First big-screen viewing, what a revelation. Sometimes you forget that these films were meant to be watched in a theater. Seeing the film grain, observing the compositions, details like Copper's nose ring which I'd never noticed before and which is very odd for a middle-aged dude in 1982. It helped that I haven't watched this film in a long time--I think its reputation as Greatest Horror Film Ever has made me less likely to revisit it over the years. I…
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Grizzly 1976
Since it seems Emma and I are having a summer of animal attack movies, I decided we needed to include the first Jaws ripoff, which neither of us had seen. But while the influence/pilfering from Jaws is certainly there, what this feels most like, and surprisingly so, is a proto-slasher! We have a backwoods setting, a victim pool that is mostly female and mostly coded as sexually active, random strangers added in to inflate the body count, and a sick…
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Toolbox Murders 2004
The film that opened my eyes to Tobe Hooper's brilliance was neither The Texas Chain Saw Massacre nor Poltergeist (though I had previously seen both) but rather Toolbox Murders. I was 18 years old, living with my parents and unemployed, having withdrawn from college after a disastrous first semester. It was the beginning of a four-year spiral of depression, isolation and substance abuse: the darkest period of my life thus far.
I rented Toolbox Murders from my local Hollywood Video…
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Waves 2019
Apparently this hasn't been seen/reviewed by anybody in my letterboxd circle yet, and I know it's gonna get a bunch of Oscars and shit so let me be the first to say FUCK THIS MOVIE.
It's nothing but a naive white perspective on African American trauma that views white pain with compassion and black pain as spectacle, dressed up with a bunch of flashy film-bro stylistics and superficial "whoa Tarkovsky" masturbatory references, all to disguise the fundamental problem that this…
