"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Sasha Lane’

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…)

Hellboy (2019)

Tuesday, July 30th, 2019

I’m not gonna totally contradict the conventional wisdom that HELLBOY (2019) is bad. I kinda thought it was bad for a while. But then it sort of won me over. I had more fun than expected, and talking about it with other people made me realize that yeah, overall I think I liked it.

Yes, it’s sloppy and choppy and takes itself less seriously than I’d like. I wasn’t surprised to read that there were tensions with the producers and that director Neil Marshall (THE DESCENT, but also DOOMSDAY) didn’t have final cut. The many rock ‘n roll needledrops (including a Spanish version of “Rock You Like a Hurricane”) and electric guitars on the score by Benjamin Wallfisch (IT, SERENITY) make it seem like it’s making a joke out of folk tale stuff that I think would be much cooler if treated respectfully, and the combination of a lower budget and higher volume of digital FX than Guillermo Del Toro’s two movies make it look chintzy by comparison. But there are tons of cool monsters, funny lines, colorful bits of mythology, and a splattery, lowbrow rowdiness that’s pretty fun whether or not it’s in the Hellboy spirit. (read the rest of this shit…)