Mini Reviews for October 10 - 16, 2022

Horror movies! Also, if you're interested, my wife and I have a new podcast episode out, this time about Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

 

Movies

Don't Worry Darling (2022)
Exactly the movie, no more, no less, you would imagine if I told you to picture the intersection of The Stepford Wives and the first act of The Matrix. There are very few—if any—surprises here if you have seen the right antecedent movies, and given that those antecedents are super popular, you probably have seen them. Obviously the problem with so openly aping such famous movies is that you're inviting comparison, and there's nothing about this movie that's better or even just more interesting than the movies it calls to mind. Nonetheless, it's not bad, assuming you aren't expecting it to be great. Olivia Wilde continues to be a director with an eye for striking imagery, even if she still doesn't let herself (isn't allowed?) to let that instinct fully flourish into something more striking; the production design, especially the costuming, is very good; Florence Pugh is, per usual, selling the crap out of her performance and probably carrying the whole movie in terms of acting, but the rest of the cast is no slouch either—I'm not sure what I was expecting out of Harry Styles, but he's good at playing a dude who is clean-cut and handsome enough to scan as vaguely menacing (though I do wonder what welcome chaos the originally planned Shia LaBeouf casting would have brought). It's just weird to see this level of prestige and budget brought to the kind of movie that probably would have gotten like $4 million and a late-January release like fifteen years ago. Grade: B-

Knock Knock (2015)
A "happily married" dude is coerced (maybe?) into sex with two strangers, who then spend the rest of the film refusing to leave his house, which they are intent on trashing. I wish I had written this review before watching the 1977 film it's based on, because I'm already forgetting how I felt about this without the '70s context. But anyway, I guess when I get to Death Game I'll talk about the rest, but what stands out as distinct about Eli Roth's remake is the absolutely sublime Keanu Reeves performance. Like the other Roth films I've seen, the film style of this movie feels premeditated and precise to an extreme degree, this time to a fault that undermines the chaos of the two female leads (this is my experience with the '70s one bleeding in already, sorry). But as a counterpoint, the technique of Keanu's acting here is really wacky in a way that is kinda surreal and unpredictable. Whether or not this is an intended effect I have no idea, but the feeling I got was that as Keanu's character has more and more of his "good guy dad" persona stripped from him by the physical and psychological humiliation he experiences, the further out of Keanu's acting range he goes, to the point where by the time he's giving the absolutely demented "free pizza" monologue, he's in some really dicey territory in terms of the actor's ability to even match what the movie is asking of him, which is bizarrely compelling in the context of a movie that is very much about taking a genteel presentation of masculinity and baiting it further and further outside of its self-satisfaction until it transforms into something feral and raw but also deeply silly and humiliating. I don't feel like it's a coincidence that this is the funniest movie I've seen from Roth, and more so than anything else of his I'm familiar with, this one has this really impish sensibility that is constantly tip-toeing around boundaries before bludgeoning those boundaries completely all at once, and that centerpiece Keanu performance feels key to that sensibility. This movie is a perfect encapsulation of one of the things people find so infuriating about Roth, i.e. the way it dances around big political topics (in this case, a bevvy of issues regarding gender, sex, age, and power) while defying clean, safe thematic readings outside of its obvious provocations—its '70s predecessor is a lot clearer in intention, and it's a fascinating effect that Roth is able to stay almost entirely faithful to the plot of the original while muddying the waters considerably in terms of what it actually means. There's at least a 50% chance that this movie really is as gross as it seems to want to bait us into thinking it is, but also, I thought it was very funny, so I dunno what to do with that. Grade: B

Death Game (1977)
A completely deranged movie on virtually every level. I'm not sure it's fair to Eli Roth to say that his remake is weaker for not having captured the pure chaotic spirit embodied by this film, because that clearly wasn't what he was after (maintaining the dirtbag ethos of grindhouse films while replacing their taped-together cheapness with a clean precision impossible in an earlier era seems to be a big part of Roth's thing, and godspeed to him on that quest, I suppose). But of the two films, this one is absolutely the superior one thanks to the ramshackle energy. Part of this seems like a happy accident of the era and the occasion of its production—as I understand it, this was stitched together from a reportedly unpleasant shoot in which nobody got along and which was plagued by money issues, and the result is a film that takes the typical amateurish messiness of exploitation films and, probably out of necessity, cranks it up to a ludicrous degree to the point of accidental psychedelia. Out of that haze come screaming the two central performances by Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, and what proceeds from there is a bewildering kaleidoscope of extreme human behavior that feels almost otherworldly as it dementedly mixes camp with sadism. Even if Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo had had any interest and/or ability in recreating that tone in Roth's remake (as they are, their performances are merely serviceable, probably the biggest liability in the remake), I can't imagine that working well within Roth's smirking, detached mode, and what Camp and Locke achieve here feels like something that could only be achieved within the specific era of smut/fringe cinema that birthed this film. Both Roth's film and this original are playing with the idoms of porn from their respective eras, and while there's something to be said for the way Roth takes a porn premise and uses Keanu's goofy mannerisms to explore the shame and puritanical impulses of a modern masculinity that nonetheless is willing to indulge in erotic play, this movie's invocation of porn feels way more productive in the end, ironically because of the lack of Keanu (the one element of the remake that is unequivocally better than this version). Seymour Cassel's character here is such a nonentity, both as written and as performed, and in that relative emptiness, it's much clearer that this dude's self-satisfaction in his station in life is a character flaw, an icky dude who has won the game of life (probably at the expense of others) to such an extent that he has lost all understanding of the precarity that exists in most people's lives, and as such, the Bugs-Bunny-esque madness visited upon him by Camp and Locke has the feeling of an uprising, a kind of youth in revolt picture, a vestige of '60s counterculture cinema only with the perspective flipped, and the only way this gross man can interpret a youth revolt is through porn and the sexual pleasure it can bring to him. I saw a bunch of people comparing this to the Czech New Wave film Daisies, and before I watched it, I felt like that had to be a stretch, but I'm shocked to report that it's really not a stretch at all. We gotta get Eli Roth to watch some Věra Chytilová. Grade: A-

