Mini Reviews for September 5 - 11, 2022

Hm.

Movies

SubUrbia (1996)
Feels like the Venn diagram created by the overlapping of Dazed and Confused with Gregg Araki's Teen Apocalypse trilogy. It's very much the bucket of cold water that Dazed mercifully withholds: whereas Linklater is happy to let the characters in the older film live with the self-aggrandizing lie that they have been given a future by our country (the only real pushback is the joke the teacher makes at the beginning about the founders not wanting to pay taxes), the teens of Linklater's follow-up teen all-nighter absolutely see America for the deception that it is and thus live in a kind of sad nihilism that feels very much like the heterosexual parallel to what Gregg Araki was exploring around the same time—and of course by virtue of occupying the white and straight ends of alienation, these characters more often than not become the aggressors in the oppressive ecosystem struggling to survive under the American neoliberal boot. The kids here are no more above hectoring and bullying and hazing than their more triumphalist predecessors in Dazed, but whereas those '70s kids' behavior comes out of a kind of raw sense of entitlement, the '90s kids here are clearly acting out of pain. It's not a very fun movie, but of all of Linklater's often romanticized depictions of Gen X, this is probably the realest he ever got about the political ecosystem animating that generation (probably no accident that this happens in an Eric Bogosian screenplay and not a Linklater one). There really aren't very many movies about latent fascism in disaffected '90s suburban teens, but there should be. Grade: B

Blind (2014)
Pretty clever exploration of how the nature of consciousness forces us to fill in details that we aren't privy to so we can build coherent narratives of what we experience, and the fact that by the end it becomes basically impossible to tell what is "real" and what is merely a depiction of our protagonist's possibly false assumptions about what is happening around here seems like an appropriate conclusion to the film. I'm not sure at all how respectful to the blind community it is to use a protagonist's blindness as a way to poke at these ideas, so maybe this is tone deaf. It's just now striking me how old-fashioned it is to use a disability as a metaphor for some philosophical concept. Grade: B

 

My Own Private Idaho (1991)
A very sad movie about unrequited love—or at least, that's what it eventually turns into, though it takes a strange, circuitous route through a bizarre adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard/Henry tetrology. The film has that rich, earthy idiosyncrasy that textures a lot of this wave of American indie cinema, and it always feels to me that there's something meaningful going on with the movie's weirdness, even if I'm not always very clued in to what it is. That said, I wonder how this would scan for me if I was even a little familiar with the Shakespeare plays it draws from. Regardless, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves are both incredible here, especially River. Gives the movie's emotional core a little extra oomph knowing that this vibrant, beautiful person baring his soul only had a couple years to live. Grade: B+

 

Juvenile Court (1973)
My engagement with this movie vacillated wildly as the film ping-pongs between depicting tedious legal proceedings and harrowing emotional landscapes—which I suppose is true to the actual experience of court. Watching how often these kids just plead to go home rather than go to foster care or a residential center or (when the horrific specter of "being tried as an adult" comes up) the penitentiary is truly hard to watch in a way probably only matched by Titicut Follies in Frederick Wiseman's filmography up to this point. Unlike Titicut Follies, though, or most of Wiseman's early features, it's not immediately clear the extent to which this film is meant to be a critique of the Memphis Juvenile Court; early in the film, a psychologist administers a Rorschach test to one of the kids in custody, and in a lot of ways, the film functions as kind of a Rorschach test for viewers to measure their own trust in the system as portrayed here, with the actions of the adults in the court accumulating layers of either bureaucratic menace or hard-won compassion depending on how you feel about the ecosystem that produces this actions. On a completely unrelated note, I wonder if there has been a linguistic study of how dialect in the American South has shifted over time, because as someone who grew up in the Memphis area, I can confirm that in my time there, I heard none of the Scarlett O'Hara-core accents that populate this film. Grade: B

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sen noci svatojánské) (1959)
I mean, the appeal here is pretty straightforward: A Midsummer Night's Dream done by Czech stop-motion "puppet" animation master Jiří Trnka. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, then definitely avoid this. Even with a built-in interest, I found the beginning and end kind of dull, but when everybody's in the forest, this becomes truly special (incidentally, this is how I feel about the Shakespeare original). The dream-like effect of stop-motion and especially the particulars of Czech stop-motion is a perfect fit for the play's fantasy, and Trnka never runs out of ways to make the film look truly magical when it's in that liminal forest space. Grade: B

 

