Last year there was a well-reviewed Valentine’s Day slasher movie playing in theaters. Normally I’d be all over that shit, but I boycotted for political reasons. You see, the production company behind it, Spyglass Media Group, were the assholes who fired the star of SCREAMs 5 and 6 from SCREAM 7 for posting about the Gaza genocide. (And being against it.) I grew up on ‘80s horror sequels, so obviously I can roll with the loss of a main character and the derailing of a storyline, but doing it for that reason was too much. They not only fired her but smeared her as having written anti-semitic hate speech and “false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion.” I’d say they’re fucking cowards for not having publicly apologized yet, now that it’s a couple years later and the genocide and ethnic cleansing continue, but I suspect they have no guilt about it whatsoever.
I think back to 2003, when the band then known as the Dixie Chicks got into trouble for saying they were against invading Iraq and embarrassed to be from the same state as George W. Bush. If there had been a SCREAM 4 in the works at that time and then one of the stars criticized the war and got fired for it, I’m positive SCREAM would’ve been dead to me then. So it’s dead to me now. I love my “horror franchise” completism bullshit but not enough, it turns out, to stomach something like this. That’s just my personal decision for myself, I’m not telling anyone else what to do.
For that Valentine’s Day movie though I decided it was okay to watch and review now because I didn’t pay money and it’s not vying for box office dollars. So here’s my right-on-time late review of HEART EYES, which is directed by Josh Ruben (WEREWOLVES WITHIN) and written by Phillip Murphy (HITMAN’S WIFE’S BODYGUARD), Michael Kennedy (IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE) and Christopher Landon (HAPPY DEATH DAY, FREAKY, DROP, was going to direct SCREAM 7 but left after the firing). It’s about an infamous murderer known as the “Heart Eyes Killer,” who kills couples on Valentine’s Day, and the idea is to combine a slasher movie with a romantic comedy. In my opinion they were partially but not fully successful with each side of that coupling. (read the rest of this shit…)
BLUE MOON is one of Richard Linklater’s two 2025 joints, the one that’s in English and that he didn’t sell to Netflix and that was nominated for two Oscars (actor and original screenplay). At a glance it doesn’t sound like the most typical Linklater picture, because it’s about the songwriter Lorenz Hart when his partner Richard Rodgers has just started a successful new team with Oscar Hammerstein II. But when you see it it turns out it’s very Linklater, because it’s basically a one location play starring Ethan Hawke (like 
