In case you missed it, here's the link to the Q&A I did on the blog earlier this week!
Also, I was on the Cinematary podcast chatting about Ratatouille this week!
Movies
I remain gobsmacked at the inexplicable seven months that began with the release of this movie and ended following the release of Captain Underpants, when DreamWorks Animation briefly became the most formally interesting American animation studio by a considerably wide margin. This movie's screenplay is mostly garbage, but it's unbelievably, eye-meltingly incredible to look at—a legitimate masterpiece in terms of its use of texture and color. Outside of Pixar's god-tier run of Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up, those three DreamWorks features—this one, The Boss Baby, and Captain Underpants—form probably the most coherent treatise on the promises of a fully embodied CGI aesthetic that we've ever gotten, and God help me, I'm tempted to say that the DreamWorks trio is actually superior as a manifesto on account of its willingness to totally unshackle the animation from realism (something Pixar is still struggling to do). Get woke, Disney/Pixar! Grade: B+
It is with great regret that I report that this movie's animation doesn't even come close to the original's—the textures are smoother, the designs are less articulate and inventive, and the character movements lack the springiness that made the original such a joy to watch in motion. Considering that I was basically only into the original movie on the merits of its animation, this is basically a death blow for my relationship with World Tour. It's not terrible; the movie occasionally has signs of life when it gestures toward the chaotic sugar-rush psychedelia of the first movie (I love the bit where the little worm-looking dude has a near-death experience and sees a Monty-Python-style worm god), and the pro-diversity, anti-colonial bent of the story is well-intentioned, if a little soft (like that other recent experiment in kids-entertainment anti-colonialism, Frozen 2, it basically wants to take an anti-colonial stance while also making sure to assure the colonizers that their culture—in this case, pop music—will remain the default). But these are paltry pleasures, nothing nearly engaging enough to make up for the gigantic aesthetic step downward. Grade: C+
An intermittently fun mockumentary about an attempt to make a Loch Ness Monster hoax documentary with Werner Herzog. Herzog himself is incredibly game (he co-wrote/co-produced the thing, so why not), and there are some entertaining moments. But the whole seems a little too pleased with itself, and nothing here is sharp enough to overcome that. Still, an interesting little curiosity. Grade: B-
It's an interesting concept on paper, which is why I've been interested in watching this movie for several years: Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Joseph McCarthy all cross paths on the same sweaty NYC night and have long, philosophical conversations. Unfortunately, in practice, I don't think this really goes anyway. Both the script and the performances turn these people into knowing caricatures of themselves, almost as if to make them more archetypes than real people, which is alright I guess, except that the movie doesn't really do anything with these archetypes. It's trying to; this is supposed to be some treatise on celebrity, America, nuclear weapons, and the 20th century, but the way that this movie only really gestures at basic ideas and surface-level history makes this seem more like fan service for mid-century monoculture nerds: "Hey, what if all these famous people met each other? Wouldn't that be cool?" It's not quite as crass as that, but it's not particularly more insightful either, except in small flashes. The movie has a few great sequences: there's a bit where Monroe explains special relativity to Einstein, a scene that has just this wonderful, ecstatic energy (and the one scene in which Theresa Russell's otherwise kinda flat performances as Monroe comes into its own), and the movie's final five minutes or so are terrific, the one place where director Nicolas Roeg goes full "This is a Nicolas Roeg movie." Besides those things, though, I'm disappointed this wasn't something more special. Grade: B-
Really, truly bleak stuff—no surprise for a movie that opens announcing a suicide that might also be a murder and then flashes back six months to show us everything that led up to that event. That interplay between suicide and murder feels essential to this movie's project; I think there's a tendency to talk about the "doomer" ideology in a way that is kind of aggressive toward those who feel utter despair, the implication being that these people have done something wrong to end up in their state of mind. And I guess it's important to maintain a sense of personal agency on some level when it comes to our self-concepts. But also, it's also worth considering, as this movie does, the extent to which people who commit suicide have been murdered by their environment: a world so relentlessly de-enchanted and twisted by capitalism and its associated ideologies that it begins to feel unlivable (and indeed, is literally unlivable for many human beings and other lifeforms), and a world in which the most prominent resistance narratives offer little in terms of constructive alternatives. I imagine that some leftists would get a little bent out of shape at that last part, but I do think that modern leftism (at least the kind that white people from bourgeois backgrounds tend to find themselves in) is so busy critiquing our current oppressive structures that it ends up being deficient at imagining a more livable world outside of vague, often archaic theoretical categories, and moreover, it's not particularly good at communicating what it does constructively imagine to a lot of the people who face the most profound alienation from our capitalist world. Not that that's entirely the fault of "the left"—real revolutionaries have faced heinous opposition that plays