321w3b

“In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I’ve never discovered a subject so worthy of my attention.”

VINCENT PRICE, TOWERING FUCKBOY! GET. IT. Happiest of belated birthdays, you unctuous Lothario!

Deserving of its chilly reputation, utterly; but Preminger’s clinical pose does permit the viewer’s focus to center on any number of the multitudinous technical areas in which this film excels— the cinematography, the mise, THE SCREENPLAY! And frankly, on this last point, the addition of the foppish, acid-tongued dandy with the carnation boutonnière (a signal that should be as plain as any hanky to the queer viewer— can anyone guess what sort of flower oft adorned Oscar Wilde’s lapels?) immediately positioned this film as one of my favorite noirs. 

Something to be written about this film’s “feminism”, which seems only to empower Laura to choose the archetypical patriarchal male (and a fucking cop at that) over the deranged, demonized effete, the profligate libertine…

Though perhaps fueled by a less-considered animus, operates in the same quasi-polemic domain as Ari Aster, taking direct aim against the testicles of an entire class of puling, entitled, haplessly mediocre oafs. And though “Friendship” appears to be far more interested in pulling the strings what make us wince than what’s actually connected to them (it’s Social Dominance Orientation and Castration Anxiety, fwiw), the substitution of ITYSL’s gonzo style for a longer, contextualized narrative structure leaves the viewer with time not simply to cringe, but to wonder after why.

Anyway… 

May all your idols slip in piss. May you bask in the disenchanting gleam of their denuded domes as their terrible toupées soak up the commingled micturations of a thousand-thousand desperados. May you be free!!!

TOM CRUISE! DON’T BLOW UP CYBERSPACE!!! I JUST GOT YOUTUBE RED! 

I choose to read the remedial script, with its narrative incoherence, endless prevarication, and constant, copy-paste sloganeering as an indicator of our collective exhaustion with the unthinking, milquetoast neoliberal sensibility of which Ethan Hunt is the ultimate avatar. 

The set pieces were pretty dece! 

Plus one half-star for Mr. Milchick’s dazzling crew of extremely gay submariners (and that one guy who was willing to kill Ethan to protect his Letterboxd ).

The darksome corollary to the ubiquitous delusion of exceptionalist egocentrism hyper-concentrated— the titillating dread that one could be so brilliant / hot / special as to become the sole focus of some malignant, abstract, cosmic force willing to warp the very laws of reality just to have you.

I mean… THAT WATER WAS BLUE!

Tag yourself— I’m Kevin Costner. 

Seen, with more needle drops than a community sharps disposal, at the Coolidge.

Every frame a painting, every word a mistake…

(Director’s cut)

Possess a clear impulse toward thematic complexity that chafes against the confines of its increasingly exhausted genre; is neither sufficiently lurid in its grotesqueries nor revelatory in its metacommentary to justify its found footage format. 

Still, some fascinating details in the peculiarities of Mr. Peek, whose voyeuristic tendencies extend beyond the mere compulsive observation of his subjects to a fixation with the very modes and media by which they are permitted to be perceived. If some fundamental reinforcing element of voyeurism resides in the perceptual information asymmetry between the voyeur and his subject (it does), Mr. Peek’s punishment of these would-be influencers— to tape over their faces, confine their images to the epistemological prison of his personal physical media— is an elegantly sadistic answer to their attempts to assert their agency. Nasty business; but I do love it when a killer has a cohesive ethos. 

Also, re: the masks, the “loops”, the Hitchcock / duMaurier references, and the dead baby rave of it all: we GET IT.  We all miss the McKittrick!!!

A minor morsel of Marvel confectionary whose recipe substitutes the oft-assumed pedantic awareness of other interconnected IPs for a heaping proportion of self-contained expository bloat. This is a trade, I suspect, that most audiences will be relieved to make, even if it renders “Thunderbolts*” nakedly goofy and insubstantial, and leaves it with less profoundness of heart than comparable offerings from the MCU (looking at you, “Guardians”). 

Still, this formula turns mostly on the charm of the film’s cast; and, uh… Slavic Florence Pugh*. Suffering no fools**. In that eyeliner***. 

* Step. 
** On. 
*** Me.

