I've been on something of an unplanned cult 70s/80s musicals mini-marathon, and this was a surprisingly good find. Pennies From Heaven is essentially a dark parody of the musicals of the 30s. It's a drama, starring Steve Martin, who plays a naive, tragic, and somewhat awful man who lives a hard life in Depression-era America, seeing his dreams and hopes crushed by reality, and destroying the people around him in the process.

The glimmer of hope, his naivety, is represented…

This is a difficult film to rate. On the one hand it's terrible. But on the other hand it's terribly interesting. Essentially the mostly forgotten sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment has its moments and elements that intrigue, but I didn't find the film as a whole compelling in any way, in fact I found it kind of a awful in its ability to keep me watching despite not wanting to, like seeing a car crash.

Jim…

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: Ridley Scott isn't a great director, and Blade Runner is the masterpiece that proves it.

Scott is the kind of guy that believes things are best when they are dumbed down, that Maximus is a good name for the protagonist of a historical epic. He's also the kind of guy that doesn't understand storytelling, but still wants to leave an audience satisfied. With the exception of Alien and Blade Runner, most…

This review spoils Django Unchained and has very minor spoilers for Pulp Fiction too.

One thing that I love about Quentin Tarantino is that, like David Lynch, he's a uniquely American filmmaker. Tarantino very obviously does borrow liberally from non-American cinema - the most blatant influence in Pulp Fiction is probably Godard - but that doesn't change the fact that only an American could make a film like Pulp Fiction.

There's actually a little moment in the film where Butch…