This is basically a guided tour of “why we can’t have nice things.” How Matt Furie is still so kind and understanding after having his art taken and twisted by these monsters, I’ll never understand.

Disclaimer: I actually watched this movie. Yes, the whole thing.

Cuties is the story of girls who are going to be women. Sometimes they look forward to this passage, sometimes they dread it. The problem lies in the fact that they don’t know what being a woman means. They don’t understand sex, consent, sexuality. One is mocked for picking up a discarded condom thinking it to be a balloon. They don’t understand the media being fed to them, neither mass nor social. They certainly don’t grasp its permanency or influence over them.
These girls glean information from the women in their lives, but gain little direction. The central character deals with her father traveling back to his native Senegal and returning with a second wife who will supplant the position of her own mother in the family. She’s left alone with her feelings. She doesn’t know how to handle sorrow, betrayal, anger. She lashes out. The same sorts of episodes are played out with her sexuality. People will complain about the dancing, but it’s very clearly the fumbling of young girls who don’t understand what they’re doing, they just understand that when women move that way everyone pays them attention.
If you choose not to take any time to try and understand what these young women are going through, you’re betraying them in all the ways that led to the predicaments they find themselves in in the film. If you choose to watch ‘coming of age’ stories featuring young boys figuring out their sexuality, and find pathos or even humor in it, and then don’t afford the same to these girls, you’re part of the problem. If you can watch upper middle class white girls on Dance Moms and Tik Tok do these same moves and you don’t have the same ‘outrage’ towards them that you may express towards these girls, you need to take a long hard look at why.
This film was beautifully made and will surely stand as a lasting, if controversial, testament to what pubescent girls the world over experience and endure on a daily basis. Maïmouna Doucouré has bravely told a story with Cuties that may be hard to watch at times, but I guarantee you, it’s much harder to live.

Absurd times call for absurd measures. Lunatic genius Scotsman Martin Creed knows that so well. Mony a mickle maks a muckle, but tha’s nowt ta do wi me ya see.

Watch Andy Serkis eat paint. Seriously. Do it.

Can someone be held indefinitely by the state against the potential of them repeating an offence for which they have already served their sentenced time?
Louis Theroux tackles yet another very difficult subject, pedophiles that have served their time and yet are still deemed to be a threat to society. He visits a “hospital” that is full of men who have been convicted, completed a sentence, and then essentially re-incarcerated in a warehousing situation. This raises crushingly difficult issues surrounding rehabilitation, the prison system, mental health, and thought crime. Hear first hand from the men themselves regarding whether they agree to participate in treatment or not, and the merit such a process may or may not hold.
This review may or may not be a thinly veiled commentary on extending ‘punishments’ indefinitely.

The best part about the second season of the Alienist is its lack of the alienist. These kinds of shows perplex me, going to all of these efforts and great cost to recreate conditions of the past and then using terms like “serial killer” about three quarters of a century early. The worst offending character is the titular man himself. This continues quite past the point of irritation, making the character act like he’s written for a decade other than the one in which the others seem to exist. Luckily, they quash this in the first series, though it is allowed to go on far too long.

So you watched Dolemite Is My Name with Eddie Murphy and loved it, right? The man Murphy played was real. Rudy Ray Moore made some hilarious movies, full of biting satire, absurd comedy, and the highest level of Blaxploitation style. You’ve seen it recreated, co-opted, and updated, now watch the real thing.
Blaxploitation cred includes: Kung Fu fights for no good reason, a man with Al Sharpton’s OLD hair, the director’s astrological sign listed in the opening credits (he’s a Libra, ya’ll), and Lucifer himself wearing an over-sized marigold velvet bowtie.
Quentin Tarantino has spent his entire life WISHING he was this cool.

No real life experience exists in a vacuum, most especially a crime, most especially in Hollywood. Scott Michaels knows his stuff and does the legwork. This documentary not only shows the Manson Family murders, but all the connections (and the connections to those connections) that spread like a web through southern California. Michaels covers petty criminals, super stars, musicians, producers, directors, actors, and everyone else who got caught in this web. Really astounding work.
“It’s history to me, and somebody’s got to save it. Even though I look like an idiot.”
The only work on the Manson case that I’ve seen come anywhere near this comprehensive in recent years was the 10-part podcast series done by You Must Remember This. And this doc is less then two hours, so watch it.

