Mini Reviews for December 13 - 19, 2021

School's out.

Movies

West Side Story (2021)
It's abundantly clear the enthusiasm that Steven Spielberg has for movie musicals, and the whole film is just packed with stunning technical flourishes and choreography in a way that completely eclipses any other attempt to revive the American movie musical in recent memory—like, for once, a modern American musical whose editing doesn't slice it to bits. In terms of sheer spectacle, this is the best Spielberg has been in 10-15 years, and in terms of just this year, this is arguably 2021's most beautiful mainstream release. Giving a major musical to a technical classicist with a penchant for sentimental sweep? Predictably great. I hope Spielberg has a chance to make more musicals (doubtful, given this movie's box office performance—what is wrong with you people??), because I've never been a huge fan of West Side Story, and I'd love to see his talents on a show I actually love. But that said, this is probably the best possible version of the show without major revisions.  The central problem that any West Side Story has to deal with is that Tony and Maria are vapid saps—an issue it shares with its Shakespearean source material, it bears mentioning, though Shakespeare seems more aware of the basic emptiness of the romance's impulsive gestures than most West Side Story tellings do. It's an incredibly tall order to write a romance so transparently foolish but also imbued with such powerful pathos that we root for it nonetheless. The traditional West Side Story take on this helps by making the romance a proxy for not just the immediate context of the midcentury NYC slums but also the American Dream itself (foolish, empty, but imbued with irresistible pathos, you say?), so automatically this new version of West Side Story makes the romance just a little more credible by leaning full-bore into the social themes of the play, under the logic that the more we care about the broader sociological import of the setting, the more we care about the romance. Under Tony Kushner's screenplay, this is now a movie explicitly about the forces of white supremacy and bourgeois capitalism conspiring to pit an assimilated European-immigrant underclass against a not-yet-assimilated Puerto-Rican underclass—the movie opens with the announcement that one of Robert Moses's urban renewal projects will demolish the tense slums that encompass the Sharks' and Jets' territory, with the white cops seeding white supremacist conspiracy theories among the Jets to divert their energy against a racial other rather than unite in solidarity with the Puerto Ricans protesting against the forced evictions. I know some people roll their eyes at the way this framing turns an existing subtext in previous versions into explicit text in the movie, but I think it works great, giving the film a sense of urgency and purpose that gives new life to a lot of the play's looser moments. Plus, I do think that such a backdrop does give the Maria/Tony romance a sense of sweeping myth that goes a long way toward helping me feel something about this pair of dopes, though admittedly this thematic approach still struggles when it comes to having to deal with the couple not just as an abstract but also as a pair of psychologically realized individuals—Rachel Zegler is astonishing as Maria and pulls Maria into a compelling character by sheer force of her performance, but the movie still hasn't figured out what to do with Tony, despite revising his character quite a bit (people are going to blame Ansel Elgort, and while he's certainly not an actor skilled enough to conjure an interesting Tony out of thin air, he's also given the much more challenging character to do that with); plus, even as good as Zegler is, even she can't sell the single most incredulous turn in the Romeo and Juliet story, i.e. instantly forgiving Tony for killing her brother. As long as these issues remain, I'm going to have to qualify my relationship with West Side Story, but golly, if this version doesn't come the closest I've seen to fixing them. And enough about Tony and Maria—the rest of the movie is top-to-bottom fantastic, filled with terrific performances (Mike Faist as Riff is especially terrific, as is Rita Moreno as Valentina), which absolutely thrive under the political dimensions of the film and the ways they recontextualize and remixe the songs, choreography, and emotional nuances of the characters. Everything and everyone is just so alive and vibrant and interesting. I loved it. Grade: A-

Benedetta (2021)
There's been a lot of talk about how this is a sexy exploitation film about lesbian nuns, and it's not not that. But I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion about how in addition to that, there's a pretty robust interrogation of church power hierarchies and how they intersect some traditional Christian beliefs about our bodies. Near the beginning of the movie, our protagonist, upon entering a convent, is told that her body is her "enemy," and I'd say that's probably a fair (if a bit provocative) summary of a pretty pronounced strain of anti-sensual tradition within Christianity. I heard it a lot growing up: nobody told me that my body was my enemy, but people did say that the "flesh" is weak, causes you to sin, will rot away before you assume your heavenly form. Nobody was literally self-flagellating, as they do in this movie, either, but it was clear that our bodies' physicality was a barrier in our relationship to God. But then here comes this movie's Benedetta, a wild, maybe serious, maybe charlatan prophetess declaring that the act of physical love is what reveals God to her, and even today such a declaration within some Christian circles wouldn't be any less shocking than it is in the film's version of Renaissance Italy. The Bible never really clarifies what it means that humankind is made "in God's image," but it seems presumptuous to assume that our physical bodies are somehow cordoned off from that imago dei—so what surer way to be closer to God than to be physically intimate with another made in God's image? I mean, sexy nuns are sexy nuns, but what this movie presupposes is... what if that's sacred? Grade: A-

Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021)
No sense wishing for the movie we didn't get, I suppose, but I really wish this had been more of a concert doc, as the talking head segments range from genuinely moving to VH1-style "let's see what this random celebrity has to say about this" (Chris Rock and Lin-Manuel Miranda both show up, for reasons I'm unsure). That said, what we do get of the concert footage is breathtaking, and I'm glad this exists. Grade: B

 

 

 

The Night House (2020)
Some great atmosphere and scares, anchored by a typically terrific Rebecca Hall who absolutely refuses to sand the sharp edges off her character, which is great. The movie gets a little hokey in execution by the end, but I thought that ultimately it was in service of some fairly serious emotions regarding self-harm and depression—and like, yeah, the "reflexively hates Elevated Horror" crowd probably checked out the moment depression shows up as a metaphor, but there's something about the way in which the movie's central metaphors manifest the dark thoughts and listlessness of grief and depression that I connected with, as silly as this is by the conclusion. And unlike a lot of the "Elevated Horror" people hate, this movie is more than just creepy vibes and metaphors—lots of just plain humanity here. Grade: B+

The Lovers on the Bridge (Les amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991)
Very lovely, very French. It peaks early with the ecstatic falling-in-love-with-fireworks sequence, which has got to be one of the greatest "falling in love" sequences in movie history—Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story adaptations, where is this energy for Act 1, Scene 5?? The movie is, by design, a lot less exciting after that, as both we viewers and the characters we're watching come down from the high and reckon with the toxic realities that the early ecstasy was situated within. But problematizing the relationship has the strange effect of making those initial scenes even sweeter, as if the movie is developing a wistful nostalgia for itself as it goes. So by the time we get to the possibly misguided reunion in the film's ending, it reads as a validation of that sense of nostalgia—a weird, complex little coup of sentiment over reason that I dug a lot. Grade: A-

Nightmare Alley (1947)
A grimy noir with some absolutely despicable character turns: carnival barker turned con main extraordinaire—so, you know, the Good Stuff. It's hard to imagine what the Guillermo Del Toro remake could add to this, since as is, this movie feels pretty untouchable. Its ending is a little corny, though I can't imagine Del Toro jettisoning that. Grade: A-

 

 

 

 

Television

Joe Pera Talks With You, Season 3 (2021)
It's not quite the profound masterwork that was Season 2, and the show has abandoned all but the faintest pretense of the casually philosophical essay structure of its first season. It feels rude to call something this charming and poignant "a step down," but it's at least less ambitious. This season is focused on some of the more marginal aspects of the show's world—in some senses, Joe Pera himself allows himself to step to the side to focus a lot more on the secondary characters: Gene, the Melskys, Sarah, that random kid from Antarctica who appeared in the final minutes of S2. It's still incredibly thoughtful and sweet, with Pera's trademark left-turn insights. But it's decidedly lower key than the already low-key previous seasons. Still good, though. Still television's best-kept secret. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for February 10-16, 2020

As you may remember, I was sick last week, so this week's post is both filling in the stuff I didn't get a chance to cover from last week as well as writing about the new stuff I saw this week. Enjoy!

Movies

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
Gorgeous animation—in fact, it's one of the most stunningly rendered "traditional" (i.e. not Spider-Verse) CGI animated features in recent memory. That this is anywhere close to a positive review is entirely on the strength of those visuals. Aside from that, though, I remain completely unable to understand people's connection to the characters and mythology of this franchise; from where I sit, the character models are still ugly, Jay Baruchel's voice acting is still bad, and the larger sweep of the story trends toward convolution rather than gravitas. I'll say this, though: props to this movie for having what is almost certainly the longest sequence devoted to animal mating rituals in an animated movie since Bambi—landmark! Grade: B-

