REVIEW: Rust Creek [2019]

You learn real quick what all can burn you. When Sawyer Scott (Hermoine Corfield) receives the call she’s been waiting for, she can’t help but smile. It’s the first step towards a post-collegiate future with a job in Washington DC all but secured—the tiniest bit of uncertainty preventing her from telling her folks why she won’t be home for Thanksgiving despite high spirits. She packs her SUV, activates her phone’s GPS, and sets off east with an impromptu detour through the backwoods of Kentucky courtesy of a traffic jam on…

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REVIEW: New Year, New You [2018]

I control my own destiny. You cannot talk about Sophia Takal‘s New Year, New You (the fourth episode of Blumhouse Television’s holiday-themed Hulu series “Into the Dark”) without mentioning producer Jason Blum‘s reaction to a Twitter storm in October that stemmed from an interview wherein the low-budget financier relayed an erroneous statement that “there are not a lot of female directors period, and even less who are inclined to do horror.” Blum talked specifically about how he’s offered pre-packaged projects to women in the past who have turned him down—artists…

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Posterized Propaganda January 2019: The Top 10 Movie Posters of 2018

“Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” is a proverb whose simple existence proves the fact impressionable souls will do so without fail. This monthly column (with a special year-end retrospective today) focuses on the film industry’s willingness to capitalize on this truth, releasing one-sheets to serve as not representations of what audiences are to expect, but as propaganda to fill seats. Oftentimes they fail miserably. If there’s one consistency throughout the sixty-plus posters I shortlisted this year for Top Ten glory, it’s a conscious desire to play with and…

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DESIGN: 2018 In Music

Tracklisting:Disc 11. “Crazy, Classic, Life” • Janelle Monáe • 04:47 • Dirty Computer, Bad Boy Records LLC2. “Two High” • Moon Taxi • 03:33 • Let the Record Play, RCA Records3. “Go Your Own Way” • Raithe Laurence • 03:14 • A Little Better, Audio Network Ltd4. “Rose In Harlem” • Teyana Taylor • 03:43 • K.T.S.E., Getting Out Our Dreams, Inc. / Def Jam Recordings5. “Missing U” • Robyn • 04:57 • Honey, Konichiwa Records6. “Lately” • Wet • 03:52 • Still Run, Columbia Records7. “BOSS” • The Carters…

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REVIEW: Mary Poppins [1964]

A wooden leg named Smith. I never had a great affinity for Mary Poppins as a child. It could have been that I didn’t connect to the subject matter or more likely it was because my sister did. I gravitated towards Bedknobs and Broomsticks instead as a point of conflict—a film (unbeknownst to me at the time) with the same director (Robert Stevenson) and screenwriting duo (Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi). I had therefore let everything slip away from memory as far as plotting and characterizations go due to my…

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REVIEW: Bumblebee [2018]

I can fix you. I get the appeal to capitalize on nostalgia and credit to Hasbro and Paramount for doing exactly that with the original live-action Transformers film. They went for wall-to-wall explosions courtesy of Michael Bay, leaned into the male gaze with an out-of-the-lead’s-league love interest, and brought a sarcastic nerd to life who could probably be argued into filling the role of a proto-Gamer Gate type entitled prick. The goal was to excite twenty-year old men who played with the toys in their youth in the hopes they…

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REVIEW: Aquaman [2018]

It’s fish-MAN. Arthur Curry’s Aquaman has been known in mainstream pop culture circles as DC’s whipping boy for a long while since it’s easy to mock an orange spandex-wearing dude who talks to fish when measured against his “cooler” Justice League compatriots. “The Big Bang Theory” made jokes at his expense for a few seasons and “Entourage” decided to use the hero’s lackluster reputation as proof Vinny Chase could turn anything to gold (with James Cameron‘s help). So it was a refreshing surprise when Jason Momoa was cast for Curry’s…

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REVIEW: Vice [2018]

What do we believe? It’s still weird thinking the guy who joked around with Will Ferrell for years is an Oscar winner, but that’s exactly what Adam McKay is. Weirder still is my being firmly in the camp that believes it was deserved. What he did with The Big Short was the equivalent of too-smart people giving the public a “layman’s terms” explanation to their questions. He dumbed-down a complex topic, made it wildly entertaining, and taught us something about ourselves both in how we reacted (or didn’t react) to…

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REVIEW: Lazzaro felice [Happy as Lazzaro] [2018]

He’s staring into the void again. Writer/director Alice Rohrwacher asks an interesting question with Lazzaro felice [Happy as Lazzaro]. How would we treat a saint? Would we acknowledge his/her goodness and understand their grace to be something to mirror? Or would we scoff at their innocence to call them naive, their loyalty to call them stupid, and their charity to call them a pushover? You’d like to think the former and yet it doesn’t take much of a history lesson to prove the latter. There’s a reason a majority of…

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REVIEW: Ben is Back [2018]

You’re all still scared of me. There’s no way to discuss the second of Ben is Back or Beautiful Boy that you watched without also mentioning the first. Maybe I’d think differently if the order had swapped, but watching the former last seems like the correct way to do things since it allowed me to have a fresh perspective on what these types of addict films generally do wrong. Everything I thought Beautiful Boy failed to grasp about the complex subject matter was fixed in Ben is Back if only…

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REVIEW: Roma [2018]

We are alone. To know that Roma is a semi-autobiographical account of writer/director Alfonso Cuarón‘s own childhood growing up in a Mexico City middle class family is to truly understand the weight of personal events opposite public ones. Placing the timeframe as 1970-71 means something for this country with a government takeover of poor village land and the infamous Corpus Christi Massacre’s death toll of around 120 people at the hands of a CIA-trained group of citizen militia coined Los Halcones. But what did those things mean to a child?…

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