This movie went straight to DVD and was meant to pioneer a technology called Navigational Cinema, wherein the viewer could chose options at certain points in the story where the narrative could fork. Ultimately, 96 different stories were possible. Guess what never caught on?…
Now. I don’t know what the hell happened, but the cut of this film I saw didn’t even break the 90 minute mark. You’re left with something that reads like you turned the pages of a Choose Your Own Adventure book into blotter acid and then ate the whole thing.
Keeping in mind that this scenario reduces characters to speaking ONLY in quips and exposition, this movie includes (but is not limited to) the following:
—-several British actors trying their hardest to maintain American accents
—-so many underdeveloped “characters” that you know they’re going to get picked off before you learn most of their names
—-a leather-clad, I dunno…bounty hunter? dressed like an off the rack Lara Croft invovled in an all lady 3 way with a couple of phantom mental patients dressed in sexy sexy straight jackets
—-some woman’s face sliding off the front of her head and splatting on the ground
—-a man drawn and quartered by sheets. Yeah. SHEETS.
—-everyone having a gun for no good reason
—-guns shot at people, walls, statues, big machines, everything
—-people totally taken aback when the shooting thing doesn’t “work”
—-everyone’s flip phones ringing at once, played for scares AND for laughs
—-everyone answering said flip phones only to hear the screams of a man dying, tied to a wheelchair by a haunted house extra in a nurse’s uniform
—-someone saying “it belongs in a museum” like Indiana Jones wasn’t gonna notice
—-a “hydrotherapy” tank that you could sink an SUV in
—-a woman who, I’m CONVINCED, has nipples that can sense danger
—-that woman being in danger for an hour straight, so her nips are up the whole time
—-a scary room that rains chairs. You read that right. It rains chairs.
—-the “heart of the house” LITERALLY being the heart of the house
—-some more gun stuff
—-a death-by-lowest-bidder-CGI
—-functioning shower heads that come out of nowhere, just so everybody’s shirts stay wet
—-and more, a lot more, so much more. I can’t express how much more. Pure. Insanity.

How are you still reading this? Haven’t you started watching it yet?! This is award winning cinema. Okay, so the award was a Golden Reel Award for best sound editing in a direct to video release. But still.
HOW ARE YOU STILL READING THIS?!

Love and sex and death and the body horrific, it’s like Cronenberg never left. Viggo Mortensen does most of his acting through breathing alone. Léa Seydoux is your own private Isabella Rossellini via the subdermal forehead implants of Orlan. Kristen Stewart plays a human as moth slamming and slamming into a lit bulb. The color palette is ultra restrained, the tone so even it spreads like soft butter. I’m already going to need to watch it again, and will forever regret that Chris Burden died seven years too early to see it too.

Richard E Berlin was the chairman of the Hearst Corporation and personal friend of Richard Nixon. His eldest daughter turned out to be a Warhol superstar who painted with her tits. It turns out, if you breed the wildly rich and effete amongst themselves for enough generations, that family tree will throw up a monster. For American high society that monster’s name is Brigid Berlin. And she’s fucking incredible.
She’s appeared in the films of Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and John Waters.
Brigid is the forever queen of us obsessives. She collects, records, repeats, and eats. She’s insanely articulate and sharp as a paper cut. She pioneered Polaroids, trip books, pug ownership, confrontational nudity, and telling the entire world to fuck off. This documentary straddles the obsessions of her past and those fueling her present.
At the time I write this there are no links for this film. But Brigid Berlin is good enough to write about without links.

One of the nicest things this series does is to step well away from the trope of serial killer as mastermind. It’s the coward’s way out to portray these people as genius level hunters evading capture, rather than expose the ineptitude of law enforcement and ignorance of family and acquaintances.
Throughout this series we see Dahmer show distinct warning signs in school, be discharged from the army rather than addressing his sexual predation, ask his father for help. We see a judge handwave a conviction for assaulting a minor because Dahmer “reminded him of his own son” and cops completely drop everything and all but run away when homosexuality is mentioned. We see a blatant criminal believed again and again for the color of his skin, and victims, neighbors, and witnesses disbelieved because of theirs.
Jeffrey Dahmer wasn’t a mastermind. He was allowed to do what he did by law enforcement, the armed forces, the justice system, and others. Hell, a victim ran out of his apartment into the street and begged police for help. They returned him to Dahmer’s apartment. He was 14. And, finally, this is a portrayal that doesn’t sugarcoat that with a sparkling veneer of some kind of super human acumen for murder.

