Mini Reviews for November 26-December 2, 2018

Happy December, everyone.

Movies

Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

There's a moment in the mid-film sequence where Vanellope finds herself in a physical manifestation of a Disney fan site (best not to sweat the mechanics of this) and, amid a procession of stormtroopers and a cavalcade of Star Wars sound effects and musical cues, we hear the Wilhelm Scream—which seems to posit that either the use of the Wilhelm Scream in Star Wars is so iconic that an entire generation assumes it's a "Star Wars Sound," or else Disney really, really wants to will this into being. It's a strange little instant that's just one of a whole cascade of strange, disorienting choices in this film—the bright "Inside Out Meets The Internet" design of the film's environments crashing into the cynical brand exploitation of that same setting; the out-of-nowhere '80s-kids-movie style traumatizing imagery, like a dude with a talking cyst on his neck; the ouroboros of Disney's own muddled instinct for self-critiquing brand maintenance that the trailers promised. It's a film that flirts with a sort of conceptual Uncanny Valley, where we're presented with things (mostly brands) familiar to us from our years as digital natives or transplants, only twisted and personified in such a way that they're both cutesy and slightly zombified. It's an exceptionally creative film, but it doesn't have a clue where to focus that energy. Of all the feature films Disney has released in the Lasseter era onward, Ralph Breaks the Internet is certainly the weirdest, which I dig quite a bit. But it's also probably the least successful overall of those features, too. Grade: C+

Widows (2018)

A political thriller in which a coalition of women steal power and resources from an oppressive male oligarchy? Yes, please. It's not nearly so cut-and-dry "woke" as that, being much more about the knotty ways in which corruption and public good intertwine and make real, clean political reform difficult. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't cathartic to see women of color going all Robin Hood on the racist old white dudes like it were the 2018 midterm elections. Not being from Chicago, I can't say if this is a particularly good depiction of the political climate of that city in particular, but as a vividly rendered mythological plane of byzantine political forces (reminiscent of David Simon's version of Baltimore in The Wire), it's wonderful. My only reservation is that the extension of one of the city's rail transit lines serves as a central metaphor for the corruption of political capital—dunno how my urbanist self feels about that. Grade: B+

Blindspotting (2018)

There is a lot to like in this movie. I'd even go so far as to say that the movie has no bad ideas, which is impressive (and a good sign) for a movie which is practically premised on being nothing but ideas. An Edgar-Wright-style urban comedy about dealing with how the world of your youth changes as you leave your youth (complete with tons of Wright-esque edits)? An incisive look at race identity that explores the interlocking layers of what defines whiteness and blackness? A soulful but really legitimately angry look at the collateral cost of a rapidly gentrifying Oakland, CA? An easy-going buddy comedy with naturalistic but frequently hilarious dialogue? A, like, freakin' rap opera? These are all A+ ideas executed sharply, and I've barely scratched the surface of what the film has on its mind. It's too bad that the only good idea the filmmakers couldn't think of was any idea of how to stitch all this together into anything resembling a cohesive film, since the whole thing feels like a particularly interesting but typically disjointed example of the old "exquisite corpse" writing experiment. But the individual pieces are so compelling that I'm willing to go along with the bumpy ride. Grade: B

Gertrud (1964)

If I'm being completely honest, I probably need to rewatch this, since I kind of rushed through the film distractedly because it was due back at the library and I had no renewals left. That said, what did stick with me I like a whole lot. The long takes of brutally honest conversations, the gorgeous but subdued cinematography, the way that the men float in and out of Gertrud's screentime like benevolent and malevolent spirits on her existential quest, the casting of love (or its dissolution) as some kind of history-ending, cosmic struggle—it's all very good. I just probably retained 70% of it at most, and I'd like to spend more time on it once the library isn't breathing down my neck. Grade: B+

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Masculinity—or at least, the traditionally performed signifiers of it within American society—is a prison, and I've not seen many films that evoke the agony of society's gendered weights as poignantly as this one does. I was kind of blown away; I dunno what I was thinking, but I was imagining more of a "bad boy has smoldering stare, rides a motorcycle" thing, not something this excruciatingly pained and well-observed.

If you're interested, the Cinematary podcast's 223rd episode discussed this movie this week, and I was on it! You can listen here.

