Old (2021)

In this movie by director and cowriter M. Night Shyamalan, based on a French graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, tourists visiting a resort spa are invited to a unique and special hidden beach. Once there, things begin to happen in strange ways. Time passes more quickly. The three children in the group are suddenly growing into adolescence and then full adulthood. They find they can’t leave the beach the way they came. Every attempt results in a blackout. The beach is otherwise blocked by steep cliffs and ocean on all sides. Eventually they gather around and do some math for our edification. It seems that one hour on the beach is aging them two years. A 24-hour stay, if they can’t get away, will age them to the ends of their lives. It all seems a little silly but that also seems to be part of the intent of the picture, making it into a kind of easygoing lighthearted horror movie with subtle comfort points—a near-total case of cognitive dissonance. A famous rapper (played by Aaron Pierre) is with them, for example. The kids want to approach him but are cautioned that famous people like privacy. His stage name is Mid-Sized Sedan, which I could not take any other way than as a joke, and a pretty good one. Lots of familiar faces dot this ensemble: Thomasin McKenzie (Last Night in Soho, Leave No Trace) is one of the kids aged to 16, Gael Garcia Bernal (Amores Perros, Y tu mama tambien) plays well against type as a fuddy-duddy actuary and muddled dad, Ken Leung (Lost, The Squid and the Whale) is a nurse with more common sense than most of the folks on the beach. As usual, Shyamalan twists the narrative near the end with surprises in the form of the explanation. It would be a spoiler for me to discuss so I will leave it to you to discover for yourself. I find myself moving off thinking of Shyamalan as mostly gimmicky. He’s that, for sure, but he’s also just good at making movies that pull you in and keep you committed, with a fair amount of style and wit. The fact that they are arguably silly—and Old certainly is that—only underlines how good they are, how infectiously fun or insidiously suspenseful. I’ve been dubious of Shyamalan for a long time now, but must admit it’s been fun going through his stuff. Cautiously recommended for the feel-good qualities and the jokes. Don’t expect too much.

The Trees (2021)

My first-time Percival Everett (who just won a Pulitzer, you know): I chose The Trees. I didn’t know how recent it was and barely knew how prolific he is. Aside from all the general raving about Everett, all I knew was that The Trees had something to do with lynching. I had no idea it is basically fitted to the template of a thriller and I had no idea how funny it was going to be. It hit me in much the same way that Elmore Leonard novels can. The pace is fast—over 100 chapters, all very short—and the language is laconic and precise. I suspect Everett may have wanted to call this novel Rise, because that’s the title of the first and only section. The story starts in Money, Mississippi, and mostly it stays in Mississippi, though it ranges wide across the US. Money is where Emmett Till was visiting his uncle in 1955 and where he was murdered. The series of bizarre murders in The Trees starts there. White men are found murdered with Black men. The white men have been severely beaten and had their testicles removed. The Black man—it’s often the same corpse—has been beaten too and is holding the white man’s testicles. Later, the corpse of the Black man disappears from the morgue, only to reappear at the next crime scene. Among other things, this is a great mystery story. Police are baffled. Racial tensions start to run even higher when the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation sends two Black detectives to work the case with the locals. The Trees respects most rules of the mystery / thriller narrative although there are a lot of stretchers along the way increasingly toward the end. I had a great time with this one—once started, reading it was all I wanted to do until it was done. It’s funny, droll and acerbic, and it is full of the pain of the history of lynching in this country. The laughs don’t let anyone off the hook. They just draw you further and further into a landscape that is terrifying when it’s not hilarious. Now I’m looking around thinking about a next Everett.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Carole King’s Tapestry (2021)

Loren Glass is an English professor at the University of Iowa. Born approximately in the ‘60s he came to Carole King and Tapestry by way of hippie parents and stepparents. I think his appreciations are sincere but they felt a little too pious for my taste. He does a good job of locating King and the album within their contexts, rock ‘n’ roll close to the moment it became rock and of course the singer-songwriter tradition and feminism. Some things I hadn’t really known before: Carole King was born Carol Klein, and Tapestry is her third solo album, following her flight to the West Coast from New York in the ‘60s. I’ve never known those first two albums. Though Glass has ties to rock critics such as Ann Powers, for better or worse he has little of the spirit. Admittedly the spirit can often be loud-mouthed braying. But I felt Glass was circumspect and respectful to a fault. On the other hand it may be the best way to approach the album. It’s a favorite of mine (and a million others) for various personal reasons. I still consider “It’s Too Late” one of the greatest pop songs ever made. My biggest complaint about this 33-1/3 volume is that it overdoes the footnotes—nearly 200 of them, usually bare citations, and often not useful. This is not the first 33-1/3 I’ve seen with citations, but Glass may have set the record for sheer numbers. I’m just too easily distracted by them in this form, too inured to the chatty kind that has something to add. My favorite section was “Trilogy,” covering King’s first three solo albums, which she later called a trilogy. It’s a nice way of ambling into Tapestry itself and Glass provides a very neat analysis. He also—as one must—addresses her background as one of the great Brill Building songwriters of the early ‘60s. There’s a reason Glass is so solemn—King is genuinely a giant of the music industry, a rock ‘n’ roll and rock icon, and a singer-songwriter iconoclast out of Laurel Canyon. After more than 50 years she is still daunting to consider. I wish more of Glass’s passion came through and less of his inhibitions, but it’s still a useful primer on King and her greatest album. His best geeky rock critic point is about the “Album Era” of rock and the place of Tapestry in it. He dates this Album Era as from 1965 to 1975. I could quibble, but fair enough!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Velvet Underground (2021)

