Film diary

How Peter Fonda is not best known for this starring role as a tomato-averse alien with explosive ejaculate is something I will never understand

A solid adaptation, almost slavishly true to the book, with a nod or two to the second book, one of which is frankly silly (sorry dude, that disguise ain’t fooling anyone). Eliot Sumner, progeny of Sting, playing Freddie Miles doesn’t really work for me, though I have to appreciate the stunt casting of a nepo baby in the role of an old money bon vivant, and they do successfully render the character as deeply unlikable,… See more →

My first viewing of the 2022 Criterion edition, which trims about two minutes from the theatrical cut. Only nerds who’ve seen Miller’s Crossing a million times will notice any difference, but I am one of those nerds, and while most of the cuts probably tighten up establishing shots and such, I did catch at least four lines of dialogue that were excised, one of which is a real loss (“Jesus, Tom!”). I wish filmmakers would… See more →

They Drive by Night is really two very different movies glued together, and the Depression-era working class drama is probably the objectively better half, but the pulp pleasures of the murderous noir it turns into can’t be denied. This is entirely thanks to American treasure Ida Lupino, whose scheming femme fatale chews enough scenery for the entire cast and then some. Lupino was 22 at the time and looked even younger, and while it was… See more →

👋🏻 Hi, Gen X artist in full midlife crisis mode over here, so maybe take my rating with a grain of salt, because this film spoke to me very directly.

I adored Adam Elliot’s early shorts, up to and including his Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, but Memoir of a Snail, overloaded with schmaltz and details recycled from his previous films, seems to be methodically constructed to confirm any suspicion that he’s content to make a career of repeating himself and tugging shamelessly at shallow heartstrings.

Too bad the franchise police put all their fingers in the pie at the end, but this is otherwise a far better crafted film than it has any right to be.

So Paul Schrader made this somewhat elegiac Exorcist prequel, and the studio rejected it and hired Renny Harlin to preside over a rewrite/reshoot, which was released in 2004 as Exorcist: The Beginning. And then that film’s poor critical and commercial performance led them to try to squeeze a few bucks out of a limited release of Schrader’s version less than a year later. And neither of the films is good. And I find the whole… See more →

The Scariest Skeleton

Mali Elfman, Pete Scalzitti IV (USA)

Tennis, Oranges

Sean Pecknold (USA)

Martyr’s Guidebook

Maksymilian Rzontowski (Poland)

It Shouldn’t Rain Tomorrow

Maria Trigo Teixeira (Portugal, Germany)

Horse Portrait

Witold Giersz (Poland)

Beautiful Men

Nicolas Keppens (France, Belgium, Netherlands)

A Crab in the Pool

Alexandra Myotte, Jean-Sébastien Hamel (Canada)

Bug Diner

Phoebe Jane Hart (USA)

Wander to Wonder

Nina Gantz (Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK)

Was Jerry Goldsmith the only person involved who was told the title of this film? His apocalyptic score is at 11 almost the whole time, but everything else about the film’s execution is relatively sedate, which is pretty weird considering the script includes a huge satanist rally in what looks like a volcanic crater, the systematic murder of hundreds of newborn babies, and the literal second coming of Christ. Sam Neill is probably as good… See more →

I watched The Omen in a double feature with The Exorcist, and in terms of overall sophistication, the juxtaposition does The Omen no favors, but it’s still a pretty fun ride, and it must be said that Satan siring a human child to clandestinely seize the world’s levers of power is a far more potent strategy for spreading evil than commandeering a tween’s body and making her throw up all over everyone.

I think I was in college when I first saw The Exorcist, by which time my resentment of the Catholicism I grew up with had calcified, and that undeniably colored my reception of the film, and still does. It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who lives in fear of a goat-man trying to lure everyone into a flaming cave of eternal suffering, and that mythology only gets sillier when viewed through the vaudevillian… See more →

You’d never know it from the title, but this movie is kiiiiiiind of sleazy.

Not quite as good as What Have You Done to Solange?, and the ending is anticlimactic, but still a great police procedural that never stops moving and gives plenty of screen time to its motorcycle maniac with an oversized meat cleaver. One of the rare occasions I kind of wish I had watched the English-dubbed version, which might have made the copious dialogue easier to follow.

George Lazenby is great, as is all the Venetian location shooting, but the murder mystery is extremely unsatisfying, and there’s not nearly enough indulgent giallo style to compensate (with the exception of Ennio Morricone’s music, but it seems like he really just wrote a couple of themes, which are reused ad nauseam). I didn’t love Don’t Look Now either, so maybe I’m just not a grieving-parents-in-Venice kind of guy.

The more it explains itself, the less interesting it is, but damn if it isn’t otherwise very well executed.

An experiment doesn’t need to have an explicit goal, but I’m still left wondering what writer/director Chris Nash hoped to accomplish with In a Violent Nature. Slasher movies are categorically shallow affairs, and framing one from the killer’s perspective doesn’t add depth, nor do its costs (like the eradication of suspense) outweigh its benefits (of which I’m struggling to name a single one). Its approach is novel, I’ll give it that, but only insofar as… See more →

I’ve decided Stranger (rhymes with hanger) is their family name, and when they show up at a barbecue, everyone is like “Ugh, who invited the Strangers.”

Having Helter Skelter as a primary inspiration doesn’t automatically make you a hack, but if your ultimate takeaway is limited to “Wouldn’t it be scary if a bunch of weirdos randomly attacked you in your home in the middle of the night?,” you’re probably a hack. Putting the attackers in “creepy” masks removes all doubt. (That said, I haven’t seen 2006’s Them since it came out, but I remember it using these same elements to… See more →

Since Terry O’Quinn declined to return for this third, made-for-TV installment, it opens with an overlong plastic surgery sequence to explain why our title character looks completely different. At no time in that sequence do we actually see his face, and once the movie settles into yet another idyllic suburban community, there seem to be some intriguing hints that maybe we can’t be sure which of this town’s painfully average dads is the one with… See more →