Mini Reviews for July 18 - 31, 2022

Announcement! My wife and I started a podcast! The basic idea is that we're reading through each book that's won a Newbery Medal and then discussing each one. I know I don't review a ton of books on this blog, especially children's books, but if that sounds at all interesting to you, here's the link!

Movies

Nope (2022)
I've seen people complain that this movie has a messy structure and an overcooked screenplay, and while I guess I theoretically understand why they'd say that (it definitely feels like we're seeing either too much or too little of Steven Yeun's character, and this movie is biting off a lot thematically with all of its "society of the spectacle" + limits of anthropomorphism stuff), I was captivated the whole time here. I'm an easy target for UFO thrillers, but even so, the specific ways in which Jordan Peele approaches that topic makes it feel like he was interested in all the same weirdo Americana stuff that I was growing up, and combine that with his Shyamalan-esque "just go for it, dude" conceptual unself-consciousness and his formidable formal command, and you've got a movie that's pretty specifically calibrated to my precise wavelength. I just thought this was a crackjack time at the movies. Also, re: the dense web of metaphors and thematic threads that a lot of people have found overdetermined and overbearing—I guess I have incurable English-teacher brain, but I thought that was fun! Grade: A-

The Bad Guys (2022)
Of all the major studios, DreamWorks is still doing the most interesting things with CG animation. It's a fairly paint-by-numbers heist film with a villain "reveal" that's even got to be obvious to the kids who make up the film's target audience, but at this point, I ain't watching DreamWorks animated movies for the plot: this has an intensely cool style that basically mixes 3D animation with some intentionally flat texturing and broad color work that make it look like computer-assisted cel animation of the kind you might have seen in the late '90s, or maybe even a digitally-inked comic book set in motion. Slick, but in a way that leaves room for play and invention. With any luck, one of these days, DreamWorks is going to get their hands on a front-to-back legitimately great screenplay and make the greatest mainstream animated feature of the decade. Until then, at least they're pushing the medium forward aesthetically. Grade: B

Because of Winn-Dixie (2005)
Softballs everything you would expect a mid-2000s family film set in the small-town South to (e.g. entirely benign Baptists, zero racial tensions), but its sense of place is really terrific—the movie nails the feel of that specific small-town window of the post-industrial, post-NAFTA but pre-"everything is just a fast food franchise or gas station" milieu: crumbling, half-vacant main street full of old-timers desperately clinging onto what remains of the idiosyncratic life their town once had. Some real grit at the margins of each shot. It's also surprisingly melancholy for a movie about a dog curing everyone's malaise. Credit to two strong central performances from Jeff Daniels and AnnaSophia Robb; the movie's deep undercurrent of sadness is simple but never calculated in their hands, which almost never happens with "single-dad reconnects with daughter" movies like this. Similar to its rendering of the setting, the movie's characterization of their relationship (and their shared but at times incompatible grief over the wife/mother who left them) is not particularly difficult, but it's so purely and effectively felt that it doesn't matter if the brush is broad. It's easy to say this a lot because major studios really only make like two or three types of movies nowadays, but they really don't make movies like this anymore, which is normally not something I would mourn (who misses the sappy family film?) but this movie's a great example of what we've lost by removing the possibility of the once-in-a-blue-moon successful product of this little genre. Grade: B

Cartoon Noir (1999)
More of an anthology of previously released animated shorts than it is a fully original movie on its own, and Only one of the shorts in the anthology has anything even resembling film noir ("Tale About the Cat and the Moon"). So anyway, here's a ranking of the shorts, sorted by favorite to least-favorite. "Abductees" is far and away the best here, a real masterpiece and also one of the best pieces of UFO media I've ever seen, but all the films are great. Feature-length adult animation has always had a spotty track record, so shorts are where it's at. There should be more compilations like this: NOW That's What I Call Music!, only for experimental adult animation.
    1. "Abductees" (1995, dir. Paul Vester)
    2. "A Gentle Spirit" ("Lagodna") (1987, dir. Piotr Dumała)
    3. "Joy Street" (1995, dir. Suzan Pitt)
    4. "Ape" (1992, dir. Julie Zammarchi)
    5. "Tale About the Cat and the Moon" ("Estória do Gato e da Lua") (1997, dir. Pedro Serrazina)
    6. "Club of the Laid Off" ("Klub odložených") (1989, dir. Jiří Barta)
Grade: B+

