Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Summer School 1978

  ★ Watched 18 Sep 2021 15

  WOW. There is a lot to unpack here.

  Summer School a.k.a. Mag Wheels is a vansploitation movie, and if you don't know what that is, I recommend reading Jason Coffman's excellent Freedom, Fun and Fine Transportation: A Brief Guide to Vansploitation Cinema. Basically, these movies are generally about young, unambitious men having fun adventures in their custom vans. The adventures are typically van-competition-related, romantic/sexual, or both. The tone is always fun-loving, antiauthoritarian, and horny.

  This particular vansploitation film opens on…

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  The Birds 1963

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 31 Oct 2020 6

  Why The Birds is Hitchcock's Most Evil Film

  To fully understand the pure evilness of The Birds, we have to go back and put it in the context of the time period and of Hitchcock's career. Hitchcock is famously known as the Master of Suspense, and the films that he's most associated with today all have a slightly sinister character — Psycho is straight-up terrifying, of course, but Vertigo, Rebecca and even Rear Window all have a dark and unsettling…

Recent reviews

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  But the Flesh Is Weak 1932

  ★★½ Watched 23 Mar 2025 2

  But My Patience Is Weak.

  Father-son duo Florian and Max Clement are a pair of jolly rascals out looking for wealthy women to wed. Max (Clement fils) happens upon the good-natured, eccentric and filthy rich Joan, whom he charms, but then shortly thereafter meets widow Rosine, who melts his mercenary heart into a romantic porridge. "Women like a direct attack, that's my experience," says pa Florian as the first line of the film, and Max apparently took this to heart,…

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  Mickey 17 2025

  ★★★★ Watched 17 Mar 2025

  I'm seeing some reviews of this one calling it messy or unfocused, and, yes, it is messy … but I think in a good way. Certainly I've leveled that criticism myself against movies that never quite chose to be one thing or another and so ended up feeling like nothing at all, but to me Mickey 17 is more like a sci-fi smorgasbord. It's got clones, colony spaceships, space politics, tech ethics, new planets, alien encounters … far from being…

Popular reviews

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  Event Horizon 1997

  ½ Rewatched 25 Jun 2018

  Was hoping for cool, Alien-style science fiction, got trashy haunted house movie in space (complete with spooky lightning because they're in Neptune's atmosphere). It's dorky and clichéd, and at heart it has the sensibilities of a 1980s straight-to-VHS body horror movie. So, basically, it's Hellraiser 2047: Shadow of Uranus.

  That may all sound pretty harsh, but I have a particular grudge against this movie because back in 1997 I stupidly suggested going to see it on a double date at…

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  The Endless Summer 1966

  ★★★★ Watched 21 Feb 2018

  The atomic bomb of relaxation, and the last glimpse of peace before Vietnam.