Diary of a Teenage Girl: (dir: Marielle Heller) It's 1976, and a fifteen-year-old girl starts the movie with, "I just had sex. Holy shit!" Yeah, it's another coming-of-age thing, but with more truth than most and zero glamor. Minnie (Bel Powley) makes the weird, overbold choices a girl makes when she's exploring her sexual power, and the consequences are not always what you'd expect. Like in life! This is based on a graphic-novel memoir, and it's drolly unflinching. The acting is good: Powley, Kristin Wiig as her mom, Alexander Skarsgard as their mutual boyfriend, and Christopher Meloni (from one of those 10,000 cop shows on TV) is particularly good as the affected bohemian who is the father of Minnie's half-sister. It's photographed with that '70s, "super-8"-ish look, which may be a cliched choice, but it does help transport one back to a time when there were Prell commercials and people drove station wagons instead of SUVs.
They got two details weirdly wrong: in 1976, only rich people had television remotes. Those of us with librarian parents (a thing Minnie and I shared in common) stood up and crossed the room to change the channel. And the haircut the mom refers to as a "Farrah Fawcett" is by no stretch of anyone's imagination even close to it. The Farrah Fawcett haircut was a very particular and exact phenomenon; this girl just has long, kind of shaggy, bleached hair.
IN SUMMARY: Probably one of the best movies of the year.
Chi-raq: (dir: Spike Lee) Heavily stylized verse musical with a big-assed ax it's unabashedly grinding. At its best, it's a heartfelt cry for America to drag its politicians out of the NRA's pocket and get some grip on the madness. Angela Bassett is the beautiful heart of the piece, playing a woman of strong ethics and fearless activism.
At its worst, it's didactic and preachy, vulgar and insulting, often simultaneously. It's written in verse, which gives it both a flowing, hip-hop cadence and an elevated sense of the ceremonial. The main plot, culled from Aristophanes, involves every woman in the world withholding sex until the men come to their senses and stop making war. It's completely absurd, makes no sense, marches boldly into the ridiculous. (Lee pays tribute to the Warriors, a Walter Hill action flick which inspired my generation and which was also drawn from the old Greeks, from Xenophon's Anabasis. He references it both in the casting of David Patrick Kelly as the confederate officer and in the bit where the men sneak into the fortress rattling keys and chanting, "Bitches and hos! Come out to play!") The subplot, about a little girl caught in the gang-war crossfire and the hunt to bring forward her killer, rings true and culminates rather beautifully.
IN SUMMARY: The moral of the story seems to be that men are, possibly congenitally, so venal, libidinous and stupid that they are to be pitied rather than held responsible for their actions, and it is up to the female half of humanity to become Victorian "Better Angels" of the Madonna-Whore variety, manipulating men through their weaknesses into disarming and saving the world. Yeah, it's crap. Interestingly, the only man who stands fully and vocally with the women is the white priest, who, the movie suggests, is emasculated, both by his vow of celibacy and his whiteness.
Still, if you don't mind musicals, it's done in bold, aggressive strokes with a firm hand, and goes off in interesting directions you'll probably never see again.
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