Favorite Movies of 2023

I don't have a lot to say here, so I'll make it very brief. These are my favorite movies! I've (obviously) not been doing reviews on the blog this past year, but I am still updating my Letterboxd, so when it says "Read original review," it's linking to that.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! Feel free to share your own favorites!

Favorite Movies

1. May December
Stunning, unclassifiable cinema. I've liked a lot of what Todd Haynes has done in the 21st century, but the slipperiness of this film feels like a return to the complex semiotics he was playing with in his '90s work.

[Read original review]

2. The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki came out of retirement not just to make the best animated movie of the year and a dense, self-reflexive meditation on loss and creation but also to make sure that people remember that his movies can pivot from cute magical hijinks to grim nightmare fantasies full of bird poop and blood. The gooey-ness of Miyakazi films is underappreciated, but it's front and center here. I guess that might sound off-putting, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't enjoy this movie on some level, so don't knock it until you've tried it.

[Read original review]

3. Knock at the Cabin
Speaking of not knocking (hahaaa) until you try it, I feel like I still encounter a lot of people who still have not forgiven M. Night Shyamalan for his wilderness period. Those people are missing out majorly. Without expending a lot of energy, you could probably convince me to say that this is the best film of his career. Obviously the best performance of Dave Bautista's career.

[Read original review]

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Replicates the slow, horrific march to the grave that Scorsese achieved in The Irishman, only this time, it's a genocide. I'm very much into this late-style Scorsese.

[Read original review]

5. Afire
People don't seem to like this one as much as the previous few Christian Petzold movies, and it certainly doesn't have the mythic, political overtures as, say, Transit, but in place of that, it is as vicious a character piece as he's ever done.

[Read original review]

6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The fact that this flopped at the box office is so incredibly depressing to me. This should be a family film instant classic; Rachel McAdams should be getting an Oscar; Kelly Fremon Craig should be getting Greta Gerwig money, acclaim, and household name status. I suppose prospects of it finding an audience streaming on [checks notes] Starz is unlikely, but I'm hoping.

[Read original review]

7. You Hurt My Feelings
Most of the time with Nicole Holofcener, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's what's nice about it. Good to see that her partnership with Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to bear fruit. Bonus points for tunneling into some very specific anxieties of mine this time around.

[Read original review]

8. The Holdovers
I thought for sure after the nostalgia-baiting trailer and opening stylistic pastiche that I would find this too cute, but no, it's very good! Sure to be a new sad-sack Christmas classic. It will probably be up for all sorts of awards, and I can get behind that.

[Read original review]

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most technically and aesthetically adventurous mainstream American animated movie in years, more so than the first one by a considerable margin, and that alone was probably enough to land this in my top 10. On top of that, though, I was actually into the story, and while I am entirely prepared to eat crow if the sequel resolves all of the threads in this movie with a wet fart, for now, I am actually excited to see what happens next.

[Read original review]

10. Godzilla Minus One
In addition to just being a very entertaining monster movie, I want to highlight how great the design and effects are on Godzilla himself (itself? themself?): maintaining the lovably bulgy proportions of the old "dude in a rubber suit" Godzillas while also containing the scale and menace that CG can provide. The best effects of any effects-driven movie I saw this year, which should put American studios to shame.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: BlackBerry—In the year of the "brand biopic," this caustic take on a brand doomed to fail stood out. Great performances all around, too: Glenn Howerton just screams the whole movie, and it is very watchable.

Would Have Been in the Top 10 If It Were Actually a Feature Film: That collection of shorts adapting Roald Dahl that Wes Anderson did for Netflix—I've enjoyed Wes Anderson's output of the past decade even as he has divided some of his fans while tunneling deeper and deeper into the hermeticism of his aesthetic. However, this is easily his best work since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel. An utter delight, and the "it's a stage play, but also an audiobook" format proves surprisingly flexible for telling four very different stories.

Best Documentary: In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50—A compelling rumination on mortality and Robert Fripp's dictatorial regime within the band. Terrific music, of course.

Best Action: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One—I mean, it's a new Mission: Impossible movie, so of course. There also wasn't a ton of competition. A very limp year for American action films.

