Mini-Reviews for March 12 - 18, 2018

No more SPRING BREAAAAAAAAK.

Movies

Game Night (2018)
The fact that this movie pays any attention to cinematography and shot composition is practically a revolution unto itself within the context of the modern Hollywood comedy. It is also solidly under two hours and mostly devoid of improvised riffing, and with all this combined, it's handily sidestepped my go-to critiques of most mainstream comedy cinema. Truth be told, Game Night isn't hilarious (though it's a decent step in that direction, even as the jokes kind of peter out in favor of plotting toward the middle section onward), and its charms lie mostly in its expert deployment of its impressive cast—it's the best use of Jason Bateman in a decade, Rachel McAdams is as charming as ever, and Jesse Plemons completely steals the show. I feel like I'm damning with faint praise here, but believe me: I enjoyed this, and I welcome more comedies that take their cinematic craft at least this seriously. Are you listening, Judd Apatow? Please? Grade: B+

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017)
There are two modes this movie works in: one about the mechanics and group dynamics of an ACT UP chapter in Paris in the '90s, the other a much more personal rendering of the experience of loving someone who is HIV-positive. Because I dig explorations of activism and the group tensions therein surrounding pragmatism vs. idealism vs. interpersonal connections, I connected much more strongly with the first mode I described, but I can imagine someone just as easily feeling that the intimacy of the second personalizes that activism in ways the first fails to do. Regardless, though, it's all very moving and strikingly presented and worth your time. I do get the feeling that the two modes are bumping up against one another rather than truly complementing each other, and this dulls the movie somewhat. But it's a minor problem overall, and one that only keeps the movie from being Great instead of Good. Grade: B+

Force Majeure (2014)
Force Majeure has one very interesting question on its mind—what is your gut reaction to a crisis: self-preservation or the protection of your loved ones—that unfortunately The Loneliest Planet already eviscerated with much more elegance. Still, it's not like we can't live in a world with more than one film wrestling with the same thematic landscape, and it's an undeniably compelling theme that Force Majeure scrutinizes with a great deal of wry humor and a good eye for critiquing the posturings of masculinity. I do wish there was a bit more on this film's mind, though, because, unlike The Loneliest Planet, Force Majeure exposes its conceit in the very early goings of the film and basically just repeatedly poses it with little variation for the following two hours, right up to its thematically muddled ending. Grade: B-

Film Socialisme (2010)
Jean-Luc Godard chose to have this film's English subtitles not be proper subtitles but as these fractured, conceptual phrases (e.g. "war is war," "hello geometry," you get the picture). I guess these are supposed to clue us English-speaking swine in to the larger thematic concerns of the movie while still preserving the feeling of us being present in a context outside of our own language, but who knows—writing I've seen about this movie discusses aspects of the movie that I totally didn't register at all (one of the characters is apparently running for public office?), so maybe Godard is just trolling us even more heavily than my academic rationalization of the subtitles indicates. What that means is that all I'm left with are those broad ideas—as always, Godard loves his leftist ideology, so hellooooo low-hanging imagery about the excesses of capitalism—and the pure texture of the movie, which, to be fair, is often quite playful and fun in that cockeyed way that avant-garde cinema can be; for example, my favorite of the cryptic subtitles reads, meme-ily, "What if reality but in books," which elicited a hearty chuckle, and other sections use the language of film to funny, incongruous effect: a long, static close-up of a llama scored with tense, serious music (and later, Gregorian chant). Honestly, the movie's first movement (set on a Carnival Cruise) and the third/final (consisting mostly of a collage of repurposed existing footage, both from Godard films and film history) are also frequently visually sumptuous in the ways it uses filmic imperfections and datamoshing to create these almost painterly images. But good merciful heavens, the middle section of Film Socialisme, set in a gas station, is interminable and inscrutable and above all crushingly boring, especially in absence of my being able to understand the French dialogue outside of those subtitled abstractions, and it just kills the movie for me. I guess part of this is my fault for not learning French like a *real* smart person, but also: screw you, Godard. Even given the eventual pleasures of the final segment, the movie never really succeeds in coaxing me back into the house after throwing me into non-French-speaker jail for so long. Grade: C

The Anniversary Party (2001)
I mean, it's basically rich people being miserable and doing drugs and hating themselves, but... imagine that being intermittently compelling. Also imagine Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming writing and directing the best film versions of themselves, because it's here, too. Grade: B

In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'amour) (2001)
This movie looks amazing, both as the classically composed b&w cinematography of urban, non-famous Paris that makes up the film's first half and as the hazed-out, digital-video-as-first-gen-Technicolor footage that encompasses the film's second half. On the other hand, I'm left extremely cold by the actual text of the film, which involves a bunch of academics considering their pasts as radicals and the ethics of complicity in capitalist systems—not ideas that I'm opposed to a movie exploring by any means, but certainly ones that I wish this particular film engaged with a bit more vigor. I'm sure this says a lot about the difference between what Godard and I want out of this movie, but I wish this felt more of an impassioned dialogue than a cool, ruminative stroke of the chin. Grade: C

Weekend (1967)
In which Jean-Luc Godard condenses centuries of human history and class conflict into a metaphorical road trip into hell—it's hilarious and outrageous and sobering and completely out-there. Weekend is not a subtle movie, but it makes a virtue of unsubtlety ("The end... of cinema" one title card declares) that feels weaponized in a frequently compelling and complicated way, even if I'm just a tad wary of the actual philosophical POV. Godard is leaning into a particularly nihilistic strain of Maoism here, one that, scrubbed of leftism's utopian impulses, posits that Western society is doomed to spiral into tribal chaos whether it's in the hands of exploitative bourgeoisie or violent radicals, which, if this movie is meant to be a political statement, I find to be understandable but ultimately a dead-end of an idea. But maybe I'm just not radical enough, ha. Either way, it's an exhilarating, endlessly inventive movie that, among other things, is the most direct antecedent to last year's mother!—if mother! is the Bible for heretics, then Weekend is (to put the chronology a bit backwards) mother! for Marxists. I liked mother! a whole lot and I'm not a heretic (I don't think?), so it's only natural I'm into this, even though I'm not a Marxist. Grade: A-

Vivre sa vie (1962)
There are definitely things about this movie that work very well—it's stylish, the editing is, of course, great, and Nana is a reasonably engaging character (performed excellently by Anna Karina). I also liked the imposition of The Passion of Joan of Arc over the narrative—Godard loves his Hollywood films, sure, but this is probably the most successful cinematic reference in the movie. That said, Vivre sa vie is fragmented to a degree that I'm not sure it completely justifies—I mean, I know that this is a gigantic part of the movie's conceit, and I'm not against modernist fragmentation. But a lot of this fragmentation feels like an end to itself rather than serving some larger scheme, and as it is, the movie seems very much like the guy who made Breathless grasping at more formal and philosophical profundity, awkwardly caught between more traditional narrative concerns and high-minded philosophical, modernist ones. Grade: B-