The Hole (洞) (1998)
For as much as this depicts misery and squalor (a crumbling city, endless rain, isolation in a pandemic [yike]), I found this to be deeply beautiful and human and even sweet. I have no idea how this would have played for me before having gone through several years of a pandemic characterizes by intermittent houseboundness and relative isolation (I at least have family at home), but the alienation these two characters feel from the broader world as well as the desperation with which they eventually cling to each other—right up to that transcendent ending in which the distance between the two is recklessly, compassionately pulled away—had me tearing up. I also watched it with my three-year-old, and that kind of drove home how lucky anyone is to have another person in their life who cares about that. I have no idea what he thought about it, he did watch quietly all the way through to the end (it was better than the alternative, I guess, i.e. taking a nap). His lone comment: "That's a lot of rain." Grade: A

Fatal Attraction (1987)
Flagrantly misogynist, which kind of comes with the territory, and for as much fun as Glenn Close has, it sometimes feels like she's hemmed in a bit. Some parts are weirdly slow, too, as if the movie can't make up its mind how artful it wants to be. Still, there's some good, nasty fun to be had once this gets cooking (er... literally in the case of that poor bunny). I think my problem is that I want to find an erotic thriller that is as good as Gone Girl, and maybe there just isn't one. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Good fun for the most part, and not nearly as smutty as I'd been led to believe. The opening and closing are great, but it does get somewhat draggy in the middle. Except for the beautiful women, it kinda feels like John Waters took everything I love about this movie—the dialogue, the arch line deliveries, the post-morality ethos, the sheer camp of it all—and nuclear-charged them, making much more front-to-back engaging (not to mention truly smutty) movies in the process, but you've got to respect an original, and compared to Waters's films, this movie is shockingly competent in the technical department. It's also glaringly obvious how much Quentin Tarantino loves this movie, too, though he kinda takes the opposite tact of Waters, making slicker and less weird versions of this movie. Grade: B

 

I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) (1964)
As is to be expected with Mikhail Kalatozov directing, this movie is visually stunning, with a camera that's practically taken flight, swooping and panning madly in a seeming attempt to take in every possible bit of scenery and human life in each scene. It's incredible. It's also great at being an anthology film, with only the last segment falling flat (the one with the guy who initially declines to join the revolution, which only really fails because of its leaden didacticism, since the film style is still as vibrant as ever). It's also nice that this movie is actually hopeful; the other two Kalatozov features I've seen, The Cranes Are Flying and Letter Never Sent, are both major bummers, which parallels the anachronistic creep of pessimism that hangs over every Soviet film because I know that that state will eventually fail. Cuba, on the other hand, for all its problems, remains a relative beacon for leftists worldwide as a socialist project that hasn't collapsed on itself or been undone by counterrevolutions (though not for lack of trying, of course), so it feels poetic to me that a film full of such national optimism in the radical then-present remains uplifting to a certain extent to this day. This is probably not exactly the right word for a movie that is pointedly agitprop, but it's almost sweet how much this loves the concept of a revolutionary Cuba. Grade: A-

Accattone (1961)
This mostly just seemed bleak. I was intrigued by the dream(?) sequence at the end, but overall, I'm not 100% sure what I'm supposed to get out of this, which is weird because the subsequent Pier Paolo Pasolini movies have, whatever their faults, crystal-clear intentions. Part of this must, as always, be chalked up to the fact that I simply don't know as much about mid-century Italian history as I need to to get the most out of the Neo-Realist films I've watched. But also, probably the biggest reason I don't know what to do with this movie is that the version I watched had absolutely terrible white subtitles that were illegible 30-40% of the time (they were hard-coded into the film, too). I really owe it to this movie to rewatch on a better transfer. Grade: C

 