Best Action Sequence: John Wick: Chapter 4—That said, I gotta give props to John Wick fighting his way up that staircase (twice!) near the end of this entirely too-long series finale. For as much as Cruise gets all the Keaton comparisons (mostly valid), that one sequence feels like the strongest evocation of silent comedy I saw in a mainstream American film this year. The train crash scene in Dead Reckoning comes at a close second, though.

Movie I Laughed Most Watching: Bottoms—This bizarro-world high school comedy is something of a return to the '90s/2000s heyday of the spoof movie, e.g. Not Another Teen Movie, though rather than parody anything specific, Bottoms instead just goes for the weird and the heightened. It doesn't all work, but most of it does.

Best Joke: Barbie—Ken mansplaining Pavement to Barbie is probably only funny for the very narrow swatch of boring, approaching-middle-age men that I consider myself a part of, but this was a big moment for us.

More People Should Talk About This One: The Starling Girl—Evokes its Christian fundamentalist milieu with more accuracy than anything I've ever seen in a movie even approaching mainstream, and while for me that alone would be enough to rush out to see this film, it also does a terrific job telling a very human story that I found riveting. Maybe the contours of this movie just appeal to me more than most people, but I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: Infinity Pool—In what may become an annual fixture of this list (MaXXXine may come out this year!), I have to shout out Mia Goth's performance here, which is far and away the best thing about Infinity Pool (a movie I enjoyed otherwise, I should stress). For Your Consideration: Mia Goth draped across the hood of a car, shouting the protagonist's name while reading negative reviews of his ill-begotten novel.

Best Audience Con: Skinamarink—Basically an avant-garde film marketed as a horror film, and it somehow made $2.1 million! I liked it, for what it's worth, but mostly, I respect the audacity.

Best Vibes: Rye Lane—A very fun, frothy rom-com with a tremendous sense of place, style, and music. Just a good time overall, I felt good watching it, and I have nothing but good memories about it.

Most Vibes: Enys Men—I almost gave this the "best" vibes award, but I don't think "best" is the best way to describe something that feels this mysterious and at-times threatening. Still, it's unparalleled in the thick atmosphere it creates. Good thing, too, because that's basically all it does.

"Not Her Best, But I Appreciate That She's Still Doing Her Thing" Award: Showing Up—Every Kelly Reichardt movie feels like a miracle for existing, especially in a film economy that doesn't make a lot of space (or funding) for these kind of without-a-marketing-hook pieces of gentle rumination.

"Good For Her" Award: Poor Things—I didn't love this as much as some people did, but Emma Stone did great work with out-of-left-field performances this year (see also: The Curse). Very interested to see what else she does now that she seems to be in her weirdo phase. Also, good for her character; seems like she had a great time.

"Good For Him" Award: Beau Is Afraid—Ari Aster, man, I think it's cool that you are comfortable enough to spend $35 million setting fire to all your good will you've earned so far. I genuinely respect that.

"Don't Know How to Work This In, But I Feel Like I Should Include This One" Award: No One Will Save You—Probably doomed to be forgotten as it lies buried on Hulu, but this is a very fun, exciting, clever alien invasion thriller.

Most Played in the Room Adjacent to Me: The Super Mario Bros. Movie—My son got majorly obsessed with Mario and Donkey Kong this year, so as soon as this got put on Netflix, it was curtains for my hopes of getting him into European arthouse cinema during his midday movie/rest time.

Worst Animated Movie of the Year: Nimona—Despite there being two animated movies in my top 10, this was a particularly bad year for feature-film animation, and this was the worst of the worst that I saw (consider yourself lucky, Disney's Wish). Thoroughly irritating, and it looks bad.

Worst Movie of the Year: Your Place or Mine—Probably not actually the worst movie of the year, but I watch so few streaming-dump "content" movies that it feels pretty egregious when I do happen to sit through one.

Best Non-2023 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2023: Theorem—This film simply refused to leave my brain since I saw it in March. A bourgeois family has a sexual encounter with the divine and the spirals into oblivion: the story all of us Christians living a middle class American existence should be wrestling with.

Mini Reviews for October 26 - November 1, 2020

 Spooky season has ended. Alas. In case you missed it, I'll link here to the post I made earlier this week, which is a new entry in my prog series!

