Ready for spring.
Movies
A front-to-back great time. Zoë Kravitz is terrific as the agoraphobic protagonist, and the Rear Window/The Conversation/Blow Out influences feel razor-sharply updated into our pandemic world. I imagine it could have been kind of cringe how it employs these very zeitgeist-y talking points (COVID lockdowns, surveillance capitalism, urban protests, etc.), but in practice, the way the movie has these elements inform the conventions of the paranoid thriller feels very smart and never distracting: a natural result of making a movie in 2021/2022 rather than a self-congratulatory conceptual flourish of having made a movie about 2021/2022. Great stuff. Grade: A-
Exceptionally patient (3 hours long???) and capital-L Literary (a Murakami adaptation), but ultimately in ways that I ended up really connecting to. The symmetries of the plots and characters scratched the English major part of my brain for the first half of the movie and moved me to tears in the second half, ultimately creating one of the better depictions in recent memory of people grappling with the frayed ends of memories left when someone close to you dies prematurely, and the fear of the profound self-reflection that the engagement with those frayed ends necessitates. It had me thinking a lot about my brother, who died very suddenly of an opiate overdose two and a half years ago, and like the characters in this film, the ambiguities and unresolved nooks of our relationship are haunting, not just for the ways that they represent the loss of my brother but for what they represent about myself. What did he think about what I said in that one conversation ten years ago? What should I have done in that one instance five years ago? With him gone, all that's left is my own interiority in relation to those questions, which can be a cavernously mysterious place. Not sure this needed to be as quite long as it is, but the generous space this movie gives itself with its story is definitely productive, and I wouldn't have connected at all with whatever cool 90-minute version of this might otherwise exists—reminds me a lot of Margaret in that regard. Anyway, cool that a movie this oblique and textured and pointedly international got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar—in a weird way, it fits right alongside my other two favs for the BP (Power of the Dog and Licorice Pizza) in its meandering unpredictability. Grade: A-
What begins as a farce about a teacher whose private sex tape gets uploaded to the internet eventually transforms into a pretty didactic but nonetheless effective treatise of how the moral panics that frequently grip the public perception of education are really proxy wars for broader tensions over the reinforcement/defense of imperialist, racist, capitalist norms. As an educator, it is existentially terrifying to watch this, but then again, watching 60% of school board meetings now is existentially terrifying as an educator, too. At the very least, it's nice to know that this isn't a uniquely American problem, though I can only imagine the looks of befuddlement I would get from some members of the Knox County Board of Education if I started quoting Hannah Arendt to them. Grade: B+
Kind of does the When Harry Met Sally gambit of introducing the male half of the romantic duo by having him spew some blindingly misogynist garbage at the beginning of a road trip (e.g. all women are the same because they all get their periods, ya see) and then daring us to like him on the grounds of his becoming friends with the female half of the romantic duo, despite the fact that he never really changes in this regard. It doesn't work for me nearly as much as it does in When Harry Met Sally because the relationship between Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson never really comes alive like it does for Harry and Sally; this movie is way too picaresque and easily distracted by interesting environmental/cultural textures like a black family reunion or an African heritage festival or a terrifically lived-in South Central LA beauty parlor for the romance ever to get enough center stage to fill its characters with the sufficient amount of nuance to land the ending. And I guess I don't blame John Singleton for getting distracted, because his facility with those textural details is excellent—I would have actually probably preferred a Before Sunrise-esque walk-and-talk through these cultural landscapes than the more conventional romance we have here. It's easy to see what the movie wants to happen for this pair: Tupac and Janet's shared trauma from gun violence helps them find a deep connection for each other in the end, which helps their love transcend Janet's grief and Tupac's misogynist anger at being functionally a single father; but there just aren't enough dots to connect satisfactorily. That said, whenever this movie spaces itself out and allows itself to meander, it gets really good, and for as much as I feel like the central romance is thin on paper, Pac and Janet having a fair amount of onscreen chemistry on the virtues of them just both being very attractive human beings. Tupac is also a great actor, and even in the scenes that don't completely work in concert with the rest of the film (his discovery of his cousin's murder), he sells his character's emotional journey 100%, which helps a lot to transcend the shortcomings of the writing.
I was part of a conversation about this movie on the Cinematary podcast. Here's the link, if you're interested!
Music
Another Spoon album, another good Spoon album. The band has been making a lot in the press about the way that this album was meant to be more live and spontaneous than their last couple of releases, and Lucifer on the Sofa does share a scruffiness with their notoriously rough-around-the-edges 2010 release, Transference. But also, that press does seem to be underplaying the ways in which this has echoes of the sonic experimentation of 2017's Hot Thoughts, most notably in the title track's use of pensive saxophone but also elsewhere in subtle flourishes. There's something so satisfying about a band who is so reliable in their sound and songcraft but also willing to accumulate subtle new flavors along the way. Grade: B+
