Mini Reviews for April 26 - May 2, 2021

I was part of a conversation about Interstella 5555 on the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here if you're interested! Otherwise, onward to the reviews!

Movies

Speak (2004)
No surprise that this movie lacks the elegance of the novel it's based on, given the reliance of Laurie Halse Anderson's prose and symbolism on the kind of interior monologue that's hard to replicate in film. The pacing of this movie is all out-of-wack, too, in the way that a lot of novel adaptations tend to be, where they include scenes because they occurred in the book rather than because the scenes actually make a productive part of the film. As a whole, there's the sense that a more judicious editor at both the screenwriting and post-production stage could have formed a much tighter, better movie overall. But it's probably more productive to talk about what this movie does well, since it's not inconsiderable. Of course Kristen Stewart is very good, but I think we've all come around to expect that now. More surprising to me is Steve Zahn as the extremely enthusiastic but also very awkward art teacher, who is pitch perfect at the kind of foolish-but-nurturing energy possessed by dorky teachers who love their subject and consider themselves above the procedure of public education. Honestly, the cast is basically top-to-bottom great (though I'm not 100% sure that they're all aware that they're in the same movie—some are pretty naturalistic, while others seem like they're going for a much more cartoony vibe). The locations are also incredible; this movie is one of the very, very, very few pieces of mainstream high-school-centric American media I've seen that depicts a high school environment that actually looks like a typical public high school—it's like this movie, Freaks and Geeks, and... that's it? This movie just nails that disinfected-but-somehow-still-dingy, fluorescent, echo-y aesthetic that's instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever stepped foot in a high school that's neither a private school nor located in Southern California, and it nails it with such fidelity that it's honestly the thing that most impressed me about this movie. Can more high school movies take place in real high schools, please? Grade: B

 

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003)
Daft Punk's Discovery is, of course, an unassailable good time, so even if this had just been an iTunes visualizer for 65 minutes as the album played, this movie would have still been enjoyable. But what we have is an anime that's an allegory for the joy of music and the exploitative practices of the music industry, which is even more enjoyable. The story itself gets a little draggy at times, especially toward the end, but the music always carries the movie forward, even then. We need more feature-length animated visual albums. Grade: B+

 

 

The Time Machine (2002)
Begins as a thinking man's dumb movie, a pretty silly but sincere and interesting rumination on loss. Ends as a dumb man's dumb movie, a loud meathead story about how the hero has to genocide a species of sub-humans in order to save his sexy replacement girlfriend. I kind of wish this would just find a mode and stick to it. It's kind of fun, but in what way? Am I supposed to be sincerely or ironically enjoying this movie?? Anyway, this was directed by H. G. Wells's great-grandson, and I gotta say, he should maybe be taking notes from his great-grandfather, certainly no stranger to weird tonal shifts but also capable of making them interesting regardless. Grade: C

 

L'Argent (1983)
Robert Bresson is a filmmaker whose work I always feel like I'm unproductively bouncing off of as I'm watching the movies but whose nuances subsequently open up to me in the days following my watch. With L'Argent, I'm still kind of in the bouncing off stage; I'm writing this just a few hours after seeing the movie, and I'm struggling to figure out exactly how this movie is saying anything more than a variation of Pink Floyd's "Money"—i.e. currency is a social (almost religious) construct but it nonetheless dominates our lives as much as anything more tangible. I'm sure it's more nuanced than that, so hopefully I'll get there. But that said, this is astonishingly precise filmmaking, even if all it's saying is "Money! It's a gas!" I know that people sometimes find the mid-century European art-film tradition to be stultifying, but movies like this, where every camera movement, piece of lighting, every edit feels like a meticulously controlled, planned piece of the broader project of the film, are great examples why I will always find this kind of style more engaging than the looser, more naturalistic techniques that have become more popular in the 21st century. I know the "one perfect shot" thing has basically become self-parody, but golly, this movie is nothing but perfect shots, and even if I never find more depth to it than I've already articulated, it's still a pleasure being led to those ideas so confidently and beautifully. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for March 22 - 28, 2021

In case you missed it, here's the link to the Q&A I did on the blog earlier this week!

Also, I was on the Cinematary podcast chatting about Ratatouille this week!