Movies

Wolfwalkers (2020)
Easily my favorite movie of the year so far and probably my favorite Cartoon Saloon feature now (sorry, Secret of Kells, you're still great!). If nothing else, this is just a tremendous aesthetic leap forward for Tomm Moore and his studio; previous Cartoon Saloon features have had to make virtues out of the limitations of the noticeably digital animation tools the animators had to work with, creating films that are geometric and smooth and dependent on crisp, clean lines at the edges of characters, and while those movies all do great work with that look, Wolfwalkers finds the Saloon with a much larger budget and hence a much more dynamic set of techniques at their disposal. The result is something that maintains the basic geometry of their earlier work while also finding ways to make the animation miles more textured and dynamic. It's just stunning, gorgeous work, the best-looking 2020 movie I've seen, animated or live-action, and what's even better is that it's in service of a terrific anti-imperialist tale that maps a variation of werewolf mythology onto the English occupation of Ireland and the intertwined birth of capitalism and English Protestantism, all bound up in an intense and often achingly sweet coming-of-age/coming-out story surrounding the friendship of an English girl with a "wolfwalker" girl. The movie is practically bursting with incredible narrative turns illuminated by breathtaking aesthetic flourishes, but my favorite is the visual motif of having the wolves' character models preserve the pencil-sketch lines around their edges, giving the wolves a noticeably freer visual palette compared to the English and occupied Irish in the town. The more I think about this movie, the more I like it, and I'm really tempted to pull the trigger on that A+. I can't imagine anything else this year captivating me like this. Grade: A

Ponyo (崖の上のポニョ) (2008)
I remember when this first came out hearing a lot of people dismiss it as "just a kids' movie," and 1. Good kids' movies are really hard to do, and Ponyo is a very good kids' movie; 2. It's also a pretty complex movie with a lot of different thematic angles to its environmental/apocalyptic themes, so it's not as if by being a kids' movie, this shows Miyazaki soft-balling any of his usual preoccupations; 3. It looks incredible, a colorful and surprisingly rich transition of Miyazaki from his usual ornateness into something that resembles the cartoonish fluidity of, like, Masaaki Yuasa. So yeah, I feel like those people I heard really made the wrong call on this one. Grade: A-

 

Ghostwatch (1992)
An extremely early found-footage example in the style of Orson Welles's infamous War of the Worlds radio program (this one was actually broadcast on the BBC!). It's a little aimless and goofy for the first hour or so, but that only makes it all the scarier when the real deal starts happening, revealing a close attention to pacing and structure all along. And the final fifteen minutes or so are VERY scary—if not on the scale of, say, the ending of Blair Witch Project then definitely just a few clicks below that. Grade: A-

 

 

Angel's Egg (天使のたまご) (1985)
This feels like the closest thing I've ever seen to an animated Tarkovsky movie: a meditative, oblique, spiritual movie involving two characters walking through a landscape of ruins and biblical allusions. The mid-film monologue recounting the revised version of the Noah's Ark story feels like it could have come right out of Stalker or something. The film's an incredible experience. The film is co-created by Yoshitaka Amano, whom I'm sure a lot of people know through his artwork for the Final Fantasy games, and as much as those games can be great, they're often busy and over-explained in ways that openly contradict what makes this movie so powerful, and I wish that Amano would have more of a chance to work in this mode, because his world clearly thrives on the slow, deliberate pace here. To wrap back around to Tarkovsky, my one wish for this movie is that it were even slower; a late-film shot of a campfire lasts for nearly a minute, and it's one of the best parts of the movie. Imagine a movie filled with shots like that. Even so, this is great. Grade: A

Soylent Green (1973)
The ending is so famous that I don't feel like I really need to warn people that this review spoils it. I'm actually kind of curious why it's such a famous twist, considering that it's not any more surprising than an average Twilight Zone twist, though I suppose that years of allusions to "It's people!" made me kind of primed to look for clues. What I'm surprised isn't as famous is the scene where riot-control cops scoop of crowds of people into big tanks, presumably to turn them into soylent. It's by-far the most haunting thing in the movie, and it's kind of wild that a movie would be that openly anti-cop—like, the cops in this movie are literally there to protect the state's process of turning political dissidents into crunchy food tablets. Hm. Makes ya think. Other than that, though, I actually think this movie is just kind of okay? It's way more of a neo-noir detective thing than I was expecting, kind of like Blade Runner without the philosophy and stunning production design (which is just run-of-the-mill '70s grime here), and not a particularly interesting central mystery either, though Heston gives 110% in his performance, as he was wont to do in these '60s/'70s dystopian films. It's a movie with striking moments but also long sections of drag. Grade: B-

