Friday, March 15, 2024

February 2024 Top Ten

1. May December (Todd Haynes, 2023) Terrific film. But this entry is about the pitfalls of democracy. I cannot stand when moviegoers need to signal how well they're grasping a film's irony or ineptitude by laughing out loud. It's happened at screenings of Bloodthirsty Butchers (Andy Milligan, 1970),  Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017), and select avant-garde films. And I hear it happens every time a NYC theatre screens a Sirk film, an experience I have so far gratefully avoided. I caught May December on Netflix thereby being spared waves of self-aware snickers. Yes, of course, it's funny (or "funny") when, over dramatic piano music, Julianne Moore's Gracie stops at the fridge to wonder if she has enough hot dogs for a barbecue. In a film about a 34-year-old teacher who engaged in sexual relations with a 12-year-old student, this moment is supposed to cocoon us from becoming too wrapped up in a melodrama that threatens to devolve into a Lifetime Scandal of the Week episode. But is it laugh-out-loud funny? Are you laughing out loud because the humor of the line leaves you no other choice? Or are you laughing to signal to others that you know Haynes is employing some sort of distanciation effect? However annoying I find the resultant laughter, though, it's the chance I take when taking part in the democratic act of moviegoing. As a fervent (albeit sometimes wavering) believer in democracy, there's nothing I can do about this nor, more importantly, would I want to, if only because I'm a hypocrite on this matter. At a recent home viewing of Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), I snickered out loud at Lynch's propensity to ridicule (or poke gentle fun at?) his characters. I snickered to signal to my partner, whose attention was flagging, what Lynch was up to. But he didn't ask for any lesson. And in that moment, I was no better than any smarty pants whose throat I wanted to punch for pulling the focus away from the film onto their erudition. But again, this is democracy. I have a right to bitch and complain and be hypocritical about it all. Hence, this entry.

2. Kleenex/LiLiPUT: The Diary of the Guitarist Marlene Marder (Thrilling Living, 2023) Published in a run of 1,000 in 1986, Kleenex/LiLiPUT: Das Tagebuch der Gitarristin Marlene Marder is a mishmash of flyers, reviews, lyrics, and diary entries from Marder, the guitarist for the landmark Swiss post-punk band LiLiPUT (née Kleenex). I'm one of the lucky few in America to own a copy and while some of the reviews are in English, most of the book is in German which I cannot read (although years before I got my hands on a copy of the book, a German friend wrote down and translated the German lyrics to Kleenex's 1978 "Nice" which I can still sing auf Deutsch to this day). Tons of cool pics. But it just sat on my shelf as a curio from a band I adored so much that I used their name as my first AOL handle. Now, thanks to publisher Grace Ambrose and in a translation by Jen Calleja, it appears in English in a gorgeous coffee table edition. It's not a translation of every word and review from the German edition so LiLiPUT completists (all 100 of you?) will require both books. But the most fascinating aspect of finally getting to read Marder's work is how, well, workaday it is. LiLiPUT’s music seemed to come out of nowhere (aka Switzerland?), a joyous but alien thing rife with squelches and sax blurts and nonsense syllables and whistles and shouts expressing little about the particular women who joined together to make these sounds. But Marder, who died of cancer in 2016, never explains how something as singular as, say, 1981’s “Eisiger Wind” came to fruition. She simply chronicles the typical highs and lows of life on the road/in a band and then it’s over as decisively as “Eisiger Wind” stops after three-and-a-half variable, ass-pinning-back minutes. And perhaps that’s apt. They came to earth and then vanished leaving so little an impression even in their native country that the Swiss arts council which funded the translation had never even heard of the band. 

 3. Steacy Easton: Why Tammy Wynette Matters (University of Texas Press) The ultimate rejoinder to "it's all about the music, man" types. Easton enlarges what counts as popular music by taking seriously such possible apocrypha as the controversial October 4, 1978 kidnapping and Wynette keeping her beautician's license current long past her first success. Precisely because these stories might not be true, Easton analyzes them as a "hermetic and seamless, rooted in the domestic...kind of art"(14). Their thesis: "Wynette crafted a persona, and resisted that persona, and that this kind of persona-crafting is difficult work, work we should recognize" (13). Where more traditional studies would focus on producers and musicians, Easton honors the women who helped Wynette with her clothes, hair, and makeup, women who were more consistent and loyal than any of the men in Wynette's life. So allow me to name them here: Nanette England, Jan Smith, and Jan Howard, the latter of whom enjoyed a substantial recording career of her own. And fret not, music-only types - Easton is an excellent textual analyst, especially in discussions on camp and kitsch. 

