Mini Reviews for December 20, 2021 - January 2, 2022

Finally got around to a reviews post. Sorry for the delay! Anyway, in case you missed it, here's the link to my favorite music of 2021 post.

Movies

Red Rocket (2021)
Simon Rex is extremely good at playing someone who is simultaneously charming and bitterly loathsome—like, lots of characters in lots of movies try to walk this tightrope, but Rex's Mikey Saber is one of the most I've ever believed a character could charm his through his insidious behavior. It's a great tension in the film, and the movie is overall a pretty captivating exercise in waiting to see if the other shoe will ever drop, with regards to Saber's dancing around the collateral damage he blithely causes. It's raucous and funny and also kind of horrifying, with Baker's typical affinity with nonprofessional actors particularly shining here in their roles as both caustic counterbalances to Saber as well as some of the best (only?) depictions of coastal Texans I've seen. In fact, the whole movie is a vibrant and ultimately kind of beautiful rendering of one of the ugliest landscapes in the United States (one I have the pleasure[citation needed] of being fairly familiar with)—that brackish swampland punctuated by industrial towers becomes an essential, often otherworldly backdrop to Saber's arc, the reckless exploitation at which industrial petroleum and gas have colonized the wetlands a macrocosm of Saber's story here. I would probably rate this a lot higher except for two things. First, the 2016 election stuff going on in the background is kind of insufferable; "What Mikey Saber Can Tell Us About Donald Trump" is like a bad Slate headline, but this movie insists on making it its explicit thesis, which I could never stop rolling my eyes at. And second, I don't think I've been more uncomfortable in a movie this year than in this movie's sex scenes between Saber and Strawberry, the 17-year-old he's trying to traffic into the porn industry. I know it's The Point that he's a creep using porn's fixation on "barely legal" girls to manipulate her at the same time that he's too self-impressed to understand that she's a fairly self-actualized person staying a step or two ahead of him, but I had a really hard time accepting the sex and nudity in the context of that point. I'm sure this is going to vary from person to person, but for me it just seems really gross to make that point while at the same time depicting nudity and sexual acts that would be considered statutory rape in most of the U.S. (they aren't in Texas, but only barely not). I know that Suzanna Son, who plays Strawberry, is actually in her mid-twenties (and she's really good in this film!), but I just can't get past that we're seeing nudity that the film wants us to believe is of someone who is only 17. I dunno. I'm probably being puritanical here. But it really took me out of the movie, tbh. Grade: B

The Lost Daughter (2021)
Parenting can be incredibly hard; the way kids just completely cage in any sense of independence or control is both profound and often claustrophobic, and in the thick of the difficulty, I think most people end up thinking and wishing (or even doing) some things they may feel guilt about later on. I mean, I've been at home with my two kids full-time for the duration of the school winter break, and I've had some very bleak moments just staring down the barrel of hours and hours of tantrums and tedium and open-ended play, even while in my heart knowing I love these two little creatures deeply. I know most parents go through these same arcs, but I've been struck by how very, very unnerving it is to feel like these children are capable of completely unraveling your curated life or even your mental stability, because in the moment, it feels incontrovertibly like they can, and there's a real guilt in feeling that, too. It's so rare to see any media about parenting deal honestly with this kind of thing, which is a big part of what makes The Lost Daughter such a treat. The other part is the cast, which is uniformly excellent, especially in communicating the unspoken through ambiguous glances or body language. The movie's cross-cutting between present-day and flashbacks feels clumsy at times, and the shades of evoking Clair Denis or Lucrecia Martel (the two filmmakers I thought of constantly watching this) sometimes tempt unfavorable comparisons with obviously better movies. But on the whole, this is a tough subject done very well. Olivia Colman probably deserves another award, and Maggie Gyllenhaal deserves to write/direct a lot more movies. Grade: B+

Passing (2021)
The black and white cinematography would feel a lot more on the nose for a movie about characters navigating the spaces between racial signifiers if it weren't so visually effective. Rebecca Hall has filled her film with some of the most striking compositions of the year, off-kilter and asymmetrical shots that show characters trapped in uneasy spaces that reflect their psychologies. The same goes for Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, who play the film's main duo; their performances are stilted and odd, a complement to the stilted performances that racialized America has them play. The story itself feels not-quite-there—it's apparently based on a 1929 novel, which is fascinating in concept, but in execution, it has the kind of elliptical, stuffy feel that sometimes plagues overly reverent literary adaptations. I should probably read the novel; by virtue of its 1920s setting and interest in who is deemed to "belong" in white society, this recalls The Great Gatsby quite a bit, and while the film mostly suffers from that comparison to one of the great American novels, I wonder if the novel Passing, published just a few years after Fitzgerald's, has a more interesting relationship with Gatsby; for a novel whose chief project involves white gatekeeping and racial oppression, Gatsby is remarkably weak in depicting its few explicitly nonwhite characters, and perhaps a biracial author such as Passing's Nella Larsen is just what this story needs. As exciting as it is to see Rebecca Hall pivot from being a great actress to a good director, I don't know if she's quite the person to crack this narrative. Grade: B

