Favorite Movies of 2023

I don't have a lot to say here, so I'll make it very brief. These are my favorite movies! I've (obviously) not been doing reviews on the blog this past year, but I am still updating my Letterboxd, so when it says "Read original review," it's linking to that.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! Feel free to share your own favorites!

Favorite Movies

1. May December
Stunning, unclassifiable cinema. I've liked a lot of what Todd Haynes has done in the 21st century, but the slipperiness of this film feels like a return to the complex semiotics he was playing with in his '90s work.

[Read original review]

2. The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki came out of retirement not just to make the best animated movie of the year and a dense, self-reflexive meditation on loss and creation but also to make sure that people remember that his movies can pivot from cute magical hijinks to grim nightmare fantasies full of bird poop and blood. The gooey-ness of Miyakazi films is underappreciated, but it's front and center here. I guess that might sound off-putting, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't enjoy this movie on some level, so don't knock it until you've tried it.

[Read original review]

3. Knock at the Cabin
Speaking of not knocking (hahaaa) until you try it, I feel like I still encounter a lot of people who still have not forgiven M. Night Shyamalan for his wilderness period. Those people are missing out majorly. Without expending a lot of energy, you could probably convince me to say that this is the best film of his career. Obviously the best performance of Dave Bautista's career.

[Read original review]

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Replicates the slow, horrific march to the grave that Scorsese achieved in The Irishman, only this time, it's a genocide. I'm very much into this late-style Scorsese.

[Read original review]

5. Afire
People don't seem to like this one as much as the previous few Christian Petzold movies, and it certainly doesn't have the mythic, political overtures as, say, Transit, but in place of that, it is as vicious a character piece as he's ever done.

[Read original review]

6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The fact that this flopped at the box office is so incredibly depressing to me. This should be a family film instant classic; Rachel McAdams should be getting an Oscar; Kelly Fremon Craig should be getting Greta Gerwig money, acclaim, and household name status. I suppose prospects of it finding an audience streaming on [checks notes] Starz is unlikely, but I'm hoping.

[Read original review]

7. You Hurt My Feelings
Most of the time with Nicole Holofcener, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's what's nice about it. Good to see that her partnership with Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to bear fruit. Bonus points for tunneling into some very specific anxieties of mine this time around.

[Read original review]

8. The Holdovers
I thought for sure after the nostalgia-baiting trailer and opening stylistic pastiche that I would find this too cute, but no, it's very good! Sure to be a new sad-sack Christmas classic. It will probably be up for all sorts of awards, and I can get behind that.

[Read original review]

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most technically and aesthetically adventurous mainstream American animated movie in years, more so than the first one by a considerable margin, and that alone was probably enough to land this in my top 10. On top of that, though, I was actually into the story, and while I am entirely prepared to eat crow if the sequel resolves all of the threads in this movie with a wet fart, for now, I am actually excited to see what happens next.

[Read original review]

10. Godzilla Minus One
In addition to just being a very entertaining monster movie, I want to highlight how great the design and effects are on Godzilla himself (itself? themself?): maintaining the lovably bulgy proportions of the old "dude in a rubber suit" Godzillas while also containing the scale and menace that CG can provide. The best effects of any effects-driven movie I saw this year, which should put American studios to shame.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: BlackBerry—In the year of the "brand biopic," this caustic take on a brand doomed to fail stood out. Great performances all around, too: Glenn Howerton just screams the whole movie, and it is very watchable.

Would Have Been in the Top 10 If It Were Actually a Feature Film: That collection of shorts adapting Roald Dahl that Wes Anderson did for Netflix—I've enjoyed Wes Anderson's output of the past decade even as he has divided some of his fans while tunneling deeper and deeper into the hermeticism of his aesthetic. However, this is easily his best work since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel. An utter delight, and the "it's a stage play, but also an audiobook" format proves surprisingly flexible for telling four very different stories.

Best Documentary: In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50—A compelling rumination on mortality and Robert Fripp's dictatorial regime within the band. Terrific music, of course.

Best Action: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One—I mean, it's a new Mission: Impossible movie, so of course. There also wasn't a ton of competition. A very limp year for American action films.

Best Action Sequence: John Wick: Chapter 4—That said, I gotta give props to John Wick fighting his way up that staircase (twice!) near the end of this entirely too-long series finale. For as much as Cruise gets all the Keaton comparisons (mostly valid), that one sequence feels like the strongest evocation of silent comedy I saw in a mainstream American film this year. The train crash scene in Dead Reckoning comes at a close second, though.

Movie I Laughed Most Watching: Bottoms—This bizarro-world high school comedy is something of a return to the '90s/2000s heyday of the spoof movie, e.g. Not Another Teen Movie, though rather than parody anything specific, Bottoms instead just goes for the weird and the heightened. It doesn't all work, but most of it does.

Best Joke: Barbie—Ken mansplaining Pavement to Barbie is probably only funny for the very narrow swatch of boring, approaching-middle-age men that I consider myself a part of, but this was a big moment for us.

More People Should Talk About This One: The Starling Girl—Evokes its Christian fundamentalist milieu with more accuracy than anything I've ever seen in a movie even approaching mainstream, and while for me that alone would be enough to rush out to see this film, it also does a terrific job telling a very human story that I found riveting. Maybe the contours of this movie just appeal to me more than most people, but I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: Infinity Pool—In what may become an annual fixture of this list (MaXXXine may come out this year!), I have to shout out Mia Goth's performance here, which is far and away the best thing about Infinity Pool (a movie I enjoyed otherwise, I should stress). For Your Consideration: Mia Goth draped across the hood of a car, shouting the protagonist's name while reading negative reviews of his ill-begotten novel.

Best Audience Con: Skinamarink—Basically an avant-garde film marketed as a horror film, and it somehow made $2.1 million! I liked it, for what it's worth, but mostly, I respect the audacity.

Best Vibes: Rye Lane—A very fun, frothy rom-com with a tremendous sense of place, style, and music. Just a good time overall, I felt good watching it, and I have nothing but good memories about it.

Most Vibes: Enys Men—I almost gave this the "best" vibes award, but I don't think "best" is the best way to describe something that feels this mysterious and at-times threatening. Still, it's unparalleled in the thick atmosphere it creates. Good thing, too, because that's basically all it does.

"Not Her Best, But I Appreciate That She's Still Doing Her Thing" Award: Showing Up—Every Kelly Reichardt movie feels like a miracle for existing, especially in a film economy that doesn't make a lot of space (or funding) for these kind of without-a-marketing-hook pieces of gentle rumination.