This documentary on the legendary ‘60s rock band—source of Brian Eno’s jokey observation in 1982 that everyone who bought their poorly selling first album started a band—is refreshingly restrained and judicious, basically giving everyone from Andy Warhol to Doug Yule their fair share of the spotlight. It starts with John Cale and Lou Reed, as it must. Reed gets all the credit he deserves, though perhaps not as much as he asserted. Director Todd Haynes traces the Velvet Underground’s most profound roots to the New York world of art and avant-garde music, placing emigrant Welshman Cale in the welter that followed John Cage and La Monte Young. Reed, for his part, was an undergraduate at Syracuse studying under poet Delmore Schwartz. A brief snippet of a Schwartz reading is all we need to hear that influence. Reed and his doo-wop love then went on to house songwriting for Pickwick Records, exploiting the confusion of kids shopping for albums at Woolworth’s (anyone interested in my copy of The Mustang Plays the Beatles Song Book?). Later he would become a student of 2 guitars bass drums. Perhaps most sorely needed in this story, Warhol is given his due as the force behind making that first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (also called the “banana album” for its famously peelable cover). Warhol sewed up the art bona fides and the aesthetic working ethos. He delivered the vision. He never stood near a soundboard, let alone twiddled a knob, but his producer credit was entirely warranted. Reed and Cale say so too. There’s a good argument, expressed here as well as I’ve seen it anywhere, that Warhol is almost solely responsible for producing the Velvet Underground.

There’s a lot of backstory to The Velvet Underground and it takes some time to get to the music proper, but when it does the picture is as generous as anyone could hope. I’ve always thought “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” are more like overrated novelties, but they have their time and place and they may be best appreciated here. “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” certainly appear to be Haynes’s favorites. But most of mine are in here too, such as “Sweet Jane” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” Further principals, from Moe Tucker to Sterling Morrison to Nico, are brought in to the documentary essentially as they were brought in to the band. The banana album gets the most attention, but the entire catalog is featured, including the “lost album” set (now the VU album). The only exception is the very last album, when Reed was gone and Yule was trying to bear the standard ... true confession, I’ve still never heard it. The band’s ever-shifting chemistry was amazing, and it was also amazingly unsuited to its commercial times, which is cringingly obvious on their ill-fated tour of the West Coast with the multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable extravaganza. West Coast pop aesthetics are unfairly derided here—too much hapless hippie hatred for me, but point taken. The Velvet Underground in many ways left them all eating their dust in the long haul. “Sunday Morning” is as good as anything by the Left Banke or the Mamas & the Papas, for example. This documentary is a good way in for novices (born every day, you know) and it’s a very apt summation for fans, particularly those who resent Reed’s hogging of the show for many decades. He was only part of something very big—an important part, but only part. In a very welcome way, this has made me rethink Warhol’s contribution, which I underestimated. It’s massive. All of it, the entire arc, is massive.

“Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke” (2021)

I heard a lot about this long story by Eric LaRocca when it came out, on twitter, on booktube, all over the place. I’m glad I got to it because it’s pretty good—deeply creepy, and maybe trying a little too hard on that score. The approach is epistolary, that old-fashioned style (see Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, and many many more). But LaRocca makes it work by updating the idea and using internet exchanges as his primary documents, largely email and chat transcripts. I thought it was cheeky to make the two principals both female-presenting, pursuing a lesbian affair, but the two never meet in real life (“irl”) as far as we know. It remains perfectly possible that one or both are men, all things considered, and perhaps even more likely given that the time setting is the year 2000. LaRocca has a pitch-perfect sense for how these exchanges went in that timeframe, the wild years I knew between Netscape (1994) and smartphones (2007). “Things Have Gotten Worse” has all the hallmarks of the loneliness and desperation encountered everywhere online then (and likely still, wherever it’s happening, I’m long out of it now), and, just as it does online (or did?), it slips seamlessly into internet BDSM dynamics with all the rules of tops and bottoms. And the story is particularly good there, leaning into the stilted master / slave language and even throwing in a brief but convincing cybersex passage. Now, yes, in the ever-ratcheting grossout sweepstakes of horror since approximately Stephen King, or at least Clive Barker, or maybe E.F. Benson’s obsession with worms, I must report it goes too far. I won’t spoil the things that happen here (or “happen,” as it’s all online reports). They are creative, I’ll say that, though I don’t know enough to say with certainty how original they are. I also thought it ended abruptly. It could be longer. There’s more to know. Maybe I just didn’t want it to end. It was mesmerizing to read, like finding a diary with super-secret confessions. What makes it work above all is that LaRocca has captured perfectly the wreck and wrack of alienation that was the lingua franca of cybersex scenes in 2000. These two are both singularly needy, hopping from one online relationship to the next and/or managing multiples. The alienation was true in 2000 and I bet a version of it still is now. “Things Have Gotten Worse” has been through two publishers, even seemed to disappear for a time. Now it’s available packaged with a couple more LaRocca stories. I’d say this strange and juicy tale is worth hunting down, though note well that it is not for the squeamish. P.S. I totally adore the title. It’s what drew me to it in the first place, along with the amazing cover artwork by Kim Jakobsson in the original Weirdpunk Books publication (above).