All Light, Everywhere (2021)
A really interesting documentary essay on surveillance, including some incredible interview footage with the spokesperson of a manufacturer of police bodycams. I probably couldn't say it better than my buddy Andrew does in his review of the movie, though, so check that out if you're at all interested in the subject. Grade: B+

 

 

 

maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2021)
A lovely, thoughtful, and often strikingly beautiful experimental documentary about Chinookan identity and the push-and-pull between the radical and assimilationist choices a colonized person must make, all in the backdrop of a natural world that stands in ancient defiance of that colonization. As with a lot of avant-garde filmmakers, I think I prefer Sky Hopinka's short films to this feature, but this is still one of the best 2021 movies I've seen. The soundscape this movie creates is unbeatable. Grade: B+

The Nowhere Inn (2020)
Some terrific St. Vincent concert footage spliced into a faux-documentary that feels like a remix of Persona and Mullholland Drive, to the point where it almost feels like a tribute to those films. Since at least Strange Mercy, Annie Clark's music has been premised on taking a somewhat pastiche-ish reverence for visionary predecessors and slicing it through structural games and pedal effects to turn it into something that feels fresh and compelling, so I guess it makes sense that she'd be drawn to something like that in her movie stardom, too. Given that I never really connected to her Daddy's Home album this year, it's started to feel to me like this approach doesn't have as much gas in the tank as it used to, as her spins on familiar material read as increasingly strained to me. The Nowhere Inn has something of the same problem; I'm just not really sure what this movie has to offer that other, earlier films haven't explored at length. It's not "bad"; Clark remains a fascinating screen presence, and there are some great moments, such as when Carrie Brownstein confides in Annie that she feels like she's in the stage of her career where people are sick of her so everything she does is deemed a misstep. But the film just doesn't ever cross the line from having interesting moments to being interesting as a whole. The concert footage is fantastic, though. This movie clearly isn't interested at all in being a concert film, but I would love a St. Vincent concert film. Grade: B-

The Messiah (بشارت منجی) (2007)
A Jesus movie from the Islamic world (Iran, in this case), which is conceptually interesting enough if only for the fact that this world has been used as a usually voiceless filming location for plenty of Christian Jesus movies; on top of this, there's the ending, which gives you the traditional Christian conclusion (minus the resurrection, interestingly) before cutting to the Muslim version of the crucifixion, thus playing up the tension between this movie and Christian Jesus depictions. Unfortunately, there's not a lot else going for this film. It looks pretty cheap in terms of filmmaking and acting, and the story itself is suffocatingly pious, treating Jesus as an otherworldly figure with zero human psychology (despite the Qu'ran's position that Jesus is not divine). More than a lot of Jesus movies I've seen, most of the narrative's tension here comes from the politics of first-century Judea under Roman occupation, which might make this movie more appealing to me if it weren't couched in such grotesque antisemitism. It's not as if you can't interpret an undercurrent of antisemitism in some of the New Testament gospels, but this movie seems several degrees worse than that. Apparently the director of this movie was inspired by The Passion of the Christ in the making of this movie, which is maybe all the explanation we need. Grade: C-

eXistenZ (1999)
Like pretty much every reviewer ever, I think it's funny that this came out the same year as The Matrix. Whereas The Matrix is, in a way, about the interplay between projected transcendence of the material plane and the squishy materiality itself, Cronenberg never even entertains the idea that you can get away from the gross, gooey meat sacks we're encased in—even in the VR game, the characters still have those nasty little butthole VR sockets in their backs, and even in the game, the characters have to use lube to plug things into those holes. It's just fleshy orifices all the way down, and whether or not you're "in the game," you're going to have to contend with biology. Meat guns, teeth bullets—the idea that technology exists as a separate category from "natural" flesh is a fallacy. Grade: B+

Splendor (1999)
It gets a little too broadly goofy in its wedding-ceremony climax, and the talking-to-the-camera voiceover was aggressively annoying to me. But it's otherwise a sweet, fun lil rom-com. There's also something really special about how Araki takes the flat sheen of the typical late-'90s/early-2000s rom-com aesthetic and makes it something beautiful and textured without losing the specificity of that era/genre. The soundtrack is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that regard; so many good, out-of-left-field cuts here, e.g. that Spiritualized remix. Some mad-scientist soundtracking, for sure. Grade: B

 

Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
Katharine Hepburn in drag is fun, and it seems for a while that the movie is going to be focused on that. But the movie ends up changing gears into a more traditional kind of rom-com, and it never really recovers what was interesting about its premise to begin with. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for November 12-18, 2018

I guess it's awards season now? It doesn't feel like it. Anywhere, here are reviews.

