September 2024

Like Fargeat’s debut, this is more successful as pulp than polemic, and its inevitably bombastic finale is a dud, but I can’t deny I enjoyed the ride, especially with an audience.

I don’t think I had seen this since the ’90s, at which time I scarcely noticed how deliriously over the top it is, with uniformly histrionic performances (including demented cameos from Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, and Martin Balsam, stars of the original 1962 Cape Fear) and spastic cinematography (courtesy of frequent David Lynch collaborator Freddie Francis). It’s very nearly a parody of its domestic thriller contemporaries (e.g. Fatal Attraction), ever teetering on the edge of… See more →

New favorite Saulnier joint. If Aaron Pierre isn’t the next Idris Elba, we will have failed as a civilization.

From the beginning, it was clear that data migration was going to be this redesign’s biggest, most cumbersome task, as the site was growing from 600-some blog posts to untold thousands. I assumed that reformatting the mountain of data arriving in disparate configurations from over a dozen external sources (as described in my previous post) would be the lion’s share of the work, and it would be smooth sailing from there. How wrong I was!… See more →

Sometimes stupid is fun and sometimes stupid is just stupid.

The joke here is that this is a Lifetime movie written by longtime SNL head writer Harper Steele and starring Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. Importantly, it’s not a parody of a Lifetime movie, or at least it’s not any more self-parody than any other entry in the well-worn genre. It does slightly tip its hand in a few places (especially the final scene), but mostly all involved do a surprisingly good job of playing… See more →