Mini Reviews for May 3 - 16, 2021

Sorry I missed last week's post! It was just a busy weekend, and I hadn't had a chance to review that much anyway. Hope this slightly longer-than-usually post makes up for it!

Movies

The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021)
I watched this because I heard the animation was incredible, which it is! I also heard that everything else about the movie was trash, which it is! Mostly, at least. Every moment of humor (i.e. 90% of the movie) is an awfully strained attempt at post-LEGO Movie frenetic internet humor, which I don't love, but I do think the screenplay has good bones re: character arcs and emotional stakes—not a given for all (or even most) animated movies nowadays. But that animation! I know it's cool to be cynical about CG and the direction of American animation in general, but I think it's time that we admitted that for at least the last five years, American animation has actually been making some incredible aesthetic breakthroughs with CG, resulting in probably the most diverse and interesting field of mainstream animation studios in the country's history. I guess you could attribute some of this to Disney's creatively troubled (and in the case of Raya and the Last Dragon, financially troubled) last few features—it seems clear to me that we're entering one of those weird, dark-age Disney eras akin to the early 2000s or the '70s, which historically has meant that we're going to get some new growth in non-Disney animation. But I dunno, it feels deeper than that—like, there are truly some stunning technical/artistic advancements happening from some of the most unlikely places, which to me tells me that something bigger is going on than the usual "disgruntled ex-Disney people are doing new stuff." The Mitchells vs. The Machines is from Sony Pictures Animation, which yeah, yeah, did Into the Spider-Verse but other than that has done stuff like... [checks notes] Angry Birds 2 and The Emoji Movie, and that's kind of how this whole thing is going: some go-nowhere studio has this bizarre, incredible flash of inspiration that pushes CG animation in some completely fresh, even transgressive new direction—it feels dumb to say about a movie that otherwise is as silly as The Mitchells vs. The Machines, but this kind of feels visionary in terms of how it uses texture and character design/movement within intentionally unreal digital environments, and I feel like I keep running into movies that feel similarly ambitious, never from the same studio: there was that wild DreamWorks run a few years ago with Trolls and Captain Underpants, Netflix's The Willoughbys last year, The Peanuts Movie from Blue Sky Studios, etc. Not all (not even most!) of these movies are very good, but the sheer number of wild technical experiments that have generated successful, expressive CG templates is dazzling when taken as a whole. And this is all happening while the King Daddy CG animators in the room, Pixar and Disney, are also consistently making groundbreaking milestones in their own CG animation—Raya and the Last Dragon is probably the best-looking Disney CG feature ever, and Soul is close to the best-looking Pixar film, both pinnacles of their respective studios' house styles while also gesturing toward new, more experimental ground. I mean, don't get me wrong: I'd love it if the current landscape made room for traditional cel animation, too, which it doesn't (aside: TV animation, also a wellspring of innovation right now, is a whole different conversation, one that does include cel animation). But if we aren't going to get that, then at least what we have instead is this. In fact, if we could actually get some good screenplays into the industry, we'd be looking at something of a golden age for American animation, because the sheer level of great animators working inside the industry right now is ridiculously high. Until then, I guess I'm going to keep writing these "the animation is incredible but the screenplay is bleh" reviews. Grade: B

Fourteen (2019)
A tremendously well-observed story of a friendship slowly drifting apart over the course of maybe a decade. This movie definitely shows its microbudget in the decidedly modest visuals, but the writing (essentially sketching out a series of vignettes between these two characters) paired with the exceptional lead performances (Tallie Medel and Norma Kuhling) make this movie come alive in ways that I wasn't expecting. The film should probably come with some sort of content warning, though, considering just how grim it gets; the early scenes of the movie suggest a light dramedy in the vein of, say, Joe Swanberg, but as the movie goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer just how serious the implications of the early scenes are, culminating in tragedy that I found extremely moving but also incredibly bleak. A very good movie, but only for those prepared for something of a tough watch by the end. Grade: A-

In Fabric (2018)
I cannot stress how much I love the texture of Peter Strickland movies—I guess his giallo-by-way-of-niche-analog-hobbies thing is a little bit of a schtick, but it's a great schtick and way more interesting than what's been done by a lot of this recent wave of horror directors looking to ape '70s/'80s media. So I wish I liked this better. It's a pair of stories connected by the same device: a killer dress. And neither story is bad in isolation—they both (but especially the second one) have a kind of EC Comics sensibility that warps the horror into wry comedy. But these stories don't work all that well in concert with each other, and their hour-a-piece runtimes are both way too long for an anthology format, which makes the movie just drag by the end. Too bad. But still keep making movies, Peter Strickland! I like your vibe! Grade: B-

Dolores Claiborne (1995)
This was obviously never going to be as good as the book—not just one of Stephen King's best but also the exceptionally rare King novel with none of that dude's worst impulses (I love you, Stephen, but still). But the fact is that adapting to the screen a book that is a 300-page monologue was always going to be a tall order, and this screenplay is not up to that task, thinning out the richness of the title character and her relationship with her employer Vera and introducing a somewhat strained mother-daughter redemption frame narrative broken up with some hammy transitions between the frame and the flashbacks. But all that said, this is still extremely watchable. The cast is top-to-bottom great, chewing through the hamminess of this whole project with visible relish, and while some of the transitions don't work for me, the actual cinematography itself looks very good—kinda Douglas Sirk meets Hitchcock vibes, at least as far as the texture of the imagery goes. And much as I ragged on the screenplay earlier, I do have to tip my hat for the way that it (along with the very game cast, it must also be said) preserves the Stephen-King-iness of the dialogue while somehow avoiding the cringe that usually comes with transposing his dialect ticks into living actors' mouths. On those strengths, I'm a little surprised this movie isn't talked about more. Then again, almost nobody talks about the source novel either, which is a far stronger overall package, so I guess it's fitting. Grade: B

The Pagemaster (1994)
Technically a rewatch, but I haven't seen it in more than 20 years, so oh well. This one really should have stayed in the memories. Just a dreadful, tedious movie with bad acting, a bad message (I mean, I guess the official message is "Read," but it's also "Quit being a dope who worries about reasonable things like biking accidents and head injuries!"), and animation that is way lousier than I remembered. This movie and its concept (there's a magical land where all the things in novels are real; also, books talk and you get to become a cartoon—this is Michael Heaven) were so intoxicating to me as a young reader, and I totally understand why this movie appealed to me enough that I checked this out of Hollywood Video countless times and wore out the novelization and wrote baby Pagemaster fanfic. But wow, does this movie look lifeless to my adult eyes. Grade: D+

I went on this disappointing nostalgia quest because it was part of Episode 350 of the Cinematary podcast, which I was on and you can listen to here if you are interested in hearing me trash this movie (or other people talk about other nostalgic rewatches, not all of which were so unpleasant).

