"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Lone Star

June 21, 1996

LONE STAR is the summer of ’96 joint from John Sayles, a limited release but made $13 million on a budget much lower than that, and well reviewed. Roger Ebert called it “a great American movie, one of the few to seriously try to regard with open eyes the way we live now… the best work yet by one of our most original and independent filmmakers.”

I must confess that to this day I’m not acquainted enough with Sayles’ work; I respect that he wrote PIRANHA, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, ALLIGATOR, THE HOWLING, etc., but his earliest directorial work I’ve seen is still THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (which I love), so I don’t have a full picture of these dramas that are his main thing. In the ‘90s, though, I was at an open minded age and trying to see the Important New Works, so I saw both THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH and LONE STAR when they played indie theaters. I barely remember them, other than that I thought they were good, so I guess they weren’t the specific type of good that made a strong impression on me in those days. (They weren’t THE PHANTOM.)

Many still consider LONE STAR one of Sayles’ best, it’s in the Criterion Collection, and I was excited to revisit it as a more wisened, soon to be wizened being. Yeah, it’s a good movie, and I think I was probly much more interested in analyzing its themes than I was before. But I have to admit that it still gives me more of an academic “that was good, that was interesting” feeling than a heartfelt “god damn, I’m gonna watch that again.” Maybe if some of you love it you can talk me up on it. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 2nd, 2026 | 13 Comments »

Supergirl (2026)

SUPERGIRL is a fairly straight forward modern super hero movie, and I think a pretty good one, though (to quote the great philosopher Dalton) opinions vary. It follows SUPERMAN in James Gunn’s new Detective Comics Comics movie universe, but it’s directed by Craig Gillespie (FRIGHT NIGHT remake) and written by Ana Nogueira (an actress and playwright).

I, TONYA put Gillespie on the map, or at least is the credit people always put after his name, but I think what qualified him for this was CRUELLA, a movie I watched way after the fact and didn’t review but thought was a surprisingly stylish and clever version of the Misunderstood I.P. Villainess subgenre. Here he brings similar sensibilities to the sturdy foundation of the 2021 mini-series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely. Like THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU this is a pretty humble, self-contained space western, specifically a space TRUE GRIT, though moreso in the comic (since it’s narrated by an adult version of the precocious young protagonist). After Ruthye (Eve Ridley) loses her entire family to scumbag brigands she goes to a saloon and offers a sword made by her late father (Ferdinand Kingsley, DRACULA UNTOLD) to whoever will help her track down his killer, Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts, BLACK BOOK, RUST AND BONE, THE DROP, THE OLD GUARD). Kara Zor-El, street name Supergirl (Milly Alcock, UNTITLED TAKASHI MIIKE FILM) is there, and not interested, but drunkenly helps the girl not get robbed, so the next morning Krem steals her ship and shoots her flying dog Krypto with a poison dart. That’s how Supergirl and Ruthye end up traveling together on a space Greyhound. Supergirl needs to find Krem in three moonfalls to get the antidote to save Krypto; Ruthye tags along because she wants to kill Krem. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 30th, 2026 | 22 Comments »

The Hunchback of Notre Dame / Eraser

June 21, 1996

Today, as I try to catch up on my slightly lagging retrospective, I will take a look at two movies released on the same day a year and a week ago. One is a lavish Disney animated musical, the other a violent Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle, each of those art forms seemingly just a little past their peak. Both are about an unusual man trying to protect a woman from bad guys, and they were tied for the most expensive movie of 1996, having budgets of around $100 million.

Disney had experienced the wildly successful “new renaissance” streak of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN and THE LION KING, followed by POCAHONTAS, which was a moneymaker, but not as much as its predecessors, and not as well reviewed (except by me). Now comes THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST directors Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise. Like POCAHONTAS it’s very Broadway influenced and addresses surprisingly heavy topics for a fuckin G-rated cartoon. It had a bigger budget and the animation is more showy, but in my opinion not nearly as appealing. With the villain in particular it kinda looks like they’re trying to do PRINCE OF EGYPT era Dreamworks but don’t quite know the style.

I’m speaking of the cruel, sexually repressed, genocidal Judge Claude Frollo (Tony Jay, TWINS), who is engaged in a bigoted crusade against the Romani people in Paris. In the opening scene he kills a fleeing immigrant holding a deformed baby. The archdeacon (David Ogden Stiers, BETTER OFF DEAD…, DOC HOLLYWOOD) witnesses the whole thing and guilts him into not dumping the baby in a well, instead agreeing to raise him as his own, by which he means name him Quasimodo and lock him in the bell tower of the cathedral. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 26th, 2026 | 15 Comments »

Switchblade Sisters

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is from 1975, but I’m considering it Slam Evil Summer, because it was re-released June 15, 1996, thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s fandom and his label Rolling Thunder Pictures. It’s directed by Jack Hill (SPIDER BABY, COFFY, FOXY BROWN), and it’s his penultimate movie as a director (the last being SORCERESS in 1982).

