Anora Instantly one of the great films about the gap between image and reality; sometimes seemingly erased, or glossed over, through optical illusions yet ultimately, and sometimes painfully, unbridgeable. To that end, it's Vertigo for the Instagram age, but vastly funnier; this century, only Mistress America comes as close to vintage '30s/early '40s screwball form. Indeed, Anora is fully hilarious –– until it's not. Then, finally, it's as heartbreaking and poignant as movies get.
Heretic A World Religions seminar thought-experiment as choose-your-own-adventure horror story. The first hour or so is exceptionally tense, funny, and engaging. But from there it over-commits both conceptually and generically, devolving into a relatively ho-hum horror movie, worth sticking with mainly for Hugh Grant's best and weirdest work since Paddington 2. Most haunted houses are scarier (in theory) before you actually step inside, although the good ones can be an awful lot of fun. In Heretic, most of the fun drains out soon after the visitors/protagonists choose their door to walk through and the film tips its hand, so intriguingly well played up to that point. Or, to mix in yet another muddled metaphor, the emperor hasn't any clothes...though maybe that is the point here?
Urbi et orbi
Conclave is sharper than and superior to The Two Popes; more earthbound and measured, less audacious and less impactful than The Young Pope/New Pope; shades of Death of Stalin minus the Pythonesque flourishes; plenty of juicy, plot-thickening West Wing-style walk-and-talks.
The stylistic stateliness of Berger's film lends it a kind of moral (/spiritual?) gravitas, while effectively concealing its essential and ultimate puckishnesss: its final twist lands like a clever punchline, though not – to the film's credit – in service of a cheap or obvious (anti-)Catholic joke. Rather, the joke, as it were, is that the titular gathering of cardinals, ostensibly sequestered from the outside world, is a messy, discordant microcosm of that wider world as presently constituted. Not for nothing are non-monastic clergy known as secular clergy. Their concerns, offices, and jurisdiction are in and of this world, the temporal not the eternal, i.e., the saeculum (see esp. Robert Markus on Augustine of Hippo) –– the Church as always already political, at least since the emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea 1699 years ago, probably earlier still.
Sit down, Jake
This always cheers me up. At least a little. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do the Right Thing
Not exactly a swing state, or else we're in really serious trouble, but due diligence done (mailed well in advance of the deadline). Literally the easiest decision I've ever made. Of course I voted For Her (again, and let's hope the second Her's the charm). You should too if you can, because –– among innumerable other reasons –– small-'d' democracy is by far the best way of doing things we've figured out so far and it's at serious risk if She loses, or even if the initial outcome appears close enough to sow dangerous doubts. If for whatever reason you have the slightest hesitation or misgiving about voting for the only viable normal, sane, small-'d' democratic-minded candidate, watch The Sixthright now. And watch it in any case if you haven't yet. Then, cross your fingers for the closest thing to a doubt-resistant landslide that's mathematically possible in these nasty, brutish, hyper-polarized times.
Wins and Losses
The Apprentice Or A Portrait of the Villain as a Young Creep. As heel-turn origin stories go, it's much better than, say, Joker (while more credibly recreating the milieu of '70s New York); not as good as, say, Isaiah 14 or Paradise Lost; comparisons with the Wicked movie TBD.
The Substance Since this is about aging (in the most utterly obvious way possible), I'll note that when I was younger and watched many more movies much more often than I find time to these days, I didn't really get it – or just thought it was a whiny cliché – when people said stuff like, "well, there's two hours of my life I'll never get back." But now I get it. This is an atrociously bad and stupid movie. The Cronenberg comparisons are blasphemous. This is as if cinema began with Requiem for a Dream.
Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds One of the best and most (visually as well as aurally) beautiful animated films in recent memory; a weird little world into which one can sink soothingly--like a dream, or a balm, or a song. And it's done with such lovely simplicity and lightness (with shades of melancholy), far less busy and cluttered than most Western and even some Ghibli animated features. A masterpiece in its indelibly idiosyncratic way.
