I miss when Aoife O'Donovan was still with Crooked Still, but her voice is as gorgeous as ever, and the string quartet she's paired with here is just mmph.

Picked these up yesterday. So begins my Cronenbergian transformation into a feminine creature.

Regan you beautiful bastard.

Pretty Good Year
(Totally accurate to how 2020 has gone so far, right???)

Adam Cramer, a D.C.-based white supremacist gone South to stoke anger at integration to a fever pitch, is the role Shatner was born to play. One of the reasons his nice-guy act as Captain Kirk never quite washes is that he's unable to cover up the self-satisfied sense of superiority nestled beneath his skin, the smug disdain for others hiding in his smirks and condescending delivery. Here that smarmy self-worship is put to perfect use, in a performance that's not necessarily "good" but has an arresting ring of truth. His racist screeds aren't lies—he really does want to see a white America, free of the filth of minorities—but it's obvious from his very first interaction with the townsfolk of Caxton that he loathes the hicks he preaches to as much as he does the black people he seeks to drive out from their midst. He gets off on manipulating them, on their unthinking hero worship, but in his Anglo-Saxon empire they would be second-class citizens at best, casting their eyes toward the Great Man and begging to kiss his ring.

But of course he's really no great man at all, and where Mirror Universe Kirk is pure, makeup-slathered id, Cramer crumbles at the first sign of resistance. He's a B-movie Harry Powell, intimidating through sheer force of charisma until someone dares to poke him, reduced to hysterical appeals to the mob's intelligence only after his opinion of them as sheep has become obvious to them. If only Shatner had been born several decades later, he would have played a perfect Richard Spencer.

As for the rest of the movie? It walks a fine line between brutal honesty and reassurance, which unfortunately lessens the impact of its social critique. Even pulled punches, however, can shock—the film's climactic portrayal of phony rape charges by a white woman against a black man is blunt and horrifyingly accurate, even if it quickly dials back its fury by hollowly allowing the white lynch mob to reconsider when presented with reasoned argument. That the creative forces behind the camera were white men clearly shows—the black "characters" are passive, saintly, there to serve as a moral but not to exist as people (save for a quick, biting "I don't know about you, but I can't tell 'em apart" from one black student to another as they eye two white jocks walking down the hall)—but that anger, even if it still doesn't go far enough, has aged far better than mealy-mouthed attempts to find the common humanity in both sides of segregation.

Under ninety minutes and available for free on YouTube!

May I have this waltz, Mr. Chrystie? (Apologies for the very hot mic/gonks.)

Suddenly Seymour

Oh hey, another great film soundtrack! Desplat's score for Gerwig's Little Women is very good in general but this cue in particular (starts at about 34 seconds in) is just sweepingly lovely.

Thomas Newman's take on the same scene from the Gillian Armstrong adaptation is no slouch either.

Re: assumptions, nope! Love TLJ (and I'm curious why you think most "film people" don't enjoy it, as most people I know who meet that description adore it).

Got dragged to see this a second time by family, and one little detail upset me so much that I ended up writing a longish thing about it. So, breaking my word from above and posting it here.

Remember how in The Last Jedi, when brother and sister are finally reunited, Luke and Leia's theme plays and it's beautiful and touching and meaningful? In The Rise of Skywalker it plays over Lando talking to Jannah, a character he's never met before, because they needed something to fill the space.

This little moment--the movie doing all it can to induce meaning through the brute force of nostalgia without context--is repeated again and again throughout the film's runtime. In The Last Jedi, Kylo smashing his mask symbolizes his rejection of his legacy as a crutch; when he reconstructs the mask in The Rise of Skywalker, it's because JJ Abrams liked the prop. In The Force Awakens, the wreckage of Star Destroyers symbolizes the failures of postwar liberalism to dispel the ghosts of fascism, and the Skywalker saber the burden of the past that the younger generation must carry; in The Rise of Skywalker, the wreckage of the Death Star is a pit stop on an unending series of fetch quests and the Skywalker saber is reassembled for the trailer shots. In The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, Han and Luke's deaths are sacrifices to reach humanity in those who have none, to save friends and family, to spark hope in the galaxy; in The Rise of Skywalker, Leia dies because the real-life circumstances of the shoot required it.

This is a movie composed entirely of gesture and reference and shades of iconography without any deeper sense of what these building blocks mean or why they matter. It's a desperate plea for these things to be loved because you loved them once upon a time, not because of what they represent or what resonance new context could give them. And even that kind of feeble parody is beyond its grasp--the imagery is slathered so thick it becones ridiculous and ugly, the score strains to thrill but is only a tired ghost of what it was, the plotlines that reach into the past take all the things about this trilogy that were genuinely new and vital and stamp them into the ground. Its appeal to past joys is so overwhelming that it kills anything that made us love these new characters--there is no interiority here, no inner lives or motivations, just puppets hurtling from beat to beat to serve a pyramid of retcons and reversals because "it's what the fans want."

"You may find," says a certain alien in a certain other space franchise, "that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting." And after all their entitled, witless, screaming wanting, this--this clumsy, cowardly, shambling reanimated corpse--is all the fans will have.