A precisely-calibrated hodgepodge of clichés and genre tropes that achieves a relentlessly perfect attitudinal gestalt, and whose interactions generate some of the best dramatic irony that I’ve encountered in a long while.

The Cartoons What Predict Your Doom are such a nice touch!

An easy addition to the personal cannon!

A towering accomplishment of the field of middification. Manages to render the notion of fuckable terminators mundane. 

Sophie Thatcher, Lukas Cage innocent.

A certain strain* of avant-garde sensibility held in perfect suspension. 

Todd Haynes’ films about music operate on an absolutely poetic level (in which form and function exist in voluminous, cohesive dialogue with one another). My kinda dweeb. 

*Self-obsessed, glamorous, queer, ultimately sort of mean. 

I love you 1960s New York… I wish you were real.

Appears to have at least partially authored vast swaths of 80s and 90s youth culture… 

Would that we could pack the faculty of every ailing institution with a battalion of Misters Hand. What an educator! ALOHA! 🤙

As with any good monster flick, theatrically demonizes the unspeakable cultural shadows of its setting’s collective (Collectivist?) unconscious; but in doing so, as a contemporary cultural artifact, becomes a sophisticated, cooptative, insidious piece of propaganda in of smarmy American Individualism. 

Put another way, if you spent the majority of this film rooting for the striving, establishmentarian, bourgeois booze merchants of the Juke t against the multinational hivemind of itinerant proletarians, you might be a reactionary :p

Remmick did nothing wrong; perfect amount of cunnilingis; see it immediately in IMAX. 🧛🏻

Edit: THE BORG ARE A DIFFERENT MATTER

“I feel like it would be possible get a picture of Stephen’s tongue.“

Specificity is such an incredible gift 🥹

AYN RAND PRESENTS…

Living though the sequel 🤡

At first glance, an onitory testament to humanity’s hubris ening us to respect the awesome power of the natural world (this is the point of the novel, after all)… And yet, doesn’t all of this high-handed thematic falderal dissolve the moment our affable, cane twirling, Caledonian megalomaniac finally helicopters away scott-free? Where are the CONSEQUENCES, STEVIE?!

Barring all of that, isn’t this just a film about capitalizing on fringe science and child endangerment to manipulate Sam Neil into boning Laura Dern raw? 

Anyway, I would absolutely queen out with the Dilophosaurus.

The Dylan flick of choice for real heads. 

Ah, sure, it rhapsodizes romantic in a way that might chafe as essentializing against our subject’s taste; but Haynes’ dense, irrepressible nerdery reliably paints an adoring, wistful smile on my face every single time. Sometimes, you just want to feel like a fan… 

Seen, giddy as Quinn meeting Ginsberg, at the Coolidge.

Bonkers that a screening of a film centered on the devastating personal effects of systemic injustice, speaking truth to power, and uh… ritual suicide completely sold out in April 2025, right?

Fairly perfect by most metrics; but I especially defy you to find a more exemplary film in of narrative structure. 

Seen, on a newly-minted 35mm print, dumbly stabbing at my gut with a blade of bamboo, at the Harvard Film Archive.

FUCK THE BEMBRIDGE SCHOLARS!!!

Heinously mid-wit colonialist dialogue charmingly delivered by hot, sopping barely-literates over the sound of gratuitous gunfire. Simply incredible that the ne plus ultra, check-mate superpower in the world of this film is the reading of a single non-English sentence by a perfect ten. High Fantasy! 

Some absolutely monumental use of The Computer Generated Imagery, though. SONS OF THE PHARAOHS! It felt like was I was there! In Problematic Egypt! 

—-

… but actually, this movie changed my life (largely due to its terrifying early horror sequences and its profusion of slutty holsters); and I love it, in spite of myself, like an unspeakably loathsome queer Auntie who refuses to surrender her disgustingly appropriative costume jewelry, although she has been warned.

See previous review here. 

Also, justice for Thud Butt Worldeater, purveyor of fine cheeses, contortionist par excellence, and slayer of men. May John Williams suffer your eternal wrath for daring to score your glorious aura with the fucking tuba. BE IT ON HIS HEAD!!

