Mini Reviews for October 24 - 30, 2022

My wife and I released a new episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here if you're interested!

Movies

Lightyear (2022)
I went into this expecting it to be bad, and it was, but I think this actually would have been a tolerable, if forgettable, piece of children's sci-fi if it weren't for the fact that it's about the "real" Buzz freaking Lightyear. It's a weird bind that I'm sure the filmmakers found themselves in making this movie: scrubbed of its forced connections to the Toy Story franchise, the screenplay is not nearly good enough to make this movie be notable as a standalone film, but the Toy Story connections that make it notable unmistakably flag this movie as a piece of cynical corporate brand management as opposed to the sincere work of middlebrow family entertainment it wants to be. I'm sorry, but I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough that I can hear the characters in this movie on multiple occasions saying word-for-word memorable lines from the first Toy Story and not come to the conclusion that some middle-management Disney husk with an MBA ghost-wrote the film. It's like watching that unbearable pre-show Regal ad where everybody just says random famous movie lines, only at feature length. Also, on the animation front, this is a major step back from the past few Pixar films' attempts to broaden the studio's style outside of their familiar aesthetic. We're in mildly cartoony photorealismville again, baby, and it's boring. Complete dreck. Almost certainly the worst Pixar movie—or at least the most dispiriting. Grade: C-

Bride of Chucky (1998)
Easily the best Chucky movie up to this point in the series. Chucky as an entity was never particularly scary to me anyway (even when I was a kid), so this movie's abandonment of any semblance of "scary" plus its commitment to weird camp and outsider sensibilities helps it sail past every previous movie in the franchise. Explicitly tying itself to The Bride of Frankenstein should be a movie-ruining bit of hubris, but it's absolutely deserved here, as it embraces that early classic's penchant for the playful and absurd over the spooky. Plus, my god, the voice acting of the central duo: the addition of Jennifer Tilly as functionally the lead is an incredibly canny move, and Brad Dourif puts in his series-best performance. Also, barely related, but I just happened to click on Dourif's Wikipedia page when writing this up, and I realized he plays Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, which is kinda blowing my mind at the moment; I should have made that connection before the fourth entry in this series. Grade: A-

Seed of Chucky (2004)
What an absolute blast. Some of the running bits don't really work (e.g. the "Made in Japan" thing or Jennifer Tilly's eating disorder), but for the most part, this is intoxicating and ridiculously fun and has the good sense to realize that two Jennifer Tilly performances are better than one. Whereas Bride of Chucky explicitly presents itself as the Chucky analog to The Bride of Frankenstein, Seed openly claims to be the Glen or Glenda of the franchise, which is 100% the logical conclusion to the camp flourishes of the previous film. Along the same lines, I gotta hand it to this movie for having the guts to evoke one of the most repulsive parts of Pink Flamingos (the kidnapping/insemination plot). Speaking of insemination, people talk about weird Hollywood synchronicity like the time there were two Snow White movies in the same year, but I've never heard anyone talk about the much more improbable parallelism of 2004's duology of CGI sperms (i.e. this and She Hate Me). A true unicorn pairing. Grade: A-

Curse of Chucky (2013)
A soft reboot after the franchise reached the delirious heights of Bride and Seed was not at the top of the list of things I would want to see out of the follow-up. But allowing for that, this was really solid—probably the most overtly "scary" (relatively—Chucky's not very scary) Chucky movie since the first one, and it does a lot of good with that aim to return to the series's horror roots. It's set in a big, spooky house, which is a tremendous setting, and appropriately, the direction is the series's most baroque, filled with moody lighting and sweeping steadicam shots (maybe my favorite direction of the series). And for us lovers of post-Child's Play 3 Chucky, the last ten minutes or so does let us know that Don Mancini hasn't forgotten about us. So, a good time, if not the great time delivered by its immediate predecessors. Grade: B

 

Books

A Gathering of Days; A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32 by Joan W. Blos (1979)
What if a children's book looked exactly like a child's journal from the 1830s? Impressively committed to its conceit, to the point that it's willing to be extremely boring in the interest of looking like a historical document. If that sounds cool to you, you can listen to my wife and I talk about it on our podcast. Grade: D

 

 

 

 

Music

Taylor Swift - Midnights (2022)
I've heard people call this album a "grower," and it certainly has the hallmarks of that: low-key production, murmured melodies, few open bids for radio play. However, after having spent a week with this album, I'm feeling like it's the opposite... a shrinker? I'm sad to report that the more I listen to it, the thinner Midnights feels. Everything on here is something that Taylor Swift has done elsewhere (and better): the nocturnal Antonoff production hearkens back to the simmering, weary back-half of Reputation and the warmth of the Lover deep cuts; the semi-ironic self-critique of "Anti-Hero" is a less sardonic revision of "Blank Space"; "Vigilante Shit" and "Karma" again evoke Reputation, but this time the cringey, forced "bad girl" camp villainy. I wouldn't mind as much if the writing on these songs were actually good, but a lot of these lyrics feel like first-drafts, with a main idea only barely developed (and certainly not as idiosyncratic and nuanced as I'm used to hearing from Swift). That's to say nothing of the outright howlers, like the already infamous "sexy baby" line on "Anti-Hero" or how Taylor Swift still seems to employ the word "fuck" like a middle-schooler giddy about saying grown-up words. The melodies on the tracks fare better, but there isn't a single song where I enjoy both the melody and the lyrics, which is disappointing coming from Taylor Swift. It's disappointing after folklore seems to usher in a new phase of maturity and hindsight for Taylor Swift that she's come up with an album that feels like ersatz Taylor Swift, mimicking the rhythms and themes of past successes without the spark of what made those earlier works cook. I guess we'll see how I feel after spending a little more time with this—maybe this will prove to be a true grower after two weeks, or ten. But right now, this strikes me as one of Taylor Swift's weakest album, if not her outright worst. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for April 4 - 10, 2022

If you're interested, I was on a podcast talking about a trio of Lindsay Ellis videos about the Hobbit movies. It was a good time! You can listen to it here (and it's a better use of your time than actually watching those Hobbit movies).

