Mini Reviews for February 10-16, 2020

As you may remember, I was sick last week, so this week's post is both filling in the stuff I didn't get a chance to cover from last week as well as writing about the new stuff I saw this week. Enjoy!

Movies

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
Gorgeous animation—in fact, it's one of the most stunningly rendered "traditional" (i.e. not Spider-Verse) CGI animated features in recent memory. That this is anywhere close to a positive review is entirely on the strength of those visuals. Aside from that, though, I remain completely unable to understand people's connection to the characters and mythology of this franchise; from where I sit, the character models are still ugly, Jay Baruchel's voice acting is still bad, and the larger sweep of the story trends toward convolution rather than gravitas. I'll say this, though: props to this movie for having what is almost certainly the longest sequence devoted to animal mating rituals in an animated movie since Bambi—landmark! Grade: B-

For Sama (2019)
It is pretty tacky to talk about how this movie is shakily edited together from video journals (of a woman in a situation unthinkably more terrifying than anything I've ever experienced), but to watch a movie is to put yourself in a place of privilege over its subject matter, so that's the critical thought that kept flickering through my head. The rest of the time, though, I was pretty deeply moved, and I don't know if I have ever felt a movie scene more viscerally than I did the emergency C-section sequence. Structural issues or not, this is a powerful document. Grade: B+

A Silent Voice (聲の形) (2016)
Meticulous animation that creates a frequently gorgeous effect—it's an oft-made observation, but this is the perfect example of how Japanese animation puts the full power of its technology behind even the most mundane scenarios, and I have nothing but respect for that. As the for the story itself, it felt a little too long and repetitive for my tastes, and the characters' reactions to the two suicide attempts in the movie seem artificial and strange (though perhaps this is just a cultural difference between the US and Japan?). But all that said, the movie finds a good intersection between the sweetness and sourness of its central relationship, and in examining its central ideas of forgiveness, depression, self-loathing, etc., A Silent Voice movingly resists a lot of the pat answers that other movies might lazily reach for. A thorny watch because of that, but not without some fruit. Grade: B

Step Brothers (2008)
Watched this bedridden with a 101 fever, and I honestly don't even know anything about anything. Time is a flat circle, and the "Sweet Child o' Mine" scene is great, but I dunno about the rest. Something else my fevered brain has been thinking about: Bob Dylan's "Isis," on repeat. I don't think that song is in this movie, but it's a good song. Would recommend. Grade: C

Paris Is Burning (1990)
Everything I liked about Climax with none of what I hated. Alternately, a vital and foremostly fun record of late-'80s NYC "ball" culture, and probably the most thorough and complex analysis of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in film history. Grade: A

Purple Rain (1984)
The narrative portions of this movie range from charmingly amateur to outright bad—not really sure what to do with either the bleeding-wound autobiographical elements or the copious misogyny here, either. But luckily, the movie is about 50% musical performances, and as every being, mortal and immortal alike, can attest, the music of Purple Rain slaps all the way to the moon and back. It may in fact be impossible to tear your eyes from the screen as Prince just tears up number after number up on that stage, and the decision to end the movie with about 20 consecutive minutes of music is the best one this movie makes. It's not hard to see why people flocked to this movie; it's also not hard to see why people don't really talk about the movie when they talk about this movie. It's Prince, y'all. Who cares what else there is? Grade: B-

Television

Joe Pera Talks with You, Season 2 (2019-20)
The second season of the best Adult Swim series of all time not only continues the soft-spoken, sincere nicety of its previous season; it also expands everything about what this show is, and in doing so, it becomes a masterpiece. Often eschewing the essayic digressions of its first season, Season Two increasingly deals directly with the psychological realities of its characters and the small and heartbreaking ways in which the march of time changes even the placidity of the show's Upper Peninsula. It's simple, but never simplistic, and almost always profound. I was openly weeping by the ends of half of these episodes. There's nothing like it on television right now, the unassuming beauty of this series and its quiet but hard-won aphoristic triumphs. Grade: A+

BoJack Horseman, Season 6 (2019-20)
All my shows are ending, y'all. Here's BoJack Horseman, ending its run on a mostly high note. There have been a lot of shows recently that have focused on personal growth and recovery in their final stretch (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend comes to mind), and that's the route that BoJack goes, too, in its closing season; its first half largely centers on the twin poles of BoJack's enrollment in rehab and Diane's struggle with depression that leads her to get psychiatric help, while the second half of the season is largely about the thorny, difficult pieces of life that happen after the formal steps of recovery: after medication, after you get out of rehab. And it's pretty good! Creator/showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg has said that he thought Netflix was going to give him more episodes to spread these arcs out over, and that's apparent: secondary characters like Todd get what feels like rushed send-offs that feel like all the show could fit in alongside the main attractions of Diane and BoJack. But allowing for that slightly rushed feel along the edges of the show, it's a mostly compelling conclusion to the series, giving some of the more complex wrestling with "#MeToo" and the idea of problematic protagonists I've seen in a show. It also provides some really stunning individual episodes, most notably the penultimate episode "The View From Halfway Down," which is probably the most frightening and bleak that the show has ever been. And alongside all this, there's of course also the supremely goofy animal puns and wacky humor on clear display, too; I am completely in love with the running gag of the His-Girl-Friday-esque pair of reporters, Paige Sinclair and Maximillian Banks, and there's half a dozen other jokes up to that caliber. This show was special; I'm going to miss it. Grade: B+