Music

U.S. Girls - In a Poem Unlimited (2018)
In case you needed any more assurance that the future of indie rock is female (thank goodness), here's U.S. Girls with a strong, left-of-the-dial collection of pop/rock. In a Poem Unlimited is perfectly balanced between its zanier elements (the sax in "Rage of Plastics," the weird hoarse vocals on "Why Do I Lose My Voice When I Have Something to Say," the song "Time" in general) and its strongly melodic songwriting, resulting in an album that feels unhinged enough to be interesting while it maintains a pop immediacy. Grade: B+

Prog Progress 1977: Pink Floyd - Animals

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

One of the most enduring images of British punk rock's first wave is that of John Lydon, alias Johnny Rotten, the rambunctious lead singer for the Sex Pistols, wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt, on which he has scribbled "I HATE" above the band's name.

In 1977, Pink Floyd released Animals. Also in 1977, punk rock killed progressive rock.

That's the standard logline. The likes of Yes, Genesis, and Jethro Tull had made rock fluffier and stuffier, and it took Johnny Rotten and co. to destroy these lumbering dinosaurs once and for all and return rock to its pure, anarchic roots. And on the surface, that idea makes sense: The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Wire, The Damned, and The Jam all released their debut albums in '77; Johnny Rotten really did wear a shirt that said "I Hate Pink Floyd"; punk's urban, working-class aesthetics seem an obvious foil to the puffed-up medievalry and prep-school roots of prog's image; punk's short, punchy songs with traditional instrumentation are definitely striking compared to prog's sprawling, symphonic compositions, and the socially conscious, snide lyrics seem a far cry from the sci-fi epics of prog's lineage. It's a conflict between a bloated monarchy and a scrappy proletariat uprising, and it's one from which punk emerges triumphant. The king is dead, long live the king.

However, as is usually the case with historical loglines, it's not nearly so simple as that. For starters, prog never really had a throne to depose; critics were, with a few exceptions, never super keen on prog to begin with, favoring instead glam (in the UK) and proto-punk (in the US) all throughout prog's golden years, and neither were audiences, at least not in the monolithic way suggested by the narrative of punk usurping prog—even in prog's home field of the UK, it was radio mainstays like Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, and Elton John who ruled the album charts during the prog years, so if punk deposed anyone, it was them (and looking at the charts from the end of the '70s, not a lot of deposing was had anyway; Zeppelin's still there, and Blondie's the only punk-adjacent group to get a #1 album by the end of the decade, unless we're counting Gary Numan [1]). The punks didn't even consider themselves completely in opposition to prog, and Johnny "I Hate Pink Floyd" Rotten apparently liked Van Der Graaf Generator.

Closer to the truth is that progressive rock killed itself. As I've mentioned several times in the last few posts of this series, the mid-'70s were a bloodbath for prog, as groups fractured or went on hiatus and key creative figures left to do their own thing outside of the prog idiom, and by 1977, you've got Yes (the real canary in prog's coal mine) doing fine but inessential work like Going for the One and Queen completely jumping ship with News of the World. Even assuming that punk did replace prog (a dubious assumption, but fine), it was hardly a battle; progressive rock practically opened the door and said, "You take over, punk; I'm going to take a nap."

There's also the strangeness of Pink Floyd being the prog band for Lydon to hate [2]. Pink Floyd often get lumped in with the progressive rock movement—sometimes even evoked as the embodiment of progressive rock—and there are reasons for that. Their peak commercial era is right smack in the center of the prog's golden era in the early-to-mid '70s; they did a bunch of concept albums; they had elaborate live shows; they're closely associated with psychedelic drug culture; their albums often have lengthy, multi-part compositions with unconventional instrumentation; they are almost certainly the most commercially successful band with proggy tendencies. If I went out into my hometown of Knoxville, TN, and asked random people on the street to name a progressive rock band, Pink Floyd is probably the name I would get most often.

And yet, Pink Floyd has never really been an easy fit with the prog world. The band formed way back in 1965, making them the second-oldest band, behind The Moody Blues, that I've covered in this series, and like The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd (or The Pink Floyd Sound, as they originally went by) was much more closely associated with the avant-garde psychedelics of London's UFO Club than the conceptual arms race that occupied a lot of the mainline prog bands in the late '60s and early '70s [3]. Their debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is comprised of mostly short, trippy rock songs, including one about band leader Syd Barrett's cat and another about riding bikes, the exception being "Interstellar Overdrive," which, even at 10 minutes, still feels a lot more spacey than proggy. Even once Barrett (in an oft-chronicled mental breakdown) left the band and Pink Floyd tended toward more sinister, experimental work on A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) and Atom Heart Mother (1970), the band never quite loses that sense of goofy whimsy that defined the early years in London's musical underground [4], and even the side-long experimental suites (which include, for example, an orchestra and a sound collage of field recordings on Atom Heart Mother) feel more in tune with the kitchen-sink ethos of Frank Zappa or what Brian Eno would be doing by the end of the '70s than it does in league with contemporary Genesis or even King Crimson. Even once you get to their albums that are often most confidently named "progressive rock"—The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), and Animals (1977; hang in there, I promise I'll talk about this album eventually)—the band's sound has funk and soul touches that in some ways make these albums more in step with George Clinton's psychedelic funk of that era.

All that is to say, they're a weird choice to be the prog band.

But even so, it's hard to deny that there's something essentially proggy about Pink Floyd. They are still making sonically and lyrically ambitious rock music within epic compositional structures, even if it's not emblematic of progressive rock's most common lyrical or sonic traits. And further still, the idea of punk killing prog in 1977 is, like Nevermind killing hair metal or The Sopranos inventing artsy television, one of those helpful synecdoches for describing broad cultural changes, even if it's not quite true in the specifics. There really is a change in musical sensibilities and personnel as rock music transitions from the mid-'70s into the late-'70s, and the fading of prog and the growth of punk makes a convenient narrative out of that.