Television

Steven Universe, Season 3 (2016)
My issues with Season 2 basically continue unabated in Season 3, mainly that some of the mythology overrides some of my favorite elements of the show's wonderful Beach City setting. I said this in my review of Season 2 also, but I really enjoy the small-scale Beach City storytelling that the first season balanced so well with the big, dramatic stuff. That balance is all out-of-wack here, most notably for the way that the first 20% of the show take place in a barn outside of Beach City, an arc that I didn't actually enjoy that much, especially because they focus so heavily on Peridot, a character whose thematic/dramatic purpose is clear (to show a character basically deprogramming after having been trained to follow a cold, abusive authority) but whose presence I never actually enjoy. The later arc-heavy episodes that end the season are much stronger, but they're often stronger not because they advance the contemporaneous plot but because they deal with the central characters' pasts with one another—this season deals a lot with, for example, the dynamics of Amethyst's being so much younger than the other Crystal Gems, and it's rich character work with that vein of melancholy that Steven Universe does so well. The same goes for the more standalone episodes in the middle of the season when the characters have returned to Beach City. Increasingly, the show is drawing from the past to inform the present as the denizens of the city mingle with one another, from the relatively inconsequential ("Restaurant Wars," which has two restaurateurs rekindling an old conflict) to the more serious (everything to do with the ongoing relationship between Lars and Sadie). In fact, my favorite episode of the season, the musical episode "Mr. Greg," is purely about characters dealing with the past, as Pearl and Greg come to grips with their complicated relationship with each other in the context of their past relationships with Rose Quartz; it's funny and fleet and sad and moving—Steven Universe at its very best. Grade: B+

Music

Neil Cicierega - Mouth Dreams (2020)
Internet savant and spicy meme lord Neil Cicierega returns with another of his "Mouth" mixtapes. These mixtapes are some of my favorite things on the internet, so it's a little disappointing that Mouth Dreams is uncharacteristically hit-and-miss for Cicierega. There are some truly great songs on here in the classically devilish Cicierega mode: songs such as "Just a Baby" (which mashes up Hoobastank's "The Reason" with Justin Bieber's "Baby" with Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" in a way that makes Cash's opening line "When I was just a baby" not just a flashback but the entire premise of the song), "Fredhammer" (miraculously turning Limp Bizkit's noxious "Nookie" into a certified bop by the addition of a beat made from a sample of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer"), and "10,000 Spoons" (Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" set to the Knight Rider theme). Elsewhere on the album, Cicierega is legitimately pushing himself into new territory, finding interesting textures and sounds seemingly as an end to themselves without the usual jokiness undergirding his work, and these are often rewarding: "Aammoorree," for example, or "Cannibals." But outside of these high points are some serious low ones, sometimes as Cicierega wrings far too much time out of an iffy or overwrought idea ("My Mouth," a mashup of Green Day with Aerosmith, is pretty weak, and it's far from the only such weaksauce mashup here), other times as Cicierega tries to expand his palate and it just plain doesn't work (the Beethoven's 5th with Britney Spears "Brithoven," for instance). More so than any of the other "Mouth" tapes, Mouth Dreams is something of a slog to get through, and its best moments are best in isolation rather than what they are in the context of the record: oases in the middle of a desert. The highs are certainly high, though, and I'm glad I have them, even if I'll probably not listen to the whole record all the way through that much. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for August 19-25, 2019

Gotcher piping hot reviews right here!

