Mini Reviews for August 20 - 26, 2018

For some reason, I went on a "sprawling, imperfect visionary films" kick this week, with mixed results.

Movies

Blockers (2018)

I'm far too late to the game to feign surprise that Blockers is so good, but I am at least pleased that it lived up to the somewhat backhanded hype of "it's better than its trailer!" To continue the backhanded mood, I will say that the movie is never better than in its first hour, and while I'm exceedingly grateful that this is the rare modern American comedy somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 minutes, I do think that there isn't really enough movie to make the last act—a largely sentimental pileup of thin character moments—work nearly as well as I wished. Maybe it isn't the spry runtime so much as the fact that the movie barely characterizes its teen characters, who are largely frictionless players in an eyebrow-raisingly idealized night of binge drinking and 'shroom-eating; outside of a gross and somewhat unnecessary vomiting incident (followed by one of the most impressive alcohol-poisoning recoveries I've ever seen), there is not a lot that actually goes wrong on the teen end of things in this movie. Contrast this with Superbad (sorry to bring up such a dude-centric movie in comparison to such a female-centric film, it's just what came to mind first), where the escalating problems of the virginity-losing night help define each character pristinely—there just isn't enough for our Blocker teens to do for me to feel like I know them outside of some very broad personality traits, and while I realize the problem-free teen plot is part of the point (hey, I guess it's not so disastrous to give teens a tad bit of freedom—at least, upper-middle-class, uncannily responsible and savvy teens), it also doesn't do the mechanics of the film any favors. But lordy, I'm being so negative about a movie that is really quite good, so lemme talk about the parents in this movie, who are pretty much perfection and, unlike their kids, actually encounter a whole movie of problems (and a bunch of ass beer, a phrase that made me giggle far more than it should have). The Cena-Mann-Barinholtz trio has one of the best comic dynamics I've seen in an ensemble American comedy in a long, long time, and the script plays precisely to these actors' strengths in relation to one another. Unsurprisingly, John Cena is a fantastic physical comedian, and everyone already knows Leslie Mann is amazing, but I was actually really caught off guard how much I liked Ike Barinholtz's street-wise buffoon; there's an impressive amount of pathos in that performance, and while the movie has no shortage of great lines and deliveries, Barinholtz undoubtedly does the best in timing the comedic cadence of his dialogue. Anyway, the movie's very funny and at least half its cast is well-served, and I wish it were possible to mash this movie with Game Night, 2018's other strong American comedy, so I could make a super movie that was visually stylish in addition to being as comedically sharp as Blockers is. I dunno if that would solve either of the movies' third-act problems, though. Grade: B+

Byzantium (2012)

Byzantium isn't anything particularly new for vampire movies, but there's a floridness to the film that I really connected with, the feeling that immortality sprawls out before these characters in the same tortured, languorous way that the characters' speech spools from their mouths. This feels like what Angel and Buffy were always going for when they did the flashback episodes that showed us Angel and Spike running around in the 1800s and stuff, only it works much, much better here, likely because of the budget and the fact that Neil Jordan is twice the director—on a sheer spectacle scale—that anyone on those shows ever was. The overall story doesn't quite ever find its feet, but the feel of the movie is rich. It's bleak but sumptuous, and Saoirse Ronan is magnificent. Grade: B+

The Road (2009)

As a movie, it's fine, I guess—a little gray, which is the point, probably, and a lot grim, which is another point. But as an adaptation, it's a good case study in why exactly it can be a bad idea to be so slavishly faithful to a source material. First of all, it accentuates any minor deviation from the book (there are a few here, and they land like bombs); second of all, it highlights all the ways in which some specific stories are better suited to one medium than another: e.g. this dystopia, which, despite being more or less accurately transcribed into film, feels far more at home in McCarthy's lean, world-weary prose than in director John Hillcoat's sooty camera. It's honestly kind of boring onscreen. Grade: C+

