Mini Reviews for August 22 - 28, 2022

Got nothing to say up here. Move on to the reviews.

Movies

Men (2022)
I think people are being a little hyperbolic about how bad this is; the sound design/music is terrific, and there are enough arresting images to suggest that if the movie had just gone complete avant-garde waking nightmare, it could have been special. But regardless, this still isn't good, mostly because, as those hyperbolic pans have explicated, the movie is insistent on being about a central metaphor that is by turns convoluted and just not very interesting. When I was taking creative writing classes, almost every professor I ever had told the class that, unless you have something truly special to say, you should never to write any story in which the main character is a writer because it had been done to death. Perhaps screenwriters should institute such a guideline regarding screenplays that are "about trauma when you really think about it," because the well is quickly running dry. Grade: C

Déjà Vu (2006)
Great fun and a great example of auteurism in the original sense, i.e. a director leaving a personal stamp despite the formulaic restrictions of the studio system. It's not hard to imagine a more robust sci-fi blockbuster interrogation of institutional failure in the Bush administration (it already kind of exists, and it's called Minority Report), which is 100% what this is for maybe an hour before it gets wrenched back toward convention. But 1) Tony Scott is super good at those conventions, and 2) the questions and pathos of the opening hour are strong enough that they haunt the rest of the film regardless, even as it starts to become recognizably Bruckheimerian. Denzel is of course incredibly watchable, and despite Scott's considerable talents, I'm not sure this would work half so well without our man in the lead. Grade: A-

The Mind's Eye (1990)
Surprisingly rad. I wouldn't have pegged myself as a "vaporwave Koyaanisqatsi" guy, but here I am. I gotta watch the rest of these. Grade: B+

 

 

 

 

 

Crimewave (1985)
I'm usually very onboard with movies that are really committing to the live-action cartoon bit, and that's exactly what this movie is doing, structuring setpieces as if they were Looney Tunes shorts and stitching them together into a 90-ish minute montage that purports to be a crime thriller. But I sure was not onboard with this. Any individual bit would probably work well enough on its own, but taken as a whole, it's just tedious and nonsensical in a way that feels counterproductive after a while. And so much shouting. So much. I want to believe there's a good Sam-Raimi-directed, Coen-brothers-scripted slapstick comedy to be made, because that sounds like a peanut-butter-and-chocolate situation to me (imagine Raimi directing Burn After Reading!), but sadly, I think we're well past the point in either of those parties' careers where that's a realistic possibility anymore. Grade: C

 

Desperate Living (1977)
Wild and at times wildly incoherent, even for John Waters, and the surreal fantasy of this film makes his other films feel like gritty realism. I've seen a lot of Salò, and maybe I'd make that comparison, too, if I'd seen that movie. To me, this feels like Waters's take on Fellini, if Fellini had a more rigorous political conscience. I don't think any other Waters movie I've seen has more contempt for the ruling class and bourgeois norms, which is really saying something. I'm unsure how to feel about this movie's relationship with sex and gender, but the good thing about John Waters movies is that they are more self-evident forces of nature than they are fodder for takes, so I guess I'll just duck that issue. Also, the ending is incredible. Truly made me want to stand up and cheer. Grade: B

 

Rabid (1977)
Some real hair-brained logic here from Cronenberg: a plastic surgery mishap gives someone a vaginal cavity in their armpit, and inside the cavity is a thing that bites people, and this creates a zombie apocalypse. I might have enjoyed this a little more if it were more phantasmagorical, a la an Italian movie from the same time period, but early Cronenberg is unrelentingly beige, which gives the film a weirdly dry quality for as nutso as it is. Still, there are some good sequences and a terrific ending. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for February 7 - 13, 2022

Busy week for me this week, hence a small post.