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Titane (2021)

[Earlier review here.]

France / Belgium, 108 minutes

Director: Julia Ducournau

Writers: Julia Ducournau, Jacques Akchoti, Simonetta Greggio, Jean-Christophe Bouzy

Photography: Ruben Impens

Music: Jim Williams, Sixteen Horsepower, Kills, Severin Favriau, Caterina Caselli, Zombies, Future Islands, Lisa Abbot, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Jean-Christophe Bouzy

Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh, Mara Cisse, Marin Judas, Diong-Keba Tacu

Titane is the kind of movie that raises preposterous to art form, asking us to believe things unbelievable, simply asserting that they exist, with a simmering undercurrent of trauma unresolved. Agathe Rousselle as Alexia delivers a profoundly harrowing performance, throwing herself fully into the body horror. As a girl Alexia is in a serious auto accident that requires a titanium plate to be installed on her skull. It tells us nothing, it makes no rational sense at all, but presumably that is the explanation for everything that follows, along with compelling clues that her father has sexually abused her. As a young woman she is working as a lascivious model at auto industry shows, making love to the vehicles under the spotlight if not using them to masturbate. She loves cars. Soon there is a scene—after hours, after the show and after most of the people have gone—where she seems to be having sex with a car, which has summoned her to the garage with imperious honking.

Fetishizing cars this way hits differently for me in the 21st century, knowing better what cars are doing in terms of carbon pollution—even in 1996, David Cronenberg’s Crash might still seem like an innocent boy hobby, like memorizing stats from the back of baseball cards. Identifying and stack-ranking car models as they pass on the road always felt ridiculous, at least to someone like me who can barely make out even the most familiar ones—Jaguars and Mustangs is about the best I can do, and even then I don’t always get them. But now it seems worse than a frivolous pastime, more depraved, decadent in the worst sense. The next thing we know Alexia appears to be pregnant. And she seems to be leaking motor oil.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

SPOILERS, STOP READING AND WATCH THIS MOVIE IMMEDIATELY!!! I wandered into Horror in the High Desert on a bleary night’s trek about the internet, looking for something to look at. Nowadays I tend to default to true-crime content (“content,” we call it). With true-crime, even if the production values are down, which they are more often than not, many times the cases themselves make up for it in terms of interest values. I thought Horror in the High Desert was pretty good, but I have to admit it fooled me and that might have been exactly what made it work. When I checked in over at IMDb, I found a clear line of demarcation: those who knew ahead of time what they were getting into didn’t like it much (overall 5.4 with 3,400 ranking). Those fooled by it, like me, did tend to like it, writing reviews and rating it with an average closer to 8.0. Among other things it makes this a tricky review to write. In general, I’m more impatient than sympathetic with people who get mad about spoilers (especially things that are decades or centuries old), but at the same time I have to admit that some of my best movie/reading experiences are “unspoiled,” that is, entering them without a clue. LAST CHANCE STOP READING NOW! The fact is that this picture is not true-crime at all, but rather another found-footage horror. I had my qualms about the story as it unspooled, involving a hiker who disappeared. In retrospect it’s easy to see—now that I know—how a lot of it even verges on true-crime parody. Notably the interviews are off, a little too hysterical. But there’s a lot of cringy stuff all over true-crime anyway, and this story moves swiftly with alluring clues and mysteries. The last 20 minutes were as scary as anything I can remember seeing in a while. It’s also when I realized the picture is probably fiction, although I certainly enjoyed the round of terrors it provided in the moment and immediately after. But the bloom comes off the rose here pretty fast in terms of final judgment. It also puts me in a bit of a muddle. I truly enjoyed it, but immediately began to think less of it once I knew more. Would I have had the same reactions if I had understood what it was going in? Frankly, I’m not sure I would have even looked at it, nor have I even been tempted to go back and look at it again for a better sense of how it was done. How it was done is that I’ve been watching a lot of true-crime for some time and adjusted my expectations for that. The case isn’t even as interesting as a lot of disappearances. But it was good enough, it hooked me enough, and then it fooled me enough that it produced the kind of scares I like to get from horror movies. Surprise has a lot to do with it.

“Lost and Found on Haunted Plum Island” (2021)

