RIDE THE EAGLE. I did not, do not, probably will not watch the series New Girl. Nothing against it, it just isn’t likely to happen. As such, I know series co-star Jake Johnson primarily from his run of slightly off-kilter, almost on the mainstream radar independent movies, especially the great work he’s done with writer-director Joe […]
Fortuna Theatre
Posted inArts + Scene
Anti-heroic
THE SUICIDE SQUAD. It has been five years (sigh) since the misbegotten and now confusingly titled Suicide Squad bowed. At the time, I was hellbent on enjoying the thing, intermittently awestruck as I had been by the work of writer/director David Ayer. Good times meet sad ends, though, and as I lengthily enumerated in this […]
Posted inArts + Scene
I’m Going to Disneyland
REVIEW JUNGLE CRUISE. Somewhere in another corner of the Multiverse Marvel/Disney’s Loki series has failed to help me conceptualize, there is a version of me with the wherewithal to join a friend at the movie theater to enjoy The Green Knight and the glory of Dev Patel in period costume. But you’re stuck with this […]
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The Wild Ride to F9
F9: THE FAST SAGA. The thrill isn’t gone, per se, but in having recently revisited the undeniable high-water mark of installments four through six — Fast & Furious (2009); Fast 5 (2011); Fast & Furious 6 (2013) — of this almost ridiculously long-lived franchise, this unlikely behemoth that was never really meant to survive, I […]
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Hybrid Hits
REVIEWS WEREWOLVES WITHIN. Surprise or not, I don’t know a whole helluva lot about video games. I’ve dabbled but that particular swath of popular culture is, by and large, foreign to me. So it brought on some trepidation when, before the title card was even revealed, Werewolves Within opened with a Ubisoft logo. (I know […]
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Behind the Music
SUMMER OF SOUL (… OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED). Intimates might wonder (fairly) at my desire to watch and ramble on about a concert movie. I’ve shared freely my general discomfort and occasional disappointment at the live music experience with those unfortunate enough to have to listen, for years beyond counting. It’s […]
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Retro Dread Redux
REVIEWS FALSE POSITIVE. To dispense with it at the outset: Yes, Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is part of the conversation. It has been for more than half a century. It arguably invented — or at least created a lasting identity for — mainstream American horror movies and, in so doing, created its own ripple-effect of sub-genres […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Funny Girls
REVIEWS GOOD ON PAPER. I usually don’t like it when comedians make movies because they’re seldom as funny as their stand-up routines. I get that they want to break out of the boxes we have put them in (or they have put themselves in) but it’s never the same. Still, Iliza Shleslinger is by far […]
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Me, Myself and I
REVIEWS BO BURNHAM: INSIDE. I don’t think I’m alone in having harbored hope that the past year — not to mention the four year season in purgatory preceding it — might give rise to a flowering of reactive art and culture. Maybe a period of collective isolation and simultaneous awakening, of tumult and unrest and […]
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SueñitosCome True
REVIEWS IN THE HEIGHTS. There was a scene in In the Heights where everyone from the Washington Heights neighborhood came together to sing, many from different Latin American countries, all immensely proud of where they were from. In the song “Carnaval del Barrio,” there’s a lyric that reads, “Pa’ribba esa bandera! Alzala donde quiera! Recuerdo […]
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Power Couple
REVIEWS THE CONJURING 3: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT. When The Exorcist (1977) aired on television in 1980, I watched it from the cracked pleather recliner I was still small enough to share with my grandmother, who loved supernatural horror and evidently didn’t put much stock in movie ratings. It was even more terrifying […]
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Back to the Big Screen
REVIEWS I certainly didn’t plan for it but I wasn’t alone: Apparently something in the collective consciousness motivated great droves of us in the same direction. Maybe the denial/resignation I observed setting in six months ago has finally become as contagious as the virus that was and is its subject. Vaccination and the promise of […]