Mini Reviews for November 23 - 29, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving, etc.

Movies

Time (2020)
An incredibly moving documentary of prison abolitionist Sibil Fox Richardson's fight to get her husband released from prison. To the extent that it's trying to portray the fight itself (only occasionally), Time isn't really that effective, and the details of the case remain hazy throughout. But as a deeply subjective (I don't think there's a shot in the film that doesn't include Richardson) exploration of not just the passage of time but also the way that prison compresses enormous fractions of a person's life into lonely captivity, this movie is a powerhouse. The decision to color-match home-video footage to the modern-day original b&w footage is a masterstroke, and the way the movie uses this simple aesthetic choice to blend the past with the present is one of the best formal decisions I've seen in a documentary in years. Grade: A-

I Am Greta (2020)
I would have been interested in learning a bit more about her family and the dynamics through what is obviously an incredibly difficult time for them, and the glimpses we do get of her father hint at some really complex tensions among the parental roles of caregiver, protector, and advocate (though given the amount of vitriol Greta has received as a public figure, it's understandable that the family might not have wanted to invite a more intimate depiction of their lives). As such, it's a somewhat surface-level treatment of Greta Thunberg's activism leading up to her famous UN address. Luckily, the surface of her activism is still pretty inspiring, and I'm pretty impressed with the extent to which she is able to immediately recognize her inclusion on the global political stage as merely virtue-signaling theater. I kind of wish the movie had done a little more of a deep-dive into that idea, too. Grade: B-

First Love (初恋) (2020)
I was really tracking with this at first (the idea of two down-on-their-luck folks getting unintentionally swept up into organized crime drama is solid stuff), but I lost interest hard in the second half as this devolves into some pretty tired crime violence and some forced humor. I know the guy has like two billion movies and I've only seen three of them, so maybe this is premature of me to say, but I'm starting to wonder if Takashi Miike just isn't for me. Audition is great of course, but the other two I've seen (this and 13 Assassins) have been middling experiences for me. Grade: B-

 

 

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2020)
Catches Herzog in a rare sweet and sentimental mood. The film is basically an elegy of sorts for writer Bruce Chatwin (who died of AIDS in 1989), and Herzog himself is (despite his explicit denials) as much the film's protagonist as Chatwin, as the film basically involves Herzog's spiritual and thematic communion with his deceased friend as he travels to various significant locations from Chatwin's career. More so than a lot of Herzog's work, much of this movie only really works in conversation with Herzog's past films (a lot of it involves him recounting stories from productions of his films), which has the unintentional(?) effect of highlighting this movie's comparatively minor achievement in the context of a towering filmography, but also, there's an enormous, beating heart put on the film's sleeve that makes it feel kind of unique as a Herzog work in and of itself. If nothing else, it's really disarming to see Herzog actually get choked up on camera. Grade: B

Rio Bravo (1959)
Rio Bravo is a movie in which a bunch of good guys have to make sure a bad guy stays in jail, so it's a movie almost premised on hanging out and stasis. For that purpose, it's got an almost perfectly calibrated screenplay: a bunch of characters are set up at the beginning of the movie and allowed to ping against one another for the subsequent couple of hours as the drama from both internal and external forces escalates in the closed environment of the small Texas town, and the pleasures of seeing those characters in motion around each other is immeasurable (though rest assured, I'll try my best to measure it with my grade on this movie). It's also the rare Hollywood western that is entirely free from any Manifest Destiny baloney, which makes it a lot easier to enjoy these characters without the ironic distance I sometimes feel like I need to keep in old westerns. It's a pretty long movie, though—too long, actually, and I know exactly what I'd cut: that dumb romance between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson. It adds nothing but bloat to a movie that's otherwise impressively svelte, and it's got some of those trademarked iffy John Wayne gender dynamics, to boot. Single-handedly brings this movie down from a higher rating. Grade: A-

 

