Review

I was never brave enough to ask what would make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? an even more fraught experience, but yeah, putting it under an authoritarian regime does the trick.

I had seen theatrical screenings of The Godfather maybe two or three times before, and while the blemishes on those aging prints may have spoken to the ruin-porn enthusiast in me, there’s no denying they were a distracting real-world intrusion on a landmark work of fiction. For the 50th-anniversary restoration, it’s tempting to include the standard caveat about the magic inherent in film projection that’s lost in digital projection, but I’ve never been more convinced… See more →

I’ve never been less worried about Steve-O, and it feels good.

There’s at least a handful of late-’70s genre oddities that somehow wrangled stylish production and bankable stars in support of truly bizarre ideas. If one of them were to really nail that art-damaged-big-budget-B-movie alchemy, it could be the holy grail of weird cinema, and I hold out hope that such a thing exists. But until it surfaces, I’ll continue to be mildly disappointed by The Visitor, The Manitou, Altered States, et al: amazing trailers that… See more →

It’s hard to square the twisty pulp charm of the whodunit with the relentless emotional sadism of the drama—virtually every character who isn’t hopelessly broken at the beginning is hopelessly broken by the end—but I definitely don’t regret watching, so I guess it’s well-crafted enough to have it both ways.

I could never have believed how boring this is if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

Let me begin by saying I promise this post is mostly good vibes. Skip ahead if you like, but if you’ll momentarily indulge my pessimism: What a stupid time to be alive.

2021 was supposed to be the year the vaccine gave us our lives back, and while it did for some of us to some degree, its international distribution predictably favored wealthy nations, and the long-simmering anti-vax movement here in the wealthiest nation of… See more →

I was pretty excited for this one. Emma de Swaef, Marc Roels, and Niki Lindroth von Bahr are doing the most interesting work in narrative stop-motion animation today, and while the bizarre nature of that work probably precludes it from attracting much more than a cult following, having some Netflix money thrown at it hopefully bodes well for its sustainability.

The House’s first segment, a fable about a 19th century family selling its soul,… See more →

Look, I’m here for the action. As much as the Matrix series is an enjoyable alchemy of classic mythology, cyberpunk, and pop philosophy, anyone who says the action isn’t far and away its biggest strength is kidding themselves. The increasingly convoluted technological underpinnings, the endless rumination on the paradox of free will, the paper-thin character work—it’s all set dressing for some extraordinary fight and chase sequences, bolstered by visionary special effects. Or at least it… See more →

I had a Hitch itch, wanted something short, and hadn’t seen Rope in ages. Perfect, right? Totally forgot about the one-shot schtick until it started, and man, I’ve never found it less impressive. The movie mostly looks like shit: The Technicolor is weirdly drab, and the plot is dialog-driven to the point that the roving camera tends to just flatly center the speaker in the frame. The limited edits do give the proceedings the effect… See more →

A decent profile of Kenny G and his position as a uniquely polarizing figure in music, but not nearly as probing as it could be. For a much deeper dive into the notions of “good” and “bad” music, I highly recommend Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

The final episode of this is scarier than any horror movie in recent memory.

No one can say Baroness aren’t professionals. After two years away from the road, an all-request tour where everything in their roughly 80-song catalog is on the table? Impressive. Ticketholders for each show were able to vote for which songs they wanted to hear, but I unfortunately missed the link in the ticket confirmation email, so I was at the mercy of my fellow audience members, who apparently prefer newer material than I do. The… See more →

When I last saw this 25 years ago, I responded with some kind of wannabe film snob shit—I don’t remember if it was for or against—and my girlfriend at the time was, correctly, not having it. This time, probably still unjustifiably, I feel assured enough in my snobbery to say that the visuals in this movie are distractingly bland. Apart from a few dramatic camera swoops here and there, the colors and compositions reflect all… See more →

Note to self: Look for Mary Lattimore interviews discussing her composition and documentation process. I’ve enjoyed her music casually for a few years, but after now seeing it assembled in real time in front of me—with her hands constantly moving back and forth between the massive harp in front of her and the delay pedal on her lap—I’d love to know more about her mental model for her music. Most other delay-oriented performances I’ve seen… See more →

Before the pandemic took hold and when I still lived in Brooklyn, I had been planning to check out Human Impact’s first-ever show at Saint Vitus in mid-March of last year. I’m lukewarm on the records they’ve put out since, so I wasn’t going to bother with this tour, especially since their tour mates Child Bite (who I’ve previously seen and enjoyed) weren’t playing the Philly show, but my friend Matt invited me to come,… See more →

I know, I know, you’re probably like, “Oh great, yet another martial-arts-infused ripoff of E.T. and Indiana Jones where the MacGuffin is a telekinetic rock that loves to eat ice cream,” but hear me out

Come to see Marilyn Monroe become the Marilyn Monroe, stay to see the beautiful Niagara Falls backdrop and a Technicolor spin on great noir cinematography. The final act is a dud, but Jean Peters is such a badass, I almost didn’t notice. And comic relief in the form of coked up shredded wheat salesmen is such a weird play, I can’t help but respect it.

From the kitschy way it introduces itself, I fully expected unadulterated camp, but for some reason, Bob Balaban directs Parents with an almost completely straight face, giving center stage to some unwatchable dead-eyed kid who sleepwalks his way through the entire film. (Unsurprisingly, this is that kid’s sole acting credit.) It’s a long 80 minutes.

THIS MOVIE IS FUCKING INSANE

Do yourself a favor and read up on Colonia Dignidad before watching this if you don’t want to feel like you got to class and found out too late that there was a homework assignment.

I gather that the first Ghoulies movie didn’t get its name until after it was made. They realized its little Gremlins wannabes are the best thing it has going for it, and I bet they wished they had pushed that button harder. Thankfully Ghoulies II takes full advantage of the opportunity to correct that error, roughly quadrupling their screen time and letting them terrorize a carnival. This movie is not remotely clever and it doesn’t… See more →

Ghoulies always felt like a glaring omission in my personal horror canon because it was one of the most memorable VHS boxes on display in the video store that was my second home in the late ’80s and early ’90s. And somehow I never noticed until now that the little green guy on that box is wearing an adorable half shirt and tiny red suspenders! Unfortunately he doesn’t wear them in the movie, so that’s… See more →

I bought two tickets to this show during June’s post-vax frenzy of we’re-back-baby optimism. I actually thought someone would go to the show with me! I was so young. Not only were there no takers, I ultimately didn’t even want to go myself. I listened to some Idles records today in advance of the show and came to the sad realization that I’m just not that into this band. But couch inertia has cost me… See more →

Well, this was a learning experience. My previous experiment in seeing a show in NYC and sleeping in my own bed that same night was pretty successful. This time? Not so much. I got to see Greet Death play exactly one song before I turned into a pumpkin. Luckily it was the song I most wanted to hear, “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done,” whose title was also very appropriate for the moment.

As it… See more →

I wonder if everyone who’s so tickled that James Wan funneled big studio bucks into a kooky grindhouse premise would find similar delight in, like, Nickelback covering a Bad Brains song.

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 →

Somehow, in the 25 years since I (or anyone else) last saw Deadguy, we all got 25 years older.

Aaaaand we’re back!

This show was originally supposed to happen a year and a half ago, and it’s undoubtedly a different experience now than it would have been then. The last 19 months of COVID loomed large, sure, but for me personally, there was also the issue of my intervening relocation to Philadelphia. A night out in Brooklyn ain’t as convenient for me as it used to be, which, in a number of important ways,… 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 →