The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
A fun and funny zombie movie, though I was caught off-guard by how bleak it is, given its otherwise flippant tone. The idea that zombies are in excruciating pain because they are conscious of their own decay is... *shudder*, and the film's understanding of the U.S. military as an institution indifferent to (and even willing to purposefully cause) suffering is maybe basic but pointedly rendered here. Also, as an aside, I'm in the exact same boat as critic Mike D'Angelo in having been always a little perplexed where the whole "BRAAAAINS" thing for zombies came from—it's apparently from this movie! Grade: B+

 

Television

The End of the F***ing World, Series 2 (2019)
I probably should have just stopped at the first series, which ended with a sense of closure and left me feeling good (if only marginally so) about my time spent with this show. This second series isn't terrible, but it doesn't really add anything to the show either. Basically, it's about the various characters having PTSD from their experiences in Series 1 while also having to deal with the consequences of their actions in that first series. Which isn't an inherently bad idea, but I dunno, I guess what ultimately hooked me about the first series was the slow-dawning sense of pathos beneath the posture of teen apathy. With that already played out, there's not anywhere for these characters to go that's all that interesting for me. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for April 20-26, 2020

Quarantine, Week 7: Increasingly unsure of the days of the week.

Movies

The Turning (2020)
I lost interest in this pretty quickly when it became clear that the movie was going to do absolutely nothing with the rather exquisite set. Just watch The Innocents if you want to see a great film adaptation of Turn of the Screw. But then oh boy, did the last five minutes pull in my attention again: I don't think I've ever seen a mainstream film released by a major studio have such a flabbergastingly fumbled ending. Either the movie thinks that it can evoke the rich ambiguity of James's novel by throwing in a bunch of incomprehensible, out-of-context plot twists and edits, or else the production team just got tired of the whole project and just arbitrarily rolled the credits after splicing in all the remaining footage they had. Either way, it's incredibly, fascinatingly dumb, and I want to know the backstory. Grade: C-

Democrats (2014)
I feel extreme skepticism about a movie like this—a documentary by a Western filmmaker about political turmoil under an aging Marxist state in a post-colonial country. Having literally no knowledge of Zimbabwe's history or politics, I really don't know exactly how much of that skepticism is valid with regards to this movie's stance on the contentious creation of Zimbabwe's new constitution following its 2008 election, though there are a few things raising major red flags for me (esp. the uncritical way to which it gestures toward "international intervention" in Zimbabwe's politics from the West). So who knows how useful this documentary is at actually documenting the broader political realities of Zimbabwe. All that being said, as a generalized take on a very specific kind of political activity (in this case, the drafting of a national constitution), this movie is stupendous, almost entirely on the virtues of the access granted to its film team. I'm not sure if we've ever gotten this intimate of a cinematic document on the shaping of a nation's central laws: the camera crew of this documentary were somehow allowed to sit in the room as representatives from the ruling political party and the opposition party edit and collaborate and shout at each other over specific pieces of the constitutional drafts, along the way showing the push and pull between democratic/populist energy and the inertia of a political establishment. It's fascinating stuff, and I gladly would have watched a 4-hour Wiseman-style documentary with just the camera stuck in those negotiation rooms rather than the rather brisk 90 minutes that this movie is. Grade: B

Holy Smoke (1999)
I was not a huge fan of the setup—Indian cult? fake terminal illness?—but man oh man does this movie cook when it's just Harvey Keitel and Kate Winslet locking horns in a psychosexual battle of wills. As in her similarly dismissed In the Cut, Jane Campion takes this movie to some really fearless places that are deeply uncomfortable, and the results are some fascinating interrogations of power and human desire. But unlike In the Cut (and virtually every other Campion feature), this movie is actually very funny on top of all that. So as it turns out, this whole narrative of how Campion lost her way at the turn of the millennium and then found it again with Bright Star is just a bunch of noise, and honestly, Bright Star is maybe my second-least-favorite Campion feature after Portrait of a Lady. I wanna see more of this, Jane! Grade: B+

Meeting People Is Easy (1998)
Maybe this is less true now that Radiohead have become de-facto elder statesmen of rock and their whole ethos has more or less stabilized since the OK Computer-->Kid A-->Amnesiac cycle, but I definitely remember a long period of time when the music press, as much as they praised their albums, somewhat dismissed the individuals in the group as a bunch of antisocial grumps. Perhaps they are antisocial and grumpy, but golly, I'd be too if I had to endure interviewer after interviewer lob the most inane questions and comments at me. Questions like, I kid you not, "Is OK Computer rock music?", and comments like, "This seems like music for wrist-cutters." I've heard people say that Meeting People Is Easy isn't really a very good tour documentary, and it's true that its lo-fi, impressionistic, at-times inscrutably garbled style is at odds with giving us good concert footage (though fans will still be treated to more or less straightforward concert gems like early renditions of "Nude" and "Life in a Glasshouse"). But when it comes to rendering the subjective experience of the hell that is doing a world tour and a million interviews with skeptical, ham-fisted journalists, this movie rocks. The fatigue and disorientation Meeting People Is Easy evokes is compelling, and to give us the catharsis of seeing the cool spectacle of Radiohead bringing down the house with "Paranoid Android" or something would probably have been antithetical to that subjective effect. Grade: B

Dirty Harry (1971)
I was kind of thinking that the "fascist-lite" allegations against this movie were overblown, given that it was unfolding like a more-or-less conventional and honestly kind of dull "loose cannon"/urban apocalypse cop movie—yes, I realize this was basically the first, but just because you're the first to promote problematic mythology doesn't absolve you of the problematic mythology, especially if you're not going to be interesting about it. But then we get to the scene when Harry tells the DA of San Francisco that the 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution are "wrong," and I was like, "Ohhhh... I see what people are talking about..." Anyway, this movie picks up as it gets more outlandish near the end: e.g. Harry intentionally crashes a school bus full of kids in order to catch the Zodiac Killer. Don't worry; all the kids are okay. I would be interested in seeing a horror/dark-comedy remake in which all the ridiculously risky gambits Harry makes in this movie actually don't pay off, and Harry is just some deranged cop with stern-dad vibes who violated people's rights, shot a hostage, and killed a school bus's worth of children, because this is nuts. "Loose cannon" indeed. Grade: C