 4. Barbra Streisand: My Name is Barbra (Viking Press). At almost 1,000 pages, an offense. A predictable offense, given the subject matter, but an offense nonetheless. There's a fine autobiography lurking within, though. She's erudite on the song choices for her many albums and revealing on the sexism she's encountered in various industries, e.g., Nick Nolte requiring her to sit on his lap so she can give him direction while filming The Prince of Tides. But perhaps a tougher editor could've eliminated such Streisandian wisdom as "1929. Not the most wonderful year, frankly, because that's when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began" 

5. Daniel Clowes: Monica (Fantagraphics). In the first issue of Eightball, Clowes ends a comic with hipster Satanists certain of an eternity of glory upon entering Hell. But Satan deems them suckers for their lifetime of devotion and dumps them into a lake of fire. His latest graphic novel ends with a similar eleventh-hour reversal. Despite all the voices from beyond or attempts at reconciliation or the quests for the meaningfulness of life that pepper this epic tale, nothing but nothing can prevent the unleashing of apocalyptic forces hellbent on (potentially? ineluctably?) destroying life on earth.
6. Fargo, Season 5 (FX) Previous seasons trafficked a bit too much in the near-supernatural character of the principal villains, a drawback that severely afflicts the Coens' No Country for Old Men. This season features a Michael Myersish bad guy as well. But he's disarmed in the end with kindness in a more humane twist on the Final Girl scenario of slasher films. Now that the superb Ted Lasso has found a way to make niceness interesting (and popular), perhaps we'll get more shows where conflicts are resolved with a plate of biscuits instead of violence. Added attraction: Jennifer Jason Leigh's Sandra Bernhard accent.

7. The Curse (Showtime) A Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie creation about a well-meaning white liberal couple (Emma Stone and Fielder) who star in a HGTV show meant to help disenfranchised locals in Española, New Mexico but who wind up gentrifying the area instead. After nine uncomfortable episodes, the titular curse voids the laws of gravity for Fielder. What starts as a hilariously demented take on Fred Astaire's ceiling dance in Royal Wedding quickly becomes harrowing before ending on an oddly comforting note as he gets sucked into space. I don't want an explanation/second season because I want to cherish this solitary moment of peace in an unbearably itchy series.

8. The Crown, "Season 6, Episode 6: Ruritania"(Netfix) Apart from the one about the abdication, this was the best episode of the entire addicting series. Under public pressure to economize, The Queen takes stock of the many people in her employ and we're granted a glimpse into what it takes to run a palace. The Warden of the Swans. The Queen's Herb Strewer. The Queen's Guide to the Sands. Yeoman of the Glass and China Pantry. Astronomer Royal. Piper to the Sovereign. Lord High Admiral of the Wash. All are interviewed by Her Majesty as she learns that "few have truly mastered the Dutch bonnet napkin fold." To the chagrin of anti-royalists, no positions are cut. But it makes for a wonderfully synchronic deep dive/pause before moving on to the Kate Middleton dénouement. 

9. Matthew Solomon, Méliès Boots: Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris (University of Michigan Press) One of the most eccentric books of film scholarship I've ever read. Solomon traces Méliès' career as a theater director and filmmaker to the earlier Méliès family success as a manufacturer of boots. He links the artisanal and industrial nature of shoe production and the international flow of commodities necessitating such a commercial endeavor with Méliès mode of creating films. As such, he places his filmmaking activity in a wildly expansive context, even getting down to the material makeup of celluloid: "The material substrate of cinema was constituted from vegetable matter (cotton, wood) that was chemically treated to yield sheets of celluloid that were cut into strips and emulsified with gelatin made of pulverized animal bones to which crystallized silver was added" (8).