You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
At least half of Midwest Princess is solidly terrific; "Good Luck, Babe!" is the single of the year and catchiest Kate Bush song since Hounds of Love; the new album probably will be really fucking good; her non-endorsement is total bullshit, in the first place because non-politician celebrities shouldn't be expected or compelled to issue formal electoral endorsements but more noxiously because it came bundled in a both-sides-ist false equivalency that in 2024 means normalizing The Purge and state persecution of, inter alias, the non-heteronormative communities of which she's ostensibly a part and unequivocally a deeply indebted beneficiary; angsty and ambivalent about fame is fine, and of its own venerable tradition; mental health is serious and important; conceding that actually you don't really know all that much about politics (even in your own country and still less on the other damn side of the world) because you're just so busy right now with so many different things is perfectly fair and valid; vaguely lumping together a normal, competent progressive candidate and an amoral felon who incited an insurrection is indefensible; (Kate Bush: also much better at music than at saying stuff about politics, viz. not-saying-stuff-but-still-ultimately-saying-stuff-by-way-of-awkwardly-opting-out); Chappell Roan is the Chappell Roan 2024 deserves; Bowen Yang as Moo Deng the cranky baby hippopotamus is the Chappell Roan Chappell Roan deserves.
Hiding in doubt 'til you brought me out of my chrysalis
One of the best shows I've seen in years –– a generational-talent-level singer-songwriter and phenomenal live performer (virtues that don't necessarily or automatically align) at the peak of her powers.
I only wish she had played "Heaven Is" and, admittedly more improbably, "I Remember Everything," which she elevated to an all-time-great downer duet. But an amazing concert, in any case, with covers of SZA and Chappell Roan aptly reflective of a genuinely ecumenical ethos that has deepened and expanded outwards from her early days singing about "when the straight and narrow gets a little too straight" at the Grand Ole Opry. Yet where approximate coeval Taylor Swift has mostly outgrown her early Nashville aesthetic, with many fans who can't even directly remember their pop heroine's country-starlet origins, Musgraves has grown within while willfully redefining the formal as well as cultural parameters of country music. They're two of our very best, following their respective arrows wherever they happen to point.
*sigh*
...Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
(I'm normally not one to post or invoke biblical quotations, but this is a really useful adage, no theologizing necessary. Really good movie too, if you've got the stomach for it and can stand Vincent Gallo...)
Always on the Run
Blink Twice, Twice
Fly Me to the Moon Delightfully uncynical and good-natured, and more than superficially "retro": a breezy escape hatch from a coarsened culture painfully contorted in on itself. In its peppy hopefulness and timely skewering of conspiracy-thinking FMTTM isn't just a glossy, fast-relief antidote to These Days. It's also an invitation to a still-viable alternative to extremist acrimony and cultural Ouroboroism that's not that far back in America's rearview mirror. (Heck, they should've screened it at the DNC!)
Blink Twice Pitched somewhere between a season-highlight Black Mirror episode and a solid conceptual/philosophical sequel to Get Out, it's over-stuffed both with stylistic flourishes and plot devices––some of which really work, some of which kinda-sorta work, some of which appear (while watching or else reflected back on) basically pointless. Having a career-year, Channing Tatum's performance is a radically counter-type possible career-best. Decidedly not so for Haley Joel Osment... Between this and Hit Man, Adria Arjorna is the revelation of the year, full stop.
Longlegs Evidently Donald Trump isn't the only one who has been thinking of late about Hannibal Lecter.
Strange Darling Some very nifty and clever parts, if finally less than the sum of them.
Said you were gonna grow up, then you were gonna come find me
As of now, my favourite TTPD track, "Anthology" or otherwise (list now updated and necessarily expanded). It's arrestingly beautiful and sad, and showcases one of her low-key most distinctive skills: wringing new life and unexpected feeling from tired and/or obvious metaphors, here transmuting the wistful idyll of Neverland into lost futures, broken promises, and horizons that contract a little more each time she sings the chorus, cellphone flashlights the fairies she wishes she could still believe were real. But whatever residual semblance of magic's all bound up in the music, in the moment; more ephemeral even than youth. Or love. Over in under five minutes. (Lucky Swedes!)