Movies

Trolls (2016)
I remain gobsmacked at the inexplicable seven months that began with the release of this movie and ended following the release of Captain Underpants, when DreamWorks Animation briefly became the most formally interesting American animation studio by a considerably wide margin. This movie's screenplay is mostly garbage, but it's unbelievably, eye-meltingly incredible to look at—a legitimate masterpiece in terms of its use of texture and color. Outside of Pixar's god-tier run of Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up, those three DreamWorks features—this one, The Boss Baby, and Captain Underpants—form probably the most coherent treatise on the promises of a fully embodied CGI aesthetic that we've ever gotten, and God help me, I'm tempted to say that the DreamWorks trio is actually superior as a manifesto on account of its willingness to totally unshackle the animation from realism (something Pixar is still struggling to do). Get woke, Disney/Pixar! Grade: B+

Trolls World Tour (2020)
It is with great regret that I report that this movie's animation doesn't even come close to the original's—the textures are smoother, the designs are less articulate and inventive, and the character movements lack the springiness that made the original such a joy to watch in motion. Considering that I was basically only into the original movie on the merits of its animation, this is basically a death blow for my relationship with World Tour. It's not terrible; the movie occasionally has signs of life when it gestures toward the chaotic sugar-rush psychedelia of the first movie (I love the bit where the little worm-looking dude has a near-death experience and sees a Monty-Python-style worm god), and the pro-diversity, anti-colonial bent of the story is well-intentioned, if a little soft (like that other recent experiment in kids-entertainment anti-colonialism, Frozen 2, it basically wants to take an anti-colonial stance while also making sure to assure the colonizers that their culture—in this case, pop music—will remain the default). But these are paltry pleasures, nothing nearly engaging enough to make up for the gigantic aesthetic step downward. Grade: C+

Incident at Loch Ness (2004)
An intermittently fun mockumentary about an attempt to make a Loch Ness Monster hoax documentary with Werner Herzog. Herzog himself is incredibly game (he co-wrote/co-produced the thing, so why not), and there are some entertaining moments. But the whole seems a little too pleased with itself, and nothing here is sharp enough to overcome that. Still, an interesting little curiosity. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Insignificance (1985)
It's an interesting concept on paper, which is why I've been interested in watching this movie for several years: Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Joseph McCarthy all cross paths on the same sweaty NYC night and have long, philosophical conversations. Unfortunately, in practice, I don't think this really goes anyway. Both the script and the performances turn these people into knowing caricatures of themselves, almost as if to make them more archetypes than real people, which is alright I guess, except that the movie doesn't really do anything with these archetypes. It's trying to; this is supposed to be some treatise on celebrity, America, nuclear weapons, and the 20th century, but the way that this movie only really gestures at basic ideas and surface-level history makes this seem more like fan service for mid-century monoculture nerds: "Hey, what if all these famous people met each other? Wouldn't that be cool?" It's not quite as crass as that, but it's not particularly more insightful either, except in small flashes. The movie has a few great sequences: there's a bit where Monroe explains special relativity to Einstein, a scene that has just this wonderful, ecstatic energy (and the one scene in which Theresa Russell's otherwise kinda flat performances as Monroe comes into its own), and the movie's final five minutes or so are terrific, the one place where director Nicolas Roeg goes full "This is a Nicolas Roeg movie." Besides those things, though, I'm disappointed this wasn't something more special. Grade: B-

