Oh. What. Fun. and If I Had Legs I Would Kick You OH. WHAT. FUN. I probably don’t need to defend my undimming affection for Christmas movies, but I am of a defensive, decking-the-halls extraction, so here we find ourselves. I am as aware of all the hypocrisy and bad faith action and indelicate consumerism […]
Screens
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Alone at the Movies
Netflix, Jay Kelly and Train Dreams In the long-ago of my youth, I would often defend my pessimism as realism; I didn’t actually know much about the world. Ever a contrarian, though, as I have aged and hopefully wised up, I find my reactionary nature producing some strain of homunculine optimism, born perhaps of an […]
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Wake Up Dead Man Keeps Faith
WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) is marvelous on a number of levels, harkening back to the ensemble Agatha Christie adaptations of the 1970s and, like the work of the queen of whodunnits, its cheerful skewering of the rich and powerful. In it, we meet gentleman detective […]
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Sisu: Road to Revenge Stays Driven
SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE. The original Sisu (2022), written and directed by Jalmari Helander is a marvelously focused action movie with nods to American Westerns but roots firmly in the history and cold mud of Finland. The movie takes its name from a Finnish word for grim determination that allows a person to push beyond […]
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Getting Away
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 […]
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Predator Badlands Evolves
PREDATOR: BADLANDS. Whether regarding the Constitution or movie franchises, originalism is a trap, suffocating innovation and imagination against our natural impulse to learn, adapt and evolve with our environment and others in it. Doubtless, the internet is already rife with complaints over the departures Predator Badlands takes from the formula that’s been mostly lucrative, though […]
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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 […]