Mini Reviews for August 3-9, 2020

Reviewin'.

Movies

Slay the Dragon (2020)
Gerrymandering and the modern Republican Party are both awful, and I'm glad there's a whole film dedicated to those two unshakable facts. But that said, this movie includes a brief clip of the Last Week Tonight episode about gerrymandering, which made me realize that the whole movie kind of feels like that John Oliver segment stretched to feature length, with very little to show for the extra length. These kinds of activist documentaries are never going to engage me formally, but I'd at least like to think they aim to be more informative than a half-hour HBO clip. On the plus side, though, this movie is entirely free of Oliver's extremely forced jokes, so maybe this would have actually been my preferred method of getting this information if I'd seen it before the Last Week Tonight episode. Grade: C+

Junun (2015)
Honestly, it's just nice to spend an hour watching Johnny Greenwood jam with his pals from India (plus one pal from Israel) while Paul Thomas Anderson does basically the equivalent on the filmmaking side. I don't have any deep thoughts. This was just pleasant, and I enjoyed it. Grade: B+

Matinee (1993)
A delightful, mostly frothy salute to William Castle (literally everything with a very Castle-esque John Goodman is a great time) that also somehow manages to argue by the end that movies acclimate people to the horrors of nuclear proliferation and the military industrial complex? Some seriously wild thematic turns, especially in the penultimate shot of the film, where a cutesy coming-of-age moment occurs in the context of a military base with literal armed helicopters and jets flying overhead. Having grown up partly on an air force base, I can testify first-hand to the astounding degree to which living within walking distance of industrial death machines can be normalized, and in conjunction with that, there's really something to Goodman's final monologue about how films help people accept almost certain annihilation at the hands of the kinds of people who populate Dr. Strangelove—if not the b-movie schlock peddled by William Castle then certainly the likes of your average U.S.-military-affiliated action blockbuster like Independence Day or whatever. Wild thematic turns, I say. Mad. Grade: B+

La Chinoise (1967)
A bunch of college kids get into Maoism and try to start a revolution. Basically a feature-length exploration of the limitations of bourgeois folks to instigate radical change—the revolution in this movie fails, in part, because these kids' backgrounds (their parents are all like bankers and stuff) give them no organic class solidarity with the people they actually need to link up with to start a movement (and, as a side note, it's probably worth pointing out that arguably Godard runs into this problem himself with his writing and direction, given the somewhat iffy way that, for example, a Black character is briefly tokenized by the film). It's a strikingly clear-eyed film, too. College activism can be so inspiring and important, but I also don't think I've ever seen a more apt deconstruction of that kind of activism, either, and what this movie depicts is uncomfortably close to the ways in which I've seen mini-movements surrounding people like those in this film (including myself) fail. I mean, I haven't seen botched assassination attempts, but the basic group dynamics and ultimate collapse ring extremely true—a bunch of college-educated white people failing to realize systemic change because they are busy yelling at each other about theorists and whether or not Johnny Guitar is problematic hits very close to home for me and likely does for a lot of people on the internet, I'd guess. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for May 20-26, 2019

HEY EVERYONE! Don't forget to check out my announcement—this summer, you can recommend movies for me to review. Check out this post for details.

Here's where you submit recommendations for next week! Last chance!

