Mini Reviews for February 8 - 14, 2021

Just counting the days until this winter is over.

Movies

The Whistlers (La Gomera) (2019)
At what point do I throw up my hands and admit that I just don't connect to Romanian movies? It seems so absurd that an entire country's cinematic output feels at arm's length from me, but every time I watch a Romanian movie, I just feel my brain smooth over, and the movie slides right off it. I don't know what's wrong with me. This is a lot more conventionally exciting than a lot of the New Wave, being basically an explicit neo-noir with gunplay and backstabbing and everything. And it's also a lot more stylistically considered than a lot of the New Wave films I've seen (I don't think there is any handheld camera here!), which should mean that this is a lot more accessible to my tastes than the others. There are some admittedly very cool sequences, and I was pretty entertained throughout those. But I dunno, I just couldn't get into this as a whole. The nonlinear storytelling feels like an unnecessary wank, the characters feel like shells walking through a bunch of tropes, and there are out-of-nowhere quotes of, like, Psycho and stuff that I don't really understand the purpose of. Also, this has the most interesting premise (people using an obscure whistle-based language to perform a heist) that it buries in all its clever hard-boiledness. I hate to be the philistine who just wants things to be "cool," but I wish they had done cool stuff with the whistles instead of making it basically a subplot after the first 30 minutes. Grade: C+

Belly (1998)
I didn't know what was happening about 60% of the time, compounded by the fact of the very busy sound mixing and that the DVD I watched this on didn't have captions. But that said, this is pretty good as basically a feature-length application of music video techniques and highlights the extent to which music videos are basically fevered-dream psychedelia. I feel like music videos usually being only like 3-4 minutes long kinda sneaks the wild craft past our conscious minds, but at 90+ minutes, this movie makes you just sit there and confront how seriously radical the music video style can be. Grade: B

 

 

Mars Attacks! (1996)
There's a lot of latent hostility in blockbuster films that show you a bunch of stuff being destroyed in some sort of apocalypse, so it makes sense that under the directorship of Tim Burton, whose classic work harbors a lot of latent hostility itself, such a movie would become almost explicitly a celebration of humanity's destruction. Once the violence starts, it's basically wall-to-wall scenes of barely contained glee as the kinds of people Burton and screenwriter Jonathan Gems hate (e.g. patriots, businessmen, politicians) meet their grisly demise. Not every moment works, but like a lot of good Tim Burton, the movie as a whole has this ineffable something about it, a vaguely sinister sense of camp and mayhem, that just works for me. It's probably the last Burton film to have that X factor, unfortunately. He'd make good movies after this, but nothing that really taps into that particular feeling. Grade: B

The Last of England (1987)
Derek Jarman's grieving elegy to the pre-Thatcher, pre-HIV queer England and his scorched-earth middle finger to everything else. It's moving and sad in a way that I don't usually see from the avant-garde, and even though I came here for Tilda Swinton and was surprised at just how little she figures into the movie, she definitely makes the most of the maybe 7 minutes total she's onscreen. A completely wild, fiercely experimental experience that I dug completely. Grade: A-

 

 

Caravaggio (1986)
A slow but nevertheless chaotic rendering of the life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, full of intentional anachronisms and extremely good-looking cinematography. It's nice to see an example of irreverent cinema that's not bratty and bro-ish. It's also nice to see baby Tilda Swinton and baby Sean Bean in this—both of their film debuts, apparently! Of the two Jarman movies I've seen, I think I prefer The Last of England, but this is such a different thing than that film that it's honestly kind of hard to compare beyond a general sense of fury simmering beneath the surface of both. Grade: B+

I was part of a conversation about this movie on the Cinematary podcast this past week, if anyone is interested in that! Here's the link.

 

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Baron Prášil) (1962)
Basically what I imagine would have happened if Georges Méliès had made a feature film. Predictably, the plot is entirely secondary to the movie's unfettered fantasy imagery and logic, and I actually had a pretty hard time following it. It would probably have made more sense to me if I were more familiar with the original Baron Munchausen stories. But honestly, it doesn't really matter, because you don't come to a dream for the plot. Grade: B+

 

 

 

Books

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet (2020)
There are probably other examples, but this is the first novel that I've read that I would call "Climate Change Fiction," in the sense that it is explicitly about the dangers of climate change and the psychological toll of climate anxiety. A group of children vacationing with their parents have formed an autonomous society apart from their parents, having become fed up with their parents' hedonistic, solipsistic behavior, and just when they do this, a hurricane of biblical proportions tears through the United States, forcing the kids to fend for their survival as society comes apart at the seams. And I do mean biblical proportions, because alongside a somewhat straightforward apocalypse plot, the book has this magical-realist sensibility wherein the events the children experience start to mirror stories from the Bible. By mixing the mythical with the contemporary, Millet is able to be playful enough with the subject to avoid turning A Children's Bible into an "issues novel" while at the same time taking climate change seriously on a level I can't think of in narrative art outside of Darren Aronofsky's Noah movie, folding it into the very fabric of some of our oldest stories until the two become indistinguishable. For those afraid of the world-rending potential of climate change (most of us at this point, I hope), large sections of this book should, by all rights, be feel-bad disaster porn, and I guess on some level, they are, but Millet's blending in of religious signifiers makes it feel a lot less nihilistic than the subject matter might tempt the book to be. It's also very funny at times, in ways that specifically de-fang climate nihilism; the narrator, one of the children, is a hilarious voice animated by an open contempt for her parents' impotent despair at the state of the world, and this is counterbalanced by a sincere sense of wonder, too—another effect of the integration of biblical iconography. Despite a plot that, on paper, should scan as pessimistic, there's a keen sense of humor and hope in A Children's Bible, if not that human civilization can be redeemed then certainly that there is beauty to be found in the twilight of our world, which is its own sort of redemption. I would call this a masterpiece if it weren't for a somewhat bizarre section involving some one-dimensionally evil dudes who feel like they walked out of a more conventional apocalypse novel (and whose depiction traffics in some ableist characterizations, I think). I'm not really sure what to do with that part, and until the heavily magical resolution to this subplot, I'm not sure what to do with this part. But otherwise, this is great, and hopefully more fiction can wrestle with climate change with the grace that this one does. Grade: A-