Movies

Alita: Battle Angle (2019)
The plot never quite decides what it wants to be—is it a dystopian sci-fi? is it an action movie? a journey of self-discovery? a conspiracy thriller? is it a roller derby movie??? And even if it did decide, I'm not sure if that would actually make the screenplay any good. But this movie has so many ideas that I'm willing to forgive the structural issues just for the pure pleasure of basking in a modern Hollywood movie that is actually curious and risk-taking as opposed to merely committed to the refinement of an already kind of mediocre idea. It's not, like, amazing or anything, but it does feel fresh and fun. I'm also kind of shocked that the Alita big-eye CG tech doesn't veer into uncanniness more than it does. I don't think the technology is quite there yet, but it's close, which is better than I thought given the posters and trailers. Grade: B

The Souvenir (2019)
This movie's grainy, ostentatiously shot-on-film look is tremendous, and the emotional resonance of the ending is raw and real. But I dunno, the rest of this is just a tad too "MFA Fiction Workshop"-esque for my tastes. Grade: B-

Rams (Hrútar) (2015)
A very staid movie about a very staid subject: in an Icelandic village, two brothers who haven't spoken to each other in forty years are now forced to interact on account of a disease among their sheep which threatens to infect all the sheep in the village. Like this movie's aesthetic itself, I have no strong feelings either way about the movie, and part of me really enjoys just how committed to being gray and underplayed this whole thing is. Then there are the out-of-nowhere comedic flourishes, like when one character delivers another character to the hospital in the shovel of a backhoe, and while I'm not really sure what to make of that, but it's fun. But on the other hand, the movie is mostly kind of boring. Grade: C+

Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ) (1986)
Miyazaki's first Ghibli film (in fact, the first Ghibli film, period) is far from his best, but it sets a great template for his work in the studio—if not one quite matched by Nausicaä just a couple years prior. The plot feels needlessly convoluted, but the animation is stunning, and the basic environmental themes are still deeply resonant, even if they're buried somewhat in a plot mythology that has the feel of compressing a whole manga into a feature film. Plus, the actual time spent on Laputa, the titular castle in the sky, is legitimately great, the kind of grand geometries that you know the early Final Fantasy games wanted us to imagine in their blocky sprites but couldn't actually render themselves. And if there's an image more representative of the Miyazaki ethos than of that robot handing Sheeta and Pazu a flower, I can't think of it. Grade: B+

Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight (1975)
Basically the ur-Vine: a collection of short and often absurd sketches based around a faux-home movie aesthetic. I spend a lot of time watching those Vine compilations on YouTube (e.g. "vines that toast my buns"), so there's no reason why I shouldn't enjoy watching Robert Downey, Sr., invent the form. Grade: B







Music

Thom Yorke - ANIMA (2019)
The critical conversation around this album is that it's his best solo work since The Eraser, which to me seems like a slap in the face to Tomorrow's Modern Boxes and the Suspira score. But ANIMA is definitely good—his most melodic and poppy since The Eraser, to be sure (maybe the source of that critical consensus), and less reliant on the kind of minimalist IDM that Yorke seems to enjoy more than most. And in fact, the back half of the album, from "I Am a Very Rude Person" to the incredible closer, "Runwayaway," is one of his strongest sequences of songs in his solo discography. Whether or not this makes it actually better than his recent output, ANIMA is still pretty mesmerizing, and I dig it. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for March 19 - 25, 2018

In addition to my normal movie watching, I've been at the Big Ears festival this weekend, and as a result, I saw a metric ton of movies, not all of which I've had a chance to review. Stay tuned next week for more Big Ears movies.

Movies

Love, Simon (2018)
"Warm" is an adjective that gets thrown at any halfway-sincere coming-of-age film, but Love, Simon is doubly deserving of the qualifier. The plotting and film style aren't going to blow anyone's mind, but that doesn't matter one bit in the face of a film that regards its characters with such affection and has the decency to imbue them all with vibrant life. Even while painting within the lines of the archetypes typical of your Hollywood teen movie (the best friend, the nerd, etc.), Love, Simon gives its cast a wealth of personality and pathos that pulls off that neat movie trick of having them all feel universally familiar (I'm positive I've had at least five versions of Logan Miller's nerd/bully amalgam in my classes) while also making them feel like distinct people. The movie flubs the ending a bit, but only in the way that most Hollywood coming-of-age movies trip over their own grand gestures at one point or another, and I guess what I'm saying overall is that we can all let out a collective sigh of relief: the first major studio release focusing on a gay teen romance is not only representationally important but also quite good. Grade: B+

