Until next year!
Movies
Like last year's The Edge of Seventeen, Lady Bird understands the very specific ways that high schoolers can lie and pretend and be careless toward each other and their families. It's my favorite kind of coming-of-age, one that takes seriously the small joys and heartbreaks of the teen experience without letting those moments swallow the rest of the world but also recognizing the extent to which the teens absolutely let their own moments swallow everything. There are some narrative loose ends that don't really work as loose ends—most notably, a weird go-nowhere subplot involving a teacher crush. But the movie at least never loses sight of its protagonist, a luminous Saoirse Ronan as the titular Lady Bird, and it never strays too far from its central thematic axes of Lady Bird's self-actualization and her recognition that the hardest part of self-actualization is the appreciation of your upbringing at the very moment you're distancing yourself from it. It's a lovely tribute to family and place and friendship (Lady Bird's friend Julie [Beanie Feldstein] is every bit the non-Lady-Bird heart of the film), measured with equal parts poignancy and knowing humor. Basically, it's very good. Grade: A-
Okay, the acting is excellent, and the dialogue has some very nice zingers. But what on earth does this movie mean? It's certainly not about violence toward women; it seems like that's where it's going—Frances McDormand, a survivor of domestic abuse, is upset that the police have not solved her daughter's rape/murder—but Sheriff Willoughby says the case has no leads, and we're never given any reason to doubt him, so that's sort of a dead-end, thematically. It doesn't seem to be about racism. Though plenty of time is spent describing the police force's racist behavior (and I guess here's as good a place as any to say that I think the film's use of the N-word [and for that matter, the word "retard"] is irresponsible and flippant—giving the UK-born writer/director Martin McDonagh the benefit of the doubt, I suppose we could chalk this up to his being ignorant of the full American connotations of those words, but that doesn't change the shocking way the movie refuses to even comment on the use of these epithets beyond an assumed irony that I don't think we can safely assume in an audience), so little of the plot has anything to do with race and so few of the cast members are black that I can't imagine how McDonagh could have been trying to say anything about racism in modern policing. More likely foci are the moral and philosophical questions that the movie poses—ones of redemption, rage, retribution, and, most interesting to me, whether individual members of a group should be held culpable for the actions of every member of that group. But frustratingly, the movie intentionally cuts to credits right before the characters' actions can give any of those questions any concrete meaning, and while ambiguity is all fine and good, this is not a movie that necessitates ambiguity, especially when it throws down those gigantic questions like whole bucketful of gauntlets. Besides, I already experience plenty of ambiguity about those questions in real life—I didn't need to watch two hours of really elaborate profanity and mediocre cinematography to just be reaffirmed of that. It's a cop out. This whole movie is a cop out, and it's lucky that it's funny enough to not make me actively hate it. Grade: C
I mean, you know what you're signing up for with this movie, and just in case the title didn't clue you in, let me stress: there is a character whose name is Professor Poopypants; he rides in a giant toilet; the word "poopageddon" is uttered in sincerity by one character. But allowing that a movie can behave in this way (a dubious assumption for some, I know), this is actually rather delightful. As a longtime fan of the Dav Pilkey novels, I can say that this is an admirable shuffle of the first four books, complete with a Flip-O-Rama! sequence; beyond that, the animation is actually kind of great. Dreamworks has been trying to do this for a while, but I'd say that it's this year, with The Boss Baby and this film, that they've finally succeeded in making CG animation look like an honest-to-goodness cartoon and not some failed attempt at realism. Oh, there's also a sequence animated in sock puppets. The movie's not required viewing or anything, but it's not far from it. Grade: B+
I don't understand this movie. The extent to which this is a consequence of how little I know about Thai political history—upon which this movie is commenting in ways I am very poorly equipped to parse—or an intentional effect by the film itself is unclear to me, though it's definitely some mix of the two. Nevertheless, it's a hypnotic feature that, when it isn't a little boring (and honestly, it is kinda, at least in stretches), is utterly arresting in its dreamy, tactile approach to its narrative—something about soldiers falling asleep and spirits waking up, but that's not all that important; this movie's alchemy of sound and image made me feel a great sense of mystery and awe, and that's valuable. Grade: B+
I think it's pretty well-established now that I'm Still Here is mockumentary and not documentary. On the one hand, this is a relief—I remember watching Joaquin Phoenix's talk show appearances depicted here and being very sad and confused. On the other hand, knowing that this is all staged sucks the life right out of this movie. One of the things that was so weird and live-wire about Phoenix's behavior during the period depicted here was the insecurity about whether to laugh or cry. The lush ambiguity of this performance is gone when you realize that it was all a gag of sorts. The movie works in small doses, particularly near the end, as a parody of the lurid, washed-up-celeb docudramas that lurk in the corners of basic cable. But as a whole, its shtick quickly wears thin. Grade: C