Music

Joni Mitchell - Wild Things Run Fast (1982)
This is basically Joni's emergence from her highly experimental, jazz-inflected period of the mid-to-late '70s, and she's definitely staking a claim here as an artist that can be trusted with, like, conventional pop song structure and melody again—perhaps no better communicated than by the fact that Mitchell includes an uptempo Elvis Presley cover on here. I far prefer her wild experiments in the '70s, but this isn't bad. It might be easy to forget when you're in the thickets of "Paprika Plains" or something, but Joni is pretty good at conventional pop song structure and melody, and this record is imminently listenable and even catchy, without completely leaving behind the jazz spirit. And yeah, that Elvis cover is pretty good. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for November 5-11, 2018

Hopefully y'all are more interested in these movies/shows than you were last week's.

Movies

The King (2018)
Any evaluations of his art aside, Elvis Presley is a figure of such titanic stature for two reasons: 1. His life is so richly metaphoric and fundamentally Americana that he can't help but resonate deeply as a secular icon, and 2. Any part of his life that didn't innately align with the broader institutions and iconography of America became coerced into alignment anyway via the mass-media commercial forces of the last half of the 20th century. And so, for better or for worse, Elvis represents Institutions in a way that very few pop stars do—not the Beatles, not Dylan, not Sinatra, certainly not the rock-and-rollers of color that Elvis surpassed: your Chuck Berrys and Bo Diddleys. It's that representationalism that made me, a white dude growing up in the Memphis area, roll my eyes so intensely at Elvis growing up: Elvis was the cranky white people fighting for noise ordinances and gated communities, and the slightly crankier old white people waxing nostalgic about Jim-Crow Memphis; he was The Man. It's also what makes The King, the second of the major essay docs getting distribution this year (after Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?), tick—the idea of making Elvis Presley's life a metaphor for America in general is practically baked into the artist's legacy. When it sticks to that, The King is frequently dazzling, using a bevvy of shockingly good celebrity interviews: Mike Myers? Ashton Kutcher?? Both good, somehow. I love Ethan Hawke, but could anyone have predicted he'd be the most perceptive Elvis critic in the film? I certainly didn't. And then you have Chuck D, who is unsurprisingly great, as well as the random people in Tupelo and South Memphis the doc runs across who have fascinating things to say about Elvis's legacy on their region. And this kind of gets to the documentary's critical flaw—none of these fantastic interviews—especially those of the people in Tupelo and Memphis—get anywhere close to the screentime they deserve. Someone (usually Chuck D) will say something fascinating, and then the movie will cut to a different scene rather than pulling on that thread. Part of this is the runtime, which is a far too short 107 minutes (if anything, this material deserved the O.J.: Made in America treatment—and how great would that have been? The privileged white other side of the coin??). More damnably, though, is how much time The King spends making an extremely labored and at least 50% bogus parallel between Elvis's life and the 2016 presidential election. Elvis as a symbol of America is richly symbolic; Elvis as a symbol for Hillary vs. Trump is tedious and perfunctory and yields exactly one good moment in the film: Alec Baldwin looking directly into the camera and stating, dead seriously, "Trump won't win." The film has nothing to say about 2016 that hasn't already been said in a thousand different ways, and put together with the existing Elvis metaphor and the wealth of often too-cute archival footage the movie crams in, it's Just Too Much. As great as some of the individual moments are, The King just can't bring it all together [insert hackneyed old, fat Elvis joke]. Grade: B-

Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur) (2017)
I am all for the idea of this film's exploration of middle-aged female sexuality—a refreshing change from the normal cinematic man's game of sexual conquest + ennui. And the film's methodical repetition as Juliette Binoche's character cycles from one man to the next allows for some precise attention to detail: a hand moving slightly over a leg, a winding conversation animated not by the participants' words but their stutters and silences. But... I dunno, the repetition also makes this movie a little tedious, too, and in practice, there's nothing in this movie that makes me feel anything too strongly, neither on a visceral level nor on an intellectual one. I've been thinking that maybe I need to give Claire Denis's filmography another chance after feeling the same way about Beau Travail a few years ago, but maybe the problem is just that Denis and I don't connect. This movie is fine, but fine isn't something I'm going to stand up and sing about. Grade: B-