In a Lonely Place
Myriad lights
We Believe That We Can't Be Wrong (Ten Things)
01. Paul & Linda McCartney, "The Back Seat of My Car" Not in any sense new-news, but I've been listening a lot lately to Ram and this is its exquisite pinnacle. And it would be top five, maybe even top three, among the songs of any post-Revolver Beatles album.
02. Zach Bryan, The Great American Bar SceneJust 28 and his catalogue is already as strong and varied and altogether impressive as stalwart singer-songwriters who've been at it for twice as long. I can't say just yet whether this one is his best yet, but just the fact that it may well be speaks highly of its top-shelf quality.
03. Hit Man Linklater's best Bernie-mode movie since Bernie; just as good-natured, as casually perceptive about human nature(s), and, though also concerned with, less necessarily troubled by the matter of murder. In what is low-key one of the film's best scenes (and very much the sort of scene that would simply be cut from and perhaps turn up as a mostly unseen Blu-ray bonus for a lesser film), the protagonist's ex-wife and still close friend suggests, "Everyone is at least a little fucked-up. You just need to find someone who is fucked-up in a way that you like, or that complements your own fucked-up-ness." One might expect such well-said, off-the-cuff sage advice from a longtime real-life friend, but will rarely find it in movies, and particularly not from supporting characters in rom-coms (which this unashamedly is, more or less), whether good ones or bad ones –– save for Linklater's, which weave in a kind of lived-in wisdom of experience that leaves viewers feeling as if they know a little more about than their own lives and circumstances.
04. In a Violent NatureMost so-called "art-horror" films dial down the more extreme tendencies of both the art-house and the horror so as to make a more congruous merger. Yet Chris Nash does precisely the opposite, instead emphasizing the jarring contrast of beautifully composed, ambiently soundtracked long-held tracking shots through vast, verdant landscapes with abruptly commenced ultra-gory old-school-slasher kills, now being roundly applauded for their "creativity" by horror-connoisseur fansites that probably won't be reviewing, say, the next Albert Serra or Nuri Bilge Ceylan features. That the half-baked premise is deliberately flimsy and silly is implicitly but clearly affirmed when the character doing the expositional explaining gets quickly offed mid-explanation, then passed patiently, repeatedly through a log chopper. The film's final stretch (the last 15 or so minutes, after the Final Girl flees and gets picked up by a truck driven by the actress who once played Vickie in Friday the 13th Part II) is really extraordinary stuff, and the cut to credits and song selected are perfect.
05. Tehran, seasons one and two The espionage series done just about as impeccably as possible: breathless suspense somehow sustained across sixteen episodes (so far), a wealth of fascinating characters and shifting relationships among them, even, at times, provocative insights into the intercultural and geopolitical dynamics of the contemporary Middle East. The first season is nearly flawless. The second is slightly more uneven and strained in places; the addition of Glenn Close is never not at least a little distracting, although her performance itself is predictably superb.
06. The first eight episodes of Beef The first seven episodes are superlative black comedy/social satire (with some highly inspired needle drops!), the eighth swerves precariously yet doesn't quite lose its footing; but then in the penultimate episode Beef goes off the rails as the ante is upped in a way that, in its turbo-charged TV-show extremity, feels more by-the-numbers FUBAR, culminating (because of course it does) in someone bisected by their panic room door. And then the finale is something else again...opaquely philosophical or a glib imitation thereof, very much like The Curse that way. Yet, at their respective bests, both shows capture with laser-like specificity a current ('80s-born-generational? national? socio-cultural? almost-but-not-quite-'post-human'?) mood of futility and despair underlying the curation of "lifestyle" as a glib imitation of –– or substitute for –– the cultivation of a philosophically coherent modus vivendi.
07. The third part of Kinds of KindnessNot just for Emma Stone's (premature) celebration dance...though not-not for said dance, which will undoubtedly outlive the minor mixed-bag triptych that makes its audience wait some two and a half hours for that smartly advertised dash of ebullience. But also for the outfits, for Omi and Aka, and for the truly Lynchian dream-weirdness of the sub-plot involving Margaret Qualley's twin characters.
