Film

I made my annual voyage north this past weekend for the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Forsaking any notion of downtime, I made it to 12 screenings in the space of 48 hours this year. Below are my notes on each of the 56 films in the short film competition, as well as four of the features in competition, and a handful of other screenings. Links are provided to films and trailers when available, with embeds… See more →

Behind the Curve is an examination of the growing community of people who fervently believe the earth is flat. While the film doesn’t support their cause, it doesn’t ridicule them either, and I had hoped its genuine curiosity might shed some light on the nature of conspiracist thinking. In speaking with psychologists and other scientists, it does offer cursory explanations of how confirmation bias and logical fallacies factor into the intractability of misbegotten beliefs. But… See more →

Bad script. Bad cast. Bad direction. Closing credits set in Arial.

I haven’t seen the Invader Zim TV show in many years, so it’s hard to say if I was underwhelmed by the movie because a) it’s not as good as the show was, or b) my brain is just no longer calibrated to enjoy Invader Zim. Maybe both?

While I can’t speak from experience, I’m pretty sure that a person getting hit by a train/bus/car/etc is unlikely to result in a blood explosion, as if the victim were an overfilled water balloon primed to coat bystanders with viscera upon impact. I get that hyperbole is a thing and bloodying a bystander is a handy visualization of the trauma they incurred from witnessing a terrible accident, but come on, actors get paid to act.… See more →

The plot is a pretty big pill to swallow—a bank teller is somehow threatened into robbing her workplace by a psychopath who clearly has no leverage—but the exquisite cinematography and score make it go down a lot easier. I would watch a feature-length documentary on how Glenn Ford’s spectacularly terrible haircut found its way to the screen.

A generational juggernaut of a performer at the height of her powers creating a spectacle of empowerment and representation with a cast of hundreds. It also happens to be an enormously entertaining show, and an effective encouragement to channel your very best self toward putting something good into the world.

When Bond goes blaxploitation, the man to hire for the theme song is clearly… Paul McCartney?

It’s easy to ding this doc for its nearly three-hour run time, which seems self-indulgent. I don’t think its length is one of its strengths, but I didn’t find it to be a slog either. Mostly I just enjoyed hanging out with its characters and hearing their stories, and I was especially tickled to hear members of the apocalyptic Neurosis geeking out over how much they love Green Day. Being something of an outsider who… See more →

Okay, I know, fine, I’ll quit Twitter.

Isabelle Huppert’s demented performance is more than this movie deserves and not enough to save it. One might expect the filmmakers to have some fun with this kind of pure pulp, but the whole thing is rote and flat, with plainspoken design and direction and a script that pulls every punch. The closest it comes to generating tension is triggering flashbacks from The Piano Teacher, seemingly intentionally. So maybe just watch that instead.

Hello, dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

I owe you a belated “Happy new year!” since I failed to get this newsletter out the door the past two months. If you’re desperate to see the links that never made it to your inbox during those months, you can find December and January (along with every other edition) on my site.

In February, I finally launched Tinnitus Tracker, a live music diary I’ve… See more →

Fuck yeah.

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

They Photoshopped Adam’s junk out of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Best dance sequence since Ex Machina.

What a time capsule. A 1968 high school faculty struggles to maintain the conformist status quo with a changing world beating at the door. When Vietnam finally comes to the fore after hovering in the background for much of the film, it’s a wrenching indictment.

Mostly irredeemably sadistic trash, but its periodic flashes of artfulness—and Meiko Kaji’s withering glare—are enough to recommend it.

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

I published a couple of nerdy blog posts in November: one about how I’m using my Letterboxd data to address my cinematic blindspots, and one about a common convention of editorial design that’s currently incompatible with CSS Grid.

Lots of interesting stuff in the links this month; for what it’s worth, my favorites are Earworm’s series of videos about jazz.

As usual, you can get many… See more →

Has its moments (including what is possibly the highest quality jump scare of this decade), but taken as a whole it’s overwritten, too long, too polished, and too corny.

