Review

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 →

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 →