The Good Place, Season 4 (2019-20)
The Good Place has always been a show better at exploring ideas than it was developing characters. That doesn't mean that Eleanor, Chidi, etc., didn't have their charms, because they did. But at least for me, if you asked why I came back to the show, it wasn't because I cared particularly strongly for the central cast, winsome as they are. So it's somewhat disappointing that the show's final season leans so heavily on the affection we supposedly have for these characters. Long periods of the final 13 episodes are devoted to giving arcs to the main characters, especially the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, and while I never hated the romance between Eleanor and Chidi, I always appreciated it more as a sideshow to the much more interesting metaphysical ideas this show was batting around. Because when you get right down to it, these characters were not especially complex or interesting; they had an accumulation of traits that worked well for sitcom situations, which was especially helpful in the first season when this show was still halfway a metaphor for the creation of a TV show. But they simply cannot bear the weight of the entire show being put on their shoulders, especially when the characters' emotional arcs are meant also to carry home the ultimate metaphysical ideas the show settles on. About those ideas: I really wish they'd done something more than the whole "eternity is a prison, so the only ethical afterlife is one that eventually leads to annihilation" thing. Look, I know many very smart people have proposed this concept before (including Todd May, a philosopher who makes a cameo in the finale and who argues that life is only meaningful because we are mortal), but I've yet to see anything that convinces me that this whole idea is just unsubstantiated hypothesizing—we don't know anything but mortality, so it seems patently absurd to be so convinced that it is mortality that gives us meaning. Or at any rate, the show is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that an eternal paradise would eventually become hell. Death is a thief and a bastard, and the ability the choose when it happens only solves half of the problem. As long as we're inventing made-up fantasy heavens, I am willing to risk one without it, thank you. So anyway, it's a final season whose characters can't sustain the weight the show puts on them, nor can the show's ideas stand the scrutiny their placement in the finale engenders. It's not like this last season of The Good Place isn't enjoyable in a lot of the ways the show has been enjoyable since its beginning: it's still funny and goofy and absurd in some pretty fun ways, its zippy plotting keeps things interesting and resists settling into a status quo, etc. But on the deepest levels on which The Good Place has been entertaining in the past, Season 4 falls short, which is too bad. So long to one of network television's quirkiest and most thoughtful delights; I'll remember you for the good times, not the finale. Grade: B-

Silicon Valley, Season 6 (2019)
In its final year, the long-running tech satire finds a few new fresh directions, including some topical ones (Richard begins this season testifying before congress making promises about data privacy that he clearly has no idea the feasibility of), and in general, the final season's focus on tech ethics and data harvesting does give Silicon Valley some of the bite it lost in its mediocre last couple years. It's still not nearly as funny as it once was, and the finale bizarrely lands the show on a note of optimism that feels both weirdly out-of-sync for this show and also pretty disconnected from the inescapable hell that is real-world Silicon Valley (I would be shocked if there was a non-zero number of tech giants who intentionally destroyed a very cool piece of code because it had the possibility of destroying the world). But the journey to that note is a solid one, and I had a fun time taking a ride with this show one more time. So yay. Grade: B

Books

March Series by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, Illustrated by Nate Powell (2013-16)
I was a little skeptical of these books at first, because my impression of them is that they were part of the whole "let's turn a school subject into a graphic novel so the kids these days will learn it!" movement, which isn't a movement without its merits but sometimes does lead to some prosaic stuff. The first book feels a lot like that, too, but each successive book gets increasingly complex in ways I wasn't expecting, eventually forming a cycle of books that gives a rich and difficult conversation about the push and pull between radicalism and centrism within political movements. A large part of this comes out of the grounding of the books within John Lewis's point of view, which gives the books a lot of personality and momentum that wouldn't be possible in a straight history. These books are as much memoir as history, which is great; that point of view also saves the books from a lot of the sanctimony that we often like to give history—it is fascinating, for example, how Martin Luther King, Jr., is presented not just as an important leader but also as both a distant celebrity and a frustratingly conservative (relatively) alongside Lewis's more radical vision from SNCC. It doesn't all work; there's a pretty hokey framing device involving Obama's first inauguration, hokey enough that I wonder if, by the end, there's a kind of bitter irony being engaged in (the book ends by talking about the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the late '60s, which then gets juxtaposed with Obama in ways that feel at-best ambivalent). But on the whole, I'm pleasantly surprised by how moving and powerful I found these books. Kids who won't read could do a lot worse than to learn about Civil Rights from this series. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for January 21-February 10, 2019

I'm back, baby!

Movies

The Hate U Give (2018)
A mixed-to-positive bag. This adaptation imports some of my least-favorite elements from the original book, from the pointless boyfriend character to the pedestrian style (though it's a better-directed movie than the book is written), while leaving out some of the best elements of the novel—the vibrant sense of place in the book's Garden Heights neighborhood is almost completely gone here, alongside the rich, multi-generational, intra-community response to tragedy evoked by the novel. But on the other hand, the film version wisely streamlines the novel's lumpy storytelling, often to great effect, and even if Amandla Stenberg can't ever make the (awful, tedious, expository) voiceover work, the acting is across-the-board excellent, which gives these characters a lot more life than they had in their novel versions. And for as much as the movie flubs the climax in its seriously ill-advised "hate we give" moment (unique to the film), it generally retains the novel's fearless intersection with incendiary political realities, rendered grippingly here. The whole is far from perfect, but there are some sublime pieces. Grade: B