Custody (Jusqu'à la garde) (2017)
There's not a lot to this movie besides it's viscerally intense depiction of domestic abuse, and honestly, it's somewhat frustrating that the film, for example, makes a dead end out of the daughter's plot. But the final thirty minutes are severely potent on a level that I wasn't at all ready for based on the relatively docile first hour of this film. And on an aesthetic note, I am overjoyed to report at least one European film with thoughtful compositions and a lack of dependence on handheld camera work. Grade: B

Take Me to the River (2015)
What an unbelievably tense movie, hoooooly cow. What gestures toward a somewhat typical "coming out" movie in its early goings (Ryder is going to visit "the Nebraska family," who doesn't know that he is gay) slowly morphs into something that's not not a coming out movie, exactly, but is also one of the most hair-pullingly uncomfortable thrillers I've seen in a long time. More so than most other movies that try to wring the "regressive backwoods" trope for tension, Take Me to the River understands the specific layers of social nuance that can make rural America so frightening to those who aren't part of it (or to those who can't fit in with it): the searing quiet, the disorientingly labyrinthine fields that stretch acres between the houses on a sprawling property, the intensely performative masculinity, the uncanny valley of feeling the difference in social mores without ever quite being able to pinpoint what exactly is different (and of course without anyone saying anything directly to you about it). More than anything, though, this movie understands the alien echo chamber of Family—the way that idioms and behaviors build upon one another until family becomes a world unto itself, and you don't realize it until you step out and then try to step back in and see everyone who's still inside, like tranquil frogs in a pot as the water creeps toward boiling. Grade: A-

The Wolfpack (2015)
The ethics of this documentary are dicey, to say the least; I'm not saying that director Crystal Moselle is taking advantage of the hyper-reclusive homeschooled family that she chronicles here, exactly, but seeing these kids—and most of them are kids, if not by age (I think at least two of the siblings here are legal adults) then definitely by temperament, talk frankly about the borderline-abusive upbringing they've experienced at the hands of their father while their father lumbers around in the back of the frame raises some real questions about the documentarian's role in a situation like this. But assuming you can put those questions on the back burner, there's something kind of profound—albeit rough-cut—going on in this documentary. There's the cynical way of looking at this, I suppose, that views these secluded folks become a walking IMDB forum in their film enthusiasm ("The best movie of all time is definitely Godfather: Part Two," says one of them, dressed in the black-tie attire of Reservoir Dogs) and thinks about the invasive power of toxic masculine film culture. But there's also the broader, much more idealistic idea of the transformative, even liberating power of film, the way that wide-eyed individuals use film to contrast the boundaries of their own homes with the wider, more wonderous world of cinema—the way we crave cinema as a way of modeling behavior, as a way of educating ourselves about the world as a whole because we are terrified that our own context is too small to do so on its own, so small that on its own, it will leave us hopelessly ignorant and helpless abroad. I wasn't brought up anything like the boys in this documentary, but I'd be lying if I didn't see at least a little of myself in them and the role of film in their lives; I suspect the same is true for a lot of us. Grade: B

F for Fake (1973)
Probably the most delightful I've ever seen a hyper-meta, post-structuralist, experimental arthouse movie be. Aesthetically, you can practically see the birth of Errol Morris here in the film's use of re-enactment for documentary purposes and the loquacious, essayist impulse in the film's pileup of tangentially connected images and words (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control-style Morris in particular). But Orson Welles flips the Morris script—or, I suppose, Morris flips Welles's script, given the chronology: instead of an a faceless documentarian bending the magnetically showman and storytelling impulses of his subjects into profound philosophies, Welles steps in front of the camera himself, caped and hatted in a magnificently flamboyant black, to be his own documentary's showman and storyteller. In that regard, it feels a little bit like an experimental documentary iteration of vaudeville, with Welles as the extraordinarily camp and completely magnetic MC tying everything together with a winking, sonorous presence. It's of course a work of high ego (because it's Welles), and it's a thematic snake eating its tail (because hyper-meta post-structuralism). But it's entirely great, I promise. Grade: A