Television

Russian Doll, Season 2 (2022)
Russian Doll, a kind of perfect little one-off jewel, didn't really need a second season, something I'm still confident of even after having watched this crazy-ambitious, wonderfully weird second season. But since we got one, at least it's good. After the first season, there really wasn't a ton left to do with the "Groundhog Day, but with NYC-based mystical stuff," so it makes sense that we'd get a different time problem here: this time, Natasha Lyonn's Nadia discovers that a train that takes her back to 1982, where she inhabits the body of her mother. At least, that's initially what the concept is. What it eventually becomes is an epic that spans generations and continents, leaning even more into the mystical stuff from the first season in order to spin a yarn about fate and the fundamental traumas at the root of family mythologies. It's considerably messier than Season One, and it's clear that the show doesn't have a clue what to do with Charlie Barnett's character here, who gets some tantalizing but underexplored threads that don't end up earning where his story eventually goes. But even so, the show can still be very funny and unexpectedly moving, and Lyonn's performance, which masterfully dances around but never lands on shtick, is still riveting. Honestly, I'm cool just hanging with Nadia while weird stuff happens. It seems that as long as this show lasts (Lyonn has indicated in some interviews that there will be a third season), we're at least always going to get that. Grade: B+

 

Books

Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski (1945)
At times really well-observed literary realism, at other times tediously moralized. I read this for the podcast, so keep an eye out for the episode if you're interested in more fleshed-out thoughts. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for February 11-17, 2019

Week two of parenthood blogging. Dude's still a sleepy fella (aka a media-consuming-enabling fella).

Movies

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)
I'm retroactively calling this the best documentary of 2018. The film creates a sense of place not, as others might have done, by outlining the social structures of a community or having residents explain their existence; instead, Hale County captures the subjective experience of being there, the sensory textures of living in one place for long enough that streets become abstractions and sunsets become like the front of a statue, worn greasily smooth by the eons of hands being laid upon it, and somehow, magically, it also evokes the entire sweep not just of this community but of the entire history of the rural American South, and specifically of the intersection of blackness within it—not with methodical thoroughness, but through beautifully incomplete gestures. Magnificent. If I ever made a documentary, this is what I would want it to be like. Grade: A

mid90s (2018)
Well, it certainly feels like the mid-'90s, both from a verisimilitude standpoint (it has the clothes down) and a filmmaking standpoint (you could tell me this came out in 1996, and I probably wouldn't bat an eye except for that one crane [drone?] shot during the "Gyöngyhajú lány" sequence). It's not really a nostalgia exercise, as some have said; I'd say Jonah Hill has about the same attitude toward this milieu as Linklater has toward the '70s in Dazed and Confused—i.e. "painful memories." But also, it's conspicuous that we only ever hear these boys listening to Nirvana and A Tribe Called Quest and other retrospectively cool music and not the veritable avalanche of terrible '90s music that any adolescent at the time would have undoubtedly listened to as well, which calls into question some of Hill's comments about the film's authenticity toward the mid-'90s adolescent experience (and the use of some highly charged... uh, "historically accurate" language). But after all, this all becomes kind of academic once you realize that, regardless of whatever critiques you might have of the movie's sensitivity or realism, it's really just a pileup of extremely dusty coming-of-age cliches not really worth a ton of thought one way or the other. And not just dusty cliches—really ham-fistedly executed ones at that. There's a whole sequence of scenes toward the beginning of the film's second half that has about all the delicacy of that whole "THIS IS A DARK PERIOD!!" part from Dewey Cox. Grade: C

Oslo, August 31st (2011)
A crushingly sad account of a day in the life of a recovering addict. It lacks the formal derring-do of director Joachim's subsequent feature, Louder Than Bombs, but it shares with that later film a similar preoccupation with the sheer, unshakable weight of existence and how the only way to escape this is to buy into the temptation of living in a sort of perpetual present that accepts new days as legitimately new experiences rather than the accumulation of everything that has come before—difficult for some in ordinary circumstances, steeply difficult for someone attempting sobriety. The way the film contextualizes its protagonist's struggle within the sweep of history—first, in the film's opening montage, within the history of Oslo as a city and second, in a later sequence, within the personal history of the protagonist's parents—makes it clear that such self-deception is ultimately off the table for the protagonist. As a result, the movie is a dreadful (yet beautifully empathetic) wait for the other shoe to drop. Grade: B+

