Are you a Kool Kat, or a Hawt Dawg?

I don’t even rate this movie high enough to write a proper essay about it, so instead I’m just gonna write about all the ways I think that this movie is offensively stupid in no particular order. I just have to exorcise this movie from my mind. Spoilers abound: Right off the bat, it implies that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a book she wrote and re-wrote over years, and that she wove the…

As much as I’d like to never think about 2025 again, something about the Oscar nominations got me thinking about writing a little something about the media I enjoyed from last year that I haven’t otherwise writing about. This is just some stuff I’m dashing off before going to bed, so don’t expect it to be organized or profound – I just feel like I should get it down. Movies My Favorite Movie of…

How should one adapt a story as influential and iconic as Frankenstein, perhaps the single most influential novel of all time? In the over 200 years since its original publication, Frankenstein hasn’t just inspired a genre, but an entire mythology of overlapping and conflicting narratives, iconography, and themes. Through near-constant retelling, it’s become as fundamental to humanity’s…

I’m a little disappointed, but not completely surprised, that I’ve seen and read so many opinions about One Battle After Another, from people who proudly brag about reading theory and being media literate and all of that, that have missed the forest for the trees. To be clear, I’m not writing about the discussions of race or gender or where they overlap – that’s not a conversation I feel my…

There’s this joke about men, that all of us fall into one of two groups: We believe we can either land a plane in an emergency with no training, or successfully defend ourselves in court without any law education.  I’ll admit that I typically fall into the latter bucket. But having read Stephen King’s The Long Walk at an impressionable age, my delusion of grandeur was that I could win it. I’m no…

For me, this is the single line that makes James Gunn’s Superman work. Corenswet’s delivery – not angry, but exasperated, sounding almost as if he could have cried it rather than yelled it – tells you everything you need to know about this version of the world’s first* superhero.  Because when dealing with Superman, who represents not just supernatural strength but supernatural goodness, who can…

~Spoilers for Sinners~ While every group of people that calls America home has contributed to “American Culture” – the Pilgrim’s infamous “work ethic,” Italians innovating on traditional flatbreads to invent the pizza, Jewish comedians and entertainers codifying film & television sensibilities – none have had the indelible influence on the American DNA as Black people. And while the effect Black…

~Full plot spoilers for Mickey 17~ Sci-fi can often be a window into an alternate universe. It’s rarer for it to feel like it came from one itself.  But Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 was clearly made for a universe where Trump lost the 2024 presidential election. And while I admire the optimism that led him to invest his time, effort, and millions of dollars towards creating a piece of art for that…

When director F. W. Murnau and his crew made the original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror in 1921, the potential of film as a medium was still largely unexplored. This was before sound, before color, before most actors had been trained to perform for the screen. Lev Kuleshov was still experimenting to understand how audiences interpret cuts, and Sergei Eisenstein – who would eventually codify…

Scratching the surface of the American carceral state could be enough to drive most people to despair, and it is the remit of art to make tolerable the medicine of history. Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross, adapting Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name – is the latest entry in this genre of American cinema, which includes movies like The Defiant Ones (which Ross directly quotes) and Cool…

I recently watched two animated movies that are each shorter than feature length, so I’m gonna contort them to be in conversation. Enjoy. … Rent ME on vimeo Besides the music attributions, the only name in the credits to ME is Don Hertzfeldt. This is not unusual for the animator, who has worked with voice actors and compositors in the past, but is known for his independent – in the strictest…

~Spoilers for The Substance & Oshi no Ko~ It’s been about a week since I saw it, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance – a film I, to be completely candid, didn’t particularly like. I like a lot about The Substance. Co-leads Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are both fantastic, with the former going from raw and vulnerable in the first act to whole ham…

As with American filmmaking overall, the 70s saw a resurrection of the horror genre. Movies like The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, and Alien, among so many others expanded the purview of the genre. Beyond introducing new designs and subgenres to the wider audiences these films attracted, they also proved that horror could be undeniably about things in the…

I saw both M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap and Fede Álvarez’ Alien: Romulus over the past few weeks, and while I didn’t really feel compelled to write a post about either of them, I guess I find myself now writing about both. Not necessarily, to compare them, but because I still find myself thinking about both, and I guess they are somewhat in conversation…I’m pantsing here, so we’ll see how this…

Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs is a movie I wanted to like more than I did. And despite what I have to say in the bulk of this post, Longlegs has a lot going for it. Perkins is incredible at composing shots that compel you to focus on the backgrounds, looking down hallways and through doorways in anticipation of a threat the characters cannot see. As exemplified by the movie’s incredible PR campaign,…

I’ve been negligent with reviewing movies as I watch them, which means when I finally do get around to writing about them, I feel more like I’m recalling my initial thoughts and reactions to the movie rather than documenting them. However, I do want to share my opinions about the things I’ve watched over the past month because well – if I didn’t have these urges, I wouldn’t have a…

Upfront, I really enjoyed Hit Man. Linklater has always been great at helming these breezy kinda cozy comedies, and I’m glad that Glen Powell is cashing in his Maverick cache to work with these – if not daring – different projects and doing a big part in reviving the talent-driven mid-/low-budget feature. Not to bully The Fall Guy – which, again, I really really enjoyed – but while both manage to…