Fathers. Sons. Dragons and Awkwafina, together again. This movie has it all, including some of the most kinetic and gorgeous hand to hand combat scenes that blow even The Winter Soldier out of the floating, mystic water. It feels like a thoughtful, bona fide martial arts film that just happens to be in the MCU. I was only left wanting more of the coordinated physicality and more of the characters.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Cool, quick knife flips while in the middle of a fight are how you can tell if it’s a good MCU movie. So, my official MCU movie rankings are Everything Else, Shang Chi, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I don’t make the rules.”
An effective, modern haunted house story that succeeds as both an exercise in the architecture of building dread and something of a meditation on sudden loss and the ensuing thoughts that plague those left behind. It is filled with so many interesting ideas, an agonizing and dark mystery to solve, and an incredible performance by Rebecca Hall. The corners of your home will never look the same again.
My VHS cover pull-quote: Though the genres are oh so different and The Night House is perhaps more aptly compared to Hereditary, the film also tackles similar themes as 2016’s Christine (also starring Hall), which was such a bummer of a real life drama based on a true event that The Night House, this grim and darkly spooky time at the movies, is so much more uplifting.
One of the best modern surreal gothic fairy tale ghost story musicals that I’ve ever seen. Now, I only really learned about Sparks through Edgar Wright’s fantastic documentary The Sparks Brothers, but I feel foolishly confident in saying that this film perfectly reflects the ethos and mission of the band Sparks in the narrative form.
Now I’ve also only really learned of Leos Carax’s movies, but I feel even more foolishly confident saying the movie is a perfect union of Carax’s avant garde French film formula and Sparks’ meta, proto-punk ideas.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “It kind of feels like a modern mutation of the Pinocchio story told from the tame, warped perspective of the fox and the cat. That might be a bit of a stretch, but I did recently watch 2020’s dark Pinocchio (which was wonderful) so I once again feel confident in making the comparison.”
A bloody, messy blast of a comic book movie that peppers in substantial emotional beats for these cannon fodder oddballs amidst all the carnage, chaos and wit. It feels like it’s pure James Gunn in a way that Guardians of the Galaxy can’t really approach. Both, however, share a common, simple thesis statement: the outcasts, the downtrodden, the misunderstood rats and the weasel things that have killed 27 children all have purpose and worth.
One thing I really appreciated, surprisingly, is the treatment of a character from the original Suicide Squad movie: Rick Flag, y’all!! Harley is always sort of core (and amazing) Harley from one movie to another, but Rick Flag gets to show an evolution of character from the 2016 film to this one. From wooden soldier to big damn hero who seems to have found a place among the outcasts he leads. While I went into the movie not caring about Flag living or dying, that changed substantially through the course of events. Beyond him, we are made to care about most of these these ‘losers’ that make it past the 20 minute mark, from Polka Dot Man to Ratcatcher 2, to even cosmic gumbo Starro the Conqueror.
My spoiler-filled VHS cover pull-quote:
“They killed my mate Captain Boomerang and, like a boomerang, I can only hope he comes back around somehow. I salute his noble severed arm, holding his boomerang high. All names are letters, dickhead!”
“This is not a prayer, but a swan’s song, the blasphemy done with intention,”
A work of self-discovery that evolves into one of spellbinding self-affirmation. Mehalick brings the reader with him on a path of rich confrontations with himself, a deity, family, music, etc., each piece either reveling in the traditions of form to firmly convey his perspective or outright exploding those traditions in the utmost punk style. Any veil between writer and narrator in these pieces feels especially thin, too, allowing readers a sort of comfortable access to the writer as he accepts, affirms, and meditates on his individual queerness. While it is an achingly personal work, it is also universal in its reflections. Readers are sure to find a bit of themselves in these stout pages, no matter who they may be.
My back cover pull-quote, tattered and folded underneath the seat of an El Camino: “Mehalick begins where many of the Final Fantasy video games end, fighting/addressing a God. In a bold twist to the JRPG formula, Melissa Etheridge’s Seminal 1993 Album Made of Two Overlapping Triangles Instead of One starts with that confrontation between man and supposed creator and then goes from there. This is cross medium conversation and intersectional genre discourse at its finest.”
