The Running Manand Keeper THE RUNNING MAN. Even back in the salad days of ridiculous action movies, of impossible physiques and ridiculous armaments, The Running Man (1987) struck me as second tier. Maybe because it wasn’t grounded in a recognizable reality, or because it was released so close to Predator (also 1987) and Die Hard […]
John J. Bennett
Posted inScreens
Monstrous Creations Frankenstein and Bugonia
FRANKENSTEIN. Were anyone to ask (why would they?), I would have said, even minutes ago, that I first read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when I was far too young to appreciate its form and content. My bookshelf has made a liar of me, though, yet again: The copy found there is a […]
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A House of Dynamite’s Harsh Realities
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE. “Not exactly escapist fare,” was my first thought, which was followed rapidly by the notion that maybe, in the face of racist, fascist theocracy on the rise internationally, a movie about mutually assured destruction by nuclear annihilation can offer some fleeting relief. I kid (sort of), because A House of Dynamite […]
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Play Dirty and Shane Black’s Comeback
PLAY DIRTY. Sometimes (often? always?) the thing that suits is a rollicking actioner in the classical mode. Something with gunfights and car chases and heists and revenge, hopefully a soupçon of dark humor and sex appeal, maybe even set at Christmastime — a Shane Black movie, in other words. Black, to use the Wayback Machine, […]
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Roofman Aims High
ROOFMAN. Putting aside the fact that the early 2000s has been a nostalgia-trip backdrop (which makes me feel old and sad indeed), purporting to be “a true story,” as this movie does, is often cause for concern. It might be a function of my innate formalism or my ongoing, probably misplaced umbrage at the paucity of […]
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The Smashing Machine Lands its Punches
THE SMASHING MACHINE. In this millennia-bridging era, combat sports are such a ubiquitous element of culture that it almost requires a more active effort to ignore them than to engage. Like garish wallpaper in an over-stuffed room, professional fighting can be fascinating, distracting and off-putting (often all at once) and remains part of all our […]
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The Revolutionaries
One Battle After Another ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. For geeks of a certain age and inclination, a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie has been — and hopefully always will be — an occasion for tremendous excitement. We’ve been down since Hard Eight (1996) — which should rightfully be titled Sydney but that’s a diatribe for […]
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A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Pays Off
A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY. Coming so soon after Splitsville and my rapturous reception thereof, this one might seem like something of a non-starter. It is, after all, high romantic fantasy in a decidedly old-fashioned vein. A meet-cute expanded into a could-be/never-was trip down the varyingly painful lanes of memory, it plays a little like […]
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Splitsville
SPLITSVILLE. In the period of relatively blissful ignorance before the plague years and the insurrection and all of that, there was a little movie called The Climb (2019), which was much buzzed about in certain movie nerd sectors. Sadly, it became one of many casualties of the closure of theaters and the rush to transition […]
Posted inArts + Scene
A Return to Messy Heroes
CAUGHT STEALING. For a quarter century (give or take) Darren Aronofsky has had me chasing the dragon of what he can do. The challenge inherent in this, of course, is that the thing I want him to do, what I see as his high-water mark, rarely coincides with what he wants to do. Requiem for […]
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Greed and Getaways
RELAY. A hundred years ago, in 2016, David Mackenzie directed Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay Hell or High Water. That story, set against and amongst the devastation wrought by the 2008 collapse of the criminally exploitative American mortgage securities racket, is about individual desperation in the face of remorseless corporate greed. It is also a thrilling heist/pursuit […]
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Night Always Comes
NIGHT ALWAYS COMES. Since 2007, Willy Vlautin has been publishing novels about the new American West, which means he specializes in stories about life at the end of empire, lives lived in the absence of opportunity and the presence of addiction, poverty and the occasional fleeting opportunity. The books draw a taut line between Reno […]