Never Goin' Back (2018)
I spent most of my high school years scowling at movies like this; there's a LOT of shared DNA between the stoner comedies of the '90s and 2000s and Never Goin' Back, from the, well, the smoking to the pointedly gross scatological humor to the easy-going chemistry between the leads. Nowadays, I've come around to a lot of those old comedies anyway, but even so, it's a wonder how much good gender-flipping the formula does—most notably, by replacing the often bro-y demeanor that is the necessary[citation needed] evil of the male-led iteration of the genre with an almost literally riotous, completely endearing us-against-the-world fury carried to perfection by Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone in the leading roles. It's hilarious and oddly moving, and I never got tired of the basic gag wherein these girls keep stumbling into a for-real bro-stoner plot, only to express extreme irritation at finding themselves there. So say we all. Grade: B+

The Sisters Brothers (2018)
I've seen a lot of people using the term "black comedy" for this movie, but I think that's selling short just how heavily the specter of death hangs over this movie. In what's probably more accurately described as a slightly more banter-y, slightly more deadly take on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Sisters Brothers is both a lament and a critique of human enterprise—not nihilistic, exactly, but definitely convinced that the worst human impulses are also the strongest. On paper, I love this, and there are definitely things I love (particularly the casting—John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix are a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combo of co-leads). But also, there's something that feels a little slack here; nothing has quite the punch it needs to tip the movie over into greatness. It may be a scripting problem, honestly, or perhaps also a pacing one. Whatever the case, it's good—just not amazing. Grade: B

Curse of the Man Who Sees UFOs (2016)
What initially presents itself as a bemused depiction of eccentric UFO chaser Christo Roppolo eventually turns into a more serious chronicle of Roppolo's personal tragedies (of which he has several). The UFO footage (real videos that Roppolo has taken, complete with his own ecstatic, often-profane commentary) is great, and Roppolo has just the right shades of unself-conscious oddity and pathos to make his mere presence onscreen consistently engaging. It's an affectionate portrayal of the guy, which is good, since this could easily slide into mockery of Roppolo; that said, filmmaker Justin Gaar seems to have mistaken affection for depth, and the movie as a whole is a bit surface-level in its engagement with Roppolo, despite being constructed out of what looks to have been some really engaging interviews. The movie is fun, but you wonder how much better it could have been if it had dug just a little deeper. Grade: B-

Karl Marx City (2016)
Petra Epperlein's investigation into her father's suicide doubles as a memoir of her childhood in East Germany and triples as a survey of East Germany in general. Watching her sort through literally miles of indexed records from the former state is awe-inspiring and terrifying; that sort of imagery, of which this movie is full to the brim, does a really great job arguing for the mid-century surveillance state as both apotheosis and nadir of modernity before digitization papered it all over with the veneer of ethics. Grade: B+

The Transfiguration (2016)
"Let the Right One In but in a NYC housing project" is the pithy way of describing this movie, but honestly, it's about all you need to know about it. Also, it's a nice touch to have a modern-day adolescent vampire obsessed with ranking vampire movies by how realistic they are, as if he were pre-gaming for the YouTube algorithm. Grade: B

Adore (2013)
Kind of reads like someone watched the end of Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel movie and thought they could do that sort of twist one better. But you'd think that a movie about best friends having sex with each other's kids would be a little less... boring. Grade: C-

Black Dynamite (2009)
Props to a parody so committed to recreating the lo-fi charms of blaxspoilation that it was filmed over less than three weeks on 16mm. The format here feels of a piece with Walk Hard in the sense that it's looking at a very specific genre and twisting the tropes just enough to the left to register as hilarious, though Black Dynamite is considerably more of an affectionate homage of blaxploitation than Walk Hard is of the musician biopic—to wit, Black Dynamite actually likes its parody target, and as such, this is less about making the genre the butt of the joke than it is about celebrating the genre to excess. It's tremendous fun, although I do wish this movie hadn't had quite so much affection for the sexism of the '70s alongside all the zooms and "jive talk." Grade: B

The Wrestler (2008)
Lacking the sometimes irritating cinematic theatrics of his early work like Requiem for a Dream and the balls-to-the-wall theological anguish of Aronofsky's mature period (that's what I'm calling Noah and mother!, deal with it), The Wrestler finds our ol' boy Darren somewhere in the middle, a gritty, naturalistic companion piece to 2010's nightmarish Black Swan. Like Black Swan, the plot beats here are somewhat obvious in their working through the tortured, self-destructive dedication of a craftsman bent on excellence, but unlike Black Swan, The Wrestler actually finds a beating heart within its inevitable arc. Maybe Aronofsky is just closer to the masculine dysfunction of this film as opposed to the svelte femininity of the other film (which he seemingly can't help but fetishize). No matter; I definitely felt something here, however standard the tragic hero structure is, and the film's final fifteen-ish minutes are powerful. My favorite Aronofsky mode is still when he's basically doing Midrash in cinematic form, but if I can't have that, then The Wrestler isn't a bad alternative. Grade: B+

Beowulf (2007)
I'm kind of gobsmacked by how much I liked this. Most of the negative reviews I see of this movie are grounded in pretty shallow critiques along the lines of "That's not how Beowulf goes!" And, I mean, that's technically correct—this is not how Beowulf goes. But these aren't just idle changes; the specific points at which this movie differs from the original epic are rich in a way that indicates they have been made by people with a deep understanding of the original, such that they know exactly which parts to tweak to completely transform the narrative. For example, the often-excised digressive sections of the original Anglo-Saxon poem are the ones where, in song, the Danes tell the mythological histories of their society, but rather than mythical digressions, what takes their place in this movie (following the fight with Grendel's mother, traditionally where "Hrothgar's sermon" occurs) is a reading of the actual text of the Beowulf poem (in Old English!) by the men of Herot. However ahistorical this is (what are Danes doing speaking Anglo-Saxon?), what it's done is position Beowulf the Epic Poem as mythology within the film, with the film itself occupying a similarly role in revising and mythologizing the stoic yet absurdly out-sized masculinity of both contemporary action films and masculine heroes without history. The whole movie becomes something of a meta-text for our sanctimonious posture toward our own literary heroes. And what are these heroes, as laid bare in this movie? Freakin' toxic males about whom we tell lies to make ourselves feel better for venerating them. I know it feels very "woke in 2019" to say that this movie is about toxic masculinity, but if not that, then at the very least this movie is about the myths about masculinity that our societies tell that end up propping up reprehensible, society-destroying behavior generation after generation. And look, maybe you don't care about yet another movie about bad dudes being bad, which is fair. And further in your defense, I will say this: 2007 gave us two PG-13 animated movies that include lengthy actions sequences hinged on a naked guy running through landscape that hides his junk in increasingly absurd ways, and what a world we live in that the one that actually had the guts to show the penis in the end was The Simpsons Movie. Grade: B+