All of this makes it particularly interesting that in 1977 Pink Floyd released Animals, an album that is at once Floyd's proggiest and also their punkiest release. On the prog side, you've got the usual suspects: it's a concept album; all of its songs (except for the less-than-two-minutes-apiece bookends of "Pigs on the Wing") easily pass the ten-minute mark, and one of them, "Dogs," is over 17 minutes long; there are long instrumental passages and strange production effects and inflections of jazz (especially on "Dogs," which, if I'm not mistaken, relies on a jazz chord progression in its main verse). Nobody's going to mistake this for anything but a prog album. But for an album from the band that Johnny Rotten singled out as the enemy, Animals also shares a lot in common with its punk contemporaries. It's a concept album, sure, but it's a particularly socially conscious one, spooling out a bitter allegory of how the UK's population is divided into back-stabbing dogs, wealthy pigs who manipulate the dogs for profit, and mindless sheep who do what they are told until they rise up in a violent wave to kill the dogs. Animals is far from prog's first socially conscious work or even the first work critiquing the social structures of UK society (Gabriel-era Genesis comes to mind); however, the way this album foregrounds economic power hierarchies and the fascist tendencies of capitalism puts it much more obviously in-line with punk's leftist leanings. These lyrics are straight punk, rendered with an eye for sarcasm and irony that walk the album right up to the edge of nihilism in much the same way the prodigious punk debut albums do. And then there is Roger Waters's sneering delivery of those lyrics, an intentionally ugly and grating vocal affectation that's new to this album (as compared to the generally smooth vocals of previous PF albums).

In fact, in many ways, this is Roger Water's album. The group in-fighting and growing dominance of Waters over the band's creative direction in the '70s is well-documented, and Animals probably represents the tipping point that sent the band shooting toward the Waters-controlled The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983). Waters had been the sole author of Pink Floyd lyrics since The Dark Side of the Moon, and they all share a certain cynicism and worldview that feels consistent. But Animals and the two albums that follow show a rapid intensification of this worldview that's also reflected in the music of those albums, as the band lost the saxophones, vocal harmonies, and female backup singers that had given their previous '70s albums a warmth that counterpointed the lyrical pills, and whether or not Waters was solely the cause of this change, it's clear who was steering the ship.

But part of what's fascinating about this album is that in other ways, this record belongs at least as much to guitarist David Gilmour's record. As the '70s progressed, Gilmour became Waters's foil in the band, and by this point, they were essentially the two combative elementary forces that drove the band, Waters the bitter realist responsible for the scathing lyrics and ragged vocals and Gilmour the melodic romantic responsible for the sense of grandeur and sonic expansiveness. Gilmour's guitar was long a staple of the Pink Floyd sound, but Animals is practically wall-to-wall guitar, especially the long instrumental passages that feature Gilmour throwing down his typically melodic, twisty style for five minutes at a time. Past Pink Floyd albums had been more collaborative efforts among the band's four members (the other two of whom are drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright [5]), but with Animals, aside from a few keyboard passages and tape loops, this is basically the Waters and Gilmour show, and a violent one at that—by the album's climax, "Sheep," the embittered vocals and the screeching guitar are at war with one another in a scorched-earth battle to drown each other out in the mix. This isn't just an album about class conflict; it's an album about band conflict, one that Gilmour would briefly lose on The Wall and The Final Cut, where the band's prog elements are essentially dropped entirely in favor of hard rock, before winning once and for all when Waters left the band in the mid-'80s [6].

It's also not hard to view this as a battle between the punks (Waters) and the proggers (Gilmour), the cynical social commentary versus the high-minded sonic experimentation. That would likely be a simplistic interpretation, but whatever; as long as we're leaning into dubious cultural narratives, we might as well go whole-hog (or whole giant inflatable pig). And regardless of how "true" the narrative is, it's hard to argue that 1977, after which the surviving prog bands go even more into free-fall than they already were, isn't the end of the first prog era along with Pink Floyd's second. Whether you're reading the lyrics or looking at broad historical trends, Animals ends with a revolution.

Until 1978!



1] Bowie wouldn't.

2] For the record, Lydon did walk back the PF hate in 2010. I'd like to think he was always a closeted Floydhead.

3] I've already touched on this slightly in my pre-prog piece.

4] Which we should distinguish from prog's sense of whimsy, which is much more interested in what happens when you jam Tolkien into Buck Rogers rather than it is in psychedelic breakfasts and hearts of the sun.

5] Wright would, as a result of the progressive sidelining of his and Mason's contributions, leave the band after Animals.

6] Though we the listeners all lose—the Gilmour-led albums that ended Pink Floyd's run (A Momentary Lapse of Reason, The Division Bell, and The Endless River) are by-far the band's weakest.

Mini-Reviews for March 5 - 11, 2018

SPRING BREEEEEAAAAAAAAAKK.

Movies

Black Panther (2018)
Typical of the Marvel-Disney mold, Black Panther is positioned to feel more political than it is. The movie's relationship to real-world politics is slippery at best (Michael B. Jordan's radically positioned villain uses colonialist tactics, Chadwick Boseman's heroic Black Panther is a nationalist and an autocrat at that, and most bafflingly, the CIA is represented by a lovably bumbling sidekick), and its narrative is unusually (for an MCU film) lopsided in favor of its charismatic villain. But putting the specifics aside, at the film's heart is an intensely sincere dialogue about a nation's relationship to the world at large that feels in some ways like the other side of the coin that Thor: Ragnarok flipped when it questioned Asgard's use of military conquest to achieve its might (and Black Panther's interrogation of this topic is much less tossed-off than Ragnarok's was), and the resolution of that thematic thread is as graceful a note a Marvel film has ended on as last year's moving Guardians of the Galaxy finale. Bolstered by this thematic ambition, the rest of the movie has a weight that your typical Marvel film—usually feather-light affairs—lacks. Even though we don't see much of Wakanda (for a movie that stresses how urban and futurist the nation is, we really don't get much beyond the rustic settings for the film's action setpieces and the token science lab), this is a place that the film successfully inspires us to care deeply about, and when Killmonger talks wistfully about the Wakandan sunsets, it's legitimately poignant, laden with a generation of idealism and longing that does more to make Wakanda real than all the mid-tier CGI this movie can muster. Honestly, Black Panther belongs to Jordan's Killmonger, who is perhaps the best MCU character since Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark and the true beating heart of the film. The movie's not perfect, but Killmonger is. Grade: B+