I thought this story by John Waterfall was pretty impressive, perhaps partly because it’s from 96th of October and typical of their fare—literary, artistic, hip, sometimes experimental to a fault. “Plum Island” is in much the same vein, classified on the website as “magic realism” and “spirituality,” selling us a heady take on the afterlife. It reminded me of Lost and also of the patient explorations required in role-playing games. A man dies in a plane crash (I think) and lands on an island as “Crasher,” more or less a human being but with red mist swirling a light source instead of a head. He is befriended by a chatty stuffed teddy bear named Ruggles, who accompanies him and is able to explain some things—this also reminded me of video game setups. But try thinking Toy Story too because, in fact, there are lots of stuffed animal toys on Plum Island, which have all been lost and/or abandoned by their child owners. This detail veers toward precious but all is saved for me by Crasher’s regard for Ruggles, who suffers a setback. The idea, stop me if you’ve heard this, is that children’s stuffed toys have unsuspected souls that suffer by being thrown away. There’s a certain safety in staying on the shore of the island. Crasher paces out the circumference of it but eventually ignores Ruggles’s warnings and heads inland. Going inland is freaky and all the freaky stuff is artful and thoughtful and above all weird and never comforting. This is no Christian paradigm except it’s a little like purgatory. Waterfall is fearless about pursuing the details of this story, but what I think makes it work, circling back, is Ruggles and his fate and how it affects Crasher. In spite of all its “cute” signifiers, this story is never cozy but more often unnerving. It comes partly of the fact that Crasher’s head is red mist, which Waterfall leans into with an effective touch. But it’s the Ruggles character that grounds the story and makes it feel vital in a way so many contemporary horror stories I’ve seen don’t. There are flaws—the language is high-blown and can be turgid—but in its totality it basically works. It’s weird and unsettling and also kind of beautiful and of course horrific in places without being gross or strained. A nice surprise.

Read story online.

The Coldest Case Ever Solved (2021)

My true-crime interests inevitably intersected with my youtube travels and led me to a type of video that is obviously low-budget and fairly called amateur. The ones I tend to prefer—channels such as Hailey Elizabeth, Stephanie Harlowe, or That Chapter—are basically run by natural storytellers. They do their research and present their findings in narrative fashion (Elizabeth while she is putting on makeup), fortified by available footage and audio that can apparently be found on the internet, some of very poor quality. Most of these videos run 30 to 60 minutes though some can go on for hours if the case is weird and/or complicated enough. Matt Orchard, an Australian (or possibly New Zealander), is one of the best. His channel, Matt Orchard – Crime and Society, has ideas about larger issues like coerced confessions, problems with lie detectors, and other troubled aspects of justice systems (mainly US). These issues make solving crimes tricky business and often exercises in whether we can ever know the truth about some things (and, by implication, anything). Orchard also takes on celebrity cases such as Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard, the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, or Anthony Wiener—probably looking for internet traffic, but his treatment of the Ramsey case is one of the best I’ve seen. As often as not, as in his latest, How Chandler Halderson Didn't Come Close to Getting Away With Murder, he’s riffing on bizarre cases simply for their own sake, and sometimes even indulging a little copaganda, an ongoing pitfall of the genre. Like many youtubers, Orchard has an accompanying Patreon account where even more information and early access can be had for something like $2 a month. The Coldest Case Ever Solved balances a lot of his favored crime elements in one of his best videos, a one-hour treatment. The details are there to be discovered. They aren't what you expect. The case involves a 7-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 1957 and the trial of a man accused of the crime 55 long years later, in 2012. A lot of what makes the video work is the case itself. But Orchard’s acerbic recounting has a lot to do with it too, taking us through all the twists and turns. His research feels clinically precise, always—one of my favorite things about Orchard’s videos is the feeling they are authoritative. In that way he separates himself from a lot of the hysterical internet sleuths populating forums and youtube. I like to think Orchard is better than most of them. At the very least, the entertainment value is high. If you like this, try five more.

Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

Director Questlove (of the Roots, Jimmy Fallon house band, and much more) has produced a documentary that is a kind of miracle, as was the festival it is about, a series of Harlem outdoor concerts in the summer of 1969 called the Harlem Cultural Festival. It was filmed in glorious color and promptly put away for 50 years. “Same year as Woodstock” seems to be a common refrain for why that is, but it’s more likely another example of old-fashioned American racism. The ‘60s were receding into the ‘70s, with Richard Nixon and his henchmen running the show, launching the War on Drugs, and generally working in the interests of white supremacy. Whatever the reasons, there has been little interest in the footage all this time. That’s another miracle of this—that someone shot it at all, let alone so thoughtfully, a wonderful document of its moment. The list of artists appearing in it is so impressive I jotted them down as it went: Stevie Wonder, the Chambers Brothers, B.B. King, Herbie Mann, the 5th Dimension, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Staple Singers, Professor Herman Stevens & the Voices of Faith, Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson with Ben Branch, David Ruffin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Sly & the Family Stone, Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Dinizulu & His African Dancers and Drummers, Sonny Sharrock, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Hugh Masekela, and Nina Simone. The amount of gospel surprised me, as did the appearance by Sonny Sharrock. Some of these artists did not play their signature songs, though a fair number did. Greg Tate is a welcome presence providing context and anecdotes. A lot of the people who attended have been rounded up to recount their memories of the shows and the times. There’s an interesting point where the moon landing has happened, and all the mixed feelings about it. Security was provided by the Black Panthers with no problems—I mean, it did make me think of the Hell’s Angels doing the same for Altamont, and the gritty black & white documentary that came of that, Gimme Shelter. This is already a better counterpart to that movie than Woodstock. The mood at these shows is peaceful, celebratory, joyful. The music is amazing—my only complaint is predictable. Why isn’t this five hours long or more? Must-see.

