My wife and I finally released another episode of The Newbery Chronicles! It's on Louis Sachar's Holes, and you can listen to it here if you're interested.
ALSO: If you're one of the 10 people who subscribe to this via Letterdrop email, I'm going to have to discontinue that because Letterdrop eliminated their free tier. I might switch over to Substack, but I may just not email these out anymore. I dunno. If you have strong feelings about that, let me know.
Movies
As I watched this, my gut was telling me that this was enjoyable but slight, a handsomely filmed and extravagantly performed feature (Paul Dano and Michelle Williams are both incredible) whose most prominent characteristic is the cute allusions to Spielberg's own filmography, e.g. the scorpion box from Hook, the monkey from Raiders, etc. But then a late-film scene—for those who have seen it, the one in the school hallway with the jock upset at how he's portrayed in the skip day film—came and hit me like a freight train, surely one of the best scenes in any movie this year and one of the best scenes in Spielberg's career as a whole, and it cracked this movie wide open for me, and the more time I've spent rolling this movie over in my mind, the more it's opened up (to the point where I started this review with one grade in mind and ended it with another, higher one). I don't think there's been a Spielberg film since A.I. that places this much tension between its thorny ideas and the facade of Spielbergian classicism and sentimentalism, and that earlier film's ersatz family dynamics by way of semiotics is the core allusion that informs everything else in this movie; yes, the movie seems like a wistful semiautobiography about the magic of movies, and the movie works perfectly well when taken as that, but The Fabelmans, with that school hallway scene, tips its hand: "movie magic" is just another way of saying "control," and Spielberg, long accused of being a "manipulative" filmmaker, completely leans into this accusation, laying bare the manipulation baked into the very premise of filmmaking, which this movie pretty explicitly depicts as a person's attempt to recreate life in his own image. What we've been watching—what we watch with every movie, but especially with this movie—is a mere simulation that creates the illusion of authenticity by sleight of hand and trickery. There's a fun, whimsical element to this idea that runs through the film, most notably how the movie shows the ingenuity of its not-Spielberg protagonist as he makes home movies recreating his favorite moments at the cinema, but there's also a deeply sad, even disturbing undercurrent to this: the longer I've sat with this movie, the more the film's depiction of the parents' divorce and particularly the mother's side of things feels like the achingly bleak ending of A.I. when aliens grant the mechanical boy a day of bliss with an artificial mother before allowing him to die. Only in this film, Spielberg is cast as both sides of that scenario, both the boy desperate for the childhood he was denied and also the magic aliens comforting this boy with a constructed image, an automaton. The way I'm describing it sounds dire and depressing, but the incredible thing about the movie is its nuance in depicting it: there are moments in which the film's drive to show filmmaking as a form of control and coercion is profoundly unsettling, most notably the scene with Michelle Williams dancing in front of the car headlights (or a later scene in which a film-within-a-film quotes from the work of Leni Riefenstahl—a truly wild allusion for a Spielberg movie to make but also probably the purest possible example of the insidiousness of film's ability to subjugate reality), but elsewhere in the movie, the results are just delightful, which is kind of the ultimate wrinkle in the movie's thesis on film (described breathlessly by Paul Dano in the opening scene), which is that the illusion of film is able to create real movement in our reality because we are able to be tricked—movies are fake, but the tears, the joy, the anger we feel as we watch them: those are real. Which brings me back to that scene in the school hallway, where an anguished school bully has realized that the illusion of himself depicted in the skip day film will have tangible effects on his real life, and the ambivalence The Fabelmans has about this epiphany is profound: there's something maniacal or even devious about the protagonist's realization of the kind of control he has sought for the previous two hours, but there's also a gobsmacked wonder about it, too. The people who hate Spielberg films (and boy oh boy, do some people haaate them) seem more conscious of this duality in his work than most fans, but it's amusing and even gratifying to know that Spielberg (or at least, Spielberg working with Tony Kushner) understands