Sinews

American Psycho is a brutal, vicious, nihilistic film that more-than-effectively portrays the hollowness of American life by painting Wall Street as a blank, white dystopia in which one's actions, intentions, and confessions mean absolutely nothing and are never noticed. There's tons of great visual cues, which one might call gimmicky, but are nevertheless a hell of a lot of fun to point out and look out for upon rewatching. This is a film meant to resonate powerfully with the viewer and will keep them thinking for a long time to come. You couldn't ask for more from a horror film.

I don't typically go for superhero movies (although I love the superheroes behind them), and I had little faith in Sony's animation team at the time. That being said, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse has proven to me to be among the most memorable films of the last decade. It has this incredible sense of charm, humor, and whimsy in way Spider-Man hasn't been able to capture since Spider-Man 2 in 2004. What's more, this is the most well-animated film I have ever seen, seamless blending a smorgasbord of styles while maintaining a magnificent sense of stylistic cohesion so as to not allow the numerous styles to crowd one another out.

The biggest problem facing Blade Runner 2049 is that it's dishonest in its presentation. It wants so desperately to be this huge story with a huge scope and massive impact, and while it's certainly not a bad story, the film tries so hard to make us think that it's more than it is that pisses on the bonfire of what it actually has going for it. It has the epic shots and epic score and larger-than-life landscape, as well as a monolithic length, but it lacks the substance to live up to the great dystopian sci-fi films that came before it. Blade Runner became an epic story not because it tried to make think it was, it just was, and the acclaimed just followed it in time. This is why that movie is a cherished classic and Blade Runner 2049 will most likely be forgotten midway through the decade.

Joker may initially scan as a pastiche of Scorsese's neo-noir "existential hero" style, but further watching reveals a film that isn't a loving forgery as much as it breathes new life into this style of filmmaking, picking up the torch where the original director left off. Like "Taxi Driver", it brings with it an ability to pull on every uncomfortable string of our tense social ball-of-yarn, slowly unraveling a complex web of institutions geared steering us away from the yearning emptiness of our late-stage capitalist lives, and like "The King of Comedy", gives a powerful and haunted glimpse into the inner worlds of the unstable and self-absorbed. Yet, it doesn't just sandwich concepts from other films, but brings with it a variety of new tools that didn't exist in that era of filmmaking, such as the ability to show some sympathy to these malignant figures and see that their struggle is ours, and warns us all of the potential danger of leaving loose threads frayed for too long.

Avengers: Endgame is dumb. Very dumb. It's a messy, convoluted time-caper strung together by cheesy one-liners, lowbrow actions, and halfwitted takes on morals, ethics, and the value we place on life. I understand that one doesn't go into a Marvel flick expecting high art, but the mass public fascination towards these characters and the esteem critics hold this film in would suggest otherwise. More to the point, I think that when you have this large of an audience, mainly of impressionable teens who are forming complex worldviews, you have a responsibility to give people something real to chew on. The actors clearly had a good time working on this picture and their acting charisma really is a force to be reckoned with. That much I'll give the movie credit for.

So much runs through the viewer's mind during the climatic graveyard scene near the end The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Somehow, through all we've have been put through for the last 3 hours, the brutality of America's bloodiest war, the many, many twists and turns that we've been put through, the highs and lows of the truly epic journey across America's sun-scorched, anarchic, savage bastard child west, nothing else matters besides what is going right now at this very instance. Despite Morricone's heavenly "Ecstasy of Gold" drumming everything, meaning the scene, its characters, the action, and the audience along, it's really a moment of restrained triumph, as Tuco the Ugly frantically gallops across this massive graveyard which more closely resembles some great Roman coliseum in search of the one thing that he could ever mean something to someone like him, some arbitrary object of gratification with which we, the audience, have had dangled in front of us for what feels like an eternity. Suddenly, the whir of excitement and triumph comes to a dead stop. The heavenly mariachi is silent now, and the almost spiritual catharsis which has briefly unified this character, this film, and this audience as one shared soul in search for something greater has finally hit a fever pitch from which words escape. The entire world has stopped and even the Heavens seem to have lent its undivided attention - Tuco has found the gold. Somehow, despite Clint Eastwood's top-billing and his position firmly at the bottom of the film's title, Tuco scans as the main character of this affair. He sets the adventure in motion, he discovers the gold, and most importantly, he's the one we empathize with, the one we actually care about. Somehow, his greed, his wretchedness, his disregard for anything which could be considered ethical or cosmically important in any way do nothing to hinder our view of him as a sympathetic human being as deserving as anyone of just one moment of satisfaction. He suffers all throughout the movie as some creature who has never been loved or even tolerated by anybody else. He can't even get by for his own brother, who couldn't loathe him any more were he the devil himself. Like many of the greatest characters of the genre - Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden, Jesse James, among others, he embodies the wild west in human form - an amoral force for chaos that we, against our better instincts, have qualities that we see in ourselves. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is the idealized west and it's also the grim, violent, bleak west. Its gorgeous landscapes that seem to melt like butter across the screen and then some and its gunslinging good guys and bad guys that we can't help but throw our weight behind are all present and accounted for, just as are the harsh, morbid realities that plagued real people that really existed and really felt at this time. It's this atmosphere, of grit and spit and grime and dirt and famine that make The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as profoundly timeless as they are. This is no surprise coming from Sergio Leone, the man who could make riveting cinema out of 10 uninterrupted moments of three guys waiting for a train in the middle of a desert. It should come as no surprise that among this film's many merits is the simple reality of just how ahead of its time this movie was. Its archetypes and arid, scenic backdrops aren't just present in modern fiction, they're almost the bread and butter of a well-told story. Star Wars, Red Dead Redemption, Blood Meridian, Grand Theft Auto, Pulp Fiction, Breaking Bad; just drops in the pan of the vast sum of works of fiction that almost certainly owe more than their fair share of inspiration to this film. We certainly don't love these settings and these characters because they bring out the best in us. There are absolutely no morals, no higher truths with which to ascribe to, and certainly very little compassion on display here. And yet, it would be a difficult position to defend that they bring out the worst in us either, being that they are able to get us to feel tremendously for the plight of even the most wretched characters and see some great redeeming power in the virtue of earnestness for earnestness's sake. Most accurately is that these stories simply bring out the most human in us, and that is the very essence of storytelling itself.

