Falling squarely into the camp of “it would have to get better to suck,” Osgood Perkins’ bewildering adaptation of a not-especially-great Stephen King story makes ninety minutes feel like an eternity. It’s literally impossible to say what the movie is going for — as a black comedy, it’s painfully unfunny, and as a horror movie, it’s worse, a kind of sneering, self-conscious piss-take that somehow manages to feel both arrogant and weirdly insecure at the same time, using its over-the-top…
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The Last Stop in Yuma County 2023
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
The AC is broken, the diner in the middle of the desert is full of heavily perspiring strangers who seem like they're going to be spending eternity drinking coffee together, and the only pie on the menu is rhubarb -- if this isn't hell, it's at least purgatory.
Rhubarb, of course, can also mean a heated confrontation as well as a word actors mouth in the background to simulate conversation, and in Francis Galluppi's unrepentantly ballsy first feature, the diner…
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The Long Kiss Goodnight 1996
Spending Superbowl Sunday revisiting Renny Harlin's best movie is definitely a choice, but I regret nothing.
I had a job reading scripts and writing coverage for a production company in LA in 1994 when Shane Black's screenplay sold to New Line for a record $4 million and copies started making the rounds. I remember sitting in my little apartment, reading it start to finish in one sitting, unable to quite believe what I was reading. Even to my recently Tarantino-ized…
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Blue Velvet 1986
"Lynch might turn out to be the first populist surrealist," Pauline Kael wrote back in the late Reagan years in September of 1986, "a Frank Capra of dream logic."
Well, that wasn't *exactly* what I was thinking, when as a sixteen-year-old, I was sitting in the Bijou Theater in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that same year, watching wide-eyed as Dennis Hopper sucked greedily on a gas mask before dry-humping Isabella Rossellini on her apartment floor. I was there on a first date…
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