Television

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 1 (2017)
I've always wanted Amy Sherman-Palladino to just go full-on Howard Hawks and write a screwball comedy, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is probably as close as I'm ever going to get. I'll take it. Lead by an effervescent Rachel Brosnahan playing Midge Maisel, a woman in late-1950s Manhattan who, when her husband leaves her, decides to take up a career in standup comedy, the show is a cascade of barbed and frequently hilarious dialogue in the same rat-a-tat cadence that animated the best of Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls—and miraculously, none of this is undercut by the involvement of Sherman-Palladino's husband, Daniel, whose contributions are somehow not irritating this time around. Even more miraculously, unlike so many shows centered around a fictionalized entertainment act, Brosnahan-as-Maisel-as-standup-comic is actually quite funny, and it requires little imagination to see how Mrs. Maisel could actually find success as a comic. On a writing level, all this is girded by a strong emotional core and mercifully nuanced depiction of class and family—those worried that Sherman-Palladino had lost her ability to pierce with her writing the subdivisions of the middle and upper classes after Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (me) need worry no longer. It helps that Marin Hinkle and Tony Shalhoub, who play Midge's wealthy, straight-laced parents, are superb in their roles as a jointly satiric and emotionally resonant presence. And on a cinematic level, this is all depicted through an unusually thoughtful attention to camera movement and lighting (even for our current "peak TV" moment), most notably in the dialogue-free musical interludes wherein the characters move in the naturalistically choreographed rhythms of their day-to-day lives as the camera glides around them as if on skates—put together with the dialogue, it's scratched my screwball comedy itch with aplomb. This is the most consistently good thing that Sherman-Palladino has done since maybe the third season of Gilmore Girls, and I'm retroactively calling this one of my favorite shows of last year. It's wonderful. Grade: A-

Music

Joni Mitchell - Song to a Seagull (1968)
Joni Mitchell was already an accomplished songwriter by the time her debut album dropped ("Both Sides Now" had been a hit for Judy Collins, for example, though Mitchell herself wouldn't record her own version until her sophomore album, Clouds), but Song to a Seagull is her entrance as a performer. In some regards, Song to a Seagull is a good establishment of who Joni Mitchell is: it's a sturdy collection of ethereal and literary-minded folk songs, sung with Mitchell's typically winding vocals. But this is still very clearly a debut, and Mitchell is either holding back on some of her more adventurous impulses or has not yet fully realized them—either way, not her best work and more than a little hippy-ish in a way that Mitchell would reject in the coming years. But to say that Mitchell has not yet achieved the heights that she would reach in the '70s (some of the greatest music of the 20th century) is not to say that she has failed, and Song to a Seagull is a fine sequence of late-'60s California folk with at least one great song (the closing track, "Cactus Tree"). Not essential, but certainly not a waste of time. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for December 4 - 10, 2017

Also worth mentioning: the high school where I teach put on a show of Pippin, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Movies

The Breadwinner (2017)

Cartoon Saloon's third feature (after the masterful The Secret of Kells and the nearly as good Song of the Sea) is the studio's most emotionally immediate film to date. We're a long way from the myth-tinted abstractions of Kells—The Breadwinner is, aside from the folk tale interludes (done in the style of paper cutouts, and honestly the least successful part of the movie, for all its visual ambition), a story of social realism, the tale of Parvana, a girl in Afghanistan who, when her father is arrested, must disguise herself as a boy in order to buy food for her family, as the Taliban-enforced laws do not permit women to leave their houses unaccompanied by men. The film is much less reliant on awe than either of Cartoon Saloon's other features (though the incredibly moving climax of the movie obtains a sort of apocalyptic grandeur), opting instead for small, well-observed moments of lyrical character detail: the women's hair intertwined as the family lays in bed together; the glint of the jewel on the shirt Parvana must sell in the marketplace to buy a bribe to see her imprisoned father; the way an illiterate man traces the name of a deceased family member on a letter. This hasn't been a particularly strong year for American animation, and of course The Breadwinner isn't American, it's (per Wikipedia) Canadian-Irish-Luxembourgian. But it's playing now in English in American theaters, and by golly, it's special enough to deserve your attention. Grade: B+

