Latest Adaptation of Frank Herbert Hard SF Classic is Unmitigated Disaster Story is everything, particularly when it comes to the so-called ‘hero’s journey.’ And any movie that doesn’t tell a complete journey… is the first episode of a streaming series. In Dune’s case it’s certainly not a cinematic epic befitting a hard science fiction classic […]
Must-see Polish Drama Packs a Spiritual Wallop Streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel, Jan Komasa‘s Corpus Christi (in Polish: Boże Ciało) represents the sort of compelling character- and theme-driven drama that American cinema, even on its recent best day, seems incapable of contemplating, much less producing and distributing to a wide audience.
Quick take: It took a lot of guts—literally—for homegrown Columbia, SC psychotronic filmmakers Christopher Bickel and David Axe to pull off their first feature. Despite a shoestring budget, an inexperienced cast and numerous technical limitations, however, these self-proclaimed “novices” have nonetheless dinged a solid exploitation base hit, bouncing way out deep in centerfield. In short, The Theta […]
Quick take: Pretty pictures, fan service, plot holes, and ret-conning make for a long sit. In other words? An all too typical Hollywood reboot/remake of beloved intellectual property (IP) dredged up from the deep cultural antiquity of the 1980s.
Or is it, Twin Peaks: The Return? That’s what it’s called on the streaming service I’m using to get Showtime all summer, just to see this continuation of a 25 year-old network television show most casual viewers remember as running into a ditch in its second season and never recovering. While that’s not quite true (see handy graphic […]
In mid-2016, noted graphic novelist and self-professed warlock Alan Moore released his second literary novel, Jerusalem, and it’s a doozy. A 600,000 word Joycean meditation on the lifeblood and history of a single neighborhood in Northampton, UK, the author’s hometown and lifelong residence, this book is an epic journey that seems to go everywhere and yet nowhere.
Ever notice someone walking by who has haunted eyes? To whom a musky whiff of past or present misfortune seems to linger as they go about their daily lives? Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck, Interstellar, The Killer Inside Me), the taciturn protagonist of Manchester by the Sea, is just such a person. He works with quiet […]
I wanted to write, that was all I wanted, and I couldn’t understand those who didn’t, how they could be happy with an ordinary job, whatever it was, whether teacher, camera operator, bureaucrat, academic, farmer, TV host, journalist, designer, publicist, fisherman, truck driver, gardener, nurse, or astronomer. How could that be enough? I understood it […]
In 1985, when I became initiated into my new life as a latter generation Deadhead—it’s called “getting on the bus,” referencing a lyric from the Dead’s psychedelic classic “That’s It for The Other One”—I had certainly heard of Augustus Owsley Stanley III. As an aficionado of the 1960s social revolution I had missed by virtue of […]
Short version: if you want to go and have a good time, avert your eyes from this savagely uncompromising review of what played like a child’s model kit—half-assembled, covered in misapplied decals and sticky with goopy globs of airplane glue—of a Star Wars movie. Seriously. Fair warning. Spoilers ahead. If, however, you’re inclined to read exactly how and why […]
