With the joys and horrors of our most recent, apolitical global cataclysm rapidly diminishing beyond the remembering, we return to some version of normal. Which is to say, many of the smaller, headier but nonetheless celebrated releases of 2023 are just now making their way to screens where country folk like ourselves can access them. […]
Minor Theatre
Posted inArts + Scene
Who’s Game?
SELF RELIANCE. Having not yet watched Minx — the Starz smut-mag series — I last checked in with multi-hyphenate Jake Johnson for Ride the Eagle (2021), a charmingly unassuming indie throwback from a time when, still in the throes of the plague, we could be forgiven for thinking the movie business might be in for […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Good Grief‘s Best Friends
GOOD GRIEF. With a brief break in the rain at last, I was in no mood to delve into the weedy waters of grief this week but here we are. Had it not been Dan Levy writing, directing and starring in the Netflix drama/comedy/romance, I would have spared myself all thought beyond what an 80-minute […]
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Music and Silence
MAESTRO. Due as much to my penchant for low-culture goonery as anything else, Bradley Cooper’s decision to follow up his directorial debut — A Star Is Born (2018), admittedly also a thematic outlier to me — with a meditation on the life and times of Leonard Bernstein seemed anachronistic, to say the least. Shame on […]
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What’s Under the Hood
ANYONE BUT YOU might have been titled Shakespeare for Dummies, Starring Sydney Sweeney’s Decolletage. Earlier this year, a couple of studio comedies (Joyride and No Hard Feelings) threatened to revivify the genre with new perspectives and insightful, pointed writing in service of jokes that are actually funny; it felt like a moment. This, on the […]
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Looking Back, Maybe Forward
Being that the only notable new release (at least in local theaters) this past weekend was Wonka, a moment of reflection presented itself. Not to dismiss Willy’s origin story; to the contrary, I’ve long immersed myself in the source material and the revelatory 1971 adaptation. I’ll continue to skip Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s portrait-in-rictus […]
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Strange Escapes
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. A degree of healthy apprehension generally attends the adaptation of a very recent, very successful novel (this one published in 2020 by author Rumaan Alam). Of course, this is a formula as old as Hollywood, empowering the twinned cabals of movies and publishing to form a hydra and hopefully double their […]
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A Dream Within a Nightmare
In an era of lamentation, one that might have been defined by the extinction of boldness in American movies, we may instead have arrived at a moment of renewal. It would be specious to attribute this welcome, certainly unexpected shift to any one artist or studio or streaming service, but it is noteworthy that the […]
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Obituary‘s Black Heart
OBITUARY. There should be something like a Scoville scale for dark humor, gradations of blackness that range from, say, a No. 2 pencil to the underwing of a raven to the lightless ocean floor to the imagined void of a black hole. Like peppers, not all of these give pleasure to all. And to taste […]
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Thanksgiving is a Turkey
THANKSGIVING. The scream and spatter of slasher movies hasn’t spoken to me for most of my horror-viewing life. It’s not the violence or the blood alone that turns me off — my action movie palate is unencumbered by those. It’s that slashers so often strike me as too fascinated with female torture and/or unable to […]
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The Killer and Dicks Go Big
THE KILLER. Given what we know — or think we know — about David Fincher, it is almost too tempting to see his latest as a smirking work of self-reflective satire. This contravenes the most basic tenet of what I was taught to call New Criticism, which is, clears throat, reads aloud: never conflate the […]
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Slow Build
THE ROYAL HOTEL. I was momentarily at a loss, Killers of the Flower Moon having left a rightful vacuum, both in terms of theatrical releases (who wants to follow that?) and my desire to go see them. This was compounded by a sense of having missed out on scary movie season. And so I cast […]