"Good For Her" Award: Poor Things—I didn't love this as much as some people did, but Emma Stone did great work with out-of-left-field performances this year (see also: The Curse). Very interested to see what else she does now that she seems to be in her weirdo phase. Also, good for her character; seems like she had a great time.

"Good For Him" Award: Beau Is Afraid—Ari Aster, man, I think it's cool that you are comfortable enough to spend $35 million setting fire to all your good will you've earned so far. I genuinely respect that.

"Don't Know How to Work This In, But I Feel Like I Should Include This One" Award: No One Will Save You—Probably doomed to be forgotten as it lies buried on Hulu, but this is a very fun, exciting, clever alien invasion thriller.

Most Played in the Room Adjacent to Me: The Super Mario Bros. Movie—My son got majorly obsessed with Mario and Donkey Kong this year, so as soon as this got put on Netflix, it was curtains for my hopes of getting him into European arthouse cinema during his midday movie/rest time.

Worst Animated Movie of the Year: Nimona—Despite there being two animated movies in my top 10, this was a particularly bad year for feature-film animation, and this was the worst of the worst that I saw (consider yourself lucky, Disney's Wish). Thoroughly irritating, and it looks bad.

Worst Movie of the Year: Your Place or Mine—Probably not actually the worst movie of the year, but I watch so few streaming-dump "content" movies that it feels pretty egregious when I do happen to sit through one.

Best Non-2023 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2023: Theorem—This film simply refused to leave my brain since I saw it in March. A bourgeois family has a sexual encounter with the divine and the spirals into oblivion: the story all of us Christians living a middle class American existence should be wrestling with.

Mini Reviews for July 26 - August 1, 2021

Goodbye, summer vacation.

Movies

The Boss Baby: Family Business (2021)
Even more so than its already-wild predecessor, Family Business is buck-wild cinema, but also tediously so at times. There are only so many out-there ideas (e.g. baby ninjas, extended Harold and Maude tributes, incestuous undertones, a dialectic reading of history with parents as oppressors and children as the oppressed—I could go on [and on]) you can stuff into a movie without giving any one of them time to develop beyond their one scene of introduction before everything becomes a numbing slurry that's hard to look at without your eyes glazing over. I'm still vaguely positive on this overall because it retains the first movie's manic obsession with cartoonish kineticism, stretching and squashing and zipping characters around in uninhibited movement with as much perverse glee as Chuck Jones and Tex Avery of yore. DreamWorks Animation isn't quite as inventive as it was back in the unprecedented innovation that gripped the studio in 2016/17, but this movie still handily slides into that legacy—a legacy I wish would cross-pollinate with some other animation studios, tbh. There are so many interesting things going on in specifically American animation right now, but there is never enough of those things happening in the same place to reliably create top-tier work. Grade: B-

Old (2021)
Your mileage with this movie is probably going to vary as a function of how much you're willing to embrace the typical M. Night Shyamalan tics: stilted dialogue, precocious kids, off-beat humor, just a general feeling that the world depicted in his movies has been created by someone not entirely familiar with real human life. I mean, these are incontrovertible facts of Shyamalan's filmography by now, and whether or not you're into them is of course a personal choice. But this far into his career, I think the impulse some people have to act as if Shyamalan is trying and failing to make more conventional films is just ludicrous; the hump you have to get over to move from Shyamalan skepticism and Shyamalan respect (if not outright fandom) is acknowledging that he's doing these bizarre things on purpose, at least most of the time, and as long as you can buy into that, I don't think it's too far of a jump toward finding those habits actually really funny in a way that has us laughing with Shyamalan rather than at him—there's no way that you can convince me that, for example, having a rapper named "Mid-sized Sedan" isn't meant to be as hilarious as it is. The same goes for his more serious impulses—yes, the logic of the movie is... unconventional, especially once you get to the final piece of the movie where you see what's really going on, and even without that, "there's a beach that makes you age quickly" is kind of an inherently silly concept to take as seriously as Shyamalan does here (though in fairness, this concept was taken from the graphic novel he's adapting in this movie). But also, as off-kilter the journey is getting there, the movie does end up being a pretty engaging rumination on mortality and time and the ways that these two things intersect our bodies and our relationships, and I think there's an argument to be made that this rumination is so engaging precisely because of Shyamalan's off-kilter approach. There's just something about his dorky sincerity and sense of pacing and character that can click together at times into this otherworldly, even profound effect that I don't think I've seen in other filmmakers. And even putting all that aside, I just had a good time with this movie; I'm sure some people are going to be too busy rolling their eyes at the movie to enjoy it, but those people are missing out on a really fun, Twilight-Zone-esque chiller. This movie's good, is what I'm saying. Grade: B+

The Green Knight (2021)
Technically, this is hypnotic: the droning score, the whispering sound design, the buttery-smooth camera movements, the dream-like lighting, the meticulously designed costumes and iconic location shooting—everything bubbling together in this thick, unsettling texture. Narratively, this feels in the vein of Neil Gaiman's screenplay for Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (though the rest of the movie resembles nothing about that earlier film) in terms of how it takes a famous piece of very old English literature and wrenches it into a non-canonical left-turn that basically twists the story into being about itself: a hero narrative about the limitations of heroism, an Arthurian story that questions how we slot its characters into the archetypes that populate it, a myth about our own personal and cultural mythologies. There's some opaque stuff here that I'm still sifting through (I'm intrigued but ultimately nonplussed at Morgan Le Fey's role here), but it's the kind of movie that feels like it's going to open up with a little time rather than shrivel under scrutiny, which is always a good feeling to have walking away from a movie. Grade: A-

Fear Street: 1994 (2021)
I found this to be dumb and undercooked, and for a significant part of its runtime I actively disliked it. Its '90s references are extremely surface-level (weird to see the Stranger Things treatment given to an era I can actually remember), the pacing is haphazard, and the characters have virtually no personality beyond their most basic identity labels: "the lesbians," "the computer nerd," "the comic-relief dummy," "the one who gets put through the bread-slicing machine," etc. That said, the climactic confrontation in the convenience store (wherein the aforementioned bread slicing occurs, among other insanity) is legitimately great, and it tempered my negativity toward the rest of this movie a good deal. Plus, I have it on good authority that the next movie is better, so I guess I'm continuing with this series. Also, there was this one part where a character starts puking, and at the very same time my infant daughter spit up in my lap, so I must say that I am intrigued by this new Netflix experiment in 4-D cinema. Grade: C

 