Pig (2021)

Probably you've heard by now that Nicolas Cage is relatively under control in this one, and that's true enough in some ways. He doesn't make faces (or they're well hidden by facial hair) and I don't think he shouts even once. But he's lunatic intense like he usually is. He plays a man living off the grid in the forests near Portland, Oregon, making what money he needs by using a truffle pig and selling to a broker for high-end restaurants. Then his pig is stolen and he is on a serious mission to recover her, because he loves her. In fairness, it's a pretty adorable animal and not in the picture nearly enough. But this is also where Pig starts to feel like typical histrionic Cage stuff. It turns out he is actually a famous gifted chef and his name alone can gain him entry into any room in Portland that has anything to do with the restaurant business. Also, he knows about a secret place underground in downtown Portland where men fight with bare knuckles and bet on the fights. He has all kinds of exaggerated powers of skill and sensory sensitivity, plus he can really take a beating. He claims to remember every meal he ever made and every person he ever served. He says all this with his face caked with blood as apparently there is no time to wash up with his pig missing. And/or he's just eccentric that way. He seems to be able to go everywhere looking like that, including sitting in fine restaurants, with a minimum of fuss. That felt like a reach. Then there's a story about a kind of sidekick he has, the kid he sells truffles to, who has some kind of drama going on with his father that's never quite explained but we know enough of these stories to fill in our own details if we're interested enough. I wasn't and it seemed hackneyed to me. But I got a kick out of the Portland setting and the sendup of high-end restaurant culture, and I felt for Cage's character and the loss of his animal, his familiar in the wilderness, his pet. Of course the script needs to make it clear he is not fucking the animal, because, well, you know—Cage, modern times, the usual debasements, etc. Cage is good but I wish he were good enough that it didn't have to be spelled out so explicitly, that we could just read it from his character. I had hopes Pig would be better than it is but even so I enjoyed it, with allowances for Cage's excesses. They're never that much under control.

C'mon C'mon (2021)

C'mon C'mon is the latest from director and writer Mike Mills, whose 20th Century Women was a particular favorite of mine (and I thought Beginners was pretty good too). I'm not sure of everything about C'mon C'mon: the choice to go black and white has resulted in some luminously beautiful images but doesn't really fit the domestic mood for me. It reminded me that way of Alexander Payne's Nebraska. I suspect both pictures would have been at least as good in regular old color. And I have mixed feelings about the way C'mon C'mon is so determinedly focused on liberal blue-state types of problems. On the one hand it's a relief not have to hear anything at all, for once, about so-called conservative values and grave concerns about guns, abortion, and religious freedom, which seem to be absorbed into most mainstream movies nowadays. On the other hand, this story about a fractured family trying to keep it together feels like it's missing some obvious things about American life today. I'm probably too bought in to rightwing frames at this point. The story involves a brother, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), the sister's kid, Jesse (Woody Norman), and a crisis that forces Johnny to take over childcare for an uncertain amount of time. Johnny is single and middle-aged, with an interesting and unusual job as a freelance radio journalist who conducts open-ended interviews with kids of all ages about their views on life and the future. These interviews are woven into the fabric of C'mon C'mon for one of its most moving elements, along with quotations from literary sources that surprise and work amazingly well. Johnny travels a lot and ends up taking Jesse with him on trips to New York City and New Orleans while Viv tries to sort out a serious mental breakdown by her husband and Jesse's father in California. Woody Norman as Jesse is a revelation—a natural player who puts across a weird kid convincingly. I want to say very weird kid, but I think he's a lot like I remember myself and others, a kid just absorbing everything he can and uninhibited about his imaginary life. He's being raised in a liberal household so there's a lot of formal honesty about feelings and so forth, tolerance for people trying to work out their problems. There are also real crises and trauma going on—a lot of pain is creased into all of this. To me C'mon C'mon felt refreshingly healthy and heartening—for the most part I am crazy in love for this picture—but I can certainly see where Jesse is going to get on people's nerves. Hoffmann is also very good, playing a woman fully engaged with life and pain and joy. Phoenix, of course, is one of the best when it comes to dissociative rage, but a movie like this (or Her) reminds us he can play quite well in a whole other key. I feel cautious about praising this to the highest skies. I don't want to set anyone's expectations too high. But I really loved it and wholeheartedly recommend it.

The Souvenir: Part II (2021)

I see reviews of director and screenwriter Joanna Hogg's epic two-part The Souvenir (the first came out in 2019) reach for heady comparisons with filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Eric Rohmer, both of which make sense. For the nearly four hours of The Souvenir it's arguable that nothing or very little happens, but step back and you see better how much it is charged with grief and grief's strange ways. It's autobiographical, with Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) standing in for Hogg as a young woman in the '80s attending film school. Julie's mother Rosalind is played by Tilda Swinton, who is Byrne's mother in real life, and Swinton also knew Hogg at the time and was featured in the 28-minute movie, Caprice, that Hogg made for her graduating project at film school. The Souvenir is thus very much a family affair, and feels it—warm, intimate, prickly, and always interesting. The Souvenir, both parts, went by quickly for me as I found it easy to sink into the rhythms of Julie's life, her involvement with a man addicted to heroin, her understanding or lack of understanding of his addiction—she seems mostly unaware of it—and her attempt to find a catharsis or something like it in her work. The elements of Ozu and Rohmer are readily apparent, also Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, and other giants a film student would encounter and attempt to absorb, as the picture sweeps from scene to scene with confidence and quiet and evocative moments. The first part essentially covers the romance and this second part the making of her student film (here called The Souvenir, of course). Among other things, The Souvenir: Part II is one of the better movies about making a movie, hitting on financing difficulties and all the on-set troubles of a million decisions to make at once and much of the cast and crew second-guessing her, bewildered by the way the story seems to be going. I loved everything about both of these movies until we arrive, late in this picture, at a screening of the movie she made, which seemed painfully pretentious to me and packed with art picture cliches. Did Hogg intend to make it look that way? Is that how it looked to her coming back to Caprice over 30 years later? Or did it affect me that way because I was unfamiliar with Caprice? It was the most jarring part of the whole experience—looking up Caprice on the internet later, it did seem dotty with film influence but much better than my experience of The Souvenir version. Worth a look—both parts, and Caprice too.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