Far From Heaven (2002)
A much better version of the story that the film version of Revolutionary Road is trying to tell—better, mostly, because it grounds its story in the actual historically oppressed people victimized by the white hegemony of the mid-20th century (read: gay people, people of color, etc.) rather than the bland lifestyle critique of the suburbs that Revolutionary Road offers. It's also just jaw-droppingly gorgeous at every turn. Todd Haynes's strengths in stylistic pastiche yield great results throughout his career, but they've never produced images of such raw beauty as his rich, autumnally colorful Douglas Sirk evocation here. Grade: B+

Audition (オーディション) (1999)
A lot has been said over the years about the way that Audition takes what a lot of movies would construe as a romantic premise and twists it into abject horror (after, of course, playing it straightly romantic for an hour—the perverse delights of this movie never end). And that's great; a deconstruction of cinematic chauvinism that's perhaps a tad obvious in retrospect but nonetheless fierce and unblinking to an unparalleled degree. I don't see many people talking about the utterly strange games this movie is playing with PoV, though, which is a shame, because they are deeply strange. Aoyama knows things in this movie that logically he should have no knowledge of, which gives the feeling that the very reality of the movie itself is collapsing alongside the horrific imagery that animates the finale. Very unsettling, very good. Grade: A

Sliding Doors (1998)
There are a lot of really bad things about this movie, but to single out the one that made me the most frustrated throughout: it has some of the worst editing I've ever seen in a mainstream release. But really, the whole package is just dreadful. I want to say that it's ripe for a remake, being that it's an intriguing premise (Run Lola Run/Blind Chance, but a rom-com) executed horribly, but you know, I don't know if anyone's going to do any better than that one episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that parodies this. Grade: D+

The Blood of Jesus (1941)
I'm surprised how much I was taken by this film, given how I responded to Hellbound Train, the last openly proselytizing film I saw. But even though both movies have ostensibly the same purpose (and have the same rather hilarious view of jazz music), only one—this one—has any sort of artistic power. The Blood of Jesus captures with striking beauty the folk religion and essential Americana of the very early goings of the Evangelical movement: the near-constant congregational hymnal singing, the fuzzy double-exposure shots of souls making their way to the pearly gates, the looming, almost ominous presence of a conspicuously white Jesus—this movie understands something fundamental about American Christianity on an aesthetic level that I've very rarely (if ever?) seen evoked in a film. And the way that everything is just slightly out-of-focus and garbled (an unintentional consequence of the film's age and upkeep?) gives the movie the same eerie, ethereal quality found in Pete Drake's cover of "Forever" or, as this review points out, Carnival of Souls. Pretty stunning stuff, especially for how ostensibly straightforward this film's ideas and plot are. Grade: B+

Hellbound Train (1930)
It feels a little mean to give a rating at all to an independently produced African-American film from 1930—much less one that's more interested in religious proselytizing than artistic merit (apparently Christian films have learned nothing in 90 years); but I've also never not rated a movie, which would make unrating this one feel a little condescending—which is why I'm sticking it exactly in the middle of the grading scale. Its mere existence is an achievement, both for having the wherewithal to be filmed in 1930 at all and also for having been essentially snatched from oblivion and reconstructed by film preservationists, and as a kind of backdoor document of early-20th-century black American life, it yields some pretty interesting moments, like footage of a black church service and a poor train yard. But other than those fleeting moments and a few chuckles at the quaint morality on display (it's an evangelical anthology film that outlines a bunch of the vices that its moral-crusading filmmakers were most up-in-arms about, vices which include jazz music and skipping church), this feature is mostly just of historical interest. Also, I hope we all realize that it's an automobile, not a train, that's going to take everyone to the Lake of Fire—it's called the Highway to Hell, after all. Perhaps that jazz section should have been switched out for the vice of America's car idolatry. Grade: C