Hard Boiled (辣手神探) (1992)
I haven't seen a lot of John Woo movies, but I do know that I'm supposed to get swept up in the melodrama. That didn't happen to me here; the friendship (romance?) between the two cops was fun enough, but I mostly felt distant from the movie when guns weren't blazing, which is probably a Me Problem. When the guns are blazing, though, this is of course a blast, and once they get to the hospital, this movie is basically nonstop blazing guns. This John Woo guy knows how to film gunplay, huh? Grade: B+

 

 

 

Child's Play (1988)
This movie's a lot of fun and much more patient in doling out the camp than I was expecting. Honestly, though, as good as the doll effects are, the best part is when an unattended six-year-old kid is able to skip school by getting on a train that takes him from his bougie neighborhood to some bombed-out hive of villainy across town, which is really the kind of future us transit advocates dream about for American cities. Grade: B+

 

 

 

Child's Play 2 (1990)
About as much fun as the first one, even if it sweats just a little bit to try to reset with a new family at the beginning of the movie. The foster care angle pays off pretty well, though, if only for the addition of Kyle and her very sweet dynamic with Andy, and the movie in general does a great job of basically revisiting the most memorable beats of the original, including Andy almost taking the rap for Chucky's mayhem, without it ever feeling stale. The finale at the factory is pretty cool, too, and I like that it gives the kids the tools to dispatch of Chucky in some fun, inventive ways (multiple times, of course, since "He's dead—no wait, he's back again!" fakeouts seem to be a staple of this series). It makes sense that the series eventually juked into kookier territory, though, because I'm not sure how much more juice this formula has. Grade: B+

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
When everybody says that Rob Zombie based his career on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I guess I thought they meant the first one, but this one is definitely the germ of stuff like The House of 1,000 Corpses. Cranks up the waking nightmare element of the first movie until it wraps around to being overtly goofy but also still kinda scary. Weird, bonkers stuff that, aside from the central family, only feels of a piece with its predecessor by virtue of having this ineffable thisness about it that is hard to describe but nonetheless makes it feel weighty and sinewy in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for October 3 - 9, 2022

Busy week, so there's not a lot here. But if you're just craving more, don't forget about the new podcast episode from my wife and I.

Movies

The Final Destination (2009)
Dumb even for one of these movies, and the deaths aren't nearly as elaborate as the best in the previous films. But I got a real chuckle out of the part when the guy's guts got sucks out of his butthole by the pool drain, so it's not as if this is irredeemable. Grade: C

 

 

 

 

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
I have nooo idea what to do with this. It's all kind of ugly and dumb and nonsensical, but on purpose? You don't just have Joe Berlinger direct and co-write something and have it accidentally end up like this. There's something here about how this purports to be a dramatization of real events, as opposed to the original Blair Witch Project's claims of being actual footage of real events, and it's theoretically interesting the way that the film is littered with scenes presented through viewfinders and screens until finally the "reality" of the film breaks with what is presented on those screens. But I just don't know, in practice this movie is so joyless and dull, and whether or not it's purposeful, it looking like a cheap TV movie just never works for me. It's beside the point that this lacks the primal, cursed power of the first movie, but well... Grade: C

 

Threads (1984)
I guess one of the central questions with any eschatological story is whether humanity will ultimately fall back upon its communal tendencies for mutual aid or instead resort to isolating, resource-hoarding shows of strength and dominance—i.e. will the "good" or the "bad" human psychologies survive. But one of the things that is so deeply horrifying about the prospect of nuclear war (and, to a not dissimilar degree, the climate crisis) is that the very premise of there being powerful nation-states in possession of weapons with the capability of making our planet unlivable for vast swaths of the population means that those in global power have on some level already given up on the idea of a collective good. In Threads, we never see these powerful people, who presumably have already retreated to their Dr. Strangelove bunkers. Instead, the first half of the film is focused on the predominantly working-class population of Sheffield watching helplessly (and in some measure of denial) as the United States and the USSR escalate toward nuclear conflict over proxy control of the Middle East—nations these poor people are neither part of nor can control. It's obvious what's so horrifying about the second half of the film, after the bombs have been dropped and we are subject to possibly the most graphic visual account of the effects of nuclear war ever put to film (if there's a more graphic one, don't tell me about it, please—this one at least has the levity of the slightly goofy way that human beings apparently forget to speak in full sentences a decade into the nuclear apocalypse), but I actually found the first half of the film even more sickening because it takes that all-too-familiar feeling of panickedly watching world leaders act with impunity as they ruin the lives of millions and cranks it up to nightmarish levels with the literal threat of nuclear annihilation. Only the worst part is that it's not a nightmare. The madmen who control nation-states are still sitting on a stockpile of nukes, and if that doesn't get us, there's the game of chicken the wealthiest nations are playing as they watch the climate crisis wrecking the formerly colonized world as they wait for the bottom to fall out for the rest of us. I don't think I'm an anarchist, but I've never so profoundly felt what anarchists mean about the ethical illegitimacy of the modern state than I have contemplating, as this movie forces you to, that every single world government with nukes knows that holding onto their arsenal means leaving the door open to a future like the one depicted in this film, and yet they keep their nuclear weapons anyway. I'm not sure how healthy it is to mildly traumatize myself with movies like this, but there is a kind of catharsis in seeing my absolute worst fears put up onscreen, which I suppose is one of the roles of horror media. Yay, October? Grade: A