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2020)
On a storytelling level, just a dull, dispiritingly corporatized SpongeBob; the usually delightful absurdity and silliness of the series is replaced by a mandatory-fun-esque set of lazy pop-culture gags and only theoretically absurd non-sequitur, and what's worse is that a significant portion of the climax is a backdoor pilot for the SpongeBob spin-off series Kamp Koral, which looks like the most excruciating thing imaginable to do to these characters. I suppose the animation here it technically impressive in the extent to which it manages to evoke the aesthetic sensibilities of the show with entirely computer-generated animation, but to what end? How in the world does it help anyone (including the studio, for whom computer animation is surely more expensive) to turn characters most familiar for their hand-drawn looseness into highly detailed 3D facsimiles? Is there a tie-in video game they are trying to create assets for or something? I would be in love with this animation if it were for a completely new world, but for SpongeBob, it just feels like a careless disregard for the sensibilities of the show, which I suppose is true of the movie as a whole, so points for coherence of purpose. Grade: C-

My Dinner with Andre (1981)
People say, "They made a whole movie out of a single conversation," and while that's 97% true, it does leave out Wallace Shawn's voiceovers at the beginning and end, which are absolutely key to what makes this movie so riveting and dynamic. The crux of Wally's rebuttal to Andre's pompous and privileged but ultimately sincere assertion that people need extraordinary experiences in order to find true happiness is that Wally insists that he doesn't need to "go to Everest" to be happy because he's happy where he is; there's beauty in the mundane of his own life, and happiness is in taking the time to realize that. But it's in the voiceover that we're given the context to know that Wally is, on some level, lying—whether to Andre or just to himself, it's hard to tell, but lying nonetheless. At the film's beginning, he rather miserably tells us how consumed he is with the drudgery of modern NYC life: the bills, the routine, the rejection, nostalgia—"When I was ten years old I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36, and all I think about is money." And over the next hour and change, we watch him listen to Andre monologue about his travels, watch his face make these inscrutable little inflections that have such rich ambiguity. Is he bored? Impatient? Intrigued? Does he pity his friend, who, despite his telling tale after tale of transcendental enlightenment, is clearly sad? Does he envy his friend for his willful abandon of the very constraints that make Wally so morose in the opening voiceover? And then Wally finally says he's going to say what he's really thinking, and then gives his proto-"This Is Water" treatise, and the beauty of this unquittable movie is that it does nothing at all to clear up any of the previous ambiguity. Does Wally truly believe what he's saying? Is he merely trying to win points against this irritating monologuer with whom he didn't want to have dinner anyway? Has listening to Andre's own life philosophy in such detail clarified for Wally what's actually important? Has it merely made him believe in the intoxicating moment that it's what's most important, despite his deeper, material frustrations? In the movie's closing voiceover, Wally is no less wrapped up in nostalgia for the perceived comforts of childhood: "There wasn't a street, there wasn't a building, that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind." But is he any happier or more enlightened after his dinner with Andre? It's impossible to know, just as it is impossible for Wally (and we viewers) to know if Andre himself isn't pulling some kind of self-deluding facade about his own life philosophy. The whole film is this beguiling, fathomless investigation of the ways in which we struggle to know ourselves completely and then have to use that incomplete self-knowledge to try to understand even more unknowable others—how human connection is this delicate dance of shadows, grasping for meaning and belonging in the dark contours. "It is not good that the man should be alone," God famously says in Genesis, and yet that's how humankind is said to have come into being: alone, desperate for connection, not knowing that he is naked. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for October 7-27, 2019

It's been several weeks since I've made a blog post, and for those of you who don't know, this is because my brother died two weeks ago. It's been a difficult time for my family, and even though I was still reading books, watching movies, etc., I really didn't feel like writing about them until just a few days ago. I don't know how much my brother read this blog, but my relationship with him casts a long shadow over my reviews. Who I am as a viewer and critic is inextricable from my relationship with him. A lot of our childhood together was spent—as is the case with most siblings, I'd guess—sharing movies, music, and television. We watched Batman: The Animated Series and played "Batman and Robin" together (though neither of us liked being Robin); we rented The Iron Giant from Blockbuster and liked to joke about "coco-lax"; we spent a lot of time doing Toy-Story-inspired surgery on stuffed animals we had. When we were teens, there was a lot of arguing over media, particularly music: he was into blink-182 and Sum 41, whereas I was a budding indie-rock snob. We both liked Dark Side of the Moon, though, and I remember loaning him my CD a lot in high school at night so he could go to sleep to that beating heart. The music fights died down once we were no longer living together and subjecting each other to each other's taste, but I still think about those fights sometimes and the ways in which I've decided he was right and I was wrong (Rage Against the Machine, for example: I of course realize now that they rock).

When somebody close to you dies, the impulse is to try to conceptualize the entire person in your mind, since that's all you have left, but it's hard to the point of impossible to fit a whole human being inside your head because when they're alive, there's no need—what forms in the mind is the organic outgrowth of life and the afterimages of experiences. So when I think about my brother now, it's only pieces of who he is that come to me at a time. Right now, as I'm putting together this blog post, it's these little fragments of shared media that bob to the surface. We are everyone we have ever known, and our relationships with art are part of that, since our experience of art is the collection of these relationships' intersections with the now. To write a review is to remember what fragments you can, as incomplete of a reckoning of a whole life as that is.

Anyway, here are the reviews.

Movies

The Lighthouse (2019)
Man, how do I even describe The Lighthouse? I guess I can now call it a hallmark of writer/director Robert Eggers that his films are heavily steeped in a meticulous recreation of arcane English dialects; in the same way that The Witch had its characters speak in Puritan English, The Lighthouse has its Willem Dafoe character go full-on Captain Ahab/Mr. Krabs seaman English—whatever that's called. The degree to which that sounds goofier than The Witch is a good indication of the difference between the two projects: The Lighthouse is the unhinged-to-the-point-of-hilarity but no less frightening cousin to The Witch's relatively serious drama of isolation. There's a lot to, uhh, behold in The Lighthouse, from its deeply rattling evocation of post-Romanticism "weird" fiction like Melville and Lovecraft to its smotheringly lush late-1800s sea-shanty production to its fevered imagery and unstable reality to its (I kid you not) mermaid genitalia, but the absolute best of it all for me is the complete and total control Eggers and Dafoe have over the effect of this dialect. Long, careening scenes will take hairpin turns of tone bent around ornate speeches and turns of phrase: Dafoe goes from lamenting that Robert Pattinson's character doesn't like his cooking to delivering two minutes of the most elaborate, blistering maritime curse I've ever heard then finally to a small, tender word all in the space of like five minutes, and it's by turns riveting and funny and scary and kind of sad—amazingly, without ever feeling unnatural or out of place. It all just is, spewing forth from this totemic force of a man inside this totemic force of a movie, high and low brows crashing together like waves whipped up by a nor'easter emanating from the deepest well of the masculine psyche. The movie is, among other things, about all the ways in which we humans—but especially we males—cloak our basest urges in all sorts of hierarchies and rituals and how quickly these hierarchies and rituals become indistinguishable from those base urges themselves when we cling to them tight enough. Dafoe's intricate dialect is a vehicle of both his rigid rules for keeping up the lighthouse and also these deeply ancient curses and superstitions that envelope his rules like a force of nature. It's bewildering, terrifying, and very, very funny. Martin Scorsese says that Marvel movies are like amusement park rides, but honestly, none of them ever took me on a ride as wild and thrilling as this. Grade: A

