END OF SPRING BREAK
Movies
I feel like I was oversold on the extent to which this is "a detective story [implied: as opposed to a Batman movie]." Sure, Batman follows clues, but that's what Batman does, because he's a detective. There's nothing here that feels out of place within a mainstream concept of Batman-ness within the past couple decades, and in fact, this movie's pretty unapologetic about including some fairly goofy elements of Batman mythos, too, like the Wayne Manor looking like a Gothic castle and the Batmobile having a literal jet flame coming out the back—this movie's pretty indebted to the tone of the Nolan Batman trilogy (especially The Dark Knight), but it's hard to imagine the Nolan films including the visual gag of the Penguin waddling that this one does. The ability to simultaneously have some goofy fun with Batman while also not really compromising on the grimness is impressive, and for a good 2/3 of this, I was enjoying it a ton. The film's climax/ending is an abject disaster, though, both in terms of plot cohesion and themes, and while I guess it's always a dubious prospect to look for trenchant social commentary in a Batman movie, it's kind of wild that the same movie that goes out of its way to show how billionaire philanthropy is a scam that primarily benefits those already in power also ends on a note that regards Gotham under martial law as something vaguely positive (say what you will about Joker's so-called social commentary, but as thin as it is, it at least has the wherewithal to remain cynical of channels of power throughout). That's a Batman movie for you, I guess, but on top of everything else, it's so unbelievably corny how it all plays out, the one place where the movie seriously stumbles in that balancing act between the silly superhero gestures and the serious superhero gestures. It's also way, way too long, and I don't know exactly what to cut to make it something not nearly so ridiculous as 3 hours, but surely that ending should have been first in line for more judicious editing. But anyway, I had a good time for a length of time that would span a normal movie, so that's not nothing. Oh and P.S., speaking of goofy, how about the score being built around Nirvana's "Something in the Way"? After this and Malignant's "Where Is My Mind?" score, I can't wait for Spider-Man 12's score to be based on "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" or "My Name Is Jonas" or whatever. Grade: B
There's been a lot of throwback '70s exploitation pastiches, some of which were already directed by Ti West himself, but I think Ti West nails it here in a way that's uncommon: not just the stylistic proclivities of the genre (which it is admittedly very clever with, e.g. the opening shot, which positions a doorway in just the right way that it looks like we're looking at an academy-ratio 8mm film) but the specific kind of reckless meanness that animates a lot of '70s exploitation, the kind that feels halfway imbued with a kind of social mandate that ultimately gets left by the wayside in search of thrills—think The Hills Have Eyes or something like that. And hoo boy, is this movie mean, mercilessly mutilating these characters in service of queasy kills and uneasy laughs. It's kinda sorta about the forced sexual repression of the young by the religious and the forced sexual repression of the elderly by society and/or their bodies, but the movie can't really carry the pathos those themes engender when it occasionally tries to confront them head-on, so instead we mostly get a full-on assault between the demographics of those themes, played with a smirking proclivity for grotesque spectacle: the old brutalizing the young in the same way that age brutalized them. Ti West still has an uncanny knack when it comes to focusing on meat-and-potatoes horror anyway, and this movie is tight as a drum in that regard. It's very fun to me that although West's The House of the Devil is a foundational text in what would become Elevated Horror, he absolutely refuses to play by the expectations of that, despite the A24 logo at the beginning. Pretty much everything here seems to be a product of West looking at the audience and saying, in the best exploitation tradition, "You want this, don't you, you sickos?" A toast to the perverts indeed. Grade: B
Honestly, terrible. Brings me no joy to say that, as I've thought all the other Gregg Araki movies I've seen so far are good-to-great. But this one is just a disaster. It's half-baked as a horny-college-students-hooking-up film, and someone forgot to turn on the oven at all with the conspiracy/apocalypse plot. At least Araki's signature bubblegum-shoegaze vibes are here. But everything else about this is dead on arrival. Grade: C-
Half of the fun of this movie is marveling that it exists: an epic historical romance released in 1981 about (and sympathetic to!) a bunch of anarchists and socialists involved with the IWW and the Russian Revolution, directed/produced/co-written by Warren Beatty, scored by Stephen Sondheim, shot by Vittorio Storaro, with script doctoring by Elaine May, and starring Beatty himself, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson (as Eugene O'Neill!). Absolute madness. Like a lot of these types of epics (most notably Doctor Zhivago, of which this movie feels like a leftist revision), Reds has a hard time credibly interweaving the historic with the personal, with some of its biggest flourishes that attempt to do so feeling fundamentally misguided (e.g. the montage that intercuts the October Revolution with Keaton and Beatty's characters falling in love), and moreover, as a historical treatise, it largely struggles to ground it within the lives of the workers/ordinary people that these characters purport to fight for. And also like a lot of movies of this kind, that runtime is pretty dang long, though I didn't feel this movie's 195 minutes nearly so as much as I felt the 176 minutes of The Batman, so take that, modern Hollywood mainstream. But also, this movie feels a little smarter than your usual historical epic in the way that it makes itself less about the history itself and more about the writing of history and the tensions between individual subjectivities as power structures begin to coalesce around different understandings of the same events—a large chunk of this movie is devoted to factions of revolutionaries struggling among themselves over conflicting interpretations of World War I, the Russian Civil War, the early Labor Movement, etc. And then the whole movie is sprinkled with cutaways to footage of actual interviews with people who lived through the events depicted in the film and personally knew the "characters" in real life, and not even these people can agree about the specifics. It's maybe more cerebral than stirring, which is probably a big-time flaw for a romantic epic, but wow, is it impressive. Grade: B+
Barely an hour long, and it's one of the greatest film noirs I've seen. I had no idea this was going to be so relentlessly bleak, even for a noir: an incredible use of boxing as a way of showing the human cost of labor exploitation. You feel it in every punch. The whole system is a set-up—it sounds corny when I say it here, but the magic of cinema is that when it's 72 minutes of hard-boiled efficiency, it feels profound. Grade: A
Television
Less the comprehensive birds-eye view of Kanye's career that I was expecting and more of an intensely personal and subjective work, which in terms of documentary artistry is probably better in the long run, even if it consciously ducks the big ideas and sweeping social commentary that the career of Kanye West makes so tempting. The first two parts of this series, which focus on Kanye's early career up through the release and widespread acclaim of The College Dropout, are honestly stunning, the most intimate and humanizing footage of Kanye that we're likely to ever get: the series is coming from the fixed perspective of Kanye's role in a larger community of Chicago artist friends, and seeing the warmth and closeness of this community, especially with the tragic tint that our knowledge of the rest of his career gives these sections, is so sweet and had me a little teary-eyed at parts. Seeing him interacting with his mother in particular is just heartbreaking because it's so pure and beautiful. The final part, which jumps over a decade forward, is by-design a lot less intimate, as it involves this community, and particularly Coodie Simmons, who remains the POV grounding this, coming to grips with who Kanye has become and how distant they now feel from their friend who very obviously is spiraling out of control. This is probably a necessary piece to any documentary about Kanye, but it's also the weakest section of the film because of that lost intimacy, since, like all of us, the documentary is forced to experience Kanye through the rush of news scandals and social media tirades that we all see and all know. It's all very sad, as is everything involving Kanye since this documentary's production wrapped, and had the documentary continued filming through this year, it certainly wouldn't have gotten a lot happier. The film ends on a note of ambivalence, with Coodie hoping that Christianity and the end of Kanye's presidential campaign will bring his old friend stability, even while the words of Donda West about the tragedy of the giant haunt that hope. I sure wish I had even the measured hope that Coodie has. Grade: B+