Mini Reviews for September 26 - October 2, 2022

October has arrived! It's horror movie time, baby! Also, there's a new episode out from the podcast my wife and I do, if you're interested. We're talking Up a Road Slowly.

Movies

Moonage Daydream (2022)
It never really figures out whether it wants to be an informative overview of David Bowie's career or an impressionistic film essay on the monumental mythology and music birthed from his public persona. Frankly, the movie is pretty tedious when it's in "let's give you facts about Bowie" mode, and the shape of this film project that emerges from these sections is a fairly lazy hagiography that presents Bowie at his most sanitized and shamanistic: lots of interest in his loudly proclaimed '70s bisexuality but only the fleetingest of glances at his later assertion that he was actually straight; a representation of his strung-out L.A./fascist-curious period as Bowie himself tended to, i.e. euphemistically filtered through the imagery of The Man Who Fell to Earth; a reduction of his '80s pop period to only the obvious highs of Let's Dance and the Glass Spider tour with nary a Tin Machine nor Never Let Me Down in sight; glowing coverage of his marriage with Iman but literally zero mention of his decade-long and acrimoniously ended first marriage to Angie Barnett. It's all very flattering to the comfy alt-grandpa image that Bowie embraced in his last couple decades of life, and to be clear, I looove David Bowie and still get sad that he's not out there anymore existing in the world as the coolest person alive. But that said, we're long past the time when this kind of surface-level worship of the dude is at all interesting, and imo, there's no point in even just gesturing down the info-doc route if you're not going to get into the thornier elements of his life. Good thing that the considerable part of the movie that isn't that actually is a total blast. There's nothing particularly profound about the way that it blends up archival interviews, concert footage, and symbolically related film clips into an overcranked rush of sound and vision (Todd Haynes's Velvet Underground doc from last year kinda beat this movie to the punch), but wow, is it a lot of fun just to bliss out to a trippy montage while, like, a jammy live recording of "Aladdin Sane" chugs into eternity. You've got some of the obvious touchstones here (e.g. "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" from D. A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust movie, because how could you not?), but there's also some really good, more off-the-beaten-path stuff, like "Hallo Spaceboy" from (I think?) the '90s Nine Inch Nails tour, as well as some demos from the Berlin sessions that I'd never heard before. There's also some very cool and clever recontextualizations of classic songs, like how it intercuts like three or four different, decades-apart performances of "Space Oddity." I would have loved it if the movie made even more room for stuff like that, or was able to incorporate more material from the eras this movie basically ignores, like the plastic soul stuff (only one cut from Station to Station? NOTHING from Young Americans??) or the '90s/2000s. The imaginary version of this film that jettisons all pretenses of informing us about Bowie's life/career and fully devotes itself to doing a dope sonic symphony of his music is a five-star, grade-A experience for this slobbering fan, but even in the more compromised form we ended up getting, I still had a good time. Hard to imagine someone not having a good time, given... [gestures enthusiastically at probably the greatest body of music in rock history]. Grade: B+

Ape (2012)
This movie, which is kinda a millennial-burnout riff on The King of Comedy, probably wouldn't work if it weren't for Joshua Burge's ability to evoke a wavelength of repulsiveness that's also doe-eyed and pitiable. It also wouldn't work without director Joel Potrykus's willingness to just marinate for minutes on end on Burge's character's bombing stand-up sets. But both of those things appear in the movie in spades, and even if there's not a lot else going on, the movie is oddly entrancing as a result. Grade: B

 

 

 

The Future (2011)
Watching Miranda July movies is a weird experience for me, because I always spend the first half of them bristling against the extremely 2000s indie-quirk flavors and being on the verge of dismissing them for being yesteryear's Sundance quirk, only to then have the second half knock me flat as it slides into more surreal, more emotionally fraught territory. I don't know why I keep forgetting that July is the Real Deal, but whatever the ostensible whimsy of her films, she is not messing around; the last forty-ish minutes of this movie are some Charlie Kaufman levels of harrowing interiority and existential dread. It's definitely the weakest of her three features, and someone needs to face charges for the (mercifully brief) interludes with the cat voice. But it's also startling in its clarity in connecting the human drive for connection to the human fear of death, and it does so in a way I've never seen before. Grade: B

