"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

A Tree of Palme

As you may have seen I’ve been dabbling in a little anime lately, trying to find interesting ones that speak to me. I can’t remember what tipped me off to A TREE OF PALME (2002), but it’s one I found interesting, first because it has an unusual style and transports us to a distinctly strange fantasy world, then because it has a complex mix of tones and emotions that speak to the experience of being human and what not. Two things I enjoy in cinema.

I went in blind, and the first scene after the credits made me think it was gonna be kinda like DUNE. It’s night time in the desert, a blue-skinned warrior lady is being chased by goggled men driving mechanical spiders through the dust storm. They are transporting something covered in burlap that I’m afraid looks very much like a giant penis. The lady decapitates one of her pursuers in self defense but gets swarmed by some plants like the thing they’re transporting, which turn out not to be penises, but weird moving cactus things called Bolas. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 15th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Space Sweepers

SPACE SWEEPERS is a South Korean movie from 2021 that I first watched in February of 2022. I know that because when I went to save this document I discovered the partial review I wrote back then, but got too busy to finish. Recently I was thinking about the movie, watched it again, and I’m excited to share it with anyone who missed it. (It’s on Netflix.)

This is in that sub-genre I love that some call “space truckers” – a sci-fi fantasy about a working class crew doing a space job in their junky, jerry-rigged but beloved space-hooptie. It’s both their vehicle and their home, a cramped quarters but with a plant and other items of comfort, a small kitchen, a table for playing cards. They’re a ragtag crew of good-hearted rejects like you get in SPACE ADVENTURE COBRA, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, Cowboy Bebop, SPACE TRUCKERS, SERENITY, etc., but this time the world they inhabit is a very pointed, acidic portrait of our current capitalistic hellscape. Four years ago it seemed very of-the-moment, and now it seems even more accurate than it did then. The truth hurts, but director Jo Sung-hee (A WEREWOLF BOY, PHANTOM DETECTIVE) still manage to make a fun popcorn movie about it. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 14th, 2026 | 3 Comments »

Æon Flux

Taken on its own, ÆON FLUX (2005) is an interesting oddity among post-MATRIX techno-soundtrack sci-fi action movies. The look is clean and brightly lit, the premise is vague, it has some legitimately strange tech and costumes. One of its shootouts happens in a rose garden, another on a manicured lawn beneath blossoming cherry trees. A major third act action set piece involves hanging from and climbing up the gold-lame-scarf tail of a blimp called “The Relical.” To date I think it might be the only movie with a Relical in it.

It’s an MTV Films production, but’s that just because it’s based on a cartoon birthed by their envelope-pushing animation anthology Liquid Television. It doesn’t have any needle drops and doesn’t seem fully invested in being of the time, or of pop culture. If not for the generic beats in the score by Graeme Revell (MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE) it would feel pretty otherworldly. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 13th, 2026 | 4 Comments »

Prayer of the Rollerboys

PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS (1990) is not a great ‘90s b-movie in the sense of being a thrilling piece of cinematic storytelling, but it stills stands as a type I enjoy due to many valuable qualities. First, there is its pure nineties-ness: its strongly held belief that rollerblading is really cool, Corey Haim’s skater hair, tying a flannel shirt around his waist, “Head Like a Hole” on the soundtrack. It being only the very beginning the nineties, there’s also a leftover-eighties-ness: lots of outdoor TVs, ritzy apartments with weird art made out of mannequins, some attempts at Verhoevenian satire in news reports.

Most notable, I think, there’s a political side to it that’s sadly right on the money for now. Not all of it; its idea of American collapse is that the government will borrow too much money, then force all the newly homeless people into camps, and also Harvard will be moved brick-by-brick to Hiroshima. (There used to be anxiety about Japanese business taking over America. See also: GUNG HO, DIE HARD.) But the part that’s sadly trenchant right now is that the title villains are like sci-fi Proud Boys: an anti-immigrant, white power gang with a uniform (beige trenchcoats and droog suspesnders). They’re controversial, yet they have strong enough ties to the government to buy a former naval shipyard, including its freighters! Some cops are trying to bust them but (spoiler) it’s actually for corrupt purposes. Oh yeah and they rollerblade around in a flock, synchronizing the waving of their arms to look menacing.

