Some of you may know this already, but when I started this Patreon I was dirt poor and had just barely scrabbled my way out of stealing to eat and digging change out of the couch to pay rent. I spe...
2020-09-07 01:27:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Raised by Wolves is deeply strange by the visual and thematic standards of American science fiction. It feels much more akin to something like The Prisoner, spare and...
2020-09-05 18:32:19 +0000 UTC View Post
“Show the man inside the monster” is, as Hitler-focused art and scholarship goes, about as prosaic as it gets. A little sentimental music can make you feel sympathy for a rock with...
2020-09-04 18:11:57 +0000 UTC View Post
When movies employ slow-motion shots, the point is almost always to emphasize how cool something is within the context of an action scene. The Matrix’s influential “bullet...
2020-08-30 02:34:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Vision, horror cartoonist Julia Gfrörer’s third and latest graphic novel, is a once-in-a-decade piece of art, a pitch-black story of domestic suffocation set at the end of New York’s ...
2020-08-25 18:05:53 +0000 UTC View Post
“Life is suffering,” the leper Osa husks from within his caul of soiled bandages. “It is hard. The world is cursed, but still you find reasons to go on living.” On his deathbed...
2020-08-14 16:08:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Two women writhe and gasp in a coolly modern bed made up with the kind of crisp linen sheets and dark comforter ubiquitous in the late 90s and early 00s. Like all of Lynch’s love sce...
2020-08-10 20:16:06 +0000 UTC View Post
In Melanie Tem’s under-read werewolf classic Wilding, a brutalized and neglected young woman named Deborah struggles to find the strength to abandon her newborn child. In James Joyce’s...
2020-08-04 16:24:33 +0000 UTC View Post
In a raging river, the self-declared samurai Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) holds a child to his armored breast as he flees downstream from a burning mill. Then, slowly, the shock of adrenaline fades. ...
2020-08-03 16:23:55 +0000 UTC View PostYou dream of completion behind acid-etched glass, the water cloudy with disintegrating matter shed during your rehab. Something went wrong when you were Iterated back from Muscida. You've been floa...
2020-07-31 04:36:40 +0000 UTC View Post
The rape scene which marks the beginning of Hagazussa’s final act takes place both on and offscreen, the goatherd Albrun’s body below the neck and the man violating her both excluded f...
2020-07-24 19:48:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Elem Klimov’s Come and See ends with a grief-stricken and traumatized Belarusian boy, Flyora, shooting at a picture of Adolf Hitler he finds lying in a puddle. The scene is ...
2020-07-18 00:41:29 +0000 UTC View Post
The Skin I Live In is a horny, nasty two-hour soap opera of hidden parentage and surgical forced feminization larded with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s signature twists, reversals,...
2020-07-15 18:39:25 +0000 UTC View Post
A stylized, vision-driven mess is always preferable to competently made factory shlock, and no matter the failings of its hokey CGI and Diablo Cody’s limp and convoluted screenplay, Jennifer...
2020-07-14 02:38:04 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s nothing quite like Elizabeth Berkley’s performance as Nomi Malone, a human tsunami of desire, anger, mental illness, and almost primal stubborn independence. As the heroine...
2020-07-10 02:37:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Image taken from Strange Suspense Stories #60, artist Jack Kirby, pub. Fawcett Comics, August 1962
Over the past two decades, “adult who consumes primarily ch...
2020-07-07 02:59:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Three men stand on the threshold of a place of power, a place where by the manifestation of inner desire the nature of the self is irrevocably exposed. One fears that to enter would me...
2020-07-04 18:45:33 +0000 UTC View Post
“The coin don’t have no say,” the widow Carla Jean Moss explains to the hit man Anton Chigurgh. “It’s just you.” Coming as it does at the end of a film concerned primarily with the prim...
2020-07-03 21:09:45 +0000 UTC View Post
I walked in on our houseguest (long, irritating story) watching Sonic the Hedgehog earlier this evening and decided to stay for the last forty-five minutes, so now you all get to suffer wi...
2020-06-30 01:49:03 +0000 UTC View PostHey gang, starting June 1st Patreon is going to be charging sales tax on pledges. If you could go to your pledge settings and adjust for taxation (it’ll walk you through it) before the 1st, I wou...
2020-06-29 18:07:27 +0000 UTC View Post
At first it seems as though Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 thriller about an English schoolteacher stranded by bad luck and dumb decisions in a desolate mining town, will be a famil...
2020-06-28 20:14:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is a film composed almost entirely of minutiae. It has no dramatic set pieces, no driving plot. It’s a movie about the formation of an ...
2020-06-25 19:42:10 +0000 UTC View Post
A young man reaches around his lover, cracks an egg on the edge of a bowl, and deposits the yolk in his mouth. He holds it on his tongue as he passes it to her with a kiss, the golden membrane slit...
2020-06-07 19:14:46 +0000 UTC View Post
For most of the runtime of Madeline’s Madeline, the titular character’s (Helena Howard) life is a shuttlecock swatted back and forth between her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the di...
2020-05-30 16:31:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Vincent D’Onofrio’s grotesquely oddball turn as a gigantic extraterrestrial cockroach wearing the hollowed out and rotting skin of an asshole farmer and abusive husband is perhaps ...
2020-05-23 00:07:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Batman Returns, Tim Burton’s odd and piquant superhero film, is about the pieces that compose a person. Outside of this film I’ve never much cared for Batman or his belove...
2020-05-16 03:21:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Shin Godzilla’s meeting scenes — and there are a lot of them — are among the funniest, most crushingly honest depictions of bureaucracy in action that I’ve seen. Watching the Japan...
2020-05-12 01:38:16 +0000 UTC View Post
A serial killer brings his blind girlfriend to the zoo to touch a sedated tiger. It sounds more like the setup for an off-color joke than the premise of one of the hottest psychosexual scenes of th...
2020-05-08 19:56:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Anna sits on the couch beside her husband, Mark, who wants to talk to her about her sudden dereliction from their family. As he whines and wheedles she remains expressionless, listenin...
2020-05-01 21:28:41 +0000 UTC View Post
The car chase in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. is so instantly engrossing, so visually inventive and muscular in its pacing, that since seeing it I’ve struggl...
2020-04-26 20:44:37 +0000 UTC View Post