Movies

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
It's, like, fine. I kind of dig that it treats "quantum" with the same sort of hand-wavy magical gobbledygook that sci-fi treated "radioactive" in the '50s and '60s. "Quick, we need some sort of vaguely sciencey rationale for telepathy! Uh... what about quantum entanglement?" It's fun in a very classically B-movie way. The rest is very much the kind of movie you got from the original Ant-Man, with maybe just a tad fewer inspired moments à la the cut from gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine to toy-sized Thomas the Tank Engine. A lot of the humor of the film feels a little too schematic, which was also true of the first one, and the mommy-daughter dynamics don't scan quite as well as the daddy-daughter emotional core of the first. But, like I said, it's fine. Nothing great; certainly nothing to justify why Marvel, after two movies, hasn't just jettisoned all this "ant-man" stuff and given the reigns entirely to Michael Peña's character, who remains the best thing about either of the films. But fine. Grade: B-

The Guilty (Den skyldige) (2018)
On a technical level, it's impressive the tension this film is able to wring out of its writers-workshop-prompt premise: it's a movie that takes place entirely in an emergency call center and whose action almost completely occurs via phone calls of which we only ever see the call-center side. It's not particularly showy in how it does it (though there's a bit with a red light near the end that is both obvious and beautiful), but The Guilty nearly perfectly balances shot length with editing in a way that's never ostentatious but always brutally effective in its drive toward a thriller intensity. On a thematic level, it's a remorseless little deconstruction of the hero impulse, showing at every turn how our protagonist's desire to be a hero in the traditional, individualist sense leaves crucial collateral damage—though impressively, manages that clear-eyed characterization without ever completely tipping its hand as to where the plot will go next. The movie isn't a revelation or anything, but it's a deftly executed experiment with just enough thematic edge to make it stick; it helps that it's a lot of fun to boot. Grade: B+

Cosmos (2015)
I'm not afraid to admit that I didn't really understand this. Maybe if I'd read more of the French existentialists I'd have been more on its wavelength, but as of right now, filtering Sartre through a slapstick comic lens with a dash of postmodern epistemology just didn't connect to my brain. I enjoy the sense of play (and the uber-cheesy score is reminiscent of what Twin Peaks did with the reappropriation of soap-opera-esque leitmotifs, which is cool); I would have enjoyed it more if I'd understood anything at all that the characters said. Uh huh, the universe is absurd; it's just a tad more absurd with this movie in it. Grade: C-

Blue Caprice (2013)
It's imbuing the perpetrators of the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks with a complicated humanity feels fairly radical, in the same vein (though obviously on a much less genocidal scale) as 2004's Downfall—refusing to relegate those who commit mass murder into the blanket, otherized category of "monster" or "criminal" means that the film refuses to engage in the flippant hand-washing that excuses society's greater forces from responsibility and that treats human depravity as a fluke event without cause or effect. "Terrorism" is the great absolver of American imperialism and American violence, and the film's rejection of the typical cinematic signifiers of this label dovetails nicely with the film's implication of American gun culture and conspiracy-prone mainstream-adjacent spaces. All that said, the film isn't nearly as complex as it wants to be—it's a remarkably static movie, sometimes by design but more often by failed attempts for lingering imagery and lyrical moments to carry thematic weight that they simply can't bear. As much as I admire some of the theoretical ambitions, the ideas are realized somewhat thinly, which is disappointing. Grade: B-

The Company of Wolves (1984)
Neil Jordan does his typical thing by bringing storybook material to lurid, lushly gothic life—impressive, considering that this is only his second feature, that he already had his "typical thing" down this pat. As screenwriter, Angela Carter does an admirable job of translating her excellent short story to film; the phantasmagoric Freudian imagery of the story's transgressive take on Little Red Riding Hood becomes literally nightmarish here, which is in concept a little too cute (the frame device clarifying that this is a dream is entirely unnecessary), but in practice, it's often stunning—and bonus points for the two incredible (and incredibly gory) werewolf transformations here. As the film's vignettes pile up, the movie does start to become a little muddled, both on a plot level (which was never really intended to come together with much precise sense anyway) and a thematic one. But taken as a broad generalization, it's a nice companion to the original story's refutation of coddling, misogynist norms. Grade: B+

In a Lonely Place (1950)
As distasteful as it can be, history repeatedly rewards cynicism, which has made film noir one of the most enduring of the classic studio genres. Its deep distrust in social institutions effortlessly waltzes itself into modern progressive politics, and so here you have In a Lonely Place, a film not only grounded by a pair of titanic performances (Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham both vying for their career-best performances, though I'll cop to only having seen Grahame in It's a Wonderful Life prior to this) but also in a bracing interrogation of how the Hollywood system enables violent men, which... uh, yeah, still working on that one, aren't we, Hollywood? That similarly industry-critiquing peers like Sunset Boulevard have lingered more strongly in the popular imagination is less a testament to Wilder's film being the superior one (though it is, by a teensy bit), but more that this tier of cynicism—that a man empowered by Hollywood's system might still be deeply dangerous even if he's not guilty of literal murder (the great scapegoat of morality)—is still a less comfortable fit with our broader social archetypes than the spectacle of a formerly glorious woman used by the industry flaming out in middle age via the throes of mental illness. In a Lonely Place is maybe a little more straightforward and obvious than it ideally should be: it's a megaphone of a film, sometimes to the muting of its non-Bogart, non-Grahame characters. But I guess nearly 70 years later, a megaphone is still the tool for the job. Grade: A-