Movies

Avengers: Endgame (2019)
There are moments of Endgame that I like quite a bit. The movie's playfulness with Marvel history is fun. The principle arcs for Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are satisfying and just the right amount of poignant. Paul Rudd's Ant-Man gets some pretty good audience-surrogate befuddlement humor. And while the movie is (somehow) both too sprawling and too rushed to have many moments of intimate character interactions of the kind we might get in Guardians of the Galaxy or even the first Ant-Man movie, the cast here is pretty much universally at the top of their respective games and sells some emotional moments that, on paper, feel very slight (particularly kudos to the original Avengers crew of Downey Jr., Johansson, Ruffalo, Evans, and Renner, who get about 90% of the screentime here). But all the things I like get completely buried beneath the lumbering, three-hour behemoth of the actual movie. It's of course possible to make a good movie at this length, but the way this movie ambles forward in its inscrutable, segmented structure makes that runtime just draaaagggg. It's a lot to swallow at once, lacking a consistent forward momentum and cross-cutting to death all of its most interesting sequences—would it have been too much to just let one of these setpieces play out uninterrupted without constantly checking in on every other character in the movie every two minutes? Can't we just get to these people's stories in a minute once this scene finishes? The central "Time Heist" sequence suffers most from this, which is a real shame because otherwise, that's my favorite part of the movie. I guess another way of saying this is that there is a lot of cool stuff here but so little artistry in stitching it all together that it becomes a tedious slog in execution. And about that execution: I like how kooky this movie is willing to get—time travel is invented in the space of a few hours by two separate characters—and it's nice to see the film drop the whole charade of scientific plausibility that the early Marvel movies indulged in. But for a movie that's supposed to be the dramatic culmination of all the franchise's conflicts and arcs, there's a lot of half-baked hand-waving away of those conflicts with, as Thor calls it, "space magic." Like how, for instance, in the space of about thirty seconds, Bruce Banner explains that he now uses Science to be himself and the Hulk at the same time without losing control; I mean, isn't that the whole thing about Bruce Banner? The Jekyll/Hyde conflict between the brain and the brawn? Ten years of this MCU character, and he just magically fixes his core personal conflict offscreen? Endgame has a dozen such moments. Don't even get me started on how Ant-Man gets out of the quantum realm. In a way, this movie is a microcosm for how I feel about the project of the MCU as a whole: lots of potential, some exhilarating moments, and a handful of endearing characters, but ultimately too structurally fractured and easily plotted and inconsistent in its engagement with its own most interesting ideas to make a compelling whole. Maybe Endgame was doomed with me from the start, since my enthusiasm for the MCU had mostly dried up by the time this movie rolled around; but I'd like to think that there was a version of this movie that I would have enjoyed a lot—alas, one undercut at every turn by the movie that Marvel apparently wanted to make. Grade: C

Booksmart (2019)
Pretty delightful overall. It has a lot of tonal problems—the movie lurches from some seriously melancholy stuff to goofy hijinks in the span of a cut, oftentimes with the characters shifting emotional tenor alongside the tone, which is pretty jarring, especially when the last act of the movie dials up the sadness and the hijinks at the same time. But the hijinks are very funny, and the sad stuff is legitimately affecting, so it's hard to complain too much. The performances are uniformly perfect, too; it would be easy to say that the onscreen chemistry between Feldstein and Dever carries the show, and they're both very good, but honestly, just focusing on them would be a disservice to the entire cast, among whom there's not a bum note even when some pretty cartoony characters are asked to pivot into emotional stakes and there's basically nothing but the performance to sell that turn. Hey, and Olivia Wilde, director: also good! In fact, there are some moments here that are positively sublime (I'm thinking in particular of an underwater pool scene that just soars); other parts feel somewhat cinematically pedestrian, which makes me look forward to a movie (her next?) when Wilde is able to make the stylistic touches this movie showcases more of a consistent aesthetic than merely a flourish. Again, hard to complain too much when what we got is still good. Plus, the teens in this movie listen to LCD Soundsystem and all the other music cool 28-year-old dads are into, which I thought was very considerate of them. Grade: B+

Under the Silver Lake (2018)
People have knocked this movie as derivative, but I dunno, "Inherent Vice for the internet age" seems like a fresh enough variation to me, not to mention a vital one. The movie's surreally timeless setting, in which it is seemingly every year between 1980 and now, combined with the conspiracy-theory-addled mind of a sexist male makes this movie feel almost like a personification of the internet itself, its glibly nostalgic leanings (Nintendo Power, of all damn things, plays a pivotal role in the plot), its pervasive sexism/male dominance, and its epistemological knots making it feel uncannily of a piece with what I feel every day when I log in to Facebook. I wish that the movie had a more trenchant critique of its protagonist's sexism, because that seems like one of the more urgent internet-era toxins out there, and the movie is definitely too long. But I found the movie compelling regardless. If Inherent Vice posits that the hippie movement failed because its culture of drugs broke down any sort of functional concept of shared reality, then Under the Silver Lake says the same about the endless, context-free information the internet gives us. When you know everything, how can you know anything? And when you know both everything and nothing, how can you not be a deluded prick? Grade: B+

