Recent Posts

• April 26, 2025

  Boston Marathon 2025

  Training Highlights

• April 16, 2025

  Daisies

  Daisies is a Czechoslovakian movie about two girls who spend a lot of time lazing around and eating. They are both called Marie. It is one hour and sixteen minutes long and gets a lot done with that time, even if nearly all of it is Marie 1 and Marie 2 lazing around and eating.

• April 04, 2025

  Mandy

  I don’t think this is for me any more. Early 2000s me would have been all over it, like when I found a DVD rental place that carried Ichi the Killer despite it (as far as I knew) being banned in Ireland. Mandy had a reputation of being way out, pushing the boundaries, an experience unlike any other. And while it kind of was those things, it was very very aware that it was doing them. I could see the thought process in every bit, what’s the wackiest, most extreme thing we could do now. You’re at home on the couch watching a serious movie and thinking, wouldn’t it be crazy if this thing happened, and then this thing happens. Nicolas Cage finds a chainsaw to fight a goon? He pulls out another chainsaw that’s about twice the length to have a swordfight with. Even having written that, it sounds cool, but that’s it, there’s absolutely nothing to care about. It always annoyed me when people would say to stop being critical of, for example, Transformers, because “I just want to see giant robots punching each other”. No you don’t, if there are no stakes, then that’s boring. That’s something AI could generate today. Why did they put humans in the movie if that’s all you’re interested in? If everything is being done just for spectacle, it gets boring. I was ten times more invested in (not in this movie, obviously) a Belgian lady forgetting a button on her cardigan as a symbol of her mental state beginning to crack than Mandy being burned alive in a sleeping bag.

• March 29, 2025

  McCabe & Mrs. Miller

  I have a very patchy history with Robert Altman. I’ve seen a bit of the Player, and allegedly all of Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion. I don’t entirely remember either of those, but I’ve also not seen the stuff he’s most celebrated for, Nashville, MASH, The Long Goodbye, Short Cuts, and this.

• March 23, 2025

  La Llorona

  I really meant to look up the history of Guatemala after watching this, but I definitely have not done it. Nonetheless, I presume it’s all factual. Similar in feel to The Zone of Interest, we’re in the house of the bad guys, who don’t consider themselves the bad guys. Specifically in this case, a general who has been convicted of genocide, stuck with his family in his mansion as an enormous protest lives outside. All of his staff (except one) has quit because, well, he genocided their ethnic group, and so he has to hire someone new who may or may not be a ghost.