Brad Pitt comes home from WWII and he’s killed in a crash with his mother in the 1940s. He ends up in an animated world. This is never explained. Gabriel Byrne is an animator in the 1990s, in prison (for killing his wife?) and he’s continuing to animate in prison. This is never explained. Minutes later Pitt is now a policeman in the animated world, and he’s gone from not know what’s going on to knowing everything and all the rules. This is never explained. Kim Basinger is an animation drawn by Byrne who wants to be ‘real.’ She can pull Byrne into the animated world. This is never explained. By seducing Byrne and having sex with him, Basinger is now a live action character. But she’s unstable and turning back into a cartoon, but NOT the character she was previously. This is never explained. Now she wants to climb a Las Vegas hotel to touch some spiky neon light that is going to ‘fix’ her. This is never explained. Now Gabriel Byrne has super powers in the real world? This is never explained!
Paramount Pictures paid $30 million to produce this pile of radioactive garbage.
This is never explained.

If you’ve ever worked in a bookstore please please watch this. If you love language play, please just watch anything with Dylan Moran in it. And if you like Graham Linehan’s central crew of an Irishman, a weirdo, and a woman then see the IT Crowd for more.

Here we have style and substance in equal measure. And, rarest of all, those levels are high. Without concern about making characters “likable,” Rian Johnson is free to crank pop culture personalities up to eleven. His attention to detail is unreal. The costume work alone does more character development than anything I’ve seen in a while.
A mix of intricate plot, wicked one-liners, and whatever it is Bautista is doing here, makes Glass Onion legitimately rewatchable. Some may say the characters are overly exaggerated, but to make it to the top of their industries (including fast fashion, Twitch streaming, and billionaire frippery) one can hardly hold on to everyday human traits. So even if the dialogue and personalities are turned up to ‘Muppet,” they ring true.
Cameos that aren’t overly harped on, an all-star ensemble that doesn’t stumble over itself, knockout visuals, and a Philip Glass joke. Come on.

If you’re watching Legendary, RuPaul’s Drag Race, or Pose and you haven’t seen Paris is Burning, what are you doing? This is a vital primer in drag, ballroom, vogue, gay lives of color, trans lives of color, and a big part of the NYC underground from the late 70s through the mid 90s. Do your homework.

“What I love about that scene is that it’s like it was written by a brain dead Harold Pinter. The subtext is stunning, until you realize there is no subtext.”
—-Adam Nayman

If you only know one Lou Reed song it’s probably “Walk on the Wild Side.” It’s essentially a song about characters surrounding the scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Little Joe (Dallesandro) is real, the Sugar Plum Fairy is only partially so. But the big three are Holly, Candy, and Jackie. Holly Woodlawn was the funny one. Candy Darling was the pretty one. And Jackie Curtis? Well, Jackie was the SMART one.
In this documentary, Jackie’s friend Craig Highberger crafts a comprehensive portrait of a person beyond any single discipline, beyond gender, beyond time. If you’re into 1970s music, art, avant guarde theater, drag, culture, poetry, chaos, quips, or glitter you WILL recognize famous faces in this doc. Poet Taylor Mead, raconteur and Bowie manager (my favorite) Leee Black Childers, drag pioneer Holly Woodlawn, trans trailblazer Jayne County, beacon of gay theater Harvey Fierstein, indie darling Sylvia Miles, director Paul Morrissey, general treasure of a human Lily Tomlin, and on and on and on.

At the time I write this there is no link here for this film. But I’ll write about it anyway, I love it THAT much.

Of the three Warhol superstars whose art lay at the edges of gender, Candy Darling was the most magical by far. Candy was trans-gendered at a time when the world had no idea what that meant, let alone how to handle it. So, like any good artist, she set to work on herself. But instead of merely making herself in the woman she wanted to see in the mirror, she made herself into a legend beyond reality.
This documentary follows longtime confidant Jeremiah Newton as he makes arrangements to bury Darilng’s ashes, and finally solidify her legacy. His firsthand accounts of Candy throughout her life in New York are joined to Newton’s personal research into her life before the legend. Revelations about a person assigned male at birth seeking her true identity is both eye-opening in the context of the 1950s and 60s, and heart-shattering as you watch her journey end in her own demise (lymphoma most likely greatly exacerbated by the early versions of female hormones she was taking).
Candy was always too blonde, too femme, too ethereal, too unafraid to last long in a world as bitter and bleak as the middle of the 20th century. She didn’t even make it out of the 1970s. She died before her 30th birthday.

