Sometimes on weeks when you feel like three different people are pulling your hair in six different directions, you’ve got to spend as much time as possible in a movie theatre for the sake of your own sanity. I’ve seen six movies in theatres in the past two weeks, plus the Rio’s live broadcast of the Oscars. It is the ultimate refuge. Netflix will never be able to compare, because Netflix does not force you to forego the rest of your life during the duration of the movie. That, more than the big screen or even the crowd of like-minded strangers, is the best thing about seeing movies in a theatre. You are at the mercy of the projectionist. Surrender or leave.
Here are this week’s 21 reviews, four of which are of things that took place in movie theatres.
Live events
Gentlemen Hecklers present: Twilight — The only way to watch Twilight is to watch it with three comics heckling it from the sidelines. I know two of the Gentlemen Hecklers from their role as ubiquitous Vancouver trivia hosts. They are funny people. But more than that, Twilight is really bad movie. The Hecklers’ best bit by far was also possibly their easiest: a drinking game where you drink whenever Edward Cullen does or says something that is a relationship red flag. It is perhaps apropos that Robert Pattinson has recently become such an interesting character actor, given that his breakout role was an abject failure to be anything resembling a leading man. Between him and Kristen Stewart, the human face is contorted into more inexplicable formations during the course of this movie than in Jack Nicholson’s entire career. This was a good time. Twilight is awful.
Movies
The Florida Project — I talk a big game about my propensity to cry during movies. I make myself out to be a right basket case: the champion of vulnerable masculinity. But the truth is that very few movies that are not directed by Wes Anderson have ever really opened the floodgates for me. But the final moments of The Florida Project put me in a right state. The tone of this movie is so nonchalant and whimsical in the face of truly bleak subject matter that its final dive into unalloyed tragedy is a knife to the heart. That’s as close to a spoiler as I’ll come. I love everything about The Florida Project. I love each and every glorious shot of a tacky Orlando novelty shop front. It is one of the five or six best new movies I’ve seen since I started writing this blog. A lot has been made of this movie’s nuanced portrayal of impoverished people, and with good reason. The film’s adult protagonist, Halley, faces impossible alternatives throughout. There’s no way to watch this movie without feeling the pressure she’s under — probably with a lot more sweat on your brow than she’s got. There’s a moment in a scene with Willem Dafoe and Caleb Landry Jones, the two recognizable actors in the film, that I suspect is meant to serve as a Rosetta Stone: Jones’ character Jack finds bedbugs in his father Bobby’s motel. Jack berates Bobby for blowing a bunch of money on purple paint to add an air of whimsy to the motel’s exterior when what he really needs is an exterminator. But think of this from Bobby’s perspective: if that coat of purple paint pulls in a few families of tourists per week, he’s that much closer to keeping the motel in business. It’s a counterintuitive decision that might make it seem like Bobby doesn’t have his priorities straight. But when you’re scraping by, priorities look different. It’s the same with Halley. Stealing a meal from a hotel buffet might not seem like a good idea from where you’re sitting. But when you’ve got no money and a daughter to feed, maybe it’s worth the risk. The Florida Project is perfect. It is toe-to-toe with Get Out in the 2017 sweepstakes that are now long over. Pick of the week.
Wild Strawberries — The Cinémathèque is doing a whole series to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman’s birth. As a programmer explained before this screening, they couldn’t bring themselves to start the series with The Seventh Seal. It’s just too overexposed. Wild Strawberries, then: the best-known Bergman film that hasn’t been subjected to ruthless parody. I hadn’t seen it before. I hadn’t seen anything by Bergmann except The Seventh Seal, which pleasantly shocked me with its balance between thinky darkness and complete siliness. But Wild Strawberries is an altogether more successful integration of heavy, existential themes into a compelling narrative. I think it’s probably the better of the two movies. It’s a story about an old doctor named Isak Borg, and the impact he’s made on the world and the people around him. The key connection that we as an audience have to that impact is Marianne, Isak’s daughter-in-law. Marianne has had to spend her life in love with Isak’s son Evald: a man who, like his father, is constantly on the verge of giving up on life altogether. I daresay that for all of the film’s brilliant ideas — and for all the brilliance of Victor Sjöström’s performance as Isak — Marianne is the movie’s masterstroke. It is Marianne that prevents Wild Strawberries from being a movie primarily about depressive, brilliant men and their problems. Because in the one or two heartbreaking scenes where we really come to know something about her relationship with Evald, the film’s focus shifts definitively towards the way that those men affect the world around them, rather than the way the world around them affects those men. It’s a beautiful meditation on family. For all its darkness and occasional cynicism, Wild Strawberries is deeply cathartic. I liked it a whole lot.