Lady in the Water (2006)
Finds M. Night Shyamalan in full mad-scientist mode. At once an elaborate piece of dark fantasy, a treatise on the nature of narrative fiction, a testy refutation of The Village's critics, a social allegory, and also a commentary on the Iraq War (?!?), Lady in the Water can't be accused of being understuffed. I'm not sure if it would be a better movie if it were doing less, but lordy, is it doing too much. The oddly convoluted mythology of the fantasy makes an ill fit with some of the more straightforwardly metaphorical moments, and when the movie turns toward a sort of cock-eyed autobiography for Shyamalan, it feels vindictive and petty and self-aggrandizing. But then again, critics were wrong about The Village, which makes Shyamalan's self-mythologizing technically correct in a way that kind of makes all the self-aggrandizing feel somewhat badass, too. The movie's a complete mess, but it's kind of endearingly so, and regardless, it remains one of the foremost examples in recent memory of truly weird cinema somehow Trojan-horsing itself into a mainstream studio release. Grade: B-

All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) (1999)
A lot soapier than I was expecting my first Almodóvar to be, which isn't necessarily bad, although the dramatic beats have that kind of muted impact of those in soaps, too. It has a really stellar score and great acting all around and above all some truly tremendous cinematography/lighting/set design/location scouting, so the movie looks and sounds fantastic front-to-back. But still, I had a hard time connecting to this lumpily structured, winding film, which I think I'm going to have to lay on the writing—there's a thrilling way to be off-format as far as act-structures go, and then there's this, which merely feels mushy and directionless and cloaks its fraught emotional territory in a vague conflictual haze. I enjoy the warmth of the portrayal of the trans community here, but even with that, I've seen some of the modern trans community critiquing the way it frames trans folks through the experiences of a cis woman, which I understand. So yeah. Good pieces, frustrating whole. Grade: B-

Sólo Con Tu Pareja (1991)
A very middling (if raucous) sex comedy is elevated somewhat by some great cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki. It's amazing how mature the aesthetic dimensions of the Cuarón/Lubezki partnership are at this early a stage in their careers—this is the theatrical debut for both, and even here, it's a fruitful collaboration. So this movie looks great. The rest... ehhh, well, first of all, it's not very funny, outside of one sequence that's basically the adult version of the old "Oh no! I've invited two different girls to the same dance!" plot. And second of all, the idea—esp. in 1991, very much within the peak years of the AIDS epidemic—of using a fake AIDS scare as a tool for teaching some rando dirtbag straight dude a lesson about being a slightly better rando dirtbag straight dude: that scans as majorly iffy for me. Grade: C

The Godfather: Part III (1990)
It's not all that uncommon for a second sequel to be thematically redundant; the Toy Story movies didn't have a single new thematic idea after the first one. So that the third Godfather film isn't really saying anything new isn't an inherent evil, and in fact, the movie does accentuate the religious subtexts of the previous two movies in interesting ways (though again, it's hardly revolutionary in the context of the franchise), which alone makes the movie undeserving of the hate it gets in some circles; that and that the film is sumptuous to an extreme degree, no surprise from a F. F. Coppola production, esp. at this stage of his career—this is essentially the same iteration of Coppola who made Bram Stoker's Dracula two years later, if that gives you an idea of the visual richness here. Still, there's not really a compelling reason for this movie to exist, and certainly not three hours of it; unlike Toy Story, this movie's thematic remixing of its predecessors doesn't result in anything dramatically urgent. Like, in theory I dig the way that this movie links crime and religion and corporate capitalism in a much more explicit way that in the '70s Godfather films, in much the same way that the third Toy Story makes the mortal implications of the series literal. But also, I kind of have a hard time caring beyond that theory; interesting theory, but it's all head and no heart, you know? Grade: B

Cape Fear (1962)
It's fine and good and has a really, really great climax. But the whole time, I couldn't stop thinking how much I wanted to rewatch that episode of The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob is Robert Mitchum's character. It doesn't help that the movie is, in a lot of ways, a less-interesting remake of Night of the Hunter. Grade: B

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938)
A very fun screwball adaptation of a play adapting a very not fun fairy tale. Claudette Colbert is great, per usual, and Gary Cooper is surprisingly good as her co-lead—a far cry from the "strong, silent type" of his reputation. You really can't go wrong with a Billy Wilder screenplay (co-written with frequent collaborator Charles Brackett) directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and while some of the character work gets a little inconsistent at times, the whole is just so airy and hilarious that I'll forgive a few out-of-character moments. Grade: B+

