Mini Reviews for December 24-30, 2018

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Mini Reviews for November 12-18, 2018

I guess it's awards season now? It doesn't feel like it. Anywhere, here are reviews.

Movies

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
It's, like, fine. I kind of dig that it treats "quantum" with the same sort of hand-wavy magical gobbledygook that sci-fi treated "radioactive" in the '50s and '60s. "Quick, we need some sort of vaguely sciencey rationale for telepathy! Uh... what about quantum entanglement?" It's fun in a very classically B-movie way. The rest is very much the kind of movie you got from the original Ant-Man, with maybe just a tad fewer inspired moments à la the cut from gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine to toy-sized Thomas the Tank Engine. A lot of the humor of the film feels a little too schematic, which was also true of the first one, and the mommy-daughter dynamics don't scan quite as well as the daddy-daughter emotional core of the first. But, like I said, it's fine. Nothing great; certainly nothing to justify why Marvel, after two movies, hasn't just jettisoned all this "ant-man" stuff and given the reigns entirely to Michael Peña's character, who remains the best thing about either of the films. But fine. Grade: B-

The Guilty (Den skyldige) (2018)
On a technical level, it's impressive the tension this film is able to wring out of its writers-workshop-prompt premise: it's a movie that takes place entirely in an emergency call center and whose action almost completely occurs via phone calls of which we only ever see the call-center side. It's not particularly showy in how it does it (though there's a bit with a red light near the end that is both obvious and beautiful), but The Guilty nearly perfectly balances shot length with editing in a way that's never ostentatious but always brutally effective in its drive toward a thriller intensity. On a thematic level, it's a remorseless little deconstruction of the hero impulse, showing at every turn how our protagonist's desire to be a hero in the traditional, individualist sense leaves crucial collateral damage—though impressively, manages that clear-eyed characterization without ever completely tipping its hand as to where the plot will go next. The movie isn't a revelation or anything, but it's a deftly executed experiment with just enough thematic edge to make it stick; it helps that it's a lot of fun to boot. Grade: B+

Cosmos (2015)
I'm not afraid to admit that I didn't really understand this. Maybe if I'd read more of the French existentialists I'd have been more on its wavelength, but as of right now, filtering Sartre through a slapstick comic lens with a dash of postmodern epistemology just didn't connect to my brain. I enjoy the sense of play (and the uber-cheesy score is reminiscent of what Twin Peaks did with the reappropriation of soap-opera-esque leitmotifs, which is cool); I would have enjoyed it more if I'd understood anything at all that the characters said. Uh huh, the universe is absurd; it's just a tad more absurd with this movie in it. Grade: C-

Blue Caprice (2013)
It's imbuing the perpetrators of the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks with a complicated humanity feels fairly radical, in the same vein (though obviously on a much less genocidal scale) as 2004's Downfall—refusing to relegate those who commit mass murder into the blanket, otherized category of "monster" or "criminal" means that the film refuses to engage in the flippant hand-washing that excuses society's greater forces from responsibility and that treats human depravity as a fluke event without cause or effect. "Terrorism" is the great absolver of American imperialism and American violence, and the film's rejection of the typical cinematic signifiers of this label dovetails nicely with the film's implication of American gun culture and conspiracy-prone mainstream-adjacent spaces. All that said, the film isn't nearly as complex as it wants to be—it's a remarkably static movie, sometimes by design but more often by failed attempts for lingering imagery and lyrical moments to carry thematic weight that they simply can't bear. As much as I admire some of the theoretical ambitions, the ideas are realized somewhat thinly, which is disappointing. Grade: B-

The Company of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan does his typical thing by bringing storybook material to lurid, lushly gothic life—impressive, considering that this is only his second feature, that he already had his "typical thing" down this pat. As screenwriter, Angela Carter does an admirable job of translating her excellent short story to film; the phantasmagoric Freudian imagery of the story's transgressive take on Little Red Riding Hood becomes literally nightmarish here, which is in concept a little too cute (the frame device clarifying that this is a dream is entirely unnecessary), but in practice, it's often stunning—and bonus points for the two incredible (and incredibly gory) werewolf transformations here. As the film's vignettes pile up, the movie does start to become a little muddled, both on a plot level (which was never really intended to come together with much precise sense anyway) and a thematic one. But taken as a broad generalization, it's a nice companion to the original story's refutation of coddling, misogynist norms. Grade: B+