Music

St. Vincent - MassEducation (2018)
Last year's Masseduction was probably the most self-consciously "produced" album of St. Vincent's career, crafted by a whole team of sound engineers helmed by none other than pop heavyweight Jack Antonoff. With MassEducation, St. Vincent reworks the same songs into basically their polar opposites: quiet, acoustic, and mostly piano-based pieces. It's an interesting experiment in theory and one that pays off intermittently. The whole album was apparently recorded in an afternoon, which shows: none of this is particularly elaborate, and while that's the point, it sometimes leaves the songs more anemic and musically reductive than the clarifying simplicity that Annie Clark was likely going for. "Happy Birthday, Johnny," already one of the quieter Masseduction tracks, becomes practically a whisper here, and the lack of volume doesn't really do anything to enhance the song; "Pills" is even worse, highlighting just how much of that song was just intricate instrumentation propping up some truly facile lyrics. Other parts of MassEducation work tremendously, though. "Hang On Me" comes alive in its piano version here, a truly beautiful ballad lifted by one of Clark's best recorded vocal performances; "Sugarboy," the lone bit of intricate instrumentation on the reworked album, is a nervy, oppressive piece of chamber pop; and on the whole, the reworked songs do a good job accentuating the emotional core of Clark's lyrics (some of the best and most personal of her career, "Pills" excepted) that sometimes got washed out in Masseduction's loud production. It's a mixed bag, for sure, but curious fans (yours truly) will find gems. Grade: B-

Mini-Reviews for November 13 - 19, 2017

All of a sudden, the movie theaters have gone from having no movies I'm interested in to having like two billion. Must be the end of the year [insert rant about movie distribution practices].

Movies

The Florida Project (2017)

As far as finding humanist beauty in the intersection of modern kitsch and poverty exploitation goes, The Florida Project is doing nothing nearly as interesting or affecting as last year's American Honey. And as far as Sean Baker movies go, this is no Tangerine. It's rambling and loose in every way that Tangerine's chaos was tight and thrilling. But as with Tangerine, even this comparatively weaker material is absolutely elevated by the sheer strength of performance—not just Willem Dafoe (though he's excellent) but especially the six-year-old Brooklyn Kimberly Prince, who delivers (though copious improvisation and a very good eye in the editing room) one of the best onscreen child performances I've ever seen, capturing as movies rarely do the shambolic sense of play that animates children's interactions with the world. She's amazing, and the film has the good sense to place her directly at the film's center as she flits through a fantastically realized extended-stay motel—the setting is the film's second star, for sure, though of course fans of Tangerine shouldn't be surprised that Baker is able to capture the alternatingly warm and desperate character of an off-beat, real-world setting. It's a movie with enough successes that I'm relatively forgiving of its more egregious missteps: the slack middle third of the film, the somewhat obvious way with which the plot thuds toward its conclusion, and particularly the flabbergastingly bad and cheap-looking fantasy sequence that makes up the film's final seconds. But those performances, man... Grade: B+

Person to Person (2017)

Well, this is a throwback. The 16mm film, the jazz and soul soundtrack, the (parodic) emphasis on hard-boiled print journalism, even the costuming suggests something of a sanitized '60s/'70s NYC. The easy-going character quirk, the low-stakes ensemble plotting, that specifically mannered humor that comes from characters acting recognizably emotive but not exactly human says 2000s American indie. It's sort of a cross between Robert Altman and a less surreal version of Me and You and Everyone We Know, and it's absolutely the lightest-weight version of that combination I can imagine. But it's so warm and fun that I have a hard time imagining someone not feeling good about having seen the movie either. Grade: B

The Ornithologist (O Ornitólogo) (2016)

The movie is supposedly a metaphor for the life of Saint Anthony of Padua. Being Protestant, I of course know jack squat about saints, so a lot of the explicit parallels sailed right over my head (and continued to fly even after the movie, when I looked up the patron saint of lost things [see, I learn things!] on Wikipedia and still had troubling finding the parallels). Not that it really matters, since regardless of the specific connections to Anthony, this is still very obviously the story of a man becoming a saint, and what's most interesting about it is the way that sainthood seems thrust upon him without his consent—for example, early in the film, our protagonist is tied up and made into something of an unwilling icon for two young tourists, who use him to feel secure against possible pagan forces, which, to my Protestant, not-canon-oriented brain, has all sorts of interesting things to say about the practice of canonization and the way that the legacies of individuals are exploited by future generations of believers. I suppose this is a little sacrilegious, but it's subtly and smartly so, something that can't be said for some of the movie's more explicitly sacrilegious (and even blasphemous) ideas, e.g. a character named Jesus who never doesn't feel like a clumsy attempt at transgression whenever he's onscreen. It's all fascinating and beautifully shot, but not always in the most successful way. If that makes sense. Grade: B

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Look, there's no arguing that "Johnny Guitar" is a baller title for a movie. But you know it; I know it; the poster even knows it: this movie belongs to the magnificent Joan Crawford as Vienna, not the titular guitarist (who, despite some romantic subplots, is almost a secondary character). Crawford's is a powerful performance, deep with subtext and nuance, and thematically, her character is a striking icon to the ways that women must grasp and claw their way forward if they are to make any progress against the hoards of angry men who scream at any change to their society. The movie softballs the gender dynamic, I'd say, by having a woman lead this band of villains (as if our heroine couldn't have faced off against just men), but only a little—Emma, our chief villain, is a truly nasty creation who serves as a very watchable (and detestable) foil to Vienna, regardless of the way that she serves perhaps as too much of a feminine counterpoint to Vienna. Grade: A-