The Other Guys (2010)
For about thirty minutes, this is one of the funniest movies of the 2010s ("Aim for the bushes" and the whisper fight at the funeral both had me in stitches), but somewhere along the line, it follows in the unfortunate footsteps of a lot of buddy-cop comedies, in that it becomes more interested in its fairly basic plot than its own jokes. The rest of the movie isn't "bad," but it is somewhat generic outside of the thoroughly winning onscreen chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (is this the last good performance of Wahlberg's career to date?). Also, the plot itself, which focuses on Wall Street financial crimes, makes this a little bit of an awkward transitional work from Adam McKay's Bush-era comedies into his modern edutainment mode, to the point where the movie credits are set against literal infographics about wealth inequality and Ponzi schemes. Like, yes, the financial sector is evil, but 1) the movie's insistence that we understand the social ramifications of what's happening dilutes the comedy quite a bit, and 2) we're doing this critique in the context of how Wall Street hurts police benefits? Whatever, if McKay hadn't gone on to make the movies he did following this one, I probably wouldn't bat an eye, because lots of comedies have trouble balancing jokes with plot, and this movie is still funnier than most of them. Grade: B+

Hostel (2005)
I'm not super familiar with Eli Roth outside of his uneven debut, Cabin Fever, so maybe this isn't true of his broader filmography, but two movies in, it seems like His Thing is to create characters who embody the absolute worst American bourgeois traits to be grist for the inevitable mill of violence that climaxes the kinds of movies these are. In Cabin Fever, you've got the college-educated upper-middle class's open contempt for the rural communities they are exploiting, and now in Hostel, you've got these vacationing swinging-dick chauvinists parading around Europe as if they owned it (and the women who live there). There's definitely something retributive and political about the ways both movies eventually torture their protagonists, and there's no way that a movie in 2005 involving this specific kind of violence isn't intentionally invoking the war crimes perpetrated by the U.S. military during the War on Terror. The whole thing has a kind of self-inflicted nightmare quality where it takes the ugliest, most reductive fears that Americans have of "foreigners" (not an accident that this is set in Eastern Europe, i.e. one of the regions on the globe it's still widely PC to be openly xenophobic toward) and says, "Yeah, you should be afraid of foreigners, because they're as bad as YOU." Throw in some vague references to the role of the shadowy cabals created by international finance, and you've got yourself a stew going. Like I said, I don't know a lot about Roth, not enough to know if this is all some muddled attempt at an intentional treatise on American intervention in the Bush years or just an accidentally interesting artifact of that specific global environment, but I guess it doesn't matter. There are enough threads here to make the movie interesting to pick at, but not enough to make it cohere into anything too compelling for me. As a movie, I thought this was solidly, if unremarkably made outside of the political signifiers. Some good intrigue and a few fun, unexpected bits of slapstick in the midst of all the violence. Honestly campier than I was expecting after all the grim sadism promised by the film's notorious (and specious, imo) reputation as "torture porn," though I still found this to be largely unpleasant—but mostly because of how repulsive the protagonists were rather than the violence. That said, I liked how that one dude kept saying "Of course, my horse." Grade: B-

Hostel: Part II (2007)
A lot slicker and more stylish than its predecessor, probably because Eli Roth had roughly double the budget, and it's also a lot more pointed in its politics, specifically the way that global capital uses violence to coerce us into complicity in its system. I'm not sure how I feel about the way the film makes this point and then allows the American character who buys her way out of death to have some victoriously badass violence—like, the structure of the film kind of necessitates it, but it also feels like a weird Lean In moment from a film that seems like it would otherwise be too cynical for that. But oh well. Like a lot of people, I enjoyed this more than the first one, mostly because of the broader scope (we spend a lot of time with the people buying the violence, which isn't as deflating and John-Wick-y as it sounds) and the way that Roth has let go of his tick for making his protagonists as loathsome as possible. Some of the primal simplicity of the first film is lost by making the movie bigger and more expensive and (relatively) nicer, but it gains enough in watchability and thematic clarity that I'm willing to call it a tradeoff worth making. Grade: B

The Pink Panther (1963)
I was a huge fan of A Shot in the Dark when I was growing up (still am, theoretically, though I haven't watched it in a decade), but my dad, who had first shown me A Shot in the Dark, always cautioned me against watching The Pink Panther. I should have listened to my dad, because this was super boring. Turns out that when you don't foreground Peter Sellers, these movies don't actually have a ton to offer! Literally everything good about this movie occurs when Clouseau is onscreen and/or being referenced (the lone good setpiece involves Clouseau's wife inviting several men into her bedroom, including eventually Clouseau himself, at the same time but trying to keep each of them from knowing the others are there). No surprise that the sequel would throw out basically everything except Sellers. Oh, actually, there is one other good thing: the animated credits at the beginning of the movie, which features Henry Mancini's immortal high-school-jazz-band staple, "The Pink Panther Theme," and also introduces the animated Pink Panther character who otherwise has nothing to do with this movie but provided the basis for the numerous Pink Panther cartoons I have fond memories for (are those any good? I remember thinking they were good when I was like five years old!). I was going to do a whole run of the Pink Panther series, but I'm kinda scared to now, because what if A Shot in the Dark is the only good one, and I have to put up with dull tripe like this for the rest? Grade: C

 

