InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 9

KICKING THE CANON
GANG OF FOUR
Jacques Rivette
It seems safe to say that we’re currently experiencing a remarkable resurgence of interest in Jacques Rivette; long the most
mysterious of all the Nouvelle Vague directors, as well as the least frequently distributed, cinephiles had to rely on old VHS tapes,
bootlegs, and the enthusiastic writings of a few dedicated critics to construct an idea of his tantalizingly just-out-of-reach oeuvre. It’s
almost fitting that Rivette’s work would exist as a kind of specter or phantom, haunting our collective imaginations. But gradually,
Rivette's work has become more and more available, each release requiring a reconfiguring of the whole. Indeed, no major filmmaker
revisits the idea of “phases” or “periods” more than Rivette. Each work exists in tandem with the others, exploring various threads and
tangents that all orbit a few key central obsessions. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has stated, “Every Rivette film has its
Eisenstein/Lang/Hitchcock side — an impulse to design and plot, dominate and control — and its Renoir/Hawks/Rossellini side: an
impulse to ‘let things go,’ open one’s self up to the play and power of other personalities, and watch what happens.”
1989’s Gang of Four finds Rivette recontextualizing many of the elements found in his work from the ‘70s — nebulous conspiracies that
function like a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a mostly female ensemble, blatantly theatrical settings, and an emphasis on improvisation. But
gone is the 16mm film and bold, borderline psychedelic colors of Celine and Julie, Duelle, and Noroit, replaced with 35mm and the
sharper, slicker cinematography of DP Caroline Champetier (a student of long-time Rivette collaborator William Lubtchansky). The film
oscillates between two primary settings: there is the Parisian acting class led by Constance Dumas (Bulle Ogier), a demanding star of
the stage who frustrates and captivates her students in equal measure, and then there is the suburban home occupied by four of her
students — Cecile (Nathalie Richard), Anna (Fejria Deliba), Joyce (Bernadette Giraud), and Claude (Laurence Côte).
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After an introductory scene set in one of Constance's classes, the
film cuts to Cecile moving out of the shared living space to move
in with a boyfriend while Lucia (Inês de Medeiros), another acting
student, from Portugal, moves into her now unoccupied room.
After the women settle in, Anna attends a party where she meets
Thomas (Benoît Régent), a gregarious but mysterious man who
offers to drive her home. Things are going well, until Anna
realizes that Thomas already knows the way to the house,
despite the two having never met before, and she demands that
he pull over and drop her off. Thomas gradually becomes
involved with each of the women, ingratiating himself into their
lives under false pretenses while searching for a key left behind
by Cecile. What is the key for? What does it open? And who is
Thomas, really? Rivette teases these questions out for the entire
film, ultimately denying pat resolutions in favor of playful
ambiguity.
The two settings are connected by frequent scenes of a
commuter train coursing through the landscape, a kind of visual
metaphor for the characters moving from one world to the other.
While studying with Constance, the women rehearse scenes from
Marivaux's Double Inconstancy, as well as works from Racine and
Molière. Rivette invites one audience, the viewer, to share space
with another, the audience-within-the film, as we watch these
rehearsals stop, start, repeat, and reconfigure, a constant search
for some abstract concept of “truth” that eludes the women no
matter how hard they try. For her part, Constance seems mostly
unhelpful, her comments cryptic and harsh, occasionally leading
to a student breaking down into tears or storming off the stage.
Throughout all this, Rivette and Champetier move the camera in
a serpentine path, frequently framing the actors on a proscenium
before panning or dollying away to reframe their bodies or
turning 180 degrees to take in the audience in their seats (there
appear to be a dozen or so women in the class, although there
are only ever two on stage at any given moment). Over the course
of the film's generous 160-minute runtime, Rivette indulges in
many such sequences. As he was fond of saying, “the work is
always much more interesting to show than the result.”
Eventually, much of the action moves away from the theatrical
space to focus on Thomas' mysterious designs on the house and
its inhabitants. After trying unsuccessfully to seduce each
woman in turn, he eventually manages to win over Claude, which
allows him unfettered access to the house after their lovemaking
sessions. His search for the key has something to do with Cecile’s
boyfriend, a criminal who may or may not have been set up by
the authorities and whose trial plays out in brief snippets
occasionally glimpsed on the TV or overheard on the radio. Like
many Rivette films, the central mystery here is never fully
explicated; Thomas claims at different points to be a policeman,
a documents forger, and an artist. It will never be made explicit
which one of these identities is true, although it hardly matters.
The house itself is likewise ambiguous, recalling the film-withinthe-film
of Celine and Julie, a haunted space where a peculiar
psychodrama plays out (although Gang of Four is never as playful
or outright comedic as that earlier film).
Throughout the film, notions of playacting and performance spill
over from one space into the other, like a brief segment where
the women stage a mock trial of Cecile’s unseen boyfriend that
plays out like an improv session. Is he really guilty of anything?
We’ll never know, just like we don’t know exactly why Constance
is removed from her class by gruff-looking men who seem to
suspect her of a crime. It’s all acting, a game, an excuse for
Rivette to gather friends and collaborators and riff on a genre.
It’s his complete mastery that makes such a lark so intoxicating
to witness. Ultimately, the presence of the morally dubious
Thomas, a male interloper in an otherwise entirely femalecentric
world, brings the women closer together, cementing their
solidarity. As Mary Wiles writes, when the women rise up against
Thomas to save Cecile, “they retain control of the keys that
unlock their feminine potential and allow them to take control of
their lives and their art.” After Gang of Four, Rivette would return
to the theater after a long absence, as if the film rejuvenated
him. Great art has a way of doing that. — DANIEL GORMAN
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CREED III
Michael B. Jordan
Creed III continues to mirror the trajectory of its parent Rocky
franchise. The first one was a dare-you-say transcendent
recapitulation of the original film’s working-class inspirational
sports story about a young (and this time Black) man coming to
understand his own political capital. Creed II tossed most of that
aside: our hero Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), like Rocky Balboa
before him, became merely the arrogant champion, this while the
much more interesting story of his opponent got pushed to the
background. Now, with this third entry, we get closer to Rocky III,
in which the complacent hero must fight someone who has a
legitimate beef to battle for so that he can maintain his
masculine pride.
Adonis is flourishing in retirement from fighting. He’s rich and
successful, his family is thriving; his wife Bianca (Tessa
Thompson) is a renowned music producer, and his daughter
Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) wants to take up boxing. But out of
Adonis’ past comes an old face, that of Damian Anderson
(Jonathan Majors), a childhood friend who took the fall for an act
of violence committed when they were teenagers and has been
in prison for 18 years. Originally the more promising fighter,
Damian has only honed both his skills and his anger in the joint,
and now he wants Adonis to get him a title match out of the gate.
You’d think Adonis would turn to mentor Rocky for a little advice
here, but pretty much any mention of Sylvester Stallone’s
character has been conspicuously scrubbed here for whatever
reason. In any case, it’s not long before some suspicious
circumstances give Damian exactly the opportunity he demands,
and when he unsurprisingly finds himself champion, his larger
agenda of revenge snaps into view for Adonis, even though the
audience could have smelled it from a mile off. Adonis will, of
course, eventually have to come out of retirement to fight him,
and the movie sets about its bland trajectory of explaining how
violence doesn’t solve anything, except when it does.
