Second viewing.

Wes makes such handsome work, you can almost miss the humanity. But, it’s there (in every inflection of Bill Murray’s line deliveries).

Robert Eggers finally shows the peep, accepts his seriousness as comedy, and does the thing. 

“Nosferatu” is how a cat-forward person dated in Brooklyn during pandemic: By throwing emotionally naked grenade texts to strangers miles away in the middle of the night. The relationship between Lenny and Orlock is a series of drunk tinder messages that neither of them can let go of. Reminded of The Last Jedi and The Lake House.

Dafoe, Taylor-Johnson, AND Juror #2 are #1 in thorough, nervously hilarious performances. Dafoe especially is on this movie’s lonely quarantined-guy-into-WEIRD-subcultures wavelength. Lily Rose Depp owns, and Bill destroys with his mustache.

Five stars will revisit for the snowy vibes on a double feature with “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and with the washed out European soot-scape of Burton’s “Sweeney Todd.”

It’s my first time seeing this, so I’m in my “this is a masterpiece” phase with it. If John Waters directed Ferris Bueller from a script by Chuck Pahalaniuk. It’s pastiche of the most 80s yuppie trash, and I fux with these crab cakes.

Nosferatu was sold out, so then we watched this and man oh man does it hit different in the wake of 2024’s (h)It Boy, Luigi Mangione. John Waters’ affection for the dilapidated houses on the side of a highway and the nightmare people within is deeply humanist. His unwillingness to let people who see themselves as normal off the hook for the quietly horrible prejudices they foster is his endless search for justice. The guy contains multitudes, this movie is short sweet and hilarious, and Free Luigi.

No it isn’t.

Super scary when Mac shows up in old man makeup

This one works less every watch. Act 3 is a logic nightmare and the shower scene is more horrifying than Psycho.

Slightly stupid for my tastes, plus the main character is specifically from my hometown in Jersey so I therefore need a New Jersey actor in the role and…”Taron”…ain’t from the Hub City.

As a lapsed, but raised Catholic, a thriller about Vatican processes couldn’t be more up my alley. It’s Glengarry Glen Ross meets The Death of Stalin meets The Young Pope. The actors are all expertly dialed in, the dialogue is riveting, and the direction/production design is gorgeous. It has the affect of being taken on a Vatican tour by a guide who’s wife just left him and he had way too much coffee about it.

I’m gonna be thinking about the ending for a long time, because it’s either brilliant or absolute dogshit and I’m not ready to render a verdict, except that I was reminded of a VERY SPECIFIC episode of South Park. 

Also, Stanley Tucci, it’s great to see you man, but you have a Danny Glover in Shooter level of saliva on all of your dialogue. No shame if you have dentures, but just glue those suckers on a lil tighter next time ❤️

Quite funny, intermittently moving, and really well scored. Minus a star because the end of this movie continues to make it very hard for me to convince my wife to leave Brooklyn. “My best friend lives around the corner*!”

*she lives a dozen blocks away and we rarely see her.

That’s a very inconvenient and sexy way to raise $30k.

how about READ ONE, as in, a book.

Santa…is the president…of the North Pole?

Handmade horror rarely has such accuracy in its ambition, but the reason this movie rules is it doesn’t care. It’s just awesome. Will revisit for the monsters and the body horror.

Ridley makes a strong case that touching dirt is a genetically inherited trait.

Needed a flashback to see young Pedro Pascal aggressively sniffing Russell Crowe’s saddle or something, but otherwise I found this to be dumb, violent, and fun. Denzel should 100% play the Joker.

A movie that doesn’t so much end as pull over to the side of the highway and get out with the engine running.

I don’t care how many times they said it, I have no idea what Paul Mezcal 🍋‍🟩🧉was calling himself before his real name was revealed. MoMa?

It’s “The Outsiders” for perverts.

I love that John Waters has a 40 something woman playing a high school character named Hatchet Face, but the joke is on the uptight parents and the acapella group. My man has a thesis.

Comedies like this used to go to THEATERS!

Nobody’s energy is the same energy in this. It’s like watching five different movies at once.

It’s AirBnb meets Tinder.

The absolutely batshit economics of Nancy Meyers strike again. “Simple Problems of the Frustratingly Rich!” A movie trailer editor with a ten bedroom house? And Cameron Diaz walks that fuckin’ dog once. IN TWO WEEKS!

Lemme save ya 90 mins:

35 or so mins in, Jessica Biel delivers this fiery monologue:  “First the ground rules. If you say too many stupid things, I'll have to slug you. If you say anything nasty about Jake, I'll have to slug you. If you try to feel me up, I'll have to slug you. If you make me listen to any sexist, racist, or homophobic jokes, I'm gonna have to slug you. And finally, I might just have to slug you from time to time, simply because I find the prospect of driving across the country with you incredibly stressful!”