I did not see this in a theater, I had to wait to rent the VHS, but it must’ve been a great time with the right audience. It starts off so strong with the wah-wah infused theme song “Black Hearted Woman” playing over a documentary-style black and white photo montage of tough ladies in a world of boarded up houses covered in graffiti. Establishing the landscape.

And then it says “Music by MEDUSA”? What kind of badass group is that!? (Apparently it’s frequent Roger Corman composer and lounge music pioneer Les Baxter.) I’m not sure who took the photos, but the credited title designer is Bill Levey, director of BLACKENSTEIN and MONACO FEVER. His IMDb bio says he was childhood friends with James Dean, hung out with Elvis and discovered Patrick Swayze (who he directed in SKATETOWN U.S.A.).

(read the rest of this shit…)

June 25th, 2026 | 1 Comment »

Disclosure Day

DISCLOSURE DAY is not related to the 1994, Seattle-set reverse sexual harassment/VR thriller starring Michael Douglas called DISCLOSURE, it’s merely Steven Spielberg (WAR HORSE) attempting to ride that film’s coattails. Also it’s his late career return to the subject of beings from other worlds, this time not dealing with close encounters or wars of but with how humanity as a whole handles the knowledge of their existence.

I went to this assuming I would like it because it’s Spielberg, but knowing that a movie with the same trailers and a no-name director probly wouldn’t have even gotten me into the theater. It didn’t look that exciting to me, so I was impressed to be immediately thrown into a conflict already in progress. Dr. Daniel Kellner (the mastermind himself, Josh O’Connor, CHALLENGERS) has already stolen secret files and “the device” from his employers, who have retaliated by kidnapping his girlfriend Jane (Maid Marian herself, Eve Hewson, BRIDGE OF SPIES), and are attempting an exchange. He manages to use this small extra-terrestrial object to escape with Jane and call his contact Hugo (Unicron himself, Colman Domingo, ZOLA) before going to hide out at a convent under the watch of Sister Maura (40-year-old Mattie Ross herself, Elizabeth Marvel, G20). (read the rest of this shit…)

June 24th, 2026 | 23 Comments »

Carolina Caroline

This may be shocking to hear, but the entertainment industry in my opinion employs a high number of attractive people. And by my estimation Samara Weaving (AZRAEL) is one of the ones who excel even among that group. Add to that the fact that she came up through horror (Ash vs. Evil Dead, READY OR NOT) and doesn’t seem to have turned her back on it, plus she’s funny and almost always picks movies that seem like something I would watch, whether or not they end up being worthy of her, so she’s a real human being who seems like some nerd could’ve WEIRD SCIENCEd her into reality. Being too good to be true was even part of the premise of THE BABYSITTER, where she exploited the heterosexual vulnerabilities of the teenage protagonist as well as anyone who may or may not be watching at home who is impressed by her BILLY JACK fandom. And now she seems to be on a crime movie kick! Fellas, are we being catfished?

I hope I can confess those feelings without being diminishing of her talents, because she’s also very good at what she does, and her new one CAROLINE CAROLINE is no exception. This is a little different from what we usually see from her, even her last one EENIE MEANIE, because it’s the type of crime movie that wants to be more like BADLANDS than like TRUE ROMANCE. It could exist even if Tarantino had never made a movie. (Not that that would be a fair trade off.) (read the rest of this shit…)

June 22nd, 2026 | 3 Comments »

The Cable Guy

June 14, 1996

THE CABLE GUY was, somehow, a divisive movie. It’s such a good idea: what if you slipped the guy hooking up your cable some extra money to give you the pay channels for free, and then he felt entitled to be your friend, and you couldn’t get rid of him? And what if he was an over-the-top goofball Jim Carrey but it played out like a SINGLE WHITE FEMALE or CAPE FEAR type suspense thriller? It’s very funny, but directed like a real thriller by Ben Stiller (following his debut REALITY BITES), so it turns out it wasn’t what most of society expected or desired from Carrey after his run of ACE VENTURA, THE MASK, DUMB AND DUMBER, BATMAN FOREVER and ACE VENTURA 2. We’ll get into that a little more later, but for now, fuck ‘em. They were wrong, obviously.

Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick, WARGAMES, THE LION KING) is newly separated from his girlfriend Robin (Leslie Mann, LAST MAN STANDING), having freaked her out by proposing. So he has a new apartment and needs the cable hooked up and it’s his buddy Rick (Jack Black, WATERWORLD) who suggests bribing the guy, which is not really Steven’s way, but he does it anyway. Great idea, Rick.

The cable guy says his name is Ernie “Chip” Douglas, acts like he’s caressing a nipple when he finds the “sweet spot” to drill into the wall, intuits that Steven is dealing with a breakup, likes to say “I’m just messin with ya” and “I’m just jerkin yer chain,” and pressures him into hanging out the next day. Then he brings him to sit on top of the city’s satellite dish, the place where he goes to think, to talk about the future of cable and internet. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 18th, 2026 | 23 Comments »

Sirāt

SIRĀT is an unusual movie – a Spanish film from French-Galician director Óliver Laxe, set in Morocco. It follows a man named Luis (Sergi López, PAN’S LABYRINTH), who brings his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) and his dog Pipa to a rave out in the desert while searching for his missing daughter. (They’re not dancing, they’re just walking around showing people her picture.)

The movie is simple, primal, artfully repetitive, hypnotic. There’s nothing but sand and a few people, they set up their speakers, they put a beat on. It takes a long time before it changes at all. The droning on and on is the point. It makes perfect sense that the two Oscar nominations this got were for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound. Funny to think about Academy voters watching very long scenes of what seems to just be real people letting loose in the desert. Ha ha, you had to watch that for your consideration.

The event gets broken up by soldiers declaring an emergency, but two RV-loads of European ravers who Luis talked to earlier make a run for it, heading to another rave they say will be happening deeper in the desert. So Luis follows this mini-convoy of grizzled punks in their van, making a dangerous trek. It’s a little bit SORCERER, with faint traces of FURY ROAD, but with more thumping beats (courtesy of French DJ Kangding Ray). (read the rest of this shit…)

June 16th, 2026 | 4 Comments »

The Phantom (30th slamiversary revisit)

FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE…

I have loved THE PHANTOM since it opened on June 7, 1996, so you may have seen me going on about it before, for example when I wrote about it in 2010. This year, when I settled on doing a summer of ’96 retrospective, I knew I wanted to skip a few major movies I’ve reviewed before. But I couldn’t skip THE PHANTOM. Not only is it in competition with MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE for my favorite of the summer, and the one I’ve rewatched the most over the decades, but it’s a major piece of evidence in my thesis for this series: that some of ’96’s so-called failures still mean much more to me than its record-smashing mega-hits. Obviously normal people love INDEPENDENCE DAY and THE ROCK, and their directors are still continuing on the paths started by those movies. I can’t deny their importance to cinema history. But they were only ever important to me as movies I rejected, and they don’t even have that power anymore. But I’m still fascinated with some of the arcane treasures the general public left on the reject pile.

Billy Zane (DEMON KNIGHT) is The Phantom, and though he may always be more remembered for playing a rich asshole with short-sighted views on Picasso, I think this is his greatest achievement. He does perfect super hero poses and movements, he got buff for the role in the days when they usually used rubber muscles, he somehow conveys both a wholesomeness and a wry sense of humor. He shows you how to be in on the joke and still believe in the character. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 15th, 2026 | 15 Comments »

I Love Boosters

I LOVE BOOSTERS is a movie with ideas (arguably too many), style (in abundance), attitude (well earned), and an excess of exuberance. It works at a pace and a rhythm that can be challenging, could be annoying, could be hard to lock in on if you were distracted or in the wrong mood. If somebody hated it in the way I hated CRANK and DOMINO back in the day I would get it, though I think I would’ve liked it even then.

For a while it seems like every scene will be a conversation between characters ignoring an insane thing that’s going on that also requires your attention. An early example is the two main characters having a serious talk about their needs in life while shoplifting what I would consider to be an extremely conspicuous amount of clothes. They stuff their shirts so much they look like Klumps, but they continue their talk as they waddle across the parking lot to their getaway van, with little sense of urgency.

This is the second film from Boots Riley (SORRY TO BOTHER YOU), communist rapper turned writer/director who dresses like Paddington Bear. It’s a goofy maximalist comedy overloaded with genre tangents, convoluted sci-fi concepts, bits of stop motion and miniature models, not to mention acidic satire of capitalist exploitation, so it occurs to me now to call it Marxist Savage Steve Holland. But the truth is that what it kept reminding me of was Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Liquid Television, Alex Winter’s FREAKED – those rare pop culture miracles from a bygone era when the occasional gatekeeper saw the wisdom of giving corporate money and platforms to passionate communities of artists to take their swings at outlandish, quirky, wonderful things they really believed in. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 11th, 2026 | 5 Comments »

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