Having just wrapped up another successful Robtober, I’m already thinking ahead to next year. Making a month-long schedule of horror movies is always more work than I think it will be, especially because I aim for most of the movies to be ones I haven’t seen before. As I’ve covered previously, my curation process is fairly involved, but I recently realized I’ve been ignoring a hugely valuable resource.

It’s Letterboxd, dummy

Anyone who’s paid any… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

October is gone, but its links remain.

I was mired in personal matters throughout October, so there wasn’t any activity on my site apart from the horror extravaganza that is Robtober, which was thankfully not disrupted. I finally finished a project that had been in the works for a few months: a custom-designed story with ProPublica Illinois about a family’s heartbreaking experience with an ill-conceived psychiatric clinical trial.

This round of links… See more →

It may be the first in the series (other than the original) to have a director and screenwriters with name recognition, but this is just another Halloween sequel, thankfully nothing less but certainly nothing more. It’s pretty boring.

Also, is there any greater talent in Hollywood who is as routinely wasted as Judy Greer is?

The director of The Raid putting his spin on The Wicker Man sure sounds like fun, and Apostle starts off with promise, with a wild-eyed Dan Stevens lurching around a muddy village of Victorian cultists. But the movie kneecaps itself before the halfway mark, rushing to resolve the most interesting aspects of its plot in favor of making a gonzo, gore-soaked spectacle of the superfluous remainder.

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films, most of which I haven’t seen before. Films, dates, and times (all subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me, and ticket links are included for public screenings. The schedule is also available as a handy Google calendar and as a Letterboxd list.

This year, Michael Myers’ imminent return to the big screen has inspired me to binge my way… See more →

I hadn’t planned to publish this post since I failed to document this fest as thoroughly as the previous one, but I decided not to waste the bits I did document, so here they are.

Short Film Competition

The first short film competition screening was probably the least kid-friendly screening at the festival, and sure enough, a family with kids was front and center in the theater. Saturday morning cartoons, right? Literally two seconds in,… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

August is gone, but its links remain.

My site was quiet in August, as I’ve been heads-down on a project I’m pretty excited about. Its release is just one facet of the ambitious September I have planned, so if all goes well, there will be much to report in next month’s newsletter.

My alter-ego Windhammer recently returned to the competitive air guitar stage for his 10th anniversary, tying for second in the… See more →

What a mess. I’m sympathetic to what Sorry to Bother You has to say about the intersection of capitalism, exploitation, and racism, but all of its statements, like all of its jokes, are blared from a megaphone and continue long after their point is made. Its amateur-hour vibe is far more tedious than charming, its gonzo satire is self-conscious, and its progressive politics are undercut by its lone female character functioning primarily as a trophy.… See more →

The underlying narrative seems sound, but the mythology driving it is vague and the stakes aren’t really made clear. It’s a short movie but I had to watch it in two sittings because I was getting restless. Visually, however, *The Secret of the Kells *is an unparalleled stunner, worthy of its namesake.

There’s a helluva story here, but this documentary is more interested in entertaining than enlightening, and at least one of the conclusions it draws is downright insulting.

Hello, I am a seasoned veteran of all manner of deranged horror films, and I watched most of this through my fingers.

Discretion is the better part of valor. Heroism ≠ leadership. I think I enjoyed this even more the second time.

That whole unlikely-victory-of-an-ill-mannered-buffoon-enabled-by-TV-ratings thing lands a little differently now.

Asghar Farhadi’s sensitivity to the contours of domestic conflict—in a universal sense but also as it relates to certain segments of Iranian society—is extraordinary. This was also true of A Separation, his previous film, and in the case of The Salesman, his focus on the complicated residue of assault rings true in a way that makes the film necessarily and rewardingly difficult.

Hello, dear reader!

June is gone, but its links remain.

It was a relatively busy month on my site! I had an unexpected reason to revisit an animated student film I made 20 years ago, wrote about designing better concert listings, chronicled my experience learning about the future of typography at the Ampersand conference, and offered middling reviews of the year’s most celebrated horror films, A Quiet Place and Hereditary.