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

In a sort of meta twist on the Punk'd / Jackass cultural landscape of the mid-2000s that clearly birthed this project, Borat isn't just about pranking the dumb schmucks onscreen that Sacha Baron Cohen encounters in-character on the streets of America; it's about baiting us, the audience members, into laughing at (or worse, not even questioning) Cohen's willfully reductive, inaccurate take on central Asia and thereby proving our own bigotry toward that region—xenophobia weaponized against xenophobia, Kazakhstan First to bring out all the America Firsties. It's a completely ballsy (uh, literally) gambit, and given the litany of my high school peers who, in 2006, incessantly guffawed and quoted "Very nice" and "Great success" in terrible accents, the bait was tremendously (horrifyingly) effective. It's all very punk rock and transgressive, and I think I'm seeing in this what a lot of my other cinephile peers are seeing in Jackass. That said, it's still a bit conceptual for my tastes, high-wire and impressive though the concept may be, and given that absolutely nobody I ever heard quoting the xenophobic shtick seemed to be in on the joke, it's just sort of depressing that all this meticulous work exposing American prejudice went into what ultimately became a decontextualized meme. Grade: B

Gangs of New York (2002)

Gangs of New York is a masterpiece of set design, and it captures with great detail something I'm always immensely interested in, which is the emergence of 20th-century American institutions and conventions out of the relative anarchy of the country's first century (see also: Deadwood). This doesn't prevent the film's nearly three hours from being a slog at times, though, nor does it make Cameron Diaz's or Leonardo DiCaprio's characters any more interesting. I keep seeing people praise Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, which is fine, I guess, but also, it mostly just made me want to watch There Will Be Blood. Basically, this is what happens when Scorsese doesn't have a good screenplay. Grade: B-

Dune (1984)

David Lynch attempts the impossible and tries to adapt Frank Herbert's notoriously unadaptable Dune. Of course he fails—it's a famous failure that anyone could (and should) have seen coming a mile away. The funny thing is, Dune is full of stuff I usually love in Lynch movies: transcendental mysticism, alternating body-horror and Freudian imagery, Kyle MacLachlan, opaque plotting involving otherworldly forces, goofy affection for old Hollywood norms (it feels very much like some mash-up between The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra, but in space), acting at a bizarre register, an acting cameo from ol' David Lynch himself. But somehow, when presented in a Dune context, this is all crushingly boring. When your score involves both Toto and Brian Eno but somehow ends up sounding generic anyway, that's the canary in the coal mine, my friends. Grade: C-

Television

Trial & Error, Season 2 (2018)

I'm hoping this (now cancelled) show gets picked up by Netflix or Hulu or someone à la Brooklyn Nine-Nine, because it's so good. Taking the lightly surreal elements of Season 1 and cranking them up significantly, Season 2 of Trial & Error is every bit the superior set of episodes, mining the increasingly strange small-town setting (something like Pawnee mixed with Monty Python) for some singular pieces of TV comedy. Some of it is fleeting—e.g. how each episode Anne is revealed to have a new psychological condition (my favorite: she has a condition that makes her eyes stay closed for long periods of time, so she has someone paint eyeballs on her eyelids, to hilarious and nightmarish effect); but other bits are recurring, and they accumulate in an impressive commitment to worldbuilding and continuity—like, for example, the Reed/Pecker feud that influences everything from the social dynamics of the town right down to the slang the characters use. And in the midst of this, the show somehow makes room for an engaging murder mystery and well-rounded characters who are likable and even sweet without ever really losing their essential comedic kernal. This is one of the better network sitcoms we've gotten in a while; come on, NBC, why would you give this up? Grade: A-

Books

Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (2018)