God's Not Dead 2 (2016)
I'm not too proud to admit that I hate-watched this. Unfortunately for the cause of hate-watching, there's slightly less to hate in the sequel than there was in the original, as this movie doesn't involve atheists being straight-up murdered by God. However, the dead-eyed acting and nonsensical Evangelical celebrity cameos (we're spared the Duck Dynasty crew save a very brief Sadie Robertson, though the Newsboys are still there to save the day with bad music and corporate prayer, and otherwise, Lee Strobel shows up, as does Mr. Awful himself, aka Pat Boone) persist, as does the insipid anti-education worldview. And then there's the franchise-staple strawman arguments, best exemplified by the film's own credits, which claim that the events of this movie are based on real court cases, but if you actually pause the credits to read the descriptions of the court cases, as you know your intrepid reviewer did in due diligence, you'll find that almost every one of these real-life cases involved instances of actual proselytizing by teachers or students within a public school setting and not the benign case this movie centers on, which is about the ACLU suing a Poor, Innocent history teacher for answering in class that yes, Martin Luther King, Jr., was inspired by the teachings of Jesus (and while I'm at it, can we please for a moment recognize how this movie full of white Protestants invokes "Letter from Birmingham Jail," seemingly ignorant that the letter is largely written in critique of white Protestants, and like, I can't even, guys, please, what is wrong with these peopleeeeee *wraith-like screaming while clawing my own eyes out*). It's about as terrible as you can imagine, but even so, I was prepared to give the film a D+ based entirely on Ray Wise's delightful, campy performance as the ACLU lawyer from hell. But then I saw how one of the protesters in the film got the Dark Side of the Moon album cover wrong on her sign, and that's just a bridge too far. Grade: D-

The Forbidden Room (2015)
My first Guy Maddin. On a moment-by-moment basis, Maddin/Evan Johnson's early cinema pastiche by way of heavy postmodernism and digital (?) blurring and manipulation (the effect is largely that the film stock is, at any moment, about to warp and melt, Persona-style) creates a constant barrage of indelible and otherworldly imagery that feels like silent cinema beamed from a distant galaxy. But on a whole-movie level... well, there's a lot of movie here. I'm not talking about its runtime (although two hours does seem to be pushing it) as much as I am the nauseating feeling of consuming all of these images at once. It's a lot to take in, and I found my brain shutting down more often than not at the sheer incomprehensible barrage of it all. Maybe that's a feature instead of a bug, though? Grade: B

From Afar (Desde allá) (2015)
From Afar is a sufficiently "edgy" movie, though to describe exactly the ways it is so spoils a crucial and surprising plot point from very near the film's end. But edge doesn't really do a lot for me if it isn't pointed at something in particular, and that's, as far as I can tell, pretty much what's going on in this movie. It's an interesting movie and one that's shocking and nervy in a way that you probably wouldn't guess from the plot synopsis (a lot of critics have called this a "romance," and I suppose that's true, though not at all in any of the cinematic ways you might assume). But it also feels like a narrative exercise in making a particular sort of manipulation work, and for me, it doesn't quite. Grade: B-

Victoria (2015)
Doing a thriller in one take (i.e. the primary reason to see Victoria) is an interesting experiment because of the way it calls attention to the parts of a narrative than an edit can hide—the length of time it takes a character to walk from one side of the room to the other, for example, or just how much time these characters spend in transit between official locations. That is, admittedly, a pretty academic way to view this and probably sounds not at all fun for a thriller, and honestly, this movie isn't a ton of fun. The one-takeness stretches out what would probably have been a very lean story into nearly 2.5 hours, and not a lot of "thrilling" thriller stuff happens until the last half hour. That said, when the thrills start, they are pretty visceral and exciting, and the ending itself is top-notch. Just prepare for a sloooow build to that. Grade: B-

Jackass Number Two (2006)
What if Jackass: The Movie, but more intense and tasteless? Unbelievably, it's actually possible. Oh yes. Lots of poop. Lots of puke. A dude intentionally pierces his cheek with a fish hook. A guy dresses up as a terrorist of unclear national origin, and another guy pretends to murder that dude's friends. So, like... mission accomplished? In all seriousness, there's a lot of behavior here—the self-flagellation, the obsession with injuring genitalia, the frequent inducing of vomit, the aforementioned terrorist "gag"—that would raise a lot of red flags in any other context, but under the guise of "boys being boys," it's just laughed off as a hilarious joke, to increasing levels of cognitive dissonance, which, as far as I'm concerned, is pretty much the definition of white, male privilege. No thanks. Grade: D-

Jackass 3D (2010)
If I'm being "objective" (whatever that means), this is probably the best of the Jackass movies. It's much more whimsical and committed to playing up the more surreal, visually engaging sides of the gang's stunt work (lots of slow-mo, lots of strange props, e.g. a gigantic, spring-loaded hand that slaps anyone unfortunate to walk down a particular hallway). But I don't feel like being objective. I watched three of these movies in two days, and I'm tired. Grade: C-

Mini-Reviews for February 26 - March 4, 2018

It's that time of the month, where Netflix movies start expiring. So expect eclecticity.

Movies

The Square (2017)

It's easy to go all "snake eating its own tail" here—a satire about the hypocrisies of the art world that itself seems to be guilty of the critiques it makes, etc. It's also easy to kick the movie for its exorbitant 150-minute runtime, because come on, dude, that's too long for most movies, to say nothing of self-serious satire. But I dunno; I liked it anyway. There are several setpieces (including a scene that involves a performance artist acting like a monkey and another that culminates in an absurd debate over censorship) that, as self-serious as they are, feel absolutely right, and are poking at just how willing we (talking about myself and other "dudes consuming the arts") are to throw around words like "subversive" and "transgressive" until they're actually upending our own paradigm of privilege and comfort, at which point we balk. Grade: B

I, Daniel Blake (2016)

This movie is borderline agitprop, but it's so unapologetically, unpretentiously good at being just that that it doesn't even really matter that the film ends basically with a leftist speech right at the audience—in fact, the movie is better for it. It doesn't hurt that I think the movie is essentially correct. This movie should be required viewing for small-government nuts; anyone who thought that loading down the welfare state with a litany of safeguards and stipulations was somehow supposed to pare down government excess and stop fraud and bloat and malpractice within the state needs to spend some time lost in the bureaucratic nightmare suffered by our tenderly rendered protagonist. Grade: B

Monsters (2010)

It's rare that the best shots in a movie with a budget this small (only $500,000, which is a miracle) are the effects-driven ones, but that's certainly the case here. Every single moment with the gigantic alien creatures that terrorize the human characters is huge and majestic and wonderful in ways that movies that spend millions of dollars on CG with their effects setpieces could be, and I'd bet it's these moments that got Gareth Edwards his plum Godzilla and Star Wars gigs. Gracious, though, I hope it wasn't for anything else in the movie, though, which is, apart from the aforementioned monster scenes, so drab and unremarkable that I'm also a little shocked this wasn't a one-off from Edwards. The monster stuff is so good, though. Grade: C+

Chloe (2009)

