Mark Proksch is great. So great, in fact, that I, jealous man that I am, almost felt bummed when I learned he had achieved some mainstream success with What We Do in the Shadows (2019-2022). Like my favorite German indie group, Fotos, I want him sitting at 14k listeners per month on Spotify (or IMDb, whatever). As Kenny “K-Strass” Strasser, he went around Midwestern morning shows and announced himself as a representative of Zim Zam, schlepping school to school with... Read more
1998’s The Last Broadcast is a movie made for me. I am a staunch New Jersey supremacist. The film takes place in Jersey’s gorgeously desolate Pine Barrens. I adore true crime and shlocky 90s horror. The Last Broadcast is a (pre-Blair Witch Project) found footage movie about a murder carried out either by the Jersey Devil or a deranged occultist deep in the woods. I love a good mockumentary. This movie is—more than anything else—a serious mockumentary, a strait-laced send-up... Read more
Reincarnation always seemed worse than Hell to me. Never mind that I feel pretty bound up in this-here body and these-here experiences, one ride on this train is enough. To invest all that love and hatred into one cast of characters, forget everything, and do it all again as a vole—not for me. Hell, for all its problems, is at least a place you can put down roots. It’s torture, yes, and eternal darkness, but it’s got the benefit of... Read more
I am the wrong person to review this movie. As long as I can remember, I have had a controller in one hand and an axe for robot murdering in the other. Buried in my bones is a feeling that the digital world—whether always or merely as it exists now, and who can tell the difference at this stage—is a product and a consequence of our alienation. I saw through Google Glass. I still rarely use Google Docs (I didn’t... Read more
Do you remember when Gilbert Gottfried (rest in peace) was met with jeers of “too soon” after a 9/11 joke only three weeks after the towers fell? Do you remember how he saved his hide by launching into a particularly graphic take on the Aristocrats Joke in his patented shrill screech? I don’t, because I was too young. But, as with following Jesus Christ or attending Woodstock, one doesn’t have to have been there to get what it’s all about.... Read more
Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st (2011) is the perfect film to watch as an early twenty-something male studying at a university. It’s saturated with wistfulness and ennui, a story of all that is existential, and, as we know from Fritz the Cat (1972), “existential” means “good, stupid.” It’s a sad movie, in its way even a selfish one, the sort of film that allows the young misanthrope to sigh at his (indeed, his) misfortune and shake his fist at a... Read more
Now I finally know why all the videos I had to watch in class in the early 2000s looked so bad. On TV, they’d show old-fashioned PSAs about slinging horse and the wonders of man’s newest, greatest mass market innovation—barbiturates—and I’d be amazed at the quality of the image. Sure, they were corny, and everyone looked like the Platonic Form of Kelso from That ’70s Show. But they looked like La Dolce Vita compared to the rad “say no to... Read more
For all its motivating potential, or perhaps because of it, “freedom” is one of those slippery words. In Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure (2022), there’s no doubt that Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel) decides to move from Scandinavia to the US to act in porn of her own volition. She, like many a young person, may be deluded about the future, about what awaits her. But it’s her choice. No question there. But every experience from then on muddies the water. Bella will... Read more
A disfigured corpse sits in a burnt-out helicopter somewhere in the Kuwaiti desert. The officer responsible for investigating the incident tells his lackey that he better identify the bodies, and, more importantly, better not say this was done by US troops. As the grunt approaches, the corpse reanimates, snaps the guy’s neck, steals his gun, and mows down the officer. Pleased with himself, the soldier-turned-revenant muses: “Don’t be afraid; it’s only friendly fire.” Uncle Sam (1996) is exactly what you’d... Read more
Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) is a B-movie done well and under immense pressure. Maybe necessity is the mother of innovation. I don’t know. Ask Roger Corman. What I do know is that ingenuity deserves praise, as does a willingness to (and this seems impossible now, doesn’t it?) have a little fun. My day job is as a medievalist. And for all the supposed religious dourness of the so-called “Dark Ages,” they loved a good laugh (and a good fart... Read more
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