Out of the Past (1947)

Solid film noir with tremendous lighting. It's a Jacques Tourneur movie, so of course the blacks are as black as they come, and the shadows are practically blotted onto the screen with India ink. There's probably more going on visually than narratively, which isn't to say that the narrative is "bad," but it does wear its film noir tropes on its sleeve perhaps to too naked an extent. Robert Mitchum is merely fine as the hard-boiled protagonist, which is a bit disappointing in light of Night of the Hunter. But Jane Greer is incredible as the femme fatale, and Kirk Douglas is doing this fun proto-Joe-Pesci heel turn. Grade: B

Television

Party Down, Season 2 (2010)

I basically have nothing to say about this cancelled-too-soon show's second season that I didn't already say about its first season. Megan Mullally does a good job of replacing Jane Lynch, who left for Glee, without recreating her exact dynamic, and this second year overall is a good example of how to lightly tweak the chemistry on the show without entirely re-inventing itself (Adam Scott's Henry becoming the team leader, for example). Anyway, the cast is great, the show is very funny and surprisingly poignant, the jokes sometimes edge into an unfortunate homophobia-adjacent space, etc. This season is at pretty much the precise same level of quality that the first season was. Too bad about that early cancellation, though it does have what seems like the perfect ending. Grade: B+

Books

The Truth Lies Here by Lindsey Klingele (2018)

A decent YA pastiche of Stranger Things and that kind of creepypasta-lite mystery. It's always fun in this type of story to see how the threads of the mystery creep out to tie together the whole town in a conspiracy; however, I can't help but remember all the William Sleator I read as a kid and wish that this whole thing were just a bit weirder--it ultimately boils down to a pretty standard (though tenderly rendered) daddy issues book, just with Men in Black creeping around. Klingele is no prose stylist, either, though I feel like I say that about most YA novelists I read these days. Maybe I'm just getting old. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for October 22 - 28, 2018

Rev yous.

Movies

Halloween (2018)

It's about as fan-servicey as the trailers promised, which is to say: very. At times, the film tries to say something about the fundamental magnetism of Michael Myers (a nice dovetail with the fan service, admittedly), which would be interesting if the movie didn't keep getting distracted by weird comic cul-de-sacs and some fairly ridiculous gore. David Gordon Green directs handsomely, and the cinematography is generally very good—if a bit ruined by the overzealous editing à la last year's It, and some of the directorial flourishes feel more like obligatory "cool" than anything truly inspired (one long take in particular feels very much like someone saw that episode of True Detective and was like, "Bro, that's sick"). Still, it looks nice, and that niceness is complemented by a solid finale. I'll cop to having seen this in a bad mood, so perhaps I should recuse myself. But I thought this was aggressively mediocre. I guess when you get right down to it, I shouldn't have been expecting anything more than I usually expect from slasher sequels (even ones forty years delayed/retconned), but at least a lot of those had the good sense to be completely loony in their mediocrity. Grade: B-

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018)

Gus Van Sant adapts John Callahan's memoir into something of a Gus Van Sant's greatest hits collage—mostly, a fusion of the counter-culture, drug-addled meandering of Drugstore Cowboy with the therapeutic schmaltz of Good Will Hunting. And it works really well on a moment-by-moment basis (both of Jack Black's appearances are among Black's best cinema in years), even if the whole package doesn't exactly hang together as something special. Which is I guess how it usually goes with greatest hits collections. Grade: B

Southside with You (2016)

"Before Sunrise, but it's Barrack Obama and Michelle Robinson's first date" is a supremely kooky premise that this film plays entirely straight. It's a profoundly weird experience to try to engage sincerely with the emotional arc of this movie knowing that one of them will eventually become the leader of the free world, and the chasm between the very light, very sweet text of the film and the overwhelmingly weight of its historical context creates a cognitive dissonance that's like a significantly more intense version of the way The End of the Tour exploited the collision of the popularly imagined David Foster Wallace with acted simulacra of that image. Here, there's the obviously pandering liberal vision of Obama as the great man who, according to the film, can on a whim rouse community organizers with an impromptu speech or make old white people comfortable with the ending of Do the Right Thing crashing into a youthful, horny, and honestly kind of douchey Young Barrack not that far removed from the pretentious navel-gazer of Ethan Hawke's Jesse in Before Sunrise, just with a bit more political soulfulness thrown in. The movie makes it utterly impossible to set aside your own opinions of Obama the Political Figure while also seeming (somewhat perversely) to tease you with the prospect that this is "just" the story of two young activists falling in love. It's an interesting experiment (one—despite all this rambling—I'm not entirely convinced is intentional, but oh well) that's probably more interesting as the subject of a graduate student essay than as a viewing experience, largely due to the somewhat flatly written and only passably acted central relationship. It's not exactly uncommon knowledge, but perhaps it's taken for granted that the reason the Before movies work so well is the extreme synergy between its screenplay and its actors—it's not that Southside with You is poorly written and acted, exactly, but that crucial chemistry isn't there. Combined with the political semiotics loop-de-loops, it's hard to really get that invested but just as hard to dismiss entirely. Grade: C+

