Curses are a nasty business and generational ones infinitely more so. It’s easy to call a catastrophe or two bad luck, but when enough ill has befallen you over a short enough period of time, it won’t be long before you start calling Eugene from Hey Arnold! (1996-2004) fortunate. Today, we call this natural enough reaction “depression” or “generational trauma,” but these more enlightened monikers were not available or only in their infancies in the long-haired 80s and 90s, when... Read more
Trying to write about Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) leaves me feeling a bit like Moses coming down from Horeb (or Sinai; take your pick). It blinds me, reduces me to ash and dirt and filth. The movie says what it says. Any attempt to reduce it to mere words is a betrayal, a bit of flim-flam best left to a monograph, if left to anything at all. Yet I’ve got this silly promise, an engine for self-improvement (or... Read more
George A. Romero’s Martin (1977) does for the vampire film what Night of the Living Dead (1968) did for the zombie flick. Here, there is demystification. Just as Romero’s more famous films avoid Haitian witch doctors and talismans with mystical powers, so does Martin reject any of those old, bloodsucking stereotypes. Martin (John Amplas) himself spends hours calling into a radio show, laughing at the idea that he has a seductive hypnotic stare, that garlic can stop him in his... Read more
“Holding Over,” I gather, is what boarding schoolers call getting stuck on campus during a break. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023) concerns two people in just that situation: an ancient civilizations teacher named Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) and a kind-hearted rebellious student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa). Bleak as the premise and the wintry weather of the Christmastide Massachusetts setting may be, this movie is a heartwarming, energizing watch, a tale as old as time: two people who can barely stand... Read more
Before there was South Park (1997-Present) there was Cannibal! The Musical (1993), Trey Parker’s directorial debut while still a film student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Distributed by beloved cheapo gore-purveying Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Entertainment, Cannibal is a gem of student filmmaking (not that that’s a high bar). Here is a land of contrasts: avant-garde filmmaker (and apparently the only faculty member who encouraged the film’s production) Stan Brakhage has a cameo alongside flesh-hungry ghouls and an upbeat... Read more
I’ll do my best to stop this from becoming a screed. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023) is a fun movie rooted in tried material. For its first 90 minutes, I was engaged, laughing, oo-ing, ah-ing, and even staring in shock. This tale of a beleaguered scholarship student and nerd named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) who strikes up a lucky friendship with an aristocratic Oxford collegemate, Felix (Jacob Elordi), kept me on my feet. The movie’s beginning presents Ollie as a crestfallen... Read more
Liliana Cavani’s The Skin (1981) only has 13 user reviews on IMDb, three of which are from American soldiers who played extras in the film (or their children). None of the military once-overs deal with its content, and at least one recounts how grunts who saw the movie upon release spent its runtime Where’s Waldoing themselves. I cannot imagine a more powerful indication of the film’s success. It sets out to show the realities of Neapolitan life under Allied... Read more
Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving (2023) is a holiday success story. This is your classic popcorn slasher, a diverting blend of blood and laughs to go with your salty treats ‘fore the big screen. We’ve got shocking kills, eye-popping gore (with some practical effects!), and a mystery that holds its own. In the spirit of 80s and 90s slashers, it’s willing to be funny and irreverent without pretending to be something it’s not. That’s what really makes this gem about a man... Read more
Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) begins where it ends. On its surface, there’s nothing all that remarkable about this fact. You might even call it “effective leveraging of form” or simply “good writing.” In more heavily declined languages like German, the first position in a sentence is emphatic. Wir gehen jetzt. Jetzt gehen wir. The latter emphasizes the “now.” It might better be translated “get your ass in gear” or “I’m offended. We’re out.” In Latin, both the alpha... Read more
Another movie about would-be celebrity self-immolation? We’ve got Showgirls (1996), Mulholland Drive (2001), and many others besides. If you take 2018’s Vox Lux to be a tale of the entertainment system and its discontents, you could be forgiven for disliking the film. Natalie Portman’s Staten Island accent leaves something to be desired (I should know; I’ve got two siblings raised there). The story’s beats are nothing new: sleep with your manager, get addicted to pills, feel the slow metamorphosis from... Read more
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