In a Lonely Place (1950)
As distasteful as it can be, history repeatedly rewards cynicism, which has made film noir one of the most enduring of the classic studio genres. Its deep distrust in social institutions effortlessly waltzes itself into modern progressive politics, and so here you have In a Lonely Place, a film not only grounded by a pair of titanic performances (Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham both vying for their career-best performances, though I'll cop to only having seen Grahame in It's a Wonderful Life prior to this) but also in a bracing interrogation of how the Hollywood system enables violent men, which... uh, yeah, still working on that one, aren't we, Hollywood? That similarly industry-critiquing peers like Sunset Boulevard have lingered more strongly in the popular imagination is less a testament to Wilder's film being the superior one (though it is, by a teensy bit), but more that this tier of cynicism—that a man empowered by Hollywood's system might still be deeply dangerous even if he's not guilty of literal murder (the great scapegoat of morality)—is still a less comfortable fit with our broader social archetypes than the spectacle of a formerly glorious woman used by the industry flaming out in middle age via the throes of mental illness. In a Lonely Place is maybe a little more straightforward and obvious than it ideally should be: it's a megaphone of a film, sometimes to the muting of its non-Bogart, non-Grahame characters. But I guess nearly 70 years later, a megaphone is still the tool for the job. Grade: A-

Music

St. Vincent - MassEducation (2018)
Last year's Masseduction was probably the most self-consciously "produced" album of St. Vincent's career, crafted by a whole team of sound engineers helmed by none other than pop heavyweight Jack Antonoff. With MassEducation, St. Vincent reworks the same songs into basically their polar opposites: quiet, acoustic, and mostly piano-based pieces. It's an interesting experiment in theory and one that pays off intermittently. The whole album was apparently recorded in an afternoon, which shows: none of this is particularly elaborate, and while that's the point, it sometimes leaves the songs more anemic and musically reductive than the clarifying simplicity that Annie Clark was likely going for. "Happy Birthday, Johnny," already one of the quieter Masseduction tracks, becomes practically a whisper here, and the lack of volume doesn't really do anything to enhance the song; "Pills" is even worse, highlighting just how much of that song was just intricate instrumentation propping up some truly facile lyrics. Other parts of MassEducation work tremendously, though. "Hang On Me" comes alive in its piano version here, a truly beautiful ballad lifted by one of Clark's best recorded vocal performances; "Sugarboy," the lone bit of intricate instrumentation on the reworked album, is a nervy, oppressive piece of chamber pop; and on the whole, the reworked songs do a good job accentuating the emotional core of Clark's lyrics (some of the best and most personal of her career, "Pills" excepted) that sometimes got washed out in Masseduction's loud production. It's a mixed bag, for sure, but curious fans (yours truly) will find gems. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for August 20 - 26, 2018

For some reason, I went on a "sprawling, imperfect visionary films" kick this week, with mixed results.

Movies

Blockers (2018)

I'm far too late to the game to feign surprise that Blockers is so good, but I am at least pleased that it lived up to the somewhat backhanded hype of "it's better than its trailer!" To continue the backhanded mood, I will say that the movie is never better than in its first hour, and while I'm exceedingly grateful that this is the rare modern American comedy somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 minutes, I do think that there isn't really enough movie to make the last act—a largely sentimental pileup of thin character moments—work nearly as well as I wished. Maybe it isn't the spry runtime so much as the fact that the movie barely characterizes its teen characters, who are largely frictionless players in an eyebrow-raisingly idealized night of binge drinking and 'shroom-eating; outside of a gross and somewhat unnecessary vomiting incident (followed by one of the most impressive alcohol-poisoning recoveries I've ever seen), there is not a lot that actually goes wrong on the teen end of things in this movie. Contrast this with Superbad (sorry to bring up such a dude-centric movie in comparison to such a female-centric film, it's just what came to mind first), where the escalating problems of the virginity-losing night help define each character pristinely—there just isn't enough for our Blocker teens to do for me to feel like I know them outside of some very broad personality traits, and while I realize the problem-free teen plot is part of the point (hey, I guess it's not so disastrous to give teens a tad bit of freedom—at least, upper-middle-class, uncannily responsible and savvy teens), it also doesn't do the mechanics of the film any favors. But lordy, I'm being so negative about a movie that is really quite good, so lemme talk about the parents in this movie, who are pretty much perfection and, unlike their kids, actually encounter a whole movie of problems (and a bunch of ass beer, a phrase that made me giggle far more than it should have). The Cena-Mann-Barinholtz trio has one of the best comic dynamics I've seen in an ensemble American comedy in a long, long time, and the script plays precisely to these actors' strengths in relation to one another. Unsurprisingly, John Cena is a fantastic physical comedian, and everyone already knows Leslie Mann is amazing, but I was actually really caught off guard how much I liked Ike Barinholtz's street-wise buffoon; there's an impressive amount of pathos in that performance, and while the movie has no shortage of great lines and deliveries, Barinholtz undoubtedly does the best in timing the comedic cadence of his dialogue. Anyway, the movie's very funny and at least half its cast is well-served, and I wish it were possible to mash this movie with Game Night, 2018's other strong American comedy, so I could make a super movie that was visually stylish in addition to being as comedically sharp as Blockers is. I dunno if that would solve either of the movies' third-act problems, though. Grade: B+