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It’s a banal choice made even emptier by being contrasted with
Adonis’ domestic concerns. Bianca has been even further
reduced to a merely worried spouse, occasionally one who warns
that her husband's values are a little out of whack. Daughter
Amara is violently lashing out at school (against a smarmy bully
who absolutely deserves it, but whatever), and we’re to waffle
about whether or not she needs to learn to defend herself. These
are all moot questions; we’re watching a fucking boxing movie.
The central conflict of enmity between the two leads falls apart
here: Damian has had his life stolen from him, either by Adonis’
negligence or by a terrible carceral system, and he’s got a
completely reasonable argument. Adonis feels guilty, but
dismisses Damian’s anger. Whether or not either fighter wins in
the end, the emotional conflict is unresolvable in the ring, except,
spoiler alert, the two men eventually make up after the bout for
no discernible reason.
“There’s so much richness to
the world [of] the Creed
franchise that it’s increasingly
disappointing to see those
aspects… get pushed aside.
Setting narrative aside, though, the most novel element here is
that star Jordan has taken over the directing gig. It’s largely a
competent job. Although he doesn’t do much to elevate the
formal work in the dramatic scenes, it’s clear that he’s spent a lot
of time with his performers. Majors brings a really fearsome
aggression to the role, as well as wearing his intense self-pity
almost like a second skin. He’s a remarkable actor, and he’s doing
quite fine work here. But it’s in the boxing sequences that Jordan
has made some interesting choices. The fights boast a distinct
emphasis on technique and speed. They may not be the elegant
long takes that occasioned the first Creed, but there’s a ferocity
on display here that’s both refreshing and appropriate to the
story.
As these movies go forward, they look more and more like the
generic entries in the franchise they’re spun off from, and maybe
that’s okay; nobody ever got too mad at the Rockys for being
run-of-the-mill crowd-pleasers. But there’s so much richness to
the world depicted in the Creed franchise, so much available to
dissect about Black masculinity, class distinctions, racial
conflicts, capitalism, on and on, that it’s increasingly
disappointing to see those aspects — which were so present
initially — get pushed aside. — MATT LYNCH
DIRECTOR: Michael B. Jordan; CAST: Michael B. Jordan, Tessa
Thompson, Jonathan Majors, Phylicia Rashad; DISTRIBUTOR:
United Artists; IN THEATERS: March 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
PALM TREES AND POWER LINES
Jamie Dack
When Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines premiered at last
year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was against the backdrop of a
roiling and mostly insufferable online debate about “age gap,”
coinciding with social media discovering P.T. Anderson’s Licorice
Pizza. That film famously features a romantic, albeit nonsexual,
entanglement between a preternaturally self-assured 15-year-old
boy and a driftless woman in her twenties, presented largely in a
comedic, judgment-free context. Unlikely to suffer the same
levels of “discourse,” Palm Trees and Power Lines also depicts a
relationship between a high school student and an adult, but the
tone is unmistakably more fraught. It treats the problematic
nature of the coupling as the basic premise, even while touching
the third rail of dramatizing statutory rape. The film takes its
characters, as well as the viewer, to some extraordinarily dark
places, acknowledging the predatory underpinnings of the
relationship, before concluding on a note as quietly despairing as
any film in recent memory. But what truly chills the blood here is
how the film presents an adolescent in a going-nowhere
situation, wrapping up her entire sense of self-worth in the
affections of an older man, and how readily he wields kindness
and the attention she’s starved for at home to break her spirit
and bind her to him.
We meet 17-year-old Lea (newcomer Lily McInerny) in the final
weeks of summer break before the start of her senior year.
Living with her divorcée mother (Gretchen Mol) in an anonymous
southern California suburb, Lea spends her days laying out in the
sun, playing on her phone, and killing time hanging out with her
shiftless friends. Without overplaying the drudgery, the film does
an effective job of presenting Lea’s life as an ambitionless blur of
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casual drinking, awkward backseat hookups — the film makes a
point of showing that Lea’s already sexually active before we
jump into the story proper — and teenage malaise, exacerbated
by mom bringing home a new guy seemingly every night. After a
failed attempt at a dine and dash, Lea is saved by Tom (Jonathan
Tucker), a 34-year-old diner patron claiming to be a private
contractor, who intervenes on her behalf. What follows is a
courtship that, under different circumstances, could be
considered endearingly chaste. Tom drives her home and seems
genuinely curious about her interests. She calls him up when
she’s frustrated by her home life, and they talk about her hopes
and dreams while watching airplanes landing at the airport late
at night from the bed of his pickup truck. In contrast to the
teenage boys she’s accustomed to, primarily treating her as a
sexual plaything, Tom has the confidence to take things slowly;
asking for permission before kissing her and even allowing Lea to
play the role of aggressor. For Lea, Tom represents escape: an
adult she has all to herself whose quiet intensity comes across
as guileless and romantic; someone who says things to her like
how she’s “not like any girl I know” and “you see me, and I can
really see you.” He talks about taking her away from the
monotony of her life and always looking after her. For a young
woman desperate to feel special and have someone devoted to
them, it’s easy to understand how she looks past the blinking red
warning lights (his secretiveness, his lack of concern about their
age difference, those rumors of other young women) that keep
cropping up.
The term “grooming” has become so thoroughly misappropriated
and devalued by the political right that it’s now all the more
bracing to see the act in its true, legitimately insidious form.
Although only months away from adulthood, Lea, with her large
expressive eyes, stringy build, and girlish demeanor, reads on
screen as considerably younger (McInerny herself is in her early
twenties), and her desperation to please Tom is easily
weaponized against her. It’s not simply his increased and
decidedly less tender sexual appetites — which she haltingly
acquiesces to — but also his possessiveness and tendency to say
things like, “you’re never gonna leave me, because nobody loves
you the way that I love you.” There is an ulterior motive to Tom’s
generosity, and it culminates in an especially upsetting
fifteen-minute-long sequence in a hotel room, where the nature
of Tom’s business interests become all too clear. Filmed with
clinical detachment, including a locked-down, five-minute take
filmed from across the small room where Lea is forced to make
small talk with a middle-aged john, we can all but observe her
soul attempting to escape her body as she surrenders herself
sexually while the man she loves waits outside in the hallway,
preventing her escape. It’s unsettling less for the act itself —
Dack’s camera angles are respectful and restrained, emphasizing
Lea’s disengagement as she focuses on a smoke detector on the
wall until the act mercifully concludes — than for how Lea is
forced to smile through a strained meal afterwards with Tom,
now laid bare as a glorified pimp, pretending everything’s great
while silently she’s dying on the inside.
