Film

I had to bail on this halfway through because the shaky cam was gonna make me barf. From what I saw, the effects are impressive and all of the characters are irritating, with the possible exception of Lizzy Caplan, who does her usual good job of playing Lizzy Caplan.

A paranoid conspiracist (John Goodman) keeps a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) captive in his underground doomsday bunker to protect her from what he claims is some kind of nuclear fallout above. Goodman’s reliably excellent performance works in concert with a smart script to keep you guessing about the truth of the matter, and Winstead’s charisma is rooted in a persistent resourcefulness that stops just short of Macgyver. I was frequently distracted by the big… See more →

Prompted by the 2017 film adaptation of It, I revisited the 1990 miniseries version for the first time in more than two decades, and it holds up about as well as expected. The kids are decent, the adults are laughably melodramatic, and the finale is pretty embarrassing. Even at a runtime exceeding three hours, this adaptation can barely scratch the surface of King’s sprawling novel, and the questions it leaves unanswered hurt more than they… See more →

Many a movie sports a protagonist who sucks at life, and you’re like, “Hey, I suck at life, too! I am invested in seeing this character succeed, for truly their success is a success for us all.” In The Void, however, it’s more like, “This guy doesn’t seem to have any good excuse for sucking as much as he does, and this warmed-over Lovecraft nonsense is exactly the dull fate he deserves.”

A serviceable (if blandly presented) documentary with about a zillion variously-credentialed talking heads discussing Psycho’s iconic shower scene. The scene’s cultural context and lasting influence are 101 stuff, but 78/52 is at its best when it digs into the minutiae of the storyboards, staging, cinematography, sound design—casaba!—editing, symbolism, etc. Even the most dedicated Hitchcock scholar will probably learn something new. The interviews’ steady fawning tone gets a bit grating (only one person… See more →

One of my favorite takedowns of all time is a single sentence in the San Diego Union-Tribune, in which David Elliott refers to Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream as “less filmed than assembled by an MTV task force committed to the final obliteration of subtlety.” Seventeen years later, subtlety continues to elude Aronofsky, and Mother!’s environmentalist/biblical allegory may be his most heavy-handed work yet.

That’s fine, as far as it goes; subtext doesn’t always… See more →

Though my feelings on the subject are unambiguous, I have a curious habit of seeking out reminders that I don’t ever want to be a teenage boy again, and Super Dark Times is an effective one. Its backwards gaze is largely unvarnished (apart from Ben Frost’s overly atmospheric score), but many moments are richly observed—I could practically smell the dead leaves that decorate those short, aimless hours in late autumn between the school day’s final… See more →

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.

Below the schedule you can find a bit about how it’s curated as well as a roundup… See more →

I’ve just returned from my ninth Ottawa International Animation Festival since 1998, and my first since 2010. I only got a weekend pass this time, rather than doing the full five days, but I still managed to cram in 10 screenings. This is also the first time I’ve attended the fest by myself, which enabled me to document it in greater detail than I have in the past. What follows are my notes on nearly… See more →

Steven C. Stewart, a man with severe cerebral palsy, made himself the antihero in a self-penned screenplay for an erotic revenge thriller, and Crispin Glover went pretty far out of his way to commit Stewart’s catharsis to film, co-directing and funding the sexually explicit project with his own money. It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine is unforgettable; I commend the effort, and welcome the challenge to broaden the range of unfiltered perspectives we accept from… See more →

Imagine the crew nervously looking over their shoulders while shooting one of the small handful of scenes that aren’t dominated by the clown crawling all over the screen, knowing that at any moment, a producer will storm onto the set demanding to know why the fuck this scene has no clown.

A very engrossing, unromantic portrait of NYC in the twilight of punk’s first wave, a palpably grimy dystopia populated almost entirely by down-and-out scammers of various stripes. Susan Berman is extraordinary as Wren, a deeply unlikeable opportunist who nevertheless inspires empathy. Her desperate energy propels the film, whose plot is essentially a catalog of her bad decisions. Pair with Midnight Cowboy for the consummate feel-bad double feature.

Why Hollywood Is Trying to Turn Everything Into Movies — Even Mindless Games Like ‘Fruit Ninja’

Vinson then realized that he was faced with a formidable predicament. There are no protagonists or antagonists in Fruit Ninja.

Goldner says the key to making movies from board games and toys is to “focus on understanding the universal truth about the brand.”

The film’s director and co-­writer, Tony Leondis, told me that “The Emoji Movie” actually began with… See more →

Needs about 100% more Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock, but naturally the finale is worth the price of admission.

