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Inglourious Basterds 2009
"We simply aren’t operating on the level of mutual respect that I assumed."
"No, I guess not."I have a lot of messy and incomplete thoughts banging around in my brain about fascist aesthetics, mass vs cult vs elite taste, counterfactual imagination, the nationality (or internationality) of film genre, vulgar auteurist politics, and how fun it is to watch Eli Roth beat a nazi to death with a baseball bat. All I can say for sure right now is that this is one big and brilliant “fuck off" to the de-nazification of Riefenstahl et al. Cue Richard Spencer getting punched in the face.
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Halloween II 2009
“Summarize the film... uh, Shakespeare meets the Vietnam War?”
In the 4+ hour-long behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Zombie’s first Halloween entry, this is how Dee Wallace (who played Cynthia Strode) describes the first film. And these initially seem like silly, overblown comparisons that an actor would make while being interviewed on location—far before the film was even finished. And, while it is admittedly more than a bit of a stretch to compare Zombie to Shakespeare (although Malcolm McDowell…
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Fear Street: 1666 2021
This makes good use of the trick that most longer narrative media (especially television) frequently benefits from: it is very easy to mistake the amount of real-time you’ve sunk into a story as actual narrative depth (thus every miniseries on this website has an average of like 3.9 or higher)—but a longer story does not necessarily equate to a more interesting or worthwhile one! That being said, there is a nice (if very simplistic) statement about power and historicity here.…
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Fear Street: 1978 2021
if you hate the simple summery pleasures of 80s camp slashers and always wished that they were more like unbearably nondescript and affected televisual slogs through some feckless schmuck’s “Rock Hits of the 70s” playlist, then boy do i have the movie for you!
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Jack and Jill 2011
Adam Sandler's biting satire of post-9/11, American, capitalist, consumerist culture. Sandler is clearly drawing from a vast and varied collection of sources to create this subversive narrative, the film contains hints of everyone from Jorge Luis Borges to Aristophanes. Sandler's slyly hilarious comedy is a brilliant celebration of one's own identity (particularly, gender and ethnicity) in the face of the increasingly repressive and xenophobic state of world politics, in fact, with each passing year, this film only grows in its…
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Jennifer's Body 2009
TRIGGER WARNING
A rape-revenge movie disguised as a high-school horror comedy. But really, is disguise even an appropriate word?
How obvious is it that the stabbing of Jennifer in the woods is a metaphor for rape? Just like the lead character of I Spit On Your Grave (who, by the way, is also "coincidentally" named Jennifer), Jennifer is restrained by a group of men in the woods who then abuse her, thrusting foreign objects into her body. The primary difference…