I had high hopes for this picture by director and cowriter Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), even after I started noticing the mixed reviews. These reviews were not only mixed, but they also tended toward extremes of love or hate. Well, I didn't hate Last Night in Soho myself, but I have to count it as underwhelming and ultimately a disappointment. The story is about a girl from the English sticks, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), who dreams of moving to London and becoming a fashion designer. She is infatuated with 1960s "Swinging London," but perhaps not surprisingly, Repulsion style, she finds the big city a cold and frightening place when she gets there. She ends up in a peculiar rooming-house and at night has strange and vivid dreams. She finds herself back in 1960s London, inhabiting the body of Sandie (Anna Taylor-Joy), who is trying to make it as a singer but has acquired a sleazy manager who is pressing her into prostitution. It's all glamorous and tawdry and harrowing and then Eloise wakes up. Her alarm clock sounds just like mine and was very annoying. I was happy to see her smash it finally. During the day Eloise shows talent in her fashion design studies but is up against catty and unfriendly fellow students. Eventually, as the detailed explanations start to emerge (and everything is explained in detail), it turns into a kind of formal ghost story that is not particularly interesting. But it does tie everything together, which might be what people like about it so much. I think more likely it's the fantasy depiction of Swinging London. It surprised me I couldn't work up a plausible nostalgia, even with authentic London-based hits of the era crowding the soundtrack (the Who, Cilla Black, Walker Brothers, etc.). The cast is impressive: I've seen good and bad from the widely exposed McKenzie (Leave No Trace and Lost Girls, respectively). Taylor-Joy doesn't have a lot to do except look '60s-gorgeous, which is a shame in a way because she has showed how much she has in both The Queen's Gambit and The VVitch, excellent in such different ways. Diana Rigg as the colorful landlady of Eloise's rooming-house is excellent and a wonderful surprise. I didn't even realize it was her until the credits ran. But these various parts, however good, did not add up to much of a whole for me. Approach with caution, bearing in mind you may love it wildly.

See DoestheDogDie report.

Titane (2021)

I really loved the wild ride of Titane, last year's big winner at Cannes, but wow, take note, the road is quite bumpy in this picture of strange extremes and ultraviolence. The various flailing labels applied to it tell part of the story: suspense, drama, horror, sci-fi. Um, OK. Agathe Rousselle is Alexia, a problem child involved in a bad auto accident as a young girl. Part of her skull had to be replaced with titanium. This is about as much explanation as we get for what follows—note it is highlighted in the title too. After the opening credits, we see Alexia has grown up to be a porny exotic dancer at auto shows. The story seems to be operating as a variation on Crash, the J.G. Ballard novel and David Cronenberg movie in which cars and auto accidents are sexualized. However, 50 years on from the novel (and 25 from the movie), fetishizing cars feels more debased as a social value, contaminated, sick. Yet there she is, getting off on the glitzy convention scene, along with all the car salesman types in their suits. The sickness of the auto industry is one sign of how times have changed. Director and cowriter Julia Ducournau seems to know very well what she is doing. Alexia becomes pregnant by one car and soon starts oozing motor oil. Did I mention Titane is body-horror? Well, it is. Alexia is a rip-roaring ultraviolent version of Anne Carlisle's Margaret from Liquid Sky, hip, disaffected, and toxically ironic. She kills people, always for rational reasons, but it's usually over the top and she always seems to have more killing to do. These John Wick bashes are often quite unpleasant though riveting and even entertaining. It's a movie where you find yourself saying "what now?" a lot. The brutality keeps coming until a significant turn at the half, at which point Titane elevates to the insanely inspired implications of one simple and ludicrous plot twist. It ratchets the tension but more importantly it takes the picture to realms where all you can do is gape. My favorite kind of movie. Titane suddenly bursts with tender, provocative ideas about family and sexual identity, fatherhood and motherhood, masculinity and femininity, love and devotion. It's all there to be discovered, so go have a good time, but remember—content warnings, content warnings. Titane has a lot of hooks to trigger. Check DoestheDogDie and approach with all due caution.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021)

