Review

Okay, I know, fine, I’ll quit Twitter.

Isabelle Huppert’s demented performance is more than this movie deserves and not enough to save it. One might expect the filmmakers to have some fun with this kind of pure pulp, but the whole thing is rote and flat, with plainspoken design and direction and a script that pulls every punch. The closest it comes to generating tension is triggering flashbacks from The Piano Teacher, seemingly intentionally. So maybe just watch that instead.

Leah and I discovered, roughly seven years after the fact, that we were at the same Soul Coughing show in Philly in 1998, long before we met. This Mike Doughty show was a fun opportunity to kind of recreate that night as if we had actually spent it together.

Soul Coughing was perhaps the most unique band to find a larger audience during the permissive major-label alt-rock boom of the ’90s, and to my ears,… See more →

Fuck yeah.

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

They Photoshopped Adam’s junk out of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Best dance sequence since Ex Machina.

What a time capsule. A 1968 high school faculty struggles to maintain the conformist status quo with a changing world beating at the door. When Vietnam finally comes to the fore after hovering in the background for much of the film, it’s a wrenching indictment.

Mostly irredeemably sadistic trash, but its periodic flashes of artfulness—and Meiko Kaji’s withering glare—are enough to recommend it.

Has its moments (including what is possibly the highest quality jump scare of this decade), but taken as a whole it’s overwritten, too long, too polished, and too corny.

It may be the first in the series (other than the original) to have a director and screenwriters with name recognition, but this is just another Halloween sequel, thankfully nothing less but certainly nothing more. It’s pretty boring.

Also, is there any greater talent in Hollywood who is as routinely wasted as Judy Greer is?

The director of The Raid putting his spin on The Wicker Man sure sounds like fun, and Apostle starts off with promise, with a wild-eyed Dan Stevens lurching around a muddy village of Victorian cultists. But the movie kneecaps itself before the halfway mark, rushing to resolve the most interesting aspects of its plot in favor of making a gonzo, gore-soaked spectacle of the superfluous remainder.

I hadn’t planned to publish this post since I failed to document this fest as thoroughly as the previous one, but I decided not to waste the bits I did document, so here they are.

Short Film Competition

The first short film competition screening was probably the least kid-friendly screening at the festival, and sure enough, a family with kids was front and center in the theater. Saturday morning cartoons, right? Literally two seconds in,… See more →

omg

What a mess. I’m sympathetic to what Sorry to Bother You has to say about the intersection of capitalism, exploitation, and racism, but all of its statements, like all of its jokes, are blared from a megaphone and continue long after their point is made. Its amateur-hour vibe is far more tedious than charming, its gonzo satire is self-conscious, and its progressive politics are undercut by its lone female character functioning primarily as a trophy.… See more →

At the Sleep show. It smells like Otto’s jacket.

The underlying narrative seems sound, but the mythology driving it is vague and the stakes aren’t really made clear. It’s a short movie but I had to watch it in two sittings because I was getting restless. Visually, however, *The Secret of the Kells *is an unparalleled stunner, worthy of its namesake.

There’s a helluva story here, but this documentary is more interested in entertaining than enlightening, and at least one of the conclusions it draws is downright insulting.

Hello, I am a seasoned veteran of all manner of deranged horror films, and I watched most of this through my fingers.

Discretion is the better part of valor. Heroism ≠ leadership. I think I enjoyed this even more the second time.

That whole unlikely-victory-of-an-ill-mannered-buffoon-enabled-by-TV-ratings thing lands a little differently now.

Asghar Farhadi’s sensitivity to the contours of domestic conflict—in a universal sense but also as it relates to certain segments of Iranian society—is extraordinary. This was also true of A Separation, his previous film, and in the case of The Salesman, his focus on the complicated residue of assault rings true in a way that makes the film necessarily and rewardingly difficult.

