UW-Madison PhD candidate, and chief film critic at AlternateEnding.com
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Africa Squeaks 1940
Got on my bad side with record speed, literally the first gag after the title card: it's a re-run of the "Dark/Darker/Darkest Africa" gag from Porky in Wackyland only played somewhat straight, rather than as a first dose of mind-melting surrealism. From there it drives into a lackadaisical copy of a Tex Avery travelogue film that's worse on everything: a more generic sardonic narrator; blander and slower gags; the recurring joke that vaguely structures it is a dreadfully ugly Spencer…
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The Fishing Bear 1940
There's not a ton going on here storywise - a duck that acts like a hound interrupts Barney Bear's fishing trip - and it's very much one of those cartoons where being charming is sort of obviously the bigger priority than being funny. Or, God knows, being well paced; this is relatively short by MGM standards, but it goes on and on for ages. But it's executed with an unmistakable degree of confidence in skill, especially in the use of…
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Judas and the Black Messiah 2021
In retrospect, of course Warner Bros. wasn't going to put out a movie that genuinely grappled with Fred Hampton's revolutionary politics, and it's on me that I was idiot enough to wonder if they might. Instead, despite a couple quotes from Marxist literature, and one appearance each by the words "socialism" (at the start) and "proletariat" (at the end; also, I might have missed a "proletariat" in there, I wasn't really thinking to count it), this mostly turns Hampton into…
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Tell It Like a Woman 2022
I think it's extremely broad-minded of the Academy to start giving Oscar nominations to films that do not, in fact, exist.