a big role in the ways in which resistance can feel so ineffectual at times. The Devil, Probably is, like Out 1, describing the disorienting fog of a post-'68 counterculture that was struggling to hold itself together as a coherent whole, and while I don't know much about the specifics of France's counterculture, I think a lot about the impotence of America's counterculture following the killings of genuine, even utopian visionaries like Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the exile of Assata Shakur—people whose radical, collectivist visions were papered over by a watery movement that struggled to articulate anything more concrete than John Lennon's "Imagine" (obviously over-generalizing here, but still). There's that famous passage from Infinite Jest in which DFW says that the subjective experience of committing suicide is as internally rational as jumping out of the top floor of a burning building, and if we're using that analogy, I think it's important to recognize that there are two systemic things to indict: first and foremost, the fact that there is a fire to begin with, but also, the lack of any kind of structure to let people out of the building. An early scene in this movie involves the protagonist at a protest where he's asking people to articulate not just what they are fighting against but also what they are fighting for, and he basically just gets shouted down, which feels like a key moment in a movie otherwise preoccupied by how the horrible environmental collapse created by modern industry feels hopelessly inevitable. To be clear, I'm not saying that people are "to blame" for someone's suicide, but I do think a movie like this highlights the importance of holding abolition in one hand and creation in the other. The people I know who face the total alienation this movie depicts are not looking for theory; they're looking for belonging and community, two things that are brutally hard to find in a capitalist society like ours and are crucially important to build as we try to clear out the wreckage from the current system's abuses. This is one of the reasons I still find church and Christianity so compelling, actually. Anyway, maybe I'm just a bloviating gasbag, so thank you for coming to my TED talk—I guess as far as this movie is concerned, this fits pretty squarely into my experiences with Bresson, where I have some nagging reservations about the whole package (this is a very shaggy feature for being only 95 minutes, and I'm not sure all of those shaggy ends work) but also find its ideas fascinating to pick at. As always, I think I just need to watch more Bresson. Grade: B
I know I'm supposed to think that Coppola's pre-fame work as a softcore director is an ignominious beginning for such an acclaimed director, and surely this isn't a "good" movie. But I didn't really find this that much of a step down from his early "respectable" work like Dementia 13 and You're a Big Boy Now. Sure, it's undeniably amateurish, and it has almost no stylistic ambition. But I actually thought this was really, uproariously funny before it settles into basically a long burlesque sequence for the back half of the movie, which I thought was tedious (as are most "erotic" films primarily interested in foregrounding the erotic, tbh). It's dumb, sure, but the opening 20-ish minutes of the movie where these two prudes recount in horror the ways that society has gone to the dogs is hilarious: a straight-shootin' moral conservative is cursed with involuntary hallucinations of naked women? a cowboy says he wants to get rid of all the strip clubs so the Wild West can become the "Decent West"? It's not a particularly insightful film, but when it isn't just boring eroticism, it's also a pretty fun goof on the same kind of anti-sex moral crusaders who are to this day acting as if the existence of things like "WAP" are a threat to civilization. Also, this movie is 69 minutes long, so... nice. Grade: C
Television
RIP to this wonderful little show. After America Ferrera's departure, the final season of Superstore feels a little more aimless than previous seasons, and the first few episodes back after its pandemic-truncated fifth season go for some low-hanging fruit re: COVID jokes. The finale swings a little too hard for sentimentality, too. But overall, this is still basically the same, delightful series it's always been, an incredibly well-observed, surprisingly innovative workplace sitcom with a terrific cast and sense of place. It's also kind of wild that we got a network sitcom as unapologetically anti-corporate and pro-worker as this one, and the penultimate episode before the two-part finale is a really vicious take-down of the veneration of "genius" rich people like Elon Musk, which is somewhat surprising on its own right. Superstore had clearly run its course by now, but I'm sad to see it go. It strikes me that I may never watch a network sitcom again after this one; I watch so few TV shows anymore anyway, and this kind of traditional, 22-episodes-per-season network sitcom is clearly a dying breed, making the odds of me watching another one seem slim. It was a good run, I suppose, me and the network sitcom, and Superstore is a great one to go out on. Grade: B
Music
Outside of their scores for Claire Denis's movies, I haven't really paid much attention to Tinderstick's output since the '90s. But in the meantime, it seems like the band's dusky, chamber-pop sound has matured into a smokey ethereality. Long compositions (particularly the 11-minute opening track, "Man Alone (Can't Stop the Fadin')") slink along unpredictable grooves with hypnotic, drum-machine rhythms, sounding not unlike Lambchop or maybe Tom Waits in his quieter moments, resulting in an album with a fantastic late-night atmosphere. It all feels remarkably of-a-piece with the whole, maybe too much so: most of the songs blend into one another and kind of lose their individual character, even the trio of covers in the middle of the record. But as a sustained vibe, it's great. Grade: B+