Music

Eiko Ishibashi - contentless dream (2021)
A random Bandcamp find. It's a single 36-minute track that forms a dreamy soundscape out of some droning loops and scattered piano musings. Also, in the middle of it, a phone notification goes off, which I'd like to think was a perfect little accident that Ishibashi decided to keep in. The album is beautiful anyway, but there's a sense of humor about that phone sound in the middle of this otherwise ethereal album that I find delightful. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for September 16-22, 2019

Finally got to get to the theater to see a new release! First time in a while!

Movies

Ad Astra (2019)
This movie is about space exploration and the search for extra-terrestrial life, so you know I'm there. But also, it's about daddy issues—which at first I was like, "Ehh, I dunno, my dad's alright" but then the movie went, "Oh, we meant your heavenly daddy, too," and then I was back onboard. I kind of wish this movie was weirder than it is (it doesn't have to be 2001, but when you're making a movie about the Meaning of Life, I dunno, maybe untuck your shirt just a little), but it ticks a lot of my boxes and in a pretty convincing way, too. The movie's depiction of our solar system is gorgeous (the orange lights and claustrophobic spaces on Mars are particularly great), and the depiction of a near-future space-traveling society as one ravaged by both corporate capitalism and international violence over the contested ownership of space resources is one of the more (depressingly) plausible takes on what space travel will actually look like in the next century that I've seen in a movie. And for a space movie in the lineage of something like 2001, it's curiously fascinated by politics—we always get someone's rank/position alongside their name when we're introduced to them, and the way that power is distributed among these ranks is a quiet but consistent thread throughout. I wouldn't say that 2019 has been a great year for movies in general, but the fact that we've gotten two major, ideas-driven auteurist space films in the past few months (I usually have to wait years between these things!) makes me feel a little better about it. Grade: B+

Hustlers (2019)
A lot of people have tried to remake Goodfellas, including Martin Scorsese himself (twice!), but I don't think any of those movies have gotten quite what makes this genre—we can call it a genre now that there are like a dozen movies doing this, right?—tick as well as Hustlers does. Having the 2008 financial crisis be the dividing line between the golden years and the dark years in the same way that the introduction of hard drugs in Goodfellas and the 1980s in general in Boogie Nights are is a stroke of structural/thematic genius, and grounding this movie in milieu of 1. women 2. of color who are 3. sex workers plants Hustlers in that lived-in, sociopolitical sense of operating within the experiences of a marginalized people that hangs so heavily over the early parts of Goodfellas (in fact, that sense is even stronger here)—something that Wolf of Wall Street, the other Goodfellas riff on 2008, sorely lacked and that propels an already extraordinarily entertaining film toward greatness in Hustlers's case. It doesn't *quite* get there, largely due to a few glaringly bad bits of dialogue in this generally strong screenplay—the final line of the movie is almost embarrassing in how much it bends over backwards to unnecessarily explain the film's themes—but this movie is very good nonetheless, buoyed by a terrific cast (that is, to a subtly devastating effect, basically halfed once 2008 rolls around) and some of the best editing and camerawork I've seen in years. This will in all likelihood be the best mainstream American studio movie of the year, so get it while it's hot, folks. Grade: A-

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (2018)
A decently directed thriller that has an admirable patience—basically Reservoir Dogs without the smirking irony and meta references, which is maybe missing the point of Reservoir Dogs, though I'm open to this premise being a good idea. But unlike Reservoir Dogs, the screenplay is dumb, and after a while, that accumulates into some pretty face-palming twists in the back half of the movie. Also, given that the movie does not mention ideology or racism or literally anything specific to white supremacy, I can't think of a single reason why this movie had to be centered on a far-right militia group other than just sheer shock value. So edgy. Grade: C+

Frankenweenie (2012)
Completely whitebread comfort food, and Burton is basically on autopilot here—Danny Elfman, too (he almost quotes his own Batman theme, like, a lot here). But it's autopilot set to the configurations of their good output, and familiar or not, it's an entirely pleasant ride. Probably the most conventionally successful of Burton's 2010s output? Given his 2010s output, that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I really did enjoy this. Grade: B+

Wanda (1970)
The movie opens with the image of a mountainside completely turned to coal dust by the hulk of industry, and it doesn't really get any cheerier from there on out. When we first see the titular Wanda (played note-perfect by writer/director Barbara Loden herself), she's listlessly abandoning her marriage, which might tempt viewers to take an antagonistic stance toward her if the movie didn't make so clear just how mind-numbingly plain her life is, a life caged by those coal mines and desolated mountains. And in no time after that, Wanda is thrown into situation after situation that show just how little agency and control she has—none of which are intended to excuse her behavior so much as it is to contextualize it within the larger purgatory of mundane lower-middle-class existence on the fringes of American society. It's relentlessly unsentimental—and, to that end, a little meandering at times until it arrives upon its bank robbery finale—but we could do with de-sentimentalizing rural American life. Grade: B+