The Devil, Probably (Le diable probablement) (1977)
Really, truly bleak stuff—no surprise for a movie that opens announcing a suicide that might also be a murder and then flashes back six months to show us everything that led up to that event. That interplay between suicide and murder feels essential to this movie's project; I think there's a tendency to talk about the "doomer" ideology in a way that is kind of aggressive toward those who feel utter despair, the implication being that these people have done something wrong to end up in their state of mind. And I guess it's important to maintain a sense of personal agency on some level when it comes to our self-concepts. But also, it's also worth considering, as this movie does, the extent to which people who commit suicide have been murdered by their environment: a world so relentlessly de-enchanted and twisted by capitalism and its associated ideologies that it begins to feel unlivable (and indeed, is literally unlivable for many human beings and other lifeforms), and a world in which the most prominent resistance narratives offer little in terms of constructive alternatives. I imagine that some leftists would get a little bent out of shape at that last part, but I do think that modern leftism (at least the kind that white people from bourgeois backgrounds tend to find themselves in) is so busy critiquing our current oppressive structures that it ends up being deficient at imagining a more livable world outside of vague, often archaic theoretical categories, and moreover, it's not particularly good at communicating what it does constructively imagine to a lot of the people who face the most profound alienation from our capitalist world. Not that that's entirely the fault of "the left"—real revolutionaries have faced heinous opposition that plays a big role in the ways in which resistance can feel so ineffectual at times. The Devil, Probably is, like Out 1, describing the disorienting fog of a post-'68 counterculture that was struggling to hold itself together as a coherent whole, and while I don't know much about the specifics of France's counterculture, I think a lot about the impotence of America's counterculture following the killings of genuine, even utopian visionaries like Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the exile of Assata Shakur—people whose radical, collectivist visions were papered over by a watery movement that struggled to articulate anything more concrete than John Lennon's "Imagine" (obviously over-generalizing here, but still). There's that famous passage from Infinite Jest in which DFW says that the subjective experience of committing suicide is as internally rational as jumping out of the top floor of a burning building, and if we're using that analogy, I think it's important to recognize that there are two systemic things to indict: first and foremost, the fact that there is a fire to begin with, but also, the lack of any kind of structure to let people out of the building. An early scene in this movie involves the protagonist at a protest where he's asking people to articulate not just what they are fighting against but also what they are fighting for, and he basically just gets shouted down, which feels like a key moment in a movie otherwise preoccupied by how the horrible environmental collapse created by modern industry feels hopelessly inevitable. To be clear, I'm not saying that people are "to blame" for someone's suicide, but I do think a movie like this highlights the importance of holding abolition in one hand and creation in the other. The people I know who face the total alienation this movie depicts are not looking for theory; they're looking for belonging and community, two things that are brutally hard to find in a capitalist society like ours and are crucially important to build as we try to clear out the wreckage from the current system's abuses. This is one of the reasons I still find church and Christianity so compelling, actually. Anyway, maybe I'm just a bloviating gasbag, so thank you for coming to my TED talk—I guess as far as this movie is concerned, this fits pretty squarely into my experiences with Bresson, where I have some nagging reservations about the whole package (this is a very shaggy feature for being only 95 minutes, and I'm not sure all of those shaggy ends work) but also find its ideas fascinating to pick at. As always, I think I just need to watch more Bresson. Grade: B

Tonight for Sure (1962)
I know I'm supposed to think that Coppola's pre-fame work as a softcore director is an ignominious beginning for such an acclaimed director, and surely this isn't a "good" movie. But I didn't really find this that much of a step down from his early "respectable" work like Dementia 13 and You're a Big Boy Now. Sure, it's undeniably amateurish, and it has almost no stylistic ambition. But I actually thought this was really, uproariously funny before it settles into basically a long burlesque sequence for the back half of the movie, which I thought was tedious (as are most "erotic" films primarily interested in foregrounding the erotic, tbh). It's dumb, sure, but the opening 20-ish minutes of the movie where these two prudes recount in horror the ways that society has gone to the dogs is hilarious: a straight-shootin' moral conservative is cursed with involuntary hallucinations of naked women? a cowboy says he wants to get rid of all the strip clubs so the Wild West can become the "Decent West"? It's not a particularly insightful film, but when it isn't just boring eroticism, it's also a pretty fun goof on the same kind of anti-sex moral crusaders who are to this day acting as if the existence of things like "WAP" are a threat to civilization. Also, this movie is 69 minutes long, so... nice. Grade: C

Television

Superstore, Season 6 (2020-2021)
RIP to this wonderful little show. After America Ferrera's departure, the final season of Superstore feels a little more aimless than previous seasons, and the first few episodes back after its pandemic-truncated fifth season go for some low-hanging fruit re: COVID jokes. The finale swings a little too hard for sentimentality, too. But overall, this is still basically the same, delightful series it's always been, an incredibly well-observed, surprisingly innovative workplace sitcom with a terrific cast and sense of place. It's also kind of wild that we got a network sitcom as unapologetically anti-corporate and pro-worker as this one, and the penultimate episode before the two-part finale is a really vicious take-down of the veneration of "genius" rich people like Elon Musk, which is somewhat surprising on its own right. Superstore had clearly run its course by now, but I'm sad to see it go. It strikes me that I may never watch a network sitcom again after this one; I watch so few TV shows anymore anyway, and this kind of traditional, 22-episodes-per-season network sitcom is clearly a dying breed, making the odds of me watching another one seem slim. It was a good run, I suppose, me and the network sitcom, and Superstore is a great one to go out on. Grade: B

