Jeffrey Malone watches every new episode of Saturday Night Live and then organizes the sketches into the following categories: “Love It” (potentially Best of the Season-worthy), “Keep It” (perfectly adequate), or “Leave It” (in need of a rewrite, to say the least). Then he concludes with assessments of the host and musical guest.
Love It
Holes – So Beck and Kyle discovered that clothes are just holes to cover up your bodily holes, and then they made a song about it, and now we get to bask in the joy of their wonder. It sounds like a cheesy ’80s power ballad, although the sartorial style is more reminiscent of Michael Bolton and other over-the-top soft rockers. And there’s even some “We Didn’t Start the Fire” influence there with the rhyming of Federico Fellini and Roberto Benigni. Wonderfully singular.
Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.
Movies –Long Shot (Theatrically Nationwide)
Podcasts
–Primetime (Premieres May 9) – Hosted by Vox Cultural Critic Todd VanDerWerff!
–The Ron Burgundy Podcast – This premiered back in February, but somehow I’m only realizing just now that it’s available.
We may be living in a decidedly digital age, but believe it or not, there are still people in 2019 who write honest-to-goodness books. Olivier Assayas’ French relationship dramedy Non-Fiction ponders what the Internet hath wrought on the world of writing by way of examining the life of a literary editor. This film is hardly the condemnation of modern technology that premise might suggest, though. Instead, it features thoughtful conversations about how online discourse has actually amplified writing and maybe even improved it overall. A series of discussions about the status of literature may sound boring to some, but at least Assayas and his actors bring the necessary gusto to their dialogue. Alas, Non-Fiction eventually just devolves into a series of affairs whose consequences feel paper-thin and that do not really have anything to do with the literary industry, beyond the fact that some of the people involved coincidentally happen to work in that business.
Non-Fiction is Recommended If You Like: French people constantly talking and/or sleeping with each other
Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.
Movies
–Avengers: Endgame (Theatrically Nationwide)
–Knock Down the House (Starts Streaming May 1 on Netflix) – Political doc about AOC and other up-and-comers!
TV
–Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (April 27 on TBS) – Samantha Bee and the rest of the Full Frontal crew are at it again.
Music
-2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony (April 27 on HBO) – Radiohead, Roxy Music, and Janet Jackson, oh my!
As the movie with perhaps the most tortured backstory in the history of cinema, it is unsurprising that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote incorporates plenty of elements about the difficulty of mounting a massive production. Of course, as it revolves around a man who is convinced that he is actually Cervantes’ title adventurer after starring in an adaptation of the novel, it was always going to be somewhat meta. I don’t think Terry Gilliam taps into anything especially uniquely profound in this regard, but it does feel like he is facing the plain truth right in its face. I have made a few short films myself, and I have a brother and plenty of friends who have worked in film and TV, so I understand the instinct to incorporate what’s going in your life into the films you make. Thus, in the end, this whole quixotic endeavor feels oddly comforting to me.
I give The Man Who Killed Don QuixoteA Hug and a Lullaby.
Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.
Movies
–The Curse of La Llorona (Theatrically Nationwide) – I have to watch all the horror!
–Hail Satan? (Limited Theatrically)
–Little Woods (Limited Theatrically)
TV
–I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson (Premieres April 23 on Netflix) – This looks crazy.
Starring: Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velásquez, Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen, Roman Christou, Marisol Ramirez, Sean Patrick Thomas, Tony Amendola
Director: Michael Chaves
Running Time: 93 Minutes
Rating: R for Intense Horror Makeup, Drowning, Skin Burns, and Some Gunshots
Release Date: April 19, 2019
It’s generally promising when a horror movie grounds itself in some well-crafted folklore, and The Curse of La Llorona offers a bit of an emotional doozy. Originating in Mexico, the tale of La Llorona (“The Weeping Woman” in English) is of a mother who drowned her two sons after becoming enslaved by a blind rage from discovering her husband with another woman. She now lurks the spirit world in a white gown, taking other children as her own and often drowning them as well. A notice posted by the studio outside the theater assured me that La Llorona is indeed somewhere out in the real world. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to accept that as effective showmanship. This is a monster with a formidable motivation, enough to make you go, “Well, what are we going to do if she targets us?”
