Film diary

Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say.

At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of America, an autocratic political party whose introduction of the Purge, an annual… See more →

I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.

There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank… See more →

I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds.

Still, Anarchy is an unqualified improvement over the first Purge film, whose one-note home-invasion plot Anarchy upgrades to… See more →

I was once again unable to make it to the animation festival in Ottawa this year, and the Philadelphia Film Festival once again filled some of that gap with a well-curated program of shorts. I’m feeling pretty raw lately about a variety of big things both personal and global, and several of these films collectively poked at all those things, so while I don’t regret attending, I did come away from the screening more emotionally… See more →

In keeping with this year’s ad hoc and mostly lowbrow Robtober, and since most of the Purge movies are available on streaming services I currently have access to, I’m reluctantly giving them a go. I didn’t hate this one any less than the first time I saw it; it’s perhaps the low-water mark of boneheaded Blumhouse mediocrity, with a kindergarten-level attempt at social commentary, cut-rate cinematography, and the most irritating villain this side of Martin… See more →

We’ve reached the “am I the asshole” stage of my reproachful trudge through this franchise, as Terrifier 3 ostensibly comes ever closer to the sort of 1980s genre trash that’s always warmed my contaminated heart. Its Silent Night, Deadly Night homage is unmistakable, its anamorphic cinematography nails the era’s unpolished 35mm aesthetic, and its uninhibited gore gleefully actualizes what all those VHS boxes on my local West Coast Video’s horror shelves always promised but rarely… See more →

In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny bicycles were probably not drawn directly from the curriculum of an existing clown college, but they at least evince an awareness that such institutions actually exist.

In an adjacent hemisphere of the late 20th century entertainment world, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a gonzo B-movie throwback, mines campy scares from… See more →

Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as plain (and plainly mortifying) as our Commander in Chief’s yearning for a Nobel Prize. Despite the fact that Art, after being introduced gearing up Rambo-style in an unearned montage, indulges in some hacksaw shenanigans nasty enough to arouse the kind of guy who owns more than one Cannibal… See more →

It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all time, so it’s time once again for me to hold my nose and commune with the zeitgeist.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Terrifier’s stabby antihero, Art the Clown, was the product of an 11-year-old Fangoria subscriber’s very first ChatGPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008… See more →

I always assumed there must be something transcendent about this 1980 live-action Popeye adaptation, seeing as a) it sure seems like a really dopey idea, b) there was nothing in Robert Altman’s critically admired oeuvre at that time (or since) to suggest he was the obvious guy to direct it, and c) it was the brainchild of Robert Evans, who produced The Godfather and Chinatown. Could it really be as artless a ploy as, “We… See more →

One of the best random laughs I’ve had in the last few years was at a “Remember when RoboCop shot that dude in the dick” t-shirt, and this fever dream of a comedy collaboration is a kind of spiritual sibling of that shirt, especially since it really goes for broke in reimagining that particular moment. All of RoboCop’s 60 scenes are remade by different people, often sketch comedy troupes, and while they don’t all… See more →

I remember getting MGM’s This Is Spinal Tap DVD when it was released in 2000 and being giddy at all the special features. The deleted scenes were longer than the movie, revealing that a ton of great stuff was sacrificed in the service of making the final cut an essentially perfect comedy. But alas, while watching Spinal Tap II, I shuddered to think what was on the cutting room floor, because the vast majority of… See more →

A pretty surface-level look at abstract painter Mary Heilmann, generally more interested in how many cool artists she hung out with and galleries she worked with than in what motivated her actual work.

Constraints are absolutely critical to my own creative process, and I’m more accepting than I used to be of process being part of (or maybe all of) what a creative work is about, as opposed to merely being a means to an end. So I can appreciate the bargain at the heart of origami: A sculptural form is created entirely from folding a single square of paper, with no other materials involved.

I do, however,… See more →

When Fire Walk with Me came out, everyone hated it, and now everyone loves it, and I’m the guy in the middle.

I don’t mind so much that it doesn’t really offer any details on Laura Palmer’s final days that weren’t already covered in Twin Peaks, and I appreciate that it gives us the chance to directly empathize with Laura’s perspective for the first time. But I’ve always found her more compelling as a spectral… See more →

Weapons has a good summer mystery/thriller premise—an entire class of third graders disappears individually from their homes one night—and thankfully the grating little-kid voiceover filling in the backstory gets out of the way soon enough. What follows is a master class in Magnolia-style nonlinear plotting, with a variety of character POVs across the same timeline unfolding one by one, each new angle making the mystery weirder, scarier, and—crucially—funnier.

As this is not some Lynchian… See more →

I’m not sure I’ve seen quite this ratio of smart presentation to stupid content before.

I assumed this would be trashy and dumb, and it was, but I didn’t expect it to be such a hoot! It’s dialed to just the right level of self-aware camp and its surplus of plot twists are as hilarious as they are absurd.

Surely no movie in 2024 made use of more fabric than this one.

Around the one-hour mark, for about five seconds, I naively thought that just maybe I would be the first to describe this film as a pope opera. Maybe next time.