Music

Tindersticks - Distractions (2021)
Outside of their scores for Claire Denis's movies, I haven't really paid much attention to Tinderstick's output since the '90s. But in the meantime, it seems like the band's dusky, chamber-pop sound has matured into a smokey ethereality. Long compositions (particularly the 11-minute opening track, "Man Alone (Can't Stop the Fadin')") slink along unpredictable grooves with hypnotic, drum-machine rhythms, sounding not unlike Lambchop or maybe Tom Waits in his quieter moments, resulting in an album with a fantastic late-night atmosphere. It all feels remarkably of-a-piece with the whole, maybe too much so: most of the songs blend into one another and kind of lose their individual character, even the trio of covers in the middle of the record. But as a sustained vibe, it's great. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for November 19-25, 2018

Holiday week, hence short post. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Movies

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
The Coen Brothers doing a western anthology film fills a lot of holes in my heart I didn't realize I had. Being an anthology film, it has its ups and downs, of course, but even the downs aren't so much "down" as they are just inevitably not as good as the film's first and best segment, the utterly delightful and demented musical sequence starring Tim Blake Nelson from which the film gets its title. Elsewhere, we have the Coens as naturalists, adapting a Jack London story with a grizzled Tom Waits (is there any other kind?) in the lead role as a gold prospector, the Coens as existentialists (by way of Sergio Leone) in the nearly wordless James-Franco-as-fate-addled-outlaw segment, and the Coens in full-on mythical mode in the final segment, which brings the film's far-flung fascination with death into a culminating carriage ride into literal hell. In this way, it's sort of in the same vein as Hail, Caesar!, an experiment in bringing all their various genre proclivities under one roof; Buster Scruggs goes the extra mile by making the film something of a survey of the full breadth of the Coens' worldview, too, a treatise on all the various ideas that have animated their filmography from Blood Simple onward: that of absurd fate, that of the essential foolishness of humanity's pretensions of rationality, humanity's finitude, that of the crucial empathy in the face of all this. That's to say nothing of the purely aesthetic pleasures of the film: the storybook framing devices (with wax-papered "color plates"), the typically florid, hilarious Coen dialogue, the stark, vibrant digital cinematography. If nothing else, it's an extraordinarily beautiful film with a keen attention to detail. But thankfully, it is something else, and a very good something at that. Grade: A-

Private Life (2018)
It's incredibly easy to chart this movie as the intersection of Nicole Holofcener, Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and Noah Baumbach's collective careers—which, unless you are one of those people who (understandably) has an allergy to that brand of cinema comprised almost entirely of upper-middle-class white New Yorkers walking and talking and bickering, is more description than critique. As an iteration of that genre, Private Life is minutely observed and acutely felt. The central struggle of a couple who are struggling to conceive feels lived-in to an extent that fertility plots rarely are in media—lived-in to the point of chaffing, an at-once breezy dramedy hinged on verbal quips and a bracing domestic struggle that rubs you raw with its slowly dawning but deeply insistent sense of tragedy. I know I compared this film to Baumbach et al a second ago, but the extent to which this film wears its heart on its sleeve and to which that heart is lacerated feels entirely its own, and it's great. Grade: A-

Maleficent (2014)
That this is sort of a stealth playtest for Disney's reprehensible new thing of doing heavily CGI'd "live-action" remakes of their animated properties is just icing on the whole nasty cake of this movie. I suppose I should give the movie credit for at least trying something new with the original story, given that I tend to like revisionist fairy tales. But it's just so lousily put together. The CG is trash, and, more importantly, the revisionist elements feel entirely haphazard, as if they never got past the pitch stage—what if Maleficent's arc is a rape-revenge story? What if we dealt with the whole icky thing of Aurora's "true love" being some rando she met in the woods twelve hours prior? What if fairies and humans are at war, and the humans are the bad guys, because COLONIALISM? What if Maleficent's arc was about surrogate motherhood? Wait, didn't we already have an arc for Maleficent's character? I can't remember, just go with it—hey, I have an idea: what if Maleficent is a scorned lover and is taking revenge on the king? What if they have a cage match at the end of the movie? Is this too much to put into a 97-minute cash-in on one of Disney's most revered properties? What if none of this fits together? Do you think our CG is good enough to stitch it all together in post? Grade: C-

