A few weeks ago I went to Baltimore for the weekend, leaving my wife with our cat & 2 dogs. After I had been on the road for about 3 hours, she called me, worried that there was something wrong with the cat's eye because he was squinting a lot. This is not unusual. She has anxiety & it often manifests in worry about people & creatures in her care, especially during periods of transition that make her feel vulnerable. Recognizing what was…
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Chrysalis 2007
I suppose they did about as much worldbuilding as they could get away with & would have done more with a larger budget, but I really enjoyed the limited glimpses of its dystopian world, leaving you to fill in the gaps in a way reminiscent of Children of Men. The plot unfolds in a sorta sideways fashion similar to other French tech-noir efforts I've seen (Eden Log comes to mind), where you are shown the pieces long before you're shown how they connect. Tighten up the pacing & spend less runtime on turgid action scenes, & you almost got a winner here.
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Toolbox Murders 2004
The film that opened my eyes to Tobe Hooper's brilliance was neither The Texas Chain Saw Massacre nor Poltergeist (though I had previously seen both) but rather Toolbox Murders. I was 18 years old, living with my parents and unemployed, having withdrawn from college after a disastrous first semester. It was the beginning of a four-year spiral of depression, isolation and substance abuse: the darkest period of my life thus far.
I rented Toolbox Murders from my local Hollywood Video…
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Waves 2019
Apparently this hasn't been seen/reviewed by anybody in my letterboxd circle yet, and I know it's gonna get a bunch of Oscars and shit so let me be the first to say FUCK THIS MOVIE.
It's nothing but a naive white perspective on African American trauma that views white pain with compassion and black pain as spectacle, dressed up with a bunch of flashy film-bro stylistics and superficial "whoa Tarkovsky" masturbatory references, all to disguise the fundamental problem that this…
