“Rambo.” There’s a blast-from-the-past name, right? Bet you weren’t expecting to hear about Rambo anytime soon, huh? Well: Too bad. Rambo’s coming back. Is that a plus or a minus? Depends on how you like your action movies; Rambo (2008) sticks to a pretty classic 1980s aesthetic of “white dude kills scores of brown dudes,” but … Continue reading
I dig Dan Stevens and I make no apologies. But I do make unexpected analogies! I remember reading, I think, Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, Mick Foley’s 1999 autobiography, and I remember Foley writing about Vince McMahon’s habit of getting in the ring and taking chairs to the face and stunners … Continue reading
Short version: We saw Jump, Little Children, whose members did jump but also are not little children, play at Boston’s City Winery at the end of September. They were great. Longer version: I was introduced to this group back in college and I’ve been a fan since, so watching them play a decade and change … Continue reading
“Enough already with Apostle pieces!” you say. “Ha ha ha! Deal with it, sucker!” says I, swinging my second article about one of my recent favorites, Gareth Evans’ new horror joint, right at your face. I didn’t get to write all of the pieces about Mandy, but lord I tried. I am now making up for that … Continue reading
Question: Does anyone care if Paste‘s Criterion round-ups publish the month after they’re intended for? This used to bother me just on grounds of professional, writerly pride, but I’m not sure anymore if it’s worth me being bothered by; by the time these pieces land, every release from the preceding month is commercially available, which feels … Continue reading
It’s October! Which means it’s still Oktoberfest! Only just, of course, but “only just” is just enough. You’ve got a couple days left. Seize ’em. You can start, naturally, by reading my thoughts on the festival, farmed from brewers at Night Shift, Marshall, and Silvaticus, because of course I’m going to speak with MA breweries … Continue reading
Weird to see a “women’s film” spotlight focused on movies from September posted in October, but, uh, mea culpa and such as that. The dog ate my homework. I dunno. There’s not a great excuse for the delay; that being said, I’d still offer that documenting the movies on Septembers slate matters, because some of … Continue reading
Upfront: Questions like these, at face value, don’t have good answers, because we can never know with 100% certainty what those answers might be. That said, I think horror, at least “horror” that does not satisfy the genre’s growing prestige among critics and check respectability boxes, is on a sort of decline among tastemakers, and … Continue reading
I’ll be honest, I’m a little surprised Assassination Nation worked so well on me; all the good, exploitative genre stuff we get at the end comes a little too late, and it frankly doesn’t make a lot of sense considering how the rest of the film functions, but it’s satisfying all the same, mostly because if … Continue reading
I haven’t watched Happiness in years, and I honestly wasn’t expecting to revisit it ever in my life. Yet here I am, writing about it up on the pages of Paste Magazine for the Movies section’s Best Movies of 1998 list. What a thing. My write-up makes the film sound miserable, which it is, and it makes … Continue reading
Maybe I’m not the guy to review a Michael Moore movie. I don’t dislike his work, per se; he’s great at crafting a convincing argument, not convincing in the manner of facts, but convincing in an emotional sense. He’s very, very good at riling up his target audience, preaching to a choir already at … Continue reading
The poster for Mandy has basically zilch to do with Bill Duke – his face is blended in that ectoplasmic cast sketch in its background – but it should, I think. He’s critical to the film’s bizarre-o world gelling together, a normal (“normal”) character in what amounts to an 80s metal themed D&D campaign where Nic … Continue reading
It’s Criterion time! This time: A smaller slate, because at least one title got bumped from the August schedule. But as usual the slate’s damn good, even if my good buddy Oktay Ege Kozak didn’t like Smithereens as much as I did (and even if I did not like Smithereens anywhere near as much as I liked Memories … Continue reading
I’m pleased that The Week gave me the go-ahead to write about Let the Corpses Tan, the new film from married filmmaking duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, whose last feature, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, came out about five years ago; it’s an oddball movie, grimy, sleazy, and likely way off-radar for a portion of their … Continue reading
If there’s a fundamental theme in The Venture Bros., it’s failure. If there’s a fundamental dynamic that dramatizes the element of failure, it’s self-involvement: All of the major characters in the series tend to cause their own problems, and this is as true of the first two episodes of Season 7 as any other episode in … Continue reading
It’s been so long since I put together my big blurb contribution for Paste Magazine‘s list of the 50 best slasher movies of all time (of all time!) that I actually…forgot we hadn’t yet published it. But we hadn’t! And now we have! I wrote about Tenebrae, the Dario Argento meta classic, and you’ll also see re-ups … Continue reading
I don’t think it’s over the line to cite BlacKkKlansman as one of Spike Lee’s best films, and I’m the guy who usually seethes at claims of “masterpiece” directed at movies that haven’t been out in theaters for even a day. Is BlacKkKlansman that? Is it a masterpiece? I’m not sure. Time will tell. But it does stand out … Continue reading
I know what you’re gonna ask: “How does he do it? How does Crump make it to, and make it through, as many beer festivals as he does?” Well my friends, it’s quite simple: I run, I bike, I take evening walks around my neighborhood, I lift, and I try to eat healthy*, and somewhere in … Continue reading