Movies

Turning Red (2022)
I'm a public advocate of Pixar being capable of producing solid movies that don't necessarily "change your life," as well as Pixar diversifying their animation palette, and I'd say the last few features the studio has made have the future looking pretty bright in that regard (though it'd be a lot brighter if Disney would actually release these in theaters). This movie isn't without its flaws, especially on the screenplay/structural level: there are some howlingly bad lines in the film (the clear worst offender: "My panda, my choice," which was practically an out-of-body experience for me), and the battling pandas is one of the most out-of-place invocations of the "Pixar shoehorns an action setpiece into the third act" trope in the studio's history. But on the whole, this is really rather lovely. The generational conflict between mother and daughter so emotionally precise in a way that feels like a less compromised version of what Brave was going for, and for as much as I just complained about the fight finale, when the movie pushes through that into the much gentler emotional climax immediately following it, it's beautiful and resonant in a specific way that Pixar has never really tried before (and, it bears mentioning, does a much more effective and nuanced rendering of Encanto's clumsily broad-brushed treatment of virtually the same thematic territory). I also like the animation here quite a bit, which, like Luca, is doing this interesting experiment in cartoonishly rounded character models and flattened color gradients which suggest but don't overly conform to the conventions of the modern cel animation you might see on a kids show now (the dreaded "CalArts style," I suppose). Also, the fur animation on the pandas is some of the nicest I've ever seen—the extremely tactile way that you can sense the presence of skin and fat and muscle under the fur is very impressive and also very cuddly-looking. There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the past decade about Pixar's difficulty in producing the same kinds of masterpieces that they did in the '90s/2000s, and while I still stand behind my old assertion that there's value in sturdy formula, it's still exciting to me that it seems like 1) Pixar is no longer automatically chasing that formula (like, not everything has to be built around a high-concept world), and 2) in place of formula, Pixar is allowing for more idiosyncratic, personal stories, even when those stories are considerably messier and less polished than classic Pixar. Unless I'm completely misreading this new era of Pixar, and in a few years, we'll all have realized that the new Pixar formula was a reliance on body transformations, which *counts on fingers* has actually been the focus of the last four Pixar movies, soooo... uh oh. Grade: B+

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022)
A really weird, tricky film, maybe especially so for me. It's set in and dedicated to describing the very Houston suburb where my mom grew up and that I have visited countless times, and moreover, this suburb is depicted at the exact time that my mom (who is just four months older than Richard Linklater, I found out) lived there, too. On one level, it's just kinda surreal to see a major motion picture talking about NASA Road 1 and Clear Lake; but on a deeper level, a movie that is already about the kaleidoscopic nature of nostalgia becomes for me filtered through family history and a second-hand nostalgia from the things that my mom, her sisters, and my grandparents have told me. For a while, this was a major liability for my feelings about the movie; the first 30-40 minutes of this film are a minefield of the cringiest, Forrest-Gump-level Boomer clichés ("we were at war in Vietnam for some reason," Jack Black's entirely too precious narration says with little irony), made even worse for me since I'm hearing them echoed through the often insufferable, usually fairly reactionary way my extended family talks about the past, i.e. with a heavy dose of "back when men were men and people weren't so soft" alongside a tinge of "when [black] people knew their place" and "you kids don't know how easy you have it"—not really the ethos of this movie (hard to imagine Linklater ever buying into any of that) but inescapably linked in my mind. But as the film went on, my attitude got better as I started noticing the accumulation of really interesting, off-the-beaten-path details among the iconic stuff: the brief digression about Whipped Cream & Other Delights, for example, or Joni Mitchell dueting with Johnny Cash on The Johnny Cash Show, or a random snippet of Janis Joplin appearing on Dick Cavett—the kinds of media details that almost never make it into this type of "Boomer's greatest hits" piece. Like, sure, the protagonist goes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it blows his mind, but he also goes to the drive-in and sees a John Wayne movie called Hellfighters that I don't think anyone but Richard Linklater remembers, and the protagonist seems just as pumped about that movie as the iconic Kubrick one. As the movie went on, what occurred to me is that this isn't so much about the self-aggrandizing mythology that Boomer movies tend to lean into but instead it's about the interplay between the specific, granular, not particularly memorable experiences that comprise most people's lives and the gigantic collective memories like the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing that end up becoming generational myths. There's a line near the end of the movie (maybe the final line of the movie? I'd have to check) about how even though the protagonist had slept through the actual moon landing on television, the nature of memory is such that he'll remember it anyway: from the longview of an entire lifetime, the moonwalk is just as real (even realer) than schoolyard rounds of Red Rover or a trip to AstroWorld, even if you didn't actually experience it. And for as much as I reflexively rolled my eyes at the way the early goings of this movie reminded me of the irritating aspects of, like, my aunt telling me about "the good old days," the film as a whole kind of moved me because I couldn't stop thinking about how easily my mom or my grandfather or whoever could have populated the edges of this movie, which is not something I'm used to feeling in stories about this era. As always, Linklater has a real facility with making his creations feel lived-in and alive, but it's awfully strange how here he arrives at that through something so arch as a '60s Wonder Years-ish space race movie, and it's really strange that it halfway felt like I was watching my family. Grade: B+

Totally F***ed Up (1993)
I was vibing on this just being a Slackers-by-way-of-Godard-style film essay built out of vignettes, but then the last ten minutes came around, and I realized that there was a plot I was supposed to have been following, which made me feel a little dumb. I should probably watch this again. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

Saint Jack (1979)
If I hadn't seen Peter Bogdanovich's name in the credits, I would have never in a thousand years guessed that he directed and co-wrote this extremely loose hang-out movie: a lot of Altman (specifically The Long Goodbye) in this, and virtually nothing of the melancholic nostalgia of something like Paper Moon or Nickelodeon other than the fact that this is halfway a remake of Casablanca, only with the decision to not cooperate with the CIA replacing the decision to help people escape the Nazis. But for the most part, this is a total change of pace for Bogdanovich, which is fine with me! Spread your wings, Pete! It has a terrific sense of place and an equally terrific central performance from Ben Gazzara, and if it's maybe a little too shaggy for my tastes in parts, those two things make up for that. Grade: B

 

Television

Nathan For You, Season 3 (2015)
As with the second season, it's more of the same, only scaled up. The sheer number of absurd steps that Nathan Fielder has his schemes go through to get his clients to traditional measures of social and commercial success in our capitalist society is never not hilarious to me, and it's also vaguely profound (and even horrifying). It's not just that there's the whiff of desperation in Fielder's plots (though that's there, too)—it's also the broader context that provides the justification for these absurd scenarios: in a society in which validation and actualization is measured via profits and private ownership, any hustle to get you there becomes valid. Wild stuff. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for June 28 - July 4, 2021

Happy birthday to this sham of a country that mythologizes its own liberation from colonial oppressors but has ignored or actively opposed every other anti-colonial liberation movement since.

