Hey, I got HBO! I'm cool now.
Movies
A deranged, no-holds-barred throw-down against any sense of "respectability" that horror as a genre has tried to gain for itself in the past decade. James Wan goes absolutely bonkers with his camera, whipping that thing around in wild, virtuosic spins, and everything else in the movie follows suit. The plot kind of resembles one of those toothpick-and-marchmallow towers you had to build in middle school science class, where the facts at how ludicrously this thing is assembled and how shakily it reaches its heights aren't problems but the entire premise of the appeal, and if you aren't going to cackle gleefully as the movie pulls rug after rug out from under you, you're not going to like this movie. I was on-board as soon as it starts getting silly after its admittedly tepid warm-up half hour, though, so I had a great time. Really wish I could have caught this in a theater. Grade: A-
A quirk in my phone plan got me HBO Max*, so now I finally get to check out Soderbergh's two movies he did for them (and that HBO probably wouldn't have put out on physical media for years). This one's good! A really, really terrific film noir screenplay from Ed Solomon, who wrote things like the Super Mario Bros. movie, the Bill & Ted movies, etc.—surprise of the century that he has a movie this grimy and menacing and tightly written in him. It's no surprise that this material attracted Soderbergh; he's been directing crime thrillers about the perils of capitalism since I was in elementary school, so it probably would have been more of a shock if it hadn't turned out good. People don't seem to like the fish-eye lens used throughout, but I thought it looked cool. Grade: A-
*Also, I've been out of the HBO ecosystem for most of my life, so I'm open to suggestions on what series to watch. Assume I've already seen the big ones like The Sopranos, because I have!
Too cute by half and doesn't have anything real to say about the US-Mexico border, despite that figuring prominently into the plot. But it is nice to see Clint palling around rural Mexico and making friends, and this movie has its low-key charms as long as it sticks to that. Grade: B-
Second HBO Soderbergh I've seen! This one is also very good. It's basically a distillation of Soderbergh's proclivity with talented ensembles, and almost nothing else. Allegedly, most of the scenes in this movie were improvised, and you can kind of tell because of all the stammering, but also, it's an incredible exhibition of just how magnetic a great actor can be with a character given the right framing. Dialogue wanders with inventively circuity around the characters' relational dynamics, but always lands exactly where it needs to to advance to the next scene or plot beat; I've seen a lot of people compare it to jazz, and that sounds exactly right to me, capturing that same live-wire energy and virtuosity that can make a jazz performance so riveting. It's a spacious, generous movie, but also a tight one in its own way, and I was never bored. This is pretty near top-tier Soderbergh for me, though given that almost all his movies are hovering in the B+/A- range for me, it's not a super high ceiling to clear. Grade: A-
An incredibly inventive stop-motion film using shoes and other found objects as stand-ins for oppression under the modern state; given its cycle of revolution-->oppressive new normal, I don't know that it would be accurate to classify it as anti-capitalist, as I've seen some people do—maybe anti-industrial and anti-hierarchical, but it seems to be going broader than a specific political system. Whatever; it's still cool. I wish I could be as over-the-moon about this as some people are, but I think the version I watched (tried both Amazon and Tubi) is broken. I can't be sure that this isn't intentional, given the already experimental nature of this thing, but it looked like the film's frames got slightly jumbled in the conversion to whatever file these streaming services are using, and as a result, the whole thing has this jittery, almost strobe-like look that was kind of hard to watch. Would love to know if other people had this experience and if this is the intended effect. If it is, then I don't like that effect.
