PhilaMOCA

One of the best random laughs I’ve had in the last few years was at a “Remember when RoboCop shot that dude in the dick” t-shirt, and this fever dream of a comedy collaboration is a kind of spiritual sibling of that shirt, especially since it really goes for broke in reimagining that particular moment. All of RoboCop’s 60 scenes are remade by different people, often sketch comedy troupes, and while they don’t all… See more →

The late, great Faraquet scheduled a handful of reunion gigs across a weekend (presumably so no one in the band would have to take time off work) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their lone full-length album, The View From This Tower, which has long been high on the list of my favorite underground records. I felt a rare bit of hometown pride when the Philly show sold out fast enough for them to add… See more →

A solid bill of oddities tonight.

Ecology: Homestones is a purveyor of harsh noise that probably wouldn’t hold my attention if it weren’t performed by a towering ghoul with a shrunken head, accompanied by a limbless torso writhing along to the cacophony on a hook behind a velvet rope. Apparently there’s a whole mythology that goes with this, and incredibly, it’s attracted more than a half million social media followers in just a few short… See more →

Gonna tell my kids this is A Complete Unknown

Steak is Quentin Dupieux’s first feature film, which I enjoyed more than I expected considering that I don’t remember much liking Rubber, the film he made after it, when I saw it some 15 years ago. Steak’s comic beats, bizarro world of Clockwork Orange-tinged perpetual high school, and bumping electronic soundtrack all cohere into a satisfyingly absurdist satire of conformity, reminiscent at times of Yorgos Lanthimos’s more accessible moments. And it’s perfectly paced:… See more →

How Peter Fonda is not best known for this starring role as a tomato-averse alien with explosive ejaculate is something I will never understand

When it’s not succumbing to self-consciously unhinged improv exercise, this is something like a feature-length maximalist update of Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture for the reality TV age. The editor is unquestionably the MVP.

Last night I watched Anatomy of a Fall and tonight I watched this. Cinema is so much.

I made a Spotify playlist of the Love God soundtrack. Only a little over half of the songs in the film are available on Spotify, but it’s still 81 minutes of music!

On this, my third viewing, I realized that Sophie is funding her revenge activities with the cash her dad gave her so she could avoid eating on campus with the plebes.

This is the most utterly baffling expression of human creativity I have ever seen.

Apart from stock footage inserts, there isn’t a single scene in Cade: The Tortured Crossing that isn’t shot on green screen, and I kind of hope Neil Breen stays with that approach in future films. The 7th Guest aesthetic really works for him.

He does look more at home, though (to the extent that he ever looks at home anywhere), in the suburban Las Vegas locations he’s traditionally used than the alternately lavish and decayed… See more →

Like an 11-year-old boy on a Lucky Charms bender scribbled out a screenplay and then picked up the phone and hired legit Hong Kong action pros to make it. If anyone has ever shot anything more entertaining on location in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I have yet to see it (and would desperately love to see it).

May we all achieve Bob Flanagan’s level of self-knowledge and self-love, even if it ultimately fails to prepare us to confront death. Bob’s poem, “Why?,” is going to stay with me. “Because you always hurt the one you love.”

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

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 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.