Film diary

In the late 1980s, two recent college graduates in San Francisco began making audio recordings of their elderly neighbors’ loud, drunken arguments, eventually amassing over fourteen hours of material. If you find that material fails to transcend momentary amusement, the ensuing story will follow suit. As the recordings become a phenomenon throughout underground tape-trading networks and spawn albums, comic books, theatrical productions, and feature films, the cult obsession over such a mundane artifact grows ever… See more →

The Fly is iconic for its premise, but its execution leaves much to be desired. It tries to turn a typically feathery 1950s nuclear family idyll on its ear with a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong, but ultimately only reinforces the status quo with a wholly undeserved happy ending. With the hero trapped unnoticed in plain sight, and the heroine taking the fall for his murder, the story is ready to end on a note… See more →

Ken Burns was still finding his voice in 1985, and with Reagan in office, PBS was even more inclined than usual to document its federal benefactor through a few layers of gauze. So it’s not shocking that two thirds of The Statue of Liberty borders on peacetime jingoism, but it is disappointing. I had been hoping to learn about the marvel of engineering and diplomacy that was the statue’s origin, and I did. But in… See more →

Going into Crips and Bloods: Made in America, I was concerned that it would just be a sensationalist exposé on LA’s two most notorious gangs. But I was pleased to find that it has a genuine curiosity about its subject, which extends beyond the violence and traces the roots of African-American marginalization from the early twentieth century to present day. It is often a bit too stylish for its own good, and I wish it… See more →