The mise en scène is evocative of the brittle and yellowed pages of an early edition of the Melville novel itself, punctuated by detailed line-drawed plates of the action. The sea scenes are gripping, maybe even astonishing for their era, and the acting successfully treads a fine line between stage-bound and raw. I particularly identify with Starbuck, aghast at both Ahab’s reckless obsession, and perhaps especially at his crew’s betraying acquiescence. Reminds me, unfortunately, of the world we live in.
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Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story 2024
It's like opening a family-size Cool Ranch Doritos. You just keep eating and eating even though you know how wrong it is. Were parricides Erik and Lyle Menendez sexually abused? I have no idea, and it shouldn’t legally matter, but thinking you can make a determination based on this wildly manipulative hyper-eroticized nonsense is downright delusional. Javier Bardem fares the worst, but the acting is pretty slipshod throughout (even Nathan Lane’s line deliveries—he plays Dominick Dunne—fail) though the boys, especially…
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Fall 2022
One mega-trashy shitshow of a movie. The characters: one a numbskull with a deathwish, the other, who eggs her on, nothing but a cleavage-fest (did I say “shitshow”? Sorry, I meant “titshow”). They climb a really tall disused tv tower in the desert, without even the smallest particle of brain lodged in their heads to help them. Fin. God help this culture of ours.
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Quintet 1979
Shale and salmon: there’s no green, no indicator of life or hope in the world of Quintet, Robert Altman’s masterful and definitive exploration of a planet’s final days, where ice and cold doom its sentient race to extinction. Quintet asks (and answers), what would we do if we finally came to the awful realization that before us, and especially after us, there is only our non-existence? Would we futilely strive to make a mark on culture, or would we aggrandize…
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