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Nobody told me that the opening 15 minutes are virtually identical to the opening of Get Out, though I'd been plenty warned that this movie is the epitome of "I would have voted for Obama a third time" cinema. It's also stagey and largely boring, full of impossible people (Spencer Tracy's character owns a major newspaper? Sidney Poitier's character is the assistant director of the World Health Organization??) walking through shallow, well-intentioned sanctimony. Most of what makes the parts that aren't boring interesting is a kind of cultural artifact perspective: for example, the movie's... interesting understanding of what late '60s rock and roll is. But the acting in this movie is also stellar and makes the film way more watchable than it would have been otherwise. No surprise given the presence of Poitier (who, per usual, does God's work of breathing real life into respectability politics' wet dream) and Tracy/Hepburn—but golly, Tracy and Hepburn are magnificent together here, and the best parts of the movie by far are the ones they share together, particularly the mid-movie drive where they get ice cream (a real shame Tracy wasn't alive for On Golden Pond, because their relationship here has a lot of the same energy and might have been able to save that movie from its own saccharine). The same, I'm afraid, can't be said for Hepburn's niece, Katharine Houghton, who is, both as written and acted, one of the most vapid screen presences I've seen in a while. Grade: C

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Somewhat difficult for me to swallow the lionizing of the U.S. Cavalry and General Custer specifically (Michael Bluth looks in bag labeled *Old Hollywood Western*: "I don't know what I expected"), even more difficult considering that the whole plotting with the cavalry mission against the Indians is right up there with the love triangle as the most tedious part of the movie. But Lord have mercy, this movie is probably the best use of Technicolor of the 1940s, and John Wayne gives a legitimately great performance and absolutely rocks that mustache. Some really great character acting from the guy who plays Sgt. Quincannon (Victor McLaglen), too. I kinda wish this whole movie was just a wistful hangout dramedy with Wayne and McLaglen's characters just futzing around the fort as they contemplate their upcoming retirement. The parts of the movie that are that are top-tier. Grade: B

I talked about this movie with some smart folks on the Cinematary podcast—if you're interested, you can listen here!

Television

Better Call Saul, Season 5 (2020)
With Jimmy McGill having fully transformed into Saul Goodman (thus completing the show's prequel arc), Better Call Saul could have easily just called it a day, giving itself over completely to place-setting for Breaking Bad. But that's not what Better Call Saul does, blessedly. Instead, as we watch Jimmy tumble into the craven abyss of his alter ego, we see him grasping frantically at those around him, and what Season 5 becomes is something of a battle for the soul of Kim Wexler. It has, in short, pivoted from the Greek tragedy of its first season to full-on Shakespearean tragedy now. In doing so, the show finds some of its most conventionally exciting plotting in a couple seasons, bolstered by some incredibly tense setpieces as well as some legitimately stomach-turning character work. Alongside a newfound purpose for Nacho (he gets his best arc in seasons) as well as a renewed relevance of Mike (who is much more organically integrated into the story than last season), Season 5 is Better Call Saul at the top of its game. Really great stuff. Grade: A

Books

Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography by Lemony Snicket (2002)
Basically a book-length indulgence in A Series of Unfortunate Events's postmodern affectations. Some of it is hilariously bewildering, most notably the introduction, in which there are four nested narrations and circular definitions; other parts are puzzles, where you have to piece together underlined words to get codes and morsels of information relevant to unraveling the intentionally opaque mysteries of the main series; other parts are just kind of inscrutable and odd, like the series of photos near the end with incomplete captions. There's not a lot of actual substance here once you get past the literary and linguistic games, and there's nothing as inspired as the best moments of the main series. But it is still pretty funny on a moment-by-moment basis, and I remain impressed and somewhat gobsmacked that Snicket/Handler was able to publish the equivalent of a Danielewski or Nabokov novel for kids. Madness. Grade: B

Christine by Stephen King (1983)
One of the weaker novels from Stephen King's golden era, if you ask me. It's overlong, misanthropic (and often specifically misogynist), and doesn't find a real emotional core in its characters until near the end. Plus, it does this irritating thing (that admittedly is also true of The Shining) where it's crystal clear exactly where this is going at least a hundred pages from the end, making the lead-up to the climax frustratingly slow rather than simmeringly intense. It's not without its charms, though: there's a great sense of geography here—it's the rare King book not set in Maine, but its Pennsylvania small-town setting is vividly evoked. Also, King's use of rock and roll car lyrics works really well to highlight the dually liberating and sinister undercurrents of that mythology, and as an avowed ally of public transit and a sworn enemy of personal vehicle ownership, I do get a kick out of the idea that car ownership is basically a Faustian deal with a demon. Still, that's not enough to buoy this book completely for me. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for June 17-23, 2019

HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Chuck & Buck! I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to put in a suggestion for next week (or put in another one), here's the link:

Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!

Movies

Chuck & Buck (2000) Reader Suggestion!
The heavy film grain and high-wire threading of black comedy, sentimentality, and a fascination with outsiders is vintage '90s American indie. Like a lot of those movies, I'm not sure how successfully on a moment-by-moment basis the movie walks its balance between making its clearly-traumatized-yet-creepy protagonist the butt of our ridicule/disdain and inviting our investment in the guy regardless. But by the end of the movie, it's clear that the holistic thrust of the film is one of compassion. Mike White (who also wrote the movie) stars as a mostly closeted gay man whose only connection as a child to a loving world growing up in his (it is implied) abusive household is his both emotional and physical relationship with his friend Buck, a relationship he desperately and obsessively clings to as an adult. Though the movie doesn't shirk from extreme discomfort with the actions White's protagonist takes in pursuing this relationship, the film also has a deep regard for the work he must do to create a happy life virtually ex nihilo, and when he finally manages to do so by the movie's end, it's a meaningful and sweet conclusion to an otherwise hair-raising journey. Grade: B

Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben) (2018)
Asghar Farhadi movies usually hinge on critical moments of ambiguous epistemology: how do we know what we know, and how many pieces of that process can we remove before we have to relinquish certainty? As the title implies, Everybody Knows involves a twist on that concept in the sense that it's an exploration of what happens at critical moments of certain epistemology: what happens when enough people know for certain information that had once been considered secret? When a child is kidnapped from a wedding reception, the movie's crisis is (in addition to the kidnapping itself) how this traumatic event reveals just how many people knew the supposed "secret" of this child's parentage—a sort of inverted About Elly. It lacks the brutal precision of some of Farhadi's more iconic films (including About Elly), but it's also a clear attempt by Farhadi to do something fundamentally new within his normal genre trappings, which I think is admirable and at times super effective. It is a thriller, after all, and while it's too long to be the punch to the gut Farhadi's other thrillers are, I can't say that I wasn't thrilled at times nonetheless. Grade: B+

Gloria Bell (2018)
Julianne Moore is a stunning light at the center of this movie, playing the titular "woman of a certain age" with a barbed sensitivity. Barring some really nice, expressionistic lighting, there really isn't a whole lot going on with this movie, though—the plot is aimless, the divorcée drama feels a little forced, and none of the secondary characters (including one played by a disappointingly staid John Turturro) make much of an impact, though credit where credit is due, the script puts some sharp dialogue in these characters mouths occasionally. So it's all the more impressive that Moore is able to carry the movie as far as she is. Grade: B-

Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano) (2018)
Basically The Godfather as seen from the other side of the border: a years-spanning Colombian crime epic that depicts the way that assimilation with the craven relentlessness of North American capitalism rots a society and destroys an indigenous culture. The film's ideas are striking, as are its depictions of indigenous traditions and practices in the context of the encroaching Westernness, which does a lot to spice up the pretty staid crime epic patterns that the movie otherwise falls into. But the movie still is beholden to some pretty rigid patterns, and the style is probably a little too chilly-arthouse for its own good, so there's a good portion of the film that's neither exciting on a plot level nor energetic enough to make the predictable plot exciting either. Nevertheless, I appreciate the new perspective this brings to the old crime epic genre. Grade: B

Red Hook Summer (2012)
Red Hook Summer is messy in the way that Spike Lee's 2010s output has often been. There are stylistic flourishes and scenes and plot threads and whole performances that just kind of amble forward without a ton of momentum or seeming purpose; most naggingly of all that is how Jules Brown and Toni Lysaith give two entirely wooden performances, and I can only imagine that their stammering, stiff line deliveries and postures are intentional for effect, but I'll be damned if I can parse what that effect is supposed to be. But this is also Spike Lee's most dedicated engagement with religion in general and Christianity in particular, and specifically, how Christianity intersects community writ large and its role as a deeply ingrained institution and also as something of a relic of the past that the community is evolving past. It is, in short, a dissection of faith by way of a dissection of a lushly vibrant community, a dissection built on bold contradictions and juxtapositions—cresting with the image of an abusive pastor contorted like Jesus, wearing his own tambourine as a crown of thorns—maybe the most audacious image of Spike's career. And if y'all think I can resist that, you folks are sorely mistaken. There's a late-breaking plot development that makes the whole movie, messiness and all, snap into focus. It's maybe not a focus I can entirely articulate right now, but it's one with a tremendous aesthetic and theological thrust, a story of a Christ who just happens to be white in his paintings and a pastor who just happens to lead a church in decline and a Brooklyn that just happens to be pushing its poorest residents to the far tip of the borough until they can see Lady Liberty's face—and how none of this actually "just happened" after all. I won't go so far as to put it among Spike Lee's very best (to my mind: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, The 25th Hour), but it's certainly among his best of this decade—maybe the best. Grade: A

Veiled Aristocrats (1932)
There are some really interesting ideas about the concept of racial passing at the heart of this film, and the movie is smart to hinge its emotional weight on those ideas. But also, it's convoluted and tedious in the way that a lot of Micheaux movies can be, so it's not like it's a rollicking ride or anything. Grade: C

Within Our Gates (1920)
Easily the best Oscar Micheaux feature I've seen thus far. It's not that the movie is less flawed than the director's other movies: Within Our Gates still has that propensity for tediously convoluted domestic drama, it still feels painted with an overly broad moralism, the acting and writing are still stiff as boards. However, the movie also shares Micheaux's frequent obsession with all facets of the early-20th-century African-American experience, an obsession that links the domestic stretches of this movie to a series of the most well-observed character vignettes of his career, involving small indignities oriented around assimilation, uplift, education, class, and racism of all stripes—all of which culminates in a climactic depiction of a lynching that makes absolutely clear that every piece, no matter how small, of a racist society is ultimately complicit in horrific violence. It's by far the most bracing thing I've seen in Micheaux's work, and one of the most bracing things I've seen in silent cinema in general. Grade: B+

P.S. I (and a couple of folks much smarter than I am) talked about Within Our Gates on episode 252 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.

Television

Fleabag, Series 2 (2019)
The second (and presumably final) series of Phoebe Waller-Bridges's Fleabag is an improvement over its first at every turn: funnier, sadder, more profound. It opens with a gonzo single-scene Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-esque family dinner episode that surely cements Waller-Bridges's place among the current pantheon of electric television writers, maybe the best episode of TV I've seen all year this side of Russian Doll (and even then, perhaps it tops even that), and while none of the subsequent episodes are as viscerally wrenching as that opening salvo, they're all every bit as smart and considered. The series opens with Waller-Bridges's Fleabag character, nose mysteriously bloodied, looking into the camera and telling us that "This is a love story," and she's not wrong. This year (three years after the airing of the original Fleabag but only "371 Days, 19 Hours & 26 Minutes Later" in the show's time), Fleabag has fallen for a Catholic priest, a setup that is Shakespearean in its tragedy, given Fleabag's sexual thirst and the priest's obvious celibacy. But the depths this season plumbs are far more profound than the sacriligious carnal/sanctified dichotomy that her pairing with the priest initially suggests; this series's six episodes take love not just as the material intersection of two people but also in its holistic emotional, spiritual, and even transcendent dimensions of two people who find connection with one another. The religion invoked by the presence of a priest character is not simply the setup to a sexual conflict but also the beginning of a serious exploration of the ways that existential meaning, the search for the divine, and the true understanding of who another human being is all intersect in messy and otherworldly ways, and one of the most shocking moments of television I've seen in years—as shocking as the edgiest twist in the tightest thriller—is built from a brief instance of profound connection that wraps together love and interiority and the divine all in one fleeting glance. I won't spoil that moment, but I literally gasped out loud. This is Great Television, folks. Grade: A