A very solid entry in the genre. The lighting is love-or-hate; but I’d be chuffed to dwell in the well-appointed, sensually dim, emotionally murky domestic environment pictured here (and to lay my head next to either of our principal snoops!!!). 

Slightly disappointed at the lack of Soderburgh boxes; but I WILL have Fassbender’s wardrobe. 

Plus one half star each for the Penhaligon’s spritz and the anal clenching. 

Seen, under suspicion of treason, at the Coolidge.

I did this. You’re out there polishing my tomb, and I’m alive and well, and living under a bed in your sister’s house.

After all these years, unblemished in its perfection. 

My single regret is that Boston music legend Aimee Mann’s incredible toe-donor cameo ed in seemingly uncomprehending silence; but perhaps at that point the audience was just too blissed-out to notice… 

Seen, taking it easy for all you sinners, at the Somerville.

Extremely Shakespearean in its tensions, themes, and plotting (suffers a bit on this score). Lighting, mise, and makeup all on-point; and Tamasaburo Bando’s performance is extraordinary. 

Love that Demon Pond is just… marked on the map— probably just south of Tengu Escarpment, slightly inland from Kaiju Lagoon. 

Also, should have guessed that Japanese OSHA permitted the use of tiddymilk eyewash stations.

As soon as the Danny Elfman dropped, I was rapt. 

Something simultaneously quaint and excruciatingly poignant in the condemnatory Vanitas of the pick-me clout-chaser (rightly vilified); but the shrewd weaponization of female sexuality that comes along with it wafts a soupçon contemporary gay misogyny (though perfumed in layers of heterosexual irony)… Why did the targets of this precise enmity always have the same haircut as Joan Cusack in “Addams Family Values”? Is there an ur-Debbie?

Anyway, as usual, loved how normal Joaquin Phoenix was in this one.

Looming perspectival contortions intone the sinister hostility that thrums beneath our Byzantine bureaucracies. With an almost expressionistic stagecraft, every facet of the world that Welles constructs here is carefully calibrated to unbalance the viewer’s sense of scale, render the banal uncanny, and immerse us in the crippling, paranoid delusion that we are the subject of some unreasoning, prosecutorial, and utterly pervasive antipathy…

… AND MAYBE YOU ARE. 

Oz Perkins, your father was the one of the lithest twinks ever set to celluloid— plus 1/2 star. 

Also, it was very kind of reality to corroborate the vague suspicion that Romy Schneider’s Leni stands in here as some sort of proto-Oja. Welles apparently met Kodar in the course of this production! 

Anyway, I wish someone would shoot some Lovecraft this way…

Daddy-issues adventurer, or mommy-issues archeologist? 

From the drop, a movie largely about dust, offhanded homicide, and defiling dead bodies. 

Just some wonderful metacinematic fare here. Shot with gorgeously legible influence from John Ford, Buster Keaton, and Alfred Hitchcock, with the latter being the subject of one of the great cinematographic set piece gags of all time: the “North by Northwest” airplane pursuit culminating in an homage the telephone booth scene from “The Birds”. And to put James Bond (and a villain who is HARD Blofeld-coded) in this franchise as a smirking response to the comparisons? Stevie, you cheeky lil fella!

What a bloated surfeit of gorgeous, misguided filmmaking; and awfully myopic despite its profusion of stunning long shots… Why bother to adapt a Ballard novel— and an extremely autobiographical one at that!— only to denude it of all Ballardian theme? How are we meant to contemplate the grotesqueries of hierarchy, the gossamer fragility of social comity, and the absurd presumptions at the core of civilization if every single adult character is nothing but a prop in the despoilment of the principal character’s youth? Steven, the latter is a CONDIMENT, NOT THE MEAL! 

It’s such a pity that all of Spielberg’s worst tendencies in this period reveal themselves when working to translate the stories of others to film; and an even greater shame that Tom Stoppard couldn’t… stop him! 

Plus a quarter star each for the cinematography, John Malkovich, the realistic depiction of being a choirboy (all child labor), and Miranda Richardson correctly choosing to die with dignity at that swanky open-air flea market (as I probably would have done).