The Hobbit (1977)
At least 50% of this movie looks pretty shoddy: the character designs for the dwarfs are not great, for example, and a lot of this movie could have used a few more animated frames per second. The music is pretty goofy, too, and though the same must be said of many of Tolkien's original songs, those at least didn't have '70s soft-rock folk for backing instrumentation. That said, there are also some terrific pieces here, including some great character designs for Smaug and Gandalf (also, John Huston voicing Gandalf is wholly inspired) as well as consistently incredible watercolor-inflected backgrounds—created by a bunch of future-Studio Ghibli animators, so of course. It's not exactly a functional movie or even a great adaptation of its source (whose episodic structure makes it tougher to adapt to film than I think a lot of people give it credit for), but it's certainly not bad. Grade: B-

Music

Jenny Hval - The Practice of Love (2019)
The Norwegian singer-songwriter and experimentalist returns for what's probably her most immediate album in a decade: a soothing, trance-indebted collection of songs that form a concept album about Love—a conceptual far cry from the same artist's work a few years ago about menstruation and vampires. But typical of Hval, her take on Love isn't programmatic or thinly cliché in the least; this is an album obsessed not with romanticized love as some sort of transcendental concept but more with the strange corners of mundane existence within love, a complicated treatise that's both philosophically weighty and also compellingly banal. And the music itself, sounding like Hval's take on what Grimes was doing on Visions, is hypnotic and lovely. One of my favorite albums of the year so far. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for September 9-15, 2019

Not a great week at the movies, gotta say.

Movies

Dumbo (2019)
Even putting aside my substantial philosophical/aesthetic opposition to the idea of these "live-action" Disney remakes, it's clear this is a huge miscalculation. I watched this pretty much because Burton doing Dumbo feels like one of those peanut-butter-and-chocolate pairings, and while late-period Burton and archvillain-period Disney are far from the ideal context for this union, there are some signs of life in the production design in general and a satirical riff on Walt Disney and Disneyland specifically (which ultimately proves toothless because duh, this is itself a Disney movie, but there's at least a hint of bitterness in it, which is fun within the rubric of this movie). But oh man, the narrative. What a mess. Disney has made PR hay out of the fact that they virtuously cut the notorious bit with "Jim Crow," but in their eagerness to do so, they've also left a pretty significant gap in the story's plot. This movie's solution is to make Dumbo not about Dumbo at all but rather about the two human children who teach Dumbo to fly in lieu of the crows, and also about their father who, as is contractually mandated of all fathers in live-action Disney films, is emotionally distant and just can't relate to his kids. And it doesn't work at all. It's not just that the human drama isn't engaging (though it isn't); it's also that recentering this story on human beings who are sympathetic and nice fundamentally misses one of the pillars of what makes this story tick in the first place, which is the depiction of the circus as a rotten, awful place for animals that exists only because of human beings' propensity for cruelty and mean-spirited amusement. Instead, the movie totally softballs this message by making it maddeningly ambivalent, where there are the Good Humans who understand the animals and the Bad Humans who want to exploit them. To call this movie's revision of the original's cynicism about human nature "both-sides-ism" would overstate the political ramifications of this issue, but it's definitely that for the world of Disney remakes. I'm not saying this movie needed an animal minstrel show at its climax, but it needed some animals in general, and it needed them to be real characters (if not speak). I'm as big a fan of humanism as the next guy, but interposing that ideology into a story that is, in many respects, Disney's parallel treatise alongside Bambi on the ways that humankind is irredeemably abusive toward animals... well, re-centering it on human daddy issues feels a little gauche, to say the least. Grade: C-

Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes (2018)
An unlikely (and often ungainly) mix of James Joyce, John Prine, and Brechtian techniques: "Two Gallants" turned into a Prine jukebox musical with deliberate moments of theatrical/cinematic artifice. It's (despite that Brechtian stuff) very sweet and, for stretches, pretty great, although the whole package didn't quite work for me. There's just too much stuff going on here, and the mix of irony and melodrama never quite gels—particularly the framing device where the movie is all part of a radio show, which is a meta bridge too far for me (a shame that this part specifically doesn't work for me, since the guy who voices the DJ is a friend of mine—it's not your fault, Nathan!). Also, I know that Sonny Carl Davis has a long and illustrious career, but all I can think of when I see him now are those anti-Ted Cruz ads that Linklater directed. Which actually works well for this movie. Grade: B-

Last Men in Aleppo (De sidste mænd i Aleppo) (2017)
It is deeply upsetting on a visceral level to watch living and dead children pulled from rubble, which is precisely what this documentary hinges on. I honestly don't know what really this documentary has to offer in the face of that—it feels pedantic to comment too much on this movie's structural issues or its unimpressively journalistic cinematic style, as if it's the job of a movie like this to entertain or wow me. I clearly responded to the visuals more strongly than I would have to an article covering the same material, which speaks to its value as cinema, though. Grade: B+

