When I saw the first Paranormal Activity (2007), I knew it wasn’t real. But, at the tender age of 13, I wanted it to be. Its elaborate pretension that, yes, this had all happened and that, yes, we have just been so lucky because the house’s cameras were turned on, helped. It gave me permission to suspend disbelief and to enjoy what amounted to a play on the found-footage film. Under a decade earlier, The Blair Witch Project (1999) did... Read more
I hesitate to say the “movies are back” because I think anyone paying sufficient attention knows cinema must change. There’s no going back to pre-COVID, pre-streaming. We can return to neither the New nor the Old Hollywood. No river stepped in at different times, etc. But I’m human, and I confess missing the mid-budget audience pleaser. Not everything needs to be Stan Brakhage or even Paul Thomas Anderson. Drop (2025) pretends to be nothing more than what it is: a... Read more
It feels bad to say, “it just didn’t connect with me.” Where there is technical brilliance, there is not always emotional connection. Sometimes this experience stems from emptiness, the so-called “exercise in style.” Not always, though. On occasion, I can watch a movie, appreciate its technical merits, marvel at the performances, respect its script, and still come away devoid of feeling. All the worse when this is a melodrama like Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006). As with many of Almodóvar’s films,... Read more
There’s really no way to “review” Fight Club (1999), a movie at this point so famous and so abundantly discussed that it belongs more to the pages of an Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book than to my blog. Fight Club is the harbinger of the Trumpian right. Fight Club is the toxic man’s mainstay. Fight Club is a pretty dang good movie. Fight Club is the pit in the American stomach. What more is there to say? Yesterday, for an... Read more
The idea goes that to say someone lives in “interesting times” is an insult or a term of pity. Europe in 1348-1349 would have been rather interesting—lots of puss, merriment, prayer, and death. The last days of the Aztec and Maya must have been something to behold, though not so much for those who lived through them. Imagine standing in the trenches along the Western Front. Boring in the day to day, sure, but the soldiers did live in rather... Read more
A respectful goon. The kind of henchman who pulls out your chair at dinner. A bald man, sheepish and charmingly incompetent. He’s the kid on the team who pinch hits in the bottom of the ninth of the big game because everyone else has broken all their bones sliding into various bases. He hits a single, and, even though your team loses 7-2, you hoist him up on your shoulders. Next week he’ll be back in the dugout picking his... Read more
Ever been in front of a fan on hot summer day, no AC in sight? How would you describe the experience? For my part, I’d report a mixture of gratitude and disappointment—gratitude because it’s better than nothing, disappointment because a solitary fan before a humid New Jersey summer day is like the backwash drop at the bottom of a Windex bottle squaring off against a mirror from Grey Gardens (1975). Black Bag (2025), Steven Soderbergh’s newest spy film, left me... Read more
The Substance: Substance Wanted If someone whose brain were turned on eight hours a day from January 1, 2017 to January 1 2024—it doesn’t matter nights, days, mornings, evenings, or whatever else—if the physical organ of their thinking were jacked directly into Twitter (now X, the Everything App) and nothing else, if they received every datum of information about the universe, from cinema to current events, from that website, that brain would produce The Substance (2024). Ostensibly, Coralie Fargeat has... Read more
I have seen three Bong Joon-ho films (Snowpiercer, Parasite, and Mickey 17). In each case, the man’s work reflects a deep investment in allegory. What I mean is a marked literalness. The world is ending due to climate change; everyone is on a train, and the train’s layout reflects a broader truth about contemporary class society. It relies on abject working conditions, child labor, and inflexible hierarchies to sustain our current world. In the train too, we see little hands... Read more
Salò, or the Circles of Hell During a break from a graduate seminar, I once expressed an interest in watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). My professor snickered nervously. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of its reputation. I knew to expect graphic violence, constant nudity, and general perversion. But I have never been one for moralism in filmmaking. As long the film wasn’t merely exploitative, what was there to laugh at or avoid?... Read more
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