"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Irene Bedard’

How To Blow Up a Pipeline

Thursday, April 17th, 2025

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.

I was a little thrown off by the opening, because it didn’t seem like the raw, authentic approach I had pictured. The filmatism is trying to make these twentysomethings rigging the security cameras at their maid jobs look like HACKERS meets OCEAN’S ELEVEN. And I was not buying this disparate team we see coming together – two messy punk rock kids (Kristine Froseth [THE ASSISTANT] and Lukas Gage [the villain the younger bouncer from the ROAD HOUSE remake]), one rugged camo-hat-wearing redneck (Jake Weary, MESSAGE FROM THE KING), etc. – how would they have gotten together? But it’s immediately thrilling with its blunt sense of purpose, its 16mm grain (cinematographer: Tehillah De Castro) and its un-ostentatious score by Gavin Brivik (The Pitt), with synths looping over beats banged out on oil drums. And though there will be scenes here and there that don’t ring true (like a cartoonish documentary director [Sam Quinn, JANE GOT A GUN] who says all the worst things to interview subjects in his one scene) it turns out to mostly play closer to “this must be what it would really be like” than just fun Hollywood bullshit. (read the rest of this shit…)

Pocahontas

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015

tn_pocahontas

RELEASE DATE: June 23
RELEASE DATE: June 23

Disney’s POCAHONTAS is the big animated feature of the summer of 1995, a part of the “Disney Renaissance” and feature animation resurgence that started in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But if the popularity of Disney animation was a motherfucker trying to ice skate uphill, this would be the point when he had just reached the top and now was beginning to slide back down in reverse. It came out a year almost to the day after THE LION KING, the tale of fathers and sons and a bunch of unrelated songs about a farting warthog and a smartass weasel guy or whatever, which smashed all box office records for animated features and remained the highest grossing of all time until TOY STORY 3 beat it 16 years later. More importantly, POCAHONTAS came about 5 months before the first TOY STORY arrived like a European with an infected blanket, triggering the end of the popularity of line drawings on the big screen.

Though not very highly regarded, and controversial for its fictionalization of history, I think POCAHONTAS is a respectable swan song for the age of Disney hand drawn animation. It goes whole hog with the house formula of glamorous heroines in a Broadway-inspired musical format, but takes some risks and, most notably, gloriously showcases the artistry of the studio’s best animators, designers and colorists. (read the rest of this shit…)