Happy birthday to this sham of a country that mythologizes its own liberation from colonial oppressors but has ignored or actively opposed every other anti-colonial liberation movement since.
Movies
I think I'm probably more positive on this than a lot of the critics I follow, which makes sense to me because I usually go to bat for the minor Pixar releases (e.g. The Good Dinosaur). I dunno, I just thought this was very sweet and very lovely; it has none of the weird edges of The Good Dinosaur, but it's similar in the sense that it's a pointedly low-key movie that does narrative and visual things that are off-format for the studio. In this case, it's about a friendship among three outcasts, two literal fishes out of water and one figurative one, probably the smallest story Pixar has ever told in terms of thematic ambition. Familiar character beats abound, but it's told with such confidence in its small stakes (the entire movie hinges on a children's triathlon) that it feels graceful and fleet rather than thin, and I'm confident it would have been 100% the wrong decision for this story to have replaced its lightly wistful character beats with a trademarked Pixar big tear-jerking moment at the climax. Plus, those small stakes dovetail nicely with the animation itself, which is the breeziest and most overtly cartoonish aesthetic that Pixar has ever used at feature-length—in fact, it has a lot of the visual sprightliness of Pixar's short films, crossed with a particular eye toward evoking hand-drawn animation, and I found it really refreshing how light and colorful everything is here. It's not entirely clear to me why a studio would spend dozens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars developing computer animation technology that approximates (with a lot more lighting and particle detail, of course) what a group of artists with pen and paper could have achieved at a fraction of the cost, but I do really love the animation here, so maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyway, this is good. Didn't deserve to be dumped on streaming in the service of brand management. Wish I could have seen it in a theater. Grade: B+
I was led to believe this had more animation than it does—I thought this would be a Waltz with Bashir-type situation, where all or most of the documentary was going to be animated, but it's really just a few comic interludes that get some (admittedly charming) stop-motion. Otherwise, this is a standard, somewhat ragged, but clearly passionate documentary about the First Palestinian Intifada and specifically how some Palestinians collectively owning a bunch of cows and distributing the milk to counter-occupation Palestinian revolutionaries came to be considered a national threat by the Israeli government. Some great interviews with some of the revolutionaries themselves, but overall, this documentary feels muddled by the very thing that drew me to it to begin with: the animation. I'm not sure what's gained by having the movie turn into basically Chicken Run for a minute or so at a time as it recounts an otherwise fairly serious and inspiring incident of self-governance and collective action, and what's lost by having those sections is a coherent sense of tone and structure. Grade: B-
Relative to the other Christopher Guest mockumentaries, this one is pretty light on the "mocking" part; it's a really interesting choice to make this so gentle, more a warm character study than the acidic comedy of, say, This Is Spinal Tap, and the fact that large parts of this forgo jokes entirely makes it an interesting note in Guest's career. But also, I just didn't find it all that engaging? The characters aren't funny enough to completely work as parody (except, of course, Fred Willard's character, who is the only person truly positioned to receive the hearty mockery so prevalent in the other Guest films), nor are they nuanced enough to completely captivate as objects of character study. Plus, the fact that this movie ends on a pretty transphobic note leaves a bitter aftertaste, as well as feeling at-odds with the generally kind vibes of the movie as a whole. Otherwise, it's a pleasant enough 90 minutes, but nothing I'm bound to look back on with much enthusiasm. Grade: B-
Maybe this would seem more radical in its time, and for sure, there's still something at least a little formally bold in making a movie as unadorned as this one is. But I was overall not into this stammering, unpolished movie about stammering, unpolished post-grads. I guess there's a kind of admirable form-content synergy in making the movie itself share the same qualities as its characters, but mostly, this just felt like a boring version of Kicking and Screaming or Frances Ha (or alternately, Slacker but about boring people), which maybe tells you how I like my post-grad ennui served. Andrew Bujalski would go on to write/direct movies that I think are much more interesting and engaging riffs on some of the same ideas as this movie, so I'm glad he moved past this. Grade: C
I've known about the wild production of this movie and its legendary lost cuts for ages, but I actually didn't know that much about the movie itself. So it was fun to finally get around to this, one of the few headliner movie history classics that I have left. People don't talk enough about that early stage of cinephilia when it feels like there are hundreds of really famous movies to watch, that overwhelming, intoxicating feeling of a world opening up that you get to share with a community; nowadays, I don't feel like I have any fewer movies to watch, but increasingly I feel like those movies reside in relative obscurity, and the fun is the sense of discovery. In some ways, it's more rewarding to be in this stage, but I do sometimes miss the communal feel to going through all the big Hollywood classics, so it was nice to have a taste of that again with this movie. Grade: B+
Anyway, if you're interested in more thoughts on Greed, I was part of a conversation on Episode 358 of the Cinematary podcast. Here's the link, if you want to listen!
Television
This has some good innovations over the first season. The show continues to problematize some YA conventions by virtue of Victor's gay Latino identity—Victor's ongoing struggles with his family's acceptance of his sexuality is knotty and specific, and there's an interesting racial tension, between the reflexively liberal white families and the more complicated politics of the families of color, for example, and while I'm not convinced that's exactly the right tension to explore in a show that ostensibly takes place in Atlanta (white people in the South are reflexively liberal? I missed that one—and at any rate, the show clearly is filmed in LA, something that frequently rubs off on the actual writing of this increasingly ersatz Southern setting), it's an interesting tension nonetheless. This season also gives Felix a lot more to do besides just pine for Lake, and his arc involving his mother's bipolar disorder is far and away the most compelling part of the season. But unfortunately, Felix and some of the more engaging elements of Victor's story are also forced to share space with storylines for the rest of the main cast, and a lot of that other material is either dumb (Benji is rich and has a band, apparently), undercooked (everything with Mia, whose presence on the show feels more like an obligation to her actress's contract than an organic character arc), or both (the sudden appearance of Pilar's friend Rahim as a series regular that has little to do besides be a gay Greek chorus for the show's relationship drama). Plus, the show is increasingly relying on trite relationship drama like love triangles, which I guess comes with the territory of watching a teen dramedy but still bores me and flattens these characters into storytelling tropes. It's frustrating, because things like Felix's arc show that this series is capable of being way smarter than some of its other arcs bear out. You can do better than this, Love, Victor! Grade: B-
