Mini Reviews for May 17 - 23, 2021

School year's almost over. The end cannot come fast enough.

Movies

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021)
I went into this with absolutely zero expectations, and to my absolute delight, it's actually one of the best Hollywood studio comedies in years. It feels like a transmission from the era in the late-'90s/early-2000s immediately before every American comedy decided it wanted to be an Apatow-style thing: a movie that grounds its tightly scripted structure in a ridiculous comedic persona as it throws as many jokes as it can against the wall to see what sticks. It's very much in the vein of Austin Powers and Billy Madison and Zoolander, only filtered through a post-2000s good-naturedness that jettisons the latent hostility that sometimes animated those male-centric projects. Like those movies, Barb and Star has a real penchant for the absurd alongside conventional humor within a broadly colorful visual design and visual sensibility, and even though the jokes don't always land, it's just such a winning vibe (especially with the absolutely superb central performances from Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) that I had a great time regardless. And a lot of the jokes do land, especially the tossed-off ones like the "sexy" sunblock thing or the villain telling her minion to be sure not to steer straight. I was gently chuckling the whole movie. Just a solid good time that I haven't gotten from even technically "better" movies in a while. Grade: B+

The Father (2020)
Before I saw this, I was worried it was going to be Oscarbait (esp. given that the bait actually produced an Oscar). It is certainly Oscarbait in terms of being about a Serious Topic and for giving a beloved actor a showy display of his chops. But outside of that, this such a squirmy, consistently surprising, and uneasy movie that I couldn't dream of labeling it with that pejorative. Honestly, the biggest surprise for me is that The Father lands squarely in the unsettling thematic and structural legacy of things like Polanski's Apartment Trilogy and Memento: a claustrophobic, recursive exploration into deep subjectivity. In fact, I can't think of a narrative movie other than Memento that so thoroughly uses its own cinematic language to put us viewers in the subjective experience of being inside its protagonist's head; just as the reverse chronology of Memento's editing made the viewers by necessity live in the main character's amnesia, this movie does the same with Anthony Hopkins's character's dementia, switching out actors for the same character, looping scenes back in on themselves in impossible chronologies so we see the same events transpire twice, having time jump unclear amounts of days or months without warning, writing intentional, irreconcilable contradictions into the plot. It is deeply unnerving and even frightening at times, and at all other times it's either darkly comic (a recurring bit about a lost watch gets some pretty good chuckles) or unbearably sad. If the comparisons to genre movies like Memento make this sound exploitative in the context of a serious movie about dementia and elder care, then the performances—literally all of them A-tier—humanize every bit of this to such a degree that all it feels like is a profound invitation for radical empathy, to recognize the elderly as still human, and not only human generically but human because they are ourselves. Also, I know this is the exact selling point of the movie and not a surprise, but I cannot stress how good Hopkins's performance is here. I sometimes think he's overrated as an actor, but then he pulls out this tour de force—almost certainly the best performance in his career and easily the best performance in a new movie I've seen in the past year. If this is Oscarbait, then so be it, because this is incredible work, Oscar or not. Grade: A-

Bombay Rose (2019)
I've never seen an animated feature from India before, and I'm happy to have this be my first one. I'm guessing this isn't representative of the animation of the subcontinent as a whole, given the relatively shoestring production here; 60 artists are credited, but overall this seems to be pretty significantly the product of one artist in particular, director Gitanjali Rao. It's gorgeous, this faux-painted digital look that's intricately and warmly drawn and inked, especially when you get these magical flourishes like two characters literally melting when it starts to rain. At times, the motion feels a little stiff, but even then, it never feels overly smooth or geometric, like 2D digital animation sometimes can. Anyway, the movie's story itself is where this falters; you're going to see every reviewer out there say this exact thing, but the movie is just too narratively scattershot. There's a central story involving a Hindu woman and a Muslim man falling in love in a sort of star-crossed lovers situation, but orbiting around that are a satellite fleet of secondary characters and side plots, and as a result, there's just too much pulling at this film's attention for anything to be more than at least a tad underwritten. It's pretty unsatisfying in that regard. Luckily the visuals are plenty satisfying. Would love to see more from Gitanjali Rao when she has more of a budget (and maybe a more coherently structured story to tell). Grade: B-