The standoff comes to Linda Cardellini as a widowed mother working as a social worker in 1973 Los Angeles. She first encounters La Llorona through her work with children living in unsafe homes. If you want to, you can dig into the subtext about the entanglement of domestic abuse and folklore. But this film is more about the surface thrills of discovering just how the boogeyman will pop up when someone closes a bathroom cabinet or opens up an umbrella. If you’re looking for camera tricks that say “Boo!”, La Llorona will scratch that itch. It also excels in some surprisingly goofy tension-breaking, especially when Raymond Cruz (Tuco of Breaking Bad) shows up as an ex-priest mystic man to exorcise some evil spirits by rubbing eggs all over the house. Weirdly enough, that moment makes sense in context. Bottom line: La Llorona efficiently pulls off its weirder-than-expected approach with a confident use of the standard horror toolkit.
The Curse of La Llorona is Recommended If You Like: Mama, Annabelle, The power of the crucifix
Release Date: April 17, 2019 (New York)/April 19, 2019 (Los Angeles)
After watching the documentary Hail Satan?, I am seriously considering joining the Satanic Temple, even though I have been perfectly happy all my life as a Roman Catholic. Maybe I can have it both ways. If dual national citizenship is a thing, then why can’t dual religious membership also be?
Hail Satan? is directed by Penny Lane, who became a Satanic Temple member herself after shooting wrapped. The Temple does not worship the Christian conception of the devil (though in some ways its teachings are based on an alternate interpretation of the Bible), nor does it promote unseemly practices like blood orgies or human sacrifice. It is also separate from the LeVeyan Satanism of the Church of Satan that has been around since the 1960s, though it does share some similar tenets. The Satanic Temple was co-founded in 2013 by Malcolm Jarry and Lucien Greaves, the latter of whom serves as the group’s spokesperson and the primary voice of Hail Satan? Greaves is eminently logical and boundlessly patient, making him a convincing salesperson to the intellectually disaffected and a compelling personality to base a documentary around.
For many, the appeal of the Satanic Temple is that it avoids dogmatism while offering the community of organized religion that wouldn’t be a part of a fully atheistic lifestyle. And save for that communal aspect, much of the Temple’s purpose is civic activism, in the form of holding an American society accountable to its ideals of religious tolerance. Much of the documentary focuses around efforts to erect a statue of the goat-headed, bewinged Baphomet outside the Oklahoma and Arkansas State Capitols alongside Ten Commandments monuments in the name of making it clear that the government is not playing favorites when it comes to religions. What could come off as trollish in less thoughtful hands instead comes off as the highest form of patriotism from the Satanic Temple. Even when some cracks start to show within the Temple’s ranks (as they almost inevitably do in any organization that grows to a certain size), it is gratifying to witness the portrait of a group living up to its own ideals.
Hail Satan? is Recommended If You Like: Going Clear, Religious freedom, Governments living up to their constitutional ideals
Jeffrey Malone watches every new episode of Saturday Night Live and then organizes the sketches into the following categories: “Love It” (potentially Best of the Season-worthy), “Keep It” (perfectly adequate), or “Leave It” (in need of a rewrite, to say the least). Then he concludes with assessments of the host and musical guest.
Love It
The Actress – When you’re an actor, I imagine you take your rewarding parts wherever you can find them. So as mundane and ridiculous as this sketch is, it strikes me as ringing 100% true. Not in the sense that Emma Stone actually has experience playing a non-sexual role in a porn video, but in the sense that she, and so many others, have surely had bizarre moments of character discovery, or have at least been fighting for them. That feeling of vulnerability is powerful, and I’m glad we got to witness it.
There are a lot of bare breasts in The Beach Bum. In the interest of naked parity, I must report that there is sadly not a whole lot of corresponding male nudity, although we do get a peek at Matthew’s McConaughey while he’s taking a drunken leak. This movie is basically the diary of a hedonist in Florida, and frankly, it could have been even more hedonistic, though it is having plenty of fun with itself in its shaggy structure. There actually does seem to be a bit of a message here, something about whether or not great men should be given the rope they’re often given to make great art, as Moondog’s shenanigans are sort of excused while he’s encouraged to write his next brilliant poetry collection. But this is also the movie in which Snoop Dogg plays a character named “Lingerie” and Martin Lawrence gets his foot bitten off by a shark, and those things seem just as important as any high-minded social consciousness.
I give The Beach BumAn Agreement to Drink a Few Sips of PBR.
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