Gulliver's Travels (1939)
When I was a kid, someone gave us a DVD with this movie on it, and my family tried to watch it but bailed about halfway through when we found it relentlessly dull. I reapproached this as an adult with optimism, thinking of all the films I'd reassessed with age. And I will say this: the animation really impressed me; the mix of rotoscoping on Gulliver with the rubbery 1930s Fleischer style on the Lilliputians works really well, and the Lilliputians themselves have some terrific character animation that makes this go down easier than it would have otherwise. But as good as the animation is, I've got to admit that my family and I were right the first time. This is terribly boring. Just absolutely nothing interesting going on musically, narratively, or even on the voice-acting level. I'm sorry. I really want these Fleischer films to be good so I can declare the Disney hegemony over the early American animated feature film to be a corporate lie, but alas, they really aren't. You hate to hand it to Walt Disney and his animators, but you gotta. Grade: C-

 

Television

How To with John Wilson, Season 1 (2020)
Kind of the intersection of Joe Pera Talks with You and Nathan For You—each episode is a little film essay on a different mundane "how to" topic (examples: "How To Split the Check," "How To Cover Your Furniture") that becomes elevated through Wilson's Joe-Pera-esque ability to find idiosyncratic corners to explore within the topic as well as his Nathan-Fielder-esque facility with finding the weirdest, most fascinating interview subjects. The tendency for silly visual puns seems all John Wilson, though. The sum total of this is a curiously profound treatise on how the web of bizarre and insignificant details of our lives accumulate into larger webs of social and personal meaning, and the season finale, in which Wilson contemplates the relationship between himself and his aging landlady, is deeply moving. It's cool how the sprawling landscape of modern television can make room for an off-beat, small-scale show like this (though unfortunately, apparently not for my dearly departed Joe Pera Talks with You). Grade: B+

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 December 9-15, 2019

One more week until school is over for the semester. Lord, hasten the day.

Movies

Marriage Story (2019)
In places, Marriage Story has the same vibe as Woody Allen's Interiors, in the sense that it showcases a director reaching just out of their comfort zone in a self-conscious attempt to make a Great Movie, and visibly straining in the process. The scenes unfold in artfully restrained long takes girded with stately camerawork focused on blood-letting performances—it's practically begging the Bergman Scenes from a Marriage comparisons, but here I am making the Allen-compared-to-Bergman comparison, so... I dunno. It's all just so deliberate and airtight, and all of its biggest flourishes feel like Baumbach sat down and said, "Now here's where I have to write an epic, ugly argument," and "Here's the big courtroom scene," and "This is the place where I put in the monologue about gender inequality," etc. With apologies to Baumbach, who it seems has very much lived this in real life, there's nothing of the spontaneity and molten hostility of the great "marriage on the rocks" films, i.e. Before Midnight, Allen's own Husbands and Wives, and the like, settling instead for grand gestures that approximate the form of these movies rather than coming up with a living document of its own. Which is not to say that this movie isn't good—it is! Very good at times! Johansson and Driver give top-tier performances, the writing is the bleeding-edge sharp typical of all Baumbach movies, and the movie is both hysterically funny and achingly sweet at times. But all of the best material occurs when the movie untenses its shoulders and unbuttons its collar, so to speak, and forgets about its ambitions: a lengthy comic interlude involving an accidental knife wound, a handful of scenes involving the screwball-paced casual sniping of creative-types hanging out with one another—basically, when the movie is content to be another Baumbach feature rather than trying to be the Baumbach feature. Unabashedly love Driver's character's barely reigned in contempt for driving, though—solidarity, brother. Grade: B

I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps) (2019)
A lot of people have already noted that the romantic half of this movie is a lot less interesting than the "I'm a disembodied hand trying to claw my way back to my body" half. Fewer people have mentioned that both halves are basically in the service of nothing but some melancholic mood piece fluff—the whole movie cross-cuts between these two timelines until we basically get to the inevitable reunion and then... that's basically it? There's a coda that makes a callback to a significant moment earlier in the film, and then there's a revelation about the protagonist's childhood. But the movie never gave me any reason to care about any of this. Maybe there's a metaphor here, but I dunno, I didn't see it. That said, the animation is amazing, and I am very partial to the hand's whole "Steadfast Tin Soldier"-esque journey, which is both familiar and strange in some delightful ways. Grade: B