“And the world is fit for all manner of mysteries.”
A fittingly strange and epic adaptation of the Arthurian tale, with lush cinematography and effects (practical skeletons galore) that capture just how bizarre these tales of yore could get. It’s sometimes easy to forget that storytelling has always been wild as fuck. Also a perfect Christmas/New Year’s movie that grasps the spookiness and soul weight of those introspective yule times.
The springish themes of renewal, birth, and connecting to nature are critical here too, though, with the radical botanics of the Green Knight at odds with the grim structures and interests of man. Alright, it’s a movie for all seasons. Except those weird couple weeks in February when it just sucks all the time. Don’t you dare watch this around then.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “At least as good as this weird version I watched in highschool English class that had Sean Connery as the Green Knight. I was convinced that I fever dreamt that version of the story until recently, but I guess not.”
Time is a flat circle. Here we are, twenty-five years later, saying similar things about Lebron’s Space Jam that the critics did about Jordan’s: uninspired, stupid, not enough Marvin the Martian, who is the best Looney Tune. But we were young back then. Children wearing those 90s “street” Looney Tunes shirts who enjoyed “stupid,” “uninspired” things. And now, we have a fondness for Space Jam.
Perhaps we have become the very thing we swore to destroy: old people with opinions.
The added corporate synergy is the real outlying negative in A New Legacy, as Warner Bros. just dumped cameos from every one of their owned properties into this thing because branding. But, like this year’s Mortal Kombat reboot, this is very much the exact same movie they made in 1996 just made in 2021. If Space Jam were never made before now, this is still the movie we would have gotten today. The trend of trading in nostalgia that’s been so successful this past decade, applied to an idea about the most famous basketball player of our time playing basketball with the Looney Tunes, can only end with a product like this in 2021. We have brought this on ourselves, and that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter what I think, though. How the children remember A New Legacy 25 years from now will truly determine the movie’s, uh oh, legacy and worth.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Pennywise the Clown could have used a bit more screentime and development. Like, he probably wants to tear LeBron’s son Dom’s arm off, drag him into the sewer and eat him, of course, but that’s not really explored here so why even have him in the crowd at the basketball game?”
The Father is an impressive bummer of a movie that somehow makes me not want to have dementia when I’m old even more than I previously didn’t want to have it, which was already a rousing 100% heck no to that.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “My father never made it to old age, but if he had I would be worried about him becoming exactly like Anthony Hopkins in this movie, so committed to remaining in control of himself and his world, not realizing these things have already slipped away from him. It’s a trait I see in many of the older generations–that need for control–which makes it all the more heartbreaking when its wrested away from them by their own mind. It’s a tragedy that this film nails.
“If this was a movie, this would be the part where the villain’s plan suffers a setback.”
The Fast and the Furious movies are just big ol live action anime mecha movies now with cars instead of giant robots. Tyrese is questioning whether or not they’re all invincible superheroes during the entire movie, but they’re not. They’re all just anime characters in a mecha movie, going through the dramatic motions until it’s time for the next big set piece when they can suit up and hop into their giant robots/cars to do impossible stunts while chasing some increasingly sci-fi macguffin or something. Plus family.
Fast10 better have a laser sword.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Flashbacks to 1989 throughout the movie explore Dom’s father’s death and its effect on the Toretto FAMILY. The actor playing Dom’s father has a similar SoCal accent to the late Paul Walker, which suggests to me that Dom saw and heard a bit of his father in Brian when they met all those years ago and that helped build his trust in Brian. These movies have layers, okay?”
A less inventive sequel that has lost the novelty of the original but not the spirit or solid filmmaking. It relies too much on the ‘people making dumb decisions’ trope in horror movies, though, and doesn’t do enough to separate Cillian Murphy daddy figure from John Krasinski daddy figure. I’m definitely into the world, that main characters, and I’m looking forward to parts III – IX and beyond as long as it’s profitable. Like The Purge. Did you know there’s a new entry in the Purge series called The Forever Purge coming out?? What even is that?
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Spoiler, but let’s stop killing Djimon Hounsou in movies. He was a cool, chill character who died stupidly just because they needed him out of the way for the ending.”
Nick Perilli 