BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM. There is the impulse to refer to bygone times as “simpler” and, by extension, better. But the past is not always simpler than the present. I suggest this because 1) I would rather not believe that Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) was released 14 […]
John J. Bennett
Posted inArts + Scene
Fun-size Assortment
I ‘d say I’m fairly neutral, as far as Halloween goes. I don’t particularly like or dislike costumery. The proliferation of candy is fine, if eventually problematic — I’m thinking of gasping adults devouring “fun size” chocolate bars like they’re emergency rations. And the aesthetics and iconography, while fun, conjuring sense memories of times of […]
Posted inArts + Scene
A Long, Funny Goodbye
DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD. Netflix, as both bellwether and arbiter of contemporary taste, has long led the drive to popularize and, at least to some extent, legitimize documentary movies in the mainstream. Not that the medium needed legitimizing among movie nerds, of course, but established norms have traditionally pushed all but the noisiest documentaries to […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Bad Old Days
AVA. There is certain cold, maybe sick comfort in watching a new, distinctly middle-of-the-road American action movie with an incidental plot and almost interchangeable heroes and villains. It helps to have a couple of knock-down, drag-out fight scenes and at least one sympathetic character in some sort of existential crisis. Throw in some actors I […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Dark Turns on Country Roads
THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME. This country has long suffered from an identity crisis — 2020 has turned it into an outright catastrophe but it was a pre-existing condition going back almost as far as the nation itself. City does not know what to do with Country and vice versa, each population distrusting the other […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Zoom and Doom
COASTAL ELITES. Maybe this will be the one, among many little-read movie columns in a left-leaning but ultimately centrist alternative weekly newspaper from the charred western slope of the former U.S., that gets me on the list. I am not egotistical enough to imagine I’ll go to the camp with the first or second tier […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Ghost in the Screenplay
I‘M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS. There was a moment, oh, 20 years ago or so, when it seemed like Charlie Kaufman was unstoppable. It was a weird confluence, with the Clinton years and the “independent” cinema boom of the ’90s cohering to provide a financially and intellectual libertine environment wherein a screenwriter, of all things, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
An Excellent Balm for Bogus Times
As much as this is a column regarding the charming third installment in a remarkably — shockingly — long-legged franchise, it is also very much not a column about Unhinged or The New Mutants. Those two, from a distance, appear to basically be throwaways, the latter a seemingly unloved stepchild within the extended Marvel family, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Shadow of Death
SHE DIES TOMORROW. The plague has gone on long enough by now that we are beginning to experience the first wave of art and entertainment produced during and in reaction to it. The movie nerd internet — with which I barely and reluctantly engage, I’ll have you know — has been clamoring for some time […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Superhero Surprise
PROJECT POWER. A friend, whose name shall remain unsaid but which once appeared on this very masthead, wondered not long ago, whither Jamie Foxx. I bristled a bit at the question, as Foxx’s contribution to Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006), a seminal if divisive document of the early ’00s and one of my favorite movies […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Underworld Underachiever
THE TAX COLLECTOR. Like James Ellroy (whose work I also consume with probably unhealthy compulsion), writer/director David Ayer has spent two decades unpacking and examining the lives of men at war, to mixed degrees of success. Occasionally he’ll explore a universally acknowledged conflict, a War with a capital W: U-571 (2000) and Fury (2014), which […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Dirty Jobs
THE ASSISTANT. Jane (Julia Garner) is often just trying to eat. Arriving at the office in the dismal Manhattan pre-dawn, she finally gets a second to wolf down a bowl of Froot Loops when her menacing, unseen boss arrives, curtailing her would-be breakfast. Later, when she brings lunch for herself and her male deskmates (because […]