"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Mark Duplass’

Backrooms

Monday, October 5th, 2026

When BACKROOMS came out in May, I was annoyed by the hype. I kept seeing articles about the rise of “liminal horror” which, as far as I could tell, boiled down to people pretending to be afraid of hallways and empty malls. Like so many annoying things it was born on the internet in Youtube videos and “creepypasta,” which is a word not even good enough to use as a placeholder. I object to its common usage, I resent that I had to repeat it, and I assert my rights as an old person to not have to be totally sure I know its definition. Whatever it is I disagree with it, so I was skeptical of this BACKROOMS, to say the least.

But the movie was an undeniable phenomenon. It wasn’t as big as OBSESSION, but a $10 million movie making $401 million is significant, whether or not it’s written and directed by a 20-year-old named Kane Parsons. The word on it was positive from all age groups, and it stars Chiwetel Eijiofor and Renate Reinsve, which kind of makes it a real movie. So, like with OBSESSION, I accepted that it was probly gonna be pretty good, it wasn’t fair for me to pre-judge it, and I let my guard down. Mostly. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tully

Monday, May 14th, 2018

No, it’s not the sequel to SULLY, smart guy. It’s also not the sequel to BULLY. It’s not the monster from Sesame Street, it’s not the founder of the coffee chain, and it’s not the device that’s a wheel and the rope goes around it to lift things up. It’s just TULLY. That’s the name of a character. I’ll explain it later. Be patient.

One thing I always get excited about: a new Diablo Cody movie. I liked JUNO and JENNIFER’S BODY was interesting and I even saw the movie she directed, PARADISE (though I don’t seem to have reviewed it), and though she said she didn’t rewrite much on the EVIL DEAD remake, she either helped make it great or didn’t screw it up.

But it’s YOUNG ADULT that made her one of my favorite screenwriters. I gotta proselytize for that movie all the time. It speaks deeply to my darkest thoughts as somebody who left the suburbs, didn’t end up being a regular grown up type person, and alternates between pitying and envying the perfectly fine people who did it the normal way and have kids and houses and cars and money and shit. And it’s one of the very best roles for one of my very favorite actresses, our Furiosa, Charlize Theron. (read the rest of this shit…)

Zero Dark Thirty

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

tn_zerodarkthirtyOkay, we were all horses pulling the Kathryn Bigelow bandwagon, right? We loved her for POINT BREAK and NEAR DARK, mostly. Also BLUE STEEL and STRANGE DAYS and all that. But did any of us ever predict Respectable Kathryn Bigelow would come about, and if so, did we guess how fuckin good that Bigelow would turn out to be? I sure didn’t.

The respect came for THE HURT LOCKER in 2008. It got the Oscar for best picture and she got best director, the only woman to receive that honor so far. It also had one of those career-exploding performances, the one that launched Jeremy Renner, at the time known mainly for playing Jeffrey Dahmer, into the guy who has two Oscar nominations and co-starred in big ass movies like THE AVENGERS and GHOST PROTOCOL and starred in THE BOURNE LEGACY and hosted Saturday Night Live and all this. I loved THE HURT LOCKER, which I saw as an ingeniously structured suspense thriller and character drama for its time that also worked as a deconstruction of many of our favorite action movie tropes. So I had high expectations for ZERO DARK THIRTY, and somehow it exceeded them.
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