PROTOTYPE (2017)
A Big Ears movie. I never could quite get on this movie's wavelength, and given that this was an almost completely abstract 3D avant-garde feature, it was sometimes difficult for me to tell if this was because: 1. I was sitting in the very front row of the theater and thereby experienced a small measure of physical discomfort while watching; or 2. I'm truly just not tracking with what the film is doing. That said, this movie's use of archival footage of the 1900 Galveston hurricane and aftermath creates some occasionally indelible imagery, most notably during two sequences, one involving the layering of TV screens within the film's 3D space and the other concerning a completely abstract static of distorted imagery that slowly fades into footage of ocean waves. The latter has probably the coolest texture I've ever seen in a 3D movie. Grade: B-

Ulysses in the Subway (2017)
Another Big Ears movie. What the avant-garde collective of filmmakers behind this movie have done here is taken a field recording of a single trip on the New York subway and used some digital process to convert that sound into this abstract imagery. That's the whole movie: sometimes it looks like a wave form, and other times it looks like a tunnel or electrical lines or the rails of the train tracks themselves. This is the kind of movie that you have to be in a very particular kind of mood to enjoy, but luckily, that's where I was, and I found it frequently breathtaking, especially once I got tuned into enough the movie's hypnotic flow that the subtle changes the movie makes to its premise felt like bombs going on, or ghost reaching out their icy hands. Grade: B+

Kedi (2016)
I'm not really a cat person, so I'm not sure why I watched this, a documentary about stray cats in Istanbul. But it was on my Netflix queue, and so here I am. It was pretty boring. What can I say, I'm a monster. Grade: C

Sixty Six (2015)
More Big Ears. An experimental feature that, in the most obvious ways, is more a collection of shorts than a proper feature, all unified by the striking style: making collages of cutouts from old comic books and animating them to tell stories of varying levels of abstraction. The early goings get pretty dull at times, to be honest, but about midway through, it becomes apparent that aside from style, what's also unifying these pieces (particularly a lovely short set to "Clair de Lune" followed by a silent short completely devoid of any human figures) is the feeling of loneliness that pervades them—in particular, the loneliness you feel when you ruminate on memories and the ways life has changed and left you isolated from that past. The loneliness of nostalgia, I suppose you could call it. Grade: B-

Kiki's Delivery Service (魔女の宅急便) (1989)
Ghibli's heavy hitters are the visionary fantasies, and I love those, too, but honestly, I feel like the more consistent bet are the nostalgic, quietly sad coming-of-age flicks like this and Only Yesterday. So anyway, I finally filled in this blind spot in my Miyazaki viewing, and of course, it's very good and well-observed and small-scale melancholic in the best way, right down to its surprisingly stressful finale. Grade: A-

American Pop (1981)
The premise—telling the story of 20th-century American pop music through four generations of a single family—is interesting, but the execution indulges in the absolutely worst of musty music industry lies, the most notable being that the apex of American pop music is some white dude with a guitar (playing, to add insult to injury, Bob Seger, nonetheless). Even giving the film the tremendous benefit of the doubt that, in 1981, playing "Freebird" over the ending credits to your rock history movie was not yet a deeply unfortunate act of unintentional self-parody (to say nothing of the other Forrest Gump-level song choices), we're still left with a film that completely erases the role of people of color in American pop music. This is the kind of pass-the-Budweiser revisionism that makes me dislike Elvis and wish I didn't like Led Zeppelin so much, and it's putrid. That said, the movie looks amazing, and Ralph Bakshi was absolutely the right person to tell if not this story then a better execution of the same premise. Bakshi's usual parade of pop-art rotoscoping and mixed-media collage and the way that it captures both the weary grime and the irrepressible energy of the American urban landscape is never less than stunning on a visual level here. Shame about the rest of the movie, though. Grade: C

Books

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex (2007)
Adam Rex's alien-invasion novel veers between satire and farce in ways that aren't always beneficial to the satire end of things (a major thread depicting the invading Boov as a satirical analog to European colonialism is smart but muddled later in the novel by the introduction of a second race of alien invaders). But given how much Rex's prose and worldbuilding is indebted to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that scatteredness shouldn't be surprising, given how much that original book is obsessed with incident and wordplay over consistent plotting or theme. Smekday isn't nearly so good as Hitchhiker, of course, but it shares that same rambling charm and goofy hilarity. The True Meaning of Smekday is very funny, especially in its details—a map of the "United State" of America, Arizona (where the alien race has relocated all Americans), is filled with renamed AZ cities like "The Democratic People's Republic of Phoenix" (ruled by harsh dictators and constantly torn by revolution, naturally) and "Las Vegas Dos," and mid-novel comic interlude tells the story of the Boov race, which involves a lot of asphyxiation. The quest of our protagonist, Gratuity Tucci, may not always hang together on the level of characterization or motivation, but the book itself is consistently entertaining and a great delight. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 25 - May 1, 2016

Another week of reviews! I pretty much liked everything here, but feel free to disagree with me!

