Movie watcher, comic writer, podcast maker
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We're All Going to the World's Fair 2021
When I was 13, I convinced a complete stranger online that I was going to kill myself. I wanted to start with this because of the parallels to plot elements in World’s Fair—but it’s also inescapable that for me here to abruptly confess a shameful transgression that I’ve literally never told another human being, to a small gaggle of disinterested strangers on letterboxd, is itself right in line with World’s Fair. Heyo.
It’s a movie that doesn’t really try to unpack…
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The Dead Don't Die 2019
Beloved and self-aware indie film director Jim Jarmusch opens his Actors Rolodex and assembles the JARMUSCH AVENGERS for The Dead Don’t Die; a zombie movie that isn’t a zombie movie so much as it is a movie about beloved and self-aware indie film director Jim Jarmusch making a zombie movie. It knows it’s a bad movie, tells you at length that it knows it’s a bad movie, but doesn’t do anything interesting with the fact that it’s a bad movie. I’ve never sat in a theater so palpably tired of being winked at before.
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Saloum 2021
In America we’re so afraid of consequences that when we spin our endless stories about revenge we always use them to assure ourselves it’s redemptive, that it’s liberating. Unshackled from this narrow cultural obligation, Saloum isn’t afraid of the truth; that revenge is consuming, that it’s suffocating, that it’s unsatisfied until it’s claimed you heart and soul. Cast is flawless and the score is outstanding.
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Saw X 2023
Embarrassing attempt to convince an audience that by turning the “what if the people in the traps are the bad guys, actually” knob to eleven, you’d get a nuanced morality play. On the contrary, I think the least interesting thing you could do with a franchise like this is make the victims unambiguously loathsome and the killer (even more of) a tedious moralizing antihero dishing out sweet revenge for the audience’s bloodlust. Some fans are into horror because they legitimately…
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Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 2015
Obviously this doesn’t even cross my radar without the Till Death Do Us Blart podcast, but like most(?) McElroy/Worst Idea fans I eventually took the holy thanksgiving pilgrimage, and came out the other side battered but not broken.
It’s bad in the ways you already know it’ll be bad, and it makes no effort to explain or justify itself, so maybe I’m grading on a curve. But despite having literally zero laughs in it, and despite containing one truly baffling…
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker 2019
It’s exactly the movie I was afraid it would be. Charmless and unsurprising, too cowardly to stand on the shoulders of Last Jedi or have anything to say about anything. The whole movie is in such a goddamn hurry to go nowhere.