the haters enough to give them a scene like this. He's also not above making the hater a raging antisemite in the film, which is the sort of self-aggrandizing "manipulative" thing that I'm sure will drive people nuts even more. But I dunno, to me, a lifelong Spielberg fanboy whose first real concept of the "art" of film came from realizing when I was ten years old that Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. were directed by the same person, there is something wonderful and magical about all of this, made even more so by Spielberg's alternating aggrandizement and villanizing of his own profession. Maybe I'm just one of the chumps who wants to be sold a magic trick, but I'm ultimately okay with that. I can't deny the reality of what this made me feel. Grade: A
More of a reimaginging than a reboot, which is fine with me: if the original Child's Play is something of a response to the gross colonization of kids' imaginations by commercial advertising, then this is a pretty canny update of that concept for the fresh hell of surveillance and data collection that capitalism has brought to the act of play. It's also just a lot of silly, mean fun and does a great job of evoking the spirit of a Chucky movie (at least, the original three) without being overly familiar. Grade: B
As long as this stays true to its stated premise (a mockumentary about the killer in a slasher film), this is a great time. The mockumentary scenes show the killer, with the goofy enthusiasm of Michael Scott giving a tour of the Scranton branch, walking the documentary crew through his plan to manufacture the tropes of the slasher genre in his own prospective killing spree, and while by 2006, this was hardly ground-breaking commentary, it's fun and funny and charming to no end. Unfortunately, when the movie flips over to the actual movie that results from this plan, it turns out that following slasher tropes to a T doesn't result in a slasher that's notable in any way, and when the movie finally ends its mockumentary conceit entirely to permanently reside in the slasher mode (albeit in a transition that is pretty clever), Behind the Mask grinds to a halt. The good news is that this is a fairly small fraction of the movie, and the rest is so enjoyable that I'm willing to forgive the deflating ending. But still, it's too bad it has to end on its least-engaging note. Grade: B
Pretty fun Lovecraft adaptation. The whole thing is a silent-film pastiche, and it does a better job evoking the feel of an old silent film than a lot of these silent-revival movies do, which is impressive given that this was basically a fan film by enthusiasts in the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Also, the decision to make it a silent film is a good workaround to the obvious problems in adapting Lovecraft's cosmic horror for the screen, as the knowingly silly embrace of limitations actually makes it feel more otherworldly when Cthulhu finally shows up than it might have been otherwise (stop-motion Cthulhu is very cool, too). It's not perfect, and a lot of this feels a little too smooth—both in terms of the framerate as well as the costuming/props—to be completely credible as an expressionist film from the 1920s. But still, this is a lot better than it has any right to be. Grade: B
It's not a good movie: it's haphazardly paced, its "spurned male lover" ethos is mean and dull, and the songs are terrible. That said, Shinbone Alley is an interesting historical document, not just for that way the its scratchy animation style so fully embodies the aesthetic preoccupations of what is probably the ugliest (not always in a bad way) era of American animation but also for the way it fits into the whole mini-trend of edgy animated animal movies. For example, this movie comes out a couple years before Fritz the Cat, but it's got some of the same bizarre predilections, i.e. the whole "animals, but make them hip and horny urbanites" thing. I mean, even Disney got in on this; 1970 is the same year that saw the release of The Aristocats, which, with its jazz cats and lecherous Thomas O'Malley and alcoholic geese, is definitely an iteration of the trend (albeit cleaned up for the Disney crowd), and while 1973's Robin Hood isn't quite the same, it's still got animals acting like people and being weirdly sexual at times. What was going on in the 1970s with animals and animators? Grade: C
An incredibly bleak film about the world's abject refusal to allow the titular character to experience prolonged happiness. For as despairing as it ultimately is, the plot is a lot of fun (one turn near the end made me gasp so audibly that my wife called from the next room to check if I was okay), and Joan Crawford's performance is an all-timer—if the latent noir aesthetic were ratcheted up just a few clicks, the movie might be an all-timer, too. Grade: A-
