SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW. Yeah, I’ll watch a romantic comedy. As much as I may long for the unobtainable approval of the critical studies elite — simultaneously reveling in violent cinematic catharsis, celebrating genre trash and semi-privately thinking I really should watch more Akerman and Bergman — I’m a product of my environment. And […]
Minor Theatre
Posted inArts + Scene
You People Brings the Cringe
YOU PEOPLE. There is a cathartic release that comes with watching terrifying movies. The adrenaline, the comforting resolution, the jump scare at the end that allows us to laugh at ourselves a little. Even the lingering dread as you turn the bathroom light on later to brush your teeth is a small, morbid thrill if […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
In Defense of Slack
We cut people slack by overlooking their failures to perform how and when we would wish them to. But this article is about communal slack: the allowances that are just out there as part of the fabric of society and the environment. Here are some examples. We kids had the run of our neighborhood in […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Tripped Out
INFINITY POOL. Because Antiviral (2012) slipped past me — and, it seems, most of us — I became aware of Brandon Cronenberg on the release of his second feature Possessor (2020), which I still (shamefully) have not seen. Despite the suboptimal timing of that movie’s debut, it helped make the writer-director’s name (beyond its substantial […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Aftersun is All Grown Up
AFTERSUN. “Coming of age,” outmoded notion though it may be, continues to be an object of fascination, in art as in life. In order to contextualize transition and ostensible maturation, we continue to construct and promulgate myths, demarcate arbitrary boundaries and assign significance to moments of arrival. As time marches on, though, we (the species) […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Risk and Reward in The Whale
THE WHALE. It is an easy, reductive, even dismissive temptation to qualify Darren Aronofsky’s work as “difficult” or “challenging.” Ambitious? Polarizing? Indubitably. But in referring to it as challenging, or academic, people generally seem to mean they don’t like it, or that it makes them think about things they’d rather not. (The irony of my […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Babylon Towers
BABYLON. As soon as we saw the trailer, my wife, who plays her cinephilia close to the vest most of the time, said, “I want to see that! It looks like a Coen brothers movie, doesn’t it?” When the time came to commit, though, she was less enthusiastic, (like most of the intended audience). This […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Cutting Room Floor
THE FABELMANS. The elevator pitch would have us believe this is a movie about the magic of (watching and making) movies, a life dedicated to a calling and the simple conflict in a house divided by art versus pragmatism. It can be so defined, of course; Steven Spielberg does not generally go in for unkind […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Glass Onion‘s Layered Craftsmanship
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. What makes a movie a Christmas movie? I recently listened to a podcast in which a host floated the idea that the best holiday movies are ones that encourage reflection on the past year and prepare us for the year ahead. They were inspired by watching It’s a Wonderful […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Exit Strategies
DECISION TO LEAVE. Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (2003) lives on the not-so-short list of movies a listicle might reference as impossible to watch a second time. It is, as a relatively unflappable friend intoned years ago, devastating. But, like all of Park’s work, it also bears the marks of a master: While sometimes hideously violent and […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Badass Santa
VIOLENT NIGHT. I set out, it my usual, aimless, addle-pated way, to construct a themed column welcoming anew the season of Christmas and, of course, Christmas movies. We have before us Spirited, the Christmas Carol musical comedy directed by Sean Anders (one of the handful of credited writers and directors allowed to make mainstream comedies) […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Young and Hungry
ARMAGEDDON TIME. James Gray does not live in the popular consciousness the way many of our cinematic luminaries — themselves refugees from an ongoing extinction-level event — do. This is likely as much due to geographical bias within the industry as to Gray’s refusal to cater to the whims of that industry, transitory culture or, […]