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943)
A movie that is almost wall-to-wall people yelling excitedly at each other. And to be fair, if I were living through the incredible parade of preposterous events that comprises this movie's plot, I would probably be constantly yelling excitedly, too. I mean, seriously, just go read the plot synopsis. Or go into this blind and experience the bewildering cavalcade with mouth agape like I did. It's honestly a little numbing after a while, and this movie is definitely more zany than it is funny in stretches. But at times it is very funny, too, and it's great fun seeing a movie that should have no business existing under the Hays Code exist under the Hays Code nonetheless. As James Agee memorably put it, it's "a little like taking a nun on a roller coaster" (a better line than any of the actual lines in the movie, though barely better than the "What's wrong with bigamy" bit). Grade: B+

 

Music

Green Day - Kerplunk! (1991)
It's weird going back to old Green Day, which I'm specifically (and maybe unhelpfully) categorizing in my mind as "Green Day before Dookie" after having so much of the canonical, famous Green Day burned into my brain during my middle school years. These guys were always slicker and hookier than their other punk peers, so if you compare this to, like, Bikini Kill's debut from that same year, it sounds like silk. But compared to Green Day's own Dookie, which came out just three years after Kerplunk! and was probably their least slick of all their subsequent albums, this music feels disorientingly shaggy and homespun. There's a snarky BDSM honky tonk lark ("Dominated Love Slave"), a middle-of-the-road Who cover ("My Generation," natch), and even some tape hiss here and there. Even just listening to "Welcome to Paradise," which of course got re-recorded for Dookie, it sounds comparatively like a demo. This isn't to say that Kerplunk! is bad. I mean, it's not the greatest pop-punk album of all time, but there can only be one Dookie, and anyway, a lot of what makes Dookie so good—the strong sense of melody, the teen angst, the impish sense of humor—is present here, albeit in test-run form. It doesn't all work (I really wish they'd left "Dominated Love Slave" off), but it's a good listen and a fascinating look into an alternate universe in which Green Day remained a spunky indie band instead of becoming one of the most popular rock bands in the world. Grade: B

100 Years...100 Movies 61-63: Sullivan's Travels, American Graffiti, Cabaret

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Another few days, another few AFI movies. Yeah, that's about all I've got for an intro. Move along.

61. Sullivan's Travels (1941, Preston Sturges)
I'll be honest here: it has been a very long time since I last saw Sullivan's Travels. Consequently, this discussion is going to have to be kind of vague on the details of this film. I cannot remember, for instance, if the cinematography or direction is any good (though given that it's Preston Sturges running the show, I'd guess they're both at least functional, if not exemplary), so those are topics I'm going to avoid. What I do remember, however, is the plot. And man, that plot is good. It's not just an engaging, funny, slightly satiric story (although it is all those things); it's a story that has such a potent thematic thrust regarding the filmmaking establishment that its barbs are still poking modern-day Hollywood. It's actually kind of hilarious that this film made it onto the AFI list at all [1], given that Sullivan's Travels is an indictment of the self-serious prestige machine that fuels the Academy Awards, film criticism, and, yes, the American Film Institute. When the film's fictional filmmaker John Sullivan decides that comedies are just as socially valuable as prestigious social dramas with capital T Themes, he might as well be directly addressing this list, which, I remind you, is made up of (not counting musicals) less than 10 percent comedy and about 80 percent prestigious social drama with capital T Themes. Now, I like prestigious films as much as the next guy (and goodness knows I've praised plenty of them on this blog), but there's something sort of rousing to Sullivan's Travels's critique. To quote another film on this list, "Make 'em laugh," dangit!