This is not very good—the plot is lopsidedly structured, the cinematography is boringly lurid rather than Hitchcockianly so—but it's very easy to see how it could have been. There's a trio of great characters at the heart of this film, or at least potentially great ones, provided the screenplay were a bit sharper, and the premise (woman uses a call girl to catch her husband cheating, begins to connect to her husband only through this call girl) is gold. A weirdly dull and disappointing missed opportunity. Grade: C+

Jackass: The Movie (2002)

A+ for commitment to a premise. One whole additional letter grade alone for that x-ray technician's face when she sees the toy car in the rectum. Minus three letters for the stars of this movie being, uh, jackasses. When you start to feel sorry for all the bystanders of their pranks, you know this movie just isn't for you. Grade: C

Jaws 2 (1978)

I've been told that this is the best of the Jaws sequels, but that is demonstrably false. Does this movie's shark roar like a lion? Does it have hilariously awful 3D effects? Is it SeaWorld propaganda cum anti-SeaWorld propaganda? No, readers, it does not. It is merely a boring retread of everything the first Jaws movie did, only executed much, much worse. The perfect example of that black hole of mediocrity that's neither good enough to be good nor bad enough to be interesting. Plus, given how rubbery and silly this movie's mechanical shark prop looks, you'd have thought director Jeannot Szwarc would have had the good sense to play coy with its appearances, instead of throwing the whole thing in our faces every time John Williams's "duh-DUM" musical sting cues. Grade: C-

Jaws 3-D (1983)

This shark roars like a lion while terrorizing SeaWorld's amazing facilities with teeth and really, really awful-looking 3D effects, none so awful as the gloriously kitsch, how-did-this-make-it-into-a-studio-film-even-in-the-'80s final shot. Now that's more like it. It's still not good, of course, but what right have we to expect a movie called Jaws 3-D to be good? Will the real best Jaws sequel please stand up? Grade: C

Mini-Reviews for February 19 - 25, 2018

A very documentary-heavy week. The truth is out there!

Movies

Annihilation (2018)
About halfway through Annihilation, I found myself wishing the movie were a bit weirder—up to that point, it had been a solid but unremarkable take on the "expedition into an unknown territory that turns into a slow-moving disaster" genre that includes previous torchbearers like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the first act of Alien (and Prometheus, for that matter, which is probably a more precise precedent for the first 2/3 of this film). Thankfully, by the end of the movie I had gotten my wish, and judging from the discussion I've been seeing online, that seems to be a sticking point for a lot of viewers. Not for me, though. With its ending, Annihilation finally becomes more than just a familiar sci-fi slow-burn with a good cast, terrible dialogue, and a dazzling visual scheme (more rainbows in serious sci-fi, please). It transforms into an intoxicating headtrip that evokes (I won't say "mimics," but it gets close) the metaphysical awe of films like Tarkovsky's Stalker and Soderbergh's Solaris, filtered through an acute sense of existential terror. It's not nearly as good (or as meticulous) as either of those films, but the vibes are there, along with an alien presence that's horrifically otherworldly and nonhuman in a way I've very, very seldom seen cinematic sci-fi attempt, and that' includes the aforementioned influences. Grade: B+

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017)
Libraries are THE great modern social institution, so yes please to a documentary that captures the ins and outs of the New York Public Library's events, patronage, and management. I had a great time with all three-plus hours of it (you heard that right—I love libraries, okay?). That said, the only other Wiseman I've seen is At Berkeley, and while this seems basically in the same mode, it's also a much less philosophically interrogative film; a major thread in At Berkeley is the questioning of the institution's image of itself and how much it's coasting on/undermining that image. In Ex Libris, on the other hand, the NYPL is portrayed as an absolute good, and while I generally agree that libraries (and this library in particular) are great, this movie maybe could have complicated the narrative a bit more; instead, we're treated to a lot of interesting characters and tensions about how to allocate resources, but the question of whether or not the library (or those working for the library) actually is this purely good is never raised. Also, the NYPL is one of the most resource-rich library systems in America, and that lends itself to a movie with a huge diversity of environments and activities we can observe. However, most library systems in the country can't book Patti Smith or tape their own personal audiobook recordings or give out wi-fi hot spots to patrons to keep for a year. This is all very cool and exciting, but I do wonder what this movie would have looked like if it had depicted a more beleaguered system that was more representative of what the average American library is like. Grade: B+

Housebound (2014)
It begins promisingly enough as a gently comedic haunted-house horror—Kylie, a young woman caught robbing an ATM, is placed under house arrest with her estranged mother, and it seems like the family house is haunted and has been so for quite some time. Easy enough, right? Unfortunately, the movie shifts gears about thirty minutes in, along with, apparently, the skill of the screenwriter, and it devolves into a pretty tepid exercise in sleuthing and murder-mystery-solving. I'm not sure why the film takes something that's working and then turns it into something that it's clearly not nearly so adept at staging. This seems like preventable suffering. Grade: C+

Margot at the Wedding (2007)
If Noah Baumbach is, as I've often thought, the second coming of Woody Allen, then this is certainly his take on Allen's occasional attempts to create an Ingmar Bergman feature, a la September or Interiors. Importantly, though, Baumbach (unlike Allen) remembers that, for all of the psychological turmoil and claustrophobic settings, Bergman films could often be very funny, too, and such is the case with Margot, a black comedy in the blackest mode it can get without literal death being included here (though you know Bergman would've made sure at least one of these characters wouldn't make it through the film alive). Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh are great as the two chaotic poles of the film, and Zane Pais does fantastic work as an amalgam of Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline's characters from The Squid and the Whale, and Baumbach's writing is as caustic and precise as always. Grade: B+

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
I watched this because I wanted to be informed, and Alex Gibney's "Long New Yorker article, only a documentary" style of info doc is the best of its kind, even if I don't think there's a lot of artistry to this style. But it's hard to begrudge the film for doing what I approached it for and nothing more. Plus, there's a lot compelling dramatic irony to be reaped from the way that, three years prior to 2008, the doc's talking heads are all warning us that the Enron scandal is a wake-up call for the financial sector and that this could happen again, and a lot of fear to be gleamed from the way that the film discusses how Enron was able to convince the public it was an innovative, ethical company through a savvy PR campaign (*coughcoughApplecough*). It's almost as if corporate institutions don't have our best interests at heart or something. Grade: B

