TALK TO ME. Australia, home to venomous brown snakes, saltwater crocodiles and a snail that can evidently kill you with a tiny harpoon-like tooth, is scary enough. Perhaps the steady baseline of adrenaline that comes from living in a country where a very large spider might casually drop out of your curtains makes scaring audiences […]
Minor Theatre
Posted inArts + Scene
Bombs and Bombshells
OPPENHEIMER. It comes as no surprise that Christopher Nolan’s latest magnum opus should be heralded for its audacity and scale. He being a holdover from another time, if such a time even existed; all of his opuses are magnums. Seemingly to demonstrate this, or to prove that even the great director is susceptible to hubris, […]
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Making it Possible
What I couldn’t have articulated then, and perhaps cannot now, was director Brian De Palma’s critical role as both arbiter and synthesist of cinema cool, even as his career was approaching an inevitable cooling-off point and he his 60th birthday. De Palma wouldn’t become a touchstone for me until years later, incapable as I was […]
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The Joy of the Ride
JOY RIDE. It has been rather widely reported — but may still be apocryphal — that at some point during the development of this screenplay, the writers (Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao) thought to call it The Joy Fuck Club. Clearly, that title is a bit too outré for our provincial American sensibilities, but I […]
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Maintaining a Legacy
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. Time may eventually allow us to more properly contextualize the great Dr. Jones. Younger generations may have already done it, distanced as they presumably are from the visceral, world-making experience of meeting Harrison Ford’s irascible, iron-tough, impossibly cool archeologist at an age when that introduction was as formative, […]
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No Hard Feelings‘ Rom-com Chops
NO HARD FEELINGS. Within the ever-deepening river of pan-cultural division, there are convoluted, often contradictory undercurrents too numerous to parse. In this new age of (dis)information, some of these knotty notions see more frequent, if less substantive, discussion than they might have in decades past. But for all the pointing and yelling, precious few reach […]
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New Tricks, Old Tropes
EXTRACTION 2. It could be said 2020 came on a little strong. Many of us met the uncertainty, paranoia and concern with a voracious consumption of media, both new and familiar. Of course, novel entertainments were in rather short supply in those early, apocalyptic months. This turned out to be quite the boon to Netflix […]
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Flamin’ Hot‘s Stale Corporate Propaganda
FLAMIN’ HOT touts itself as a heartwarming tale of grit and pride, and a corrective to the injustices Latinos face in the U.S. (and Hollywood in particular), but it’s a discouraging paean to a mythical American dream. The strength of its cast, its cultural celebrations, and its hollow promise of an examination of race in […]
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You Hurt My Feelings ‘ White Lies
YOU HURT MY FEELINGS. Sometime in the future, a forensic anthropologist trying to understand human society in the year 2023 will wonder how it felt to identify as “bougie” in a world on the brink of collapse. How did people dance on the edge of that abyss? Did they really sublimate the pervasive sense of […]
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Heroine Withdrawal
HIGH DESERT. Maybe we don’t need another detective series. Maybe every red herring has been fileted by now and it’s time to call it a day. I have watched a lot of TV. It has all been done. Around the time a psychic detective solved a murder by seeing through the eyes of a haunted […]
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Live,Love & Death, Laugh
LOVE & DEATH. Like fish in a river, each of us have a lure that, no matter how clever we are or how much we want to resist its color and flash, will snag us every time. If you popped open my custom tacklebox, there among the action heroines, hauntings and heists (and makeover montages […]
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Not that Kind of Mother
THE MOTHER. Now that the Mother’s Day brunch dishes have been cleared, the bath bombs dissolved and hug coupons redeemed, let’s talk action movie motherhood. Wives and children are a civilizing force on action movie men, who put aside the weapons of war for family. Well, at least until someone kidnaps or murders said objects […]