Alaska Cruise: Vancouver

May 15, 2018

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Don't Bother to Knock, 1952 - ★★★½
February 4, 2025
Lovely little potboiler with, as promised by many of y’all, a strong Marilyn Monroe performance. The crazy young woman trope is handled about as well as I’d expect from a 1952 Hollywood movie — there’s real sympathy here. Anne Bancroft is good in her debut role. Widmark digs into his character’s worse qualities. Well worth […]
T Blockers, 2023 - ★★★½
February 3, 2025
Why yes, I am in the mood for a neon glitter gore movie which barely pretends to be anything other than its metaphor. Alt-right men get taken over by parasites and trans youth go vigilante to fight back. The lack of subtlety forces the point: it’s not a metaphor, it’s what it really feels like […]
28 Days Later, 2002 - ★★★★
February 2, 2025
Boyle’s right, this is as much a post-apocalypse movie as it is a zombie movie. It just happens to be a zombie apocalypse. The zombies are plenty scary and it’s fine that they aren’t actually undead, but a core aspect of the classic zombie is the hordes. It’s the metaphor of zombies as mass consumerism […]
The Brutalist, 2024 - ★★★★
February 2, 2025
Spectacular in many senses of the word. I kept thinking of Conclave; like Conclave, The Brutalist draws upon the tropes and structure of those old airport novels, thick enough to last a transatlantic flight. The generational stories and trauma and melodrama would be at home in a Michener novel; but even that old Communist Howard Fast […]
The Anderson Tapes, 1971 - ★★★
February 1, 2025
Clever exploration of the surveillance theme executed with the expected Lumet sense of craft — the flashforwards are particularly elegant. Sean Connery is too flinty for empathy and that detracts from the heist portion of the movie. He’s hard to like. The final twist probably works better if it’s within the fabric of the movie, showing […]