10. JPEGMafia & Danny Brown: Scaring the Hoes (AWAL, 2023) Danny Brown alone is enough, the most sonically generous rapper of our time. I know little about JPEGMafia. But whatever his profile, together with Brown he's created a phantasmagoria that invites a lifetime of exploration. JPEGMafia brings the politics with references to Matt Gaetz, Kyle Rittenhouse, Marjorie Taylor Green, and kicks off the album with "First off, fuck Elon Musk." Brown is the sybarite rapping about sex, drugs, and rap (and politics, fear not). They dis/honor R&B, jazz, and, especially, gospel via samples that they rap against, like magnets stuck haphazardly on a fridge. Titles include "Orange Juice Jones," "Run the Jewels," and, the best, "Jack Harlow Combo Meal." It's all given a glistening, high-register sheen reminiscent of the PC Music aesthetic. The overall effect is akin to being bounced around a pinball machine, scary for the milquetoasts they parody on the title track but exhilarating for those of us who never mind getting our hair mussed. And if somehow all of this isn't enough for you, proceed directly to the Scaring the Hoes: DLC Pack EP which includes another gospel trash compactor number called (thank gawd for copy and paste) "No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!"

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Sunday, March 10, 2024

2023 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) - This is the kind of film American Fiction satirizes, bloated Oscar bait about the suffering of a disenfranchised group. Hell, even the title was pre-ridiculed by Daniel Clowes in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) - remember The Flower That Drank the Moon? But if it's gotta exist, let it be the work of a master. Scorsese's account of the slaughter of the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma is rich in novelistic detail and earns every moment of its 206-minute [sic] running time. And I'd say that this showcases a career-defining performance for Lily Gladstone if the exquisite Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) hadn't already done so. A-minus.

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) - I'd probably knock it down to B+ today. But I had it at A-minus when I reviewed it after Barbenheimer weekend.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) - I can't believe it either. Reviewed here. B+.

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) - Tender, welcome evocations of Black middle-class quotidian existence vie with corny satirical jabs at white liberal well-meaningness, promising yet another two-steps-forward, six-steps-back prestige project. But then there's the ending which I initially loved because I thought Jefferson was offering us a pomo Choose Your Own Ending type of dénouement à la Clue. Watching it more closely a second time, I now realize it's more conventional than that. Still, it's looser and jazzier than most prestige projects ever get. I'm impressed. B+.

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)  Like American Fiction, a film to curl up with at various points of the year - December for this one, July for the former. Reviewed here. B+.

Barbie (Greta Gerwig) - Reviewed here. B+.

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet) - Solid. But only the ambiguity of "did he fall or was he pushed?" and its was-it-really 152-minute running time save it from a certain Investigation Discovery feel. Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) covers similar ambiguities with more complexity and a better ventilated conception. It expands where Anatomy of a Fall implodes into its overly localized concerns. And Saint Omer is half an hour shorter. B.

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) - One of the biggest disappointments of the year from a director capable of the very best (Birth, Under the Skin). Reviewed here. B-minus.

Past Lives (Celine Song) - Even more localized than Anatomy of a Fall, a considerable feat given that the film concerns a woman who leaves her native South Korea to become a writer in the USA. Bittersweet if you don't think too hard about it. I just want to know if all the talk about 80,000 layers of fate and past lives and future lives is an apologia for ghosting. A much better film about the importance of living this present life: Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2015). B-minus.

Maestro (Bradley Cooper) - Ugh. And it looked so enticing on the New York Film Festival lineup. Panned here. C-minus. 

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Monday, March 04, 2024

Yorgos Lanthimos finally makes a good film!