Shitty workplaces are where the misfits meet. If it’s not retail, then it’s going to be food service. Party Down is a genuinely funny portrait of people who would never otherwise have met, just trying to not break down for one more shift. Some of their attributes are punched up for laughs, but at their core the characters are all recognizable and real humans.
Dark, clever, and featuring dozens of top notch performers right before you knew who they were. Give yourself the privilege of saying you knew about Adam Scott before Parks and Rec, Martin Starr before Silicon Valley, and Lizzy Caplan from something cooler than Mean Girls AND Masters of Sex.
And if that doesn’t sell you, then hear this.
Steve.
Guttenberg.

The intersection of Verhoeven and Eszterhas must also be the location of a failed nuclear power plant. The two films in this precise location are Showgirls and Basic Instinct. All of the characters are uncontrollably emotional, comically sexual, occasionally homicidal, and absolutely hilarious.
When Sharon Stone is actually wearing clothes in this movie she only wears white and beige. So, at a distance, she’s nude all the time. Michael Douglas spends about 90% of his time on screen in some kind of spitting rage. And all of the dialogue is ludicrous. The phrase “f*ck of the century” is used, without irony, three times.
But am I going to watch it again? Yeah, probably.

The only movie I’ve ever seen to make push pins sinister. And possibly the most egregious Scottish accent ever committed to film.

In this lovely little sequel you can see Number Five (now Johnny Five):
-deliver granola
-wear a bandana
-steal car stereos
-dig a tunnel
-trash a bookstore
-rob a RadioShack
-hug some people
-hang glide
-insult a cat
-make his own mohawk
-go to confession
-join a street gang, sort of
-very sweetly call a woman ‘crap head’
-and much much much more!

But I’m A Cheerleader immediately flashes its indie cred by casting Bud Cort (Harold and Maude) and Mink Stole (everything John Waters has ever done) as Natasha Lyonne’s parents.
….Speaking of John Waters, this film draws directly from his sense of inclusive world-building. If you haven’t, or haven’t recently, watched Desperate Living, stop reading this and go do that right now….
It’s rare to find hyper colored camp with a heart this human, especially set in something as vile as conversion therapy. The visuals are sublimely surreal and the humor is plenty dark. Oh, and April March was used perfectly on this soundtrack seven years before Tarantino got a hold of her. So there.

Jiminy Cricket says “Go ahead, make a fool of yourself. Maybe then you’ll listen to your conscience.”
A boy who has always been real, despite his wooden parts, dances in the way he wants to dance. There are no strings on him.
“Gosh,” says Cricket, “They like him. He’s a success.”
And to think, all the other boys were turned into jackasses.

Fisher Stevens’ truly bizarre role in this movie aside, it’s great. (I mean, brownface, really?)
This is the movie that should make everyone want a robot, if somehow you don’t already. Also, Ally Sheedy’s character has a skunk in her kitchen and occasionally just carries around a ferret. Neither of those things are ever really addressed adequately.

While it doesn’t stand up as the strongest horror movie of the 80s, and its subsequent sequels would send the franchise further into comedy, Nightmare on Elm Street does two things remarkably well.
Firstly, it makes for the ultimate VHS tape to have at your slumber party. It made you terrified to fall asleep. Of course this made conditions ripe for childhood pandemonium fueled by sugar, pizza, and the threat of having your hand put into a bowl of warm water if you were the first to nod off.
Secondly, it centers on a narrative that scares every child. Adults don’t believe children. Over and over adults are warned, cautioned, pleaded with, begged for help. And they brush off the sheer terror of the main character as hysteria or sleep deprivation. Eventually, I’m sure you’re not surprised, she has to take care of things on her own.
Oh, and it’s Johnny Depp’s first role. He gets eaten by a bed. Eaten. By a bed. He gets eaten by a bed.

Absolutely incredible documentary about the portrayal of native people in film, and how those portrayals affect native viewers. Humorous, heart breaking, eye opening, everything it should be. Also functions as a fabulous to-watch list of movies, for good and bad reasons.

Filmmakers filming filmmakers making films. Actors talking about actors acting like they’re acting. Artifice on top of reality on top of artifice on top of reality. On top of artifice?

Watch Lynch talk about transcendental meditation, Polish factories, and that one time he spent a half an hour trying to “pop” a dead and bloated cow with a pick axe. Watch him smear paint on the floor, make a tiny model of a bison, and cut some holes in the wall. Watch David Lynch smoke. A lot.