This month’s links are the sort… See more →

I can’t decide if its ideas are muddled or merely complex, but as a pure action movie, Incredibles 2 is a lot of fun. I’m disappointed that the filmmakers couldn’t find a way to avoid the strobing effects that exclude epileptic viewers. For a company as creatively industrious as Pixar, that struck me as a lazy choice.

As for the preceding short film, Bao, bravo to Pixar for stepping away from the Eurocentric boys’ club,… See more →

A couple of years ago, I got a very unexpected email:

I wanted to inquire as to whether you were student at Kutztown University under the tutelage of Dr. Tom Schultz, and if you made an animated film in 1998 under the tile "Twelve Bucks".

Apart from the misspelled name of my professor (it’s actually Schantz), this was correct. But why on earth would someone be contacting me about an old, obscure student film?

The… See more →

For whatever reason, horror is having a moment of sustained critical cachet, with a growing list of scary movies receiving praise for emotional resonance, thematic richness, and/or excellence of execution that transcend the genre’s usual stale jump scares. Hereditary seems keen to get in on the action, offering a sophisticated layer of fraught family drama atop a pulpier horror foundation; its familiar depictions of unraveling psyches and things going bump in the night are shaped… See more →

A Quiet Place centers on a family living in a not-too-distant future in which vicious aliens with hypersensitive hearing have wiped out much of the world’s population. A little over a year into the invasion, after losing their youngest child (of three) to the creatures, they have another child on the way. In a world where silence is absolutely crucial for survival, a newborn baby is the ultimate liability, and while we’re privy to the… See more →

I’ve read a number of Ayn Rand’s essays, but never bothered with her fiction until now. I expected overt advocacy for her self-centered Objectivist philosophy, but I also expected it to be packaged in something approximating a compelling story. After all, The Fountainhead has been devoured by legions of basement dwellers who couldn’t make it through two pages of Kant or Foucault. But apart from Gary Cooper’s and Patricia Neal’s radical egoists settling for fucking… See more →

Someone finally made the meditative arthouse thriller the Pizzagate crowd has been waiting for.

Hello, dear reader!

April is gone, but its links remain.

I’ve been obsessed with my current personal project lately (more on that soon), so apart from a handful of very brief movie reviews, I didn’t do much writing in April, though the web designers in the audience might want to take a look at my notes from last week’s Generate conference.

The links this go-round include some gems for Prince fans on the second anniversary of… See more →

Wes Anderson’s films are all effectively stop-motion animation, and part of what I find off-putting about most of his live-action work is the resulting reverse-uncanny-valley effect. I had been over his schtick for years by the time Fantastic Mr. Fox came out and made me realize that the world of proper animation is where Anderson belongs. Isle of Dogs is a welcome return to that place.

This stylish proto-slasher is stupider and trashier than the more highly regarded gothic works of Bava’s horror ouevre, and more enjoyable for it. A Bay of Blood is a must-see for anyone interested in how giallo films paved the way for slashers, especially since Friday the 13th borrowed from it liberally.

This dizzying array of Cronenbergian psychobabble, pulp horror, and avant-garde psychedelia doesn’t quite hang together, and its ending is pure garbage, but overall it is more than bonkers enough to recommend it. Pairs well with The Manitou.

Considering when Forbidden Planet was made, its special effects are astonishing, and its psychological concept is ambitious. But that concept is explicated through far more dialogue than action, moving back and forth between just two fairly modest locations, and the result is kinda boring.

Hello, dear reader!

March is gone, but its links remain.

I gave a brief talk about designing information at the annual Society for News Design conference, and also shared my notes from the other talks I took in.

Always ahead of the trends, I left Facebook at the beginning of the month, a little over two weeks before the news about Cambridge Analytica broke (news which long-time readers may not have found shocking). Since think… See more →

This movie has everything: police slapstick, domestic slapstick, courtroom slapstick, office slapstick, and most importantly, several exquisitely staged set pieces overflowing with thoroughly mind-blowing action. Jackie Chan may be the most committed entertainer in the world, and Police Story is among his finest endeavors.

Hello dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.

This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →

Listen (shh) to what the flower people say
Aahhh
Listen, it’s getting louder every day