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It’s the kind of performance from Tucker that could adversely
cling to an actor; devoid of any showiness or affectations that
easily signal to the audience that he’s only playing a bad guy. He
merely inhabits someone who’s a monster, skillfully breaking
down Lea’s defenses and exploiting her vulnerabilities, never
betraying his calm and in-control demeanor. The film follows his
lead, eschewing dramatic fireworks and direct confrontations for
understated observations of unguarded moments. It doesn't play
like a traditional cautionary tale or a challenge that’s been
overcome by its young protagonist. Rather, it’s altogether more
sticky and perceptive about the lasting psychological damage
that’s been visited upon Lea. What lingers is the realization of
just how deeply Tom’s claws have been sunk into her, laying the
groundwork for a potential lifetime of codependency and
subjugation. There’s real integrity in the choices that Dack and
co-writer Audrey Findlay have made here, particularly in carving
out a path for hope and liberation while still acknowledging the
gravitational pull of the abyss. — ANDREW DIGNAN
DIRECTOR: Jamie Dack; CAST: Lily McInerny, Gretchen Mol,
Jonathan Tucker; DISTRIBUTOR: Momentum Pictures; IN
THEATERS & STREAMING: March 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
STILL THE WATER
Naomi Kawase
Naomi Kawase's 2014 romance drama Still the Water is never
short on striking imagery. Set in Amami Ôshima, an island off the
southern coast of the Japanese mainland, the film is overflowing
with beautiful shots of crashing waves, misty mountains, and
painterly sunsets. A particularly memorable sequence early on
also captures main character Kyôko (Jun Yoshinga) diving along
the lush seabed which surrounds the island, clad in her schoolgirl
uniform. Kawase briefly suspends her in a twilight world between
dream and reality, her underwater odyssey veering into the
fantastical before she ultimately comes up for air, breaking the
spell. When it comes to setting a mood, Kawase succeeds
handsomely.
Narrative and character are another story. Described by Kawase
herself as her "masterpiece," ahead of its premiere at the 2014
Cannes Film Festival — "There is nothing I want more than the
Palme d'Or," she explained. "I have my eyes on nothing else." —
Still the Water plods along for two uneventful, dreary, and
pompous hours. The characters don't converse as much as they
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spout pseudo-philosophical questions at each other. "Why is it
that people are born and die?" wonders Kyôko after telling her
love interest, the mercurial Kaito (Nijiro Murakami), about her
shaman mother Isa's (Miyuki Matsuda) terminal illness, the exact
nature of which isn't disclosed.
Kawase's preoccupations have not changed all that much since
she chronicled life, love, and death in a rural community with her
1997 feature directorial debut, Suzaku — a film far more
deserving of being called a masterpiece, for whatever that’s
worth. Instead of letting Still the Water’s story unfurl organically in
front of her documentarian's gaze, the filmmaker strains to
imbue every scene with meaning and a quotable, faux-deep line.
A possible explanation for this: Kawase had, by this point, been
nominated for the Palme d'Or a total of three times, so perhaps
her naked ambition just got the better of her.
“Instead of letting Still the
Water’s story unfurl
organically… [Kawase}
strains to imbue every
scene with meaning and a
quotable, faux-deep line.
With its countless scenes accompanied by arpeggiated piano
tinkering, Still the Water seems cynically designed to appeal to a
more sentimental segment of the arthouse crowd. One would
expect a director as accomplished as Kawase to somehow
complicate the maudlin tale of young love, but the impact of the
crime thriller-esque appearance of a dead body evaporates
almost immediately, as the film puts it on the back burner. And
even though Kaito's trip to Tokyo to visit his father (Jun
Murakami, Nijiro Murakami's real-life father) introduces a
welcome change of pace — the film finally feels unpretentious
and natural — Kawase can't help but cap off the sweet father-son
bonding moment with a labored monologue on fate, delivered by
the father who seems to shroud his bitterness over the divorce
with Kaito's mother in New Age philosophy.
Kyôko regularly turns to the eccentric fisherman Kamejiro (Fujio
Tokita) for advice, his habit of espousing kooky ideas, which the
film more or less treats as gospel, offering comfort to the young
girl as she struggles to come to terms with her mother's
imminent death. Meanwhile, Isa, whose illness can only be
described as being the mother of a headstrong teenager in a sad
coming-of-age story-itis, spends most of the film in bed,
regurgitating whatever well-worn ideas she picked up from the
chief shaman.
Although Still the Water's natural beauty is unimpeachable,
Kawase opts to juxtapose the island's scenery with not one but
two scenes of goats being slaughtered, both having their throats
cut by a straight razor. It's difficult to verify the authenticity of
these scenes but they are framed as part of the island's
traditional rituals, so in light of Kawase's semi-documentary
approach and cultural differences with regards to the treatment
of animals, their inclusion — real or not — can perhaps be
forgiven. What's harder to forgive is how the film tries to offset
its overbearing dullness with hollow philosophical musings, in the
process wasting both star Jun Yoshinga — who makes the most
of the turgid script — and cinematographer Yutaka Yamazaki's
considerable talents. — FRED BARRETT
DIRECTOR: Naomi Kawase; CAST: Nijirô Murakami, Jun
Yoshinaga, Miyuki Matsuda; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; IN
THEATERS & STREAMING: March 3; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 1 min.
YANAGAWA
Zhang Lu
Zhang Lu has proved a unique presence in 21st-century film: A
Korean-Chinese literary intellectual of the 1980s who became a
little-known cult figure in the outsider DV movement in 2000s
China, he then defected to South Korea at the exact moment that
wave began to terminally recede. Over the 2010s, Zhang gradually
moved to the fore of the Korean indie scene, and just at the
moment the Korean wave was peaking in the Western world, he
defected again, at first to Japan and ultimately back to China,
even as growing political hostility to China in the West is
manifesting as cultural isolationism. His newly released — in the
West, anyway — Yanagawa represents the pivotal point of that
last transition, but it’s anything but a digression. Superficially, the
film heavily parallels Zhang’s preceding feature, Fukuoka; both
follow yearnful, middle-aged East Asian intellectuals as they
journey to Northern Kyushu in search of lost love. It would be
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easy to posit a hackneyed thesis like "Zhang is saying 'x' about
inter-Asian social dynamics," but his work operates on a more
nuanced register than that, one concerned with the way complex
intercultural dynamics subtly influence the already knotted web
of interpersonal relationships. Characters are universally
allegorical rather than avatars of nations or class. The dual
settings of Beijing and Yanagawa are triangulated with
occasional reference to the distant, unseen apex of London.
Consider how Zhang’s 2005 feature debut, Tang Poetry,
contrasted a direct, imagistic, raw depiction of emptiness and
domestic violence with the elliptical textual density of the
medium that film took as its titular subject.
In Yanagawa, the audience finds themselves at the other
extremity of the relational spectrum: complete unity. Every
image is steeped in text; there is no shot that does not center a
character, just as there is no text that is semiotically distinct
within a composition. Every image in the film is in an unusual
aesthetic harmony with the moment that meets it. The editorial
grammar is understated and appropriately punctuated. The
cinematography is subtly obfuscatory and tightly bound by rules,
as is the meandering but dramatically austere story. We see
people using their phones but never what is on them. Characters
act with a deliberateness so overwrought as to be
indistinguishable from reckless impulse. Despite a cultivated
artifice of "realism," the dialogue is often bizarre and
non-naturalistic, each line a functional hook in a continuity of
poetic logic. For example: in the opening sequence, central
character Dong (Zhang Liuyi) tells a complete stranger that he
has been diagnosed with stage-four cancer in a bizarre and
unempathetic exchange, but for the rest of the film, he obscures
this fact from the people he loves most, to his own detriment.
