Category: Review
November 21, 2018
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Review
Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935, Roy Del Ruth, W.S. Van Dyke)
I get nostalgic for times long before I was born.
November 18, 2018
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Review
2010 (1984, Peter Hyams)
Man, this really didn’t age well. Almost everything predictive about it is dramatically wrong.
November 17, 2018
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Review
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017, Martin McDonagh)
The acting, directing, cinematography – most everything about this movie was ace. But I wasn’t really happy with the horrible racist people being redeemed. It felt like the wrong year for that.
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Review
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)
This was loads of fun. Anthologies are generally hit and miss, but I liked every one of these old-timey western stories. And Tom Waits as the old prospector was an absolute stunner.
I keep wanting to call it The Ballad of Lester Scruggs though, because Foggy Mountain Boys.
November 13, 2018
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Review
Logan Lucky (2017, Steven Soderbergh)
Dumb people heist movies are a nice antidote to super-genius heist movies. Soderbergh does both well. This started out amazing but lost it’s way toward the end.
November 11, 2018
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Review
Gaslight (1944, George Cukor)
First time watching this classic for me. I’d been talking to the girls about the origins of the modern term “gaslighting” and realized I hadn’t seen the movie myself.
October 28, 2018
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Review
You Were Never Really Here (2017, Lynne Ramsay)
Intense doesn’t begin to describe it. I thought less of it immediately after watching than I did as time went on. As with most challenging films, it takes a bit of analysis and maybe reading a few reviews to get a sense of what you actually saw. Recommended for the adventurous.
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Review
Lake Success (Gary Shteyngart, 2018)
One of Shteyngart’s best. Takes the madness of modern living and makes it personal, and manic, and funny.
October 13, 2018
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Review
Black Panther (2018, Ryan Coogler)
One of the better superhero films of late, but I’m not a fan of the genre. In any case, I love the afro-futurism and it was wonderful seeing so many strong black actors playing positive characters that are far less frequent in Hollywood than they should be.
October 5, 2018
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Review
The Stars Are Legion (Kameron Hurley,
This was mind-blowing. One of my favorites of the last year. -
Review
808 (2015, Alex Dunn)
This documentary about a drum machine was a major rush for me. The classic 808 sounds unpin so much of the music I listened to in the eighties and beyond. It’s rather bizarre – particularly since most of those sounds came from people using the device in ways its inventors never anticipated – much like AutoTune.
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Review
The Endless (2017, Aaron Moorhead, Justin Benson)
They were going for something here. I’m not sure they made it. Or I didn’t get it.
September 14, 2018
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Review
New York 2140 (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2017)
The drowned world of New York in, well, 2140, shows us humanity’s resilience and inability to deal with sunk (literally) cost bias. The book lost me a few times with it’s many, many descriptions of the SuperVenice waterways and I didn’t quite buy any of the financial chicaneries which make up more of the book than I had expected, but overall it was a fun read.
September 11, 2018
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Review
The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017)
This was wonderful. I knew it was heartbreaking but didn’t realize it was also so funny. The kids are so natural, the adults so incredibly broken.
September 5, 2018
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Review
Deadpool 2 (David Leitch, 2018)
This was very funny. More like Naked Gun or the Scary Movie series than a “real” superhero movie.
September 3, 2018
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Review
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
Probably my third or fourth time watching this. I forget how many times I’ve seen it. 🙂
Glad to see the special effects are still holding up well.
August 31, 2018
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Review
The Price You Pay (Aidan Truhen (pseudonym), 2018)
Whoa. This is one in-your-face crime novel. Not for the faint-of-heart. That said, it can be fun to get inside the head of a charming sociopath every now-and-then. As long as you can get out again.
I saw someone guessing this is a Nick Harkaway novel and I’m pretty sure it is.
I am a fucking asymmetric criminal startup. I got limited expertise in criminal strategic warfare. I hotdesk and I outsource and I franchise, but what I mostly have is a core concept, forward momentum.
August 26, 2018
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Review
Ball Lightning (Liu Cixin, Joel Martinsen (Translator), 2005/2018)
Liu Cixin really is a worthy successor to A.C. Clarke – the first author I became obsessed while a mere wee tike). This is a new English translation of an older novel that doesn’t quite have the expansiveness of Three-Body Problem, but was still a joy to read.
August 22, 2018
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Review
The Beyond (Hasraf Dulull, 2017)
None of this makes any sense at all!
August 21, 2018
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Review
The Commuter (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2018)
Dumb. Fun.
August 18, 2018
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Review
Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)
Not a fan – at all – of superhero movies, but this was fun. As with Deadpool, if they go for humor I can get behind it easier.
August 17, 2018
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Review
The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (Mike Newell, 2018)
An old-timey romance that features beautiful shots of the Guernsey island landscape but otherwise is weak and problematic. We’re still making movies about women falling for their Nazis captors in 2018?
August 11, 2018
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Review
The Incendiaries (R.O. Kwon, 2018)
A great debut novel by R.O. Kwon. Cults and terrorism examined from a new angle. Maybe it’s “cult adjacent” more than about cults.
August 1, 2018
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Review
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)
Moshfegh writes wonderful stories about damaged women doing terrible things. This fantastical story of a woman going to extreme lengths to avoid the consequences of her life didn’t please me as much as her earlier novel Eileen, but it was satisfying nonetheless.
July 30, 2018
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Review
The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946)
I hadn’t heard of this film until it popped up unexpectedly on Netflix. Now I know why.
July 29, 2018
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Review
Give Me Your Hand (Megan Abbott, 2018)
Sometimes when I’m reading a murder mystery told from the suspect’s perspective, I like to think about the same book told from the detective’s perspective. In this case, the detectives would have to be the most bumbling cops ever to not figure out what’s happening here. I’m not sure a novel set in 2018 can just ignore modern forensics and the ubiquity of surveillance technology.
July 27, 2018
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Review
Extinction (Ben Young, 2018)
Pedestrian SF thriller. I’m lame at seeing what the twist will be so I did do a “huh” at the big reveal.
July 26, 2018
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Review
Mercury Rising (Harold Becker, 1998)
Boy of boy, this has not aged well. In particular, the treatment of the kid’s Asperbergers is so hamfisted and plain incorrect it definitely feels like it’s from another age – even though the movie is only twenty years old.
July 25, 2018
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Review
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Jake Kasdan, 2017)
I enjoyed this way more than I expected to. A nice update for a new generation. By the way, I’m totally cool with any movie being remade any old time. “Everything is a remix.”
July 22, 2018
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Review
This is a near-future story about people having babies. It won a bunch of awards, but I can’t say I get it. The people seem very parochial in their opinions about reproduction and what they want from their kids. I hope we progress a LOT more than over the next century.