The Raid: Redemption (Serbuan maut) (2011)
I care not a whit for any of the plot or human beings within this movie. But the action is very super good, y'all. I mean, that's the only thing people talk about with this movie, so it's not like I'm blowing any minds. Sometimes consensus is just right. Grade: B

The Happening (2008)
I'm not going to say that people "misunderstood" The Happening upon its release, because so much of what's here defies the typical sort of appraisal: the dialogue has the almost-human surreality of one of those AI-generated scripts ("We ate tiramisu together, that is it"); Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel give two of the most idiosyncratic and unnatural performances of 21st-century mainstream cinema; the score is ham-fisted to the point of self-parody; Shyamalan's motif of wind blowing through trees feels laughably flimsy. There's nothing here that's conventionally entertaining, that's for sure, and it's no surprise that audiences and critics bristled at this deeply off-beat horror-melodrama-thriller oddity. But I dunno... I kind of liked it. Kind of. I'm not fully with the re-appraisers who want to call this an outsider masterpiece or whatever, but like most of Shyamalan's movies, there's this undeniable energy to the whole thing that's pretty compelling when it isn't just confounding. The way this threads the needle between an evocation of '50s-style B-movie kookiness, an almost arthouse level of seriousness regarding the lived experience of humanity on the brink, and (intentional?) absurdist comedy is just so undeniably its own thing. To be honest, the alchemy of it all feels just a few clicks away from the otherworldly camp that David Lynch taps into, and if people hadn't taken The Sixth Sense so po-facedly seriously and did the whole "Next Spielberg" jig, we might be talking about Shyamalan more in that vein. Maybe. Like Lynch, it's easy to chuckle at the window dressing, like the off-kilter dialogue and weird acting, but its themes (in this case, ecological collapse and the horrifying unpredictability of human self-destruction) are so unrelentingly bleak and unshakeably tethered to my own real-world terrors that it's hard to feel comfortable sitting unambiguously in the "so-bad-its-good" enjoyment mode. Tell me, what on earth are you even supposed to do with First Reformed as filtered through Plan 9 from Outer Space? Grade: B-

The People Under the Stairs (1991)
This movie definitely bites off more than it can chew as far as ideas go. There's so much crammed into this gleefully dark satire that there are a lot of elements that feel half-baked—including the titular people under the stairs themselves, who are never as engaging or interesting or developed as the children protagonists or the maniacal villains. But holy moly, what works here works. I'm all about this movie's hatred of vulture landlords, and I'm especially all about this movie's villains as the Reagans from Hell. Plus, the "'80s family movie, but a Hard R rating" is a very fun vibe. As a movie, it's a LOT, but gloriously so. Grade: B+

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Demented and gonzo to an absurdly delightful degree: I almost died of happiness when the gremlins break out into a big musical number to the tune of "New York, New York." The chief pleasure here is just how anarchic it is (very); the movie opens with an animated bit involving the classic Looney Tunes opening, but with Bugs and Daffy fighting for control over the segment, and this is a pretty great microcosm for the level this is working on—quite explicitly a live-action cartoon. As a result, the movie is a little less sharp in its satirical targets than its predecessor's shredding to pieces of Christmas Americana, but '80s NYC yuppies and real estate barons are still worth the chaos that's wreaked on their world here. In a 2019 in which Donald Trump is leading a quasi-fascist regime seemingly bent on destroying everything I like about America, I can see how some people might feel like this movie softballs its depiction of its very Donald-Trump-in-the-'80s-esque villain (he has a semi-sympathetic redemption arc); however, it is a marvelously bitter pill that The New Batch ends with this theoretically reformed villain cashing in his newfound goodwill by deciding to profit from the mass-manufacturing/exploitation of the first movie's small town. It's not just (as the first movie argues) that the concept of "Americana" is flimsy kitsch that can bear none of the weight of reality; it's that this kitsch is a pandering lie cooked up by a craven corporation, and any humanity that once existed within this concept has been wrung out for all the shareholder value it's worth. It's a good thing this movie is an all-time blast, or the cynicism would collapse under its own weight. Grade: A

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
This movie's reputation as the supreme oddball of the Halloween franchise (taking place in a universe outside the continuity of the Michael Myers entries) led me to believe that it was going to be a lot more meta and self-reflexive in its posture toward the series as a whole. Instead, its relationship with the rest of the series boils down to a few cheeky references, and otherwise, this is a fun little one-off sci-fi horror movie reminiscent of The Stuff and that kind of thing. Most slasher franchises would probably be improved if they eventually just became anthology series like Season of the Witch was apparently trying to make of the Halloween series, so I applaud the attempt here, however unsuccessful. I guess there are already a couple other Halloween continuities we could try this with again, though—get on it, Universal! Grade: B+

Ganja & Hess (1973)
The first Capital-G Great horror movie I saw this October. Spike Lee of course remade Ganja & Hess in 2014, but Lee's somewhat terrestrial preoccupations never manage to hook the deep mysticism of this original. Actually, it's 2012, with Red Hook Summer, that shows ol' Spike most dedicatedly carrying forward this movie's torch—a sprawling, searingly fervent reckoning of Christianity's role in colonialism and slavery, set to wall-to-wall gospel music. Bitter and evocative: eternal life is the price of vampirism, resurrection its perverse horror. But the magic is that oppression never overwhelms the film itself, which blooms into a liberated beauty from the husk of its plot. It is a profoundly spiritual experience—neither the social treatise of Spike's Red Hook Summer nor the neutered eroticism of his remake two years later—but rather inventing its own sublime cinematic language of cross-fades and double-exposures and slow-mo, seemingly from the ground up. Its radical freedom of style and substance forms the perfection of blaxploitation; Curtis Mayfield and stuff form the cultural memory of that movement, a monolith of groovy bass and bottomless cool for semi-ironic appropriation. But at least to me, the elliptical mysticism and self-made mythologizing of this movie (and, to a different degree, Sweet Sweetback) form a much more compelling soul to the whole scene. If you couldn't tell, I loved this. Grade: A