High School (1968)
The Wiseman touch to the public high school. As a high school teacher myself, I was fascinated at the time capsule this is. On a tangible level, there are the hallway alcoves full of phones for students to use and the typewriters in the classrooms that feel completely alien to my own high school experience, and on a philosophical level, you have the brusque, authoritarian temperament of a lot of the teachers, which, while not completely gone from modern secondary education, is certainly not nearly so much the norm. Most striking, though, (and this hasn't changed one bit in the intervening decades) is the way that the school as an institution is so bent toward instilling conformity and unthinking allegiance to certain social institutions. The final scene, where a principal reads a letter from a former student who has gone off to Vietnam, is a real punch to the gut; the student is clearly scared out of his mind and talks about how he wants to donate his life insurance to create a student scholarship if he is killed in Vietnam, which is just horrifying, crushing stuff, but all the principal does is smile with pride and say something to the effect of, "When you get letters like this, you know our school is working." Cut to black, credits roll. I try not to be someone who teaches my students blind allegiance to ideals or authorities, but even so, there's a certain amount of authoritarianism to my teaching on a logistical level (as I'd imagine is true of most teachers). This documentary really makes me wonder how much I should even be doing that. The connection between schools and the military has always made me uncomfortable (there's something exploitative about how recruiters come to the schools directly), but I hadn't even thought about how the philosophy of public education itself might compel students toward their possible deaths. Grade: A-

Television

Adventure Time, Season 8 (2016-17)
While I'm still sensing a little bit of the complacency with the standalone episodes as I felt in Season 7, Season 8 sees Adventure Time also stretching its wings into a more straightforwardly sci-fi realm. It's a season preoccupied with the past, with standalone episodes calling back to previous seasons (James Baxter, that beautiful horsey, makes a return) and the ongoing serialized plots obsessing over the planet's tumultuous backstory—in clearer terms than we've ever been given before, Season 8 explores what exactly happened to the planet following the Great Mushroom War, answering questions you may have been wondering for quite some time (if Finn the Human is human, what happened to all the other humans?) and others that may never have crossed your mind (was Princess Bubblegum a person before she was bubblegum?). Somewhat surprisingly, this commitment to filling in gaps in the show's mythology doesn't take the air out of the series; as I said, it's presented in a mostly straightforwardly sci-fi way, free from a lot of the absurdity and elliptical goofiness that's defined the show's storytelling up to this point, and while in theory this sounds like a bad idea (the absurdity and goofiness are some of AT's greatest strengths!), in practice this ends up being mostly satisfying because the show always grounds it in its typically wistful character work—this is particularly true of the Islands miniseries that ends the season, which explores deeply personal material for both Finn and Susan. I'm not sure if they'd announced the Season 10 endgame at this point in the run, but it's clear that in Season 8, the show is winding down; if this is the direction in which it chooses to send itself out, I'm alright with that. Grade: B+

Music

Chicago/London Underground - A Night Walking Through Mirrors (2017)
As recursive, eerie, and confounding as its title implies, A Night Walking Through Mirrors is an album of mood and ethereality, one entirely transportive but also maddeningly intangible. Motifs turn to mist when you turn your ear toward them; the quartet has that cicada quality where you can hear each member clearly without ever being able to pin down any of their locations, and from time to time, one or two or three of them will wink out of existence to leave you alone with the others (usually Chad Taylor's drums or Rob Mazurek's cornet). In fact, forget cicadas: you're on an empty city street at night, and you hear the urban sounds from blocks away—car horns and subway rumblings and wind and indistinct voices and cracklings you can't quite place. This sort of avant-garde jazz isn't for everyone (80 minutes of it, no less—four compositions, each at least 15 minutes a piece), but for me, it's transfixing. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for February 12 - 18, 2018

Good morning and welcome to my world of reviews! Hope you like what you find!

Movies

Last Flag Flying (2017)

Not having seen/read The Last Detail, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what's Ponicsan's and what's Linklater's here. But it's an enormously generous film in the way that only Linklater films tend to be—so generous, in fact, that it finds room for compassion for none other than Saddam Hussein. This is a movie about the horrific cost of war: not just the deaths that result but the lies we tell ourselves about those deaths, lies that perpetuate the national myth that lures our young to their deaths to begin with. Last Flag Flying spits in the eye of the patriotic rhetoric of "heroes" and "patriotism" that American governments use to prevent people from questioning that cost, but what makes it ultimately as compelling as it becomes is the way that even the characters doing the spitting—a trio of bitter and shaken Vietnam veterans—can't escape the allure of the aesthetics of military prestige. As cynical as Linklater and Ponicsan are about the greater powers motivating and commanding the military, they are resolutely ambivalent on the profound meaning that veterans (or at least, these veterans) find in their military identity. It's all lies—the uniforms, the stories, the "character-building,"—and damaging lies at that, but to what extent should we condemn these lies when they clearly mean so much to those who actually experienced the truth of military service? The movie refuses to answer this question, and while I'm sure this ambiguity (some might say "mixed-messaging") won't work for some, it worked for me. This is narrative generosity in its most difficult form. Grade: B+

Better Watch Out (2016)

For a horror comedy, Better Watch Out is willing to get extremely sadistic, and unlike a few other reviewers, I count that as a plus—it's threading a pretty familiar needle here, but the extent of the ruthlessness in the film's villain remains the film's most reliable surprise, even when it's clear what the movie's game is (which, not to spoil too much, happens about half an hour in). I'm not sure if the way the movie juggles the staring-into-the-abyss nihilism of its villain with the winky appropriation of famous holiday movie beats (the movie has an extended homage to Home Alone, e.g., and on the non-holiday side, there's a conversation piece involving Adventure Time characters that's like the adolescent hell version of Reservoir Dogs's "Like a Virgin" bit) is entirely cohesive, but it works more often than not, even if the characters are either incoherent plot devices or staid archetypes. Fun and cringey times to be had by all, I'm sure. Grade: B

Empire of the Sun (1987)

I guess we can call this a "problem" film? The movie's first hour, as the Shanghai International Settlement is sacked and occupied by the Japanese and young Christian Bale's Jim is forced to live alone in the ruins of his spoiled, imperialist upbringing, promises a masterpiece. It's a miracle of visual storytelling, featuring some of the best imagery in any Spielberg film ever. The middle hour, however, drops the ball majorly; the plot slows way down for an interminable internment camp sequence that not only tones down that incredible imagery but also begins to lose Bale's character in a crowd of dull secondary ones—it's maybe thematically relevant, given the drudgery and dehumanization of the camp, but lord is it booooring. Thankfully, the final half hour recovers a bit, ending the movie on a strong and complicated note that foreshadows where Spielberg's dramatic output would go in the '90s and especially the 2000s. In fact, it's not hard to view this movie as ground zero for some of Spielberg's future endeavors—the Japanese occupation scenes feel like Spielberg's audition for Schindler's List, while a lot of the crowd scenes and the itinerant children with morally complicated adult companions feels like a test run of A.I. (dunno if Kubrick was watching this or not, but it sure feels like it). Both of those movies hang together a lot better than Empire does, which is maybe part of my disappointment here. But also, there's enough greatness in Empire that I feel like we don't really need to critique it solely in relation to other films. It's a big, complicated movie in a way that, to me, more often feels complicated in a flawed way than it does complicated in a rich or complex way, but I'll give Spielberg this: it's his first attempt at interrogating his own sentimentalism, and it does so brilliantly and in a way that he has never been able to recapture since, for as much as he's tried to replicate it—when Bale's character sees (perhaps supernaturally) the flash of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, he assumes it's someone's spirit going to heaven, which is such a bitter, ironic inversion of E.T. and Close Encounters and every other "messianic bright light from the sky" moment in his filmography. In a way, the film as a whole is an attempt to stretch this feeling out to a full 2.5 hours (even, if I'm going to be really generous, using John Williams's cloying and frankly awful score as a counterpoint to the misery we see onscreen); it's not successful at all in doing so, but there are glimmers of the success that could have been. Grade: B