Like a lot of biographies/memoirs of celebrities who have gotten this level of success and artistic freedom (Bruce Springsteen's autobio also comes to mind), Room to Dream is at its most engaging when it's dealing with David Lynch's childhood and early career, where he feels much more within the chaos of bohemian life (there's an amusing/terrifying anecdote recounted in the book involving a young Lynch fending off burglars in his inner-city Philadelphia home with a sword) than later in his career, when he has a team of assistants who cook lunch for him and stuff. This is compounded by the format of the book itself, which is split between traditional biographical writing by Lynch's long-time friend Kristine McKenna and more memoir-ish recollections told in first person by Lynch himself; Lynch's recollections are far more interesting and poetic when he's dealing with events far in the past, which both raises the question of how much these events have been warped by the tricks of memory over decades but also illustrates with great detail exactly the kind of off-kilter mythologizing that Lynch's mind makes of the world around him. So not only does Lynch's life become more straightforward and comfortable as he gets older; his narration seems less steeped in Lynch's own sensibilities. That's not to say that the whole book isn't interesting, though, and fans of his films and other projects (i.e. yours truly) will find a lot of anecdotes and information to tickle their brains. I also wonder, though, what this book would be like if it weren't quite so cozy with Lynch himself; that McKenna has known the man for so long is surely a boon to the book in many ways, but also, it's a very genial biography, despite some bits that seem like they should be a bit more probing (especially when the book talks of his relationships with women, which is routinely depicted as somewhat messy but also quirkily, endearingly so—apparently his ex-wives have all made peace with Lynch's penchant for serial infidelity and work-before-family habits, but even so, I wonder what someone who wasn't Lynch's friend might have made of this). But I'm being unduly negative; David Lynch is an exceedingly interesting person even when he's older and more comfortable, and the behind-the-scenes information about his work is fascinating. Even if it isn't a great read, it's still a very good one, and one I'd recommend to Lynch fans. Grade: B+

Music

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids - An Angel Fell (2018)

A jazz and worldbeat fusion that's sort of a concept album in the vein of some of the spiritual jazz luminaries of the 1970s. I wish the album swung a bit more for the fences, musically—there are some touches of free jazz, but nothing nearly so ambitious as John Coltrane's Ascension, which makes the spiritual dimensions of An Angel Fell feel comparatively flat. This is an album that could do with a bit more transcendence. Maybe it isn't fair for me to connect this to some of the most notable spiritual jazz of all time, so I'll just say this: there are very good passages here (I love the incorporation of violin and classical guitar in the opening track, for example) as well as some places that feel kind of thin (the chant-like "Land of Ra" is a centerpiece, but not a particularly compelling one). Still, if '70s spiritual jazz is your thing, or jazz that's reaching for something a bit bigger and more mystical than your typical jazz record, you might want to check this out. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for July 30 - August 5, 2018

Three cheers for school starting...

Movies

Eighth Grade (2018)

I was not an unusually unhappy middle schooler, but there were plenty of awful things that happened during those years. And boy, did Eighth Grade force me to remember each and every one of them. And if it wasn't hard enough just to be reminded of my own experiences, there's also the added vicarious pain of the way the movie shows again and again how its protagonist—Kayla, a sweeter and kinder middle schooler than I ever was—encounters one bad experience after another precisely because sweetness and kindness are not the currency of adolescence. Eighth Grade is an excruciating watch. I suspect this will be true for most viewers of the film. My wife had an even harder time (which makes sense—there is a lot of this movie that is specific to the particular social and sexual forces that torment young women, which I of course only recognized second-hand). Most middle schoolers are unhappy and lonely and confused and uncomfortable in their skins, trapped in the dissonance between their vibrant (and often silenced) interior lives and the reckless uncaring of the adolescent social structures around them. Like no other movie I've seen, Eighth Grade recognizes just how traumatic the litany of tiny tragedies that confronts all adolescents can be, despite their seeming inconsequentiality to adults (or even high schoolers) on the other side. Part of this is maybe just that Eighth Grade is mostly breaking new ground and the novelty can't help but be compelling (there are precious few movies that want to seriously depict the middle school experience); but also, I dare you to watch that pool party sequence and tell me that the movie isn't tapping into something deep and primal and utterly terrifying. Grade: A-

