REVIEW: Echo Boomers [2020]

You can help me bridge that gap. I’d never heard the term Echo Boomers until Seth Savoy‘s film (co-written by him, Jason Miller, and Kevin Bernhardt). As a synonym for Millennials, however, it’s pretty apt. Baby Boomers screamed into the void and Millennials bounced back. We (I’m borderline with Boomers saying my 1982 birthdate makes me a Millennial and Millennials saying I’m Gen-X) are mirrors they hate because of how much we remind them of themselves. They call us the “Me Generation” because they believe we’re over-confident and entitled without…

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REVIEW: Secretary [2002]

“I like dull work” I had read that Secretary the film was very different from its source material (a short story in Mary Gaitskill’s book Bad Behavior). Even so, I wasn’t prepared for the difference being tone rather than content. Besides a drastically altered ending, everything that happens in text is included almost verbatim. But director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (both credited with “adaptation by” since the result is drastic) deliver it with an absurdist air instead of dramatic severity. Theirs exists in a parallel dimension of…

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FILM MARATHON: Movie Musicals #11: Victor Victoria [1982]

“I’d sleep with you for a meatball” You’re down on your luck, famished, and unable to get a job despite having a voice like no other. What do you do? Victoria Grant (Julie Andrews) is asking herself that very question when we see her auditioning for Chez Lui—a dump populated by gangsters and hotheads that’s closed almost ever other night due to brawls. This soprano can shatter glass with a high B-flat at whim but her empty stomach barely allows her to walk home. And then, of course, once she’s…

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