62. American Graffiti (1973, George Lucas)
In discussing George Lucas, a lot of people focus on Star Wars, which is entirely reasonable considering that the original Star Wars trilogy and especially Episode IV are some of the biggest, most groundbreaking, most culturally significant, most aesthetically successful movies of all time. But what often gets lost in all the galaxy-far-far-away shuffle is poor old American Graffiti, the little movie that immediately precedes Star Wars in Lucas's filmography. And that's kind of too bad because not only is American Graffiti, like Star Wars, a great, distinctively personal film (as well as proof that at one time, George Lucas was actually a good writer), it also is pretty groundbreaking in its own right. The extent to which it incorporates classic rock and soul tunes into its soundtrack was pretty much unheard of at the time of its release, and it remains one of the most technically and thematically sophisticated uses of pop music ever in American cinema. The wall-to-wall-songs approach to its soundtrack has also been hugely influential on subsequent generations of filmmakers—you can bet that Dazed and Confused and Do the Right Thing, to name two of American Graffiti's biggest heirs, would sound a lot different without it. And speaking of those heirs, another piece of American Graffiti's groundbreaking legacy is that it (to my knowledge) pretty much invented the whole cinematic subgenre of wistful coming-of-age stories that take place over a single night. Movies like Sixteen Candles, Superbad, and yes, Dazed and Confused all work within this mode and basically follow the structure of American Graffiti verbatim, with a series of mostly episodic (and mostly comedic) events slowly escalating to catharsis at dawn. It's a killer way to construct a plot, and it's always a treat to see a movie adopt the form. I've talked so much about the influence of American Graffiti that I've run out of room to praise the actual movie itself. Don't let my lack of discussion fool you; American Graffiti is great, and, for what it's worth, I think it's better than at least sixty-seven percent of the Star Wars films. I'm guessing it's pretty obvious which sixty-seven percent.

63. *Cabaret (1972, Bob Fosse)
So this is the kind of musical American filmmakers made in the '70s. You know, for all the movie musicals I've seen (and, for all my tepid feelings toward them, I've seen quite a few), I don't think I've ever watched one from the '70s, unless you count something like The Aristocats, which I don't (and besides, it's rarely the animated musicals that I complain about anyway). Now that I've seen it, I'd say Cabaret fits perfectly within the decade, and, if we throw out auteur theory (which we should, because it's just silly), as representative of the New American Hollywood aesthetic and moral concerns as any work by Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. Social consciousness, grimy sets and costumes, dark lighting, beautiful cinematography (an especially pleasant surprise, given that musicals tend to pride themselves on inventive but not particularly beautiful camerawork), complicated sexuality, a bleak, bleak ending—it's all here, and I liked the film a whole lot. In fact, Cabaret is now probably my favorite musical on this whole AFI list[2] so far behind The Wizard of Oz (and Nashville, if you count that). Cabaret succeeds in taking that position largely because it works as an anti-musical, in the same way that films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Godfather: Part II could be called, respectively, anti-sci-fi and anti-gangster movies, in that it majorly tweaks or ignores many of the genre's conventions. The biggest nose-thumbing Cabaret gives the musical genre is that it almost entirely forgoes the device of delivering plot and character through song, instead relegating almost all of its music to the actual cabaret stage, which makes the music feel totally organic and integrated into the more serious intonations of the plot, an effect almost entirely foreign to most conventional musicals (where, I realize, the heightened artificiality is a good portion of the fun). The disconnect from plot development gives the songs a chance to relate to the characters in a more tangential, thematic way that pays especially well when the editing cuts from the stage to the characters going about their lives. Oh, and just so I don't give the wrong impression, this movie, for all its '70s dourness, is still a lot of fun. The cabaret performances are giddy, hilarious, catchy, and the performances, especially Liza Minnelli[3], are impassioned and charismatic. This one's a winner.

Per usual, I'd love some discussion on these films. Until next time!

If it strikes your fancy, you can read the previous entry, #s 58-60, here.
Update: The next post, #s 61-63, is up here.

1] In fact, Sullivan's Travels didn't make it onto AFI's original 1998 list, being only added for the 10th anniversary version that I'm working through now.

2] The irony is not lost on me that, when one of my perennial complaints of movie musicals is that they rarely capture the energy of a live stage performance, one of my favorite musicals ended up being a movie whose music is very self-consciously confined to an actual stage. For what it's worth, though, I should probably admit that I've never seen the stage version of Cabaret, so who knows how I'll feel about this film once I do.

3] aka Lucille Austero! I'd like to think that her character ends up escaping to Southern California and, late in life, developing crippling vertigo and an unflagging infatuation with one Buster Bluth. We can only hope—it's certainly a happier ending than Cabaret suggests for her.