An enjoyable but entirely disposable kids' flick. It's something they will get a kick out of, and decent turn for one of entertainment's most infamously hit-or-miss commodity. Anything more is overselling it, anything less isn't giving credit where credit is due.

Man, this movie was like Parasite the lesser. No doubt Jordan Peele has some directing chops, and for its time, it had an original and nuanced perspective on racial dynamics. What really bogs the movie down and keeps it from holding up are its on-the-nose visual metaphors and its lame one-liners and quips that feel more at home in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than they do in a semi-serious black comedy, and serve as some serious mood whiplash. A decent first start, remains to be seen if its good enough to spin a career out of.

Despite its clever cinematography, The Invisible Man is an overly-lengthy slog with far too many needless, unwarranted plot diversions, likely there for the sake of covering up its greatest shame - it lacks a soul.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Every aspect of The Lighthouse works. Not a moment of filmmaking is dull, unwarranted, and not one but of these actors' talents were put to waste. Moreover, The Lighthouse is far, far greater than the some of its parts. In essence, The Lighthouse is to the 2010's what "There Will Be Blood" was to the 2000's - unabashedly over-the-top, larger than life, often-times ham-fisted and downright corny, but utterly compelling, and more than sophisticated enough to justify its bizarre conceits. Words cannot do justice to this film's sense of atmosphere. It gets compared to SpongeBob Squarepants of all things, and the comparison is not unwarranted. The Lighthouse is in many ways an adult fever-dream episode of SpongeBob, with its twisted, absurd sense of comedic timing, weirdly-authentically nautical atmosphere, and a willingness to entertain the weird, scary, and abhorrent for the sake of memorability. It's campiness works because this story clearly doesn't take itself seriously, taking as much time to chide and mock its characters and their questionable motives. Very little is explained over the 2-hour runtime, yet very little needed to be explained. Its absurdly simple premise invites all kinds of weird shenanigans, as its rudimentary narrative required some abnormal **** to possibly be interesting. Not enough can be said for Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, who play their respective characters exactly the way they ought to be played - exaggerated, almost grotesque abominations of the archetypes they're supposed to embody. Dafoe, a grizzled old sea dog constitutionally incapable of using timely language, at the cost of making his speech so mysterious and antiquated as to be almost completely devoid of meaning, and Pattinson, in perhaps a parody of his bleary-eyed heartthrob origins, a completely insufferable young buck who's so smug and self-assured in his way of life that he flat out refuses to cooperate with his elderly cohort in any way and makes his own life harder in effect. Without spoiling anything, the back and forth between these two actors is the final piece of the puzzle towards making this one of the greatest horror films of all-time. The tension escalates to such a comically absurd degree that when it all boils over, Daniel Day-Lewis' savage beatdown of Paul Dano at the end of "There Will Be Blood" almost seems subdued and muted by comparison. And yet, the heart and soul of this film is how much fun it manages to be, despite the rather weighty subjects it plays with. It's a sophisticated, yet hilarious homage to weird fiction that will leave you absolutely speechless, nerve-wracked, drained, and profoundly entertained by the time it reaches its conclusion.