Books

Night Shift by Stephen King (1978)
Stephen King's first short story collection is, alongside his run of '70s novels, sort of the ur-text for understanding King's place in pop culture. A lot of these stories were adapted into movies, and often quite famous ones at that: to name just a few, "Children of the Corn," "The Lawnmower Man," "The Mangler," "Graveyard Shift," "Quitters, Inc.," and "The Ledge" (the last two of which formed sections of the 1985 anthology film Cat's Eye). So yeah, this collection casts a long shadow on King's legacy. Like his '70s novels, the stories in this collection often lack the nuance and complexity of his later work and instead evoke a sort of bemused, b-movie sensibility that's meaner than later King would be, and that's not always a bad thing, given how cumbersome and self-impressed some of King's work could get during the worst impulses of his writing in the '80s and especially the '90s. There's something to be said for the quick-and-dirty ethos that goes into these stories, the complete lack of futzing around. Some of it is kind of dumb—I'm astounded that "Trucks," easily the worst story here, is the one King decided to adapt into his sole effort at directing a film, Maximum Overdrive—but the majority of the stories are at least fun, and a few of them are quite chilling. My two favorites, "Graveyard Shift" and "The Lawnmower Man," are both really great at being kind of laughable in premise but get-under-your-skin creepy in execution. Like any short story collection, there's a bit of unevenness from tale to tale, but on the whole, it's a solid read. Grade: B+

Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare [maybe?] (c. 1606-1608)
Uh... wut. Easily the most bizarre play attributed to Shakespeare that I've read (and even that attribution has a lot of asterisks by it, as the historical record is unclear—but he probably wrote at least part of it). Its meandering, picaresque plot jumps ridiculously through time and space by ease of one ridiculous plot twist after another, plot twists involving presumed dead-characters being discovered alive, pirates hitherto unmentioned storming the stage to kidnap a character about to be murdered, and more shipwrecks that you can count. Honestly, it feels like every time the story was getting boring, the playwright was just like, "Hey, let's throw in a shipwreck to spice things up." It's wild and not particularly good outside of how wild it is. "Exit, pursued by a bear" ain't got nothing on this one. Grade: C+

Music

William Basinski - On Time Out of Time (2019)
An ambient drone made from processed space sounds—specifically, as Basinski says in the liner notes, "recordings from the interferometers of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) capturing the sounds of the merging of two distant massive black holes, 1.3 billion years ago." I don't have much more to say about this; I like space and black holes, and I like this album a whole lot. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for May 13-19, 2019

HEY EVERYONE! Don't forget to check out my announcement—this summer, you can recommend movies for me to review. Check out this post for details.

Here's where you submit recommendations for next week!

Movies

John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum (2019)
Pieces of this movie are vying for that same professionally ridiculous energy that made last year's Mission Impossible movie so intoxicating. There's a horseback chase down the streets of Manhattan; a swordfight that happens on motorcycles; a brutal mano a mano brawl in a hall of mirrors and glass. Other pieces have a cockeyed humor unique to this particular franchise: the sheer amount of glass that gets shattered in this movie is practically an aesthetic unto itself, to say nothing of the advances Parabellum makes in "dog bites man in the crotch" cinema. It's wild and great and entirely an Experience. I imagine this movie will be a breaking point for a lot of people regarding the franchise's escalating devotion to an increasingly involved mythology and the draconian honor codes that form the spine of the series's world, and I honestly didn't 100% love that stuff this time around either. But at the end of the day, a bit of gravely intoned silliness about the High Table is a small price to pay for the gory cornucopia that makes up the rest of the film. Grade: A-

Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (2019)
There's definitely not any musical artist today exploring the paradox of being a celebrity artist as directly as Beyoncé is right now, and I'm not sure there ever has been in the modern music era. The tension of any artist of sufficient fame and privilege is how to remain "universal" as your personal surroundings become increasingly exceptional; Homecoming (and, of course, the Coachella performances at its core) is basically a textbook of this tension, and Beyoncé's solution is, as it has been the entirety of this decade, to position herself as the platonic ideal of American black womanhood, identifying herself as the synechdoce of that experience while being pointedly and unassailably above it. I've personally always felt that there was something maddeningly hierarchical about this (e.g. easy for one of the most beautiful women in the country to say "I woke up like this," esp. when the point of so much of the music is that you can't wake up like this, i.e. like Beyoncé), but at the same time, who am I to tell people by whom and how they should be empowered? Because as the emphatically intense crowd reaction shots in this film communicate so well, people find Beyoncé and her music deeply meaningful, and given the stunning concert footage on display here, there's no mystery why. I'd be a fool to deny the power of the whole package, tensions at all. When the world's most charismatic pop artist stages one of the most visionary concert performances of all time—a richly historied, magnificently choreographed, and virtuosically executed piece of performance art captured rivetingly by a Bey-directed camera—somehow the fabric of the world folds in on itself, and in the ecstasy, it's the easiest thing in the world to believe that this is both the sum total of an identity and its godlike avatar. Grade: A-

Happy Death Day 2U (2019)
A supremely weird sequel that pushes the "Groundhog Day slasher movie" premise of the original way past the breaking point until it fractures into all sorts of odd little cul-de-sacs, including, amusingly, a riff on the old "college dean is a mean ol' killjoy, let's trick him" chestnut. I appreciate just how bonkers this all is, and a montage of rapid-succession deaths is easily the best thing from either movie. But in all the noise, 2U absolutely loses the heart and the precision of the original, and what it puts in its place feels just a tad thin. Grade: C+

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018)
It's as much a profile of an aging Orson Welles as it is the making-of doc for The Other Side of the Wind that it was billed as, and the movie is all the better for it. There are some interesting details about the production of Wind, my favorite being the footage of Peter Bogdanovich doing a ultimately cut character who is a cross between Jerry Lewis and a film journalist. But the best bits of the documentary are the ones that lay out the rich, pathetic tragedy of what Welles ultimately became. The documentary is too cute by half, and the parts of the film that shallowly try to mimic F for Fake are actively irritating. But there's a lot of gold here, too. Grade: B+

