America has never been more beholden to the cult of celebrity than it is today, having elected an unstable game show host President who in turn has appointed an array of TV and Internet personalities to run our government. Our attention-based economy requires that we all buy in, curate an audience, build a personal brand, become either Influencer or Influenced. With his feature directorial debut, Opus, Mark Anthony Green casts John Malkovich as a stand-in for dangerous obsession with charisma…
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The Electric State 2025
While textually anti-corporate and anti-escapism, the movie version of The Electric State is the perfect artifact of our current soulless technocracy. It’s one of the most expensive films ever made, perhaps because someone at the Netflix C-Suite decided it would create the appearance of success, which in turn builds investor confidence and raises stock prices. Will Netflix actually gain or retain $300+ million in subscription dollars thanks to this film? Almost certainly not. The movie itself is vaporware. It will…
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Waterworld 1995
I’ll say this for Waterworld — in 1995, when a movie cost an unbelievable amount of money to make, you could see all that money on the screen.
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Carnival of Souls 1962
You can feel exactly when Rod Serling would step into frame to deliver a cryptic monologue direct to the camera. You can smell his cigarette.
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Deadpool & Wolverine 2024
I went into Deadpool & Wolverine surprisingly optimistic. This is, after all, the only Marvel Studios feature due out this year, a respite from superhero fatigue. This film is also a novelty in the Marvel oeuvre, an R-rated comedy that bridges the gap between the 20th Century Fox X-Men franchise where Deadpool and Wolverine both started out and the ongoing MCU. But despite being right in the demographic crosshairs for its incessant geek culture references, I found myself as exhausted with…
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John Mulaney: Baby J 2023
I’ve revisited his SNL monologue that turned out to be the demo version of this special a number of times so naturally I loved this. I think part of what makes this work is that he doesn’t actually apologize for his awful behavior while he’s on drugs? His embarrassment is obvious, but also he’s talking about it on stage for money to entertain people, so if he went “Hey everyone, come hear me talk about all my shitty behavior while…
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