The interviews get pretty repetitive in this rock doc about the post-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” feeding frenzy in Seattle, but they’re well worth sitting through for the film’s treasure trove of live footage of a ton of great bands from the scene who never hit the big time. Oddly enough, for as much as Hype! is about the Pacific Northwest, its most memorable moment for me is a bunch of Japanese rockabilly dudes with comically… See more →

I find that a terrible movie that broadcasts its amateur maker’s steep learning curve is usually more interesting than a terrible movie made by a professional for whom it was just another day at the office. And the more ambitious the amateur’s vision, the more compelling their failure. In the case of Almost Invisible, apparently the first and last writing/producing/directing effort of a 50-something MD (currently serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for running a… See more →

Look, I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but a carefully coordinated effort by the international punk intelligentsia to keep me in the dark is the only explanation I see for why it took 37 years for this incredible album to find its way to me. Nomeansno has been on my radar since the early ’90s, when they appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Virus 100 compilation, and their committed a cappella cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death”… See more →

This thing is so overloaded with ridiculous ’80s signifiers, and its picture is so pristine, I initially thought it was a nostalgic throwback made sometime in the last 10 years (à la the dreadful Kung Fury). But the hair, the clothes, the cars, and the music are simply too perfect, and that pristine picture comes courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome, patron saints of pulling out all the stops on film restorations no one else would have… See more →

I’m not really into Christopher Nolan or epic movies, but my knowledge of Greek mythology is shamefully cursory, so I hoped seeing Nolan’s Odyssey would give me the nudge I needed to finally do some proper reading. I enjoyed the film more than I expected to; it’s very effective in many ways (Polyphemus! Circe!) and clunky in others (loud plot forecasting and a clumsy big finish), but I don’t think I looked at my watch… See more →

Filho is really good at setting a scene and immersing you in a time and place, and just as I was with the titular town in Bacurau, I was fascinated by The Secret Agent’s recreation of Recife during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s. There are so many details and characters, and I didn’t mind that many of them are superfluous to the plot. I also didn’t mind that the plot really takes… See more →

what emotional malfunction makes me so relish being brutalized in this way

“Foreigner! Foreigner! This is America! You’re not American! Get the fuck out!” I woke up on the 250th anniversary of my nation’s independence to the sound of some poor soul on the street having a manic episode, and its substance, such as it was, was thematically indistinguishable from that of any stump speech given by our current, duly-elected president.

With the exception of Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven’s studio sci-fi extravaganzas are all slathered in sociopolitical satire, and this one is arguably the most overt, with Verhoeven, recalling his childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, saying in an interview:

If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me. So I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything… See more →