i bought all the sodas at the gas station
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
Dragged Across Concrete 2018
Punishing like Haneke, but it never feels like it is talking down to you from a place of higher cultural import; this is red-blooded American genre cinema first and foremost. This does not belong in the art-house (even next to "provocateurs" like Von Trier) or alongside the gentrified horror/exploitation of Ari Aster et al. It can be frustrating that the film pushes at as many buttons as it can without ever completely showing its hand. It is practically begging us…
-
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…
Recent reviews
More-
The French Dispatch 2021
Everyone knows what to expect from Anderson, but I was surprised by what I felt to be a novel streak of self-awareness and maybe even self-critique here. I would not go so far as to call it a full-on interrogation of Anderson's bourgeois aesthetic mastery, but there is something deliberately disruptive about this. For one thing, Anderson's narrative structure (or lack thereof) finally congeals with his film's artificial presentation: a beautiful facade, a dream of journalism as writing, as storytelling…
-
Popular reviews
More-
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…
-
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…