Movies

Luca (2021)
I think I'm probably more positive on this than a lot of the critics I follow, which makes sense to me because I usually go to bat for the minor Pixar releases (e.g. The Good Dinosaur). I dunno, I just thought this was very sweet and very lovely; it has none of the weird edges of The Good Dinosaur, but it's similar in the sense that it's a pointedly low-key movie that does narrative and visual things that are off-format for the studio. In this case, it's about a friendship among three outcasts, two literal fishes out of water and one figurative one, probably the smallest story Pixar has ever told in terms of thematic ambition. Familiar character beats abound, but it's told with such confidence in its small stakes (the entire movie hinges on a children's triathlon) that it feels graceful and fleet rather than thin, and I'm confident it would have been 100% the wrong decision for this story to have replaced its lightly wistful character beats with a trademarked Pixar big tear-jerking moment at the climax. Plus, those small stakes dovetail nicely with the animation itself, which is the breeziest and most overtly cartoonish aesthetic that Pixar has ever used at feature-length—in fact, it has a lot of the visual sprightliness of Pixar's short films, crossed with a particular eye toward evoking hand-drawn animation, and I found it really refreshing how light and colorful everything is here. It's not entirely clear to me why a studio would spend dozens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars developing computer animation technology that approximates (with a lot more lighting and particle detail, of course) what a group of artists with pen and paper could have achieved at a fraction of the cost, but I do really love the animation here, so maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyway, this is good. Didn't deserve to be dumped on streaming in the service of brand management. Wish I could have seen it in a theater. Grade: B+

The Wanted 18 (2014)
I was led to believe this had more animation than it does—I thought this would be a Waltz with Bashir-type situation, where all or most of the documentary was going to be animated, but it's really just a few comic interludes that get some (admittedly charming) stop-motion. Otherwise, this is a standard, somewhat ragged, but clearly passionate documentary about the First Palestinian Intifada and specifically how some Palestinians collectively owning a bunch of cows and distributing the milk to counter-occupation Palestinian revolutionaries came to be considered a national threat by the Israeli government. Some great interviews with some of the revolutionaries themselves, but overall, this documentary feels muddled by the very thing that drew me to it to begin with: the animation. I'm not sure what's gained by having the movie turn into basically Chicken Run for a minute or so at a time as it recounts an otherwise fairly serious and inspiring incident of self-governance and collective action, and what's lost by having those sections is a coherent sense of tone and structure. Grade: B-

A Mighty Wind (2003)
Relative to the other Christopher Guest mockumentaries, this one is pretty light on the "mocking" part; it's a really interesting choice to make this so gentle, more a warm character study than the acidic comedy of, say, This Is Spinal Tap, and the fact that large parts of this forgo jokes entirely makes it an interesting note in Guest's career. But also, I just didn't find it all that engaging? The characters aren't funny enough to completely work as parody (except, of course, Fred Willard's character, who is the only person truly positioned to receive the hearty mockery so prevalent in the other Guest films), nor are they nuanced enough to completely captivate as objects of character study. Plus, the fact that this movie ends on a pretty transphobic note leaves a bitter aftertaste, as well as feeling at-odds with the generally kind vibes of the movie as a whole. Otherwise, it's a pleasant enough 90 minutes, but nothing I'm bound to look back on with much enthusiasm. Grade: B-

Funny Ha Ha (2002)
Maybe this would seem more radical in its time, and for sure, there's still something at least a little formally bold in making a movie as unadorned as this one is. But I was overall not into this stammering, unpolished movie about stammering, unpolished post-grads. I guess there's a kind of admirable form-content synergy in making the movie itself share the same qualities as its characters, but mostly, this just felt like a boring version of Kicking and Screaming or Frances Ha (or alternately, Slacker but about boring people), which maybe tells you how I like my post-grad ennui served. Andrew Bujalski would go on to write/direct movies that I think are much more interesting and engaging riffs on some of the same ideas as this movie, so I'm glad he moved past this. Grade: C

Greed (1924)
I've known about the wild production of this movie and its legendary lost cuts for ages, but I actually didn't know that much about the movie itself. So it was fun to finally get around to this, one of the few headliner movie history classics that I have left. People don't talk enough about that early stage of cinephilia when it feels like there are hundreds of really famous movies to watch, that overwhelming, intoxicating feeling of a world opening up that you get to share with a community; nowadays, I don't feel like I have any fewer movies to watch, but increasingly I feel like those movies reside in relative obscurity, and the fun is the sense of discovery. In some ways, it's more rewarding to be in this stage, but I do sometimes miss the communal feel to going through all the big Hollywood classics, so it was nice to have a taste of that again with this movie. Grade: B+

Anyway, if you're interested in more thoughts on Greed, I was part of a conversation on Episode 358 of the Cinematary podcast. Here's the link, if you want to listen!