A Story of Floating Weeds (浮草物語) (1934)
My first silent Ozu ever and my first Ozu at all in several years. This is definitely the work of the master of Tokyo Story. Even if that master isn't quite at the top of his game yet (the character of Otaka, for example, feels too one-note both to make her woman-scorned role interesting and to carry the pivot toward nuance in the film's final minutes), it's still got that same heady combination of a simple story dealing with some anguishedly complex emotions—emotions made even more complex by the misogynist violence of the protagonist near the film's climax. We're supposed to feel for this man's situation while also feeling the depth of his destructive impulses while also understanding the social forces that guide him toward resorting to violence while also recognizing the internalized classism he wrestles with daily while also completely understanding the reactions of everyone around him. Like I said, complex emotions. Maybe more complex than is strictly responsible. Maybe more complex than I'm quite up to handling at this particular moment. But also, isn't that what happens when something is truly complex? Grade: B+

Floating Weeds (浮草) (1959)
I'm not sure this story is better served by giving it more space to be naturalistic (and have random comic relief from the stage players?), but it's also much, much more consciously gorgeous in that classic Ozu way—my word, the colors. One of the bit characters says it best: "The sky is so blue; it's sad." So between this one and the 1934 original, I'd say it's six of one, a half dozen of the other. Grade: B+






Television

The Good Place, Season 3 (2018-19)
The third season of The Good Place is by-far its least consistent. In previous seasons, the show's constant shape-shifting has been thrilling; this season marks the first time that the show shifts into shapes that don't completely work. The early goings of the season, in which our cast get a chance to continue their Earthly lives, has some interesting things to say about the show's central inquiry into "What does it mean to be a good person?", but that doesn't stop the majority of these episodes from feeling rudderless at times—simultaneously underdeveloped and not engaging enough to sustain more development. But on the plus side, the show's restlessness in format means it never settles down long enough for the weaker pieces of the season to truly curdle, and along the way, we're treated to some of the very best episodes the series has done yet: the metaphysical "Jeremy Bearimy," the please-give-D'Arcy-Carden-an-Emmy grandeur of "Janet(s)," the deeply wistfulness season finale. For as shaky as some of the individual pieces are, taken as a whole, this season gives the show's emotional core a resonance it's not previously had, and that new resonance lends the show's philosophical and ethical questions a new weight alongside the usual jokiness evoked by past seasons' dalliances with philosophy. That a network comedy would arrive at a particularly meaningful invocation of "no ethical consumption under capitalism" has me thrown completely on my backside. God bless this show. Grade: B+

SpongeBob SquarePants, Season 2 (2000-2003)
It dials back some of the gleeful whimsy of the first season in favor of something more akin to dadaism ("NOSFERATU??"); this mixes with an often more straightforwardly satirical bent, of, for example, language ("Sailor Mouth"), standup comedy ("Squirrel Jokes"), and factory farming ("Jellyfish Hunter"), and the result is some of the show's best and most iconic episodes. This second season is just a tremendous season of television, and it's nice that, for once, an object of such intense millennial nostalgia is actually good. Grade: A




Books

Inspired by Rachel Held Evans (2018)
Rachel Held Evans takes a break from the memoir-ish mode of her previous books to create a work about the big kahuna of all books: the Bible. She seems to be at about the same place I am regarding the Bible, which is to have moved on from the literal, legalistic lens of her upbringing toward a more diverse, open-handed approach to Biblical interpretation, which is cool; I like where I'm at right now. However, as is often true of the whole post-Evangelical crowd once they get past the telling of their own deconstruction/reconstruction stories, Inspired finds Held Evans basically realizing that a key part of moving forward toward a more inclusive faith is the inclusion of more voices. So Inspired is mostly a survey of a lot of different interpretive lenses for the Bible: here's liberation theology! Here's historical criticism! etc. Which is good; those are important ideas to know and use. But also, if these are important ideas, it begs the question of why I'm reading what Rachel Held Evans has to say about these things rather than just going straight to the source and picking up any of the many, many books used as references for Inspired. There's value in an accessible 101 orientation to the broader world of biblical interpretation, which is what Inspired is. I definitely heard from voices I hadn't heard from before, and I got stuff out of this book. But also, if the post-Evangelical movement is going to be worth my time going forward, it's going to have to figure out its place within this broader world rather than just observing it all as if it were a buffet set before it. Honestly, my gut tells me that the post-Evangelical movement's place is in critically engaging with the Evangelicalism of its past, and while I realize that's an exhausting prospect, it's probably the most critical. All of which is to say, this is not Rachel Held Evans's best work, although it's hardly a waste of time either. Grade: B

Wonder by R. J. Palacio (2012)
I guess I thought this was going to be a sentimental message novel. What it actually is is a pretty bracing depiction of the hardships of self-actualization in the early stages of middle school. This is (rightly) focused most on August, the central character whose facial disfigurement throws into relief all the prejudices of the early-adolescent social sphere, but one of the biggest surprises of the novel for me was the extent to which the novel grants a voice to the satellite secondary characters, who also struggle to navigate the nuances of their social strata—either due to their own tangled selfishness or the inconsideration of others. While I did kind of look askance at the extent to which this book resolves each and every conflict in the seeming happiest way possible, its journey there is a lot more honest and mature than most YA books intended for a supposedly more "mature" audience. Grade: A-

The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket (2005)
For its... uh, penultimate entry, the series returns to the social satire of its best books after the lackluster Grim Grotto, and the results are excellent. Being a kind of big reunion novel (the setting this time is a hotel, and the guests are a veritable who's who of the series' characters), there's no particular strata of society that the book puts through its funhouse mirror; rather, this novel positions its hotel as the intersection of all the various settings of the series's past, and as such, the plot becomes something of a culminating satire, an examination of how all these various worlds interact with one another. This feeds right into the book's primary philosophical idea and its most concerted and honest wrestling with the series's ethical questions yet: that the sheer complexity and accumulation of narratives and information in the modern world makes it impossible to gather enough knowledge to make truly informed ethical evaluations—especially compared to the curated, artificially pared down world presented to children. It's a fascinating and sophisticated development for a series that leaned into deceptive simplicity for its early books, and more so than the periodic birthdays that crop up in the series's plots, this development best signals the Baudelaire's growth from childhood into adolescence. The book's climax involves the novel's entire cast trying to run a courtroom while all wearing blindfolds, and really, I can't think of a better evocation of the human condition in all of children's literature. Grade: A

