Bailed after 30 minutes. Not for me.
-
-
White Plastic Sky 2023
To some extent, White Plastic Sky is more interested in the nuts and bolts of its post-apocalyptic scenario—a resigned, utilitarian version of “Soylent Green is people!”—than it is in developing characters. We never really learn anything about the couple at the center of it beyond the salient points most relevant to the plot, and I guess that’s the trouble I have with a lot of sci-fi and fantasy: A fair amount of world-building is necessary for the audience to get…
-
History, Mystery & Oyssey: Six Portland Animators 2023
This documentary doesn’t have much of a narrative arc, but its portrait of a community of visionary independent animators in Portland—Jim Blashfield, Rose Bond, Joan Gratz, Zak Margolis, Joanna Priestley, and Chel White—is an effective adrenaline shot for anyone on their creative wavelength. What might have been a staid feature-length showreel is elevated by the filmmakers’ frequently eloquent discussion of their work, and it’s a good reminder that animation is a vastly broader and richer medium than its mass-market offerings suggest.
-
-
Ghost in the Shell 1995
I think this is the first chance I’ve had to see Ghost in the Shell with its original Japanese dialogue track, and watching with subtitles reinforced my previously noted view that this film is way too chatty for its own good.
-
Cade: The Tortured Crossing 2023
Apart from stock footage inserts, there isn’t a single scene in Cade: The Tortured Crossing that isn’t shot on green screen, and I kind of hope Neil Breen stays with that approach in future films. The 7th Guest aesthetic really works for him.
He does look more at home, though (to the extent that he ever looks at home anywhere), in the suburban Las Vegas locations he’s traditionally used than the alternately lavish and decayed locales seen here. So maybe…
-
Barbie 2023
It’s all true, obviously, and it saves its best joke for an impeccable closer, and maybe if we’re lucky it’ll be a meaningful feminist Trojan horse for a few people. But the whole thing is just entirely too on-the-nose, and no amount of ostensibly subversive mumblecore cachet behind the camera can outrun the movie’s prime directive of brand rehab for a multibillion dollar toy company.
The good news for Barbie fans is that my opinion of this movie could not possibly matter less.
-
-
Superfights 1995
Like an 11-year-old boy on a Lucky Charms bender scribbled out a screenplay and then picked up the phone and hired legit Hong Kong action pros to make it. If anyone has ever shot anything more entertaining on location in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I have yet to see it (and would desperately love to see it).
-
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 2023
I’m not a superhero enthusiast, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Spidey, maybe because his origin story, while admittedly rife with the tiresome trappings of adolescent male power fantasy, is at its core a coming-of-age tale. In that tradition, 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse allows its Spider-Man, Miles Morales, to not only find himself, but also find his tribe: a variety of spider-heroes, each representing a different far-flung dimension. The demographically diverse influx of coexisting spider-personae makes the character more…
-
Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist 1997
May we all achieve Bob Flanagan’s level of self-knowledge and self-love, even if it ultimately fails to prepare us to confront death. Bob’s poem, “Why?,” is going to stay with me. “Because you always hurt the one you love.”
-
Love & Death 2023
I was due for a trashy true crime brain drain, and this one seemed like it would fit the bill. I didn’t expect much from it, but I never could have imagined the story of an extramarital affair culminating in someone getting hacked to bits with an axe could be such a snooze. It’s at least three times as long as it needs to be, heavily padded with repetition, superfluous characters and details, and a surplus of 1970s pop and…