Obviously the music is great, and I like that Richard Lester was able to make something so formally daring out of what would otherwise have been rote idolatry. Its kinetic energy simultaneously encapsulates early Beatlemania’s rapture (for the kids) and chaos (for everyone else). That said, the movie, which is essentially plotless, lives and dies by the band’s offstage antics. Their irreverence may have been revolutionary at the time, but its presumed charm was almost… See more →

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A strange homage/parody of occult and hippie films from the ’60s and ’70s, overloaded with wishy-washy neopaganism and boneheaded musings on heterosexuality and patriarchy. My best guess is that it wants to be some kind of feminist Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but apart from offering an excuse for the wardrobe department to go for broke, I can’t really figure out why this film exists.

An interesting profile for the uninitiated, but in its cursory understanding of chess, it makes little effort to understand Magnus’s genius, which remains enigmatic as ever. While Magnus the man has had an outsize role in inspiring a new generation of young chess players, Magnus the film fails to depict the game as anything but arcane.

Though it does little to distinguish itself from the untold thousands of horror cheapies that litter the streaming landscape, The Evil Within has a certain undeniable flair, even if you don’t know it was the singular obsession of a millionaire meth addict who spent 15 years and vast sums of his own money to make it. “Outsider art” doesn’t quite do it justice. Unlike the bewildering writing of Neil Breen or Tommy Wiseau, writer/director Andrew… See more →

Plot-wise, Hounds of Love is in many ways a fairly by-the-numbers kidnapping / serial killer movie. But after a first act that hews uncomfortably close to crass, skin-crawling exploitation, its character development and attention to style are able to set it apart from less compelling grindhouse fare. Its success in those departments is noteworthy: Emma Booth’s fragile performance has rightly received a lot of praise, and the cinematography and score work well together to create… See more →

Toronto’s New Flag

I’m a big fan of Kenzie Ryder’s concept.

Key to Improving Subway Service in New York? Modern Signals

Over the years, the authority has kept pushing back the timeline for replacing signals. In 1997, officials said that every line would be computerized by this year. By 2005, they had pushed the deadline to 2045, and now even that target seems unrealistic.

London has moved more quickly on signals because officials completed the work… See more →

At the end of In a Lonely Place, when Capt. Lochner calls to announce Dix Steele’s vindication and (needlessly) apologize for his persistent investigation of Dix as a murder suspect, Laurel Gray tearfully responds, “Yesterday, this would have meant so much to us. Now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.” This suggests that the strain of the murder investigation was the catalyst for her love affair with Dix unraveling, as if it might… See more →

To be a good character animator, one must also be a good actor, and animation, typically an exaggerated abstraction of reality, tends toward appropriately exaggerated performances. Though they’re often capable of exuding enough warmth and humanity to inspire genuine empathy, their reliance on gestural extremes usually keeps them from being as relatable as a skilled actor made of flesh and blood. Kubo and the Two Strings, whose every frame boasts a visual imagination – both… See more →

If any kids out there want to know about white America in the ’80s without the burden of understanding white America in the ’80s, The Wraith is your delightfully dumb one-stop shop.

Absent its jaw-dropping stage performances, Purple Rain is a weak film. And yet, there is something about the stilted drama of its narrative that elevates those stage performances, giving Purple Rain the peculiar distinction of being stronger for the inclusion of its weakest moments. Its otherwise clunky character development is lent a certain cohesiveness when expressed musically. The unconvincing relationships and turmoil established in various poorly-staged, non-musical moments somehow manage to make the already-amazing songs… See more →

Medicine.

Alice Lowe was already well into her pregnancy when she was approached to make a film, and she managed to write, direct, and star in Prevenge before she gave birth, which is amazing. And there’s a lot to admire about its surrealist fusion of horror, comedy, and drama. But the final product doesn’t quite hang together.

Jordan Peele’s uncommon wit, keen perspective on racial identity, and perfect cast are unfortunately no match for Blumhouse’s insistent blandness.

A magnificently dark crime thriller with equal attention paid to tense plotting and nuanced characterization, spread out across a sizable and capable ensemble. The urban underworld of The Asphalt Jungle is as vivid as it is bleak.

Blown Away

If you’re suffering from an excess of self-respect, the Corey Haim/Feldman erotic thriller is now available on Hulu.

King Crimson: Starless

RIP John Wetton. Colon cancer. Here’s my favorite King Crimson song, which he co-wrote, sang, and played bass on.

What Can Ivanka Trump Possibly Do for Women Who Work?

Before the election, her main interest in women was getting them to buy her clothing, her handbags, and her shoes. Who can forget… See more →

Talk about an unreliable narrator. Powered primarily by a single interview, Author: The JT LeRoy Story gives Laura Albert carte blanche to frame as she pleases her decade of hoodwinking the literary world. And yet, the skepticism her story provokes is eclipsed by how engrossing it is, providing canny insight into how she was able to pull off such a stunt in the first place.

Albert is a masterful and enigmatic storyteller, and one whose… See more →

Apatow productions have a habit of reveling in the pathetic frailty of maleness, and in a way that usually doesn’t do much for me. Superbad, the apotheosis of the form, an effortless synthesis of vulgarity and tenderness, is the one that finally reached me. Every time I see it, I laugh until I cry, and then I laugh some more.

