Overrated/Underrated: “Boss Baby’s” acclaim, and Acetone earns a well-deserved retrospective
UNDERRATED
“Ingrid Goes West” (2017): Starring Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen, this edgy comedy about a stalker energized and enabled by her Instagram feed isn’t quite the biting satire of social media and its many hashtag-adorned “#influencers” we need, but it comes close. Plaza is an unsettling bundle of need as Ingrid, who sets about rebuilding her life in the image of Olsen, who portrays any number of digital tastemakers curating their brand through their image-conscious shots of launch parties or Joshua Tree weekends. Judgment doesn’t come easy for anyone here; the rest of us maybe aren’t so lucky.
Acetone’s “1992-2001”: Specializing in a languid blend of spacious psychedelic rock and Americana that paired well with hazy L.A. summers, the indie rock band Acetone broke up far too soon in 2001 with the suicide of bassist-vocalist Richie Lee. Though the band’s last and best album, “York Blvd.,” provides a poignant epitaph, Light in the Attic recently released this career-spanning collection of superb outtakes and under-heard tracks along with a novel-length band biography that testifies to what drew a cult-like legion of fans that includes Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce and Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star.
OVERRATED
“The Boss Baby” (2017): Forever known as “The Oscar-nominated ‘Boss Baby’ ” thanks to the academy’s nominations announcement this week, this movie featuring the voice of Alec Baldwin as an infant in a suit made a lot of money and, therefore, apparently deserves a shot in the animated feature category. While there’s some comfort for fans of the snubbed “Lego Batman” in knowing this category belongs to Pixar’s beautiful “Coco” (which could have landed in the best picture category), there’s some question how this middling movie got here. Maybe voters thought it was an “SNL” sketch?
The indie cred of streaming TV: Back when internet upstarts were striving to disrupt the programming dominance of the major networks, you could count on the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Hulu to cast a wide net for an audience with idiosyncratic shows like “Lady Dynamite,” “One Mississippi” and “Difficult People.” But now that some time and money has passed, everyone wants an awards-gobbling blockbuster series, and all of the above shows have been canceled. While you could argue some were too wonderfully weird for a big stage, it seems the more an industry is disrupted, the more it stays the same.
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