I can’t decide if its ideas are muddled or merely complex, but as a pure action movie, Incredibles 2 is a lot of fun. I’m disappointed that the filmmakers couldn’t find a way to avoid the strobing effects that exclude epileptic viewers. For a company as creatively industrious as Pixar, that struck me as a lazy choice.

As for the preceding short film, Bao, bravo to Pixar for stepping away from the Eurocentric boys’ club,… See more →

For whatever reason, horror is having a moment of sustained critical cachet, with a growing list of scary movies receiving praise for emotional resonance, thematic richness, and/or excellence of execution that transcend the genre’s usual stale jump scares. Hereditary seems keen to get in on the action, offering a sophisticated layer of fraught family drama atop a pulpier horror foundation; its familiar depictions of unraveling psyches and things going bump in the night are shaped… See more →

A Quiet Place centers on a family living in a not-too-distant future in which vicious aliens with hypersensitive hearing have wiped out much of the world’s population. A little over a year into the invasion, after losing their youngest child (of three) to the creatures, they have another child on the way. In a world where silence is absolutely crucial for survival, a newborn baby is the ultimate liability, and while we’re privy to the… See more →

First time in the @philauu basement in a decade (to see @KINGTUFFY) and it feels as familiar as ever, like no time has passed at all.

I’ve read a number of Ayn Rand’s essays, but never bothered with her fiction until now. I expected overt advocacy for her self-centered Objectivist philosophy, but I also expected it to be packaged in something approximating a compelling story. After all, The Fountainhead has been devoured by legions of basement dwellers who couldn’t make it through two pages of Kant or Foucault. But apart from Gary Cooper’s and Patricia Neal’s radical egoists settling for fucking… See more →

Someone finally made the meditative arthouse thriller the Pizzagate crowd has been waiting for.

Wes Anderson’s films are all effectively stop-motion animation, and part of what I find off-putting about most of his live-action work is the resulting reverse-uncanny-valley effect. I had been over his schtick for years by the time Fantastic Mr. Fox came out and made me realize that the world of proper animation is where Anderson belongs. Isle of Dogs is a welcome return to that place.

This stylish proto-slasher is stupider and trashier than the more highly regarded gothic works of Bava’s horror ouevre, and more enjoyable for it. A Bay of Blood is a must-see for anyone interested in how giallo films paved the way for slashers, especially since Friday the 13th borrowed from it liberally.

This dizzying array of Cronenbergian psychobabble, pulp horror, and avant-garde psychedelia doesn’t quite hang together, and its ending is pure garbage, but overall it is more than bonkers enough to recommend it. Pairs well with The Manitou.

Considering when Forbidden Planet was made, its special effects are astonishing, and its psychological concept is ambitious. But that concept is explicated through far more dialogue than action, moving back and forth between just two fairly modest locations, and the result is kinda boring.

This movie has everything: police slapstick, domestic slapstick, courtroom slapstick, office slapstick, and most importantly, several exquisitely staged set pieces overflowing with thoroughly mind-blowing action. Jackie Chan may be the most committed entertainer in the world, and Police Story is among his finest endeavors.

Listen (shh) to what the flower people say
Aahhh
Listen, it’s getting louder every day

Projects

Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →

A video essay about how Star Wars was saved in the edit inspired me to finally watch Harmy’s Despecialized Edition, which had been sitting on my hard drive for years. Not having seen the original practical effects in decades, I expected them to look a lot rougher than they did. Their toyetic artifice is definitely apparent, but knowing how much of a leap forward they were in 1977—the industry drafted behind this achievement for well… See more →

Bruce Lee’s electrifying fight scenes may be the primary draw, but Nora Miao’s amazing outfit is a close second. I didn’t expect this to be the case, but Gordon Chan’s loose remake with Jet Li, Fist of Legend, is a superior film in nearly all respects.