Television

You're the Worst, Season 4 (2017)

This season of You're the Worst does the impossible in that it makes Lindsay a believably redeemable character, a television miracle of sorts after the stabbings and, uh, cuckolding of last season. By largely jettisoning Paul (though he does make a couple of hilarious cameos), the show is able to ground Lindsay in an emotional reality that feels absolutely true to the character and unexpectedly makes her plot the more affecting of the season. The same goes for Vernon, weirdly, and the show manages to wring a surreal tragedy out of him. The same cannot, alas, be said for the remainder of the cast. They each have their moments, but Jimmy and Gretchen's will-they-won't-they is entirely dull, considering how unlikely it is that the show will end without these crazy kids together, and Edgar's storyline with his new writer friend (admittedly played perfectly by Johnny Pemberton) is pedestrian when it isn't a total afterthought. The show's as funny as ever, and per usual, it manages to deliver at least one episode that completely knocks my socks off ("Not a Great Bet," in which Gretchen returns to her hometown—for all my gripes with this season, it's one of the best TV episodes of the year). But the unevenness with which the series approaches its characters' forward movement has become bumpy to the point of discomfort. Grade: B-

Music

St. Vincent - Masseduction (2017)

Masseduction is St. Vincent's weakest since Actor (still my least-fav, don't hurt me), but instead of that album's angular, off-beat guitar passages, Masseduction finds Annie Clark melodically and instrumentally forthright in a way that recalls her St. Vincent debut, Marry Me. This cuts both ways; lyrically, Clark is more personal than she's been in years, despite the persona-heavy ad campaign, again recalling Marry Me's introspection and emotional transparency, but musically, the Jack Antonoff production, while clean and immediate, lacks a lot of the layered complexity that's made previous St. Vincent releases to rewarding to revisit, and even after only a few weeks of listening, I'm starting to find moments on the album worryingly thin. It's still St. Vincent, and there are still tremendous moments. But the whole is having a difficult time coming together as a complete work of ownage. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for July 25 - July 31, 2016

Reviewing: all day, every day. Last one of these before school starts up again (heavy sigh). Let me know what you think of what's here.

Movies

Café Society (2016)
A melancholy romance that, if it weren't for the abundant morbidity in the rest of Woody Allen's career, would be rather startling in the lengths it goes to connect unrequited love with death. We see at least half a dozen onscreen deaths throughout the film, most played for laughs (Jesse Eisenberg's protagonist has an uncle in the mob, with predictable results ensuing), and at least a couple offscreen as well; the tone is light, but the themes weigh increasingly heavily on the movie's plot and style, culminating in a lengthy dissolve between two scenes in the film's final shot that's as aching an evocation of regret as Woody Allen has ever committed to film. "Live every day like it's your last, and one day you'll be right," one of the funnier lines in the movie goes, and that seems to be true of both life in general and time with lover in particular.  Make mistakes in your romances, and you've squandered the finite time you have before the end. I liked last year's Irrational Man a whole lot, but even so, my gut is that this is Allen's best film since Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or at the very least, Blue Jasmine. My wife says that Woody Allen has run out of stories to tell, and certainly, there are echoes of his past work here—Sweet and Lowdown and shades of Bullets Over Broadway, for sure, and maybe a touch of Annie Hall's sense of the passage of time. And I'll say this: the first 15-20 minutes are the movie's weakest, which gives the initial impression that what we're about to see is a retread of Allen's greatest hits (one scene in particular involving a prostitute feels ripped from his mid-'90s output). Woody has his tropes, that's for sure; but when he's able to spin new, interesting, and frequently moving permutations of those tropes (as he does mightily in the back half of this one), you'll hear no complaints from me. Grade: A-

Sing Street (2016)
Almost all of my issues with this movie—the queasy way the romantic fantasy never quite integrates with the indie realism, the way the songs seems a bit out-of-time and more akin to 2016 impressions of what 1985 New Wave must have sounded like, the thinly cartoonish way most of the characters are established and then never given any more context (or really, much to do at all) beyond their first scene—can all be waved away with the simple admission that, "Dude, it's a musical. Of course those things happen." I might be more amenable to that position if I thought the songs were more than just pleasant. I mean, they're fine; they're well-crafted. But they aren't, like, memorable. I like the undercurrent of melancholy that informs most of the movie (especially the scenes between the protagonist and his older brother), but it never squarely lands upon something that definitively works dramatically. Musical or no, I really do need one or the other: timeless songs or workable drama. Or maybe I'm just a grump. Grade: B-

The Aviator (2004)
It's not Scorsese's finest hour, but it's far from his worst, either. Howard Hughes is such a fascinating and perfect Scorsese protagonist—charismatic, troubled, adventurous, reckless—and our esteemed director's touch so nimble in painting him that it matters a lot less than it might have otherwise that this movie is about an hour too long or that the editing often commits that great Academy Awards fallacy of mistaking "most" for "best." I'm also not convinced Leo DiCaprio was the best man for the job here; the guy's certainly trying very hard to evoke Hughes's breezy recklessness, but, well, when you're trying to seem breezily reckless, it works a lot better when your effort to look so effortless isn't quite so visible. Grade: B