For Sama (2019)
It is pretty tacky to talk about how this movie is shakily edited together from video journals (of a woman in a situation unthinkably more terrifying than anything I've ever experienced), but to watch a movie is to put yourself in a place of privilege over its subject matter, so that's the critical thought that kept flickering through my head. The rest of the time, though, I was pretty deeply moved, and I don't know if I have ever felt a movie scene more viscerally than I did the emergency C-section sequence. Structural issues or not, this is a powerful document. Grade: B+

A Silent Voice (聲の形) (2016)
Meticulous animation that creates a frequently gorgeous effect—it's an oft-made observation, but this is the perfect example of how Japanese animation puts the full power of its technology behind even the most mundane scenarios, and I have nothing but respect for that. As the for the story itself, it felt a little too long and repetitive for my tastes, and the characters' reactions to the two suicide attempts in the movie seem artificial and strange (though perhaps this is just a cultural difference between the US and Japan?). But all that said, the movie finds a good intersection between the sweetness and sourness of its central relationship, and in examining its central ideas of forgiveness, depression, self-loathing, etc., A Silent Voice movingly resists a lot of the pat answers that other movies might lazily reach for. A thorny watch because of that, but not without some fruit. Grade: B

Step Brothers (2008)
Watched this bedridden with a 101 fever, and I honestly don't even know anything about anything. Time is a flat circle, and the "Sweet Child o' Mine" scene is great, but I dunno about the rest. Something else my fevered brain has been thinking about: Bob Dylan's "Isis," on repeat. I don't think that song is in this movie, but it's a good song. Would recommend. Grade: C

Paris Is Burning (1990)
Everything I liked about Climax with none of what I hated. Alternately, a vital and foremostly fun record of late-'80s NYC "ball" culture, and probably the most thorough and complex analysis of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in film history. Grade: A

Purple Rain (1984)
The narrative portions of this movie range from charmingly amateur to outright bad—not really sure what to do with either the bleeding-wound autobiographical elements or the copious misogyny here, either. But luckily, the movie is about 50% musical performances, and as every being, mortal and immortal alike, can attest, the music of Purple Rain slaps all the way to the moon and back. It may in fact be impossible to tear your eyes from the screen as Prince just tears up number after number up on that stage, and the decision to end the movie with about 20 consecutive minutes of music is the best one this movie makes. It's not hard to see why people flocked to this movie; it's also not hard to see why people don't really talk about the movie when they talk about this movie. It's Prince, y'all. Who cares what else there is? Grade: B-

Television

Joe Pera Talks with You, Season 2 (2019-20)
The second season of the best Adult Swim series of all time not only continues the soft-spoken, sincere nicety of its previous season; it also expands everything about what this show is, and in doing so, it becomes a masterpiece. Often eschewing the essayic digressions of its first season, Season Two increasingly deals directly with the psychological realities of its characters and the small and heartbreaking ways in which the march of time changes even the placidity of the show's Upper Peninsula. It's simple, but never simplistic, and almost always profound. I was openly weeping by the ends of half of these episodes. There's nothing like it on television right now, the unassuming beauty of this series and its quiet but hard-won aphoristic triumphs. Grade: A+

BoJack Horseman, Season 6 (2019-20)
All my shows are ending, y'all. Here's BoJack Horseman, ending its run on a mostly high note. There have been a lot of shows recently that have focused on personal growth and recovery in their final stretch (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend comes to mind), and that's the route that BoJack goes, too, in its closing season; its first half largely centers on the twin poles of BoJack's enrollment in rehab and Diane's struggle with depression that leads her to get psychiatric help, while the second half of the season is largely about the thorny, difficult pieces of life that happen after the formal steps of recovery: after medication, after you get out of rehab. And it's pretty good! Creator/showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg has said that he thought Netflix was going to give him more episodes to spread these arcs out over, and that's apparent: secondary characters like Todd get what feels like rushed send-offs that feel like all the show could fit in alongside the main attractions of Diane and BoJack. But allowing for that slightly rushed feel along the edges of the show, it's a mostly compelling conclusion to the series, giving some of the more complex wrestling with "#MeToo" and the idea of problematic protagonists I've seen in a show. It also provides some really stunning individual episodes, most notably the penultimate episode "The View From Halfway Down," which is probably the most frightening and bleak that the show has ever been. And alongside all this, there's of course also the supremely goofy animal puns and wacky humor on clear display, too; I am completely in love with the running gag of the His-Girl-Friday-esque pair of reporters, Paige Sinclair and Maximillian Banks, and there's half a dozen other jokes up to that caliber. This show was special; I'm going to miss it. Grade: B+