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Madeleine L'Engle's original novel is primarily a book of ideas, the foremost being to point out the ways in which modern society's increasingly bureaucratic and "rational" structures create environments that value conformity over love and that encourage hostility toward outsiders. Disney's adaptation largely jettisons these ideas in favor of a more interior central thesis about the importance of self-love, which... *sigh* is fine, I guess, in theory, although it's mighty convenient for Disney, the most corporate of corporations, to repackage such an anti-corporate novel into something more consistent with the company brand. Still, it's not a completely terrible idea to change the gigantic brain IT from a symbol of modern society's cold, loveless machine of profit and social control into a metaphor for the ways your own psychology can be your worst enemy. But the problem is that in getting rid of some of the pieces of L'Engle's message (the foil characters of Meg's WASPy twin brothers, for example), it also gets rid of a lot of the important character-development devices in the book like the family dynamics at the Murry family, which makes Meg's culminating action of familial love through self-love completely theoretical rather than the earned moment of sincere reflection and affirmation that the movie surely means it to be. Also, the kid actors in this movie are uniformly terrible (though Storm Reid is definitely the best of them), which makes it hard for that thing to happen that sometimes does where actors can breathe life into lifeless screenplay pieces. So like, I hate to be That Guy, but I wish they'd stuck a little closer to the book regarding its main ideas (and speaking of fidelity to the source material, surely it's just trolling to include the part where the witches list off all the light warriors from earth but then have them very conspicuously not name Jesus, right? I know they're going for a secular humanist vibe here, which is fine, but come on, did you even need that scene? That would have been the perfect opportunity to name, like, I dunno, the Buddha alongside Jesus, if the movie was worried about wading too deeply into L'Engle's Christianity. But fine, whatever.). I'll give the movie this, though: if the Hollywood blockbuster is going to continue to be dominated by the green screen, A Wrinkle in Time seems like one of the better embraces of that feature(?) of mainstream filmmaking since George Lucas codified the approach in the Star Wars prequels—the movie's CG visuals are sumptuous and completely devoid of any devotion to realism or pandering "maturity," which is exactly how it should be. I wish more movies had this go-for-broke approach to their special effects and this level of unself-consciousness at its own childlike sense of anything-goes, no matter how goofy (Lettuce Witherspoon forever!). It's possible that this commitment to spectacle is part of what cuts off at the knees the movie's time to develop believable characters. Still, it's cool to look at. So the film is a mixed bag, to say the least. But at least it fails in honest, heart-on-its-sleeve ways that modern Hollywood (esp. Disney) blockbusters are rarely allowed to these days, which maybe makes it worth a watch. Grade: C

Sweet Country (2017)

What begins as a western in the vein of The Ox-Bow Incident, only agonizingly slow (and set in Australia) eventually, in its final 30-40 minutes, turns into a sort of twist on To Kill a Mockingbird directed by an aboriginal man and following the accused person of color as its protagonist rather than cute kids whose innocence is being shattered by the cruelty of their society. And like To Kill a Mockingbird, the ending is utterly devastating, but unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, the focus on people of color leaves very little room for optimism in race relations. I can only approach this from an American point of view, but that this movie ends with the raising of a church steeple cross-cut with a man wailing at the heavens, "What chance has this country got?", it feels like an apocalypse that echoes still to this day. It's possible I'm letting this ending weigh too heavily on my overall evaluation of the film (the preceding hour-plus is really kind of dull for long stretches, despite the gorgeous cinematography), but I can't lie about how I'm feeling right now with the credits rolling. Grade: B+

13 Assassins (十三人の刺客) (2010)

I guess this is sort of like 300, just without the gratuitous stylistic flourishes or xenophobia. But like 300, I had a hard time with the masculine posturing of the violence, and I found it difficult to care much about the characters when so much of the movie is forward motion and chest-thumping (the fact that there are thirteen heroes just compounds this—I have no idea who these people are beyond their archetypes). That said, the finale is a legitimately great and elegant tapestry of fight choreography, particularly the very end when the lone villain faced down our lead hero. What happens with the villain in particular is haunting and surprising, and honestly, he may be the best character in the film? Grade: B-

Marie Antoinette (2006)

It probably leans too hard into the charms of its anachronistic alt-rock/ambient soundtrack (though I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a gigantic grin on my face seeing a bunch of 18th-century French aristocrats dance to Siouxsie and the Banshees). But the cinematography and the production design are legendary, and I really, really dig the emotional undercurrent of the film's emotions. Recontextualizing Marie Antoinette into a sexually awoken women whose sexuality is nevertheless exploited is inspired, and turning her into a semi-tragic female scapegoat for the entirety of the abuses of the French royalty is bold. Grade: B+