The French Minister (Quai d'Orsay) (2013)
I don't know a thing about French politics, so maybe a movie-length parody of French governmental figures was never going to be in my wheelhouse. Even so, I do think it's worth pointing out just how inconsistent the comedic tone is, a feeling no doubt bolstered by the fact that the editing only decides to get tight and interesting every once in a while. Grade: C+

Suspect Zero (2004)
It's really the worst kind of bad movie when the script requires the special stupidity of having Albuquerque be some podunk nowheresville, people from Dallas treat Frito pie as some mysterious foreign cuisine, and the CIA have a rogue, psychic agent, and still manages to be a bore. That's a real shame. Suspect Zero is so close to being entertainingly bad: the script is silly and portentous in equal measure, the cinematic style is almost mad-scientist in its impassioned attempts to artsy, the acting veers into the uncanny valley of not quite recognizably human behavior. We're just missing a level of intensity by a factor of two to make it actually fun. Grade: D+

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
That the story of the Peoples Temple is upsetting is old hat at this point (see: any "lol don't drink the Kool-Aid" jokes), but for me specifically, there's something so viscerally horrendous about the entire thing that I doubt I'll ever shake it. The arc of Jim Jones and his followers is one of the few historical narratives that makes me truly despair: that revolution is a myth, that the premise of organized religion is fatally flawed—thoughts that I don't believe 99% of the time, but that this specific narrative forces me to confront anyway, whether I'm prepared to bat them down or not. The genius of this documentary is that its mix of archival footage and actual Peoples Temple member interviews refuses to let this story become old hat. It's a full-throated howl at the realization that any attempt to untangle the chaotic beauty of the Peoples Temple from its unspeakable evil is doomed to fail, and the remaining survivors of Jonestown speak with such clean enthusiasm and life that it drives home with painful precision just how real this movement was to everyone involved and how apocalyptic its end proved to be. Grade: A

Books

Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)
Toni Morrison's followup to the legendary Beloved maintains that novel's preoccupation with postbellum African-American history and heightened, magical vibes. It's not as good as Beloved, no, but that's an unfair standard to keep any literary work to, and Jazz has plenty to offer aside from its younger sibling status to one of American literature's recent(ish) masterpieces. Most notable is the novel's structure, which, true to the music of the title, follows characters into historical digressions and POV switches in a way that does often feel meandering but also frequently pays off by richly mirroring the "present-day" story of a man who has murdered his mistress. Typical of Morrison, the prose is absolutely pristine in a way that feels highly structured without sacrificing any of the spontaneity of the free-flowing jazz she's trying to evoke, and overall, the effect is pretty impressive. The very literary reality Morrison has constructed here does sometimes rob the story of stakes in favor of lyricism—the characters seem shockingly nonchalant and deliberate in their reactions to an uncontested murderer walking in their midst—and a lot of these characters feel very bookishly human rather than realistically human, if that makes sense. But the marvel of Morrison's work here is that that artificiality somehow ends up making the book more approachable than it might have been otherwise, and the emotions are never anything but searing. Grade: B+

Music

St. Vincent - Actor (2009)
St. Vincent's second album lacks the melodic precision of her debut, Marry Me, or the guitar flamboyance of the albums to follow, and as such, it's probably my least favorite of hers. That's not to say it isn't good—it is, and with the mid-record streak of "Black Rainbow," "Laughing with a Mouthful of Blood," and "Marrow," it's even great. Elsewhere, the string arrangements are maybe just a little too thick, and the baroque pop just a tad too baroque, to let the album truly breathe. Grade: B

PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)
I was excited enough to hear PJ Harvey's companion piece to 2011's career-best Let England Shake that I suppose a bit of disappointment is to be expected. A protest record dealing with poverty in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington DC is bound to be less specific than Let England Shake's critique of Harvey's homeland, England, and that's one of the main issues. The album opener, "The Community of Hope," describing DC's Ward 7, is a good microcosm of what doesn't work here: the climactic chant of "They're gonna put a Wal-Mart here" is a generic, heavy-handed complaint that could apply to pretty much any aging American city (including my own city of Knoxville), while the comment that "the school looks like a shit-hole" has the unintended effect of seeming to lash out against the school itself rather than the bureaucratic and social dysfunction that has made it that way. The tone is off, and the observations are rote, and the music isn't quite good enough to forgive either of those flaws. It's not all bad, though. In fact, the final three songs—and especially the climactic "The Wheel"—form a suite that ranks among the best work PJ Harvey has ever done. The rest of the album isn't quite there, but if only for those closing 15 minutes, the record's still worth at least a cursory listen. Grade: B

Favorite Music of 2014

It's list-making time again in the pop culture world! Barring possible album releases from Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper, I don't think I'll listen to much more new music this year, so hopefully this list will remain accurate for the remaining few weeks of December.