The Good Place, Season 4 (2019-20)
The Good Place has always been a show better at exploring ideas than it was developing characters. That doesn't mean that Eleanor, Chidi, etc., didn't have their charms, because they did. But at least for me, if you asked why I came back to the show, it wasn't because I cared particularly strongly for the central cast, winsome as they are. So it's somewhat disappointing that the show's final season leans so heavily on the affection we supposedly have for these characters. Long periods of the final 13 episodes are devoted to giving arcs to the main characters, especially the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, and while I never hated the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, I always appreciated it more as a sideshow to the much more interesting metaphysical ideas this show was batting around. Because when you get right down to it, these characters were not especially complex or interesting; they had an accumulation of traits that worked well for sitcom situations, which was especially helpful in the first season when this show was still halfway a metaphor for the creation of a TV show. But they simply cannot bear the weight of the entire show being put on their shoulders, especially when the characters' emotional arcs are meant also to carry home the ultimate metaphysical ideas the show settles on. About those ideas: I really wish they'd done something more than the whole "eternity is a prison, so the only ethical afterlife is one that eventually leads to annihilation" thing. Look, I know many very smart people have proposed this concept before (including Todd May, a philosopher who makes a cameo in the finale and who argues that life is only meaningful because we are mortal), but I've yet to see anything that convinces me that this whole idea is just unsubstantiated hypothesizing—we don't know anything but mortality, so it seems patently absurd to be so convinced that it is mortality that gives us meaning. Or at any rate, the show is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that an eternal paradise would eventually become hell. Death is a thief and a bastard, and the ability the choose when it happens only solves half of the problem. As long as we're inventing made-up fantasy heavens, I am willing to risk one without it, thank you. So anyway, it's a final season whose characters can't sustain the weight the show puts on them, nor can the show's ideas stand the scrutiny their placement in the finale engenders. It's not like this last season of The Good Place isn't enjoyable in a lot of the ways the show has been enjoyable since its beginning: it's still funny and goofy and absurd in some pretty fun ways, its zippy plotting keeps things interesting and resists settling into a status quo, etc. But on the deepest levels on which The Good Place has been entertaining in the past, Season 4 falls short, which is too bad. So long to one of network television's quirkiest and most thoughtful delights; I'll remember you for the good times, not the finale. Grade: B-

Silicon Valley, Season 6 (2019)
In its final year, the long-running tech satire finds a few new fresh directions, including some topical ones (Richard begins this season testifying before congress making promises about data privacy that he clearly has no idea the feasibility of), and in general, the final season's focus on tech ethics and data harvesting does give Silicon Valley some of the bite it lost in its mediocre last couple years. It's still not nearly as funny as it once was, and the finale bizarrely lands the show on a note of optimism that feels both weirdly out-of-sync for this show and also pretty disconnected from the inescapable hell that is real-world Silicon Valley (I would be shocked if there was a non-zero number of tech giants who intentionally destroyed a very cool piece of code because it had the possibility of destroying the world). But the journey to that note is a solid one, and I had a fun time taking a ride with this show one more time. So yay. Grade: B

Books

March Series by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, Illustrated by Nate Powell (2013-16)
I was a little skeptical of these books at first, because my impression of them is that they were part of the whole "let's turn a school subject into a graphic novel so the kids these days will learn it!" movement, which isn't a movement without its merits but sometimes does lead to some prosaic stuff. The first book feels a lot like that, too, but each successive book gets increasingly complex in ways I wasn't expecting, eventually forming a cycle of books that gives a rich and difficult conversation about the push and pull between radicalism and centrism within political movements. A large part of this comes out of the grounding of the books within John Lewis's point of view, which gives the books a lot of personality and momentum that wouldn't be possible in a straight history. These books are as much memoir as history, which is great; that point of view also saves the books from a lot of the sanctimony that we often like to give history—it is fascinating, for example, how Martin Luther King, Jr., is presented not just as an important leader but also as both a distant celebrity and a frustratingly conservative (relatively) alongside Lewis's more radical vision from SNCC. It doesn't all work; there's a pretty hokey framing device involving Obama's first inauguration, hokey enough that I wonder if, by the end, there's a kind of bitter irony being engaged in (the book ends by talking about the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the late '60s, which then gets juxtaposed with Obama in ways that feel at-best ambivalent). But on the whole, I'm pleasantly surprised by how moving and powerful I found these books. Kids who won't read could do a lot worse than to learn about Civil Rights from this series. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for December 17-23, 2018

2018 catch-up time.