I'd loathed every single Lanthimos film I'd seen until 2018's The Favourite where his feel-bad cinema for once evinced some mild subtlety. And now I'm semi-bowled over that he's finally directed a good film. Based on Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, Poor Things traces the rebirth of Bella (Emma Stone, typically fantastic), a Frankenstein's monster created by Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a surgeon who has reanimated her near-dead body with a baby's brain. As Bella moves beyond mastering basic motor skills and simple sentence structures, she self-actualizes into a brilliant woman, freeing herself from Baxter and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) and falling in and out of love with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lumpy lawyer with whom she jetsets around the world. Much of Bella's self-actualization resides in the realm of the sexual - she eagerly becomes a prostitute and fails to see the logic in monogamy. For some viewers, this trajectory makes her a feminist icon; for others, it's the ultimate male fantasy of unbridled sexual availability. But what makes Poor Things somewhat transcend this debate is that it takes her self-actualization as a totality. From eating properly to not punching a crying baby, Bella's journey in becoming reveals the processes we all go through in fashioning a socially acceptable presenting self. And along the way, she/we can reject any of the norms to which we're supposed to adhere, e.g., she has no need to adjust her rigid dance moves if the hilariously unconventional ballroom sequence is any measure. Poor Things helps us examine the truths we hold to be self-evident and Bella's struggle with them reminds us that the self is a perpetual work in becoming.

Of course, how much of the thrill of self-fashioning on display can be laid at Lanthimos' feet is up for debate, especially since I haven't read Gray's novel. Lanthimos fans can be reassured that his misanthropic fish-eye lens remains, thus potentially making Bella yet another of his objects of contempt. Nevertheless, there's a purity of conception here that I never would have thought possible in his cinema. It's no longer impossible imagining him joining us in the human race.

Grade: a carefully hedged B+

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Thursday, February 22, 2024

Peter Gabriel is Okay! And That's Bad!

To paraphrase myself, the only thing worse than a bad album is an okay one. Of course, Peter Gabriel is a musical artist of more substance than, say, Sha Na Na or Burt Reynolds, to choose two recent horrors I've accessed via Apple Music. But where Sha Na Na enrage me and Reynolds's sole album makes me guffaw, Gabriel's discography hangs in the air moist with solid intentions, waiting for you to honor it. Plenty of music lovers have honored it such that it compels you to wrestle with the oeuvre. But for me, despite the occasional arresting moment or even entire song, the music remains suspended in mid-air, rarely traveling down my auditory canal and into my musical memory hole. Across a discography, such inoffensive ambience soon becomes irritating and that's when okay shades into bad.

The bland masala of Gabriel's oeuvre derives in part from a neutralizing of source genres. No authenticity queen, I get itchy invoking a genre purity that doesn't exist. Nevertheless, on the first four self-titled albums, it sounds as if Gabriel aimed to prog out within tighter new wave and post-punk structures but failed to achieve the highs in any of the respective genres.* That's why I'm constantly longing for something with more foreground spritz, something punkier or funkier and just weirder, when listening. 1978's "D.I.Y." may have been his tribute to (parody of?) punk. To the extent that it's not, it's a perfectly nice number with a lazy piano that rolls more than it rocks (at least in the chorus). To the extent that it is, then lawd gawd why not listen to (gulps) the real thing? Or even the unreal thing, e.g., Blondie's "One Way or Another" from the same year. "San Jacinto" has a creepy coda...that starts 5:20 into a 6:34 track of trebly tinkle. "I Have the Touch" is a slinky dance track that unfortunately stays at "Safety Dance" levels of speed and the nifty section when Gabriel mirrors the rhythm with the "Pull my chin/Stroke my hair" verses again comes near the end of the song. I love "Shock the Monkey" unreservedly, "Solsbury Hill" is a roving classic, and "Games Without Frontiers" dazzles despite Kate Bush's hideous French pronunciation. But too much of his oeuvre through 1982 passes by respectfully in the background. It's no surprise that he soon became a soundtrack maestro. 

I assumed 1986's So was where Gabriel took whatever miasma he'd been working up for the past near-decade and whipped into shape. But even at the time, I couldn't stand "Sledgehammer" and "Don't Give Up." Revisiting again after almost thirty years, I'm nevertheless stunned at how much I cannot stand his (American) pop breakthrough. The former trudges by at 96 BPM, a lynchable offense on most dancefloors, never mind the grody lyric that allowed the thing to wink-nudge its way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The latter raises the suspicion that Gabriel was trying for a pop-new age fusion, damn near inaudible in its wispy, detail-free atmospheric(s). It's a charge that could be leveled against baffling ILM fave "Mercy Street" and even John Cusack fave "In Your Eyes" as well. That's over half the album's running time right there. Thankfully, "Big Time" picks up the pace. But it's the only sign of life on this multiplatinum appliance. 

