Review

Not a packed show, but well-attended by scene afficionados, as I noticed members of Baroness, Pentagram, Pharaoh, and Sonya in the audience. Also cool to spot Ben Brower (formerly of The Stuntmen) in Breakker! Tower crushed. Definitely the best way I could have spent this particular Sunday evening in Philadelphia.

The late, great Faraquet scheduled a handful of reunion gigs across a weekend (presumably so no one in the band would have to take time off work) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their lone full-length album, The View From This Tower, which has long been high on the list of my favorite underground records. I felt a rare bit of hometown pride when the Philly show sold out fast enough for them to add… See more →

Filling a couple conspicuous holes in my collection. RIP Ozzy.

I’m not sure I’ve seen quite this ratio of smart presentation to stupid content before.

A solid bill of oddities tonight.

Ecology: Homestones is a purveyor of harsh noise that probably wouldn’t hold my attention if it weren’t performed by a towering ghoul with a shrunken head, accompanied by a limbless torso writhing along to the cacophony on a hook behind a velvet rope. Apparently there’s a whole mythology that goes with this, and incredibly, it’s attracted more than a half million social media followers in just a few short… See more →

I assumed this would be trashy and dumb, and it was, but I didn’t expect it to be such a hoot! It’s dialed to just the right level of self-aware camp and its surplus of plot twists are as hilarious as they are absurd.

It’s not uncommon for me to lament an old band’s preference for new material at a live show, and while tonight’s set list was dominated by songs from NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD, and I do find that album to be something of a rote exercise, that wasn’t the only reason I left early. Even in this grim geopolitical moment, Godspeed’s brand of all-consuming pessimism somehow feels to me more naive… See more →

Surely no movie in 2024 made use of more fabric than this one.

Around the one-hour mark, for about five seconds, I naively thought that just maybe I would be the first to describe this film as a pope opera. Maybe next time.

I watched a shitty VHS transfer on Tubi for a very appropriate extra layer of grime.

I only recently discovered this HBO miniseries from Garry Trudeau and Robert Altman, whose fictional narrative intersects in real time with the real-life 1988 U.S. presidential primary elections, and while its overall substance was clearly an influence on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, I thought I’d note a few tidbits from Sorkin’s series that seem to be Tanner ’88 homages:

• Both series have a spare martial drumbeat over their “Previously on [this show]” intros
• Both… See more →

Embarrassing, tedious Scorsese wannabe shit. Thought it would be a fun watch on a lazy Sunday and quit halfway through. Blah.

I saw Tower open for my buddy’s band Mutant Scum at Saint Vitus (RIP) 10 years ago, and frontwoman Sarabeth Linden’s powerful pipes and electric stage presence have been burned into my brain ever since. In the years that followed, the band’s first few EPs and LPs were enjoyable, but didn’t measure up to what I remember of that show, and on record, at least, Tower seemed destined to be one of those bands whose … See more →

Kinda wild to take in this tasty morsel of espionage competence porn on the same day it’s revealed that a cabal of U.S. cabinet secretaries accidentally invited the editor of a major magazine along for the ride when they planned a bombing using something they downloaded from the App Store.

My 2,000th film diary entry. 🙂

I wouldn’t have expected to really get into this one! Electronic music’s presence in my listening habits has definitely increased over the last several years, but it’s tended to be more in the avantgarde realm than the dance music realm, and I’ve never been all that interested in electroclash, so Marie Davidson’s persona and deadpan vocals on this record don’t do that much for me. But the production is another story, and if I’m being… See more →

Gonna tell my kids this is A Complete Unknown

Cusack is a pro who knows how to gracefully navigate insipid interview questions, and I’m sure he wouldn’t do it if it weren’t a decent payday, but it was still kinda hard to watch him endure a post-screening Q&A with a local corporate rock radio DJ and a theater full of middle-aged nostalgia freaks.

Steak is Quentin Dupieux’s first feature film, which I enjoyed more than I expected considering that I don’t remember much liking Rubber, the film he made after it, when I saw it some 15 years ago. Steak’s comic beats, bizarro world of Clockwork Orange-tinged perpetual high school, and bumping electronic soundtrack all cohere into a satisfyingly absurdist satire of conformity, reminiscent at times of Yorgos Lanthimos’s more accessible moments. And it’s perfectly paced:… See more →

Boring and corny. Borny?

The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, Wallace & Gromit’s finest outings, have such a wonderful economy to them. They’re impeccably constructed, compact thrillers that fit a surprising amount of story into 30 minutes without ever feeling rushed. They accomplish this partly by never wasting a single shot, and also by maintaining a very limited cast of characters, which gives the audience space to properly soak in all the extraordinary attention to detail, including beautiful… See more →

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →

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 joked with some other folks in line about the event staff carding people at the door: Would anyone attending a Slowdive show in 2024 be under 40? I had momentarily forgotten that the kids on TikTok have in recent years made shoegaze far bigger than it’s ever been, and not only had the kids come out to pack this show, but they’d arrived early. I got there shortly after the start of Quannic’s opening… See more →

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.

The name of this tour, The Future Past, led me to believe it was one of those tours where Maiden would be sticking to the classic albums, which is all I really want to hear. If I had done any research at all, I would have learned that “Days of Future Past” is the name of a song on their 2021 album Senjutsu, and indeed, that album accounted for a full third of the setlist.… See more →

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 →

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 →

My fourth Greet Death show, and my first since singer/guitarist Harper transitioned, and it was nice to see her come out of her shell, playing more expressively in a way that maybe she felt she couldn’t before.

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 →

Terry O’Quinn’s socially regressive Reaganite dad is pitch-perfect, and the opening scene—showing him calmly strolling through the house, past the family he just slaughtered, en route to his new identity—is a doozy. But pretty much everything else in this, including the plot, characters, and color palette, is weirdly bland. Maybe that’s meant to be its own comment on the insipidity of the 1980s’ dominant conservative nostalgia, but a better movie would have just let its… See more →

Like Fargeat’s debut, this is more successful as pulp than polemic, and its inevitably bombastic finale is a dud, but I can’t deny I enjoyed the ride, especially with an audience.

I don’t think I had seen this since the ’90s, at which time I scarcely noticed how deliriously over the top it is, with uniformly histrionic performances (including demented cameos from Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, and Martin Balsam, stars of the original 1962 Cape Fear) and spastic cinematography (courtesy of frequent David Lynch collaborator Freddie Francis). It’s very nearly a parody of its domestic thriller contemporaries (e.g. Fatal Attraction), ever teetering on the edge of… See more →

New favorite Saulnier joint. If Aaron Pierre isn’t the next Idris Elba, we will have failed as a civilization.

Sometimes stupid is fun and sometimes stupid is just stupid.

The joke here is that this is a Lifetime movie written by longtime SNL head writer Harper Steele and starring Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. Importantly, it’s not a parody of a Lifetime movie, or at least it’s not any more self-parody than any other entry in the well-worn genre. It does slightly tip its hand in a few places (especially the final scene), but mostly all involved do a surprisingly good job of playing… See more →

As I recall, you couldn’t walk into a video store in the mid-90s without tripping over multiple copies of Rumpelstiltskin, so I’m not sure how I never saw it before, apart from the fact that the period’s glut of cheap fairy tale horror never really interested me. I would not have guessed it was essentially a remake of The Terminator! I spent most of the runtime trying to figure out why the lead, Kim Johnston… See more →