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Posts Tagged ‘Dakota Johnson’

Materialists

Thursday, November 6th, 2025

MATERIALISTS is a movie I missed in theaters, caught on blu-ray a while back, and this week it will start streaming on Home Box Office Maximum, if you want to catch it to. I really needed to see it because it’s the second movie from writer/director Celine Song. Her first was PAST LIVES (2023), which I didn’t review, but I loved it. It’s about an American woman (Greta Lee) reuniting with a guy (Teo Yoo) who she knew before her family left South Korea when she was little. He’s handsome and in love with her and reminds her of her roots, but also she loves her life and her boyfriend and oh man. It’s so good. Swooningly romantic, achingly beautiful, keenly observant, feels so true to people and to life, never like a formula. Why didn’t I write about it? Maybe I was afraid I couldn’t do it justice. I should watch it again.

Celine Song Joint #2 is pretty different. Another classy A24 production, but with beautiful movie stars* and a little bit of a satirical or social commentary aspect to it, in that it depicts a world of entitled people with superficial and unattainable demands for relationships. Madame Web herself Dakota Johnson (NEED FOR SPEED) stars as Lucy Mason, a top matchmaker for a New York City company called Adore. She has a great reputation for success, so her clients feel comfortable bluntly talking about people as lists of statistics: salary, net worth, race, age, weight, height. Most of it is very demeaning and presumptuous.

Everyone wants to marry rich, and Adore throws Lucy a party every time she hooks up a big wedding. At one of those (notch #9 on her belt) she tries to match the groom’s brother, Harry Castillo (Maxwell Lord himself, Pedro Pascal, THE GREAT WALL) with another client, but instead he begins pursuing her. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Drama, Romance | 15 Comments »

Parasite (1982) / Bad Times at the El Royale

Friday, February 28th, 2025

Hey friends, I don’t usually post on Fridays, but I thought I’d squeeze in one more Oscar nominee review before Sunday’s awards – a double feature of Best Actress nominees. I’m rooting for Demi Moore to win for THE SUBSTANCE, but did you know that wasn’t her first body horror joint? Way back in 1982 she starred in Charle’s Band’s third film, PARASITE.

Supposedly it started as a remake (or rip off?) of THE TINGLER, and it’s about a scientist trying to get rid of a weird tingler type thing living inside his chest. But rather than doing the electrified seats gimmick they made it immersive by shooting it in 3D, with the help of Chris J. Condon, who also did JAWS 3D. It is available on a 3D blu-ray, but I don’t have the means to watch it that way, so I can only say that it looks like it has lots of good gimmick shots, like I enjoy.

(3D gimmicks: a snapping rattlesnake, a guy impaled on a pipe with blood pouring out of it, squirting a syringe, lots of guns coming at us, looking up at a creeper on the ceiling dripping slime and then falling at us, lots of sharp-toothed monsters gorily tearing out of people, etc.) (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Crime, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »

Madame Web

Monday, February 19th, 2024

As you can see in my reviews of VENOM and MORBIUS (I didn’t write about VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE for some reason, but it’s probly the best one), I sort of have a soft spot for the In Association with Marvel Comics Universe, the last vestige of the era when the movie rights to different Marvel characters were sold to different studios. I definitely don’t consider these to be among the better comic book movies, but there’s something charmingly out of fashion about them that I get a kick out of. They seem magically transported from another time when super heroes were still kind of niche and many of the movie adaptations were trying to make them palatable for normal people, but the people in charge were clueless business assholes who didn’t know what normal people were like anyway, so they ended up making them accidentally weird. The VENOMs are the best merely because they’re a chance for one of my favorite actors to get a paycheck for being a big goof, but all of them have a similar late ‘90s/early 2000s kind of attitude that now seems kind of novel.

What I’ve come to realize is that I tend to go to movies with a mentality of “show me what you got, movie” while some people go to them with more of a “listen up you dirty sonofabitch, you can’t slip one past me.” So I’m gonna be listing a bunch of stupid things in this movie because those were the things that made it fun for me, while others will cite those exact same things as proof that this movie is terrible. We’re really not that far off, I’ve just learned how to get a chuckle from some silly shit instead of get mad at it. If it’s the right type of silly shit. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Comic strips/Super heroes | 16 Comments »

Suspiria (2018)

Monday, November 5th, 2018

SUSPIRI… uh…

Luca Guadagnino’s SUSPIRIA (2018) is technically a remake of Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA (1977), because it’s about an American named Susie Bannion going to a dance academy in Germany in 1977 where other students are turning up dead and weird shit is happening because it’s run by a coven of witches led by Mother Suspiriorum, The Mother of Sighs. But don’t expect to see any of the things you think of when you think of SUSPIRIA, like the colorful lighting, the maggots dropping from the ceiling or that room full of razor wire. Guadagnino (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME) doesn’t use the same look or any specific scenes or story points, he just plays with the basic idea. Now there’s more intra-coven political stuff going on, as well as news coverage of Baader-Meinhof bombings and the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and a subplot about an old therapist looking for a patient who disappeared after telling him the school was run by witches, and also his wife (played by o.g. Susie Bannion Jessica Harper) disappeared during the war and he keeps thinking about her, and…

I mean it’s 52 minutes longer than the original so there’s alot more stuff going on. It bills itself as “Six Acts and an Epilogue in a Divided Berlin” (spoiler: actually should be Six Acts, an Epilogue, and a Brief, Uneventful Tag Near the End of the Credits). I appreciated the act breaks. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Horror, Reviews | 75 Comments »

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