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
I appreciate that a director with the stature of Linklater has been consistently willing to work on projects that defy conventional ideas of "importance." Where'd You Go, Bernadette isn't really the kind of movie people are mourning when they talk about the shrinking space for mid-budget films in the modern studio landscape, but it is absolutely the kind of movie most in danger of going extinct from this economic reality: crowd-pleasing, sentimental dramedies without much by the way of thematic ambition on their minds, imperfectly scripted but impeccably acted—you know, like We Bought a Zoo and that kind of thing. This is basically Linklater's We Bought a Zoo, only a little better because it's animated by a typically great Cate Blanchett and a ridiculously watchable Bill Crudup, as well as some pretty interesting material regarding architecture and mental health on the fringes of the plot. It's still a little goofy in places, and the last thirty minutes or so don't work in the slightest. But I had a good time with a lot of the other pieces here. Grade: B-

The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue) (2016)
It doesn't quite have the bite of some of the previous Dardenne brothers movies (side note: what's up with Kid with a Bike being virtually ignored in the end-of-decade lists? EXPLAIN, film critics community!), but The Unknown Girl is still an engaging little gumshoe movie with its boots planted in the textures of the Dardennes' social realism. I enjoyed it. Grade: B+

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)
It's clear that Scorsese and Co. put a lot of time into archival research, assembling this movie from mostly preexisting footage, some of it rarely seen before, others from better, more lively documentaries. It's fine that the movie is never as live-wire as something like Dont Look Back, because how could it be? The new interviews the movie gets—with old folkies like Joan Baez and some pretty obscure characters like the (extremely enthusiastic!) studio tech who helped record Highway 61 Revisited, as well as the man himself—are decently candid; Baez in particular is upfront about the extent to which Dylan personally hurt her with his erratic mid-'60s behavior, which is a perspective that's not often explored in the "Dylan goes electric" mythology, and I'll be honest that watching this documentary was the first time it occurred to me that I'd probably be a lot more fun to hang out with Joan Baez than with Bob Dylan. In fact, in general the movie walks a decently impressive tightrope between taking seriously the reasons why people felt betrayed by Dylan's abandonment of the folk revival scene while also not denying the small-minded stodginess that underlined a lot of that reaction, too. As a PBS-style piece of informative filmmaking, it's a great introduction to Dylan's early career, with enough obscure/new info sprinkled in to keep the veterans happy. As a piece of cinematic art, it's nothing special. Grade: B

Television

Wormwood (2017)
Netflix Bloat is a real thing, and it's a shame to see it happen to my boy Errol. At its core, Wormwood is a classic Morris piece in the vein of The Thin Blue Line about epistemology and the hall of mirrors one walks down when you challenge the modern authority state for the truth—this one centered around the officially accidental death of CIA employee Frank Olson that was not unlikely an assassination on the part of the CIA. It's a gripping premise and yields some fascinating material, especially in its first and final episodes; Eric Olson, Frank's son, is the sort of tragic hero at the center of this series, whose quest for the truth is bound to be confounded by the tenacity of the powers that be in keeping an air of ambiguity, and Morris does a good job of showing just how broad a net "the powers that be" actually is, especially in the final episode, where Seymour Hersh, in a completely bananas interview, basically tells Morris to his face that he knows what Morris and Olson want to know but that he won't out of a commitment to standards of journalistic integrity—which of course raises all sorts of fascinating and bitter questions about the true purpose of journalistic standards and the extent to which they truly are capable of speaking truth to power. So that's all great. BUT. There's absolutely nothing here that warrants a six-episode, 256-minute miniseries. This would have been a great feature film, but at the length that it is, it's too long at least twice over, and large stretches of time are padded out with redundant and somewhat extraneous reenactments, seemingly just for the purpose of making this long enough to be a series rather than a rich feature. At times, Wormwood even becomes something I never thought I'd say about a Morris project: tedious. It's super unfortunate, because there is some terrific stuff here. Grade: B-

Mini-Reviews for February 12 - 18, 2018

Good morning and welcome to my world of reviews! Hope you like what you find!