Helter Skelter (1976)
A friend of mine loaned this to me after we talked about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and I guess it's not his fault that I think that the mystique of the Manson Family is kind of dull, but man, three hours of made-for-TV (in every pejorative that implies) cinema specifically about the Manson Family really didn't do it for me. It doesn't help just how lurid this thing is. I know that's the whole point of a movie like this (made slap-dash from the book of the same title), but there's something pretty skeevy and uninteresting about just how procedurally this movie lingers over the details of the sex and murder perpetrated by the family at Manson's behest, with everyone involved (including the victims of the murders) feeling like wooden props by which we get access to this wild story. The whole thing oversells the grossness of the Manson endeavor while somehow not taking his motivating ideology seriously enough, which is a weird tension. Believe me, I still have some reservations about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and particularly its ending, but it's movies like this that really throw into relief just how lovely it is that Tarantino's movie lets Sharon Tate exist as a human being apart from her status as a casualty of a cult massacre. Grade: C-

Television

Dear White People, Volume 3 (2019)
It would be overstating the case to say that the third season of Netflix's incendiary Dear White People is its first major misstep, but it is undeniably a step down from the previous two seasons. Part of this seems by design; there's a lot of this season (especially early on) devoted to meta jokes about Netflix shows in their third seasons becoming tired. On a deeper level, this is, in a lot of ways, a season about exhaustion and aimlessness. These characters are burned out: by their financial insecurities, by the relentless push for excellence, by the power hierarchies of Winchester, by the oppressive awfulness of the world around them. So they have become adrift. Sam has quit her radio show; Troy has quit Pastiche; Lionel is exploring the new (to him) world of the university's LGBT community; Gabe faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles on his thesis. It's a completely understandable development for the show. Dear White People was forged in the crucible of America's mid-to-late 2010s political and identity turmoil, and though that turmoil persists, a palpable feeling of exhaustion has set in among progressives—we're tired of marching, of writing representatives, of being outraged: tired of doing the things we're supposed to do in the face of a situation that only seems to become more dire by the day. So it only makes sense for the show to reflect this. The problem is that it never quite finds a way to make all its variations on this idea cohere. Dear White People is as attuned to the nuances of The Discourse among progressives and of the political climate in general (a subplot about the unionizing of teaching assistants feels very much an outgrowth of the labor fights of the past couple years), but unlike the blackface party of Volume 1 or the alt-right social media mystery of Season 2, none of the plots form a central structure for this third volume to hand its assorted pieces on. A plot involving sexual assault allegations feels like an attempt to provide a backbone for the season, but it's too late-breaking to make it work as that. It may be thematically appropriate for a season about aimlessness to itself lack structure, but as a viewing experience, there's definitely something missing. None of this is to say that this season is unwatchable or even just bad; it is still good, sharp-tongued television. But for a series with as sterling a pedigree as Dear White People, it's just a tad disappointing not to have it quite live up to its predecessors. Grade: B

Music

Flying Lotus - Flamagra (2019)
With a track list nearly as long as the White Album's and a title like a Final Fantasy spell and a cast of collaborators like the invite list for a Hollywood wrap party (George Clinton? Denzel Curry? DAVID LYNCH???), Flamagra is certainly one of the more bizarre and sprawling releases of Flying Lotus's career. It careens from genre to genre, R&B melding into fusion melding into electronica melding into neo-soul melding into unclassifiable sonic experiments. It doesn't cohere in the slightest, nor does it ever try to. Instead, it is basically the musical version of its own cover art: a baffling hodge-podge. Any one moment is fascinating (my favorite is the strange, scary David Lynch collab, "Fire Is Coming"), but good luck making sense of any of this from a bird's-eye view. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for October 22 - 28, 2018

Rev yous.

Movies

Halloween (2018)

It's about as fan-servicey as the trailers promised, which is to say: very. At times, the film tries to say something about the fundamental magnetism of Michael Myers (a nice dovetail with the fan service, admittedly), which would be interesting if the movie didn't keep getting distracted by weird comic cul-de-sacs and some fairly ridiculous gore. David Gordon Green directs handsomely, and the cinematography is generally very good—if a bit ruined by the overzealous editing à la last year's It, and some of the directorial flourishes feel more like obligatory "cool" than anything truly inspired (one long take in particular feels very much like someone saw that episode of True Detective and was like, "Bro, that's sick"). Still, it looks nice, and that niceness is complemented by a solid finale. I'll cop to having seen this in a bad mood, so perhaps I should recuse myself. But I thought this was aggressively mediocre. I guess when you get right down to it, I shouldn't have been expecting anything more than I usually expect from slasher sequels (even ones forty years delayed/retconned), but at least a lot of those had the good sense to be completely loony in their mediocrity. Grade: B-

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018)

Gus Van Sant adapts John Callahan's memoir into something of a Gus Van Sant's greatest hits collage—mostly, a fusion of the counter-culture, drug-addled meandering of Drugstore Cowboy with the therapeutic schmaltz of Good Will Hunting. And it works really well on a moment-by-moment basis (both of Jack Black's appearances are among Black's best cinema in years), even if the whole package doesn't exactly hang together as something special. Which is I guess how it usually goes with greatest hits collections. Grade: B

Southside with You (2016)