Girls Trip (2017)

I mean, geez, I feel like I should create a macro for reviewing Hollywood comedies, but here we go again: the cast has good chemistry, but the jokes don't really land for me most of the time, and what in the name of Ernst Lubitsch is this thing doing with a two-hour runtime?? The social import of the fact that the plot (a pretty stock plot, it bears mentioning, albeit one in which the relationship among the four main characters feels more lived-in and vibrant than most) centers on a cast of 40-something-year-old African-American women can't be discounted, and please, let's have more gender, racial, and age diversity in our comedy. But as far as enjoying the movie goes, social import becomes a bit abstract when I'm bored. Grade: C

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

When I say that Valerian is the realization of the promise of the Star Wars prequels, that's going to sound like a backhanded compliment to some. But it's not, I promise. The use of CG effects not as photorealistic approximations of our world but as the digital-age equivalent of those lushly painted backdrops from the early days of color cinema is dazzling, and if Marvel Studios hadn't already doubled down on the "kooky cosmic space opera" aesthetic this year, I'd call Valerian the best comic-book look by a landslide (and even with Marvel in the game, it's still handily beating Guardians and Thor). Put all this in service of a nearly wordless opening David-Bowie-soundtracked beginning that's a small masterpiece of blockbuster cinema, followed by another nearly wordless sequence basically set on the Tales from Topographic Oceans album cover, you're well on your way to a great film. The subsequent two-ish hours following these two sequences aren't nearly as good, but they've got enough crackerjack action and inventive sets that you'll probably forget the clunky screenplay and wooden performances (I guess the Star Wars comparison was a tad backhanded). Judging by its depressing box-office performance, I'm guessing we aren't going to get a major-studio blockbuster that's so appealingly strange and visionary as this one for a long while. But what a blessing that we got what we got. Grade: A-

All These Sleepless Nights (Wszystkie nieprzespane noce) (2016)

Imagine a world in which Terrence Malick filmed Knight of Cups in Warsaw. Only also imagine that there's not really any philosophical weight beyond some lazy Transcendental whatever. And what if it also starred these vague millennial archetypes who just party and walk around and, like, seize the moment, maaaan? Also, cocaine. THUMBS DOWN. Grade: C-

The Kindergarten Teacher (הגננת) (2014)

A 5-year-old randomly spouts these thoughtful little nuggets poetry, as if suddenly struck by the Holy Spirit or tapping into some subterranean creative power. It's like an Israeli film version of Thick as a Brick, only twice as dry—the absurdity of the premise is played so straight that there's only the barest twinkle of satire; instead, the film plays like a slow-burn thriller, eventually coming to a head with a shocking and ultimately kind of hilarious finale. It's weird, funny stuff that pretends to be the height of serious international drama, a tonal game that's a big part of what makes this movie so arresting. Grade: A-

Music

Joni Mitchell - For the Roses (1972)

I could call For the Roses a transitional album, and I'd be technically correct; the album forms a nice bridge between the confessional singer-songwriter Joni of Blue and the jazz-inflected conceptual wizardry of Court and Spark. But there's a pejorative connotation to the word "transitional" that I don't want to imply here. For the Roses isn't quite as good as the masterpieces that bookend it, I suppose, but this is still Mitchell at the height of her powers, which means that it's a jewel of lyricism, both personal ("See You Sometime," "Lesson in Survival") and political ("Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig's Theme)"). Every single song is a pristine hoard of riches, and even if this doesn't feel like the gigantic achievement of some of Mitchell's more notable albums, it's still one that deeply rewards the time spent with it. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for August 21 - 27, 2017

A good week for seeing movies in the theater. I'm building up those Regal Crown Club points like a pro.