Each textual construct in Yanagawa functions this way, as irony,
or as contrast, or as disconnect, compounding loops of meaning
within loops of feeling. Cumulatively the effect is novelistic in the
best way possible, building a metatextual schema in the viewer’s
mind as the film progresses, a nebula of intrigue and implication
demanding analysis from its audience. Zhang is like an ambient
narrativist, reveling in minute textural shifts in feeling and affect,
and maintaining intrigue and a subtle aesthetic build across
duration. On a more tangible level, Yanagawa's mournful longing
is relatable to anyone who has experienced the sad misdirects of
love, without seeking to reflect common experiences back at its
audience. — NOEL OAKSHOT
DIRECTOR: Zhang Lu; CAST: Ni Ni, Zhang Liuyi, Xin Baiqing;
DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; STREAMING: February 24;
RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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CHILDREN OF THE CORN
Kurt Wimmer
Kurt Wimmer's mirthfully overwrought Children of the Corn, a
revamp of one of horror's longest and least-consequential
franchises, is more fun than it should be. It's not a good movie —
did you expect it to be? — but Wimmer, who wrote and directed,
carves up a breezy, playfully lurid, never boring slab of sinister
silliness, a welcome reprieve from the surfeit of dour, traumaobsessed
horror films that A24 produces and has inspired, selling
self-seriousness as art. Wimmer made his name with Equilibrium,
one of the more endearing post-Matrix dystopian action flicks of
the early 2000s, directed with a glut of style, some of which is
pretty cool; its unwinking approach to a ludicrous concept offers
unintentional laughs, especially when Christian Bale thinks he's
giving a great performance, but a laugh is a laugh, and Wimmer
really believes in the material. Certainly no one can deride him
for laziness. He followed this up with Ultraviolet, a flamboyant
swirl of CG shine and action scenes so absurd they almost pass
as surreal. It's a mess, and often resembles a PlayStation video
game, but there are some images that spark with inspiration.
Wimmer has been quiet for years, and his involvement with a film
no one was clamoring for provoked little hype. Children of the
Corn premiered in 2020, then lingered in limbo for three years;
it's only making its way to theaters now, and it won't stay long.
Instead, it’s as a surprise bit of pulpy pleasure tucked snuggly
between disposable slashers and accepted classics on Shudder
that the film will find life. A small town of destitute farmers
gathers for a town hall meeting, vexed over their failed crops and
demanding a remedy. The government is willing to pay the
denizens to not plant corn, and everyone goes along with the
idea — well, except the kids, who are led by the unhinged Eden
(Kate Moyer) in a craven crusade to save the corn by killing their
parents. But the real impetus for the slaughter is that the police,
trying to save a group of 15 students from a hostage situation
(which we never see), accidentally gas and kill the kids. They
have to pay. Meanwhile, a teenager who will soon be escaping her
dead town to go to college (Elena Kampouris, who was 22 when
this was made) tries to stop them, but you almost root against
her because the iniquity of the killer kids is handled so joyfully.
The disturbing story revels in the expression of evil, and so do
you.
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The digital photography looks lovely, belying the modest budget
— lustrous light splashing over flaxen fields that sway prettily in
the wind, vast grids of golden grain reticulated in orderly files
under the blue sprawl of sky. The camera moves rambunctiously,
and Wimmer oscillates between intrusive close-ups and
slow-motion shots of children traipsing in eerie unison or
marching minaciously through night-darkened streets, armed
with axes and picks and hoes and pitchforks. Some fun images:
the lead little girl, garbed in a gas mask as gray whorls of smoke
writhe all around her and a collection of captured adults beg for
mercy; and the pint-sized psychos sitting behind the wheels of a
pack of big yellow bulldozers, like slumbering beasts, that growl
to life and slowly close in on their prey who are cowering in a
ditch, waves of dirt washing over them. There's also an insert
shot of the camera whirling with an almost Bay-esque bombast
around a water tower as the sun breathes brightly behind the
time-tarnished structure, a familiar image that succinctly says:
"Rural America." Why include this shot? Because it's fun. Is it a
well-placed, meaningful moment? Not really. But it’s obvious that
Wimmer is trying to keep things lively.
The problem, then, is that there's no innocence to corrupt here —
our main villain is menacing from the beginning, and we don't
ever see how she influenced a whole town of rural children to
rise up and slaughter the adults. The diabolical deity they serve,
He Who Walks Behind the Rows in King's story and the original
film, makes no notable impression (not that it did in any previous
iteration), its presence depicted as poorly-animated tendrils
wriggling in the rows. Wimmer's film isn't particularly memorable,
and the Children of the Corn series has yet to summon a single
indelible moment in 40 years, but you have to appreciate a horror
film that aspires to entertain, and often succeeds. Good job, Kurt,
and welcome back.
The problem, then, is that there's no innocence to corrupt here —
our main villain is menacing from the beginning, and we don't
ever see how she influenced a whole town of rural children to
rise up and slaughter the adults. The diabolical deity they serve,
He Who Walks Behind the Rows in King's story and the original
film, makes no notable impression (not that it did in any previous
iteration), its presence depicted as poorly-animated tendrils
wriggling in the rows. Wimmer's film isn't particularly memorable,
and the Children of the Corn series has yet to summon a single
indelible moment in 40 years, but you have to appreciate a
horror film that aspires to entertain, and often succeeds. Good
job, Kurt, and welcome back. — GREG CWIK
DIRECTOR: Kurt Wimmer; CAST: Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer,
Callan Mulvey; DISTRIBUTOR: RLJE Films; IN THEATERS: March
3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
LINOLEUM
Colin West
These days it feels like we’re more frequently encountering
stories of people — particularly men — obsessed with legacy.
Characters yearn for a sense of permanence while us viewers,
overwhelmed by the high-speed, haphazard contentification of
everything, silently wish for something more solid in our lives
too. One temporarily pacifying pleasure is to reminisce, letting
memory launch us back to our recollection of earlier, simpler
days when so much seemed to be ahead of us and the world
wasn’t so complicated. Colin West’s new feature Linoleum is made
in this spirit. It jettisons the ruminative self-seriousness a more
prestige-inflected drama might opt for, instead preferring a
snug, pleasantly offbeat vibe that’s equally nostalgic and
sanguine.
Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan) is the host of a shoestring-budget
children’s science show on local TV (think a failing, super-retro
Bill Nye the Science Guy). His milquetoast life gets upended when
a space-race-era satellite crash lands in his backyard, inspiring
Cameron to MacGyver a rocket ship in his garage in a bid to fulfill
his long-held dream of becoming an astronaut. His wife Erin
(Rhea Seehorn) and daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon) already think
he’s losing it a bit, and as their family faces mounting turmoil,
strange disruptions to his life begin to convince him that there’s
more to his reality than he thought.