The End by Lemony Snicket (2006)
In one of the more audacious literary allusions in the series, The Penultimate Peril is explicitly centered around a quote from Richard Wright's Native Son: "Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?" That book answers the question definitively, culminating in the crumbling of the series's plurality of societies in the book's final chapters. The fire that ends the book is, for all intents and purposes, the end of the world as defined by the previous 11 books, so it's unsurprising—though no less audacious—that the final book in this series is about the creation of a new world: physically, socially, and even morally. It only makes sense; each book up to the penultimate one has been, in some form or another, about the dysfunctional orderliness and incomprehensible complexity of modern society, so it's incredibly satisfying that the series would end by examining the cosmic fabric by which social order is created in the first place. What's got me completely gobsmacked is just how intricate and rich this final book's approach to that idea is. Washing up on an island along with the rubble of their past adventures, the Baudelaires end their story with a group of humans trying to build a new society quite literally out of the broken pieces of the past, and on top of that is the way that this new society takes the fragments of all the linguistic tics of the series to try to build a new moral framework by which they can understand Count Olaf, Kit Snicket, and all the other characters who wash up from the series's past. It is supremely complex, bending the series in on itself to build this final novel out of the flotsam of the previous books and in the end arriving at something that's almost literally biblical in its scope (Edenic imagery litters the book): a novel about the entire sweep of human history, realized with beautiful simplicity in the microcosm of the Baudelaire family. If the penultimate book focused on that Richard Wright quote, then this final book could just as easily organized itself around another famous literary excerpt: Faulkner's claim that "the past is never dead; it's not even past." Each generation, The End argues, must build their world from the artifacts left by previous generations—artifacts whose context is increasingly lost to time and yet who inevitably drag that mysterious, obscure context with them into the future. We are both compelled to make our world better and doomed to repeat the errors of the whole series of unfortunate events of human history, and somehow, both of the betterment of the world and the cyclical inevitability of the past's traumas coexist in each new iteration of our universe. The world is both new and the same. Frankly, folks, The End is the best novel I've read in years and a flat-out masterpiece—something I would have never have guessed I would have said about any piece of this series when I started it last year. I'm shocked how good this whole series is but even more shocked that it ended with one of the great novels of the 21st century. Bravo. Grade: A+

Mini-Reviews for January 29 - February 4, 2018

January, the Monday of Months, is over. Long live February!

Movies

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

This is basically the epitome of a movie that's "interesting" without actually piquing my interest much. It's not for lack of trying. There are parallels to Greek drama, the Bible, and just plain ol' ethics a-plenty here, all filtered through the register of Lanthimos's typical black-comic absurdity with impressive deadpan—the fact that the characters all speak in the flattest of monotones, regardless of whether they are talking about murder, masturbation, or mundanity, feels like self-parody of the highest order, and it's probably the one Lanthimos technique that I felt invested in at all here (though I'll also go to bat for the bleached, angular cinematography, which doesn't feel as quintessentially Lanthimosian but fits the chilly humor of the film perfectly). The rest, sadly, is just not drawn with the razor precision of his earlier work, at least not enough to make the film much to wade through. "Don't you understand? It's a metaphor," one character says at one point, and you gotta admire the gumption it took to put a line like that in here but also, like, yes, I do understand but I just don't care—the movie in a nutshell. Grade: C+

Princess Cyd (2017)

It's a movie full of great incident and generous characterizations, and there are so many moments that I watched and found so precisely human. So I enjoyed it a ton based on those pieces. I mean, some of this stuff seems genetically engineered to appeal to me: for example, the characters have a soirée in which people tell stories and read excerpts from "The Dead" (though to be fair, at least two of the characters are totally bored by this, which seems about right). However, it's also a movie so strangely devoid of conflict that when conflict does appear, it feels really joltingly out of place—e.g. there's a subplot about a murder-suicide that I'm really not sure at all belongs in this movie. Still, it's great on a hang-out-type rubric, and the two leads (Jessie Pinnick as the titular Cyd, a by-turns endearing and monstrously inconsiderate teenager, and Rebecca Spence as Cyd's aunt, who hosts the soirée and that's probably enough to let you know about her) are tremendous and have this wonderful natural chemistry. However meandering it was, I definitely don't begrudge my time spent with the film. Grade: B

Lost in Paris (Paris pieds nus) (2016)

It's pretty much a Chaplin movie, only every character is a Chaplin character. Plus Wes Anderson's visual sensibilities. Your mileage with this movie is probably going to depend exactly on how much you like either of those filmmakers (and especially how appealing you find the prospects of their combination to be), but I'm digging it a lot. Grade: B+

The Last Unicorn (1982)