Movies

Last Flag Flying (2017)

Not having seen/read The Last Detail, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what's Ponicsan's and what's Linklater's here. But it's an enormously generous film in the way that only Linklater films tend to be—so generous, in fact, that it finds room for compassion for none other than Saddam Hussein. This is a movie about the horrific cost of war: not just the deaths that result but the lies we tell ourselves about those deaths, lies that perpetuate the national myth that lures our young to their deaths to begin with. Last Flag Flying spits in the eye of the patriotic rhetoric of "heroes" and "patriotism" that American governments use to prevent people from questioning that cost, but what makes it ultimately as compelling as it becomes is the way that even the characters doing the spitting—a trio of bitter and shaken Vietnam veterans—can't escape the allure of the aesthetics of military prestige. As cynical as Linklater and Ponicsan are about the greater powers motivating and commanding the military, they are resolutely ambivalent on the profound meaning that veterans (or at least, these veterans) find in their military identity. It's all lies—the uniforms, the stories, the "character-building,"—and damaging lies at that, but to what extent should we condemn these lies when they clearly mean so much to those who actually experienced the truth of military service? The movie refuses to answer this question, and while I'm sure this ambiguity (some might say "mixed-messaging") won't work for some, it worked for me. This is narrative generosity in its most difficult form. Grade: B+

Better Watch Out (2016)

For a horror comedy, Better Watch Out is willing to get extremely sadistic, and unlike a few other reviewers, I count that as a plus—it's threading a pretty familiar needle here, but the extent of the ruthlessness in the film's villain remains the film's most reliable surprise, even when it's clear what the movie's game is (which, not to spoil too much, happens about half an hour in). I'm not sure if the way the movie juggles the staring-into-the-abyss nihilism of its villain with the winky appropriation of famous holiday movie beats (the movie has an extended homage to Home Alone, e.g., and on the non-holiday side, there's a conversation piece involving Adventure Time characters that's like the adolescent hell version of Reservoir Dogs's "Like a Virgin" bit) is entirely cohesive, but it works more often than not, even if the characters are either incoherent plot devices or staid archetypes. Fun and cringey times to be had by all, I'm sure. Grade: B

Empire of the Sun (1987)

I guess we can call this a "problem" film? The movie's first hour, as the Shanghai International Settlement is sacked and occupied by the Japanese and young Christian Bale's Jim is forced to live alone in the ruins of his spoiled, imperialist upbringing, promises a masterpiece. It's a miracle of visual storytelling, featuring some of the best imagery in any Spielberg film ever. The middle hour, however, drops the ball majorly; the plot slows way down for an interminable internment camp sequence that not only tones down that incredible imagery but also begins to lose Bale's character in a crowd of dull secondary ones—it's maybe thematically relevant, given the drudgery and dehumanization of the camp, but lord is it booooring. Thankfully, the final half hour recovers a bit, ending the movie on a strong and complicated note that foreshadows where Spielberg's dramatic output would go in the '90s and especially the 2000s. In fact, it's not hard to view this movie as ground zero for some of Spielberg's future endeavors—the Japanese occupation scenes feel like Spielberg's audition for Schindler's List, while a lot of the crowd scenes and the itinerant children with morally complicated adult companions feels like a test run of A.I. (dunno if Kubrick was watching this or not, but it sure feels like it). Both of those movies hang together a lot better than Empire does, which is maybe part of my disappointment here. But also, there's enough greatness in Empire that I feel like we don't really need to critique it solely in relation to other films. It's a big, complicated movie in a way that, to me, more often feels complicated in a flawed way than it does complicated in a rich or complex way, but I'll give Spielberg this: it's his first attempt at interrogating his own sentimentalism, and it does so brilliantly and in a way that he has never been able to recapture since, for as much as he's tried to replicate it—when Bale's character sees (perhaps supernaturally) the flash of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, he assumes it's someone's spirit going to heaven, which is such a bitter, ironic inversion of E.T. and Close Encounters and every other "messianic bright light from the sky" moment in his filmography. In a way, the film as a whole is an attempt to stretch this feeling out to a full 2.5 hours (even, if I'm going to be really generous, using John Williams's cloying and frankly awful score as a counterpoint to the misery we see onscreen); it's not successful at all in doing so, but there are glimmers of the success that could have been. Grade: B

Watermelon Man (1970)

An outrageous satirical comedy from Melvin Van Peebles: racist white man wakes up as a black man one day, and the majority of the film is him trying to turn himself back white. It's a lot more grounded in traditional narrative cinema than Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the only other Van Peebles I've seen—this is Van Peebles's only studio film, and it shows. But for a studio film, even one made in 1970, this movie is pretty strange. For example, Godfrey Cambridge, the lead, is in white face for the opening sequence of the movie before he "turns" black, and there are multiple points where the screen flashes strange colors or has these weird title cards, for no other reason except to be disorienting, in a way that anticipates Sweet Sweetback. It's also pretty unflinching about race—the (excellent) tagline is, "It won't happen to you, so you can laugh," which just feels like a gigantic middle finger to any white audience who might enjoy this movie. Grade: B+