The Blood Spattered Bride (La novia ensangrentada) (1972)
The marketing promises a kind of Spanish giallo, but it plays like a grindhouse take on a Val Lewton picture. Ancient curses and lesbian vampires cooked in a visually rich slow-burn. I'm not always the biggest fan of exploitation cinema, but this is kind of the platonic ideal of it for me: in which it's a trojan horse for the marginalized to wield the lurid tropes of the genre as weapons against its own audience, right up to that final shot, which is probably the most shocked I've been by a movie this whole horror season. It's a pretty nasty movie, and I wish it had made as much space for onscreen queer sexuality as it makes for onscreen sexual violence, but as an indictment of masculine sexual entitlement/aggression, it's damning—not to mention pretty riveting. Grade: B+

Daughters of Darkness (Les lèvres rouges) (1971)
I'm writing this review a couple weeks after I actually saw this movie, and I honestly don't remember the plot hardly at all. But I do remember Delphine Seyrig's wonderful performance—a more sympathetic, vampire iteration of Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca—and I do remember the pretty lush scenery and cinematography, which itself feels like a vampire old-soul version of cinematic styles gone by. Anyway, I remember enjoying this overall. Grade: B

The Velvet Vampire (1971)
A really dope score and some very cool hallucinogenic/dream imagery buoy this movie a bit for me, and there's a deep sadness to the ending that I wasn't expecting. But I guess I'm not really invested enough in vampire stories to begin with to be all that entranced by a revisionist one. Then again, I did love Ganja & Hess, so I dunno why I'm not more excited. Grade: B-







Music

Lover by Taylor Swift (2019)
The first half of this album is fantastic, and things like "Cruel Summer" and "Miss America and the Heartbreak Prince" are some of the best Taylor Swift's ever been at pure pop music: shiny, pristine, hooky, thoughtful. But there's a lot of pretty weak material buried deep in this record, too, material like the lead single "Me!" and the honestly pretty dumb pileup of Britishisms that is "London Boy," and the fact that anything can be buried deep in this album speaks to the biggest issue, which is that it's just too long and, with that, has some really awful track sequencing—the supremely goofy "London Boy" goes right into "Soon You'll Get Better," a song about her mother's battle with breast cancer? Who thought that was a good idea? I'm probably in the minority in thinking that Lover as a whole is a step down from her previous record, Reputation; it lacks that album's thorniness or the arch-villain camp or the thematic complexity. But it's certainly not a weak album, and if we're going just on the basis of high points, Lover has several very high ones. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for January 14-20, 2019

Probably will be a father by the end of the week, which means that Glass is the last movie I watch in a theater as a regular old non-father guy. This seems... appropriate.

Movie

Glass (2019)

I mean, I don't even know, y'all. It's earnest and dumb in the way that Shyamalan movies can sometimes be, but also a deeply, deeply strange piece of filmmaking, both as a mainstream studio release and as a continuation of Shyamalan's filmography. This is being marketed as the "Avengers Assemble" film of the Shyamalan Cinematic Universe, but what they're not telling you is that, like, 90% of it takes place in an authoritarian mental institution bent on gaslighting its inmates (i.e. the familiar super-powered faces from Unbreakable and Split). As such, it's this uneasy, almost structureless movie where you're waiting an hour thirty for the other shoe to drop and for it to be revealed what The Deal is with this institution; I hesitate to say this because it sounds like the kind of goofy movie-buff nonsense that ends with people seeing Godard's influence on Michael Bay or whatever, but dang it, Glass is almost like an Ingmar Bergman movie with all the tortured, philosophically minded chamber drama and lack of forward momentum. But at the same time, it's also a completely uninhibited parade of Shyamalan following just about every stylistic whim that occurs to him. The camera swoops and zooms and finds five different compelling compositions for each scene, and there's the sense that Shyamalan wanted each and every shot in the film to be the very best thing he ever committed to film—which makes the movie feel intensely kinetic, as if (combined with the static plotting) it's trying to invent the cinematic equivalent of running in place. It's wild. It's also not all that fun either. In fact, the movie is pretty joyless overall, and the film's climax, which belabors some of its death scenes to an exhausting degree, is straight-up tedious. But you'll likely not see an odder mainstream movie at the multiplex this year, and even if you do, it probably won't end by indicting the police as an arm of a fascist conspiracy. So there's that. Grade: B-

The Day After (그 후) (2017)

The most emotionally immediate Hong Sang-soo film I've seen, with a few scenes that (to continue my ongoing Woody Allen analogy) approximate the kind of scorched-earth relational rawness of Husbands and Wives. But then it veers into uncharacteristic screwball territory in its final act, which... okay. Despite being relatively straightforward, Hong-wise (I don't think we have any multiverse shenanigans going on here), The Day After is strangely frayed, almost compellingly so. But I dunno, yet again, I'm not really too excited about anything here, and it doesn't help that the b&w cinematography is all washed-out and dead-looking compared to the exquisite look of The Day He Arrives, the last Hong I saw. Grade: B-

Volcano (Ixcanul) (2015)

For a movie ostensibly committed to "realism," this is such a wonderfully tactile film, so thoroughly grounded in the hissing grass and grinding pebbles of its Guatemalan setting that it feels practically dreamlike in the way it becomes pure sensation at times. The story itself is crushingly grim and unforeseeably cruel, which is much more for-the-course for this sort of quiet, desperate drama—though that by-numbers social naturalism only barely dulls the impact of the film's tragedy, wherein the horrible exploitation of Indigenous peoples simmers under the surface of most of the film before completely boiling over in the climax. Grade: B

Cartel Land (2015)

This documentary is shocking in its inability to carry the weight of its own ethical questions. Trying to paint parallel pictures of both American and Mexican counter-cartel militia groups is a fundamentally flawed project to begin with, and the ways that the movie tries to highlight the flaws (e.g. the interviews with innocent Mexican civilians) carry almost no weight at all; the movie does a disturbingly effective job of drawing the Mexican end of the situation as nightmarish and virtually no job at all in depiction the American side of things as largely run by out-of-control nationalist fears—at least, not enough of a job to counteract the impassioned speeches by the American militia dude as he stares off nobly into the sunset. It's equally frustrating, then, to see the movie devote so much time to showing the Mexican militia devolve, somewhat expectedly, into corrupt, amoral chaos and then spend zero time deconstructing the American militia dude's explicitly fear-mongering nonsense about how "people all over the world" are afraid of foreigners coming across their borders. At the time of this movie's release, the Syrian refugee crisis was beginning to ramp up in Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the United States), and the Western world's response was basically to collectively lose our minds down a rabbit hole of xenophobia and borderline fascism—so I guess the American militia dude's not exactly wrong, but also, there's nothing in the movie besides a dubious parallelism with the Mexican vigilantes to suggest just how dangerous this rhetoric is. Maybe it's just a casualty of timing; if Cartel Land had been made just 12 months later, it would have basically been handed on a platter the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump as the absurd apotheosis of these ideas. So maybe this isn't all the movie's fault. But still, it's a hell of a bad feeling watching this movie now in 2019 while the federal government barely functions because people are irrationally terrified of what (who) lays beyond our national borders. Grade: C-