It's really obvious what isn't good about The Last Unicorn: the songs are bad, sounding like the kind of music '70s prog rockers would have made in 1982 if they hadn't discovered New Wave; the animation is undeniably cheap-looking; the score is overbearing and schmaltzy. But there's a lot to like here, too, or at least a lot that I like. First of all, the voice acting is great, particularly Mia Farrow as the titular unicorn and Christopher Lee as the late-breaking villain. And then there's the screenplay, which, written by Peter S. Beagle (who wrote the excellent novel on which this movie is based), is quietly poetic and melancholic in a way that children's fantasy rarely is. And best of all are the character designs, which don't look great in-motion due to the aforementioned cheapness but do look great as designs; this was sort of a golden age for idiosyncratic character designs in American animation, the sole moment in the history of American animation when Disney's dominance over the market waned for long enough that animators didn't feel like they needed to aspire to the round, cuddly Mouse-House templates. This is the same environment that allowed for the brief, bright flourishing of Ralph Bakshi, and the images we're presented in The Last Unicorn are similar: lumpy and stern characters that range from the innocent (the aspiring magician) to the grotesque (Angela Lansbury's witch character) to the viscerally frightening (the harpy, the red bull), all superimposed over elaborate backgrounds—though instead of Bakshi's urban decay, The Last Unicorn goes for evocative, medieval-art-influenced landscapes. It's a strange and uneven movie, but it's also capable of striking beauty, too. Grade: B

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

This movie flat-out wouldn't work without Bowie. Everything about him—his mid-'70s otherwordliness, the casually dashing costuming draped over his cocaine-drained body, his oddly vulnerable line readings, that carrot-orange hair—is perfectly calibrated for the specific needs of The Man Who Fell to Earth, and if there was one role David Jones was born to play, it was that of a mesmerizingly handsome alien lost among the strangeness of human routine. Don't get me wrong: Roeg is doing great work here as director, and Graeme Clifford is maybe even doing better work as editor—this is a film full of, if nothing else, arresting imagery, and it's strung together compellingly (if at times a little shakily). But Bowie grounds the movie; while the plotting and other characters can be opaque, it's his performance that gives the film its form, weighing the character with a heavy sense of tragedy. This is, above all, a movie about how the bizarre rituals of modern human life are inherently corrupting, and Bowie, who in his own personal life was on a particularly rough downswing from the excesses of modernity, embodies that sentiment more profoundly than any stunt-casted celebrity has in a film role before or since. Grade: B+

How to Steal a Million (1966)

Lots of fun, though much more so in the early goings when the power dynamics between Hepburn and O'Toole are more evenly distributed. Once the heist begins, O'Toole definitively takes the reigns of the plot, and the film loses a lot of that repartee in favor of wide-eyed adoration toward O'Toole's character. It's still enjoyable, and the heist sequence is by turns tense and funny. But something of the spark gets lost along the way, mostly on the Hepburn end. That's said, if all a movie gives you is Hepburn's egg-shaped driving hat and goggles, then it's still a win in my book. Grade: B

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)

An early Irwin Allen disaster film. The premise is amusingly ludicrous (a meteor makes the sky catch on fire across the world, and a super submarine must shoot a cruise missile into the sky to blow the fire into space), and for a while, I was thinking that I'd be happy just watching this stupid science play out. But alas, it quickly devolves into a reeeally dull chamber drama with the submarine crew, and aside from a few sort of exciting setpieces (there are not one but two sequences involving tentacled sea creatures), it ended up being a drag. Grade: C

Television

The Good Place, Season 2 (2017-18)

Improving everything that was good about Season 1 and pretty much jettisoning the few things that didn't work, The Good Place's second year is a phenomenal testament to everyone involved in its creation. With the first season's twist out of the bag, the series's second season has been able to spend a lot more time world-building and exploring the bizarre mechanics of the fanciful afterlife that the characters inhabit, and the absolute best moments of this season are when the show pushes its premise right up to a cliff and then jumps—for example, in the season's third episode, "Dance Dance Resolution," in which Michael reboots the show's world literally hundreds of times, or in the last few episodes of the season, in which the show unexpectedly turns itself into a low-key thriller. Most impressive is that as chameleonic as The Good Place has proven itself to be, it never feels like it loses its identity, and this is largely a credit to the actors, who ground the show in an increasingly warm and slightly melancholic emotional space. Ted Danson remains the best in show, of course, but the rest of the cast steps up tremendously as the show throws increasingly complex character entanglements at them. It's all very lovely and hilarious and still like nothing else on television right now, and I can't recommend it enough. Grade: A

Music

Air - Moon Safari (1998)

The thing about Air is that they really just want to be the French electronica version of Pink Floyd, if Pink Floyd were considerably less morose. Moon Safari is Exhibit A, beginning with what basically amounts to an upbeat "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" and hitting those same vibes several more times over the course of the record's 44 minutes. Once you figure this out, there really isn't that much to the album besides the prog-blues antecedent, so your enjoyment of the album is couched almost entirely on whether or not you find this prospect interesting. Lucky for me, I love this sound. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for January 16 - 22, 2017

Reviews for a rough week.

Movies

The Love Witch (2016)

Watch this movie. The Love Witch is beautiful to look at—populated with gorgeous people, eye-popping costumes, and a wonderfully tactile film grain, the movie never ceases to be visually stunning. A pastiche of '60s Technicolor thrillers in which all the lively sets and costumes have been designed by its mad genius director, Anna Biller, The Love Witch is a work of tremendous passion, only appropriate for a plot whose protagonist, played with hilarious deadpan by Samantha Robinson, is a witch in search of true love. There's clearly some social commentary going on here, but the film's delivery—a confident but sometimes disorienting blend of satire, parody, and straight-up exploitation—defies a clear interpretation along the lines of the gendered themes it engages in. Don't fear, though: even without any sort of "message" (and who wants that in their killer witch movies?), this movie is whip-smart and great fun. Grade: A-

The BFG (2016)