Television

Love, Victor, Season 2 (2021)
This has some good innovations over the first season. The show continues to problematize some YA conventions by virtue of Victor's gay Latino identity—Victor's ongoing struggles with his family's acceptance of his sexuality is knotty and specific, and there's an interesting racial tension, between the reflexively liberal white families and the more complicated politics of the families of color, for example, and while I'm not convinced that's exactly the right tension to explore in a show that ostensibly takes place in Atlanta (white people in the South are reflexively liberal? I missed that one—and at any rate, the show clearly is filmed in LA, something that frequently rubs off on the actual writing of this increasingly ersatz Southern setting), it's an interesting tension nonetheless. This season also gives Felix a lot more to do besides just pine for Lake, and his arc involving his mother's bipolar disorder is far and away the most compelling part of the season. But unfortunately, Felix and some of the more engaging elements of Victor's story are also forced to share space with storylines for the rest of the main cast, and a lot of that other material is either dumb (Benji is rich and has a band, apparently), undercooked (everything with Mia, whose presence on the show feels more like an obligation to her actress's contract than an organic character arc), or both (the sudden appearance of Pilar's friend Rahim as a series regular that has little to do besides be a gay Greek chorus for the show's relationship drama). Plus, the show is increasingly relying on trite relationship drama like love triangles, which I guess comes with the territory of watching a teen dramedy but still bores me and flattens these characters into storytelling tropes. It's frustrating, because things like Felix's arc show that this series is capable of being way smarter than some of its other arcs bear out. You can do better than this, Love, Victor! Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for December 21 - 27, 2020

In case you missed it, I made my a list of my favorite music of the year, which you can read here.

Movies

Soul (2020)
The comparisons to Inside Out are inescapable, from the premise that materializes abstractions into a slick, colorfully realized bureaucracy (in this case, it's the afterlife, souls, the "spark of life," etc.) to the Second City/SNL/NBC sitcom alum in a starring role (Tina Fey) right down to the person in the lead director chair (Pete Docter, who, in terms of where the thematic vision is in the studio, seems to be poised to become the new John Lasseter of Pixar, hopefully without the toxic work culture). I'd say that Inside Out has more raw emotional heft, but Soul 100% brings the stronger visuals and music. The sequences in the afterlife are visually sublime in a way that Pixar has never attempted before, experimenting with texture and particles in a way that feels more in-line with what DreamWorks Animation has been up to in the past few years than the usually photo-realistic commitments of Pixar (though it's of course executed a lot more expansively than in, say, Captain Underpants). And in terms of the music, the score is absolutely transfixing, making a definitive case that Pixar's musical identity has finally been able to evolve past the Randy-Newmanisms that it's leaned so heavily on in the past 2.5 decades; plus, it's definitely my favorite Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross work in a very busy year for that duo. And the fact that the movie is able to use all this to build a pretty compelling and complex thematic tapestry that connects jazz to a David-Foster-Wallace-ish version of existentialism scratches an itch that I never realized I had. But yeah, it's definitely a lot like Inside Out, and nothing here is completely surprising if you're familiar with Pixar's output at all. I know some people are going to use this as evidence that Pixar has devolved into shtick, and I guess it is a shtick in some respects. But it's a good shtick, and I remain unconvinced that the presence of tropes and formula in a studio's output inherently signals a decline in quality. Pixar certainly isn't redefining the medium like it did for a solid decade at the beginning of the 21st century; its median quality has certainly stabilized somewhat below its early peaks; but most studios have formulaic elements (and even something as revered as Studio Ghibli has its autopilot Onward-esque output), and I dunno, I suppose I think it's interesting that Pixar has a personality well-defined enough that a movie as distinctive as Soul can feel as much like a riff as it does something entirely new. And in the case of Soul specifically, the fact of its familiarity and potential banality in the context of repetition actually feels thematically relevant: the film argues that life is meaningful only as a function of someone's ability to appreciate the beauty of a mundane existence, and that works as much as a life philosophy as it does a lens for Pixar films in general. Increasingly, I'm finding Pixar's films to be enjoyed and even meaningful because of the pristine bits of craft within reliable plot patterns, and on that rubric, Soul is a veritable shower of beautiful little moments and aesthetic flourishes: the almost Looney-Tunes-esque way that Joe obliviously has near-misses with death for the film's first 15 minutes; the dazzling introduction to the afterlife, probably the most stylistically ambitious thing Pixar has done in a decade; the breathtakingly realized human forms, maybe the finest-ever example of CGI animation creating expressive but cartoonish human bodies; the way the exterior lines of the cubist afterlife custodians subtly pull in the grains of sand that form the ground of the afterlife; that entirely predictable but no less affecting moment in which Joe understands the truth about his life's "purpose." This has been the longest possible way to say: Soul is a Good Movie. And now that I've defended you, Pixar, please don't make me look stupid by making Toy Story 9 or something. Grade: A-

Feels Good Man (2020)
A wild, melancholy ride through the history of Pepe the Frog and Matt Furie, the artist who created the character and then watched helplessly as his work turned first into a malleable meme and then an icon of the alt-right. But it's also the story of memes in general and their constant push-pull of ownership and appropriation; it's also the story of a key group of people with a tragic inability to understand how the internet works and who were exploited by those who do; it's also the story of how Pepe became a form of cryptocurrency; it's also a story about occult symbology. This movie could have easily been twice its length, and it's probably to the film's detriment that it's not; a good portion of these ideas feel a little under-explored, and there's a much better version of this movie to be made that simply makes room to explore them more. But the version we got is still a pretty fascinating account, and it has tremendous access, not just to Matt Furie himself, who is the emotional core to the film, but to all number of talking heads, both eccentric (there's a professor of the occult, for example, and he looks exactly like you'd imagine a professor of the occult would), scary (a lot of space is given to a Trump campaign guy, who honestly seems to understand the internet better than anyone else in the film), and ludicrous (we meet a "Pepe millionaire" who made bank on Pepe cryptocurrency and now rides around in an ostentatious sports car blasting a customized version of the Pokemon theme song about "rare Pepes"). It's worth the watch for these people alone. Grade: B+

The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020)
I really wish this were better overall, because Radha Blank is so good as the lead, a somewhat satirical portrait of herself as she tries to navigate what it means to write something authentic when market forces and powerful people only seem interested in amplifying parts of that voice. But the writing and direction (also by Blank) are a lot dicier than her central performance. Like, I couldn't stop being distracted by the way that a movie about how clichés flatten the authentic experiences of minorities relies really heavily on an unironic deployment of a Gay Best Friend, and I feel like that goes for the movie overall, where some truly excellent bits (the entire first 30 minutes of the film, for example) are consistently undercut by some extremely trite or corny bits. But plenty of great writer/directors have dodgy film debuts, and I really hope Blank's cinematic career has enough legs to get her more films after this one inevitably falls into the the Netflix memory void. Because the way she bounces off her own screenplay is wonderful, even when the screenplay itself isn't pulling its weight. Grade: B-