Movies

Jason X (2001)
At long last: The Space One. It didn't disappoint, to the extent that I can even be disappointed by a Friday the 13th movie at this point. It's definitely a significant step up from its immediate predecessors by virtue of its ability to completely let itself go. So many sublimely stupid little tidbits: the fact that it's in space; the part where a person gets turned into ground meat by being sucked through a grate; the part where a guy who got stabbed by Jason twice wakes up from unconsciousness and is all like "What's going on here?" and someone has to remind him that Jason Voorhees is running amok; the part where two characters make out and then say how much their survival chances have increased; the sadly unresolved Pinocchio-esque subplot in which a femme-presenting android wants real boobs; the "we love premarital sex" line, and the part almost immediately after when Jason is just swinging sleeping bags against one another; the fact that Earth 2 apparently has a Crystal Lake, too. I kinda wish the movie had the wherewithal to recognize how golden these moments are and just leaned into them, jettisoning some of the more tedious direct-to-video-esque parts, but maybe that level of self-awareness would make this one lose its ingenue charm as a accidentally awesome cash grab. Also, I love that this movie premiered in Spain a solid six months before its American release, like it's some kind of prestigious festival film or something. Incredible. Grade: B

The Ninth Configuration (1980)
Sure, some people have mental health struggles, but what if the real insanity is... American Imperialism?? I'm not sure how much I'm actually behind the premise of this movie, which is kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by way of Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Catch-22, wherein men in the throes of psychosis are actually just victims of the unspeakable evils of the 20th century and, moreover, prophets capable of both hilarious incongruity and profound insight into metaphysics and religion—a premise that seems at least a little bit dismissive of the conditions of neurodivergence and especially mental illness, which is kind of true of any work of art that uses "insanity" as a metaphor for Society, Man. That said, the singular vision of this movie is truly something to behold, and the way that literally all the characters speak in often very funny, mind-bending stream-of-consciousness non sequitur that, for all its absurdity, builds to a fairly serious interrogation of the existence of God in the face of American Imperialism is impressive and utterly unlike anything I've seen before. Plus, for as potentially ableist as its premise can be, there's something to the mythic undercurrents of it: the Bible talks about how Moses couldn't see the face of God and live, and there's a perverted version of that here, wherein these men, through their experiences in Vietnam, Korea, NASA, and beyond, see the true face of their god (i.e. America) and come away with their brains fried. There is no rational solution to the Problem of Evil that maintains a benevolent, omniscient, interventionist God; there is no rational way to comprehend the abject evil of the American machine and remain devoted to your identity as a subject of that empire. Grade: B

Multiple Maniacs (1970)
Kinda dull and meandering for stretches in a way that I've never felt in other John Waters movies, but also, the scene in the church was maybe the best thing I've ever seen in a John Waters movie (give or take "Surfin' Bird" in Pink Flamingos)—I don't know if this would make John Waters sad or happy to hear this, but watching a passion play cross-cut with Divine being anally pleasured with a rosary was so sacrilegious that it wrapped way back around to being sacred again. Good, unlikely thematic pairing with Benedetta. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for August 30 - September 12, 2021

Sorry about not posting last week. I was out of town for the weekend and then got sick. Life's been hectic!

Movies

Sword of Trust (2019)
A somewhat shaggy comedy that's really only worth watching for Marc Maron. I've pretty agnostic on Maron as a personality/comedian, but between this and GLOW, he's developed this riveting screen acting presence that I think is genuinely great—a potent and seemingly effortless mix of world-weariness and sweetness that has lent itself to some pretty compelling performances, Sword of Trust among them. The rest of the movie is just kind of there, some sort of lightly satirical hijinks about trying to sell a Civil War sword to a group of conspiracy theorists who believe the South won the Civil War—honestly kind of a flippant treatment of a genuine threat (not this brand of conspiracy theorist per se, but just broadly the white-supremacist, right-wing militia), but Maron's performance is so good that it makes it all go down easy enough, I guess. Grade: B-

The Old Man and the Gun (2018)
It's kind of incredible that David Lowery has exactly two modes: the icy, cosmic art-house mode (e.g. A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) and the gentle melancholy warm-blanket mode (e.g. Pete's Dragon, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, now The Old Man & the Gun)—and never the twain shall meet. If you told me that there were two completely different filmmakers both working under the pseudonym "David Lowery," I would believe it. I usually prefer the icy arthouse stuff, but last night, I was just wiped out after having been sick on Monday and Tuesday and then teaching on a sore throat the rest of the week, and I needed a warm blanket, and boy, did The Old Man and the Gun hit the spot. There's not much to the movie, but it hits every one of its unambitious, easy-going beats out of the park. Plus, Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford have unbelievable onscreen chemistry. Grade: B+