You’d be forgiven if the first thing that comes to mind when
watching Linoleum is “Kaufman-lite.” Much of the film’s style and
themes are derivative of Charlie Kaufman’s work — the neurotic
handwringing about mortality, the surrealist touches bending the
story world’s contours, the doses of metaphysics providing the
springboard into questions of the meaning of life. There’s even an
implied minor thread around gender identity concerning Marc
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FILM REVIEWS
JACKALS & FIREFLIES
Charlie Kaufman
Depending on your disposition, New York City’s claustrophobic
crush of humanity is either unsettling or liberating, if not both
simultaneously — it’s not easy to find your foothold in a place
where crying in public is both a rite of passage and a punchline.
There are many, many love letters to New York City out there, but
Charlie Kafuman’s Jackals & Fireflies is less a declaration of
devotion than a wistful, extended Missed Connection. An
unnamed narrator, played with gentle gravitas by the poet Eva
H.D., crisscrosses the city in an unspecified time frame, noting or
forging fragments of connection amidst the buffeting streams of
urban ambiance. In keeping with Kaufman’s surrealist
sensibilities, Jackals & Fireflies is a meandering tone poem
whose only other major character is the city itself.
H.D., who wrote the 20-minute film’s script, most recently
collaborated with Kaufman by penning the poem “bonedog” for
I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Like fellow flaneur Leopold Bloom,
who wanders through Dublin in equally mesmerizing fashion,
H.D.’s narration is a loose amalgamation of stream of
consciousness and internal monologue, peppered with wry
observation and personal reflection. Cinematographer Chayse
Irvin (Blonde and BlacKkKlansman) shot the film with a Samsung
Galaxy S22 Ultra as part of a new campaign, but unlike
high-budget shot-on-iPhone features, Jackals & Fireflies retains
a down-to-earth moodiness that befits its pensive subject. Even
in the face of solitude, there’s more than a little serendipity; it’s
their fleeting coexistence that Kaufman, in his own understated
way, chooses to celebrate. — SELINA LEE
DIRECTOR: Charlie Kaufman; CAST: Eva H.D.; DISTRIBUTOR: —;
STREAMING: February 12; RUNTIME: 20 min.
GODS OF MEXICO
Helmut Dosantos
Helmut Dosantos’ feature debut, Gods of Mexico, is an ethereal
work of observation, informing tonality through compositional
rigor, the beauty on display siphoned into a controlled stasis. In
opposition to historical narratives of modernization and the
industrial imperialism that ravages the landscapes of indigenous
communities, Dosantos seeks an immobility that dignifies itself
through the act of statis-as-resistance. He frames a collection of
indigenous peoples in a plethora of tableaux so that, when
brought together, they might construct a new perception and
narrative of resilience. But this well-meaning survey of beauty
and might quickly collapses into the ornamental.
At a point, the film’s stillness and observation becomes rote, its
capacity to evoke its ideas and aestheticized vision begins to
stifle, and the whole thing pretty openly flails toward
ethnographic gaze. One might be able to extrapolate intention in
invoking beauty as a faculty of the very representation it
expresses, but there isn’t enough of a sense of subjectivity as the
camera’s inherent estrangement seriously affects our perception.
These people become objects of a leering gaze, one that flirts in
spectacle and only affirms that the indigenous subjects are
being made fetish. A black-and-white portraiture motif adopted
during the film’s mid-section reads as grotesquely projected
nostalgia, seeking to render those images of history as specters
within a reimagining of this process, wherein their ghosts are
caught in that quest for an image. These forms, if
reappropriated, offer little new but a pointed reflexivity. In the
portraits, we see figures ripped from their storied landscapes
and placed on display.
The intent is clear enough: of seeking reclamation of these
historied images through a context of labor and inserting — and
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FILM REVIEWS
bringing to the foreground — a textured proximity to the land.
However, even those images read as fraught: austere and
enclosing, orchestrated to such rigid compositions that it’s
difficult to know whether each act was sincere or only performed
as to amplify a sensorium, as so much of the film is less
interested in a people and their ways and more transfixed by the
capacity one has to curate that. It all feels quite removed from
the humanity the film ostensibly seeks to capture, and is instead
more alike the very violence desired to be here subverted. And
the structural integrity God of Mexico’s narrative hinges on is of
such simplistic juxtaposition that the only real affects that land
are sensory pleasures of kinetic compositions, aural texture, or
the evocative qualities of a well-lit frame. Sadly, these few truly
beautiful frames are burdened by their utter passivity.
“[God of Mexico’s] wellmeaning
survey of beauty and
might quickly collapses into
the ornamental.
The end credits are overlaid with a track that can only be
described as a blatant Philip Glass riff, concluding this 90-minute
montage with that a sense of grandeur especially not
appropriate for this subject matter. The Qatsi trilogy works so
well with Glass’ music because it dehumanizes its subjects
purposefully, creating charged spectacle as to extrapolate from
each image an impression, then molding these elusive materials
into a monolithic concept, enveloped by poetic montage. To bring
this kind of gaze to these communities, reducing them to
idealisms, feels like a betrayal: an orchestration that turns their
willing participation into the very kind of aesthetic structure
once actively used to objectify them.
The specific Indigenous communities represented in the film are
as follows: the Aztec (or Nahua), Chinantec, Cora, Cucapa,
Guarijio, Huave, Ikoot, Maya (and Lacandon), Mazatec, Mexicanero,
Mixe, Mixtec, Purepecha, Raramuri, Tepehuan, Tohono O’odhaim,
Totonac, Yaqui, and Zapotec peoples. These distinct indigenous
cultures have been swallowed up into the homogenizing vision of
Gods of Mexico; it reflects a curious
hypocrisy, as the director made this film as “a wake-up call about
the importance of preserving such cultural diversity against a
world that wants us more and more homogeneous.” Why then are
these disparate indigenous communities observed through a lens
that perceives them as all alike? In fairness, it would be in bad
faith to suggest that the intention here is as corrosive as the
final project comes across — the intent obviously was not to
present these portraits as mere echoes of colonial gazes. But
when working in this mode of baroque polish and Euro
aestheticism, there’s little else to take away. — ZACHARY
GOLDKIND
DIRECTOR: Helmut Dosantos; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR:
Oscilloscope Laboratories; IN THEATERS: March 3; RUNTIME: 1
hr. 37 min.
CALL ME CHIHIRO
Rikiya Imaizumi
From its first frames, Rikiya Imaizumi's Call Me Chihiro is easily
identifiable as a Netflix original. Adapted from Hiroyuki Yasuda's
manga Chihiro-san, the film's flat, textureless cinematography
and crisp digital sheen carry the signifiers associated with the
kind of streaming dross that any discerning cinephile would
avoid like the plague. Content-wise, the film doesn't appear to
fare any better: main character Chihiro (Kasumi Arimura) is a
former sex worker with a naturally sunny disposition. Widely
beloved, she brightens people's day while working at a bento
shop, pets a stray kitten, and even feeds, bathes, and clothes a
homeless man (Keiichi Suzuki) — all within the first ten minutes
no less.