Mank (2020)
Lots of surface pleasures here, from the performances (except for Tom Burke, who is inexcusably bad at playing Orson Welles) to the slightly anachronistic Reznor/Ross score to some of the images (though I do think that this is kind of a failure at b&w digital photography trying to look like b&w film photography, and when it doesn't look good, the movie often looks muddy and underlit). But as a lot of people have already noted, there are some pretty big problems with Mank under the hood. If the point is to give us a biopic of Herman Mankiewicz, it's a hopelessly scattered film, dividing time in a way that doesn't always make sense between some pretty vapid scenes about the screenwriting of Citizen Kane in the early '40s and downfall of Mankiewicz as a studio cog as both his alcoholism and hatred of Louis B. Mayer and William Randolph Hearst intensify. If the scatteredness is the point, a reflection of Mankiewicz's increasingly self-destructive, fractured life, then the screenplay really doesn't do enough to undercut Mankiewicz himself besides relying on alcoholic clichés. If this isn't a biopic at all but rather an anti-nostalgia screed about the beautiful but destructively deceptive myth-making powers of the Hollywood studio machine (the strongest thematic throughline in the movie, I think, and certainly the one that yields the best scenes, e.g. the election-night GOP party), then it spreads the most potent arc (the Hollywood executives plot against Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign) far too thin in favor of the material about the making of Kane, which is absolutely the wrong framing device for those thematic ends. So it's a mess. I guess all this makes it sound like I should give this a lower grade than I am, and perhaps I should, but all issues aside, the truth is that I really did have a pretty good time with this anyway, and it's the kind of movie where it actually feels productive to think about its flaws. So I dunno. It's worth a watch, I guess, if you haven't already. And you better watch it before it disappears into the Netflix memory void and people forget it exists in two weeks. Grade: B

The Wolf House (La casa lobo) (2018)
I know next-to-nothing about the Chilean history this movie is supposed to represent, so I'm mostly approaching it as a purely aesthetic object. And as such, it's stunning: a kind of meta stop motion in which the objects and characters are constructed in front of us as part of the animation, where the objects themselves become the canvas for moving images that slide off one surface onto another. I've never seen another movie that looks like this one does. It's also abjectly terrifying, probably as a direct result of the movie looking so singular—unfamiliarity breeding fear. A nightmare-fuel film if there ever was one. Grade: A-

 

Television

The Queen's Gambit (2020)
The seams are pretty evident in this orphan-to-chess-champion miniseries. Like a lot of streaming series, The Queen's Gambit feels like it could have benefited from a few more drafts in the writers room: character development happens in somewhat unearned lurches (the protagonist goes from socially awkward misfit to über-cool chic icon in practically the blink of an eye, for example, and the same goes for the arguably more significant transformation from rock-bottom addiction to clear-headed sobriety), and the series's structure as a literally episodic Bildungsroman means that secondary characters pop in and out of the plot at seemingly the narrative's convenience, resulting in a cast that, while always tremendously acted, feels somewhat thin—this is particularly egregious for Jolene, the lone black character and one who appears only in the first and final episodes, both times to give crucial aide to the protagonist without much interior life of her own. But all of these issues are offset by the fact that this is such an eminently watchable series. I tend to be pretty slow going through television, especially television whose episodes are in the 45-60 min. range, but I had no trouble at all watching two of these per night (with the urging of my wife, of course), and as much as I may have misgiving about the bigger picture, on a moment-by-moment basis, this is tremendously exciting. It's a great mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, too: I've seen rags-to-riches sports dramas before, but not about chess; I've seen problematic protagonists stumbling through the mid-century on the wings of their own preternatural talents while narrowly escaping their own personal demons, but rarely starring a female protagonist. It also bears mentioning that Anya Taylor-Joy is a bona-fide star, and her mesmerizing performance basically single-handedly makes this whole thing work at all. I can see this series falling completely flat with another actress cast in that role, but in her hands, it soars. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for October 28 - November 3, 2019

Spooky movie season has sadly come to a close. Eleven more months of non-spooky entertainment, I suppose.

Movies

Toy Story 4 (2019)
None of the Toy Story sequels ever had a reason to exist, but Toy Story 4 is unique among them in that doesn't ever figure out a convincing way to pretend to need to exist during its runtime. So I guess it's to its credit that it isn't actively bad, given its lack of conviction. It's a collection of reasonably good ideas—Forky, the carnival setting, the Key & Peele-voiced plush prizes, etc.—but most of these simply remain good ideas unto themselves without ever cohering into a thematic whole. To be fair, this was also true of at least Toy Story 3 (I think people tend to forget its kind of wacky second act in the daycare), but the momentum of that movie's existential dread was so powerful that it kind of made everything cleave together by sheer force of will. Toy Story 4, on the other hand, has a much gentler emotional core, teasing out the implications of the final scene of Toy Story 3 by turning toy ownership into a religious/ideological framework by which toys form meaning—something touched on by the other movies but much more centered here. It's never as intense as either of the two previous Toy Story sequels, which is fine, since I like the relative subtlety of the first movie better; but unlike even that first movie, none of the existential concepts become a true backbone for the movie to hang itself on; these themes just exist alongside all the other pieces of the movie as simply "good ideas" that haven't done the work to fit with one another. Toy Story 4 is certainly near the bottom of the Pixar canon, and while it's not quite the studio's weakest or even just the weakest of the sequels, at least Cars 2 has a cohesive emotional core and story structure, ya know? On a completely different note, as weird as it is to say, I think Pixar's CG rendering technology is getting too good; the limitations of the tech in the previous three entries gave their worlds a cartoony look, while Toy Story 4 is as photorealistic as a Pixar movie has ever been outside of the landscapes in The Good Dinosaur, and honestly, it's distracting to a fault how different these characters look from their previous iterations when they have minutely detailed textures and lighting—everything's just so shiny and fuzzy in ways that my brain refuses to acknowledge. The worst is in a flashback of a young Andy, and while I never would have said I had any affection for the dead-eyed animatronic doll that was Andy in the first two movies, the realistically proportioned and textured boy we see in this flashback is almost unrecognizable as the character he's supposed to be, and it's more unsettling than any of the poorly aged CGI of the earlier movies ever was. Take it easy, Pixar. Grade: B-

Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)
Ugh, not another one of these zombie Christmas musical movies—enough is enough, Hollywood! But in all seriousness, it's a pretty good execution of that batty premise. I was never really feeling that connected with the character beats, so when the movie tries for some emotional gravitas toward the end, it doesn't do a lot for me. It's also got some pretty connect-the-dots music—but the lyrics are great. Also great is the cast, who are super charming even though the screenplay never got me that invested in the characters themselves. There are also some of the most fun gore effects I've seen in a zombie movie in a while. The zombie parts of the movie crib maybe a bit too liberally from Shaun of the Dead, but then again, my favorite moment of the film by far is basically a musical reworking of the Shaun gag where he's always improbably looking in just the right direction that he never notices the zombies around him. Good stuff, for the most part. Grade: B

Hocus Pocus (1993)
Finally catching up with this one, I guess. Bette Midler is having a great time, and that's contagious to an extent—which is saying something for me, who usually isn't too entertained by Bette Midler. And there are some kind of fun, old-fashioned effects, which are charming. The rest is pretty drab and mediocre, though. I don't hate anything here, but there's also not a whole lot for me here either. Millennials have terrible taste in their nostalgic favs, so the best I can say (and I am very thankful for this) is that Hocus Pocus at least isn't the worst of those. Grade: C+

Lady Frankenstein (1971)
A boilerplate Frankenstein story, only imagine that Dr. Frankenstein is killed by his monster at the beginning and his daughter decides to enact revenge by taking her aging romantic interest whom she will not have sex with on account of his aging flesh and putting his brain into a younger, more bang-able body that will, in addition to rocking her world, also allow said love interest to kill her father's monster, sating her vengeful spirit. Wild, right? But oh no! The boring boilerplate elements of the story basically overwhelm everything until like the last 30 minutes! Too bad. Grade: C




Books

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006)
The way this book combines typical coming-of-age tropes (first crush, new friends, new school, etc.) with a really complex wrestling with ideas like double consciousness is fascinating and compelling, and I love the tri-part storytelling structure, which breaks the novel into one third a realistic narrative about Chinese-American boy's experiences in a mostly white school, one third a pseudo-sitcom involving exaggerated racist tropes, and one third a re-telling of part of Journey to the West. Even before the ending ties all these together, it's not hard to understand how these three are all related thematically, each exploring the nuances of being a minority in a majority-white society. Very good stuff. The ending does end up linking it all—in a device I don't really find convincing, to be honest, and it's super-rushed, to boot. I wonder if the book would have worked better just leaving the connections between the three parts implicit, as I really don't think the book sticks the landing. Which is a shame. Grade: B+

Music

Chance the Rapper - The Big Day (2019)
After several mixtapes that were basically albums by another name, Chance the Rapper finally released what he's calling his debut album, The Big Day. It's sort of a worst-case scenario in some respects, as Chance takes the absolute worst elements of the past couple decades of big-budget mainstream rap albums (77 minutes long! too many features! freakin' skits!) and at the same time loses a lot of the ebullience and sonic personality of his mixtapes. Chance the Rapper has never been boring before, so I guess you could call this a new direction? It's not a total wash, though; people like to make fun of Chance the Rapper for his corniness, but I do think that's an asset here; The Big Day is pretty short on posturing and pretension, which I appreciate—if the most important things in your life are your family, your child, and God, then by golly, sing about that (and he does, a lot). There are also a few tracks that hint at the lush heights of Coloring Book, most notably the closer, "Zanies and Fools," which uses a gospel choir to interpolate "Impossible; It's Possible" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella alongside some pretty strong verses, and it's great. Wish I could say so of the album as a whole. Grade: C+

Mini-Reviews for July 2 - 8, 2018

Stupid summer, going by so fast.

Movies

Incredibles 2 (2018)
As with the first Incredibles and Objectivism, this movie makes it uncomfortably easy to make a very uncharitable reading of Incredibles 2 re: support of a police state and the dismissal of BLM and other grassroots, media-driven law-enforcement critique as conspiracy. So I'll just leave that there for the grad students. More generously, I'd say Incredibles 2 simply lacks thematic cohesion, and the careful character arcs of the first movie are gone in favor of character chemistry, which is an adequate (if not entirely satisfying) substitute. But enough negativity; all gripes aside, I will sing from the rooftops that, after all the Marvel movies upon Marvel movies that end in incoherent, generic CG, we finally, finally, FINALLY have a movie that understands how to build an action scene with superhero teams—not just coherent action scenes but action scenes that positively sparkle with ideas and kineticism and the unbridled joy of the form that superheroes should encourage in our films but rarely do. When I complain about the punch-kick blandness of the fight scenes in something like Infinity War, Incredibles 2 is the sort of thing I have in mind as the polar opposite. Whatever other flaws this movie has (and it has them, for sure), there is always the exquisite poetry of this film in motion. Stand and salute the best-choreographed superhero movie, perhaps of all time. Grade: B+

The Endless (2017)

Like this film's sort-of prequel, Resolution, The Endless is a nice slice of cosmic horror mixed with metacommentary on filmmaking itself, though also like Resolution, this is maybe more clever than it is good. But the ideas are super interesting, and even if we don't ever get anything as cool as the movie poster, I enjoyed this more than not. Grade: B

Deathgasm (2015)

I watched this because I've had good experiences with New Zealand horror comedies, and I'm always down for some tongue-in-cheek riffing on heavy metal culture. But lord, this movie is dreadful. It's neither scary nor funny, though I suppose gore hounds may get a kick out of some of the splatter here, and worse, every female character (all two of them, three if you count the woman who only appeals to reveal that she's been performing fellatio on a guy under a desk the whole scene—this is the kind of movie Deathgasm is) seemingly exists solely to appear topless or otherwise be lusted after as a sexual object. Is it too much to ask that my demons-disemboweled-by-power-tools movie be free of ugly sexism? Grade: D