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
It's easy to dismiss this film as an exercise in cinematic sadism, and to be clear, it's not not an exercise in cinematic sadism—to watch this film is to be "treated" to 95 minutes of virtually uninterrupted tragedy, often of the most happenstancial kind, human society being cruel for the sake of cruelty. But the specific way that Bresson frames this misery feels subversively profound, too. The choice to make so many of the film's incidents perverse inversions of Biblical narratives is deeply rattling: Balaam's donkey, beaten but denied human speech; the Virgin Mary raped and abandoned. It calls attention to just how much of the Bible's depiction of the Divine is aspirational—how much of a grace note it is for God to intervene on the behalf of the oppressed and how often that feels far divorced from a world in which oppression marches forward unimpeded, not only undeterred by our parochial society raised on the Biblical narratives but in fact spurred on by it. Society, undergirded by our collective Christian morality selectively applied, is both cruel and a fount of misprioritized empathy. Balthazar the Donkey is an expressionless, perfectly blank vehicle for empathy, upon which it is easy for us audience members to wish Christian charity as we see him mistreated time and time again. But human beings: these are not tabula rasa targets for our empathy; they are dirty and grating and weak, and we hate them. This is the film's strongest indictment, evoking one of the most crucial Bible stories of them all: the often-overlooked ending of the Book of Jonah, in which Jonah mourns the death of the vine under which he found shade, while at the same time wishing for the entire city of Nineveh to be destroyed. It's the crux of the film's moral spine: we care about this donkey, for which we neither worked for nor helped grow—should we not care for our own teeming mass of humanity, who cannot tell their right from their left? Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for July 23 - 29, 2018

So long, summer—I'll miss ya.

Movies

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

The obvious thing to talk about here are the action sequences, which are great. That's not surprising; the last three Mission: Impossible films have established this now over-twenty-year-old series as one that consistently delivers some of the most exciting and refined action setpieces in modern English-language filmmaking, and it's more a pleasant affirmation than an outright shock that Fallout has probably the best ensemble of setpieces in the whole franchise (though I still think that Ghost Protocol's Burj Khalifa scene is the high-water mark for the series). More surprising, though, is how Fallout structures its plot as a procession of increasingly dire trolley-problem situations, which gives a decent weight and thoughtfulness to the characters and their decisions, especially considering that this is a franchise that in the past hasn't exactly thrived on narrative thoughtfulness. I mean, it isn't First Reformed or anything, but especially for the kind of wide-release popcorn flick that it is, Fallout is strikingly concerned with the ethics of violence and the human cost of the usual action movie mayhem, which is something I wasn't at all expecting. It's the best Mission: Impossible movie yet, one of the most exciting theater experiences I've had this year, and likely the best American action movie until the next Mission: Impossible movie comes out. Grade: A

Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

The central gimmick—the entire movie on a computer desktop!—isn't as fresh as in the original (and certainly not after having seen The Den just a day prior), and Dark Web isn't really scary at all either. This is definitely a slasher, but instead of dead teenagers in service of horror, the movie becomes something of a very twisty, very dense techno-thriller with more plot than I've seen in a so-called horror movie in years. This is, frankly, the best thing about the movie, the way the plot reveals rule after rule until by the end, it's magnificently complex for the kind of movie this is—it kept me guessing, at least. The movie also fills its cast with some shockingly competent protagonists, which makes Dark Web less of the usual schadenfreude of watching stupid, mean people meet karmic deaths (a feeling which the original Unfriended definitely traffics in) and more of a kind of sad, nihilistic exercise in watching people being crushed by powers far beyond anything they could hope to overcome. Which... I mean, you read the news. Grade: B

The Tribe (Плем'я) (2014)

The letter grade above a D is thanks to the craft and audacity of the conceit—a movie with no audible dialogue (instead featuring Ukrainian Sign Language), told through extremely long takes that emphasize body language and the staging of character action within the shots. It's a fascinating experiment that would be extremely effective if it weren't in service of a hollow and desperately edgy tale about how teens murder and rape each other. Go back to the '90s, dude. Grade: C-

The Den (2013)