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016)
It's initially pretty captivated to have a movie set in a high school animated by images that look like they could have been drawn by the students at that high school, and the dreamy surrealism is cool (the title is not a metaphor). But the movie runs out of gas long before the end of its already slight 75 minutes, and having Jason Schwartzman voice the precocious main character is a meta bridge too far—like, Max Fischer, is that you? Still, there are some very, very cool bits in this movie—it's clear that the craft in terms of imagery and animation is here. I feel like a better screenplay could have elevated this into something actually very good. Grade: C+

 

Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)
A thoroughly white-washed, company-approved history of the Disney Renaissance, but it has some great footage, and it's appropriately disdainful of Jeffrey Katzenberg, though not nearly enough so of Michael Eisner, which is too bad, but I guess we'll always have Shrek. And anyway, it was Katzenberg, not Eisner, who wanted to cut "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid, and if there's a single opinion that can prove that someone is an artless buffoon worthy of a lifetime of contempt, he found the one. Grade: B

 

 

Cats Don't Dance (1997)
A pretty forgettable movie overall except that 1) it's directed by the same guy who did The Emperor's New Groove, and you can see Dindal carrying some of the sensibilities of this movie into that later masterpiece, which is fun, and 2) it's got that extremely frantic, rubbery animation that a lot of Warner-Bros.-affiliated animation in the '90s had, e.g. Animaniacs and stuff like that, and I like that style a lot. Otherwise, this is mediocre stuff, for sure. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Christine (1983)
Like the best Stephen King adaptations, John Carpenter's Christine streamlines a classically overwritten King novel into the primal story it should have been to begin with. It's interesting that both artists, Carpenter and King, at their white-hot prime couldn't wrestle this story into something on-par with their other work of the time. There's some mighty cool stuff in Carpenter's adaptation, like the scene where Christine is driving around on fire, but as with Stephen King, Carpenter has trouble finding a way to make this story play into his strengths—e.g. this is probably the least-consequential Carpenter score of his classic period. But at least Carpenter makes the story fun—more than I can say about King's novel, which I found to be a bit of a slog—and it is single-mindedly driven in a way that makes this movie move with this unstoppable sinister energy that Carpenter was so good at evoking. Grade: B

Female Trouble (1974)
It's not nearly as purely transgressive as Pink Flamingos, which makes this... well, "boring" is the wrong word, but I guess comparatively docile in the pantheon of early John Waters—no explicit sex (in fact, the sex is pointedly, exaggeratedly simulated), no mutilated live animals, no licking scene. It's just generally a movie much less interested in using bodily stunts for gross-out extremes, which sands off both the best and worst parts of Pink Flamingos. In return, we get a slightly more coherent story and slightly higher production values, resulting in something that feels a little less like a shoestring production among friends and more like the good version of a Troma movie, which isn't a bad thing. Divine remains an unparalleled performer, the Waters brand of high camp remains very fun, the ability of his scripts to toss off seemingly effortless one-liners is intoxicatingly hilarious ("I'm going to Detroit to find happiness in the auto industry"), and the open disdain for normies (and in this case, specifically heterosexuals) remains inspiring. As a heterosexual myself, I can confirm that the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring one. Grade: B

The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը) (1969)
Just an unassailable vibe. It seems crass to say that of a movie that is obviously freighted with huge social, historical, and personal themes, but honestly, I don't feel like I have the background knowledge to parse those themes when the movie is about an Armenian poet I knew nothing about before watching this movie (and still know basically nothing about), so most of what I'm left with is the exquisite feel of the movie. The movie itself seems uninterested in informing its audience about the specifics of Sayat-Nova's life, which apparently was a sticking point for the Soviet officials responsible for the release of the film, but ultimately that approach is probably for the best, as a more explicitly informative movie would have been more objectively educational while also being a far poorer viewing experience. Because what's actually here is rich: a parade of some of the most gorgeous imagery every put to film, set to some completely transfixing audio tracks that form a kind of proto-ASMR-type soundscape, all assembled into a rough symbolic arc of the artist's life. The collage of surreal images and religious spaces and the way that the movie interlocks everything into one incredible tableau after another evokes the subjective experience of reading poetry—I have no idea what Sayat-Nova's poetry is like, but this movie gives the impression of dwelling inside one of his poems. It's not unlike Andrei Tarkovsky's project in the more abstract corners of Mirror, but at the same time, The Color of Pomegranates is also unlike anything I've seen before. Beautiful, mesmerizing stuff.