I won't weigh this post down with a long preamble this time around (does anyone read those anyway?). As always, I'd love to hear your own ideas about the year's best music—what did I miss? What did I like that you didn't? Let me know! Anyway, here's the list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Sun Kil Moon: Benji
There's a real chance that Benji is the most human record I've ever heard. I can only imagine that sentence sounding like hyperbole to someone who hasn't listened to the album, because with Benji, Mark Kozelek has captured the sprawling messiness, the pain, hilarity, and complexity of human nature with a depth that's rarely been achieved before—think John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band; In Utero; The Wall. This album would be a masterpiece if its only song were "I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same," an opus that ranks among the all-time great singer-songwriter moments. But that's not it; there are eleven in total, all in the same spirit of confession and compassion.

2. St. Vincent: St. Vincent
Let's get this out of the way first: St. Vincent is not as good as Strange Mercy. It's not nearly so sonically adventurous, it's thematically looser, and it's the first time in Annie Clark's career that a new release hasn't signaled a significant expansion of her sound. All in all, St. Vincent is a lateral move. But here's the thing about lateral moves: their laterality doesn't matter one bit when they're as confident, winsome, and blisteringly virtuosic as St. Vincent's is. Clark's not just the guitar wizard we've seen in the past—she's a master songsmith whose pop precision is formidable enough to make even the weirdest effects sound tightly melodic. Just ask "Birth in Reverse."

3. The War on Drugs: Lost in the Dream
A large part of the pleasure of Lost in the Dream is the rather dorky gratification of seeing a good band turn into a great one. The War on Drugs have taken an enormous leap in quality from their previous album, Slave Ambient, and it's one of those rare moments that geeks like me relish—Bleach to Nevermind, The E Street Shuffle to Born to Run. With this one, the War on Drugs have taken their Dylan/Springsteen/Dire Straits influences and crafted them into the fullest realization of their potential, a sound that's both huge and personal. For evidence, look no further than "Red Eyes," which is one of the best "broken heroes on a last-chance power drive" songs the Boss never penned.

4. Against Me!: Transgender Dysphoria Blues

The problem I have with a lot of punk is that it tends to be a little one-note, emotionally. Aggression and devil-may-care self-righteousness  can only go so far before they wear thin, so thankfully this latest album from Against Me! is as rich as any album in any genre this year. Lead member Laura Jane Grace sings about the struggles of coming out as a transgendered woman with intensity, confusion, hurt, and vulnerability. "You want them to notice the ragged ends of your summer dress," she sings on the opening title track, and it's a sentiment so sweet that the revelation that "they just see a faggot" hits all the more heartbreakingly.

5. Spoon: They Want My Soul

Spoon is a weird band to write about. On the one hand, there's almost nothing to say besides, "Well, they've made another great album." On the other hand, as I've just proven right now, that unremarkable consistency actually is quite remarkable. So, here it goes: they've made another great album. There's nothing here that's significantly different from the band's previous output (though "Outlier" seems to have picked up a few cues from singer/guitarist Britt Daniel's Divine Fits side project), but the album also has that wonderful Spoonian quality of sounding both familiar and fresh. In this humble blogger's opinion, Spoon's rarely been better.

6. Ex Hex: Rips
I'm not going to say that guitar rock is extinct or even that it's rare (heck, at least half of the albums on this list could easily be considered guitar rock), but it's still a distinct pleasure to encounter a record rocking as unquestionably hard as this one. There's a straightforward, upbeat energy to Rips that you hear less and less these days in riff-heavy music, making it a record that actually rocks without being tortured or ironic (something that actually is rare). That's not to say that Rips is emotionally simple or anything like that—songs like "I Don't Wanna Lose" and "War Paint" contribute plenty of complexity—but it's also brash and loud and fast and unapologetically fun. Party on, ladies! 


7. Badbadnotgood: III
Full disclosure: I've no idea what's going on in the jazz world these days. The most recent full-on jazz album I have any familiarity with is Brad Mehldau's Elegiac Cycle from 1999, and even that one's a throwback, as I understand it. Fuller disclosure: I've little idea of what's ever been going on in the jazz world; I've listened to plenty, but if you want me to spout definitions or trace its history Ken-Burns style, I'll have to see myself out. What I do know is Badbadnotgood makes excellent music. III is less rambunctious than its predecessor (I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the Kanye West and My Bloody Valentine covers), but it's also BBNG's most sophisticated, atmospheric work yet. 

8. tUnE-yArDs: Nikki Nack
I never listened to tUnE-yArDs' (try typing that five times fast!) debut, but if this one's any indication, I need to seek it out pronto. Nikki Nack's a phenomenal work of progressive traditionalism, a purely pop album at heart thrown cockeyed by a terrifically fun infusion of the weird. Polyrhythms surround flourishes of psychedelia and chants, electronic whistles swoop in and out of the mix, and a "Modest Proposal"-esque skit takes a 1.5 minute break from melody and song structure altogether. And yet, somehow, none of this stops "Water Fountain" and "Real Thing" from being among the most infectious songs of the year. A high-wire act, but tUnE-yArDs pull it off gloriously.