Books

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor (1976)
A surprisingly unflinching depiction of racism in rural Jim Crow Mississippi. If this were published a couple decades later, this would be a YA novel in which the protagonist would be aged up to a teenager, and she would be given a love interest that would occupy a tedious amount of space in the book, but what we got instead is, thankfully, something like a foil to To Kill a Mockingbird: a coming-of-age loss of innocence in which its protagonist gains a racialized consciousness in response to the immeasurable cruelty she sees around her. Unlike the Lee novel, though, this book sidelines the do-gooder white lawyer (who ends up being about as effectual as Atticus Finch in preventing white supremacist violence—i.e. not very) and instead focuses on the experience of living in the apartheid South from the perspective of black children, many of whom are living among families trapped by sharecropping, and this shift in perspective gives the book a much more nuanced and human depiction of its black characters, as well as a much more robust understanding of the interplay of economics and racism (funny how an author whose family actually experienced this oppression is able to do this, huh). The march toward its queasy, grim finale is fairly brutal, and I'm honestly kind of shocked at the way the book refuses to soft-pedal any aspect of white supremacy, to the point where I'm curious if I could even teach this book in a Tennessee middle school classroom under our new anti-anti-racism laws. More thoughts to come when my wife and I do our podcast episode on this. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for September 19 - 25, 2022

In case you missed it, my wife and I released a new episode of our podcast The Newbery Chronicles. This time, we're discussing The Witch of Blackbird Pond! Listen to it here if you're interested.

 

Movies

Romancing the Stone (1984)
Not without its pleasures (principally, Danny DeVito and the croc-filled climax), but it's weirdly inert for an African Queen riff with a blood transfusion from Indiana Jones (though about as racist as that combo suggests). And it's especially inert for a Robert Zemeckis feature from this era. The ironic sleazeball tendencies of early Zemeckis just feel straightforwardly sleazeball here, probably not helped by the co-leading Michael Douglas (the sleazeballest of sleazeball screen presences from this era; truly baffling how much of an A-list star he was, given how consistently off-putting he is in his movies—'twas a different time, I suppose). Kathleen Turner is good, though, and much more keyed into the African Queen vibes than Douglas is. Grade: B-

 

The Alchemist Cookbook (2016)
I keep having to remind myself that I watched this movie, because it just keeps sliding off my brain. Ty Hickson and Amari Cheatom are both very good in their respective roles, and all of writer/director Joel Potrykus's proclivities for mixing bleak horror with the mundane ephemeral of male and geek culture are on full display (including one particularly striking scene involving cat food that feels like a dry run for the disgusting challenges of Relaxer). But I dunno, this feels minor compared to Buzzard and Relaxer, and I think there's just too much micro-indie "futzing around in the woods because we don't have sets otherwise" stuff for it to be as memorable as those other movies. Grade: C+

 

 

The Gate to the Mind's Eye (1994)
A lot less ineffable and a lot more music-video-y than the previous Mind's Eye films, but still pretty cool. There's a distinctly PS1-prerendered-cutscene vibe to these ones in particular that is fitting of the era. Also, the version I watched on YouTube was a LaserDisc rip, so there were a couple of load screens, which is a nice period detail. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

Ocean Waves (海がきこえる) (1993)
Easily my least-favorite Studio Ghibli movie I've seen that isn't Earwig and the Witch. I'm not against high school melodrama, and it's theoretically interesting to see Ghibli operating on that gear. But this movie is sooooo narratively inert. I have no idea why I'm supposed to care about anything that happens here, not because it's stupid and low-stakes (not necessarily a deal-breaker with high school melodrama) but because none of the emotions experienced by the characters are convincingly evoked by the movie. It's not even visually engaging; the animation is warm and competent, but it's thoroughly anonymous. This was kind of by design: the whole point of the project was for Ghibli to allow its younger animators to practice making a movie on the cheap, and I guess you get what you pay for. Grade: C

 

Capricorn One (1977)
Starts out as a fairly cool idea for a '70s paranoid thriller (what if the government didn't fake the moon landing but they faked a Mars landing to save face after the real mission ran into technical difficulties amid public-private corruption at the twilight of Watergate and the dawn of neoliberal creep?) that is just a bit too dumb to mine all the promise from that premise—the kind of dumb that thinks that you have to get on a plane to travel from Houston to Galveston, or that you should have a pivotal emotional scene involve a mother breaking down into sobs as she reads Fox in Socks to her kid (though as a parent, I can honestly say: same). Somewhere along the line, though, probably right around the 2/3 mark, when Elliott Gould becomes the protagonist (always a good move for a movie to make), this shifts gears into something a lot more openly goofy and thus makes what were intellectual and tonal liabilities in the front half of the movie actual virtues of the second half, and by the end, this has righted the ship into a dumb-fun blast. Gould is extremely good as a down-on-his-luck journalist who gets into increasingly absurd situations as a result of being two degrees of separation from the conspiracy, and the way his plot slowly drifts into full-on screwball comedy is really entertaining. The helicopter/crop-duster chase at the climax is legit great, too. What a weird movie. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for September 12 - 18, 2022

Pretty good movie week, all in all.

