Review

I first saw (and loved) the Dimension Films cut of Police Story 3 when it was released in the U.S. in 1996. For years, I didn’t even know it was a sequel, since the American version was simply titled Supercop. Twenty-seven (!) years later, thanks to Criterion Channel, I’ve finally seen the original version, and the differences are fascinating.

• Score: I don’t remember much about the Dimension version’s score, but I do remember it being… See more →

I think I can count on zero hands how many people I know who can even name an Unwound song, let alone call themselves fans, so after I got over my excitement when the reunion tour was announced last summer, I was a little surprised to learn they were playing Union Transfer (capacity: 1,200), and still more surprised when that show sold out and a second one was added. I’ve long had an objective understanding… See more →

The six massive pillars in the middle of Underground Arts make the stage invisible to big chunks of the room, and when it’s a sold out show like this one, finding an even halfway decent sight line can be next to impossible if you don’t get there early. I’ve been burned by this a few times now, so I think going forward I’ll need to commit to early arrival or just skip the show.

Tonight… See more →

I only made it through about 20 minutes of this, and I think the filmmaker’s vision is at present too underdeveloped to sustain a feature length, but I’d still much rather see more of this kind of unorthodox exploration than another round of rote Blumhouse banality.

Side note for my fellow graphic design pedants: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone miss the point of dot leaders quite so flagrantly as the opening credits of … See more →

I generally prefer to avoid Christian proselytizing and convoluted sci-fi but apparently if you put them together WE ARE IN BUSINESS

1. Act 1: Children savagely beating each other
2. Act 2: Children talking to each other on the telephone
3. Act 3: Children using the telephone to administer savage beatings

Don’t mind me, just starting off the new year with some quiet weeping over here

Maude

Leah and I became dog parents early in 2022, adopting a 15-pound, two-year-old Jack Russell / Chihuahua mix. Knowing Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned, we named her Maude, after the Bea Arthur character, who in 1972 was the first sitcom character to have an abortion. Living with Maude has been a big adjustment, but after getting over the initial hump, I’m not sure how we ever lived without her. She loves belly… See more →

I’m not well versed in the Hong Kong school of “what if [title of recent successful American movie], but completely incoherent?,” but between Magic Crystal’s kung fu/E.T./Indiana Jones cocktail and Scared Stiff’s action/bromance/comedy take on Nightmare on Elm Street, I’m more than sufficiently compelled to investigate further.

I came for the stop-motion, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from bailing about halfway through. I assume there are more songs, and I’m not sorry to have missed them.

Why do all the Kansas City mafiosos in this have Brooklyn accents?

I genuinely appreciate when a movie I know is going to be wretched proves to be significantly worse than I thought possible, so I have no regrets, but this was truly painful all the same.

After having to cancel my plans to attend last month’s Ottawa International Animation Festival at the last minute, I was glad the Philadelphia Film Festival’s animated shorts program gave me a chance to get my fix. This was a pretty solid collection of films, encompassing a variety of styles and narratives. The overall tone was fairly dark, which is always fine with me, but several of the films also made a habit of just stopping… See more →

The kind of thoroughly bonkers extravaganza that could easily elicit a bewildered “Well, that was certainly… a movie,” but the thing is, that response is actually pretty accurate and appropriately concise. This movie is more movie than almost any other movie, in that it embraces the form with such maximalist abandon as to leave it completely spent in just over an hour.

This was a bucket-lister for me, long overdue and worth the wait. It was also the second incarnation of Weird Al’s Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, in which he plays all original songs rather than the pop parodies he’s famous for. And I realized at the show that I think I generally prefer his originals! Don’t get me wrong; it was super fun to hear the parody medley in the encore, especially the extended “Yoda”… See more →

You know, after watching Watcher earlier in the day, I was like, “Maybe I’m just not a slow burn kind of guy.” And then Speak No Evil comes along to remind me how it’s done. This thing had its hooks in me from start to finish. It is cold-fucking-blooded. Obligatory warning: Parents of young kids might want to steer clear.

That rare four-band bill where everyone’s great. And as always, it is impossible to overstate how thoroughly @melt_banana rules.

There’s a lot to like here. It’s stylish and warm and conveys an understanding of brutality without feeling the need to bludgeon its audience. It feels very Bacurau by way of From Dusk Til Dawn: a remote community in a poor part of the world, a certain mysticism, a pronounced genre shift in the final act. And its most important characters manage to breathe real humanity into shallow genre archetypes. It’s all just a bit… See more →

I’m all for the post-A24 let’s-get-gnarly thing, but can we please do it with some more imagination?

I’ve been waiting a long time for this night, and it did not disappoint!

It’s rare for me to go to an arena show, and when I do, I generally expect the lack of intimacy to seriously diminish the experience. This was certainly the case for Mastodon, who absolutely demolished the basements and bars I saw them play years ago, but they couldn’t energize me in nearly the same way from across Trenton’s cavernous Cure Insurance Arena. The fact that I haven’t paid much attention to their last few… See more →

Relocating Philip Marlowe from 1940s Los Angeles to 1970s London is such a patently terrible idea that it’s no wonder no one involved in this seems to make much of an effort. But some contributions seem actively intent on dragging it down even further, most notably the tacky TV movie aesthetics and Candy Clark’s embarrassing, absolutely ridiculous take on Camilla (née Carmen) Sternwood. Awful.

I may be living in a backsliding democracy, but at least I finally got to see the mighty Def Leppard!

Another one checked off the bucket list!

Many years in the making, Mad God is the stop-motion passion project of special effects legend Phil Tippett, best known for his pioneering work on Star Wars, RoboCop, Jurassic Park, and others.

Tippett cites Karel Zeman’s revered collage aesthetic as a primary inspiration, but I see a lot more of the Quay brothers in Mad God, or at least the grotesque brand of Street of Crocodiles worship seen in Adam Jones’s early Tool videos. While… See more →

This is essentially a six-hour Vox explainer video—sans cute graphics and podcast cadence—shoehorned into a drama. Like The Wire before it, it excels at unpacking long-festering issues in the American criminal justice system, making a product that’s both coherent and cogent out of a complex story on a non-linear timeline. But all the information it wants to convey and all the points it wants to make are spoken rather plainly, which may make it successful… See more →

That night my two favorite former Sepultura dudes played all my favorite Sepultura songs.

Some stray notes:

• Upchuck’s frontwoman is a powerful performer, but part of her schtick is taking swigs of water or beer and spraying them from her mouth onto the audience. Punk rock abandon or not, I’m astonished anyone doesn’t understand how the events of the past two years have made that kind of behavior 1,000 percent unacceptable.
• Not to say any of their songs are bad, but Amyl and the Sniffers’ set list made me… See more →

If you have a thing for endless closeups of extremely filthy bare feet, have I got the movie for you

Not in the upper echelon of the many Low shows I’ve been to, mainly because I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the new record, Hey What, which I think they played in its entirety. And the rest of the setlist was a bit too familiar, made up mostly of songs they play at pretty much every show these days. Some are classics I’m always game to hear (“Sunflower”) and others not as much (“Monkey,” “Plastic Cup,” “No… See more →

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