The central conflict of this movie—essentially the tension between the necessity of the traditional British monarchy as a political symbol and the pragmatic realities of modern Western representational democracy—is something I can't relate to; every time some character suggested that it was maybe time for (shock! horror!) the monarchy to be dissolved, I found myself nodding in agreement. However, I'm not from the UK, and this tension is clearly a deeply British one, so it's not really my tension to critique. And besides, the movie is still able to take those themes to effective places; the cinematography is nice (though not jaw-dropping), the acting is good, and the screenplay is pretty smart in how it handles the conflict between the Queen and new Prime Minister Tony Blair in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death. Grade: B
As with most Jack-Black-involved projects, there's an admirable level of enthusiasm here. But the core material just isn't there. A few setpieces are fun—the dream sequence of the duo's rock success is a highlight—but overall, this is just under-baked (ha). Also, I was under the mistaken impression that this movie contained "Tribute." It doesn't—talk about a disappointment. Grade: C
Is screwball noir a thing? I don't think so, and I'm willing to blame this movie—an unfunny and dull combination of screwball comedy and noir mystery, Dressed to Kill is enough to have discourage anyone else from attempting the format. The only thing that really lands is the final scene, and that's more for how mean-spirited it is than for actually being funny. Grade: C
The first third of this movie is straight-up myth-making silliness of the sort you might find in one of those children's picture books from the 1950s. Then the movie abruptly left-turns into a court drama (because Lincoln was a lawyer, y'see) before returning to the myth stuff in the final couple minutes. None of this is great Abraham Lincoln biography, I'm sure, but the lawyer section is pretty great. Grade: B
Television
It's possible this show is too patient, especially in the early-going, when it maybe assumes a bit too strongly that its quiet, slow depiction of Earn's life unadorned is fascinating. Earn (Donald Glover) is the least-interesting character here—though he's able to give a fantastic deadpan look of mixed fear and incredulity, and two of the season's best episodes, "Streets on Lock" and "Juneteenth," rely heavily on this look—so it's a breath of fresh air when the back half of the season begins to stray from relying on his POV alone and instead embraces the other characters are worthy storytelling vessels. Even better, the show develops a low-key surrealism as it progresses, and many of the funniest moments in this decidedly genre-fluid series (it's a half hour, but it's not always a comedy) come from this understated strangeness, e.g. Justin Bieber being played by a black actor without comment. My instinct is that this show is a tad overrated, but oh well. I still enjoyed it. Grade: B+
Books
The most incredible thing about Allende's incredible debut (!!??!!) novel is the way it so effortlessly conflates the personal with the historical. The House of the Spirits is basically two stories—the lives of four generations of women in the aristocratic Trueba family and the political development of Chile over the course of the 20th century—but under Allende's confident plotting and beautifully efficient prose, these two threads become one. There's never the feeling that we've spent too long with the historical sweep of the country and we should return to the Truebas or that we've focused too narrowly on the Truebas and need to zoom out to the broader political context, because the novel is brilliantly meticulous in making those two one and the same. It's intimate and epic and exciting and gently funny until it turns bracingly tragic until it's sweetly nostalgic, and I loved it from cover to cover. Grade: A
For a little while, it seems like A Raisin in the Sun isn't going much of anywhere, instead just willing to show symbolically freighted but dramatically low-impact slice-of-life events for the duration of its multiple acts. And that would have been fine—plenty of successful drama works in this way. However (and those of you who've read/seen the play know what I'm talking about), all of the sudden everything happens, and in that instant, the play doesn't just become symbolically weighted but also dramatically profound and, in gaining this dramatic heft, symbolically profound, too. This is the 20th-century black experience in microcosm, and it's powerful. I'm not blowing your minds—I'm probably the last person on earth to experience this required-reading staple for the first time, but... *shrug*. It's still great. Grade: A
Music
Let's not kid ourselves here (*cough*Rolling Stone*cough*): this is U2's worst album since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and while there's nothing here quite as bad as the worst bits on that album, we're not dealing with much of a margin above it. On Songs of Experience, U2 is determinedly non-experimental (it's looking more and more like No Line on the Horizon was our last chance to see a truly new-sounding U2 record, and they kind of mucked that up), and while that's not inherently a problem (Songs of Innocence, which I like a whole lot, is similarly stylistically staid), it's not doing the album any favors when most of the songwriting is this mediocre. It's not all bad; the two opening tracks ("Love Is All We Have Left" and "Lights of Home") are actually very good, and "13 (There Is a Light)" recontextualizes one of the weaker tracks on Songs of Innocence ("Song for Someone") and turns it into a pretty strong closer. But the ten tracks in between those are full of run-of-the-mill pop/rock and more lyrical Bono-isms than anyone should have to endure. Grade: C+
