Mini Reviews for November 8 - 14, 2021

Already hate this time change. Give me back my evening light!

Movies

The French Dispatch (2021)
There was no way I was ever going to be able to resist this. Wes Anderson at his most visually hermetic, romanticizing the glory days of print periodicals by basically adapting fictitious New Yorker features into poignant, incredibly dense vignettes? I'm tempted to rate it even higher, because I was absolutely transported. But I'm hedging my bets until a rewatch, when the shine sometimes comes off Wes Anderson films for me. As for now, though, I thought this was stunning and put me in a great mood all evening, even after a somewhat bad day at work. Also, Alexandre Desplat's score is great, especially the piece that recurs throughout the final vignette—there's a moment in that vignette when a character picks up a guitar and idly strums it in a way that syncs up to the piece, and it made everything in my brain shudder with satisfaction. Grade: A-

Sleepaway Camp (1983)
I feel like it's not too controversial to say that this is extraordinarily regressive and transphobic while also noting that it taps into something a lot more powerful than those things. Most slasher movies have casually cruel teenagers, but this one takes that cruelty so seriously that it's hard to dismiss, even when it goes into full-on Fox-News-Covering-a-Bathroom-Bill territory at the end. I wouldn't blame anyone for hating this movie, but I get the love, for sure. Grade: B

 

 

 

The Masque of Red Death (1964)
Very cool stuff. Really cranks up the upper-class squalor of the short story by making the rich dude at the center of this a literal devotee of Satan (which I think is a fair characterization of all ultra-wealthy folks, but it's nice to hear one say it out loud) and on top of that being an enormous abusive cad. Probably the first Vincent Price performance I can remember where I genuinely loathed the character he played instead of being caught up in the magnificent camp of the performance, which goes to show how much range Price had beyond mere camp. Also, the colors are super cool, which I'm beginning to realize must be a thing with these Corman/Poe adaptations. Grade: A-

 

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Very cool sets and colors, very very cool Vincent Price performance (is there any other kind?), drippy protagonist, only barely perfunctory plot, which is premised on a kind of dopey premise of "What if we did 'Fall of the House of Usher,' but scotch-taped 'The Pit and the Pendulum' to the end?" But still, Vincent Price and the visuals! Lots of fun. I wish I'd have gotten this Corman/Poe set from the library at the beginning of October, instead of that Friday the 13th set—curse you, slow holds queue! Grade: B

 

 

Television

Midnight Mass (2021)
I guess I'm going to have to watch all these Mike Flanagan miniseries, huh? I thought this was great. It really scratches my itch for classic Stephen King, and it also scratches my itch for anguished Christian deconstruction (something classic Stephen King never does), and it does both modes with aplomb. The series is a deeply sincere wrestling with the idea that the Christian faith, though comforting and meaningful for some, is inescapably a tool for mass complicity in oppression, the promise of eternal life, however beautiful, becoming a literally vampiric idea to justify suffering at the hands of the powerful. There was a time in my life where I would have probably been offended by that idea, and given that I'm still a Christian, I clearly don't think it's an inescapable truth; but as I become more and more aware of Christianity's role in the spread of white supremacy, capitalism, and hierarchy in the United States (and elsewhere, I suppose, but I'm most familiar with the USA) and as it becomes clearer and clearer that, despite whatever lies I had been fed about the repentance of White Christianity after the Civil Rights Movement, an enormous portion of contemporary Christianity in the States is still in the thrall of those demons to the point of the destruction of their own communities on their altars, it's increasingly hard not to resonate with the despair at the core of this show. People have talked a lot about the optimism of Flanagan's work, and I suppose there is a kind of humanist optimism to this on a certain level, but none of that optimism is found in its depiction of religion, which, by the end, is sweet but irredeemable. Everyone's talking about Hamish Linklater as the central priest, and rightly so: it's a virtuosic performance, imbuing what is already the best character in the series with an incredible humanity that straddles the series's two modes regarding religion: sweet, bounding idealism ultimately crushed by horrible guilt and then ideological defeat. The rest of the cast is almost as good (though with condolences to Alex Essoe, who has to endure some of the worst old-age makeup in recent memory, and Zach Gilford, whose arc is purposefully but nevertheless unsatisfactorily cut short), but it's Linklater who forms the heart of this piece. I've seen some complaints about the series's reliance on lengthy monologues, but 1. those are where Linklater shines brightest, and 2. I sure hope nobody complaining ever has to watch an Ingmar Bergman movie, which is very much what these reminded me of (in a good way). Anyway, good stuff. Made me feel bad at times, but that's horror for ya, I guess. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for April 23 - 29, 2018

Yo, people, there are only TWO DAYS LEFT TO VOTE ON THE SUMMER PROJECT. If you haven't already done that, do so!