People, Places, Things (2016)
Jemaine Clement brings a ton of charm, per usual. Honestly, the whole acting crew here is pretty charming, from Regina Hall to Jessica Williams, which makes it all the more of a shame that it's put to such pedestrian ends. Less than pedestrian, even. It's another one of these breakup movies where a guy gets dumped and has to figure out how to do life alone but oh no he has to figure out keeping the kids, too, when will the indignities stop? The movie goes out of its way to (clumsily) rebuke some of the more misogynist tropes of this kind of movie, but these rebukes just feel like window dressing in an overall pretty conventionally structured/executed indie comedy, and there's not enough lip service in the world that could give life to the incomprehensible, one-note, harpy-ish stereotype of Clement's character's ex, which means that an important half of this movie is just dead on arrival. Even beyond that, while some of the dialogue has a pretty fun repartee, it's just overall a bland experience with nothing new to say about relationships or parenthood or gender roles or anything, really. The acoustic guitar plucks; the dudes mope. You know the drill. Grade: C+

Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World (2016)
I knew a documentary that essentially only exists as a cash-in on David Bowie's death wasn't going to be stellar, but nothing prepared me for just how wretched this is. On a technical level, this is a borderline amateur production, with at-times borderline incomprehensible sound mixing and distractingly cheap digital backgrounds and transitions—to say nothing of the music, generic instrumental tracks that feel as if whoever was editing this movie put in Garage Band templates as placeholders until they could license Bowie's music and then forgot to ever call his label. On a purely informational level, it's a nonsensical, shambling shuffle through Bowie's career, with little flow or narrative logic or even legibility; for example, the documentary talks about Station to Station and the Thin White Duke persona before talking about Young Americans, implying that his plastic soul era came after his L.A. era, and that's the most sense the film's trajectory ever makes. Amusingly, though, the only new interviews the doc seems to have gotten (the rest being pretty widely available archival interviews) are from people on bad terms with Bowie, like Angie Barnett (his first wife), which gives some of the documentary a kind of scandalous, combative tone completely at odds with the otherwise hagiographic overtures of the rest of the film—honestly, that tension is the only pleasure to be had here. Oh, and you also get to hear Dana Gillespie describe what Bowie looked like naked and remark that he had good birthing hips, so there's that. Grade: D

Creepshow (1982)
Some fun practical effects alongside the comic-panel aesthetic, and the whole thing has a mean streak that impressively walks a delicate balance between cosmic irony and sadism. But Creepshow is also about as uneven as any anthology movie, and this is compounded by the fact that several of the segments are adapted from Stephen King short stories by King himself—I haven't actually read any of these stories on the page, but it's clear that a lot of these would work a lot better in a prose format than they do as dynamic screen experiences (I'm thinking especially of "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," a great example of how King's colloquial interiority works in stories but not onscreen). This is to say nothing of just how badly King's idiosyncratic grasp of New England idioms sounds when spoken out loud. The movie has personality to spare and is frequently entertaining, but its flaws are baked deeply into its very premise. Grade: B-

Television

Bob's Burgers, Season 9 (2018-19)
The most remarkable thing about Bob's Burgers is that is remains virtually identical year to year without ever becoming stale. In its ninth year, the show is pretty much the same show as it has been since it founds its legs in its second season, and that's a great thing. There's very little experimentation or format-breaking, but why fix what isn't broken? I look forward to watching this every week, and that's something I can't say right now about any other show approaching its second decade. Grade: B+

Superstore, Season 4 (2018-19)
Superstore became the best show on TV so gradually, I don't think anyone noticed. Each season has been an improvement on the last, funnier and sharper and more assured and ambitious, and Season 4 is the absolute peak of what the show has done so far. As its characters have grown beyond their original dynamics, the show has found complex, entertaining, and often emotionally thorny new ground, from Jonah and Amy becoming an official couple to Glenn shifting job prospects to the fleshing out of the secondary cast like Sandra and Marcus—with each of these changes, Superstore does what the best sitcoms do, simultaneously developing comedy and pathos from the same character development. It's also a show that, increasingly, is fascinated and horrified by the power structures and hierarchies of the modern American workplace; rarely has a workplace sitcom so dedicatedly explored the corporate and societal factors that make modern retail hell, and as the season progresses, the show's various plots masterfully converge on a storyline focusing on an attempt at unionization that rolls the personal and political preoccupations of the show into one while at the same time expanding the mythology of the series (if we can call it that) by exploring the Cloud 9 corporate environment. This season's tragicomic development of the mind-numbing existential, philosophical, and personal hierachies of the modern workplace recalls UK version of The Office as well as the early seasons of the US iteration of it, only much more pointedly so, and where this season ends up feels like the closest thing to the crushing claustrophobia of the UK Office's pre-"Christmas Special" finale that English-language television has produced since. I'm making this sound super heavy and depressing, but the magic of Superstore is that it tackles all this heavy stuff without ever feeling heavy itself. The show is fleet and hilarious and entirely charming, and everyone needs to go watch it. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for July 2 - 8, 2018

Stupid summer, going by so fast.

Movies

Incredibles 2 (2018)
As with the first Incredibles and Objectivism, this movie makes it uncomfortably easy to make a very uncharitable reading of Incredibles 2 re: support of a police state and the dismissal of BLM and other grassroots, media-driven law-enforcement critique as conspiracy. So I'll just leave that there for the grad students. More generously, I'd say Incredibles 2 simply lacks thematic cohesion, and the careful character arcs of the first movie are gone in favor of character chemistry, which is an adequate (if not entirely satisfying) substitute. But enough negativity; all gripes aside, I will sing from the rooftops that, after all the Marvel movies upon Marvel movies that end in incoherent, generic CG, we finally, finally, FINALLY have a movie that understands how to build an action scene with superhero teams—not just coherent action scenes but action scenes that positively sparkle with ideas and kineticism and the unbridled joy of the form that superheroes should encourage in our films but rarely do. When I complain about the punch-kick blandness of the fight scenes in something like Infinity War, Incredibles 2 is the sort of thing I have in mind as the polar opposite. Whatever other flaws this movie has (and it has them, for sure), there is always the exquisite poetry of this film in motion. Stand and salute the best-choreographed superhero movie, perhaps of all time. Grade: B+

The Endless (2017)

Like this film's sort-of prequel, Resolution, The Endless is a nice slice of cosmic horror mixed with metacommentary on filmmaking itself, though also like Resolution, this is maybe more clever than it is good. But the ideas are super interesting, and even if we don't ever get anything as cool as the movie poster, I enjoyed this more than not. Grade: B

Deathgasm (2015)

