Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 26 Jan 2021 17

  Movies can live inside you. By which I mean, the really important ones that reverberate with you on a spiritual, molecular level, take on a whole new life that transcends subtext, political reading or even groundbreaking aesthetic iconography. I’ve just begun my 5th decade spent consciously obsessing over film and precious few movies I’ve watched in that interim have been as diligently studied and wholeheartedly embraced by yours truly as Tobe Hooper’s seminal masterwork from 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. …

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  American Psycho 2000

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 23 Oct 2022 66

  The most enduring aspect of this film, apart from Bale’s nuclear chain reaction of a performance, is how smartly it leans on the book’s recurring joke of all these guys looking the same and none of them being able to tell each other apart or even knowing who they’re talking to half the time. The gilded prison of conformity. Entitled duplicates fighting for air in a sealed boardroom. 

  A bunch of men with no purpose or sense of self, trying…

Recent reviews

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  Dementia 13 1963

  ★★★ Rewatched 31 May 2023 26

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  This is my Succession. 

  Soggy secrets in sepulchral swamps. Lavish estates morosely harboring long extinguished hearths. Head games and submerged dames. Deep shadows and shallow focus. Prescient footsteps and hidden passageways. 

  A tacky Roger Corman/AIP produced Psycho riff, but Coppola’s preternatural craftsmanship and meticulous eye for composing shots is already on full display, exponentially elevating this tawdry chiller. 

  I’m tired of writing all this drivel. I’m tired of watching movies. I’m not really even watching them anymore if I can…

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  The Outsiders 1983

  ★★★★ Rewatched 30 May 2023 24

  Complete Novel Version

  Is all the world burning schoolhouses and abandoned churches? Hollywood pretty boys cosplaying down and out in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Beautiful vignettes of vacant lots and aching sentimentality. The only emotions are the unstable ones, the untenable ones, the combustible ones. A world without parents means Budweiser and chocolate cake for breakfast. It means a foster network of lost boys and dubious father figures. It means to die a hero AND a thief. 

  This world is bullshit, man.…

Popular reviews

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  Open Range 2003

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 24 May 2023 18

  Needed to cleanse my Costner palette after Wyatt Earp and this sneaky little masterpiece was the ideal huckleberry. Before I commence with the bloviating, let me mention that this is at the coveted $5 sale price in iTunes currently. I heartily endorse a blind buy and immediate watch if you’ve never been. 

  I saw this three times the week it came out in August of 2003. I was so taken by its sweeping grandeur and masterfully unpretentious craftsmanship, I kept…

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  Shazam! Fury of the Gods 2023

  ★ Watched 24 May 2023 17

  “We’re gonna need some more skittles.”
   
  Artless, charmless trash. The textbook definition of inessential superhero garbage. Crummy effects, tired tropes and grating performances.

  Poor Diedrich Bader.