This is the second best part of the movie. 

The first is when JTT wakes up lost in the desert with a Santa hat, suit, and beard GLUED to his head, face, and body, and screams up at the sky: “THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!”

Sure is, buddy.

I’m bored of David Gordon Green’s suburban knucklehead whimsy AND Ben Stiller’s manic guy cracks up under the weight of the world BUT this alchemy works. The kids are great, the whole thing looks and feels genuine, and it got me at the end. Will revisit.

A 4 star movie with a 5 star kiss. David you NASTY!

My wife and I worked from home and watched this and went through some shit. Francis is doing magical musical realism alongside emotional throat cuttery. Will revisit for the craft and how much filmmaking fun he’s having, will end up waiting for a while cause of how devastating it is.

Cher being romanced by shoe store owner Bob Hoskins while her two precocious daughters (Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci) grow up in New England in the fall of 1963. All fall. The whole thing even the worst thing. 

Cher rules, Hoskins’s eyebrows should be arrested.

It was all a dream, right? So is Wicked the dream she had the night before this dream? If Dorothy has a s*x dream is it also…like this?

So we drop a house on one woman and melt another woman. And Glinda is like “tee hee” *dink*

Still makes me cry will revisit.

What fun it is to watch two “comedians” on a working vacation in Hawaii! We’re auditing their fun! 👎🔪

The kinda movie where cursing + sexuality = comedy. 

God what a daze we were all in in 2017. Then we got woke up by 2020, and now we’re about to go through the same damn thing SMH Jesus take the wheel 

Mannnn I forget how chaotic Rid can be. This movie is edited in a Tony Scott way, but it’s got the Ridley prestige. That is because the score is so lush and iconic (and is the Rosetta Stone for big box action thrillers of the 00s) and the story is a home run. Joaquin Phoenix proves early on in his career that he is the preeminent disgusting shit boy, and Russell Crowe solidifies his place in the annals of film history as The Beefiest (TM). He is the Arby’s of leading men, and I love his stubby fingers over the wheat. I laughed, I cried, I really wanted to punch Commodus.

First DVD I ever watched.

😬 this is not for me

$600 for a night’s work was a lot of money in 2004 and my BEST day rate in 2024 was also $600. Our country is so fucked.

If James Grey directed a Marx Brothers movie. 

Per Jimmy Hoffa: “If I said it once, I said it a thousand times, I don't care they're Irish. I don't care they're Catholic. If there's one person you can't trust in this life, it's millionaires' kids.”

A great New York movie and the most French ending imaginable.

Car people are so intense.

If Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was about Midwestern auto workers.

One of my first Netflix dvd rentals.

I think Lynch movies are incantations that allow him to take over the viewer. Can’t watch twin peaks without occasionally Dale Cooopering about coffee or pie, and you can’t watch Lost Highway without spending the next few days listening to late era Bowie and committing adultery. His movies make it so that, like Fred, he can always escape into a new vessel and never get caught.

The plot of this thing is confounding but does enough backflips to keep me standing in front of the tv for five minutes at a time while I get ready to go out. Another wedding 💀🤘

Dee Snider is both good and bad as a serial killer/kidnapper/piercer with a mortally Long Island accent. He’s doing a piercing thing in this movie. This is not for me. Maybe somebody is torqued, but I don’t know em. He does a TON of sewing too. Very Etsy.

Musician filmmakers are a mixed bag at best. This is better than Danzig but not as good as Rob Zombie. Belongs to the genre of “movie that doesn’t mean to, but says ACAB.”

Copoganda is rarely this fun. Adil & Bilall have play-doh’d this franchise from a nonconsensual pelvic thrust of the 90s and 2000s into cosmic gumbo of comedy, heart, redemption arcs, inter-office romance, afterlife vision quests, staying honest about where we came from and who we are now, the actress from Better Call Saul (did not watch but the internet says she deserved an Emmy for it, and based on her ability here to make a nothing character something, she prolly did), and action scenes that recall the best Michael Bay ever did (it’s The Rock, btw) but if he’d had drones and was even remotely interested in continuity. Plus Bay’s patented brand of bigotry is fully buried and replaced with journeys of masculine self improvement and healing through communication. 

Seriously the action scenes rule. Crank level shit.

Not afraid of spooky kids. Hit them with your big bodies, people.

Really enjoyed this again. Big dumb balls, good sequences, and a great closer.

When you go on a family vacation and see yourself (and your family and friends), without the context of your life, it is deeply horrifying. Nothing like having to face the fact that you can’t start a boat you rented without calling the guy for help. 