Movies

Pearl (2022)
A substantially messier movie than X, and large chunks of this simply do not work. It also runs into the same problems as X did with the character of Pearl, which is that it has a hard time landing its theoretical sympathy for Pearl while balancing the plot's need for her to be a Krazy Killer. That all said, this is some mad scientist filmmaking for sure, far and away the strangest thing that Ti West has ever attempted and about as far out of his wheelhouse as he's ever been. I don't know that it ever comes into something coherent, but the way that this film uses West's facility for pastiche to squeeze '50s melodrama, The Wizard of Oz, and silent film into an exploitation mode is a true maniac's project, and the fact that Mia Goth is 110% onboard with whatever the intent was here becomes a compelling glue to hold it all together. This wouldn't work at all without Goth, who is keyed into the specific wavelength of camp this movie requires to an astounding degree, and that the movie doesn't even consistently work with her A-tier performance should give you an indication of how uneven this movie is. But for every bit that's uneven, there's a moment that feels like a payoff that doesn't exactly redeem what doesn't work but at least makes it clear why you stuck it out with that thread—e.g. spending about half an hour wondering why in the world I was seeing all these Wizard of Oz references and then getting to the part where Goth humps a scarecrow to climax and going, "Ohhh, wow." Ti West doesn't really have any of the, uh, ex factor of someone like David Lynch, who works with a lot of the same reference points to create films that feel much more primordial, and West is just a lot more crass about it than Lynch ever is, but the uncanny juxtaposition of familiar Americana with a squirmy recognition of the extremes of human behavior feels at least in the same country as the Lynchian mode (or at least pre-Fire Walk With Me Lynch). Long story short, I had a good time with it, and in the long run it'll probably be more memorable for its wild ambition than the much more coloring-inside-the-lines X, even if X is definitely the better movie. Grade: B

The Black Phone (2021)
Has this weird quality of being simultaneously too ambitious while also provoking a "that's it?" reaction from me. It kind of reminds me of that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark adaptation from a few years ago that was somehow trying to be simultaneously a spooky campfire story and also some sort of treatise on the presidential election of Richard Nixon, and while this isn't as baldly political, it has this ersatz Stephen King undercurrent of trying to have this movie be about these battling metaphysical forces while at the same time being just a straightforward serial killer thriller. I dunno, it only barely works at its best, and at its worst it feels like an inauthentic accumulation of signifiers, not unlike its period setting (though at least we get some good, slightly unexpected needle drops—if you're going to do a Dark Side of the Moon track, "On the Run" is basically the only remotely interesting choice at this point). I love Ethan Hawke in general, but he really feels like he's just doing unflattering serial killer kitsch here. Just kind of an empty calories movie all around, and not even yummy calories either, because this movie is bleak and unpleasant on top of being uninspired. Grade: C-

Petite Maman (2021)
A purposefully small, warm blanket of a movie. A young girl's grandmother dies, and soon after, she discovers a friend who is magically a manifestation of her mother as a little girl, which allows her to process her loss. There are some scenes that are so emotionally precise that they made me cry, but mostly the movie involves just watching a couple of cute, convincing child actors genially play together. Very sweet, very cozy, only rips your heart out of your chest twice. Grade: B+

 

 

Woodstock (1970)
It's hard not to look bitterly at this as a bunch of future Reagan voters cosplaying as revolutionaries, and to that end, the documentary scans as a lot more ambivalent toward its subject than I was expecting from such a mythologized text, right down to the final Hendrix solo playing over post-festival footage of the area that looks positively bombed-out—a wildly conflicted image to end this depiction of an ostensibly celebratory event. There are a few other pointed jabs at the shaky integrity of the festival, such as the darkly ironic juxtaposition of the nominally anti-war sentiments uniting the crowd with the fact that the U.S. Army supplied medical aid to the crowd once it became clear that the festival organizers themselves were incapable of maintaining an event at this scale. On a less ideological note, I guess I was expecting the music here to be better, but it's wildly inconsistent. The famous performances, i.e. the ones I'd already seen, are justly famous, especially the film-ending run of Santana --> Sly and the Family Stone --> Janis Joplin --> Jimi Hendrix. But a good portion of the acts here are a bunch of white blues groups of the kind that were popular in the UK at the time, and that's just such a tedious little subgenre of music to me. That Ten Years After set felt like an eternity, and there were at least a few more like it. The music was one of the few things I'd always figured I gotta hand to the hippies, but boy oh boy, not here. With any concert doc, there's a certain "you just had to be there" element, especially with one as ragged and sloppy as Woodstock, so I guess I've just got to assume that these bands just sound better when you're tripping on that subpar brown acid the festival staff kept warning people about. But anyway, probably the best thing about this documentary is how close it does actually get to helping its viewers understand what being there was like, and outside of the Santana, et al, finale, the best parts are the delightful little details the roaming cameras and mics pick up, like the wholesome dude servicing the toilets or the random loudspeaker announcements about somebody's wife having a baby or whatever. It's a deeply grimy and tactile film, and the breadth and specificity of sensory experiences it manages to capture is truly impressive. Probably could have done without nearly four hours of it, though; it's too bad that the 1994 "Director's Cut" is now basically the only version you can get, because the three-hour theatrical cut sounds much more manageable (though admittedly, that one cuts out a lot of the Hendrix stuff). Grade: B

Monterey Pop (1968)
With the exception of the haunting use of light in the Otis Redding sequence, this is much less of a cinematically interesting object than Woodstock (the obvious comparison point, given that the former inspired the latter), and it has virtually none of the sensory immediacy that defines so much of the film document of the latter festival. But the music is several orders of magnitude better in this movie, which covers a multitude of inferiorities. Furthermore, nowhere in the four hours of Woodstock does Jimi Hendrix pleasure his guitar before setting it on fire, so I think I rest my case on the (admittedly only barely) superior film experience. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for September 5 - 11, 2022

Hm.