A sort of proto-Unfriended, with the action of the movie taking place entirely on computer screens. But instead of Skype, Facebook, and the other familiar environments of Unfriended, The Den goes basically for the jugular of internet terribleness, making its central device a Chatroulette clone. By the end of the movie, the web has lead to a literal cesspool, but even prior to that, the internet media is shown to be a breeding ground of not just the beloved cat videos and silly humor that makes the internet a fun place but also the virulent sexism and violence (both verbal and physical) that has made it such a frightening and effective social force in recent years. It's way bleaker and a lot less fun than the mean-but-cathartic justice of Unfriended, and The Den isn't nearly so meticulous in its only-on-computer-screens storytelling device, cheating at least a few times. But there's an awful lot on this movie's mind, which covers a multitude of sins. Grade: B

Killer of Sheep (1978)

In some respects, this is a very immediate movie—I am watching, with little fussing, a succession of loosely connected scenes depicting the parallel lives of adults and children in 1970s Watts, LA, shot in sumptuous, grainy black and white, and to understand what is really very good about the film, all I have to do is look at the screen and watch the beautiful lyricism of these characters within their scenes within this aesthetic. At the same time, though, it's not all that immediate of a film, presenting little forward pull or conventional narrative lampposts and instead obsessing on small moments and strange (often funny) details. It's tremendous and full of life in a very down-to-earth way, but I'll probably have to watch it again to know exactly how enthusiastic I am about the collective weight of the project. (If you're interested in hearing much smarter people than I talk about this movie, you can listen to Episode 205 of the Cinematary podcast here, which I participated in). Grade: B+

Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951)

This movie ticks a lot of my boxes--religious turmoil, existential dread, nice cinematography—so I thought I'd be more into it than I ended up being. If I'm anachronistically comparing it to this film's most notable children, Winter Light and First Reformed, I guess I have to admit that I just don't find this priest's psychological turmoil nearly as soulful as either of the priests in those subsequent films, and perhaps this movie's grounding in a legitimate terror of mortality, as opposed to the heady philosophical angst of those other movies, just feels a little more terrestrial than I'm interested in for this kind of movie. But I did like it, don't get me wrong! Claude Laydu's performance is stunning, and as I said, the cinematography is super nice. Maybe I just need to watch more Bresson—this is my first of his. Grade: B

Television

Orphan Black, Season 5 (2017)

The fifth and final season of Orphan Black kind of pulls a Lost in the sense that, at a moment when it would make the most sense to be scaling back its narrative ambitions in favor of resolution, it instead spends a large piece of its (limited) time with some main characters stuck in a cult-like encampment that expands the show's mythology in convoluted, unhelpful ways. But also like Lost, Orphan Black comes back around to a truly magnificent run of episodes leading up to a series finale that rightly focuses on characters rather than going out of its way to tie up every loose end. In the end, what this series leaves us with is a compelling portrait of sisterhood and motherhood (grounded by the magnificent Tatiana Maslany) that rejects binaries and patriarchy and everything that is not an empathetic care for fellow human life, which is exactly the final bow it needed to take. I'll miss this weird, wonderful series. Grade: B+

Music

Father John Misty - God's Favorite Customer (2018)

Shrugging off the philosophical grandiosity and instrumental expansiveness of last year's Pure Comedy, Father John Misty returns with something of the photo-negative of 2015's I Love You, Honeybear—God's Favorite Customer, a record not about the intoxicating dance of true love but of the existential terror of watching that love fall to pieces. The album is a bona-fide bummer, and Josh Tillman goes to some bracingly dark places in its ten songs and 39 minutes, culminating in the exquisite, lacerating piano ballad that forms the album's penultimate track, "The Songwriter," which calls into question the very premise of writing about romance when, in fact, romance involves two people and not just the one chronicling the confessional details. "What would it sound like if you were the songwriter, and you did your living around me?" it goes. "Would you undress me repeatedly in public to show how very noble and naked you can be?" This destroys me, y'all. It's a record drenched in self-loathing and regret, and while it isn't quite free of the self-referentiality and sarcastic lyrical barbs that often turn people off the Father John Misty project ("Mr. Tillman," the second and probably weakest track, is awash in sarcasm and inside-baseball musical allusions), those features are channeled to much rawer and more emotionally immediate effect than they've been in the past. Besides, whether or not this is just shtick seems beside the point when the music makes me so weepy. Grade: A