9. White Hinterland: Baby

In the year of St. Vincent, it's tempting to label Baby as simply "indie art pop that isn't as good as St. Vincent," but of course that's not fair. This is a work with way more heart than Annie Clark has ever displayed; for all of St. Vincent's virtues, there's no getting around that moniker's iciness. While White Hinterland certainly shares some of that iciness around the edges, it also bares a sloppy, beating core—foremost is the harrowing title track, where singer Casey Dienel cries raggedly, "Is this my weakness?" over and over, even when the instruments falls away. It's about as emotionally naked as they come.

10. U2: Songs of Innocence
In my book, it's U2's strongest album since at least All That You Can't Leave Behind, and I say that as someone who, to varying degrees, likes How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and (especially) No Line on the Horizon. Like those last two albums, Innocence slumps in its middle third; unlike those albums, though, there's an urgency and lyrical complexity that recalls the band's early post-punk years by way of their '90s darkness. The latter stages of the record shine in particular with their War-meets-Pop fervor. And I'll be darned if "The Troubles" isn't one of the best album closers of the year.



10 Great Songs Not on These Albums:

Chance the Rapper & the Social Experiment: "Wonderful Everyday: Arthur"—Remember Arthur? The suspiciously humanoid aardvark who taught us kids to laugh and play and get along with each other every weekday on PBS, 4/3 Central? Well, Chance the Rapper turned that show's theme into a soulful concert staple this year, and the results are lovely. Bonus nostalgia points for folks like me who grew up with the show.

Coldplay: "Magic"—Ghost Stories isn't my favorite Coldplay album, but I appreciate the quieter approach after the booming, often garish Mylo Xyloto. "Magic" is the best recipient of that approach. The melody blooms beautifully from the initially sparse production, and by the time Chris Martin's singing falsetto, it's Coldplay perfection.

Father John Misty: "Bored in the USA"—Despite the Springsteen allusion of the title, this song is most indebted to the singer-songwriters of the '70s, only a version of those '70s icons that recognizes how self-obsessed and solipsistic they could be. It's dark and funny and sad, and it's got me pumped for the full album next year.

Ariana Grande: "Problem (feat. Iggy Azalea)"—By the end of the summer, I was at risk of getting sick of this song. Thankfully, Meghan Trainor swooped in with a song of her own for me to get sick of, and here I am now, still digging "Problem." The Iggy verse still sucks, but the rest is great pop and a wonderful showcase for Ariana Grande's vocal flexibility. Her full-length is pretty good, too, if any of y'all are looking for more of that four-octave range.

Mick Jenkins: "Jazz"—So, this song's from Mick Jenkins's mixtape The Water[s], which is a concept album about (you guessed it) water. It's kind of goofy in theory, but in practice it's a striking listen that does some cool thematic work with its central concept. I've heard it derogatorily described as "honors student rap," and that's definitely true of some of the album's more heavy-handed moments. But then you get songs like this, which, with its namedropping of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, is definitely honors-y but also completely fresh in its comparison between hip-hop culture and jazz culture. Plus, the jazzy production used throughout the album is never more appropriate than it is here.

Kendrick Lamar: "i"—Kendrick Lamar songs have a way of shifting meaning when placed in the context of their albums (ever try listening to "Backseat Freestyle" without the rest of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City?), so who knows what this track will sound like once the rest of the album is released. Right now, though, it's an uncharacteristically upbeat track, a moment of optimism and self-actualization in the face of disenfranchisement that, after the depths plumbed by his previous album, feels rather beautiful and redemptive. Plus, Kendrick's instrumentation doesn't get much more lush than it is here.

Taylor Swift: "Shake It Off"—When this song first dropped, there was this weird thing among some critic types where they called it a mortal error of Swift's, one that perhaps signaled the end of her pop dominance. 2.5 million sales of 1989 later, I think we can all agree that those critics were dead wrong. Besides, c'mon, this song's awesome.

Sharon Van Etten: "Your Love Is Killing Me"—Van Etten is usually an intense presence on her albums, but before this year, I sure didn't think she had this level of intensity in her. It's a monster track, six minutes of self-effacing fury that hits its climax early and somehow keeps building.

Yellow Ostrich: "Shades"—Unfortunately, Yellow Ostrich is no more; the band dissolved a near the end of the fall. I've been following these guys from their DIY Bandcamp days, and I'm sad to see them go. However, they did leave a very good swansong in this year's Cosmos, and "Shades," with its Krautrock-on-speed riffage, is a highlight. It's Yellow Ostrich at their off-beat best, throwing in some new-found (an, as it turns out, short-lived) guitar rock chops for flavor.

Thom Yorke: "Nose Grows Some"—The more Thom Yorke drops solo material, the more it becomes apparent that, for all Yorke's ostentatious frontmanship, the magic of Radiohead is built on the alchemy of all five band members in collaboration, not just the manic genius of the singer/lyricist. That being said, Thom's BitTorrent-released album this year, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, is pretty strong stuff, and this song's the strongest of the bunch. It's a piece that approaches the sensuality and sublimity of The King of Limbs while still maintaining the austerity of Yorke's driving aesthetic, flowing organically from the song suite that closes the album.