Movies

Sisters (2015)
A funny—often very funny—comedy that's entirely hogtied once it realizes that it has to figure out an ending. But hey, if we judged the success of comedies on the rubric of plot, we'd be awful short on good comedies (I mean, even shorter than we are now). What's important here is this: I laughed. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (but especially Tina Fey, who plays gloriously against type) are being their typical charming selves and having a great time doing it. It's not sophisticated or even all that internally consistent, but it's fun. Grade: B

Porco Rosso (紅の豚) (1992)
I like Miyazaki in swashbuckling mode, which is a mode I didn't realize he had. I'd like to see more of Swashbuckling Miyazaki. He needs more movies where people are inexplicably pigs (he's got at least two). Still, I won't lie: the best bits of the movie are the ones that are in regular-old Miyazaki mode, tender and wistful and slightly mysterious. Grade: A-

Eye in the Sky (2016)
Without a doubt the most upsetting 2016 movie I've seen so far and also possibly the first great 2016 movie I've seen (give or take Hail, Caesar!), Eye in the Sky is both not to be missed and not for the faint of heart. I'm really serious here: the bulk of the movie's plot revolves around the prospect of a little girl being blown up, so if you have any aversion whatsoever to seeing children in peril in movies, think long and hard about this one. I'm making it sound unpleasant because it is, but only in that way that any grim thriller is unpleasant—that is, in an absolutely necessary, profound way. It's a film about drone warfare, after all, which means that dives deep into the utter moral quagmire that is the War on Terror and the possibility that there truly is no such thing as "right and wrong" when it comes to that War. Postmodernism, it turns out, was not predicting society as a whole but specifically our modern military operations. Grade: A

Tabu (2012)
I don't hear a lot of people talking about it, but surely this Portuguese drama is one of the best films of the 2010s. Seriously, I'm blown away. It's stylish, moving, literary (it has all the hallmarks of a novel adaptation, but it's not, which is kind of charming), and at once classicist and modern. It's that combined old-fashionedness and cutting edge that makes this movie such a delight: in many ways, it's a revival of silent film and '40s melodrama, but with thoroughly modern technical twists. For example, especially in the film's jaw-dropping second half, the movie cuts out the dialogue audio altogether but keeps the ambient, environmental noise, to sublime effect: it appears as though we are in a silent movie but without the surrealism inherent in draining the world of sound completely—the actors seem merely lost in time, which is keeping right with the themes of memory and history in the plot itself. Beautiful. Grade: A

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
It's a fun little action movie but not a great one: the fantasy feels a little thin and (though far be it from me to speak for a culture but still) possibly culturally insensitive. But Kurt Russell is a treasure in general, and specifically here, he's far an away the best part of the movie. The central gag of having him look and sound like an '80s action hero but giving him the grace and intelligence of one of the Three Stooges is hysterical. The rest of the movie isn't half so entertaining, but it's nothing game-breaking. Grade: B




Television

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 3 (2015-16)
Fox's cop comedy continues to be one of the most consistent traditional sitcoms on TV. The inclusion of more cop-drama-esque storylines in the quarter of the season via ex-undercover-cop Adrian Pimento (Jason Mantzoukas, aka Parks and Rec's Dennis Feinstein) does a great job of shaking up what is, most weeks, a classic workplace comedy in spirit, and the final stretch of episodes is some of the best work the show has done. Elsewhere, the series consistency means that there's the occasional predictability and lull to the rhythms of the show, but when that's anchored by one of the funniest casts on TV right now, it's still lots of fun. Grade: B+

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 2 (2016)
The only thing better than a fantastic rookie season is the proof that the sophomore season is every bit capable of keeping pace. There's a lot of 30 Rock here, which is good, but it took 30 Rock at least twice as long (and several missteps more) to hit the glorious levels of absurdity that Kimmy achieves on an episode-by-episode basis. Perhaps even more impressive, though, is that in the thick of all the jokes about Cate Blanchette (is she talented, or just tall??) and roller coasters, the show manages to preserve the human core that makes it all so endearing. If anything, the series manages to plumb even greater emotional depths than before with its portrayal of the psychological fallout of Kimmy's trauma. It's hilarious, bizarre, and sweet, which is just the way I like it. Grade: A-

Books (Plays?)

Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre) by Federico García Lorca (and Ted Hughes?) (1933 [1996?])
Sorry for all the parentheses and question marks. I'm frankly confused about Ted Hughes's involvement with my particular version of García Lorca's modernist play. The cover says, "in a version by Ted Hughes," which seems different from a simple translation, but the notes inside don't indicate what exactly makes it Ted Hughes's "version." Anyway, it's good, minimalist, politically charged drama with sharply human stakes. I enjoyed it, Ted Hughes or no. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for March 21 - 27, 2016

Reviews, reviews, reviews! Happy Easter, y'all! (Only movies this time—ah, the allure of the silver screen)

Movies

Mountains May Depart (山河故人) (2015)
The thing is, it's kind of hard to discuss this movie without talking about the movie's final third, and that movie's final third is best experienced cold. Whether or not that ending works is another conversation altogether, and I'm of two minds right now, and neither is entirely enthusiastic. Neither is entirely negative, either. I will say this: throughout its runtime, Mountains May Depart shows an sharp eye for imagery and genre-blending (it handily vacillates between light comedy, domestic melodrama, and sweeping saga) that makes it a thoroughly interesting experience. What's even better is that it's one of those rare movies that, regardless of the technical success of its "interesting" elements, is consistently engaging on an emotional level. And that covers a multitude of possible structural sins. Grade: B+

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Nausicaä is, without a doubt, one of the most visually stunning of Hayao Miyazaki's career, which is no small feat. It's also full of some of the most inventive creature and character designs in animation history, period—the opening minutes are absolutely jaw-dropping in their warped, mystical grandeur. It also runs into the same problem that I've always had with Princess Mononoke (a movie that shares no small portion of Nausicaä's DNA), which is that for all its epic scope, it's kind of cold. I enjoy watching these characters, but I don't care a thing about them, and I'm not convinced the movie does either. Ultimately, that's not a huge problem--it's much more focused on imagery and action, and on that rubric, it's a resounding success. Grade: A-

The Comedy (2012)
The point is good: irony and sarcasm are ultimately empty ways of interpreting the world if it's the only way you look at things. The problem is that the point is made clearly in the first five minutes and reinforced ad nauseum over the next 90 minutes of generally bland indie-aesthetic cinematography and mumbling dialogue. It's tedious to the extreme. Grade: C-

Nostalghia (1983)
Another Tarkovsky, another masterpiece. At this point, I'm prepared to call the man the greatest visualist in cinematic history: it takes about thirty minutes for the truly arresting images to come in this movie (it's no coincidence that those first minutes are the least interesting of the whole film), but once they come, they are constant and gorgeous. I was riveted, and I'm convinced that you could take any frame and mount it as gorgeous photography. Get me a poster of the final shot, STAT. It's not all just eye candy, though. Thematically, this movie's a little more straightforward than earlier, more cryptic Tarkovsky like The Mirror, but it's no worse for that. Like Stalker before it, Nostalghia is a film about religion's role in how we think about the past and present, and it's super compelling. So, gold stars all around. Grade: A

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
The original Cloverfield showed the traditional monster-movie scenario from the perspective of basically mere extras—those who just run and scream the whole time, a bleak portrait of how little agency most non-Schwartzenegger people have in a disaster. Enter 10 Cloverfield Lane, one of the tightest, smartest sci-fi thrillers of the 2010s, and you have a similar conceit of telling a micro story in the context of what turns out to be a much larger one. 10 starts at the smallest possible point, focusing on tiny objects on a dresser, and meticulously pulls back its lens over the next 100 minutes until the ending gives our protagonist her first moment of true agency: the choice to be either a movie extra or a movie hero. Like the rest of the film, it's simultaneously horrifying and thrilling. Grade: A-