It's kind of crazy to think of how subversive and bold this movie is in 2020.
People always call Hollywood "leftist," but a critical glance at its treatment of real life topics such as abortion - a common, important experience in so many lives - shows that the movie industry in America is largely conservative. I honestly cannot recall a single other movie to so frankly and maturely address the issue, especially not with such warmth and empathy. And fun.…
Desperately seeking love and connection, a need so deep in your bones that you'll do anything, crazy stuff, absolutely wild nonsense that you'd never in a million years think you'd do, but there you are following a cop around, riffling through the guy's apartment and leaving mementos of yourself and dancing to a cover of "Dreams" over and over in between top-volume sessions of The Mamas and the Papas. It's not a flight to California but it'll do until you…
"I'm a bad girl, Nicholas. Real bad. Rotten to the heart. Last scrape I was in, I f***ed up a lot of people, bad people - people like me. People that don't forget. But I was given a second chance. So I went back to the States where I got everything a bad girl ever wanted."
So begins the titular woman's self mythologization in a late-movie conversation with the man accidentally responsible for blowing her cover, her entire comfortable life…
X is a truly fun, richly textured, aesthetically cohesive backwoods slasher that manages to organically weave in genuine themes about repression, religion, and America's dumb dichotic culture where we simultaneously worship sex and act repulsed by its very existence. We love porn but we spit upon the people who create it for us. We get horny, but we pretend that's not a natural part of human existence most of the time. We can thank religious puritanism for a lot of…
Moonfall is gloriously stupid and a genuinely good time, at least if you chomp an edible and crack a beer like I did while watching with my wife. After an intro sequence ripped straight out of Gravity, it kicks off as a queasy mixture of both 1998 asteroid films, Armageddon and Deep Impact, and last year's Don't Look Up, before flipping right off the deep end into third-act-of-Mission-to-Mars, Interstellar, and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite territory. Or at least, that's…
Watched Knives Out for a fourth time kind of randomly because we were staying at my in-laws and they were actually staying up late with us (and drinking!) so Kaitlyn wanted to put on a crowd pleaser, something fun and funny with a familiar cast, but also smart, with some teeth, and a genuine plot to chew on. Which is honestly a great set of criteria for something to watch with your parents! So I put the vudu app on…