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

There are some extraordinarily questionable decisions in this movie, from the aesthetic (some of this CGI, woof) to the narrative (like, wtf is even going on in this movie?) to the more serious (the brief scene of blackface, the enthusiastic "The age of consent!" line right after Lily Cole's character establishes that she's pretending to be 12 but is really almost 16). But there are also some extremely compelling decisions here, too: Tom Waits plays the Devil! A group of policemen put on a musical burlesque! There's a balloon made of several iterations of Christopher Plummer's face stitched together! Even the CGI, while often dreadful, has this endearingly homespun quality to it—the digital backdrops and CG characters come off as intentionally rickety in the same way that Gilliam's cut-out animations in Monty Python do, and it has the same odd charm that I've begun to see in some of the washed-out digital effects of Lucas's Star Wars prequels. This is one of the most inventive and bonkers movies I've watched in a while, and as much as there are pieces that don't work (like, at all), the experience of following this head-trippy, funhouse Faust retelling is just too wild to dismiss. Yep, sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie alright. Grade: B+

Medicine for Melancholy (2008)

There's not a lot to these characters outside of how they intersect the various social issues they spend the majority of the movie discussing. On that basis, I feel like I should rate this movie lower on principle. But the depiction of San Francisco by way of desaturated digital cinematography is really vibrant. There's also a lot of talk about gentrification and the limitations of late-2000s indie culture and a scene in a public meeting where people talk about rent control, and y'all, I am but flesh. Grade: B

Books

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (2018)

Lisa Halliday's debut novel is an extremely tricky book, both on a structural and thematic level. Structurally, this book's division into two large sections and one quick epilogue gives the story its titular asymmetric shape and also makes it extremely hard to wrap your head around as a whole, given how seemingly standalone each section is. Thematically, Asymmetry is a veritable rabbit hole of truth and lies, recalling Atonement in its metafictional layers but as if Ian McEwan never tipped his hand in the book's final section. It is, among other things, a study in the distance an author takes from her subject, beginning with basically autobiographical material in the first section's depiction of a young woman's romantic relationship with a Philip-Roth-like "Great American Writer" (Halliday herself was romantically involved with Philip Roth in her twenties) before zooming out in the second section to the most distant possible character from Halliday's own experience, an Iraqi man being questioned by airport security as he attempts to fly to Iraq to visit his brother. Both of these sections seem to be openly bating, respectively, the tabloid-ready biographical critics and the socially conscious critics who urge authors to "stay in their lane" regarding marginalized voices, while the final section (a lengthy interview transcript in which the Roth-esque character openly flirts with the much younger [and married!] woman interviewing him) seems to be putting up a lightning rod for #MeToo. All this is nested in this niggling feeling that at least some of these characters have been written into existence by others, and it's hard to tell what really has happened and what is just fiction (within the larger fiction of the book, of course). It's all very bold and fascinating, and though I'm not sure if I completely get it yet. But it's definitely a novel to be reckoned with and one I'm glad I read. Grade: B+

Music

Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention - Absolutely Free (1967)

On their sophomore release, Zappa and the Mothers take the absurdist, non-conformist mosaic rock of Freak Out! and refract it even further into the proto-prog psychedelic shards that set the stage for later Mothers albums like We're Only in It for the Money. Each side of the album forms a mini-suite of music that culminates in a lengthy, genre-sprawling composition—Side 1 and its anti-Nazi, vegetable-conscious satire leads into the woodwind-heavy jam "Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin" (my favorite part of the album), while Side 2's "pageant" suite builds to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," which resembles a community musical theatre that has taken acid. The intentional fragmentation makes the album somewhat difficult (though not nearly as difficult as future Frank Zappa), and the satirical humor is oftentimes kind of repulsive (particularly on "Brown Shoes," which involves a dude fantasizing about his 13-year-old daughter—definitely a cornerstone of the pageant satire and not something we're supposed to think is good, but still... not fun to listen to). But also, Zappa's penchant for the weird is virtually unparalleled, even at this early point in his career, and his utter disdain for America's ruling class makes for a unifying and often compelling ethos. Also, there's a monologue about how vegetables keep you regular, and I'm not sure if we've seen anything like that in the world of rock music either before or since. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for January 23 - 29, 2017

Jesus is an immigrant.

Movies

Silence (2016)

Martin Scorsese's long-gestating adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel isn't just one of Scorsese's best—right up there with After Hours, King of Comedy, if not quite to the level of Goodfellas—but also one of the best films about faith of all time. It's slow cinema for Scorsese, evoking more Bergman than any of his more kinetic influences that made works like the similarly lengthy The Wolf of Wall Street so propulsive. But what Scorsese gives up in movement he gains in fervor and rich, rich intellectual and emotional depths. The film's central question of ideological integrity vs. pragmatic compassion—in the film's thorniest ethical knot, Andrew Garfield's priest must choose between renouncing his faith or watching dozens of Japanese Christians tortured and killed—is one that's clearly deeply personal for Scorsese: what is it that defines a Christian? What does the atonement for sins really mean? Can you ever truly excise sincere faith from your identity? These are issues that ring deeply personal for me as well. I can't say how those who aren't Christian will react, but for this believer, Silence was as searing and profound a movie experience as I've had in years. Grade: A

Split (2017)

My theory is that forty, thirty, maybe even just twenty years from now, it's the depiction of mental illness that's going to date our art, politically. People will look back at our bevvy of movie-villain psychopaths and schizoids and feel the same way about that that we feel about, I dunno, blackface in '30s movies or callous, misogynist nudity in '70s films. That said, Split's world is set in such an obviously fanciful version of reality in general and DID specifically (probably a mistake to identify a real-world disorder, Shyamalan) that I don't have too many misgivings about James McAvoy's split-personalitied antagonist. Plus, it's clear that McAvoy is having an utter ball with the hammy grandiosity of his performance here—something that goes for the rest of the film, too. Split isn't as relentlessly clever as Shyamalan's most memorable work, which is both a blessing and a curse: it's good because it hinges the film's success not on some mind-blowing twist or subversion and instead on Shyamalan's film craft, which is always where his greatest strengths have lied anyway; on the downside, it does feel like just a B-movie thriller. But, I mean, to be simply a well-made thriller is hardly the worst thing to happen to your movie, and, in fact, Split feels quite at home in that distinction. I had fun. Grade: B