Crooklyn (1994)

It courses with life in the way the best Spike Lee joints do. Lee's beloved Brooklyn is rendered magical and dangerous through the PoV of Troy, a girl growing up with her brothers and parents in a brownstone—the camera captures her family life with the subjectivity of Troy's own experiences, the constant movement of imagery showing the vibrancy Troy's warm but troubled interior life, while the occasional lens manipulation and purposeful areality evoke key moments of alienation and trauma. Like the Radio Days of Lee's obvious inspiration, Woody Allen, Crooklyn is more a collection of memory flashes, nostalgia mixed with genuine heartbreak and strange loose threads, than it is a traditional story, and when the movie most gestures toward a firm narrative structure (the somewhat unsuccessful ending, in which tragedy feels like an artificial imposition of drama, however true to the autobiographical nature of the film), it stumbles. But at its best—and its best is some of Spike Lee's best in general—the film is tremendous. Scripted by Spike and his brother and sister, Crooklyn has the warmth of lived experience. Some moments, like the recurring scenes in which the young siblings sit in front of the television, singing along with the Partridge Family or cheering on the Knicks, could only be the product of shared memories, and they're wonderful—like we're hearing adult siblings reminisce and lightly bicker over an photo album. Grade: A-

Always (1989)

I'd have to go back and rewatch Hook and The Lost World to figure out if Spielberg has a worse movie. But why in the world would I want to do that? I can instead find comfort in the bitter ambiguity that Always, this tedious piece of lifeless schmaltz, just might be the worst thing my boy Steven ever directed. There are of course some nice shots and pieces of lighting, because we're dealing with one of the great formal masters of modern American filmmaking, but I could have just looked those up online and saved myself the tepid romance and unintentionally creepy dynamic of ghost Richard Dreyfuss setting up his ex-wife (Holly Hunter) with some rando he speaks through like a Cyrano de Bergerac demon possession. John Goodman isn't even good here. Grade: D+

More American Graffiti (1979)

I am completely shocked to report that the sequel to American Graffiti is, in fact, WORTH YOUR TIME. What I had assumed was going to be a Happy Days spinoff is actually an ambitious and somewhat complex interpretation of the mid-to-late '60s. Tracking the original cast (minus Richard Dreyfuss) through four cross-cut New Year's Eves from 1964 through 1967, the movie uses a different film format for each year (Super 16 for its Vietnam-set 1965, handheld split-screen documentary style for the psych-rock-scened 1966, etc.), mirroring the explosion of visual media in the back half of the decade as it captures protests, hippies, and a bunch of other hallmarks of the era. Some of this rings of "haha, remember The Sixties??", but far less of it than I would have suspected. The film's rollicking, hijinks-ish feel disrupts the profound melancholy of the original American Graffiti's ending, which is unfortunate. But this is way better than I thought it was going to be and occasionally profound in its own small way. Grade: B

Books

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King (1992)

If this isn't Stephen King's finest novel, then it's very, very close to the top. I'm not sure why it isn't mentioned in the same breath as genre titans like The Stand and Carrie; perhaps it's because Dolores Claiborne is something of a formal experiment for King, not a novel with chapters and shifting points of view as in the standard King piece but more of a 300-page monologue by the titular character, without section breaks or chapter titles or anything novels usually use to demarcate physical space. It's just us and Dolores, and the result is one of the warmest, richest characters Stephen King has ever penned. The first-person narration allows King to indulge in his love for dialect and colloquialism—Dolores is nothing if not colloquial—and while this indulgence is often a liability in King's more traditional novels, as an unending stream from this one particular character without any breaks from that voice, the language becomes a world unto itself, this coiling, self-referential idiom that fits the central tragedy of the main character and conveys her experiences with an alternatingly brusque and intimate manner. And those experiences—the novel's plot isn't complex (essentially, it's a domestic drama disguised as a murder mystery), but what it gives us instead is an uncommonly generous, affectionate portrait of Dolores herself as she recounts the two major relationships of her life: those with her employer Vera and her husband Joe. The empathy and sweetness of the novel is breathtaking—in particular, in its depiction of the thorny bond between Vera and Dolores—and the way it shows the weight of life's accumulating tragedies on one's own soul is heartbreaking, to say nothing of the way this dovetails with the novel's discussions of gender dynamics in 20th century America. Even if you aren't a Stephen King person, I'd highly recommend seeking this out. It's a masterpiece. Grade: A

Music

Sufjan Stevens - Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001)

The early career of Sufjan Stevens is an odd one, in the sense that he seems to have hashed out all his wide-reaching stylistic preoccupations one by one before even attempting to make a truly good album. His debut, A Sun Came, sees Sufjan throwing together a collection of demos that show his various indie and rock-adjacent proclivities; five years later, he released Enjoy Your Rabbit, an album in which he makes a test run of all his electronic impulses. The resulting record is similarly meandering and overlong, and as in A Sun Came, not all the different experiments really work here. It's basically 80 minutes of glitch electronica, something I've never been a huge fan of, and the cluttered sound has the feel of Sufjan just throwing every production technique he can think of into the mix just to see what happens. But thankfully, this album has an organizing principle that gives it a structure (it's about the Chinese zodiac, basically), which makes it a more cohesive listen than A Sun Came. It's still an oddity, mostly for completists. But it's at least one conceived as an album, rather than the disjointed eclecticism of A Sun Came. Grade: B-

Mini-Reviews for November 27 - December 3, 2017

It's that time of year again, when I start to realize all the 2017 movies we aren't going to get in Knoxville until the next day. Oh well. There are plenty of movies here already.

