ex-film critic. current film studies instructor & film programmer. forever loyal to r. durgnat, b. balázs, & photoplay fan magazine.
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Spider Baby 1967
It's charming! It's electric! It's generational trauma, just as The Addams Family would of done it. Romero must have smiled so big! But, if my late-night googling is to be believed, the two never truly crossed paths. That sense of play Hill has, Romero's unwavering gaze...I can only wonder what world we'd be living in, if it had been Hill, not John Russo, who met George, sweet George all those years back. A psychological horror's Powell & Pressburger, perhaps? I'll ask them when I go to heaven. Until then, I'll be watchin' Spider Baby & Martin back-to-back.
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Past Lives 2023
An extraordinarily selfish, lazy little film. To think this is an autobiography! Perverting in-yeon in this way — as a cutesy ploy, pretty packaging for a willful lack of insight — is not just cowardice but cruelty. It must be so lonely to love a person like this.
Well, Song, you surely know there's no interest in an unexamined life. Go ahead and hide behind cultural myth. Adapt Chekhov via the Sims. Get that Pulitzer! Beat me over the head with it! I’ll still know your full of shit.
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Nope 2022
A rare film in that its motivations, and not so much the film's content, moved me to tears. Clearly, Nope is a celebration of cinema's history and mythmaking’s transformative power. But, to me, its greatest success lies in the way Peele makes these concepts personal. Gazing is the central action here, animating Nope’s thematic concerns, opening up questions of when and how to look into trauma and when to turn away, to look to others. And, oh!, the way Peele's…
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The Batman 2022
Centrist propaganda -- I bet Steven "the 80s weren't political" Spielberg l-o-v-e-d it. Really can't believe just how clunky the script is, while not saying anything at all. And, dang, you can tell Reeves has been making movies with CG apes for the last 7 or so years; nobody was directing Kravitz, or so it felt, but she also has nothing to work with. How do you fuck up Long Halloween's Catwoman? She's giving off Twin Peak's James in this -- how?? Fucking how?
The most dangerously stupid movie of 2022. Someone buy Reeves a newspaper subscription. He needs help.
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