EDIT: Okay, I rewatched this on Plex (never heard of that streaming service? Me neither!) and confirmed that the Amazon and Tubi versions were broken. Plex is the way to go! Seeing this with a lot more clarity now. On the one hand, I'm even more in awe of the technical prowess on display here; truly jaw-dropping craft, so much so that I'm bumping this up from what I had originally rated it. On the other hand, now being able to follow the story a lot better, I think I am going to have to change my take and agree with the consensus that this is anti-capitalist—though of a kind of Animal Farm variety that's ultimately not so much concerned with the theory of deconstructing capitalism as much as it is with the ways that the oppressions and hierarchies present within capitalism can manifest themselves in other systems, too, so long as they are reliant on the same kind of industrialism that subjugates bodies and the planet. So far so good, except that this movie frames it in gendered terms, which is kind of cool for the way that it shows the limitations of the "more female CEOs" line of thinking and how the enforcement of gender roles is a way of upholding modes of production but also feels pretty iffy in the ways that it evokes trans identity (especially given the English title and tagline). I genuinely don't know what to do with this movie's relationship with transness, and the film is opaque enough that I couldn't say for sure that it's transphobic, but I can't say for sure that it isn't transphobic either. For that reason, I'm hedging my bets by not rating this even higher, but know that this is absolutely amazing in most other aspects—heavily reminiscent of The Wolf House and 1986's The Pied Piper in terms of its grotesque, mind-melting animation, so if you were at all into those movies, SEEK IT OUT (but on Plex, though). Grade: B
It's more or less a Twain anthology, and the decision to focus on Twain's later, less-read works like The Mysterious Stranger (which provides the film's lone top-to-bottom great segment) is extremely cool. But given that, it's pretty disappointing how aggressively dopey the execution of so much of it is. This is a fairly niche reference, but the writing and voice acting (esp. for the vapid children—character from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for some reason) reminded me of those episodes of Adventures in Odyssey where the kids would jump in the Imagination Station to live through some edges-sanded-off depiction of American history or The Bible or whatever, and while it's impossible to turn Twain (and especially his unrelentingly cynical late career) into something as leadenly wholesome and whitewashed as Focus on the Family's radio-drama versions of beloved white Christian myths, there's an aw-shucks folksiness to this movie's relationship with Twain that overlaps a little bit with that, mixed with those "Read" library posters and an anachronistic dash of The Pagemaster. Even so, the general thematic arc of the film is kind of wild in its obsession with mortality (if I'm still on my Odyssey analogy, it's basically "The Mortal Coil" with a secular-humanist gloss—why do I remember so much about Adventures in Odyssey?), and the claymation yields some genuinely incredible imagery, especially near the end with the Halley's Comet sequence. It's kind of sad that outside of the extreme polish of Aardman, clay-based stop-motion has basically gone extinct, because in its heyday, the medium's capacity for rough-edged phantasmagoric worlds was something special. Grade: C+
The pacing and some of the creative decisions early on (why is Munchkinland so dimly lit?) make it pretty clear why short-sighted audiences and critics didn't respond well to this upon release. But holy cow, this movie is magnificent for long stretches, including the entire last 45 minutes. Michael Jackson is a revelation to me as the Scarecrow, the colors, set design, and choreography are jaw-dropping, and the cinematography does the thing that a lot of '70s musicals did, where it mixes scuzzy '70s grime with the aesthetic maximalism of the musical genre's 1950s heyday. I wasn't initially sold on Diana Ross as Dorothy, but good lord does she sell it by the end, especially in the final song, "Home." It's incredible that in a movie as ostentatious in its style makes its most ostentatious stylistic flourish in its final minutes with that one-take medium close-up of Ross decontextualized from any scenery, just absolutely belting "Home" at the top of her lungs as tears pour down her face—maximalist minimalism of the highest order. This is kind of a tangent, but I'd also be shocked if the "Home" sequence wasn't a direct inspiration for the "Fools Who Dream" sequence in La La Land, and I'm also shocked that for as much as The Discourse surrounding La La Land involved people excavating its influences and pointing and sneering at how La La Land was allegedly a weaker/less pure pastiche of its predecessors (unfair, but whatever), nobody mentioned The Wiz and how much "Home" and Ross completely and totally eclipse anything "The Fools Who Dream" and Stone are capable of. Not sure if it's fair to say that The Wiz needs to be reclaimed, given as I understand it that it was never really lost on the black audiences it was made for. But it certainly surprised me. Grade: A-