I’m amazed this role wasn’t written specifically for Isabelle Huppert, because no one else on the planet could have pulled it off.

This is exactly as corny as it looks.

Dear Fictional Military,

You’ve got a tough job, I know. Your presence in any story is inescapably political. You are either a condemnation of our instinct for violence or a celebration of our defense of Freedom, with little opportunity to exist somewhere in between. You have to balance your duty to propel an artificial narrative with your duty to realistically portray the actual military, two things that are often at odds with each other. So… See more →

The first six words uttered in Rashomon summarize my feelings about the film’s universally fervid acclaim: “I don’t understand it at all.”

“A man was murdered,” says the priest, overcome with despair.

“Just one?” replies the commoner. I share his confusion.

In a world the priest describes as full of daily, devastating horrors, the crime at the center of Rashomon seems almost mundane. And yet, more so than even the rape and murder themselves, the… See more →

Mostly on the stupid side of silly, but it still beats Temple of Doom.

Rob Weychert’s Year in Review

My personal movie-watching stats for 2016, provided by the always delightful Letterboxd.

Why Classic Rock Isn’t What It Used To Be

But do radio stations rely at all on the institutional knowledge of their DJs to decide what to play?

Nope. The role of the song-picking DJ is dead. “I know there are some stations and some companies where if you change a song it’s a fireable offense,” Wellman said,… See more →

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ambulance scene, an EMT says awkwardly to her charge, “I’m just gonna… check you.” She looks enough like Abbi Jacobson – a Philadelphia area native, like Split’s writer/director, M. Night Shyamalan – that it instantly becomes my favorite scene in the movie, a random cameo with Jacobson’s hapless Broad City character stumbling into an EMT job for which she is comically unqualified. But it’s not her. In her absence, the scene… See more →

A looser and more uneven amalgam of gags than I expected, which makes the coherence and emotional impact of its humanitarian rebuke of fascism – a system which, at the time, many Americans still regarded with curious optimism – all the more incredible.

When Ryan Gosling sings “City of Stars,” my ears editorialize it as “City of Cars,” but then he wins by making me wish I had nice hair too.

I’ll gladly acknowledge this was a bold debut for Errol Morris, training a genuinely curious eye on a variety of unglamorous characters in the orbit of the pet cemetery industry. Its willingness to keep the camera rolling through their lengthy and often unfocused tangents makes the film more interesting than if it had stuck rigidly to the topic at hand, and Morris’s straight-ahead style exposes a certain layer of everyday human vulnerability not often explored.… See more →

An Oedipal love triangle of professional liars is undoubtedly a concept worth mining, but The Grifters’s update of classic noir ultimately amounts to little more than stagey anachronism.

A love letter to a city I do not love, La La Land nevertheless did an impressive job of disarming me with its vivid palette and dazzling setpieces. It managed to seize on my love of music while circumventing my distaste for musicals.

What’s Your Ideal Community? The Answer Is Political

It’s conceivable that people who live in cities come to value more active government. Or they’re more receptive to investing in welfare because they pass the homeless every day. Or they appreciate immigration because their cab rides and lunch depend on immigrants. This argument is partly about the people we’re exposed to in cities (the poor, foreigners), and partly about the logistics of living there.

The suburbs… See more →

Stray thoughts:

• Going all in on CGI Peter Cushing was a bold move, but more than giving Rogue One a through line to A New Hope, it serves as another reminder that the uncanny valley isn’t paved over just yet.

• The introduction of moral ambiguity to the otherwise black and white Star Wars universe is not unwelcome per se, but Cassian isn’t interesting enough to give it any real weight. (Really, none of the characters… See more →

Barbara Crampton on Stuart Gordon, Chopping Mall, and the new wave of indie horror

For fans of 1980s B-horror, here’s a good AV Club interview with the delightful Barbara Crampton.

Anti-Christ in a custom van: The churchy cheap thrills of A Thief In The Night

It may seem impossible to not think of the end of the world in poetic terms, but never underestimate the premillennialists.

Why Punching Down Will Never Be Funny

Watters and… See more →

Though it’s not the masterpiece that John Carpenter would make 30 years later (which is apparently more faithful to the source material), The Thing from Another World is smart and tightly wound. The titular Thing is scarier in the imagination than on the screen, but its appearances, wisely, are few and brief. Tension is instead generated mainly by the conflict over whether the Thing should be studied or destroyed, and these scenes – dense with… See more →

Empty and ugly, The New York Ripper is content to have its inscrutable serial killer revel in the seediest corners of early-’80s NYC without the benefit of a remotely compelling narrative. It’s all cheap and no thrills, but I’ll give it some credit for being extremely skeevy, which I took to be its lone goal.

Exquisitely overdone in every respect, and entirely a product – and rebuke – of its time. This was clearly a lot of fun to make, is in turn a lot of fun to watch, and its theme song will get stuck in your head for weeks.