He should've stuck with soundtracking after that point. Us, the belated follow-up, is damn near unlistenable, punishingly slow and with a pathetic attempt to match "Sledgehammer"'s char position in "Steam." And just as I wisely never bothered listening to those Sha Na Na and Burt Reynolds albums in their entirety, I cherry picked Gabriel's post-Us oeuvre, taking in only the focus cuts of 2002's Up and appreciating his 2010 cover of the Magnetic Fields' "The Book of Love." Last year's I/O came out in various mixes and I quickly got sleepy trying to determine which I should listen to. What little I heard demonstrated that he was still atmopshering around too much for my ever-unsettled ass. 

Peter Gabriel 1 - I'm in a Car: B

Peter Gabriel 2 - I'm Scratching: B-minus

Peter Gabriel 3 - I'm Melting: B

Peter Gabriel 4 - Security (Ok this is one of the coolest, creepiest album covers ever): B

So: C

Us: C-minus

* This is how I explain other okay 1980s artists who become annoying in their okayness. INXS fused dance and rock and blanded out at both. U2 melded arena rock with post-punk and then tried to meld that mélange with pop and wound up with edge-less bloat or blurry wallpaper.


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Thursday, February 01, 2024

Big Star: Radio City (Ardent, 1974)

A shorthand for determining which of the three terrific Big Star albums is the masterpiece is to recognize Big Star as a semipopular band. Semipopular is Robert Christgau's coinage "for music that is popular in form but not fact--self-consciously arty music that plays off popular or formerly popular usages but isn't (sup posedly) designed to sell." So 1972's #1 Record errs too much on the popular side of the equation while 1978's Third/Sister Lovers gets lost in the semi wild. Side one of #1 Record laid down the foundations for power pop, a classic on those terms alone. But side two slips into the genericism that afflicts any strain of pop, power most definitely. And Third/Sister Lovers had such a tortured release history that there's no definitive edition of its sere, clanky psychodramas (although Complete Third reportedly collects every drib and drab recorded during the original 1974 sessions).

Yeah no, Radio City is Big Star's masterpiece, one of the ten greatest albums of the 1970s (do I hear five? Sold!). And yet it's difficult to recommend to non-music critics/geeks, especially any potential customers for the advertised pop. Music lovers of a certain age will notice that the very first sound on the album was replicated by Kenny Loggins for the central guitar riff of "Footloose." But opening track "O My Soul" is "Footloose" fed through a wood chipper. Like many of the songs on Radio City, it lurches forward like a gawky teenager trudging through snowbanks on the way to high school. Sometimes this kid manages a sprint. But usually, he loses his footing. One of the guitar lines sounds like a refugee from a Burroughsian cut-up experiment. Another offers some unfunky chicken scratching. A Mellotron pipes in now and then with extraneous (drunken?) commentary. And the entire things lumbers on for nearly six minutes. Heck a way to kick off a "pop" record.

And it doesn't get much easier from there, at least upon initial impact. Contrary to Chuck Berry's dictum on rock and roll music, the band keeps losing the backbeat which makes Radio City a no go for dancing. Its greatest track (see below) moves so slowly that it's difficult to use a BPM counter glacially enough to figure out just how slowly (84 or 42 BPM depending on how you're counting; I say the latter in terms of feel). However assiduously each song was constructed, most of the hooks and sound effects announce themselves as afterthoughts. Radio City is a temple of attention deficit disorder. Even at its most incandescently chartbound ("September Gurls" went to #1 in the minds of actual-pop agnostics the world over), every number is trying to score some Ritalin. To balance off the lengthy opening track with appropriate perversity, the album ends with two fragments totaling barely three minutes (presaged by #1 Record's last cut, the 59-second moan "ST 100/6").