Apollo 11 (2019)
One of the more bizarre elements of modern life is the way that the moon landing has become just historical background noise, just tacitly accepted as fact in the same mundane way that we acknowledge any figure in a textbook. So though it seems an obvious thing to do, it's no small achievement that Apollo 11 renders the moonshot with exactly the appropriate level of awe, turning a montage of archival footage into a justly gobsmacked expression of wonder at what is arguably the greatest technological and political feat of all time. More incredibly, the movie manages this nearly mythic depiction of the Apollo 11 mission through an obsession with the process that got us there. You get the famous "One small step for man" stuff, sure, but that's a relatively small moment set against dozens of minutes of NASA technicians feverishly running through tests and figures; we spend more time watching and listening to Neil Armstrong, et al, prepare coordinates and measure velocities on the approach to the moon than we do watch them on the actual moon, and even when on the moon, there are surprisingly long stretches devoted to small technicalities like the hassle of an astronaut trying to put an object in his suit's exterior pocket. It's myth-making through meticulous specificity, and it's edge-of-your-seat riveting. I could quibble with some of the showy musical choices (I would have rathered no music whatsoever), but what are quibbles when we made it to THE MOON?? Grade: A-

Alphaville (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution) (1965)
I really like how the traditional sci-fi/noir trappings interact with the more overt "Godard" touches like the abstract montages that occasionally pepper the movie. I don't know that outside of its aesthetic ambitions that the movie is doing anything super philosophically interesting, though, which is a shame, since that's like the whole thing about dystopian sci-fi. Like, okay, sure, modern society's emphasis on reason and logic and cold mechanical processes is ultimately antithetical to what human beings actually are, but that seems obvious, right? Maybe it's just that I'm watching this 50+ years after it came out, but that seems like a disappointingly straightforward and obvious idea for Godard. But man, at least this film has style. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for March 26 - April 1, 2018

SOME EXCITING STUFF BEFORE THE REVIEWS:

• Firstly, don't forget to vote on what project you'd like me to do over this summer! If you voted on the Blogger widget yesterday, you'll have to vote again on the Google Form... I'm sorry for the terribleness of that Blogger poll.
  
• Secondly, as I mentioned last week, I went to the Big Ears festival. I'm now excited to announce that my first piece of coverage has been published (view it here), and the podcast in which I recap the festival in more general terms with my friend Andrew is live here.

Okay, now onto the reviews.

Movies

Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage) (2014)

Though it lacks the highest highs of the other two 21st-century Godard movies I've seen (e.g. the Carnival Cruise sequence on Film Socialisme), Goodbye to Language holds together much better, and it *thankfully* finds a meaningful philosophical position beyond the political nihilism of some of Godard's other movies. Even better is the way that though the movie is essentially plotless, it still finds a way to endear me to its two central human characters (whose relationship I feel weirdly invested in, even though it largely consists of them being naked and the dude pooping) and even the dog (who becomes the doggiest of audience surrogates). This movie made me feel things besides the impulse to roll my eyes, which is an enormous step up from Film Socialisme. Also, the 3D is pretty neat. Grade: B

Atari: Game Over (2014)

What I assumed was going to be a goofy puff piece about the investigation of the "Atari dumped millions of E.T. cartridges into a landfill" urban legend turns out also to be part familiar history of the Atari company (sans all the sexual harassment allegations, so okay) and part weirdly sentimental defense of the E.T. game. It's quite boring. Also, Ernest Cline is all over this movie, and he wants you to know the E.T. game is great. Grade: C

Death Proof (2007)

