Megalopolis, or the Old Man’s Fever Dream

September 30, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

There is no getting around it: Megalopolis (2024) is an elderly man’s fever dream. Its psychedelic transitions, flat dialogue, bizarre acting, and milquetoast politics polymerize into a whole both mysteriously personal and entirely legible. It is a fable set in faux-contemporary New York with “Make New Rome Great Again” signs and superficial invocations of the Catilinarian Conspiracy. Characters have names like “Cicero” and “Crassus.” Signs for the New York Stock Exchange are still visible. Yet, none of these allusions go... Read more

Empire Records: At the Heart of Gen X

September 24, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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Empire Records (1995) is a cult hit. Having been born in 1993, I missed out on the phenomenon. In preparation for seeing the stage-musical adaptation of the Allan Moyle film, I decided to check it out. It’s fun in its way. Teen comedies are, well, for teens. And I can imagine enjoying this movie in a right-place-right-time sort of way. I’d wager the musical would be better (the movie never leans into its song choices). But I had to miss... Read more

Hoffman’s Capote Deserved the Oscar

September 13, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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My dive into Rochester’s own Laurence Olivier continues, this time with Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005). I’d put it off for some time for the obvious reason: it received five Oscar nods and won Hoffman an Academy Award for Best Actor. It’s a biopic. I remembered the trailer where he spoke in a half-helium caricature of a dead twentieth-century gossip. Being frank, I feared seeing PSH reduced to a single role, a once-in-a-lifetime bit of Oscar bait to the detriment of... Read more

AfrAId of What?

September 9, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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The critics are wrong again. Or at least, the critics who aren’t me. Christopher Weitz’s AfrAId (2024) has few friends. Rogerebert.com’s Peter Sobczynski savages what he terms “a film that is so awful in so many ways.” Shall we count them, Peter? Users haven’t proven much kinder. Big ideas, but alas, poorly executed—so goes the standard lament. Why did I have so much fun watching it then? AfrAId offered me one of the best theater-going experiences of the year. I... Read more

The Savages’ Ravages

September 3, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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It’s ten years since the death. Not my mother, who’s been dead longer (13 years). Not my grandmother. She’s been gone about two years now. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the phenom. It’s been ten long years. His is the only celebrity death I can remember publicly crying about. Norm Macdonald hit during lockdown. That one would’ve been best kept to myself anyway. And, as a kid, I was too incurious and provincial to have many other heroes. KoRn? None of them... Read more

Lesser Bergman?

August 26, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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After a week of travel and sickness, this will be more an exhortation than a review. Even now, I’m sniffling and coughing. Never mind the deadlines on the horizon. I had the pleasure of seeing Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968). It’s unfair. It’s unfair that Bergman seems capable of making a masterful example of any conceivable genre of film. Here, we have a phenomenal horror film. Hour of the Wolf is about a couple, an artist and his... Read more

Fear and Listlessness in the Suburbs

August 12, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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May December (2023) is, like all movies starring Julianne Moore, good. And, as might be expected, her talent anchors it. Moore’s willingness to play a monster so flatly and straightforwardly demonstrates her courage. Not that it really needs demonstrating. May December concerns an actress (Natalie Portman) sent to Savannah, Georgia to live with and study a woman (Moore) who began a sexual relationship and then married a middle schooler (played as an adult by Charles Melton). She gave birth to... Read more

Nothing is Written

August 12, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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It’s a common movie-lover’s mistake, or I hope it is, to put off seeing certain great films. They’re simply too grand, too loaded down with Significance and History. The corollary to that fear is that we’re always wrong. As best I can tell, that drowsy anxiety is a surefire indicator that the movie, once watched, will blow you away. I have just had this experience with David Lean’s masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia (1962). There’s no point in reviewing it. Lean... Read more

The Point of Return

August 4, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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Technically speaking, “melodrama” has little to do with the Greek word for “honey” (meli). But what’s the fun in what’s technical? Melodrama teaches us to be suspicious of the technically correct and attentive, rather, to the emotionally astute. Melodrama touches the spirit of the law and not the letter. It oozes, too sweet and rich—mere soap opera—for some. However, for those of us believers with a sweet tooth, it offers pleasure and insight in a way simultaneously filling and sickening.... Read more

Ridley Scott’s First Napoleon

July 29, 2024 By Chase Padusniak

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There is a species of genius in casting Harvey Keitel as a Frenchman. Doubly so as cavalryman in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, framed by tussles of brown hair, mustachioed lips barking “this is about ahnah! Duels a’ about ahnah!” There is also a species of genius in casting Keith Carradine, that gaunt Californian, as Keitel’s lifelong rival. Carradine responds in unaccented, standard, white-bread American news-speak. A distant relative of Carradine’s prepared editions of Archimedes and Euclid. His parents were actors. Keitel’s... Read more