Biopics are an almost universally boring and unnecessary category, but I, Tonya subverts that by a) relitigating a scandal and depicting as a hero someone long understood to be a villain, and b) being brutally entertaining. Its pitch-black comedy is reminiscent of The Wolf of Wall Street, with inferior style but a vastly more appealing and sympathetic protagonist. As Tonya Harding and her mother, Margot Robbie and Allison Janney own the film, and without performances… See more →

Call Me by Your Name strikes me as an important achievement, but one that doesn’t speak to me as much as I had hoped, at least not as much as Carol or Moonlight, the other recent queer crossover hits that are inevitably offered for comparison. The gulf between its adolescent protagonist’s cosmopolitan intellectualism and my own experiences as a teen may be a factor, and it doesn’t help that I am definitely not a fan… See more →

A sweet fairy tale, easily the best of the small handful of Guillermo del Toro films I’ve seen. My one gripe is that it relies so heavily on the (strong) appeal of Sally Hawkins’ and Richard Jenkins’ performances that the film sags when they’re not onscreen. Michael Shannon is a serviceable villain, but his contours aren’t nuanced or idiosyncratic enough to justify the amount of attention del Toro lavishes on him.

I liked this so much more the second time!

Much as The Force Awakens strongly echoes A New Hope, many elements of The Empire Strikes Back are recognizable in The Last Jedi:

• A budding Jedi, Rey (née Luke Skywalker), seeks training from a master, Luke Skywalker (née Yoda), isolated on an obscure planet, Ahch-To (née Dagobah).
• Meanwhile, her friends in the Resistance (née Rebellion) are on the run from the First Order (née Empire).
• A rogue named DJ (née Lando Calrissian) comes to their aid… See more →

Greg Sestero’s 2013 memoir, The Disaster Artist, tells the story of his unlikely friendship with Tommy Wiseau, a bizarre and mysterious man more than two decades Sestero’s senior. Both men dream of movie stardom, and the book centers on the making of The Room, Wiseau’s self-financed and uniquely terrible feature film, which later inspired an enduring cult following. Anyone reading the memoir is probably already a fan of The Room, and hoping to gain some… See more →

If I were a congressman running for governor, and my son and my nephew committed an appalling crime together, the first thing I would do is arrange a dinner date to discuss the matter in a public place with my unstable brother.

Like the magic trade itself, this movie is a silly thing that takes itself way too seriously.

When I see a new film of almost universal acclaim, sometimes I go out of my way to read the negative reviews to get a little distance from the zeitgeist. In the case of The Florida Project’s negative reviews, I saw a few patterns:

• the expected backlash against the critical consensus
• the frustration of viewers who prefer more traditional narratives
• locals objecting to the portrayal of Florida
• accusations of poverty porn

One flavor of… See more →

I generally appreciate starry-eyed visionaries following through on ill-advised, shoot-for-the-moon ideas, even when the results are underwhelming. There are lessons to be learned and inspiration to be taken, and some demonstrable good is likely to come of it eventually. That said, I wish Loving Vincent, the first animated feature film to be constructed from tens of thousands of oil paintings, were more of an achievement than a stunt.

Narratively, it’s a fairly stale exercise in… See more →

For the small, pedantic portion of the audience I represent, the title character’s old-soul Luddite appeal is undermined by the poetry overlays’ use of a handwriting font rather than actual handwriting. Just sayin’.

Hot Doug’s: The Movie does a good job of capturing the special vibe of the iconic restaurant, but offers virtually no backstory. Who is Doug? What is his background? How did this place come to be? To the extent that these fundamental questions are explored at all, answers are cursory at best. Fans of the now-closed Hot Doug’s will enjoy the opportunity to bathe in its warm glow again (as I did), but anyone looking… See more →

The Uninvited is a compelling and well-paced mystery that tries to be a few too many things. The seams between its comedy, melodrama, and horror may be visible, but when it wants to be spooky, it does so very successfully, and the whole thing is beautifully shot. I’m especially fond of all the opportunities it creates for characters to emerge from and disappear into inky blackness.