricatured African Americans (this would maybe be a little easier to swallow except for my memories of the movie's ad campaign using these specific elements to sell the movie way back when this first came out). But you know, that hypocritical posture toward the marginalized people whose plight it explicates is something that's also true of The Great Gatsby, and that's one of my favorite novels of all time (and clearly a heavy influence on this movie), so what can I say. Besides, it's really hard to say no to a movie with THAT James Franco performance and THAT Britney Spears singalong. Grade: B+

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008)
As a documentary, it's haphazardly put together, and parts of this movie practically scream of the filmmakers having primed the pump in order to address the film's narrative. It also softballs its subject matter, not nearly digging deeply enough into the tragic, even self-destructive elements of Anvil's continued drive (or delusion, depending on who you're asking) toward heavy metal stardom. Also, I dunno, even for a movie that obviously baits a This Is Spinal Tap comparison, some of the stuff just feels too cute and... I dunno, setting off my baloney sensor? Like, they visit Stonehenge? Their drummer is named Robb Reiner? These are either the greatest coincidences in music-doc history, or there's something fishy afoot. But honestly, whatever; I'd be lying if I didn't find this (esp. the central figure of "Lips" Kudlow and his relentless Canada Nice) endearing to a surprising degree. For all the doc's faults and foibles, there's a beating human element that's irresistible. Grade B-

La Pointe Courte (1955)
Though it's nowhere near as effective as Cléo from 5 to 7, the first feature from Agnès Varda most people seem to talk about, it's at least as interesting as that film is as an expression of the mid-century European New Wave. This predates Wild Strawberries by two years; The 400 Blows by four; Breathless and La Dolce Vita by five—and yet, it seems to anticipate a lot of what feels so distinctive about those films, from the abstraction of classic film tropes to the intentional, modernist shot composition. Getting somewhere first isn't worth everything, but just sayin', Varda arrives at the famous "Persona shot" in 1955. And plus, as a film divorced from its context, it's pretty good! The mix of traditional narrative film with pseudo-documentary footage is something I'm told Varda gets much better at later in her career, but as is, it's a really interesting, often compelling how this movie juxtaposes the discursive, very movie-ish conversations of the foregrounded marriage-in-crisis plot with the documentary-ish footage of the working-class goings on of the fishing village in which that plot takes place. I dig it. Grade: B+

Television

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 4 (2018-19)
The end. It's a sad day for me and the twelve other people who watch this show. Not too sad—the show was clearly running out of gas, as evidenced by the relative dearth of songs this season as well as the increasingly spotting plotting for all the show's secondary characters. Even Rebecca's arc, one that centers on her efforts to create a stable, healthy life in the context of her mental health struggles, is hit-and-miss. But where else on TV would you even get a season-long plot about the work of creating stability within a mental-health context? Where else on TV would this have been told through song? Where else on TV would you have gotten this winning combination of snark and raunch and heart and soul? Whether or not Crazy Ex-Girlfriend should have continued (it probably shouldn't have, both because the creators said they were done and because the series was definitely running short on ideas by the end), the television landscape is much poorer without this show giving its burst of idiosyncrasy each week, and I'll miss it badly. We were lucky to get the four years we did. Grade: B-