SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW. Yeah, I’ll watch a romantic comedy. As much as I may long for the unobtainable approval of the critical studies elite — simultaneously reveling in violent cinematic catharsis, celebrating genre trash and semi-privately thinking I really should watch more Akerman and Bergman — I’m a product of my environment. And […]
John J. Bennett
Posted inArts + Scene
Tripped Out
INFINITY POOL. Because Antiviral (2012) slipped past me — and, it seems, most of us — I became aware of Brandon Cronenberg on the release of his second feature Possessor (2020), which I still (shamefully) have not seen. Despite the suboptimal timing of that movie’s debut, it helped make the writer-director’s name (beyond its substantial […]
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Aftersun is All Grown Up
AFTERSUN. “Coming of age,” outmoded notion though it may be, continues to be an object of fascination, in art as in life. In order to contextualize transition and ostensible maturation, we continue to construct and promulgate myths, demarcate arbitrary boundaries and assign significance to moments of arrival. As time marches on, though, we (the species) […]
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Risk and Reward in The Whale
THE WHALE. It is an easy, reductive, even dismissive temptation to qualify Darren Aronofsky’s work as “difficult” or “challenging.” Ambitious? Polarizing? Indubitably. But in referring to it as challenging, or academic, people generally seem to mean they don’t like it, or that it makes them think about things they’d rather not. (The irony of my […]
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Babylon Towers
BABYLON. As soon as we saw the trailer, my wife, who plays her cinephilia close to the vest most of the time, said, “I want to see that! It looks like a Coen brothers movie, doesn’t it?” When the time came to commit, though, she was less enthusiastic, (like most of the intended audience). This […]
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The Cutting Room Floor
THE FABELMANS. The elevator pitch would have us believe this is a movie about the magic of (watching and making) movies, a life dedicated to a calling and the simple conflict in a house divided by art versus pragmatism. It can be so defined, of course; Steven Spielberg does not generally go in for unkind […]
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Exit Strategies
DECISION TO LEAVE. Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (2003) lives on the not-so-short list of movies a listicle might reference as impossible to watch a second time. It is, as a relatively unflappable friend intoned years ago, devastating. But, like all of Park’s work, it also bears the marks of a master: While sometimes hideously violent and […]
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Badass Santa
VIOLENT NIGHT. I set out, it my usual, aimless, addle-pated way, to construct a themed column welcoming anew the season of Christmas and, of course, Christmas movies. We have before us Spirited, the Christmas Carol musical comedy directed by Sean Anders (one of the handful of credited writers and directors allowed to make mainstream comedies) […]
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Young and Hungry
ARMAGEDDON TIME. James Gray does not live in the popular consciousness the way many of our cinematic luminaries — themselves refugees from an ongoing extinction-level event — do. This is likely as much due to geographical bias within the industry as to Gray’s refusal to cater to the whims of that industry, transitory culture or, […]
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Food, Music and Corruption
There is a theme at work here, whether by pure happenstance or more ominous cosmic coincidence, that seems unlikely at first blush. But, in this disparate collection — a quasi-verité examination of investigative journalism, a darkly comic satire of celebrity cookery and an impossibly precise character piece rendered as waking-life ghost story — there lurk […]
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Making it Weird
WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY. For many of us, there has always been Weird Al. Before we could formulate anything like a valid critical opinion, much less decide what, by our flaccid cultural barometer, could be called “good,” we could still appreciate (or at least enjoy) the overlaying of silly lyrics upon songs we could […]
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Mixed (Genre) Bag
I can’t pretend there is any cohesive theme — any connectivity, really — to the movies I will set out to briefly discuss here, except that they have all been backburnered in an uncharacteristic pursuit of the horror genre in the past month. Being a contrarian reactionary, I may willfully not watch horror movies when […]