If you're interested, I was part of a pretty fun conversation about this movie on the Cinematary podcast, and you can listen to that here.

Television

Lodge 49, Season 2 (2019)
Even better than the first season, which is great but also a shame because it's also when the show was cancelled. Here, the series's soft-hearted Pynchonisms have coalesced into a season of television that's at-once a lot weirder and more oblique than its previous year while also finding a resonance in these particular characters that is often profound. Increasingly, these characters are forced to deal with abject failure—of the lodge, of their ability to find answers, of even their beliefs themselves—and consequently, the show is constantly pushing these characters to re-evaluate their role in the show's world. But the result of such soul-searching is never despair, incredibly. What instead these characters find is connection; despite facing genuine hard times and some serious dark nights of the soul, the characters come out on the other side having found each other. I mentioned Lost in my review of the first season, and I'll evoke that show here, too, but for a different reason: as the world of Lost got more and more convoluted, the show increasingly leaned on the idea that the true weight of the series wasn't the ongoing mystery but rather the ways that the characters' connections with one another created profound meaning, and Lodge 49's second season does something similar, albeit in a way that isn't so nakedly sentimental as that earlier show. Lodge 49 is, at its core, a show about a world so bewildering that the only thing people can cling to is their ability to care for one another, and when the show hammers that home, it produces some of the most moving moments I've ever seen on TV: the culmination of a postmodern "Gift of the Magi" subplot between Ernie and Dud, Liz's plot involving who she believes is a surrogate mother figure, the whole-cast trip to Mexico—I was in tears. And somehow, the series finds a way to do this without ever losing its extremely off-beat sense of humor: for example, the warmth of that trip to Mexico is also a showcase for a truly hysterical late-season arc involving a character played by Paul Giamatti, and that's just one of many deliriously, hilariously absurd threads in the show. I dunno, as with everything involving this show, your mileage will vary, but the mix of really human moments with giddily goofy absurdity is so keyed in to my sensibilities that I felt extremely seen by the show. I could have watched five more seasons, and even though I knew it was coming, it was actually pretty upsetting to me when I got to the inevitably abrupt ending. In this era of "peak TV" where there's always another network or streaming service to pick up shows with small but dedicated fanbases, it's rare to see great TV shows cut down prematurely like this one was, which makes this one's early demise even more painful—not since the end of Pushing Daisies have I felt so dismayed at show so obviously special and with every indication of more greatness to come hitting the brick wall of a cancellation-forced ending. Wyatt Russell is still apparently out there campaigning for this series to be picked up by another company, which feels about right for a guy who played a character defined by his indefatigable optimism. I hope he's right. Grade: A+

