Review

I avoided seeing Rocky Horror forever, mostly because throughout high school and college, I found all the attention-starved theater kids who worshipped it to be so irritating. Decades later, I can’t help but be charmed by how giddily transgressive it is.

When Melanie says to Sgt. Parks, “It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore,” I so badly wanted Sgt. Parks to be Mitch McConnell.

Like all Dahl adaptations, this pulls its punches more than it should, but Jim Henson’s magic and the crazy camera work manage to make it truly special, and it’s miles beyond the atrocious Zemeckis version that came 30 years later. The experience was also elevated for me by watching it with my partner, whose lifelong idolization of the titular witches is morbidly adorable.

The office politics themes and serial killer plot may be uninspiring, but Office Killer’s overall craft is very enjoyable. Though it doesn’t noticeably echo the self-portraiture Cindy Sherman is best known for, the cinematography is deliciously and unselfconsciously skewed, which, in tandem with the chamber ensemble score, lends it a peculiar elegance. The whole thing is pretty firmly dated by its pre-Y2K anxiety and the ostentatious graphic design of its titles (courtesy of Bureau),… See more →

Tales from the Hood’s vengeful ghosts aren’t nearly as scary as the real-world racism and cycles of violence that provoke them. The film’s portrayals of those social ills are anything but subtle, but they are nevertheless undeniably horrific.

Why in the world did it take me so long to see Street Trash?! It might be the most grotesque film I’ve ever seen, and its gleeful commitment to thorough vulgarity wouldn’t be a virtue if it weren’t made with such flair. It’s several steps above what I remember of the Troma movies, but doesn’t quite reach the bravura heights of Sam Raimi’s and Peter Jackson’s early splatstick gems. Street Trash is apparently also the… See more →

Neither the trailer nor writer/director Leigh Whannell’s bonafides in the Saw and Insidious franchises gave me much confidence that this Invisible Man remake would be any good, so its overall high quality is a very pleasant surprise indeed. Its loudest moments are its weakest, but thankfully it spends much of its time quietly plumbing the depths of Elisabeth Moss’s crippling PTSD. If there is to be a modern version of the scream queen, may Moss’s… See more →

I wasn’t able to make my annual trip to Ottawa this year for obvious reasons, but thankfully, in lieu of canceling the festival, they took the whole thing online, so I was still able to get my animation fix. Since all kinds of events have had to rapidly move online this year with wildly varying results, I kind of expected it to be a shit show, but with the exception of a few hiccups, I… See more →

Sweet, dumb, fun. No more than I needed from it, and no less.

A handful of the adults in this are written and performed with noticeably more warmth than is typical of mainstream fright flicks, and Aubrey Plaza in particular is given real latitude to employ her considerable talents. Unfortunately she’s sidelined after the first act in favor of her kid and his friends, all of whom are pretty stock, and nu-Chucky doesn’t hold a candle to the original. All in all, though, this is slightly better than… See more →

Charming but exhausting. The action is too quick, the plot is too slow, and at 65 minutes, it runs at least four times longer than it needs to. Also, given the abject poverty constantly on display, I was distracted for most of the movie wondering how the profit sharing works when a no-budget DIY flick like this gets international distribution. Oh, and having not set foot in a movie theater in four months, the Alamo… See more →

First things first: no, Verotika isn’t the new The Room. Maybe this is splitting hairs, but it’s more Ed Wood than Tommy Wiseau, which is fitting given that Wood is the poster boy for the kind of 1950s schlock that shaped much of Glenn Danzig’s imagination.

Like Wood’s films, Danzig’s Verotika is obliviously, bewilderingly badly conceived and made, often comically so, but it’s ultimately a slog. Of its three segments, the first is by far… See more →

Gene Tierney carefully assembling the perfect outfit for throwing herself down the stairs to force a miscarriage is just about as good as movies get.

If Robo Vampire has a script, it reads like something a 6-year-old wrote, which makes it a compelling argument for child labor. Somehow this is my first exposure to the hopping vampires of jiangshi folklore, and only the second Godfrey Ho movie I’ve seen. It won’t be the last.

The premise is a bit too clever for its own good, and its foundational recontextualization of horror cliches sees fit to bask in said cliches for far longer than is tolerable, especially considering its satirical scares are blander than much of their source material. Cabin in the Woods is at its best during its early peeks behind the curtain, before Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins’ charming rapport is displaced by a too-thorough accounting of the… See more →

@manorastroman_official still kicks ass, even if @market.hotel’s sightlines do not.

This movie is so goddamned good, I’m not even mad that it neglects to incorporate Van Halen’s “On Fire.”

Gentle but not slight. Didn’t know how much I needed that right now. Extra points for the quick hit of what is probably the best bookbinding porn ever to grace a major motion picture.

If you know a better live band than the Sadies, you live a life of riches.

How I became so attached to the songs in this movie when it came out the same year I fell in love with thrash metal is anybody’s guess, but “Part of Your World” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” are the bedrock of my karaoke game. Decades later, no other aspect of The Little Mermaid does much for me, although Scuttle is pretty delightful and Ursula is the shit. Can’t believe I only just learned that she… See more →

My immune system didn’t do me many favors in 2019. I was sick on five or six separate occasions in the first half of the year, including an obnoxious bout of bronchitis that lasted the entire month of February. Luckily that didn’t stop me from having an adventurous and fulfilling year, and for the first time in my four years at ProPublica, I used every single one of my vacation days.

Projects

My first three… See more →

Quite possibly the best-looking Disney film.

