REVIEW: Rocketman [2019]

I’ll take care of the rest. When you have an icon like Elton John as your subject, the straightforward biopic formula simply won’t work. We know him as the flamboyantly dressed, rock star pianist with funny glasses and sequins who belts out songs that will either make you tap your feet or cry. And while that might have started as a façade to break free of Reginald Dwight’s introverted shell of shyness, he ultimately became this on-stage persona for real. The battles with drugs and alcohol alongside the constant media…

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REVIEW: Late Night [2019]

You’re a little old and a little white. You can imagine how this film would have gone had a white male wrote it. The affirmative action jokes would play strictly for laughs rather than poignant introspection. The strong woman television host would use masculine tropes to service her goals rather than understand that a double standard can’t be weaponized in ways that end up affirming said double standard. And the idea that the fish-out-of-water newcomer entering the fray to shake the status quo could potentially date the “hot” co-worker would…

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REVIEW: Doubles vies [Non-Fiction] [2019]

An infinite minority. You know when you go to a get-together and the conversation inevitably turns to current affairs for which everyone has a fringe understanding? So rather than provide true opinions, they simply start regurgitating what they’ve read on the subject. Most times their content doesn’t even come from a primary source because we’ve conditioned ourselves to blindly trust media outlets that paraphrase, parse, and filter through their own personalized political agenda. Fact therefore becomes a stepping-stone towards editorial and that editorial suddenly becomes a stand-in for the facts.…

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REVIEW: The Russian Five [2019]

Literally—we’re making it up as we go along. While everyone hates division rivals when it comes to loving the Buffalo Sabres, I don’t necessarily care. They despise Toronto, loathe Boston, and dislike Montreal. Hartford earned ire when they had a team and Ottawa too upon coming back into the league. For me, though, it was always different. Because Toronto was in the Western conference when I started watching hockey, I actually liked them. And I still kind of do despite their switch to the East in 1998. Conversely, however, the…

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REVIEW: Fast Color [2019]

I want us to try again. It’s a gift that has been carried down through generations, always from mother to daughter. It can break apart any object they can physically see into its core molecules, swirling them around in the air until ready to reform as whatever it was beforehand. A bowl, cigarette, and even a door if need be can get dematerialized through sheer will of spirit—a parlor trick on its surface with the potential for more. But what if “more” means corruption? What if “more” means harming outsiders…

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REVIEW: The Wedding Planner [2001]

Dark tower demolished. I shouldn’t be surprised that my nineteen-year old self wasn’t a fan of The Wedding Planner when it came out. Romantic comedies weren’t my genre of choice and I surely didn’t pick it upon going to the theater with friends. So I probably watched with an immovable bias, honed in on its familiarity, and ignored its strength with an agenda to walk out without laughing. Watching it almost twenty years later removed from that teenage boy mentality, however, reveals how strong preconceptions can prove. That’s not to…

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REVIEW: Into the Mirror [2019]

You don’t have to be lost forever. What started as a script for a five-minute short by Jamie Bacon and Charles Streeter soon developed into the sixty-five-minute feature film Into the Mirror after handing it over to visual artist Lois Stevenson. She saw the potential to expand it outwards to become the colorfully nightmarish fantasy that dives headfirst into a rabbit hole of self-identity it has—the trio’s sensibilities merging together to deliver a sensory experience rather than a narrative one. There’s still a linear progression as far as Daniel (Bacon)…

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REVIEW: Exhibition [2014]

Stop worrying about me. After two films centering upon characters that need to escape their insular lifestyles in order to discover what it is they truly desire, Joanna Hogg‘s Exhibition conversely traps D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) within their claustrophobic yet comfortable home so they must confront their past and present before deciding on their future. She does this by using a 1969 house built by commercial architect James Melvin as her canvas, the actors as her paint. Its modern design provides three levels of segmentation: a communal…

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REVIEW: John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum [2019]

Rules and consequences. Like the Purge series before it, John Wick is proving to be a money-making franchise that loves to let its mythology gradually unfold in a way that familiarizes via a personal experience prior to zooming out so the systemic issues beyond one man’s home can be revealed. While we still stay with the titular character as played by Keanu Reeves (an assassin that assassins simultaneously fear and revere who did the impossible to get out of the life only to see tragedy—his wife’s untimely death—start a chain…

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REVIEW: Blood Rage [1987]

Here’s to the new family. Shot in 1983 but released in 1987 under a different name (Nightmare at Shadow Woods) and without most of its gore, the uncensored version of Blood Rage doesn’t even have its title intact. The word Slasher takes its place during a drive-in theater prologue instead—an apt name in its own right considering the murder weapon of choice is a machete wielded with a swing of the arm to inflict gashes into the faces of its victims. It ultimately doesn’t matter what you want to call…

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REVIEW: Chopping Mall [1986]

Absolutely nothing can go wrong. Only a 1980s horror could have a killer robot plot and intentionally gloss over artificial intelligence themes for lightning. Who wants a ton of exposition talking about hubristic irony when you can let Mother Nature provide a malfunction? Rather than show humanity as its own worst enemy flying too close to the sun, supernaturally sci-fi-inspired sentries wreak havoc with little more than a bolt of electricity flipping the switch that transforms these programmed protectors into autonomous predators. Now all you need is a few sex-crazed…

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