Gandahar
My long overdue first visit to Lightbox Film Center’s new location in the Bok building after UArts’s untimely demise two years ago. I’m glad Bok’s massive old high school auditorium is available to them, and if they decide someday to do less esoteric programming, the room can hold a lot of people. Hopefully those people will be prepared for some discomfort, because the uncushioned wooden seats are not great! By now it seems like a curse that follows Lightbox, as the International House seats back in the day were also pretty bad. I’ll also be interested to see how the auditorium’s cavernous acoustics fare with an English-language film. In any case, I will adjust, because Lightbox provides exactly the kind of rarefied film curation that should get me out of the house much more often than it does.
More film and television posts
Dr. Giggles
I initially decided against Dr. Giggles tonight in favor of watching Dark Night of the Scarecrow, but when the doctor himself, Larry Drake, showed up in the very first scene in Scarecrow, I took it as an omen and made it a double feature. I got slightly more than I expected from Giggles (his demented giggling is truly infectious!), a video store staple I never got around to seeing in its early-90s heyday. I wonder… See more →
Lady Terminator
I always assumed Lady Terminator was trying to piggyback on the success of James Cameron’s iconic film without bearing any real resemblance to it, so imagine my surprise when I witnessed a big chunk of its runtime explicitly copying scenes from The Terminator. But don’t worry, it’s a totally different movie because the Terminator is a lady this time, and she trades in the cyborg part for some Indonesian folklore involving vagina dentata.
I’ve wanted… See more →
Resident Evil
Yes! Fumbling through the dark; ears twitching at every unidentified sound; scanning the environment for weapons, ammo, keys, exits, and most importantly, threats; hoping upon hope you’re prepared to face whatever misbegotten grotesquerie comes next in this spiraling nightmare. This movie gets it, making little reference to specific Resident Evil lore but still feeling very much like a Resident Evil game, without forgetting to be cinema in the process. And its quest-oriented plot is an… See more →
Good Boy
Indy the dog is indeed a very good boy. But everything else about the movie is pretty meh.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
The many hours I spent with the first two Resident Evil games didn’t do my college GPA any favors, but the sweet spot they found between the immersive dread of a good zombie movie and the adrenaline rush of a good action/adventure game was a revelation. Two great tastes that taste great together, and they even threw in some fun puzzles while they were at it.
The series lost me when it veered into convoluted… See more →
In my dream, MAGA went manga in a new season of House of Cards. New administration officials’ hairdos looked like something out of a sloppified, live-action Dragon Ball Z. One guy grew out and gelled his nose hair.
Runaway Jury
I’ve never really had any interest in John Grisham’s work, but for some reason we’ve been watching the film adaptations the last few Sundays, and this one might be my favorite so far! Sometimes a stacked cast giving its all to a twisty potboiler premise lands just right. Its supersaturated assembly feels very of its time, and while early-aughts pop culture isn’t a source of much nostalgia for me, I’m not entirely immune to the… See more →
Night of the Juggler
I hadn’t heard of this one before its recent Blu-ray upgrade, and what a gem! It goes for broke pretty much from start to finish, with James Brolin rampaging through upper Manhattan and the Bronx as he hunts his daughter’s kidnapper, pounding his way through street gangs and crooked cops, leveling half the city in the process. In the 1970s-NYC-as-hellhole pantheon, I’d say it triangulates somewhere between Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three… See more →
Hype!
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 →