Tarantino's half of Grindhouse is mesmerizing in that Tarantino way of long, long, talky tension and then sudden release. There's not a lot to Death Proof beyond its studied commitment to certain old-school aesthetics (both the opening slasher-like half and the twisted-metal chasing of the second half are unapologetic throwbacks, right down to the grainy film and freeze-frame ending), its rambling-but-measured pacing, and its blunt-force feminism/rape-revenge metaphor, and people who call the movie "slight" aren't wrong. But it's a good time. (I talk about this movie in more detail on Episode 189 of Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.) Grade: B

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

I won't tell you that Tim Burton's adaptation isn't a disaster, because it most definitely is. But that disaster is mitigated by the saving grace that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is at least a fascinating train wreck, full of bizarre and intriguing ideas that more often than not just plain don't work together but in isolation are dazzling to think about: the garish, colorful set design that's something akin to Disney World by way of German Expressionism, the rollicking Oompa-Loompa musical sequences (each in their own musical style from across the spectrum of 20th century music), the way the film really embraces the nastiness of the book (nobody ever hated children quite so deliciously as Roald Dahl, but John August's screenplay comes pretty close), the utterly strange and uncomfortable decision to lampshade the evils of capitalism (Charlie's dad loses his low-wage factory job to automation, for example) and the fact that Willy Wonka is basically a colonizing capitalist who uses slave labor while at the same time maintaining the story's wide-eyed adoration for the Wonka brand—I could go on and on. None of this works in concert with one another, and not all of it even registers as "good" when taken in isolation. But the fact that Burton decided to mash it all together into one big nauseating gobstopper of a film remains endlessly entertaining to consider. It's one of the last glimmers (however faint) of Burton the Visionary before Burton the "I'm Trapped in a Prison of My Own Design, and Oh Please, Why Alice in Wonderland" fully overtook his career. We also hadn't quite reached the point where Johnny Depp's "celebrity impression, but with funny hats" thing had worn thin yet (to say nothing of the uncovering of his abusive behavior, which is of course inescapable now), and his Willy Wonka is a riveting, profoundly alien presence (though the Wonka Daddy Issues subplot is a huge part of why this movie doesn't work). So no, this is not good. But ask me about it—I'd love to talk. Grade: C

Whale Rider (2002)

This film's depiction of a young girl's fight against her community's patriarchal structure is maybe a bit staid, but Keisha Castle-Hughes is really, really good as the lead, Paikea, and New Zealand's Whangara community is a fascinating and (to me) unfamiliar setting in which to tell this story, however sedate. Grade: B

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

It's a movie about drug users, so you know what to expect. There's not a lot going on thematically in Drugstore Cowboy that, at this point, you wouldn't have already seen in Trainspotting or the less hysterical parts of Requiem for a Dream, though I suppose Cowboy deserves points for getting there first. It's also considerably less self-consciously "cool" and show-off-y than the aforementioned movies and a lot less ponderous than something like Leaving Las Vegas, which are also marks in its favor. Plus, the cast is excellent from top to bottom, and I appreciate the clear-eyed way in which the screenplay views its characters—affectionately, but never under the delusion that the drug-rustling protagonists nor the cops in pursuit are heroes. Grade: B

Polyester (1981)

Having seen only Hairspray years ago and now Polyester, I'm sort of backing my way into John Waters's legendarily uproarious filmography (at least, I'm led to believe). I can only imagine what lays in store for me as I explore the rest of his work, because Polyester is plenty uproarious: a relentless parody of the nuclear family that feels like the unholy lovechild of a live-action cartoon and a Ramones song. It's consistently hilarious and also oddly sweet and sad in ways I wasn't expecting. My screening also came with scratch-and-sniff Odorama cards, as John Waters intended. All ten scents all just kind of smelled like a cross between B.O. and petroleum byproduct, but maybe that was the point. Grade: A-

Property (1979)

This (criminally under-seen) movie checks a lot of my boxes: economic critiques of urban renewal, depictions of community organizing, activism, '70s bohemianism, long discussions about city planning. Property is rambly and very '70s American indie in the Altman vein, but it's also much more intimate than, say, Nashville or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or any of Altman's community-focused features. I credit the cast, which depicts this Portland, OR, community with a liveliness that threatens to pop right off the screen and join me in the meetings I go to in my own neighborhood. I relate deeply to the scenes in this movie that involve block residents just sitting around a table and trying to get stuff done in that chaotic, incredible way that anyone who's been involved in community organizing will recognize. The movie isn't perfect—most notably, it ends with an ellipsis when it should by all means have concluded pointedly with a period. But it's my favorite discovery from my time at the 2018 Big Ears festival, and it gets a big ol' thumbs up from me. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for March 12 - 18, 2018

No more SPRING BREAAAAAAAAK.