To best digest this documentary, you must consider its source. This is a project done by an (inexperienced) young film maker about his own mother. These circumstances present both problems and opportunities.
First, objectivity is nearly impossible. While objectivity is very very difficult for any documentary maker, Madison Hamburg has an easier time admitting it. If a documentarian tries to take the stance that they completely separate themselves from their subject, or that their involvement with their subject doesn’t change perceptions or outcomes of the research, they are either lying, naïve, or both.
Second, the story being told in non-linear. There have been very popular documentary series in recent years (i.e. Making a Murderer) that give into “storytelling” and force a pleasing and cohesive narrative. Investigations aren’t linear. The grieving process isn’t linear. Family relations, especially those involving substance abuse and money problems, certainly aren’t linear.
Hamburg does fall into a bit of a Documentary 101 formula of getting a bit too episodic. Having each of the four pieces of this series focus on a different aspect of the story, following different motives and subjects, is an easy way to break down a very complicated story. But unless handled by a masterful documentarian, this approach can leave things feeling disjointed, abrupt, and jerky.
Real life is messy. Murder is messier. Madison Hamburg doesn’t shy away from either of these truths, nor does he try to tie up the story of his mother’s death with some kind of big plastic bow. His efforts continue and I wish him well.

The devil is hot.

Think of everything you love about Ghostbusters. Got it? Great. Hold that thought.
Now take out New York City. Now take out most of the ghosts. Now take out about 95% of Ramis, Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson, and Annie Potts.
Now replace those things with, of all choices, rural Oklahoma, a kid from Stranger Things, some other kids that are Stranger Things rejects, and a severely watered down Paul Rudd. Now that’s this movie.
Maybe if it had not been a “Ghostbusters” movie, if had been allowed to be its own thing and not two hours of subtle call backs to something you already like.
Turns out Rick Moranis may have been the linchpin to the entire project all along.

Mary Anning is a fossil. She’s dark, muddy, rough. She’s unassuming yet exploited. She is exceedingly difficult for most people to understand. And anyway, they don’t take the time to even try. She takes daring to obtain, hours of work to reveal, a certain knowledge to understand, and her ultimate value is incalculable.
Along comes Charlotte. She learns to hunt for, discover, and care for fossils. One in particular.
(Nothing says historic lesbian drama like a dimly lit film with precious little dialogue. If Winslet and Ronan don’t get best actress nominations for their work in this, I quit.)

Jason had a hockey mask. Freddy had those claws. Pinhead had a grid of nails.
Joan Crawford had those goddamn eyebrows.
Sure this movie was based on a book by Joan’s adopted daughter Christina that was later thought of as a hatchet job. But if a half of a half of a half of this stuff is true, that woman was a monster. Watch as Joan Crawford mentally and physically tortures men, women, employees, studio bosses, and her own children in brilliant technicolor. She’s a heinous bitch and she doesn’t give a fraction of a fuck.
And if you’re a gay man and you HAVEN’T seen Mommie Dearest… bro, do your homework.

The Green Knight is brilliant.  It is, perhaps, the film David Lowery was born to make.
First and foremost, Lowery understands this story for what it is.  This is threefold.  The Green Knight is a fairy tale, and therefore fairy tale logic applies.  There is not a lot of exposition in dialogue.  In tales like this characters don’t need to explain themselves all the time.  Their motives are societal and cultural, understood by its audience as almost a second nature.  Time stretches and contracts, animals are trusted guides, magic is real.  Given.  Unquestioned.
Second, this story is one told over centuries.  It is Celtic in origin, but was woven into Norman and Anglo-Saxon culture, and picked up different flavors in its telling and retelling across peoples, years, and languages.  Lowery handles this very well in not nailing down a pronunciation of Gawain’s name.  He is Gawain, G’Wayne, Gow-in, Gown, because he has had all these names and retains them still, simultaneously.
Third, this is a chivalric tale.  In very very basic terms…  The Norman (French) word for horse is cheval.  A horseman (knight) is a chevalier.  Therefore the rules that govern the knightly class are called chivalry.  Chivalric tales, told through the form of epic poems, laid down rules and examples of how someone with those resources and level of power was to govern himself.  The chief principles were five, represented by the five pointed star that you see again and again in this film; generosity, courtesy, chastity, friendship, and piety.  Gawain’s journey to see the Green Knight sees him facing tests to prove these values in himself.  Boy Scout badges in a pre-modern world with life and death consequences.
If I get into a plot breakdown of how all this is done I’ll be here all day.  If I dive into the symbolism that Lowery has so expertly laced throughout the film, I’ll be here all week.