(read the rest of this shit…)

April 9th, 2026 | 4 Comments »

The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas

I know prequels are always divisive, but I’m usually willing to give them a shot. When I revisited THE FLINTSTONES for my summer of ’94 retrospective, I decided it was time to finally found out how it all began. Then I waited two years. But now I have watched it.

THE FLINTSTONES IN VIVA ROCK VEGAS comes from the same director as the original, Brian Levant (PROBLEM CHILD 2), but not until six years later, with almost an entirely new cast. According to a 2024 SyFy.com article, Universal wanted to film two sequels back-to-back, but John Goodman didn’t want to do another one. Levant theorized, “I think it came down to one thing: people coming up to him in airports and going ‘Yabba-dabba-doo!’ He didn’t like it.”

So they made it a prequel about the characters entering adulthood, but oddly they didn’t cast people who look that age, so it doesn’t really feel like a good explanation for the recast. These actors are in fact younger, but I’m afraid the main difference between John Goodman at 42 and Mark Addy (JACK FROST) at 36 is not their ages. Addy does fine, and Kristen Johnston (AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME) is pretty good as Wilma (is it weird that she reminded me of Emma Stone here?). Stephen Baldwin (POSSE) is definitely not as good as Rick Moranis at playing Barney, but honestly the problem is mainly just that we know he’s Stephen Baldwin and that they let him have ‘90s hair. I can’t honestly say he’s bad in it. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 8th, 2026 | 23 Comments »

A Working Man

A WORKING MAN is a 2025 Jason Statham joint that I missed in theaters. Felt guilty about it too. Then waited until now to catch up on video, for some reason. I agree with the conventional wisdom that it’s not one of his better works, but in my opinion it is in fact watchable. So that’s what I did. I watched it.

It’s a much less absurd one than THE BEEKEEPER, even though it comes from the same director, David Ayer. Being a little less silly is not a bad thing in and of itself (I really liked Statham’s recent more serious one, SHELTER), but it is kind of weird coming from the director of wild movies like SABOTAGE and SUICIDE SQUAD. They aren’t all great, but they’re usually not bland. Here he’s credited as co-writing the screenplay with Sylvester Stallone (who also wrote HOMEFRONT), based on the novel Levon’s Trade by Chuck Dixon. (Note: Stallone sold out his legacy to become a Trump stooge and Dixon is one of the comics legends now better known for whining about the scary wokeness coming after him, but thankfully the movie isn’t really pushing right wing buttons like, say, LAST BLOOD.)

It uses one of the most elemental action setups possible. Statham’s character, apparently named Levon Cade (I’m surprised they didn’t say his name more) is a foreman for Garcia Family Construction, but he used to be a Royal Marine Commando. He doesn’t tell anybody that, but it comes out when some gangsters are shaking down one of the workers on the site so Levon comes at them with a bucket of nails and a pickaxe, beats them up and points a gun at them until they leave. The boss’s 19-year-old business major daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas, Mustang from BLACK PHONE 2) witnesses this and asks if it’s “some military shit.” (read the rest of this shit…)

April 7th, 2026 | 15 Comments »

Alpha (2025)

I loved the first two films from writer/director Julia Ducournau – RAW (2016) and TITANE (2021) – so of course I went to see her new one, ALPHA. I know it didn’t go over well when it played Cannes last year, and I sort of get that because I felt I didn’t connect with it as much as I did the other two, I didn’t understand it as much. But it’s a special movie. Ducournau paints sickly portraits of a world where flesh is malleable, pain is universal, behavior is extreme, and so is emotion. Any chance to spend two hours seeing through her eyes is a rare cinematic buzz, and as I go back over ALPHA to write about it I’m making new discoveries, it’s sinking in deeper. I urge all Ducournaunauts not to skip it.

