FREAKY TALES. Sometimes good things do happen. Not geopolitically, it would seem, but at least occasionally at the multiplex. With zero foreknowledge, I stumbled across the poster for Freaky Tales, emblazoned in neon green and tantalizing us (especially we NorCal kids of a certain age) with the tagline, “In 1987 Oakland was hella freaky.” OK, […]
John J. Bennett
Posted inArts + Scene
Death of a Unicorn‘s Satirical Magic
DEATH OF A UNICORN. Magical realism is, pun intended, one of the trickier genres to both execute as a creator and to navigate as observer/reader/audience. Because it relies even more heavily on suspension of disbelief than its really only slightly less fantastical cohort, we in the cheap seats need a cohesive, compelling vision to allow […]
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Leigh’s Soft Touch in Hard Truths
HARD TRUTHS. Loath as I am to contribute to the ongoing erosion of the cinematic theatrical experience, and legitimately intriguing as Ash or Locked or Novocaine may seem — genre exercises, all, with promising hints of 21st century cheek and worldliness — circumstances will intrude. And so, for now, I’ve missed Flying Lotus’ undoubtedly singular […]
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September 5 Goes Live
SEPTEMBER 5. Being of a certain age and something of a masochist, trigger warnings aren’t really my thing. Times being what they are, though, it only seems appropriate in this case to preface these remarks with the disclaimer that September 5 centers its narrative on one of the more broadly visible events in the ongoing […]
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The MonkeyGets Weird
THE MONKEY. My close reading of Stephen King — now three quarters of a lifetime ago, was defined by morbid curiosity — a fascination with the seemingly endless, dark wellspring of the author’s imagination. The books were scary, sure, but they were also compelling for their weirdness and perversity and examination of Evil as an […]
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Nickel Boys‘ Powerful Perspective
NICKEL BOYS. There is a school of thought among filmmakers (Friedkin springs to mind, probably some of the French New Wavers), which holds that the camera must have a distinct point of view, that it cannot simply be an omniscient third-party observer. This flies in the face of some deeply held values among cineastes (read: […]
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The Brutalist‘s Hard Edges
THE BRUTALIST. Although the nerd wires have been hotly humming for what seems like years, the arrival of Brady Corbet’s prospective magnum opus has felt decidedly anticlimactic here in the hinterland. Granted, most small towns lack a 70mm projector to do justice to the movie’s vaunted, arcane Vista Vision format, and the matinee crowd with […]
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PresenceMakes Itself Known
PRESENCE. I wouldn’t want to testify to it, but I would be willing to bet Steven Soderbergh has made more movies after falsely — but probably sincerely, at the time — announcing his retirement from that very pursuit than before. Just as I can’t say exactly when he issued that dire dictum, I would not […]
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Wolf Man‘s Incomplete Transformation
WOLF MAN. Almost five years ago now, the new plague looming as the presumptive worst thing that could happen in the next however-long — were we ever so innocent? — the release of writer-director Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man prompted me to both lament the rather dismal roll-out of Universal’s ostensible monster series reboot (The […]
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Shock and Irish
In a fitting end to a discomfiting year, my holidays were canceled in lieu of a protracted illness absent even the minor satisfaction of a diagnosis, or that glorious, wished-for but likely apocryphal fatigue and rest we sometimes associate with influenza. No, this was an unrelenting, tasteless sapping of strength and enthusiasm that, as it […]
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Nosferatu‘s Rebirth
NOSFERATU. Steeped as we are in vampire lore, it can be challenging to sort the origins from the iterations, source from echo. It’s possible this is because the definitive, canonical material is exceedingly limited, vivid enough in its construction — close enough to the truth? Who am I to say? — and so arrestingly simple […]
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Deliberations
CONCLAVE. Having heretofore missed (or avoided) the latest from Edward Berger, a German director I had never heard of until his remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) garnered massive critical and awards recognition, one might be inclined to pass over it all together. But then, in the spirit of the season, local […]