Movies

Coco (2017)
It's way too easy to expect every Pixar feature to be a landmark in narrative animation, even a few years out from Inside Out (the last of their features to qualify, I don't think it's too controversial to say), and then be disappointed when they don't deliver that. But increasingly over the past ten years, the studio has instead contented itself with creating technically dazzling but narratively simple movies. And as it's turned out, Pixar is very very good at creating this sort of modest feature. I think it's important we don't lose sight of this, especially in an era where every Disney animated feature has like a thousand narrative inconsistencies and mainstream blockbusters have like ten thousand—it's increasingly rare to see these sort of narratively coherent works of film fiction on a large-budget scale, so when Pixar gives us something like Coco, a movie whose ambitions are about as modest as any Pixar movie's have been since Cars 2, that's still something to celebrate. It isn't a surprising movie, but it is a colorful one; a gorgeously designed one; a technically breathtaking one (these are perhaps the best computer-animated human models in film history); a tender one—one whose emotional through line comes honestly and organically out of every visual and storytelling beat that precedes it. There isn't a false note in the film, and if that means that it's simply a Very Good movie executed to perfection, in lieu of a Great movie, then oh well; at least we got a very good movie. Grade: A-

Loving Vincent (2017)
The look of Loving Vincent, the first-ever oil-painted animated feature (it was filmed in live action and then the frames were given to artists, who painted over the action in the post-impressionist style of Van Gogh), is dazzling. And one gets the idea that this is the only thing the filmmakers are trying to accomplish, because otherwise, there's really not a ton going on. The plot is a Citizen Kane knockoff of a man investigating the death of Vincent Van Gogh, the acting is fine, and even the use of the visuals is decidedly ordinary, with very little of it reaching for anything beyond the strictly realistic/representational within the Van Gogh style. But it's a true marvel seeing these oil paintings come to life. It's the only animated feature I've ever seen where the sheer craft of the animation was so engrossing—I spent the first half hour of the film just watching the brushstrokes dance across the screen—that I couldn't keep up with the plot for a while. And I suppose that's something, though I surely hope this isn't the pinnacle of oil-painted movies. Grade: B-

Brigsby Bear (2017)
If a plot featuring a developmentally arrested guy who's lived most of his life kidnapped underground obsessing over the mythology of the educational sci-fi TV series his captors have created for him didn't already give it away, surely the casting of Mark Hamill as one of the captors does: Brigsby Bear is a metaphorical commentary on geek fandom. Which is sort of a relief, because this movie works much better as metaphor than anything approaching realism—its warm, dramedic overtures are far too light a touch for this sort of subject matter (unless it were to go full-on Kimmy Schmidt with its silliness, which it doesn't [and side note: what is it with bunker kidnappings and pop culture these days?]). Even as figurative commentary, the movie softballs its approach a bit more than is helpful. I'm all for assuming the best about human decency (this movie resembles nothing so much as that old indie oddity Lars and the Real Girl in the sense that despite its eyebrow-raising premise, the movie largely consists of people being nice to our protagonist). But given the past few years of GamerGating, Rotten Tomato death threating, and the like, I don't know if "decency" is quite the right part of human nature to be highlighting when online male fandom is concerned. Still, there's something rather endearing about this whole endeavor, even if it's not quite as cutting as it should be. Grade: B

Super Size Me (2004)
Look, of course modern eating habits tend to be awful, and of course the food industry has a monetary interest in keeping foods fatty, sugary, and addictive. These are real problems that need to be addressed (more so than they already have), and I wholeheartedly side with Super Size Me on this. But you know what's not helpful? Stupid publicity stunts. Experiments with bad methodology. Linking poor eating habits to ignorance of American history. Ironic music cues. Sardonic animations. Fat shaming. There's so much fat shaming in this movie, y'all. I didn't clock it, but I'd be willing to bet that Spurlock spends at least twice the time visually mocking the appearance of the overweight as he does actually discussing the systematic issues that drive poor food consumption. Lord, I hate mid-2000s issue docs. Grade: D+

Ali (2001)
Good on this movie for making the intersection of Ali's boxing career and his political activism the story's linchpin. Bad on the movie for not making it more interesting. I don't know if I've quite figured out Michael Mann, either—I've never loved one of his movies, and most of them seem, to me, handsomely made but ultimately dry experiences. Such it is here. Grade: C







Television

Lady Dynamite, Season 2 (2017)
Netflix's most idiosyncratic comedy returns with that same blend of meta-commentary, zaniness, silliness, and mildly horrifying introspection that made the first season such a strange, strange delight. Season Two isn't nearly so self-referential (it's dialed down the recurring Arrested Development-style music cues, for one), but in its place is a doubling down on the flashback structure of the first season, adding a hallucinatory "Future" timeline that, in its heightened manic sci-fi, is so surreal and off-the-wall that it's a veritable broadcast from a different universe. As always, there's a high-pitched intensity to the show that's not going to work for everyone, and it doesn't always work for me. But when it does, it's something special. Grade: B+


Books

Danse Macabre by Stephen King (1981)
Stephen King is someone who writes great nonfiction but also has kind of questionable taste in movies/television, so in the case of Danse Macabre, a collection of essays he wrote about horror writing and film, your enjoyment of the former is going to hinge on how much you're willing to lean into the latter. As a historical artifact, this book is kind of interesting because it gives us very early takes into King's thoughts on Alien, The Shining, Halloween, and a few other now-classics that had just been released. Per usual, some of his takes are strange, and his ideas about "women's lib" and gender politics, though not, like, "offensive," betray how long ago this was written and that he's a straight male. And he's also weirdly anti-academia, perhaps burned by the Ivory Tower's disdain for his work and his own experiences as a professor. But on the whole, King's a fascinating and thoughtful analyst of horror fiction, and even if you find his taste in movies iffy, his close reading of the social and artistic implications of horror novels and short stories is surely worthwhile. Plus, two lengthy appendixes provide us with lists of King's movie and book recommendations, both of which are goldmines that split nicely between obvious choices like Rosemary's Baby and more obscure B/pulp fare. Grade: B+

Music

Morgan Craft - Circle of Light (2016)
Every once in a while, I'll go on Bandcamp and download albums that are cheap and sound interesting. So maybe that's how I got this (Morgan Craft is certainly on Bandcamp). But all I know is that I was looking through my downloads folder a couple weeks ago and saw the ZIP folder with this album in it. I have no memory of putting it there. To my knowledge, it just appeared, which is sort of appropriate for a ghostly record of dark-ambient drones (made entirely, according to the Bandcamp page, with electric guitars). It's an album for late nights and loud speakers, being alone in a house, feeling a little spooked. In other words, good stuff. Grade: B+