I watched this because I've had good experiences with New Zealand horror comedies, and I'm always down for some tongue-in-cheek riffing on heavy metal culture. But lord, this movie is dreadful. It's neither scary nor funny, though I suppose gore hounds may get a kick out of some of the splatter here, and worse, every female character (all two of them, three if you count the woman who only appeals to reveal that she's been performing fellatio on a guy under a desk the whole scene—this is the kind of movie Deathgasm is) seemingly exists solely to appear topless or otherwise be lusted after as a sexual object. Is it too much to ask that my demons-disemboweled-by-power-tools movie be free of ugly sexism? Grade: D

Crooklyn (1994)

It courses with life in the way the best Spike Lee joints do. Lee's beloved Brooklyn is rendered magical and dangerous through the PoV of Troy, a girl growing up with her brothers and parents in a brownstone—the camera captures her family life with the subjectivity of Troy's own experiences, the constant movement of imagery showing the vibrancy Troy's warm but troubled interior life, while the occasional lens manipulation and purposeful areality evoke key moments of alienation and trauma. Like the Radio Days of Lee's obvious inspiration, Woody Allen, Crooklyn is more a collection of memory flashes, nostalgia mixed with genuine heartbreak and strange loose threads, than it is a traditional story, and when the movie most gestures toward a firm narrative structure (the somewhat unsuccessful ending, in which tragedy feels like an artificial imposition of drama, however true to the autobiographical nature of the film), it stumbles. But at its best—and its best is some of Spike Lee's best in general—the film is tremendous. Scripted by Spike and his brother and sister, Crooklyn has the warmth of lived experience. Some moments, like the recurring scenes in which the young siblings sit in front of the television, singing along with the Partridge Family or cheering on the Knicks, could only be the product of shared memories, and they're wonderful—like we're hearing adult siblings reminisce and lightly bicker over an photo album. Grade: A-

Always (1989)

I'd have to go back and rewatch Hook and The Lost World to figure out if Spielberg has a worse movie. But why in the world would I want to do that? I can instead find comfort in the bitter ambiguity that Always, this tedious piece of lifeless schmaltz, just might be the worst thing my boy Steven ever directed. There are of course some nice shots and pieces of lighting, because we're dealing with one of the great formal masters of modern American filmmaking, but I could have just looked those up online and saved myself the tepid romance and unintentionally creepy dynamic of ghost Richard Dreyfuss setting up his ex-wife (Holly Hunter) with some rando he speaks through like a Cyrano de Bergerac demon possession. John Goodman isn't even good here. Grade: D+

More American Graffiti (1979)

I am completely shocked to report that the sequel to American Graffiti is, in fact, WORTH YOUR TIME. What I had assumed was going to be a Happy Days spinoff is actually an ambitious and somewhat complex interpretation of the mid-to-late '60s. Tracking the original cast (minus Richard Dreyfuss) through four cross-cut New Year's Eves from 1964 through 1967, the movie uses a different film format for each year (Super 16 for its Vietnam-set 1965, handheld split-screen documentary style for the psych-rock-scened 1966, etc.), mirroring the explosion of visual media in the back half of the decade as it captures protests, hippies, and a bunch of other hallmarks of the era. Some of this rings of "haha, remember The Sixties??", but far less of it than I would have suspected. The film's rollicking, hijinks-ish feel disrupts the profound melancholy of the original American Graffiti's ending, which is unfortunate. But this is way better than I thought it was going to be and occasionally profound in its own small way. Grade: B

Books

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King (1992)

If this isn't Stephen King's finest novel, then it's very, very close to the top. I'm not sure why it isn't mentioned in the same breath as genre titans like The Stand and Carrie; perhaps it's because Dolores Claiborne is something of a formal experiment for King, not a novel with chapters and shifting points of view as in the standard King piece but more of a 300-page monologue by the titular character, without section breaks or chapter titles or anything novels usually use to demarcate physical space. It's just us and Dolores, and the result is one of the warmest, richest characters Stephen King has ever penned. The first-person narration allows King to indulge in his love for dialect and colloquialism—Dolores is nothing if not colloquial—and while this indulgence is often a liability in King's more traditional novels, as an unending stream from this one particular character without any breaks from that voice, the language becomes a world unto itself, this coiling, self-referential idiom that fits the central tragedy of the main character and conveys her experiences with an alternatingly brusque and intimate manner. And those experiences—the novel's plot isn't complex (essentially, it's a domestic drama disguised as a murder mystery), but what it gives us instead is an uncommonly generous, affectionate portrait of Dolores herself as she recounts the two major relationships of her life: those with her employer Vera and her husband Joe. The empathy and sweetness of the novel is breathtaking—in particular, in its depiction of the thorny bond between Vera and Dolores—and the way it shows the weight of life's accumulating tragedies on one's own soul is heartbreaking, to say nothing of the way this dovetails with the novel's discussions of gender dynamics in 20th century America. Even if you aren't a Stephen King person, I'd highly recommend seeking this out. It's a masterpiece. Grade: A

Music

Sufjan Stevens - Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001)

The early career of Sufjan Stevens is an odd one, in the sense that he seems to have hashed out all his wide-reaching stylistic preoccupations one by one before even attempting to make a truly good album. His debut, A Sun Came, sees Sufjan throwing together a collection of demos that show his various indie and rock-adjacent proclivities; five years later, he released Enjoy Your Rabbit, an album in which he makes a test run of all his electronic impulses. The resulting record is similarly meandering and overlong, and as in A Sun Came, not all the different experiments really work here. It's basically 80 minutes of glitch electronica, something I've never been a huge fan of, and the cluttered sound has the feel of Sufjan just throwing every production technique he can think of into the mix just to see what happens. But thankfully, this album has an organizing principle that gives it a structure (it's about the Chinese zodiac, basically), which makes it a more cohesive listen than A Sun Came. It's still an oddity, mostly for completists. But it's at least one conceived as an album, rather than the disjointed eclecticism of A Sun Came. Grade: B-

Mini-Reviews for November 27 - December 3, 2017

It's that time of year again, when I start to realize all the 2017 movies we aren't going to get in Knoxville until the next day. Oh well. There are plenty of movies here already.