A weird— arguably slightly distasteful?— flex in that, helmed by any other director, the treacly exuberance that suffuses some of the more luminous scenes might undermine the film’s pervasive sense of feminine precariousness, blunt the terrors of constant abuse, inure us to the omnipresent threat of rape that these characters must endure… Still, undeniably achieves its puzzling tonal alchemy. One really does feel it all!

Insufficiently gay to earn its tags.

i SAW eraserhead HERE: redux

Seen, after throwing ass at the Barcelona Wine Bar, at the Coolidge.

Bear witness to Robert Pattinson’s High Voicework Era!!!

Frustratingly dangles an escalation of the “Challengers” dynamic in front of our faces, doesn’t even have a boner slap. 

And yeah, sauces ARE a Litmus test of civilization, Toni Colette with a Nutribullet Full of Gore (volumes to be written on this character!!!). 

Seen, before throwing ass at the Barcelona Wine Bar, at the Coolidge.

RIP Gene Hackman, who deserved so much better than the tartarean torture of his final weeks. To wake each day in fresh disarray to discover the decomposing shell that once housed the love of his life, each morbid repetition a novel horror beyond memory… heartbreaking.

Savor the good times, friends. Life can be so much crueler than you imagine. 

—

Anyway, great movie! “Get well” goes into immediate and heavy rotation as a term for getting a fix (like the stiff drink I’m going to pour myself later to avoid fixating on this).

Truly a stunning bungle for the venerable scriveners whose creative loins birthed “Howard the Duck”… 

PS: any dude with That Armband Tattoo can do the heart thing. That’s what it means! Just ask!

Violently violated voluptuary...

The slow, inviting close-ups of prone and supine flesh— at times gnawed to pulpy flaps, others pristine and inviolate— makes this more acutely affecting than others in its filmic line (thoughts of "Martin", mainly). Still, the use of vampirism to here to explore the natural antagonism of appetite is somehow simultaneously more intuitively emotional, grotesque, visceral, comprehensible, palatable— eerily, less compunctious in its gorgeousness in comparison to Romero’s spiritually off-putting masterpiece. 

Béatrice Dalle has a mouth for the ages!

“But I’m going to live…”  🥹

RIP Gene

Sort of puzzling for the protagonist of an enviro-doomer kiddie flick to wind up abandoning their chosen family in order to collaborate with a bunch of world-destroying technofascist slavers; but I guess that’s the degree to which we’re meant to fetishize the martyrdom of parenthood? 

Also, do these guys seriously blow up their entire biodome every time they see a goose, or what? 

Lupita et al, the stars are for you!

The goal now is to emulate the state in which we find the cat— bed down in an architecturally-significant home that’s well-sited on high ground, find an owner who desires to worshipfully people our dwindling spit of Arcadia with unnumbered monuments to me— in life avant le déluge… :p

Pretty cute, but what was with the raptor getting raptured?

“Well, if nothing else, this has settled the brief bout of sexual confusion inspired by that other monkey picture”, he lied. 

Feels like a conduit for Perkins’ malefic older sibling energy— arch, baroque, ultimately sort of cheugy. 

Probably not the very worst in its genre of Rube-Goldberg / splatter-kill gigglefests, but it’s still sloshing around down there with the franchise horror and the sweatier works of Joss Whedon.

Doling out an extra half star for the pixelmancer whose life’s work it was to dial in the size and shape of the digital monkey’s hog. Thank you for making those silvery booty shorts pop for all of us in a normal way that will leave our collective incidence of simian sex dreams unperturbed. Hope you get your gold statue.

The script is howls a minute; but Stillman’s snickering sortie into the world beyond the cloistered, debutantish salons of “Metropolitan” veers disappointingly exceptionalist. Sure, our nebbish, WASPy, pseudo-Fitzgeraldian oafs endure countless cogent polemics against the ills of American geopolitical hegemony in the course of their Catalonian tour; but what are we to make of the chief polemicist’s cultural assimilation after scantly an hour’s runtime? Is the viewer meant to simply gloss over this outrageous critical abdication, to shut up and hork down the hierarchical pluralism like so many insipid hamburgers? The assumption that everyone is equally deserving of the pillory works for a hyper-focused high-society drama unfurling in an Upper East Side drawing room, but… there are *actual* stakes here. 