Spielberg's penchant for earnest sentiment makes a surprisingly effective companion to Roald Dahl's sardonic absurdity, and although I haven't read the book this movie is based on, the film is a nice reminder of just how odd Dahl stories can be (let's not forget that Charlie and a band of space aliens meet the POTUS himself in the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). It's all quite effective in its own narrow way, playing toward specific beats of family film and children's fantasy that might not be everyone's favorite and I'm not entirely sure is mine. That the film's effects are big and colorful and look great helps tremendously. Grade: B+

Little Men (2016)

As a commentary on gentrification, which this movie seems to nominally want to be, Little Men has little practical impact, being way too committed to the "both sides are equally wrong" argument to even consider that most of the historical factors driving gentrification have little to do with the events of this film, which involves a family inheriting a building. But as a gently tragic character drama, Little Men works quite well, if not quite as well as director Ira Sachs's previous stunner, Love Is Strange. Still, like that movie, it's infused with a fantastic sense of melancholy and an insightful eye for character details. Grade: B

Cameraperson (2016)

Long-time documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson gives a thoughtful overview of her career by assembling this collage of footage she's shot in everything from doc blockbusters like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizenfour to indies that you (or certainly I) have never heard of. The effect is something like the abstracting of the TV clip show format, and the results are frequently cool and occasionally haunting—one late-film montage is nothing but still shots of locations where human rights atrocities have occurred, and it's probably the film's best moment. As with any compilation of this nature, there's an inherent frustration in the format when the individual clips are too good and simply leave you wanting to see the original rather than the montage-ready version. But on the whole, it's an arresting parade of images and words. Grade: B

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)

The enormous pretension of a filmmaker thinking that their movie set was anything close to a war zone is egregious, and this documentary has the good sense to point out the sheer pomposity of Francis Ford Coppola surrounding the production of Apocalypse Now is consistently both the movie's best punchline and horror. My favorite part comes when Coppola convinces his collaborator from the studio that Apocalypse Now will be the first film to win a Nobel Prize, but that's just one of a host of highlights, not to mention the sense of near catastrophe that informs most of what happens on set. Coppola's film didn't win the Nobel Prize, obviously, but it's a small miracle that we got even a good movie out of the disaster, much less one of the all-time greats. Grade: A-

Arachnophobia (1990)
This movie is sort of perfect. A monster movie whose creatures (killer spiders from Venezuela) push the boundaries of believability just enough—it's to this film's immense credit that not one of the spiders onscreen is bigger than spiders would be in real life—and whose characters, even minor ones, are painted with bright and bold colors, there's not a moment of Arachnophobia that doesn't entertain. It's the sort of movie we don't see a lot of these days: the warm, funny, scary, irony-free embrace of genre tropes executed masterfully. I don't have much else to say but that I had a fantastic time with it. Great, great fun. Grade: A



Television

Horace and Pete (2016)
Louis C.K.'s idiosyncratic, heartbreaking, and auteurist miniseries (which, for the record, he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in) is not going to be for everyone: it's far too brutal, too bleak, too vulgar, too haphazard, too meandering, too C.K. to ever reach a broad audience. But if you can get into it, there are immense riches waiting. Never—and I mean truly never, like, in the history of the medium so far as I've experienced it—has a scripted television series felt so politically vital; were you to condense 2016 into drama, this would be it. But even if you're uninterested in that, it's still among the boldest experiments in even an era in which television prides itself on bold experiments. With episodes ranging from nearly and hour to a mere thirty minutes in length, the show makes hay with the flexibility of its web format, making room for episodes comprised entirely of a single scene and for epic-length compilations of otherwise unrelated scenes that circle around the characters' loopy, offensive, impassioned discussions of everything from current events to philosophy to personal struggles. The structure is loose and slow and occasionally baffling, and it's great. Enabling this even further is the aesthetic. Filmed essentially like a stage drama, with minimal editing and mostly single-location settings, it's at once a revival of the old 1950s trend of live TV plays and an evocation of the half-dead multi-camera sitcom, particularly Cheers. And appropriately, the bar (i.e. Horace and Pete's) is filled with barflies and one-off guests that give the location a lived-in, colorful feel. It's a veritable murderer's row of performers, too, with everyone from the co-starring Steve Buscemi to the semi-regular Alan Alda and Jessica Lange (both of whom, in a just universe, deserve Emmys for their roles here) to guest stars like Amy Sedaris and Laurie Metcalf (who probably deserves an award, too). But this is no sitcom. C.K. has accurately described the series as a tragedy, and it should be engaged as nothing but. This works in a few ways, but most notably, as a social tragedy in how it shows the absolutely dysfunctional ways that the diverse members of American society react to one another, and, more bitingly, as a personal tragedy focusing on the trajectories of Buscemi's Pete and C.K.'s Horace. I really don't want to spoil it; a blind watch is probably best. If what I've said here appeals to you, go for it. I think it might be one of the great television achievements of this decade. Grade: A

The Good Place, Season 1 (2016-2017)
High-concept TV shows rarely have legs—they too often lean on its central conceit to the detriment of important things like characters and writing. This is compounded with comedies. But here comes The Good Place to stand proudly alongside Fox's The Last Man on Earth as a high-concept show that actually works. Really well, in fact. Focused on Eleanor (a hilarious Kristen Bell), who finds herself dead and in "The Good Place," despite her having been, at best, a "medium person" in her previous life, the show prods ethics, metaphysics, left-turn plot twists, and fun fantasy hijinks while, most importantly, being really, really funny. It's sweet, it's breezy, it's mysterious, and it's got the best Ted Danson performance in ages, to say nothing of the rest of the entirely great cast. The ratings for this first season have been low. Please watch it. The world needs a Good Place, Season 2. Grade: B+