The sleepy seaside town she lives in is home to a number of
kooky characters like Okaji (Hana Toyoshima), a teenager who
spends her free time stalking Chihiro, taking pictures of the
young woman, clearly enthralled. The sage Chihiro, meanwhile,
turns out to be aware of this, playfully confronting Okaji when
she finally works up the courage to speak to her. Moments like
this reveal Call Me Chihiro's biggest problem: its protagonist is a
bit of a goody two-shoes. Instead of being alarmed by Okaji's
stalking, she recognizes the girl's social alienation and forms a
maternal bond with the bespectacled teen. Even when a
foul-mouthed young boy's mean-spirited prank culminates in him
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FILM REVIEWS
stabbing her in the arm with a pen, she takes it in stride,
offering to buy the boy a hamburger bento and doling out a very
pedagogically progressive punishment which consists of light
teasing and asking him to apologize. Of course, the boy, Makoto
(Tetta Shimada), warms up to her pretty much immediately.
The largely plotless drama's relaxed pace feels appropriate given
its setting, and the stakes are suitably low. Anything resembling
conflict usually comes in the form of mundane
misunderstandings or conflicting desires — a single mother
reprimanding someone for making her look bad in front of her
neighbors, a young girl not wanting to go on a family trip — and it
takes a good while before Call Me Chihiro delves into its titular
character's somewhat turbulent inner life. Although the script
doesn't always do her a lot of favors, Arimuri imbues the
superficially flawless Chihiro with some rough edges, especially
once the film finally decides to foreground her loneliness and
lingering grief from her mother's death, while never allowing her
to be anything other than unfailingly kind and understanding.
The reveal that her chipper energy obscures a more mournful
side isn't exactly a surprise, as any attentive viewer will likely be
able to piece together that her ability to bring joy and comfort to
so many stems from her own rather isolated life, her habit of
neglecting herself while constantly being concerned for others
becoming clear relatively early on. When she comes across the
dead body of the homeless man she had previously taken care of,
she is alone in her grief, choosing not to share her tragic find
with anyone. As there is no one to inform of his death, she ends
up burying him herself, before returning to her lonely apartment
to sullenly wash the dirt off her skin.
Quietly melancholy sequences like these are what make
Imaizumi's latest more memorable than most of what currently
clogs the digital arteries of streaming platforms — this goes
double for Netflix, whose library is overstuffed with beige,
throwaway content fodder that seems to have been conceived by
an AI — and its reflections on loneliness and the value of strong
communities and found family do, to a generous viewer at least,
carry shades of Hideaki Anno's 2000 arthouse romance Ritual
and Satoshi Kon's 2003 animated comedy-drama Tokyo
Godfathers. This isn't to say that Call Me Chihiro comes anywhere
close in terms artistic value — or excitement for that matter —
but as far as Netflix originals go, one could do a lot worse than
this warm-hearted, empathetic, and yes, occasionally uneventful
and saccharine slice-of-life drama. — FRED BARRETT
DIRECTOR: Rikiya Imaizumi; CAST: Kasumi Arimura, Hana
Toyoshima, Ryuya Wakaba; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING:
February 23; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 11 min.
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OLD REVIEWS NEW RELEASES
LA CIVIL
Teodora Mihai
“The goal is to keep focus on empathizing with Cielo, but raises a
vital question: who gets to look away? Cielo, like her inspiration,
doesn’t, having no choice but to stare straight ahead. But we the
viewers and the outsider director can instead safely watch
violence reflected in the eyes and heard in the gasps of the
troubled woman to whom the camera so tightly clings. The line
between empathy and pity is sometimes blurred by the remove
from Cielo’s perspective. If there’s anything keeping La Civil on
the right side of that line, it’s Ramírez’s performance, which
conveys bottled rage and frustration without ever boiling over
into melodrama… suffused with complicated, sometimes
conflicting emotion.” — CHRIS MELLO
DIRECTOR: Teodora Mihai; CAST: Arcelio Ramírez, Álvaro
Guerrero, Jorge A. Jimenez, Ayelén Muzo; DISTRIBUTOR:
Zeitgeist Films; IN THEATERS: March 3; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 20 min.
THE YEAR BETWEEN
Alex Heller
“The Year Between has no interest in painting Clemence in a
particularly flattering light, her disaffected nature and constant
putdowns established from the very first frame. It’s quite obvious
that Heller, a bipolar filmmaker herself, wants to craft a
warts-and-all portrait of mental illness, one that refuses to
sugarcoat its devastating effects. And while such an approach is
respectable, it also makes Clemence quite unpleasant company,
as Heller errs on the side of real more than some audience
members might be willing to tolerate. There’s never any doubt
that such an approach is intentional, and the fact that it leaves
Clemence nearly impossible to empathize with makes for a
rather fascinating dichotomy.” — STEVEN WARNER
DIRECTOR: Alex Heller; CAST: Steve Buscemi, J Cameron Smith,
Wyatt Oleff; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: March 3;
RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
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PLEASE BABY PLEASE
Amanda Kramer
“It’s the rare film that proves capable of achieving genuine novelty, and even rarer to find one that manages to parlay novelty alone
into success. Too many such aspirants resort to gauche gimmickry or conceptually florid moonshots that result only in scaled-up
failures. On its face, it might seem strange to observe this when talking about Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please, a film not just
indebted to but intentionally cribbing from a number of aesthetic and modal reference points. But if every story tells a story that has
already been told, it follows that recreation is creation. Given the thematic and discursive well it’s drawing from, it’s not surprising that
at the core of the film’s singular makeup is a profound sense of the familiar, but in taking pains to defamiliarize these recognizable
parts before carefully recomposing them, Please Baby Please proves to be like few other films you’re likely to have seen.” — LUKE
GORHAM
DIRECTOR: Amanda Kramer; CAST: Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling, Demi Moore; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN THEATERS:
March 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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BLESS THIS MESS
U.S. Girls
Meghan Remy, mastermind behind the
experimental pop project U.S. Girls, has
been on a trajectory of constant evolution
since she began releasing music under her
deceptive moniker in 2008. On Bless This
Mess, the Chicago-born singer-songwriter
dives into an elaborate fantasia
constructed through retro, dance-flavored
pop, with the therapeutic vulnerability of
2020's Heavy Light and the dark emotional
complexity of 2018's In a Poem Unlimited
seeming like blurry memories —
sufficiently worked through and left in a
less-than-pleasant past.
Remy opens Bless This Mess with the
glutinous disco groove of "Only Daedalus,"
where she finds herself trapped in the
labyrinth constructed by the titular
mythological architect who also happens
to be a particularly controlling lover: "You
can't invent my love / And you can't hide
me away." Unimpressed with his creation,
she quips, "You're good with your hands /
But where's your soul?" before segueing
into a cool chorus where she reminds her
partner that "under the street there is a
beach," a line repurposed from a May 68
slogan which, at the time, was regularly
spray-painted throughout France.
Throughout, this new, more outwardly
exuberant emotional register shimmers
with the danceable, luxuriously
throw-back sheen of contemporary pop
music, exemplified by the likes of
Beyoncé and Dua Lipa, whose last albums
appropriated the sounds blaring out of
discothèques in the '70s and '80s. "Tux
(Your Body Fills Me, Boo)," for instance, is
a funky goofball ditty in which Remy
takes on the POV of a frustrated tuxedo,
sick of wasting away in its owner's closet.