"Before Sunrise, but it's Barrack Obama and Michelle Robinson's first date" is a supremely kooky premise that this film plays entirely straight. It's a profoundly weird experience to try to engage sincerely with the emotional arc of this movie knowing that one of them will eventually become the leader of the free world, and the chasm between the very light, very sweet text of the film and the overwhelmingly weight of its historical context creates a cognitive dissonance that's like a significantly more intense version of the way The End of the Tour exploited the collision of the popularly imagined David Foster Wallace with acted simulacra of that image. Here, there's the obviously pandering liberal vision of Obama as the great man who, according to the film, can on a whim rouse community organizers with an impromptu speech or make old white people comfortable with the ending of Do the Right Thing crashing into a youthful, horny, and honestly kind of douchey Young Barrack not that far removed from the pretentious navel-gazer of Ethan Hawke's Jesse in Before Sunrise, just with a bit more political soulfulness thrown in. The movie makes it utterly impossible to set aside your own opinions of Obama the Political Figure while also seeming (somewhat perversely) to tease you with the prospect that this is "just" the story of two young activists falling in love. It's an interesting experiment (one—despite all this rambling—I'm not entirely convinced is intentional, but oh well) that's probably more interesting as the subject of a graduate student essay than as a viewing experience, largely due to the somewhat flatly written and only passably acted central relationship. It's not exactly uncommon knowledge, but perhaps it's taken for granted that the reason the Before movies work so well is the extreme synergy between its screenplay and its actors—it's not that Southside with You is poorly written and acted, exactly, but that crucial chemistry isn't there. Combined with the political semiotics loop-de-loops, it's hard to really get that invested but just as hard to dismiss entirely. Grade: C+

Big Eyes (2014)
I don't know how much I buy that Burton is positioning this film as a metaphor for his career, but if it is, it amusingly positions Amy Adams as '80s/'90s Burton and Christoph Waltz as 2000s-onward Burton, which feels just about right. Anyway, Big Eyes is nothing really to write home about, but it's solidly constructed (which is practically a miracle for modern-day Burton) and it's really, really nicely shot and lit—and not in that normal, post-millennium Burton way, either. Grade: B

Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から) (2002)
The opaque milkiness that water gets as it seeps from a regular drinking-water pipe through the ceiling of your home and back into your living space is particularly off-putting, as if there is something irremovably contaminated about the drywall and insulation and other structures that literally make up your home. Somehow, it is worse than lake or river water, which on a scientific level is (I imagine) significantly filthier. But to see such filth come from your own house—it makes me feel ill. Dark Water makes this essential repulsion its premise, and it's frequently horrifying. It also takes the idea of contaminated water leaking through a home to its metaphorical extreme, using that imagery to explore generational trauma (the true structural contamination of a home) and the knots that form between parent and child, knots that twist and ache and wind until it's hard to trace the linkages that separate one generation from the next. It's scary, sure, but more than anything, it's heartbreaking. Grade: B+

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

A huge step down from Dream Warriors and every Nightmare film before it, The Dream Master is when the inherent silliness of this franchise collapsed in on itself and smothered its inventive spirit. There are a few inventive moments—it's apparently going to be a franchise staple for Freddy to seduce some horny dude in a grotesque way, and there's a scene involving a waterbed here that is a decent iteration on that—but for the most part, the film is pretty tedious and rote, lacking the audacious special effects/gross-out gags or the demented sense of humor of its predecessors. It almost succeeds in becoming a sort of unintentional comedy (the film's idea of literary academic debate is, "Kafka and Goethe have never been irreconcilable to me," which is surely a Mad Libs creation), but ultimately, the funniest thing in the movie is its recycling of Annie Hall's penis envy joke, which probably speaks more to the creative drought here than anything. Grade: C

Television

Party Down, Season 1 (2009)
Though it was the American version of The Office that was at its popular height in 2009 when this short-lived but cultishly beloved comedy about a team of caterers debuted, it's the UK iteration of the show that Party Down draws most from, using that original series's borderline-cruel well of darkly observed human microdrama and the cosmic irony inherent in being stuck in a job that was nobody's first choice—there's a real sense of tragedy to these characters that is so sharply and agonizingly realized that it's impossible not to think of Gervais and Merchant's early-millennium masterpiece. Even if you're only familiar with the American Office, though, you'll recognize the DNA, from the socially clueless boss who overcompensates for his flaws to the point of dysfunction to the sardonic/wistful will-they-won't-they couple to the insufferable and rude coworkers. That isn't to say that Party Down isn't its own thing; the catering conceit allows for some pretty great "job of the week" features (catering a rich kid's yacht birthday! catering a libertarian rally!), and Ken Marino's Ron is a fresh, utterly sad spin on the "awkward/offensive boss" trope. The cast as a whole is excellent, in fact, starring all sorts of late-2000s comedy luminaries such as Lizzy Caplan (of course—can we have her in every TV series from now on? Please and thank you!), Jane Lynch (whom the show loses to Glee near the end of this first season, which... *shakes fist*), and Adam Scott. The whole package probably isn't going to blow your mind—due to the aforementioned similarities with The Office as well as its unfortunate propensity for making homosexuality the butt of its jokes (it's, like, self-aware, but it's still operating on that late-2000s assumption that if something is "gay" it's inherently funnier, which is blegh)—but it's a solid and sometimes hilarious little half-hour tragicomedy. Grade: B+

