REVIEW: High Life [2019]

What do you know about cruelty? Redemption can be an illusion to so many people. They try so hard to make up for past misdeeds that they often fall prey to even more along the way. That’s what happens when you give your quest a tangible goal—achieving it becomes paramount, the process a means to an ends. If you tell a murderer that they will be forgiven upon saving their victim’s family, who’s to say they wouldn’t simply kill another to do so? If you tell someone that saving humanity’s…

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REVIEW: Wild Nights with Emily [2019]

Sue, forevermore. As evidenced by her poetry and letters, the reclusive spinster Emily Dickinson proves anything but. Through them we learn of her struggles to get published, the rejections endured, and a love shared with her sister-in-law Susan. Why then was the former thought process how we were told to consider her life? Because those lies were better suited to the mythic status one would manufacture as publicity to garner posthumous acclaim. Mabel Todd erased Sue’s name from Emily’s love correspondence (proven via spectrographic technology) and created a legend that…

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REVIEW: Family [2019]

Take control of your life. One of many side effects (central tenets) of the patriarchy is this notion that women must either follow a workaholic career trajectory devoid of distractions (family) or choose to stay at home and devote their time to being housewives without distractions (career). It’s a very conscious duality with which to place women in boxes and thus punish them for doing what men have done for millennia. Too many people see this contrast as deciding between a path towards ostracization for going against your unrealistic gender…

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REVIEW: What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Deep Space Nine [2019]

We were the ‘dark’ Star Trek. More than merely a look back at what was, Ira Steven Behr‘s documentary project What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Deep Space Nine is also a way to look forward—a perfect contrast considering how maligned the show was during its tenure compared to today. You could say “Deep Space Nine” stands as a dividing point amongst fans that appreciated the grand social and political ideals of the Star Trek universe and those who wanted spaceships fighting with laser beams. The latter are the…

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HOTDOCS19 REVIEW: Mr. Toilet: The World’s #2 Man [2019]

Turning poop culture into pop culture. This statistic says it all: 40% of citizens on Earth don’t have toilets. A big part of that number is India and China, but it’s still insane to comprehend as someone from a country that won’t allow homes or businesses to be built without one. It’s the type of problem you’d assume tops every nation’s to-do list and yet most cases have it found at the very bottom. Why? Because change isn’t easy. If your family has practiced open-air defecation for generations, why stop?…

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REVIEW: Avengers: Endgame [2019]

I love you three thousand. The best thing Marvel ever did was split their Avengers 1.0 saga’s final chapter in two since it allowed Infinity War to deliver what no other entry could: stakes. Despite knowing they were always false due to the giant gauntlet in the room that literally bends time and space to its whims, they hurt nonetheless simply because we were forced to sit with those results for a full year before discovering how things might be put right. Had Anthony and Joe Russo conversely fixed everything…

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REVIEW: Booksmart [2019]

‘Your ugly’ what? Does Olivia Wilde‘s directorial debut Booksmart call to mind Superbad? You bet. Not only is it about two nerd best friends trying to punch above their weight class and party hard before graduating, but it also stars that film’s co-lead Jonah Hill‘s sister in a very similar mode. She (Beanie Feldstein‘s Molly) has just discovered (due to a ham-fisted loop-hole in plotting where students can’t reveal their collegiate destinations) that her slacker classmates somehow got accepted into Ivy League universities like her and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever). While…

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REVIEW: I Trapped the Devil [2019]

Something feels wrong. Tragedy struck some time ago and we honestly don’t need to know the details to understand how it’s affected the three characters we’re about to meet. Steve (Scott Poythress) is the one who’s hurting from it and has been ever since. Maybe his brother Matt (AJ Bowen) thought space was needed for him to heal or maybe he was just too unsure about what he could do to help alleviate his pain and/or scared about what doing so entailed, but it’s been awhile since they’ve last seen…

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HOTDOCS19 REVIEW: Willie [2019]

I’m not done. It was 2003 before a Black hockey player had the honor of being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. That player was Grant Fuhr, the Stanley Cup winning goalie of the Edmonton Oilers and multiple other teams (including a short stint with my hometown Buffalo Sabres). Because he was far from the first Black player in the league, however, you wouldn’t be faulted for wondering why the man with that unique distinction hadn’t already been enshrined. The reason was simple: Willie O’Ree only played forty-five games…

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REVIEW: 江湖儿女 [Jiang hu er nü] [Ash Is Purest White] [2018]

Armed men tend to die first. The genesis of Zhangke Jia‘s Jiang hu er nü [Ash is Purest White] is intriguing. After thinking about cut scenes from two of his earlier films starring now wife Tao Zhao (Unknown Pleasures and Still Life), he found himself merging her characters into one. He saw this woman having begun in the coal-mining town of Shanxi before eventually making way towards Fengjie as the county worked to flood cities for construction on the Three Gorges Dam. So this latest work becomes a sort of…

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REVIEW: Rottentail [2019]

I don’t want to change! I’m a proponent for fun comic book adaptations that don’t adhere to the Christopher Nolan school of brooding drama that’s more or less taken over the genre, but I’d hope the goal would be smart wit rather than dumb idiocy. That doesn’t mean I necessarily begrudge the sort who seek out fare such as Brian Skiba‘s Rottentail or its source material from Kurt Belcher, David C. Hayes, and Kevin Moyers. Some just like cheesy over-the-top one-liners that were definitely written before the scenes trying too…

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