Movies

Coco (2017)
It's way too easy to expect every Pixar feature to be a landmark in narrative animation, even a few years out from Inside Out (the last of their features to qualify, I don't think it's too controversial to say), and then be disappointed when they don't deliver that. But increasingly over the past ten years, the studio has instead contented itself with creating technically dazzling but narratively simple movies. And as it's turned out, Pixar is very very good at creating this sort of modest feature. I think it's important we don't lose sight of this, especially in an era where every Disney animated feature has like a thousand narrative inconsistencies and mainstream blockbusters have like ten thousand—it's increasingly rare to see these sort of narratively coherent works of film fiction on a large-budget scale, so when Pixar gives us something like Coco, a movie whose ambitions are about as modest as any Pixar movie's have been since Cars 2, that's still something to celebrate. It isn't a surprising movie, but it is a colorful one; a gorgeously designed one; a technically breathtaking one (these are perhaps the best computer-animated human models in film history); a tender one—one whose emotional through line comes honestly and organically out of every visual and storytelling beat that precedes it. There isn't a false note in the film, and if that means that it's simply a Very Good movie executed to perfection, in lieu of a Great movie, then oh well; at least we got a very good movie. Grade: A-

Loving Vincent (2017)
The look of Loving Vincent, the first-ever oil-painted animated feature (it was filmed in live action and then the frames were given to artists, who painted over the action in the post-impressionist style of Van Gogh), is dazzling. And one gets the idea that this is the only thing the filmmakers are trying to accomplish, because otherwise, there's really not a ton going on. The plot is a Citizen Kane knockoff of a man investigating the death of Vincent Van Gogh, the acting is fine, and even the use of the visuals is decidedly ordinary, with very little of it reaching for anything beyond the strictly realistic/representational within the Van Gogh style. But it's a true marvel seeing these oil paintings come to life. It's the only animated feature I've ever seen where the sheer craft of the animation was so engrossing—I spent the first half hour of the film just watching the brushstrokes dance across the screen—that I couldn't keep up with the plot for a while. And I suppose that's something, though I surely hope this isn't the pinnacle of oil-painted movies. Grade: B-

Brigsby Bear (2017)
If a plot featuring a developmentally arrested guy who's lived most of his life kidnapped underground obsessing over the mythology of the educational sci-fi TV series his captors have created for him didn't already give it away, surely the casting of Mark Hamill as one of the captors does: Brigsby Bear is a metaphorical commentary on geek fandom. Which is sort of a relief, because this movie works much better as metaphor than anything approaching realism—its warm, dramedic overtures are far too light a touch for this sort of subject matter (unless it were to go full-on Kimmy Schmidt with its silliness, which it doesn't [and side note: what is it with bunker kidnappings and pop culture these days?]). Even as figurative commentary, the movie softballs its approach a bit more than is helpful. I'm all for assuming the best about human decency (this movie resembles nothing so much as that old indie oddity Lars and the Real Girl in the sense that despite its eyebrow-raising premise, the movie largely consists of people being nice to our protagonist). But given the past few years of GamerGating, Rotten Tomato death threating, and the like, I don't know if "decency" is quite the right part of human nature to be highlighting when online male fandom is concerned. Still, there's something rather endearing about this whole endeavor, even if it's not quite as cutting as it should be. Grade: B

Super Size Me (2004)
Look, of course modern eating habits tend to be awful, and of course the food industry has a monetary interest in keeping foods fatty, sugary, and addictive. These are real problems that need to be addressed (more so than they already have), and I wholeheartedly side with Super Size Me on this. But you know what's not helpful? Stupid publicity stunts. Experiments with bad methodology. Linking poor eating habits to ignorance of American history. Ironic music cues. Sardonic animations. Fat shaming. There's so much fat shaming in this movie, y'all. I didn't clock it, but I'd be willing to bet that Spurlock spends at least twice the time visually mocking the appearance of the overweight as he does actually discussing the systematic issues that drive poor food consumption. Lord, I hate mid-2000s issue docs. Grade: D+

Ali (2001)
Good on this movie for making the intersection of Ali's boxing career and his political activism the story's linchpin. Bad on the movie for not making it more interesting. I don't know if I've quite figured out Michael Mann, either—I've never loved one of his movies, and most of them seem, to me, handsomely made but ultimately dry experiences. Such it is here. Grade: C







Television

Lady Dynamite, Season 2 (2017)
Netflix's most idiosyncratic comedy returns with that same blend of meta-commentary, zaniness, silliness, and mildly horrifying introspection that made the first season such a strange, strange delight. Season Two isn't nearly so self-referential (it's dialed down the recurring Arrested Development-style music cues, for one), but in its place is a doubling down on the flashback structure of the first season, adding a hallucinatory "Future" timeline that, in its heightened manic sci-fi, is so surreal and off-the-wall that it's a veritable broadcast from a different universe. As always, there's a high-pitched intensity to the show that's not going to work for everyone, and it doesn't always work for me. But when it does, it's something special. Grade: B+


Books

Danse Macabre by Stephen King (1981)
Stephen King is someone who writes great nonfiction but also has kind of questionable taste in movies/television, so in the case of Danse Macabre, a collection of essays he wrote about horror writing and film, your enjoyment of the former is going to hinge on how much you're willing to lean into the latter. As a historical artifact, this book is kind of interesting because it gives us very early takes into King's thoughts on Alien, The Shining, Halloween, and a few other now-classics that had just been released. Per usual, some of his takes are strange, and his ideas about "women's lib" and gender politics, though not, like, "offensive," betray how long ago this was written and that he's a straight male. And he's also weirdly anti-academia, perhaps burned by the Ivory Tower's disdain for his work and his own experiences as a professor. But on the whole, King's a fascinating and thoughtful analyst of horror fiction, and even if you find his taste in movies iffy, his close reading of the social and artistic implications of horror novels and short stories is surely worthwhile. Plus, two lengthy appendixes provide us with lists of King's movie and book recommendations, both of which are goldmines that split nicely between obvious choices like Rosemary's Baby and more obscure B/pulp fare. Grade: B+

Music

Morgan Craft - Circle of Light (2016)
Every once in a while, I'll go on Bandcamp and download albums that are cheap and sound interesting. So maybe that's how I got this (Morgan Craft is certainly on Bandcamp). But all I know is that I was looking through my downloads folder a couple weeks ago and saw the ZIP folder with this album in it. I have no memory of putting it there. To my knowledge, it just appeared, which is sort of appropriate for a ghostly record of dark-ambient drones (made entirely, according to the Bandcamp page, with electric guitars). It's an album for late nights and loud speakers, being alone in a house, feeling a little spooked. In other words, good stuff. Grade: B+