Watermelon Man (1970)

An outrageous satirical comedy from Melvin Van Peebles: racist white man wakes up as a black man one day, and the majority of the film is him trying to turn himself back white. It's a lot more grounded in traditional narrative cinema than Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the only other Van Peebles I've seen—this is Van Peebles's only studio film, and it shows. But for a studio film, even one made in 1970, this movie is pretty strange. For example, Godfrey Cambridge, the lead, is in white face for the opening sequence of the movie before he "turns" black, and there are multiple points where the screen flashes strange colors or has these weird title cards, for no other reason except to be disorienting, in a way that anticipates Sweet Sweetback. It's also pretty unflinching about race—the (excellent) tagline is, "It won't happen to you, so you can laugh," which just feels like a gigantic middle finger to any white audience who might enjoy this movie. Grade: B+

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (1962)

My first Agnès Varda movie, and I LOVED it. It's not much else besides a woman waiting two hours for the results of a potentially fatal medical diagnosis and the ways all the people around her react to her dread, but why would you need more? The casual surrealism underpinned by some truly harrowing emotional ground, all bound up in this vigorous existential philosophy that's at once clear-eyed and serious without ever taking itself too seriously... this is extremely my thing. Also, how is Corinne Marchand not an international star? She's radiant and wonderful in this. Grade: A

Television

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 3 (2017-18)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's always had, to paraphrase its first season's theme song, a nuanced relationship with the "crazy" in its title, and Season 3 basically makes that relationship its thesis. The show's third year is very pointedly and single-mindedly about Rebecca Bunch's realization and acceptance that she has mental health concerns—this is signaled by nothing less than the conceptually clever (if musically weak) theme song for the season, which plays with the various and conflicting definitions of the word "crazy" in pop culture. That Crazy Ex-Girlfriend takes Rebecca's struggle seriously should be no surprise, but it's disarming and often harrowing just how seriously it takes it, giving the most clear-eyed look at the realities of mental illness I've ever seen in a TV series, bar none. At this point, we all know what Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's tricks are—bawdy comedy, piercing emotional insight, jaunty and parodic musical sequences—but the directions these tricks steer the show are consistently fresh. Last season's finale, with Rebecca swearing bloody vengeance on Josh, did nothing to prepare us for a season-long exploration of the personal and social implications of a mental health diagnosis, and I expect this season's finale (involving Rebecca going to jail [??]) to be entirely unrepresentative of where the show's fourth season will take us (there will be a fourth season, CW... right?). To be fair, this season could do a bit more with its increasingly crowded roster of secondary characters, and Paula in particular feels given short shrift. And while I'm at it, is it just me, or is this season less focused on the musical sequences than past seasons? Season 3 is the show's most inconsistent, but its highs are so high that despite that, it doesn't feel like much of a step down. Grade: A-

Books

Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley (2004-2010)

I didn't feel like reviewing all six volumes of this series one by one, so here's them all in lump sum. O'Malley's graphic-novel treatise on love, emotional baggage, and personal responsibility is a lot more fun than I just made it sound. In fact, it's great fun. Set in some surreal version of Toronto that's a confluence of mid-2000s twentysomethings' personal experiences and the culture they have internalized—especially video games, and the series tends to operates on video-game logic (Scott gets a 1-Up at one point and levels up at multiple points)—Scott Pilgrim is the sort of stylized, endlessly inventive narrative that the comics form was created to support (though to be fair, the Edgar Wright film adaptation of the series does a great job with it, too). At least as good is the characterization, which relies on slacker archetypes as its foundation but then builds each of its principals into full-bodied, complicated humans within that framework and, impressively, without losing any of that surreal, comedic voice until the final volume, which perhaps gets a little too video-gamey and high concept to make room for the small, well-observed character moments that made the first five volumes so rich. Best of all is the series's no-nonsense approach to its protagonist, Scott Pilgrim himself, and the way it's not shy about the uglier aspects of Scott's personality; I don't know if I've ever read a book that depicted the insidious ways in which meek passivity gets conflated with niceness and how that passivity can be just as douchey as some preening jock, but if I have, it's certainly never been as scathing as Scott Pilgrim is. Grade: A-

Music

Wilco - Sky Blue Sky (2007)

Back in 2007, some people saw this album as a disappointment, and I suppose after the art-rock freakout that was A Ghost Is Born, I can see how this might have felt like a step down at first blush. I certainly don't remember being very impressed the few times I listened to it back then. But guys, we were wrong. So wrong. So wrong, in fact, that we missed the part where Sky Blue Sky was one of Wilco's best, most mature releases. It lacks the noisy fireworks of Ghost (though Sky's songs are more deconstructive than they seem—they just unexpectedly bloom into pop-adjacent blossoms rather than scuzzy feedback; Nels Cline's guitar here is a lot more precise and clean than Tweedy's in the previous album, but it's no less exploratory [see the Cline showcase, "Impossible Germany"]), but in its place is a lyrical precision mixed with soul-music underpinnings that occupies an emotional and sonic space distinct from anything Wilco has done before or since. This is "dad rock" only in the sense that it captures the way that (I assume) it's a complicated and beautiful things to be a father. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for February 5 - 11, 2018

Nothing to see up here. Go straight to the reviews.