Big Eyes (2014)
I don't know how much I buy that Burton is positioning this film as a metaphor for his career, but if it is, it amusingly positions Amy Adams as '80s/'90s Burton and Christoph Waltz as 2000s-onward Burton, which feels just about right. Anyway, Big Eyes is nothing really to write home about, but it's solidly constructed (which is practically a miracle for modern-day Burton) and it's really, really nicely shot and lit—and not in that normal, post-millennium Burton way, either. Grade: B

Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から) (2002)
The opaque milkiness that water gets as it seeps from a regular drinking-water pipe through the ceiling of your home and back into your living space is particularly off-putting, as if there is something irremovably contaminated about the drywall and insulation and other structures that literally make up your home. Somehow, it is worse than lake or river water, which on a scientific level is (I imagine) significantly filthier. But to see such filth come from your own house—it makes me feel ill. Dark Water makes this essential repulsion its premise, and it's frequently horrifying. It also takes the idea of contaminated water leaking through a home to its metaphorical extreme, using that imagery to explore generational trauma (the true structural contamination of a home) and the knots that form between parent and child, knots that twist and ache and wind until it's hard to trace the linkages that separate one generation from the next. It's scary, sure, but more than anything, it's heartbreaking. Grade: B+

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

A huge step down from Dream Warriors and every Nightmare film before it, The Dream Master is when the inherent silliness of this franchise collapsed in on itself and smothered its inventive spirit. There are a few inventive moments—it's apparently going to be a franchise staple for Freddy to seduce some horny dude in a grotesque way, and there's a scene involving a waterbed here that is a decent iteration on that—but for the most part, the film is pretty tedious and rote, lacking the audacious special effects/gross-out gags or the demented sense of humor of its predecessors. It almost succeeds in becoming a sort of unintentional comedy (the film's idea of literary academic debate is, "Kafka and Goethe have never been irreconcilable to me," which is surely a Mad Libs creation), but ultimately, the funniest thing in the movie is its recycling of Annie Hall's penis envy joke, which probably speaks more to the creative drought here than anything. Grade: C

Television

Party Down, Season 1 (2009)
Though it was the American version of The Office that was at its popular height in 2009 when this short-lived but cultishly beloved comedy about a team of caterers debuted, it's the UK iteration of the show that Party Down draws most from, using that original series's borderline-cruel well of darkly observed human microdrama and the cosmic irony inherent in being stuck in a job that was nobody's first choice—there's a real sense of tragedy to these characters that is so sharply and agonizingly realized that it's impossible not to think of Gervais and Merchant's early-millennium masterpiece. Even if you're only familiar with the American Office, though, you'll recognize the DNA, from the socially clueless boss who overcompensates for his flaws to the point of dysfunction to the sardonic/wistful will-they-won't-they couple to the insufferable and rude coworkers. That isn't to say that Party Down isn't its own thing; the catering conceit allows for some pretty great "job of the week" features (catering a rich kid's yacht birthday! catering a libertarian rally!), and Ken Marino's Ron is a fresh, utterly sad spin on the "awkward/offensive boss" trope. The cast as a whole is excellent, in fact, starring all sorts of late-2000s comedy luminaries such as Lizzy Caplan (of course—can we have her in every TV series from now on? Please and thank you!), Jane Lynch (whom the show loses to Glee near the end of this first season, which... *shakes fist*), and Adam Scott. The whole package probably isn't going to blow your mind—due to the aforementioned similarities with The Office as well as its unfortunate propensity for making homosexuality the butt of its jokes (it's, like, self-aware, but it's still operating on that late-2000s assumption that if something is "gay" it's inherently funnier, which is blegh)—but it's a solid and sometimes hilarious little half-hour tragicomedy. Grade: B+