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (1962)

My first Agnès Varda movie, and I LOVED it. It's not much else besides a woman waiting two hours for the results of a potentially fatal medical diagnosis and the ways all the people around her react to her dread, but why would you need more? The casual surrealism underpinned by some truly harrowing emotional ground, all bound up in this vigorous existential philosophy that's at once clear-eyed and serious without ever taking itself too seriously... this is extremely my thing. Also, how is Corinne Marchand not an international star? She's radiant and wonderful in this. Grade: A

Television

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 3 (2017-18)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's always had, to paraphrase its first season's theme song, a nuanced relationship with the "crazy" in its title, and Season 3 basically makes that relationship its thesis. The show's third year is very pointedly and single-mindedly about Rebecca Bunch's realization and acceptance that she has mental health concerns—this is signaled by nothing less than the conceptually clever (if musically weak) theme song for the season, which plays with the various and conflicting definitions of the word "crazy" in pop culture. That Crazy Ex-Girlfriend takes Rebecca's struggle seriously should be no surprise, but it's disarming and often harrowing just how seriously it takes it, giving the most clear-eyed look at the realities of mental illness I've ever seen in a TV series, bar none. At this point, we all know what Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's tricks are—bawdy comedy, piercing emotional insight, jaunty and parodic musical sequences—but the directions these tricks steer the show are consistently fresh. Last season's finale, with Rebecca swearing bloody vengeance on Josh, did nothing to prepare us for a season-long exploration of the personal and social implications of a mental health diagnosis, and I expect this season's finale (involving Rebecca going to jail [??]) to be entirely unrepresentative of where the show's fourth season will take us (there will be a fourth season, CW... right?). To be fair, this season could do a bit more with its increasingly crowded roster of secondary characters, and Paula in particular feels given short shrift. And while I'm at it, is it just me, or is this season less focused on the musical sequences than past seasons? Season 3 is the show's most inconsistent, but its highs are so high that despite that, it doesn't feel like much of a step down. Grade: A-

Books

Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley (2004-2010)

I didn't feel like reviewing all six volumes of this series one by one, so here's them all in lump sum. O'Malley's graphic-novel treatise on love, emotional baggage, and personal responsibility is a lot more fun than I just made it sound. In fact, it's great fun. Set in some surreal version of Toronto that's a confluence of mid-2000s twentysomethings' personal experiences and the culture they have internalized—especially video games, and the series tends to operates on video-game logic (Scott gets a 1-Up at one point and levels up at multiple points)—Scott Pilgrim is the sort of stylized, endlessly inventive narrative that the comics form was created to support (though to be fair, the Edgar Wright film adaptation of the series does a great job with it, too). At least as good is the characterization, which relies on slacker archetypes as its foundation but then builds each of its principals into full-bodied, complicated humans within that framework and, impressively, without losing any of that surreal, comedic voice until the final volume, which perhaps gets a little too video-gamey and high concept to make room for the small, well-observed character moments that made the first five volumes so rich. Best of all is the series's no-nonsense approach to its protagonist, Scott Pilgrim himself, and the way it's not shy about the uglier aspects of Scott's personality; I don't know if I've ever read a book that depicted the insidious ways in which meek passivity gets conflated with niceness and how that passivity can be just as douchey as some preening jock, but if I have, it's certainly never been as scathing as Scott Pilgrim is. Grade: A-

Music

Wilco - Sky Blue Sky (2007)

Back in 2007, some people saw this album as a disappointment, and I suppose after the art-rock freakout that was A Ghost Is Born, I can see how this might have felt like a step down at first blush. I certainly don't remember being very impressed the few times I listened to it back then. But guys, we were wrong. So wrong. So wrong, in fact, that we missed the part where Sky Blue Sky was one of Wilco's best, most mature releases. It lacks the noisy fireworks of Ghost (though Sky's songs are more deconstructive than they seem—they just unexpectedly bloom into pop-adjacent blossoms rather than scuzzy feedback; Nels Cline's guitar here is a lot more precise and clean than Tweedy's in the previous album, but it's no less exploratory [see the Cline showcase, "Impossible Germany"]), but in its place is a lyrical precision mixed with soul-music underpinnings that occupies an emotional and sonic space distinct from anything Wilco has done before or since. This is "dad rock" only in the sense that it captures the way that (I assume) it's a complicated and beautiful things to be a father. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for July 11 - July 17, 2016

More reviews. Lots of B-grade entertainment this week. Be sure to tell me what you think in the comments.

