The Last Jedi (2017)

A sea change in Star Wars.

The Disaster Artist (2017)

What might have been if they had taken a step back and dug further.

Justice League (2017)

The team assembles and it's not quite as super as it could be.

Hey, I Wrote A Thing!

The folks over at The Solute were nice enough to let me ramble on about Dave, its interestingly cynical fantasy feel and the terrible DVD menus it has, for their Year Of The Month feature on 1993!  I'm pretty happy with how this came out.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

Jesus, what a nonsensical turd. About the only good thing I can say about it is that Alice gets brought
back from 4 and doesn't get killed off (I hate that trope). Dumb, cruel, shoddy looking and kind of mean.  Avoid at all costs, and here's hoping Nightmare 6 is somewhat better.

★

1989 - Written by Leslie Bohem and directed by Stephen Hopkins

Mother (2017)

Mother may be my favorite comedy of the year. It’s essentially the haunted house and characters of Shirley Jackson and the kitchen sink emotional violence of Sam Shepherd whipped together into an over-the-top mix of creation and toxicity. There’s a lot here, from relationship problems to haunted houses to Michelle Pfieffer being awesome to a scary frog. It’s goofy fun.

All Through The Night (1942)

It runs a little long, but this is a really solid mix of comedy and gangsters action as a bunch of New York mobsters take on Nazi fifth columnists during World War II.  Excellent combination of dramatic and comedic actors like Conrad Veidt, Humphrey Bogart, Jackie Gleason, Peter Lorre and others make this a good little comedic thriller.

★★★ 1/2

1942 - Directed by Vincent Sherman.  Written by Leonard Speigelgass and Edwin Gilbert.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

A really interesting cinema verite of the Gospel of Matthew, where the amateurism actually adds to the experience.

Dunkirk (2017)

A satisfying movie about an interesting corner of World War II, but not much more.

The Funhouse (1981)

Don't just stand there!  Run!

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)

This originally appeared in the comments section of the late, lamented The Dissolve. 

Let’s Dissolve The Criterion Collection!

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsey
Criterion Spine #29

Note: I wrote this using the most recent Blu-Ray edition that came out in June 2014. Completely gratuitous self-promotion on this is that I got it at the semi-annual half-price sale at a Barnes & Noble *and* got to flip off Jenny McCarthy, there to sign whatever the hell she was promoting, on my way out the door. So there’s that.

I think it’s always interesting to contemplate artists, such as a director like Peter Weir, to whom you saw their career almost in reverse. I had seen plenty of Weirs works when I was younger, such as the underappreciated Witness and the horrifically over rated Dead Poets Society, but I’m not sure I was ever really that aware of him until The Truman Show, a movie I maintain is one of the better science fiction movies of the last quarter century. At that point, I started noticing his body of work more and decided to dig in a little deeper. It’s at this point, somewhere in 2000, that I first saw Picnic At Hanging Rock.

Il deserto rosso (Red Desert)

Madness might be the only sane reaction in this hellscape.

Table 19

Sometimes, a wedding just isn't a happy ending.

Beware The Slenderman

An interesting surprise of a documentary, in that this look at the Slenderman assault in Wisconsin starts out as a look at memes and how they propagate and how this affected the two attempted murderers but then slowly shifts into a look at how mental illness was a factor. It's that second part that was much more interesting to me, as I was pretty much familiar with all the meme stuff (Creepy pasta, got it, Richard Dawkins, eh, memetics, so forth and so on). But the interviews with families of the girls involved in this get deeper and more complex as everyone tries to come to some sort of understanding of what happened (and jeeeez, did I feel for the parents of the accused).

2017 - Written and directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky

Jug Face

An interesting and smart horror film by way of the Lucky McKee crowd. Chad Crawford Kinkle hasn't quite made his May or The Woman yet, but this certainly shows some good potential. Lauren Ashley Carter is a standout here as a young woman in a backwoods family cult who tries to escape her fate. Damn nice Sean Bridgers performance as well.

2013 - Written and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle.  Starring Lauren Ashley Carter, Sean Bridgers and Sean Young.

Under The Shadow

What do you do when the people outside are worse than the horror inside the house?

Stranger Than Paradise

1984 - Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch.  Starring John Lurie, Eszter Balint and Richard Edson

★★★★

Not all of the Jarmusch I've seen has worked for me, but this, his first proper feature, is the kind of slice-of-life weirdness where I think his strength lies.  Sometimes, that slice is of on-again off-again vampires in Detroit trying to just make their way in the 21st century and sometimes that life is a hitman who follows the bushido code as he protects some really, really low-rent mobsters.  There is a joy in his best movies about finding the specialness in the every day, even if sometimes it might feel a bit fantastical.

Moonlight

2016 - Directed by Barry Jenkins.  Written by Barry Jenkins based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney.  Starring Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Travante Rhodes, Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali

★★★★★

Sometimes,  a movie just works from beginning to end and when you search for something, anything to criticize it starts coming down to "oh hey, I'd have liked more of this one thing."  Such is Moonlight, the story of a young boy in Miami searching for his identity in three separate phases of his life.  We first meet him around ten, called Little, as he's dealing with a mother sort of keeping it together as a nurse who also has a crack habit and also dealing with bullies chasing him from school.  It's the sort of thing where you can tell this has been going on for a while and could be going on for quite a while more.

The Last Emperor

1987 - Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  Written by Bertolucci and Mark Peploe

★★★★ 1/2

Such a sad, small epic of a man who was bounced from golden prison to golden prison and then finally to walls of concrete and a sad end. I dont' quite buy that Pu Yi had that serene of an ending, but nonetheless it's a great movie  about his poor life.

Swiss Army Man

Swiss Army Man (2016) - Directed and written by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan.  Starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

★★★★ 1/2

What seems at first almost an odd excuse for farting corpse jokes becomes something much deeper and stranger and sad, but with a weird joy to it. This could have been a disaster in execution but instead builds into something wonderful and strange.