Byzantium (2012)

Byzantium isn't anything particularly new for vampire movies, but there's a floridness to the film that I really connected with, the feeling that immortality sprawls out before these characters in the same tortured, languorous way that the characters' speech spools from their mouths. This feels like what Angel and Buffy were always going for when they did the flashback episodes that showed us Angel and Spike running around in the 1800s and stuff, only it works much, much better here, likely because of the budget and the fact that Neil Jordan is twice the director—on a sheer spectacle scale—that anyone on those shows ever was. The overall story doesn't quite ever find its feet, but the feel of the movie is rich. It's bleak but sumptuous, and Saoirse Ronan is magnificent. Grade: B+

The Road (2009)

As a movie, it's fine, I guess—a little gray, which is the point, probably, and a lot grim, which is another point. But as an adaptation, it's a good case study in why exactly it can be a bad idea to be so slavishly faithful to a source material. First of all, it accentuates any minor deviation from the book (there are a few here, and they land like bombs); second of all, it highlights all the ways in which some specific stories are better suited to one medium than another: e.g. this dystopia, which, despite being more or less accurately transcribed into film, feels far more at home in McCarthy's lean, world-weary prose than in director John Hillcoat's sooty camera. It's honestly kind of boring onscreen. Grade: C+

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

In a sort of meta twist on the Punk'd / Jackass cultural landscape of the mid-2000s that clearly birthed this project, Borat isn't just about pranking the dumb schmucks onscreen that Sacha Baron Cohen encounters in-character on the streets of America; it's about baiting us, the audience members, into laughing at (or worse, not even questioning) Cohen's willfully reductive, inaccurate take on central Asia and thereby proving our own bigotry toward that region—xenophobia weaponized against xenophobia, Kazakhstan First to bring out all the America Firsties. It's a completely ballsy (uh, literally) gambit, and given the litany of my high school peers who, in 2006, incessantly guffawed and quoted "Very nice" and "Great success" in terrible accents, the bait was tremendously (horrifyingly) effective. It's all very punk rock and transgressive, and I think I'm seeing in this what a lot of my other cinephile peers are seeing in Jackass. That said, it's still a bit conceptual for my tastes, high-wire and impressive though the concept may be, and given that absolutely nobody I ever heard quoting the xenophobic shtick seemed to be in on the joke, it's just sort of depressing that all this meticulous work exposing American prejudice went into what ultimately became a decontextualized meme. Grade: B

Gangs of New York (2002)

Gangs of New York is a masterpiece of set design, and it captures with great detail something I'm always immensely interested in, which is the emergence of 20th-century American institutions and conventions out of the relative anarchy of the country's first century (see also: Deadwood). This doesn't prevent the film's nearly three hours from being a slog at times, though, nor does it make Cameron Diaz's or Leonardo DiCaprio's characters any more interesting. I keep seeing people praise Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, which is fine, I guess, but also, it mostly just made me want to watch There Will Be Blood. Basically, this is what happens when Scorsese doesn't have a good screenplay. Grade: B-

Dune (1984)