Rick and Morty, Season 5 (2021)
I'm not really feeling this show anymore. When I reviewed the previous season of Rick and Morty, I indicated that I was tired of the show's somewhat haphazard and repetitive approach to character development, and that's still true here: we'll go episodes at a time with virtually no meaningful stakes for the characters, and then out of nowhere we're expected to, for example, care deeply about Morty being sad about his breakup with a superhero. It's not like other adult animation doesn't do something similar: both The Simpsons and Futurama are famous for their out-of-left-field sentimentalism, but neither of those shows are anywhere near as flippant about their characters' relationships or their emotional well-being during the episodes that we're not asked to care for them, which helps make the shift toward emotional stakes not feel so drastic and extreme as it does in Rick and Morty. It's also just simply the case that there are only so many times that a single character beat can be used for emotional resonance before its effect wears off on me—sure, it's theoretically sad how Rick alienates those close to him, but after five seasons, I'm going to need a more profound iteration on that than a lampshaded "dead kid" trope, which is what this season goes for. Anyway, my usually comfort in Rick and Morty is that the show has been at least funny even when the broader ambitions aren't working for me, but unfortunately, Season 5 is also where that's stopped working for me. At least part of this is the show increasingly stooping for ironically extreme violence and gross stuff in lieu of traditional jokes—an episode like "Rickdependence Spray" (in which Morty's sperm is used to create monsters) is cro-magnon levels of stupid and puerile, and I'm surprised that it even passed the muster of the show's usually pretty solid quality control filters. But another part—a bigger part, it must be admitted—is probably just a "me" problem. I think I don't really find the show's basic mode of "characters stammering through hyper-quippy, self-aware dialogue" very funny anymore. I guess we all outgrow things, so oh well. To the show's credit, it is still capable of being incredibly clever in terms of plotting and sheer complexity of sci-fi concepts: episodes like "Mortyplicity" and "Rickmurai Jack" have classically Rick-and-Morty-style head-spinning premises that play out with mathematical precision, and it's still pretty fun to watch the show excel in that mode. But 1) the show isn't going to that mode in every episode, and 2) without the humor or characters landing, the show's complexity isn't enough to make the show worth my time overall. Not sure if I'll keep watching. It just doesn't really seem like this is the series for me anymore. Grade: C

Mini Reviews for July 5 - 11, 2021

For those of you who describe by email, I'm working on a new way for y'all to still get emails of each post after the current email-subscription feature goes away at the end of the month. Stay tuned.

Movies

A Glitch in the Matrix (2021)
It's honestly deeply frustrating to me that simulation theory, an unfalsifiable thought experiment with a huge leap of a first premise, has been embraced by a lot of the same extremely online techbros who (used to?) enjoy poking holes in religious belief for being an unfalsifiable thought experiment with a huge leap of a first premise. Points to this documentary, which at its best draws the line between religious mysticism and simulation theory pretty well. There is something to be said for the way that a rigidly rational, naturalist worldview of the kind promoted by the Enlightenment onward is ill-equipped to deal with the epistemological complexities of living a subjective existence—that's something that a lot of religious, literary, and philosophical thought has wrestled with since the Enlightenment itself, but if the only things you ever watched were The Matrix and Elon Musk interviews, I suppose simulation theory would seem like the only possible explanation for the human experience, and the movie is at its best when it's gently poking at the sad, pseudo-secular solipsism created by the alienating framework of post-religious digital capitalism. I wish the documentary burrowed into that idea more, though, or honestly any idea here—in typical Rodney Ascher style, the meat of the film involves letting a handful of true believers just meander through the wildest, far-flung regions of their ideas, but the difference between this and a movie like Room 237 is that Room 237 had a pretty whimsical and specific premise (people's interpretations of The Shining) that allowed the interviews to cluster into a natural geography in tension to one another, whereas simulation theory is such an all-encompassing idea that the movie just ends up skipping around and briefly lighting on these enormous ideas about consciousness and belief and epistemology and alienation without settling on one quite long enough to tease out the implications. Also, by virtue of being a grand theory about life, simulation theory is a bit more serious than wacky exegesis of a Stanley Kubrick movie, so A Glitch in the Matrix gets really grim at times, touching on sociopathy and murder in a way that is both scary but also frustrating in that it doesn't get any more in-depth investigation than any of the other two dozen loose ends this movie tugs on. A weird kind of movie that is endlessly fascinating in the moment while also being fairly empty as a whole. Here's hoping that Ascher can find a smaller subject for his next movie, because I don't think his style can really sustain something this big. Grade: B-

The Orphanage (El orfanato) (2007)
This movie has a really rich setting in its central haunted house/orphanage, and the ending is surprisingly great. But the movie just takes forever getting there, with some fairly generic spooky atmosphere padding out places that either should have had more engaging drama or more hair-raising scares—as a mushy middle ground between those two, the vibes of this movie don't really work for me until the aforementioned ending, which, again, is super good. Too little too late, though. Grade: B-

 

 