Movies

Mandy (2018)

I'm far from the first to observe that there is a prog half of this film and a metal half, and given that I have a whole section of my blog devoted to progressive rock, there's no surprise which half of this movie I prefer. That said, there's definitely a version of the movie's second half that I would enjoy very much: maybe it's all just for the memes, as some people have insinuated, but a movie in which Nicolas Cage gives a performance of loony Face/Off-style intensity while going on a cartoonishly violent rampage to kill lizard-people cultists sounds like a good time and a half to me. But here, being only half the movie, it feels somewhat cut off at the knees, and besides, juxtaposed with the far trippier, wilder first half of the movie, it feels like a disappointingly ordinary way to finish a film that opens with a bravura credits sequence set to King Crimson's "Starless." In fact, juxtaposed with director Panos Cosmatos's previous feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, which remains one of the great cinematic sensory experiences of the 2010s, even the first half of the movie feels disappointingly ordinary. I dunno, maybe the secret to Black Rainbow was that it was impossible to track the plot; even when Mandy is going full Yes album, it's never that difficult to follow, and it just becomes clear that there's not a lot going on beyond the diluted psychedelia. Inspired in spots but unsatisfying overall. Grade: B-

Roma (2018)

As with most of Alfonso Cuarón's output, there's a sort of nagging feeling that this dude is just showing off with all the precisely choreographed long takes and immaculately blocked cinematography (this time filmed and edited not by his longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki but by Cuarón himself—all the more reason to think he's simply flexing here). And the schematic screenplay, which somewhat contrivedly has grand character confessions and shocking revelations intersect at exactly the moments of highest cinematic sheen, bears this out. But honestly, I don't care one bit how artificial it feels when the results are this gorgeous. It's without a doubt the most visually stunning film I've seen all year, as well as the most pristinely constructed. And as much as the underwritten touches might undercut some of the character development, the cinematic style lifts it right back up again; those long takes tracking through crowded streets and violent tableaus become a sort of characterization of their own, crafting a grandly tragic emotional landscape nearly whole cloth from the film style alone, and as much as I can intellectually pick apart some of the decisions on paper, I didn't have much trouble getting swept up either. Grade: B+

The Green Fog (2018)

That something which, on paper, seems to amount to nothing more than an impressively-but-pointlessly difficult and theoretical archival project (recreating Hitchcock's Vertigo by stitching together footage from other films) actually adds up to a functional movie is sort of miraculous on its own. That it's not only one of the best movies of the year but also one of the funniest and also one of the most beautiful is nothing short of impossible. But here we are, with this amazing little impossible movie somehow existing and being great, having slipped in from another dimension or something. AND TO BOOT, it's got probably the best use of Michael Douglas in a decade, possibly in his whole career. Grade: A

Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)

I don't know why Michael Moore didn't just make a full movie about the Flint water crisis, since that's far and away the best part of this scattered, shambling movie. Moore's populist fury for what has been done to his hometown remains his most compelling characteristic, and the 30 minutes that the film devotes to the whole sordid disaster is borderline great and alone probably justifies Moore's sharp turn toward actual agitprop in this film. However, the rest of the movie is this whirlwind of what feels like a survey of Daily Beast headlines from the past 2-3 years, unified under the really vague umbrellas of "Donald Trump" and "activism." Full of Moore's typical bluster and stuntery (hey, you lip-synced Adolf Hitler footage with audio of a Trump speech, you sure owned the MAGA crowd, don't know how they'll recover from that one), it's this heap of a film that just kind of flops around under its own many-tentacled weight, and it just plain doesn't work. It's viscerally upsetting because watching footage of the Stoneman Douglas shooting or Trump's threats toward protesters is viscerally upsetting just by virtue of those events having occurred at all. But as a coherent take on the modern American political landscape or even as the call to revolution that the finale so dearly wants to be, this is just ineffectual thunder. Grade: C

Food, Inc. (2008)