My appreciation of JP’s work is unanimous. The guy hasn’t missed yet.

I remember when the trailer came out for this but it was missing an audio track when the plane crashed so tom was like “oooooooOOOOohhh” but no sfx or music. So good.

This is why you can’t volunteer. 

So did Night write all the rap lyrics? I’m sure there’s an answer readily available, but he probably didn’t intend on the twist being “the kid spits bars.” What a goof ❤️

As I was watching this I kept thinking “well the next one must be a real stinker, otherwise people would love this movie!” That is incorrect. Each segment is pretty damn good. This is a dark as night anthology movie about horribly modern American horror. Tough watch, but well worth it.

If you’re gonna be a silent movie be a silent movie don’t be a chickenshit.

My immediate fix? If they were literally all played by the Muppets, this is a stone cold classic. As it is, my wife said it best when telling me how much she liked it: “It’s like the show! There isn’t time for intellect.”

It also lacks…history. For a timestamp, we get Milton Bearle’s penis (well, shaft), and the disembodied voice of Johnny Carson. Maybe nothing else happened in 1975? I’m not asking for “Good Night and Good Luck,” but it’s so much filmmaking candy already, you can give me some vegetables (I would also accept one unlikable character). It’s all too cute. Just because SNL is a comedy doesn’t mean you need a scene where the actors throw scripts around like they’re the gremlins (back to puppets again as the fix). I bet this movie says it doesn’t like “The Big Short,” but it actually hasn’t seen it. 

If I wanna be intermittently entertained I will watch the friggin tv show. I was hoping for insight into tv history, and instead this movie loves the smell of its own clove cigarette farts.

Will revisit when a podcast does Jason Reitman.

Anyone who survived this movie was 1000% at January 6th.

Boy. When a plot hangs on a roofie, you can probably stand a rewrite.

Fun outfits!

What the fuck is up with him and basketball? He shoots around with his kids a LOT. It’s clearly an exercise in bonding, and theoretically provides this family unit with some physical rhythm, all of which is effective storytelling.

But! We’re in (around) Beverly Hills in the early 90s, and this terribly affluent family balls all day without any exterior interest in the sport. And good lord do they look like Charles Barkley in Space Jam after he loses his powers (“be gone wannabe!”). They been playing their whole life, have no interest in any professional version, and never got better than Steve Martin in the first movie. I guess I just need a little more background on this choice than “the hoop’s outside!” For me anyway. Clearly the class issues within this film bother me the way Franck bothers George.

Also We got married! Then watched this while making thank you notes.

“A Star is Porn”

Kinda reminded me of “Dark Blue” in that it’s a dramatization of a real LA thing but can’t help itself from being the kind of schlock the historical event inspired. Also kinda reminded me of True Detective seasons 2 and 4: 2 for the “Jesus Christ LA is disgusting” stuff and 4 for being about a lot of stuff I like but not executing it all the way…right.

Look Ti West will always have a place in my heart, and as far as this flick existing as a cap to a slasher TRILOGY, bravo. Here’s the most damning compliment I have to give: It reminds me of “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.” Do with that what you will.

The economy of cocaine has changed so much.

Laura Palmer is Pollyanna who has sex with everybody.

“Casper the Dead Horny Tween.”

It takes place in Maine but is a very NJ movie: Lots of smoking and people calling each other “bitch.”

Lots of fun ideas and disgusting VFX. I will a hundred percent never be going skydiving or camping alone, but I appreciate this movie for reminding others.

I’m getting married this week so we watched this. The $250 a head stuff worked for me, as did every single thing related to Martin Short.

But generally this movie represents a time period, a social class, and plot mechanics that I find contemptible. This film is 100% capable of radicalizing someone against America, and so it should therefore, in the name of national security, be banned (unless you need to watch something soft because you’re freaking out about your own wedding). 

Plus 1/2 a star for the heightening of Franck to Hanck.

Love and romance in America according to the most emotional 18-year-old couple. Beautiful, hideous, sweeping, and alienating all at once. The movie is the jacket, the jacket is the movie. 

Reverse analogy: “Garden State” is “Wild at Heart” for virgins.

Tree of Life for drunk boomers. The spectacle IS occasionally grand, but the storytelling is like hearing a review of your local junior high’s “Julius Caesar” from your barber, Chet, whos nephew was in it. He thinks. He’s not sure. He was very tired.

Also this movie’s take on Taylor Swift is that she’s older than she pretends to be.

• The Talented Mr. Ripley
• Raising Arizona
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Gangs of New York
• Depraved
• Blow the Man Down
• Pet Sematary
• Bone Tomahawk
• Fight Club
• Jackass 3D

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.