Like any great band or artist, Talking Heads were about more than just a few dozen great songs and albums. Whether by design or by accident, they become an idea. For Elvis, it was smashing cultural boundaries and having a good time, for Radiohead, a solemn prayer for our collective angst. And for Talking Heads, it was a simple but profound statement acceptance of what it is to be human. Talking Heads have a pretty extensive catalogue, from the immaculately produced sonic wizardry of Fear Of Music and Remain In Light, to the funky fresh Talking Heads: 77 and Speaking In Tongues, but, for all intents and purposes, Stop Making Sense is the ultimate Heads experience. What's on display here is music reached an international audience because it expressed music as a universal language. You see some funky African performers that clearly think this American white dude just wrote the most kickass stuff on planet Earth, and you have these clever little tricks, like a ray of light serendipitously shining on drummer Chris Frantz as he pounds away at the heavenly "Thank You For Sending Me An Angel", and you have David Byrne crying out "Thanks!" to the crowd between songs in much the same tone as you do in your car when someone waves you in at an intersection. They didn't need fancy words to write songs about being afraid of Heaven, or about being "just an animal looking for a home." They took some advanced, college-education musical stuff and made it look simple. They made it look easy. And when you watch David Byrne in his oversized suit fumble around onstage to a hip-hop rendition of one of his songs, you start to realize: It was never that hard being human. Everyone's afraid. No one knows what they're supposed to do with their hands, nor have they been handed a written code on how to maneuver a crowded set of urinals. You didn't sound all that dumb when you went on that diatribe about how there are no real bad guys in the world at your friend's wedding. In fact, most present would say you had a point. No, you didn't happen to sleep in the one day they explained the meaning of life and what happens when we die, and most everything you were told as a kid was some ape's best guess. And that's okay. Because you aren't alone. And never is that more reassuring than when some nerdy guy in an oversized suit with an acoustic guitar is screaming it at you.

I remember watching Vertigo with my mom when I was about 13 and still wet-behind-the-ears in most respects when it came to film. I remember my mom holding this movie in an unusual esteem and personal engagement that she so rarely held anything in. My mom was my mom though, and when she loved something, she really loved it, more than anyone has loved anything else, and this, to her, was one of those movies. I didn't fully get it as a kid. Where movies were supposed to make you feel emboldened and secure in your values, this strange new kind of movie flew in the face of that, and seemed to like making you feel cold, naked, and dumb. It's been years since then, and I've seen this movie quite a few times. It's the perfect, endlessly-rewatchable thriller. Knowing the conclusion to the whole affair actually improves, holding the audience captive in perfect suspense, with each insidious narrative turn tightening the noose around the audience's neck. And when the conclusion does arrive, the first-time unassuming audience is shocked, but not offended. All along there were clues, inaccuracies that could only possibly amount to one conclusion. It's not so much that the audience forgets these clues as much as they choose to forget these clues, preferring one "truth" over another. It's this predicament that our protagonist, Scottie Ferguson, finds himself. However, his actions run perpendicular to the audiences wishes, turning up every stone, prying at every loose end until inevitably he undoes whatever happy ending he wrote for himself. It's his feverish search for "the truth" that makes him such a tragedy, and, to his friend and living-partner Midge, a comparatively well-adjusted, capable woman, such a mystery. He's the kind of paranoid, troubled individual who gets by on the notion that people are never really paying attention to the right things. His "truth" here is the mystery of one Madeleine Elster, a wife of an old friend who he (meaning the friend) believes to be possessed/hypnotized/some odd thing. Less important to Scottie are the specifics, choosing instead to understand a "bigger picture" that chronically eludes him. Hitchcock's direction perfectly compliments the sadness and claustrophobia of the film, which is shot in film's favorite city, San Francisco, which just so happens to be my home city. The film prefers quiet over loud, dimly lit, gothic cathedrals with narrow, dark corridors, paired with voyeuristic figures looking on like a moth attracted to lit. It prefers empty city streets and lifeless, seemingly abandoned docks. It's the city as intimate and naked as it comes. Not so much Norman Rockwell as it is Edward Hopper, the film is photogenic as all-get-out, but unbearably lonely. The lighting enhances the mood, using shadows at the edge of the screen to draw its figures together, obscuring desired women-as-objects under sickly green curtains. Vertigo take its audience's plaintive hopes for some virtue or nugget of personal triumph, and, rather than lazily turn it against them, draws upon our collective sadness for inspiration. In the end, Scottie is an everyman, living only to view goodness and light through some distant lens, and is simply the victim of being too observant, too clever, and too skeptically honest to ever really leave well enough alone. He's an emblem of the eternal shifting mass of the chronic, who remain miserable in their search for fulfillment, yet blinded by its need for closure. When the ideal presents itself, reality follows, ever-mocking, ever-naked in its approach.