Normally, I would damn with faint praise by lumping this in with the rest of that tedious activistcore wave of documentaries from the mid-2000s. And... it's not like this isn't that (though it has good taste lacking in every other activist docs, in that it forgoes the obligatory ironic animated sequence). But this film's argumentation against industrial farming is particularly ruthless and cleared-eyed—impressively so. It also yields two legitimately great documentary moments. One involves a beef farmer cutting a hole in the side of a living cow and excitedly showing the camera how he can reach his hand into one of the cow's stomachs like it's the greatest thing since the microchip. The enthusiasm is infectious, both figuratively and literally (being part of a whole segment involving E. coli in meat). Errol Morris would be proud. The other, much more in-tune with the doc's overall rhetorical aims and almost without a doubt the most pointed and effective use of the film's take-no-prisoners posture, is when footage of immigrants being shoved into vans by immigration officials after raids of meat-packing plants plays over audio of an impassioned interview which tells us relentlessly that this is the real cost of our holiday hams and turkeys. It's the film's most bracing deployment of pathos, or at least it is for me eight months after a mass-scale version of that footage occurring just a county over from my house. Grade: B

Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

I mean, this is certifiably pro-cop in this really icky "ends justifying the means" way, to say nothing of the '80s trademark homophobia on display in a few key scenes (apparently the only thing more villainous than a vaguely Russian drug dealer is a vaguely Russian drug dealer who might be gay). But Eddie Murphy is extremely good in this movie—so good that he does a decent job of papering over some of the more objectionable qualities of his character. This is maybe the best Murphy performance that I've seen, and while that's not exactly saying much, given that I've seen only a handful of pre-Shrek Murphy roles, it is pretty stunning what he's doing here. Grade: C+

Vanishing Point (1971)

I'm of two minds regarding this film. Well, of many minds, actually. The film is complete and utter worship of the automobile, which my train-loving spirit objects to strongly, to say nothing of the mythologizing of the Ruggedly Individual American Male, which just sort of bores me. But also, as something of a 20th century folk tale, with all the kaleidoscopic cul-de-sacs and slippery meanings that come with the genre—I mean, is it a lionizing of the Ruggedly Individual American Male, what with that self-destructive ending and all? It's not as simple as it seems. But also, it falls handily into the fallacy of reducing the counterculture to a mere quest for Freedom, Maaaaan, wherein anti-authority sentiments are an end to themselves, which is the same kind of thinking that landed the movement at Altamont and later Ronald Reagan. So screw that. But also... maybe this movie is aware of that? But not enough to avoid casting its almost arbitrarily defiant (and of course white—they're always white, the salvific figures of these counterculture movies) protagonist as some sort of larger-than-life hero of the people? But also, the car goes vroom, and the rock music kicks, and the cinematography is brilliant. I dunno, man, I gotta lotta feelings here, and most of the time, I was feeling like I was having a good time. Grade: B

Television

Joe Pera Talks with You, Season 1 (2018)

I don't even know where this came from. Seemingly out of the clear blue sky (or, more likely, the cold, overcast sky of Michigan's Upper Peninsula) appears this beautiful little Adult Swim gem, featuring none of the aggressive weirdness that's characterized the Adult Swim brand, instead going for a quiet, contemplative wholesomeness that feels more in-line with, like, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood or The Joy of Painting—only infused with an idiosyncratic philosophic impulse and a deep well of melancholy that makes every one of its 11-minute episodes feel like something of a soft-spoken treatise on the human experience. I barely know how to describe it; what I'm saying here barely conveys the wonderfulness of Joe Pera Talks with You. When people talk about "Peak TV," they're usually referring to the explosion of ambitious content on streaming services, but honestly, this is the Peak TV I'm here for: these graceful little pockets of brilliance in the odd corners of the television landscape, both a piece of television tradition and curiously apart from it. Seriously, go watch this, folks. Grade: A

Books

The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket (2003)

The tenth book in A Series of Unfortunate Events is something of a transitional book. Being set on a relatively nondescript mountainside for its entirety, the novel lacks the inventiveness and little satirical microcosm societies that the best books in the series often develop; it's also something of an info-dump as far as the ongoing mysteries in the series go, which feels uncharacteristically inelegant for these books. But it's still that same wonderful wit as the other books, and Snicket's metafiction is both funny and interesting in the ways it's developed here. The payoff to all the ethical questions of the previous few books feels earned, too. Grade: B

Music

Noname - Room 25 (2018)

Chicago rapper's sophomore effort (or debut, if we're counting 2016's Telefone as a mixtape instead of an album, which... is confusing, but okay) is jazzy in production and quietly profound in its exploration of both the personal and the social. But let's take a moment just to appreciate how uproariously funny Room 25 is: "My pussy teaches 9th-grade English/My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism" is maybe the funniest lyric in any music anywhere this year. Grade: A-