Movies

Game Night (2018)
The fact that this movie pays any attention to cinematography and shot composition is practically a revolution unto itself within the context of the modern Hollywood comedy. It is also solidly under two hours and mostly devoid of improvised riffing, and with all this combined, it's handily sidestepped my go-to critiques of most mainstream comedy cinema. Truth be told, Game Night isn't hilarious (though it's a decent step in that direction, even as the jokes kind of peter out in favor of plotting toward the middle section onward), and its charms lie mostly in its expert deployment of its impressive cast—it's the best use of Jason Bateman in a decade, Rachel McAdams is as charming as ever, and Jesse Plemons completely steals the show. I feel like I'm damning with faint praise here, but believe me: I enjoyed this, and I welcome more comedies that take their cinematic craft at least this seriously. Are you listening, Judd Apatow? Please? Grade: B+

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017)
There are two modes this movie works in: one about the mechanics and group dynamics of an ACT UP chapter in Paris in the '90s, the other a much more personal rendering of the experience of loving someone who is HIV-positive. Because I dig explorations of activism and the group tensions therein surrounding pragmatism vs. idealism vs. interpersonal connections, I connected much more strongly with the first mode I described, but I can imagine someone just as easily feeling that the intimacy of the second personalizes that activism in ways the first fails to do. Regardless, though, it's all very moving and strikingly presented and worth your time. I do get the feeling that the two modes are bumping up against one another rather than truly complementing each other, and this dulls the movie somewhat. But it's a minor problem overall, and one that only keeps the movie from being Great instead of Good. Grade: B+

Force Majeure (2014)
Force Majeure has one very interesting question on its mind—what is your gut reaction to a crisis: self-preservation or the protection of your loved ones—that unfortunately The Loneliest Planet already eviscerated with much more elegance. Still, it's not like we can't live in a world with more than one film wrestling with the same thematic landscape, and it's an undeniably compelling theme that Force Majeure scrutinizes with a great deal of wry humor and a good eye for critiquing the posturings of masculinity. I do wish there was a bit more on this film's mind, though, because, unlike The Loneliest Planet, Force Majeure exposes its conceit in the very early goings of the film and basically just repeatedly poses it with little variation for the following two hours, right up to its thematically muddled ending. Grade: B-

Film Socialisme (2010)
Jean-Luc Godard chose to have this film's English subtitles not be proper subtitles but as these fractured, conceptual phrases (e.g. "war is war," "hello geometry," you get the picture). I guess these are supposed to clue us English-speaking swine in to the larger thematic concerns of the movie while still preserving the feeling of us being present in a context outside of our own language, but who knows—writing I've seen about this movie discusses aspects of the movie that I totally didn't register at all (one of the characters is apparently running for public office?), so maybe Godard is just trolling us even more heavily than my academic rationalization of the subtitles indicates. What that means is that all I'm left with are those broad ideas—as always, Godard loves his leftist ideology, so hellooooo low-hanging imagery about the excesses of capitalism—and the pure texture of the movie, which, to be fair, is often quite playful and fun in that cockeyed way that avant-garde cinema can be; for example, my favorite of the cryptic subtitles reads, meme-ily, "What if reality but in books," which elicited a hearty chuckle, and other sections use the language of film to funny, incongruous effect: a long, static close-up of a llama scored with tense, serious music (and later, Gregorian chant). Honestly, the movie's first movement (set on a Carnival Cruise) and the third/final (consisting mostly of a collage of repurposed existing footage, both from Godard films and film history) are also frequently visually sumptuous in the ways it uses filmic imperfections and datamoshing to create these almost painterly images. But good merciful heavens, the middle section of Film Socialisme, set in a gas station, is interminable and inscrutable and above all crushingly boring, especially in absence of my being able to understand the French dialogue outside of those subtitled abstractions, and it just kills the movie for me. I guess part of this is my fault for not learning French like a *real* smart person, but also: screw you, Godard. Even given the eventual pleasures of the final segment, the movie never really succeeds in coaxing me back into the house after throwing me into non-French-speaker jail for so long. Grade: C