Movies

Isle of Dogs (2018)
Wes Anderson's latest is his weakest in quite some time (probably since The Darjeeling Limited, though it's a significant step above his career low, The Life Aquatic), but it has its typical Wes-Andersonian pleasures: its fussy precision, its deadpan dialogue, its cast. It has a few flaws that feel uncharacteristic of Anderson's usual efficiency, most notably the character of Tracy (I'm not sure why we needed a white character in this Japan-set story) and the gender dynamics in general (the female characters are so underwritten that I have to wonder why they're even there in the first place). Even laying aside those critiques, there's no denying that this film is minor—there's nothing of the epic sweep of The Grand Budapest Hotel, for example, or the painfully observed family dynamics of The Royal Tenenbaums or Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's basically just a story about dogs and why people love dogs; while I don't actually love dogs (I know, I know), I can appreciate what this movie is going for, but I can also observe that what it's doing is especially small-scale and somewhat silly. The movie at least has the decency to depict its small-scale silliness in some truly excellent animation, though. Its stop-motion feels less homegrown than that of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but the increased sophistication gives this movie a fluidity and an attention to detail that's never not captivating on a visual level. So if nothing else, we at least got what is likely to be the best animation in any American film this year. Grade: B

Zama (2017)
If Barry Lyndon were just a touch more surreal and set in Argentina, you'd have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this movie right up until the third act blows any previous expectations to very small bits. As with The Headless Woman, I suspect this movie will improve on rewatch, when I won't be so concerned with keeping up with character names and worrying which parts are intentionally confusing and which parts are just confusing because I couldn't keep character names right. But even now, with first-watch levels of comprehension, this is a rich movie in both aesthetics and ideas, one that I'll be rolling around in my head for a while. Come for the sumptuous period detail and brutal skewering of European colonialism, stay for the hypnotic sound design and llama photo bomb. Grade: A-

Hostiles (2017)
Remember that song "Savages" in Disney's Pocahontas that's terrible because it's all like, "But Native Americans and European colonizers were both equally bad"? This is basically the feature-length version of that (in that the movie flatters modern viewers with easy platitudes—this time about how the genocide of Native Americans was just an outcropping of the hierarchical structures of violence within the idea of government or whatever ["I'm a good guy, I'm just doing my job"]), only I guess writer/director Scott Cooper couldn't secure the rights from Disney, so they had to tweak the title just a tad. Disney sure is stingy with their intellectual property; makes you wonder who the real hostile is! Grade: D+

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
There's probably someone out there who'll hang me out to dry for saying this, but the Star Wars prequels' use of green screen and CG as a sort of futurist, deliberately nonrealistic merging of rear projection and matte painting was legitimately visionary and one of the more interesting aesthetic advancements of the past couple decades of blockbuster filmmaking. And here's Sky Captain, nearly a year prior to the release of Revenge of the Sith, beating Lucas at his own game, not just on the technological level but also in its appropriation of decades-old pulp tropes. The movie imagines, rather breathtakingly, a huge (and entirely green-screen-driven) world that's something like the mashing together of Metropolis, Buck Rogers, and the 1927 silent feature Wings, creating, like Lucas did for both of his Star Wars trilogies, a historically grounded but technologically modern pulp sci-fi idiom. Where the movie stumbles is in basically everything else, though none of it is catastrophic. Unlike Star Wars, the action scenes are disappointingly perfunctory, and the movie exhausts its whole bag of visual tricks by the end of the first act. And then there's Gwyneth Paltrow, who, while never exactly a riveting presence, flounders in any attempt to breathe life into the musty female archetype she's given, though I suppose the true fault goes to the screenplay for writing an archetype that musty to begin with. All that said, it's a completely fascinating movie with lots of weird corners and decisions—an alternate history not just for its steampunk postwar plot but also for the way it posits a modern cinema in which everyone else found Lucas's green screen art as engaging as I now do. Grade: B+

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
We're long past the era in which having a female protagonist who swears and talks frankly about sex is anything close to groundbreaking, and even in 2001, Bridget Jones's Diary seems to be hanging on the coattails of Sex and the City. Where the movie still feels fresh (ish) is in its depiction of women navigating the masculine-enabling power dynamics of the workplace and dating scene, which is, after all, more in line with this movie's Jane Austen roots (it's based—loosely—on Pride and Prejudice). It's not exactly #MeToo conscious (there's a moment where a woman's boss jokes about sexually harassing her that's played very much as a haha comedy moment instead of a cringe comedy moment), and when you get right down to it, this movie isn't ultimately saying a ton that a lot of other movies haven't. But it has moments of sharpness, and although the rest of the cast is kind of hit-or-miss (Colin Firth is particularly inert), Zellweger has probably never been better in a role than she is here. Grade: B-

Music

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet - Landfall (2018)
Laurie Anderson teams up with Kronos Quartet for—what else?—an album of modern classical infused with mercurial electronics and haunting spoken word. It's a record-length meditation on environmental catastrophe that swings from almost mundane pieces of concrete detail ("CNN Predicts a Monster Storm," "It Twisted the Street Signs") to cosmic and even supernatural grandiosity ("Galaxies," "Gongs and Bells Sing")—all swirling around the album's eerie and elegiac 10-minute centerpiece, "Nothing Left but Their Names," in which a pitch-shifted voice reads out a meditative poem on all the animals that have gone extinct, sounding as much like a ghost as the croons of a humpback whale as it methodically takes apart, brick by brick, the idea that human experience has any centrality in the universe. Not everything on the album works; there are plenty of moments that feel overly literal or a tad too on-the-nose, and those moments usually coincide with the less interesting instrumental portions. But this album is on more than it's off, and at its very best (i.e. "Nothing Left but Their Names"), it's actually stunning. Grade: B+