“Chalk this one up to the winking, hubristic perspectival myopia of the mid-nineties intellect!”, you say. “Just have fun!”, you say. “Don’t hide a dead rat behind a suit rack at the J. Press!”, you say. Okay, okay…   

Anyway, Mira Sorvino!!!

Forgoes the easeful conceptual straightforwardness of Bergman’s major works (lol) in favor of a surrealistic rumination on the annihilative psychic pitfalls of contemporary artistry. 

A nightmare of class-consciousness and social precarity wherein the working artist is transfigured from agentic creator to self-abnegating prey animal. Here we witness von Sydow vilify his own id (indeed, he fully murders his childlike aspect on the rocky precipice of dream / recounts a horrific childhood tale of being trapped in a closet with an imp of pure appetite) as an uncontrollable distraction from total devotion to his artifice, whose value has no diegetic arbiter save for the “vampires” of the local castle.

These inscrutable stalkers confine, co-opt, and seem to subsist upon the creative essence of the artworks they come to own (peep the little man in the box!), reducing von Sydow— even within the borders of his own imagination— to a painted concubine, an object, a plaything— a captive to the whims of a shadowy, ravening, aristocratic cognoscenti tittering at his humiliation from the darkness. 

One almost yearns to become the audience that Bergman imagines, non ?

Performs its function as an incredibly thin pretense to spend time with a distinguished smattering of history’s best Horror Uncles— a cortège of well-worn suits, hypnotic visages, and sweeping gestures with elegant hands… 

This ought to have been whittled down to about half of its runtime (the introduction is absolutely nothing), but it does have its charms… Peter Cushing assumes an inexplicable German (?) accent (did he contract this in Africa?!), and Vincent Price calls Christopher Lee a bitch!

“Assault on Precinct 13” with Notions. 

… and also extra wet, Satanic gleeking. 

Plus 1/2 star for the iconic mirror shot. 

… and another for Alice Cooper’s credible turn as “Street Schzio”!

Entrancing, diaphanous, ethereal… Archetypal 80s dark fantasy. Angela Lansbury is so perfect in this! 

I need a living stole that hisses at men!

“By dinnertime, I had dispensed with God altogether…” from a softly-lit, glistening, post-coital William Hurt could heal me, certainly. 

Somehow, one of Ken’s less whimsical efforts (no stunt mongooses produced from kilt-pouches, nor weaponized taxidermied alligators here!), but earns a half-star for its incredible Bostonian / Cantabridgian references, and the well-chosen elements of its stylistic pastiche. Some fine trippy visuals and practicals, too! 

Possibly supplants “Close Encounters” in the category of Cinema’s Best Bearded Bob Balaban?

Charlie Kaufman, but hold the charm.

Most accurate cinematic representation of Trying to Get to the Beach. 

Something disconcerting in the expressionistic primordial stew from which this film, “The City of Lost Children”, and “The Matrix” emerged, all seeded with the individualistic DNA of “Metropolis”…

One can hardly disagree with the metaphysical / socio-political invective here: what are human agency and identity, really, if they only exist in reference to, are dictated by the confines of an almost comically-flimsy total institution (society…? SOCIETY!!!)? But for an endeavor so conspicuously competent in its blending of form and function (you guys, the characterization is emaciated on PURPOSE!), and which practically slobbers after the viewer to consider its Very Edgy Ideas, the film never quite acknowledges that we can’t *all* be the Everyman at the center of its masculine, slacker, exceptionalist power fantasy. 

Anyway, some incredible production design here…!

Turkeys in the corn, horses in the living-room, David Bowies that were never there… 

*blood-curdling shriek* 

🥹

At least after Spielberg was informed how badly he was telling on himself in rewarding the ill-tempered, neglectful, monomaniacal, workaholic father with celestial transcendence, he recanted the ending of this film. 

Stevie, you perspicacious king! 😍

Films in which Joaquin Phoenix models a normal, healthy relationship to women. No debilitating mommy issues here, just 100% rizz.

This guy definitely isn't the Laurence Olivier of playing pathetic little creeps.

• Beau Is Afraid
• Gladiator
• Her
• Joker
• Napoleon
• The Master
• Quills
• Inherent Vice
• To Die For