08. Charli XCX, Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not Like the Tortured Poets "Anthology" edition, not to mention the essentially sui generis case of the "Vault"-enhanced rerecordings-not-reissues, these eighteen tracks that hang together well sans skips beg the question(s) –– or at least they do for those of us old enough to wonder how exactly this sort of thing would've been promoted and packaged as physical discs before the immateriality of streaming was assumed as the default mode of consumption –– of what exactly an album/record/LP is and isn't in 2024, or whether that matters. Probably it doesn't, except to aging, persnickety music nerds who Venn diagram-overlap only negligibly with Charli 100–10+10's target audience, to whom "Club Classics" conjures what...late-period Daft Punk? Early BTS? Swift, though, skews just enough 'Old-Millennial' that she's presumably given the matter of The Album some degree of thought, and not only for banal business reasons. (No need to worry / her accountants handle that.) "Clara Bow," named for a silent-film-era actress, is a full-stop Album Closer par excellence, while the Anthology material concludes with a song called "The Manuscript" that encapsulates the less-finished, sketch-like quality of the addenda released simultaneous to and no less accessibly than the album-proper. Brat etc. etc. ends with "Spring Breakers," referring to Harmony Korine's ironic-salacious Floridian gangster fantasia, which by now might be as pop-canonical as Scarface for the young people ('brats' or not) who were too young to see it in situ way back in 2012.
09. Clipped An octogenarian Al Bundy as Donald Sterling was a masterstroke; Laurence Fishburne makes for an excellent Doc Rivers (even though the voice is not quite Cookie Monster enough); and his recurring sauna chats with LeVar Burton are oddly distinctive highlights that feel borrowed from a deeper, more patient and interesting show than the kind that Clipped is actually, consistently interested in being. As such "content" goes, it's not as good as the terrific first season of Winning Time, but much better than its rushed and ruined second season. Sufficiently engrossing if one follows closely the on- and off-court dramas of the NBA, probably solidly entertaining as the reenactment of an early cancel-era trainwreck if one doesn't, Clipped is decidedly less than the sum of its parts. Ed O'Neill and Fishburne deserve awards recognition; maybe also Jacki Weaver, whose accent work is more on-the-mark than Fishburne's; and *definitely* LeVar Burton, from Roots to Star Trek to Reading Rainbow (forever my first point of association) to ruminating on the nature of rage, the intractable problem of race, and the special utility of micro blades for the artful sculpting of facial hair.
10. The first part of Kinds of KindnessAlas, it is getting harder all the time to see Landry Clarke (and Crucifictorious!) the same way ever again.
Current Listening
01. The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times"
02. Zach Bryan f/ Kacey Musgraves, "I Remember Everything"
03. Kacey Musgraves, "Heaven Is"
04. Taylor Swift, "Peter"
05. Steely Dan, "Any Major Dude Will Tell You"
06. The Kinks, "Do You Remember Walter?"
07. The Kinks, "People Take Pictures of Each Other"
08. The Rolling Stones, "Sweet Virginia"
09. The Rolling Stones, "Thru and Thru"
10. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "That Smell"
11. Simon & Garfunkel, "Hazy Shade of Winter"
12. The Bangles, "Hazy Shade of Winter"
13. Jan & Dean, "Surf City"
14. Fire Saga, "Double Trouble"
15. The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do Is Dream"
16. Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"
17. Elliott Smith, "Speed Trials"
18. Drive-by Truckers, "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife"
Watching her do serious, insightful yet visibly perplexed analysis of the Stop Making Sense "Life during Wartime" performance is Must-See TV.
At 18:03: "Like, that's awful, you shouldn't have to live on peanut butter for a couple days."
At 21:30: "It feels like he's, like...laying down for death on stage right now."
You Can Call Me Al or Betty or Deacon Blues
'Mid-life crises' are intrinsically optimistic insofar as they presume based on statistical averages that there's roughly another half still to come and intrinsically pessimistic insofar as they realistically recognize that it's probably, comparatively gonna mostly suck, as quantitative equality ('mid'/'half') is not at all the same thing as qualitative equality.
We've seen the last of good King Richard. Raise up your glass to good King John.
