Movies
The usual issues with modern Disney features persist here, from the rather plastic-y skin textures to the haphazard plotting—the latter especially rears its head here, as the existential threat to Moana's homeland is basically ignored for the duration of the second and third acts, making for a movie of confused stakes. But you know what? Moana is still really freaking good! It's the best Disney musical since Mulan, maybe even Aladdin—"How Far I'll Go" has only "Let It Go" to contend with for the best Disney song of the past decade, and the rest of the songs (and yes, unlike Frozen, there are actually lots of songs!) are no slouch either. It's even got a song where Jemaine Clement reprises his Flight of the Conchords David Bowie role, only this time as a crab, and if that doesn't get you pumped, there's not a lot I can say for you. Animation-wise, Disney CG has never looked better, from the phenomenal water animation (you know Disney's on its game when it even beats out Pixar in technical wonder—sorry Finding Dory) to the ingenious integration of 2D hand-drawn with computer-rendered 3D. Plus, as much as I was out-thinking the movie up at the top of this review, Disney films are always more of heart-over-head endeavors, and on that metric, Moana delivers in spades. I'll be darned if I wasn't majorly verklempt by the reprise of "How Far I'll Go." This is a feeling that's been percolating in me for a while now, but after this year and especially after Moana, it's solidified: Disney has surpassed Pixar as the American animation studio whose features I look forward to most each year. Grade: A-
It's a solid biopic with an appropriately hammy Meryl Streep performance, and a big part of the biopic's solidity has to do with the nice tightrope that performance walks. Streep's acting these days tends to suck all the air out of the room, but that's kind of a function of her character here, a singer whose skills (or lack thereof) are no match for her ambitions as an opera hall star. Knowing nothing of the real-life basis for this movie, I can't weigh in on how well Streep's character fits the specifics of this woman's legacy. But with Ms. Jenkins, the movie character, Streep has found a role uniquely suited to her late-career acting tics, and that's pretty cool. Grade: B+
A horror movie with scares of the arthouse variety, not ones that jump out and say "Boo!" but instead ones that walk up softly behind you and ask you how your day was in a low whisper, and it only slowly dawns on you that they have forked tongues or something. All of which is to say that I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House will not make you jump, but it might make your skin crawl just a bit. Only a bit—this thing's pretty slow, and while generously crafted, maybe a bit too mannered for its own good. Grade: B
Every inch of this film is gorgeous—it's a painterly, languishingly detailed depiction of rural Scotland that by sheer visual weight alone justifies the occasional note of nostalgia. That, and the movie is also really well-acted. The plot itself isn't handled quite as deftly, and this piece is really, really obviously an adaptation of a novel, what with the copious voiceover and artistic jumps in time—the whole thing is just so literary, which is fine if your story is, you know, a work of literature, but as a piece of cinema, it risks feeling just a bit airless at times. It doesn't help that its story—centering on the abuses, struggles, and quiet triumphs that its women face—already deals in archetypes to such an extent that it can be stiff. But I'm being overly negative here: this is a good movie with consistently great technical work, and if you're looking for a richly textured period piece, look no further. Grade: B+
As a tribute to one of the greatest cult bands in rock history, Nothing Can Hurt Me works well; it works just as well as a salute to the bygone years of Stax Records and the scrappy, blockbuster Memphis music scene of the '60s and '70s. The movie ambles through the Big Star chronology (including the post-breakup solo efforts of Alex Chilton and Chris Bell) with a little too much looseness to ever give the movie any sort of urgency, and as a piece of documentary filmmaking, it's not going to blow any minds as far as technical craft goes. It's just a solid and loving profile with some interesting Memphis talking heads thrown in, to boot. Grade: B
Books
You know one Harry Potter device I've always disliked? The Time-Turner. You know what I've always disliked even more than the Time-Turner? The Deathly Hallows epilogue. So I suppose it's a triumph of sorts that a book whose premise is basically to stretch the epilogue to a feature-length story involving Time-Turners was able to get me to like it even a little. I do like this book. A little. The Time-Turner stuff isn't anything great—don't get me wrong, I love a good time-travel/butterfly-effect story, but The Cursed Child isn't a good time-travel/butterfly-effect story; it's an average one in service of an even more average villain plot that sort of reminds me of how for a while, every Zelda game involved revealing that the game's villain was trying to resurrect Ganon. It's a tremendously unnecessary and undeserved story, but there's good here, too. For starters, while a lot of the returning cast (particularly poor Ron) gets flattened into their movie-version caricatures—and let us not speak of Ginny, who was never really anyone to begin with—Harry himself is rendered wonderfully and unsentimentally as an adult; maybe I'm just mean, but I get immense satisfaction out of the fact that a canonical entry in the series has finally embraced that Harry Potter is a bit of a self-involved douchebag. Even better is the way the story approaches the issue of the Hogwarts houses, always one of the most thematically troubling of Rowling's inventions in the original series—young Albus Severus Potter does, as he fears, land in the Slytherin house, and the results are the first time outside of the character of Draco Malfoy (who also returns to great effect here) that the series has paid anything more than cursory lip service to the idea that the members of Slytherin aren't automatically unrepentant minions of evil. In fact, the play's generosity toward characters of all stripes is its biggest strength, and its update of the original series's theme of friendship as a restorative and even life-saving force is welcome. This is a story about the outcast and the lonely—the converse, of course, of friendship and belonging—and in the play's best scene, Draco tells Harry that he envied Harry and his friends when they were students at Hogwarts. Harry, the play argues, will never truly understand the isolated misery that defines the lives of those (including his own son) he has scorned, and its this misery that drives people toward cruelty and darkness. It's a powerful idea and one that's considerably more morally sophisticated than most of what Rowling attempted in her novels. It's unfortunate that the play's not a better vehicle for these ideas, though—the recent Fantastic Beasts movie approaches some of these same themes with considerable more success as a story, which leaves The Cursed Child as the awkward, inferior Rowlingverse work of 2016. Cursed child indeed. Grade: B-
Music
At this point in his career, I'm not sure exactly what we're supposed to expect from a Brian Eno record, especially since I haven't listened to any of his post-'80s work. I know this much, though: The Ship is nice little rainy-afternoon album, with the spacious, ambient/electronic textures of its 21-plus-minute title track and 18-minute followup, "Fickle Sun (I)" taking a detour into spoken-word before arriving at a closing, cathartic cover of The Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free." Even knowing nothing of Eno's career in the past 20 years, I suspect that nothing here is going to surprise fans. But the album's almost linear progression toward that point of catharsis shows a fantastic control of mood and pacing, and man, that "I'm Set Free" cover is super nice. Grade: B
