CHALLENGERS. Although never a proper tennis fan, I would, in my younger, dumber years, have considered myself something of a casual appreciator. As country kids, old tennis rackets were useful indeed for seeing how high into the air one could drive small rocks. And a case of tennis balls might as well have been a […]
The Miniplex
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Team Efforts
THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE. When they’re really cooking, Guy Ritchie movies can deliver a thrilling, funny, well-appointed (if slightly vapid) pastiche of Brit-crime in a heightened, mid-century American vein. That he has produced more (artistic) misses than hits is perhaps a function of over-productivity or the demands of a myopic market place. Fortunately, it’s […]
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Civil War‘s Victory
CIVIL WAR. I would never call myself a science fiction head, as much for fear of reprisals from within the community as for the sake of accuracy. When the genre works, though, it can deliver vivid, exciting, not-so-thinly veiled commentary on the triumphs and tragedies of humanity as we have known it. Properly executed, it […]
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The First Omen and Monkey Man Fight Dirty
THE FIRST OMEN. With the recent spate of horror movies centered around nuns — from the Conjuring universe’s spinoff and 2023 sequel, Immaculate’s robes only lately sweeping out of the theater and now The First Omen opening — one wonders how recruitment is going. The Omen (1976), stars a fully gray Gregory Peck as a […]
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Hash of the Titans
GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE. For a giant lizard, Godzilla has evolved. At this point, his multiverse timelines are overlapping, with reboots from Japan and the U.S. passing each other at the box office, Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One finishing its acceptance speeches just as Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire hits theaters. The 1954 […]
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Music Tonight: Friday, March 29
The Miniplex has yet another local band showcase tonight and the line-up is smoking. Swingo Domingo is a duo with everything in the name, so expect swing and pop, boppin’ tunes. Icarus and Suns holds down the funk with an Afro and Central American style of melody making, and House of Mary takes you to […]
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Devils and Do-Overs
LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL. After a brief, pleasantly surprising period of infatuation with modern, low-budget horror, my enthusiasm precipitously — maybe inevitably — declined. But as it has been, so shall it ever be, and the “breakthrough,” every few decades or so, of a group of inspired, well-executed movies will typically be followed in […]
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Music Tonight: Wednesday, March 27
Derek Monypeny from Joshua Tree plays music that fills the horizon, in a manner of speaking. His tightly articulated and mildly treated guitar billows out shimmers of sounds like a heat mirage, and, much like a heat mirage, will take the observer to places that do not exist with the spectral promise of hallucinatory fumes. […]
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Love Lies Bleeding‘s Genre Breakthrough
LOVE LIES BLEEDING. One might not have suspected there was room to develop new sub-genres within film noir, much less imagined that hyper-stylized, ultra-violent, Southwestern lesbian romance bodybuilding revenge noir could prove such a fertile and vibrant one. This lack of vision is forgivable, both because almost nobody could have foreseen this development and because […]
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Oscar Worthy
So as not to be accused of bad faith arguments, a disclosure: I did not watch the 2024 Academy Awards presentation ceremony. In fact, I don’t think I have watched the thing in over a decade. This year, I second-screened — I know modern things! — while I prepared meals and watched Cocktail (1988) on […]
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Spectacle and Substance in Dune: Part Two
DUNE: PART TWO. Looking back, it seems almost egregious not to have reviewed Dune (2021) at greater length upon its release. But then I remind myself that we live in genuinely crazy times and the times of two and a half years ago were maybe even crazier. Late 2021 was a brief era of momentary […]
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Women on the Run
DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS. With the dissolution of the artistic and commercial enterprise that was the Coen Brothers sometime in the beginning of the end of the world (2018-ish), one of the most innovative and imitated dynasties in American cinema came to its apparent end. And with it, perhaps, an epoch of satirical invention transcending form and […]