David Lynch attempts the impossible and tries to adapt Frank Herbert's notoriously unadaptable Dune. Of course he fails—it's a famous failure that anyone could (and should) have seen coming a mile away. The funny thing is, Dune is full of stuff I usually love in Lynch movies: transcendental mysticism, alternating body-horror and Freudian imagery, Kyle MacLachlan, opaque plotting involving otherworldly forces, goofy affection for old Hollywood norms (it feels very much like some mash-up between The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra, but in space), acting at a bizarre register, an acting cameo from ol' David Lynch himself. But somehow, when presented in a Dune context, this is all crushingly boring. When your score involves both Toto and Brian Eno but somehow ends up sounding generic anyway, that's the canary in the coal mine, my friends. Grade: C-

Television

Trial & Error, Season 2 (2018)

I'm hoping this (now cancelled) show gets picked up by Netflix or Hulu or someone à la Brooklyn Nine-Nine, because it's so good. Taking the lightly surreal elements of Season 1 and cranking them up significantly, Season 2 of Trial & Error is every bit the superior set of episodes, mining the increasingly strange small-town setting (something like Pawnee mixed with Monty Python) for some singular pieces of TV comedy. Some of it is fleeting—e.g. how each episode Anne is revealed to have a new psychological condition (my favorite: she has a condition that makes her eyes stay closed for long periods of time, so she has someone paint eyeballs on her eyelids, to hilarious and nightmarish effect); but other bits are recurring, and they accumulate in an impressive commitment to worldbuilding and continuity—like, for example, the Reed/Pecker feud that influences everything from the social dynamics of the town right down to the slang the characters use. And in the midst of this, the show somehow makes room for an engaging murder mystery and well-rounded characters who are likable and even sweet without ever really losing their essential comedic kernal. This is one of the better network sitcoms we've gotten in a while; come on, NBC, why would you give this up? Grade: A-

Books

Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (2018)

Like a lot of biographies/memoirs of celebrities who have gotten this level of success and artistic freedom (Bruce Springsteen's autobio also comes to mind), Room to Dream is at its most engaging when it's dealing with David Lynch's childhood and early career, where he feels much more within the chaos of bohemian life (there's an amusing/terrifying anecdote recounted in the book involving a young Lynch fending off burglars in his inner-city Philadelphia home with a sword) than later in his career, when he has a team of assistants who cook lunch for him and stuff. This is compounded by the format of the book itself, which is split between traditional biographical writing by Lynch's long-time friend Kristine McKenna and more memoir-ish recollections told in first person by Lynch himself; Lynch's recollections are far more interesting and poetic when he's dealing with events far in the past, which both raises the question of how much these events have been warped by the tricks of memory over decades but also illustrates with great detail exactly the kind of off-kilter mythologizing that Lynch's mind makes of the world around him. So not only does Lynch's life become more straightforward and comfortable as he gets older; his narration seems less steeped in Lynch's own sensibilities. That's not to say that the whole book isn't interesting, though, and fans of his films and other projects (i.e. yours truly) will find a lot of anecdotes and information to tickle their brains. I also wonder, though, what this book would be like if it weren't quite so cozy with Lynch himself; that McKenna has known the man for so long is surely a boon to the book in many ways, but also, it's a very genial biography, despite some bits that seem like they should be a bit more probing (especially when the book talks of his relationships with women, which is routinely depicted as somewhat messy but also quirkily, endearingly so—apparently his ex-wives have all made peace with Lynch's penchant for serial infidelity and work-before-family habits, but even so, I wonder what someone who wasn't Lynch's friend might have made of this). But I'm being unduly negative; David Lynch is an exceedingly interesting person even when he's older and more comfortable, and the behind-the-scenes information about his work is fascinating. Even if it isn't a great read, it's still a very good one, and one I'd recommend to Lynch fans. Grade: B+

Music

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids - An Angel Fell (2018)

A jazz and worldbeat fusion that's sort of a concept album in the vein of some of the spiritual jazz luminaries of the 1970s. I wish the album swung a bit more for the fences, musically—there are some touches of free jazz, but nothing nearly so ambitious as John Coltrane's Ascension, which makes the spiritual dimensions of An Angel Fell feel comparatively flat. This is an album that could do with a bit more transcendence. Maybe it isn't fair for me to connect this to some of the most notable spiritual jazz of all time, so I'll just say this: there are very good passages here (I love the incorporation of violin and classical guitar in the opening track, for example) as well as some places that feel kind of thin (the chant-like "Land of Ra" is a centerpiece, but not a particularly compelling one). Still, if '70s spiritual jazz is your thing, or jazz that's reaching for something a bit bigger and more mystical than your typical jazz record, you might want to check this out. Grade: B