Television
Dear White People, Volume 4 (2021)
Conceptually, one of the most baffling final seasons of a show I've ever seen. There are a couple of things here that defy explanation. Firstly, the season is given a framing device where the characters are sitting around sometime in the future (I think it's supposed to be the late 2020s/early 2030s, though I don't remember it ever being clarified) reminiscing about the events of Volume 4 as we see them unfold—I suppose we get to see where these characters ended up in their careers, but none of that proves to be particularly illuminating, and anyway, the framing mostly is an outlet for tired jokes about Zoom and "oh no, the pandemic never ended." The second and far harder bizarre creative decision to swallow is that as the characters flash back to the events of the season, they remember them as a '90s R&B jukebox musical, complete with reality-breaking choreography. And, like..... what?? Dear White People has always been a stylistically arch series, but having characters suddenly break into song (and not just any song but distractingly famous songs) is such a radical break from the show's normal that I have to ask: why? We get a few clever recontextualizations of lyrics, some nice dances, but that's about it. It's an extremely tall request for an audience to go along with the series blowing up its format like this, and in return, there's no immediate thematic payoff or urgency to it, much less a suitable explanation. I do kind of admire the sheer audacity of the concept, but the concept itself is just never justified enough to warrant the dissonance of its inclusion. People joke about Community's "gas leak year," but this genuinely feels like the writers were in a chemical-induced fugue state. I might be more charitable about this stuff if the season didn't also feel like a major step down in terms of writing. There's a thematic throughline about the tensions between working within the system vs. tearing the system down, and the season does a reasonable job of showing why someone would choose the former despite believing in the latter. However, the moment-to-moment dialogue and character development feels strained and thin, diluted by the musical sequences and the constant flashing back and forth between the framing device. Plus, the catalyst for this tension is a new character named Iesha Vital, a freshman activist who attacks the cast (especially Sam) from the left. It's not a theoretically bad catalyst, and like most of the characters on the show, Iesha is premised on a contemporary political archetype. But Iesha never feels like she's given the life and messy humanity that the rest of the show's cast is afforded, and on a political level, the show seems unduly skeptical of her political motivations. In fact, the series makes the questionable decision to have her be somewhat disingenuous in her critiques of the older cast, being propelled by what the series explicitly labels as "immaturity" and emotional confusion. In the past, Dear White People has done a great job having imperfect people in ideological dialogue with one another, and oftentimes the show uses interpersonal psychology to inform its characters' politics. But Iesha's characterization feels strikingly slim on generosity, and even at the end of the season, when she's made more sympathetic, she's still a fairly flat character. I dunno, it's just a weird look for a show that's usually so sharp in terms of evoking current extremely online political discourse that it fails to believably render this dynamic. Just another miscalculation in a season full of them. An exceptionally disappointing end to what has perennially been one of Netflix's freshest shows. Grade: C
Books
Wildly ambitious climate change fiction (a real genre now, it seems). The novel tells three parallel stories: one of a mythical faun and his human brother in late-1700s Ohio, another of ecologically collapsing late-21st century when the world's resources are owned by a tech giant run by a Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk analog, and the third thousands of years in the future as a 3D-printed cyborg searches for the last remnants of human civilization—all three tales riffing on Johnny Appleseed, the Orpheus myth, and biblical echoes to form an arc of North America under human industrialism. It's clear that Bell knows exactly what he's doing; the novel's plausibility is extremely stressful (as are all clear-eyed looks at the titanic realities and frightening possibilities of climate change), and its mythological preoccupations are inventive and often profound. I was sure that a novel with so many threads and sweeping ideas would spin out of control by the end, finishing on an unsatisfactorily tangled attempt to tie everything together, but astoundingly, Bell lands this incredible machine with the most elegant series of pages in the entire novel as he dovetails all three stories in the book's finale. The novel isn't perfect (it has a habit of over-explaining itself in the late-21st century story), but it's compelling nonetheless, not to mention impressive: a fully realized treatise on the fatal incompatibility of our planet's health with humanity's compulsion to subjugate, which reads not like a treatise but like a myth. Grade: A-