American Honey (2016)

Meandering and virtually plotless outside of the barest sketches of a scenario, American Honey is probably best experienced as a kind of meditative experience that uses its heady blend of sights and sounds—I can't stress enough just how fantastic the movie's soundtrack is, which deploys a vulgar mix of indie and contemporary pop/rap to evoke a more convincing evocation of youth culture than I've seen in ages—as a wedge into its pet themes of class and gender. It's a road trip movie that makes of point of putting boots on the ground not in picturesque road-trippy destinations but at the motels, fast-food joints, and gas stations that make up the majority of America; our characters greet the skyline of Kansas City, for example, with whoops and wonder, but after that moment, most of what we see of the city are green suburbs and greasy motel rooms. It's a romanticization of the mundane by characters who fall below even the broadest conception of the American middle class, and the various and picaresque explorations of the characters' intersections with the middle and upper classes, from evangelical Christians to workers on an oil field, are never less than fascinating. Like I said, this is more of a meditation than anything propulsive. Those going into this looking to enjoy the character relationships, for instance, are bound to be disappointing. But as an experience to let wash over you, you'll come out gasping on the other side. Grade: A-

Pete's Dragon (2016)

A lovely little film content to be nothing more than a lovely little film, which is cool. The stakes are refreshingly small for a movie with a dragon in it. There's nothing breaking convention here (the "fantastic creature brings joy to a child's life" genre remains intact, from the wistful small-town vibes to the eagerness of adults to hunt/study/profit from said fantastic creature—the movie is nothing if not formulaic), but as a gently crafted execution of the formula, it's nice. Grade: B

Enter the Void (2009)

Wow, I haven't hated a movie this strongly in quite some time. Where to start? The way it infantilizes its one female character? The way it feels the need to take five whole minutes of its already bloated 161-minute runtime to explain The Tibetan Book of the Dead, just to make sure we get it when it actually visualizes The Tibetan Book of the Dead? The puerility with which it approaches sexuality? The head-smacking idiocy of its oedipal implications? The shallow individualism of its own stoner logic? The use of legitimately interesting experimental camera techniques to depict a solipsistic, mundane, and utterly tedious version of the afterlife completely devoid of mystery or transcendence, which might be an interesting decision if the whole movie weren't so gobsmacked at what it assumes is its profundity? Ugh. I hate it. I hate how a movie so nominally interested in the afterlife is so terrestrial. I hate how its final ten minutes are basically just an orgy—but, like, a profound orgy, maaaan. I hate the waste of what I can tell is legitimate talent somewhere behind the camera. I hate it so much. Grade: D

The Kite Runner (2007)

The question of interiority is always the challenge of adapting a novel for the screen--written literature has, naturally, way more tools at its disposal for evoking the interior lives of its characters than film or television ever will have, and The Kite Runner suffers greatly for that. The movie runs aground in its mostly literal adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's fantastic novel by never really finding a good way to dramatize the rich emotional landscape of its protagonist. We're left with a tepid and often blank character, and with that, the story begins to fall apart, losing much of the Dickensian sweep and emotional complexity from the novel in the process. Grade: C+

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

The most inconvenient thing about this movie is that it's not very good. It's a matter of genre, really, not truth—climate change is a super true and super important issue, of course, but An Inconvenient Truth is essentially a feature-length TED talk, which would be fine if it were presented as such. As a movie, though (not to mention an Academy Award-winning documentary (for real, what's up with the 2000s and their documentary Oscars?), this one's a bore. Grade: C-

Books

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (1998)

One of the founding works of modern YA fiction turns out also to be one of the best. While it's not an absolute requirement for YA to be vigorously realistic, it sure helps when the protagonist's voice sounds exactly like something one of my students might write. YA lit is usually tied to hyper-witty Caulfield-esque precociousness, which makes it pleasantly disarming to have a narrator like Charlie here who actually feels like a real teenager. Even better is how Charlie's experiences ring so true to my own high school memories: rarely have the emotional beats of finding one's place within alternative culture been rendered with more compassion and understanding: the crafting of identity through music, the aimless hanging out, the minor intra-group personal tragedy, the confused lines between friendship and romance, the joy of discovering that other people think similarly to you and that you are not doomed to be alone. The book does edge a little close to romanticizing these feelings at times—e.g. the famous/infamous "We are infinite" moment—but in a book filled with such acute and precise pain, the feeling is more one of catharsis than empty nostalgia. Grade: A

Everything Is Teeth by Evie Wyld (2016)

I'm starting to realize that I really dig these graphic novel memoirs. In this one, Australian author Evie Wyld remembers her childhood obsession with sharks and shark attacks. It's a morbidly funny, tender, and at times tense coming-of-age plot, warmly illustrated by Joe Summer in cartoonish but emotive strokes, and even if it doesn't find something entirely mind-blowing to say, it at least says it with a memorable hook and frequent shark-gore fantasies. Grade: B+

Music

Bon Iver - 22, A Million (2016)

I've never been the biggest Bon Iver fan, so take this with the appropriate dosage of salt. But 22, A Million is far and away the best of Bon Iver's three albums. Working in samples and electronic beats that recall Vernon's work with Kanye West and largely (thankfully) eschew the weepy, beardy folk that defined the early Bon Iver sound, the album represents something of a cliché move for indie/post-indie artists these days, who stay relevant by adopting electronic and hip-hop textures, but it's an effective one, effectively emoting Vernon's wounded lyrics without feeling nearly so anemic as his earlier work. For the first time, Bon Iver sounds full and muscular, and I like it. Grade: B+

100 Years...100 Movies 88-90: Bringing Up Baby, The Sixth Sense, Swing Time

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Blah blah blah.

88. Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
Let me tell you a story. When I was growing up, my family would periodically have movie nights. My dad would go to the local Blockbuster or, in the way olden days, the local Hollywood Video (remember those?) and come home with some classic movie that we'd all watch together, arm-in-arm on the living room couch. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting, only with a lot more Star Wars. And you know what? My dad was really good at picking movies we'd all enjoy. Except for this one time. That fateful evening, he came home with this old screwball comedy that he'd never seen, "but it's supposed to be really good," he told us. "It's a classic." Well, we all sat down in front of the TV, my brother popped the popcorn, Dad put the tape in the VCR, and we watched the movie. And we hated it. All of us, including Dad. It's literally the only time I can remember a unanimous thumbs-down from the family on a movie-night movie. The name of that movie? Bringing Up Baby. Full disclosure: I haven't watched the movie since then (which was, by the way, probably twelve or thirteen years ago), although I have an unusually vivid memory of the film (such was the intensity of my dislike, perhaps?), so I feel at least semi-confident to say that I probably still wouldn't enjoy it today, although my hatred would probably be tempered to a "meh." The big sticking point for me is that I just don't find Katherine Hepburn's character funny. Like, at all. And that's a pretty big deal breaker for the movie, considering she delivers most of the jokes (give or take a few irate straight-man-turned-funny lines from Cary Grant's character). I'm not sure if I can explain why exactly I don't find her funny other than to say that her anarchic comedy becomes positively grating to me as the movie wears on. Irritation is a weird, inexplicable feeling, though; for instance, I love Spongebob Squarepants, Bugs Bunny, Groucho Marx, and Tina Belcher, all of whom are similarly nonsensical agents of chaos in their respective worlds. Why don't I find them irritating, too? I can't tell you. But whatever strange alchemy of factors it is that pushes a performance to the right side of the line between hilarious and aggravating, Hepburn just doesn't have it here. And that goes for the rest of the movie, too, unfortunately. Sorry, folks.

89. The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)
Honestly, I'm not sure of the reasoning that led to AFI's putting The Sixth Sense on this list. In the context of the rest of the list, the selection of this movie seems to go against the general character of films that made the cut, which, as I've discussed previously, usually tend toward Big Important Themes, epic scale, huge cultural import, sweeping romance, and/or showy, majestic cinematography. The Sixth Sense has none of these [1]. But oh well. No sense in belaboring the point since it did end up making the list, and anyway, it's a movie I like very much. For starters, it's a horror movie [2] that relies on clever use of atmosphere and practical effects, something I can always get behind. It's a darned entertaining, efficient bit of filmmaking, too, and also an appealingly personal one. So much of the discussion surrounding this movie has to do with the film-ending twist (and it's a doozy of a twist, too!) that the fact that the movie is, at heart, a poignant character study of two profoundly broken individuals often gets lost in the shuffle. Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment both give fantastic, haunting (heh) performances that flesh out the already psychologically sophisticated characters the screenplay provides, and the chemistry between the two (both on an acting and a writing level) is just as important to the movie's success as Shyamalan's excellent composition and command of tone. One of the great things about The Sixth Sense, in fact, is that it's still great without the twist. Future films of Shyamalan's would fail in part because the whole movie was in service of some endgame antics. With The Sixth Sense, you have the opposite, with the end in service of the rest of the movie. It's a character-based movie masquerading as a high-concept one, and a warmly redemptive one at that. For all of horror's nihilism, that redemption is a welcome anomaly.

90. *Swing Time (1936, George Stevens)
I'm not sure there's such a thing as a hangout musical in the same way that there are hangout sitcoms (e.g. Friends), hangout comedies (large chunks of any Apatow film), and hangout dramas (The Deer Hunter), but Swing Time is the closest I've seen any musical come to capturing the easygoing, elliptical vibe of that subgenre. There's almost no plot to speak of (well, characters fall in love, but in musicals, that's pretty much akin to breathing), and consequently, a large part of Swing Time's MO is just to let the characters sort of exist in front of the camera, bursting into song and dance numbers whenever they feel like it. It's surprisingly laid back for a musical, both in terms of adherence to the musical formula[4] (the first song doesn't appear until well past the 20-minute mark) and actual craft. And you know, that makes for a largely enjoyable viewing experience. The dialogue is light and fun, Fred Astaire is as dapper and charismatic as you could ever want a lead to be, and the songs are catchy, well-choreographed, and generally charming (particularly "The Way You Look Tonight,"[5] which is the charmingest of the charming and one of the best ever of cinema's musical creations, melodically). It's a movie that aims to delight by the sheer force of its fleet amiability, and it's largely successful in doing so. .... And then there's that blackface sequence. Okay, sorry, I just couldn't not mention it. Astaire doing a song-and-dance routine with his face smeared with dark shoe polish is one of those shocking old-movie moments that jolts you into realizing the uncomfortable truth that oh yeah, this movie is from the '30s, and things were like that in the '30s. Honestly, my first impulse (other than "WTF, Swing Time, seriously blackface???") is to give the movie a pass because of the film's otherwise amiable demeanor and that the sequence seems to be a mostly good-natured use of that sort of performance (i.e. not a whole lot of appeals to racial stereotypes other than the fact that, yeah, Astaire is painted black). But that first impulse is a bunch of crap. Given the ugly, destructive context of the whole minstrelsy medium, there's not really such a thing as a "good-natured" use of blackface performance[6], and no matter how nice the rest of the movie seems, the fact is that the blackface comes in the middle of a movie in which there is only one black character, a porter who has like two lines—that doesn't help the racial politics here one bit. And did I mention that the song Astaire dances to here is called "Bojangles of Harlem"? Yeesh. All of this is a shame, firstly because of the racism of course, but secondly because it blemishes what is probably the best-choreographed sequences in the entire film; Astaire dancing with his shadows in one of the most beguiling images from the movie, too, again made less palatable by the racism. Anyway, sorry for the rant. It's an unfortunate spot on an otherwise endearing trifle of a film.

My friends, we are now just a scant ten movies away from the end of this project. Just in time, too, since the school semester is just around the corner. Per usual, feel free to share your own thoughts on the movies here. Until next time!

If you feel so inclined, you can read the previous entry in the series, #s 85-87, here.
Update: You can read the next entry, #s 91-93, here.

1] As far as Big Themes go, for sure The Sixth Sense is a rumination on death and grief, but its treatment of those themes isn't the sort of capitalized portentousness that characterizes, say, Apocalypse Now.

3] Another bit of AFI counter-programming on The Sixth Sense's part. It's a horror movie, for Pete's sake—granted, an extremely classical, even Hitchcockian[3] horror movie, but a horror movie nonetheless. And if there's one thing that AFI doesn't put on its 100 Years...100 Movies list, it's a horror movie. How many times do you think I can use the word "horror" in this footnote? Horror horror horror horror horror. Ten. Ten times.

3] So, it looks like Alfred Hitchcock has directed the only other horror movie on the list (Psycho). There may be a link here...

4] Well, I guess I should say the musical formula that would be standardized by the '50s. Swing Time is probably the earliest musical I've ever seen, and, being mostly ignorant about the larger mechanics of the genre, I have to admit that it's possible that the conventions I'm familiar with didn't emerge until much later.

5] Am I an idiot for not knowing that this song came from this movie? I had always assumed it was some old pop standard or something.

6] Besides, good-natured racism is nonetheless still racism.