Movies

Risk (2016)
This movie wants to be a few different things: the kind of breathtaking fly-on-the-wall depiction of Julian Assange that Citizenfour was for Edward Snowden, a self-reflective text on why the sort of hero narrative Edward Snowden got out of Citizenfour is impossible for a man as compromised as Assange, a history of WikiLeaks behavior beginning in 2011, an Errol-Morris-type character piece defined by revealing Assange talking heads. All of these objectives are interesting to varying degrees, but none of them end up being super compelling, partially because the documentary is being pulled in so many different directions but mostly (I suspect) because filmmaker Laura Poitras's relationship with Assange was crumbling as the movie entered its second half, thus severing a lot of access to the man. There's a lot of voiceover by Poitras herself in this movie that tries to reflect on the act of documenting a man like Assange and the ethical/professional quandaries that presents, but honestly, it mostly just comes off as a thin attempt to salvage a project that was falling apart as it was being made. She got some good footage and interviews out of it, but it doesn't hang together as a whole. Grade: B-

The Hunting Ground (2015)
To be clear, my tepid grade of this movie has everything to do with my experience with this documentary as a documentary and nothing to do with critiquing the information it presents. Sexual assault on college campuses needs to be taken seriously, and The Hunting Ground takes it very seriously—I applaud that. The information and testimonies presented here are important. People need to be educated on this stuff if it's going to get better. HOWEVER: 1) as an educational experience, I didn't get a ton out of this, given that the documentary is now over two years old and I've done a decent amount of reading on the topic already; 2) as a documentary experience, it feels very much like a feature-length episode of 60 Minutes or something of that nature, and that's pretty much what it is, having aired on CNN—the talking head/infographic format doesn't do a ton to engage me, even if it's a reasonably clear method of presenting this info, and the few times the doc tries to capture, vérité-style, the experiences of the activists fighting against college administrations are too few and far between to create a weighty picture of activism in the modern age. I realize I'm basically critiquing this movie for being what it tries to be, but I believe I've made my ambivalence toward activist docs pretty clear on here, and the TV aesthetic really isn't helping things. Still, you probably shouldn't listen to me. This movie is good at doing what it does. Grade: B-

Honeymoon (2014)
It's probably not going to blow anyone out of the water, but this little horror film does a great job with its extremely modest production budget, essentially creating a modern fusion of Rosemary's Baby with any number of "out in the woods alone" horror movies. The scares are rarely (if ever) jumpy, and the pacing is very good, patiently doling out increasingly unsettling turns of events until it escalates in its impressively gross body-horror finale. A promising debut from director/co-writer Leigh Janiak. Looking forward to whatever she does next. Grade: B

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
This movie's a minor miracle, because: 1) It's a mainstream American comedy that's consistently funny throughout; 2) It's a mainstream American comedy in 2007 that's only 96 minutes long; 3) It's a mainstream American comedy in 2007 that's tightly scripted; and 4) It's a mainstream American comedy in 2007 that's a parody that's actually good. The film's main mode is lampooning musician biopics (which, in 2007, was a much riper subject for ridicule than it is today, I'll grant) by bending their drippy sentimentality and predictable beats toward absurdity as the titular Dewey Cox goes through every musician biopic plot ever—drugs, daddy issues, love affairs, reunions with his children, a misguidedly ambitious studio session in the late '60s, etc. What's especially impressive here (besides the aforementioned miraculous elements) is that the film, while never really breaking its parody mode, manages to muster up some sincere emotions by the film's end, and I'd largely credit this to just how good the music is; this is as much a musical as it is a parody, and not only are the songs pitch-perfect mimicry of the various eras Dewey stumbles through (including, hilariously, an anachronistic moment of punk rock), they're also just good songs. There are times when the jokes in this movies are more of the "I see what you did there" variety than the laugh-out-loud kind, but even when that happens, the music provides a consistent through line and tone. In case you missed it back in 2007 (and, given its box office returns, you probably did), seek it out now; it's a good one. Grade: B+

The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
There's a bus crash that kills 14 children. I thought I was going to be alright watching this movie, and then I saw the school bus disappear under the ice and I just lost it. This is strange, upsetting, and otherworldly cinema in the same way that The Virgin Suicides was all of the above. Some of the stuff with the pushy lawyer stirring up a class-action lawsuit against the school bus company feels a little stale (lawyers gonna lawyer, I guess), but even that is justified enough for the way it allows the bitter, spellbinding saga of the lawyer's relationship with his daughter. It's a diffuse movie in which not a ton happens outside of the central crash, but it's all tied together with a genuinely unnerving extended Pied Piper analogy and a score—an out-of-time fusion of medieval music with contemporary keyboard atmospherics—that's one of the best and strangest of the past few decades. Grade: A

The Visitor (1979)
For the first five minutes of this movie, you could be forgiven for assuming you were watching one of the myriad Star Wars imitators that rushed into cinemas following 1977—there's this Space Jesus dude in a Jedi robe, trippy space effects, the whole nine yards. But then it becomes a basketball drama, before becoming something of a rip-off of The Omen scored with the funk-soul brass flourishes of a blaxsploitation film. And then Space Jesus comes back. This is a weird one, y'all—not so much for any specific piece (most of the movie's beats, after all, have pretty obviously antecedents) but more for the fact that somebody thought to mash them all together into this transfixing suicide drink of a film. Grade: B


Television

Seinfeld, Season 9 (1997-98)
This season has some of the incontestable classics of Seinfeld's late-run era (most notably "The Strike," which contains Festivus, and "The Voice" [helloooooooooo]), and its willingness to get strange is basically unparalleled among network sitcoms of any era—for example, a major plot of the season premiere involves Newman fantasizing about cannibalizing Kramer. But as with the eight season, the post-Larry-David show is just far too dependent on silliness and forced catchphrases and parody to rival any of Seinfeld's peak. Which is okay, because no show (even this show) can be expected to produce the best American sitcom episodes week after week for its entire run. The final year of Seinfeld is still lots of fun. Still, it's hard not to wish for those earlier seasons at times, especially in the series-ending one-two punch of a clip show followed by one of the most notoriously unfunny sitcom series finales of all time. Grade: B

Books

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman (2017)
I'll be brief here, since it's entirely likely I'll someday revisit this to follow up on my His Dark Materials series from last summer. The first book in Philip Pullman's new companion trilogy to His Dark Materials has some very fun adventuring that mashes up a Cold-War-type espionage intrigue with folk magic in the novel's latter half. However, so much of this is tied to the original trilogy (and in ways that undermine the tension in this book's plot) that it sort of begs the question of why this story is being told—not enough fan service to reward attentive fans and too much interconnection to work entirely as a standalone. The next two books are supposed to take the story into timelines that aren't parallel to the original series, though, so I'm still holding out hope for Pullman to strike gold again. Grade: B-

Music

Jeff Rosenstock - POST- (2018)
The album's mix of shout-along punk and power pop is fun, and the touches of shoegaze/ambient are unexpected and nicely textured. I can't imagine this having much staying power with me over the course of the next year—it's a bit inessential, to be honest—but as of right now, this is by-default my favorite album of 2018. Grade: B