Books

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket (2001)
The seventh book of the Series of Unfortunate Events series represents something of a turning point in these books in a number of ways—not the least of which is that Count Olaf no longer needs a disguise, and (in the typical cynical fashion of this series) not because of any particularly uplifting victory by the Baudelaire siblings but because a typo in the newspaper leads all the other characters to belief that the villain is "Count Omar." It's also the book in which the Baudelaires begin to have more autonomy, since they get to pick where Mr. Poe sends them (the titular village), as they think the village's name—abbreviated V.F.D. on a map—will help them solve some of the series's ongoing mysteries and find the Quagmires. This is also the book in which the cruel cosmic joke of "V.F.D." comes to the fore, and the sheer accumulation of things that V.F.D. could stand for becomes something of a sick, postmodern joke—V.F.D. on the map, it turns out, stands for "Village of Fowl Devotees." The essential absurdity of the Baudelaires' universe becomes more and more apparent at the same time that their agency increases, and the series begins to modify its thesis from "the world is a cruel and absurd place that is incompatible with ideas of justice or equity" to "the world is a cruel and absurd place made even more so by the individual actions of autonomous individuals," an idea reflected not just by the Baudelaires' frustrated attempts to own their own destiny but also by the byzantine proliferation of rules that the Village of Fowl Devotees has put into place—laws and rules being perhaps the most acute way that a free people make the world a maze of absurdity. It's all very darkly funny, but it's also, more so than any other of the Series of Unfortunate Events thus far, crushingly sad—not just in the formulaic "foiled attempt at victory" that all the books have leaned into but also in the minutiae recorded of these frustrations. In what is without a doubt the saddest moment of the series so far, Klaus realizes, when he and his siblings are at their most despairing, that it is his birthday, and the book takes a few pages to mull over the chasm between what Klaus's previous expectations for this birthday and the reality of it. It's uncharacteristic for the series to languish over little character moments like this, and when it does, it's a punch to the stomach. Grade: A-

The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket (2001)
The Hostile Hospital continues the series's subversion of its own tropes that The Vile Village began—this time, forcing the Baudelaires to disguise themselves instead of Count Olaf (although Olaf also disguises himself, too). It also extends the previous book's exploration of individual autonomy to pose ethical questions about what it is that truly makes a person's decisions "evil"—do the ends justify the means? should a pure motivation be a factor? does the way that the universe's absurdity limits one's viable options change the way actions must be evaluated on a moral level? This is only accentuated by the increased visibility of Lemony Snicket as not just the book's author but also a character (a character who has perhaps committed questionable actions himself). It's always been clear that these books were postmodern metafiction, but as the series gears up for its back half, the precise nature of its postmodernism and its metafiction is snapping into focus. The Hostile Hospital is not nearly as biting or clever as The Ersatz Elevator, nor is it as sad as its immediate predecessor, but it's still no slouch. I can't believe I never read these books when I was in middle school. I would have dug them so much. Grade: B+

The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket (2002)
Like The Hostile Hospital, The Carnivorous Carnival is more of an extension of the ideas and plots of the previous few books than it is anything new of its own. Back again are the plot subversions of having the Baudelaires, not Olaf, in disguise; returning is the ouroboros of "V.F.D."; here are the same questions of freedom and one's own responsibility for one's actions (there's a particularly violent and horrifying iteration of this question at the book's finale, rivaling the infamous Aunt Josephine death by leeches in The Wide Window as the series's most grisly moment). But, as formulaic as this series can get, these ideas still feel fresh, if not quite as exciting as when they showed up in The Ersatz Elevator and The Vile Village. Plus, the book ends on an especially nasty and unfortunate riff on the "suddenly tragic ending" thing that this series loves, which is, even in a book (and series) full of mean shocks, still pretty shocking. Grade: B+

Music

Let's Eat Grandma - I'm All Ears (2018)
Let's Eat Grandma are, in most respects, yet another piece of the current wave of female-led, emotionally forthright, retro-curious, future-focused indie rock that's been dominating the game for a few years now. What sets this band apart from Snail Mail and Mitski and their other peers in this wave, though, is a deeply atmospheric and even goth spaciousness to their music; listening to I'm All Ears feels a lot like listening to classic The Cure or Echo & the Bunnymen filtered through a distinctly millennial sensibility, and that's probably intentional—surely it's no accident that the excellent 11-minute closing track is called "Donnie Darko," name-dropping that ur-text in post-millennium appropriation of '80s goth rock. These folks aren't copycats, though, and as much as the album evokes its 30-years-prior ancestors, the music itself is as fresh and inventive as you would want a 2018 indie rock release to be, not just in the spaced-out, epic closer but throughout the album with the likes of the high melodrama of "Snakes & Ladders" and the strutting synth-pop of "Hot Pink." I've not listened to the band's 2016 debut, but that one would have to be quite an album for I'm All Ears to come anywhere near to being a sophomore slump. It's one of the strongest releases of the year. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for March 26 - April 1, 2018

SOME EXCITING STUFF BEFORE THE REVIEWS:

• Firstly, don't forget to vote on what project you'd like me to do over this summer! If you voted on the Blogger widget yesterday, you'll have to vote again on the Google Form... I'm sorry for the terribleness of that Blogger poll.
  
• Secondly, as I mentioned last week, I went to the Big Ears festival. I'm now excited to announce that my first piece of coverage has been published (view it here), and the podcast in which I recap the festival in more general terms with my friend Andrew is live here.

Okay, now onto the reviews.