Edmund Kemper. This man was/is 6’9” of high IQ serial killer. He turned himself in, believe it or not. Look him up. He is impressive in every sense. Anyone, anyone, would be a mere twig in his hands… and his crimes, his brutal crimes of dismemberment, sex with dismembered corpses, killing his mum and putting her vocal cords in the kitchen disposal to grind them up…etc. are some of the most (if not THE most) horrific, ever. To willingly turn himself in shows something so baffling for someone like him. His mother sounded like a true monster, but the women he killed must have been completely helpless and utterly terrified. The voice you hear on this episode is Edmund Kemper. Bone chilling.

Mary Beard manages, in two short hours, to present a program encompassing art history, feminism, gender, the male gaze, the early quest for anatomical knowledge, censorship, human sexuality, museum ethics, and the politics of aging. She uses pieces of art from the ancient world through to contemporary works. She even talks to Marc Quinn. All of this leads me to ask, can Mary Beard see inside my brain? Possibly. Very possibly.

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?

Pro tip: If you’re writing a book about demons and a page includes both an incantation to release one of these demons AND a warning to never ever read that incantation, put the warning first. Seriously, top of the page. Think of the coeds.

Lift your skinny fists like antennas to heaven.

Do you remember that part of the video game in which the former king is ‘de-evolved’ into a sentient fungus that can catch a stolen police car as it drives over a cliff and dangle it in the air like a bungee jumper? Yeah, me neither.
But I do feel like Chuck Tingle’s writing has really improved since 1993. Too bad Dennis Hopper didn’t live to see his renaissance.

“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’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.

The State is truly seminal to comedy of the last 25 years. Not only is the show itself really really good, but members of the State (in various combinations) went on to create Reno 911, Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, Viva Variety, Michael and Michael Have Issues, and Children’s Hospital. Members of the State have been on, basically, every comedy show you’ve loved in the past two decades…Always Sunny, Bob’s Burgers, Drunk History, Archer, Veep, Party Down, Another Period, Burning Love, and on and on and on.

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.

Ok, first never seen this show before, I’m not american so this type of ‘news-entertainment’ is weird thing.

Is this news or is this not news, I realise news is largely no longer objective but still, guy needs to talk less.

Bland tanned man with quaffed hair and the brow of a chimp stares in seeming faux perplexed constipation.

Segments really seem to drag on with the casual banter, talking to me ( the viewer ) like were friends is just kinda tacky, weird rich dude stop chatting to me in that condescending way.

Is his hair real? He needs a moustache.

The never ending waving neon coloured flag and banner at the bottom of the screen are irritating. I do not need to know what channel this is on, nor which nation it comes from and I can hear what you are saying you do not need to write it down also. Waste so much of the screen.

2/5 meh not really funny and the information seemed its faster to digest a paper format in the time it took to watch that.

I sure hope John Lithgow got paid time and a half for this, ‘cause that man was acting overtime. A hunched stance, the most absurd accent, buggy eyes, crazy hair, and teeth that are (somehow) villainous. Even the teeth! Heck, watch it on mute just for his facial expressions and it’s still worth your time.
Where are we going?
Planet Ten.
When?
REAL SOON.

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.

After its initial airing, Ghostwatch was banned from being broadcast on the BBC for ten years. What was supposed to be a bit of a Halloween prank ended up with 30,000 calls to the BBC switchboard in an hour. In an ill-fated attempt to straddle fiction and documentary, the network failed to properly warn the viewing audience that what they were watching was definitely not real. Cut to thousands of British children watching a beloved kids’ TV presenter, Lesley Manning, being possessed by a ghost called Pipes.
In the wake of Ghostwatch an intellectually challenged young man killed himself after the pipes in his house began to knock like those in the show. There was even a medical journal report, with dubious validity, about kids showing symptoms of PTSD after watching the program.
Viewing Ghostwatch now you could never fully grasp the effect it had on a nation. It would look hokey and stupid. But before all of our minds were trained, by reality television and social media, to watch with a more skeptical eye, stuff like this could really do some damage. (Go find a British person between their mid 30s and mid 40s. Ask them about Pipes.)

Lily didn’t listen and now the world is dying and she might have to marry Satan. So the next time your Forest Folk (boy)friend tells you not to touch something, maybe don’t touch it. Okay?

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.

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