Film

Looks and sounds great, and the lead performance is fantastic, but oof, what a shoddy script. A short film stretched out to feature length with plenty of repetition and a variety of plot threads teased out and then just left to dangle, culminating in a tacked-on shrug of an ending that basically amounts to “the butler did it.”

For the second (and hopefully final) year in a row, the Ottawa International Animation Festival was held virtually. This is always the busiest time of year for me, but with the addition of Plus Equals and a couple of other projects, things really piled up this year, which meant I could only make time for the short film competition and two features (one of which, Archipelago, was sadly not available to view outside of Canada).… See more →

If your milquetoast skateboard gang has a name as uninspired as “The Ramp Locals,” you’re really just begging for trouble.

Fired this up for the first time in ages (and I believe my first viewing of the Final Cut version) because I was in the mood for something stylish, maybe noir or prestige sci-fi. Blade Runner is all of those things, but style is the only one it does really well. It’s procedurally, romantically, and philosophically underwhelming (spare me your master’s thesis on the great depths of its inquiry into What It Means to Be… See more →

I’m glad Lydia Lunch exists, but man is she exhausting.

Before today, the last movie I saw in a theater was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Seventeen months and 4 million COVID deaths later, Zola is, to say the least, a different movie for a different time, even if it was made before everything fell apart. Catching up, after the fact, on the viral tweet thread and subsequent Rolling Stone article that inspired it, I’m a little surprised the film didn’t do more with… See more →

Next month, my competitive air guitar alter ego will make his national television debut on ESPN 8: The Ocho. Before I absorb the derision of the biggest audience of my “career,” I figured I should see DodgeBall, the movie that birthed The Ocho, and said movie exceeded my low expectations. Who knows, maybe my compatriots and I can do the same for our audience?

Apparently Steve Guttenberg was once allowed to be in the same room as Isabelle Huppert and I had to see it with my own eyes.

Love Švankmajer, love Faust, didn’t love Švankmajer‘s Faust.

Started working my way through Criterion Channel’s art-house animation collection, never heard of this one before, chose it because I wanted something short, hit the goddamned jackpot.

Turned it off after 20 minutes, grabbed my phone and verified that a bunch of my Letterboxd friends loved it, watched 10 more minutes, gave up.

Whatever terrorist school this useless IRA crew graduated from should lose its accreditation.

A few stray thoughts:

• I love listening to David Cronenberg talk about the thematic underpinnings of his films, but I find that his work rarely lives up to his descriptions of it. Possessor, directed by his son Brandon, is more like what those descriptions would lead me to expect; its ideas about the intersections of technology and identity are neither plainly stated nor willfully obfuscated.

• Possessor is a welcome heir to the elder Cronenberg’s most… See more →

Took a chance on this one knowing nothing about it but Hulu’s description of it (including the cast), which made it sound like a pretty standard late-80s cat-and-mouse serial killer thriller. What I got instead was maybe the most tonally confused movie I have ever seen, something like the product of a neural network trained on Sea of Love and A Fish Called Wanda. It doesn’t work at all, and I kind of love that… See more →

Much of the criticism I’ve heard about Nomadland is that it doesn’t more forcefully editorialize. America’s broken healthcare system, Amazon’s labor practices, the shredding of the social safety net: they’re all there, but we don’t hear about them. And indeed, I was surprised by the gentleness of the film, waiting in vain for something terrible to happen. In her Vulture profile of Chloe Zhao, Allison Willmore nicely sums up the difficulty of telling these kinds… See more →

As fond as Kusama: Infinity is of its subject, the film does Yayoi Kusama a disservice by framing her story in a typically American binary notion of success. Apparently, prior to the last few decades of her status as one of the world’s most celebrated living artists, Kusama’s visionary talent was uniformly overlooked and/or disrespected, which is a funny thing to say about someone who spent the ’60s and ’70s exhibiting all over Europe and… See more →

Most of the magic tricks are neat. Most of the self-satisfied pseudo-profundity is not.

Not an overtly political film, but its distinctly American story, told mostly in Korean, puts the lie to so much of the right’s empty nativist rhetoric.

War is hell.