Movies

Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage) (2014)

Though it lacks the highest highs of the other two 21st-century Godard movies I've seen (e.g. the Carnival Cruise sequence on Film Socialisme), Goodbye to Language holds together much better, and it *thankfully* finds a meaningful philosophical position beyond the political nihilism of some of Godard's other movies. Even better is the way that though the movie is essentially plotless, it still finds a way to endear me to its two central human characters (whose relationship I feel weirdly invested in, even though it largely consists of them being naked and the dude pooping) and even the dog (who becomes the doggiest of audience surrogates). This movie made me feel things besides the impulse to roll my eyes, which is an enormous step up from Film Socialisme. Also, the 3D is pretty neat. Grade: B

Atari: Game Over (2014)

What I assumed was going to be a goofy puff piece about the investigation of the "Atari dumped millions of E.T. cartridges into a landfill" urban legend turns out also to be part familiar history of the Atari company (sans all the sexual harassment allegations, so okay) and part weirdly sentimental defense of the E.T. game. It's quite boring. Also, Ernest Cline is all over this movie, and he wants you to know the E.T. game is great. Grade: C

Death Proof (2007)

Tarantino's half of Grindhouse is mesmerizing in that Tarantino way of long, long, talky tension and then sudden release. There's not a lot to Death Proof beyond its studied commitment to certain old-school aesthetics (both the opening slasher-like half and the twisted-metal chasing of the second half are unapologetic throwbacks, right down to the grainy film and freeze-frame ending), its rambling-but-measured pacing, and its blunt-force feminism/rape-revenge metaphor, and people who call the movie "slight" aren't wrong. But it's a good time. (I talk about this movie in more detail on Episode 189 of Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.) Grade: B

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

I won't tell you that Tim Burton's adaptation isn't a disaster, because it most definitely is. But that disaster is mitigated by the saving grace that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is at least a fascinating train wreck, full of bizarre and intriguing ideas that more often than not just plain don't work together but in isolation are dazzling to think about: the garish, colorful set design that's something akin to Disney World by way of German Expressionism, the rollicking Oompa-Loompa musical sequences (each in their own musical style from across the spectrum of 20th century music), the way the film really embraces the nastiness of the book (nobody ever hated children quite so deliciously as Roald Dahl, but John August's screenplay comes pretty close), the utterly strange and uncomfortable decision to lampshade the evils of capitalism (Charlie's dad loses his low-wage factory job to automation, for example) and the fact that Willy Wonka is basically a colonizing capitalist who uses slave labor while at the same time maintaining the story's wide-eyed adoration for the Wonka brand—I could go on and on. None of this works in concert with one another, and not all of it even registers as "good" when taken in isolation. But the fact that Burton decided to mash it all together into one big nauseating gobstopper of a film remains endlessly entertaining to consider. It's one of the last glimmers (however faint) of Burton the Visionary before Burton the "I'm Trapped in a Prison of My Own Design, and Oh Please, Why Alice in Wonderland" fully overtook his career. We also hadn't quite reached the point where Johnny Depp's "celebrity impression, but with funny hats" thing had worn thin yet (to say nothing of the uncovering of his abusive behavior, which is of course inescapable now), and his Willy Wonka is a riveting, profoundly alien presence (though the Wonka Daddy Issues subplot is a huge part of why this movie doesn't work). So no, this is not good. But ask me about it—I'd love to talk. Grade: C

Whale Rider (2002)

This film's depiction of a young girl's fight against her community's patriarchal structure is maybe a bit staid, but Keisha Castle-Hughes is really, really good as the lead, Paikea, and New Zealand's Whangara community is a fascinating and (to me) unfamiliar setting in which to tell this story, however sedate. Grade: B

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

It's a movie about drug users, so you know what to expect. There's not a lot going on thematically in Drugstore Cowboy that, at this point, you wouldn't have already seen in Trainspotting or the less hysterical parts of Requiem for a Dream, though I suppose Cowboy deserves points for getting there first. It's also considerably less self-consciously "cool" and show-off-y than the aforementioned movies and a lot less ponderous than something like Leaving Las Vegas, which are also marks in its favor. Plus, the cast is excellent from top to bottom, and I appreciate the clear-eyed way in which the screenplay views its characters—affectionately, but never under the delusion that the drug-rustling protagonists nor the cops in pursuit are heroes. Grade: B

Polyester (1981)

Having seen only Hairspray years ago and now Polyester, I'm sort of backing my way into John Waters's legendarily uproarious filmography (at least, I'm led to believe). I can only imagine what lays in store for me as I explore the rest of his work, because Polyester is plenty uproarious: a relentless parody of the nuclear family that feels like the unholy lovechild of a live-action cartoon and a Ramones song. It's consistently hilarious and also oddly sweet and sad in ways I wasn't expecting. My screening also came with scratch-and-sniff Odorama cards, as John Waters intended. All ten scents all just kind of smelled like a cross between B.O. and petroleum byproduct, but maybe that was the point. Grade: A-

Property (1979)

This (criminally under-seen) movie checks a lot of my boxes: economic critiques of urban renewal, depictions of community organizing, activism, '70s bohemianism, long discussions about city planning. Property is rambly and very '70s American indie in the Altman vein, but it's also much more intimate than, say, Nashville or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or any of Altman's community-focused features. I credit the cast, which depicts this Portland, OR, community with a liveliness that threatens to pop right off the screen and join me in the meetings I go to in my own neighborhood. I relate deeply to the scenes in this movie that involve block residents just sitting around a table and trying to get stuff done in that chaotic, incredible way that anyone who's been involved in community organizing will recognize. The movie isn't perfect—most notably, it ends with an ellipsis when it should by all means have concluded pointedly with a period. But it's my favorite discovery from my time at the 2018 Big Ears festival, and it gets a big ol' thumbs up from me. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for April 18 - 24, 2016

Hey! This week I actually have media besides movies!