Movies

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Richard Linklater has said that Dazed and Confused, his early-career coming-of-age dramedy, is based on painful memories of his own during high school. He's also said that Everybody Wants Some!! (yes, Virginia, there are exclamation points) is the spiritual successor of Dazed, although I think it's important to butt in here to stress that this movie is suspiciously devoid of pain. The hazing, cruising for chicks, the drinking: in Dazed and Confused, these are activities made jagged and cruel by the ruthless dynamics of high school society, whereas in Everybody Wants Some!!, those same elements are just rowdy (but ultimately harmless) college fun. The extent to which that idealization of college jock behavior is irresponsible (especially in the context of the spate of horrifying, criminal, rapey behavior by college athletes that has come to light recently), I'll leave up to the reader. This much is true, though: the movie is fantastically funny, and the fact that it's able to make spending extended amounts of time with a group of people I'd have very little patience for in real life (athletes who explicitly tell us they're only in college for the babes, beer, and baseball) not only tolerable but actually fun (heck, lots of fun) is a marvel of Linklater's characteristically unjudgemental screenwriting. Grade: A-

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
Billy Wilder sex comedy, you had me at "hello." Ah, but it's late-period Billy Wilder sex comedy, which means that it's bitter and misanthropic to a fault—something that's (admittedly) true of even the golden-era Wilder of the '50s, but this one's got the extra kicker of featuring an ending so absurd and character-breaking that the film never really has a chance at being anything other than a curiosity. It's Wilder, so you've still got a generally entertaining film on a moment-by-moment scale. But hang together narratively, tonally, or thematically, this movie does not. Grade: B-

Cassandra's Dream (2007)
I'm always pleased to see Woody Allen in philosophical-thriller-involving-murder mode, even for a movie like this that adds relatively little to the conversation between other, superior features like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point (and unfortunately, Cassandra's proximity to the latter film in Allen's filmography does it no favors). The ending wets the bed, but on the whole, it's a decent, if unremarkable, little movie that at least gestures toward some interesting ideas. It's also a great example of using thoroughly non-Woody-Allen-esque actors to enliven Allen clichés (the casting of Farrell and McGregor is inspired and pays off well). Grade: B

The Invitation (2015)
It takes a long time for The Invitation to reveal itself as a horror movie rather than the psychological drama that it feints toward for so long that maybe I'm spoiling the film by revealing that, by gum, all the characterization and troubled flashbacks are ultimately red-herrings to what ends up being a feature-long buildup to a supremely unsettling final fifteen minutes. The issue is that the psychological drama stuff really isn't very interesting—it's all just boilerplate dealing-with-trauma narrative, and only mediocre execution of it at best. I'm giving this a pass for the ending, though, and especially the final shot, which ranks among some truly great last images in the history of cinematic chillers. Grade: B

Boy & the World (O Menino e o Mundo) (2013)
The rough, hand-drawn look that makes this movie look something like a child's scrapbook is fantastic. In stills especially it's wonderful, even if the technology that animates it does end up being a little too smooth and obviously CG to sustain the illusion. But at the movie's best, it's an evocative, imaginative, slightly abstracted rendering of the typical rural-to-urban coming-of-age story. One sequence involving real-life footage of deforestation in action makes the movie a little more literal than is for its own good, and the story never quite hits that precise balance between melancholy and whimsy that it aims for. Clearly, it's the weakest of the 2015 Best Animated Oscar-nominated features. But last year was an extremely strong showing for that category. Grade: B

Television

Deadwood, Season 2 (2005)
The plot is still the least-interesting thing about the show, and the lush language is still by-far the most interesting. All this means that I'm less engaged by the showy, grim, serial-killer-esque story arc involving newcomer Francis Wolcott (pawn of real-life business threat, George Hearst) and the generically cable-drama domestic-strife arc of Sheriff Bullock with his newly arrived wife, Martha (Anna Gunn, whoo!). No, man, as with Season 1, Deadwood's Season 2 is at its best when it's just hanging out with these loquacious, eloquently smutty characters and luxuriating in the beautiful contours of the dialogue. The show is a love letter to the English language, and as a lover of the language myself, I couldn't be happier to bask in its glow. Grade: A-

Music

Logan Richardson - Shift (2016)
Cool, modern jazz that's not going to blow your mind or anything but that's still pretty solid stuff. The miscalculated "Locked Out of Heaven" cover aside, it's a seamless, energetic, and entrancing trip through some gorgeous soundscapes. Grade: B+