I began last year’s “That Was 2019” post by expressing disappointment in my immune system’s poor performance that year, so let me begin this year’s wrap-up by praising that same immune system’s effectiveness in 2020. More than 1.8 million people died of COVID-19 in 2020, a disproportionately high 340,000 of them Americans, and I didn’t get so much as a head cold. I spent much of the year being grateful for my health and financial… See more →

A sloppy film in many respects, but its formal shortcomings do little to diminish how fascinating its subject’s single-minded obsession is. Reading some of the more prominent critiques of said subject in the Guardian and the New York Times, which describe Tim Jenison as a philistine whose attempted deconstruction of Vermeer’s technique is an act of denigration, I was struck by how willfully they miss the point. Jenison makes no bones about being a dilettante,… See more →

The Terminator movies are all basically the same: a bad robot is sent from an apocalyptic future to kill someone who will later be important to humanity’s survival, and a good person or robot is sent to protect that important person. One of the main things that determines a Terminator movie’s quality is how much it ties itself in knots to justify the inclusion of an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose titular character is conveniently (if… See more →

I avoided seeing Rocky Horror forever, mostly because throughout high school and college, I found all the attention-starved theater kids who worshipped it to be so irritating. Decades later, I can’t help but be charmed by how giddily transgressive it is.

Every October, I make a schedule of dozens of horror films, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. I call it Robtober, only half-ashamedly. It’s fun! For the past few years, I’ve announced the schedule’s contents via blog posts with increasingly elaborate designs, effectively dressing my site up for Halloween. This year, I wanted to harness some of my favorite visual themes from horror movie marketing (such as posters and trailers), and distorted hand-lettering… See more →

When Melanie says to Sgt. Parks, “It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore,” I so badly wanted Sgt. Parks to be Mitch McConnell.

Like all Dahl adaptations, this pulls its punches more than it should, but Jim Henson’s magic and the crazy camera work manage to make it truly special, and it’s miles beyond the atrocious Zemeckis version that came 30 years later. The experience was also elevated for me by watching it with my partner, whose lifelong idolization of the titular witches is morbidly adorable.

The office politics themes and serial killer plot may be uninspiring, but Office Killer’s overall craft is very enjoyable. Though it doesn’t noticeably echo the self-portraiture Cindy Sherman is best known for, the cinematography is deliciously and unselfconsciously skewed, which, in tandem with the chamber ensemble score, lends it a peculiar elegance. The whole thing is pretty firmly dated by its pre-Y2K anxiety and the ostentatious graphic design of its titles (courtesy of Bureau),… See more →

Tales from the Hood’s vengeful ghosts aren’t nearly as scary as the real-world racism and cycles of violence that provoke them. The film’s portrayals of those social ills are anything but subtle, but they are nevertheless undeniably horrific.

Why in the world did it take me so long to see Street Trash?! It might be the most grotesque film I’ve ever seen, and its gleeful commitment to thorough vulgarity wouldn’t be a virtue if it weren’t made with such flair. It’s several steps above what I remember of the Troma movies, but doesn’t quite reach the bravura heights of Sam Raimi’s and Peter Jackson’s early splatstick gems. Street Trash is apparently also the… See more →

Neither the trailer nor writer/director Leigh Whannell’s bonafides in the Saw and Insidious franchises gave me much confidence that this Invisible Man remake would be any good, so its overall high quality is a very pleasant surprise indeed. Its loudest moments are its weakest, but thankfully it spends much of its time quietly plumbing the depths of Elisabeth Moss’s crippling PTSD. If there is to be a modern version of the scream queen, may Moss’s… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. It’s usually a mix of home viewings and public theatrical screenings, and the schedule is published both for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me. This year, sadly, the pandemic will keep me out of theaters, and guests won’t be able to join me for home viewings. But… See more →

I wasn’t able to make my annual trip to Ottawa this year for obvious reasons, but thankfully, in lieu of canceling the festival, they took the whole thing online, so I was still able to get my animation fix. Since all kinds of events have had to rapidly move online this year with wildly varying results, I kind of expected it to be a shit show, but with the exception of a few hiccups, I… See more →

COVID-19 has made much of the U.S. a remote workforce for 28 weeks now, prompting the obvious question, “How does this pandemic stack up against the one depicted in the 2007 horror film 28 Weeks Later?” In the film, a solid sequel to Danny Boyle’s classic 28 Days Later, the world is besieged by the Rage Virus, which launches everyone it infects into a mindless, murderous frenzy. (Some filmgoers might refer to the infected as … See more →

Sweet, dumb, fun. No more than I needed from it, and no less.