The track is the record's indisputable
highlight, Remy firing on all cylinders
while still sneaking in some sly, if not
exactly novel, social commentary: "I was
your passport to so many rooms / Your
mask of pure exclusivity / Now you treat
me like a long gone novelty / A costume, is
that how you see me?"
The only drawback to the track's
explosive flurry of synthesizers,
handclaps, vocoded backing vocals, and
absurdly humorous lyrics is that it
completely overshadows the rest of the
LP. The more subdued "R.I.P Roy G. Biv"
follows "Tux" and tries its hand at a
similar brand of whimsy, relaying a
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fantasy tale of a rainbow paramour, "Roy G.
Biv" referencing the acronym for the hues
that make up a rainbow. Unfortunately,
Remy and guest vocalist Marker Staling fail
to pull off the tune's silly central metaphor,
an act made nearly impossible by the
track's plodding pace.
Similarly, "Futures Bet" opens, intriguingly
enough, with thick, distorted guitar chords
and a riff which, for reasons unclear,
plays the first few notes of "The
Star-Spangled Banner," but it quickly falls
apart amidst an aimless, bland melody
and trite lyrical truisms like, "When
nothing is wrong / Everything is fine / This
is just life" — shockingly uninspired
toss-off, especially considering the
gorgeous, challenging work Remy is
capable of creating. It's true: nothing on
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Bless This Mess reaches the depth of, say,
"M.A.H.," a track which provocatively took
on Obama's drone warfare and public
image — "As you were the first in line to
use those bugs up high / The coward's
weapon of choice / But you got that
winner's smile / And you know how to
leave 'em moist" — but balanced its
incendiary politics with a varied sonic
architecture, Remy making use of an
arcade of different textures and
instruments.By contrast, Bless This Mess
— an uncharacteristically "Live, Laugh,
Love"-esque album title for the
songwriter — feels less diverse than
slightly disjointed. The penultimate
"Pump" — a reference to breast pumps,
Remy having recently given birth to twins
— starts promisingly, with a steady
electro pulse propelling the song into its
first verse. But the song's eye-rolling
wordplay — "My first child was two /
Talking 'bout two babies at once" —quickly
puts a damper on the cut's otherwise
elegantly assembled nu-disco swagger.
The pivot into spoken word on the
prophetically-titled "Outro (The Let
Down)" ends things on a whimper, as
Remy spells out the album's already
clearly articulated themes in a thuddingly
literal manner.
The last few years have seen pop music,
and a sizable amount of supposedly
alternative music as well, become
obsessed with producing "bangers" —
hook-filled, club-ready, singable, vaguely
empowering — often at the cost of sonic
and thematic intricacy, so perhaps
seeing this turn for the prosaic isn't
exactly surprising. It's a shame, though,
because whenever Bless This Mess
unshackles itself from the demands of
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contemporary pop aesthetics, it offers
plenty of playfulness, weird ideas, and
infectious melodies. But too often, Remy's
natural songwriting talent gets bogged
down by her incessant need to sound
timely, something which her previous
work never seemed all that concerned
with. One hopes that this isn't the
beginning of Remy's descent into the
musical ghetto of algorithm pop — if
nothing else, Bless This Mess' best
moments prove that she is way too good
for that. — FRED BARRETT
LABEL: 4AD; RELEASE DATE: February 24
WORKIN’ ON A WORLD
Iris DeMent
Iris DeMent likes to play the long game.
When the Pentecostal-raised but avowedly
agnostic 31-year-old from Kansas City,
Missouri, made her John Prine-cosigned
debut on the alt-country/Americana
stage, she opened her first album, 1992’s
Infamous Angel, with a succinctly perfect
verse that laid the foundation for a
career-spanning concept of secular
spirituality: “Everybody is a wonderin'
what and where they all came from /
Everybody is a worryin' 'bout where they're
gonna go when the whole thing's done /
But no one knows for certain and so it's all
the same to me / I think I'll just let the
mystery be.”
On “Workin’ on a World,” the title track and
opener off DeMent’s new album, the
philosophical tables are turned: Now it’s
DeMent who’s “filled with sadness, fear,
and dread.” But instead of retreating
inward, she finds faith in the cause of
others, and decides it’s actually what
comes after that’s more important than
the troubles of the day. “I'm workin' on a
world / I may never see,” goes the
plainspoken chorus, which sets the tone
of this set as surely as “Let the Mystery
Be” did her diaristic debut. That is to say
that DeMent has put herself on a path of
activism — and not for the first time,
either. In 1996, just before the longest gap
in her discography, she released The Way
I Should, an album which grappled with
the turbulent political climate of its day.
And both the biggest swings and the
modest misses of this set largely trace
back to that effort.
At its best, DeMent’s activism not only
hits its targets with a sneering
righteousness, but also puts the rock
back in what’s long been a defanged
alt-country genre. The first few seconds
of “Workin’ on a World” feature the same
old-timey church piano that DeMent
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made the foundation of her austere 2012
album, Sing the Delta, but here that
instrument is quickly interrupted by a hard
symbol crash and a full band
accompaniment joining in, with a rollicking
Mark Knopler-style guitar solo in the
middle and a horn section worthy of
Muscle Shoals. It’s a statement of purpose
in more ways than one, but the specific
motivations for its call-to-arms are
sketched in vague terms.
DeMent saves the proper nouns and a
litany of causes that she’s fighting for (and
against) with this album for its
eight-minute second track, “Going Down to
Sing in Texas.” That song — penned after
DeMent was shocked to arrive at a Texas
university campus where she’d long
performed only to see a new sign
posted about proper etiquette for open
carry — splits the difference between
ragtime gospel and jazz shuffle, and
recalls some of the more distended late
Bob Dylan compositions. Though, unlike
Dylan, DeMent is less interested in weaving
puckish Americana myths than soberly
addressing the people who inspire her to
stand her ground (The Chicks [née Dixie],
the Squad, Muslims) and calling out some
familiar groups of offenders (war
criminals, greedy people, Trump). It’s an
ambitious piece that sometimes trips over
the corniness of its good intentions (“I got
a plan / How about we ban hate from every
corner of this land?”), much like 1996’s
“Wasteland of the Free” did when it took a
moralizing tone against a generation that
knew “the name of every crotch on MTV.”
But the careening focus proves
instructive, and is born out over the course
of an album whose breadth is nothing
short of disarming.
The best song here, “The Sacred Now,”
not only rocks the hardest, but features
some of DeMent’s sharpest and most
economical writing in decades, an
effortless string of evocative
juxtapositions lent a kind of cosmic grace
through the singer’s see-sawing vocal
delivery: “Time speeds by, then slows
down / All is lost, hope is found.” DeMent
was at the vanguard of a new intellectual
movement in country music in the ‘90s,
and songs like “The Sacred Now” and “The
Cherry Orchard” — which feels out the
psychological contours of a character
from the Chekhov play of the same name
— remind just how singular her
songwriting voice (to say nothing of her
uniquely rural-influenced trill) has always
been. On “Nothin’ for Dead,” which
features more horn charts and gorgeous
pedal steel, DeMent gets especially
adventurous, sketching a series of short
observational vignettes with loosely
extracted life lessons, before inserting
herself into the song to comment directly
on its jumble of ideas.