The Anniversary Party (2001)
I mean, it's basically rich people being miserable and doing drugs and hating themselves, but... imagine that being intermittently compelling. Also imagine Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming writing and directing the best film versions of themselves, because it's here, too. Grade: B

In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'amour) (2001)
This movie looks amazing, both as the classically composed b&w cinematography of urban, non-famous Paris that makes up the film's first half and as the hazed-out, digital-video-as-first-gen-Technicolor footage that encompasses the film's second half. On the other hand, I'm left extremely cold by the actual text of the film, which involves a bunch of academics considering their pasts as radicals and the ethics of complicity in capitalist systems—not ideas that I'm opposed to a movie exploring by any means, but certainly ones that I wish this particular film engaged with a bit more vigor. I'm sure this says a lot about the difference between what Godard and I want out of this movie, but I wish this felt more of an impassioned dialogue than a cool, ruminative stroke of the chin. Grade: C

Weekend (1967)
In which Jean-Luc Godard condenses centuries of human history and class conflict into a metaphorical road trip into hell—it's hilarious and outrageous and sobering and completely out-there. Weekend is not a subtle movie, but it makes a virtue of unsubtlety ("The end... of cinema" one title card declares) that feels weaponized in a frequently compelling and complicated way, even if I'm just a tad wary of the actual philosophical POV. Godard is leaning into a particularly nihilistic strain of Maoism here, one that, scrubbed of leftism's utopian impulses, posits that Western society is doomed to spiral into tribal chaos whether it's in the hands of exploitative bourgeoisie or violent radicals, which, if this movie is meant to be a political statement, I find to be understandable but ultimately a dead-end of an idea. But maybe I'm just not radical enough, ha. Either way, it's an exhilarating, endlessly inventive movie that, among other things, is the most direct antecedent to last year's mother!—if mother! is the Bible for heretics, then Weekend is (to put the chronology a bit backwards) mother! for Marxists. I liked mother! a whole lot and I'm not a heretic (I don't think?), so it's only natural I'm into this, even though I'm not a Marxist. Grade: A-

Vivre sa vie (1962)
There are definitely things about this movie that work very well—it's stylish, the editing is, of course, great, and Nana is a reasonably engaging character (performed excellently by Anna Karina). I also liked the imposition of The Passion of Joan of Arc over the narrative—Godard loves his Hollywood films, sure, but this is probably the most successful cinematic reference in the movie. That said, Vivre sa vie is fragmented to a degree that I'm not sure it completely justifies—I mean, I know that this is a gigantic part of the movie's conceit, and I'm not against modernist fragmentation. But a lot of this fragmentation feels like an end to itself rather than serving some larger scheme, and as it is, the movie seems very much like the guy who made Breathless grasping at more formal and philosophical profundity, awkwardly caught between more traditional narrative concerns and high-minded philosophical, modernist ones. Grade: B-

Music

U.S. Girls - In a Poem Unlimited (2018)
In case you needed any more assurance that the future of indie rock is female (thank goodness), here's U.S. Girls with a strong, left-of-the-dial collection of pop/rock. In a Poem Unlimited is perfectly balanced between its zanier elements (the sax in "Rage of Plastics," the weird hoarse vocals on "Why Do I Lose My Voice When I Have Something to Say," the song "Time" in general) and its strongly melodic songwriting, resulting in an album that feels unhinged enough to be interesting while it maintains a pop immediacy. Grade: B+