Movies

SubUrbia (1996)
Feels like the Venn diagram created by the overlapping of Dazed and Confused with Gregg Araki's Teen Apocalypse trilogy. It's very much the bucket of cold water that Dazed mercifully withholds: whereas Linklater is happy to let the characters in the older film live with the self-aggrandizing lie that they have been given a future by our country (the only real pushback is the joke the teacher makes at the beginning about the founders not wanting to pay taxes), the teens of Linklater's follow-up teen all-nighter absolutely see America for the deception that it is and thus live in a kind of sad nihilism that feels very much like the heterosexual parallel to what Gregg Araki was exploring around the same time—and of course by virtue of occupying the white and straight ends of alienation, these characters more often than not become the aggressors in the oppressive ecosystem struggling to survive under the American neoliberal boot. The kids here are no more above hectoring and bullying and hazing than their more triumphalist predecessors in Dazed, but whereas those '70s kids' behavior comes out of a kind of raw sense of entitlement, the '90s kids here are clearly acting out of pain. It's not a very fun movie, but of all of Linklater's often romanticized depictions of Gen X, this is probably the realest he ever got about the political ecosystem animating that generation (probably no accident that this happens in an Eric Bogosian screenplay and not a Linklater one). There really aren't very many movies about latent fascism in disaffected '90s suburban teens, but there should be. Grade: B

Blind (2014)
Pretty clever exploration of how the nature of consciousness forces us to fill in details that we aren't privy to so we can build coherent narratives of what we experience, and the fact that by the end it becomes basically impossible to tell what is "real" and what is merely a depiction of our protagonist's possibly false assumptions about what is happening around here seems like an appropriate conclusion to the film. I'm not sure at all how respectful to the blind community it is to use a protagonist's blindness as a way to poke at these ideas, so maybe this is tone deaf. It's just now striking me how old-fashioned it is to use a disability as a metaphor for some philosophical concept. Grade: B

 

My Own Private Idaho (1991)
A very sad movie about unrequited love—or at least, that's what it eventually turns into, though it takes a strange, circuitous route through a bizarre adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard/Henry tetrology. The film has that rich, earthy idiosyncrasy that textures a lot of this wave of American indie cinema, and it always feels to me that there's something meaningful going on with the movie's weirdness, even if I'm not always very clued in to what it is. That said, I wonder how this would scan for me if I was even a little familiar with the Shakespeare plays it draws from. Regardless, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves are both incredible here, especially River. Gives the movie's emotional core a little extra oomph knowing that this vibrant, beautiful person baring his soul only had a couple years to live. Grade: B+

 

Juvenile Court (1973)
My engagement with this movie vacillated wildly as the film ping-pongs between depicting tedious legal proceedings and harrowing emotional landscapes—which I suppose is true to the actual experience of court. Watching how often these kids just plead to go home rather than go to foster care or a residential center or (when the horrific specter of "being tried as an adult" comes up) the penitentiary is truly hard to watch in a way probably only matched by Titicut Follies in Frederick Wiseman's filmography up to this point. Unlike Titicut Follies, though, or most of Wiseman's early features, it's not immediately clear the extent to which this film is meant to be a critique of the Memphis Juvenile Court; early in the film, a psychologist administers a Rorschach test to one of the kids in custody, and in a lot of ways, the film functions as kind of a Rorschach test for viewers to measure their own trust in the system as portrayed here, with the actions of the adults in the court accumulating layers of either bureaucratic menace or hard-won compassion depending on how you feel about the ecosystem that produces this actions. On a completely unrelated note, I wonder if there has been a linguistic study of how dialect in the American South has shifted over time, because as someone who grew up in the Memphis area, I can confirm that in my time there, I heard none of the Scarlett O'Hara-core accents that populate this film. Grade: B

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sen noci svatojánské) (1959)
I mean, the appeal here is pretty straightforward: A Midsummer Night's Dream done by Czech stop-motion "puppet" animation master Jiří Trnka. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, then definitely avoid this. Even with a built-in interest, I found the beginning and end kind of dull, but when everybody's in the forest, this becomes truly special (incidentally, this is how I feel about the Shakespeare original). The dream-like effect of stop-motion and especially the particulars of Czech stop-motion is a perfect fit for the play's fantasy, and Trnka never runs out of ways to make the film look truly magical when it's in that liminal forest space. Grade: B

 

Gulliver's Travels (1939)
When I was a kid, someone gave us a DVD with this movie on it, and my family tried to watch it but bailed about halfway through when we found it relentlessly dull. I reapproached this as an adult with optimism, thinking of all the films I'd reassessed with age. And I will say this: the animation really impressed me; the mix of rotoscoping on Gulliver with the rubbery 1930s Fleischer style on the Lilliputians works really well, and the Lilliputians themselves have some terrific character animation that makes this go down easier than it would have otherwise. But as good as the animation is, I've got to admit that my family and I were right the first time. This is terribly boring. Just absolutely nothing interesting going on musically, narratively, or even on the voice-acting level. I'm sorry. I really want these Fleischer films to be good so I can declare the Disney hegemony over the early American animated feature film to be a corporate lie, but alas, they really aren't. You hate to hand it to Walt Disney and his animators, but you gotta. Grade: C-