Television

Russian Doll, Season 1 (2019)
Nadia is curiously death-prone, but luckily, death is not the end; it's just an excuse for the universe to boot her back to the same day and the same Harry Nilsson needle drop (you will hear "Gotta Get Up" a lot in Russian Doll). Every time she dies, she must relive her birthday and the days following it, depending on how long she makes it until death finds her again. It's basically a much more morbid Groundhog Day, and for as much as we've seen this concept reiterated in the twenty-plus years since that Bill Murray classic, there's still a lot of freshness to be found in the premise. For one, while there have been distinct episodes of shows devoted to a Groundhog Day scheme, I'm pretty sure Russian Doll is the first TV series entirely premised on the structure, which alone makes it something of an experiment. And that's even before you get into its utterly beguiling thematic ambitions, which stretch the show from questions of metaphysics and spirituality to a deconstruction of family and trauma to a meditation on the ghosts left by the casualties of the gentrification of NYC's Lower East Side. It's also very funny and very moving, anchored by a transfixing performance from Natasha Lyonne (who also co-created the series and occasionally writes and directs it, too). The best TV series I've seen so far in 2019, and it'll be a steep challenge to best it by the year's end. Grade: A

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 4 (2018-19)
Kimmy's farewell season is handily its weakest. Like Season 3, this season struggles to find a consistent throughline for its characters in its multitude of plots, and unlike any other season of the show, there isn't a single recurring plot that really works at all. The #MeToo-centric stuff with Titus is an inconsistent and uneasy fit with the show's absurd universe (and has at least one too many Muppet penises), while the fact that everything to do with Kimmy's bunker past was mostly wrapped up by previous seasons means that Kimmy is adrift as a character who has mostly fully actualized, and the show doesn't always know what to do with that. The fact that the season was bizarrely broken into two parts and released months apart from one another doesn't really help the feeling that the season is disjointed and slight, as that break absolutely kills any forward momentum the early episodes have. As always, the moment-to-moment dialogue is still hilarious, and at least two episodes (the mockumentary "Party Monster: Scratching the Surface" and the Sliding Doors parody "Sliding Van Doors"—interestingly, both episodes that involve Kimmy and Titus sitting down to watch Netflix) are fantastic. But I guess now, at the end, is as good a time as any to come to grips with the fact that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has never really been a capital-G Great series, and each subsequent season has had a little less gas in the tank. So it's only fitting that the final season sputters to a stop with the gauge on empty. Grade: B-

Books

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Volume One by Emil Ferris (2017)
This is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read, which isn't exactly saying much, considering the number of graphic novels I've read. But don't let that dilute my praise for this book (the first of two volumes). Ferris's story is a two-pronged coming-of-age narrative, nesting a searing memory of Weimar Germany within the more immediate diary of the ten-year-old Karen, a girl growing up in 1960s Chicago and who identifies more with creepshow monsters than human beings. The Germany flashbacks are the showiest and heaviest parts of the book, but the "present" of Karen's Chicago is hardly slight, and both sides of the story serve as sharp and utterly human renderings of pain and warmth and the audacious optimism that children always seem to find—made all the more endearing by the book's intentionally sketch-like graphic style, interspersed with thematically relevant recreations of classic horror magazine covers. It's all so beautiful and full of life, and I cannot wait to get my hands on Volume Two when it comes out later this year. Grade: A

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz (1981)
I remember hearing a bunch of these spooky stories when I was growing up, which creates a sort of chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. This is an unexpectedly academic collection of folk anthropology (seriously, how many children's books have a lengthy bibliography that cites not just preexisting anthologies but actual academic journals?) is clearly drawing from a rich tradition of American oral tradition, but also, did I encounter these stories as organic folklore, or did the popularity of this collection canonize these specific stories and spread them via commercial means into my young ears? Anyway, it's cool to see stories whose origins are clearly on the American colonizing frontier rubbing shoulders with more modern urban legends like "The call is coming from inside the house!", blurring the line between contemporary media and folklore. And beyond the mere text of these stories, it's clear that at least half of this collection's spookiness comes from Stephen Gammell's nightmarish illustrations, which are impressively macabre for a book with this young a readership demographic. There's a lot to like here. But maybe I'm just too old for it, or I'm just already too familiar with these stories from the schoolyard grapevine; either way, there's nothing (except maybe those illustrations) that blew me away. In fact, the collection is maybe too academic for its own good, putting guardrails on where these stories can go. It doesn't help that Schwartz's prose style is so... well, so boring. There's a line between deceptively simple and just plain dull, and Schwartz flirts with the wrong side of that line far too often. Grade: B