Books

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket (2001)
The seventh book of the Series of Unfortunate Events series represents something of a turning point in these books in a number of ways—not the least of which is that Count Olaf no longer needs a disguise, and (in the typical cynical fashion of this series) not because of any particularly uplifting victory by the Baudelaire siblings but because a typo in the newspaper leads all the other characters to belief that the villain is "Count Omar." It's also the book in which the Baudelaires begin to have more autonomy, since they get to pick where Mr. Poe sends them (the titular village), as they think the village's name—abbreviated V.F.D. on a map—will help them solve some of the series's ongoing mysteries and find the Quagmires. This is also the book in which the cruel cosmic joke of "V.F.D." comes to the fore, and the sheer accumulation of things that V.F.D. could stand for becomes something of a sick, postmodern joke—V.F.D. on the map, it turns out, stands for "Village of Fowl Devotees." The essential absurdity of the Baudelaires' universe becomes more and more apparent at the same time that their agency increases, and the series begins to modify its thesis from "the world is a cruel and absurd place that is incompatible with ideas of justice or equity" to "the world is a cruel and absurd place made even more so by the individual actions of autonomous individuals," an idea reflected not just by the Baudelaires' frustrated attempts to own their own destiny but also by the byzantine proliferation of rules that the Village of Fowl Devotees has put into place—laws and rules being perhaps the most acute way that a free people make the world a maze of absurdity. It's all very darkly funny, but it's also, more so than any other of the Series of Unfortunate Events thus far, crushingly sad—not just in the formulaic "foiled attempt at victory" that all the books have leaned into but also in the minutiae recorded of these frustrations. In what is without a doubt the saddest moment of the series so far, Klaus realizes, when he and his siblings are at their most despairing, that it is his birthday, and the book takes a few pages to mull over the chasm between what Klaus's previous expectations for this birthday and the reality of it. It's uncharacteristic for the series to languish over little character moments like this, and when it does, it's a punch to the stomach. Grade: A-

The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket (2001)
The Hostile Hospital continues the series's subversion of its own tropes that The Vile Village began—this time, forcing the Baudelaires to disguise themselves instead of Count Olaf (although Olaf also disguises himself, too). It also extends the previous book's exploration of individual autonomy to pose ethical questions about what it is that truly makes a person's decisions "evil"—do the ends justify the means? should a pure motivation be a factor? does the way that the universe's absurdity limits one's viable options change the way actions must be evaluated on a moral level? This is only accentuated by the increased visibility of Lemony Snicket as not just the book's author but also a character (a character who has perhaps committed questionable actions himself). It's always been clear that these books were postmodern metafiction, but as the series gears up for its back half, the precise nature of its postmodernism and its metafiction is snapping into focus. The Hostile Hospital is not nearly as biting or clever as The Ersatz Elevator, nor is it as sad as its immediate predecessor, but it's still no slouch. I can't believe I never read these books when I was in middle school. I would have dug them so much. Grade: B+

The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket (2002)
Like The Hostile Hospital, The Carnivorous Carnival is more of an extension of the ideas and plots of the previous few books than it is anything new of its own. Back again are the plot subversions of having the Baudelaires, not Olaf, in disguise; returning is the ouroboros of "V.F.D."; here are the same questions of freedom and one's own responsibility for one's actions (there's a particularly violent and horrifying iteration of this question at the book's finale, rivaling the infamous Aunt Josephine death by leeches in The Wide Window as the series's most grisly moment). But, as formulaic as this series can get, these ideas still feel fresh, if not quite as exciting as when they showed up in The Ersatz Elevator and The Vile Village. Plus, the book ends on an especially nasty and unfortunate riff on the "suddenly tragic ending" thing that this series loves, which is, even in a book (and series) full of mean shocks, still pretty shocking. Grade: B+

Music

Let's Eat Grandma - I'm All Ears (2018)
Let's Eat Grandma are, in most respects, yet another piece of the current wave of female-led, emotionally forthright, retro-curious, future-focused indie rock that's been dominating the game for a few years now. What sets this band apart from Snail Mail and Mitski and their other peers in this wave, though, is a deeply atmospheric and even goth spaciousness to their music; listening to I'm All Ears feels a lot like listening to classic The Cure or Echo & the Bunnymen filtered through a distinctly millennial sensibility, and that's probably intentional—surely it's no accident that the excellent 11-minute closing track is called "Donnie Darko," name-dropping that ur-text in post-millennium appropriation of '80s goth rock. These folks aren't copycats, though, and as much as the album evokes its 30-years-prior ancestors, the music itself is as fresh and inventive as you would want a 2018 indie rock release to be, not just in the spaced-out, epic closer but throughout the album with the likes of the high melodrama of "Snakes & Ladders" and the strutting synth-pop of "Hot Pink." I've not listened to the band's 2016 debut, but that one would have to be quite an album for I'm All Ears to come anywhere near to being a sophomore slump. It's one of the strongest releases of the year. Grade: A-