On Killer Joe And William Friedkin
William Friedkin has always been drawn to intense violence. One presumes this isn’t limited to his movies. He was a notorious asshole among assholes in the ‘70s, a decade marked […]
Author Archives: Supreme Being
Baz Luhrmann Takes A Great Crapsby
Man, I should be getting paid for writing post titles like that! Or else put away in a very small, windowless room for the rest of my life. What’s inspired […]
Django, The Spaghetti Western
As with all things Quentin Tarantino, his new movie Django Unchained is inspired in some vague way by another movie, in this case the classic Italian spaghetti western Django […]
Scorsese’s Mean Streets
After film school, Martin Scorsese spent four years making his first feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (’67), starring the then unknown Harvey Keitel. It didn’t make a splash. […]
Smurfs 2 Is Coming, I.e. Smurfette Becomes A Nymphomaniac
If you thought Hollywood could sink no lower into the filth in which it resides, you’ve got another think coming. Watch this preview for the so-called “children’s movie” Smurfs 2 […]
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Disaster
The Hobbit, as presented at 48fps* (i.e. high frame rate, HFR), marks the death of cinema. At least digital projection, depressing as it is, is being improved to the point […]
The Spy Who Bored Me
Are you kidding me? This is supposed to be Roger Moore’s best outing as James Bond? The Spy Who Loved Me (’77) is not anyone’s best outing as anything. To […]
Mind Control Double Feature #21: Aliens Watching Television
Since its invention, television has been hypnotizing all humans careless enough to glance toward its gaping maw of doom. It takes a strong will to look away from the pretty […]
Samsara, Baraka, Etcetera
There are shots in Samsara (’12) of places you can’t believe exist on Earth, like the stone temples in the jungles of Myanmar that look like a CGI landscape from […]
Star Trek Into The Darkness of The Star Wars Prequels?
Star Trek Into Darkness, with no colon in there, because it’s stupider this way, will be demolishing movie theaters next summer. Is it next summer? It’s sometime. I think we’re […]
…Reflections On Dead Man…
…An acid western, a revisionist western, a post-modern western, the western Tarkovsky never made, Jim Jarmusch’s masterpiece, Dead Man (’95), has been dubbed many things. It is best not to […]
“I Am The Motherfucking Shore Patrol!” Hal Ashby And The Last Detail
The Last Detail (’73), director Hal Ashby’s follow-up to Harold & Maude, is a mysteriously compelling little movie. There’s not a dull moment in it, yet nothing happens. Ashby and […]
Mind Control Double Feature #19: 1980s Film Noir
Film noir isn’t all 1940s, black hats, deep shadows, back-stabbing women, desperate criminals, and the hopeless futility of trying to escape one’s fate. It’s mostly that, which is why film […]
On Lincoln, Spielberg, And Crushing Boredom
One of the inconcievably vast number of brain-rapingly awful things about Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull was Steven Spielberg’s boring direction, evident in every boring frame […]