A Wrinkle in Time — It’s a mixed bag. On one hand, it takes a powder on Madeleine L’Engle’s most ambitious ideas: the explanation of how a tesseract works; the segment on a two-dimensional planet. On the other, it’s a family-friendly blockbuster with a distinctive aesthetic and some compositions worthy of Oscar winner Roger Deakins. (I’m going to call him that from now on, every time I mention him. I’m just so happy for him.) For every stroke of brilliance (i.e. the casting of Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and GIGANTIC SPACE OPRAH as the Mrs. Ws), there is a disappointment that feels like a betrayal of the source material (i.e. the casting of Levi Miller, The Most Boring Teen In The World, as Calvin). The movie’s primary theme is “love yourself,” which is a deeply valuable theme — especially considering that it is a film for children, starring a young black woman who comes to terms with herself over the course of the film. But what it gains over the book in heart, it loses in brains. L’Engle’s novel contains a borderline nonsensical but deeply compelling metaphysical matrix that is almost entirely glossed over here. That disappoints me. What it all comes down to is this: Ava DuVernay is a master of her craft, but she’s working from a flawed script on a project for a massive corporate juggernaut. It’s worth seeing, and I hope it makes a pile of money, because it’s great when taken on its own merits. But as an adaptation, it’s a bit wanting.
Moon — I don’t know why I wanted to watch this. Certainly it has nothing to do with Sam Rockwell’s recent Oscar win, which I am actually a bit miffed about. But it’s the kind of movie I wish we saw more of: a small, interesting science fiction movie, in the vein of Ex Machina, but six years before. Its actual story is less interesting than it might be: in a sense it reduces Blade Runner to a high concept story about human replication. But Rockwell’s performance as two different facets of the same person, and the excellent, understated screenplay lift it above its premise. I enjoyed this a lot. It’s on Canadian Netflix. Check it out.
Television
Lady Dynamite: “Pilot” — Wow, this is weird. I love Maria Bamford, but this is so completely bonkers that I didn’t laugh much. I’m told I should stick it out. I may. We’ll see.
Literature, etc.
Kris Straub: Broodhollow, Book 2 — Immeasurably better than the first book. Where the first arc of Broodhollow deals with the question of whether or not everything crazy going in is happening in the protagonist’s head, this book dives into the much less travelled idea of a whole town forgetting its traumas. It’s something that Stephen King dealt with in It, but Broodhollow has another take. The masterstroke here is the introduction of a second town society. Where the first was an all-male Eyes Wide Shut riff with absolutely no idea what’s going on in Broodhollow, the second is a ladies auxiliary that, in spite of its innocuous trappings, knows more about Broodhollow’s threats than anybody else. I really enjoyed this, and I’m appalled at the cliffhanger it finished in. I hope Kris Straub is hard at work on book three.
Jorge Luis Borges: “German Literature in the Age of Bach” — I wandered into The Paper Hound this week, a Vancouver bookshop that I particularly like. Just go in and browse, I said to myself. Maybe pick up something light, I said to myself. Six pounds of books later, I have begun reading the collected nonfiction of Jorge Luis Borges in this completely arbitrary location. I’m not sure what exactly precipitated Borges’ lecture on this topic, but I like to think that somebody asked him to speak about this topic, and he discovered for himself as a result of this that there was virtually no interesting literature to speak of in Germany while Bach was composing his masterpieces. Still, being Borges, he does his due diligence and reflects on the reasons for this, and also muses on the virtues of some of the literature from this period that has perhaps not aged especially well. Also, he passingly mentions an idea of Paul Valéry’s that it might be interesting to write a literary history without proper names. I share a birthday with Valéry. Maybe one of these days I should do something like that. A music history podcast, perhaps.
Music
Yes: Tales from Topographic Oceans — This was my favourite album from the ages of about 12 to 20. It has always pained me slightly to demote something that was an all-time favourite to a lower rung on the ladder. But these days, the top of my list is populated by albums I discovered a little later (e.g. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love), albums that grew on me over the course of many years (e.g. Brian Eno’s Another Green World) and one album that has lost none of its lustre since I first heard it as an impressionable teenager (Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick). Even among albums by Yes, my first favourite band, I’m not sure that Topographic would come out on top these days. For all its flaws, Fragile has the moments that most define what I continue to love about the band: the drama; the casual virtuosity; the personalities of five individuals all emerging from ensemble compositions. But listening through Topographic again for the first time in years did genuinely some strengths that are immutable. Its second side, “The Remembering” was always, and remains my favourite. With its delicate Mellotron and jangly acoustic moments, it is a cosmic folk song in memory of childhood. It isn’t even one of the most popular songs on this album, but I still think it’s one of the crowning glories of progressive rock. Likewise for “Ritual,” the one track from Topographic to become a regular live favourite. Having learned and grown since I last heard this, I now have a bit of trouble with the line “we love when we play.” Throughout this album, and to some extent his entire career, Jon Anderson comes off as a child prophet. If you can’t accept him on his own terms he’ll alienate you right out of the genre. But I also feel like anybody who can’t accept him must be harbouring a particularly toxic kind of cynicism, because the man just has so much love for the world. So much love. I’ve always had a soft spot for “The Ancient,” probably the most difficult of the album’s four tracks. The acoustic outro is a flat-out classic moment in the Yes corpus, but the Steve Howe freakout that leads up to it is no mere virtuoso display: it is a masterclass in how to generate tension with instruments. The one track that disappointed me upon returning to this album was the one that has perhaps become the fan favourite: “The Revealing Science of God.” It is structurally the closest thing on this album to the long tracks on the albums that bookend Topographic. Where “The Ancient” is a showcase for Howe, “Ritual” features lengthy solo spots for the rhythm section, and “The Remembering” (not quite the Rick Wakeman feature the liner notes make it out to be) channels an atmospheric side that the band does not generally foreground, “Revealing” is an attempt at an integrated full-band feature with internal symmetry and a dramatic arc unto itself. And in that respect, it doesn’t rise to the level of “Close to the Edge” or “The Gates of Delirium.” Still, this was like rediscovering an old friend. A final note: Apple Music does not have the Rhino remaster of the album that I grew up with, so I now understand why so many people complained about the sound quality. The unremastered digital files are abominable.