A handful of the adults in this are written and performed with noticeably more warmth than is typical of mainstream fright flicks, and Aubrey Plaza in particular is given real latitude to employ her considerable talents. Unfortunately she’s sidelined after the first act in favor of her kid and his friends, all of whom are pretty stock, and nu-Chucky doesn’t hold a candle to the original. All in all, though, this is slightly better than… See more →

Charming but exhausting. The action is too quick, the plot is too slow, and at 65 minutes, it runs at least four times longer than it needs to. Also, given the abject poverty constantly on display, I was distracted for most of the movie wondering how the profit sharing works when a no-budget DIY flick like this gets international distribution. Oh, and having not set foot in a movie theater in four months, the Alamo… See more →

First things first: no, Verotika isn’t the new The Room. Maybe this is splitting hairs, but it’s more Ed Wood than Tommy Wiseau, which is fitting given that Wood is the poster boy for the kind of 1950s schlock that shaped much of Glenn Danzig’s imagination.

Like Wood’s films, Danzig’s Verotika is obliviously, bewilderingly badly conceived and made, often comically so, but it’s ultimately a slog. Of its three segments, the first is by far… See more →

Since we’ve all been stuck at home since mid-March, my friend Sequoia has been hosting delightful trivia nights for friends on Zoom. In Philadelphia, pub trivia is known as “quizzo,” so Sequoia’s weekly event is cleverly dubbed Sequizzo (or, if you don’t have time for all those syllables, Squizzo). This week’s theme was rock and roll, and when I was asked to commandeer a round, I decided to focus on fictional bands. My questions are… See more →

Gene Tierney carefully assembling the perfect outfit for throwing herself down the stairs to force a miscarriage is just about as good as movies get.

If Robo Vampire has a script, it reads like something a 6-year-old wrote, which makes it a compelling argument for child labor. Somehow this is my first exposure to the hopping vampires of jiangshi folklore, and only the second Godfrey Ho movie I’ve seen. It won’t be the last.

The premise is a bit too clever for its own good, and its foundational recontextualization of horror cliches sees fit to bask in said cliches for far longer than is tolerable, especially considering its satirical scares are blander than much of their source material. Cabin in the Woods is at its best during its early peeks behind the curtain, before Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins’ charming rapport is displaced by a too-thorough accounting of the… See more →

This movie is so goddamned good, I’m not even mad that it neglects to incorporate Van Halen’s “On Fire.”

Gentle but not slight. Didn’t know how much I needed that right now. Extra points for the quick hit of what is probably the best bookbinding porn ever to grace a major motion picture.

How I became so attached to the songs in this movie when it came out the same year I fell in love with thrash metal is anybody’s guess, but “Part of Your World” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” are the bedrock of my karaoke game. Decades later, no other aspect of The Little Mermaid does much for me, although Scuttle is pretty delightful and Ursula is the shit. Can’t believe I only just learned that she… See more →

My immune system didn’t do me many favors in 2019. I was sick on five or six separate occasions in the first half of the year, including an obnoxious bout of bronchitis that lasted the entire month of February. Luckily that didn’t stop me from having an adventurous and fulfilling year, and for the first time in my four years at ProPublica, I used every single one of my vacation days.

Projects

My first three… See more →

Quite possibly the best-looking Disney film.

Modern fandom is little more than ravenous consumerism, and more than any other Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker’s blockbuster maximalism is calibrated with this in mind. When I rewatched The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi the night before, it felt mostly like homework, and trying to summon anything else to say about The Rise of Skywalker feels about the same. Anyway, I’m done. Thanks for the memories, Star Wars, if not… See more →

I’ve never shared the average cinephile’s effusive fascination with Scorsese’s brand of pathologically dishonest men, but I’ll give said men credit for consistency: their demands for much more than they’ve earned are always reflected in how much time the audience is made to spend with them.

Like many ghost stories, Lake Mungo is about grief, its apparitions manifestations of its characters’ inability to accept their loss; and like many ghost stories, its emotional core is overshadowed by its spook factor. And that’s fine. Lake Mungo’s misstep is in its approach to being a mystery thriller, loaded with nonsensical twists and arbitrary red herrings, none of which coalesce into a remotely satisfying resolution. At one point, a woman who has spent… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films, most of which I haven’t seen before. Films and dates (all subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me, and ticket links are included for public screenings.

This year, I’ve set aside a weekend to plow through the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series (I’ve only ever seen the first three). I’m also finally finishing off (the current version… See more →