A menacing and lecherous Klaus Kinski is the perfect kind of guy to run into on a godforsaken rock in space where the creatures from a 200k year old alien menagerie are coming back to life. One of the better Alien ripoffs I’ve seen, and it all evens out because Ridley Scott rips Creature off for Prometheus a few decades later.
The movie is framed as two stories within a story—first Victor’s, then the monster’s. But there really isn’t even one, despite being an adaptation of one of the most famous stories of the last 200 years. There is no reason to have two narrators. The storytellers themselves add nothing to their tales. The only difference in perspective is literal. However polychromatic the movie might be, it is surprisingly monotone. The one thing Guillermo del Toro crafts with love every time…
One Battle After Another is structured by two fantasies.
The first is the right-wing fantasy of—and desire for—the enemy, a hyper-sexualized cartoon of the US revolutionary Left of the 60s/70s. PTA needs to indulge this fantasy to set up the 2+ hour punchline that follows the title card. Nothing that happens before the smash-cut to teenage Willa in Sergio St. Carlos‘ Dojo happens outside of Col. Lockjaw’s wish-fulfillment. Perfidia Beverly Hills is the only form an Assata could take in the…
Synecdoche, NY is the perfect movie for reminding you of all the reasons you should hate theater people, including the people who wrote, directed, & acted in it. Who let Charlie Kaufman make so many movies about how much he despises women? To his eternal credit he perfected the move of winking at the audience like “I’m just jerking myself off… how pathetic… but there’s truth in that… how pretentious of me to say… but honest… & that’s so lame… but real…”
It…