Nonetheless, Radio City remains one of the most welcoming albums ever recorded, crazy porous and with myriad entry points. Resident pop theorist-practitioner Alex Chilton sounded more like a teen here than when he was an actual teen idol fronting the Box Tops with such hits as "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" in the late 1960s. His put-upon whine helps the zany structures go down more easily. Once acclimated, you hear not forbidding avant-gardery but sweet confusion, a confusion that persists for so many of us long past adolescence as indeed it did for Chilton who never got the glory (i.e., money) he deserved. I hear ache and a willingness to connect in its every intricate detail and suspect that eternity is not long enough to extinguish its ability to garner obsessive listening. 

Grade: A+

This is how I'd rank the songs in order of preference. 1 and 2 have long been etched in stone. 9 - 12 too. Any song in between could fluctuate, e.g., I just bumped up "You Get What You Deserve" two notches. 

1. What's Going Ahn
2. September Gurls
3. Life Is White
4. You Get What You Deserve
5. O My Soul
6. Morpha Too
7. Daisy Glaze
8. Back Of A Car
9. Way Out West
10. I'm In Love With A Girl
11. Mod Lang
12. She's A Mover 

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Monday, January 29, 2024

Gram Parsons: Grievous Angel (Reprise, 1974)

As the chief architect of country rock, Gram Parsons epitomized fusing the thing and not the thing which means Grievous Angel was bound to be greeted with indifference by the audiences for both country and rock in 1974. Indeed, it peaked at a pitiful 195 on the Billboard albums chart, better than the previous year's outing, GP, which missed the chart altogether, but 24 places below The Velvet Underground and Nico's high of 171. Now, of course, it's long since entered classic status even though the most country thing about it is how it emulates the mishmash quality of the average country album - covers, originals, live cuts, filler if you want it. But what it lacks in gestalt, it more than makes up in originals that outshine the covers. The masterpieces are "Return of the Grievous Angel" and "$1000 Wedding." Both feature lyrics and song structures as knotty as anything in Steely Dan's oeuvre, e.g., Genius thinks "supposed to be a funeral" is the latter's chorus, and yet both remain super catchy (also like Steely Dan); you don't know whether to hum "Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels" or "And I remembered something you once told me" once the album is over. And while "In My Hour of Darkness" concerns the recent deaths of several Parsons contemporaries, including the beautiful actor/country music hopeful Brandon DeWilde, it sounds like it was written alongside "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" in 1907. 

Grade: A

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Tuesday, January 16, 2024

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

I wanted to adore The Holdovers. This is the kind of warm, cozy film I can imagine someone keeping on in the background during that odd interzone between Christmas and New Year's Eve when those lucky enough to be off work have no clue what to do with themselves. Indeed, The Holdovers takes place across that very week when Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, gangly and totes adorbs) gets held over for the holidays with several other unfortunate students at the New England boarding school they attend. Largely as a result of his curmudgeonly behavior, classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is tasked with supervising the holdovers and much tension arises when he expects diligent study from the misfits under his care. Payne, along with screenwriter David Hemingson and cinematographer Eigil Bryld, deserve whatever Oscar nods may come their way for evoking moments when something could happen. With an empty campus as their canvas, the film's architects paint situations pregnant with possibility, to quote Margo Channing in a film underestimated for its warmth, including the possibility of sitting on your ass and doing nothing at all.

Would that the film progressed in such a lazy fashion. But alas, the lash of narrative progression must strike down upon us. It's ye olde vertically compelling, horizontally moribund problem of mainstream cinema once more. In a crusty deus ex machina, the group of holdovers gets broken up when one student's rich father arrives on campus via helicopter and airlifts all of the the boys save Angus to a ski trip. That leaves Angus alone with Paul as both Come To Terms With Things and Payne abandons the polyphonic density of, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest film Licorice Pizza (2021) for story beats that march forward in lockstep. In a career-defining performance I hope/predict will earn her an Oscar, Da'Vine Joy Randolph airs out the proceedings a bit as Mary Lamb, a cook mourning the loss of her son in the Vietnam War. But the depth she provides is not enough to swerve away from the predictable spectacle of Paul finding a heart and Angus learning valuable lessons on the cusp of adulthood. Still, I expect to enjoy The Holdovers in fitful chunks around 2038 on whatever streamer is left standing long after they've all adopted ad-supported plans.

Grade: B+

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