Modern fandom is little more than ravenous consumerism, and more than any other Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker’s blockbuster maximalism is calibrated with this in mind. When I rewatched The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi the night before, it felt mostly like homework, and trying to summon anything else to say about The Rise of Skywalker feels about the same. Anyway, I’m done. Thanks for the memories, Star Wars, if not… See more →

I was feeling like a slug earlier and the devil on one shoulder told me to skip this show. But the angel an the other shoulder was like, “This excellent band traveled all the way from Busan to play their music for you. Are you really going to deprive them of even one smiling face to greet them?” Thanks, angel.

I’ve never shared the average cinephile’s effusive fascination with Scorsese’s brand of pathologically dishonest men, but I’ll give said men credit for consistency: their demands for much more than they’ve earned are always reflected in how much time the audience is made to spend with them.

Previous legs of Slayer’s sprawling farewell tour included support from Lamb of God, Anthrax, Behemoth, Testament, Napalm Death, Obituary, Amon Amarth, and Cannibal Corpse, none of whom could entice me to drag my ass into a cavernous arena or amphitheater. And the last time I saw Slayer turned out to be the last ever appearance of the original lineup, shortly before the untimely death of Jeff Hanneman and the departure of Dave Lombardo, which seemed… See more →

Great to catch up with some Kansas City @usairguitar buddies swinging through Brooklyn tonight!

For most of their existence, and especially since the market for recorded music collapsed, the Misfits have been more of a fashion brand than anything, their logo adorning virtually any object that could conceivably accessorize with a shade of Manic Panic or a pair of Doc Martens. The unlikelihood of a proper Misfits reunion stemmed from the decades-long feud between founding members Glenn Danzig and Jerry Only over how those sweet merch profits should be… See more →

Finally saw my first live performance of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians”… in the middle of a shopping mall. Capitalism rubs it in.

Like many ghost stories, Lake Mungo is about grief, its apparitions manifestations of its characters’ inability to accept their loss; and like many ghost stories, its emotional core is overshadowed by its spook factor. And that’s fine. Lake Mungo’s misstep is in its approach to being a mystery thriller, loaded with nonsensical twists and arbitrary red herrings, none of which coalesce into a remotely satisfying resolution. At one point, a woman who has spent… See more →

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 →

This is about the zillionth time I’ve seen @lowtheband and I think the first time I’ve seen them play “Do You Know How to Waltz?” What a gift. My favorite moment of 2019 so far.

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?

When my friend Alex from my Harmonix days announced on Twitter that his first show playing drums for the NYHC band None Above All was coming up, I thought it would be fun to surprise him, see him do his thing, and catch up a bit. And it was! His band was on first and I figured I’d split when they were done. But as soon as I got there, the room’s overwhelming majority of… See more →

I know it’s punk rock and it’s the late show and everything, but this isn’t someone’s basement. A 30-minute set from the headliner? Weak.

Biggest difference between tonight’s @bssmusic show and when I last saw them in 2004 was the woman next to me doing a crossword on her phone

Teenagers have shown us on many occasions that they’re capable of making fresh, exhilarating music, but that music is usually rooted firmly in an existing paradigm: hip-hop, punk, etc. Teenagers are students and students are formalists. One of the most striking things about Black Midi’s fresh, exhilarating, teenage music is its lack of an obvious reference point. It is at times reminiscent of Slint and their math rock descendants, and the funk-tinged post punk of… See more →

So I went to a Phish show. It was a big deal, not because I love Phish, but because my partner Leah loves them, and I emphatically do not. In our nearly 14 years together, this hasn’t been a problem (apart from the time she tried to make the case that a band I like is similar to Phish, and I, uh, did not respond well), but after I reluctantly agreed to finally go to… See more →

I like Uranium Club so very much, and I was fully prepared to travel to see them (after I learned to speak the incantation that makes their sporadic, unadvertised tour dates appear momentarily in hexadecimal at the bottom of a beer bottle), but then they just showed up in my backyard.

I hadn’t been to Brooklyn Bazaar before, so I wasn’t quite prepared for its ballroom’s 250 capacity, which held about triple the amount of… See more →

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.

At @thetrocadero for the last time. 😢

The Big Mess Cabaret’s endearingly sloppy mix of queer-friendly vaudeville, drag, and burlesque was the first act booked when Joanna Pang took over ownership of the Troc from her father in 1994, making it a fitting finale for the venue 25 years later.

I so love the mere fact of an artist as singular as Björk that I often forget how little of her music actually grabs me. I’m a huge fan of her masterful millennial output, 1997’s Homogenic and 2001’s Vespertine, but given how much else she’s done that doesn’t move me like those records do, it’s probably not fair to call myself a big fan of Björk herself. Cornucopia, advertised as her “most elaborate staged concert… See more →

Reich Richter Pärt is a pair of collaborations between the American composer Steve Reich, the German painter Gerhard Richter, and the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. I’m an admirer of all three men, so this event was a no-brainer for me, and since I knew Frank would be into it too, I invited him along as a belated birthday gift.

The first performance pairs Pärt’s 2014 choral piece, Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima, with wallpapers and tapestries… See more →

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.

There were definitely more men in their 50s at this show than I expected to see!

I went partly because I enjoy Colleen’s records and partly as something of a recon mission: As I’m focusing more on making music again, singing and playing power chords live over canned backing tracks is an approachable performance goal, and I wanted to see how well a pro could make it work. Colleen’s biggest strength is her songwriting, and… See more →

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 →