Mysterious Skin (2004)
I was severely under-prepared for what this movie was, and I don't know if that was just because I was cavalier enough to have not done more than read the logline or because the movie's advertising was intentionally playing coy about a subject that would have almost certainly been impossible to market (which kind of calls into question how crass the whole enterprise of commodifying art is, right?). Regardless, this movie should come with the biggest content/trigger warnings imaginable, and I'm rating this movie in terms of how well it's made rather than my usual way of how I feel from having watched it—Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet alone make this a masterclass, giving what have to be two of the greatest, most human performances of the cinematic century so far. But whew, I probably would have skipped this one if I'd known more about it. Sending as much love as I can muster to anyone who has experienced sexual abuse. Grade: A-

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (봄 여름 가을 겨울 그리고 봄) (2003)
Begins as something of an anthology film of Buddhist parables and eventually coalesces into a much larger spiritual/monastic journey. It's told through this patient but still conventional style that seems to be trying to evoke the effects of slow cinema without actually using the techniques of slow cinema. Both the storytelling and the cinematic style have moments that left me a little restless and unfulfilled, but the overall effect is so strong that it ends up not really mattering that every moment doesn't work. Grade: B+

 

Johnny Corncob (János Vitéz) (1973)
So, Hungary's first animated feature is extremely racist/nationalist—almost fascist, even, which was a real unfun surprise for me. There are like thirty straight minutes of this that are just the hero with an army mowing down dozens of caricatured Asians and Africans. I guess that's what you get when the government commissions an adaptation of an epic nationalist poem, as I assume a lot of this is just baked into the source material. Luckily, the story structure has that fun, dream-logic folktale shape that Marcell Jankovics would explore more in his later masterpiece, Son of the White Mare, and the animation here is truly spectacular, a really engaging midpoint between Yellow Submarine (which Jankovics cites as a direct inspiration) and White Mare (a purer achievement of the aesthetic this movie is gesturing toward). So I guess I'm going to shake out positive on this one, which maybe reflects poorly on the strength of my opposition to fascism. One last thing: why on earth is the English title of this "Johnny Corncob"? As best I can tell, the literal translation of the Hungarian title is "John the Knight," which makes sense with the actual story instead of the hicksploitation vibe we got in the English title. Grade: B

Pink Flamingos (1972)
It's so rare to get a film with a vision this radical make it to the screen this uncompromised. But holy cow, here we go. I don't think I've ever seen a more transgressive movie in my life. Explicitly a contest of escalating hostility between two groups (two bourgeois posers vs. drag legend Divine and her crew) to see who can be "the filthiest person alive," and every minute of this movie is a direct engagement with that conflict, whether that's the unbroken shot of a butthole lip-syncing (sphincter-syncing?) to "Surfin' Bird," the unbroken shot of Divine just chomping on some dog poop fresh from the dog anus, the unbroken shot of a couple bashing to death a real-live chicken with their bodies as they have sex, or the unbroken shot of... well, I could go on, but for once, the MPAA got it 100% right by giving this the single greatest content descriptor of all time when they rated it NC-17 for "a wide range of perversions in explicit detail," a description which I imagine writer/director/cinematographer/editor/narrator/pervert extraordinaire John Waters was ecstatic to receive. I'm sure he would also be excited to hear that I was pretty turned off by the animal cruelty and really, really excessive sexual assault in this movie. Transgression as an end to itself is a two-edged sword maybe never better embodied than by this movie—on the one hand liberating from oppressive social forces, on the other hand lacking an ethos coherent enough to avoid hurting the vulnerable, I guess. I know it's a losing game to accuse a movie premised on poor taste of having poor taste, and maybe I'm a bourgeois poser myself, but I really didn't find that stuff fun at all. But the rest of this is really magical. There's this frothing contempt here for all hierarchy and social convention that I found super appealing, and its delivery through Waters's exquisite, borderline dreamlike sense of camp makes the parts of this movie that I didn't find actively risible to be transcendent—and in a turn that should be impossible, that transcendence finds a rich humanity and even a kind of affection within its anarchy. Plus, of course Divine is one of the most compelling screen presences of all time. Grade: B+

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Feels like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone stretched out to feature length, which makes sense given that Ida Lupino, the director, went on to direct episodes of those shows. But like both of those series, this movie has a terrific sense of atmosphere that simply isn't sustainable as the primary engine for a feature film (or even, in the case of The Twilight Zone's fourth season, an hour as opposed to a half hour). But for a while at least, this is pretty gripping. 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-