Movies

Logan Lucky (2017)
In the same way that Magic Mike was basically an indie movie with stripper scenes, the film Logan Lucky ends up being is a lot more subdued than the raucous film promised by the advertising. It's as sweet and naturalistic a heist film as Soderbergh has ever done, electing for quietly observed character bits over slapstick laughs or crazy heist hijinks (although the third act does get pretty twisty). That's not to say that there aren't laughs or that these actors aren't trying their hardest to make these characters entertaining (Daniel Craig in particular is tremendous, as I'm sure numerous reviews have told y'all already). But Logan Lucky is just such an unassuming, easing-going, lived-in kind of film that it makes what it's doing seem easy and almost lazy, in the best way possible. It's a hangout movie, essentially, one with a heist in the center, and a tremendously fun one at that. Grade: B+

The Glass Castle (2017)
Critics have painted this as a movie that detrimentally sands off the edges of a harrowing true story in the interest of delivering a feel-good weepy. But sometimes critics are wrong. Granted, I haven't read the book this movie is based on, but any criticisms that this movie is shooting for empty sentiment over hard truths is ignoring the fact this this film is in dialogue with itself over the central two characters of Jeannette and her abusive, charismatic father, Rex—it's a feature-length exploration of the conflicting ways with which we are forced to relate to people close to us who have hurt us tremendously, buffeted between love and hatred, joy and pain, and the soft, warm moments come as lurching juxtapositions with the movie's numerous scenes of domestic horror. The movie isn't perfect by any means (Naomi Watts as the mother figure is sorely underused, and the score—a barrage of treacly inspirational movie cliches—is terrible), but there's something vital and complex going on here, and the effect is nowhere near as easy as some seem to think. Grade: A-

Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Not being the owner of a smartphone, I'll admit that there's an aspect of from-the-outside-looking-in to my enjoyment of Ingrid Goes West's wicked social media satire. Then again, I'm on Facebook every day, so the movie's depiction of the ways that interpersonal interactions are warped and even defined by the online currency of likes and followers isn't lost on me. Even if it was, there'd still be plenty to like here, not the least of which is a game cast, helmed by a deliriously unglamorous Aubrey Plaza performance (which, coupled with her work on Legion, positions her as one of the most watchably off-kilter performers in Hollywood, a sort of modern Shelley Duvall with fewer camp sensibilities). Even with the acting, not all of the characters really work here, but that's okay—the real character is the monstrous hydra of trendy ephemera that is the social media world itself. Ingrid's tongue-in-cheek riffing on this digital universe is the most well-observed depiction of social media I've yet seen in a movie, and its jabs at the characters' various vanities and online habits are informed such by a deep and current knowledge of the meter of the social-media discourse of the moment that in even a few months' time, this will likely be a fascinating and slightly alien capsule of what 2017 online interaction looked like. The ideas presented through this pitch-perfect depiction are maybe a bit too obvious to make Ingrid anything close to great, but you could do a lot worse with your psychological thriller-comedies. Grade: B+

Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Skull Island does so many things right—the special effects are great, the cast is solid, the creature designs are cool, and the visual style is distinctive—that it's a real shame that the total package is kind of a bore. This is, I think, a complete failure on the screenwriting level. None of the characters come alive but for the grace of their talented actors' performances, and even then, what we see are paper-thin meat sacks waiting to be destroyed by the film's vicious bestiary. There's not anything inherently wrong about that body-count approach to an action film, and many a great movie have basically revolved around the same concept. But without any life in these characters to begin with, it's not really all that fun to see them die. Grade: C+