This long documentary (available via Shudder) bears the subtitle A History of Folk Horror but it's more focused on movies and TV than horror literature. It is densely packed with video clips and titles so I'm not about to complain. For one thing, Wikipedia defines "folk horror" as "a subgenre of horror film for cinema or television." For another thing, I came away with another big list of stuff to look at. So fair enough. Director and writer Kier-La Janisse boldly attacks in the first of six sections, naming "the unholy trinity" of folk horror in three movies from the '60s and '70s: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). If you know any of them, notably The Wicker Man, you already have a good idea what folk horror is all about: superstitions of rural people and their connections to the mysteries of the earth. Witches are quite a big deal, and folk horror is often embedded in specific places—isolated rural settings, caves and shallow graves, abandoned homes going to ruin, and of course the deep dark woods. The first half of this documentary stays close to the British Isles, arguably the source for all folk horror—certainly this doc is willing to entertain that argument. But eventually it steps across the Atlantic to examine US traditions and contributions and then into the world at large, where folk horror or something like it appears to be everywhere: Greece, Japan, Laos, Mexico, Serbia, and many other points of interest. It also takes a look at a folk horror revival that has been going on in the past 10 years or so, with pictures like Midsommar, The Ritual, and The VVitch. And while it is mostly focused on movies and TV, Woodlands Dark takes time to note such writers as Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, and M.R. James, which I appreciated. For me, what's most immediately useful and interesting here are the TV movies from the '70s on, which often seem to slip through the cracks and elude me. I'm also excited to look into a number of the foreign titles, as Woodlands Dark lays bare some of my most significant gaps, such as Witchfinder General, which I hope to rectify pronto (I've meant to look at it for a while). This documentary runs over three hours, but it's packed with information and definitely worth a look.

The History of the Atlanta Falcons (2021)

The Dorktown follow-up to their massive Seattle Mariners documentary is an even longer Atlanta Falcons documentary—twice as long, in fact, closing in on seven hours. I found it just as easy and fast to watch, but it did put to the test some of my thoughts about the Mariners doc. First, yes, you probably can give this treatment to any sports franchise that's been around long enough, especially the hapless ones (and if we can vote, I'd like to see it done for the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Mets). As it happens, I have zero attachment to and little knowledge of the Falcons, thus a lot of the emotional investment I could bring with the Mariners was not here. So The History of the Atlanta Falcons is a more abstracted exercise for me. I had some interest in the degree of haplessness—frustration does tend to lead to the best sports stories. But the main point remains Dorktown's absolutely masterful deep research and, equally important, creative data presentation. They go year by year, studying management and coaching developments as well as team and player performances, and it's ultimately the statistical breakdowns that make it so riveting, along with all the familiar cliches of sports stories, which are cliches because they happen so much. They never lose sight of the stories even in the welter of statistics. Strange stuff is going on all the time in sports. Dorktown has another piece (much shorter) about how many times in baseball the ball count has been in error. They found dozens of examples—on video!—of batters who got a base on three balls or were denied it on four or struck out on two strikes. Still, as much as I look forward to Vikings and Mets histories, or whatever they're going to do next (they tease the Vikings possibility in their report of the 1999 Falcons playoff game), another important caveat here is that they should be put together by people who care a lot and have their own baggage history with the franchise. Or, I mean, maybe. I assumed Dorktown principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein have some long-term tie to the Pacific Northwest when I was looking at the Mariners doc. I still do, but I'm not as sure, because now I know for a fact that Bois lived a significant part of his life in Atlanta. I also noticed Bois has a version of my own problem with the Mariners. He claims to be a Kansas City Chiefs fan but he loves and hates the Falcons in obvious cringing, irrational ways. In the Mariners doc, they chided people like me who can't accept that the Mariners have still never been in a World Series (in practical terms, that means I have considered it a shitty organization for decades now). But you can feel exactly that angst coming from Bois on the issue of the Falcons winning the Super Bowl. As you likely recall, that 2017 Super Bowl was the third act in the four ominous 2016-2017 Apocalyptic-Like Bizarre Events (with the World Series, US presidential election, and Oscars ceremony). Part 7 is focused primarily on that Super Bowl, a sickening spectacle even presented mostly as graphs and charts, and it's the longest part of all, over an hour and a half. I don't feel that Super Bowl that much myself, but I can really feel Bois feeling it. I love Dorktown's stuff and can't wait for the next big one.

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021)

I was surprised to see that this Netflix miniseries has been ranked in aggregate on IMDb by some 16,000 viewers at 5.9 stars out of 10. I did what I could, giving it 8 stars, but one person can only do so much here. The complaint, as far as I can tell, seems to be the same as mine about Wormwood a few weeks ago, which is that it is too long and padded out. But that was not my experience. Parachuting in to check out the first few minutes of the first episode—a new habit of mine, and I'm quick to abandon ship—I was completely pulled into this strange story of a young woman's disappearance from the legendary Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Looking further into it before committing myself to all four hours I noted that the documentary was coproduced and directed by Joe Berlinger, coproducer and codirector of the memorable Paradise Lost series, recounting the harrowing story of the murder of several children in May 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas. So that did it and I went all the way with this fascinating documentary, which is so skillfully put together. It tells the story of Elisa Lam who disappeared from the hotel in 2013 in mysterious circumstances. She was a young Chinese-Canadian woman traveling. She kept a prodigious account of her own life on Tumblr. The elements in the case were baffling and tantalizing: video of Lam behaving strangely in a late-night hotel elevator the night she disappeared basically drove the whole phenomenon of it. Unexplained editing of the video confused it further, along with an army of eerie coincidences and the very strange circumstances of her death and how her body was discovered. Everything is ultimately explained, and it's all there to be discovered. Berlinger evidently still has some of his old sympathies, as the case also involves accusations against an outsider figure, a Mexican death-metal musician named Morbid who happened to be staying in the hotel at the time Lam disappeared. In this age of social media mob action, he found himself the object of hundreds of self-styled web sleuths who were sure he was good for the crime. Not surprisingly, perhaps, The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel and the case are deeply involved with the effects of swarming social media. Sometimes I think social media is all there is to think about after climate change. Add to the mix that the Cecil Hotel, located at the edge of the Los Angeles Skid Row, has a longstanding reputation for being haunted, tainted, cursed, and otherwise an ineffable vortex of evil. What a cluster! The only spoiler I'll mention is that, even though I am generally sympathetic with their impulse, 99% of the web sleuths were wrong about everything in this case. Berlinger and crew put this miniseries together artfully, making it work well as a suspense production, and a lot of the interviews are just great—not only the people corralled for it but all the things they have to say. This is a good one. I think I've talked myself into revising my ranking to a 9.