Animal Farm (1954)

The animation--a dark combination of drawn and painted that looks by turns cheap and breathtaking; the visibly painted fire effects are incredible, and the pigs are marvelously cunning in appearance, even if the rest of the animals are a bit too loosely designed for their own good. It's a decent adaptation of Orwell's original novel, too, the "cute" animal slapstick juxtaposed with the narrator's delivery of Orwell's writheringly satirical prose creating just the right amount of dissonance, though I'm loathe to accept the film's criminally dishonest ending. If the film had been made in 1989 or 1990, the idea of a second animal uprising overthrowing the pigs may have been a nice update of Orwell's mid-century depiction of the USSR; in 1954, it just feels like a lie. But the rest of the movie is mostly unimpeachable, though. Grade: B

Television

Trial & Error, Season 1 (2017)
A strange, fun mash-up between true crime and Parks & Recreation (just without the idealism), Trial & Error isn't blowing my mind, but familiar as it is, what it does, it does well. John Lithgow as a defendant who has guilelessly stumbled into literally the worst possible case against him (e.g. there is security footage of him buying a ski mask along with quicklime and a shovel) is never not entertaining, and Sherri Shepherd's spacey secretary beset by a host of increasingly off-the-wall psychological conditions adds a nice dose of surrealism to the otherwise naturalistic mockumentary format. My favorite, though, is Steven Boyer's cheerful, Gomer-Pyle-esque ignoramus, who delivers his stupid lines with such enthusiastic sincerity that it's hard not to love the guy. Like I said, it's nothing too mind-blowing, but this brisk season is good for a few days' entertainment. I'm looking forward to diving into the (currently airing) second season. Grade: B+

Books

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)
Ada is a Nigerian woman and also an Ogbanje, a chaotic spirit who, according to Nigerian mythology, is repeatedly born into the same family. Though to use "spirit" (singular) is a bit misleading—a whole host of spirits lives within Ada, running through her psyche as if it were an open-air edifice and taking control of her behavior from time to time. The resulting novel, which chronicles, though these narrating spirits, Ada's childhood and early adulthood, is something like a much pricklier literary-fiction rendition of Pixar's Inside Out, using intricate interior landscapes and characters as a way of depicting the psychological growth and developing identity of its protagonist. The novel's opening, which describes Ada's birth and early childhood, is breathtaking, and it's honestly a bit of a disappointment that the novel never regains that bewildering, bold mojo after that section passes. But the novel is also never not challenging and fascinating, and even when it's dealing with more traditional literary-fiction subject matter (e.g. going to college, dealing with trauma, etc.), the central device of the Ogbanje narrators always makes it feel fresh. This is an astoundingly confident and engaging debut novel, and I'm excited for what more Emezi will do. Grade: B+

Music

Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth (2018)
I guess Heaven and Earth is technically smaller than Washington's last full-length release, the triple album The Epic. But it doesn't feel that way. Sure, I guess Heaven and Earth is only two discs, but it's only a scant twenty minutes shorter (a mere blink when we're talking about 2-3 hour records here). More importantly, Heaven and Earth just sounds bigger than The Epic. The vocals, used as accents to The Epic's mostly Coltrane-ish jazz, have taken center stage here alongside a booming orchestra, which, again, was on The Epic a flavor added to Washington's central saxophone. As a result, the compositions on Heaven and Earth feel much more, well, epic than The Epic's, and they are also much more conspicuously constructed, with clear crescendos and movements and fewer opportunities for improvisation. This is simultaneously a savvy way of sidestepping the common criticism that Washington isn't really that great of an improviser to begin with and also a doubling down of what has become Washington's signature: high-concept, spiritual, and enormous. It, in fact, wouldn't be inaccurate to call Washington more this record's conductor than its lead performer, and I think the role serves him marvelously. Grade: A-