I confess before God and you, my brothers and sisters, that I have gravely sinned. I have sinned! Like the Witch of Endor, my wife and I conjured up a shade from the great beyond, a specter whose place in 2023 is—I see now—ill-advised. Between puppy energy bursts and our yowling cat (he’s named Crybaby for a reason), we traipsed about Netflix, willy-nilly scanning each little rectangle until there it was: 2017’s Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press. We... Read more
It’s not giving much away to say that 500 Days of Summer (2009) is about a break-up. The movie takes a nonlinear tack in exploring the year and a half Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) needs to date and then get over Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). The two meet at the greeting card company where they both work, enjoy a tempestuous romance, and then split. The constant cutting between the present and past, ostensibly a way to show us the sunny... Read more
Duplex (2003) is the kind of black comedy you don’t see much these days. Streaming services offer cutesy angst and an aesthetic sensibility distantly related to the gothic [e.g., Wednesday (2022-Present)]. The pitch-tinged moxie of films like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1947) and The Loved One (1965) is an ill fit for our time. Right-wingers and dejected comedians may complain that comedy is dead, that you can’t insult anyone anymore. In the process, however, many make their careers, pivoting from... Read more
When we found out Norm Macdonald died, my wife and I set our hearts on doing one thing and one thing only that night. No, not toasting his demise! We watched Dirty Work (1998), the only feature film to star Norm. The ex-Saturday Night Live (1975-Present) star had an immensely loyal fanbase maintained through podcasts, guest spots, and whatever else Norm found himself doing. After getting fired from SNL, Dirty Work was his shot at a more traditional comedic career.... Read more
Despite my hopeless pride in coming from New Jersey (being a Raiders fan, despair comes naturally to me), I missed the boat on Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004). I didn’t even really watch Scrubs (2001-2010), though it anchored many a conversation in middle school. In retrospect, I floated past certain aughts cultural touchstones because I was a content kid with older parents who watched sitcoms and reality TV. What was trending didn’t matter, except insofar as my mom got to... Read more
You’d have to come from a family both normal and strange to gather and watch Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) at Christmastime. Normal, because it explores kinship, childlike wonder, and the simple pleasure of togetherness despite difference in a way that makes me feel saccharine just typing that out. But it’s not at all sweet and light; it’s an odd journey filled with quiet violence, questions of performativity, and hauntings. It’s also, in its TV version (the one worth... Read more
Much to some Baby Boomers’ chagrin, our moment bears comparison with the tumultuous 1960s. Then, as now, Black racial consciousness blossomed, just as Black music and culture became fashionable. We’ve got rioting, a Leftward push rebuffed and domesticated by entrenched power structures, and moral panics around sexual mores. More kids take more drugs more regularly in the face of a hopeless future—many times more powerful than those available in the Decade of Love and Hate (paging Robert Mitchum), but paralleling... Read more
The nigher the end, the wonkier the appetite. Whether it’s Jay and Silent Bob in Dogma (1999) or General Jack D. Ripper saving his precious bodily fluids ahead of nuclear annihilation in Dr. Strangelove (1964), expecting our shared finale induces extremes. The gnostic sects of the first couple centuries AD were either orgiasts or ascetics, while today Proud Boys compete with new family structures held together by Blackstonian polygamy. The apocalypse is a comedy gold mine for the soul brave... Read more
If you combined the stories of “Little Red Riding Hood” and Last House on the Left (1972), then transposed the byproduct to medieval Sweden, you’d have Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960). Indeed, the Wes Craven film was consciously modeled on Bergman’s effort, lightly nudging the tale away from idealization by associating the action with the emerging and dangerous freedom of the late 60s and early 70s. Bergman takes the opposite tack, bending toward melodrama. He sets his movie in... Read more
It was about 10 years ago that, driving a friend of mine to some late-night Jersey diner, he told me he was going to queue up something, the likes of which I had never heard before—Bisch Bosch (2012) by Scott Walker. He was right. As best I can recall, he led with “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter).” Shrieks and instruments I could not place pierced a stochastic silence, all whirling around the near monotone of a male voice, a steady,... Read more
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