I love her matter-of-fact presentation of the bizarre – a sort of magical realism but with weird shit instead of magic. In RAW she had such a persuasive depiction of savage hazing in a veterinarian school that I felt like I should look up if this was a real phenomenon. ALPHA starts with a character seeming to get off on stabbing himself with a tattoo needle, followed by our thirteen year old title protagonist (Mélissa Boros) getting the letter ‘A’ carved into her arm while drunk at a party, so at first I thought we were in for some body modification subcultures. But actually I remember my friends cutting the Dead Kennedys symbol into their arms in middle school, so this is not really science fiction. (I don’t recommend doing that. Good band, though.) (read the rest of this shit…)

April 6th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Project Hail Mary

PROJECT HAIL MARY is a nice crowd pleasing sci-fi movie based on a book by Andy Weir, same author as THE MARTIAN. It’s directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, the team who directed 21 JUMP STREET, produced SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE and got fired from SOLO. It’s a huge hit, some people are talking it up like it’s Important, and it’s the closest thing Lord & Miller have done to a classy grown-up movie, so time will tell if it sends them on a catastrophic Adam McKay type trajectory. But right now we’re good. It’s a movie with lots of laughs and a lovable alien. People just get emotional about astronauts, I think.

Ryan Gosling (director of LOST RIVER) stars as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who accidentally winds up shouldering the responsibility of keeping the entire earth and at least one other planet from becoming uninhabitable. It’s kind of a long story doled out in episodic flashbacks, but an against-the-grain paper he wrote in a former life as a molecular biologist leads to him being one of numerous scientists recruited by a top secret international program to stop the crisis of single-celled alien organisms they call “astrophages” from blotting out the sun. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 2nd, 2026 | 16 Comments »

Primate

PRIMATE is a 2026 horror movie that I enjoyed for very straight forward reasons: it has a simple premise, executed well, but a little smarter than I expected, and also with some flair. You almost don’t have to mention that it’s a premise with high difficulty to pull off, because the villain is an animal. They always say it’s hard to work with kids or villainous animals.

It’s in the grand tradition of studio horror in that it’s very slick and about pretty young people trying to have a party at Dad’s killer pad while he’s away on business, but it’s much meaner than some of the audience wants these days. It likes most of its characters but doesn’t see that as a reason to spare them. It never felt to me like it was copping out. It means business.

It plays out like a slasher, but it’s also an animal attack movie. At a very basic level it’s CUJO – family pet gets rabies, and is no longer himself. But of course the family pet is a chimpanzee named Ben. His linguist owner taught him ASL, but she died of cancer. Luckily her widower Adam (Troy Kotsur, Academy Award winner for CODA) is a famous novelist who can afford to keep Ben in an enclosure at their beautiful Hawaii estate. His daughters, visiting college student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah, Dexter: New Blood) and teenage Erin (Gia Hunter, Sherlock & Daughter) treat Ben as a family member and aren’t intimidated by being left alone with him. And when he starts acting up they don’t want to fight him like their visitor does. He’s their brother. They want to talk some sense into him. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 31st, 2026 | 12 Comments »

They Will Kill You

THEY WILL KILL YOU is one of those rare cases where the first time I saw the trailer was the first time I heard of it, and before it was over it had become one of my most anticipated movies. What it conveyed was that Zazie Beetz (GEOSTORM) would play a maid at a hotel that’s run by satanists, they try to sacrifice her, she runs around with a sword chopping them up in spectacular, stylized action scenes. It looked like KILL BILL meets READY OR NOT, and that shorthand does capture some of it. But happily the trailer was also holding back some of the other ingredients in the pot, and they all add up to a fun time at the motion picture house.

Beetz plays Asia Reaves, who ten years ago was on the streets with her little sister Maria (I think there’s a young version whose name I can’t find, but the grown up Maria is Myha’la, BODIES BODIES BODIES). They were running from their abusive father when Asia landed herself in prison. Now she’s out, showing up on a stormy night for a job as a maid at a historic apartment building called The Virgil. I would say this was secretly a sinister place, but they’re pretty open about it – there’s a big pentagram and devil sculptures on the exterior. The characters don’t try to be subtle any more than the movie does. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 30th, 2026 | 7 Comments »

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