I LOVE MY DAD. Having recently entered into a misguided, increasingly heated exchange with parties who shall remain nameless (but for their frequent bylines in these pages) regarding the definition and origin of the phrase “milkshake duck,” while simultaneously engaging a Zoomer in spirited debate in order to better parse and decode the appeal of […]
The Miniplex
Posted inArts + Scene
The Bear Roars
I’ve never been a particularly dedicated consumer of food shows, despite my infatuation with eating. Killing a couple of minutes before bed with whichever PBS cooking show might be on is always a simple delight (unless you are hungry). All the better if the host is traveling. Polished food documentaries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Bullet Trainand Prey Ride the Summer Wave
I hate to sound optimistic (ask anybody), but I’ve been developing a theory that, in spite of literally everything, Summer 2022 has become a pretty good movie season. This is due in no small part to my constant, chiggerish contrarianism, which I’ll address momentarily, and to my sadistic satisfaction at the movie-industrial complex maybe finally […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Turning into Your Umma
UMMA. Intergenerational Asian American women’s trauma is having a big year at the movies. It felt like my daughter and I had barely wiped our eyes and shaken off the cringing giggles of Turning Red (2022), when we found ourselves visually and emotionally sandblasted by Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Both centered around Chinese […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Cha ChaDelivers, Gray Man Delights
CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH It’s not that I didn’t want to like Cooper Raiff (or his work), at least not exactly. But Shithouse (2020), his rather quietly acclaimed feature debut, suggested a number of themes and ideas that, in my insecurity, bitterness and age, seemed like potential emotional landmines. It is, after all, a college […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Crimes Fails to Captivate
Crimes of the Future. I suspect the only people ambivalent about the work of David Cronenberg are those who have not seen it. For all the rest, he is a polarizing figure: either a loathsome degenerate or one of the most noteworthy creators working in the medium; OK, maybe both. Matters of taste aside, he […]
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Taika Waititi Takes Thor Over the Rainbow Bridge
THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER. As I lay in the emergency room on July 3 — with a non-explosives-related digital wound, as I abhor cliché — writing about a Marvel movie was perhaps the furthest thing from my mind. Realistically, I was probably busy scrambling for hand-trauma jokes (Will I ever play the piano? What about […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Interceptor’s Fumble
In the strange chambers of my heart, there is a special place for action movies and my beloved sub-genre, the schlocky action movie. (It’s next to the spot for teen Shakespeare adaptations and only God will judge me.) In the days of rewinding rented video tapes, one mostly had to choose between a good script […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Lives of Women
It would seem I’ve chosen the wrong decade to quit drinking. With apologies to Samuel Clemens, it’s easy: I’ve done it dozens of times. For whatever reason, though, I selected the summer of 2022 to take a longer, less-defined hiatus from one of my longest-standing hobbies. These weren’t conscious factors in the decision, but it […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Better Than the Real Thing
Not for nothing, I haven’t been to the theater in a while. It seemed like springtime had us on a roll, both in terms of plague abatement and promising new movie releases. But the complex network of circumstance — viral, political, artistic and financial — that lately serves to harsh the collective mellow has now […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Gamers
HUSTLE. As a foolishly sentimental person of a certain age, I will likely never give up on Adam Sandler. He rose to prominence at a time when Saturday Night Live was an illicit pleasure, at least in my house, something to be enjoyed as much for the show itself as for the accomplishment of sneaking […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Communing with Comedy
JERROD CARMICHAEL: ROTHANIEL. Despite its boom and bust popularity, stand-up comedy is an elemental art form. Combining obfuscation and transparency, truth and illusion, tragedy and hilarity, it’s all about vulnerability. There can be triumph, even dominance, but the prerequisite is for a spiritually naked person to climb into a spotlight with a microphone and communicate […]