I was maybe twenty minutes into Bringing Out the Dead when I had the thought: how in the holy hell did I miss this when it was new? Furthermore, how did I keep missing it in the twenty-plus years since? This movie is exactly my kind of thing and even at age 17, when it released, it would have been the kind of dark dreamy experience I'd have pushed on every friend who would let me.
Scorsese + Paul Schrader…
I've been obsessed with dreams my whole life, to the point where some of my foundational memories, the earliest ones lodged deep in my head, are dreams that I had as a child. There's one in particular, where I'm in some sort of ornate hotel with red carpeting and fancy furniture and loads of carved doors, spiral staircases, and seemingly endless ways to move from one room, one level to another. I know I need to leave, fast, that my…
Now I've Got A Gun: The Movie
Gnarly, moody, stylish, heavy, unflinching, pitiless, and a little fucking goofy: that's A Bittersweet Life. What could have been the most straightforwardly satisfying gangster revenge flick turned out to be knottier, more vulnerable, and ultimately weirder than its bloody brethren tend to come across. You've got a guy working for a more powerful guy. We see this guy kick some major ass in the first scene; it rocks. His boss wants him to…
This snowbound single-location thriller delivered exactly what was promised, no more or less: a recovering drug addict realizes that one of the people stuck with her at a rest stop during a snowstorm has kidnapped a child and she's got no clue how to suss them out, rescue the kid, or escape unharmed, but she's gonna try goddammit! My wife and I caught the trailer and said "sold!" halfway through (we rarely finish horror/thriller trailers since they're always spoiling the…
I've been reading a book called Sapiens, and the early chapters detail the era when multiple human species walked the earth at the same time, each with their own tribes, languages, burgeoning cultures - big brains blooming across the world, an evolutionary breakthrough that's about to change the planet more than anything since its creation billions of years ago. Homo sapiens is a singular animal amongst the creatures of the Earth, but in our earliest days, we were one of…
Dawn is a level up in every way from its predecessor while keeping the core magnetism that helped it rise above its cgi blockbuster brethren: Andy Serkis' central performance as Caesar and the generous empathy built around his difficult relationship with humanity. The cinematography, music, script, and editing, brought together by Cloverfield (and future The Batman) director Matt Reeves, truly elevate this thoughtful, thrilling look into life after the Anthropocene. The change can be witnessed right in the opening scene,…