Movies

Ed Wood (1994)
That Ed Wood is the best Tim Burton movie by such a wide margin (beating my other favorite, Big Fish, by a country mile) leads me to the uncomfortable idea that Burton is way better without the things that we normally associate with Good Burton: showily Expressionist scenery, Gothic fantasy, S&M, Danny Elfman. To be sure, the first couple of those tropes exist in Ed Wood, but they are pared waaaay down when compared to other Golden-Age-Burton output—it's by no means a subtle movie, but Ed Wood is perhaps the closest we've ever gotten to subtlety in this famously flamboyant director's filmography. So, maybe Burton is better when he's just a little less obviously himself than usual? It's a disheartening revelation in a movie that features such an unapologetic affection for the supposed worst director of all time; there's an easy possible version of this movie that depicts Ed Wood with all sorts of condescension: he's a fool, ignorant of his own shortcomings, filled with pretension and myopia. But Burton's version (and Depp's, who plays Wood with tenderness and empathy—rarely has Tim's favorite actor been so vital to the impact of Tim's film) says something different: that maybe it doesn't matter how good something is, just that it's done sincerely, with the kind of dorky passion that only a true outcast can muster. So maybe I've just missed the big fat point with my Burton critique? Grade: A

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
This one snuck up on me. Leave it to Errol Morris, ever the docu-philosopher, to turn an ordinary documentary (well, "ordinary") about a robot scientist, a naked-mole-rat expert, a topiary trimmer, and a lion tamer into a treatise on consciousness and individuality. It's talking-head documentary-making taking to the abstract expressionist edge, and it's riveting. I had to take a walk afterward—it's not necessarily heavy viewing, but the ideas slowly envelope your mind like creeping vines until you can't shake them. Grade: A

Beau Travail (1999)
A loose, artsy adaptation of Melville's Billy Budd, apparently, which might mean more to me if I had read Billy Budd. As it is, we've got a movie that's hard-to-follow and kind of boring (in a meditative, considered way that's boring nonetheless) but also mercifully beautiful, albeit in that "handheld, accidentally beautiful" way that I don't particularly enjoy all that much. I demand for film compositions to be stable and intentional-looking, dang it! Grade: B-

Buffalo '66 (1998)
A great example of how style, not plot, is cinema's most valuable commodity. Because honestly, the plot here kind of sucks, particularly when it comes to Christina Ricci's woefully underdeveloped and possibly fetishized Layla, the kidnappee/love interest (I know, right?) for Vince Gallo's infinitely more interesting and alternatingly scary and hilarious Billy. But on a style level, we've got a nearly masterful combination of film grain, editing, music, lighting, and framing that pretty much single-handedly rescues the film from its male-centric tropes and turns it into one of the most distinctive-looking indies of the past couple decades. I mean, it's still not great, but it's hard to hate a movie with both Yes and King Crimson so skillfully deployed on its soundtrack. Grade: B+

Books

Reality Boy by A. S. King (2013)
Now that I'm teaching high school, I've decided to make a more diligent effort to keep up with YA lit outside the blockbuster Hunger Games/Harry Potter field, as most of my experience with that genre comes from at least a decade back (and most often begins and ends with Robert Cormier). This was my first stop on that journey. It's pretty good—A. S. King evokes a fantastic voice in her protagonist/narrator, and the basic premise, examining the psychological fallout of a child from one of those "Emergency Nanny"-type reality shows appeals a lot to my general loathing of that kind of show. The ending doesn't work at all: it stares right into the abyss so compellingly in its middle hundred pages that the sudden shift toward positivity and self-actualization at the conclusion feels under-cooked. But the journey there is funny, scary, and all kinds of readable. Grade: B

Television

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 1 (2015-2016)
Anyone paying attention to Rachel Bloom's fantastic video work prior to last fall (I wasn't) would have had no problem anticipating the Bloom-starring/co-created/co-written CW musical comedy, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as the sharp, gutsy, laugh-out-loud hilarious show it turned out to be, not to mention just how hummable the songs are. But I think what caught everyone off-guard was the depths of the emotional stakes here. Bloom deserves pretty much all the awards for imbuing what even the theme song acknowledges is a sexist term with wonderful, aching human life. It's sharp, laugh-out-loud, etc., yes, but it's also a moving, messy examination of what it means to be happy in modern life. Which is, like, amazing considering the really kooky premise of the show. The first few episodes are kind of duds, but once you get to the one with the "Sex With a Stranger" song and the Astaire-Rogers homage (that both of those can exist in the same series should give you an idea of just how wonderful this show is), it's pretty much gold through the end. If you're only going to catch up with one new show from the past TV season, make it this one. Grade: A-

Music

Black Mountain - IV (2016)
Black Mountain and their signature Pink Floyd/Black Sabbath revival sound with an album that is particularly Floydian and Sabbath-ish, in equal measures. The long, atmospheric passages and guitar solos (and heck, that cover art) is vintage Wish You Were Here, while the punchier, crunchier songs are straight Master of Reality. Plus, there's the gloriously unironic use of sci-fi imagery and proggy synths throughout, which, come on, we need more sci-fi songs these days. Like most revival-type albums, some of the stuff here ventures a little too close to pastiche at times, and the music can seem a little thinner than the legends it's trying to evoke. But when you get right down to it, this is either going to be your thing or not, and your love of Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath is pretty much going to determine that thingness. Grade: B+