Tom Rogerson & Brian Eno: Finding Shore — Eno’s latest project is as a sideman to an improvisational pianist who is willing to allow Eno to twist his music about into an electrified finished product. That sounds like a role where Eno will thrive. And he does. This album begins with a collection of electronic plinks that do not identifiably come from a piano. But about a minute and a half into the album, the origins of the sound make themselves obvious as the piano crashes in. This entire album is an absolutely gorgeous collaboration, and one of Eno’s most worthwhile projects in some time. Much of the credit must clearly go to Rogerson, who is the actual composer of this music. Listen to this. Do.
Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno: Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks — I needed something more to listen to while I was writing up this week’s reviews, so I revisited another old favourite. This is one of Eno’s finest ambient albums, perhaps only behind Music for Airports and On Land. It’s certainly best known for “An Ending (Ascent),” which is lovely. But the best moments are the ones that most clearly feature Daniel Lanois’ appalachian-tinged pedal steel. Lanois’ “Silver Morning” may be my favourite on the album. Essential Eno.
Podcasts
Pop Culture Happy Hour catch-up — Their Oscars coverage is always the most fun in the business. Audie Cornish doing the Regrettable Television Pop Quiz is a sure bet. Their Wrinkle in Time take turned out to be about right, when you take the average of the whole panel. Will watch: Annihilation. Won’t watch: Queer Eye.
On the Media: “Face the Racist Nation” & “Everything You Love Will Burn” — These two episodes on the alt-right in collaboration with The Guardian are worth hearing, though I feel like I’ve heard these arguments advanced in a less consolidated fashion on a combination of previous episodes of OTM.
The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Memories of an Invented City” — This old story about Cuba’s most influential author in a generation is a lovely thing. It has plenty of his personality, interspersed with vital readings from his work and enough context to make sense of it all.
The Hilarious World of Depression: “Highlights From A Hilarious Night of Depression” — This is great. Come for the comedy, stay for the genuine insights into mental illness that come from doing a whole season of interviews with people who suffer from it.
Reply All: “Trust the Process” & “The World’s Most Expensive Free Watch” — Two perfectly fine episodes of a great show. One has Alex Blumberg explaining sports to the hosts, which is a pleasant switcheroo. And we get Gene Demby as a bonus, so that’s fun. The other is about how even internet scamming is a scam. So that’s really distressing. Nice stuff.
This is Love: Episodes 1-4 — I love Criminal, but I might love that team’s new show even more. The first episode of this has everything you need to know about it. The guest is nobody of particular note, but he’s got a love story that’s worth hearing. Subsequent guests have more unusual tales to tell, i.e. reuniting a grey whale with its mother and founding one of the most acclaimed restaurants in America to pay tribute to one’s parents. But all of these episodes are completely compelling. A new favourite. Pick of the week.
Criminal: “The Manual” & “Willie Bosket” — “The Manual” is appalling in a good way: a story of how the first amendment is sometimes considered more important than human life. “Willie Bosket” is fine: a story of a particularly rough juvenile case. Both of these stories have far-reaching legal implications. Listen for that alone.
It’s Been a Minute: “‘Black Panther’ with Glen Weldon and Evan Narcisse” — I’ve heard and read enough about Black Panther now. But hearing noted comics expert Glen Weldon and actual comics writer Evan Narcisse bounce ideas off of each other is great fun.
WTF with Marc Maron: “Jennifer Lawrence” — This is an awkward interview. Lawrence has become self-conscious about her guilelessness with the media, and Maron’s show is the worst place to find yourself if that is what you’re currently self-conscious about. But they seem to like each other in spite of it. I dunno, it’s okay.
Code Switch catch-up — Definitely check out the immigration status episode. Three members of the same family, with three different immigration statuses. Complications ensue.
The great and shameful archive 