In fact, the fulcrum of a lot of these
songs — the motif that holds together an
album that often seems to be pushing in
a lot of different directions at once —
tends to be a verse, or even just a few
lines, where DeMent reflects on her own
charge as an artist and as a moral
person. Toward the end of “Going Down to
Texas,” she returns to the subject of an
afterlife, but it’s suddenly become a lot
more real to her, maybe because of that
inevitable proximity to guns: “I don’t know
if there’s a judgment day or a master plan
/ But I know I want to be ready if before
the Lord I stand.” The collected
sentiments of Workin on a World, from its
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most earnest moments of liberal guilt to
its poetic discursiveness, amount to a
mighty testament, a simultaneous
retrospective look at DeMent’s
career-long preoccupations as
songwriter and a building-out of her
earnest concern for the future. — SAM C.
MAC
LABEL: Flariella; RELEASE DATE:
February 24
CRACKER ISLAND
Gorillaz
“It’s a cracked-screen world,” sings Damon
Albarn on Cracker Island, the eighth
studio album from everyone’s favorite
cartoon band. Since 2001, Damon Albarn
and Jamie Hewlett have used their
Gorillaz project to hold a carnival mirror
up to society. The universe they’ve built is
wild, dark, and wacky, distorting the art
and politics of our own world into a 20+
year party playlist for the end times.
When life gets rough, human beings find
freedom on the dance floor — this is
something Damon Albarn understands
instinctively. “Are we the last living
souls?... Get up!” Albarn sang back on
2005’s Demon Days, and Cracker Island is
its creators’ latest groovy reflection on
our insane modern world.
Albarn has enjoyed a career most artists
can only dream of. The story is the stuff
of legend at this point: after bearing the
standard for the Britpop generation as
the frontman of Blur, Albarn went
left-field — teaming up with comic book
artist Jamie Hewlett to create the world’s
first “virtual band.” The experiment paid
off, to say the least, with Gorillaz
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achieving greater success in both the U.S.
and worldwide than Blur ever reached, and
elevating Albarn to bonafide auteur status.
Albarn has always been a jet setter —
famously soaking up inspiration from
everywhere he hangs his hat. 2001’s Mali
Music, his collaboration with Afel Bocoum
and Toumani Diabaté & Friends, was born
out of his journeys through Mali, a country
whose music he’s long since championed.
Elsewhere, work on Blur’s comeback
album, 2015’s The Magic Whip, began
during an extended layover in Hong Kong
after a canceled festival appearance in
Japan. In that spirit, Cracker Island is
Albarn’s California album, recorded in LA
and boasting a sunny demeanor and
plenty of Golden State guest stars and
references. The project kicks off with the
Thundercat-featuring title track, with the
bass virtuoso offering his distinctive
plucking and falsetto over a textured
instrumental. While Albarn’s vocal melody
on the verse feels a little rudimentary and
gets a bit redundant, the song’s lyrics
succeed in welcoming us to the album’s
ebullient but sinister setting: “Where the
truth was auto-tuned / And its sadness, I
consumed.” This textural space is
expanded on the following track, “Oil,”
which features the album’s most
surprising guest star, Stevie Nicks. Her
iconic gravely voice enters with a dark
bassline to give the track a gleefully
ominous feel, while her harmonies help to
entrance listeners: “You can't hеlp
yourself anymore and the madness comes
/ You'll be falling into the bass and drum.”
21

“The Tired Influencer” features the album’s
most famous guest star: Siri — you know,
the Apple assistant. A song about trying to
keep up with a changing world, you can
almost picture the 54-year-old Albarn
asking Siri how to navigate LA’s labyrinth
of neighborhoods and music trends. A
cultural chameleon, Albarn has always
managed to keep up with the times while
remaining true to himself, and this track
demonstrates that those efforts aren't
always easy. “Silent Running,” one of the
album’s strongest cuts, is a hypnotic
meditation on social media and addiction:
“Machine-assisted, I disappear.” Elsewhere,
“New Gold” is a classic Gorillaz single in its
sound and execution, pairing The
Pharchyde’s Bootie Brown with Tame
Impala’s Kevin Parker. Playing a smaller
vocal role, Albarn shines most in his role of
a curator on this song, craftily blending
the styles of his different collaborators
into something that sounds legitimately
new.
But then there’s “Baby Queen,”
where Cracker Island hits a bit of
a dip. Relying too much on vocal
layering and an over-extended
synth arpeggio to create
atmosphere, the song feels
undercooked in both melody and
structure. “Tarantula” comes off
slightly better, offering a bit more
in the way of groove and style,
aided by Bad Bunny, who delivers
an infectious vocal melody
against the lush reggaeton
production. We then move into the
record’s penultimate track,
“Skinny Ape,” which is another
standout, doing what Gorillaz does
best: taking listeners on a
wild voyage from folksy ballad territory to
a charmingly breezy (almost lazy even)
verse to straight-up synth-pop chaos. It’s
a slow burn with a strange structure, but
one that effectively coheres its disparate
parts. And it has an even stranger
inspiration: apparently born out of an
encounter with an Amazon delivery bot
(classic Albarn fodder). Like a Gorillaz
album, the track is a bit all over the
place, but it’s the kind of oddity that
Albarn so often — and indeed here —
makes work.
While it may not achieve the classic
status of high-point predecessors like
2010’s Plastic Beach — Gorillaz’ utterly
fantastic concept album about our
relationship with the environment,
disposability, and authenticity (and one
of the best records of its decade) —
Cracker Island does feel like something of
a spiritual successor. It’s quintessentially
Albarn in the way it spins anxiety and
isolation into conviviality — sailing from
ALBUM REVIEWS
one forsaken getaway to another without
forgetting that this is supposed to be a
vacation. Indeed, Albarn’s lonely tourism
may be the defining quality of a Gorillaz
album. Playing genre mixologist, he
curates sounds and collaborators from
unexpected ends of the musical map, and
yet for someone with such a global
network of friends, Albarn always seems
to wind up alone with his thoughts. On
Plastic Beach, the late, great Bobby
Womack sang of the “cloud of unknowing.”
Sometimes peace is best found not
through adventure or achievement, but
by sitting in a space of mystery and
wonder. Cracker Island ends on a similar
notion with the shantying “Possession
Island”: “The time I came to California, I
died / At the hands of the coasting queen /
Where things, they don't exist / And we're
all in this together 'til the end.” — NICK
SEIP
LABEL: Parlophone; RELEASE DATE:
February 24
22

Photo Credits:
Cover - Eli Ade/MGM Pictures; Page 1 - Les films du losange; Page 2 - Les films du losange/Mubi;
Page 3 - Eli Ade/MGM Pictures; Page 5 - Momentum Pictures; Page 6 - Film Movement; Page 8 -
Film Movement; Page 9 - RLJE Films; Page 11 - Shout! Studios; Page 12 - Oscilloscope
Laboratories; Page 14 - Netflix; Page 15- Tribeca Film Festival; Page 16 - Patrick Jones/Music Box
Films; Page 17,18 - Emma McIntyre; Page 19 - Dasha Brown; Page 21, 12 - J.C. Hewlett; Back
Cover - RLJE Films