Their Finest (2016)
The sort of polite, stiff-upper-lipped historical drama that serious cinephiles tend to hate and I tend to just find kind of okay, Their Finest is just kind of okay. The premise is hooky enough, and I'm willing to give this movie a pass just for that—during WWII, a female screenwriter struggles to find her place in the man's world of British film, and she finds work as a writer of British war propaganda, and honestly, that's great, because we need more movies about 1) female screenwriters, and 2) the making of war propaganda. And as long as the movie sticks with that, it's engaging. Unfortunately, the film decides to fill a good part of its runtime with thin romantic drama, which is not only not great but also frankly kind of tedious. Pair this with the relatively pedestrian film style, and you've got a movie that nearly squanders its good ideas. Grade: B-

The Summer of Sangailė (Sangailės vasara) (2015)
A completely superfluous piece of coming-of-age fluff. Not that there's anything specifically wrong with that, I guess, but, outside of a mildly interesting visual sensibility, there's not anything specifically right about it either. Grade: C

The Book of Eli (2010)
There are a lot of things that are kind of dumb about The Book of Eli, most notably its third-act twist that doesn't seem to accomplish anything for the movie beyond stretch the credulity of its protagonist's actions throughout the first 3/4 of the film. But the action is well-staged and exciting, executed with a subtle, smirking sense of humor that's welcome in the dour post-apocalyptic landscape that envelops the rest of the story, and while it's a bit ham-fisted, the movie's ideas about the role of religious texts in a society on the fringe is still kind of interesting. Put on top of this the fact that the movie is essentially a post-apocalyptic western (why aren't there more of these??) with a visual style that's way cooler than we have any right to expect from what's essentially a mid-budget B movie at the height of the high-contrast, digitally color-corrected wash-out era, and you've got a fun couple of hours. Grade: B

Television

Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later (2017)
As always, Wet Hot American Summer is inconsistent—perhaps more so here in Ten Years Later than ever. First Day of Camp, the Netflix years-after-the-fact prequel miniseries to the cult comedy film, was something of a minor miracle, justifying its existence by being way better than the original, doubling—nay, tripling—down on the film's penchant for absurdity by making the plot a borderline epic cornucopia of sci-fi, conspiracy thriller, coming-of-age tropes, lampooned to near-perfect comedic heights. Ten Years Later can't really compete with that, partially because the sheer shock of Netflix actually pulling this off has worn off, but also because it's just not nearly so successful. Ten Years Later makes an extended joke about how lame its ending is, and while that's kind of funny, it never really assuages the fact that the series really doesn't know how to build all its varying threads into a satisfying whole. Whole plots are basically dropped midway through the series (Paul Rudd in particularly is woefully underused this outing), and there are parts where WHAS's reliable it's-funny-how-sincerely-and-unskillfully-we're-playing-this-hacky-trope tone shows major cracks, especially in the various love triangles the series builds. Still, on a moment-to-moment basis, Ten Years Later can also approach the comedic sublime—everything involving Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush is hysterical, as is a plot involving a nanny-for-hire. And I will never not giggle uncontrollably at H. Jon Benjamin as a sentient can of vegetables. Grade: B

Music

Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
In the gradual weirdening of Joni Mitchell, one of the most rewarding and underappreciated artistic progressions of the 1970s, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a vital moment. Proving that the jazz inflection of Court and Spark was no fleeting lark, the relentlessly experimental and exploratory Summer Lawns is the point of metamorphosis, when Joni Mitchell transitioned from the confessional hippy of Blue into the artist who would make Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus. It's an unapologetically out-of-fashion album, embracing jazz at the precise moment when music culture was moving away from the genre, and as such, it was panned mercilessly upon release (though let's be real: '70s rock critics only ever begrudgingly accepted Mitchell's genius to begin with). But no matter; The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a masterpiece. Joni's lyrics have rarely been better here, shaping twisting, oblique character portraits wreathed in mystery and piercing social insight, and the music itself is gorgeous, not to mention influential—it's not hard to hear the genesis of both Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective in the album's discursive melodies, and the entire freak folk scene of the mid-2000s practically owes "The Jungle Line" a lifetime of royalties. Grade: A