 

Television

How To with John Wilson, Season 1 (2020)
Kind of the intersection of Joe Pera Talks with You and Nathan For You—each episode is a little film essay on a different mundane "how to" topic (examples: "How To Split the Check," "How To Cover Your Furniture") that becomes elevated through Wilson's Joe-Pera-esque ability to find idiosyncratic corners to explore within the topic as well as his Nathan-Fielder-esque facility with finding the weirdest, most fascinating interview subjects. The tendency for silly visual puns seems all John Wilson, though. The sum total of this is a curiously profound treatise on how the web of bizarre and insignificant details of our lives accumulate into larger webs of social and personal meaning, and the season finale, in which Wilson contemplates the relationship between himself and his aging landlady, is deeply moving. It's cool how the sprawling landscape of modern television can make room for an off-beat, small-scale show like this (though unfortunately, apparently not for my dearly departed Joe Pera Talks with You). Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for August 29 - September 4, 2022

COVID finally got me (a relatively mild case, thankfully), but on a positive note, my wife and I published a new episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here.

Movies

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021)
Captures extremely well that particularly brand of loneliness represented by grainy bedroom online video uploads, a kind of cry for help that seems to have transcended the ebb and flow of tech platform whims—I remember seeing this kind of stuff on YouTube and Google Video and other early forums, and you can apparently still find it on TikTok and Discord servers. In addition to that, the movie really does a great job of evoking the way that the "real" world gets all smeary and overlit after a long session of peering into the internet. What I'm most taken by, though, is the premise, where the protagonist (played by Anna Cobb, who is truly great here) gets involved in some kind of role-playing/ARG-type viral video thing that requires her to post videos of herself pretending(?) to lose herself to some mind-and-body-altering power, which is a spooky enough idea for this to justify its (slightly misleading) designation as a horror film but also is a smart way of dramatizing the ways in which the internet forces us to launder our humanity through the mediation of a persona that may or may not accurately reflect aspects of our psychological wellbeing, not necessarily because we want to keep the truth secret but because true, radical openness is hard enough in in-person interactions and even harder online where we are personally responsible for curating facts about ourselves. Knowing yourself enough to craft a virtual representation of your true self is one of these impossible tasks foisted upon us by our contemporary way of being, and that's not even keeping into account the reasons (usually out of self-preservation) why someone might not even *want* to present their true self to the internet. There's a particularly harrowing moment later in the film when one character tries to cut through the pretext of the game to simply ask the girl directly if she is okay, and the act of doing so is such a violation of the social contract of the majority of online spaces that the girl responds with rage and fear—and maybe it's right for her to do so, since after all, the internet is full of weirdos and creeps in addition to well-meaning folks, and the movie has given us no way of knowing which this person is at this point. But at the same time, that vulnerability, that directness sans the irony and refraction inherent to digital life, is the only way for genuine human interaction, whether online or in person, and if we can't find the ability to reach through the screen, as it were, and find each other's personhood and worth on the other side, we're doomed. Whatever the case, I found this utterly captivating, more sad than scary as we watch this teenage girl try to navigate all these conundrums while also dealing with the deep loneliness endemic to teenagerdom. My internet access as a teen was fairly limited, so my sympathies go out to all the kids now for whom having to survive this stuff is basically a given. Grade: B+

Josie and the Pussycats (2001)
The meta-commentary is fun, and the cast is pitch-perfect (I'm begging you, movies: bring back regular Parker Posey appearances). But mostly what I was struck by is how much of a blast the soundtrack is. The Adam Schlesinger-penned "Pretend to Be Nice" is my favorite, but "3 Small Words" (co-written by the movie's directors!) would make a great double-A-side single with it, and really, all the music is just a great time. I wish "power pop" were the early-aughts flavor of mall-punk that was coming back, instead of whatever MGK and the like are peddling. Also, the Netflix DVD of this was scratched, so midway through I had to bail and finish watching it on the Internet Archive, where the movie is listed under the topic of "MK Ultra," which gave me a chuckle. Grade: B

 

Beyond the Mind's Eye (1992)
Somehow kitschier and also cooler than its predecessor. The tech is a little better in the found-object renders, but it still has that early-CGI abstraction that is very, very entrancing. It's hard to say a lot about these movies because they are pretty much the platonic ideal of "pure cinema" in the sense that there's no satisfying way to communicate what is meaningful about them without having experienced first-hand their visual and aural textures. It's very silly, but also, its status as an artifact of an indelibly precise slice of a cultural moment really strikes a chord in me. Transporting. Grade: B+

 

 

Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959)
Unbelievably good. My sweet spot for jazz is about ten years later than this, but this film captures a special energy that probably wouldn't have been present at whatever fusion/free-jazz freakout would have resulted from a circa 1970 concert of jazz luminaries. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a movie so effectively observe the liberatory joy of jazz while also so convincingly evoking the banality of a music festival. It is legit hilarious how this doc will show some musician in the throes of the profoundly spiritual ecstasy of their performance and then cut to someone chomping unglamorously on an ice cream bar, but it's also kind of beautiful, too, that these two expressions of humanity coexist in the same space. Grade: A