Army of the Dead (2021)

Things on which I am agnostic: Las Vegas, Elvis Presley, Zack Snyder, zombies. They are all reasonably charged with excess and putting them all together certainly leads to the reasonable expectation of an excess of excess. I don't appreciate any of them simply for existing—Elvis comes closest to that, and he doesn't have that much to do with Army of the Dead. He's more like window dressing to signify Vegas, him and that song. For that matter, Vegas is not really Vegas. It is a pile of rubble in this movie with a wall built around it to keep the zombies in. On the 4th of July in this movie the president is going to drop a nuclear bomb on it, wiping out pesky zombies once and for all. Great stores of cash still exist inside vaults within the old "Lost Wages" party town in the desert and a team of experts is dispatched in to retrieve as much of it as they can before the nuke hits. Army of the Dead is thus basically a heist or caper movie, is what I'm trying to say here, even within its context of intentional ludicrous excess. I happen to disapprove of tarting up the zombie mythos with things like fast zombies, but Army of the Dead has it all: fast zombies, slow zombies, even a zombie hierarchy, which looks a bit insectile with its obedience to and worship of a brainy queen with her various lieges. You still have to get them in the head. That seems to be the constant in zombie movies. I admit I appreciated the choreography of some of these fast zombie fights—the fast zombies seem to have their own way of fighting, always protecting the head. Army of the Dead is a long picture at two and a half hours but it gets down to business with few delays, spins out a number of interesting narrative threads, and generally does not overstay its welcome, allowing for repulsion factors. As for Snyder I've only seen 300 and Watchmen—I know, not even the Dawn of the Dead remake. Both 300 and Watchmen, I thought, were basically on the mediocre side of average all things considered. By reputation Snyder has done worse. I got a kick out of a lot of the parts of Army of the Dead, which is really all you can ask of today's tentpole popcorn movies, right? P.S. I also watched it at home.

Tiger (2021)

This HBO documentary is a fair summation of all we know about Tiger Woods to this point, a remarkable roller-coaster ride worth reviewing every step of the way—or at least it was a fair summation until his auto accident last month, on which news is trickling in slowly. Still, this documentary filled in a lot of gaps for me, notably about his father Earl and the demise of Woods's marriage (not to mention the pharmaceuticals episode in 2017). As fully packed as it is Tiger is arguably premature even on golf, as Woods is still only 45. Jack Nicklaus won his last major at 46 and Tom Watson seriously contended for one at 59. At the same time, Tiger makes clear enough the possibility that Woods has used up a lot of his body once and for all. I did not know quite what a prodigy he was—he had an amazing swing at age 2, which somehow ended up on a TV show with Bob Hope. The evidence is here. His father Earl was a harsh master but the dream was not just athletic domination in an unlikely realm, but then using that as a springboard to becoming a "chosen one" historical figure the size of Mahatma Gandhi. Heavy burden, especially when you have the athletic talent for the first step. I remember Woods always seemed to be in the peripheral vision of ESPN through the early '90s but he really busted out for me, as with much of the world, with the 1997 Masters win, which was utterly convincing of the road ahead and the way he lived it out as a professional golfer. The documentary spends all suitable time on his greatest wins, that '97 Masters and the 2000 and 2008 U.S. Opens, plus, of course, the little wonderful miracle of the 2019 Masters, on which the documentary ends with an upbeat note. Tiger is not exactly authorized. There are many friends of the family interviewed, with a good deal of evident insight, but there are no family members, not his mother or ex-wife Elin, let alone Woods himself. Understandable. In many ways the distance is useful. This story may be told best by others. For me, it was the brutal downfall that had the most gaps, as after a while I couldn't bear to look anymore in real-time. So finally I have a better idea, for example, of what happened that Thanksgiving night in 2009 with the bizarre auto accident. And some better idea of the potential sex addiction driving him—which sounds real and disturbingly intense. A word that comes up a lot in regard to Woods in this documentary is "compartmentalization"—his ability for it not only rivals his ability for golf, it's practically the reason for his achievement. And it is everywhere in his life and sometimes doesn't seem far from "disassociation." He's a sad figure in many ways, for all the joy and pleasure he has wrought. He's one that celebrity may have swallowed whole. But the story is not done yet either. Meanwhile, this will get you pretty much up to speed.