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Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol 2021
Insurrection Panopticon
There may not be what one considers a definitive documentary on the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, at least not yet--just as there isn't a joint Congressional investigation into it, what with one of the nation's two political parties being significantly complicit (aside from six Senate and 35 House Republicans or so who voted for the commission). This is opposed to, for comparison, two fine documentaries on the 9/11 terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center, "9/11" (2002)…
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For All Mankind 1989
Cinematographic Cosmos
This is a sublime documentary not only because it depicts the great human achievement of landing men on the Moon, but also because it embodies the vital function of motion pictures in that achievement. This is what brought the Moon into people's homes via their TVs on 20 June 1969, and it's what continues to allow us to this day to be fellow spectators to those on the scene--the astronauts--of what they witnessed. As merely men touring another…
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Day Shift 2022
Valley Vamps
A complete waste of time, I don't know why I watched this Netflix movie of the week. I guess it's made by some of the stunt men responsible for "John Wick" (2014), but the fights with flexible vampires are too cartoonish to be exciting, and the lore of the bloodsuckers is generic. I wanted to bail every time rapper and stoner personality Snoop Dogg made an appearance in a manner that seemed to suggest I was supposed to…
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How to Marry a Millionaire 1953
Gentlemen's Revenge on Blondes
Superficially a piggybacking pastiche of Fox's prior box-office hit starring Marilyn Monroe and the female camaraderie of gold diggers, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953), "How to Marry a Millionaire" is actually its reactionary patriarchal antithesis, also from Fox and starring Monroe and the female camaraderie of gold diggers. Here, she teams ups with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable. Instead of the synergy Monroe and Jane Russell demonstrated in the prior film, though, this trio frequently inadvertently undermines…
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Memoria 2021
Thus Spoke the Pulse of Slow Cinema
Sometimes or in some ways I fear cinema is dead. We've signed its death certificate, and all that remains is like a jumbled memory of a lost sister. There's only this double with the same name but clearly different, a spiritual traveler, a reception and interpretation of a source, but not the thing itself. It's alien. The despair of the aborted never-ending theatrical-only release of "Memoria" only seems to confirm those fears. Cinema…
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 2022
Nic Cage Sucks Faces Off with Nic Cage
Geesh, they cut the best scene out of the movie, those stupid studio hacks. Thankfully, it's included as an extra on the home video release, but it's not the same. I might've given this title a positive review had it remained. It's a "Caligari" (1920)-inspired battle of doppelgängers in monochrome and on Expressionist sets that also references some of Cage's films. Everything setting up this sequence remains, the banter with the daughter…
